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mysticdragon3md3 · 3 years ago

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Ranma ½ is GENIUS. Here’s Why by Bonsai Pop

The thing I really appreciated about Ranma ½ when I was younger, was that it was a discussion about gender without getting sidetracked by sex, the way most “sex comedies” did, especially at the time. At the time, publishers tried to market Ranma ½ as a “sex comedy” in the vein of raunchy college-setting Hollywood movies or fanservicy Male Gaze series (compare “Futaba-kun Change” or the proceeding “harem genre” that Ranma ½ started). But Ranma ½ felt more like a discussion about gender more than sex, or even more than sexuality. And being an AroAce kid, who didn’t know what AroAce was at the time, but was very confused about my gender, I really appreciated Ranma ½’s focus on gender over sex, fanservice, and heterosexuals navigating (sexual) relationships—which, I *cannot* express enough, was the saturated majority of all anime/manga, that even came close to discussing gender, at the time. I just wanted a discussion about gender, gender roles, complaining about presumed traditional ideas about gender, and how to define one’s own gender despite society’s pressures about gender. I wanted a discussion about Strength, that the martial arts genre did so often, without an advocation for sexist ideals, toxic masculinity, stereotypes about “feminine” being weaker (even as warriors), fixated only on romance, or any number of female stereotypes, etc. I feel like I can’t remind people enough of how it was back then, when not only were these toxic mysoginist ideas portrayed frequently, but they were also portrayed as good, true, “right”, or unquestioned. At least when Ranma Saotome was being a sexist jerk, he was punished for that terrible thinking or eventually had to reconcile with his dissonance. And Akane Tendo was revolutionary at that time too. It used to be that on the Shonen genre side, we had only hyper fem, passive, romance-fixated, love interests, OR nagging, cold female characters that really felt like the author was conveying all their horrible views on women in general, OR sexy eye-candy that had close-ups on their boobs or butt so frequently, that it completely made their lack of focus on romance or anything else in their personalities, secondary. Then on the Shoujo genre side, we had girls who were fixated on nothing but romance, constantly jealous and possessive—and often over guys who hadn’t even proven themselves worthwhile to pursue romantically. Let’s face it: A lot of Shoujo leading men were often jerks, treated their female love interests badly, and for some reason, she was just supposed to play the devoted “Lady Murasaki” and be totally “in love” with him. Whyyyyyyyyyy????????????? Even worse on the Shonen genre side too, because he treats her badly, it doesn’t get portrayed as bad treatment, he doesn’t understand why she’s angry, so she just looks like a volatile nag all the time, often existing only to be objectified or serve as a flimsy motive for his character arcs and actions. It was a pretty bad time. Not that now has eliminated those problems, but when Ranma ½ and Akane Tendo seem like the shining lights of something different, maybe then you can understand how much I sorely needed Ranma ½ and Akane Tendo at that time.

Really surprised that this video essay didn’t mention Jackie Chan. The thing that differentiated Ranma ½ from so many martial arts battle anime/manga at the time, was that Ranma ½’s style of martial arts was inspired by Jackie Chan. Meanwhile, all the other Shonen martial arts manga/anime were so serious and based more on “cool”, “action” genre toned martial arts movies.

I’m intrigued by this video essay’s idea that Ranma ½ the series isn’t sexist, but rather, characters within the series are sexist, and are so in order to make a point about how them being like that is messed up. I need to grapple with this because one of my problems in looking back at Ranma ½ is that it can be a little transphobic and/or homophobic at times. Like, I’ll never forget when Tsubasa Kurenai was introduced and, Akane, this character that we’re supposed to completely sympathize with during this series, just keeps screaming in Tsubasa’s face that they are a “pervert”, simply because it’s revealed that Tsubasa identifies as a boy but dresses as a girl. I think the episode just ended like that, and that was supposed to be a joke, but I don’t know whether the reveal’s shock intended on the audience was supposed to be conveyed through Akane and we were expected to have the same reactions as her, or if we were supposed to be shocked at Akane’s reactions and her reactions being ridiculous were the joke. I dunno; it was a long time ago, I don’t remember much context, and I really should look it back up. But frankly, there’s a lot of Ranma ½ to sift through and that’s more time than I have, writing this post. Akane does seem to repeatedly have instances of being perfectly nice to characters, but when she discovers they’re actually guys, she spends a lot of time yelling “pervert” in their faces. Sometimes I don’t know if we’re meant to see how ridiculous Akane is being or if we’re meant to agree with her. Again, I watched/read the series a long time ago, and maybe if I re-watched/re-read it now, it would be clear to older me. Because, when it happens between Akane and Ranma, Ranma has a specific line, grummbling about how Akane was perfectly nice to him, up until she found out he was actually a boy. And Ranma was a bit nice in his characterization up until that early line of dialogue, so maybe we were supposed to be on his side in that thought. So maybe Akane spending the rest of the series yelling “pervert” at Ranma (repeated so often it’s essentially their running gag), is supposed to be a joke laughing at how irrational Akane is being. o.o? I’d hate to think we’re supposed to be on Akane’s side, repeatedly calling Ranma a “pervert” over a curse that he had no control over getting, and early on was portrayed as a misfortune that the audience was supposed to sympathize and pity him over. Maybe the whole thing is supposed to point out Akane’s flaws, since everyone in the series is pretty messed up. (Even Kasumi unsettled me a bit when I was younger, in that she dropped her entire life, to replace her mother’s role when she died. For me, being a young girl who didn’t buy into those traditional female roles, that were still at the time, strongly pushed onto girls in society, that was a little unsettling. Still love Kasumi as a person though.) Akane did have reason to “hate boys”, as the series specifically states early on, but I’d like to think that she was given this flaw as a point to grow away from. Just as this video essay calls to attention Ranma being sexist and, over the series, eventually growing out of it. But back when I was young and initially into Ranma ½, I feared that some of these sexist or even homophobic ideas in Ranma ½ were actually reflective of thoughts that Rumiko Takahashi advocated. After all, there’s a point in Maison Ikkoku where Kyoko berates herself by saying all women are fools. Maybe I was too young to see the nuance in a character berating her own mistakes in her love live, vs the implication that all women are “properly” stereotyped into being obsessed with love and end up acting foolish for it. Nowadays, I can see how we can berate ourselves whenever our specific actions can slot us into generalized stereotypes, and we curse ourselves for falling into proving stereotypes true on occaision. But back then, when I was younger and watching Ranma ½ for the first time and reading Maison Ikkoku for the first time, I was afraid that such lines were reflective of Takahashi believing such stereotypes as truth. Which is why I was so happy when sometime after Ranma ½, Inuyasha had a canonically gay character, and instead of Inuyasha calling him a pervert the entire time, he just got exasperated with his non-stop flirting, the way that all the female characters from Ranma ½ are tired of guys who won’t take “no” for an answer. At the time, I thought, “Yay! Takahashi has evolved to a less homophobic stance!” But maybe, all this time, she was always against such things, and merely portraying them, even through characters we were supposed to sympathize with, merely to show how messed up such ideas are. I really like that thought which this video essay presented.

But I will disagree with this video essay on 1 thing: The manga is better. I’m not trying to be elitist. I realize that comedy has a very subjective sensibilities, and the anime leans into awkward silence type comedy, whereas I am sick of that type of comedy. But so many visual gags and jokes in the manga, and Rumiko Takahashi’s style in general, involve panels that are almost completely re-drawn, with only 1 element changed—the gag element—suggesting that the eye is supposed to read from panel to panel quickly (since the human eyes/brain filters out a lack of change, and is hard-wired to focus on changes from previous conditions). To me, this suggests quick punchlines, whose sudden oddity is supposed to shock, implying an intended fast pacing to the jokes. And yeah, Takahashi will draw seemingly normal scenes, detailed with all the normalcies of a commonly recognizable environment, then suddenly the next panel is exactly the same except a character is contorted into a silly pose or an absolutely ridiculous creature with an intentionally nonsensical facial expression has suddenly appeared, amid that completely “normal” scene, with all its “normal” details _redrawn_. It’s why the “evil oni” episode in Ranma ½ had a ridiculous face, despite its supposedly ominous background. In fact, anywhere Takahashi can fit a gag face, especially if it contradicts the surrounding scene’s/story’s serious tone, she will do it. She has even said in interviews that if scenes are too serious, she will try to put in a gag in the corner. I remember reading Maison Ikkoku during a depressive episode (for both me and Godai) and suddenly Yotsuya had poked his head through a hole in the wall, into the scene, shining a flashlight onto his own face, like a kid telling a ghost story, all while he made funny faces and Takahashi’s typical gag with the sign language “I love you” gesture. The woman cannot let things stay serious (except for Mermaid Saga, parts of Inuyasha, and some short stories), and I love her for it! ^o^ But the way she suddenly injects ridiculousness into scenes and character designs, suggest, at least to me, an intended fast paced delivery with the jokes. That sudden shock when you notice Yotsuya making faces in the corner of a depressing scene. That sudden shock, when Ranma is hiding from his mother, and is clinging to the ceiling or futons like Spiderman, and Akane is just supposed to act natural so Ranma’s mom won’t notice where he’s hiding. To me, this suggests the punchline is supposed to come at you like a sudden punch, unlike awkwardness that hangs in the air. So when the anime tries to make the joke linger, I just don’t enjoy it as much as when my brain can dictate the faster pacing I want (and believe better fits) while reading the Ranma ½ manga.

Also, the manga is better because those manga filler episodes were not as well written as the manga. Rumiko Takahashi is a master of short stories. And that shows when you run into the less-effective filler anime episodes–even when you don’t know they’re filler episodes! I remember watching the Ranma ½ anime before reading the manga, before there was even internet lists of which were the filler episodes, and coincidentally, all the filler episodes did not make me laugh out loud, whereas every episode up until that point, had made me uncontrollably laugh. I feel like the anime thought that because Ranma ½ was an episodic, very silly series, they could just insert anything and it would fit. But clearly, only the manga-based episodes—and even individual scenes!—had the nuance of Takahashi’s writing and pacing, to make even an episodic, ridiculous series work.

Also, I love how this video essay just lavishes the love on Rumiko Takahashi. ^o^

Another thing this video essay pointed out that I appreciate about Ranma ½ is how indifferent Ranma is to all the advances of his suitors or even accidental fanservice. All the consequential “harem genre” series that tried to emulate Ranma ½ always seemed to include male protagonists who were surrogates for the audiences’ intended horny reactions. But Ranma was neither turned on, enticed, nor tantalized by even accidental fanservice falling into his lap. (As Mother’s Basement has noted, harem genre protagonist have a penchant for accidentally falling and grabbing a girls’ boobs, or their face falling into her boobs, or accidentally put into a position to forcibly see up her skirt, etc.) If anything, he’s more embarassed that he accidentally walked in on girls in undress, rather than enjoying the view OR reacting so long, that the scene drags on, fixating on the accidental nudity/groping/fanserivce. And I was about to postulate that maybe because most harem genre and fanservice series are usually made by straight men for an audience with a Male Gaze. But Takahashi wrote Maison Ikkoku’s Godai, right before she created Ranma ½, and he very much enjoyed the view, took peeks, and fixated on any accidental fanservice. So it’s actually Ranma himself who had reactions and a perspective that were very agreeable to this asexual.

I hadn’t noticed before this video essay said it, but Happosai really is condemned much more for being the “pervy old man” archetype, whereas other series are very permissive towards that same archetype, even when they’re being sexual predators. I’d like to attribute this to Takahashi bringing a woman’s perspective, but Sailormoon was also written by a woman and (if I remember correctly) Rei’s grandpa’s pervy ways were reprimanded in only 1 episode then permitted as a running gag in the rest of the series (thankfully, not often). Then again, lots of the Shoujo genre also advocated for many toxic traditional ideas about gender (like girls picking romantic partners who don’t respect them, and girls being fully devoted/invested in such guys, because they “once” meet the bare minimum for human decency by being nice to them once). So maybe it was uniquely Takahashi’s prerogative to not let the “pervy old man” archetype slide as supposedly “endearing” silliness.

#ranma 1/2 #ranma1half #rumiko takahashi #video essay #analysis #gender #manga #anime #nostalgia #old otaku #martial arts genre #shonen genre #reactions #reminicing

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welcome-home-official · 3 years ago

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why do you even like him?

^ The short answer.

The more nuanced answer: I'm someone who likes truly horrible, awful characters with no redeeming qualities. I don't condone any of their actions, but there is something fascinating about the way they're written, they're like an exercise in how good a creator is at writing terrible characters.

A big thing with Fenrir's appeal is that aside from his 'activism' that frankly probably set werewolf rights back by decades in the Potterverse, is the fact we know very little about him. He doesn't even have a lot of scenes in the books (and forget about the movies, they shafted him completely) BUT when he IS present on-page, he leaves one hell of an impact on people. He was that horrible in LESS than a paragraph, or maybe not even five sentences that he had people who hate/heavily dislike Dumbledore agree with Dumbledore for once.

As someone who wanted to be a criminal psychologist + someone with terrible family issues, Greyback serves as a great vessel for venting those. His daughter, Twig, may love him dearly, but during her years at Hogwarts she starts seeing him for what he truly is. I never intend to romanticize or condone Greyback's actions. I give him *some* humanity, because if there's one thing that pisses me off in fiction its that abusive monsters are always one dimensional when in reality, they're nuanced. It's actually part of the reason why nobody took my childhood abuse seriously because "_____ goes to church and she helps out people, she's so sweet-" among other things. When I am not drawing Fenrir with his daughter (who by the way, is going to grow up to loathe him) any other 'silly' thing I do with him, such as the latest post with him in one of my outfits, is simply for fun. I like to torment him a fair bit, actually.

There really is no simple answer as to why I like Greyback as a character, but that's exactly that: as a character. There's a multitude of reasons why, and he's not the only HP character I like, he just so happens to be the one I'm fixating on most because there's so little content of him, let alone content that I enjoy and vibe with. You may have also seen Snape art floating around too on my page, he's another one who I fixate on just as much, as he's more or less the secondary character in Twig's story (seeing as he's filling in where Greyback failed as a father in teaching Twig independence)

Altogether, I don't really think people SHOULD have to justify why they like a character. I respect that you don't like him, but please just blacklist the tag or unfollow me/block me if you don't like that I draw him, and please do not tell me what not to draw.

#Harry potter #fenrir greyback

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cryptocism · 5 years ago

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So since pretty much everyone agrees that Tim needs a name change, and I think most people dislike the first two RR costumes (I dislike the pretty much Robin one too, because it seems like he hasn’t accept losing Robin, when I feel a lot of his comics right after Bruce W died was about that?) which leads me to: What do you think Tim’s costume would look like if he got a good outfit, and what name?

o yeah i was not a fan of the cowl. and the n52 design is just… so busy and excessively accessorised (excessorised???) - i drew it a couple times for this project im workin on and the whole process was me squinting at reference panels and whispering softly but passionately “what the fuck” - and i agree on the rebirth RR design, it looks more derivative of dick and jasons retconned robin costumes than inspired by tims og 80s design (however. the unternet costume - its simple and appealing and clearly nightwing-inspired and i am a fan, also the giant scythe/halberd/mace thing was so ridiculous i loved it)

which is why i thank pat gleason for my life bc tims new outfit is such a good modernisation of his original robin design. so i mean to answer ur question i think tim has a p good design right now (although not for long i guess since they announced hed get a new look/codename soon) BUT if i were in charge of debuting a new design and name… hm……….

whatever his new name is, it’d preferably have something to do with wherever his personal storyline is headed, which i dont know, and for all my complaining abt how red robin is a shit name i dont actually have great alternatives lol. i did see somewhere the suggestion for the name “Cardinal” which i dont hate, so ill use that as a placeholder for now (although “Halcyon” is an interesting option)

tangentially, my personal preference for his robin graduation would be a miniseries featuring tim and damian both as robin, begrudgingly having to work together to fight some greater enemy and becoming true brothers along the way. ending with tim giving damian his blessing to be robin (a post-mantle blessing but still) with the first amicable passing on of the robin title literally ever

as for Look: his new design should a) accurately reflect his character b) mesh well with whatever tone his personal storyline is going for c) be a natural progression of gleasons newest iteration while still d) able to stand as its own iconic look

i always thought tim would do really well in a more grounded noir-style detective story, both using and especially subverting the tropes of the genre (for instance tim befriends every femme fatale and romances absolutely zero of them. theyre pals and have weekly movie nights or smthn) obvs using some of the mystery elements to springboard into classic comic wild times etc etc. theres also a great opportunity to include some more cyberpunk aesthetics to the look and feel ofthe story

i.e. tim is part of the waynetech r&d teams, working with them to develop new technologies, and proceeding to test out some of the prototypes while doing vigilante work (bc terry had to get his rocket boots from somewhere ok). gotham is still gotham, but its starting to see some of that neo-futuristic/blade runner flavour from batman beyond.

so. cyberpunk detective story starring cha boy tim drake. im not gonna draw it rn but lemme just gather some ref elements here in case i ever do

first off - motorcycle, obviously. redbird is back babey and this time its a two-wheeler. all his gear would be modded the hell out of, but the motorcycle itself would be an approximate balance of 70% ducati and 30% tron lightcycle situation. a speedy bike with ample room for the edgy overkill batfam aesthetic, with maybe a little akira in there who knows

same goes for helmet; 70/30 on this modern/cyberpunk situation. heres a quickly photoshopped “cardinal” helmet lol

although theres totally room for some daft-punk leds in there. serving as a heads up display AND a fun neon aesthetic. I really want to play into that John Wick neo-noir situation.

besides that… ive got a preference for street style over the superhero spandex, so… detective jacket. every detective has a good jacket. norm breyfogle made a comment on his early tim robin designs that itd be pretty either/or on jacket vs cape, merging the two looked a little silly. for robin they probably decided on cape to keep things classic, but for cardinal i can do what i want

and i want to bring back some of this popped collar.

which i basically did for that other tim design i drew, which i still like, so this one would probably be at least a lil borrowed from that.

attempting to merge cape/jacket might end up smthn like these:

which admittedly i like.

admittedly… i do also like the concept of wings introduced in tims n52 design, i just think they couldve been hidden/incorporated better

greig rapson had a sweet robin design that had a sort of flight-suit (which dove into the actual mechanics??? i love) and since id want to dive into tim testing out waynetech prototypes, its a pretty good natural progression from him to terrys glider thing

the whole ensemble would be fairly understated however - enough to semi blend in with any crowd, hero or civilian. after all the story focus would be just as much about solving the mystery as it is punching the bad guy

the various interchangeable gadgets would be both prototypes of terrys eventual batsuit, and also all the failed prototypes that never managed to get off the ground. just to add an element of tension/plot devices wherein tims gear could break or malfunction pretty much anytime.

im fixated on this rocket boot situation though so itd be a paired down version of terrys eventual seamless/invisible design. still noticable and clunky, but working with the sleek modernish style outlined by gleason

smthn almost similar to the prowler actually from spiderverse - as in: Clearly Rocketboots, and clearly diy’d the shit out of, but still working with that Aesthetic

(most of the screencaps of prowler are dark af so im taking this from jesus alonso iglesias concept art)

im debating on the addition of more overtly birdlike/cyberpunk elements, so ill add this here cause its dope as fuck (from ahmet atil akar).

and a lot of batclan capes tend to end with that concave spiked look, which works great for bats but not really for birds. a tailcoat might emulate the bird tail, but it also might evoke Penguin a lil too much idk.

also in the interest of keeping everything within the same sort of design language, i would Love to see some new villains emulating deconstructionist/architectural kawakubo fashion:

like could you imagine the supervillain potential

so uhhh yeah. budding cyberpunk detective story with a little noir and a little technological advancement progressing in fits and starts. taking from the gleason foundation with heavy black featuring brighter coloured accents and modern sleekness, made a little dorky via prototype technology, with some extra neon blade runner shit thrown in there.

depending on how much i love or hate the new codename/design reveal i might draw this via inspired motivation or spiteful motivation lol

#asks #tim drake #tim redesign ref #tim scarlet redesign

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michiigii-writes · 4 years ago

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Of Shadows and Tyr (1.5/??)

A continuation of our DnD campaign’s first session right here. Because there is a limit to text on text posts. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In the beginning: There was a city (2/2)

We spent about a week living in the Church of Tyr. Elyssia provided us with a constant stream of free food, and it was a safe, dry place to stay. Craven and Valzan were also always around, but I spent the most of my time with the Tiefling girl.

She never spoke. I was pretty sure she could understand common, from the way that she listened to the rest of us speak, but the most she ever said was during that first fight with the slavers. I wondered if she knew how to write or draw, but she tended to keep herself otherwise occupied, so I never got much of a chance to ask.

She had scars all over her arm and neck, like she had been shackled for a long time and the bonds had chafed. I tried touching her to cure her wounds, the first evening at the church. She looked so small and guarded, and had clearly had a rough life; I was worried that there was some kind of wound that she was keeping to herself.

I was promptly bitten for my efforts.

I had hoped that clearly being an ally would have warmed me up to her even a little, but she definitely did not like to be touched ever. I drew back with a grimace.

“I’m only trying to help you,” I grumbled, keeping my low but feeling annoyance bubble into my tone.

For a reply, she bared her teeth at me in warning. I frowned, then recalled a different spell that might work.

[May you find sweet grass and gentle water,] I murmured, sending healing words her way.

The spell wasn’t as strong as if I had touched her, but I saw her sit up a bit straighter in shock as she felt the healing take effect. I couldn’t see or feel if what I had done was enough, but seeing her surprised yet calm was enough to satisfy my efforts. At the very least, she was well, and I had to be content with that.

For the rest of the week, she remained in my sights, not necessarily beside me, but always nearby. I’m not sure who thought of her name first. It might of been me, joking referring to her as “my shadow” whenever I spoke about her. It might have been Elyssia, nodding to how the young Tiefling always managed to find the darkest, most secret corners of a room.

It was definitely not Craven. The giant somehow found out that she liked all things that glittered in the light, and from then on, he called her, “Shiny.”

But by the time our company decided to go out and explore Kendrith as a group, we had somehow all elected to refer to call her, “Shadow.” And she seemed to like it just fine.

Craven and Valzan had a few errands they wanted to run, before investigating about the slavers we had come across. I heard mention of “books,” so I wanted to go, and wherever I went, Shadow tended to follow.

It was another bright day; I found the weather rather pleasant in comparison to the humid, warm days we had in the swamp. Shadow walked to and fro behind us, while Valzan and Craven walked ahead. As usual, I kept my distance from Valzan, but I had to admit he was growing on me. He treated Shadow and I with the same courtesy he paid Craven. I still kept my horns tucked away in his presence, whipping my hood up when he approached, but more than once, I had accidentally let my tail peek out while talking to him. I was getting comfortable around the human, and that troubled me, a little. Was Valzan the exception, or had it been the humans in my past?

Time and experience would have to tell. Maybe there was a reason Master didn’t want me to return until a good year had passed.

Not too far from the church, Shadow ended up distracted by sparkling glass shards by the side of the road. Tail swishing back and forth under the cloak that Elyssia had provided her, she crouched low and fixated on the twinkling remains of what might have been a bottle.

Our party ended up right within reach of a nearby game stall. There were targets set up, and according to the hawker, if we hit a bulls-eye with a throwing axe, we would get a voucher for a free drink at a local tavern.

I heard “free.” Considering I had about two silver pieces to my name, that was enough to get my attention.

I waited for Valzan and Craven to play, first. Craven managed to snag three free drinks! I was impressed, but not too surprised; the Kalashtar barbarian was huge.

I was, however, surprised when he gave his prizes to Valzan. Who turned down something that was free? And Craven didn’t seem particularly wealthy, to me.

When it came to my turn, I did my best, but I clearly had never used a throwing axe, before. I could hit the targets, but not well enough to win anything. For my last throw, I could see that it was about to fall just a little too low. Wanting that stupid coupon, I drew on my Druidcraft and encouraged a light puff of wind to boost the axe up, a little.

I was too encouraging. The axe ended up blown too high above the target.

"You better not be trying to pull any funny business,” the stall-keeper said suspiciously, looking between the target and I.

Feeling cornered, I forced a laugh.

“Well, if I were going to cheat, you would think I’d be more successful,” I joked, mentally kicking myself for being so eager about a free drink.

The stall-keeper seemed to agree, but I don’t think he completely bought it. He offered me another try, but I declined; only the first round was free, and it would probably be cheaper to just buy myself my own drink. Valzan asked the man where we could get information, and he was told that a woman who worked at the tavern where our coupons applied might help us. Convenient, but good enough for me!

Our next stop was to the library. I’d never seen so many books in one place, before; I had thought Master had a grand collection, but even all of his tomes would barely take up a shelf. I was also relieved to see that the librarian was half orc(?). I hoped humans like Valzan were the rule and not the exception, but I really didn’t want to test it in the library.

Craven walked off in search of books on plagues and blights, of all things. I opted for herbs. I was only familiar with swampy things, and it would be nice to see what could be used for healing or poison from local flora. Shadow followed suit, even finding me a couple books with some excellent diagrams. Nothing with words, though...I was becoming more certain that she didn’t know how to read or write. I considered teaching her for a moment, before throwing the idea away. I wasn’t patient enough to teach, and if she wanted to learn, she was clearly determined enough that she would have made some signs of it.

Still, I wanted her to have something to take from the library. The books were free. Everyone should take advantage of free. I knew she liked shiny things, and Valzan had recently given her a brass bell that she liked, but I asked her what kind of books she wanted. However, she either didn’t hear or didn’t have time to answer, because Craven took that moment to materialize.

He wanted to know if I knew anything about creeping blights; according to him, the land of his home was slowly dying by some unknown evil. He said he realized that I was in-tune with nature, and knew about growing things, so he felt that I was his key, or destined to meet him, or something?

He got a bit fuzzy, after that, turning red and tripping over his words. I thought he was being silly, in an endearing sort of way, and couldn’t help but smile a little. Shadow, on the other hand, seemed irritated with him, hissing her displeasure. That seemed to cool Craven off, and rather than let me really respond in any way, the giant lumbered off, muttering to himself as he was wont to do.

I looked at Shadow, and saw that she looked ready to leave the library. I grabbed a book on healing herbs, and one on poisons, and when the librarian said I could take a third, and snagged a book with a lot of rather beautifully illustrated gemstones. With my hand, the librarian set some kind of enchantment that would return the books automatically, once a week was up. I liked it; that would prevent me from accidentally paying late fees, and I wouldn’t need to worry about losing the books.

When we left the library, I handed the book on gems to Shadow. I had meant well, but from the way she looked at me, she was very clearly offended that I thought she would enjoy a children’s book.

“She’s probably older than she looks,” Valzan pointed out.

I rolled my eyes and tried not to groan, while Shadow moved to the side of the group furthest from me. It’s not like she mentioned what she did want to check out! How was I supposed to know!?

I clearly wasn’t doing a good job getting on Shadow’s good side.

And, to add insult to injury, she excepted a shiny marble from Valzan.

“How is that not condescending?!” I exclaimed, while Shadow contentedly added the bauble to a pocket of what I was certain contained a growing collection of shiny things.

Instead of answering, Valzan shrugged dismissively. The desire to grab a less shiny rock and throw it at his head occurred to me, but instead, we continued to our second stop: A pet store.

Craven was under the impression that he could find a bear for a pet. The shopkeeper was surprised, most likely because that seemed more like an exotic/black market kind of pet. However, when he offered up hedgehogs as an adequate alternative, I was on Craven’s side: bears are to hedgehogs as falcons are to finches. They are not equal.

Naturally, Craven got even more upset when the shopkeeper suggested a squirrel, instead.

To use as bait.

None of us were pleased! Craven began roaring about what a terrible person the shopkeeper was, and I’m pretty sure when Shadow called him a squirrel murderer, his nose started bleeding. Valzan ushered us out, but when Craven suggested we return after dark to Free the Enslaved, I readily agreed. I wanted to Speak to the animals, to see if they were all in danger or just the squirrels, but there wasn’t enough time; already, we were out the door.

It didn’t take us long to reach the top of the hill, finding the tavern where we could redeem Craven’s vouchers was situated. A creaky sign with the words “Scout’s Mug Bar and Inn” hung over the doorway that we entered, Craven stooping slightly to fit through. I braced myself for noise, but it was early enough in the day that there weren’t too many patrons.

Shadow moved straight to a table in a secluded corner, dark but safe; I and the rest followed suit. Craven, of course, immediately ordered every dessert on the menu. I tried not to let my eyes pop out of my head as plate after plate of confection and pastry were brought by the waitress and placed before him. I was about to ask how he could possibly eat all of those desserts by himself, when I saw him push all the plates to Shadow.

...Of course they weren’t just for himself. I made a note to myself to be a little less snide toward Craven.

Eyeing all the desserts, I surreptitiously slid what looked like a slice of apple pie towards myself. Shadow didn’t seem to notice. And while she did have a good appetite, I doubted she could finish everything. Besides, the pie was warm and smelled heavenly. I never got to eat anything like this, in the swamp.

Valzan, ever dutiful, was already in the process of asking for Mildred, the woman who would most likely have information for us. By some stroke of luck, our waitress was Mildred.

Things were coming together smoothly! Perhaps things would be simple from now on, I thought.

Suddenly, a bang came at the bar’s entrance; someone had slammed open the door. A dishevelled man rushed in, eyes wild, hands wringing in worry.

...of course it wouldn’t be that easy, I sighed inwardly.

“My daughter! They took my daughter!” he exclaimed.

I sat up straight, head whipping around to look at the man in surprise. His daughter? Taken? That was awful! The very idea made me sick.

And yet, for some unfathomable reason, all the patrons of the bar started laughing at the man.

What on earth is going on?

---tbc--

Continuation here!

#Of Shadows and Tyr #dnd campaign #dnd #Strive not Charity

4 notes · View notes

vaingloriosa · 5 years ago

Text

love brought weight

Summary: When war against alien beings took the love of your life away from you, you cross time and space to find him again.

Word count: 5.5k

Characters: Quentin Beck x female!reader (though I do not use any descriptions or explicitly call the reader a “woman”, i do use the word “wife” to often describe the reader)

Warnings: major character death, angst, pining, cross-dimensional love, more anguish, slight “far from home” spoilers

Author’s note: my first quentin fic and i got a little carried away with this story? VALID! so, the gist of the universe i created is that alternative timelines can cross to different timelines. think back to the ending of endgame and those portals and how scott describes quantum realm physics...but this is on a much grander scale. it’s an occurrence that is readily accepted so it isn’t “freaky” but rather sorta normalized to see alternates crossing the timeline. hope i didn’t lose y’all jsjskaljskal. forewarning though: i did write some of this story while on a lot of ibuprofen...i get absolutely silly whenever i’m on that. i also made quentin bisexual because Rights. gif made by me :)

Quentin isn’t sure why he continues to twiddle with the gold band around his ring finger while he’s not performing in front of an audience.

After every debriefing, he takes a bow as the curtain draws before him, the spotlight diminishing from his view, he can’t help but reach for it. The ring acts like some sort of tether, bound somewhere between the role Quentin plays and something far fetched...a yearning feeling that breaks his own heart at times. He can’t quite find the words to express how he feels but he knows to ignore such foolish longing.

Focus, Beck.

Focus.

Home.

A mystery to be solved.

Staring down the familiar cherry wood door before you, there’s a hint of hesitance as you bring your fist up to the door. It will be him, but he won’t be yours. Being in this universe felt foreign to you with the eerily stillness of the Venice air. Back in your universe, it felt as if the world was engulfed in an endless war, a hellish nightmare that had not a single light at the end of the dark tunnel. However, you had your husband, the two of you surviving alongside each other until...until...

You blink back the tears before they have a chance to fall.

Perhaps you weren’t as ready as you thought you were. Though you may argue that the years it took to find yourself on these steps in front of this exact same door that kept the outside world away from you and the love of your life may say otherwise. You poured everything you had to get to this very point in time to be with him again, to reconnect, to have your soulmate in your arms again.

No, you are ready for this.

Knock, knock.

You can feel your body vibrate, goose flesh forming along every inch of your skin, heartbeat slightly drowning your own thoughts. There’s a beat of silence then you think to yourself that maybe this may not be the best time for a reunion. You look over your shoulder to admire the scenic night life outside the bustling tourism. The water current beats against the concrete, boats gently floating near the pier, a hypnotic lullaby. Street lights illuminate passersby as their laughter fills the once still air. You can’t help but smile at them, memories flooding back from your universe with your loved ones. Moving to Venice may had been a spur of the moment kind of deal but you had him by your side every step of the way. You miss waking up in the morning to him, interlacing your fingers into his, the way he would hold you close to his chest.

It becomes too overwhelming to bear the heaviness of the loss of Q-

“Can I help you?”

Your head perks up at the sound of a voice you never thought you would ever hear again. Slowly, you turn around to face the man that had sacrificed his life in return for your safety.

“Quentin.”

Your voice sounds nearly disembodied; even being taken aback by the sound. You swallow thickly as your eyes fixate on the face you thought you had lost forever. The way that everything seems to be in place, how it’s like looking at an exact copy of him, like he never really left, put into this alternative universe that you found yourself in. Your heart begins to skip, you feel your palms become clammy as if you were on your first date with your Quentin all over again.

Oh, it’s him! It’s him! It’s him!

Oh! You know it’s him!

Your eyes beam as if reinvigorated by being in close proximity of his aura. “Hi, I’m your wife from another timeline.”

Silence.

Quentin narrows his eyes at your form to try and soak in who you are and what you just told him. Is he in a dream? Is he currently sleep walking? Another one of his illusions that came back to bite him in the ass? Or, rather, are you what he’s been searching for?

He shakes his head violently.

You begin to protest. “I know it sounds wild, believe me I know! After losing my Quentin, the other Quentin in my timeline, I desperately been trying to find my way back to you.”

Quentin takes a step back, still clutching the door like a lifeline. Even in the dim lighting of the light post shows how white his knuckles are and you know he’s frightened and overwhelmed like you were once you crossed the timeline boundary. You want to reach out, to hold Quentin and tell him it’s going to be alright because you are there to help him through this.

He takes another look at you, then shakes his head again, letting out a shaky breath. Despite the fact that “cross-timeline destiny” has been achieved before doesn’t mean that he fully understands the concept. There were others who have crossed the quantum realm into different worlds and universes but experiencing for himself...it all feels unreal. Quentin has always been more methodical, leaning against science as proof of existence. You standing there may be the lifeline a part of his is reaching for but he thinks with his brain first.

“Listen, I am not him. This “Quentin” of yours must be really something for you to travel through space and time like that but believe me, I’m not what you’re looking for. Goodnight.”

He goes to close the door but you press the palm of your hand before it can lock. Quentin looks at the door then shifts his gaze to you. It’s not a look of determination or anger but rather of brokenness. How shattering it is to look into your eyes that loved someone like him, eyes that carry memories of the two of you.

A ring on your left hand that proves who you are.

You blankly stare at the ghost of a man you used to know, somebody that’s supposed to be dead and shredded into bits. You long to embrace Quentin, to be protected once again against the evils that the world can bring. Memories flash before your eyes as you gaze into those ocean blue eyes of the lover you thought you lost. Lazy weekend mornings, faily evening strolls through the streets of Venice, resting on each other’s shoulders, just conquering the everyday with each other. You know it’s going to be a 500 mile journey to get there yet you are determined to be there every step of the way. You have loved your Quentin and you have crossed several boundaries, bent the known physics of the fabric of time to be with him again. You will not let that stop you from getting him back; the hero you’ve lost before.

“How did Other Me die?”

The first week had been particularly rough for the two of you. How does one even navigate a situation where someone is claiming that she’s his wife from a different dimension? Tense to put things lightly. Quentin often finds you watching and observing him as he gets ready for “work”. You gaze from the corner of the couch while he cleans up the house or waters the plants outside on the patio. Every time at breakfast, it’s always stifled in awkwardness where you can’t help but break a little as you remember your mornings with your Quentin. Ones where you snake your arms around his waist while he cooks, little kisses placed on your forehead before he leaves for work, how you two would play footsies underneath the table and giggle during any ordinary day.

Now there’s just silence.

Until Quentin decides to take a step forward in discovering more about you.

Your chest heaves a bit as you straighten yourself. You’ve tried to give Quentin some space to try and adjust to his new reality since you did just intrude on his personal space. Only when he’s ready to talk, you remind yourself.

“Well, you died a valiant death. There was only one way into stopping the hellish fight with these monsters from another world that you tried to create a portal to engulf them. And that saying...’the captain does down with the ship’...my friends had to pull me away as I watched you waved goodbye with a kiss then turned it on. The portal you created obliterated you. Afterwards, I ran over to your dead body and kissed your forehead for one last time. I told you how much I loved you.”

Quentin mulls this information over for a few days.

He wonders if he should call you “alternate’s wife”.

Sure, Quentin may not live up to his Other Quentin namesake with sacrificing himself up like that but there’s something deep down that believes he is capable of doing exactly that. He’s always wanted to be the hero in his own origin story.

Peering over his shoulder, he watches you paint your nails on the couch in the living room. It’s evening already and the television is playing the news with the volume on low. Quentin can’t help but feel a pull, mesmerized by such simple actions as blowing your nails dry. He has to admit that you are still very much his type. Perhaps this Other Quentin has some taste.

Before you can even catch him in the act, he turns back to his work.

Alternate wife.

Explains the ring around his finger that he has chosen to hide away.

The one who makes him laugh, one that challenges him, nearly breaks his own mind to try and figure you out. You’re good company to the market as you playfully toy with him and reminisce on how the two of you used to do this every Saturday. Sometimes the looks you give him, the way you involuntarily reach for his hand...it kills him to know that he is not Other Quentin.

Still, Quentin tries to be there for you.

One night he wakes to the sounds of your screams.

This is the third time this week.

Quentin rushes over to your side as your whole body rattles. You run your hand over your face and leaving them there. He’s not sure how to comfort somebody who comes from a different timeline who is supposedly your alternate you’s wife and has nightmares about the night his Other died. It’s not like people Google search “how to console someone who has seen another version of you die a horrific death with their very eyes” frequently. To see you in such a state slowly broke his heart.

All he can offer is a shoulder to cry on and a hand to hold.

Those nightmare nights are complete opposites to nights where you get drunk off his beer and become a giddy individual who loves to over share.

“You know I love you, Quentin? Mmm, so, so much. Like you know the universe? The stars and the moon? She has nothing on us.”

You take another sip as Quentin still nurses his first bottle.

You sit right next to him and curl your legs under you, carding your fingers through his silky hair then try to mess around with a few strands. You miss being this close to him and you know it’s the liquid courage coursing through your veins right now.

Another sip sends you back into memory lane.

Your features brighten up, placing a finger up as you place your bottle on the coffee table. “Gosh, I just remembered our first date together and how I thought it was such a disaster. You are afraid to eat in front of others but I didn’t know then so I really thought you were like...blowing me off just to seem disinterested. It was like ‘Hello! I’m carrying this whole conversation or what!’ When I got that text afterwards about that whole fear, I always found it quite endearing. I’m glad we worked through that together though.”

You giggle at your own anecdote and Quentin rubs the back of his neck.

How did you know about that? The last few girlfriends and boyfriends before that never quite understood it, let alone find it “endearing”.

“Ooh!” you nearly screech as you bounced up and down on the couch. “I’ll never forget that giant teddy bear you gave to me for my birthday then having them eye us having sex that night kinda killed the whole mood.”

Quentin watches as you come alive for the first time in a few weeks (after the last time where you nearly blacked out). You dance to the sound of your own tun and try to recruit Quentin on the “dance floor”. He chuckles, places his hands up in mock surrender, and tells you that he should be going to bed. You pout, folding your arms across your chest, and telling him that he owes you a dance.

He caves in with a smile tugging at the edge of his mouth.

You provide your own music as you sing out loud some song Quentin’s never heard before but sounds eerily familiar. It’s some funky pop song that sounds like a top 40s song yet all that is in the background. He focuses on you only, the way your face is animated, lifting his arms up to twirl yourself around and not giving him the chance to dance on his own. You keep telling him that you love him with your entire being and that the rain has nothing on the love you two share.

I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you...

You press your head against Quentin’s shoulder.

He can feel your shallow breath against the fabric of his night shirt and he feels goose flesh forming. You have started falling asleep with one hand interlaced with his and a hand on his shoulder. Slowly, that hand that was on his shoulder drops down to the crook of his elbow.

Quentin carries you and he finds it a tiny bit ironic at the name of the hold: bridal style. You’re his alternate wife and he’s your alternate husband in a timeline unlike his, a timeline he tells the people at work about. He lays you carefully on the couch you’ve called home for almost a month now and pulls a blanket over your form. You bury your head into your pillow to try and get more comfortable.

Could it be possible to be jealous of a man Quentin’s never met before?

He’s jealous of Other Quentin finding someone like you in his timeline. Somebody who is willing to sacrifice the very physics of time to take a leap of faith and find him again. Quentin will admit that much about his love for his Other Self.

He envies the Other Quentin on how the exact same person sleeping on his couch watched another version of himself perish in front of her eyes yet still had that much love within her to approach a corpse full of blood and a rotting flesh to press a kiss against his temple.

Those same fingers that interlaced his brushed off guts and gore from Other Quentin’s face and still found love even in death.

And he has the audacity to call himself a “hero”.

Anomalies are known to happen in science.

When there’s an unusual blimp on the radar that isn’t of his own doing, Quentin’s blood runs cold. He can’t explain it on his own rehearsed terms and desperately tries to regain his composure in front of Agent Fury and Agent Hill.

Just plaster on another face.

However, deep down, he’s afraid.

Sabbath morning.

He places a plate of Challah bread in front of you as you shift in your chair. You move your head to the side as you wonder if Quentin knew this was your favorite type of bread. Maybe an alternative universe is just a mere mirror of oneself; still the same but slightly different.

Quentin nudges the honey pot closer to you.

The sun highlights the amber tint of the honey that you drizzle over your piece of bread. You take a moment to bask in the warm rays of the Italian sun while sitting outside of Quentin’s patio. Birds call out from above, clouds nearly stationary against the pale blue sky, and the world continues to spin on its axis. You take a small bite of your bread, licking a few honey droplets off your thumb.

It’s a comfortable silence between the two of you before you spot honey along Quentin’s lips.

Out of habit, you reach over to his chair and direct his head towards you with your hand so you can inspect him. You swipe a dampened thumb across the seam of his bottom lip, bringing your thumb to your lips and licking the stray honey right off. Quentin feels that pull again, the pull that you that’s intoxicating and has been drawing him closer and closer to you ever since the moment he found you standing outside his door. Why can’t he just admit the feeling? How can he admit that he can’t live up to the expectations of Other Quentin? The man you once fell in love with? How on Earth is he jealous over how Other Him managed to find someone as beautiful and loyal as you? He thinks he doesn’t deserve kindness, nor does he think he deserves the love that you are trying to give him.

A love that has stood the test of time over an alternative timeline.

Something tells him to give into that pull like a ship returning back to the sea of the unknown. It’s exciting, electric, new. Quentin brings hims lips closer to yours, you closing the gap until both of your lips are mere inches away from each other. His breath tickles your skin and it’s so damn familiar that you’re becoming more unhinged with each passing second. The scent of honey on his lips brings a certain sweet delirium that stirs inside of your body. Quentin shivers as his nose presses against yours and the softness of your skin sends a new wave of chills down his body.

Quentin places the ghost of a kiss on your lips.

He can’t. Not now.

You don’t deserve this emptiness.

Quentin shuts his eyes closed in frustration, pressing his forehead against yours for a second then apologizing.

“Sorry, I have a debriefing to attend to.”

You are not his to keep, anyways.

He wants to be your Quentin but he doesn’t know if he can. Quentin knows he will never hurt you nor put you in harm’s way yet he’s scared his technology might unintentionally do so. Maybe he’s slowly going soft on you as you stubbornly sleep on his couch, eat his food, crack jokes from here and there, and make him smile whenever you can. You are more than just some random roommate but...he fears it’s something more. Maybe the Other Quentin is rubbing off on him in some way, shape, or form even despite such cross-destiny conspiracy that his brain is yelling at him to stop believing in. The longer Quentin stares into your eyes, with infinite knowledge and wonder in them, he begins to wonder if he’s truly fallen for you. The idea of you? Was this just the jealously of Other Quentin?

Or the imminent danger unraveling before him and having no way in stopping? Could it be that he’s afraid of losing you?

Maybe the biggest act of love that he can give you now is to let you go in order to be safe. You don’t deserve to be thrown into the whirlwind of his creation, a deceitful bitter lie born out of cold revenge. To Quentin, admitting that he cares for you is a step in a frightening direction of questioning if revenge is the right way in dealing with Tony’s betrayal. In his fury, he never predicted there would be an actual imminent danger.

He stands up suddenly, pushing the white iron chair away from you then departing. You don’t open your eyes, not just yet. You squeeze them tighter as you hear the sound of the front door close then you feel your chest tighten. You erupt in a ravaging sob that causes your entire body to shake in the process. You bring your trembling hands to your mouth to try and muffle your cries but to no avail. Your fingers brush upon your quivering lips as you try to memorize the shape of him once again.

You love him, you love him, oh, how you loved him in your universe. To do anything to kiss Quentin’s jawline again with his stubble tickling your lips. How he would place kisses on the back of your hand, on your palms, on your neck, your body was a temple and he wanted to show you the utmost devotion. You miss his intimate touches, his hair against the palm of your hand, his warmth near your body. The memories only add fuel to your fire with no end in sight to your crying.

How could you be so selfish, you wonder to yourself.

To think Quentin could be the same as the Other Quentin. How could he love you the same way as yours did?

But it’s him, it’s him...you know it’s him.

Perhaps you are merely just Icarus who flew too close to the sun. Maybe you will die in your own act of selfish hubris with scorching wings that acts as your medal of valor for your efforts in time travel. Have others felt the same way that you did after crossing over a new timeline? Shame? Guilt? Selfishness? You felt alone in a universe that is not yours to keep. Had it all been worth it?

You yearn for his touch, the warmth of another human being.

You sigh, your eyes fluttering up to clean up the long abandoned breakfast.

Anxiety greets him like an old friend. Oh, how the cold Beck before him would guffaw!

Quentin reconvenes with his team and discusses the next illusion. Not as elaborate as the ones they’ve pulled off before but Peter is more than naive to notice. It’s yet another role to act with a script that gives him commands and actions.

He remembers you.

There’s a hesitation as he hovers over the phone number that reads “home”. But why? How can he tell you that the monsters that infiltrated your timeline and killed the Other Quentin, causing you to find your way back to him, are ripping through the fabric of time to destroy this world? The world you thought would be safe? The reason why Quentin pushed his true feelings aside was that he was afraid of hurting you and now there’s actual threat to his livelihood.

Now is not the time to think about his illusion, it’s about saving your life. Feelings coming bubbling in his stomach but Quentin knows this is the right decision, much to his team’s dismay.

After all you’ve done for him, Quentin accepts what has always been there inside of him.

Calling home.

You hesitate at the bar door.

It’s like being in school again when you peer into the windows then your eyes lay on a mysterious figure sitting at the bar. There’s a kid with glasses next to him hunched over a glass much different than the beer bottle of the man. He’s dressed a little funny in what only appears to be a costume of sorts. It’s hard to make out who it may be but you begin to scan the other patrons of the bar. They’re all very much in their own little worlds, caught up in the whirlwind of different discussions.

You wonder where Quentin may be.

The man at the bar turns to the kid and your heart nearly drops. The profile reminds you of Quentin but why would he be wearing a costume? With newfound gusto, you enter the bar.

He turns to see you and his eyes light up. It’s Quentin.

You tilt your head to the side.

Quentin reaches his arm out to you and you walk a little closer. As you approach, the kid turns his attention to you and suddenly you feel very out of place, almost awkward.

What’s happening right now?

“Peter, this is—my alternate’s wife.”

Your breath nearly catches in your throat as after so long, he acknowledges you for who you really are. You feel a hand at the small of your back, almost hesitant but gets stronger as the kid named Peter reaches his arm out for you to take.

“It’s really nice to meet you. Mysterio only told me very little about you but I respect his boundaries, y’know?”

Mysterio? Talked about you?

You turn to look at him but a solemn expression replaces the one he had before. You place a hand on his shoulder and shake your head.

“Are you alright?”

Quentin closes his eyes for a second then lets out a shaky breath. He swallows thickly as he catches your gaze for reassurance, to make sure he is doing the right thing. Quentin begins to replay the gruesome death of Other Quentin he’s conjured up as you told him more and more details over the course of the month. His eyes bore into your soul, knowing the inevitable.

He waves his hand like a conductor and just like that, the illusion drops.

The bar begins to dissolve in thin air with dusty chairs and tables coming to light. You spin around to take in your new surroundings, watching Peter stiffen then removing his glasses. His boyish features turn to that of pure confusion. You look over at Quentin who stands up to take off the chest plate of his supposed armor and tossing it haphazardly to the side. His mouth is agape, almost as if to say something but closes it back up.

Quentin’s afraid to reach out for help. He’s vulnerable in front of you, his lie exposed to you once and for all.

Will you love him any less? Will you care about him any less? Will you understand?

“I’m a fraud,” Quentin begins with his eyes glued to the rotting floorboard of the establishment. “There’s not too much time to explain everything but we are all in real danger.”

He glances up at you with pleading eyes, ones that beg for forgiveness. “Those monsters that came and destroyed your timeline? Well, they’re back in this dimension and I don’t know how to stop them.”

You are taken aback. You can feel yourself become lightheaded, a chill running down your spine as your eyes become wide open.

Oh, no, you tell yourself.

Not again.

“You are smart, Quentin. I believe in your work and so should you.”

Yet he feels absolutely powerless. No illusion to save him from this destruction. No more hiding behind a façade perfectly constructed to his liking.

Several papers sprawl all over the table in a headquarters you never knew operated underneath Venice. All those times you strolled with Quentin in your other life, you never knew this was all happening at the same time. However, you felt somewhat secure in a place like this. Even with the agents you met, Hill and Fury, with a tough exterior towards strangers, they warmed up to you after finding out who you are.

You are brought back to reality when Quentin sighs in frustration.

Just like before.

The life you knew begins to mirror in this timeline and you are petrified of the outcome. Would history repeat itself again and you are left picking up the pieces? Could this happen again where you lose the love of your life again? Were you simply chasing a future to call your own? Or was it simply destiny to live broken?

No matter the impending destruction, you stick right by Quentin’s side, or Mysterio that others refer to him as.

Quentin pulls out the wedding ring again.

He thinks it may bring him luck, maybe even strength, but deep down he knows it represents more than that. He touches the ring to remind himself of you and the journey it took to find him here.

It all feels a little too late when Quentin begins to reciprocate the touches that were once one-sided. He actively seeks you out, having you close to him whenever he can. Even if the days between the two of you is dwindling, Quentin tells him that he won’t stop expressing how he feels in the only way possible. You begin to sleep next to him on his bed, curled against his bare chest and falling asleep to the sound of his heartbeat. You two share lively conversations over every meal with laughter filling the room. Quentin holds you closer whenever a nightmare startles you awake.

It all feels like you two are running out of time.

During a particular debriefing, you recount the plans that Other Quentin had in defeating these alien beings. It pains you to revisit memories just days before his death and even looking at Quentin brings back that forlorn feeling.

Maybe this time is different, maybe this time you can stay.

You two hold onto maybe.

But maybe is never good enough.

The moments before the inevitable begin to play out again and it’s all painfully real. Quentin has the contraption along his wrists, ready to go into the line of fire for his final act. In order for this all to work, he must get close to the actual being in order to extinguish it out of existence.

He had volunteered.

Just like Other Quentin had before.

Hot tears drop down your cheek as you try to find your voice to call out to Quentin. There is utter chaos going about with Peter, known as Spider-Man, begins rescue efforts with other agents from S.H.I.E.L.D. working besides him. You can feel the heat from the fiery being and you close your eyes to blink back the ash that the wind peppers you in. Your arm is being pulled back by Agent Hill, her barking orders being tuned out as you watch Quentin walk past you. He stops with his back towards you.

This is his time to be the actual hero.

He stalls for a bit then turns to you. You can tell Quentin’s eyes are glassy with tears but they weren’t tears from the heat.

Sadness.

In your mind, you begin to plead for mercy, that this couldn’t possibly be happening again to you and your Quentin. The progress you’ve made comes crumbling down as each minute ticks away. Nothing ever seems to last.

Quentin steps forward and places a warm hand to one side of your face. You forcefully remove your grip from the agent to wrap both of your hands around his wrist. He says your name in a gentle voice and you begin to shake when you begin to relive the nightmare that woke you up in the middle of the night time and time again. The love of your life brings you closer to his face and closes the gap, sealing your fate with one final soft kiss on your lips.

And this time he means it.

You are pried away from Quentin once again as he gives you a reassuring nod, a sad smile on his lips. Oh, how you want to reach out for him, to throw yourself into the line of fire if that meant being with him again in another life.

For his final act was out of the love for you. He knows that in order to protect you, he must sacrifice his life for the safety of not only you but for others.

There’s a blast of green that drowns over you as two cosmic beams light up the night sky. Agent Hill shrouds you with her body despite the fact that you are safely away from the chaos.

It’s happened again.

You don’t listen to the chastising commands coming from the agent once the beams die down. You are determined to find Quentin again.

History repeats itself, first as a tragedy but for you, then it’s another tragedy.

Lying on the ground is the man you traveled far to find again. The one who held skepticism towards you but you could tell he was warming up to you slowly. The man who saved your life again.

You drop to your knees at his lifeless body. You wish to kiss his fingertips again, to laugh again, to dance together again, to tell him you love him again.

You brush some of his hair side then trace his jawline gently with your index finger. There are several abrasions, burns, and blood all over his face but you know it’s still your Quentin. Tears begin to blur your vision, smoke permeating the air which wraps around you like a shock blanket.

You loved and you loved and you lost him, then you loved and you loved him then lost him again.

You press a soft kiss on his forehead.

“I love you, too, Quentin.”

Tagging: @kwaiky, @xmicrxn // @omi-writes-things (AHHHHH??), @cura-posterior // @can-t-figure-it-out (i hope u open ur home to all this angst, my friend), @aliebestraum // @fuckodinlives (bruh moment ://) @phalangewrites // @chaotic--lovely (i know u said keep it optimistic...well...), @reyskywclker (you KNOW i had to do it to ‘em), @deviantramblings (i am so sorry), @arsynia (true mysterio sluts), @obsiidio (HHHHHH it be like this sometimes), @alphysian (asjdksajlska ltierally...we had it coming huh), @drmsqnc (hello, queen), @bum-rayee (hehe :3c), @lastflyinggrayson (oh hell yeah babeyy!), @anniesburg (they call us mysteriHOES) and last pero not Least @the-darklings (now i know why u write a lot for your stories....the words just keep coming and they won’t stop coming)

#angel writes #quentin beck x reader #quentin x reader #quentin beck #mysterio x reader #mysterio #jake gyllenhaal #jake gyllenhaal x reader #marvel #marvel imagine #mysterio imagine #marvel fic #far from home #spider man far from home #idk how to mf tag omg i havent written in so LONG #love brought weight

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theexistentiallyqueer · 5 years ago

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Okay so I’ve been thinking about that really bad Hot Take that’s been circulating about fanfiction. And it’s been kind of simmering in me. The root of the problem with it isn’t so much that it diminishes the quality of fanfiction so much as the way it characterizes two completely different genres of media.

Preface: at no point is this ever, ever, ever a diatribe or condemnation against fanart or the work fanartists put into their work. This is about the value that is ascribed to visual art vs the value ascribed to literary art. I am trying to talk specifically about the denigration of literary art in fandom spaces and the way it’s been recently, in a very popular tumblr post, martyred at the expense of queer and disabled writers and writers of color.

Fanart (as a collective genre, according to that post) - Good, artistically-driven, pure, wholesome. Fanartists draw for the sake of becoming better artists, and every work a fanartist draws or creates is made with the goal of becoming a better artist. Fanartists never draw anything that is base, silly, shippy, or smutty; if there is pornographic art, it isn’t pornographic but Erotica. There is no such thing as low- or middling-quality art, because all artists are striving to sharpen their skills and become better artists, and there are no fanartists who draw just for fun or shits and giggles. Fanartists achieve fame purely on the merit of their own artistic ability. There’s no room to criticize fanartists who attempt to cis-wash trans (or trans pesenting) characters, or fanartists who blatantly, frequently, and with frankly no impunity (as their art is reblogged, and reblogged, and reblogged) whitewash characters of color.

Fanfiction (as a collective genre, according to that post) - Smutty, ship-fodder, audience-pleasing trash. Fanfic writers write for the sake of expressing their inner boners or enacting their internal fantasies. No fanfic writers seek a sense of growth in their writing or work to improve their writing in any way. The only reason any works of fanfiction are popular is because they cater to the readership’s base instincts, and the True Authors, the Really Daring authors who write Real Literary Content, are cast the wayside.

It’s such a two-dimensional view of the situation--and it doesn’t even take into account edited content, such as gifsets, which makes up a huge portion of fandom content and has been a type of content, along with fanart, that fanfic writers have long voiced their (our) upset about getting more active & polarized attention than written works. It presents this dichotic view of fanart good/fanfiction bad. Which is also incredibly ugly and disturbing when you consider the fact that fanfiction is the earliest form of curated fan content, and fanfiction itself is inherently transformative in a way that fanart and edits are not, because fanwork in general, and and fanfiction in particular, is inherently in and of itself the public (fans) themselves overriding the corporate-owned landscape with their subversive interpretations.

Like, I have seen not-good fanart. I have seen bland, unimpressive, generic fanart. There is fanart from artists who don’t have their own unique sense of style. Fanart from artists who are just starting out and haven’t developed their skills yet. Fanart from artists who draw as a hobby, and damn they may be good, but they don’t give a fuck about contributing to The Body of Artistry because they have bills to pay and career interests outside of art, and damn, they’d really rather draw these two characters making out, or blushing at each other, or straight-up fucking, than they would create something of Great Artistic Importance. That art gets so many notes. It is liked and reblogged and shared.

And that’s all valid, because art ISN’T A COMPETITIVE SPORT. I embrace fanartists who draw just because they want to, because they don’t care about quality or artistic ideals or whatever, and just want to draw someone being happy, or sad, or angry, or getting dicked down, or whatever!!! It doesn’t matter. Draw because you want to draw. Because your art is an expression of yourself that speaks of your experiences and transgresses the definitions of the world you’ve been told to adhere to. You make art for yourself, to say fuck the system!!!! We’re just the lucky souls who get to appreciate it afterwards.

The complaints that come from fanfic writers--and yes!!! I am one, so proceed with the accusations of butthurt--are that fanart and edits get more social media attention (in the forms of likes, reblogs, retweets, shares, etc.) than fanfic does.

And it’s a valid complaint! It isn’t rooted in some alien reality that fanfiction is inherently more base and less artistic than fanart. I’ve seen some pretty aesthetically displeasing fanart get a high reblog count. And I’ve seen some incredible works of literary attention get no recs, no likes, no comments. I’ve seen works of middling writers who have a lot of fucking talent and show it in their work, and yeah maybe they write porn, but their prose SINGS, and no one comments, no one shares it, no one makes their love of it public the same way they do the fanart, the same way they do the edits and the gifsets.

It’s rooted in two things:

1. Literature (which fanfiction is a subgenre of) takes time to appreciate. You can look at a piece of art and reblog it without thinking about it. It could be a work on par with the Mona Lisa, and you could still look at it without any aesthetic or artistic sense and say, “Hey, that looks pretty.” But you can’t read without thinking; reading is an active mental pursuit you have to engage with. (If you try to pull out Twilight on this point to fight me, I’ll fight you back. I’ve actively read Twilight. Even reading awful literature takes effort; arguably it takes more effort than reading something good).

2. Literature is hard to market with words, because when you’re trying to encourage other people to read it, you have to use even more words. You have to use words to convince someone to read even more words! Some fanartists draw comics or fanart inspired by fanfiction--I love those artists and they do more for us than they could possibly know--but for the most part, you can’t use visuals to show someone why they should invest their time in reading a thing. And unlike fanart--when it’s a tribute, when it’s a showcase of the character’s or characters’ canonical attributes--fanfiction can’t be green-stamped by creators, because fanfiction is inherently built in narrative, and canon-compliant or not, that opens the legal owners of the property up to legal disputes.

So much easier, then, to focus on fanart, which distribution and publishing companies love because they see free advertising in sharing it, to complain that fanfiction is a dispirited genre of unartistic creators who just want to read the queer version of a bodice-ripper.

And then we get to the question of: why is the bodice ripper so bad? Are you willing to critique Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski with the same derision you have for queer writers? Are you going to hold the wish-fulfillment fantasies and introspective examinations of sexuality in relation to gender, race, class, and physical ability written by writers expressing their own experiences as inherently debauched and debased because pornographic fanfiction is popular, but not hold George R R Martin to the same standard? Are you going to criticize the prejudices and disparities and biases in publishing that prevent marginalized writers from being able to break into the industry?

Are you ready to combat the enduring popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is overwhelmingly a series of heroism tales about shitty and mediocre white men?

Are you going to take aim at HBO for taking a fantasy series that, while still written by a sexist author who has a disturbing fixation on female sexuality has uplifted its female characters as heroes in their own right, and then drove it into the dirt to end on a note with the male “hero” murdering his female lover, an abuse survivor, after engaging her in an intimate kiss?

Did you take issue with the streaming blockbuster Stranger Things only confirming a character as canonically gay--after planning to have her be a straight romantic option for a major character--because the actress is the one who repeatedly badgered the showrunners about how she didn’t feel her character fit that role?

Are you invested in the fact that video games continue to be majority white, majority male, majority able-bodied, and majority inaccessible to disabled gamers?

You want to complain about fanfiction having too much porn and somehow that deligitimizes fanfiction as a genre as a whole?

Fuck off. There are hundreds, thousands even more likely, of other authors of equal skill to you or greater, who are struggling to have their works recognized in fandoms that don’t want to put the effort in to reading them, the effort into sharing and appreciating them. It’s harder to make someone care about a fanfic. You can reblog a fanart, and your followers will see the art itself right away. If you reblog fanfic, they have to make the conscious choice to engage with it. And none of that is your fault, because you can’t control how other people engage with fan content, but you can advocate, vocally, for the fair and equal respect for fanfiction and fan-written content. You can remind people, again and again, how fanfic writers do so much for so little.

But you want to come into my house and compare fanart to fanficton and claim one is inherently better? You’re the Banksy to my Catherynne L Valente, to my N.K. Jemisin, to my Seanan McGuire.

Start understanding the system is built against us all and start understanding why your battle is uphill. What’s oppressing your creative success is a white, straight, cis monopoly on what the good story, what the correct story is, limiting your options, tying you to a narrative you don’t belong to. Queerness and marginalization exist beyond what’s depicted in mainstream media, and fans expressing that through their own written content?

That’s us taking back the corporate-owned narrative for ourselves. It’s self-liberation through the written word. And yeah, some of it is porn.

It’s porn when it’s a drawing too.

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webwingalpha · 6 years ago

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The Iron-Forged Chronicles: Eclipse

@griminal-rising @yuushanoah-fr @frxemriss @majestyrising (if you want to be added to the pinglist for my lore posts let me know!)

(a few years before)

A pale blue egg rested safely between the front legs of an aqua and tomato colored Coatl, who was curled up in a corner of a large and spacious room. Her pink eyes were fixated upwards, focused on the event that was currently happening through a large and round glass window on the ceiling. She had never seen anything like it, though she had read about it in various books. An eclipse. It was so much more... intense in real, more than what she would have ever expected it to be, even after reading about dragons personally seeing one. Vastly more beautiful than she had imagined, though the window was tinted for her eyes' sake and thus wasn't showing the full glory.

She felt blessed being able to experience an occasion like this.

The egg shivered, the movement drawing the Coatl's attention back to it. She had been the egg's caretaker ever since the father, a grey and gold Pearlcatcher with spotted wings, known as Umessis, had disappeared without a trace. He had brought the egg, pale blue and perfectly smooth, to this small Light clan, claiming the egg was “a gift from a goddess.” The egg most certainly looked special, not like any normal elemental egg, but most of the dragons in the clan had laughed it off. There was no way this one dragon had gotten in contact with a goddess, much less receive an egg from one. It just wasn't possible.

Was it?

Something had drawn her to the little egg, despite her own doubts about it. This was why she offered to take care of it when the Umessis went missing, before anyone else had the chance to speak up. It felt right. As if she was meant to be the baby's caretaker before it was born.

The egg shuddered again, bringing her out of her thoughts. As she focused on it, she became aware of a small crack beginning to form near the top of the oval object. Was it... starting to hatch? During the eclipse out of all things? Was it a sign? It felt like one, that was for sure.

Hmmm. Maybe his claim wasn't as ridiculous as it at first seemed after all. The timing was just too perfect for it to be a coincidence, in her eyes at least. What would the others think of this, she wondered. Would its hatch timing change anyone's opinion?

She watched the egg now, the eclipse seemingly forgotten, as the egg shook and shivered again, the fracture lengthening and widening. It seemed as if the hatchling was in a rush to get out, wanting out now, instead of slowly working its way out of the shell. Maybe it really did want to get out before the eclipse was over.

She was paying so much attention to the egg and watching the crack progress, while other cracks started to form, that she was unaware of the progress the eclipse was making until the room was enveloped in darkness. The realization that the sun was now behind the moon caused her head to jolt up, and she directed her head to look upwards at the window again. Just for a moment, the egg had been her focus, the importance of it being a distraction. But still... she wanted to see this, even if it was only a glimpse. This was the part she had been most intrigued about.

It was so wonderful.

Unable to remove her eyes immediately, she remained fixated on the scene above for one minute... two minutes... this was amazing. She was glad this room was rarely used; otherwise she might not have gotten as much of a chance to see... this. And oh look, the moon was moving away from the sun, showing a sliver... how fascinating! She would never forget this-

Crack!

The Coatl looked back down, her feather crest pinned back in surprise. That crack had been overwhelmingly loud, enough that it reverberated throughout the entire room even after the original sound had finished, startling the Coatl out of her wits. And now, as she stared down at her front feet, eyes wide, while the room slowly gained brightness due to the eclipse moving on, the mass at her feet twitched, no longer just an egg. It moved slowly, a mess of shell and dragon, sitting up with a soft hiccup, eyes closed. The hatchling was a Pearlcatcher, just like its father, and the small stub on its face, in front of the horn on its forehead, showed clearly that the hatchling was male. She couldn't tell his colors easily in the dim lighting, just enough to see that he looked to be a mix of gold and grey, seemingly glowing in areas such as his sides and feet. Did he have Runes...?

“Why hello little guy! It's quite nice to finally see you! You're quite adorable!”

Her startled mood leaving, the Coatl lifted a front foot, gently plucking a piece of eggshell out of the Pearlcatcher's mane. She dropped the piece of shell onto the floor, reaching out to stroke one of the hatchling's cheeks with the back of one of her claws. “Welcome to the waking world, little one! How does it feel?” she smirked, chuckling softly and tapping the top of his head afterwards, being careful to not poke herself on his larger horn. “Maybe you should open your eyes and get a look for yourself, you silly dragon.”

As she pulled her foot away, he did exactly that. He shook his head with a soft squeak as he opened his eyes, first staring straight at her. The Coatl inhaled, watching the hatchling, unable to speak, unable to do anything other than stare. His eyes were glowing brightly, two bright beacons on his face, standing out against the small blanket of darkness still covering the two. Bright enough that the rest of his details were even more blurred than before. He seemed unaware of it, blinking a couple times as he looked around, squeaking again as he tried to stand for the first time. The attempt failed, and he flopped over, twitching an ear as he looked back up at the larger dragon.

Though, as soon as it had begun, it was over. The room was cast into bright light again as the moon finished its journey over the sun, and at the same time, the hatchling's eyes stopped glowing, revealing a pair of dark purple-grey eyes, marked with flecks of yellow, including a ring around each pupil. It was unlike anything she had seen before, in fact, his eyes made her think of the eclipse that had just passed. So it was really meant to be. He was special.

And in her heart, even if his eyes had the look of a Shadow dragon's at first glance, she knew he was a Light dragon. There was no denying it, especially with how his eyes had glowed a bright yellow just moments before.

Also now that the room wasn't obscured by the darkness anymore, she could see his small form clearly now, as he moved back into a sitting position, attempting to scratch himself with a hind leg as he did so. His body was a vibrant gold, spotted with darker brown, with glowing dark pink runes running along his side and tail, blotting each cheek, covering each paw, making it look as if he had walked in some kind of strange-coloured liquid or muck. And last of all, his mane, cheek fluff, and tail tuft were all a dark grey, with a soft appearance, while his wings were a paler grey. They sparkled in the dimmed sunlight like glittering gems as he stretched them out, making an attempt to stand up again as he did so. They were marvelous, reminding her of insect wings with how transparent they were.

This time, when he fell over, the Coatl caught him before he hit the ground. “Careful little one.” she cooed, coaxing him to sit on the floor again. “Don't need you hurting yourself, do we?” she nudged him as she spoke, ignoring the squeak of protest she got as she started picking the pieces of eggshell off of him and putting them on the ground next to him. She knew what Pearlcatcher hatchlings did with the pieces of shell and she wanted to make it a little easier for him.

“I can't wait for the others to see you, little one, after you're done making your pearl! I'm sure you'll get quite the reaction.” she was ecstatic, enthralled, her voice showing it loud and clear. She was also highly curious. What would the rest, the ones who had scoffed at Umessis's words, think of all of this? Of him? The young Pearlcatcher was definitely not a normal, run-of-the-mill Light dragon. Not with the way his eyes had glowed during the eclipse, not with how they looked now, dark with speckles of light yellow showing through.

He was a gift, she thought as she watched him poke at a piece of eggshell, unable to keep from smiling. A blessing. And hopefully they'll see that. Hopefully.

The remains of what looked like a major battle were strewn all over the southern Scorched Forest. From pieces of broken trees and ripped foliage, to areas darkened with blood, to torn cloth, broken weapons, and even a limb or some other body part, hardly any of the cracked ground was free of carnage. Enough time had passed that any bodies that had been there were dragged off to be buried or burned, and there was seemingly no life in the area, no dragons, no birds, not even a sign of any sort of insects humming or buzzing around.

Except it wasn't quite devoid of life, for lying just at the edge of the wreckage, against a fallen log resting on a broken stump, was a small egg, its mostly dark coloring keeping it from being easily visible among the other objects lying around. Smoke seeped from small cracks in the surface, and if one looked closely, it would also be apparent that the inside of the egg was very bright, a vibrant glow peeking out from within the cracks. It shook every now and then as time passed, though the cracks did not progress much. Whatever was in the egg was ready to hatch, hinted by the cracks and the occasional shudder, but taking its time.

As the minutes ticked by, as morning turned into the afternoon, the day growing warmer, the egg's appearance changed slowly, but surely. Smoke was starting to billow out of the cracks a little thicker now, it was shuddering more often and more violently, as if it was about to explode, and the whole egg was emitting an orange glow, the cracks glowing brighter than the rest of it. It stood out as opposed to blending in with the log and ground now, and since there was an unnatural silence over the area now due to the lack of animal activity, all the small noise it made, the shifting around and the cracking, and even sizzling on occasion, seemed to be a lot louder than they really were.

As it shivered, threatening to roll over onto its side due to how violently it was moving, a strange darkness fell over the forest, plunging everything in shadow, as though something had shaded the world. The egg, due to its light, was the only thing that wasn't at all affected by the sudden occurrence, and now, its bright glow caused it to stand out starkly against the darkened landscape, even among the dimly glowing cracks in the ground and trees. It was a beacon; something that would quickly and easily draw the eyes of anyone who happened upon the place.

The darkness only lasted for a brief period of time, for a few minutes later, it slowly passed, the forest gradually growing lighter as the source of the darkness faded away. It was soon back to what it was before it had been before everything was shrouded, as if it had never happened. Silent, desolate, foreboding.

As the light returned with the darkness fading, the glowing egg finally toppled over onto its side. Multiple cracks sounded as it landed with a thud, as the shell that made contact with the ground shattered into little pieces. A single purple-blue paw broke its way out through a large crack on the side, clawing at the air. Not long after, a tail, tufted at the end with streaked brown fur, broke free from the other side of the egg.

As the creature, likely a dragon, within the egg worked to free itself from its temporary prison, a small four-legged shape, with a long whip-like tail and fins flattened against its head and neck, made its way slowly towards it. It was curious, though wary as well thanks to the signs of slaughter all around. What was an egg doing here? Left all alone, when this place was obviously a recent battlefield?

This was no place for a child, the shape mused. It didn't belong here. It needed a home. It would take the youngling in. Take care of it.

#lore post!#flight rising #l: Eladrin #l: Chandra #The Iron Forged Chronicles #IT'S HERE!#look at all the introductions baby #also that waifu site is a blessing and a half #this was like due last year but ha I am slow #but now it can count as a past piece #ehhhh fixed the name I just wasn't sure if it'd count or not #but two will eventually live there so...

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immalien-artsu · 7 years ago

Note

Amami does not have romantic feelings for anyone. Kodaka himself confirmed in the artbook that Rantaro can only express brotherly love for people. There is no way in hell that he fell in love with Shuichi and less with Kokichi. The closest character that you can say that are in love/ have interest with is Kaede, like it or not. Stop being so deceived about your impossible ships. Your word is not worth more than Kodaka's.

Good day anon! Whoa, I’m surprised to see this the firstthing in the morning (I think this is my first anon/ship hate hhhh)! But worrynot, I’ll happily explain why I shipped Oumami and AmaSai, so prepare your popcorn! °˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖°

(This will be kinda long because I rarely talk about myships, & THIS CONTAINS NDRV3 SPOILERS!!)

Firstly I’ll apologize if I focused more on Oumami, it’sbecause they’re my ultimate OTP at the moment hahaa Xa

First off that part about Amami can only express brotherlylove for people in the artbook, I think it actually refers to his fondnessabout his sisters, because as we all know he’s really worried about them andhence his priority is to save his sisters. So I actually think it made senses when forced to do a killing game, his only worries was to get out there assoon as possible & saving his sisters, and romance is not his utmostpriority there.

As you can see the term here is actually imouto(littlesisters) love, so imo the artbook here actually is not making point about his brotherly love for any peoplebut his sisters only (Because when I looked for fraternal love google refers it as 兄弟愛/ kyoudai ai & not imouto rabu? so i think this term is exclusively for his lil sis, which invalid your excuses that this section talks about his type of love for other people). But no worries! Actually as seen in otoges there’s usually the big bro type, and I think he’ll suits that type hahaa.

But what if the killing game isn’t commenced? Then theprobabilities broaden! I think many ndrv3 fanarts are actually based on what if they survived / lived happily scenarios, and I’m sure fall for that trope too. Well I like to think because Amami’s a brother of 12sisters, he’ll be more attentive toward someone who’s younger–looking, in thiscase Ouma! Imo Ouma knows one of his strong point is he kinda looks like achild, so he can use his looks to his advantage wwww So this is just my own hc,but I think Ouma will keep pestering Amami (about his talent or anything rly),and because Amami doesn’t remember anything (or probably being cautious atfirst) he’ll dodged the questions. Ouma kinda doubts that, so he’ll keepsticking near Amami all the time. And although at first Amami was bothered, inthe end he can’t help but being weak when Ouma goes all cute & adorable, sohe’s fine with Ouma being around. And that will branches into them getting toknow about each other more, that even in the end they’ll grow closer & probably comfortable enoughto share about their pasts ;w;

Even if they’re in the killing game, I also like Oumamidynamic! Ouma likes interesting thing, moreover mysteries & ofc he’sinterested to solve the mysteries around Amami, being an amnesiac and all. Evenwhen Amami’s gone, Ouma was still determined to solve the mysteries behind him,judging by how he knew about Amami’s safe combination & such. If Amamilives longer, I think somehow he’ll be the only person that gets how Ouma’s wayof thinking is…. For example in thetrial when Ouma states his statements that riddled with lies, the only personthat can comprehend & decipher the truth from those statements is Amami. Amami being the cautious person he is probablywon’t say anything outright too, and Ouma knowing the clever boy Amami is certainlywill enjoy digging more informations out of him. Heck, they even shared thesame goal to find the mastermind by themselves, so probably if they somehowrealized the others are not a threat they even can cooperate together __(:’3__

ALSO FUN FACT ship doesn’t need to be about interactions all the time!!It can be about their complimenting/contrasting designs/personalities, or maybe you just think the pair look nice together? Sure, ship them if you feel like it! Here are some my favorite tidbits that make me got moooore interested in Oumami :http://rosesoma.tumblr.com/post/153133450929/do-you-know-why-we-ship-oumamihttp://rurukandy.tumblr.com/post/156478379296/i-know-that-amami-and-ouma-didnt-interact-at-allhttp://oumakokichi.tumblr.com/post/168624564590/okay-so-youve-mentioned-that-ouma-might-have

So imo even they barely interacted in the game, it’s interesting how we can imagined how will their interactions be together based on these infos that actually kinda hidden & needs extra attentions to find! (*sigh* Kodaka, why would you waste such a potentialinteresting pairing development T_T)

For Saihara, because at first he doesn’t look thatconfidence I think Amami want to boost Saihara’s confidence too. Like there’s amoment where he told Kaede to stop teasing Saihara, so I think Amami actuallywants to protect him too hahaa!

Also I think you should already know about dangan salmonteam ends, but Amami asking for Saihara’s help to find his sisters by going ona trip around the whole world for their whole life?? Man if that ain’t a proposalthen I dunno what it could be ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Then all of my drawings about Saioumami? Well I loves imagining their interactions, like Amami taking care of the 2 boys & doing silly things together~ But y’know, just because I ship & draw them doesn’t automatically make them canon, & even so I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t enjoy this ship! I can ship anything I want even if they’re not canon, & tbh I’m still quite confused why you’re so fixated that I should ship pairing that (probably) is canon ._.

Well I respect every ships you know, & I think it’s quiteclear that I’m a multishipper! I likeAmamatsu (they look cute together!), and I even think Amami & Toujou lookgood together! But if this is your way to forced your otp/hcs onto me, I thinkthis is not the best way to do it….. Pls don’t make other Amamatsu shipperslook bad ;_; If you hc Amamatsu or Amamias an ace I’ll totally respect it, but please respect my opinion for shipping Oumami and AmaSai too!

And I don’t think Oumami is impossible (except the factsthat they’re uh… y’know… ded) since we don’t really know how Amami & Oumawill interacted if they’re both alive & not forced to do the killing game,and for AmaSai? Hoooh boy Amami asking Saihara to go on a trip around the worldtogether for their whole life doesn’t sounds gay, suuuure ;)) But if you keep insistingthey’re impossible…. Y’know, as creators we strive to make the impossible topossible! That’s also why au and hc exist! So don’t worry, one day I’ll surely draw my hcsabout Oumami~ (╯✧∇✧)╯

Also my words doesn’t worth more than Kodaka? When I evenever forced everyone that they should ship Oumami or AmaSai…? I rarely eventalk about Oumami because I only know a few people that ships them, that’s whyI just… draw Oumami… And hoping to found more shippers… ( ´•̥̥̥ω•̥̥̥` ) Or do you think when I said I ship Oumami thenthey suddenly will become canon?! Gooosh you think too highly of me anon! >///

So that concludes it! I’m sorry if some parts are poorly worded / come off as aggressive/offensive,but I tried my best to make my wordings polite enough, and personally I thinkit’s even too polite to actually show my frustrations wwww Also rest assured, I’m not trying to attackany ships or anything!

Also anon! Wouldn’t it be nice if we just respect each otherships and headcanons? I think it’s nice enough we have interests in a samefandom, so won’t it will be really nice if we all can get along? So basically a ship DOESN’T NEED TO BE CANON, LET’S JUST SHIP WHAT WE LIKE & DON’T ATTACK OTHER PEOPLE IF WE DISLIKE THEIR SHIPS! I mean, do you think some random ship hatecoming outta nowhere will make someone’s day better? Of course not! (´；ω；`) I hope in the future there’ll be lessdiscourses about shipping because I’ll always in the stances to let peopleenjoy what make them happy (as long it’s harmless)! ^^

If you reached this far then thank you for reading my rambling! Also Oumami and AmaSai and Saioumami BANZAI!!! ＼(*ﾟ∀ﾟ*)／

#Whoa I think I thought about this more seriously than when I was doing an essay lol #Also oh boy I never thought I’ll get a hate ask about Oumami & AmaSai #I mean they’re quite the minor otp enough??#Let a lonely shipper ships will ya #tw ship hate #tw shaking #rant #new danganronpa v3 #ndrv3 spoilers #danganronpa #Ask imma!

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finsterhund · 7 years ago

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Finsterhund’s 2017 Summary of Art (and by extension, the rest of my life)

I’d be lying if I said that 2017 wasn’t an incredibly difficult year for the easily excitable finsterhund but it was also a very productive year for my art. I’m not going to deny that. A lot of issues came about that pushed me really hard, and I did break, but I mended too. I grew stronger in some ways. My writing took a nosedive and I’m not sure how to repair that, but my art, well... this is the first time I’ve ever done one of these. That should speak for itself.

In some months it was difficult to pick which one. I decided against choosing ones that may have been partially rotoscoped (such as my reaction images and most memes) and also because I tend to draw too similar to reference images I use. So no redraws of blurry HoD concept art or stuff.

January: [x]

This was supposed to be the picture for holidays 2016 but I’m a lazy earth boy who must’ve been slacking off because I finished and posted it right on January first! I remember at the time I was really proud of this one, and spent a lot of time on it. It was drawn traditionally and then scanned and digitized in GIMP... yes gimp. Fishy loved it and that made me happy. Nowadays I can pick apart so many flaws, especially in Andy. The lines look so shaky! Maybe I’ll redraw it for January 1st 2018! Assuming I don’t slack off again.

February: [x]

It was hard picking one from this month because I didn’t really like my drawings from then. Here’s art in paint of Red Spot eating a burger. I used to draw him with food when I was hungry for a while. Mmmmmm borger.

March: [x]

This is the month things started to take a nosedive. There was lots of good things happening, but some bad stuff too. A few new problems arose, but at the time the biggest was I found out my birth mom was being evicted and I would have to help her clear the old house. THAT old house. I retreated heavily into my artistic comforts and drew a lot of pictures of Red Spot being comforting and supportive to Andy. Red was created for that purpose after all, and Andy being a character I so closely identify with ended up being the comfort I needed especially then. Despite its crudeness in ms paint I do love this picture and should redraw it in Sai at some point.

April: [x]

The trials I had to face were unreal this month. The Wannabe War(tm) is well underway, and the time to return to the old house rapidly approached. I drew like there was no tomorrow, and these paint pictures were the best. Smoother lines, and more detail. When the time came to face that house things got ugly. Mom hid that my dog Jack had been dead for over half a year and broke the news only when I became distraught when I arrived and he didn’t come when I called him. My fixation on the “monkey’s paw” that was ruining everything I ever wished for started around here, and I kept breaking down. Bad regressing back to before I left that place happened. But something else did too. I DIDN’T. STOP. DRAWING. I drew more and more. Choosing to bring my laptop allowed me to make more pictures. A lot of Red Spot and Andy comfort ones, some mean little immature vent comics, and memes. Lots of memes. I was able to do the job I went there to do and returned home exhausted but VICTORIOUS. My art? Well I think I actually improved a lot then. It was predominantly due to surviving in spite of everything and the sheer volume of cruddy little paint drawings. I didn’t want to pick a mean comic and already had one ms paint Andy and Red picture in this line up so here’s a surprisingly detailed xenomorph queen being licked by a prequel era character who is a massive spoiler. Not only were both characters very complicated to draw, but I’m genuinely shocked I was able to draw an xenomorph at all.

May: [x]

After the painful embarrassment of April I tried really hard to relax. I was still really scared and anxious about the Wannabe incident, but it had more or less turned into a post-arms race stalemate where he wasn’t really doing anything and I just had my weapons of mass destruction pointed at him with my grubby little orange paw over the launch button which is where things have been ever since. My art took a relaxation break, but it was still steadily getting better. Late May I wanted to come up with a reason to actually celebrate my birthday (June 3rd) so I did a silly little “June is International Heart of Darkness month” post featuring Red and Andy sharing a slice of chocolate cake. I went on to say that June 3rd was “International draw heart of darkness fan art” day (real smooth you egocentric mutt) but I thought it’d be a good way to actually celebrate the day but make it about the video game that gave me a reason to live another year instead of about me aging, as I openly hate that I grow older.

June: [x]

A few of my friends drew HoD stuff this month, but a lot of my friends were busy due to jobs, school, life, etc. We used to be a lot more active in 2015 and even in 2016 so this did hit me pretty hard. As a result, I become very frustrated and out of spite decide it’s finally time to test my “new toy.” I don’t remember when Kale actually gave me his old tablet, but in June I finally install its drivers, get a copy of paint tool sai, and draw a lot with it. At first I hate these pictures and go back to paint whenever possible. There’s something wrong with my copy of sai and windows 10 doesn’t like the drivers. But I push myself, and I start to make more pictures of Andy, Whisky, Red Spot, etc. Not a lot of my early Sai pictures ever got posted or even made it past the inking stage, but one night I just couldn’t sleep so I drew Andy cradled in the crook of Red’s wing and got it to the flat colors stage.

July: [x]

I try to calm down. it’s a good month I think. Not much happens. It’s the month I finally give myself a new fursona. I decided that Red Spot isn’t “me” and I can’t use Andy in furry communities so I come up with a solution. It... it’s just Andy as a doberman. It’s a little orange doberman that wears a red bandanna and Andy’s hat... Doberman Andy. But he’s cute, and I can draw him, and so I do draw him. And he helps me get better at drawing in Sai.

August: [x]

The month of the solar eclipse! Me and my friend were going to go down to the US to see it together and... nope... that plan fell through. It makes me a brat, but that’s okay because I can just draw six hundred thousand drawings of Andy. That’ll help me feel better. I ended up having a sabbatical from my blog after some people on tumblr began to bother me and I put up a drawing of Andy’s shoe so nobody could go in. This is an MS Paint picture! Sadly, I’ve stopped really drawing in the program. I like how I did Andy’s face even if his hat and hair weren’t the best.

September: [x]

I return from my sabbatical and begin to spam my tumblr with Andy drawings I’m making in paint tool sai. The quality and style of Andy in these pictures varies drastically as I try a whole manner of new things. At one point I make a post that has five color pictures of Andy in it. It’s slowly becoming difficult to pick which picture I wanted to put here. Not because I didn’t like any, but because I liked too many. SMOL Andy was probably my favourite of the bunch. I made him more chibi and cute than I normally do. It was on accident but I thought he was too cute to go back and make him more on-model.

October: [x]

I was supposed to do an Andy version of Inktober but I guess the extreme amount of Andy pictures was a September thing because I burned out relatively quickly. I had some drama involving a prototype disc and also ended up having to pay way too much extra money every month until further notice but it’s a relatively calm month all things considering. The way I drew Andy in this art isn’t particularly stellar, but I love what I did with Red’s mouth and nose. I wanted to show that the way I draw Red improved too.

November: [x]

My chronic pain gets worse for no good reason, I get a very disturbing creeper threatening me online, and I’m generally depressed, but I’m drawing. That’s good. I start a new revolutionary technique when I rely almost entirely on the cinematics as reference and don’t reference other cartoon styles whenever I can when it comes to drawing Andy. I enjoy the result. Drawing him in a cute penguin-themed suit made my day. It was so hard to decide which one to pick this month. I loved so many of them.

December: [x]

Like November, but somewhat better I think. I’m still drawing Andy a lot, with Red coming along for the ride too. This one I tried to draw Andy in a more Disney-like style. I love how I did his face and freckles. The drawing of Whisky from the same post is great too. I look at a lot of my newer drawings and feel genuinely pleased with the result. I think I actually am improving, and whilst I think it is due a lot to getting sai and a tablet, it can also be because I’m becoming more skilled and getting more practice as well. Lets hope the new year brings us smooth sailing, lots of fun, and happy times our way. HoD will be 20 in 2018 and I’m ready to bring the subject of my love and joy a great two decade celebration.

#summary of art #2017 summary of art #my art #long post

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ihfsttinuf · 8 years ago

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Screw It, I’m Making a Webcomic

So, as I made it abundantly clear on Twitter mere moments ago, I have a real honest-to-Glob New Year’s Resolution for 2017.

I am going to create a webcomic.

I am going to write a sequential art narrative which I will draw and provide various artistic accoutrements to and post it on the Internet. This is going to happen by the end of this year. I am doing this.

Perhaps this sudden outburst and declaration of artistic intent seems a bit out of left field, both in its overtones of grandiosity and relative lack of context given what most of you guys know about me. So let me provide some of that much needed context, both to show you why I am doing this and what I am really saying, which is probably even more ambitious (and maybe pretentious) than you think it is.

I’ve been writing weird little stories and drawing accompanying illustrations for them since I was a wean, as most of us did at that age, but since that point I’ve never really stopped. At a very young age I encountered not only excellent children’s books ranging from the charming and heartwarming to the downright mind-bending—Peter Sís and Henrik Drescher were big in my household—but also illustrated works whose contents and subtext were far too old for me yet entranced me nonetheless, particularly the works of the great New England illustrator and satirist Edward Gorey. By the age of six or seven, I had memorised “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” and would recite it with morbid glee to anyone who would ask (or didn’t). I discovered books through Gorey’s cover illustrations, first accidentally discovering the alternate history genre through his work on Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite series, and was only drawn deeper into John Bellairs’ junior Gothics when I discovered that Gorey had provided the frontispiece and dust jacket to every one of the entries in the series he’d written up to his death—which I mourned, with a mix of vague incomprehension, sorrow, and creeping disappointment. I was eight at the time.

Parallel to this, I spent a lot of time at my town’s local art centre, which provided free classes in all sorts of artistic endeavours. I took most to theatre and improv in particular—I was a wee ham; now I am a large ham—but what stuck with me was drawing and, to a lesser extent, animation. As I fixated on Gorey’s superficial techniques and aesthetics, the simple sunken eyes and odd little triangular noses, I’d also more subtly acquired his less obvious techniques: The way he used cross-hatching and simple, intense linework to suggest different textures entranced me, and indeed still does. I am told that a very strict art teacher, who I thought disliked me and of whom I was somewhat afraid, freely admitted that a sketch I’d done of a horned figure playing a flute on a rooftop by the light of the moon had taken her breath away.

Which is not to say that I was, or am, some prodigy of form, or that I lacked for more prosaic influences. The former, I will get to, but the latter is best expressed in the fact that a recurring scene which I have since revised and transfigured many, many times began life as... well, thinly veiled Darkwing Duck fanfiction, minus the duck part, given a sound twist of Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter”. I was maybe eleven or so at the time.

It was in one of these classes that this weird little scene deep beneath a ruined graveyard was born. It was also there that I made plans for an elaborate series of beast fables, set in a world quite unlike our own.

It is perhaps worth noting that one of the handful of these early sketches which sticks in y mind to this day was a tale of two young male lizards falling in love only to be torn apart by a disapproving society. Even at an age when I was functionally unaware of homosexuality and bemused or outright repulsed by what I knew of sex, a queer romance was perhaps the most emotionally intense thing that I had conceived of up to that point. But I digress.

The setting in question and certain characters in it would perennially re-emerge in my other writing, which I was quite certain would be my career path throughout late elementary and middle school. In seventh grade, I was part of an experimental programme where middle and high school students were allowed to enrol in a creative writing course at a nearby university. Only two students wound up attending: Myself, and a classmate of mine who had skipped a grade and would later become known in my high school as something of a mad and insufferable genius. (We got on pretty well.) After several semesters of studying poetry and short fiction, there was a presentation. One of the selections I made for my reading was a list-poem, from the perspective of an older character trying to live day by day with the memory of his deceased wife hanging over him, with the distinction that the final entry was a reminder to keep his claws neatly filed.

It was around that time that I began to come under the influence of Thomas Ligotti, and it was with this exposure to the refiner’s fire of such elegant horror—the kind that brought the same sort of visions into my mind that Gorey brought to the page—that I realised what form my true opus should take, at least in plot. I took it with me into high school, and beyond into the wilderness of these past six-and-a-half years of confusion. The polestar of this mad endeavour formed here.

I had been thinking a lot about epic high fantasy at the time—I was eleven when The Return of the King hit theatres, and I had read enough in the genre and in styles adjacent to it to be aware of the tropes—and it occurred to me that the moral framework and cosmology of a lot of such works rang a bit hollow to me, not because right and wrong did not exist, as certainly people do good and bad things to one another all the time, but because there was always this sense of certainty that the side one was meant to root for was indubitably in the right and some great objective force of Good deemed it so, blessing their struggle against a force similarly ordained by some great objective Evil. It was that last dimension which particularly irked me. It felt reassuring in the most painfully reductive and philosophically trite way possible. And so often the battles were so... literal. I never much cared for war films to begin with, and by putting such struggles in a fantastical framework, you subtracted the one thing that made war films kind of neat: The recognition that these were people doing the fighting and the killing. Not symbols, people.

Very middle school analysis, yes, and unfair to some things I quite enjoy, Tolkien included, but the ultimate conclusions were the important part.

Which is where Ligotti comes in. Much has been made of his non-fiction opus The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, but in terms of his philosophy and its influence on my thinking at the time, I’d rather stick to his fiction, as that was what I was reading and that is what made me. In brief, Ligotti is not a reassuring writer. The universe of his stories reflects his views of our own, which are, in essence, a wholesale rejection of the commonly held notion that human consciousness and life in general are good things that we should all be even remotely enthused about, instead proposing that the very idea that we are aware of ourselves and that we should think of ourselves as individuals for whom some higher power might just be watching out is more likely an obscene and sadistic joke on that hypothetical power’s part or else, more likely, a horrible accident. His stories are filled with personal totems and surreal motifs, the fates of his characters determined by blind chance or the detached malicious prankstery of a party with whom they cannot bargain or reason, the sadistic frenzies of Poe’s maniacal villain-protagonists writ large, often on a cosmic scale. There is the feel of a nightmare and yet also of the sleepless hours after, alone in the dark, thinking, where wakefulness and dream bleed between one another and all the world is a nightmare to which the hells of sleep might well be preferable.

If I’ve lost you, well, I’m sorry; but you and I probably have something to talk about if your first reaction to all this was, “I’ve certainly had *those* days.”

And if you’ve had enough of those days, the rest probably follows easily enough.

Wouldn’t it be interesting, I thought, if one took that quest narrative key to so many epic fantasies, and put it through a world where the rules of the game were so utterly reversed? If our well-meaning hero—of course, as in Tolkien, basically some poor backwater schmo, by no means stupid nor necessarily naïve but very, *very* far from the classical man of virtue—were to bear with him some artefact of power that could, perhaps by its very existence, rend the veil of normalcy that should keep all of the sane and happy citizens of this world from confronting what writhes beneath all that they see, what might he choose to do with it, particularly if he were, say, by some inexplicable invisible bond, *tied* to it?

Now, what makes a fitting antagonist for such a tale? What sort of character provides the ideal foil for a kind-hearted soul confronted with all the horrors of what may be in a neat little package? Rather than some cosmic sadist intent on throwing us all under the bus, why not something a bit scarier: Another kind-hearted soul. Someone who has seen behind the veil their whole life. Someone who has seen the truth and the agony of this world and seeks nothing less than perfect closure

And there it was.

And then it began to get complicated.

For every character that I created to flesh out the story, another came into being, and I wanted to know more about them. A side-plot salvaged from some other silly project merged seamlessly into the new whole, and suddenly there were whole new plots, full of new characters with motives that I wanted to understand. Characters grew, changed, lightened and darkened as my thoughts steeped. Exposure to other writers through classes and forums and variably disastrous shared writing projects made me realise what I did and did not know, what I could and could not do.

It was also in high school that I began taking music seriously, first toying around in Garageband and singing in the school choir and then as part of a band with several close friends. I wrote a lot of poetry, and I sang a bit, so we had lyrics; I still drew sometimes, so we had art when we needed it, although we rarely needed it. I was always ambitious with my lyrics: One of our most successful songs was structured to simulate one character murdering another during a snowstorm in a glade where they had played and hidden as a child. Morbid character studies were common; I was always taking grim little vacations in people’s heads, my own or otherwise. Informed by my middle school studies of haibun and my lyrical adventures, my prose grew more experimental, collapsing into poems or switching into strange persons and tenses. My mind was full of images, yet where to go with them?

My path to sequential art was an odd and rocky one. As mentioned, I loved picture books and illustrated stories as a child, and while I failed to touch upon them earlier (mea culpa!), Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side were pretty important in their own right. I even attempted to create something of a running series at around the time I was in that poetry programme, mainly for the amusement of myself and a very affable art teacher who found the premise amusing. It was only a year or two later that I would read Doom Patrol—the first superhero comic that I would ever admit to liking, and still one of the chosen few—and realise that Grant Morrison, the bastard, had stolen my idea before I’d even been born: Of killing one’s own imaginary friend, only to be tormented by their vengeful spectre years after the fact at the least appropriate of times.

But the comic idea sort of fell by the wayside for the longest time, for the simple reason that I am, to my own mind, an atrocious draughtsman. I cannot reproduce figures to save my life. Hilarious, seeing as I can draw you a teeming alien cityscape, or a perfectly detailed mosquito in flames, but in terms of doing the same thing twice, I’ve spent years hanging my head in shame and self-loathing.

The secret is, though, not that I couldn’t learn this, but that for such a long time, pride had kept me from allowing myself to be bad at things until I was good. As someone to whom a lot of fairly complex ideas just come naturally, someone who just absorbs information like a souped-up Dyson vacuum, the idea of having to draw the same damned thing ten thousand times just to get decent at drawing that same damned thing was a horrifying prospect. It still is.

I got pushed into it. My own fictions put a knife to my throat and told me, “This is what needs to happen.” But it took two different interconnected experiences to understand how, both courtesy of my boyfriend being a huge dork.

The first was his recommendation that I read LAMEZINE 02, at that time the latest salvo from the wonderfully deranged comic artist Cate Wurtz, then going by the moniker Partydog; the second was his use of a Bec Noir avatar on a forum we’re both on, which got me to finally bite the bullet and read Homestuck.

Wurtz’ Lamezone comics are a trip. Her art style is by most technical standards fairly primitive, but it’s a very *refined* jankiness, part and parcel to her overall embrace of scuzzy punk ‘zine aesthetics, immediately recognisable and all-around immediate. Her approach to story and tone is just the same, at once surreal and ridiculous and incredibly emotionally potent, ranging in tone from giddy B-movie absurdity to crushing Carver-esque sorrow, composed of as many little side-stories that flesh out what sort of world these characters live in as of its “meat” and all the better for it. The way that her comics are often framed only adds to the ambience: DVD menus of hit TV series that never existed, tales from the everyday lives of people living on the precipice of madness (and/or suburban Kansas), the wild Lynchian adventures of a man who talks to the spirit of the good ol’ USA through Twitter while traipsing through other people’s comics and the comment sections on furry porn sites. She was even working on a video game at one point about a woman trying to battle her way through deformed iterations of her past selves while maintaining a sufficient ganja supply. I have no idea if that’s still happening. It looked awesome.

Homestuck has already had much said about it, so I’ll keep it brief. Comparisons to Pynchon are not unwarranted. It takes the hypertextual potential of the webcomic to the next level, and is longer than many novel series. The art is, quite intentionally, all over the place, and uses collage surprisingly effectively. The story is a beautiful mess that is, fundamentally, about the process of storytelling and how “things that happen” become “stories” in the first place. It’s very oblique about this, and generally quite funny.

And so I looked to the story I was writing.

I looked at the multiple plotlines growing out of one another, intersecting, snakes devouring their tails, thematic parallels on parallels, spirals of mental imagery with bits of torn wallpaper making the fabric of waistcoats and cathedrals made out of lines of scripture and trees bearing watches like fruit, and I went: “This should be a comic! A hypercomic, in fact, McLuhan-style! This should be a wondrous blend of visuals and text and...

“I...

“I can’t draw. Fuck me. I should stick to prose, like a good loser. Get rejected that way instead.”

So I waffled. For months. And then for years.

But you know what?

I’m done waffling.

Limitation is power in its own right. Ever since I learned of Oulipo in that long-ago three-person poetry class, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of innovation through defining what you cannot do, or what you must do, no matter what. Of forcing yourself to start from a set place or end at one, no ifs, ands or buts.

I am limited. Within that, I am omnipotent.

I am going to draw this comic. I am going to write it and I am going to draw it even if it starts out looking like total shit and the process drives me half-insane. If things that I love, in sequential art but also in music and painting and writing and animation and all sorts of other forms, can make a perceived deficit into a key strength, I can do it, too. Even if I can’t be a classical master, I can be the best at that crazy thing I do.

I guess this is also my grandiose way of saying “fuck last year,” where I made so much progress that felt so thwarted by external circumstances and my own failings, and where so much went wrong for so many of us. So I’m embracing this year as a year of progress. Even if everything else sucks, I’ll be running up that hill.

And just so there’s no mistaking it, I will still be making music and probably writing at least a smidgen of prose fiction and poetry on the side. In the former category, I might even start a band.

Oh, wait. We’re not doing half-measures any more.

I’m starting a band, too.

Tell your friends.

Happy 2017, everyone, and have a lovely rest of your night.

#Writings #my artwork #New Year's resolutions #important #rant #so many words my laird #DOING THE ART #comics #so many tags

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roughand · 7 years ago

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The Last Jedi

Things I enjoyed

Rey

I liked Rey a lot in this movie. I thought Daisy Ridley gave a strong performance, and she really made me feel her frustration and exasperation. I liked the nuance she brought to her scenes with Ben, and I liked what a good no-bullshit foil she was for Luke. I don’t have a lot to say because I liked pretty much everything she did, even when she was stuck in a less-than-good scene.

Rey’s Parentage

I didn’t mind that Rey’s parents were nobodies. It’s kind of nice, because for the last 20 years Star Wars as a franchise has been obsessed with the Skywalkers, to the point that they’ve become this narrative trump-card, and in any conflict it’s only a matter of time before one of them turns up and performs some heroic feat using the Force. I don’t love the fact that Rey is both super powerful AND innately skilled (as it robs her journey of some much needed conflict), but I do at least like the fact that she’s not a Skywalker, and can hopefully explore her own path.

Ben Solo

Adam Driver is excellent in the role, and brings a lot of menace and tension to the scene whenever he’s on screen. I don’t love the narrative decision to make him the Big Bad for the next movie, but at the very least he’s doing good things with the material they are giving him. I liked his conflict, I liked his interactions with Rey, and I liked his insane lack of control toward the end. He’s a very finely-crafted character.

Ben’s reason for turning to the Dark Side

I thought this moment, where Luke senses the growing darkness and Snoke’s corruption in Ben and briefly turns his lightsaber on, was perfect. It was such a raw moment that fit into what we knew about both characters. Luke is rash and impulsive, he always has been. Ben Solo is clearly hurting from wounds and rejections we don’t fully understand yet, but we can see the emotional scars. It makes sense for Luke to peer over the precipice but ultimately back down from killing Ben, just like it makes sense for Ben to feel a powerful sense of betrayal, and to carry that rage and hatred for a very long time. This was excellent characterization, and one of the few moments where I felt the movie (or really, the new trilogy) had strong and good ideas about what happened to Luke/Leia/Han post-ROTJ.

Ben & Rey

I liked the weird Force-connection that let them interact with each other, even if it was ultimately revealed to have been one of Snoke’s ploys. But the two are the most talented actors in the production, so giving them a chance to play off each other is a good idea. Plus, this introduced an aspect of the Force that, while new, didn’t feel too out of line with what we’d already known.

The destruction of the Dreadnought above D’Qar

This fight had the benefit of being at the start of the movie, which meant you couldn’t be sure how any of it would play out. We don’t know if Poe will get shot down and captured, or crash on some strange planet, or be sent hurtling into space. Maybe the attack will succeed, maybe it will fail horribly, maybe there will be heavy losses on both sides. It’s all possible, and made for exciting action.

They also did a good job with minor characters like Rose’s sister, and giving them small stories to engage the audience without putting the protagonists in any serious danger. They did well to flesh out these supporting characters, because their deaths were more impactful, and their struggles more tense.

In comparison, look at the fight on Crait. As visually appealing as parts of it were, the outcome was a foregone conclusion--Luke had to sacrifice himself in a grand way to (1) bring hope back to the galaxy, (2) help the Rebels escape, and (3) inspire Rey. The only people left in that bunker were the main cast and a handful of extras. It was pretty clear that everyone had to make it out alive, and that Luke/Rey would be the ones to do it. That meta-knowledge robbed the sequence of a lot of the dramatic weight it should have had.

The destruction of Snoke’s ship

This was right up there with the Star Destroyer crashing into the Super Star Destroyer in ROTJ. In fact, it was probably better. There was a lot of very visceral visuals throughout, and the silence of the initial explosion was perfect.

BB-H8

He didn’t overstay his welcome, and even though it was preposterous to think that the First Order troops wouldn’t notice BB-8’s disguise, I liked that they had him noticed by one of his own kind. Given that the weird droids are always a fixation for Star Wars, this felt very much true to the universe.

The fight with Snoke’s guards

I enjoyed this because it was a good lightsaber fight-scene that didn’t go all CG like the prequels, but still had more finesse and interesting fight choreography than all the fights in the originals. Plus, seeing Ben and Rey fight together (as opposed to against each other), and help each other out occasionally, was a nice subversion of expectations.

The Kylo Ren/General Hux rivalry

As I’ll mention below, the humor was often something I didn’t enjoy about the movie, but the Kylo/Hux rivalry always felt very entertaining. It never got too cartoonish, but consistently reminded us that Hux is more than just a putz and that there’s no love lost between the two characters. It was effective at what it set out to do, and entertaining in the process.

The spaceship-that-was-actually-an-iron

This was a great cut late in the movie, reminiscent of the bit in Raiders of the Lost arc where the scary villain has the girl tied up and captive and he starts unpacking what looks like some sort of sadistic torture device...only for it to actually be a coathanger for his heavy leather coat. This is the kind of humor that fits a bit better with the tone, and fleshes out the world in ways that feel realistic.

Things I was unimpressed by

Much of the humour

Including:

Luke flicking the invisible lint off his shoulder after the AT-AT barrage

Luke milking the alien

Luke tickling Rey with the leaf

Poe taunting Hux about his mom

Finn wandering around in the suit leaking water (felt very “JJ Abrams Star Trek Kirk wandering around with the swelling disease)

I’m not averse to comedy (see my list of things I enjoyed for several comedic moments that worked), but a lot of this felt like it was from a different movie. Luke has never been a jokester, he’s always been almost painfully earnest. MARK HAMILL, on the other hand, is a funny weird guy with a huge personality...but that’s not Luke. I’m happy for Hamill and Fisher to get roles that are more in line with their real-world personalities, but at the same time Hamill’s performance especially didn’t read as the Luke we knew.

The rest of the comedy, particularly from Poe/Finn, but also from Chewbacca and the Porgs, just feels like it’s targeted to the child audience consuming this. It’s cheesy and doesn’t feel fresh, nor does it vibe with the rest of the film.

The stupid Jedi Tree and the stupid Jedi Texts

Ugh, so like, I don’t enjoy the way the sequels (TFA & TLJ) have handled the idea of Jedi in a post-ROTJ world. My biggest issue here is that the Force isn’t going away. It’s still there, and people will still be born who can control it. The little slave-boy Force-pulling his broom is evidence of that. So this idea that “Luke is the last jedi and everyone’s forgotten about the Jedi (again) and they might disappear for good” is just preposterous. The Force is like magic in Harry Potter. Lots of people are born with the ability to use it, and they’re gonna cause a lot of problems (and draw a lot of attention to themselves) unless someone helps them to learn to use it safely. So I just find it hard to buy that the Jedi are constantly at risk of dying out and being completely forgotten (again) despite the fact that people all over the fucking galaxy are clearly being born with Force abilities.

Then there’s just this whole idea that Luke would somehow become so slavishly devoted to the IDEA of the Jedi that he’d squirrel himself and the last remaining Jedi texts away on some planet. I mean, the most obvious thing here is that if Luke thought the Jedi were so dangerous and that they shouldn’t continue to exist, then he should have just killed himself and burned the books years ago. Keeping them in that silly tree (when you have a perfectly good mountain temple complex which no doubt offers better protection from the elements) was just a needlessly contrived set-up for Yoda to burn it down later.

Captain Phasma

Man, Captain Phasma seemed like she’d be such a cool character before TFA--Brienne of Tarth as a badass unique chrome stormtrooper! But now after two movie’s she’s done ZERO interesting things, and instead has had her ass handed to her embarrassingly by Finn twice now. And not even in a “wow that was satisfying to see David beat Goliath with ingenuity and skill” but rather in a “wow, is Phasma THAT useless that she can’t fight off this spaz?” Phasma became more of a punchline than anything when she showed up on screen because there’s zero threat to the character. She’s never done anything exciting or dastardly or shocking or intimidating. She just looks menacing because her armor is shiny and everyone else’s is matte.

The Dark Side cave on Ahch-To

I understand the point of this scene--Rey is who matters, not her parentage. It’s her own self she should be worried about, and exploring, and which poses the most potential for greatness or terrible things. But ultimately it felt very out of place in the film because it lacked the overt connections to Rey’s wider arc that Luke’s same experience in the Dark Side cave on Dagobah had. Luke goes into the cave and we, the audience, know that Vader is his antagonist, and that Luke is deeply afraid of him. Having Vader in the cave was fantastic, because it makes us question what’s real--is Vader here or is Luke fighting his own fears? And then to have Luke defeat Vader, and remove the mask to find his own face (shades of The Prisoner) was excellent foreshadowing for the eventual reveal that Vader was Luke’s father, and that perhaps what Luke should fear most is himself. They packed a lot of narrative heft into Luke’s cave sequence. Rey’s, in contrast, didn’t seem to advance anything we didn’t already know, or have reason to suspect, and there was no subtlety revealed during the rest of the movie, no moment where suddenly Rey’s experience in the cave was cast in a new light. As a result, it just felt ancillary and unnecessary.

The Porgs

The Porgs were cute...and then immediately overused. It’s hard to introduce a character or race, and then make them feel oversaturated so quickly, but TLJ succeeded in that mission. I don’t hate the Porgs, but everytime one appeared on screen it felt like the film was directly interacting with a younger audience, and I was no longer part of that experience.

Luke Skywalker’s character/storyline

Right off the bat, I didn’t buy the backstory that Luke went into seclusion after what happened with Ben. It feels very much like JJ Abrams said “I want my movie to be about everyone looking for Luke!” but then no one since has been able to come up with a plausible reason for Luke to abandon everything the way he did. It’s one thing for me to assume that YOUNG Luke is incredibly short-sighted and rash, but JEDI MASTER Luke should have already learned a lot of the lessons that Yoda taught him in TLJ. I mean, the whole “learning from failure thing” is pretty much what he learned at the end of Empire Strikes Back. It just goes back to that idea that if your plot relies on your characters acting like idiots for it to work, then you need to do some re-writes.

Consider that when Luke visited Dagobah and Yoda acted weird at first, it was because Yoda was testing Luke. Luke came there looking for a great warrior to train him to fight, and Yoda needed to disabuse him of those notions before he could actually start training him. Yoda’s shtick was just that--a false persona intended to see how Luke would react, and to expose his faulty assumptions about what it means to be a Jedi.

But when Rey visits Luke on Ahch-To, he’s a dick to her because he doesn’t WANT to teach her. Again, this just doesn’t seem like Luke’s style. He’s an idealist, he’s someone who sees the good in everyone. It’s why he couldn’t bring himself to kill Ben, so it beggars belief that he would so callously refuse to train Rey. Moreover, it was a huge contrivance (more on that later) that Luke had “withdrawn from the Force” because that’s never really been how that works, but also because that was only a thing so Luke wouldn’t sense the fact that Rey and Ben were in contact. Like, it didn’t make sense for Luke to have not been touching the Force all these years, and it doesn’t make sense that he wouldn’t be able to detect the presence of someone like Ben. But again, the plot wouldn’t have worked unless Luke’s entire character is fundamentally altered so that he’s a crotchety recluse who lacks the Force-awareness even characters like Leia seem to have.

No chance to process the events on Snoke’s ship

There is a total lack of Rey processing what happened on Snoke’s ship in the script. One minute she and Ben are literally tearing apart Luke’s lightsaber after they’ve turned on each other, and seconds earlier they killed a dozen elite First Order Guards after Ben executed Supreme Leader Snoke, who moments before had been torturing Rey. And the next minute Rey’s on the Falcon, with Chewie, shooting at TIE Fighters and seeming totally chill. There was zero time to process the impact of everything that happened to her, and given that the whole reason she went to Snoke’s ship was to save Ben, it beggars belief that she’d be so cavalier after having him reject her so spectacularly.

Holdo

I love Laura Dern, and she did a fine job with the limited material she was given (ugh, that “may the For--” “oh i’m sorry, you go” “no you go!” exchange with Leia was cheeseball to the extreme), but there were three elements of Holdo’s character that didn’t make a lot of sense:

Why not tell people, or at least Poe, that she still had a plan, that the transport ships weren’t just going to fly randomly into space but that she had a destination in mind? Instead, Holdo, who seemed very capable, suddenly seems like she’s ok with letting mutiny foment on her watch because….why? She thinks Poe is a flyboy? It wasn’t good leadership, and she could still have inspired hope without seeming like she was without a plan. How is acting like everyone’s probably going to die an inspiring approach for a leader to take?

Why was Holdo, who is ostensibly a brilliant, seasoned, compassionate general, the ONLY PERSON who can fly the cruiser’s suicide mission? Surely there was a low-level tech or even a droid for god’s sake who could have done it? Her death seemed to exist to ensure there was a “heroic sacrifice” moment for the rebellion, which felt very contrived and not authentic.

Why did Holdo wait so long before kamikaze-ing!? I can understand that due to the magic of editing less time may have passed from her perspective than the audience’s (as we are cutting back and forth to simultaneous action elsewhere), but we still watch Holdo sitting there while at LEAST 3-5 rebel transports get destroyed before she decides to ram Snoke’s ship. Like, she KNEW she was going to die on the cruiser, so why not ram Snoke immediately, or at least after he destroyed the first transport? Holdo standing there and looking stricken and helpless while the rebels are getting shot like fish in a barrel felt almost comical. It was so obvious that she had to ram the ship that it was frustrating that the plot forced her to wait so long.

The Knights of Ren

Someone else pointed this out online, but: where are the Knights of Ren? What is that? Why introduce it if it’s never mentioned again? Will these guys ever crop up? How do they fit into Ben Solo’s backstory?

Luke’s other students

Yet again we get a mention that Ben Solo left Luke’s academy with a few students he had turned to his cause (or, presumably, who Snoke had turned to his cause). What happened to them? How come Luke isn’t torn up about them, too?

Things I really disliked

Let’s start with a bunch of little things that really bugged me:

Ackbar dying offscreen

Ackbar is one of the most iconic characters from the original films (at least to fans) and he deserved a bit more than being killed offscreen. He could easily have been one of the many ship captains that Holdo watched go down with their ships via hologram as they were picked off one-by-one. Using him that way would really have upped the stakes as we watched a beloved character from the original film die in a heroic but senseless way.

Luke throwing his father’s lightsaber away

Yeah, this was very out-of-character for Luke. That lightsaber must hold a LOT of significance and memories for him. To see him toss it away so callously just felt like people wanted a funny beat to end the scene on more than they wanted to stay true to the character. It didn’t ruin the movie for me, but it definitely IMMEDIATELY gave me the sense that they didn’t have a good handle on Luke’s character.

The New Republic falling so easily

In The Force Awakens, it is heavily implied that the galaxy is relatively peaceful place and the remnants of the Empire have retreated into obscurity. Admittedly, I’m not as well versed in the SW political structure as I used to be, a quick google search confirms that as recently as 6 years prior to The Force Awakens, there was still a galactic senate looking after things. Given that’s the same New Republic senate that gets destroyed by Starkiller Base in The Force Awakens, it makes you wonder how easy it is to take over a galaxy? Like, right now any kind of large scale continental invasion is prohibitively complicated and costly. Similarly, subjugating literally dozens of worlds is not a cheap, fast, or simple affair. It’s quite time-consuming, and requires extraordinary resources. It seems rather convenient that the Imperial Remnant could build up such a devastating fleet without the New Republic noticing, but also improbable that any Imperial Fleet could immediately establish control over the WHOLE GALAXY (remember, no one answers Leia’s distress call at the end of TLJ) by blowing up ONE planet.

It reminded me of late-period Game of Thrones where characters would just stab each other and “take” that person’s power. GoT spent almost 4 seasons demonstrating that it didn’t work that way--stab the man at the top and you might find yourself with no power and surrounded by enemies--only to do an about face in the last three seasons on that point. TLJ felt like it did the same thing. We’re told the galaxy is huge, and full of different planets and species and people, but then the First Order blows up one planet and everyone falls into line? Way too convenient.

The slave kids on Canto Bight

Is it just me or does the SW franchise seem to present a really happy-go-lucky depiction of child slavery? Anakin and Shmee’s enslavement to Watto was frequently played for laughs, even the bit when Anakin was giggling about the explosive device planted in his and his mother’s brains that would detonate and kill them if they tried to run away.

Similarly, Rose and Finn stumble upon these slave-kids who are forced to care for alien race horses, and they save the bulk of their sympathy...for the horses? Like, I get it, animals in captivity are sad and we want to free them...but there were literal child slaves there that Rose and Finn did not seem in any way concerned by.

Like, when the one kid presses the button to free the horses all I could think was “Man, he’s probably going to get whipped to death for that! Why don’t Rose and Finn seem to care?” The fact that the movie KEPT RETURNING to them, too, felt a bit odd. These kids are enslaved on a pleasure planet that caters to rich arms dealers, and based on how the casino treats the alien-horses, I can’t imagine they treat their child-slaves much better.

So that just took me out of whatever scene the kids appeared in.

The bad dialogue

There were so many moments were the film was clearly going for some kind of iconic, powerful line (like ESB’s “Do or do not, there is no try.”) but fell miserably short. The ones that spring to mind:

The repetitions of “We are the spark that will light the fire that will burn down the first order.” It got cheesier with each person who said it.

Poor Rose got some of the worst lines:

“I want to smash this lousy beautiful city to pieces”

“Finn, we’ll never win by fighting what we hate, we’ll win by saving what we love…*dies*”

Captain Phasma’s “No! Don’t kill them quickly. Make it painful”made me groan AUDIBLY. It was such movie-speak for “Don’t hurt them! Let them escape!”

Anytime a character discussed hope and whether it was all gone, or how much was left, and who had it, and who didn’t, and oh it’s back, and hey here’s this Force-sensitive slave-kid he’s got hope too now because of his decoder ring

Any of the “yee-haw that’s one hell of a pilot” type lines from Poe or Finn.

Now for some more substantive problems:

Leia’s resurrection and Force-propelled spaceflight

This bothered me on a bunch of levels:

This would have been a good send-off for Leia. She got a lot of good moments in with Poe prior to Ben’s attack, and she really drove home the idea of how important it is for Poe to learn to be a leader. That would have been an excellent time for her death, as it would catalyze those last words to Poe, and make them really mean something. Instead, she comes back and snickers with Holdo at how thick Poe is. It’s not bad, it’s just a missed opportunity that became disappointing.

The movie seemed to care about, but then immediately stop caring about, Ben’s relationship with Leia. As far as Ben knows, Leia dies when that other TIE pilot blows up the bridge, but we never see Ben reacting to either her “death” or her resurrection (which he doubtless should have been able to sense through the Force). Leia sensed Han’s death, so shouldn’t Ben have sensed the massive amount of Force energy Leia must have used?

This was one of several scenes where I found myself asking “What the fuck are the rules anymore?” I’m not trying to be a Force-purist or anything, but as a regular member of a movie audience, a lot of the reveals in the movie felt very out-of-left-field. I get that Jedi are essentially superheroes in space, but it makes “the Force” into a bit of a plot device that can get them out of any situation. It’s further compounded by characters like Leia, and Rey, who have little to no training in the Force but who, when the situation dramatically calls for it, are able to perform tremendous feats of skill and power. If we don’t see them training and struggling with these abilities building up to those moments, then the impact is not only lessened when they occur, but the suspension of disbelief is violated. It just introduces new powers and new abilities with no groundwork or grace, and that makes it hard for audiences to stay in those moments. It then becomes a challenge for them to come up with reasons those characters DON’T continue to use those abilities. On the one hand, I can understand the whole shock/trauma-activated-ability idea, but on the other if you discover you have the ability to withstand the vacuum of space and fly through it, wouldn’t that be an ability you’d want to pursue and become better at?

Overall, though, it felt narratively cheap because we took a character who’s very much been established as NOT skilled in the Force, and had her suddenly pull off something that we hadn’t even imagined Obi-Wan or Yoda at their height could do. I’m not attacking it on scientific grounds, or even trying to say “The Force couldn’t do that!” I’m just saying that from a storytelling perspective it felt deeply unsatisfying and out of place.

Snoke

Snoke in this film was a big letdown. At first, it seemed like they had something interesting planned for him. We got to see him in the flesh early on and he had his own kind of unique menace. They got Andy Serkis to play him so clearly he’s an important part of this story. His origins and motivations are shrouded in mystery and his power level is clearly off-the-charts. It was all setting up our expectations for later reveals, or deepening his motives, or making him even more threatening.

Then he dies halfway through the film and we never learn a single new thing about him. I’m all for zagging when the audience thinks you’re going to zig, but TFA and TLJ invested a sizeable amount of their running times establishing Snoke as this big threat, who was connected to story in ways we didn’t understand yet. I can understand killing him off unexpectedly, but to do it without exploring more of his character, or setting up anyone to take his place is a big letdown.

To be clear, I understand that Ben is going to be the new Big Bad, or at least until the end of the next movie when he comes back to the light and the new Big Bad for the NEXT trilogy shows up, but Ben is not a good replacement as a primary antagonist. I mean, we know he will either be saved, like Vader was, or die heroically helping the rebels. There aren’t a lot of other directions to take him in--having him be uncomplicatedly evil would feel like a betrayal of his character up until now. I also get that Ben is slightly different than previous antagonists because he doesn’t care for the structure and regimentation of the first order, he just wants to rule as he sees fit. It’s just that that’s...kind of boring. Snoke was interesting because he was mysterious, and we couldn’t be sure what his connection to the Force, or the First Order, or to Ben really was. He was unpredictable, which made him an entertaining villain. Ben, meanwhile, is broody and prone to fits of rage. He’s very much still a child in a mask, and while that can make him intimidating to other characters, it’s not enough for a primary antagonist like Star Wars needs.

Finn’s “arc”

I get the sense that the writers really struggled to come up with something for Finn to do in this movie.

Rey’s arc was clearly connected to Luke and Ben, and did not have room for a third major figure in her emotional landscape. They may return to moren Finn/Rey stuff down the line, but this movie was first and foremost concerned with Rey/Luke and Rey/Ben.

The next strongest relationship was probably Leia/Poe. As much as I think Leia should have died off earlier in the movie, I think her arc with Poe was a decent-enough one, and will hopefully pay off in the next film, when he learns to take more of a leadership role in the rebellion. Holdo was there to give Poe an antagonist, and although I didn’t love the obvious and constant reversals of Holdo’s character (she’s good, she’s bad, she’s a coward, she’s a hero!), I thought the story pulled off the task it had set itself. Poe learned the lesson he needed to learn, as seen when he counseled Finn against sacrificing himself for the “battering ram cannon” (dumb name).

It feels like the Rey/Ben storyline was locked in, as was the Leia/Poe/Holdo storyline, but then after those two big plots, Finn had no one in the main cast to bounce off, and no one’s story needed his presence. Rey’s apprenticeship with Luke, subsequent surrender to Snoke, and eventual escape to rejoin the Rebels was completely unaffected by anything Finn did. The Rebel fleet’s attempts to escape the First Order did not need Finn’s help, and indeed reached their true objective in spite of him mucking up the plan. All he was good for on a metanarrative level (by the time his actual plan had gone up in smoke) was goosing the drama by alerting the First Order to the defenseless transport ships, thereby ensuring heavier losses for the rebels.

So obviously the writers knew that Finn needed to be there at the START of the story (to pick up with him after the last movie), and they knew where they needed him at the END of the story (on Crait, with a bone to pick with the First Order) but they didn’t really know how to get him from point A to B, nor how to ensure that nothing he does in the interim fucks up the rest of the already-established plots.

To fill the gap, they created the new character of Rose for Finn to bounce off of. It makes sense on paper--she’s grounded while he’s hyperactive, she’s sensible while he’s deeply emotional, she’s a low-ranking rebel while he’s one of the heroes--and all of their qualities make them good foils for each other. Indeed, in that first scene where she finds him trying to board the escape pod they find an enjoyable rhythm together pretty quickly, and I liked the dynamic they established.

But then it all goes deeply off the rails because the writers realized they couldn’t let them do anything that mattered. Finn’s plan had to be unsuccessful because the fleet needed to make it to Crait, not jump away. Finn couldn’t run into Rey while on Snoke’s ship because that would jumble the plot too much. So they had to keep Finn at arm’s length from doing anything useful and it showed.

What we got instead was a really problematic (See below) detour to a planet that didn’t ultimately matter, in search of a macguffin that ultimately didn’t matter, all in the service of developing a relationship with Rose, a character who may be dead and who never had any real chemistry with Finn.

I honestly wish they’d thrown out that whole thing and found a different way to incorporate Finn into either Poe or Rey’s story, because clearly they don’t have great ideas when he’s on his own.

Hyperspace tracker subplot

One of the biggest problems I had with the movie was the “First Order tracking the rebels through hyperspace” subplot. Almost EVERY ASPECT of this was a disappointment, and here is why:

Hux’s Plan First off, there’s a moment early on where Kylo walks in on a conversation between Snoke and Hux where Snoke is congratulating Hux on his clever plan, saying something about how a cur’s weakness can be his strength. It seemed to imply that some element of Hux’s personality allowed him insight into hunting the rebels, and he devised a singularly brilliant way to do it. But then ultimately it was just “the First Order are tracking the rebels through hyperspace” and that seems like, I dunno, ANYONE could have devised that plan. There was nothing to the plan that indicated ONLY Hux could have come up with it. He doesn’t seem to possess any kind of advanced scientific or technical knowledge and his strategy (Track them until they run out of fuel) isn’t exactly complex, or subtle. It’s fairly obvious. I kept waiting for a further reveal that Hux had convinced a high-ranking rebel to defect and feed him information, or SOMETHING to explain why Snoke seemed so impressed and satisfied with his plan. But it never came.

Also, how are we to believe that Rose, who is essentially an electrician, would be able to disable a high-level First Order specialized system in such a way that no one notices? It just felt super convenient that this tradesperson that Finn runs into randomly possesses the ability to effectively and secretly disable the ONE thing ��the First Order has been using to track the rebels. Remember, Dj the hacker only opened the door to the stupid thing, it was Rose who said she could secretly disable it all on her own.

Compounding all that letdown is the fact that, in the end, “disabling the tracking device” was barely different than “disable the tractor beam on the death star” in ANH. Just like the tractor beam on the Death Star in ANH, in TLJ it’s up to our heroes to infiltrate a massive evil ship and disable this one tiny room that should, when you think about it, be MUCH MORE HEAVILY GUARDED THAN IT WAS. At least in ANH the Death Star tractor beam room was super impressive. In TLJ, the tracker-room was a broom closet with a giant flux capacitor in it, tucked away behind some random panel in a random hallway.

Also, the whole conceit that “there’s only one ship actually tracking us” felt like an easy out, but one that didn’t hold up to scrutiny. If this truly was the last of the rebels, and wiping them out would ensure the total victory of the First Order, then maybe have a tracker on ALL your ships? Even if you’re not worried the Rebels will sneak on board and secretly disable it, you should always have redundancies for critical systems and processes like that. In the case of Ben Solo choosing to fight Luke while the rebels escape, this is an oversight that makes sense. We’ve seen how Ben can be ruthless and clever, but how there are still parts of his personality he can’t control (his need for his master’s approval, his hatred of Luke, etc.). So when he makes the mistake of facing Luke, his shortsightedness makes perfect sense. In comparison, Hux’s failure to properly safeguard this incredibly important tracking device just felt like lazy plotting.

Lastly, I’ll cover this more in a later section, but the fact that this whole entire subplot wound up having zero significance and not actually achieving anything was deeply, deeply frustrating. It’s one thing to do a Bespin-like sequence, where the heroes’ plan goes awry but they still move their arcs forward, or move the plot forward. Like, Luke faces Vader and learns a lot about himself. Leia is ripped apart from Han but finally declares her love for him in the process. Lando betrays them, but then proves to be an ally and helps them escape and joins the cause moving forward. Bespin was an unmitigated disaster in terms of “the protagonists achieving their goals” but narratively it was deeply productive. The entire “disable the tracker” subplot in TLJ only served to deepen Rose’s character who was ultimately wasted in the climax. The rest of the plotline did absolutely NOTHING to change the status quo. It almost seemed like the interaction between Finn and Benicio del Toro (aka DJ) would make Finn into a more Han-like, morally grey character, but then when DJ betrays them it’s clear Finn is a rebel through and through. Ignoring Rose’s character, what impact did the tracker-device plotline have on the larger film? I can’t think of any.

Canto Bight The problems with this part start right away with the very-hard-to-take-seriously scene where Rose and Finn just basically figure out the entire First Order plan and how to stop them in a matter of seconds. Instead of taking this information to ANYONE, like maybe Leia, they instead decide to contact Maz Kanata because Lupita Nyongo signed on for three movies, damnit, so she’s gonna be in them. Maz tells them the ONLY person who can complete their mission is a codebreaker wearing a special lapel pin. NO ONE ELSE can help them, and Maz would know, because characters repeatedly tell us that she’s very wise.

So they sneak off the ship and land on Canto Bight, which looks a lot like Naboo at night, but whatever. The movie wants us to know that Finn is enchanted by this place, while Rose is not, and it takes very little time for her to detail all the problems with it. None of this is conveyed in a particularly elegant or artful way--Finn stares dopily around at everything while Rose just clenches her jaw and spouts truly godawful lines like “I just want to smash this beautiful lousy city to pieces.” We also get a bunch of alien race horses, and it’s all starting to stray into the realm of the prequels.

Ultimately, Finn and Rose find the dude with the lapel pin, but are apprehended by security before they can talk to him. That is the last we see of the actual codebreaker.

After they meet and then part ways with DJ (more on him below, I hated him so much!), they find the alien race horses again and take off on horseback in one of the dumbest sequences in the film, and definitely the most broad. This part especially, the horseback escape through the city and eventual rescue by DJ felt very prequel-esque. The happy-go-lucky slave kids, the overly-CG horses, the slapstick ride through the city, it was all just too lowbrow compared to the rest of the film.

Benicio del Toro aka DJ I have a lot of issues with this character but they all really boil down to one thing: It’s cheap fucking storytelling:

It’s cheap storytelling to have Maz tell the audience “ONLY the codebreaker can get you onto the ship!” but then DJ can also do it.

It’s cheap storytelling to have Finn and Rose get imprisoned in the cell with a DIFFERENT codebreaker who can do exactly what they need.

It’s cheap storytelling to have a character as resourceful as DJ simply hanging out in jail waiting for someone to what? Also get imprisoned and ask for his help? It doesn’t make sense that if he could stroll out of prison at any point in time that he would be there at all.

It’s cheap storytelling for DJ to be able to steal a weapon merchant’s ship so easily, yet he hasn’t already done that and was instead hanging out in jail for no reason.

Not only does all this make many of the scenes in this plot (with Maz, or on Canto Bight looking for the lapel pin) feel pointless, but it also makes the rest of Finn and Rose’s plot (once they’re off Canto Bight and onto Snoke’s ship especially) frustrating because it all seems so convenient.

The best part about DJ is that, for a second, you think he’s going to contribute to Finn’s arc by pushing him towards being a more Han-Solo-at-the-start-of-ANH-style independent operator, by pointing out that both the Rebellion and the First Order are part of a larger military-industrial complex. For a second it seems like Finn might get some real depth and shading, and an interesting perspective that’s vastly different than Rey or Poe’s.

And then the worst part of DJ’s character is that he betrays them to the First Order as he was obviously going to do and this just makes Finn angry at the First Order. DJ leaves as pointlessly and stupidly as he arrived.

Finn & Rose getting captured This entire sequence was endlessly frustrating. I’ve already detailed my problems with Hux’s plan above, but Finn and Rose’s capture and subsequent escape deserves its own section because it was so bad.

The first problem is that their hangar scene was clearly written to fill dramatic space, not to function as a realistic sequence of events. Finn and Rose are brought to the hangar, surrounded by a legion of stormtroopers. Phasma insists her troops kill them slowly, which is such a painful cliché at this point that there were multiple audible groans from the audience at that point. The stormtroopers slooooowwwwwwllllly lower laser-axes to Finn and Rose’s heads. Then the ship is caught in an explosion, and when we cut back to Rose and Finn, the literal dozens of stormtroopers who had been surrounding them with laser-axes millimetres away from their necks are nowhere to be seen. Phasma is also gone, but then just as quickly the stormtroopers and Phasma come walking back into the hangar like they were never there. It makes no sense!

Then, you’ve got a very implausible fight between numerous armoured stormtroopers (it seems that in the 20+ years since ROTJ their accuracy has not improved) and two blue-collar workers wearing no protective gear. Somehow Finn goes toe-to-toe with Phasma despite the fact that if she lands a single hit on his unarmored form, he’d go down. Not to mention the fact that Phasma HAS A BLASTER which she chooses not to use on Finn. Her ultimate death was silly, earned a bunch of laughs in the theatre, and had zero drama or tension to it. I love Gwendolyn Christie but she played a horribly written, terribly underused character who never got to do a single cool thing, then got herself killed in the silliest way and went down barely landing a single blow on the unarmored janitor she was fighting.

Meanwhile, there were apparently more stormtroopers but they just kinda get forgotten about. Rose hides and fires a few stray shots, but where did the half-dozen troopers flanking Phasma when they re-entered the hangar after the explosion go?

And then, the capper on this shit sequence, is BB-8 taking control of an AT-ST, and rescuing Finn and Rose. It reeked of the worst kind of prequels-level “wouldn’t it be cool if…?” writing. It was silly, and not in a fun way, but in a really dumb and cheesy way. It was reminiscent of Anakin in The Phantom Menance shooting a bunch of droids by accident when he was hiding in the fighter cockpit, or the nonsense factory escape sequence with R2-D2’s hoverjets in Attack of the Clones.

Structural Problems

There were some massive structural problems with the film, on the following levels:

Derivative Storytelling

The movie felt and looked more original than Force Awakens, but when you look closer it’s still cut from much of the same cloth as the original trilogy. Off the top of my head, from ESB alone, there’s:

Rey trains on a remote planet with a reluctant Luke Luke trains on Dagobah with an initially reluctant Yoda

Rey’s enters a “Dark Side cave” and has a vision Luke enters a “Dark Side cave” and has a vision

Ben asks Rey, “Join me and we can rule the galaxy together” Vader asks Luke to join him so they can rule the galaxy together as father and son

The Resistance flees D’qar in cruisers and transports while being shot at by the First order The Rebels flee Hoth in cruisers and transports while being shot at by the Empire

The First Order assault a Resistance base on the remote, white salt planet of Crait with AT-ATs The Empire assaults a Rebel base on the remote, snowy planet of Hoth with AT-ATs

Because the base is older, Poe and other pilots are forced to fly slower, less maneuverable and powerful ships Because the base is on an ice planet, Luke and the other pilots are forced to fly slower, less maneuverable and powerful ships

Rey loses Anakin’s lightsaber during a confrontation with Kylo Ren Luke loses Anakin’s lightsaber during a confrontation with Vader

Rey must build her own lightsaber, a Jedi rite of passage Luke had to build his own lightsaber, a Jedi rite of passage, on Tatooine before going to Jabba’s palace

Some of those bits weren’t wholly unwelcome, but I’m really ready for Star Wars to move beyond the shadow of what’s come before. I’m ready for a Star Wars where:

The protagonist isn’t a callow youth about to become a Jedi

The main antagonist isn’t a Palpatine-like dictator

The secondary antagonist isn’t a Vader-like enforcer

The villains don’t rule over an Empire-like army

There were elements of this film that hinted at more creative stories that might get told, but too much of it hewed too close to familiar beats and tropes.

Plot Contrivances

This was a huge problem for me. The contrivances pile up really quickly, and take you out of the story fast. Rose and Finn suddenly sussing out the First Order’s secret plan. Rey is just innately powerful and doesn’t need more than a day of light training with Luke to be super powerful. Rey repeatedly tries to gain Luke’s trust, going so far as to tell him she’s being completely honest with him, despite lying from the get-go about her connection to Ben. Luke declaring that he’s been cut off from the Force for the past X years so he can plausibly not be aware of all the things he should be aware of, like Ben being inside Rey’s head. Maz tells Finn there’s only one man who can do the job, but then they randomly meet another. Phasma tells her troops to execute Finn slowly, giving him time to escape.

The sheer point of fact is, at least for me, much of the story the film told was exhausting because it required constant and new suspension of disbelief. We are already suspending our disbelief quite a bit for a story of space wizards, so I do not think it’s too much to ask for the story to flow logically, and sensibly.

Implausible Timeline

Ostensibly, from the point at which Finn and Rose contact Maz, all the action is compressed into roughly 12-16 hours (since there’s still about 2 hrs left on the fuel for the fleet when they start to abandon ship in the transports). However, in that time it feels like Rey spends several nights on Ahch-To with Luke, while Finn and Rose spend less than a single night on Canto Bight (they arrive early evening and depart the planet before dawn). Perhaps the two planets have different day/night cycles and this all works out, but to viewing audiences it seriously distorts our understanding of how much time is elapsing in between scenes. There were moments where it felt like Rey was on Ahch-To for days but then we cut back to Finn/Rose and only an hour or two have passed, and then back to the fleet and it feels like no time has passed. It’s not a death knell, but it’s just one more thing that caused a bunch of whiplash when trying to process all the different threads.

Status Quo Reset

This is perhaps my biggest disappointment with the movie, far beyond anything mentioned above. I was truly dismayed that this new trilogy is still retreading the same ground as the previous ones, and more than that it seems to be setting us as close to square one as possible and slowing down the progress enormously. At this point in the film, the Rebellion is smaller than it’s ever been, and the First Order is (somehow) nominally in charge of the galaxy. We’ve been here before--it was the first three movies. Only now we’re back to an almost pre-ANH configuration, with every indication that the story this time will move even slower and with even more unecessary detail and sideplots. I can already see the slave-kid with the Force abilities being the protagonist of the fourth, or fifth, or ninth Star Wars trilogy, and indeed the realization that these movies will be coming out like clockwork every year robs them of their lustre and appeal. If they were telling unique stories, and showing me things I’d never seen before, I’d be more excited. But instead they telling the same old stories, and taking me to the same places, with the same people (or same types of people) and it fundamentally just doesn’t look like they want to go anywhere new.

A huge part of the former Star Wars Expanded Universe was the idea that there’s a huge chunk of the galaxy (at least half of it!) that was unexplored and dangerous. There were whole societies there unlike anything we’d seen, and threats, too. I’m ready for Star Wars to grow up and stop telling the same story about the plucky Jedi taking on Darth Evil and his army of faceless fascists. I’m ready to see Jedi and Sith threatened by some new menace, or the fascists subjugated by anarchists who create their own problems. I’m just ready for there to be new stories, but when I look ahead at the road the franchise is charting for itself, it’s deeply, and stiflingly, familiar.

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