#like if this is more setup for a larger narrative it works

[kurozu501]

i feel even more confused about if gwitch is getting another season or not now. episode 14 was great but also sped through 2 huge plot beats that most of us thought wouldn’t happen until much later in the season. then episode 15 suddenly drags the entire plot to a stop to spend the episode on earth with only three short cutaways to non guel members of the main cast. that’s not something a show that needs to end its story in 9 episodes should be doing. i really hope we get more then 24 eps bc otherwise this ep will end up feeling like wasted time.

[phantomchick]

Naruto and being the Underdog

Okay so recently I was discussing naruto's characterisation in the comments section of a fanfic and the author was explaining that they don't like/never vibed with Naruto's character (which is totally fair). But then they explained how they felt the supposed underdog setup was contrived and didn't really work because Naruto never actually starts at zero thanks to his jinchuriki powers and being the yondaime's son. (And so here I am, on my soapbox to discuss how Naruto and the concept of being an underdog relate.)

On a physical level perhaps this applies, but Naruto places an equal (if not larger) amount of focus on the emotional action as it does on its plot action.

On an emotional level he has to work for each and every one of his personal relationships.

He wants to be hokage a role he can only take if he is both respected by his village and powerful enough to protect it. It''s a twofold goal. And in terms of the social aspect this is clearly stacked against him due to the hatred and exploitation of jinchuriki as well as shinobi in general, achieving emotional connection and dialogue between people who are used to might makes right or who are pre-disposed to look down on him or want to kill him puts him firmly at a disadvantage narratively.

With the notable exception of Hinata whose love is unconditional, whether it's Tsunade, Neji, Sasuke or Gaara or even Kurama the respect and attention that naruto craves are things he actively pursues in both good and bad ways and he earns them through his own effort.

He does this both by striving to understand these very different people and where they're coming from as well as surviving all the shit the world throws at him. Emotional and physical tasks.

In terms of being a jinchuriki and getting the rasengan easily thanks to his shadow clone bullshit / birthright connections to the yondaime It must first be acknowledged that the jinchuriki power is more of a disadvantage than a boon to him at first. First, because of kurama actively going out of his way to mess with his chakra control as a kid while doing the leaf exercise he was unable to learn the regular clone jutsu; it also results in him experiencing the trauma of discrimination and isolation from a young age which could easily have led to festering self-hatred and alienation if not for Iruka's intervention, it results in multiple S ranks who are fully capable of killing even shippuden level Naruto targetting him, and while the trade-off of boundless energy and survive-ability is immense those same boundless resources have the potential to burn him alive if he loses emotional control/gives into his most negative emotions - that's basically making the subtext text at that point, the story is about his emotional development and growth, something his "OP buffs" don't earn for him. Let's talk about boundless chakra resources for a moment. At the end of the original series, he only knows the rasengan; the rasenshuriken, the shadow clone justu and sage mode/yinyang mode by the end of the series and that's like 5 justu tops if we're counting yin/yang/bijuu mode and sage mode as jutsu. The majority of what he learned from jiraiya for three years seemed to be taijutsu only with a side of failed bijuu control. Naruto has his jinchuriki chakra from the start but that doesn't translate to an ability to use it, he has to spend hours working out how to do the shadow clone, he did not figure out how to do the jutsu because of his chakra even if that was the reason he was able to use it at all, and when it comes to the rasengan I will cite [someone who deleted their reddit account] here:

Naruto completed the first stage in three days and one night. He figured out how his chakra needed to move to burst the water balloon (thanks to a cat) but because he didn't have the necessary chakra control, he improvised by using another hand. He completed the second stage in three weeks or so. The next day(?), Jiraiya gave him a hint to improve his focus which allowed him to finally complete it. And the third stage was completed seven days later to win his bet with Tsunade. Once again, Naruto didn't have the control to focus his chakra the correct way despite his continuous efforts. It wasn't until he came up with another improvised method by using a shadow clone to focus the chakra that he was able to complete the final stage.

Meaning he is the one who comes up with unorthodox methods, such as also using his other hand, or using a shadow clone to focus the chakra, to learn it in four and a half weeks but he still had to figure out how to do it all himself. The shadow clone would've been useless without his understanding of the jutsu or his ability to do the individual parts of the jutsu. He earns the jutsu and could conceivably have learned it the old fashioned way were he not under an artificial time limit as both Jiraiya and Kakashi, both without jinchuriki power, know it and can use it.

Now I'll talk about his supposed privilege as the yondaime's child: Sasuke gets chidori and later kirin thanks to HIS connections but that's never remarked on in the same way. And in fact most people in the naruto-verse learn a big jutsu from their clan or parent; see Might Gai, the genius of hard work, learning the eight gates thanks to his father. The rasenshuriken is something he's only capable of learning thanks to his chakra and shadow clones I hear you quote Kakashi, but it's again, something he couldn't do without actually putting the work in to learn the jutsu. Naruto is on a time crunch because of Akatsuki, the fact he is capable of learning the jutsu once he has advice on wind chakra from Asuma and has practiced forming the rasengan and doing windblades enough means he didn't need the extra chakra to do it, having the chakra didn't automatically make him capable of the rasenshuriken all it did was speed up his chakra control practice exponentially, it would have taken him more time practicing but he could have learned the jutsu eventually even if he wasn't a jinchuriki. Now summons. Being the Yondaime's child might get him an in with Jiraiya to let him have the toad contract, but Sakura and Sasuke also get summoning contracts thanks to personal connections with Tsunade and Orochimaru and Jiraiya only gets him the opportunity. It's Naruto who has to use his willpower to stay on Gamabunta's back and it's Naruto who has to form relationships with his summons like Gamakichi, (a bond that becomes instrumental toward the end of the 4th war). Additionally learning Sage mode wasn't just a result of Naruto getting the contract because neither Sasuke nor Sakura achieved it despite both having contracts (and despite Kabuto managing it where Sasuke didn't) Sasuke with the Hawks as well as the Snakes. And importantly Naruto was unable to use clones or his extra chakra to speed up his training in this. In fact the clones only come into it after he has successfully mastered sage mode and function as a limited extra resource that's can't go beyond three shadow clones meditating and this doesn't function as more sage powah but as a means of extending his sage modes duration, a workaround that's only needed because his being a jinchuriki gets in the way of him gathering sage mode in real-time with the toads on him. In conclusion while his chakra lets him practice jutsu to learn them faster, this is not the case in either his sage mode or the yin yang release and only applies to the shadow clone, rasengan and rasenshuriken - all of which he had to actually learn and understand the mechanics of otherwise the jutsu wouldn't have worked no matter how many shadow clones he had try it and that with the exception of shadow clone he demonstrably could've learned them without being a jinchuriki. And in the case of rasengan and rasenshuriken he is under artificial time-limits imposed by Orochimaru and the Akatsuki.

So that's shadow clone, rasengan, rasenshuriken and sage mode covered but what about bijuu mode. An overpowered special mode he only gets for being a jinchuriki, that B only bothers to teach him because he's a jinchuriki, surely that's LEGIT op bullshit. No? No. At least not in comparison to the Sakura's forehead seal from Tsunade, Sasuke's Mangekyou abilities like izanagi, giant purple warrior and amaterasu, Obito's mokuton, Madara's sage of six paths abilities or the rinnegan's everything, anyway. Not to mention what the edo tensei are capable of.

The only reason bijuu mode works is that he earns Kurama's regard on an emotional level, it's not something which being a kage's kid or having jinchuriki chakra levels actually does fuck all to contribute to. He was that all along but Kurama still hated him and tried to take over his body. It's Naruto himself who has to reach out and make that effort to understand this person who he's always seen as a burden or a curse or an annoying tenant who doesn't pay rent, a monster who tries to kill him and take his body. It's Naruto who has to put in the emotional labour and see Kurama as a person, no matter the harm he's done.

Naruto is the underdog in spite of being "the chosen one" and having the strongest bijuu and a kage father because emotional labour is never easy and in a world like his it seems insane to even try. It's why everyone except him was prepared to give up on Sasuke, Naruto recognises his anger at Itachi and desire to avenge his family as valid, Naruto when he finds out the truth about Itachi from Danzo tells Sasuke he gets it, why he wants to destroy the village, why he's so angry, when Sasuke changes his mind and decides to become hokage instead of destroying it so he can change it, Naruto understands WHY even if he still wants to be kage himself. The problem with Sasuke is that his anger is self-destructive and self-isolating, not that it exists, it's when Naruto fights him one last time and makes Sasuke realise that he's only hurting himself and his loved ones at this point, that "talk no jutsu" finally works and Sasuke is able to listen to Naruto and come home.

It's also why Naruto earns being hokage; in a world full of killers, someone who is capable of acknowledging the harm done and not ignoring or forgetting it (like how he tells pain he can't forgive him), but who is also capable of looking past that and understanding the motivations and feelings of the person he's dealing with and talking to them on that level as equals hits so hard. It just felt like a fantastic set up for a diplomatic hokage capable of dealing with other kages and achieving a peace in spite of the fact they're all to the last, untrustworthy ninja mercenaries who are generally very ends justify the means. In a world of kill or be killed Naruto is still willing to kill, but he's also willing to understand and to talk. And he wasn't born with that, he worked for it and failed often, especially with Sasuke, it was never easy, it often appeared hopeless but he kept trying.

And we rooted for him because of it.

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

@grimharuspex in the comments of that @zoe-oneesama post said it the best; Butterfly should’ve been Emotion and Peacock should’ve been Desire. I know that Zoe has a limit on what canon she changes for her comic which I respect/appreciate given the thought she puts into it (even when canon’s various nonsensical magic rules are especially grating like this) but how do you think things would’ve gone in-show if this was the setup from the get-go? On that note, do you think it’s a good setup for canon in the first place? Why or why not?

This is going to be a rather long lecture on lore and world building and how the peacock fails on every level, so before we get into that, let's start with the positives. I saw a few people pointed out the Desire idea - that being that the peacock's associated Force should have been Desire while the butterfly got Emotions - and I think that they're absolutely right. That one tiny change does fix the surface level issues and make the peacock make sense for its larger role in the narrative.

It would complicate the whole magical slave thing and also mean that you probably have to rework a few of the minor sentimonsters, but generally speaking, it makes way more sense for Desire to birth a fully realized human being. The sentipeople being people while also coming from a single emotion will always be total BS in my eyes.

At the same time, I blame no one for just sticking to canon's lore. Reworking the lore is a serious thing and even I only do it when I'm telling a lore-heavy story. There are plenty of stories where I just stick to canon's nonsense because the lore isn't important.

Now that we've done our positives, let's getting into the negatives! The issue of the day is this: changing the Force from Emotions to Desire doesn't solve the larger problems with the peacock. Problems that we'll now get into. Buckle up, this is gonna be a long one.

Issue 1: Power Diversity

While I would not call myself a superhero expert, I have seen a good deal of superhero and magical girl team shows in my time. Most of you probably have. If you think about the power sets that we see in those shows, then you'll notice that one thing is pretty much always true: every power is unique OR the powers are all closely related in some way. You never do both because the two concepts don't mix. It makes no sense for half of the characters to have totally unique powers while the other half have copies unless there's some sort of special thematic reason for this like siblings sharing a power.

Without that sort of explanation, it just feels weird and it also makes the characters feel redundant. You don't need two speedsters or two supermen! One is enough. Heck, Avatar the Last Airbender takes place in a world where whole civilizations have the same power and they STILL didn't duplicate powers for the core team because they understood that it's important to keep the characters unique.

Miraculous is pretty obviously supposed to be the type of show where the powers don't overlap. Every character gets a unique power that's uniquely suited to them. We even have this confirmed in universe during that confusing scene in the episode Destruction where Orikko - the rooster - tries to explain how his powers work:

Orikko: No, you're mistaken! Time travel is Fluff's power and I can't grant the power that already belongs to another Kwami!

This brings us to the problem with the peacock: it is not a unique power. It's derivative on multiple levels.

Derivation Level One: Akumas

The first and most obvious level is how similar sentimonsters are to akumas. In terms of how they're normally used in the narrative, they're pretty much the exact same power to the point that you literally can't tell which one you're dealing with until someone tells you. The narrative uses them interchangeably with some episodes using an akuma, some using a sentimonster, and some using both.

In fact, I thought that it was really weird that Gabriel didn't switch to maining sentimonsters back in season four. You had akumas breaking their bonds left and right, which is a thing that sentimonsters literally cannot do, making them the obvious fix to this new problem.

To really highlight the whole "indistinguishable power" issue, allow me to highlight some dialogue from Kuro Neko to show that this is very much an in-universe problem:

Cat Walker: You think that's Cat Noir? Ladybug: Of course it's Cat Noir! He must've been akumatized because he regrets having given up his Miraculous!

Ladybug: You'll see once we deakumatize him. (She runs towards Kuro Neko.) Cataclysm his bell, I'm sure that's where the akuma is! Cat Walker: Hang on! (follows her) Ladybug, what if that's a sentimonster? If I use my power on him, he'll lose control and become more dangerous!

Cat Walker: (cringes) What I mean is you're right to doubt, and I agree with you. Until we know for sure whether we're dealing with a sentimonster or someone who's been akumatized, we shouldn't make any brash decisions. (Kuro Neko leaps away.) Let's find out more.

This sort of confusion should be impossible unless it's the result of clever planning by the villain, but that's not what we're dealing with here. Kuro Neko was not about Gabriel tricking the heroes. He sent out a normal sentimonster having no idea that Chat Noir had just quit. And yet Ladybug had no idea that this was a sentimonster. She looked at it and saw an akuma.

Cat Walker also didn't know that it was a sentimonster. He just knew that it wasn't Chat Noir, which was probably the only reason that he thought to question Ladybug and warn her to be cautious. They only realize that it's a sentimonster once they learn that there's a child inside it.

This is canon accidentally telling us that akumas and sentimonster are just straight up indistinguishable unless you see then made or do some experiments to figure out what you're dealing with. That's not a good look if your claiming that each miraculous grants a unique power. It is, however, a great lead in to the second power that the peacock copies: the power of illusions.

Derivation Level Two: Illusions

I said above that it should take careful planning for a sentimonster to be confused with an akuma. While we never see that type of carefully planned setup, we do see sentimonsters used to successfully impersonate humans on several occasions. One example is the episode Optigami which gave us SentiNino and SentiAlec. Seemingly perfect clones of Nino and Alec who did whatever Shadow Moth told them to. We even see a scene where Shadow Moth is telling SentiAlec exactly what to say.

You know who else gives us this type of scene? Rena Furtive in Rocketear:

Ladybug: You said that if Nino could have heard what you were saying, there'd be no misunderstanding? Rena Furtive: Absolutely! Ladybug: How well do you remember what you guys said on the balcony? Rena Furtive: Every. Word. Ladybug: Do you think you could make... a sound illusion? Rena Furtive: Totally.

Is there any doubt in your mind that the peacock can do anything that the fox can do? What's even worse is that the peacock does illusions better than the fox! Fox illusion vanish in a puff of smoke if you touch them. SentiNino was real enough to wield a miraculous because he was a fully corporeal illusion that would have kept on going if he hadn't been snapped away. This brings us to derivation level three: the power of creation.

Derivation Level Three: Creation

The peacock doesn't just outshine the fox, it outshines the ladybug! Lucky charms vanish as soon as Ladybug detransforms. Sentimonsters last forever. The ladybug is only useful in battle as it requires a super villain to cast its cure (which is asinine, but let's not get into that here). The peacock can be used at any time. The ladybug doesn't give you what you want, it just gives you a puzzle to solve. The peacock can fulfill your deepest desires and even create life.

Outside of the extremely specific circumstances that the show gives us - aka an ongoing battle with a super villain - the ladybug is kind of useless. If you want the power of Creation, you're going to use the peacock. This brings us to our second main issue: power balancing.

Issue Two: Power Balancing

The ladybug and the black cat are supposed to be the two most powerful miraculous in existence, but it really doesn't feel like that's true. Sure, if you put them together they rewrite the universe, but that's not part of their individual base power sets. At an individual level, they don't actually feel all that powerful when compared to the butterfly and the peacock. It's more like Marinette and Adrien are smart enough to make their very limited powers work while Gabriel and Nathalie are dancing along easy street and making fools of themselves with every step.

I've mentioned before that I can forgive the butterfly's overpowered nature because this is an episodic show. They want each episode's fight to be unique and interesting and so we have to give them room to have one power set that should be an insta-win card, but isn't because plot.

I can give them that grace once. I cannot give it to them twice.

There is no reason why both the butterfly and the peacock need to feel more powerful than the supposed most powerful miraculous in existence. I've even talked to one person who is rewriting canon with the assumption that the peacock and the butterfly ARE the most powerful ones because they are! Nothing proves this better than the fact that they've both made creations that can copy the powers of the ladybug and the black cat (see: Copycat, Strikeback, Ladybug, Sandboy, Miraculer, and probably a few others that I'm forgetting).

They're also the only miraculous that don't require an active user. You can create a sentimonster or an akuma, then detransform and have a snack while your creation does whatever you need it to do. That's so incredibly broken and such a terrible move in terms of power balancing. Either have all of the powers require active users or, at the very least, have more of a mix of active and passive powers. Why do Mirage, Shelter, and Lucky Charm vanish when their caster's detransform while akumas and amoks stick around? There is no in-universe logic to explain this. It works this way because that's what the writers needed these miraculous to do. A fact that makes it impossible to get invested in the lore of this show.

When designing a complex magic system, you generally don't want "because plot" to be the only answer to why things work they way they do. You want your magic system to feel real and organic to the world. That's how fictional worlds come to life! If Miraculous' magic system was well designed, then you could take it and use it to tell a wildly different story set in the same universe, but you can't. Everything about it is designed around making canon's story work and not around making an immersive world that you can almost believe exists.

There are stories that I wouldn't hold to that standard, but they're mostly short form stories. Anything as big and complex as Miraculous needs to have a solid lore system backing it or else you lose all sense of stakes. A great example of this is the Bunnyx problem where you know that she can show up at any time and reset the timeline even if things are happening in her own past, so why do we need to worry about bad things happening? And how are the ladybug and the black cat the most powerful ones when you have nonsense like time travel and the power to create human-like creatures? Early canon lore was decently solid, but the longer the show goes, the more nonsense the lore gets and that makes me sad because I love good lore.

Some Final Thoughts

You may have noticed that I didn't really talk about the sentikid issue in this post. That's because my dislike of the peacock came long before that fun little twist. While sentiAdrien is yet another great reason to dislike the peacock, it didn't need to be a thing for the peacock to be a terrible idea. Take away the sentikids and you still have an incredibly derivative and lore-breaking power set that never should have made it into the show.

I actually completely redesigned the peacock for my own rewrite which I start plotting back when I was first watching season three, long before sentiAdrein was even on my radar. That's not something that I usually do in my fix it stuff. I usually try to stick close to canon and make more minor tweaks, but the peacock is so fundamentally world breaking that I had no choice but to do a total overhaul. This is already an incredibly long post, so I won't go into that here. I'll save it for another ask that's sitting in my inbox. I'll schedule them to post back to back.

For this post, I'll just end by pointing out that switching the peacock to Desire makes it derivative of and arguably better than the pig, too, since the pig can only tease you with what you want. The peacock actually gives it to you. In fact, I'd say that the peacock may be a better pig even without the switch!

You can also argue that the peacock is better than or at least equal to the rooster and the goat because they're also just variations of the butterfly and the ladybug's power. Like there is legitimatly potential in taking those miraculous and doing an AU where each Kwami's power is an aspect of creation because the powers are so awkwardly intertwined. Probably make the peacock the master and all others spawn from that one or something like that.

Anyway, this is why you can't design powers around characters if you want good lore and a large team! You have to start with the powers and go from there! It's why I edit Nino's character to be more of a protector since that's his supposed True Force! Also because I want him to be more narratively important but that is a rant for another day.

[knickknacksandallthat]

if you don't mind me asking, what got you into kevin's character?

for me it was actually your fic, but since its so normalized in the fandom to dismiss his trauma and call him a coward and annoying for doing things that other characters are loved for, i didn't really care about him when i first read the books

now hes my favorite

Oh, anon, I love this!! What an honor, I’m so glad to have helped you join the Kev lovefest 😊 (Welcome to the dark side lol!) It makes me so happy that the A Fallen Star series has awakened this in you! 💖

And wow, what a good question. I don't mind at all! I actually had to think about this for a while to try and remember…how the heck did I get here???

So here is my ridiculously uncalled-for POV on Kevin’s character and slow descent into madness below:

(Disclaimer that these are just my thoughts and anyone in the aftg fandom can hc or think whatever they like about Mr. Day 😊)

Like you, anon, I was easily swayed by Neil’s perspective of Kev on first read. It makes sense and is a credit to Nora how we so fully buy into Neil’s opinion of Kevin that many of us just run with it. And to be fair to the fandom, it’s canon – Andrew, Neil, and all the Foxes tell us he’s a coward and annoying and so we assume it must be true.

So, I created many fics that played into this image and focused on andreil. (Because who isn’t enamored with andreil??? Legit, deranged obsession and couple goals lmao). Using that lens, it was easy to make Kevin the punching bag because he is the quintessential “straight man” in comedy (and yes, I do hear the irony in that) – the foil to other characters to make them seem better, braver, funnier, smarter, etc. It’s an age-old trick/trope in fiction that works very well. And it was an easier transition for Nora to make, I think, once she made the decision to remove Kevin from the main narrative of her story.

This character setup works well enough when you’re doing a fic from Neil or Andrew’s POV, providing an easy source of humor to fall back on. So, for me, I think my thinking shifted once I started working on Flavors of Fall and delved into Andrew and Kevin’s storyline there. That fic forced me to think from Kevin’s perspective, and I found at the time I had a shallow understanding of what made Kevin tick. It totally threw me once I really started considering sequels for that fic and the 12 Day Program for Courtship, both of which have Kevin cast as a main character. I had to dive deep into his makeup, seriously considering his motivations, his likes/dislikes, his personality traits, his relationships, and how he would react in any given situation.

Because I was interested in his character development, I started delving into fics like orionauriga’s just pretend , @likearecordbb's Long Walk in the Woods, @thetrojeans daylights, sunsets, and @dayurno's the age of no regret series. They are all brilliant, fascinating character studies of Kevin Day and his relationships that are extremely well done. There’s many more, of course, but I was searching for fics that specifically delved into Kevin’s thought process and choices and stayed there a while.

That’s what led me to feeling like I needed to tell his story with Dead of Night. Of course, it turned into a larger series with my flavoring of Kerejean added because I’ve never been a huge Kevin/Thea relationship fan. (But that's a discussion for another day which you can start here and here for that adventure.)

Now all that I’ve described above gives you the mechanics of the descent – the when, the where, the how. But it crucially misses the why. What is it about Kevin that got me in the end?

Ironically enough, it was his potential.

I think when Nora stripped away any kind of romantic narrative (RIP Kandreil OR Riko/Kevin/Jean) or a chance for a tragic storyline (Kevin dying in the end) it resulted in removing a lot of Kevin’s emotional vulnerability. We don’t get to hear what he’s feeling or thinking unless it’s related to Riko, the Moriyamas, or Exy. This means his storyline is consumed by the stereotypical sports underdog story, with us following his rise to champion (which is still a powerful enough narrative on its own that shines even in the midst of Neil’s crazy plotline. Switching that racquet to his left hand in the championship game? Iconic.) 

However, it leaves us very much with a shell of a person. Kevin’s character outside of Exy is reduced to a handful of facts – there’s a passing comment on his like of history, and the stark evidence of an alcohol addiction as a coping mechanism. We’re told he used to dance. That he learned French because Jean Moreau taught him. That he has no qualms about taking (mild?) drugs (cracker dust). Despite how much we’ve run with it as a fandom, the only allusion I’ve found in the books to him being strict with diet is this section from The King’s Men:

“No one needs to eat this before a game,” Kevin said. “Eat some granola or protein if you’re that hungry.” “Hello, there’s protein in the peanut butter,” Nicky said. “Let go of me before I tell Andrew you’re outlawing chocolate. I said let go. You’re not the boss of me. Ouch! Did you seriously just hit me?” … “Kevin, just let him go,” Neil said. “It’s not worth fighting over.” “When our defense is sluggish, we all suffer,” Kevin said.

From what I can find in the books, Kevin never once denies Andrew eating ice cream. (Which I’m 100% able to admit I might have missed something so feel free to quote me where that scene is because I was totally searching for it). In fact, every time they go to Sweetie’s, it’s implied Kevin orders ice cream with them. In the infamous kissing scene in The King’s Men, we actually have proof that Kevin got ice cream:

Kevin still hadn’t messaged Nicky by the time they reached the ice cream aisle, so Nicky gave in and called him. Neil half-expected Kevin to ignore Nicky’s call, but Kevin wasn’t so sour with them that he’d turn down a free snack…Nicky grabbed spoons from the kitchen and distributed pints to their hungry owners. Neil checked his expression when Nicky came back from dropping Kevin’s off….

Now I do think it’s in line with his character and his upbringing to have issues with food, so I’m all for buying into that specific hc. But we have very little evidence of it in the text.

His personality is reduced mainly to anger, arrogance, or cowardice (all traits that don’t make us sympathize with him). The only facts we have about his Tragic Past™️ are two things: his mother’s death, and his hand injury. Everything else we assume is based on Neil’s knowledge of the mafia, Wymack’s hearsay, Andrew’s deductions, and Kevin’s reactions to Riko and Tetsuji. We have literally no idea what happened to Kevin in the Nest. His trauma and his time spent there is a complete mystery. The closest we get is Riko’s comment to Neil in The Raven King:

“I am going to love hurting you,” Riko said, “like I loved hurting Kevin.”

This, I think, is one of the main reasons many of the fandom “dismisses” Kevin’s trauma in comparison to Neil’s because we can’t see it. We don’t know what happened and we don’t get to experience it, so this lack of explanation or motivation leaves us only with very cold personality traits. We’re unable to root for him as a character because we can’t sympathize. We can empathize because we know Very Bad Things™️ must have happened in the Nest, but we don’t see them happen the same way we do Neil or Andrew. Even Kevin’s hand injury is old and “healed” when we’re first introduced to the character.

The only true canon moment where Kevin appears “human” is in The Raven King with Kevin’s “then run” and “you should be court” conversation with Neil. His admittance that Neil’s life is more important than Exy is instantaneous – he doesn’t even pause to throw his Exy dreams down the drain if it means Neil can survive.  In a weirdly parallel way, we see Kevin’s thought process implicit in his conversation: “at least you’d have a chance.” It is strikingly similar to Neil’s internal conversation of: one of us should make it. (And there’s another whole separate discourse I could get into on how Kevin and Neil are two halves of the same coin, but we’ll save that for another day.) But even the revelation of Wymack as his father has more shock value than true emotional weight – we never see what that conversation looked like or how either party actually reacted. (In some ways, I feel like Dan being pissed at Kevin is given more “screentime” than Kevin’s response to telling his father and how Wymack reacted.)

So with Kevin’s emotions and past firmly locked down, we’re left to brush off Kevin’s reactions (or lack thereof) as part of his indifferent personality. It is what it says on the tin. (And that’s not to say Kevin is a perfect character by any means. He has flaws just like every other character.)

Now some people very accurately depict and buy into those limitations as simply being Kevin’s character/personality – I’ve read some awesome fics where Kevin is Ace/Aro and/or on the spectrum. These are completely valid, extremely well done, and I could totally see why others see and write him this way. Canon practically sets them up for it.

For me, though, it circles back to our skewed view of Kevin given to us by some deeply loved but also deeply flawed characters (cough, Andreil). Those same characters that we’re told time and again not to judge them by their cover but to try and understand how they’re affected by (and make choices because of) their trauma.

While Andrew and Neil end up giving each other this grace through a hard-fought battle of truths and exchanges, they do not extend this same courtesy to Kevin, and neither are we given the chance to do so. We literally can’t because, again, we don’t know what the full extent of Kevin’s trauma is.

Kevin doesn’t talk about his time in the Nest to any character, meaning we know nothing about it. Ergo we don’t know what choices Kevin makes because of it. In The Foxhole Court, Wymack specifically tells us Kevin was Riko’s pet. In fact, there is so much specific language that Kevin himself uses around the concept of ownership, and that Nora uses when referring to him that it jarringly sticks out in the text.  He has no sense of personal space or proper boundaries, viewing people only as assets to be used for the good of the team, which at the very least is a sign of mental abuse. But the fact remains that we just don’t know. We don’t know how far this mental abuse was taken, how often or severely he was injured, if he injured or was forced to injure others – we don’t know.

But it’s obvious whatever happened to him started as a child and built from there. Which means he has years of abuse and power dynamics embedded into him. He has every right to be afraid. In fact, we are demonstrably told and shown often in canon that Kevin is afraid…but fear does not equate to cowardice. In fact, we know that bravery often means being scared and doing something anyway. And in many cases, that’s just what Kevin did (with a crutch named Andrew). But even before he entered his deal with Andrew, it's important to remember that even though he was brainwashed and beaten from a young age to understand that he would die if he betrayed the Moriyama family in some way, he left them.

This is always so significant to me because so many abuse victims stay in their situation thinking/hoping/praying it will get better – either because of an idea that their abuser will change (“they’re just having a hard time at work rn”) or that the victim will fix whatever flaw the abuser finds lacking. Or alternatively, they recognize the situation is bad, but they can’t leave because they feel like they have nowhere to go, no one who will help them, trapped by their lack of skills/contacts/money. In Kevin’s case, both situations rang true. And yet he left. He left, and in only a year and a half’s time he recovered from his injury and led his team to the championship.

But he is only at the start of his recovery. I think he’ll need years of therapy to recover from all that happened in the Nest. I think many of his emotional and social shortcomings are a direct consequence of that timeframe and he did not have the freedom to address them until the threat of the Moriyamas was removed. I do not think they are permanent parts of his personality – I think in time, he will be allowed to grow and recover and contribute much more to his relationships than he’s capable of doing at the end of The King’s Men.

Though the series finished, I think Kevin’s story is just beginning.

That’s why I think he’s fascinating to explore as a character. That’s why I love writing him right now because in many ways, his possibilities are endless. There’s so many opportunities to explore different facets of his story that we never get a chance to in canon. Kevin’s character and narrative is a tantalizing tease which many of us have fell hook, line, and sinker for. (Including yours truly.) We want to rabidly sink our teeth into it and shake it, like a dog with a bone.

So we do. 😉

Phew. Okay, that’s enough. None of what I’ve written above is new I’m sure to those of the fandom who have been here since the beginning or have become diehard Kevin fans. But thank you for letting me ramble in this ask, anon. Writing about Kevin has been a very fun and therapeutic adventure for me. So I’m so glad that there are others out there who are enjoying it too 😊

[bonzos-number-1-fan]

TMAGP 5 Thoughts: Getting Babadooked

Honestly, I didn't really vibe with this one. I didn't hate it or anything but it didn't really grab me. I'm not really sure there is a whole lot to say about it either. It's an interesting premise in a cerebral sense but I don't think the incident itself was super compelling.

Spoilers for Ep 5 below the cut.

I think the setup was pretty great but when it got time to do something spooky there wasn't really much of it there. The build up was compelling enough. A movie that's so obscure information on it in any sense is hard to come by. The singular review being not overtly strange but not really a review at all. A contest that's pretty clearly a scam of some sort. Some hints that the theatre was wrong, a single weird staff member hinting at more, spooky popcorn, etc. The movie itself is entirely mundane except that it's a home-movie of your own family, with a detail you never noticed while you were living that movement. Then it just sort of ends.

It really felt like it could've done with a couple more minutes to give it a bit more of an ending. The conclusion, while scary to think about as a full scenario, lacks so much detail and happens so abruptly it's hard to feel like there is really much of a conclusion at all. Just a minute or two of blind panic and a hurried attempt at an escape before they get kidnapped, and presumably, replaced would've been a much better climax which the final post on the site would've helped reinforce. There was even a narrative device worked in that would allow for all sorts of fucked up stuff to happen and still be coherent in the format. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] is just [EXTENDED SOUNDS OF BRUTAL PIPE MURDER] by a different name and could've done a lot of great work in leaving that sort of imaginative space for the listener.

For the office drama portion of the episodel; Klaus being the IT manager before Colin is an interesting detail for sure. Wasn't entirely expecting that but it explains a few things. It doesn't significantly alter any of my previous understanding other than suggest that the precursor to the OIAR's system might be a little bit more fringe. As in if Klaus set up Freddy entirely then the Klaus sheet might not be from a German version of the OIAR. The response 121 came back a lot sooner than I was expecting but still feels a bit like a slow burn.

DPHW Theory: 2377 lines up well enough. It was mostly a weird time where they got compelled to do something. Makes sense, not too exciting.

CAT#R# Theory: CAT2RB is properly filed this time around but still not a whole lot to say. You could assume the ones that were wrong are all wrong and so the tria prima thing is back on the table but with so few data points it's hard to call any of them anomalous. R# could be some sort of scale indicator now though. Rank C incidents supernaturally affect single people or objects, Rank B's can affect larger areas or spread from person/object to person/object, Rank A's are wider still, and Rank S's are on very large scales. That idea fits pretty well with what we've seen so long as you labour under the assumption that the effect an incident can have doesn't map directly with its Rank. Daria's incident ranks higher than the violin but lower than the Institute. Whatever happened to Daria was passed onto her through another means so is higher even though the violin ended up killing more people it never grew beyond just a violin. Where as the Institute is a hole building that's seemingly supernaturally tainted.

Header talk: Disappearance (undetermined) -/- Invitation is fairly interesting. Showing some broader concepts than I think we've previously seen.

[inkblackorchid]

I watched this duel again yesterday and I honestly wish I had any sort of fresh take or unusual perspective on it, but I think the truth is that I just don't. This duel is three things for me:

Proof of concept for a very intriguing larger narrative (whose execution sadly doesn't land all the way for me)

The introduction of a character who has several interesting key aspects to them (and who could have, perhaps, been handled a bit better)

Emblematic of all the issues I have with the WRGP arc's writing.

As I said, I don't think I have any truly revolutionary things to say about this duel, but I feel like getting my thoughts out, so expect a fairly non-structured, stream-of-consciousness post below. There are multiple things here that bother me and I finally want to dissect them. Feel free to follow along if you also like examining stuff like this in more detail than it perhaps needs to be examined in. And I really mean examine them in unnecessary detail. Be warned, this post could count as a dissertation in terms of length. But I'm passionate and like analysing things, so no attempt to control its length was made.

So, I won't mince words here. The Team New World duel is absolutely where several major aspects of the time-travel-Iliaster plot completely fall apart for me. I want to make it clear that this isn't the fault of Aporia's character writing or what this duel is building up to, though. Nor do I think that the concept of a secret shadow organisation using time travel to influence world events is too out there. Lbr, this is yugioh. The time-travelling-cyborg-shadow-organisation is absolutely not the culprit of why I think some things don't work here. (And by here I mean specifically the WRGP arc.) Moreover, I'll be the first to admit that the finale this duel builds up to, with everything from the Ark Cradle beginning its descent to Yusei's final duel with Z-ONE, is stellar. So there are several things that do work here—but I think that may be exactly the reason why the other things piss me off all the more.

So what are the "other things", then?

Well, simply put, a lot of this arc's supposed setup and worldbuilding falls apart as soon as you start asking a few simple questions, first and foremost "why". And again, I will likely not be treading new ground here, but this just irks me to no end. However, so this post doesn't devolve entirely into unproductive whining about a part of the show I wish had been better than it was, I'll be doing another thing here: Trying to provide solutions for the things that irk me as I go along. As a kind of thought exercise, and because it's not hate motivating me here, merely extreme frustration about an arc that feels like it was fumbled like a hot potato. So, let's start digging through this mess.

The elephant in the room.

This whole arc (and in fact even the pre-WRGP arc before it) hinges on the concept of antagonists using monsters that can absorb synchro monsters, which is treated as such a monumental problem that we see Yusei, our protagonist, in downright anguish about it not one, but several times. Like, this eats at him.

(Pictured: A troubled boy brooding about his synchro summoning issues.)

And look, I know everyone and their mother has brought this up at this point, but this is already the first bit that falls apart under the weight of the question "why". Why is Yusei so hung up on the fact that duelling against Meklords means using synchro monsters becomes pretty risky? Why is this enough of a problem to supposedly drive the plot for a not insignificant stretch of episodes? Now, I know Yusei uses mainly synchro monsters as his heavy hitters, and I have seen someone bring up the fact before that even irl, completely altering the strategy of your entire deck is a pain in the ass, to say the least. And I do want to admit that this is a valid argument. If Yusei genuinely had to change his whole deck to accommodate the new circumstances, that would be a Herculean task, to say the least. However. While I can see the merit of that argument, I have to raise two counterpoints: One—who said he had to permanently change the entire structure of his deck? The show never gives us reason to believe that anyone other than the cyborgs will suddenly jump out of the woodwork and also use an anti-synchro strategy, and it doesn't show us anyone else who uses a strategy like that, either. And two—note the framing of this issue. The show never suggests that Yusei needs a new deck, or that all his old tricks are completely invalid now. It harps on and on about how he needs a new strategy, yes. But is that the same thing? In my opinion, nothing really demands that Yusei needs to restructure his deck completely. If anything, he only needs to keep in mind that this is now a possibility when duelling people, and thus start keeping a backup plan. And unfortunately, he kind of does, which is where I need to address the Dragon Knight Draco-Equiste-shaped elephant in the room, because it sadly undermines that sensible argument something fierce.

(Yeah, remember this thing? Because I do and sometimes wish I didn't just so I wouldn't have to get frustrated about it all over again.)

Listen. We're all not stupid. Even before the Team Unicorn match, the vast majority of people watching 5Ds would have been aware that tribute summoning, ritual summoning, and fusion summoning are very much methods to get around the dreaded synchro-killers that already exist in the card game and don't require any supernatural shenanigans to be acquired. But speaking only for myself for a moment, I was still at least a little bit willing to suspend my disbelief and accept that not being able to synchro summon would be a categorical impossibility for our beloved motorcycle family before this scene. Except, then Draco-Equiste comes out. And naturally, you're left to wonder "ah, so this is the solution to the synchro problem, then"? But no. No, it very much isn't. Because unfortunately, this is the one and only time Draco-Equiste even shows up. Immediately before and after this duel, this card is treated as though it never existed. Even though this thing could have posed a serious threat to the Meklords, what with being able to absorb the effect of a dragon synchro monster in the graveyard and being able to bounce back effect damage. (Can you imagine how differently the Team New World duel might have proceeded if Yusei had summoned this again?)

So, of course, we're left with the question: Why the fuck was this even here? And on the surface, the answer is super simple: To sell copies of Dragon Knight Draco-Equiste, naturally. But narratively? Narratively, this card's appearance is a disaster. It's a miscalculation of such insane proportions I can hardly find the words for it. Because it proves the assumption many viewers, especially TCG players, would have had from the start: Fusion, ritual, and tribute summoning are still a thing and would definitely work against Meklords. To say this takes the wind out of the sails of the central problem of "oh no, what are we going to do without synchro summoning" would be an understatement. And that's without addressing the fact that the actual "solution" the show provides against the Meklords, as cool as Shooting Star Dragon and Red Nova Dragon are, is, on paper, ludicrous: In a bind because your synchro monster gets absorbed? Just synchro summon harder! And I just. Please. We can agree that this is silly, right? Even if they're very cool dragons and I definitely appreciate them, this is almost looney tunes logic.

Swinging around to a more productive discussion, could they have done their "uh oh, synchro summoning is now impossible"-bit in a better, more coherent and less silly way? Probably, but depending on how they might have handled it, they would have probably needed to sacrifice some other things. The issue here is the thematic element. Synchro summoning is hated, and thus punished, by the emperors of Iliaster because to them, it's a symbol of humanity's greed and subsequent destruction. And originally, the show ends up vindicating its use despite their warnings about the destroyed future in a sort of awkward "with great power comes great responsibility"-way. As in, synchro summoning still has the potential to ruin humanity by the end of the show, but Yusei and the others "earn" their right to use it anyway because they and humanity as a whole learn the lesson not to overdo it. Supposedly. The metaphor is, frankly, a bit wonky, which might be another problem in and of itself. But what's relevant here is that any attempt to fix this conundrum would thus have to keep the thematic element intact. To do that, our protagonists would therefore have to rely on synchro summoning at the start of the arc, as they did before, and would also have to rely on it by the end of the arc (again). The in between is, I think, where more interesting things could have been done with the concept, though—moreover, it's where I think the plothole of "hey why doesn't anyone tribute/fusion/ritual summon" could have been addressed. Say the gang learns that synchro summoning might now get dangerous and actually tries to shift gears. Say they do try out fusion, ritual, and tribute monsters to account for that—only to run into an in-universe meta wall and realise that sure, these monsters might not get absorbed by Meklords, but their effects and strength can't keep up with the synchros their opponents use, or that they're flat out too cumbersome to summon! It could have been as simple as showing scenes where trying to get tribute fodder onto the field or play a fusion or ritual spell card would have been too slow, too inefficient in a duel. They could have also gone an even simpler route and flat out made it so that Meklords could have absorbed any extra deck monster. Would this have made them stupidly overpowered? Sure. But wasn't that kind of the point, anyway? The Meklords were supposed to be a nigh insurmountable obstacle that ultimately required discovering not one, but two new, unique ways to synchro summon—and even then, the solutions still weren't perfect because Shooting Star and Red Nova can still get absorbed under especially tricky circumstances. So I doubt making them that much more powerful would have mattered. (And they had to be heavily adjusted for the irl TCG as is, so there's not really a need to factor in that concern, either.) Finally, and I admit this pains me a little to say, I think that any version of the synchro dilemma that wanted to make sense should have flat out removed Draco-Equiste. The card does nothing except open plotholes, and especially if we want to keep the themes intact without opening the can of worms that is alternative forms of summoning possibly being a better solution than Accel Synchro or Burning Soul, its presence just becomes a hindrance. Sorry, Dragon Knight Draco-Equiste.

So much for the synchro dilemma, then. But unfortunately, this is not the last aspect of the worldbuilding surrounding the three emperors of Iliaster and especially their Meklords that's built on a shaky foundation, to say the least. Onto the next one.

2. The Meklord genocide and the many questions it asks (and never answers).

I'm gonna roll several points into one here because they're all related to the Meklord genocide—that being the supposedly unavoidable catastrophe in the future where Aporia received all his trauma from. And I want to preface this with two statements, one good and one bad. Firstly, Aporia and the way his backstory gets exposed, quickly getting us intimately acquainted with the utter devastation of the Meklord genocide, is extremely compelling. You really get a sense of the terror at play and it gives him a perfect, understandable motivation for wanting to avert that future at all costs, even if human lives have to be sacrificed along the way.

(Ahhh, the lovely smell of childhood trauma in the making.)

Secondly... The Meklord genocide makes zero sense, and it has everything to do with the fact that once again, several major aspects of it buckle under the weight of a few simple questions. But let me roll that back first and examine what those major aspects, which the Team New World duel introduces us to, are.

Number one: I went back and checked, and this is the first time in the series that we are introduced to the concept of synchro summoning resonating with Moment reactors. Previously, the reactor itself, through the concept of planetary particles, and, by extension, the Moment energy itself was only implied to be something like a perpetuum mobile, infinitely producing its own energy.

Number two: Now, we have heard of Moment rotating backwards and exploding in the show before. But there are two new things here, one being that the Iliaster trio explains that in this instance, it caused a chain reaction, and that, for some reason, all the Moment reactors began exploding one after the other. The other, more crucial part being that they claim the Moment reactors responded to people's hearts. This ties in with another small thing introduced much earlier, where Bruno/Antinomy explains that Clear Mind, Yusei's accel synchro technique, is a way of "controlling Moment". Both link the reactor and its energy, which are pillars of 5Ds' worldbuilding, to human emotions. And I already need to say this here: This doesn't make lick of sense. But more on that later.

Number three: We don't get an outright explanation for this in this duel, as in, it's not stated verbally, but right after Moment supposedly "responds to people's hearts", the Meklords show up, heavily implying that the reactor, for some reason, summoned a robot army to destroy humanity.

Now, I'm going to give you the quick-fire round of questions these three concepts immediately sparked in my mind when I saw these scenes, because I think that will illustrate just fine why I have such a problem with all this: Since when is synchro summoning linked to Moment and how? If humanity already knew through the Zero Reverse incident, which is the foundation for 5Ds' canon, that Moment reactors could spin too fast, gain a negative rotation, and subsequently explode, why on earth did nobody think to install safeguards against that? Why are the Moment reactor and its energy linked to people's hearts now? How does that even work? And how is a human supposed to "control" a sodding energy reactor that was implied to stay in perpetual motion through a set of gears, which famously know how to read hearts, through achieving a clear mind? And why, oh why did the reactor—independently of its human creators, apparently—have a killer robot army at its disposal to let loose on humanity when it grew sick of their shit?

This plot has so many holes, it may as well be a net instead. And you know what the worst part is? The show answers none of the questions above. Moreover, the implications behind the concepts introduced for the sake of setting up the Meklord genocide are buckwild, to say the least. Let me run with this real quick to highlight the absurdity here.

Taking the idea that an energy reactor can respond to people's hearts and summon an on-demand murder robot army of apocalyptic proportions when humans around it grow too evil at face value honestly makes me wonder how the Moment reactor in NDC hasn't exploded five times over since its creation. You mean to tell me that between Goodwin's Iliaster goons, the Arcadia Movement, the corrupt security forces, and all the duel gangs in Satellite, there weren't enough evil people there to make the reactor go crazy? Plus, all of these people were already synchro summoning as if their life depended on it! Synchro summoning is basically ubiquitous from the moment the show starts, to the point where it's more unusual to see a duellist who doesn't synchro summon than one who does. But somehow, that wasn't enough to affect the reactor yet? Or is the implication here supposed to be that the part where the man-made machine meant to produce limitless energy can suddenly see into people's hearts was added later into the reactor's development? That humans for some reason decided, "yeah, that's what our new energy source needs! A way to shame and punish us with violence on an unimaginable scale for our transgressions!" And that's without addressing the robot army. Who built these things? And who decided it was a good idea to put them at the disposal of the very reactor itself? Do you mean to tell me some team of utterly cracked up scientists decided that the best entity to put in charge of the robot army that was constructed for some reason was the reactor system supplying the world with energy, "computers can't be blinded by human error and would thus never deploy this army for selfish reasons"-style? (Honestly, I almost wish that had been the idea here, but I'm absolutely certain it wasn't.)

I can already hear two major criticisms to the above, purposefuly hyperbolic extrapolation in the back of my head here. Allow me to talk about them for a moment.

One—"Okay, so the WRGP arc has plotholes. Didn't the dark signers arc have those too, though? It's not like they explained everything about all that stuff."

You're right! It did! As much as I love the dark signers arc, it hardly has the most tightly-written worldbuilding of all time, either. There are lots of things, some small (why was Rudger/Roman somehow a signer and a dark signer at the same time), some not so small (why on earth did Rex' plan to summon the king of the underworld and remake the world seemingly hinge on one of the signers failing to seal their tower, which he could have never guaranteed in a million years) that the DS arc never properly takes the time to explain. But even so, the dark signers arc doesn't fall apart under questions such as "why" and "how" nearly as easily as the WRGP arc for a reason that is as simple as it is stupid: The DS arc has a much less ambitious premise, and though its antagonists are cool, they don't actually pose a greater, moral dilemma. Think about it. The premise of the DS arc is a run-of-the-mill prophecy thing. You've got your chosen heroes, your destined enemies, and a battle for the world using supernatural shenanigans. And a lot of questions of "why" or "how" are relatively quick to be brushed aside with "magic" (or rather, Crimson Dragon/Earthbound Immortal shenanigans). Moreover, the dark signers themselves, while having interesting stories relating to the heroes on a personal level, are still, fundamentally, pure evil. They're not fighting to prevent a devastating, apocalyptic future, they just deadass want to get revenge and destroy the world. And all the more complicated, major themes the arc has (class discrimination, police brutality, how societal alienation can lead teenagers to join cults, poverty, etc.) are actually not really tied in with the Earthbound Immortals, instead happening on the sidelines or only being tangentially related to the dark signers (such as when Kiryu becomes a dark signer through the abuse suffered in prison). The only major theme that ties in with the dark signers is destiny VS. freedom of choice, which also gets resolved in the battle with Rex Goodwin. (Interestingly enough, all the more complicated themes on the side were also dropped after this arc, but that's a rant for another time...) Perhaps the arc still has some inconsistencies here and there, but largely, it stays fully coherent. Thus, the DS arc makes it way easier to suspend one's disbelief, making the unexplained parts seem much less egregious.

Two—"Calm down, this show was made for twelve year-old Japanese boys. They don't need to explain any of this."

If you honestly think children don't deserve well-made entertainment whose concepts and worldbuilding can hold up to scrutiny, I have nothing to discuss with you. Sure, children will swallow some concepts much easier and will suspend their disbelief much longer and more artfully than any adult on average, but that doesn't mean "kids are dumb anyway so why bother putting as much effort into worldbuilding for their shows as for adult shows" is the hot take you think it is. I am fully congnisant of the target audience for this show—that doesn't make me any less convinced that said target audience deserved a show where things made sense while they were watching it and where things could still make sense if they decided to rewatch it years later. Because, you know, that's what I think a good show should be able to do.

And with that, I can come back to the WRGP arc and an issue that ties in with both things I just addressed: The WRGP arc's actual story premise, buried beneath the well-known, equally beloved and beloathed tournament arc format, is a lot more ambitious than the DS arc and has several, fairly heavy, core themes that it sets up and tries to resolve by the end, among them: learning how to cooperate as a team (during the WRGP) and learning how to be independent (by the end of the show), destiny VS. forging your own path (round two), and, most importantly, taking responsibility and fighting for one's future. That last one especially is not only a good topic to address in a show specifically made for 5Ds' target audience, it is also represented by both Team 5Ds and Team New World in-story. Spicier yet, both teams are actually fighting for the same thing. Team New World, having seen the supposedly unavoidable, tragic future and thus decided to take action against it, is fighting for a future that doesn't have to be marred by such tragedy, by whatever means necessary. And Team 5Ds, young, hopeful, and trusting in their connection to one another and humanity as a whole, is fighting for a better future because they believe that tragedy can be avoided. The future these two teams want is almost the same—the only, crucial difference is that Team New World has embraced the use of drastic measures to bring that future about, while Team 5Ds hasn't. To Team New World, the future presents something like a trolley problem, if you will: They think doing nothing will lead to that inevitable tragedy and erase humanity, whereas sacrificing New Domino City in the present will still kill people, but preserve humanity in the long run. And they have firmly decided pull the lever and set the course so the trolley runs over just one person instead of many. Team 5Ds, meanwhile, isn't even thinking about the lever, instead insisting there has to be another way, and that even thinking about getting anyone killed for this is stupid. The whole conflict is, on paper, wonderfully compelling, because you can see where both sides are coming from. Sure, Team New World's members still act like absolute dickheads in true yugioh-tournament-opponent fashion, but ultimately, their goals make sense. Viewers can put themselves in their shoes and perhaps think that, faced with a horrible dilemma like theirs, they would make the same, awful choice to set the course and cause suffering now to avoid greater suffering later. For the greater good.

Unfortunately, the questions I listed above undermine all this somewhat, because as good as these antagonists are on a character level, it's incredibly easy to poke holes into their backstory and especially the circumstances surrounding the horrible, distant future they want to avoid so desperately—which, in turn, undermines that terrible future somewhat, because this is a narrative that demands weight (in my opinion). But if the supposed threat at the end, the terrible thing even our protagonists briefly aren't sure they'll be able to avoid, begins falling apart at the seams in terms of logic when you think about it for more than two minutes, where is that weight supposed to come from? There is also another question to be answered here that I need to discuss so I can touch on a central aspect that hampers the plot in this arc somewhat later:

Why are they so convinced that horrible, destroyed future is utterly unavoidable?

I want you to really think about this question, with me. Canon... never really gives us any direct proof that they're justified in being this certain. However, that doesn't mean we don't get an answer, per se, though the answer is a bit vague.

The implications here are... something, to say the least. First, as our basis, we have to assume that every "correction" Iliaster has made has been to avoid humanity's destruction in the future. Because frankly, that's all we get as far as Jose, Placido, and Luciano's definition of the "correct path" goes. Then there's the second bit. Apparently, they've been merrily "repairing" history for a good while already, yet, for some reason, they always get the same outcome: The Meklord genocide. This, in turn, has led them to take more and more drsatic measures to try and avoid it. And I want to point out the very obvious, mind-boggling implication that comes with this: Apparently, after every "correction" they made, these three have either let history run its course to see where it ends up this time, or have quickly zipped over to their own time to check whether things were still shit. Meaning Iliaster's whole deal of fixing history to make sure the Meklord genocide never occurs has been a very, very long run of trial and error. (I want you to think of all the possible "fixes" this could have included for a moment. We know from BBT that killing Pegasus was one of the ideas they had, for example. Did they also try to kill the presumed Industrial Illusions employee who came up with synchro monsters? Did they try to kill Yusei's dad so Moment would never be invented? Could they not have tried to simply inhibit the creation of the robot army, then? Or made sure someone installed some bloody safeguards on the reactors, as Yusei later does in-canon, which somehow works when he does it? The list goes on.) Now, we know that in canon, their newest idea is that the future can be fixed if they just destroy New Domino City altogether.

Here, the questions begin again (you may sense a running theme): If Moment is already invented and internationally known, why would destroying its place of invention do anything? If synchro summons are already a thing, doesn't that mean destroying NDC would only slow the catastrophe down, at best? And most importantly: Why are these guys so utterly convinced that this "repair", of all the ones they've already done, will save their future? How can they know that this particular plan will work when they've supposedly already tried everything?

(There is, of course, the tragic possibility to consider that perhaps, they know that there's no guarantee this will work. They've tried everything, after all. So maybe they know this won't fix things, either. But we know that Aporia, like Paradox, like Antinomy, and like Z-ONE is, somewhere at the bottom of his despairing heart, still desperate for a shimmer of hope. And maybe, just maybe, he has reached such a point of desperation that he'll watch an entire city getting destroyed if it has even the faintest chance of succeeding. But unfortunately, this is purely speculative—the show never states this, and so, I can only leave it in the realm of fan interpretation.)

The show never answers this question, either, instead relying on the audience to suspend their disbelief some more and assume that Iliaster has put in the work and is 100% certain that the future can and will absolutely end in disaster unless they destroy NDC now. It almost acts like they have some sort of supernatural foresight; they know things nobody else in the show's world does, and due to this (and their non-human status) they label themselves as superior to the "foolish humans", who, without their guiding hands, will only bring about the apocalypse. But their superiority and the internal consistency of their actions is already wobbling under the weight of all the half-assed worldbuilding I mentioned above, which is an extra big problem due to another, major difference between the WRGP and the DS arc: While the DS arc stylised itself as a sort of funky genre mix between cyberpunk dystopia and urban fantasy (in a very broad sense, given that ancient Inca gods are very much real and their prophecies come to fruition in the modern day, yet we are not presented with any sort of magic outside of the conflict with the dark signers), the WRGP arc, aside from its tournament format, stylises itself much more as science fiction. The antagonists are no longer ancient, evil shadow gods, they're cyborgs from a destroyed future. Their motivation isn't as simple as wanting to destroy the world, either! In fact, they want to save the future! And they don't pose a threat to our antagonists through shadow duels in rings of fire and giant, magical monsters that sacrifice human souls to be summoned. No, they have advanced technology like high-tech robots that cut our protagonists off from one of their go-to tactical options, and they send out duel robot armies, and they travel through time by means of sophisticated wormhole-technology.

...But do they?

Now, I said I don't just want to complain here, I also want to provide solutions—and I intend to stick to that. But first, because these two things are so intrinsically tied together, let me address the final aspect that puts Team New World as antagonists and the WRGP arc on such shaky ground from a writing perspective.

3. Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, magic-science cyborg nonsense.

So, I've talked about the strongly differing methods the Iliaster trio uses in comparison to the dark signers. Sci-fi is the name of the game now, so we've got robots, cyborgs, advanced tech and... time travel. But amidst all this, you may have noticed something. Even though our plot is supposedly decided by futuristic tech now, the magical/occult element that was there in the first half of the show doesn't actually get dropped. Why? Because it can't be. Because the signers, our protagonists, are defined by their status as a group of magical chosen ones, hand-picked by an ancient Incan deity. Regardless of what the writers of the show wanted here (and my personal guess, based on hearsay and what I've read on forums, is that they wanted to hardcore-pivot to sci-fi because they hoped it would engage audiences more), this was an element they couldn't erase. (Or, well, technically, they could. The signers do lose their marks at the end of the show, after all. But perhaps they thought doing that earlier was too risky.) So genre-wise, we've got a bit of a situation here. From the pre-WRGP arc on, 5Ds is more of a sci-fi show, yet, we've still got all this occult stuff wandering around that can't be cut out of the narrative and still influences it because it's too intrinsically tied to our main actors not to. And you might have noticed that this actually doesn't just extend to the signers. As in, they're not the only ones where sci-fi and magic elements mix. This happens for the Iliaster trio, too. Placido gets a sword that can randomly cut a hole in space-time (and it's never explained how). The Meklords can cause real damage in duels even though they're supposedly not supernatural. Moment reactors can suddenly read people's hearts. Not one, but multiple cyborgs get a magical girl transformation where they change clothes and runners, or even combine from three people into one. And for some reason, the Crimson Dragon, even though its "own", central enemies, the dark signers, are already defeated, doesn't take its marks away from our heroes until after the cyborgs are taken care of, suggesting that the ancient, magical entity recognises the robots from the future as a supernatural threat of some sort. None of this is presented with any sort of attempt to get it to make sense, yet, we're supposed to believe it isn't magic, because we're all about robots and time travel now.

(Insert the magical girl transformation song of your choice.)

And I want to make one thing clear: I'm not saying this weird genre-mix couldn't have worked. In fact, I think it's hilarious and low-key brilliant even in the wonky state we got. Sure, let's make the antagonists robots from the future while keeping our protagonists the agents of an ancient Incan god on the mortal plane! If nothing else, you absolutely can't argue the idea wasn't original.

However, even with all the love I have for the show, I can't help but feel like there's an issue here, and the only way I could put it into words would be genre dissonance. We are supposedly in a sci-fi show now, yet the central antagonists, who are also the fundamental reason for this genre shift, seemingly can't decide whether they're actually using technology or magic for their schemes. And this becomes a problem insofar as that seemingly no effort to meaningfully fuse the fantastical elements with the pseudo-scientific ones is made, yet at the same time, they aren't properly separated, either. Specifically the latter might be harming the show even more than the former. Let me explain what I mean.

I'm no stranger to the fact that sci-fi sometimes likes to use technology that's supposed to be so advanced that to an outsider, it begins looking indistinguishable from magic. And in all fairness, that is probably what the 5Ds writers were gunning for. What hampers this a little, though, is that we're just coming from an arc that had actual magic in it, which leads to the allegedly scientific elements sending some mixed messages. Especially because they're never explained. And I'm not saying we needed super hardcore, internally fully consistent sci-fi worldbuilding here. Frankly, with all the weird nonsense 5Ds has already mostly handwaved by the start of the pre-WRGP arc, that would have been absurd. But I think a few explanations here and there, hell, even just the occasional off-handed remark, could have done a world of good for this arc, and especially for the Meklord dilemma and the setup of the ruined future. I don't need a whole breakdown on how exactly a reactor knows about the greed in people's hearts, but a remark somewhere on the side about how, for example, the particles that are the central player in that reactor also happen to be copious within the human heart (which would be impossible to prove, but ignore that) would have been nice. And I don't need a full breakdown of how the robot army was built; a throwaway remark that humanity created it as weapons in their supposedly endless, petty wars could have been cool, though.

My point is, fundamentally, that unlike the occult nonsense, which can skirt by on prophecies and simple, black-and-white, good VS evil stuff, the sci-fi elements feel like they demand a surface-level justification for their existence, at least. A surface-level justification they didn't get. And this is without addressing the much, much bigger problem that may actually be the root cause of most, if not all the things I've listed above so far: The time travel.

I don't think it's any sort of new, groundbreaking opinion to say that time travel is a notoriously finicky worldbuilding element that many writers, regardless of medium and/or skill, have already massively shot themselves in the foot with. And unfortunately, I feel like this has happened in 5Ds, too. Specifically because the time travel has seemingly absolutely no limits. The Iliaster trio (and even Paradox) can seemingly be everywhere they want, in any time period, and do whatever they want/deem necessary. Worse yet, the time travel is actively shown to have massive consequences more than once. And I think it's under the weight of this massive, utterly uncontrollable element that the plot really begins to collapse. Because frankly, with the implications we're given, things just really don't look good in a universe where limitless time travel can be used! Let me circle back to two questions from above to really emphasise this: Why are these guys so utterly convinced that this "repair", of all the ones they've already done, will save their future? How can they know that this particular plan will work when they've supposedly already tried everything? In a universe with limitless time travel, these questions become an absolute mess to deal with. And the real problem is that canon never even entertains the idea of answering them. Sure, you can begin to fill in the gaps for yourself if you feel like it. Maybe it's not that all the previous "repairs" Iliaster did truly didn't work, maybe they brought about even worse futures and that was the reason why they were discarded. Or maybe there's a hidden in-universe rule that people from the future who go back to the past actually don't have the power to change anything, as in, no matter what they change, it will never affect their present, because their actions will always loop back around to causing the same things they already know. But there. Precisely there is the problem. I'm not getting this from canon, I'm making it up from scratch. And sure, all stories have gaps—that's where a lot of fanfiction lives, after all. But when you reach the point where you have so many gaps that the audience can no longer suspend its disbelief over these gaps, that's when there's a problem. And the WRGP arc, for all that its antagonists are extremely compelling, pose genuine, moral dilemmas, and for all that it resolves in one of the best arcs of 5Ds, has precisely this problem for me. The worldbuilding is stretched too thin, and my suspension of disbelief breaks and leaves me wondering why so many good themes have to be buried in an arc that is this frustrating to watch sometimes.

*deep breath*

Okay. So now I've aired all my grievances and laid out all the problems that make me shake my fists in frustration at this arc, at the Meklords, and at the Team New World duel. What about the productive part, then, you might ask. I did say I wanted to provide solutions, as far as I can, anyway. How would I try to solve this mess?

Well, honestly, I think the solution here, at least to me, would be fairly basic: More consistency. Make it make sense. The genre mashup can stay exactly the way it is, but maybe tone down the magic on the cyborgs a bit. Make them actual cyborgs. Even if their tech is justified through bullshit, at least justify it. Why does Placido have a reality-splitting sword? Oh, it's actually the Moment Express wormhole technology in miniature. Why can Moment reactors see into people's hearts? Well, duh, they contain the same, special particles as human hearts. Why is there an army of robots in the future to begin with? Humans built it. For war. Like they did so much else. And why did the reactor use it against them? Because it was just responding to their own negativity. Their own, constant desire for strife and petty conflicts amongst one another made them actually turn the weapons against themselves (or rather, against the people they personally didn't like, which ends up being everyone when everyone has a grudge against someone) through the reactor. (The show almost does this one, but not quite.) How do the three emperors of Iliaster know destroying NDC, specifically, will fix the future? They don't! They're doing this on trial and error, and more importantly—and I think this would work best if it was introduced purposefully late—they can't actually save the future by changing the past, because they're not from the past. They just don't actually know that this is a rule of time travel.

None of these fixes would have to be big, episode-spanning things. Off-handed remarks would have been enough. But I think just that could have saved many points from becoming the plotholes they did.

And with that, I think I'll finally leave you be, I've rambled quite enough. To anyone who has made it all the way to the end, I can only give a sincere, heartfelt thank you. I realise this is a LOT of words. Moreover, I'd like to leave you with one more statement: Though I can absolutely understand if this post comes off as me getting on a soapbox and cupping my hands around my mouth before yelling, it's not meant to be. I absolutely invite discussion about the the handling of, the themes behind, and all the arguments I gave regarding the Meklord worldbuilding and the Team New World duel. So, feel every bit as free as I did to yell about this. This post encourages yelling.

[litres-of-cocaine]

i cannot believe that people genuinely dislike skyler white it is so strange!!! like even my dad called her manipulative and yes, sure but like that’s what makes her so fun??

like i think the direction they took her in s5 was the right and logical one for her character but s4 was PEAK come on.

in the early seasons she is essentially the embodiment of the stay-at-home mum existence and she’s an interesting and assertive character in conversation with that but ultimately used a plot device. like the family life she represents conflicts with the meth trade that walt is getting involved in. obviously she has an inner life going on, i.e. her pregnancy and the arguments with marie about the shoplifting, but she more seems like an individualised portrait used for walt’s deception. she’s propping up the narrative where walt lies to himself about the reasons he does it and parallels his family life to his business life.

like this is not to diminish that side of her character at all (although it is irritating that we don’t get a female character that isn’t a family member or love interest be a larger part of the narrative until s5) but i feel it’s more of a setup not just for walt but her later arc.

s4 where she is actively involved in the money laundering, buying of the car wash etc. is so so dear to me as it’s such an interesting view into her naivety but her skills in doing this.

where krazy 8 said walter wasn’t suited to that life and then he turned out to be works in a similar to manner to how skyler adjusts to this sudden criminal enterprise that she is a major part of. she also turns out to be good and criminal-minded when she gets involved even if she is unsceptical that what walt (and her by extension) are doing is hurting people.

she doesn’t want to be involved because she’s afraid for walt but it’s undeniable that she is good at it. i would argue that this characterisation of her as so overly cautious and nearly paranoid is paralleled to gus’s cautiousness and care and is probably the most successful businessman that we see throughout breaking bad. certainly more successful if we are thinking in terms of caution and longevity. skyler. beyond this parallel she is already shown to be good with tax evasion in that whole ted plotline and then manages to get him off of prison after the irs discovered him. the irs. the people who are literally ruthless when it comes to that kind of stuff.

it creates such an interesting contrast with walt who likes that world not only because he is good at it but also because he likes the power it gives him over others. it makes him ‘feel alive’ blah blah blah etc etc. but skyler doesn’t enjoy this power. when ted is afraid of her she is devastated and feels the guilt of her actions come up on her all at once and this is the start of her unhappiness and fear of walt. like in s4 she’s not *happy* but she’s not necessarily unhappy either. there’s a whole ass scene of her bouncing holly on her knee while she’s looking up money laundering on wikipedia.

this all comes crashing down in s5 and becomes particularly obvious after the midpoint of the series. she’s practically a shell of herself. those looks between her and jesse at the car wash?? could not be more obvious kind of submission to walt’s gross authority from either of them.

(don’t get me talking about the parallels between skyler and jesse it will set me on a roll)

and again this makes sense for the changing dynamic between her involvement and the increased understanding of how violent the business the both of them are a part of is. her character is not less interesting but definitely less fun to watch. it’s not presented as cathartic suffering for the audience either which i think brba did a good job with. she’s not assertive anymore and i think that’s a great example of the effects it’s had on her. she’s lost a key component of her character. like i guess you could call her high-maintenance or difficult in s1 if you found her annoying and that’s an opinion but realistically i’d say she was just assertive in way that’s alienating for some of the misogynistic sides of the fanbase.

she regains some of this right at the very end where she confronts walter thinking he’s going to say he did it for the family again. it’s only a small thing in refusing to let walt walk all over her but at least it has some reclamation of her initial character!

this has been a ramble and i think i had other things to say but in conclusion:

skyler white is overhated

[wildvetch]

various thoughts on breaking- finished dying a bit ago, probably dropping those later.

the stuff on shin felt *kind of* rushed, but mostly i think that's just a side effect of the larger hurdle in the story, where you've got multiversal settings w/ limited povs & limited time/narrative real estate to afford those settings. thematically though i think it accomplishes a lot, and i think the story spends enough time investing in some of the things that become important during breakthrough's stint there that the arc still ends up being p satisfying.

the cape/anti-cape sentiment stuff plays pretty well here imo--i think bianca does a few good things for the story (gives us another access point/case example for how clusters--&shard-host-power dynamics--actually work, plays part of the slew of master-effects/brainjackings that help give dimension to vicky's trauma throughout the plot, etc etc) but more than anything i think her reign & the way it plays off of gimel's post-GM trauma helps to really emphasize the antipathy felt toward capes as not being like, categorically senseless/irrational spite-for-spite's sake. it comes from real fears and real needs, and i like that the arc spends time making breakthrough really contend with that.

really fun to see how fucked Vicky 🐷Dallon's best efforts at a criminal justice system are & then be confronted w/ Shin's insanely fucked prisons--like i obviously don't think willybilly sat down w/ the serial like "aha, today i will come up with the perfect justice system" & i'm not really holding out for like, the Antares Abolitionist Arc or anything, but i *do* think the story's pretty blatantly concerned w/ carcerality and i think the text definitely asks the reader to consider the victoria's prison world & shin's whole setup as differently cruel.

fuck amy

fuuuuuuuuuuuuck chris

fuck. amy.

okay so like i love capricorn, i think the twins are one of the best parts of the story, and i don't want to get into what happens next arc just yet but i do think that the stuff we get with byron/missy here is like. it's obviously way more about the twins & their relationship's growth than anything to do with vista. the capricorn interludes take the reader to some pretty extreme lowpoints in their relationship, but within the goddess arc they also really help to underscore like...not just the extent to which they've both grown, but the extent to which reconciliation was even possible for them in the first place--and it couldn't be forced, it wasn't something that either twin could get from brute-forcing or self-flagellating, it had to be worked for and worked through and critically they both had to want it. which itself took time. &what i like about the brothers is that even up to this point in the story, they still have their issues--like, the stuff at the beginning of the arc where it talks about them playing out arguments with each other (first as a therapy exercise and later with the team as a teacher-countermeasure), makes it pretty explicit that things aren't just All Better. but comparing the vista convo & its aftermath to the moonsong/nate convos, you really start to get this sense of like... a possible future for them--one that must be built, but one that's worth building.

all of which to say, like, completely and utterly fuck amy. it's kind of frustrating, because a lot of this just boils down to Unfortunate Consequences of Characterization, but i do think being reminded of all the obstacles overcome by the twins just sort of drives home how badly amy has hurt &continues to hurt victoria by demanding and coercing reentry into her life--to an extent that, even if there had ever been a question of repairing that relationship before (on victoria's terms), that avenue has been pretty thoroughly destroyed. like. to the point where i actually think chris comes out looking better by the end of the arc, despite having been the one to arrange for vicky to end up in that room with her in the first place--because in all honestly i don't think the story's as interested in redeemability/irredeemability as much as it is in the question of like... okay, you fucked up. you did something reprehensible. what do you do next? &I think one of the things that makes amy's character so deeply upsetting, is that all anyone's asking her to do atp is stop: own up to what she's done, and then stop doing it. walk away. respect the boundary that has been put before you. but instead we get more of the same refusal of responsibility that had her run away to the birdcage, we see her trying to lie and guilt-trip and violate her way into her version of forgiveness, demanding absolution while rejecting culpability in the first place--both for the molestation of her sister & for subsequent negligence and malpractice in her healing. and it's nauseating! but in this story, where more than a few of our protagonists have blood on their hands, where amnesty is a central question of the setting, where the world owes its continued existence to one girl's largescale act of mind-body violation and the story takes no interest in exonerating her, instead asking "would you do it over again?"... i think it says a *lot* that chris makes the choice that he does at the end of the arc, and amy refuses to change course.

[ardentpoop]

spn related - thoughts on deans final death scene?

this feels like a trick question 💀

I’ve talked abt it a little bit before but really my feelings abt the finale are too complicated to concisely sum up in a way that doesn’t have ppl making annoying (usually ship-related) assumptions abt me as a fan. all u really need to know unless you’re interested in my future fix-it-fic-writing endeavors is that I mostly laughed delightedly thru the barn scene bc dabb sucks at conveying emotional weight thru dialogue. and then I of course cried so hard I actually felt sick bc I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to sam :)

I like that we got “it’s always been you……. [loaded pause] and me” out of that monologue for narrative symmetry reasons - only viewers who understand sam’s place in the story and the way it shifted over time (of which there are few) can truly appreciate that piece.

I also like that the intimacy of this scene made ppl uncomfortable even tho it made me a bit uncomfortable as well even as someone who is well-versed in S/D fan culture 😅 like my initial reaction to “I love you so much. my baby brother” was something akin to WUGH . HE WOULD NOT SAY THAT. but that is silly, given the gravity of the decision dean was making in this scene (and it Was a decision).

I like that sam couldn’t leave The Life again (not since stanford, not since amelia) in favor of pursuing supernatural’s idea of “normal” until dean died and instructed sam to let him stay dead. I like that covid restrictions forced them to axe the scene where dean is surrounded by “family” in heaven (which would have felt just as cloying and empty as much of the rest of this episode to me) so instead we just see him driving endlessly in the impala until he’s reunited with sam. I initially HATED that sam named his son “dean jr” but it’s so unintentionally horrible that I’ve come around to enjoying the implications. I enjoy that we got so little insight into sam’s Normal Life Sans Dean because fan writers far more capable of handling sam with the nuance and love he deserves can take this skeleton of an ending and pack on the details that make it feel real and earned and (most importantly) intentionally tragic.

ultimately most of this audience hates the finale for reasons I find aggravating. they paid no attention to sam and they’d grown accustomed by the final seasons to him being a faded fixture in the background, to dean being larger than life in the spotlight at all times, so the series finale suddenly reverting so clearly to the original early-seasons setup of sam as the heart of the story and dean as his foil felt jarring to them. to be clear I do consider much of this show to have failed sam as a character and it’s how we ended up with a conclusion that so many of the “fans” did not understand in the slightest. I won’t elaborate on the D/C shippers’ takes because I don’t feel like sticking my hand in that bear trap rn.

anyway uh TL;DR

disliked the finale as an actual episode/viewing experience, but conceptually I can work with it

me disliking it has little to do with my ship preferences or lack thereof

samndean heaven is a horrific concept and this is beautiful if you’re a tragedy enjoyer

dean monologuing at sam for 7 minutes abt how much he loves him and desperately needed him in his life while sam cries silently and begs him not to leave. and then the fans going this monologue should’ve been about cas / why can’t dean be his own person / EW GROSS why do they look like lovers!!! / (select few) why won’t they let sam speak. is there anything more samndean than this lmfao.

sorry lol you literally did not ask for any of that but you never know what you’ll get when you ask me a question abt this show tbfh <3

[penultimate-step]

Cliffhangers: when do they help?

There's a reductive negative stereotype of cliffhangers that comes to mind when people complain about them: with neither planning nor setup, a dramatic situation occurs to the characters. "how will the characters get out of this one?," asks a dramatic voiceover, as the show cuts to credits. Then, next episode, the whole thing is resolved immediately in two seconds, so the series can go back to focusing on the actual plot.

Now, as I said, this is something of a stereotype, not something that often happens - most writers know better than to do something so blatant. It does sometimes happen, but usually the situation has more nuance to it than that.

The cliffhanger that inspired this, the recent Oshi no Ko 158-9, has very little of those mitigating factors. It is almost entirely the negative stereotype, a cliffhanger that adds very little to the story and detracts much. Which got me thinking a bit on cliffhangers in general - what separates a good one from a bad one?

The same week OnK gave us that disappointing cliffhanger, another weekly manga I follow, Chainsaw Man, had a cliffhanger that felt much more interesting. (Though perhaps given we haven't had the followup chapter, this is premature...nonetheless, it is an easy at hand example.) Looking at the chapters preceding them, we can see a difference in pacing and buildup.

OnK 158 comes after a few chapters of winding down and calmer pacing - the cliffhanger, in this case, doubles as a spike in tension, intended to kickstart the next bit of serious plot, coming as a surprise and shock to the readers. This is already something of a problem, as it doesn't have anything to build on; but arcs have to start somewhere, this isn't in itself a problem. but by framing it a sudden jump, it puts all the true requirements for execution on the followup, where it's leading to. Which is why when the next chapter immediately follows up with a "just kidding, teehee uwu" it kills the whole momentum.

CSM 176 goes for the more conservative approach - while it does still end on a shocking twist, this comes in the middle of an already intense fight scene. It forms one brick in a larger rising action, supported by previous scenes, so even if the followup doesn't land it doesn't kill the whole momentum. It's not trying to establish it's own setup - where OnK ended one chapter with a sharp shock and then tried to offramp into character revelations, CSM dual purposes them - Yoru's revelation about the Gun (and Tank) as well as her own personal actions are twist, cliffhanger, and plot development all in one. So it works as a story beat regardless of where the chapter leaves off.

But that feels a little too hostile to cliffhangers, right? Like am I just saying that cliffhangers are an artifact of the serial storytelling format, and could basically be excised? Is a "good cliffhanger," one that integrates itself with the story beats, basically indistinguishable from a non-cliffhanger? that can't be true, right?

Anyway while rolling this around in my head I tried to think about some memorable and positive cliffhangers that I've read in the past. And one that came to mind was from about halfway through the webnovel Pact. So, spoilers for that.

So at the end of Arc 7, the protagonist gets into a fight with a demon. He loses. Chapter cuts, we start arc 8 - from a completely different perspective. What happened to our previous protag is left up in the air for a whole arc, with hints slowly trickling in - but it is only when the arc ends that we get a more complete picture, that he had lost his connections, been removed from all the memories of others, and fallen into a place outside conventional reality.

In this case, the cliffhanger, I would argue, helps the narrative significantly - in separating the event from the resolution, forcing readers to stew on it while other plot threads go on, it made the eventual revelations more satisfying, not less.

I don't think that quite helps my point though. "Cliffhangers are good when planned and executed into the story and bad when they aren't" seems like 2 steps away from saying "its good when its good and bad when its bad," that doesn't much clarify things for me.

That might just be what it boils down to, though - cliffhangers are just one of many ways to control the pacing and tension in a story, with no special negative or beneficial properties, and are good when used in cases where an upswing in those things are good, or the author otherwise wants to direct focus and attention to an element. The negative stereotype, with examples like OnK's, are a result of pursuing those in the short term while sacrificing longer-term story stability - a misstep many longer stories make, not anything tied to cliffhangers inherently.

I still feel like there's something important I'm missing that separates the bad example from the good. But I think I've lost the train of thought here, and this has gone on far too long for what was originally intended to me just me musing to myself about why recent developments in my favorite ongoing manga aren't hitting as well as they should.

[mollybearrttrpg]

the d20 kind of sucks for TTRPGs

In a good number of systems, the 20-sided die is the primary die used for determining success or failure of any given action. On paper, this makes sense. 1-20 is a good number range, and the factors of 2 and 10 make a lot of sense when developing games, as it gives you a lot of freedom to make giant tables or the like without sacrificing consistency.

However, in my experience, the d20 is too random. When you break it down, you have pretty much exactly a 5% chance to roll any given number on the die. So if you need to roll a 15 to succeed on an action, you have about a 25% chance to succeed that action not including any modifiers. This works very well when you're handling "straight" rolls, or typically when doing something your character doesn't have any particular advantage or disadvantage with.

For example, when you have a character who has say, practiced sword combat their entire life with a deep variance of targets, and you have maybe a +5 to this roll to hit someone with a sword with a threshold of 15. This is a fairly typical setup, but this now only increases your chances of succeeding on this roll to 50%. Which... feels bad. The d20 makes this check with modifiers still basically a coin flip, which ideally should not be the case with a (functionally) percentile die. The larger margins of values should give more dynamics to rolling checks, not less.

In Pathfinder 2e for example, a system I quite like and enjoy, this problem gets especially bad when you consider how critical successes and failures work in that system. The way criticals function is that if you succeed or fail a given check by 10 (so with the 15 example, rolling a 5 is a critical fail and rolling a 25 is a critical success, including modifiers). Theoretically, this is sort of designed to solve the problem I proposed, in which that characters who are exceptionally skilled at something still often have a coin-flip level probability to do the thing they're good at.

However, in practice, instead of making characters who are skilled at their thing more likely to succeed and succeed well, it doesn't really change anything except the frequency in which critical successes or failures are rolled. At the end of the day, the threshold to succeed is the threshold to succeed, and rolling higher than that is more or less just a narrative tool (unless you're rolling a critical in combat), which you don't necessarily need codified gameplay mechanics for. You can kind of just do that when an exceedingly high roll calls for it.

Basically, I just don't think the randomness that the d20 introduces is useful, and essentially having a "fuck you" mechanic in which you can just get unlucky and be completely unable to function in gameplay sense just... is bad. I don't think the forces of RNG should be able to deprive players of their agency, and the inconsistency it introduces is a net negative to enjoyment of the game as a whole. I think in order to deprive players of their agency and have it remain fun, there needs to be structured, non-randomized systems that do this. You can get unlucky in real life, yes, and that can make you unable to function. But in a TTRPG, it just isn't that fun or interesting to me. Players should succeed well thought out maneuvers and fail poorly thought out maneuvers or those completely outside of your expertise. Randomization should be used for the things that fall in between those margins.

[radiation]

i’m bad at questions but i’m excited for ur game! i hope i’ll be able to play it :) how long have you been making games? are u self taught and what did u use to learn?

Thank you so much !! The free demo of the game will be in the form of both an itch.io web build (works on most OS/browsers) and a Windows download. The full game will probably be download only and unfortunately probably on Windows exclusively because RPGMaker MV games no longer work on newer Mac updates. So unless I get programming assistance that’s what’s up

As for how long I’ve been making games - I work in the game industry and I’ve worked on quite a few games w small/medium teams, albeit mostly on the art side of things. Having a lot of experience with the development process means I have a pretty good idea of how to handle scope & pipeline stuff

My experience in like… actual game design/development outside of me just fucking around in RPGMaker VX Ace as a high schooler and taking like. Suuuuuper basic Java, unity, and level design classes. mostly includes co-creating the game jam game Feed 15 Fish and assisting with game design / level design stuff for the wayneradiotv Minecraft charity stream mod (im responsible for the idea of the Pig Scare among couple other things)

I guess as far as game design goes you could probably say I’m primarily self taught, but that goes with the caveat of like. My game is a visual novel/adventure game, mostly reading dialogue and making occasional dialogue choices, traversing an environment to progress the game, a couple sorta-puzzles. I’d say the cloooosest equivalent I can think of to the game’s setup is To The Moon if you’ve played that, although id say my game’s gameplay design is a bit more…like, intentional? But narrative/script is absolutely the most important part of my game, whole thing is built around that. I think knowing programming fundamentals (you don’t really have to program in RPGMaker but knowing the logic is SUPER helpful) + being really really dedicated to building around scope + being halfway decent at writing are the most important skills for the kind of game I’m making. I think the first 2 speak for themselves but like….script writing ?? I think learning that has just been like. Idk. At some point I started becoming really fascinated with the intricacies of sentence structure and wording when making jokes both IRL and online, and I think getting good at economy of wording + comedic structure + always implying shit allowed me to me gain strong instincts for writing both individual lines and larger narratives

[rhetoricandlogic]

Liberty’s Daughter by Naomi Kritzer

By: Eric Hendel

Issue: 15 January 2024

Naomi Kritzer’s novel Liberty’s Daughter is a book that I both loved reading, and also a story which I think falls short of its full potential. Based in part on a series of shorter works written by the author (all of which have here been compiled into a larger narrative), Kritzer’s novel centers around the experiences of Beck Garrison, a sixteen-year-old girl who, along with her father, lives on a scattered network of artificially created islands and repurposed cruise ships known as a seastead. Set in an ambiguously dystopian near-future world, the novel introduces us to the six nations of the seastead, which was originally constructed by libertarian activists seeking to create what they falsely conceptualized as a utopian society valuing personal liberty above all else.

As the novel opens, the seastead has persisted in an ambiguous legal state for nearly forty-nine years. While the mainland United States government refuses to acknowledge this society’s independence (pointedly calling its embassy on the seastead not an embassy but an institute), it has also paradoxically neglected to arrest the many well-known corporate criminals who have fled here to avoid prosecution for their crimes. Over the course of Liberty’s Daughter, Kritzer uses this setup to explore contrasting articulations of human rights and social responsibilities, with the seastead slowly revealed to be an intensely authoritarian community in its own right.

All of this is introduced alongside a more subtle storyline, in which Beck’s realization of the true nature of the seastead’s views of human rights tracks alongside her gradually expanding understanding of the context in which her father brought her to live in this community. This latter development follows on from Beck’s decision to begin slowly reconnecting with her estranged mother, whom her father previously claimed had died years earlier. In this way, she eventually comes to recognize not only the truth of the seastead and the many ways in which its libertarian ideology fails, but also the precarity of her own privileged status within this self-described utopia.

The main plot of Liberty’s Daughter begins with a self-contained story that effectively introduces the novel’s themes. Beck is working as a “finder” (a person who is hired to negotiate trades on the seastead for hard-to-find commercially manufactured goods) when she is contacted by an indentured bond worker named Debbie Miller. While Beck is normally hired only by people hoping that she can find rare items for them, like slippers and bathing suits, Debbie has instead reached out to Beck in the hope that she will track down her missing sister, Lynn.

Having previously contracted a mysterious illness which prevented her from working, Lynn vanished shortly after asking her bond-holder on the seastead for a loan so she could pay to be seen by a doctor. Since then, everyone on the seastead to whom Debbie has spoken has claimed to know nothing of Lynn’s whereabouts, with Lynn’s bond-holder himself refusing to speak to Debbie at all. As Beck reflects immediately after hearing of this situation:

I had a bad feeling about this. My job is finding things, but normally that just means finding willing sellers for interested buyers. That’s why I was looking for the sandals. Finding a person was a whole different kettle of shark bait. But the seastead wasn’t that big, so unless she’d fallen over the side and drowned … I pulled out my gadget to take notes. “Okay,” I said, and keyed in the name. “What else can you tell me?” (p. 11)

This search draws Beck into a loosely connected sequence of overlapping objectives, all of which in turn coalesce into a larger story. Initially intent only on locating Lynn and verifying her safety, Beck soon discovers that the bond that allowed Lynn to live on the seastead has been sold to a “skin farm”—a dangerous factory whose impoverished workers routinely die due to exposure to chemicals normally outlawed. Worse still is that this factory is located on one of the seastead’s most infamous islands—a decaying cargo ship called Liberty (or “Lib” for short) whose residents abide by the single all-encompassing law that their exclusively capitalist society has no laws at all.

This brief story is resolved when, unwilling to simply abandon Lynn to her fate, Beck chooses to call upon the help of a private militia in Lib called the Alpha Dogs—a group for whose services her father had previously purchased a security subscription. In a scene which almost comes across as deliberately anticlimactic, Beck simply walks into the skin farm in which Lynn is being held captive, and, under the protection of the Alpha Dog bodyguard she has hired, commands that Lynn be set free. Critical to this scene is the exact manner by which Beck manages to free Lynn, and the exchange that occurs when she does so:

She was chained to the workbench. “Can you get her loose?” I said to my bodyguard. He gave me a look. “I’m hired to protect you. She is not on my contract.” “Yeah?” I walked over and grabbed her arm. “Lynn, will you give me the honor of your company? Say yes.” “… Yes?” “Lynn is my date and my contract specifies that you will provide protection services for me and my date at all times. And I want you to get us out of here.” (p. 38)

This scenario functions as an encapsulation of the themes that the entire novel explores. The way in which Beck frees Lynn (by extending the terms of the bodyguard’s contract onto her) reveals the vast gulf that exists between this libertarian society’s claimed values of personal freedom and autonomy and the reality of how these values manifest. Beck is only capable of entering the skin farm because of the bodyguard whom she has personally hired; having a member of a privately-funded militia at her side is all that allows her to move through this space without question. By contrast, Lynn is indicated to have spent the last two weeks chained to a desk in this same factory, unable to leave due to an outstanding medical debt that she had no choice but to incur. Even in this scenario, Beck’s bodyguard at first refuses to free Lynn by claiming he has no right to do so due to the terms of his contract; he only agrees to do what Beck says when she changes the situation so as to better meet those terms. While this is a community whose citizens claim to have no laws, the actions of Beck and her bodyguard reveal that the society abides by at least one: that the only rights which anyone has are those that can be forcibly extracted from the lives of others.

This examination of the limitations of the seastead’s ethos continues as the book progresses, with Kritzer’s novel quickly giving way to less a single narrative thread than a fascinating sequence of loosely connected subplots and self-contained story arcs which require that Beck directly engage with the entrenched social inequity of the seastead’s community.

After she has freed Lynn from the skin farm, there is a strange but also unexpectedly fascinating story in which Beck is recruited by the producer of a reality television program from the mainland United States. While working as this woman’s assistant, Beck comes in turn to serve a vital if indirect role in an emerging labor movement amongst bond workers like Debbie and Lynn. In the process of this work, Beck witnesses a bizarre inversion of the seastead’s libertarian philosophy when the producer of the program tries offering her employees healthcare, only to then be threatened by the leader of the entire seastead due to the dangerous precedent he fears this act will set. There is also, later on, an extended story depicting the outbreak of a mysterious plague originating from one of the seastead’s unregulated nanotech research facilities, with Beck and several of her friends desperately working to distribute a vaccine to the seastead’s overly paranoid citizens. Eventually the book concludes via a legitimately fascinating final act wherein what little governmental infrastructure the seastead previously possessed collapses. Beck and others subsequently begin working to rebuild their society, and in the process start replacing its libertarian, capitalist ethic with something more holistic and inclusive.

My main problem with Liberty’s Daughter is that, as engaging and creative as the book’s story is, there are also several critical junctures at which I think that Kritzer fails to fully explore the implications of this narrative. Instead, in these moments the novel pulls back from the events it is depicting and shuts down any further exploration of the issues its story has introduced, in a way that feels extremely artificial.

One example of this emerges in the conclusion to the story of Lynn’s escape from the skin farm. Initially simply expecting Lynn to go to the American Embassy so she can formally request asylum, Beck learns that a drug charge in Lynn’s past makes this option impossible for her. This is a crime which the book explicitly verifies to the reader is so minor as to be nonexistent, and yet because of this charge—and what it apparently means for Lynn’s future if she ever returns to the United States—she chooses to remain on the seastead in spite of the danger she now knows she faces. This is a plot point that is then abandoned as the story continues, with Lynn simply vanishing from the chapters that follow, and Beck—despite her prior desire to rescue Lynn—appearing strangely uninterested in contemplating how an excessively punitive criminal justice system has forced this woman to place her life in undue danger.

A similar issue emerges in the ending of the book itself. After a cholera outbreak leaves what little social infrastructure the seastead had previously possessed in shambles, a humanitarian group arrives to administer aid to the sick and injured. It’s in this way that Beck is unexpectedly reunited with her mother, Lenore, who has traveled to the seastead with this group. Here, after learning that Beck’s father has fled from the seastead (abandoning his daughter in the process), Lenore reveals the context in which her former husband, Paul Garrison, emigrated to the seastead: he kidnapped a four-year-old Beck after attempting to arrange for his wife’s death in a traffic accident. Lenore then claims custody over Beck against her will, and, in an act that leaves her daughter feeling both disillusioned and betrayed, forces her to leave the seastead for good. The book ends with a scene in which Beck and her mother begin planning a road trip, with Beck herself seemingly forgetting the sense of betrayal she had felt—and the ways in which her mother’s actions mirror the very same exploitative reduction of human rights which had marred so much of the seastead’s society.

Moments like this, while initially appearing minor, function to dampen many of the more pressing questions which Liberty’s Daughter raises. Just as Lynn’s decision to risk her life to remain on the seastead is an act which clearly exists within a still larger context that the book refuses to explore, Lenore’s decision to take Beck away from the seastead against her will raises the possibility that the flaws of the seastead’s exclusionary conceptualization of human rights are far more widespread. Beck’s mother, despite having never adhered to this libertarian ideology, ultimately ends this book by exerting a control over Beck’s life that seems to exist purely for her own sake—a desire to spend the last two years of Beck’s childhood living in a very traditional family setting, regardless of what her daughter has to say about this.

Yet rather than allowing these moments to exist in the story as points of ambiguity, they end up being pushed aside. Liberty’s Daughter ends with Beck and her mother going on a hike together. Even the book’s final line has Beck asking her mother if they can go on a road trip to the Grand Canyon, and Lenore answering, with a laugh, that Beck can go wherever she wants. Yet this moment feels hollow due to how it contrasts with Lenore’s actions: there is at least one place where she will apparently not allow her daughter to go, and, as the novel has demonstrated, it’s a very important one.

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

If you had to pinpoint the main issue of MLB, the root of all evil if you may (aside from Astruc), what would it be?

If we're going super high level, it would be narrative consistency (I believe this is a synonym for "narrative coherence" or, at least, I've always used them pretty interchangeably and googling one finds you stuff on the other). I wanted to get an official definition of this term and wikipedia gave me this from a larger article on the theory of narrative paradigm:

Narrative coherence is the degree to which a story makes sense. Coherent stories are internally consistent, with sufficient detail, strong characters, and free of significant surprises. The ability to assess coherence is learned and improves with experience. Individuals assess a story's adherence by comparing it with similar stories. The ultimate test of narrative sense is whether the characters act reliably. If figures show continuity throughout their thoughts, motives, and actions, acceptance increases. However, characters behaving uncharacteristically destroy acceptance.

I also found a pretty good overview of the topic on the blog of a random editor. You can follow that link to read the whole thing, but I wanted to highlight this section on characters as I thought it was particularly relevant to the stuff I talk about on this blog:

Your characters will have their own personalities and behaviours that the reader will become familiar with as the story develops, so if you deviate from these patterns, the reader will notice. That’s why it’s important to maintain character consistency – that they would act in a way that is right and in keeping with their personality, rather than making them act out of character to make elements of the story fit.

As you can hopefully see from the above sources, the stuff I've talk about on here, and just generally thinking about the show, most of the issues with Miraculous have to do with the show being narratively incoherent. Characters do whatever the writers want them to do. Plot lines get dropped and picked back up then dropped (Lila) with no rhyme or reason. Big, meaningful setups lead to nothing (Gabriel learning all the temp heroes identities). Twists come out of nowhere (Kagami being a senti). They all indicate that something is majorly wrong here.

I am not involved in the production of this show, so I cannot tell you where all of these issues come from. It may be that the writing staff doesn't know what they're doing or it could be that unknown forces like marketing are driving the writers to do things that they'd rather not or it could be a mix of the two. For example, I'm pretty sure the magical charms we get in season four were only added to sell stuff like this and this, which is why I try to approach this show without pointing fingers at anyone too specific unless there's some hard evidence to back up what I'm saying. All I know is that this show has a massive writing problem and I'll end with a little advice on how I avoid this issue. It may or may not work for you. It all depends on your writing style.

When you sit down to write a story, it's very normal to not have a clear path for how to get from story point A to story point B. You don't need to find that path before you start writing. You just need to keep in mind that B is your goal and start figuring out how to logically get there.

I often describe this process as taking a journey with a known destination, but no planned route. However, just like with a road trip, the further you go, the more limited your options become because of the choices you made. If you skipped stopping at an interesting city or landmark, you can't change that fact and we're not turning the car around just so you can get a picture next to the big ball of string. You had your chance and you missed it. Accept that and move on.

Similarly, as you write your story, you have to own the choices you've already made on your journey. If you choose to let a character in on a massive secret (Alya learning Ladybug's identity), then you have to fully own how that choice would impact all elements of the story (Alya's opinion of Lila) not just the short sighted elements you wanted it to impact (note how Lila's not a thing in season four? Almost like they didn't plan out how to handle her and Alya at the same time?) Own the route you committed to and find a way to tell the next part of the story in a way that feels like it's on the same route and you'll be fine.

Does that mean occasionally having to give up on cool ideas that you really liked? Yep, but that's the nature of story telling. It's part of the reason why people are told to "kill their darlings." That's just a thing you have to learn to do if you want to be a good writer.

[dreampearls]

i started rambling about genshin's writing intending it to be a quick short thing but it ended up being so so scary long so i'm putting it under a read more

i feel like the problem w genshin is that ultimately it is a game motivated by profit & thus so many of the things holding it back are just. going to remain that way bc they are structurally inseparable from it being a gacha game. like so many characters aren't given nearly as much development as they should be given because there are Too Many of them; genshin's cast is enormous and it's to each of the characters' detriment on an individual level. & the horrifying reality is that its only going to continue growing from here on out. like there are so many characters who have these amazing setups but absolutely no follow-through... & even if it's hinted that they'll get more lore/backstory/screentime/whatever in the future it'll take months before it unfolds because they need to release like 23 other shiny brand new characters first yknow?

like. genshin has its story yeah but its main conceit is its gacha, meaning that all of its characters are created for the express purpose of getting you to pull on their banner. some characters Do serve to further its larger narrative, and a lot of them have interesting sub-stories, but this all gets overshadowed by the fact that Genshin Wants You To Like Their Characters. enough so that you'd spend your money on them. this inherently prevents them from being as multifaceted as they could be. like they're not primarily written for the sake of servicing a greater story at hand-- at most i feel like it's a secondary thought -- this alone prevents so much of the cast from reaching their full potential and feeling like Actual Fully Realized Characters from an Actual Fully Realized Story. or maybe im just being mean to gachas in general idk.

regardless this problem also extends to the traveler; every single playable character is required to like the protagonist & thus the entire world of teyvat revolves around them, flattening this otherwise extremely vast and expansive realm that they've obviously taken a lot of care to develop. the prioritization of the traveler in every single thing we do is kinda just a result of how Games work but its such a shame bc it limits so much of what can be done... like okay take scaramouche. so much of his character arc could have been made substantially better if the traveler hadn't played such a large role in it. scara's entire character arc revolves around his struggle to find/reclaim agency for himself (he is Literally a Puppet) but So Many important decisions/actions following The Irminsul Incident hinges on the Traveler being the one to make them. like at the exact climactic moment where scara decides to discard all his past names & adopt a new one as a symbol of his newly found autonomy WHY on EARTH is the traveler the one who decides on a name for him. Like alright!!!

and then obviously the greater issue of the game's blatant racism & sexualization go hand in hand; real life cultures end up being bastardized because it is the simplest and most effective way to guarantee profit... doesn't matter if the attire is religiously significant or not they will find a way to make the women half naked. doesn't matter if the general population of the culture they're inspired by does not have #fff skin they will find a way to ensure everyone is still pale

[the-eyes-in-the-wallpaper]

Welcome, Foolish Mortals

To be completely fair, that was likely exactly what you expected. But how else is one supposed to open a sideblog dedicated to the Haunted Mansion?

Regardless, welcome, readers. This will serve as a place to catalog my collective thoughts, analyses, writings, and ramblings concerning the Haunted Mansion and Phantom Manor, at the Disney parks across the world.

To many of you who may be following me from other places or who have simply stumbled upon this blog in the vast jungles of the internet, the existence of this page likely raises several questions:

It's a ride at Disneyland, what's the big deal?

Shouldn't you grow up and get a Real Job?

You're one of those insufferable Disney adults who spends $60 on a popcorn bucket from Ebay aren't you.

To answer these to some extent, I am firstly doing this because I think it is fun, I do already have a Real Job, and I have never spent $60 on any piece of merch, popcorn bucket or otherwise.

But it did get me thinking. What is it about the Haunted Mansion in particular that has managed to create a fandom this strong over the past 54 years? On the face of it it's not that big of a deal, and it's not exactly highbrow Art or Literature or Cinema. So why do people keep coming back?

The answer lies, I believe, in what the Mansion is in the first place:

A narrative. Due to its nature as a dark ride, there is an opportunity to present the story in the second person: You, the rider, are exploring an old and reportedly haunted mansion. This setup, especially in an age before technology could create an interactive experience, lends itself especially well to a

A commentary. While the Mansion as a whole is meant as entertainment, it is playing with tropes, questions, and archetypes that reflect the human fascination with life and death.

A magic show. The Mansion was built in an era when computers were still the size of living rooms, so very little of the special effects required them. Instead, the designers of the ride used illusions dating back to the Victorian era (and sometimes even older!) to convince the rider the house is actually haunted.

A historic artifact. Given that the building is (as of today, April 9 2023) 54 years old, it has been around for long enough that it funcions as a time capsule of sorts into what a haunted house looked like in 1969, before further developments in the horror genre during the 1970s and 1980s.

The impression it leaves in the minds of those who enter. The ride itself is only about 9 minutes long - not a long time at all. But the details that are left make one wonder - about backstory, about the history of the place both fictional and real - and those details shared between fellow enthusiasts has over time left the Mansion with the feeling that it is truly haunted, in a way.

Each post in this blog will roughly correspond to these categories, more or less depending on the particular topic. We'll be covering a bit of everything here - history, architecture, special effects, literature, and the list will go on. Updates will probably be weekly - I am still working out exactly how to write everything and make sure you all have quality posts in a timely manner, but that is the plan.

I will also say up front that this blog will assume that you already have a cursory knowledge of the Haunted Mansion as a ride. If you need a refresher, there are several "low-light POV" videos on YouTube of the three Haunted Mansions (Anaheim, Orlando, and Tokyo) currently in operation, as well as of Phantom Manor in Paris. I will do a larger post with a more complete secondary source list later and make sure it is tagged and pinned.

Without further ado, welcome, foolish mortals. I do hope these posts are as fun for you to read as they are for me to write.