#like I'm not one to criticize the villains you're into but I'm absolutely gonna have to red card this one

[talesofely]

Filipino Perks

Pairings : Natasha Romanoff x Reader (gn, i think)

Summary : You and Natasha were assigned by Fury to get intel from a private art exhibit while you were on a date. However, Fury failed to give you tickets so now you're stuck in the car with absolutely no way to get in... or is there?

Warnings : Nothing, just one mention of y/f/n, which means your fake name. Readers' a liar.

Note : first fic! hopefully I did Nat justice. criticism, likes & reblogs r always appreciated!

★—★—★—★—★—★—★—★—★—★—★

You and Natasha were finally able to act like a couple, going on little dates without worrying about world threatening aliens or villains. But Fury just had to ruin it by calling and assigning you two on a mission since you were in the area. It was a simple mission, just get the intel from a company that SHIELD suspected to be working with HYDRA. The only hard part was it was a private art exhibit and you didn't have tickets. So that leads you two to stay in your parked car in the parking lot, trying to think of a way to get in.

"This is literally impossible! How the hell do they think we'll get in there without tickets?" You said with a groan, leaning back into the driver's seat dramatically. Natasha just chuckled at how dramatic you were being.

"Tasha, baby, as much as I love hearing your laugh that gives me butterflies every single time and make me feel like a lovesick teenager — we need a solution." You frowned, trying to show how serious you were. However, instead of helping you think of a solution, she just gave you an amused smile.

"I'm sure we can think of a way to get in, my love. Calm down." You girlfriend's reassuring tone made you pout, which consequently made her laugh.

"Maybe we can break one of the windows?" You suggested, eyeing the windows on the left side of building.

"That would cause a huge scene, детка." Natasha replied in 'in a matter of fact' tone.

"Threaten one of the guests to give us their invitations?" You tried again, seeing a young couple walk past your car towards the entrance.

"Nope."

"Threaten the guard to let us in?"

"Not gonna happen."

"I'll seduce one of the guests so they'll bring me as a plus one?"

Your girlfriend's glare was enough to answer your question.

"Okay, no, uhhh... I'll seduce the guard so he can let us in?"

"Seriously, babe?" You had to stifle a chuckle at how natasha was glaring at you.

"Then what? oh, I know! We can kill the guard!"

"Y/n. You are not seducing nor killing anyone, okay?" Natasha's tone was enough to shut you up, especially cause she called you y/n instead of all the gushing endearments she normally uses.

"Okay, I'll let you do the thinking, I guess..." You sighed, and closed your eyes, letting her think of a better solution.

You were supposed to give up and just wait for her idea when you saw one of the middle-aged guard's nameplate.

On the nameplate was his last name, Santos. Santos was a Filipino last name. Then it hit you, you can get in.

"Baby. I know how we'll get in." You said with a mischievous grin. Natasha looked at you in confusion and amusement. You looked so confident with your idea that she couldn't stop a small amused smile to show on her face.

"What is it, малыш?" She asked with a raised brow, not sure if she should take you seriously or if it's one of your unserious plans again.

"The guard. He's Filipino." You were already forming the conversation in your head while Nat just stares at you in pure confusion.

"And? I don't see how that will get us in, love." Instead of answering her, you get out of the car and opened her door for her. She stepped out in confusion, interwinding your fingers with her.

You approached the Filipino guard with a polite smile. He immediately held his hand out to ask for your invitation.

"Goodday, ma'am. Welcome to the exhibit. May I see your invitation, please?" The man looked like he was in his mid 50s. His Filipino accent wasn't too obvious, but it was there. It was enough for your smile to widen slightly, knowing your assumption was correct.

"Goodday rin boss! Filipino ka po?" You asked in a calm tone, earning a subtle confused look from natasha.

(Goodday to you too, boss! Are you a Filipino?)

"Ay oo! Filipino ka rin? Hindi halata ah? Mukha kang kano!" The man said with a smile, he reminded you of your father back in the Philippines.

(Oh yes! Are you a Filipino too? It isn't obvious, you look like an american!)

"Ay hindi po, half lang po. Fil-Am po ako, sa Pinas po ako lumaki." You replied with a chuckle. He seemed interested and kind enough to make your plan successful.

(No, I'm only half. I'm a Fil-am, but I grew up in the Philippines.)

"Ano pong pangalan niyo, boss?" You asked once again, getting ready to start the first step in your little plan.

(What's your name, boss?)

"Danilo, Danilo Santos." He confidently said, his filipino accent very evident now.

"Pwede po ba kaming pumasok? Naiwan kasi ng bebe ko yung invitation, birthday pa naman po niya ngayon." You let out a small sad smile, trying to win over the heart of the guard.

Danilo thought about it for a minute, looking at you with hesitant yet sympathetic eyes.

"O, siya, sige. Pumasok na kayo, wag nalang kayong maingay sa iba ah? Anong pangalan niyo ulit?" The guard said with a kind smile, making you instantly feel guilty for lying. (Alright, fine. Come inside, just don't tell others, okay? What're your names again?)

"Salamat po! Y/f/n po, siya naman po si Natalie. 'Di po siya marunong magtagalog, eh." (Thank you! I'm Y/f/n, she's Natalie. She can't speak tagalog.)

"Happy birthday, Natalie. Enjoy your day, ah!" Mr. Danilo smiled at Natasha who thanked him and gave a polite smile. He then suddenly leaned in to whisper into your ear.

"Ganda ng nobya mo, galing mong pumili." He gave you two thumbs up and a fatherly grin. (Your girlfriend's pretty, you're good at picking.)

"Sobra po, mahal po ata ako ni Kupido," You joked, causing him to chuckle. Natasha just looks at you confused but had a small adoring smile on her face. "Salamat po ulit, boss." You waved politely, before holding Natasha's waist to lead both of you inside. (Very, I think Cupid loves me. Thank you, again, boss.)

Once you were both inside, she stopped walking, causing you to stop aswell. You looked at her in concern, pulling her closer to your body.

"What's wrong, Tash?" She faced you with a small impressed smile.

"That was honestly impressive. But why'd you call him boss? And what the hell is a bebe?" Her obvious confusion made you chuckle.

"Oh boss? It's sorta like a Filipino culture. We use it as a sign of respect, like when you call someone ma'am or sir. It also helps when you want to get stuff done fast. It's hard to explain." You shrugged and she just nodded. She interwinded your fingers together, resuming your walk into the halls of the building.

"And bebe is?"

"Bebe is your significant other. It means, baby. Mostly teenagers use it to refer to their lovers," You snorted, laughing at your own explanation. "Like, 'bebe kita', which means, 'you're my baby'. But please never call me that, it reminds me of my highschool boyfriend, ew." You grimaced at the memory, making your girlfriend chuckle.

"What filipino endearment should I call you, then?" She asked in a soft tone, interested in the Filipino culture.

"Mahal." You smiled, squeezing her hand affectionately.

"I'm assuming that means Love?" You nodded and leaned down.

"Tinatangi kita, aking Natalia." You whispered, and placed a soft kiss on her temple. The way you said her name in a Filipino accent made her heart flutter. You smiled when you saw the almost unnoticeable pink tint on her cheeks. (I love you, my Natalia.)

"I love you, more."

★—★—★—★—★—★—★—★—★—★—★

note : the translations aren't 100% accurate since some filipino words doesn't have exact translations soooo yeah. i'm half filipino so i'm kinda confident with the tagalog lmfao. tysm for reading !

— sincerely, ely. ★

[genericpuff]

Not related to lore Olympus but this discussion seems a bit uhh strange. Some of the comments are calling Mattie bites a right woman hater. If you don't believe me,check this out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/webtoons/s/4zaDi6fWos

god okay I feel like I'm opening Pandora's Box with this shit but I have lots to say about it so... yeah fuck it, let's do this, I'm brave-

So I can absolutely agree with OP's sentiment that BlackLightJack's content has become uh... more aggressive and mean-spirited , and don't get me wrong, that was always sort of his vibe, but now it feels like he's straight up just weaponizing his fanbase and like... y'all know how curt I get about LO here, I can be a real asshole about it, even I think what BLJ is doing feels really shitty, immature, and frankly just uninformed? Because most of his videos are just him pout-screaming profanities into the microphone, like I know this is gonna sound nitpicky and petty but I can literally hear it in his voice that he's enunciating his words the same way an 8 year old would so that spit would land on the person they're yelling at ("STOOOOOOOOO-PPP-UHHHHH") and lately his content just feels like what it used to feel like being in CoD lobbies back in the day. Him having the name 'webtoon killer' just gives me such a sour taste in my mouth. Like... this feels like some kind of Batman villain in the making LMAO

But maybe no one wants to hear that opinion from someone like me who's literally called themselves the "far superior off brand" as a gag LMAO and that's fine honestly if you think I'm full of shit, this is also just my opinion!

But like... and I know I'm being an asshole going 'b-but-!' but... BLJ is also building an entire ass monetized platform off his vibe and using that platform to specifically go after Canvas series and creators. And let me tell you, while many would argue "well it's just the webtoons that are grossly negligent / breaking Webtoons' ToS / etc.", his fanbase is also constantly just sending him new comics to read and trash on and I feel like it's only a matter of time before he goes after a completely innocent creator whose only crime was being not great at webcomics which... shouldn't be viewed as a default crime punishable by pitchforks. That sorta already happened with the Fulcagay situation, I don't know Fulcagay and he almost definitely wouldn't know me, but he's a fellow Canvas creator who I've run into and shared a space with, and BLJ's original comments about him just felt incredibly off-base and volatile without giving even a shred of benefit of the doubt. I get the sense BLJ doesn't know about Hanlon's razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") because EVERY video he does about every comic and creator he's addressing assumes maliciousness always.

This is the same shit we got with Youtube creators like Leafy who became infamous for just taking the piss out of everyone until they took it too far. Like, take it from me, it can be VERY easy to get so entrenched in being an asshole and taking the piss out of everything that completely innocent people get hit with splash damage, and if you're not willing to take responsibility for that, then you're gonna look like a bigger dick than the people you were aiming for. This pee analogy working for y'all? 😆

As for what Matty Bites has to do with that, I don't really get it? Like maybe I'm just misinformed here, maybe I haven't watched enough of her stuff, but she's never given me anywhere near the amount of red flags I get off listening to even one episode of BLJ. Matty feels like someone who actually reads and analyzes and researches the stuff she's criticizing in a way that's relatively harmless with her own flair sprinkled in (and her humor is hilarious btw, her opening skits are great LOL); BLJ meanwhile feels like he's constantly one opinion away from starting a #victimofcancelculture campaign because he's just trying to be as edgy and angry as possible LMAO (and ironically they're both often criticizing the same thing, but it goes to show how delivery makes a hell of a difference when it comes to dishing out criticism)

All that said, if there is something with Matty Bites that I'm missing here, I'm fully open to being informed because I haven't watched many of her videos and there could just as well be something that I've missed. But I don't think she's anywhere near as hostile as BLJ tends to be, I don't think Matty Bites' comedic video editing and sassy commentary has ever resulted in creators actually being attacked and bullied like BLJ's have.

Overall I think anyone who builds a platform or audience off criticizing content (and this includes me!) needs to practice responsibility and accountability in what they put out and what they choose to focus on and criticize. It can be really easy to accidentally use "criticism" as a get-out-of-jail-free card to just be a bully. It can be really easy to wind up leaving your criticism so unrefined and surface level without any deeper reflection that you never actually open your mind to anything and you just end up echoing out hate speech without even intending to. And it can be really, really easy to ruin your own palate from willingly consuming nothing but shit all day.

Just to quote some very famous words from a fictional character that absolutely apply here:

[emmitaaa4]

Addressing some fandom BS inconsistencies

Gwyn was shadow mommy, Az was shadow daddy, they were gonna have shadow babies with her extra super pliable bones.

I audibly chocked when I read this @nikethestatue (btw everything said in this post was on point). No but seriously this is how they sound, too many of them insisting that there is nothing wrong with basing the likelihood of a ship on who has the more suitable uterus to be with a man... cause supposedly they're just picking up on the hints SJM wrote for them? She likes babies for HEAs so ofc children are the end all be all of a relationship, plus there's absolutely no way that she could ever write an adoption plot SJM is literally adopted and has done it in other series. Selective reading strikes again.

A minimum amount of critical thinking would tell you that 1) the infamous *magical uterus change* scene was about nessian (& feysand), not about any ship; 2) if SJM had written Nesta changing Elain's uterus, it would have given too much away, not to mention 3) how disturbing/violating it would have been for Nesta to change her sister's reproductive anatomy WITHOUT HER CONSENT?! None of it makes sense narratively; my girl Nes would never, especially given the trauma they both suffered from having their bodily autonomy--and so much more--ripped away by the Cauldron.

This argument is so trivialized that I see it every other day on reddit/tiktok/*insert media app*, and yet elriels are the toxic side of the fandom? The ones whom people are allowed to insult, to ridicule for theories all made in good fun, the women that are villainized over a difference of opinion? Don't get me wrong, there's assholes on both sides and people keep calling one another variations of delulu (and the nastier personal attacks). But by painting this fandom-wide villain there is such a lack of accountability for the plethora of harmful talking points spread by other portions of the fandom. (I've been silently reading the anti-elain & anti-elriel tags for like a year, and I'm on tiktok. Yes, I have self-destructive tendencies).

Anyways.

I never understood either how people ever actually thought (or well still think) that gwynriel would happen BEFORE elucien?? It makes no sense logically, narratively, or in terms of characterization & the arc she's set up for Elain, Azriel, and Lucien. Yet it took one controversial bonus chapter for people to decenter Elain in her own story, that is make her choice of romantic partner--which SJM spent 3+ books setting up--Azriel's. It took one bonus chapter that soo many readers are still unaware of, to brush Elain off as a "sexual object" Az is using to distract himself until his therapist-extraordinaire Gwyn comes in and heals him all up. Because ofc she will: she's badass and not the "passive and weak and boring" Eplain (aka "Plant" or "brain dead gardener"), she fits the YA archetype of the spunky warrior-girl so she can handle his darkness, and SJM supposedly spent time fleshing her out because she wrote her as a LI for Azriel; she's made for him, she is what he needs to grow (I actually enjoyed Gwyn's character btw, just pointing out how silly it all sounds). “Next book is a love triangle between Elain/Az/Gwyn” “Elain will turn evil or is secretly evil”. So you're telling me that SJM would pit Elain & Gwyn against each other in a love triangle over a man... all because of a necklace that was not even mentioned once in the actual books? Please, let's be logical for a second.

All this because instead of reading the bonus chapter in the context of the books, some people are reading the books in the context of the bonus chapter. Which now that I think of it is probably why so many people mischaracterize Az the way they do--because yes we know enough of his character to know half of the stuff the fandom diagnoses him with is questionable. Azriel? Entitled incel x fuckboy hybrid (gotta be the first of his kind, minute slay ig)? Interesting tell me more. No joke I saw a semi-popular post on here where a gwynriel said they read the bonus WITHOUT HAVING READ ANY OF THE BOOKS. I'm sorry, ship wars are silly and believe it or not idc who ppl ship, but it makes it hard to take some of the things they say seriously.

All this to say that the fandom isn't even debating the right thing. If you consider everything SJM has said in her interviews:

(she's been planting seeds for Nesta & Elain's book since acomaf; she knows who she is writing the first 2 books about + is keeping things open for the 3rd one--with 5 different ship options--which automatically rules out "Elain will close the series"; she said she's doing research for Elain's book in the ACOFAS bonus & there's seeds for future bookS in acofas; all she said recently about her beloved *heroines* and the themes of fate/true love/choice she finds *very* interesting & wants to discuss)

and if you also consider all she's written in the actual books (elain's characterization + the overarching plot in general & how she fits into it), then it's pretty evident that Elain's book is next.

The question then would be who is the MMC / 2nd PoV in her book, aka would acotar 5 be an elucien or an elriel story? Because logically, gwynriel was always a consequence of elucien. I honestly do not understand how people don't see that.

Oh and they always think they're gagging elriels with the "obviously Azriel is the next MC" as if elriels aren't saying the same thing? And we're the ones twisting info and not making sense. It's just funny at this point.

---sidenote: I realize that this post generalizes some things, and I just wanted to say that I have interacted with lovely eluciens / people on either side of this headache of a ship war. My hard limit is Elain haters though... back off I say 🤺 BACK OFF 🤺

---sidenote 2: I would have written this as a reblog except im not entirely sure how tumblr works and I get no visibility from them rip.

[prankprincess123]

Spoilery Jot-Note Thoughts on Last Night's Critical Role:

(In no particular order because I'm still struggling to process everything, and mostly revolving around the twins because OW!!!)

The simultaneous PAIN and hilarity of Vex and Bozos just laying prone and wailing on eachother

Pelor's blessing is freaking amazing

Vesper - who I've seen a lot of posts expressing concern about her almost being forgotten by her parents at times because they're focused on/busy with the younger kids - being the only one specified by name in Vex's last thoughts

Vex DYING for a freaking FIFTH TIME!!?!

!!!!!!"...save him..."!!!!!!

The whole table going absolutely silent when Ozo went after Vex, and then the two clerics panicked whispering to eachother as soon as it became clear she was gonna die

"Please, not today!"

Pike, you are an actual angel. I love you

PERCY'S REACTION!!!!!!!!

Man went full smoke demon to avenge his wife despite not having an active pact anymore

I genuinely lost track of how many shots he took, and am pretty sure it wasn't exactly game legal but I don't care

The fact that both Laura's in-game husband and real-life husband immediately rushed to rip that psyco apart to avenge/protect her

Literally ripping him apart in Grog's case

Trinket! I was so panicked that he was gonna die! And then he was just having the time of his life riding Skrag

Disappointed that we didn't get a Trinket reaction to Vex's death though. We should have both story wise and game mechanics - cause the moment a ranger goes down - whether dead or just incapacitated - their companion goes into a protective rage and is supposed to get a reaction attack - and Trinket would

Keyleth just breaking my heart on repeat

"Do I see my boyfriend?!"

Girl is trying so hard to be strong and be a leader like everyone expects, but she just really needs a chance to breakdown

Vex's constant reassurances to Keyleth both this ep and the last two. Yes! Just give your sister-in-law all the hugs!

VAX!!!!!!

Keyleth frantically pulling Vax's breaking orb INTO her body to try and save him!!!!

HE'S BACK

Making sure to make immediate eye contact with both his most important girls as soon as he's able so they know he's alright and he's himself

'I head over to join the family reunion'

Percy! I know you're letting the twins have their moment, but you just watched your wife die and haven't seen your brother-in-law in 30y. You're allowed to express relief that they're both alive and breathing! Joining the hug or saying something will not hurt

Keyleth's just dissociation as soon as Vax is back. Girl, you're allowed to feel the feels. You can be happy and relieved and heartbroken and ready to murder the Matron all at once. I have alexithymia so I get not being able to identify or process all the feels, and I get not wanting to be hurt again, but you're allowed to hold onto him.

4-sided Dive a few days ago talking about how MN were all a couple bad days away from going villain, but after this I think Keyleth might be on the verge of murdering the Matron if she takes him back permanently.

As SOON as they know they have more than 5min with Vax, Vex instantly and very excitedly starting to babble about the kids, and everyone else chiming in

Vax's laughing glee at hearing about Vax'ildan Frederick, and utter baffled shock at the name Wilhand'ildan. Because yes, your family absolutely decided to both honor and tease you when naming 2/3 of your nephews.

They better get to keep him, or I'm gonna be a wreck.

I'm still screaming about everything

[transgamerthoughts]

a night at poe's masquerade

Last night I made a quick tweet about how I think Persona games (particular from Persona 3 onwards) tend to be fundamentally conservative games. In worlds filled with magic powers, shadow selves, and literal gods there's an understanding that many of the most villainous people you can know are folks in positions of social/political power who weaponize their status in order to prey on those beneath them. This is a particular focus of Persona 5 but it extends even back to back to a game like Persona 2 and characters like Tatsuzou Sudou. Although these games acknowledge the social structures that lead to particularly vicious kinds of abuse, there is tendency for our protagonist to then fold themselves into those power structures. In games that focus less on real-life political allegory, there's still pattern of protagonists eventually accepting the societal roles that they're initial chafing against. It's a very common occurrence in the series. clockwork!

Persona 4 is the chief culprit here. Yukiko struggles with the idea that her presumed inheritance of the Amagi Inn is an imposition on her life but makes peace with that fact and eventually prepares herself for that role. Chie confronts Adachi, shocked that anyone who chose to be a police officer would do so for selfish reasons or betray the ideal image she holds of that job. Though confronted with the ways in which the system enabled Adachi's murders, she ultimately decided that she wants to become a police officer. Just as some examples. there's more. it's a fraught game in many ways

(I'm not gonna talk about Naoto. That's a minefield. as a trans critic people ask what I think about Naoto quite often. my answer is I like Naoto quite a bit and while I appreciate the queer read I don't need her story to be actually about transness. my tongue in cheek deep position here is that I think she's the damn coolest thing in the Dancing All Night opening movie. absolute fire!)

Persona fans are totally reasonable human beings. by which I mean that they might be the most electric and fuckin' absurd fandom I've ever encountered. While some people agreed with my read of the series, many others swarmed in. Which is fine enough. That's just what happens when you're visible on Twitter. I don't really have an interest in outlining the series in gross detail although, contrary to many accusations, I have played all the mainline games. One thing that can never be hurled my way is a suggestion that I don't play videos games. This criticism doesn't arise out of nowhere though I admit I didn't exactly expect it to become a trending topic floating in the "For You" tab. I was tweeting before bed.

Lesson learned! this fandom is wild! So it goes!

I've been thinking about people's responses and I want to venture into fraught territory to talk about a particularly bad habit I see from many fans. Which I think can be extended to things like ongoing debates about localization as much as they can apply to this little tempest in a teapot. Which is that I've grown somewhat concerned with he ways in which RPG fans (intentionally or not) exoticize Japan as a means to defend their favorite games from critique. It's kinda bad!

and I'm gonna risk a ramble exploring the topic… and I wonder how tumblr in 2024 will compare in reaction to hellscape of twitter

Something you often encounter in these discussions is an implication (sometimes a direct suggestion) that it is impossible to really engage with Japanese media as a westerner. That there's too many layers of nuance and too many centuries of ingrained tradition for anyone who has not engaged in lengthy study on the topic to penetrate. Often, this is framed as a desire to simply put things in cultural contexts. respect it and give due seriousness! Which is fine. I absolutely think if you wanna talk about something like the portrayal of the Japanese justice system in Judgement, it probably helps to… y'know… know details about the Japanese justice system. If you want to talk about how a game approaches gender, an understanding of certain social mores is important. No one debates this; it's important to understand art as arising from specific material conditions and places.

This is not really the approach people take however. Instead there is an insistence that the cultural difference between Japan and western nations is essentially insurmountable. Which has some bad implications. I think people are well meaning when they're like "hey, you gotta watch this YouTuber talk about Shintoism and JRPG boss fights for over an hour" but it comes at the cost of painting the culture as something of a puzzle to solve. and make no mistake: I'm glad anyone is doing the work but there's a bit of strangeness at play when folks are like "well you're American" and then tell me to watch criticism also made by Americans. especially since I do have a educational background that includes the study of world religions. i've studied plenty of this! and it's not impossible for me to have grasped.

the world is beautiful and nuanced and specific and full of vibrancies. but these things are not so singular that we can't connect with them or come to know them. and those nuances and specifics and vibrances don't create a protective ward around works. if anything, they're invitations to explore something new. if I walk away from Persona with a position that you don't agree with I promise that it's not something that's happened in haste. It used to be my job to think about games. and I've thought about Persona a lot! it's not inaccesible.

When we start to paint a culture as being particularly foreign we inherently exoticize it. We drape a degree of mystery over it which implies there is no universal connections found in art. Of course the concept of "police" is different in Japan to some extent as is the expectations that go into inheriting a family business. yes, the social nuances of a classroom differ. But Japan is not so alien to the western critic that we can't look at popular fiction and spot patterns. I certain don't need a 17 anime consumer to write me an essay on honne and tatemae or whatever in order to understand what's going on in the Midnight Channel. It's an easily observable truth that Persona often identifies issues within Japan society while also (particularly in Persona 5's case) concluding that these problems are not a consequence of specific power structures but rather moral failings of certain bad individuals. That's the text. Even when it wants to suggest otherwise.

Here's a little snippet from Persona 5. On face value, it seems to contradict what I'm saying. "Harper, how can you say that it only cares about individuals when it outright says that society itself needs to be addressed!?" DO YOU EVEN PLAY THESE GAMES YOU BITCH?! The answer is that the game does not have a model or idea of what it means to change society except vaguely to inspire people to more individual action. be nicer. stand up for yourself, speak your truth, do things for your own reasons. which has a radical element to it in the context to be sure but we've spent a huge portion of the game seeing how the abuse of power, particularly power placed in certain positions and social strata

a change of mindset is good but… is that sufficient? I'm not entirely convinced. not if this game want to truly deliver on everything it has explored. (side note, a lot of folks were like "why are you focusing on p5 so much here?" and the answer is that it's recent, representative of the series' values from the last decade or so, and because I'm a tired adult in their 30s who has stuff to do and isn't obligated to make a 300 tweet long thread breaking down multiple scripts. if you want me to do that labor, you better pay me for my time. otherwise I don't care to appease fan who have no plans of truly entertaining what I'd do anyway. no breakdown I do could please them)

but you fight Yaldabaoth Harper! You kill the collective gestalt representative of the status quo!. okay sure but the metaphorical battle falters as the game ultimately imagines many of our heroes (for instance Makoto, who also decides to become a cop even after her sister leaves the profession to become a defense attorney) are content to slide into the power structures as they exist. they've simply become "good apples" in the same basket that held the bad ones What does it matter if you kill the metaphor when you don't carry through elsewhere? It's not simply some vague human desire to be exploited that created the various monstrous villains we face throughout the game. There's real material circumstances, systems and long-held powers that gave them the carte blanche that enabled their abuses! Be they financial, political, or even sexual.

We might layer nuances on top of this of course. Notions of reticence to change or valuing of tradition, attitudes towards elders. But when we do so it's important be careful. When fans imply impenetrabilities in the works by virtue of cultural difference, there's a risk of veering into a kind of Orientalism. One which mystifies the culture and turns it into a kind of "other." Distant, strange. This sometimes comes paired with a kind of infantilization of creators but that's a different though similarly fraught topic that I think is particularly best left in the hands of the creators themselves. I'm not the person to talk about that!

Nevertheless, a frustrating part of the response to my tweet today has been a rush to say "This work functions that makes it necessarily elide your ability to critique it."

I'll be an ass and generalize. It's mostly people with Persona avatars making this suggest. That Persona, as a Japanese work, is imbued with an ineffable quality that magically allows it to side-step what's ultimately a pretty timid conclusion. Many of these folks are younger players, self-identified as such in profiles, who clearly have a deep connection to the series. It means something to them. But I'd rather they simply say "hey, I found this thing particularly moving at an important moment in my life" rather than conjure an impassable ocean between myself (or really anyone) and the work in the event they find flaws.

Otherwise, you just get this:

Stories are not merely about what happens on the journey. The destination does matter. It means something when the king grabs his shining sword and fights off the orc invaders or whatever. A value system is suggested Similarly, it does means something when Chie becomes a cop. (This is just a shorthand example mind you! But you hopefully get the idea!)

I don't think games or any work of art need us to defend them. The trap of fandom is that you often turn to any possible means to justify what you love. For Persona, a series which does have the decency to explore cultural issues, that same cultural specificity is often weaponize by fans (largely western fans even!) to deflect certain problems. This process inadvertently portrays that culture as a mystery, a shrouded thing that we cannot ever criticize. It's one thing to dig into some of those contextual specifics but it's another all-together to imply these specifics provide a mean to abrogate certain analyses. and I think navigating the line between due deference and something deeper and stranger seems to be something many of the fans reacting to me... have not managed. I had a peer talk to me about this situation and their feeling was that the animated members of the fandom that were coming at me, many of whom are self-identified as young and western, were kinda treating Japan like it was a land of elves. which it's not! it is a place on Earth and yes we need to take strides to understand and respect certain specificities... but we can't mystify an entire people. especially if the purpose is to turn those people and their culture into a shield. a means to justify and validate the specialness you see in a franchise.

I call Persona conservative because it cannot imagine a world in any other shape that what we have right now. God dies but nothing actually changes. I don't think it's enough to say "well, they defeated the god! and they needed the collective strength of society to do it! people did change because without that change of heart, the heroes wouldn't have the magical juice to fight the Kabbalah monster!" to toss Makoto's words back at the series: victory against a single god is meaningless if the true enemy is society.

If you can't show me what that grand spiritual change means for society, then I think you've kinda failed. you've certainly failed if the conclusion is that the world after that change is functionally the same and it doesn't really matter to me if "they talk about this in Strikers or whatever" because you can't offload your thematic snarls to side games. if the main stories you tell can't resolve this tension, that's a problem. these are often very beautiful games. they certainly have amazing structure and systems. but I don't think it's controversial to say they often hedge their bets at the end. and there's no impenetrable cultural wall surrounding the games that leaves the criticism off the table.

that's just What Happens. and it's fine for us to acknowledge flaws in even in things that contain beauty or meant something to us

really. it's fine.

[abla-soso]

One of my biggest criticisms of how Hori wrote the LOV villains was how remorseless and utterly self-absorbed they were.

They were given too much empathy and compassion by the narrative, so much focus was put on them being tragic victims of society that never got help, so much emphasis was put on the heroes needing to reach to them and save them from themselves.

All the typical sings of characters who will get a redemption or at least a salvation arc, right?

But it was utterly baffling to me how much these villains didn't give a flying fuck about the victims they ruined or killed. How much they even enjoyed lashing out at innocent people and destroying lives. This might trigger their fans, but when it comes to evil apathy? They were exactly like Overhaul and AFO. They absolutely were!

And it got me thinking, how the hell are these villains gonna get a redemption or a salvation arc when they've never shown the most crucial qualities thar all redeemed villains and bad people had in this manga: remorse and a sincere desire to atone?

But the answer was right there, wasn't it? They were NOT supposed to get a redemption or a salvation arc precisely because they did NOT have these qualities.

Hori was very consistent about this throughout the story.

Now the question is: why did Hori choose to make the LOV undeserving of redemption or salvation despite feeling so much empathy and compassion for them? You couldn't possibly accuse him of not caring deeply about these characters. He put his whole heart in writing their tragic lives and all but forced his readers to feel for them and care about saving them.

I've thought about it for a while, and I guess the answer might be in Hori's love for sad endings and horror stories. He has expressed his fascination for them a couple of times. Deeply sympathetic yet doomed characters who fail themselves are a pretty standard trope in these genres. So it's not surprising that he channelled this into his writing. And I think he wanted his readers - the ones who the LOV villains - to experience the tragedy of these types of characters. I think he wanted to use their tragedy to express his concerns about real societal issues in Japan.

This is part of the reason why I'm glad Hori has no interaction or even any knowledge about the discourse in BNHA's western fandoms. I'm glad they're not his target audience.

Cuz imagine you're Hori. You've spent years enjoying writing about specific genes and tropes that you've always loved and you managed to incorporate them in your Shonen manga, only to find out that a large segment of your fandom are throwing the biggest hissy fits because they belived you were writing about radical hope syiry and redemption arcs for monstrous villains when you actually writing about your (horror/tragedy-influnced) sympathetic yet doomed characters 🫠

[criscura]

Absolutely adore your OPM writing but I am also living for your recent takes about Dorian Gray. Easily one of the best books I’ve had to read back in school. I just love when I find other people who are also obsessed with jt!

THANKS FOR ACTIVATING MY TRAP CARD I'M GOING TO GO OFF ON WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT YESTERDAY

okay. okAY so like. so i finish Dorian Gray right. It still feels so cold and ruthless and bitter, and once AGAIN I'm left thinking "oh damn, Henry is probably gonna be a little devastated by this one, he spent the last twenty years hanging out with this dude who he was absolutely fucking almost daily, and THEN he's going to find out that Basil really is dead, AND his wife left him, he can't sardonic his way out of feeling for this"

and he's hot right like that's a plot-critical point, Henry is seductive. SO HERE I GO LIKE "okay tumblr let's try this again SUREly you have art of the fucked up sexy old bastard right"

AND FUCKING THEN (under the cut this is SO LONG and i'm not apologizing for it)

i go on and see????? like not only is there almost nothing of him??? people GENUINELY hate him??? but they LOVE Basil??? and I'm like no, no this CAN'T be right, maybe--like okay, Tumblr is a unique place, maybe this is one of those cases where my opinion falls more in line with the majority, so I go to google and I just. Type in "Dorian Gray Henry Wotton"

AND IT'S ALL THE SAME. ALL!!! ALL THE SAME!!!! He's awful, he's the villain, he's the worst, blablabla, and i'm like. okya. OKAY. ALRIGHT OKAY yes he was terrible but it was so painfully obvious he was in love with/obsessed with/infatuated with Dorian, S U R E L Y that's gotten him some brownie points there. Like. He sees Dorian, and then goes onto spend every single day with him if he can, morning, noon, and night, taking him out on dates and trips and giving him anything he asks, for EIGHTEEN YEARS, to the extent that when his wife divorces and leaves him he begs Dorian to stay with him.

Like even his whole issue with women, specifically romance with women, like---did???? did fucking no one???? ?DID FUCKING NO ONE READ THAT AND SEE A GAY MAN PISSED OFF THAT HE HAS TO PLAY A PART??????? HOW MUCH FUCKING CLEARER CAN YOU GET. All in all he does the EXACT SAME THING Basil does, just in his own way, so i figure there must, there MUST, there has GOT TO BE sympathy for him *somehwere*

AND!!!!! NO/!1!!!!! NOT!!!!1 NO!!!!!!!!!! EVERYWHERE!!!! i loook EVERYWHERE!!! for "Henry Wotton in love with Dorian" AND IT'S ALL LIKE!!! oh no, he just wanted power, oh no, he just wanted to see dorian fall, oh no, he NEVER felt ANYTHING for this guy he fucking DEVOTED ALL HIS WAKING HOURS TO IF HE COULD and i just. i.

so i go to my last recourse right??? i'm fucking desperate. i am DESPERATE. I go to Reddit. Surely, FUCKING SURELY--and at this point i just want to know I'm not insane, you KNOW you are in the absolute fucking trenches when you're going to reddit for opinions on literature but fuck at least if I can find a mirror in the cesspool i know that I exist right like i'm not some fucking ghost right SOMEONE will have seen what I saw--and

overwhelmingly

OVERWHELMINGLY

it's people talking about how much they hate Henry.

i. And like. SOME people are like "oh he was so interesting, he was the best part of the book," which yes, gratifying, but???? I????

As i was reading it, it was unbelievably--UNBEARABLY--again ****OVERWHELMINGLY**** obvious that a) both Basil and Henry were in love with Dorian b) they were BOTH older men taking advantage of him and dominating his time and attention so they could try to mold him into something for their own personal viewing pleasure c) Dorian was bare minimum a little bit shit from the start--as in, BEFORE WE SEE HIM he's introduced as someone who likes to hurt his friends because he enjoys it. This was so obviously a mean book about bad people and we're watching a train wreck unfold. a sexy, sexy, SEXY train wreck because wanting to fuck Dorian is a critical pull for the whole thing, but!!!!

BUT!!!!! ALSO CRITICALLY!!!!! ESSENTIALLY!!!!! HENRY WOTTON IS A SEXY ASSHOLE YOU NEED TO WANT TO FUCK

LIKE!!!!!! It's like the whole thing with stories about Satan, where he HAS to be hot so you understand why people would do what he says despite knowing it's bad for them. Henry is designed to be the dangerous, hot, older worldly dude stepping further and further into the shadows while beckoning for Dorian to follow after him, and to a certain extent you NEEED to understand that pull so you understand what Dorian is going through. AND THIS IS SO COMMON IT'S A MYTHOLOGICAL TROPE!!!

DO YOU HATE SATAN IN THE BOOK OF JOB. DO YOU HATE MEPHISTOPHELES IN MEPHISTOPHELES. Henry is performing the exact same role!!! All his lines are written sex!!!! it is fucking LEGITIMATELY some of the most sensual shit I have EVER read!! "talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin" ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME. aND YOU!!! You're supposed to be pulled in!!! that's SO IMPORTANT. WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU READ THE BOOK AND ENJOYED IT BUT HATED HIM AND DIDN'T WANT TO READ HIS LINES. WHAT DID YOU FUCKING READ.

But okay. Alright okay. EVEN DISREGARDING that Henry is a hot sexy bastard and that's necessary for the story and for Dorian's characterization. I would fucking GET IT if he was the ONLY person in the story that's like that. I would give it a pass if this is a story where everyone is good and sweet and everything is all daisies and niceness. FUCKING BUT.

THE ENTIRE NOVEL IS FULL OF ABSOLUTELY SHIT ASS PEOPLE FROM START TO END

Everyone uwu-ifies Basil, but that man is the same age as Henry. He saw this barely legal???? Not yet legal???? I'm not entirely sure how that works at that time with people of that status, but he saw the equivalent of a fresh-faced "i've been 18 for one day and have never left my house" angel of a boy who lost his parents young and was raised with family that fucking hated him and was like "yes well i want to look at him forever I'm going to keep him with me as much as I can and tell him how perfect and pretty he is so he does what i say and lets me paint him in whatever pose i can think of" and like

HE DOES TEH SAME THING AS HENRY???!!! IT'S TEH SAME THING???????

IT'S NOT BETTER JUST BECAUSE BASIL IS PATHETIC?

He does the same thing Henry does!!!! Henry is also a manipulative predatory asshole!! HENRY IS JUST MORE FORWARD ABOUT IT.

like WHAT??? what is it better when he does it because he's a sad wet cat of a man??? why, because he says he loves Dorian? He loves Dorian SOOOOOO MUCH he watches as he falls down a worse and worse path, refusing to believe any of the rumors he heard about him FOR TWENTY YEARS because they don't line up with how he personally sees Dorian, and only steps in to try to make a positive difference the HOUR before he was going to leave for an unknown amount of time???? he loves him THAT MUCH he just gives up every time he runs into legitimate resistance when it comes to helping Dorian out????

And!!!!! fuckin!!!! Everyone uwu-ifies Dorian too!!!!! ONCE AGAIN, LITERALLY ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS WE LEARN ABOUT HIM--no, I'm just gonna write out the paragraph:

"He likes me," he answered after a pause; "I know he likes me. Of course I flatter him dreadfully. I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I know I shall be sorry for having said. As a rule, he is charming to me, and we sit in the studio and talk of a thousand things. Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day."

HALF OF THAT IS DEVOTED TO SAYING HE'S KIND OF A DICK. The *other* half is Basil saying being with him makes him happy, but, but, but, but, but. There's SO MANY conditions on that happiness. Dorian is NOT a purely good person--he's capable of good, but he's also capable of bad, and he chooses which he's going to be. He's capricious. And he's not an idiot!! He can tell Henry is bad news!! and he gets PLENTY of warning about it! But he's curious and he chooses to go back to Henry, over and over and over again.

AND THAT'S THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT!!!!!

Dorian chooses!!!! DORIAN CHOOSES!! Basil and Henry are both different forks on the same kind of hedonistic, idolatrous paths. Basil wants to put him in art; Henry wants to put him into the world. They're BOTH fucking Pygmalion and Dorian is their Galatea--it's just that the medium they both use is different. And Dorian can tell!!! He can see!! He realizes that Basil sees him like a pretty thing to keep around to inspire him! He KNOWS that Henry's ideas poisoned him!! AND YET!!

HE CONTINUES TO GO BACK TO BOTH, depending on what he wants the most at that moment!!

AND IN THE END HE BECOMES A WORSE VERSION OF BOTH OF THEM BECAUSE HE CONTINUES TO CHOOSE BAD DESPITE HAVING SEVERAL OPPORTUNITIES TO STOP.

The manipulation? Using people for his own pleasure and then throwing them away when he's bored of it? The hateful, bigoted, judgemental thoughts? Ruining lives because that's convenient for him? The deaths of MULTIPLE people, probably considerably more than we know about? Dorian does ALL OF IT, again and again and again, because he wants to.

We revisit him throughout SEVERAL points in his life, all of which it's very apparent he wants for nothing and can do whatever he pleases. At ANY OF THOSE MOMENTS, or any of the ones between, he could have chosen to do good. But the same way he chose to hurt Basil because he enjoyed it, he chooses to fuck around and cause chaos because he likes it. The ability to do bad was always, ALWAYS inside Dorian, and both Basil and Henry were fascinated by it because it served different parts of their own vanity.

Basil liked Dorian the way you like a filter on a camera, and he thought Dorian left everything that HE made looking more beautiful. It's made abundantly clear that his biggest concern was the art he was creating, and Dorian was key to it. Henry liked Dorian the way you'd like a phonograph, where you can hear everything you've said reflected back at you, but in a different way with different tones. They are BOTH narcissistic in their approach towards Dorian, WHO IN HIMSELF IS NARCISSISTIC IN HIS RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER PEOPLE. No one is good here!!! No one is a purely good person!!!!!!!!

And everyone else, except fuckin' Sybil Vane, is bare minimum kind of shit. We don't meet a SINGLE other character that's a glowing representation of what mankind can be, who doesn't have some sort of flaw. And like.

THERE IS A LITERAL LIST OF RULES AT THE BEGINNING THAT MAKE IT CLEAR NOTHING IN THIS BOOK IS SUPPOSED TO BE MORALLY GOOD.

It says it!!!!!! Again and again and again!!!!!! It makes it SO FUCKING CLEAR that this isn't concerned with right and wrong and you need to abandon that at the doorstep!! There are no good characters, the same way there aren't any evil characters, because that doesn't apply here.

SO FUCKING. TO COME BACK TO IT. AFTER ALL THAT. AFTER!!!! ALL!!!!! THAT!!!!!!!

TO HAVE PEOPLE SAY HENRY IS EVIL AND THE VILLAIN OF THE BOOK!!!!

DORIAN IS THE VILLAIN OF THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY. DORIAN IS THE BAD GUY!!!

Basil and Henry were paths!!!! They were choices!!! They were options AND DORIAN FUCKING CHOSE!!!!!!! And you're not supposed to feel good about it!! It's not supposed to make you happy!! We're supposed to see that Dorian was doomed from the start and we're watching his downfall!!

And it just!!!!! IT IS MAKING ME INSANE. IT IS DRIVING ME CRAZY THAT I'M NOT SEEING THIS OUTSIDE OF MY OWN HEAD. Gosh even just!!! Even the way the "Henry is the antagonist" removes agency from Dorian, and everyone else, when it involves Henry?? As if they don't all willingly go to him and talk to him and want to be with him??

Not to get fucking spicy about it but it comes WAAAAYYY too close to the idea that thoughts and ideas are guilty/sinful/actions in themselves and they need to be shut up, and there's little to no responsibility on the shoulders of the people hearing them to dissect them and decide whether or not they're a) legitimate and b) something they want for themselves. It's the reason it drives me absolutely I N S A N E when people say the devil made someone do bad or it was just God's influence who made something good happen, as if there weren't real actual living fucking human beings who made choices and put in the work, good AND bad, to make those things happen. It's like throwing up your hands and going "well! everything is predetermined and there's no point in fighting."

Like. The complete villainization of Henry, and the hand-waving on what Dorian and Basil do, is just---TUM,BLR. TUMBLR!!!!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING!!!!! I CAME TO YOU FOR HELP. I CAME TO YOU FOR NUANCE. TUMBLR!!!!!!!!! HENRY IS THE FOREFATHER TO ALL YOUR SEXYMEN!!!!! HE'S GAY!!! HE'S MANIPULATIVE!!!! HE'S HOT!!!! HE'S WEIRD AND OLD AND LURKS IN CORNERS ALL THE TIME!!!!! WHAT !!! THE FUCK!!!!!!!

[harumin24]

Fanfic Writer Review

I'm gonna do this now and I'm gonna do this fast because if I don't it will never get done.

Long-ish post below the cut

“How many works do you have on Ao3?”

A grand total of three lol. My first foray into fic writing was a spur of inspiration that got kicked off by the lovely @permanentlyobsessed312 and ended up being over 100k words.

“Your top 5 stories by kudos/likes?”

Three's a crowd but he's still alone - 677 kudos

Considering how few total fics I have, I am just going to include the single top fic. This is a story with two distinct "seasons" or "books" with the first one fully completed. It follows Midoria Izuku in an alternate timeline in which his father was a villain and raised him in a life of crime, while he still had the unrelenting desire to be a hero. With two soulmates, Bakugou Katsuki and Todoroki Shoto, he learns how to make his way as a hero while also processing the trauma of his childhood and learning how to move his life forward.

“Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?”

Pretty much all of them! I absolutely adore engagement on my fics, even long after they're posted, and I'm not shy about responding. I'm the kind of person to be like, "you're cool!" and then bully my way into their lives lol.

“What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?”

I haven't much ended fics with angst (and I am including my WIP's and brewing ideas in this). While I don't always plan to end with an "everyone is fine and things are good" I do prefer to at least have "they have dealt with the major situation and they have a good framework on how to move forward." That being said, Snow Over England has less of that resolution, and involves a post-Narnia ending of Edmund encountering his first snow after the white witch.

“What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?”

As they currently exist, Three's a Crowd has the best resolution so far, with an eye on their future happiness together. However, my Narnia long fic (name pending, and to be posted at some point) will probably have much more of that relief and catharsis at the end.

“Do you write crossovers?”

I don't particularly have an interest in doing so, and I don't have any such ideas in the works.

“Have you ever received hate on a fic?”

Not at all! Though one person did hate on other styles of fics in my comments though. I was initially a bit confused and just clarified whether I fell under that category or not (I didn't, which was a relief!)

“Do you write smut? If so, what kind?”

I... have tried. Problem is I either have no interest in continuing the work, or I DO and then all of a sudden I am distracted by things and promptly lose interest again... I have only tried on one fic, an unpublished and unfinished Banana Fish one-shot of "what if Ash didn't arrive quickly enough when Eiji was caught with Golzine"

“Have you ever had a fic stolen?”

Nope.

“Have you ever had a fic translated?”

I don't believe so, and if so they haven't mentioned it to me.

“Have you ever co-written a fic before?”

Not a fic but an original story. And it was more of an attempt than anything else. I had... strong ideas, since it was intially my brain-child, and when a friend found I was lacking structure, offered to help and co-op. We clashed quite a bit on themes and importance of certain critical plot elements - not angrily or rudely, mind, just we wanted to take it in very different directions - and it never really got off the ground.

“What’s your all-time favourite ship?”

ffff- that's honestly a hard one. I haven't really engaged in fandom spaces much until I started writing a couple years ago, and shipping has never really been my thing?

That said, favorite all time characters: Bonchien Nicoli La Tasty Peach Uralis and, separately, Edmund Pevensie.

“What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?”

Probably all of them lmao, but I'll give it my best shot.

“What are your writing strengths?”

Taken from @kings-highway: Fuck if I know, man.

“What are your writing weaknesses?”

Non-angst domestic moments. Having a lack of action or motion in a scene, whether the scene in question has vital building blocks to the plot or not, is both 1) boring to me and 2) I end up over-analyzing each word of dialogue to see if it fits the bigger picture and themes that I often stall out.

“What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?”

It makes the fic seem a bit more impressive to me in a vague sense, that the work was put in to translate, but I already skim what I read pretty fast and anything I can't read just kind of disappears from my brain.

“What’s a fandom/ship you haven’t written for yet but want to?”

Hmm, I don't have any real plans to or any specific ideas, I would say Gravity Falls and Teen Titans both exist right on the periphery of my interests. They have a wide enough cast of characters to fit a variety of story types, the characters have plenty of elements to work with while not being constraining in their canon depth, and both have plenty of opportunity for angst. Though, now that I think about it, I did have a BUNCH of comic pages drawn for a MLP fic from high school that I don't entirely hate.

“What’s your favourite fic you’ve written?”

You might think it would be Three's a Crowd, but oddly enough I think Ace and Prime is my favorite. Specifically being able to include the eviction notice very early in the fic as a scene-setter and then bringing it back as a key to resolving the conflict felt super satisfying to tie in. Plus the action was super fun to write, along with the world building, all included in a compact little fic.

Tagging: victims!

Double tag for @vvalllerie, and another for @birdiebortnik

[spiritmander13]

Silly Game Time: Who are some of your favorite alien (non-human *and* extra-terrestrial) characters? And what do you like about them?

They can be from sci-fi or fantasy, from other worlds or dimensions or realms. All that matters is that they're not from Earth and that they're not human in any traditional sense (and, most of all, that you find them interesting).

While I would say things like Silver Spoon, I'm gonna point to my favorite game franchise.

Scratch, Chopper, and Cobra Cadabra from Skylanders. Technically, Cobra could be seen as humanoid because of the arms, but I find the three unique simply because they're three cores from the middle two games that aren't that popular in the community.

"The Luck Of The Claw!"

Scratch is the only one from SWAP Force and as you can see, she's a feathercat. Core Skylander of the Air Element, I like her because of many reasons. One of my favorite things about Skylanders is how unique the designs will get and Scratch sortof goes back to the basic days of Spyro's Adventure, which you're not going to see more in later designs. She also breaks the traditional color coding of the Air element; instead of shades of white and light blue, we're treated to gold, magenta, and green, which is moreso a personal preference than a fun fact.

She's also UNGODLY powerful. There's a bit of a trend where the Cores from SWAP Force are either a complete miss or a direct STAB, and Scratch is a direct stab. Her Ruby Path upgrades her critical hit chance while her Sapphire Path focuses on speed and the final upgrade in that path can even slow enemies. Most importantly, her Soul Gem (found in Fantasm Forest, which is near the tail end of the game) makes her HEAL A BIT WHILE COLLECTING COINS. It's only like 7 HP on max level, but considering they're the thing you collect the most, Scratch is absolutely terrifying.

"Dyno-Mite!"

Chopper is a Core Skylander from the Tech Element from Trap Team and he's a t-rex. A crazy t-rex. A crazy t-rex with a fucking helicopter pack and MISSILES, ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I kin this guy. He's pretty decent for a Core Skylander and I love the personality. Most importantly, his first attack (THE MISSILES) are homing and will spin after firing, which makes it so you can just fly around and spam the first attack button, which makes Chopper a decent pick for certain situations like facing a Tech villain during Nightmare Mode.

Fun Fact: Chopper was originally going to be the Tech Giant, however TfB realized that T-rexes are more horizontal than vertical and it would take up most of the portal, so they created Bouncer to replace him. Another fun fact: he can fly by simply double-tapping the jump button.

"Charmed and Ready!"

Cobra Cadabra is a Core Skylander from the Magic Element from Trap Team. He is a cobra with arms (which you can interpret as humanoid but I digress) and is based around snake charmers. While there's nothing too notable about his personality (other than he is mysterious and actually doesn't have the traditional snake lisp), his attacks and his whole design is wonderful. Props to the concept artist for coming up with a snake who's a snake charmer.

His attacks may not be unique, but they're wonderful to me, and while this community won't give him some love, I will. Most notably, his first attack might just be a simple spammable bullet at first. But there is an upgrade called Keep The Beat! which added an extra challenge for extra damage. As you can tell, because Cobra Cadabra is rooted to music, the challenge was to keep with the beat of the background music. If you perfectly time your first attacks with the beat, you get an extra damage boost. Best of all, with another upgrade in the Concerto Cobra Path, the notes can bounce off walls. Trap Team was pretty much the game to try out different unique mechanics besides the Trap Masters and this was VERY unique and interesting. Also, I managed to max him out in 30 minutes after acquiring him, so there's that.

[khaire-traveler]

hey! just wanna know, how do you feel about hellenism related media? do you like something?

Hey, Nonny, thanks for the ask! I appreciate that you're curious about my opinion.

Personally, I don't engage with modern media about the gods much. I've had people tell me about it, and I've read about it, but there's a lot of stuff out there that I haven't really interacted with. I try not to be too judgemental, although I used to be a lot more critical of how modern media depicts the gods, but it's still not something I often enjoy. As a worshipper, my opinion is always bound to be biased, but I try my best to judge modern media for its story-telling rather than its accuracy (although that doesn't always happen, if I feel the depictions are egregious enough).

Below, I'll state my thoughts and opinions on the media I have interacted with (or at least have heard extensively about which is the case for Percy Jackson, as I haven't read the books).

I did like the Hades game! I felt it was really fun to play through, and as a game, it kept me engaged. I genuinely had fun with the game mechanics and the relationships you can build with other characters. It has its flaws, but so does every game. I've recently heard some grumbling about the way it depicts Greek mythology, but honestly, I think that if people are basing all of their knowledge of Greek mythology on a video game, it's up to natural selection at that point (this is a joke).

Along with Hades, I did find myself enjoying Immortals: Fenyx Rising. I was surprised with how similar the gameplay was to Genshin Impact, actually, but I'm not gonna talk about that lol. Fenyx isn't as widely known, but the way it handles Greek mythology is adequate and intriguing. The characters are pretty fun, and I enjoyed helping them in their main quest. The twist at the end (I will not spoil it) rubbed me kind of the wrong way, but I understood that it's just a game trying to tell a story, you know? It was fun, engaging, and interesting. Oh, and the monsters were pretty cool! I loved how they included monsters that you wouldn't really expect to see. The Hydra was a bit underwhelming to me, though.

Then there's the God of War series. Listen, I LOVED the recent additions to God of War that centered on the Norse pantheon - beautiful graphics, interesting story-telling, and a fun use of the mythology - but the original games that take place in Greece kind of bothered me. Mostly, yes, it was the representation of the gods. The way pretty much all of them were villainized (and the way they did Hermes so, so dirty, imo 💀) was a bit comical and strange to me. It felt like it lacked nuance to their characters (even Aphrodite was kind of there for one main "purpose" if you catch my drift). I also wasn't too big on the character designs of all the gods. Some were interesting, but others didn't land for me (mostly Hermes; he looks like he should be Apollo or Helios, and I just don't understand what they were trying to do with his design). Overall, it's a VERY fun series, but I find myself not being able to enjoy the original games as much because of their depictions of the gods.

Other forms of media (that are more popular), however, aren't really my thing. Percy Jackson isn't something I'm too big on. It plays into a lot of harmful tropes about the gods, and unfortunately, I've had some bad experiences with the more disrespectful side of the fandom. Not every PJO fan is an asshole, though (most aren't), which is extremely important to keep in mind (I see a lot of hate in the HelPol community towards them sometimes, so that's why I say that). I felt the plots were creative, for sure, but I didn't like the way Rick handled some topics or the way he sort of twisted the mythology for his own purposes. Like, some of these major plots throughout the series are absolutely bizarre; they make certain gods out to be massive assholes, tbh. Also, I didn't like the way Rick stated that the Greek gods "left the dangerous Mediterranean"; it just felt like a really weird and uncomfortable way to refer to Greece. I think if Percy Jackson brings new people into HelPol, then that's great, but people definitely shouldn't base their knowledge of Greek mythology on the books which is something I've unfortunately seen happen. If you enjoy the series, that's cool; it's just not my cup of tea, personally.

I think the one piece of modern media about the gods that I genuinely hate - and I really do mean hate - is Lore Olympus. That shit has harmed even the pagan community which is kind of wild. I've literally had people call me an "Apollo sympathizer" for worshipping a god who is NOTHING like the damn comic. It is an extremely disrespectful representation of the gods and mythology, and it's something that gets under my skin quite a lot. And honestly, it doesn't need to happen with the Greek gods. If you took the characters out of the setting they're in and placed them somewhere else, it wouldn't really change much, in my opinion; the Greek mythology part of it is really just used for the dramatics. It doesn't have much to do with Greek mythology besides just wanting to make Persephone and Hades the main focus. I have other complaints about it, but I will save my Lore Olympus critique for another day lol. I could go on forever about what bothers me.

-

I hope this answered your question thoroughly! Feel free to ask more if you're curious about anything else. Have a great day/night. ☺️🧡

[demonsfate]

Victor's design is cool AF but my god is the sword a bit too much for Tekken, and I LOVE sword/katana wielders. Like I can see why people are saying he's a Noctis replacement, and let's not even talk about his teleporting deal. Some people on 4ch are debating whether Reina will be a Heihachi/Kazumi hybrid without electrics. I also feel like people are expecting too much from her character, but who knows. We will see her soon either way

I actually LOVE Victor's design. I dunno why, but I just have a feeling he's gonna be the best designed Tek8 newcomer. (I have no hopes for Reina LOL) But while I'll get into the "anime" stuff soon into Tekken. I wanna note the reason why it's throwing you off is because when you look at characters like Azazel, you're not surprised by its abilities because it matches its stupid purple chicken design. Victor looks like almost a relatively normal guy, so seeing HIM pull off these crazy cybernetic moves is unpredictable and doesn't match the design. Which may have been intentionally, they may have wanted to subvert expectations. But I'm personally not the biggest fan of it.

And I think I'll take this opportunity to really talk about Tekken and its story, how it changed. Because I'd rather just make one post rather than making a short response agreeing with you, and then doing a follow up! So feel free to read beyond this point or not. :) See... most fans do agree that Tekken 6 is when the game took a turn and became Very Anime. That was the start, and that's another reason why many people are critical of Tek6 beyond its depiction of certain characters. Hence why Azazel came to your mind.

But I actually think Tekken 5 is when the game began developing theses symptoms. Jinpachi was leaning toward "too much," characters that didn't have joke endings before now had joke endings (see Lei and Heihachi) Xiao's awful characterization, and despite Jin still being relatively in character, it did set up Jin's ""villain arc"".

And before I get into how Tekken 6 took this to a whole new level. I just wanted to explain that there is absolutely nothing wrong with anime. When I (and many critical fans) state that we don't like it being "anime," we don't mean in general. Yes, we acknowledge Tekken has always been anime. It's always had anime tropes, designs with spikey hair, and nonhuman characters such as bears, space ninjas, and devils. But the problem lies in when the game began implementing predictable, overused tropes as well as bad writing. People try to use Kuma or the devils as proof the game has always had "wacky" characters that aren't grounded in reality. But if you were to take Kuma's moveset and give it to a large human character, it would still be semi-realistic fighting, and nobody would think much beyond the biting LOL. Kuma may be in the form of a bear, but he doesn't whip out a flashy cybernetic sword, or does he throw his head at people and it explodes. And the devils also practice semi-realistic martial arts, too. The only thing is that they sometimes use a laser and sometimes fly up. Sometimes you can fight a Devil Kazuya or Devil Jin without them even using their devil moves. They don't constantly teleport with flashy effects to the point where you can't even process what's going on. And if you watch Jin in Tekken 4, he's just a traditional karate user. That's it. If you watch Jin in Tekken 8, he now has all these flashy moves and it just takes away from him practicing real karate. HELL, Tekken 4 would have Jin calmly practice karate techniques in a dojo with no background music. It showcased that the game really had a focus on real martial arts. It didn't have to contain flashy effects and images, and Jin screaming while going Super Saiyan, and loud music playing while a war is going on and all that shit.

Tekken before was anime. Tekken now is poorly written anime with no sense of direction.

Back on to Tekken 6. Tekken 6 took the "anime" tropes to a whole new level with both design and writing. First off with what it did to the story of Tekken. Tekken's story was still relatively simple prior 6. It mostly had a focus on the Mishimas familial rivalry and their corrupt business. Because of their corrupt business practices as well as their selfish desire for power, they tend to hurt a handful of people. (Such as Michelle whose father was killed because of these criminal practices.) And with the introduction of Jin Kazama's character, we have a good Mishima whose main story becomes wanting to kill his family because of their corruption. There's also the whole devil gene ordeal Kazuya and Jin struggle with, and how it affects their morals and decisions. That's it.

However, Tekken 6 is when the series' story took a nosedive and became convoluted and over the top. The game is no longer just about a dispute between family, it's now about a MOTHERFUCKING WAR that a 21 year old started and somehow managed to devastate most countries and conquer them without even a nation of his own, just a corporate business. All of this done in less than a year btw. So instead of a handful of people being burned because their family was involved with a company that's comparable to a criminal organization, or people who are investigating the corrupt company because of their not so legal practices... we now have characters who are mad at the Mishimas because they're literally bombing cities, taking over nations, and killing people in the masses. And if that wasn't crazy enough, it turns out this war started because Jin started hearing "voices" in his head of an ancient demon who threatens to destroy the world and Jin thinks his only way to save everyone is by... killing millions of innocents...? Oh and there's the whole maybe getting rid of the Devil Gene, and Government Bad.

See? That plot is just so fucking bizarre, and not in a good way. It's to the point where it's actually incomprehensible. Because even to this day, fans cannot understand Jin's motives due to his wild (un)characterization and motives. 14 years later, fans still discuss whether Jin was the evilest Mishima and was only doing this for selfish reasons (muh devil gene bad) or if Jin was genuinely a good guy who was forced to do Bad Things for Good Reasons. Though, Jin's behavior as a character doesn't help him appear like a good guy who was forced with a tragic dilemma. But you see, the game does nothing to help the case that Jin is actually "good." For no reason, he acts uncharacteristically cruel. In fact, Jin was given opportunities to have the "Save The Cat" moment in 6. What's Save The Cat? It's a method utilized when writing a character with mostly unlikeable traits. It got its name from the trope of a not so good person feeding a stray, or saving a cat from getting hit by traffic. This means to give an "unlikeable character" a moment to show they do have a heart of gold deep down inside. This makes them more sympathetic and likeable to the viewer and helps balance their overwhelming negative traits. Jin never has this moment in 6 despite being written as an anti-hero. There were moments when Jin could've; notably Alisa's death and Miguel's grief could've been Jin's "Save The Cat" moments. He could've felt genuinely sorry that Alisa died for him. But what did he do instead? Call her a worthless piece of junk and act GRATEFUL that she died all while mocking her FRIEND'S pain. And then him giving Miguel the cold shoulder, and even showing no remorse for killing his sister. There is nothing in Tekken 6 indicating Jin is a "good guy" or has any redeemable qualities. Despite not acting like it, Jin just tells us he's good.

Anyway, I don't wanna dwell too much on Jin's characterization as I've made countless posts and have already proven how Jin in Tekken 6 might as well be a totally different character from Jin in the previous games. But I just wanted to bring that up real quick as it is an important part on why the story is so messy and I will bring it up later when talking about the game now being "over the top anime." Other than the overall plot which is too wild, the game also suffered other bad anime tropes that fans didn't like. Such as plot beats like Secret Child we've never heard of, as well as Lars' amnesiac plot. Jin's own story might've been heavily influenced by Code Geass itself, as that was a new and popular anime at the time. Except, whilst I never watched it, I'm gonna assume he developed naturally and had real reason and emotion behind his actions that make sense to the viewers as opposed to Jin whose development wasn't natural, his personality completely changed with little explanation, and his motives didn't make sense no matter how people look into it. But the fact they were heavily inspired by Code Geass but with poor execution is more example of this feeling like a bad anime. Alisa's addition was also heavily criticized by fans due to her appearance. Up until now, despite some characters having spikey hair, we never had any character with unnatural bright colored hair - which that's a HUGE anime trope. Every character had natural hair colors and eye colors (with the exception of Kazuya's one red eye. And Hwoarang's orange hair... but he's a punk who dyes it) So to see a girl with bright pink hair was alarming to some fans. And then her whole moveset... we've had robots like Jack before, but Alisa is a new extreme with how she can shoot her fists, pull off her arms, and throw her head like it's a bomb and somehow regenerate another head. People believed her to be too far fetched, and actually clashing with the Tekken aesthetic up until now. Alisa also felt a bit waifu bait at the time with her polite and usually compliant personality. Lars was also often criticized mostly due to his over the top hair. But Alisa was the start of these "flashier" anime characters.

Even though I actually thought Tekken 7 had a better story than Tekken 6 (but that's not saying much) and I felt it wasn't as generic. But... Tekken 6 was such an open sore that it left a scar on the entire series. Even though I felt Tekken 7 had some improvements in design over Tekken 6, it still continues the predictable anime trends such as Lucky Chloe being a Neko cosplayer. And what's worse is that, aside from main story, now almost every character is a joke. The majority of the endings in Tekken 7 were joke endings. This makes the writing even worse than before.

And finally... I wanted to talk about Tekken 8's story. Despite people's complaints about it being "too anime," there are many that SERIOUSLY believe Jin's gonna be a plot twist villain and Kazuya will be the one to turn around just because Jin was "very bad". These people are trying to form these theories without considering the following. 1) the anime tropes they criticize the modern games for having, and 2) the writers mindset and intentions.

First the anime tropes; this is something that people commonly joke about anime. The guy who killed many innocent people suddenly says he's "sorry" and somehow the main characters forgive him and he's now apart of the Friend Group despite his atrocious crimes. IF Jin's actions from 6 do not get retconned, then this is definitely the route they're taking. Just because Jin's "sorry" and is now trying to do "good", he's forgiven. Yes, the game's still pointing out his sins and Jin's like "I must make amends!111!!111" but it doesn't change the fact that Lars is now clearly buddies with Jin. And yes, I do see Lars maybe having it in his heart to forgive Jin, as many people faced with trauma tend to forgive the ones who hurt them as a healing process. But I don't see Lars becoming friends with Jin... or at the very least, being this friendly toward him. Jin had devastated the world, and caused millions pain... but he's also personally hurt Lars time and time again. It's weird for Lars to be "I'M PROUD OF YOU. :)" to Jin but then all scowling towards Kazuya. Which yes, Kazuya isn't doing anything to redeem himself. But... Jin still personally traumatized Lars more than Kazuya has.

Secondly, the writers intentions. Jin isn't good because of his actions and Kazuya isn't bad because of his actions. They're morality depends on the writers' intentions. The writers want Kazuya to be bad, therefore he's bad. The writers want Jin to be the hero, therefore he's good. It doesn't matter what their actions were, you can't create theories for what direction Tekken 8 goes without considering the writers. Jin ISN'T gonna be a plot twist villain because his actions in 6 appeared villainous. This is because the writers don't view them as villainous. YES, Tekken 8 is definitely acknowledging Jin's actions as "bad". But in the end, the writers are trying to depict it as a necessary evil. You can tell because not only have the game been emphasizing Jin as the "hero" now, but the writers have said in many interviews that this story is about unshackling yourself from the chains that hold you and finding freedom; redeeming yourself and learning to accept yourself. That is Jin's story. They've also made this apparent when they [Harada specifically] referred to Jin as an "almost villain" in Tekken 6 from an interview from last year. This shows that the writers themselves do not view Jin as a "bad guy" despite what the fans think, therefore they wouldn't make him a plot twist villain. In the eyes of the writers, Jin is good because his intentions were to ""save the world,"" and Kazuya is bad because his intentions are "selfish" as he's taking over the world because he wants the "power."

Also stop saying Kazuya should be redeemed but not Jin. Sorry but Kazuya is literally just as a bad as Jin. If you want to say "OH JIN DID DO ALL THOSE ACTIONS LETS IGNORE BAD WRITING YADA YADA" Then you can't go around and say "JIN SHOULD BE MAIN VILLAIN AND KAZUYA SHOULD BE REDEEMED AND DEFEAT HIM IN THE END." Kazuya is just as bad as Jin. Some fans don't think so because Kazuya "didn't start" the war. Which is so silly. It'd be like if a serial killer kills 25 people, and then another serial killer gets inspired and kills 25 people as well. Nobody is gonna say the former is "more evil" because he "started it." They're both gonna be deemed terrible people. Kazuya is perpetuating the war and striving for world domination. People try to say "but Kazuya isn't raining missiles on people like Jin did!!1" and it's like how do you know? Because the game hasn't quite shown that yet? Kazuya has been demonstrated in Tekken 7 to kill many innocent people to get what he wants. Even if it's as petty as making Heihachi look bad. If Kazuya is taking over the world, devastating it, and has all this expensive equipment... I can guarantee he's likely using the same methods Jin did in Tekken 6. Either Jin is also worthy of redemption or neither of them are.

Which brings back my point of how jacked the writing of Tekken 8 may be. The concept is something I highly enjoy; learning to accept yourself and not being afraid to take on your demons. But the issue is... this concept can ONLY work for Tekken 4 Jin or even Tekken 2 Kazuya. It CANNOT work for Tekken 8 Jin or Kazuya. It's why Tek8 Jin NEEDS to be retconned in order for the story and its message to work! There are some things you and other people should never forgive yourself for. Mass murder and war crimes are one of those things. If Jin, however, was just brainwashed (or a devil was in control) to do these actions... then it would fit the story better as Jin has to learn to accept himself, and learn to accept that just because his body was the one to make those choices, doesn't mean he himself was and that he's not responsible. It's guilt he has to learn to let go.

But at this point, I really do fear that the writing just isn't gonna be as competent to do that or pull off a convincing redemption for the character. I think it's highly likely they're just gonna have Jin say "Sorryyyy :(......" and the other characters going "cool." I fear it's gonna suffer the bad mistakes of most recent games' writing. Which is a shame, because Tekken has AMAZING concepts, but it keeps getting wasted and wasted.

And to finish this, I'll also return to something you stated about Victor being "over the top." You've seen Victor's trailer and how he just teleports everywhere and slashes his sword then does a rage art.

Here's a Tekken 3 clip if Jin versus Xiao. Xiao nearly defeats Jin, but Jin makes a major comeback... but not without cheap power moves or weapons but with genuine skill. He chooses the best moves and dodges rather than just pressing a trigger panic button. The fight flows really well too, and there's never any interruptions with a cinematic or rage/heart trigger. And the success of both characters don't feel cheap, they feel genuinely earned. This feels like watching an old martial arts movie. Modern Tekken games feel like you're watching a fight scene from an MCU film. It just feels way more gimmicky with all those bright and flashing effects.

[sweettsubaki]

Girl, you guys are too sensitive when it comes to Buck. NO ONE is bashing him, it's all about feeling sympathetic towards Eddie and the position he's in / his point of view. But then again there's always been a MASSIVE favoritism towards Buck over anyone in the fandom, leading you guys to become misogynistic and apologists of tbh shitty behaviors. Like Taylor? Yeah I never liked her at all, but that shit that Buck pulled with her? Fuck no. Season 1 Buck? Fuck no. Buck has really grown as a person, we love him, but the majority of you have a favoritism that's always been based on attraction and it shows on the way you speak and showcase your opinions.

Usually starting a sentence by "you're too sensitive" is very much used to gaslight someone so, heads up, I'm likely not gonna take what you say afterwards very seriously. Especially since you're on anonymous. Also I'm known for a lot of things but sensitivity isn't one of them...Kinda the opposite even. But I am easily frustrated and I did vent, which as far as I'm aware shouldn't matter to you.

"no one is bashing him it's all about feeling sympathetic toward Eddie".

Ok so either you haven't seen the numerous posts I'm talking about and you took it upon yourself to speak for everyone or you don't know what bashing is. Either way not the best look for you but I have seen many (stopped counting at around 50 posts) talking about how Buck is an ass for daring to say that to Eddie. Not "poor Eddie's been rejected" but very much "Eddie deserves better than someone who doesn't appreciate him" posts (I've literally seen at least a dozen variation of this sentence), often followed by people using that as a proof that Buddie is toxic actually. And just generally very little critical thinking involved and changing the whole scene to mean what they want.

There might be favoritism toward Buck. Probably, most likely tbh. I mostly follow buddie blogs with either a buck or Eddie focus and other more general blogs with no focus at all. Buddie's the most engaging part of the fandom and the funniest for me in general. Because I follow Eddie girlies as much as Buck ones I don't see the difference and I generally don't venture too far away 'cause Chim is my favorite and I've seen too much racism when wanting to look for him so I stopped venturing too far off the fun people who make meta that seem a bit too much but are still enjoyable.

Now even if I personally didn't witness it because I've curated my own experience on Tumblr and don't interact about 911 on any other social media, he's the young White Adult in a fox procedural. So I'm not surprised there'd be favoritism towards him in a mostly American/western fandom. I've just been talking about this specific situation because it managed to hit my recluse corner which is a feat in itself.

Now that also doesn't matter in this case. Like there being favoritism in general doesn't change that there has been bashing here. If you don't care about it or feel vindictive about it then good for you but that's clearly not my case. That's why I avoid it in the first place.

Now I'm probably biased because I've curated my experience but as far as I'm aware, most people don't like season 1 Buck ? Never seen someone who loved this side of him. Because he was the youngest and most immature, it's easy to focalize on him if you like long ass development, but that's it. And most ppl who talk about s1 talk about it in a "look how much he grew" way so I have no idea why you're bringing it up?

As for TK, you can despise her without it being related to Buck. I personally found her appealing as a character, but the same way I find villains appealing. I very much loved to hate her. The woman does not care about others and will step on them to get what she wants even if she violates all moral ethics and loved ones to do so. You can dislike what she did to Buck without caring for Buck, like in a collateral damage way. But I get people absolutely hating her (I draw the line at mysogynistic behaviors which I luckily mostly avoided but I don't doubt they were there). Buck was an ass yes but he felt guilty about it and also learned and grew from it ...still is learning from it actually. That's a huge difference in my book and probably others. There are no unproblematic characters, just characters willing to be better and those which aren't (relatively speaking since it depends on what the writers find problematic). I mean Hen cheated on Karen (which I still do not comprehend in the slightest), Bobby is linked to the death of his kids, Eddie abandoned his child for years. Chim is the one who did the least problematic thing in general because he's the one with the most empathy and the closest thing I can think of is punching someone he loves when distressed and panicking about someone he also loves. And I've heard Chim got a lot of racist shit from it and while I have no doubt it's true, my curated experience means I didn't have to deal with it.

As for your last point, I happen to be aroace and I'm the kind who only understand what attraction means as a very abstract concept. (I especially don't think muscles are all that interesting but I'm happy for the people who like thirsting over big muscles).

And so like...yeah I've seen people thirst over the actor (as much as Eddie's), but thinking that people who are basically just talking about media literacy and "how the fuck are there enough posts that they ended up in my circle that's usually undramatic as fuck", are doing so just because they're attracted to the actor seems a bit bad faith.

So maybe the bashing only happened in this corner I thought would prevent me from seeing character bashing and needless drama, but it's still happened and it went from funny memes (which I liked and still have queued) to literal tirades of how Buddie is toxic and Buck is the worst. That wasn't me exaggerating, they literally said stuff like that. Which is a terrible take, like how do you even get to this point. So I vented and you thought it was a good idea to come to my inbox to ...I'm not even sure what this is for...warn me ? Annoy me? Insult me? Something else?, well whichever, I'm just using it to vent some more...because holy shit have I seen dumb takes in the past few days.

[betelgeusing]

I was in the m*chael sh*nnon tag and saw strickland x reader fic so RIP me

[juniperhillpatient]

"Jet" Re-Watch

I'll be honest, this episode is one of those that I've seen A LOT. So, it's not like there were any surprise takeaways. Jet is one of my favorite characters & "Jet" is one of my favorite episodes to re-watch. So, let's talk about Jet - the character - & why I love him. And let's also talk about why I have a love-hate relationship with his titular episode.

This is the very first episode of my re-watch where I'm going to.....ugh. criticize the narrative framing...

Look, I love a sympathetic anti-hero & that's at least part of why I love Jet - anyone who knows me knows I am drawn to morally gray characters, flawed people with good intentions, traumatized villains who see themselves as the hero - & that's a huge part of why I love Jet. But I think it's doing a disservice to critical engagement with the material to NOT acknowledge the way Jet is framed as the "scary evil Earth Kingdom rebel fighting back the "wrong" way." This episode felt very much like propaganda not to trust people who are TOO rebellious or TOO angry at their oppressors.

Remember kids, violent rebellion is never the answer even when you're being violently oppressed. Anyone who says otherwise probably wants to murder babies!

Sokka getting to be the grumpy mom of the group is always fun & I gotta feel bad for the guy. It can't be easy keeping these kids in check when they're always so eager to be reckless & don't even take him seriously or respect him! And poor Sokka was right in the end...And was way less of an asshole about it than I would've been after all the crap he took!

Jet's entrance is just so badass. I absolutely loved the Freedom Fighters coming in & immediately kicking ass & winning over both Katara & Aang. And also I'm sorry but I must say it. The Avatar fandom is so sick & twisted & wrong for everyone fighting over if Katara should be with her little brother-like friend or Zuko when Jet is RIGHT there. From the bottom of my heart, I'll never forgive the Avatar fandom for having such bad taste just LOOK AT THEM

What is this....Sad......................alright, okay, okay, I'm done.

ANYWAY!!! Katara's instant chemistry with Jet is so real & I love how she got insta-heart-eyes. I love you Simptara. Girl, can't you even tell when your episode of the week love interest is introduced anime style as a person you obviously can't trust? So fucking funny to me. Like, Katara, haven't you ever seen a single episode of television? Jet is handsome & smooth & charming & he has wheat in his mouth. Of course he's gonna break your heart baby girl, it's right there in the narrative framing.

Also, Jet is a manipulative little shit & I love him. I think a big reason Jet gets a lot of hate ASIDE from the NaRrAtIvE fRaMiNg issues is that he IS in fact very calculated & manipulative. I think it's worth noting though, that the Freedom Fighters look to him as a "good leader." Jet is clearly the kind of person that is good with people, & good at leading others as well as being mature for his age. So, he's taken on the mantle of leadership with these kids. Yes, he is manipulative & he mugs sad old Fire Nation colonizers, but like, he was given the mantle of leadership at EIGHT YEARS OLD after watching his parents die y'all. Cut him some slack for not having the soundest moral compass, jeez.

Like, what can I really say here? No, you're right guys, an eight-year-old who witnessed his village being destroyed & his parents dying & then was left to protect other orphaned kids should TOTALLY understand that #NotAllFireNationPeople are bad. Obviously, that's a reasonable expectation.

Anyway, Jet's plan to flood the village is very....interesting. I've seen it discussed endlessly whether there are ex-Fire Nation generals in that village, whether the old man Jet mugged was an ex-Fire Nation general, whether there were Earth Kingdom citizens living there or not, & well...it's all just VERY vague. The show doesn't tell us because I guess the point is that "murder is bad." Which...sure, I guess. Still would've been nice to understand more details?

A big anti-Jetara argument that I get pretty much every time I say I ship them is that he broke her heart & made her cry & also wanted to commit mass murder. To that I say.....where's your sense of drama? Jet touching Katara's face as she turns away crying, horrified by what she might've helped him accomplish is just good drama. I don't know what to tell you. Have fun shipping boring things where the characters have no complexity & only ever agree with each other I guess.....

Sokka does deserve some major props in this episode, I'll say that. He put up with pretty much constant shit from Katara & Aang both, he was right in the end about Jet's plans NOT being something Katara & Aang would like, AND he managed to warn the village about the flood. So yeah, props to Sokka.

Anyway, this "re-watch takeaway" post....ended up being.... just...me defending Jet & saying Jetara rights. Whoops. Oh well, I feel like that's a fitting takeaway for this episode :)

[unmakingandincorporeality]

Class politics in the Knives Out franchise

A few weeks ago a friend of mine made a tiktok criticizing an article arguing that Glass Onion is bad anticapitalist media, on the basis that it's not anticapitalist media. Like, yeah, the villains of both films are rich people, but that's more of a plot device than a critique: death among rich folks entails a lot more motive, means, and opportunity for well-obscured murders to have taken place than among poor folks.

(For the record: I love these films and have watched both of them more than once, it's possible and even good to enjoy media with politics that are inconsistent with your own politics sometimes, and the argument I'm making here is definitely not the only legitimate interpretation of the text.)

Spoilers coming obv.

I commented on that video that the Knives Out films can even be read as critical not of wealth, per se, but of class mobility.

The format of both films are a man with an air of longstanding implicit wealth pursuing a career of excellence in his field more-or-less as a leisure activity, paired with a companion who has come into proximity to wealth, but does not desire that wealth, against a collection of horrible wealthy people, all of whom are desperately concerned with maintaining their wealth, and all of whose fortune is traceable to a specific, recent accomplishment of capitalist growth.

The protagonists of Knives Out do their best to perform the affect of old money, but that claim is discredited implicitly by the instability of the whole cast's financial support structure, and Benoit Blanc calls bullshit on it explicitly in the climax:

Ransom: You think I'm not gonna fight to protect my home, our birthright, our ancestral family home? Blanc (laughing): That is hooey. Harlan, he bought this place in the 80s from a Pakistani real estate billionaire.

No such pretense exists among the shitheads in Glass Onion—for all its criticism of the bullshit of tech billionaires, the film absolutely lets Miles Bron have the character trait of being a self-made man who came from nothing that the heroes of tech bro masturbation fantasies all claim, few of them legitimately.¹

The murder victim in both films is the person whose exceptional abilities led to the wealth that all the suspects benefit from, and an interest in which highlights and focuses their character flaws. In this regard, the film deviates from the historical nobility narrative that the lower class is incapable of the kinds of accomplishments that are typical of the nobility—an attitude that has been visibly indefensible for hundreds of years—and instead takes up the more recent narrative that the lower classes just lack the wisdom and moral character to handle wealth. The victims, through their genius, create conditions for explosive wealth, and, through their sentimentality, share that power with the people close to them, who are naturally working-class people whose moral character is destroyed by exposure to fortune. Ultimately they discover that those with whom they have shared their success consider access to that success an inalienable right, and at least one of them in each film feels justified in defending that right by murdering them.

The murderers, thereafter, are each undone by the collaboration of a pair demonstrating rightful and just class dynamics: a noble gentleman, whose contributions consist principally of being present and being exceptional, rarely rising to the level of doing anything apart from telling other people what their roles and responsibilities are; and a member of the working class, so far in both films women of color, who works in a care industry (a nurse, a teacher) and has never aspired to wealth, and who takes action informed by a moral compass premised not on the position that she deserves the wealth at play, but that the suspects don't.

Blanc: I want you to remember something that's very important: you won not by playing the game Harlan's way, but yours. You're a good person. Marta: This family. I should help them, right? Blanc: Well, I have my opinion. But I have a feeling you'll follow your heart.

This all doesn't mean that Rian Johnson is, like, a feudalist, though. His oeuvre doesn't maintain any kind of coherent overarching attitude towards class. Anti class mobility isn't a core theme of The Brothers Bloom, which explicitly valorizes the accomplishment of stealing from rich people for personal gratification, and the opposite position—a rejection of hereditary or institutional criteria for legitimacy in power—is a core thesis of The Last Jedi. I only saw Looper once, a long time ago, but I don't remember any positive portrayal of wealth at all in it. And I'm sure I will watch Brick eventually. Johnson doesn't seem to think of storytelling as a means to an end; he doesn't seem to write with any motive other than doing a good job telling the story he's trying to tell. The politics of his films are whatever they need to be to create the genre that he's working in, and to do something he feels is worth doing with that genre.

Johnson absolutely could've worked in "Miles Bron came from money and lies about it" somehow, and it would've been more true to the storylines of tech billionaires in real life. But it would've added nothing to the story in its capacity as a murder mystery; the only thing to gain from adding that would be to adjust the shades of political implication that you can get from applying the text to reality. The only time I've seen Johnson transparently do things with a film because of their implications outside the text, it was in The Last Jedi, and the implications were on what Star Wars is and is capable of being as a cultural work. It was still about the story—even when the film is a means to an end, to Johnson, it's because the larger story is an end unto itself.

Notes:

The Musk Family emerald mine is an exaggeration but in his childhood Elon Musk belonged to a wealthy family. Bill Gates got the edge he had early in his career by having a huge amount of free access to computer processing time due to his family's academic connections and the private school he attended. Jeff Bezos was born into poverty, but his stepfather, whom his mother married when he was four, was an entrepreneur, and by the time Bezos was starting Amazon his parents could (and did) give him a quarter million dollar startup investment. Steve Jobs did grow up in a working class family; Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak came from somewhat more money, but still in the territory of 'very well-paid working class,' what we sometimes call the middle class in America. To the best of my knowledge, Apple's story is the only one in tech that even borders on resembling the bootstrap fantasy without a thick layer of outright lies spread on top.

[kitkatopinions]

Oh thank God, someone else that didn't like Ragnorak. I *despised* that movie for how it just threw out years of characterization, motivations, and style for the sake of juvenile comedy. Why the hell would you hire a man to direct the third movie in a trilogy and the whatever movie in a connected universe ***that didn't like the first two?***

I weep for how Thor, Loki, and Bruce Banner were just absolutely trashed with that movie.

-whitleyschn33

Friend, saaaame! I don't usually talk about this on main, but I hated that movie so much. I'm gonna be ranting about it under the keep reading, but please nobody from the MCU fandom come to debate with me about these things. I obviously will be very critical of Thor Ragnarok, and keep in mind, I haven't seen it since I watched it in theaters in 2017 and also have not watched Love and Thunger.

The first two Thor movies (and the first Avengers, which is crucial to Thor and Loki) were full of problems and were pretty campy, but there was a lot I liked about them too, specifically the characters of Thor and Loki and their dynamics with each other, the potential in the Warriors Three and Sif, and the fantasy-based sci-fi world they were partially set in and also because I love mythology.

Not only did they completely change the setting of the series from 'fantasy based sci-fi heavily centered around Norse mythology' to 'just sci-fi that sometimes reminds you that this is technically involving Norse gods but that part doesn't really matter,' and not only did they change the vibes from 'comedic and action driven but also dramatic series heavily involving complicated and nuanced relationships' to 'just an action comedy with the same kind of jokes you've heard a million times and have long gotten sick of,' but....You're right, they trashed characters to get there.

Thor was one of my favorite characters, because despite the fact that I thought that the movies fumbled and mishandled things, Thor as a character had understandable growth that improved his character without changing it too drastically. In Thor 1, he learned not to be such a hothead, to be more peaceful than aggressive, and he learned some humility and to not be such an asshole. Also he suffered a supposed loss that was believably horrible for him that probably drove these lessons home all the more. In Avengers 1, Thor is still a bit of a hothead and still definitely likes a fight (I'm specifically thinking about the time when he went to fight Tony for the first time in the forest and looked at Loki like he was making sure Loki was watching and Loki looked back with this look like 'yeah bro I am watching lol this will be fun.') But despite clearly having some of the same qualities he had before, Thor had learned lessons and so he was more thoughtful, he clearly made an effort to get along with people, and where he once would've just yelled at Loki to know his place, he tried to have at least two meaningful conversations with him. And that carried into Thor 2, as well. Thor became a more careful, humble person who gave chances and saw good things in others. Thor Ragnarok threw that aside to make him basically Star Lord 2.0, an obnoxious smug asshole. And I can't get over the fact that he used the taser on Loki. One of my friends got angry at me for 'double standards' when I protested about that, because I liked Loki despite him doing bad things, but Thor is the protagonist hero who I'm supposed to root for, not the gray-morality wildcard sometimes-villain! Thor became basically a more tired version of who he was at the start of Thor 1, and I was so sad.

Sif was just???? Completely missing???? At least they acknowledged Jane's existence, but I kept waiting for Sif and they just pretended like she hadn't ever existed. The addition of Valkyrie was nice, but it's like they decided they could only have one powerful woman in the series. In my opinion, sidelining Sif was unforgivable. As for the Warriors Three, they killed like all of them and we never even see Thor react if I remember correctly! These were his very best friends and they got murdered and the movie didn't even let the audience take a moment to process that! The movie really read like the person who was making the movie actively hated the other Thor movies and was doing whatever they could to make Ragnarok bear next to no resemblance to the other movies in the series.

The rock guy was not funny, point blank period. He was some people's favorite character, but I thought he was just, pointless. Just the joke machine for their tired unfunny jokes. Hulk was kind of just as pointless and unfunny, and though Bruce had some of the only somewhat funny lines, he also was different from how he had been in Avengers, and again... What was the point of his character being there? I didn't like the Gamemaster or whoever Jeff Goldblum was, I thought that plotline could've been interesting, but instead was just... Boring and didn't matter. Odin was badly done too, and the way that Loki having been impersonating him ended up just not mattering either was so vexing. What else? Oh yeah, Hela was just as badly done as the villain in Dark World was, if not more so. I could deal with him being pointless and not getting a lot of depth, because what I really cared about was the sibling dynamic between Thor and Loki, but Hela should have been involved in that sibling dynamic, and they were too busy with their pointless otherworld drama that didn't matter to actually pay attention to her. What we got was a villain that was really built up but that we all knew wasn't gonna actually matter at the end of the movie, just like the villain in Dark World.

But you know what? All of that sucked, but I could get over it... If they'd put effort into writing Thor and Loki's relationship. It was literally my favorite thing about the MCU. I could talk for hours about how I think that having different directors and writers for the movies messed with Loki's character because I don't think there was communication there for a clear story (despite the fact that I headcanoned up my own reasonings,) but Loki - love him or hate him - is a nuanced character with a lot of tragedy surrounding him and his story. Despite the fact that there was a lot of comedy in the other movies, Thor and Loki's relationship was one that was by and large treated with the nuance it deserved. At the end of Thor the Dark World, they had been working together, they'd gotten to a better place, and Thor literally verbalized that a lot of the devaluing of Loki had been bad and he thought Loki actually had been a better option for king than he had been iirc, and Loki used his Odin disguise to give Thor the affection and approval of the father he clearly loved who had been acting horrible through the whole movie. And not only did the next movie trample all over all that work to make the relationship more shallow, but they didn't take anything seriously. I knew I was gonna hate that movie the moment I saw the stupid play scene where Loki was disguised as Odin. Loki was protective of and ashamed of his heritage as a Frost Giant because he'd been raised to believe they were monsters, and that heritage wasn't just common knowledge, and it definitely isn't something Loki would just throw around in a jokey play about how great he is.

It's clear to me that they literally did not care about the nuance, either in Loki's character, or in his relationship with Thor, or in his heritage... It just sucked. The whole movie felt like a hate mail letter to the last two, rather than a love letter. It felt like they were actively trying to make it clear that they hated the other Thor movies and needed to change the characters drastically in order to avoid hating them too. It made me give up on the entirety of the MCU and I haven't seen anything from it since. I didn't want another Guardians of the Galaxy unfunny comedy with more nothing characters who say interchangeable one-liners. I wanted another Thor movie that actually put work into at the very least this one sibling relationship and treated at least these two characters as more important than big colorful action scenes and jokes I could find in an amateur open mic comedy night act put on by a sixteen year old boy. I watched that movie with my little sister (who loves Loki but loves Thor even more, while I loved Thor but loved Loki even more,) and a group of about five or six others. Me and my little sister hated it, but the others adored it and said we were just too critical.

So... Yeah. Sorry for going off on a tangent, but I've been steaming about how much I hate this movie for like five years now. XD