#like can we talk about how fucking bugfuck that is

[utilitycaster]

It really is interesting as a thought experiment to like, play with the idea that traumatized people can do whatever they want without consequences which is the primary defense provided for bells hells because like...the implications if that were true are fascinating in a grimdark dystopia way (play it out! Hell, write the next great fucked up sci fi novel!) but mostly it's just reaffirming the self-absorption allegations.

[aihoshiino]

chapter 165 thoughts

Aqua Hoshigan Status: It's Officially Hoshinover

Chapters Until The Story Ends Without The 143 Kiss Being Addressed Or Acknowledged: 1

damn i guess they really did just kill his ass

I'm gonna be so real with you gamers, I kind of don't have a lot to say about this one either lol. Which I acknowledge sounds completely wild given the Everything that happens in it, but most of my meat and potatoes analysis in these reviews comes from breaking down characterization and we're flying through everything at such breakneck pace that we're barely getting any characterization.

It continues to drive me bugfuck insane that Ai is completely absent from this finale despite the importance of 15 Year Lie. Its imagery is plastered all over but whenever we return to it, we just see Aqua. Not only that, but Gotanda is the one who insists on pushing the movie through for Aqua. 15YL as a story about Ai's true self and her tragedy is now officially taking a backseat to being about Aqua's tragic death and legacy. It was already bad enough that we spent so much time in the Movie Arc not actually focusing on Ai to the extent that, as everyone pointed out, based on what we saw on-page it was basically a Sad Kamiki Movie, but this really is just pissing right in the wound at this point lmao.

The funeral scene also serves as the final nail in the coffin for any Secretly Alive Aqua copes, which is kind of a relief. I still don't like how Aqua's death played out, but I think dragging it out for four chapters then going "sorry you thought i was /srs when i was just /jk" would have been infinitely more insulting. I don't like this ending, but I can respect that Akasaka seems to be sticking to his guns on it, even if we still do have like a whole chapter left for him to whip around and go "I WAS /JK ALL ALONG!!!!" but I don't see it happening.

Anyway, yeah! The funeral! Uh. Is it gonna sound weird if I say I felt kind of like… grossed out reading this the first time? Like, I really don't know how else to explain the visceral "why the fuck is the author making me read this" reaction I had to it. I think it's just because Kana is so fucking distraught here and the drama is just so hammy and so over the top that it feels kind of… ech. I dunno. I just really didn't vibe.

It doesn't help that this is part of a much broader pattern in the back half of OnK of Aka getting us right up close into the gory details of a character's complete mental breakdown and suffering and then spend zero time or focus on their recovery. This happened with Ruby all over the Movie Arc and this many times and with this little runway to the end of the series, it just starts to feel exploitative, like a way to cheaply pull at our heartstrings without doing the work to build everyone back up after tearing them down.

also pre-emptively dreading all the fuel this is going to add to the fires of People Who Are Weird And Misogynistic About Kana but she could die saving innocent children from a burning building and people would find reasons to be shitty about her lmao

we really are not seeing ruby's reaction to finding out her brother was dead huh lol

I will say the one thing I didn't Actively Dislike about this chapter was Ruby, though. I was honestly starting to get pretty skeeved out with how many people were gleefully predicting or actively wishing for her immediate suicide purely for ship motivated reasons and I was also worrying that the story was going to pretend that Ruby doesn't like. Have a life and support system outside of Aqua. Yes, she should absolutely be affected by his death but this period of her shutting down only to drag herself back onto her feet that we seem to be getting feels way more in line with pre-Movie Arc flanderization Ruby and I'll take that W where I can get it.

god. I haven't even talked about Kamiki's supposed serial killer cult. I just don't have the strength. Like… that's self-evidently stupid, right? I don't need to explain to you why that's ridiculous and unbelievable? You don't need me to tell you why it's fucking crazy that we're getting this information about the alleged overarching antagonist of the series not only in the second-to-last chapter of the entire series but after he was already dead, right? We can just move on? Ok good. jesus christ.

FINAL CHAPTER NEXT WEEK…

[olderthannetfic]

To the NLOG anon:

I had written a long piece but lost it, so the gist of it is that bullies are social chameleons. They will always try to find a way to get away with bullying while claiming to be the victims. And many of the "bad" NLOGs were girls looking for ways to recreate the status quo with them at the top instead.

I think that NLOGs were a natural result of the post 9/11 conservative paranoia of "anyone who is not a good American™ is a Satanic Menace to Society" (where good American meant white, christian, affluent, thin, conventionally attractive, straight...and everybody else, from foreigners, fat people, anyone gender non conforming or even alternative people were "planning the downfall of civilization"). In that climate, harassment towards "the weird" was not only tolerated but encouraged as the moral thing to do.

And the thing is, if you are ostracized from society but discouraged to learn about feminism and such, then it's no wonder that your only way of defending yourself is by using the same attacks used against you!

The big change here I think came with the recession where suddenly society became fascinated with the weird, and being a hipster or a nerdy girl was "acceptable" (hence the "golden years" of Tumblr). Many of the bullies who had gained notoriety thanks to their privilege suddenly realised they couldn't get away with it as talk about discrimination and feminism was becoming more commonplace, and so many people adopted NLOG looks and attitudes to keep doing society approved bullying.

Nowadays tho you don't see many NLOGs because, like you said, we either know better now and have deconstructed ourselves or simply because in this era of "bring back bullying" most people don't need to hide behind underprivileged people to harass someone. If they want to hate on other women they can just become a tradwife/high value woman and go back to the conservative politics of the 2000s or they can pick a bit of #girlbossfeminism while going back to their hyper feminine roots to claim *throws dice* that you have to like pink or you have internalised misogyny and that you should just try to fit into the mold, for your own good, you know.

So yeah, those who want to oppress will find a way to do so under any costume, while being the loudest and sidelining the rest of us. There's nothing to do about it, unfortunately :(

--

I mean... sure...

But the actual phrase "not like the other girls" rose to prominence to point out how fucking obnoxious a class of book is for its heroine who is always like "I don't want to stay home and do needlework!" and then the book is set in some era when rich ladies are supposed to be running an entire manor house or something, not just embroider, and the author has blatantly missed all of that. Or it's some Anita Blake bullshit where the heroine hates literally every other woman, and especially all of them with blond hair because the author is insecure and bugfuck nuts.

It's a specific dumb trope in fiction and term in criticism of that dumb trope.

[windienine]

YOU. Kicks my legs like we're at a sleepover. Who was the character u were posting about in the tags.. spill..

kicking my legs back, ready to paint your nails at any time soooooo

okay i already dedicated a whole 2k word post to his partner goddess weird animal who bites him sometimes personal jester friend (?) Ysmé, so this time I'm going to spill about Loïc Ard from Soul of Sovereignty (prelude), an hour-long adult fantasy visual novel preview (< link here) that arrived on itch late last year courtesy of webcomic artist GGDG (if you're familiar with Lady of the Shard or CQ, you know their work)

So. This idiot.

look at this character design. the people hunger for men with strong cheekbones and glasses. look at the robes that attach at the fucking fingertips to draw attention to the position of his hands.

He's very soft-spoken and sweet. He knows a lot about the history of his world, as well as the biology of what lives there. He's staggeringly generous to others, even complete strangers. He's good at cooking. He knows how to sing.

He's the viewpoint character for the lion's share of the story atm, we get to look into his brain a little more often than Ysmé's for reasons that Will Become Rapidly Apparent As You Play.

Loïc is a middle-aged guy (late 30s? early 40s?) who works in an unofficial capacity at an inn in bugfuck nowhere (Tarn, a northerly village miles from anywhere else and regularly frozen solid by blizzards, with a population of Not Enough To Maintain Infrastructure), helping to cook, clean, and care for its mostly non-paying clientele, who his friend Alma, the proprietress, is allowing to stay for free. It's become a glorified sickhouse and shelter. No one is paying to stay in Tarn, but Alma can't turn her back on what she considers her hometown and Loïc can't turn his back on Alma (and he's here for other reasons too) so the inn is just kind of slowly decaying as conditions get less and less profitable. This sucks.

Especially because Tarn was built less than a century ago as an adventurers' hub for treasure hunting squads looking to uncover temples and relics right nearby, and the inn used to be full of good people and good food and fire and light and Alma wants all that back so bad it hurts and she refuses to say it's cooked and move back to the big city (in this case, the Mosaic, an ark-like vertical metropolis that housed humanity for hundreds of years after their world's apocalypse. After the outside was deemed safe again a century back, many people wanted to try and make a living documenting and salvaging stuff... but most of it turned out to be decayed, empty, and/or worthless, after so much time had passed.) The Mosaic is bright and lively, but it's a restrictive place to live for a lot of people-- cultures outside the dominant (very fantasy-Catholic) one are suppressed and the focus on making money to survive is exhausting.

But Loïc makes things a little less miserable. He's got a calm and pleasant bearing, he brightens up the place with flowers and greenery he manages to get growing even in this climate (he's a florist), and he's someone to talk to. He's witty, he's thoughtful, and he's almost a little too willing to dedicate all of his time and energy to helping people, and overall he's this mundane nice fella... with one big caveat you learn real early on.

Loïc is a mage, and a really unique sort.

The floristry bit isn't just his job or a characterization quirk, it's the whole basis of his magic. Species of flowers in this world each hold a unique concept-- fire (pallisia), calm (lavender), light (white dawn's eye), mundanity (dandelion), memory (cloud sage), you name it, there's probably some obscure botanical species that represents something in the ballpark of it. A god of language (Fayim) allegedly imbued a meaning into each, and if you can commune and reflect and experiment around hard enough to unravel the concept of one, you can turn that concept into something real.

Think of it like magical linguistics -- [correct flower] + [expressed meaning] = [physical effect], like [correct phonetics] + [contextual meaning] = [language]. You can even chain a couple of them to make a more complex spell, like turning words into compounds, phrases, and sentences, but you do have to understand what it actually means to do so. You're forming a connection to Fayim's power by talking. This burns up the flower, but Loïc's extreme dedication to botany means that he's got a regular supply of the spells he uses most often.

Loïc can hand you a golden pallisia blossom, start waxing poetic about the nature of warmth, and the firelight kept inside will radiate out and keep you comfortable even in Tarn's frigid weather. It's rare and potent stuff, doubly so because worship of Fayim is dwindling-to-nonexistent in the Mosaic, where the only faith and magic most people are familiar with at all are those revering the Builder, the creator deity who erected the Mosaic and saved humanity from the apocalypse in the first place. Everything else? False gods. Loïc himself doesn't worship Fayim or the Builder; he uses Fayimic magic but is pretty disconnected from his own background + faith in general. He's interested in the theology but doesn't use prayers in his invocation if he can help it.

Magic's not foreign to this world (most people in this world know at least a little artisanry, a more logical and physical approach to magic which lets you stitch together bespoke objects out of thin air, used heavily in both art and industry), but flower reading is a rare and dying language. Loïc's cute little flower shop back in the Mosaic was also a spell broker for people in need of small miracles. Given that the Mosaic worships a creator deity, I guess this implies that magic, generally, is something humans tap into extant divinity to borrow.

So, Loïc is holed up in Tarn studying magic and using mending spells (yellow rose) to cure people of minor injuries, but everything goes to hell when a certain sickly blonde washes up at the inn's doorstep begging for help escorting her to a nearby temple please please you gotta, she'll die from turbo tuberculosis otherwise, god (not the builder, some other guy, don't ask who) said so. Oh my gosh, you will? Thank you so muchhhhhh

[paraphrased very hard]

alma: this is definitely a scam of some kind. please just talk her out of this so she doesn't get eaten by mutant wolves.

loïc: oh for sure but you don't try for scam this obvious unless you're really desperate. idk what she even wants here, let me feel her out. i have nothing worth robbing. maybe this is a trauma thing or a money thing and i can talk to her about it.

alma: loïc, that's literally not your problem. loïc there's this weird pattern where you prioritize the hypothetical wants of strangers over your own proven needs. loïc no.

loïc: loïc yes

So, of course, it ends up coming out that Loïc is in Tarn specifically because he is a single father with a daughter named Lelia who is comatose from an unspecified illness. Her prognosis is extremely grim (low chance of survival that dwindles the longer she stays out, probably terminal.)

Specifically, he's on a hopeless little snipe hunt for a rumored species (the glass bell) that could act as a panacea for any illness, if harnessed correctly in a spell, and it might either be extinct or entirely fictitious.

He knows he can't find it alone. If it even exists, it is a needle in an impossibly massive haystack. He is consumed inside-out with a compulsive need to do something about it, and when that proves impossible, it starts spreading into a compulsive need to do something for anyone. The grief of admitting that Lia is already in a prolonged state of death would eat him alive, so if he can transfer that feeling of purpose onto anything else he can buoy himself. He is spinning his wheels because confronting the fact that he has outlived his own daughter and has to go on without her is impossible.

But like... he's dying slowly, too, in this state. Like Lia. Like Tarn. It's only a matter of time before there's nothing left of himself to give, and at the impetus of the story that's basically what he wants. There's nothing left for him.

... Unless...!!

OTHER THINGS:

would give blessings to his daughter every day before she went to school

apparently has a puppy and a kitty back home

loves lavender and sunflowers most

sometimes casts so hard he passes out

including other people and making his casting into a conversation is a quirk he does and that's just super cute

carries pictures of his daughter around in his spellbook maes hughes style

besides his suspiciously alb-and-chasuble looking mage robes, wears an apron and skirt around the house + gg regularly draws him in cute dresses. this is a known victor's weakness.

the in-game glossary has botany notes from him, usually paired with him waxing poetic about each species' meaning. this nerd shit is a known victor's weakness.

you see his general bearing and a lot of people assume he's kind of this easily-flustered anxious disaster type, but he's actually very serene and difficult to get a rise out of. he'll play along with most jokes you try to throw at him. if he does actually freak out at any point, you know something is up.

we don't know what happened between him and his ex, but there are dialogue clues that point to it being weird and messy. he's played very interestingly as far as divorcee characters go (conflict-avoidant rather than desperate for love, wants to be the better person at every opportunity), what with being a man who has primary custody of his kid (and a good relationship with her!) and taking on a position that the audience would probably identify as more motherly than fatherly, in terms of western gender roles. there's this fun contrast where he's very confident in his looks and presentation and bearing (very charismatic guy!!), but a lot of that is traditionally feminine. he's just very genderous.

(all of this tragically forgoes the meat of his special connection to ysmé, but that is the core premise of the prelude and if i got into that here it would really and truly give away the whole plot. i need you to experience her for yourself. (for ten dollar.) if you do not have ten dollar i will stream the game for you and give GG an additional ten dollar. this is a threat.)

(what i WILL say is that if you read lady of the shard, looked at the "sexualized mind control" tw beforehand and went "well now i want to read it more and not less," there is a delicious taste of that here and it once again intersects heavily with themes of control and coercion over the self, skewed power dynamics, and the emotions that arise from them.)

whatever horseshit this confluence of circumstances makes you assume he will pull, i guarantee you it is not the full picture of what actually happens.

[vaccerelli]

the suggested station for stuff “like” Everlast is bugfuck shitterton nuts. I was sitting on the porch drinking lemonade and smoking at two am thinking about how ridiculous it was I was still wearing my suit, when I was thinking it was too quiet and rainy so I put on What It’s Like, which always struck a chord of strange unidentifiable feeling with me as well as the innate wrathful melancholy of the song itself. it got me thinking about how all the things fall apart because I don’t text back or how I’ve become less and less and less extroverted and how it’s all just entered this unsatisfying loop and great another one. out of the existential frying pan into the fuckbrain fire. the more I talk to people the less I want to. I shut down pretty much all my push notifications so I’m not yelling at my phone to be quiet when someone sends me ten memes in a row. but it’s mostly alt-country or nineties songs from the same Everlast time period so you get like, southern hick shit and then Cake and Moby. it’s very unexpected. those don’t fucking sound like Everlast at all. next is Creedence, which I don’t even fucking know what. then Fleetwood Mac and Tarantula & Tito, which is even more of a don’t even fucking know what. it’s hard to identify that feeling. people just don’t do charged acoustic irish muslim rap anymore, I guess. we’re missing out. I’m missing out. it’s all some big fucking cheat or another. it’s harder to focus. it’s harder to sleep. it’s more boring to watch video games and play movies and eat sandwiches to the point I barely recognize myself. and sure, Eat At Whitey is more coastal hip-hop influenced, so once that enters the algorithm, you’re just fucked. Dogg Pound. Fun Lovin Criminals. Beastie Boys. but also Kottonmouth Kings? how fucking stoned do you think I am? I am searching for Everlast at two am, so I do appreciate you at least feeling around in the dark. that’s the best we can all do something. I keep putting on and losing a lot of weight, which is probably super healthy. I turned forty and didn’t do shit. Sweatshop Union?? okay you’re not going to impress me pulling crate like this. I know exactly how deep you go, Spotify algorithm. I can get three curated playlist deep into a cousin of a cousin of a recommendation to find the Nth continuum of some funk bit in some random song from 1971. I recognize you as a tool, partly because I’m fucking terrified of watching how much the algorithm dictates human behavior. we wrote ourselves a new civilization to staple messily over our old one. that’s cool. that isn’t unnerving as shit. leave me the fuck alone. like that Deki Alem song. man, if I heard Deki Alem on Everlast radio I would have ten different kinds of aneurysms. I barely care about suits anymore. I don’t take ten pictures of myself when I’m bored. I’m barely there. Johnny fucking Frierson? no, Everlast radio. I haven’t been being good to myself. all I had to eat today was popcorn. I watched seven Stargate episodes instead of sleeping and I don’t even like Stargate. sometimes I put on lame war is hell movies and then I do sleep. all that sorrow and blood just seems so tiring. dunno, though. What It’s Like. kinda corny, listening to it as an old man. Death Comes Callin is way more my speed. that or the old angel of death guy karaoke in Only God Forgives. that song is Leum Mai Long by Suraphol Sombatcharoen. also known as the Thai Elvis. I know so much stupid shit about stupid shit and it gets me nowhere. that’s the dice roll, right? either you’re full or you’re forward. it’s pronounced Sohm-batch-are-rohn or something, it’s easy. my favorite song of his is Suai Ching Nong — Truly Beautiful Girl — because it just sounds so full. doesn’t sound fucking shit like Everlast, though. that’s the root of the problem, really. that and the burnout.

[hbosscreations]

So much of people's misunderstanding of John Constantine comes from a lack of reading comprehension, understanding of literary tropes, and a plain lack of interest in the source material. See below if you're interested in the ramble.

Let's briefly touch on the topic of tropes and their use in fiction, shall we? I’m gonna keep this part around 200 words for the sake of my own sanity.

How many movies, tv shows, novels, video games, and comic books have the trope of ‘adult takes care of child’? So fucking many. The trope is literally called ‘Badass and Child Duo’. Taken directly from https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BadassAndChildDuo

‘The Badass and Child Duo occurs when a badass takes it upon themselves, out of goodness, interest, or circumstances beyond their control, to protect a young kid (typically an unrelated orphan).’

(If you have the time, you should read the explanation for the Badass at the top of the page, because if someone wanted a succinct description of John, it’s actually not that far off the mark.)

The Badass and Child Duo an extremely common trope, so common in comic books that most mainstream heroes don’t have to name the kids they rescue. From just a comic writing standpoint, why would you not use this extremely common trope for a character who’s major trauma that everyone who writes for him knows about is not being ‘good enough’ to save a child and the lingering guilt that leaves behind? (This is such a small interpretation, but it's the one most people who write for John seem to at least peripherally get).

As a general rule in fiction, when someone’s inciting incident is ‘failing to do x’ it becomes part of their story that at every opportunity they have at a redo of ‘x’, they’re gonna do it.

Moving on to 'doesn't like children' and 'is super mean'.

John is, by his own admission is a mean son of a bitch, and depending on who's writing him it varies how bugfuck awful a person he is. That being said, as you've provided, there are overwhelming examples of John's kindness and affection towards children even if he's not emotionally interested in taking on a parental role.

There are very few examples of John Constantine around children (and they aren’t just drawn into the background) where he’s not careful. The man often puts himself at great personal risk for children and teens, and takes it personally when they are fucked with.

He met Noah less than 48 hours before. I might argue part of the reason he cares so much in this moment is that Noah saw his friend’s butchered body the night before, but John doesn’t just save Noah. He saves him, sets him up for success as best as he knows how, and tells Noah to go back to school. Then makes Noah his driver, effectively making it so he can keep an eye on the kid and make sure he's safe.

But yeah, John Constantine hates kids. Hates people. He’s sooooo awful.

As for people who think John Constantine is not a kind man, I just do not fucking get that? How many of his stories are him getting involved with a situation because someone needs help and he happens to be nearby? He almost can’t help himself, which in a Doylist interpretation would be ‘well yeah, otherwise there wouldn’t be a story’, but let’s be Watsonian here. John Constantine is a man drawn to supernatural shit, who likes being right, and likes being the best in the room.

In crossover material and fanfiction. Where most of these people are learning about him.

Anyone who’s read any of the comics or even just watched City of Demons should have at least some understanding of just how kind John Constantine can be. He’s a man who has been so far down that he’s been to hell on the regular, and it’s clear that he might not know how to relate to other people, but he never wants someone to feel the way he does.

In The Fear Machine timeline, John devotes months of his life to finding a little girl named Mercury while her mother fucks off to a magical girl's retreat. I could talk about that whole storyline for a while, but instead I want to focus on a small portion of it that takes place in a rented room. He's been living there for six weeks at least, finds someone related to the situation with Mercury, hears a weird noise in the man's room, and finds him trussed up with a plastic bag over his head.

John stays up all night with Simon, he holds his hand until he falls asleep, and then spends the rest of the night watching over him. Is that for practical reasons? Sure, the man who tried to kill Simon might come back, but you don't need to hold someone's hand and comfort them to protect them. John Constantine holds this stranger's hand, because he's alone and afraid and John can help.

Long story long, anyone who looks at me and says John Constantine is a man who doesn’t care about other people is welcome to come fight me outside of Grokk and Roll. I’ll gladly sit on you and force feed you comic book pages.

If you're one of those people who are upset about John carrying about others, especially feeling somewhat responsible for kids, do me a favour and don't talk to me. (/hj) If you think that he would never act in a parental way because he "hates children" and doesn't care about anyone than you fundamentally misunderstand his character.

His origins story is that he accidentally doomed a young girl, Astra, to hell and wants to save her because he feels responsible, for crying out loud.

Do you all just think of us, adults and older teenagers who say they 'hate kids', as some sort of monsters who will kick a child out of our way? It literally just mean we don't like dealing with the annoying nuances of brats, and all kids are bratty sometimes.

[beesmygod]

is 9/11 funny? 🤔

im putting a rare CONTENT WARNING on this post for frank discussion of 9/11. there are no pictures (they are linked and no gore), just words.

i feel compelled to answer this since 9/11 was on my mind lately. very american thing to say lol. anyway: i was thinking about the emotional/social disconnect between generations and how difficult it is to convey how vastly and terrifyingly different things became almost instantaneously. american has been in a freefall since, we've all just become accustomed to the perpetual pit in our stomachs.

9/11 is the point i think most people can point to as the moment when america became completely bugfuck insane

in a complete failure of leadership in a time of legitimate fear and confusion, the american right-wing government used the loss of civilian lives as casus belli to start a war predicated on a complete lie with the sole intention of lining their own pockets. 9/11 has been invoked countless times as america's free pass to run roughshod over the middle east, eliminate personal freedoms, RUIN AIRPORTS FOREVER, and enforce a narrative of victimization in which we were attacked by people we trained and armed ourselves. it's insane how fucking bad the bush years were culturally and its honestly hard to convey to a generation that doesnt know what it was like before all of america started suffering from a gas leak. as such, the attack has come to been associated with opportunists, grifters, warhawks, racists, and the biggest monsters in modern, if not all of, history. no exaggeration.

its human nature to want to sully the sacred. for 20 years it was a surefire way to hit ANY conservatives berserk button instantly. then i guess when trump had to account for one of his classic bangers, conservatives decided they didnt give a shit any more

the older and more cynical/internet poisoned i get, the more i start to sincerely believe that the ongoing attempts to shield people from the gruesome reality of what happens to the human body during a violent death has not done much to improve the human psyche. there are plenty of (good) resources and first-hand accounts about how unhealthy it is to repeatedly expose yourself to human death (like, i dont think its good to sit on ogrish and likeleak all day. it is bad to jack it to human suffering and mutilation lol), but now we completely refuse to engage with it at all. this is the part thats complicated for me lol. i dont think people should be FORCED to look at gore. i dont think it makes you a stronger or "better" person. but exposing myself in small doses to The Horrors has given more more of a uhhhh...understanding. as someone who was a kid and lived literally 3000 miles away, the way the culture shifted around me was significantly different than on the east coast. there really is a lot of information that deserves to be known by more people as common knowledge.

dont worry im not 9/11 truthing lmfao. im talking about things like the oral history of 9/11 book which includes an account from an EMS worker who had to argue with a woman who was just lungs and a head over putting a black triage tag on her. the new york times has an enormous archive of survivor accounts detailing how, in the middle of evacuating the second tower after the first plane hit, they were told to go back to work and stay in their seats, leading to an unforgivable number of needless deaths. there's the families that refuse to accept that their loved ones are "jumpers" in attempts to identify them because jumping to your death is suicide and bars you from heaven. can you fucking imagine? the idea of being forced out of a window because of the unbearable heat and into certain death freefall is horrifying enough to even have to contemplate but to have your family members pass judgement on you for it after would be beyond mortifying.

there's a lot i think about when i think about 9/11, even when i clown on it. the man who tried so hard to climb his way to safety and fell to his death while the camera watched helplessly. the scream of the man on the phone with 911 for almost 20 minutes before the tower fell on him. the sheer, impossible to comprehend scale seen in the photos of people hanging out the windows for air. or what it felt like to see the second plane hit; the ice cold terror of realizing this was not a horrible mistake after all.

ehhh but on the other hand

lol lmfao

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

@deadgodjess yeah I thought I was done being peeved about this but I just spent a full forty minute yoga session unable to think about literally anything else. starting a new post because this one has gotten unwieldy but for anyone just joining us this is the tl;dr:

sorry it’s a day later and I’m still thinking about how dirty this godforsaken show [Gotham] did the riddler. why did you have to give him such a tacky ~ooooo mental illness is SCARY!! uh oh I killed my girlfriend by aCcIdEnT!!~ origin story when it would have been infinitely funnier for Ed to just run some numbers re: how many cases would actually get solved without him and come to the completely justifiable conclusion that he can absolutely get away with quitting his job and turning to a life of riddle-based crime.

I'm going to offer my alternative for what I, personally, think would have been a more fun Riddler buildup across Gotham's 4.5 season run. I am absolutely not seeking feedback, this is a thot exercise meant to be enjoyed by me, myself, and maybe like three people that I trust on this hellsite.

anyway having our boy Ed abruptly jump headfirst into the shallow end of the homicidal maniac pool was executed in a way that was not just wildly ableist but also mmmm dumb and boring as hell and really ripped away a lot of opportunities to use this character in a more interesting way, and by "more interesting" I cannot emphasize enough that I mean "ways that I think are funnier."

if I'm being totally honest I think producers/execs whoever got nervous about the show's continuation and insisted on pulling the trigger on Ed riddling out before season one ended in the hopes that having another Batman villain active pre-Batman would help build a little more railroad for this awful show to keep careening along on. this has to play out via the manifestation of a fucking evil alternate personality because, frankly, up until this point Ed has been characterized as pretty much a total sweetheart with absolutely zero ulterior motives and possibly the only brain cell in the entire Gotham City Police Department. he is literally Just Some Guy with hamfisted autism coding and a fondness for riddles who regularly gets dismissed and bullied by his colleagues, all of whom I wish would die in a fire (except for maybe Harvey Bullock because he's really the only man bringing any kind of eye candy to this show, but we're not here to talk about that).

what I'm getting at here is that the writers had a really great opportunity to spend a few seasons showing us how life in Gotham gradually wore down a man who was one a friendly and law-abiding colleague of Jim Gordon's into a little freak in spandex who cannot stop trying to one-up a man dressed as a bat. he actually could have been a compelling foil to Jimothy, whose whole deal is that he's somehow managed to remain The Only Honest Cop In Gotham despite years of horseshit; building on the relationship between the two of them and exploring how their paths eventually diverge could have been really cool and yes, I will be drawing on that in my posthumous script doctor.

as long as we're talking about the Riddler and basically everyone else in the show sans Selina (and... sort of Poison Ivy, idk, I don't like the in-universe age lift and I don't want to contemplate it too much) I think it's stupid that Gotham is basically setting up a universe where all of Batman's iconic enemies are actually more like a bunch of middle aged assholes that Gordon already has decade-old beef with. it's dumb but it's also what I have to work with because if we tweak things any further to make Bruce and all of his future rogues teenagers together I think we're just remaking Riverdale.

sorry we got a little lost in the weeds there, I wasn't originally planning on making that and I don't want to admit how much time I wasted on it. anyway after a little "oh boohoo I'm just a poor little guy I can't believe I did murders" Ed's pretty much straight to bugfuck crazy murdertown with every other villain on this show. everybody on Gotham is like two seconds away from committing homicide at all times except for MAYBE Bruce; pretty much every recurring antagonist is a kill-happy maniac and most of the one-off villains of the week are as well. even the Penguin gaslight gatekeep girlbosses his way through a truly staggering number of people in the first half dozen episodes alone. what I'm getting at here is that dropkicking the Riddler straight into the same mold isn't just ableist or lazy - it's also the very worst thing that writing can be, which is FUCKING BORING. what if, god forbid, we had one rogue bringing a different kind of sauce to the party? in this essay I will -

season one: my pitch here is actually so simple, because I literally just want to keep Ed's characterization the same for the entire season. no abrupt slip and slide into stabbing and/or choking people to death, just a weird little dude who's around and good at his job and has a little mug with a question mark on it. he shows up once an episode for two minutes to crack the case wide open and tell a riddle and the remind the audience that he's around. "yep, that's the Riddler," they'll say. "no need to give him a violent split personality, I know where this is going and I am indeed capable of waiting for that payoff."

season two: now at this point you might be saying "Makenzie wait - is your pitch going to assume that the original storyline of Gotham is otherwise proceeding as it did otherwise? because that's going to get pretty impossible pretty fast if the Riddler has a drastically different personality/role in the show." yeah hey listen man. listen. I don't give a shit about what actually happens in the show. I give a shit about the Riddler. don't ask about this again. this all takes place in an AU where Gotham is a competently written show; I know that's sort of a stretch but bear with me.

anyway season two is when we can start getting some cracks in Riddleboy's chipper little exterior but for god's sake, let's deploy a little subtlety. probably he needs to start getting bullied more - possibly because he's notably friendly with Jim and easier to bully than Bullock, Jim's only other friend. anyway, this is how Ed learns that sometimes fucking people over is okay, actually. nothing drastic, just manipulating evidence here and there to ruin the day (and then career) of some of the biggest assholes in the department and bolster his faves (Jim). I cannot emphasize enough that the first half of the season has to be about this man realizing that most of his coworkers are VERY DUMB and EXTREMELY EASY TO MISLEAD.

come the second half of season 2 we get to see him getting a little too cocky, which will ultimately lead to his downfall. tl;dr being smarter than everyone is fun but still doesn't solve the problem of nobody else noticing or caring that he's smarter than them, and it's really starting to rankle. this will be the point when Ed upgrades to like. full sending his own boss cut-up magazine ransom notes and shit making demands to try and steer the GCPD more efficiently. there are, obviously, subtle little riddles embedded in these letters, but Gordon is the only one who will notice because Gordon's the protagonist and gets to notice things. this will end in a big confrontation, whatever, he's not going to turn Ed in because he believes Ed was genuinely acting in the interest of flushing out dirty cops, but he's also a little bitch so he IS going to tell Ed that he'll turn him in if Ed doesn't resign. Ed goes quietly and with a frankly unsettling amount of glee that someone was finally smart enough to solve one of his little puzzles. personally I love when the Riddler won't really look at or acknowledge anyone who won't play his silly little games I think that's so fun of him.

season three: the first half of season three is actually by far the most fun for me because it involves Ed a.) doing the Riddler thing where he tries to be a private detective for a while and b.) getting mercilessly bullied by all of Gotham city for a bit. you can fill in the specifics of the goofs yourself but suffice to say he's just a plucky little guy investigating some weird ass shit and still getting dumped on a lot in the process. our boy is going to have to learn to get a little unscrupulous.

it's vital that during this half of the season Jim comes to him at least a couple of times to ask for input that frankly none of the useless sadsacks at the GCPD are qualified to provide now that Ed's gone, because they're all doing the equivalent of that John Mulaney bit where they look at a corpse and go "ew! clean it up!" instead of gathering anything useful in the way of evidence. for some reason that I can't QUITE put my finger on it seems important to establish that Jim Gordon is willing to work alongside people who are operating a bit outside the law as long as he believes their intentions are good. and listen - Ed will genuinely help him! but he is also absolutely going home and idly jotting down notes for how he'd get away with exactly the crimes he helped solve.

the second half of season three involves him getting nabbed by Someone and pretty much extorted into helping them work against the GCPD on account of being a former employee who knows exactly how they investigate. what ensues is a series of crime scenes that have an abundance of fake evidence designed to lead the cops in circles that go nowhere - UNLESS you piece together some extremely abstract hints being hidden there, because Ed is sincerely making an effort to alert his old GCPD chums to what's going on. except, oh no, the stress of being held hostage is getting to him and he is SORT OF starting to enjoy how good he is at this and also beating his head against the wall in frustration over how fucking stupid literally every single one of his former colleagues is. he'll get rescued (by Jim) by the end of the season but god will he be bitter by then.

also I said he was being forced to work for Someone and it truly could be anyone in this horseass show but like. come on. it's Penguin. the rest of canon can go to hell but it's so important to me that Penguin still wants to fuck the Riddler so bad it makes him look stupid. it's just hands down the funniest thing that happens in all of Gotham and I wouldn't change it for the world.

season four: alright so Eddie boy starts this season trying to go to therapy about his whole kidnapping and probably PTSD thing but we the audience will realize very quickly that he's getting twitchy and is just purposefully playing with like. MULTIPLE different therapists and giving them all wildly different information to see if he can get each of them to give him different diagnoses. he has absolutely no idea why he's doing this except that it's fun and he evidently can. this man is living on the knife edge he's so sweaty and gross and he wants to do crime again SO bad and is really running out of reasons why he shouldn't.

if this show were written by people I could trust I'd say we could actually do a really thrilling mental health(TM) storyline here focusing in on Ed getting increasingly manipulative and ruled by compulsive behavior. I'd say the crux of his arc in the first half of the season is Jim convincing Ed to check himself in to some kind of mental health facility for his own wellbeing - probably Arkham, since it seems to somehow be the only mental health facility in Gotham despite the fact that it appears to be patterned on ghoulish 19th century sanitariums more than anything. anyway, this lasts approximately one day before Ed disappears from the facility and leaves an elaborate riddle behind, thus ending his arc for the first half of the season.

second half starts as a straight up revenge plot against Penguin because I love when these awful little homos fight with each other, but Gotham being Gotham I think a bit of an emotional roller coaster can ensue. Penguin can definitely convince Ed to ease off and work with him as more of a partner for a bit, but I still want this Riddler to be a murder lite contrast to most of the other villains in the cast so I think that will be the point of contention that ultimately drives them apart. the Penguin CANNOT stop lethally girlbossing; it's his first love.

anyway after that Ed's just fucking with the GCPD for shits and giggles because fuck 'em, am I right? he's definitely got the whole question mark suit Look going by this point; hanging out with the Penguin for too long changes a man.

season five: god I don't even know; there were only 12 episodes and one of them was for the flash forward. he tells some shitty riddles and probably gives Gordon one final helping hand but in a way that benefits him, firmly securing his status as "sometimes useful, always a bastard." all that really matters this still happens to him. this is the last we see of him, dangling next to Robin Lord Taylor in just the least convincing fake gut I've ever seen in god's green earth.

anyway sorry this got so long I'm genuinely appalled and disgusted with myself. I have problems!

[yellowocaballero]

Your reverse robin au is such an odd take on Tim? I don't hate it though? I am... confused

YES I GET TO TALK ABOUT TIM. Warning that this is probably going to be long, because Reverse Robin!Tim is probably one of the most complicated characters I've ever written, psychologically. Because Tim is my favorite character in comics, just behind Bart Allen, and I've been in love with him since I was 9. Also I'm going to talk about how we write comic book fanfic I am SO sorry you've unleashed a kraken. I'll put a cut later because Tumblr's bugging and not letting me. Content warning for discussions of suicide, self-harm, PTSD, drug and alcohol mentions, addiction, and homicidal urges.

 How do we write comic book fanfic? It's tremendously difficult. Especially for the Batfam: it's such a soap opera, if you take every single little thing as canon everybody ends up a sociopath. In comics, Bruce has PUNCHED Dick in canon. So we make up our fanon. But if we keep too closely to fanon, then you end up with fairly unrecognizable characters, which is no fun to read. And...a lot of Batfamily fanfic is just Bruce as a great dad with a hoard of adorable children. It's boring to me.  So what do we do? Well, I like to keep a character recognizable while still kind of doing what I want and what I find most nuanced and realistic. You can't completely divorce from canon, but you really should just keep to the essentials of the character. This is subjective - I find it essential to Bruce that he's not really a great parent, but he's constantly trying and working on it. Not everyone feels that way - valid. 

 So what I consider essential to Tim is this: he's a socially awkward nerd. He always feels extraneous and neglected, because he's insecure, because he was a victim of childhood neglect. For most of his life, he really doesn't consider himself Bruce's kid. He's crazy intelligent and good with computers. He's a better detective than Bruce. He has a ton of friends who love him very much, but he shows a different face to them than to his family. He has lost basically everybody he has ever cared about at one point or another and just kinda gotten on with his life, which if you want to be realistic about it was probably hugely traumatizing and a huge sign that Tim kind of boxes himself away. That's Tim to me. Everything else is flexible. And although Tim in the Reverse Robin AU is a COMPLETE FUCKING MANIAC, he is still all of those things.

 I've done it differently in other roleswap aus, but the idea behind the Reverse Robin is that everybody is half themselves, half who they were switched with. Damian is reserved and cold, but he is just as much 'oldest daughter syndrome' as Dick. Jason is intellectual and rough (which is canon!), but he is just as much of a mediator who feels like he has to single-handedly keep the family together as Tim (which is canon especially in very early Tim - check Knightfall, the stupid Gotham Earthquake thing, and his introduction). Dick is loving and hyper, but he's just as reserved and resentful and alien to America as Damian. So, Tim is all of the things I listed, so I can establish that he's basically Tim. But he is as batshit crazy as Red Hood!Jason. He's just as cruel, resentful, self-harming, desperate, alienated, attention-seeking, groomed by Talia and Ra's, and just bugfuck insane because of the Pit. He's also been low-key mentally ill his entire life due to his complete and total isolation and childhood neglect. His life ended through torture and suicide. In 'the prophetic spring', he is at Jason's lowest point in his life - and his own.

 But, and this is important, Tim as Red Hood does not work. Jason became a drug lord because he came from that background. Tim's spoiled and rich. Jason had a motivation, a reason to live, a Bruce to hate and a Dick that always reached out. Tim doesn't have this. Tim is listless and purposeless - and I say several times that Tim is cosplaying this life. He's cosplaying wanting to kill his friends, being an addict, being a supervillain. Without Bruce, without that target of hate, Tim is lost. Without his dad, who loved him, Tim is lost.

 It's important to understand that everything he does in 'the prophetic spring' in self-harm. He thinks of himself as a monster (because Tim was raised by Bruce and he's extremely rigidly moral, and he can't reconcile his morality with what he did while he was pit-mad), and as a result he wants everybody else in his life to think of himself as a monster. He wants to be hated as much as he hates himself, because at least that's real and validates his feelings. He thinks of himself as the lowest of the low, so he performs his image of a spoiled party boy - the kind of person he's never been, and who he always hated, because he thinks of himself as the person who ruined Tim Drake, not Tim Drake. The drugs and alcohol are self harm (and I'd say, in my essential interp, that Tim has an addictive personality). Having sex is self-harm for him specifically because he's sex-averse. Alienating everybody who ever loved him is self-harm. Practically begging Damian to put him in Arkham is self-harm. This is a 20 year old unstable kid who wants to self-harm until he dies or his family kills him, because he is suicidal. He's still clinging on because he doesn't want to do it himself, but if someone kills him no big deal, and if he overdoses he probably deserved it.

 It IS confusing! As readers we are used to traumatized characters who seek catharsis, affection, and safety. We want the hurt and the comfort. But I really wanted to highlight how fucking ugly PTSD is. It can genuinely make you into a cruel and hurtful person. Tim is suicidal and he responds by becoming an addict, rejecting his family and friends so nobody can try to help him, and lashing out nonstop because he wants to punish the people who love him for loving a monster. And because he wants to punish the people he blames for his death - Bruce and Damian. The Joker. But Bruce is dead and the Joker’s dead Damian isn't giving him the attention he wants...so what does he do? He's lost. And so 'the prophetic spring' is the story of someone who is so fucking lost that he tries to destroy his own life because he can't bring himself to end it again. 

 Hope that cleared stuff up. I really love Tim. You probably didn't need that amount of detail but I am psychically compelled to share these things...partly because most people take Tim's incredible trauma and just make him a cute woobie..no guys make him mean. People are mean sometimes. Fiction exaggerates and magnifies - so many hurt people WANT to do the stuff Tim does, but their lives aren't a comic book soap opera so they don't. I wanted to highlight that real pain. Thanks for asking!!!

[trollprincess]

Finished the whole thing last night and he was literally the only cop on the force who dealt with the case and was willing to talk. And in the last episode he’s like, “We still don’t know who killed Carol Stuart.” Like, we do. It’s not official, but all of the evidence is there. It was her pig on a husband.

And then of course he whines about how everyone picked on the Boston PD and they did their best, and what I love about the documentary is how when he says something that’s bullshit, it’s almost always immediately countered by someone calling him out. Like, after he says this, Matthew Stuart’s lawyer rightly says something like, “In every single case where a wife is killed, the husband’s the main suspect, yet in this case for some reason - AHEM - he wasn’t. Even though he had a pile of life insurance on her, even though a friend came to the police not long after the murder to say Charles Stuart asked him if he knew someone who could kill his wife … STILL the police went bugfuck racist as hell.”

And then the cop is lamenting the good old days where cops could do whatever the fuck they wanted and one of the Black interviewees who’d been told about this quote is basically like, “You can tell him I said he can fuck off with that bullshit.”

I don’t know, I just inordinately hated that guy even for a cop. The cops invade the main suspect’s apartment in the middle of the night and trash it, and his elderly mom tells the media they stormed in and trashed the place at three in the morning, and this douchebag’s response is, “First of all, it was midnight, not three. And second, that apartment didn’t look much better before we got there.”

Oh, fuck ALL the way off. Ugh.

So there’s this limited series on HBO about Charles Stuart shooting his pregnant wife Carol in Boston in 1989 and blaming it on a random Black man, and how the Boston PD went ballistic targeting the Black community, and there is only one cop being interviewed in this thing and I really want to know if he understands just how much of an asshole he’s being. Just absolutely unapologetic whatsoever.

[vaguely-concerned]

I rewatched the mandalorian episode 8 and boy have I got feels for you

- lol gideon’s callouts to all of them though... you have ‘hey cara remember how we blew up your entire planet and killed your fellow soldiers’ and ‘hey din djarin yeah I know who you are lol the mysterious stranger thing doesn’t work on me remember how we apparently murdered a bunch of mandalorian children in one night’ (that’s how I’m taking ‘mandalorian recruits’ anyway) and then finally there’s just ‘greef karga. you’re really old enough to know better.’ 

- oh bb!din doesn’t cry at any point during the whole flashback :((( bb boy. he’s of course terrified but there are no tears. I’m guessing he’s in shock/dissociated the entire time. (probably also due to having a child actor but I think it makes a lot of sense in-universe too! to put on my trauma hat for a moment he’s always read to me as a combined freeze/flight type; he either dissociates or loses himself in work. I suppose he got started early) 

- the look on Papa Djarin’s (I mean I assume) face as tiny din reaches out for him and he knows he has to turn away and leave to save him :) exquisite burning agony

I still wonder so much what his parents did for a living. those red robes look almost like uniforms/religious garb to me or it might of course just be the fashion in this place, people in the background seem to be wearing similar things. 

- I LOVE the mando who saves him as a kid because that’s apparently the same actor who’s in the mando suit when it’s not pedro pascal or another stuntman (brendan wayne, I think it is?) so it gives this wonderful feeling that you get now where a lot of din’s body language and general bearing comes from but there’s also just enough difference that it’s clearly another person. with din there’s always this edge of reserve and a slight stiffness no matter how relaxed he is, and this guy has the same basic steadiness as him but seems a bit more open just from these few short shots. (there might be a little bit of character design in this as well -- din’s shoulder pauldrons are naturally uh ‘higher’ than this guy’s, who has smoother/flatter and more rounded shapes, giving the feeling of shoulders just slightly raised and relaxed down respectively)

it’s nice to see the mandos as a protective force even if they have the death watch symbol there to make you go ‘?!?!?!’, there wasn’t a lot of that in clone wars but it’s an ill wind and so on I guess 

- this confused jawa looking at the dead stormtroopers is everything. don’t worry you’re doing amazing sweetie

- the context for why din picks up the e-web (channeling the spirit of baze malbus, a man who also didn’t let the fact that his weapon was really meant to be mounted on a tank stop him :’) ) makes it even better: he sees that IG-11 has the baby and that he’s getting overwhelmed and he literally grabs the biggest gun he can find and goes to town to let him get away.  

- “I haven’t heard that name spoken since I was a child” ooof but also what are the logistics of that? I’m wondering if it might be the ‘Djarin’ part, if that’s his family name? maybe there hasn’t been a use for that among the mandos? surely someone has needed to call him by name somehow at some point in the last 30+ years lol

- one of the reasons gideon works so well as a villain is that he can get past the beskar. he knows exactly how to kill mandalorians because he’s done it before. he’s not only a huge threat emotionally -- he wants the baby and he’s done some fucked up shit to din’s culture -- he’s also one of the few people who can nullify the physical protection of our main boi in the helmet. and that scares me. because he’s my dad and I love him.

- I’m fairly sure din is properly unconscious for almost half a minute there. (which is very very bad. always go see a doctor if you lose consciousness after hitting your head if an IG unit with appropriate training and equipment is not on hand)   

- baby yoda passing out after doing one (admittedly spectacular) thing is a wholeass mood, #same buddy ilu 

- din is the first person to explicitly call the baby a foundling ;____;

- poor cara she’s already lost so much and her new bro is trying to convince her to let him throw himself on any sword made available to him. (I do love that neither she nor IG-11 buy mando’s bullshit for a moment here tho lol they’re openly saying they’ll take him with them anyway while he’s listening) 

- oh. oh din starting to jumble his words even as the gun remains rock steady in his hand is hitting me really hard this time. ow.

- I think the baby can sense din and IG coming (he gives a little sound right before they show up) 

- when cara checks in with him in the tunnel she touches her fingers to his chest so very lightly and he almost falls over backwards sdfaksdljhf

- well he definitely is trembling while picking up that helmet from the pile. so have fun knowing that with me 

it’s so messed up too because there’s not that many of them left; he’s all but guaranteed to have known every single one of them. 

- this image of him on his knees in front of this pile of the empty armor of the dead feels. I don’t know how to describe it but like a repeat. like he has been here before, this isn’t the first time and it’s hitting him all over again. (considering how things have been going for the mandos recently that might very well be true too. metaphorically this is essentially what’s going on in the background of the entire show, anyway. Friends I think mando Saw Some Shit during the night of a thousand tears or a similar event) 

maybe what gives me this feeling is how clearly he is in another time in some way during this part, before the armorer diagnoses him with Dad and brings him properly back. he’s trying to send them away with the baby, who’s like. basically the symbol of his will to live at this point. “I can’t leave it this way”, he can’t leave the dead behind and be alive, some part of him wants to stay with them. 

you can see this from how he talks about the baby too: in the scene where he’s hurt and trying to get them to leave he consistently calls him the child or the baby (not to mention the first foundling we get!) and focuses very specifically on keeping him safe. in this triggered state the baby briefly becomes it again and he doesn’t even mention him, he just tells them to take his ship and leave. in that moment all he wants to do is fight and probably die on behalf of those who are already gone. (I think bessel van der kolk has called PTSD ‘a profound loyalty to that which is lost’ or something like that. that rings very true to me here)  

the talk with the armorer is basically a very short debate between ol’ coping mechanism!din being like ‘hey I just remembered before all this I was doing my very best to work myself to an early and likely shallow grave, I should get back to that’ and Papa Wolf!din being like ‘except this is my son so we’re not doing that we’re gonna have to improvise something new on the fly here’. bless. 

(all of this is so subjective and probably me reading things into it that don’t really exist so don’t quote me on any of this but his anger at greef karga sounds to me like that of a younger, emotionally rawer man too, it’s so openly hurt and... active? I guess? these days when he gets angry he seems to tend more towards getting deathly quiet. then again this is one of the most genuinely upsetting things in the whole show so it could just be that)  

- hahahahahaha greef rests his hand on his gun before he follows them into the armorer’s workshop; it would seem he did not think it guaranteed either she or maybe especially mando wouldn’t try to shoot him  

- the way the armorer’s voice gains a brightness/warmth when she sees the child! the mandalorian ‘protect babies’ instinct in action haha, she’s like ‘oh this is why you did this bugfuck insane thing. perfectly reasonable, keep up the good work’.  the foundlings are the future is not just lip service it really is a central tenet of their culture even when it’s inconvenient 

there’s this sense that... in the face of his hurt she’s basically telling him to go be alive, to raise this child, to choose surviving and healing. I think she understands him very very well, I wonder how long they’ve known each other. (she had the mould for his signet ready <3)

- he sounds so crestfallen and lost when he asks if the baby is an enemy. and then she’s just fondly like ‘no it’s your son you absolute dummy’ and he’s like ‘...yeah I know’ 

- I. love that in these scenes he’s hurt (and not just physically) and other people are there to carry the baby until he can pick him up at the end fully as a father would.  

- I have talked about it before but I must restate how hilarious and endearing I find it that mando conscientiously leans the thing he tries to pry the boat loose with against the wall again while cara shoots the place up. one is never too busy to mind one’s manners. (this scene really showcases each of the characters too. greef: just keep fuckn pushing! mando: briefly kicks the thing with a growl then tries attacking the problem from a new angle. cara: GUN.) 

- oh the absolute sweetness of how IG says “And you will live”. there’s so much emotion in his droid voice there and all of it is peaceful and affectionate. I agree with din IG don’t goooooooo don’t leave us we need an adult

I keep whispering ‘pls someone think to shield the baby’s eyes’ through my tears in this scene, he didn’t need to see that happen D:

- I really need to repeat that despite what IG-11 says, he goes ahead with his plan anyway even though mando never satisfies his ‘programming’s’ demand. droid’s got free will and a huge big heart Y___________Y anyway... droid rights in the star wars universe when (...it would be very funny if din became embroiled in that fight somehow after this, oh how the turntables) 

- another continuity error: mando puts the jetpack on, then we get a shot of cara shooting and he’s standing there with it in his hands again haha. unless he realized he put it on upside down the first time around or something that seems unlikely. (he’s also lying in slightly different positions between cuts in the scene where IG-11 heals him, but that’s so small and subtle I don’t even really count it) 

- the jetpack scene is a beautiful encapsulation of din’s fighting style. he flails and gets jerked around a lot. he nearly blows himself up. I don’t think he’s fully in control of anything that whole time. and yet he gets the job done yet again. a disaster, but a glorious disaster still standing at the end of it all. one simply must stan. 

- a) I think din remembered how to take off better than he remembered how to land haha and b) BABY’S HAPPY LITTLE FACE WATCHING HIS DAD COME BACK DOWN c) THE BABY & MANDO MUSIC PLAYING WHEN DIN NOTICES THE BABY CLUTCHING HIS LEG *elmo surrounded by flames gif* (it’s a calmer/more grounded version of the same song that plays when they have that moment of connection right before the other mandos come to the rescue in ep 3 and also a few other times)

- baby’s joyful little trilling sound when his dad turns his head to check on him 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 and he strokes the cape with such contentment because it’s a safe familiar texture because this is his dAD (officially and legally too now, mandalorian-wise :’) im so happy)

- the unsympathetic comedy stormtroopers at the beginning could conceivably have survived (if not uh happily lol). if they become a recurring duo who show up and get more and more screwed every time I wouldn’t be mad haha

- I support these jawas in everything they do, I feel a great kinship with these lil goblins 

- anyway I love this show so much and I hope season 2 is good too and knows it holds my fragile heart in its hands 

[rallamajoop]

Some musings on symbiote morphology (AKA when size does matter)

So, back when Venom was still in cinemas, I saw it with a friend who (like me) enjoyed it mightily -- though said friend did roll her eyes pretty hard at the She-Venom scene, because of course the female!Venom has to be skinny and sexy. Of course she does.

I mean, the sexual dimorphism on display here is, uh... pretty extreme.

Usually, this would’ve gotten to me too. Few issues in genre film stick in my craw like the double standards applied to male and female bodies (ask me my thoughts on the likes of Wonder Woman or Gamora at your peril). So it was a little surprising to find that this was one I was mostly willing to shrug off.

Why? Well, that requires a bit of backing up and some more context. But mostly, it’s the perfect jumping-off point for a whole lot of rambling about visual shorthands and how symbiote morphology has been handled in the comics over the years, which apparently I had a whole essay’s worth of thoughts on. So here we go.

Now, Comic!Venom =/= Movie!Venom. They aren’t the same character, don’t have the same history, and their biology doesn’t follow the same rules.  But one is still the basis for the other, so we’re going to start waayyy back at the beginning.

Since the symbiote's introduction back in '84, precious little about the species has remained consistent through the many writers and retcons, but one detail that Marvel was -- mostly -- consistent on back in the early days is that the shape a symbiote takes depends a lot on the body of its host. So when Spider-man was wearing the symbiote the result was (by design) literally just Spider-man-but-in-black:

But Venom's next host did not have the muscularly-lean body of Peter Parker, he had the jacked-up muscle-mountain that was Eddie Brock’s -- and the result is the Venom we all know and love.

Whereas when completely-normal-human-woman Anne Weying first bonds with the Venom symbiote in Sinner Takes All, we get a much slimmer She-Venom.

You can see the same trends at work with the Life Foundation Five and various other examples. So, in the comics at least, there’s some internal consistency explaining why He-Venom and She-Venom should look so very different. (Why Eddie and Anne should be such wildly different sized humans is a whoooole other topic, but best left in the Don’t Get Me Started pile for now.)

Of course, when the guy you've cast as Eddie has the physique of Tom Hardy rather than, say, He-Man, the logic of why Venom looks so huge falls apart. 

  ⬥ Venom and She-Venom, actual size comparison.

While comic book writers of the 80's may have been able to convince a generation of fans not to question why a professional journalist would be jacked enough to dwarf Captain America, film adds a layer of realism and audience expectations that would make that a much harder sell (not to mention limiting your casting options to a much smaller pool). Casting Tom Hardy was inarguably the right call. 

If Eddie no longer looked like Venom, the other solution would have been to make Venom look more like Tom Hardy--but good luck getting that past the existing fanbase. When it comes to pleasing the longtime fans, it's safe to say that Venom, not Eddie, is the character who has to look the part. Plus, Venom is entirely CG, so casting and realism no longer have to matter. Fanboys can have their giant Venom and tiny She-Venom, and the fangirls can have Tom Hardy getting all prettily roughed up. There are worse solutions.

Don't get me wrong: they could and absolutely should have evened up the difference on screen by giving She-Venom some extra body mass (she is on screen for like ten seconds, the fanboys can effing deal). But when the key decision that fucked up those ratios is making Eddie so much slimmer and sexier than he was originally supposed to be, I am unusually willing to give them a tentative pass. I mean, I love comics!Eddie too, but I can’t see him working on screen.

While I’m talking symbiote-bodies, it’s worth going into some of the other reasons to make Eddie+symbiote so huge, the obvious ones being to a) make him more threatening, and b) emphasise that Eddie's bonded with the symbiote in a way Peter never did. As a shape-shifter, Venom can make his host look bigger but not smaller (which is presumably why Rad Eddie may look younger than regular!Eddie, but is still suspiciously large for a skateboarder hanging with teens).

But size isn't the only way to make a character like Venom threatening. Compare Carnage, who is much more dangerous than Venom -- but (along with his host) fairly consistently drawn as smaller and leaner than the original.

He's still plenty threatening, though -- not because he's huge, but because he's completely bugfuck nuts and into murder for recreation. His design gets this across with a texture less like skin than a mass of veins and tentacles. Size is a good visual shorthand for danger, but it's not the only shorthand that works for symbiotes of the 90′s heyday.

You can see the same logic at work in Toxin too (a lesser-known and sadly mistreated Carnage-spawn from the early 00's). Precious little about Toxin's look remained consistent from one creative team to the next, but the impact of the host body is still there. His first host, Pat Mulligan, was a pretty average-sized dude, which is reflected in his bonded form (left), but when Eddie gets the Toxin symbiote later on, we get a much bigger Toxin (right). And Eddie's Toxin has more tentacles and rougher skin, so we know he's not going to be friendly (Eddie was really not in a good place at this point in his history).

Perhaps the most interesting example is Agent Venom, who turns up when the military bonds the Venom symbiote to Flash Thompson: disabled vet and card-carrying Spidey fan. His Venom-look is a brilliant bit of storytelling-through-design: the face and overall build hearkens back to Spider-man's time in the symbiote, the equipment signposts his military connections (past and present), and black will always be the signifier of a guy working black ops.

Perhaps most important, there's no mouth (compare both Spidey and Toxin #1), which is our sign that the symbiote's under control -- drugged into submission by the military, in fact.

But key to Flash's time in the role is that the Venom symbiote doesn't always stay drugged and docile, and whenever it starts to break free, Agent Venom morphs into Venom's traditional look -- gaping mouth, no belts or shoulder pads, and lots of bulky muscles a la the original flavour Eddie Brock (you can see him mid-transformation on the left below).

Does that make sense, when Flash is the host? Probably not, but comic book logic, as usual, is suspended for the sake of visual shorthand: fans know what Venom is "supposed" to look like, so that's what he looks like when the comic wants to telegraph that Flash is losing control. And that, I suspect, is why Lee Price's Venom (above right) looks more like Eddie's, even though Lee Price looks more like Flash. Price may be the one in charge, but he’s also a madman, so his Venom has to look out of control. The comics have officially hit Tom Hardy territory: Venom is huge now because people have come to expect Venom to look like the original Eddie-Brock!Venom, regardless of who’s inside.

There are bigger exceptions to the rule, however -- two of the more interesting turned up almost simultaneously in 2015, when both Venom!Flash and Toxin!Eddie got significant redesigns in the pages of Venom: Space Knight and Carnage (2015). Now Flash's Venom is the bulky muscular one, while Eddie's Toxin looks slimmer than Eddie has ever been before or since. What's going on here? Did the artists just screw up?

Well, not entirely -- the characters haven't just flipped looks, they've flipped roles. Now Toxin's the one being drugged into submission by a US agency (and we can only assume those drugs somehow prompt a symbiote to produce pouches, because we're two-for-two on that front). Meanwhile, Venom's been "purged of corruption" and has finally bonded with Flash as a full partner, which may be why they opted for something closer to his original look. Note that Venom has no mouth, and Toxin's is positively restrained by symbiote standards, which tells you a lot about the temperament we can expect from both of them.

That said, I don't think either design really works. Venom's new look is a real step back in creativity from his Agent Venom days, and the helmet-face would be better suited to a mech design than a symbiote who's being treated as a real character for the first time. Meanwhile, Toxin’s look doesn't really work for Eddie, for all the same reasons it did work for Flash: Eddie isn't a trusted agent in this scenario, he's more like an intelligent animal on a short leash. It isn't just the builds that are wrong -- none of the story comes across well in these designs.

All in all, the longer Venom’s been around, the less the standard host=symbiote rules seem to apply. Venom is huge because his look is sufficiently iconic that that’s what the fans expect, regardless of who’s on the inside, or whether we’ve just rewritten his entire backstory and made the jump to film.

Speaking of which, it’s worth pointing out that there is actually precedent in the comics for female symbiotes who aren't drawn like a bikini model in a layer of black body paint. One is Patricia Robertson, who bonds with the "Venom" symbiote (read: not actually the Venom symbiote) in the 2003 Venom series.

Though Trish is a woman of fairly average build, her "Venom" is virtually indistinguishable from Eddie's (too much so, if anything -- it's very hard to tell which is which when they clash). Unfortunately, the 2003 series is otherwise an ugly, incomprehensible mess of a comic, containing almost nothing that has ever been referenced again. I can really only recommend it to absolute completists.

Somewhat better handled is Tarna, a skrull Agent of the Cosmos who appears in Venom: Space Knight. Tarna's symbiotic look is not remotely feminine, and one suspects that's the point: it's ugly, threatening, and gives no clue as to who's inside. (Her symbiote can also separate from her while maintaining form, making the comparison pic unusually easy for me).

But as a shapeshifting alien bonded to a shapeshifting symbiote, Tarna perhaps doesn't make the best example for general principles. It’s worth keeping in mind that every design has a storytelling function too: Patricia’s Venom needs to be mistakable for the original Venom for plot reasons, and the reveal that Tarna is a humanoid woman under her symbiote is set up as a surprise. But the creators of the film wanted us to know that was Anne under the symbiote from the moment she appeared, so sexy!She-Venom it is.

All that said, at the very end of the day, I’d much rather not have to make these excuses for the film. I’d much rather see more Tarnas and fewer She-Venom’s, and both film and comics have a long way to go before we get there yet.

[eisforeidolon]

Episode: Peace of Mind

Hey, remember how Castiel can reach into people's chests and grope their souls?  No?  Not even a mention of why it can’t possibly work on nephilim?  Oh, okay, let's just let the ridiculously overpowered and possibly soulless Winchester-wannabe wander around in limbo about having a soul despite a canonical way to check.  Why the fuck not?  

Also, expecting me to give a fuck about Sam mourning some nobodies from AU world who didn't even have names except the joke that was Maggie just shows what absolute emotional dunces the current writers are.  You never showed us any relationship there beyond, at best, being Sam's interchangeable flunkies!  Jared can act his little heart out trying to sell this (and he did), but I have more emotional investment in the loss of that lamp Dean broke that one time.

But anyway, Sam’s trauma over a bunch of cardboard is the excuse for him wanting to be anywhere but the bunker this week, and some bullshit nonsense conversation between Cas and Dean is why Sam goes off with Cas instead of Dean.  Because the show needs more of Castiel's tryhard motivational speeches, apparently.  I kind of feel like maybe this episode started out with Sam and Dean on the case and then got changed partway through?  There are a few of the jokes that are pretty clearly Castiel jokes – like when everything comes to a standstill in the diner over him loudly saying something appalling and stiltedly talking about the content of the love letters.  However, a few of them, like the pop culture reference, seem far more like things Dean would say and just make it feel kind of blatant how badly Cas has been transposed in for reasons.  

Reasons possibly being the writers suspected some of us might fast-forward through a Castiel & Jack B plot?  Except Castiel spending more time with Jack and being shown as more attached to him would better serve the story they're actually going to tell later this season.  That would apparently overflow the quota Dabb apparently set for continuous minutes Dean and Sam can interact, though, so.  I wonder if, since his major change after Carver (besides everything getting worse) is less brother-fighting he thinks the Winchesters should spend no time together if there can't be potential world-ending dramaz?  Yes, stories do need conflict but that's not what that means. 

Look, Dean's actually my favorite, but I feel like nothing of value would be lost if we cut basically everything from this episode with him and Jack.  No knock against Jensen or Alex, but the dumb stilted conversation about snakes and bacon?  The ridiculous use of Yellow Fever in the previouslies when he was literally under a fear-inducing supernatural affliction to justify making Dean afraid of snakes now because ha fucking ha?  The angel food/devil food thing - somebody actually wrote that and thought it wasn't so deeply embarrassing they should change their name and move to Alaska to never write fiction again!

Even the whole thing with Donatello (which I have a sneaking suspicion is the only reason they bothered to bring him back) is kind of dumb.  Remember how Donatello is the exception and not the rule when it comes to soullessness?  How all those other people went bugfuck when their souls were taken by Abaddon or Amara (this show really really believes in recycling).  Even putting that aside, Donatello is soulless, which at best, means completely not giving a fuck - so he’s the guy you go to for advice?  Not even to mention how absolutely tryhard the whole What Would (the) Winchesters Do WWWD thing was.  Ew.  The final cap on it being that I am really fucking tired of every latest potential threat being OMG TEH MOST POWAHFUL IN TEH UNIVERSE!!!  Suddenly Jack's a potential antagonist again so we're back to it being him instead of Michael instead of Lucifer instead of Amara instead of Rowena instead of …[loud snoring].

I did actually appreciate that for once it was Sam in the weird goofy costume episode playing up the 50's camp.  Those kinds of obvious gags pretty much always go to Dean, and I do like it when they at least switch things around so it's not just variation 100 on the same old theme.  Also Castiel commenting in his typical matter-of-fact about Sam's beautiful hair did make me laugh a little.

Seems pretty typical Cas mistakes the daughter as the one doing the brain exploding because he misses what a human cue it was she was trying to get him out of the town to save him instead of trying to keep him there if she was crazy enough to be running not!Pleasantville.  As a case, I think this part of the episode works okay.  Not the best ever, not the worst ever, and Jared clearly had fun with the playacting  of Sam being brainwashed into 50s husband dude.

Not entirely thrilled by some random guy developing the power to control a whole town with his brain out of nowhere midway through his life (as well as literally throw people and angels).  Most of the other characters we've seen with that kind of power got it from somewhere. Though I'll grant that we didn't exactly get the dude's entire pedigree and it seems like his daughter inherited some serious power, too, so maybe he just didn't know there's psychic monster in his family tree.  

Really the thing that doesn't work for me in this episode with the Sam & Cas plot is less any of the individual bits and more how clearly it is what the writers were trying – and for me, ultimately failing – to do. In the early seasons with better writers, they did a lot of episodes like this where what happens in the MotW plotline illuminates what's going on with the characters in the larger story and they were really trying to do that with Sam here.  But the literal amnesia and Cas' big speeches and some dude brainwashing a whole town to avoid his personal sad and another instance of a character having a variant of AKF shoved awkwardly into their mouth hole?  The kind of character work they were trying to do is not well served by just dropping anvils on the audiences' heads.  

The part with Dean and Sam at the end was actually fairly enjoyable – of course Castiel tattled and of course Dean takes the opportunity for teasing.  If we've seen this same realization about how you can't outrun things in your head a million times already, well, with the Winchester's lives I honestly can't blame them for still hoping that somehow it will work this time.

Then the episode ends with Castiel witnessing the snake incident and keeping it to himself because he's  somehow hardwired to make the wrong decision in literally every possible circumstance these days. Yay.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Roles

When I was younger, I signed up with employment agencies who always advertised the same thing: “We will find you a permanent job! With a few temp jobs while you wait, so you won’t go hungry or anything!” That somehow never panned out; they made more money out of farming us out than they did finding us permanent roles. I stopped calling them employment agencies, in my head; just temp agencies. There would be nothing but temporary roles, forever.

Except I got a call today from Agency Guy, which I missed because the ringer on my mobile phone is broken so I’m having to use the New Mobile (which used to just be my more portable iPad and Spotify-capable mp3 player) at least on a “You can call this number” basis.

Agency Guy was talking about a permanent role.

He called back just now and yeah, permanent role, private hospital, less annoying commute. Not sure when I’m going to hear back but I’m definitely going for it. However, not being a total idiot, I also asked him to pursue something else slightly weird I got from the place I was working at last week. Basically, when I left, I was told that there might be something going in Cardiology soon, and I told them, “Great; contact the agency when and if it comes up and ask for me by name!”

...Line Manager texted me last night instead. And according to Agency Guy, she hasn’t even been in touch with the agency yet. So agency is going to chase that one, just in case the permanent role doesn’t pan out or takes awhile to do so. Just ... seriously, why am I having to do the hospital’s organisational work on this basis already? Ugh.

Anyway, point is, if I go for the permanent role and it turns out I like the place and want to stay, I’ll have the usual “going from weekly to monthly paycheque” issue, which will not entirely be fun but if I’m really lucky, I’ll have the temp role to get myself a buffer to live on. Still going to be tight if that pans out, but ... it’s not wrong to be hopeful, right? Push comes to shove, I can have another perfume sale to keep myself in commute money and edibles until my first paycheque comes through, and I can also hope that I end up joining in the middle of the pay cycle.

So a lot of stuff is up in the air but at least it’s “a number of different options” instead of “no options; waiting for something to turn up”. That’s a somewhat better way to be. And in the meantime, I can enjoy my time off, which after the role I just finished I have very much needed. My current True Love for free time of late is Guild Wars 2 - I have a character of each race (more than one in the case of human, mostly because their run animations don’t drive me absolutely bugfuck insane), and I’m loving the classes I have with the possible exception of Elementalist, but mostly because I haven’t figured out how to cope with how fucking squishy casters are. I like ranged, for the most part, but I have found a particular love of wave-dashing or teleporting around the battlefield. I’ve even taken part in a few metas - yesterday was the Tahrir meta and that was fucking insane but got me the XP I needed to start a mastery track I very much needed.

I don’t do these alone. I refuse to do these alone. The only thing I do alone in GW2 is crafting and map completion stuff. Everything else happens with @true0neutral, and I’m kind of hoping to get @fauxfire76 back into the game because some aspects of the running-around remind me a lot of TSW and I miss running around with those two doing whatever.

Also exploration dungeons are made of bullshit.

[rahirah]

via Barb's Place OK, guys, normally I try not to publish things which are this rough, but fuck it, it has been YEARS and I feel like I owe the six of you who are still hoping to read the rest of POM someday something. So here is the crappy first draft of Ch. 14, scene 1. (If you feel like leaving critical comments, please do. It needs savaging.) As Tara collapsed into Willow's arms, the silver cross, still straining at the end of its chain towards the stone, collapsed with her. Only a necklace again, and not the needle of Angel's moral compass. Buffy snatched it and held it tight, till her palms ached where the metal dug into the flesh. She could almost imagine the cross burning her hand, as if she were the vampire. Angel wouldn't, couldn't be doing the things Spike had described if he still had a soul. He might be infuriatingly high-handed sometimes, but he wasn't some kind of undead Don Corleone. Okay, fine, he'd basically put out a hit on Spike last year, and there'd been that whole episode with Resurrected Darla – she was certain she didn't know all the details there, and was even more certain she didn't want to – and that thing with the submarine, though Spike wasn't the world's most reliable narrator where Angel was concerned, and that had been forever ago and Angel had been really depressed back then and it shouldn't count, should it? And anyway, he'd said he'd had an epiphany, hadn't he? Buffy forced herself to take a breath and relax. Or to take a breath, at least. Damn Angel anyway. There was a corner of her heart that would always be his, just as she suspected that a corner of Spike's heart would always belong to Drusilla, so why couldn't they both just stay in their respective corners, safely cocooned in nostalgia? It would make life so much simpler. Everyone else was still arguing. Giles, bless him, had intercepted Kennedy and the Finns, but Dawn pounced on Spike with the speed and ferocity of Miss Kitty hunting the wily laser pointer. "Come on, spill! What plan?" "Doesn't bloody matter what plan, because it's bugfuck insane, and we're not having it." He really wasn't at a hundred percent yet. Insane plans were the last thing that was likely to put Dawn off. Her sister folded her arms and raised an eyebrow. "You do realize that this is the twenty-first century, and I can just, like, phone Cordy and ask her what it is?" Spike's jaw worked, and he glanced up at the ceiling and then over at her, as if imploring the heavens and the Slayer in order of importance. Buffy sighed. "We kinda used her for First Evil bait last year, Spike. The protect-poor-innocent-Dawnie ship has sailed, lost radio contact, and disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle." "I miss the days when a bloke could cut a sodding phone line," Spike muttered. "All bloody right, here's the gist. Chase had the idea this Burkle chit can use Dawn to pop into another dimension, where we'll conveniently run into no slavering monsters whatsoever, traipse across the landscape without falling into any inconvenient pits of molten lava, and pop back into this world in the Hyperion's safe. Then she fancies we can drag this Gunn bloke back the in same manner as whence we came, no doubt scattering sodding rose petals in our wake. I told her — " "But I can do that!" Dawn exclaimed, whirling on Buffy. "You know I can. I got us to Pylea and back last summer! We could drive close to the Hyperion as we can, cross over into the other dimension, hike to the spot where the Hyperion would be, cross back into our world, rescue the prisoners, and cross back to the World of No Slavering Monsters to get back to the car, and then cross back into our world again." At Spike's dubious expression, her own grew obstinate. "Seriously, how is this worse than you sneaking in and out of Angel's hotel through the sewers, which are definitely full of slavering monsters?" You had to admit Spike was giving it the old college try. "And supposing we miss the safe? Pop out in the middle of the lobby? Or the middle of a wall?" "You said Mr. Tanner's with them, right?" Dawn replied, smug. "He's a geomancer, remember? He specializes in topographic magic. I'll bet he can come up with something to get us to the right spot. I'm not dumb. I know this is going to be dangerous, but you need me. It's not like I'm going on some solo mission here. I'll be with you and Buffy, and Faith might even get here by then. All I'm going to do is stand around and exude Key vibes while you guys make with the punchy-kicky." She looked Spike in the eye. "I did fine in Pylea, didn't I? If this was some random nest of vampires..." "But it's not." Buffy hated the brittleness in her voice. "If Angel's really... it took everything I had to beat him last time." More. "You have a lot more now than you had then," Dawn said, her voice softening. "You're only alone if you want to be, Buffy. Let me help. Please." She'd had help last time, too. How could she explain to Dawn that the memory which haunted her nightmares even now was the result of that help: the look of stunned betrayal on Angel's face as she plunged the sword into his heart? If Willow had called his soul back five minutes later, or half an hour sooner... Dawn had never known that particular flavor of heartbreak. She took her sister's hand. "Thanks, Dawnie. But – " "No buts. I get it," Dawn said with the certainty of someone who didn't. "You have all this romantic baggage, and Spike has all these weird-ass vampire daddy issues – " "Oi!" "Well, you do! But you guys have fought demons, and wizards, and gods. I'm not saying Angel isn't a badass, but repeat after me: He's only a vampire." Spike's lips twitched in a rueful smile. "Bit might have a point, love." Rats. She did. Buffy grimaced. "You're not supposed to be the insightful sister." "I've always been the insightful sister." Dawn let her go and bounced back with a grin. "So I'm coming with you, right?" "You're coming." Buffy straightened. "OK, people. Spike and I leave for L.A. tomorrow morning. Kennedy, Willow, Tara, Giles, you're all with us – we'll take two cars if we have to. Riley, do whatever you need to to get your people there, and let me know when you'll arrive. And make sure they know not to randomly stake anything with fangs. Spike's called in some favors from the local vamps, and while I'm not gonna cry bitter tears if some of them come home in a Dust Buster, I don't want to waste troops. We won't know how many of them will keep their word till they actually show up in L.A., so Xander, can you and Anya stay here and coordinate things with David, and let us know how many are coming and when they'll meet up with us?" Xander nodded; if he was disappointed not to be tagged for combat duty, he didn't show it. "Anya and I can pack up the weapons and supplies tonight, if you want to get some rest, Buff." Buffy shot him a grateful look. "That would be great. We'll talk to Cordy in the morning about someplace to stash any allied vamps. Riley?" Riley exchanged a look with Sam. "We've got some fast talking to do with Headquarters. I'll keep you updated." Team Finn rose in tandem and headed for the door. Giles, having assessed the population of Casa Summers and deemed it excessive, was phoning a hotel. Willow was fussing around with Tara, and – "What are we going to do with Grandpa when we get there, Slayer?" And Spike was looking at her like he expected her to have an answer for that. Maybe she did. "After we catch him? We can enroll him in Riley's chiphead program if we have to. At least until we find out what's going on." Spike frowned. "You think a chip in the head's gonna be enough? For Angel?" How was this even a question? "It was enough for you. And it's only temporary." "It was an excuse to hang about in your general vicinity. Not that I'd have admitted as much at the time." His tone was serious; Spike wasn't even trying to pick a fight, damn him, and she really wanted to punch something in the nose right now. "Angel, he won't put up with it, not for the pleasure of anyone's company." Buffy choked back a bitter sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. "'A more permanent solution,' huh? Maybe everyone's right. It took me... so long, last time. To... do what I had to. And people died for it. I can't let that happen again. But I can't..." The words dried up in her throat, too painful to force out. "All of you want me to kill him, don't you?" She was shaking. "So easy for all of you to say, because he's not your friend or your lover. Well, you know what? Screw that! Drusilla's up there with him, and I haven't once questioned that you'll be able to handle her!" Spike's eyes flashed yellow for a second, but he didn't rise to the bait. Maybe his L.A. adventure had really knocked some restraint into him after all. "Yeah, well, maybe you should. I promised you Dru's ashes once, if ever you gave me a crumb. P'raps you've noticed that she's not actually a big pile of dust yet, for all I've gotten the whole sodding cake by now." His shoulders drooped. "Fuck it all, pet, I don't want you to kill him. I hate his sodding guts, but he's family. It's just... you keep talking as if you can fix him. What if there's nothing to fix? What if he really has just stopped trying?" "Then we convince him to start trying again. We didn't give up on Willow when the First had her, did we?" Spike stood silent for a moment, his bright head bowed. Then he sighed. "Fair do's," he said. Whatever that meant. "You know I'll back you, Slayer. I've got no doubts you'll do as you have to. Whatever that turns out to be. Just needed to have my say first." The unshakable confidence in his voice was... not cheering, exactly, but something. She laid her forehead against his shoulder, saying with touch what couldn't be said with words. After a moment his arm snaked around her shoulders, and she felt the uneven rise and fall of his chest gradually match the rhythm of her own breathing. She wondered if he even realized that he did that. "I've got to get some sleep. You coming up?" He glanced across the room. "Up in a mo.' Want a word with Tara. Bird's had a rough night of it," Join the club. "OK. See you in a bit." It occurred to her, as she climbed the stairs, that if the worst ever happened between the two of them, Spike would see that final stroke from her hands as an affirmation rather than a betrayal: a little gesture to show that she cared. Which was weird and sick and vampirey, and also... strangely comforting. No wonder Angel was convinced she'd come back from heaven wrong. TBD comments

[innuendostudios]

Superposition, a 25-minute dissection of Life is Strange’s genre fuckery. As ever, you can keep this work coming by supporting me on Patreon. Transcript below the cut.

Maybe you knew this already, but Life is Strange is a weird-ass video game, one that is, by turns, a nakedly honest point-and-clicker about teen girls and a psychosexual freakout on the nature of choice. It doesn’t exactly marry these two themes painlessly and I’m, frankly, unconvinced it’s trying to.

Mechanically, Life is Strange - a game by Dontnod - is a mostly faithful iteration on the Telltale adventure game model: a lot of mid-90’s LucasArts design, several recent innovations, and a heaping dose of Heavy Rain. Like a Telltale game, you navigate a 3D world and interact with your environment using context-sensitive button presses. And, like a Telltale game, play consists of simple adventure game puzzles, plot-branching decisions, and a whole lot of dialogue. Like a Telltale game, it’s released in five episodes, where choices you make in one will alter the contents of episodes down the line, and it has the same notifications that a choice will have consequences, the same frequent autosave to keep you from replaying too much of the game, and the same breakdown at the end of an episode that compares your choices with those of other players. But one hallmark of a Telltale game that is conspicuously absent is the thing that makes Telltale’s choices so meaningful: the timer.

A timer at the bottom of the screen ticking down every time you make a decision enforces a particular type of play. See, Telltale doesn’t want you to deliberate on your choices, Telltale wants you to act on your gut, which sometimes means making a choice you come to regret and having to live with it for the rest of the game. But, in Life is Strange, players are given the ability to rewind time, letting them see the all results of just about every choice, every puzzle, every line of dialogue, before making up their minds and proceeding. Players can deliberate forever. If you were to keep two saves going so you could see all outcomes of your choices, that would be playing against Telltale’s design philosophy, which is about living with your decisions, but, here, save-scumming is a core mechanic.

Now, I dunno what the developers’ thought process was, but I like to imagine them coming up with this idea and then asking, “OK, say a person could actually do this, could see every possible future stemming from their actions and pick the one they think is best; what would the logical endpoint of that story be?”

Hahaaahahaahaahaaa, okay. Okay. Alright.

The plot mechanics of Life is Strange are fucking bizarre. It is, in essence, two entirely different stories rolled up into the same package. These two stories contain all the same characters and all the same plot points, but exist in wildly different genres and have wildly different themes. For the first two-and-a-half-ish episodes, you appear to be playing a tender coming-of-age story, while the second two-and-a-half-ish are a Lynchian psychodrama that seems designed with the express purpose of complicating, then rejecting, and, ultimately, attempting to devour the coming-of-age story and erase all records of its existence. And then, in a truly bugfuck climax, the game point-blank asks you, the player, which of these two stories you want an ending to.

Why don’t we start at the beginning?

Max Caulfield is a student at the prestigious Blackwell Academy in her hometown of Arcadia Bay. Like a lot of people her age, she’s a little awkward, a little shy. She’s on her own for the first time - several years earlier, she and her family moved to Seattle, and her parents are still there while she’s moved into the Blackwell dorms. Max hasn’t maintained any of her local friendships, and, while she gets along with everyone who doesn’t actively hate her, she doesn’t have a group, or any close friends, except maybe the boy who has a crush on her. She’s also devoted to photography - it’s what she’s here to study - and greatly admires her photography teacher, but she’s too nervous to submit her work to the big photo competition, despite her teacher’s encouragement.

One day, after an intense vision in her photo class, Max bears witness to the school bully pulling a gun and shooting a girl in the bathroom, and, in that moment, she, as if by instinct, discovers that she can reverse time by up to a minute or two. After a bit of trial and error she manages to change history, preventing the girl’s death. And, that strangeness aside, she steps back into her normal life with her newfound abilities.

This is the setup for a very particular genre of story, albeit one with a more fantastical bent than usual. This genre has a name, but I’m only going to say it once, because it’s long, and German, and when American’s start dropping long, German words into their sentences they come off as seriously pretentious and even I have limits. But the word is Bildungsroman.

Now, English-speakers often use this term interchangeably with “coming-of-age story,” but it’s actually a specific genre with specific themes. The novel most often referenced as the first… story of this kind is Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and other notable examples include Jane Eyre, The Glass Bead Game, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Classically, these are stories about indecision, about a youth, pulled in many directions, trying to decide what kind of adult they’re going to be. The tension is not between protagonist and antagonist - traditionally, there is no real antagonist - but between protagonist and society. The adult world has expectations of the main character, and that character needs to decide to what extent, as a grown-up, they want to satisfy those expectations and to what extent they want to pursue their own happiness. The usual emotional arc of a… German coming-of-age story is accepting that maturity means taking on the world’s demands - shouldering your share of society’s burdens - and learning to fit your happiness around that responsibility: Wilhelm Meister leaves the theater and becomes a doctor, Jane Eyre marries on her own terms, Joseph Knecht leaves Castalia to become a teacher in the larger world (though sometimes the battle between personal happiness and social responsibility is not resolved simply).

The early going of Life is Strange fits snugly into the… genre. There are even subgenres that are “coming into one’s own as a student” and “coming into one’s own as an artist,” which revolve around mentor characters, so tick those off the list as well. After discovering her powers, Max runs into the girl from the bathroom in the parking lot and realizes it’s her best friend from childhood, Chloe, and the two become nearly inseparable. When Max reveals her abilities, Chloe enlists her in the hunt for Rachel Amber, a friend of hers who vanished recently, and what follows is less a traditional plot than, typical of the genre, a string of vignettes, this one loosely structured around a search for the missing girl. These various episodes gives Max many windows into lives she could lead. Stick it to the mean girl, or turn the other cheek? Down-to-earth boyfriend or maybe unpredictable girlfriend? Reach out to the girl being mistreated by a security guard, or take a photo for art? These are all hallmarks of the genre: questions of ethics, the wholesome love vs. the wild love, dedication to others vs. dedication to art.

You might think that the ability to call do-over on any decision would make these choices easier, but you’d be wrong - time travel makes all of them harder! Dedicating yourself to photography means breaking a hurting girl’s heart; kissing the wild love means devastating the wholesome love. At one point, Max changes history so dramatically that she actually visits an alternate timeline, where she’s popular with the girls who had previously mistreated her but isn’t friends with Chloe at all. This only drives home that, no matter what life she leads, there will be a cost. She can’t have everything; there is no one right answer. No matter what she chooses, she’s doing wrong by someone. This sets up the classic arc where she’s going to have to make some big decisions about what maturity means to her, and those decisions will involve sacrifices.

At least, that’s how it works on paper. In practice, the game only sometimes strikes that balance where all options have merits and drawbacks and no one is empirically better than the others. More often it’s like, ok, you’re trying to get into this RV but there’s an angry dog inside: do you distract the dog by throwing a bone into the parking lot, or kill the dog by throwing the bone into traffic? And that’s a fake choice. No one kills the dog. Why would you kill the dog? And then there’s the small mercies, like keeping someone from getting splashed by muddy water, which… ok, that isn’t a sacrifice; there is no reason not to do that.

So let’s say the time travel works as an imperfect metaphor for youthful indecision. And what pleasures can be drawn from this section of the game are to do with how much you enjoy earnestness. There’s a commitment from the designers to tackle subjects that are very uncommon to video games - from teen suicide to euthanasia to budding queer romance - and it’s hard not to respect their willingness to go there. Real effort has been put into addressing these subjects seriously, and these sequences can be very affecting… even as none of them entirely hit the mark. The scene where you talk a suicidal Kate off a rooftop, for all its intensity, is, mechanically, Kate quizzing you on how much flavor text you read in her room earlier; the sequence where alt-universe Chloe wants to die takes great pains to not be ableist towards paraplegics while still being kind of ableist towards paraplegics; and the budding queer romance often seems about two sentences away from turning into a late-night Showtime erotic drama that is obviously written by middle-aged men. But it’s not crass! The game’s heart is on its sleeve, and the writers clearly mean everything they say even when they don’t entirely know what they’re talking about. And if you can appreciate sincerity even as you acknowledge its failings, then you can appreciate the game for what it is: it’s like Max, awkward but well-meaning, naive, possessing a good heart and still kind of ignorant.

And that’s Life is Strange.... until the second half of the game happens.

In this story, time traveling teenager Max Caulfield and her best friend, Chloe Price, hot on the trail of the missing girl, Rachel Amber, discover that her story was not a tragic one of a wayward youth getting in over her head with her drug-dealer boyfriend, but one in which she was sedated, photographed, and murdered in an underground facility straight out of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. In trying to track down the boy they think is responsible, Max suddenly drops to the ground with a needle in her neck and watches helplessly as her best friend dies from a bullet to the head, then wakes up tied to a chair by the real killer: her photography professor, Mr. Jefferson. This is a story about regret, choice, and loyalty, full of serial killer monologues and hallucinatory imagery; a story where people look in the sky and see the moon doubled and the beach fills with the bodies of dead whales.

After two and a half episodes of vignettes, Life is Strange has decided it has an honest-to-goodness plot, one that bears a striking resemblance to, well... the designers want me to say Twin Peaks, but, honestly, the greater debt it owes is to Donnie Darko: Max is guided by an animal figure only she can see and who is probably the spirit of a dead character; Chloe is a teenager who’s only alive due to the interventions of a time traveller and this is causing a number of supernatural events to occur; just before the climax our hero is up on a hill coming to a difficult conclusion after watching her girlfriend die as a curious weather pattern descends on the town below; Chloe realizes that maybe the only way to set things right is to go back in time and die like she was originally fated to and then none of this awfulness will have ever happened; and multiple episodes end with tracking shots of all the major characters montaged together while melancholy pop music plays underneath… it’s not subtle.

As you can imagine, going from Jane Eyre to Donnie Darko is a bit of a tonal shift. In fairness, the game does set all these threads up in the first half, and it’s not like the coming-of-age story disappears (the euthanasia subplot actually happens past the midpoint), it’s just that what used to be background texture have become subjects in their own right, and they make the coming-of-age story look pretty out of place, Like, the love triangle between Chloe, Max, and Warren made sense in a coming-of-age story but it’s just ridiculous when your relationship with Chloe is tearing apart the fabric of reality and Warren is just a dude. In this story, the antagonist is not society but the very literal villain you thought was the mentor figure. The narrative tension is not about Max finding herself but about fixing mistakes, and hopefully not getting murdered in the process. Chloe is not a wild love but the possible instigator of the apocalypse. And Max’s powers are not a metaphor for indecision but a pointed meditation on what it means to be a protagonist, but more on that in a minute.

This half also has some ideas about choice that complicate what choice meant in the first half. There’s a scene where you try to get information from Rachel Amber’s ex-boyfriend, and, thanks to Max’s powers, you can see it play out a lot of different ways, but you start to realize that possibly the only way that nobody gets hurt… is if you killed the dog earlier in the game. Four episodes in Life is Strange decides it actually is a game about living with decisions you can’t undo!

When I started this video talking about Telltale, that wasn’t just an easy point of reference - what originally seemed like an interesting take on the Telltale model now seems as though it has a bone to pick with games of that type. The complaint so often lobbied against Telltale is that it promises your choices will have significant impact on the story; lots of people criticize them for not delivering on that promise, but Life is Strange seems to criticize Telltale for making the promise in the first place. Why, the game asks, should you even want that responsibility?

I mean, let’s look at how Max escapes Mr. Jefferson’s studio. Earlier in the game, Max discovers that she can travel to any point in the past that is captured in a photograph. So, through the photos Jefferson has on hand, she starts leaping back to different points in the game’s continuity adjusting her decisions, trying to tweak the timeline, undo mistakes. She’s looking for a scenario where she is free, Chloe is alive, and, if at all possible, no tornado is bearing down to wipe Arcadia Bay off the map, in case you forgot that’s a thing that’s happening. As when she first used her powers to save Chloe, it takes some trial and error, but she pulls it off - Mr. Jefferson’s in jail, Chloe is safe, and, hey, she even got her photo into that competition, and, what do you know, she won! Instead of tied up in a murderer’s photography studio, she’s in San Francisco with a new and better mentor figure, and her art is up on the wall, and she’s the toast of the show. This is a hyper-idealized ending to the coming-of-age story - after finally making up her mind and taking decisive action, Max has come into her own as a student, an artist, and a young woman.

Then she checks in on Chloe. There is always a cost.

Stories about teenagers who develop superhuman abilities often frame themselves as coming-of-age stories - it’s not a coincidence how many fall back on the puberty metaphor. Even without time travel or gamma rays, growing up means gaining power and independence one didn’t have as a child, so everyone is expected to learn - let’s all say it together - “with great power comes great responsibility.” But, however much superpowers serve as symbols for growing up, they are also wish-fulfillment. We may agree that Peter Parker should use his newfound strength with discretion, but it still feels good to watch him beat up the bully. And we may be saddened by Uncle Ben’s death, but we’re still glad that it turns Peter into Spider-man. Because that’s what we’re here to see. That’s a tension endemic to the genre - that, on the one hand, power is dangerous and must be be used sparingly, and, on the other hand, power is awesome, and we pay money to see characters wield it. And law and order, good and evil, life and death are all present not as subjects deserving of their own films but as means of centering a protagonist in an interesting story, compelling him to use his awesome powers, and teaching a boy how to be a man.

This tension is at the heart of Telltale games, as well, and most games in that model. They may present as being about futility, about being a miniscule player in an enormous, losing game, but the plot still contorts itself to ensure the most dramatic and impactful decisions rest on the protagonist’s shoulders. And however terrible that responsibility is implied to be, players play because they want to make those decisions, and complain when they are not impactful enough.

In Life is Strange, Max comes to realize that all the bizarre occurrences - the moons, the whales, the tornado - have been caused by her leaping through time. That she can’t set things right because trying to set things right has and will only ever make things worse. This isn’t just a false ending; this is an evisceration of the game you thought you were playing for the first two and a half episodes. Max gives up her perfect ending and goes back to the studio in one last effort to save Chloe, while the game stares down the player and says, “How dare you think this was a coming-of-age story. How dare you think time travel was a neat way to work through your indecision. How could you think a power this great could ever be used responsibly? How could you think the consequences for your mistakes would be borne by you and you alone?”

This sets up an arc where Max will have to do what superhero movies almost never do: truly reckon with how dangerous real power can be.

This point gets hammered for the rest of Episode 5. I got rescued by Chloe’s step-dad, and when he learned Chloe was dead he killed Mr. Jefferson, and the game was like, hey, do you want to go back and change that? And I was like, I don’t know anymore. I could, but will changing things just make them go even more wrong? And when I go back and save Chloe, will any of this have even happened? And, fuck, there’s a tornado gonna come kill all of us anyway, so is there any scenario where this choice even matters? Then, above ground, the game still let me perform those small mercies, but, like, great, you’re welcome, hope you enjoy the five minutes I just added to your life cuz you’re still gonna die and it’s all my fault but I want my girlfriend back so I’m gonna jump back one more time and make things just a little bit worse.

Even when you do get Chloe back, the game has made you aware of the horrible cost your entire community will pay for you having used your powers to save her again and again and again. Your only goal has been to fix your mistakes and you’re being punished for having even tried! The game deposits you on a hill to watch as Hell descends on the town below, and then tells you, in so many words, “This is the price you paid for your friend.”

And then it asks, “Would you like a refund?”

Seeing what’s happened to Arcadia Bay, Chloe says that, if there’s a chance it will undo everything that’s occurred, she wants you to go back in time to the bathroom and let her die. Maybe that’s just the way fate wanted things to happen. And it’s up to you to grant or deny her wish.

This final decision is the game offering you two very appropriate endings for the two very different games you have been playing. Per the themes of the… coming-of-age story of the Germanic persuasion, Max’s arc is learning to sacrifice for the greater good. She can’t have it all, she can’t satisfy everyone, and sometimes doing right by your society means giving up something you love. In the battle between personal happiness and responsibility, responsibility wins. Sometimes the wild love is someone you have to let go of - be grateful for your time together and kiss her goodbye. She knows what’s right - it’s better this way.

Per the themes of the Lynchian psychodrama, have you fucking lost it?? What about the last 12-odd hours of gameplay in which trying to change the past universally makes the present worse gave you the idea that going back “one more time” could possibly fix anything? Have you learned nothing? Yes, you fucked up, and all of this is your fault, but in real life people have to live with their fuckups, even the big ones. No one has the right to change history. You can’t keep trying to control this. This is bigger than you and Chloe. You have to let go.

That’s about as incompatible as two endings can be. In one, all the themes of the first half of the game are thrown in a lake and Max never finds her place in society because society gets eaten by a tornado, and in the other the whole psychodrama plotline and all its attendant themes are literally erased from history. Whichever you pick, whichever plot you decide is the right one, a sizable portion of the game will be rendered meaningless. And we should acknowledge that these two themes, Sacrifice For The Greater Good and Learn To Live With Your Mistakes are not, in real life, things we get to choose between. Maturity means doing both.

If you elect to keep Chloe alive, Max and Chloe wordlessly drive out of town. And maybe it’s meant to be an unresolved ending that sticks with you for a while - T2 meets Thelma and Louise - and that might be a pretty bold decision if the game didn’t autosave right before The One Choice You Can’t Make Twice, which means everyone is going to reload 5 minutes after they finish and watch the other ending which is just… is just in all conceivable ways better. The ending where Chloe dies is longer, it has proper closure, there’s this funeral scene that is so cathartic it doesn’t even make sense (you two never even met Chloe in this timeline, why are you here???). And it confirms that, yeah, you didn’t have to live with your mistakes, going back would have fixed everything. Worse, it boils the ending choice down to Who Do You Love More, Chloe or Everyone Else?, the reason fans have dubbed the ending “bay or bae,” but whether or not you love Chloe the mostest isn’t really what all that stuff about fucking up the timeline was getting at. If ever a game needed to pull a Swapper and erase your save after you make the final decision, this was it.

And that’s how Life is Strange ends. I honestly can’t tell you if this game is good, I can’t even tell you if I liked it, but I think… I think I loved it? I mean, that last decision is kind of bullshit, but I got real choked up making it. Now we’ve got word that both a sequel and a prequel are in the works, and, frankly, I’m apprehensive. There is a certain power to starting with an emotionally resonant genre and then ramming it headlong into a weirder, darker, more ambitious genre, and that’s a move that only works when you’re not expecting it. Do I wanna critique how effectively Life is Strange goes off the rails when once I was dumbfounded that it did at all? Life is Strange was like nothing I’d ever played, for good and for ill; a sequel will like at least one thing I’ve played already. And I don’t even know if I should like this game! When people talk shit on it, I don’t even disagree, and yet here we are. Ah, fuck it. I don’t even know. Life is Strange, everyone. Wowser.