#just in case because i actually got fucking spoiled on the plot twist and it made me so mad

[ihavesomejays]

text transcription:

Many springs ago, I perceived a sea of flowers upon a lake. I thought to myself that those fleeting colors held indescribable beauty.

The next time I perceived those colors was many years later, when the medic’s tent had blinded me to all but red. The radiance of that shining star was lost on my eyes.

Now, my eyes no longer perceive the subtleties in the colors around me.

But I am content.

For I can now see the most brilliant colors in my universe.

anyways yeah why did they fucking do that to jiaoqiu bro

the planning for this experimentalish comic is under keep reading

[marley-manson]

New Doctor Who episode reaction post in a pros and cons list. Overall I really liked it.

Pros:

-- That's my show!!! That's my faves!!!!!! They're right there on the screen!!!

-- Donna Donna Donna Donna Donna Donna Donna Donna <3333333333333333

-- Gorgeous TARDIS interior, I cannot believe it's an actual 100% physical set god damn, I'm in love. I think it's actually better than the old coral

-- Rose was a great character, love her. I think Davies did really well writing her as trans, the scene with her shitty classmates and Donna being protective was a great moment imo that was just the right amount of transphobia to feel grounded without feeling gratuitous, and Sylvia second guessing herself about calling Rose gorgeous was also a nice moment. Felt real but also warm and loving.

-- I liked that Rose feeling like she's from an alien planet isn't a trans thing, it's a secretly has timelord genetics thing lol

-- oh god the Doctor saying he's a friend of Nerys was incredible, amazing writing, so fucking funny, love that continuity

-- Shaun was great too, love his amiability

-- I liked the Meep being the twist villain, you could see it coming a mile away but I'm always a fan of these kinds of twists

-- I also loved that one of the hints was that Shaun's car wasn't affected by the energy weapons because during that scene I was like 'lol wtf why are their weapons so weak come on' and then 2 minutes later I got an explanation. Love when that happens

-- I liked that Sylvia chilled out a lot and is much better but still isn't a perfect parent (taking a moment before reassuring Donna that she does know how Donna feels about Rose eg), and Donna partially overcompensates with Rose because she didn't get enough praise from Sylvia, and Sylvia seemingly trying to make up for her unsupportiveness of Donna by being very supportive of Rose. Man I love how Davies writes people, yk?

-- I got teary when Donna got her memories back <333

-- RTD always showing the big dangerous effects of the aliens through the pov of innocent bystanders <3 Mainly the neighbour kid in this case.

-- UNIT's scientific consultant was great. I forget her name, but again I enjoy how RTD wrote her representation-wise. She does have a disability, she can't take the stairs and that's a plot point at one point, but she also has some awesome ways to help not just in spite of her disability but because of it. Again, a great balance between grounded and uplifting imo

-- Catherine Tate's performance as a half-timelord is just so fun <3

-- I really loved the revelation that Rose inherited some of the timelord stuff and so she helped save the day as well as keeping Donna alive longer, it was a great exciting moment

-- I was spoiled for the Doctor's line where he tells Donna he loves her and then goes 'oh do I say those things now?' and I was prepared to be annoyed at the gender essentialist implication that it's from ~the female doctor~ but in context it did not feel like a reference to Thirteen being more open, it just felt like the Doctor reflecting that this regeneration isn't exactly the same as Ten. I haven't seen Thirteen so I can't say what her personality is like exactly beyond some vague osmosis, but it could be read as a contrast since he just regenerated from her and that's the kind of stuff a new regeneration says in comparision to the last one. Which I dig.

-- I liked the psychic paper giving him a 'mistress' title and the Doctor saying "oh catch up." Actually in general I enjoyed the occasional Thirteen references, the Doctor was a woman, not anymore, cool. Good, light touch. I am primed to be easily annoyed at how sci-fi gender changes are handled, so I was pleasantly surprised.

-- Oh, I like that the 10 clone thing is gonna be an ongoing mystery over these three specials. I didn't like the concept when I'd heard about it (I was like c'mon can't we get Ten II up in here if we're going to bring Tennant back?) but it is the only way to have a Ten+Donna adventure at this point in the story without handwaving the aging and making it a multi-doctor story featuring 3 Doctors idgaf about, and it's def worth it, so I'm glad they're making it a mystery to be solved rather than giving an offhand easy explanation at least.

Cons:

-- This is on me, but having not watched the show aside from like 5 episodes in the last 15 years, I'm not sure which elements are RTD originals and which are from Moffat and/or Chibnall. Like the sonic screwdriver being able to draw in the air and create forcefields? I don't like that.

-- Also on that same note, UNIT's Judge Dredd swat team vibe? What's up with that? Not a fan, not sure who to blame tho.

-- But yeah this lack of knowledge of what came before left me feeling a little lost sometimes, unsure what I'm supposed to roll with and what's supposed to be new and cool. I'm hoping RTD does more of a clean new start overall because I'm not willing to watch previous DW for the sake of this series.

-- RTD's thing with... puns as (usually retrospective lol) foreshadowing? Always one of the sillier things about his writing, eg YANA, the Doctor-Donna being an actual thing rather than an idiosyncratic speech pattern, etc. Anyway he did it again with the binary/non-binary thing and I thought it was silly again.

-- Biggest con probably is that the resolution to the half-timelord thing was underwhelming and I realize this was meant to be a bit of a feminist statement but came across as gender essentialist as hell too. We're women so we understand we can just let the power go??? At LEAST make it crystal clear that this is only an option now that it's dispersed between two people and not something Donna could've done 15 years ago lol.

-- The editing felt a little off? Scenes cut off a hair too quickly, causing the pacing to feel rushed during a lot of it. There were a few good emotional and character scenes that had room to breathe ofc, but the action/plot scenes felt a little too crushed together, yk? Gimme half a second after a line of dialogue before you cut to the next scene pls.

-- Oh I was meh about the opening titles, but honestly that's just because I like how simple the old RTD credits were and these feel overdone in comparison. But that's a super minor complaint lol, I don't really care.

That's about it though honestly, I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to. I mean I was vascillating hard between high and low hopes lol, but yk. I try to keep my expectations moderate, and those expectations were exceeded. Before this I wasn't sure if I was going to jump back in at all, but now I'm genuinely looking forward to the next special, and the next Doctor after this anniversary stuff!

[leonawriter]

I reached ch700 last night, with one of the cases being "someone asks Kazuha for an omamori because he's got a crush on her, and finds out she's already interested in Heiji" and this morning started thinking-

While people saying that certain twists are out of the blue, un-foreshadowed etc, I've been a Cousins Truther since 2008, at least.

D'you know what hit me hard as "what the fuck is going on here, I have no idea what this is supposed to be, c'mon this is annoying"?

Momiji Ooka.

When I first saw her, I was exactly as I just said - at no point that I've read so far is she hinted at! If anything, the way she was introduced reminds me of how Shiratori's whole story of his "first love" (and the subsequent non-reveal that said first love wasn't Sato Miwako) took place in a grand total of... THREE CHAPTERS. It even included the reveal of who his first love actually was, who was someone we already knew, in spite of the huge number of people in Tokyo it could have been.

Momiji - per my years-old memories of her - just appeared out of thin air purely to act as a love triangle interest to Heiji, and a rival to Kazuha (who's already having enough issues on her own!). Because of that, I got annoyed and frustrated at what to me was clearly a blatant case of the author throwing a character in to prolong things and not make it too easy, when it'd already been long enough. She read to me as more plot contrivance than "character."

Now, I'm hoping that in my re-read, I'll be able to appreciate her this time, as I'll be prepared for her appearance. I think Gosho also took pity on her and created a canon boyfriend for her? I never got that far, so I don't know the details (don't spoil me).

Also, looking up her name to make sure of the spelling, I was reminded that I never actually read all the way through the school trip to Kyoto arc. I vaguely remember trying, but not getting all the way through? So there. We have a vague sense of where I left off. More or less. It could've been a bit earlier, and I may have simply read the flashback case on its own.

[fictionfixations]

persona 3 reload (i love)

CW: ACTUALLY. uh. warning for like. suicide?? guns? well its not actually suicide but like. i mean this isnt spoiler free but they use a certain method to trigger their personas that could be very triggering to people so if you're uncomfortable with death and anything related, this is NOT the game for you!

Also spoilers for other persona games

i just saw the entire story of persona 3 reload (well. i watched someone play it. because im not the biggest fan of grinding, but on the other hand listening to grinding in tartarus vods where they just talk about random stuff [actually, i watched CyYu's playthrough. If you don't know, that's Akihiko's VA] is nice to have in the background)

this was the second persona game ive seen. the first was persona 5, which i saw the anime for, but forgot like most of what happened (ive been regaining that knowledge through fanfiction.)

in any case i also spoiled myself to what happened in persona 3 by fanfiction

so i knew. that. protag would die.

but it got me really sad. and with the in-cutscene options where it just. feels so slow.

(and a part of me is relieved that we didnt see them make the realization that we're dead. it was all happy times till the end and i know that wouldve gotten the waterworks coming)

and then the main menu screen??

its just. empty.

and this got me crying (i always hate endings, honestly. the 'will we or will we not meet again?' no thanks i shall live in 'these characters will live forever in a sort of limbo in the same school and nothing changes because yes'. ...although that might be a little too close to a certain twisted wonderland plotline LMFAO)

(also oh my god the osts in this game are such a fucking BOP AGHH)

(i have no clue what my reaction to the plot twist with like ryoji n stuff would be though, honestly. i spoiled myself reading those time travel fanfictions where persona 3 protagonist [either makoto or minato] either comes back to the beginning. ..OR somehow comes back to life??? or appears in persona 5 with amnesia at first. and like. there's one where ryoji was there (as a voice). or the yellow in his phantom thief costume was 'his idea of rebellion' aka ryoji. so then. i went to the wiki. and so yeee.)

in any case i definitely prefer this over persona 5. and that might be because i really got myself invested in the actual story and cared a whole lot about the characters (Cy Yu did a 100% playthrough using a guide as he played the original but respectfully kept the entire thing spoiler-free so ppl like me could fully experience it for the first time while getting the most story :D)

but yeah.

also.

GUNS.

trauma.

ive only seen it a few times in crossover fics between persona games. but. ..i really like seeing peoples reactions to them pulling a gun out and shooting themselves. (sometimes it works. sometimes it doesnt and it breaks because there's a difference to how every persona world works for each game. like. Dark Hour, TV World(? ive never seen 4 but ive seen fics), Metaverse(iirc)... And the shadows I think mean different things.)

also the theurgy's are very pretty. and if i misspelled that i am so sorry.

[fzzr]

Spring 2023 Anime Wrapup

Original Post:

This sure was a season. I finished 14 full-length series, plus some OVAs and carryovers. Undisputed show of the season Oshi no Ko and underrated hit Dead Mount Death Play lead the pack, but there's a range of other content between hate-watchable and actually good as well.

New Stuff:

Oshi no Ko (My Star) - Holy shit. I don't want to say much to avoid spoilers, but it was a 10/10 candidate from episode one and still might end up there on rewatch. For now 9/10, you MUST watch this. There will be a post forthcoming when I process it for a while.

Isekai de Cheat Skill wo Te ni Shita Ore wa, Genjitsu Sekai wo mo Musou Suru: Level Up wa Jinsei wo Kaeta (I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in The Real World, Too) - They put the entire power fantasy in the title for your convenience. It's not a great message that all you need to do to become popular is inherit a bunch of money and literally magically change your entire body, but here we are. The power fantasy is truly stratospheric - for example, he accidentally seduces a model and is proposed to by a princess in the space of one episode. The "animation" (or lack thereof) doesn't give the at best mediocre plot the support it needs, alas. A very generous 6/10.

Jigokuraku (Hell's Paradise) - Samurai Suicide Squad with a hearty helping of EDGE and a surprising amount of heart. The action was good, even though it sometimes felt like they ran out of time to make things truly excellent. 8/10.

Kanojo ga Koushaku-tei ni Itta Riyuu (The Reason Why Raeliana Ended up at the Duke's Mansion) - Another villainess anime, this time with the twist being that she becomes a villainess on purpose in order to save her own life. Most of the time the plot foreknowledge twist was used to undermine typical shoujo tropes rather than heighten them. Between that and the nothing ending, I found it oddly muted. 7/10.

Kimi wa Houkago Insomnia (Insomniacs After School) - I didn't finish this yet, because I don't think I'm ready for the emotional punches it's setting up. Not dropped, just not done.

Skip to Loafer (Skip and Loafer) - A country-girl-in-the-big-city shoujo story, in which our protagonist good-natures her way through a whole stable of stock high school antagonists. I like that given only twelve episodes to work with they didn't speedrun to parts where relationships happen, and instead let the story take its time. This is the first time since Hyouka I've really liked something with this sort of sedate pace. Looking forward to more! 8/10.

Tengoku Daimakyou (Heavenly Delusion) - A trip through the post-apocalypse featuring spooky monsters, bioethics failures, and a mix of hope and despair at how people face life after the end. Worth a watch, but be aware there's some extreme content. 8/10

Yamada-kun to Lv999 no Koi wo Suru (Loving Yamada at Lv999) - Shoujo for gamers! Unlike Raeliana above this shoujo with a twist did it for me. For personal reasons I appreciated the respect paid to online relationships. Convincing characters and relationships plus distinct and consistent art make this a very honorable 8/10.

Otonari ni Ginga (A Galaxy Next Door) - A guy touches an alien princess funny and they're married now. Yes, another one. This time, she's his manga assistant. Very light and fluffy, despite the subtheme of family alienation. 7/10, though at the high end for myself.

Dead Mount Death Play - Reverse Isekai! With a name like that you'd expect some serious edge, and there is some. Surprisingly though the themes are very wholesome. This was the biggest surprise of the season. I didn't watch it in the first round of shows, but when I looked at it out of curiosity it blew me away. 9/10, you should really watch this.

Tonikaku Kawaii - This is a sequel, but I hadn't watched the previous season, so it's new to me. I added it later in the season mostly out of curiosity. It turned out to be another entry in the impossibly perfect significant other microgenre, like The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten. As with Angel Next Door, the point is that you should be an actual good person. This time it's about the rewards of getting married as soon as possible, and here are step-by-step instructions. There's a subtle-but-not-subtle supernatural undercurrent that becomes increasingly obvious in season 2, as well. 7/10.

Sequels:

Birdie Wing: Golf Girls' Story Season 2 - What can you say about a show that introduces multiple dangerous forbidden techniques in the middle of a tournament arc... of golf? Anyway here's lesbians doing more wacky special moves. If you're into weird sports anime you're sure to be into this. 8/10.

Dr. Stone: New World - There was a lot more yadda yadda this time, so it fell a bit flat. The less they show Senku's work coming up with things the more they feel like instant win buttons instead of things they worked for. I had hoped the cast size constraint in the second half of the season would have let them go back to spending time on inventions, but alas no. 7/10.

Kimetsu no Yaiba: Katanakaji no Sato-hen (Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Swordsmith Village Arc) - Yep, it was more Demon Slayer. I'm pleased that Demon Slayer has mostly maintained its quality, in contrast with My Hero Academia which fell off a bit in the middle there. 8/10.

Kidou Senshi Gundam: Suisei no Majo Season 2 (Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury Season 2) - The robots (and lesbians) are cool, but I don't see how it's possible to miss the "war (and unfettered capitalism) is bad" message. It's also a new take on Revolutionary Girl Utena, which I've been meaning to re-watch and write about for some time. No excuse now, I suppose. 8/10.

Uma Musume: Pretty Derby - Road to the Top - I forgot to put this on the first list because it's a four episode ONA that hadn't started airing yet. As one of the weird sports anime I actually enjoy, of course I was up for even just a small arc of it. 8/10.

Carryovers:

Kubo-san wa Mob wo Yurusanai (Kubo Won't Let Me Be Invisible) - Finally a bulli anime I can enjoy, thanks to it not actually being bulli for very long. In the end this was a sort of nothing-in-particular show, falling somewhere in the fuzzy area around impossibly perfect SO and teasing anime. As expected it's almost all frosting and no cake, but I did enjoy my time with it. 7/10.

Itai no wa Iya nano de Bougyoryoku ni Kyokufuri Shitai to Omoimasu. 2 (BOFURI: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense. Season 2) - This fell off a bit, and I think I know why. It suffered from the same thing as later Dog Days seasons, where it used its expansive cast by shuffling who hangs out with who. This provides less novelty than the original concept of "what will they get up to now" did, and it also necessarily slows things to a crawl as we need to see more perspectives on every event as a result. Still, the characters remain fun and the game is as busted as ever. 7/10.

Dropped:

Kaminaki Sekai no Kamisama Katsudou - Garbage. A fetish fest with godawful CGI. Rancid vibes. You'll never know where it's going. You may have trouble looking away. I did eventually, though. Dropped at episode 10. 6/10.

Isekai One Turn Kill Neesan: Ane Douhan no Isekai Seikatsu Hajimemashita (My One-Hit Kill Sister) - Lots of Rule D edging. The quality isn't the most consistent, the tropes are basic, and little of value is to be found here. When it's good, it's actually kinda good. Unfortunately it got boring. Dropped at episode 10. 6/10.

Edomae Elf (Otaku Elf) - Elf in real world! Wooo! A nice comfy show. Not much happens, but it's cute enough. Got boring in the end though. Dropped at episode 10. 7/10.

My Home Hero - It's hard to think of anything recently that used tension and suspense to this degree. That said, the every-episode cliffhangers eventually got exhausting and turned me off and I stopped keeping up. 7/10 not for me.

[not-souleaterpost]

This posts brings up a good point, but even though I had some joke thoughts in the notes already, I think I got a brainblast big enough to try to be a contrarian again.

I wont go into the manga here so no worries for anybody who thinks Im just gonna use this as an opportunity to spoil and shit on it lol

Also I may look like I'm white knighting the anime too much even for my standards, so lets start with saying that it is a mostly solid and good criticism of it, because it brings up a problem with a pivotal part of it all, and not just whines about stupid lore inconsitencies or powerups like the crictisms I actually dismiss.

So anyways, I first remembered how ironically peeps that like Maka and Soul as a couple used the fact Soul was so unbothered by getting sliced as a trait that made him both appealing and a good match for Maka - somebody who even outwardly is crass and abrasive but in things that matter to her supports her unconditionally - even if it would totally be expected for him to be bothered by it.

But this lead me to rethink the situation - in a way Soul is supposed to be determined to place his live on the line, he escapes from his old identity by being totally into the role of the "cool" weapon that does the job of the DWMA and more importantly of his Meister without question. And this is shown many times, even with the conflict evolving into Soul feeling useless when alone.

Anyways, maybe my thoughts are to scattered to make clear what I mean - but lets look at it this way - Soul and Maka both are like soldiers putting their lives on the line (yeah yeah, its a whole other topic with the child soldier angel), its a kill or be killed world literally, and they commence the execution of Crona - a weirdo kid that even then clearly is fucked in some way - this leads to the famous near fatal wound - which also Soul choce to get, twisting the dynamic into a self sacrifice thing and even kind of removing Crona from the strong negative emotions they both feel about it - well later because at first Makas whole Modus Oporandi is to kill Crona, even if that already gets twisted from revenge to an inner battle of insecurities.

Anyways, the point Im getting to, that by the time the whole sappy Crona beach scene happens, it already gets implied that nobody is really blaming Crona as some malicious actor (even if one could arguee that its clunky, especially with the death of those thugs at the church and other things, but I guess even the fact that at the boat all the souls were allready killed was a way for the story to try to soften the evil of the actions, even if kinda dishonest to do it that way but idk)

So this is the situation - Maka and Soul and the whole DWMA forgives Crona for being part of a plot to resurect the devil, for all other killings and evil shit, so then maybe the whole "well shit you got nearly killed by being cut up man" thing in a twisted way doesnt really matter to Soul - like holding over some scissor incident over the weird kid who turns out had some unexpected muscle spasm attack and you getting injured while trying to get the scissors from hurting somebody (lol ok maybe one of my worst analogies, but still get what I mean?)

Idk, at the end one can say its unrealistic that Soul even if he has some logical reason to not feel this resentment would still feel unconsious anger and antipathy towards Crona or Maka's increased interest in the psycho kid but eh, dunno in the end its a conceit of the story - even as a kid I thought it was kinda emotioanlly unrealistic that atleast some kids arent scared of Crona or think that the DWMA is crazy for lettting a murderer just walk around, but I think thats įust missing the forrest for the trees of stories - in the end it is a way to show and communicate metaphors, in this case the integration of an outcast by a supportive community - even having therapists would ruin it and turn it into something else and go against the whole point of bonds being what brings us back from the abyss of fear cause nobody aint bonding with some grumpy bored theraphist who is only checking of a list without even understanding how human connections work lol (think this anonymous ask I used to request an image that actually kinda blew up illustrates it best, damn should have been public with it, so much clouth lost...:

Art credit to @slimeel (Hope it had enough reblogs to not go.against etiquette)

((reading this shit gave me a bigger ego boost and feeling of euphoria than a lot of things lol))

Anyway, did I just write everything to go on a tangent to try to claim a post I cant prove I made?

Yeah...Sorry- Nah wait, back to the point.

So yeah, in the end I think it still is a good question, and I think I'll need to rewatch the anime to figure out if Soul really was as sidelined as he really was - or if it was the point - that Soul is a great partner because in the end he trusts his Meister, even if they both may not allways show it.

(Also maybe this is part of Souls real struggle of fearing abandoment once people see him for who he is and why Maka accepts him and opens the box - the fact he supported her even if it lead to being thirdwheeled is prove enough he is a person worthy of unconditional respect, no matter what ugly or lame side he may hide🤷‍♂️)

And also to get really pretentious - maybe it was a flaw of the whole conceit of including the Emine inspired Crona Maka stuff in a story that has the partner theme so ingrained with the Meister Weapon relationship - it just formally causes many situations where charachters feel neglected or even forgotten about because its hard to write somebody bonding with a new person who used to be an enemy while jugglijg the whole aspect of the Maka and Soul relationship - ofcourse more time or maybe a different story could handle it, like maybe making Crona just a weapon and the conflict resolving with Maka dual weilding while making sure that Maka assures Soul that she isnt abandoning him for a new toy and making Soul appreciate Crona and actually forgive the black dress stick figure after actually being saved by Crona directly or Crona doing something only for Soul and not for Maka by proxy ((also one reason Soul could be cool with Crona in the end is because Crona protected Maka by jumping into the attack so if Soul values that the most it kinda comes full circle, yaknowwhatImean?) So yeah idk maybe writting a situation about a friendship not breaking even after adding another part to it would actually be interesting and an aspect of life that isnt often discussed in media. But who knows.

Anyways I think I missed the point again but still guess I should have just saved it all for the iceberg lol.

"now the anime i felt diminished Soul's character in the second half... that's another topic though, haha."

What do you mean, his character was diminished?

Hello! Sorry it took me so long to answer!! Spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn't seen the whole show.

Let me approach this a different way... We know the running joke about Tsubaki, that after the Masamune arc she gets no character development. Her lines are just screaming Black Star's name, and that's about it for her.

That's how it feels for Soul after Crona shows up. Except with him it's just...silent brooding and watching his meister put all her focus onto someone else. The meister/weapon relationship that seems like it's kinda supposed to be the whole point of the show...? We don't get much of that for Soul and Maka anymore until the finale. And then it feels just kinda...forced in at the last moment, since we haven't gotten much of that.

He's not the only one whose arc gets skewed, and a good lot of that is due to the anime ending so abruptly and not getting to tell a fuller story. It needed at least ten more episodes in my opinion, whether it followed the manga or not... It just ended too fast.

But Soul specifically got supplanted by Crona, and it makes no sense to me. To have his relationship with Maka just...set aside entirely. Or rather, the issue is that they tried to pretend it wasn't. They tried to pretend all was well, and then bring it back at the very end as if things have been fine the entire time. But no.....no they haven't been.

For some idk like fifteen episodes or so? The only glimpses of Soul are him brooding, pining, trying to be himself toward Maka, being a good friend and weapon, but Maka only has eyes for Crona. Even at their apartment her only thoughts are for Crona, even telling Soul to leave her alone one time. She puts this wall between them and doesn't even know she's doing it, and Soul... His devotion to her never changes.

And... He never gets resolution with Crona for himself. So Maka just...forgave Crona I guess for almost killing Soul? Remember that huge giant plot point that started back in episode 7? That started the entire black blood thing? We never see or hear them talk about it but I guess Maka just....let it go, after purifying Crona? Which makes NO sense but okay I guess. But what about Soul... So since Maka decided to forget about Crona almost killing him, Soul is supposed to just forget too? Since his meister has decided to obsess over this poor mixed up kid who desperately needs professional help NOT a friendship that's doomed to unhealthiness due to the kid's issues, and Soul's supposed to just...be cool with it?

I was really glad that Kid brought it up that one time at the courts, even if it was just for a moment. At least somebody remembered what Soul went through. But it should have been his meister.

So yeah it's just...messed up. In summary.... Soul gets ignored second half of the show till a last-minute dramatic thing in the finale, but it feels out of place since Maka has ignored him for who knows how many episodes except to tell him to leave her alone. Soul has remained devoted and loyal. Soul's devotion to her has him repeatedly use the black blood for the sake of all of them, risking himself. And Maka just forgot I guess about her "new project" or whatever almost killing her weapon. And Soul just gotta deal with....all of that. Deal with what looks like the slow losing of his meister.

Yeah. That's what I meant by Soul being diminished... Everything about him was just kinda forgotten except what he could do for the rest of them.

Gonna take a left-turn here and compare Maka to her father again... Wonder if this is what Stein felt like watching his weapon go off with someone else, slowly losing him to some new, interesting person for whatever reason...

Yeah Maka, your weapon deserved better from you.

All that said? Oh I still ship it. I can be annoyed as heck with canon and still use it, lol.

[vulpiximisa]

Okay current list of rants before I forget everything because there was just soooo much:

Unfortunately I had already been semi spoiled for the mastermind. I don’t remember where but I saw a figurine of Tsumugi with Monokuma and I was hoping it was just representative because there has been figures of Kyoko with Monokuma but alas 😔

So knowing that, and me being on Naegi’s wiki trivia section, seeing that Tsumugi has done a cosplay of him, makes me either guess that Danganronpa was a fictional world or she Can cosplay real (in their world) people if they are dead (under the assumption that drv3 actually took place in the future like they said)

Okay where can I start complaining.

The reopening of the first case, making Kaede out to be totally innocent felt a little hm. Tsumugi’s bathroom excuse is only flimsy because we find the hidden passageway but she literally could have just gone to use the bathroom. If she wanted to lie about seeing Kibo or whoever the other accused was in the bathroom she could have done it because LITERALLY WE LIE IN COURT ALL THE DAMN TIME. Anyway, it was a flimsy argument but she didn’t fight back too hard and just pulled the Junko card to get out. (Ngl seeing the case reenactment with Rantaro nearly getting hit with Kaede’s ball is Hilarious. He probably thought “oh damn, I almost died 😂” only to get clobbered by another ball.)

My early theory was that they actually were normal kids with no Ultimate skills and I guess I was right. And I wish they just stopped there. I hate Hate HATE that every single Flashlight meant ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. That’s not good writing, that’s bullshit. It’s like, the point of building a mystery is to give the viewer clues, but if you’re telling me all the information is false, then what’s the fucking point.

I’ve had my problems with DR writing from the beginning, where everything Revealed is literally just Info Dump from THE VILLAIN. So like, are we SUPPOSED to believe any of that? Also in DR2, I HATED that the Countdown Timer was made to be a big deal and then revealed that No, It Did Absolutely Nothing. The protags having memory loss makes it so that the narration is unreliable already but if even the little bits of information were slowly start getting through out the story is BULLSHIT then What The Hell Am I Supposed to Believe.

For all the shit that I give Professor Layton mysteries, where they are over the top and Super Ridiculous, at least the narrative takes itself seriously.

Then they started going all meta/fourth wall breaking. I really could have accepted it if it was just “Tsumugi is a big DR fan and wanted to reenact the killing games” but then they had to keep going and give the poor characters existential crisis and then pull the “entire world” into it. Look, I’m a new DR fan, so you can’t pull the “you guys asked for this” with me, because I literally thought it could have stopped with the first game. This is Kodaka’s way of saying “don’t ask me for anything ever again” 😂

Like I understand that Hope vs Despair wasn’t all black and white. We got that from DR2 from Komaeda’s whatever he is. I get that Shuichi here is suppose to represent the absolute neutral with his One Truth. Making us go through the mini games to just not play them really feels like it’s pushing for time. We got it after the first two mini games Please.

Man I really hope the rest of the game can save this plot twist because I’m feeling really bitter about it.

[antiloreolympus]

10 Anti LO Asks

1. Why is no one talking about one of the most stupid things we've seen in this webtoon thus far? I'm talking about the fact that H&P deadass pull a "I nominate Hades as an attorney to defend me in this case uwu" and the mf accepts (clearly the had it planned) although he is part of the jury.

Now, I don't have fast pass but I really hope this whole thing is forbidded by Zeus in the next episodes. It makes no fucking sense! Hades is not a lawyer, and as a god is not associated with law/justice (him being a king doesn't excuse this, he is there to "judge" not to defend the accused).

This really proves that absolutely nothing works against Persephone ever. She is able to get away with murder and have zero consequences for her actions, all while the smurf plays daddy with her, spoils her and defends her in court WHICH SHOULD NOT BE EVEN POSSIBLE LMAO.

From OP: It’s allowed because ‘loophole’.

2. I would like to add to what that person said about the characters looking too stiff. Literally that panel towards the end of ep. 179 where P said "I nominate Hades" is the best example of this. Wtf is wrong with her hand? It looks like a wooden doll with her arm extended like that. The only explanation I have for this (aside from the fact that the art style sucks big time) is that she's trying to imitate the art style on the ancient Greek amphoras (amphorae?), but even the scenes depicted on them had signs of natural movement, with the bodies looking much less stiff of course.

3. Anyone else wanna mention the backgrounds are also just not there at this point? Like she was already bad with this in the beginning but at least there was some sketch up lines to give the impression they were in a real space, but now it’s literally just blank voids of color and that’s it, and often not good use of color either (why is the above land pink while the underworld is blue? It makes it hard too tell what’s going on). There aren’t even establishing shots to at least give the readers an idea where they are and then becoming abstract about it, it’s all abstract and flat, which doesn’t help when the characters also are so lacking in character design and aren’t really doing anything pose or action wise. The world around them don’t even seem like actual places, it just seems like a set, and a very cheap one at that. It just ends up looking so boring in all fronts.

4. I don't know why it's only happening now but Persephone's eyebrows have started to piss me off lately. Why are they pure black? And when did they become so thick? It doesn't fit in with the rest of her fair and hairless appearance, it just looks like her brow artist did a piss poor job on them.

5. it honestly makes me sad looking at the first few lo episodes. were they perfect? god no, but at least the art was unique and had some actual thought put in it, but by around episode 25 or so you begin to notice the style is becoming less and less, until you have what it is now which is completely different, and not for the better. i know styles change and all, but this is a case where it got so much worse, losing its unique factor to look so generic and lacking instead. it make me sad.

6. Ive noticed LO fans dont seem to enjoy any other greek myth works, only LO. for example there's a huge overlap in PJO fans liking Hades Games and BoZ, and Hadestown fans towards TSOA, and so on and so on, meanwhile LO overwhelmingly don't even read other HxP stuff like Punderworld and openly hate stuff like PJO. They tend to only consume LO while claiming to be "big myth fans". It reminds me of Potterheads who claim to be big book nerds when they've really only read the series and nothing else.

7. its truly a testament to how bad the writing is from RS in that she honestly thought it was a dramatic twist apollo and artemis of all people were children to zeus, despite looking exactly like him and not like their mother. also, tbh, the fact hera humiliated leto and treats the twins like garbage, it is any wonder theyre being depicted so negatively in LO? theyre only used to prop up hades and p's "friendships" to eros and daphne. artemis is even the "bad" maiden. it's all so stupid.

8. the thing to me is no retelling of myths will be perfect, how could they be? but LO takes the cake at claiming its so researched and is the actual truth and is 99%+ correct (both from rachel's words as well as by her fans) with both refusing to even admit to any mistakes and refusing any critique, especially from greeks themselves, that's where the issue is to me. you cannot claim to be so well researched only to be upset when people notice the many obvious inaccuracies. that's not how it works.

9. there's a part of me that wonders why LO has never featured any MLM romances like poseidon, zeus, or apollo's many male lovers, but then i remembered she doesn't care about poseidon and both zeus & apollo are both evil to her, her made up WLW romances are terrible, and all relationships that cant be used to prop up hades and persephone are made cruel and abusive, so maybe that's a blessing in disguise that she's so bad at even remembering LGBTQ+ relationships, much less depicting them.

-----FP Spoiler/Mention-----

10. The whole trial thing just puts into perspective how much plot points go off the rails. I was actually looking forward to finally hearing from Demeter that Persephone IS a fertility goddess and them having a argument before the trial, but then it just left on a Clift hanger. And then oh wow Hades is being her lawyer, which??, pretty sure that’s not how that works but okay whatever he’s going against his brothers. But he doesn’t even make an opening statement because the other side does instead. And then Hermes shows up and his backstory starts and everything gets so muddled. I’m not an expert on court cases but seeing the witness be called up right after and the other side just make a bunch of shi up instead of stating a pathos but accurate opening statement hurts my brain. Not to mention the jury and people just speaking out at random? Like can Rachel just write something serious for once? Or at least somewhat accurate? Legally blonde had a better comedy court case scene than whatever this is.

[dreamsmp-au-ideas]

Okay, so, I’m an absolute fool for the Immune AU. Something which has only been strengthened by more recent streams with Sam really becoming Tubbo and Tommy’s tired Dad as well as Tommy at the very least having what looks like a true immunity (jury is out on Tubbo). When I have the time I fully intend to write an Immune AU fic! I just have a couple additions I want to make.

I think Karl and Foolish should absolutely be Immune as well. In fact, to me it feels like they should have been the ones to build the portal but they had to stay behind to make sure the others got to the other side safely. This adds in a lot of interesting angst potential since the characters of Sapnap and Karl are technically canonically engaged. I strongly dislike shipping when the people playing characters share so many similarities with the characters themselves, but I think in honor of it technically being canon there’s room to forgive if people want that kind of angst. Otherwise it can just be regular angst over having had to leave Karl and Foolish behind. Maybe just making Karl, Quackity, and Sapnap a really close platonic trio instead for the people who still don’t really want to involve any hint of shipping, canonical to the story or not.

Another idea I’d like to purpose is the idea of partial, full, and pseudo immunity. Full immunity is found in the people like Tommy or Sam who outright are ambivalent or hateful towards the egg. Even locking them into the room with the egg for hours on end wouldn’t change their opinion (just significantly piss them off in the case of Tommy). Partially immune people are the ones like Puffy or Skeppy who find the strength to resist it but will slowly wane over time if they’re exposed to it too much. We can even add Punz to the partial immunity list and add in hints of the overprotective mercenary big brother au, possibly being more loyal to Tommy than the egg but ultimately loosing his life to protect the group. Finally we have the pseudo immunes like Eret and in my own opinion Tubbo. Either they’re so loyal to someone that they can refute the egg or they have a special blood line that gives them some protection, but their ability to rise above the egg’s manipulation is more so through sheer force of will than an actual immunity and even they too eventually start to crumble. Hell, maybe Tubbo stayed loyal to the very end and Punz sacrificed himself to give Tommy and Tubbo an extra week together so that Tommy could come to terms with things.

If you’re looking for SBI hurt/comfort then make Techno pseudo immune because of chat and Phil partially immune. Techno could hold out super long and we get an emotional heart to heart between Tommy and Techno only for Techno’s greatest weapon against the Crimson, Chat, to become his greatest weakness as the Crimson figures out how to make chat be quiet and in turn lulls Techno into its grasp. Phil on the other hand might have partial immunity but after being captured is tricked by the Egg into thinking that it can bring back Wilbur (which it kind of does by capturing Ghostbur and reviving a super messed up Wilbur.) Where as Pogbur was mentally ill, he genuinely loved Tommy. The first time Tommy confronts him in the button room there’s tnt under the room and it’s implied Wilbur doesn’t press the button because he doesn’t want Tommy getting hurt. He got really sick at the end, but he still loved Tommy. While I am all for an evil and abusive Wilbur during the Pogtopia arc within certain aus (cus sometimes Villain Wilbur is fun), canon Wilbur really was just sick and while that doesn’t excuse all of his actions, it speaks to a redemption arc and it isn’t fair to demonize him if a fic wants to go the route of him being sick instead of a villain. Crimbur would be the exact opposite. Only further edged on by a now sick Phil essentially trying to “repair” his family as a twisted way to make amends to his two youngest (something we might even see mirrored in an infected Techno who could perhaps realize how fucked up some of his actions were. Like offering to sell Tommy back to Dream for the favor, bluff or not it wasn’t a chill move y'all.)

I have a couple more interesting ideas/plot points that I would love to share, but, well, since I’m actually planning to turn this into a fic it wouldn’t be any fun if I spoiled everything. If this tumblr’s curator is chill with it I wouldn’t mind dropping a link here when the first chapter goes up.

~Snapdragon & Firefly

[rallamajoop]

...and the unironic joys of better living through chemistry

How do I love Venom: The Hunger, let me count the ways…

It’s by far the shippiest Venom/Eddie story to come out of the character’s heyday. It’s the only story of the era to treat Venom’s violent wild-animal instincts not as an immutable fact, but as something that can be managed. It pulls off an aesthetic like nothing else that was being done at the time.

And then there’s the way it says, Does the world around you seem sinister and foreboding? Do you lie awake at night contemplating metaphorical oceans of despair? Well shit, son – have you considered you may be suffering from a mundane neurochemical imbalance, and a round of the right meds could clear that right up for you?

It does all this without breaking the atmosphere, without a whiff that our story has been interrupted for a Very Special Message about mental health.

In the near-decade since I was first prescribed anti-depressants, I don’t think I’ve read another story that lands the message “Sometimes, it’s not you, it’s just your brain chemistry,” so well.

Fair warning: if you have not read The Hunger, I am about to spoil every major plot point. If you have, well, maybe I can still give you a new appreciation for a few details you might have missed.

It’s a strange book, whatever else you take from it. It’s almost the only thing either author or artist contributed to the Venom canon, and it’s so different stylistically and tonally from the 90′s Venom norm that it feels like a tale from some noir-elseworlds setting instead of 616 canon. When you take risks that big with a property, you leave yourself precious little landing space between 'unmitigated triumph’ and ‘abject failure’: if this book hadn’t absolutely nailed it, I’d be dismissing it as edgy, OOC dreck. Fortunately, if The Hunger is nothing else, it is a story that $&#@ing commits – to basically everything it does.

Now, I'm not going to tell you Venom: The Hunger is a story about overcoming depression, because I don't know whether author Len Kaminski even thought about it that way while working on it. There's always space for other readings, and this one take is not gospel. That said: holy shit is this thing unsubtle with its metaphors. And with that in mind, let’s start by talking a little about Kaminski’s take on Eddie himself.

As I may have mentioned before, I like to divide 90′s Eddie into two broad personas: the Meathead, and the Hobo.

Kaminski’s Eddie nominally belongs in the angsty, long-haired Hobo incarnation, but that’s a bit of a simplification: this version certainly has plenty of angst and plenty of hair to his name – but nowhere, not even at his lowest ebb, does he doubt that he and his Other are meant for each other, which is usually Hobo!Eddie’s primary existential quandary.

He’s also taken up narrating his own life like a hardboiled PI.

So that’s... novel.

The only other time Eddie’s sounded like this is, er, in that one other Venom one-shot Kaminski penned (Seed of Darkness, a prequel that sadly isn’t in The Hunger’s league), so I think we can safely file it under authorial ticks.

Then again, Hobo!Eddie’s always been one melodramatic SOB, so maybe this is just how he’d sound after learning to channel his angst into his poetry. You can’t argue it fits the aesthetic, anyway.

We’d also be remiss not to mention Ed Halsted’s art, which I can only describe as gothic-meets-noir-meets-H.R.-Giger. Never before or since has the alien symbiote looked this alien: twisted with Xenompoph-like ridges and veins.

But Halsted doesn’t treat Venom to all that extra detail in every panel. Instead, the distortion tends to appear when the symbiote is separated from Eddie or out of control – and I doubt you need me to walk you through the symbolic importance of that creative decision. More importantly, Halsted’s art provides exactly the class of visuals that Kaminski’s story needs.

Did I mention this is a horror story? You might be surprised how few Venom stories really fit that genre, but if all those adjectives about Halsted’s style above didn’t clue you in, this is one of them.

Anyway, with that much context covered, let’s get into the main narrative of this thing.

As our first issue opens, Eddie’s world has become a dark and foreboding place. He’s not sleeping, though he mostly brushes this off. (Fun fact: trouble sleeping is one of those under-appreciated symptoms of depression. Additional fun fact: the first doctor ever to suggest I might be suffering from depression was actually a sleep specialist. You can guess how that appointment was going.)

Just to set our scene, here’s all of page 1.

Eddie’s narration has plenty of (ha) venom for his surroundings, but the visuals are here to back him up: panels from Eddie’s POV are edged in twisted, fleshy borders and drained of colour, the people rendered as creepy, goblin-like creatures. A couple of later scenes go even further to contrast Eddie-vision with what everyone else is seeing:

As depictions of depression go this is a little on the nose, but then, you don’t read a comic about a brain-eating alien parasite looking for subtlety, do you?

Eddie  doesn’t see himself as depressed, of course. As far as he’s concerned, he’s seeing the world’s true face: it’s everyone else who’s deluding themselves. He’s still got his symbiote, so he’s happy. He’s yet to hit that all-important breaking point where something he can’t brush off goes irrevocably wrong.

But he’s also starting to experience these weird... cravings.

He just can’t put a name to exactly what he’s craving until a routine bar fight with a couple of thugs takes a turn for the horrific.

(I include this panel partly to point out even in The Hunger, the goriest of all 90′s Venom titles, you’re still not going to see brains getting eaten in any graphic detail. We don’t need to to get the horror of the moment across. The 90′s were a more innocent time.)

Eddie himself is horrified when he comes back to himself and realises what he’s done.

Or rather, what his symbiote’s just made him do.

Kaminski doesn’t keep us in suspense about why, though. Eddie may have just done something horrific, but there’s a reason, and it’s as mundane as a vitamin deficiency. He’s bonded to an alien creature, after all, and his symbiote is craving a nutrient which just happens to be found in human brains. And if Eddie can’t or won’t help it meet that need, it’ll do so alone. 

Now, giving us that explanation so quickly is an interesting creative decision: this is a horror story, and horror lives in what we don’t know. Wouldn’t it be all the more horrifying had the symbiote been unable to explain what’s going on, leaving Eddie without the first real clue as to where this monstrous new hunger had come from?

The Hunger doesn’t take that route though, and I love it. Eddie isn’t a monster, this isn’t his fault: he has a fucking condition, and wallowing in his own moral failings is going to get him nowhere. You might as well try to cure scurvy or rickets with positive thinking. Just like depression can make you feel like an utter failure at the most basic parts of being human, and all the affirmations in the world won’t fix it when it’s fundamentally your brain chemistry that’s the problem. Or like addicts aren’t weak-willed for struggling not to relapse, they’re dealing with genuine chemical dependency – or even like how someone who’s trans isn’t at fault for being unable to reconcile themselves to the bodies and the hormones they were born with by pure force of trying. Free will is more than an illusion, but we’re all messy, biological organisms underneath, and your own brain and biochemistry can and will fuck you over in a hundred wildly different ways for as many wildly different reasons and it’s not your fault.

We aren’t monsters. But if we do, sometimes, find ourselves identifying with the monster, there might be a reason for that.

(Ahem)

I’m just saying, that’s fucking powerful, and we need more stories that say it.

Anyway, in case you missed it during that tangent, issue #1 closes with the symbiote having torn Eddie’s heart in two itself free to go hunting brains without him.

I’m trying not to get too sidetracked at this point talking about Kaminski’s take on the symbiote itself. Suffice to say there are broadly two schools of thought on how it ought to function while separated from its host: the traditional ambulatory-slime-puddle version, and the more recently popular alternative where anything-you-can-do-with-a-host-you-can-also-do-without-one. I’m not much of a fan of the latter, personally: if your symbiote doesn’t actually need a host, I feel you’ve sort of missed the point. (The movie takes the route of saying symbiotes can’t even process Earth’s atmosphere without a host, which is a great new idea that appears nowhere in the comics, and I love it. Hosts or GTFO, baby!)

Kaminski has his own take, and I can only wish it had caught on. Without Eddie, the symbiote becomes an ever-shifting insectoid-tentacle-snake-monstrosity, driven by an animalistic hunger. It’s many things, but it’s never humanoid.

If you absolutely must have your symbiote operating minus a host, I feel this is the way to do it: semi-feral, shapeless and completely alien (uncontrollable violence and cravings for brains to be added to taste).

Issue #2 comes to us primarily through the perspective of the mild-mannered Dr. Thaddeus Paine of the Innsmouth Hills Sanitarium (yes, really).

Yeah, he’s not fooling anyone. Meet our official villain! He joins our story after Eddie is picked up by the police and handed off to the nearest available institution, on account of how completely sane and rational he’s been acting.

Naturally, Dr. Paine soon has copious notes on Eddie’s ‘crazy’ story about his psychic link to a brain-eating alien monster. Fortunately for Eddie, Paine also runs some tests and makes an interesting discovery. 

Congratulations, Venom: the ‘vitamin’ you were missing officially has a name!

Finding the right meds isn’t always this easy. I got lucky – the first ones my psych put me on worked pretty well – but I have plenty of friends who weren't so lucky. In fact, the treatment for Eddie's problems is so straightforward it arguably has more in common with, say, endocrine disorders like thyroid conditions or Addison’s disease, which differ from clinical depression but present many similar symptoms (but can sadly be just as much of a bitch to get correctly diagnosed – please do read author Maggie Stiefvater’s account of the latter when you get the chance, because forget Venom, that is a horror story).

‘True’ depression remains much less well understood by medicine, either in its causes or how to effectively treat it. But simply having a name for what was wrong with me made so much difference, and that’s an experience I imagine anyone who’s dealt with any long undiagnosed medical condition could relate to. It put my life in context in a way nothing else had in years.

(I can’t speak to the accuracy of the way phenethylamine is portrayed in this comic – a quick google suggests there may be some real debate that phenethylamine deficiencies have been overlooked as a contributor to clinical depression, but having no medical background, that one’s well beyond me. Either way, scientific accuracy really doesn’t matter in this context – it’s how it works in-universe for story purposes that we should pay attention to.)

Since this issue is mostly from Paine’s POV, we don’t get Eddie’s reaction to having a healthy amount of phenethylamine sloshing around in his brain again, just the assurance that treatment appears to be ‘completely successful’.

He’s still a paranoid, hostile bastard though. Meds can turn your life around, but they won’t make you not you.

But even if Eddie’s feeling better, he’s still psychically linked to someone who isn’t. Symbiote-vision still comes through drained of colour and edged in viscera.

That’s the thing about meds: they won’t solve all your problems overnight. If you’ve been depressed for a while, there are good odds you have problems stacking up. But working meds can be a godsend when it comes to getting you into a space where you can deal with your problems again, whether said problems are doing-your-laundry or all the way into not-giving-up-completely-and-just-accepting-you’ll-die-alone-on-the-street.

For Eddie, ‘dealing with his problems’ begins with stealing a keycard and busting out of the asylum.

Of course, that’s the easy part. How do you solve a problem like a feral symbiote? Like any good 90′s comic book protagonist, Eddie tackles it by putting on his big-boy camouflage pants and kitting himself out with weapons and pouches while quoting “If you live something, set it free. If it doesn’t come back, hunt it down.”

We can add this to the list of things I love about this comic. Even if The Hunger is a weirdly-stylistic tract about depression at heart, it’s also still a goddamn 90′s Venom comic, and not ashamed to be.

We’re into issue #3 now, and back to hearing the story from Eddie’s POV.

Eddie is very much aware that his symbiote has murdered innocent people while they’ve been separated. Even if this is the result of extreme circumstances, there’s a good case to be made that the symbiote is too dangerous to be allowed to live. Plenty of heroes would treat it like a rabid dog at this point.

But Eddie isn’t a hero, he’s a mess of a character and an anti-hero at best, so we don’t have to hold him to the same standard. He’s well aware his symbiote may be too far gone to save, that he may have to put it down – but that’s only his backup plan. He wants to help it. He wants it back. He’s down in that sewer with screamers and a flamethrower because he knows all his symbiote’s weaknesses, but he’s also carrying a large jar of black-market synthesised phenethylamine, because if he can just get close enough...

Depression can’t make you a literal monster, but it can make you an asshole. Miserable to be around, lacking even the energy to care who else you’re hurting. The depression doesn’t excuse that, but it makes everything harder, and it’s that much easier to sink back into your spiral when everyone around you has given up. It can make you think everyone around has given up even if that isn’t true.

So to have Eddie here say, in effect, I don’t care how many people you’ve eaten, I know it wasn’t your fault. I still love you. You’re still worth fighting for – god, does that get me right in the id.

There’s still a whole issue left at this point – we’ve still got to deal with our real villain, Dr. Paine, who we’ve just learned is into eating brains himself and torturing his patients recreationally, and who wants to capture the symbiote for his own purposes. There’s the scene where Eddie and his symbiote finally bond again, and Venom beats up all Paine’s goons while singing David Bowie because like I said, this is still a 90′s superhero comic and this is what Venom does.

But for our purposes, I'm going to skip to the penultimate page of the story, because the way it mirrors our opening page is really lovely.

Remember that shot of Eddie dealing with a beggar back at the beginning of the story, thinking about how these people would 'get their despair all over you'? Here he is again, cheerfully forking over the last dollar in his pocket to the next man to ask him for change. For all the gothic atmosphere and gore, it’s moments like this that make The Hunger easily one of the most positive, uplifting Venom stories ever written. Funny, that. (I could probably write a whole other essay on sympathy for the homeless as a recurring motif in Venom stories, but that... well, whole other essay and all that.)

What’s Eddie learned from this experience? Don’t take your symbiote for granted. Is ‘symbiote’ a metaphor for mental health here, is paying attention to its needs an allegory for paying attention to your own? I still don’t know how literally Kaminski meant us to take this, but it’s a lovely note to end on no matter how you parse it.

At the end of the day, The Hunger isn’t flawless. The conflict with Paine ends on a thematic but slightly unsatisfying note. Eddie makes much of his symbiote's loneliness and desire for union, but when the two of them are finally reunited, the only reaction comes from Eddie's side. In fact, the symbiote seems to have no response to being able to return to Eddie at all, and that’s an omission that bugs me.

But Kaminski is more interested than any other writer of the era in the truly alien nature of the symbiote, in its relationship with Eddie from Eddie’s side, and though plenty of others talk about the symbiote's love/hate relationship with Spider-man, no-one else had the guts to portray their relationship this much like a romance.

And Venom: The Hunger is no less interesting in the context of Len Kaminski’s other work. You don't have to look far into his Marvel and DC credits to pick up that the guy has a real thing for monsters. (“All of my favourite characters are outlaws, misfits, anti-heroes,” he says, in one of the very few interviews I could find with him, “I wouldn't know what to do with Superman.”) He's written for vampires, werewolves, victims of mad science, and all of three at once, littering his work with biochemistry-themed technobabble, melodramatic monologues, gratuitous pop-culture references, and protagonists who must learn to embrace their inner demons. So The Hunger represents more than a few of his favourite running themes.

For our context, his more notable other work includes Children of the Beast, in which a werewolf must make peace between his human and animalistic sides, and The Creeper, in which a journalist must make peace with the crazy super-powered alter-ego sharing his body. In fact, The Creeper and The Hunger share so much DNA (including an evil doctor posing as a respected psychiatrist who uses hypnosis on our hero while he's trapped in a mental institution) that it’s quite the achievement that they still feel like such very distinct entities beyond that point.

The human alter-egos of both werewolf and Creeper even use prescription meds while wrestling with their respective dark sides. The difference, in both cases, is that these are stories where meds play their traditional fictional role – and that's a role that could be as easily filled by illegal drugs or alcohol without making any substantive difference. You see, if a protagonist is using them, it's a sign of unwillingness to tackle their 'real' problems. Even among work by the same author in the same genre, The Hunger represents an outlier. And that's just a little disappointing – at least to me.

In real life, of course, prescription meds are no magical cure-all elixir. Depression meds that work for one person may not work for another, or may not keep working in the longer term. Everyone has heard stories about quack doctors who prescribe them to the wrong patients for the wrong reasons, about lives ruined by addictions to prescription painkillers, or the supposedly-damning statistics about how poorly SSRI's perform in rigorous clinical trials. The proper way to treat depression is obviously with lifestyle and therapy. People will still airily dismiss medications that we all know previous generations got along just fine without, or suggest that figures like Van Gogh would never have created great art if they hadn't been mad enough to slice off an ear. I mean, the fact you think you need those bogus mediations is probably the best possible sign of just how broken you are, right? Who do you think you’re kidding?

Our popular fiction loves stories about manly men who bury their trauma under a gruff, anti-social exterior and come back swinging at the world that broke them, bravely refusing even painkillers that might dull their manly reflexes. Other genres make space for broken people confronting their demons in grand moments of catharsis, finally breaking down into tears when someone gets through to make them face their problems. "I could barely make it out of bed in the mornings until I found a doctor who started me on this new prescription" is not only wildly counter to the accepted social narrative, it's a hard thing to know how to dramatise.

 Even other Venom comics have been guilty of this.

Believe me, I recognise all of this, and just how much progress we've made in the last few decades. But I haven't the slightest doubt that for so many vulnerable people, the stigma against prescription medications does infinitely more harm than those same meds could ever do. And just having the right to externalise my problems into it's not you, it's your brain chemistry, may have helped me more than the meds themselves.

(And again, no, being prescribed SSRI's didn't fix me overnight, but I honestly don't know if all the talk therapy and tearful conversations with family members in the world could've got me as far as I've come without them.)

I love Venom: The Hunger. It's no-one's idea of high art, but it doesn’t need to be. There is a whole other post’s worth of things I love about it that I’ve already cut out this one as pointless tangents, and that may actually be it’s biggest drawback as a go-to example: I fully recognise that I would not be making this post if The Hunger hadn't also also grabbed me as a great bit of Venom canon, being the massive fan and shipper that I am. Other people who are just as desperate as me for more stories with the same core theme, but not into weird 90's comics about needy goo aliens, probably won't get nearly as much out of it as I have.

But if it sounds anything like your jam, maybe you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

If nothing else, it proves that you can make a viscerally satisfying story out of a message that shockingly unconventional. And you may even have people still discovering it and falling in love with it 25 years after the fact.

[ghoulciifer]

So heard you want Haikyuu request! So when I get mad at someone (VERY rare) I just look at them like 😠. And just kinda shun them like “dont talk to me 😠. That was rude 😠” so i just scoot away from them. I wont walk away from them, ill just go to the other side of the couch or whatever and if they try to console me im like “no! You spoiled my show 😠” and only kinda yell at them if they keep pursuing like “im mad at you” and if they touch me im like “NO! IM MAD AT YOU” is all lmao UHHH PART 2

hc: how Kageyama and Nishinoya react when their S/O gets angry

tw: none (i think?)

tags: angry!reader, haikyuu, eventual comfort/fluff, slight nsfw with noya

notes: ahsgshahajsh i’m the same way when i get angry but i CRY so much, so i kinda felt this one? but i did hc’s for this because i wanted to do it NOW. i love my boys, especially noya. ty for the request, i love you, and my inbox is still open for asks ❥

» i feel like kageyama is just permanently unaware of everything going on around him, like all this boy has on his mind is fuckin’ volleyball and you, ofc

» i also feel like this is a big reason why doesn’t have a filter sometimes... which gets him in trouble.

» you two are just chilling on the couch, all cuddled up together, watching a show you’ve been trying to catch up to him on (because he’s impatient and apparently can’t wait for you to come home smh)

» you’re halfway through a super suspenseful episode, and there’s a huge lead up to a plot twist but it’s just dragging on forEVER

» “ugh, why can’t they just show who dies, already?” you grumble under your breath, beyond irritated, huffing for good measure

» kageyama just

» nonchalantly fuckin’ spoils it

» “oh F/C/N dies, happens next episode.”

» the speed in which your head turns his way is inhuman LMAO

» you’re so angry you can’t even form words, your blood boils as it rushes to your face and your brow is furrowed so deep

» not only did your boyfriend ruin the rest of the episode but YOUR FAVORITE CHARACTER DIES??

» of course kageyama doesn’t notice your death glare until a couple seconds later, looking at you with the most dumbfounded expression

» “...what?”

» you don’t even say anything, just get up, take a deep breath, and walk as calm as possible to the bedroom, slamming the door behind you

» meanwhile kags is still just ?? nani ??

» he leaps into action and tries talking to you through the door but once he hears the tub’s faucet running from your bathroom, he knows it’s your me time and he shouldn’t interfere

» so while you’re soaking up in a hot bath with your favorite scented candle burning at the edge of the tub, listening to your favorite playlist at a comfortable volume,

» kageyama literally sits on the couch and thinks SO HARD about what he could have possibly done wrong ahsgsgshaja this boy

» you were fine before you started watching the show, even after the show started you were quite literally all over him, so where did he go wrong?

» it finally dawns on him that your sudden mood change happened after he spilled the beans on your favorite character’s death

» insert kageyama slamming a palm to his face

» THIS DUDE FEELS SO FUCKIN’ BAD NOW

» he waits at least another 15-20 mins before creeping into the master bath to check up on you, a warm mug of your favorite tea in hand and the sweetest look on his face

» how could you still be mad at him when he’s literally doing the 🥺 face ???

» he crouches at the edge of the tub and leans forward to press a gentle kiss into your temple before setting the mug on the ledge, situating himself so his chin is laying over his folded arms, facing you

» “I’m sorry I’m an idiot... and about F/C/N. I know you liked them a lot.”

» you can’t help but giggle at how precious the moment (or the look on his face) is and you raise a hand to his cheek, rubbing the soft skin over his cheekbone with your damp thumb

» “It’s okay, Tobio, at least I didn’t have to see it. But next time... try not to spoil anything, okay?”

» nishinoya might seem like an air headed tornado to most, but he’s actually pretty perceptive !!

» so he’s always aware of when you’re angry, very in tune with your emotions, constantly tries his best to avoid hurting you or your feelings in anyway

» but uh... he fucks up sometimes.

» you were at your shared home, waiting for him wearing nothing but his old volleyball jersey and his favorite pair of your panties (y’know the ones, with a cute lil’ bow on the front and less fabric in the back ;0)

» there wasn’t really any special occasion but you both made it very clear during a suggestive text conversation earlier in the day that you were going to jump each other’s bones as soon as you got home

» he did let you know he needed to stop by tanaka’s after work to pick something up, but you figured that wouldn’t take long at all, right?

» wrong

» you’ve been nestled in the same spot on the couch for hours, the sun no longer shining into the living room, and you were absolutely steaming from the ears in wait for your boyfriend

» you honestly weren’t even in the mood anymore the longer time dragged on, the show you put on doing nothing to distract you from your aggravation

» eventually you hear the familiar jiggle of your front door and the clanking of keys being hung on the rack before footsteps head your way

» you keep the blanket in your lap wrapped around your waist and sit up, arms crossed, bottom lip jutted out ever so slightly with narrowed eyes

» “Hey, baby! I missed you all da-“

» he tried leaning down for a kiss but you pressed your hand against his lips before they got close enough

» noya is confused for a split second before he notices you’re wearing the one piece of clothing you know will get you laid when you wear it

» “...fuck.”

» “Actually, no, not anymore.”

» you get up from the couch and side step around him, ignoring the way his fingertips brush against your wrist in a failed attempt to grab it

» once you make it to your bedroom you lock yourself in the bathroom to change clothes, wash your face, let your hair down, etc.

» the running water lets noya know you’re starting your nightly routine, and there’s no way you’re doing anything after that

» he’s very aware that you just need to cool off, you got your point across and all that remained was the recovery process

» so he decides to use this time to get himself in his sleep clothes as well and situate the bed in the most comfortable set up possible, the way he knows you like it

» also grabs a snack or two from the kitchen and sets it on your nightstand in case you do decide to talk it out instead of going straight to bed

» he patiently waits for you to emerge from the bathroom as he holds onto the stuffed koala he won for you at some fair years ago HE’S SO CUTE I CAN’T ALDJSHSJAK

» when you finally do come out, donning an old pair of his sweats and an oversized t-shirt, hair brushed and face clean, his face instantly softens

» bc he can’t help but admire how beautiful you look in moments like this 🥺

» once you see the look in his eyes and the stuffed toy in his arms, it’s all over, my guy - you don’t even remember why you were upset in the first place

» you climb on the bed and settle on top of him, head tucked under his chin and arms wrapped underneath his shoulders while he runs his hands up and down your spine, koala bear long forgotten

» “I’m sorry I was out so late, babygirl, I lost track of time... I’ll make it up to you whenever you want, okay? and I’ll hold you like this if you just wanna go to bed.” He finally says after a comfortable silence, kissing the top of your head as he finishes.

» your heart practically melts and suddenly you want to be the one comforting him

» “It’s okay, Yuu. I love you so much.” you lift your head from his chest to give him a sweet kiss as he reciprocates the phrase against your lips

» the kiss lasts much longer than intended and grows in intensity - next thing you know, he’s got you flipped over with his hands sneaking under your shirt to explore your soft skin, mouth latched onto your neck

» his hands wander to the waistband of the sweats resting over your hips and when his fingertips brush over the familiar texture of lace, he looks up at you with the MOST excited look

» “You kept them on?? FOR ME??”

[allthefilmsiveseenforfree]

What Lies Beneath

So my wife is incredibly supportive of my movie-watching goals. She helped me set up my blog and my Patreon, she was my very first patron, and she watches at least half the movies with me. As my patron, she has the right to request one movie per calendar year for me to review just for her. But sometimes she tries to skirt the rules by insinuating, nay, cajoling nonstop in her goal for me to watch a movie she wants me to see without it counting as her “official” selection. And because I love her, I (sometimes) allow it. Such was the case with What Lies Beneath, a twisty psychological haunted house thriller that stars two middle-aged, serious actors (Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer), and that I shockingly wasn’t lining up at the megaplex for when I was 13. What did my preteen self miss? Well...

A fucking GREAT movie is what I missed. I won’t sugarcoat it - this was a huge surprise in the best way. I won’t spoil the ending at all, because this is one film I think you really need to watch unfold for the first time without knowing exactly what’s going on. Basically, Claire and Norman Spencer are new empty-nesters, and in their gorgeous Vermont home all to themselves, strange things start happening. Is it something to do with the mysterious new neighbors? Or maybe some past traumas that are dug up over the course of the movie? Could their house be actually haunted by some malevolent spirit? All of these are distinct, and delicious, possibilities, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun figuring out what exactly is going on.

Some thoughts:

A VERY GOOD DOG at the very beginning! I was so concerned for the dog at a few points in the film, but the dog (Cooper) is absolutely fine and remains happy and carefree all the way to the end of the film. 

I have always had a thing for Harrison Ford, and that is not diminishing at all as I watch him shirtless in bed while writing a paper about science. Unf.

Very into the way this exposition is handled - Claire (Pfeiffer) missing her daughter and finding the Julliard tank top in her dresser, then looking through photo albums where we see the daughter wearing it, then see Claire studying at Julliard, then see HER wearing the tank top, plus some articles about Norman’s father dying and photos from a car accident in which I think her first husband died. It’s all tiny pieces of exposition, just little bits of information that you, the viewer, have to put together and remember, and I love that. 

Don’t love Norman (Ford) gaslighting her about what to do about the neighbors. If you mind your own business and never reach out when people sound like they need help, that’s how people get hurt. Makes me think he has something to hide or maybe some kind of connection to the neighbors?

Loving the Rear Window vibes of spying on the neighbors, thinking you’ve witnessed a murder, complete with binocular surveillance.

There’s a lot of wind in this movie. Wind is basically like another character.

The layering of dialogue - Norman and his friend are talking about a colleague who got fired for stalking an intern, and Claire and her old friend are catching up. The two conversations are overlapping, and I think they’re both important but we’re so wrapped up in Claire and her friend that that stalking conversation gets buried. This is really well-thought-out character development and building of backstory and motivation. I haven’t watched a movie this skillfully thought out in quite awhile.

I hate the way Norman diminishes her. Like he’s charming and he’s Harrison Ford, but he kind of implies that she’s hysterical or silly for the things she’s been experiencing, and laughs at her expense. 

She didn’t say goodbye after playing with the Ouija board. ROOKIE MISTAKE, everything that happens afterward is clearly a result of poor Ouija etiquette. 

Oh interesting, so she was in a terrible car accident a year ago, which is part of why everyone is worried about her mental state and fragility. We don’t discover this until HALFWAY THROUGH THE FILM. This is storytelling like prestige television does it, and it’s so unusual to see in a film now that it keeps bowling me over. 

Their water bill is gonna be sky high after this. These completely full tubs? The rates are astronomical.

Oh no things have escalated so quickly - I feel like I’m trying to outsmart the twist at every turn and I can’t quite grasp it, which is good because I actually think this is an incredibly plotted movie that’s so purposefully and carefully crafted. I can’t help but feel that we are missing so much now, because we just don’t get mid-level budget domestic dramas with A-list actors like this anymore. I think their era might have completely passed, and that’s a damn shame because the nuance and care here makes this such a delightful and surprising ride to take.

A huge part of that is Ford and Pfeiffer just absolutely nailing how they play every single scene. Their chemistry is great, and watching them play off each other, you can sense all the layers of their relationship, all the past traumas and the lies and the reconciliations. 

He says “I know you’re going through something I don’t understand and I’ve tried to be there for you” but like...have you, Norman? You’re always working, you shut her down every time she wants to talk. 

The brilliance here is that you don’t know if something supernatural is actually going on or if there’s a rational explanation, and I’m so here for the ambiguity. We simply don’t get enough ambiguity (that’s purposeful) in mainstream Hollywood films anymore. It’s all in the indies, which are great, don’t get me wrong! But I want more audiences to see how it could be done.  

I know I just keep going on about it but every new scene reveals a detail that feeds into the overarching mystery in such a natural way. For example, this NICE callback to the key, which I had totally forgotten about. This honestly is a fantastic slow burn of a film, really well done. 

I’m so enjoying Harrison Ford using his charm and his looks and his general Harrison Ford-ness to play a not very nice guy. He’s not a lovable rogue like Han Solo or a stubborn adventurer with a heart of gold like Indiana Jones, he’s just a guy who thinks he deserves to have what he wants at any cost. He’s worked hard, he’s a “good guy” and he thinks that he’s entitled to have things go his way just because. 

Holy shit the symmetry with the first scene of the film to the big climax - that’s just some damn good writing, that is. 

I’m so pleased that there’s no music at all during this final sequence - the score had been a bit overbearing at times, but this eerie silence with just the water running is, frankly, terrifying.

One slight critique - the movie has almost as many endings as Lord of the Rings. You think it’s done, and then there’s another whole section that you think is gonna be the last, and then everything’s underwater again and it’s STILL NOT DONE. But in a good way, I didn’t get nearly as pissed as I do at the end of LOTR. 

Holy fucking shit, Clark Gregg wrote this?????? Agent Coulson Clark Gregg?? This is my absolute favorite bit of movie trivia I’ve learned all year. 

Did I Cry? No. 

I am never going to stop talking about this movie. Wife was right, and I will say it loudly and publicly - I am so glad she cajoled me into watching this film. If you haven’t seen it, watch it immediately. It’s smart, it’s well-paced, it keeps you guessing, and it boils over into an absolutely bonkers climax in the best way. I will be thinking about this for aaaages and missing the way movies outside of the “Disney/Pixar/Marvel vs. teeny independent Spirit Award winner” machine used to get made. 

If you liked this review, please consider reblogging or subscribing to my Patreon! For as low as $1, you can access bonus content and movie reviews, or even request that I review any movie of your choice.

[dazais-guardian-angel]

What are your thoughts on this mf ^^^

(Please pretend this is anonymous)

Man sorry for the delay on answering (also pls no don’t pretend to be anonymous; you’re too amazing for that king 👑)

@anothertastelesstetrahedron already said everything better than I could, but Juror 3 is amazing and we Stan 🗡️ his whole “eat the rich” shtick? fuckin Respect. his weird slightly unhinged knife kink he’s got going on? hilarious. just a total icon all around, man knows what’s up and he ain’t taking shit from anybody. It’s why I kind of dislike the fact that he eventually switches sides and decides Megundal is not guilty just to go along with everyone else, I get that the plot needed all the jurors to be on the not guilty side by that point, where it looks like he really might BE innocent until everything becomes chaotic and a mess and fishy with the uncertain state of the evidence, but it feels ooc for him tbh; I feel like it would have been a lot more interesting if he had simply REFUSED to budge from his stance that the rich are always guilty and scheming. Some of the jurors in the cases get more focus in others, and a few we even learn about their pasts, like with the construction juror (5?) in case 4, and Dimitri Demiglaski in case 5, and I feel like this guy must have had something happen to him to give him such a beef with the rich, exactly like with Rupert, so I wish we had learned about him during the trial, where he uses that to sell why he thinks Megundal is definitely guilty, like Van Zieks’ account of how Megundal has always been in the shadows of crimes and bribed witnesses and twisted evidence, etc etc. Literally, Juror 3 is a discount Rupert before Rupert himself is able to be revealed sorry juror 3, there’s nothing discount about you but that’s still the most accurate word, so I wish his presence in Megundal’s trial had been used more as a kind of foreshadowing for the truth and character to come, without outright spoiling what actually happened. And obviously the outcome of the trial can’t change, but if it had ended with Juror 3 still holding onto his not guilty verdict, being vehemently angry about the outcome, and ominously hinting that this isn’t the end for Megundal (granted, Van Zieks says this too, but it’s just one line), I think that would have been perfect, and made the case even more impactful than it already is.... although that being said, him getting too up in arms about Megundal’s obvious guilt really would just feel like Rupert all over again before Rupert comes along, with how pissed he is during his confession monologue, soooo yeah. don’t lay it on too thick to make things feel redundant, but play up his role and presence just enough.

Because seriously, he and Rupert would DEFINITELY get along, and I like to imagine that Rupert was just dying to be on the jury for Megundal’s trial (although, perhaps not, since he’d struggle to keep so much to himself, to avoid revealing his own crime... I have a lot of thoughts about this), and so if he was watching everything play down, he’d just be clapping at Juror 3 because oh this man gets it, fuck ‘em up for me Juror 3, lmaoooo. They’d be best friends, they would 😌 and I like how similar his outfit even is to Rupert’s, with the same purple-gray color on his coat and hat trim, and the same style puff tie/cravat, and how his shirt collar flares out the same way Rupert’s does when he’s agitated/sad. If Rupert hadn’t killed Megundal himself, I 100% believe Juror 3 would have shanked him himself sooner or later, and Rupert would absolutely approve 🙏 Capcom please let me fund Dai Gyakuten Saiban 3: Egg and Knife Eat The Rich 🥚🍽️🗡️

also this is the funniest animation ever, like sir.... sir please.... what did you think was going to happen, swinging that thing around... smh

[consumedkings-archive]

12) ‘things you said when you thought I was asleep’ w John x Ell 🥺

u know what jess? i was gonna say sorry about the fact that this is primarily john being horny and that i slapped that request right at the end, but u brought this on urself!!!

set ancient names adjacent, not that it matters too much--there’s hardly any plot in here lmao.

explicit sexual content under the cut, along with some softness. but mostly 2.1k words of john being a ho and liking when el lets him take the lead. (ꈍᴗꈍ)✧･ﾟ

send me a prompt + a couple and i’ll procrastinate with a oneshot or blurb!

John liked to talk.

A lot.

It was one of his more endearing qualities. And frustrating ones too, all things considered; but it was a good way for Elliot to gauge what was going on in his head. John tended to talk for a plethora of reasons; including, but not limited to, lying, getting caught in a lie, trying to be charming, trying to be threatening—trading verbal blows was an Olympic past time for John.

“—and anyway, I think that the insinuation you wouldn’t let me fuck you if we met before this is categorically wrong,” he said, trailing after her into the bunkhouse. “After all, I just about snagged you, didn’t I? At the bar?”

“I thought you were handsome,” Elliot replied tiredly. “That was before you opened your mouth.”

“Actually,” John clarified, “if you’ll recall, you were very much interested until you were spirited away. Now, I can’t account for what things might have been said about me to have dissuaded you from being interested in me—”

“Do you ever stop talking?” she asked, turning to look at him. He grinned, wolfish, but she crossed her arms over her chest and said, “I’m serious, John. Do you ever shut the fuck up for like, even a minute? Have you tried it? It’s really cool.”

“Hm.” He didn’t sound impressed. He uncrossed her arms, having closed the bunkhouse door behind them, and leaned in to kiss her; she tilted back just out of reach.

“Answer the question.”

“I’m a lawyer, hellcat,” he replied, eyes glittering with amusement. “Why on earth would I ever stop talking?”

She rolled her eyes. “A real estate attorney.”

“I still had to go to school for it!” John exclaimed. He regarded her for a moment before he slid his arms around her waist and tugged her close. “Besides, you know what talking a lot has gotten me that being quiet wouldn't have?”

Elliot didn’t bite—not right away—because she had an idea of where it was going. John just absolutely couldn’t resist the opportunity to tout some kind of skill that he thought he’d garnered and that clearly no one else could commit themselves to as well as he, and she was the last person who wanted to feed that ego of his.

“Elliot,” he murmured after only a second had passed, and he pressed a hot, open-mouthed kiss to the slope of her neck, “do you—”

“Fucking Christ, what, John? What insurmountable skill have you gained from talking so much? Aside from making me want to pull my own eyeballs out, of course.”

She could feel him grin against her neck, hands splaying against her spine—and against her better judgment, Elliot leaned a little into the touch, the feeling of his mouth skimming down her neck enough to making her spine prickle with a wicked kind of anticipation.

“It means I’m really good with my mouth,” he told her, voice silky. Instantly, she felt heat crawl up into her face; he continued, quite satisfied with himself, “Should I give a hands-on example?”

Elliot cleared her throat. Yes, her body said, instantly; and even when she didn’t respond, John was already nudging her back against the bed, fingers deftly undoing the button of her jeans just as he slid to his knees on the floor, nestled between her legs. It was insidious, how someone could be so handsome like that. In a position of serving.

“Your Honor,” John rumbled playfully, “I am but a humble real estate attorney—”

His fingers tugged her jeans down, and propped up on her elbows as she was, she could see—and feel—the way he dragged his mouth along the exposed skin of her abdomen and down down down. “John—”

“—but please, allow me to redirect your attention,” he continued, completely disposing of her jeans and underwear and pressing a kiss to the inside of her knee, then inside of her thigh, then the crux of her hip, “to Exhibit A.”

Elliot opened her mouth to tell him this wasn’t necessary, that she knew he was good with his mouth—but by the time she’d started formulating her counter-argument, John had pressed his mouth to her; hot, and hungry, and he moaned into her the second he did like he’d just been waiting this whole fucking time for it. He gripped her hips as he flattened his tongue against her, and then he looked up at her—smug and relentless and impatient for her and oh so fucking good.

Arrogant fuckhead, she wanted to say, you think you’re so fucking good, but you’re not, you’re just—

“Oh,” is what she said instead of all of the other things her brain was firing off now; things like so fucking good and please, please don’t stop, and the single word left her in an exhale that caught halfway into a whimper. His movements slowed, and instinctively Elliot tried to shift—her traitorous body thought only to try and garner more friction, heat rushing through her and all of the blood roaring in her ears and her body tensing when he slid his tongue against the most sensitive part of her.

“Needy,” John murmured pleasantly. Already, heat writhed and twisted in the pit of her stomach; already, her fingers knotted in John’s hair and she wanted to say wait, wait, not so fast, and John—ever so well-fucking-versed at reading her body language—pulled his mouth away from her just before she could unravel. His tongue peeked out, swiping over his bottom lip, like he just couldn’t get enough of the taste of her, and she felt a bone-marrow-deep ache in her body for him.

“You taste so good,” John purred. “And you look so—”

“John,” Elliot managed out, her voice unsteady, “if you don’t put your mouth back on me, I fucking swear—”

“Spoiled,” he interjected playfully. “Something you want? Just tell me where you like my mouth.”

Briefly, Elliot considered the logistics of murder. “Yes,” she ground out, “John, please stop talking, I—” Fucker. “—want your mouth on me, please—”

It felt like she was rambling now; but it didn't matter, because John did her the mercy of pushing two fingers into her, beckoning them in time with the movement of his tongue against her, and she made a sound that might have been a cry if it didn't feel so fucking good.

“Fuck, I—” He almost faltered for a second, and then plunged on seamlessly, “—love the way you look at me.” He ground out a low, hungry noise against her, eyes blown dark with want fixed on her own. “So sweet, aren't you, hellcat? Just for me—”

Elliot sighed her agreement, lashes fluttering at the feeling. He leaned back into her, tongue flicking and dragging wet, hot pleasure with it, his gaze half-lidded and fixed on her. The sound that came out of her was treacherous—beyond reproach, certainly, for a woman who didn’t want John to know the things that he did to her, but she couldn’t help it; the moan slipped out before she could stop it, and it sounded a lot like his name, and—

And that was fine. That would have to be fine, because John groaned against her and sighed, “Come on, El, don’t you want to come for me? Don’t you want to be so fucking good for me?” and she about came unraveled.

Well, about wasn’t the correct terminology for it. She did come unraveled, sighing his name when white-hot pleasure thundered through her body as the blood went roaring through her ears, and for a second the entire world went silent otherwise; John grinned at her from between her legs, dragging his thumb along his lower lip and dipping it into his mouth for another taste.

Stupid, infuriating, narcissist, she thought, watching the gesture and feeling a little starved even in the wake of her own pleasure—but a part of Elliot liked it, a big part, that a man felt hungry for her. This man in particular.

“So anyway,” he said casually, “that’s a benefit of talking all the time.”

Elliot’s hand slid to the back of his neck, tugging until he obliged her and was climbing onto the bed over her. She kissed him; and she could taste herself in the kiss, too, but she could only spare that a passing thought before John was pushing her shirt up.

“Should use your mouth for that,” she managed out breathlessly into the kiss, “more often than you do for talking.”

“I’ve got a couple of other talents I could make a case for,” he suggested in a pleasant rumble. His teeth caught her lower lip with only a light sting. “If you’ve got the time.”

She did have the time, whether she liked it or not, and that meant that by the time she was falling asleep that night her body ached pleasantly just about everywhere; a chilly breeze crept through the window that she’d opened the tiniest amount, and she was halfway to sleep when John stirred. 

“El? You awake?”

He said her name against the back of her neck, fingers tracing the scars that he had spent every chance he had memorizing over and over. She stifled a sigh and kept her eyes shut; crammed onto the tiny bunk because John insisted on sleeping with her, it was almost impossible for her to get any actual sleep as it was, not accounting for John wanting to have a witching hour chit-chat.

It was dark—too dark for him to see if her eyes were open, anyway—and she shifted a little. John’s mouth skimmed the slope of her shoulder; his breath fanned silky and warm against her skin, and she felt the flutter of his lashes. The gesture of it was a little painful, if she thought about it too much: John, touching and holding like he was afraid she’d fold up and disappear if he let go of her, and maybe—

Maybe, if she didn’t have him there to anchor her, maybe she would. There were enough pieces of her brain that considered it a viable defense mechanism to make it a possibility.

Elliot swallowed and shifted in bed, kicking her leg out from under the blanket without opening her eyes. Heat prickled up the back of her spine, tingling where John was pressed against her. He exhaled a short breath against her shoulder, almost like a laugh—and she thought maybe he did this often, watched the way that she was when he thought she was sleeping, because he wanted to know her better.

“—you,” he rumbled, his voice muffled by her hair, so low and quiet she almost didn’t hear it. He was trying his hardest not to wake her, probably; she laid still, exhaling slow and even through her nose; the bed felt like it was rocking and swaying beneath her in time with her heartbeat, and more often now she found herself looking to John for signals, in moments like these, to tell if it was real.

John slid his arm around her midsection and tugged her against him, burying his face into her neck, and he said, “Fuck, I love you, El—you make me so mad—sometimes, I can’t ever tell what you’re thinking and—”

His voice was barely audible, but that didn’t matter—that she heard at all what he was saying made her chest tighten uncomfortably, like he was sucking the air right out of her lungs, like the room had suddenly filled with smoke that she couldn’t breathe in. It was dizzying.

“—I think loving you,” he finished, his voice hoarse, “is going to be so fucking painful.”

Oh, she thought, because that was the opinion that she had of him. The words hadn’t come to her yet—not like that, not in that shape, not in the I love you, but she thought maybe it had come in different ways; looking to him first for comfort, holding on to him to feel real, to not feel so alone anymore. That felt a little like the same thing.

Everything in her itched and burned to roll over and kiss him. She wanted to say, me too, but the words wouldn’t come; not for lack of truth behind them, but because the moment lay cradled between them just like this, fragile and fresh, and maybe anything like moving was going to make it go away.

So, she didn’t. She closed her eyes tighter and sighed sleepily into her pillow, and pressed closer to him as though she sought him even in her sleep because she knew that John liked that feeling—of being thought of, wanted, even in something like sleep—and let herself enjoy the feeling of knowing something that John didn’t. For once.

Me too, Elliot thought tiredly. I think loving you is going to be so fucking painful too.

[monysmediareview]

Juliet, a novel by Ann Fortier Review

This time I have a review for a one-off book rather than a series for you guys and it may have actually reached the top of my list for favorite books ever. Juliet, a novel by Anne Fortier was so incredibly good I worry I’ll never be able to fully describe the way it made me feel reading it. I read this book incredibly slow because the idea of finishing it made me so upset; I didn’t want it to end but also found myself thinking about it constantly.

The Shakespeare of it All

When I found this book at goodwill, I figured I’d grab it just to see what it was. Having a degree in theatre and having studied Shakespeare in Europe, I even work for a Shakespeare specific theatre; I figured it would at the very least be interesting. And I was right, but for the wrong reasons. Shakespeare is barely mentioned as the book is actually about the true story of Romeo & Juliet.

If you don’t already know, Shakespeare stole the story of Romeo & Juliet from an Italian poet who wrote the story in the early to mid 1500’s. That story may have also been stolen from another author from France, and maybe even someone else before that. Thanks to the lack of records or copyright laws, there’s not really a way to be sure but we do know that Shakespeare was not the first, only the most famous. And to be fair, his story is much more intense since it takes place over the course of less than a week while the original plot takes months. There are a few other differences between the two but the gist of it is, two star crossed lovers separated by family feuds and ending in tragedy. And this book takes us through all of that drama and gives us a beautiful and dramatic ending to it all.

The Real Story

Some of the things I loved about this book were actually the historical events and characters. The three families in the story, the Tolomeis, the Salimbenis, and the Marescottis were apparently all real families that had feuds and stories fairly similar to what happened in this book. Fortier wrote in her authors note that she did take some liberties with the history for the sake of the story but that she tried to be faithful to them. I do highly suggest reading her author’s note if you get the book because for me, it made it that much more special.

I think that her ability to blend the past and present was well executed and emotional in ways I wasn’t expecting. I really felt the connection between the Romeo and Giulietta of 1340 and the Romeo and Guiletta of the early 2000’s. Her ability to connect these people not only by blood but by fate and destiny and emotion and passion is unmatched and she managed to do it in roughly 500 pages.

Divine Intervention

I am normally not a fan of books with religious undertones, especially without some kind of supernatural explanation to it but in Juliet it really didn’t strike me as prevalent even though it was. The Virgin Mother and the “curse on both your houses” are two huge driving forces behind this story. Both felt like completely natural pieces of the puzzle rather than an overbearing push for Catholic guilt which could have easily been the case in a story set in Italy spanning 600 years with generational family drama. There was a real feeling of the Virgin Mother being the overseer of the fate of these people and bringing them together, to righting the wrongs done in the past. In a lot of other books this might have felt preach-y or overbearing but it actually made fate feel real.

Love Story

I’m a sucker for a good romance book; I will read love story after love story after love story, but even I can get tired of the same plot over and over again. Sometimes the misogyny gets tiring and I want these female led stories to be about more than finding a man to complete them and this book gave me exactly that.

The story starts and ends with Julie Jacobs’ family. She needs to learn about her family, about her history, where she’s really from. I got so sucked into her journey of self discovery that I kind of forgot it was a love story for a while. And that kind of messed me up when we got there because I had missed a lot of the chemistry build up that I had to think back about to even realize it was there. I was so focused on her learning about her father and visiting banks and libraries that I nearly missed her falling completely in love. But in the end it was one of the most passionate and tumultuous love stories, because when you’re Romeo & Juliet, how could you have anything else?

My Personal Opinion on R&J

Following that I want to talk quickly about Romeo & Juliet. If you’ve taken a Shakespeare class or even just a high school English class at some point you’ve probably talked about this. Sometimes it gets glossed over because it’s one of the well known stories and they don’t usually waste time on it but I’m going to.

Classes like this tend to brush these lovers off as horny teenagers who are in lust and get married so they can bone each other but I think that’s a sad approach. I’ll even admit that was my view on it for a while, but not now. It’s a love story. It’s the love story. So to read an in depth story like this that doesn’t diminish the real feelings they had for each other was very pleasing. I might write a whole thing about some of my Shakespeare opinions one day but for now I will leave you with this:

To thine own self be true. Shakespeare is theatre. It isn’t mean to be read, it’s meant to be staged. And the beauty of theatre is that every single production of every play is different (at least it’s supposed to be. Some directors have yet to learn this, but I digress). This means that everyone interprets things differently, so while I think Romeo & Juliet are the ultimate lovers, you might think they were just horny teenagers. And that’s okay.

Generational Drama

Generational stories like this hold a special place in my heart. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but the idea of fate and family and stories that span hundreds of years just really get me. I won’t go on about this too much because I’ve already mentioned it a few times but I love the redemption that Romeo and Guilietta get through their ancestors, even if it was 600 years later. I love that their love lasted generations and the thought of how the spirits of the original couple feel looking at themselves, their ancestors, finally bringing their families together chokes me up a little if I’m being honest.

Alessandro

I was really not counting on Alessandro being such an important piece of this story, but his evolution as a character was a fucking ride. Going from a security guard/driver, to basically an undercover cop, to potential lover, to fake identity, to actual lover, to liar and cheat, to being framed and actually being a lover and savior was intense. Ideal. I loved and hated him through the whole thing but I was very happy with where he ended up.

Symbolism

There is so much symbolism in this book. The gems being the color of their eyes, the golden statues, the paintings, the maestros. All of it. It can be found on almost every page. But there were a few that really stood out to me.

The cencio and dagger constantly popping up as important of the story for Giulietta was not lost on me. I’m still tossing around what I think it really means, actually, but where I stand now is the idea of an official marriage and what makes it official in the eyes of the Virgin Mother. Romeo and Giulietta weren’t considered actually married because they never consummated and it didn’t happen on the cencio if it had. So for it to have been hidden in Julie’s bed after that weird secret ceremony with Alessandro, was interesting because they also weren’t really married. Not the way we think of now. It just shows that marriage isn’t defined by sex (which I think futher proves my point that this was never just about horny teenagers. As well as the entirety of this book), or by words. Marriage is defined by love and commitment.

And then there’s the River Diana. Another thing I haven’t quite landed on a full meaning for, but I know what it made me feel. It’s hard to put into words, but the first word that came to mind was literally symbolism. This story, this curse, killed Diana, Julie’s mother. And now Julie made it to the statue, and she found her Romeo and in the moment that she almost dies it’s by drowning in the River Diana. This whole time she was drowning in what her mother started for her and it’s Alessandro that pulls her out and saves her from it. Being with him is what keeps her alive, from being swept away by this curse the way her mother was. So maybe it’s symbolic of the end. Of not falling into the same pattern or being swept into the same current.

Plot Twists

This story never went where I thought it was going to go. I don’t actually want to talk about the plot twists too much because I want people reading this to be as surprised as I was. Not like I didn’t spoil things before but there are still quite a few things I didn’t mention that really fucked me up if I’m being honest.

If you’re a fan of plot twists, please read this book.

Ye Olde Slow as Hell Language

I don’t want to scare anyone off here - most of the book is in modern language and even the parts that take us back to 1300 aren’t that bad. But they are far more detailed and can sometimes just feel really slow. But all of the information is really important so I wouldn’t skip it. But the language and the flow of the story really slows things down in these parts and it’s what made me take so long to finish this book. Well that and the fact that I just wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I finished it too soon.

However, I will give the author credit for having parallel story lines set so far apart. She really pulled it off and made the entire thing just so magical. By the time they died, I didn’t want to leave that world. I wanted to stay and watch them be happy but then I got to go back to Julie and watch her get her happily ever after

Janet’s Character Development

Right off the bat we’re supposed to hate Janet. And we do. She’s awful and when she shows back up we kind of hate her even more because of what she’s been doing. I didn’t feel sorry for her in the slightest. Up until the last few chapters of the book, these twin sisters felt very estranged so to go from that to them being a fantastic duo that you root for was a twist I wasn’t ready for but whole heartedly welcomed. It was a nice change of pace to see a female character arc into a better person instead of someone who got increasingly bitter. Still not a huge fan of the character but she ended up being kind of important and at least it passed the Betchdel test, right?

In Conclusion

I think this might be my favorite book now. High recommend.

[el-oh-her]

Creative Writing Case Study: Blackwall

Look m8′s, I hate this man with a burning passion from a creative writing stance because his story was executed SO BADLY it just got fucking r u i n e d. (I am breaking it up with gifs because it looks nice) 

Spoils, btw 

Him masquareding as a dead man is COOL. Him trying to pretend to be a warden is COOL. Him hiding from his deep dark murder past is COOL. 

What’s NOT COOL is it just happening so off screen. 

The writers made a character choice that after an drunk experience, Blackwall feels so guilty for his actions he decides to turn himself in. Okay okay okay, I get where we’re coming from. We want to have Blackwall in a guilty, redemption positive light. The groundwork here is so that if a player wants to redeem Blackwall, they’re not just siding with a cold homocidal murderer. Giving him a guilty conscious allows the player to find a justification to let him live. 

But it just felt so out of left field, and here’s why: 

In creative writing, for the plot twist or the story beat to pay off, it HAS to be touched on beforehand. We call this planting the gun. It’s a little different than Chekov’s Gun, kind of it in reverse: If you want the main character to have a gun in act 3, you need to put a gun in the setting in act 1 so the reader know’s its there. 

When writers fail to do this, I typically refer to it as “The Law of Convenience” The plot point/device on screen apparaits with no prior mention or forshadowing, as if it didn’t exist until this very moment, making it a very convienient plot point/device” 

( I think this is acutally called a Deus Ex Machina, but I played Deus Ex so it always throws me off. )

Where there is good subtle moves in Blackwall’s Dialogue that forshadow he’s not a Grey Warden, there’s  n o t h i n g  forshadowing him being Rainer. No gun was planted in Act 1, and so now it feels weird and out of left field that suddenly, Blackwall is a murderer genreal dude. The dude he steps in to save in that scene isn’t even mentioned or dotted on or anything. The massacre is never mentioned until this point, either. N o t h i n g about Blackwall’s story exists until it needs to, and that isn’t good writing. 

We don’t have anyone in Orlais discussing Rainer. THAT would have been good planting. That awful man that they gossiped about during the ball? He’s in YOUR party! 

Could you imagine in Adament if you mentioned Blackwall and everyone said Blackwall was dead and THAT’s how you found out something was up which could have led to the Rainer Reveal?. Or if a soldier came trying to kill Blackwall, or if Sera’s PEOPLE in that area told her about Rainer becuase of the massacre? Like, there’s so many ways to get this information without it being a sad exposition. 

Leliana’s a spymaster, for crying out loud. 

My other problem with Blackwall’s narrative is that it tells, not shows. Blackwall goes to prison and he just tells us sitting in the cell what he did. There’s no action, no drama to the scene. Just exposition followed by a decision. They write up a reason why he’s there (so one of his soldiers doesn’t take the fall for his crime) and yyayaya. 

 if you find out outside of this, like through Leliana, you only have one side of the story, and fuck, might even arrest Blackwall yourself because you don’t know about the guilt yet. That’s drama! G o o d  s h i t.  OMG, the Inquisitor could think he KILLED Blackwall. 

If it got revealed at Adament, that would have been d r a m a t i c. ESPEICALLY if Blackwall was in your party. The way to pull that off would be that up until then, Blackwall HAS to join the inqusition, and he can’t be kicked out until after. 

These are subtle background things that Dragon Age did before in Dragon Age II, where Anders, Isabella, Varric, Merril, Carver, Bethany, and Aveline join your party no matter what. Anders is the one I point to here, because he’s also a Grey Warden. So like, Leliana could have said “Blackwall is staynig to help because we should have a Grey Warden just in case things go south” and that can pay off for the Archdemon, and actually would forshadow the archdemon. 

If you want to do something like Blackwall’s narrative, here is my advice: 

- Unreliability. If other people told us about Blackwall’s, we make wrong conclusions and make mistakes and it involves us more than him just sitting in a prison and telling us what happened. There’s drama in misinformation. 

- Plant the gun. If we want him to get arrested in Act 3, we need to know about Rainer in act 1. Passing Dialogue in appropriate areas, maybe there’s a soldier who was under his command that you can interact with in Haven. There could be even more subtle, Blackwall hates when he’s in Orlais. He doesn’t want to go to the ball, etc. We need to know about the massacre, we need to know about the soldier getting falsely accused somehow. Not all of these things need to be planted, but some of them at least so when it does happen, the player can connect the pieces. 

- The Reveal has to be on point. This whole story falls apart if the reveal isn’t good, which is exactly what happened in Blackwalls story. It’s fine to make him guilty, but there’s nothing there in a conversation at a prison with all this expostition. 

- You HAVE to make Blackwall  feel guilty if you want him to live. There’s a lot of good people in the world who couldn’t justify Blackwall if he didn’t legitimently feel bad for his actions. Doing the story any other way without Blackwall turning himself in makes this harder, but it’s going to be hard, you’re justifying a murderer. If I could change the narrative, I’d have made a wartable mission that someone is being hanged in VR for the crime Blackwall admitted to, and Blackwall begs you to turn him in so the man doesn’t get killed. Like, that’s a good show of a changed man. 

Good Things About Blackwall

1. Him not being a Grey Warden was executed well. Blackwall is consistently vague and has a lie prepared for every question, which makes sense because it’s a false idenity 

2. “Scale the Wall” is fucking hilarious 

Eh, that’s all I really got. I am a little dissapointed that I don’t have much for him. He’s just not my favorite. 

These are just my opinions, btw. I am God or the law of creative writing, this is just how I feel, but I do study this at University so I feel like I have a small handle on this type of stuff? Tell me what you think about Blackwall. and if you’re a Blackwall lover, like why? I don’t see his appeal and  I guess it would be funky to learn.