#like i feel like they get written off as like a jokey monster in a lot of ways but i genuinely think they offer insight into like

[joltning]

rvb aus

when I said I had a lot brewing I meant a LOT brewing…! god I need motivation

I’ll be splitting these into 3 sections: one offs/fic ideas, less expanded on ideas, and then my main aus/ones I have more ideas on

one offs/jokey aus/fic ideas:

feel free to take these ideas as your own, im not too attached to them

• grimmons fic where kai lives on iris and simmons is super nervous around her. grif thinks it’s because he has a crush on her but actually it’s because she keeps teasing him about his crush on grif

• teen beach rvb au. think about it man.

• au where lopez and felix betray locus before he can betray felix. and they kiss or something I don’t know

• freelancer donut au…!!! one of my firsts. not very good. has no substance. but it exists. tex donut beef goes CRAZY

• trivia murder party rvb au. i have no clue what this would entail

• slipspace (the grifball miniseries guys) team up with fh57 from s14. this was before I learned that fh57 was just funhouse. womp womp

• shis tril writer mentions that locus now “owns a food truck on Fiji” or something. someone write that Please im begging

• fast food au focusing on the lieutenants. + Frank from s15. i know him and bitters gonna be oomfs or whatever

• au where church stays in the s3 time loop and experiences generation loss, feeding bits of himself into the other soldiers in order to save them

• au where the s5 ending where they all die is canon and they all go to hell

less expanded ideas

• so basic but I’m putting it in this tier anyway. A song fic battle of the bands au, but MY WAY…!!!! I have a vision. Don’t know what it is yet but I have it

• campy horror movie rvb au, where they all claim to see different things in the woods, but it turns out literally every single person is the horror. they all embody horror tropes and are, of course, alone in the woods in a summer camp.

• started as an everything everywhere all at once au but turned into something more Evil. Anyway regular domestic au but then the ai from the “alpha universe” jump into people in the main universe when they’re “compatible.” GRIMMONS JUMPSCARE….!!!!! Simmons is gonna be the one to end the world and the ai are either helping or hindering that process. he becomes a literal monster. originally this au was made so I could experiment with purple prose + text art etc but I guess not anymore what the hell

• rvbz au…! Viper and shatter squad are two organizations, viper being a splinter group from the AOD. When they start fighting on chorus, the reds and blues take sides, splitting off into two groups, some staying neutral. both are somewhat regarded as terrorist groups, viper being victims of starlight labs and shatter being a sort of vigilante group that. isn’t very good at it.

• “split ends” au…!! I really hope to bring this one up to the top tier at some point! geotah focus because im ill but it’s mostly balanced as i wanna get all dynamics in. project freelancer, instead of having ai, has units run using a partner. Only one can use it at a time, and the other has to focus on running it, leaving them vulnerable on the battlefield. This goes for enhancements, but it also goes for other things, such as calculations, enemy tracking, etc. they can switch whenever they want. each pair has one unit. god i wish I could write the unseen freelancers because all those silly powers would be chaos. Oh, also, you can steal the armor enhancements like you would ai. Hmm.

more expanded ideas

these are in order from least important to me to most

• trailer au! one of my first aus, and the ONLY au I’ve written a full outline for. (it’s not very good now that I look back on it.) it asks the question: what if the s15 trailer was EXACTLY what it was eluding to? featuring…Frank staying on the film team and making a trio with jax and dylan, insane murder party reds and blues, spencer plot relevance (somewhat) omalley coming back, the reds and blues failing to beat Hargrove, tucker shooting wash, and one armor enhanced, cobalt colored Tucker.

• s15 rewrite au. after disliking the trailer au I made this one! the blues and reds, instead of being mirrors or even reflections of the main cast, is reflections of what they could have become if they hadn’t changed their old ways, if things had gotten worse. this is basically my snider cut i reorder a shit ton of things etc. also very important carolina was not there when biff died it was just Tex and she didn’t kill biff, she just refused to help him (that kill goes to our friend loco!) anyway it’s more centric of the idea of comparisons between people who have distinguishing differences. Also kuane exists

• interstate au! honestly I have so little in terms of plot but idea wise I have Everyhting. I cannot stop thinking about it sooo..that’s why it’s so high up. Okay I’ll be real this is honestly like a glorified swap au but it’s MY swap au. Basically everything after s5 (also the miniseries) is noncanon and it diverges from there. ft…wash getting sigmapilled by eta, red team maine, red and blue road trip, the quest to find kai (she’s kissing women) and the run from DEAD CAROLINA..!! DEAD..!! oh and church and tex are literally just ghosts. Instead of the director trying to bring back allison and fragmenting one full ai into attributes, he is trying to pair FULL AI with freelancers in an attempt to boil them down to one trait, to harvest them and combine them into a Super Dead Daughter Carolina. wash and eta, or Data (see what I did there) are the collectors which is why they’re the main antags or whatever

• TRIPLETS TRILOGY. OHHHH MY GOOODDDD. I can’t say much because I intend to actually show this one to the world, but WOW. love this one. Basically, the triplets and sherry’s squad are alive. After an alien crash lands on their planet years later, they’re left to explore and find out what they’ve missed while they were gone. It’s split into 3 ‘seasons,’ (with one scrapped mini series), takes place during the recollections, and is looking to be way shorter than I intended it to be, but oh well. It’s where my obsession with the green guy and the white fuck and sherryvera insanity comes from. why did I have to fixate on these random ass mfers what the hell. It’s canon plausible….!! It would never happen!!! But it could!!

now the rant’s done, here’s some older images. oh god ray’s hair is So wrong

[kcuf-ad]

Aight bet- I’ll start off with some things I like you may already know XD

Well written female characters given equal amounts of flaws and development in both character and strength depending on the type of media to the male characters, that’s given for almost any show I like really

MONSTROUS CHARACTERs. I’m not taking about like oh cute petite anime girl/boy with like a tail or some horns I’m TALKING MADOKA MAGICA WITCHES THOS GIANT WEIRD THINGS IN EVANGELION. I WANT MONSTERS THAT LOOK LIKE THEIR AN EXSTENTIAL NIGHTMARE!! It’s so gender envy ngl ✨💕 wish that were me

FATHER DAUGHTER DUOS, BONNEY AND KUMA?! DID NOT CARE THAT MUCH EXCEPT TAHT BONNEY WAS RELATABLE IN HER LOBE FOR FOOD AND IMMATURE BEHAVIOR UNTIL I FOUND OUT THEIR FTAHER AND DAUGHTER BACKSTORY IN THE MANGA AND VIOLENTLY SOBBED

Also Father son duos are a treat for me, but I love father daughter duos more on a personal level (Haha daddy issues go brrr xDD)

SNAKE THEMED CHARACTERS! I know that you know I love snakes Fran XD

Symbolism in character design, the backgrounds, abilities names, I’m a sucker for shows and medias that have me over analyzing everything I could in terms of a character as a whole as well as their Morality, Psyche, biology, etc. just any character or moment I can just daydream about breaking down to their rawest moments and just analyze it til there’s nothing left for me to analyze over

The protagonist has flaws, and genuinely doesn’t win everytime (Yes even though I love Yusaku I mean this whole heartedly) XD

Angst bait and whump bait characters ig XD, I want to fall in love with a tragic character and immediately start hunting down angst and whump about them or just make my own ximssjsm

Also characters that I just wanna coddle and adopt XDDD

Bratty or cocky characters, that have utter fear of god instilled into them or absolutely gets knocked down their pedestal and it’s EMBARRASSINGLY AGONIZING FOR THEM, I’m not a sadist I swear :D

Theirs probs more but I can’t think rn and it’s already at ten I think that’s enough XDD

Oh~ This is such an interesting list, and I am actually pretty sure that Bleach has almost all of these.

Yeah, that is pretty much of a given. Orihime wants to protect her friends, but something happens to her powers and she feels horrible about it, she has real flaws that any girl would have.

Espadas, Just the Espadas. More specifically, Ulquiorra Cifer and his Ressureccion looks like a genuine devil in Bleach.

WE HAVE THAT! WE HAVE KENPACHI ZARAKI AND YACHIRU KUSAJISHI! And it is actually so cute, because this menacing beast of a man that loves to fight to death,

has a tiny little girl on his shoulder, 24/7. And when he is angry, he just doesn't even think about harming her at all, he just thinks about the people he is about to fight.

4. If you count Isshin and Ichigo, then yeah, we have that. They are a perfect duo. Legit hilarious and Isshin actually loves his son and will protect him.

5. Yup! Cyan Sung-Sun

6. Yeah it does have that with pretty much every character in this show, even the jokey characters like Asano Keigo. There are hundreds of videos just talking about these characters.

7. Ichigo gets his ass kicked like every arc, at least. Not to mention, the internal battle that he has with his inner demon, both literally and narratively. This guy has more layers than an onion.

8. Pick one. You want angsty antagonist? Coyote Starrk. Angsty protag? Ichigo. Angsty female character? Rukia Kuchiki. Angsty side character? Uryu Ishida. It is filled with angsty characters.

9. Rukia, Yachiru, Yuzu, Karin, Nel, Toshiro, Momo, pretty much, anyone that won't kill you, but knowing you, you will adopt all of them.

10. Renji FUCKING Abarai, this boy is the most hilarious boy on the planet and I love him for that.

Soooo~ Interested?

[eldritch-spouse]

Hi, it’s Spooky Anon (also, I’m sorry about the misunderstanding with the eldritch in a human disguise ask, meant it more as “what if a random person who was secretly a monster wandered in” and not “what if Y/N was a monster in disguise, anyways not the point of the post-)

I have a few questions, answer whenever you feel comfortable

1. Katia is a sloth demon, so how did she have triplets who are wrath, gluttony, and pride demons? It seems that demon types are inherited

2. How would Fank-Es voice sound? Like we know he speaks in l33t, but like, take the sentence “N1C3 to m3et U!1!” for example (idk made it up on the spot) would it sound like a very fucked up “Nice to meet you!” Or would it sound like “N-one-c-three- to m-three-et u!-one-!”

This last question is more optional and jokey, not rlly important but I remember there was a brief mention of E-Knaf, opposite of Fank-E. Would they be dressed in all black? Dressed like a boring office worker? Or something else?

Thank you! - Spooky Anon 🕸️

["Reader who is secretly a monster" and "reader who is a monster in disguise" are the same thing to me. Sorry if you meant something distinct, that's what it reads as to me.]

1)

Demon types are inherited only in specific scenarios, particularly when:

A) Only one of the parents is a demon;

B) One of the parents is an Icon;

When you have two demon parents, genome works differently in the conception process, different types can be achieved according to what both parents have going on in their DNA.

Katia was a sloth demon, yes, but the triplets' father was wrathful. It was a mix and mash of genomes since both parents came from mixed-type households as well.

2)

[I think I've said this before, I'm not sure.]

Fank-e's voice is higher pitched than it should be for a robot of his size (not ridiculously so, but it's noticeable), it's also glitchy and features periods where it loses clearness, becoming cracky or echo-y. It has some jarring spikes in speed and pitch, which makes him hard to comprehend until you've hanged around the robot for a while.

This is, in part, caused by the damage to his "head", where plenty of vital components reside.

He doesn't read out the numbers or random upper-case/lower-case configurations in his speech pattern, that's purely for "effect" (such as how Kalymir speaks in caps locks).

Whenever a ":]" is written in his dialog, he doesn't verbalize "colon, right square bracket". What happens is that his visor displays that emoticon. Sometimes he'll display words in his visor as well, and those are more often than not written in l33t.

3)

They'd be devoid of anything remotely noteworthy. Between reverse Fank-e and a brick wall, you'd be better off trying to get a relationship with the wall.

[gregrulzok]

Hello...Do you mind if I ask your top 10 favorite characters (can be male or female) from all of the media that you loved (can be anime/manga, books, movies or tv series)? And why do you love them? Sorry if you've answered this question before.....Thanks...

Hi !!

I wouldn't say I necessarily have a straightforward top 10 list as such ... But I'm not one to pass up and opportunity to infodump on anyone who'll indulge me !

I hope this is what you're looking for and, uh, buckle up. I'll include a TL;DR with each character to make your life easier, because knowing me, this is gonna get LONG.

Also potential spoilers for: Dungeon Meshi, Night in the Woods, Berserk, Devilman Crybaby, Arcane, Jujutsu Kaisen, Dimension 20: Fantasy High, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind.

Also note that Berserk and Devilman Crybaby are both NSFW sources. I don't mention anything explicit here, but be mindful when looking into it.

Laios Touden (Dungeon Meshi)

TL;DR: Excellent neurodivergent representation, complex and unique in how interesting he is, also just me IRL

I'll be honest in saying he isn't actually my favourite Dungeon Meshi character (that's probably Chilchuck), but he IS the one I think about the most.

I'm firmly of the opinion that Laios is intentionally written to be neurodivergent-coded, and I say this because he's incredibly nuanced and interesting in the way he portrays symptoms and signs of autism. Most canon autistic representation I see can be boiled down to "slightly quirky" with a dash of the same 3 symptoms, and the background of that, Laios is a breath of fresh air. He's socially inept, but not at all cold or inexpressive - quite the opposite, he's open and enthusiastic and optimistic. He's obsessive, not in a quirky jokey way, nor in the way of being a savant that knows everything off the top of his head - he genuinely feels like he's learning about his interest and ENJOYS learning about it, rather than being robotic in his hyperfixation. On top of that, the thing he's hyperfixated on is EXTREMELY realistic for a neurodivergent person - many of us do find interest in animals, in cryptids, in other living beings that are, well, other, because we spend our whole lives being alienated and separate from our peers and we seek that comfort in other places. Monsters are straightforward, they don't play mindgames. They are powerful, they don't let others push them around (Laios, mind, is also powerful - but he's a human, so his strength alone has never been enough to protect him). And after all, humans already hate him, they already treat him as an unwanted freak. Why shouldn't he find solace in creatures that are treated the same way he is?

I could go on and on about how amazing he is, but honestly a lot of what I have to say could be posts of their own and we'd be here all day. I'll say also that he's just ... Plain and honest relatable. I have not projected so hard onto a character in a long time.

Angus DeLaney (Night in the Woods)

TL;DR: Comfort Character Extraordinare

If Laios is good to my brain because he reminds me of myself, Angus is good to my brain because he reminds me of my boyfriend. This, I cannot deny.

He isn't the most complex character in the world, nor even in NitW - yet I think there's more to him than people give him credit for. I think he's excellent in filling the role he's given - a friend-of-a-friend, a near-stranger, the person in the friend group our protagonist is in, someone she knows, and yet doesn't, likes, and yet doesn't really vibe with. He's nuanced and deep, has a life of his own, and honestly I'm almost glad they didn't explore it fully. By having Mae only get a tiny glimpse into his life, after knowing him for so long and yet never really spending time with him, we get the sense that people are people whether or not they're in Mae's life. It gives a greater sense of depth to the world offered to us by the game. Mae's close friends she knows well aren't the only ones going through tough things, everyone has their own story, and sometimes she only gets a tiny hint of that, and sometimes she gets none at all. I think it's very true to life, and very smart.

As for Angus specifically, well. He's smart, warm, kind. He doesn't let his cynicism get in the way of his friends fun, nor does he let it stop him from taking their worries seriously. He shows affection through cooking, he makes dumb nerdy jokes, he's canonically more charismatic than you'd think, he wants to take care of everyone and doesn't know how to take care of himself, and he has a fantastic ass.

He reminds me of my boyfriend. What more can I ask for.

Griffith (Berserk) & Ryo Asuka (Devilman Crybaby)

TL;DR: Incredibly nuanced villains that I want to put on a little dish and dissect. Themes of light and purity as something evil, of good intentions (Griffith) and love (Ryo) as something horrifying.

I figure I could just combine these two, given how much they've impacted each-other's writing.

Griffith AND Ryo are both infinitely nuanced characters, in ways that are complimentary and yet still different enough.

I've made a few posts about Griffith (if only because I recently finished Berserk), and my opinion on him can be summarised as such: I think he's the best villain in fiction, in that he is afforded nuance and complexity, without having to take away his teeth and make him ultimately pathetic, unintimidating, or a sexyman. I think the most interesting part of Griffith is his politics, his drive to change the world, his willingness to sacrifice everything to the greater good to the point where it becomes apocalyptic. It's fascinating to watch a character be so wrapped in genuine and honest good intentions, to the point of destroying everything.

I don't think I've talked much about Ryo (I should rewatch Crybaby), which is really a shame because he's no less interesting. He takes an aspect of Griffith that I haven't talked much about (rather, Griffith takes an aspect of Ryo) - obsessive love and devotion to the point of destruction - and amps it up to an infinite degree. Unlike Griffith, who pushes aside his love for his political motivation, Ryo destroys everything and anything in his path to the one he loves - including that very person. He's possessive and obsessive, in a way that does end up feeling genuine, and his entire humanity is concentrated on his feelings to this one person.

Together, these characters represent a trope that I personally love - purity, beauty and light as something evil, something vile, something overwhelming and possessive (as contrasted by something dirty, something crude, something rough being real and human and kind).

I just find them fascinating.

Ekko (Arcane)

TL;DR: mmmm community centric anarchist punk king.

This is possibly the most self indulgent one. Arcane is a wonderful show entirely full of fascinating characters I love, and each one of them deserves an amount of words that even I don't possess to describe their greatness.

Ekko is no less cool and interesting for having less screen time, but if we're just being honest here for a second ...

I just love his vibe.

I love that he was a rowdy, shitty little kid that antagonised everyone he could. I love that as he grew, he got more serious, took on an air of responsibility, but he didn't lose his friendliness, his humour, his artistry. I love that he prioritizes fun and growth and community, not just survival. I love that he has authority as a leader, not through fear but through confidence, through respect. I love his scene with Vi, where he bites back at her for the first time, I love their hug, I love their bond. I love his fight with Jinx, I love that for a moment they're just kids playing a game, I love seeing the reality crash over him like a wave. I love the little tidbits we get of him as a kid, playing dumb pranks, practicing his punches.

And to be completely clear: HE IS THE ONLY CHARACTER THAT WAS CORRECT.

Heimerdinger, Jayce, Silco, Vander, Mel, every single leader in this show is either too preoccupied trying to preserve broken pieces of the past or they're speeding towards a future they don't understand.

Ekko says NONE OF THAT SHIT, takes up the punk anarchist mantel, and says "I am going to take care of the injured, the indisposed, the homeless, the sick, the children, because blind ideals mean nothing in the face of real poverty and struggle".

...Which is why I say it's self indulgent on my part. It's just because I fully agree with his ideologies.

Geto Suguru (Jujutsu Kaisen)

TL;DR: Another villain I absolutely love analyzing and dissecting. Beautifully written ideology and motivation that is fully understandable even if it's something any sane human would viscerally disagree with.

I've written post upon post on Geto, so I won't get too into it, but I still wanted to mention him. Another reason I won't talk too much here is because I've ultimately fallen out of love with JJK - sad, but true. In my opinion, the most interesting part of the show was, in fact, Geto.

Geto's ideology is incredibly well written. So, so many little details end up playing into it, it's set up so carefully and expertly that in the end it's incredibly easy to see how he ended up in the place he did. The death of his friends, the responsibility of Mimiko and Nanako, the way he's treated, the way his best friend is treated... Some of these things are big, some more subtle, but they all lay a brick in the foundation of one of the best villain arcs I can name. And if you can't tell, I'm a big fan of villains that genuinely believe what they preach. There's an air of sincerity about him, despite being a manipulative asshole, he isn't a selfish one.

I just think he's fascinating.

Fabian Aramais Seacaster (Dimension 20: Fantasy High)

TL;DR: Incredibly entertaining, and has informed the way I play my TTRPG characters.

A bit of a random one, and a more light-hearted one - I just love this silly little man.

Fabian is so unabashedly loud, silly, over the top. He makes such obvious, catastrophic mistakes, often after delivering such confident speeches about how awesome he is. And then he's allowed to have quiet moments - he can be somber, soft, sad, tragic. He loves his friends, but he can't bring himself to be obvious about it, but he wants so badly to express it. He has repressed trauma that we don't really get told - instead it's expressed through every desperate cry for attention and every subsequent moment of quiet reflection.

I've been playing TTRPGs for a little while now, but Fabian has fundamentally inspired me to be more confident, more nuanced, to take up more space at my table, and to not be scared to change the way my characters act based on the scene and mood and circumstance.

I just think he's neat !

Panacotta Fugo (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind + Purple Haze Feedback)

TL;DR: An underrated character that showcases burnout, gifted kid syndrome, and abandonment issues in a way I find particularly painful.

God. Where do I even start.

Fugo speaks very deeply to some of my own trauma. The gutteral, albeit brief depiction of gifted child syndrome and the subsequent burnout that follows it felt incredibly, palpably real not only in the episodes we see his backstory in, but also in his general behaviour. In the way he still tries to act proper and composed, in the barely-restrained rage that bubbles over once in a while, in the severe guilt felt through these outbursts. Pretty much any time Fugo is on screen is a testament to his pain and his sheer desire to overcome it, which (as amazing this show is) I can't exactly say for most JJBA characters.

The abandonment issues are more personal to me than I'd like to get too deeply into - suffice it to say, being left behind without a thought, looking at people you came to think of as your family turn their backs on you and walk away, and realising for the first time that you weren't, in fact, a needed and cherished presence in their lives, but rather something easily parted with ... That shit hurts, and it hurts me very personally.

Araki has gone on record stating that he fell in love with Fugo as a character and came to see him as a personal friend. I believe him, if the genuine and subtle care poured into every crevice of his character is anything to go by.

Purple Haze Feedback isn't canon, but it is Araki-approved, and its the exact amount and type of Fugo content I was starving for after his extremely undercut role in part 5.

And I think that's it!

Was that 10? Who knows.

Either way sorry if this isn't what you were looking for - i think one look at my blog will tell you that I'm very prone to infodumping especially as it pertains to character analysis.

And if you read it this far... Holy shit, thank you !!

To be honest as I've fallen out of fandom spaces it's become incredibly hard to come up with characters I actually like, rather than ones I've projected my own stories onto and changed fundamentally.

Playing DND has NOT been helpful, it's increasingly difficult not to spend four hours talking about a PC I made that I really love instead of any actual character haha.

Either way thank you for the ask !! Like I said I love a good opportunity to infodump.

[sarrie]

Hmmm... blorbos blorbos blorbos... how about- some Gaster, Sans, Handsome Jack, Nisha, and Rhys? ;3

hEEEHEHE ok let's go!

☝︎♋︎⬧︎⧫︎♏︎❒︎

Okay so I am definitely saying this in a time where Gaster, The Mystery Man, is so unknown lol. That said, I was normal about him until I saw the not-released tarot card for him. Then I started reading fic as a joke and it all went downhill from there. And. Ok. I know we don't know ANYTHING about him, so me saying fandom takes are incorrect isn't quite fair, but I have a hard time thinking he's just 100% evil. Especially if he's a monster - made out of hope and love and all that jazz. Not saying that monsters can't do bad things (LOOKS AT ASGORE) but there's a lot that goes into that. Asgore did bad things because he was put in a bad situation, lost his family, and wanted to help his people. Alphys wanted to help people, but wound up doing bad things, too. I feel like a lot of fic and content I see for Gaster is just about him being super mega evil and Fucked Up which is fine but, like, for why? What made him act that way? I also love the idea of him just being an absolute goof. A real "Sans had to learn puns from someone" type character. And idk it's hard to have canon content about a character that uh erased themselves from existence lmao. That being said I'm not normal about him. I have 3 full fledged fanfictions about him - two I've started writing and one that I visit when I try to fall asleep and haven't written yet. If he is 100% evil that's fine load me up in the extractor baby I'm subject 01.

Snas

In the same way that I relate too well to Dante as being the haha funny pizza man as a coping mechanism to not acknowledge his own fear and depression, I relate WAY TOO WELL to Sans Undertale for the same reason. If my depression gets too bad and all encompassing I'm going to take a nap. While I used to have a healthy love of naps, they're now also coping mechanisms to avoid reality for me. Back when my anxiety and depression pretty much took over my life I would sleep forEVER. 18 hours a day if I could. I now also struggle with insomnia and sleep avoidance so it's like. I sleep in small amounts now and it's gotten to the point that I will 100% use my 15 minute breaks and my lunch to take a nap. The laid back jokey personality is very much who I am truly, but then there's also the Projection where I use that as a facade to avoid my problems/emotional trauma. And I'd say Unwillingly I have come around to him because, as I'm sure you know, in the beginning I was like I don't get this Undyne is the only hot character here what's going on why do people want to fuck this dude. And then I finally watched a play through and learned Everything and I'm like oh no he's so saaadd poor meow meow :((( sad boyyy sad!!! tragic!!! (and then The Fight happens and it's like oh uh hmm not examining my reaction to this bc i don't want to know what this says about me) Then I started reading fanfiction as a joke which ok can I say a lot of blorbos for me have come from me reading fanfic as a joke and then getting super into it??? LMAO. And now I've given myself the challenge to read as many sans/reader fics on AO3 that catch my interest and I still have 274 pages left lmAO.

Handsome Jack

Put him in more situations. Destroy him. I love him. I hate him. The reality is he could make me SO MUCH WORSE. He's handsome. He's a loser. I want more of his face to melt off. I want to chew on him like a chew toy. Jack is such a fun character to hate. He has so much charisma it's sexy but he's also so unhinged and, like, there's never been an option to fix him. I think he was born and from that moment on it's just been a collision course with absolute fuckery. He's such a caricature of a human, and if you're not the receiving end of his insanity it's so fun to watch.

Nisha

I love her. I want her to destroy me. BL2 said we need a character who can go toe-to-toe with Handsome Jack in terms of being an absolute disaster of a human being and then they delivered the most badass cowboy hat wearing woman they could. She is 1000% too good for Jack, and arguably Jack happening to her ruined her life. Rhys

My sweet precious Rhysie boy. ;-; He's so pretty and so stupid I love him so much. I really feel like BL3 fucked him up in terms of characterization. The absolute trials we go through in Tales with him and just. Stop!! putting him in situations!! I lie lmao I need a follow up of Tales where he is put in another situation with Fiona so we can see what the fuck all happened there.

[bykalopsia]

faiz episodes 11-20 notes

i had a whole rant written out about mari's age in here since this batch of episodes drops a whole bunch of Skeevy Romance Plots That Really Didn't Have To Be Skeevy but i deleted it bc it was A Lot and i don't think it's anything that hasn't been said eight billion times already so there. i'm just acknowledging it now. it just sucks because in a normal situation i'd be very much up for it bluhhhhhhhhhhh (i'm cutting myself off. no more ranting!!!!)

i can't help but wonder what my reaction to kusaka would be if i did not have The Stuff Everyone Knows About Kusaka lingering in the back of my brain. bc i don't know if my endeared "oh look at this asshole" reaction is because i Know or not. but so far i'm at the very least enjoying him bc he's making takumi act like a bitch and bitch takumi is my favorite takumi so yayyyyyyy. tldr i love antagonistic fake bitches!!!!

the fact that yuka is the most violent of the orphnoch trio is intensely funny to me. 1) because yuji keeps monologuing to her about not hurting people and she keeps going :] yep. that's definitely what's going on over here! 2) kaido talks the most game but literally hasn't done anything ever

also yuji's obliviousness is getting increasingly funny both re: yuka killing people (which tbf he has no real way of knowing about it's just funny) and. well. he kind of just bungles all of his interactions with yuka it's just amusing to me.

not-hojo's haircut seems to get less flattering by the appearance. fascinating. extremely funny that one of his attacks is just POETRY BLAST. extremely unserious show. anyways he's way more competent than i was expecting i really thought he'd be outta here by the time this set of episodes was over.

increasingly becoming more and more enamored with takumi. like yes he's pissing me off bc he's terrible at communicating but he's also wallowing in his own misery which is lovely. also his hair has been looking really great. (i wrote this and then immediately in ep 20 it looks perhaps the most jank its ever looked)

btw i keep doing the thing where i'm like "i'm gonna take my notes concurrently this time so i don't lose all my funny thoughts" and then i go watch 5 episodes on my tv where i can't be writing shit down. so i've lost all my funny thoughts. but rest assured i am cracking myself up on my couch between the hours of midnight and 2 am.

for the minutes in between episodes 14 and 15 where takumi and yuji were both in the river i thought they were going to somehow bump into each other and i nearly made myself cry laughing

also takumi and yuka are making me want to bite chunks out of my television. oughjafjhgfjgkgjjgf pain pain pain pain suffering

everybody point and laugh at kusaka's mandatory sidecar

the idea that yuji still thinks that faiz is being used by a smart brain agent is interesting

also. these episodes have a critical lack of smart lady. where is she!!!!!! :[

i feel like no one in this show gives a fuck about collateral damage. if i was at this college that got attacked by monsters and once it was fine to leave i went out into the parking lot and i found out my fucking car got exploded bc takumi couldn't step around it to do his finisher i'd go crazy.

this really does bring up the question of what the public thinks about faiz. though tbh it seems like orphnochs have some sort of quality that impacts people's memory of them and they fight generally in secluded places so idt it's all that well known (+ the police are actively covering the whole thing up) but like. they're exploding shit and knocking chunks out of parking garage beams surely someone's got an idea about faiz. he's got a flying fucking attack bot for christ's sake. kusaka just sent a fuck ton of missiles into a completely public area. huh???? (this is not legitimate pedantry going on here i'm riffing bc it's funny but if they actually address this i'd die laughing)

kaido seems to have been downgraded to being a sleaze / jokey character but ultimately this is Fine. Whatever. i'll just ogle him without any seeds of Investment forming it's Fine.

anyway my curiosities for the next batch of episodes are: 1) we still do not know wtf is going on with the underground school???? are those guys just dead now???? 2) what bizarre cult shit was going on with the ryusei academy stuff / how do they relate to what smart brain is doing now 3) i know delta is showing up next ep so i'm curious about that (EDIT: it was not delta i'm maybe an idiot and forgot takumi could get other forms) 4) i need to dissect yuji's brain or something man i feel like i Still don't have a handle on him

[rollercoasterwords]

#do not even get me STARTED on the overlap w zombie media godddds

I for one am very here to get you started on the overlap with zombie media if you’d like 👀 I love your meta and I think you’d have some really interesting thoughts!

omg omg omg ok kissing u on the mouth first of all second of all i don't even think this is going to be coherent it's just gonna be me rambling but it'll probably get way too fucking long so i'm gonna put it under a cut

okay so the thing about zombies is that they are the perennial "other," right, even more so than most other types of monsters, because the defining feature of the zombie is ego death. like--werewolves, vampires, frankenstein's monster...even creature features like alien or the thing, all these horror movie monsters still have some form of subjective identity, some sense of self, and usually the conflict comes because these monsters live in ways that cannot coexist with human life.

zombies have no identity beyond consumption. like, i would argue that the core feature of a zombie even moreso than just "reanimated corpses" is this violent need to consume--and, in that consumption, to reproduce, to create more zombies. (this gets played around with in a lot of more recent films but i'll get into that later). so, in a way zombies are the antithesis to humanity, because humanity requires coherent identity, and zombies do not have that. in a way, it's almost utopic; zombies are genderless, sexless, without race or capital or religion or politics or any of the things that creates conflict between humans. zombies typically have no issues with each other; theoretically, in a world with no humans and only zombies, there would be absolute peace.

but, ok. hang on. let me back up a bit. because the thing about trends in horror is that they reflect societal fears of the time, and zombies have changed quite a bit throughout history. like, most people agree that the original zombie movie was White Zombie in 1932, which i haven't personally watched but i have read about and like. my interpretation is that a lot of the fear the movie speaks to is fear of the foreign, particularly foreign men/the masculinized foreigner, and as much as i want to go on a rant about like the historical context surrounding that and the gendered dynamics that arise from the movie and how it can be read onto a war story (particularly since we're dealing with the lost generation here, like all these young people who are traumatized from wwi), i am going to reign myself in. and just say: in the original zombie movie the core focus of the zombie was not consumption--in fact, as far as i'm aware (again, haven't actually watched the movie), eating people wasn't even part of it. instead, the zombie was just a mindless puppet being controlled by somebody else, and this is because the zombie mythology that White Zombie was drawing from originated in Haiti, where the zombi was a reanimated dead body that was used as a slave (which really illustrates like. the colonial overtones of White Zombie, where a cultural figure representing the fear and pain of slavery was essentially taken and pasted into a story where the primary monster is the foreign threat to white americans).

SO it's not until 1968, Night of the Living Dead, that romero introduces cannibalism to zombies, and also introduces like...the concept of The Horde. like, in White Zombie, the focus is really just on a single zombie (although there are a few more), but i don't think it's until romero that we get this like cultural image of a horde of cannibalistic ghouls crowding in and attacking.

and so like--this is 1968, right? fear of the Other looks a bit different but is still very much swirling in U.S. politics--like, we've got the cold war, the civil rights movement, the vietnam war, the space race. and the monsters in Night of the Living Dead are actually tied to both fears about aliens and nuclear radiation--supposedly they were created by the radiation from an exploding space probe or something. so in a lot of ways, these mindless hungry monsters are standing in for any number of broad, "evil" forces that the American public is being constantly warned about. but at the same time, there is an argument to be made that romero critiques that fear in the survivor dynamics he portrays and especially in the way he ends the film with Ben's character (again, refraining from another sub-rant within my rant).

okay so THEN after Night of the Living Dead we see the rise in this cultural figure of the zombie, and in the later half of the twentieth century the zombie is normally portrayed as these hordes of reanimated, cannibalistic corpses. but we don't really get this boom in zombie media until the late 90s/early 21st century, particularly post 9/11 with the rise of the war on terror. once again, a lot of these nebulous fears about the "Other" are in the foreground--we've got the advent of the internet, which begins to globalize and connect the world in unprecedented ways; we've got the AIDs crisis and fear of disease and contagion; we've got the war on terror and fear of the cultural Other who takes the form of violent, mindless hordes in the american imagination. and we get not just movies like the 28 Days Later franchise but also other media like The Walking Dead comics (debuted in 2003) which will eventually become staples of the zombie genre.

and so by the early 2000s we've got the zombie established as a horror monster + cultural figure, which opens things up to start pushing the borders of what makes a zombie a zombie and sort of exploring with new forms of zombiism. and we start to see this more in a few different ways--one is the simple physical conventions, which i'm less concerned with, but i think 28 Days Later is the best example of this--suddenly, you not only have fast zombies, but also zombies that haven't died and come back to life at all, but rather have a monstrosity rooted in disease. but then you also have movies like I Am Legend, where we're starting to explore not only different physical forms of zombiism, but also the possibility of sentient zombies.

(sidenote--i know that we saw sentient zombiism explored somewhat before the 21st century, with movies like Day of the Dead, but i feel like it wasn't really until the 21st century that the concept started to take root. just let me have this one lmao)

and now the thing is--remember what i said earlier? a core feature of zombiism is ego death, and it's that ego death that is key to making a zombie a zombie and separating them from humans. so what does it mean when zombies suddenly become sentient--when they can communicate and form their own societies? where is the new line between human and zombie?

we start to see the sentient zombie really take root in the 2010s--2013 is a big year, with both the release of Warm Bodies and the initial air date of In The Flesh (an AMAZING show if you haven't watched it you should. i will forever be bitter that it was canceled). and we start to get a lot of movies that really, really blur this boundary between zombie and non-zombie. a non-comprehensive list of just ones i've seen that come to mind: All Cheerleaders Die (2013), Raw (2016), The Girl With All the Gifts (2016), Zombie For Sale (2019), and now, most recently, if you think about Netflix's Army of the Dead (2021), we see this growing trend of zombie media blurring the boundaries between human and zombie. and i've limited myself to movies for the most part here--this trend can also be found in zombie TV shows (think Santa Clarita Diet or even Z Nation--one of the most atrocious shows ever made which i think absolutely everyone should watch), books, probably even video games (although that's one area of zombie media i really haven't consumed, so honestly i'm not sure). like, at this point we've got zombies that can fall in love (I Am Legend, Warm Bodies, In the Flesh, All Cheerleaders Die, Zombie for Sale, Santa Clarita Diet), zombies that can build their own societies that mirror human ones (The Girl With All The Gifts, Army of the Dead), zombies that literally live and function alongside humans (Santa Clarita Diet, In the Flesh, The Girl With All the Gifts), even zombies that sire or give birth to children (Z Nation, Army of the Dead).

of course, there's still an abundance of zombie media making use of more "traditional" zombie monsters, too. but i think this steady increase in zombie media eroding the boundary between zombie and human has ultimately left zombies with only one uniting feature that holds true across almost every distinct form of zombie media from the latter half of the 20th century onwards (at least, i can't think of any exceptions): their cannibalistic hunger.

and so like this is where we start to hit the sweet spot of crossover with cannibal movies and zombie movies, because not all cannibals are zombies, but all zombies seem to be cannibals. and what does it mean that zombies, over the past fifteen years or so, have become monstrous less for their mindlessness and ego death and more for their violent consumption?

like, at the end of the day i feel like what's happening with the zombie genre and also the growing popularity of cannibalism as a horror trope (and the changing form it's taken--oh i could write a whole 'nother essay about the sexification of cannibalism. like, remember when cannibalism was very much "the hills have eyes" grossness? and now it's timothee chalamet in a romance movie?) are both spinning around this centerpoint of our own growing horror with the culture of consumption that late-stage capitalism has trapped us all in, where we are no longer individuals but instead only consumers. and, simultaneously, products to be consumed. and we are beginning to see more and more that the only forms of connection available to us are through consumption, and just like sentient zombies, we might be horrified of what we're becoming, but we cannot rid ourselves of this hunger for connection, even if the only avenues left to seek it are by consuming or being consumed.

so like, to summarize, i sort of see the evolution of the zombie as: monster representing fear of slavery -> monster representing fear of the proverbial Other -> monster representing fear of ourselves

like i think we are beginning to see a cultural shift in zombie media where it's less blatantly nationalist propaganda (or propaganda against whatever x group is being Othered in the cultural consciousness of the moment) and starting to turn towards these questions about the blurry lines of humanity as late-stage capitalism looms larger as like the Monster of Cultural Consciousness. which is!!!! so interesting to me!!!!

[furrama]

I've been slowly rewatching the old Digimon seasons (dubs because that's all I can find) and we're almost done with Tamers. My observations are:

Adventure aged pretty well all considering. I know the plot was written by the seat of the writer's pants after the Devimon arc and the dub will not shut up with the jokey jokes and yet still it's probably the best season. It works in spite of the flaws and is still the best jump in point, though at this point try to find the sub if you can.

02's dub is literally unwatchable. The story suffers from Too Many Cooks and marketing meddling. Probably the worst season out of all of them, even if some ideas had potential.

Tamers used to be my favorite or "The best one" but on a rewatch it's kinda not working. The pacing is even and the story had one main guy writing it, so there's follow through and stuff gets set up and paid off, (something 02 doesn't really do). However important chunks of the Digimon world building are hollow if you look past the surface. Emotional stakes are set and reset over and over with lessons forgotten, and we never really deal with all of the digimon murders by the kids (but that one murder that one other guy did was wrong and he should feel bad I guess). There's also a lot of little inconsistencies that add up.

This was also a problem with 02 and beyond, but I don't like it when digimon evolutions look too similar to the preevos, like they're Pokemon. The entire lines from baby 1 to mega look like a straight shot instead of a diverging family web of eccentric weirdos that occasionally look related or are only thematically related. It really bothers me in Tamers, except Guilmon, because of his in story creation. It makes sense for his evolution and devolutions to be partially copy pasted.

I also don't like giant rookies. Guilmon again gets a story pass because a kid created him to be better than Agumon and the kid trying to hide a big dinosaur is fun. But Renamon doesn't have that excuse. (I don't like Angoramon from Ghost Game being so big either. If I mistake your rookie for a champion you did something wrong. Higher level digimon looking like they are lower is fine if the concept supports it, but child stage digimon should look like they're children imo.)

Calumon and Terriermon's designs shouldn't be in the same lineup. They look too similar color and size wise while also looking like two different art styles, (the eyes, the proportions). Which if I remember right, they are, because Terriermon is a bit older.

The dub at least chilled out for the most part by Tamers. I think it even left a quiet moment in tact here and there. Progress?

Anyway, this turned into a Tamers rant on accident, I should probably wrap it up. I remember Frontier being okay, just a little long and aimless at times, and it's a little too divorced from the Friends With Monsters concept. Good theme song though. We'll rewatch it soon.

[ngame989]

Starco Fic Recs

Disclaimer: This list is largely curated to my own personal preferences (minimal feelings angst, minimal AUs, character development >>> plot) and has a fairly high bar for quality in characterization, etc. There will likely be many popular/beloved fics that I really don’t think highly of at all and therefore don’t make the cut. Feel free to DM me things you think I should consider adding, but I make no promises.

And of course I’d be flattered if you gave my own works a chance - stop by my About Me section for links! Thus far I’m particularly proud of the post-canon series I just started in collaboration with an awesome team, The Greatest Gift.

(Updated 9/26 - I decided to redo the list since people might appreciate seeing it in the tags again. To anyone whose own work is featured here that I haven’t personally responded to - I’m a tough critic with a lot of strong personal preferences so PLEASE do not take my gripes as condemnations of your skills - if they make the list at all, I think they’re worth a read!)

See below for the very thorough list!

Bolded titles indicate must-read.

Italicized titles indicate work is incomplete (in the case of continuous stories).

Asterisks indicate new additions from last update (3 for brand new, 1 for status update).

I’ve VERY loosely organized the categories by personal priority order this time around, but read the descriptions and decide for yourself!

Must-Reads

Forevermore - A Starco wedding story (with a bit of Jantom as well). Simply one of the best fics I’ve read in the fandom. I have no meaningful criticism to give it, and that’s the highest praise I can possibly give something.

Monarchs of Mewni (+ Traditionally Lovingly Yours) - A series of chronologically disconnected oneshots set years after the show. The backstory is very dated given how long ago it started (Jarco was kinda serious for a few years, Tomstar v2 never happened, etc) but overall it’s lovely. Has a bit of plot, a bit of Jantom, a lot of other character interactions, and a boatload of Starco - plus a Starco kid who is a decently developed character but also doesn’t just take over and crowd out Star and Marco themselves! That alone deserves merit.

Ruined - Aftermath of a hypothetical return of Monster Arm. Angst with a happy ending (and one of the few angsty fics that gets my seal of approval), so read this extra early if that’s more your schtick than mine.

study buddies - Y’know what, fuck it, I’m putting this here. It’s a short ball of Starco fluff but it’s one of the sweetest and fluffiest fluffballs I’ve seen in a long time and it’s very emotionally immersive and y’all needa read it.

*When Two Worlds Collide - One of my favorite postcanon series thus far. I admit I’m really not big on “magic returns!” plots in postcanon (which this has), and the sections that focus on that are hit or miss for me, but overall it has some of the funnest and cutest characterization and gags I’ve seen in any SVTFOE fic, ever. Absolutely worth following (and it has a fair amount of art to go along with it!)

***Star Chef - Oneshot (two chapters, so twoshot technically?) set in the same universe as Starlight Justiciar (see below) and is just a day in the life of Star and Marco. Goes absolutely above and beyond at emotional immersion and little nuances and details to bring the world and characters to life, which elevates it to something special to me.

Light of the Sun and Stars - (Promoted to Must-Read!) One of the few heavily divergent AU fics I care for. Marco is an orphan raised by monsters, and meets Star after running away. Just finished its “first season” and I've loved the recent chapters, am very excited to see where it goes.

*Don’t You Let Me Go - Wonderfully fluffy post-Cleaved Starco, one of my favorite oneshot “epilogues”.

i want to tell you (but i don’t know how) - Post season 3 fic detailing the growth of Star and Marco’s relationship. It’s spectacular writing and shows off a lot of the true depth of Starco beyond just being cute.

Adult - NSFW warning, non-explicit (aged-up characters). It’s a story about the journey towards Star and Marco’s first step into adulthood together -  it’s not graphic and way more focused on the emotions involved, but it still is definitely more explicit than your average FFnet rated-T fic. If sexual themes ain’t your thing, I totally respect that, but this is a charming and funny piece of writing.

Lawchan’s various oneshots - There isn’t a great compilation for them right now so the best I can do is give you her tag for it and you can comb through it yourself. I like some more than others here, but they’re all very well-written - my only gripes with some of them are my own tastes in subject matter, so have fun perusing this on your own.

I Will Always Be There For You - A really pure and wholesome Starco oneshot. Very well-written.

Post-Canon Series to Follow

I figured with the show being over, and so many people starting their own series, I should include a lot of them here even if I’m personally not the biggest fan just to help gather them up so people can decide for themselves. Little bit looser on judgment here.

*Life on Earthni A to Z - Non-chronological postcanon slice of life oneshots, Starco and some Globclipsa and Jantom. Overall really good so far, one of my favorites in terms of direction.

*When Dimensions Cleave (sequel - Unforgettable Getaway) - Another postcanon series hellbent on bringing back magic queen lore, but it has some solid Starco fluff still. Credit where it’s due, the “Star constantly freaking out over what a horrible person she was” bit that I called preachy in the prior rec post gets somewhat less preachy and does end up actually going somewhere as part of character development, but I’m left scratching my head at how they all act sometimes. The good parts are certainly good, though, and in terms of quantity of lovey dovey Starco, it really can’t be beat (especially the sequel) and that’s worth something by itself. 

We’re a Miracle - Extra adorkable postcanon fluff. Lighter on the “but ACKSHUALLY MAGIC IS BACK” stuff compared to the others, but it’s there, like almost every postcanon fic in existence.

Star vs the Sands of Time - Heavy politic/lore postcanon fic, not my fav but if that’s more your thing then great. Has some casual Starco too.

Goodbye Isn’t Forever - More POV dives into Cleaved.

Fake Proposal - Some decent jokey but cute fluff

The Stars Above - Some exploration of Earthni

New World - A bit over-the-top meta, but fun fluff

The Starlight Justiciar - Four years after canon, some social change plot stuff and some decent Starco. Not the biggest fan of some of the plot stuff but check it out for yourself!

Starco vs the Forces of Evil - Another collab fic/art thing. Fair warning, I really am not personally a huge fan of a lot of the characterization and plot decisions here (see my notes on Sign of the Moon waaaay down below) but decide for yourself, don’t let my pickiness dictate your own preferences!

Ready For The Future - Technically a oneshot (with some Starco) but sets up some Mina plot, if you’re interested in more give it a follow/review.

Worlds Together - Some Starco and exploration of Earthni.

Epilogue -  Some Starco and exploration of Earthni.

***A Dark Horse - Has a few really nice lovey dovey Starco bits but also lots of superdrama with politics stuff. There’s a lot of fics here that I honestly just windowshop the scene I like for a quick fix of dopamine every now and then and skim at most otherwise, and this is one.

Revolution - end of canon AU where Moon is as anti-monster as Mina, dark as fuck. Only putting it here cuz some of y’all angstlords might like it.

Shorter Works/Oneshot Collections

I’ll Carry Your World - Big ole’ ball of wonderful Starco fluff with an important moment between them (written before end of show so a bit divergent).

***LoveIsTheStrongestKindOfMagic - Very short and basic fluff.

Starco Week 5 (Hugs Included) - Some of it is postcanon Earthni oneshots and others are from the Light of the Sun and Stars AU (see above). Great author, fun as hell writing style.

Fragile - Star worries about keeping her boyfriend Marco safe.

Complete - An older Star reflects on her past and present. Short and sweet.

Knighthood - Simple fluff piece on if Star and Marco got together after Storm the Castle.

Too Hot to Move - Star and Marco try to survive a heat wave on Earthni. Also funny fluff.

Marco Make-out Mayhem - Star really likes kissing Marco. Funny fluff.

Cleaved Together - NSFW warning, non-explicit (aged up) - Star and Marco’s first time. Very very overly focused on the whole purity/sacredness of first time thing, but still pretty cute.

Like Us - Really nice, sweet casual reflection on her life with Marco from a future Star’s POV.Toothpaste Kisses - Short fluff about its title.

A Friend’s Memento - Starco fluff with some reflection on the results of destroying magic

Plum Pie - Some goofy antics and hurt/comfort.

Not Losing You - A little dive into Marco’s POV at the end of Cleaved. Also adds a kiss.

We Belong Together - More speculative slightly angsty comfort/fluff.

Enough - A nice study of the emotions and thoughts during the last scenes of Cleaved, adds some depth to it.

Heartless - A bit of angst over magic going away with some sweet Starco comfort.

Together - Post-Cleaved Starco megafluff.

My Prince - Starco fluff set in a world where they were together before Cornonation.

Dancing with a Star - Starco fluff from alt S4.

Love in the Time of Pancakes - Written hours after my last update of the list, another little ditty based on the pancake promo.

Pancakes - Fluffy S4-promo-based little oneshot.

Hers - Hurt/comfort/confession-y fic, has some really nice moments and shows off a lot of how much they care about each other. Nice to see after such a drought.

Someone to Stay - Another hurt/comfort fic, nice and simple.

A Viola, a Violin, and a Butterfly’s Sword - some nonlinear oneshots about Starco. Some kinda weird directions gone in with the “plot” but it’s pretty good overall.

Falling - One of many, many fics from throughout the fandom’s history about Star and Marco getting together. Short and sweet.

forget about white horses & once upon a time - Drabble collection of various moments scattered throughout Star and Marco’s lives. Cute fluff.

The One Where I Thought I Lost You - Post-BFM fic where Marco realizes his feelings for Star earlier. Very wholesome.

christmases when you were mine - Established relationship fluff.

lightning in your veins, thunder in your heart - Post-season 3 established relationship fluff (slightly divergent, written before 3B).

once upon a december - Established relationship fluff.

Flags - Alternate rendition of the episode “Flags” with Starco.

Spells and Hot Chocolate - Wintry fluff.

5 Ways to Say ‘I Love You’ - Post BFM with some events in Star and Marco’s lives.

You’re My Wish Come True - This is just indulgent Starco trash. I won’t even argue for the characterization/writing quality, this is just a straight-up guilty pleasure.

Wands and Nachos - ^

The Princess and the Safe Kid - ^

A Day in the Life of Starco - ^

A very Starco Xmas - ^

Could It Be -^

All the times Star wore Marco’s hoodie - ^

Protect Me, Squire - ^

Crushed - Star and Marco both get turned down by their respective crushes and find comfort in each other.

Stay - Cuddly fluff. There’s another Stay out there which I frankly can’t stand with will-they-won’t-they melodrama out the wazoo, so don’t get confused.

Longer Series

*The Inescapable Us - Really tropey miscommunication will-they-won’t-they type of thing. Not my fav, especially now that the show is over and finished that leg of Star and Marco’s story once and for all (I’m personally WAY less interested in things that redo something canon already did). However, where it’s at now has some really good Starco moments. Fully admitted that I hella skimmed most of it until the parts I enjoyed, but And if you’re more fine with that type of thing then you’ll probably really like it, it’s well-written otherwise.

Together We Fall - Throwback S2 AU fic where Star and Marco go to the dance together instead and Toffee makes moves earlier. Gets kinda dark but has a lot of nice Starco along the way.

Safer, Sorrier - A recent rewrite of an older fic, Better Safe Than Sorry, where Star has to leave early to become queen and Marco is alone for a few months before they reunite. A very dated premise (post season 1 ish) but quite good.

Sugar and Spice - NSFW warning, non-explicit (NOT aged-up characters). In this fic, Star and Marco have gotten together after BFM, and a spell gone wrong leads to Mewberty relapses with obvious consequences. This fic has adorable Starco moments, but what I love this for above all is the other character interactions (especially Glossaryck and Star’s parents). This is probably a controversial add-on to the list, but I stick by my decision - if the subject matter isn’t your thing, then by all means avoid it.

Beyond Dimensions - Plotfic + established Starco where some ancient sorceress has to trap Star to escape and try to take over Mewni. Maybe y'all are more into plot stuff than me but the Starco that’s there is quite good regardless.

Starfall - NSFW warning, explicit (aged-up characters). Probably the most popular one to make the cut. Star and Marco are forced apart and have to find their way back together. Very old fic, lot of dated stuff here, and the narration and plot itself can get kinda questionable sometimes, but it has a lot of good Starco and some interesting plot elements that make it, in my opinion, worth a read despite a lot of flaws. A few epilogue chapters contain rather explicit sexual content, so be wary of that (and the epilogue itself after Ep 6 kinda transitions into a nextgenverse, so maybe just skip that entirely).

The Star Butterfly Effect - The sole fic on the list that is purely plot-based, with very little actual Starco development whatsoever. I can’t even really explain it, just give it a shot and see what you think; I was rather engrossed by the plot, and that’s rare for me.

The Princess and her Knight, Return of the Empire The former fic in this series is way more character-based, while the latter is very heavy plot stuff. Pretty decent character writing with some fluff. There’s a third that I honestly can’t recommend because I completely dropped it because it was just a nonstop war story.

Experimental - REALLY heavy, dark AU where Star and Marco are tortured and corrupted. It’s pretty decent.

Blood Moon Blitz - Alt BFM fic of Marco going to fight Toffee with Star. unfortunately dropped without completing, but what’s there is pretty solid.

Read at Your Own Risk…

The Sign of the Moon, The Dance of the Stars - Starts post-3A, involves the growth of Star and Marco’s relationship as they take on foes in and out of the castle and learn more about the Blood Moon. This series is rather… melodramatic, and there were some chapters and character interactions I flat out did not enjoy reading. But some people aren’t as strict on character interpretations as I am and would love such a long plot-based Starco fic, so overall I still will at least list it and let you decide for yourself. There might be a third entry in this series now, but I dropped it before then.

Photos - I hesitate to include this one here because the “Tom is a perfect angel who must sacrifice his love for Star” thing pisses me off. But just skip all that (and ignore the random “a part of me will always love Tom” line) and it’s a really nice post-s3 confession fic.

[tlbodine]

Three 1970s Horrors Worth Watching (that are not part of this film series)

The Horror by the Decade series started innocuously enough, with someone requesting some recent film recommendations. That got me to thinking about trends, and recommendations from previous decades, and how many movies that were true classics I was familiar with but had never seen, and thus the idea “hey, let’s watch movies from every decade!” came into being. 

But obviously you can’t watch every horror movie from every year, so there had to be a selection process in place. Here’s roughly how I’ve been choosing movies: 

Search Google for “horror movies {year}” for each year of the decade 

Research them a bit and pick out everything that is familiar, historically significant, or seems especially interesting, and put them on a list

Pare the list down to 1-2 of the most interesting titles per year 

Look for themes and pair movies up according to theme (since we watch two movies a week)

In order to save time, any movie that both I and @comicreliefmorlock have seen recently/a lot gets knocked off the list. In the 1970s, that means removing three extremely good, extremely important movies, so I wanted to talk about them a bit here. 

Follow below the cut for thoughts on Jaws, The Exorcist, and Alien

Jaws, made in 1975 by Steven Spielberg, is based on a novel of the same name written by  Peter Benchley. Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider team up to kill an unusually large and aggressive great white shark that is terrorizing the beach in a quiet New England town. 

Fun fact: Until Star Wars was released two years later, Jaws was the highest-grossing movie of all time! This is probably due in part to how much money Universal decided to sink into its distribution and marketing, but the film’s quality has to play a big part too. It really is a magnificent movie and is probably a big part of why people are still scared of sharks. 

Some things that are notable about Jaws: 

It has one of the most iconic and effective film scores in cinema. Everyone knows the Jaws theme, and it’s been used to basically mean “impending danger!” in a jokey way for...I mean, at least 30 years, because I know that was a meme when I was a kid. I imagine it has been since 1975. That’s just a really impressive feat, and John Williams (yes, the Star Wars guy) deserves acclaim for it. 

Music aside, Jaws is an excellent study in suspense and restraint. Technological limitations meant they couldn’t show the shark as much as they’d wanted, so scenes had to be filmed suggestively to ramp up the tension. (You do still get to see a lot of wonderful big scary shark, though, and honestly the effects still hold up pretty well to this day) 

The performances are really good, too. The leads have a great chemistry and play off of each other really well. The script was a joint effort, getting passes from several people (including the book’s author), but a comedian  Carl Gottlieb got a pass at it, and that humor really helps to elevate the film. 

The most powerful thing about Jaws, though, is that it taps into a mythic seed that renders it utterly timeless. There is an echo of Moby Dick in Quint’s character and motives, with a similarly tragic arc. But it draws on something older and deeper, too. The premise of “man-eating wild animal terrorizes a community, a bounty is put on its head, only a hero can kill it” has been a staple of mythology for thousands of years. 

Man-eaters are real, and they become the stuff of legend -- dating at least as far back to the monstrous Nemean Lion that could be slain only by Heracles. Historically, there are accounts of man-eating wolves, lions, tigers, etc. terrorizing locals, sometimes inspiring local werewolf legends - you can read about just a few of them here: https://listverse.com/2010/10/16/top-10-worst-man-eaters-in-history/ 

I think I watched Jaws for the first time when I was 8 (I saw all the sequels too, there was a cable marathon) and I was utterly captivated. I feel pretty confident if I showed it to an 8-year-old today, they would be too. It’s just that kind of movie. 

The Exorcist, released in 1973 and directed by  William Friedkin, was based on a novel by  William Peter Blatty, who also wrote the screenplay. 

The story is about a 12-year-old girl, Regan, who begins acting strangely after playing with a ouija board. Once medical causes are ruled out, her mother turns to two priests for assistance; they come to perform the exorcism and have a harder time than expected with casting out the demon, to say the least. 

The film is still considered one of the most frightening horror movies of all time by some, and at the time of its release it was a sensation. Movie-goers were said to have all sorts of reactions, from fainting and vomiting to having miscarriages and heart attacks. Contemporary psychologists even wrote about “cinematic neurosis” in people who had watched the film: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1151359

The story crossed a lot of boundaries (even for the 1970s) and you have to bear in mind that this was a major cinematic release, not a grindhouse exploitation film. Most film-goers in 1973 were absolutely not prepared to see an innocent child spouting off vulgarity, urinating on the floor, and masturbating with a crucifix. And some of the practical effects, like the famous head-twisting scene, are still really creepy. 

This is one of those movies that’s hard to watch with fresh eyes because it was so influential on all of cinema to follow. If you like demonic possession movies, this is the film that started it all. I know religious people who are deeply afraid of this movie and won’t allow it in their home for fear of inviting real demons, so, that’s the kind of staying power the story has. 

** As an atheist, I am not particularly frightened of demon movies, and I suspect I will never fully grasp the real terror of watching something like this for people who believe that these types of things happen in real life. The Exorcist is definitely not the scariest movie I’ve ever seen, but I can respect that it definitely is for many other people. 

Fun trivia: The Exorcist is considered by some to be cursed because the cast and crew had an unusually tough time with filming: the set caught fire (but Regan’s room was undamaged), several actors were injured during practical stunts/effects, several people died during filming or in post-production (not on set), and the demon’s voice actor experienced an awful tragedy years later when her son killed wife, kids, and himself: http://www.the13thfloor.tv/2015/12/02/is-the-exorcist-movie-cursed/

The events are all most likely coincidental (and on a long enough timeline, everyone involved with a project will be dead!) but it lends power to the suspicion that this was A Very Cursed Movie That God Doesn’t Want You To Watch, which makes it all the more frightening. 

Alien, directed by Ridley Scott, came out in 1979 and is so powerful that it’s still a popular franchise today, spawning books, movies, video games, merchandise, and more. 

The story is essentially a haunted house film set in space. A commercial space crew is woken from stasis by the ship's on-board computer to answer a distress signal, discovering a derelict alien ship and founding a chamber of eggs belonging to an aggressive, parasitic alien creature that infests a crew member with its egg, which later hatches violently from his body, grows up, and proceeds to terrorize the ship. 

It's a tense cat-and-mouse game of searching for the alien as it picks off crew members one by one, and the music, atmosphere, and visuals are all compelling, with effects that still hold up pretty well for modern audiences. But what makes Alien especially significant is the performance of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley. 

We’d had scream queens before -- female horror protagonists who survive as “final girls” against the mayhem and slaughter -- but Ripley is something different. She is badass, heroic in a way that girls rarely got to see themselves, and laying down a template for strong female characters in future cinema (for better or worse). 

The script was reportedly written to be gender neutral, with no assumptions about casting, which allowed Ripley to defy gender norms and expectations. But despite this supposed gender neutrality, there is a definite flavor of female horror in Alien -- which is, after all, a movie about forced impregnation and death at the hands of a decidedly phallic monster. 

And that is, I think, probably right at the heart of the film’s sticking power. Science fiction can swiftly become dated as our knowledge of the universe expands, but the horror of Alien isn’t really the aliens so much as what they represent -- and sad to say, sexual violence is something we humans may never understand. Here’s a fun essay on the topic: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/film/2019/03/forty-years-what-can-ridley-scott-s-alien-teach-metoo-generation

So, there you have it. Three movies we will not be watching in our film series, but which you absolutely should check out if you somehow haven’t seen them. 

[diloph]

Pardon me, but it seemed from some of your posts on KOTM that you didn't like Mark Russell that much. I know he was a cliche everyman type, but what exactly made him any worse than others in these movies?

I apologise if this isn’t my most coherent answer. I’m a little bit stressed at the moment, trying to finish the next chapter of IIID and create relevant, if poorly assembled memes before the Invader Zim movie is released.

To be honest, some of it is a bit tongue-in cheek. Making fun of the most visible character in the film, considering that he hates Godzilla with a burning passion, is just a little bit of fun. It’s like how I refer to Rick Stanton with disdain sheerly because he’s somewhat based on Rick Sanchez, who I don’t dislike either.

The film isn’t about Mark: King of the Fathers anyway, so if I completely despised him, I could just zone out during his scenes, or skip them when the DVD comes out.

But… some of it wasn’t so jokey. He’s still an okayish protagonist, I’ve got nothing against the actor himself and his acting is fine. Still, Mark was loud, abrasive and hated Godzilla; you know, things that grate on my nerves when it comes to a 2+ hour Godzilla movie and that made the character… trying.

We’ve had them before, but Godzilla was generally more villainous and obviously, we feel sympathy and camaraderie with him as the title character and we are here to see him do cool things. Having a human protagonist who hates our cool monster protagonist makes sense in universe, but ultimately, it’s not what we’re here for. We can tune that out.

As for what makes me dislike Mark… for starters, he’s kind of a prick. I once saw somebody describe him as the type of guy who thinks that if he speaks loudly enough, shouts enough, he’ll get his way. I can’t say I blame them, in that first meeting with MONARCH, he’s downright hostile.

He’s also, for whatever reason, the guy that everybody turns to in the crisis. He might have a background in bioacoustics like his ex-wife and animal behaviour besides, but apparently nobody else at MONARCH is capable of doing things without the express instructions or approval of everyman Indiana Jones. Military procedures, common sense, the desperate plan to revive Godzilla; everybody seems to defer to him really quickly.

It took me out of the movie. I understand that he’s meant to be our relatable protagonist, but it’s a little bit jarring and it happens multiple times. Mark is either issuing instructions or is along where he shouldn’t be, given control of a situation where by all rights he shouldn’t have any other than spur of the moment hero stuff.

It’s like he believes that nobody has any common sense and frustratingly, a couple of times the narrative agrees with him or at least proves his actions right. For example, when Colonel Foster tries to brief MONARCH on the actions of Jonah and the terrorists, he shoots down her theory and proceeds to go on a rant as to why we should Destroy All Monsters.

He’s right, as Jonah wants to free King Ghidorah, but he has this frustrating “protagonist only” habit of noticing threads that other characters really should (nobody seems to notice that the Titans are attacking capital cities or at least very densely populated areas until he points it out), then speaks about it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

Which when MONARCH is meant to be staffed with scientists of multiple disciplines veers back into the incredulous. I can suspend disbelief when it comes to giant monsters, I don’t excuse people not seeing what’s in front of them.

And as for the moments where he really shouldn’t be issuing instructions, take a look at when Rodan is freed by Emma Russell. Serizawa instantly defers to him (I think that Mark might have been his senior before he left MONARCH and BOY do I want to talk about that plan later on) to cook up a plan instead of… himself (Director of MONARCH, or at least I assume so) or again, Foster, who controls the planes and men he wants to send at the giant pterodactyl that just shrugged off a molten lava flow.

Given his characterisation as an angry, driven father who is desperately looking out for his family after being bereaved by monsters and is butting heads with the scientists at MONARCH, I think it was an attempt by Legendary to recreate Joe Brody. Bryan Cranston’s character in the previous film was killed off too early and was featured in a lot of the trailers, giving a wonderful performance. When he died to be replaced by his son, Ford, it caused a backlash as a result.

Mark being that angry, snarky character definitely shares some similarities. But while Joe was a crusader for the truth and more than a little bit obsessive, he was trying to pierce the veil as to why his wife died, without realising that it drove his son away from him. He was trying to reveal this great coverup to the world and spent the rest of his life doing so with such conviction that he appeared crazy.

Mark… doesn’t have this driving force. He lives in a post-San Francisco universe. Monsters Exist and everybody knows it.

Now, that’s not to say he doesn’t have reasons for acting as he did. He lost his son and has driven a wedge in between his family via his drinking problem (but let’s face it, compared to unleashing the Titans by starting off with Space Dragon Satan, he’s taken it comparatively well) but he acts as if he’s the only person who has ever lost something to Godzilla and the rest of the monsters.

Even when that happens to characters in the film, Mark still acts like that and it doesn’t make him look like the grim, determined hero, it just makes him look like an obnoxious dick. It isn’t his way of coping with the trauma of loss, he just… does it.

Part of me does get why he’s annoyed and angry with MONARCH’s attitude towards the Titans. He’s correct that they’ve been keeping secrets, dangerous ones at that, but equally the kaiju are living things. They’re dangerous and unpredictable, yes, but MONARCH have been taking precautions; killswitches are present in even the supposedly benevolent Titan’s chambers like Mothra and as far as they know, all of the Titans bar Godzilla are dormant and those that aren’t are kept in check by him. Had the Ghidorah Crisis never arose, we may never have seen any other Titans for the rest of human history.

But he treats everybody around him like an idiot with little to no prompting. Mark is brought on as a consultant and he then proceeds to dominate the scene, either through his decisions in universe or the part written for him out of it. He gets the last word, the last say on a plan or a witty remark or whatever.

And some of that costs lives. Actually, no, a LOT of it costs lives.

So, to start off, when the operation in Antarctica goes tits up, Mark grabs a handgun and goes into Outpost 32 by himself (though what he and the central nervous system of MONARCH were doing on the ground and not supervising from the Argo remains to be seen, but I digress). He stops Jonah and the terrorists on the walkway… screwing up Foster’s attempt to take down Jonah, forcing her to snipe his henchman in order to save Mark’s life.

This leads to King Ghidorah waking up. Not going to extend him a great deal of blame for this one, as with a sniper present, Emma or Madison would have been forced (or “forced” in the former’s case) to retrieve the detonator and the Six-Eyed, Six-Horned, Flying-Golden-People-Eater would have gotten loose regardless. Hell, I spotted clues that he was gearing up to wake up without Emma Russell’s help.

In a narrative sense, its his character that also sets up Vivienne Graham’s death. If he hadn’t been stuck in the tangle of wires and metal aboard the Osprey, she would never have needed to stay behind to help and subsequently got singled out by King Ghidorah.

I’d definitely agree that this is more of a personal thing on my part, as I’d wanted to see more of Vivienne’s character thanks to her actress’, Sally Hawkins’ work in The Shape Of Water and that in the previous film. But in a way, he is still sort of responsible for her being written out and replaced with the vastly less interesting replacement characters of Rick and Mor- erm, Sam.

That said, I know that Ghidorah is 100% to blame in universe. He killed her because he was a bastard and I wanted to him to be a bastard, so the monkey’s paw curled a finger there, so that’s egg on my face. It certainly did wonders for establishing him as a monstrous villain who we love to hate.

I’m not wholly unsympathetic to Mark. Like I said before, the pain of loss over the 2014 attacks hurt him badly and the film doesn’t shy away from this. Mark’s descent into alcoholism is noted by both himself and his family as a rough time for all involved, part of the reason he left MONARCH in the first place. Having his daughter and ex-wife seemingly kidnapped by dangerous ecoterrorists who plan to unleash giant monsters to mass-cull humanity also wears his patience thin, as you might expect it.

But he keeps this… horrible attitude throughout the movie. The world is literally going to shit, another monster is about to be unleashed and he asks if MONARCH have had enough common sense to evacuate the town of Isla Del Mara and if Rodan has had a cutesy name all picked out from mythology for him ahead of time.

Fuck me, if I was Serizawa, having just lost my protégé and quite a few well-meaning soldiers who were trying to rescue somebody who turned out to be a massive ecoterrorist nutjob, I would have floored him. There is a time and a place for snarky comments and it is not after at least twenty people you worked with are dead and BILLIONS MORE MAY FOLLOW.

But now, one of the points that really got me disliking Mark Russell follows here. The scenes that start at Isla Del Mara and the luring of Rodan to King Ghidorah, all the way up until the detonation of the Oxygen Destroyer.

Rodan emerges from the volcano and asides from spreading his wings and roaring, doesn’t do much. He spots the incoming Argo and its entourage and narrows his eyes. Uh oh! Surely, at this point, the dastardly destruction god would leap from his perch in an attempt to chase this challenger from his territory?

Um… no. No, actually, he stays put.

Now, I get that Rodan might not have stayed that way for very long. From the ensuing chase scene, I can gather that the Monsterverse’s version of Rodan is a bit of a dick, but he still didn’t start the fight.

Instead, what happens is that Serizawa asks Mark what they should do and Mark comes up with the plan to get Rodan to fight King Ghidorah in the hopes that one will kill the other and that would at least solve one of their problems.

Sound in theory, yes, but it is not sound in execution. At all.

So, that little town that Mark kicked up quite a fuss about? As you might have noticed, it’s lying between Rodan and the Argo and is part of the reason that the big ol’ bird should be lured away, to complete the evacuation.

Mark’s brilliant plan has the jets surrounding the Argo to blast Rodan and 180 the superplane in order to get him to chase… without factoring in THE TOWN BETWEEN THEM AT ALL.

I get King Ghidorah was closing in. I get that Rodan is a wild, unpredictable animal who could go off the chain at any moment. But there was absolutely no time to get the ARGO to move a little ways around the island before beginning the attack? At worst, Rodan would make a dive for them anyway, but that’s what the jets are sent in to distract him are for. To grab his attention and then lure him to the Argo, which would then take him to Tricephalopathic Terror Town anyway.

As a result, Rodan utterly OBLITERATES Isla Del Mara simply by passing over it and so many of the people they were trying to evacuate die a horribly pointless death. It never once passes his mind (or let’s not beat him down solely) or that of anybody aboard the Argo that a creature with wings that size that can fly would generate an unbelievable amount of force simply by flapping once to create lift? He’s also dripping lava, so even if the hurricane level winds that follow him weren’t an issue, having something with that amount of residual molten rock passing overhead doesn’t seem like a healthy thing to expose Isla Del Mara to.

Further dislike ensues when one of the miraculously surviving Ospreys issues a mayday during the Rodan/Ghidorah fight and the cargo doors are jammed. Mark the Hero leaps up with gritted teeth and desire to get things done, asking the way to the hangar. After all, he’s had miraculous problem solving abilities so far, why not?

“Which way to the hangar?” he asks.

Sam, a character who I’m even less fond of, stands up and offers to show him the way. Fairly brave, considering that the Argo is rattling like a leaf in a thunderstorm as two daikaiju battle nearby. I found the character annoying and sort of… pointless, but I admire that bit of bravery.

“Anybody else?” Mark asks, making a face.

Dude. The man just offered to help you and people need that help. Get off your high horse, swallow your pride and just go without comment. God knows how many people your stupid plan just got killed.

The two run to the hangar and a crewman explains the door is jammed. Mark decides to drop a hanging Osprey onto the doors to get them off… without suggesting it to the crewman. He just fucking goes for the buttons, expecting his usual “my plan will work” attitude to succeed.

At last, one of Mark’s harebrained schemes is met with reasonable resistance for the first time and the crewman attempts to wrestle him off, before Mark Is Proven Right Again. But even suggesting it, getting a refusal and then doing it is more heroic than just going for the damn buttons like a lunatic.

He would have looked damn stupid if the weight of the Osprey wasn’t enough to open the doors and it instead just blocked them. The falling aircraft also almost hits the airborne one with its civilian payload as it also wasn’t warned, so again, he took an unnecessary risk that came off lucky because he couldn’t find the time to say “I have an idea”.

To round out the trifecta of what makes me dislike Mark in these scenes is what happens when the rest of the scene plays out:

Gravity Beams spew from Ghidorah’s mouth and blast Rodan into the ocean, defeated. Not satisfied with just this victory, the Golden Demise locks his terrible gaze on the Argo and with a sickening, gleeful cackle, closes in on the plane and its freshly arrived civilians.

All are stunned into a horrified silence. Even Mark, who has been having Unreasonable Protagonist Luck up until this point, bricks it.

“Oh, God.” he pleads.

God answers and he erupts from the ocean.

With a deafening roar, the mighty form of Godzilla slams into King Ghidorah with the force of a collapsing mountain. His dynamic, mid-air leap is enough to drag the foul hydra into the depths of the ocean and Godzilla proceeds to hold him there.

Ghidorah attempts to resurface and fly away, or at least lash out at the Argo in spite, but there Godzilla is again, yanking the head back underwater, biting and rolling like some mountainous crocodile, pinning the alien dragon under his weight.

Unbeknownst to our hero (Godzilla, obviously), the military has deployed the terrible Oxygen Destroyer in an attempt to Destroy All Monsters, giving only a cursory warning to the Argo to get out of there and fast. Mark makes his way onto the bridge and is informed of the decision.

“But he… he just saved us!” says Mark.

No, wait, he didn’t say that. Hold on…

“They… they didn’t even let us get clear?” says Mark.

Uh, no, sorry, trying again.

“Well, it’s not the worst idea.” he says.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUCK. YOU.

I get that you’re mad with Godzilla. I get that as the title character with a long history, we root for the kaiju more than anybody else. I get that he took your son from you, but twice… TWICE NOW, he has saved you and the people around you with PERFECTLY TIMED ENTRANCES. Even if it was just a coincidence, I’d be at least slightly more forgiving of the lion that killed my brother by accident if it jumped in front of a tiger that was slaughtering people left and right before it leapt at me.

Twice.

There’s not even a hesitant “oh, but he did help us”. Not even a shocked disbelief that the military has a weapon that they think will kill not just one, but two (because I’m willing to bet he thought Rodan was dead) Titans, much less them firing it without warning right on top of their position. Just a “well, fuck ‘em” shrug.

Godzilla nearly dies, Ghidorah seizes control of the Titans and sets about starting the apocalypse. Finally, Serizawa says what I’ve been thinking for quite a while and says “Well, it looks like you got your wish, Mark.” with a mixture of anger, sadness and disgust.

I could go on; the Titans are rampaging and Mark goes to leave Castle Bravo to strike out on his own and rescue Madison, despite the fact that he knows that Emma will probably try to keep her safe in whatever secure hidey hole she and the Kaiju Cultists have holed up in. In the novel, he’s outright going to steal one (also his first instinct when confronted by an alpha wolf in the novel, is to blow it away with a sidearm, before realising that’s absolutely callous and horrible and tries submissive behaviour tactics instead. So hey, Movie Mark is a slightly better person than Book Mark).

Mark suggests the nuke plan and goes down with Serizawa, Chen and Rick Sanch- Stanton. Everything goes sideways and he doesn’t even fucking blink when Serizawa decides that somebody’s gotta do it manually.

Back aboard the Argo? How does he break the news to Sam, the only member of the MONARCH team that wasn’t there? Shoving Serizawa’s notebook into his chest, saying that they better not screw this up and not even fucking pausing to tell him what happened.

Mark’s self-centred attitude keeps coming back and it gets people killed. My second time viewing this film, during the two confrontation scenes with Godzilla, I wasn’t getting the “There is a massive threat in my territory!” vibe from the King of the Monsters, I was getting a “Who the hell is this asshole and why does he hate me so much?” feeling from Our Glorious Boy.

It’s a recurring theme too. Mark experiences loss, but he feels as if his loss is the only one that matters. Both he and Emma do this to Madison and it makes me mad that in trying to cope with their own loss, they shunned the one remaining child they had left. By the time they realise that, the world is literally about to end and they’re still bickering at one another.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m very vocally critical of Mark and Emma’s treatment of Madison. Both she and Mark decide to put their own ways of coping with their son’s death (constructing a device to allow for the orchestration of mass human death and convincing oneself that it’s the correct course of action/drinking booze) above Madison’s own well being.

When the chips are down, of course, they care for her and ultimately risk their lives to save her, but… congratulations for the bare minimum parenting, guys? Physically, they want her out of harm, but mentally she should either fall into line with Emma’s thinking or be there for Mark.

Godzilla and Mothra feel more like her bloody parents in this film (Godzilla saving her life when she was facing down the literal fucking devil and Mothra’s gentle interaction at the temple and reviving her from death when she appeared to have died in the novel) than the other Russells do. Both fill the archetypes of “Father” (tough, stern, but ultimately your protector) and “Mother” (gentle, nurturing and wonderful) better than the people do.

…yeah, alright, that one is a stretch, but I had that idea a while ago and I wanted to put it to paper.

In short, I’m mad at Sad Mad Dad because his character shoves the waaaaaaaay more interesting, compelling and sympathetic characters of Serizawa, Graham and his own daughter (and the actual goddamned non-monster hero of the movie), Madison out of the way of main character-ness, just so we can have somebody who is about as pleasant to interact with as a cactus.

King of the Monsters is a film that has a lot of sacrifice in it, good and bad. Emma wants to sacrifice most of humanity to save the planet. Serizawa sacrifices himself to save Godzilla and thus, the planet. Mothra sacrifices her own life to save Godzilla from King Ghidorah and so does Emma, to save her family and as redemption for her sins.

Even Madison was also ready to at least risk her own life to distract the Titans and King Ghidorah if it would even slightly disrupt his efforts to conquer the planet. She goes against terrorists, her own mother and a demonic, nigh-omnipotent being of malicious intent and faces him down with a defiant roar of her own when it looks like the end.

But Mark doesn’t sacrifice. He wants his daughter back, but he never takes a hit. Other people die for him, as a result of him and he doesn’t even recognise it. The world is at stake and he keeps his focus on his own desires, ignorant to the people around him because only his loss matters.

He might not be the genocidal monster in the film that Emma was, that Jonah and of course, Ghidorah certainly were. But he has a very narrow and dispassionate world-view and outside of certain cartoons with comedic circumstances, I don’t care much for that at all.

TL;DR: Madison should have been the central protagonist, because I like her more.

[stevenuniversallyreviews]

Episode 95: Gem Hunt

“I don’t want you fighting this thing alone.”

I mentioned in my Monster Reunion post that it’s been ages since we’ve had an episode about fighting a Corrupted Gem. The latest examples are Rising Tides, Crashing Skies as a cameo and Reformed as an episode focus, but neither involves an actual mission: the former takes place on the beach, and the latter in the Temple. If we want to look back at a true Season 1-style Gem Hunt, we have to actually go to Season 1: the last episode that featured the Crystal Gems going out into the world with the express purpose of fighting a Corrupted Gem is Island Adventure, sixty-five episodes ago, and that was only the first act of the story.

There are plenty of reasons for this. After Monster Buddies and Ocean Gem the idea of beating up Gem variants that can be friendly and used to be just like the Crystal Gems seemed a lot less fun. After Mirror Gem, the show became more serialized and the need for monster-of-the-week episodes dwindled. After Peridot’s arrival, we got new sentient opponents to worry about until Keeping It Together, where Cluster Gems began standing in for Corrupted Gems. But regardless, the result of this gap is that Gem Hunt gets to feel like a wonderful mixture of old and new: it almost tricks you into thinking this is a throwback to early self-contained missions, until serialized drama barrels in and rips the monster of the week apart.

Gem Hunt wasn’t written with the knowledge that Season 3 would air almost in its entirety within the span of a month, or that this event would be called the Summer of Steven, but relocating to the Great North plays excellently off of these circumstances. With so many episodes coming one after the other, it’s good to have an obvious break from the less arc-driven stories of late, and the snowy environment immediately contrasted with the season of the show and the season of the year. Even before Jasper comes in out of nowhere to reveal the start of an arc, this story feels like a new beginning.

I had to rewatch a few times for this review to get back into the headspace of not knowing the twist, because I forgot how unexpected Jasper was. Maybe some people guessed it, but Steven and Connie only discuss corruption (which Jasper is not yet associated with) and her name isn’t even mentioned before she arrives; contrast with The Message, which gives us a whole song about Lapis Lazuli to set the stage for our “twist,” and Message Received, featuring Peridot gushing about Yellow Diamond in the first act. There isn’t even any fanfare to Jasper’s arrival: she lunges into frame, back turned to the camera, in the middle of our last fight scene. Watching Gem Hunt with the knowledge that she’s coming makes her appearance a little underwhelming, because she just sorta shows up. I frankly don’t remember how shocked I was that she was the humanoid Steven and Connie were tracking, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this scene’s execution was responsible for my lack of concrete “oh wow!” memories.  

That said, Jasper’s arrival does fit with the episode’s unusual structure: even back when missions were the norm, we never had an episode that exclusively consisted of a single outing. There have always been introductions framing our quest (like Cheeseburger Backpack or An Indirect Kiss), or episodes beginning in media res that cut back to Beach City (like Steven’s Lion and Arcade Mania). The closest we’ve had to a full episode mission is Serious Steven, but that includes flashbacks to Funland. Gem Hunt is all set from the start, and the result is an adventure that gets a lot of detail but an episode that speeds right on by. It’s crazy to think that Gem Hunt and, say, Steven and the Stevens are the same length, going by how much stuff happens in each episode: one has a time travel plot and a clone plot and a band plot and several songs, and the other is one long trek through the snow.

While this structure leaves plenty of time for the ending to not feel abrupt, it’s still clearly the start of something big, and in retrospect this feels like an especially complete place-setting episode. But in the moment, it’s a mystery episode! The promo art featuring our leads wearing their Hanna-Barbera Best isn’t the only reference to Scooby-Doo we get: Connie suggests that the gang split up early on, and both kids reference monster suits and property disputes while sipping pine needle tea. We begin by tracking a monster, learn something weird is going on, and investigate. We even get a red herring! It’s basic, but it does wonders for the pacing to always have a concrete goal in mind.

This is what separates Gem Hunt from, say, Open Book. We’re not meandering despite the longer-than-usual scenes and a plot that’s largely about two buds hanging out. We know throughout that we’re going somewhere, which makes me enjoy the former more than the latter even though the latter has a better twist in Connterfeit and a more emotionally compelling climax when Connterfeit forces Steven to come clean about embarrassing emotions. It doesn’t matter how good your destination is if I get sorta bored along the way, and for all of Gem Hunt’s simplicity, I never find it boring.

Granted, a major advantage Gem Hunt has over Open Book is that this Connie is real throughout, which allows her to be an utter delight. Applying the Maheswaran Code of Safety to tracking down and fighting a monster with a giant sword, she takes a character trait that might turn her into an annoying worrywart and instead spends the episode dorking out about survival. Of course she’s basing her actions on a book, this is a girl who went from reading fantasy literature to living a literal fantasy. She’s more role-playing an adventurer than being one, as evidenced by her zealous overpreparation. This nerd’s over here thinking about scurvy an hour into a hike.

And thank goodness Steven is all aboard, because if this episode would suck if it was about Connie being a know-it-all and competing with Steven. Steven invites her enthusiasm without any ridiculous character beats like being worried about his place in the team (more on that coming soon from a more realistic place courtesy of Amethyst) or arrogantly shutting down her ideas. These are two friends on a fun journey, so Connie’s bravado and Steven’s go-with-the-flow attitude are just what we need.

The climax neatly cuts both ways on Connie’s attitude. She loses her composure for a bit and is hard on herself afterwards, but she still gets to show off her training without going overboard. Pearl might not have to do much, but Connie does the right thing in calling for help as soon as she’s able to do so. 

I’m hesitant to theorize that this connection is intentional, but I think Connie’s first mission ending in her calling for help (and getting rewarded for it) is a cool lens to examine her anger with Steven in the Breakup Arc after he leaves her behind on Earth for the second time in one season. Gem Hunt might breeze on by for us, but as Connie’s first mission it’s bound far more impactful for her than it is for Steven and Pearl, and the lesson she learned from it is to let people help you. Steven taking the fall for everyone is the exact opposite of what she does here.

Comedy flows freely among all three of our leads—my favorite gag is Pearl reminding the kids that humans need food, she really is the world’s most maternal alien—but the third act entrance cleverly mines that humor for drama. Pearl’s nervous chatting over the walkie talkie comes back to bite the kids when she won’t stop yelling out of their speaker and alerting the Corrupted Gem to their presence, and we can hear that her jokey smugness from “Who’s your favorite Gem?” has crumbled from anxiety with time. Steven’s photography begins as a joke, and breaks the tension when he snaps a shot of Jasper mid-intimidation, but that picture returns us to a state of dread to end the episode. Efficiency might not seem as crucial in an episode with so much time to breathe, but you’ll never see me complaining about a story skillfully repurposing its material. 

Still, I wouldn’t quite call this a comedy-centric episode, and not just because it’s primarily a mystery. Connie gets more focus than Steven, but he has plenty of time to remind us that he’s still thinking about Nephrite and all the other Corrupted Gems he could be helping by talking to Connie about it. What could have served as a rote reminder of Corrupted Gems turns into a plot point, as his desperation for signs of hope causes them to assume the humanoid tracks are from a Corrupted Gem trying to heal. But its larger importance, as usual, is its development of our characters. 

Steven isn’t as gung-ho about fighting monsters as he was at the beginning of the show, and sees this mission as a way of helping someone who’s hurt rather than ridding the world of a threat. And Connie isn’t as emotionally distant as she was at the beginning of the show, sensing how bothered Steven is by corruption and asking if he’s okay. After the enjoyable but blunt Greg the Babysitter, it’s wonderful to see how much these kids have grown and bonded without the episode shouting “HEY CHECK IT OUT THESE KIDS HAVE GROWN AND BONDED” at us.

Gem Hunt works well as a transitional episode, borrowing elements from Monster Reunion and Alone at Sea and allowing Steven and Connie’s growing competency to form the basis of Amethyst’s angst in Crack the Whip. But it does what I believe Super Watermelon Island and Gem Drill failed to do: it tells its own story first, and allows its role as a pivot point to come second. It means that things aren’t as overtly different afterwards as they were when Malachite defused and the Cluster was dealt with, but if that makes for a better episode, I’ll take it.

Future Vision!

It’s nifty that I wrote this episode the same week that Escapism aired, because it allowed me to immediately identify the Protes bar Connie brought to space. She’s still prepared, folks!

If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have inconsistencies…

Both this episode and I are aware that references to “Connie’s first mission” are talking about her role as a swordswoman, but it’s still a little strange that nobody brings up her tagging along with the Crystal Gems (and Greg) and Ocean Gem. 

We’re the one, we’re the ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!

This is a borderline episode for sure, because I enjoy it, but in the end it still feels a little too light to rank higher than a like. Which may sound odd considering my top two episodes, but I mean light in terms of that structure rather than the episode’s weight in regards to the greater plot: this may be a terrific episode about Steven and Connie hanging out and adventuring, but it lacks that oomph factor to make me truly love it. Fortunately it’s not a consolation prize to “only” be an episode I like. 

Top Fifteen

Steven and the Stevens

Hit the Diamond

Mirror Gem

Lion 3: Straight to Video

Alone Together

The Return

Jailbreak

The Answer

Sworn to the Sword

Rose’s Scabbard

Mr. Greg

Coach Steven

Giant Woman

Beach City Drift

Winter Forecast

Love ‘em

Laser Light Cannon

Bubble Buddies

Tiger Millionaire

Lion 2: The Movie

Rose’s Room

An Indirect Kiss

Ocean Gem

Space Race

Garnet’s Universe

Warp Tour

The Test

Future Vision

On the Run

Maximum Capacity

Marble Madness

Political Power

Full Disclosure

Joy Ride

Keeping It Together

We Need to Talk

Chille Tid

Cry for Help

Keystone Motel

Catch and Release

When It Rains

Back to the Barn

Steven’s Birthday

It Could’ve Been Great

Message Received

Log Date 7 15 2

Same Old World

The New Lars

Monster Reunion

Alone at Sea

Like ‘em

Gem Glow

Frybo

Arcade Mania

So Many Birthdays

Lars and the Cool Kids

Onion Trade

Steven the Sword Fighter

Beach Party

Monster Buddies

Keep Beach City Weird

Watermelon Steven

The Message

Open Book

Story for Steven

Shirt Club

Love Letters

Reformed

Rising Tides, Crashing Tides

Onion Friend

Historical Friction

Friend Ship

Nightmare Hospital

Too Far

Barn Mates

Steven Floats

Drop Beat Dad

Too Short to Ride

Restaurant Wars

Kiki’s Pizza Delivery Service

Greg the Babysitter

Gem Hunt

Enh

Cheeseburger Backpack

Together Breakfast

Cat Fingers

Serious Steven

Steven’s Lion

Joking Victim

Secret Team

Say Uncle

Super Watermelon Island

Gem Drill

No Thanks!

     5. Horror Club      4. Fusion Cuisine      3. House Guest      2. Sadie’s Song      1. Island Adventure

[royalreef]

@candyredmuses || 𝔉𝔦𝔰𝔥 ℜ𝔬𝔞𝔰𝔱 😩 - Hardest thing about writing the muse?

(( Consistency has long been my greatest enemy, to be honest. I tend to read and re-read over my previous responses when making a new one as much as I can, but the issue is - I hate reading my old writing. Yes, even things that I’ve literally written minutes ago! Kinda why I’ve long considered myself needing an editor/beta reader for basically everything I do. I’m so fickle with it - I want to get it just right, exactly perfect, and that’s what leads to a lot of my inconsistencies. I also tend to change my mind a lot, and my memory has only been getting worse recently, so together all of those make for a horrible blend. 

Finding actual inspiration for writing is also hard as hell. I tend to get into one mood one moment, and work my best to truly capture it in writing, and then the second I focus on another mood, the first one is long gone. I don’t exactly have emotional permeance, so it’s something I really struggle with, to even recall what that mood was like before and what was going on through both my own mind and Miranda’s mind. 

Third comes the worst of all: ACTUAL CANON. Seriously. I’ve fallen into a recent kind of trend in my writing; namely, themes. I love themes and things that have meaning, and just using themes as a means to improve even my current understanding of the world! And yet... Monster Prom itself doesn’t have a lot of themes, not a lot of big questions that I like to play with. It’s a dating sim, and it’s very silly! And it works for a dating sim! But not so much once you start to actually question things and expand the world outside of just the game and the mood that comes with the game. It’s joking and playful and it has to keep that mood. 

That’s part of why I’ve kinda developed... I’m not sure if it’s a hatred exactly, but it’s certainly some kind of bitterness towards canon Miranda. She could be so much more! In the game, she really is a much flatter character than the others, and I feel like that’s because of the mood issue. You could talk about the reality of her being a princess, what it would be like to grow up in a family that so heavily encourages excessive force and who are rulers of a totalitarian regime - but then you break the mood. Then you make the game serious. Then you’re no longer in Monster Prom. Or, you could go about it in the same way, with a lot of joking around and a far more playful mood - but I don’t think the Devs will do that nor should they. Because then you could easily make light of very serious issues, issues that actually are being focused on today. Then you destroy the messages that you want to get across, sacrificing for the mood. 

So, yeah, I’m super canon divergent. I say that outright, that only the barest threads still tie me to canon anymore. Hell, I’ve gone so far and built up so much for my own Miranda and my own story, done so many things to diverge from canon, that I’ve considered making all of this just a novel of my own making, cutting all threads of my Miranda from Monster Prom’s Miranda. Of course, that would provide a lot more work (I’ve been wanting to make an actual language for merfolk, with their own letters and words and everything, not just the keysmash I’ve been doing - but I’d have to do more research into linguistics and figure out a root language, from which the other merfolk languages diverged), but I’ve been considering this good practice nonetheless.

And, finally - there’s the anticipation. I have so many secrets, so many little things to discover here and there, so many things hidden around or mentioned in passing that tie into bigger things and bigger themes, with so many things I have planned - it’s really hard to keep pace sometimes! It’s hard to stay happy, light, jokey Monster Prom Miranda when, underneath it all, I have huge cogs turning and so many different avenues considered and so many things just going on or existing in the background! It makes me really want to show it all off! But I can’t, I gotta reveal it slowly, easing everyone into it!

I can say that I worry a lot about people thinking I’m just making things up as I go or pulling things out of my ass - but I promise, I’m not! There’s just a lot of fun content is fully my own that has yet to be explored!

[flynnspeaks]

“Frozen” Thoughts

Just got back from my trip and can finish this up from my drafts. Spoilers abound:

So tl;dr thought: Script is basically good, production bad. I think the show, script-wise, is 80% there but it needs some major changes to work effectively as a piece of theatre.

General stuff: - The only things outright cut from the film are Marshmallow, the icepickers, “Heimr Arnadalr” (replaced with a new coronation hymn) and “Frozen Heart” (which is still quoted in the show?? Like at one point a character literally says “born of cold and winter air”, so I don’t know why it’s missing). Every other song and character is represented. - The trolls are changed into sorta mystical ‘mountain folk’, and made into the narrators of the piece (I kinda felt this would happen--the movie has two options for a sort of greek chorus, the icepickers and the trolls. IMO they picked the wrong one). - Lots of new songs - Heavy ensemble--several new numbers incorporate them heavily, and they’re added to “Let it Go” (offstage voices) and “First Time in Forever”

The Good: - Two new songs are excellent additions to the score--a poppy Kristoff/Anna duet called “What Do You Know About Love” and an Act II solo for Elsa called “Monster” (insert Nicki Minaj joke here). The rest of the score isn’t nearly as memorable and there are times where it feels like you’re waiting for a movie number to happen, but it’s still for the most part good. - The score feels a lot more unified than the film--I know people complained about the songs in the film feeling sorta disjointed stylistically, and though that’s not a complaint I subscribed to the whole thing is a lot more cohesive here, both in terms of orchestration, in what the linking material is able to do, and the use of the ensemble. - Speaking of improvements over the film, “Fixer Upper” is vastly better. It loses a verse, and they’ve reorchestrated it to be more rhythmic, fitting with the other musical material the mountain folk get in the show. It’s far less jarring and far less annoying than in the film. - Both Hans and Kristoff get a lot more to do, which is good--less so for Hans, but we’ll talk about that later. - Sven is accomplished really well in an elaborate costume that sorta recalls Lion King but in a more ‘realistic’ vein. It’s very fun to watch, with one drawback--he blinks, and it’s really creepy for some reason. - The climax is really well-staged. It is also the only moment in the show that’s really well-staged, but we’ll get to that. - There were two families on either side of me both with little girls who seemed to be really enjoying the show. That doesn’t actually have anything to do with the show but it was nice. The Eh: - I was actually expecting some of the cut songs featured on the album would be used (”We Know Better”, “Spring Pageant”, “Life’s Too Short”), and they ended up not utilizing any of them. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing except that it often felt like those would’ve functioned better in the show than the songs they actually used--like, the opening number isn’t bad by any means, but it’s probably the weakest number in Act I and isn’t anywhere near as good as what a rewritten “We Know Better” probably would’ve been. “Life’s Too Short” is an interesting one, because I think it was definitely wrong for the moment in the film, but something about where the Anna/Elsa confrontation happens in the stage version feels like it desperately needed that number instead of the “Forever” reprise. - There’s dance breaks added to “Love is an Open Door” and “Fixer Upper”, and they’re not, like, awful, but they’re just sorta there. Here’s a thought: why not dance during the song? - The tone is really slippery in the first half of Act I. I’m probably misremembering, but I don’t remember Anna being this jokey as a kid in the film. It gets better as it goes on (either that or I’m Stockholmed into it by then), but they never quite reconcile the classic fairy-tale stuff with the more modern sensibility, and it jars constantly. - The finale is ok, but also just sort of there. They end on “Love is an Open Door”, which works better than it sounds but is also a really odd song to end on (like, why not just close with a “Vuelie” reprise?) - They try and justify the title of the show in one of the lyrics and it kinda really doesn’t work

The Bad: - Okay, let’s get the worst out of the way: The Act II opening number is the absolute worst piece of garbage I have ever seen committed to the musical stage. It’s an extended comic setpiece called “Hygge” featuring Kevin del Aguila as Oaken (the “Yoo Hoo!” guy, who only appears in this scene) explaining what ‘hygge’ means to the audience, done as a polka. With a chorus in the nude. The entire song exists only to get Anna out of the winter gear she’s wearing into the recognizable winter gear from the film. The audience clearly lost patience with the number halfway through. The song ends with the chorus doing a kickline in the nude with fig leaves covering their privates. It had better fucking be cut before Broadway. - Olaf. Olaf Olaf Olaf. Starting with the script, he’s for some reason far more grating here than in the film, and I think it’s because he’s being written as an iconic character rather than the simply sweet innocent he was in the film. “In Summer” is towards the end of Act I, which is absolutely the wrong place for it--by this point the show becomes a waiting game for “Let it Go” and the song is only an irritating distraction in that context (it clearly needs to open Act II, but we saw how that went). Olaf also gets a second comedic number in Act II that just doesn’t work. It’s not “Hygge” levels of awfulness, but it just falls flat and again feels like a distraction. And then there’s the performance. - Okay, this is gonna be its own bullet point. So the actor himself is fine, but he’s stuck doing a Josh Gad impersonation and can’t really make it his own. But they have Olaf be a puppet, Avenue Q-style with the actor operating him from behind, and it is awful. First off he’s designed to look exactly like the CGI model, which jars immensely with the look of the entire rest of the show. And the puppet itself is actively bad--horribly inexpressive, and the mouth doesn’t appear to actually be able to close all the way??? At first I thought the actor just wasn’t a very good puppeteer but at some point in the show the actress playing Anna has to operate the puppet and the issue persists, so you’re left with this mouth that can only close partway and it looks baaaaaaaad. - Hans. Okay, so I was actually expecting them to do something with the twist--the thing is that worked immensely well in the film, but is also kind of a one-trick pony and in all likelihood the entire audience of the show is going to know the twist going in. So with that I was expecting them to either reveal it a lot sooner, so the audience knows what’s up before Anna does, or else reverse it entirely. Instead it plays out exactly as it does in the film, with the added wrinkle that a considerable amount of material has been added to make Hans more trustworthy and likeable, which makes the twist feel facile and contrived. More than anywhere else this is the spot that needed to be different from the film, and the fact it stayed the same reveals a lot about the show’s priorities. - The set is actually awful. All projections and drops, and very little in the way of actual interactive pieces. It honestly felt like a national tour set--not something you would put together for Broadway. And the “special effects” are laughable--a few moments where they have actual ice shards in the set that are kinda cool, but for the most part Elsa does elaborate hand gestures and they project a swirl of ice on the set. The dress transformation is fun, but the rest of it feels honestly cheap as hell (especially since this really feels like a show that would sell itself on special effects work). - The set being bad impacts the direction, which often has no idea what to do with its actors and leaves the ensemble aimlessly wandering in the background. The staging is bland and lifeless--occasionally enlivened when it’s able to copy directly from the film, but usually staid (”Love is an Open Door” is literally, like, walking. It’s bad). - More than anything you get the feeling this is a production that aims for little more than slavishly recreating the film, and it ends up feeling like something you’d see at Disneyland rather than actually on Broadway. I don’t think the script is bad--it’s got really bad moments, but will probably be fixed pretty well in time for Bway--but this needed a director like Taymor that could make it feel like its own thing. As is...I mean, it’s a Disney show. Maybe it’s expecting too much for it to be theatrically interesting, but damn I really wish it was.

Ultimately this isn’t a show that’s going to change your mind about the film. If you liked the film, you’ll likely at least enjoy the show (though I loved the film and thought this was merely allright, so YMMV), if you don’t like the movie you probably won’t enjoy this very much. Hopefully the script issues that exist will be fixed by Bway, and with luck it won’t be long after that when the licensing opens up--honestly the best possible production of this would be with a smaller company that wouldn’t be obligated to recreate the film but could do their own thing, treating the material seriously on its own. Until then, it looks like this is what we got, and I can’t say right now that it’s gonna be worth your time outside of what will probably be a pretty great cast album.

[kierongillen]

Writer Notes: The Wicked + the Divine 26

Spoilers, obv.

This felt like a big issue to us. I mean, in a literal sense it was a big issue. We normally are 20 pages of art (plus cheats). This is 23 pages of art, due to me completely fucking up and writing a 22 page script extremely early, thinking I'd go back to it and work out a way to compress it to 20. Except I forgot I had extra work to do on the script, so didn't leave enough time to rework it before Jamie had to get it. And then Jamie insisted on expanding a sequence by a page, because he loves you guys, or at least loves the comic.

I don't really think I could have compressed it without hurting the comic either. I compress the action at the start, and it leaves a reader cheated. I talked about false drama of cliffhangers last time, and if you don't have at least some manner of satisfying that promise, it's a cheat, and not in an interesting way people would thank us for. However, at the same time, that's not what we're really doing here. Equally, losing stuff from the back of the issue would move it into the next issue... and that is also sub-optimum, for reasons you'll see next time.

Put it like this: Jamie joked “can we split this issue in two?” and I took it entirely seriously, and started doing the math on making this a seven issue arc.

But no.

There's also one change which should be mentioned – we've gone up to $3.99 from $3.50. Why? Image suggested we should. There are very few Image books that are $3.50 now. The vast majority are $3.99. We've had our price set at $3.50 ever since 2006, with the exception of Immaterial Girl. We figured we should listen to our publisher. 50 cents across a decade seems reasonable, especially in an industry where $3.99 seems standard.

Anyway, let's do this thing...

Jamie/Matt's Cover The Norns, and they are kind of core to this issue, so more of a connection between cover and contents than for most of the issue. For reasons that become clear this issue, The Norns and Baal step forward as alternative protagonists for the story structure. They are key.

There was considerable EEEK! Over the wearing of masks.

Nicola Scott's Cover

Nicola's wonderful. I've wanted a candid photo cover for most of WicDiv, and I'm surprised it's only turned up now. It's also delineating Sakhmet and Persephone, which is a key note towards the end of the issue.

The Image 25th Anniversary Cover

It should be stressed, this was Eric Stephenson's idea.

You may wonder how we did it.

This is how we did it.

In short: we did it like an episode of Playschool. The lighting being a lamp, gaffataped to a wall is a particular highpoint.

And then Katie-west worked her magic.

All the good jokes on the covers are Jamie's, which is very annoying, but makes me feel better when I laugh at it, as at least I’m not laughing at my own crap.

Page 1

I love the first panel. I almost put it in the newsletter, but decided we should save that thrill for context. It's very much in the establishing shot mode, and a promise. Jamie and Matt executing things like Minervas concussive wind blasts out of the swirling body is lovely detail too.

I did have something akin to a NOT AGAIN! As a line of dialogue from Minerva here, but was obviously killed for breaking tone. See later in the notes for other thoughts on that whole sequence.

And by the end of the page, we've changed direction entirely. No, this isn't going to be a straight fight. We have other narrative fish to fry.

Page 2-3

RISING ACTION was basically four issues of straight punchy, with a middle act of woe. We're not the sort to do that again, and immediately try and make this feel different. That first panel where we get a very human observation of a superhero event. A glance out the window, and shit is going down out there. There is a lot to try and ground this as we go on, even as it escalates...

I suspect Amaterasu's realisation is one of the cruellest lines I've written for her.

Heh. Okay – want to hear another example of me messing up? I knew I needed Amaterasu here, ASAP. But I had also set the scene at night, so her long-range-teleportation doesn't work. This led to a rewrite to bring in the Woden-designed-arm-piece from Rising Action. And it helps in other ways – we get the interaction with her mum, which says a lot about Amaterasu. I do like the idea of Amaterasu having left this piece of fancy armour lying around on her bedroom floor and her mum tidied it up.

Jamie pushed a panel from page 3 onto page 2, which is obviously a smarter call, letting him keep a steady angle on the three teleportation panels, which nails the effect. The breaking up dialogue to show that things are instantaneous is obviously one of our tropes.

The lettering on this sequence involved some messing around with layers to get work, and to make the fade in operate. Nice work, Clayton. This is also an area where my suspicion of sound-effects was entirely over-ruled.

Page 4

And hulllllo Baal's family.

This strikes me as a very WicDiv take on a reveal. It could have worked with just a reveal of his family – we'd want to see that. But to reveal that, and juxtapose it to the creeping monsters, so mixing the excitement of meeting new people with the fear of losing them? That's WicDiv, innit? Sigh.

This was also the page which went through the most colouring notes. Getting the exact level of reveal on the Great Darkness creatures, of how much they're in the light or not took quite a few takes. We're very happy.

Page 5

We are totally not rated PG.

Page 6-7

If you follow me on twitter, you'd see me doing a crowdsurfed suggestion for a line of dialogue for someone to say when they're pulling someone out of the way. That was this page, and Persephone pulling the tentacles. I decided that any dialogue was too much. It even makes it jokey (clearly not the intent) or slows down the action. Even a “NO!” felt too much for me.

We're heading more towards action here, and doing a beautifully rendered fight-scene in someone's garden. This feels a very us thing to do.

I believe I described the Amaterasu laser beam shot in the mode of a Quietly moment, that sense of a still moment in time. Jamie and Quitely don't have a huge amount of overlap as artists for me – Quitely is all about the 3D space of a shot, which Jamie simply isn't – but this captures something really furious. The colouring from Matt on the heat vision is particularly A+.

The push and pull of Amaterasu is very much her thing. Her bravery is an open question, as is her capacity for anger and violence. From Persey-Poo to incinerating her foes in a couple of pages doesn't exactly make me feel comfortable about her. So nice work, J ane M.

Also Good Job Baal's Brother on spotting the baddies.

Page 8

Jamie and my debate on exactly how to (er) Biggify the Darkness creature was quite a thing. Of course, the creatures are granular. We can't just make the grains bigger.

We were a little worried that Persephone firing red thorns being a little confusing, when red is Amaterasu's signature. We may end up tweaking them green in the trade. Not that we've seen anyone complain about it.

I think Amaterasu's living-Darkseid-stary-beam is my favourite regular power signature in this book.

Lots of careful unpacking on what is said on the phone, to ensure clear storytelling. That we never actually show the Great Darkness Creature back at the shard defeated is an unsusual choice... but we need to make sure that people know it HAS been defeated and Minerva rescued. Equally, we come back to the nature of cliffhangers we mentioned earlier. We've promised a fight against the Great Darkness, but are much more interested in introducing Baal's family, showing Amaterasu's complicity in this, Persephone's powers, etc. So you DO get a great darkness fight, just not the one you were expecting, which is hopefully okay as the one you were expecting is a lot less interesting than this. Hopefully.

The Phone is a Woden design, as referenced later in the issue. Baal can't just go down any phone. You'll see one on his living room table in last issue.

Page 9

This is the sort of page I'd have ended up cutting if I tried to reduce the issue... and why would I want to do a thing like this?

There was a discussion of whether ALL I DO IS WIN was too much. It eventually worked around to obviously it's too much, but WicDiv is too much, so that's all fine.

This is a lovely set of colouring from Matt here. The white and purple is just a delight.

Notice tiny Scarab-esque thing shooting off in the top right panel. In a moving medium the Great Darkness' nature would be a lot cleaner, but we do stuff like this.

Page 10

And we're back to grounded colours. Just turn this page and see how things change. Isn't that a delight? Matt Wilson For Eisner, etc.

Yes, Baal's name is Valentine Campbell. Obviously we chewed it over a bunch. Valentine has so many connotations seemed to be useful.

I find myself thinking that in the first half of the issue Persephone is almost back to volume 2 Laura. She's primarily an observer, one who is taken places and sees thing. That does tend to make Amaterasu's final line particularly pointed.

Lovely pair of expressions in that final panel.

Page 11

The title for this was originally ONCE MORE, leading directly into Baal's first line, and hitting the beat again. That changed when I realised I wanted to do the whole sequence as a nine panel grid.

This is the first time all the surviving gods have been in a scene together, and it's a circular table. Luckily, when I mapped the gods to the seats, the ones who are most important to interact are actually sitting beside each other – imagine how difficult it would have been if Baal and the Norns weren't seated by each other.

(We'd have done something else, clearly, and had the Norns standing like Persephone is.)

So I was trying to work out how to panel all this political-meeting style chat, and hit the bit where the gods vote. And I realised that as there were nine gods voting, it'd work really well as a nine-panel grid. That rapidly expanded to... wait, especially with Baal/Norns sitting by each other (so minimising the need for wide shots) I could do the whole thing in a nine panel grid. That allows you to cut between individual characters speaking, and not have to worry about the interactions for most of it.

That unlocked the way to best dramatically sell the Persepone's final line. If we build a structure, we can get an aesthetic effect by demolishing it.

It's not the first time we've done a Nine Panel Grid in our work, but its' certainly the longest. And if we're doing Nine Panel, it brings it back to Watchmen, which means that we should highlight that. Hence, the title altering to THE WATCH, which obviously has all kinds of connotations.

I go through this to primarily show how much fun this job can be. Stuff builds on top of other stuff, and you eventually end up with something much more full than the original idea. For me, pretty much nothing is as good as writing is when it's going right.

Which is the sort of thing I'll get depressed about if I think too much about it, so let's not for now, eh?

Page 12

If we're going to do the nine panel thing, we need to establish the scene properly. Two panels, built on a nine-panel grid superstructure.

Obviously this was a heavy described panel, as we had to cram in all the character beats for all the people. Baph's slouch is particularly on point. The coffee that Dio is hanging onto for dear life another. The Norns not getting a seat.

One thing I particularly like about this page? It forefronts the visual element of the table with twelve gods around which people may not have noted. This, on a page after a big title saying THE WATCH is more obviously a clock face.

Yes, Watchmen was a big influence on me as a writer. Did I mention it? I may have mentioned it.

Page 13

Oh man – look at Matt's use of shadow here. Baal in the darkness on last page was great, but passing from the shadow to light in the first panel.

When I first saw Jamie had put Minerva in plaid I worried for him. “Er... Jamie. Drawing Plaid is a lot of work.” He noted that as there was only a few panels with her in, it'll be fine. Jamie is not entirely foolish.

The page does show one of the things about the nine panel – as in, you get more beats... but you have to be pretty particular to choose those beats. 9 panel is good for a writer, for certain things (most important: timing), but you can do less with any one panel. On the plus side your beats are more deliberate, more delineated.

In this case, showing Persephone's is relatively “expensive” in page space, but clearly necessary – Baal is saying the stuff he's never said before. We need to see her response.

And yeah... Baal finally lays out his main motivation. I suspect for close readers or re-readers, things make a lot more sense.

The seventh panel is one of four two shots I can see in this whole sequence, to get an idea of how sparsely we tried to use them. Maybe 5 if you include the one with Woden asking “Does she get a vote.” Though I say this having only skimmed quickly, and am sure I must have missed one..

The non sequitur panel of the 8th is one of my fave things you can do with a rigid panel like this. Drop a silent panel and break it up.

Page 14-15-16

Honestly, this kind of shit is stuff I love. Just lock characters in a room and let them argue. Political dramas. Legal dramas. It's just a fascinating writing challenge – who speaks next and why. How to delineate the information, how to lampshade information is questionable, etc, etc.

I mean, in some ways this sort of debate is pure exposition – here are some statements – but the fact that each is immediately interrogated turns it into something else.

Basically, if left to my own devices, I'd have just done a 40 issue series in the style of 12 ANGRY MEN called 12 ANGRY GODS.

In terms of my outline, I knew that the pantheon would have a schism at this point. Until Brexit happened, I didn't realise that it would be by something as clear and true as a simple democratic vote.

The hand on Cass' shoulders is the sort of thing I'd have only done in a nine panel grid.

Yes, Baphomet, there was a time for jokes, and it was in the first arc.

PAGE 17

This issue, for reasons which we'll get to shortly, had some consultants' eyes on. That bit was fine. The thing which was tweaked then, and tweaked time and time over is trying to delineate the sides. The first draft simply hadn't sufficiently. Hell, the second or third lettering tweaks didn't do the trick completely. At least from the comments we've seen, no-one seems lost, so the effort seems worth it.

The problem is that each member of the debate wants to phrase their position in the best way possible and their enemies in the worst way, which actually leaves it hard to say what's actually go on. This led to Baal in the final panel actually bringing it together – the PRIORTISE THE GREAT DARKNESS vs STUDY is the key thing. ANARCHY had to be introduced explicitly by cass to describe someone else's position as a label before it could be used here too.

In terms of minor fact drops? One of the things people always ask is what's going on with the skulls. Here we just let people know they're ornaments.

In terms of the nine panel grid, I think the single hardest decision was letting go of showing the Norn's response to Sakhmet's threat. Alas, everything else is more important.

The second one would be Baal doing something like counting people around the room, to ensure that the reader knows that Baal thinks he's won. In the end, we highlight that later, and with the ellipsis  in the eighth panel. And, of course, as always a Jamie McKelvie expression goes a long way.

Er... I'm writing too much about this stuff, but I hope it's useful for people who think about comic craft. And to double-triple stress, as always in these notes, I really am just telling the surface level storytelling basics.

Page 18

And the vote page. As said earlier, was where the 9 panel grid came as possible.

These lines were especially tweaked to sell the positions and why.

And Dionysus, for the first time in the scene, speaks. Obviously a key issue for Dio, where we move him into an explicit new position in the plot.

Page 19

Man, I don't even want to unpack this page.

But I can easily imagine how both Baal and Cass are feeling in the last panel. Uh... wait...

Page 20

Formalism doing its formalism thing.

This was written in a nine panel grid, but with descriptions of which panels are covered by Persephone's hair.

Page 21

And then we go into our quick cuts to move to the new status quo, the nine panel.

It's very much our aesthetic that we show the break-up but don't show the getting-together.

I suspect it's the sort of scene I'd like to talk about further down the line, but not now.

The gold prize for Jamie here are panels 3 and 4. For me, that's comic, and that's why I love comics.

Well, one of the reasons, anyway.

Page 22-23

Cass continues to be a gift for those who like reaction images.

The strangest rewrite of the issue for me was the “What's the saying about stopped clocks?” line, which was originally a lot more suggestive and less explicit. But 2 of the first 4 people to read it didn't get it in its more suggestive form, which meant that I was always going to dial back for clarity's sake.

So, yes, this is a Cass/Dio/Woden team-up for the Study side. Splitting your cast into smaller narrative units is a good tactic in a team book (I sort of learned it properly when I was writing my 9-core-person Uncanny X-men team). You also see it all over the place – if you listen to Community notes, you'll see how they split their cast into different arrangements and see how the characters interact. Having three characters who, on the surface, appear to have very different priorties come together under a larger banner is an interesting one.

In terms of the explicitly delineating at least part of the sexualities, this has been considered for a while. Let's start with Cassandra.

Early on in WicDiv, I saw a random comment of someone annoyed with something I'd said. Specifically me saying something akin to “I sometimes need room to discover a character's sexuality.” Her response – and one I completely get – was annoyance with suggesting people don't know their own sexualities. The “No, I know I'm Bi – don't say it's a phase. Don't say it's something I'm discovering.”

As I said, I get it, but that's not what I meant. I meant characters. Writing often feels like excavation. Not always, but sometimes, and especially in a book like WicDiv. You get to know them by writing them, sometimes in actually fundamental ways, ways which were always there but now come to the surface. For all my planning in WicDiv, it's also a living creature.

So when starting off, I always had a few feelings about Cassandra. There was the possibility that she was actually asexual. It would fit with her for a few ways, and the evidence for a reading of that was certainly there. However, I rapidly realised it caused huge problems inside the narrative in terms of what it was saying about asexuality. One of Cassandra's primary traits is that she doesn't experience the performances. If she's asexual, that implies that it's linked to that – especially when the performances have been linked so strongly to sex at various places in the narrative. I thought that'd be true even if we had another asexual character in the primary cast to show the contrary. I continued writing her and thinking, and having an awareness of the various potentials I saw in her. I didn't have to make a choice yet.

The flashpoint was issue 20, where I realised that it just was untenable for her to be asexual. Because if performances are linked in the readers' mind to sex, that eventually Cassandra does response to a performance is a sign that asexuals just haven't met the right person yet.

No. I'm not writing a book that suggests that.

There is also the real world thing that trans women are viewed through a hypersexual lens or an asexual one, which is certainly one feeds into the final dialogue on the page.

So everything re-arranged and solidified in the other way I saw them – a stable lesbian polyamarous triad. I saw with Imperial Phase ahead, that felt more and more necessary. WicDiv is... not a book where relationships are healthy. Every single romantic relationship in the book is openly dysfunctional. Relevantly, there is a lot of people doing polyamory very badly. It comes to a point where it looks like the book saying this behaviour is bad rather than this specific practise is bad. The Norns would be the counter-argument. In this issue, we show them in an private, loving supportive relationship that's arguably more unconventional than any other in the book.

We don't get to see any of the sex, of course, as it's none of our business and they're not there for the readers' pleasure. But with them in our story, it shows there's nothing implicitly wrong with kink, or polyamory or anything else... as long as you don't act like sentient burning trashcans.

That was the thinking. Some of it, anyway.

Oh – on the note of discovery, I only realised that she'd lean submissive as I wrote the page. It was a surprise to me as well, but seemed to align with everything else and make a lot of things make more sense.

In Dio's case, it was there as a possibility even as I first wrote him into the bible. I see myself writing around it in my notes, saying that I just didn't feel like sex was a big drive for him in the way it was for so much of the cast. The problem eventually came for the place to introduce it, and how, and in the same action where we move Dio towards the centre stage (or at least primary supporting characters) seemed to be it.

We've had a lot of supportive messages about both of these, so thank you. And thanks again to our consultants, who we will continue to high five at the slightest encouragement.

Page 24-25

This was originally written as a page, but Jamie insisted on MOTORBIKE DRAMA!

And how could we resist that?

I actually wrote a first draft of this, and wondered if it was too much, and then did a completely different end scene based on Persephone leaving the Shard. Arguing it over with Chrissy, we came down strongly on this. It's WicDiv. We crash motorbikes into walls for the sake of it.

Worth noting: this is a return to a non-cliffhanger ending structure. The “read the next issue” comes from the whole of the issue rather than a specific beat. This is about leaving it with a mood.

Favourite thing in colour – the circle of light on the wall, a half second before impact.

I'll give you one for free: Persephone is on the phone to one of her people, probably an agent. I could have put an explicit call in that to the dialogue, but it was too crass and fake, and the specific identity doesn't really matter that much. It's just someone who's clearly going to get her a new bike.

Also: the main reason why I wondered whether this scene wasn't too much, is because it is literally the lyrics to Icona Pop's I LOVE IT.

Page 26

“Hey, C, is referencing Kesha too much on the interstitial? It sort of is a trashy pop take on Watchmen's encroaching apocalypse feel.”

“No, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing you do.”

“Cool.”

See you next month, where we reach the penultimate part of IMPERIAL PHASE (I). It's just being put to bed, and we like it a lot.

Thanks for reading.