#literally not my fault the show's premise is That but it has a lot of really good scenes..... both silly and truly meaningful

[artist-issues]

I Saw Wish

And it was the worst animated Disney movie I’ve ever seen. I have to watch it again before I can get into the nitty gritty details. But I don’t need details to sum it up, because my dad actually said it perfectly as we left the theater:

“It was like someone who didn’t really understand Disney movies tried to make a Disney movie.”

Both the form (the technical arts of filmmaking) and the content (the morals, values, and themes of the movie) were totally horrible.

I don’t know who’s fault it was. Jeremy Spears was in the storyboard room and Mark Henn and Eric Goldberg did some 2D animation. But they must have gotten outvoted, or they must not care anymore.

Because holy cow. Here’s some stuff that’s just off the top of my head.

SPOILERS. Not that it matters, because nothing interesting happens in this movie.

The writing? Terrible. Ninety percent of it feels like the characters are filling time with quirky one-liners that are trying too hard to be appealing, then failing, then taking you out of the movie. The jokes aren’t funny. The characters just respond to each other in conversation to check a one-liner box. The other twenty percent is whole conversations repeating tell-don’t-show exposition that has already been covered, usually twice, in previous scenes. Like if in Tangled, every scene had included some variation of Rapunzel saying to friends and enemies alike, “I have to see the floating lights so I’m sneaking to the castle with this thief who wants a mysterious tiara I hid from him. Don’t tell my mother, she’s a bit overprotective!” Over. And over. And over.

The character motivations are way too broad. Asha? Her dream is just “that everybody around me gets to be happy.” That’s it, in a nutshell. No deeper exploration of that. Nobody asks, “why do you care so much?” Nobody tries to convince her she should look out for herself, and then she proves she was right all along. The King? We are told (not shown) that he doesn’t want anyone else’s dreams to be “destroyed.” But he in no believable way expresses that that motivation is still what’s driving him during the movie—what’s driving him is just a plain old lust for power, no nuance.

By the way, the whole premise of the movie? Undercooked. Half-baked concepts strung together with no definitive meaning. Therefore, it’s not believable. Example: The characters act like the wishes are beautiful—well, actually, no, this movie doesn’t know how to show, so there’s not a lot of meaningful acting—the characters just tell us that wishes are “the most beautiful part of someone,” and that’s why it’s worth going through this adventure to give their wishes back to them. But there’s no proof of that in the movie. In fact, it directly kicks it’s own legs out from under that idea, because it has every character who gives up their wish forget that part of themselves. Asha’s grandfather has forgotten his wish, but that doesn’t make him any less “beautiful.” She, and everyone, still treats him like he’s this wonderful old man who deserves the world, who everyone loves…but why is he so appealing? If he “gave up the most beautiful part of him?” The only character who is changed by their lack-of-wish is the Sleepy-analogue character…who is just sleepy, which is described as “boring.” But nobody else who’s given up their wish in the whole kingdom acts like that. It’s just him. Also, the King acts like it’s so important to protect the wishes from destruction. But what does destroying a wish look like? That actually happens to Asha’s mom. Her wish-bubble is broken, literally, and she just says she feels grief. But like. Why? She never remembered it in the first place; it had been missing from her life for years. Also, what the heck is a wish?! It seems to range from broad concepts like “inspire people” to “fly.” Just “fly,” like a bird. The desire to levitate off the ground is the most important, beautiful essence of one background character. Like, what?! But no character ever has the why behind their wish to make us care.

I could go on and on about that point. Like, think about Disney movies that wrote the book on how to make movies about characters with wishes. If Ariel were in Wish, her bubble would look like “dancing and learning and exploring on the Surface with someone who understands her.” But we believe that that is her real, genuine wish, and that it matters to her, because we are shown why being understood is so important to her. Because it’s missing from her life. There’s a scene where she explores a boat alone, and even her best friend doesn’t get excited about it with her. Her dad won’t listen to her point of view. Her siblings don’t ask her about her life even when they think she’s in love. She wants what she wants because of pieces of her life that we are shown.

We are never shown why Asha’s grandfather is obsessed with inspiring people, so we have no reason to believe it, or care whether he gets it or not. We can’t feel disappointed when his wish is said to “never come true,” like we did when Quasimodo was abused by the people he wished to join. We can’t feel elated when he finally “gets” his wish, like we did when Simba smiles on Pride Rock remembering the same way he used to as a cub and claims the crown with a roar. We don’t have anything to hang on to, nothing to relate to, nothing to grasp and feel with the characters. So we don’t feel, because they didn’t put the work in to help us feel. They just say, “the mom’s feeling grief. Feel grief.��� And expect us to do the work ourselves. I have to stop harping on this point and move on.

But The main point of the movie is very broad because of that lazy premise, and it’s barely reinforced by any kind of appealing storytelling. If I had to guess, the point would be “Keep wishing for more even when it’s hard.” But the story they told to communicate that meaning was so unimpactful. Asha doesn’t have a dream of her own that’s such hard work to accomplish! (Neither does her grandfather; his wish is “to inspire people.” And at the end, we’re supposed to see him strumming a guitar and believe it’s inspiring? We were never shown how he worked hard to learn how to play the instrument. Or that he carved it with his own hands, or anything like that. So there’s no meaningful demonstration of working hard for it or achieving your wish even if it’s far out of reach.) And nobody except the king is trying to take wishes away from anyone, and he just does it literally, after they voluntarily give them to him, so there’s not even any impactful demonstration of “don’t let anyone tell you your wishes are dumb or unachievable, or stop you from reaching them.” Even when he takes them away, it’s just because they…could, someday, be used to threaten his kingdom in a vague, really unlikely way. There are so many things you could do with “keep wishing for more even when it’s hard.” For instance; you could say the main character has always been afraid to dream (wish for more), because maybe when she was a kid something wonderful almost happened but ended in tragedy, so she keeps her head down and doesn’t want much because if you don’t dream you’ll never be disappointed. She takes no risks, and has to learn that sometimes trying and failing is worth more than slogging through life all self-protective. I mean, the pieces were right there. She has this line about her dad, and how she wished he would get better but then he died. She has lines about how nobody should have to live with grief?? Then that’s never addressed again! It’s just a throwaway emotion-moment with no buildup or follow-through to tie it to and support that main theme.

The compositions of too many shots were so terrible. Characters got cut off in weird places. One shot has Asha dead center, with her grandfather on the left side of the table and her mother on the right, having a family dinner with a super exposition-heavy conversation that is meant to be emotionally charged. But despite everything else being perfectly centered, half of her mother’s body is chopped off. The movie’s shot like someone’s mom who doesn’t understand technology tried to take a video with her phone.

The charm of the art “style” wears off basically immediately. I know what they were going for. I see the sketch lines and watercolor textures. This is maybe the first time Disney ever failed to accomplish a visual “look” that turned out good. Everything looks dull. Muted. De-saturated. Slightly out of focus, but not in a cool Spider-Verse way. The sets or backgrounds are lazy; at no point does the scenery look complete; big, empty, boring spaces that do not create any kind of “stage” for impactful moments. The rendering looks unfinished. When Asha’s hair moves during her belting of the “I Make This Wish” song, it’s bad. It’s unnatural. It flops in a way that doesn’t make sense for the weight of her hair. The most impactful visual moments come from the villain, and they’re moments when he looks way too unhinged for the kind of line he’s saying.

There is no interesting character development. Asha goes from believing everyone is basically good and their wishes deserve the chance to come true , to….that, again. That would be fine, she could be a static character, if she proved contrast-characters wrong, in a believable way. But she never does. Because no other characters argue with her except the King. And it goes no deeper than “everyone’s wishes are basically good and they deserve the chance to make them true” vs. “nuh-uh, because I get to decide what makes them deserving.” The King doesn’t have any kind of interesting development, either. They don’t expand on his tragic backstory—it consists of one drawing of him near a broken boat, and a few images of the corner burned off of his family taoestry. They never say “King Magnifico wished for _____ and it was taken away!” They literally never tell you what his wish or dreams were, or what motivated him to create the whole kingdom that the movie’s premise sits on. So there’s no convincing sense of progression, how he got this way, why he’ll keep going “so far.”

The pacing is weird. It undercuts every moment that could have any kind of emotion behind it. One minute Valentino is suavely bouncing around, then he’s given a two-second beat to blubber with badly-animated tears that he’ll miss Star—then he instantly gets to have another funny one-liner so we forget he might’ve been sad a second ago. We’re clearly supposed to believe that the King and his wife are devoted to each other, and his turning evil was such a big betrayal, but there’s no time and no impactful evidence for us to believe either of those things. And even if we did, the moment he’s defeated and trapped in a mirror, and begs to be let free, the Queen kind of shrugs it off, makes a forgettable one-liner, and tells them to throw him in the dungeon. And he doesn’t look remorseful. And we don’t even get to assume he’s embarrassed or emotionally devastated that he’s come to this—because the last thing he says is “nooo, the dungeon is so smellyyy!” Like this is a half-baked LEGO short that can’t get emotionally deeper than what an actual 3 year-old’s parents might be okay with.

And that’s the worst offense: The movie is not genuine. It works hard for nothing, and it has no vulnerability. It just uses old Disney standbys to pretend to be vulnerable. Have the music swell and the characters gasp and the songs drip emotion when characters are meant to be saying or doing something emotional.

But truthfully, think of all the Disney movies you’ve ever seen with the hardest emotional moments. The sheer joy of Genie when he realizes he’s free. The anguish when Elsa thinks Anna’s been frozen forever, or when Anna thinks she’s dead. The trauma when Simba loses Mufasa. The longing and dreaming of Ariel when she reaches up out of her grotto. The sense of foreboding when Mother Gothel says “fine, now I’m the bad guy” or the heartbreak in Rapunzel’s eyes when she thinks Flynn has abandoned her, or the shame on Aladdin’s face when Jafar reveals he’s a street-rat, or the horror of cruelty when the stepsisters rip up Cinderella’s dress, or Kala’s tears when Tarzan leaves her in the treehouse, or Sarabi’s tears when Simba comes back, or Mulan’s father tossing aside the sword and token of the Emperor to embrace Mulan, or heck, even just Lilo pushing Stitch in the woods and telling him “get out of here.” This movie has no moments like that. It has moments you can tell that the filmmakers wanted to hit like that—but they don’t.

Because no work is put into building them up. You know how much Simba loves Mufasa, because you’ve been watching their chemistry more than any other character all the way up till he dies. You know how much Mulan wants to please her family because she spends all of Act I desperately attempting to do that. You know Quasimodo believes the world below is beautiful and wants them to accept him because he has interesting things like—talking to gargoyles, convincing us that he’s lonely; building a scale model of the townspeople, convincing us that he sees them in a beautiful way and wishes he were beautiful in more ways than one like them, too.

Right down to the facial expressions, none of them are as anguished, happy, sad, excited, silly, in any convincing way like all of Disney’s other movies. Asha’s “low moment” when she’s afraid her “wish” hurt everyone else (still vague on what that wish ever was) lasts two seconds, she’s not crying, she’s barely sitting with slumped shoulders, and her family barely spend two seconds comforting her. They basically just say, “aw, no, it’s not y fault, it’s the king’s.” And she’s like, “yeah okay” and that’s that. It’s like the animators we’re afraid to animate really intimate emotions on the characters’ faces. The voice actors, too.

And the whole movie is peppered with Easter eggs to past Disney movies. But all that does, if you really know Disney beyond the visuals, is make you think of how hollow this movie is in comparison. How much you wish you were watching Cinderella or The Little Mermaid or something with depth and vulnerability instead of Wish.

[crispycreambacon]

I'll forever be upset about how Elemental (2023 Pixar movie) flopped so hard, and it's not even its fault.

Let's be real, going against Across the Spiderverse would be a deathblow for any animated movie, but the marketing team REALLY didn't help matters. Not only did the trailers barely show up (to the point my friends DIDN'T EVEN KNOW IT EXISTED), the trailers also did such a poor job representing its actual story.

A lot of people were turned off by the "unoriginal premise" as well as the "forbidden romance", and I can't even blame them but no!!! The story is so much more than just "ooo they can't fall in love because they're (gasp) FIRE AND WATER?!?!?!?" and "what if (insert concept) has emotions but elements this time"!!!!!

At the heart of it all is a personal immigrant story. A story about two fire people moving to another place in order to start a new and hopefully better life (aka literally immigrants). A story about their daughter who feels in debt to them for making the sacrificd to leave their home. A story about her feeling like she'll have to sacrifice her whole life and her dreams in order to repay them and make them happy.

Not to mention how Asian-coded it is!!! The director, Peter Sohn, is clearly writing from his perspective as a Korean-American immigrant, and as an Asian immigrant, I resonated so unbelievably hard with Ember's story. It really felt like the movie held up a mirror in front of me. I've never felt this seen in a movie before this one.

And it feels so good!!! I'm so sad that a lot of people will be missing it out because the marketing team did such a terrible job at their literal jobs. If more people gave it a chance, they'll likely find a story that truly made them feel heard.

Also the romance is really cute. Like I don't typically seek out romance stories, but damn that was good food, that was good fluff. I think it's also a great allegory for interracial couples, but I'm not in an interracial relationship, so I won't overstep too much!

Long story short, if you're unsure on whether you really want to see this movie or not, hear it from me who saw it twice:

Go Watch Elemental!!! You will not regret it!!!

[pupyuj]

rei mentioned sugar is in the premises

okay but can we talk about how she would absolutely love having reader having an oral fixation.. like?? it’s not your fault that you just wanna give all your attention to her tits,, even when she’s on stage, giving a performance, despite trying your hardest to focus on her dancing you can literally just focus on her bouncing chest and she knows it AND LOVES IT???

also switch!rei thoughts but she’s either such a doll ready to be used and objectified or the caring praising mommy,,, wanting to be groped and titty fucked and ridiculed OR.. wanting to breastfeed you and pamper you while she fingerfucks you while she kisses your neck LIKE YOU GET IT RIGHT??

ask from suggy my beloved!! RRRAAHHH I HAVE TO DO THIS WELL OR ELSE I'LL DEACTIVATE 😤😤

i am a firm rei-big-boobies enthusiast as ya'll may or may not know and ugh.. i need her badly 🤤 switch!rei would be sooo cute tho?? as in her smirking and intentionally wearing outfits that show a lot of her chest to get you excited and then once you've got her alone she's completely at your mercy while you grope and squeeze her tits 😵‍💫 i just know rei would absolutely love having you leave hickeys all over her chest and tits and take pics of it... lowkey she can be such a troll (jiwon's influence istg) so she'd send them to the 04 gc just to show off and bring chaos upon wony and jiwon's lives 😭😭

mmmdsfhgfdh imagine coming home to a needy subby rei,, her climbing on your thigh the moment you sit down bcs she needed to be touched :(( pulling off her top and grabbing your hands, putting them on her bare tits herself.. stares at you with a pleading look that so cute to the point you don't bother to even tease her about how needy she was being! but she'd enthusiastically start grinding her cunt on your thigh without being told... whimpering at every little sensation she felt whether it was from her grinding or your hands.. and yes she can cum just from being groped bcs i said so!!

telling her to quicken her pace on your thigh so she does :(( watching her breasts bounce softly as she moved back and forth like the sick perv that you were 😵‍💫 even slapping her tits from time to time?? laughing at the way she'd whine and moan but she enjoyed every hit more than the next 🤭 her cumming on your thigh and she's sooo embarrassed 💔 but both of you know that she'd willingly do it all over again!!

rei also doesn't mind when you choose to make a mess on her chest tee hee 🤭 letting your drool spread while you sucked on her tits.. she absolutely loves how you'd look up at her and she could see just how obsessed you were with her 😳 oh, and since she already sends pics to her 04 sisters as a prank, why not videos as well?? reibear probs has an entire album of you just,, playing and sucking her nipples like a needy baby and she touches herself to them all the time—especially when you're separated for a while!!

if you were the super needy one, she'd definitely make you ride her fingers as a way to make you beg and beg for her boobs :(( "mhm.. baby wants mommy's tits in her mouth, hm? cum lots on my hand and maybe i'll consider even letting you touch them..." and then she gropes her tit herself just to make you whine and work yourself harder on her fingers 😣

now.. omg... the titty fuck part??? 😩 YA'LL KNOW I DON'T DO THIS OFTEN BUT FUUUCKKK this is so perfect for g!p reader EEHHEEHDK sitting on your bed while rei has her tits around your cock?? moving up and down while sucking you off at the same time she's actually insane?? again, her loving the sight of you literally drooling for her while she did what she does best 🫣 "a-am i... ummf.. doing good, mommy?" she randomly ask in the middle of her super awesome blowjob, knowing damn well you can't reply bcs you were too busy moaning her name 😣😣

and now the best part of the night.. cumming all over rei's face and tits with a cute squeak (which she soooo loved, by the way) and watching her lap up your cum obediently.. she's such a sight to see GAWDDD

[absolutebl]

Ranking Every Restaurant Based BL

As of August 2024. Shows not yet finished by that date are not on this list. Otherwise, features any BL set in the restaurant & beverage industry (that I've watched). I did not include the home cook domestic BLs on this list (like Our Dining Table).

1 To My Star

Korea 2021 Viki

10/10

Hwang Da Seul directing this show about a neurotic actor (actual puppy) who takes refuge with a grumpy chef resulting in sparks, cooking lessons, and LOVE! It’s is a touch quirky to get into, but utterly charming once it hits its stride. This is the ultimate grumpy/sunshine pairing plus the most appealing light-filled kitchen of our dreams. I adore this show so much. Limited use of BL tropes makes this feel more of a sweet contemporary gay romance between an actor plagued by scandal and the grumpy chef who adopts him, but the gentleness will appeal to fans of the BL genre.

2 What Zabb Man!

Thai 2022 YouTube

8/10

Star Hunter's WZM was better than we had any right to expect, with decent pacing and a foodie theme threaded through the narrative as both love language and plot driver. Basically CEO falls in love with a street vendor’s food, recruits him to work in his hotel, falls in love with him, and that’s just the beginning. Class struggles! Kitchen drama! Papaya pounding (not a euphemism)! Chef poaching (not literally)! Spicy scenes (yes both kinds)! It’s all so delicious.

3 DNA Says Love You

Taiwan 2022 Gaga

8/10

Okay it's only in a cafe about 1/2 the time but it is the main setting if not the plot. DNA deserves extra marks for an upbeat approach to a queer story arc that other shows have systemically mishandled with sadness (in the guise of realism). There is a twist, which I found predictable, but knowing what would happen didn't spoil this show. The leads are luminous and engaging, and it’s full of queer found family representation and an unexpected amount of domesticity, plus it’s Taiwan, so the kisses are great. The first few eps are rough going but have patience, it's worth it I promise! The second half is really special and life/love affirming - and the end is big-grin charming.

4 The Tasty Florida

Korea 2021 Viki https://www.viki.com/tv/38119c-the-tasty-florida

8/10

Not really a love triangle featuring the prettiest men ever to be grouped together outside of K-pop, honestly the visuals are ridiculous, there’s a story, it has to do with food, whatever, they so pretty. I have a weakness for this BL and it's entirely Speed's fault.

5 My Day

Pinoy 2020 YouTube

8/10

The set up on this one is enemies (also boss/employee) and they don’t like each other to start. But that gets resolved pretty quickly. And then they are some of the cutest, hottest, and best boyfriends ever. This is an under-appreciated BL, IMHO. It's also more set in the office of a food creation company, but there is a lot about food.

6 My Tooth Your Love

Taiwan 2023 Viki

8/10

Earnest dentist hottie with sad eyes who worries too much is smitten by an adorable sunshine neurotic bar owner with serious anxiety issues. They fall madly in love while courting each other with food, plushies, and naps. Then, shocker, talk about their feelings and try to actually sort out their problems so they can have an adult relationship. Bonus crumbs = 18 year old poor little rich kid in mad crush with a much older man. I really enjoyed this show, it had a unique premise, killer dialogue, there was a solid lead pair with charmg chemistry, soft flirtation, delightful smiling kisses, and stinkingly cute domesticity. All that said, I wasn’t wild about some of the darker themes it explored, even though it did a good job with them. And while the sides were adorable, they were underused. In the land of May/December, baby boy kabedon is my kryptonite! Why so little of it? (Kabedon is My Krytonite = also the name of my indie band’s first single.)

7 All the Liquors

Korea 2023 Viki & Gaga

8/10

A pretty classic foodie set KBL that managed to distinguish itself from others in this category by having a particularly satisfying final episode centered around found family. Sunshine sweetie soju rep gets involved with a shy introvert chef who doesn’t drink. This has a somewhat uneven plot and ridiculous central conceit (much in the way of Tasty Florida), but if you are looking for a restaurant BL with Korea’s signature softness, then this is a great option. FYI I may identify with our baby party boy hedonist more than any other BL lead ever presented.

8 Although I Love You and You - Sukiyanen Kedo Do Yaro ka

Japan 2024 Gaga

8/10

The promise of this show, younger cook courts older divorced office worker, should have been my catnip. I mean if someone pitched this to me in an elevator I would have downloaded it by the second storey. Unfortunately, it did not exactly fulfil that promise, not in the way I'd hoped. Did I still enjoy the ride? Yes, but I feel a little let down.

9 Ocean Likes Me

Korea 2022 Viki https://www.viki.com/tv/38367c-ocean-likes-me

8/10

Stars Kpop’s best known out gay singer, Holland & Han Gi Chan (Where Your Eyes Linger). Noodle shop! Broken dreams! This is a solid little KBL, with a good premise and cast. Manic pixie dream boy can get old fast but when contrasted with awkward grumpy chef? It’s a tasty combo that elevates both ingredients. Holland is a charming screen presence - baby boy is HYPNotiC. And while I wasn’t entirely sold on the chemistry, these two did give us some very good kisses and sweet domesticity. I grinned through most episodes and I didn’t even mind the standard KBL 1 year separation at the end because it felt so true to the characters. Is this Korea's first out gay actor in a BL? I think it might be.

10 My Sweet Dear

Korea 2021 Viki

8/10

I liked this one a lot better than most. Strict professional rivals (chefs) in a very enemies to lovers BL - to the point where we mistrust the sincerity of the seme because he’s so very in it to win. I kinda like that, because kitchens are hotbeds of drama, and I like a seme with some sinister edge. But be warned, it means the whole romance comes off as a little disingenuous.

11 You Are Ma Boy

Vietnam 2021 YouTube

7/10

The leads in this drama crackle on screen together and I kinda adore them. No one has seen this BL, and you should really give it a try. Is there angst? Nope even what could have been angst (a gay idol) doesn’t materialize, it’s just cuties in a cafe confusing each other with cat & mouse games. The side het couple is a touch disturbing, tho.

12 My Lascivious Boss

Vietnam 2021 YouTube

7/10

While it did have pacing issues and some questionable content at the beginning, MLB’s unabashed queerness carried it though and ultimately elevated it with camp. It never felt like mockery or punching down, it felt joyful, and very new wave BL. It’s as if Vietnam is starting a process of handing out HEAs to all the letters of LGBTQ+ in BL style - I love this look for them.

13 Pure Vanilla

Singapore 2023 microfilm Gaga

7/10

It’s very sweet. Bit awkward acting. I love seeing real tats. I wish Singapore would give us a full proper BL.

14 La Cuisine

Thai 2022 Gaga

7/10

A sweet and somewhat pure show, and like the Thai desserts it features, perhaps requires too much patience for a layperson. Because of the pacing and the focus on a bad girl character, I did dock it. But if you like stuff in the Oxygen vein, then this show is for you, and far better than most Thai BL pulps. That said, I suspect that I enjoyed it more than many would.

15 My Universe - Lucky Love

Thai 2023 iQIYI

7/10

A boy suffering heartbreak is asked to look after a friend's restaurant, and meets a young chef whose food brings on a relationship. I enjoyed this 2 part installment, it’s a bit of a sad sack recovery SAGA, but the acting is genuine, the couple believable, and the story felt particularly queer to me. It was really quite charming.

16 Cooking Crush

Thai 2024 YouTube

7/10

1/3 of this is a sweet romance about a student doctor falling in love with a student chef, and the rest of it is utter dross. Look the OffGun bits were GREAT. In fact, I think they’re better AS A PAIR in this show than in any of their other BLs. And I'm a hard sell on any OffGun being better here than PickRome. Saying that, how can I review a show where I could only tolerate 1/3 of it? Because I didn’t like any other aspect of this show, no other pairs and no other plots. That gives me: 9/10 for the OffGun bits, 5/10 for everything else. Frankly, it probably should be an 8 but I gotta go with my gut and it's UPSET about this so 7/10. Sorry boys. It’s GMMTV’s fault. Your heart was in this show, mine wasn’t.

17 Love in Translation

Thai 2023 iQIYI

6/10

A sweet little pulp about a Thai boy with a crush on a Chinese influencer who ends up in a business relationship with her ex-bf. This show had truly great chemistry between the leads, cute found family with good rep, and an exciting (if silly) ending that almost, but didn't quite, make up for how incredibly annoying the main character was in the first half. Gotta say the make-out scene in the convenience store is one of the greatest in Thai BL history, but I can't like a show where I dislike the main character to such a degree, sorry DouOffroad I intend to enjoy your next offering.

18 Please Tell Me So

Korea 2021 microfilm YouTube

Cute barista (played by Han Hyun Jun star of Love Class) has a crush on his customer, musters up the courage to ask him out.

19 Love Advisor

Thai 2021 microfilm YouTube

6/10

Set in a cafe but not about cafe workers, this is an actor’s piece, more like a one act stage performance about friends to lovers and miscommunication.

20 VIP Only

Taiwan 2024 Gaga

6/10

A sweet if aimless story about a writer and a chef finding love via noodles, fake dating, and family challenges. If it had a tighter script and a shorter run, more like a KBL this might’ve been quite special. But it didn’t and it lost me too many times.

21 609 Bedtime Story

Thai 2023 WeTV

6/10

Okay it's sometiems set in a club but that's not really part of the... plot. An interesting time slip concept and a great set up ultimately disappointed. It opened strong, on one of my favourite under appreciated Thai actors: Plustor (as Vee) in a side bartender romance with younger bisexual king, Games. Unfortunately, it went downhill from there. OhmFluke’s solid chemistry and romantically soft kisses were ill served by a reformed rake meets rich-kid cheater pairing. While it was nice to see Ohm play a part with more animated facial expressions, his was the only character that remained consistent. All in all, this was a confusing show about disloyalty and parallel worlds that never made sense or stayed true to its characters. A promising start, confusing middle, and disappointing end. I don’t say this lightly, but Oh My Sunshine Night is better, and OhmFuke deserve better than either.

22 Bake Me Please

Thai 2023 Gaga

6/10

A lackluster story about a group of bakers coping with (mostly) a shoddy script that could not be saved by either the beauty nor the talent of the actors involved. It suffered for lack of narrative backbone and so did I.

23 Bite Me

Thai 2021 Viki

6/10 (yeah I'mm surprise too, I thought I gave this a 5)

Thailand gave us Korean style slowly simmering ultra soft and sweet BL only at a Thai length so the pacing was… not good. Slower than molasses and full of insane subtext, long gazes, missing dialogue, abrupt mood swings, and one very pretty kiss. It curdled around episode 8, the sauce split, and there was no saving it. It did have some of the best food porn I’ve seen in my life, and I watch cooking shows regularly. It was beautiful, the leads were decent, it should have right up my alley, and yet… it left me with a feeling of disaffected ennui - bland and boring and unsatisfying. 11 courses of tasty tasty pacing issues.

24 One Last Order

Korea 2019 microfilm Gaga

5/10

Extremely hot cafe customer has to figure out which of the cutie baristas has a crush on him and sends hime poetry.

25 Craving You

Taiwan 2020 Viki

5/10

Honestly, I haven't rewatched this since it aired and I maybe might cut it more slack now. About a jerk of a cook with a crush on a musician and having to make a cake for a gay wedding.

26 Coffee Melody

Thai 2022 Viki

5/10

Stars Pavel (my love) as a cafe owner (Forth in 2 Moons 2) and Benz as a composer (Call it What You Want). This should have been my kind of BL - on the fluffy end of the spectrum plus honestly queer. Unfortunately, the slow pacing, manufactured angst, odd secondary story arcs, and a selfishly immature unlikeable wet dishcloth main character, meant its flaws outweighed its charm. Jean (flame on snark fairy) is ME, I love him so much but in the end neither he nor Pavel in an apron could save this show for me. It’s not bad. It’s not good either. Ultimately so forgettable I’ve probably already forgotten it. There is also a Coffee Melody holiday special.

27 Evening Cafe

Thai 2021 YouTube

5/10

Cafe setting with no heat and no kisses (almost Chinese in this regard), but a decent lead pair. About a boy who works in a cafe and the new employee who has a crush on him. That’s it, whole story.

28 Love Area: Part 1

Thai 2021 Gaga

5/10

It ended on a cliffhanger and I'm still annoyed by it. But it is somewhat set at a restaurant.

29 Love Next Door 2

Thai 2014 Gaga

4/10

One of Thailand’s early very high heat pieces, it’s odd, but sexy I guess? Some unexpectedly decent queer rep at the cafe including femme characters getting screen time and HEAs. Part one from 2013 has the same high heat content and feature the same lead character (and actor) early on in his queer journey, discovering he is gay with the sex worker next door, but isn't as good nor is it relevant to this story. Which, unfortunately, also isn't very good.

30 The Promise

Thai 2023 WeTV

4/10

Although well acted this show dragged a too simple premise out into the ultimate manipulative miscommunication repeats of idiotic "why don’t you just TALK!?” Phu & Nan are childhood bffs through college (almost lovers) until Phu disappears. After looking/waiting for him, Nan gives up and self isolates, and the actual story takes place 10 years later. Phu’s “reason” and inability to say it out loud makes the whole show just frustrating, squandering good chemistry, and a stellar cast of multiple faen fatals (whose personalities would’ve made them better boyfriends). Seriously do not bother. What a damn waste of talent, time, and electronic bandwidth. Fatally flawed.

31 Love Area: Part 2

Thai 2022 Gaga

3/10

It wasn't as boring as Bite Me, but it wasn’t actually good, either. This started out as Thailand tackles love triangles pulp style, but in part 2 lockdown changed everything. Valen & Kaitoon dropped some great kisses but traded off crazy hair and makeup in a scene-by-scene whiplash that was clearly pickups done months after lockdown, and the second lead vanished. It was... surreal. Side dishes jumped up screen time but tackled mental health... badly. A fantastic new queer side character was randomly introduced, June, who was the best thing to happen to BL linguistics in 2022 but had nothing to do with the rest of the cast, show, or plot. What a mess. In the end, I didn’t know what I was watching, and neither did it.

32 Cafe In Love

Thai 2023 grey

3/10

A café setting featuring 3 couples with a great queer fam but held together by tropes and sexual-harassment, surrounded by dubious consent and statutory rape. Avoid.

33 I Am Your King 2

Thai 2019 grey

3/10

Early love triangle BL about a cafe boy caught between two brothers, mostly not good because the wrong brother wins. Has no connection to the original I Am Your King.

34 Senior Love Me

Thai 2023 YouTube

3/10

Pulp cafe, nothing happens, not even a BL

35 Jealousy is My Guest

Korea 2016 microfilm Gaga

2/10

Just very very odd and kinda deadly.

I also have 3 unrated DNFs in this sub genre:

Accomplishment of Fudanshi Bartender AKA Fudanshi Bartender no Tashinami - Japan 2022

My Story - Pinoy 2023

About Us but Not About Us 0 Pinoy 2022

Restaurant & beverage is my favourite possible setting for a BL. I'm extremely disappointed that the BL world hasn't produced more that I truly love. I'm not demanding 10/10 but I could use some 9/10s.

Side eyes Thailand and Japan.

(source)

[godofthisworld7]

Why did Tsumugi allow Rantaro to tell his in-game self that this wasn’t his first killing game and what was the 53rd killing game meant to be?

Spoilers for literally the entire game, but also this game has been out for years so it’s not my fault really if you don’t heed my warning now. (Btw, a lot of what I’m saying is speculation. Just my personal theory.)

Tldr at the end.

I think about drv3 a lot, and something that’s been bugging me is Rantaro’s given plot line. He’s been officially allowed to record a message to his in-game self as a perk for surviving the previous killing game.

However, that is so incredibly meta compared to what the false story line that the flashback lights give them. The story that the flashback lights tell is meant to be it’s own story (the main plot line), but Rantaro’s perk tanks the credibility of it. I’m very curious as to why they allowed that.

We all know they were meant to be the last symbols of hope entrapped in a dome meant to be their own little Noah’s Ark. Essentially a refuge from the terrors that fell from the sky and destroyed their Earth.

That is the story that Tsumugi wrote. That is the story they’re meant to remember as they discover new flashback lights. And in the 6th trial, Tsumugi doesn’t let up on the plot line she failed to execute. She even goes as far as to reveal herself as Junko Enoshima the 53rd and used Kokichi as leverage to show that she indeed was real and had fans who followed her path to despair.

She even denies the possibility that there are viewers watching by excusing the set up of the game as just a reproduction of the first game—which was meant to be viewed. It’s all under the guise that everyone aside from them are dead and that “Junko” simply wanted to recreate the past games. She clearly didn’t want the illusion of the killing game to be broken and it was only when Shuichi revealed the truth that she gave in and revealed that everything was fictional.

I assume every previous Danganronpa game within this context has its own story it’s meant to follow just as the first two games did.

So, what exactly is the initial story for the 53rd game meant to follow? What was it meant to be?

Rantaro being allowed a survivor perk that shatters the illusion of the initial plot line never quite made sense to be because it essentially would cancel out the credibility of the flashback lights (which Tsumugi heavily relied on to progress the story). It’s a huge contradiction, story-wise. The plot would all be for nothing… unless the initial purpose of 53rd was to break the game and go full meta??? Or at the very least meta enough to where they acknowledge there being previous games but not enough to where they deem it all to be fictional. There’s layers to this.

Rantaro’s character doesn’t mix well with the story that Tsumugi made. He’s an entire contradiction to her story because he is a survivor of a previous killing game in a world where this is the first killing game that’s happening. He’s something entirely separate from the premise of the 53rd game’s plot.

Tsumugi is free to change the story as she goes, so before Rantaro died, was she aiming for a plot line where he exposes the truth. The truth that there have been previous games? After Rantaro died, she no longer had a use for the meta plot line so she discarded it. It was only when Shuichi brought up many of her inconsistencies that she had to reel back and go back to her first ever plot idea.

I think that Rantaro was her first plot device and someone important worth keeping around in order to lead the story down a certain path. He’s a survivor, someone the fans are anticipating and waiting to watch over. He’s important. However she obviously slips up and he ends up dying first.

She was forced to reveal the previous games herself, so instead of it being a meaningful story where her plot device progresses the story to find the truth, her story is left unsatisfying when she has no other choice left but to reveal it herself for the sake of shock value.

I wonder how her season of danganronpa would have went if she hadn’t misjudged the effectiveness of her first two motives and had someone else die instead of Rantaro. A season where she hadn’t been forced to frame Kaede and had her main plot device live to progress the story to a different path.

I’m definitely overthinking, I think I’ve confused myself somehow.

But i’m thinking about this all through the view of the entertainment business. Danganronpa is obviously a huge show with a large team and audience. I think the big mistake they made was putting all that pressure of creating a good story on a teen girl who wanted nothing more than to have her own season of Danganronpa. I just know she was stressed as fuck the entire time.

Idk. I wrote this at 3am and I definitely strayed away from the main point.

TLDR: Was Rantaro meant to be apart of a plot line where he reveals the truth about Danganronpa to his classmates?

When he dies this plot line is discarded and they proceed with the meteorite plot line until Shuichi eventually fucks them over and reveals the truth anyway.

Rantaro dying is likely the main reason (or at least what snowballs the proceeding events) why drv3 went the way it did.

[firecrackerhh]

I sometimes wonder if the reason (if not at least one of many reasons) why antis are so against Hazbin Hotel as a show (besides the obvious anti viv bullshit) is because the very concept of redemption is anathema to them.

They do not believe people can change, and thus the entire premise of hazbin, (and frankly helluva too) is something they literally cannot understand. Refuse to understand at the least.

They don’t care about other people, they do not care if their actions in the name of their own twisted form of justice causes undue suffering, they simply want to be seen as a “good person” without putting in any actual effort to be good.

Sure, it’s easy to find a shitty person online and rake them over the coals for things they’ve said or done years ago. Effortless. But it takes real patience, compassion, perhaps slight firmness but certainly no undue cruelty to convince people they need to change, and even then, that’s a personal journey that others can at most try to influence, but they can’t make people change.

And even if the person they’re bitching about does, it’ll never be good enough.

There’s nothing Viv can do to change these peoples minds, nothing we can do. No matter how many apologies she gives they will never accept it. No matter what we say they will never accept that Viv is not fucking Satan incarnate.

Engaging with these people is a waste of time. Always has been. If Viv is so irredeemable to them, they likely look at us the same way.

I wonder what skeletons people like this must hide, anyone who acts holier than thou about being a “better” person while engaging in reprehensible behavior themselves is a rather irritating form of hypocrisy that boggles my mind.

I am no saint, god knows I’m no fucking saint, but I know what’s right and wrong and antis are wrong every. Single. Time. Any evidence they claim to have of Viv’s awful behavior is either nearly a decade old and thus clearly irrelevant given the people who vouch for her in the present, doctored discord messages (which even if they were real, shows no dates, so we have no idea how old those are to begin with) or the ‘evidence’ is so flimsy that if a lawyer looked at it he would say you’re wasting his time.

I think these people don’t like Viv’s shows because they are morally incompatible with it. They do not believe in redemption. They believe once you’ve fucked up in life, that’s it, no second chances.

I fear what they must think of our current prison population. I fear what they might say.

These people have no moral high ground whatsoever.

They dare to talk shit about the fandom, Viv, anyone else associated with the show, pretending that they’re saying what they’re saying in the name of justice, as if attacking people with their past when they have clearly changed and made apologies is in any way a justifiable thing to do.

They don’t have to like Viv, they really don’t, but calling her irredeemable, calling us irredeemable, is fucking bullshit.

None of us are irredeemable.

The fucking conceit. The fucking gall. The fucking balls on these people.

Everyone has the capacity to make good and bad choices in this life. Yes, many people don’t make the best choices, but that doesn’t mean that they should be stoned to death for the most minor of offenses. For shit that’s long been in the past and apologized for.

I’m not going to say I think very highly of humanity as a whole, I’m a fucking misanthrope through-and-through, but I don’t think we’re incapable of being good, or doing good things, we just…choose not to, a lot of the time.

I also do not deny that there are some crimes so horrible that redemption isn’t even on the table, nowhere near it. But I feel like antis treat every perceived fault of Viv as some most grievous sin that must be met with full penance by…doing what exactly?

Apologize? Again, they won’t accept it.

Donate to charities or causes? She gets shit on for it, say she’s “flaunting her wealth.”

Get off the internet entirely? In an anti’s wet dreams maybe.

Her very existence makes them so mad. It would be funny if it wasn’t so fucking pathetic.

These people twist her words in every way imaginable to make her look like some horrible person undeserving of her success, without realizing they make themselves look far worse than her by several measures.

They claim she’s racist and queerphobic, but if anything acting as if BIPOC and queer people shouldn’t ever be shown doing awful things because “bad queer/ BIPOC rep” or whatever I think is just as racist and queerphobic. Minorities are human beings, and as such they are just as capable of being shitty. I already made a post about this before, so I’ll keep this paragraph short.

They claim she’s abusive to her coworkers when it seems the one person bitching about it has no problem putting other past co workers under the bus for their personal gain. Antis claim she’s abusive while engaging in downright emotionally abusive behavior (I know that sounds kinda dramatic but I’m making a point) themselves as they shit on us for the stupidest reason imaginable: liking a cartoon.

They cry about ableism while ignoring their own.

Not that I’m all that offended if I’m honest, it’s just more evidence that antis aren’t any better than the people they bitch about.

I could go on about this for a while but you get the point.

I repeat, these people have no moral high ground whatsoever.

Frankly, as much as it bothers me that they leak patreon shit and whatnot, many fans are actively warning against them, and I think the idea of someone actively choosing to give money to someone they hate just so they have more content to shit on is fucking pathetic and getting upset about it is exactly what they want.

They want you to be just as miserable as they are. They just want to suck all the fun out of this fandom, I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again, these people are tar pits, trying to drown us in their muck. It’s pathetic and sad. No use in having sympathy, they don’t deserve any.

It’s funny how antis scream and cry about how awful we are as they ignore their own sins and mistakes, hypocrites.

If anything, their behavior is far more irredeemable than Viv’s has ever been.

I wonder when they will realize that, if they ever do. I can only hope some of them grow the fuck up and realize what the fuck they’ve done. If the ensuing guilt eats them alive, I can’t say I have pity for them.

Wonder how many of us would accept their apologies, if they chose to make one.

Alright it’s almost 7 am I gotta get to bed. Peace.

🔥🧨~Firecracker out~🧨🔥

[velvet-ii]

endlessly curious about the death note utena au 👀👀👀

okay so i wanted to have some more content to show before answering this ask... and i was already working on a character lineup for artfight!

so here's the full lineup of my death note au redesigns (not including any side characters i may include later as story permits such as akio, nanami, shiori, etc.) :)

and honestly i have to stop just calling it "my death note utena au" when it has a name.. so: here's the beginnings of revolutionary girl kira!

the basic premise is literally just inserting them into the death note character roles, nothing too crazy lol

surface breakdown:

utena is light! obviously because she's the main character but also because she would probably test out the death note to see what happens (in this au, she decides to use it to "revolutionize the world" and take out perpetrators of violent crimes who never faced justice)

anthy is L (or, in this case, "rue,") because seriously who else would be L. after shutting herself out from the world to focus on a job she can do without showing her face, she's forced to show her face and work with the police to gain access to more information. she knows this isn't a typical serial killer case...

wakaba is misa! she adores utena almost to a fault after discovering her status as kira, but becomes an invaluable asset due to the shinigami eyes she got from a deal with her shinigami (shadow play girl)

touga is the captain of the kira task force and is determined to stick with it until the end, maintaining his confident persona while overlooking key details provided by rue (much to her dismay)

saionji is touga's second-in-command, although treated more like a bodyguard than a friend sometimes. since high school, he's cut his hair short to distance his resemblance to touga (which doesn't work too well since they ended up in the same profession anyway).

miki takes on matsuda's role, but often takes things too seriously rather than not seriously enough. he's by far the youngest member of the task force, and is incredibly dedicated to the kira case.

juri parallels aizawa as a voice of reason for the task force, but their characters aren't too closely tied together. juri holds a grudge against rue (and later, utena upon joining the task force) due to her belief that they're young, inexperienced, and didn't work hard enough to get here; she's often maddened by rue's often unusual tactics and plans.

in terms of changes to the main story, a lot of it is driven by the subtle changes in character relationships or motivations. for example:

utena's motivation to use the death note, while similar to light's, differs in that she only kills criminals who haven't been brought to justice-- which makes it a lot harder for anthy and the task force to ignore the message she's sending.

wakaba and utena have a more balanced relationship than light and misa do in the original show-- utena still considers her a liability, and wakaba's actions lead to some unfortunate circumstances, but i want her to have a complete character arc (unlike misa's complete shafting in the show. pissed me off)

obviously, since touga isn't utena's dad, utena's gonna have to figure out some other way to get access to police records and land herself a spot on the task force.

utenanthy endgame. dont even worry

the themes established in utena (for example, the effects of misogyny and the meaning of revolution) will make a big effect on how the story changes from death note as well! i want to stay faithful to both source materials in a way that's productive.

if this ever gets written/created in some form, the story's gonna veer away from following the death note storyline at the end of L's arc. i have something completely different planned for those scenes that changes the rest of the plot!

with all that being said, honestly there aren't any guarantees i'll have time to end up making this real.. it's mostly just a thought experiment for now since i love both shows and also (re)designing characters :)

[theexhaustedqueer]

I have a lot of feelings about s2 of arcane but the most prominent, I think, is actually just the sheer dread of what I’m going to have to do to convince my dnd players that I didn’t just straight up rip off the plot of arcane for our campaign. Seriously.

An inventor who has previously dedicated themselves to improving the lives of others gets fused with an eldritch horror power source (that’s spherical, no less) that they created in the pursuit of their dream, comes to the conclusion that all the problems in the world are caused by the faults inherent to humanity (in my campaign, it’s specifically that people have free will, i.e. if people have the choice between good and bad, there’s no way to stop them from choosing bad, so the solution is to just take away the ability to choose) and becomes a god-like figure with a cult following that aims to strip people of their personhood.

There’s even a desolate cityscape full of the empty husks of once-people (they don’t move in my campaign but god would it be awful if they did) that the party’s going to have to travel through as they learn exactly what will happen if they don’t stop the bbeg because she’s trying to accomplish this again but at a much larger scale. So it’s not a literal glimpse of the future the way it is in arcane but it serves basically the same purpose.

And it’s going to be impossible to convince my players that this was an accident because my practice as a DM has always been to steal as much as possible from other media properties I like. I’ve ripped off so much from the magnus archives, there’s a non-zero amount of shit I took from fmab in there, and heck, I’ve even stolen stuff from arcane— the design of the main city in my setting being pretty heavily influenced by piltover/zaun in the show.

This campaign has been my brainchild going on five fucking years, with the main premise being locked in for a solid half of that. But it doesn’t even matter because one day one of my very observant players is going to look me in the eye and say “Is the big bad basically just Viktor from arcane?” and I’ll have nothing to say for myself except “Yeah, I guess so.”

[flower-boi16]

Why "The Life and Crimes of Scrooge McDuck"'s Message Doesn't Work

Ducktales 2017 is one of my favorite cartoons of all time and used to be my No. 1 favorite until I saw TOH, but I still hold a very deep love for the show, especially when it comes to a lot of the character writing. That being said, the show…isn’t perfect, and I think the third season has a few problems that make it weaker than the first two (though I’ll have to finish rewatching the season to be fully sure).

The Life and Crimes of Scrooge Mcduck especially isn’t a particularly good episode with how it handles it’s whole message about "accepting responsibility for your actions" and in this post I’m going to analyze why it falls apart.

As I said before, this episode’s message that its trying to send is that you should take responsibility for your actions rather than make excuses for it. The premise of the episode is that Scrooge and Louie are transported to a magical courtroom thingy where Scrooge is accused of being responsible for Glomgold, Ma Beagle and Magica’s turn to villainy, and Louie has to prove Scrooge innocent.

The episode has Glomgold and Beagle show proof of how Scrooge "made them evil" and Louie refuting those claims, proving Scrooge’s innocence…until Magica comes along and shows her first time facing Scrooge, where, he ended up getting Magica to accidentally turn her brother into a bird and refused to catch him for her, leading Magica to lose her brother forever and never be able to find him.

The show treats this as a big moment where, Louie CAN’T defend Scrooge here, being an example where Scrooge DID have a part in one of his enemies turning evil because of him, and after that, he says that he might have some influence on each of his enemies becoming evil…

…except for the fact that Scrooge did not make Magica evil. Scrooge had no effect on Magica turning evil; Magica was already directly shown to be evil to begin with, mainly with how she and her brother…ya know…literally in slaved a town into giving their goods to them and then made a spell that attracted money directly to them?

Was Scrooge not catching Po a dick move? Yes. Does that mean he is inherently responsible for Magica turning evil? No, because Magica was already evil to begin with and Scrooge changed nothing about her.

Same thing goes for the other villains as well, who the episode also tries to say that Scrooge might’ve had an influence in becoming evil as well after saying the exact opposite up until this point…?

Scrooge is not responsible for turning Glomgold or Ma Beagle evil either, Scrooge was trying to give good advice to Glomgold, its not Scrooge’s fault Glomgold was a brat, and Scrooge won the wrestling match far and square, and, like the episode shows, Ma Beagle was also always a brat from the start.

So the episode’s message of accepting responsibility for your actions doesn’t work because Scrooge was not responsible for any of them turning evil, they were ALWAYS bad people from the start.

The same thing applies to Louie who the episode has learn this same message, with him accepting responsibility for how his actions might have hurt Doofus Drake, which would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that Doofus was shown to a spoiled brat from the beginning and the first time him and Louie met he literally tried making him his "best friend".

I’m sorry, is Louie seriously supposed to apologize to Doofus for getting his parents to grow a spine discipline him just a tincy bit? Cuz I don’t think so.

Really, The Life and Crimes of Scrooge McDuck has a decent message on paper but it falls apart when you actually think about it for more than five minutes. The episode has other issues like introducing a major revelation near the end of the show, or just how underwhelming it is as the penultimate episode of the show which just further solidifies it as my least favourite episode of the show, but this is the biggest issue with it to me.

So ya, that’s why this episode’s lesson doesn’t work…goodbye.

[mezzy-1]

Agents Reacting to Deadlock Joining the Valorant Protocol

Another of Evie’s headcanons that I’m slowly but surely going to do some more of and hell, probably more of my own stuff.  Thanks again @eviethelesbian for the ideas!

Gekko 

He ran up to meet her at first when she got released from the medical wing after being stabilized and allowed to walk around the premises

When Thrash appeared behind him, she panicked and grabbed a nearby kitchen knife to defend herself

Gekko had Thrash revert to a globule and instead grabbed Wingman to show Deadlock that there was nothing to fear

Wingman waddled up to her and kicked him away 

Gekko’s reassurance didn’t work and she called him childish for keeping the radivores around and made it clear she wanted nothing to do with them

In his eyes, she was being cruel and he didn’t let her off the hook for reacting with hostility

Neither tried to back down in this confrontation and it was broken up only by Killjoy insisting Gekko go to Neon for training and that she needed Deadlock’s measurements for the prosthetic 

Afterwards, she would often consider killing Gekko’s pets if she saw them.  The only thing stopping her is the retribution from the protocol

They hated each other for a while, passively avoiding each other and trying to keep their distance as much as possible

It wasn’t even that they got off on the wrong foot, they have fundamentally different philosophies a wedge issue

Wingman is used to wandering the headquarters, and whenever she sees him she can’t help but remember the events at the facility 

She and Gekko didn’t have respect for each other and a mixture of Deadlock’s trauma and Gekko being unaware of this meant they would continue their conflict

Skye

Her and Iselin are on a first name basis, but initially she was a hesitant to get to know Kirra

Because of the animals she could create, Iselin initially thought that there was some kind of tie to the radivores 

Then when out hiking, she met Kirra and to be accommodating Kirra dismissed one of her summons

Additionally, Kirra and her started hiking together to let her get out of the facility.  It was Kirra’s idea because she knew Wingman never leaves the building if Gekko is inside

Both of them bonded over a shared love of nature and also from working out together.  Iselin could easily see Kirra being on the Staljaeger team and that gives her some comfort

When Kirra showed her ability to heal, Iselin got somewhat intrigued by the regenerative process.  Both of them were thinking the same thing

They attempted to regrow Iselin’s arm, but it wasn’t effective and both walked away with with disappointed looks

That evening they both apologized to each other one of the overlooks on their typical hiking path.  They agreed that it was nobody’s fault and they just got their hopes up too much

Iselin trusts Kirra with her life, and has even asked for her to produce the totems before so she could see how they worked.  Kirra being able to influence them fully and use them as an extension helped Iselin’s anxiety

The pair like each other, enjoy each other’s silence while hiking and have deep respect for the other

Sova

When Deadlock woke back up at the HQ, Sova was in the room with her and one of the first faces she saw at the Protocol

Sova’s understanding nature and general compassion helped to ease her during some of the initial shock

Also there was a lot of gratitude towards Sova because of him finding her and taking her to medic immediately

When she received her first active mission, it was with Sova

Yeah they have a lot of sibling energy, but weirdly nobody can tell which one is the older sibling

Example: Sova will absolutely have no idea what’s going on if he zones out in a briefing and Deadlock will grab his attention 

Other Example:  Iselin will completely focus in on something so intently she’ll forget things around her and Sova will remind her 

She’s literally forgot one of the fingers on her prosthetic before, back when it was being adjusted

They’re both capable, mature people but together they have no brain cells 

Also drinking buddies, especially cause Sova isn’t a lightweight and neither is she so they take their time sharing progressively funnier or sadder stories

Deadlock and Sova don’t use first names though, which is strange considering how close they are

The ‘thumb incident’ at Sunset is the perfect microcosm of their entire relationship.  They are basically brother and sister and have no shortage of loving and confusion for one another

Deadlock feels safe around him, and trusts his judgment when things get difficult and she needs a confidant

Fade

Her and the Protocol were on ok terms and the Radiants there convinced her that Radiants were just human, and above all could be dealt with if needed

Fade was another matter entirely though, as she not only had Nightmare but also the knowhow to blackmail Valorant.

It didn’t exactly help that Nightmare fed off of Iselin’s fear at times, tendrils and sinew crawling up her while she dreamt

Fade noticed the Prowler she let around sniffing around Iselin’s room and when it took the appearance of a bear she decided to investigate

Iselin’s terror had been sent into overdrive by Nightmare, visions of the Landfall facility and the bear leaping out at her, severing her arm 

She woke up to Fade holding back Nightmare and shaking Iselin awake

The two didn’t talk much before, but seeing as they needed to have a discussion about what happened they retreated to Fade’s room

Fade explained to Iselin that Nightmare fed on fear, and the stronger the fear the harder it was to control and Iselin confronted her about keeping it away from her

What made this difficult was the fact that Fade knew Iselin was still holding on to enough terror that it would haunt her regardless of what Fade did

That’s when Iselin decided she was done with the constant nightmares, and because Fade was the only one who could help she was basically forced into triggering an episode

Fade and her held hands throughout the ordeal, Nightmare coming within inches of the two but Fade reassuring Iselin it couldn’t harm her if she controlled her fear

After about an hour, Nightmare couldn’t get energy and slunk back into shadows.  Iselin and Fade just kinda talked about what happened at Landfall after that

The following morning, the two shared some coffee and began talking more.  Very goth kid meets jock kind of relationship

Since Fade saw Iselin at her most vulnerable and kept it between them, Iselin feels at ease around Fade more than she lets on.  The two of them keep the other emotionally well

[wistfulweaverwoman]

I’m triggered lol. My son sent me the following text:

One of my friends said that Katniss sucks and when I asked why they said “Katniss is manipulative, shallow and a coward.  Throughout most of the books her character as well as its development is stagnant. She doesn't learn, she does not change and she doesnt grow as a person. She becomes a catalyst for a revolution and while I understand that starting a rebellion was not in her intentions but it is undeniable that she is the head and perhaps heart of a movement that could potentially change their world. 

   Most information is kept from her, hindering her ability to act at times that I cannot fault her for. It is the fact that even when she has information about both events and people he hides and leaves others to pick up the slack. She becomes the literal head, the symbol of this revolution  yet does nothing to lead it, to change it. Most of the time it's people telling her what to do and her failing or refusing to do it. Her whole premise is to sit and look pretty, to at least act the part and she fails to do that much.

   Not to mention the love triangle between Peeta, her and Gale. Gale is her childhood friend and has been at her side for years. He has shown to be  compassionate and protective but he is also possessive. Gale was never a good fit for Katniss, no matter which way it turned. In the books he is described to be a burning fire, and inferno. A fire that held nothing of what Katniss needs. His actions ultimately meant the death of Katniss' sister, Prim. 

    Katniss and Peeta didn't really know each other until the Games. But throughout the games Peeta has shown himself to be resourceful, caring and a manipulator of words, getting people to believe almost anything he says. Peeta has always been a wonderful character and it is truly awful that a side love interest has more development that the main character herself. 

     Peeta is always there when Katniss needs him, even when he himself is in a deal of pain yet she repeatedly takes him for granted, even being fully aware of this. She takes both Gale and Peeta for granted, only choosing Peeta when Gale is unavailable. Katniss has shown herself to be an absolute coward as well as a ruthless manipulator. In one of the books while they're in hiding Peeta and Gale have a conversation while Katniss pretends to sleep. Gale tells Peeta that Katniss will choose "Whoever she belives she cannot live without." Katniss is clearly upset by how Gale could think of her like that. That she would choose who ever offered her a better chance at survival. 

      But that is absolutely what she does. When she finds out it was Gale's bombs that killed Prim she cuts herself of from him and chooses Peeta when she shows up to help her. She chooses who ever she believes she needs. Katniss has shown several times that she understands her faults yet does nothing to change. During the first books when they have to be 'entertaining' she refuses to comply with any of the glamor, the acting, even if it raises her chance of survival. By doing so she endangers herself and people helping her. 

       She does this a lot. When people withhold information she acts against the best interest of the plan, but shes unaware of the plan so that blame cannot fall on her. But when she does have the full picture she still refuses to comply, acting against orders as well as her superiors. She actively plans against them, endangering them on more than one occasion. She refuses to learn, remaining stubborn and withdrawn. One of her biggest faults is noncompliance, something she is well aware of. She seeks to assume command but is completely unfit for the position and when she realises she's unfit she still tries to lead, causing the deaths of dozens. 

        In trying to make sure she's not a Mary Sue, she is actively written as weak, undermining her character as well as her actions. She is mentally and emotionally too unstable to be a reasonable and functional main character, again something she and other characters are aware of but never change. She starts a revolution and becomes the face of it but is unable to lead it, having other characters pick up the slack. And when she does assume control and command, she is bad at it. Endangering dozens and killing just as many. She became her own antagonist 

          If i was Snow, i'd want to kill her too.” 

I sent back a series of texts lol. My son had to tell me to slow down. For context my son and his friend are 14. I told him to read the books and form his own opinions after I quit my tirade.

[queernarchy]

yes yes yes i totally agree. also it reads like such surface-level storytelling and that is just. boring? like oh yay jon got all the powers and he’s mastered them already! time to go be a superhero on literal day one! and lois actually went along with that?? my lois lane??? what?? she was ready for him to take up that mantle so quick, meanwhile her other son—who has been struggling with this and working towards this for years, who has made mistakes but who wants this so badly—is just, like. not even a thought in her mind. and i don’t fault any of them for thinking jordan’s not quite ready—he is not, he has not been doing well for a long time—but she also makes no attempt to even just… talk to him about that? help him figure things out so he can get to that place he wants to be so badly? they scolded him in s3 for using his powers for the wrong reasons and he’s already been dealt the consequences in s4 of not thinking things through before acting, but they have never actually sat down with jordan to figure out what is going on with him. not in any way that doesn’t feel like an interrogation, or an accusation. and it just feels like such a cruel writing choice to have jon swoop in and take that role and get the El crest (which i think we’re heading towards, based on what i’ve read some of the producers say) after we spent such a long time watching jordan put so much effort into it too, and it is just. disappointing! because it was such an interesting story and they had such complex characters but it feels like they’ve given up on getting to the core of those characters and the things that made them so human and real (their connections with each other, the way they just want so badly to take care of each other, more than anything else) in favor of pleasing a particular set of the fans. and the presentation of it just feels so shallow. jon has always been such a compelling character and really carried a lot of the heart of this show. it is a disservice to take all of that hard-earned development and strength away from him and turn him into some less complex, ‘chosen one savior’ character, and erase all of that time he spent learning to be a hero in his own way, on his own terms. and yeah maybe jon is ready for this in ways jordan isn’t, and that’s fine, but to just not even acknowledge that this is something he wants too, desperately, and to not have these characters understand each other anymore like they always used to… woof.

quite literally ^^ and to be real the whole 'this feels like destiny' thing that both sam and jon and lois brought up is not the flex the writers think it is. it's because he's superboy in the comics, and it just feels like a dumb meta commentary about how this is how the show SHOULD have gone in the first place.

but having him be a generic chosen one whose destiny it is to save the world feels so minimizing in this context because they’re undercutting THEIR OWN premise. it’s like they’re throwing up their hands to the hater fanboys who have been screaming to give jon powers since season 1 and going fine you were right we were wrong, instead of sticking by their own pitch for the show and seeing through the storylines they've been setting up for 3 seasons.

[secret-engima]

Hi ! So glad I find your master worldbuilding mind!

Quick question, how do you think we went from a clan-based village to actual Konoha where several clans (Senju, Sarutobi?, Uchiha, Danzo clan? , Hatake if it's a clan) have disapear? Did the village care ou try to protect them? Did other clans are treathen by the possibilities to be let down?

Because you said that Tobirama trust Uchiha with police force but Sarutobi was obsessed by clan balance and all. I know Sarutobi is old, so a lot could have happening.

Any thought?

Hi! Okay so this ask is actually based on a slightly flawed premise (not your fault it's Kishi's worldbuilding again) in that we do not actually see a lot of "wiped out" clans. What we see is Kishi not bothering to flesh out the clans he has because what is attention span. For example; the Sarutobi are not wiped out! There is exactly one shot of the Sarutobi clan in the 4th war arc that is in both the manga and the anime (in the anime the shot is actually narrower so you can't see as many as in the manga shot) where a bunch of their jounin and chuunin members (like easily double digits, I forget the exact number but I wanna say around 20ish? With more implied to be off screen) breathe fire at the juubi in sync. And it is confirmed they are all Sarutobi. There's like one guy who's essentially like: COME ON GUYS LET'S SHOW THEM THE SARUTOBI CLAN KICKS ASS.

So the Sarutobi clan is actually a decent enough/healthy enough size, we just literally never hear or see it until that one single shot. So it's reasonable to assume most clans are healthy and protected by Konoha. This is kind of implicitly supported by the narrative too, because things like the Uchiha and Hatake and Senju being nearly extinct are things that people comment on and find noteworthy, which means it's *not* the norm.

As for how the three clans we know of being wiped out *got* wiped out, I think that is less the fault of Konoha itself (tho Hiruzen is directly at fault for allowing the Uchiha massacre thanks) and more a side effect of that transition from clan based society to village based society. Namely the multiple shinobi wars. As I mentioned in my economics rant, the shinobi wars were something entirely out of the league of clan wars back in the day in terms of scale and destruction, so clans that got hammered likely were ones either already on the small size (like the Hatake probably were) or ones that would have been intentionally targeted by the enemy out of fear (Senju and Uchiha). The sheer scale of the conflict and clashing powers would have decimated targeted clans, and the villages would have been unprepared for that kind of issue until it was too late. After that, the surviving members could have easily died out without having kids post war, or if they were female members in the case of, say, the Senju, they didn't die out but the *name* died out, because it's still traditional in Naruto world cultures for the woman to join the family of the man and not the other way around (with the exception of the Uchiha and other regularly manifesting kekkei genkai clans I imagine).

We don't see anything about the Shimura clan either way beyond Danzo, which is again a flaw in the kishi worldbuilding, so we don't know if he actually has a clan still running around, or if they were just a small clan that got hammered in the multiple shinobi wars. On that note you can apply this same worldbuilding problem to almost every other village in the show. Kumo, Iwa, and Suna all have characters who are implied to be from a clan or have kekkei genkai that appear to be hereditary but no clan is mentioned. So we just do not know if there IS a clan of say- people with hand mouths like Deidara, or if they are one-off manifestations of a kekkei genkai, or if they are survivors of other villages' clans that got hammered casualty-wise by the wars like the Senju and Hatake presumably were.

Logistically speaking it would be beneficial for the villages as a whole to do everything they could to keep their clans alive, since their clans are where their powerhouses tend to come from while civilian-born shinobi fill out the ranks with more mid-level shinobi. There would probably be incentives and benefits offered by the village for clan shinobi to marry and have kids that bear the clan name, etc etc. And clans that are still a healthy size work hard to keep it that way.

I hope that answered your question?

[ochasuyu]

my take on the end of mha

this was a rant i did on discord that i'm reposting here. it'll probably be too long so uhhh. reblogs i guess. :3

i think that a lot of what 430 suffers from is classic shonen jump problems, honestly. horikoshi developed such a rich cast of characters that 5 chapters after the end of the war was never going to be enough to give them all satisfying conclusions, which sucks but isn't really his fault given what little i know of serialization (people were saying that 5 chapters is already quite long for a sj epilogue, so like… yeah)

the final chapter holds up pretty well as to what i was expecting, honestly. a timeskip had to happen given that so many of the themes of mha revolve around the idea of societal change, and you can't show that in a week after the end of the war. i think that the conclusion that the students got largely makes sense — i wish that dabi's death had been a little bit more conclusive, but i thought that his wrap-up was pretty good; he spent the rest of his days after the war being watched over by his family, especially endeavor, so he succeeded in his goal of getting endeavor to watch him. shouto may not have saved him physically, but frankly that was never a possibility given how dabi treated his own body throughout the series. he certainly saved him mentally, and i think that's kinda present throughout the other main villain wrap-ups

i think that the ochako vs toga arc was the one that was best concluded; toga could've lived, but she made the decision to reverse the role she'd been playing and give up her own blood to the girl she loved so ochako could live, instead of taking the blood of someone else. it wasn't a decision that ochako made for her (like it was with dabi vs shouto & midoriya vs shigaraki), instead toga's death IS proof that ochako DID save her mentally, and toga viewed her own death as freedom in a way.

^^ and then post-timeskip, we see ochako having taken that sacrifice and turning it into something good, with her quirk counseling program. out of all the deaths, toga's made the most sense to me, especially given that it wasn't swept under the rug narratively. the actions that ochako is making as an adult prove that toga's death didn't go in vain, and that ochako has adopted toga's wish of making the world an easier place to live in.

then there's midoriya vs shigaraki, which. i understand the narrative decisions behind it, considering they'd been setting up the idea that sometimes you have to kill people to save them (gran torino said that verbatim to midoriya) for a WHILE, but it still felt unsatisfactory to me. the general premise was that while shigaraki tomura was too far gone to save, shimura tenko wasn't, and midoriya saved/freed him? it was all kinda jumbled to me, though. not to mention the fact that there was this whole realization that all for one kidnapped shiggy, forced an altered quirk onto him, and then raised him, but shigaraki never actually learned that iirc? it was weird & i think that while shigaraki dying isn't an issue in itself, the way that the story handled it was. midoriya's only real reflection on it is one wordless panel where we see shigaraki's ghost? which is also very open-ended as like. we don't know if that's midoriya's imagination, or if shigaraki became a vestige in one for all, or what?

i have a whole TIRADE of thoughts on how poorly midoriya was handled as his own character later on, especially considering he's supposed to be narrating the series. there's a decent few bits of dialogue that feel robotic, as if his character became more of a voice for horikoshi to tell things to the readers instead of a character within the story. i've had problems for a while with how little introspection we get from midoriya, honestly, and how much guesswork we have to do as to what he's thinking / feeling / whatever considering he's not only the main character but also LITERALLY NARRATING the story

[oddygaul]

The Hunger Games Cinematic Universe

To preface, it does feel a little weird to critique these movies as if they sprung from nowhere. They’re all pretty faithful adaptations, which is relevant because many of my problems with this series are structural / worldbuilding issues, and so aren’t necessarily the fault of the adaptation as much as the source material itself. On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to rattle off some adaptations that took risks and made something fairly transformative - Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, or anything Masaaki Yuasa has adapted come to mind  - so fuck em, they’re fair game.

(I’d seen the first two movies a decade ago, and read the trilogy after that. Ballad and the Mockingjay films were new to me.)

The Hunger Games

Okay, so the original holds up as far as I’m concerned. What sets it apart from much of the post-apocalyptic or action YA that I’ve seen is ultimately how grounded it manages to keep its portrayal of all the kids. I think a lot of fiction with a similar premise tend to falls prey to Anime Syndrome: yes, all the characters are 16 or 17 or whatever, and the authors will make them do some classic teen angst things like get into stupid arguments and be deeply hormonal, but they fail to have the kids react to the horrifying situations they find themselves in convincingly. This is the plight of any battle shounen: the characters are literally fighting to the death against some manner of horrible supernatural monster, or even other human beings, yet will be written like a little devil-may-care badass, or even be stoked about getting to tEsT tHEiR LiMitS! If you’re going for a fun action show, that’s fine, but if you’re trying to sell it as a drama, you’ve already lost your biggest chip.

The Hunger Games (the first one, mind) never forgets that all its characters are young as hell. The absolute shaking terror of the cornucopia, the wide eyed panic as Katniss and Foxface come face-to-face and realize that neither of them wants to do harm, even Cato’s eleventh hour realization that his entire life and persona are ultimately meaningless*, all fill the story with a pathos that makes the movie work, despite some inherent YA cheese.

*Probably my favorite addition to the movie.

I really love the stupid-ass beard they gave this guy

Catching Fire

Yeah, this is where it starts to fall apart for me. The first act prior to the Games is pretty compelling; our look into Katniss’ PTSD, her and Peeta’s inability to reintegrate into society as if nothing happened, and the acute, sudden horror they’re slammed with upon realizing they’re being forced back into the games are all handled incredibly well. The first half hour of this movie feels like slowly waking up from a bad dream, only to realize you’re still asleep.

After that, though… eh.

I think what bothers me about the Games themselves in this one is that everyone taking part is an adult now. Part of what makes the concept of the Hunger Games so brutal is the age of the contestants - and not merely in a pearl-clutching, oh-jeez-it’s-so-horrible-to-see-this-violence-done-upon-the-youth sort of way. There’s just a special abhorrence tied to watching a bunch of children, who ought to have their whole lives ahead of them, slowly have the dawning realization that their whole world is now this mere microcosm, in which their only options are murder or death. Watching this emotional turmoil play out differently for each character is what makes the setup compelling; horrible, wrenching, but compelling.

So, having the idea for this one be that these grown-ass adults, each of whom has (by definition of being a victor) gone through this incredible trauma before, is willing to go back again and fight like it was the first time? I dunno, it feels goofy to me. And I’m not saying they have a choice to participate - I know it’s mandated - I mean that once they’re in the arena, half of them seem to go “oh well, here I go killin’ again!” like they’re clocking in for a job. It’s not like they’re sliding back into their old psychology by force once they’re in the arena, either - even in the training center, the careers are doing their usual sneering badass routine. You could make the argument that successful careers are the most likely to have child actor syndrome - that they stopped emotionally maturing after the Games and are stoked to be back in their element, Football Player That Peaked in High School style - but that feels so reductive.

I guess the fact that half of the tributes get in on the Secret Rebellion Plan kind of addresses this - they are working toward a goal in the background - but it still feels off. I wish the movie spent more time exploring the mindset of all the contestants before the games started to flesh out their motivations. As is, the Games here no longer feel like blood sport exploring the psychological response to trauma - they’re just blood sport.

Also, the violence feels very sanitized. Say what you will about the shakycam used in the first movie (it is undoubtedly excessive at times), but the confusion it provides combined with the blood makes the 74th Games feel absolutely terrifying. It gives the sense that no one is prepared for how primal things are becoming as the situation descends into a barbaric haze of violence. In Catching Fire, meanwhile, the bloodbath feels like it’s by-the-numbers for everybody - Katniss and friends group up and just start killin’ Bad Guys** right off the bat like it’s nothing, barely even watching their backs as they talk to each other. I read that the director of #2 and on made an intentional decision not to show blood, because he doesn’t like ‘glorifying violence’... I truly don’t understand how showing a bunch of characters cleanly and effortlessly killing other people like they’re in a Marvel movie is any better.

**This is just a symptom of my larger issues with the worldbuilding, but I really think the careers and their motivation get such short shrift in these movies. They explore it a bit in the first movie, but in Catching Fire they’re fully content to have the careers be easy Evil Bad Guys that the viewer isn’t supposed to feel bad for when they die. It’s another touch that betrays its YA roots, and reminds me of Harry Potter - “Welcome to Hogwarts! We’ve sorted you into the evil house for evil, no-good children, which exists because we need to have antagonists.”

This is also where the rebellion bits start popping up, but I’ll talk about those in a moment because…

Mockingjay I & II

…that’s what these entire movies are about and it’s so, so dicey.

Honestly, to me it feels like Collins had a great idea for a standalone book, but then, by dint of it being YA, was obligated to have the characters eventually band together to take down the big bad Capitol, and just didn’t have a great grasp on how the wider world worked or what a strong revolution story looks like. I think this story worked the best when it was only a small snapshot of the world, with all the periphery implied; the more it’s forced to get into the real nitty gritty of how the setting works, the more ramshackle and unbelievable everything feels, and Mockingjay is where it hits a breaking point. It’s not that there are plot holes, exactly, it’s that we see so little of the wider world that everything feels grossly oversimplified.

I think this is where these films’ dogged adherence to the source material really screws them over. While the books are also lacking in worldbuilding and context from the perspective of other characters, it makes sense there because the books are all first-person POV. Of course we don’t get cutaways to citizens in the Capitol ruminating on their role in all this, or seeing the inner workings of the Peacekeepers to give them any characterization whatsoever outside of being blank plastic suits, because Katniss doesn’t see that. Since the movies have fully done away with this conceit, though, the omission of these supporting scenes feels glaring - especially when the movies are trying so hard to push this theme that everyone has their own fight, and both sides have a reason for their actions.

So, on that note, thematically it’s a fucking mess. It dips its toes into a dozen different themes without really firmly exploring any of them, leaving it feeling indecisive and tonally inconsistent. For example, Mockingjay I spends its intro showing the effect Katniss’ PTSD is having on her, and challenging the idea that just because someone has gone through trauma, they’re a hero and ought to be set up as the mouthpiece of the revolution - how can you ethically put the responsibility of leadership on someone who gets the shakes every time they hear a bang? …but then, not to worry, show her a cool superhero outfit and she’s out there shooting down gunships with fuckin Hawkeye arrows by dinnertime.

And the wider revolution story has many similar issues. What’s your message? Dictators are bad? Wow, what a take. Both sides committed atrocities, so they’re both bad? Politics are hard and messy, and you just gotta keep your head down and hope you can retire to the country? Yeah, way to really take a hard stance on that one.

If I put all that aside, it generally works as a character piece - Katniss and Peeta’s development over the course of the story, in particular, is well done through and through, and it feels rare to see a broad appeal series like have the nerve to take its leads to such dark places. There’s also a lot of surprisingly great character acting throughout; my personal standouts are Hutcherson, Stanley Tucci, and (surprisingly) Woody Harrelson, but there’s honestly not a bad actor in the bunch, which is impressive. Still, with the subject material being so heavy, it’s hard for me just to take it at face value like that, and I wish they shored up the weaker elements a bit.

I’m just saying, if you spend that much of your screentime showing crowds of children being murdered by IEDs, I think you ought to be building towards a strong statement. 

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Yeah, this one felt like a waste of a movie in a really weird way. The execution was incredibly well done - lots of solid acting, production design, etc, which is a huge waste because the basic premise of the movie is fucking worthless.

So, the whole point, I would say, of doing a prequel is to flesh out interesting parts of your universe that you didn’t have time for in the original work. Unanswered questions, a character’s past that you want to learn more about, a deeper dive into parts of the world or lore that weren’t touched on but caught people’s imagination. The Hunger Games series has plenty of gaps that need to be filled: I said above how incredibly small the world seems due to barely exploring any of the capitol, other districts, etc., so it was ripe for a prequel or spinoff! Let us spend some time in other districts, see how other people live and feel about the whole thing. Even if we’re not going post-war, and are going back to the era of the Games (which of course we would), there’s 75 years worth of questions to explore.

Instead of focusing on any of that, the premise of this movie (/book) is “Hey, you know the villain from the original story that seemed like a huge, irredeemable piece of shit? Let’s spend a two and a half hour runtime telling you his backstory, which will show you that actually… he’s always been a piece of shit”. Wow. Spellbinding.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a main character being a bad person. Particularly, if your character is charismatic, they don’t necessarily have to be right or good to be interesting to watch; there’s a certain magnetism to watching that for a lot of people. It’s never been my cup of tea, to be honest; whether pegged as comedy (Always Sunny) or drama (Breaking Bad), I get fed up really quickly when I hate everyone in a piece of fiction. But done correctly, it can still be interesting - showing how a character ended up where they are, showing you a rare good side of them you’d never seen, or showing that they used to be moral, but just happened to be tested one too many times and fell off the deep end.

Snow is none of these. He’s a piece of shit from the first time we see him, he consistently acts like a piece of shit to everyone around him, and then he ends up, in fact, being a piece of shit***. What’s interesting about that?

***I think the most generous interpretation I could give of his character is a piece of shit who briefly dabbles in transactional friendship after Lucy Gray saves him from the rubble, then shortly thereafter returns to being a piece of shit. Which I still do not find especially compelling.

Even outside of that, it’s one of those prequels that does nothing but make the world feel smaller - rather than expanding on any of the dozens of untouched ideas in the series, we spend a bunch more time in District 12, and show that, actually, it turns out Snow and his hangups are the only reason anything happened in this universe for nearly 100 years. From Katniss’ name to the Hanging Tree song she sings, turns out half the things we learned in The Hunger Games resulted from this one particular guy’s life story. In a series that already felt like the world was too small and was in desperate need of expansion, further narrowing the scope feels like such a misstep.

Why yes, I did need to know exactly what the Kessel Run was!

Odds & Ends

I mostly blocked out my memories of Mockingjay the book from the single time I read it back in the day, because I thought it was booty, but the one thing I remembered liking that they changed up was Finnick’s death. In the book, he’s just there one moment and gone the next, without any fanfare or time to grieve, which serves to make his death feel especially cruel. I suppose it was inevitable, but counter-intuitively, the Big Hollywood Death Scene they gave him here felt a lot less impactful.

-------

A point about the series in general: boy did the costume design bother me. It’s interesting, because all I remembered about it from when this series blew up was the gaudy Capitol style and how crazy the internet was about it. Watching these movies again, I feel like that success was a total fluke, because everything else is goofy as hell. The way that every district has their own bespoke fucking Civil War re-enactment outfits is wild - look, the ‘District 11 is just one big Southern plantation’ thing was always really obvious, but seeing each district dressed up like they're from competing historical re-enactment groups was wild.

The prequel turns this up to 11. I feel like someone on the team though they were real clever - this one’s set 60 years earlier, so let’s make all the outfits and design retro! What? People in flapper clothes, the lake scene with their 1940s swimsuits, even the logo and graphic design in the Hunger Games broadcasting room looking like it’s from the 50s - it doesn’t make any fucking sense. Yeah, they’re set decades before the original books - in the year, like, 2300. What, everyone just forgot how to do graphic design again after the war? Fashion is cyclical, but not like this…

--------

Also, movies 1 and 2 in particular definitely have some uncomfortable racial dynamics going on. I was already weirded out that a lot of the districts seem to be separated by ethnicity, but as you go on, it’s hard to ignore how nearly every Black person seems to exist solely to help Katniss along in her quest before dying horribly and usually on-camera. Rue, Thresh, Cinna, even that old man that flashes the salute in District 11… it’s remarkably consistent.

[5hrignold]

lsp episodes ranked by how much they make me want to punch myself in the face out of how upset i am that i cant hug and hold her for 4 hours straight

bad timing is the big one. the entire premise of that episode is basically “what if lsp finally found someone who really likes her and she connects with but it was her fault she lost him” and i love it. it consumes my mind that she could’ve had it all right there. and i really think the cherry on top is the way at the end she begs for bonnie to erase her memory of the whole thing. literally who wouldn’t do the same thing. i would

be sweet is rlly good because it has sweet pea and Also because it addresses that yeah lsp is now on good terms with her parents and doing things for herself and doing well but she still isn’t happy. she still feels alone and disconnected from other people and she regrets choices she’s made that make her feel like she isn’t worth good things other people have. it matters a lot to me because that specific thing of hers pretty much is never brought up any other time ever except in this episode so it’s special. also the part near the end where she sings the little lullaby to sweet pea Aaaaaaa. ya! her soft voice is my fav thing eever 😊😊😊

slime central is another one where it kinda revolves around her self esteem being put into a blender on highest speed lol. her idea of perfect is skating with her friends and having a boyfriend Basically. and that just gets taken away with her, she’s rejected and called terrible and humiliated. and yet after that she’s still herself because like. she has to be. the 2 biggest moments in that ep is when she falls over and everyone in booing and she’s just laying on her back in the dark looking absolutely mortified and after they get kicked out where she’s crying about never fitting in

I KNOW loyalty to the king is not an lsp episode but what there IS of her is really good. just that one scene of her wanting to be whatever the nice king finds most convenient for him and straight up PUNCHING HERSELF to force her body to be smooth.. Its a lot. its a good chunk of her character summarised like yea that 30 second scene is literally her

the monster is super important because it’s the 2nd super lsp centric episode and it does a good job summarising what she goes through throughout the series. trouble in lumpy space is like a basic introduction of her life in the most neutral “nothing has happened yet” state and this episode shows what happens afterwards and how it makes her feel. she craves the feeling of being in control of her life but it’s either not getting that or upsetting her parents so that’s already like. she’s in a bit of an emotional corner. so she runs away and is met with nothing but what feels like just more punishment for just wanting to prove to herself that she can do things on her own. also this episode im PRESUMING is where she discovers her love and deep connection to animals!! which is absolutely one of my favourite aspects of her so fuckin awefomeee

the prince who wanted everything is really really good bc it’s an entire episode basically of her venting her feelings through her fionna and cake fanfic of her oc. it’s mostly reflective of her feelings towards finn, how he was the one who made her really realise her worth, but also stuff about how she prefers to do things that make her feel good and free in the moment, and how she views her parents, even if just internally. also people take the line about lumpy space prince only being able to date “someone who is so much like me she doesn’t even exist” as another like ohh classic self absorbed lsp Moment haha! but i really really like it bc it resonates with me lowkey . lol

princess day is another one that revolves around her guilt for acting the way she does and it being all she knows how to be. from the very start of the episode her mere presence is seen as an offense and an insult to everyone around eachother and so, having not much else to do in that position, she lashes out on breakfast princess. which AGAINNN again is very much a summary of her entire character. people hate her no matter what so she resorts to doing all she knows - being loud and assertive to make people respect her at the very least. this episode is also super special bc it shows us the exact moment her and marcy meet !!! in my mind she’s kinda the first to person to really listen to what lsp has to say, and her troubles and stuff, and she genuinely enjoys her company and lsp is absolutely flattered by how fondly marcy treats her and frankly never stopped being super cautious of it for a while until she Knew she really likes her

summer showers is kind of a blur to me but it is super good. i really like viola and her dynamic with lsp in this episode is cute. we get a whole scene where lsp just ends up venting to viola pretty much completely on accident while trying to tell her how to get the raindrops just perfectly right, because everything in the play has to be top tier since it’s very important to her. this episode gives another peek into how much of a little nerd lsp is which NO ONE talks about. she loves writing, she loves acting things out and being super dramatic and getting really into playing characters, she gets invested in silly things, she’s like best friends with turtle princess for crying out loud. she is cringe!!!!! and it’s adorable and wonderful of her!!!

i talked about trouble in lumpy space before so continuing. i do like that basically her first act in the show is screwing something up completely on accident without her being able to control it (her ability to float suddenly disappearing and that resulting in her biting finn). it’s really really good lol. i love this episode so dearly for 2 huge reasons ; it’s the most we see of early seasons lsp, and it establishes what her life was like before she started being more independent. the people she knew, where she went and how her people view her, her relationship with her parents and her friends and stuff. i feel like without all the stuff we learn about lumpy space in this episode there’d be WAY less to lsp. im just extremely grateful for it because the damn place pretty much never appears again in the entire series apart from the happy place thing in elements and lsp’s scene in the come along with me ending sequence

the creeps, again, not at all An Lsp Episode, BUT it does have a scene that reveals some stuff about her that’s important, which is her inability to really commit to relationships without being afraid. she objects to talking about why she broke up with brad at first but while finn is talking to bonnie she just completely falls apart to the pressure (which is absolutely nothing) and breaks out rambling about how much she regrets it and how she thought all you needed to do to be a good girlfriend was to look pretty. which lfhfhfbfdbdbfbfbfbbfbf. my Girl…………….my poor girl

i dont really have anything to say about from bad to worse lol. she’s cute in it! the way she snatches the instructions immediately and pouts at everyone while doing so and the way she shoves everyone aside talking about how she should go first… So good. also she looks so fucking good with wings can we talk ab that maybe some time

gotcha is like Maybe perhaps my favourite out of all of these. and it’s probably because while a lot of these make me sad with the stuff they all imply about lsp and her insecurities, this one makes me SO happy. how she is at the beginning, how confident she is waltzing toward the treehouse talking about how finn won’t be able to resist her because of how beautiful she is, the way she makes the treehouse cozy for herself without anyone’s permission, her friendship with turtle princess sprinkled throughout the episode, the part with finn tucking her in, THE WHOLE PART WITH HIM SAVING HER SND THEN TELLING HER SHE DOESNT NEED TO BE PRETTY PHYSICALLY FOR PEOPLE TO LOVE HER. AHHHHHH . Good Episode. GOOD. Episode.

sorry for the tone change but as for those last three episodes i really dont have much to say like at all. absolutely all she is in them is a device used for a joke. WHICH IM FINE WITH. ADVENTURE TIME IS A KIDS SHOW AND AN OFTEN LIGHTHEARTED ONE AT THAT I DONT CARE. sorry this description really makes it seem like i dislike how she is in these eps. idk if you could tell but i fucking love lsp always. she could do the most heinous things and id defend her and adore her for it always. she has never done a single thing i dislike NOT an exagggerarion. at all. /srs there ill even say that if it makes you believe just how much i love her. space girl help me