#like. tangentially lol

[corellianhounds]

I think we all had a pretty good idea going into the sequel trilogy that the writers were going to kill at least one of the principle characters from the original trilogy, but you could also definitely tell Han Solo was gonna bite it in the first movie for sure. Han Solo walks out into a black, cavernous room onto a long bridge with no railings to try to talk to his genocidal kid dressed in all black and everything including aforementioned son’s lightsaber is or is lit with red. We know how this is going to end.

Movie and tv show playwrights loooove shock value twist endings and in the past 20 years or so it’s almost gotten to be THE thing they bank on getting audiences in for (which is why I think the idea of ‘spoiler culture’ has been taken to the extreme it has) even when they don’t help/actively hinder the story, and it’s why so many writers have changed the trajectories of stories midway through because the audience, in between movies or episodes or seasons of shows, figures out where the story headed, and they didn’t want the audience to have figured it out sooner than its reveal, so they throw a wrench into what might have been carefully structured and successfully foreshadowed stories, just so they can still get a surprise or twist or reveal in. It’s why a lot of “plot twists” nowadays don’t make thematic or emotional sense in the story, or they’re inconsistent with tone or pacing, and we end up with disjointed and disappointing movies and shows as a whole.

I digress. My point is that even though we kind of had an idea that they would kill off a/some beloved character/s in the sequel movies, there are ways it could have been done better and ACTUALLY shocked the audience, while maintaining a cohesive story. In the movie it looks like Han’s death was there to say to the protagonists and the audience that this villain is willing to kill his own father in cold blood, so there’s nothing he won’t do or sacrifice to achieve his goals (despite the fact we as the audience already saw him blow up multiple planets so like. we weren’t under the impression he had all that much internal conflict in doing so). I don’t remember Han being brought up in the next movie, so it doesn’t appear like his death had much of an impact on the characters’ choices moving forward. (If there was, oh well, it’s not relevant to this post)

The overarching storyline for the sequels (and I do admit I’ve still only seen the first two, I know several pieces of the third through Tumblr osmosis but I just didn’t like or care about the other two enough to watch the third) is centered around Kylo Ren as a villain. Great, we have our bad guy. Problem is, none of the main trio have any significant tie to the main bad guy with the exception of Finn, a stormtrooper who defects when he sees what it is he’s fighting for. With that setup, Finn should have been the main character. (Everyone knows this, it’s been debated and argued to death, that isn’t the point of this post)

The problems came in when the writers ALSO wanted to include the original main cast as principle characters, because those characters had STRONGER ties to Kylo Ren than Finn or the others. You can’t always have two sets of protagonists and tell a meaningful story with all of them when attention is being drawn so many different ways and you’re trying to cram so many characters arcs and dynamics into just three movies. Unless you’ve established a framed narrative, or an ensemble cast from the beginning à la Ocean’s Eleven style, it’s usually not going to work out.

There are already a trillion and one different takes on the Finn-Poe-Rey trio and Kylo Ren’s story. They’re irrelevant to this post BECAUSE

If they really wanted to shock the audience with an established, beloved character’s death, they should have nixed the new trio entirely and kept the focus on the older trio like it appeared they wanted to and they could have explored the story and connections they had to this new antagonist. Then you can really get into some meaningful character dynamics based on history and set up the audience’s nostalgia for the movies and characters they loved as a kid, but still have new circumstances for them to operate under. (Again, this is if you’re wanting to tell a story with the old characters anyway instead of trying something new.)

Ignore the whole First Order and whatever bigger plot was happening in the movies and set it up to be a different story entirely; I don’t care what it is, it’ll exist as the result or extension of the new emotional plot. Kylo Ren is still the villain but this time Han Solo is the main character.

In this universe Han and Leia didn’t split because of his wandering ways or whatever, Han stayed with her because the whole culmination of his character in the first trilogy was becoming the guy who sticks around, and who does so not just for himself or the individuals he cares about but for the greater good, even when the going gets tough. Han Solo was not a good guy— He became the good guy. In this universe that extended to staying with Leia and raising a family because he did choose to settle down.

We follow Han as he tries to track down and redeem his son, bring him back to the light (and how interesting could it have been to see a non-Force-sensitive person redeem a Sith? For it to be the inverse of the first trilogy, with a father trying to appeal to his son?), and the whole movie focuses on the strained relationship Leia, Han, and Luke have with Kylo Ren, in addition to the now-strained relationships between the three of them.

Kylo Ren doesn’t want to be redeemed. He wants to make people hurt, and he especially wants the people he believes failed him or are trying to appeal to him to hurt.

To that end we come to the catalyst for the final showdown. This time, however, Kylo Ren doesn’t kill Han.

He kills Chewbacca.

That is the kind of plot twist audiences wouldn’t have seen coming, the kind that would unite all of them and inspire outrage against the villain (and make it more compelling if he truly does get a better character arc in coming back to the light) because the villain has done something unthinkable, and it leaves the story and characters open to evolve in more meaningful ways because of all the people the villain could have killed it was the one they (and audiences) weren’t expecting to be a target. The injustice of it all.

The original trio were older, and they’re human. The audience knew they at some point in the Star Wars universe were going to die, but Chewie? Chewie’s over two-hundred years old. Chewie’s always been there. Han is almost never separated from Chewie, the one we know has been through thick and thin with him for longer than Han’s kid has been alive.

Han has to reckon with the fact his son has killed his best friend, and that his son did it specifically to hurt Han as much as he possibly could in that moment. Han Solo reached out knowing he could be hurt in the process, but Kylo Ren wanted his father to suffer, and with killing Chewie— someone who was almost certainly present nearly the entirety of Ben Solo’s upbringing— Han Solo is forced to live with and experience the grief as a result, and he now has to figure out what he actually wants in the next movie.

Does he still love his son enough to forgive him for this? Is his son still worth saving? Is he even the same person? Does Han even want to save him at this point? What will Luke and Leia think if he doesn’t? Was Ben only trying to hurt him, or did he do it as a means of challenging Han by saying “Who have you prioritized in your life?” Did he somehow neglect his son to the point this could all be his fault, or was Ben Solo always going to make the choices he did despite the good upbringing he had? Is there anybody who can appeal to this Sith, knowing his purpose is to hurt people by making them suffer the loss of those closest to them? You as the hero may be willing to sacrifice your own life, but are you prepared to sacrifice the lives of others on the gamble that you might redeem one truly evil person, in the hope that doing so will prevent the deaths of trillions of others?

How far are any of them willing to go to try to save Ben Solo from the Dark side, and at what point would they admit or consider him a lost cause?

If you want a true plot twist, make it the death of a character the people within the story aren’t expecting either. Force your main characters to develop based on that twist, and the ripple effects it has will have a stronger impact.

[meamiki]

isat color palette challenge WOO!! these are always fun :D

[dailyhtfboards]

Day 101

Today’s board is:

ya know if it weren’t for the blood, this one would just look like Giggles is taking a *very* refreshingly deep nap.

(From TV episode 12A I’ve Got You Under my Skin)

[liontamarin]

twice as many stars as usual

[ducktracy]

So do you like bugs or nah?

I LOVE BUGS!! a lot!! i just went on a big long rambling post yesterday about all my favorite characterizations i like about him and that he’s tied for being in my top 5 favorite LT characters ever. believe it or not one of my driving forces of getting into LT was for him specifically

but i just don’t have very much to say about him! yet! he sneaks up on me, my Bugs Thoughts And Analyses come to me when i’m actually reviewing his shorts. he’s coy

the thing about me is that Daffy and Porky are an exception in my enjoyment of LT. i don’t really care AS MUCH for most of the characters. i’m so much more into the shorts for the people behind it and the production behind it rather than the characters, and this is probably why i’m so picky or disenfranchised with a lot of modern LT stuff. i care more about how, say, Friz Freleng portrays Bugs or Bob McKimson portrays Bugs than Bugs himself. i care more about what McKimson’s Sylvester represents about his cartoons and directorial voice, compared to Freleng’s Sylvester and what that says, than Sylvester himself as a character. so much of my interest in LT is completely dominated by its place in animation history and what it means about the medium of animation, what it says about the directors, etc, etc. the characters are just incidental to that. Daffy and Porky have won out as the single exceptions, and they also have the benefit of having been rotated around all the directors, so it hits all my LT niches in one

just because i don’t post as much about Bugs doesn’t mean i don’t like him!! rather, i’d rather let the Bugs People do their thing and claim him than me tread on their turf! he’s already so popular and has a bunch of people who will post art and analyses of him, i’m sure… i’ll focus my energies on characters like Porky who get very little love or characters like Daffy who are obnoxiously misunderstood (Porky too.) i’ll get there! trust me i love Bugs and while he’s lower in my top 5 of characters, he’s probably the character i have the most investment in besides Daffy and Porky. this isn’t the first time i’ve been asked this and it makes me sad like noooo 🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲

[kohakhearts]

goh parentified child syndrome. go(h)

my time is here at last. thank you for enabling me <3 apologies for taking months to finish writing this giant post!

welcome to my dissertation on this fucking Dynamic <3

ok! first thing, let's establish our criteria for Parentified Child Syndrome. this is obviously not like, an actual diagnostic Thing, but there are a million and one articles out there for us to look through. so i did the tough work of scouring those to find some Symptoms we can use as anchor points here. a lot of this is split into "emotional" (parents seeking comfort from their children, rather than comforting them) vs. "material" (parents assigning their children responsibilities that are not age-appropriate (e.g. grocery shopping, paying bills, etc.)) needs, but for simplicity i'll just merge them together - because realistically, they often go hand-in-hand. so the primary symptoms we'll work with here will be:

disruptive childhood behaviours (particularly at school)

stress and anxiety

reluctance to participate in play/age-appropriate activities with their peers

difficulty acknowledging and accepting one's feelings

insecure attachment styles

need to feel "in control"

distrustful of others/self-reliant to a fault

absenteeism and poor performance in school

passive communication style

the other obvious prerequesite here is the family dynamic. so let's dissect that one a bit!

goh's family situation isn't actually like...100% clear. but i have analyzed every episode where his family is even mentioned like it's my full-time job and i have no reason to believe his grandmother actually lives with him. so in the scope of this essay, i am assuming that she lives nearby, and most likely has a key to the apartment, but does not live with them.

otherwise, we are given enough context to assume that camille and walker have been busy with work goh's entire life (though i'd choose to believe for my own sanity that in his infancy his mother at least wasn't working...though given the type of job she has, that's actually...kinda hard to say for sure). we can also assume that they've at least been self-employed for the majority of his life. it's clear that they are fairly well-established in the city/in their field by jn, and since goh is supposed to be 10 at this point, it makes sense to me that they've been building that company up pretty much his whole life.

in terms of the work they do, goh tells ash, my dad is a system engineer and my mom is a programmer. they run a company together. granted, we don't see very much of their actual workplace, but what we do see is completely void of other people. as in, camille and walker do all this work BY THEMSELVES.

nothing in the anime otherwise disputes this! if anything, goh's explanations of his parents' lifestyle just reinforces it. he also suggests that during periods of harsh weather and heavy system use, his parents are busier than usual. this implies that they are most busy during holidays. this is actually further implied by the flashback in jn015 where they explicitly say to him that they're sorry for having to work through the holiday. his reaction, being completely unengaged, not even really even acknowledging it, tells us that this is the norm.

however!! he also shows off a special device to horace in jn032 that he says his parents made specifically for him, to help him learn more about mew. this suggests that they must have some amount of free time to dedicate to him...but they show their love for him through material gifts related to their line of work (his computer set-up, too; he tells scorbunny that his parents set it all up for him).

otherwise, we see camille and walker privately share their concerns about goh (a clear awareness that he doesn't have many friends, concern about him being lonely because of them, etc.) but never actually confront goh with their concerns or appear to go out of their ways to do anything about it. i wrote a bit about this and the symbolism of having him catch a cubone of all pokemon in the episode we're introduced to his family here but the tl;dr is that camille and walker demonstrate care for goh to each other but not to him - presumably to compensate for their physical absence, we get the impression he's given a lot of freedom and little to no discipline.

which brings me to the first criterion:

disruptive childhood behaviours (with a side of absenteeism, which presumably contributes to poor performance in school)

goh's school life is obviously inconvienent to the plot progression, so for narrative purposes the writers have him just not go to school. in jn049 we get the explanation that goh had made a promise to their teacher to show up to school for tests...but the weird thing about this scene is that chloe's surprised by it:

since in jn001 and jn002 we see that chloe is goh's only point of contact amongst his schoolmates and that she hand delivers schoolwork to him at her dad's lab, the only way this exchange really makes sense to me is if it's a new arrangement. even the fact that goh makes a point of saying "hey, i followed through, go me" to their teacher here gives that vibe.

so, we can extrapolate from that that...prior to whenever this agreement was made, goh just didn't go to school because he didn't want to. but given how schools operate, we can pretty safely assume his parents are aware of this. and i have strong reason to believe that they have at least been on the receiving end of phone calls from teachers or administrators, because of these lines from jn015:

all things considered, this is a weird assumption to make, especially about your hyper-independent introverted child...unless there's a history of disruptive or unfriendly behaviour to inform that assumption. and based on goh's behaviour in jn001 at professor oak's pokemon camp, i don't think it's so out there to say the pattern probably was there.

goh is actually a super sweet kid towards his parents and has a clear admiration for them both. even in flashbacks, his whole thing is kind of like...he doesn't want to bother them. they fall asleep on family vacation and don't spend time with him? well, that's fine! he'll just find something else to do! in that same episode in the flashback sequence, they pick him up on the side of the road alone in the pouring rain and he doesn't say a word to them. even though he was angry and upset before.

so, yeah. i think it would make a lot of sense if he were well-behaved at home and not so much so at school. but camille and walker, even when they learn about things that happen, don't seem to probe or discipline him. whether because of any combination of giving him leeway out of guilt or of not wanting to encourage him to act out at home, we don't know. but the disconnect obviously exists.

which then contributes to

stress and anxiety, difficulty acknowleding and accepting one's feelings, and passive communication style

goh is socially awkward, yes, and clearly very anxious socially especially early on in jn, but a lot of that seems to come from an inability to express his wants and needs. i think jn003 has some of the most succinct examples of this - ash having to realize he's struggling and to reach down to him when they're climbing the tower in order for him to even accept that he can get (and needs) help getting up, and then later one when he stumbles over his words trying to ask ash to be his friend.

i think another good example is in jn007, after he gets knocked out at the flute cup. passive communication relies a lot on shifts in body language and in, well, passive statements. when ash approaches him to tell him to cheer up, goh doesn't actually really...respond to that. he does this

and then runs off. which he does fairly often, actually, even as late as jn135. it's emotional avoidance 101. literally just run away from the thing that's bothering you. something else we see in jn135 is him backing out of admitting he wants to go on a journey - because he is concerned about ash's reaction (though i think it's a little more complex than that, but i'll circle back to that).

and of course there's jn062, which i wrote a lot about in this post. but the whole thesis of the episode is that goh has learned through his relationships up to this point that it's okay to not understand your feelings but you still have to feel them. and it's actually a really beautiful character development moment for him, but also reinforces the fact that he still doesn't know how to grapple with his own emotions. after finally finding drizzile and explaining how he knew he would find it there, he starts to cry and doesn't know why. but even aside from feeling vulnerable, it's kind of a culmination of this stress he's been carrying with him throughout the whole episode...and the sense of responsibility he feels for driving drizzile away. which is a great segue into

insecure attachment styles and need to feel "in control"

if there's one thing i feel like people sleep on regarding goh's character, it's how much of a mother hen he is. he's obviously very thorough and thoughtful when it comes to looking after his pokemon - as in jn062 where he spends all that time chasing down drizzile after it runs away, even to the point of telling ash and chloe that they should stay behind because it's getting late but that he's going to keep looking - but he's the same way with ash.

off the top of my head, things like buying extra scones because he knew ash would want them, making ash wash his hands after eating ice cream, chastising him about punctuality, you know...very parental kind of things. he actually does it with horace too, when they first meet, by bringing a lunch for them both when he goes back to the forest to meet him again.

anyway, being a Mom Friend is cute and all, but it also REEKS of parentified child. taking on responsibilities that aren't yours to fulfill? yeah. that's a need to feel in control. it's what he's used to! it offers him security!

the other side of this is...chloe. goh's first friend, who he refuses to consider a friend, or let consider him a friend. but, like, she obviously IS his friend. and yet our introduction to them gives us this exchange

goh and chloe have a pretty tense relationship at the beginning of jn, wherein she is clearly trying to help him (by you know. getting his homework for him and shit) and he blows her off in a text message, which she complains is a repeating behaviour. chloe is obviously very loyal to him, even though he doesn't seem to repay the favour. again, there's a big disconnect here.

insecure attachments generally stem from anxiety over potential rejection and/or poor self-esteem cultivated in childhood based on parents’ emotional availability (or lack thereof) to their children. by keeping chloe an arm's distance away, goh keeps himself safe from the dangers of vulnerability, taught to him through childhood encounters with emotionally unavailable parents.

i'm not here to armchair diagnose (ok, who am i kidding, yeah i am), but i think goh's attachment style is anxious-avoidant. his clear avoidance of making friends, the multiple times we see him break off his friendship with ash only to minutes later be like "me and the bestie"...yeah, that's avoidance. but he does crave intimacy, arguably even more than he fears it.

hence why even though he knows ash would want him to journey on his own...he still convinces himself that actually telling ash that would be, as he calls it, a "betrayal of [their] friendship." my theory is that he's not concerned that ash will be upset - he's concerned that ash won't be upset enough. which is why when then ash turns it around on him and says he's going on a journey, goh gets upset and pushes him away. he does the exact same thing with horace when they're younger. just a complete 180 - he wronged me once, so he's the worst and i can't forgive him, ever.

the difference with chloe is that she actually takes care of him more than he takes care of her - which changes the dynamic from "i have to do everything to keep this person in my life, including suppressing my emotions for their sake" to "i cannot express to this person that i have needs and desires because they'll think i'm too much and they won't stick around if i do." which is primarily avoidant, but insecure attachment nonetheless.

this is extrapolation, but i think his relationship with chloe is so different because we are supposed to get the sense that they have a more familial dynamic. so, she's the one person he can't push away from him - but as he learned in his actual family dynamic, he also can't be too close to her. he doesn't want to be smothered; he doesn't want her to feel smothered by him. so they maintain a degree of separation that only begins to go away after her father begins literally housing and feeding him, thus integrating him and ash into their family in some honorary way.

which brings me to the last point, i guess, which is

reluctance to participate in age-appropriate activities with peers and self-reliant to a fault

these are, i think, the traits that jn is most blatantly attempting to better in goh throughout his arc. so i won't spend too long hashing it out, because i think these are things we all know he struggled with!

in flashbacks, we see him alone at school; during the first episode, at professor oak's camp, he is always physically distanced from the other kids and chloe even points out that he's basically doing professor oak's job at one point! he's not on the same level as the other kids and it's clear he doesn't want to be. when he meets horace, we see that it takes him some time to get comfortable enough with him to go explore the forest together and become friends.

he doesn't go to school, but that doesn't mean he isn't learning things - he becomes a very self-directed learner early on, from what he see. he's not just like...rotting in his room playing video games. he's studying and researching. the only times aside from with horace that we see him in a flashback doing something that isn't solitary is with pokemon - and even then, he's like...reciting their pokedex entries. his abra story at the end of jn is precipitated by him saying he was going through his dad's old pokedex (which is a whole other thing - this implies walker used to be a trainer, but neither of goh's parents seem to have pokemon...perhaps they're too busy with work to look after them? a theory for another time, i suppose, but it has undeniably being gnawing at my brain since that episode aired lol).

and of course, there's the fact that in jn062 he tells drizzile he was never comfortable with confiding in his parents or his grandmother...suggesting that he never confided in anyone, because we don't really get the sense from the whole "i don't NEED friends" exchange in jn001 that he considers chloe a reliable confidant, either.

the other place we see his flawed sense of self-reliance, aside from like...everywhere in the first 10 or so episodes, lol (something that is reflected pretty beautifully and symbolically in scorbunny's story, too!), is in project mew. he has to learn how to work in a team - and he clearly hates it. at this point he's found one person to rely on, but that already feels like too much. the raid battle with articuno is the most obvious example of this. he isn't good at being a leader, but he also isn't good at being a follower. because he's only ever been responsible for himself, and he doesn't trust anyone else to know how to direct him, but he also has no clue how to work within the parameters of a team.

i also want to say, as a final note, that i actually think this is all extremely intentional writing. obviously in the west we have a strong capitalism culture too, but the work culture in japan is very toxic (just google "japan work culture" and you can see right away how intense it is lol) and i'm not actually surprised at all that pokemon would make such a direct commentary on that - a lot of japanese kids could probably relate to goh and his emotionally absent, work-obsessed parents! they are clearly pretty well-off, but their dedication to work supercedes matters of home and family, because that's how it's supposed to be. as a result, goh admires them a lot for this dedication - but his arc is primarily about letting go of the "work" part of interacting with pokemon and learning how to have fun and make the most of his experiences. and i think that's a really lovely message for modern pokemon to be sending to kids :')

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2025: TIME'S AGENT by Brenda Peynado.

New year, new book tag! I have been Patiently Awaiting this one since the book deal was announced, because I love interdimensional nonsense and pocket worlds, and yeah okay maybe it did remind me a little bit of TIME WAR (beloved), and sure let's sprinkle in evil corporations and make it gay, why not. Very excited for this!!

[crimeronan]

managed to catch the last twenty minutes of a writing workshop run by a local author whose work i have not read & at the end he passingly mentioned that he does a lot of stuff with invisible illness because of his own autoimmune stuff & so i came up to talk to him very incoherently like "oh invisible illness!! i-!! lupus!!" and he was like "OH AMAZING" and then took my email and is putting me in touch with his professional writing partner who writes and teaches almost exclusively about living with & managing chronic illness & injecting people's illness experiences into fiction :) flapping a bit about it.

[hopecomesbacktolife]

to be fair I still haven’t seen episode 9, but. I’m still 100% a “korkie is actually secretly korkie kryze-kenobi and his daughter is rey making her rey kenobi” truther

[poepill]

last year i had the fun opportunity to draw for the quodo valentines minifest, and while I didn't draw anything this year, here are some leftover quodos I'd done then to get a better hang of drawing the pair.

i'd planned to make the last two into a comic about quark getting stood up on a date (with a happy ending), but i,,,didn't finish, so now it's just. sad quark hrs. whoops! (sorry quark)

anyway happy valentines day !! 🥰💕💕💕

also putting the songs i was listening to while drawing sad quark bc they're so good:

bonus close ups:

[sysig]

Evil Time is great :) (Patreon)

[badjohnspeakeasy]

Something I made while bored. I'll get back to regularly scheduled manga edits tomorrow; for now, I wanted to try my hand at this rudimentary version of cartooning.

It really do be like that tho

[utilitycaster]

Just realized that on some hilarious level Ashton and Laudna are literally the most basic Classic Dark D&D Backstory of the kind that people tend to mock when it's like, a Liam Neeson character archetype, and everyone (myself included) just missed it entirely because the characters aren't a straight man with a dead wife or daughter.

[meamiki]

Love your reverse entry AU! Also put a silly amount of thought into the idea of Loop doing a vtuber nuzlock thing; namely, the universe hates them.

See, in my headcanon* of your AU not only do they make the mistake of naming their pokemon after the party, (discreetly, I'm guessing?) They also encounter a bug that makes the game reset if any of their pokemon faint. After freezing for a bit. And once they realize what happened, they decide to actually do their job, and make little puppets. They memorized all of their families actors lines after all! So it's easy for them to act out little scenes in between bits, while waiting for things to happen or during interludes.

Also, they look rather real for a vtuber, so they just have a 3d model of themselves mapped over themselves to hide that they are themself. Except the lighting from glowing head makes it glitch for a half second every hear and there so.

Also! Maybe the puppetry thing ends on them giving the story a ridiculously tragic ending? Because they don't feel like they can acknowledge an alternative ending for a play they star in and remain sane.

*was headcanon the right word here? Probably not. More like, 'I think it'd be neat if'

Anyway this was a lot. Feel free to ignore literally all of it! I just think it's a cool and interesting au that's nothing like anyone else is doing so I couldn't help myself.

Wah!! /pos

This is super interesting and fun anon!!! The Universe hates Loop :thumbsup: 

To expand upon your idea with more ideas (hope this is okay!): 

I can only imagine Loop, while waiting for the game to reboot after freezing, just taking out like. Wood carving tools and materials from out of nowhere and just start whittling away to make these puppets of The Party (but as they remember them, not their modern counterparts.) A few extra set pieces here and there, maybe as well. Not the King though. 

Maybe it ends up becoming a recurring thing throughout the stream while waiting for things to stop glitching out? And they start giving “made-up” backstories for each of these puppets while they’re being created well in addition to using them properly for acting out bits! 

Every once and a while someone points out their model having an “art-style shift” for a few seconds. They ignore them. 

Once they’re all completed maybe they end up putting on a whole production out of it completely discarding the nuzlocke (lmao). A completely fictional tale. Not at all based on their own experiences. 

When they get closer and closer to the climactic end. When the party is staring face to face against the final boss, the King. They stall. They think. What type of ending will this story have? They were reciting lines from memory while telling it. Going off script is scary. 

They want to continue the tale as written. They want to stay true to their memory. 

But they also don’t want any of their (puppet) Party to suffer either. So, they tweak it, just the tiniest bit.

They continue telling the tale, beat for beat. Up until when the King defeats them. In one fell swoop.

Instead of the Housemaiden being thrown, it’s the Traveler.  

Over and over again, Loop acts out the King (metaphorical, there is no puppet) throwing the Traveler puppet onto the table. While narrating the whole ordeal as well.

They get really into it too, smashing the puppet into smithereens on the table after a bit. Whoops!

This causes the vtuber model to completely glitch out, showing themself instead of the model. They abruptly end stream after that.

…Many people will probably speculate that this is somehow an ARG. 

All this happened because The Universe was like “you are not allowed to play this Pokemon Game without some form of hiccup.” lmao. 

Anon, I will repeat this again. This is a super fun and interesting idea!!! Thank you, for introducing me to a new idea I had not considered and making me think!!!!!

And I am also sorry for using this ask as an opportunity to reveal where this Loop is coming from (sort of kind of) LMAO.

For anyone who read this to the end, thank you!! And also feel free to send any other asks my way since. I like thinking. About things I have not thought before!!!!

[lavernius]

I was so happy about getting multiple 1A requests that I decided to just dump all my recent 1A doodles in one post :-)

[steamedtilyapia]

im very normal about fuuta in general but i dont think im ever going to emotionally recover from his fire motif and what it represents for his character and how he reflects the greater theme of justice so that means i must rant about it

(more under the cut because this got longer than i expected whoopsies)

so anyway fire is pretty obviously supposed to be symbolic of his passion for justice right? that fire is all over the place in bring it on. he's wielding it to take down enemies, his signature weapon is a flaming sword. it's what he uses to lead the campaign against the people he's after, the people he's deemed in the wrong.

it's a fucking flaming sword, it's badass as hell!!!! it's what a hero of justice, a knight, would use!!!! it's cool as shit, it's his symbol of justice.

that's how he sees his justice in trial 1.

he's righteous, he wants so badly to believe he was a hero, he was doing it all for a good cause, for justice. his passion for justice was a tool he used to meet those ends, to be a hero, to wave it valiantly in the face of enemies.

the fire, however, is conspicuously absent once he's noticed the blood on his hands

interestingly, despite backdraft as a song title being much more related to his fire motif than bring it on, fire is actually surprisingly absent from the mv's visuals. fire, as in actual orange burning fire, doesn't show up much at all in backdraft except for when both fuuta and his victim begin turning to ashes, and a short bit near the end right after the last chorus when the spraycan explodes in fuuta's face. you know what the mv does show a lot of though?

smoke. and ash. the byproducts of a fire, the byproducts of fuuta's passion for justice.

bringing it back to firefighting for a moment: as many people have already pointed out, backdraft as a firefighting term refers to when a fire that has consumed all available oxygen suddenly explodes when more oxygen is made available, such as when a window or door breaks. the thing about fire hazards, though, is if the fire and the heat don't do someone in, usually it's the smoke. the smoke inhalation causes breathing difficulties and suffocation, making it even more difficult for a person to escape the fire.

in backdraft, instead of fire itself, what we're shown is these byproducts of a fire. the smoke is damaging to human health, and the ash shows that the fire has burned things up and caused destruction, in this case killing someone. all we're shown is the negative results of a fire, in sharp contrast to its badass, positive portrayal in bring it on.

hell, even fuuta himself starts turning to ashes and the spraycan explodes in his face, showing how even he is experiencing the negative results of a fire that has gotten out of his control, how even he has gotten burned by his passion for justice. or, is it es' desire for justice?

translation of fuuta's t2 vd by onigiriico

Me, too! I was like that, too! I also didn't think it'd turn out that way!

You and I are exactly the same breed! The only difference between us is the clothes we're wearing.

fuuta's justice and es' justice, it's all the same in his head now, he directly tells es that they're the same, that we're the same. it's all the same hunger for justice that ends up causing harm even if that wasn't the intention.

you know that saying that fire is a good servant but a bad master? i think that's pretty applicable to fuuta's situation. his passion for the pursuit of justice was great when it was still a tool, a sword he could wield, after all he did manage to shed light on some people's wrongs and bring them to justice. but once it exploded, when it became a backdraft that even he could no longer control, it did more damage than he intended.

it burned even him, it killed a middle schooler. and he recognizes that in backdraft. he only shows us the ways fire that becomes a hazard can go wrong.

translation of fuuta's t2 vd by onigiriico

What did I do? All I did was say that what's wrong is wrong! I was just going off at a bad person online!

I didn't think they would die! I just thought that wrong things are wrong, and that a crime is a crime! You get that, don't you? See? Aren't we the same?

it's just. fire is such a good metaphor for the message of fuuta's character and his arc. it's an amazing illustration of how dangerous it is when you feed a desire for justice too much, when you forget to put a boundary on how you handle that fire. eventually the fire spreads just like how passion for justice becomes zealotry, until more and more things fall under what you consider to be 'punishable' by your standards and goes out of control to hurt people that probably didn't deserve it. it's a warning to set proper boundaries on our own definition and desire for justice and what's 'right' so the good intentions doesn't spiral into harm. it's a reflection of our attitudes towards milgram as the audience responsible for their justice and forgiveness. it's amazing i love it i love fuuta's fire symbolism i love fuuta's character arc and i love milgram's writing so so so much