#it's interesting. makes me like his character more than just a guy who unquestioningly helps the prince ya know

[nibeul]

I really want to know more about how Yeong Shin feels about Ahn/I wish they interacted more. and I would also like to know how Lee Chang would react to Ahn's massacre if he ever did find out

[blockgamepirate]

Technoblade’s purpose in the political narrative of the Dream SMP

I can’t sleep so I decided to finally write the post I’ve been struggling with for literal months, except way more casual because I can’t be bothered anymore and also I’m sleep deprived.

So the thing is: to me the DSMP storyline has always been primarily political, probably because I was introduced to it through Wilbur who was definitely going for political, and also because I’m just generally interested in political narratives right now. Obviously I appreciate the character work and the personal relationship stuff, that’s what makes it more interesting than just dry allegory, but when it comes down to it, this story is about politics to me. So that’s the angle I’m going to approach it from.

Also not to spoil the conclusions here, but I’m an anarchist, that’s my lens.

(Obviously all of this is about rp from here on out unless otherwise specified)

Basically the situation as Techno joins the server is this: L'Manburg exists as an autonomous nation and is de facto independent although not officially recognised by the Dream SMP. The self-appointed president Wilbur Soot decides to hold an election and rig it in order to consolidate his power over the nation he founded and he gets his VP Tommyinnit to join in on the plan. Their scheme fails and they end up voted out instead. The new president, Schlatt, immediately establishes himself as an authoritarian figure and exiles Wilbur and Tommy.

A couple of points on what the election arc demonstrates:

1: the appearance of democracy can be used for distinctly undemocratic purposes.

2: even if the elections aren’t rigged, the electoral system could be massively flawed and end up favouring a party that in fact didn’t have the popular vote

3: even if the winning government (the coalition in this case) has the majority vote, that doesn’t guarantee that they’ll actually act according to the popular will.

4: the supporters of the losing parties basically just have to let the majority overrule their wishes, espcially since apparently L’Manburg doesn’t have an established role for an opposition, yikes. That’s actually a MAJOR oversight in the system but I’m not gonna go into that too much.

5: frankly as an anarchist I am just deeply cynical towards representative democracy, and just because you have a token appearance of choice and consent doesn’t mean that it isn’t a hierarchical and authoritarian system. And to be fair, from my point of view this applies even to so-called liberal democracies and progressive parties. Full disclosure: even if L'Manburg was the ideal example of a representative democracy (which it very much isn’t) I would still be opposed to it because I fundamentally do not believe in top down systems, even electoral ones.

6: despite all these flaws, all the characters seem to implicitly accept the electoral system as legitimate. There’s criticism against the actions of individual characters acting within the system, such as Quackity calling out Wilbur for trying to rig the election, but nobody is questioning the system itself.

So at this point I’m sitting there, watching all this go down, and thinking “man, this would be so much more bearable if there was an anarchist point of view being represented in the story.”

And hey, look who IMMEDIATELY SHOWS UP.

Okay, I’m not gonna lie, early installation Technoblade is not the best representation of anarchism. I was mostly rooting for him out of sheer contrarianism initially. I didn’t really even care if it would be another Killmonger/Magneto/Zaheer situation because I’m used to reading against the authorial intent when it comes to these things. Sometimes any representation is better than no representation, even with political ideologies. That’s not to say that him just straight up spouting this hobbesian notion of a “dog-eat-dog world” didn’t grate on me, obviously it did.

That kind of worldview of humanity needing authority in order to prevent chaos and conflict is literally antithetical to anarchism and is the favourite talking point of authoritarians, the least anarchist people there are. It’s literally what people use to argue AGAINST anarchism. I think it’s mostly because cc!Techno obviously wasn’t particularly educated on anarchist thought and was just basically having fun roleplaying with his friends at this point. Which is frustrating but fair enough I guess.

Cynical ideas about human nature are pretty deeply rooted in the mainstream, unfortunately, most people just consider it common sense. And like I said, it’s a huge talking point in the propaganda against anarchism.

(… even though in fact these arguments were originally used against proponents of representative democracy. Hobbes himself was very much a monarchist, the idea of letting normal people vote for their representatives would have been terrifying to him. Like surely the world would descent into a free-for-all war, all against all. Imagine letting commoners have OPINIONS, the horror.)

So yeah, that stuff was pretty ehhhhh. It was basically what I’d expected though: cc!Techno isn’t an anarchist and we just don’t get accurate representation from non-anarchists, ever. What I dared to hope was that Techno’s character would at least stay consistent about his opposition to ALL governments. I was pretty sure that he would, even though it seemed like the majority of the fandom at the time was convinced that he would switch over to Schlatt’s side or something. It would have been a really shitty twist, I would have ragequit immediately. I mean what would have been the entire point of his character then? He might as well have been a random mercenary. Why even have his character be an anarchist if you were just going to make him work for a government?

(ftr this is kinda my biggest problem with the Hypixel Skyblock revolution event lol, honestly I think that was a worse depiction of anarchism than early DSMP Technoblade. I mean the speech was good, but… still became a government official, tho. booooooooo, cringe)

And yes, I was rooting against L'Manburg, obviously, and I would have even if it had meant having to deal with another badly written anarchist villain character. I never understood why people saw L'Manburg as the good guys, they were nationalist and exclusionary and their whole existence was based on trying to scam people for money.

I mean they were definitely funny, they were great entertainers. I have no problems with people rooting for them because they’re fun to watch; I did that for a bit too. But people were starting to get really into the story and talk about Wilbur and Tommy, the corrupt politicians, and the country that literally excluded people based on nationality as the heroes, unironically, which was wild to me. And when Wilbur started his “villain arc” well: people called it a villain arc, as if he hadn’t been pretty much a bad guy from the beginning, constantly just out for money and power and taking advantage of the people around him and then pretending to be the victim when challenged. I mean yes he got worse, but I wouldn’t call it a villain arc, more like just a mental breakdown arc.

More importantly, to me L'Manburg represented so many things I hate about the status quo in real life, and seeing the fandom mostly unquestioningly accept it as good just pissed me off. Still pisses me off tbh. I mean, to be diplomatic I could say that I understand the emotional attachment and the way L'Manburg was built up mirrors a lot of how real nations are built and how they create a sense of patriotism out of symbols and a sense of honour and loyalty, and it’s actually really fascinating how it even works in a Minecraft roleplay. Says something about the human mind I guess. Doesn’t mean I have to like it though.

Anyway, I just wanted to see literally any kind of opposition to power, even if it had to come from a character that was unquestionably a villain, which I fully assumed Techno would be. Because political narratives so often just leave us out, or at best barely mention us. And even from a narrative point of view, adding an anarchist perspective to a political story just objectively broadens its scope and actually challenges people who are used to only arguing along the lines of conservative or liberal, welfare state or privatization, nationalism or multiculturalism, etc. Even if the original work dealt with it poorly, at least it would give me the excuse to rant about it on Tumblr, which is kinda why I revived my old Minecraft sideblog for this. (That and pig!Techno fanart.)

Also how can you have a story so fundamentally about power without its counterpoint: the rejection of power?

(Yes, Dream SMP as a whole is definitely a narrative about power, it’s a huge theme for Wilbur, Quackity, Dream, Eret and the Badlanders at least, as well as obviously the anarchist characters from the opposite direction.)

So yeah, the build up to November 16th for me was mainly about the anticipation for what Techno would do, how would Techno’s character respond to the seemingly inevitable formation of a new government. THAT was the point of interest for me, that was what I was the most invested in. Would we get an actual anarchist opposition as a new side to the conflict or would they just awkwardly drop that whole angle? Or even have him team up with Schlatt like a complete sellout? There was so much potential but I worried they might just waste it.

And I was right to worry since apparently in the original script Techno wasn’t supposed to do anything, he was just there to help fight Schlatt and witness the explosion along with everyone else.

And WOW that would have been so incredibly boring

Not even just from the political perspective, just talking about the narrative in general terms here: imagine November 16th without Techno’s plot points. Not only would it have been boring for Techno’s character but it would have been equally boring for basically everybody but Wilbur and Philza. An anticlimactic fight followed by a big explosion that pretty much everybody had seen coming already. Yes, the button room scene is dramatic and heartbreaking… for Wilbur and Phil. But nobody else was there to see it. For everybody else, it was just a big explosion. It would have been such a huge disservice to anyone watching the other POVs.

Techno’s intervention gave everyone an ACTUAL climactic fight, it allowed characters other than Wil and Phil to witness some actual drama happening and to participate in it, rather than just waiting around for the explosion, while also foreshadowing the explosion. Even better, it provoked SO MUCH discussion in the fandom AND gave a perfect hook for future conflicts to arise. Wilbur’s end was tragic but it was, at the time, final. L'Manburg would have still suffered a catastrophe but it would have been left with just the same exact antagonist as before: Dream.

And at this point Dream’s core goals had barely changed, just his approach was now different. Yes, that makes a difference for the plot, but it doesn’t really change much in terms of ideological conflict. Especially since there really isn’t that big of an ideological difference between Dream and Tommy, because arguably neither of them are particularly big on ideology in the first place, they just have conflicting goals and use different tactics to achieve those goals (well, the tactics aren’t always even that different *cough Spirit cough*).

Techno’s conflict with Tubbo and especially Quackity (and honestly most of the other characters in general) brings in so much more depth to the story, just by introducing another angle, not to even mention how much it brings to focus questions about power and violence. These are themes that exist in other characters’s storylines too but nowhere in the same way or as central as with Techno.

I’m getting kind of ahead of myself here, though.

The real twist of November 16th was the fact that Techno WASN’T a straight up villain, actually. It was a twist to me anyway, because with all my cynicism I just didn’t see it coming, I didn’t expect him to actually start making reasonable criticisms. I didn’t expect him to drop the hobbesian arguments entirely and start making points that actually sounded like anarchism.

I have to assume that cc!Techno must have seen some of the criticisms of his character and been inspired to adjust because the difference is pretty notable.

(Sidenote: I’m just forever kinda sad that Techno’s “I may seem like the villain here” monologue was cut from the video and most people never heard it.)

And I felt SO validated by the way, because it works so well in the story! Everyone is mostly content with the restoration of a status quo of some sort, Schlatt is gone, this is supposed to be the good ending, and then Techno calls them all out and turns the narrative around completely: This was just a coup d'état. This was just the previous political leadership retaking power by force. Why is everyone celebrating the same exact system that lead to Schlatt’s authoritarian rule in the first place?

What he does there is force the audience to question the narrative they’ve been presented so far, that they’ve accepted without a thought. It might not convince them, but they can’t just ignore it either.

Whatever you wanna say about the discourse around Techno on that day, in the ideological narrative THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART. Not who betrayed who or when is political violence justified, that’s about personal relationships and morality and it’s mostly all more relevant to the aftermath than the event itself. In my opinion, the REAL point in the moment is that the characters and the audience were comfortable with the ending only to be presented with a completely new perspective on the events.

It also recontextualises the finale, including Wilbur’s actions! It’s a much more ambiguous end to the Pogtopia vs Manburg arc and to Wilbur’s original run as the head writer. Wilbur’s “even with Tubbo in charge I don’t think [that ‘special place’] can exist again” is vague enough to be dismissed as just part of his paranoia and internal conflict, but with Techno, there’s a concrete question: what if Tubbo, given the same powers as Schlatt, will turn out to be just a new Schlatt? And suddenly you have to wonder what Wilbur meant by his words too. And was all this foreshadowing something about L’Manburg’s future?

Okay I’ve only made it to November 16th and there’s so much more DSMP to talk about but the post is getting too long and I’m starting to lose my energy. Will I ever make a part two? No idea. But I’ll try.

Standard disclaimer: I’m not the spokesperson of anarchism, other anarchists might disagree with my reading

[mimiri22-6]

I JUST FOUND OUT BEE AND PUPPYCAT HAD A SECOND SEASON! GUESS WHAT I JUST FINISHED WATCHING!

Oh my fucking god holy shit, my guys! This show. This fucking show. Where do I even start! First off

SPOILERS!!!!!!

YOU DO NOT WANT TO WALK INTO THIS SEASON, THIS SHOW, WITH SPOILERS! DO NOT FUCKING LOOK, THIS IS 1000% SPOILER TERRITORY!!!

So I will be taking the extra step of taking my laptop out, and continuing this on there(and after I wake up because it's 4am and I regret absolutely NONE of this whatsoever because, guys, I love this show with everything I have left to my being, I swear, I will die for a third season)

Warning: This is a long one.

OKOKOKOK! I know I know! It’s been uh...A Month since I first posted this! BUT I am Here Now and Ready!!! I am less than 10 seconds into the first episode of season 2 and I am already So Ready to relive this!!(Dream SMP has Nothing on this show, God I Love This Show Far Too Much!!!!!!)

...First ten minutes...I have So Much I want to say...Just-just a lot of love...

okokokokokokokokokok!!!!!! I think I know how I’m going to do this now! One bullet for each episode! Let’s see if I stick with it.

Gentle Touch

In the first episode we already get a big game changer for Bee and her development. Bee becoming more responsible as a favor for Deckard. He asks her to take care of his family while he’s at cooking school and we already see her doing this. Going out to the ocean with Weasley, going out of her comfort zone for people she’s practically family to, which is why we got the beginning flashback, once again going out of her comfort zone to stop Puppycat from punching kittens, And Finally, coming out from her nap cupboard to face Howl and help pay for bills by eating ugly food.

Little Fingers

Ooh, this one has foreshadowing dream sequence. I would say more about it if it had more significance, but it’s really just what happens to Bee in the last ep. This episode brings more of Bee being responsible, trying to take her phone away from Puppycat so he stops making bad purchases. This episode made me realize what Puppycat’s role is this season, the child. Or something among those lines. He’s the same as he was last season, but it seems/is a bit more exaggerated because Bee isn’t doing the same things anymore. She’s started to care about consequences. And speaking about consequences, Toast announces she’s pregnant while confirming that she’s been staying...in Cass’s room(?)...weird, but ok, and by Tim pointing and Merlin’s reaction, it’s Merlin’s...but also everyone else seemed like they thought they were the culprit and I don’t want to think about the implications of that....MOVING ON-OH WAIT, And Cardamon’s mom is spouting magic tears that messes with the plants, so there’s that.

Snow and Violets

I’m going to be honest, I’m not 100% sure what to put here and I’m loosing steam. (I’ve been awake since 3 am...) But I think I can put something. The situation with Mr. Cup is the definition of being haunted by your past. The guilt and regret of cheating in the past has made him lose his motivation to give it his all in racing because, what’s the point? Motivation and not caring was his norm, so he just stuck with it. Until Bee, and now he can be a rainbow and sleep with less guilt and regret on his conscience. The thing with the island rapidly changing could be one of three things. Something to do with the ship that  Is the island, a metaphor for change, or something really cool the creators just wanted.

Day off Work

Not Too much to note for this ep overall. Puppycat totally did do the ‘wrecking the house in search for the owner’ thing dogs do. Finally, a dog trait! Every time I see Cardamon now I just get sad cause he’s 7, and should Not be doing landlord stuff. Bee showing worry about how Cardamon’s mom is still asleep and being worried about Cardamon himself, I’m just glad someone’s noticing. I keep forgetting that some people haven’t watched the pilot so they don’t know about Puppycat being a Space Outlaw, so when he found all his stuff under the apartment I was less surprised and more excited. The two last things I want to say is I think it’s interesting/cool/intriguing how the Wizard family just takes every weird thing either in stride, unquestioningly, or ignorance. Just trying to pretend it didn’t happen so they don’t have to deal with it(other than Crispin, but he’s coming up). And the last thing I just want to bring to light is CARDAMON BEING SO CUTE IN THE LAST SCENE! JUST BEING A CHILD! AND LAUGHING WITH HIS DOG! ON A FUNNY CHAIR! I LOVE HIM YOUR HONOR AND I WILL PROTECT THAT SMILE WITH MY WHOLE BEING!!!

My Favorite

Note, Pretty Patrick is also The Mayor. Alright. It’s definitely been a few months and you can see the relationship between Howl and Bee has gotten better, not that it was too bad to begin with, just a bit less peeved on Howl’s end. The theme of Bee being responsible is brought into play again with the train station scene. Telling Puppycat to not hit and the way Puppycat was acting around Patrick. All little kid stuff. Which also kind of clashes with what I thought was Puppycat being older than Bee by a lot, I’m honestly slowly getting more and more confused exactly how I should perceive Puppycat. THE FIRST REAL LOOK AT THE HAND GUYS! I’m still not sure what their deals are, but they have a corpse on their hands and that is already the biggest red flag. I have a guess as to what/who they are in relation to Puppycat and, by acquaintance, Bee, but I could be wrong, but I also can’t think of any other people they may be. I’ll bring it back up either the next time we see them or at the end.

Did You Remember

Grampa Puppycat cares about his granddaughter a whole lot. Don’t @ me, their dynamic is more confusing than a moving maze...Now this episode, ooh boy, it feels like a lot, but in a minimal way? First off, Cardamon finally breaks down about the stress of being a 7 year old landlord and Bee takes care of him for the day. Big Sis Bee For The Win! DON’T @ ME I MAKE UP MY OWN FAMILY DYNAMICS!!! Kind of continuing from the first sentence, Puppycat and Bee love each other(I Stand By Platonically For Them) so much already, for them it’s been a little over a year considering Puppycat fell into Bee’s life before her last birthday and now they’re celebrating another one. And I must admit, I can not for the life of me figure out wtf the deal is with the tears. They have little shapes of recent events in them and they make plants weird/straight up just make life! Like, What Even Is That?! Also, Cardamon finally gets a good sleep.

Bird Friend

Ok, so we got more ship pieces, a most likely reason as to why Puppycat was Like That in the last few episodes of season 1 and has been goopy every now and again in this season. Apparently eating things he shouldn’t eat make him Extremely off model and goopy. More hands! But not the rest of them this time around. I wonder if Sticky’s hunt for all the birds has any significance other than showing us another piece. Puppycat breaking down and spilling a few secrets after stress eating off the floor and Bee immediately saying no to someone else telling her what’s wrong with Puppycat and letting him come to her first instead of forcing him is always such a good lesson to have. Also, Cass is into weirdly shaped shiny things.

Two Clown Noses

Ah, it’s this one. The one that Really throws a wrench into the Bee/Deckard ship. THEY’RE BOTH SO CUTE! I CAN’T CHOOSE!!! This entire episode is just Crispin and Bee hanging out with the added angst of the beginning ‘story’. This world is full of such amazingly crazy characters and Crispin’s backstory is one of those crazier ones. Bee and him Lived Together and Know Each Other, he knows she’s a robot! My only question is, what happened that they broke up? WAIT- DID THEY EVEN BREAK UP?! It would be weird if they weren’t because they were living together and then they decide to live separate again would make no sense. I think I just jumped to the weirdest conclusion...Anyway! How would Puppycat get sick? I feel like that was just another thing they added to create different dynamics. The beginning birthday thing and the conclusion felt so real even though the cause was something so out there that I feel like only animated shows like this could pass, but also I feel like someone out there has done something similar, so what do I know. Yeah, not much else about this episode, it was mostly just Bee/Crispin stuff and character stuff. Gosh they’re so cute...but so is Bee/Deckard. Being a multishipper is hard...

Funny Lying

RIGHT! THEY’RE CALLED THE WARLOCKS! THAT’S THE TITLE I WAS FORGETTING! Tim knows everyone’s secrets, comes with the perk of having a lot of time and not talking much, you observe everyone else while they think you’re doing something else. I know from experience. Eavesdropping is a specialty of mine. SHIT THIS IS THE ONE WHERE CASS GETS THE MESSAGE DISSING HER FOR FALLING FOR TOAST FROM A COWORKER! I caught those vibes during the first season, but then the first half of this season came along and I was forced to drop those vibes in favor of cannon because TOAST WAS PREGOS WITH ONE OF CASS’S BROTHER’S KIDS! I’m good at catching gay vibes in fictional worlds, but I’m shit in the real world, just like everything else. And the thing is, we don’t get Any kind of explanation/closure for the entire rest of the season! We see Toast totally shocked reaction, probably moments before she was going to sneak attack Cass, but froze upon seeing that text. AND WE GET NOTHING ABOUT THAT FOR THE REST OF THE SEASON! Anyway, that was only like 2 minutes into the ep, this is taking forever. We got more Bee being responsible for Cardamon and getting rid of the tears, but the biggest part of this episode is undoubtedly Puppycat’s scenes. We got him sinking to the bottom of the ocean and getting cradled by flowers created by the tears next to the ship. We find out he was bullied and ridiculed in school as a kid and his best friend(idk what else they would be counted as), Violet, convinced him to leave their planet after they accidently summon their ship, leaving Puppycat’s mother behind. seeing how he cried about leaving her she seems to have been a great caretaker and he loved her immensely. We get the scene of Bee’s dad as a baby/Very young child on a mission, giving a presentation, and finding the candy to be a source of energy by cracking it open. Making me think, ‘Is that Bee’s fuel source? If it is, how would not taking full doses for two years effect her?’ because in the first season she splits the candy in half to share with Puppycat and in this season she didn’t eat the candy at all. Makes me even more worried for the future knowing what state she’s in when this season ends. With the last flower fever dream/memory it seems that the princess that he fell in love with was the one to make the final move to turning him into a ‘monster.’ Don’t worry tho, Bee saved him from the bottom of the ocean 

Golden Eyes

(I’m getting more and more tired as this goes one. I started doing this at around 12 this morning and now it’s nearing 6 pm. I’m loosing it!) We got another birthday and it’s Howl’s this time, though it’s not really his episode. The fish are attracted to the wish crystals for some reason and one eats a bit of it to be ‘human’ for a day. I love how the fish hated being a human and Weasley didn’t even notice it was a date. I don’t know if it was or not, but ending on that was funny. We got the return of the major douche from the season 1 finally and a mention of Moully. 

Why Don’t You Help Me?

(I took a break between episodes, aka I went tf to sleep, because I was falling asleep at the table and not really processing everything enough for what I’m trying to do) Ok, so this is a day in the life of Cardamon episode with supposed parelles to the Warlocks. We start with the red one stuck and the others unwilling to help...and then they start drawing Puppycat’s face on the 5th one’s corpse and these guys just do not care that it’s a dead body that they supposedly killed themselves. In short, they have all my fear because they are uncaring about body counts. Cardamon still goes to school on top of being a self proclaimed landlord and gets made fun of for being responsible and tattling at every chance he gets. Something I just noticed too is, at first I just assumed he was finally getting tired after being an adult in a child’s body for who knows how long, but now I’m thinking if he’s supposed to be asleep with Violet, his mom, then the reason for him being so tired is being awake too long. It could most likely be both, too. Just like Cardamon, I have no idea what all the tears mean. In the most recent one was see Moully as the charm in the center. What’s the pattern with these? Again we see Bee being responsible and taking care of Cardamon, making sure he gets home safe, tucking him in, and pulling an all night favor so he can sleep and get to school in the morning. Speaking of that, I can’t say I like Cardamon’s teachers all that much. I could rant about them, but this is already long and they’re not worth it. My only real question is, why the hell are their clothes so ragged and dirty? Do they not know how to bathe? Just, WTF? (either that or they’re Really not trying to hide their *ahem* activities from the kids, which just makes me want to punch sense into them or something)

Now I’m Really Alone

MOULLY!!!! Sorry, I just love him a lot. From what I can put together, he’s some kind of gift giving being. Giving wishes, exchanging good deeds and quick favors for other good deeds and favors. Just being Really nice and wanting to help everyone he comes across. This episode makes me see so much in common between Bee and Moully. They both want to help even when they don’t know how. Making messes and finding ways clean up those messes out of guilt and the feeling of obligation. They both have lost things they need to pick up and the knowledge that they have all the time in the world because they’ve both been alive for so long. It keeps getting hinted, but now kind of confirmed, that the Wizard’s know Bee is Weird because they haven’t seen her age. Hell, seeing how she interacts with Cardamon she could have even baby sat them. So all the Wizard’s know she’s Weird and, supposedly, only Crispin knew she was a robot. That was until Deckard found out in the season 1 finally. Once again bringing up the point of people in the Wizard family finding something out and ignoring it and hiding it. In the season 1 finally, Tim asked Cass if Deckard wasn’t depressed anymore, practically saying that Deckard has some form of depression. Depression being a mental illness that runs in families, it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that some other members of the family have similar problems. One of the things I remember depression doing is the person will see a problem and ignore it. Something that many people in this show do with the weirdness around them and the emotional states/situations of the other people in the show. This season is about finally seeing the thing you’ve been ignoring and doing something about it. And that’s what Bee’s been doing this season, taking charge and finally getting her junk out of the ocean and getting REALLY far out of her comfort zone. She HATES water and the ocean, but she’s diving in to take back what’s hers and cleaning up a mess. There’s A Lot to analyze with this episode, the similarities of Moully’s and Bee’s situations and personalities, Puppycat being the responsible one again for the long run of things, the tears and how the wish crystals work, and the state of multiple character’s minds. Ignorance is bliss until it isn’t.

I Won’t Leave You Alone

Ok, SO MANY NOTES! Which makes sense seeing how it’s the last episode. First off, THOSE WARLOCK BASTDARDS VIOLATED MOULLY AND IF THEY WERE REAL I WOULD THROTLE THEM TILL THEIR HEADS POPPED OFF!!! I am a very protective person when it comes to things I care about. And I’m going to say it here and now incase something comes up of it, Cooking Prince gives be Colorful Vibes, if you know what I mean. You don’t follow someone home and bother them when they don’t want to be bothered unless you’re Into into them. That’s all I’m saying and if nothing comes of it, I will drop it. I’m barely hanging onto it to begin with. So, last episode we watched one of three hands punching the other hands to let Moully go, and in this episode it’s confirmed that the day Moully was pulled through the void, the 5th warlock died. My theory with that is, the 5th one was against getting Puppycat in some way and retaliated by fighting them off of Moully and then the others retaliated by killing them in some way. And the tears in this episode didn’t give life to the corpse, but grew new life over top of it, the tears can’t bring the dead back. The ship gets put back together and we see Puppycat being pretty selfish again, bringing the ship online while Bee gets scooped trying to help Moully. He indirectly helped, but only after he got what he wanted. Cooking Prince, an outsider, brings up how everything going on on the island is Weird and Cass celebrates someone acknowledging it. Once again, bringing back the ‘ignorance is bliss until it’s not’ thing going on around here. Cardamon does more childish things this episode, making a wish and crying in his mother’s arms. He got to finally let go of his responsibilities and let it out until he passed out, and now he gets to sleep again. Moully and Bee are out of commission and the Wizard’s+Cooking Prince stay one the island/ship to be with Bee even though they are mostly confused about EVERYTHING going on rn. Bee has multiple Bees now while she’s out, and so, they go looking for Bee’s dad. I have a feeling he has at least some white hairs by now.

I remember watching this season for the first time. I remember I definitely cried at multiple points, but I can’t exactly remember what points now. I didn’t cry this time, I was too busy taking everything in and trying to put what little pieces I could find together. The first season was to get us used to this world and get comfortable for a chill ride, but then it smacks you in the face with something much bigger at the very end. This season was to make you pay more attention and to question your surroundings. It was also about the first steps to taking charge of your life. If Bee didn’t do all the responsible things she did this season, the warlocks would have probably gotten Puppycat while the island went to shambles. Actions have consequences and that’s what this was about. I believe next season is why ‘Lazy in Space’ was the title. The characters are going to be in space, looking for Bee’s dad, and will acknowledge all the weird things going on while developing, excuse the pun, in out of this world ways. 

I can’t wait for season 3.

[maddiefriendlovesbilly]

Spencer x Ghost?

Spencer x Ghost

(AAAAA- it has been months since you sent this to me, and all i can say is im so sorry) Side note I have my friend @lethalbreadkills helping me with this one!

For reference: Maddie (maddiefriendlovesbilly) is green, Jimmy (lethalbreadkills) is red (((its 4:30 at the time i have joined this so im dead braincell wise sorry yall))) and Orange is stuff we decided together :3

Also this is so very chaotic im so sorry for this anon but this has been in my fuckin drafts for SO LONG and this is the only way its getting finished (its now 5 am uwu) im so sorry for all the shitposting i do its a mess. I shouldnt have been allowed here. (we finished at about 5:30 am its hell <3)

Sphost? Ghencer?? Sphoster??? I adore and despise them all equally.

We have decided that it should be BeanieGhost

Anyway I think this ship is really cute

They’re both so neurotic I can only imagine the chaos that would ensue

One of them starts a rant on some topic and the other joins the hell in

I’m an advocate of LETTING SPENCER INFO DUMP BECAUSE HE DESERVES IT OKAY

And Ghost would let this dream come true???

I would die for both of them and if Spencer told me I had to die I wouldn’t even complain, no questions I’d just be like “Aight.” I trust him that much.

(Not sure I trust Ghost’s judgment enough to do that unquestioningly; sorry Ghost)

Back on topic

I can’t imagine these guys on anything that comes close to society’s definition of a date

It’d be more like “hey you wanna come on this hunt with us?” “maybe, depends if there’ll be snacks” or like chilling in Spence’s room binging the entire star trek: original series in one sitting or “oops sorry about that level 11 entity that attached to my soul and is now wreaking havoc in your house, wanna make out later to make up for it?” “Fine but you also have to play three rounds of Call of Duty with me afterward”

They wouldn’t be romantic often but like highkey? I can see them throwing themselves into the line of fire for each other with a recklessness only they could survive

We can’t forget that Spencer is a more than 60,000-year-old overpowered demon/god/entity/thing, which, yes, could throw a slight wrench in this ship for multiple reasons, but I choose to make angst out of it instead.

Side note: Ghost is a chronic conspiracy theorist (and you can’t tell me otherwise) and every once in awhile Spencer will offhandedly say something like “Y’know I helped the Egyptians build the pyramids” and Ghost just goes fucking feral.

Look, I’m not saying Spencer IS touch-starved and most likely has issues creating and developing relationships and therefore avoids interpersonal connection, especially offline, but I AM saying he is prime material for it. (thats a lie thats exactly what shes saying don’t believe it) (I’m projecting okay dont judge me) (loser imagine projecting)

Imagine with me for a second: Why does Spencer willingly stay with a family who locks him in their basement with only minor complaining? He’s a near all-powerful entity just released into the world for Spence’s-sake - If he wanted to, there’s no telling what havoc he could wreak! So why doesn’t he? Why would someone so powerful, so terrifying, so dangerous that a group of people decided to seal him away forever stay with the first family he finds in sub-par conditions for years - especially someone who’s seen to be as high-maintenance as Spencer? Let me hit you with a theory: He’s chasing the feelings of validation, safety, and love - no matter how rarely it’s shown - that a family can provide. Being socially isolated for even a few years can do a number to a person’s psyche (I should know, I’m projecting onto this character right now), let alone thousands.

Now maybe Ghost can’t match thousands of years in isolation, but damn if he doesn’t have a few years of crippling loneliness on his record too.

I can see the two of them learning how to be vulnerable around others together, emotionally and physically; learning how to open up and how to talk through issues; and some third point, because points are better in threes.

(May I suggest that these losers are both trans but thats just me adding in my own projection lmao)

(You absolutely may)

Imagine the conversation thats just “so i have a murderer in my head thats an ass” “rip to u ig sounds like a you problem :///”

imo spence has trouble expressing emotions other than like,,, annoyance and haughtiness, its like sort of his go-to defence, so showing Ghost his emotions is a big step for him

I hear you, and i say yes good. (found this one headcanon that i kinda live by where he was uh, either autistic or adhd i dont remember but theres that too) OH yeah that would be at thing huh. Spencer: *is emotionally vulnerable @ ghost* ghost: oh shit im trusted??? Oh fuck uh.

Yeah so like…. Ghost and spence showing emotion at eachother is kind of :flushed: ghost be like: whats an emotion. Imagine having emotions fuciiing loser hhaha,,,, *laughs nervously*

Ghost is also very emotionally distant with most people so it would probably be like “what??? The fuck?? Emotions?????? You have those???”

Ghost and Spencer be like *gay*

So another idea is that maybe Spencer realizes Ghost doesnt play any games [like the uncultured SWINE he is] and decides he must [remedy] this and so he introduces him to like, nintendo first. (some bitches thought that said nintendo fortnite. Im bitches) and theyre playing like, mario kart or smash or smth and Ghost gets really [fuckin into it]

Ghost and spencer: *literally in eachothers laps playing fucking wii tennis*

Spooker: what are the- *TOAST FUCKING SLAPS A HAND ACROSS HIS MOUTH* shut up you dont wanna know what happens when its mentsonssbfdjfsd (sorry i had a stroke uwuwuwuw)

(Theyre in denial we don’t judge in this house)

They will not hesitate to play dirty either, they will straight up push each other over and vaguely flirt

Ghost is losing and straight up fucking goes “ur hot” and spencer actually dies and boom ghost is the winner. sparkle emoji Magic sparkle emoji

“I am Not a HomoSexual:™:” “Yeah, sure you aren’t” “Screw off”

Pet-names-ish: Asshole, Gaymer-Boy, casual insults, Mr. Spirit Bitch, Mistake, Loves Ghosts More Than His Boyfriend What A Fucking Loser aka Gay-ass

Pros:

They both open up a lot most likely. Gain someone to trust since they’ve sort of been through the same things (though on much different scales)

I can see soft hours of hanging in each other’s bedrooms

Spencer is a tsundere you cant tell me otherwise youre just a coward if you disagree

So is Ghost so this can only go well

Every time Ghost has to solve a case at the Acachallas Spence is just peaking out from his basement like “the fuck is this?? Hot Man??????”

Enemies to lovers 500k (Gets Hot and Steamy :flushed: NOT CLICKBAIT!!!!11!!!!! 18+!!!!!!! GAY LOVE StORY!!!!!!) Lemonz!!! Made from teh Sexiest of Wattpaders UWUWUWU YAOI Boys Love don’t like don’t read!! (this is so fucking stupid jkfnd) I hate this with a passion Q^Q. All my years of being a basic watpad fanboy have helped me to the moment i bring maddie to tears

The steam is just like,,,,, holding hands and being angy all the fuckin time the steam is literal because their anger translates into actual steam

Cons:

Their angst has nowhere to go and it just sits between them like two raccoons at a dumpster-style mexican standoff

They really start off hating each other huh. Like, I know this can still lead to healthy relationships but neither of them are very good at healthy relationships with people he hasn’t known for his Whole Life so that’s an Oh No.

They totally feed off of each other’s stupidity (but this could be seen as a pro too so take that as you will) as well as anger - im talking one-upping each other kinda shit

Its ridiculous honestly how intense it gets, like they straight up need intervention sometimes because they dont realize they can just STOP

Conclusions:

I think this would be a relationship that would that a lot of time and hard work to make work, but i think in the end it would be really super cute!! Like it would make no fuckin sense to anyone else but somehow they’d understand each other and help each other through their similar issues. Also theyre both big nerds in different ways and i think they’d have just ranting sessions back and forth over and over and it would be soft!!!!! So yeah, i think it would work, at least, i want it to :D

So. Maybe?? I feel like it could, but they’d need to work pretty hard to make it healthy and not constant fighting. Could be stupid amounts of cute and wholesome but also could be stupid amounts of oh no and pain, depending on how the two act. If they learned how to get along with each other and work past their differences it could be super cute and soft. Just a very, er, bumpy beginning. And middle. And end. (this makes me very nervous,,,,why did you mention an end) (wouldnt you like to know weather boy) (TvT) UFDUNS bumpy but soft . Agreeing with the loser gay, want this to work it’d be interesting :3

[ablogthatishenceforthmine]

Echo’s Unfulfilled Potential

I know a lot of people hate Echo, and are baffled by Jason’s apparent love for her character. I think some of the hate she gets is unfair, but there are a lot of problems with her character. However, I can see why Jason might love her character. And throughout the past through seasons, I have seen so much potential for her to be an interesting character... and there are hints of it here and there. But her character has yet to live up to that potential.

I thought Echo worked great in Season 4. She was the perfect minor villian for the season. That season was all about overcoming only caring about one’s own people. It was about all the different groups learning to reunite, about learning to care about all people, not just one’s own. Echo’s character is all about doing what’s best for her people whatever it takes, and whatever it costs, no matter the detriment to others. Thus, she is a great embodiment of what many of the characters on the show are trying to overcome. And, the show leaves her in such an interesting place at the end of the season, as the fish out of water. She has never been to space, and she is stuck with people she doesn’t really know for 6 years. Emori is in a similar boat, as she is also a grounder in space. But she has her relationship with Murphy and her friendship with Raven, so she is not as out of place as Echo was. This left the audience with intriguing questions. How would Echo fit into this group? What relationships would she develop with the other characters? How would this time affect her loyalties? How would this time change her?

Season 5 does not do a great job of answering these questions. Her dynamic and place in the group is too generic: a problem with the Space Crew’s dynamic and a lot of its relationships in general. It’s just shown that they are family and that there care about each other, but many of the characters don’t have a specific dynamic: the exceptions are Bellamy-Monty, Murphy-Emori, Murphy-Raven, Bellamy-Murphy, Bellamy-Raven, and Monty-Harper. Most of these dynamics and relationships were established before Season 5, so the show does not do a good job of showing a difference these five years have made. 

Echo does not have a distinct dynamic or relationship with anybody apart from Bellamy, and even then, their romantic dynamic is pretty generic. Their relationship doesn’t really add anything to either of their characters, and doesn’t say anything about who either of them are. While I know a lot of people hate this hearing from the Bellamy and Bellarke side of things (and i do too), I think this relationship is much worse for Echo’s character than it is for Bellamy’s character. Throughout Seasons 5 and 6, Echo is often stuck in the girlfriend role. Her character is often about Bellamy, loving Bellamy, worrying about Bellamy, trying to help/protect Bellamy. Other than this, Echo often serves some plot functions, that could be filled by other characters and don’t often say much about her character. But In Season 5 and 6, it largely didn’t feel like she was much of a character on her own.

Season 6 also has a major issue with her character; it doesn’t explore what Monty’s final plea to be “the good guys” means to her, if it means something at all. We get an exploration of what Monty’s message means to almost every other character but Echo. We see Clarke and Bellamy trying, and eventually succeeding, to do better. We see Raven react to it with self-righteousness (not my favorite plot, but at least its a reaction). We see Murphy ignore it and then find his way back to trying to be a good guy; Emori has a similar journey of this, but it is far less explored. But watching Season 6, I had no idea what Echo felt about this “do better” quest. She never talks about it, or even mentions this idea.

She also behaves in ideas contrary to this mandate, but it is never commented on. Echo violently kills Jade, immediately plans to go to war after finding out about Clarke, and kills Ryder. But watching the season, I had no idea how the show wanted me to think or feel about these actions. Am I supposed to be critical of them? Am I supposed to see them as acceptable? Am I supposed to see Echo as ignoring or failing the quest to do better? Unlike with every other character, the show doesn’t seem to frame her actions in the context of the aim to do better. She seems weirdly exempt from this theme, which left be confused about her character the whole season. I didn’t know how I was supposed to see her.

But throughout these two seasons, Echo’s character is full of potential. Think about her character. Think about her backstory. From when she was a young child, she was trained as a spy. Trained to obey and to follow. It’s hard to shake that off. She does what she’s told, unquestioningly. Who is someone is that much of a follow? What is their sense of self? Do they have one? This is so interesting to me! Someone trying to find out who they are when they’ve always had to be whoever they needed to be, whoever their leader wanted them to be. That is an interesting character! And I can see why Jason would be so interested in a character of this backstory, and of this mentality. But this potential in Echo’s character has yet to be fulfilled, and all that interesting stuff has yet to be fully realized. There are hints of it in a few scenes of Season 6: her flashback backstory, and her confiding in Bellamy about her family and her difficulty with emotions. The latter of which I think was poorly executed, and felt forced, even though I like the idea of it. But I thought the flashback was interesting and did provide insight into her character. Although I do think both these character details would have better revealed in Season 5 rather than Season 6. But overall these are just little swipes at Echo’s potential.

So Season 7. I really like Echo’s character so far in Season 7. Her character has greatly benefited from separating from Bellamy. While she is still driven by her love for Bellamy, she interacts and forms bonds with other characters: Echo, Gabriel, and Dev. And it feels like the show might be planning to fulfill her potential, to explore the ideas that I mentioned above. In the season premiere, hallucination/Anamoly Roan straight up asks Echo who she is when she doesn’t have someone to follow. So, it seems like Echo’s journey this season might be exploring this idea! Hallucination Roan also refers to Bellamy as someone Echo claims to love. Maybe this season will also explore the Becho relationship in a meaningful way (and hopefully result in their breakup). For the first time, Becho makes sense, at least for Echo’s side. Echo is forever a loyal follower, and Bellamy is an extremely charismatic leader. Is it any wonder she fell for him? Is the reason she is so desperate to get back to him more complicated than just love? Maybe she needs him because she needs a leader, someone to be devoted to, someone to follow? Now that she thinks Bellamy is dead, who is she? Does she even know who she is? Do we? Who is Echo when she has no one to follow? I hope this season explores these ideas, and finally lives up to the potential that Echo’s character has always had. I’ve been disappointed by the show before. And maybe I am getting hyped about this for nothing.  I don’t know for sure that Echo’s potential will be fulfilled this season... But I still have hope.

[mamthew]

A Final Fantasy Ranking

Over the course of the quarantine, and because I had such a good time with the Final Fantasy VII Remake, I've ended up blazing through a ton of Final Fantasy games. Since April, I've played IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XII, and XIII. 6, 7, 9, and 10 I'd beaten before. 4, 12, and 13 I'd played to some capacity before. 5 and 8 were completely new experiences. I had no interest in going further back than IV, since it was the first one to really put any effort into character work, and I didn't play either MMO because MMOs don't really appeal to me (I'm planning to try XIV whenever this new update drops that makes the story mode more accessible, but it keeps getting pushed back so oh well). I also didn't replay XV because I've played XV three times and watched other people play it in its entirety twice, so I have a much better handle on it than any other game in the series.

Anyway, I didn't really have any plans for what I'd do with this, besides get a better understanding of the series as a whole, but I was kinda inspired to do my own Final Fantasy ranking. I'll probably be a bit more detailed than I should be because I tend to overanalyze my media and end up having too much to say. I’m actually not placing VII Remake in this ranking half because I regard it as a spinoff and half because it’s not yet a complete story, even though Part 1 is unquestionably a complete game. If I were to put it somewhere, it would probably be close to the top, possibly even in second place. Also worth noting that this is gonna have SPOILERS for every game I discuss here. I really just wanna use this as a place to nail down some of my thoughts on these games, so they’re pretty stream of consciousness and I didn’t bother avoiding any details from the plots.

10: Final Fantasy VIII.

I don’t think there’s another game in the series with a more obvious corporate hand in it than VIII. It’s kinda the Fant4stic of FF games; there are the bones of a substantive game in there somewhere, but every aspect of the game is such a bald attempt at checking off a 1999 list of “things gamers want” that the whole affair feels hollow and sickening. A major trend I’ve noticed throughout this series is the extent to which FFVII’s success pushed the architects of almost every subsequent game to try to recapture whatever it was that worked about VII, and VIII got the worst of it. It’s got the sullen guy with a special sword. It’s got the sci-fi. It’s got the terrorists with hearts of gold fighting against an oppressive state. It’s got the train scenes. It’s got the case(s) of amnesia that hides the true premise of the story. It’s got the ability to give any character any loadout.

Besides that, they kinda crammed in just a bunch of stuff popular with kids at the time. Jurassic Park? It’s in there. Beauty and the Beast? Here’s the ballroom scene. Hunchback of Notre Dame? Here’s that carnival. Alien? Now you’re alone on a spaceship running away from a horror monster. Saving Private Ryan? The party shares brains with war veterans and dreams of their experiences at war I guess. Half of anime? It’s all about a high school for mercenaries and the party is trying to get back in time for the school festival.  Fandom culture? Zines are a collectible item, and each one you find adds an update to Selphie's Geocities page. It also has astronauts, and transformers, and a haunted castle, and a prison break, and Rome, and Alpine Wakanda, and war crimes, and lion cubs that have attained enlightenment, and there’s almost no connective tissue from one idea to the next.

Also the junction system is convoluted and terrible, using magic makes your stats worse, all enemies level up every time you do, and I couldn’t tell you which character excelled in what stats. The characters were all very flat, and the first time I felt like I was seeing the characters interact in ways that helped me to understand them was in the cutscene that plays during the end credits.

Also the female lead’s role in the story changes entirely with no warning every five hours or so. She’s a terrorist, oh no she’s aristocracy in the country she’s terroristing against, oh no she’s jealous of the others because they grew up together and she didn’t, oh no she’s Sandra Bullock in Gravity, oh no she’s the villain and it’s too dangerous to let her out, oh no it’s actually fine and they were bad for locking her up.

It’s an absolute disaster of a game. However, the music and background art is absolutely beautiful. Maybe they never gave me a good enough reason to be in an evil time traveling haunted castle, but damn is it a gorgeous rendering of an evil time traveling haunted castle.

9: Final Fantasy XII.

I’ve known for years that FFXII had issues in development. The writers came up with a story for it, and execs got scared because there were no young characters and they’d convinced themselves that young protagonists are what makes games sell. So two more characters - Vaan and Penelo - were added, one was framed as the protagonist of the story, and the entire story was rewritten so it could feasibly be from his perspective.

While the two characters they added are egregiously tangential to the plot, XII honestly has no protagonist. The writers originally wanted Basch to be the protagonist, but his entire arc is really just following Ashe around and being sad about his evil twin. Ashe is probably the most important to the story, but doesn’t have much presence for a good chunk of the story, and makes her most character-defining choice offscreen before having it stolen from her by a side character. Balthier has the largest presence in the story, and is most closely related to most of the events of the story, but has pretty much no role in the ending.

Honestly, if I were writing FFXII and told it needed a young protagonist, I would have aged up and expanded the role of Larsa, the brother of the main villain, who shows up as a temporary party member from time to time. The entire game is about family ties, and a journey spotlighting Larsa could have involved his learning about Ashe, Basch, Balthier and Fran’s family situations and using their experiences to grapple with his own. Damn, now I’m sitting here thinking about how good that could have been.

As it is, the game feels disjointed and aimless, and the ending is so bad it’s farcical. When I reached the ending, I watched Basch and Ashe forgive Basch’s evil twin for his villainy rampage, harking back to the moment earlier in the game when Ashe turned down the chance to gain powers that would have allowed her to avenge her country because she realized that those powers could also drive her to hurt innocents in the crossfire. In this moment, I realized how Vaan fit in as the protagonist of the game. “Oh, he’s going to realize that violence begets violence, and that he must break the cycle by forgiving Vayne for the death of his brother. He’s going to let go of that hatred he’s been trying to push onto someone for so long, and it’ll finally allow him to heal.” I realized that even though the road to this point was rocky, the writers had managed to craft a satisfying ending from the seemingly disparate pieces of this uneven plot.

And then Vaan picked up a sword and screamed AAAAAAAAAAA and charged Vayne down and stabbed him, and Vayne turned into a shrapnel robot dragon and exploded all the star wars ships and I threw my controller aside and laughed uncontrollably while my characters beat him up and completed the game on their own without any further input from me.

Oh yeah, the battle system is also incredibly boring. Instead of battling, the player writes up an AI script for each character, then lets them act based on those scripts. I would straight up put the controller down and watch youtube videos whenever a group of enemies showed up. I was pretty excited about the job system, but then there didn’t really feel like much of a difference between jobs, and my characters all behaved pretty much the same as each other.

The hands-off battle system, unfocused story, lethargic voice acting, and tuneless music all left me pretty uninvested in the whole affair. The art style and locations are beautiful, though, and it did make me want to eventually check out some of the Tactics games, which take place in the same universe but are supposed to have excellent stories and gameplay.

8: Final Fantasy XIII.

I’m not sure I’ve ever had two such opposing opinions of a game’s story vs. its gameplay. This game is the only one that plays with a bunch of story elements from FFIX, which did a lot to endear it to me. It’s sort of a game in which the protagonists are Kuja, the villain of IX. Like Kuja, they are created as tools by an uncaring god for the purpose of fighting against one world on behalf of another world, and are subsequently forced to grapple with the horrors of having an artificially shortened lifespan.

The story actually has a lot of Leftist themes, too. The gods of that universe spread ideology among the populace, and the people unquestioningly believe these false stories, as the gods have provided for them for as long as there has been written history. Much of the character arcs center on the characters being forcibly removed from their places within those ideological frameworks and having to unlearn what they’d always believed to be objectively true about the world.

So the story actually is pretty good, but it’s held back by some really clumsy storytelling; it constantly uses undefined jargon, has almost no side characters with which it might flesh out the world, actively fights against players trying to glean information from environmental details, and maintains (at least for me) a weird disconnect between the characters in the gameplay and the characters in the cutscenes. I think this partly stems from Square’s original failed plan for FFXIII to be the first game in a much larger series of games sharing themes and major story details. Despite these issues, however, the characters are all likeable and (mostly) believable, and their interactions are grounded in real emotional weight even while their universe feels intangible.

This all got dragged down by the gameplay, which is total dogshit. It’s got the worst battle system I think I’ve seen in an RPG. The game only stops being doggedly, unflinchingly linear about thirty hours in, the whole game took me about fifty hours, and I spent the last fifteen hours beating my head against each individual battle, waiting until the system hiccuped long enough to accidentally slide me a win. That meant I had about a five hour window of euphoric play, convinced that I actually loved this game, thrilled with every new experience it gave me, and excited to see what would happen next. I guess those five hours are what pushed this game over XII in my ranking.

7: Final Fantasy V.

Until FFXV, this game was the last of the “Warriors of Light” games, in which the game follows a party of four set characters for its entirety. To this day, it’s the last of the “Warriors of Light” games to let the player customize which character holds which roles through the job system.

FFV’s job system is the reason to play the game. Its story is mediocre, and its characters are all fairly flat, but there’s something viscerally satisfying about building party members up in jobs that might enhance the role they ultimately will fill. For my mage character, I maxed out Black Mage, Blue Mage, Mystic Knight, Summoner, and Geomancer. Then at the end, I switched her to a Freelancer with Black Magic and Summoning, and she kept all the passive skills for those jobs and also the highest stats across those jobs.

It was super fun and kind of a shift of focus for me, since I tend to place story above anything else in games. Despite the story not being special, though, the game’s writing is actually a ton of fun. It’s definitely got the most comic relief in the series, and I came away loving Gilgamesh as much as everyone else does.

And while it’s nothing special graphically, it does have some really cool enemy designs, and the final boss design is one of the most memorable ones they’ve ever done. Which is impressive because I keep having to look up Exdeath’s name because the character himself is super forgettable.

6: Final Fantasy IV.

This wasn’t the first game in the series to feature actual characters with names and depth, but I have no interest in playing FFII, so it might as well be. I actually played the DS Remake for this game, so it definitely had some quality of life improvements, like full 3d characters and maps, voice acting, an updated script, the ability to actually see the ATB gauge, and the ability to switch to other characters whose turns are ready without using a turn.

Apparently one thing the remake didn’t do was rebalance the difficulty for more modern sensibilities. Instead, this remake is...harder? It requires more grinding than the original? Why??

Either way, though, the story is actually solid! The game opens on its protagonist, Cecil, committing a war crime on the orders of his king, who raised him as a child. The first ten hours of so of the game follows Cecil as he tries to understand why he was ordered to kill so many innocents, turns his back on his country, and works to redeem himself.

This arc is reinforced by the game mechanics, too, which is super clever. His redemption is marked by a change in job from a Dark Knight to a Paladin, which also resets his level. For a time, his life is considerably harder because he’s finding his footing as a new person, which is marked by battles which had been easy becoming much harder for the player for a time.

This game places storytelling over gameplay more than I think any other game in the series. Each character is locked into a job, which I much prefer in my RPGs to games where characters function pretty much interchangeably. I dunno if it’s because I cut my RPG teeth on Tales, but it really bugs me when I can give Tifa the exact same loadout as Barret. I want the lives of the characters to bleed into their functions as gameplay devices.

However, the developers clearly had a ton of different jobs they wanted to add to their game, but hadn’t figured out how to allow for the player to switch in and out party members in standby. To fix this, they increased the in-battle party to five characters rather than or four (or the later constantly frustrating three), rotated the roster a ton, and had a ton of characters who straight up leave permanently. One character dies and never comes back. Two characters die and only are revived after it’s too late to rejoin the party. Four characters end up too injured to continue traveling.

This let the developers make a ton of jobs, but it doesn’t let the player exploit these jobs to their fullest. Characters’ stats reflect their role in the story, as well. One character is quickly aging out of adventuring, so his magic stats increase on levels, but his attack and defense stats actually decrease, signifying his failing body. Another character has already achieved some form of enlightenment, so he gains no stats when he levels up at all. The purpose of IV is the story, over any other aspect of the game, which makes it even more mindboggling that the remake would have increased the difficulty.

Besides that, the biggest issue I had with this game was the overbearing constant drama of it. While there were a few more lighthearted parts, they were mostly relegated to NPC dialogue and sidequests. The characters in this game don’t become friends so much as they become companions who bonded over shared tragedies, and this makes for quite a few scenes of every character separately wallowing in their own immeasurable sadness. I played FFV directly after this game and the light story and jokey dialogue was a much-needed palette cleanser.

5: Final Fantasy VI.

Before the unexpected success of FFVII irreparably changed the franchise, Square constantly mixed up the story formula for the series. IV, V and VI all handled their stories really differently from each other, and what I remember of III also felt fairly different from the games that came after.

Every game from VII on had a very clear protagonist (except XII, whose botched protagonist was still clearly marketed as the protagonist). The concept of the Dissidia crossover series is built on the idea that every FF has a protagonist at the center of its story. FFVI’s Dissidia character is Terra, but Terra is not the protagonist of FFVI.

Apparently while developing FFVI, the directors decided they didn’t want the game to have a clear protagonist, so they asked the staff to staff to submit concepts for characters, and they’d use as many as they could. This game has fourteen characters, each with their own fun gameplay gimmick in battles. Three of the characters are secret, and one can permanently die halfway through if the player takes the wrong actions. Of these fourteen characters, the main story heavily revolves around 3-6 of them, while five more have substantial character arcs.

There’s kind of a schism in the fandom over whether this game or VII is the best one in the series, and I can see why; this game is absolutely fascinating. No other game in the series has done what this game did, which means it’s one of the two FF games I really want to see remade after they complete this VII remake.

The first half is very linear. It breaks the beginning party into three pieces, then sends each character to a different continent, where they meet more characters and build their own parties before everyone reunites. Once the story has taken the player everywhere in the world, the apocalypse hits. The villain’s evil plan succeeds and tears the entire world apart.

The second half of the game picks up a year later with one character finally getting a raft and escaping the island on which she’s been marooned. In this half, the player navigates the world, which has all the same locations, but in completely different parts of the map. The driving factor for much of the second half is to learn from incidental dialogue where each party member has gone in this new world, to track them down, and to try to fix some of the bad that’s been done to the world before finally stopping the villain who destroyed it.

It’s unique and clever and occasionally legitimately tugs at the heartstrings some, which is impressive for a poorly translated SNES game. The final dungeon is a masterpiece all on its own. It requires the player to make three parties of up to four characters, then send them in and switch between them as new roads open. This way, the game manages to feel like an ensemble piece up to the very end.

4: Final Fantasy VII.

As I previously mentioned, there’s kind of a schism in the fandom over whether FFVI or FFVII is the best game in the series. Neither is the best game in the series. FFVII is better than FFVI. Oops.

When I was first drafting up this list, it was before I’d reached my replays of VI or VII, and I tentatively placed them next to each other, with the strong assumption that I’d end up placing VI a bit higher than VII, since it has so many strongly differentiated characters with solid story arcs, beautiful artwork, great music, etc. etc. Then I reached FFVII and not even four hours in, I realized it would have to be higher on my list than VI.

VI has a better battle system, its characters are much more differentiated by their gameplay, its character sprites have aged much better than VII’s character models, and it has four party members in battles instead of three. But I couldn’t overlook VII’s gorgeous artwork, sharp character work, and character-driven story. In the end, I had to give it the edge.

VII is a strange beast. It simultaneously really holds up and has aged horribly. The story is excellent and I love the characters, but the actual line-to-line writing is pretty bad, making the whole experience of the game a bit like swimming upstream; you’re getting somewhere good, but the age of the game is still pushing you back the best it can. Similarly, the background artwork is fantastic and gives the game locations a sense of place incomparable to anything that had come before it, but the character models are so low-poly that the two are constantly at odds with each other.

Still, the game is more a good game than it is an old one. I think it’s managed to duck the absurd level of hype around it by actually being very different from what the most popular images of it make it out to be, if that makes sense. The super futuristic techno-dystopia city only makes up a very small portion of the larger game, and most newcomers to the game won’t have seen Junon, or Corel, or Cosmo Canyon. Heck, I didn’t know Cait Sith or Red XIII were characters before I played the game for the first time. One of the many reasons I’m excited for the rest of this remake is to see newcomers to the story learning just how much variety there is to the world, events, and characters of this game.

FFVII also began (and pulled off really well) a number of storytelling trends that continued in subsequent games in the series. Obviously, almost every game since this one has a clear protagonist with a cool sword for cosplayers to recreate, and an androgynous villain whose story is closely linked to the protagonist (or one villain who is linked to the protagonist and a second one whose purpose is to look like Sephiroth), but it’s started broader, more quality shifts, too.

FFVII is the first game in the series to try to give all its characters arcs based on a similar theme, for example, a trend that has helped give it and future games a sense of thematic unity, especially in IX, X, and XV. Heck, that trend was why I almost came around on XII before they nuked it. It was also the first game in the series to have a real ending, rather than closing out with essentially a curtain call featuring all the party members, like they did in IV through VI (and I assume earlier).

Another common feature of FF games that it didn’t start with VII but certainly was canonized with it was the mid-game plot twist tying the protagonist to both the villain and the larger story. FFIV had this as well, of course, but I feel like the orphanage twist in VIII, the Zanarkand dream twist in X, and the time skip twist in XV were all meant to recall VII’s twist of Cloud’s…very complex existence (IX’s two worlds twist actually is a clear homage to IV, but it’d be hard to argue that Zidane’s connection to Kuja - and the character of Kuja generally - weren’t more influenced by VII).

2: Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XV.

Sorry, this one is a two-fer. I’m not gonna spend too much time on why I placed these two together in the #2 spot (I wrote a long thing on it here, if you’re interested). In summary, the games kinda mirror each other, in story and design. Each game can be seen in the negative space of what the other game leaves out, and at the end, the characters react to similar situations in completely opposite ways. For this reason, and that they’re of comparable quality, I think they’re best viewed as companion pieces.

FFX was the first mainline Final Fantasy game I ever completed, six years late. It was the first FF game with voice acting and many fully modeled locations. It also kinda marks the beginning of the series’ constant changes to the battle system.

That’s not to say the previous games’ battle systems didn’t also differ from each other, but they all had the same setup, with levels and an ATB gauge. This was the first game since III not to have any real-time element to its battle system, nor numbered levels gained through experience points. Since X, no two FF battle systems have been remotely comparable, which is cool and innovative and keeps things fresh, but also means I’ve been starved for just a regular ATB FF game for too long.

In many ways, FFX feels like a bridge between the PS1 games and the later games. It feels much more streamlined than VII, VIII, or IX, in terms of both storytelling and design. The game is very linear, pushing the player from one area to the next and not allowing much backtracking until the very end. It also loses the aging look of the PS1 games’ menus and UI, finally updating the classic font and the blue menus with white borders to fully modernized and sleek graphics.

However, movement still feels very similar to movement in VIII and IX, the music definitely evokes the PS1 games more than the later games, and most locations are portrayed with beautifully painted backgrounds, rather than modeled in (which I actually prefer, and I was glad to see that VII Remake has gone back to that in some places).

Voice acting in this game is phenomenal for 2001, and honestly on par with many contemporary games. I can’t think of a voice actor for the main cast who didn’t do a great job. Tidus’s narration, especially, is emotional and evocative in all the right ways. Grounding the plot in a very personal story about Tidus’s difficulty coming to terms with and proving himself to his abusive father keeps the story relatable and real.

Something interesting about my experience with X is that because it was my first Final Fantasy game, I thought for a very long time that the series was about organized religion, and the ways it is used to justify evil acts. This might be the only game of the ones I’ve played that is about organized religion, or even prominently features a religious doctrine, which really sets it apart from the rest of the series.

The game’s thematic unity is on point, even if there is a scene where they state the central themes a bit too plainly. Every character, and even the entire universe of the story, is held back by the past, and every subplot and the main plot revolves around finding ways to move forward and leave the past behind.

I love FFXV. It feels like a return to form after XII and XIII. It’s also probably the furthest any game in the series has strayed from the original formula. Battles are entirely real-time, and the game is a straightforward action game. There is very little time spent with menus, and even the leveling system has been stripped down to a few skill trees. It’s immediately obvious that the game was originally created to be a spinoff, not a main title.

FFXV is also probably too much a product of the current era of microtransactions and payment plans. The full story is spread out across *deep breath* a feature film, an anime series, an anime OVA, a standalone demo, two console games, four DLC story chapters, a multiplayer side game, a VR fishing game, four phone games (though really three phone games because A New Empire straight up isn't in that universe and also is terrible), an expansion including several entirely new dungeons, and finally a novel set to release sometime this year. That’s a whole lot of story. I’ve not played the phone games or the VR fishing game, or read the novel yet, but I’ve experienced all the rest.

But I also played FFXV when it first released, before any patches, before I knew there was a film, just the game all on its own. So you can believe me when I say that without any supplementary material, the game is still great.

It goes back to the FFI, II, III, V “Warriors of Light” system, where the party has four characters who do not change at all throughout the game. While this bugged me at first, I soon came to appreciate having a story where almost all character interactions involved these four characters. It meant I came to understand them well enough to feel like they were my friends, too. Most characterization in this game is understated, presented through small shared moments, dialogue, and body language as they travel the world together. Much like X, the overarching story might be expansive and far-reaching, but the real show is in the personal journeys the friends have.

Much of the first half of the game is spent exploring an open world, driving along the road and getting out of the car for pit stops or to explore the forests nearby. This is one of the very few games where I don’t mind just exploring an area without the promise of an upgrade or a new scene, just to see what’s around the corner, or to hear whatever banter the characters might engage in next.

The entire world of this game is gorgeous, and the orchestrated music is some of the best they’ve ever done. The main plot is beautiful, too. It’s bittersweet and emotional, with a charismatic villain and a twist that blew me away the first time I reached it.

The supplementary material is also mostly really quality. I’d recommend the Royal Edition over the original edition for sure, and to watch Kingsglaive as well. The anime series is quick and fairly fun, and Comrades expands on the universe in some great ways, but neither has as much bearing on the overall plot as the DLC chapters and Kingsglaive. I’m so in love with the DLC chapters, actually, that two years ago I wrote a piece just on how much Episode Ignis affected me (here if you care).

This is definitely getting long, so I guess I’ll move on after saying I’m upset that they patched Chapter 13 to make it easier, and I’m angry at everyone who complained that Chapter 13 was too hard. It was a brilliant piece of storytelling through game mechanics, and it’s mostly been stripped of all that, now.

1: Final Fantasy IX.

It’s IX. It was always IX. I actually did come into this with an open mind, wondering if one of the new games I’d experience (IV, V, VIII, XII, XIII) might end up hitting me harder than Final Fantasy IX, but as I replayed my favorite game in the series I quickly realized that wouldn’t be happening.

There are only a handful of games that make me cry. IX is one of two without voice acting. There are several songs from IX that make me tear up just when I hear them.

The story of the black mages gaining sentience, learning that they can die, and trying to force themselves back into being puppets just to lose that knowledge really moves me. The same goes for the story of Dagger no longer recognizing her mother, setting out to find a place to belong, learning that her birth family is long dead, then watching her mother return to her old self a moment before losing her forever. And Zidane’s story, where he has nowhere to call home, finally discovers the circumstances of his birth, and realizes that had he stayed in his birthplace, he would have become a much worse person than he ultimately did.

More than any other, though, Vivi’s story will always stick with me. He was found as a soulless husk by Quan, a creature with the intention of fattening him up and eating him, but each of them awoke something in the other, and Quan ended up raising Vivi as his grandson. When Quan passed, a rudderless Vivi went to the city to find a new home, and eventually learned he was created as a weapon. Other weapons had also gained sentience, but none had the worldliness that Vivi had gained from his loving relationship with Quan. When Vivi discovers that most weapons like him die after only a few months, he grapples with the possibility that he may die at any time, and eventually decides that he can only take control of what life he has by living each moment to the fullest. He ends up becoming an example for the other weapons to follow.

FFIX is a game about belonging: both yearning to have somewhere to belong and learning that the place where you think you belong is actually toxic and harmful to you. Even the menu theme is a tune called “A Place to Call Home.”

IX ran counter to the trends of the series in a number of ways. It was a return to high fantasy after the more sci-fi VII and VIII, and was also much more lighthearted than those games, while still being heartfelt and occasionally bittersweet. Gameplay-wise, it locked each of its characters into a single job, gave them designs based on their jobs, brought back four-character parties, and introduced a skill system in which characters learn skills from equipment. It also had a much softer, less realistic art style, and mostly avoided the attempts to recapture VII that have plagued most other subsequent titles (besides Kuja’s design, I guess).

The story is also structured so well. It regularly shifts perspective for the first thirty hours, allowing the player to spend ample time with each of the party members, and shaking up character combinations for fun new interactions. It introduced a system similar to the skits from Tales games, showing the player often humorous vignettes of what’s happening to other characters at the time. Once the characters have all come together in one party, the game has earned the sense that all of them (except for the criminally underexplored Amarant) have become a family.

The supporting cast are a blast as well. Zidane’s thief troupe (who double as a theater troupe) are likeable and fun. Kuja’s villain arc allows him to be sympathetic without losing his edge. The black mages are tragic without being overdone.

The development team for this game put so much more work into this game than they had to. The background artwork was all made in such high-definition resolutions that the act of downscaling them to fit in the game removed details. Uematsu traveled to Europe to make sure he’d get the feel of the soundtrack right, and has said it’s his favorite score he’s ever done. Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, says IX is his favorite game in the series.

FFIX is one of the two games I would like them to remake after they finish the VII Remake, but I’m terrified they’ll mess it up in some way. Honestly, the game’s only flaws (which I do desperately want them to fix) are a lack of voice acting, the underdeveloped party member Amarant (and to a lesser extent Freya), the dissonance of Beatrix never getting punished in any way for her hand in a genocide, and the fact that very few of the sidequests are story-related because so many of the smaller story details that would normally be relegated to sidequests are covered in the main plot.

Despite the danger, though, I think revisiting IX is absolutely essential moving forward. It represents so much of what made older games like IV and VI great, and its story is much more grounded in real emotion than many current Square stories tend to be. Remaking VII will be good for getting VII out of Square’s system. Remaking IX would be good for putting IX back into Square’s system.

Here’s a IX song as a reward for getting this far. I’m gonna go listen to it and tear up again.

[upslapmeal]

Second Doctor Thoughts

When I finished the First Doctor’s era a year after starting it and in the summer before I started university I joked that at this rate I’d graduate before finishing Classic Who. Well joke’s on me because I very nearly graduated before even finishing the Second Doctor’s era, avoided in large part thanks to a conveniently timed DWSoc screening of The War Games that pushed me to finish the previous two serials in time for that. And I think all this makes it seem as though I wasn’t particularly interested or invested in Two’s era but that really wasn’t the case. Rather, it was more that my progress was bogged down by a combination of having a ridiculous amount of uni work, combining that with starting several other new tv shows (I’m super great at time management and priorities guys) and there being so many missing episodes. I know Power of the Daleks took a month to watch because of the combination of missing episodes making it hard to get a feel for what Two was like (the animation didn’t come out for another year). 

And now it feels weird having to talk about my thoughts on something I started three years ago. When I was writing up my thoughts on The Krotons the other day I was struggling to remember what my notes were referring to and that was only several months after watching. But then again this is my thoughts on the era as a whole rather than individual parts of it. And there’s definitely something to be said for taking so long to watch. I mean Two and Jamie have been on-and-off fixtures of my life for the past 3 years which is more or less what they would have been for DW fans back in the 60s. And a six-episode serial back then would have taken over a month for people to watch. Maybe I should pretend this was all intentional to get a ~realistic viewing experience~….

I’m looking back now at my post where I talked about my First Doctor thoughts and I had split it into four sections: the Doctor, the companions, the aliens and the writing/visuals etc. I feel as though I have less to say this time, both as a result of 2/3 of Two’s era being less recent to me than the entirety of One’s had been at the time, but also because I feel as though I went into this era with a better idea of what if would be like. I started Classic Who blind, more just to fill the time while DW wasn’t on air than wanting to actually see what it was like and a lot of my post once I finished One’s era was talking about how pleasantly surprised and how I hadn’t expected to love the characters/character development/plots as much as I did. I had really gone in expecting very little and if you’ve spent any time on my blog you can see how much I really love One’s era now. However, since starting Classic Who I’ve followed a bunch of Classic Who blogs. I’ve seen people talk about Classic Who (including Two’s era) and I’ve even see some people I follow start and work their way through Classic Who at a significantly faster pace than me, going through Two’s stuff before I got there. I tried to not pay attention to plot details (oh how I wish I hadn’t known about the Time Lords in The War Games) but not only is it hard to avoid 50-year-old spoilers, I didn’t start watching only to be surprised by how good a lot of the characterisation and plots were. The quality of some serials still took me by surprise (I knew people said it would be good but The Enemy of the World was really EXCELLENT, can’t wait for Two to save 2018) but I generally had higher expectations.

Obviously this era suffers from missing episodes significantly more than One’s era. I watched all the reconstructions but so often something would be described in the scrolling text that I would pay large quantities of money to get to actually see (x x) and there were serials like The Macra Terror which I could tell were really good and enjoyed but would have been even better if there were full visuals to go with the audio. It’s a shame because all these missing episodes must seems like a huge barrier to a lot of people when it comes to starting Classic Who and I’ve seen people under the impression that most black and white episodes are missing.

But anyway. On to the actual thoughts. Like I said this is going to be shorter than it was for One’s era but please don’t mistake that for lack of enthusiasm. Also I’ll put it under a cut because this preamble has already gone on long enough.

The Doctor:

Isn’t Two fantastic? He’s really just out there to have a good time and explore and help out, and it really builds up well to the revelation that he ran away from the Time Lords because he wasn’t content to just observe the universe without interacting with it. He doesn’t seem to have misconceptions about him in the same way One did and I can’t imagine anyone watching the era and not thinking Troughton was an absolute delight. There’s a child-like amusement mixed in with scattiness that often seems to act as a mask to his thought processes (though not always - this is someone has done the blowing-up-an-island equivalent of sawing off a tree branch while sitting on it). And when you see Two switch to being dead serious you know that the situation warrants it. It was fascinating in particular to get a first glimpse into his interactions and relationship with the other Time Lords and I’m looking forward to the Master being introduced now I’m going into Three’s era to start to build on that (I know we had the Monk with One but that felt different, understandably, as I’m sure at the time there was so concept of Time Lords). Two had a deceptive child-like glee, not the same as One’s but not entirely different either, and I’m going to miss this recorder-playing space hobo and his expressive face. 

The Companions:

I didn’t talk much about Ben and Polly in my First Doctor post because I felt I hadn’t really got to know them yet, although I don’t think their four (well…..really three, it’s a shame they weren’t in most of their last serial) stories with Two really told me anything I hadn’t seen with One other than giving them a new surface to bounce off of. I just loved their combination of small, frequently surprised sailor and hip 60s woman who defeats the cybermen using knowledge about nail polish. And of course they were the first ever companions to deal with regeneration and I really enjoyed seeing their different approaches and different amounts of trust in this new Doctor during Power. I’m not usually fussed about the whole ‘first face this face saw’ but seeing how overlooked these two are I like to think they had a special place in Two’s hearts because of this.

And then there’s Jamie who is unquestioningly the defining companion of Two’s era and for good reason too. A lot of the era’s comedy comes from Two and Jamie bouncing off of (and clinging to) each other, and seeing that Jamie lost all that time he spent travelling with the Doctor was really right up there with Donna losing her memories. It would be easy to just think of Jamie as not very clever, but I feel like a lot of the time this came down to a lack of familiarity with what would later become familiar technology (I really enjoyed having a historical companion, done much better than Katarina RIP). Yes he would sometimes be slow to get things and be the butt of the joke, and sure he would do things like jump in front of an ice warrior but it would work and he had a lot of heart and a lot of love for his friends. He would often be an outside perspective to Two, being a voice of reason when Two got a bit carried away (cf. Two’s blowing-up-an-island equivalent of sawing off a tree branch while sitting on it). Here are just a few favourite Jamie moments: x x x. Oh and of course, Jimbo McCribbob.

Quick shoutout to almost-companion Samantha Briggs - if she had ended up staying as originally intended we would have missed out on Victoria so I don’t wish that had happened but I thought she was really brilliant in The Faceless Ones and I loved her interactions with Jamie.

What I loved and also found sad about Victoria was her interactions with Two, how he showed a real understanding of the fact that she had lost everyone and come on the TARDIS out of a sense of having nowhere else to go rather than out of curiosity and a sense of adventure (Tomb of the Cybermen stands out in particular in this respect). She was often scared (and I’m pretty sure I would have been terrified in the situations she was put in) but always kind and I thought her exit was really earned. She deserved to live in a stable place with people she could grow to call family and not constantly feel in danger. That life just wasn’t for her as much as she loved Jamie and Two and I appreciated that the Doctor refused to try and persuade her otherwise, no matter what Jamie said.

Oh Zoe. My science daughter. My incredibly intelligent science daughter who didn’t know how candles worked #just21stcenturyproblems. Firstly: congrats Two! You only (accidentally) kidnapped one (stowaway) companion! I liked that she was introduced in a cyberman episode, contrasting her wanting to feel everything like someone who hasn’t been trained to be a human computer and the cybermen who want to erase emotions. And again, all that is lost when she leaves and it’s a tragedy. But this show always has to have bits of tragedy woven in every now and then, keeping us grounded. It’s a show that does bittersweet well. Her advanced scientific and mathematical knowledge meant that she had a dynamic with the Doctor that we also saw with Vicki only to a lesser extent and I liked that she often thought of things before the Doctor (oh what I would have given to see Zoe and Vicki meet at some point). Also, and very importantly, Zoe always made a cute(r than usual) face when she was complemented! 

The aliens:

This is going to be very short, limited to four quick points:

I found Two-era cybermen increasingly difficult to understand and I’m not sure if that was just me or something people found in general

also interesting to see the introduction of another (if less-so) recurring alien with the ice warriors (and in a serial with Peter Sallis no less!)

yeti!! made even better by the fact that I got to see the actual costume when I went to the DW Experience this summer

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE MACRA

The plots, writing, and visuals:

I think this is where I’m going to have notably less to say than in my post for the First Doctor. What I will say is that while there were many outstanding or particularly fun stories (Enemy and Macra as I said earlier but also The Faceless Ones, The Mind Robber, The Invasion, The Web of Fear (Anne Travers <3 and the Brig!!) and The War Games to name a few), I’m definitely more a fan of going-on-an-adverture-to-find-stuff-out stories than the base-under-siege pattern that this era had a lot of and I felt like there were more stories that I was indifferent to than in One’s era, but even then that wasn’t any great amount. Oh and historicals. I miss historicals. One thing that I will say is that while this era managed have more roles played by black actors, whenever we we met a black character my first thought was always ‘I hope they don’t die’ (especially Kemel and Fariah), and as far as I can remember I was let down every time. But that is more a complaint with 1960s TV in general rather than being something specific to Doctor Who.

Overall:

The Second Doctor era has really been a constant in a significant era of my life, and I don’t think I have anything left to say that I’ve not already said in this overly-long post. I’m glad it’s not totally goodbye forever though, there’s still the anniversary specials to look forward to and I haven’t heard characterisation complaints for Two and co. in the same way as for One and Susan. But for now it’s onto the (temporarily) Earth-bound world of colour and UNIT, back with the Brig and getting to meet Liz, Benton and Yates (and later Jo and Sarah-Jane)! Autons! Dinosaurs! The Master! Let’s just hope this doesn’t take another three years!

Goodbye cosmic hobo. I’ll miss you.