#it’s not like there aren’t people who WANT to make this stuff just execs who don’t wanna pay for it

[the-peculiar-bi-tch]

CW: extreme transphobia, political violence, Don't Say Gay, trans genocide, 2024 election

I was made aware today of the GOP's "Mandate for Leadership" document today, which is a giant policy wishlist for conservatives and business execs for the first 180 days of a Republican presidential election victory in 2024. What they want is beyond extreme. This article from Dame Magazine covers it, and I'll put it below the break because it really is as bad as the CW makes it out to be. tldr, conservatives quite literally want all trans people locked up or dead, if you're an adult in the U.S. and can vote, vote blue no matter who. idc what arguments you make, you vote blue to stop this from happening.

Conservatives are trying to build off the anti-woke culture war that has proven broadly unpopular and has shot the leg off DeSantis' campaign. Some of the biggest conservatives policy orgs and think tanks are pushing this and it is the most threatening, unconstitutional shit imaginable.

They are fully embracing the "unitary executive theory", where the president has total power over the executive department and its agencies (anything labelled "Department," the EPA, etc) with no Congressional oversight whatsoever. It's a ridiculous, flatly illegal doctrine to try and act within, but conservatives have shown they do not care about the law and are going to do whatever the hell they want if they can. They want to use this total power over the executive branch to politically influence the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the courts into prosecuting political enemies (revenge for grand juries charging Trump with well over 100 felonies over crimes he provably committed) and forcing blue states to turn over all trans people they are sheltering for prosecution. Prosecution of what? Anything. Sex crimes applied to trans people existing in public, whether in person or online, because "what if a minor sees this perversion?"

States like California and Maryland have enacted safe harbor laws, meaning any trans people fleeing a red state, say, Texas, will not be extradited back to Texas for wearing makeup around a child. It means that these states will not recognize efforts by other states to essentially kidnap trans people. This document shows that conservatives want to use a political DOJ to threaten district attorneys in those states into turning over any and all trans people they're harboring. Stuff like this would be made way easier with KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act, S.1409), requiring Internet service providers to share a lot for personal data with the federal government. The Republican Senator who introduced it, Blackburn, has said it would be used to target trans people. While I have reached out to both my senators about this and Warnock and Ossoff have both told me they are no votes, it's still far too widely supported in the Senate. (Btw fuck Sen. Blumenthal, he's been on this anti-privacy bent for years and I hope he gets primaried and made completely irrelevant just for introducing this bill.)

What does this mean for trans people in 2024? Simple. If you value trans rights, and you are eligible to vote in the U.S., vote for the Democratic Party.

Greens stand less of a chance in defeating any Republican presidential nominee than I stand swimming across the Pacific. 2024 cannot be a "I don't like either party" election, it cannot be a "both sides" election because while I curse Blumenthal and other Democrats for going along with stuff like KOSA, they are not actively genocidal and many rail against the attacks people like DeSantis and MTG have levied against us. This cannot be a "let's just do a revolution" election cycle because yeah you're just going to organize a proletarian revolution in 400 days, overthrow the U.S. government, and install a functioning proletarian-focused queer-protecting government without it immediately backfiring from any number of potential fuckups that come with revolution.

Vote Democrat. Tell your friends to vote Democrat. Vote down the ballot. Phone bank, canvas, hell join a campaign. I made calls in 2020 with a nonprofit to get out votes for GA senate runoffs, those orgs were vital in those campaigns. When it comes to political pragmatism for this issue, the 2024 presidential election is the best way to affect the change we want.

Trans people cannot have our rights stripped this completely from us because a few hundred thousand people in a few key states go "oh yeah I like cornell west, my vote doesn't matter anyways so what's the harm voting third-party?"

“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

There's your fucking harm.

[voidsentprinces]

FFXIV feels like a weird tv series in terms of how I feel about each expansion

1.0 is the pilot season that people agree was bad but there was charm to it. It had its moments and if given a better writing staff and perhaps more budget. It could of been something great. But the season’s cancelled now so we’ll just have to post on the forums about missing its charms.

ARR feels like the reluctant second season after they got cancelled after the first season. It airs on SciFi (or however the fuck they’re spelling it nowadays) at a 1am dead block in hopes to never see it again. Its rough around the edges, the writing has some spots to be desired, the costuming is iffy but functional and all it all it becomes a cult classic.

Post-ARR is a lost season, extra materials, some unconnected filler but a few episodes that actually link back and boy does the finale really shake things up. Causing a massive fandom to grow around it and pester executives for a third season.

Heavensward is the return of the king. Final Fantasy XIV is back, it has budget, production, and cast and man with the special effects blow you out of the fucking water. After the Post-HW you hear stories about the cast loving their time on set and with the directors and really getting invested in the “characters”.

Stormblood is the unlucky season which has big shoes to fill cause its coming up after Heavensward and like thats like being the Dark Knight Rises after the Dark Knight right? And while it comes close to Heavensward. Some studio heads got involved and wanted to change stuff up because they saw another TV show do it and thats super popular so why don’t we do that? It returns to being a bit rough around the edges but the new villains really are here to chew the scenery and be memorable as all get out.

Post-SB is uneasy, it feels like the execs aren’t happy it didn’t bring in billions like the Heavensward Season did. Some actors go on to different projects and its really up in the air where its going to go. Are we going to stay in Ala Mhigo? Are we going to stay in Doma? Going to Garlemald is on the table. And this new Solus character just seems like Lahabrea but then BAM! The Call Episode happens and everyone is fucking LOSING THEIR GODDAMN MINDS! There are leaked trailer footage online and Y’shtola is now Master Matoya, Urianger is half naked and IS THANCRED WIELDING A GUNBLADE?! WHAT THE FUCK!?

Shadowbringers hits and it is the best thing on television since sliced bread. Everyone is invested, the budget is back, the writing hits hard, the Solus character is changed and given new dimension. Everyone is up in arms about fist fighting Thancred over his initial treatment of Ryne. There’s fan art of Runar and Y’shtola even though the actors are just good friends. And that Finale? Holy shit. There is some sleeper episodes like the second Amh Araeng arc but the emotional pay off of seeing Minfilia return for a last cameo is well received.

Post-Shadowbringers is making the most of the new world sets. Tying up lose ends, here and there. Setting up the next big bad with this Fandaniel dude and Zenos being back by fandom demand. But the mid-season finale has everyone hooked, I mean after the Seat of Sacrifice arc, who can top that?

Endwalker hits, a love letter season. Some stuff feels overtly long, like was an entire half an episode necessary to show extras turning into monsters. But the baby rescue episodes has people emotionally invested, the loporitts are beloved, everyone loses their shit that Zodiark is introduce and fought only like five episodes into a 24 episode season. Speculation flies left and right and then they get the Elpis and the Ancientsona Fandom from Shadowbringers’ initial season is reignited. People are getting into fights whether to fight or protect Meteion and everyone cries at the finale of the Ultima Thule arc.

Now we’re in the after season of Endwalker, its had sort of monster of the week villains. We’ve seen some cool set design in the Thirteenth Shard and this Golbez character seems like a stand in until they figure out what to do next. But everyone is absolutely LOVING this Zero character. Nidhana’s fandom is also reignited. And there is some debate over Vrtra and his avatars but everyone is also absolutely losing their shit on whats going down in Pandaemonium and with the Twelve. Though its getting close to the end of the season and people are wondering where we’re off to next.

...if that makes any fucking sense whatsoever.

[perelka-l]

When I say “through the wringer”, I guess I’m referring to things that may have happened pre-Team Rocket. I actually picture Proton functioning through a good chunk of like..dissociative amnesia? I’m still figuring out exactly how I want to write his backstory, but I know I want him to have gone through A WHOLE ORDEAL before joining Team Rocket…something that he wants to get a leg-up on, through just…chasing power, and making everyone as scared of him as possible. Which he’s Clearly pretty good at, but not when it comes to the higher ups (gio, other execs etc.) which ironically, is like..his key social group.

This isn’t to make him super sympathetic, or a “poor little meow meow” or anything. He’s ruthless and operating from a place where his brain doesn’t even remember all that tortured “backstory” stuff. On a typical day he’s having a GREAT, EVIL TIME. I just like the idea that his whole “scary, cruel” shtick is set on a foundation of others being scary and cruel to him first, and now he’s HELLBENT on flipping the script in his adulthood. I picture him with a hair-trigger temper when things aren’t going his way. Another reason he might lowkey resent/envy Giovanni, who he still has to obey if he wants to get away with anything (and like you said, be protected!).

Also, fully on the same page with you that Proton hasn’t thought through all the responsibilities that would come with Being Giovanni. It’s definitely just the principle.

(I fully agree with you on Proton being the youngest + Petrel the eldest + I HC Petrel being ~18 when Madame boss passed, but had never considered him working for her, that is a fUN thought. In my HC timeline he wasn’t in TR at that point, but now I’m rethinking it because the idea of Petrel knowing Giovanni AND his mother is jkfdl;a)

Whoa, that's an elaborate hc!

I enjoy the thought that TR preys on people that don't have where to go, people that don't quite fit in in all wrong ways. With amnesiac Proton and his violent tendencies, he'd fit just right in. Though I would argue that at least that key social group would allow him to exact it in ways that would satisfy him.

Your description reminded me of another kink meme Fic (which I don't feel like searching, I am sure I didn't save the link) in which a female grunt is like nah, he's pretty, most likely misunderstood, he definitely ain't that horrible! (Spoiler: he's worse.) I can see how him desiring to be cruel and be perceived even as cruel specifically could stem from some sort of trauma from past. I also find it interesting that it extends in a way towards Pokemon as well.

I suppose he is still young and a pretty dumb and maybe isn't entirely sure why and what drives him to such behaviors. He just knows what satisfies him, and for him Giovanni seems like he's in a place that could satisfy him as well. And Giovanni maybe is aware and just treats him a little like a useful kid, a predictable tool. Something about leaving a message, haha. Giovanni is pretty sure as well that Proton won't hurt him. Not that he wouldn't, just the he is not capable of doing so even if he wished.

Tbh I didn't consider that idea at all until I wrote it and now I can cling to it like a deranged baby uwu I also now had an idea with Petrel and with TR changing hands so to speak. I can imagine that young Giovanni definitely did some reforms and rearranged people inside the organisation. I now wonder about Petrel being forced to prove himself and his loyalty to Gio (or else-)

[crystalelemental]

“megazardx2: That’s the “beautiful” thing about capitalism. It really doesn’t matter if a company is making a profit, or if their losses aren’t that bad; they’ll always look for ways to make an even  BIGGER profit or not suffer any losses. There’s no such thing as “good enough.”“

No, I get that.  I’m saying they’re doing it wrong.

“Also, capitalism and art are like oil and water; they don’t mix, no matter how much we pretend they do. Look at Scarlet and Violet, for example. A game with tons of love poured in from the actual creative people at Game Freak, only to be neutered by executives who wanted it out by a certain time because $$$.

So while Variety Scouts may be boring from an artistic perspective, if they make enough bank relative to the minimal amount of effort spent on them, then you bet DeNA’s execs will gravitate towards them over Seasonals or Special Costumes, which require more time and effort. It’s f***ed, is what it is, but unless artistic quality correlates to money gained, the quality will be sacrificed every single time. TL;DR: I agree with you, but I don’t think the Giovanni expys running DeNA would. (Sorry if I got too political.)  (I’ve been REALLY angry about capitalism stifling the potential of media lately.)”

You’re fine.  You’re not wrong.  But what I’m saying is, the avoidance of loss is not growth, and the tech industry fucking loves growth, so this feels antithetical to their objective and is going about it in a way that isn’t actually maximizing profit.

Consider the following:

People hate the Variety Scouts, and in almost all situations, the broad majority of players skip.  In fact, many people skip most banners due to high spark threshold, so seasonal and even many PokeFair options are ignored too.

People want more general pool additions, but conventional wisdom is never scout for general pool, so limited scouts make better money.

Popular characters are the most consistent means of generating profit, and people don’t like it when popular characters are “Spammed.”  But they’ll still pull.

From this, we can make a few suggestions when you dig into the specific problem:

#1: People Skip Most Stuff This is a two-parter, the first being just...spark.  Spark is expensive.  Spark is more gems than you get for free in an entire month.  On average, you get maybe 8 pairs a year, and you desperately need to make them count.  As the game flatlines on what can be done at the top, many players are looking at things and saying hey, I have a good [insert type here] Striker for CS, and can get my ten wins in Gauntlet okay.  I don’t need new stuff.

The simple solution is powercreep being mandatory, but that will kill the game.  Like, people will not respond well.  It’ll likely make profit, but the culture around it will stagnate.  They seem invested in avoiding this for the moment, and instead look to practical solutions like the limited CS, High Score, etc.

Another solution is lowering the damned spark threshold.  I’m dead serious, I have every faith that people would be more inclined to spend a bit if it had more clear-cut results, but the company will never, ever do this.

So you’re left with two options: shotgun approach, or the tried and true.

Shotgun approach is just throw everything at the wall.  I think this month will be a good indicator of it, with Tate and Liza on the seasonal end as legitimately good sync pairs worth trying for, while the Variety scouts are absolute garbage but cost nothing.  All of them are low-popularity.  If the Variety Scouts and Seasonals have a roughly even number of people pull (which, from Reddit response, may well be the case), then the Variety scouts win.  Similar gain, significantly different cost.  Variety Scouts are superior.  But that assumes you play to less popular characters...

#3: Popularity Always Wins And they goddamned know it.  If they could, they’d spam the hell out of popular characters, but most (not all) get a lot of negative fan response from getting “too many alts.”  This doesn’t seem to be an absolute value issue though.  Steven and Blue reach 5 and 6 alts respectively and no one bats an eye, but Leon hits three and people are up in arms.  There are other possibilities, but I think time and frequency is the key factor.  Characters like Leon and Marnie got three alts in the span of a year.  Galar started getting annoying to many people it took up so many seasonals.  To say nothing of how much of its cast is still missing anyway.

From this, we can divine that popularity spam is a matter of what’s interspersed.  Consider that seasonals are only two at a time, and we have five seasonal sets: New Year, Palentine, Summer, Halloween, and Winter.  Ten slots.  Ten opportunities for low popularity characters.  And half of them tend to be popular options.  We’re through six.  Dawn and Elesa are the popular picks.  Until now, it was 50/50 on popular/less popular.  This duo threw it in favor of less popular.  Halloween or Winter could throw it back.  But people get really upset when it’s too often, and when, perhaps most critically, other options don’t stand a chance.

A sentiment going around Reddit right now is that “no one actually wants unpopular characters unless it’s their favorite unpopular character,” and that’s stupid.  I think the dilemma is less that people aren’t willing to be happy about other less popular options getting attention, so much as...when you have such limited odds, of course it’s frustrating.  To a degree, you have to up the odds of your minor fave getting in to keep people happy, but doing that leads to frequent use of poorly selling characters.  So what do you do?

Make more.  No really, make more sync pairs in a month.  Intersperse popular characters with comparable regularity, or even slightly more frequent, but up what you produce in a month.  Right now we get 4-6 pairs.  Up it to 6-8.  There’s nothing stopping you.  Rerun things more often; people are always waiting for a rerun.  Your spark system’s a disaster, but people will pull where they want.  The limited angle gets people to pull in a panic over when something will return, but that tapers off.  The difference between a year (Dojo Gloria) and two years (Leon) is not significant when it comes to evoking a fear of “When do they rerun?”  If you need more limited options, make more seasonals to pad things out and up how many slots you have available.  Hell, if you really want to be stingy?  People would be mad about it, but lack of an EX color scheme on a unique seasonal costume would likely go over better there than on a Variety scout.  Speaking of, you wouldn’t even need to get rid of variety scouts.  They’re low-effort, sure, but I think a lot of frustration around them is less that they’re low-effort, and more that they’re indicative of “if you’re not popular, this is all you’re likely to ever get.”  If that’s proven untrue, which this event suggests it could be, then hope remains.

But that’s also a lot of effort and cost, so there’s gotta be a better way, right?

#2: And When Nothing’s Limited, Everything Will Be General Pool.  You have like a billion unused models in your game that would cost zero dollars to add as scoutable pairs to the general pool, the introduction of which would spark considerable joy and optimism from the player base.

Moreover, if FEH taught me anything with 4* special, it’s that you can make anything feel limited by making it hard to get, even if it’s always there.  How do you get people to pull for a 4* the same way you’d pull a 5*?  By making the pool so goddamned bloated that the notion of “you’ll get it through a Master Fair pull eventually” fade to nothing.  This is doubly true with ticket scouts.  People correctly said that the ticket scouts disincentivize this, because you can free pull.  But consider Sinnoh.  Once, Volkner was the only source of Electric Terrain, and you had 1/3 odds for him.  Now it’s 1/7.  Because they added a bunch of extra Sinnoh pairs.  You want to know how to make the tickets feel less like a guarantee when something new shows up?  Bloat the pools.  When everything’s looking like Unova and Alola, your odds suddenly aren’t so sparkly anymore.  Even after villain events, you maybe get six pulls.  On Kalos, sure, I’m willing to wait on Shauna to see if I can snag a copy.  But on Unova?  Now you’re running a risk.  Better pull now.

By introducing more general pool options, which again cost zero dollars since they’re already modeled and animated, combined with more regular seasonals, you have more opportunities to “spam” your popular money makers without fans getting irritated, and cultivate more significant good will, and frankly better profit as the general pool bloats and many dolphins start looking at the difference between a 0.07% chance off-focus, or a small investment of $50, now $20 less than a modern video game, to guarantee them fully decked out.

I’m not saying capitalism and the company don’t have an antithetical investment in profit over art.  I’m saying they’re not even doing profit that intelligently, because there are better ways to really shill fan favorites, and less frustrating ways to cut costs while introducing a ton of new stuff, that also removes the feeling of safety regarding skipping general pool additions. Call me, Sasaki-san, Iguchi-san. 1-800-224-8546.

You know…it occurs to me…why doesn’t DeNA just make up new seasonals?

No one likes Variety scouts. No one. They’re limited for no reason, and with Kiawe we are very officially at “worse than general pool” tier of failure. Which is something we’ve always kinda gotten away with on seasonals. Which…are also limited. But have a costume. And generally go over better.

I assume Special Costumes didn’t have the impact they wanted, which sucks because I’ve really liked all the events as far as costuming goes. But like…make up new seasonal events. FEH has like one a month, you have some options here. And it seems a more workable solution than the Variety scouts that I cannot imagine are doing anything but bombing. If Mallow and Kiawe sell better than literally anything else this year I’ll withdraw this entire complaint and give up on the fandom entirely, because come on. There has to be a better solution here. For both of us.

The only reason not to is the removal of cost for designing and animating with the new outfit, writing dialogue, and new voice lines. Maybe it really is just cost reduction over possible profit given previous failures but it really cannot possibly be that bad.

[euphoriaonpluto]

Queer Representation

Alright let's talk about Loki and Good Omens.

Before anyone tries anything, I am going to state upfront that I am a biromantic asexual. So keep that in mind before you automatically take what I want to say in bad faith and go to accuse me of bigotry.

I want to talk about how the only ones benefitting from the way we handle queer rep discourse right now are the queerphobic networks and execs.

First, let's look at Loki. The MCU's first canonically queer character. Since episode 4 came out yesterday, I have seen multiple accusations go around of people who are upset about the hinted romance between Loki and Sylvie being biphobic. Bi people are allowed to date people of the opposite gender, you say. And of course they are. But you are purposefully missing the whole point of why people are upset.

The MCU is a 13 year old franchise and Loki is the first time they are actively acknowledging the existance of queer people. This, despite how infuriating it is, is pretty par for the course when it comes to fantasy and sci-fi media. These two genres are notoriously horrible when it comes to diversity and the portrayal of queerness. So it's only natural that people are going to be upset about what Disney is doing right now, and no, they aren't upset because they hate bisexuals.

Fiction in inherently limited to what is portrayed on screen/in the text. We don't know a character's every thought and feeling and we have not seen their entire life. Which is why good media follows the 'show not tell' rule. A character making an off-handed comment about their sexuality is never going to be enough representation, not when Marvel continues to refuse to portray explicity queer relationships or have their queer characters have any experiences tied to their queerness at all.

So sure, bisexuals can date people of the opposite gender and still be bisexual, obviously. But why are you guys acting as it that isn't how most bi people are portrayed anyways? Aren't most bisexual characters only shown being in het-alighned relationships and their identities only acknoleghed like a couple of times in passing converations? Please point me to the abundance of bisexual characters in fantasy and sci-fi shows who have actually been shown being in a relationship with a person of the same gender or have explicitly gone through stuff linked to their queer identity. Please go ahead.

Now let's look at Good Omens, specifically Aziraphale and Crowley's relationship. The constant discourse there is that queer relationships don't always need to be physical. "Aziraphale and Crowley can be asexual!!!! They don't have to kiss on screen for their relationship to be valid!!!!!" Okay fine but can you please first point me to all of those explicit mlm couples that you are refering to when you use the word always. What does always mean in this case? Are you telling me that fantasy and sci-fi shows are so oversaturated with explicit mlm and wlw relationships that some change of pace is desparately needed?

All of this discourse around the two shows is purposefully ignoring the history of homophobia in film and TV. Despite the code being removed almost sixty years ago, the film indistry is still in the shackles of the fucking Hays code. Queerness is viewed as dirty and sinful. Queer men and viewed as sick predators. MLM relationships are treated are perverted and nsfw and will someone please think of the children!

So why, please tell me, WHY are you giving the powers that be such loopholes for them to continue to not portray queerness while wearing a brand new woke hat? Do you not realise that you are giving Disney the option to continue to never portray queer relationships because all they had to do was write one short line of dialogue and now whenever someone tries to demand mlm representation they are going to be accused of biphobia. Loki can go on to never be shown having interest in someone of the same gender or having queer experiances at all, be it discussing his identity or anyone else around him acknowledging it or having his part experiences shape his behavior or anything at all that is just part of real queer people's lives. And people will continue to uphold his character as good representation because he said the sentence "a bit of both". Disney would rather Loki go and fuck a female version of himself than portray a mlm relationship on screen and you go and accuse people of biphobia for pointing that out.

Nuance is great. It's needed. But, perhaps, before we start talking about the nuances of sexuality and identity and the nature of queer relationships we should at least get to see some gay people kiss on screen, don't you think? When there is sufficient mlm and wlw representation in fantasy and sci-fi shows and movies, we can go on to talk about all of these things. But until then all you're doing is giving networks the excuse to never show an ounce of queerness on screen and then market their product as queer rep becase the writer said they love each other on twitter and oh if you object to that at all you're acephobic because their relationship doesn't have to be physical! Nevermind that homophobia still holds that industry by the throat and they continue to find gay relationships are disgusting and less than and to be avoided at all cost.

TL:DR - let some gay people kiss on screen first before you start giving networks exuses to not portray explicit queerness.

[ask-artsy-oncie]

I mean I can say it but nobody wants to hear it. Except it’s especially important, now, considering recent events.

Any discourse regarding the ethics of consuming Disney-owned media - in the context that this discourse has been taking place - is effectively worthless until animation becomes a more respected medium in the West.

And like - first of all, just fucking pirate everything. Just pirate as much entertainment as you want. Like be smart about it, but I’m not talking about which companies you give money to. That’s also effectively worthless to the conversation right now, but I feel like I should disclaim that I’m pro-piracy and this post wouldn’t change regardless of money being involved.

Because I’m talking more about the people who tie ethics to the type of media someone consumes whether they’re paying the company or not. And I need every single one of these people to understand that the people you’re yelling at make up a fucking microcosm of any given show or movie’s viewership. To keep all this discourse within fandom spaces demonstrates an ignorance to the bigger picture - and the picture is SO much bigger. Despite the fact that fandom has been growing so rapidly within the past decade, we remain a pond looking over the ocean that is the majority of the Western animation audience - non-fandom kids and parents.

I cannot emphasize enough that the 14-year-old animation fan who happens to be fixated on the newest Disney release is likely exploring non-Disney, non-USAmerican animation when the fixation wears off and they get curious about what they’re able to access now that the wider internet is available to them. Admonishing them for enjoying Disney at all when they “could be watching X film from X country instead!” is essentially just preaching to the choir. Like yeah, they’re still learning about different films that are more obscure to them, but if they’re out here still unabashedly enjoying animation into their teen years when Western society demands they grow out of it, they were going to go looking for this stuff, regardless.

Meanwhile, the parent who needs to entertain a kid for a few hours is going to just put on a Disney movie because of brand loyalty, blind trust, and the notion of “this is animated, ergo my kid will enjoy it” without considering genre or quality. They don’t know about whatever indie or non-USAmerican animated movie that might speak to their kid more effectively or even be enjoyable for them to watch on their own - and they’ll never learn because they don’t care. Animation isn’t a medium they believe they should be enjoying beyond “this is cute and makes my kid happy”. The non-fandom “Disney Adults” who kind of appear to be fandom but like never actually participate in any kind of fandom community (or have any respect for animation as a medium) are in it for brand loyalty. Buying Disney merch to them is like buying the newest iPhone.

I’m reminded of this every time I see some kind of outcry about a movie or show not getting supported enough. With things like the HBO pull or instances of Laika stop-motion underperforming in box-offices, it’s important to note that animation fans have always been showing up to support these shows and movies. What support these works lack is the parents and kids outside of the scope of fandom who weren’t effectively advertised to - there’s a thread on Twitter from Matt Braly regarding all the cartoons being pulled from streaming services for “not earning enough money”, where he talks about how these shows aren’t advertised, weren’t merchandised, and didn’t pull the viewership that execs expected them to. How could that be though? A ton of these shows had considerable and dedicated fanbases. Could it be, perhaps, that fandom doesn’t actually have more power over non-fandom or “normie” viewers when it comes to animation? The kids who ask for toys and other merch of their favorite shows and movies and the parents who are told about the new animated show or movie from advertisers?

What I’m getting at, is that if you want a multi-billion-dollar company to stop having the stronghold on Western animation that it does, then people outside of fandom spaces have to start caring about Western animation again. It can’t be “just a medium for kids”, it can’t be something seen as “lesser” than live-action, it can’t be “good” with the caveat of “for an animated movie/show”. Yelling at other fandom people who have shown so much love for every facet of animation, just because one of those facets happens to be Disney, is pointless. This doesn’t mean that you can’t say “if you liked [big name movie], you’ll probably also like [small name movie]!” but guilting people who are so barely part of the problem that even their support doesn’t seem to matter is performative. If you really care about making a difference, spend that energy promoting animation as a medium to Western audiences, instead. I promise you that will make much more of a difference.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Games Workshop declares war on its customers (again)

There’s a difference between a con-artist and a grifter. A con-artist is just a gabby mugger, and when they vanish with your money, you know you’ve been robbed.

A grifter, on the other hand, is someone who can work the law to declare your stuff to be their stuff, which makes you a lawless cur because your pockets are stuffed full of their money and merely handing it over is the least you can do to make up for your sin.

IP trolls are grifters, not con artists, and that’s by design, a feature of the construction of copyright and trademark law.

Progressives may rail at the term “IP” for its imprecision, but truly, it has a very precise meaning: “‘IP’ is any law that lets me control the conduct of my customers, competitors and critics, such that they must arrange their affairs to my benefit.”

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

In that regard, it is a perfect grifter’s tool — a way to put you on the wrong side of the line for simply living your life in the way that works best for you, not the grifter.

Now, copyright and trademark’s framers were alive to the possibility that they might become this kind of weapon, and they wrote limitations and exceptions into each doctrine that were meant to safeguard the public’s right to free speech and free action.

But those limitations and exceptions are weirdly self-eviscerating. Both trademark and copyright’s limitations assume that they aren’t being weaponized by immoral sociopaths. Both collapse if they are.

Take copyright. Copyright has a suite of limitations and exceptions under various global legal systems, including US law. US law also contains a specific set of exceptions colloquially called “fair use,” a subject of much mystification for lay people.

Under fair use, someone accused of copyright infringement can ask a judge to find that their use of someone else’s copyrighted work is permissible because to deny it would be socially harmful.

The fair use law sets out four factors that judges MAY consider when considering such a claim. Note that these four factors are neither comprehensive (judges can weigh other factors), nor dispositive (failing to satisfy a factor doesn’t disqualify your use from being fair).

If that sounds confusing to you, don’t worry. It is confusing. As the lawyers say, “fair use is fact-intensive.”

The specifics of a use really matter: who’s making the use, what they’re using, why they’re using it, how they use it, and how much they use.

That’s why anyone who claims that “X is never fair use” (for example, commercial fanfic) are full of shit — as are people who say “X is always fair use”).

Commercial fanfic absolutely can be fair use. No less a body than the Supreme Court says so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Done_Gone

Despite all this ambiguity and nuance, IP grifters who want to force other people to arrange their affairs to their own benefit are laser focused on the four factors, reasoning correctly that if they show a judge that the factors favor them, they’re more likely to prevail.

Half of the four factors are out of the grifter’s reach. As a rightsholder, you can’t control “the purpose and character of the use,” or “the amount and substantiality of the portion used.”

But the other two factors are more readily within the IP wielder’s remit. As someone seeking control a work, you can frame “to the nature of the copyrighted work” by talking up how much creativity and originality went into it, which judges will weigh in your favor.

More importantly — and disturbingly — is the way that an IP holder can influence the fourth factor: “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”

Think about that fourth factor for a moment here: if my use of your work doesn’t cost you any money, then it’s more likely that my use is fair.

The corollary: if you can bully some people into paying for something they’ve always gotten for free, then you can claim that the people who refuse to pay are ripping you off — that there is a “market” for the use, and that their failure to pay weakens that market.

This is effectively what’s happened to music sampling. Seminal albums like “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” were produced with thousands of uncleared samples — but at the time, no one was clearing samples.

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/08/creative-license-how-the-hell-did-sampling-get-so-screwed-up-and-what-the-hell-do-we-do-about-it/

Had the rightsholders to those samples dragged Public Enemy into court, they wouldn’t have had the fourth factor on their side. No one was paying for samples, so a failure to pay for samples had no “effect on the potential market for the copyrighted work.”

However, in the 33 years since Nation of Millions dropped, paying to license samples has become common practice — and the mere existence of paid samples makes not paying for samples more legally risky.

So say a rightsholder decided to aggressively license simple quotations — as the Associated Press did in 2008, when it offered to sell you a license to a 5-word quotation for a mere $12.50.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010341.html

All other things being equal, a short quotation from a news article is likely to be fair use. But if the AP managed to terrorize enough bloggers into coughing up $12.50 for a 5-word quote, it could create a market for 5-word quotations.

That market would change the fair use argument for people who don’t pay — yes, they’re making a transformative, critical use, but they’re also undermining the market for the copyright, and a judge might find this change tips the scales away from fair use.

Even more importantly, the additional uncertainty might stampede more people into paying $12.50 for a 5-word quote rather than risk a $250,000 statutory damages award for copyright infringement.

The more people who pay for 5-word quotes, the sturdier the market becomes and the riskier it is to rely upon fair use.

The fourth factor looks like an escape valve for uses that harm no one.

But it actually rewards to bullies who intimidate others out of money they don’t actually owe — until they do.

Trademark has a similar gotcha. Trademark is very different from copyright. Fundamentally, trademark is about protecting buyers, not sellers. Trademark meant to help buyers avoid being tricked into buying an inferior product because it was deceptively named or styled.

If you buy a can of Coke, you want the true Black Water of American Imperialism, not an inferior brand of dilute battery-acid.

But if your Coke turns out to be a fake, you might shrug off the harm or balk at the expense of punishing the fast operator who mis-sold you.

So trademark empowers Coke — and other vendors — to punish third parties who trick their customers, acting as their customers’ champions. Trademark doesn’t exist to prevent Coke from losing money to a rival — it exists to help Coke drinkers get what they pay for.

Trademarks can be registered with the USPTO, who nominally weigh trademark applications to ensure that they’re distinctive and original. Practically, examiners are busy, sometimes careless, and ideologically inclined to grant, not deny, claims.

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/14/son-of-cocky-a-writer-is-trying-to-trademark-dragon-slayer-for-fantasy-novels/

But you don’t have to register a trademark to assert it. You can threaten or pursue legal action on the grounds that someone has violated an unregistered trademark, which is any distinctive graphic or phrase that is associated with your product.

Registered or unregistered, trademark enforcement primarily comes down to whether a “naive consumer” would be mislead by someone else’s use of a mark. That is, when you bought a Coke-branded sack of chicken feet, did you think it was blessed by the Coca-Cola company?

If there’s no likelihood of confusion, trademark holders struggle to enforce their trademarks.

This standard seems reasonable, but, like the fourth factor in fair use, it has a sting in its tail.

One of the ways you can induce confusion in the public is to gain a reputation for being a litigious bully. Say Coke is known far and wide for clobbering anyone that uses its trademarks, no matter how trivial the use and no matter how bad it made them look.

If Coke is truly notorious for its zero-tolerance policy, that will lead to a widespread public understanding that every time you see Coke’s marks, the use was blessed by a Coke lawyer — meaning a use that might not otherwise be found to be confusing can be made confusing.

“If that was any other company’s trademark, I’d assume that they had nothing to do with it — but since I know Coke has an army of baby-eating attack lawyers who destroy anyone who uses a mark without permission, that must be an authorized use.”

Like fair use’s fourth factor, trademark’s confusion standard rewards the most vicious and uncaring businesspeople with new rights that their more reasonable competitors do not enjoy. IP selects for sociopathy.

Now, IP — in the most sinister sense of the phrase — has pervaded every industry, but the contradictions of IP are felt most keenly in its spawning grounds: the culture industry.

Culture is in tension with the control of ideas, because culture is the spread of ideas.

Creators (and execs) are vulnerable to the pirate/admiral fallacy: “When I take from my forebears, that’s legitimate artistic progress. When my successors do it to me, it’s theft.”

This pathology, combined with ready-to-hand IP weapons, incentivizes all manner of wickedness. Remember when Marvel and DC teamed up in a bid to trademark the word “super-hero” so that no one else would be allowed to use it?

https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/18/marvel-comics-stealing-our-language/

These perverse incentives are made tragic by the inherently participatory nature of culture.

It’s not merely that Marvel and DC wanted to steal the word “super-hero” right out of our mouths.

It’s that super-heroes are culturally important because of how we take and remix them in our lives. Marvel went on to use the law to stop us from pretending to be superheroes online, something Casey Fiesler called “Pretending Without a License.”

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277598023_Pretending_Without_a_License_Intellectual_Property_and_Gender_Implications_in_Online_Games

Which brings me, at last, to Games Workshop, a company that has consistently led the IP bully pack, indiscriminately terrorizing the Warhammer 40k fans who made it a massive commercial success.

Warhammer is a strategy/roleplaying game that is played with miniature creatures that players buy, modify and paint. If you’re not familiar with all this, maybe this sounds a bit like toy soldiers.

It’s a lot more interesting — not just because of the game rules or lore, but because of the incredibly, unbelievable, jaw-dropping virtuosity of Warhammer players when they paint and style those miniatures.

There’s a reason I look forward to Saturday morning’s weekly linkdump from Jonathan Struan of the week’s best Warhammer and other RPG miniatures:

https://www.superpunch.net/search?q=warhammer&max-results=20&by-date=true

and why I follow incredible painters like Aurelie Schick:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/110246635@N06

Warhammer is intrinsically participatory, co-creative and active — it’s not media you consume, it’s media you produce.

Games Workshop has become fantastically rich off of this…and they hate it, and they always have.

For years they’ve pursued fans for producing their own fan-made supplements and additions to the game:

https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/99301

The more Warhammer players complained about the indiscriminate censorship of their fan media, the harder GW cracked down on them, wiping out whole genres of creative work:

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/48933/games-workshop-files-purge-09

GW claimed it was only defending its rights, the grifter’s signature move, making you a crook for having the audacity not to put their shareholders’ interests ahead of your own.

Then Games Workshop claimed a trademark on “space marine,” a generic term that had been widely used in science fiction for decades, including, notably, in Heinlein’s classic “Starship Troopers” (1959).

https://web.archive.org/web/20130207002144/http://mcahogarth.org/?p=10593

They didn’t just go after RPGs that used the phrase — they used trademark claims to remove novels from Amazon for having the phrase in their titles.

“Space marine” is a generic phrase, but GW was betting if they were sufficiently, spectacularly brutal in their enforcement, they could create a proprietary interest: “Now, I know GW destroys anyone who uses ‘space marine,’ so this ‘space marine’ must be endorsed by GW.”

GW just launched a new set of terms of service, including: “individuals must not create fan films or animations based on our settings and characters. These are only to be created under licence from Games Workshop.”

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-WW/Intellectual-Property-Guidelines

Now, this isn’t how copyright works. There are many ways in which a fan film or animation could be fair use, no matter whether GW forbids or permits their production. But this isn’t mere overreach: it’s a direct play against the fourth factor in fair use.

If GW can establish that all animations and vids are produced under paid license, then any fanvid that doesn’t pay for a license has a weaker fair use case, because the fourth factor protects existing licensing markets.

Indeed, as Rob Beschizza points out on Boing Boing, GW timed the terms of service change to coincide with the announcement that they’re launching a subscription service including “cartoons, in-house hobby videos, access to a vault of ebooks and mags.”

https://www.pcgamer.com/now-even-warhammer-has-a-subscription-service/

This is bullying with a business-model, in other words. Fans have figured out how to have fun with each other for free, and GW wants them to stop and pay the company for its in-house version of that fun.

Warhammer creators are demoralized and disheartened. The creator of the hugely successful Oculus Imperia Youtube series posted a heart-rending message of surrender.

https://twitter.com/OculusImperia/status/1421136444437970949

Oculus Imperia also edits “If The Emperor Had A Text To Speech Device,” (TTS) another beloved Warhammer fan series. Alfabusa from TTS posted his own absolutely demoralized goodbye to his work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXljeaktnDA

Ironically, both channels would have a stronger fair use case if they mocked and criticized Warhammer, rather than celebrating it, as fair use tips favorably towards critical uses.

The fact is, they love their hobby and its community and they want to improve it, not tear it down.

Neither wants to get dragged into a brutal copyright case against a deep-pocketed corporation. Even people with great fair use cases balk at that:

https://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/

Now, some people might be thinking, what’s the big deal? Why don’t these creators just make up their own stories instead of remixing the ones that come from Games Workshop?

Those people are assholes.

*All* stories are fanfic of some kind or another. Every mystery novel is a remix of Poe’s Murders In the Rue Morgue. Games Workshop’s stories are the thrice-brewed teabags of many sf writers (remember “space marines?”).

Tolkien straight up ripped off his characters from the 1000-year-old Norse poem “Elder Edda,” which features dwarves named “Thorin, Balin, Dwalin, Fili, Kili, Oin, Gloin, Nori, Dori, Ori, Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur.”

https://musingsofatolkienist.blogspot.com/2015/07/hobbit-origins-catalog-of-dwarves.html

Culture is made of other culture.

GW made something wonderful with Warhammer — by plundering the stories that preceded it.

The sin isn’t in the taking, it’s in the pretense that it never happened, and the vicious grifting that punishes anyone who does unto GW as they did unto everyone else.

[asimplestrawberry]

so i am also. not happy about it but when i watched theories about the stuff that Was cut, reasons were

1) not enough time for a movie to fit everything in there, & for june specifically getting cut, it was bc nora was bi and could be rep as well as be combined w june’s role (in their eyes)

2) they’d said the movie was going to be different from the book, nick had said ‘it’s a completely different thing’

3) amazon wanting to please *all* audiences including royalists, the more conservative, general population who are more moderate and may not want to watch a movie with a bunch of other themes and implications not related to a normal fun cheesy rom com

4) the movie is, ultimately, a rom com and everything else in the book for timing and for genre and to fit with what amazon (execs and all the other higher ups & people involved in approving and making a movie and shit) wanted as well as like. fit the general narrative they had to cut things that would distract from the rom-com thing and henry and alex’s relationship, because as much as the book ppl would have loved a 3 hour movie fitting Everything in there, not everyone else would so for a larger audience, time, and a bunch of other reasons they cut june (and as you continue reading, you’ll see they had to cut a lot more)

^and these aren’t my thoughts this is just what I’ve read for like analysis and why they wouldn’t keep her in, and they’re what make the most sense

I Love june, I adore the book as a whole and I really fucking wish they’d kept her because i think she’s really important and she and alex’s relationship is great but I also kind of understand why they didn’t keep her

btw i did come around to listening to red white and royal blue on audiobook and my most constant thought is i can't believe they nerfed his sister

[autumnleopard]

Could the Loki Fandom please stop being mean to each other?!

So you don't like the series, you hate it, and you hate this Loki. That's fine, that's your opinion, and you are entitled to your own opinion.

BUT what you are not entitled to, and which only makes you out to be a massive f*cking arsehole, is hating on others if they enjoy the series, attacking them for having a different opinion than you.

Same goes for stating that, if you are a Loki fan, you have to hate the show. Calling people who genuinely enjoy or like the show "part of the problem" is f*cking wrong, and if you don't see it that way, then that makes you the problem, and not the person who enjoys something.

Just because you hate the show, doesn't mean everyone else has to hate it too.

Just because someone enjoys the series, doesn't mean they like every aspect of it. And making others out to be fake Loki fans, just because they enjoy the show or even love it, is just wrong and pathetic. Someone might enjoy the show for reasons that you can't even comprehend, and it is very small-minded of you to assume anything. More importantly, if you hate them or attack them for having their own opinion, you're just being a f*cking d*ck.

And you're even more of a d*ck if you deem it right to hate and attack the actors and crew. At the end of the day, they're doing their jobs and have little to no influence on how Marvel/Disney wants the show to go. Even an Exec can't to much. And Tom is first and foremost an actor who is working off a script and gets told by a director what to do.

You wouldn't hate/attack a waiter for serving you a bad meal either, would you?

Anyway.

So what if someone genuinely likes and enjoys the show? It's their opinion, and they are just as entitled to it as you are to yours. Let people enjoy what they enjoy. Is that really that difficult? It's basic human decency.

And besides, someone can enjoy it and still be critical of it. Those two aren't mutually exclusive.

More than upsetting, this whole situation is just sad and pathetic. You don't realize the effect all this negativity and hate can have on some people, and filtering or blocking can only do so much, some stuff will fall through the cracks. And some people are scared of voicing their opinion, in fear of being hated and attacked.

Grow the f*ck up and let people enjoy something in peace.

This has been a PSA. If you attack/hate me now, you are just proving my point.

Thank you very much.

P.S. This does apply to every fandom. Just show some basic human decency and let people enjoy stuff, and don't attack/hate them for enjoying that stuff. And don't attack actors etc either for doing their jobs. Just be a decent human being, instead of d*ck.

Fandom is supposed to be fun, and not give other people anxiety.

[mk-wizard]

Big Hero 6 The Series: It could have been better

Hello, friends. Today, I will be analyzing a TV series based on a movie that I fell in love with for its colourful themes, deep plot, compelling characters, great CGI and memorable messages. Before I get into it, I want to take a moment to say that I have quit doing videos. They are too big of a pain in the petunia to make and I write better than I speak, so I will stick to writing essays, reviews and more. Anyway, onto the analysis.

All I can say about Big Hero 6 the series is that it had a great concept, it presented some great ideas and tried hard to be a cartoon of the times, but it could have and should have been a lot better. The show’s downfall all centers around trying too hard to be kid friendly which makes the shame sting all the more because Big Hero 6 was already kid friendly even with its dark themes, sharp edges and intelligent writing. If anything, even the brightest kid friendly cartoons (Steven Universe, She-Ra, etc.) had those things and actually benefitted from them. By needlessly trying too hard, character development got scrapped, the edges were all smoothed out, storytelling was subpar, the humour was too silly and the executive meddling in the end produced a dismal final season. However, I don’t want this analysis to be one lengthy negative rant about how awful the series was because in its defense, awful is an unfair word. It did have potential and ideas which are worth carrying over to a reboot that I hope will be done someday in the future. Also, we should root for a reboot because Big Hero 6 would not be the first story that needs it before striking gold. Just look at how many times Spider-Man was rebooted in film before MCU found the version that worked. Anyway, I will list all the things in Big Hero 6 that could have been better in my opinion;

1- Go easy on the laughs and be more generous with the action. - I love adding comedy to my own writing because I think a good sense of humour makes everything better, but Big Hero 6 is not a stand up comedy routine. It is a superhero story where we expect action, suspense and life or death situations that are to be taken seriously first. The comedy should be for relief and with the right timing. Also, the chibi cutscenes and having characters act like fools aren’t funny. Ren and Stimpy are the exception not the standard and their way of making you laugh doesn’t fit an action series. In a show as big as Big Hero 6, real life physics and danger matters.

2- Make the villains menacing and gritty. - I admit that after having a movie villain like Yokai who was the stuff of nightmares, it is going to be a challenging act to follow, but it was obvious that the writers were trying especially with some villains who could have easily gone into some dark relatable territory. For example, Mr. Sparkles (the gentleman in the photo above) embodies social media and Internet personalities. Right off the bat, you have a long list of things which embody the dark side of that like scams, fraud, using social media to dox or harass, driving people to suicide, online predators, the Internet personalities being very depressed people in real life, and much more horrifying things. When you stop and look at it, Mr. Sparkles even looks like the Joker which hints how dark and scary he could have been if the stops were removed. The same goes for enemies like Hardlight who embodies online gaming, Liv with cloning, Obake an amoral and insane scientist, and Trina and Noodle Burger Boy (more on him later) being evil robots. Globby especially should have been painted and written in much darker colours rather being played off for laughs because he has many parallels with Clay Face. The only two villains who I can say were supposed to be campy, charming and comical were Baron Von Steamer and Supersonic Sue because they were a satire of the Adam West style villains.

The rest of them needed to be dark and threatening including Mr. Sparkles. In fact, I would love a rebooted version of Mr. Sparkles who gives me the heebie-jeebies. Going back to Noodle Burger Boy, I must confess that I was actually excited when I heard that he was going to be the main villain of the final season because I thought he was going to fulfill his master’s final wish and as a reminder, Noodle Burger Boy was based on a super robot for military purposes.

It would have been fantastic if Noodle Burger Boy was upgraded into a full military war machine with a new threatening look. For that, I think all of the villains deserve to be rebooted and have their full potential unlocked for better or for worse.

3- A show about geniuses merits genius level art quality. - I am usually forgiving towards art styles, but in the case of Big Hero 6, the oversimplified style with minimal details and lack of textures did not suit the show. The characters blend in with the background which makes them look flat and the special effects were extremely dulled down. I also know for a fact that Disney can do a lot better than this because I saw how superbly Tangled the Series was drawn.

You can see and almost feel the difference in quality, the number of layers and level of detail between the two styles. I think there was no excuse Big Hero 6 was not done in the same style and at the same level if not better as Tangled.

3- Don’t dumb down or flanderize amazing characters. - I absolutely detest it when characters are flanderized because it makes them one dimensional and grating. For example, Go Go is tough as nails and extremely calm, but she is not cold or hesitant towards helping her friends. She doesn’t require very special episodes for us to know that. If anything, the movie version of Go Go reminded me a lot of Garnet in how she deconstructed the broody character. She isn’t cold or emotionless. Just calm and mature. Another good example was how Honey Lemon was rewritten to be overly positive to the point of toxicity, naïve and oblivious with a juvenile obsession with stickers. Then you have poor Fred who was rewritten to be an incompetent fool. The spark that makes Big Hero 6 shine is that they are a team of geniuses meaning they are all intelligent. Even Fred is genius in his own way just not a scientific one. He has a vivid imagination, he is resourceful and can get himself out of tight spots. Please, don’t turn characters into dummies especially if their intelligence is a part of them. It doesn’t make them better or funnier. It ruins them.

4- Tadashi needs closure and honour. - I am all for Hiro making peace with the loss of his brother, but Tadashi is to the Big Hero 6 team what Uncle Ben was to Spider-Man. His loss was the catalyst if not the reason. He should never be forgotten. Moreover, there was never any true closure to him especially with the possibility that he may still be alive up in the air. After all, like Callaghan, his body was never found and it turned out that Callaghan was still alive.

With that said, who is to say that Tadashi was not secretly still alive and just hiding or being hidden? This is something that Disney really needed to clear up if not for the fans, then at least as a service to such an important character. Never just forget about them.

5- The format can only be episodic with a deep plots, continuity and character development. - Random episodes with a mere monster of the day is an outdated format which doesn’t fit Big Hero 6′s modern and bright setting. In seasons 1 and 2, when the episodes were plot heavy with character development, the series shined brightest. It also helped move the story along, but with the final season, plot was removed, closure was abandoned or poorly written if any was given, and characters were disallowed from growing. A good example at how plot and character development could have made this series and its characters better was the relationship between Hiro and Megan. Would it have truly survived or would they have broken up?

Would Richardson Mole have eventually lost interest in his obsession with besting and bullying Fred or would his obsession consume him compelling him to become a super villain? I do see quite a few similarities between Mole and Reverse Flash.

Then you have Karmi who is in my opinion, the biggest wild card of the bunch. She was intentionally introduced as an arrogant, prickly and unlikable yet complex character who rivaled Hiro bitterly.

Yet had a huge crush on his alter ego and as time went on, started to grow up and even form a friendship with Hiro. What would have happened further down the road with her? Would she have become a super hero herself? Or maybe even another love interest for Hiro kind of like how Black Cat is for Spider-Man?

Is Obake really gone?

What does the future hold Diana (Liv’s clone), Liv herself or the Sycorax the genetics company?

Is Alistair Krei going to become an ally to Big Hero 6 or an antagonist? There is also the issue at how little we know about the other Big Hero 6 characters other than Fred, Hiro and Baymax. What are Honey Lemon, Wasabi and Go Go’s backstories? These questions matter and while not every mystery can be solved, leaving none of them solved is lazy writing.

6- Executives, kindly stay out of the writing and any other part of the creative process. - I’m sorry, execs, but there is no nice way to say it. History itself proves that every time executives got involved in the creative process of any media, it got worse not better. Leave the writing to the creative team and the execs should only handle the legal stuff. Please. We understand that TV is a business, but writing itself is not. It is an art which you just don’t have a talent for. Let the creative people do their thing with the freedom necessary and you do your thing, deal? Deal.

7- Focus on Hiro and Baymax. - The are the main characters so keep them at the heart of the series no matter what happens around them. That is all I can say.

And that sums up all the things that could have made Big Hero 6 the series better, but this is all just my opinion. What is yours?

PS: I am well aware that the Big Hero 6 series is being retconned because a new series called Baymax is in the works as well as the long awaited sequel to the first movie. I am looking forward to both with an open mind. PPS: I also am aware that some people liked this show the way it was including the art style and I am cool with that. An analysis for art that includes cartoons is never right or wrong. It is solely based on opinion. I may have thought this series could have been better, but there are people who make arguments that it could have been worse.

[corroded-coffin]

ok besties we finished so here's my thoughts on episodes 6-8 + overall and whatever

episode 6:

i know that's likely the whole point but oh my god i hated looking at the vault 4 overseer's face. i would like that to not continue in the future seasons. thx.

ok we got... NCR remnants?? in this vault? new vegas music intensifies???????

you guuuys he's really a good guy underneath it all, look, 200 years ago he cared about his dog!

max's lack of sex ed is KILLING me and i for one hope the lucy/max fic writers of the world are exploring this in appropriately bizarre and uncomfortable way

YOU WANNA MAKE MY COCK EXPLODE RIGHT NOW?????

the video of the lady giving birth to the gulpers(???) that then fucking started eating her is actual nightmare fuel. i hated that so fucking much. 0/10 please god no 🤮

episode 7:

oh hi there, ranger helmets/dusters!

lmao it could just be because i've seen that movie 500 fucking times, but the whole scene with the lead farmers reminded me so much of the opening scene from inglourious basterds

“that’s just a dirty word they use to describe people who aren’t insane.” full body cringe. sorry girl. i support u tho.

i really didn't get the plot of vault 4 but ok.

maximus spent the whole time watching a waterfall on loop and one song. neurodivergent win

DJ carl you will never be three dog or mr new vegas 😔 you can be travis miles if you want

???????????????????????????????????? what the hell did dr. chickenfuck give thaddeus??? why are ghouls just fuckin wolverine now???? i don't understand this lore. iirc aren't ghouls generally more fragile to everything that isn't radiation? huge amounts of radiation is healing to them, but just... existing ???

the terminal hacking easter egg made me giggle, i'm glad we got that. so silly

episode 8:

yay diversity win: this non-binary BoS side character is alive!! :)

i've been wondering this the whole time but why is the brotherhood catholic lol

quintus you're weird. since when did the brotherhood rule the wasteland. ok bud lol

...ok bud!

corporate managers should not be allowed to do anything much less take over the world, my god

moldaver/rose is the real ship of this show, i think. that's why kyle's so mad, right? wife's gay AND a wastelander. bit weird to keep your ghoulfriend alive for that long tho.

BUD BRAIN ROOMBA

oh shit it's him. Mr Home

yeah i do not like any of the stuff with the execs/corporations being behind the scenes and controlling the bombs dropping and being aware of this shit the whole time. silly and dumb.

other people have said it too but sucks that the biggest black woman character in the show ends up being Evil Capitalist Mastermind

wAr NeVeR cHaNgEs

dammit hank i thought u were a good dad instead you're a corporate SHILL!!!!!!!!!

lucy you belong in BG3 not fallout those are the saddest wettest eyes in the world. i love u girl

DAMMIT HANK

yay diversity win: this non-binary BoS side character is STILL alive!! :)

oh... ok. well. that sucks max. my poor bb.

DEATHCLAW! NEW VEGAS! WOWIE

overall... i don't know! there were things i liked, namely the production design which was incredible. i'm definitely going to watch season 2 and i do think *some* of the backlash from fans has been a little overblown, but expecting fallout fans to be normal about lore changes is a losing game LMAO. we're uh... intense. a little. we've been burned, um, a little. just a bit.

i just watched tim cain's review of the series as well, and i do hope that vault-tec didn't *actually* drop the bombs. it makes no sense - why would barb knowingly drop the bombs while her daughter + husband are out at a birthday party??

i DID like that the NCR aren't completely gone bc that made no sense to me... except now i guess they are gone :|

anyway, if nothing else i'm glad that this seems to have awakened all of the dormant fnv fans out there and i hope that this side of fandom picks up more steam. i largely fell off of fallout fandom when it all became fallout 4-centric because that game just... didn't grip me like 3 and NV did. and i hope it brings new people into the franchise and the fandom as well!

i wonder what other existing canon characters will be brought into season 2, if any. new vegas has so many characters i just adore that i'm not sure if i want them to get the tv treatment or not yet!

ok if you read this far thank you i love you BYE

decided to start the fallout tv series despite being a No Good Bitter Angry New Vegas Stan (tm), so making this post of my assorted thoughts as i go

(spoilers below)

episode 1:

watched this last night so i'm probably gonna miss stuff/it will all be out of order

oh shit kyle maclachlan is here! bless

the signing your name in the lining of the hand-me-down wedding dress bit cracked me up

why did her geiger counter only start going haywire after they'd fucked??? why are they giving off *that* much radiation??? LOL

was it unclear to anyone else why maximus was getting bullied. is he just supposed to be a loser or is it because he's an outsider not born into it or whatever

diversity win! the BoS respects pronouns!

never mind why are we branding people

specifically, why are we branding a black guy? was this important to add to the brotherhood lore??? ??????

(points at power armor) LOOK GUYS IT'S JOHN FALLOUT!!!!

the BoS being just like, in a rando military base outdoors felt weird too, but idk! i guess they didn't want all of their main characters to live underground

speaking of, why was the ghoul just... buried lol

spent most of last night randomly saying A FERAL GHOUL CAN'T ABIDE NO CHICKEN...... googled it, that's not even the exact quote. i fully do not care. feral ghoul can't abide no chicken

while i'm sure walton ghoulgins will be my fav character (ghouls almost always are), god he is BARELY a ghoul!!! no voice changes and he's... so smooth. a literal smoothskin. they dewalted my white.

okie dokie!

[torispn15]

THOUGHT TIME (get ready):

Dean’s character arc was not finished. They had a buildup to him saying what he needed to say and he never got to say it. His arc was also crapped on. The whole show, was getting Dean to realize that he doesn’t have to go out with a gun in his hand with nothing else. It was showing him that he could have a family. That he could have the life he wanted. He deserved more. But nope. He died with a gun in his hand, impaled on a metal hook with nothing more. He said “just like I always knew I would” (paraphrasing of course). It was all basically for nothing. All of the buildup. Was. For. Nothing. The crapped on it all. The whole meaning.

Cas’s arc was disregarded. Yes, he basically completed his arc with sacrificing himself for the person he loved most, he got to say what he needed to say, he did it all because he wanted to. He did it with he own free will. But, he still needed two things, he needed to hear that all this time, he meant more to Dean and more to everyone than just a tool. He needed to hear what Dean has been needing to say. He also needed to be human or at least have a semblance of human life. And he was an angel who broke everything, who gave up everything, for love, for humanity, etc.. him going back to being an angel, is honestly not good. At all. If he stayed in the empty, I would’ve liked it better because it makes no sense to have him be an angel again, even under Jack’s new management. If Jack put him up in Heaven, fine. If he stayed in the empty, fine (but definitely not preferable). If he was made human, fine. Any of those would’ve been way way way better for his character.

Dean/Cas romantic arc was not completed. It didn’t come fill circle. It got super close. The handprint, yes. But, if Dean had “raised Cas from perdition”, that would’ve came full circle. And Dean needed to say everything he’s been needing to say, not out of need, but out of want.

Sam, well, Sam’s character arc was better than Cas and Dean’s but... it had its problems too. Eileen got sidelined, bad. Literally it makes NO sense. In 15x18, she disappeared. Chuck zapped her away. Jack brought everyone back. Sam doesn’t mention her once. We don’t see her at all after she comes back. He was basically sobbing when she disappeared. But, after she comes back.... nothing. Not one single thing.... MAKES SENSE. She is literally gone. Sam’s love, is never mentioned or seen again. Who did he marry? Who did he have a son with? We don’t know. Nothing about any of it makes sense story wise or character wise.

(I know so many of you are saying “well, it wasn’t that bad if you imagine all this stuff happening after the episode ended”, ummm that doesn’t make the episode good. You’re just taking the scraps of it and imaging everything else yourself. I’m not hating or shaming. If that’s how you want to feel or how you feel.. okay. Everyone process it different. And I know you’re going to disagree with what I’ve said and will say.. that’s okay too. I just don’t want to be spammed with a thousand different coping mechanisms that have to do with me imagining everything differently. This is the way they decide to end it. Covid didn’t change their writing and their ultimate ending. They said that. And I’m not gonna try and downplay my feelings on this. It’s been a huge part of my life for a about half my life) anyways... continuing:

And I’m probably missing a lot of stuff. That’s how dumb the finale was. It crapped on the character arcs, the characters, the meaning of the show. It literally, built up so much and then they did nothing with it. They had the most beautiful, perfect ending wrapped up for them with a shiny bow. An ending that 80+% of fans would’ve loved and held dear forever. An ending that would’ve made sense with the show, they way the story went. And instead of using it.. they burned it. They said “nah”... let’s give the 10% or less of fans who are disgusting incest people an ending that makes them happy.

It’s not on the actors.. and I don’t think Bobo liked it either. I’m sure the other cast and crew didn’t like it either. So, no hate at all to them. None at all. My blame goes with Dabb, the writers that liked and approved of it, and with the execs. I’m not saying to send death threats or anything like that. But, to tell them that a show that changed your life, that you put your life into, that you are not only having to grieve but also are having to reconcile with THAT ending, has hurt you, had affected you, and is garbage, that’s okay. You can’t vent your feelings. You have every right to. You have emotions and feelings too. As long as you direct it at the right people and aren’t vicious about it.

In conclusion: I am sad, disappointed, kinda mad, heartbroken, betrayed, and also in grievance. What really rubs salt in the wound for me is when I think about the fact that: this is it. No take backs, no do-overs. This... this is the final product. We have to live with what could’ve been. We have to live with knowing what we know. We have to live with the fact that they were handed the perfect ending. An ending that they looked like they were gonna use... and they decided to not only not use it but, to take it and do almost the exact opposite. (I’m not just talking about Destiel in this post and I’m not only upset about Destiel btw). If you are feeling any of what I’m feeling... it’s valid and you’re not alone. ♥️🤝 we still have each other and it will be okay, no matter what. But, don’t let anyone, including yourself invalidate what you’re feeling. Let it out. It’s okay. ♥️

[thessalian]

Thess vs Marketing Execs

When I’m having a particularly bad day and really need to get my mind off something, I have a little trick, and I have Tumblr to thank for it.

I mean, you look at a lot of media by a lot of the big individuals and a lot of what you find is fairly formulaic stuff. Some of it’s good. Some of it’s bad. But all of it is very clearly micromanaged by a bunch of executives looking at a spreadsheet and saying, “This is what The Young People want. This is what will make us money”.

The problem for them is that their whole model’s out of date, and has been since the internet. Once upon a time, they could reinforce the formula through the only way we The Young People ever got to hear about anything new that we might like - radio, TV, magazines. And then the internet came along and you could type something into a search engine and find the official site ... but also a lot of fan-made sites by people who were into it which often pointed to the other things they were into. Yeah, those sites were cringe, often badly coded on Geocities ... but we got a bigger window to the world than most companies wanted us to have, because they wanted to control what consumers thought was cool as much as possible and suddenly people were just ... sharing what random shit they thought was cool, and people were getting into those things rather than just jumping on The Next Big Thing.

Thing is, even when we got into the social media space, The Almighty Algorithm allowed MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter to reinforce the formula. Tumblr, on the other hand ... we’ve called it a lot of things. The Last Wild Frontier of the Internet; the whale carcass that sinks to the abyssopelagic zone of the internet to feed the deep-dwellers there, all kinds of weird analogies. Fact is that it’s just never been that level of profitable. The algorithm attempts never worked here. The format’s wrong for it, and people use it for things that just aren’t profitable in that way. And yeah, we celebrate fandoms, but we also create new ones, beautiful and impermanent as soap bubbles, for the most random fucking shit.

So sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly grumpy and need to start thinking about something else for my sanity, I imagine a marketing team assigned to monitor Tumblr, reporting back to their team lead, and the team lead asks, “...What are they obsessing about this week?” Just because I love the mental image of what happens when the answer is something like, “Sea shanties, The Cask of Amontillado, and this guy who sold substandard copper a couple of milennia ago”. Imagine a marketing department who lives to tick the boxes on a marketing spreadsheet trying to find some way of making bank on something like “Out Of Touch Thursday”. Or trying to figure out what exactly The Young People are trying to say about the viability and direction of the Star Wars franchise in the wake of “Live Slug Reaction” memes.

Seriously, next time you’re depressed or angry, just look at whatever weird and wacky bullshit is on your Tumblr at the moment and imagine someone trying to explain it to a marketing exec. We don’t feel like we have a lot of power in the grand scheme of things, but by the gods we can frustrate people who want to make us little more than a demographic to which to sell shit.

[althcr]

okay so, no spoilers and i’ll not even mention any details about the leaks, but if it does turn out to be true (which i hope not for a few reasons, but also am a bit unsure cause for other reasons they do seem true, especially with all the teaser trailer confirming certain things), i don’t even know what to think tbh.

like, i’m not even a book purist (i’m not even finished reading lmao). it’s okay if things aren’t similar and all that cause tv adaptions (movie or tv series) will always have to change things because of the change of medium alone. but yes i have to admit that there have been changes made that i just can’t comprehend - sure, we don’t have the full picture yet and don’t know what they have planned for the full (possible) eight seasons. and honestly i don’t think this is all on rafe either. he had stated that he had wanted a 120min pilot and ten episodes per season but amazon denied it. same with “making the show darker”, that’s also something that came straight from the amazon execs and we don’t know how much they have their finger in the pudding in other matters either. (though i do have to state that i disagree with people who insinuate that the books aren’t dark. just because robert doesn’t focus on every single bloody detail in those moments, doesn’t mean some dark shit isn’t happening, like have you actually read the books or just looked at the cover and skimmed wikipedia?)

i’ve been so torn with this show. the casting is perfect imo, the actors do give it their all and it is incredibly obvious that they’re very passionate about their characters. so i am not blaming any of them at all for anything (why would i even, they have no say in anything). and there have been scenes that weren’t from the book or changed quite a lot in the show which i actually enjoy a lot and in some cases even prefer. but some other changes really do rub me the wrong way. and listen, that’s fine too. you can enjoy and like a show and still be critical of it or not like (or agree with) every aspect of it. but these leaks (which ngl i am inclined to believe for specific reasons the more i think about it) do hamper my enjoyment. not because they changed some major points - cause lbh the ending of teotw is quite confusing on a first read through and very rough so i don’t even mind changes to it - but because it is kinda showing a preference the writers have that i just don’t agree with and that so far is deliberately getting in the way of other storylines in the show. (again, keeping it very vague, no spoilers.)

i will watch season two, especially to see if maybe certain viewpoints change and focus gets shifted around a bit more and characters actually get to do stuff without staying one-note. (screentime doesn’t matter if said character is just standing there moping around and not doing anything btw. no you can’t change my mind but you can soothe your own and that’s fine by me.) i will definitely continue to support the actors who are all doing a stellar job (and tbh, for them alone i don’t want this show cancelled at all, like i have my grievances but that doesn’t mean i want the show to end. who knows how it’ll go next season.).

anyway this is all more incoherent rambling, cause i’m just confused as hell. i’ll get over it, it isn’t the end of the world for me, just momentary disappointment i suppose. also i do still have the books left for me and still have my book journey infront of me. so that isn’t gone in any way and no matter how much i’d disagree with anything the show does (not saying that i do, i’m just confused and... idk... underwhelmed?), the books are still there and not running away.

thank you and apologies for having wasted your time if you read this mess. and please don’t let my vague reaction influence how you view the show in any way. if you thoroughly enjoy it and have fun, then that’s great! and i genuinely am happy for you. but i myself am torn, even if some things turn out to be wrong about the leaks, my problems with the show have been there since ep1. but i will get to that once i watched the finale and have the full season in perspective.

[mr-kamiyama]

I would also like to posit that the reason more Asians could afford houses when that was a thing that was possible here, and can also afford to send their kids to school is because LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN YOU ARE NOT CROSSING THAT IN A DINGHY!!! Poorer Asians in Asia get stuck more often , barring refugees, just like poorer ones that ended up here where everyone tells us it’s a priveledge to be raped for our race get stuck.

Also, to be perfectly honest, you’re only poorer over here because all the housing is fake Airbnb stuff and you can only get certain jobs if your name isn’t a “normal, easy” name like Aeloui SniffleWalk McFuwbfkfk III, Jr. and you’ll be a polyglot college graduate stuck under illiterate bosses who give you 40 minute lectures about having a “troublesome, bad, wrong, difficult, impossible” name like “Li Yu” or “Ikeda Tarou” and get force-renamed without your consent if you actually get the job and don’t just get tossed in the shredder pile (or deleted by the algorithm these days, I suppose) so it’s a trade down from some places unless you come for some US branch high exec job.

Here’s a whole lot about how priveledged we are to be targets/s

The offenders here love to return to the US and pretend to know more about Japan than us filthy Asians and like to tell me that’s why they should be my friend

I want you to also mind here that in 2019, a local Sinophonic (they have a few Chinese languages) news channel in NorCal ran a story on how police refuse to help Asians, which is why I lost my home back in 2014 to racially motivated violent DV and murder attempts and the police just told me it wasn’t important, and I recently watched an Asian worker in the run-down, violence-filled building I live now be gaslit out of reporting a hate crime earlier this year (2021), so of course there’s no data on Asians. Even when the media was suddenly oh-so-shocked that they weren’t ignoring it anymore, the entirety of Western Society is just like English Tumbler, only blogging under SAH to disrupt and destroy our voices so they can continue gaslighting us that we deserve racism because we “never did anything”

While this article feels like it has to genuflect toward the end because we aren’t allowed spaces for ourselves by others, this is another good article, and do keep in mind that the entire modern system of immigration was created to criminalise Asians, who were also being used as a replacement for newly-banned slavery of Black people, all the bans on citizenship if one had Asian blood, and that the entire Anglosphere if not all of EuroAmerica, including English Tumbler, considers it just as much “leftist praxis uwu” as a right wing cause to carry this all out, call it love, and claim it’s totally not racism to deny this isn’t love. And that police won’t help you, and also the whole banning women in immigration from Asia, the West will then turn around and tell you “your backwards people thought women on ships were bad luck, that’s why” WHICH WAS ACTUALLY AN OLD EUROPEAN BELIEF CHINA HAD EARLY MEDICINE EVEN CENTURIES BEFORE EUROPE DEVELOPED LEECH TREATMENT AND HUMOURS (the “black bile” stuff)

Also, I’m Asian and trans male, which is another thing people tell me I’m priveledged to be oppressed for , and since I’ve lost my orientation because people only ever wanted me as a “weak” walking wallet despite me being poor as dirt thanks to AsAm “sticky floor” from the Wikipedia article, four languages and a college degree and I’m priveledged to be bottom rung under bosses who can’t spell “towel” in their only language of English and then tell me I’m stupid because my English isn’t native but it’s a priveledge to be treated this way because I’m Asian, so I don’t even have money, but I literally became aromantic due to trauma (Caedromantic) because partnerships have only ever been about racialised violence and using me for the money I don’t have, so I thought I’d add this. All the violence against me was because I’m Asian enough to capture and beat, so Asian trans man, forget about it.

I will tell you multiple likely reasons Asian men report violence less than Asian women cis or trans or any orientation:

1. Bog standard male DV survivors are hardly believed and usually have nowhere to turn for help, and widespread mockery and invalidation as well as being continued to be stuck with abuser and have to escape with no support whatsoever, save maybe a willing friend for the lucky.

2. Again, police do not serve Asians, or at least didn’t until this year

3. A lot of postwar Japanese immigrants are scared off from passing on language to their kids and families here before were already jailed as babies for being an “evil race.” Which America denied for decades until George Takei made it no longer deniable. So, very recently. America says “Japan is a hive mind of insects but in America, we celebrate difference—racism, sexism, ableism, queerphobia, and all that other stuff we exported are one big party!!!” but you are never more afraid of being the nail that sticks up than if you’re Asian or Latino in America, particularly as an immigrant yourself. I’ve been having deportation nightmares again despite citizenship for 23 years. This goes for everyone and all crime, not just male DV survivors.

4. Just like we’re brainwashed by 99% of non ALPOC that our Asianness and our Americanness can’t both be true, so it is with Asianness and masculinity. Remember what I said above about male DV survivors being ignored or made fun of? Racism posits us all as “effeminate”=“weak”=“undesirable”=“not a real man.” (And yes, of course that’s loaded with 30 other bigotries. You find bigots where you find bigots, surprise of the year/s) So you really think that incentivises reporting by Asian men unless they’re like me and have been done with all this abuse for decades!? Even I lost my wonderful home and never recovered because no one took me with my Asian name, Asian neighbourhood address (yes, a white racist literally stole an Asian’s home in an Asian neighbourhood, this is how our lives are. Online fetishisers of Japanese and Korean media are not our friends. They are closer to the Atlanta shooter or military rapists than they are to good or safe people) seriously. Police refused to help over several calls for several days and told me they had ‘important things to do uwu.’ Mind you this was only because my white, later, violent Nazi-loving, cousin pushed me to cal. No one cares when it’s Asians, that’s why no one reblogged Angelo Quinto’s death around Christmas 2020 same exact way as Floyd except right in front of his pleading mother in her home, and I’ve personally faced violence by Southern cops, but the “Asians can not be men” is also why you get overcompensating macho n-th gen AsAm guys. It’s not a great thing, machoism is always bad, but it is a reaction to racism. Those guys are super not gonna report.

Clearly, we are so priveledged to be gaslit and refused acknowledgement of all our suffering anywhere ever/s

And sorry this is so East Asian centric and not a lot on SE Asians who also face all this as well as all those targeted deportation raids by ICE no one cares about on top of that, sometimes committing suicide in the country they’ve not been since two months old, have no clue on, separated from spouses and children and all their families with no hope of reuniting, and all of us E/SE Asians are otherwise treated the exact same because people refuse to learn we’re not all the exact same single person because racism is inherently dehumanising and 100% OK to do to us in 2021 Anno Domini because we’ve totally progressed../s

Don’t forget SE Asians are more likely to come over as refugees, so same financial instability as me and a lot of Asians around me regardless of where we’re from or our parents were, come over poor, and poverty becomes inter generational. SE Asian Americans, a lot of times they end up nurses or home care aides around here, which hospital and nursing home nurse deaths were significantly Filipina, at least here, because that’s the best they can hope for ever.

[princesssarcastia]

Just wanted to say I love your tag "the last great american queerbait" bc yeah. It really does feel like we'll never see this level of bait in a major media property again. Which is probably a good thing, but it makes spn all the more unique...

thank you! that's from @biggersons on this post here. excuse me while i now ramble about this bullshit

i'm sure someone else has said this before on this hellsite, but YES. supernatural is one of the last of a dying breed, certainly one of the most iconic. supernatural was thee CW show to end all CW shows before it was cool. one of the last shows with such a dichotomous fan base, with dudebros vibing with all supernatural's surface level masculinity and violence on one end, and queer people screaming into the void about intricate rituals dean creates to touch the skin of other men on the other. hell, it was one of the only popular shows on TV in 2020 that still did 22 episode seasons; certainly nearly the last sci-fi/fantasy shows to do it.

remember that post about the difference between queerbaiting, queer coding, and subtext? FOR 15 YEARS SUPERNATURAL DID ALL THREE SIMULTANEOUSLY. its a work of art. homophobic, homophobic art. also racist. and sexist. why am i enjoying this content again?

There were so many different writers and directors and showrunners and camera operators even, that you have:

the showrunners and the marketing gurus running a long-con advertising will-they-or-won't-they-(they won't) queerbait on the queer people screaming into the void because the execs want their money AND the dudebro money but hate the queer identity and the fact that they kept rubbing their queer little hands all over supernatural's manly man masculine characters...

the writers who Been Knew queer coding dean and cas and getting it under the homophobic execs' noses, to the delight of their queer audience...

and the writers who were just monkeys at typewriters churning out nonsense with moments of shakespeare who kept loading on more and more subtext that made the queer audience want to take them by the shoulders and shake their heads right off.

frankly given this mess the only person left who gets to speak with any authority is misha collins, which—

this combined to make a show that is near incomprehensible as a whole but can be sanely consumed in smaller chunks or through fanfiction that burns out the stupid stuff. There's NO way it makes sense if dean and cas aren't madly in love with each other. none. the plausible no-homo ship sailed in like season 7, or like the second time one of them watched the other die and grieved like a widower.

and yet. those dudebros, with allll their money and viewership, are still there. still watching. and so the CW tries to have its cake and eat it, too. for fifteen, fucking, years. because they fear the homophobic backlash if they just fucking commit.

they were too afraid that they would stop making something profitable to realize that they could have made a work of art, that they could have made HISTORY.

no one else will do it like them again. no one will ever even get the opportunity. i can't see anything ever again coming close to having the kind of cultural impact supernatural has, that weird mix of americana and masculinity and brief flashes of themes that make your breath catch and crave more. supernatural was a mirror of american culture in the best and the WORST way, and I don't know that TV creators have the range or the desire to ever reflect us back to ourselves like that again.

there are more explicitly queer shows now that are so much better and more heartfelt, with production teams that aren't remotely predatory. I adore them all! we need them! we deserve them! I want more of them! supernatural should not be a template for anyone ever because it was objectively terrible!

but their was something magical about the tentative hope in the air while it was still going, that little voice in the back of your mind that says, it's been fifteen years!, maybe it will grow beyond its origins, maybe they can learn from their mistakes, maybe they can reach for the happy ending that is right in front of their faces if only they would look past their prejudices long enough to see it. to see us. that's why the show blew up again in the fall of 2020, during the U.S. election, because on a meta level it was reflecting our culture and the moment back to us once again.

of course, in the grand american media tradition, they set that hope on fire. one last queerbait for the road.

so. yeah. its the last great american queerbait.