#its fun for character design to turn every guy that I think is neat into a lesbian

[science-lings]

me, looking at a male character: for totally not sapphic reasons I'm going to turn you into a woman

[inktog]

Came for the Yuri, Stayed for the UBI

(assorted thoughts)

When I Win the World Ends is a delightful enough read for the dynamic between its protagonists: valley girl empath X repressed misanthropic hermit. And they were rivals—oh my god they were rivals.

—

If you root around in my brain long enough you will find a thin file labeled "Ideas for a slightly grittier, more realistic Pokemon world." I suspect many fans have their own version of this file. I particularly enjoyed Bavitz's because Bavitz runs with the prompt in exactly the opposite direction you'd expect from a video game adaptation—leaning into the numbers and crunch. It reminds me of glowfic, the way it doesn't just take seriously, but also rationalizes and extrapolates from a system not designed for such scrutiny.

To give a concrete example:

The thirty-second pause between turns in this fun little game called Pokémon battling wasn't just to give trainers time to think and announcers time to announce. The regimented structure mandated discipline from the Pokémon, which in turn ensured they didn't go, like, feral from bloodlust. If Scizor had its way, it wouldn't stop after one attack, but Dad did train these guys well.

I dunno, I just think it's neat! I similarly appreciated the in-universe explanations for the retroactive Fairy typing and for every generation introducing a new gimmick™.

—

I want to be careful here, because WIW leaves open the specifics of its economic and geopolitical worldbuilding. We don't know how far the peace and plenty experienced by our characters actually extends—clearly not everywhere.

And yet I am drawn to the most charitable interpretation of Bavitz's Pokemon world: that despite its fits and starts, its broken promises and secret wars, it is actually, meaningfully better in some ways than the real world. The emergent pseudo-utopian themes—

How do you spend your life when the world is basically pretty okay? When humanity's worst instincts have been sublimated into sport? When it feels like history has come to a standstill?

—are hands-down my favorite aspect of this fic, and the reason I expect to keep coming back to it. It's an inspired union of setting and theme: the bright, smiling, play-violence Pokemon universe as a glimpse into restless abundance.

—

When I Win, The World Ends. For RISE it's literal. For her competitors it's the death of meaning—what a sham if Aracely Sosa sweeps it with her daddy's Pokemon. But for Cely herself it's a promise:

Become the most special person in history

Quit while you're ahead.

When I Lose, The World Keeps Turning.

[kayrllylikesblitzwing]

Hnnnghhhhh I should be drawing transformers …

BUT I LIKE THE ZOMBIE MAN.

HELLO I’m posting some ocs because recently I’ve gotten into a new rp server and it’s like one of those usual “oh kids go to highschool and they have powers and it’s alllllll monitored by the government” BUT they allow aliens too so it’s pretty neat

I brought in a TON of my old ocs who I used to use Back In The Day when I roleplayed on my hero academia roblox servers which HAS to be the most haunting, most horrible Experience of my entire life thus far. But basically I redrew a lot of my characters who I added to the new server im in and gave them a basic little sketch design and NOW im going to INTRODUCE THEM TO YOU

The girl in red is Fuji she is very mean and very manipulative and very evil and her ability is basically she can just glitch. Like it’s so funny the universe thinks she’s an error so she constantly like fades out of existence and stutters and lags and stuff but still remains. She can glitch through walls, lag and glitch other people, and even insert something like a trojan virus into others, where she can control them remotely, albeit she won’t have control of her own body while she controls them…. PRETTY COOL, pretty EVIL!

NEXT the weird SpongeBob looking thing is literally god. I’m not joking!!! In the lore of my own universes this guy, Sir Boxers (which, fun fact, had a close friend name him and it stuck perfectly!!!) is legitimately god he has the ability to warp reality and do legit whatever he wants. Ofc for the sake of the rp I have to tone down his power so we made this super crazy dramatic backstory that he was like the reigning but benevolent king of his dimension but then he got usurped by some evil force and sent into another world, trapped in a weaker, smaller vessel that can’t do as much as his other godly form, and he’s like trying to return to his dimension to restore order… it’s a funny thing LOL he’s just a joke character

Next is T-0FF-E3 of TOFFEE, and I HAVE DRAWN AND POSTED HIM BEFORE!!! I just didn’t like his design cuz he was too skrunkly so I bulked him up. I already talked about him but basically he was a regular dude and when his powers started showing up he just like mutated into a machine. Super nice, doesn’t know his strength, I love toffeee

Next is Liberty and I very Love Her!!! She’s a little bit of a mess because she’s both like a gym bro but also a cat girl so she’s pretty funny LMAOO she’s extremely competitive and almost aggressively supportive but also has the ability to turn things into weapons!!! As long as she can put both of her palms on something she can turn it into a weapon but that does NOT mean she can use it effectively, because a) the more elaborate the weapon, the more energy she needs to use on it to create it, b) the mass of whatever she makes the weapon on doesn’t change so if she makes like a weapon out of something heavy she might not be able to pick it up and c) she has NO EXPERTISE in any weaponry WHATSOEVER lol

Next is… Romeo 😍😍😍 he’s fucking disgusting! Little Zombie Boy “died” when he was an infant of like some sort of tumor in his brain but even though he was medically dead his body just persisted on its wild Basically his ability is he has full control over every single individual cell in his body and can use his his abilities to manipulate his flesh and stuff however he pleases and can just put himself back together if he’s torn apart. He’s like that trope where people talk abt bats and they’re like THE BATS ARE MORE SCARED OF YOU THAN YOU ARE OF THEM becuz Romeo lowkey is scared of everyone NOT socially inept but he just doesn’t like to interact and because of his strict upbringing

Next is Coronette and OKAY SHES ONE OF MY ALIENS Coronette was initially a part of a species I made for transformers where this group called the crixstaline were Cybertronian minicons that escaped to another planet, initially just to colonize it but then they sorta mutated with it… anyway Coronette is similar to that but I removed all of Cybertronian stuff from her stuff and made them just a species of PURE crystal theyre so cool they have their own language and like customs and stuff and UGH I might post their lore Bible one day it’s so cool anyway. Coronette is a princess from Crixstal, which is a planet that fell to foreign alien influences, and she hates earth and is stupid and dumb and wants to go home but doesn’t know WHY she can’t go home (planet was destroyed L BOZO) and she’s an iPad kid

TWO MORE second to last is CHIP and first of all I would like to say he is named after my dog and I have three ocs named after my dog two are named Chip Mooney and one is Chip Gebelhoff and the second Chip Mooney is based off Neil cicierega—

BUT ANYWAY this is the ORIGINAL CHIP other than my dog Chip used to wear red but I made him blue bcuz it fits him better and because I wanted a rainbow with my characters designs Anyway chip has the super power of onomatopoeia which means that when he says words like Pow or Boom they actually take affect in the world around him. This is disastrous and deadly and after he unintentionally nearly killed his father by activating his powers on accident, he has become mostly selective mute. He’s really guarded with how and when he talks and he’s JUST like those redditors who write like scripts of how they’re supposed to like interact and talk with people so he specifically doesn’t accidentally say a word that might trigger his power’s affects anyway he has my favorite ability

AND FINALLLLY we have Whizzer he’s a little guy the youngest oc of the line up. HES AWESOME he’s actually a remake of one of my OLDEST OCS EVER, who was an umbrella academy oc. Whizzer has a weird little astronaut bubble head not just to protect himself from anything, but to mostly protect others— FOR YOU SEE, whizzer’s ability is that his lungs are SO POWERFUL, if he breathes, he can basically desolate an environment of all of its oxygen and even take the oxygen out of other peoples lungs. He wears his little bubble so he doesn’t suffocate no one but also so he doesn’t breathe in nasty stuff like smog or bugs all of the time cuz that??? That would be bad.

ANYWAY. That’s my oc post have a wonderful day!!! Will blitz post soon❤️❤️❤️

[anxietymadmax]

Cheeky wee Art Recap

Aha haven't gotten to do anything like this before.. hmhmm.

I finally started doing digital art in October this year, and while it has presented so many skill-checks and struggle points, it's all been learning, practising, and honing whatever the hell I'm doing, which is a fun feeling.

So, I've put together the 9 things that I've been happiest with, most proud of, or just had a ton of fun making. Which I shall go into typical excruciating detail on. (and also share some traditionally done highlights for funsies)

Though in no super particular order, just visual appeal, I did purposefully place the top left, centre, and bottom right.

Top left is the initial painterly style that I first tried doing digital with, which I feel like was a style that (though I soon found the flaws with) helped my confidence in actually putting stuff down digitally, and feeling it out mechanically. I still really like how it turned out, it was a super cool visual I really wanted to portray.

Then in the middle is where Hyperfixation(TM) does its magic and unlocks your full potential. I don't really know why I was determined to draw The Nightmare digitally, but hey I was shocked by my own ability and that really gave me the drive to continue. While it has been surpassed as what I think is my best work, it fills a pretty special role in this little art journey, hence a (memed) version of it has been my pfp since I posted it.

And finally I decided to put Remire Valley bottom right since it is the most recent thing I've done (literally yesterday) and I still really like it! The opinion-decay has been weaker than usual which is nice.

I still believe that Thorn (middle right) is the best thing I've made so far, and in general I'm like, so thankful to the slay the princess creators for inspiring me and influencing my art style in a way that I love.

My New Years resolution is to continue to draw pretty and/or spooky girls. and maybe a guy, sometimes.

Bonus Traditional Highlights

I did also some random traditional drawings here and there, mosty from before I started doing digital, though I believe the earliest drawing I'm gonna show here comes from about August.

Never showed it off but I did this little practice of closed helmets which I found pretty fun, looked at some cool helmet references and tried my best to work out the shapes, and I think they actually turned out pretty cool. This study was done to prepare for doing the character design on the right, who is a prepared NPC for the dnd campaign, though I expect it will be some time until they ever turn up, so barring blocking their name/title I feel okay with showing them here in terms of spoilers. I can confidently say that they are not associated with any current plot threads, so they will arise when their own little story comes up.

Speaking of the dnd campaign, that was probably my biggest motivator for traditional art, I did so many sketches/concept art for things I have put in the campaign (and lots of things that are yet to appear, as seen). Of these, by far the ones I'm happiest with are the Peccatorum soldiers and their leader, The Pontiff.

There's one other traditional thing that I thought I'd share, since it was a pretty neat exercise in character concepts and design, those being some interpretations of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse.

(or horsewomen, because of course they are)

These designs are probably my current idea for a redo in digital, since I really like some of the concepts and design elements, whilst I'd probably change/refine some others. That'll probably be my next big project, but I have ideas for other smaller drawings, and every now and then I'm still opening up the sketchbook to just do whatever.

So yeah, if there's one thing I can say about 2024 it's that it brought about the actualisation of multiple creative outlets (the dnd campaign, and doing more art than ever) which I'm super happy about, and I look forward to doing even more and seeing what 2025 will look like.

[futuresconnected]

3/12/24: Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

Back again for your (not) regularly scheduled blog post about video games!

Over the last 10 days I played through the entirety of the new FF7 Remake project game, clocking in at a blistering 75 hours, so be aware that my thoughts here will be influenced by the fact that I played this game like it was a full time job for the last week and change.

I'll be talking about my thoughts here generally, with some discussion of early and mid-game characterization and plot elements, but I'll also be talking about the ending towards the end under a readmore, if you don't want to know the specifics of that.

Overall, my thoughts on the game are that I had a mostly pretty good time for about 70 out of my 75 hours, and the ending left me feeling quite a bit deflated at the very end, but let's talk about the fun stuff first.

To begin with, this is about one of the most "hang out with your friends, these characters" games I've ever played, which is saying something as someone that has played a LOT of Persona games in the last few years. I really liked that aspect of this game! It's kind of in its nature as the middle game in a planned trilogy that takes 20 hours of mid-game and blows it up to 80+ hours of Stuff To Do. I think one of the major strengths of the game is giving you a lot of fun interactions between Cloud and the gang, I came away from this game with a real love for everyone in the party (except Red XIII and Cait Sith, sorry you guys didn't have the juice). Every chance I got to do a side quest with Barrett, Yuffie, Tifa, or Aerith was a good one, and all of the interactions that the party has during the course of the regular plot were very fun as well.

Two big highlights of the characterization for me were how much time and energy this game puts into Tifa and Aerith's relationship with each other. These two have such a clear affection for each other and a mutual love of poking at Cloud every chance they get, it really feels like there's just as much emotional connection between the two of them as there is between each of them and Cloud himself. In my opinion, though FF7 has always been a classic in the "fighting over who's best girl" genre, I left this game thinking that they should all just kiss each other already and get on with their lives. The second big highlight for me characterization wise is Yuffie. Having only played some of the OG FF7, I had no real connection to her character and was really only introduced to her through stuff like Advent Children and Intergrade. I came out of this game really liking her, I felt at the beginning that her silly-girl schtick would get tiring but it really didn't for me and watching her bounce off of Cloud and the others was really entertaining. Plus, her Gold Saucer date later on was incredible, both in getting a peek into her deeper thoughts and also for watching Cloud be a total goober with her, which was just very sweet.

So lets talk some gameplay. For many people, the fact that this game has Open World Video Game design, complete with things to check off on your map and Assassin's Creed towers, is a major turn off, but for me I think that a lot of that stuff was mostly fun and at worst easily skippable. Plus, the fact that I was having a blast with the combat gameplay in this one compared to FF7 Remake made me a lot more motivated to go do combat challenges and world bosses and things of that nature. I felt like there were lots of ways to make your characters specialized in neat ways, and with a couple of exceptions (sorry Red and Cait, again) I really enjoyed the gameplay flow of each character, especially getting Aerith a perfect setup to let her blast multiple 9999 damage Firaga's back to back, that's just good gaming right there. I also generally enjoyed how much of a minigame collection Rebirth is, running into some new bespoke game every hour or so was pretty fun, and I think that the hit-rate on the minigames being fun was pretty high. Thankfully i'm not a masochist who wants to go for the platinum trophy, that would probably change my mind real quick. Overall though, I thought playing this game was a real blast, with a few bosses and encounters that I felt were more annoying than needed.

One quick shoutout before we talk about the ending goes to the music, the sound team for this game put their whole fucking ass into the music in this game, all the rearrangements of original songs were great to listen to, and the fact that so many sidequests, characters, and one off areas had their own bespoke tracks was really incredible. Top Prize goes to Salmon's Theme though:

so with all that said, let's talk the ending: I didn't really like it!

Let's get into it. This game, in it's nature of covering the middle parts of FF7, inevitably draws its way to the most iconic and talked about plot elements of JRPGs ever: Aerith's death. From the moment that we realized back in Remake that this game was about doing something new and metatextual with the story of FF7, the first question on many peoples minds was the following: will she still die?

and the answer is...........Kind Of!

In the (overlong imo) final stretches of the game, there is a real lack of clarity in what the hell is happening in general, as Cloud and Aerith wind their way through other worlds/timelines/dimensions/whatever and the game cuts between different outcomes before ultimately showing that Aerith does in fact die once again, in pretty much the same scene as the OG game. Except not really, because the game does a very poor job at letting you know what happened to her before throwing a seven phase final boss at you, where she even comes in at the end for a 2 on 1 fight with Cloud against Sephiroth, where afterwards she and Cloud have a few moments before the rest of the cast comes in and gets approximately five seconds to realized that she's actually dead. Except for the fact that Cloud still talks to her and sees her like normal.

I'm really not too concerned with the exact details of "what is happening here" because ultimately its a bunch of multiverse stuff that I don't really think is that engaging, but there are other things that bother me a good deal.

I felt that, as a player, I had no idea what kind of emotional response I was supposed to be feeling during the last three hours of the game. I was ready to be sad, I was ready to mourn the loss of a character that I had genuinely come to love over the course of the game, I was guarded every time she was on screen towards the end, but then in the moments before the big boss fight where Sephiroth comes down from the sky and stabs her, I felt it was very unclear if what the player sees there is supposed to be understood as a vision of something that could and did happen before, or something that was happening to Our Aerith, I wasnt sure if this last boss was something that I should have been fighting fueled by my grief and sadness, triumph in having avoided fate, or anything else.

Second, and the thing that honestly is sticking with me more the more I think about it, is for how much they build up Aerith and Tifa's relationship through the whole game at every possible opportunity, the ending felt really unconcerned with giving Tifa the opportunity to grieve the loss of a dear friend. For everyone who isn't Cloud, their friend is dead! And we don't get a chance to see them have to deal with that in any real way. We see them find her body, then we see them sitting shocked and deciding to move on in the aftermath of this, then we see them gassing up the jet and leaving towards Part 3, and the whole time the game is more concerned with Cloud and Aerith-who-is-not-here sharing knowing glances and words. I think that for a game that is so much about building up the relationships between everyone, and especially between Aerith and Tifa, I think they really dropped the ball in the end for everyone.

Third, I was a believer in the idea that they could do something substantively different with the story of the game and what it was trying to do, which I now don't really know that the writers of this game care to do. In the second game in a series that has had a lot to say about fate and its changeable nature, and promised Something Different, what is the ultimate result? Aerith is still gone, they left her on those plains as they flew off to Part 3, and it remains to be seen whether she's going to come back and be a real character or if she's just going to continue to be Cloud's force ghost over his shoulder while everyone else has to deal with her being dead. I wish the game had taken bigger swings! I thought it was going to!

At the end of the day, I don't think this was the worst thing on the planet or anything, I still had a really good time playing it and I really like the gameplay and the characters, I just feel like I have to temper my expectations on them delivering on anything interesting with the main narrative thrust of the project going forward.

[bluedogxl]

I have a few gripes:

The pacing of the episodes felt simultaneously like there’s not enough time to give equal focus to all the characters and also like it’s taking its sweet time getting going. If if just focused on the Yes 5 Cures, I think it wouldn’t really have this problem, but including Saki and Mai (and a bunch of Splash Star’s side characters) stretched the screentime budget a bit too thin. The show could have used another 12 episodes to get some more room for all these characters.

Relatedly, the pollution/climate change theme felt a bit… cliche? Like, in terms of humanity’s apathy creating the Shadows, that’s actually great and I thought that was really cool. But in the end the moral of the story is the same “let’s all think really hard about how We Average Joes can Save The Planet” that doesn’t talk about industrial pollution much at all. (The proportion of this gripe might be a bit skewed by the fact I was taking a global issues class when OtonaPre was airing. I still think it’s important, though.) And also all the cutaways to random people throwing garbage into the river or wasting food or whatever felt like a waste of screentime. (Although I kinda did think the subplot with the land developers looking to cut down the Sky Tree was pretty neat. Those guys got what was coming to them (getting monster of the week’d))

The whole Time Flower thing felt kinda bullshit to me, personally. Basically, the Cures only get to be Cures again because weird flowers turn back the clock and bring back the Curemos. I don’t like this because A) we don’t get new adult designs for the Precure and it’s just the same 18-year-old stock footage again, B) they’re implied to be Doing Sinister Shit but because we only have 12 episodes it’s only really seen happening to Nozomi, so everything’s dandy for everyone else while she’s getting put through the wringer, and C) it makes Saki and Mai’s transformations really weird. Like, presumably, they can still communicate with the Land of Fountains, right? Flappi and Chopi probably aren’t dead. But no, they get their trinkets back via Time Flower just like the Yes 5s. Does this mean that they’re dead? We never see them, so we’ll never know.

Lastly, shipping stuff. They give Saki a fiancé in what feels like a move designed to really just go ‘lol, sakimai is dead.’ We barely see him, and he’s pretty much entirely redundant to the plot. If I’m not kidding myself, they probably weren’t gonna make them canon anyways, but it still felt like a slap to the face.

That, I could excuse. But, being a Yes 5 sequel, they bring back Coco. And of course, they bring back him and Nozomi’s mutual crush. And, like, I get that this was just supposed to be wish fulfillment or whatever back in 2009, but really? We’re spending our limited time in this 2022 show on NozoCoco, quite possibly the relationship with the skeeviest implications in the whole franchise?? Instead of like, any of the 50 other things that need addressing????? Is this why Flappi and Chopi are dead???? (Probably not.)

Also, the CGI for the Shadows kind of sucks ass. Like, it’s approaching Kemono Friends levels of bad, but with enough of a budget that it’s not charming anymore. They’re visibly a lower framerate, there’s only like 4 unique ones I can think of, and the generic grunt ones just kinda shamble around at various speeds for 90% of their on-screen lives. If they were a more traditional style of Precure monster, I think they’d be way better.

What gets me, though, is that if you addressed at least the pacing thing and the time flower thing, Otona would become like 200% better. It just feels really hampered by so many things going wrong, but there’s some real gems in the rough. Believe it or not, I had fun watching this as it aired. Nozomi’s first fight was incredible. Dark Night Light stole the show with every appearance. I really loved the message, that we all need to do our part to care for each other and stave off apathy (even if the pollution message tied to that was a bit tone-deaf). Beneath all these problems is a very strong concept. It could have been an incredible showing, were it not for… pretty much everything about it.

For those who have watched Power of Hope - Pretty Cure Full Bloom and don't like it, why don't you?

I’m legitimately asking. I’m not trying to judge because I haven’t even watched it yet (but I’m OK with you telling me, even if it’s spoilers).

Just leave your answers in the comments or send it to me in an ask or something.

[sepublic]

Through the Looking Glass Ruins!!!!!

         …

         SO! Onto other things first…

         WRATH IS BRAXAS’ FATHER!??!!? HOLY SHIT, Wrath is a canonical dad, I’d always expressed my… OH MY GOD WRATH IS DAD! And of BRAXAS, that sweetie… How is Braxas such a sweetie with a father like HIM, also-

         Wrath was in casual wear? Either he has a day off, or he got fired by Belos/Kikimora after drawing Luz a map to Eda in Young Blood, Old Souls! Either way this guy has a sudden new level of NUANCE that I am reeling from, and yes I checked, that really is Wrath according to the credits! Dang this puts everything in a WHOLE new light…!

         AMITY HAIR OHMIGOD IT LOOKS SO ADORABLE SHE’S SELF-ACTUALIZING I AM FUCKING SCREAMING HOLY SHIT OH MY GOD!!! OH MY GOD OH MY GOD, it’s PINK and not green… They acknowledged it, Emira did! And they CHANGED IT I AM LOSING MY FUCKING MIND OVER THIS-

         She looks so BEAUTIFUL and I love the kind of foreshadowing with the bookends of our first shot of Amity having her hair down, and now it’s changed! And she looks adorable and EMIRA AND EDRIC BEING GREAT SIBLINGS I LOVE IT SO MUCH! This… THIS is everything I wanted! I was resigned to not much of them but HELL YEAH they’re being good siblings and we get a look at their rooms, we see them doing MAKEOVERS together this is everything from my favorite fanon content and MORE,

         Also Edric has a date?! Emira says ‘their’ mom… Unless the Golden Guard has a mom, DARN! Not gonna lie, I half-expected a big twist at the end that Edric was dating the Golden Guard, who was doing some sort of reconnaissance as his unrecognized normal self and/or screwing around with the Blights even further, but in a GENUINE sense… But then who knows Kikimora could be posing as GG’s ‘mom’, this is a stretch anyhow-

         JUST HELL YEAH Blight Twins! Blight Twins being sweet and mischievous and supportive of each other, Blight SIBLINGS being siblings, Emira being an older sister and giving advice! And AMITY, Amity mentioning how much Luz has changed stuff, I love that they acknowledge it openly how her life has completely shifted, and now… NOW…!

         No necklace! Red leggings! PINK HAIR?! Is this why Amity in the intro hasn’t been updated yet… She was getting TWO updates, so the animators decided to only animate a change after this final update?!

         King and Gus are also friends it seems, and they even recorded some fun together! I’m surprised at how much Bria and the others mock Gus’ illusion skills… Obviously Belos is kinda terrible but like; I don’t think he’d set aside an entire subset of magic into Illusions without reason! Also that nightmare trip… I LOVE IT, I love Gus applying the creativity of illusions in their ability to completely warp and distort someone’s sense of reality! And I called that dragon-thing being an illusion!

         A graveyard… I wonder if the Gallderstones (is that how it’s spelled) have any relevance or if they’re just neat? I hope Mattholomule and Gus help hide the Looking Glass Graveyard… Damn, that’s another Death reference with Gus, huh! Is it culminating in his respect for the dead, or will it continue further with Gus being a necromancer, or an Oracle who can commune with the deceased, and he has their respect as someone who treats them properly?!

         Also not to get dark but… What if all those Illusionists are dead because of Belos? I’m JUST SAYING…! And not gonna lie, every time someone insulted Illusions, I kept imagining the Illusion Head just suddenly waking up and feeling like there’s a disturbance in the force, as well as a weird compulsion to beat up some Glandus kids. It’d be even funnier if he had beef with the Construction, Plant, and Abomination Heads as well!

         Speaking of which, more confirmation on Construction Magic being related to earth! Glad to see Bria give us a look into that, which furthers my idea of Belos using construction magic… Also dang, Bria and the Glandus Kids really are the parallels/foils to the Detention kids! You’ve got the short ‘nice’ girl, the tall lanky kid, the furry… But the Glandus Kids start off looking nice and cool, but turn out to be rather nasty!

         Meanwhile the Detention Kids seem like bad news and delinquents, but no! They’re just demonized and actually very kind and chill! The Detention Kids are looked down upon, the Glandus Kids are appraised… The Detention Kids are dual-track, the Glandus Kids are singular; Glandus Kids from, well, GLANDUS, Detention Kids from Hexside… One’s ‘mischief’ is actually very neat and cool, the other’s is literal grave robbing.

         I guess that’s how the bleeding statues got past the censors- It’s technically just an illusion! Also more insight into how Glandus works with its Survival of the Fittest mentality, I wonder if we’ll get confirmation on which coven heads came from there, how that might influence them as adults…

         What is Glandus like, is it more whole-heartedly accepting of Belos’ rule, hence its harsh ideals? Was it made after Hexside? Does Bump hate it for being so cruel like that, or is it just school bias? And dang poor Mattholomule, I always had a feeling he sort of felt and knew that he wasn’t much, so he accepted and compensated by deliberately doing whatever he can for power…

         They confirmed he’s from Glandus, and I appreciate this new look at him! This new leaf turned… Hot take but he’s honestly not as bad as Boscha, his stint with Gus was a one-time thing that Gus was able to live with! And that seems pretty good to set them up as friends! Speaking of Boscha, Willow was injured by pixies? And the last time we heard of pixies, they belonged to Boscha and caused the school to get shut down… Did BOSCHA DO THIS I SWEAR SHE IS DEAD TO ME-

         (Also she’s mentioned in the credits for this episode but I don’t remember hearing her? I might’ve gotten distracted with so much other things.)

         Gus! I like the insight into his relationship with Illusions, and I appreciate how he’s considering other forms of magic… But this hesitation might just serve to reaffirm his believe in Illusions, which is okay! It’s all about choice… And yeah, it seems Gus also has a case of impostor syndrome like King, no wonder they get along so well! I love the glimpses into Gus’ house and the confirmation that he has a library card, no Perry though alas…!

         I appreciate how Gus feels overlooked, like he has no real substance, which is how his Illusions reflect a desire to draw attention, but also the idea that there’s nothing real beneath them… Again, very much like King! And Gus, he’s not a powerhouse like the rest, he’s SKILLED and smart, but strength isn’t his forte, it’s not brute force he operates on, but cleverness! Trickery, I like it…! It’s a nice callback to his last A-plot episode, SVSF, where instead of fighting Mattholomule physically, Gus’ solution is to think outside the box and pull the alarm!

         You go kid, not relying on brute strength but showing that some clever tricks and thinking are just as valid! Kinda wonder if this episode is lowkey a discussion on masculinity for young boys, especially with Gus growing older with puberty, though the latter is mostly because his actual VA grew… But maybe the writers rolled with that and incorporated it, or it’s just a very neat coincidence! Also, it is me or did Mattholomule’s voice change? And the gag that Gavin’s dad looks identical to him, even moreso because he’s NOT supposed to have a moustache… That’s great!

         Malphas! Love this reference to a classic demon, I wasn’t sure if Malphas was the librarian with glasses whom I’ve always headcanoned as a father figure to Amity… But maybe it’s actually this bird dude! He seems adept in Bard magic, and I love the reveal of his true crow appearance… Guess those theorists were right that the one-eyed figure is from the Forbidden Stacks! Also Malphas NOT COOL with Amity, but I’m glad Luz changed his mind, and I wonder how that adventure looked…

         Which- DAMN, the RSD with Luz! She looks so UTTERLY BROKEN when Amity mentions doing stupid things, and she didn’t mean it like that, but Luz just looks so completely shattered and you can tell she wants to cry but instead she bottles it up and tries to take it in stride, and that plays into her trying to overcompensate for her mistakes AGAIN… SOMEONE GET IT TO HER HEAD that she doesn’t need to! I’m scared for Luz, and I was SO scared this episode would end on a bad note…

         BUT DOAHLDdFAEONDKFHN LUMITY KISS LUMITY KISS! ONE-SIDED BUT THEY FINALLY FUCKING KNOW AND AMITY IS LIKE WHAAAAT AND I WAS WAITING FOR IT AND I COULD FEEL IT HAPPEN AND GAY KISS! GAY KISS ON-SCREEN!!! And the way Luz just FLOPS to the ground on her knees AAHJJFFKHGGK and no Alador nor Odalia to ruin this, UTTERLY PERFECT and the twins WATCHING OOOHHHHGGGG YYYEEAAAAHHH-

         This is EVERYTHING I ever wanted!

         What an AMAZING episode with wonderful characer beats and reveals! Again, Amity’s growth as a character, that brief insight into how Luz as a person is very chaotic and sometimes frustrating for Amity and forces her to reevaluate, but ultimately it’s good and Luz DOES try her best, and Amity clearly wanted to make things up for Luz and apologize, they’re BOTH doing things, just the little moments!

         Also, Alex Lawther voices Philip Wittebane! He has long hair and a vaguely british accent, he’s… He’s Belos isn’t he? And they got a new VA because having him voiced by Matthew Rhys would be really spoiler-y right? He’s got the long hair and he’s a nerd… And with how he talks of finding a way back home, maybe Belos really DOES just want to return home, after all? He talks of making a way back home…

         And we see a glimpse of the Portal, so it might’ve brought him there? Or did Philip succeed in making it, and that was his blueprint designs? Did he arrive by Titan’s Blood? What happened to the portal if it brought him there, or if he made it? Why the scar, why near Eda’s house, partially buried?

         Was it lost before he could finish his work, and Philip got side-tracked into something else… Perhaps going on a crusade, on behalf of a curse/demon that possessed him? A demon that killed King’s father…? Was the portal broken and he had to discard it, but then it naturally healed- Or did it just need to recharge, maybe Philip DID make it back home, WHAT IS THE ANSWER?! Is there some sort of doppelganger for Philip, is BELOS his doppelganger?! What is THIS WHAT-

         WHAT AN EPISODE!

[undertale-data]

Closing Remarks

Feelings about the Survey

Ficus Licker: Thank you guys for taking our survey. When we started this project, it was just for fun, and I thought maybe a couple hundred or so people would take it. Receiving over 2500 responses was amazing and allowed us to view more accurate trends across the fandom. Everyone has been super nice and supportive throughout this project, including my fellow contributors. They’re great at reminding me to get sleep and not go too crazy stupid trying to do everything at once. There’s a limit to the amount of things you can do today, after all.

Vessel #1: I never expected this to get so big either. I’m just very glad for all the support we got throughout the event, both from the team, and every single one of you! It’s true that no research can be done without flaws, but this was a really good experience overall and I hope you guys liked being a part of it as much as we did.I felt like working with the team was amazing. Hell, I’m starting the Ficus Licker and Vessels [and redacted] fan club, because they’re brilliant people and it’s surprising they can still stand me. It’s like working on a group project where everyone does their part and it flows almost perfectly jsjsjs.

I’m excited to see how people react to our work, or if they motivate others to do their own events. Whatever it is, I’m rooting for all of you!

Vessel #2: Being a part of this survey has been a delight. I was technically the one who came up with the idea, but I wasn’t expecting my teammates to step up so hard and put it together so gorgeously. I think we all learned a lot about data analysis, different social media platforms, and graphic design, but for me, the biggest takeaway has been the overwhelming positivity of the fandom’s reactions. At first I was half joking about wanting to study the fandom because I thought statistics were cool, expecting this to be a niche project that a few friends responded to. Instead I was blown away by fans who were just as hyped about the data as I was. It was also the best feeling in the world to read through pages and pages of responses from all over the internet, and realize that so many different people have so much in common with me in their connections to this game. Thank you to everyone who participated, especially to my fantastic fellow Vessel and Ficus Licker, [and redacted if they would like to be credited] for turning my silly math ramblings into such a work of art. <3

Feelings about UNDERTALE

Ficus Licker: I never expected to get this deep into Undertale. I did not know anything about the game before playing it, except that there was a square robot named Mettaton, and that Sans was a meme. I only got it because it was on sale and I thought it would be a simple way to pass some time. And, well, here we are. I’m always a sucker for found family, as well as for video game mechanics influencing plot and/or lore, so it was no surprise that I ended up loving the game so much. I want a found family like the one in Undertale, even if I know that's not realistic haha.

Vessel #1: I honestly do not know what decisions led me here. Maybe it’s that when I played Undertale I was hooked. And I guess I also have a love for surveys, data and just… trying to understand people’s motivations. V2 said something about studying the fandom and I just exploded with the need to do it. Still, in general, Undertale and Deltarune meant a lot to me, they pushed me to be more creative, I found a huge community and met a lot of cool people (like FL, V2, and [redacted] even if they’re really far away). Oh! And as someone who’s terrible at video games, the game mechanics and story always made me stay determined. And that is not even mentioning the music, which is probably what motivated me to try out the games in the first place. Anyways… to cut it short, I love both the game, its story, and music and the people I’ve met because of it, thanks so much!

Vessel 2: I started playing Undertale because my friend was obsessed with it, and I’m so glad I did. The characters are all so fun and complex, and I think about them constantly. And the morals questions brought up by the game are so cool, I keep coming back to them. Still, it also manages to be a neat little game filled with friendly characters and a fabulous soundtrack. I love the depth and heartwrenching scenes, but more than that, I love that they are just… some guys. They are my some guys. Mettaton if you're out there you're doing fantastic.

-

If you would like to view all of the posts on this blog in google doc format, you are welcome to do so in this google drive folder. Also, our askbox will remain open if fans have questions on collecting fandom data. We will likely not answer all questions, but if you scream into the Void, the Void may scream back.

[lankieghost]

Lankie's Bloodborne Boss Ranking Bonanza! (Part 2/3)

This is part 2 of my Bloodborne boss ranking! You can find Part 1 here

Spoilers for Bloodborne ahead!

Here's a fun challenge : try and draw The One Reborn with no references. Because hooo boy is this meat centaur a mess.

The fight starts with a bunch of bell ringing ladies on the balconies. Hilariously, I don't know what the bell ladies do if you leave them alive, since I killed them first thing every time.

You'd think this guy would be a flailing mess but it seems he mostly just summons a bunch of loose limbs over you. The only thing that gave me trouble was his big throw up attack which covers the whole floor of the arena.

I ended up killing him in two attempts, he looks intimidating but he's basically a very gross paper tiger.

Oh Amygdala, have pity on the poor bastard!

Turns out, ol' Amy took Patches advice at heart, because I beat them on my first try.

Which is surprising because Amygdala is pretty intimidating! What with the lasers and the prodigious size and the ripping its own arms off to beat you to death. But yeah I don't know what to tell you, I pressed O when I needed to dodge, I hit r1 a bunch of times and they just kinda died.

I do like that after killing Rom it's revealed that there's tons of Amygdala's (Amygdalae?) just chilling all over Yharnam, very creepy.

Ah Kos, or some say Kosm!

Boy howdy there's a lot of gimmick fights in Bloodborne. The Host of The Nightmare will just constantly run away from you until you corner him in a room, then he shoots a bunch of tentacles at you.

I'm making it sound easy but I ended up dying to this bastard 4 times! The tentacles hits hard and he's got his little puppet buddies backing him up in fights.

The best part of the fight is Micolash's running commentary on Kos and granting eyes. He really sells the whole raving madman vibe he's got going.

What does it say about me that I died multiple times to Micolash but beat Mergo's Wet Nurse on my first attempt? I don't know! But What I do know is that Mergo's Wet Nurse is awesome.

Look at this cool ass design! Six armed black angel with scythes? Rad as hell! Sounds like an OC I'd have when I was 13! I love that its head looks like a big slug thing but it's actually just an empty cloak. I love that this horrible thing is a 'wet nurse'. I love that the music playing in this fight is just a kids music box. Great vibes all around!

The fight is pretty easy unfortunately, the wind ups are really telegraphed and it's too easy to just get behind her when she starts flailing her scythes. You gotta be on the ball when she starts summoning her clones to attack you (reminds of the High Priestess fight in Sekiro) but there was never a time when I felt threatened in this fight.

But despite all that I'm still giving MWN an A just for the great design. Let it be known that I'll bump any character's score up if you attach some angel wings to the mix.

Does anyone care about this boss?

It's another gimmick boss where there's a bunch of these dumb aliens and you gotta find the REAL Celestial Emissary. At which point it triples in size.

I do like when these guys have the weird tendrils coming of their heads, that's pretty creepy. But they honestly didn't have to put this boss in the game. The next boss is only one corridor and a elevator ride away!

Side note: Upper Cathedral Ward, the place you find this and the next boss, fucking suuuuUUUUuuuucks. Brain eater enemies everywhere,the part where it just ganks you with 3 werewolves, if the little slug things nibble you once it fills up a full frenzy bar. Just absolutely awful.

The Daughter of The Cosmos has a very neat design, very creepy and alien. I was expecting this fight to be pretty tough but it was honestly not too bad, think I beat in 3 attempts.

I like that there's a thing that looks like Rom's corpse in the arena, I think the implication is that Ebrietas is an adult form of whatever Rom is. That's neat!

Another thing that I like about all the more alien designs in Bloodborne is that they all have some slightly human qualities to them, like Ebrietas' slug body looking like a humans kneeling legs. It adds to the creepiness of the monsters, like was this thing human? Is it mimicking humanity? Maybe they're not so different to us??? SPOOKY??????

Ebrietas gets a - solely because of Upper Cathedral Ward. Because fuck Upper Cathedral Ward.

Logarius, in my opinion, is the toughest boss in the base game. He's got projectiles, he's aggressive in his 2nd form, he's got his whole gimmick of planting his sword in the ground to summons constant ghost swords that chase you. He's a dozy!

However the main thing that makes him tough, and the thing that pops a minus on his score, is his tendency to jump straight up into the air and goomba stomp you to death! The camera doesn't track him when he does this, so you just have to guess when he's gonna land. Sometimes he'll do it multiple times in a row. I'm really not a fan of this attack because it feels like Logarius is taking advantage of the bad camera to land hits on me.

Also the run back for Logarius is not a good time. Two ladders!? What am I made of time!?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This ends part 2, in the next part, we'll take a brief jaunt into DLC town and rank the final 2 bosses!

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

[oodlyenough]

psychonauts 2 review!

I played the first few-ish (not many... I'd guesstimate under 4) hours of the original Psychonauts years ago, but found it unruly to control and never progressed further. I remember thinking the concept was neat, though, and when I heard a sequel was coming I figured I'd check it out, since it'd presumably be more polished.

The sequel is very very good. I think it is the best game I've played this year. It's also maybe the most creative game I've played... ever.

When Rift Apart came out, a lot of reviews said it was "like a playable Pixar game". Having played (and enjoyed!) Rift Apart as well, I gotta say while that may be true in image fidelity, in basically every other respect I think Psychonauts 2 comes closer. I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who's ever enjoyed this kind of platformer.

More detail and possible spoilers:

I'll start with the cons, because there aren't very many:

I posted early on that I found jumping kind of unwieldy/frustrating, which is bad for a platformer. Although I got better at it as I got used to the controls, I still did run into scenarios where I was creating a thought bubble while trying to wall jump, or rolling off the edge of a platform I'd just landed on, or otherwise just finding jumping clumsy. I turned off fall damage pretty early for this reason; it was infuriating to just keep dying because I couldn't make a clumsy jump, and then respawn with increasingly limited health.

(Also, fwiw, because I know gamers were losing their damn minds about this when it was announced, turning off fall damage doesn't allow you to skip out on executing all the platforming. You just don't respawn with a health penalty if you fail. You still have to eventually time it right.)

A few hours after turning off fall damage, I turned off combat damage too. So I guess I can't really evaluate the smoothness or difficulty of combat fairly, because uh... I was immortal. This is just me as a player though -- I played large chunks of Spiderman & Miles Morales & Rift Apart on immortality mode. Boss fights simply do not spark joy for me; I want to progress a story without repeating a segment several times. I will say, in this mode, combat was fairly repetitive, mainly just psi blasting and meleeing everything. I kept thinking about turning it off, to maybe appreciate the challenge or figure out other techniques.... but I really just wanted to keep progressing the story, so I never did.

HOWEVER... there's a ton of extremely profitable games where combat is literally just "shoot", so, even then I wouldn't hold it against Psychonauts much.

I'm an idiot I guess and didn't realize levelling up skills was a separate thing from buying pins to augment the skills. So I played like a good chunk of the game with every skill at level 0 lmfao.

Easily my least favourite level is the first one, which I think is a bit unfortunate... I don't have, like, a dental phobia and I was still not really enjoying that part, and compared to how colourful and cool and imaginative the other worlds are it just seems like it starts the game off on a weird foot.

I know some purists are reading this like SO YOU PLAYED A GAME WITH NO DAMAGE AT ALL? Yep and I appreciate DoubleFine allowing me to do so. ✌🏻

And then onto the pros:

Like... everything else?

Playing Rift Apart this summer made me feel like a kid again, as a someone who grew up on cartoony platformers like Spyro and who still craves the satisfaction of first discovering you can charge that cracked wall and find an orb behind it. Psychonauts 2 had all that fun of exploring maps and finding secret, hidden locations and collectibles... on top of having the most creative and varied level design I've ever seen.

Seriously the levels were gorgeous. I was constantly spinning the camera around to take in all the little details, and there were SO MANY different levels where the gimmick would surprise and delight me. Almost every level for me was like "omg how did they think of that". Even when I was getting irritated by (for eg) the unruliness of trying to steer a giant bowling ball down a precise ramp, I was at least marvelling at the ingenuity involved.

The script was wonderful. Funny, charming, clever in its use of metaphor, and genuinely touching at times. If ever anything felt a little bit simplified, well, it's a kid-friendly game... I can't be too mad about that.

Raz is so endearing! It's very easy for the plucky young kid character to uh, become grating, but I always found Raz charming and I was rooting for him. Richard Horvitz is so good.

TBH all the characters were super lovable and funny. In a giant cast of cartoons I don't think there was a single one where I'd be like "ugh, this guy again" which is quite a feat honestly. They were all charming and well-acted and bursting with dialogue.

Even the random NPCs around the motherlobe who have their own progressing storylines via conversations... I love that detail! It was one of my favourite parts of Life is Strange: True Colours and I was delighted when I realized it was happening in this game too. It was fun to check in on some of your faves as the game progressed.

I'm pretty thorough, and I love exploring maps, and boy do these maps have a lot to explore, especially the hub areas. I STILL haven't figured out how to get everywhere in the Questionable Area, lol, or gotten every psy card, etc.

I like the music, especially the music in the quarry area that absolutely makes me feel like I am walking around Epcot. Perfect vibe. (And the Small World knock-off music in Nick's brain lmao...)

As soon as the projection started talking I was like, "this is GIR, right? This is intentionally a Zim and Gir thing?" So I felt validated by checking IMDB after lmao.

Ummm... I think that's about it. Honestly great game. I might give Psychonauts 1 another go... although I'd say there's a high chance I instead watch it on YouTube, lol.

[onlydreamofmysoul]

Gingerbread (Ficmas #1)

Here we go!!! Ficmas day one! Super excited about this - I’ve never done ficmas before! As promised... a little sweet competition!

Characters and their world by @lumosinlove “Is everyone ready?” Celeste asked, standing around her kitchen, looking at the room nearly overflowing with hockey players and their loved ones. “Leo and I are the judges. The rules are simple, you all have to build a gingerbread house, everything you need is right in front of you. The best looking one wins, okay?” 

Remus grinned and nodded, nudging Sirius excitedly. They had everything - including the gingerbread premade by Celeste herself, so even if it looked like a disaster it was sure to taste amazing. Not that theirs would look anything less than fantastic.

On second thought, maybe a group of highly competitive athletes working against each other instead of with each other was a bad idea.

“Okay guys!” Leo called as he hopped up to sit on the counter and oversee the proceedings. “You have one hour. Your time starts.... Now!”

Remus grinned at Sirius, and then they set to work.

Logan knew watching Leo be all authoritative as a judge while he just had to watch would be hard. He didn’t know it would be torture. He was teamed with Adele and Katie, but Adele had to keep hitting his arm to get his attention.

“Logan,” She warned. “I want to win. Now are you gonna focus or not?”

Logan shook his head. Leo could wait. He had a competition to win. “Oui, sorry yes I’m good now.”

Adele nodded, apparently satisfied and Katie drew their attention back to her when she started bouncing in her seat. 

“Allez!” She said, her eyes wide, “Tremzy come on I wanna get to the part where I can eat it.”

Logan chuckled but obliged her, obediently holding pieces of gingerbread in place at the girls’ command as the icing dried.

“Okay, no pressure or anything, but your name’s Noelle so I’m expecting you to dominate this Christmas thing.” Thomas said, only partially jokingly as Noelle carefully piped the outline of their ‘windows’. 

“Um, excuse you Thomas Walker,” She replied, “What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Okay, but hear me out,” Thomas started as he picked up a piece of gingerbread, and started piping green spikes on it. “We should have pine trees in front of it.”

Noelle looked at him like he was losing his mind. “Babe, it’s a gingerbread house.” She said slowly as if it were a foreign concept.

“I know!” Thomas said, excitedly waving his hands and as he did, his pine tree went flying through the air and landed in Kasey’s hair. 

Kasey turned around very slowly and looked around menacingly, reaching up and pulling the biscuit out of his hair, leaving green splotches and crumbs in its wake.

“Who?” He ground out, and Thomas looked around with a shocked expression. “I have no idea! Noelle? Did you see anything?”

Noelle bit down her laugh and shook her head. “Non. Maybe it was one of the kids?” She said, looking over at Logan’s table to where Katie had more icing on her than the house. Kasey followed her and his vision softened. He nodded once and turned back around, Thomas made another tree and held it up to Noelle.

“They’ll never see it coming.” He said, finally finishing his statement. Noelle rolled her eyes, but in the end, there were a ton of palm trees in their ‘garden’. 

Finn was with Pascal and Marc, all of them particularly competitive and set on winning except there was one little problem… None of them had ever actually made a gingerbread house before.

“I think it goes like this?” Marc said, tilting his head as he stuck two pieces together, the icing going everywhere. He let go and they all held their breath while the biscuits stood for about ten seconds before collapsing so slowly it was actually a little sad. 

“I say we give up and just eat everything.” Finn proposed. Marc nodded, Dumo looked like he was going to put up a fight, but one glance at their gingerbread wreckage had his shoulders slumping. He reached out and broke off a bit of biscuit, popping it into his mouth with a grin.

“At least it tastes good?”

“But we didn’t make-” Marc began.

“Shh.” Finn cut him off with a playful wink. “At least it tastes good.”

Kasey’s hair was green and that had been a problem but then Alex promised he’d wash it out himself later that night and well, those words along with the little wink Natalie sent him had Kasey pretty okay with the whole situation. He sat there, smiling softly as he listened to Alex and Natalie chat away while Kasey did all the actual work, creating quite a nice gingerbread house, thank you very much.

Kasey grew up with his dad baking every Sunday and he’d always help. He wasn’t ashamed to say he was quite handy with a piping bag, and Alex was watching with wide eyes as Kasey piped ‘snow’ on the roof.

“How-” Alex stuttered, his eyes focused on Kasey’s hand.

Natalie bit down her smile. “He likes to keep people guessing.”

“I… I’m not complaining.”

“Like what you see O’Hara?” Kasey asked, unable to stop himself from teasing the other man. Alex was as prone to flushing a deep red as his brother, but Kasey found Alex looked a lot boyish when it happened to him.

“I definitely like what I’m seeing.” Alex replied, before cheekily dipping his finger in the icing and smirking at Kasey as he ate it. 

Natalie laughed at them both as she leaned in and kissed the sugar dusting Alex’s lips. Kasey raised an eyebrow, but kept looking at what he was doing, until Alex was standing next to him.

“Open up.” Alex prompted, holding his icing coated finger up to Kasey’s lips. Kasey made eye contact with Natalie for a split second, before doing as instructed, smiling into the kiss Alex gave him after.

“Chocolate was always my favourite.” Alex said with a sigh as he sat back down, Natalie placing her feet in his lap as she shamelessly ate the sweets they needed to decorate. Kasey glanced up to see Leo already looking at him.

“Redheads.” Leo mouthed with a shrug, “Gotta love em.”

Leo had to admit, sitting back and watching the world devolve into chaos was quite entertaining. He could still taste the gingerbread Finn had given him, their house looking more like it had been hit by a hurricane instead of like someone had actually tried to, you know, build it. Logan’s little team was doing a whole lot better, it was looking a little messy but Katie was doing a lot of the icing and well, there’s only so neat kids can be, try as they might. 

Leo’s heart melted as it always did when he would watch Logan with Dumo’s kids. He was just so good with them and they adored him in turn. One of the spare bedrooms in their apartment had been the designated spot for where they would keep presents until they were able to give them out, and Leo was fairly sure half of the room’s contents were just Logan’s presents for the little Dumais’.

“Are rookies even allowed to be judges?” Thomas queried as Leo passed and Leo had fun getting to act all haughty. Thomas looked particularly suspicious and Leo didn’t miss the correlation between the green icing he sported and the little patch of colour in Kasey’s hair. Leo filed that little bit of information away for a day he could really use it.

“Do you think it’s a good idea to get on a judge's bad side, Talkie?”

“Hey, you love me!” Thomas protested and Noelle shook her head. 

“No, but he loves me.” She said looking at Leo and winking. “You’ve got to stay on the good side of your future in-laws.”

Leo felt himself flush even as Logan twisted in his seat to look at them. “Tricheuse!” Logan cried. “Leo baby don’t listen to her, she just wants to win.” He stuck out his tongue at Noelle.

Leo abandoned Noelle and Thomas to crouch next to Logan, smirking. “Am I not marriage material Tremblay?”

Another time, earlier in their relationship maybe, Logan would have scrambled to reassure Leo, probably tripping over his own words so many times nothing actually coherent came out. Now though, Logan just smiled at him lazily.

“The most. I just mean she loves you either way, I think there’s literally nothing you could do that would make her not like you.”

Leo kissed him on the cheek before laughing as Katie wrapped her arms around him. 

“Salut Katie!” He said, standing up to throw her in the air, Katie shrieking with laughter before Leo set her back down on her chair. Leo stood up and began to move away, but not before he missed Katie unintentionally chirping Logan, “Leo throws me high.” She said in a serious tone as Leo snorted his laughter, shaking his head as he moved away.

Regulus hadn’t been sure about building a gingerbread house with Nado and Kuny - he didn't really know them and as a general rule, he didn’t like to spend too much time with people he didn’t know. But Dima got on with them really well and Dima was his friend so here Regulus was, building a gingerbread house in Pascal Dumais’ house. Two snakes in a lion's den.

“Are you sure that will hold?” Regulus found himself asking sceptically as Kuny attempted to build a several story building. Gingerbread house - more like gingerbread mansion if Kuny had his way.

Nado answered instead just nodding his head. “Of course.”

“Fair enough.” Regulus conceded, happy to sit back and watch the proceedings. He glanced around the room, still not quite sure where he fit into this chaotic little familial like team, but happy to be here all the same. More than happy to see nothing but pure joy on his brother’s face. Hope because maybe Regulus could find that kind of happiness here too.

“D’accord!” Celeste called, clapping her hands. “Okay everyone step away from your tables, your time is up!”

The team piled into the sitting room as Celeste and Leo judged all the gingerbread houses. Sirius and James sat on the floor, with Harry playing happily with them. Remus and Lily sat snugly on the couch above them, both nursing mugs of tea and heads bent together as they caught each other up on the events of the last couple of weeks. 

Finn and Logan were having an arm wrestling competition in the corner and most of the others piled around to watch them, all yelling for someone. Logan won, Finn hanging his head in shame and then they were both immediately challenged by the rest of the team, Logan battling (and losing quite dramatically) to Katie. 

Leo and Celeste came back into the room, looking quite smug as they held up a cardboard trophy.

“We have the winner,” Leo said to get everyone’s attention and the sudden hush that fell upon the room was quite comical. 

“Drumroll!” Thomas cried and the room was filled with the rapid thuds of everyone slapping their hands against the nearest object.

“And the winner is…” Celeste drew out, “Katie, Adele and Logan!”

The trio jumped up, hugging and high fiving. 

Logan stood up on a chair and pressed his hands against his chest in gratitude. 

“Thank you, thank you,” He joked, wiping away a fake tear. “We’ve been dreaming about this for, mon dieu, I don’t know how long.”

“You weren’t this dramatic when you won MVP!” Sirius called from the back of the room and Logan winked at him before continuing. “I think Adele had the idea that secured our win though, Adele?”

The girl dashed to the kitchen and came back with their little gingerbread house, the outside entirely lined by little gingerbread people. 

“We made the team!” Katie said, bouncing on her toes. There was a rush as everyone came over to have a look and before long, everyone was grabbing their figurine and eating them.

“Goodbye little Thomas.” Talkie said mournfully before biting its head off.

“Hey, maybe now I can give myself head.” Leo muttered to Finn, who promptly choked, spitting crumbs everywhere as he flushed a deep red.  

Remus leaned back into Sirius as they munched on their biscuits. 

“This is fun. We should do it again next year.”

Sirius wiped the crumbs from his lip and tightened his hold on Remus’ waist. “And the year after that, and they year after that, and the ye-”

Remus giggled, twisting in Sirius’ arms to shut him up by kissing him. “Yeah, baby. I’d like that.”

[linkspooky]

Series I’m Reading in 2021

My favorite manga all come from Shonen Jump. A lot of series ended last year, and a lot of new series started, so I thought I’d do a post with a quick recap of all the manga I’m currently keeping up with in jump, and my favorite things about them. 

My Hero Academia - My two favorite manga are both reaching the ends of their biggest arcs yet, and that’s been exciting but also exhausting to read week from week. 

MHA’s strength lies in its ideas and the scope of its ambitions. There’s few stories in shonen jump that work with such broad ideas, in trying to define hero and villain and giving the villains so much depth that the main character’s ultimate foil Shigaraki Tomura, feels more like a deuteragonist to the story, a second protagonist for the other side of the story rather than an antagonist. 

It’s a creative story,  with neat little ideas. Giving an entire arc to the villains was taking an actual risk. From a story that began wrapped entirely around Deku’s perspective, the story has evolved to balance the perspective  of multiple different characters who all come into conflict with each other. The best part of the war arc is that there’s no real good guys in a story with clear and distinct entities that label themselves “heroes’ and “villains.” The heroes are allowed to have impure motives, and do impure deeds. The villains are allowed to have noble motivations, and genuinely care for one another. This is all good because it’s not boring. A boring, simple, story where good defeats evil has been told a hundred times, My Hero Academia shines the brightest when it tries to do something different. 

Jujutsu Kaisen - If MHA’s strength lies in creativity, then JJK’s is in technical execution. If you compare the first 27 chapters of MHA and JJK just in the way that they develop the stakes, story, and ideals, JJK accomplishes a lot more in the same time. 

I’m not saying JJK is better, just that it tells its story better in some ways. MHA is in the middle of a tournament arc, whereas in JJK we see the first major emotional blow of the story. A character which was set up to be saved, and who everyone expected to be saved is instead killed and this has permanent ramifications for both Yuji’s development and the threat the villain presents. 

That’s why the Shibuya Arc has so much impact , despite only having 100 chapters of build up before it. Jujutsu Kaisen introduces a lot of characters, and then quickly develops them and the ideas that surround that character in a way that it feels like every time they’re on screen they are growing and changing in a way. It’s because things are continually changing in the story all the time, that every single time the story hits you it feels like a gut punch. There’s no one safe, no status quo, just a world that you know is going to change by the end of the story. Jujutsu Kaisen is good. Everyone should read Jujutsu Kaisen.  

Mission: Yozakura Family - Katekyo Hitman Reborn used to be one of my favorite manga in shonen jump, which gave me a weakness for manga with big mafia families where everry single character has one special quirky and eccentric power. 

Yozakura Family is also reaching a similiar pont that Reborn did, where after a year of publication it’s not doing well enough as a weekly gag manga and is starting to focus to a more serious with an overarching plot, and a fighter. The main female and main male protagonist have a relationship that actually develops which makes me soft for the two of them because I want to see the story improve and see where the author wants to take them. 

Our Blood Oath - There’s been a trend towards horror series in the recent newcomers in jump, which is great because I am all about horror. A series full of vampires using their blood to cut each other up is an easy sell to me. 

Stories in jump generally don’t tend to develop until they’ve lasted an entire year, but I like a lot of things that Our Blood Oath has started with. I love the series focus on adopted family, and the relationship between the two brothers. The main character genuinely acts like a bratty younger brother, and wields unlimited power exactly like a twelve year old swinging around a blood scythe would. Which is to say, very badly.  

Phantom Seer - Another newcomer series that leaves a strong impression. The things that the series has going for it so far is a really strong main character, who’s a pretty far deviation from the standard shonen protagonist of “I want to save everyone.” Rather than wnating to be the strongest, or wanting to be a hero, he just wants a normal life, and instead gets dragged into heroics by the good intentions of the people he’s surrounded by.

The art is also incredibly strong for this series. I’m glad the artist got another chance to draw a shonen junmp series because their art really shines in both the character designs, and the curse designs. There’s incredibly unique monster designs that are equally parts horrifying and fascinating even though most of them only stick around for one chapter. 

Undead Unluck - Most Shonen Manga either figure out right away what the central conflict is, other manga never figure it out. Undead Unluck is like “fuck it, let’s kill god.” 

Undead Unluck has a bad start, and normally I would never say “keep reading and give it a chance” if it gives you a negative first impression, but Undead Unluck quickly fixes a lot of mistakes in the first chapter. Andy at first says some creepy things towards the main character, but the author seemed to learn their lesson and made a lot of changes later on to make their relationship into a healthy one of consent and mutual affection. 

The main characters and the story premise are what sell this one. A bunch of supernatural beings going out of their way to do the impossible and kill god. The plot is almost pure chaos, but I believe the two main characters are strong enough that you want to follow them all the way through it. 

Dr. Stone -  The best part of Dr. Stone is trying to unravel the mystery of the premise, how the world became turned to stone. Senku is a compelling protagonist because he’s constantly trying to solve the mystery around him, the same way the audience is. 

Senku is a strong character, and there are other interesting ones like Gen, however sometimes the series while being a fun adventure the characters don’t really develop that much. However, there’s nothing better for a protagonist than a good antagonist. The best part of the america arc so far has been the introduction of an antagonist and foil to Senku. Instead of trying to rule through strength. Dr. Xeno views everything as a problem to be solved through science like Senku. He just also sees Science as a tool to rule others, unlike the fairly anarchistic Senku who doesn’t care for leadership. 

Some of the most interesting charactermoments for Senku lies in his interactions, his similiarities and differences with Dr. Xeno, and the fact that they’re now forced to cooperate while Senku is technically holding Dr. Xeno hostage is an interesting building tension between these two. I’m following this series for two reasons, one I’m interested in how the mystery will be solved, and two I wonder what kind of person that Senku will become when he completes his goal of restoring humanity. Senku is the main draw of the series with his weird charisma, and his unique interest in science above everything else, and I think there’s still a lot of untapped potential to mine in his character. 

[wheres-sam]

I binge-watched the spn anime because of the brain rot

It’s bad except for the parts that are good, and it’s pretty to look at. Here’s a comprehensive list of pros and cons. Spoilers ahead!

Pros:

- more psychic kid backstories: Max (Nightmare), Lily (Darkness Calling), Jake (Loser)

- more psychic Sam

- more Azazel

- basically if you want more about the psychic/demon kids, watch the anime

- more young Winchesters

- the monsters, the superhuman abilities, the fight scenes, it all looks really cool animated. (But PSA it’s violent. It doesn’t shy away from blood and gore.)

- Sam and Jessica backstory

- more of the brothers being cute and funny together

- Missouri isn’t forgotten

- includes some Japanese legends/mythology

- the impala looks great in every scene. They did Baby good

- the “Supernatural” intro title

- the outro sketches of the boys hanging out with Baby

- Episodes adapted from the original show are different, but I like some of the changes? It’d be boring if it was an exact retelling and the visual medium wasn’t utilized. (I know I said spoilers before, but this is when they get detailed. If you wanna skip over, I’ll tell you where they STOP.)

Nightmare goes more into the abuse Max has suffered. Instead of locking Sam in a closet, Max sends Sam through the floor and covers the hole by breaking his bed in half, and it’s extremely sexy how Sam shoves the 2 halves apart with his mind. Later on Dean puts bandaids on Sam and they talk about demons loudly in front of a fast food intercom.

In My Time of Dying highlights the guilt Sam feels over Dean. In both the og and the anime John verbally blames Sam for not shooting Azazel, but where in the og Sam goes right on arguing, in the anime he reels back for a moment like he was slapped. Dean’s spirit touches Sam’s shoulder, and Sam knows immediately that it’s Dean. He doesn’t even question it. Instead of “Are you here?” it’s “I know you’re with me. I can feel it.” And I love that. Dean figures out right away he’s dealing with a reaper, and the reaper takes on the appearance of Mary to convince Dean to move on to the afterlife. Instead of a Ouija board, Sam uses a laptop to talk to Dean, and the first word Dean types is “Sammy!” Dean is so fond of his little brother and Sam is so baby.

Rising Son is an anime only episode, but it draws inspiration from John’s journal. Dean has a proper breakdown over his dad’s death and the possibility of having to kill Sam. Ms. Lyle, Sam’s favorite teacher who turns out to be possessed, is explored. John takes Dean hunting, and in the journal Dean hesitates to shoot a buck, and little Sam shoots it thinking it was endangering Dean. In the anime, Dean’s cornered by a moose and Sam makes it explode with his mind and it’s so !!! How little Sam’s first words are, “I’m glad you’re okay. It didn’t hurt you?” The boys are covered in blood and guts and Dean’s like 👁👄👁 “Why are you here? Did you do this?” And then Sam starts freaking out a little, the shock sets in. “I don’t know. I don’t know, honest.” And he’s staring at his hands, and I am a big fan of Sam showing superhuman signs as a kid. Like in the journal, Ms. Lyle tries to take Sam. She gives Sam the illusion of a choice to come with her or stay with Dean, and Sam chooses Dean. This ep is pretty much when John figures out Sam has demon blood. He kills another hunter that wants to kill Sam.

Crossroad is based on Crossroad Blues, and I love how the crossroads demon shows up. It’s hard to describe, but it’s so neat, like she’s walking underneath Dean in this mirror world, and then the mirror world takes over the regular world, so you really get this sense of otherworldly seclusion, existing outside of time.

What Is and Should Never Be shows Dean is a firefighter in his ‘Mary never died’ world, and Sam got to play soccer growing up like he wanted. The brothers hold each other after Dean is saved from the Djinn.

AHBL part 1. When Azazel shows Sam that he fed Sam his blood, Sam gags and slaps a hand over his mouth, and I like that reaction more than the live action. The psychic kids get to go more anime with their powers, and that’s a lot of fun. They don’t need weapons. Ava slams Sam into the brick side of a building and cuts him without touching him. Jake snaps Ava’s neck with one hand and then catches Sam in his arms. When Jake attacks Sam, there’s no gun or knife. He’s relying on his super strength, his fists. Sam throws his arms up to protect himself, and (accidentally?) pushes Jake back with his mind, and the collision creates a crater in the ground. Jake puts his fist through Sam’s chest to kill him. It’s brutal and it’s rad as fuck. These kids are terrifyingly powerful.

The Sam and Dean reunion before Sam is killed is not as emotional as the live action imo, but what the anime does intrigues me. Hurts in a different way. Because Sam is stunned after he uses telekinesis again, on Jake, and when he hears Dean behind him Sam freezes. He doesn’t look relieved to see Dean, but wary and weary. It’s Dean taking steps towards him, not the other way around, and it has to be because Sam doesn’t know if Dean saw him push Jake back. Sam doesn’t know how Dean’s going to respond to all this, to him, having powers that come from a demon, the demon, Azazel. Sam hasn’t had a chance to process anything. He’s scared. He’s tired. And the way the anime focuses on Sam’s eyes here. Gah. “Dean. Dean, I’m...” I’m sorry. I’m all right. I’m glad you’re okay. I’m a monster. There’s also this one shot between Sam and Azazel that sends me because of how anime it is.

AHBL part 2. I love how Sam brought back to life is animated, with all the color returning to his face and a light wind rustling his hair and his lips parting to indicate his soul returning to his body. Jake attacks Dean, and, a lot like how Sam activates telekinesis to save Dean from Max in Nightmare, Sam gets a burst of superhuman strength. He rips Jake’s arm off and tackles him to the ground and beats him to death, punches holes into his body, and it’s so savage and bloody and scary, and I love it. The Devil’s Gate opening looks so cool animated. Same goes for Dean shooting Azazel with the Colt.

Not to turn this into a meta post, but I also noticed how the last couple times Sam uses his powers they’re colored green-yellow, the same colors as Mary’s ghost when she reveals herself in the anime’s Home, and I don’t know if that’s intentional, but it’s neat how it draws a connection to Sam’s biological family instead of Azazel’s blood.

The Spirit of Vegas is like Bad Day at Black Rock, but Dean has all the bad luck instead, and it shows off the silly cartoony physics that make animation fun. The boys sleep outside and split a chunk of bread for dinner. Also this lil bit of Dean’s hair tied in a bow.

- (STOP) the brothers are pretty. I am not immune to animated Sam and Dean Winchester.

Cons:

- Jensen doesn’t voice Dean until the last 2 episodes

- The English dialogue is really bad sometimes. I wish I could’ve watched the sub, but I couldn’t figure out how to change the language

- Some character designs are really different from the live action, and maybe that’s petty, but if you’re gonna change the characters diversify them? Don’t just make them unrecognizable white people

- Missouri’s design as a stereotypical witch doctor is racist

- Gordon is replaced by some British guy named Jason?? Why

- There’s an LGBT character who is not accepted by her family and, while that bigotry is always shown to be negative and she dies the hero of the episode, she still dies ://

- In the English dub Lily’s gf is made into her roommate instead. Idk about the sub

- Bobby’s pretty much a totally different character

- Sam and Dean are OOC sometimes

- Dean’s hair usually looks darker than Sam’s and it drives me crazy

- The storytelling is, overall, not nearly as good as the live action

- The non-Japanese lore in some episodes makes no sense. Sometimes it’s just plain ridiculous?? Like there’s a giant robot made of cars and scrap metal controlled by a demon? ? I wish I was making this up

- Meg’s role is severely reduced

- No Harvelles or Roadhouse

- Shadows are overused, but maybe that’s because the og show is so dark?

- I don’t mind the art style. I like the aesthetic, but I wish it was a little more expressive. It doesn’t do Sam’s puppy eyes justice.

- AZAZEL’S SHADOW?? PROPORTIONS?? PEA SIZED HEAD

- Idk why they mashed season 1 and 2 together? The story feels rushed

- there’s not as much chemistry between Sam and Dean, but that’s a given without J2 on screen

- Nobody tells you!! That there’s scenes after the credits!! And some of them are important! Why are important scenes after the credits??

The anime would not be good on its own, without the heart and depth the live action brings, but it works as supplementary material you can cherry pick from. I would watch more if there were more episodes.

It hasn’t turned me off from wanting an spn anime. I’d like to see it continued or redone, with updated animation and better scripts. There’s a lot of potential in exploring more about the psychic kids and Sam’s powers, storylines that were cut short in the og show. Animation is a great medium for showing off the supernatural, getting creative and creepier with the designs, dramatic with the fight scenes, without having to worry about bad CGI. I don’t want a live action reboot, but I think a redone animated series could be a lot of fun! (As long as it’s not an excuse to make any romantic ships take over. SPN is a platonic love story, and I like it that way.)

If you made it to the end here and are interested in watching the spn anime, you can watch it for free on the CW Seed app! You can probably stream it elsewhere, but idk where!

[shipping-is-the-shit]

My Loud House Sin kids AU

(Sin Kids meaning- a fandom term for fictional sibling x sibling ship kids or fictional adult/minor ship kids)

So I’ve been getting into the loud house fandom lately and i found out the “sin kids” concept/AU where Lincoln has kids with his sisters and stuff, so yeah you know how that is, anyway i decided to create my own sin kids but between Bobby x Lincoln. The ship was first inspired by @samsuchan​ and by then i hadn’t really thought of the idea of bobby x lincoln but when I actually thought about it it sounded cute so decided to draw their sin kids

(yes i am aware that bobby looks different here, i just don’t really like his headshape plus this is easier to draw)

So this is how my AU goes, It all started normally till after the episode where Lincoln and Bobby hang out,Lincoln finds out that he unfortunately has a crush on Bobby and tries to surpress the feelings because of the age gap and cause he’s dating Lori so later on they find out they have feelings for each other and then start having their secret relationship, it’s all fine and good till one day Bobby drinks Lisa’s potion and then one day unknowingly has a kid, he had no idea about it cause his stomach didn’t even swell and he wasn’t even showing the usual pregnancy symptoms, he just went to take a dump one day and found a fucking baby that looked identical to him and Lincoln, Bobby asks to move out and tries to keep the birth of the kid a secret from everyone except Lincoln, they keep unknowingly having more kids, thinking the effects of the potion would’ve worn off but it didn’t till their seventh kid, when Lincoln turned eighteen he moved out to go live with bobby and the kids but it didn’t take long for everyone to find out what was going on and be surprised and furious, well furious mostly referring to Mr and Mrs Loud, Lori,Ronnie Anne and the Casagrandes of course. They currently have seven kids though i’m still struggling with whether or not this takes place in the original sin kids AU of the loud house especially since Bobby is supposed to be dead in that AU, Well anyways time to introduce the kids!

LUISA   LOUD, 16 years old

She is sixteen years old but mature for her age. She has a studious, serious and formal personality. She dislikes her buck teeth because she thinks less people might take her seriously because of it. She does smile but it doesn’t happen much. She loves reading adventure/mystery novels and is neat and organized like her father Bobby. She is responsible so she gets easily annoyed with her other sisters’s irresponsibility and she always does her best to please people and abide by rules.

  LILIANA LOUD, 15 years old

A total comic book enthusiast,she does play video games but spends most of her time drawing comics and manga and watching anime. She has anxiety and stutters with her words. She can be kind and sweet but likes saying humorous depressed and suicidal lines from time to time which can most times annoy or creep out her sisters and parents. She is an anti-social shut in with no friends and just like her dad Bobby she is very clingy to people she’s close to. She can’t even imagine a single day without her dads and is very clearly not independent on her own. Her favorite comic book series is Ace Savvy which she likes to read with her dad Lincoln plus she also has a hobby of drawing hentai which she tries to hide from everyone.

   LUPE   LOUD, 14 years old

Lupe is extremely irresponsible, feared by almost all of her sisters and sometimes even her parents!, she is considered to be “that one sibling you just don’t want to fuck with” in the house of the Loud and sees herself as a badass and regularly makes snarky comments . She likes to be on her own with her own private space but is not as anti-social as Lilianna . She gets annoyed easily and regularly yells at her siblings (tho its mostly the younger ones). She is not as petty as to do random shit just to piss people off but she’ll do it if she hates you. She also finds it fun to regularly tease people(not in a sexual way) and also likes to play videogames. Her favorite band is also “SMOOCH” though she can’t play any musical instruments so she just listens to music.She can sometimes be close with her sisters Liliana and Luz.She also regularly swears in spanish.

LUPITA  LOUD, 13 years old

She is as cool as a cucumber and is very level headed and chill like her father and doesn’t really care or get bothered by most things though unlike Bobby she is extremely lazy and mostly spends her time lazing around the house much to Bobby’s disappointment. She sees herself as cool and is also obsessed with being cool . She gets unhappy when she has to do work even if it’s for her own good. Her favorite past time is sleeping, she doesn’t really have any skills and even if she does it’s probably something stupid like being able to make a fart sound with your armpit or being able to get your toe to touch your nose, she also uses the word “dude” in almost every sentence. Her laziness can also annoy her siblings from time to time.

    LUZ     LOUD, 12 years old

(yes she’s inspired from the owl house)

  Luz is the main character of my Lincoln x Bobby AU, she is a very happy go lucky girl and is always optimistic. She is trustworthy of everyone around her which can make her a victim of her sisters’s plans as she is gullible, despite being dimwitted she is very good at making plans to get out of sticky or difficult  situations. She also dreams to be an astronaut when she grows up and likes designing spaceship ideas. Her favorite past time is playing video games with her dad Lincoln though other times she considers Lupa as her gaming partner. Lupa and Luz constantly argue but they have their moments. Luz also reads comics from time to time though only if they have something to do with space.

LORENA   LOUD, 11 years old

Lorena is a very mischeivious girl who is always looking for new ways to piss people off all in the name of getting a reaction, she does this to everybody though her favorite victim is Lupa. She likes to be an annoying asshole to almost everyone and rarely abides by the rules. Her favorite past time is pulling ghost pranks and making fun of people,she finds joy in laughing at others misfortunes,she also makes ghost jokes. She likes reading comics about ghosts and has a big interest for paranormal stuff. She is a big fan of ghostbusters and dreams of being an excorcist when she grows up.She also has a bit of a gothish personality. Just think of her entire personality as that annoying and buggy little sister,yeah thats her.

LUCIANA    LOUD, 10 years old

  Despite her age, her street smarts is on a whole other level. She has a huge interest in business or commerce topics or subjects. She has a calm personality but is most times obnoxious, she also really likes money, especially gaining it. She is known to be a trickster both in the house of the louds and even out in the streets. She helps her dad Bobby to run his store and one day hopes to be a successful businesswoman in the future. Her partner in crime and the one she hangs out the most with is Lorena.

Hope you guys like my idea and the characters!

Content about the characters or my AU will always be appreciated!

The original sin kids AU was inspired by (or atleast i think it was) @liosdoodles , @trillhouse-lh , @patanu102​ , @sadistcshy​ 

This is hands down the most cursed thing i have ever drawn lol.

[secret-engima]

*kicks down door* WHO WANTS TO READ ME RAMBLE/RANT ABOUT THE GRALEA LEVEL IN FFXV AND WHY IT ACTUALLY WAS A GOOD LEVEL AND EVERYONE SHOULD PLAY THE NOCTIS ROUTE AT LEAST ONCE RATHER THAN THE GLADIO ROUTE EVEN THOUGH IT’S TERRIFYING AND FRUSTRATING.

No one?

WELL TOO BAD.

(Unless you haven’t played or watched the game yet and don’t want spoilers in which case TURN AWAY NOW).

...Ahem. *deep breath* Okay so I will forever stand by my opinion that chapter 13 of the game (the one that takes place on the train and then in Gralea) is Good™ and does exactly what it's supposed to in the narrative. That is not to say I don't hate it with a passion and didn't cheer when they added the Gladiolus route for those of us (like me) who didn't want to replay the Noctis route again, but I will stubbornly insist to anyone that wants to listen that the chapter's difficulty and wildly different tone and pacing was THE POINT of the darn thing and deserves some respect for it.

See, the game up to that point is, if not always lighthearted (because it's not), has still been something of an Adventure Story™. Yes there's horrible tragic things like Insomnia falling and Regis dying, but for the most part the gameplay is exploration and cool combat mechanics and the relationship between the four brothers. It's ... happy for a good chunk of it. There's this light at the end of the tunnel, this comfy assurance that there can be a happy ending, that this can all be fixed and tied up in a neat little bow somehow.

Then Altissia happens. Luna dies, Ignis is blinded, and the game puts you on literal rails, forcing you to go hurtling toward A Different Tone. Everyone is stressed, everyone is scared or angry. You’d THINK that this is the lowest point of the story and that surely there’s going to be an emotional reconciliation between Noctis and Gladio and then we’ll get back to exploring and saving the world and all that jazz.

Except we don’t.

The train scene with Ardyn and Shiva happens, and the entire heartbreak with Prompto happens, and that’s when things start to seriously crack. You lose all access to your magic while stuck in this narrow train, then you lose the Regalia, your symbol of freedom, your main way to travel through the game (even when you fast travel, the animation of arrival shows you getting out of the Regalia). You are now trapped in Gralea. In dark, hostile territory with one of your party missing, one of them blind, the other angry at you, and still no magic. Then a few minutes later you are forcibly separated from the rest of your party, the characters you’ve spent all game getting attached to, and leaning on, and laughing with. They are your last anchor points to the brother dynamic that has kept the whole game on a lighter note and now they are GONE. You have none of your weapons or skills, you have no idea where the others are (first time playing the game without spoilers anyway), you have NOTHING. No hope. No backup. No distractions from the fact that, oh yeah, this is a story where the Bad. Guys. Win. Are winning, have won, and all Noctis (all you) can do is take out the Ring that slowly killed Regis, that Luna died for, the thing that represents everything going wrong and all NOCTIS must do to fix it even when he is painfully, woefully unprepared ... and finally put it on. 

Noctis (and by extension you, the player) MUST shoulder the responsibility of being the king of a lost kingdom, of acknowledging that he IS the king, his dad was MURDERED, and Luna was killed for the thing you are now wearing and everything it means. It’s your only option until you eventually find the dead Ravus and take back Regis’s sword toward the middle/end of the level, which you can’t use recklessly because every swing drains your very life-force, forcing the Ring to still be your “best” option in many cases.

Most of that level is spent running, and hiding, and praying that the MT Units on the floor don’t leap up and try to murder you, or that the daemons don’t notice you, or that the teleporting daemon doesn’t find you, or that Ardyn will just SHUT UP because his taunts are really unhelpful right now.

The only hope you have left in this level is to grit your teeth and get through it with the Ring until you can reunite with your brothers and get magic back and go get the Crystal, the mcguffin of this whole game, and put the game back on the normal track of brotherly dynamics and fun quests. Just get to the Crystal, and everything will somehow start going back to normal.

And then that turns out to be a trap too.

Welcome to the final act of a tragedy, and your character is the one living through it. There will be no restoration of the norm until you’ve seen this to its final conclusion. There will be no light save for the one Noctis dies for.

Even when I first played that level (vanilla, not even a day one patch version btw because I was an idiot like that) and hated it because it was terrifying, I never thought it didn't belong in the story like ... quite a few comments I saw on the internet later insisted it didn’t. This is Noctis's story. This is Noctis's tragedy. THIS is the level that strips every last distraction and security blanket and shelter away from him and makes him put on the Ring and thus shoulder everything it represents. There is- terror here, there is trauma, there is GRIEF. This is practically Noctis's headspace without his brothers, because let's not forget that while we the players are having fun fishing and catching frogs for a silly scientist lady, Noctis is a refugee from an empire that MURDERED HIS FATHER and the FATHER OF HIS SHIELD-BROTHER, destroyed his HOME and then, right before Gralea, murdered Luna, the girl who he's known and talked to and confided in via letter for twelve years. This is a world falling into literal darkness (and if the player hadn’t noticed how the daytime cycle in the game kept getting shorter and shorter before this point YOU CERTAINLY NOTICE NOW) and it's up to Noctis- JUST Noctis, ONLY NOCTIS thanks to a Prophecy made long before he was ever born, to somehow Fix It™.

One person. Just one.

And he has to fix ... all of this.

How?

He doesn’t know. During the Gralea level he DOESN’T KNOW. All he (all we) know is that the Crystal is the key, but since the Crystal only answers to Lucis Caelums, that means Noctis is the key, and Noctis (and you the player) is painfully aware of how Not Ready he is.

And the weight of that is enough to render you helpless in the face of it. The fear of that is a maze. The terror of it is a monster following you down the halls that you cannot escape from and cannot kill while it laughs at your misery.

All of that is GRALEA. The capital city of the people who overthrew his home, killed his father, killed his fiancé, and isolated him from the last safety nets he had.

The entirety of chapter 13 isn’t meant to be enjoyed. It’s meant to make you scared. It’s meant to frustrate you and make you feel helpless. It’s meant to make you feel sick when you learn what the daemons and MTs you’ve been killing really are. It’s meant to make you RAGE against Ardyn, and the Empire, and this entire situation because you’re one person and you’re not prepared for this and it’s NOT FAIR and you just want things to go BACK TO THE WAY IT WAS AND ALL OF THIS SUCKS.

Yeah. It does.

And who else do you think feels like that?

Noctis.

Chapter 13 isn’t meant to be fun. It’s meant to make you feel like Noctis does.

And what emotions would you expect from someone who has just lost everything and is expected to fix everything for everyone else, and now has no distractions or shields between him and his grief?

I remember reading an article about “why this chapter failed” and it was basically to the order of “this game is about a fun road trip with your bros and reuniting with your fiancé and chapter 13 breaks away from that too hard” and I respectfully have to disagree.

This story isn’t about a “fun road trip” and it isn’t just about “reuniting with your fiancé”. From the very first cutscene we are told that it’s not in Regis’s desperate (and soon revealed as last) words to his son about setting forth on a journey and not being able to go back. We are told it’s not in the first hour or so when Insomnia burns and Noctis cries and Cor tells us that “in his last moments together he didn’t want to be your king, he wanted to be your father”. How is that a “fun story about a road trip?”. Yes the road trip IS fun for us, and it IS about the brother relationship, but in a large, LARGE part-

Final Fantasy XV is about a young man setting out into the world and facing the hardships of it. It’s about loss. It’s about regrets. It’s about how no matter how much you want them to, some things can never go back to the way they were yet you must keep going anyway. It’s about how the darkness of the world will just keep taking-taking-taking until someone is willing to pay the price to make it stop, and that sometimes a happy ending for the people you love most means giving up your own personal happy ending on their behalf.

Final Fantasy XV never really hid the fact that it was a tragic, bittersweet story.

But it’s in chapter 13 that the story refuses to let you mistake it for anything else any longer.

Could the chapter have been structured a little better so that the gameplay itself wasn’t so frustrating? Probably. I know almost nothing about game design so that’s not really my call. But does the chapter, for all its frustration and anger-inducing inversion of pacing and tone, brutally get the point across?

Maybe it’s just my opinion, but I’d say yes. Yes it does. Because this video game was the one that fully 100% convinced me, in a way that no other video game had before, that the platform could tell heart wrenching stories, could give me characters I would care for, cry over, rage on the behalf of.

And a big part of that clicked for me at the ending, but it likely wouldn’t have if I hadn’t first struggled my way through chapter 13 and all the emotions it causes and represents just like Noctis did.

...

There. I’m done. Thanks for reading my long-suppressed rant on the most hated chapter of FFXV.

[grigori77]

2020 in Movies - My Top 30 Fave Movies (Part 2)

20.  ONWARD – Disney and Pixar’s best digitally animated family feature of 2020 (beating the admittedly impressive Soul to the punch) clearly has a love of fantasy roleplay games like Dungeons & Dragons, its quirky modern-day AU take populated by fantastical races and creatures seemingly tailor-made for the geek crowd … needless to say, me and many of my friends absolutely loved it.  That doesn’t mean that the classic Disney ideals of love, family and believing in yourself have been side-lined in favour of fan-service – this is as heartfelt, affecting and tearful as their previous standouts, albeit with plenty of literal magic added to the metaphorical kind.  The central premise is a clever one – once upon a time, magic was commonplace, but over the years technology came along to make life easier, so that in the present day the various races (elves, centaurs, fauns, pixies, goblins and trolls among others) get along fine without it. Then timid elf Ian Lightfoot (Tom Holland) receives a wizard’s staff for his sixteenth birthday, a bequeathed gift from his father, who died before he was born, with instructions for a spell that could bring him back to life for one whole day.  Encouraged by his brash, over-confident wannabe adventurer elder brother Barley (Chris Pratt), Ian tries it out, only for the spell to backfire, leaving them with the animated bottom half of their father and just 24 hours to find a means to restore the rest of him before time runs out.  Cue an “epic quest” … needless to say, this is another top-notch offering from the original masters of the craft, a fun, affecting and thoroughly infectious family-friendly romp with a winning sense of humour and inspired, flawless world-building.  Holland and Pratt are both fantastic, their instantly believable, ill-at-ease little/big brother chemistry effortlessly driving the story through its ingenious paces, and the ensuing emotional fireworks are hilarious and heart-breaking in equal measure, while there’s typically excellent support from Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Elaine from Seinfeld) as Ian and Barley’s put-upon but supportive mum, Laurel, Octavia Spencer as once-mighty adventurer-turned-restaurateur “Corey” the Manticore and Mel Rodriguez (Getting On, The Last Man On Earth) as overbearing centaur cop (and Laurel’s new boyfriend) Colt Bronco.  The film marks the sophomore feature gig for Dan Scanlon, who debuted with 2013’s sequel Monsters University, and while that was enjoyable enough I ultimately found it non-essential – no such verdict can be levelled against THIS film, the writer-director delivering magnificently in all categories, while the animation team have outdone themselves in every scene, from the exquisite environments and character/creature designs to some fantastic (and frequently delightfully bonkers) set-pieces, while there’s a veritable riot of brilliant RPG in-jokes to delight geekier viewers (gelatinous cube! XD).  Massive, unadulterated fun, frequently hilarious and absolutely BURSTING with Disney’s trademark heart, this was ALMOST my animated feature of the year.  More on that later …

19.  THE GENTLEMEN – Guy Ritchie’s been having a rough time with his last few movies (The Man From UNCLE didn’t do too bad but it wasn’t exactly a hit and was largely overlooked or simply ignored, while intended franchise-starter King Arthur: Legend of the Sword was largely derided and suffered badly on release, dying a quick death financially – it’s a shame on both counts, because I really liked them), so it’s nice to see him having some proper success with his latest, even if he has basically reverted to type to do it.  Still, when his newest London gangster flick is THIS GOOD it seems churlish to quibble – this really is what he does best, bringing together a collection of colourful geezers and shaking up their status quo, then standing back and letting us enjoy the bloody, expletive-riddled results. This particularly motley crew is another winning selection, led by Matthew McConaughey as ruthlessly successful cannabis baron Mickey Pearson, who’s looking to retire from the game by selling off his massive and highly lucrative enterprise for a most tidy sum (some $400,000,000 to be precise) to up-and-coming fellow American ex-pat Matthew Berger (Succession’s Jeremy Strong, oozing sleazy charm), only for local Chinese triad Dry Eye (Crazy Rich Asians’ Henry Golding, chewing the scenery with enthusiasm) to start throwing spanners into the works with the intention of nabbing the deal for himself for a significant discount.  Needless to say Mickey’s not about to let that happen … McConaughey is ON FIRE here, the best he’s been since Dallas Buyers Club in my opinion, clearly having great fun sinking his teeth into this rich character and Ritchie’s typically sparkling, razor-witted dialogue, and he’s ably supported by a quality ensemble cast, particularly co-star Charlie Hunnam as Mickey’s ice-cold, steel-nerved right-hand-man Raymond Smith, Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery as his classy, strong-willed wife Rosalind, Colin Farrell as a wise-cracking, quietly exasperated MMA trainer and small-time hood simply known as the Coach (who gets many of the film’s best lines), and, most notably, Hugh Grant as the film’s nominal narrator, thoroughly morally bankrupt private investigator Fletcher, who consistently steals the film.  This is Guy Ritchie at his very best – a twisty rug-puller of a plot that constantly leaves you guessing, brilliantly observed and richly drawn characters you can’t help loving in spite of the fact there’s not a single hero among them, a deliciously unapologetic, politically incorrect sense of humour and a killer soundtrack.  Getting the cinematic year off to a phenomenal start, it’s EASILY Ritchie’s best film since Sherlock Holmes, and a strong call-back to the heady days of Snatch (STILL my favourite) and Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels.  Here’s hoping he’s on a roll again, eh?

18.  SPONTANEOUS – one of the year’s biggest under-the-radar surprise hits for me was one which I actually might not have caught if things had been a little more normal and ordered.  Thankfully with all the lockdown and cinematic shutdown bollocks going on, this fantastically subversive and deeply satirical indie teen comedy horror came along at the perfect time, and I completely flipped out over it.  Now those who know me know I don’t tend to gravitate towards teen cinema, but like all those other exceptions I’ve loved over the years, this one had a brilliantly compulsive hook I just couldn’t turn down – small-town high-schooler Mara (Knives Out and Netflix’ Cursed’s Katherine Langford) is your typical cool outsider kid, smart, snarky and just putting up with the scene until she can graduate and get as far away as possible … until one day in her senior year one of her classmates just inexplicably explodes. Like her peers, she’s shocked and she mourns, then starts to move on … until it happens again.  As the death toll among the senior class begins to mount, it becomes clear something weird is going on, but Mara has other things on her mind because the crisis has, for her, had an unexpected benefit – without it she wouldn’t have fallen in love with like-minded oddball new kid Dylan (Lean On Pete and Words On Bathroom Walls’ Charlie Plummer). The future’s looking bright, but only if they can both live to see it … this is a wickedly intelligent film, powered by a skilfully executed script and a wonderfully likeable young cast who consistently steer their characters around the potential cliched pitfalls of this kind of cinema, while debuting writer-director Brian Duffield (already a rising star thanks to scripts for Underwater, The Babysitter and blacklist darling Jane Got a Gun among others) show he’s got as much talent and flair for crafting truly inspired cinema as he has for thinking it up in the first place, delivering some impressively offbeat set-pieces and several neat twists you frequently don’t see coming ahead of time.  Langford and Plummer as a sassy, spicy pair who are easy to root for without ever getting cloying or sweet, while there’s glowing support from the likes of Hayley Law (Rioverdale, Altered Carbon, The New Romantic) as Mara’s best friend Tess, Piper Perabo and Transparent’s Rob Huebel as her increasingly concerned parents, and Insecure’s Yvonne Orji as Agent Rosetti, the beleaguered government employee sent to spearhead the investigation into exactly what’s happening to these kids.  Quirky, offbeat and endlessly inventive, this is one of those interesting instances where I’m glad they pushed the horror elements into the background so we could concentrate on the comedy, but more importantly these wonderfully well-realised and vital characters – there are some skilfully executed shocks, but far more deep belly laughs, and there’s bucketloads of heart to eclipse the gore.  Another winning debut from a talent I intend to watch with great interest in the future.

17.  HAMILTON – arriving just as Black Lives Matter reached fever-pitch levels, this feature presentation of the runaway Broadway musical smash-hit could not have been better timed. Shot over three nights during the show’s 2016 run with the original cast and cut together with specially created “setup shots”, it’s an immersive experience that at once puts you right in amongst the audience (at times almost a character themselves, never seen but DEFINITELY heard) but also lets you experience the action up close.  And what action – it’s an incredible show, a thoroughly fascinating piece of work that reads like something very staid and proper on paper (an all-encompassing biographical account of the life and times of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton) but, in execution, becomes something very different and EXTREMELY vital.  The execution certainly couldn’t be further from the usual period biopic fare this kind of historical subject matter usually gets (although in the face of recent high quality revisionist takes like Marie Antoinette, The Great and Tesla it’s not SO surprising), while the cast is not at all what you’d expect – with very few notable exceptions the cast is almost entirely people of colour, despite the fact that the real life individuals they’re playing were all very white indeed.  Every single one of them is also an absolute revelation – the show’s writer-composer Lin-Manuel Miranda (already riding high on the success of In the Heights) carries the central role of Hamilton with effortless charm and raw star power, Leslie Odom Jr. (Smash, Murder On the Orient Express) is duplicitously complex as his constant nemesis Aaron Burr, Christopher Jackson (In the Heights, Moana, Bull) oozes integrity and nobility as his mentor and friend George Washington, Phillipa Soo is sweet and classy as his wife Eliza while Renée Elise Goldsberry (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Jacks, Altered Carbon) is fiery and statuesque as her sister Angelica Schuyler (the one who got away), and Jonathan Groff (Mindhunter) consistently steals every scene he’s in as fiendish yet childish fan favourite King George III, but the show (and the film) ultimately belongs to veritable powerhouse Daveed Diggs (Blindspotting, The Good Lord Bird) in a spectacular duel role, starting subtly but gaining scene-stealing momentum as French Revolutionary Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, before EXPLODING onto the stage in the second half as indomitable third American President Thomas Jefferson.  Not having seen the stage show, I was taken completely by surprise by this, revelling in its revisionist genius and offbeat, quirky hip-hop charm, spellbound by the skilful ease with which is takes the sometimes quite dull historical fact and skews it into something consistently entertaining and absorbing, transported by the catchy earworm musical numbers and thoroughly tickled by the delightfully cheeky sense of humour strung throughout (at least when I wasn’t having my heart broken by moments of raw dramatic power). Altogether it’s a pretty unique cinematic experience I wish I could have actually gotten to see on the big screen, and one I’ve consistently recommended to all my friends, even the ones who don’t usually like musicals.  As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t need a proper Les Misérables style screen adaptation – this is about as perfect a presentation as the show could possibly hope for.

16.  SPUTNIK – summer’s horror highlight (despite SERIOUSLY tough competition) was a guaranteed sleeper hit that I almost missed entirely, stumbling across the trailer one day on YouTube and getting bowled over by its potential, prompting me to hunt it down by any means necessary.  The feature debut of Russian director Egor Abramenko, this first contact sci-fi chiller is about as far from E.T. as it’s possible to get, sharing some of the same DNA as Carpenter’s The Thing but proudly carving its own path with consummate skill and definitely signalling great things to come from its brand new helmer and relative unknown screenwriters Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev.  Oksana Akinshina (probably best known in the West for her powerful climactic cameo in The Bourne Supremacy) is the beating heart of the film as neurophysiologist Tatyana Yuryevna Klimova, brought in to aid in the investigation in the Russian wilderness circa 1983 after an orbital research mission goes horribly wrong.  One of the cosmonauts dies horribly, while the other, Konstantin (The Duelist’s Pyotr Fyodorov) seems unharmed, but it quickly becomes clear that he’s now the host for something decidedly extraterrestrial and potentially terrifying, and as Tatyana becomes more deeply embroiled in her assignment she comes to realise that her superiors, particularly mysterious Red Army project leader Colonel Semiradov (The PyraMMMid’s Fyodor Bondarchuk), have far more insidious plans for Konstantin and his new “friend” than she could ever imagine. This is about as dark, intense and nightmarish as this particular sub-genre gets, a magnificently icky body horror that slowly builds its tension as we’re gradually exposed to the various truths and the awful gravity of the situation slowly reveals itself, punctuated by skilfully executed shocks and some particularly horrifying moments when the evils inflicted by the humans in charge prove far worse than anything the alien can do, while the ridiculously talented writers have a field day pulling the rug out from under us again and again, never going for the obvious twist and keeping us guessing right to the devastating ending, while the beautifully crafted digital creature effects are nothing short of astonishing and thoroughly creepy.  Akinshina dominates the film with her unbridled grace, vulnerability and integrity, the relationship that develops between Tatyana and Konstantin (Fyodorov delivering a beautifully understated turn belying deep inner turmoil) feeling realistically earned as it goes from tentatively wary to tragically bittersweet, while Bondarchuk invests the Colonel with a nuanced air of tarnished authority and restrained brutality that made him one of my top screen villains for the year.  One of 2020’s great sleeper hits, I can’t speak of this film highly enough – it’s a genuine revelation, an instant classic for whom I’ll sing its praises for years to come, and I wish enormous future success to all the creative talents involved.

15.  THE INVISIBLE MAN – looks like third time’s a charm for Leigh Whannell, writer-director of my ALMOST horror movie of the year (more on that later) – while he’s had immense success as a horror writer over the years (co-creator of both the Saw and Insidious franchises), as a director his first two features haven’t exactly set the world alight, with debut Insidious: Chapter III garnering similar takes to the rest of the series but ultimately turning out to be a bit of a damp squib quality-wise, while his second feature Upgrade was a stone-cold masterpiece that was (rightly) EXTREMELY well received critically, but ultimately snuck in under the radar and has remained a stubbornly hidden gem since. No such problems with his third feature, though – his latest collaboration with producer Jason Blum and the insanely lucrative Blumhouse Pictures has proven a massive hit both financially AND with reviewers, and deservedly so.  Having given up on trying to create a shared cinematic universe inhabited by their classic monsters, Universal resolved to concentrate on standalones to showcase their elite properties, and their first try is a rousing success, Whannell bringing HG Wells’ dark and devious human monster smack into the 21st Century as only he can.  The result is a surprisingly subtle piece of work, much more a lethally precise exercise in cinematic sleight of hand and extraordinary acting than flashy visual effects, strictly adhering to the Blumhouse credo of maximum returns for minimum bucks as the story is stripped down to its bare essentials and allowed to play out without any unnecessary weight.  The Handmaid’s Tale’s Elizabeth Moss once again confirms what a masterful actress she is as she brings all her performing weapons to bear in the role of Cecelia “Cee” Kass, the cloistered wife of affluent but monstrously abusive optics pioneer Aidan Griffin (Netflix’ The Haunting of Hill House’s Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who escapes his clutches in the furiously tense opening sequence and goes to ground with the help of her closest childhood friend, San Francisco cop James Lanier (Leverage’s Aldis Hodge) and his teenage daughter Sydney (A Wrinkle in Time’s Storm Reid).  Two weeks later, Aidan commits suicide, leaving Cee with a fortune to start her life over (with the proviso that she’s never ruled mentally incompetent), but as she tries to find her way in the world again little things start going wrong for her, and she begins to question if there might be something insidious going on.  As her nerves start to unravel, she begins to suspect that Aidan is still alive, still very much in her life, fiendishly toying with her and her friends, but no-one can see him.  Whannell plays her paranoia up for all it’s worth, skilfully teasing out the scares so that, just like her friends, we begin to wonder if it might all be in her head after all, before a spectacular mid-movie reveal throws the switch into high gear and the true threat becomes clear.  The lion’s share of the film’s immense success must of course go to Moss – her performance is BEYOND a revelation, a blistering career best that totally powers the whole enterprise, and it goes without saying that she’s the best thing in this.  Even so, she has sterling support from Hodge and Reid, as well as Love Child’s Harriet Dyer as Cee’s estranged big sister Emily and Wonderland’s Michael Dorman as Adrian’s slimy, spineless lawyer brother Tom, and, while he doesn’t have much actual (ahem) “screen time”, Jackson-Cohen delivers a fantastically icy, subtly malevolent turn which casts a large “shadow” over the film.  This is one of my very favourite Blumhouse films, a pitch-perfect psychological chiller that keeps the tension cranked up unbearably tight and never lets go, Whannell once again displaying uncanny skill with expert jump-scares, knuckle-whitening chills and a truly astounding standout set-piece that easily goes down as one of the top action sequences of 2020. Undoubtedly the best version of Wells’ story to date, this goes a long way in repairing the damage of Universal’s abortive “Dark Universe” efforts, as well as showcasing a filmmaking master at the very height of his talents.

14.  EXTRACTION – the Coronavirus certainly has threw a massive spanner in the works of the year’s cinematic calendar – among many other casualties to the blockbuster shunt, the latest (and most long-awaited) MCU movie, Black Widow, should have opened to further record-breaking box office success at the end of spring, but instead the theatres were all closed and virtually all the heavyweights were pushed back or shelved indefinitely.  Thank God, then, for the streaming services, particularly Hulu, Amazon and Netflix, the latter of which provided a perfect movie for us to see through the key transition into the summer blockbuster season, an explosively flashy big budget action thriller ushered in by MCU alumni the Russo Brothers (who produced and co-wrote this adaptation of Ciudad, a graphic novel that Joe Russo co-created with Ande Parks and Fernando Leon Gonzalez) and barely able to contain the sheer star-power wattage of its lead, Thor himself.  Chris Hemsworth plays Tyler Rake, a former Australian SAS operative who hires out his services to an extraction operation under the command of mercenary Nik Khan (The Patience Stone’s Golshifteh Farahani), brought in to liberate Ovi Mahajan (Rudhraksh Jaiswal in his first major role), the pre-teen son of incarcerated Indian crime lord Ovi Sr. (Pankaj Tripathi), who has been abducted by Bangladeshi rival Amir Asif (Priyanshu Painyuli).  The rescue itself goes perfectly, but when the time comes for the hand-off the team is double-crossed and Tyler is left stranded in the middle of Dhaka with no choice but to keep Ovi alive as every corrupt cop and street gang in the city closes in around them.  This is the feature debut of Sam Hargrave, the latest stuntman to try his hand at directing, so he certainly knows his way around an action set-piece, and the result is a thoroughly breathless adrenaline rush of a film, bursting at the seams with spectacular fights, gun battles and car chases, dominated by a stunning sustained sequence that plays out in one long shot, guaranteed to leave jaws lying on the floor.  Not that there should be any surprise – Hargrave cut his teeth as a stunt coordinator for the Russos on Captain America: Civil War and their Avengers films.  That said, he displays strong talent for the quieter disciplines of filmmaking too, delivering quality character development and drawing out consistently noteworthy performances from his cast.  Of course, Hemsworth can do the action stuff in his sleep, but there’s a lot more to Tyler than just his muscle, the MCU veteran investing him with real wounded vulnerability and a tragic fatalism which colours every scene, while Jaiswal is exceptional throughout, showing plenty of promise for the future, and there’s strong support from Farahani and Painyuli, as well as Stranger Things’ David Harbour as world-weary retired merc Gaspard, and a particularly impressive, muscular turn from Randeep Hooda (Once Upon a Time in Mumbai) as Saju, a former Para and Ovi’s bodyguard, who’s determined to take possession of the boy himself, even if he has to go through Tyler to get him.  This is action cinema that really deserves to be seen on the big screen – I watched it twice in a week and would happily have paid for two trips to the cinema for it if I could have.  As we looked down the barrel of a summer season largely devoid of blockbuster fare, I couldn’t recommend this enough.  Thank the gods for Netflix …

13.  THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 – although it’s definitely a film that really benefitted enormously from releasing on Netflix during the various lockdowns, this was one of the blessed few I actually got to see during one of the UK’s frustratingly rare lulls when cinemas were actually OPEN.  Rather perversely it therefore became one of my favourite cinematic experiences of 2020, but then I’m just as much a fan of well-made cerebral films as I am of the big, immersive blockbuster EXPERIENCES, so this probably still would have been a standout in a normal year. Certainly if this was a purely CRITICAL list for the year this probably would have placed high in the Top Ten … Aaron Sorkin is a writer whose work I have ardently admired ever since he went from esteemed playwright to in-demand talent for both the big screen AND the small with A Few Good Men, and TTOTC7 is just another in a long line of consistently impressive, flawlessly written works rife with addictive quickfire dialogue, beautifully observed characters and rewardingly propulsive narrative storytelling (therefore resting comfortably amongst the well-respected likes of The West Wing, Charlie Wilson’s War, Moneyball and The Social Network).  It also marks his second feature as a director (after fascinating and incendiary debut Molly’s Game), and once again he’s gone for true story over fiction, tackling the still controversial subject of the infamous 1968 trial of the “ringleaders” of the infamous riots which marred Chicago’s Diplomatic National Convention five months earlier, in which thousands of hippies and college students protesting the Vietnam War clashed with police.  Spurred on by the newly-instated Presidential Administration of Richard Nixon to make some examples, hungry up-and-coming prosecutor Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is confident in his case, while the Seven – who include respected and astute student activist Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and confrontational counterculture firebrands Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Succession’s Jeremy Strong) – are the clear underdogs.  They’re a divided bunch (particularly Hayden and Hoffman, who never mince their words about what little regard they hold for each other), and they’re up against the combined might of the U.S. Government, while all they have on their side is pro-bono lawyer and civil rights activist William Kunstler (Mark Rylance), who’s sharp, driven and thoroughly committed to the cause but clearly massively outmatched … not to mention the fact that the judge presiding over the case is Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella), a fierce and uncompromising conservative who’s clearly 100% on the Administration’s side, and who might in fact be stark raving mad (he also frequently goes to great lengths to make it clear to all concerned that he is NOT related to Abbie).  Much as we’ve come to expect from Sorkin, this is cinema of grand ideals and strong characters, not big spectacle and hard action, and all the better for it – he’s proved time and again that he’s one of the very best creative minds in Hollywood when it comes to intelligent, thought-provoking and engrossing thinking-man’s entertainment, and this is pure par for the course, keeping us glued to the screen from the skilfully-executed whirlwind introductory montage to the powerfully cathartic climax, and every varied and brilliant scene in-between.  This is heady stuff, focusing on what’s still an extremely thorny issue made all the more urgently relevant and timely given what was (and still is) going on in American politics at the time, and everyone involved here was clearly fully committed to making the film as palpable, powerful and resonant as possible for the viewer, no matter their nationality or political inclination.  Also typical for a Sorkin film, the cast are exceptional, everyone clearly having the wildest time getting their teeth into their finely-drawn characters and that magnificent dialogue – Redmayne and Baron Cohen are compellingly complimentary intellectual antagonists given their radically different approaches and their roles’ polar opposite energies, while Rylance delivers another pitch-perfect, simply ASTOUNDING performance that once again marks him as one of the very best actors of his generation, and there are particularly meaty turns from Strong, Langella, Aquaman’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (as besieged Black Panther Bobby Seale) and a potent late appearance from Michael Keaton that sear themselves into the memory long after viewing. Altogether then, this is a phenomenal film which deserves to be seen no matter the format, a thought-provoking and undeniably IMPORTANT masterwork from a master cinematic storyteller that says as much about the world we live in now as the decidedly turbulent times it portrays …

12.  GREYHOUND – when the cinemas closed back in March, the fate of many of the major summer blockbusters we’d been looking forward to was thrown into terrible doubt. Some were pushed back to more amenable dates in the autumn or winter (which even then ultimately proved frustratingly ambitious), others knocked back a whole year to fill summer slots for 2021, but more than a few simply dropped off the radar entirely with the terrible words “postponed until further notice” stamped on them, and I lamented them all, this one in particular.  It hung in there longer than some, stubbornly holding onto its June release slot for as long as possible, but eventually it gave up the ghost too … but thanks to Apple TV+, not for long, ultimately releasing less than a month later than intended.  Thankfully the film itself was worth the fuss, a taut World War II suspense thriller that’s all killer, no filler – set during the infamous Battle of the Atlantic, it portrays the constant life-or-death struggle faced by the Allied warships assigned to escort the transport convoys as they crossed the ocean, defending their charges from German U-boats.  Adapted from C.S. Forester’s famous 1955 novel The Good Shepherd by Tom Hanks and directed by Aaron Schneider (Get Low), the narrative focuses on the crew of the escort leader, American destroyer USS Fletcher, codenamed “Greyhound”, and in particular its captain, Commander Ernest Krause (Hanks), a career sailor serving his first command.  As they cross “the Pit”, the most dangerous middle stretch of the journey where they spend days without air-cover, they find themselves shadowed by “the Wolf Pack”, a particularly cunning group of German submarines that begin to pick away at the convoy’s stragglers.  Faced with daunting odds, a dwindling supply of vital depth-charges and a ruthless, persistent enemy, Krause must make hard choices to bring his ships home safe … jumping into the thick of the action within the first ten minutes and maintaining its tension for the remainder of the trim 90-minute run, this is screen suspense par excellence, a sleek textbook example of how to craft a compelling big screen knuckle-whitener with zero fat and maximum reward, delivering a series of desperate naval scraps packed with hide-and-seek intensity, heart-in-mouth near-misses and fist-in-air cathartic payoffs by the bucket-load.  Hanks is subtly magnificent, the calm centre of the narrative storm as a supposed newcomer to this battle arena who could have been BORN for it, bringing to mind his similarly unflappable in Captain Phillips and certainly not suffering by comparison; by and large he’s the focus point, but other crew members make strong (if sometimes quite brief) impressions, particularly Stephen Graham as Krause’s reliably seasoned XO, Lt. Commander Charlie Cole, The Magnificent Seven’s Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Just Mercy’s Rob Morgan, while Elisabeth Shue does a lot with a very small part in brief flashbacks as Krause’s fiancée Evelyn. Relentless, exhilarating and thoroughly unforgettable, this was one of the true action highlights of the summer, and one hell of a war flick.  I’m so glad it made the cut for the summer …

11.  PROJECT POWER – with Marvel and DC pushing their tent-pole titles back in the face of COVID, the usual superhero antics we’ve come to expect for the summer were pretty thin on the ground in 2020, leading us to find our geeky fan thrills elsewhere. Unfortunately, pickings were frustratingly slim – Korean comic book actioner Gundala was entertaining but workmanlike, while Thor AU Mortal was underwhelming despite strong direction from Troll Hunter’s André Øvredal, and The New Mutants just got shat on by the studio and its distributors and no mistake – thank the Gods, then, for Netflix, once again riding to the rescue with this enjoyably offbeat super-thriller, which takes an intriguing central premise and really runs with it.  New designer drug Power has hit the streets of New Orleans, able to give anyone who takes it a superpower for five minutes … the only problem is, until you try it, you don’t know what your own unique talent is – for some, it could mean five minutes of invisibility, or insane levels of super-strength, but other powers can be potentially lethal, the really unlucky buggers just blowing up on the spot.  Robin (The Hate U Give’s Dominique Fishback) is a teenage Power-pusher with dreams of becoming a rap star, dealing the pills so she can help her diabetic mum; Frank Shaver (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is one of her customers, a police detective who uses his power of near invulnerability to even the playing field when supercharged crims cause a disturbance.  Their lives are turned upside down when Art (Jamie Foxx) arrives in town – he’s a seriously badass ex-soldier determined to hunt down the source of Power by any means necessary, and he’s not above tearing the Big Easy apart to do it. This is a fun, gleefully infectious rollercoaster that doesn’t take itself too seriously, revelling in the anarchic potential of its premise and crafting some suitably OTT effects-driven chaos brought to pleasingly visceral fruition by its skilfully inventive director, Ariel Schulman (Catfish, Nerve, Viral), while Mattson Tomlin (the screenwriter of the DCEU’s oft-delayed, incendiary headline act The Batman) takes the story in some very interesting directions and poses fascinating questions about what Power’s TRULY capable of.  Gordon-Levitt and Fishback are both brilliant, the latter particularly impressing in what’s sure to be a major breakthrough role for her, and the friendship their characters share is pretty adorable, while Foxx really is a force to be reckoned with, pretty chill even when he’s in deep shit but fully capable of turning into a bona fide killing machine at the flip of a switch, and there’s strong support from Westworld’s Rodrigo Santoro as Biggie, Power’s delightfully oily kingpin, Courtney B. Vance as Frank’s by-the-book superior, Captain Crane, Amy Landecker as Gardner, the morally bankrupt CIA spook responsible for the drug’s production, and Machine Gun Kelly as Newt, a Power dealer whose pyrotechnic “gift” really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Exciting, inventive, frequently amusing and infectiously likeable, this was some of the most uncomplicated cinematic fun I had all summer.  Not bad for something which I’m sure was originally destined to become one of the season’s B-list features …