#it was interesting going through this era because the looks? most are top tier

[cosmicdreamgrl]

taehyung x dynamite era for @cordiallyfuturedwight [ cr : 0613data, namuspromised ]

[sergeifyodorov]

would you actually be willing to give like a pretty long rundown of those main guys from the 2015 draft class?? because i would be Very interested

Of course! I wrote this in a Google doc so I could get it all down. It's a LOT btw -- this is the abridged version, leaving out what are probably important details, and it's still [checks] 11k words long. Sorry about that.

Anyone who tells you that the draft is a science is an idiot not worth their twenty-dollar stadium beer. The draft has analytical elements, sure, but it is a crapshoot through and through. If you dare to take a look back on draft histories from the past ten years -- the past twenty, the past thirty -- only rarely is the first pick, the “best in show,” actually the best of his class. I mean, no wonder, right? How well can you determine how good a man is going to be at hockey when you have only seen him as a teenager? Accuracy and prophecy are not kin.

Every ten years, though, you come across someone whose trajectory is easy to map. A prospect who is so head and shoulders above everyone else -- in numbers, in the eye test -- that you cannot help but say that they are going to be The Next One. God save the poor boy you put that name on.

In this case, it is 2014, and they are speaking those words again. On the dingy ice of an OHL arena, a red-haired Toronto boy with scared fawn’s eyes paces around the circles, faster than anyone else in the building. There are articles written about him already, calling his experience the torture test and labelling him Jesus, the saviour, the new great. It will get worse for him from here.

A Generational Prospect

It is 2004, and all eyes are on Sidney Crosby. He has eclipsed QMJHL scoring records. He performs highlight-reel antics. It is known that he will make the NHL as a teenager, and that whichever team has him will have an asset they should not ever think to relinquish.

Now, in 2023, all expectations of him are blown away. He is fifteenth on the all-time scoring list, having played most of his life in the dead-puck era, and will be inside the top ten by the time he retires. He has never been below a point per game, having gotten to a hundred points as an eighteen-year-old rookie and only slowed down to ninety at thirty-five. He has won three Cups; two Harts; two each Art Ross and Rocket Richard.

Something similar can be said for his contemporary, one Alex Ovechkin, sixteenth in all-time scoring, second ever in goals. While neither were always the most singular, dominant player of the past eighteen years (has it really been that long?) their longevity and consistent high-level play have cemented them into that tier of all-time greats. 

Such players only emerge once (or, for them, twice) in a generation; a “generational talent.” Gordie Howe was the first, before drafting happened at all, then Gretzky, joined as a part of the WHA merger, then Lemieux, then, debatably, Jagr through the early half of the dead-puck era, then Crosby and Ovechkin. Jagr was drafted fifth overall partly due to political constraints (it was 1990, and Czechia was behind the Iron Curtain), but all of the other drafted ones went first. While development curves for everyone else are hard to map, it is easy to tell, for them, how good they are as youths. We all call Gretzky the “Great One,” but he actually got that nickname before he was a teenager, because of how much better than the rest of his peers he was.

This is how we go up to the 2015 draft. Let’s say that it is September 2014, a full hockey season before the draft, so we can set the scene. Go back to the dingy Erie rink, watch the red-haired boy speed around the ice.

This is Connor McDavid. He was born in January just outside Toronto; if you are unfamiliar with the term “GTA,” I will pause now to tell you that it means Greater Toronto Area, and that it is the nexus of all hockey in the world. He is a Leafs fan, as so many of the GTA hockey-playing hopefuls are. 

Connor is an unusual child, even by young hockey prospect standards. Entry to any of the CHL major junior leagues -- the OHL, the WHL, the QMJHL -- starts at sixteen, but select few can apply early, and if they are academically, physically, and emotionally deemed adept they can be accepted for exceptional status and join at fifteen. This happens once every two or three years nowadays; Tavares and Ekblad were the only ones to predate McDavid. As well as being deemed exceptional by the board of the CHL, he is exceptional among peers, too: intelligent and analytical, black-and-white, painfully shy. He works hard in school, desperate to avoid coming off as a “dumb jock.” Media interviewers ask for him, but they have to change the settings on their microphones in order to pick up his voice, it is so soft. 

He has already won trophies; scholastic achievement, sportsmanlike behaviour, CHL rookie of the year. He will score at least one point in all but one of the first eighteen games of the 2014-15 OHL season, before breaking his hand in a fight (getting himself a Gordie Howe hatty, being that he already has a goal and an assist). He will score a hundred points in thirty-eight games, and a hundred and twenty points in the forty-seven games he will play.

Understandably, his name is penned in at number one on the draft board. Even such deficits as breaking a hand and being out for six weeks don’t tank his stock, it is so obvious how well on track he is to outpace all but the best.

He is sweet and shy, a captain of Erie based mostly on skill, and tight-laced into the destiny of future franchise saviour.

At least he has a friend, though, right?

Dylan

The 2014-15 Erie Otters are a good team. A great one, even -- third in league standings by season’s end, and you don’t get that far if your single generational superstar is sidelined half the year with a hand injury.

This is where Dylan comes in. Like Connor, he’s a GTA boy, and a young Leafs fan. Unlike Connor, he’s part of a serious hockey family -- the middle child of three. His older brother Ryan has already been drafted, in the first round, no less. He’s a real student of the game, too, a stats obsessive and a calm, steadfast personality. 

Remember how we said the draft is a crapshoot? That’s very true. Prospects may have precise rankings when all is said and done, but in the meantime I find it best thinking of them as instead arranging into tiers -- there’s the generational talent in this year, but disregarding him we have a first overall-level, then a small handful of top prospects. Not saviours in their entirety, but certain to make a team very happy. Dylan projects as the latter group -- he’ll be somewhere between three and five. In 2014-15, he’s the OHL scoring leader, and takes the Erie Otters’ single-season record.

He and Connor are also best friends. Connor’s quiet, anxious even, but Dylan has a coolheaded sort of confidence that brings out the best in him. Rarely are they pictured without each other; rarely are they spoken to without mentioning the other. There’s a sweet little video out there of the Otters going to New York state and going on this little ziplining/outdoor climbing gym, and Connor and Dylan are about as glued to each other’s sides as you can be while obeying the harness safety rules. In hockey terms, while a little young for it, they’re married. Much like Crosby and Malkin are, although over a much shorter term, and publically the two Otters are much closer.

Dylan is the one I feel as if I can talk the least about. He is mostly defined by what he is not: not Connor, to start, and before the actual draft takes place that is the most of it. 

Of course, that’s the most of what any of it is, isn’t it? These are teenagers, separated into imprecise tiers and mostly defined by which tier they slot into. The three boys below Connor, no matter how good they are, are defined by being not Connor.

Jack Eichel most of all.

Jack, to start, is American, unlike any of the other three. He’s a late birthday -- born in November of 1996 instead of  the first eight and a half months of 1997 -- so he’s, in theory, had another year to adapt. (Brief footnote: the September 15 cutoff is what determines draft eligibility, either the year you turn eighteen or the year you turn nineteen. If you were born in, say, June of 2000, you would be eligible for the draft in 2018. If you had the audacity to be born in October of 2000 instead, you’d have to wait until 2019.) His development pipeline is also unlike the others, having come up into the NCAA, college hockey, and playing at the US National Development team before committing to Boston University. He won the Hobey Baker award as a freshman, and led the NCAA in scoring as a rookie.

He was marketed, coming into the draft, as the American Connor -- the new face of American hockey, a homegrown star, a fellow generational talent, although that was a feeble marketing strategy to dull the disappointment of going second to greatness. He was proud and polite, quiet but not scared, a young man uncomfortably aware of his own myth and rather irritated at the fact he had a myth in the first place. Taken in and treated well, he would probably have a well-suited disposition to a high-stress, playoff-bound team.

It’s unfortunate that that wouldn’t realize until eight years after he was drafted.

The Draft Itself, or, What Caused All These Problems In The First Place

The draft lottery rolls around. The lottery and the draft take place on different days -- the lottery several weeks before, so that for a long time the boys have an idea of to whom they will go. The first four teams to pick are, in order:

Edmonton. Edmonton had been very bad, for a very long time, and had three shiny prizes already to show for it: Taylor Hall, drafted first overall in 2010; Nail Yakupov, drafted first overall in 2012; and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, drafted first overall in 2013. I’m sure you already know this, but Edmonton was Gretzky’s team, while Gretzky won all his cups, and they now stand to get themselves another generational talent in Connor McDavid.

Buffalo. The Sabres have a few decent pieces: Ryan O’Reilly, Sam Reinhart. They haven’t made the playoffs in a few years, and have plummeted to the bottom of the standings, finishing thirtieth out of thirty.

Arizona. Arizona has never gotten off the ground, not once. They are a dust mote of a franchise, held in place by Gary Bettman’s fragile ego and the skimmings of Original Six markets. Their survival, as doomed as we know it is, is banking on a distant hope of good prospect luck and better PDO.

Toronto. While Arizona is the smallest of small markets, Toronto is… well, it’s Toronto. Remember earlier, how I said that the GTA is the nexus of hockey? Toronto is called the Centre of the Universe, and for good goddamn reason. The Leafs are one of the most storied franchises in the NHL, and simultaneously one of the winningest (the second-most Stanley Cups, after Montreal) and the losingest (their most recent Cup was almost sixty years ago.) Their fanbase dwarfs all but the most hardcore of French Canadian separatist contingents. There’s a common phrase now, when any hockey news is mentioned -- but how does this affect the Leafs? It’s well-done satire.

And with four teams, we have four boys. So I come upon the last one now: Mitch Marner. Mitch, like Dylan and Connor, is a GTA boy, a born and raised Leafs fan on an OHL team. He plays for the London Knights -- a diminutive forward (he weighs in at 160 pounds soaking wet at eighteen, and eight years later barely cracks 180) with fantastic playmaking skills, the creativity and gall to do things other players have never even thought of. He’s a sweet one, too, bubbly and energetic and cuddly and kind.

Here is how the draft goes:

The Oilers take the stage first, for the fourth time in six years. The ceremony is unnecessary. Connor McDavid is the name everyone knows they will say. Connor walks up to the stage, looking vaguely nauseous, and dons the jersey and the hat. (His facial expression in the interviews afterward is thoroughly dissected over the next eight years. Some say it’s simple stage fright; others say it’s personal distaste for the Oilers -- remember, Toronto boy, Toronto heart. I choose to believe it’s the first one. Not all of us are John Tavares.)

After a first-round prospect is chosen, they bring him down for an interview, then shuffle him off to some arena underbelly for photos upon photos. Connor performs his niceties, but before he is taken back, he asks to stay. He wants to watch Dylan get drafted.

The Buffalo Sabres come second, and pick Jack Eichel. Eichel is asked, throughout, how he feels about Connor, being behind Connor, coming second to Connor. The narrative being pushed is called McEichel -- the Canadian wunderkind versus the American one -- and he wants no part in it. He’s impressed by Connor’s play, in their few brief meetings he thinks of him as nice enough, he wants to carve out his own path.

This refusal to play along may have been the start of the discontent, in hindsight. The media clearly wasn’t going to get anything out of soft-voiced scared-eyed perfect Canadian boy Connor, but Jack, sharper edges and colder heart, might be good for a soundbite or two about this new league-made rivalry. Jack, though, ever aware, puts himself solidly into Generic Hockey Interview voice and backs off.

The Coyotes come third. Here is where a choice occurs, the first genuine decision. Connor McDavid had been slotted into first pick since the day he got accepted for exceptional status. Eichel had taken a few years more, but his place in second after Connor was well known for months on end. Dylan and Mitch, however, were up in the air. Do you pick the big one with more points, or the small one with star power?

The Coyotes follow the conventional hockey wisdom, and take the big boy. Connor waits to watch his friend take the jersey, then hugs him in the wings.

Finally, the Leafs.

Let’s actually take a step back to talk about the Leafs rebuild, for a second, because it, like everything the Leafs have ever done, is a testament to failure. Also, somewhat, because it is relevant. Also, moreso, because I can’t shut up about hockey and you’ve asked me to talk as long as I like. If you’re still reading, I want you to know that a) I am ever thankful for your time and b) we’re, like, just getting started here.

The Leafs’ last contending era was before the 04-05 lockout season, which means it predates the salary cap. They struggled in the midsection, for a long time, then finally fell enough to gain the fifth overall pick in 2008, with which they selected a big tough young defenceman named Luke Schenn, the first official piece of the Leafs’ rebuild, strange as it may be. Luke, while competent enough, was obviously not the sort of franchise-changing star the Leafs needed, and they struggled in the midsection again, before gaining, once more, the fifth overall pick, with which they selected Schenn’s partner, one Morgan Rielly. The two would be perfect partners, but we won’t know this for eleven years. Luke was traded twelve hours after Rielly’s draft.

Rielly is still in the AHL the next year, 2013, when the Leafs make the playoffs. This is the infamous 4-1 series: the Leafs go down 3-1 in the series, claw their way back up to game seven. They gain a 4-1 lead, going into the third period, and then blow it completely and lose the game, and the series, in overtime. They do not make the playoffs in 2013-14, and before the 2014-15 season begins they change management. The man they install as President decides to tank, and tank hard, selling as much of the Leafs as he can in the hopes of landing that elusive first pick.

They end up with fourth overall, and Mike Babcock, the Leafs’ head coach, does not want Mitch Marner, instead asking the then-management for the bigger defenceman, a boy named Hanifin who will go fifth to the Hurricanes. The Leafs take Marner anyway. Watch him as his name is called. He, like the first three, sits in a nest of other prospects and their families -- Mitch actually sits right behind Jack Eichel -- but unlike them, when his name is called the other prospects lean over to offer him congratulations, as well as his parents and brother. Mat Barzal, from across the aisle, offers a bro-hug as Mitch goes by.

The rest of the draft goes as usual. The 2015 draft, beyond narratively, is one of the deepest drafts in recent memory; players you may recognize include Timo Meier, Mikko Rantanen, Travis Konecny, Sebastian Aho (the Carolina one!), Roope Hintz, Kirill Kaprizov, Troy Terry… the list goes on. These players have their own stories, but few really tie in to this one. (So far.)

Summer passes; we move on. Training camp rolls around.

Connor McDavid, as expected, makes the team. He moves in with Taylor Hall, a fellow first overall. Jack Eichel also makes the team.

Dylan and Mitch do not. Dylan’s reasons are unknown to me, but Mitch is sent down because, again, Babcock does not want him. He’s naturally undersized and does not have a frame that builds muscle; Babcock is not under the impression that young men in Mitch’s image make good hockey players. Both Mitch and Dylan are returned to the OHL.

The stage is set now; each boy has a team. Eight years on, only half of them are on those teams. But we can’t worry about that yet! We have to make it to the NHL first!

World Juniors and the Memorial Cup

Once Connor makes the Oilers, Dylan Strome is named captain of the Erie Otters. Very cool, to only get what you deserve after the golden boy is gone.

Jack and Connor are off playing with the big boys. They’ll get their own section later -- we have to work our way up, not up and down and up and down. I’ve got to be somewhat cohesive, you know? So, we’ll stay, for now, in the world of junior hockey.

The Otters and the London Knights, Mitch’s team, are in the wonderful circumstance of not only both being very good at the same time, but also being in the same division as one another. This means they see each other quite often (no plane travel in the OHL. Bus only.) and have thus formed… a bit of a rivalry. It is becoming difficult to dance around: Dylan Strome, despite the politeness they’ve shown each other at the draft, hates Mitch Marner.

And why wouldn’t you? He’s the one Dylan fought with all last season for the OHL scoring title; he’s fast on his feet and can shoot from impossible angles; he makes plays you’ve never even considered, much less considered possible. He dangles through the Otters and scores the easiest impossible goal you’ve ever seen and laughs as light as air about the whole thing. And he’s tiny. Unfortunately for the rest of us, Marner drew a lot of comparisons to Patrick Kane in his junior days -- thankfully without the character in common, but as a hockey player. An undersized (almost comically so) London winger with otherworldly ability to manifest scoring chances out of nothing. The exact sort of irritating worm that not one of us wants on the other team.

So, of course, they get put on the same team.

The 2016 World Juniors are summoned. Connor McDavid, then dealing with a broken collarbone and a great deal of pressure, is not on Team Canada’s roster. Dylan Strome and Mitch Marner both are. Suddenly and thankfully, the media’s focus shifts from one, false rivalry in McEichel to a very very real one.

I don’t want to dismiss what happens next as a mere symptom of the fact that hockey players are engineered to get along with their teammates, even if they don’t like each other. Admittedly, it does start that way -- Mitch is a winger and Dylan a centre, and both skilled, so the coach puts them on the same line. Simple enough. And then they spark up a friendship.

Dylan’s reasons for hating Mitch were not personal, just hockey-related. Dylan hated Mitch because he was good and he knew it, the simple way a teenager hates their direct competitor. On the same team, though, the competition aspect is removed, and the barrier for hatred is gone. This is the Dylan/Mitch enemies to lovers arc, if you want to put it that way.

Mitch, for the record, I doubt ever hated Dylan. He doesn’t have that in him, never had. He saw a rival, sure, and as soon as that rival wore a matching jersey I assume he taped the word friend over whatever defined their relationship before. Mitch is probably one of the most gregarious, friendly, charming hockey players out there. Beyond his cute little face and on-ice highlights, even. He’s loud, sure, but when he talks he knows how to include you. He finds out what you like and talks about it, he singles you out if you’re shy and builds up your confidence. He’s just plain nice.

Dylan, like the rest of us, was charmed. Within weeks he went from calling Mitch annoying to telling us all about how he loves cuddling (!?) with him. They became fast friends and great linemates.

Dylan’s not the only one Mitch Marner befriends at Worlds, though. Somewhere between matches, Mitch takes an elevator at the complex they’re staying at, and ends up sharing it with a boy from the American team, a tall square-jawed Mexican centre with a Justin Bieber obsession. This is Auston Matthews, one of the projected top picks of the 2016 draft -- born just two days after the cutoff that would have made him eligible to go in 2015. He played with Jack Eichel at the USNTDP, before taking his age-eighteen year to go play pro in Switzerland. He holds the NTDP scoring record as a seventeen-year-old, and will continue to hold it until Jack Hughes breaks onto the scene. The two boys in the elevator do not yet know it, but they are about to share the mantle of franchise saviour, for the franchise most desperately in need of saving.

Either way. The Canadians place sixth at World Juniors, the Americans do better, the Finns win the whole thing. (In the long run, Laine turns out not to be better than Matthews after all.) Mitch and Dylan go back to their OHL teams.

Erie and London tie in points that year, but London wins the OHL title and goes to Alberta for the Memorial Cup, the CHL trophy. Mitch Marner takes home the scoring title, the Stafford Smythe (CHL equivalent of the Conn Smythe), and the Memorial Cup itself. He is one of the most decorated winners in OHL history, touted as being clutch, creating magic, and racking up points. He has close friends in Dylan Strome and fellow Knight Matthew Tkachuk, who will be selected sixth overall in the 2016 draft, the second American after Auston Matthews himself. And when NHL training camp rolls around in the fall, even Babcock cannot deny he is ready, no matter how slight he may still be.

Connor Complex

There’s nothing that fuels story like a good rivalry, and the NHL was obsessed with marketing this rivalry. The Canadian versus the American. The perfect child of a long line of red-blooded southern Ontario tradition versus the Boston boy with a chip on his shoulder. Jack and Connor, Connor and Jack. They hyped Jack up the time leading up to the draft, trying to hint that he was almost as good -- no, just as good -- as McDavid himself.

He was not, and everyone knew.

The 2014-15 Sabres, then the worst team in the NHL and having done an elite job at tanking (they are one of the worst teams in the analytics era, besides the 2022-23 Anaheim Ducks -- I wonder what prize might be waiting at that number one spot? Surely not someone named Connor.) wanted McDavid. The Pegulas, the owners of the Sabres, tried to hide their disappointment in him as pride. They had an all-American star, they said, someone who had grown up not too far from Buffalo himself, and in the same country, no less. He would be the sort of man to lead them into a new golden age, away from the misery of the tank years.

And yet the narrative persisted. McEichel, they whispered. Look at how good Connor McDavid is, and look at how much Eichel is not him. McDavid, they say, McDavid McDavid McDavid. No article could be written about Jack without mentioning how he came second to Connor.

The Sabres tried to quell the whispers. Look at our boy, they say. They signed Eichel to an eight-year, ten million dollar contract, and in the beginning of the 2018-19 season they named him captain. Isn’t our boy great.

The team does not improve. The Sabres hadn’t made the playoffs for three years when they drafted Eichel; they still haven’t made the playoffs today. I wasn’t around to look, but the team was bad. Eichel did his best, but he was young and inexperienced and did not -- never did -- have captain’s blood in him; Ryan O’Reilly lost his love for the game.

The whispers of character issues start to come out. Jack Eichel is a “locker room cancer;” he’s selfish, stuck-up, quick-tempered. He’s caught in a cage where the only key is to be Connor, something which he never wanted to achieve in the first place, and never could have even if he did want it. The whole narrative was completely fabricated. He liked Connor well enough when they met.

I do imagine he has feelings about it, though, and feelings about Connor now. He didn’t know him, not enough to have an opinion on the boy, but the name followed him around long enough for him to think about it. Imagine it. You’re good in your field, great, even. You’re doing well enough to earn yourself a superstar contract, you’re an All-Star, and yet the only way you will get any recognition at all is when they say that you are worse than one of the greatest players ever to play the game. They lock you into a connection that you have never wanted, barring you from forging your own path. You exist permanently in that orange-and-blue shadow. I don’t blame Jack for being angry. I would be too.

Babcock

Auston Matthews was incredible from the jump. He was big, he was strong, his wrister is the stuff of legend. He won the Calder in his and Mitch’s rookie year, by a not insignificant margin, well ahead of Laine. He was a coach’s dream doll, unusual enough to be marketed and good enough to be useful. Unavoidably masculine even at nineteen.

Mitch less so. Mitch is still small, remember, and struggles to gain weight. I know I talk about his size a lot, but it’s genuinely important. Hockey and its fan culture has long been a group that prioritized size and raw power above all things. Mitch possessed neither of those things, and when he struggled with gaining muscle it was seen as an unwillingness to try. If you know anything about the ability of our bodies to gain or lose weight, you know that it is simply a genetic roll of the dice, a scale that puts a little bit of us into the “gains muscle mass easily” category and decides when to stop. Most hockey players actually aren’t very far up the muscle-gaining spectrum, especially when compared to American football or baseball players -- mass is strength, yes, but it’s also more to move around on ice -- but Mitch is especially low on the scale. Because of this, he is seen as unmanly, a dangerous thing to be.

The Leafs media market is a nightmare, and always has been. Because this is the Centre of the Universe, there are more eyes on the Leafs than on any other team. More eyes mean more writers, means you have to say weirder and wilder things to beg for clicks. Outrage is a good marketing tactic. Getting mad about one of the prize prospects seemingly not wanting to bulk up for the good of the team is a very easy thing to do.

What’s more, Mitch, after his entry-level contract had expired, had had a very difficult and long-drawn out contract negotiation, asking for a lot of money -- essentially the maximum that the Leafs could afford at the time. Because of the salary cap constraint, this was seen as kind of selfish. The angry clicks move. Mitch is sensitive, they say. Soft, selfish, weak.

It’s easy enough to dismiss out of hand when your uncle from Belleville does it, because what does he know. It’s different when it’s the head coach of the Leafs. Mike Babcock, is, at the time of hiring, the highest-paid coach in the NHL. He was signed before the 2015-16 season, and at that point had an eight-year contract, which would have carried him up until this year.

Mike Babcock sucked. Structurally, his teams were fine -- the Leafs made the playoffs in 2016-17, and haven’t missed it since, but he was awful, horribly mean to the boys under him, and especially, especially Mitch. 

We should skip ahead a little bit. It’s the beginning of the 2019-20 season. The Leafs have made the playoffs three times already, and lost in the first round each time -- but this, too, is not yet a phrase that strikes worry into our hearts. They’re young, and they have plenty of time left. 

Respected veteran Jason Spezza came home to the Leafs, having spent his career -- a player who might squeak the Hall of Fame, but is more likely just below its level -- in first Ottawa, where he was the captain of the Senators briefly and one of its most well-loved players, and then Dallas. Like the boys I talk about here, Jason Spezza is a former OHL player, a GTA boy, a Leafs fan. The Leafs’ season opener is against Ottawa, the team where Jason Spezza left most of his mark. There used to be a promotion with the Senators -- a local branch of some pizza chain would offer a free slice if the Sens scored more than five goals in a game. Spezza (and his linemates, Heatley and Alfredsson) were so good, they named his line the Pizza line. Mike Babcock makes Jason Spezza a healthy scratch on that day.

This is seen as disrespectful, but no more than a coach living up to his hardass reputation. You do what the coach tells you, don’t you? Lest you become a whiner, or worse, a locker room cancer. Scratching an extremely well-respected veteran on the opener against his former team is just something some guys do. A message, if you will. Stay the course, Babcock just wants his players to respect him.

And then news of the list leaks.

It happened when Mitch was a rookie, but they kept it hidden for three years. The Leafs went on a father-and-sons trip, one they do every season. They’re on a road trip, with only their fathers, isolated from their home.

(A brief aside to talk about Mitch’s dad; his name is Paul Marner, and he is the most stereotypical hardass hockey dad on the planet. A nitpicker, an armchair coach, a bully. I do not imagine Mitch felt particularly comforted by his and Babcock’s combined presence on this trip.)

Babcock approached Mitch and asked him to organize all of his teammates in a list. He wanted Mitch to arrange them in order of hardest workers to laziest; he thought Mitch was one of the lazy ones, and wanted to drive this point home by making him categorize his teammates like this. Mitch, as a rookie hockey player does in the presence of the Maple Leaf hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles, obliged. He was under the impression it would be a private affair, just an assignment from Babcock to teach him some sort of lesson. Whether it be out of fear or honesty, he placed himself last on the list. 

Babcock told the others.

Specifically, two Leafs vets that Mitch had placed low on the list -- Nazem Kadri and Tyler Bozak. Imagine this: you are a decent centre on a bubble team, but nonetheless an established NHL veteran of about a decade, and your coach shows you a list a rookie made. He tells you that the rookie arranged everyone by work ethic, grinders to lazy shits. You are firmly on the “lazy shit” end.

How much does the coach have to suck, or how much does the rookie have to be loved, for Kadri and Bozak to react like they did? The rumour says they called for Babcock’s head on the spot. Mitch was in tears. I wouldn’t want to stay in Toronto if that happened to me. No wonder he and Auston signed for so much -- Babcock was barely halfway through his contract when they did. If I’d thought that I would have to deal with him for that long, I wouldn’t accept anything less than as much as they could possibly pay me.

In the end, in the beginning of December, 2019, Mitch got hurt and the Leafs went on a road trip. They were already losing by the time they’d left, and they kept losing. Normally, a team on a road trip doesn’t take the hurt players with them, but they took Mitch. The Leafs lost six in a row and finally fired Babcock, letting Sheldon Keefe take his place. Mitch’s presence was a comfort.

Go West

The Leafs make the playoffs first, and take Mitch with them. The Sabres are fighting a silent war with their star centre, but they are no closer to success. 

Connor McDavid is named captain at nineteen, the youngest in the history of the NHL. He scrapes the team to a playoff spot, then to a second round loss. He wins the Art Ross and the Hart.

The year before his entry-level contract expires, when he is first eligible, he signs what is then the most expensive per-year contract in NHL history -- eight years, a hundred million dollars. He is looking forward to spending the rest of his prime as an Oiler. He wins the Art Ross the next year, comes very close the year after. The Oilers do not make the playoffs again until after Covid hits.

He gets hurt a lot, too -- he breaks his collarbone as a rookie, missing half the season, and at the very end of the 2018-19 year, crashes into the net irons and shatters his knee. There are rumours of the man who broke Connor’s collarbone doing it on purpose; Connor claims that he overheard the man bragging about it, and I am inclined to believe him. This guy gets traded to the Oilers not too long after that.

In the meantime, Dylan is struggling. The Coyotes stick him in Tucson, a team he is obviously too good for. His entry-level contract slides another season. He wiffles between Tucson and Arizona, not being considered good enough to stay up but being too good to stay down. In the end, on the last year of his entry-level contract, he is traded from the Coyotes to the Chicago Blackhawks, a similarly bad team with a few remnants of its Cup-winning days. Dylan, a feeble icon of Chicagoan hope for one last dance with the aging core, centres Patrick Kane.

In his first half-season with the Blackhawks, he scores 51 points in 58 games. There are hopeful flashes of what he can be, the touted prospect he once was. 

Things wrap up on New Years like this: Connor is beyond a hundred-point pace; Dylan, although in no less danger, is at least out of the dust at the bottom of the barrel; Jack is caught in a cold war; the team loves Mitch. 

John Tavares has a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Playoff Series

March of 2020 rolls around, and with it the coronavirus pandemic. The league is shut down before the season ends, and the playoffs re-formed in July, inside a bubble -- no one in, no one out until they are eliminated. The Sabres stay with their families, having once again missed the playoffs. The Leafs are set to play the Columbus Blue Jackets, and the Oilers are set to play the Blackhawks.

This, to date, is Dylan’s only playoff appearance, and he is set to face Connor.

Dylan wins.

The qualifying round -- functioning as the first round of the bubble playoffs -- is a best of five, not of seven, and the Blackhawks defeat the Oilers 3-1. They then proceed to lose in five games (this one is a best of seven) to Vegas, but Dylan’s job is done.

The Leafs lose in the first round again. The Leafs have made the playoffs since Auston and Mitch’s debut, every single year, but they lose each time; in six, to the Capitals, then in seven every year after that. Or, in this case, in five.

Covid had not stopped by the end of the 2020 season ( :/ ) and the NHL was rearranged for what would be ostensibly the 2020-2021 season, but ended up being played mostly in 2021. Because of border laws, the Canadian teams are sequestered into their own, North division. Dylan Strome signs a two-year contract extension with Chicago right before the season starts -- one that will carry him until the end of the 2021-2022 season. 

If you’ve seen All or Nothing on Amazon Prime, it is this season that is covered. The Leafs tear through what is seen as a weaker North division, taking a comfortable first place spot. Connor McDavid cracks a hundred points in fifty-six games. Both Leafs and Oilers lose in the first round.

The Leafs do it perhaps most remarkably. They have drawn the Canadiens, a rather insubstantial team who are in their spot mostly because they have one of the best goaltenders in recent memory at their back.

I watched this game, live, before I was a serious Leafs fan. I can only imagine what it would be like if you were already invested at that point; I would not wish to live that horror on anyone. I tried to watch All or Nothing, later, but I stop here. 

Corey Perry and John Tavares are both on the ice, in the race for the puck. Tavares catches an edge, as you sometimes do, and falls, and Perry’s knee is in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, and it catches Tavares in the side of the head. He falls to the ice, his limbs splaying unnaturally. He won’t move. 

Medics come over, to try and raise him to his feet. He fights against them, blood streaming from a cut in his forehead, unable to tell if they are trying to hurt him or not. There is no one in the crowd, the stadium empty for the pandemic. The camera cuts to Kyle Dubas in the rafters, who has a phone in his hand and swiftly vanishes back into the halls of the arena. He is calling Tavares’ wife. We do not know what is going to happen. Everyone looks shaken -- the Habs have just watched a man nearly die, the Leafs have just lost their captain, perhaps forever. They lose, although the game feels like an afterthought. I do not want to watch hockey anymore.

They win the next three straight, though, even without him. Then they lose, twice, in overtime.

The Leafs, as they have done for the past four years up to this point, go to game seven.

Partway through the game, Mitch Marner panics in his defensive zone and puts the puck over the glass. This is a penalty, it is a penalty every time, and he knows that. He sits in the box, looking defeated already. He curls in on himself, and the camera flashes to the penalty box. He’s crying. He knows the game is lost.

The Leafs are eliminated again, and there is a target on his back now, not only for the puck going over the glass but for the tears. He’s soft, they say. As they have said since he was picked, because he doesn’t look like a hockey player should, because he doesn’t act like a hockey player should, because he doesn’t play hockey like a hockey player should. He makes too much and he disappears when it matters.

Thoughts on the Leafs’ playoff successes suddenly switch from the core is young, even if this is frustrating to they need to win before it’s too late. Already, in recent years, they have suffered historic game-seven chokes and drastic failures to launch. Whether they do it against teams like the President’s Trophy-winning Capitals or the barely-alive wild-card Canadiens is irrelevant. They cannot win a round, at all. The Leafs are already the team with the greatest Cup drought, and they are now gaining a long playoff round victory drought too. It should be time, at least, for them to look like they are a contender. 

This is how the Leafs find themself stuck; a particularly frustrating timeloop, even though hockey itself is nothing but. Sports are cyclical by nature. A team is bad, then okay, then good, then declining, then bad again, and this repeats anew. Some teams try to get themselves out of this cycle by being good forever; I can assure you that this only really happens to the New York Yankees, who employ a cadre of evil wizards to keep everything on that hell team going well for them. Most other teams who try end up stuck like the Canucks are, right now: bad enough to miss the playoffs, but not good enough to get key picks for a rebuild. I can see next season play out, clear as day: they struggle out of the gate, one of their stars gets hurt right when it seems like they’re at the very, very start of gathering momentum, they’re bottom-10 by January and the team says everyone but Pettersson are on the table, they trade picks and low-grade players, they get blazing hot post-deadline and finish twenty-first.

There is, unfortunately, also a perception that pure talent is not what makes players playoff performers -- instead, some so-called “clutch gene” that exists, or not. The reality is somewhere in between. Clutch exists. There are always players who can score when no one else can even dream of it, but a greater problem is luck. President’s Trophy winners are not often Cup winners (even if higher seeds are most likely to win), because the regular season is a much, much bigger sample size and the playoffs can change the course of all of it by a goalie having a hot streak at the right time. The 2018-19 Tampa Bay Lightning, third-best team in NHL history, got swept in the first round by Sergei Bobrovsky going crazy. The 2022-23 Bruins lost in seven in the first round in much the same manner.

And no matter what, the Leafs are always on the wrong end of the luck. Bounces hit the post. The refs take back goals for reasons they would have ignored at any other time of year. John Tavares slips, and his head makes contact with a knee.

Mitch ends up the whipping boy. He is the Leafs’ most valuable player, and this is a team with Auston Matthews on it, but I’m serious. He was the Leafs’ leading playoff scorer in 2023, he’s one of the best penalty-killers in the league, he’s adored by everyone who’s ever once talked to him. He only ever wanted to be a Leaf, and now that he is here he is the sacrificial lamb for the anger at a curse that is not his fault.

I do blame the media. I will always blame the media, those who turn on him at a moment’s notice because they know picking on the skinny pretty unmanly one will get more clicks than anything else. I beg of you -- know that, of anything that it could be, it is not Mitch’s fault.

Jack Eichel has a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Neck Injury

It is 2021, and the Sabres aren’t going to make the playoffs. Jack Eichel has been captain for coming up on three years, and has been a Sabre for coming up on six, none of which have even slightly improved the team. He is widely disliked within the fanbase, and, rumouredly, within the locker room and organization. 

Jack is frustrated, dragging a mediocre team along through a slog of the past six years, and he has never been the kindest man on the planet. He is about to get worse. The Sabres are on a losing streak when they head to Long Island, and Jack is hit the wrong way and slips a disk in his neck. The Sabres insist he’ll only be out a week and a half. 

It is a great sin in hockey, to go against team. Anything that can be seen as selfish is demonized; shooting from a difficult angle when your teammate is wide open, not playing when you can muscle through the pain. Not trusting your coach or management is about as bad as you can get. If you’re a team guy, willing to sacrifice health and limb for the boys, you are held as saint, no matter how hurt you become in the end. This is a philosophy that has been drilled into these men since they were kids, as soon as they put their first skates on. You can stand any pain for the length of a hockey shift; you can play through anything for two minutes. It is a dangerous, dangerous school of thought, one of the most destructive parts of hockey culture. But it is, nonetheless, law.

Eichel is about to commit a sin so great they’ll kick him out of Heaven. I do think that, of the four of them, he is the only one with any semblance of genre awareness: when he was first scouted as a prospect and they were comparing him to McDavid, I think that he would be the only one to ignore the media’s spin on that as thoroughly as he did. He knows what he is, and he knows himself. Of course it comes off as bitchy and selfish, though -- that kind of pressure can’t be kind to anyone.

Before the week and a half is up, he visits a specialist doctor about his neck. This is where it all starts to go wrong.

The Sabres take issue with that for two reasons: one, that they hoped he’d be able to come back after the end of it. Keep in mind that he has herniated a disk in his neck, an injury typically so severe it’s impressive he’s walking -- slipping a cervical disk often causes nerve pain that radiates down through the entire spinal cord below that point, which is the whole body from how high up his is. Two, that the doctor he consults is an independent surgeon, one unaffiliated with the Sabres themselves. 

The thing about belonging to a hockey team is that you are, because of the way your employment is linked to your physical health, essentially their property. They make your medical decisions for you, they feed you, they tell you how to move. Going to someone else is a breach of contract, and the already-tense connection between Jack and the Sabres gets more tense. The Sabres keep losing. They lose eighteen games in a row.

Jack’s doctor recommended a surgery that no NHL player has ever had; cervical disk replacement. The Sabres did not want this -- the surgery carries risks, yes, but they also wanted to control the way that Jack’s injury was handled, and going through with this surgery was Jack’s wish, not theirs. The Sabres do their own evaluation, and ask for a different, more common surgery: spinal fusion. This surgery carries less immediate risk, but the bones in Eichel’s neck will also be fused, and he doesn’t want that. Because the team has final control over a player’s health, not the player, they decline his disk replacement. Having reached a stalemate, they rule him out for the rest of the season, trying to win a war of attrition.

September 2021 rolls around, and the Sabres, along with thirty-one other teams, take training camp. At the beginning of training camp, players do a physical exam. Jack, because his herniated disk has not improved, because he needs a surgery that has been denied from him, because he is stubbornly and bravely willing to wait out the Sabres, fails his physical. As a result, the Sabres, fed up with him, strip the captain’s C from his chest.

Jack makes one final request to the team: either let him get the surgery or trade him. In the end, they trade him to the Vegas Golden Knights, a team that did not exist when he was drafted. The Golden Knights approve him for the disk replacement surgery the day they acquire him.

The surgery is a success; his rehab goes better than anyone expects, and he starts tearing it up when he comes back. I would argue that, if the Golden Knights win the Cup this year, he should get the Conn Smythe -- he has been an invaluable member of the team, even without a letter on his chest.

It is less important for him to win his million awards than it is for him to come in and out of this surgery in the first place, still able to play. He fought with the team that was supposed to have upheld him as their star for months over his right to do what he wanted with his own health; in the end, the only way to go was for him to change that team. He was the first to have this surgery, but after him there have already been hockey players who have undergone it -- much like Tommy John, the baseball player who got his ulnar ligament reconstructed and the surgery to do so named after him. He fought for the chance to control his own body and won.

And for that, he was demonized.

The Sabres missed the playoffs every year they had him; they missed the playoffs every year after he left. Because he was the captain and he had the audacity to go against the organization’s wishes, he was hated. In Buffalo, he is still hated. If you ask, they’ll tell you he was a locker room cancer, that he was undevoted to winning. If you look at him in Vegas, neither of those things are true.

Jack Eichel is a rare man -- he does have that “clutch�� gene, or rather doesn’t have the choke instinct. He has always been unbothered by the spiral around him. He operates well in the mire, and when the pressure rises it doesn’t affect him (or maybe, even better, he feeds on it.) He has the right kind of mentality -- that fuck-you, I’m here and you can’t change that, you tried to control me and I wouldn’t bend mentality. He has only made the playoffs once, this year. Like Dylan, actually, his only appearance has involved defeating Connor McDavid. Go back and watch his highlights from the Vegas-Edmonton series if you can: he has a couple of pretty goals and more than a couple great defensive takeaways, but he doesn’t lose his cool, not once. He has earned his right to be here, and he knows it more than anyone else. I’m rooting for the Stars, but I hope he wins some day.

153

How do you talk about the Edmonton Oilers? I mean, without either excusing or demonizing them, although I admit I have Hater Instinct and trend towards the latter. They have the best player in the world; that grown-up incarnation of the wide-eyed boy on the Erie rink. They have the best playoff performer in the world; Leon Draisaitl, who I have not avoided mentioning until now on purpose, but whom I cannot continue without bringing up. They have been terribly cap-managed since the day McDavid was drafted, and are an unstable roster with blazing-hot offense and very little defence or goaltending at all.

For a brief moment, let’s not talk about the Oilers. Let’s only talk about Connor himself.

McDavid has 850 points in 569 career games. Not even Sid had that many points through that few games. If he stays healthy, Connor’s well on track to become the second player ever to hit two thousand for his career -- after a certain other Oiler, who need not be mentioned. He has won just about every award you can win, with the exception of the Selke… and the Cup.

If it’s possible, he has proven himself better than all of the hype at the draft saying he would become a great. To watch him, you can see the way he has changed his team, how even though they have all learned from him that he is still the best.

There is something that many Oilers do. When next your team plays them, pay attention to it: they cut into the offensive zone with possession on the outside, using tight little crossovers to gain speed, after which they’ll usually try to rush the net (if there are no defenders in the way). This is a move that McDavid has patented; he’ll use it, just as many of the others will, but he’ll probably be the one that scores. The depth all skate like him, really, fast and in wide arcs, trying to generate a rush chance. 

Connor as a player is a tour de force, the best power-player in the world by a mile, no slouch at even strength, speedy enough to score even shorthanded. The boy’s got wheels. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which NHLers are fast and which are slow, but Connor’s just that tick above everyone else that you can see it without eye training at all.

Connor as a person is a bit less showy. He’s quiet by nature, shy and soft-voiced. Because he was hyped so much (franchise saviour, McJesus, Next One) he has been media trained into sterility, giving the same level answers as everyone else, hardly daring to express any opinion at all. His eyes are big, rounded, and one of them is lazy from a time when his brother tried to take it out as a child, and that combined with his heavy brow and stiff expression -- he’s never been a good smiler, smirks with one corner of his mouth and that’s mostly it -- give him a resting expression of something like concern, or maybe despair. When he laughs, he doesn’t really “laugh,” just kind of coughs, a one or two-syllable affair. He avoids eye contact with the camera, and often the reporters as well. There is no seething emotion under the surface, not like with Eichel, nor does he speak analytically like Dylan does. He moves through his life as if he is someone who does not want it to turn out quite like this.

I do not know if he wants to be in Edmonton. There are jokes about how he is desperate to leave, but I definitely don’t believe those; there’s a difference between not wanting to stay and wanting to go. I don’t think he hates it. He has been given a responsibility, the captain’s C -- and because, unlike Jack Eichel, he is a good Canadian boy who has been given a destiny, he accepts it. He loves his teammates, especially Draisaitl, whom he seems to derive all his confidence from.

I will also say that I don’t believe he’s stupid. Naive, perhaps; not stupid. There is no way out for him, even if he was sure he wanted to leave; he’s the best player in the world, far too expensive for any contender to afford in either trade or cap space, and if he asks for a trade he won’t let himself go to a team that isn’t already a contender. He will remain an Oiler at least until his contract is up, and I imagine that his staying afterwards depends on Draisaitl.

People talk about him leaving a lot, largely because of the team that has been assembled around him. The Oilers are not a well-created team, and I will say that plainly now and spend as little time technically deconstructing it as possible.

Beyond McDavid and Draisaitl, they have:

A rookie starting goaltender, whose success as we know it is based on a single-season sample size and a complete playoff collapse.

A five million dollar backup goaltender, who earned his contract by being carried by the Leafs, despite being utterly horrendous for a long enough stretch leading up to his free agency that anyone who looked beyond the win-loss numbers wouldn’t have signed him.

One genuine shutdown defender.

One young up-and-coming defender; by far one of the most promising Oiler (or otherwise) defensive prospects, beyond the usual suspects.

One netfront grinder who is great at playing wing to high-power setters, but cannot drive his own line.

One decent 2C.

Sarah Nurse’s cousin. Sarah’s better.

A supporting cast of bad defencemen and middling-at-best forwards.

Many charming characters, of course: Zach Hyman, the grinder, is a beloved ex-Leaf, and I’m personally a fan of Nugent-Hopkins, the 2C, but the vast majority of this is not the sort of thing a contending team is built upon. McDavid has missed the playoffs almost as often as he’s made them. The playoffs are a crapshoot, but in order to try your luck you have to at least be able to enter the lottery, and it takes a stunning amount of effort to be able to do that.

So, McDavid lingers, in this kind of limbo. It mirrors the Leafs, almost. (And yes. Because McDavid is an Ontario boy, and the Leafs are the Centre of the Universe, we have to mention them both in conversation. Not all stories revolve around the Leafs, but this one does.) One true contender, and one generational talent, both what we picture to be well overdue for their Cup run, but neither having yet done so. 

The thing about the stories of the class of 2015 is that they intertwine, that they mimic and mirror each other. These boys have not simply gotten drafted in the same handful of picks in the same year and gone on their merry ways -- they layer, they parallel, they weave around each other. Connor is the captain of a team that cannot win, Jack is a captain, Mitch cannot win. Jack fought for the right to control his body and was demonized for it; Mitch negotiated for a contract that he determined to be a fair price for Babcock, and was demonized for it. Whatever pure saviour they figure Connor to be, Jack is the twisted inverse of that, falling from grace.

Connor has one of the best seasons in NHL history, one of only seventeen player-seasons with over a hundred and fifty points (Nine of those seasons belong to Gretzky. Another four belong to Lemieux.) He loses, in six games in the second round, to the Vegas Golden Knights. At the time that he’s eliminated, he leads the playoffs in points. Leon Draisaitl is tied for second place. Counting from the date Mitch Marner played his first game in the NHL, the Oilers and Leafs have almost exactly the same number of playoff game wins, with the Oilers having one more.

There’s No Place Like Strome

Before we can look to the future, there is one person I have been neglecting. Dylan, poor Dylan. I think it would be only half an unfair assessment to call him a draft bust. He’s talented, for sure, but not nearly the same calibre that the draftees around him are. Hardly a Marner, an Eichel, or even a Rantanen or a Meier. 

His career has existed quietly in the shadows, so far from Connor McDavid that it only feels fair to mention them in the same conversation in this context. It has been eight years since they were best friends, Connor so close to Dylan he waited in the stadium in order to watch him get drafted. They didn’t look each other in the eye in the handshake line when Dylan won their series. Connor didn’t go to his wedding.

That being said: so far, he has found himself a knack for landing in the shadow of greatness. When he was an Erie Otter, it was Connor -- Dylan held the scoring title in their draft year, while Connor was out nursing his hand, but Connor was the chosen son and Dylan was the Coyotes’ consolation prize. When he was traded to the Blackhawks, he found himself centring Kane and Debrincat, but of course both of them were the offseason and trade deadline’s prizes, and not him.

And then he signed in Washington.

So now, we go back to Ovechkin. Alex Ovechkin is one of the greatest players of all time; his Capitals are on the decline now, but they contended for a long time while he was playing and may still contend as long as Ovi still skates. For a long time, the team relied on Ovechkin’s goalscoring, assisted mostly by his faithful centre, Nicklas Backstrom. They, too, are married; they have played a thousand games as teammates, been through a decade of heartbreak together before the Cup was theirs. During the 2021-2022 season, Backstrom took time off -- he needed hip surgery, something likely to end his career. Ovi was alone.

There is a fundamental difference, of course, between the expectations of wingers and centres. A winger, like Ovi, scores, or assists, at his own leisure, but it is the centre’s job to drive his line. Ovechkin is generational -- he will sink forty goals no matter what -- but he still needs someone to move him out of the defensive zone, someone to make his assist.

Enter Dylan -- a young centre, not especially fast on his feet but intelligent, and clearly experienced in the realm of managing high-calibre wingers (see: Debrincat, and the ghost of Patrick Kane.) He joins the Capitals on a one-year contract, desperate to prove himself. Chicago didn’t want him, and Arizona didn’t either. It takes barely until November before he is, once again, the necessary shadow of greatness. 

Ovechkin, the team’s captain and centrepoint, clearly likes what he sees, and the management does, as well. The Capitals offer Strome a five-year extension.

Maybe it’s because he’s less of a superstar then the other three members of his draft class, but Dylan has a life outside of hockey -- a wife and young daughter. After being thrown away by other teams, and with his new family, I can only imagine that it was… peaceful, if anything, to be offered this contract.

Chicago, after rapidly getting rid of him, Debrincat, and then Kane, would go on to tank spectacularly, and win themselves the first overall pick. They will use it to draft another generational talent. His name is also Connor.

The Blue Wedding

So, here we stand, at the end of it all. Dylan finally has a home, a mother hen of a Russian bear that it has become his job to assist in record-breaking, and soon to be two daughters. Jack has a team that loves him, freedom from pain, and an ongoing potential Cup run. Connor has a sterile mansion, a best friend, and an unsteady team. Mitch’s life is up in the air.

Right as I’m writing this, the general manager of the Leafs has been unceremoniously kicked out. His tenure will end the day before Mitch’s no-move contract kicks in, but it is not known if Mitch’s time as a Leaf will survive that long. He is well on track to become one of the greatest Leafs of all time, and his tenure might be cut short in the prime of his career. 

But let’s wrap up with this: Mitch will get married this summer. Because he’s Mitch, the darling of the league, everyone’s best friend, I imagine the wedding party to be extensive/ Packed to the brim of current and former Leafs, as well as people who have never been Leafs. I wonder if Dylan Strome will be there -- or even Connor McDavid, although McDavid never even attended Dylan’s wedding.

The stories, as they do, go on.

[majorproblems77]

ITS LU UPDATE TIME!!!

AND IT IS ALL ABOUT SKY AND IM SO EXCITED :DDDDD

You know what that means! It means a long post by me! :D

Cant wait to be excited about my blorbo for like 30 minutes, so sit get some popcorn and like some earplugs cause i will try to contain my screaming but I've been waiting for more Sky stuff and I'm so excited!!!!

For point, and because I keep forgetting, all the panels I'll be talking about belong to JoJo and @linkeduniverse

Let's do this!

Alright lets get this out of the way first, I love some parallels right, So as per usual, if I need a panel from anything prior I'll let you know where it's from!

So what do you think he asked him.

Hey sir! Have you seen a guy with a big flag on his back going way to fast come through there?

Man is just like, oh yeah he went that way past the forge that your other weird fellows were at earlier.

He run, Then he hero stop. Power pose activated, target acquired. Then he run some more

Run my blorbo run!

Genuinely interested in what exactly this is, Is it a map? Is it a list of places? Is it a paper with time shift shenanigans in it?

I'm not versed in the postman, Is this normal, or did he do this cause he heard Sky and wanted him to think he was waiting?

This face has be dead. (/pos) I love him so much my dear blorbo its been too long since we saw you last.

Putting this together for 1 reason

Postman is a dick, Sky was so close, That can't be more than 10 or so metres at most. Poor man ran across Town out of town to catch up to you for you to go sprinting off into the woods, and my man is full on Olympic sprinting to deliver this mail geesus.

Also, the compulsory return of the king 🧍, Sky is the king of this pose and will not be beaten. Although Legend comes pretty close.

God the expressions in this update are top tier, Sky is just so expressive. Right now, Man is thinking why he does this to himself.

I'm fucking cackling, this art is amazing and Jojo's sister did an amazing job. Like I feel like I can hear this picture with that teasing tone that my siblings would use on me when we were younger. God I love it.

So even though Sky is looking towards Legend here, so I'm totally under the impression that Legend said Wahhhh, and Hyrule said I cant run. As Hyrule was with wars When they got split up initally. Poor Sky, man has become the butt of jokes. Im glad Four is giving them a look, He doesn't look impressed. Its okay Sky, you've got a friend in Four behind you. :D

War's is the real MVP of this arc in my opinion, Man has been in charge of the ragtag chain while Time has been out of action looking over Twilight. He's at the end of his tether.

Part of me wonders if this is going to impact his fighting going forward? Maybe he'll slip up because he's so stressed. He knows not all of them are knighted. These heroes he is with are NOT soldiers and he can't treat them as such.

And this sentence. Don't Interrupt! sounds like he is scolding rowdy recruits, rather than fellow heroes.

Which if you think about it, Sky is giving essentially a scouting report here, He scouted ahead and has returned to speak about his findings. War's is a captain, in his era he's a commanding officer. He's taken reports of this kind before.

Having a panel with Time, Wild and Twilight in Gives me more life than i think i give it credit for. (I am in the crowd that there's a family connection between these three.)

It's also nice to see Wild, like genuinely smiling.

Moving on

Hero pose again! :D

I love this man

These panels are very important to me so give me a moment while I explain.

Sky probably has her words engrained in his mind. You can see the questioning look, and thinking. "Is this going to work?"

That eternal dream That he's talking about, he knows her power is faded, but he's going to try anyway. I just didn't think he would use it to track what I can only assume is the postman.

It's really nice to have Sky's relationship with the master sword put on display. It means a lot to me and has brought me great Joy through this update.

He cares about her. And even if she can't talk to him anymore. He still trusts her to lead him true.

And this panel breaks my heart! Something inside of him probably really hoped Fi would speak to him or give him more of an indication. Sky looks so sad.

I just wanna hug him, and tell him it'll be alright. He's probably thinking about turning around at this point. Maybe he's thinking about how some members of the chain perceive Fi.

A soulless weapon.

(Or maybe im thinking too much into this)

The way his faith is restored!

Fi did lead him! She did! She's still there somewhere, and his shock! Oh my boy. My sweet blorbo,

And having used like super zoom on that last panel, MY BOY IS SMILING! :D

RUN BLORBO RUN I BELIEVE IN YOU!

(Also appreciation for the full body shot's we've got of Sky from this update, I love it so much I love him so much.)

Did I go hunting for the references, Yes I Did.

I think the following area is the area where they pull Twilight too, rather than the battle field and he then moved on from here to get to the battle field.

From sunset pt4

The pillar behind Sky has the only slant I can think of. It looks to be the same angle, but that could just be me.

If it is that location, it might be closer to that battlefield than we originally (Or at least I originally) assumed.

(If you've got any other places let me know!)

God i love him

Blorbo beloved! Is about as shocked as i am with the whole Mailman thing.

The confidence of this man is unreal. He's ready, he's moving he's going. He's going and ain't going to stop.

Me absolutely yelling at how this portal looks, it so ANGRY, But we know the Shadow is pissed right now. And if the shadow is making these portals and he's angry. I think the chain might be in for a surprise as they move on to the next location.

Which if I have to be honest. I think is going to be Skyloft. I think we are moving into a Sky arch, having had a Twilight Arc. (I also really want to see Skyloft in this universe, and there's an opportunity here. We've had more master sword things. We've had Sky content. who knows where Jojo will take this next, but I'm excited either way.)

Finally back to the chain! :D

The gremlins return :D

Wind's little 3:< face as he's thinking is giving the energy of an upcoming detective arch, He is thinking and he is thinking HARD okay.

Poor Sky. Man has been running around doing all the hard work while the rest of them just enjoy themselves. Hyrule especially is kinda like 'Ohhh... our bad...'

It's actually a kinda guilty look, maybe he feels a little bad about the teasing from earlier?

Now i gotta mention the potion thing, cause its just so damn funny not too. Sky my blorbo slow down you are gonna choke on the stamina potion.

But.

I want to focus on War's here.

And Wild too.

These two. These two are important.

Wild has gone from happy and chill vibes to Oh shit real quick.

After everything he put into the Shadow, while the shadow was injured and watched as the thing exploded. It just decided to come back or something. And Wild, here I imagine is thinking, "How was that not enough..."

Now Wars.

War's is Stood not looking at anything, In fact, I think he's looking past Time. The last thing he said was a two word scolding but apart from that he's been awfully quiet. Now he looks like he's thinking. He's closed off, protective.

The only time I can see where he does this is when he's in what I'm going to call, 'Captain mode.' So, When he's flicked something in his head that tells him he has to be a knight.

He dosent do it often, in fact from what I can see he does it 4 other times.

In order

Devine dark reflections pt 8 - when he's talking about knighthood with Sky and Hyrule

Sunset pt11 - When talking about Wild, and the fact that he's left

Sunset pt13 - When speaking to Twilight about pulling his own weight

Dawn pt 2 - when Twilight is talking about the team they are.

And now here in Dawn 7 - Where they are discussing the fact that an enemy they fought escaped or survived.

All conversations I would assume a captain would have to have with his men at one point or another. I wonder what He's thinking here. It's got me thinking.

Woah, So this took me longer than I thought. I am on the 4-hour mark now. Lmaoooo

Hope you enjoyed it! Thanks for listening to me ramble for like 20 minutes.

And just remember

Sky is the sweet bestest blorbo beloved and I love him. :D

Thanks for coming to my tedtalk.

[positivelybeastly]

X-Men #5

Late, but who cares? Let's go.

So, I've made no secret that I thought Kwannon wasn't really being given enough to do, these last few issues of X-Men, and it's for the same reason I'm happy to see Greycrow here - Zeb Wells' Hellions was amazing. It was one of the few Krakoa era titles that actually bothered to examine the moral double standards of the era, that really took advantage of its unique status quo, that looked at mutant resurrection and thought, okay, how can we mine this, not for obscure background cameos that will make a person on Twitter happy, but for actual drama? It was a truly great series, and I was hoping it would be followed up, if only in small ways.

I do like that Kwannon and John have a cabin together. With how they left off, it felt very personal and intimate between them, like they truly didn't need anything else to be content with one another, and neither of them struck me as people who need action to be fulfilled - or, rather, they don't see action as a means for enjoyment. As Kwannon says here, it merely gives them purpose. So far, so good.

Wasn't expecting an Amelia Voght callback, of all characters. Then again, this is a Jed MacKay joint.

Psychics and death, name a more iconic X-Men duo.

It is interesting that we get kinda sort of confirmation that Quentin remembers being a head, since I would've figured that the Cerebro cradles were down and he'd have lost those memories, but I suppose it's also possible he could have just heard about it second-hand and been like, wow, I got turned into a head in a box? Weird.

Yeah, no, you don't get to call Scott Slim, Quentin. Only Hank, Bobby or Warren get to do that. And Jean, if she's feeling quirky.

Can I also say something? I actually dig Quentin's fit? I don't know if that says something about my fashion sense or what, but I actually like this look for him more than . . . pretty much any other look he's had. Granted, that's not saying much, given his other uniforms were black blazer with t-shirt, the 60s retro-futuristic mutant fascist attire, or the bland melange that was his X-Force uniform, but I do actually like it. Purple and checker pattern work.

So, this whole issue is an homage to New X-Men #121, which was part of Marvel's Nuff Said initiative, and it, along with all the other issues published that month, had pretty much no dialogue in it, it was all told purely through art. It's not a direct homage, of course, since dialogue is happening, but I appreciate the lampshade being hung on it here, with Quentin both pointing out that this isn't like the other homage, and then not-so-subtly pointing out why it isn't like them.

Because Quentin can't shut the fuck up.

Honestly, that's a fun spin on it. That's how you iterate on something you've seen before.

I'm a sucker for mental landscapes. Always have been, always will. I just like getting to grapple with a character's psyche in a tangible way, it's why I like series like Silent Hill or Star Trek's many telepathic episodes. And if I had to break down why I like them?

Well.

Pretty much.

You really could've just called this New X-Men volume 3, Jed, and I don't think anyone would've objected. That being said - I couldn't have given less of a shit what happened in Marauders volume 2, so seeing that Cassandra Nova is back and wasn't consigned to the dustbin because of that series is a win in my book. She's a top tier villain, tbh, one of the best new X-villains of the last 20 years, and her particular incisive methodology for breaking down heroes' psyches feels like it's perfectly suited for the team of this book.

As she demonstrates.

Ahhhh, good foreshadowing earlier, good stuff. And I have to say, Stegman's Sabretooth is fucking top tier. Excellent rendition of the big man himself (whom I already miss, even if he does have a miniseries coming up very soon).

This is a great sequence, tbh. Like, poor Quentin - this is actually the most anyone has made me feel for Quentin since Aaron, about ten years ago - but in terms of threat and character exposition, it's very good, with some excellent art and very Nova-esque deconstruction. I also particularly like this panel composition.

His head is in a smaller panel. His head is literally in a box.

Good stuff, tbh. Again, this is the most useful Quentin feels like he's been in a while, because if he did anything of real worth in X-Force other than die, I'll freely admit that I do not remember it.

Hank, Scott, do you . . . wanna get them some paper towels, or . . ?

Overall, not a bad issue - definitely not as memorable as the original psychic rescue, though.

Now, originally, I was gonna say, you can't hold that against it, it's not easy to match Morrison, that's just common sense, but then again, most writers don't directly invite the comparison, so, I really hope Jed is cooking up something long term and satisfying, because constantly referencing Morrison is all fine and dandy, but it needs to go somewhere.

Still, I'd say the title has been squarely good thus far, and it still has room to get better and better, so I'm gonna give it time to breathe.

Also?

Our expert panel of judges have concluded that Hank McCoy once again wins the title of Original X-Man with the Dumpiest of Dump Truck Asses. Thanks for trying, Scott, but, uh. Your nickname is Slim for a reason.

Conner, you and I are gonna fight.

Damn right. It's not Hank's fault comics readers don't read anything from before 2010 . . .

[anhed-nia]

So I'm in the middle of this research project centered on Dario Argento's OPERA, for which I have required myself to watch as many screen adaptations of the Gaston Leroux novel The Phantom of the Opera as I can take. What I have determined so far is that the Phantom of the Opera is a story everyone wants to tell, but not very many people are sure of how to tell it. In fact, it's not that easy to say what it is about archetypally. You know, Wolfman stories are typically about "the beast in man" (with femininity positioned as some sort of cure for this personality split), Frankenstein stories are usually about human nature (i.e. an uncanny creature can have more humanity than vain and bigoted humans), Dracula-type vampire stories are most generally about the problems of being an outsider (queer, foreign, etc). But Phantom of the Opera is like...well, everyone likes the love story part of it, which is more or less modeled on Dracula, with a woman torn between seductive darkness and the safety of square society. But then there are all these other parts that seem to flummox people in the retelling.

I haven't read the Leroux novel YET but the first round of movies have been interesting, and also sort of perplexing. The iteration from 1925 holds up, largely due to Chaney's creation of the Phantom which remains a top tier monster. People don't often talk about the mask though! Which looks like a cross between Peter Lorre and the Devo Boogie Boy, it's disturbing and I like it.

This Phantom was born in the dungeons during a revolutionary bloodbath and is disfigured from birth, drawing on the antique idea that a mother's trauma is translated in the deformity of her children; also, compellingly, these dungeons lie fathoms beneath the opera house where the bourgeoisie are witlessly dancing on the graves of martyrs and criminals embodied in the Phantom. The ingenue Christine is an interesting figure who breaks up with her boyfriend at the beginning because she wants to give her whole self to her career; when the Phantom starts murmuring to her through the walls it's as if the spirit of opera itself has chosen her to be its avatar, which she seems to find totally rational. It's sort of cool, what other movie of this era has a likeable heroine choosing her potential for greatness over love? This is the element of the story that is the most interesting, but I'll expand on that in a minute.

The Chaney edition benefits a lot from keeping things simple. The 1943 version with Claude Raines has a little bit too much going on and the story doesn't get a lot of time to congeal between so many long opera sequences; this movie really takes the opera part of the title seriously! Actually they're the best thing about it, mostly because of Nelson Eddy who is extremely beautiful and a real opera singer, and who projects this blazing desire for Susanna Foster that is incredibly convincing. Like I'd normally say they have great chemistry, but I think it's just a lot of power radiating from him specifically.

Ahem.

Uh anyway. This movie picks up the reoccurring (but not universal) idea that the Phantom is a genteel and sophisticated composer who has just fallen on hard times, who goes mad when his latest concerto is stolen. He is disfigured while struggling with the plagiarist and installs himself under the opera house where he can haunt his former protege Christine, who is already torn between dreamy Nelson Eddy and her stuffy cop boyfriend. One of my favorite things here is that even though this film is extremely quaint and old fashioned, everybody hates cops; this Christine is less a self-determined careerist than someone who is under pressure from her artist friends who find it profoundly repulsive that she is dating a policeman. Meanwhile the Phantom is just way too gentle and sappy, which is extra disappointing because Claude Rains's Invisible Man is so fabulously chaotic and sadistic, it made me really aware of the Phantom that could have been. This one doesn't properly represent the high society vs. underworld dichotomy that Christine should be torn between. So what is this movie about? There's so many guys in it and a few different themes flapping in the breeze. Is it about love? Is it about self-actualizing through art? Is it about the cutthroat world of showbusiness? It doesn't have that much to say, ultimately, and it just seems really unmotivated. Also I don't like this mask, sue me.

The Hammer edition is even more disappointing, considering the studio's previous successes with Universal Monster remakes. Here Christine is torn between a suave opera producer, the lecherous composer who has plagiarized the Phantom, and yeah the Phantom. Too many guys, it confuses whatever the dynamic and themes are supposed to be. Michael Gough as the plagiarist is so much more evil and threatening than poor Herbert Lom's Phantom that it's hard to stay focused on the main point here. Curiously the Hammer version is rather unromantic, with the Phantom just slapping Christine around until she sings his tunes right; that is kind of refreshing in a way, although it also means that the film lacks tension, which contributes to its being surprisingly anticlimactic. The best guy in the movie is actually Thorley Walters whose character serves almost no narrative purpose at all, he just hulks around with this WTF? look on his face and it is kind of adorable. I guess I like the gross mask in this one, too.

But the Hammer version has one interesting strength, which is that Christine is singing the lead in a new opera about Joan of Arc. Just like Joan, Christine hears a disembodied voice prophesizing her ascent to power. The best thing about the Phantom lore is the idea that the woman has this latent power that can either be activated by the Phantom, or suppressed by her square boyfriend (the relationship being mutually exclusive with opera stardom in many iterations). She isn't just a love object to be possessed, she herself possesses of some kind of devastating energy that needs to be awakened and channeled--or contained and forgotten, if she decides to get married and stay home or something. This is pretty cool, and it is interestingly realized in Dario Argento's OPERA, in which (spoiler alert I guess) a killer stalks an opera singer with the aim of catalyzing her own latent psychopathy. This idea is at the center of my thesis and I'm looking forward to fleshing it out, although I'm kind of dreading all the other PHANTOMs that I have committed myself to watching. I really don't want to deal with Andrew LLoyd Webber at all, but after I get through at least the Joel Schumacher one of the those I'm going to reward myself with a rewatch of PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE which I'm going to guess right now is the best retelling of this story after the Chaney one. I'm counting on Paul Williams' music to be catchier than Webber's.

I'm whining about my own decisions, I know, but really the main hardship of this project is that now I keep getting the Vandals' punk theme song from PHANTOM OF THE MALL: ERIC'S REVENGE stuck in my head, and let me tell you that is very unwelcome. Here it is, if you've decided you're done being happy and sane:

[miirshroom]

Mechanics of the Astral Clocktower (Theory)

Scrolling around, see the Bloodborne image with Lady Maria in front of the Astral Clock. Was thinking about how instead of numbers there are 12 blank circles around the clock face, which is a motif that I recently noticed in the Dark Souls 2 Smelter Demon Boss room (was researching for miniature painting reasons).

And because of the direction that my thoughts have been in recently, I thought to myself: This reminds me of the album cover for Clockwork Angels (2012). Except in that case instead of circles there were various alchemical symbols that replaced the standard numbers, each symbol is generally believed to correspond to a song on the album - although not always in order. One interpretation in this 2012 blog post that I found. A commonality that this shares with the Bloodborne clock is that the top symbols are in the correct orientation and the lower ones are upside down. The clock hands are also positioned meaningfully: on a 24 hour clock the time would read "21:12" in reference to one of the early breakout albums of Rush.

...and then I zoomed in on the photo and realized what of course Bloodborne fans have long known, which is that there ARE symbols etched around the border of the clock. It's just that they don't exactly align with the circles.

I haven't played Bloodborne, I can't just go stand in the room. So I try some searching because surely it has occurred to someone before that this is a timeline. A few hits, but nothing too satisfying in my short search. I've already more or less cracked the timeline puzzle in the Round Table Hold of Elden Ring, so I figured I'd take a look at the Bloodborne version. What I found especially interesting is that the most potent versions of most of the runes are found in the chalice dungeons, which have connotations of Victorian era Egyptomania similar to the mummified husks of the Round Table Hold. But the lower level versions tend to be found around the world in various places.

Video research intensified. When the clock is activated the circles complete a single full rotation in a clockwise direction and the upper hand completes 8/12ths of a rotation in the clockwise direction. The lower hand completes 11/12ths of a full rotation in an anti-clockwise direction, also crossing below the upper hand, which on most clocks would indicate that this is the hour hand. Given the context that Kos's corpse is found through the clock and her discovery by the hunters is an event that occurred in the past, I assume that the general idea here is to "turn back the clock" in the sense of conducting historical research.

I assembled a reference of the runes and their relative locations. There are 14 of them, clockwise starting left of Lady Maria:

- Lake - [Unnamed] - Oedon Writhe - Oedon - Guidance - Eye - Moon - Communion - Radiance - [Unnamed] - Hunter - Beast - Beast's Embrace - Deep Sea

Observations and other thoughts:

1) In the start position the two hands of the clock are aligned as if to link opposite sides of the clock face. The lower hand is pointed just before the "Beast's Embrace" rune which is obtained by defeating Lawrence, the First Vicar and when equipped allows permanent transformation into a beast. The upper hand is pointed at the "Guidance" rune, of which the 1st tier version is found on a Carrion Crow elsewhere in the Research Hall before reaching Lady Maria, the 2nd tier version is obtained from Ludwig, the Holy Blade ("Aah, you were at my side, all along. My true mentor… My guiding moonlight…"), and the 3rd tier version is simply unavailable without save editing the game.

2) The lower area is illuminated in light and the upper part is obscured in shadow - implying that the upper runes are more mysterious from the perspective of the Hunters. This could perhaps be read as a conversation between present and past. The next clockwise rune from "Guidance" is the "Eye" rune, which is one of only 3 blue glow runes in the game, and associated with the idea of having eyes on the inside.

3) The "Moon" rune is directly opposite the "Deep Sea" rune which is itself behind the head of Lady Maria. The 3rd tier version of the moon rune is obtained by performing the "make contact" gesture in front of the Brain of Mensis. The arms are held out at right angles as if to mirror a clock hands at 12'o'clock and 3'o'clock positions and then grasp and manually rotate that clock anti-clockwise to the 9'o'clock and 12'o'clock positions (or vice versa to force the clock forwards by a quarter turn, if the player facing forwards is themself the clock). The Doll in Bloodborne is modelled in the image of Lady Maria and she also reacts by clapping when the "make contact" gesture is performed. The 2nd tier version of the moon rune is obtained in the nightmare of Mensis during the Micolash fight, in which he appears to be puppeteering many dolls. As I understand it, the 1st tier version of the moon rune is obtained by being kidnapped by a Snatcher, defeating the Witches of Hemwick, and then taking it from a location in the Hypogean Gaol guarded by 2 other Snatchers.

4) Unlike a typical clock where only the hand move, the entire clock face rotates. Also it is a portal to another location. Both of these remind me of the function of the Stargate, for which the last chevron locked in is the point of origin. For Stargate the last chevron lock is positioned at the top of the wheel. In Bloodborne, the two clock hands form a chevron surrounding the circles at the bottom.

So my guess is that the present day is "Deep Sea" on the timeline - one step beyond "Beast's Embrace" (which is basically the thing that is presently happening to the Hunters) and the destination is "Guidance".

5) There are 5 standard Caryll runes that are not represented on the clock border: "Clockwise Metamorphosis", "Anti-clockwise Metamorphosis", "Blood Rapture", "Clawmark", and "Heir". The implication might be that these are concurrent with other runes on the clock border. A question would be, should efforts focus on trying to place them as substitutions for the 5 mismatched runes (the 3 oath runes and 2 unnamed runes), or should a wider range of possibility be considered?

There are 4 other runes that contain a hint of either clockwise or anti-clockwise turning. These are: "Beast's Embrace" (clockwise), "Beast" (clockwise), "Guidance" (twisted as if vacillating between clockwise and anti-clockwise), and the unnamed snake tangle rune (three strands turning in multiple directions).

A commonality between the other 3 runes is that they are all associated with visceral attacks - the "Blood Rapture" rune allows visceral attacks to restore HP", the "Clawmark" rune strengthens visceral attacks, and the "Heir" rune causes visceral attacks to grant more blood echoes. Of all other runes on the astral clock, only the "Oedon Writhe" rune is also associated with visceral attacks.

6) There are 6 total runes that can be placed in a player's "Oath Memory" slots, 3 of which are not represented on the clock face: "Corruption" (symbol of the Cainhurst Vilebloods), "Impurity" (symbol of the League oath), and "Milkweed" (rune envisioned by Adeline, patient of the research hall).

The inventory depiction of these runes includes a sortof circular shape as if they might be inset into the circles of the clock, and in fact the 3 that are present on the clock border each match to clock face circles to varying degrees. I would place the "Corruption" rune with the "Moon" rune opposite Lady Maria (she is thought to be a descendant of Cainhurst), the "Milkweed" rune opposite the "Lake" rune (it is similar to the left part of the rune, as if it's the false "eyes on the inside" version of the real rune), and the "Impurity" rune opposite the Unnamed rune of similar shape. Another support for this interpretation is that the three symbols are counting upwards: 4 voids, 5 tally marks, 6 dots.

Analysis (?)

Edit: with further research, there are several flaws in the below text, especially related to the chronology of the Hunters vs Church Hunters. I keep this up as a reference anyways.

I have been picking over this for 2 days and perhaps I see a shape of what's going on. I want to try working it out anyways before I lose my train of thought:

The Runesmith Caryll believed that a person can predict the future by listening to the Great Ones who live outside of time. From their position at 12'o'clock on the dial they peer into the shadowy abyss on the opposite side and faintly divine the "Deep Sea" rune. Over time they proceed to discover a handful of other runes: "Anti-Clockwise Metamorphosis", "Beast", "Clockwise Metamorphosis", "Oedon", "Eye", "Moon", "Communion", "Corruption", "Heir", "Radiance". To my knowledge, only these 11 runes actually have the text "A secret symbol left by Caryll, runesmith of Byrgenwerth." which would imply that "Caryll Rune" became a proper noun applied like a generic concept, and at least in the case of "Guidance" and "Milkweed", these are said to be discovered by specific other people.

So let's say you're Lawrence, one of Byrgenwerth's researchers in Bloodborne. It's around 4'o'clock on the dial (4 being a number associated with death in Japan) and Runesmith Caryll has just died. You're clearing out their office and you find all of these secret runes that they've been working on transcribing, as well as partial instructions on how to listen to the Great Ones. You get the idea this this is a recipe for immortality - a panacea that cures all ailments including death and will allow a human to become a Great One. You cover up the existence of the "Beast" rune deeming it forbidden - because implying that humans are animal is heretical and obviously humanity is destined for greater things. Could a beast have figured out how to comprehend the Great Ones? Instead you focus on the good stuff: "Radiance" awaits at the end of the future predictions as far as you know. To help you get there, the first new "Caryll rune" envisioned by the Church Hunters that you recruit is "Guidance".

The Healing Church starts to get rolling in the 6'o'clock timezone which is fixated on 3 concepts: "Eyes", "Moon", "Communion", and moves on to the 7'o'clock position as enthusiasm for the project grows, adopting the mythologizing of a grail quest/quest for immortality as inspired by the shape of the "Communion" rune. And also having people descending into the "chalice" dungeons to obtain the Old Blood.

The Unnamed rune at 8'o'clock might possibly represent that time that Old Yharnam's lake was poisoned and started an epidemic of Ashen Blood before the Church arrived to carry out blood ministration, as represented by the upcoming Oedon symbol. Or some other "unspeakable" event.

Research and human trials continue with the belief that all of the steps of the process are being followed as described by the runes. There tend to be outbreaks of people turning into beasts, but this is a "minor" setback. Between 9'o'clock and 10'o'clock something happens to cause doubt in the process. Communing with the Great Ones continues, but what they are reporting back is that there is something beyond enlightenment - a dissolution of structure. This rune remains unnamed because nobody can agree on what it means.

They decide to try again after inching forwards a bit further and discover the rune that would come to symbolize "Hunters". No longer an idealistic quest for immortality but a pursuit of elusive meaning of why things are starting to go wrong. They seek again and discover the "Beast" rune - they thought that they were following a linear timeline but instead they have been trapped in a cycle. This research into immortality will go nowhere - the Great Ones are not timeless beings, they're just dead and all that can possibly be perceived in their blood is echoes of the past. They are all now trapped in an ever deteriorating nightmare. With the "Beast's Embrace" being obtained in the Hunter's Nightmare it is acknowledged in retrospect that in declaring it forbidden to consider humans beasts they had given themselves permission to be monsters. They believed in an upcoming miracle despite all evidence to the contrary and deadened even emotion itself to justify treating people as slabs of meat to be experimented upon and dissected.

Future prospects are looking grim, and people figure that maybe Master Willem had the right idea after all and they should develop "eyes on the inside" to better understand their own current position, and figure out how the present zeitgeist is influencing perception of what comes next. So they do that and develop the "Eye" rune around 11'o'clock. And with this sudden injection of Madman's Insight the last threads of sanity in the Choir snap and they make the blood moon happen right on schedule at 12'o'clock by reanimating the Great One to whom the "Moon" rune belongs. Micolash is totally okay with being trapped in Samsara.

Meanwhile in the background of all this research stuff, probably Old Yharnam has been being rebuilt into Yharnam and the Healing Church has been waging war against Annalise and the Vilebloods until she is the only one left around 12'o'clock. The Executioners believe in a 14-spoked wheel, and in their version history will repeat itself and if man is diligent enough in destroying corruption for every revolution that will inch them slowly closer to someday reaching enlightenment and escaping that wheel - "Radiance" at 3'o'clock is their symbol because this is their aspiration. And true enough, Annalise seems to be immortal.

I'm guessing that a lot of the eldritch stuff happens between 10'o'clock and 3'o'clock - matching how defeating Rom triggers the blood moon and exposes all of the stuff that was previously only visible with high insight. Especially 1'o'clock and 2'o'clock - they need to repopulate the chalice dungeons with Great Ones for the next cycle of the Nightmare.

And by the time the clock is back at 4'o'clock the stage is basically set for the player who will soon be arriving. Badge or no, you are a Hunter of Hunters in terms of arriving and systematically eliminating the NPC Hunters.

[sorenphelps]

Szia! 😊 4, 9 and 18 please 🙏

Hi! sorry for the late reply, you guys asked so much and I had to go to sleep eventually... But back I'm back with more intel about Hungary!

4. favourite dish specific for your country?

Already answered here.

9. which of your neighbouring countries would you like to visit most/know best?

Hungary's neighbour countries are the following: Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria. I've been to all except Serbia and Slovenia, I've travelled through them tho. Hungary is mostly surrounded by itself population-wise, before the end of WWI, we had a quite large country, so because of our shared history we are taught about all of our neighbouring countries in school.

We are however not particularly fond of our neighbours, we are jealous of Austria because they are more advanced and richer than us (we call them our "brother-in-law"), we are also jealous of Croatia because they have a sea (rich politicians all have resorts in Croatia tho). We make fun of Slovakia for being such a "young" country (technically speaking, I am older than Slovakia), and sort of look down on Romania and Serbia (as we consider them part of the Balkan). We are sort of indifferent about Slovenia and Ukraine (the latter changed since the war tho). The joke's on us, because we are objectively doing much worse than any of our neighbours, so they should look us down, really.

But back to the original question, I'd really like to visit Slovenia, it looks like such a charming destination (and I need to add it to "my collection" of visited countries haha), and maybe have a vacation in Croatia (I've only seen the Plitvice lakes/waterfalls, but not the sea). I've been to Austria and Slovakia multiple times, but I actually liked my visit to Ukraine the most. Obviously that was way before the war, so the Kyiv I've seen is probably very different now. I'm really interested in the Cold War Era of history, and their Cold War Museum was top tier.

18. do you speak with a dialect of your native language?

Already answered here. Also gonna link an almost decade old audio post of me talking in Hungarian, even tho I think it's pretty standard in case of dialect.

[decepti-thots]

sorry if you've answered this somewhere already - out of the books you've read this year, which three did you enjoy the most? and out of the fics you've read this year, which three did you enjoy the most?

All the fics I loved this year I mostly recced as and when on my fic recs tag, and tbh I don't think I read enough TF fic this year to really sort them into a top three- if I loved it, I put it up somewhere, mostly. If I had to pluck three out, I'd say Red Gold (god tier Rodimus characterisation), Your Own Hands (a reread, but still my favourite taraprowl fic, it gets the nod) and... oh actually. Okay, this one isn't Transformers, but I have to give a shout out to this Lupin III interactive fiction Twine fic that is an INCREDIBLE use of form to do something very ambitious with a fic. It's so good! If I do have any even casual Lupin enjoyers following me, definitely take a look.

The books, discounting one I already recommended:

Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic, translated by Sophus Helle, is probably the single best book I read this year. I love the Epic of Gilgamesh very much, and this is a lovely translation, but what tipped it over for me was his essays after the poem where he discusses it in a way that is both accessible and also gets into the finer points of how to approach and appreciate the poem in a wider context. His discussion of the way gender plays into the power structures of the poem and the overview he gives of contemporary Iraqi cultural reaction to the poem were especially interesting. Especially after the former, I am really excited to read his book published this year translating and discussing all the poems of Enheduanna! Highly recommended. God I love Gilgamesh.

I reread The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard, a play set in the Victorian era based (very loosely) around the life, death and afterlife of A. E. Housman. It's a really dense play on a lot of levels, mostly well known for being really obtuse. It has about six deeply obscure references to classical scholarship per sentence, twice as many offhand references to Victorian Oxbridge Stuff that go unremarked on, the timeline constantly jumps back and forth, a meaningful chunk of it is a dead guy talking to his younger self on the Styx, and they spend most of that time discussing the minutiae of latin grammar in poetry (with absolutely no dumbing down for the audience) as a metaphor for their unrequited yearning. I believe when it premiered on Broadway, they basically had to provide a book of like. Explanations as to what the fuck every other conversation was referencing. But I love it, even though I understand maybe fifty percent of it, because it's so beautifully written and clever and funny and able to withdraw from the ever-present threat of sentimentality. One of my favourite plays of all time. The 'poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship' exchange gets me every time. On my knees begging for a fucking proshot to be made of a performance one day.

A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames by Brendan Keogh is my favourite nonfiction by a narrow margin. It's a book that outlines a way to approach analysis and criticism of video games through a phenomenological framework, and it made me completely re-think how I understand what the 'text' of a video game is. This one is very much a work of academia, though it does give a lot more overview of what phenomenology is than, say, the average philosophy text is likely to, since it sits more in the 'games studies' area where that's not taken as much for granted, so it's not totally inaccessible. It made me think a lot about how video games exist as a unique medium in ways that completely diverge from the standard narrative of 'videogames are unique due to interactivity'. It takes a lot for me to be impressed by writing about games, given just how much of it I read/have read, but Keogh never disappoints.

[arbitrarygreay]

I would love to hear more Berryz vs C-ute meta if you're interested! I started out as a Momusu fan and dabbled in Berryz but C-ute felt way, way too young for me at first so I mostly ignored them. By the end of their careers though, Berryz sometimes felt like they were miserable performing while C-ute just got better and better. I've never seen anyone seriously ruminate on this though.

Thanks for the ask!

The thing to know about the era is the industry context. MM is the obvious case, starting in the late 90s when there were some pretty big girl groups (Speed, Zone, Folder5), and of course the Golden Age was called that for good reason.

(Huh, weird, now only Wikipedia lists MM's single sales in table format.) But if you look at the singles sales numbers, they've already fallen back down to Morning Coffee/Furusato level sales by 2003. This is why when you read the ancient fan forum archives (o7) the people who are all around for Golden Age have a grudge against 5th and 6th gens, and the taken-for-granted assumption of management's incomptence. So, H!P is already in a decline by this time (not that H!P broadly was ever as successful as MM in this era), but Tsunku is on a total roll musically, so it can be hard to notice.

And outside of H!P, the idol market (for girls, anyways, Johnny's is still trucking along as usual) is pretty bleak. Avex makes a few attempts every now and then (with dream, BRIGHT, and SweetS), but none of them really take off. For reference, AKB48 starts in December of 2005. I have treasured fan forum memories where Maeda Atsuko was "the one who looks like Kamei Eri". They won't get any real traction (especially sales-wise) until 2008, at which point they spearhead the Idol Sengoku Jidai.

This is the environment in which the H!P Kids are formed and have their early careers. H!P in decline but in denial about it and so throwing about some money they probably didn't make back their money on (very notably, the Sports Festivals actually going so far as to rent out Dome arenas). ZYX, Aa!, and early Berikyuu are receiving god-tier music, Berryz skips doing indies and is doing hall tours right off the bat. (Idols won't really get into livehouses until years later thanks to Idol Sengoku Jidai.)

At the same time, there are some signs. Most notably, the similarities between Berryz and Melon Kinenbi. Sure, I just called early Berryz music god-tier, but there are also quite a few songs and singles in those first three albums are now forgotten deep cuts, aren't they? Even the good ones! At the time, people could definitely predict that Kofuku Kangei would get lost, but the ever catchy Piriri to Yukou? More than that, there is the easy sense that this music is already deeply uncool. Those MKB songs are outright cringe now, especially in the visuals. This is why MKB eventually had to re-pivot to that rocker energy (to the point of mosh pits and even crowd surfing at some of their lives). Berryz, however, were never able to do that. To the end, their music retains a composition style harkening to this mid-00s Tsunku pop, even their dance tracks like Want! or Dakishimete Dakishimete. His last hurrah of the unabashed cheesiness that took Love Machine straight to the top and Koi No Dance Site to peak MM's sales. Pata did a series of posts where he complained about Tsunku's intrusions into Buono's otherwise blessedly Tsunku-free run of singles.

Kobushi, of course, also never recovered sales-wise from their scandal parade and exodus of members. However, because the members of Kobushi grew up in the social media age, as well as after H!P had gone through true industry dark ages, the members reacted to the shrinking by upping the sass and DGAF that make for great clips, Jojo Gundan able to engage with them on improv comedy.

Berryz, meanwhile, kind of had a chemistry problem. They were friendly enough. A newbie like me found their early making-of footage compelling. But they could not really carry a non-scripted segment. Again, maybe a newbie might find their DMs sweet, but the moment you switch to another group, you can see the difference when the interactions have snap and rhythm. Wota joke about Yurina's inability to tell anecdotes. There's a very real reason that only Momochi was able to break out on TV, and even Momochi's schtick feels more forced than the attitude the 48G was bringing to the table, honed by late night variety willing to be really mean to them. Maasa and Chinami are getting pretty good at DGAF, but it says something that they seem to get better mileage when interacting with their juniors (like 5nin J=J or 2nd gen S/mileage) than their own group.

So yeah, by 2007 (around Kokuhaku no Funsui Hiroba) Berryz can tell that it is not going to happen for them. I guess given that they started their careers so early, they really didn't know yet what they could possibly do outside of the industry yet, so they all just stuck around because why not? And they broke up when enough of them had found post-Berryz prospects.

Honestly, I can't give you an answer as to why C-ute succeeded. They were why I thought Kobushi's scandal parade and member exodus would actually benefit them, but I was never really into C-ute's music. Their songs were also pretty unabashedly Tsunku cheese? Someone I met through SNSD fandom really liked e.g. The Middle Management, but didn't seem to get any deeper into H!P. Anyways, some kind of magic happened, with Chisato and Nakki embracing late blooms intersecting with being able to snag onto the Idol Sengoku Jidai momentum with with a will. Who knows? Love is timing, after all.

[flintsdragon]

it started out with a song!!!

I've yet to see the broadway revival of merrily we roll along (although I desperately need to) but I have watched the first production of the show that Maria Friedman directed in the west end several times (shoutout @dolorianpolymath for insisting that I do like five years ago now??) I am still manifesting a New York trip where I see this show before it closes, but in lieu of that, the announcement of the revival cast recording was the most exciting news I've heard in a while. this is the first time I've had a chance to really sit down and listen (with my copy of Finishing The Hat by my side) so im going to ramble about how I feel about the whole thing now:

overture

like the rest of the show, this has been a profoundly overlooked. overture, its jazzy, it sets you so perfectly in the eras of the show, it makes me cry, needless to say it could've kept on going! gimme just the orchestrations of the entire show and I would enjoy it just as much <3

HEY WHERE THE FUCK IS THE HILLS OF TOMORROW

since when is "may we come to trust the dreams we must fulfill" irrelevant to the show???

merrily we roll along

this narrative device that is literally directly lifted from the ancient greeks that people decided was too confusing in the 80's. sounds like they're looking us directly in the eyes saying "I guess it made sense the whole fucking time, didn't it?"

that frank

feels like an audio play more than a modern cast recording. much more interested in carrying you through the show than being like "Hey guys look Lindsay Mendez is here! There's Jonathan Groff!" character/plot centric over celebrity boasting.

old friends-- like it was

old friends is a top tier Sondheim song of all time. on top of being really fun, it perfectly canonizes this relationship dynamic in a way you can apply to any story. Case in point, I made a letterboxd list about it earlier this year!

Trouble is Charlie, that's what everyone does, blames the way it is on the way it was. on the way it never, ever was.

and like it was really fucking gets to me, it gets to me more and more every year. the brutal underbelly of nostalgia, amirite ladies?!!

Franklin shephard inc.

"Listen- Frank does the money thing very well, but you know what, other people do it better. And Frank does the music thing very well, and you know what, no one does it better."

tour du force from Radcliffe, fucking good for him! what else is there to say! its like the realest song ever. the whole money refrain is really interesting coming from Daniel, because like he's part of a unique group of actors that had their breakout in massively successful franchises and now choose to use their clout to get fun, interesting indie projects made (ie. Kristen Stewart, Elijah Wood, Robert Pattinson post-Twilight, pre-The Batman) Give him a Tony (and give me the video of him in the recording studio)

old friends

its really interesting to see where old friends falls in the plotting of the show, because unlike not a day goes by, we aren't heartbroken by this not reprise reprise because we are starting to understand these characters but we don't fully love them like we will in an hour. so this gets to mainly be fun.

Halfway through listening to the song and trying to formulate an opinion on it I realized that I was literally listening to fucking Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez sing Old Friends in a Merrily cast recording and got so happy I could cry. what a gift!!!!

growing up

secret good thing going reprise. capitalism ruins everything! they all want the same thing and they still end up where they end up I can't handle it :(((((( I can't help but feel we don't really need the Gussie stuff. I guess that seeing someone who has no dog in the fight in terms of Frank's soul is an important foil to Charlie and Mary.

third transition

the harmony is so pretty

omg not a day goes by

lets GO Katie Rose Clarke! I've been truly obsessed with this song since I first heard it. It just grabs you by the shoulders and stares in your soul and shakes you around a bit and then it lets you go and you're like holy the fuck where am I. no shade to Katie Rose Clarke (who kills) but Bernadette's version is the only version.

Now You Know

wow this show really moves. we're already at now you know. I guess I have bootleg brain. fun story I saw Lindsay Mendez in Godspell at Circle in the Square like 12 years ago and she scared me when she was running through the audience and high fived me. I'll never ever forget it. Legend behavior always.

every "right" from Groff is iconic lololol

Gussie's opening number

oh Gussie. I don't think she's a horrible character but she's a narrative device. a two and a half dimensional character, to use Sondheim's term. cannot over-emphasize how good Krystal Joy Brown sounds though

It's a Hit!

"If it only even runs a minute, at least it's a wedge"

it's a bop! the most meta-song of the whole show. you love to see it!

fourth transition- the blob part 1

the transition slide is so fucking gorgeous I could listen to it all day.

I initially feel compelled to say the blob is prescient but I know it's not meant to be. It was written by Steven Sondheim in 1980 about the 60s, and it's reflective of how this sect of society has always been and always will be. It feels diminutive and inaccurate to call it prescient.

growing up (reprise)

Gussie's power is that she takes control of the pace of the show. its manic time-traveling nature has to stand still and listen to her every word.

good thing going

"it could've kept on growing, instead of just kept on"

makes me cry before it even starts *bangs my head on the table* the pain in Radcliffe's voice is killing me.

"we want to hear it again"

I truly feel like I'm in a horror film every time I hear this line. It is so fucking brilliant it feels like it must've come from lived experience because how do you even think of something so subtle that feels like such a direct attack on our characters emotional evolution. give in to the encore and you'll never keep on growing.

the blob- part II

the interruptions during the encore are fucking perfect- because its like yeah of course they didn't really want to hear it again- the blob can't know what it really wants that's the whole point! its the blob!

Frank and Charlie singing louder hurts me personally because they don't just want to be heard they want to keep singing together.

fifth transition

the tonal & rhythmic shifts are thrilling- I think it would be fun to sing this at an audition or something lol

Bobby and Jackie and Jack

the Irish jig music is so fucking funny

Both Beth and Gussie are undersung but it's nice that Beth gets to be funny and not just the stereotypical long suffering wife. two and a half dimensional!

not a day goes by (reprise)

I think Mary being literally in love with Frank is realistic but doesn't provide much to the story in the grand scheme of things.

Groff just has one of the most lovely voices on planet earth. they all sound so lovely together.

sixth transition

how did you ever get to be here?

more mournful the more we move backward. real. devastating

Opening Doors

"Russian Tea Room" feels dated without feeling actively offensive? a smart change.

groff's "I saw My Fair Lady/ I sort of enjoyed it" is so fucking funny! I love when line deliveries prove that actors get what lines are fun!

they all have so much chemistry its unreal. this feels like their polygraph test video.

the horns!!! the horns are incredible!

I love "up a tone" it showcases their chemistry instantly

can you imagine being in the room when Lindsay, Jonathan, and Daniel sang together for the first time??? I think I would pass out

seventh transition

a child??????

our time

the decrescendo at the end truly almost killed me. this song makes me so emo already and groff was born to sing it. it got me so bad!

final thoughts

I'm really hoping they're filming a pro-shot because they clearly marketing.the shit. out of it. so why not? its star studded and historical and I would like to see it!!!!

[tigerbasilisk]

Watching anime!

I have now completed all the anime I was watching previously, and it's time to pick up some more! It's always a delightful medium, with great potential for presenting notable stories in a fresh manner. For reference, the two I was watching last season were Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru and Attack on Titan: "final season". While I think the entire corpus of Attack on Titan is exceedingly high quality fiction, you might be able to tell from the rest of my blog that the single anime season which brought me more joy was Bisque Doll, otherwise known as My Dress-Up Darling.

The upcoming season is full of wonderful anime that I would recommend to you! Personally, I don't think I will be picking anything up, though. I will go over the most popular looking ones and comment on why that's the case, and why you could consider watching them.

As for what I will be watching, I have on my list just one anime for now: The Vision of Escaflowne. It's a rather old anime from 1996. I have heard that, while it employs mecha, it's not sci-fi at all and is more of a fantasy style anime. I watched the opening and it seems oh so dramatic. This one's a classic, and I hope I enjoy it too!

Now, here are the top new anime airing this season.

Kaguya-sama: Love Is War -Ultra Romantic- This one is going to be amazing! The hilarity of the previous seasons continues and you can expect some thrilling developments to the romance as well. Some of the best arcs are going to be covered in this season. The reason I am not watching this is because I am a long time manga reader and the anime is really far behind. Watching it would get a little disorienting. I have noted that the anime has great voice acting, and that alone makes it worth giving a try. The sheer intelligence and honesty of the writing makes me grade this as one of the best series around.

Image

Spy x Family With the advent of free, legal, online access to Weekly Shōnen Jump, I got the chance to follow this series right form the beginning. It has amazing art, lovable characters, top tier physical comedy, some great action and a solid premise that constantly pays off: What happens when a Spy, an Assassin and an Esper have to act like a loving family while maintaining their secrets? This series caters to so many cravings that you will end up loving it for reason or another. The strongest reason just might be little Anya Folger. I might just watch this one, since Spy x Family is a manga that can be greatly enhanced through an anime adaptation.

Komi-san Can't Communicate S2 I really like this manga! It has been a constant source of lighting up my day. I was excited when the anime was announced. The initial episodes had surprisingly high polish. Due to Netflix completely screwing up the subtitles I had to put the anime on hold and unfortunately never picked it back up. Nevertheless, the first season had a decent run. You can expect the anime to get much better with the permanent developments coming up. Expect more funny gags and the charming presence of Tadano Hitohito.

Shield Hero 3: I haven't heard good things about this series and there isn't enough time to complete the previous seasons in time for me to give this a try anyway. A fun addition to any isekai fan's list.

Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie: The manga wasn't quite to my liking. There is a lot of hype for this one, and I hope all those people enjoy it as much as they expect to.

A Couple of Cuckoos: This one will be a fun watch for enjoyers of Heisei era romcoms. I wasn't too fond of the execution but the premise is interesting.

Shout out to Witch Hat Atelier getting an anime adaptation confirmed. This might be a good watch whenever it comes out.

[idontwanttospoiltheparty]

Now YOU: best album? Song you most like playing (assuming you’ve tried to learn any TS songs)? Or if not, what you’d like to be able to play? Best lyric? Favourite era look-wise? Favourite music video?

folklore is her best album. It just is. It has SUCH interesting things to say about like the NATURE of storytelling itself, how and why it happens. It does not, in fact, contain a single skip. The production is excuisite. Everything FITS. ALSO, I love how it was created??? This epistolary album almost, produced primarily by three people who were never in the same room for the entire process. It reflects the loneliness of the album so well and also how folklore is typically created! By hearing what someone made and adding something new to it. She was deeply insane for that album and I'll NEVER get over how she spent years clawing her way back to the universal belovedness she'd had in 2014 foe years only for it all to come back to her within 24 hours when no one expected it.

(also, evermore is a close second; it has higher highs than folklore but it's slightly less tied together and — while not really having skips either, it comes closer to it)

I really like playing mirrorball on the piano, doing the chords with my left hand and the melody with my right hand. There's some sooooo soothing about it. On the guitar, I've actually been neglecting her catalogue a little, though I should go through it a bit to practice some of her picking techniques, which are actually fairly underrated and more sophisticated than they might seem!! I think I'd love to be able to do Death By A Thousand Cuts like she did for her Tiny Desk Concert, it's a really lovely accompaniment!

Best lyric is an IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION but "And the skeletons in both our closets plotted hard to fuck this up" is literally like... I'm speechless. She WROTE THAT. Also honorable mention to my oldest fave "I took your matches before fire could catch me". ALSO, I could write essays on "I can't decide if it's a choice, getting swept away" because that line dealt me psychic damage 8 years ago and I've never recovered.

My favourite era lookwise was probably rep, especially the early period, when she was just so cozy in her sweaters. It was so heartwarming to see tbh! Plus, she looked hot af on tour (though I am also one of Those who is still not over the white crop top outfit from the 1989 tour that Yes was objectively tacky and yet is her most sexy look on earth????)

Favourite music video is difficult, probably Look What You Made Me Do, because, when I watched it the first time, I had an out of body experience and literally LOST my MIND when I noticed her past selves (her releasing the MV a week AFTER the song was out is lowkey one of her BEST publicity moves to date). But also Blank Space, Wildest Dreams and I Bet You Think About Me are GORGEOUS and fun top tier music videos!!!

[cherry-valentine]

Spring 2021 Anime Season

Mars Red is one of two series this season set in one of my favorite periods, the Meiji era. It’s a vampire series that deals a lot with the politics of war as the Japanese military is attempting to establish a vampire unit, supposedly to compete with the British vampire unit (because of course that’s a thing). It focuses on a human military officer named Maeda who is charged with recruiting and managing vampires. Maeda is the type of character I really enjoy. Handsome, a little older than most anime protagonists, chain-smoking, overly serious, and voiced by Junichi Suwabe (who has to have the sexiest voice in all of anime). The series has a classic, romantic feel to it. Its take on vampires is somewhat traditional (they evaporate in the sun, drink blood, sleep in coffins, have super strength and speed, etc.). If it brings anything new to the table, it’s the concept of vampires having different ranks, from S-class down, and how lower ranks naturally fear higher ranks. Still yet, the classic vibe works in the show’s favor. Combined with the historical setting, it gives the show a certain charm. The art is lovely, from the backgrounds to the character designs, and the music is a high point. It easily has the best ending theme of the season.

Fumetsu no Anata e (To Your Eternity) is a unique series. I’ve seen a lot of people comparing it to Mushishi, but with an overarching plot, and that assessment is pretty accurate. The show follows an entity that comes to be known as Fushi. It begins as an orb, and as it makes contact with other objects and creatures, it learns from them and can possibly take their forms. Among the forms it most often takes are a white wolf and a young man. Originally, it’s a somewhat empty shell, incapable of communicating, but as it meets different creatures and learns, it develops a personality and begins to speak. The series is, overall, about Fushi’s journey through this world and all the experiences it gains, both wonderful and tragic. There’s a subtle beauty to the series, with an early focus on nature, but it also has scenes of trauma and violence. The animation is fluid and the facial expressions are amazing. There’s an overall natural feel to it that, like others have pointed out, reminds me of Mushishi (though it’s definitely faster paced than Mushishi). The show also likes to make you cry, so keep that in mind.

Joran: The Princess of Snow and Blood is the other series set in the Meiji era this season, albeit an alternate version of it that has a strange form of technology. To be honest, I’m a little fuzzy on some of the details, but it seems to be about a group called the Nue who work for the government to fight against a growing rebellion. The main character is Sawa, a member of Nue who has some sort of special powers involving her blood, which allow her to transform and battle monsters, or whatever else stands in her way. Her goal is to get revenge for the death of her entire clan (implied to be wiped out because of their power). Sawa is a decent heroine, a woman who craves vengeance and is determined to get it through any means, but is, at her core, a compassionate person who would rather live in peace. It’s this internal conflict that makes Sawa compelling (even if it’s not entirely original). The other characters are interesting, particularly Tsuki, whom I won’t talk much about because it would involve spoilers. The plot and details can get a little convoluted, but the action and animation are solid. When Sawa transforms, the art style changes, and it’s a really cool visual effect. The music is also nice.

Shaman King received a remake this season. I was a huge fan of the original, and so far I’m enjoying the remake, but to be honest, I’m having trouble seeing the point. The art is almost the same (just a lot shinier), the voice actors are the same, the plot is the same. Maybe it’s just that it’s been so long since I saw the original, I’m unable to remember the details and so I can’t tell what’s different. But to me it feels like I’m just rewatching the show. Which is fine, because I loved it to begin with. Maybe it gets different later on. Maybe it more closely follows the manga. I’ll keep watching to find out. For anyone new to the series, it looks like the remake is a solid place to start if you want to get into it. I won’t go into plot details for a story this old, so I’ll just say it’s a top tier shounen fighting series with a unique art style and some very memorable characters. If you like that sort of thing, and missed the original (or you just want a refresher), definitely check it out!

Godzilla Singular Point is a true delight. I’m a huge Godzilla (and kaiju in general) fan. I’ve watched every single Godzilla movie, as well as all the related movies (the Mothra films, Rodan, etc.), but I never watched the previous Godzilla anime that was on Netflix a few years ago. It just didn’t sound like something I’d like. Singular Point, however, is right up my alley. Set mainly in a small seaside town that’s suddenly attacked by bird-like monsters known as Rodans, we have two geeky protagonists using their intelligence to figure out what’s going on while more and more monsters appear. Mei and Yun are excellent heroes. They rely on their wits rather than physical strength, which is a refreshing approach. It’s also interesting that they have little to no face-to-face interaction. Instead, they chat with each other via text as they work separately. They often challenge each other with science questions. It’s adorable. The show’s overall feel is fairly upbeat and energetic. The colorful art and peppy character designs by Kazue Kato (who did Blue Exorcist) help with this feel. It should be noted that Godzilla himself doesn’t fully appear until halfway through the series. It says a lot about the quality of the show that I don’t actually mind that at all. Some of the science stuff does go over my head, but the general plot is easy enough to follow and the action is very well done. It also has fantastic music, with my favorite opening theme of the season. Even if Godzilla isn’t your thing, consider giving this series a shot if you like nerdy science types as heroes.

Burning Kabaddi is a sports anime about an unsual sport. I’d never heard of it before now, and if people in the comments were not talking about the very real sport, I would have assumed it was made up for the anime. The show is aware that the sport is obscure, so it takes great pains to explain the rules and details so that we can all follow the action. The story centers on Yoigoshi, a soccer prodigy who decides to drop all sports once he gets to high school due to all the drama and angst that surrounded him (mostly due to his teammates being jealous of his talent), and pursue a career as a streamer. All the various sports clubs at the school want to recruit him (especially the soccer club, of course) because they’ve heard of his skill and he has an athletic build. He rejects them all, but the Kabaddi club is strangely relentless. He ends up being manipulated into joining (the vice captain of the team straight up blackmails him by threatening to show his online streaming account to the whole school). Despite this rocky beginning, Yoigoshi actually starts to enjoy playing Kabaddi, and more importantly, begins to bond with his new teammates. It’s pretty fun stuff that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The art is serviceable for a sports anime and the music is fine. The series isn’t going to blow your mind, but it’s a fun way to spend twenty minutes every week. Worth a watch if you have a weakness for hot blooded sports anime.

The World Ends With You finally got its anime adaptation and I was so excited. The game is one of my all-time favorites. So far the anime is pretty good. The art is a near perfect replication of the bold, thick-lined art of the game. The battles are exciting and cool. Best of all, the anime often uses music from the game. This is important because the game has one of the best soundtracks, ever. Every time I recognize a song from the game, I almost squeal. If I had a complaint, it’s that the pacing feels a little off at times. It feels like the anime is rushing through the story, but that’s understandable. In the game, it took longer for everything to happen because you were walking from place to place, fighting battles along the way, stopping to scan NPC’s, shopping at stores, spending time in menus, etc. The anime has to cut most of that out, so naturally things are going to move faster. The result is that you don’t get to spend as much time with these characters, and so you feel less attached to them. Anyone watching the anime who didn’t play the game might feel like the emotional beats are lacking. I feel like this anime is definitely meant to be enjoyed by fans of the game, rather than newcomers to the story. But if you are a fan of the game? You should be watching this every week. It’s an excellent refresher on the story, just in time for the second game to come out this summer. Super high on my watch list.

Boku no Hero Academia has a new season. To be honest I don’t remember what number we’re on. This season, so far, focuses on a tournament-style competition between the two main hero classes. I would much prefer the plot to move on to something more exciting involving the villains, but I suppose they have to throw arcs like this in every so often just to remind everyone of which characters have which quirks. The plus point is that instead of being an individual competition, it’s team-based. What this ultimately means is that characters that are viewed as weaker or having more obscure quirks actually get a chance to shine. These are characters who definitely aren’t going to win one-on-one battles. In an individual tournament, it’s pretty much a given that characters like Deku, Bakugou, and Todoroki are going to win most of the matches. But in a team, everyone has to work together. The end result is that the lady characters, all of whom have fairly weak or situational quirks, finally FINALLY get to actually do stuff! Even better, in several of the match-ups, the girls have taken the lead in planning and strategizing. It’s been pretty nice to watch. The girls from the other class have been very proactive as well. I really wish the girls could do more in “real” battles with villains, since it’s clear that they can step up when they need to. Who knows? Maybe this is a sign of good things to come.

86 is a new mecha/sci-fi anime based on a series of light novels. The setup is fairly cool: In a country where everyone has silver hair and eyes, the people live in what looks like a utopia. There is a war going on outside their protected land but all combat is performed by automated robots, so there are no human casualties... or so the government would have the people believe. In reality, there is a district that exists on the outskirts of the country called 86, where people who don’t have silver hair and eyes are sent to pilot the robots and fight to protect the country that shunned them. Most of the pilots are children or teenagers. The mortality rate is high. Only a few people in the government know of their existence, mostly military types that include “handlers”. These handlers each take on an 86 unit and communicate with them through a system called “para-raid”. Using this, they monitor the battlefield from their safe positions and issue commands. Naturally, most handlers view their units as nothing more than tools in the war, and most 86-ers view their handlers as privileged snobs who know nothing of actual battle. The real plot kicks in when Lena, a young Major, becomes the new handler for a particular 86 unit. Lena is sympathetic to the people of 86, but it’s going to be hard getting her notoriously rough unit to accept her. The plot is a bit complicated and the show deals with some weighty themes (racism, privilege, war, child soldiers, death). Lena is a likable enough heroine and the members of 86 are all interesting and fairly well written. The music is fine. The art... well, it’s pretty to look at, but it feels a bit generic to me. A bit too shiny. The mecha designs are great, but I’m not crazy about the character designs, which feel like they could be from any other modern anime. I also find it sad but hilarious at the same time that the women’s military uniforms are clearly designed for fanservice (they include mini skirts, thigh-highs with garters, and a short jacket that opens up just above the chest to show the tight shirt underneath) while the men’s uniforms are just totally normal military wear. To be honest it’s just too stupid to actually be offensive, so it comes across as comical. Thankfully, the interesting setup and plot carry the show, making it good enough to overlook the generic visuals.

Moriarty the Patriot has a new season... maybe? I think it’s technically still season one, but with a split cour. Regardless, it feels like a new season so I’m treating it as such. The series focuses on famous Sherlock antagonist Moriarty, here represented as a trio of handsome brothers (though one of them is clearly the protagonist and the leader of the group) who work as “crime consultants” and basically help the lower classes wage class warfare against the nobility. This season shifts the focus away from the individual crimes Moriarty concocts and instead focuses on larger-scale conflicts that involve government conspiracies, corrupt cops, etc. We’re also treated to a lady James Bond (finally!), fixing one of the very few complaints I had about the first cour (that it lacked strong lady characters). The show remains very compelling, with beautiful art and excellent new opening and ending themes.

Best of Season:

Best New Show: Godzilla Singular Point

Best Opening Theme: Godzilla Singular Point

Best Ending Theme: Mars Red

Best New Male Character: Maeda (Mars Red)

Best New Female Character: Sawa (Joran)

[patricksmusicblog]

DMX Discography Overview

It's Dark and Hell is Hot(1998): DMX's distinctive growl, aggression, and arresting flow is fully formed and at its highest potency here on It's Dark and Hell Is Hot. It's Dark and Hell is Hot is, for the most part, a dark menacing and street-orientated album. Some tracks even lean toward a horror-core vibe, "X is Coming" being the bleakest and most unsettling of the bunch. Still, there are deeply emotive tracks like Let Me Fly, Look Through My Eyes, and Convo, where DMX gets introspective and lets us in on his struggles internally and morally/spiritually. There are also hits here, like the hard but catchy "Ruff Ryders Anthem" and the chill summer jam "How's It Going Down." The album's production is handled by PK and Dame Grease, with the album's calling card produced by Swizz Beatz. On a broader level, DMX was a presence in the rap game filled some of the space that had been vacant since Tupac Shakur was murdered, passionate, aggressive, and visceral only specifically representative of the east coast. He also was the answer to the shiny suit luxury rap era Puffy was dominating with in 1997. The album is pure classic and certainly a top-tier album of 1998. Rating: 9.0/10

Favorite Tracks: Rough Rydahs Anthem, How's It Going Down, Intro, Crime Story, Look Thru My Eyes, Let Me Fly

Flesh of my Flesh Blood of my Blood(1998): Flesh of My Flesh Blood of my Blood was released in late December of 1998 cemented DMX as the biggest rapper of that year and late 90s in general(Jay-Z notwithstanding). Aside from the Beastie Boys, the album had the highest first-week sales in a highly competitive year. As for the quality of this one, It's more of DMX's burst of rough and jagged rhymes. When he's not menacing(which is most of the time), he's as introspective and pain-stricken as he was on It's Dark, and Hell Is Hot. The apex of that would be "Slippin," an iconic song that is amongst the saddest tracks in hip-hop history as DMX open shares the trauma of his upbringing, being an addict and struggling to get out of it only to find its way back in it and everything that surrounds that in his past. It's really the fight in the song that makes the song his willingness not to quit and keep trying that makes the song "I got to get up, get back on my feet so I can tear sh*t up." What keeps the album from being the classic his debut was is that Swizz Beats takes the helm on most of the production here, which is hit or miss. DJ Shok, PK, and Dame Grease have a lot of the best beats here. They bring out that dark energy and tone that makes for X's best work. All in all, it's still a great project and amongst his best work. Rating: 8.0/10

Favorite Tracks: Slippin', Dogs For Life, Coming From, Black Out,

...And Then There Was X(1999): ...And Then There Was X picks up were DMX previously left out brutal, pummeling bone-crushing violence come is to be expected. "One More Road to Cross" and "The Professional"(one of the albums hardest tracks) are early highlights. Then there's the heartfelt but mature writing of "Here We Go Again," one X's best tracks, and "More 2 a Song," the ladder of which speaks to DMX's avoidance when it comes to rapping about the flashy materialistic side of things. While this is DMX's third full length album, it sounds more like a full-fledged sophomore effort to It's Dark and Hell is Hot while Flesh of my Flesh' plays more as an extension, too, or a very good b-side to its predecessor. This album contains some of DMX most well-known hits it including his biggest "Party Up"(Up in Here), a high energy track produced by Swizz Beatz that finds DMX being peak DMX, the chorus is both funny and little corny, there's a good touch of humor in DMX's bars on the track that give it charm. Another well-known X track is "What these B*tches Want" ft Sisqo, a silly and misogynistic track that has its charm and humor but is a bit lacking as far as the chorus in my opinion. "What's My Name?" however, is a banger that's one of DMX's better singles and meant to be played at a high volume out of your car. ...And Then There Was X is another strong album from DMX, and its more consistent than Flesh of my Flesh' less visceral and hungry than It's Dark. 8.5/10 

Favorite tracks: Party Up(Up in Here) Here We Go Again, What's My Name, The Professional, Angel, More 2 a Song

The Great Depression(2001): DMX's fourth straight #1 album finds him trying new things. There are the rap-rock efforts like Bloodline Efforts, and I'ma Bang which will always be hit or miss depending on the kind of music listener you are. To me, they're listenable but amongst the corniest of DMX records in his catalog. The worst is the silly/sad "She Was Da Bomb" where X writes a track about basically impregnating a woman and threatening to be a deadbeat. Yeah, the lows here are amongst the lowest of his career. Transversely, "Who We Be," a socially conscious record, is one of DMX's best tracks ever, and "We Right Here" has a great beat and is amongst the best on the album. Aside from the hits, you get the heartfelt "I'm Missing You" and the thoughtful "When I'm Nothing". There are also more R&B sounds here which I think is a nice change of pace. The Great Depression is solid; it's less aggressive and consistent than any of the three albums before it; some songs really work, and a few don't. I think it's worth listening to; there are essential DMX tracks here, but I wouldn't consider the LP quintessential as a whole. 7.5/10

Favorite Tracks: Who We Be, We Right Here, When I”m Nothing, I”m Missing You,

Grand Champ(2003): DMX's fifth straight #1 album is even more boom or bust than The Great Depression is. Where The Great Depression had weird moments and tracks that didn't quite work. Here X doesn't sound quite as passionate as he does early in his career. In an interview he did on 106 n Park around the time of the album's release, he'd spoken about not making what he should off his music, and I wonder how much that put a damper on writing and recording for this album. When it comes to what's here, the menacing brutality and growl is here, but it isn't as consistently visceral as it was early on. At 24 tracks, it's also a long, over-bloated album but even shorting it; I don't think the bulk of the music here holds up through time. "Get it On the Floor," has a terrible chorus, and most tracks between 13-23 are forgettable. As for the best of what's here "Where the Hood At" Produced by Swizz is a classic DMX track it's hard and has a great beat and hook. "Dogs Out" Which features Kanye on production. Then you have "We're Back" ft Eve and Jadakiss, another highlight and features pretty good verses from all three, but I believe Jada had the best performance. The international version of the album features the track "X Gon Give It To Ya" another very good single from X. This is an interesting listen, and depending how die-hard an X fan you are you may still enjoy this. I think there are tracks worth salvaging, but it isn't an essential listen. 6.5/10

Favorite Tracks: Dogs Out, Where The Hood At, X Gon Give it to Ya

The Year of the Dog(2006):This is the point where the bottom really fell out on DMX's music. The highs here aren't amongst the highest of X's career, and the lows are certainly amongst the lowest—tons of generic and lackluster production, mediocre choruses. A weird rap/rock crossover. DMX's tenacity isn't as urgent or visceral, and a lot of what's here (tracks 2-10) sounds, sadly, like a caricature of himself(with "It's personal" as the exception). The best tracks on the album are sneak in at the end where you find songs like "Blown Away" and "Goodbye"; those are the most soul-bearing tracks on the album. As a whole, it's a below-average album that, aside from a few moments, The down turn reflected itself culturally and sells wise it was his first album not to go #1 and only to go gold, and by the mid 00s DMX wasn’t in most conversations when comes to being amongst the best . 4.0/10

Favorite Tracks: It’s Personal, Blown Away, Goodbye, Life Be My Song

Undisputed(2012): Undisputed was a well-intentioned, admirable comeback album for DMX.  There are some solid moments here "Cold World" Speaks on what he perceives as the rap game getting weak.  "I'm back" is one of the better tracks on the album. You can hear the pain coming through on "Have You Eva."  I like "Y'all Don't Really Know" because it comes close to some of his early work. Still, it just isn't enough; there are quite a few missteps on this album, whether it'd be the awful "Sucker for Love" or "I Get Scared" X sounds weaker vocally, and the production is lacking. There's some charm to "I Don't Dance" with MGK but it's somewhat awkward and not among his strongest singles.  It's better than Year Of The Dog but still far from the level of X's heyday.  5.5/10

Favorite Tracks: I‘m Back, Have You Eva, Ya’ll Don’t Really Know

DMX is an undeniable legend and quintessential to late 90s-early 00s hip-hop. His music and voice, and passion transcends its era and is easily felt now. His apex from 98-00' is highly recommended. Past that, it's a lot more hit and miss, but both the Great Depression and Grand Champ have some gems worth grabbing. Past that, it's even spottier but given X's internal struggles it was great we were even able to get those LPs. Fortunately, DMX seemed to be doing well and had finished an album before passing away, so I'm eager to hear what he'd been working on.

[chappybird]

How to Get Roleplay on F-List: A Guide

Hey all. So I’ve had a few people ask me how on earth to get RP over F-List, or for those that have tried, say its too confusing. While F-List is a much different format than I think a lot of people are used to, it’s a pretty reliable source of RP once you get used to it. So I’m going to walk you through, step by step, how to start from nothing and get a profile set up to start RPing. F-List is 18+ Only and is a Restricted To Adults® Verified website. You can learn more about it by clicking the RTA logo at the bottom of f-list’s main page.

F-list’s main landing page can be located at https://www.f-list.net/.

Note that my f-list may look different from yours because I’m using dark mode (which can be set in the account tab) and I’m a subscriber, so I don’t see ads.

Step One: Make a Profile

Making a profile, or as they’re known on F-List, a character, is your jumping off point for getting started. There are three main factions on F-List: Anthro Characters, Canon Characters, and Original Characters, with subcategories of each. You also have hub profiles. There is a right way to make a hub profile, but that’s not something I’ll be talking about on this post. Hub profiles are pretty universally disliked on F-List and are often seen as a mark of laziness, and I do not recommend making one to look for RP on. You should make a separate Profile for each character you want to play as. If you have a normal account, you can make up to 150 different characters. If you’re a subscriber, you can make significantly more than that depending on your tier. 

Choosing a name for your character is very important! You want something attention grabbing, but since each character has to have a unique name, this can get a little tricky. Today I’m choosing to create a Link from the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. As this is a popular character, it can be difficult to track down a good name. You can be clever with naming conventions, while making it obvious who you’re playing, or you can add in underscores, hyphens, numbers, etc. It’s really up to personal preference. I advise not getting too abstract with your character name. Just pick something easy to read and to the point. Once you’ve decided on a name, click the create character button to open up the character editor.

Step Two: Holy Fuck Dude That’s a Lot of Shit To Fill Out

Take a deep breath. The character editor is very intimidating to those that haven’t used F-List before. Perhaps you have used F-List for it’s old intended purpose, just to list your kinks to link people to when RPing on other sites. Your first instinct might be to scroll down there and start picking kinks willy-nilly. Stop. In the grand scheme of things, this is not as important for getting Roleplay and if you do it incorrectly you might actually hurt your chances.

Now that we’ve calmed down you’ll notice two things at the top of the page. A big white text field, and this guy:

This, more than anything on your profile, is the most important thing. If you have this on profile, you will almost never get any roleplay. This is your character icon, and it’s the first step on your journey to doing this whole thing correctly. All you need to do is find an image that’s 300x300 pixels or smaller and upload it with the Choose File button. Then scroll down to the very bottom of the page and hit save. Search on google, and if you have a hard time finding something of that size, A great site to use is https://lunapic.com/ to edit pics if you don’t have Photoshop or Gimp. Choosing or creating an image with some sort of transparency layer is recommended because it makes your icon look more polished, but you don’t really need to do that. This isn’t an image software guide so I’ll leave that to you to figure out. If all you can do is crop an image into a square, that will do perfectly. But you need to have something here. Besides your character name, it’s the first impression you’re going to give to people when using the site. I have honest to god had people message me on empty profiles that having nothing but a character name and an icon. 

Sourcing your images is a bit of a grey area on f-list. It’s not really an art sharing site, but if you choose fanart that someone doesn’t want to be reposted, it can be removed by the mods if you’re reported for it. So we’ll just use some official art that already has a transparency channel and crop it using Lunapic.

Step Three: How To Set the Profile Up

If you’re following along, you should have something like this by now. This already gives us an idea of who you’re playing, and what they look like, and while you might get a couple of weirdos messaging you already, there’s still a lot to do. So let’s go over what to do next.

Now that you’ve already created a character, it will be listed under the character tab. Further characters will be listed in alphabetical order. Navigate to your character and click the “Edit” button underneath their icon.

We’re back to the big scary page. Remember that big text field? We’re going to ignore everything else and focus on this first.

F-List uses standard BBC code tags with [square brackets.] You can find some buttons that will give you tools like bold, italics, color, hyperlinks, and quote blocks. There are many different ways to create eye-catching descriptions. I would say the three basic ways are minimalist, inline based, and heavy BBC code. We’ll go through the first option in detail but if you’re interested in the the latter, there is actually a few F-List profiles that teach coding and even have a few templates to use. User beware, though. Many F-List users use these templates and they can sometimes look a bit generic as they are overused.

Templates: https://www.f-list.net/c/profile%20templates

Coding Help: https://www.f-list.net/c/profile%20references

If you want to make an inline based profile, having access to software like Illustrator, Photoshop, GIMP, and similar content is good to have as well. You can also make a blend of the three styles of profiles. I’ll link some examples of my own profiles for reference. Some of these have text included in the inline. Some of them just have an image with the text written out underneath. Again, it’s really up to your personal preference.

https://www.f-list.net/c/Rival%20II/

https://www.f-list.net/c/Lion%20Heart/

https://www.f-list.net/c/The%20Fire%20of%20Tamaran/

Now would also be a great time to familiarize yourself with the rules. Keep an eye on these, especially if you play contentious content.

https://wiki.f-list.net/Code_of_Conduct

Some big things to look out for and not to do: Photographs and realistic images of animals are not allowed. Even Nonsexual ones. Photographs and 3D renders of minors (even nonsexual images or nonsexual profiles) are not allowed. If there is even a hint of the character being a minor, do not use photographic or 3D renders. (For example: Tom Holland’s depiction of Spiderman. Even though Tom Holland was an adult when he played the role, the character is a minor.) Sometimes these can run into a lot of grey areas, but it’s better safe than sorry!

Step Four: Creating A Minimalist Profile

We’ll start with a short description. It’s really important to make sure your character’s name is present in your descriptio, especially if it’s not the profile name. If you’re feeling particularly lazy, you can copypaste something from a wiki or official description. Let’s start with something like this.

Link had humble beginnings as a boy that lived in the forest with the Kokiri. Known as the boy without a fairy, Link led a simple life until one day, the dying Guardian of the forest, the Deku Tree, set him upon a Quest to save the Kingdom of Hyrule from darkness. Arming himself with the elemental powers of Hyrule and the legendary Master Sword, Link journeyed through time to the Dark Era of Hyrule to challenge the evil Ganondorf and save his Kingdom from evil.

Shoving this into the Description box and hitting save will generate something like this.

You might notice that this looks like crap. And it does! however, we can very easily fix that with the power of just three simple BBC tags. Those being [center], [color], and [sub]. plus a little something extra I’ll explain in a moment. Let’s add those in like so.

[center][color=green][sub]Link had humble beginnings as a boy that lived in the forest with the Kokiri. Known as the boy without a fairy, Link led a simple life until one day, the dying Guardian of the forest, the Deku Tree, set him upon a Quest to save the Kingdom of Hyrule from darkness. Arming himself with the elemental powers of Hyrule and the legendary Master Sword, Link journeyed through time to the Dark Era of Hyrule to challenge the evil Ganondorf and save his Kingdom from evil.[/sub][/color][/center]

Instead of hitting save at the bottom of the profile this time, we’re going to click “Preview BBC Code” to get a look at what our coding has done.

Fancy.

But it could use a little work. When I’m making minimalist profiles, I like to make the lines of text a little shorter so it’s a little easier to read and looks nicer. Make sure each line of text is about the same length as the previous (minus any BBC tags)

[eicon]blank[/eicon] [center][color=green][sub]Link had humble beginnings as a boy that lived in the forest with the Kokiri. Known as the boy without a fairy, Link led a simple life until one day, the dying Guardian of the forest, the Deku Tree, set him upon a Quest to save the Kingdom of Hyrule from darkness. Arming himself with the elemental powers of Hyrule and the legendary Master Sword, Link journeyed through time to the Dark Era of Hyrule to challenge the evil Ganondorf and save his Kingdom from evil.[/sub][/color][/center] [eicon]blank[/eicon]

You’ll also notice that I placed an eicon tag with a “blank” body. Eicons are essentially image macros that can be used all over the site. Using the blank one here is a good way to put a block of empty space on the top and bottom so the text isn’t too crowded by the frame of the description box. Another couple to keep in mind are [eicon]under construction[/eicon] or [eicon]WIP[/eicon] if you want to save your work now and get right to chatting and exploring the site. This signifies that you’re still working on your profile and more will be added later. You can create your own eicons by going to Account > Icon gallery. Keep in mind each eicon must have a unique name across all users. Inputting this into the description and checking how it looks in the preview, we end up getting something that looks like this:

Looks like we got a bookmark while we were setting the profile up. That means someone saw us while browsing new characters and decided they want to keep an eye on our profile and are likely interested in RPing! If you like, you can disable bookmarks per character in the character editor under settings. Generally speaking though, bookmarks are your friend and it’s how people will find you to RP later.

Optionally if you want to add an inline, just upload an image of your choice in Account > Inline Images. You can then add it in the character editor using this button.

This isn’t a tutorial for creating inlines, but a general rule is to make sure it’s sized well, and transparent images tend to look better than non-transparent images.

Step Five: Character Details

Opening the Character Editor once more, a couple basic things should be filled out. We will take this section by section.

Settings: Some general tweaks to change and edit. Personally, I like to turn my timezone off, and besides that, I like to have my Guestbook and Bookmarks turned on as well, but all of these settings are up to you. A big one a I suggest turning on is “Custom Kinks Sort First.” This will come up later but it’s good to turn it on.

Character List: For now, you can ignore this part. You can use this to have certain characters grouped together and will show up in the sidebars of these characters. I haven’t run into any limits for how many character lists you can have, but keep in mind a character can only belong to one list at a time.

Images: If you have any images you want to upload, this is the place to do it. Headcanons of body types, additional art you’ve drawn or found, can be added here. You can add descriptions to each image that will appear when a user hovers over the image. Keep in mind, again, that usage of fan art is a grey area on F-List. It’s not an image posting site, but some artists do not want their art reposted at all.

Profile Info: You don’t need to fill out every single detail here. Bits that aren’t filled in will just not appear on your profile. It’s a good idea to fill out your gender, and in many cases, your orientation. Both are under General Details. Filling out RPing preferences is also a good idea. It’ll keep people from approaching you IC using first person posts if that’s not your thing.

Step Six: Kinks and Custom Kinks

This is probably one of the most overwhelming parts of the process. My first tip: Ignore the Kink section for now. Instead, skip ahead to the Custom Kink section.

Custom Kinks are a good way to tell people what you really want. Click the Add +1 Custom Kink button to make a new custom kink. You can fill out the basic title of the kink, and a description. Or if you prefer to leave the description blank, just press the spacebar. Select what category you want the kink to appear in (Fave, Yes, Maybe, No.) Try to avoid using inflammatory language against different races, genders, identities, and don’t kinkshame. This is a site based primarily around finding rpers that have the same interests and kinks that you do. Save the profile when you’re done and we’ve got something like this.

And really, you can probably start roleplaying like this. Maybe add a couple of images, and tweak a few things. So if you like, skip to the next step. But for now, I’ll go over the kink list.

The most important think to remember is you don’t have to add every single kink to your profile. Try to select the most relevant things, and avoid redundancies. 

For example, I’m not interested in Vore of any kind. So I can put the kinks Vore (Being Predator) and Vore (Being Prey) Into my No category. Or, if I want to make it even more simplified, I can add a custom Vore kink and put that in my No category. Likewise, if I don’t want to do any sex driven play, I can probably go ahead and just put sex driven there and ignore most of the kink list. Kinks that are not relevant such as Vaginal Sex (Receiving) on a cis male can also be ignored. Kinks are broken up into sections, and while it is a lot, just take your time, go through it sensibly, and take a break if you want to. Remember you don’t have to add every single one to your profile. This will ultimately be easier on you and make your profile easier to read. 

After a bit of editing, this is what my kink list ends up looking like:

You can try exploring the Subfetish editor but it’s a little confusing to navigate and isn’t very necessary. And now, your profile is done!

Step Six: Using F-Chat

 So now that we have a profile set up, it’s time to find some partners. Regardless of what way you want to connect, if you prefer script or para, the main place you’re going to find RP is through F-Chat. There is currently both a desktop and mobile client. if you select Chat you’ll see the option for both, and clicking on them will take you to instructions on how to set those up. We will however be using the Browser client in this example. Go ahead and select F-Chat 3.0.

You will be taken to a landing page with a drop down of your characters, with the first character you created selected as the default. (You can change your default character in your account settings.) You can have up to three characters online at once. Keep in mind this goes by IP address, so if you have a roommate that also uses F-List, those will count towards your total number of online characters. If this becomes a problem for you, just use a virtual machine or connect to the internet via a different method, such as with data. (F-List is not that much of a data drain.)

Here is what you’ll see when you open F-Chat. You’ll see I already have people in my friends list and my bookmarks (that I’ve blurred out for courtesy.) These will appear the same on all the characters you sign in as. I will be notified whenever one of my friends signs in or sets a status. You can set these notifications to show only on the console if you’d like to in the settings. Let’s set a status first.

Here, you have the options of selecting from the default Online status to Looking, Away, Busy, and Do Not Disturb. These all do what you’d expect, with Do Not Disturb turning off the sound that would play when you get notifications from personal messages or pings.

The Status Message is an optional addition, and it’s great for if you’re looking for specific things or want your friends and bookmarks to know what you’re doing. Be careful not to post anything that breaks F-Lists code of conduct. F-List does have an aggregate of every status you ever posted logged on their server, so throwing a temper tantrum and posting something inappropriate and then taking it back later might still get you in trouble.

While the Character Search Option is available to you, I’ve personally never found it very effective. You can search users by kinks, but keep in mind it doesn’t search by gender or orientation, or what species or even if they’re canon or original. Instead, we’ll go right to the settings tab.

General: Just your general settings. You have a few options here to tweak and while most of it is personal preference, I’ll highlight a few to keep in mind.

Disallowed BBC Code Tag: good for if you find a particular colour particularly garish as a text colour, or if you find an eicon that you no longer want to see anymore. Enter Sends Messages: I have this set to off so I can avoid accidentally sending a message for when I post. When this is enabled, just press the send button on screen to send messages. Otherwise, if you want to linebreak in one post, just press Shift + Enter. Animate eicons: If you’re running a slow computer, or have a slow connection, turn this to off. Eicons are used as memes a lot in F-Chat, and some of them can get a little ridiculous. (Someone has compressed the entire Shrek movie into an eicon and uploaded to the site in very poor quality for example.) There can also be bright flashing colours or even nsfw images. In general these eicons are all 100x100 pixels in size, but some users like to tile them together to create bigger images so it can sometimes get out of hand. This is something up to personal preference, and while I have Animate eicons turned on, I can see why some people wouldn’t like it. Idle Timer: If you are the kind of person that walks away from your computer without changing your status, or you have fallen asleep with F-Chat open, it’s good to set this to a reasonable time. If you’re in Online or Looking, after you’ve been inactive for the depicted number of seconds, your status will be set to Idle. This is so other users know that you’re not ignoring them if you don’t respond to their messages. A downside to this is if you’re tabbed out or multitasking, it’ll set you to idle when you may not intend it to and going back to the window switches you to Online again. It can be a little spammy if you’re constantly switching between Online and Idle. Font Size: If you find F-Chat’s font too big or too small, you can edit that here.

Notifications: While this section is pretty self explanatory, I’d like to specifically go over the Custom Highlight Notify Words.

Now, because each profile has to have a unique name, you might want to select additional pings. For example I might want to add Link,Zelda,Hyrule,Hero,Hero of Time to my list. Everything is comma seperated and not case sensitive. There are a few things to keep in mind.

Common word pings: If I add Link to my list of pings, I might get pinged whenever someone talks about a url link, or a chain link, or any other common use of the word link. It therefore might be better to not use the word. If you have a profile name that is a common word, it might be better to also uncheck the option for Notify Messages Containing your name.

Similar Profiles: If there’s another Link in chat, then I will be notified everytime someone refers to him by name as well. This is less of a problem on more niche characters, but it’s something to keep in mind! You can set pings by room, so perhaps a solution to this is using Link as a highlight word in the Canon Characters room, but not using it as a highlight word in the Nintendo room. More about how to do that later.

Hidden Users: Pretty self explanatory once click over. If you keep seeing an ad you dislike, you can hide all advertisements from said user (re: character) going forward. Keep in mind this is not your block list.

Import: If you make two profiles and want to have these settings copied from one to the other, just log into the profile you want to import to, and select the profile you want to import from. Make sure to go back to change your pings if needed.

Lastly, we’ll be looking at the channel section. 

You might be starting to be overwhelmed again, and that’s okay. There are a lot of options, but most of the time, you’ll only want to select the options that are relevant to us. Check off the list of rooms you want to open a tab for. These will begin to be added to your sidebar. the number in brackets signifies the number of users thats joined that room. By default, this list is most popular to least popular, but I personally prefer alphabetical. There may be some channels that you find inappropriate, offensive, or contentious, but your best bet is to ignore those parts of the site. It’s an Adult site that is heavily moderated by a mixture of paid and volunteer staff. Every effort is made to ensure that no real people get hurt, but it is understood that as an adult, you are responsible for curating the content that you consume. This is one of the fundamental principals that F-List is built upon.

For now, I’m going to go with Canon Characters and Canon Characters OOC from this list.

You will also notice an Open Room tab. Unlike the Official Channels which are moderated by F-List staff, Open Rooms are chat rooms created by the userbase, and moderated by the userbase. While the standard F-List code of content is applicable to all areas of the site, special rules may apply in these rooms, and you’ll find things like rooms dedicated to certain kinks, species, and fandoms. I can try searching for a few things I think might be applicable to me, such as Hyrule, Zelda, Nintendo, and Elf. Some of those get hits, and some of those don’t. I can also check them off to add them to my list. (Note that search terms have to be entered one at a time. I cannot search for multiple things at once.)

Once you’ve selected the channels and rooms you want to join, you can click and drag on the tabs to reorder them on the sidebar. If you’d like to pin a chat, You can just press the little push pin symbol, which will then turn green. (You can do this for User Messages as well.) This means when you sign out, these chats will still be there when you sign back in. Note that settings and pinned chats are device by device only, and furthermore, channels and logs will not carry over between characters.

Make sure to read the description of each room you join. There are often specific rules (such as no ooc talk in the canon characters room, and no male characters in the lesbians room.) Clicking the gear will allow you to change settings on a per-room basis.

Step Seven: Actually Finding some RP

Now, after all that effort, we’re finally ready to find some RP. You have a few options on how to do this.

You could just join a few rooms and set your status to looking with a status message on what you want, but this is considered very passive. You may get some people that reach out (As you saw, someone had bookmarked my Link less than an hour after I made the profile before logging into f-chat.) But your best bet is one of three options.

Look at the Ads: Whenever you’re in a room that allows ads, you will sometimes notice a differently coloured message fly by looking for roleplay. This is an ad. If you see one that seems to fit what you have to offer, you can right-click on their username and select “Open Conversation.” A chat window will be open under the PMs section on your sidebar. You can view this conversation like you would a channel. Keep in mind that users are not notified if you open a conversation with them, only if you send them a message.

Create an Ad: Make sure you are in a room or channel that allows ads by checking the description, you can select the ad tab in the lower right hand corner above the text input box to write an ad instead of a chat message.

Making a normal chat post saying “hey does anyone want to roleplay with me” is considered spam and could result in the mods having a word with you.

You have similar tools to what you do in the character descriptions, and clicking each one will automatically place the tags in the text box, with the eyeball being a preview and the question mark being a how to. You want your ads to stand out, but you don’t want them to be too obnoxious. Take a look at what kind of ads other people are posting to get an idea of what’s expected.

Talk to Others: And lastly, you can just play in public rooms or chat with people in ooc channels. This is a great way for others to sample what you’re like to play with and vice versa, or even just to get to know potential partners. In my general experience, you’ll have more luck finding people to play with long term in the user created Open Rooms than in the Official Channels, but ever case is different. There are a vast number of styles, methods of RP, and types of partners you can find.

That’s basically the ins and outs of F-List! The more you’ll use it, the more you’ll understand how it works and the social etiquette on the platform. Like many sites, it certainly has it’s share of dark corners and flaws, but all in all it’s a pretty good website to find people to play with! Have fun!

[angelhummel]

So I saw a post about the eras of the Glee fandom and I am in the Resurgence Era. I began watching the show back in May 2020. I know people like to make fun of the show a lot, and I totally understand, but I unironically enjoy this show. Well maybe not a majority of S4-S6, but I like the music, the comedy, the heartfelt moments, the zany characters. But I can also see how even in the early seasons, which people hail as Glee's Peak, how it could have been better. (1/?)

With the exception of a few song changes and polishing clunky dialogue, there isn't much I would change in S1 or S2 (although I would cut down on the cheating plotlines in S2). S3 should have been about the club finally being unified with almost no infighting, and they shouldn't have tried to cram so many PSAs into one season AND Santana's coming out story should have had more focus than it got (and it should have been handled more sensitively period) But the music in S3 still rocked.

In S4-S6 I can see almost exactly when people began dropping from the fandom and I understand why. S4 through S5 (especially S5) seemed to be flailing for some sense of direction with the characters and juggled too many nonsensical (and often tone deaf) storylines for it to be coherent. S6 saved it from ending disastrously, but by then it was too late to truly save the show. Not to mention Ryan Murphy's unprofessionalism leading to actor drama and just butchered story lines.

But I can see how the show could progressed coherently and satisfyingly. In S3-S4 the New Directions should have become the champions for the underdogs. In S4 with most of them graduating, they should have had the theme of branching out into the big world beyond their small, closeminded town in Ohio. S5 could have been them getting too big for their britches and then failing because of arrogance. Then S6, they go back to Lima as a humbling reminder of where they started.

In S6, with the allotted 22 episodes they should have had, they could have started up the Glee club again, and be reminded why they joined in the first place. It makes me sad that bad writing and Ryan Murphy's unprofessionalism tanked a show that had all the groundwork for being absolutely amazing. Glee is many things: wacky, musical, bizarre, heartfelt, frustrating, insensitive, sometimes all those things in the same episode, but when it was good, there was nothing else like it.

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I mean that last plot is basically what they tried to do but just with Rachel while everyone puttered around for ten episodes before they wrapped all the pointless crap up. I mean I was never a fan of them having to go back to Ohio in the final season just bc they’d already done it multiple times by then and it’s like can we please see something new?? All I wanted for the last two seasons was all my faves and a few guest stars in NY lmao. It’s still an ensemble show with like 7-10 characters and some good guest stars, right?? 

Also like I’ve sort of said this before lately but. S2 is a hot damn mess. If you didn’t have Kurt or Klaine and you didn’t have Santana or Brittana?? That season would be nothing lol. Maybe it’s just me but idk all the het nonsense that season really drags it down for me. And s3 is fucking awful but that’s what so many people cite as their favorite. Which to me it just proves that people talking about “it was really good at first then sharply declined when everyone graduated” is complete bullshit and it’s just people looking at the seasons they actually watched through rose colored glasses and just saying it got 100% when they stopped being interested in it. 

And I swear I’m not trying to just shit on everything you’re saying lmao but again people saying s3 had the best music of all but like. I dunno I think DWS had the best music and was the best actual tribute ep. Michael also had really good performances. Then there’s maybe five other performances I’d put in the iconic tier lol. Idk I think it’s overrated all around and I just hate s3 so damn much (: But yes it does have some good music

But anyway your last paragraph. If I could rewrite Glee with 20/20 hindsight I would have the s4 and s6 newbies switch. So the new and interesting characters for s6 are introduced earlier and actually bring something new to the table. And then in s6 we get the wannabe copies of the oldies so that when all the alums are there, they pick out the person that reminds them most of their high school selves to mentor them. So like Thanksgiving but for like half the season or whatever lol. And it’s like sweet and nostalgic for them to sort of see themselves at the start of their friendship again and to give everyone the advice they wished they knew back in the day. Stuff like that. Could’ve been cute

And idk I don’t agree with everyone else saying s5 sucked lol. I mean obviously one of the contributing factors to the strangeness and sloppiness was one of their main characters dying and having to write around that. And poor Sam having to fill Finn’s crap shoes and become Finn 2.0 and I think you can see that best with the nurse Penny stuff. But idk I mean there’s twerking and puppets which are nonsensical and only one of those things comes off as tone deaf to me. I don’t think it’s as bad as people wanna say. But after the boringness of them coming back to Ohio for the glee club in the middle of the season?? And then my favorite characters are in NY after that?? Those are some of my absolute favorite episodes. I mean I’m in my top 40 glee ranking episodes and I’ve got 5 eps just from the back half of season five to go. I love it. It’s some of my favorite Glee

Although I still agree that s1 is the best. And that’s with the show focusing mainly on Mr. Schue, Finchel, and Quick. And I still adore it as much as I do. Season one really is something special. I mean just about every season is like watching a different show. And no one is going to agree on what they like best or why. But idk I’m just glad everyone in the fandom has something to hold onto.