#marvel is not going to kill the fucking PROTAGONIST

[devflamme]

begging people to stop saying that agatha is going to die or that rio is going to kill her. there are so many points that just... BREAK those theories

it has already been confirmed that agatha and rio will show up in other marvel projects, and that agathas storyline isnt complete yet

the scenes that people are citing most to further proof the theories had already been shown since the first teasers. guys. we're talking about a MARVEL show. do you guys really think that marvel would just show a character's death in the first teaser? please

plus, rio cant kill agatha. "you cant kill me" / "you cant kill ME. its not allowed"

with that i say: agatha isnt going to die and if she dies im coming with her

[ghostbird-7]

I think it's really funny that marvel created a character who survived the holocaust, having his family killed, being experimented on by nazis for being a mutant, had his wife and daughter killed while trying to lead a normal life when they discovered he was a mutant and then turned around and went this is actually the antagonist lol. they really fumbled that one. no actually we cannot try to nonviolently wheedle our way into living peacefully charles you know my life story we have been over this

[iudex-of-dead]

Fuck you marvel

I don't know why I blindly trust you to do something right, I'm not talking about giving Agatha a good ending with Rio....

(I honestly expected that both would end on good terms, not as lovers but really kill Agatha???)

I'M TALKING ABOUT GIVING A FUCKING GOOD ENDING TO THE PROTAGONIST OF THE FUCKING SERIE 🖕🖕🖕

I'm not going to consume any more shitty Marvel content, I'm done with you!!

🫠🙃🥲🥹🙁☹️😭🔫

[gay-disabled-characters-showdown]

LBGTQ+ Disabled Characters Showdown Round 3, Wave 1, Poll 6

A character being totally canon LGBTQ+ and disabled was not required to be in this competition. Please check qualifications and propaganda before asking why a character is included. 

Check out the other polls in this wave and prior here.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus-The Locked Tomb

Qualifications:

She's a lesbian and the author Tamsyn Muir has confirmed she's written as schizophrenic, based on her own experience.

Okay SO Harrow is a necromancer nun who is also a huge lesbian. She spends the books of TLT series being super gay and repressed about her emotions for 1. Butch lesbian Jesus and 2. Human Barbie the death of God. She narrates the second book (Harrow the Ninth) and is author-confirmed schizophrenic. She experiences hallucinations thru the whole book and has since childhood. She’s also WIDELY headcannoned as autistic by the fandom (me too) because. Because she IS SO FUCKING AUTISTIC (source: I am autistic too)

Schizophrenic lesbian with a traumatic brain injury

Schizophrenic and sapphic

canonically a schizophrenic lesbian. neither word is used in series, she isn't in a position to get a diagnosis and queer identities are so normalised in the universe that labels just don't get mentioned, but she is written as both by an author who is also both.

Canon schizophrenia

Canon lesbian with canon schizophrenia

She's a schizophrenic lesbian with a traumatic brain injury

Propaganda:

The Locked Tomb is pretty popular on tumblr but I might as well submit her anyway

She’s a lesbian necromancer nun. She’s a saint and also woke up the death of God, who is a human Barbie, who she is in love with, tho she’s also kind of married to lesbian Jesus. She’s schizophrenic. She’s scrungly. She puts bread in a drawer. She’s even autistic

Harrow first started hallucinating (visual and auditory) when she was ten years old! The traumatic brain injury and seizures are much more recent. Unironically gotta love a pov protagonist who makes you struggle along with her in sorting out hallucination and false memory to figure out what's going on. Also while Harrow's disability shapes the narrative, the book isn't at all about her being disabled. It's a fantasy/scifi gothic horror novel about being trapped at a work retreat with God.

so many women want her but she’s determined to be in love with the soul of the dead earth trapped in a 10ft barbie doll instead. she’s a lesbian disaster and is trying to deal with both schizophrenia and over 200 actual ghosts haunting her.

a schizophrenic lesbian, written by a schizophrenic lesbian! she's in love with multiple dead women, but she's also a necromancer so that's not as big of an obstacle as it sounds. weird little bone-obsessed necromancer lesbian. I care about her deeply

Author Tamsyn Muir has discussed how Harrow's schizophrenia is modeled after her own experiences. It matters a lot in her eponymous novel, where her inability to trust what she sees and hears is compounded by her self-inflicted lobotomy to save her girlfriend's soul from getting absorbed into her own.

Harrow is one of the protagonists of her series & both her lesbianism & her schizophrenia play major parts in the story. The author has spoken about how she wrote Harrow based on her own experiences, and the authenticity comes through strongly. Beyond that, she's a teenage gothic nun in love with a holy corpse & she's the greatest bone magician ever born. What more needs be said.

She's a lesbian, she's psychotic, she has seizures, she faints regularly and can't rely on her own memory worth shit. And the only reason she's not going to kill god is so she and her girl can escape the cycle of violence. Basically, Harrowhark Nonagesimus is the entire package.

Anything Else?:

Listen. Listen. I’m not doing Harrow justice here. I LOVE her (Submitter 2)

The author is also schizophrenic! Which is pretty cool. (Submitter 3)

The author of the series is openly schizophrenic, and has mentioned in interviews that she's drawing on that experience when writing Harrow :) (Submitter 8)

Charles Xavier / Professor X-Marvel

Qualifications:

He [uses] a wheelchair. And frequently shipped with Eric Lehnsherr / Magneto.

Propaganda:

Listen, I don't even like this man a lot of the time. But he is gay, and he is disabled. And I love both James McAvoys and Patrick Stewarts portrayal of the character. And as a character I really like him.

[intertexts]

OK HI. HELLO ROS <3 standing in ur doorway like this 🧍 listen i will read worm eventually i just have so much HAPPENING. ALL THE TIME RIGHT NOW. AND DONT HAVE THE TIME. and also jrwi has me in a chokehold u know how it b. ANYWAY. i need u 2 tell me as much about new haven wards as u can without like major insane spoilers for worm. little spoilers r ok. i watch/read everything with a few lil spoilers 2 look forward to anyway <3 i know nothing abt the universe of worm (<<has barely made a sizeable dent in it but god i will i prommy) but i wanna know what exactly nhw is about. how does the universe work. how do the powers work. what is the situation with the nhw how and why are they working together where did they all come from!! gimme the nhw lore!!! as much as u can!!!!! looking at u with the biggest saddest wettest eyes rn pls pls pls infodump abt nhw 2 me!!!!!!!! ros pls 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

HIII HI HI WHISKEY <333 UR INSANE FOR ASKING THIS. BTW. literally insane. grabbing u so hard by the shoulders there is a crazed look in my eye. anyway. FIRST i am tagging @stuck-in-the-ghost-zone here also!!!!!! bc it is his au as much as mine & i am NOT qualified 2 talk abt nhw mark n such. augh.

ok. ok. ok. new haven wards. putting the cut here.

so the basic movement of worm is that powers are from trauma. ridiculously simplified, but that's the base of it-- if you have superpowers, you have them because you went through traumatic events so severe to you specifically that it broke ur brain a little bit. the powers manifest in some way as a reaction to the traumatic scenario. (it is also more complicated than this. playing the spoiler card.) OR secret second option u put urself into indefinite debt to an extremely shadowy and ominous.... organization? person? shadow government branch? conspiracy? and get superpowers in a can, with like, a 10% chance they'll backfire and mutate u into some fucking terrible inhuman shit and then they'll completely memory wipe you and brand you and dump you off somewhere. not really relevant here. because the main way of getting superpowers is to be violently traumatized, cape society in worm tends to be grittier, more violent. there's more villains, the heroes are less shiny marvel or dc and more making whatever moral compromises they need to get the best outcome possible. at one point one of the main heroes in the city worm takes place in tells the sixteen-year-old protagonist "i don't care, there's a kill order out on them, just put a bullet in her brain if you see her, it's fine" and then a while later goes "yeah i'd vote for a kill order out on you guys too," directly to her face. worm is always going "hey, wouldn't it fucking suck if superheroes were real?". there are many horrifying and inhuman and violent threats. sexual and racial and physical violence aren't swept under the rug. these seventeen year olds are sent to crime scenes where flayed and gutted corpses are suspended from the ceilings because they're heroes! ^_^ but this aint about worm this is about the new haven wards!!!!! [wards are the child soldiers junior hero branch of the main syndicated/unionized hero organization, w/ placement in every major city alongside regional protectorate headquarters]

>key things for this au:

--william wisp changed his last name to bell when he moved to new haven (where his brother david lives :) and joined the wards, for another layer of anonymity ^_^ (he is. severely paranoid about his identity & privacy. <- also a Big and Heavy thing in worm/parahumans world. it's a Big Fucking Deal to unmask a cape regardless of their alignment)

-dakota never got the mechanical heart & biomedical augumentation so didn't meet mato cole at that time! he's still dakota damascus :]

-virion... idk why he's still virion & not vyncent actually. probably just because that was the name his parents gave him? we can't change it now though nhw virion & canon vyncent r two different guys to me...

-ashe is the unluckiest fucking guy in the world!!!

their powers are a little different from canon both bc of the ways powers work just being different frm how they do in pd & also because of the "they're always a reflection of the worst moment of ur life that you're just dragging around with you reminding you of it" thing. <333

wibby / whisperer is a breaker/shaker (<- power classifications meaning he has another form he shifts into, and also an area of effect] in his breaker form (crackling white-blue energy) he 1) can control how corporeal he is, or *how* corporeal he is, from "walks into the brick wall" to "doesnt notice there's a brick wall and goes straight through it", to "goes incorporeal to stick his hand in a guy's chest then resolidifies to instakill him" w/ some tradeoffs. & 2) shape/control energy manifestations in a fairly wide radius around him, where the power of the shaped energy is in proportion to the amount of recent death in the area-- if there's a ton of casualties in the area, he can do a lot more than he could in a peaceful small town in the middle of nowhere. the situation with his trigger event was him. growing up socially isolated and half convinced he was going crazy and everyone else Also thought he was fucking insane (deadwood is still haunted!! more haunted :]) for years & years + the loneliness + frustration + unsureness if he's actually the one just. losing it or if it's all really real + the constant feeling of being in danger, that the town is bad and malicious and out to Get you. anyway. he fell, take that as ambiguously as u do for that in canon, didn't die, but was severely injured & couldn't move. just laid there for maybe a day or so in the woods that wanted to kill him. anyway he triggered when he was found! the catalyst was not "the place that's been out to get me my entire life finally succeeded" but the helpless incandescent frustration of "actually nothing i ever do is going to make you understand. i've been trying for so fucking long to make you See It but you won't!!! you never will and you just think i'm crazy or stupid or making it up for attention even though it has such obvious fucking consequences and is manifestly Real!!" he was recruited to the wards by miss g herself, who was like hahahhahaa this kid could be a Really Fucking Big Problem if he doesn't have an eye on him!! ^_^ he never wanted to be a hero, and still doesn't, really, but he's terrified of accidentally hurting people & deadwood is like a weight around his neck and maybe things will be better if he just gets out of here. for a while they're not, of course. he just feels like. y'know. he's another sick thing that crawled out of deadwood, and his powers make that obvious. the way they interact with recently dead shit makes him sick!! living with david is awful-- a big, lovely, lonely high rise apartment, an older brother who barely bothers to speak to him, calls to their mom through the walls going "why is he here? why would you send him here? can he like, go anywhere else?"

virion sol / imprint is a trump (meaning his powers interact With other capes powers.) he can copy powers by touching other parahumans-- the copied power is just as strong as the original, whatever the original is, but he doesn't have an innate sense of how to use it; he can easily be overwhelmed or overstimulated by powers that involve a ton of sensory input, or accidentally loose cannon something he wasn't expecting and can't easily control. regardless, this is a fucking insane power to have. it's so cracked. like within the parahumans-- world, this is something so rare, especially being able to copy the full strength of the power. the very few examples in canon of something similar, the copied power is always inferior. his situation was similar to canon-- the greats were a team of independent heroes, & were like, extended family to virion. he grew up unpowered, but in the cape world-- so many aunts and uncles teaching him security, standard protocols, how to fight capes, how to run cape business and independent team business, how to handle guns and tasers and safely run background checks. y'know. a family's worth of professional knowledge. he never really wanted to be a cape, anyway, he was more than happy to do all the unpowered stuff at home that needed to be done. occasionally he came with them on patrol n stuff or snuck out to watch them. the greats' long term goal was prying out the lich, an extremely heavyweight warlord who had control over most of the city. virion's father struck a deal with the lich-- virion knows as little what the deal was For as he does in canon, but he double crossed the entire team. virion snuck along to the confrontation with the lich (setup) & watched his father turn & murder all of them. still not sure if he did it all himself or just watched as the lich's minions did it, but the way they knew all their weaknesses, how efficient and brutal and unexpected it was-- it was his dad feeding the information. virion stays frozen in shock and horror & hidden during all of this. can't do anything to help. is fucking useless, despite all he knows and has done. for the first time in his life, he wished he had powers, that ram and min and everyone could have taught him how to have and use their powers like they taught him everything else. he triggered watching it all happen. after this, he went on the run, terrified that someone would Know that he saw, that they'd be coming for the loose ends, that his dad would come back for him. all he has of his family is a couple piecemeal things he could grab before he ran-- ram's favorite revolvers, a holy medal of alphonz's, some of his mom's sturdy jewelry. anyway, he ran, moved to a different city, new haven. started figuring out his powers, started targeting specifically other capes who were up to bad shit-- minor to mid league villains, the occasional local hero who would Look squeaky clean, but after their sudden death dirty secrets would come out, etc. all very low-key, very subtle. none of the disappearances or deaths looked related. during this period he is SO fucked up. he is so fucked in the head. he's incredibly hypervigilant and paranoid and jumpy (good at looking unbothered and still clocking every single sound and movement and always facing doors and windows), mired in the grief and guilt and horror at. watching his entire family slaughtered and life shattered in a night. sleeps for no more than two hours or so at a time. even on top of the lich and his dad... what he's been doing puts an even bigger target on his back. doesn't have time or heart for anything but the dirty work. is dissociating through the periods of time where he's not actively hunting someone down or on the job. silhouette is the one who puts the pieces together-- of course he's on the protectorate (hero organization) radar. sure he's only been targeting bad guys, but how clean each one was? how well covered they all are? how whoever this is has allegedly killed at least almost two hands' worth of capes in cold blood by now? sets off alarms, if you're looking!!

anyway, silhouette tracks him down, says hey, i know who you are, i know what happened. you're just a kid. you join us, and you'll gain the resources and skill to be able to get revenge. aren't you tired of running? now... virion took to this fast and well when he did, but. before it all, he was just a teenager. despite the family business, he was just some guy! he helped his mom cook and got help with schoolwork at the kitchen table and his cool aunts took him out for lunch. he never wanted this or expected it. and of course he doesn't trust the heroes farther than he can spit, but... it's something. it's better than this. anything has to be better than the way he's driving himself into the ground. & also, of course. if silhouette can find him. anyone else who's looking for him can too. (i don't think he's even registered on the radar of anyone. his dad didn't actually survive the lich, obviously, & he was the only other one who really knew abt virion + nobody knew he triggered. he's just. so fucking paranoid.)

dakota damascus / failsafe is a thinker/mover. he 1) has a precognitive sense of any pain that anyone in a radius around him will feel in the next short amount of time. this is-- varyingly difficult to block. he can't just Choose not to feel it, although the intensity of the feeling, again, varies. mostly proportionally to how severe the pain actually is, or how many people are hurt, but, with time, he can dull or sharpen it + follow the threads of it to discern Who exactly is in pain, rather than just an ambient sensation. 2) is VERY fast & has matching enhanced cognitive speed. these two abilities work SO good together, both in combat situations & also just day to day patrolling. man. i love dakota. anyway, he triggered young-- he was out with his parents (maybe 7/8) and they got caught in an attack by siberian-- a genuinely indestructible, incredibly powerful villain who can just,,, run her hand through a concrete foundation like it's butter & collapse buildings, or scoop out peoples insides in a heartbeat. and also likes to eat people, like, raw and bloody after dismembering them. whatever level of ultraviolent shocking horror u are imagining. double it. anyway. they got caught in the scene of this attack, dakota got separated from his parents in the panic and stampede and rush to get out-- he's seven! it's terrifying levels of panic and claustrophobia and people shoving and trampling and he's not gonna leave without his parents!! of course not!! he triggers from the fear and the disorientation and the panic & he can't find them & he's trying to fight the crowd but he barely comes up past their knees & there's awful sounds of fighting & he's close enough to see her... things are doubly disorienting with the echo of the agony from everyone who gets Fucking Siberianed. he sees most of the fight. um. a while after she's driven away and it's finally finished he finds what's left of his parents. there's a beat in worm, during an encounter with siberian and the Big Heroes, the prime force equivalent, where they just.. give her a victim to chew on because it makes her happier and less of a nightmare to fight. which is something i think about frequently. anyway, after this things are kind of loose, similar to canon. he does the same shit. it's also quieter and you can feel less people hurting the higher up u are. yk? OH GOD. YEAH. at some point after this we still have not hammered it out. he confronts the slaughterhouse 9 (the supervillain group that attacked/siberian is part of) about it & gets his face slit open (half chelsea smile style) & makes a deal to either kill a guy in [n years] or that guy will kill him & several hundred other people!!!!!!!!!!!! dakota damascus killing a man baked into the bones of nhw!!!

anyway he & cat still fell. he underwent a second trigger event when this happened, actually-- the panic and desperation of that situation + the way it echoed his first trigger, etc. this is also super fucking rare, btw. there are very few second triggers & it is almost Never good. (u cannot trigger more than twice + a second trigger is always a refining or an improving of the intent of the original trigger) so that's where the speed etc. came from. tide found him, gave him. a better support system (low bar!!) + a real purpose in joining the wards. i have a lot of feelings abt this.

ashe / auxiliary / muse is also a shaker/breaker!!!!! his backstory i cannot talk too much about because it is Big Spoilers. but he is a fucking powerful telekinetic (around when he joins the wards, having not really used his power in years, he has an upper weight limit of a couple times his body weight & a fairly large radius of effect). he also has a breaker form that only triggers in certain situations & if he really really pushes himself to breaking w/ his powers-- when he enters it, he loses lucidity, for the most part, & starts warping and stretching and breaking space-time in strange, dreamlike ways-- the pavement melts, or everything gets bouncy, or cars and concrete chunks and things with no business moving float slowly around like balloons, or he pulls and crumples reality to move without really moving.... it gets Real fucking bad, real fast. ANYWAY. he eventually sneaks out one night, walks to a gas station to get. snacks. it-- okay, i'm fucking linking mac's post, i CANNOT summarize all of this concisely. go read that. so. that's ashe's deal!!!!!!!!!

THERE'S ALSO. MARK. ASK MAC ABOUT MARK i have typed this entire thing out on myfucking phone keyboard i literally Cannot keep going. help. and also their mark stuff is so fucking good its so. auuuhhgh. AND ALSO DAVID BELL. WHO WORKS FOR THE ORGANIZATION THAT SELLS U SUPERPOWERS IN A CAN W A CHANCE OF GETTING TURNED INTO AN UNRECOGNIZABLE MONSTER AND DOES HUMAN ABDUCTION AND EXPERIMENTATION. AND JADE AND X AND ALLEN ARE THE FREEDOM CITY WARDS AND GRAYSCALE SHAKES OUT EVEN FUCKING WORSE THAN IT DID IN CANON. YEAH.

SO. YEAHG. THATS. THATS THE MOST OF IT. um. yeah. theyre a dreadful little polycule they are. So fucking clingy they r traumabonded. like little trembling chihuahua puppies. separation anxiety and all. virion and dakota share a comfy old victorian house in a suburban neighborhood maybe a fifteen minute walk from the protectorate hq. wibby starts out living w/ david and eventually just... all his stuff moves over to their place. their clothes r all mixed up they know each others blood types they're all sleeping together on the couch. eventually their house gets blown up. they all get various flavors of nightmare & are 1 million shades of debilitatingly mentally ill but like-- it works. they r good for each other. theyre good together. do not separate them. etc. i'm not even gonna fucking START talking abt their dynamics other than that but like. i mean. if you want a repeat of THIS u can always ask!!!!!!!

[weathermanpolls]

Original Gangster: They were nothing but unthinking robots. While fun, trying to add any depths to the series proves impossible, and instead leans more on slapstick comedy.

X: Dr. Light decided to build a real AI, but realized that putting a real AI in a nearly invincible robot was... problematic, so put him in stasis to test his morality. He's uncovered by Dr. Cain, who decides to blatantly copy him, and make no effort to make sure his new, fully sentient Reploids were moral. Some of them started going "Maverick", and the days of Humanity seemed numbered, as the damage caused by these Mavericks dramatically escalated, up to an including a colony drop. The series is known for much more dynamic action and deeper, emotional stories, as the main character is conflicted about killing Mavericks, and whole armies fall to darkness. This is unfortunately the attempt at make-it-better remakes that changed the map order, despite the fact you physically cannot get to many places without your rocket assist.

Legends: One of the early attempts at 3d. Almost all early attempts at 3d were bad, at least in 3d controls. But, this game has a warm place in many hearts. And, you get to play as Roll, whom has super vacuum powers.

NT: What if Megaman was a programme that fights other programmes? Relies in the common late 90's/early aughts complete misunderstanding of hacking, but it is filled with interesting characters, both real and virtual. That said, it was patently obvious they were trying to create a world dedicated to alternate revenue channels. Good thing e-commerce wasn't sophisticated enough yet, or the schoolyard fights over Pokemon would seem like child's play.

Zero: The true successor to X. Keiji Inafune originally wanted to make Zero, Megaman, but Capcom was basically like, "fuck you, make Megaman blue and less edgy". So, X was meant to be a short series that lead to Zero in the future. X5 was meant to be the final X game, and then transition into Zero. Capcom was like $.$, and made more X games, that are so terrible it's better to never play them. Because Zero was where Inafune wanted to go. In Zero, X has gotten tired of Mavericks trying to wipe out Humanity, and decided to wipe out Reploids. Zero, with the help of Reploid resistance, and... Elves... (sentient computer programmes), fought back.

ZX: Humans and Reploids have merged, and... honestly, no mention of Keiji Inafune, who doesn't like to spend his entire life on one franchise, and instead wants to create bounded stories that have a beginning and end. So, Humans are Robots, Robots are Humans, and you get to pick the sex of your protagonist! Something-something ancient artifacts that literally turn the Humans/Robots into pale imitations of the original heroes.

Shooting Star is the distant descendant of NT, and I don't really know much, other than it's in space!

[skitariiposting]

Okay, I've just finished watching episode 1 of Marvel's hit TV show Secret Invasion, and I've gotta say: eh. Especially coming off of binge watching all of adventure time and experiencing it all over again, then immediately watching AI Builds again and suffering another mental overload despite it being one of my favorite pieces of media ever. Heck, even if I have to compare it to another Marvel thing; Loki season 2 was way better. I really should have watched something bad before watching this, I'm coming down off of the "Rewatching AI Builds and fucking crying myself to sleep, again" high, but here we are.

This show feels especially "the writer strike, struck." Given that I haven't heard anybody really talk about this show at all, good or bad, I will be undertaking the task of relaying things I enjoy and/or find annoying.

Spoilers, obviously.

1. Look, say what you will about AI stuff, trust me when I say I'm pissed with it possibly taking my job eventually too, but for once it felt like it was used for a stylistic choice as opposed to just trying to rob people of a job.

The intro is obviously made with AI. However, I feel like they're trying to use it to make it feel alien and foreign, something inhuman or unearthly, and it works. It's visually interesting. However, I just wish we could get something like that without having to rely on this shitty AI stuff to do it. Imagine how cool it'd be if it wasn't for the immoral and outright theft involved with sourcing for AI.

2. The main plot is wacky, goofy, and utterly silly sauce. "Oh damn this giant catastrophe that effected literally half of all life all at the same time and made a bunch of people disappear made Nick disappear, that means he's totally not going to honor his deal with us because he's disappeared, time to terrorists!" I hope that the plot gets more fleshed out or something, but off to a bad start in episode 1.

3. Nick feels both simultaneously great and awful at the same time. He's still cocky and charismatic, which is something I love about his character. However, he feels like he's dumb. He's not the same Nick Fury from Avengers and Winter Soldier, and I don't like that. Sam Jackson's putting in a lot of the footwork here to keep the character from falling completely flat; line delivery is on point as always with Sam, but it feels like the writers are just dishing out some crappy plot stuff he's having to work with.

4. They set off three dirty bombs in a square full of people, with all three protagonists within range of it, and yet its a gunshot that almost kills one of them, not the bombs nor the "dirty" part of it, which I feel like they kinda forgot about. These are supposed to be radioactive for a reason: skrull are immune to radiation according to 30 minutes ago in the episode. As I've not seen any spoilers or anything plot related to this show (since nobody has really had anything to say about it at all, good or bad) I am forced to make the super easy prediction that there will be a big reveal where Nick is actually a Skrull.

I will continue with the show now and bring updates as I go.

[formerheroeswhoquittoolate]

why I'm unhappy with secret invasion: an accidental essay that turned out WAY more aggressive than I wanted it to (sorry about that)

I'm furious about how Secret Invasion is going. It feels like Marvel just went ahead with a Samuel L. Jackson vanity project, but and it's barely interesting and it's fucking with canon characterization. And it's fucking Secret Invasion! This could be meaningful! But instead it feels like it's trying to redo what TFATWS already did and did better. We already HAD a show about a global terrorist movement and the evils of white privilege, and it was actually really good, so what is this show supposed to be again? Oh. I see. It's different because Nick Fury is in it. Gotcha.

Oh, and [spoilers for ep 1 and 2]

They killed Maria Hill in the first episode. Not only did they kill her (which is bad enough from this studio, considering they've also killed Gamora, Natasha, and Wanda), but they fridged her. And not even kind-of-fridged, like with the aforementioned characters, where the death was required and mostly reasonable by in-universe circumstances, even if it was an easy out. No. Maria was literally, actually, to-the-letter fridged. They even confirm that in the dialogue of the second episode. Fury actually says that Gravik killed her to hurt him. She didn't have to die -- hell, if she wasn't going to be relevant to the rest of the show, she didn't even need to be in it in the first place! (More on that in a minute.)

And the thing is. The thing is. I would be so much happier with the show if the roles were reversed. Canon Fury is all "I still believe in heroes! There's good in people! Befriend the aliens!" He's a badass spymaster, yeah, sure, but he's also pretty optimistic about people. And then there's Maria Hill.

[Image description: Maria Hill, saying "Best advice you'll ever get from me, a dedicated law enforcement officer, to you, an amateur looking to go pro: 'Assume everyone is a broken, nightmare, garbage person and then be pleasantly surprised if it ends up not the case.' It'll save you a lifetime of disappointments."] [Image credits: Bendis and Pichelli's Spider-Man #12 (2017)]

That seems to have carried over into the MCU fairly well. And to see her? Struggling to fulfill Fury's goal after his death, operating without her mentor for the first time, trying to figure out how to reconcile his faith in the Skrulls with her natural instinct that everyone is lying all the time? To see her actually doing the work, speaking to the security committee and telling them to piss off, because Fury was in Moscow to do a hero's work and he died a hero, no further questions? To see her, the character who has long been reduced to the sidekick of male characters with a much shorter stint in Marvel's canon, fully come into her own as the protagonist of this series? It would have been perfect. We could have actually gotten a show full of espionage and intrigue instead of a hamfisted... racism metaphor? I'm not even sure at this point. This could have actually been something besides a Samuel L. Jackson vanity project. I know I said that already, but I am going to say it again. This show is here so Jackson can look cool and badass and also be a funny old man. And I wouldn't care if they weren't reducing every other meaningful character in the series to a Skrull, a corpse, or a realpolitik adversary. Like, fuck this false advertising. Maria Hill, Everett Ross, and Rhodey were all in the trailer like they were going to be relevant. As if this was going to be an interesting web of an ensemble cast. Instead, it's the Nick Fury show with a few redeeming scenes from the terrifyingly cheery British spymaster lady.

It's almost like Marvel knew no one would want to watch the show if they just straight-up said it was going to be all Nick Fury. And I haven't even started on the bullshit that was the train conversation (a whole monologue about sitting in the colored section on trains and then straight-up telling Talos there's not enough room for his people on the train? Was I the only one thrown off by that?) or the dialogue between him and Rhodey in the bar ("even when I'm out, I'm in.") or the Skrull wife reveal (which felt like it wanted to be some big important twist but it also had exactly zero setup) or... whatever is happening with Talos and Gaea. The next episode comes out in two days, and I'm still crossing my fingers that a miracle of plot will happen and it will get better. But it's going to take a miracle.

[oatmealaddiction]

It still blows my mind that people watch Steven Universe, and come away from it thinking it's a fascist narrative because it has the gall to say "bad people can change." Notice how these same people never once throw stones over at DC or Marvel who make a million movies a year with messages like "this one truly acceptable hero has the moral authority to blow up all the bad guys." Our media landscape right now is so fucking blood thirsty and full to the brim with villains who are acceptable to murder in various horrifying ways. We have a million stories where pacifists are dismissed as unrealistic and killing is automatically accepted as the correct and moral thing to do. We have over saturated the market with children's stories where pretty blue-eyed blonde boys murder hook-nosed witches or dark puppet master dictators in self defense, and one children's show says; "hey actually, I think even the very worst of people can still reduce their harm and be better if given the chance," and you guys called it fascism apologia. Steven Universe. A show that consistently presents morally grey situations and refuses to tell the audience how to feel about them. A show that has its protagonists be both truly awful to each other, while also being truly kind and loving. A show about how we cannot judge others on the surface level, where everyone is revealed to be way more complicated than what they present outwardly. A show that asks its viewers again and again, over and over, to sit with discomfort and ambiguity and to not judge everyone as either good or bad. A show that says even if you're a hero who saved the earth out of pure selfless love; that doesn't mean you're a good person. A show that says no matter how bad or awful you have been, you're never beyond changing for the better. A show that says outright, without a stutter, that no one deserves to die and everyone's life is worth saving. A show with a protagonist who literally wields a shield against colonizing invaders who call him an affront to nature. A protagonist who fights them over and over and tells them "I'm not your enemy, I'm your family."

That's the show you're going to call fascist?

[spindle-girl]

Worm 12.4 is so incredibly important to me. It has so much in that one chapter that I love.

Below is me gushing over the characters for the chapter where Jack cuts Tattletale's mouth.

We get to see the Slaughterhouse Nine with their cruelties of what's to come. Detailed explanations on their tests that our protagonists are going to have to go through. We also get to see the dynamic between four of them. Cherish tries to make herself the center of focus only for that to turn around on her when Jack makes her show Manequinn's test. After that she goes and tries to get the Siberian to kill the Undersiders. Jack is there to enjoy the ride. He wants to see where he can get his entertainment from and he basically throws a tantrum when Tattletale ruins it. The Siberian is just there to be used as a threat by her teammates. The invincible cannibal who will make any resistance pointless if she decides to intervene. Then the creeping horror that is Bonesaw, how even you die she can also bring you back. But she's also the one that wants the tests to be fair and have rules and she enforces this by casually having a city wide plague already in the water.

There's Bitch, who once again doesn't tell the Undersiders what happened when she was alone. And once again it threatens to alienate her from the group. It lingers in Taylor's mind, but when it comes to Bitch's mind this meeting probably helps to push the S9 into an enemy for her. Cherish tries to play the mind games she hates, Jack admits to playing a mind game on his own teammate which she absolutely hates, and all throughout the Siberian doesn't say a thing to her. Jack also hurts one her teammates and that would piss her off. Just one meeting for any thought of joining the Nine to go out the window, but bc we're in Taylor's mind it stays as a concern for the reader.

Then you got Regent and we get a fun throwback to Bakuda where he starts a conversation with the horrifying murderers. His insults to Cherish while appealing to Bonesaw is him trying to make himself the more likeable sibling. He once again manages to get critical info for Tattletale to make her move while also pushing back their executions. And when their usual shtick fails, Regent is instantly by Tattletale's side trying to stop the bleeding. He does care for them, even if he can't fully grasp it.

Grue stays quiet. He's once again in a situation where he can't do anything. No matter how strong he trains the best he can do is just being there, insulting the Nine to try and get their attention and he fails. When Taylor doesn't know what to do he just silently takes her place, letting the others talk as he himself doesn't know what to do. Grue just tries to there and has to hope that it's enough.

You have Tattletale in her element. She tries three times to get Jack to find entertainment in them so that he doesn't kill them then and there and she gets her mouth cut for it. It's even meant to kill her, but instead of backing down she goes all in. Bleeding out she makes a deal that Jack finds interest in and he basically takes it. Then to cap it all off you have her push Taylor to go. Go, leave her to save her dad and warn everyone she can. Fucking peak Lisa, not letting Taylor in because it would hurt too much.

Sundancer is just a bystander. She's just as scared as everyone there and is probably marveling at at they're even managing to talk to the Nine. When Tattletale gets injured she's actually there with Regent to try and help her, but when Tattletale goes to make her deal with Jack she's just a bit slow until she catches up to help. It's this repeating thing where Sundancer absolutely hates that this is her life and she probably hates how quickly she can jump into it.

Finally Taylor. Taylor the hopeful Worm, getting called that at last. In the face of the Siberian appearing she thinks of a plan, when she learns that Shatterbird is going to sing her thoughts go to her dad and her people, but Lisa gets injured and she stops. She's late to stopping the bleeding because Lisa's blood is splattered on her. Jack is saying she'll die and Taylor doesn't know what to do. Then when Lisa leaves it to her to finish the deal with Jack her ability to analyze the situation comes into play. She seen that Jack and Bonesaw are the two most important to get the Nine on board so she says it'll be interesting and that the game will be fair. And with the Nine gone she's has to decide between staying with Lisa or warning her dad and others about Shatterbird and again she freezes. Despite all the claims that Taylor behaves to clear minded in insane situations, she really doesn't. She just places far more value in her friends than herself so when it's her being hurt she can still operate but when it's her friends she just wants to leave with them. It's only with Lisa reassuring her that she goes and does something incredibly heroic.

This is after they leave the villain alliance making them the underdogs again. Before Taylor's fight with Manequinn where she wins because her people intervene to help her. Some of the absolute best of the Undersiders and Worm in general. I only wish Imp was here as well.

[jupitermelichios]

my dc movies hot take is that the green lanterns should get split into essentially home and away teams for the new universe, with John being the GL who appears in league stuff, and Jess and Guy being the lanterns appearing in any green lantern stand-alone movies

this is primarily because when John gets adapted to other media his defining character trait is always that he's the competant one, and that's very useful in a team story, but makes a shit protagonist for an origin story, and people are not familiar enough with the lanterns to skip the origin story movie

my pitch for the GL solo movie would be that it's about Jess getting called up after the deaths of hal and kyle in a 'nobody wants to talk about it' pre-movie disaster. guy is assigned to mentor her but is initially fucking awful at it because he's massively traumatised from hal and kyle's deaths.

(jess is absolutely tailor made for origin 'coming into her power' type storylines, and guy is both mentor shaped and the most capable of starting the movie as a grumpy kind of agressive mess and then actually working through that without either end of the character arc feeling ooc. i'm just fully haymitch abernathy-ing this man because i know he can take it)

over the course of the movie, jess will slowly uncover the truth that the disaster in question involved hal going paralax (this would not be widely known - most people on oa think hal died fighting paralax, and only guy knows that actually hal got possessed by paralax and him and kyle had to kill him before he blew up the planet or whatever), and also he's not actually dead he's coming back to try it again, but no one will believe her, except guy, so they both have to work through some stuff to build a solid working relationship and defeat paralax and save the world

i honestly don't really care if you save hal at the end of the movie or permakill him, i think you could give either pretty good emotional resonance, but personally I think you save him, and have him basically fuck off in self imposed exile to star in an animated series for a couple of seasons

(kyle probably just stays dead, tbh, and simon never appears, because there's a limited number of human GLs you can fit into the smaller scale of a movie universe, so someone's got to go. if you really can't resist including kyle, the injustice-verse gives us precedent for a recently evil hal being haunted by the ghost of a GL corps member, so he could just follow hal around in his animated series as a ghost forcing him to talk about his feelings, he'd probably be quite good at that)

anyway marvel continue to refuse to hire me despite me making multiple posts on tumblr.com about how good i'd be at writing marvel movies, so i guess this is my pitch to dc. james gunn i know you're reading this you can have this concept for free if you promise to make a we are robin movie

[hasarjunadoneanythingwrong]

That whole Gudako anime thread having someone treat me like an idiot when I pointed out their continuity argument is bunk (because apparently acknowledging that Camelot and Babylonia is incompatible because 100 faces and Touta are confirmed to appear in one and are completely absent in another is the "most stupid thing they've ever heard") will be the start of my villain origin story, maybe.

Oh it’s great how they shift their goalposts on why they don’t think a female protagonist won’t work constantly don’t they? 🙄

Like:

The statement: it would mess with continuity to make the protagonist female after having them be male for the other adaptations

The rebuttal: continuity has already been broken by having flashbacks that show characters that then don’t appear in the actual adaptation of that part, suggesting it’s a different timeline

The response: uh well that’s stupid (doesn’t actually address the continuity error or even acknowledge it)

The statement: switching to a female protagonist would confuse anime onlys

The rebuttal: there are plenty of franchises that switch protagonists out, while there may be some confusion the first time it’s done you’re vastly overestimating how much people will be bothered by it. If precure or sentai can hard reset their universe every season with the same core concepts carrying over and literal 5 year olds can figure out the same general rules for the setup still apply then adults should also be able to handle it

The response: hooooowwww dareeeew you act like all sentai use the same basic premise don’t you know ultra man isn’t even produced by toei (you did not mention ultra man) marvel is also tokusatsu I’m going to derail the shit out of this bc you made the rookie error of mentioning 3 franchises made by the same company. I’ve never heard of Warriors or guardians of gahoole or avatar and the idea of a media franchise changing its protagonist scares me

The statement: a female protagonist wouldn’t be profitable, there aren’t enough female players to make it worth doing

The rebuttal: at least 40% of fgo players according to surveys are female and by the most recent survey for the 7th anniversary they’re actually the majority at ~58%. You can’t say that they aren’t a profitable demographic when you’ve never tried marketing to them

The response: uh but that’s a famistsu poll they don’t count my 2019 poll saying it was 30% (still a significant number?) is from an offical source (no you don’t get to know what that source is)

The statement: well they can’t use her because then they’d have to pair her up with female servants and they wouldn’t want the gay implications!

The rebuttal: assuming that they suddenly get cold feet on lesbian fanservice if it isn’t ‘comedic assault’ like in lwm they could just…pair her with male servants? Those exist? Or, yknow, focus on telling a story instead of solely pandering to self inserts

The response: uh but they don’t want to pair her up with guys bc she needs to be a waifu >_<

My actual response to that: SHE ISNT SUPPOSED TO BE A WAIFU FOR THE MALE PLAYERS. FOR GODS SAKE SHE IS THE ONE CHARACTER WHO SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO EXIST INDEPENDENTLY OF MALE DESIRES AS A REPRESENTATION OF THE FEMALE FANBASE. ILL FUCKING KILL YOU

The statement: uh but she died in the fgo command room in the fuyuki anime

The response: bitch that was literally an Easter egg that wasn’t the actual master

The rebuttal: but she’s dead! They can’t ever reboot or disregard their own canon! Especially a franchise like fate, which is known for being super set in stone and never going back on events that have already happened

And repeat ad nasuem. Like we get it, as soon as a women does anything that isn’t hanging off the arm of a guy it pisses you off but god DAMN the shitty argument tactics piss me the hell off. Just say you don’t want a serious female protagonist with your chest and quit making these garbage excuses

[rappaccini]

... ok very specific theory about how to best use spider-punk to solidify hobie brown's future variants.

first off for context, hobie brown was the first black guy to 'be' spider-man, but that lasted one issue. the guy was given so much intentional paralleling to peter. they're smart, they're engineering whizzes who create the same kind of wrist-tool, they're perpetually broke, they keep fucking up their lives, they date the same kind of girl at the same time, they become vigilantes at first because of selfishness, a loved one being killed by preventable violence prompts them to put the mask back on. then hobie gets the opportunity to put on the spider-mantle when peter's indisposed, and he... never gets to again. marvel was raising the possibility of a black guy becoming the second spider-man after peter as early as the 1970s (... and the idea of him getting gwen away from her role of peter's doomed girlfriend), but in the end miles was the one to get there and stick around.

hobie was otherwise the original prowler for about four decades. and not so coincidentally, miles's uncle aaron took that prowler mantle when miles was created. it was a very subtle reference to how miles owes his creation in part to hobie; in a meta sense, hobie brown is the narrative ancestor of miles morales. hobie lit the torch, miles ran with it.

(... and now the spiderverse movies are putting miles into that narrative of 'you should've been the prowler, but became spider-man by mistake.' which is spider-punk's metanarrative. they're still borrowing from hobie.)

so hobie kinda had nothing for a while. he couldn't be the prowler, because aaron davis was the far more well-known prowler. he couldn't become a spider-man, because that was miles. (even the connection with gwen ended up getting handed to miles in atsv. like... ok what's going on here, writers. why are we eating hobie's lunch).

marvel tried to relaunch him as the new hornet, but that didn't really take. the hornet still heavily resembles the classic prowler, still uses all the same powers and gadgets, and he's right back to being vaguely shady but sometimes on the right side of the fight. no one can tell the hornet apart from the prowler, so everyone will prefer aaron. so hobie seemed doomed to obscurity.

then spider-punk happened, which is phenomenal. being spider-punk answered that question of what would happen if hobie got to stay being spider-man, and created a fantastic payoff where hobie gets his own world where he's the protagonist... but he was a d-list hero from a very specific alternate world who had a suicidal urge written into his character to justify being killed off in a future spiderverse event. they did not intend for him to stick around.

... but thanks to atsv making him the breakout character, spider-punk is the main hobie everyone knows, which means that impression's going to stick. when you say "hobie brown," people think 'spider-punk' instead of 'prowler,' 'hornet,' or 'spider-man for one issue.' marvel won't get rid of that. spider-punk's going to be a mainstay of spiderverse events forever and if he's killed off he'll inevitably be brought back. he's safe.

spider-punk is set. hobie brown is not.

being a spider-person isn't very adaptable outside of that specific context. there are only so many spider-heroes that are going to land in your story, and punk occupies such a specific niche that it's just never gonna be him. he's too difficult to work into the story if it isn't a spiderverse one, and no writer will ever choose him over miles when creating a second spider man narrative.

so here's the conundrum: hobie brown is so entrenched within spider-man's supporting cast that he can only appear in spider-man stories. but he will never be the prowler again. he'll never be the second spider-man at all. he can only be spider-punk in special settings that don't come up often. the only way he can reliably stick around is as the hornet, but nobody cares about the hornet and the hornet is too easy to confuse with the prowler.

... but. people love hobie's punk aesthetic and personality, and that can easily be incorporated into any setting. so apply it to the hornet.

the hornet already needed a redesign so he can't be confused with the prowler anymore, so give him one that makes him look punk (... hornets sting. giving him some spikes makes sense). take the anticapitalist origins of hobie's prowler, infuse them with spider-punk's politics, and make that the hornet's new motivation. combine spider-punk's desire to do good with the prowler's tendency to act on short-sighted plans that hurt people because he wants direct results, and you have a very compelling antihero who can be as much of an ally as he is an obstacle depending on the situation. you even have the beginnings of a redemption arc if you want to make him an antivillain to start.

just don't give him spider-powers and there you go: he's spider-punk in all but name, which means you have a workaround to keep hobie's new personality intact while allowing him to participate in more spider-man stories again.

if marvel were smart, in future spider-person continuities that can't use spider-punk (which will be most of them), they should start introducing hobie brown as the hornet, an antihero with a punk aesthetic and philosophy who often butts heads with the hero and causes trouble pursuing his goals but generally is on the right side of things. god knows marvel loves a 'well-intentioned activist who Goes Too Far and becomes a villain.'

[mio-nika]

I was rewatching a Lindsay Ellis videos about movie adaptations of musicals and why they usually don't work. Diegetic and Non-Diegetic narratives.

And it organically started this line of thought about Legion and how hard is to recommend it. So I wrote a giant post.

Like, yes. It's a very lose adaptation of marvel comic. The forgotten spin-off of X-Men universe about a powerful but insane mutant. But, let's just say, it took me three seasons to understand that it was a marvel property. I'm quite slow and only when I heard the last name Xavier I started thinking that I heard it somewhere else. It works great as a stand alone story where some characters just has this paranormal abilities and government are kinda not having it. So I don't think that marvel fans would be very interested in watching. Daredevil is not a good show, but at least Daredevil has Daredevil in it (sorry for fans of dardevil, I also like whump but let's be real here).

And for other people... It's extremely weird show? When I was talking about it with my friends and acquaintances I usually compared it to Voices, a 2014 thriller/black comedy film staring Ryan Reynolds who kills women and talks with his cat. But I also don't think that it's a good comparison? Voices is a black comedy and even if it takes some of the parts of living with schizophrenia realistic it downplays it for comedic purposes.

Fuck. I should have started from explaining that Legion is. As I already wrote, Legion is a TV series loosely based on the series of marvel comics by the same name.

It starts with David, our main protagonist, who is living in a mental hospital, because he's a menace of society, hears voices and let's just say. A little unstable. In the course of the first episode he finds himself a GF and finds that the reason why he hears voices is not because he's sick, but because he's a powerful mutant, a telepath, who hears other people and gets tangled in their minds. And he's a god's child and saviour that that will defend mutants from oppressive politics of humans.

So it's a story about telepaths. And showing epic battles between telepaths are kinda hard? I mean, they can throw big blocks of concrete, cars, control other people minds but it's all are happening outside of their minds. To show things inside their heads, you need to go deeper, you need to be creative. And weird. The magical and terrifying world of human psyche.

In the exact first episode we are granted with a complicated choreographic scene of all of the mental patients in the clinic... How else would we understand that the main character is in love with a girl of his dreams?

And it's only the starting point. The show blurres the boundaries between reality and unreality, where every event is both real and theatrical because in the mind of the main character. It is.

And this is the problem. For example. I have a friend. And they told me, that they don't like musicals because it's hard to them to take seriously the moment where everyone just starts singing all of the sudden. And like. Valid. So let's imagine that the people in the show, not only start singing for no reason, they start a complex dance-off to show their mind power? And you don't even know if they're really dancing, or they just. Doing something else, that for the audience looks like a dance? Anyway, yeah, the second season starts with a dramatic dance-off between three powerful mutants and you just. Sitting there. And I refuse to tell you about rap battle. There was a rap battle. I'm an old wizard who lives in the shoe...

Every episode of Legion starts with a retelling of a previous one. And where all the other shows says "previously" Legion says "ostensibly". Ostensibly in Legion. Who knows that is happening? Not me.

So let's get back to the Voices. Why I'm so torn up when I'm comparing Legion to Voices. Because, well. I think that Legion tells a story about mental illness and it impact much more seriously. Yes, it's a quirky show, with dance and songs, but... "может ли бог быть сошедшим с ума?"

Have you ever watched "They Look Like People"? It's an indie horror film from 2014 about a guy who hears voice of God telling him about incoming apocalypse and alien monsters who are taking people's bodies. I don't like horror movies where mental illnesses is a main story point. They are usually tacky and mean. "This person is ill, so he's scary and dangerous!" And all that. But at the same time, illness is dangerous. Not only for people around sick person, but to the person themselves. Main character in They Look Like People is not evil, he's sick and he needs help. He's suffering much more than the suffering that he inflicts. But where the main character in They Look Like People has a way out, the Legion does not. So what will you do? What you could ever do, if you have an insane god in your hands who are untreatable. And even if he was, he would refuse help because of the years of medical abuse. Both he and people around him have no way out. No happy ending.

So. It's hard to recommend Legion. But I would ask you to try. It's a salad of beautiful horror hiding in colourful clothes of the fairy tale.

Милый, имя тебе легион...

[comic-panels]

Final Fantasy XVI Review

Spoiler warning For Final Fantasy XVI

and Asura’s Wrath I guess

Somewhere around 2/3rds of the way through Final Fantasy XVI Godzilla and Mothra do the fusion dance to defeat King Ghidorah and I am through the moon.

It’s the peak of the dumb spectacle that FF XVI delivers in its best moments, topping the previous large spectacle boss fight that was also a marvel of large scale blow your socks off nonsense. It’s also the emotional peak of the narrative where the emotional threads that the game actually cares about come together (It’s brothers all the way down).

They go to space!

It’s great.

After that Final Fantasy XVI basically fritters away everything it’s built up, squandering all its potential and my good will. But before I get to the deal breaker let’s talk about some other issues.

The early hours of Final Fantasy XVI spend a lot of time building up the world and political realities of the world. The game wants to present itself as a more adult Final Fantasy. This is a Final Fantasy that fucks and says fuck. There’s blood. Red blood. There’s politics, people in a room discuss a war. And a lot of air is spent on the magical slavery of this world. The early hours we see the tragedy of Clive’s life and how everything he had is taken away from him.

And then he gets like all of it back. Even his dog.

Clive is a pretty dumb protagonist. And I mean like head empty dumb. It takes hours in game for him to realize that it was him who turned into Ifrit and killed his brother. And then he has to come to terms with having killed his brother. And then it takes more hours for him to discover that his brother was never really dead after all.

I don’t have a problem with a head empty himbo protagonist, but it tries my patience a little to be following around this specific guy who’s never put two and two together explore and learn about the world of magical slavery and why it’s bad.

This is a game about Kaiju firing lasers at each other in space. There isn’t nuanced thoughtful commentary here. The game doesn’t have anything interesting to say about its magical slavery, or how to depict it, it just sucks a lot of the air out of the room. A lot of whinging, no meat.

All that early posturing, and setup in those early hours gives way to a game that isn’t really “mature” at all. It took some light seasoning from Game of Thrones but that’s it. After those initial scenes of Benedikta straddling Hugo in the hallway, or Anabella ready to go to town on Elwin’s dick while ranting about genetic purity, the game is actually really chaste and terrified of sex.  When it comes to Clive and Jill’s romance suddenly the game is unwilling to show anything. When they meet up as adult they just fall into being married like immediately, the game only willing to even give the player the classic almost-kiss-but-interrupted moment after hours of them together. Just falling face first into the Whores and Madonnas trope. My favorite example of this is when Clive goes to an actual brothel and the Madame flirts with Clive a little and there’s just zero chance that Clive would respond to this one iota. The only characters allowed to be really horny are explicitly evil and brutally killed. Only characters the game doesn’t think of as fucking are allowed to have the actually emotional conversations that can provide a feast for horny fan communities. Like Clive and Cid. Or Clive and Gav. Or Clive and Joshua. Clive and his brother spend more time lovingly starring into each other’s eyes than him and his wife do in this video game. And the one actually gay relationship is also reduced to tasteful kiss with the camera zoomed out. The game is too scared of actual romance and so the emotional moments of characters interacting and sharing feelings is left to the homosocial moments. The endgame sidequest that is basically Jill’s loyalty mission when at the end of it you get a pop-up saying Jill will now always stay in your party is about you and Joshua hanging out without her. And she doesn’t even come on the final mission!

But so it goes.

The game is at its best when it’s Kaiju firing lasers in space. Being afraid of cooties isn’t a deal breaker.

Neither does the fact that all the political intrigue hinted at early on comes to naught when it becomes clear that the video game is built around going to all the Mothercrystals on the map and blowing them up. You just go around and cut off the head of every major government one by one and none of their relationships with each other matter. Infuriatingly at the same time as you’re doing that you’re also going to a nearby town and befriending the most influential richest person there, who is your main ally in your quest to free slaves. To the point where in the last town you don’t know who your contact will be so the plan is to specifically find the richest, most influential person in town, because clearly that person will be against slavery. What are we doing here guys? Just a lot of time befriending the nice slave owners in this video game. There’s a late game sidequest that’s all about about finding your dad’s lost will where he says he was gonna free all his slaves after he died. Aw, see, he was a good one after all.

Can we get back to the Kaiju in space please.

It’s not just that the content of this part of the game is bad. It’s that it’s bad in the same way repeatedly, which sets up a bigger problem with the end of the game.

The game just doesn’t have enough surprises.

When Ifrit and Phoenix fuse together into one being, the emotional climax of their entire journey to stop their step-brother Bahamut, whose life has also been ruined by Anabella and is now enthralled to Ultima, I was surprised and delighted. That just never happened again for the rest of the game.

The only kinds of surprises were baffling disappointments, like Jill not coming on the final mission, or Ultima’s strongest form just being evil Ifrit-Phoenix, like this was a Marvel movie.

The thing I will point to that I think a lot of this stems from is that Ultima is fucking boring. His flat affect, his weird emotionless face and the fact that at the end of the day, he’s just another dumb guy.

There’s also the fact that being enthralled to Ultima also makes Barnabas/Odin suck.

In the early parts of the game there is some intrigue set up with Cid, Benedicta and Barnabas; how Cid abandoned his position at Barnabas’s side. We see Benedicta hates him for it and we get a taste of Cid’s  anger towards Barnabas.

But with Cid dead by the time Barnabas is really in the story there’s no emotion left there. He and Clive have no relationship. Ultima’s whole thing is about how people shouldn’t have will, they’re just a tool he created for his own needs. With Barnabas fully bought in on that, it means there’s no juice to this showdown. Barnabas is just a dumb guy who doesn’t believe in his own will.

There’s nothing there. There are hints of other things as you can tell at some point someone thought maybe there should be more to this. We get a cutscene with Barnabas naked as Ultima transforms into his mom also naked. But there’s no follow up to that. And then during the fight Barnabas, in masked Odin mode, goes full green goblin and becomes a different character briefly cackling like a madman, which is like just enough to make me go “you’re right video game, Barnabas should have had literally any personality this whole time.”

And this is where my enthusiasm for this game died. For one the game pads out getting you to the Barnabas fight, and it does so using a nasty trick it used before: to put you face to face with the boss fight, only to then pull you away so that you could meet face to face again, without any of the stakes of the game having changed. The game also does this with Titan, but at least there you got to cut off Hugo’s hands for your trouble. You fake fight Barnabas twice, with him kicking your ass in cutscenes and you undergoing no actual power ups before you really fight and defeat him.

The spectacle of this fight is a downgrade from the last big one, you barely even fight Odin in Eikon form. And there are no emotional stakes. Barnabas is King of a dead city. He doesn’t have an argument, his temptation of Clive is completely hollow.

I just need the characters to hate each other, or at least be emotionally involved with each other in some way. This is basic Shonen stuff here, and the game drops the ball completely. The storytelling and plotting have sucked everything dry. Early on all Odin had to do was stand on a hill and be huge, and my heart swelled.

He’s a giant dude on a giant horse, and all the fun of that has been slowly, repeatedly and thoroughly stamped out.

At this point I’m mad.

You never even confront the blight itself omg, how do you fuck that up, I’m so mad. Ultima is just some guy running from it. Cid’s whole theory was wrong but it never even mattered. We’re just here to punch God and end the video game. Nothing matters.

I love the video game Asura’s Wrath. That is spectacle action done correctly even though the playing of the video game is kinda whatever. The end of that game is Asura angrily punching God for making his daughter cry. It’s not complicated. But it’s worlds more engaging to me than the end of Final Fantasy XVI, which vaguely just copies that ending beat for beat without any of the verve that makes Asura’s Wrath sing.

It feels kinda dumb to say after mentioning Asura’s Wrath, but the combat here kinda ran out of steam over the length of the game. It starts really fun and the first few Ikon unlocks really keep making it better, but then you kinda hit a wall. Too many of the abilities feel similar to others, and there’s no fun new moevement getting added to your kit. And then the really late game Eikons just gave me abilities that had lengthy animations attached, so it really was like an older Final Fantasy where I’m sitting there watching an unskippable cutscene in the middle of battle. The game went from dodging and parrying to comboing abilities to maximize stagger amount to firing Kamehamehas over and over. And like, that last one is cool, but less engaging when you’re just doing that over and over for like the last 10 hours or whatever. That’s an exaggeration, but for the final boss, he was so mobile that I basically couldn’t do my setup combos on him and just had to wait for the cooldown on my lengthy laser beam spell.

Final Fantasy XVI wishes it were as good as Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4.

I was having a good time for most of the way through Final Fantasy XVI. I had my nitpicks with the story and structure, but the highs were very high. The Bahamut fight is truly incredible. I was very happy. But the back end of the game was frankly just pretty boring overall, which burned away a lot of my goodwill and makes me less forgiving of the game’s other problems.

There’s like one moment late in the game where your whole crew crashes your death march to kill the Night King beyond The Wall and you are all finally together to confront evil and I saw a glimpse of a better world where you just got to hang with your party and use the power of friendship to save the world together.

But like that the dream was gone.

Instead the game ends with a world where people use flint to make fire instead of expending people’s life force.

So I dunno. 7/10. 7.5? It coulda been a 10. The Devs should have watched less Game of Thrones and more Kamen Rider. It would have served the game they were capable of making better.

[amazing-spiderling]

for the least favorite ask game: episode of DD? matt murdock fanon headcanon or joke? marvel movie or show? fic trope? book you had to read at school as a kid ? place you went to for fun (doesn't have to be a whole vacation destination)? meal you've had multiple times but cant say no to because its what was being served?

Least Favorite:

episode of DD?

Probably "Semper Fidelis" from season 2. I think this is one of those episodes that is just rife with all the things that made that season not work for me. The Punisher trial could have been so interesting and it gets kneecapped because Elektra is impatient. Matt makes bad decisions for no real reason and his and Elektra's stuff is treated like it's SO time sensitive, but it's really not, it's just there to throw a wrench in the works. It sticks out like a sore thumb, and I just hate when I'm watching a show and I'm yelling, "Get back to the GOOD part!"

matt murdock fanon headcanon or joke?

If I never have to hear the "What to Daredevil and Scarlet Witch have in common" joke again, that would be great. Thanks. I'll be minding my own beeswax on instagram and then a random Turkish comic meme blog will show up in my feed and I can't read the language but I *KNOW* what it says and it wasn't even that funny the first time, guys. Let it go.

marvel movie or show?

Eternals was pretty darn boring for all the people in it that I wanted to like. I got a kick out of the Bollywood bit and then... the rest just didn't hold up to even its own internal logic. It's pretty bad when the fanbase is *begging* for the movie to be quietly erased from canon.

fic trope?

Probably "Dark!" versions of characters. I realize this sounds counterintuitive, given my love of Murderdock, but I think when I've given these fics a chance, they just tend to be, "Hey if your blorbo killed 10 guys with a rock and then kissed his love interest would that be fucked up or what" and there's not a lot of... *there* there. Or else they tend to read like someone is trying to convince me how dark and edgy they are and it's just... too difficult for me to get emotionally invested. Sorry, gang. I'm a hypocrite.

book you had to read at school as a kid?

The Witch of Blackbird Pond. I was assigned this book two years in a row and was bored to tears both times. I still have no clue what it was about because I could not focus on anything, I just remember being annoyed by the protagonist. I just tried to look up a summary and my brain still rejected it. :/

place you went to for fun (doesn't have to be a whole vacation destination)?

I'm just really not a beach person. I've been to Miami and stuff and I'm like. Yep. There's water next to some sand. Can we go home now? (I prefer the atmosphere of rocky beaches. There is Alaska in my bones.)

meal you've had multiple times but cant say no to because its what was being served?

My dad was one of like 11 kids, which meant I had a lot of aunts and uncles and countless cousins and for *years* the Thanksgiving tradition was to drive two hours to my grandmother's house where dozens of people would collect for a potluck. Being a dorky sci-fi and comic book reading nerd in a family of football enthusiasts aside, this meant that Thanksgiving dinner tended to be giant aluminum pans of dry turkey, gravy with mysterious bits one person in the family liked and overdone brown-and-serve rolls. It was often the worst meal of the year for me. Eventually when I was in high school, my older sisters decided enough was enough and we had Thanksgiving at home and it turns out, I actually like turkey when it wasn't cooked 10 hours before I get to eat it.