#like. I understand why 13 feels like such a reset. its a new era its a new showrunner its a new jumping on point

[burnedself]

not gonna lie the idea of an oc incarnation is extra appealing because, at least to me, 13-14-15 seem to have this tangible character continuation whereas 12 feels so isolated at times so I'd love to have a 13 that's a more direct continuation

But to loop back to the topic of 'voice', trying to think of actors that feel right seems borderline impossible

[lanalaynetalks]

I skipped the Daphne arc. I’m sorry I can’t do it. Like I don’t understand how people can look at that arc and the Zodiac arc and say that the Zodiac arc is the worst filler arc. But yay Edolas! This is an arc I have grown to like. When I first watched it I had the same feeling about it as Oracion Seis Arc. Now I like it even if it hurt my head a little bit. This is just exposing me as an idiot I think. I’m just a girl!

1. The filler episode before the Edolas arc are some of my favs! I like most of the filler episodes in the series. I do think these episodes are important because we are reminded of everyone’s personalities before Edolas where they are like the opposite.

2. I’m going to try my best to reframe from talking about Lisanna and how her character was useless after she came back. Let me be clear I am not Lisanna hater. I love her, I just believe she was so underutilized in the series and the most pointless revival of the whole series. This is will be a longer post but I love her and she deserves better.

3. “We are on a cusp of a new era” Makarov said this in the episode Guildarts came back. Now this is likely hinting that he is wanting Guildarts to become master, but I see it as something else. I personally see the 7 year time skip as a soft reset for the show. So I think it was for shadowing that. It could also be hinting at Earthland learning about Edolas.

4. My favorite part of this whole arc is Gajeel wanting a cat. I love it. It humanizes him so much!

5. I will say I don’t really like the first part of the Edolas arc and I think it starts really slow

6. Edolas Fairy Tail 🥰

7. It annoys me that they don’t just tell Edolas Fairy Tail that they are from Earthland

8. Lisanna and Nastu’s reuniting is underwhelming

9. Why is Edolas Wendy just older???

10. I don’t understand why Edolas Gajeel is a journalist but I love him sm. I need to see him and Edolas Levy together. Because we all know they are soulmates in every universe. Plus both Gajeels together is 10/10

11. I also think it’s goofy that Edolas Nastu is known for driving a car. It’s the same goofy as Cancer Vs Gray dance battle. No I’m not explaining further.

12. Lucy and Nastu are already together in every universe besides ours.

13. We don’t talk enough about how the huge ass lacrima in the middle of the city was just Erza and Gray… we need to talk about this more.

14. Also who was the Master of Edolas Fairy Tail? Was it Edolas Laxus???? You know what where is the Edolas Thunder Legion??? If Edolas Makarov is the king what about Edolas Ivan and Laxus??? Are they princes??? If Mystgon is his son shouldn’t he actually be Ivan’s counterpart? This confuses me the most about Edolas… where are the rest of the Dreyar family? I guess if Wendy is just older they may of been born to different people I guess. I’m just going to believe that Edolas Laxus was master and died. WHERE IS EDOLAS LAXUS!

15. Maybe I am being too crazy because why is Edolas Ichiya a cat…

16. It’s honestly pretty dark to think that the only reason Carla and Happy cared for Wendy and Nastu is because the Exceeds fucked with their minds.

17. I love Happy’s mom and dad so much. Them being rebellious makes so much sense. I just love them. Grumpy X Sunshine at its peak

18. I am going to fan girl over panther lily! I love him! He is my second favorite cat. Because Frocsch does exist! I love them so much. Like I cry every time something bad happens to them!

19. ROCK CITY BOY IS ON OF TH BEST OPENINGS! I think it’s in my top 5.

20. While the arc started slowly, the climax is so good. The rest is well paced.

21. So is the giant robot dragon supposed to be Edolas’s fairy heart? This is likely a dumb theory.

22. Rip Mystogan… he’s not dead just we don’t see him again until 100 year quest. Seriously though Mystogan has a special place in my heart for being my first anime crush…. Then I saw Laxus and I was like Mystogan who?

23. It took me so many years to realize this, but Lactor’s and Frosch’s parents live in earthland… like their parents were sucked out of Edolas. They are both the same age as Carla and Happy when they came back from the 7 year time skip…. I just realized this and I feel dumb. THEY WERE BORN DURING THE TIME SKIP! I don’t know why my brain never realized this!

24. And that’s the last time we see the exceeds…

25. GAJEEL AND LILY! The best of friends!

26. Why were Edolas Mira and Elfman so chill about Lisanna not being there Lisanna? Why did Mira and Elfman not question why Lisanna disappeared and there was no body after her death?

27. Not gonna lie Lisanna reuniting with Mira and Elfman makes me cry every time.

28. I do wish we got some filler episodes about Edolas, or some updates on how they are doing.

29. I think the funniest part about the series before the 7 year time skip is the fact that so many of the villains main thing is reviving Zeref, but turns out he was was chilling on Tenrou Island. Like the man was spending time with his situationship.

I wanted to put this at the end of this one, but I will start putting this at the end of the rest. I would like to let the people know who read this that I am actually doing my rewatch while working on my school work. I am working on mostly my capstone while watching. I am likely going to miss some stuff/forget to write it down. This is something I have wanted to do for a long time so I am doing in now during this rewatch. Sorry if I miss anything and feel free to share your opinions!

[sandymybeloved]

Why You Should Stop Saying Don’t Skip Nine

Background and Disclaimers:

I’ve pretty much been a Doctor Who fan my entire life, I was 2.5 in 2005, never missed an episode from the time I was ~10, although the bulk of my argument is about newcomers, thats not my experience with the show, so take it with a pinch of salt

I’m a huge fan of the ninth Doctor, he’s in my top 3, I’ve watched series 1 more than any other, I think if someone is a fan of another era of Doctor Who and hasn’t watched, they absolutely should, its fantastic, it enhances everything that comes after it

Saying Don’t Skip Nine and Spreading Posts that Say it is Gatekeeping, and I’m Tired of Pretending its Not

By and large, I would say the Doctor Who fandom, or at least the parts that don’t use Doctor Who as an excuse to complain about a non-existant “woke agenda”, is a pretty friendly one. There’s no big cannon arguments because everyone understands its not worth getting into arguments about, nobody minds who you ship, theres no character thats universally hated or loved that people will be shitty about if you go against the grain. Maybe its just the people I follow, but its a good fandom to be a part of.

The one exception to this, the one thing about the (normal parts of) the fandom that I find to be toxic and offputting is the widespread nature of the phrase “don’t skip nine” and its variants I’ve seen over the years, along the lines of “if you skipped nine I dont respect/respect less you/your opinion”, “If someone tells you to skip nine, they don’t respect you”.

The intention is to encourage people to watch Eccleston, who’s considered to be the most overlooked of the modern Doctors. At Doctor Who’s pique in popularity, this was true, and 1 season wasn’t a lot to watch before getting to the stuff you wanted, “don’t skip nine” felt more like an encouragement not to pass him over just because he was less popular, at least within the fandom.

But as time’s gone on, and the number of series has increased, its perfectly reasonable for a person getting into the show for the first time to choose to start from a more recent point. And the show’s designed for that at its foundations, its designed to refresh itself on a regular basis, and in the new show, that period is always treated as though new people will be watching and it resets the continuity it can, and reintroduces the continuity it can’t.

So, let’s imagine you are this hypothetical newcomer, and you started watching with, say, 13, and you liked it enough to join the fandom. Are you going to feel like your welcome if you see a post that says “don’t skip nine”, or worse, one that says people who skip nine aren’t to be respected? Is that going to make you want to explore the show further? Is it encouraging?

At this point in time, in my opinion, the phrase only serves to gatekeep, I don’t see any real difference between something like “don’t skip nine” and “you’re not a real fan unless you watch the show in this specific way”, and at this point i’m just sick of hearing it outside of the context of a recommendation of where to start for people who've never seen the show, which, if you are saying it in fandom spaces, is not the audience a majority of the time.

If you’re a doctor who fan reading this, and you initially skiped nine, hell if you never watched him and don’t plan to, theres nothing wrong with that, your not less of a fan because you started somewhere else, that friend who told you to start at a later doctor didn’t respect you less, they thought you would like another doctor more, there is no right way, no right order, in which to watch doctor who, the way you did it made you a fan, and thats the bit that actually matters.

[biofunmy]

The N.B.A. Elite Are Now From Everywhere

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It was at the 2018 All-Star Game in Los Angeles that I asked Steve Nash, one of the foremost imports in N.B.A. history, if the league would ever be ready — really ready — for a Rest of the World vs. United States format for its annual midseason showcase.

“We’re getting there,” Nash said then.

Nash suggested that perhaps 2022 would be “the time to try it,” as a 30th anniversary tribute to the original Dream Team that wowed the world at the Barcelona Olympics.

That forecast is looking smarter every day.

Understandably somewhat lost last week amid the very sad news of the former N.B.A. commissioner David Stern’s death was the bulletin from the league office detailing the first batch of returns from fan balloting for next month’s All-Star Game in Chicago.

The leading vote-getter in the Eastern Conference: Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo from Greece.

The leading vote-getter in the West: Dallas’s Luka Doncic of Slovenia.

Fan voting will always generate outrage for one reason or another. Boston’s little-used Tacko Fall, who placed sixth among East frontcourt candidates, and the Los Angeles Lakers’ Alex Caruso, who landed at No. 8 among West guards, were the primary causes for complaints from the opening round of polling. Yet you scarcely heard a quibble about the fact that LeBron James trailed both Giannis and Luka even though he has joined Anthony Davis in powering the Lakers to a 29-7 start.

Antetokounmpo is the league’s reigning Most Valuable Player Award winner and is playing at an even higher level this season. Doncic has yet to appear in an N.B.A. playoff game, but he has established himself as a consensus top-10 player by averaging a ridiculous 29.7 points, 9.7 rebounds and 8.9 assists in his sophomore season — leading the upstart Mavericks to a surprising 23-13 record in the process.

Unlike Nash’s era, when the N.B.A. certainly featured numerous successful international players but only a few who were considered truly elite, there are several at that level besides Giannis and Luka.

The Cameroonian duo of Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid and Toronto’s Pascal Siakam have their own gaudy stat lines that make them All-Star locks.

Denver’s Nikola Jokic (Serbia), despite some slippage in his numbers from last season, remains the unquestioned fulcrum for the team with the second-best record in the West.

Utah’s Rudy Gobert (France) is not assured of making his All-Star breakthrough next month because a defense-first reputation like his historically doesn’t help much in All-Star campaigning. But Gobert has made such an all-around impact for the Jazz that you can find his name on Basketball Reference’s M.V.P. tracker at a solid No. 10.

Minnesota’s Karl-Anthony Towns, who was born in New Jersey but represents the Dominican Republic internationally, played in the past two All-Star Games and would be a cinch for a third appearance if not for a recent knee injury — and the Timberwolves’ slump to a 14-21 record from a 10-8 start.

Throw in top All-Star contenders such as Philadelphia’s Ben Simmons (Australia) and Indiana’s Domantas Sabonis (Lithuania) — as well as All-Stars of recent vintage such as Orlando’s Nikola Vucevic (Montenegro), Philadelphia’s Al Horford (Dominican Republic), Toronto’s Marc Gasol (Spain), Miami’s Goran Dragic (Slovenia) and Dallas’s Kristaps Porzingis (Latvia) — and the point becomes clear.

There may not quite be 12 internationals playing at an indisputable All-Star level as we speak, but it’s increasingly fair to ask, as Nash predicted, if we’re all that far away.

Porzingis, after all, is working his way back to an All-Star standard after a lengthy injury layoff. Two of Nash’s young fellow Canadians — Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Denver’s Jamal Murray — have also flashed All-Star potential. Recent top-five lottery picks include Phoenix’s Deandre Ayton (Bahamas) and the Knicks’ R.J. Barrett (Canada).

The way things are going, as we dribble into a new decade, it looks as though mathematical fairness is the only deterrent to N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver’s trying out a United States/World format.

There were 108 foreign-born players on opening-night rosters this season, meaning there were more than 300 American-born players. It simply wouldn’t be equitable for two groups of such disparate size to battle for 12 All-Star spots each.

But I also don’t believe that the league is married to its two-year-old system in which the two leading vote-getters, as captains, pick their respective squads without regard to conference. For all the anticipation and chatter that the made-for-television selection show generates, momentum from the first game played using this format in L.A. in 2018, after years of waning interest, did not carry over to the 2019 edition in Charlotte.

Don’t forget that Silver, when he initially proposed the introduction of an in-season tournament starting with the 2020-21 season, was looking at the final four of that competition as a potential replacement for the All-Star Game entirely. The league ultimately backed off that proposal when teams and the players’ union voiced resistance to an in-season tournament that would fall any later on the league’s calendar than December, but Silver’s original thinking suggests that the N.B.A. remains concerned about how flat All-Star Games tend to feel.

At the M.I.T. Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston in March, remember, Silver himself said the 2019 All-Star Game “didn’t work” and admitted that the most recent changes were akin to putting “an earring on a pig.”

Maybe the starry imports who have succeeded Nash, Dirk Nowitzki, Pau Gasol, Tony Parker and all the international stars from the last decade will never get their chance to engage the Americans in an All-Star duel. Maybe restricting that format to the Rising Stars Game featuring first- and second-year players, as the N.B.A. has done for the past five seasons, is the right call.

Yet the mere fact that the debate only gets stronger may be as fitting a tribute as we can muster for Stern — since taking the N.B.A. global before any other North American sport, and to a much greater degree, is such a huge slice of his legacy.

The Scoop @TheSteinLine

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You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I’ll field three questions posed via email at marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. (Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you’re writing in from, and make sure “Corner Three” is in the subject line.)

Q: Where would you rank David Stern as a commissioner compared to those in other sports like Pete Rozelle in the N.F.L., Bowie Kuhn or Fay Vincent in baseball, etc.? — Bob Purcell (San Diego)

Stein: I covered a smattering of all the major North American men’s team sports in my youth, but I have been covering the N.B.A. almost exclusively since February 1994. So it’s not really fair for me to answer this one.

I would naturally put Stern ahead of all his competitors because I know so much more about his work. Most of my older peers always say that mythical top spot has to go to either Stern or Rozelle. But as our own Harvey Araton sagely noted when I asked him, Stern’s edge may well be that on his watch the N.B.A. achieved relevance on social, cultural and international fronts that the N.F.L. — for all its advantages in TV prominence and in-stadium attendance — can’t match.

What I can say with greater confidence is that I will always wish Stern, upon ceding his office to Adam Silver in February 2014, would have spent a few years trying to bring order to a sport he loved almost as much as I do: tennis.

Tennis has always suffered greatly from the lack of a commissioner who could exert authority over the sport’s many (too many, really) competing factions. But Stern’s focus, for pretty much his entire adult life, was the N.B.A. and growing/enhancing/protecting his league. So I am forced to concede that it probably would have been hard for him to muster anywhere near the same passion for another sport in a working capacity.

Q: I have to agree with the recent comment here that the Raptors are mostly ignored by the American sports media. Maybe you are an exception, but why aren’t more people writing about the Chris Boucher story alone? — Kent Goodwin (Stowe, Vt.)

Stein: I think we’ve reached the point in this discussion where nothing I say is going to persuade the skeptics. But I think I will be vindicated when Coach of the Year Award voting results are released in June.

The Raptors awoke on Tuesday on a 54-win pace. If they maintain that level for the rest of the regular season, given the ridiculous string of injuries they’ve faced along the way, Nick Nurse will have a real shot at winning the C.O.Y. prize — and thus prove how closely the Raptors are being monitored south of the border in the post-Kawhi Leonard era.

It was suggested to me last week by a trusted insider that the Raptors just might surprise us again before the Feb. 6 trade deadline and emerge as buyers to fortify themselves for another playoff run. The widespread assumption coming into the season held that Toronto would trade the veteran likes of Kyle Lowry, Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka to prepare for a reset in the summer of 2021 built around the free-agency pursuit of Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo. (I predicted as much myself.)

The safe bet remains that Masai Ujiri, Toronto’s president of basketball operations, will avoid any deals that affect the Raptors’ cap space in 2021. But the Raptors will be a huge source of curiosity over the next month — thanks in part to the unexpected contributions from the likes of Boucher, Terence Davis, Matt Thomas, Oshae Brissett and O.G. Anunoby — whether or not they’re generating reams of coverage.

Q: How convenient for you. Now you get to expand your hate for Houston beyond basketball. — @venramamurthy from Twitter

Stein: This tweet came in response to my social media cheering for the Buffalo Bills as a proud former Western New Yorker — which lasted until the Bills unraveled in Saturday’s A.F.C. wild-card loss to the Houston Texans to extend their drought without a playoff win to 1995.

The supposition from Venkat is that rooting against the Texans was a natural for me because I “hate” his Rockets.

We’re still not past this stuff in 2020, friends?

My only issues with Houston, here in the real world, are the traffic, how hard it is to get to Cafe Adel for some wonderful Bosnian food in that traffic when staying downtown and the oppressive weather from June to September (my quarrel with every city in Texas — including the one I live in).

Happy New Year!

Numbers Game

$2,615,000

In 20 years as the team owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban has accrued more than $2.6 million in publicly announced fines from the N.B.A., according to this ledger maintained by the longtime Mavericks historian Patricia Bender. Not all fines issued by the league office are made public.

6

The N.B.A.’s two Florida teams sport quite the contrast with their records in overtime games so far this season: Miami is 6-0, and Orlando is 0-0.

16-19

The Pacers finished three games under .500 last season after losing Victor Oladipo to a ruptured quadriceps muscle in his right leg and were swept by Boston in a first-round playoff series. After acquiring Malcolm Brogdon in an off-season sign-and-trade with Milwaukee, Indiana is on a 51-win pace this season without Oladipo but still doesn’t know when he will return.

3-2

The potential downside of the Los Angeles Clippers’ well-chronicled “load management” strategy with Kawhi Leonard is that they may have to settle for a playoff seed that forces them to play the Lakers sooner than the conference finals. Thanks to an underwhelming 3-2 mark since their impressive Christmas Day defeat of the Lakers, Kawhi and Co. awoke on Tuesday as the West’s No. 4 team — which has the Clippers on course for a second-round playoff encounter with their Staples Center cotenants.

20

The Lakers’ 20 blocked shots in a home win on Sunday over Detroit were a rarity. According to Basketball Reference, no N.B.A. team had recorded at least 20 blocked shots in a game since it happened twice in 2001: Toronto with 23 against Atlanta in March 2001 and the Raptors with 20 against Golden State in November 2001.

Hit me up anytime on Twitter (@TheSteinLine) or Facebook (@MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram (@marcsteinnba). Send any other feedback to marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com.

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