#most villain characters are people who will go far beyond the “average” limits people have

[essayofthoughts]

Genuinely, I think one of the most fun and crunchy things about any character is

How far they will go for things they want

What they will do to get things they want

Things they won't do, no matter how much they want what they'd get in exchange

Because these things tell you some very important things about the character, namely their limits, their price, and their absolute No's. (And it lets you create some really REALLY crunchy conflict)

[kazewhara]

and with great power...

# — pairing: spidey!kazuha x gn!reader

# — characters: gender neutral reader, spidey!kazuha

# — summary: ...comes great responsibility.

# — warnings: mentions of blood, injury, violence, mentions of character death (confirmed minor character death, no real MCD)

# — tags: spider-man!kazuha, nursing student!reader, physical hurt/comfort, fluff, angst, confessions, kisses, a little bit of arguing, lots of banter, kazuha almost dies (HE DOESN'T ACTUALLY DIE, REST ASSURED)

# — notes: always wanted to make a title like that. (edit: i'm crawling on my hands and knees forcing this in y'all's face, LOL) as always, reblogs and reactions are greatly appreciated and i hope you enjoy!

wanna join the tag list?

✧ — 🍁🕷— ✧

the whole city saw it happen. everyone, all eight million people, watched in mutual shock and horror as the beloved vigilante known as spider-man was bested by the newest supervillain that terrorized the city streets.

to be fair, kazuha tries to reason with himself, he didn't go down without a fight. and at the end of it all, he still technically came out on top. the villain put on quite the show but grew too greedy in the end; once kazuha figured out their weakness, it was easy to figure out how to take them out. doing so was easier said than done, and it certainly wasn't ideal for the villain to have to die in the end, but with them out of the way, the city was safe — you were safe — and that's all that mattered.

well, sort of.

kazuha's never worried too much about his public appearance. it's not like he was keeping the city safe for the attention. in fact, he doesn't like it very much — he actually thinks he hates it now, especially since the villain somehow televised most of the entire battle. the entire city had to see him get stabbed and knocked unconscious. the end of the fight and the villain's defeat didn't seem to be shown to the public, so essentially, the people think that spider-man is dead.

kazuha stops his shambling down the alleyway and leans on the concrete wall. "they may not have to think that much longer..." he groans to himself.

barely conscious and annoyed beyond belief, kazuha has been trying to feel his way around the backstreets of the city to find your apartment for over an hour now. with the extent of his injuries, the average person would have dropped dead over thirty minutes ago; kazuha considers himself lucky that he managed to make it this far. he would have swung here, but he's fairly sure he'd widen one of several gaping wounds, and he'd rather not do that when he's so close to his destination. but close or not, his body is finally reaching its limits. it's hard to tell if he's made it to your building or not. he'd planned to scale the wall all the way to your balcony, but he doesn't think he can lift another finger.

kazuha slowly eases himself to the ground and rests his back against the wall with a weak chuckle. he can practically hear your enraged yelling now. you'd probably panic at the sight of him and make some snarky comment about him interrupting yet another one of your extensive study sessions. you'd force him to lay still and tell him to shut up every couple of seconds even if he wasn't saying anything, and he'd probably laugh at you.

"it's a shame," he whispers to no one, "i can't do that anymore."

kazuha's breathing becomes uneven. he may not be a nurse like you (he can hear your rebuttals already), but he's sure he's dying. the sleep that's creeping up on him feels oddly final; he knows for a fact that if he closes his eyes now, he's never going to open them again. but he wants to keep them open — he wants so badly to see you one last time, even if only for a second.

you, the only person he's ever loved; the only person who means anything to him; the only person left in this world who cares about him.

kazuha wheezes a laugh. technically, you don't care about him; he's long since pieced together that you've fallen in love with the masked version of him, yet he still swung by almost every day to see you.

"i'm a glutton for punishment, aren't i?" he murmurs.

...he misses you. he's going to miss you.

kazuha pulls his mask off and rests the back of his head on the wall with a sigh. at least he's going to die having kissed you at least once. the memory brings a smile to his face, but it quickly crumbles. he promised he would come back safely. he even sealed it with a kiss, and yet here he sits, barely clinging to life alone in an alleyway.

"...i'm sorry." he whispers.

"...zuha..?"

kazuha blinks slowly, his vision dotted with black spots. did someone call him just now?

"oh my fucking god..! kazuha!"

there's the quick slapping of feet on pavement approaching, but kazuha doesn't move to see who it is. there's no real use in that, he thinks tiredly. with what little strength he has remaining, he tugs the mask back over his face. whoever it was that called him already saw him in the suit, but he may as well try to salvage what little privacy he has left, if any.

the footsteps stop and the person's once distant voice comes in clear from right beside him. "no, no, no, don't cover your face! don't hide from me, please, i--"

kazuha frowns from behind the mask. that voice... it sounds an awful lot like... you?

"no," he rasps. "that can't be right."

your voice doesn't go away. if anything, it gets clearer. "what can't be right? kazu-- i-i mean, spider-man, you have to get up!" you touch his arm gingerly, a silent request for permission to do so. when kazuha doesn't move, you pull his arm up and drape it over your shoulders. he groans loudly and you begin to spew apologies. "i'm sorry, i'm sorry, just bear with me, okay?"

in a moment of desperation, kazuha's brain tries to switch itself back on. it is you — you're actually here, trying to help him. the heavens took pity on him and let him be with you one last time, but now that you're actually here, he finds himself scrambling to find ways to stay alive for just a moment longer. unfortunately, his body's exhausted just about all of its energy reserves — he's nearly dead in the water.

that doesn't stop you, though. despite all odds (and kazuha's agonized noises), you put your all into helping him into your building, into the elevator, and into your apartment. it takes far longer than you would have liked, but carrying a half-dead body isn't exactly easy for non-morticians. the entire way up, you could hear spider-man mumbling incoherently, the occasional apology coming in clear.

"if you're really sorry," you grunt as you lay him on your carpet as gently as possible, "you'll stay alive."

kazuha tries to laugh, but it comes out as a cross between a pant and a groan. "i'm... not too sure about that one, dove..."

you press your fingers to his pulse point; just barely a flutter. you need to act, and fast.

on any other day, you'd bemoan your status as spider-man's personal caretaker. you can't even call yourself his doctor -- or nurse, for that matter. you're just a nursing student who just so happened to stumble across him one day in the very same alleyway you just found him in.

but today, you have not one life in your hands, but two. and you'd be damned if you let either of them slip through your fingers.

you rush to your linen closet and sweep an entire shelf clean of medical tools and supplies. you're going to need everything you've got. you find a sizable hole in the suit and cut away the cloth on spider-man's (kazuha's?) torso with a pair of scissors.

the damage is almost as bad as you thought it was; there are four large clean cuts amongst a palette of bruises on his body, each one steadily oozing blood. with the way he's (barely) breathing, you'd assume that he's broken quite a few ribs, and that doesn't even begin to cover what you assume is similar lacerations on his arms and legs that are hidden beneath the suit.

"first things first," you whisper to yourself, your voice trembling. it's going to be a long night.

it takes almost eight hours to stabilize spider-man.

thanks to your lack of expertise and access to high-end supplies, it takes far longer for you to get his body to stop going in and out of shock. but in spite of it all, you did it. once you wrap the final bandage, you sit back and look at the carnage. there's blood everywhere; you're going to have to trash this carpet. the thought almost makes you laugh. almost.

now that you have the time to think about something other than keeping someone alive, you find yourself scanning over spider-man's slumbering body. how were you supposed to explain any of this to him when he woke up? he wouldn't be surprised to know where he was, but you remember what you saw when you found him.

how were you supposed to tell kazuha that you found out his secret? do you even tell him at all? how do you tell him?

your thoughts are halted by a yawn. tears spring to your eyes with how big it is. maybe you're still thinking too hard; after all this, you need time to process — time to rest. so, you climb onto your couch, lay yourself out, and let exhaustion take you under.

you awake to the sound of your balcony door opening.

you shoot upright and squint and shield your eyes immediately. it's impossibly bright outside; did you sleep until morning? you blink back the vertigo and your vision clears to see spider-man with one foot out the door. you may not be fully awake, but you jump to your feet anyways, panicking. "wait!" you yell at him.

spider-man doesn't flinch, but he does stop. he looks over his shoulder at you, the gesture uncharacteristically cold for him. you feel your heart sink. "you're finally awake." he says evenly. "good afternoon."

"afternoon?" you parrot back. you fumble for your phone and check the time. sure enough, it's well into the afternoon — not only that, but you slept for over 24 hours straight. you gape, but then remember what you sat up to do. when you look back at him, you see spider-man perching on the edge of your balcony, ready to leave. "no, no, stop, seriously! wait a second, dammit!"

"i'm afraid i can't," he barely turns to face you again. "i have to go now."

"what about your injuries?"

"eighteen hours of sleep was more than enough for me to regain my strength." spider-man faces the city again. "now, if you'll excuse me."

you ball your hand into a fist at your side. why isn't he listening to you? why isn't he trying to crack a joke with you? why does it feel like he's never going to come back? if your heart sinks any lower, you think you're going to throw up.

what can you say to make him stay? he's so close to leaving. there's a lump the size of a rock in your throat and the words become stuck. you need to think of something. say something, anything!

"kazuha, please... don't go."

that gives him pause. you exhale, relieved, when spider-man — no, kazuha — hops down to stand on your balcony properly. finally, he turns to face you completely. you notice that the holes you made in his suit have been closed; he must have found your sewing kit while you were sleeping.

kazuha's shoulders sag. "i can't stay here." he says your name so softly, the sound of it jostles the lump in your throat. "i have to leave."

you swallow thickly. "and do what, almost get yourself killed again?" you don't know how the words are coming to you so easily. "i don't think so."

"in my defense," he tries to joke, "i nearly get myself killed every day."

it feels so sick to you, seeing the man who you'd barely managed to resuscitate make light of everything that's happened. he will never know of the four times his pulse completely stopped, of the hours you spent choking back tears as you desperately tried to keep him alive. you're barely holding it together now as you look him in the face — you still haven't even had time to process the fact that you've fallen in love with kazuha twice over.

molten tears sting your eyes. "am i a joke to you?" your throat tightens and your vision blurs.

you wonder what expression kazuha is making beneath that mask. the fact that you can't see his face — the fact that he still won't let you — only makes your face burn hotter. "no," he says. he says it like you've personally offended him. "never, i--"

"then stay." you demand. your vision blurs with unshed tears. there's just too much to process. "please, just... stay."

kazuha seems to consider your request. then, he walks further in your apartment. there's still so much distance between you two. is he doing that on purpose? he's silent for a while before he pulls the mask off, revealing his face. before you stands kazuha, the barista you've been seeing for the past couple of months. something akin to regret swims in his autumn colored eyes.

you bristle. "don't look at me like that."

"like what?"

"like you want to leave." you barely manage to get the words out. "like you don't want to be here anymore." when kazuha doesn't say anything right away, you feel your heart crack. "is this really that painful for you?"

kazuha frowns, his pretty features marred by regret and something else you can't quite place. "you were never supposed to find out this way." he sighs quietly. "you weren't supposed to find out at all."

you feel tears sting your eyes. so you were going to start a relationship with a man who was hiding a secret as big as this one? was he really never planning on telling you this? "why?" is all you can manage.

"for your safety." kazuha's response is quick, almost sharp. his brows twitch downwards.

"why?" you feel like a broken record. "i could've handled knowing something like this, i--"

"songbird," kazuha comes closer to you and you shudder subtly. you're not used to hearing that name come from his lips. "if someone found out that you knew my secret, there would be serious trouble. and i... i can't let anything happen to you. i won't let anything happen to you."

and yet here you stand with a single tear slipping from your eye. you're not sure what it is that's breaking your heart. it could be many things, really: it could be the fact that you're relieved to know that in the end, you were in love with kazuha all along, or that you've been keeping him alive for months without knowing, or that he literally died in your arms several times during the night, and had you not resuscitated him, you would have had to unmask his corpse.

there's just so much weighing on you, and you're nowhere near prepared (nor awake) enough to handle it all.

kazuha's in front of you in an instant, his hand coming up to rest on your cheek and swipe the tear away. he calls your name softly, like it's a fragile thing. he's been treating you that way this entire time, you realize. "don't cry, please." he almost begs.

"i just don't understand," your voice cracks. "how long were you going to-- to lie to me, kazuha?"

it's kazuha's turn to crumble. he visibly winces, clearly bothered by your choice of words. it's harsh, but you're right; he's been lying to you as both spider-man and as himself. "however long i could." he admits. more tears roll down your cheeks and he cups your face and rests his forehead on yours. "please believe me. it was for your own good, dove. i never intended to hurt you. that's the last thing i ever wanted."

"i know," you sniff. "i know, but..." you're at a loss for words. you stop for a moment and just bask in how warm he feels. the silence you share is weighted; so heavy that it closes your throat and nearly chokes you. kazuha's gloved fingers swipe your cheeks free of tears, however endless they may seem.

"what if i'd lost you?" you finally ask. "what if-- what if i couldn't help you? what if i ki--"

"you wouldn't have." kazuha cuts you off quickly. "i knew that you wouldn't. you have my gratitude. i literally owe you my life. but.."

"but..?" you echo. "but what?"

"i can't entrust that job to you any longer." kazuha's hands leave your face and you shiver at the loss of warmth. "i can't..." a pained expression makes its way across his face. "i can't see you anymore, dove. i have to go."

kazuha doesn't make any move to leave just yet, but you grab his hand, keeping him in place. it's almost funny -- he said he had to go, yet he curls his fingers when you take his hand, tightening his grip on you. "i can still help you!" you insist. "d-don't just cut me out-- i can help you, so let me help!"

kazuha shakes his head. "and run the risk of you getting hurt? no. i can't do that."

"kazuha, please--"

he calls your name, soft but firm. "i told you, no."

"i was always at risk of getting hurt! what's so different now?"

that doesn't seem to sit well with kazuha. something dark skitters across his face. "you're too important to me. i need you to stay safe, and... and if that means that i have to keep you away, then so be it."

"what the hell?" you throw kazuha's hand away from you. "you've been doing this ever since--" you stutter for a second, your emotions and memories coming in too fast for you to process. "fuck, you've been doing this since we met! making decisions without asking me how i feel!"

kazuha reaches towards you, but you slap his hand away.

"i take you in and patch you up once, and suddenly you decide that i'm your personal doctor. did you ever ask me if i wanted to help? no! you just kept coming back!" the words flow out of you faster than a rushing river current. "you dumped the responsibility of keeping you alive on my shoulders without my consent, and now that i'm doing it, you suddenly want to take it away -- again without asking me if i'm okay with it!"

"dove, breathe."

"oh, fuck you." you hiss. your head hurts. "i'm not going to let you jerk me around anymore, kazuha. i can't do that." a fresh wave of tears hits you, but you blink them back. "i don't care what you say; you're stuck with me whether you like it or not. you made this bed, so you better lie in it, dammit."

kazuha just stares at you. he's silent as you sniff and catch your breath from your outburst. something about his silence feels so condescending, so oppressive. something tells you that you're not getting through to him. then, after a long pause, he speaks.

"you're right." he says.

what?

"huh?" you reply, too stunned for words.

kazuha gives you a wry smile. "you're completely right. i dragged you into this and it would be... improper of me to push you out of it." he looks so pained by his words -- like the weight of his actions is finally coming to crush him. "i pulled you in all because i..." he trails off and looks past you.

"you what, kazuha?" you move in an attempt to meet his eyes, but he avoids you. is he finally going to tell you why he did this? "why did you keep coming back here?"

something so vulnerable and raw crosses kazuha's face and he doesn't catch it in time. the sight of it makes your eyes widen. his jaw sets and he finally meets your eyes. he looks so serious -- you're not used to it. as if he can hear your thoughts, kazuha exhales slowly, and the tension leaves with his breath. he seems to be his usual self once more.

"because i was in love with you." kazuha says after a beat. "and i'm standing here because i still am."

you balk. as obvious as it should have been based on how you two have been dancing around each other for the past couple of months, the idea of kazuha liking you back in earnest -- the thought of him loving you -- just never crossed your mind. you thought yourself alone in your intense feelings, and you were okay with it. you still had kazuha's affection at the end of the day; you were content with what you had.

perhaps it was because your feelings had split between kazuha and spider-man that you believed your feelings to be one-sided. spider-man could never have loved you back -- your intense emotions would be a hindrance to him. so by that logic, you automatically assumed the same must be the case for kazuha.

but it's not. it never was. spider-man and kazuha are the same person. and he's in love with you.

kazuha keeps talking. "i latched onto you, songbird." he huffs a laugh, the sound derisive. "it was a desperate move on my part. clinging to the one person who'd shown interest in me -- to both sides of me. i couldn't stand the thought of being without you. i still can't."

"then--"

"but there are some sacrifices that must be made." kazuha's words are firm, but his voice wavers. his whole expression shifts, and you can see just how uncertain he is about all of this. he gives you a tight smile. "if i have to lose you to keep you safe, then i'd lose you a million times over. i would do anything if it means keeping you out of harm's way."

you don't speak and for a while, neither does kazuha. the two of you let his words marinate and you can see plain as day just how affected he truly is by this decision. now that you're thinking about it, you think that this sounds scripted -- like kazuha made this decision and kept it on the back burner as a last resort. but if that's the case, then there's one thing he didn't account for: the depth of his feelings.

tentatively, you reach up and brush kazuha's face with the tips of your fingers. he blinks at you but doesn't pull away. you cup his face in one hand and sigh softly. "you don't really want to leave," you whisper. "do you?"

kazuha shuts his eyes and leans into your touch. he doesn't answer verbally, but you both know that what you said was correct. he presses the faintest kiss against your palm and looks you in the eyes. "i love you." he declares just loud enough for you to hear. "i want to keep you safe, but... truthfully, i... i want to do so by your side."

kazuha's words dance around every corner of your brain, lighting you up from the inside out. you lean in and lightly brush your lips over his, sending butterflies loose in your stomach. "then stay." you whisper in the space between.

you can feel kazuha sigh. he pulls you in for a longer, sweeter kiss, murmuring something incomprehensible as he does. kazuha's lips are soft and his hands are so gentle as they brush over your face. you try to break the kiss to say something, but kazuha keeps you in place, murmuring a soft, breathless wait.

he seems satisfied after a few more minutes, breaking the kiss to leave one on your nose and forehead. "hey, kazuha?" you murmur as he does.

"hmm?"

"i love you, too." it's almost liberating, finally getting that off your chest. your face burns with your confession, and when you see the way kazuha's crimson eyes brighten, your body temperature rises even further. god only knows what he's thinking right now. you avert your eyes. "kazuha... promise me something."

kazuha nods. you can still feel his eyes on you. "anything."

"come back to me alive." you chuckle quietly. "i'd say come back safe, but that's, uh... not our thing, apparently. so just... don't die out there. let me take care of y-- mmf--"

kazuha silences you with a kiss, one you melt into. when he pulls away, he looks torn. it takes a second for you to realize just how loaded your request is. in his line of work, where most of his opponents would rather see him dead than merely unconscious, staying alive is quite the hefty task.

he brushes his thumb over your cheek, his brows carrying the slightest draw to them. "you know--"

"i know." you cut him off with a weak smile. "i know. but at the very least... try your best. please."

kazuha looks at you for just a moment longer before leaning back in, resting his forehead on yours. "i'll do my best," he says. "for you."

you let your eyes slip shut. the thought of him leaving you after this makes your stomach turn. so you ask, "will you stay?"

kazuha's answering hum is immediate. "i will." he pulls you into his arms and sighs, the sound low. "i will."

you wrap your arms around him in turn and heave a soft sigh of your own. it's starting to dawn on you just how much you're taking on by having him here like this. kazuha's secret is a monumental one -- one that you now share. the safety of the city rests in your hands as well, now; whether you're ready to handle that responsibility or not doesn't matter anymore. your choice to stand by kazuha's side means that you're choosing to help take on the burden he's been shouldering alone.

you tighten your arms around him. you'll be damned if you let something like this happen to him again.

✦ okay, okay, i know i've written better endings, but i didn't know how else to wrap this one up..

✦ but FINALLY this comes to an end... this has been in my drafts for AGES. i suppose you can say i'm cleaning out my drafts? i'm going to try wrapping up some old stuff and checking it to see if it's worth posting! there's some good stuff in here, y'know?

✦ anyways, i hope you liked this!

[esmeraldablazingsky]

I’ve finally hit my limit on the number of bad takes on the Lan parents I can see before I have to lay out all the reasons I disagree, so hello, I’m Blazie, and in this essay I will justify my visceral dislike of the assumption that Qingheng-jun married/imprisoned/had sex with Lan-furen against her will.

    Warning for mentions of rape (in context of Interpretations I Really Hate) and a very, VERY long post below the cut.

    Before I start going off about the finer points of all this, I want to make sure people are on the same page regarding what we actually know about what went down with Qingheng-jun and Lan-furen. What I say is based off the EXR translation of MDZS, for the sake of clarity, and although I don’t think the exact wording should be too important, feel free to let me know if you think I’ve missed an important bit of nuance or something (the whole story is in Chapter 64.)

    The story we get is told by Lan Xichen, and it goes like this: a young Qingheng-jun falls in love at first sight with Lan-furen, who doesn’t return his feelings, and at some point kills one of Qingheng-jun’s teachers over unspecified “grievances.” Although he’s understandably very upset over the murder, Qingheng-jun sneaks Lan-furen back to Cloud Recesses and officially marries her in order to announce to his clan that anyone who wants to hurt her has to go through him.

After that, he locks Lan-furen in one house and himself in another as a form of repentance. Wei Wuxian speculates that this was because “he could neither forgive the one who killed his teacher nor watch the death of the woman who he loved. He could only marry her to protect her life and force himself not to see her.” 

    A central detail of this story that I think people don’t give the import it deserves is that aside from marrying and protecting her, Qingheng-jun’s other option was to let Lan-furen be executed by his clan. His purpose in marrying her wasn’t just for kicks/out of a possessive sort of love, it was so she wouldn’t straight up die. How she felt about this arrangement isn’t stated, but I’ll get into that in a bit. In addition to that, Qingheng-jun and Lan-furen live separately, which was apparently purposeful on Qingheng-jun’s part, and runs counter to the interpretation that he intended to take sexual advantage of Lan-furen.

Though there aren’t many concrete details in Lan Xichen’s retelling, he does specifically inform Wei Wuxian that his mother never complained about remaining in her house. What exactly this signifies is unclear— whether she was simply putting on a brave face for her sons, or whether she was in fact at all content with the situation— but it at the very least serves to further muddy the waters on how she and Qingheng-jun felt about all this. 

Beyond what Lan Xichen and Wei Wuxian are saying out loud, there’s also quite a bit of subtext in this scene, especially in light of later events and revelations, like Lan Xichen’s confession for Lan Wangji at Guanyin Temple. 

So what is Lan Xichen trying to convey with all this? There’s a lot of memes about this scene, most of which err too far on the side of Himbo Airhead Lan Xichen for my liking, but one that I do find amusing emphasizes how Lan Xichen draws parallels between Wangxian and the story of his parents (Lan Xichen: [flute solo] please use your one brain cell to connect the dots.) If Wei Wuxian hadn’t completely lost his memory of Lan Wangji defending him against his own clan elders, one would assume that Lan Xichen’s story would have had a much better chance of hitting home. 

In hindsight and side by side, the parallels are much clearer— Qingheng-jun, “ignoring the objections from his clan… told everyone in the clan that she would be his wife for the rest of his life, that whoever wanted to harm her would have to pass through him first.” Similarly, according to Lan Xichen in Chapter 99, “for [Wei Wuxian,] not only did WangJi talk back to him, he even met with his sword the cultivators from the GusuLan Sect. He heavily injured all thirty-three of the seniors we asked to come.”

In that context, it makes a lot less sense to interpret Qingheng-jun as an aggressor towards Lan-furen, as in Lan Wangji’s case, the narrative clearly establishes that his actions are to secure Wei Wuxian’s safety. The action of Taking Someone Back To Cloud Recesses is— okay, actually, it’s a little more nuanced than I took into account when I started writing that sentence, so let me go a little deeper into Lan Wangji’s actions and how they relate to his father’s, story-wise. 

My intent is not to dive into the terrifying underworld of novel-versus-drama discourse, but simply put, Novel!Lan Wangji as he is written isn’t exactly the poster child for clear consent. (I’m going to entirely leave off the extra chapters for the sake of everyone’s sanity, so I’m just talking about the main body of the novel here.)

He means well, and I’m sure we can agree that he does actually love and want the best for Wei Wuxian, but his lack of communication on this point means that he accidentally gives Wei Wuxian the impression that he wants to imprison and/or punish him in Cloud Recesses at least twice off the top of my head (pre-timeskip, as we know, and post-timeskip immediately after Dafan Mountain when he actually drags Wei Wuxian back to his room.) 

That all likely has something to do with MXTX’s narrative kinks and regular kinks and all that, and can absolutely be taken with many grains of salt. However, these events establish how easy it is to misinterpret the action of Taking Someone Back To Gusu as an attempt to imprison rather than protect them (much to Lan Wangji’s chagrin.)

Failing to communicate his purpose to Wei Wuxian doesn’t mean that Lan Wangji actually had any intent of hurting or caging him— that was just a misinterpretation on Wei Wuxian’s part, and we, as the audience, find that out in due time— but as written in the novel, it can be really uncomfortable to read. Because of that, many people choose to accept CQL canon regarding Lan Wangji’s more possessive actions or mix characterization from different adaptations, which, to be clear, I completely understand and respect. 

However, Qingheng-jun doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt as often, which I frankly find baffling, because nowhere in the text does it state that Lan-furen objected to being taken back to Cloud Recesses, while even Wei Wuxian clearly objected the first few times. In fact, while we’re on this note, I’ll take it a step farther— I find it baffling that people seem to default to an unsympathetic view of Qingheng-jun, because nowhere in the text does it state that he overruled Lan-furen’s wishes in any way. The text doesn’t clarify a lot of things, actually, and that is part of the point. 

The narrators of MDZS are, in many situations, highly unreliable. This is, presumably, very purposeful! MDZS can easily be read as a sharp criticism of reputation and mass judgment and the concept of condemning people without knowing their motives! And I don’t want to sound mean, but guys… did any of us learn anything from that? Here, I’m going to put it in meme format for a second to convey what I mean. 

MDZS: It’s easy to condemn someone as a villain if you don’t know their story or the reasons behind their actions

MDZS: Anyway, here’s a character whose story and reasons behind his actions you know nothing about

Some Parts Of This Fandom: Ah, a villain 

    Memes aside, here’s what I want to point out. It’s entirely possible to assume Qingheng-jun was a bad person who disregarded a woman’s wishes in marrying and confining her when all you have is Lan Xichen’s (actually very neutral, thank you Lan Xichen for being an eminently reasonable and concerned-with-evidence character) account of what happened. It would also be at least that easy to assume Wei Wuxian was just an evil necromancer if he hadn’t un-died and brought his own story to light, or even to believe that Lan Wangji had somehow tamed Wei Wuxian into submission and being a respectable cultivator if you were an average citizen of Fantasy Ancient China with nothing but rumors to operate on. 

    The thing about Qingheng-jun and Lan-furen’s story, then, is that there is nobody left alive who knows the full tale. Nobody knows what they thought about anything, really. Nobody even knows why Lan-furen killed Qingheng-jun’s teacher. Wei Wuxian asks why, and Lan Xichen can’t tell him, but I think the best answer would be something along the lines of I don’t know, Wei Wuxian, why did you kill people? Your guess on the motivations of your own thinly disguised narrative parallel are as good as anyone’s. 

    So, while it’s not technically impossible to assign darker motives to Qingheng-jun, the cautionary tale of MDZS seems to warn against that exact assumption. 

    I’ve refrained from getting too salty on a personal level thus far, but now that I’ve said a lot of the more logical and story-based points of my argument, I will say that at least some of my annoyance with the interpretation of Qingheng-jun as a possessive rapist and Lan-furen as his victim stems from the fact that I just think it’s straight up boring. Where’s the nuance? Aren’t you tired of reducing these characters to the flattest possible versions of themselves? Don’t you just want to add a little flavor? 

    In a slightly more serious phrasing of that criticism, I find that making Lan-furen a helpless prisoner strips her of whatever agency she might otherwise have. To be fair, she’s more or less a non-character in keeping with the general state of the MDZS universe, but making her a damsel in distress only consigns her more deeply to hapless, milquetoast innocence. 

    It’s perfectly valid to enjoy ladies who have done nothing wrong, ever, in their lives, but like… Qin Su is right there, if that’s your ball game. There’s also really no need to make Qingheng-jun someone who doesn’t respect women. Isn’t Jin Guangshan enough for at least one universe? 

    Anyway, ultimately, you do you. I don’t like arguing on the internet, and will just ignore things I don’t agree with (or write an 1800 word vaguepost) like a mature human being. I’m just saying, if it’s a cut and dry tale of imprisonment and assault you’re looking for… you probably don’t want to turn to a woman who committed a murder and a man who loved her enough to forfeit everything to keep her safe. 

[centrally-unplanned]

Haruhi Suzumiya’s Limited Shelf Life

The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi, an adaptation of a light novel series of the same name, is a 2006 anime who’s ascent into stardom occurred with unmatched speed, but in my opinion its staying power as a “relevant” anime experienced an equally rapid descent. Most people would point fingers at the legendary - just unparalleled in its audacity and “fuck all y’all” vibes - Endless Eight arc of its second season. Others, such as this quite fun video essay on Endless Eight which partially inspired this essay, point to the lack of light novel source material dragging down the possibility of more content to keep up momentum. I’m not going to make a numbers or data-based argument on how the Haruhi franchise actually performed; instead, after rewatching the Haruhi anime recently I feel the show itself was built to have a limited shelf-life from the get-go, and its decline should be no surprise.

Haruhi, to briefly summarize, is the story of Kyon, a witty-but-average highschooler who gets tsundere-roped into being the assistant to the titular Haruhi Suzumiya, a bored maniac constantly trying to drum up paranormal hijinks for kicks who is, unbeknownst to herself, secretly God who’s boredom if left unchecked will destroy the universe. That might sound like a pretty zany plot premise, but it has nothing on the presentation of the show itself. The ‘first’ episode of Haruhi aired, with no context or lead in, as an obviously garbage-tier magical-girl show ‘home-made’ by the actual characters in the show, with fourth wall-breaks and editing mishaps aplenty. And while the next episode proceeded to be the proper episode 1, the whole show airs entirely out of order, with characters referring explicitly to past events that the audience has not seen. Which all leads into the final episode of the first season being chronologically...episode 6. Pieced together afterwards, the show has a complete arc from the episodes 1 to 6 that were peppered throughout the broadcast order, and episodes 7 to 14 are one-off stories that enhance the characters and showcase the (subtle) changes resulting from that original arc.

This presentation was a *huge* part of the success of the show, primarily because it contributed so much to the Drama of it all. Love it or hate you had something to talk about, and the puzzle of what was actually going on - particularly after the first episode - pushed the 2ch thread comment counts into the Haruhi-blessed heavens. It wasn’t just a gimmick though - what it did was make a good show out of, well, not-very-good source material. 

Haruhi in broadcast order presents a sort of arc mystery in that how you see Kyon & Haruhi act around each other changes as the timeline jumps around, and that answer to “why?” is slowly revealed to you (spoiler alert, it's fundamentally romance, but it is well done). It gives that finale a ton of impact, and given how well you know the characters means you are really invested in their relationship at that point. But in chronological order...well that conclusion is a bit rushed, isn’t it? 6 episodes to care about a romance, half of the run-time of which is spent on the 3 other main characters besides Kyon and Haruhi? And then those later episodes, more than half the season, are just one-offs with no narrative. Airing chronologically would be a bad way to structure the show, for sure - but that is exactly how the books go! They are decently executed but jeez are they fluffy beyond the first novel, which tells that tight 6 episode starting arc. 

The show’s first season even acknowledges this, even in its later filler, by jumping around in what they actually adapt. One of Haruhi’s best episodes is episode 12, “Live Alive”, which features the stunningly-animated “God Knows” musical performance, but also ends on an intimate moment between Haruhi & Kyon where Haruhi lets slip a bit of growth in seeing what emotional value doing things for others can hold over always chasing her own myopic desires. It’s a great way to set up her slow-burn evolution, so it works well as lead-in to the finale (which is when it broadcasts). That is why Kyoto Animation chose to adapt that scene... from the depths of Book 6!! They skipped over several novels of content to pull that story out, because they needed it - as the rest of the source material is often filler.

Even the comedic chops of the show, its other strength, often exist in the first season despite the source material, not because of it. The seams actually start to show in season 1 itself, which has a few clunker episodes in its runtime. One of the comedic underpinnings of the show is how it parodies sci-fi anime & light novel elements, making fun of how esoterically nonsensical they can get. In one of the early episodes, when one of the crew - Mikuru - reveals herself to be a time traveller sent from the future to ‘protect the timeline from Haruhi’s power’ or whatever, her explanation is just completely skipped over by our point-of-view character in Kyon, with every other word bled together in a montage sequence as the camera spins around the scene, to highlight how silly the *mechanics* of the powers of these characters are to think about. It's definitely a great gag - which makes it very odd when, in episode 7, the characters spend, and I counted, *4 minutes* explaining over static shots of the characters how the mechanics of the paranormal villain-of-the-week operated. Its has a wider point, the show isn’t incompetent, but its jarring given how earlier the show told you so stridently that these kinds of details won’t matter. But that story is from book 3, it's what the source material becomes, so they can only go so far to fix it.

All of these problems just compounded on themselves when they made additional content, as at that point they had already mined the source material for the arc-nuggets it had and only the detritus remained. Remember that hilariously-bold opening episode, of a magical-girl homemade trainwreck of a film I mentioned? The one that is so funny precisely because you have no context for it, such that your confusion just heightens the humor while you also somehow learn so much about the characters you have never met via the bold characterization? Want to watch *five episodes* about them making that film, which you have already seen and is in the end nothing but a punchline? No? Then 30% of season 2 won’t have much to offer you, since that is what they did - because that smash-cut opening gag doesn’t exist in the source material, it instead gets a whole book devoted to it. For sure other stuff happens in those episodes, it isn't terrible - but it fundamentally lacks the stroke of genius of that season 1 opening, to trust in the audience the way they did to go along for the ride.

Endless Eight obviously didn’t help the show maintain popularity, and the movie is pretty decent, but there was no escaping the fundamental problem; namely that everything after Season 1 is fundamentally niche. It appeals if you like this specific genre of show, and these specific characters. Which is fine, but that can never be the Most Popular Show around, that market size is capped. The moment Haruhi the show had to keep going beyond that first season, it had nowhere to go but down. 

[pass-the-bechdel]

Stargate SG1 full series review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

43.6% (ninety-two of two hundred and eleven).

What is the average percentage of female characters with names and lines for the full series?

23.23%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Thirteen.

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 50% female?

Three. 

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Seventy-two.

Positive Content Status:

Well, it’s altogether not impressive - on the plus side, the one (1) original female lead on the show is a legitimately great character and a strong feminist icon who has thus far withstood the test of time, but on the negative side, it’s fucking slim pickings for quality female representation beyond that one character. I’d also like the register my displeasure at all the times when the intense heteronormative male-obsessed writers room churned out content which was so rooted in straight-white-cis-male-Christian-American ideology as to be utterly absurd when applied to alien beings and cultures, but with zero evidence that anyone had reflected in the least on that fact. It’s science fiction, morons. Get a clue (average rating of 2.96).

Which season had the best representation statistics overall?

Season ten has to take it - as the only season with two women in the main cast, it passed the Bechdel 80% of the time (its closest competitor in that regard was season five at 54.54%, the only other season to even make it over 50%). Season ten also scored a 26.93% female cast, which is rubbish compared to most shows, but it’s the second-best score in that category for this show: the season which got the highest female percentage was season two, at just 27.5%. Seasons two and ten also tied for the lowest number of 20%-or-less episodes, and season two had three episodes at 40%+ and one at 50%+ (whereas ten had only the one 40%+, and no fifties), so weird as it seems, we gotta dive back into the nineties to claim season two as the runner-up for best overall statistics.

Which season had the worst representation statistics overall?

It’s a battle between seasons six to nine: season nine had the series-low for Bechdel passes (30%), and for the female cast (an abysmal 19.07%). However, season six barely did better on either score (though it was not second-worst - that was season eight, on both counts), and on the other hand, season six had a below-average positive content score, and the highest number of 20%-or-less episodes for a single season (twelve - though, season nine hardly did better, at eleven - tied with season seven, which also had a below-average positive content score, and only 20.53% for its female cast, which is the ‘best’ score of that latter cluster of seasons, but to such a negligible extent it’s hard to pretend it matters). The only thing in season nine’s favour, really, is that it didn’t tank its positive content score, but coming in at average isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement - it’s gotta take the prize for worst overall statistics, with seasons six, seven, and eight all jumbled in to second-worst, because the numbers are altogether just not that different from each other. It’s a sad showing.

Overall Series Quality:

If you can stomach the absolute overload of white dudes (both onscreen, and making their identities sooo fucking obvious all the way from the writer’s room), it’s...pretty delightful. They really don’t make exciting adventurous shows like this anymore, and more’s the pity, because sometimes the wonder of stepping through the ‘gate and discovering grand, varied, bizarre, and challenging new things on the other side is exactly what we need. 

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Woof.

I did say, going in, that I did not expect this show to perform well, but that I was interested to see if maybe it’d do better than it appeared at first glance. It didn’t. Boy oh boy, it did NOT. As I have also said, as I’ve gone along, they increasingly surprised me in a bad way with their escalating inability to conceive of female characters, existing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: they were better at being inclusive of women in the nineties. They weren��t necessarily good at handling those women in respectful or intelligent ways, but they bothered to remember them in a limited capacity, and that was...ok, it wasn’t much of anything. I’m not going to praise the early seasons for having better numbers than the later ones even though ALL of the numbers sucked, any more than I’m gonna praise season ten for pulling the least-crappy scores out when we all know that’s a direct consequence of having two women in the main cast, and nothing more substantive than that, no actual effort or attempt to be better was involved. Early on, I thought that the fact that the Powers That Be had allowed Samantha Carter to move beyond her uncomfortable written-by-men straw-feminist-caricature origins to become a person in her own right was a great positive sign for the future, but that turned out to be a misdiagnosis. Not of Carter - she’s fantastic - but a misdiagnosis of the creative team as men who were willing to learn and develop and expand their intensely narrow perspective. That never happened. These writers did not learn.

To put the numbers in some additional perspective, let’s look at what we got in terms of recurring characters: as established, we had just the one main female character for the entire duration of the series. Vala, our final-season addition (appearing in just shy of thirty episodes out of more than two hundred), was not the second-most prevalent female character on the show: that would be Janet Fraiser, who was killed off in season seven but who appeared in almost half the episodes up to that point (almost half to that point, not for the show in totality, mind). So, we have Carter in over two hundred episodes, Fraiser in less than eighty, and then Vala, in twenty-eight. There are ten male characters who appear in as many episodes as Vala or more - five who appear in over one hundred episodes. After Vala? The next most prominent female character is Carolyn Lam, Fraiser’s eventual replacement, in a measly eleven episodes. Considering the show ran for TWO HUNDRED and eleven (three of those being movie-length episodes, none of which featured any of the female characters mentioned other than Carter)...in at least as many episodes as Lam, we have an additional ten male characters, bringing us to TWENTY recurring males, and four female. Carter, Vala, and the two primary base doctors. That’s IT for recurring female characters who appeared in at least ten episodes of over two hundred. Male characters? Take your pick, we’ve got soldiers, scientists, politicians, aliens, villains and friends and ambiguous third parties on and off Earth, we have a bounty. We’ve got random extras with no story of their own who look exactly the same as all the other random extras (do I mean Reynolds, or Marks? Doesn’t matter, they’re both more prevalent than Lam). Want one more female character, to make it a top five? It’s Adria, who appears in six episodes exclusively in season ten (no wonder that’s the season with the best numbers). You get another thirteen male characters in the process, so we’re at thirty-three to five. You want a top ten for female characters, you gotta get all the way down to the ones who only appeared in three episodes, and it’s a joke to really call that ‘recurring’ on this scale. When I say this show had a male-dominated problem, I am not exaggerating. 

Where is the variety? You’re either a female lead (in which case, a primary part of your function is simply to BE female - and traditionally attractive - so that there’s some eye candy for the presumed straight-male audience), or you’re placed in the Compassionate Caregiver role as a doctor, or you...don’t exist. Certainly, you don’t exist in a way that sustains story for multiple episodes. As noted, if you’re a dude you don’t even NEED story, you can be a regular-recurring extra, but a woman? Forget about it. Even the female villains never last more than five episodes, if they manage that (the nameless Priors recurred more often than Adria did). And as the show wore on, episodes in which Carter was the ONLY woman became more and more frequent (until season ten, which just makes a big ol’ last-minute mess of the series-long trends). While this was good news in terms of having less sexy-lamp female guest characters popping in to single episodes to look pretty, be useless, and never appear again, it was bad news for women, existing in the narrative in any way, because evidently, these male writers struggled with the concept of women with actual functions. Even with such a variety of settings, a variety of planets and cultures and walks of life of all the dizzying kinds a person could think of (IT’S SCIENCE FICTION, MORONS), we still somehow get stuck with this itty little version of society that matches the comfortable white-Christian-American illusion of life that has been perpetuated blindly in television since its inception (pro tip: women existing in all different career paths and walks of life have been a thing since before tv shows were a thing). There’s more social variety on this planet in the real world, right now, but these dumb bastards couldn’t muster the effort to be creative with alien cultures. Hell, they failed to even be thoughtful or do basic research into historical social structures in order to reflect those in their transplanted-from-Earth-centuries-ago peoples (who had a lot of different ways of doing things, ya know?). And don’t even get me started on the gendered obsessions of genderless symbiotes...This show could be delightful and weird and wonderful with some of its ideas, but thoughtful, open-minded, PROGRESSIVE? Not at all. When you think about it, it’s actually quite alarming, just how reductive they could be. It’s like they made some minimal effort with Samantha Carter and then decided that’s it for anything or anyone who isn’t a straight-white-cis-Christian-American-man. Our work here is done.

Of course, I’m not inclined to give them credit for Samantha Carter anyway - as I noted back when I reviewed season one, credit goes to Amanda Tapping for sticking up for the integrity of a character who was originally written without any; just like the writers don’t get to take any of the credit for the work Christopher Judge did in making the Jaffa into less racist caricatures (including addressing the misogyny the writers had embedded in Jaffa warrior culture - bless you, Chris Judge), I am not going to pretend that Carter’s success as a feminist icon for the ages belongs to anyone but Amanda Tapping herself. A-Taps saved her character from the trash-heap of history to which she would have been relegated if she had continued in the model that the early episodes laid out, and whatever struggles she had behind the scenes with the kind of content she was handed (in particular I mean He Who Shall Not Be Named, Schmete Schmanahan), she never relaxed her grip on who Samantha Carter is, what she stands for, and what that means for the audience looking up to her. It’s a huge achievement, really, that despite the obvious brainless sexism of the writing staff, and despite the test of time which has claimed so many other nineties feminist icons as ‘good for the era, but actually incredibly problematic’ (we’re talking Dana Scully, Buffy, and their ilk), Carter is still pretty much unblemished; she’s close to a platonic ideal of her archetype. Again, I really don’t think it’s deliberate on behalf of the show-runners, and especially considering the rest of their atrocious track record with female characters it would be a mistake to suggest they actually knew what they were doing with Carter and/or that it mattered to them to make a truly strong female lead. If all they did was occasionally cave to Amanda Tapping when she told them to do better, well. They can have credit for not being too egotistical to listen, even though they failed to extend that ability to being basically receptive to the world outside that one interaction. Excuse me if I still think they’re fucking idiots. Because I do.

The thing about the closed-mindedness of the creative team on this show is that it translates into the storytelling in a very particular way: not just in the obvious sense (where only straight white American (*Canadian*) men are real people), but also in the context of the ethos of the show, the perspective. The characters learn and change as individuals, but the overarching attitude of the series does not develop in self-awareness to encompass the knowledge of the universe achieved by humanity at large, and that’s because, plainly, there is none. For all that the show deals in exploration, discovery, and advancement, these things are framed heavily as being scientific in nature, and just as the writers seem so confident that they know everything about the way the world works to the exclusion of even trying to understand the perspective of anyone different from them within their own culture, so the show itself never goes through self-reflection upon the America(n-military)-knows-best approach to interstellar exploration. While some early episodes - pretty much just in seasons one and two - toy with the idea that Earth knows little about the ways of the galaxy and we’re all ‘very young’, etc, there’s no development or change in approach over time which would be indicative of growth, and as the SGC garners more tech and allies and accelerates into scientific comprehension (largely applied through military enhancement, yay), questions about whether or not the gung-ho charge they lead into other worlds (sometimes with apocalyptic consequences) is really a good idea essentially dry up. There’s an overriding arrogance about this show that seems to be a by-product of that lack of self-reflection, the assumption that the audience will agree with whatever they see because, well, it seemed right to the creators and the fact that there might actually be more nuance to the issue never occurred to them. This can lead to some wild assertions and some truly shocking decision-making that is delivered straight-faced (season ten gave us the good guys committing genocide, in the name of the Ancients whom they uphold as a great species despite THEIR arrogant and terrible coloniser legacy throughout the universe, and somehow no one is troubled by any of that), and it’s a prime example of why an open-minded, considerate and understanding approach (and a diverse creative team to help facilitate that with their naturally different perspectives) is a really important thing in storytelling, even beyond the immediately obvious issue of representation: if everyone in the room has created an echo chamber of the same incredibly limited point of view, you lose the ability to recognise that alternate interpretations exist and that from some angles, what you’re making could be illogical, offensive, propagandistic, or evil.

So, here we are. With me, wrapping this thing up with a reminder that despite just accusing the show of sometimes supporting evil ideologies through the blind ignorance of its self-absorbed show-runners, I actually really enjoy Stargate SG1 and will always hold a special place for it in my heart. On an entertainment level, it is pretty reliable, there are some duds in there for sure (some of them duds for various illogical, offensive, propagandistic, or evil reasons, some of them just fucking boring as Hell), but for the most part it’s solid, and sometimes it digs up a gem and really shines. Every virtue it has is a virtue that could be vastly improved upon (and every flaw is easily solvable with just a little bit of Goddamn thinking), and the full template is there, primed for a remake of the more inclusive sort, something that’ll play the game of alien cultural variance and the intrigue of Earth-based politics and the gravity and wonder of galactic exploration with the seriousness, creativity, and gusto that it all deserves. The heart and soul of SG1, what made it work for ten years and what makes it delightfully re-watchable despite being infuriating upon analysis, that core part of the story is pure. Damned if it doesn’t just need a broader, more considered take on that core, because it ain’t got a bless’d thing to do with being a straight-white-cis-Christian-American dude. That’s not how universality works.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Roman Sionis

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

Birds of Prey is a fun, silly movie. So you’d expect a fun, silly villain for such a film, right? Well, we sort of get that… but this is an R-rated fun, silly movie, so the villain is going to cuss a lot and peel people’s faces off and be a raging psychopathic manchild. Roman Sionis, everybody!

Good old Roman Sionis, known to comic fans as Black Mask (he isn’t ever called that by anyone except Harley during his introduction, and he doesn’t even wear his mask until the end), is just an absolute raging lunatic. He gets mad at the drop of a hat, is creepily posessive of Dinah Lance, has a very close relationship with his murderous second-in-command Zsasz, and is just generally unpleasant to every single person who crosses his path.

But that’s par for the course for Roman Sionis, who is never really EVER portrayed as a charming, likable guy. The real question here is, is he an entertaining villain? Well he’s played by Ewan McGregor, what do YOU think?

Motivation/Goals: Roman is a relatively simple villain, but I think this works in his favor. You see, a big issue with Harley’s previous outing, Suicide Squad, is that the mission was way too high stakes despite the cast featuring a group of people who didn’t really have any powers beyond “fighting really good.” or “has weapon skills.” You’re telling me you’re gonna put Harley Quinn, Deadshot, and Captain Boomerang up against Enchantress and her army of ancient Aztec super-zombies? WHAT? Here, we have a street-level threat much more suited to Harley’s capabilities: Roman is just a very powerful gangster, and his goal in this movie is the simple “get this diamond that was stolen back to me so I can make fat stacks of cash.” That’s really all their needs to be here, a simple MacGuffin to drive along the plot to its various setpieces.

Performance: I love Ewan McGregor, so, really, he didn’t have to do much with the role of Roman Sionis to make him great. Still, this man went above and beyond despite having comparatively little screentime to Harley. Roman seems incapable of going a single sentence without cursing up a storm and is the epitome of a psychopathic manchild, tormenting people for the slightest of reasons. He forces a woman to strip and dance on one of his tables because she was laughing too loud when he was upset, and decides not to spare a girl’s life because she had a gross snot bubble on her face from sobbing while he had his crony Zsasz peel off her parents’ faces. As funny and hammy as he gets, the dude is a stone-cold ruthless bastard who has no line he won’t cross to get what he wants.

Final Fate: Cass hides a grenade on him and steals the ring, and then Harley kicks him off the pier while he panics. Before he even hits the water, BOOM! Never would I have expected to laugh out loud at the sight of Ewan McGregor being blown into bits, but this movie was just full of surprises.

Best Scene: I think that the honor has to go to his establishing character moment with Zsasz, as they cut off the faces of a family who crossed Roman, and then when Roman decides to spare the daughter, he notices snot on her face, says “Ew” like a petulant child, and has Zsasz cut her face off anyway. It’s a great way to establish that Roman is an awful human being no matter how you slice it, and firmly establishes that while, yes, he is a misogynist villain in a female-led blockbuster, his misogyny is just a tiny facet of how unabashedly terrible Roman is.

Final Thoughts & Score: So, this is gonna sound weird, but… Roman kinda reminded me of Justin Hammer. Hammer is a villain who I have greatly warmed to over time (mostly thanks to Nando V Movies on YouTube), to the point where I think he’s actually pretty funny but is held back from true greatness by the sloppy nature of Iron Man 2. The film was big, bloated, and didn’t know what to do with itself. And this film is KIND OF like that… but it knows what to do with Roman.

The movie has an undercurrent of female empowerment, so why not make the villain emblematic of things women have to overcome? Roman is creepy, misogynistic, and even a bit racist especially with his condescending actions towards Dinah. And he even throws a fit when she “betrays” him and decides to murder her. But the movie is smart so as to not make this hamfisted; the movie makes it entirely clear that even if you take away his misogynistic elements, Roman Sionis is just an utterly disgusting human being. Everything about him is just so hilariously vulgar and repulsive, but the way he’s performed helps lighten it and help keep him within the tone of the movie. He’s just dark enough and just hammy enough to work.

My big issues with Roman are mostly due to his utilization and the wasted potential, which is a problem that really hits a lot of stuff in Birds of Prey. He is great every time he’s onscreen, but his screentime is fairly limited, and then he dies at the end which robs him of any chance of coming back in the future as an antagonist. He actually functions great as a more grounded threat rather than some larger-than-life end of the world threat, but the fact he dies horribly – before even having his mask burned onto his face, even! - just kind of feels like a waste of a character. To be fair, Black Mask is not the best or most interesting Batman villain crime lord; we have the Penguin for that. But when you cast  someone like Ewan McGregor and he’s clearly having a blast, it’s hard not to feel at least slightly bitter when he gets hilariously gibbed at the end.

Still, I can’t let Justin Hammer’s sacrifice go in vain; he walked so Roman could run, and Roman ran so that perhaps someday Hammer could sprint. Roman gets a nice, fat 8/10, which he definitely earns with the heaping helpings of ham he brings to the table, though he is held back at least a little by the wasted potential of his character.

But hey, if you want to talk about wasted potential…

Psycho Analysis: Victor Zsasz

I really like Victor Zsasz in this film. I really do. The angle they went with, the implied homosexuality, the actor… it’s all good stuff that helps make a disturbing character like Zsasz easier to swallow. But he gets hit with wasted potential harder than even Roman does.

Motivation/Goals: He’s Roman’s right-hand man, so basically his motivation is to do whatever Roman wants him to do. However, there is a bit of an implied thing between his boss and him; Zsasz seems undeniably irritated with the attention he lavishes on Dinah, and is very hands-on and affectionate with his boss. A lot of his later actions in the film and his cruelty towards Dinah does seem to stem from some place of anger towards her for taking Roman’s attention away from him.

Performance: I have to say, Chris Messina does a stellar job at portraying Zsasz as creepy and obsessive, and certainly showcases the fanatical loyalty he has towards Roman, making him something of a dark mirror to Harley’s former relationship with the Joker. I also appreciate that, despite not going with Zsasz’s original psychotic serial killer angle, they still made him a bloodthirsty psycho with a sort of nihilistic edge to him. Frankly, this might be the best possible take on a live-action Zsasz without things getting intensely uncomfortable.

Final Fate: This is probably the worst element of Zsasz: his death. Right before the climax he gets shot out of the blue by Huntress and then Harley just repeatedly stabs him with the arrow. And I have to make it clear here – Zsasz barely got to do anything. He never really poses any sort of physical threats to the heroines, never gets into a fight, and is never mentioned again after his death despite being very close to Roman (to the point where the two may have been lovers).

Final Thoughts & Score: As far as henchmen go, Zsasz is pretty solid conceptually. He’s established early on as a psychopathic enforcer of Roman’s gang, he has an eerie air to him, and he has a lot of elements from the comics you rarely see on Zsasz in other media, such as being blonde. Messina does a fantastic job at making the character seem like a competent killer in the employ of Roman.

But the key word is “seem,” because Zsasz frankly never lives up to his hype. Despite being introduced peeling the faces off of a family, he is just never utilized to his fullest extent. He’s kind of just there in a lot of scenes, and while he isn’t unmemorable or anything he never really does anything that makes him into a worthwhile addition to the franchise. He’s honestly just a glorified mook with a few interesting gimmicks to help set him apart.

I’ve gotta give him a 6/10. While he’s definitely a step above average, he’s really not anything amazing, mostly because the movie refuses to allow him to reach his full potential. He doesn’t have any great quotes, his most memorable scene really serves more to establish Roman than anything, and he is dumped and quickly forgotten right before the climax. He would easily be a 7 or 8 if the story treated him with a little more weight or respect, but he just ends up underwhelming despite having so much going for him, and it’s frankly a bit depressing. It’s just a very sad state of affairs for the character, especially when he managed to be more intimidating in the Arkham games despite the fact that he posed even less of a physical threat than he does here.

Well, while we’re here, let’s go over THAT Zsasz briefly.

Portrayed in the games by Danny Jacobs (who you may know as Sacha Baron Cohen's stand in on The Penguins of Madagascar. Yes, Zsasz and King Julien had the same voice actor.), Zsasz is never really a major antagonist and is, in all honesty, a pretty weak fighter; you can always take him down in one punch. The thing with Zsasz in the games, though, is that it’s always tricky to get to him, because he usually has hostages of some kind. In Arkham Asylum, he appears twice, and you need to use stealth to take him out before he kills his hostages. In City, he gets a much longer sidequest where he requires you to pick up ringing telephones and then glide to another one across the city within a time limit. Once you’ve listened to all of his messages, Batman finds out where his lair is, sneaks through it, and whoops his ass.

I certainly can’t say he’s the best villain in either game he appears in, but he’s definitely scary. His messages and game over screens are really freaky and unnerving, and the Riddler even requires you to find some of Zsasz’s work as parts of riddles… and by “work” I am of course referring to corpses posed in life-like positions. There’s also the horrifying little tidbit that in City, Zsasz actually does kill one of his hostages and there’s nothing that can be done about it; if you switch to detective mode in his lair, you can see a corpse at the bottom of the water in the room.

I think how creepy and intense he is really helps make him stand out among the more colorful characters in those games like Joker, Clayface, and Riddler, so I think giving him a nice 8/10 for his appearances is well-earned. I feel like Birds of Prey could have learned a few lessons from this portrayal; if they wanted to make him more creepy than physically intimidating, that could have worked well and it would have made his anti-climactic defeat a bit more plausible. Instead, they kind of tried this middle ground where he’s creepy enough and intimidating enough physically that it just feels like a letdown when he’s offed.

Oh yeah, did you know he appeared in Batman Begins? He had a brief cameo and didn’t do anything significant and looked like this:

Pretty sure he’d get a low score if he wasn’t just a quick little reference.

[loplainlointhemorning]

DOING THE HARD WORK OF MAKING EVERYONE IN DORIAN GRAY LOOK LIKE A DICK EXCEPTING, WITH LIMITS, DORIAN GRAY

okay so I’ve read The Picture Of Dorian Gray three times and I plan to again after I finish a few more novels, so I consider myself knowledgeable enough both about the book AND about the fandom surrounding it to make this post. This has been kicking around in my head for YEARS, especially after getting into Velvet Goldmine and noting how that fandom treats Brian Slade, who’s basically a modern interpretation of the same character. I know a lot of people are jonesing for me to rag on Basil Hallward and I plan to, so fair warning to those of you who i know are obsessed with him.

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To start, a lot of people see Lord Henry as the only discernible “Villain” in the book(though the book really has no villain) and Basil as the put upon good guy. This description is somewhat fair. Lord Henry contributes a lot of Dorian’s toxic ideas and enables a LOT of his most self centered behavior, not to mention he gives him the book that inspires his worst deeds. He’s the person who makes it clear to him that youth, self gratification, and most importantly, beauty are all that matter in life. Basil, on the other hand, does his best to “counter” these ideas, though I personally would say his idea of countering amounts to nothing but passive aggressive, low energy disdain. Dorian is too wrapped up in Lord Henry to listen to reason, and eventually murders Basil in cold blood, allowing him to achieve a sort of tragic book character aura that makes him sympathetic.

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To put it simply, the general attitude towards these character dynamics is that Lord Henry is the Bad, Basil is the Good, and Dorian could’ve been good if Lord Henry would’ve let him be. I find this interpretation very surface level despite the relatability of Basil Hallward’s homosexual yearning and romantic struggles.

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But before we dissect Basil, let’s dissect his counterpart. Lord Henry, to start, is immediatley established as a vain and flippant dandy(which is true) because of his belief that beauty is the most valuable trait a person can possess. This is the first lesson that he gives Dorian: that his beauty is his power, that his youth is fleeting, and that life will be worthless once he’s lost the ability to appeal physically to others. However, while he is the first to say it frankly enough for Dorian to consciously understand it, he is NOT the first to communicate that to him. He is just one in a long line of many, as is Basil himself.

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Funnily enough, I would argue that of all the adult figures in Dorian’s life, Lord Henry is the MOST supportive of Dorian’s actual person, and I think it’s entirely natural that he became as attached to him as he did and may have less to do with Henry’s good looks and manipulation than we think. Nobody in his immediate circle of friends or family allows him to explore himself or form an opinion about the world that differs from their own- Except for Henry. It’s merely Dorian’s misfortune that the first person he meets who allows him to be a human being is a conceited asshole, but it follows the theme of Dorian’s life, which is that he is the avatar for older and more cowardly men. And in Lord Henry’s eyes, Dorian’s poetential is limitless. He’s happy to give him ideas and let him run wild, but can’t accept the responsibility of teaching him kindness or compassion or self-preservation, because that would make the spectacle less interesting. Lord Henry is using a 19-to-20 year old to live out his fantasy of what he wishes he could do- But he’s not really different from Basil in that respect.

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And now it is time.

Basil Hallward reminds me a lot of myself, so I feel like I understand his motivations. He’s a shy, earnest, secretive artist who doesn’t care much for anything besides doing his work and yearning while looking out over his garden. He’s upset by people like Lord Henry, who are the embodiment of the poet who lives what he cannot write, because he is the opposite: He creates, and therefore doesn’t have to live out, his fantasy worlds. Basil is repressed and mild mannered while Henry, to his intense jealousy, is more attractive, vivacious, and conversationally interesting- Which is most likely why he didn’t want to share him with Dorian, instead of the reason he gave, which was that Dorian’s pure personality would be tarnished. It’s quite obvious Basil has a crush. But I don’t believe he ever loved, or even truly cared for, Dorian himself.

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Allow me to explain: I have a whole blog of random pictures, mainly of other people, that I keep because I find those pictures striking in some sense. I don’t have an aesthetic theme, really: It’s just people who make me feel, or think, or see something a certain way. I have a pregnant wax figurine in there and old pictures of Marilyn Monroe- And I find both creatively interesting because of how they appear to me. What I’m getting at is I think Dorian Gray is to Basil what an art blog is to the average tumblr user. As David Bowie once said, there’s a difference between being in love and going on to love someone; And there is a difference between being fascinated with your muse and actually caring about the person beyond the projection.

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I think it’s extremely telling that before painting his portrait, Basil had an entire notebook dedicated to portraying Dorian as various mythical figures and heroes. I think it’s even more telling that when Basil DOES paint his portrait, he’s ashamed of it because it is a portrait of HIS soul, an admittance of his worship and idolatry. Dorian REPRESENTS something to Basil, and it’s fun to speculate on what: I believe he is the poster boy for all of Basil’s sexual and romantic fantasies, which he obviously finds shameful, woven together with the romantic escapism found in mythology. But it’s obvious from the start that Dorian is Not the virtuous young man that he wants him to be, and that those virtues are simply what Hallward believes Dorian should be like, as opposed to what he actually is.

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This is depressing, but what’s worse is that Dorian is aware of it, which is what actually inspired me to write this post. When he realizes his youth is fleeting, he accuses Basil of the truth, in a heartbreaking scene featuring this quote,

“Dorian Gray turned and looked at him. ‘I believe you would, Basil. You like your art better than your friends. I am no more to you than a green bronze figure. Hardly as much, I dare say.’ The painter stared in amazement. ‘Yes,’ He continued, I am less to you than your ivory Hermès or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when someone loses one’s good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.’

Hallward turned pale, and caught his hand. ‘Dorian! Dorian!’ he cried, ‘don’t talk like that. I never had such a friend as you, and I shall never have such another. You are not jealous of material things, are you- you who are finer than all of them!”

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Lord Henry and Basil are nowhere near on the same moral level, but what’s tragic is that they, and everyone else, treat Dorian the same way- As their vicarious vessel. It’s just that Basil’s idea of what Dorian should be is A) Literal sainthood(as evidenced by the above quote), and B) Impossible to live up to, so therefore he seems to be the nicer guy. But it’s cruel to value anyone for what you can get from them, even if that thing is great art.

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In my opinion, the adult figures in Dorian’s life couldn’t give less of a shit about his true nature. His grandfather hated him and wanted nothing to do with him. Lord Henry is interested in seeing how far Dorian would go to do the things he can’t do because of his own cowardice. Basil expects him to be a storybook character, as do most people who came into contact with him. He was right to believe that his looks were the only thing anybody wanted from him because it’s the truth.

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To close, my personal interpretation of Dorian Gray is this: Dorian Gray was a neglected, naive child who became the fancy of two older men, both of whom were only concerned with using him as a fantasy and therefore both corrupted him for their own personal gain. This in no way excuses his actions, but I think it better explains them- And I think it condemns the people who ought to be condemned. Lord Henry was the person who played on his lack of self-worth to manipulate him, but Basil was the person who exacerbated that lack of self-worth in the first place. Basil wasn’t a good mentor(and DID NOT deserve to be his boyfriend). Henry wasn’t a good mentor. There was no good mentor- There was only Dorian, and the simple fact that people weren’t going to love him if he stopped being pretty. The person he became afterwards was someone of his own making- But the initially shy, praise-hungry, warped young boy who felt the need to become that person was both Basil and Henry’s creation.

[dndplus]

In-Depth: Altering Combat

This is post is titled “In-Depth”, and it is done so because it talks about the aspects of combat and building encounters in D&D that are beyond your basic ‘understanding locales’ and KFC nonsense.

If you want the beginner’s post on Combat, go here:

    Getting Started: Combat

That said, in my Getting Started post, I didn’t go into detail on certain aspects of running an encounter.  This was intentional, as someone who’s just started should’t be concerning themselves with quite so much.  But what about the rest of us?  The people building encounters for players at level 3, or 5, or 9, or 14, or... you get the picture.

As per usual, I’m going to break this post down into certain key segments:

Experience, and Why You Shouldn’t Always Listen to the CR

Special Enemy Abilities

Moving The Goalposts: How to Make Parties of Particularly Deadly Player Characters Feel Their Weaknesses

One Big Foe

Depending on your level of experience, one (or all) of these bullets will jump out to you as things that have needed adjustment on your end.  Here’s some tips and insight on how to manage all of these factors, starting with some advice to keep experience values from affecting how you structure encounters...

Experience, and Why You Shouldn’t Always Listen to the CR

I’m going to go ahead and start this post by saying that, in my opinion, no custom campaign should ever really bother with experience.  This is a guideline (admittedly a useful one), but it can grossly limit a DM’s creativity and flexibility when building an encounter.

So, you can either assign experience values yourself based on the difficulty (because, yes, an encounter can be worth MORE experience than the CR suggests as well), or you can simply inform your players of when they’ve earned a level-up as your campaign’s story dictates.  I’ll give some advice on this, but first, let’s talk about the why.

A vampire has a challenge rating of 13, and awards 10,000xp (split evenly among the group).  It’s a difficult foe, with regenerative capabilities, Legendary Actions and Resistance, the added complication of Misty Escape, incredible story-centric skills (shapechange, charm, etc), and even the ability to summon minions.

It also only has 144 hit points (on average).  In a straight up, no non-sense fight, you’d be downright shocked to see how low a level some parties of 4 can be when challenging a “dreaded” vampire and coming out on top.

So, what gives?  Why 10,000xp for something that has such a strong chance of being outright blown up?  Well first of all, a vampire has legendary resistance and legendary actions baked in because it’s meant to fight with others.  The chaos of a packed battlefield is what makes a vampire the CR 13 menace it claims to be.

But that’s my point: A vampire is not a CR 13 creature when alone, not the way many dragons fit their CR when they are.  For instance, an Adult White Dragon (also CR 13) has the same Legendary Resistance, Legendary Actions, much more HP, a higher Armor Class, a deadly breath weapon (12D8, save DC 19, YIKES!), and a far more powerful array of standard attacks.  What’s more, dragons of this size have Frightful Presence, which severely ups the creature’s action economy (more about action economy in One Big Enemy later...)

At this point, the Adult White Dragon already seems stronger than a Vampire, but it pulls way, wayyyy ahead when you factor in its nightmarish 80ft Flying Speed.  If this isn’t proof that you can’t always trust the CR rating of a creature, I don’t know what is.

So, how do we go about assigning level-ups in a way that keep us from worrying about the sudden deluge of experience an overrated monster offers?  Simple!  You forgo experience altogether!  Some players like the illusion of experience, though.  To accommodate this, plan out all of the adventures you wish to have spanning a “level” and then split up the experience rewards based on the difficulty of individual missions.

If your players understand and trust you enough to handle the level-ups without the bells and whistles, it’s up to you to plan their distribution.  The best way to do this is to look at the greater adventure at play in your campaign and take stock of your villain.  Your players should be strong enough to handle them when the times comes, but not so strong that they walk right over the poor sod.  Use those benchmarks to create the ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ points of the level ups you need your players to get.

After that, use important encounters to space those level ups out.  Here’s a few examples of events that are well suited to triggering a level up:

Defeating one of the villains most powerful minions.  This one is obvious, and a classic.  As an added bonus, it cements the feeling in your players that they’re getting closer to final confrontation.

The conclusion of an important meeting, or the coming of a particularly plot-important revelation.  This one is a bit more complicated, but again fits well with the feeling of progression.  Typically, this is best used when your players have gone through a lot of combat since their last level, but are lacking in some plot-significant baddie to mark the occasion.

Difficult Side Quests.  Yeah, sometimes the players get dragged into something completely unrelated, but it’s nice for these to have weight and not feel like a waste of time.  If you’re worried about your players going off and doing other stuff to the point that they’ll become too powerful, remember that you can fill the final boss encounter with additional minions to bring the difficulty up to par.  Alternatively, you can use the story you’ve created to put a sense of urgency into the players, and also create consequences for their wandering.  A necromancer threatening to ascend into a lich is a terribly frightening prospect, and makes the players feel like they’ve lost ground for running off to level up more before the final confrontation.

That’s really all there is to say about experience.  It’s not a terribly detailed subject, but it’s one I want Game Masters to understand.  CR, like everything else, is just a tool.  Treating it as gospel will make balancing encounters that much more difficulty in the long run.

Special Enemy Abilities

I sincerely hope that this is a short subject, because it’s not a particularly complicated one.  What’s it really about, though?

Well, sometimes that Specter enemy you’re throwing at your players was created as a result of something unique.  The Monster Manual already gives us a ‘special’ version of the Specter in the Poltergeist, but that doesn’t always fit the flavor of your specter’s circumstances.

Let’s start with a few examples of why a creature might have special abilities:

A pact, blessing, or curse from some greater being.

The unique way in which it came to be.

Life in a locale not typical to its species.

Some detail specific to your setting.

There’s a lot more, but these should give you an idea of when to get creative.

In the instance of the specter, we’re going to combine 1 + 2, in which someone died at the hands of a particularly horrid and dark god.  At this point, you have to ask yourself: how much stronger, or weaker (because yes, they can be weaker), is my ‘special’ creature?

So, our ultra horrible nightmarish entity has doomed a few pour souls to a particularly vile magically induced death.  What comes of it?  If the entity is supposed to be particularly powerful, then make the specters more powerful too.

We’ll start by upping the HD from a flat 5D8 to 5D8 + 20, which is a significant increase for any party that has trouble dealing with a Specter’s natural resistances.

It can’t just be more powerful though, can it?  No, the rule of cool is important, and we want this new version to do something cool that will tip your players off to how unique it is, as well as match the dark entity that created them.

In this example, I’m using an evil god of my own design known as Goddenfeir.  Without going into too much detail and boring you all to death, Goddenfeir is a god obsessed with the concept of complete nonexistence, and finds it unattainable.  Wraiths, specters, and the like created by Goddenfeir carry this sense of oblivion deep within their being, and manifest abilities to go along with it.  Here’s what I gave the specter:

Breath of Oblivion - Recharge 5-6, 15ft Cone.  Targets caught in the breath must make a DC 12 Dexterity Saving Throw, suffering 5D6 Cold Damage on a failed save, or half as much on a successful one.

This is a frightening ability, especially when the prospect of multiple specters comes into play.  In my own campaign, this was done to pump up Goddenfeir himself in a simple event that wasn’t meant to threaten the players that much, merely show them that he’s there, and that even something as harmless as a Specter (CR 1 normally) can potentially become very dangerous with his dark influence.

Moving The Goalposts: How to Make Parties of Particularly Deadly Player Characters Feel Their Weaknesses

Adding this category was very much so an afterthought, but it’s an important one: some player parties are just too damn good at killing things.

So how does a Dungeon Master kill-, er... challenge such a party?  Simple: you move the goalposts.  Not every encounter needs to come down to ‘killing the other guy’.  Not every encounter needs to be combat, either.  You could throw a puzzle at your players, or a particularly deadly trap (or a combination of the two!).

When you are looking for a way to give your oh-so-powerful band of murder-hobos a fight that will leave them quaking, you want to change the goal of the overall fight.  Here’s some basic examples of how to do that, for you to use straight up or to inspire you to create one of your own:

Evacuation!  A town is under attack, and its enemies are legion.  Have your players brave the town and help the people trapped within escape, fighting through the endless hordes all the while.  This can be easily done by enticing them with a great deal of gold for every person they save (and then making them increasingly difficult to get to, of course).

Trapped!  Sometimes, the only play is to run away.  Again, we have an endless horde situation, but this time your players are working against the clock (and their own limited resources) to secure a means of escape.  Speaking of clocks...

Stall/Rush!  Some parties are strong because they blow enemies up super fast.  Some parties are strong because they’re just so damned resilient.  Whichever the variety plaguing you, making a fast party take their time (such as with an enemy who’s invulnerable for a series of turns at the start of a fight) can be devastating.  Likewise, forcing a slow party to get the job done fast (say, defeating a powered up Ogre Champion with the key to the lift of the collapsing mine they’re in).  

This is a pretty bare-bones set of examples, but I think they demonstrate pretty well that a lot of parties are only really strong when the game is being played how they expect.  Dungeons and Dragons isn’t just about killing the bad guy, though.  Sometimes the evil player campaign requires taking someone alive, or the good player campaign needs the players to make an ally of an enemy.  Whatever the demand, there’s always a way to move the goalposts and show your players they’re not as unstoppable as they think.

One Big Foe

I saved this for last specifically because it’s what reminded me to return to an combat in an In-Depth post.  In the Getting Started: Combat post, I talked about KFC and how it shows us that quantity > quality when it comes to making an encounter more difficult.

But what about when when you want to hit your players with a proper, ginormous monster?  Some monsters are already built for this, like Dragons and Beholders, as shown by the presence of Legendary Resistance and Legendary Actions.  Legendary Actions, in particular, are there to help even out the action economy difference.

Action Economy

You have 5 players.  They are each level 3, and you’ve called in a Hill Giant (CR 5) to pick a fight with them.  With the ability to deal 36 damage in a couple of attacks, it’s pretty clear that a Hill Giant is a deadly foe.  Surely it will-, wait, no, the players killed it in 2 rounds.

How?  Your 5 players only had to average 10 damage each to deal 100 damage in two rounds, and the Hill Giant has a low Armor Class and an average HP of 105.  The Hill Giant, if lucky, did 72 damage total.  In all reality, it did much less, with several points of damage going over as a player fell unconscious, or 18 points vanishing into the abyss as your giant rolled a natural one or just outright missed.  What’s more, no one in the party probably even bothered using a potion or other consumable, and next to no healing spells (if any) were used either.

This is where we even things out...

Legendary Actions

Hill Giants do not have legendary actions, and shouldn’t, but when one big enemy is alone, giving them legendary actions can help improve the threat they pose to the party without diluting the experience and adding more small enemies to back it up.

For a Hill Giant, we give it a pool of 2 Legendary Actions, which it takes at the end of a player’s turn, and is refreshed every time the Hill Giant’s turn ends.  It’s Legendary Actions would then look something like this:

Move, 1 Action - The Hill Giant moves up to half it speed.

Club, 1 Actions - The Hill Giant swings its greatclub at a target..

Hurl, 2 Actions - The Hill Giant scoops up a rock from its pouch and hurls it at a distant target.

At this point, the Hill Giant is suddenly terrifying.  2-3 turns feels like an eternity when it gets two attacks on its turn, and up to 2 additional attacks through the use of Legendary Actions.  We made it more mobile as well, a fact that will truly terrify the squishier members of the group who rely on keeping their distance.

In the end, though, a Hill Giant still only has so many hit points.  The fight would have to go terribly, TERRIBLY wrong for 5 player characters to all die to this one Hill Giant.

It’s important to think about what you want your legendary actions to accomplish for a creature.  I set the boundary of two attacks, an attack and half of its movement, or a single ranged attack, and then made the total legendary action uses match the pool of actions themselves.

Hopefully, this will improve your encounters when you try to throw a single, menacing beast up against your players, instead of it just turning into an ego boost for your players!

[wits-writing]

DC’s Nuclear Winter Special (Comic Book Review)

There are plenty of reasons to not feel like getting into the holiday spirit, many of them valid and more apparent in the world at large this year in particular. So in the spirit of a time where it can feel like the world is ending, I’m going to recommend DC Comics’ 80-page holiday anthology special for this year, the Nuclear Winter Special. Featuring ten different stories focusing on some of the DC Universe’s greatest heroes from across time dealing with struggles in varied post-apocalyptic environments and connected to the holiday season in some way.

The ten stories and creators are the following:

Rip Hunter (writer: Mark Russell, art: Mike Norton, colors: Hi-Fi, letters: Daron Bennett)

Batman 666 (writers: Collin Kelly & Jackson Lanzing, pencils: Giuseppe Camuncoli, inks: Cam Smith, colors: Romulo Fajardo Jr., letters: Clayton Cowles)

Superman One Million (writer: Steve Orlando, pencils: Brad Walker, inks: Drew Hennesy, colors: Nathan Fairbairn, letters: Clayton Cowles)

The Flash (writer: Jeff Loveness, art: Christian Duce, colors: Luis Guerrero, letters: Tom Napolitano)

Supergirl (writer: Tom Taylor, breakdowns: Tom Derenick, art/colors: Yasmine Putri, letters: Deron Bennett)

Aquaman (writer: Mairghread Scot, art: Dexter Soy, colors: Veronica Gandini, letters: Steve Wands)

Firestorm (writer: Paul Dini, art: Jerry Ordway, colors: Dave McCaig, letters: Dave Sharpe)

Kamandi (writer/pencils: Phil Hester, inks: Ande Parks, colors: Trish Mulvihill, letters: Steve Wands)

Catwoman (writer: Cecil Castelucci, art: Amancay Nahuelpan, colors: Brian Buccellato, letters: Josh Reed)

Green Arrow (writer: Dave Wielgosz, art: Scott Kolins, colors: John Kalisz, letters: Alex Antone)

[Full Review Under the Cut]

I’ll mostly be going out of order for how I discuss the stories in this anthology special. However, the first two in the book are worth grouping together for discussion, the Batman 666 and Superman One Million stories. Both expansions on characters from alternate futures presented during Grant Morrison’s runs on Batman and JLA, respectively.

The story of Damian Wayne as the future Batman wandering the frozen wasteland while pondering if his dedication to his father’s ideals still means anything in the remains of the world, when he’s one of the people who ruined it. Multiple stories in this special play on the idea that time stopped really meaning anything in the post-apocalyptic landscapes the characters are left in, so they’re made to focus more on the essence of what the holidays represent. Kelly, Lanzing, Camuncoli and Smith bring in the idea of family togetherness by introducing Damian’s grandfather, Ra’s Al Ghul, into the story with the way the fight between the Bat and the Demon resolves coming down to the end of the world helping Damian put where his values are in perspective.

Superman One Million’s story focuses on togetherness as well, but from another perspective and adding in the idea of the importance of memory. While Kal Kent, the Superman of the 853rd century, is highlighted in the table of contents for this issue, his segment of this issue absolutely belongs more to J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter. If this issue indicates Orlando’s approach to writing J’onn, then his upcoming miniseries focusing on the character is going to be something special. How canon anything in this special is meant to be taken loosely at best, but I like what this short story adds to J’onn’s character history when Kal Kent goes back in time to stop a time travelling villain from destroying the Superman Dynasty before it starts. The sequence where Kal gives J’onn back the memories of their past encounter the were removed for the sake of preventing paradoxes among the most heartwarming moments in a book full of them.

On the topic of stories that add interesting new details to the featured character’s background, the Kamandi story by Phil Hester does this by way of tribute to the character’s creator, Jack Kirby. It takes the already heightened world that Kamandi inhabits and places this adventure within a framework that calls back to the stories of both Hanukkah and the Nativity. The Hanukkah elements are mostly in play as something Kamandi recalls from his time growing up in a bunker with his grandfather telling him stories. As far as I know, this is the first story in the character’s history to feature the idea that Kamandi is of Jewish decent. In addition to that neat detail, there are ways that this story feels more complete than a couple of the others within this issue as it manages to set up all its necessary elements quickly and executes paying them off in a satisfactory manner within the limited page count.

Another story that makes effective use of its short page count is the Firestorm story, “Last Christmas.” The brief tale of Ronnie Raymond and Professor Stein having a final confrontation with the android Nuclear Family as they face their last Christmas ends up weirdly poignant and heartwarming. Dini and Ordway work together to balance the tragedy of the supervillain family with them still being a genuine threat. That tragedy also reflects on the kindness of Ronnie and Stein as they figure out how to save the day while letting the Nuclear Family’s final Christmas be a merry one in the end.

Two more stories that contain some interesting parallel structures are the Catwoman and Supergirl stories. Each one puts the focus heroine in a parental role and shows how that keeps them inspired to action, even in the face of a world that’s falling apart. Catwoman’s story starts with Selina in a position where she mainly seems to be using her role as guardian to the daughter of her longtime friend, Holly Robinson, as a reason to remain self-interested in the dystopian Gotham. In a time when people are forced to stretch whatever resources they manage to get their hands on for as long as possible, Selina debates her charge about whether they should try to help others when their own supplies keep running low. Eventually, Selina gives into her better nature and it inspired to play the role of Santa Claus by way of Robin Hood.

Writer Tom Taylor went to Twitter to ask people not to read the table of contents of this anthology, so they wouldn’t spoil his Supergirl story for themselves with its title. Since this easily makes the strongest contender for best story in the book, I’ll oblige by not giving away the ending either. The older Kara Zor El in this story looking after her adopted daughter in the “Not Distant Enough Future” journeying across the blighted Earth to find some place she can charge up her powers again is a compelling start to the story. The ending of the story builds up to Kara reflecting on a simple idea. In the face of the end, she has a choice to either perpetuate the cycles started by those who came before her or do something better. If you know anything about the Super-family, what her final choice ends up being won’t come as a surprise.

While I don’t think any of the stories in this special are bad, there were three I felt fell short of the standards of most of this issue. The Flash and Aquaman stories, while playing on the same themes of hope in the face of a hopeless existence that permeate the rest of this issue, are the ones that stretch the holiday connection the most. Though both still serve as pretty good highlights for their focus heroes. The choice of focus hero was my main issue with the Green Arrow story. I’ve never particularly liked or disliked Oliver Queen as a character, but this story seems to require some type of investment in him to get something out of him being grumpy at a future Justice League’s Christmas party. Though the actual weakest part of the book is the framing device with Rip Hunter, which doesn’t seem to serve much purpose related to the other stories beyond being a framing device.

DC’s Nuclear Winter Special showcases the present creators pulling some great material for the featured heroes within the setup of the titular motif. There are certainly people reading this who will get more out of the stories I was dismissive towards and the average quality of the ones I’ve highlighted is strong enough to give this 80-page special a strong recommendation as a way to get into the holiday spirit with some exemplary superhero storytelling.

If you like what you’ve read here, please consider throwing some support my way at either Patreon or Ko-Fi at the extension “/witswriting”

[theampreviews]

Dragged Across Concrete

When I sometimes attended my Film Studies classes at University one thing stuck with me from the Script Writing class; an economy of writing was critical to the success of your screenplay. It was a mantra echoing the sentiments of William Goldman’s “Arrive Late, Leave Early” approach to scene writing (as detailed in his books Adventures In The Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell?). To his mind this prevents an audience getting “antsy”. It’s a notion S. Craig Zahler wholeheartedly disregards.

If Zahler’s first two films, Bone Tomahawk and Brawl In Cell Block 99, could be described as leisurely in pace (both clock in at 142min), then Dragged Across Concrete, with its hefty 159min, is positively lethargic (which, for context, is still only 10mins longer than the last Avengers movie and 5mins shorter than Blade Runner 2049), and will likely push most multiplex audiences to their limits. Holding it to The Goldman Standard; this could be the least economical screenplay ever filmed, but it’s all the better for it.

Going into this film you need to understand that you’ll have to bed down and submit to his tempo, which is at times almost static. Zahler builds scenes of great magnitude that draw his viewers in, enveloping them like a sphygmomanometer (I had to Google that), applying ever more pressure until it’s almost unbearable. Virtually scoreless throughout, there’s precious little to distract from Zahler’s writing, but thankfully he’s still one of the most refreshing wordsmith’s out there. He might not pack his dialogue with pop-culture references as Tarantino can do (someone he’s rather erroneously compared to), but his way with words is just as pleasing to the ear. It’s hard-nosed, pulpy writing that exists purely in a world of his creation - his actors chewing on his dialogue like a T-Bone. He can also show a man eat an entire sandwich in silence and have it pay off.  

The most satisfying part of Zahler’s writing is that everything matters. There’s nothing throw-away about anything he shoots. The space he affords actors within the scenes allows them, and us, to take it all in without relying on cinematic shorthand to move things forward. No matter how long a scene is, it feels right, even (or especially) if that feeling is one of discomfort. The narrative drive of the film is relatively linear, we know exactly where we’re headed from early on, it’s in how Zahler stretches everything to breaking point in getting there that generates an anxiety that makes you shift in your seat; not the run-time. He can cut to the chase, but don’t be surprised if that chase is a leisurely tail across a freeway - the antithesis of Friedkin’s To Live & Die In L.A. but just as enthralling.

The other key attraction to a Zahler movie is his now notorious use of extreme violence. Whilst it would be disingenuous to say he has toned that down here (this is still far beyond much that you’ll see in your average movie these days), it is used more sparingly and dwelt upon less so than in his previous two. If Bone Tomahawk was sparse but unflinching in its depictions of depravity, and Brawl In Cell Block 99 relished the gonzo splatter effects of old, this time Zahler uses short, sharp jolts of violence to provoke the mind rather than overwhelm it. Often shots of explicit detail are cut away from so quickly that you’re still processing what you saw well into the next scene. It can have a disorientating effect, but one that makes you consider what you saw rather than simply have it thrown in your face.

Zahler also expands his eye for Old White Males, something I know many roll their eyes at, with his casting of Mel Gibson. Adding to the ranks of Kurt Russell and two time cast members Vince Vaughn, Don Johnson, Fred Melamed and Udo Kier, Gibson fits into Zahler’s aggressive, grim fatalism with ease. Some might consider this a role Gibson’s publicist might have urged him to avoid.

Since his original “cancellation”, Gibson has sought refuge in B-Picture pulp (Get The Gringo, Machete Kills, The Expendables 3) and couple of Father roles casting him as avenger/protector to wayward daughters (Edge Of Darkness, Blood Father) which all points to him acknowledging his new found villain status whilst also embracing a need for redemption (even the seeming outlier of Studio Festive Comedy Daddy’s Home 2 dines out on his asshole persona). Here though, the role of Brett Ridgeman felt too close to the bone for some; a bitter, mean son-of-a-bitch with a heavy-handed disdain for minorities. Be that as it may, Gibson is perfection and should be recognised for what is close to a career best - certainly it tops the list of performances in this second half of his career. Equal part hang-dog weariness and brittle rage barely concealed below a haggard surface, I can’t think of many others that could embody the character this wholly.  

Gibson and Vaughn’s Anthony Lurasetti are police officers who find themselves suspended without pay for Ridgeman’s abusive arrest of a Hispanic drug dealer; an act captured on a cell phone and spread throughout local media. The idea that Zahler frames their subsequent descent into “crime to make ends meet” as right-wing apologist rhetoric for the "forgotten majority" has made many uncomfortable, and I don’t doubt for a second that this is by Zahler’s design. Do I think he holds those beliefs? I wouldn’t know, but this film is not one for the Red Hat brigade if that’s what concerns people, but it does wave those common red flags without flinching (look to the “Black Panic” scene in which Gibson’s daughter is tormented by black youths on her way home, Gibson’s character bemoaning his lowly wage forcing them to live in such a “shit hole” with a young daughter and disabled wife).

As counter-point, the third main protagonist Henry Johns, played by a revelatory Tory Kittles, offers another staple of the genre; the recently paroled felon in desperate need of cash (imagine Denis Haysbert’s role in Heat given more screen time) providing a cultural juxtaposition to the craggy old cop routine (he and his partner Biscuits even “whiting-up” at one point). Whilst he rises a notch or two above the others in the morality stakes, he’s no Magical Negro; his purpose is not to elevate or educate his white co-stars, he has as much stakes in the game as either (sharing a financial need for care-giving with Ridgeman), and just as much blood on his hands (and sometimes more...). 

The Heat nod was clearly intentional, as Zahler cited that as a reference point in his Q&A, along with Dog Day Afternoon and Point Blank. Lofty comparisons they may be, but as a homage to those films, Dragged Across Concrete holds its own, albeit through the filter of a filmmaker that clearly loves exploitation cinema as much as any. Swimming in those waters, Zahler toes a fine line as to what audiences will find acceptable in both content and execution, and I think he’s pushed back against that line a little further here than he has before. It’s a provocative film without being insolently button-pushing and I’m sure it’s one that will divide audiences for some time (all but guaranteed to be a future Cult Favourite though).

There’s a scene that precedes the pivotal bank robbery that proved contentious to some during the screening I was at. We’re introduced to a character (one of the principle cast members) who we assume will form a large part in the film going forward, only for her screen time to be short lived and inconsequential to the plot. It makes for a quite harrowing and frustrating vignette, prompting one audience member to ask Zahler to account for its inclusion, a question met with spattered murmurs of approval around the auditorium. Zahler, clearly relishing the fact that this scene had struck a nerve, went on to explain (accurately) how everything from that point is framed in an entirely different way. It may have elicited anger from some of those watching, but he’s right in how that scene causes a shift in how you view the film and the protagonists going forward. He also acknowledged that, had he made this film under the watchful eye of a Studio and without his Final Cut deal, that scene would be the first thing any Producer would make him cut.

In a world dominated by audience pandering franchises, I think Zahler’s singular voice is one that needs to be preserved in tact, no matter how acquired a taste it may be.

[casualarsonist]

Mission: Impossible - Fallout review

I can empathise with Tom Cruise’s plight. At one point in my life, I too found myself over fifty, with half a billion dollars in net worth that I didn’t know what to do with, and having had my religion chase all my girlfriends away. The world can be a lonely place when your wealth-to-height ratio is 323,592,411 to 1. At that time I also wanted to die, and my only regret is that I didn’t attempt to do it via elaborate helicopter stunts - the one aspect in which Tom Cruise and I differ from one another. (I’m lying. You don’t know for a fact that I’m not Tom Cruise, so I thought I’d clarify.) Seriously though, if I had the means to, I’d like to go out in the exact same way as him, and I’m sure he’d feel the same about my preferred method of demise - ‘not while wanking’. But for now, Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise, and I am not, so instead I satisfy myself by watching him try to find the most expensive way to end his life as he films it for our viewing pleasure. 

‘Pleasure’ being the operative word here, because Mission: Impossible - Fallout is an ode, a testament to the crazy, gregarious, charming, golden age action films of the late 80s-early 90s, complete with a villain’s death (spoiler, the villain does not win) that makes you suck in your breath and wince. And that’s a great, great thing, because between the first film and this one (the...sixth?) the series has run the gamut of action-film styles, from a tense, spy-thriller, to ridiculous wire-work John Woo insanity, to boring summer fodder, to the most recent run of three superb releases that up the ante every time. I’m not gonna lie, I absolutely hate heights, and the idea of clinging to the outside of a plane as it takes off scares the literal shit out of me as I sit here writing this. But watching Cruise do it is absolutely breathtaking. Apparently he doesn’t have a stunt double. Could it be any more clear that he’s simply trying to reach the great beyond the only way he knows how - in a big-ass summer blockbuster? More power to him I say. 

If you’ve watched any of the M:I movies before, you’ll know that plot doesn’t really count for much. Not because there’s not enough plot, mind, but because there’s too much plot. Every time there’s too much plot, full of double-crossings and fake-outs and masks and secret spy dealings. Trying to follow it all isn’t worth the mental effort, and it probably doesn’t really make much sense when you break it down, so there’s little to be found in the plot other than a sense of the large scale machinations of the various entities at work. In the end, the plot moves forward because the right people show up at the right time as if everyone is sharing their location to a Whatsapp group for international agents of espionage, and the details are but a means to an end - an end that lies at the point the next action scene begins. In most other cases this might diminish the efforts of the film, but when your action scenes are this enjoyable, I really couldn’t care less. 

Tom Cruise hangs off so many things, guys. He hangs off helicopters in flight. He hangs off a cliff. He hangs off a building. At one point, he even leaps from the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, across thirty metres of open road, and onto the rooftop of another building half a football field away. It’s not something that the average punter will notice, but those familiar with the sheer amount of space between St Paul’s and every other building around it will understand just what an amazing athletic feat this is. My mum, a woman with a heart condition and a proclivity towards anxiety, left the theatre breathless and excited - a state I don’t think I’ve ever seen her enter in a positive capacity. She’s not a thrill-seeker, is what I mean, but this film thrilled the shit out of her. There’s a great sense of continuity and flow to everything, and this meticulous attention to detail, coupled with a lack of bewildering CGI helps keep you invested, even as the stakes are raised further and further. It’s the antithesis of the Bourne Identity shakey-cam technique that dominated action films for far too long - no-longer can directors use it as an excuse to cut corners and create a bamboozling visual mess in which you can’t tell who kicked what and where, while Cruise’s capability and commitment to doing everything for realsies means that they don’t have to cut fifteen times just to film him hopping over a fence. I almost, almost, raved about it when I left the cinema, and that’s a high endorsement from me when it comes to big-budget blockbusters. And that’s probably the strangest thing of all - that this film is a blockbuster sequel in a series that has long crossed the temporal line that usually denotes an irreparable decline in quality, and has somehow not only managed to recover, but get better with successive installments. Say what you will about Tom Cruise, but a Tom Cruise action film inspires a very different anticipatory feeling than a Dwayne Johnson action film. There’s a consistency in the quality that is fed by a tangible sense of ambition - this series has become Cruise’s baby, and with all the money in the world and nothing else to live for, he clearly tries damn hard to make sure that it is worth the price of entry. 

As for the rest of the film...it’s okay. It’s not so much an episodic installment as those before it, but a direct sequel to Rogue Nation, and if you haven’t seen Rogue Nation, then you’re gonna be really fuckin’ confused for a good part of the narrative. Old friends and enemies return, and you will have zero connection with any of them for at least two thirds of the production unless you’ve seen them before. Which sucks, because it’s not exactly fair that in a series of six films, they waited until you were five in before smacking you with a the first story that carries over. The performances are fine, serviceable. Simon Pegg’s character actually has some weight to it and serves a greater function than simply being the comic relief. Alec Baldwin is in it and through no fault of his own, simply due to the fact that he’s Alec Baldwin, feels miscast in his redundant, bite-sized role. Henry Cavill is...fine. He plays a charmless thug well enough, and the thing he does with his arms in the trailer and the bathroom fight is legitimately cool for reasons that I can’t explain. He’s the perfect henchman, and in this sense he’s well-cast for the first time in his life, but that’s not so much a compliment to him as it is to the casting director for realising his limitations as an actor. Cruise is the film’s heart and soul, partially because his character is the axis around which all of the other elements turn, and partially because no-one can stop themselves from crowing that Ethan Hunt is the saviour of the world, and the best-est, most amazing spy ever. It reeks of vanity project dialogue, and while it might be, I can forgive it because of the quality and effort that has gone into almost all the aspects of the production. 

In short, as mindless fun goes, watching this film is possibly the most mindless fun I’ve had in a long time. It was extremely refreshing to go from The Meg to this in the space of a week, and to be reminded that not all big-budget films are CGI-soaked trash garbage. I wouldn’t thank Tom Cruise for many things, but I’ll thank him for that. In the meantime, I just hope that when he finally does meet his maker, it’s because the navigational instruments on the spaceship he spent six months learning to pilot failed and he was propelled into the Sun during a billion-dollar set piece while filming Mission: Impossible 15 - Space Terrorism.

8.5 digitally-altered Henry Cavill moustaches out of 10

[gwcndolyne-a]

misconception : Gwen is purely the damsel in distress.

SEND ME A MISCONCEPTION YOU THINK PEOPLE HAVE ABOUT MY CHARACTER AND I’LL EXPLAIN IF IT’S TRUE OR NOT :: // ACCEPTING

Okay! I actually have a lot to say on the subject so buckle up. Let’’s start with the key word here ‘purely’ that word alone makes this statement unarguably untrue. Gwen was never just the damsel, there has always been more to her. Maybe when she started there wasn’t much more, but she existed outside of being rescued. But I’m going to focus on my interpretation just because I don’t have the time to dissect fifty years of comics. 

Let me start with this: my version of Gwen Stacy can be a damsel in distress, but I don’t think that reflects poorly on her. It’s understandable, and here’s why:

She’s an average fifteen year old girl. Anyone who expects her to fight off any villain that approaches her isn’t being realistic. She’s cautious, and she can outsmart the best of them, but she’s not paranoid enough to avoid being taken by surprise. She has the physical capabilities and limitations of a small female, which means if attacked by a grown man she has to play her cards right in order to defend herself and escape. Now add superpowers, technology, or weapons tot he mix and it’s far from a fair fight. I think we judge her on her inability to do things, that we can’t. I wouldn’t be able to fight off Doc Ock with my bare hands, so I’m perfectly comfortable with writing scenarios where Gwen doesn’t absolutely kick unrealistic ass.  

And it makes sense that villains would target Gwen, not only is she dating Spider-man but she’s the daughter of a police captain, so she’s doubly vulnerable and taking her hostage would take advantage of two powerful people’s emotions. Gwen knows that she’s a valuable piece in the game, and she believes it’s her responsibility to defend herself as much as she possibly can so as not to become a bargaining chip. 

Some other things that I want to talk about that are related:

My version of Gwen is well-trained in self defense and teaches it to other women, but in most of the verses I write her she’s a human being with human limitations. So that means even if she punches the Rhino in the face like a pro, it’s going to have little to no effect. She is constantly abducted into a  world that is beyond her own, sort of a ‘pick on someone your own size’ dilemma. And that fact that she’s still alive, quite frankly, is amazing. 

She has skills outside of physical prowess. She’s a literal genius, she’s got incredible grades, a healthy social and family life, and she balances extra curricular activities. So even if she can’t save herself all the time she brings a lot of other skills to the table. Her inability to protect herself is a weakness, but it is matched by her ability to solve mysteries and her knowledge of biochemistry, 

And as time passes, and she recognizes that her frequent kidnappings are becoming a pattern, she equips herself to combat the problem. She gets webshooters so she doesn’t fall to her death, she carries industrial grade pepper spray, and takes on of her dad’s high tech tazers. She is proactive in preventing her negative outcome,s but she isn’t perfect and she can’t be prepared for everything. 

She is not passive in her abductions. If a supervillain picks her she doesn’t just scream, and cry and then wait to be rescued. The whole time she is elbowing, yelling, and planning her escape. She never gets kidnapped and assumes someone is going to come rescue her. There have been plenty of times where she’s gotten herself out of situations before anyone has even noticed she’s gone. 

Knowing that supervillains will come after her and that she’s capable of keeping herself safe she is comfortable using herself as a decoy. She’s happy to be swung off to a villains lair, fake crying all the while, if that means tracking down a base of operations. She’s willing to be the bait in a trap, because even if she doesn’t’ have the physical skills to take down a villain in fisticuffs, she wants to play an active role in saving the city. She’d rather it’s her that gets swept off and bruised up, than some other girl. 

Additionally, after becoming spiderwoman, a lot changes. She’s able to keep up in a fight against event he most dangerous supers. She’s far form the damsel in distress, and it is her years of dealing with villains, helping spider-man, training to defend herself, and  her new powers that allow her to be so good as a hero. Gwen knows what it’s like to be the damsel in distress, to be underestimated. So now that she has a suit on she is ready to use her strangely acquired powers to make sure other people don’t experience that helplessness she has felt at the hands of beings with inhuman power. 

[mana-the-saiyan]

The Character Defence: Broly

In the few years that I have been a Dragon Ball Z fan, I’ve grown to love so much of it. But there is a trend that occurs in every fandom and in truth, every person. The constant battles and bickering about characters. Everyone is entitled to an opinion and clearly this is mine but I’ve seen some tremendous hate for him but I’m going to put forward a defence of Broly.

1) Broly is Non-Canon. For the Dragon Ball community, canon has been a shifty thing. A general consensus seems to point to one solid conclusion: If Toriyama didn’t write it, it’s non-canon. This is to help ease over fans who try to fight over this particular point and hopefully this closes that particular wound: Your love for a character is your love. It may not matter if it belongs within the cannonical storyline but no one can take away the joy you have about your favorite character(s).

I personally love the Super Saiyan 4 transformation from GT. I love the design and everything about it and I readily accept that it’s not part of canon. I accept it because in the end, it doesn’t diminish the love I have for the form itself and Broly not being in canon shouldn’t make you love him less.

2) Broly is too OP. This is almost a joke at Dragon Ball itself. The premise of the show follows Goku & co battling enemies far stronger than any enemy before. If they weren’t, it would get boring really quickly. But Broly seems to reserve a special kind of resentment and confusion in this regard. To the best of my knowledge, he is currently the only character confirmed to be a galaxy buster by an on screen demonstration. By comparison, the villain that would make the most sense in terms of what characters that were present for a scale would be Cell (based on the appearance of Future Trunks and Pre-Super Saiyan 2 Gohan. It most likely would be placed during the ten day wait for the Cell games if established in mainstream canon)

Now already this sounds like I’m reiterating old facts that everyone knows but I do so for a good reason. It’s been expressed multiple times throughout the series, in particular the Tournament of Power, that a Saiyan has every capability of surpassing their current limits. (Spoilers) Vegeta expresses this himself to Belmod in the ToP when Goku is going for his final battle against Jiren when he achieves Ultra Instinct again.

What should also be common knowledge is the Zenkai boost ability. A quick recap: Zenkai boost is what a Saiyan gets when placed near death and then allowed to recover. Best example is during the Frieza Saga after Goku heals in the medical pod. It allows the Saiyan’s power to rise exponentially at a near 33% rate (based on Vegeta’s power level Pre-Recoome and Post-Recoome) on average though it could vary.

A Saiyan’s ability to surpass limits coupled with a near death power boost is how Broly could have gotten so strong. After all, it’s quite clear that throughout his childhood, Paragus was less than exceptional as a father and used Broly as more of a tool than anything, most likely leading to quite a few Zenkai boosts before the events of the first movie.

Long Story Short: A rough childhood along side his Saiyan genes could easily mean Broly attained his power by simply living through numerous harships.

3) Broly is 1-Dimensional. A fairly common complaint but an important one to him. Broly was born (in movie canon) at the same time as Goku. Goku was quite the fussy kid, meaning that Broly never could really rest easily. Have you heard a baby scream without stopping? But beyond the constant screaming, it’s also the day Broly gets stabbed in the chest and when Planet Vegeta is destroyed. Broly endured a lot of trauma, more than people give him credit for. Of course he’s going to associate everything negative in his life with Goku. His earliest memories were hearing him scream, being stabbed and nearly dying in a planet wide explosion.

Remeber how I said Paragus was a particularly bad father? He also had a hand to play. Paragus would have used Broly’s exceptionally high power level to his advantage and would no doubt use him like a weapon. Broly’s only interaction prior to the movie was casually destroying and killing at his father’s behest.

Without a doubt if Broly had received a similar up bringing to Goku, he would be radically different. While he would still associate his near death to Goku, it wouldn’t consume him. It would more so just make him give Goku the cold shoulder at best and maybe hostile remarks at worst, rather than a direct murder attempt. Being treated like a weapon and being forced to fight no doubt left him with a mental state that though such acts of violence would get him praised and allow him to get attention.

Long Story Short: A bad childhood followed by worse parenting are to blame for Broly’s mental state rather than lazy writing.

4) Broly went out like a sucker. He did but upon some thought, it would make sense. Where Goku punched him at the end of the first movie was also where he was stabbed as a child. In a way, it’s an almost tragic poetic flaw; his first wound that nearly killed him would later be the wound that almost kills him again. Upon watching the battle he has with the Z-Fighters, he has no other weak points. He took a full powered Kamehameha point blank for fun but that’s because the blast hit a wide area rather than a focused point.

If you want to bring up the Special Beam Canon and it’s piercing properties, this is where I stop you. Even if Piccolo wanted to use it, he wouldn’t have the time to charge it. Most of the battle is Broly trashing the rest of the fighters with almost no effort on his part. Even if Piccolo did charge it and it was fired, it’s doubtful that he would aim for that ONE spot. Piccolo never knew about it in the first place and would most likely aim for a different area such as the upper chest ala Raditz, the heart or perhaps even the head. But we’ve also seen the attack being deflected, notably during the battle between Piccolo and Imperfect Cell. Who’s to say Broly couldn’t deflect it similarly?

5) Broly mistook Goten for Goku. (Spoilers) For those that don’t know, Broly survives the events of his first movie and arrives on earth in the second. There he is frozen (for what the movie guide describes as several years) until his is awoken by Goten crying near by. When Broly goes under, the events of the battle are entierly fresh in his mind. So much so that his is in a state of flight-or-fight because of his near death. He is awoken by the sounds of crying, crying that reminds him all too vividly of his own traumatic childhood and he simply wants it to end. The last thin he really sees is Goku’s face (before he blows up, escapes in a pod and makes his way to earth?) and since Goten is an almost exact carbon copy of him, Broly simply lashes out with animalistic insinct.

His near death and sudden awakening from his traumatic past hitting him again throws what rational thought he has out as he wants to SURVIVE. In his mind, killing Goten (Goku by extension) would end that torment for him. The last thing from his past would be laid to rest and he could relax.

That brings us back to his mental state. He’s fine when he encounters everyone else. I dare say he even smiles when he is introduced to everyone. But upon seeing Goku (Goten by extension after a few years), his thoughts of peace are shattered as the one trigger that brings back all the torment he’s endured stares him in the face. He simply seems to exhibit a very violent survival reflex.

6) Why was Broly almost killed? Less of a complaint and more of a good question. Broly was born with a power level of 10,000. King Vegeta at the time was barely above that. No doubt the king gave it consideration as to using Broly. But what would happen if one day Broly didn’t want to take orders from the king? What could he do against a warrior who’s power would ecplipse his own once he became an adult?

Had King Vegeta not ordered his death, Broly may have even grown strong enough to challenge Frieza long before Goku would have, beating the tyrant and becoming the greatest warrior ever known. Dragon Ball could be a whole lot different with that train of thought.

7) Broly one shots too many characters. This basically ties into my “Broly is too OP” argument. But lets go a bit further into detail by comparing his fight with the Z-Fighters against them vs Cell. Cell (Perfect and Super Perfect) took the likes of Future Trunks, Vegeta, Goku and Gohan to beat, easily the most powerful characters at the time. But during that fight, each fighter worked individually or as a tag team in some cases to bring down Cell.

Broly functioned in a very similar fashion for most of it. But where they diverge is how they ended. Cell was beaten by a Super Saiyan 2 Gohan after an intense beam struggle. Broly was beaten by four fighters (Gohan, Trunks, Piccolo and Vegeta) channeling their power into Goku who then beat Broly. That is the final nail in the coffin for this argument.

Gohan during the fight received no ki transfers from the other fighters and barely beat Cell during the beam struggle. Goku on the other hand took noticeable leaps in power with each ki transfer. Pre-Vegeta boost Goku almost punched directly through Broly’s ki barrier, meaning that there was very little difference remaining. After receiving Vegeta’s power, Goku was finally strong enough to push through Broly’s ki and strike him, ending the events of the first movie. The difference is simple for this comparison: Gohan worked alone as a Super Saiyan 2 and barely won while Goku received energy from four other fighters and ended the lengthy battle with one strike.

Why does this matter? Because it gives us a scale. In the main canon, Buu was the only one held to a similar power level. He tore apart planets left and right and while not explicitly seen trashing galaxies (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here or at any point), it is heavily implied he did. Broly direclty showed us his power by trashing a galaxy in the beginning of his movie, giving us a clear indicator to his power. Compared to Cell who COULD reach similar heights but never did, it’s pretty easy to see why he can trash around other characters so easily. I won’t say he’s stronger than Buu who took a Super Saiyan 3 Goku to kill while Broly was handled by a Super Saiyan Goku with four fighters, it’s pretty easy to see how he is able to beat most other fighters.

All in all, Broly receives a bit more flak than he actually deserves. He’s a character who went through a lot of suffering very early on in his life and rather than be given the chance to move on and recover, he was used as a weapon and treated as such for most of his life. He is a powerful individual in the Dragon Ball universe that is a very serious contender on the villain roster. Had he been given a better up bringing, Dragon ball would be very different and would see him as the most powerful player on the character roster. Canon or not, Broly has made quite the impact on the fandom as a whole and certainly deserved his spotlight in the games and movies. In the end, he’s an example of what even Goku could have been if he received a Saiyan upbringing instead of his earthling one. Also, apologies if there are spelling mistakes throughout.

[journeysintowebcomics]

Worm Liveblog #63

UPDATE 63: Just Like Them

Last time Jack Slash had encountered the person he wanted to recruit. It went badly for the potential recruit – Oni Lee. Theo will pursue Jack Slash and try to kill him with a time limit of two years. Meanwhile, Labyrinth was visited by Burnscar, who didn’t try to recruit. It didn’t go well either. Who is next in the Slaughterhouse Nine’s potential recruits? Let’s find out!

It takes me a moment to realize the significance of this candidate. It’s Colin, or as he used to be known when he was a hero: Armsmaster. Well this has the potential to be quite the interesting situation! Because despite everything, I don’t think Armsmaster would join the Slaughterhouse Nine unless he’s really upset about the consequences of his actions during the Leviathan attack. It doesn’t seem to me like he’s delusional, thinking it wasn’t his fault or anything like that. In my opinion, he’s of sound mind and has relatively stable moral opinions. He should be okay.

What worries me is which one of the Slaughterhouse Nine will visit him, though, because it’s very likely they’ll cause havoc no matter who it is. The question is how destructive they’ll be.

So! Armsmaster is at his house because where else would he be during his house arrest, when he hears a noise like tinkling glass. Shatterbird, perhaps? Better step away from anything made of any kind of glass, just in case. Armsmaster does precisely the opposite to that, contacting Dragon, who is currently busy examining a boring code. Hah! An AI is getting bored of code! This is great. Through the microphones, Dragon tries to listen and find out where the tinkling noise is coming from. This is good, I think. If anything happens to Armsmaster, Dragon will know immediately what it was.

There’s nothing to be seen outside through the window, which of course doesn’t mean he’s safe. The noise is coming from the vent, and I think it’s clear for anyone that anything that has to come from the ventilation can’t be benign. To defend himself, Armsmaster takes a small knife that seems to have disintegration based on nanotechnology, and considers going for his helmet.

The vent exploded from the wall with enough force to fly across the room and embed in the opposite wall. It was hard to make out in the cloud of plaster dust, but Colin saw a hand, all white, each joint segmented, fingers splayed, palm facing the room.

The hand tipped forward, and then dropped to the floor alongside the attached forearm, a length of chain stretching from the vent to the ‘elbow’.

…I remember in the crime scenes the Wards had fought the Travelers at one of the bodies looked like this – joints attached with chains and stuff separated. This has to be the person who made it. I can’t avoid wondering how exactly this parahuman can survive with such mutilation, from the description I’m reading here it should be an impossibility. This person must be a tremendously skillful tinker, because I suppose it relies on technology to work.

Do you know how creepy the idea of seeing exposed organs at work is? How do surgeons endure such thing? Golly!

He knew this one from the briefings.  Mannequin.

Well the name is very fitting. From the physical description alone I’d say this one is the most memorable of all the Slaughterhouse Nine so far. There’s something extremely unsettling about him that goes beyond the fact he’s a shambling mess of a person walking and moving. Has someone drawn Mannequin? I’m certain there is. If you know some pretty good Mannequin art please show it to me! Call it morbid curiosity, because I’m sure I’ll kind of regret it once I see it, haha

Armsmaster reacts immediately, lunging forward with his weapon ready to hit while Mannequin is still lying on the floor unmoving, but of course it doesn’t work. What kind of Slaughterhouse Nine member would get killed like a chump? A large blade emerges from the hand, and Armsmaster dodges because he got lucky. Will Mannequin approve this? I think he will, it’s not like he expected a warm welcome, right?

The head is the last thing that gets to the body, and it truly is like a mannequin’s head. It doesn’t even have facial features, so I suppose that means Mannequin’s brain is the only thing inside? I’m imagining that’s what’s going on with him. Goodness, my imagination is flying about how biologically possible it could be. Mannequin seriously is such a weird character.

Dragon noticed what’s going on and help is already on its way. Will she use her speedy suit to come all the way from wherever she is, like she did with the Undersiders’ attack to the Protectorate? Maybe not because this isn’t a somewhat average villain from the city, this is a member of a worldwide threat. Launching yourself carelessly against Mannequin can’t end well...for Armsmaster because he’s the one who is vulnerable here.

Mannequin does what can only be intimidation tactics such as showing Armsmaster his spinning fingers and trying to ward him away with them, as if threatening to slice his face off with them. Instead, the blades touch the leg, and it bounces around in what may or may not have been a calculated move because of this:

All at once, it ricocheted, shearing through the computer, bouncing violently off of Mannequin’s head, then his leg again, the desk, then his arm.

It hit the computer. Maybe Mannequin heard Dragon talking, even if she was careful not to be too loud. I don’t think they’d be so careless as to make the computer what allows Dragon to listen, but Mannequin may not know that, to them any voice he heard may just be someone Armsmaster was talking with.

The blades stopped, Mannequin still isn’t saying anything. Just like I suppose, the destruction of the computer doesn’t stop the connection with Dragon, she’s able to give some useful information about Mannequin. It’s of interest to me too!

“Mannequin. Original name Alan Gramme. Tinker, originally went by the name Sphere.  Specialty is in biomes, terraforming and ecosystems… or it was.”

Well this is the most information I know of any Slaughterhouse Nine member yet. Of course he’s a tinker, no surprise there, although now I can’t avoid wondering how exactly he turned himself into his current state. It doesn’t say he was a former hero, maybe he was like Canary, a rogue? His specialty is biomes and ecosystems. His, uh, his being right now may be related to that, if he can make a self-sustaining environment for what little remains of him. Who knows what kind of stuff is inside that mannequin. All in all, useful information.

“He became newsworthy when he took on a project to build self sustaining biospheres on the moon.  He had ideas on solving world hunger, and building aquatic cities near cities plagued by overcrowding.  And he was putting it all into effect.  Until-”

“The Simurgh,” Colin finished.

So he was a genius, a veritable world-saving genius. Self-sustaining biospheres and aquatic cities are concepts that seem so science fiction it’s amazing to hear he was putting it all into effect, but the Simurgh...something happened with the Simurgh. That sounds familiar. Wasn’t the Simurgh one of the Endbringers? Behemoth, Leviathan and the Simurgh, if I recall correctly. The city he was in must have been obliterated, and he changed then.

“His wife and children were killed in the attack, years of work ruined.  Everything fell apart.  He went mad.  He cut himself off from the rest of the world.  Literally sealed himself away.”

Literally sealed himself away, no doubt. It’s a real pity such a promising mind went insane and is now one of the Slaughterhouse Nine. I can understand why he joined, though, or at the very least I can imagine why he’d be willing to take part of this group.

In what must be the world’s least surprising fact ever, Dragon says Mannequin has a body count. What’s important is what kind of person he prefers killing, though.

Like other serial killers, Mannequin favored certain types of people as victims.  His prey of choice included rogues, those individuals seeking to make a profit from their abilities, especially those looking to better the world… and tinkers.

Pretty meaningful targets, if you ask me. I can’t say I know what’s going through Mannequin’s head, but I suspect he’s killing them out of rancor or envy, like they deserve getting killed for being altruistic or because he envies they’re actually being able to help the world without things going badly for them. Maybe this is also why Mannequin is here to try to recruit Armsmaster. He was trying to do what he thought was the right thing to do for the sake of the world – and his own reputation, but that’s beside the point – yet got punished for it, dishonored and thrown aside. His fall from glory was nowhere as dramatic or painful as Mannequin’s, but it’s close enough.

Being killed isn’t something Armsmaster is afraid of, he even welcomes it because he has nothing left in his life. That’s when Dragon reveals to him what the Slaughterhouse Nine may be doing in Brockton Bay. He didn’t see it coming, he’s not happy to hear he’s under consideration to join one of the global menaces. Yes! Just like I hoped he’s not interested. I hope my judgment of him isn’t wrong!

Mannequin doesn’t seem capable of talking. I suppose vocal functions are one of those functions that aren’t important, or at leIast I doubt he left his vocal chords intact. Instead of talking, he takes some of the keys from the keyboard to try to communicate. Somehow this isn’t the kind of communication I expected with a known murderer...communicating through keyboard keys. Somehow that doesn’t really increase the scare factor.

Mannequin swiveled his upper body to face the other direction and reached for the shattered monitor.  He picked out a piece of glass and a piece of glossy black plastic.  Pressing them together, he raised it to the right side of his face, looking down at Colin.  Slowly, Mannequin changed the angle of the shard of glass with the black backing.

It took two long seconds before the villain’s intent became clear.  Colin tensed, and Mannequin froze, fixing the angle of the shard.

With the black backing, the glass reflected an image.  With the angle Mannequin had carefully found, the image reflected was half of Colin’s own face, overlapping with Mannequin’s head.

It took me a while to realize what Mannequin was trying to communicate. What can I say, I’m not very good with charades. After a moment I realize he’s trying to indicate he thinks Armsmaster and he are similar. Looks like I was correct! This is why he went to find Armsmaster and invite him to join! And unlike me, Armsmaster isn’t pleased. He refuses to think they’re anything alike.

“I didn’t date, I didn’t have kids, because I wanted to be out there, helping!  I knew that any attachments could be used against me, so I went without!  I was fucking smart enough to do that!”

Given how their deaths is part of what pushed Sphere over the edge, mentioning this seems like a ticket straight to getting your head bashed in. Mannequin doesn’t even do that, he’s silent even when Armsmaster demands a reply. He’s so upset Mannequin insinuated they were similar he’s throwing all caution to the wind, even with Dragon begging him to shut up. It’s because he’s certain he’s going to die, so may as well die telling the madman what’s what.

“You want to compare us, freak?  Maybe we both had bad days.  Days where nothing went right, days where we were too slow, too stupid, too weak, unprepared or tired.  Days we’ll look back on for the rest of our fucking miserable lives, wondering what we would have done different, what we could have done better, how things could have played out.  The difference between us is that I actually did something with my life, and I’m still trying to do more while I serve my sentence!”  He stopped and took a breath.  “You started your big projects, got every fucking person in the world to get their hopes up, and then you failed to finish anything because you couldn’t hack it when your fucking family got killed!  You insult their fucking memories every motherfucking second you exist like this!”

I won’t lie, I’m kinda impressed. It can’t have been easy to say all that to a serial killer’s face, knowingly pressing all the buttons and aiming to enrage him as much as possible. I’m also pleased to know he’s trying to do something productive even while he’s trapped in his own home. Maybe there’s hope for this man. I’m not going to expect much because he did something rather extreme that cost a few villains’ lives and that’s not forgiven easily, but I’m glad he’s not sinking into hate for heroes or anything like that. He’s the first hero Taylor had contact with, and as such I’m sure Mr. Wildbow has plans about how to use Armsmaster’s character. Will he die here in this intermission? I doubt it, given how much potential he has.

As expected, Mannequin isn’t happy at all. He slams Armsmaster against the wall and stabs him three times, and slashes him across the face. Not only now he has lost one arm during Worm, he also is minus one eye now. Nothing that can’t be fixed with tinker technology, I’d say.

None of it hurt as much as it felt like it should have.  More serious wounds didn’t tend to, odd as it was.

It’s the adrenaline, I suppose. He’s not letting the attacks stop him, he’s going to stab Mannequin with the knife. Praying it works so nobody else is killed by this monster, Armsmaster tries to stab and...well, he fails. Figures. He’s not giving up, though, he tries to drive the knife into Mannequin’s chest cavity – since it’s nanotechnology like the one his halberd had that means it should be able to cut through the materials of Mannequin’s body, right? Even if he doesn’t apply lots of force.

How many blades does Mannequin’s weird body have, geez!

Still resisting, Armsmaster makes the knife inch closer, Mannequin positions his face less than an inch from the edge of the blade. It’s so close the material of the casing is being affected, but...it’d be quite anticlimactic for the most interesting Slaughterhouse Nine member so far to get killed because he was sticking his face near a dangerous weapon as if he was a kid with a fork wondering what an electrical socket is for.

He was toying with me.

That he was. I’m glad Armsmaster did such an effort to try to win, even if he didn’t really have a chance.

Armsmaster is too weak to continue moving, he has to let the knife fall and collapses onto the floor, chance Mannequin takes to use the knife to cut the wall apart to make a daring escape. All Armsmaster can hear before falling unconscious is Dragon begging him to stay away. She even says ‘I need you!’. Huh!

She’s there to greet him – well, there’s a laptop. That’s good enough. Better this than waking up and finding a large armor right beside your bed.

Looking around, he saw a laptop propped up beside him, and a get well card from Miss Militia.  She must have put the laptop there when she left the card.

For some reason I’m very amused by Miss Militia leaving a get well card, as if Armsmaster is just resting after an appendix surgery or something. Is there a ‘Get better soon!’ balloon tied to the bed, and a vase of flowers on the nightstand? Heh, but yeah, at least she was here. Nice.

“Your heart stopped nine times on the operating table,” Dragon said, “A lesser man wouldn’t have made it.”

Okay, that’s a feat of endurance. Most of the reason why he survived is because of the artificial parts Dragon invented that are now holding Armsmaster’s face and body together. I can’t avoid making a connection to Mannequin and the fact he also has artificial parts to keep him alive.

There’s still many surgeries Armsmaster has to go into, but he’s fine with it. With Dragon’s help he knows he can survive, and he’s not so far gone into his regrets he’s just going to stop caring about what’s being done to him now that he’s not staring at death to its plastic weird face. Props to Dragon for inventing stuff to save Armsmaster, too.

“You’re a fucking idiot, Colin.  That was the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”

List this sentence under stuff I never thought I’d read Dragon say. She always seemed so proper and composed, this is not composed at all. Must be because Armsmaster was the one to get hurt, all because he wanted to hurt Mannequin where it hurts.

“Wanted to provoke him.  See if I couldn’t find an opening.”

“I repeat: Stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Was going to kill me anyways.”

“Was he? He could have killed you there. He didn’t.”

“He tried.”

...I hadn’t realized it before, but Dragon is bringing up a good point, now that I think about it. Mannequin Is a serial killer. He’s not going to fail just like that. He must have known what he was doing. Dragon’s suspicious is that Mannequin deduced Armsmaster was talking to her. He also left a photo that says ‘BRB’. Is he going to visit Armsmaster while he still is in the hospital? For everyone’s sake I hope not.

Trying to make the situation a bit less tense, Armsmaster brings up what Dragon had said right before he passed out, that she needed him. It doesn’t go well, there’s such a long silence even Armsmaster knew he had said something he shouldn’t have.

The silence stretched on for so long that he knew he’d made some faux pas.  He just wasn’t sure what.  Stupid.  This was the kind of thing that had cost him his position, started the dominoes falling in such a way that they’d led him to being prisoner in that room, led to him being an easy target for Mannequin, to him being here, in this bed.  Never knowing what to say, or how to say it, or who to say it to.

He really is starting to change, the first step to achieve that is acknowledging your flaws, and here he’s doing it. I almost can’t believe I’m actually seeing it happen! For once I have a purely positive opinion of this man.

There we go! Anyway!

He was about to apologize when Dragon said, “Those prosthetics I gave you?  They were part of a bigger project.  Something I’d intended to use for myself.”

Ah...perhaps she’s planning to make a body for herself? One that isn’t a battle armor. Interesting plans, hm...well, giving Armsmaster some of these prosthetics doesn’t mean she has to delay her plans, surely she has schematics and specifications, she can make more for herself. It should be matter of time before she finally has a body. Armsmaster thinks this is because she’s a cripple, he doesn’t suspect anything. The logic for these thoughts makes sense, it’s just that they’re incorrect, that’s it.

The intermission ends with a line that makes me wish this chapter had kept going:

“No, it’s not that,” she paused.  “There’s something you need to know about me.”

Looks like she’s going to tell him the real nature of her existence. I really wish the chapter had continued, I’d have liked to see how she worded it, what his reactions were, what their thoughts were. I hope it goes well, I like Dragon and it’d be awful if this went badly for her. Mr. Wildbow will mention how it went later, I suppose. This is too interesting of a plotline to just toss aside.

That marks the end of the fourth interlude, I’ll check the next one right now.

The fifth interlude is...heh, call me impatience, but I’m immediately going to search for a name.

Hookwolf walked between the groups of his sparring recruits.

...I can’t decide if he would join or not. Back to the start of the interlude! One paragraph above. There seems to be a fight going on right now – it’s sparring, to be more precise. Looks like Hookwolf is currently supervising the training of his recruits, for his racist organization. Needless to mention, highly trained soldiers can hold their own against parahumans and special forces if they have the right moves and weapons. Bullets and knives are quite good equalizers in many cases, as seen before. What Hookwolf is doing, all this training, is a certifiable threat. This man is serious. Although...it makes me wonder what Purity’s group is doing? She’s not trying to use brute force, that much I know, but I’m not sure what she and the others in her faction have been doing.

Hookwolf isn’t the only one looking closely at the recruits’ movements, Menja, Cricket and Stormtiger are here too, watching and waiting to see which recruits are the best ones. They all have specific people already selected. After giving some positive encouragement to the troops, a person named Bradley is called forward to fight Menja. She’s not going to crush him into pieces in a one-sided fight as she’d do if she was using her full power. Bradley is already in disadvantage, being a common human who is tired from sparring, while Menja is fresh and using her powers a little. How well is Bradley going to do? That’s what everyone is waiting to see.

At first Menja easily gets the advantage, by virtue of having powers and all, but Bradley adapts quickly to the situation and manages to get a grip. True, he’s still at disadvantage for a variety of reasons, but Hookwolf judges he has seen enough once Bradley shows to not give up and endures Menja’s kicks.

“Enough,” Hookwolf said.

It wouldn’t do to let the man defeat Menja, and it was looking increasingly possible that he might.  It would hurt her pride and weaken the position of his powered lieutenants in comparison to the unpowered ones.

Yeah, he might, if you give him like two hours. He wasn’t exactly kicking ass and taking names a second ago. Hookwolf judges him capable enough, though, and congratulates him. Welcome to the elites, Bradley! Who is next? Some gal named Leah. It’s her turn, and Menja wants her to give a try to fighting Cricket. It’s all about speed, you see.

Cricket stood from her seat in the corner and limped forward.  She’d refused the same help that Othala had granted Stormtiger, both for the injury to her leg and the damage she’d taken to her vocal chords when she’d had her throat slashed, in a time before he’d met her.  It would have taken a few days at most to restore her to peak condition, but she valued her battle scars too highly.

It’s kind of hard to think of Cricket as a hardened warrior when everything she has done onscreen is get hurt. I know she fought the Undersiders, but it didn’t end that well for her. The other big injury she had from what I remember didn’t even show her fighting. This is her chance to show she be in a fight without getting injured!

Of course. Of course she didn’t get the chance. Why would she have the chance. Not that I’m complaining, I’m not particularly fond of Cricket and these developments are of extreme importance:

The windows shattered with an explosive force, knocking the majority of the people in the room to the ground.  Hookwolf was one of the few to remain standing, though he bent over as shards of glass tore through the layer of skin that covered his metal body.

Yeah, this is what Shatterbird does! Making glass explode! I remember someone once told me the Slaughterhouse Nine announce their presence by making all glass in a city explode like this. Does this mean they’re announcing their presence, in middle of their recruiting? True, it’s not like the heroes didn’t already know – judging by what Dragon knew – and there’s no way they’d tell the general public because there’d be widespread panic. This’d be the way to make all the civilians know.

A few of the recruits and one of the graduates are dead because glass exploded in their face. Many others are injured because they had cellphones in their pockets while sparring – who the heck does that? – and I honestly can’t feel too bad for any of them, given that, well, you know what they were hoping to do by being part of this organization. Also I bet Cricket is slumped against the wall, injured for the fifth time today. The Leah woman who was going to fight Cricket is currently bleeding out from a nicked artery. This whole thing pretty much delayed Hookwolf’s plans of having new useful recruits, it’s going to take a long while for everyone injured to recover, leaving aside the few who died.

He knows all glass exploding means the Slaughterhouse Nine are attacking, so he prepares himself for further attack through some invulnerability. I’ll take that as a sign the villain groups don’t know about the Slaughterhouse Nine trying to recruit. He also takes the time to think about his odds of winning against specific members of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Good! This should be enlightening.

He was virtually invincible in this form.  That left few that could actively hurt him.  Burnscar.  The Siberian. Crawler.  There was Hatchet Face, the bogeyman of capes.  With the exception of Hatchet Face, the group wouldn’t be able to do much harm to him unless he was forced to stay still.

Of course Burnscar could hurt him, thanks to her fire powers. The Siberian is a fearsome opponent who outclasses a lot of parahumans. Crawler...I don’t remember what Crawler does. Hatchet Face sounds of special interest. The boogeyman of capes, eh? Quite the lofty description, given it’s of capes instead of a specific subset, so it’s like he’s a problem for all capes in existence. I already have high expectations for this Hatchet Face, I hope they live up to them.

More troubling were the Nine he couldn’t put down.  The Siberian was untouchable, an immovable object, invincible in a way that even Alexandria wasn’t.  Even if he were capable of hurting Crawler, he wouldn’t want to.  Mannequin, he wasn’t sure about.  He knew the crazed tinker had encased himself in a nearly indestructible shell.

For some reason he doesn’t want to hurt Crawler, but he doesn’t say why. A personal connection, perhaps? I remember Crawler is a monstrous thing who isn’t seen very clearly in the one photo there’s of him. Mannequin does seem rather tough, but from what I saw in Armsmaster’s interlude, it’s not impossible to damage its carapace, but you’d need some specialized weapons to do that, which I doubt Hookwolf can get access to.

Who else? He wracked his brain.  Jack Slash was the brains and leader of the operation. Not a threat unto himself. Shatterbird couldn’t harm him, he was almost certain.

I wouldn’t underestimate Jack Slash, after seeing him. True, his power doesn’t sound like an intimidating concept, but who knows how cleverly he’d use them. Better be careful, anyway. Shatterbird...well I guess as long as Hookwolf doesn’t have anything with glass inside him he’ll be okay. That’s been seven killers, there’s one still yet to be mentioned.

Bonesaw. She was the wild card, the most unpredictable element in terms of what she could bring to the table.  So often the case with tinkers.

Ah, so Bonesaw is a tinker. I like her name. It’s rather ominous, I can only imagine what kind of stuff a tinker named Bonesaw does. A tinker really is like a wildcard, who knows what this Bonesaw may have with her at the time of an attack. Hm.

Outside, all the windows and stuff is broken. Inside,

Surprisingly, Cricket is intact. Good for her! The reason why she felt something was off was because the glass was ‘singing’ to which I think it means it was vibrating. Hookwolf decides to go outside, so he leaves the care of all the injured in Menja and Stormtiger’s hands while he jumps through the window and lands in the pavement.

Cricket and Hookwolf hurry, running over the many, many shards of glass on the ground. Shatterbird is making barriers in front of them with the glass, barriers Hookwolf runs through without any problems. Dozens, hundred of barriers were one strike isn’t enough to clear the way.

Through the mess of dozens of dirty and wet panes of glass, he saw her. Shatterbird.  A sand nigger, going by memory and the color of her exposed skin.

Wow. What classy narration, Hookwolf. Not slimy at all, nope, not at all, the slurs are just added charm, why’d that be bad. Then again, it’s not like it’s surprising, given who is talking right now.

To get through the barriers quicker, Hookwolf makes very big spears with his hands and punches through the barriers, shattering a couple dozen every time. He’s not moving as fast as he’d like, but he’s moving forward. Behind him I guess Cricket is following the pace. Shatterbird changes tactics once it’s clear he won’t be deterred, instead using the glass to form a big spike she makes hover in the air, and drops it down on him with strength.

Even if Hookwolf is very sturdy, a big spike of glass hitting you at full speed isn’t something you just shrug off. It hits him and he goes sprawling down while Cricket gets hit by glass shards and scraps of metal.

“Stand,” Shatterbird said.  Her voice held traces of a British accent, and her body language and the crisp enunciation made her sound imperious, upper class.    “I know you survived.”

‘Unlike the woman you brought with you. What an unfortunate demise’

Not wanting to overexert himself, Hookwolf absorbs the metal and tries to save energy, instead facing Shatterbird without any fear and preparing himself for what the Slaughterhouse Nine may plan. He doesn’t like hearing she’s here alone because it’s arrogant.

She shook her head, her helmet sparkling in the light cast by the setting sun.  “I’m the Nine’s primary recruiter.  I have an eye for people who can thrive among us, and I have brought more than five individuals on board.  I thought long and hard before settling on you.  I am not about to let you turn me down.”

...ah. The odds of Hookwolf being the one to join them just skyrocketed, by virtue of Shatterbird being the most successful recruiter. She not only has done a good job at that, judging by all the crazy killers currently in the group, she also is ready to force Hookwolf to join. I don’t know what exactly she’ll do to force Hookwolf to join...perhaps she’ll destroy his organization? I don’t think that’d be beyond her. If Hookwolf’s plans are completely obliterated, he’d have nothing to do other than join – or so some people would say, but I don’t think he would, he seems like the kind of guy that’d put his pride above everything else.

So that was why she hadn’t hit the entire city with the blast, shattering the glass and maiming or killing hundreds.  She hadn’t wanted to kill any prospective members, wanted to reserve her power for when it would be most dramatic.

Ah, so it wasn’t to the entire city, it must have been only to the place Hookwolf was at. It was dramatic, yeah, and maybe it’ll make Hookwolf realize she’s completely serious when she says she’s not going to take a no for an answer, even if there’s no reason to doubt it in the first place.

Given Shatterbird’s pushiness, I suppose that means it’s settled: Hookwolf will be the new member of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Maybe she was the one who brought Burnscar into the group, since she doesn’t seem to be there completely willingly.

“You ally with the Aryan groups.  Run one, but your motivations seem to be different.  I have guesses as to why, but I’d rather you tell me.”

Eeeeh…well I suppose it’s within the realm of possibility Hookwolf’s ideologies aren’t the only reason why Hookwolf is running his group, but I don’t doubt he really is a racist asshat. I mean, the narration established it quite well, it’d be deceitful if it turned out Hookwolf’s thoughts and all that were a lie.

When Hookwolf keeps defying her, Shatterbird seems to try to use her power, but it doesn’t work as she intended. It’s Cricket, she’s using subsonics to cancel Shatterbird’s power. Right, of course she’d be capable of that, she noticed stuff like the glass ‘singing’, she could counter that. Kind of foolish to reveal it to Shatterbird like that, though. It’s not that I think this killer didn’t know already what Cricket is capable of, but…yeah, confirming it is a bit imprudent. What was it again, Hookwolf? Pride goeth before the fall?

“And here I was thinking you’d won the lottery with powers.  Incredible range, fine control, devastating force, versatility… and all it takes is the right noise and it all falls apart?”

“Guess the men who bought my power should ask for a refund.”

O-kay! Cauldron stuff! They’re shaping up to be very relevant to the current state of affairs in the Worm world, more than I thought they would be! I’m having a hard time deciding what I’d like to see more of first, if focus on the Slaughterhouse Nine, or focus on Cauldron.

Not wanting to waste any time dealing with this whole thing, Hookwolf decides to just end this as soon as possible, and Shatterbird doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry. She just takes out a gun and aims. While she did intend to take Cricket out so she’d be able to use her powers properly, she didn’t hit her with bullets, she did it with pieces of glass. Looks like she still could use them to some extent.

Okay, I was joking all this time that all Cricket does is be intimidating and then get injured, but I didn’t expect it to happen. Oh, geez. Yeah, she’s out of commission for real now. Of course Hookwolf doesn’t accept these developments, he intends to kill Shatterbird, and he’s sure he can do it by himself. He did indicate in his thoughts earlier Shatterbird wouldn’t be able to hurt him, after all. Maybe he really could do it, Shatterbird doesn’t outright deny it.

She can make herself levitate by moving the glass of her costume up! Well that’s a clever way to do that.

While she attacks, she tells Hookwolf what she thinks of him. The first thing she says isn’t unexpected, she says he’s a born warrior, and despite all of Hookwolf’s bad traits, he really is, and he knows it. What Shatterbird doesn’t know nor can understand yet is what Hookwolf is trying to do with his group. Hm. Want to enlighten me on this one, Shatterbird? Because I can’t think what he may be doing with them if he’s not completely sincere about his rhetoric.

Stormtiger turns out to be useful when he makes Shatterbird lost control of her flight and she crashes onto the ground. She even falls badly, she’s injured, and therefore an easy target for Hookwolf. I must say, this isn’t being as one-sided as I expected. I had thought Hookwolf was being too cocky when he thought he could defeat one of the Slaughterhouse Nine, but it seems he wasn’t. There he is, crushing her with a foot and burying some blades into her.

“A sword age, an axe age.  A wind age, a wolf age.  A world where none have mercy.  I can believe this is your goal, your ultimate objective.  Do you crave to reduce this city to darkness, blood and ash, so that only the strong will survive?  Do you tell your followers that it is only the pure will rise to the top in the new world order?”

...well I hadn’t considered that. Hookwolf does seem like the kind of person to want that, theoretically, but I don’t know, for some reason I can’t believe that’s what he’s aiming to do. I fully believe he subscribes to the might makes right philosophy, but not to that extent. Guess I’ll know for sure once things continue here.

The second time Shatterbird offers him to join the group he again declines, planning to kill her, and she keeps twisting the knife by aiming to hit what Hookwolf cares about.

“Then kill me.” A thin smile crossed her face, though her expression was drawn with pain.  When she spoke, it was in more short sentences. “But know that your dream is over.  Unless you come with us.  Once nominated you’ll be tested.  By others, whether willing or not.  I have left notes.  Urging them to kill your soldiers.  To raze any place you might call home.  To bestow fates worse than death.”

As if they weren’t going to do that anyway. It’s effective enough, though, because Hookwolf raises his claws off her and actually considers the situation. Joining the group will make Shatterbird rescind the orders to kill and destroy everything Hookwolf had done so far, but he doesn’t plan to be there for long, just long enough to kill them, to destroy the Slaughterhouse Nine before they leave Brockton Bay. Okay, now he is being very cocky. No way he’d be capable of killing all eight members.

He wasn’t going to accept this.  They’d insulted him, hurt his people.  They wanted to subvert his mission and twist it to their own ends?  No.

See? I think it’s likely Shatterbird is right, but maybe not to the extent she believes she is. There’s some loyalty here in Hookwolf’s behavior. There’s something deeper here than it seems at first sight, I’m sure of that.

Heck, he’s so against joining the Slaughterhouse Nine, against turning his back towards his group, he’s realizing he can’t deal with the situation alone. He’s going to need help. Is he going to ask Purity’s organization for help, perhaps? I think they’re the most likely people he’d ask for help. Maybe Purity would agree to aid him, since one of the Slaughterhouse Nine members tried to kill her daughter and Theo. How successful they’d be in fighting this worldwide threat...well that remains to be seen. I’m not going to get any high hopes; I don’t think they can do much.

That’s the end of the intermission! Who is next? I’ll see next time!

Next update: in two updates

[violetosprey]

TDDUP My thoughts on Aria

Doing one of these for each of the 5 stars in TDDUP (yes, even the ladies).  This is incredibly subjective, so I decided not to call this a review.  Rant sounds too negative to me, it’s more a mix of gushing and analysis here.  Anyways, MAJOR SPOILERS ahead because I may talk about stuff not revealed until the very end of a play through.  In fact I’m probably going to talk in a way that just assumes the person reading this has completed TDDUP.  Kinda like, “Oh I won’t give the whole story of this scene because you know what I’m talking about.”  Without delay, let’s talk about Aria.

Alright, I’ll get right to the point on this one:  Aria scares me.  In the BTD series and TDDUP, there are a lot of scary characters who do horrible things.  And honestly, I’ve been pretty good with all the characters.  I kind of think of it at times like when I went to see the new 2017 “It” movie.  The only thing that scared me in that film were the brief jump scares.  The rest of the time, it was just exciting to watch (gets your adrenaline pumping).  I loved the movie!  I definitely would not categorize it as anything but horror, but I was having fun watching the events unfold.  It’s not like the subject matter is light-hearted either.  So I guess I kind of always thought of the BTD and TDDUP characters like that.

You know that disclaimer about the beginning of these games though?  The one that mentions “This game was built to thrill,” and “If you’re feeling overwhelmed, close the game and take a break?”  Aria is the ONLY character in the entire series the made me physically take a break from the game to get my composure back.  I could not go back to her route or the game at all for several hours (and this was when I was all hyped up after the release).  These games are a choice to do and I really encourage people to take their time and not push their boundaries to an area that’s beyond their comfort level.

I did manage to recover and actually got all of Aria’s endings.  But I don’t think I will ever be able to play her route again.  It’s funny, we’ve had endings and characters involving snuff films, getting your head sawed off, being burned alive, getting ripped apart, having your soul stolen, getting turned into a living doll, getting shot, being dismembered, being left to die alone in a creepy forest, being forced to eat yourself, getting eaten (which happens more often than you think in these games), being boiled alive, being beaten to death, being chained up, being forced to observe necrophilia, being mind broken, being caged, and having insects put in your ears just to name a few.  All that stuff?  Been fine with.  The endings for me have ranged from being “meh” to “oooh that was so dark I love it.”  Not to mention I start to embarrassingly even gush over some characters (especially a certain yandere *sweats*).

But go figure that the one person to freak me out, is not only one of the completely human characters, but probably the one who...is the least threating honestly.  There is no way Aria could take on ANY of the other cast with the exception of maybe Ellen (only because...I don’t know who’d win in a fight, they’re really different).

First off, I guess I need to say what DOESN’T bother me about Aria before anyone starts to think anything: the incest angle.  To be perfectly honest, I feel pretty neutral about her having feelings for her brother.  Actually from a story standpoint it kind of helps a little better for her to have that to explain why she goes so far.  Because when I think about it, if she didn’t have those forbidden feelings, she’d come off as overprotective of her brother still yes...but I think this gives her character a better dark edge believe it or not.  Incest in real life, not a fan of.  Incest in fiction though I have a different view entirely.  I have both shipped incest pairings, as well as cringed and nearly vomited at them in fiction.  The problem is I can’t distinguish what causes me exactly to ship or hate an incest pairing.  I’ve tried to write the notes down, but there’s really no consistent criteria.  All I know is it STRICTLY depends on the the characters themselves and I think how it affects the story.  In this case, I don’t really feel like Aria and Chris would make a good pair, but I think Aria having feelings for Chris gives her more character.

So then what does bother me?  One ending.  ONE ending out of all five shook my core and made me legitimately afraid of this character:  “Aria walled you in.”

It’s weird because I’m not claustrophobic, though I do cringe at the thought of someone sewing a person’s mouth shut.  But this ending really managed to get under my skin and I had to think for awhile why exactly.  Horror is indeed meant to scare you, and I finally found something that did scare me in these games.  But it not only scared me, but disturbed me.

I think the key here is the entire scenario for the route.  Remember, the MC in Chris’s path is a verbally abusive spouse, and Aria is a VERY mad sister-in-law.  She’s there to give you your comeuppance.  So while Chris was violent, Aria tortures you while keeping you in her basement.  MC starts to realize towards the end of the path that what they’ve done to Chris is wrong, and they want to make things right.  The thing is though when you look at all of Aria’s endings...she never planned to let you redeem yourself from the very start.  The only ending where she doesn’t kill you...she sells you (fun fact: I actually liked this ending because it’s a tie in to Gurobob’s “The Hunt” game for the future- so cool!).  Chris in his endings, if he doesn’t get furious and kill you...either leaves you alone (sometimes even turns HIMSELF in) or you compromise.  This is what makes Chris a good person (just the violent snap was a bad decision).

However, I think the kicker with the ending where Aria walls you in, is the fact that you hear Chris and her talking upstairs.  You’re listening to him moving on without you and the two of them laughing happily.  Meanwhile, your mouth is sewed up, and you’re left trapped in the walls of the basement.  Aria’s not coming back to torture you.  As far as she’s concerned, it’s better if you just disappear.  So you have to spend the rest of your days, unable to scream, unable to move, listening to Chris and Aria live happily without you there.  You can never apologize to Chris.  Inevitably you’ll die of starvation and/or dehydration.

This ending doesn’t just scare me for the claustrophobia and the “I have no mouth but I must scream” trope; It’s disturbing because it’s also very sad.  Someone finally told you off for your behavior all those years, gave you your punishment, and then you are left to die.  And this is where you have to ask the question:  Did the MC indeed deserve this fate?  It’s actually a question that scares me to think about because I’m not sure I know the answer to it.  Is it pretentious to think that I as the MC would be entitled to fix my mistakes after years of abuse to Chris?  Or is there indeed a limit to how far a person like Aria should go when someone has hurt their loved one?

I think the key here is WHO is giving you punishment: Chris vs. Aria.  You have Chris, who has been the victim in all of this and is a very sweet guy.  He gets violent when he snaps, but can realize his mistake later.  Aria is not the direct victim here but a sister who cares very deeply to her brother (too deeply even).  Of course most people like Aria would want to smack Chris’s spouse in the face.  But is she entitled to kidnap and torture you?  I don’t know...The problem here is I actually don’t know all that much about Aria as a character.  She loves her brother a lot, and she helped Marcus out with his divorce because he was a friend of Chris’s.  So she’s good and loyal to some.  She’s also incredibly smart.  Beyond that though, how does Aria even act around the average every day person?  Is she like Marcus, who is “generally” a good person and a good cop, just one minor flaw (his obsessive love with MC).  Or is Aria actually more of a cruel, even sadistic, person naturally?  That’s not stuff we learn about, so it really makes me wonder if she’s the type of character that deserves to torture you.

When all is said and done though, I need to thank ElectricPuke here.  Of course Aria scares me legitimately and she’s my least favorite character in the series because of it.  But I’m really glad she’s there actually.  Listen, these are all FICTIONAL characters.  No one needs to really get up in arms about who likes what kind of dark material as long as it’s enjoyed in a safe manner (and the atrocities are not replicated in real life).  As long as people know their own boundaries and don’t push others into something they don’t enjoy, everyone can coexist peacefully.  Creating a villain character doesn’t making you a villain either (If it does, we might need to keep an eye on Stephen King :P).  There was a tiny part of me going through these games though that wondered “Gee, there’s a lot I let slide in fiction.  Is this still sane or healthy?”  So when Aria actually spooked me, I felt better.  It’s good to know that yes, I do have limitations.  They’re not easily apparent, and this game caught me off guard by the scenario.  But it’s nice to see I can recognize a stopping point for myself.

Please be respectful then to people who say “Character A in TDDUP I love, but I’m afraid of Character B.”  Everyone has their own tastes and their own thresholds.  Sometimes for reasons they can’t even explain.  By the way, I’d bet good money that Jack freaked out the most people for his hobby :P

So yeah if you read this post vs. the one I wrote about Marcus...completely opposite ends of the spectrum here, haha.  Also like Marcus, I’m not sure if I can probably judge if Aria is a good character or not because I’m so afraid of her.  I don’t hear people talk about Aria or Ellen as much as the guys, so I don’t know what the general public thinks either.  I’d be curious if people actually liked Aria and thought she stuck it to the MC well, or if people got creeped out like I did.

For any future games likes these, just remember to watch the warnings guys!  Enjoy yourself, but don’t push yourself.  I’m still looking forward to more of Puke’s character’s for sure.

Only one more character to go now!  

[davidmann95]

My Dream Superman Movies

Well, I said I’d do it.

So yeah. If I had all the money and influence in the world, you bet I have some ideas for what I’d want with free reign over the Superman movies (as opposed to my pitches as-requested for Man of Steel 2, a blue-skies no-creative-limits version of the same, or Lego Superman).

In terms of the creative setup, for the first movie at least I’d actually like the Wachowski sisters heading it up as the directors. This would likely be the main reason none of this could ever happen, because by their own admission they’re never going to be handed a tentpole movie again, but based on Speed Racer I know they can do colorful, fun, stylish, sincere blockbuster work, because of The Matrix I know they know how to show super-people kicking ass, and from what I’ve seen in commercials for Jupiter Ascending they design cool alien vistas and technology. I’d have Alan Silvestri from Back To The Future and Captain America: The First Avenger put together the score, and if these were standalone movies I’d cast Oscar Isaac as Superman; if this were part of a larger set of DC movies (in which case the Superman movie would be the fourth or fifth in the series as I’d plan it out) I’d have him cast elsewhere, in which case Tyler Hoechlin, he’s turned out pretty much perfect. Don’t have anyone in mind for a script, but Markus and McFeely have proven they can make this kind of character work in a bunch of different tones and setups with Captain America, so they’d be ‘placeholders’.

For the first movie and prospective franchise reboot, Superman actually isn’t exactly the main character - that’d be Lois Lane (as still played by Amy Adams, she’s the best part of the current Superman movies), following her point of view on him and his world. It’s several years into Superman’s career, more than long enough for him to have faced off against all kinds of wild threats and built up his reputation and status quo, but while he and Lois have obviously met a fair number of times, it’s been more a kind of distant attraction than a proper relationship. However, she’s been invited to the Fortress for a proper look at it since it was recently revealed to the world, and along with shining a spotlight on his weird hidden treehouse at the top of the world (this being a prime opportunity for the Wachowskis to redefine it visually after almost 40 years of the barren ice cave, and a chance to throw in visual references to villains there won’t be time and space for like Zod and Solaris and Mxyzptlk, as well as a solid bench of iconic adventures), she starts to actually get to know Superman, The Guy for the first time. 

Her viewpoint is the same as that of the prospective average audience member: she knows about Superman, she likes him just fine, but she essentially thinks of him as a living statue, cultural background radiation. But as she gets to know him and understand him and fall in love with him, we do too, until by the time of the finale with the coming of Brainiac - framed as an antiseptic alien being beyond mortal understanding, a contrast to the deep humanity and vulnerability we and Lois learn to see in Superman, his super-ness with his clubhouse and his costume and his hobbies an extension of his passions and insecurities as a guy - it’s not a thrilling hero vs. villain duel, but watching Our Pal Clark from the ground getting in over his head and hoping he’ll be okay.

(Speaking of Clark, he’s around, but as a separate character hanging around the Planet, with no indication until near the end of the movie that he and Superman have anything to do with each other - Lois admitting she’s pieced it together right before the fight with Brainiac, and Clark bearing his soul on why he spends half his life in a bad suit pretending to trip all over everything, being the big emotional climax.)

Tradition suggests the sequel is supposed to be the dark one, and along with wanting to keep things a little more experimental, the followup would actually be an anthology-format film - five 25-30 minute explicitly-divided individual stories, linked together in ways that don’t become obvious until the finale. A pretty traditional scrap with Metallo and his techno-cult gang (if each of these segments would have a different director, I’d probably get Brad Bird for this one); a horror story of a drained Superman trying to survive the night against a monstrous Parasite; an indie-movie, slice-of-life comedy style segment of Superman hanging out with Bizarro and attempting to reach an understanding with his ‘brother’; a trippy cosmic adventure, probably by the Wachowskis again, where Superman goes head-to-head with Darkseid* in deep space in a battle that ends up far more a conflict of ideas than brute force; finally, a quiet confrontation with Lex Luthor (played by Bryan Cranston, because everyone and their mother wants him to play Lex) in his office, where they both lay all their cards on the table and all the plot and thematic threads from throughout the movie come together. No final brawl (though maybe Lex has a deathtrap of some sort in mind, whether tangible or psychological), just a conversation about humans and what they both think humanity wants, out of themselves and out of supermen like the two of them. And maybe Darren Aronofsky can direct one of these, he apparently would really like to do Superman.

* I know “Superman villain” is at most a tertiary role for Darkseid, but it is one nonetheless, and he fits best for what I’d have in mind for this segment.

For the big finale - though I’d imagine this series going on unabated James Bond style, recasting as necessary, rather than needing to reboot again - is the most traditional blockbuster of the bunch, but on the largest scale possible with a relatively straight adaptation of Superman Beyond, whether on its own or as a lead-in to a prospective Crisis movie. There’d be some changes: a bigger role for Lois (she and the Daily Planet crew could provide a ground-level perspective on the multiversal catastrophe, though she’d still have to eventually end up in a coma since how Superman saves her is such a perfect capstone), some tweaks to the nature of the Bleed, Monitors and Overvoid to make it reflect film as a medium rather than comics, and it wouldn’t be exactly the cast of Supermen from the original comics. I’d go the obvious route of hiring largely actual former Supermen, but since having 6 near-identical versions of the same guy running around would rapidly get dull, they’d be playing different takes than those they previously had. Dean Cain’s a Kingdom Come-esque elder Superman. Tom Welling’s Ultraman, not as a knock on Welling, but because he always did his best work on Smallville when mind-controlled, high on Red Kryptonite, possessed, or otherwise made to act like an asshole, if potentially a redeemable one in this case so we can finally see him in the damn Superman suit by the end (though maybe some plot contrivance could get all these guys in more traditional getups at some point, since it’d be a shame to have them all together and not have them rocking their classic costumes). Brandon Routh’s the Red Son Superman, as he’s both more recognizable and more acceptable than Overman, and Routh did a good job with Sad Superman in Returns and could probably do far better in an actual good movie. Billy Crudup is straight-up back as Doctor Manhattan, since Captain Adam was always a stand-in and I suspect we’re about a year out from the announcement of Watchmen characters showing up in the DC movies anyway. And finally, Jon Hamm’s here as Golden Age Superman.

I hadn’t mentioned it earlier, but also in this universe where I get to tell WB what DC movies to make, @i-swordfish and I are in agreement there needs to be a sepia-tone Superman movie by Kerry Conran set in 1938 where he fights Nazi mad scientists and robots, and that version of Superman played by Jon Hamm is also in the Superman Beyond movie.

Anyway, there’s two scenes in particular I know would be in this movie. As the Supermen are having the nature of the Bleed explained to them, they’re seeing snapshots from other timelines, allowing cameos by the likes of Kirk Alyn and Christopher Reeve. Sometimes, the Monitor notes, it almost seems as if they’re aware of the higher order and their observation...and ‘our’ Superman jumps back, startled, because he was looking at George Reeves’ Superman, who turned to the camera and winked at him. Fast-forward about two hours to the end of the movie, and Lois and Clark are talking in the office about everything that’s happened, and as Lois walks away from Clark’s desk, she jokes that she hopes after having saved all of reality Superman doesn’t get a big head, and still cares about us mere mortals, not knowing just how far he went to save her alone. And as Clark smiles and mutters to himself “Maybe he does, Lois...maybe he does”, he turns, looks at us, and winks.

Those are the Superman movies I’d want to see.