#like some of my favorite nate's are characterized so differently from one another but they work well in the context of the fic yknow | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

grittyreadsfic · 3 years ago

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haha welcome to my newest rec list, what a run we had tho, a collection of all of my favorite nate bastian/mikey mcleod fics. rip superbuddies, they're not dead, nate's just in fuckin SEATTLE

the only hard part of making this list was not just listing out every fic ao3 user lotts has for the pairing which i did consider doing. so.

all that by lotts

summary: If Mikey gets a soulmate soon, he’ll have to explain the whole Nate situation.

Not– not that there's a real Nate situation, per se, but it’s just– Mikey has Nate, and it’s kind of a thing.

(Or: there very much is a Nate situation. There's also a Mikey situation. Eventually, they realize this.)

why i love it: to me, this is the superbuddies fic-it’s got the perfect pacing from friends to lovers with just the right around of blurred lines between what’s normal for friends and what’s something more, and their characterizations are just *chef’s kiss* it’s also such a great take on soulmates, and it really covers the different ways people can feel about their soulmates/the concept in general

kiss the night air by clementiae

summary: Jersey, Jersey. Whispered into the warmth of their laced fingers like a prayer.

It was a stupid dream. Mikey wanted it to last.

why i love it: never has under 1.3k words made me want to cry as much as this fic has. the way talking about their dream of playing together evolved, the narrative structure that builds? absolutely hits, very good if you want to cry about the expansion draft

sure thing by bitter_leaf

summary: In the history of hockey, there’s no way something like Nate suggested has never happened before and Mikey feels out of control following that thought down the rabbit hole, how he’d be powerless to stop it if it did, and that’s if he’d even want to stop it. The terrifying thing is that even though he can’t see it happening—they’re both straight, this whole fucking thing is just a thought experiment, pretend��now that Nate’s painted the picture for him, he can’t stop thinking about it—whether he’d even notice the signs until it was too late.

Sick of their teammates chirping them, Mikey and Nate pretend to date.

why i love it: i’m SUCH a sucker for fake dating aus, and this one does it so well. It really leans into the messy and complicated feelings part of fake relationships that i don’t think gets explored enough, and it handles it so, so, so well.

you let him wonder but you never let him sink in his teeth by anonymous

summary: Mikey didn’t really pay attention much in biology— didn’t have to, not really— but he vaguely remembers something about doing heat by yourself in a pinch. There were lots of warnings about it.

“You can’t just be alone,” he says and Nate lets out something that sounds like laughing.

Mikey is just trying to be helpful, and Nate is just trying to get through it.

why i love it: i really love omegaverse fics that invert the usual takes on the tropes (and this is one of them!) and it just really is a great look at their dynamic. i really like this take on mikey and nate as a whole, as well

though far away, we’re still the same by rathands

summary: Mikey wishes he wasn’t in love with Nate, because everyone knows that juniors shit—it doesn’t work out. Like Dylan and Mitch.

why i love it: lots of fun bad communication between nate and mikey, and i think this one really handles the emotion of it all so well. absolutely peak idiots to lovers, and i really love that it gives us both of their point of views

so i don’t have to keep imagining by preciousthings

summary: “It was a mistake. That’s— I didn’t mean that, and that’s it.” Mikey says, but he can’t quite meet Nate’s eyes. “That’s where I’m at, I guess.”

“That’s what I thought. So, we’re on the same page.” Nate nods.

(or: lost gold medals, ill-advised snapchats, love confessions, meddling teammates, and a whole lot of miscommunication.)

why i love it: i just think the premise of this works so, so, so well for them-it’s another great idiots to lovers vibe for nate and mikey, and the whole concept of drunkenly telling your crush you love them via snapchap? yes, good, correct

there is a bridge over a river, and some days it is lovely by lotts

summary: “What are you doing here?” Mikey asks, trying and failing not to stare, but Nate’s staring right back, like he’s also not sure what’s going on.

“I figured I’d meet you here,” Nate says. “Put a familiar face on the Binghamton welcoming committee.”

Mikey looks around. “There’s no one else here.”

“Well, it was either a familiar face or no face,” Nate says with an uncertain smile, like he’s not quite sure he’s allowed to make a joke.

why i love it: perhaps i love it because i like to hurt my own feelings, but this is really just a well done fic that really just hits. it’s honest and emotional and you can feel the weight of that throughout it, but it does have a pretty light hearted ending that is good and hopeful. bonus points for being one of my favorite break up make up fics ever and currently my most read fic of 2021

a catch in the curse by aliquis

summary: Mikey McLeod is gifted — or cursed — with the power of psychic persuasion. With the ability to bend people’s ears to his will, Mikey is well aware of how dangerous a power he wields, and the responsibility he bears to not abuse it.

Though he rarely uses his gifts, new developments in his friendship with Nate Bastian may threaten his control. Mikey would do anything to protect his best friend, including finding a way to get rid of his powers for good. Luckily, Newark’s own witch in the woods may be able to help.

why i love it: magic au!!!! i cannot stress how fantastic the world building is in this series (you don’t have to read the tknp fic that’s first to follow what’s happening, but it is worth the read) and mikey’s feelings towards nate and his own struggle is just!!!! honestly i’m just a series of exclamation points about it all

Invisible string by philatoi

summary: Mikey has known he’s liked guys since the first time Nathan Bastian smiled at him. That’s the thing, almost everything about Mikey’s sexuality has involved Nate — which isn’t necessarily bad. In Mikey’s humble opinion, Nate is the perfect person to fall in love with. Highly recommended. Mikey doesn’t regret putting all his eggs in that basket for the last six years.

why i love it: the pining in this, the emotions of it all-just absolutely top notch all the way around, and really just what i wanted out of a superbuddies fic. it really just feels so right for nate and mikey, and i just love it

you are a diamond and i’m just coal by hannah_baker

summary: When Mikey learns his roommate Nate isn't going home for Christmas, he drags Nate back home with him for break.

Or, the one where Mikey thinks all of his feelings for his roommate are platonic, and everyone laughs at him for it.

why i love it: me picking between this and hannah_baker’s other christmas centric superbuddies fic was like picking a favorite child. this is one of my all time favorite takes on mikey in any fic, and i always love a good college roommates au. just such a wonderful fic

turn the lights off, i’m in love by awoogah123

summary: “I can’t go to sleep yet,” Mikey murmured against Nate’s mouth, “I’m not tired.”

Nate knew this couldn’t be true, his and Mikey’s season had just finished and they were both exhausted. Still, Nate knew what Mikey meant when he said he couldn’t go to sleep yet, that he was too wired up, because he felt exactly the same way.

“I think I’ve got a way to make you more relaxed,” Nate said, mouth curving into a smirk as he brushed a hand over Mikey’s cheek. Mikey’s mouth smiled against his own.

***

Nate and Mikey are there for each other when the Devils don't make the playoffs.

why i love it: do you ever just need some soft comfort to cope? yeah me too! this fic is that and i was very 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 about it when i read it

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ct-multifandom · 4 years ago

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MLB ideas/hopes/predictions/prompts

Bunnix using her umbrella to fly like Mary Poppins

Ladybug coming up with an overly convoluted Rube Goldberg machine type plan with her lucky charm, but not having some of the components, so she just sends Pegasus to the store in the middle of a battle

Characters who are close slowly finding out about each other’s superhero identities in funny ways

Pigella picking up something massive and like 10x heavier than her and chucking it

I really want one of these heroes’ tools to be a comically large anime-style weapon, but alas I don’t think they’d do it

Season finale boss fight featuring all the new heroes, which is totally gonna happen at some point, but it would look really busy on screen to have them all running around at once, so I’d split them into smaller teams based on their skills to carry out specific parts of Ladybug’s Epic 36-Step Plan™️. It would make for a satisfying “oh yeah, it’s all coming together” montage and also give us some unique character interactions.

Ladybug picking unique combo teams of new heroes based on their skills to fight specific strong villains

Alya starting a school paper and getting the whole team in on it. I love the episodes where the class does one big project together, they’re so cute.

Someone/a group getting akumatized on purpose to disobey Hawkmoth and take advantage of their akuma’s power for a noble goal

Episode from the POV of a boring background character detailing how the life of the average Parisian is affected by LB and CN. Unreliable scheduling, monster traffic jams, the sheer embarrassment of getting got by an akuma...

I want an animal to get akumatized. Someone’s dog who feels lonely when their favorite human gets a new, demanding job and turns into a terrifying Cerberus beast or something.

Mayor Bourgeois allocates some taxpayer dollars into a LB bank account to support her, and she has to make the very important decision on whether to save it for a real emergency or buy 17 hamburgers.

Okay part of me doesn’t want to make kwami/future hero predictions in case I accidentally come up with something way cooler than what will really happen and then be disappointed, but the other part of me is like hee hoo predikshun. So don’t expect these to actually happen lol.

I won’t talk about Multimouse because we kinda know everything about her, but she looks cute and it’s nice to see two heroes who aren’t super skinny.

The silhouette of Minotaurox in the intro doesn’t offer a lot of insight other than his epic horns. I have no idea what his tool might be. His costume looks to be pretty simple/practical, though, which is in line with Ivan’s character. I heard a theory that his power will be increasing in size, and it makes sense looking at Stoneheart and the pattern of flipping the characters’ flaws on their head, but that sounds kind of boring to me, especially compared to all the other creative abilities.

Tigresse’s silhouette makes me think her design will be awesome. Her tail looks like it might be her tool. It kind of resembles Amethyst’s whip from SU so maybe she can use it to grab things like Ladybug does with her yo-yo. I heard a theory that her power will be invisibility which I support because it takes the flaw that turned Juleka into Reflekta (wanting to be invisible out of insecurity) and makes it powerful like the stealth of a tiger.

From the silhouette, Caprikid looks a bit like a beginner’s Trollhunters cosplay, but I’m sure he’ll be cool. I’ve seen people argue whether he’s Nate or Marc and I’m positive he’s Marc (making Nate CC) so if anyone asks for an explanation I’ll make the comprehensive post on why. He’s holding his tool, and I’ve seen debate over which direction it’s in. If he’s holding it pointed up it looks like a giant calligraphy brush, but I think he’s holding it pointed down and the “brush” is just a decoration on the end. I’ve heard a theory that it’s a shepherd’s cane which is my favorite one. Personal idea here: I’d make his power telekinesis. Pretty basic, but I can imagine it being very useful for the type of scenarios we see in the show without it being OP. I like the idea of using a cane to “shepherd” something through the air. This could reflect Reverser’s desire for control, but flip it to be more collected and useful.

I fully support Coq Courage’s ninja pants, they are simply Correct. It’d be cool if his tool was a bow and arrow, and that seems like a pretty popular theory. The shape to the left of his torso looks like it might be a quiver but it’s probably just his other arm. Thumb rings are used in archery, but what little we’ve seen of the miraculous (disguised on Marinette and Chloe) shows a different type of ring. Still tho. Also get ready for my crazy never-gonna-happen idea: the bow can turn into a hang glider. Roosters can fly, but not super well/freely, which could translate to gliding. It’d add some versatility to the way the heroes move around since a lot of the temporary ones can only run, and it would let him reach places LB might not be able to. I’ve heard a theory that his power will be supersonic voice which could contrast how Nathaniel is bad at communicating and quiet until he gets mad and blows up.

Orikko might be the kwami of illumination. Roosters are associated with the sun and Evillustrator’s power was sourced from light. At first I thought his transformation words might be “sunrise” and “sunset” but someone said the activation code could be “rise and shine” which sounds awesome.

Traquemoiselle, believe it or not, is actually in the intro, she’s just hidden at the very top and only a snippet of the head is showing. All we know is that she has round dog ears. Barrk is surprisingly one of the more fleshed-out kwamis as of now, having a few solid lines of characterization in Furious Fu. Kwamis are usually yin-yang to their holder, so Barrk fits Sabrina perfectly, being loyal yet independent while Sabrina is loyal and an absolute doormat. No clue about her tool. Her power is kinda in the name: tracking. Maybe she can track down some one specific thing of her choice, but maybe she can sniff out akumas. As seen in Dark Owl and Gang of Secrets, Hawkmoth can be creative with akuma placement, so she can probably save the team from some close calls.

I have no theories for the transformation words of the other kwamis. Ziggy or Stompp could include “horns” or “charge” and Roaar “stripes” but I can’t think of any phrase including those words that isn’t too similar to an existing one. There are some phrases based on powers, though, not the animal. Or maybe they’ll just give up and give us another iteration of “Sass, scales slither”.

I think the theme for one of these remaining new heroes might be “assertion”. A lot of them struggle with that as their civilian selves, and the animals that are left can all be associated with independence/dominance, not that the animal traits always play into what the heroes are.

Ok last one, long one: in season 3, Luka’s main traits were “cool and nice” which doesn’t make for an interesting, complex major character, and at first he seemed like the perfect love interest, but from an outside perspective the extent of his kindness is kind of disturbing. I’m hoping they can flip this around and turn it into a character flaw where he has practically no boundaries, and it turns into a problem. Maybe he could agree to run random errands for the background characters for nothing in return, and at first it’s just him being nice, but later people start seeing his help as an obligation. They get peeved when he’s unavailable one day and get akumatized into a “boss rush” of classic akumas, effectively trapping and forcing him to help them. Then Tigresse Pourpe comes and helps save the day, expanding on Juleka and Luka’s relationship. The resolution can teach kids that putting yourself first isn’t necessarily selfish, and that sitting back and letting people take advantage of your kindness isn’t heroic.

There’s probably some stuff I forgot which I can put in a different post later, but lmk if you want a separate post about any of these things in more detail! This was just me rambling out all my new hyperfixation thoughts. Also if anyone uses any of the hypotheticals/scenarios as a prompt I’d love to see it.

#miraculous ladybug #mlb #miraculous spoilers #miraculous les aventures de ladybug et chat noir #miraculous season 4 #miraculous lb #too lazy to add all the character tags #long post #brain go brrrr

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kinetic-elaboration · 4 years ago

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December 10: Endings

The posts that have been going around about all these bad, nonsensical, random tv endings we’ve been seeing recently (GOT, T100, SPN), have made me think about what makes a good television ending in my opinion.

I admit that concluding a series is probably quite tricky because most shows, if they’re not miniseries, are conceived without a known end point in mind. A show runner can build an idea around a 5-season arc, but he might not actually get 5 seasons. He might only get 1. Or he might get 10, if the show is popular. So unlike a movie or a novel, the first episodes need to set up a general premise, a universe, a theme, but not necessarily a specific plot with X number of specific plot points leading to a pre-ordained conclusion. There has to be a flexibility to the narrative. But when the whole thing is completed, it should feel, ideally, as if it WAS pre-ordained, as if the show was always meant to have as many seasons as it got and was working toward its conclusion the whole time.

So, roughly, I think shows that stick the landing do so because the showrunner knows what the show is, at its core, about, and crafts a finale that relates to the central theme(s) and brings the main narrative to a logical and emotionally resonant conclusion.

This is very rough and very general, and it’s a formula that applies more to some shows than others. TV is incredibly varied after all. I mean, first off, not all shows know their last season is their last season going in. You can’t judge the final episodes of, to use two examples of shows I liked that were unceremoniously axed recently, The Society or Altered Carbon as “finale episodes” because they were never meant to be finales. Then you have a show like My So-Called Life, which does have a Classic ending, despite ending all too soon--mostly because every episode of that show was classic, and it only had one season, so its season finale being a fitting ending to the season automatically means its series finale was a fitting ending to the series.

(It’s such an outlier that I can’t really compare it to anything but honestly--this is how to do an open-ended cliffhanger and still make it feel like a conclusion. But that’s a whole different post.)

My formula above also doesn’t apply well to sitcoms, because they aren’t really about anything, in terms of plot. Like the name says, they set up situations: a group of people who are family, co-workers, friends, and then lets those situations play out in a funny manner for as long as there are jokes to tell. Sitcoms to me end well if they don’t overstay their welcome, if they remain true to the characters (because it’s the characters, not the minimal narrative, that defines the show), and if they hit an appropriate ‘ending’ tone. But the biggest thing for me is if the sitcom went on for too many seasons. Even if the final episode isn’t the greatest, it’s fine. But if the last 2-4 seasons were lackluster, it tarnishes the whole legacy.

‘Procedural’ type shows are yet another category, and I’m not entirely sure how to characterize those, or what makes a strong ending for that sub-genre. I’m using ‘procedural’ broadly to include, like, Bad Guy of the Week type shows--for example, Charmed, which I thought should have ended after S7. Again, I think it’s about not letting the whole thing go on too long, and then staying true to characters and tone in the finale itself.

So looking just at dramas that have a season’s warning before their finale--which, really, are the type of shows that are most likely to make people ANGRY with shitty endings, because they lure the viewer in with the idea that a singular, coherent story is being told. Maybe it’s convoluted. Maybe it’s winding. Maybe it’s hard to tell where they’re going with this. But if it all comes together in the end, none of that matters--and if it doesn’t come together, what was the point of all the seasons that came before? It becomes, retroactively, a betrayal.

The more plot-driven the show (if it has a mystery, a conspiracy theory, a quest), the greater the betrayal if all fizzles out. But I think the same feeling can arise from shoddy conclusions in dramas more generally. The L Word is one of my comfort shows but that last season is a MESS all the way down, the finale especially. There definitely wasn’t a point to anything, and it wasn’t even entertaining as, like, a dramatic soap.

But then I think about shows whose endings I really liked. For example, Six Feet Under had a great final season and one of the best finale episodes/ending sequences ever. The show up to that point had been about death, and that theme had always been centered most particularly on Nate: his fears of the family business, his previous brushes with death because of his AVM, etc. So of course the show had to end by killing one of its mains, coming full circle with the pilot, showing real grief hitting home--and of course Nate’s personal journey as the main character had to end with his death. Everything about the conclusion was fitting, not even counting the final montage.

I also really liked the conclusion of Big Love, for similar reasons: it was thoughtful, and it successfully teased out the main strands, both of plot and theme, that had run through the show up to that point. The most important thing had always been depicting this family, their problems but also their strength and their love for each other--so, as the showrunners said, it had to conclude by showing you that the family survives. They are strong, and their bonds endure. But the ending was, and had to be, bittersweet too, because anything less would seem to sweep under the rug the real tragedies of the last seasons. Not everyone gets happy endings. And the unhappy endings relate specifically to the toxic patriarchy that’s haunted all of the characters from the pilot. Alby has a chance to turn away from his father and the compound life--but the forces arrayed against him were too strong, so there was no deus ex machina for him, and he ultimately just became fully the evil villain. And Bill is taken out not by the state or by the compound but by an aggrieved man who feels he’s been emasculated, forgotten, who is raging against being so Unseen. What a way to make clear what the common denominator in all of the threats of the past 5 seasons has been.

I also give major points to shows whose finales feel like they’re trying, even if they’re imperfect, especially if the imperfections are because of factors outside the showrunner’s control. For example, I saw someone list Dollhouse as one of their ‘worst endings’ but I have to disagree. I like the ending of Dollhouse. It wasn’t supposed to be 2 seasons. That’s well known. But that’s how many seasons it got, and I think honestly they turned that into a plus rather than a minus. Dollhouse was its best when it was rushing to a conclusion, when it was fast-paced and exciting. Did it always make complete sense? No. Were there some pretty big holes in the plot? Yeah--S2′s Big Bad was absolutely and transparently a retcon instituted between S1 and S2 and I get that, and I forgive the show for that. I thought bifurcating the epilogue as two extra episodes after each of the two seasons was genius, and I liked that it allowed the show to have its cake and eat it too: a happy ending, with the main, immediate, singular Big Bad eliminated, at the end of S2, and a more bittersweet, more complicated, post-apoc ending in the bonus episode. Yeah, I can see the seams; I know there were a lot of constructed work arounds in there because the show was intended to be longer. I think the ending was presented in good faith.

I also, perhaps controversially, liked the ending of Veronica Mars (the original 3-season show; I didn’t see the reboot). The way the season aired was weird and didn’t do it any favors: having a long break before the last couple of episodes, which existed outside of the two Big Case arcs of S3, makes those final stories feel tacked on and random. Basically impossible to have a strong finish with that kind of structure. But the very end of the last ep had the bitter, dark feel of a noir, which is what the show was, a mash up of a noir and a high school drama. I liked that they leaned on the noir rather than the high school aspect, because it was the more creative way to go imo. Also, I appreciated that S3, in general, learned from S2′s mistakes. Yes, the college years are always going to be lackluster compared to high school, in any series that starts with its characters in high school. But VM recognized that no overarching mystery was going to compare to the Lilly Kane murder, so it split the Big Mystery into two Medium Sized mysteries, and I thought that was smart. All of which makes me inclined to think fondly of the conclusion. As with Dollhouse, its weakest points seem to be compromises it had to make, not really its fault but just an inevitable imperfection of the form.

It’s pretty easy to list aspects of a bad ending: a sense that events are arbitrary, a disrespect of characters, a rushed construction, a jarring tone, and most importantly a disconnect between the finale and what came before. If the show appeared to be a narrative (as opposed to a situation), but it doesn’t feel like a complete and coherent whole at the end, then the conclusion was bad.

I didn’t watch GOT or SPN and I stopped watching T100 at the end of S4 (though I do feel confident from tumblr that the ending was Bad), so I have somewhat of a hard time thinking of shows that I thought had really bad endings. I can think of dissatisfying endings that came from shows being cancelled without warning. I can think of shows that lasted too long in general or otherwise had fallen from their greatest heights by the time they limped to a conclusion (unpopular opinion: Friends fits in this category--that show should have been 4 seasons, maybe 5 tops; Boy Meets World and Dawson’s Creek are comfort show favorites of mine but they both should have ended with high school, like, pretty objectively speaking; iZombie started a slow downturn after S2 and by the end of S4 was kinda unwatchable. I literally stopped halfway through the finale.). I can even think of shows that lost me by the end even though objectively they probably had good endings (for example, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend--I couldn’t get through S4 and the finale sounded... technically well-constructed but like it would have driven me nuts).

But then I guess most shows with shitty finales technically had shitty last seasons in general. Truly notorious crash-and-burns don’t come out of nowhere. I mean I’m sure there are counter-examples to this (what’s that one with the kid and the snow globe lol?) but unless you try for a weird last-minute twist, or unless you’ve got your audience hoping against hope that an impossibly twisty story is actually very smart instead of very ill-planned, it’s generally clear before the last episode if a narrative has lost its way. I don’t tend to watch a lot of ‘twisty-turny conspiracy’ shows, and when I do I am supremely skeptical all the way through, so it’s hard for me to think of examples I’ve personally watched of a last minute “what the fuck was that” conclusion.

#the year 2020 #2020: fandom thoughts #the entire purpose of this ramble is for me to avoid introspection rn because i'm in such a bad mood

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zutaralesbian · 5 years ago

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001: Euphoria, Black Sails. 002: Rue/Jules. 003: Eleanor Guthrie, Jules Vaughn.

Already answered Black Sails! :)

Euphoria:

Favorite character: Jules. This was initially born out of spite because of all the ridiculous hate she got but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that she really is my fave. Despite what a lot of people say, I think she's genuinely one of the nicer people on the show. But she just has a lot of her own issues and is still trying to find herself. I feel very protective of her lol. Rue is a close second fave though.

Least Favorite character: Probably Cal Jacobs

5 Favorite ships (canon or non-canon): Rue/Jules, Cassie/Maddy, and Kat/Ethan. That's it really.

Character I find most attractive: None of them really. I think Rue and Jules are both really pretty but they're minors. And Zendaya and Hunter are also both a little too young for me.

Character I would marry: None of them. They're kids.

Character I would be best friends with: Lexi is probably the one I'd get along with best, honestly. But I also kind of feel like Jules is one of those extroverts who would adopt introverts as her friends and that's how 99% of my school friendships started, including the one with my best friend lol.

a random thought: I can't believe they really made Zendaya read L*rry fanfiction out loud lmao

An unpopular opinion: Eh....I can't really think of anything other than loving Jules and believing that she isn't any more "toxic" than most of the other characters lol. But idk how unpopular that is. There are a lot of Jules haters but she also has a good amount of stans.

My Canon OTP: Rue/Jules. I just want them both happy :(

My Non-canon OTP: Cassie/Maddy. Maddy needs to ditch Nate and date her soulmate.

Most Badass Character: Rue. Her confrontation with Nate in the finale was iconic. I hope she wrecks his shit next season.

Most Epic Villain: "Epic" is a strong word but I actually do think Nate is kind of interesting as a villain. He falls into the "love to hate him" categories of villains for me. I think it's partly because I think Jacob Elordi is one of the strongest actors on the show. It probably helps that other than following certain blogs and venturing into the Jules Vaughn and Rue x Jules tags, I'm not too involved in the fandom. So idk how rampant Nate woobifying is other than the fact that there are some freaks who ship him with Jules.

Pairing I am not a fan of: Jules/Nate 🤢 Luckily I don't think it's THAT rampant yet

Character I feel the writers screwed up (in one way or another): Kat's characterization got a little crazy for a while there but I don't think she was screwed up per se.

Favourite Friendship: I'd say Cassie/Maddy but I also ship it romantically lol. Um....I'll go with Rue/Fez even if I do find it kind of problematic considering he was her drug dealer.

Character I most identify with: Kat. I didn't really grow up as a fat girl (though I'm far from being skinny) but the whole thing with her getting lost in online fandoms and fictional worlds to cope with her loneliness is something that I think a lot of us can relate to.

Character I wish I could be: Eh....none really lol

Rue/Jules:

When I started shipping them: I think it was 1x02 that sold me on the ship. It was strange because they met, became friends, and started developing feelings really fast and I usually can't get into ships like that. But something about their chemistry and dynamic really speaks to me and makes me melt.

My thoughts: They are an unhealthy relationship but NOT an abusive one. And they have potential to become healthy if they both work out their own problems as individuals. It's clear that they both care about each other a lot and when things are good between them, it really is good. They have a lot of potential to make each other happy and give the other what they need. And their chemistry is so good and tender. They make me soft in both the best and worst ways.

What makes me happy about them: That they get so much screen time together, more so than any other pair.

What makes me sad about them: That they're both so lost and troubled atm :(

Things done in fanfic that annoys me: There isn't a ton of Euphoria fic yet and I've only read like two Rue/Jules fics lol. So nothing.

Things I look for in fanfic: I'd love to read some established relationship fics with the two of them that take place where they're both in healthier places. I have an idea in my head of one taking place during their college years where they're both juggling school, their mental health, and having a relationship with each other. Maybe one day I'll write it lol

My wishlist: For them to both grow and heal and characters and then eventually come back together stronger.

Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other: I don't really ship either of them with anyone else. For Rue I might have said Lexi if the shippers didn't make me resent the pairing so much.

My happily ever after for them: The two of them finish high school and go to college while attending therapy. Somewhere down the line, they move to New York City and get their own apartment together. They also get a cat. (It's Jules' idea. Rue is initially kind of grumpy about it because cats could have fleas and they have to clean the litter box. But she eventually grows to love it just as much as Jules). And they're both happy.

Eleanor Guthrie:

How I feel about this character: I love Eleanor so, so much and I'm sad about her always. I loved her right from her very first appearance on the show and I so wish she had gotten a better ending.

Any/all the people I ship romantically with this character: Max. I don't know how I ended up loving a ship that broke up romantically in the second episode of the show so much but I do. And I loved that they became friends again before the end and that their importance to each other was never truly forgotten. I also dig Miranda/Eleanor as a crack ship. And Eleanor/Mrs. Hudson.

My favorite non-romantic relationship for this character: Flint. I loved how much respect they always had for each other, even when they were technically on different sides. I also really wish we had gotten some sort of Eleanor/Anne dynamic outside of those scenes in S1. Even if the dynamic ended up not being entirely positive, I wanted some more interaction between the two of them lol.

My unpopular opinion about this character: She was killed at least partly for manpain. People can argue all they want but they literally made her pregnant just to make her death more painful for Rogers.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: That she hadn't died. I also would have liked to see her with another woman if we couldn't get more Maxanor. It's unfair that after Max (which didn't last long) we only got to see her with two shitty men.

Favorite friendship for this character: I liked her scenes with Madi in late S4 and I wish we could've seen more of that dynamic. Eleanor died trying to save her :(

My crossover ship: I don't do crossovers. But I've seen the fandom pass off the idea of Eleanor/Elizabeth Swann from POTC a few times and I think that's sort of intriguing.

Jules Vaughn:

How I feel about this character: I love her a lot and I feel like she's very misunderstood. As I said before, I believe she's one of the genuinely nicer characters on the show but has a lot of her own shit and problems to deal with. I think some people are way harder on her than they are other characters and that annoys me.

Any/all the people I ship romantically with this character: Rue and that's it.

My favorite non-romantic relationship for this character: We don't see a lot of it but her friendship with Kat seems cute. I also like her dad.

My unpopular opinion about this character: Whenever people bring up Rue/Jules being unhealthy, they always cite Jules as the only reason it's unhealthy and I don't think that's fair. Rue literally makes herself dependant on Jules to stay sober and that's a lot of unfair pressure to put on a teenager, especially one that's dealing with her own problems.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: That she hadn't slept with Cal Jacobs. That scene was so gross and made me uncomfortable. I get that hooking up with married men is a by-product of a self esteem issue for her but at the very least, I didn't need to see it.

Favorite friendship for this character: Kat again.

My crossover ship: NA

Thanks! :)

#euphoria #rue x jules #rules #eleanor guthrie #answered #lylagarritysgf #long post /

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ty-talks-comics · 5 years ago

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Best of Marvel: Week of July 17th, 2019

Best of this Week: Uncanny X-Men #22 (Legacy #644) - Matthew Rosenberg, Salvador Larroca, David Messina, GURU-eFX and Joe Caramagna

It’s the end of an era and for once, I’m terrified.

I’ve been a fan of the X-Men for a long time. I’d even go so far as to say that they’re my favorite team in all of comics ever because of the range that their stories can go, from tales of marginalization to various stories of abuse and moral relativism, the X-Men have been amazing so why has it taken them so long to feel relevant again? At some point even the best books run out of good stories to tell or end up retreading old waters for a drink of nostalgia and that’s been the X-Men for the last five to six years.

Cyclops had become what Magneto was, young versions of the original five were brought to the future, villains like Mojo and Exodus were brought back, Sentinel threats reemerged, X-Men died and were brought back. In the grand scheme of things, it was all a mess with no cohesive direction and Marvel noticed. In comes Matthew Rosenberg who, I admittedly, was very wary of because I hated both his time on Astonishing X-Men and the Multiple Man mini-series. I don’t know if it was all his idea, but he decided to wipe the slate clean with a new Uncanny X-Men series and… it was stupendous from start to finish.

In the aftermath of Emma Frost’s actions from the last issue, the X-Men that are still on our Earth have found a peace that Mutants have never known. With humanities knowledge of mutants erased, Scott Summers is at a loss and questioning what his role in life is now that no one needs protecting. He and Dani Moonstar, aka Mirage, wax poetic on the nature of mutations and what their next course of action is. Scott is morose, seeing as his mutation made him function primarily as a weapon to fight back against humanity as it tried to destroy him, but now that they don’t know he exists, what is he good for?

The dynamic between them is interesting. Scott has been fighting since he was a teenager and he’s only ever seen this life as one big war. Dani is still young, but has the experience of several lifetimes and all that she can think of is helping people. Both of them have experienced loss but process it differently. Scott sees all of his friends as soldiers in the fight where Dani sees them as family. Of course this is because Scott has been leading everyone for so long and Dani has gone through thick and thin with the New Mutants, the Fearless Defenders and the X-Men themselves.

This causes a disagreement between the two and she simply walks away from him as Alex Summers, aka Havok, speaks with his brother about the freedom of being ignored over being targeted. On their way back to the Hellfire Mansion, Alex explains that every bit of leadership he’s ever had to exhibit was learned from Scott. Even with all of his brooding, Scott has been a great leader and it definitely helped when Alex was an Avenger, and he lets his brother know that he’s thankful for it before they’re attacked by some kind of golden Sentinel.

Scott’s unable to damage it and Alex surmises that they’ll never make it back to the mansion before the Sentinel kills them both, so in an act of self sacrifice, knowing that his powers won’t affect Scott, he self destructs and destroys the evil machine. Soon after, more arrive under the control of the General that originally help Emma Frost captive and target the remaining mutants. The battle is hard fought with heavy casualties before the rest of the X-Men return from Nate Grey’s utopian world, winning the battle for mutantkind.

This is the final issue of Uncanny X-Men and it ends on a bittersweet note.

*Slight SPOILERS BELOW*

Havok, a man who was on top of the world, brought low and tried to climb his way back up made the ultimate sacrifice just so that his brother could continue being the leader he is. Madrox, who was just brought back to life has met yet another grisly end, but the status quo has reset though very similarly to the Astonishing X-Men or Mutopia eras in a way. Jean Grey has returned to Scott, Emma and Magneto appear to be on the side of angels again and the X-Men are choosing not to hide anymore.

Shifting focus from this amazingly written and fantastically drawn book, I want to look towards the future and the threads left untied. House of X begins next week and I don’t know how to make heads or tails of things. Who is the man with the giant globe on his head? Is it professor X who had recently taken over the body of Fantomex and is now known as X? Will Magneto ever make use of the Brotherhood he established late last year? What will happen to Illyana now that she’s a demon again? I don’t know, but I am very excited.

This run was great. Rosenberg wrote everything in the most dire way possible given the situation and it fit each and every month. Scott remained hopeful in the face of ever present adversity, flanked by Logan who back up almost all of his actions. Characterizations were great from Dani acting as a voice of reason and Hope being a militaristic badass and the surprisingly black humored Jamie. Larroca’s art never faltered in being action packed but also still and dark.

Whatever comes next from this team, I have high hopes for.

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

The “Superior” Spider-Man is actually starting to live up to the ideal.

Runner Up: The Superior Spider-Man #9 (Legacy #42) - Christos Gage, Mike Hawthorne, Wade von Grawbadger, Jordie Bellaire and Clayton Cowles

After the events of the War of the Realms, the Spider-Man of San Francisco is awarded the key to the city for his efforts in making sure that there were zero casualties as Frost Giants stomped their way across SanFran. He accepts the gesture, but “crime” calls him away, only it’s not a crime, he simply thinks he has better things to do with his time than deal with the trivialities of ceremonies. He heads back to his lab and converses with Anna Maria about her making him go to the ceremony and summarily dismisses his colleague Emma after she apologizes for freaking out on him on their first date.

Otto seems to be in a bigger huff than usual and takes his frustrations out on a minor villain by the name of Turner D. Century. Century’s quickly defeated after a savage beating by Otto and the surprise appearance by Spider-Man, Peter Parker. Peter shows up at the request of Anna Maria and being one of the men who knows Otto best, he simply asks what’s wrong. Otto has been irritable, moody and angry since he saved the city and he obviously has no one to talk to.

He immediately spills to Peter that while he was able to keep San Francisco safe, thousands of people still died in the US, more abroad. He removes his mask and Hawthorne paints the face of a man that’s tortured by guilt and doubt. Otto feels that he’s the greatest mind in the world and that he should have thought of something. He doesn’t want to hear Pete say that he can’t save everyone, but it’s eating him up inside that he can’t.

By far, this is some of the best character work and advancement that we’ve seen from Otto in a while. He tried to become a hero, tried to be a good guy while he was inhabiting Peter’s body, but now that he’s doing it on his own and seeing the fruits and consequences of his labors, he sees how hard it is. He’s becoming a good guy and I’m here for it.

After Peter tells him that he’s doing the hero thing right, Emma shows up on the roof that they’ve swung up to and Otto breaks down in tears in front of her. He tries to posture that he’s a loner and asks if he looks like someone that needs anything from anyone before being held by her. He cries in her arms and they finally go on a second date with a surprising enemy spying on them.

I love it when heroes become good guys, no matter how brief it might be, watching Otto rise before his inevitable fall is interesting. I love the fact that he’s sort of mended fences with Anna Maria, I love that he’s found a near intellectual equal in Emma. He has a life and is using his smarts as a teacher and a hero in San Francisco. His ego is still huge, but he’s finally starting to see his faults, becoming Superior than Doctor Octopus.

Mike Hawthorne’s art is stellar. He has a talent for faces and body language. Otto expresses frustration, annoyance and grief; not only in his face, but with the slumping of his shoulders, the shaking in his hands and the tension in his fists. He even somehow finds a way to differentiate between Peter and Otto's bodies given that Otto's is cloned.

This Superior Spider-Man has far more emotion in this one issue than Otto's had in the many years since the original run. It's a joy to see the once horrible villain embrace his own good emotions for the benefit of others. This is a definite high recommend!

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recentanimenews · 6 years ago

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THE GREAT CRUNCHYROLL NARUTO REWATCH Begins with Episodes 1-7!

*guitar*

*shadows*

COME ON!

Welcome to The Great Crunchyroll Naruto Rewatch! I'm Nate, and I'll be your host this week as we make our way through all 220 episodes of the original Naruto. Last week, I told you how all this worked, but everybody who's new I'll go over things one more time.

Each week, we'll be watching SEVEN EPISODES of the original Naruto, and sharing our thoughts on them interview-style every Friday at 5pm PST.

This week, we're starting things off with episodes 1-7, featuring an introduction to everyone's favorite super-loud orange ninja, the rest of our main cast, and this world of ninja that they inhabit. Things move pretty quickly--it's not long before Naruto's assigned to Team 7, they have their first real test against their teacher and commander Kakashi, and they face their first life-or-death fights against the Demon Brothers and Zabuza!

But, before we discuss these episodes, let's take a look at the comments and questions that you had from our last installment!

The number one question we got last week was a simple one: ARE WE GOING TO SKIP THE FILLER?

No. We are not skipping the filler.

You may skip the filler, but be sure to tune in to see our reactions to it... there's gonna be a lot down the road.

Now, let's see what the Crunchyroll Features team thought of this week's episodes!

Alright, this is where it all starts--I know a bunch of you are new to Naruto. How did actually watching it compare to your expectations?

Paul: Judging from my previous experiences with the fans, I was expecting Naruto (both the show and the titular character) to be a little more meat-headed and hyper-masculine. Instead, the show sets a laser focus on evoking sympathy with a protagonist who wants to be the best in the world simply so people will recognize him. I didn't anticipate such feelings of internalized inadequacy from the shouty, fighty shonen hero.

Peter: I’m rewatching and also decided to read the manga alongside. So far I’m really impressed by how strong Kishimoto’s aesthetic was from the outset. The environments and character designs are all unmistakeable and his action is like this perfect combination of piece-by-piece panels and splashes. I like the anime’s additions, especially some extra Naruto/Konohamaru scenes which drive home the difference in how they’re treated and an early Ino intro that sets up her rivalry with Sakura.

Kevin: I was one of the people watching the original Cartoon Network run of the show’s dub back somewhere around 2003 or 2004. Going back and rewatching, I forgot how much the early parts of the show focus on Naruto’s emotional struggle, first of not being accepted by anyone and just trying to get attention, then how he feels about his various failings as a ninja. As a result, the stakes aren’t as high, but it feels like a much more personal story.

Jared: I completely missed out on Naruto after dropping off anime around 2003, but going in I was more expecting it to follow a similar structure to other shonen shows I’ve seen. From the start, the opening episode completely shattered any expectations I had with how tight the entire episode was woven together with regards to its narrative, characterizations, and how much info it packed into 24 minutes. Outside of that, I think I’d missed out on knowing that Naruto can act like a brat early on in the series.

Joseph: I’m in an interesting position, because I watched maybe 40 episodes of this a decade ago and I’ve read around 50 volumes of the manga. I will say I was surprised at how nostalgic it felt to watch this compared to, say, Shippuden, which has a much different vibe. It’s also impressive how much groundwork is laid for the entire series via Kishimoto’s designs and world and the way the anime adapted it.

Carolyn: I was very surprised at how quickly they dove into Naruto’s backstory. I have seen the show many years ago and didn’t seem to remember that such a “big reveal” occurred so quickly. I… honestly find the story quite boring and hard to keep my attention focused on, I guess I’m just not super invested in the characters. However, I can absolutely see seeds of how this show has affected and inspired many that came after it. I hadn’t really noticed that when watching other anime, but going back and rewatching Naruto makes that pretty clear. Also, I am cracking up at the totally rad ‘80s Breakfast Club-esque opening sequence. I didn’t remember that music at all.

Noelle: Naruto was one of my first encounters with manga when I first really started getting into it, but it’s been a long time since I touched it. I read the whole thing, but I never reread it, so a lot of instances I completely forgot about. For example, I forgot how kind of gruesome it was at the start, focusing on serious injuries instead of just fantasy violence. At the same time, I’m impressed how strong the characters are established, along with themes such as kindness and proving yourself that will resonate throughout the entire series.

Kara: I was five years out of college when Naruto started, and I remember in the circles I ran in it was Not The Done Thing to be into it. I can’t remember if it was because it was considered a “casual’s anime” or if it was based on run-ins with cosplayers at conventions. Likely a little of both. Watching it has been a lot more chill than I expected, and while I see a lot of the tropes I figured I’d see, it looks like it’s leading somewhere interesting.

David: I basically grew up with Naruto, but I fell off of it in high school so it’s been more than a decade since the last time I actually watched an episode or read a chapter. Comparing it to my expectations, it’s much more focused than I recall--the first episode could stand alone as a very emotionally effective short story, for example. Kakashi is still the only side character who seems to have a lot of thought put into their long-term character arc, though.

Daniel: I like it, though Naruto has always kind of been a blind spot for me. I’ve seen a decent chunk of it, but it’s always kind of been background noise, something to have on so that when people ask me “Do you only watch One Piece?”, I can say “NUH UH. I ALSO WATCH THIS ONE ABOUT ANOTHER LOUD BOY.” That said, actually paying attention to it, it’s pretty fun. I dig Kishimoto’s world building, and the environment that he’s set up. I’m really interested in finally figuring out why so many people adopted this show as their gospel.

Danni W: I actually did watch the first dozen or so episodes of Naruto around six or seven years ago, so this was more of a refresher than anything. It never quite clicked with me the first time, so I was surprised to find I enjoyed it more this time around. I think it helped that the show gets real pretty immediately. We’re only seven episodes in and Naruto has already had to face real combat three separate times. The characters aren’t enough to hook me yet, so the early doses of action have made for a good on ramp for me.

I've always enjoyed how Naruto hangs on to its emotional core, and we see that very strongly in the first few episodes. What did you all think of this part of the story?

Paul: I'm not fully invested yet in the emotional stakes of the series, mostly because I don't really know the scope and scale of the world that Naruto inhabits. Why are these children being trained to be spies and assassins from such a young age? What dangers does the outside world present such that it prompts entire villages to weaponize their kids?

Peter: I feel like I never gave Iruka enough credit in retrospect, maybe because his act was the first in what later emerged as the series core. Without him, Naruto probably would have been another Gaara. I also never realized that Naruto is wearing Iruka’s headband the entire damn story. After Naruto’s hand stab I’m trying to remember if grand masculine gestures are regularly mocked as an inverse toward the important compassionate gestures, so I’m planning to track that moving forward.

Kevin: While I like seeing the cool techniques and fights from later in the show, going back to the beginning and seeing much more of a focus on each character’s internal conflicts is an interesting change, giving each of their actions a bit more personal weight. It’s not inherently better or worse, just a different focus on the same story.

Jared: It really seemed like a great way to start the series and let people know from the onset that this is a story that deals heavily with empathy. I figured eventually the series would go that route, but to do it immediately sets a tone that allows for these characters like Naruto to instantly have layers that otherwise might take a long time to see. With the show really bouncing between emotional moments and comedy pretty frequently, I’m curious whether it’ll continue that or try and lean more in one direction or the other.

Joseph: Naruto is the most three-dimensional character in these first episodes, mostly because we haven’t had much time to delve into the stories that drive Sakura and Sasuke. I think they do a great job of making Naruto sympathetic, which makes up for his brattiness. One other thing I appreciate is that they make it clear from the outset that being a ninja isn’t just cartoonishly huge shuriken fun and games. People die on the regular here, and Naruto and the rest of his upstart era would do well do remember that before taking the next steps.

Carolyn: Just let Naruto live! Everyone is so mean to the poor kid. Again, I was surprised at how quickly they jump into this and I have a feeling it is what kept me watching the first time around. They do a good job of making you feel empathy for Naruto even when he is being totally obnoxious.

Noelle: While I remember pretty vividly the general plot, I don’t remember a lot of the small moments that make up a scene. Naruto is set up really well, and I to this day really enjoy that he’s not just cast as a quirky problem child with no future, but someone who genuinely wants to be acknowledged, and acting out is the easiest way to get attention. Knowing how things end up, seeing everyone at the start and how they are introduced is a good refresher and sets up a lot later on. At its heart, this really is a story about teamwork, empathy, and growing up.

Kara: It’s been all right—some cute and funny bits, and I like what action scenes we’ve had. From a writing standpoint, it feels like (except for Naruto himself) everyone’s categorized largely by wanting to be the Hokage, wanting to kill someone, or having a crush on someone. But I can also see that we’re quickly moving forward from that. Being on the News team means educating myself fast about unfamiliar shows, and the wildest thing to me has been seeing Hinata in the background crushing on Naruto when I just recently posted an article about her wedding figure.

David: Iruka and Naruto’s relationship has to be my favorite single part from this section. Iruka is given every reason to not like or just give up on this kid, yet he sticks up for him the whole time (while also never letting him slack--no free pass on the exams for Naruto!). Kakashi is setting up to be a good role model, too, but I’ll definitely miss how intimate Iruka’s care for Naruto is.

Daniel: You can really sympathize with Naruto because he’s the “chosen one” character without being a prodigy. He isn’t impressive right out of the gate, but he has the potential to be impressive. I think you can relate to him easier than, say, Goku, who is ready to dropkick most of the world the first time you meet him. That feeling of being meant for bigger things, but still struggling to even get on the path to those bigger things is pretty powerful.

Danni: I think it’s showing some promise. I really appreciate the lengths it goes to explain why Naruto is a troublemaker in the first place. He can be pretty annoying, but the reasons for that are mostly justified. In the end, he’s a victim. I like that Sasuke can already see that and identify with him in that respect. They both have a lot of trauma to work though in the next *checks notes* few hundred episodes.

I know we're really early in, but have there been any standout moments or characters so far?

Paul: I know everybody else is probably going to go with Kakashi as the standout character, but also cool as Kakashi may be, my heart goes out to Akimichi Choji, the chubby ninja who is stuffing his face with potato chips in Episode 3. I also like the design of the oversized shurikens and other exaggerated weapons, and I dig the visual aesthetic of the Village Hidden in the Leaves.

Peter: This question is kind of hard to answer since I’m retracing old ground but I definitely did not recall Sakura being such a little shithead. Completely forgot her putting her foot in her mouth with Sasuke saying Naruto’s a troublemaker because he’s an orphan. Funnily enough, I think her hating Naruto for who he is rather than what he represents is a really important connection between the two.

Kevin: Naruto freezing up in his first real fight and then stabbing himself, swearing that he’ll never be a burden again was a scene that I feel is an exemplar of how the early story focuses more on Naruto’s emotional journey, rather than just trying to fight increasingly strong bad guys, but still has the kind of payoffs that the audience can rally behind.

Jared: Iruka is a good dude who really wants what’s best for Naruto, even if it means taking an oversized shuriken to the back. Naruto stabbing himself in episode 6 was an immediate “YO” moment from me. The entire atmosphere of the fight in the back half of episode 7 was incredibly good. I really hope that Konohamaru continues to show up with either worse and worse stealth or continuously better ways to try and fight Naruto.

Carolyn: Glad to see Shikamaru show up so early. Love him. As I mentioned before, I’m not sure I’m fully invested in these characters. I am quite disappointed in Sakura. I remember loving her when I was younger and she is not the strong female character I remembered. She’s kind of desperately boy-crazy. Which is fine! But it feels like it comes on strong and the first several episodes don’t give her many traits beyond that. She must grow throughout the series, or my memories were warped? Kakashi Sensei feels sooooo much like a Shoto Aizawa (My Hero Academia’s Eraserhead) prototype. The mystery, the aloof manner, but secretly a big softie that just wants his student to do well. Similarly, Naruto has a lot of traits that seem to overlap with Bakugo and Soul Eater’s Black Star. More evidence of the show’s reach. Sexy Jutsu has not aged well. Also, the ending theme song is beautiful.

Noelle: Kakashi’s great, and knowing that he’s pretty close to my age puts a lot of things into context now that I’m an adult. Kakashi’s got a lot on his plate with these three problem children under his wing, but he’s still a pretty laid back guy personality-wise. Someone who stood out to me more in my rewatch was Iruka. Iruka’s presence means so much to Naruto, being the father figure he never really had. If Iruka wasn’t kind to Naruto, and he really was the only person to treat Naruto like a kid and not just a monster container, this would’ve been a very different series. Naruto truly did need someone to be there for him, and seeing their relationship really does make my heart warm. Iruka’s a good guy!

Kara: I actually cannot believe how much I associate with Naruto, and 12-years-ago me would faint at hearing that. The absolute need to prove himself, the feeling that he’s sliding backwards the harder he works, all that is something I (and others, I’m sure) can relate to. Obviously he goes a little harder than most people would in his situation—seriously, if you’re wearing Safety Orange constantly, you’ve gotta think really highly of yourself as a ninja—but it’s really something to see how much of his attitude is couched in fear of failure.

Joseph: Kakashi’s kancho, obviously.

David: Konohamaru only gets his one episode here, but I actually thought his bit was the most emotionally effective. He largely has the same issues as Naruto but in reverse. Konohamaru isn’t necessarily "royalty" but treated as such, infantilizing him from his perspective. Even his name is a point of contention for him, putting a burden on his very existence that others can’t relate to. To these ends, he looks up to Naruto for being a free spirit, but as the viewers we understand that they are more similar than they know. Naruto is the main character--we see his troubles garnering respect and even love from his peers and mentors in these episodes--but Konohamaru grounds that conflict by mirroring it.

Daniel: In my high school band class in Freshman year, a kid asked the teacher to be referred to as “Sasuke.” He also had a ninja headband that he’d wear around some time, and while I thought it was goofy then, I think it’s ABSOLUTELY DOPE now. So, while I still figure out the characters, I’m gonna nominate broody ol’ Sasuke in honor of that kid.

Danni: Kakashi covers like 75% of his face with ninja gear and to show how badass he is fought one-handed while reading a book called Makeout Paradise. I want to be that cool someday.

The action escalated pretty quickly--we started with Team 7 having to take the bells from Kakashi for the first full-on action scene (even if it wasn't "for keeps"), and then we have to worry about Hidden Mist assassins and our first real villain, Zabuza. Any thoughts on the action?

Paul: I like all of the action that I've seen so far, but the resolution to Kakashi's test wasn't dramatically satisfying for me. The payoff didn't match the build-up. I wanted to see Team 7 put up more of a show of resistance than simply refusing to obey Kakashi's instructions not to feed Naruto. The scene plays more like everyone being recalcitrant teenagers and less like anyone taking a principled stand.

Peter: I can’t believe the action is so sick even this early on. I always thought of Sasuke’s style as the most orthodox and the intricacy of some of his combos and the shots are so damn satisfying to look. Kishimoto made it super easy for the animators to make some stylish shots and they ran with it. The series is already building its vocabulary with a Sasuke attack that obviously builds into the Lion Combo and some underground shenanigans.

Kevin: I feel like this is the show’s action at its weakest. None of the Genin know how to fight yet, so once the actually dangerous fighting begins, they’re relegated to standing around watching Kakashi and Zabuza fight, and even that hasn’t gotten to the more impressive techniques. It’s not bad since at least there is still a fight between two experienced combatants to watch, it’s just weaker than what the show delivers on later when the protagonist and major characters are experienced enough to contribute.

Jared: I was surprised how subdued the action had felt before Team 7 took on Kakashi with there being pretty minimal fight scenes until that point. Kakashi messing around with Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura gave a good baseline of the complete difference in skill between all of them, but it wasn’t until Zabuza and his ridiculous cow print sleeves showed up that we truly get a sense of how much of a gap there is between Kakashi and Team 7. The beginnings of that fight truly gave the feeling of their being stakes involved which had been missing elsewhere.

Carolyn: Again, surprised at how quickly the show turns on a dime. They can go from goofy to serious in a heartbeat and it is very reminiscent of how things often progress on My Hero Academia. But I still find it hard to really get into the peril. I’m not sure why, exactly, I’m not very invested in the characters, but it’s early. I’m sure that will change.

Noelle: Since this series came out where it did, Jump was still very much comfortable with keeping pacing slow. As a result, the fights are a lot slower than what I’m used to, even if that was the norm back then. At the same time, the action itself isn’t bad--it’s pretty clever, and introduces the rules of the world in a way that anyone can pick up with ease.

Kara: I have a feeling a lot of my appreciation for the fighting will come as I start learning the different abilities in play. There have definitely been some cool moves, but I think we’re still in that exposition phase where we’re learning the types of things ninjas can do (and what our main cast’s strong and weak points are). A couple weeks from now when I’ve seen more of how this universe operates, I’ll probably be all in.

David: Sure, the action isn’t flashy, but the Kakashi training fight was much better than I remember it being for two reasons. One, it’s just funny. Kakashi doesn’t do anything truly harsh to the kids (well, aside from starve them, but that’s part of the plan), and what little physical combat he does with them is either light or just plain comedic. Two, it serves as a small show-don’t-tell of the show’s combat mechanics. For example, he calls out at the beginning that he’s going to use taijutsu, leading to his infamous kancho when he could have done a million other things; Sakura even believes he is using a more fancy technique before it happens. From there more involved strategies are used and by the end we have a basic primer of Naruto combat simultaneously serving as a team-building exercise for our heroes. Very efficient storytelling.

Joseph: The action is really clear and well-handled in these early episodes. I’m not sure how it gets later on, but I know in the manga I found some of Kishimoto’s action layouts much harder to follow than they should be. His designs and the intention behind his action translate nicely to animation, thankfully. Naruto is also really good at suddenly showing just how powerful a character really is within action, which is a total must-have shonen staple.

Danni: It’s not very flashy so far, but it is pretty tense. The high-level combat so far seems to entirely be a contest of clones and substitutions. The substitution jutsu seems way too broken. That being said, it’s a pretty cool technique. I hope we get to start seeing some good hand-to-hand soon.

For this batch of episodes, what were the highest and lowest points, respectively?

Paul: High point: Naruto getting caught in Kakashi's rope trap, grumbling about not getting tricked again while he frees himself, and then immediately getting caught in another rope trap. I love those kind of gags. Low point: ninja diarrhea.

Peter: In both cases probably the information reveals. Purely narratively speaking, a lot of the info that comes at the characters feels like common knowledge in retrospect. Kakashi is famous for having the Sharingan, how the village and mission systems work, and Sakura not knowing about her crush’s family being murdered seem like they should things the kids know. On the other hand, I’m super impressed with how much of a foundation Sasuke and Kakashi’s backstory have so early on and foreshadowing for both.

Kevin: The lowest point for me was the repeated use of the “Sexy Jutsu.” Once made sense to show Naruto as a troublemaker who could invent new techniques if he tried, and the Harem Jutsu showed that he can be creative and combine techniques for new tactics, but the other 2-3 times just feel like a joke being overplayed. The best moment was the fight against the Hidden Mist Chunin, since each of the kids’ personalities show through clearly. Sakura is terrified but keeps to her main duty, Sasuke starts retaliating to get rid of the threat, and Naruto freezes in place and needs to be saved, leading to an excellent emotional payoff when the fight is over.

Jared: The high points for me were Kakashi vs. Zabuza, Naruto’s hand stab, and Sakura and Ino’s incredibly ridiculous power walk competition in episode 3. Sexy Jutsu really beats you over the head with how many times they use that gag and Naruto’s stomach issues from episode 3 were just strange, so those would be my low points.

Carolyn: The music is a definite high! The emotional moments and humanizing of Naruto is nice to see. Using ninja skills to save a lost cat is completely adorable and feels like something All Might would do. Did the My Hero peeps grow up on Naruto? It feels like it. I also like how positive Naruto is in the face of adversity. He can make any situation a positive one. Laughing at the clunky exposition, “It’s going to take someone who is highly skilled.” Low point, again, definitely Sexy Jutsu (and teaching Sexy Jutsu to a little kid, WTF, these were different times) and Sakura’s desperate crush.

Noelle: Sexy Jutsu got old really fast. It was interesting to see Naruto expand it, as that showed he was learning, but aside from that, it’s an overdone gag. Glad they cut down on it. For good points, the Zabuza fight for sure, and each one of the kids standing up for themselves in the face of danger. And of course, Naruto stabbing himself in the hand to show his resolve!

Kara: Low point was absolutely the diarrhea episode—add to that the weird middle school comedy of errors surrounding it. I only had so much tolerance for Sakura’s crush and Naruto’s willingness to either mess with or take advantage of it. High point for me was Konohamaru’s desire to be called by his name and not his function or association. It was such a goofy little episode, but something really resonated for me about being willing to go to ridiculous lengths just to be recognized for who he is.

David: The bizarre ‘love triangle’ dynamic as a whole is the low point--this is notably represented well in the “diarrhea episode,” but comes across everywhere else too in how obviously undercooked Sasuke and Sakura’s characters are at this point. On the other hand, the high point is how obviously fully developed Kakashi is despite us knowing so little about him at this point. Unlike the rest of the side characters, there is clearly a lot going on in both what we see him doing here and what is implied to be happening in his background, and that’s as exciting a hook as it was when I was in middle school.

Joseph: The gags are hit or miss, but mostly decent. For me, the low point is any time an information dump rears its head. Zabuza standing on top of his sword for an eternity while he and Kakashi trade off exposition about the Sharingan is sloppy. I dig most everything else, and the high point is how the story handles this early-stage version of Naruto. He is just straight up a bad ninja, and it shows. He’s loud, brash, and obnoxious in an all orange jumpsuit. He’s the anti-ninja. Best of all, he’s terrified, and he totally should be.

Daniel: I really like the show’s tone, usually. But the high point and low point were within five seconds of one another. In the first episode, it’s so rad when Naruto finally reveals his Shadow Clone Jutsu against Mizuki. And then they all beat up Mizuki, and you get these “BONK BOOP SCHWWWWOOOP” sound effects, which takes all of the power of the scene and kicks it out the door.

Danni: For me, the highest point of this batch was in the first episode when Naruto overhears Iruka defending him against Mizuki. That’s a potentially life-changing moment for Naruto, finally learning why so many in the village hate him. Had it been anyone but Iruka who had found Naruto, he likely would’ve ended up turning against the entire village in anger. It’s a touching moment of understanding not just between teacher and student, but also between a pair of orphans linked by the same tragic event.

The lowest point is anytime I‘m reminded the sexy jutsu exists.

COUNTERS

Ramen consumed so far: 2 bowls, 1 cup

"I'm gonna be Hokage!" count: 8

Number of Shadow Clones summoned: 46

And that's everything for this week! Remember that you're always welcome to join us for this rewatch, especially if you haven't watched the original Naruto!

Here's our upcoming schedule!

-Next week, on JANUARY 25th, we'll be discussing EPISODES 8-14, hosted by KARA DENNISON! The mission in the Land of Waves continues! THIS IS THE ONLY INSTALLMENT WE'RE ACCEPTING QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS FOR THIS WEEK!

-Then, on FEBRUARY 1st, we discuss EPISODES 15-21, with KEVIN MATYI hosting! Not only do we start the Chunin Exam arc, but we get our first FILLER EPISODE!

-On FEBRUARY 8th,we'll discuss EPISODES 22-28, with JARED CLEMONS as host! The Chunin Exam kicks into high gear!

Thank you for joining us for the Great Crunchyroll Naruto Rewatch! Have a great weekend, and we'll see you all next time!

Have any comments or questions about episodes 1-7? What about our upcoming installment, featuring episodes 8-14?

-----

Nate Ming is the Features Editor for Crunchyroll News and creator of the long-running Fanart Friday column. You can follow him on Twitter at @NateMing. Check out his comic, Shaw City Strikers!

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to a special edition of FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. Today, we’re partnering with The Weekly Standard to explore a question that everyone seems to have an opinion on: To what extent does the Republican Party now belong to President Trump?

micah: This being a special chat and all, let’s just start with quick introductions!!!!

Mike and David, can you briefly introduce yourselves to FiveThirtyEight readers?

Nate and Julia, can you briefly introduce yourselves to Weekly Standard readers?

(Just ~1-2 sentences … we don’t need your whole life story, Nate.)

natesilver: My name is Nate Silver and I’m editor in chief of five-thirty-eight-dot-com

I was born in 1978 in Lansing, Michigan …

julia_azari: Hello! I am a political science professor at Marquette University. I study the president-party relationship and presidential communication. I am a contributor to FiveThirtyEight. I prefer the title “hired nerd,” but that’s not official.

David_Byler: Sure! I’m chief elections analyst at The Weekly Standard. Basically I cover elections from a quantitative/data-driven angle — it’s similar to a lot of the stuff you see at FiveThirtyEight.

Mike_Warren: Hi, everyone. I’m Mike Warren, and I’m a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. I cover the White House, politics, national security and everything in between.

micah:

(Oh, and I’m FiveThirtyEight’s managing editor.)

OK, now to the meat of things. We’ll break this down into two main parts:

Why are so many people obsessed with asking whether it’s Trump’s party? (I don’t remember people asking this about Democrats when Barack Obama was president.)

How do we tell if it’s Trump’s party? What voters think? What Congress does? What elected Republicans say? Something else?

First, thoughts on No. 1?

David_Byler: People ask because Trump is, in substance and style, pretty different from past Republicans.

Mike_Warren: Well, doesn’t the fact that people keep asking if it’s Trump’s party suggest that … it’s not?

Or, at the very least, it’s still an open question.

julia_azari: That point is really interesting, but it’s also possible that this question is raised because Trump was so lacking in elite support. Obama wasn’t lacking that support going into the nomination.

natesilver: I mean … Trump is the most unconventional presidential candidate to have won in many years — probably ever under the current, two-party system. And one of the ways he was unconventional was by somewhat proudly and blatantly violating the taboos of the Republican Party, such as by criticizing their past presidents and nominees. He also had much, much less support from Republican “party elites” than nominees typically do, as Julia said. So it’s natural to ask how all of that is playing out two years into his presidency.

julia_azari: The “whose party is it” question was also primed by debates that started when George W. Bush was president and continued with the rise of the tea party.

micah: So everyone thinks it’s a fair question?

Mike_Warren: It’s a weird thing, though, because usually it’s a moot question: OF COURSE the leader of the party is its presidential nominee/president. But Trump’s was a hostile takeover.

micah: Yeah, I have sorta two reactions to this question overall:

“This is a silly question that only elites ask — of course it’s Trump’s party.”

“Good question.”

julia_azari: In political science, we have a concept called a “factional candidate” — a candidate who is very popular with one segment of the party and sometimes wins the nomination if the other candidates get in one another’s way. Trump did consolidate the party to some degree in 2016, so that may not be an accurate characterization. But he sure looked that way in the spring and early summer of 2016.

natesilver: Are “how much is Trump a Republican?” and “how much are Republicans Trump’s party?” two versions of the same question?

julia_azari: So, again, coming from the poli-sci perspective, I also think Trump makes the question interesting to ask, but it’s under-asked. There’s a lot going on in the party that’s not the president.

Mike_Warren: Ultimately, people are asking the question because they don’t know the answer. Trump’s hold on the party still feels temporary, even if he ends up changing it in important ways.

David_Byler: Right. Mike said what I was trying to say, but in a better way.

Mike_Warren: Yes, I agree with me.

micah: Haha.

Now the hard part …

How do we answer the question?

Opening bids?

David, wanna start us off?

David_Byler: So my approach would probably be to break the GOP down into parts and see how much Trump “owns” each part.

micah: Give us the parts.

David_Byler: The electorate.

Elected officials.

Sort of the intellectual parts of the party. (I’m thinking think tanks and such.)

We could include media, too, though I think sometimes the lines between conservative media and the sort of think tank-y parts can get blurry.

Mike_Warren: So when we say the electorate (to take that to start), we’re talking about the people who vote in Republican primaries and for Republicans in the general election, right?

David_Byler: Yeah that’s what I was thinking — basically the voters.

Mike_Warren: That seems to be where Trump is strongest, in my view, in terms of his ownership.

David_Byler: This is the data point that gets tossed around the most, right? Trump’s job approval rating among Republicans? It’s typically near 85-90 percent.

natesilver: Trump was less of a departure for GOP voters than for other parts of the party.

Mike_Warren: That’s a great point, Nate.

David_Byler: Agreed

julia_azari: My read on this is that Trump’s support among GOP voters is both powerful, in that it shapes the incentives for members of Congress and activists, and potentially flimsy, because it’s not clear how deep it goes.

Mike_Warren: The issues that motivated GOP voters over the past decade or so are: immigration, out-of-touch elites in Washington, a broad sense that the U.S. “as we know it” is going away. Just spend time on the trail and you’d learn that.

natesilver: I think one thing people like me got wrong in 2015/early 2016 was in overestimating the importance of policy to the electorate … policy as opposed to what you might call identity.

micah: Or “culture.”

Mike_Warren: Allow me to deploy my favorite bon mot, from George Will:

He once said that parties “organize our animosities.”

Which is undoubtedly true, and Trump kind of elevates the subtext of that truth to the text.

natesilver: That’s pretty good.

micah: To go back to what extent Trump owns the Republican voters, though, has he also changed who identifies as a GOP voter?

David’s right that Trump’s approval rating is sky-high among Republicans. And Trump owns those Republicans.

But are they not totally the same Republicans?

David_Byler: That’s a fair point — asking whether Trump owns, say, the 2014 version of the GOP is a little different than asking if he owns the 2018 version.

Mike_Warren: This gets to a chicken-or-egg question. Non-college-educated whites have been a growing part of the GOP coalition for years, and Trump saw that and sort of accelerated it.

College-educated whites are falling away from the party rapidly.

Did Trump build this new party? Or just recognize that’s what the party is now? Probably a bit of both.

natesilver: Yeah, there’s the issue of party identity being fluid. If you’re a #NeverTrump Republican, then at some point, do you stop identifying as a Republican? That probably slightly exaggerates Trump’s intraparty approval, although from the research I’ve seen, the effect is fairly minor.

Mike_Warren: I’d say the bigger problem for a Trumpy GOP is not #NeverTrump, which is small in numbers and concentrated in the media, but the loss of the suburban whites, who have mixed education (some college, some not) and have been the backbone of the Republican Party.

julia_azari: I’m still not sure that it’s a new party in this regard. I was just talking to a political scientist who has done research showing that the college/non-college gap between Democrats and Republicans is really pronounced among high-income voters. Working-class voters are still pretty heavily Democratic, he said. (I haven’t independently looked at this data.)

Mike_Warren: Look at what happened in the special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District last year or in Pennsylvania’s 18th District this year — suburban districts where the GOP vote dropped off significantly. Service-sector industries, not manufacturing/blue-collar.

natesilver: Counties that were high-income but with lower education levels were pretty good for Trump, whereas middle-income but high-education counties were quite bad for him.

julia_azari: Right, Nate, I think this is the same thing my colleague was saying — he was looking at individual level data that told the same story.

Mike_Warren: That suggests the cultural component is the most important.

julia_azari: I have a question about #NeverTrump Republicans. Do you all have a sense that this group is primarily motivated by policy (immigration, trade) or by Trump’s political style?

Because the former would seem like a much stronger candidate for durable partisan ID change. If it’s a style thing, then perhaps the alienation is more likely to be temporary.

micah: I think it’s mostly style?

David_Byler: Yeah, I tend to think that among voters, it’s style and that among GOP politicians and intellectuals, it’s both style and policy.

julia_azari: Can I throw out something about Trump approval among Republicans? It’s about identity and ego protection.

I think Democrats would do the same thing: Someone wins your party’s nomination, he or she becomes the face of your party, you don’t much like them, but it’s your identity and you need to reconcile that.

Mike_Warren: Yes. That seems right, Julia.

David_Byler: The only other thing I’d throw out there about Trump approval and the electorate is that a lot of people who approve of Trump feel pretty mild about it — they’re in the somewhat approve category.

But I don’t think these qualifications really change the answer — that when it comes to the electorate, Trump can fairly be said to “own” the GOP.

natesilver: That’s an interesting point, David. Trump actually doesn’t have particularly high “strong” approval numbers. There are a lot of voters with lukewarm feelings toward him. And some sort of loyalty to the Republican Party was important in getting them to get out to vote in 2016.

Mike_Warren: Yes. Organized animosity toward Hillary Clinton, more than love of Trump. At least in November 2016.

micah: So, it seems like the consensus on voters is this: “Yes, Trump owns the GOP. There are a couple of caveats — maybe it’s a slightly different GOP than 2014, maybe that grip isn’t ironclad — but this one isn’t that hard to answer.”

OK, next!

Does Trump own the Republican Party’s elected-officials wing?

David_Byler: The answer to this one is complicated because the ownership sort of seems to run both ways. Like, you see GOP politicians generally voting for stuff that Trump proposes. And you see a lot of loyalty in public statements and such. But what you also see is Trump proposing and passing a lot of stuff that’s more conventionally GOP-ish than people might have expected from the campaign.

julia_azari: Part of the answer is that there was an expectation that fewer elected officials would go along with Trump on stuff given the elite reaction to him during the election — in both the primary and, like, after the “Access Hollywood” tape.

I also think it’s pretty important that a lot of the prominent people to push back are either retiring (Jeff Flake) or not elected officials, like George Will (media) or Steve Schmidt (I am not sure where he fits in our schema).

Mike_Warren: I’d submit three articles from my colleague John McCormack for us to answer this question.

First, Sen. Lindsey Graham is now a neo-Trumper.

Second, Sen. Marco Rubio is now a nationalist.

And in the recent Wisconsin GOP primary for Senate, the candidates were just trying to out-Trump each other and had no real policy differences.

It’s been a slow but steady march toward embracing Trump and, in some cases, Trumpism by electeds. There’s been more resistance in the Senate and much more resistance from governors. But politicians seem to be recognizing where their party is now, in ways that Trump had a better sense of in 2016 than they did.

David_Byler: That’s fair — a lot of primary candidates try to basically out-Trump each other.

julia_azari: Depending on how many of these new candidates are successful, this seems like it could be a longer-term effect than superficial shifts in the electorate.

David_Byler: But I’d also note that a lot of the major legislative stuff that’s either been attempted or passed has been more conventionally GOP-ish — suggesting that Trump has been influenced by the party.

Take the Obamacare repeal bill that the House passed (the American Health Care Act), the tax reform legislation that became law, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

I don’t think those are necessarily the “Trump-iest” things when we think about how Trump differs from previous iterations of the party.

natesilver: How much of that will change if Republicans have a bad midterm? Especially for officials up for re-election in 2020 in swing states who have to worry about the general election as well as the primary?

Mike_Warren: If it’s a blowout against the GOP, Nate, you have to expect a retreat from Trump. What he’s been offering them, as David points out, is a bargain. “I have the power to do what you want, so support me so I can do what I want.” If the power’s diminished or gone, politicians will recalibrate accordingly. But it may not be a blowout!

julia_azari: I want to answer Nate’s question in a roundabout way: Trump may or may not have changed the Republican Party, but he’s definitely kept anyone else from changing it.

Parties are always changing, so a lot of influence is actually blocking what others are trying to do to change the party. Presidents who have bad midterms — Ronald Reagan in 1982 and George W. Bush in 2006 — still influence their parties. But maybe not as much as if a bunch of candidates like them had entered Congress and stayed for 40 years.

Mike_Warren: There’s an issue with the electorate, too: If 2018 shows a big enough shift away from the GOP by those suburban white voters the party has relied on for decades (or if they stay home), that’s a significant part of the party that politicians with long-term interests can’t just ignore.

julia_azari: Bill Clinton is a good example of this: If a bunch of DLC Democrats had been elected in 1994 instead of Republicans, then we’d say he transformed the Democratic Party. But it was still a party influenced by his ideas for many years and I’d argue still today, even if it’s no longer “Bill Clinton’s party.”

Mike_Warren: Lots of potential parallels between Trump and Clinton.

julia_azari: Ha!

I mean, I think that’s a serious point too. But I can’t resist a good snark. Especially a good bipartisan snark.

I think that parallel also works for impeachment threats.

Mike_Warren: If the ’18 class of Democrats in the House go overboard, that could be enough to consolidate Trump’s support for 2020 among Republican leaners who can’t stand the guy but don’t like all this “abolish ICE” talk and kneeling for the anthem, etc.

I’d say that GOP overreach in 1995 and 1996 helped Clinton in 1996 in a similar way.

natesilver: Ordinarily, you’d think the party would mostly stick with Trump through 2020 just because lots of parties have bad midterms, there isn’t an obvious alternative, and having a primary fight is usually really damaging when you’re trying to get re-elected. But, I don’t know … at a minimum, the Mueller investigation could require Republicans to actively start thinking about whether sticking with Trump is the best move for them, instead of just doing that as a default.

Mike_Warren: Yup. Mueller is big question mark in all of this.

julia_azari: Yeah. I could see impeachment being a mess politically for Republicans OR for Democrats, depending on public perceptions of its legitimacy. #promoformyrecentpiece

Mike_Warren: We tend to underestimate the effect of having one credible GOP politician challenge Trump in a primary.

Even if Trump wins handily (which I think he would), it would suggest there’s more to the GOP than Trump, and it would open the floodgates for a lot of criticism that elected Republicans have that they say privately but not publicly.

David_Byler: Right.

micah: I’m having trouble tying a bow on this section — is the consensus that Trump owns elected Republicans in terms of politics/rhetoric/deference but that the ownership runs both ways on policy?

julia_azari: Yup, I agree with that.

I think that’s fair.

David_Byler: Yeah.

And I think that matters for what the party does post-Trump and what it looks like then.

But that might be a whole different can of worms.

natesilver: Another big post-midterm contingency is whether Trump decides that maybe he wants to be a centrist after all.

I know a lot of people discount that, but I don’t think he has strong ideological moorings, other than on a few issues like immigration.

David_Byler: If that happened, I think that’d help us answer this question more thoroughly. Whether Trump could get Republican politicians to really bend on policy instead of passing the sort of stuff they probably would have tried under President Rubio or something.

Mike_Warren: There were hints to this last year, Nate, which I wrote about.

julia_azari: I think that’s true, but Trump also seems to provoke a strong reaction (two decades of political science education for this observation). That seems to keep moving him away from moderation.

micah: I just feel like no one would let that happen, Nate — not Democrats, not Republicans, not members of Trump’s own administration.

Anywho …

Final section of the GOP: Does Trump own the Republican Party, smarty-pants wing?

I.e., the intellectual conservative movement.

David_Byler: This is where Trump gets the most resistance.

micah: Yeah.

This one is a clear “no,” right?

julia_azari: Yup.

David_Byler: And I think it’s easy to discount this part of the party as unimportant because it’s basically a non-existent slice of the electorate. But I would say that policy doesn’t spring up from the electorate fully written and that some of these people are still going to be (at least trying) to influence policy after Trump is gone.

Mike_Warren: It’s not as if Trump doesn’t have a foothold in this “wing,” though. Particularly on the media side.

But on the policy side of things especially, this is one area where it’s the Republican Party (or in this case, Conservative Inc.) owning Trump.

There are a LOT of Koch policy world folks in the administration and even the White House.

The more hawkish Trump decisions in areas like Afghanistan and Syria are what tick off the Steve Bannon true-believer types, because of the supposed nefarious influence of the neocons in the National Security Council.

natesilver: I seem to remember a lot of predictions from liberals that the intellectual wing of the Republican Party would become more Trumpish after the election. And to a large extent, I think that hasn’t happened. (On the other hand, as David points out, the intellectual wing isn’t very large.) Still, I’m curious to see what this looks like in 2020 once there’s a Democratic opponent to demonize.

Mike_Warren: And the judicial appointments, Trump’s most successful area, were basically farmed out to a group of really serious, dedicated legal folks who forced the “list” on Trump and won.

David_Byler: I think the longer Trump sticks around, the more the intellectual wing of the GOP will come around.

micah: That’s interesting.

I think of that group as pretty conviction-driven?

David_Byler: Yeah, I think so. I guess I would want to be a little more specific.

Mike_Warren: But also donor-driven, which is a reality, not a criticism.

micah: True, Mike.

David_Byler: Yeah, I think there are huge parts of the intellectual wing of the GOP that just won’t come around to Trump because of ideology. But there are also gradations here (i.e., people who really don’t like Trump but are willing to work on stuff they care about) and people who would get worn down over the course of four to eight years of Trump in the White House. But I could be tooootally wrong about that.

micah: OK, so let’s close here with some final thoughts. To summarize, it seems like we think the answer to “Does Trump own the Republican Party?” is, in three parts:

On voters: “Yes” — Trump has near total buy-in from GOP voters. But that’s partly a circular statement, and that buy-in isn’t unconditional.

On elected officials: “Kinda yes” — he does politically and rhetorically, but not as much on policy.

On the conservative movement intellectually: “No” — there’s a possibility that could change, though.

Is that about right and any other final thoughts?

natesilver: That sounds about right to me.

David_Byler: I think that’s right, Micah.

julia_azari: When I look at our different parts of the party, what we see is not clearly ideological factions but ones that are determined by role and position. The intellectual wing is not accountable to voters in the same way lawmakers are. My second big thought, which is kinda related, is that style differences seem to be almost as important as policy differences when we think about the party’s reaction to Trump.

Mike_Warren: My final thought: All of this is subject to change given the circumstances — an economic downturn, something damning or exonerating of Trump from Mueller, or an international crisis. All presidents have a temporary hold on their party, but Trump’s seems the most tenuous and would change dramatically in those kind of circumstances.

natesilver: Yeah, I sometimes feel like we’re in that painting where we’re concerned about the medium-sized wave in front of us and not the gigantic wave that is formulating in back of us.

micah: Wait, what’s the gigantic wave?

natesilver: What Mike was talking about — Mueller, the economy, war, terrorist attacks — the known unknowns. And the midterm is also a known unknown.

David_Byler: True — maybe presidents only ever rent their parties.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

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oakmd · 7 years ago

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Congratulations ! You received 1,000+ followers !

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Well, I can’t really express anything but amazement at such an accomplishment, and to be honest I’m pretty blown away that so many of you have stuck with me since the beginning of this blog, and that so many of you enjoy Professor Oak enough to stay. I’ll forever stand by the fact that this blog was the best 'joke’ I ever made, and probably one of the most fulfilling things I’ve actively kept at.

As much as I hope this blog has helped you find comfort and laughter, RPing Professor Oak has definitely changed me for the better, as well. It has given me an outlet to heal parts of myself and provide help to others, and also pushed me to practice positivity even when I know I get so low sometimes that I don’t even want to try. Another bonus is that I have met wonderful people here, most of you just strictly friends on the dash, but I’ve also gained relationships with people that have extended into discord and I’m sure it has made all the difference this past year and a half.

As usual, I’m not really a fan of long-winded gushes of emotion, so I’ll keep it short, but I would really like to have it be known that my love for Professor Oak has grown tremendously, in ways I would have never reached without taking the time to thoughtfully craft his backstory and work to develop him further. I know he’s a very nostalgic character that so many of us know and respect that I’m always very careful of how I choose to build on the image without ruining what’s already there. Out of all my many muses here, this one has seemingly ( and surprisingly ) all at once snuck its way as my primary blog; the blog I always look forward to logging into the most, where I enjoy following your activity whether it be IC or OOC, and just generally enjoy being in the presence of people so passionate about a fandom associated with my childhood. I love this little corner of a community that has welcomed me and engaged with me and unknowingly kept me going, and to look back at my experience and see that I’ve had no trouble at all makes me feel really lucky.

There will never be a way to fully and accurately express my thanks, but I will say it anyway: thank you so much, and I hope that no matter where you go, and no matter what you do, you are trying to be your best, and that you’re happy. Professor Oak will always be there to congratulate you when you reach your dreams.

IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER ( because my mind is so scattered - ) special shout outs to special people:

@timecapscle - wasn’t it you that said i’d one day get 1,000 followers? : ) you’ve literally supported me since the beginning and i just wanna say that i appreciate your enthusiasm for professor oak as much as i appreciate your enthusiasm for bill. its wonderful to see someone represent an otherwise under represented character and you do it well. i care for you so much, and wish nothing but good things for your future even if you want to do bad things in the name of science

@diligentseeker / @evolutionexpert - someone i consider a cherished friend, despite how sporadic our interaction seems, i appreciate all our random long talks on discord, and i’ll never forget our very first conversation. it meant a lot to me, and i want to thank you. i dont meet a lot of ppl that i feel ‘get’ me on some unspoken level, so when it happens, its a nice surprise. anyway i won’t ramble because i take it you’re not one for praise, but im glad people like you exist. with that being said please stop making professor elm stress me out.

@undinaes - the moment you’ve been waiting for. SIKE! just kidding; its no surprise that you’re always filling my dash with testimonials from people that see you for what you are. you’re a beam of sunshine with all the qualities to match; warm, bright, and a natural source of energy that brings people together. your passion for writing is astounding and even when ppl dont deserve your kindness, you’re unbiased in giving it out. truly a mom through and through. but most importantly, ur my girlie and im glad we met :v

@ofpalletown - in my mind, you are practically ash, and ill be here to support you even during all your moments of Extra™ ... but aside from that you’re very loyal to your friends and full of something sunny that i can’t describe. ur gonna be okay, kid. so pls stop stressing out ur dear prof oak

@03redd - i probably mentioned not long ago that your blog is really good, but ill say it again in case you weren’t listening. i love your blog? its very fun to follow, and i think you’re one of my favorite reds. even with me not being game verse, its so easy to just immerse myself in whatever nonsense you have red drag professor oak into. i dig your creative energy.

@normaliium - and ofc i cant leave out my cousin. the one to be admired, the ever-successful, brilliant human being that loves me even when i take off ten years of your life each night. my life would lack such substance without you, and i will never forget all you’ve done to help me when i would otherwise be left to myself. you make me really proud to know you, you really do, and everyone i ever talk to you about can attest to that. #YOLO

@bossgiovanni - you haven’t been active in forever, but you remain one of my friends and that’s all that matters. from skype to discord, im glad we could stick together even with our blatant differences in opinion. you are always so nice to me and say the kindest things, and i just wanna say thanks. hope youve been doing well! you are capable of so much, and i believe in you, so don’t forget that.

@agentmansley - can i jsut say thank you for staying true to your muse and throwing even the purest of characters into your mess? i have loved your blog long before i made professor oak, and you’re seriously one of the funnest people i’ve rp’d with here. everything i’ve written with you is refreshing and new, and never fails to make me laugh. thank you for your love for kent, and also for writing with me. i know you’ve been MIA for a while, but you’re definitely a memorable person.

@tcssaiga - i dont have a lot of cross-fandom interactions so when they happen im usually pleased. you’ve got great characterization, and have perfect dialogue. i never watched a whole lot of inuyasha but i’ve atched enough to know that you’re pretty close to canon. thanks for the interactions even if you’re mean to prof oak on archer ; (

@askgarymfoak - MY LITTLE ACORN!!!! the dedication you have for gary honestly gives me so much life, and i love rping with you on discord and just yelling about sam / gary hcs. its always a highlight of my day and i can tell you’ve thought about gary and his life long and hard, and its so cool to see someone interested in all that makes him the Headache we all recognize and love. please never stop sharing with me the personal hcs you have for the boy, i always want to hear them.

@futureheld - we don’t even rp with each other on this muse BUT youre one of my longest tumblr rp friends that i still talk to and you’re really important to me. we have history, we go back!!!! okay? #FRIENDSHIP n all that. but tbh id follow you on any muse because your writing is just great? id write any weird crossover with you because you have a talent for making it work seamlessly anyway. thanks 4 the memories, loser.

@seviiserver - CELIO!!! we dont talk as much as we used to, or rather, we talk in bursts every now and then but i consider you one of my good friends! not only are u really talented in all things artistic, but i love your writing and it’s always enjoyable to read, even if its not one of our threads together. you made me have so much adoration for celio and like all the other ppl ive met who bring life to underrated / under-rp’d muses, i enjoy seeing everything you pour into him... AND ALSO I LOVE OUR OAK / ROWAN INTERACTIONS? i love them so much it hurts okay. even if its just silliness in discord it brightens my day. anyway perhaps one day we will cross paths in this sleepless city and i will finally teach u how to ride a bike.

@rottenrhythms - i know i dont have much to say or comment with whenever you message me on discord, but i admire how much detail you put into your characters and meta. im always impressed with all the work and thought you put into your world-building; i wish i had that much drive. also, you’ve made a lot of improvement with yourself from the time i first started talking to you on skype. be proud of your progress, and keep working at it, it’s worth it in the long run!

@lack--two NATE youre definitely a very sweet person, and perhaps a little more devious ooc than i’d imagined you would be ( at least to me, why must you poke me for reactions? ; ( u wound me ) but you’re a soothing presence to be around and im glad you were finally able to make discord work. bonus points for letting me yell about yugioh all the time. never stop being wonderful. im here for you whenever you might need a listening ear, okay?

@loyalpika / @palletbloomer - #PRIKA!!! ever since i first followed you i remembered being blown away by your extensive headcanons on pikachu and i genuinely enjoy every blog you make! we dont talk OOC but from all your ooc posts you seem like a very caring older sister and thats nice to see; with you running around all the time, i hope you do get some rest every now and then! i hope our camaraderie never falters, take care friend!

@thepkmnnurse - i cant forget all the love and support both you and your muse have for professor oak, and im happy you try to spread positivity on the dash whenever you can! we don’t talk much OOC but from what i can tell you’re just as kind and nurturing as nurse joy herself. i hope you’ve been taking it easy wherever you are, and i hope your days are bright!

@rebelracket - will there ever be a day that i dont enjoy seeing your delinquent muse causing havoc on the dash? your creativity is wonderful to witness and i enjoy clarissa so much, thank you for interacting with a pure ol’ muse like mine. i hope we can continue to keep writing together, im excited at where we might end up. p.s. your art is delightful.

@porttownprince - you’re a gentle presence on my dash but im glad that youre here and that you’ve stuck around despite all the bad things that followed you. i hope you can overcome all the trauma you’ve been through. thank you for being kind with me!

@nikkouki - i know i dont say much but i enjoy your random check ins with me on discord, and i think youre a sweet young girl. you’re gonna go far in life, just make sure you keep going! continue being a precious kiddo and don’t forget to study your japanese ; (

@viciousvainglory & @midoriyamight - i cant think of one without the other so accept this double-tag lol. you’ve both supported this blog since the beginning and i wont forget how welcome you made me feel! no matter what blogs you’re on im glad we can still be friends! you deserve the big toblerone!

@fateandfury - my long time writing parter without knowing we were long time writing partners! the work you put into professor juniper is something to behold! we haven’t seemed to interact much despite rping professor muses, but that doesn’t mean i don’t appreciate your take on such a muse!

OTHER BLOGS TO BE ADMIRED ( also in no particular oder) : @sterlingsilverchampion @starmarkcd @pxgtails @satanstories @champofpallet @golden-oak @spriggaens @nurturen @florenselite @craniumaniac @ask-guzma @tenderpoison @gocatchem @faemoria @hikaup@writtenbykaichu @executiveariana @honoxtokage @simikami @bigcalavera @rotorotom @thehopcful @and-they-succeeded @metalprincess13 @keep-those-memories-away @hisvanity @attitxde @asmayflies @sesshcmaru @theagentlooker @ambcrly @kantocowboy @dauphindekalos @beareroftheblueorb @blastingxff @aquaelegance @bugeyesboutique @make-it-trouble @thunderstonereject @theagentlooker @soultattered @scvedbylove @diluviumx @inevitabilis-sors @pokedouche @fightiniumz @firespun

I’M SO SORRY IF I MISSED PEOPLE, THIS IS REALLY HARD FOR SOMEONE SO SCATTER-BRAINED AND MEMORY-FOGGED AS ME. EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT INCLUDED AND EVEN IF WE’RE NOT MUTUALS, I REALLY APPRECIATE YOUR SUPPORT OF THIS BLOG. WITHOUT ANY OF YOU I WOULDN’T HAVE GOTTEN HERE.

BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR A GIVEAWAY!!!

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

#congratulations hall of famers! ▸ [ PROMO. ]#this is too mcuh work im sorry if i missed anyone dnfkgh #also sorry if i started sounding repetetive but i dont say anything i dont mean #this was overwhelming but it was worth it!!!!#follower count for ts #wat a nice early bday gift :o #and around the same time as the anniversary pkmn game release

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atcabblog · 7 years ago

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Maybe the truth is, I'm really not so ordinary.

August Pullman, Wonder (2017)

Based on the novel by R.J. Palacio, “Wonder” tackles the life of August “Auggie Pullman, born with genetic abnormalities, as he deals with the struggles of acceptance and “blending in”. It also puts the lives of the other casts in the movie into perspective .

After being home-schooled by his mother Isabel, Auggie is enrolled in Beecher Prep, a private school, as decided by his mother and father, Nate. In his first days, he received mean looks from students all around him and was ostracized. He eventually meets and befriends Jack Will.

After developing a strong bond of friendship, Auggie experiences betrayal when he accidentally hears how Jack would feel if he looked like him, and how he was only pretending to be his friend. Jack, on the other hand, was clueless that Auggie was there when he uttered this, as Auggie was dressed in a “Ghostface” costume.

With an Auggie-Jack friendship hiatus, Auggie then befriends Summer Dawson, the girl from his homeroom. Through her, Jack realized his mistake and the reason why Auggie suddenly became distant, when she gave a clue saying, “Ghostface”. The two eventually reconciled with one another, and even became partners for their Science Fair project.

Despite the mending of a torn friendship, Julian Albans and his friends torment Auggie with harsh and threatening notes given on his desk and posted on his locker. As a result, Julian was given a two-day suspension.

Meanwhile, we get to see the perspectives of other movie casts. We learn how Olivia (Via), Auggie’s sister, meets Justin Hollander, her reason to sign up for theater. They become friends and eventually, couples. Moreover, we also learn why Miranda, Via’s best friend, suddenly drifts away from her after returning from summer camp.

Drawing closer to the denouement, Auggie and Jack find themselves in a tight spot during a school trip when they were confronted by students from another school who were much older and bigger than them. After engaging in a fight, Julian’s friends step in to give them a heping hand.

The movie ends with a graduation ceremony, wherein Auggie was bestowed an award for standing out. He receives a standing ovation and a warm applause from the audience, with a remark from his mother, emphasizing how much Auggie is a true wonder.

Guide Questions

1. Life lessons from the movie

-I learned two important things from the movie. First, kindness is a choice we must never hesitate to choose. In dealing with other people of different walks of life, treating them with kindness leads a long way, especially that their daily battles are something we know nothing about. Next, being different is not always a bad thing. It is never your obligation to blend in with the background if you were born to stand out.

2. Most powerful part of the story told in the movie

-After Auggie’s first day of school, he expressed tremendous emotion after being ostracized. The most powerful part in my opinion would be his line, “It matters that I look different. Is it always gonna matter?” The problem with society is in how much we insult those who are different. Instead of growing and developing together, we stunt their growth by taking away their self-esteem via harsh words. We live in a society bound to giving importance to outside beauty, and failing to realize that the beauty from within is what truly matters.

3. Favorite character

-Before anything else, allow me to enumerate some of the characters along with justifications as to why they could also be one’s favorite character.

Auggie, the star wonder, stands as an inspiration to those who have been in isolation due to constraints set by society.

Isabel, Auggie’s mom, portrays a devoted mother who chose to momentarily leave behind her passion in order to provide comfort to her children.

Nate, Auggie’s dad, emanates strong will and determination, shown by his optimistic viewpoint.

Jack, Auggie’s first friend, epitomizes how difficult it is to find real friends. Moreover, he shows purity of heart in his desire to stand by Auggie’s side no matter what happens.

Julian and his friends, despite being bullies, characterize second chances and character development.

And my favorite character, Via, exhibits maturity and deep understanding for the things happening around her. Despite knowing the fact that Auggie receives most of the attention in the family, this does not affect her treatment towards her brother. Rather, she stands as a loving and caring big sister, ready to comfort and defend her brother at all costs. Moreover, she has never shown embarrassment as Auggie’s sister, and continually encourages her brother to stand out and never aim to just blend in.

4. Occurrences in the movie which has occurred in my life, or which I have seen to occur to others

-The similarity which Auggie and I hold is the realization that real friends are hard to find. In this world full of people with masks and facades, it proves difficult to find people with pure intentions.

5. Ask a question to a movie character

- I want to ask Justin how he gained the confidence to directly tell someone (he likes) that he wants to kiss her.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk. I will be shadow-traveling to the Underworld if you need me. Here is a picture of me in my homeland.

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tinymixtapes · 7 years ago

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Feature: 2017: Third Quarter Favorites

As we stumble into the final quarter of the year, TMT would like to temper the political incoherence and informational carelessness of the last few months with another transmission from our trusty quarter-list propaganda machine. And you, dear reader, are invited! Whether it was transcendental smackdowns (Young Thug) or moonlit ruminations (The National), unlistenable prayers (Lingua Ignota) or symbol play (Giant Claw), 2017’s summer sounds found our bodies trembling (Pan Diajing), swiped like a shoe along concrete ($3.33), and glowing with deceitful charm (White Poppy). It didn’t matter if it was coming from the Dar Es Salaam underground (Nyege Nyege Tapes), a modded 70s Speak & Spell (White Suns), or Jack Rabbit’s Palace (Twin Peaks); it didn’t matter if it was evinced by lurker auteurs (Nmesh), sonic ecologists (Avey Tare), or one Pretty Bitch (Lil B). In the face of an ever-increasing shitshow, the last three months of music carried on like if often does: with a mix of hope, absurdity, and some exquisite world-building, with hearts both heavy (death’s dynamic shroud) and gentle (Mark Templeton). The full list can be found below, but first check out our ridiculously long list of releases that didn’t make the feature proper. And thanks, as always, for reading! Shortlist: Yves Tumor’s Experiencing The Deposit Of Faith, Nate Scheible’s Fairfax, Tzusing’s 東方不敗, Jay Glass Dubs’s Glacial Dancehall, Shabazz Palaces’s Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines, HKE’s HEEL AESTHETIC, Windy & Carl’s Blues For A UFO, Shabazz Palaces’s Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines, woopheadclrms’s Meeting Room + Rare Plants (Ukiuki Atama), Youngboy Never Broke Again’s AI YoungBoy, Costanza’s George, Mount Kimbie’s Love What Survives, Femminielli Noir’s Echec & Mat, I am just a Pupil’s CRYSTAL PAIN, Léo Hoffsaes & Loto Retina’s Early Contact, Arve Henrikson’s Towards Language, Schneider Kacirek’s Radius Walk, S.W.’s The Album, Damien Dubrovnik’s Great Many Arrows, Alan Vega’s IT, chris†††’s social justice whatever, and Ariel Pink’s Dedicated to Bobby Jameson. --- Nmesh Pharma [Orange Milk] [WATCH · LISTEN · REVIEW] With Pharma, lurker auteur Nmesh has both legitimized and destroyed the vapor-non-genre, virus-like, from within. Now entombed in some lo-poly pyramid, we can see the ‘wave for what it was: a dig through the garbage-dump archives of the 1990s to recover, warp, and recontextualize whatever memories got lost beneath the pile. The samples and annotations would be nothing, though, without the music, and lucky for you Pharma delivered well on this front. Not only is this Nmesh’s best album to date, but these 26 tracks (plus many remixes) ran rings around an entire micro-era of electronic music, wearing it out until the soul within was revealed. Plus, how brazen is that Ferris Bueller sample? –Dylan Pasture --- Pan Daijing Lack [PAN] [LISTEN · REVIEW] Abstract music, even “noise” if you want, is too often discussed in relation to absence. Absence of harmony, of “form,” of the philosophy of separation underpinning musical tradition per se. I imagine that, in witnessing a performance by Pan Daijing, who discusses her music along the lines of embodiment and the “acting out” of sound, it becomes difficult to persist in this manner of speaking. With Lack, a document of that performance practice, she rattles the consciousness of the home listener from its critical distance back to where it belongs: the wanting, lurid presence of the body. “Practice of Hygiene” breaks words — “above, below,” “excuse me,” “why do I have to” — into moaning, groaning, and almost-human creaking, cradled in the bleed of a low, repeating piano note. A dissonant arpeggio dances for five minutes across “The Nerve Meter,” a synthesized pattern that seems to shake the receiver as if having passed through air from a nearby amplifier. At the climactic moment of “Lucid Morto,” the final track, delayed vocals combine with the unsure, three-note melody of a meaty trance lead. In different and captivating ways, this album takes advantage of the notion that sound is a physical encounter; its Lack is not of form or substance, but the one that lives in all of our hungering, trembling bodies. –Will Neibergall --- Milo who told you to think??!!?!?!?! [Ruby Yacht/Alpha Pup] [LISTEN · REVIEW] “Ghiath Matar is dead, roses are not armor,” goes the first rapped line, and if you’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that Milo’s strictly a “college rapper,” you might also be assuming that Ghiath Matar is the name of some ancient Eastern deity or the protag of a Russian fantasy novel. But it’s not. He was, I know now, a Syrian activist who gave flowers to soldiers, then was arrested, tortured and killed. The next line goes, “In my neighborhood, it was become a poet or a farmer.” Writing amazing, beautiful, weighty verse is part of Milo’s job, as is performing. But geeky flights of fancy aren’t gone, they’re just getting pointier. Also in the first song, he says, “Hold the self like J’Zargo in Winterhold,” referring, of course, to the fictional cat wizard and mage college in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. Did I mention this is the album’s first verse? It goes deeper still, metaphors atop one another like racks. I haven’t cracked the seal on my vinyl copy yet, because it looks so snug sitting in its shrinkwrap beside Down With People’s self-titled album. One more unsolicited thought: if Nostrum Grocers ever drops, there are going to be a lot of professional poets out there burning their own chapbooks. –Samuel Diamond --- Avey Tare Eucalyptus [Domino] [LISTEN · REVIEW] Ever since Campfire Songs, we’ve known that Avey Tare is a sonic ecologist, attuned to the environments and relationalities that bloom and burble through his terraformed recordings. Lately, though, his work has dripped somewhere Down There, somewhere murky and suffocating, goopy and fecund. But, aerated and sun-drenched afresh in the Eucalyptus, Avey Tare sounds like he can breathe again. Awash but not overwhelmed, the atmospheres that populate Eucalyptus oxygenate the expansive melodies Portner has always nursed — from “Chocolate Girl” to “Amanita” — only this time, they can photosynthesize something delectable out of the coral, salt, soil, air that have always permeated, always tickled, always snickered. There’s a spaciousness in the hebetic sonic environments here, room to snuggle and inhale. Like the calyx that protects the budding eucalyptus flower, Eucalyptus chaperones us into a nourishing amnion. We can’t help but curl up and sink in. –Benjamin Eckman Bieser --- Various Artists Twin Peaks (Music from the Limited Event Series) / Twin Peaks (Limited Even Series Soundtrack) [Rhino] [WATCH · WATCH · WATCH] IRRATIONALLY ESSENTIAL. There’s no other way to put it. For Twin Peaks fans, this was the Summer of Frost/Lynch. We watched, listened, pondered, argued; we breathed it, ate it, shit it, and then sniffed the shit for more clues. By the time the 18-part series that first infected us back in May fully metastasized at the beginning of September, we were zombies. Our gray matter was hollowed into cheese by Dougie-Cooper’s Disease, characterized by the frenetic drive to bathe ourselves in anything connected with the story in any way — e.g., these two albums, featuring Angelo Badalamenti’s iconically eerie scores, plot-pregnant songs from each of the show’s Roadhouse bands, and a few of Lynch’s maniacal manipulations. Even now with the series in the spooky, Lynchian rear-view, the obsession lingers. The past dictates the future. There’s no going back. –Dan Smart [pagebreak] SADAF SHELL [Outside Insight] [LISTEN · REVIEW] An album gets called cinematic when the music elicits the feeling of a wide shot, of a soundtracked scene, of prestigious drama. SHELL is cinematic because it’s a movie. Vestigial, footgazing, inflammable, SHELL is a movie with no stars, a movie with no film, that unfolds in unfolding, getting ahead of itself. Even the pronoun is in the can before she means to. So you hear SADAF: just trust your eyes. Audition requires participation, and here, off the top of her head, participation means filmmaking. The unmaking of, in stereo. Although there are no bangers, there’s still the magic of SADAF’s multiplying VOICE, playing over scripts. (Little fires, drowning onscreen, disowned from the spark that lit the faucet. Its instructions crossing themselves out, the skipping noise and scraping strings roll like credits, hand in hand, like the tide, a substitute for reaching through to the other side.) “Though there is stillness, I can feel your heartbeat. Though I can’t see you, I can hear a sound.” Fear that you hear yourself, but you don’t listen. –Pat Beane --- Various Artists Sounds of Sisso [Nyege Nyege Tapes] [LISTEN] It’s fair to say that Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes has left a rather sizeable imprint on the TMT hivemind this year (see: Otim Alpha, Mysterians, and first-quarter fave Riddlore http://j.mp/2g2GAt3

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spynotebook · 8 years ago

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We’ve run our 11 Best Single Issues Of The Year. Well now, Rich Johnston and the Bleeding Cool writers (not Jude) give you 11 collections and graphic novels to reflect on as we say good riddance to 2016 and welcome 2017 with nervous worry.

Eliot Cole

Doctor Who: A Matter Of Life And Death by George Mann, Emma Vieceli and Hi-Fi.

I don’t have quite as much to say here as I did in my “lack of words” on A-Force #4, but I find this Eighth Doctor collection just the lovely example of (a) comics and (b) what could’ve been with the best of all the doctors. George Mann’s stories are each self contained, following the fantastic journey of Josie, and how she becomes part of Eight’s life. Each story was a book, and was self contained, but lends well to the whole. I wrote 3 sentences on George Mann’s awesome plotting (and such), and having a good take on 8 but they amounted to that word, “awesome.” Emma Vieceli’s trademarked panelling design compel you through this beautifully, I could genuinely read pencils of this quality on anything. Ms. Vieceli is surely meant for the greatest of things. Do yourself a favour and check out Titan’s Eighth Doctor Collection.

Jeremy Konrad

The Fix Vol.1-Where Beagles Dare by Nick Spencer, Lieber, Ryan Hill, and Nic J Shaw

I actually was starting to feel a little burnt out by Image this year. Quite a few of their series were blending together and felt to be covering quite a bit of the same ground. That all changed when I picked up The Fix. This series, with its dry, sarcastic humor and panels that you have to study to catch every little gag in the details very quickly became one of my favorites. And I mean, Pretzels. How can you not love a dog like Pretzels??? Every issue gets better and better, and hopefully it runs for a very long time.

Hannah Means-Shannon

Aleister & Adolf by Douglas Rushkoff, Michael Avon Oeming, and Nate Piekos

This book has been an outlier on many press radars, but it’s one of those densely crafted, significant works that hopefully will be the gift that keeps on giving, showing comic creators and fans what new directions in the medium can be taken. Written by powerhouse social critic Douglas Rushkoff and drawn by the endlessly original Michael Avon Oeming the book tracks a fictional account of Aleister Crowley’s media wars with Adolf Hitler based on a few key historical facts. It follows the life of a young military reporter assigned to Crowley through the course of “sigil” developments, like the swastika by the Nazis and V for Victory by Churchill in the war over human minds during WWII. Rushkoff’s characterization, research, and narrative framing devices, combined with Oeming’s emotive and often highly symbolic artwork make sure this book has something significant to say about the ongoing role of symbolism and propaganda in the way we see the world around us. It might just remind you of the dangers and the positive powers of belief and focus to influence any struggle, even on an international level. Aleister & Adolf may be about the second World War, but it’s highly relevant to our times and makes for a thought-provoking, and at times disturbing, read.

Joe Glass

The Wicked + The Divine Deluxe Hardcover by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matthew Wilson and Clayton Cowles.

I mean, just look at it.

Let’s not even go into the story or anything yet, just take in this huge, black, hot foiled beauty! You can read comics on your train to work looking like you’re reading out of some mystic grimoire of mystery!

Plus, it contains Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matthew Wilson and Clayton Cowles’ incredible series of pop stars as gods and the hard price of fame (it kinda kills you in the end, which 2016 proved in force really, didn’t it?). Collecting the first two story arcs, plus loads of behind the scenes materials and a good chunk of Gillen’s breakdowns of the book, it makes for the absolute best purchase for fans of the series.

And it just looks sexy as hell on a book shelf!

Abdulkareem Baba Aminu

Huck by Mark Millar and Rafael Albuquerque.

Surprising myself, and after a great deal of thought, I have picked Huck Vol. 1 by Mark Millar and Rafael Albuquerque as the best graphic novel/collection for 2016. I started reading the monthly issues, up to the second, and I somehow fell off. But I did know I’d catch up on the trade when it gets released. And boy was I glad I waited. The story, collected, had a pace that was missing during its monthly run, and the character development proved to be near-perfect. Early comparisons to Superman did no justice to the story of a small town resident who’s revealed to have some truly awesome powers, of course with disastrous results. The art – oh, boy the art – is beautiful, aided by perfect colours and it sets the tone the right way. There’s almost a Spielberg-ian sense of wonder and adventure to the tale, enough to make me ignore the irritation that is an editing error which portrayed a factual kidnapping of schoolgirls by insurgents as having happened in East Africa, when the stated Sambisa Forest is in Nigeria, in West Africa. You could say it was personal for me. That aside – and I truly enjoy most of the Millarworld books – Huck is my absolute favorite.

Marilyn Weiss

Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks

I was so excited for this graphic novel to be released, it was easily one of the highlights of my reading this year. We meet Kaidu, a recent arrival to the Nameless City, and son of the latest ruling clan, Dao. As he trains to become a warrior, his adventurous nature drives him into the city, where he meets up with the lovable, street wise Rat. Hicks did an amazing job creating a detailed world that I would love to explore and get lost in. I can tell that there are so many stories hiding within the city, just waiting to be told. I would gladly hand this book to any fan of comics, be they young or old. The sequel, The Stone Heart will be out in April 2017.

Rich Johnston

Patience by Dan Clowes

I’m a sucker for a post-modern time travel story. See my love for least year’s There’s No Time Like The Present by Paul Rainey. And Dan Clowes gives us actual plottage with Patience. A story of rags to – well not exactly riches, but a different state of being, as the newly pregnant young Patience is murdered, a series of events that destroys her partner, Jack. It’s his attempts to “put right what once went wrong” and the calamitous consequences of his actions, digging his own grave – or Patience’s – deeper and deeper that drive this book forward. Or backwards. Which means you’ll have to reread it the moment you finish for that Sixth Sense experience. But for all that it’s the attitude of Jack, the anti-Hollywood hero that sets this apart, refusing to follow the obvious tropes or experiencing triumphs – or disasters as he may be expected to.

And the devil is always in the details. Clowes has always had a style that grabs the eye, gives it direction and pulls it forward, the narrator grip in full effect. Here every object in every panel could have serious significance that you will need that second – or third reading to pick up on it.

Toward a Hot Jew by Miriam Libicki

You know those overnight sensations who have been working hard at the craft for decades? That’s Miriam Libicki. In something that resembles the missing link between Marjane Satrapi and Joe Sacco, her autobiographical work exploring her Jewish identity, attractiveness and the reaction of those around her, whether as a Israeli soldier or a professor of art, this collection of a decade’s work jumps from illustrated essay to comic book panels, exploring the medium, the tools to create the work and express inner neurosis as beautifully – and as ugly – as possible.

Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash by Dave McKean

Art about art – Dave McKean creating a comic about war artist Paul Nash, and how that artist turned the worst extremes of humanity into art that illuminated the mind. And then how it affected the young Dave McKean, and how his work has existed in relation to that of Paul’s. This is a giant standing on the shoulder of another giant and between them they can see so much about us. An incredibly moving masterpiece, and stands alongside McKean’s Cages, as an exploration of the effect of art on both the viewer and the artist themselves. Psychologically complex and using the very strictures of comic book panels, speech, character positions to demonstrate so much of what we are.

Rolling Blackouts by Sarah Glidden

Another example of comic book journalism, Sarah Glidden takes a trip to the Middle East with an eye on America’s influence on the region, travelling through Syria, Iraq and Turkey. But its also an examination of journalism itself, as Sarah is accompanying two “proper journalists” as they look at the effect of the Iraq War and of its refugees, so it also becomes a procedural for the profession as well – especially when they are joined by a friend and a US soldier who served in Iraq. And it suddenly gets a whole lot more awkward. Something that is made more palatable by Sarah’s soft watercolors, a different look than we might have otherwise expected.

Everyone has a story to tell. It turns out that’s as much true of the journalists as it is those they report on.

Clean Room Vol 1: Immaculate Conception by Gail Simone, Jon Davis-Hunt and Quinton Winter.

For some reason I never find The Walking Dead comic as gross as I do the TV show. I occasionally wondered if that was a creative choice of the limitations of the medium? Well, Clean Room answered that. It really is something very nasty indeed. Writer Gail Simone has rarely been given the chance to operate at this level. And she choosing the tack of making the people far scarier than the Entities that are meant to be threatening them, in terms of the moral choices they hold. Jon Davis-Hunt’s choices of style are also a surprise, eschewing the darkness for something brighter, more visible and cleaner. This is horror with the strip lighting turned up and refusing to blink.

It also takes suicide head on, as something fuelling the survivors, and as psychological as that is, the comic is never afraid to shlock-horror out, embracing that aspect rather than being embarrassed about it. It’s the combination of both approaches that elevates this title above the norm and makes it something special. And the way it buolds from issue only helps the trade paperback – even if you are denied the pain of waiting from month to month for cliffhangers to resolve.

Buy this for the Scientologist in your life. And then get Gail Simone to write Crossed.

Bleeding Cool’s 11 Favourite Graphic Novels/Collections Of 2016

#IFTTT #Feedly

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theliberaltony · 5 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

A much-discussed poll last month showing an effective three-way tie between Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders at the top of the Democratic primary field has since proven to be something of an outlier. But the narrative that the Democratic primary has collapsed down into a three-way race between Biden, Warren and Sanders is still going strong.

Now that we’re past the Labor Day holiday — traditionally a time when the pressure increases on lesser-running candidates to either improve their performance or to drop out — is the “three-way race” the right way characterize the primary? On ABC News’s This Week on Sunday, I gave a quick answer to this question.1 (p.s. Our “Do You Buy It?” segment on This Week, usually featuring yours truly, is airing almost every Sunday now, so we hope you’ll tune in!) But this is fairly challenging question, so let me give a longer answer here.

The question is challenging because it really involves two distinct components:

Are candidates who are polling in the low single digits — there are a lot of these candidates! — in deep trouble? Or do they have plenty of time to come back?

Among those candidates with more of a pulse in the polls, do Biden, Sanders and Warren form a clear top tier?

Let’s take these one at a time — today, we’ll try to define that top tier, and tomorrow we’ll explore whether any of the bottom-dwelling candidates have much of a prayer.

Defining the top tier is a challenge. To develop some very crude priors, let’s turn to my colleague Geoffrey Skelley’s research on the predictive accuracy of early primary polls, which included a chart showing how a candidate’s standing in national polls translates to his or her chances of winning the nomination:2

Depending on which polling average you look at, Biden’s currently polling at 28 to 30 percent, Warren’s at 18 to 19 percent, Sanders is perhaps just a hair below her at 15 to 18 percent, and Harris is at 7 or 8 percent. All of them would count as “well-known” candidates by our definition,3 although Harris is somewhat less well known than the others. They’re followed in the polls by two candidates who aren’t as well known: Pete Buttigieg at 4 or 5 percent, and Andrew Yang at about 3 percent. Historically, these less-well-known candidates have a lot more room to grow from single-digit polling.

If you look up each candidate in the chart, you’d come up with roughly the following for the odds of their winning the nomination. To be extra clear, this is just a simple calculation based only on national polls, not a FiveThirtyEight forecast. For a fun comparison, I’ll also show each candidate’s probability of winning the primary according to the betting market Betfair as of early Sunday evening:

Biden leads polls, but prediction markets favor Warren

Chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination based on …

Candidate national polls Prediction market (Betfair) Biden 35% 22% Warren 15 33 Sanders 10 14 Harris 5 10 Buttigieg 5 5 Yang 5 5

Betfair price is as of Sept. 8 at 5:30 p.m.

All right, there’s lots to unpack here. For one thing, based on national polls alone, Biden is still really in a tier by himself. It’s not just that polling at 28 or 30 percent is quite a bit higher than 17 or 18 percent. It’s also that the difference between Biden’s polling and the candidates below him falls within a range that, empirically, has been something of an inflection point as to who eventually wins the nomination or not. Candidates who are sitting in the mid-to-high teens — such as Warren and Sanders — don’t have a fantastic track record. A candidate in Biden’s position will still lose more often than not, but they have a considerably better record of success historically.

Of course, there’s no reason you should limit yourself to looking only at national polls. If you were building a predictive model at this stage, it would probably consist of some sort of amalgam of national polling adjusted for name recognition, early-state polling and endorsements, which are historically fairly predictive of nomination outcomes. In Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden looks weaker and Warren and Sanders (and to some extent Buttigieg) look a lot more viable. But endorsements are another story and those don’t look especially good for Warren and Sanders. Instead, Biden and Harris are well out in front in endorsements, although many potential endorsers are sitting on the sidelines.

The prediction markets deviate a lot from the objective data in the cases of Warren and Biden. They actually had her as being more likely to win the nomination than him (as of Sunday evening), even though he’s ahead in national polls and endorsements, and at worst tied with her in Iowa and New Hampshire (and way ahead in South Carolina). That isn’t necessarily wrong; it’s an early enough stage of the primary that I’d say there’s some room for subjectivity. But there are also some reasons to be cautious. The conventional wisdom has repeatedly expected Biden to implode when it hasn’t really happened yet. And frankly, the people trading in these markets — mostly younger and well-educated — aren’t your prototypical Biden voters.

And none of this makes it any easier to divide the candidates into tiers. For me, at least, the lines between the top several candidates are blurry. I’m pretty sure that I still like Biden’s chances better than Warren — as I said, that’s certainly where a statistical model would come out. But I wouldn’t wager a huge amount of money on that proposition. I think Warren has a few things going for her that Sanders doesn’t — less voter concern about her age, more room to make peace with the establishment and slightly better polling. But you could argue that they should basically be treated as tied.

I’m also not quite sure what to do with Harris. A “Party Decides” rubric that heavily emphasized endorsements and the ability to build a broad coalition would treat her as one of the favorites, while the polling wouldn’t. Then again, she’s had moments where she was polling better, and she could be poised to benefit if Biden falters among black voters or Warren does among college-educated ones. One reason to be pessimistic about the chances of candidates such as Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke, in fact, is that if something did happen to one of the frontrunners, Harris would probably be first in line to benefit from that.

Overall, the best I can do is something like this:

Nate’s not-to-be-taken-too-seriously presidential tiers

For the Democratic nomination, as revised on Sept. 9, 2019

Tier Sub-tier Candidates 1 a Biden b Warren c Sanders d Harris 2 Buttigieg 3 Yang, O’Rourke, Klobuchar, Castro 4 Everyone else

Note: Steve Bullock was demoted into the “everyone else” tier.

Even if you do have Biden, Warren and Sanders as your top three candidates (as I do), there’s no particular reason to draw a firm line at three candidates as opposed to some other number. If you’re just looking at national polls, then Biden’s still in a tier by himself. Prediction markets basically have it as a two-horse race between Warren and Biden. You can add Sanders to make it a top three… but factor in endorsements, and Harris probably also needs to join the group, which would leave us with four candidates. I don’t really put a lot of emphasis on money raised, as it hasn’t been a very predictive indicator historically, but if you did, you could add Buttigieg to the top tier and make it a top 5.

Perhaps this week’s debate will provide more clarity. If Warren has another strong debate and continuities gaining in the polls, for instance, we might have a relatively clear two-way race between her and Biden. But the reality will probably be a lot messier.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nate Silver

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recentanimenews · 6 years ago

Text

Crunchyroll Favorites 2018 Part One: Anime and Manga!

2018 was a wild ride for all of us, but at least we had a whole lot of great anime and manga to keep us entertained along the way! We laughed, we cried, we recoiled in horror, and we waited for the "ahh, you are motherf**ker?" moment in Pop Team Epic's anime that never actually came.

We recently talked about our favorite anime of the past season, and our most-anticipated anime of the coming season, so that brings us to now, to the now-annual tradition of Crunchyroll Favorites (can you believe we've been doing this for eight years?!), where CR's staff, editors, and writers share what stood out most to them over the entirety of 2018. The rules were simple: for Part One, only anime, manga, and related media that were released in 2018 (or received a Western release in 2018), or experienced a major milestone (like starting a new season or closing up a major arc).

There's a whole lot to look at in Part One--let's get started!

Nate Ming

Devilman Crybaby - Satisfying violence and a pulsing soundtrack headline this savage modern retelling of the Devilman legend--this is the kind of thing that got me into anime in the first place, and it felt great to be back.

Dragon Ball Super ending - Meanwhile, Dragon Ball Super wrapped up with an insane 3v1 fight to the finish in the Tournament of Power. Imagine a group of grown men sitting around screaming at the TV like excited children--because in that moment, with a gassed-out, shoulder-to-shoulder Goku and Freeza meeting Jiren head-on… we were again.

HINAMATSURI - MY SMARTPHONE!! I figured Hinamatsuri would just be this goofy domestic comedy about a beleaguered yakuza adopting a psychic child, but then it got real. Like, "why am I crying so much at Anzu's story" real. It's so good, and one I really need to rewatch.

March comes in like a lion - The beauty of March is that it's sad, and sometimes a downer, but never a miserable pity parade that constantly dumps on its characters. There's growth, and a light at the end of the tunnel--healing and catharsis that come after the worst parts of life. We're going to lose the people we love, and we're going to be treated like garbage by the people around us… but that's never the end of the story if you have people you love and trust by your side.

Shonen Jump - This is what I'd been dreaming of for years, but always felt too difficult to implement… until now. New chapters? Free every week. The massive back catalog, along with an updated list of currently-running titles? TWO DOLLARS A MONTH. This is madness, and it's never been a better time to see people reading classics like Dragon Ball for the first time ever.

Honorable Mentions: A Place Further Than the Universe, Asobi Asobase - workshop of fun -, Laid-Back Camp

Cayla Coats

Liz and the Blue Bird - Sound! Euphonium is one of my favorite series, and this film takes the franchise to new artistic heights. Director Naoko Yamada and composer Kensuke Ushio reunite and create something truly special together.

A Place Further Than the Universe - This wasn’t the best-directed, best-animated, or best-scored anime of the year, but the sum is greater than the parts in this case. A Place Further is by far my favorite broadcast anime of the year.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime - I love “another world” anime that focus on worldbuilding and characterization over action, but Slime has both in spades. Also, protagonist Rimuru is super OP, but they’re so likable that I don’t really care.

Violet Evergarden - There’s a lot I could say about this stunningly-produced show, but I’ll just note that toward the beginning of the first episode, Violet picks up an object using her mouth. While it seems like a weird character eccentricity at first, it’s later revealed that she has trouble using her new prosthetic hands. That’s a pretty good indication of how thoughtful the entire series is.

Dead Dead Demon’s Dedede Destruction - The newest series to be brought stateside from Goodnight Punpun author Inio Asano, Destruction is easily my favorite work from him to date. Taking the trademark eccentricity and attention to detail of his other titles, Destruction merges it with a much less grimdark tone that I find hugely refreshing.

Nicole Mejias

Golden Kamuy - It’s no secret that I love Golden Kamuy to bits! The unique characters got me hooked, and then everything else (the story, action, drama and comedy) reeled me in to keep anticipating each and every episode. When’s season 3?!

Pop Team Epic - Where were you when the anime gods blessed us with Pop Team Epic? It’s basically anime shitposting, and it’s absolutely GLORIOUS! Yeah, I’m gonna be thinking about Hellshake Yano for a very long time.

Ms. Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles - If you know me, you know I love my ramen. And this show was a testament to how amazing and delicious ramen is while presenting a different array of wonderful ramen you can find in Japan! Of course, after each episode, I was left with the overwhelming desire for ramen, which was hard to curb.

Banana Fish (manga reprints) - Once news of the reprints began spreading around, I knew it was time for me to actually experience the majesty of Banana Fish! I don’t know what I expected, but I was addicted, reading all the volumes so fast, and I had to know what was going to happen next, so I went from volume to volume until I reached the end… What a thrill! I can’t believe it took me this long to check this series out. I’m glad I did!

Pokemon marathon on Twitch - The second Twitch announced this marathon, I was SO ready for it! I watched the old Pokémon anime when I was a kid, and watching the marathon brought back a lot of fun memories. There were also a bunch of moments in the anime I didn’t remember at all, like that bizarre Kangaskhan episode… It was a fun time to relive the show with thousands of other fans on Twitch!

Daniel Dockery

Dr. Stone - This is the “Are you reading this? No? WELL YOU BETTER GET ON THAT” manga of the year, along with Promised Neverland. It’s so good and funny and I just love it.

“Mr. Osomatsu In Hell” - The second season of Mr. Osomatsu was more uneven than the first, but the season finale is a work of art. I really hope the movie is good, and that we get a Season 3.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind - I only got into JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure this year, and the more I watch it, the more I like it. It’s one of the few pieces of media that I’ve seen that is just as good as everyone made it out to be.

My Hero Academia: Two Heroes - No theater experience will ever top hearing an entire audience erupt into applause when All Might yelled “CAROLINA SMASH.”

That Time I Got Reincarnated As Yamcha - Poor Yamcha. His stock has dropped significantly since he went toe-to-toe with Goku in his first Dragon Ball appearance. Luckily, this manga knows that, and is more hilarious for it. Next I hope for “That Time I Got Reincarnated As That One Pterodactyl That Tried To Mess With Goku In Dragon Ball Chapter 1.”

Peter Fobian

A Place Further Than the Universe - A Place Further felt like it was going against the grain in many ways, as a character-driven drama without many of the usual anime trappings. It’s a damn near perfect show with an excellent story, tight character writing, and some truly brutal emotional beats delivered in novel and creative ways.

Planet With - Maybe some of the tightest storytelling I’ve ever seen, getting 24 episodes' worth of content finished in half that, at a pace that felt perfect. If you decide to check it out, be ready for two full narrative arcs and a ton of interesting character-based subplots all serving the overarching message of the value of compassion and forgiveness.

SSSS.GRIDMAN - It feels like I’m always waiting for the next TRIGGER anime that has the same bombastic energy as Gurren Lagann or Kill la Kill, but GRIDMAN proved they’re able to deliver a muted and thoughtful show as well. Amemiya penned a love letter to tokusatsu so reverent that even people like me can feel his passion. Some characters felt underutilized, but GRIDMAN was charming, mysterious, and stuck the landing.

Laid-Back Camp - I wish there were more anime like this: realizing a new episode of this anime was out became a weekly highlight. It’s chill, it’s funny, it’s educational, and it doesn’t pull any anime shenanigans. Just like the title says, you have absolutely nothing to worry about while watching this show.

HINAMATSURI - I remember seeing a promotion for this anime almost a year before it was released, showing Mao’s kung-fu sequence and thought: this would be a martial arts anime. Nothing could have prepared me for one of the single funniest anime I’ve ever seen. Hinamatsuri has some of the greatest comedic timing this year, and still managed to pack in beautifully-animated psychic fights and some ridiculously powerful emotional moments. I still have whiplash.

Ricky Soberano

Fairy Tail Final Season - This marks the end of this legendary shonen and inevitable Fairy Tail-induced tears well up with every episode that inches slowly to the end. It may look like a victory lap on the surface, but the show is answering every burning question, fueling a fire in hearts, and cementing every reason why it’ll be missed.

As Miss Beelzebub Likes It. - As someone who doesn’t go out of their way to look for cute anime, I was pleasantly surprised at myself and this show for the effect it had on my well-being. It was my guiltiest and fluffiest pleasure of the year and I enjoyed how light, adorably cute, and heartwarming it was.

Attack on Titan - I’ve been holding off on watching this for as long as I could and I definitely regret holding back on it. I will note: I did become vegan for a month after watching the first episode. Now I’m left screaming at the screen and dissecting every moment. With stakes as real as they could get, and consistent losing, I live for the small but progressing wins in the neverending battle for humanity.

Food Wars! The Third Plate - The tables have turned and a new set of rules have left our favorite food orgasm inducers to fight for their survival despite an entire system against them. The creations only got more mouth watering and frankly so did the more visible presence of Joichiro-san. In all seriousness, Hayama-san’s betrayal and Erina’s heightened courage in front of her father was enough to induce a lot of stress eating. Next stop: the final showdown.

Emily Bushman

Mo Dao Zu Shi - Technically a donghua (Chinese Animation), and not traditional Japanese anime, this is BY FAR one of my favorite shows of the year. There’s magic, it takes place in ancient China, and there’s lots of zombie slaying. The character designs are gorgeous, the pacing and action are exceptionally well done, and there’s juuuuuuust enough romantic tension to keep my blood warm.

Banana Fish - I didn’t catch this manga when I was younger, but my roommate told me I was missing out. We started watching the anime, which entranced me with cool character designs and excellent pacing. I got impatient and read the manga (which is just as good, if not better than the anime), and cried my eyes out at the ending.

Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai - I thought I was going to hate this, and instead ended up loving it. The dialogue is fast-paced, which keeps otherwise off-color jokes from souring, and instead transforms them into witticisms worthy of a chuckle. It is fun, heartwarming, and a little nostalgic, but does a wonderful job of transforming those perceived insurmountable imperfections into challenges worth overcoming.

A Place Further Than The Universe - Great characters, wonderful development, original story line, dramatic without being overwrought, an improbable scenario without being impossible. It made me cry big, fat tears (I was alone, in my apartment, it was kind of sad honestly), but I loved the salty-clean feeling of relief and forgiveness that came after I finished the show.

Kakuriyo: Bed and Breakfast for Spirits - This is a great show that DID NOT get enough love. It was a bit of a guilty pleasure for me, but also great from a cooking blog perspective. Aoi, the main character, makes a lot of foods that are interesting and not pedantic. It’s definitely a slice of life, but has a main character that is steadfast in her determination to burn through the prejudice, anger, or sadness of those she meets through her cooking.

Noelle Ogawa

The Promised Neverland - I got into it this year and what an absolute treat! Having grown up on the slow pacing of the Big Three, this turned the Jump formulas all around. Excellent cast of characters, a condensed story, intrigue about the world, a constant wonder- this series had it all. Emma is the rare female shonen protagonist who is completely capable on her own terms, and every character is sharp. It’s worked its way to be one of my favorite Jump series, and I can’t wait for the anime.

Pop Team Epic - I genuinely looked forward to this every week. It’s so hard to describe how absolutely wild it is. It’s hard to describe what exactly Pop Team Epic is but it’s definitely some kind of an experience. Being able to catch all the many cultural references were always a fun game to play for every episode, as well as seeing what chaotic entities Popuko and Pipimi had to shove into our faces.

That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime - This caught me off guard because I really am not a fan of 99% of isekai. I’d passed this series off as silly because of the title but I was wrong. It’s still an isekai in its bones, but it combines having fun with having something to say- with a slime protag, of all things. I’m really excited to see more!

My Solo Exchange Diary - Nagata Kabi’s autobiographical work always cut me to the core. Her dealing with both depression and her seuxality with finding her place in the world really speaks to me. At the same time, it’s not a dismal story at all, but one that’s filled with hope. It’s about trying to find your way in the world and make do with what you have, and I think we can all relate to that.

Paul Chapman

Planet With - A series that squeezes 52 episodes' worth of story into a trim 12, Planet With is packed with honesty and heart. Few shows leave me with a feeling of hope for the future, but Planet With's relentless positivity and effortless heroism in the face of unspeakable tragedy speak to how fiction can embody the best aspects of humanity.

A Place Further than the Universe - Blurring the boundaries of the “cute girls doing cute things” subgenre, A Place Further than the Universe is a heartfelt (and sometimes heartbreaking) drama about coming to grips with loss while on a journey of self-discovery. Incidentally, any moe show that features the main cast becoming seasick barf-monsters for an entire episode is A+ material.

Umamusume: Pretty Derby - It's hard to imagine that a tie-in anime for an as-yet-unreleased smart phone game that's supposed to sell viewers on the glories of Japanese horse racing can also be so consistently entertaining and emotionally sincere, but that's just the sort of thing that makes Umamusume: Pretty Derby a dark horse candidate for pure viewing pleasure.

Cells at Work! - Equal parts hilarious and horrifying, Cells at Work! makes learning the basics of human biology fun, because it's nice to imagine that every individual part of my cellular anatomy is just as dorky, self-conscious, and occasionally inept as I am.

Pop Team Epic - Every so often, there comes a work of art that so overwhelms me with its beauty and its ugliness that it leaves a scar upon my soul. But enough about Devilman Crybaby, 2018 is also the year that gave us the inimitable, inscrutable anime adaptation of Bkub Okawa's Pop Team Epic, and no one's complaining (except you).

Nick Creamer

Liz and the Blue Bird - As an unlikely followup to a side story from Sound! Euphonium’s second season, Liz and the Blue Bird was basically guaranteed to have niche appeal. But even if you haven’t seen the show it’s spun off from, Liz is a stunning accomplishment in any right, a gorgeous expression of love composed by one of the greatest directors in anime. Beyond its overt beauty, Liz uses visuals and music to perfectly evoke the mental states of its heroines throughout, making it easy to get carried into their world. Liz is a perfect jewel of a film.

Violet Evergarden - This has certainly been a strong year for Kyoto Animation! Along with the stunning Liz, their full-length Evergarden took my breath away again and again, elevating a poignant melodrama with all the animated splendor and thoughtful visual storytelling you expect from this team. It feels like my favorite animation studio are somehow leveling up.

After the Rain - There are far too few dramas about actual adults facing realistic problems in anime, and After the Rain stands as a welcome and brilliantly executed counter to the trend. Equally sympathetic to its teenage heroine’s feelings of displacement and its middle-aged hero’s feelings of regret, After the Rain paints a thoughtful and sympathetic portrait of its melancholy leads from start to finish. More people need to check out this insightful and very pretty show!

Planet With - Satoshi Mizukami has long been one of my favorite mangaka, and so I was thrilled to see his work finally debuting on the small screen. The results don’t disappoint; Planet With is a wildly ambitious, creative, and emphatically humanist tale of interplanetary war, secret identities, and much else besides. Along with providing some of the most thoughtful human insights of the anime year, it’s probably also the only show this year to feature a space general in a giant cat suit.

March comes in like a lion - March has stood among the best anime dramas for three straight years now, and the conclusion of its second season was an absolute triumph. Having slowly and compassionately articulated Rei’s journey from depression to genuine self-love, the show was at last able to extend its focus outwards, and celebrate the journeys of all the people Rei has come to care for. From its vivid visual embellishments and keen psychological insight to its great empathy for all its characters, March was a wonderful experience this year, and a show I’ll dearly miss.

Wilhelm Donko

A Place Further Than the Universe - The heartfelt story about four girls’ spectacular journey to Antarctica is not only my personal anime of the year; it also managed to secure itself a spot among my all-time favorite shows. Add highly-likeable characters, a great soundtrack, as well as gorgeous visuals to an excellent story, and you have one of the most well-crafted anime in recent years.

Laid-Back Camp - Laid-Back Camp accomplished the feat of making camping out alone in the cold look extremely enticing. Its cozy atmosphere, light humor, and the simply gorgeous-to-look-at backgrounds always made me want to grab my tent, and head out to the great outdoors after each episode.

Harukana Receive - This was a perfect fit for this year’s summer anime season, getting us in the summer spirit with a whole season of nothing but beach volleyball in tropical Okinawa. On top of its vibrant visuals, the show also had a great upbeat soundtrack.

Kara Dennison

ZOMBIE LAND SAGA - The series’s vagueposting approach to publicity was as interesting as it was risky, but none of us could have been prepared for undead idols finding closure while Mamoru Miyano yells a lot. The back half of the series was especially good, touching on everything from personal identity to the spiral of depression. And in spite of all that heavy stuff mixed in, it brought me so much joy.

Lupin the 3rd Part 5 - I will always be a sucker for new Lupin, but there was something extra special about this season. Maybe it was the no-fear approach to action balanced out with the characters staying in-character, a dichotomy the franchise sometimes fumbles. Maybe it was just how deeply important the characters’ intelligence was, to the point of reminding us that Lupin is no mental slouch. Or maybe it was the callback filler episodes. At the moment, probably my favorite of the many Lupins.

Pop Team Epic - From a news standpoint, this series was a disaster to cover because we never knew the truth from the troll. Watching as a fan, and one with very little experience with the 4koma, was delightful. The cultural references were on point, and Norio Wakamoto made his way onto the cast list at least five episodes earlier than expected.

-----

And that's a wrap for Part One! Be sure to tune in at the same time tomorrow for Part Two, where we share our favorite VIDEO GAMES of 2018! If you're in the mood for more CR Favorites, here are the links to past years' features:

Crunchyroll Favorites 2017 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2016 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2015 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2014 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2013 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2012 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll News' Best of 2011 Part One | Part Two

What were your favorite anime and manga of 2018? Remember, this is a FAVORITES list, not a BEST-OF list, so there are no wrong answers--sound off in the comments and share your favorites!

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Nate Ming is the Features Editor for Crunchyroll News and creator of the long-running Fanart Friday column. You can follow him on Twitter at @NateMing. His comic, Shaw City Strikers, launches January 15, 2019.

By: [email protected]

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