#like he wasn’t even supposed to be a prominent character in the first movie

[moviemunchies]

The first review I saw for this movie said that it wasn’t brilliant, but that it was great fun. Then a bunch of reviews poured out saying that it was pretty bad, and I wasn’ sure what to think.

Maybe it’s better to go into a movie with no expectations?

Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom picks up after the events of the first Aquaman. Arthur is king of Atlantis now, he’s married Mera and has a young son who he raises at his father’s lighthouse. Things aren’t simple, though; the Council of Atlantis doesn’t let him institute all the changes he’d like, especially as they still don’t respect him for his half-human heritage. The world is also becoming considerably more polluted, causing a plague among Atlanteans. And Black Manta, hoping to repair his equipment with the help of Dr. Shin, has stumbled upon an ancient Atlantean artifact that will give him an edge over Aquaman.

Alright, so! One of the most talked about things regarding this movie was Amber Heard’s role as Mera, considering she had a very public trial in 2022 regarding her marriage to Johnny Depp, in which public opinion was violently against her despite the UK’s High Court of Justice ruling in 2020 that 12 out of 14 incidents of violence by Depp were “substantially true.” I did not follow that 2022 trial–that is not the sort of thing I think people should watch as entertainment, and I have better things to do than follow a trial regarding domestic abuse as if it was entertainment. 

All the same, people wondered how much Mera would be in the movie, if at all. The answer: she’s not in that much of the movie. She’s not a non-person in the film, and does a lot in the climactic battle at the end. All the same, it is really weird that the first quarter of the movie deals so heavily with Arthur’s home life, and his raising his son, and his wife is barely in those portions? And with almost no lines? One would think that the mother of his child would be more vocal and more a part of the storyline, wouldn’t you? It’s a little awkward, and I think there was more here that was probably cut. I would have appreciated her being in more of the movie, considering her personality and prominence in the first one.

And speaking of those early sections: I don’t know how I feel about Arthur’s suitability as king. Part of the conflict between Arthur and Orm is that Orm doesn’t think Arthur has what it takes to be king. YMMV on whether he does, but the movie makes it clear that a lot of Atlantis doesn’t accept him as a king. Season four of Young Justice did something similar in its Atlantis arc, and resolves it in an interesting way. This movie only has it so… Arthur remains king and overrules his council, I guess? It didn’t seem adequately resolved.

I will say, though, that I think Manta’s character arc is one of my favorite supervillain arcs in a cinematic universe? Let’s be real here, Marvel generally sucks at making a coherent, movie-to-movie character arc, especially for villains. Black Manta doesn’t have that problem though–his actions here follow his characterization in the first movie, and I like how even when he’s making bad choices, they’re choices that make sense for him. Also, he looks really cool and has laser eyes.

Orm, on the other hand, evolved in an interesting way. He’s a villain in the first movie, sure, though he’s played a lot more sympathetically than he is in, say, the Justice League cartoon series or Young Justice. Here, he has to team up with Aquaman to save Atlantis from Manta, in an interesting but not too out-there twist. I think he gets off a bit lightly–the man did start a war, after all, and no matter how much he cares about Atlantis, it’s a difficult thing to forget. It certainly works better than Malcolm Merlyn’s “complex” character arc in Arrow, because at least Orm was explicitly trying to murder the poor people in his community. I suppose it helps that Orm was raised in a culture that’s explicitly unhealthy in its outlook on sovereignty and international policy? And overcoming that is part of his arc here?

[There’s one point in which Arthur even calls him ‘Loki’, which felt a bit too on-the-nose, considering how similar of a Plot this movie had to Thor: The Dark World.]

It is fun, though, I suppose. Maybe I’m working too hard to make Orm’s character arc into something it’s not.

I think that some people might be bothered by how the Plot heavily involves pollution and global warming? I don’t think it’s too much of a problem. Yes, it’s heavy-handed; however, this is exactly the sort of thing that Aquaman is supposed to care about. And it’s often pointed out as the source of conflict between Atlantis and the surface world. I don’t mind it being part of this movie.

The tone of this movie is pretty light, which I don’t think is bad, though at the same time I found myself thinking several times, “Well, they wouldn’t go that far, would they?” It means that the movie is loads of fun to watch, while at the same time the stakes don’t quite feel as real. There’s very little I was actually afraid of happening to the characters. YMMV on whether that hurts your experience too much.

There are still plenty of cool action scenes, too. I am always happy to see these guys fight with tridents, and towards the end there’s a duel between Aquaman and Manta that I really enjoyed. There are less massive battles, and giant sea monsters, which is a bit of a bummer, though there are still huge monsters, chase scenes, and jaunts through Atlantis.

There was a persistent rumor that Batman would be in this movie in some capacity. Following The Flash, and the rebooting of the DC universe, it flip-flopped between being Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck. As it turns out, no version of Batman appears in this movie, and honestly I can’t think of how he’d fit in, so it’s probably for the best.

I think this is a good movie, though not as good as the first one. It’s more fun than it is actually well-written, though I don’t think there’s anything bad in it. Maybe it’s hard to look at positively for some, as DC is throwing away this continuity; either way, that’s not this movie’s fault, and I had a good time watching it.

[hederasgarden]

Top Gun Maverick Observations

I saw Top Gun again this afternoon and I have many thoughts. The first time I saw the movie I wasn’t paying too much attention but today I had my fandom glasses on. 

So in no particular order I present my observations/musings/general thoughts.

Hangman’s slightly southern drawl and the fact that he addresses Penny as “My Dear.” I didn't realize he was meant to be southern the first time around, but now I am envisioning him coming from a prominent family in the south.

Headcanon - the drunker or more tired Hangman gets, the stronger his accent comes out. 

Possible fic idea - Hangman running for senator after he retires from the military. I got the idea after the admiral tells Maverick he should have been more than a captain by now and listed off senator as an option. Maybe it's a fake dating scenario where Hangman's campaign manager says he needs a wife/girlfriend to win and the reader gets convinced to play along for...reasons. Or maybe the reader is his chief of staff and they have a secret romance.

Phoenix and Rooster definitely made out while drunk before they realized they were better off as friends. Her knocking the cue into his stomach when she realizes he didn’t tell her he was stateside again, plus the way she checked in on him after that first dogfight with Mav shows they have a pretty deep friendship. 

Bob being the only one not drinking during the bar scene. It looks like he was holding a cup of water while eating peanuts. They were all over his pants when he stood up. 😂 He is so adorable. Send help.

Hangman being really good at darts! He made three bullseyes in a row, including one when Coyote covered his eyes. 

I enjoyed that we saw Mav get very emotional at least twice in this film. Tom Cruise tends to play these macho guys so seeing him cry and have those soft moments with Penny, Iceman and even Rooster was really nice. 

Even though Phoenix has known Bob for exactly 5 second she’s already taken him under her wing and grouped him in with Payback and Fanboy. She is like this is my baby and if you hurt him I will kill you. 

The fact that Rooster, Phoenix and Hangman (possibly Coyote?) all were in the same Top Gun class. I’m guessing Payback and Fanboy were assigned to the same carrier as Phoenix because she seems to know them pretty well but they didn’t know Hangman.

Bob calling Hagman Bagman after they get shot down in the first exercise and Phoenix’s little smirk. He also has a snappy comeback to Hangman when he is rude to Rooster later on. I love that. 

Just how stubborn of a character Rooster really is because he insists on doing the second set of pushups and breaks the hard deck to make Mav pull up before him so he can prove himself. 

I was worried I was making Hangman too cocky/antagonistic in a new fic I am working on, but the movie reminded me he really was such a cocky asshole.

The whole exchange between Mav and Rooster after they were shot down is hilarious. Side note, I thought pilots were supposed to carry sidearms. I didn't see Mav or Rooster with one.

[memryse]

many thoughts about Scar in Last Life

We all know Scar is one of the standouts of Last Life; he’s always been one of the key players ever since 3rd Life, driving conflicts and shaping the course of the server. His chaotic nature lends itself perfectly to 3rd/Last Life, and he seems to have only refined it in the hiatus between seasons.

In 3rd Life, Scar was more of a subjective villain. From his own perspective and Grian’s perspective, he wasn’t scary at all! The two of them were just having fun and causing problems – sure, they threatened people, but their dumb antics together made them just feel like two friends messing around; their POV was lighthearted until the final session, really. From other perspectives, however (particularly Dogwarts’ POVs), that was not how the two of them came across. They felt malicious, scary in how casually they approached such a bloodthirsty game. They’d laugh as they took lives, showing no care for anybody but themselves – they’d betray their allies in a heartbeat without an ounce of remorse, and the rest of the players knew it. Scar wasn’t someone to fear from his own POV.

Since Last Life began, however, Scar has become very openly malicious. Even watching his own POV, it’s hard to see him as anything but a villain – his own comment section is full of people commenting on how scary he suddenly seems. I want to expand on some of these villainous moments, because holy fuck, Scar.

In session 1, Scar is certainly a prominent figure, but we mostly get to see his classic silly Scar antics. Sure, he plans on “selling souls”, but it feels like the equivalent of his reputation points in S1. We still don’t get the sense of him going full villain arc yet. He allies with Joel and commits a crime, and we all expect another lighthearted Scar scam which definitely does not go to plan.

And that is what happened… sort of. He’s immediately caught by Scott and Pearl, etc etc etc. The two of them cheerfully agree a scheme to try and kill Jimmy, but that casual discussion of murder is as bad as they get.

Session 2, Scar is chosen as one of the two boogeymen, alongside Joel.

Things go decidedly not to plan immediately. The two of them had agreed last session to try and kill Jimmy, and were supposed to be trusting enough to tell each other if they’re the boogeyman – and yet what does Scar do? Immediately try and push Joel into lava. He’d betray Joel without a second thought – already a contrast to 3rdLife, where upon turning red Scar threw flowers at Grian and asked if they could still be friends. He doesn’t succeed, of course, and Scar and Joel realise they’re both boogeymen, before parting ways.

Scar heads to the nether, where he immediately decides to deceive Etho and Bdubs into thinking he’s weak and has no food, so that he can get close to them nonthreateningly or something. I’ll talk about this more later, but here we get to see what a good liar Scar actually is. People want to assume that he’s all bark and no bite, that he’s a schemer who poses no real threat – when Scar plays into this, he can be reallyconvincing.

The next big moment I want to talk about is, of course, Joel’s trap. The first thing to comment on here is that Scar cries “Joel, are you trying to kill your best buddy?!”, and I can’t work out whether this is Scar acting to diffuse suspicion, or genuine surprise that he’d pull the trap when Scar was right there, but either way it definitely has the former effect. None of the Southlanders suspect Scar in the slightest. Until Scar murders Mumbo in a matter of seconds.

What’s really horrifying about this is that Scar had been begging Mumbo to ally with him just last session. And yet here… not only does he go for Mumbo without hesitation, his reaction afterwards is downright chilling. He just laughs, and tells the others “Welcome to Magical Mountain!” – it’s really quite like a movie villain in how little he seems to care. He doesn’t actually say a word about killing Mumbo; again, despite having desperately wanted to ally with him. To Scar, this was nothing more than an opportunity. Or maybe it’s all a show to him. Maybe it’s both. Scar doesn’t actually care about winning this game – to him, it’s more fun to put on as good a show as possible, and drag as many people down with him as possible (which is definitely a “cc!Scar being a good entertainer” thing, but it translates very well into being a LL!Scar character trait too).

He then hands Joel some supplies, and with the exact same level of nonchalance, tells him to go burn Scott and Pearl’s house down. I’m… getting the sense he enjoyed burning down Etho’s castle in 3rdLife.

Not much of note happens during his subsequent conversation with the Southlanders beyond him failing an initiation spectacularly – after this, he heads back to Joel. They chat from opposite ends of a broken bridge, which is quite a poetic scene honestly, representing the gap between their lives, the destruction of their alliance, etc. I’m just here to talk about Scar’s villainous moments, though, so let me point out one specific line from this conversation.

“I did avenge you, to be fair - Mumbo, I burned him to death, which was enjoyable. I heard him cry, so it was- yeah, that was a thing.”

Just… what the fuck, Scar? What? I know he tried to push the “red lives are psychopathic and feel nothing except a small sense of happiness when people die” in 3rd Life, but this was definitely a lie or at least an exaggeration, because 3l!Scar definitely had a much wider range of emotions than that. Either way, here he doesn’t even have the excuse of being a red life; this is just active malice, pure and simple. Bdubs had a similar level of pride in his boogeyman kill, but I never got the sense that he enjoyed it like Scar did.

Scar goes off to visit Scott and Pearl, and figure out whether they have the enchanting table or not. Note the emphasis on simply figuring it out, not actually getting the enchanting table. Here’s where I want to talk about Scar being a great liar: he fully convinces them into thinking that he was willing to trade lives for the enchanting table, and then he convinces them that he’s so desperate to get the table that he’ll lie about Joel burning their house down. The thing is, Scar had no intention of ever getting the table at that moment – he wasn’t going to trade lives for it to begin with. He’d try his luck at threatening them, but nothing more. He got exactly what he wanted out of that situation: proof. Meanwhile, Scott and Pearl were left believing they’d outwitted him, that they’d called his bluff and bullied him into leaving. They never saw his true intentions, never saw him as an actual threat. Scar is much smarter than people believe, which only makes him all the more threatening.

And finally, he goes on to prove this intelligence even further. He figures out that Scott and Pearl planned to trade for the enchanting table simply by seeing Scott ask Lizzie if she’s home in chat. He then goes to visit Lizzie, and she tells him she declined their offer. What’s notable about this scene is how much less belligerent Scar is than usual: he readily accepts what Lizzie says for once in his life and leaves without being too annoying about it. He later talks about lulling the others into a false sense of security, letting them think he’s not after the enchanting table anymore; that makes me think his visit to Lizzie was purely to confirm that the offer was even made, and he’s now certain that she accepted it. It’s not hard to work out, especially if he noticed her life count.

So, all in all, if you’re not scared of Scar in Last Life, you most definitely should be.

Did I forget to mention he’s currently tied for the highest life count on the server?

[angelinthefire]

A few days after the firing range incident, Dean had introduced Cas to the magic of Putlocker. They sat next to each other on Dean’s bed, the heat from the laptop battery mixing with the heat from Cas’ thigh pressed against Dean’s. Dean angled the laptop screen towards Cas, letting him scroll though the titles. Problem was, Cas seemed to pick movies based entirely on how pretty he thought the posters were. After Dean gently steered him away from a number of films that prominently featured sunsets and women in old fashioned dresses, Dean decided to lay down the law.

“Look, Cas…” he started, but then came up short. There either weren’t words for what Dean wanted to say, or when he came close to finding them, they sounded kinda stupid. You’re not allowed to watch those kinds of movies? Cas was nothing if not a rebel, so that was sure to be a dead end. You’re a guy, and guys don’t go for that kind of stuff? Cas was already getting down on himself about his sudden lack of expertise in everything. Listening to music, watching movies was supposed to be the easy part of being human; so Dean wasn’t about to tell him he was doing that wrong too. If you don’t act right, you’ll let him down. They’ll see through you and then you’ll be nothing? Dean didn’t even know where that thought came from or what it meant, and he quickly shoved it to the back of his mind.

“I actually have a plan,” Dean ended up saying.

“A plan?”

“Yeah, like a curriculum,” Dean bullshitted. “Best movies of all time. Must-sees for any human.”

Cas nodded. “Well, you’ve been a great teacher so far.”

Dean could feel heat rising in his cheeks, and the corner of his mouth twitching up involuntarily.

“Where do we start?” Cas asked

“With the classics, of course,” Dean answered, and typed “A fistful of dollars” into the search bar.

Regarding this meme:

Pick any passage of 500 words or less from any fanfic I’ve written, and stick that selection in my ask/fan mail. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what’s going on in the character’s heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

About this fic: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30781544/chapters/75979019

The funny thing is that when I started writing Life Skills, and even after I posted chapter 1, I didn't conceptualize masculinity as The Issue of the fic. It was just An Issue, along with Dean’s general obliviousness. It wasn't until I got to the end of chapter 2 that I realized I had to make more of a thing out of Dean’s masculinity issues, so I went back and added this scene.

One thing that was fun about this fic was the sense of intimacy between Dean and Cas when they're hanging out, and finding ways to show their closeness. Like Dean pouring syrup all over Cas' food, or putting his hands all over Cas when he's teaching him pool. The thing about their thighs touching, and the heat from the laptop battery was one of those things.

About Dean's inner monologue -- the thing that makes this whole fic really work for me, is that Dean's hangups are so inwardly directed. Like, he's not coming down hard on Cas for Being A Man Wrong and Violating Man Rules. He's internalized all of it so much, he genuinely believes that it's vitally important to know How To Behave (and that belief is backed up by experience), and he takes that belief for granted. Everything he does is because he wants to help Cas. Like, he's just so genuinely sharing and teaching. It's the caretaker aspect of Dean's personality that comes through. And in the end, it's the desire to help Cas, that originally compelled him to teach Masculity to Cas, that compels him to disregard the demands of masculinity.

So yeah, that little internal monologue about needing to act right shows that. That Dean's not just unthinkingly perpetuating stereotypes or anything, his anxieties are deep-seated and significant. And he's motivated by good intentions.

And while Dean's having this inner tug of war, him and Cas are almost cuddling and smiling and blushing at each other, and I just love that vibe.

[shining-magically]

so I’ve wondered this since the trailer came out years and years ago and Chloe defended the movie - was the red shoes teaser written by the same team that made the movie? were they forced to market it like that, was that based on an earlier draft, etc?? not sure if you know but you seem like the leading expert!

Sorry, this is gonna be an absolute novel because you know I’m an animation fan and the history and production of Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs is SO interesting and insane. Like, Tangled levels of insane. Thanks for calling me an expert, no one else was gonna do it so I just kind of took up the helm lol.

Here’s the low-down... The timeline of the movie’s production is an absolute mess and kind of an extremely wild ride. It was in production for ten years, went through a lot of different crew members, and went through at least two other major versions of the story before landing on the final version.

Since there’s not a ton of info on the movie’s production, a lot of this is pieced together from different interviews and context clues, and also a lot of what I’ve read and what I am quoting has been translated from Korean, sometimes pretty roughly. But yeah.

Here’s the story of why the Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs teasers and poster were so, so bad and fatshame-y and the actual movie was so, so good and body-positive. (With pictures and production artwork!)

(This is a beast of a post so I’m putting it under a cut.)

All right, so. After its conception originally as a short story by the South Korean studio Locus Creative in 2009-2010-ish, Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs was being worked on and was set to come out in Summer 2017, as evidenced by this poster at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, featuring a different logo and very different character designs for most of the dwarfs.

In early-mid 2016, the first teaser (in which we see Snow White undress and then two dwarfs recoil in horror at her fatness when she takes her magic shoes off) was released, after the film had kind of been slowly chugging along for 6 or so years. (I am having such trouble pinpointing when the second teaser was released (in which one of the dwarfs basically attacks Snow while she is sleeping to steal her shoes), but I believe it was around the same time.) The teasers didn’t get that much traction because this was a small film from a small indie studio in South Korea.

None of the final actors had been cast yet. At this point in the production, the story was different, one of the many versions that the movie went through. As in the final movie, the dwarfs were actually cursed knights/princes and Snow White switched back and forth between two body types due to her magic shoes, but in this version, the dwarfs needed to steal the shoes from her in order to break their curse (rather than needing “a kiss from the most beautiful woman in the world” like in the final movie).

The weird thing is, I believe they had JUST changed the movie’s story when the teaser came out. I’m almost positive it was released more as a proof of concept than as an actual trailer for the movie. They had just recently combined two separate characters (seen above), a typical pretty, skinny princess character (Snow White) and a cute chubby girl character (’Bonnie’), into one single character that switches back and forth between the two appearances when she wears the magic shoes (also they had just dropped literally half of the movie taking place in the real world, with a magic mirror portal, it was a whole thing). 

They didn’t have the details of this aspect of the new story hammered out yet, and the first pass at presenting Snow’s magically changing body type, was, yeah, not good and super offensive. This was a really inexperienced indie studio making their first film on a low budget, so even the animation and voice acting wasn’t great. I think they just wanted to get SOMETHING out there because it had been 6 years and they wanted to have something to show for it.

But here’s the thing. Despite how the teasers make it seem, this was always supposed to be a movie about body positivity, letting go of appearance-based prejudices, and loving yourself and others for who you are and for who they are, which we see in the final film.

I like to think of our film as a kindhearted one. Our intentions are nice.

- Director Sung-ho Hong

It’s important to keep in mind that this movie was made in South Korea by a 99% Korean crew, and, as I understand it anyway, in Korean culture, ‘fatshaming’ is not really a thing that is seen as overtly offensive. Also, children’s media there seems to have more adult things in it than in the US, which probably accounts for the more risque parts of the teasers. That said, I really believe that at this point in the timeline, the movie was on-track to be bad (or at least not very good) when it was released, and it would have ended up bad IF a few key players hadn’t signed on (which I’ll get to in a moment).

Interestingly, the movie’s producer, Sujin Hwang, said in a 2017 interview:

“[Both teasers] were solely produced to induce curiosity. They’re completely irrelevant to the actual story.”

- Producer Sujin Hwang

I think what she was trying to convey was that neither one is a scene in the actual movie, because while the teasers didn’t reflect the revamped story as it existed in summer 2017 (the time of the interview), they DID reflect the earlier version of the story where the dwarfs wanted her shoes, which is what the story was at the time they were made.

Now that we’re in post-teaser 2016, HERE’S where things start to turn around. After the teasers were released, my guy Disney veteran and native Korean Jin Kim joined the project. He and Red Shoes director Sung-ho Hong had been buddies for about eight years and Sung-ho had been trying to get Jin to come to Seoul and work with him at Locus for a long time, and he finally succeeded.

Jin and his twenty years of Disney experience as an animator and senior designer on films like Tangled, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, and Moana, had a HUGE HUGE HUGE influence on the movie. He redesigned almost all the characters, oversaw all the visual development from the moment he signed on, and heavily (HEAVILY) supervised the animation, literally going frame-by-frame through preliminary animations and drawing over them, teaching the inexperienced animators at Locus everything he knew. (Literally almost everyone except him either only had TV experience or had no professional experience because they just gotten out of school.)

From an outsider’s perspective, it really seems as though Jin joining the project (and his gargantuan effort) made the quality SKYROCKET. Not just in character design and animation, but also in things like effects animation, story, etc. After he joined, Locus really started pushing HARD to make a good, high-quality movie, and his influence and experience from being a prominent figure at Disney was absolutely key. The studio also began to really study Disney films and other well-made animated films from other studios to really try and pinpoint what the DNA of a good animated movie really is.

I don’t have any solid evidence, but I’m pretty sure that Tony Bancroft (an animator and the co-director of Mulan) then joined the project because he’s good friends with Jin Kim. He is only credited as the voice director (the movie was recorded in English and the characters were animated to the English dialogue), but I am SURE that he probably also had a pretty big influence on the movie, because like... How could he not? I really really think there was more to his role than his title would have you believe, even though there’s almost no info out there about it.

So now the movie goes through a gigantic metamorphosis. Character designs, visual development, and animation quality are all rapidly improving, the story is tightening, and the themes of the movie (which, again, were always the same and intended to be positive) are being presented in a more sincere way. The movie is becoming the sweet, self-love-encouraging and body-positive movie that was eventually released.

I’m putting a gif from the credits of the final movie here. As we move into 2017, when the giant eruption of backlash occurred, please keep in mind that the story was finalized at this point and that THIS was the movie people were so mad about:

Chloe Grace Moretz accepted the role of Snow White immediately after she read the script and she recorded her lines (I think) in early-ish 2017. Her co-star Sam Claflin also immediately accepted the role of the romantic interest, Merlin, after reading the script and recorded his lines in (I believe) July 2017.

In the summer of 2017, the story and script were more or less the same as in the final movie. Promotional images from that time show that most of dwarfs had been completely redesigned by this point and didn’t have their teaser designs anymore.

They also released a few screenshots that look exactly like the final film. The movie was advertised as coming out in ‘2018′ at this point. Here’s a promo image from 2017 that is MUCH more tactfully worded than the infamous Cannes poster:

So now we’re in summer 2017. The Cannes Film Festival. The movie’s script and story have been basically nailed down, animation is underway, and the Korean film company Finecut is beginning to market and sell the movie to worldwide audiences. They are planning on showing some footage to potential buyers at the festival, and they make a poster to advertise the film there.

Unfortunately, it’s THIS POSTER:

Now here’s where there are some unknowns. By this point, the movie is basically in its final form, which is an adorable, body-positive story about loving people for who they are, loving yourself for who YOU are, and that provides commentary on society’s standards of beauty and how they affect how people are treated/viewed. So why this poster??? All I can really tell is that someone (I think Finecut) really, REALLY messed up and either horribly mistranslated the tagline, or didn’t do enough research to know that this kind of thing is REALLY NOT OKAY in western culture.

The above picture is shared and the internet backlash begins, fueled by tweets from prominent body-positivity activists like Tess Holliday. Even Chloe Grace Moretz speaks out against it, because she of all people KNOWS that that’s not what the movie is about. The internet then finds the old teasers from before the movie was revamped and it makes things worse. Producer Sujin Hwang profusely apologizes and says that that is NOT the message of the movie. Locus pulls the advertising campaign, and takes down the two old teasers.

“Our film, a family comedy, carries a message designed to challenge social prejudices related to standards of physical beauty in society by emphasizing the importance of inner beauty.”

- Producer Sujin Hwang

Voice director Tony Bancroft also tried to explain the situation:

“The truth is the film has a body-positive message as its core theme–it’s the opposite of what reports are saying. The problem is one poorly translated movie poster that has been taken dramatically out of context.” 

- Voice Director Tony Bancroft

And then... There was nothing for a while. The movie didn’t come out in 2018 and was delayed. From what I can tell, I DON’T believe this delay was related to the Cannes backlash. I think it was mostly due to Locus’s limited budget and resources, because as we know, animation is difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and easy to do badly but hard to do well. Also, probably with Jin Kim and Tony Bancroft’s influence, they REALLY wanted to make sure to do a good job with the animation because they now had a great story and they really wanted the movie to be a quality, worldwide hit that would kind of put South Korean feature animation on the map. Just take a look at how nice the final animation was:

The movie was released in South Korea on July 25th, 2019. Unfortunately, the damage was done in the English-speaking markets and it was not released to an English-speaking audience until June 22, 2020, when it was released digitally in the UK. At the time of this post, there is no set US release date, but the distribution rights were recently bought by Lionsgate and the MPAA gave the film an official PG rating.

So who’s to blame? There’s no good answer. You could blame Locus for making those old teasers. You could blame Finecut for the competely tonedeaf Cannes poster. You could even blame cancel culture for raging against the movie based on one poster and two old teaser trailers without researching what the movie was actually about.

All I know is, it’s a damn shame.

[imagineaworld]

mr & mrs smith | b.b

in which bucky and y/n go undercover

pairing: bucky barnes x reader, platonic/romantic undertones

word count: 2k

warnings: none

undercover missions were usually fun. coming up with a character and a backstory was something y/n enjoyed doing the night before the mission. this time, however, her character and story were already decided.

“you two,” tony stuck his head around the corner of the door into the common room and beckoned with his finger. “come with me.”

y/n shared a confused glance with bucky from across the room. they had both been sat on opposite sides of the common room, bucky reclined on an armchair, head in a book, and y/n sat in the windowsill, her head also buried in a book. 

shrugging, y/n headed after tony, bucky following suit, wondering whether they were in trouble or not. when they got to tony’s office, bucky took a seat next to y/n, bouncing his leg up and down unconsciously.

y/n put a hand on his leg. “it’s alright,” she said, flashing a reassuring smile.

bucky smiled back, awkwardly patting y/n’s hand as it rested on his leg. he never knew how to respond to physical affection.

“alright you two,” tony chucked a file across the desk to them. y/n took her hand off bucky’s leg to read through it. “got an undercover mission for you. this time, i decided your aliases.”

“what?” y/n complained. “that’s no fun.”

“quite the opposite,” tony said. “you two are in the honeymoon suite.

bucky choked in surprise. y/n’s jaw dropped.

the two weren’t the best of friends, but they weren’t enemies either. y/n was always kind to bucky, and very physical in her affection. on multiple occasions, when going to bed, she would hug everyone good night, including bucky if he was in the room. bucky tried not to think of it personally, she did it with everyone of course. but sometimes it was the only physical affection he got for days. 

“you couldn’t have picked someone more compatible? like bruce and nat?” y/n suggested.

“vision and wanda?” bucky chimed in. the thought of going on a mission with y/n made him nervous, because she made him nervous.

tony shook his head. “has to be you two. this mission requires a particular skill set. you spend the night in the honeymoon suite, plant some bugs, secret cameras, y’know?”

“why?” y/n asked.

“after you two check out, a prominent member of a terrorist organisation will check in with his equally prominent new wife. see what information you can get, hm?”

-

y/n chucked her suitcase into the trunk of the loan car. “i’m driving,” she announced.

“why you?” bucky asked, leaning against the car, dressed in dark jeans, a plain t-shirt and a zip-up hoodie to cover the majority of his metal arm.

“you’re an old man. plus you don’t have an actual licence.”

bucky protested as y/n climbed into the driver’s seat, starting the engine. grumbling to himself, he got into the passenger seat. “here you go,” he said, handing her a gold ring. “goes on your left hand.”

“yeah, i know,” y/n muttered, slipping the ring on her finger. she held her hand out, admiring the wedding band. bucky put his hand next to hers, wearing a matching band. “i always thought if i was marrying a hundred-year-old man, he’d be my sugar daddy.”

“i can buy you a coffee at starbucks,” bucky offered.

y/n chuckled. “you know what? i’ll take it.”

bucky watched y/n from the passenger side as she drove. the pair drove for an hour until they passed the nearest starbucks, where bucky bought them both a latte and a pastry for the rest of the journey. another half an hour and they arrived at the grand hotel tony had booked for them. 

they each grabbed their suitcase from the trunk. “okay, metal man,” y/n murmured. “keep your left arm hidden behind my back.”

“no shit, captain obvious.” y/n elbowed him in the side. “yeah, that’s exactly how a newlywed couple would act,” he said sarcastically. 

“okay, newlyweds starting now.”

the two walked into the hotel, suitcases in tow. bucky’s metal hand was on the small of y/n’s back, hidden from the view of the receptionist as the two of them checked in. for him, it felt strange to be touching her like that, but y/n showed no signs of even acknowledging it.

“hi,” y/n greeted sweetly, in a voice bucky had never heard before. “we’ve booked the honeymoon suite.”

the receptionist typed something into the computer. “mr and mrs smith?” she asked. bucky and y/n nodded, fake smiles plastered on their faces. “third floor, let me just get your room key,” she headed into the backroom.

“mr and mrs smith?” bucky whispered.

y/n rolled her eyes. “must have been tony’s idea of a joke,” she whispered back.

“i don’t get it.”

“never mind.”

the receptionist had returned, handing y/n a room key. “enjoy your stay,” she smiled.

“thank you,” bucky and y/n said at the same time, heading up to their room.

-

inside the honeymoon suite was beautiful. there was an expensive-looking chandelier in the middle of the ceiling, gorgeous floral wallpaper adorning the walls. on the walls also hung beautiful paintings and embellished mirrors. at the back of the room, there was a huge, decorated bed. just one.

“there’s only one bed,” bucky pointed out.

of course, there was only one bed, it’s the honeymoon suite. bucky hadn’t thought of this. 

y/n abandoned her suitcase and flopped down on the massive bed. “it’s a movie.”

“what’s a movie?” bucky asked as he sat awkwardly on the edge of the bed beside y/n.

“mr and mrs smith,” she explained. “angelina jolie and brad pitt play a husband and wife who are both assassins, but neither knows about the other because they work for different agencies. until they get assigned to kill each other.”

bucky chuckled. “sounds good, actually.”

in the golden light reflecting off the ornately carved, brushed-gold headboard, y/n looked ethereal. bucky took in her exquisite facial structure, the way her hair splayed across the pillow where she had laid, how her eyelashes fluttered against her cheeks as she closed her eyes.

“about the bed situation,” y/n said, snapping bucky back to reality as she opened her eyes to look at him. “you mind sharing? it’s pretty big and i don’t take up much space.”

bucky just shrugged, not really sure what to say.

“it’s okay if you don’t want to, you can tell me,” y/n reassured.

“no, it’s fine, honestly,” bucky replied, not entirely convincingly.

y/n got up from the bed, picked up her suitcase and opened it on the bed. she rummaged around underneath a bunch of microphones and cameras to pull out a bikini. looks like we’re filming a porno, bucky heard her mumble under her breath.

“i’m heading to the pool, wanna come?” y/n asked, disappearing into the bathroom, leaving the door slightly ajar.

bucky tapped his metal arm. “can’t.” 

when y/n came out of the bathroom, she had on a simple black bikini. she threw on an oversized shirt, grabbed her towel and her book. “alright, i won’t be too long,” she said, heading out the door.

-

happy to have some time to himself, bucky made his way out onto the balcony, taking a seat in a sun-lounger and started reading his book. it took him a while to get the image of y/n in her bikini out of his head, but eventually, he managed to focus on his book. in the midday heat, he slipped his t-shirt off over his head, shirtless in the sun.

he had been so lost in his book that he hadn’t heard y/n come back, or realised how much time had passed.

“whatcha reading?” y/n asked, surprising bucky. she was sat on the sun-lounger on the other side of the balcony, her shirt also discarded on the floor like buckys.

“i didn’t hear you come in,” bucky murmured.

“that’s the point,” y/n shrugged, opening up her book.

“to kill a mockingbird,” bucky answered her question. “saw it on a list of ‘ten books everyone should read’. have you read it?”

“yeah,” y/n used her hand to shield her eyes from the sun as she looked at bucky. “i really liked it. you enjoying it?”

“so far,” he said.

y/n diverted her attention back to her book, but bucky found it difficult to do the same. y/n’s body was exposed, leaving little to the imagination. bucky wasn’t yet used to the new way women dressed nowadays. he most certainly wasn’t complaining though. her hair was damp, slicked back and trickling droplets across her bronzed skin. her face was makeup-free, glowing in the sunlight. her long legs...

“what?” y/n asked, noticing bucky staring at her.

his cheeks flushed as he mumbled, “nothing.”

“i can cover up if it makes you more comfortable?” she offered, not unkindly.

“no, it’s fine,” he spoke louder now. “i think it’s great that women can wear whatever they want now.”

“you sure?” she checked.

bucky cleared his throat, closing his book. “yeah. i’m gonna take a cool shower now anyway, too hot.”

he headed inside, leaving y/n in her bikini on the balcony. 

-

by late evening, y/n and bucky had ordered room service for dinner and were now sat opposite each other on the humungous ornate couches. between them was a glass coffee table, holding two glasses of red wine. bucky was already on his second glass.

"so," y/n said, making conversation. "you think nat and bruce will ever make it official?"

bucky looked confused. "is it not already official?"

y/n shook her head. "nat talks my ear off about it, how she's not sure if she should make the first move or wait for him to." 

y/n wore a pink silk pyjama shirt and matching shorts, exposing her long legs, which she crossed in front of her as she sat. she took a large gulp of wine and carefully topped up her glass. bucky wore dark sweatpants and a dark t-shirt.

“why don’t you have a boyfriend?” he asked, the wine giving him an edge.

y/n looked slightly amused. “what?” 

“why don’t you have a boyfriend? or girlfriend?” he added.

“i guess i haven’t found the right person,” y/n shrugged.

he contemplated this for a moment. “so, are you...” bucky cut himself off. “never mind. none of my business.”

y/n knew exactly what he was going to ask. “a virgin? no, i’m not. you?”

“no.”

“i didn’t think so,” y/n said with a smile.

bucky frowned. “what’s that supposed to mean?”

“well, have you looked in the mirror? you’re not exactly ugly,” she said with a laugh.

bucky wasn't sure how to interpret that. he wasn't used to compliments, nor was he used to speaking so openly about sex. did that mean y/n thought he was good-looking? perhaps he hadn't been mistaken all those times he thought y/n hugged him just a bit longer than everyone else.

he didn't say anything, just poured himself some more wine. 

"why don't you have a girlfriend? or boyfriend?" y/n threw bucky's question back to him.

bucky thought for a while. he hadn't really thought about having a relationship. he didn't think anyone would want to be with someone with as much baggage as he has. but he didn't want to share that with y/n. "haven't exactly figured out this modern dating," he said, taking a sip of wine. "don't like the idea of going on a date with someone i haven't even met." 

"i tried it once," y/n confided. "nat dared me, a few weeks ago. didn't go very well." 

bucky raised his eyebrows. "why not?"

"men are pigs," y/n shrugged, not wanting to go into much more detail.

perhaps she wasn't interested in bucky then like he had thought for a second there. ask now, he thought, while its the topic of conversation.

"there's got to be someone you like though?" he asked.

he watched her shoulders rise and fall as she sighed, contemplating. "it's not a priority for me, i guess. if i find someone, cool. but i'm not looking. i think love just happens sometimes, you can't always look for it."

"i'm sorry your date didn't go well," bucky spoke lowly. "anyone would be lucky to have you."

y/n chuckled. "you think?"

"i do."

"you're real sweet, you know that?" y/n smiled softly at bucky. "anyone would be lucky to have you, too.”

[makkarisbelova]

ok I got around to the cinema tonight and can now do a full review so THOR: LOVE & THUNDER SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT!!

first off, let me just say: TAIKA. MOTHERFUCKING. WAITITI. this man has done so much for the Thor movies and has really brought so much richness and colour into the MCU. this movie was equal parts funny and emotional and I had such a blast watching it!!!

I’ve seen a few people say that it doesn’t feel like a cohesive movie narratively and to that I’d say I disagree completely; it’s just not as cohesive within the larger story of the MCU. Personally, I don’t think that takes away from the movie at all!! I never felt like there was something missing, it does a good job at being a very solid standalone movie. Thor as a character has always thrived in his solo movies far more than in the big plans of the MCU, I find. When he gets tossed into a group setting such as the Avengers, he ends up becoming more like the butt of the joke (hence, the offensive fat Thor bit they had in Endgame). I find here, in his solo movies, they maintain that himbo energy while also letting him have depth and be serious when necessary.

There are a few other smaller things to cover before the next big things I want to discuss, such as the POST CREDITS SCENEEEE. As a Ted Lasso super fan, seeing Brett Goldstein as Hercules a) made me scream in my seat, and b) makes SO MUCH SENSE. He’s here, he’s there, he’s every-fucking-where, and Mr. Roy Kent has a growl and bark to him that makes his energy so perfect. AMAZING CASTING!! And now that Cristo Fernandez AKA Dani Rojas was a bartender in the end credit for Spiderman NWH, the Ted Lasso -> MCU pipeline has been created and can only get stronger from here! My heart is bursting at the seams!! Also, round of applause to the screaming goats because that never failed to make me laugh. And no, I’m not just saying that because it was inspired by the Taylor Swift goat parody of I Knew You Were Trouble. And finally, I’d like to shout out Taika for making me fall back in love with Thor and Janes as a couple because this is the movie that really gave us the dynamic and love between them that the others never could. Here, they felt real and earnest and truly connected. The chemistry with Chris and Natalie was very solid and I can’t believe I’m saying this but I’m going to miss their relationship a lot!

Now let’s talk about the next big thing: the queer rep. This is where a lot of people are divided, with some saying it was super gay and some saying the representation was underwhelming and disappointing for something that was “marketed as a super gay film”. However, I’m not sure I agree with either of those statements. Was it super gay? No, not at all. There were definitely some much appreciated confirmations of queerness with more than one character I suppose, but none of it felt worthy of it being marketed as extremely gay. That being said, there is a difference between Taika and Tessa calling it super gay and it being specifically marketed as super gay. At no point in any of the interviews or promos did they promise deep and prominent queer exploration. It’s also worth noting that Disney has a lot of control over the story, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Taika had wanted to make it even gayer and the higher-ups had said no. Also keep in mind that there WAS allegedly a version of this movie where Valkyrie’s whole storyline was romantic and she had a love interest, but Tessa didn’t want love to be the center of Valkyrie’s story and wanted a different route, so they rolled with it. So overall, the movie didn’t contain as much queer content as I had anticipated, but I don’t think it was a baiting attempt or a downside to the movie in any way. We got what we got, and even though it wasn’t a gay extravaganza, what we got was very solid.

The part of this movie that shines the most though has to be Christian Bale as Gorr. Not only was he completely fucking terrifying, but he was also, at the same time somehow, a villain I could sympathize with much more than Thanos. This movie was all about love and loss and how they intertwine, and Gorr reflects that just as much as Thor does, though in their separate ways. And let’s just take a minute to appreciate the differences between Gorr and Thanos because!!! hello!!! Thanos kills his own daughter for a goal of his that is purely economic/practical (in his mind) whereas Gorr literally makes a vow to kill every single god in existence just because his god didn’t save his daughter!! That is so beautiful!! And to think that I was more scared of Gorr than I ever was of Thanos, and yet still simultaneously more moved by Gorr. And in the end, he HAS to do the right thing!! His motivations and beliefs REQUIRE it!! If he had used his wish to kill all the gods when he could have used it to bring his daughter back, he would have been willfully refusing to save her and would therefore have been a hypocrite and just like the gods themselves. This movie did a fantastic job of answering the question: what happens when a villain’s motivation is, truly and without falter, love?

Overall, when looking at the bigger picture of the MCU, this movie does not contribute much and probably isn’t the best of the best. But I think I like it better that way??? It’s a movie that shines beautifully on its own, whereas something like Dr Strange MOM (even though it also found its strength in the director’s strong stylistic tone coming through) had its faults even if you did look at it as a standalone movie, which is why this one is just so much more enjoyable. I would rate this movie a solid 8.7/10

[immaturityofthomasastruc]

IOTA Reviews: Truth

Hey. Hey guys. Remember when I said I was feeling optimistic about this season? God, that was funny, wasn't it?

Let's just... Let's just get into the actual first episode of Miraculous Ladybug's fourth season: Truth.

We start off with Gabriel repairing the damaged Peacock Miraculous, which also restores Duusu's sanity, before he quickly gives it a test run by transforming with both it and the Butterfly Miraculous.

And good lord, the result looks atrocious. This is the design for the new and improved Hawkmoth? First off, the peacock feather eyepatch looks stupid. Is he trying to be the Phantom of the Opera? When Mayura had the same thing, it didn't completely cover her eye and matched her color scheme. It just doesn't match with this new design here. Other than the feather, the peacock aesthetic is barely visible here. The most we get is a peacock feather pattern on the back of his jacket. And then there's the popped collar and coattails, which only look more ridiculous than menacing. What made the original Hawkmoth design work was how sleek it was. It was simplistic, which reflected Gabriel's no-nonense personality. This just looks gaudy and unnecessary. How was this right after the amazing suit the animators gave Dragonbug?

So after Gabriel designs another stupid looking outfit, we cut to Marinette, who's still trying to figure out how the Miracle Ball works. She accidentally opens it, letting the Kwamis out, who wreak havoc on her room because Marinette suffering is going to be a big part of this episode. This just raises the question: Why can't Marinette simply order them back into the box like Su-Han did, or rather, is going to do? It's still not established what gives the Guardians authority over the Kwamis in the first place.

Two of the Kwamis accidentally start a video chat with her friends, leading to some more Unfunny Marinette Slapstick. But Alya thinks something's up with her friend.

Has Marinette even told Alya she's already in a relationship? Like, at all? It feels like all Alya is there for now is to remind the audience that Marinette and Adrien are “meant to be”, even if they're both in relationships right now. It's either that, or teasing Marinette over her crush and doing nothing to help her anxiety.

Marinette accidentally ends the call, before Luka calls to thank her for the pictures of Adrien one of the Kwamis accidentally sent him. Yeah, even though he barely appears in this episode (barring his scenes at Cat Noir), they're going to talk about Adrien a lot. Marinette continues to stammer around Luka (once again making fun of people who have speech issues), but Luka, being the ray of sunshine in any abysmal episode he's in, is completely understanding of it. He also sets up a pretty funny joke.

Apparently, Marinette missed her last date with Luka yesterday to see a movie that was re-released, Crocodile Heart, that was actually Jagged Stone's first movie. I wonder if it's connected to Crocodile Dundee.

While walking to the movie, Luka and Marinette play a game finishing the lyrics of a Jagged Stone song, establishing the former as a huge fan of the rock star. Before we can actually get an on-screen kiss for Lukanette, Mr. Pigeon attacks yet again, because I guess he's the first villain Hawkmoth wants to use in his new form.

Cat Noir sneaks up on Ladybug, causing her to accidentally throw him off a building before catching him, chastising him for the stupid jokes, yet Ladybug has to apologize for missing patrol with her partner, who casually acknowledges her new status as Guardian before the two go and fight Mr. Pigeon.

By the time they defeat him, the movie ends as Marinette gets back, disappointing Luka. We then get a montage of Marinette bailing on Luka multiple times to stop Akumas and Sentimonsters. To his credit, Luka is seriously torn up by all the times Marinette leaves him, showing he isn't just a calm soul.

After Marinette gets back, Luka takes her underneath a bridge to listen to the echoing sound of the water. Luka says that he never knew his father, and he would always go here to relax whenever he got stressed. He uses this to segue into asking Marinette where she constantly disappears to. He doesn't pressure her or anything like Alya, and he even says that if she still loves Adrien, he'll understand. He only asks for the truth. Unfortunately, Marinette can't tell him the truth, which just breaks the poor boy's heart.

Hawkmoth, now calling himself Shadowmoth, sends out an Akuma and an Amok for Luka at the same time, corrupting a guitar pick signed by Jagged Stone that Marinette gave him. And again, to Luka's credit, he fights back against Shadowmoth's influence at first, saying he trusts Marinette, but the temptation of knowing the truth is too good to pass up. He tells Marinette to run before being akumatized into Truth, assisted by the Sentimonster Pharro.

Truth's design is... pretty forgettable. The guitar pick being prominent around his neck is a nice touch, but it's just a generic black bodysuit with light blue highlights, and he has a third eye instead of a visible mouth. Pharro is also pretty boring, just a giant eye that freezes people in place so Truth can use his powers to make them tell the truth.

So Truth goes back to where everyone else was hanging out before he was akumatized and asks Alya to tell him the truth about Marinette.

Yeah, he's right, Alya. That's what you believe. We're supposed to treat Alya saying Marinette loves Adrien as an unbiased source. Truth asks Rose, Mylene, Tom, and Sabine what Marinette's secret is in this episode, and they all say she's in love with Adrien. That isn't actually the truth. It's like asking an atheist if there is a God. You know what they believe is the truth, but you don't know if that answer is actually the truth. Why not have them reveal other secrets about Marinette, giving the audience subtle character details? Like the writers could make someone say stuff like she still sleeps with a nightlight on, or that she secretly gets cookies from another bakery.

You know what also would have worked? Instead, have Truth catch Marinette before she transforms into Ladybug, ask who she actually loved, and then she'll blurt out Adrien's name, shocking both her and Luka. This could also make Ladybug's confidence in herself waver throughout the episode, wondering if she actually loved Luka at all. That would have been much better drama than what we're going to get instead.

Ladybug charges in to stop Truth, but is zapped by his truth ray, meaning she'll be forced to tell the truth when asked any question. Before she can admit her identity, Cat Noir saves her by retreating with her into the Seine, before reassuring Ladybug that he wouldn't force her to tell the truth by force. It's a nice bit that does show he respects Ladybug's secret, a far cry from his behavior in episodes like “Syren” and “Frozer”. Truth turns his attention to his mother Anarka, and asks who his father is.

Yes. Seriously. This is happening. Luka's father is actually Jagged Stone. I have... mixed feelings regarding this development, but my biggest question is, well... they're doing this now? They couldn't save this for another episode? I mean, was focusing on Luka and Marinette's relationship (something that had been established since Season 2) not good enough of a plot for the writers? Why shoehorn in this plot development? Why not save this part as a teaser for a future episode? You know, have Luka walk home, and remember what he made his mother say as Truth, setting up an episode focusing on his relationship with Jagged Stone.

But no! Instead, we're just supposed to go along with the plot taking a detour. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I don't want Jagged Stone to appear in this episode.

Truth heads over to the hotel where Jagged Stone lives and asks him if he's actually his father, the latter admitting that Anarka was right. Truth naturally isn't happy.

Well, to be fair, it's still a better title than his first drafts, like “It's Not My Fault the Condom Broke”, or “Up Yours, I'm Not Paying the Child Support, Bitch”.

Honestly, I can get what the writers are going for, and I like the idea of them trying to give some depth to a character who was mostly used for comic relief in earlier episodes. The problem is, as much as they want to portray Jagged as regretful for walking out on his family, it still doesn't excuse him for never even bothering to check in on his children and their mother while writing a song about it. He doesn't even bother to give some money to the person he knocked up.

I'm not saying a conflicted relationship like this can't work in animation (a decent example being Steven Universe slowly growing to resent his mother for her time as Pink Diamond and believing his birth was an excuse for her to avoid responsibility), but you need to put more emotion into this. I don't come from a broken home, but if it turned out my dad was, let's say, “Weird Al” Yankovic, even if I enjoy his music, I wouldn't be happy that he decided to come back now of all times without so much as a “hello”.

Truth goes to Marinette's house/bakery, and starts looking for Marinette's diary to find out her secrets. It's almost like the minor plotline that he has a deadbeat dad was only there to eat up airtime. Ladybug is still affected by Truth's powers, and not long after she summons her Lucky Charm, Cat Noir is zapped too, so he starts asking questions that basically amount to complimenting certain qualities he and Ladybug have. When Ladybug asks him what he thinks about her being Guardian, Cat Noir says nothing's changed between them. It's a nice strategy, very reminiscent of when they had to talk in rhyme when fighting Frightengale. I'm also glad they aren't trying to play up Cat Noir not feeling as important immediately now that his partner has access to top secret information.

Cat Noir Cataclysms Pharro, but rather than destroying the Sentimonster, it causes it to go out of control, accidentally paralyzing Truth with some manipulation from her and Cat Noir. Ladybug then de-evilizes both the Akuma and Amok, defeating Truth.

Marinette struggles to find the words to explain things to Luka, but he says that he'll be waiting for her when she's ready. While walking back to his houseboat, Luka runs into Jagged Stone, who promises to write a song together with him. Because I guess Shadowmoth was kind enough of him to not erase that part of his memory. And of course, Luka just accepts this despite the fact that Jagged was absent from his entire life.

So according to this show, you shouldn't bother to give mean people a second chance, but it's okay to give your deadbeat dad a second chance without harboring any negative feelings? I'm sorry, but I just don't see the point of shoving in this subplot if you're barely going to do anything with it before coming to a resolution. If there was more detail put into it, like if Luka just angrily lashed out at Jagged for abandoning his mom, I would have been more open to it. But in the end, this major character revelation is nothing more than filler the episode doesn't need.

We cut to what I'm surprised doesn't happen at the end of every episode given how much crap she gets, Marinette crying in her bed, saying it's too dangerous to have a boyfriend thanks to Shadowmoth. One of the Kwamis apparently doesn't know what crying is, so Marinette asks them to give her a hug, and the showrunners really need to find another song to play at the end, because the upbeat song playing doesn't go with Marinette crying at all. Imagine if this song played at the end of Deep Space Nine's “In the Pale Moonlight” when Captain Sisko confessed to basically being an accessory to the murder of an alien ambassador. It'd be tonally jarring, wouldn't it?

Even the ending image doesn't feature Luka and Marinette together. Instead, he's hugging it out with Deadbeat Stone like everything's okay.

So yeah, that's how the episode ends. In case you couldn't tell, I thought it was awful.

Remember in my New York Special review, where I theorized that Astruc rewrote it to focus more on Adrienette to stop people from shipping Lukanette? I have another theory that I also want to be taken with a grain of salt. I think this episode might have also been rewritten a little to follow up on that. I mean, why else would Astruc spend two seasons building up Luka's relationship with Marinette only to rip it away the episode after they officially get together? It would also explain why it feels like there's two separate episodes going on with how shoehorned in Jagged Stone is.

But other than that, this episode managed to screw up the one thing I was actually looking forward to about this season, seeing Marinette together with Luka. Even if they were going to break up, I was hoping there would at least be a character arc for Marinette where she realizes what she truly wants in a relationship isn't with Luka, leading into a relationship with Adrien where she feels more confident in herself. I was at least hoping their relationship would last more than A SINGLE EPISODE.

In fact, remember that tweet Astruc made soon after the New York Special, defending Marinette and Adrien essentially cheating on Luka and Kagami respectively?

What exactly was so complicated about Season 4 when you're immediately going to break up a couple you spent two seasons building up? Astruc's predictions are about as accurate as Uri Geller.

And then there's the fact that all everyone talks about this episode is Adrien. Marinette's wall is covered with pictures of him, Alya thinks her friend's abnormal behavior is because Adrien's in the room with her, Luka somehow knows Marinette loves Adrien and is actually cool with it, and everyone else thinks that it's her biggest secret. How convenient is it that all of this happens when barring his scenes as Cat Noir, Adrien doesn't appear in this episode barring a five second cameo?

When I was writing this episode, I saw a tweet Astruc made addressing a question someone posed, asking why Adrien didn't get as much screentime in the recent Shanghai Special. He said that “history does not revolve around him”.

For the love of God, writers, just give Marinette a plotline that doesn't revolve around her feelings for Adrien for once. People already started to get sick of it halfway through last season. Either have her confess and make the Love Square canon, or stop letting it dominate the main story for once. Why can't the writers just let her move on from Adrien for more than a single episode? Give her a goddamn break already.

I once again have to ask: what was the point of building up a relationship between Luka and Marinette since Season 2, if you're just going to break them up the second they get together? Why make a big deal about Marinette's conflicted feelings for both Adrien and Luka if you're just going to ignore her feelings for the latter in favor of the former? And remember, chronologically, this was right after the end of Chloe's “damnation arc”, another plotline that had been built up since Season 2 only to be aborted in favor of “sUbVeRtInG tHe AuDiEnCe'S eXpEcTaTiOnS”. It feels like the writers are trying to punish people for getting emotionally invested in any storyline that doesn't relate to the holy pairing that is the Love Square.

This episode is just frustrating to watch. Part of me knew Marinette and Luka were going to break up, but I didn't think it would be this bad, and it would be so soon. I'm glad they're on somewhat good terms, and I liked the buildup to Luka realizing Marinette might not trust him, but the timing of this episode is what baffles me the most. Is it any wonder I think Astruc may have rewritten this episode?

If any Lukanette shippers need to recover, I'd recommend checking out @mc-lukanette​. They have some wholesome one-shots and fix-it fics for some of the weaker episodes of the series. In fact, she already wrote a fix-it to this abysmal episode that’s so much better than what we got.

[hermannsthumb]

As per our convo, Newt getting set up with Hermann via Hermann’s father’s binder full of pre-approved suitors for his son...

(from @k-sci-janitor 👀) easily one of our funniest concepts yet. I was going to end on newt coming over for dinner scenario but I like the ominous open ending. I'm not actually sure when kaiju attacks fall in the PR timeline so excuse my handwaveyness, LOL

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

Hermann’s relationship with his father is what one would call strenuous at best, but—Hermann must admit, to the man’s credit, and in spite of his many flaws—he took the news of Hermann’s sexual orientation as unflinchingly as if Hermann had told him the day’s weather. It was a bit annoying, in fact. Hermann had agonized over the proper way to breach the subject for months, certain it spoke to some sort of personal ruin (whether ostracization from the Gottliebs or being forbade following through on any attraction he may feel whilst still living under the family roof, he wasn't sure), before finally simply announcing it one day at the breakfast table on a whim.

It had been a long-standing tradition that Hermann’s parents compile a binder—effectively of dossiers—on all the most eligible bachelors (for their daughter) and bachelorettes (for their sons) to aid in the choice of the latest Gottlieb mate. It was easiest this way, or so Hermann and his siblings were told. Parental approval was already secured. The histories of each were already secured, which bypassed any nasty shocks that might emerge in the courtship stage. Most of them were children of his father's colleagues or bright minds in their own rights: surgeons, and dentists, and mathematicians. Poets were strictly forbidden.

The occasion of Hermann’s breakfast table announcement had also been the day Hermann’s father presented him with his very first binder of prospective mates—a few days after his eighteenth birthday, and shortly before he was to go off to begin work on his PhD. His father had slid him a hand-written binder of names, no more than a dozen, and all with accompanying photographs. “All are accomplished young women,” he assured Hermann. “We can arrange any meetings of your choice over your winter holidays.”

Hermann glared down at the row of frozen smiles. He stabbed his fork into his cooked tomato wedge. “I don’t want to marry any of these women,” he said, and turned his glare on his father. He still had a rebellious streak in him at that point, something nurtured by a charismatic young man he used to trail after in boarding school, who pierced Hermann’s ear with a sewing needle in the boys’ toilets and listened to songs about setting things on fire. In late this streak had manifested itself in Hermann in nicking packets of cigarettes from his father’s study, one of which was in his pocket now. The weight of it made Hermann feel bolder. “I don’t want to marry any woman,” he continued. “I like men.”

The binder was drawn away in silence, and Hermann was free to eat his toast and tomatoes. The next morning a binder of young men was in its place.

(In a way the acceptance infuriated Hermann. It meant he could not blame his father’s obvious dislike for him on an unfounded, homophobic prejudice; rather, it was a result of Hermann’s own personal failings.)

The binder was placed at Hermann’s breakfast plate every day until he left for his studies. It was placed at his plate when he returned from them five years later. Not even the emergence of the kaiju from the bottom of the ocean shortly after Hermann turned twenty-four dampened his father’s hopes, nor turning all their scientific efforts towards the new jaeger program: some names were removed from the binder (the reasoning Hermann shudders to think at), more still were added, though Hermann is expected only to consider it once a week now on account of his busy schedule. This was one of such days.

“Your brother is very happy with his wife,” Hermann’s father reminds him. “She was one of my first suggestions for him, in fact.”

Hermann is not fond of his sister-in-law. Too rude—too cold. Though perhaps that makes her perfect for Hermann’s brother. “Haven’t we got bigger things to worry about these days than whether or not I’m going to marry?” Hermann says. He adds milk to his tea. “I’m sure they’re all, er, marvelous selections, only—”

“Your sister, too, with her husband,” father says.

Hermann sighs. He hasn’t got much of the rebellious streak he used to in him anymore—too stressed. Not fancying a fight before they’ve even begun today’s coding work, he picks up the binder and begins flipping through it. Sons of engineers working on the jaeger program with them, prominent young chemists, many of whom Hermann has been presented with since he was eighteen. Plenty of them are even handsome. Half of Hermann wonders if he should just pick the least-unappealing one of the bunch and be done with it already. He turns the page over and freezes. “Oh,” he says. “This one is—new.”

“Hm?” father says.

Hermann holds up the binder, tapping at a new entry. “Newton Geiszler.”

“Dr. Geiszler,” father says, nodding. “A child prodigy from Berlin—he’s made tremendous strides in kaiju science in such little time. And,” he adds, “three PhDs. Two of them before he even turned twenty.” The unspoken implication was that Dr. Geiszler far surpassed Hermann in intelligence and Hermann should feel ashamed for not skipping as many grades as Dr. Geiszler.

Hermann feels he ought to resent Dr. Geiszler for it, but he's finding it difficult to summon up any animosity towards him. It's likely because Hermann finds Dr. Geiszler to be strikingly handsome in his photograph: cheeks which haven’t quite lost their baby fat (giving him the appearance of being a scruffy hamster), large, thick glasses, tousled hair, an easy grin. Three PhDs, and German at that. And a child prodigy? “I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned him to me before,” Hermann says. He seems precisely the sort father would. Geiszler’s photograph is black-and-white and a bit grainy, but Hermann swears he could make out the lightest bit of freckles across his cheeks.

“I’d not heard of him until he published an article last week on kaiju biology,” father says. “Besides—he’s moved to America.”

Geiszler has three piercings up the side of his left ear. “I am going to write to him,” Hermann declares.

Father nods, and picks up his newspaper, clearly already disinterested. They speak no more of it that day.

It is not hard to find Dr. Geiszler online (his name is not the most common, and his field of study certainly isn’t), nor is it hard to match his photograph to his faculty page on MIT’s website. From there, Hermann retrieves Dr. Geiszler’s email address. He takes the evening to read over Geiszler’s publications spanning back to 2003 before he gathers up the courage to type out an actual email.

Dear Dr. Geiszler,

You do not know me, but I have recently been made acquaintance with your work and find it—Hermann pauses—scintillating. My father and I are—Hermann backspaces this—I am currently working on the development of the jaeger program…

There’s a response waiting for him the next morning. It’s as enthusiastic as it is brief. Dr. Gottlieb- That’s so awesome!! Believe it or not I’ve been following your work too. I have a million questions for you about the jaegers. If it’s classified info I promise I won’t tell. -Newt

It makes Hermann smile like nothing ever has before.

Hermann’s correspondence with Dr. Geiszler does not transgress beyond the professional until the following January. By that time, Hermann and his father have successfully completed the coding for their first jaeger prototype, and Hermann has been offered his fair share of tenured university positions to pick from as he likes. He finds himself oddly disappointed that none of them are in America with Dr. Geiezler. This, which leads to the realization that he’s grown rather fond of Dr. Geiszler, is perhaps what drives Hermann to uncharacteristic sentimental extremes on January 19th: he orders Dr. Geiszler a birthday present. The first email Dr. Geiszler sends him after that addresses him as Hermann. The first email Hermann sends Dr. Geiszler after that addresses him as Newton. Things move rapidly after that.

“Are you still writing to that young biologist?” Hermann’s father asks him in March. Hermann has spent the last two months devouring every bit of information Newton has seen fit to divulge about his personal life: his dexterity with no less than three different instruments, his favorite loud monster movies, how he’d love to get a kaiju tattooed on him one day. Hermann suspects he might be falling in love with Newton. In hardly five months! These are war times, Hermann supposes, so it would make sense. People are meant to do such extreme things.

“I am,” Hermann says.

“I’ve asked around about him,” Hermann’s father says. His expression is stern—unimpressed. “About his character. I’m not sure it’s wise to continue your correspondence.”

The reasons are this. Dr. Geiszler’s methods are unorthodox. Dr. Geiszler is loud and uncouth, and has little respect for his intellectual superiors. Dr. Geiszler was thrown out of a convention once for storming up on stage and stealing a microphone from an engineer to shout about the destruction coral reefs. Dr. Geiszler was in a distasteful band for several years. Dr. Geiszler was once arrested for egging a politician’s house. Dr. Geiszler has gone on record as describing the kaiju as “kinda cool”. Almost none of this is news to Hermann; in fact, that which is only causes Hermann’s affection for Newton to grow. “I will consider your advice,” Hermann says, knowing he won’t. Besides, it's not as if his father really has Hermann's interests at heart—Hermann knows he merely wishes to preempt any scandal Newton Geiszler could possibly bring upon the Gottlieb name.

In April Newton goes on television and declares that he’s sure the kaiju are extraterrestrial in origin, on account of their great size and his brief examination of a sample from the second kaiju to make landfall. He’s laughed off by his older peers before he can get another word out. The email he writes to Hermann afterwards is furious, capslock-heavy, and expresses that Hermann is the only one who takes him seriously in the whole world. It leaves Hermann certain that he is in love with Newton.

“Dr. Geiszler was interviewed on some American television program,” Hermann’s father says a few days later.

“I know,” Hermann says, proudly. Newton was on television. “I watched it.”

“He made some extraordinary claims,” Hermann’s father says.

But Hermann is thinking only of the outfit Newton wore (skinny jeans and an oversized leather jacket, so out of place compared to the suited other scientists sitting around him), the shade of his eyes (hazel), his short stature (hardly taller than Hermann), and the cadence of his voice (high, but not unappealing). He’d been so confident, and carried himself with a self-assurance that was foreign to Hermann. It was marvelously attractive. “I’m sure they're correct,” Hermann says. "Every single one. Newton is a terribly brilliant scientist." All bold claims are met with derision at first, are they not?

Newton’s theory is proven correct after the next kaiju attack, when experts other than him get their hands on kaiju samples and validate his claims. The general consensus after that is that the kaiju are not of this world. And Newton was the first to propose the theory! Hermann sends Newton an email full of congratulations, and Newton responds with a heart emoticon in his sign-off. Newton isn't just a brilliant scientist. “Newton is a genius,” Hermann tells his father, dreamily.

The binder reappears on Hermann’s work desk a few months later, Newton’s page torn conspicuously from it. Hermann tips the whole thing straight into his trash can. He has more important things to worry about—arranging a meeting with Newton, perhaps. Hermann ought to have him over for dinner.

[shihalyfie]

"Canon” and “not canon” in the Adventure/02 universe

This is something I want to talk about, because it has a certain degree of relevance to the question of what I choose to take into account in my analyses and what I don’t. I write a lot about Adventure and 02 because both series are ridiculously consistent over their 104-episode runtime, but there are times when things contradict or don’t quite track together, and I have to figure out how to best rationalize them -- which means I need to make arbitrary decisions on what to count and not count, and when one does make those kinds of decisions, you’re very liable to get the complaint: “but that’s not canon!”

Which always makes me think: who decided that? And in the end, this is something that I think extends beyond just Digimon; every fanbase for everything always wants to believe there’s a clear-cut answer to things that everyone’s supposed to follow in a canonical timeline, and things that fall outside it. And sometimes, for some franchises, that is doable, because official staff will actually say outright that “this counts, and this doesn’t.” But that’s not how Toei and Bandai work, and their modus operandi has always been to toss a bunch of often-contradictory stuff at everyone and go “figure it out yourself,” and I think at some point the fanbase really needs to acknowledge that this so-called clear-cut boundary of “canon” and “not canon” doesn’t actually exist at all. Or in other words, any assertion of something being “canon” or “not canon” in the Adventure and 02 universe is purely something arbitrarily defined by fans, and was never determined by official - which, conversely, has actually encouraged you to take as much as you want and figure out the rest yourself.

Before we begin, I do want to make clear that this is not about one’s personal canon based on one’s own preferences -- that is to say, if you’re going “I don’t consider this canon because I don’t like this/don’t want to work with this,” then that’s entirely your right, especially if you’re doing creative work and need to decide what to apply and to not to apply. (Although, as always, one must be conscientious and respectful of those who do like it and consider it canon, because everyone’s going to differ on this.) What I am talking about is when people take a substantial part of the franchise that they otherwise like, such as a movie or drama CD, see one detail that’s contradictory in terms of the timeline or lore, and take that as evidence of “yep, the entire thing’s not canon. We’ll just throw the entire thing out, then.” It just makes me think -- you threw out a perfectly good work for that?! That’s such a waste!

First of all, Toei and Bandai don’t work that way

In general, a lot of the contradictions in the series have a “right hand is not talking to left hand” problem, because as much as we would like to believe that a Digimon series is written by a single consistent entity, the franchise itself is a huge trade-off between Toei and Bandai, and a lot of things from Bandai -- spinoffs, crossover material, games, what have you -- don’t exactly have a stellar track record of being vetted by Toei anime staff. It’s pretty well-known that game portrayals of certain characters can be really off or have misleading info, and even V-Tamer’s somewhat guilty of it. So this is going to happen no matter whether you like it or not, and it happens with any long-running kids’ series that involves a collaboration between multiple companies like this.

Moreover, the traditional custom for Toei “side movies” (in this case, meaning things like the original movie, Our War Game!, Hurricane Touchdown, and Diablomon Strikes Back) is that they’re produced with minimal involvement from the original series’s core staff -- at most, the producer is lightly involved -- and are sometimes even worked on simultaneously with the start of the original series, so you often end up with a movie that’s impossible to fit anywhere in the series timeline because there wasn’t any communication with the two sides. And for that, it’s all too easy to dismiss those movies as “non-canon”, with the fanbase arbitrarily deciding that canon ones are canon because they fit -- but Toei itself has never taken this stance.

The other thing is that, given that Adventure/02 is famous for its ridiculous level of worldbuilding consistency thanks to its director Kakudou’s conscientious efforts on it, it means that as a result, anything not made by him was prone to running afoul on it, and it’s not like the stance back then was to just reject all of it wholesale. “Doesn’t comply with the lore” is so often equated with “not canon”, but Kakudou, the author of that lore, not only made no indication of invalidating or disliking those non-compliant things, but also conversely made an active effort to make those things relevant in spite of that! (See: Our War Game! below.) The official stance is to not deny those works for being noncompliant -- it’s just that Kakudou seems to be the detail-oriented kind of person who personally prefers to work with things that have a high level of consistency (he’s very quick to say “I wasn’t involved on that” whenever someone brings up something from said external materials, not in any condescending way, just “I wasn’t involved, so don’t attribute that to me”). In fact, one of the reasons there wasn’t initially a third Adventure series was that he had difficulty finding a way to adhere to the higher-ups’ pressure to keep all of these contradictions consistent -- so the official stance itself is to try and maintain all of those side works, and that it would be better to end the series itself than to have to do something like deny them.

Which makes things very frustrating for the fans, of course, but nevertheless, that’s how it is -- even back in 2000, the right-hand-not-talking-to-left-hand phenomenon was this significant! And it would have been easy for official to step in and go “okay, we’ll put a statement out here that these don’t apply,” but no, the stance was be that it would be better to stop dragging it out longer and cancel a whole series than to deny those works, which leads us to the current situation. (Plus, think how insulting it would feel from a PR perspective if someone got attached to one of those “non-canon” materials only for official to come out and outright say “yeah this doesn’t count anymore”; we can name examples of this happening in other franchises that have understandably gotten a lot of people upset, and it would be especially offensive to do this right after said material had been released.)

Bolstering the concept of official staff’s very loose opinion of “canon” are the Adventure novels, which were supervised by Kakudou himself and written by Digimon episode screenwriter Masaki Hiro, and are non-compliant with Adventure timeline by design, because it’d be bad for the format to try and depict every single detail in the anime in the form of three novels. Several events are condensed or shuffled out of order, or even sometimes completely different (Koushirou’s incident with Vadermon goes very differently from the anime version). Despite that, this is said directly to be intended as a series of novels to help people understand Adventure and 02 better, and several details in Two-and-a-Half Year Break and Spring 2003 are incredibly consistent with it (namely in the sense of details meant to retroactively connect Adventure to 02, and other background details like Daisuke’s backstory). So you are supposed to do some kind of mental leap where you don’t take the contradictions around the actual events too seriously, but still accept the spirit and the background information you learn from it and retroactively apply it to Adventure and 02 -- and, presumably, that’s probably what you’re expected to do with everything else, too.

And this isn’t even getting into the fact that the anime itself has occasional contradictions and errors due to things like animator error or simply different writers writing different episodes -- the Adventure and 02 staff were certainly very detail-oriented, but they are human and of course inevitably slipped up here and there. How seriously do you take honorifics shifting from episode to episode in ways that don’t seem intentional, or the fact every background material refers to Osamu and Ken having a bunk bed and yet the actual episode with both of them fails to depict it? How do you deal with the fact that the Animation Chronicle is one of the most extensively useful post-02 reference materials with tons of production background info not revealed in the anime, and yet is infamously full of suspected typos that would cause some pretty massive implications if true, or all of those other Bandai and Shueisha-commissioned “side books” and other pieces of media meant to entertain the kids while the series was airing but clearly had no input from Toei staff whatsoever? 

In the end, frustrating as it is, the answer seems to be the same as ever: figure it out yourself.

The standards for what’s “canon” and “not canon” are way too arbitrary

Let’s look at a handful of things that have been historically dismissed as “non-canon” by the fanbase:

The Adventure mini dramas and Armor Evolution to the Unknown: Drama CDs that were generally dismissed as non-canon because they’re “too crack” to be canon (their writing style is of the “it’s okay to push the boundaries of characterization for the sake of comedy” sort, and it wouldn’t be until later when we finally got some more serious drama CDs). The latter is full of honorific inconsistencies, most prominently Daisuke and Ken still being on surname basis at a time they’re not supposed to be (due to the fact that it was released while the series was still being produced). But official word is that you’re still supposed to consider them canon -- and yes, that’s Kakudou himself giving official sanction to a drama CD that involved a massive amount of fourth wall breaking and a completely unexplained reunion between the Adventure kids and their Digimon sometime between 1999 and 2002 (apparently this wasn’t the only one, either). How is this supposed to work? Figure it out yourself.

Hurricane Touchdown: The funny part is that up until Kizuna validated Wallace’s existence, there was no actual consistent agreement on why this movie shouldn’t be canon (the Western side being “evolutionary form timeline violations”, the Japanese side being Wallace’s status as a Chosen Child prior to 1995), which really goes to show you how arbitrary all of this is. It also has a sequel drama CD in the form of The Door to Summer, which is also contradictory with Hurricane Touchdown’s ending, so we’ve got two layers of “it can’t be canon because...” -- and yet it has a lot of interesting Daisuke characterization, and, heck, the whole character of Wallace himself, that would all be rejected if you throw this out wholesale. Then Kizuna came along, and there’s a general sense of hesitation against easily denying officially-sanctioned “main” entries like that, which retroactively forced people to somehow skip past all that and accept it, just for the sake of Kizuna’s notability.

Diablomon Strikes Back: Similar to the above, it used to be constantly dismissed as “a non-canon fun movie” because of the evolutionary forms that appear in it, despite the fact that 02 itself established that it wasn’t that hard to restore evolutionary forms if you figured something out. Somehow, a ton of people treated it as such an impossibility that “they figured it out in the first three months of 2003″ would be a viable explanation, and yet official word is that of the second through fourth movies, this is the one that had the most amount of initial consultation with the TV anime staff! And then tri. and Kizuna came along and clearly had high-level evolutions in play too, and dismissing DSB on these grounds meant dismissing those by proxy, and a lot of people were too intimidated to do that and decided to retroactively validate DSB instead, after years of having dismissed it for this reason. Again: look how arbitrary this all is.

The tri. stage play: Mainly because its timeline of events doesn’t fit tri. at all (in regards to the reboot and part 5). This is a fair assessment to make in light of the fact that it doesn’t seem to work very hard to be compliant with the very series it’s branded with, but, funnily enough, it’s actually more lore-compliant with the original Adventure and 02 than the tri. anime series is, and yet the few minor contradictions it makes with the tri. anime series are sufficient to consider it completely kicked out of canon, yet those same people who declare it so aren’t as willing to hold the anime to that same standard just because it holds a more prominent “main” position.

On the other hand, let’s look at some of the things that have been more likely to be accepted than the above:

Our War Game!: Reading this is probably going to make everyone go “whaaaaaat?”, but yep: according to Kakudou, the second through fourth movies were all made without his supervision or involvement and thus have lore contradictions (although he also made sure to say that they’re very fine movies, too). We still haven’t figured out what the lore contradiction is, and so the fanbase considers it canon, and even 02 itself makes multiple references to “the Diablomon incident” in 2000, so you can’t consider this non-canon in the slightest...but yes, according to the official side, it’s actually got a contradictory incursion somewhere in there. There is one hypothesis as to what it is, and it’s such a minor thing that no fan or even official member of staff would dare deny the movie for it, but it still contributes to how arbitrary this entire concept is: Kakudou didn’t want to give anyone (except Miyako, who’s based off a real person) canonical birthdays or blood types for the sake of preventing horoscoping, but Sora’s birthday is portrayed as being around March in the movie. And yes, Kakudou himself refers to this as being something that only happened because he wasn’t involved. (Remember what I said about him historically being quick to disclaim involvement on anything he wasn’t involved on, regardless of how much of a minor detail it is, yet doesn’t necessarily intend to deny the work entirely due to it?)

Tag Tamers: A very vital part of Ken’s backstory that establishes a lot of context behind the Dark Seed and the elusive Akiyama Ryou, which also does not make sense with 02′s timeline and characterization at all, presumably because Bandai and Toei weren’t properly communicating on what kind of details they needed to iron out for this. But of course, all of us would like some explanation to Ken’s backstory, and we have to apply some kind of logic as to how that makes sense, and I’ve yet to see people declare Tag Tamers (or any of the other WonderSwan games) as entirely non-canon as a result.

tri.: For obvious reasons, it’s a “major entry in the franchise”, so people are generally more averse to dismissing it so easily (or, at least, for reasons that aren’t related to pure preference), but I find it rather ironic that Kizuna’s the one that got all the attention for apparently being lore non-compliant, when the exact same lore points mentioned in Kakudou’s reasoning as to why it’s non-compliant (along with a ton of things that actually were in Adventure and 02′s text) are gone against even more regularly and prominently in tri., whereas Kizuna still goes out of its way to adhere to most of these and only seems to have incurred a contradiction in terms of originally intended ideology, and, possibly, its extensive use of the aforementioned movies. (Recall that this got brought up for Kizuna specifically because Kakudou was initially consulted for it; he wasn’t involved in tri. to begin with at all.) See above on how people’s unwillingness to write this one off so easily despite everything ended up retroactively dragging DSB into “accepted canon” territory; that’s how arbitrary this entire thing is.

Then, tied to all of this and making it even more confusing is Kizuna, which, again, putting all issues of personal preference aside, is basically being torn back and forth between all of these whenever you try to apply one of the above arbitrary standards. It’s allegedly lore-noncompliant with Kakudou’s lore and thus lacks his involvement, but it does have the involvement of original series producer Seki Hiromi who was known to be responsible for the series’s original human drama themes (including the premise of 02 itself) and personally vetted the scripts so that everyone could be properly in-character and the original themes still intact; it’s supposedly a “main” entry to the point where people will stop denying older works’ canonicity because of it (see Hurricane Touchdown above), but, legally speaking, is actually classified in the same “gekijouban” category that the first four movies and things like the Tamers through Savers movies are; the staff will say to hell and back that the 02 epilogue still holds (and the movie makes abundant retroactive references in both worldbuilding and themes to it), but many people out there will still insist that the movie ending that way means that (like with DSB above) “they figured it out” between the movie’s ending and the epilogue is apparently some kind of impossibility, and either the movie is non-canon or the 02 epilogue is invalidated now. (My personal stance on this is that the epilogue itself provides the answer to how they figure it out if you look closely at the movie’s themes, but that’s a tangent.)

The point I’m trying to make is that regardless of whatever stance you take on all of the above points, this is all extremely arbitrary, and these fanbase rationalizations on why this and that isn’t canon are constantly contradicting each other, shifting, and occasionally based on really meaningless things. And, again, it’s fine if you’re saying that you don’t consider this or that canon because you personally dislike it or where it went, or you find it difficult to work with, or between two contradictory things you prefer one or the other (I certainly have my fair share of strong opinions in this regard) -- but it would be better if we all admitted this and went “I just don’t consider this canon” instead of acting like there were ever some universal consensus or official backing.

"It didn’t happen this exact way, but something resembling it still happened”

So, we’re in this uncomfortable situation where we’ve been handed a ball of knots and have to work with it (a very frustrating situation especially for fanfic writers), and I have to personally say that I think all of this comes from people having far too inflexible of a concept of “canon” and “not canon”, especially to the point of rejecting a full-on perfectly fine entry just because of one timeline issue. I honestly think it’d be better if we could rather take a certain stance close to the Pixiv dictionary wiki’s view of how Wallace can appear in Kizuna: “(some version of) Wallace exists in the timeline of the main story.”

Right, so: Hurricane Touchdown is contradictory. The evolutions don’t work at that point in timeline, and Wallace shouldn’t be able to be a Chosen Child from before 1995. Those things don’t work with Adventure and 02′s timeline and lore. However, let’s look at the following story: let’s say that, between 02 episodes 14 and 15 (when the movie first screened), while school was on break, Daisuke and his friends went on a summer adventure to the US and met a boy named Wallace, who had a struggle regarding one of his partners losing his sanity, and bonded with him and helped put his partner to rest. No part of this contradicts 02 at all. There we go! So we can safely say that some story that mostly resembled Hurricane Touchdown happened in the canon timeline. Some of its details weren’t exactly the way they happened in “the movie we, as the audience, saw” -- but something that substantially resembled the movie still happened in the universe of Daisuke and his friends. And you can apply that same logic to Tag Tamers, or any other vital canonical but ostensibly contradictory material -- the media that we as the audience got may not accurately reflect the events in universe, but there’s absolutely nothing saying that some more timeline and lore-consistent alternate version didn’t happen in canon instead.

Moreover, even Adventure/02 itself gives you a bit of precedent for this concept -- namely, the fact that the final episode of 02 reveals that the entirety of Adventure and 02 is part of Takeru’s novels. It’s a pretty common theory that there might be differences in the way “the story we got” was presented, versus how they actually happened in the world Takeru lived in -- of course, Takeru certainly went out of his way to remove as much bias from the situation as he could, but you can hardly say that he, as a human, would be completely free from it, and he himself even admits that everyone he consulted had differing opinions on the events in question. And not every single piece of Digimon media has the Hirata-Hiroaki-as-Takeru narrator, which means that perhaps it’s not entirely out of the question that the different takes on the stories that the Tokyo Chosen Children went through in their youth would not be entirely consistent with each other, depending on who’s telling it. But that doesn’t mean that those events necessarily didn’t happen at all, just that some of the details were different from what we as the audience saw.

In the end, I leave the rest to everyone else to figure out -- as I said, I think this is a decision everyone will have to make for themselves, whether they’re a fanfic writer picking and choosing what to include for the sake of a coherent fic, or whether they’re just expressing a preference to not have to think too hard about or work with something they’re turned off by. (And in the case that there is someone who expresses their dislike of working with something and doesn’t want to consider it canon, I think it’s very rude to give them grief for that, and conversely, if you don’t want to consider something canon but encounter someone who doesn’t have as much of a problem with it, it’s very rude to try and expect them to change their opinion to yours.) But I do think it would do well for all of us to have a bit more of an open mind and a creative attitude towards these kinds of things before trying to shove everything into a “fully canon” and “fully not canon” binary.

[twdmusicboxmystery]

TWD 11x06: On the Inside - Analysis

Okay, how did everyone like this episode? I loved it! It might be my favorite episode of the season so far. Partly because of all the horror movie vibes and jump scares. I thought that was delightful. And Lauren Ridloff did an amazing job. But more than that, it's because of all the symbolism and what I think this represents. Seriously, I think I might have like fifty-six theories come out of this one episode, LOL. Not brand-new theories, but just connecting symbols in a way I haven't before. For now, let's talk about the broad arcs here and what they mean.

***As always, spoilers abound below for 11x06. Don’t read until you’ve watched! You’ve been warned!***

Basically, we’re following two storylines in this episode. The first is Connie and Virgil. The second is Daryl, Leah, and the Reapers. I suppose you could call Kelly and Carol looking for Connie a third story line, but given that they're searching for Connie, it's really just a subplot of Connie's arc.

Connie and Virgil:

There are a lot of people saying that they might be setting Connie and Virgil up as romantic partners. I think that's probably the case, for a lot of reasons. They were very purposely put together in this house. After the episode, Angela Kang talked about how Virgil basically had to suppress part of his heart in order to get through the death of his family. That's why he seemed a little bit villainous when we first met him with Michonne.

Actually, we're seeing a major theme here that we've seen with other characters. Near the end of the episode, Virgil tells Connie, "I lost myself for a long time." It's very reminiscent of what Michonne said to Carl in 4x14. It's a theme we see where the character goes through some kind of trauma, and the aftermath of that trauma is very much a PTSD thing. They lose themselves to insanity for short time, but then someone is able to bring them back. We see this with many characters over the years. And this is something they're doing with Virgil. So this was Virgil kind of coming back to reality. Michonne gave him the chance to come back first, but he also says that her giving him that second chance led him to Connie and he sees that as Providence.

So basically, A.K. is saying that Virgil lost a big chunk of his heart when his family died, but he's rediscovering it here with Connie. And that's very important. I can't imagine them saying that, or him having this kind of arc, if there isn’t going to be a romance between them. Which, for the record, I think is cute. I totally ship it. (Totally objective over here. As always, of course. ;-))

But the big question is, what does this foreshadow? I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count.

I think this is a foreshadow of Beth and Daryl. I'm sure you're shocked to your toenails. I'll give you a moment to recover. Good? Okay.

A lot of us got Alone vibes from this episode. Just the two of them in house together. The undercurrent of possible romance between them. There's even a hug at one point.

Actually, the white, plantation style house with the white pillars immediately struck a cord with me. Back when they were filming the missing scenes from S5, they filmed in a house just like this one. it wasn’t the “white cabin” as we always refer to the house Emily was seen going into. But it was next door to that one and had a sign up about not mowing the lawn because it would be used for filming. 

I don’t know if this is actually the same house, but I’m willing to bet that this will end up having parallels to something we see when we finally get those missing scenes.

Once they get inside the house, we see Connie holding the door shut against walkers. It's very reminiscent of Daryl doing that at the funeral home in Alone.

The thing is, I don't even think callbacks to Alone are the big cheese. (For the record, we also saw them around Kelly, but I'll get to that in a minute.)

Because more than being a call back, this is a foreshadow. It represents some time in the future when Beth and Daryl will be together inside the CRM and trying to escape. Remember that “No Exit” sign in Beth’s cell?

We have a situation here where Connie and Virgil are trying to get out and there's literally no exit. All the doors are locked, they’re being trapped everywhere they go, they get separated. Even when Connie is in the wall, looking at Virgil, she wants to warn him of things, but she has no way to get into the room with him. There's literally no exit for her.

There are so many parallels to Beth and Daryl.

They emphasize the fact that Connie is lost. After getting out of the cave and walking around for walkers for so long, she clearly lost her bearings and doesn't know where she is or which way to go to get to Alexandria. It puts me in mind of the scene from 6x10, where Carl was talking to Judith and said if she was ever LOST and needed to find her way HOME, she should use the North Star. This is another way in which Connie is being paralleled to Beth. She's lost and needs to find her way home.

Virgil talks about wanting to get Connie HOME. To get her back to her family (which just so happens to be her sister). Of course there's the undercurrent of romance.

I also couldn't help but notice outlets throughout the episode. This house is very dilapidated and dirty. There's grime and rust and darkness everywhere. But we can very clearly see the outlets on the walls, as though they’re brand-new. I believe that's to draw our attention to them. Outlets suggest power, which suggests lamps or batteries.

Remember how I said that the whole battery theory is about resources and that it indicates the CRM? This is why I think this house represents the CRM. And I'm not at all saying that at some point, we’ll see Beth and Daryl running through a house together, as Connie and Virgil do here, trying to escape some threat. I think this represents a much bigger arc of them being inside the CRM and trying to get out. It will probably span a lot of episodes, maybe even multiple seasons.

At one point, we see a red coda pendant hanging in the window behind Virgil. Remember that, via the Matrix theory, red represents the outside world that TF is currently unaware of, and of course Coda suggests Beth. That’s a big part of the evidence for this template being a foreshadow of Beth and Daryl.

I’ll go over all the background details tomorrow, but pretty much every detail I found suggests what I've laid out here. I'm going to do completely separate post on the awake/asleep theme as well as the mailbox theme. That one stemmed from last week's episode (11x05), but I haven't gotten a chance to post it yet. And of course we saw the mailbox feature prominently in this episode as well.

We also have a situation where Virgil basically tells Connie to go on without him and that it’s very important to him that she gets home. And then he gets stabbed, and she not only saves him, but pulls him out of the house. We’ve always said that we think there will be a time when Beth will save Daryl. I think this is a foreshadow of it.

I think we'll have a situation (again, much bigger than what we see here in the single episode) where Daryl will be willing to sacrifice himself, his life, to get Beth back to Maggie. Of course she's not going to allow him to do that, but he'll probably be hurt very badly.

(And for the record, I think we've seen foreshadows of this and other arcs. Daryl getting hurt when fighting Alpha was probably a foreshadow of the same thing. I'm sure we could identify others.) I think he will be hurt and Beth will save him, and that will happen as they’re figuring out how to get out of the CRM.

To touch on Kelly’s side of things, we see her find a camp that Virgil and Connie had previously been at. She finds Connie’s stuff there, and the orange backpack that Virgil must have left behind. The thing that jumped out at me here is that, in the foreground, we saw ropes around the camp with cans attached as an alert system.

That was featured very prominently in Alone, both because Daryl set up something like that at the funeral home and also because the other half of that episode was about Maggie/Sasha/Bob and they did the same thing in their camp. So again, major callbacks to Alone, and to what this is probably foreshadowing.

But my favorite thing about this was connections that I made. Things that kind of confirm events we’ve suspected in 4B, but have never been able to prove. Let me explain.

First, there’s the reunion between Connie and Kelly. And this really jumped out at me. Not only because it's two sisters reuniting, but because of the way it was shown.

When approaching Connie, Kelly is crying and says, "I'm sorry." And that's out of character or out of place in any way. She’s sorry that for what happened to Connie and that it took them so long to find her. All that is completely understandable. But at the same time, Kelly has no reason to feel bad about what happened to Connie. It wasn't her fault, and she's been a dutiful sister looking for her intensively ever since.

But I think the “I'm sorry” will make a lot more sense if we hear Maggie saying it to Beth, given everything that's happened, and especially what happened in S5. I mean, Beth did get left behind.

The other thing is that when they see each other and then hug, the background music almost sounds angelic, like a choir. I mean, they really wanted this to be a big deal, the reunion between these two sisters. And not that the Kelly and Connie's reunion isn't a big deal. It's very sweet, but I feel like this a foreshadow something much bigger. And what other reunion between sisters could qualify for something like that except Maggie and Beth, who didn't get the reunion in season five?

We’ve always said that Connie was a proxy for Beth, and that the cave-in, followed by her being missing was a parallel to Beth’s arc. So, this arc ending in Connie finding someone she’ll eventually have a romance with and then finding her sister is makes me very hopeful for what we'll see when Beth returns.

I have to say that this is kind of a relief to me. Because of Daryl's line back in Still about how, "you ain't never going to see Maggie again," I’ve gone back and forth about whether Beth and Maggie will actually get a reunion. Yes, there are plenty of ways to explain away that line, and I don't disagree with any of them. But I’ve still been really back-and-forth about whether this is going to happen. After seeing Connie and Kelly really reunite, I have no doubt that eventually will see a Beth/Maggie reunion. Yay!

Next, is the fact that Virgil and Connie talk about how the people living in this house lured them into a trap.

This is talked about very much anymore, but was always but what happened in Alone was always so wonky to me. I know it was supposed to be, but the whole thing felt like it was orchestrated somehow. I mean, what happened to the dog? We hear barking, but we didn't actually see the dog again, because when Daryl open the door all the walkers were on the porch. But how did that many walkers get up to the porch without them hearing it?

When Beth and Daryl sat in the kitchen staring at each other, they heard the cans rattle and then at the dog bark. I think that the idea was that Daryl thought it was the dog moving the cans and that's why he was going to open the door and get it to come in. He didn't understand that there were walkers there. But why didn't they hear the walkers? More importantly, why would that many walkers go up to the door if they couldn't see any humans on the inside? It's completely weird behavior for walkers. And then when Beth leaves the house, she just happens to be picked up by a car?

Like I said, I just always felt like the whole thing was really orchestrated, but even at Grady, we were never told that it was. Gorman suggested to Beth that they happened upon her accidentally. Of course, Gorman is the opposite of trustworthy, but we also understand better now the way that these episodes are often approached. We sometimes see things from one character's point of view over another. Clearly, Slabtown was seen from Beth’s point of view, so if she couldn't see the truth about what happened, that's why we couldn’t neither.

My point is, in this episode, Virgil says that he and Connie were herded there like prey. These feral people apparently went to the camp (Kelly says the left in a hurry and something was very wrong, and I think she's right. Given that Virgil and Connie left all their stuff behind; Connie would not have left behind her slingshot on purpose). Which means the creatures came to their camp, scared them away, chase them toward the house, herding them that way, in order to eat them.

Now, I'm not saying that's specifically what happened in Alone, but I think it kind of proves that what happened was an orchestrated trap that was set up to capture Beth.

And we do get the sense from what Noah told her that Grady purposely left the strong behind and took the weak. So, I'm not sure if Beth and Daryl were actually herded toward the funeral home. From what we saw, it really was more like they happened upon it. But I'm wondering if once there, someone observed them, or observed them approaching, and decided that they would be optimal targets. Given that Beth was injured (which they would have known if they saw Daryl giving her the piggy back) obviously it would always be her that was taken, while Daryl—obviously the more survival-oriented of the two—would be left behind.

And I love this connection because it proves (as far as we can prove theories 😉) that there are things they haven’t shown us, not just in S5 with the missing 17 days, but reaching all the way back to S4.

The other thing that's just kind of cool to consider is that, as I said before, the other half of the episode was about Maggie/Sasha/Bob, right? There are a lot of things that their sequence foreshadows as well. And in the episode, Maggie is specifically looking for Glenn, not Beth. However, given that this episode with Connie and Virgil also featured Kelly, Connie’s sister, looking for her, it just doesn't seem like it could possibly be a coincidence that the other half of Alone was Maggie searching for someone. What I’m saying is that both Alone and this episode, 11x06, foreshadow what will happen when Maggie and Beth reunite. I'm sure I could go into the details of Alone find a lot of connections, but I don't have time to do that right now. Maybe during the hiatus. Maybe. ;-).

Daryl and Leah:

Okay, I guess we need to talk about Daryl and Leah’s part of this episode as well. I don't have as much say about the symbolism for them. This is really more about where this is going.

Daryl tortures Frost, which I'm sure some people are going to have a problem with. But A.K. said that this is really about Daryl wanting to stay on the inside with the Reapers. As I said after ep 4, Frost is smart and he understands what Daryl is doing. A.K. said he did exactly what Daryl wanted to do him to do here. Daryl wanted him to give them a basic location but not an exact one. In other words, to tell them the neighborhood but not the exact house. And that's exactly what Frost did. Angela says Daryl did this because he was trying to save Frost’s life. Unfortunately, by the end of the episode, we see that didn't work out so well. But he was attempting to save him.

You have to watch the details closely to pick this up, but the first house that Daryl, Leah, and Carver go to is not the house Maggie is in. That's why Daryl says they should stick around and look around for things, because he knew Maggie wasn't there and wanted to give her time to escape. But the second house we see them go into is where Maggie and co are hiding under the floorboards.

At first, it seems to be empty, but when Daryl comes downstairs, he sees the place where they might be hiding and slides the rug over it. In the end, Carver sees it and checks, but Maggie and the others have already made their escape.

I had to stop and think about that for a minute. Since Beth wore yellow and we think yellow equals life and escape, I would have thought the yellow house would be where Maggie and the others were hiding and then escaped from. That would've made more logical sense. But actually, the yellow house was a decoy.

It gave me a whole new insight into the meaning behind the color yellow in TWD universe.

I still think yellow represents escape, among other things. But it also represents looking for someone in the wrong place. Even if you think about Rick’s mini death fake out in 7x12, there was probably only 12 feet between where Michonne thought he was (right side of the screen being eaten by walkers) and where he actually was (left side of the screen coming out of the yellow carnival car) but still, she was looking for him in the wrong place and assumed he was dead because of it.

I also thought of the Glenn situation in S4. Maggie looked for him on the school bus (yellow). And in both cases, it was because that’s where Rick/Glenn were last seen, but what was UNSEEN was how they ESCAPED. So, TF was looking for them in the wrong place.

And I’m sure something similar will happen with Beth during the missing 17 days. It doesn’t really change what we believe happened with Beth, but it makes me want to re-examine every yellow reference we’ve ever seen on the show, which is probably hundreds by now, lol.

At one point, Carver is coming down the stairs and Daryl runs over to him and starts talking really fast. He says that they (Maggie’s group) will not to come back here, that it wouldn’t be smart, etc. The first time I watched it, I remember thinking that Daryl was being really obvious. It made him seem nervous and like he was hiding something. And he probably was somewhat nervous. The reason he ran over Carver right then, is because he didn't want Carver to see the hiding place where Maggie and the others were (because Daryl himself noticed it when he was coming down the stairs).

But the other thing to remember is that Daryl knows Maggie and the others are down there. He was using this to give them information. He talks about how the Reapers have walls and weapons, twenty people inside their town, etc. That is also him getting Maggie information so she would know what they're up against. It was actually very smart on his part, even if it kind of tipped Carver off.

By the end, they returned to Pope and find that Frost is dead. I thought it was super weird and creepy that Pope started laughing when Carver said they had lost Maggie's group. That's very out of character for him. Angela Kang said Pope was purposely playing mind games to make Daryl and Leah paranoid, but even so. That laugh was just maniacal.

So, not sure exactly where this is going, or what Pope's plans are. He kind of suggests that maybe Frost turned on Daryl and sold him out before he died. I doubt that's true, but Pope also strikes me as the kind of guy who, if he's decided Daryl is an enemy, doesn't actually need proof of it. So, we'll just have to see where this goes.

Okay, that's it for today. I'll do details tomorrow. How did you all like the episode?

[gorogues]

Spoilers for comics in April!

purplecyborgnewt said: “A version of Gorilla Grodd unlike anything you’ve ever seen” - so, nice and friendly? Wait, no, he kinda became a good guy on TV eventually… Small? No, saw it too - in fanart, granted, but still. Oh nooo, I figured it out - this Grodd will not be fluffy anymore! (Or… he’s gonna be a monkey. “Gorilla” is just his name.)

I think he's supposed to be a crimelord of some kind, which is why the Rogues are trying to rob him in the first place, but hopefully he won't be anything like this guy Gorilla Boss :>  I mean, technically that'd be different for Grodd! 

longitudinalwaveme said: Yeah, I wasn’t expecting to see Girder staring in a movie prequel, either. Why Girder? Presumably you could use almost any Flash villain, right? Why not Reverse-Flash, since he’s the most famous? Why not Captain Cold? Or Gorilla Grodd? Or Mirror Master? Or even, like, Murmur? All of those characters are more prominent than Girder.

If I had to guess, it's probably because the DCEU people aren't planning to use Girder and the comic can do whatever they want with him...possibly even kill him off, if that's in the cards (which is what happened to him in the CW series).  I wouldn't want them to waste a prominent Flash villain on this, as they'll probably want to save those for a debut on the big screen.  But Girder is a strange choice.  I guess it's because he looks really cool and striking?  I'd actually love to see him in a movie if they could do a good job with the CGI, so in a way him being here is kind of a bummer.

[jobrookekarev]

You're My Home

Chapter One of One

Words: 1898

Summary: “I’m pregnant Alex.” Jo didn't know how to say it without feeling like she was dropping a bomb on him. “And you're saying all these things about how your life is supposed to be with me and then you go and invite Meredith Grey into our house and you play family with her.”

“Jo,” Alex said, reaching out to her, but she took a step back. 

Or the 11x24 AU where Jo is pregnant.

Chapter: 1/1

Fandom: Grey's Anatomy.

Relationship: Alex Karev/Jo Wilson.

Characters: Alex Karev, and Jo Wilson.

Rating: General Audiences.

Additional Tags: Angst With a Happy Ending, Fluff, Babies, Pregnancy. 

Read at AO3

Read at FFN

AN: Will, I ever stop with the, Jo’s pregnant AU’s 🌟no🌟

Happy belated Birthday to Stevie @angry-slytherin and Lay @odd-birds-and-booksellers (who doesn’t deserve fluff but I’m being nice)

……………………………………………………………………

“Jo!” 

She turned her head to see Alex run up behind her as she walked down the hall. He was the last person she wanted to see right now, but she didn’t fight him when he grabbed her arm. 

“Jo, come here,” Alex said as he led her into the office space behind the nurse’s station and closed the door behind them. “The sad widow is my friend, my best friend and I don't want to piss you off and I don't want you running off somewhere, but I can't say no to her.”

“So, you're saying no to me, okay,” Jo said with a nod, she didn’t expect him to say anything else. She knew that to Alex, Meredith would always come first

“No. Look, all that crap I said about building a life here and about putting down roots. Look, I meant with you. I want a house with you, my career with you, uh, maybe someday a dog, maybe.” Alex said, as he shook his head with a sigh. “It's all supposed to be with you.”

Jo looked up as he spoke, his eyebrows were turned up but the wrinkles in his forward were as prominent as his worry as he took a step towards her.

“I thought you got that. I didn't think I needed to say it. So, when I say that I can't say no to my friend, it doesn't mean I'm saying no to you. I want you and all of it with you.”

“A dog?” Jo asked, raising her eyebrows at him.

“Yeah,” Alex said with his signature shrug as if he was simply agreeing to it because she asked.

“What about a baby?” Jo said watching his expression closely trying to find the answers in his face.

“Yeah, someday,” Alex said, a flash of a smile stretching across his face. 

“What about today?” Jo asked before she lost her nerve.

“What?” Alex asked as he furrowed his brows and his wrinkles appeared again.

“I’m pregnant, Alex.” Jo didn't know how to say it without feeling like she was dropping a bomb on him. “And you're saying all these things about how your life is supposed to be with me and then you go and invite Meredith Grey into our house and you play family with her.”

“Jo,” Alex said, reaching out to her, but she took a step back. Despite how much she knew it hurt him to pull away, she knew that the moment he touched her she would lose her resolve and melt into his arms.

“No, I get to talk now. I get to be important now. I get to be your first thought, this baby, our baby, has to come first from now on. And I can't think about anything other than what’s best for them,” Jo said, turning around and putting her hand on the door handle as she went to walk away.

“Jo wait,” Alex said, reaching to grab her arm again, but she slipped out of his fingers. “Where are you going?”

“I just, I have to think about what’s best for our baby,” Jo said, biting her lip as she opened the door and walked away, leaving Alex alone. 

……………………………………………………………………

The party was in full swing by the time she got there and Jo lingered in the open doorway before she spotted Alex sitting at the kitchen bar. She pulled her jacket in front of her stomach, already self-conscious despite how she wasn't even showing yet as she walked over to Alex.

“Hey.” 

“Where have you been?” Alex asked as he just looked at her waiting for her answer. 

“Come with me,” Jo said, holding out her hand to him. “I want to show you something.”

Alex took her hand and let her pull him away from the party and out to her car. She could tell by the way he looked at her as she drove that he wanted to say any of the million things that were running through his head, but instead, he remained silent. It was an hour-long drive from the house on Bainbridge Island as they took the ferry into Seattle. She turned on the music to make the silence less awkward as she continued to drive back to the Queen Anne neighborhood. However, instead of taking him home, she drove a few blocks over.

Jo pulled open the door to the abandoned bungalow and let Alex step in first as he looked around. She hadn’t gotten permission to explore the space from the owner when she made the offer, so walking around the space they were technically breaking in, something neither of them were strangers to.

“Why are we here?” Alex said turning around as he walked further into the space.

“It's a house.” Jo clarifies as she follows him in. 

“Jo, it's a crime scene,” Alex said gesturing to the garbage and leftover furniture around them. The walls were torn open and the floors weren’t much better. It looked like the house in new york from Home Alone 2.

“Stop! Stop it, you're ruining it,” Jo said, she knew it needed a lot of work to turn it into a livable space, but she could see it become a home.

“Someone beat me to that,” Alex said looking around.

“Oh, shut up, it's all I can afford!” Jo said walking up the stand in front of him she sighed and folded her hands together before gesturing to the space around her. “I took everything, all my savings, everything that I had and it was almost enough to cover the whole thing.”

“Wait, you're buying this?” Alex said with a sigh.

“Well, um, we are, if you want to pitch in. I put in an offer.” Jo said as she watched his face as he took it. His eyebrows knit together and he still had that look of bewilderment on his face, but she continued as she stepped towards him. “Sell Meredith her house back, because this is what I want. Our own place, for the three of us. I just, I saw this place, and I thought that we could make it anything, whatever we want.” 

Jo looks at the ceiling and turned to look around at the empty space around her. With the two stories, there was enough room for a few bedrooms and a nursery for the baby. There was a lot of open light and windows and they couldn't see it from there, but there was a decent size backyard. Jo knew that she didn't need a white picket fence to build her family, this was what she wanted. 

“I love you and I love living with you, but we should just, we should have our own place. For just us, you, me, and this baby.” Jo said as she took a step forward, she reached out and took his hand, placing it on her stomach. “If you want that. If that's, if that's what you want, too.” 

“You've never said that,” Alex said, with a little shake of his head.

“Said what?” Jo asked, not sure what he was referring to.

“I love you.”

Jo stared into his eyes and shook her head remembering what he had said early in the office behind the nurses’ station. “I didn't think that I had to.”

Alex leaned forward and kissed her. Jo instantly put her hand on his cheek and wrapped the other around his neck. He kissed her as an I love you, back and she finally melted into his embrace. He kept his hand on her belly and put the other on her waist pulling her closer to him. They seemed to kiss forever and Jo wasn't ready to let him go when he pulled back.

“I'm not so sure about raising a baby here?” Alex said, looking down at his hand on her stomach.

Jo put her hand over his and turned to lean against him as he wrapped his arms around her waist and kept them on her belly. “We could make a little entryway there, and then we could have an open floor plan with the living room and the kitchen and playroom in the back that looks out over the backyard. Our bedroom would be upstairs and next to that we could put the nursery and there’s space for one or two more bedrooms, for siblings though, not strays.”

“It's further from the hospitial and close to Meredith,” Alex said, but she could tell he wasn't putting up much of a fight, more just making sure that this is what she wanted. “But the parks just around the corner.”

“The neighborhood's not that bad and it's a great park and a good school district, and I don’t mind living so close to Meredith so long as she donesn’t end up in out bed anymore” Jo said, squeezing his hands on her stomach before she looked around the space agian. “I know it's not much, but it could be a good home and it's what I want.”

“Okay,” Alex said, nodding before he put his head on her shoulder. “I guess we better hire a good contractor right away. Someone that can get it all done in, about 35 weeks?”

“34 weeks, I’m six weeks along and due March 24th,” Jo said with a smile as Alex kissed her shoulder before she turned around. “I know it's unplanned and unexpected, but I’m happy about it. I want to have a family with you.”

“I don't care either. I don't care that it's unplanned. I want a family with you, too Jo. You and me, we're going to be good parents, just like I said.” Alex nodded as he moved from behind her and pulled her away towards the door. “And if I’m going to be a good dad and a good partner to you, I should probably get you and the baby out of this mold filled mess.” 

Jo smiled and let Alex pull her along with one hand around her waist and the other on her belly they walked back to the car. 

“Do you want to go back to the party?” Alex asked, opening the car door for her. 

“Not really,” Jo said as she shook her head and got in. 

“Want to go home, order pizza, and fall asleep on the couch?” Alex said getting into the car and smiling over at her, knowing her answer.

Jo returned his smile as she looked over and reached out for his hand. “I'm pretty sure pizza and a movie is what got us this little one.”

Alex laughed remembering their movie night on the couch a few weeks ago that ended with them ignoring the movie in favor of other activities. 

“That was a good night,” Alex said, squeezing her hand.

Jo looked down and put a hand on her belly. “Yeah, it was.”

You're My Home came on the radio and Alex smiled as he started to sing to her. Jo laughed as he kept singing and reached over to put his hand over her hand on her belly. He didn't have the best singing voice, but she still loved it when he sang to her and now he would sing for her and their baby. This was her family and they would build a home together and it would be everything she ever dreamed of.

[algernoninwonderland]

So the Shanghai Special wasn’t nearly as terrible as I had feared it would be!

The good:

Superhero stuff that doesn’t involve fighting off villains. At last. Only took us 3 seasons but that finally happened.

The Cheng family. Well, Wang Cheng. He’s really a good guy. They hired Bing Yin, an actual Chinese actor to voice him instead of the white VA they had in season 1. That’s the bare minimum and I shouldn’t be praising this, but at least they did it.

All that sweet sweet Cheng family history. I loved every second of it. Cheng Xia Ping.

Bastille the Cockatoo.

All the background characters. Their models look actually finished, and good, with varied fashion choices, unlike these monstrous Parisians (though to be fair, we Parisians are a terrifying people). The Mandarin they speak isn’t gibberish, they hired actual Chinese-speaking people for that. Once again, bare minimum, it’s not praise as much as me noting this.

Some of the sets actually look like Shanghai! That hadn’t really been true of the New-York special, but here, the Bund actually looks like the Bund! Good job on that!

Some of Fei’s characterisation! There’s this nice internal conflict within her that I quite enjoyed (even though the way it’s shown… But we’ll come back to that later). Her character animation is pretty good which almost makes up for the more caricatural parts of her character. Thank you SAMG!

Expressive lighting. So much of it. It’s nice, and something the regular show was lacking. It’s genuinely good!

Some of the soundtrack is fitting and moody and isn’t orientalist nonsense.

These three kids. I want a spin-off series starring them and Fei.

Wow, antagonists who are adults and capitalists who exploit vulnerable kids are the bad guys and join forces. You know, not angry teenagers. Accumulating large sums of money is only truly possible through the exploitation of other people. Yes. I agree with you there, person that wrote that part of the script.

The Renlings and the Prodigious, from an entertainment standpoint. Cool concept, cool powers, I quite like that.

Hawk Moth getting vaporised. Take that, sucker.

Fei doesn’t turn into a blonde after all! They changed it! Wow! It’s the very bare minimum, once again.

The noodle thing is true!

The bad:

This whole eclipse thing. Was it really necessary? Sort of. Are we made to care about it? Sort of. Not really. Unfortunately not very compelling.

Why Marinette Goes to Shanghai in the First Place. I get that she’s a teenager with a crush but come on. 

Some directing observations: Marinette looking at pictures of Adrien on her phone while her uncle is introducing her to their family. That would be fine if she weren’t the audience surrogate, really. The thing is, if she isn’t shown to care all that much about her family and only wants to see Adrien, if she doesn’t ask to know more, the audience is encouraged to feel the same way, i.e. to not care.

She isn’t shown to be spending time with her uncle at all. We get like two minutes at most with only these two alone. Because apparently Marinette getting acquainted with her Chinese family is not that important to her character. Newsflash, when you make a show, you get to decide what is important or not, unless the producers really force your hand. And so what’s important is that Marinette has a crush on Adrien. Wow, never heard about that one before.

All That Kung-Fu nonsense. Is every Chinese character playing a prominent role in this show proficient in martial arts in a way or another? In 2021? Could we stop making Kung-Fu this thing with sort-of-mystical elements in it, and chi strikes and whatnot? Xu Xiaodong would like a few words with you. Yes the fight choreography is decent, but c’mon.

All that “ancestral values” stuff. I mean, really?

The Ugly:

Not specific to this episode, but Marinette really knew nothing about the Chinese side of her family before? Her parents only planned on saving money to travel with her one day but nothing beforehand? Really? That’s terrible writing.

Fei’s backstory is a cliché wrapped inside another cliché from old Kung-Fu and Wuxia movies, and that’s because the special isn’t long enough to do everything it wants to do properly in just 50-something minutes.

These stupid voice-over moments. It feels almost amateurish. If your directing is strong enough as is, the images should be able to do the talking themselves.

Part of the music is good. Part of the music is utter rubbish with all the musical clichés about China you can think about wrapped into one neat package.

Yes it’s a show for children, but the moralising aspect is really shoved in our faces in an unsubtle way this time, and, more annoyingly, it’s very superficial. The whole “purity” thing… What is that even supposed to mean? The show doesn’t do its work, it doesn’t define what that is supposed to mean.

The Prodigious and the Renlings only raise more questions that probably won’t be answered ever, this worldbuilding continues to be a mess.

It’s always about the Love Square, isn’t it? It can’t not be about the Love Square. When some things happen that aren’t Love Square-related for more than five minutes, the special is yanked back to that. Yes, we know Marinette is infatuated with Adrien. Yes we know Adrien is kind of oblivious. We know that. You’ve been telling us that for three seasons straight. We haven’t forgotten. Now do something else for fifty minutes please, since this isn’t following the show’s regular continuity, this would be the perfect chance, right?

Overall, it’s pretty good, for Miraculous, but Miraculous shouldn’t be your standard for goodness.

Not unsalvageable/10, not a complete catastrophe but not nearly as good as it could have been.

[blackgirlsuperherorants]

With more articulation, I'm ready to talk about why the push for Lokius simply bothers me, and this can be said for other m/m or w/w ships that fans push to be canon so hard just because they ship it.

It's the framing. The framing that if Marvel doesn't do it (or whatever the brand is), it's because homophobia, and if other fans don't like it/ship it, it's because homophobia (even if they ship other queer ships and are queer themselves.) And the biggest problem with that is that it overshadows the REAL issue of lack of queer representation on screen in mainstream nerd media, especially from big things under the Disney umbrella (Marvel and Lucasfilm/Star Wars, especially.)

It makes it bad that your ship isn't canon instead of bad that there haven't been any queer romances on screen in the MCU.

And like, as a writer myself, I find myself dissecting the stories of other media all the time. I can watch an MCU movie or series and pretty much assess what direction the story is going in by the narrative points they're hitting. I knew Sylki was basically gonna happen (even if just a kiss) because narratively, that's what the show was doing as soon as they had that "what is love" conversation on Lamentis-1. It didn't mean I liked it. But I knew it was happening.

Similarly, there's no romantic undertones to Loki and Mobius. None. For Marvel to make them a couple, it would mean they'd be doing it simply because the two present as men and it would make stans happy. And while there's something to be said for fan service, it would be annoying to watch them cram two guys together who aren't romantic in the slightest. I'd much rather see Loki meet some guy and have the same type of undertones they were giving to Sylvie and form a real bond to where the kiss feels earned and warranted. Not just put him with the nearest man because "he gay lol."

And how you guys are claiming it's being queer that makes you want this is beyond me. It's not being queer that makes you want this. I don't want queer characters that fuck everyone of whatever gender(s) they're attracted to even when it doesn't make sense for them to. I want real love stories. I mean, yeah, sometimes we can have a slut character, because that's fun, too, but that's not even what y'all think Lokius is. You seem to want them to be in love. But why? Because he's the first friend Loki made that isn't through Thor?

I hate that, too, because I hate this idea that queer people cannot have friends of their same gender without wanting to fuck them. IDK how y'all are, maybe y'all are like that, but I almost never have wanted to fuck any of my friends. The only few exceptions have been when I tried to befriend someone I had a crush on (in which case, usually the friendship can't work, really, because I have a crush on them.) I also think it's okay if you can have casual sex with friends, or if you have a friendship that develops into romance, but Jesus, do you people not have friends that you don't want to fuck? I am bi, maybe more pan (gender kind of doesn't matter to me, I guess) and I'm friends with people of all kinds of gender identities and like... I love them as people, which is why they're my friends, but I DO NOT want to fuck them. Especially my closest friend. I talked about her, before, here, but she's like my sister. The thought of fucking her is gross, to me. Not because she's gross, but because it feels incestuous.

Loki shouldn't want to fuck Mobius just because they developed a friendship. And that's very much how it's written on the series. They almost dislike each other (or Mobius is at least indifferent to Loki) and then they become friends.

That's not to mention the power dynamic that exists, there. And I know some of y'all are subs, but yeah, it's a bit gross to imply a sexual relationship with Loki's captor.

But on to Sylki. It sucks that I feel like most of y'all hate Sylki because Sylvie is a girl, and not just because it's bad in other ways. Like, the reasons Sylki is bad have less to do with "it should have been Mobius" and more to do with it being a lazy 1980s action movie plot that should have never happened. I'm not as creeped out by the selfcest (as many of you wouldn't have been if she was a he, I'm almost positive), but what's bad about it is that they couldn't have a strong female lead character without her being the love interest of the main guy. She didn't need to be, especially because she was a Loki variant, anyway. There was no need for it to have romantic undertones, and there was no need for them to kiss. It was sexist more than it was homophobic (and I can't help feeling like y'all are kind of being biphobic in this case. Maybe I'll talk about that, later, but yeah.) It was sexist bullshit. And there's valid criticism that Sylvie is underdeveloped. She's just angry and something for Loki to project affection onto.

I was also hoping they'd do a "found family" type of thing with Sylvie and Loki and let her be like the sister he never knew he needed, but no, they had to go trope and make her the love interest. It was lazy and bad and basically went "If Loki girl, main Loki want bone!"

Basically, having the main character fall for a character just because of their proximity and gender is bad and I hate it (and it would have been bad with Mobius, too, but yeah.)

Both the Mobius and the Sylvie thing also feel kind of racist, to me, because the show has prominent Black women who aren't even presented as desirable to Loki. And y'all, of course, ship him with anyone but the Women of Color. Y'all can pull true love with Mobius out of your ass, but he couldn't possibly fall for the Black women. lol.

Anyway. Not every show needs ships, and this show shouldn't have had any. I hate it. It's bad.

I guess on the biphobia front, I have heard some takes that it's not biphobic because Loki being queer in the MCU which hasn't shown any queer relationships, and Loki being the first openly queer character means they shouldn't have shown him with a woman presenting character. Which, I guess I get where you're coming from... but I have also been in fandoms for a long time and I see mostly girls saying this shit, which is what leads me to feel like it's simply jealousy. It happens all the time when a long-beloved single male character/celebrity suddenly starts dating a woman. Everyone hates it. And like, we haven't seen Loki be with ANYONE in the MCU, because mostly he's been doing villainy and his dating life hasn't been relevant. If the demigod says he's bi, he can kiss a woman. Especially a woman version of himself. Like I said, I hate it for other reasons, but pretending it's because he should have kissed Mobius is utterly delusional. He probably shouldn't have kissed anyone. Not in this series. There was no reason for any canon romance, especially because the show has a season 2 and we'll have time to see Loki develop earned, deserved romance with someone.

I'd much rather see them create a character just to be his boyfriend than have y'all push Marvel into making Lokius canon, which is a nonsense ship that only happened because Mobius is the only prominent male-presenting character before we meet the other Lokis.

My sincere wish is for people to remember that their ships are just ships and to enjoy them without getting all self-righteous about it. I TOLD y'all that Lokius wasn't gonna be canon like 4 episodes back, and here y'all are acting shocked and like Marvel took something from you. NOBODY expected y'all to ship Lokius. It's not even queerbait.

You can make clear arguments as to why Sambucky was queerbait. It's there in undertones in the actual series.

You cannot watch Loki and tell me you thought it was queerbait, unless you think men can't have conversations or hug goodbye without being romantically involved. Which means, in my opinion, that you need to learn about healthy masculinity.

Again, this is not a defense of Marvel. They DO need to let characters be queer, for real, and not just by saying " A bit of both". Like, let Loki be queer. Let Deadpool be queer. Let these queer characters be queer on screen. Yes.

But please stop making it about your ship. I'd rather see a flashback of Loki dating a guy and see him kiss someone he loved back on Asgard than watch y'all force Lokius. Because my queer rep is not about your crackship. It really isn't. And the fact that y'all keep calling us homophobic for not liking your ship REALLY needs to be addressed.

Like, when will y'all stop? I got on Stucky shippers about this shit in the past. All of us gay as hell, too, we just don't like YOUR ship. A lot of us like other queer ships. A lot of us like queer ships in other fandoms, too, and even have queer OCs. YOUR ship just ain't it. Stop forcing it. Literally, most of the ship wars between MCU fans have been queer ship vs queer ship, not really queer ship vs straight ship. Like, the number one Stucky rival ship was Stony. Not Steggy. People are not homophobic for not wanting your ship.

Sometimes it's because they ship something else.

And sometimes, like me, it's because they want something to make sense narratively and not happen for the sake of it happening. It's always better writing to have a character meetcute a new love interest than to magically turn a platonic friendship into a romantic relationship. Like, even when the characters are straight. Like, when Moesha dated Hakeem. It was just weird, even if he was kind of a great boyfriend. He was just supposed to be her friend, and people didn't really like it because it didn't fit narratively.

And that's why ships for the most part should be left to fanfiction, with the exception of a few where fans are right to call out the writers for not making it canon because it's clearly bait (like what happened to Destiel shippers. To see Lokius shippers compare themselves to THAT was so ridiculous. Destiel shippers had a decade of evidence only to be let down by a criminally unfair ending. Lokius shippers saw two men have a deep conversation once and lost their minds.)

Anyway, I'm not saying don't ship Lokius. I don't even hate it, really. I just think it obviously shouldn't be canon, and fans pretending like they were robbed of it is ridiculous. Literally, Ao3 exists for this reason. I will never see Steve fuck Sam Wilson, so I wrote it into my fanfic. I am not mad that they didn't actually date in the main MCU storyline.

[lunammoon]

The Problem With Hetalia (As told by someone who actually in the fandom until like, 2016)

I'm hoping this post will explain to people who are still into Hetalia why a lot of people have an issue with from the perspective of someone who knows a lot about the show. 

TL;DR: By making the WW2 axis powers come across as a lovable idiot, his serious friend, and the stoic voice of reason, it downplays the serious nature of what the Axis did and seeing as the real-life Axis harmed real-life people, many people have a justifiable huge issue with this. 

I will go more into depth about this under the cut.

A lot of people are talking about how Hetalia is coming back after 5 years and a lot of people are rightfully annoyed at the show. But what I'm seeing is that a lot of the people who are upset are people who clearly haven't watched the show and therefore are unable to explain to people who have watched it why it’s bad. The most that you hear is:

"it glorifies the Axis Powers" (which isn't 100% accurate although the assessment that they are portrayed in a way that makes them seem less bad is accurate) 

"Hetalia Cosplayers wore Nazi uniforms in front of a Holocaust memorial" (which I'd say is more of an issue with fans than the show). 

That is not to say that there isn't an issue with the show, because there really is. But these observations are unlikely to mean much to someone who watches Hetalia. So, in this thread, I'm going to explain why Hetalia is Problematic with the added context perspective of someone who was into the show during most of middle school and until Freshman year of high school. 

I knew the human names, used to jam to "Always With You" and "Pub and Go" and “It’ll Settle Itself Somehow” and “Light my Heart” and “Absolute British Gentleman” and “Mein Gott” and “World Rondo” and “Excuse Me, I’m Sorry” and so, so many more. 

I lost my shit with everyone else when the season 6 ep dropped and Italy danced like he was possessed by a demon. When I hear “ACE” family, I don’t think of Youtubers. I actually took a side on the FruUK vs UsUk debate and if you look in my archive, you can probably find some Hetalia posts that I’m too lazy to delete.

The point here being, I’ve actually seen the show so I know what I’m talking about. This isn’t an outsiders perspective is what I’m saying.

So, let’s get right into it. While technically only seasons 1-2 are officially actually called "Axis Powers" (Seasons 3-4 are called "World Series" Season 5 is "Beautiful World" and Season 6 is called "World Twinkle") WW2 and things relating to the Axis Powers are an important part of every season and appear prominently.

While Hetalia has covered many things from all different time periods, the two most common periods covered are the modern-day and of course, the second World War. The show is Japanese and (I assume) because Japan was on the Axis side, these portions focus more on the Axis Powers of Italy, Japan, and Germany. The Allies do come into play. And while the Allies aren't directly like, evil, which would've been FAR WORSE they've got a kind of Team Rocket-esque thing going on? They're not exactly mustache-twirling villains but they're clear antagonists. Make no mistakes.

I think the deserted Island arc is the best example of the problems many people have with the show.

Take for example, that beach fight. If you've watched Hetalia, you'll know the one I'm talking about. The one that they reused like, 50 times. The Allies are clearly shown as the antagonists/aggressors while the Axis are literally just vibing on a (kinda) deserted island and defending themselves. 

Now, if this was three dudes chilling on the beach and they suddenly got attacked by another five dudes also on the beach who they then fought off until the five attackers ran away that’s be one thing.

The issue is that this is supposed to be a representation of WW2. It's basically saying "oh, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy were literally just vibing, not bothering anyone when suddenly, the Allies attacked for no reason. Luckily, they (the Allies) retreated because the Allies are Cowardly but they keep coming back and bothering them,". Do you see the issue there? Most of the beach arc seems to be the writer forgetting that these are supposed to be Nations, not a random Italian dude, a German dude, and a Japanese dude.

“Oh, but they don’t glorify Nazi Germany. They don’t really even talk about what Germany was doing! Look at this pic of Germany in a lab coat holding a dandelion :)“

That’s not the defense that you think it is and it’s actually a main part of the issue that I, and many other people have with Hetalia.

I think the scene where this issue is the most obvious is the one where they are gathering around a campfire and talking and one of them comes up with the name "the Axis". The whole scene has the same energy characters in a moe anime coming up with a band name.

They’re sitting on a beach at night. I think there might’ve been a campfire, the stars are out, and the three of them talk about their dream of making a world that revolved around them. One of them comes up with the name “the axis” and then they all talk about how you would translate "axis" in their language. It’s all very found family-esque. The way the scene is framed is to encourage you to route for them to reach their goal. It’s the same kind of tone you’d see in a shoujo with a girl telling her friends about how she wants to win the singing competition no matter what or in Sword Art Online when Kirito talks about saving Asuna.

The issue is that their goal isn’t to win some competition or to save someone they care about. It’s to spread facism, imperialism, and bring about genocide.

There of course don’t SAY that that’s their goal, and outside of a one off line in the English dub that’s been since censored, they don’t really bring up what Germany was up to during WW2 vis-a-vie the Holocaust and if they did bring it up, I either wasn’t paying attention, it was in the manga, or it was in one of Germany’s character songs.

The issue is that during WW2 the show seems to at best forget and at worst, gloss over it that the main trio that they're focusing on are the villains. And not like, fantasy villains. Actual real-life villains that hurt real people in the real world. Imagine if instead of Ludwig Beilschmidt and Feliciano Vargas, it was Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. 

Are you seeing the problem yet?

I get why people like to watch the show. Ignoring the WW2 bits, it’s actually pretty good. I, as an American, really like Alfred F. Jones and the way he’s portrayed.

If Hetalia had stuck to non-WW2 related things such as that episode where the nations all talk about how horror movies differ in their nations, or they talked about their Christmas traditions. Or the ones where America and Japan are roommates. Or when they showed that time when America airdropped XL condoms on Russia labeling them as "small" for intimidation reasons. Or that series of episodes where they talked about Micronations. Or that time they all had to come together to fight aliens. Or the bit where they talked about the WW1 Christmas Armistice. Then it would be fine.

The issue is that they didn’t.

If they kept WW2 stuff for SOME reason. They had two options. 

Make the axis as proper villains

 Be explicit in showing that the nations will doesn't reflect what their leader wants. 

The first option wouldn’t be ideal if they wanted to cover any time period other than World War 2. The axis would be too unlikable and I doubt that an anime where Japan is the villain would appeal much to Japanese audiences.

But what about the second option. Have a bit where Ludwig is passing out White Rose pamphlets or smuggling people to safety.

Have Kiku (Japan for people who don’t watch Hetalia) purposefully looking the other way as Sugihara writes visas to get people to safety and covering for him against his boss. SOMETHING!

But instead of doing either of those, they took the bad third option which was, their choice to instead make the axis seem like likable individuals who are a group of three good friends who work together will in contrast with the “bumbling Allies” who are barely cohesive and constantly fight and argue. At best, makes it seem like both sides had a point and at worst, makes it seem like the Axis was a better than the Allies.

All of this is to say that liking Hetalia does not make you inherently a bad person, but you need to be more critical of what you watch and understand that there is a reason that some people have a genuine issue with it and they have a very good reason for that. You can still watch it the show, but do keep this information in the back of your brain as you do