#my theory is the ones we saw were all old warriors so they’ve all got marks from war fighting and general survival

[worstloki]

I like how the frost giants in Thor 1 are presented as these scar-riddled tough-skinned creatures with heavy voices that inspire fear in even the Asgardians and then the few times we see Loki transform he’s got smooth baby skin, well defined skin markings, softest shade of blue imaginable

[paradisetemporarilymisplaced]

So I was being a basic bitch the other day and listening to my true crime podcasts when it occurred to me just how suspicious Nile’s “death” would look to everyone not in the Guard, leading me to a train of thought that, 2200 words later, absolutely got away from me but I can’t let go so I’m inflicting it on all of you!

To set the stage, we know the movie takes place over approximately a week. Here’s what happens to Nile from the military’s point of view:

She dies is very seriously injured

She heals without a scratch

Just before she’s supposed to be shipped out to Germany, she vanishes, leaving two men concussed (and presumably reporting being knocked out by a woman with short hair wearing civilian clothes)

She goes AWOL for several days

They get word from the CIA that she is to be reported killed in action (details unclear)

So, at the beginning of this very weird week, the USMC has to tell Nile’s family of her death critical injury. What her family was told depends on how long she was dead – a Google search tells me that family will be notified in person within 8 hours of a soldier’s death, but we don’t know how long her first death lasted. For an injury, however, they’d get a phone call to notify them and the unit would arrange for them to visit as soon as the soldier is transferred out of a combat zone. Like I remember when I was in high school, a guy from my church who was a Marine was really seriously injured in a helicopter crash in Iraq and from what I could tell, his parents were told immediately and were flown out to Germany to see him, so it stands to reason that Nile’s family would have been informed relatively quickly after her throat was slashed, one way or another.

And then, she goes AWOL. Her family would be notified while the USMC tried to figure out where she went, not least because the military would want to know if she’s contacted them. (And it’s possible that her family may have been on the way to Germany to see her since we know that’s where she was supposed to go!) So for several days:

Nile’s mom and brother have no idea where she is

They know she was seriously injured and most certainly should not have been moving around on her own

They can’t get a hold of her

The military can’t tell them anything

And the next thing they know for sure is that she was “killed in action.” After being injured and vanishing into thin air. And they presumably cannot produce her body or any concrete evidence of her death. In any case, something sketchy is going on, so they’re like. SMELLS LIKE A MILITARY COVERUP.

In a surprise to probably no one, there is a well-documented legacy of mysterious US military deaths, particularly of women of color (TW for sexual assault in these links). The cases of LaVena Johnson and Vanessa Guillenin particular have made national news because of their families’ persistence in seeking justice. Likewise, Nile is a Black woman, and her mom and brother are most certainly hypercognizant of (a) state violence against Black people and (b) these high-profile cases of suspicious military deaths. So her family are seriously side-eyeing the situation, knowing that (a) the military has a serious incentive (and a documented history) of covering up things that make them look bad and (b) nothing about Nile’s disappearance and supposed death are adding up.

And Andy’s right. Nile does come from warriors. And you know who else does? Her brother.

Don’t get me wrong. Nile’s mom would absolutely not back down. She’d know something was up and want to get to the bottom of it. But based on what I know about Gen X parents (mine), they’re not the most technologically savvy. Like they can use the internet, but they didn’t grow up with it the way we young millennials and Gen Z did. So Nile’s brother takes the lead. And what do zillennials do best?

Social media.

Nile’s brother starts going hard on any site he can, trying to get the word out to see if anyone knows what happened to his sister. He starts a Reddit thread. He starts a Facebook group. He reaches out to the media and true crime bloggers and podcasters à la Sarah Turney, getting loud and being a general nuisance in hopes of getting some answers. He gets his friends and Nile’s friends involved. Maybe eventually Dizzy, Jay, and others from Nile’s unit hear about it and reach out, telling him what they saw and how weird it all was. He’s drumming up interest, and soon “Nile Freeman” becomes a household name (at least among the true crime fans).

Copley is, of course, trying his best, but at this point there is just so much that it’s impossible for him to scrub everything. Sure, he can erase new footage of Nile and the Guard, but what can he do about Reddit threads and podcast episodes that are speculating something weird has happened? Maybe he could hack the sites and shut those things down, but honestly, that’s the last thing he’d want to do, because that only adds weight to the theory that Nile’s disappearance is a military coverup. So eventually he has to tell Andy what’s going on.

Andy, obviously, does not take the news well. However, she is also completely computer illiterate, because that’s Booker’s job and he’s the only one who ever bothered to learn what the internet is in any meaningful way. (She probably calls Booker for advice, and for the record, I think Booker would have no qualms about shutting down conspiracy threads, tinhats be damned, but Copley is too concerned about the consequences. He’s ex-CIA for crying out loud, he knows how it’ll look if they scrub every mention of Nile’s name from the internet.) Maybe she confers with Joe and Nicky but, let’s be honest, they’d be equally unhelpful. So at this point, she knows they have to bring in Nile.

But the thing about Nile is that she, too, knows how to use the internet (duh). Aside from her being a young millennial/digital native, we know from the cave scene where she’s giving Booker suggestions on how to track Copley that she clearly is even more computer savvy than the average person. And for that reason she almost definitely took over the day-to-day tech stuff after Booker’s exile. So I think it would be foolish to expect her to be unaware of what’s happening. She’s not contacting her family or posting on the message boards or anything, but she knows what’s up. So Copley and the team probably sit her down to “break the news,” but we know the girl does not have a poker face (see: literally shooting herself in the foot and not being able to play it cool whatsoever) and cracks immediately, telling them she’s seen everything about her case – she’s not interacting with any of it, she certainly didn’t instigate anything, but she knows. (And she is so goddamn proud of her brother.)

At this point, I’d like to pause and consider Nile’s role in the overall narrative of this movie. She’s set up as a foil to Andy, obviously, but she’s also a foil to Booker. Booker, who, like Andy, is a serious pessimist, but who, unlike Andy, still has very fresh memories and trauma associated with being the new kid, which have destroyed him. In his mind (and Andy’s), if Nile communicates with her family, she’ll become just like him in a century or two – bitter, alone, and stuck with her grief and memories of watching her family die and knowing they died resenting her. It’s a small sample size, but this is the only experience they have to go off of.

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

There’s been a lot of discussion of TOG being a fundamentally queer movie – a group of people brought together because of something inherent about themselves that is different, that must be hidden, that causes others to hate, fear, and reject them. Booker’s backstory is the archetypal traumatic “coming out” story – his family learns who he is, hate him for it, and attempt to cast him out of their lives. He’s stuck with his trauma, his pain, his loss, and it consumes him.

But what if Nile’s family would be the opposite? What if her “coming out” to them as immortal is met with acceptance, love, celebration? What if her family is just overjoyed to have her back, and they don’t care what the circumstances are? I'm reminded of this incredible post from @shitty-old-guard-deaths a while back, where Nile’s mother hits Booker with a frying pan because “my baby let me believe she was dead for FIVE YEARS based on your bad advice???” (which may or may not have inspired this whole tangent). Nile takes the advice of someone who did the same thing she wants to do because she doesn’t want to risk her family’s rejection. She wants the good memories with her family and is afraid that showing them her true self will bring her unbearable pain, forever replacing those memories. But, with high risk comes high reward.

Anyway. Nile and the team are trying to come up with a plan for how to handle this whole thing, but she’s not really participating because she’s too afraid to hope. Until finally, quickly, so she doesn’t lose her nerve, she suggests she reach out to them, knowing that, realistically, that’s the only solution before things snowball even further out of control. The team is shocked, but realize that she has a point. They decide that Copley should actually be the first point of contact, posing as a US government official to talk with them and test the waters.

So Copley goes to Nile’s family’s house to talk with her mom and brother. They’re probably distrustful and apprehensive, but nonetheless secretly ecstatic that their work has paid off. They talk and review all of the information that they’ve collected, including testimonials from the people on Nile’s base and recent sightings (along with photos) of Nile (with the same three people) over the last few years that people have sent them but they haven’t posted publicly. At this point, Copley’s like, yeah this is about to blow up, we gotta put our cards on the table. He convinces them to come with him to some safe house/black site/whatever he can get that is technologically impenetrable (I’m picturing them in like, an interrogation room at a police station kind of deal), takes their phones, locks the doors, and brings in Nile.

What follows is the most delightful reunion scene of all time, bringing Joe, Nicky, and even Andy to tears as they watch and listen from outside the room. With Copley’s help, Nile tells her mom and brother about her immortality and what’s been going on since she died (within reason, of course), and they are thrilled. They don’t understand why (because no one does) but they don’t question it and they see it as a gift from God – she’s been resurrected, she will live, and she has a purpose. Her mother and brother are so happy to see her again and are willing to agree with pretty much anything to stay in her life as long as they can.

So. They set up some complicated agreement (they bring in the other three for support/intimidation as needed) setting the terms of their relationship. They swear Nile’s family to secrecy, maybe bringing up the lab to show how high the stakes are, and they readily agree. They come up with some cover story for Nile’s brother to share on the message boards (maybe that the government has opened an investigation but because it’s an open case he has to shut it all down? Tells people to direct their tips somewhere else? Something to that effect). There’s still speculation, of course, but without Nile’s brother at the helm providing the energy, the hype dies down as news stories are wont to do without any movement. And Nile’s family goes to work for the team. The experience has taught them that Copley can’t possibly do everything himself, especially when it comes to social media, so Nile’s brother takes the lead on the day-to-day tracking/social media while Copley and her mom focus on finding jobs and scrubbing their traces afterward.

So there you have it: Nile gets to integrate her biological family into her found family and spend the rest of their lives with them as it should be, Copley gets some badly needed help managing the reality of social media, the team finally has a positive narrative surrounding outsiders Knowing About Them AND about interacting with people from their previous life, and the audience gets the happy ending to this very lovely and very queer story to counteract the pain associated with Booker’s family.

Plus, you know, I’m a sucker for both a good government conspiracy theory and for Nile getting every good thing she deserves.

[regina-del-cielo]

I was thinking about Copley’s Murder Conspirancy Board (mostly to deal with the absolute rage that the scene with Andy Copley and Booker gives me because ‘UGH THESE MEN ARE SO S T U P I D’), and... I may have a Theory about it - which mostly delves into how much Booker and Copley were in actual contact with each other before the events of the movie.

TL;DR: the Murder Conspirancy Board was built with a contribution of Booker’s information, and Copley was Very Confused on the workings of the Guard’s immortality

(the Essay(TM) is under the cut)

This excellent post expounds on how these two Grieving Dumbasses Definitely Did Not Think Their Plan Through, but still what little they did plan was not done in two days. And I would like to think that Booker would have required more than One (1) Persuasive Speech to get him to potentially get his family outed and put in danger for the (tiny) chance of getting a cure for their immortality.

So they’d been in contact for a while, possibly for almost the whole ‘break year’. Copley has lost his wife two years before the movie, so when he and Booker met again he’s one year into mourning. If Andy needed a break from their jobs, I can’t imagine in what mental state Booker must have been.

Copley probably started looking into the Guard because man, that Surabaya mission was a masterpiece, and how come these guys aren’t mercenary superstars? But they’re like ghosts, and the IDs don’t really match their supposed ages... and dealing with his wife’s death made him go into a Nerd Spiral. And then he finds Booker.

So this is how I think it went: they meet again. They talk. Copley is a grieving widower, Booker goes ‘man don’t I relate’. Booker is probably drunk a lot of the time (maybe so is Copley, misery loves company and all that). They enter a positive feedback loop of sharing grief over lost loved ones. Copley probably spills that he knows something, that they’ve done great things and they have a gift obviously. Booker probably answers along the lines of ‘fuck the gift, it sucks. Didn’t save my children when they needed it’. Copley goes ‘well, medicine is much better today. What if you could do it now?’ And the rest is history.

A) Booker ‘helped’ with the Murder Conspirancy Board

We know for a fact that the Conspirancy Board contains information about the Guard ‘from the last 150 years’ which is, approximately, the time photography’s been around. And it makes sense - photos are pretty easily accessible, and Copley knows their faces. He probably scanned them from one of those fake IDs and then used a facial recognition software to find them in historical photographic archives. But we know (and by the end of the movie so does he) that the last 150 years is a nothing in their lifespan. And while going backwards Copley may have found Booker’s original birth and/or marriage records, nothing of the sort would exist for Joe, Nicky and Andy.

Despite how much we joke about the Guard’s faces being Everywhere in museums and art galleries around the world, we can assume that they wouldn’t leave so many traces of them behind. The two known art pieces representing Andy in an obviously recognizable manner, her portrait with Achilles and the Rodin, are in the cave in Val d’Argent. I don’t believe Nicky and Joe wouldn’t have similar storage places, especially for Joe’s own art. Without photographic evidence and before newspapers, trying to pinpoint the three of them across history would be harder than finding a specific needle in a haystack of needles... unless someone tells you where to look. 

When Andy enters Copley’s living room, he calls her ‘Andromache the Scythian, the eternal warrior’. But how could Copley have known that Andy’s “real” name was Andromache? It’s not on her IDs, and it’s not the top choice for a full name that has Andy as a nickname. It’s a literary name, of course it would appear through history in poems or plays or novels. And how could he have associated Nicky and Joe precisely to the Crusades with what he knows of them from the last 150 years alone? For all he knew, they could have been as old as the Punic Wars, or as young as the Battle of Lepanto. Assuming he’d actually caught on on them being together together.

Well, I think Booker told him. Maybe just a thing here or there, while Commiserating on How It Sucks being an Immortal, like ‘Andy’s been around for so long she doesn’t even remember her true age, that’s exhausting’ or ‘Joe and Nicky are ridiculous for two people whose first meeting consisted of killing each other during the fucking Crusades’. And Copley fell into another Nerd Spiral that brought him to understand that holy shit these people are much older than I thought what the fuck.

B) Copley is Very Confused on How Immortality Actually Works

Copley talks to Andy by calling her ‘eternal warrior’ and talking of her immortality as if it was some kind of gift that can somehow be transferred from one body to another (debatable, but... ok). But he’s also flabbergasted by her not healing from Booker’s shot, and later with Nile he says ‘but then why would the immortality leave?’, which is... well, it makes it sound like he thinks the immortals are some sort of Chosen Ones.

Which means that Copley knows nothing about Lykon. He had no idea that at some point the Guard will stop healing.

But why would he not know, since I just conjectured that Booker told him enough about immortality for him to pinpoint the origins of the eldest members of the Guard? Why would Booker not have told him such a central detail of their “power”? (Booker obviously knows about Lykon. We see Andy telling Nile, and you can bet that ‘is this thing permanent?’ is probably the third question Booker ever asked when he met the others. He can’t not know)

I think it’s because despite having bonded over their grief, they are approaching this ‘discovering what the fuck is up with immortality’ from two extremely different sides. 

Copley wants to know if there is some biological aspect to their immortality that may be ‘transferred’ or ‘activated’ in any random human being. He’s gotten into his head that their regenerative powers can end all diseases. Which. I could probably write another entire separate post on how this is far-fetched at best. Point being, Copley never thought his endeavour as taking the immortality from the Guard to give it to someone else. He thinks Andy and the others are going to live forever and ever.

Booker knows their immortality is not forever and ever, theoretically. He knows that at some point, in the future, he’s going to stop healing and die. But he Wants to Talk to the Manager about it, damn it. He wants his death to be a certainty he can quantify, not something that may happen in another five thousand years based on the data he’s got at his disposal. He wants to have the choice to end it tomorrow or in fifty years - if discovering what causes his immortality saves other people, well that’s an undeniable bonus, but it’s not the focus of his motivation.

Just like Booker and Copley didn’t cover all the potential ways in which Their Plan Could Go Wrong (and honestly, has Booker not learned yet just how fast they revive on average? He tells Nile that ‘big wounds take longer’, and still he revived from the grenade in three/four minutes!), I think they also didn’t Delve into their motivations for seeking that knowledge. Booker probably thought that Copley knowing of their immortality being relative was irrelevant, because of course the doctors will find something (the thing that makes them stop healing), and then he’ll die anyway, so who cares? 

And Copley... Copley was probably Convinced that the Guard was a group of superheroes that just needed to be suggested a new investment plan for using their powers, because saving individuals during wars and natural disasters is very noble and good, but come on, it’s inefficient as hell, they can do much better!

(It absolutely sends me that Copley saw the kind of accomplishments reached by the people that the Guard saved, or by their direct descendants, and STILL it didn’t occur to him that there was a pretty decent chance that sometime in the future they would save someone that would find the cure for ALS and/or other shitty diseases! HE’S LITERALLY HINDERING THEM!!!) 

[firestorm1991]

DBZ Dissertations 1: Vegito

The Fusion into Vegito: Why is Vegeta now the opposite of Saiyan Saga Vegeta? (Constructed 4/6/2021)

Goku and Vegeta were mortal enemies even in the moment Vegeta reluctantly took the potara earring and they iconically fused into Vegito. Then Buu ate Vegito, and inside his gut, Vegeta and Goku defused back into their original selves, which was a surprise because they were told the fusion would be permanent, a fact that was retconned in Super. Once the two Saiyans had their own bodies back, there was a difference in the way they interacted with one another. One could argue that the events of “Fusion Reborn” are canon, most accept they are not. This means Goku and Vegeta did not fight Janemba in hell together and have that moment of understanding before Vegeta went back to Hell.

So what happened when Goku and Vegeta were themselves again that is of interest? Well, when they separated, they no longer seemed like enemies. In fact, they seemed to bicker like friends, brothers even. When just an hour ago, Vegeta was snapping and yelling at Goku, against fusing. Now, he acts like the back and forth bickering is normal between them, and like he hasn’t hated him all this time. That always struck me, and it stuck other friends of mine as well.

So how did they go from enemies to friends in an instant? Heck, how did Vegeta get seen as good, which even shocked the Saiyan prince? My theory is that the fusion did more to Goku and Vegeta than can be seen on the surface level.

Out of nowhere, Vegeta, who was always calm, cool, collected in the face of danger, who spoke derisively to those he feared. Yes, he was afraid and sometimes displayed that when he realized that he was screwed in battle. But he never flat out freaked out, wanted to throw up over some irrational fear. So why in Buu’s body did he react like Goku does to needles to the worms? That was not a very Vegeta thing to do. I mean, even if he was afraid of worms/bugs, he could have destroyed them like he did Arlia (yes, I know that’s filler). But the man who was raised in kill or be killed universe didn’t just kill the worms. He used to purge planets and surround himself with death and eat the buggy carcasses of the victims (see Episode 2 when he and Nappa are just finishing purging a planet). Food for thought.

Also, yes, we know Goku was always a fighter. He always answered the call to protect the world. His Saiyan blood awoke and he wanted to battle strong opponents. But in DBZ, the androids being the only exception after he and Vegeta denied Bulma’s desire to track down Gero and end his project, Goku never invited danger into the world. They all just came for him. He chose to stay away to protect everyone. Then we have Super, which starts a few months after Buu saga, and now he’s invited people to hunt him down, put the multiverse in danger, and suggested “hey, let’s bring back Frieza!” His behavior is much more reckless than DBZ. Interviews have shown that this is the vision Toriyama always had for Goku, but Goku through childhood to adulthood never seemed to be so inconsiderate. When Roshi died in the ToP and Goku resuscitated him, I felt such empathy and turmoil for the Earth-raised Saiyan in that moment. He was almost human in that moment, the same way he was when he discovered Krillin dead as a child, and it was like the old Goku was back in that moment.

Let’s explore. It would be safe to say that the Saiyans Raditz, Nappa, and Vegeta described in the Saiyan saga are exactly like that. Single-minded, battle hungry and ready, no thinking of consequences or family (which we all saw Goku with Little Gohan. He seemed like an okay father in that first episode before Raditz came and destroyed the quaint family life and Goku died. There were four years where Goku, Chi-Chi, and Gohan lived happily and in peace without fighting). Now, after fusing with Vegeta, Goku has reverted back to Saiyan tendencies he never fully seemed to possess through DB and DBZ.

My theory is this: when Goku and Vegeta fused into Vegito and separated, they took a piece of the other warrior with them. This led to Vegeta understanding Goku more, seeing him as a friend and comrade in arms as Goku saw him, gave him a goodness that he took back home with him so much so that he was willing to relinquish his pride for his family on multiple occasions (Bingo dance anyone?). There are many people who are angry about Vegeta’s complete 180 from the Saiyan saga and Namek saga Vegeta. But he went through a lot of changes throughout the series. Both in nature and nurture, evil was taught to him as normal. It wasn’t until he saw another way of life, namely living with Bulma and fathering a child, that he ever considered he could live a life that didn’t involve him slaughtering other races. I believe part of his psychological transformation was due to his life with Bulma and Trunks, trying to be a good partner and father despite a traumatic and horrific past, and experiencing peace for the very first time ever in his life (because until the seven year period, Vegeta’s life never had one iota of peace) in contrast to Goku who experienced peace many times. Now, after fusion, Vegeta knew what to do with those unfamiliar experiences and emotions…and then exposed his irrational fear of buggies, so there’s that.

Likewise, Goku, the good, honest hero of Earth who did everything in his power to protect the planet and his family and trained to get skills to combat these various enemies, now became more Saiyan-like. He fought and trained for himself, much like Vegeta once had in his pursuit to be the strongest. Now, Goku doesn’t care about being the strongest; he just wants to fight strong guys to get stronger. He still uses his power to protect, but after instigating the risk factor. Goku Black could have been avoided if he didn’t have the desire to fight Zamasu and got with Beerus and Whis for the same of fighting the deity in training. The ToP wouldn’t have happened either without Goku pushing it. Thankfully, that worked out, but it was still very reckless. And he lied multiple times to his friends who he once trusted in times of trouble and brought back the greatest evil who harmed his friends multiple times without even a second though in addition to promising to bring him back to life.

I wonder if the reason Goku keeps getting worse and worse and Vegeta keeps getting better in better has anything to do with the other times they fused. I will say that I believe a lot of their changes definitely come from them and their changing personalities, but I definitely they think they’ve influenced each other, if not by fusing and having access to the other’s thoughts, then by their strange friendship resulting from the fact that they are the last two (not including Tarble, Broly, and Paragus) full-blooded, universe seven Saiyans.

Anyway, let me know what you think of this fan theory. Do you agree, disagree, or have additional ideas that reflect this topic? Feel free to let me know. Just remember to be constructive and respectful to others who share their ideas. Until next time!

[untitledtallgeesepodcast]

[TRANCRIPT] EPISODE 14: ROAD TRIP (NO APOLOGIES)

Cathy  00:03

Hello and welcome back to Untitled Tallgeese Podcast, a podcast where four old friends rewatch and discuss Gundam Wing. I am Cathy, your moderator for this episode, and I am joined as always, by Kat, Mallory, and Caitlin. If you have been following along, you know that this week's episode — Episode 27, Locus of Victory and Defeat and Episode 28, Passing Destinies — are recap episodes, following the unofficial Season Finale from last time. As mentioned previously, we will be spending the bulk of this episode discussing a topic near and dear to all of our hearts, Gundam Wing fanfic from the early 2000ish through the lens of one very special fic, Road Trip by Sunhawk.  But first, there isn't a lot to talk about that's new in episodes 27 and 28, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention two bits of new information we got. First, that Relena has switched wardrobes, and is now in a Sanc Kingdom school uniform. And she no longer is informing Heero that he needs to come over here and kill her but rather to return to her, echoing Quatre's telepathic insight into Heero's Golden Aura from the end of Episode 26. And second, Treize is now being placed under house arrest by the Romefeller Foundation for his speech in front of Duke Dermail. At the end of Episode 28 we see that he's not alone in house arrest, but rather joined by a ghostly Lady Une still in her peaceful ambassador outfit, who joins Treize, as he looks at blueprints of yet another mysterious Gundam-like mobile suit on his laptop, which spoiler alert, is Epyon. I think, you know, these are interesting episodes. And Caitlin, I know you had something to say about the way the recaps are done in 27 and 28.

Caitlin  01:45

Yeah, I think that it's really interesting how they, I mean, that new information comes to us via these framing narratives, where you have Relena, and a little bit Heero, and then Treize narrating everything that's happened to them. So we get a Relena narration where she's much more strongly identifying herself as the ruler of the Sanc Kingdom. And then we get a Treize narration that links together a lot of his dubious political thought, in the midst of his defeat.

Kat  02:18

It felt like the first time we really understood like, exactly what Lady Une thought his politics were, or his plans were and how he changed those plans, like explicitly.

Cathy  02:29

Yes, there was this moment where he reflects on the beauty of where he is trapped, which I believe is the Luxembourg base, but I don't know if they ever say that. And he articulates it as if to say, "this is what I wanted to preserve. This is what I joined OZ thinking it was to preserve," and then traces his change in thought, which I don't remember that ever coming through necessarily. What he thought he was doing originally before he became the Treize that we know.

Kat  02:56

Cathy, I did want to say that it felt like Treize was really reciting from your theory of anime from last episode when he talks about these "warriors with rebellious wings," and how their like purity of spirit completely changed his life.

Cathy  03:12

Yes, I love it. I felt like [laughter]--

Mallory  03:15

Yeah, I wrote, "Cathy! strong wills, what purity! theory of anime!" in my notes. So there you go. 

Caitlin  03:22

Now we have to address the possibility that Cathy is Treize. Treize was God, he was Hannibal, and now he's Cathy. 

Cathy  03:28

It does, I think, speak to why I've always found Treize a really fascinating character, even if I think he is a huge asshole, and none of his ideas make any sense. But you know, I am always drawn to this idea of people who, and I think I phrased it as "get sucked into other people's deranged orbits?" and Treize is both a person who creates a deranged orbit around himself [laughter] and also gets sucked into the orbit of the Gundam pilots, so I do love that about him.

Caitlin  03:56

Interesting. That explains a lot about you, but also makes me understand Treize a little bit better framing him that way.

Kat  04:03

I know you're sick of her but I did like that Une finally figured out the soul of OZ, that the purpose of battles isn't limited to making ideals into reality.

Mallory  04:11

Since you brought it up... why does Treize refer to her as like, my love? Or beloved? He says, "Lady Une, my love, rest in peace." So is the show trying to make me believe that Treize has feelings for Lady Une? 

Kat  04:26

Is it just awkward writing?

Caitlin  04:28

I think it's just awkward writing but also kind of that. I think the dub at least -- and I only listened to the dub this time -- decided that Treize was in love with her and is going with that.

Kat  04:39

Both of these episodes felt very much like, "Hey, remember this heterosexual pairing?"

Cathy  04:44

Yes! And I remember one time we talked about whether or not this show actually ships heterosexual pairings or just, they thought they were but they're just so horrible at writing heterosexual romances [laughter] that everything comes off really strange and this is definitely an example of that. Like, I could see both sides of this, that we are supposed to believe that Treize had romantic feelings for Lady Une and then it just was written so poorly because nobody on the show has met a real woman before. [laughter] Or, and I guess this would be my interpretation, it isn't that he is like romantically interested in her or was in love with her. But she was very important to him and represented, you know, one of the people that I think he wielded the biggest influences on and that touches him deeply. And her quote unquote, fate being that she is, quote unquote, dead at the end of Episode 26 weighs heavily on him.

Caitlin  05:40

But she's not dead. [laughing] Why does he say it? I know that in the episode, it's meant to be a fake out like, Oh, we know, we saw Lady Une die. And then Treize is talking to her as though she's dead so it's really not until the very end of episode 28 that we get the reveal that she's alive. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

Cathy  05:59

So let's address fake outs because there are characters talking in episodes 27 and 28, and I'm not sure if we are supposed to believe that they're talking at the time of the flashback footage being shown to us, or afterwards, right now, in the world of Episode 28.

Kat  06:16

I think Relena's was the only narration that actually seems like 100% anchored to what we were looking at. So... like Treize definitely we hear his earlier thoughts at the beginning and then he explains how they've changed, but with Heero it's just sort of like A, and then B. 

Mallory  06:34

Right, when Heero in Episode 27 says, "I don't consider the other Gundam pilots my comrades, I've never had comrades from the start," I have no idea if this narration is trying to tell me that Heero at this point in time currently, after Episode 26, does not believe the Gundam pilots are his friends. Or if he's referring to how he felt back then.

Caitlin  07:00

I under-understood that as definitely he's talking about that point in the flashback.

Cathy  07:05

It is kind of thrown out there. And it seems like by now he would have had so much interaction with these guys, especially at least with Trowa, that it would be kind of wild for him to say that [laughing]

Caitlin  07:18

He considers Trowa his comrade boyfriend, y'know? [cat meows in background]

Mallory  07:20

It was making me laugh because we've been reading this fic, this road trip arc. And it's kind of incredible how much this arc -- and we'll talk about this -- how much this arc and formed my idea of what the Gundam pilots' relationships were or like, their, their relationship dynamics or that they /had/ relationships with each other. So when I read all these fic, I was thinking like, "Wow, I didn't see any of this coordination in the show. Like there are no safe houses in the episodes that I watched. Oh, that like, it's okay, that must have come later." And now I'm later in the series, [laughing] and I'm finding out that actually, they interact very tangentially for the most part, where I was imagining a lot more camaraderie as the episodes progressed.

Kat  08:11

I know in Episode Zero, you were really distraught to learn that it's not like, "let's all five meet up and team up!" ... 

Mallory  08:19

Yeah!

Kat  08:19

...kind of anime

Mallory  08:21

I mean, I'm really enjoying where it's going now. And I enjoy the sort of bits of relationships that we're getting and the ways that their personalities bounce off each other. And that's what makes, that's what makes Gundam Wing such a rich field to mine for fic, because you get all of these like, glimpses of what these characters could be to each other, within the canon of the show. And it's really easy for writers like Sunhawk to kind of just like, take them and run.

Cathy  08:52

Yes, so let's talk about Road Trip by Sunhawk. Road Trip is part of a larger, 17 part series called the Road Trip Arc by its fans. We are going to be talking mostly about just the first installment -- which is actually barely shippy. Like there are hints of the relationship that will come to be especially the 1x2 part of it. And the rest of the series is very staunchly 1x2 with background 3x4, question mark with Wufei, which I'd really love to talk about later. But at least in the first part, it's kind of more of a, I don't know if action story is the right word...  You know, it starts at some unspecified time in the canon. Heero and Duo are escaping a mission that is kind of going south. They land on earth, on a beach. Heero is badly injured, Duo is you know, kind of beat up but is still mostly functional. You know, he's not internally bleeding and concussed, which is what Heero is. So he's forced to drive them to safety, and eventually to a rendezvous point where the idea is that Quatre and the others will pick them up. But when they get there OZ is basically hot on their heels. So Duo is able to leave Heero, basically in secluded cover, but he has to redirect OZ's attention, which gets him into more trouble. And he almost essentially drowns. So exhausted, pummeled within an inch of his life, he limps his way back to a safe house, again, unspecified location, or why he knows that that thing is there, but whatever, where all the rest of the pilots are staying at. So that's Quatre, Trowa, and Wufei. Heero's already in the hospital, you know, Duo basically passes out. He's given immediate medical attention, including drugs that cause him to lash out and nearly kill everybody around him. But finally, Heero, near death himself, manages to sneak out of his hotel--hospital room to sit by Duo's side, which calms Duo down and the fic ends with them having this really cute exchange about Duo's IVs.  So I did want to talk about the landscape of fanfic reading at this time, before we really dive deep into Road Trip itself. Do you guys have any memories, you know, or impressions of what it was like at the time when you first started reading Gundam Wing fanfic?

Caitlin  11:12

I remember that... I'm pretty sure I read this fic on a site that had either an all black background with white text; a sepia tinted background, that was like, you know, like a light, brownish, and then like a sort of off gray text. Because back in 2000, the only HTML any of us knew was how to change background color and how to change font color. You could put one image... They had gifs back then. And I don't, that's probably why my eyes are bad now. [laughter]

Kat  11:45

Yeah, it was either like very weirdly colored websites or really, really intensely over-styled websites, where it like, it's a little pop up and it's butterfly-shaped.

Mallory  11:58

Yeah. And there's like glitter and sparkles when you move your mouse and stuff. I didn't have fast like, I didn't get DSL until really late, like I was a senior in high school. So all of these websites just like crashed our internet constantly. [laughing] It was, it was hard for me to read those kinds of archives and stuff. 

Caitlin  12:22

The point here is that these fics were hosted on like, a bunch of different sites. And it was just small, privately run, I guess you could say archives, like it's like it's one person who wants to save all the Gundam Wing fic in the world. Which is actually why we have Road Trip preserved on AO3, Archive of Our Own, which is that it's part of the Open Doors Project where a archivist by the name of Dacia used to run a site called A Little Piece of Gundam Wing, she was really into Duo. She read pretty much every Duo pairing if I recall correctly, like she was really into like all Duo pairings and she started collecting fic from various places where like, she-she wanted to curate like the best fic in her mind. So she would like ask authors, "Oh, can I host this on my site too?" after finding the fic other places and so she collected a bunch of, a bunch of fic. And as probably a lot of us know, Archive of Our Own, which is run by the Organization for Transformative Works, has a program called Open Doors where they will import archives that are closing, fanfiction archives that are closing, or that the maintainers just don't want to maintain anymore. So they maintain, they import them wholesale from the original archive and put them on Archive of Our Own.

Kat  13:49

It's pretty great because there are tons of fic from that time period that I wish I could remember or find or go back and to be able to like even search stuff on AO3 that was on those is great.

Cathy  14:02

So we've talked about this before, but that's where Gundam Wing Addiction is actually pretty funny because they did rescue some of these sites. You know, we talked about the Izumi Fountain District with Alexe Cinz stuff last time, but they also rescued, I want to say it's Lev or Levwolf or something like that? 

Kat  14:23

Leviathan's Lair. 

Cathy  14:25

The-the Leviathan's Lair. There we go. 

Kat  14:26

Ooh, I remember this site. Wow--

Mallory  14:28

Yeah

Kat  14:28

Looking at this site is like getting slapped in the face. 

Cathy  14:31

Yeah, I definitely read a lot of fic on A Little Piece of Gundam Wing, which I remember had a lot of text that was like accent text in orange [laughter]. And one of my favorite authors. well, they were an author pair, TB and Marsh, they were hosted on A Little Piece of Gundam Wing, that's where I first discovered them. But same thing with Sunhawk, who wrote two really famous series you know, Road Trip is the first one -- and in my memory, the more famous one although I think some people might say it's the Ion Arc, which I really don't remember anymore. 

Kat  15:06

No, like reading Road Trip -- it's sort of like if I didn't read Road Trip, I read a bunch of fics like it, but the Ion Arc doesn't really ring a bell. 

Cathy  15:15

Ok, yeah. So it was also the one that was easiest to talk about because the first part of Ion isn't really meaty enough, I think to talk about whereas Road Trip, the first installment is almost perfectly self-encompassing of a lot of stuff. In terms of dates, you know, I cannot find a definitive date of when Sunhawk first wrote and posted Road Trip, the first archive I could find that was still crawled by Web Archive, thank you Web Archive, was from November 2001 on Steelsong, who was another moderator of a large network of websites, a lot of which were Gundam Wing websites and specifically had their own Gundam Wing fanfic archive. By the time that Steelsong had put Sunhawk on their site, which was some time around November 2001, Sunhawk had already written much of Road Trip, she had already written the first six installments, which is a lot of fic. And at that time, at least in 2001, 2002, Sunhawk was writing Road Trip concurrently with Ion.  My suspicion is that Sunhawk probably first wrote this on a mailing list, you know, the 1x2 mailing list was a really popular one at the time, and so maybe it was that she first started there and then later got into the archives. But this would mean that Sunhawk probably started writing Gundam Wing fic right after Gundam Wing's run on Toonami in 2000.  So another thing I did want to point out is that we are really lucky now that Gundam Wing is available on streaming on Hulu, that there's all these wiki sites that we could basically find all the information we would want. It's possible that Sunhawk did not actually have a way to fact check anything that she was writing at the time. And so you know, one thing I did want to talk about with the fic was this indeterminate canon timeline issue, I don't know when in the series, this was supposed to happen. You know, Deathscythe is called Deathscythe. Much later in the series, Wufei's Gundam is referred to as Altron, which is his second Gundam. But we don't ever get this kidnapping phase that happens in the fic. So I don't know. But then again, I realized when I was Sunawk in 2001, how was she supposed to have checked that? Right?

Kat  17:29

I think also, nobody gave a shit back then. [laughs] 

Mallory  17:32

Yeah. Like, it's also sort of like, did it really matter to your enjoyment? Like, you have all the elements of the Gundam Wing pilots and them interacting and the shipping, and like, it doesn't really matter what canon we're supposed to be in because we're already out of, outside of canon.

Kat  17:52

I feel like there were only like two timelines for fic and it was basically like pre-Endless Waltz and then post-Endless Waltz. I never really felt like, even though there's definitely a definitive plot split between, like, from all the episodes we've seen, and all the episodes we're about to see, I never really felt like fic did.

Caitlin  18:12

It's, it's sort of an interesting question in like Film Studies, where, you know, up until VHS, there was no way to really rewatch a movie that you were writing about. So a lot of film criticism and film theory was written by people who had only like, watched the movie once. So there's, it's kind of like a pathology we have nowadays that we can rewatch everything over and over again, so we can get this sort of like perfect timeline, this perfect like, sense of a film. Whereas in the past, like nobody ever watched anything like that. And there are, there are some film theorists nowadays who's still argue for that as like the true model of cinema, though obviously, that's much less prominent now. That, that gets into my whole idea of fanfic as a form of like interpretation, like fanfic is like a type of criticism of the original series. 

Kat  19:01

Yeah, absolutely. And the thing that people wanted more of in Gundam Wing was gay shit and safe houses. 

Mallory & Caitlin  19:08

Yeah. 

Caitlin  19:09

And it's and it's easy to just like put that in. Like reading Road Trip, I wasn't thinking too much about like, where does this fit in the timeline because who cares?

Cathy  19:16

This is a first person POV fic, which in my mind now is pretty rare for big fanfics to be first person POV. But you, Mallory, had noted how much this voice sounded like the dub Duo voice. 

Mallory  19:30

Yeah, she has gotten Duo's voice down. [laughs] I think it's just the slang that she kind of throws in there, the sort of casual way that Duo thinks and speaks feels very "of the show." Like I hear Scott McNeil's voice in my head [laughs] reading her fic is how good I think it is. Like there's like a cheesy earnestness in the dialogue of both the show and the fic that I think like works really well and is like really charming.

Caitlin  20:05

And I think that, so I think Duo's voice is very well established and it is at least, I only read the first two parts, but in the second part which is Heero's first person point of view, Duo's dialogue lines are also very strongly Scott McNeil-esque, I felt. I think Heero's voice is a little bit less distinct. One of my struggles with these fics was like, does this read as Heero to me? Like I really wasn't sure. And I'll say with regards to the first person point of view, maybe this gets us on to a different topic, but there are so many things about this fic where if I opened a fic like this now in 2020, I would hit I would hit the back button so hard. 

Cathy  20:48

No, I want to talk about this, this is a great topic. I love this. 

Caitlin  20:51

So I would never read something with this much violence. I'd always be like, what I don't want to read that, I don't want to read Duo getting beaten up or tortured, or whatever.

Mallory & Kat  21:00

Oh! [laughter]

Caitlin  21:02

I know! I like, I don't, I don't read that sort of fic these days. Like I don't read whump, the ancient genre of whump. [laughs]

Kat  21:10

Oh, whump I guess is like a ancient genre but an everlasting genre to me. 

Caitlin  21:15

Yes.

Kat  21:15

Cathy, when you were trying to classify this fic, I was thinking, "this is definitely whump, pre-slash."

Mallory & Caitlin & Cathy  21:21

Yes, yes. Yes. 

Mallory  21:22

At least part one is pre-slash.

Kat  21:24

Yeah

Caitlin  21:25

And I would never read something like that these days... Like if it was, it was tagged pre-slash, rated M, and I be like, "but how can it be rated M if they don't have sex?" I'd be like, "no, there's got to be some other reason for this to be rated M, I can't handle it. I need to go back." Like I would hit the back button so hard. And I'd be wrong because this fic is really good. 

Kat  21:47

It definitely feels from, from an older time~

Cathy  21:50

Yes, I agree. And I second everything Caitlin said. This fic was surprisingly readable and I know that sounds like a backhanded compliment but what I mean is, I didn't expect it to still sound as good and like something I would see someone write now, but it is. It's still really good, you know the voices are really good, the dialogue are really, is really good. But everything about it screams back button. Like I hated Quatre and Trowa even in this fic. [laughing]

Caitlin  22:19

Oh my god, oh my god [laughter]

Cathy  22:20

[laughter] Even though they do nothing, I hated them. Outside of Gundam Wing I did not ever read whump or hurt/comfort fic, you know, this was just not a genre that I was ever interested in. In Gundam Wing it was almost unavoidable? 

Kat  22:33

I was gonna say there's no way [crosstalk]

Cathy  22:34

because of the plot [crosstalk] So you kind of had to--

Kat

especially if you like Duo--

Cathy

Especially if you liked Duo! And then of course all of the little fandom tropes that kill me now about the fic might actually have not yet been as deeply entrenched in fanon at the time she was writing as they are now but--

Caitlin  22:51

True

Cathy  22:51

Certainly now when I read it, I'm like, well, there's the safe house.

Mallory  22:55

Yeah, it's like a checklist almost. Like oh, there's that mention of Duo's hair smelling like sandalwood,

Cathy  23:02

Yes!

Caitlin  23:02

Why sandalwood?

Mallory  23:03

It was always sandalwood and it was always Duo. Duo's hair always smelled like sandalwood..

Kat  23:08

I mean it might be this fic though, like this is  The the fic, the landscape of fic reading and stuff, there was just less of it and like the people who are into it are like really spending time to find it and stuff. We're talking about different archives, I read like everything on 1x2x1--

Mallory  23:10

Mmhmm

Kat  23:10

Uh wing-- Shinigami and Wing like and so I think it was like, fanon still coalesces pretty fast now but I think because there's less access to source material too it's like so much easier for it to grow like this, just sort of permeate the entire fandom, not just one pairing.

Mallory  23:48

Yeah, I mean like Kat you were saying earlier you may not have read this particular fic but you have definitely read 10 or 15 other ones that are very similar to it in terms of what you can expect from the action and the characters and the pairings.

Kat  24:04

Duo is gonna get hurt. Heero is gonna be angry over something that he doesn't need to be angry about. Trowa is gonna to be a calm head, Quatre's the kind heart. Wufei I like in this because he's like the friend, the bro, instead of the standoffish fifth guy. 

Mallory  24:19

Yeah, 

Kat  24:19

so that's nice--

Caitlin  24:20

Yeah. Wufei good in this but he has a better like,

Kat  24:25

Rapport?

Caitlin  24:25

He has more rapport with Duo than Heero does [laughter]  

Mallory  24:28

Yes. I was going to say--

Caitlin  24:31

I'm sure we were all in on this but I was side shipping Duo and Wufei a lot. Wufei gave him a bath!

Mallory & Kat  24:38

Wufei gets him! 

Cathy  24:40

Do you guys, can I spoil something about the rest of the Road Trip arc? 

Caitlin  24:43

Yes! 

Mallory & Kat  24:44

Yeah. 

Cathy  24:45

So I okay. And I will first give readers this warning, if you do want to read the rest of the installments of Road Trip, there are warnings on AO3 but I must add that there is a significant part of Duo's backstory that deals with rape and trauma and especially rape of Duo when he was very under age so--

Caitlin  25:10

This also something that would be auto back button for me.

Cathy  25:13

Yeah so I have to I have to put in that disclaimer because I don't want people wandering into the rest of the story. Road Trip the first installment is fine but the rest of the story this is, this is a big part of his character so please don't read it if it is triggering. But one thing about Wufei is you find out later he actually has a BIG honkin' crush on Duo and he is almost always--

Mallory 25:36

I must have read this.

Caitlin  25:37

Nooooo!

Cathy  25:37

 He is almost always there basically like helping like pick Duo up and like--

Caitlin  25:43

no [crosstalk] this is too sad!

Cathy  25:43

Supplements this like emotional stuff that like Heero doesn't get because Heero has a bad problem 

Caitlin  25:49

[agonized] Noooo--

Cathy  25:49

in Road Trip of like treating Duo as like too fragile which pisses Duo off  

Kat  

That was a common dynamic. 

Cathy

He comes to this like realization that he's like really in love with Duo but then he has to shelve it because he realizes that Duo and Heero are soulmates? And so he like, he says he'll be a friend forever and he gives like do this plush dragon. And then the whole thing is it's set up to be eventually a Wufei and Sally Po story? But the very last installment -- that is part 16 of the 16 part series -- is essentially a story where Duo has an anxiety freak out while Heero's away. He calls Wufei over to his apartment, they spend a night together completely platonically. Duo realizes that Wufei is like eaten up inside by something that Wufei won't tell Duo about. And it's like this crush, which all of us know because we all read the part with the Wufei point of view, but like Duo didn't get the memo. 

Mallory

Oh my god?

Kat

I picked up on this and I only read one chapter.

Caitlin

I can't handle this.

Cathy

So he's not sure what's happening. And that at the very end, you know, Wu Fei is like basically telling Duo that he doesn't want to start dating Sally Po because he's afraid of like, basically something that like, and he phrases it in a way that makes Duo think he's talking about his former dead wife, but it's actually about Duo. [crosstalk: No!] And Duo says to him, you have to let the past go. And so then Wufei does and call Sally up for a date. 

Kat

Okay, that plush dragon thing just lit up eight synapses.

Caitlin

I hate this.

Kat

I have read this fic, 100%.

Caitlin  25:57

It's possible that this is why I got into 2x5.

Cathy  27:32

So I just had to add this here because like, I truly felt the same way. Like I shipped Wufei and Duo was so hard and the more Heero like became this like, super protective like... I like this story, but I don't buy it as Heero characterization. Like I don't think Heero was very convincing. But I do find Duo and Wufei very convincing in the series. [laughs]

Caitlin  27:51

Yeaaah.

Kat  27:51

I think this is a big problem with a lot of Heero fanon characterization at the time, though, because like the logical conclusion of the fanon characterization of Heero is just a huge asshole nobody wants to date. [laughs] When the Toonami series aired, it was like a ton of 1x2. That was it. It was like 1x2, 3x4 blah, blah but I think as fanon crystallized like pairing diversity also increased.

Caitlin  28:17

Yeah, the thing is that I'm fine reading fanfic between assholes that nobody would want to date. That is, tends to be the type of fanfic that I read anyway. 

Kat  28:27

Look, I get that.

Caitlin  28:27

So Heero being terrible is fine. The problem is that this fic characterizes him as less terrible than he seems to actually be?

Mallory  28:36

Mmm.

Caitlin  28:36

Like, I don't think Heero is this, I don't think he's this protective. I don't think he's this in tune with his feelings. Part Two, really, like, as some of you might know, I never read established relationship fic, so I wasn't going to continue past Part Two anyway. Even though they have a lot of problems, I'm just like, all right, they already confessed their feelings. I'm not interested anymore. But I just found it really hard to believe that Heero would be able to confess his feelings or even like, recognize love, emotions, or romance that early on. 

Kat  29:10

It's the combined problem of he's an asshole who no one would want a date and the fic is still trying to convince me that him and Duo are like really great together in general. So I wrote a lot of Gundam Wing fic in middle school, so I consumed so much of it on [laughing] fanfiction.net and the characterization ended up getting really, really far removed even further removed than this fic from the actual show, I guess.

Cathy  29:35

So one thing I did want to point out, it's less obvious in Part One, but becomes increasingly obvious as you move through this arc is the total lack or mention of Relena Peacecraft. And, and I mean it, she is not mentioned once in this entire fic, which is odd because it goes from middle of the canon through until the post-Endless Waltz and then [laughter] seven to eight years, and seven to eight years after--

Mallory  30:05

Wow 

Cathy  30:05

the end of Endless Waltz, which, and again at by the end of this fic series, spoilers, Duo, Wufei, and Heero all work for the Preventers. So it seems very [laughter] weird that none of them would interact with Relena. So like I did--

Caitlin  30:14

It seems like they would run into Relena sometime [laughter]. 

Cathy  30:21

I did want to open the floor to talk about Relena Peacecraft and her place in Gundam Wing fanfic.

Kat  30:29

Well, so either you're a het shipper so you're, you're, you're doing fine, your Heero is probably very different. [laughter]

Caitlin  30:41

Wait, let's let's be clear that there were a lot of het shippers

Kat  30:44

Yes.

Caitlin  30:44

And they still are there. There was a lot of het shipping in the Japanese fandom too. I think Heero and Relena were popular. 

Kat  30:51

Duo and Hilde. 

Caitlin  30:53

And the official media that came out was like, oh Duo and Hilde. And, oh Heero and Relena.

Cathy  30:58

Yeah.

Kat  30:59

Relena and fanfiction so you're a het -- you could be a het shipper, so then she's in it a lot. 

Mallory

Or you hate her and she's a monster and she's the the thing standing between Heero and Duo falling in love or being together, which I feel like I read a lot of.

Kat  31:15

She could be shipping them but that was way more rare I thought and then like just not having her around.

Caitlin  31:22

So like, from the perspective of the contemporary moment, it looks bad to just not write Relena at all in your 300,000 word fic about characters who talk to Relena all the time. Like it seems bad 

Kat  31:38

But! 

Caitlin  31:39

but she was so controversial that I could see like I can see the logic of just not including her.

Kat  31:45

And as a reader I, I often preferred that she just kind of not be there be like very peripheral over... like I think at the beginning I really enjoyed the like Relena hating because there's just very viscerally satisfying, but later on, I was like, hmmm.

Caitlin  32:01

The other option is like, write a explainer about why your Heero in your fic doesn't love Relena, he only loves Duo. It just becomes, like, tedious to write that every single fic.

Cathy  32:15

One thing that I was digging up was a lot of Relena hate sites. And one thing we had talked about in past episodes was kind of like hating her because she was this rich girl, she had this entourage, we couldn't really relate to her. And there was a lot of that in why people expressed why they hated Relena. Like she was spoiled. She had everything. She was obsessed with Heero and so she definitely like wanted him as one of her belongings kind of thing? So I think it is one of those moments where now that I've read a lot more other types of Gundam Wing fanfic that I wasn't reading at that time that have, I think, much more interesting Relena characterization, and much more I think realistic ideas about what Heero and Relena's relationship would be like. I think, "God I was so stupid!" but I feel that same way about like everything I was into, right? [laughs] So like, it is kind of humbling and also funny. 

Mallory  33:14

Like reading this fic it's about as comforting as like finding your favorite High School sweater, you know, in the back of your closet when you're visiting home and putting it on and finding out it still fits. And it's because it sort of hits all of those familiar tropes that I remember reading, like the use of "Gods" is like--

Kat  33:32

Yes!

Mallory  33:33

punch in the face.

Caitlin  33:34

Why does everyone say gods? 

Mallory  33:36

Yes. 

Cathy

Everybody!

Mallory  33:37

Okay, and I don't remember, like I remember this being a thing in Gundam Wing fic I don't remember why--

Caitlin  33:43

[crosstalk] Duo was American and was raised in a—

Cathay

[laughing] Catholic!

Caitlin

Catholic. Why would he say Gods?

Kat  33:48

[crosstalk] Yeah Duo would never.

Cathy  33:49

I kind of get maybe the idea of why others would do it if this became like a post colony thing but certainly not Duo.

Kat  33:57

In like middle school. I was always wondering like, "oh, what kind of weird event happened in the future that made everybody until like a polytheist?" [laughter] Like, what kind of world building is this?

Mallory  34:07

Yeah, I thought that there had to be like a reason or is there a rule?

Caitlin  34:12

I kind of thought that just like the people writing fanfic at the time tended to be like pagans. Like, like, that was fine. And they and they were pushing their pagan agenda by having everybody say gods. 

Cathy  34:22

No, I, I, 100. That's 100% my theory.

Caitlin  34:25

that's what I think it is. 

Cathy  34:26

So I mean, Sunhawk was one of the older writers at the time, but I think a lot of the people who were archivists and writers at the time were older, she was probably at least I want to say in her 30s. They're usually older, some of them are Wiccan or pagan and a lot of them were very interested in like education and sort of like bringing up the younger members of the fandom. So Sunhawk specifically, like had a personality who was like very educational? I'm not saying that that's why she did particularly this "Gods" thing, but I do think that that was like part of the general dismantling of monotheistic-- 

Mallory 35:01

Christian god. 

Cathy  35:02

Yeah. So the last thing I want to talk about in terms of this fanfic is all the five pilots working together, coordinating pickup and rescue missions. 

Mallory  35:11

Rendezvous points? How are they in contact with each other? 

Cathy  35:15

And they all appear to have like similar missions? Like, it seems like Heero and Duo were on this mission together instead of what we see in the show, which is that they don't...? Again, I think I just love this idealistic view of the Gundam pilots where they're all not just friends, but also comrades in arms.

Caitlin  35:33

Yeah, I mean, this makes more sense than what the show does, which is that on the show, it's always, oh, they just happen to run into each other on the same mission. And they're like, oh, who are you? Why do you have the same Gundam as me? [laughter]

Mallory  35:47

We shouldn't be fighting. 

Caitlin  35:48

But Quatre's the only one who says that everybody else is like, let's blow each other up.

Cathy  35:53

We joke a lot about how this podcast is basically us questioning the internal logic of Gundam Wing, like why would anybody do this thing where they just sent five teenagers without any knowledge that there are four other of them and just be like, here you go.

Mallory  36:07

Complete a vague unspecified mission.

Kat  36:10

I feel like fanfiction really made them way more competent. Like there's literally that whole scene where the doctors are like, "You guys fucking suck. You're not the perfect soldiers at all." [laughter] 

Mallory 36:21

"You don't know anything." 

Kat  36:22

And then in fics it's like Heero's like, "I'm the perfect soldier. I know everything! 

Mallory  36:28

"I must be the perfect soldier." 

Caitlin  36:30

Oh, yeah. Like they all seem to be much better fighters than they are in canon. 

Kat  36:36

Yeah

Caitlin  36:36

I feel like in canon Wufei is the only one who does his job. And in fanfic, it seemed like they were all doing jobs.

Kat  36:43

Trowa's maybe just doing his own thing. 

Mallory  36:46

But he's doing A Job.

Caitlin  36:47

Yeah, clowning. Trowa's job is clowning! 

Kat  36:50

Everybody got way more trauma than Quatre did in fic even though the show is like here's Quatre's biggest trauma. 

Mallory  36:58

You know, that's very true. 

Kat  36:59

Which didn't even show up in the clip show.

Caitlin  37:02

Yeah, it also doesn't really make sense that Quatre's always this really sane one in fanfic when he's the main one we've seen in canon go apeshit. 

Kat  37:12

Reading this fic and then watching the clip show, I was like, damn, like Wufei/Treize/Zechs was like it's, a whole ass universe. And it's just like, one scene in the first 27 episodes. [laughter] But what a scene. 

Mallory  37:27

Such a good one.

Caitlin  37:29

I think that it's important to note that Sunhawk passed away last year, and so we could consider this episode our very weird tribute to her.

Cathy  37:37

Yes, in 2019 in March, there was a post on Sunhawk's LiveJournal, by her daughter, who had become in Sunhawk's words, essentially somewhat of a fandom secretary for Sunhawk, noting that if you are reading this entry, now, it means that she had passed away, she had been diagnosed with cancer, like in 2015, she said four and a half years ago from the time of the writing of the entry. So Sunhawk, beginning in 2007, did a tradition where every year for the 12 days leading up to Christmas, she would post the ficlet, or fanart inspired by her fics, usually 1x2 related usually an excerpt from or like a special scene or bonus scene from one of her stories about Duo and Heero. And she continued that tradition even up until 2019. 

Kat  38:25

Oh wow

Cathy  38:25

So prior to that she had actually queued up 12 Days of Christmas for 2019, which her daughter posted. And the very last story actually was a coda for the Ion arc, which was left unfinished and her daughter finished it for her. And if you had the chance, and of course, we'll link to this, I really highly recommend you read the goodbye post from Sunhawk.

Caitlin  38:49

It's, wait, it's really good. Can I read just a little bit of this? 

Cathy  38:51

Yes, please. 

Caitlin  38:52

Before I shuffle on off, though, I would be remiss if I didn't address the fandom that I have called home for almost two decades. To everyone, thank you, I realized that we aren't as large as we used to be that the heyday is over. But I've enjoyed being here and writing for you all. And there is one thing that I've learned through all of my years, and all of my time with the fandom that I want to share that I think applies not just to our little corner of the internet, but all fandom. Write it, draw it, sing it, create it, share it. We all start somewhere. We all start with works that are horribly out of character. We write tropes that have been written up million times before. We all stare at blank canvases unable to get the lines down in a way that we want. And we all scrap ideas that we feel just aren't good enough. But a fandom lives because of the people who produce for it. And by those who come to read and view. Yes, maybe that 500 word drabble in which two strapping young men are trapped in a remote cabin during some horrible weather event and there is only one bed, isn't your best work. But what about the work after that, or the one that follows? With each creation you learn, you polish yourself, you grow. Never stop yourself from growing. Never let others stop you from growing. Share the stories you have in you. Post your heart -- Post your art, because at the end of the day life is too damn short to spend not doing something you love to do. To all of the Gundam Wing fandom and all of my friends, I want to again say thank you, reading my work supporting me talking with me, you've made my stay here a pleasant one.

Cathy  40:21

I find it really heartwarming. And one thing that I did for this episode is I went back and I read some of Sunhawk's first LiveJournal posts in 2002, when she started her LiveJournal, and even in the comments to people who were, I don't think close friends of hers, you know, just fans, she was always extremely, you know, encouraging and welcoming, and always told her fans that they should just write, you know, even if they felt like whatever they did wasn't perfect or wasn't in their words going to match up to what she did. She always told them just write it. Coming to Sunhawk and realizing that she'd spent two decades in a fandom that I think a lot of us considered dead and she was still cranking out work there and like encouraging people and being loving in that fandom, it just is it's like everything that one hopes one span that experience will be like and how they'll be remembered when they leave. Well, I want to thank you guys for joining me on this episode where we talk about, you know, Sunhawk and fanfic and being really young and on the internet with dial up. I really, you know, appreciate all of your memories, which are also my memories. And together, we'll keep Sunhawk's spirit alive. Write it, draw it, sing it, create it and share it. Thank you very much and see you in two weeks.

[elle9095]

So yesterday The Boyz’ Checkmate performance on Road to Kingdom completely blew my mind and it's been all I can think about for like 15 hours so I figured writing basically a dissertation explaining what I saw in their performances is going to help me make sense of life again.

The narrative that I got from the performances tells a story about the power struggles of monarchy, both literally and metaphorically, when you consider the industry. It’s also the concept of the show, giving these bands a chance to play in the same league as the so called kpop royalty.

It like the Boyz were on a show called Road to Kingdom and decided to make it literal.

First performance: Hwarang/ Sword of Victory

I think no one could've imagined what was to come when they made this performance. It was meant as an intro to the group so it was short and impressive and I’d say that it sort of set the style of their performance but not yet the general concept that has developed over the show.

Also I just learned that hwarangs were entertainers before they became a legion of warriors and later an institution, so they're basically old-timey boy groups turned soldiers.

How quaint when you consider the later performances.

Second performance: Danger

This is where it all started I guess. They went with the thieving concept of the song, decided to take inspiration from their first performance and bam now they’re stealing crowns and climbing walls.

Third performance: Reveal (Catching Fire)

So obviously referencing the Hunger Games which is a survival game but essentially a story of revolution.

Fourth performance: Heroine

This one's a bit different since it's a collab but yeah the whole performance is basically a person's journey to center stage, which is usually occupied by the winners/royalties.

Fifth performance: Quasi una fantasia

This one didn't look like it was going to fit the narrative with it being so ethereal and so hopeful, what with the branch slowly blooming, like a good thing coming to fruition, but this is the euphoria after you've made it and they sort of tell you in the title that yes this is basically a fantasy.

Final performance: Checkmate

This one is fucking insane okay? They start off with a deja vu: Yonghoon's with the hypnotizing watch again and you notice the blooming tree in the background but there's something uncanny and the watch stops, you get flashbacks of Juyeon taking down the king, wearing his crown, Q stealing the crown, stealthily sliding and passing it on to Sunwoo who seems like he's finally going to ascend to the throne and next thing you know he's falling and waking from a bad dream…

At this point I was already cursing and gasping and having a heart attack and they haven't even started singing. And it's like everything they've done so far was just a dream, the game is on let's start all over again.

And isn't it exactly like that? Because a game of thrones (though not explicitly referenced) is exactly just that: a game. You come to power but how long is that going to last? Sunwoo’s (literal) fall from power lasted a breath. You win first place on a music chart this week, you start all over again next week. And The Boyz would know that, having spent the the first weeks on top, but it only took a single performance in one episode for them to drop to third place.

And the chess concept is PERFECT. Chess is a game of war and strategy and the big picture and that's all they've been doing on this show: they've stolen, tricked, rebelled, and dreamed before they finally checkmate. All these performances make up one big picture and I don't know if they've planned this from the start but it’s fucking genius.

The Boyz are so good at coming with a concept and sticking with it, they make a song called checkmate and whoa they have a chess concept now, they have black and white costumes, dancers dressed as pawns, chess board effect and choreo, chess piece props… Which all seemed like obvious artistic choices but there's always MORE.

Like can we talk about that fucking table? I was like 'where did they find a three-way chess table omg it's gorgeous' and then someone's dancing on it and you see the glass tube thingy under the table and MOTHERFUCKER ITS A FUCKING CHESS HOURGLASS

Also for someone to be able to dance on it they flipped the table upside down and it's either like turning back time (rewind sound effect at the beginning) or starting all over again, but also I was like 'huh the tables have turned' and then 'OH FUCK OFF'

And it's all in the details in the performances, the small things that they reference, the same imagery that comes back again and again, every time I rewatch a performance I notice something I didn't before.

There’s the flower, something that's fragile and fleetingly beautiful, also the 'hwa' in hwarang. The moon, which is always changing, like an illusion, the full moon referenced in Reveal, which originally had a werewolf-y concept.

The fire, the sword, all associated with war and power. Even the tricks and optical illusions. The chess, the crown, the king. Everything came together so perfectly in that final performance and wrap up so nicely like HOW IS THAT SHIT EVEN REAL

I love how they have all the names of the song in the title cards (Thieves, Reveal, Paradise, Checkmate) and I’ve been thinking about the lyrics 'the show must go on' and 'the game starts again' and how Sisyphean it all is.

And it's almost like in the end they understand how futile the pursuit of power is but is still pushed by their drive to thrive for better, and in the end they realize being king isn't winning the game. Chess isn't about being king, you don't have to be king to win the game.

Their final card says 'As long as the moon shines, the king of all games is the Boyz'. They don't say 'we're the king' they say 'we're the king of all games'. It’s like 'yeah we're good at this and we're ready to go at it again' be it the hunger games, a game of thrones, or a game of chess.

DAMN THESE PHILOSOPHICAL REBELLIOUS BOYZ

These performances are inspiring and stimulating on so many levels, I mean yeah, the concept is mind-blowing, and of course the performances are just (literally) breathtaking but we haven't even talked about the technicalities.

Yes, I know these performances are great but more importantly I love how self-aware they are. They really seized the opportunity to do the kind of performance that they couldn't be possibly allowed to do anywhere else.

You can hardly do these things for a live audience, since so much rely on the camera work. You can't do this on music shows or music awards where people only care about the more famous groups.

And while these performances were created with the camera in mind, they still make the watching experience so incredibly live by making the performances so risky, upping the stakes to insane levels, and I don't just mean having to catch flying weapons or falling members, but like having a crazy domino choreography where one member's misplaced limb could ruin the whole shot, or using cool props and tricks that could so easily go wrong.

Like the branch that Juyeon was so upset about? The whole trick relied on everyone doing the right thing with the right prop at the right time right place TWICE all the while making it look effortless and seamless.

Can you imagine what kind of crazy you have to be to come up with that?

I personally think that mistake was a perfect imperfection when you look at the whole picture: something not quite right in this otherwise perfect dream that proved to be a mere fantasy, too good to be true.  

Watching the Boyz on Road to Kingdom was pure delight, and for people like me who get off on the thrill of live experience, performances like these are SUCH A TURN ON. And as a writer I'm just a sucker for conceptual plots, unexpected twists and experimenting with structures.

I’m currently torn by a mix of feelings: excitement for Kingdom, anxiety about the safety of the performers, dread of the inevitable end of the show. It kills me a little to think that we'll probably not see this kind of performances as much. That they don't get to perform like this again: go all out and not just tell a story but a fucking epic that will make Bertolt Brecht cry.

I hope they get their own comeback specials or that the company does like OK Go and makes all these crazy fun performance music videos. At this point I don't even know how to organize my thoughts to express my love for the creative team behind the productions, like someone there's got imagination to spare and I want to pick their brains so bad.

I didn’t know anything about this group before my sister showed me their Danger performance clip, and I’m 98% sure I’d never have discovered this group have they not gone on RTK but holy fuck am I glad that this happened because this is probably one of the best things that came out in 2020, making this disaster of a year almost bearable.  

So yeah, that's what I thought about the Boyz performances. Thank you for coming to my ted talk or whatevs

Also I have a second theory that the whole season is just Sunwoo getting over his fear of heights through exposure therapy.

[thepeanutbutterwizard]

Ninjago/Avatar au Pt 4

Basically just Book 1 (and I agonize over ships. Help)

(Also I finally finished watching A:TLA)

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5)

Recap time:

So, we’ve got Maya, Garm, Lloyd, Kai, and Nya flying on Ultra and trying to get to the North Pole. Morro and Wu are pursuing them, as is Clouse, (who will be taking Zhao’s place) and, y’know, the entire Fire Nation. Koko has been abroad for about three years, looking for any information on the Avatar she can. Ray went off to fight with the other men from the Southern Water Tribe.

They have a lot of similar adventures to cannon: they go to the Southern Air Temple to see if that can jog any memories from Lloyds past lives. It doesn’t work, Lloyd just gets ahold of a glider (there are a lot of shenanigans with him learning how to use that) and adopts a Flying Lemur (give Lloyd all of the pets pls) who is just as mischievous as Lloyd. They take a detour to Kyoshi Island, and get a letter that Koko had left for them, saying that she was going to look for a mysterious library (wink). They also befriend one of the prominent members of the village, Cyrus Borg, and his daughter Pixal (she’s human), the leader of the Kyoshi Warriors (I know Cyrus would make a great Mechanist, but the idea of Kyoshi Warrior Pixal was too good and I fell in love with it. Also Samuraishipping is fantastic.)

They fight pirates, there are Spirit World shenanigans (btw the last fully realized Avatar before Lloyd, and his spirit guide is a human version of Firstborn.) and there might be a Jet stand-in if I can figure out a good character for that role. There’s a running gag of people automatically assuming that Maya and Garm are married, to their combined amusement and annoyance, until one of the kids will call one of them their parent, and the other one aunt or uncle (they’re family in this au. Fight me). Eventually they just start automatically answering anything that implies they’re a couple with ‘We’re siblings’.

Wu and Morro have been chasing them the whole way. Wu has been conflicted this whole time; he just found out that his brother is actually alive, and has been hiding for years, with the Avatar no less. And now he’s having to hunt both of them down (as well as his brothers wife and kids? Maybe?) when all he wants to do is, like, talk? Have a cup of tea and catch up maybe? Meanwhile Garm is thinking that Wu is completely on their father’s side, and that he won’t show them any mercy if he catches them.

Eventually they make it to the Northern Water Tribe. The chief is the former elemental master of ice. I shall call him Ice, bc I dont think he has an actual name. He’s a waterbender. And now we finally meet Zane, the white haired (human) wonder! (Heh, you all can probably guess where I’m going with this. Pls don’t kill me.) His unnamed mother died giving birth to his younger brother, Echo, when Zane was about two, and their father died a few years after that, and they were taken in by Ice, who was a close friend of their parent.

I don’t think I’ll make Zane a bender bc of the whole ‘moon spirit saved my life as a baby’ thing, but Echo is (purely for angst reasons. You’ll see what I mean in a bit). But this is the part where we get some sweet sweet Oppositeshipping! Zane isn’t betrothed to anyone, but even though he likes Kai, he’s constantly worried about his tribes safety and worried about what will happen when the Fire Nation shows up (he’s smart enough to know that they will show up eventually) and he’s scared of letting everyone down, and there are just a lot of issues there holding him back from being in a relationship with Kai.

Now, even though everyone knows that Lloyds the Avatar, they’ve kept it secret that Kai and Garm are firebenders (and Garms whole backstory) for obvious reasons. But you guys know that date that Zuko went on in Ba Sing Se? Pretend that they have that lantern thing in the Northern Water Tribe. Kai and Zane have that cute date and Kai lights the lanterns and its adorable.

But I bet you’re wondering who takes the place of krusty old Pakku? Krux of course! Who better to be the traditionalist old jerk waterbender teacher than the traditionalist old jerk boomer? (Acronix is there too. He’s not a bender. If I could find a way to work Futureshipping into this au, I totally would. I am still trying to figure out how to organically work it in) So Lloyd, Nya, and Maya are ready to learn some traditional waterbending (bc even though Maya is a really good waterbender, she literally just made up her own style. It would be like someone trained in acrobatics and dance, turning it into a form of combat, and entering a mixed martial arts tournament. She’s always wanted to learn some traditional waterbending) but Krux does the whole ‘boys do combat, girls do healing’ speech.

None of them like it much, but they go along with it and try to pull the whole ‘I’ll just show you what he showed me!’ thing and get caught. Krux demands an apology, and Maya is trying to keep Lloyd and Nya from blowing up at Krux, and she’s also trying to keep from blowing up herself (I hc that Kai gets his temper from Maya). Krux says something about how even if he wanted to teach them, clearly Maya, and Nya especially, don’t have what it takes to be real waterbenders, and Maya fucking snaps. She goes off on Krux, says some things about how she’s spent her whole life living in fear, and how she worked her ass off to hone her bending, and then she challenges him to go outside and she’ll show him what a ‘real’ waterbender can do.

Lloyd, Kai, and Nya are all a little shocked. It’s the first time they’ve seen Maya get so mad. Garm, who has known Maya for years, had been trying to subtly tell Krux to shut up (even though Krux was really pissing him off too, but someone needed to be the adult). Since Maya isn’t about to let Krux get away without a fight, Garm is just thinking ‘hoo boy, here we go’.

Krux tries to walk away from Maya, and then promptly gets his ass handed to him on a silver platter. He begrudgingly admits that, while Maya’s bending is chaotic and wild and sloppy, it is very powerful. But just bc she was able to beat him in one fight doesn’t mean that he has to teach any of them any waterbending. Maya says ‘fine! We just thought it would be a good idea for the damn Avatar to learn traditional waterbending, but I guess I’ll just go ahead and teach him more of my ‘wild, chaotic, sloppy’ waterbending style! And, I’ll teach anyone in this tribe who wants to learn from me, no matter who they are! And besides, it’s not like you can stop me.’

And so she did! Maya spends the next little while teaching not only Lloyd and Nya everything she’s come up with, but a bunch of the young waterbenders in the tribe learn from her too, as well as some older benders. Krux is less than pleased, but he isn’t looking for Round 2, so he keeps his mouth shut. Garm has been trying to lay low through all this. As low as possible for the father of the Avatar at least.

Meanwhile, Wu and Morro have been tracking them down diligently. At least, Morro is being diligent. Wu has been a little shit and trying to slow them down on purpose, and anytime they have to fight team Avatar, he keeps trying to use that to get his brother alone and get him to talk shit out dammit brother, where have you been and who are these people do I have niblings? cause you do and he’s a good kid even though hes trying to kill you right now explain that he is really, truly glad that he’s alive and well, and that no, he doesn’t actually want to catch him.

There wasn’t any type of assassination attempt on Morros life like there was Zuko, he either faked an injury so he could go on his secret ‘capture the Avatar’ mission during the siege on the Northern Water Tribe, or he wasn’t allowed to go and snuck away (with a little help from Wu either way). He does the same thing Zuko did with the underwater tunnel, but Morro doesn’t have firebending to break the ice. He has airbending (bet no-one saw that coming). I debated with myself for a long, long time if I should make Morro an airbender (they were nomads, and bending is inherited. It’s not that hard to believe that a few airbenders survived that way. I also love the airbender Ty Lee theory)

Wu figured it out when Morro was pretty young, and did everything in his power to both teach Morro, and keep his bending a secret. This played a big part in contributing to Morro’s need to be seen as worthy and deserving.

So anyways, the siege. It’s happening. Kai is being a bit of a grumpy angst lord (bc he wants to hold hands with a pretty boy) but gets assigned by Ice to guard Zane and Echo. Lloyd enters the Spirit World, Morro fights Nya and only wins bc he pulled out his secret airbending when she had her back turned. Meanwhile, Maya and Garm are helping fight of the Fire Nation (Maya with her waterbending, Garm with hand-to-hand combat) when Garm see’s Clouse going off to kill the Moon Spirit and follows him. Wu also follows them and gives Clouse the whole ‘we need the moon too’ speech.

Garm watches from the shadows as that confrontation takes place, but jumps in to fight the Fire Nation soldiers who came with Clouse at the same time that Wu does when he kills the Moon Spirit, and not only does he all-out firebend for the first time in a while (once he and Ray became more trusted by the Southern Water Tribe the blanket ban on their firebending was lifted, but it’s kind of a bad idea to excessively play with fire in a village that’s made almost entirely of ice and snow) he reveals his identity to everyone. He’s actually a little surprised that Clouse is surprised that he’s alive. He figured that Wu would have told everyone about his death being greatly exaggurated.

Clouse books it, Lloyd fuses with the Ocean Spirit to go wreck the Fire Nation, things are a teensy bit more awkward in the spirit-cave-pond-area-place with Garm and Wu being there together, but its overall just a somber moment.

And then, Zane becomes the new Moon Spirit. But not only do we have a sad Oppositeshipping good-bye kiss, we have a sad last hug ever between Zane and Echo. I made Echo a waterbender solely so it could be a terribly sad thing where anytime Echo bends he can feel his brother with him. It’s sad. There are tears (including from myself as I type this). Kai is comforted by Garm, which is basically confirms Wu’s incorrect suspicions that Kai and Nya and Maya are Garms kids and wife, and that they’re helping the Avatar (look, this gag is just too funny to me and I will keep it going as long as I can.)

When they leave the spirit pond, Wu tries to pull Garm aside to talk to him, but Garm still has no idea if he can trust Wu, and that means that the kids are super wary of him (they know that Wu and Garm are brothers) so all that really accomplishes is getting Kai to firebend at Wu’s face (btw, Kai firebending is a big deal. When he was a fairly little kid he accidentally firebended [firebent?] and Maya got burned. For Kai, firebending is the last thing he uses, not the first) and then grabbing Garm and Nya (whos giving an inconsolable Echo a piggy-back ride as he is still sobbing) and booking it. But not before Wu was able to slip a letter into Garm’s parka.

While all this is going down, Morro and Clouse had their little scuffle, but Morro has to airbend at one point to save his own skin, and not only does Clouse see, but quite a few mid-retreat Fire Nation soldiers see as well. Then Clouse gets killed by the Ocean Spirit.

Morro and Wu steal a raft and book it, since now one of them is a traitor and the other was just outed as an airbender. Krux and a group of people, both benders and non-benders, head to the South Pole to help them out. Echo is a part of this group; it’s what he knows Zane would have wanted to do. Team Avatar head out to find Lloyd an earthbending teacher, and Garm finds the letter from Wu. He’s scared to open it, and doesn’t for a while.

And now, it’s time to introduce a new character! See, back in the Fire Nation, the Firelord had been growing displeased with his son. Despite Wu’s best efforts, dear old dad had caught on to how much Wu disliked the war, and he figured it would only be a matter of time before something tipped Wu over the edge and he turned full traitor. That would leave him as a ruler with no heirs, and that wouldn’t do. So he secretly was searching for a good candidate to take the throne, preferably an orphan, who showed proficiency in firebending and could be moulded into a cut-throat living weapon.

He found what he was looking for in a young girl named Harumi. A firebending prodigy whose parents had both died in the war. And now that the Firelord learned that, not only did his younger son turn traitor in the North Pole and run off with his airbender adopted son, but his disgraced fool of an older son is alive and actively helping the Avatar, well, it’s high time the world saw just what his hand-picked heir can do.

[him-e]

Why do you ship Reylo? Or, more accurately, what first interested you about Reylo and what do you find compelling about the ship that keeps you engaged in the fandom or rooting for it in canon?

What first interested me about it:

it’s the only thing that actually took me off guard me in a movie (TFA) that was otherwise really cute and engaging but also really, really safe (and predictable). Before watching TFA, I thought I had spoiled myself on every major development: Starkiller Base, Han’s death, Luke’s last minute apparition, Rey and Finn’s playful chemistry… I went to the theatre expecting two hours of harmless entertainment (which I got), the good guys being good and the bad guys being bad, a nostalgia trip at best and an uninspired but ultimately innocuous rehash of the original trilogy at worst… but what I actually did was stumble on a gorgeous and completely unexpected hero/villain ship, the kind that had sadly been lacking in my fandom life for years, at least since the good old days of True Blood season 2. No early review or spoiler had prepared me for that. (no early review or spoiler had prepared me for Rey and Kylo interacting at all, which in hindsight is h i l a r i o u s, and few mentioned how fantastic the character of Kylo Ren was. So not just Reylo, but everything surrounding Kylo was a pleasant surprise to me.) Bottom line: I went to see the movie with several expectations, but Reylo wasn’t certainly one of those. It wasn’t even something I knew I needed in my Star Wars. It just happened.

like, when i say it’s the only exception in a movie that plays it safe, I mean it. Just look at the interrogation scene, and all the pearl clutching it caused. Name another thing in TFA that sparked so much discourse.

it’s also the only dynamic that wasn’t ripped, one way or another, off similar relationships in the OT or PT.

curiously enough, Rey’s parentage wank is also one of the main reasons that got me looking more and more into Reylo. Like most people, I walked out of the theatre fully convinced Rey was a Skywalker and precisely Luke’s daughter. Predictable, but also so typically Star-Warsy, and back then I had no reason to believe they’d go for subverting the audience’s expectations. But Rey’s being a Skywalker meant that she’d necessarily develop at some point some sort of *personal* dynamic with local evil cousin (/brother?) Kylo Ren, a prospect I immediately found more interesting and narratively compelling than whatever relationship she might establish with her presumed deadbeat father, Luke. Were Rey and Kylo going to have a Micheal/Lucifer sort of dynamic, were they going to battle over their “divine” legacy? were they going to feel sympathy for each other? would they see each other as family at all? It didn’t take me long to realize I was actually more into this than into any other aspect (or dynamic) of the sequel trilogy, and it was all downhill from there.

all the post TFA fan theories concerning Rey and Kylo meeting in the middle and what that could entail for the Force plot (a new balance? Grey Jedi?)

yin/yang—opposites attract dynamic—enemies to friends (to lovers) = I CANNOT RESIST

they’ve seen each other’s deepest FEARS

THE STARKILLER DUEL!!!

What keeps me interested in it and makes me root for it in canon:

they’re complicated. Their relationship is complicated. Nothing about them is a simple “good girl redeems bad guy” scenario. Neither of them is willing to accept compromises to pull the other to their side, much less win their heart. They’ll move mountains and cross galaxies (and defy their own masters) to save the other’s life, but they’re not going to give up on their ideals, and if that’s the price to pay they’re fully willing to fight each other to death. They both understand each other deeply, on some instinctual, spiritual level, and don’t understand each other at all. The kinship and intimacy they feel when they’re in each other’s brain and soul dissipates when they try to communicate in person, in the same room, and it’s like they’re talking two different languages. They both want the best for each other, but they disagree on what “best” is supposed to mean. This is all very fascinating to me.

they’re real equals. In the Force, and in terms of narrative weight. See: the lightsaber tug-of-war. (and how interesting it is that in TFA Rey was able to both have exclusive control on the legacy saber and defeat Kylo, while in TLJ they both controlled it to the point that neither of them was eventually able to claim it for themselves?)

I, obviously, root for Kylo’s redemption. I believe Rey will have a huge part to play in it.

lonely eldritch Force children with too much power and too much responsibility on their shoulders, finding solace in each other and crying at the barest glimpse of a bright future together

none of the other options for Rey (or Kylo) interests me. Not even celibate!Rey—as I abundantly discussed before, it’s not the idea of Rey having a platonic/celibate happy ending with no romantic attachments per se that I reject (I’d be fine with it if the context was different), but the fact that, for it to happen NOW, Rey’s feelings for Ben should be inexplicably reduced to some weak sauce *I only care for your well-being as a friend and I’m happy to see you go on your merry way and possibly never see you again* pseudo-platonic thing. The way I see it Rey is super fiercely covetous of having Ben at her side, for her own selfish reasons and not just to win the war or because she has a good samaritan complex. Call it love, call it passion, call it passionate friendship, call it force bond shenanigans but… don’t tell me she’d be perfectly happy without him. 

speaking of which, THE FORCE BOND. Sensing the other’s presence at your side—being able to talk and even touch each other across entire galaxies, feeling what the other feels, but only for a handful of minutes each time, before the vision fades like mist between your fingers and you’re alone again. Dude. It’s the most beautiful trope EVER.

I need to stress it again: the Force is connecting them.

what we saw during the praetorian guard fight—Kylo and Rey fighting together in perfect synchronicity, like the force-bonded warriors they are—kept me awake for many many nights. I want more of that. 

I do believe that a Rey/Kylo alliance / friendship / partnership / romance is not just the heart of this trilogy but also the only satisfying endgame for it, at least for the Force side of the plot. A new concept of balance that’s the result of Light and Dark finding harmony and healing the wounds of the past is imo the only way to give the Force a happy ending that doesn’t feel like a rehash of the OT one (the Light wins = the Darkness is destroyed = the Jedi were right and the Sith were wrong). Also, consider: the PT ended with the triumph of the Dark Side, and the OT with the triumph of the Light. It’s not that much of a stretch to imagine that the ST will end with a combination of the two, or perhaps with a subversion of the whole dark/light dichotomy. 

they haven’t kissed and I live for the day they will

(I also live for the day they fight again and that’s the beauty of this ship: it’s a win-win situation no matter how it goes, and them being sworn enemies is almost as good as them being lovers. almost)

[kurainohikaru]

I made a few friends Cussing out Cinder/ Rwby Volume 6 Episode 1: Argus Limited

So at the premiere tonight they began it with showing a recap of the last 2 episodes of Volume 5, the first scene being a closeup of Cinder’s face. Now I’m not normally that rude guy at a theater but as soon as she showed up on screen I just shouted: “Get off the screen, you stupid bitch!”  Now this is in no disrespect to Jessica Nigri or CRWBY (maybe a bit of salt to M&K for waiting this long to give the backstory of her if we are ever even gonna get it but I digress.) I covered my mouth in shame but to my surprise, most everyone laughed (the theatre wasn’t even close to full so it wasn’t that many people)., so I continued to add my colorful commentary throughout, shouting, “BYE FELICIA!” in the silent moment where she is falling to her “death” frozen and there’s no audio, got a good few laughs outta that. 

Beware Spoilers below!

So after the Adam Trailer and Director’s commentary we finally got into the meat and potatoes, Rwby Volume 6 episode 1: Argus Limited.

 I wasn’t one of the people who avoided spoilers and so I was aware of the scenes shown at NYCC and I gotta say... I have NO IDEA why the kiss ignited the ship wars like it did. You couldn’t even see the kiss! It was from a zoomed out shot and Blake’s body blocked the cheek she kissed. Granted I love both ships (though still holding out for dem Seamonkeys, I know it won’t happen let a boy dream!), so I loved it anyway. Also, the entire theatre SCREAMED when Neptune showed up, if only for a brief moment.

What I CAN say about the Blake and Sun moment is that in that one conversation we had more development for Sun since his iteration into the series! Not only did he lament for how long he’s left his team and recognized how he’s kinda been a shitty leader lately, but he also realized that he would always be there for Blake, but she doesn’t need him right now and she’s where she needs to be. And that was both incredibly mature and wise of him to say. #ProudofmySun I have no doubt they and CFVY will be returning in the Vacuo Arc, if not sooner.

There was also a great conversation prior to this between Blake an Ilia, and a heartfelt teary hug from Ilia wishing Blake didn’t have to go. Honestly, that made me more shook up than Sun’s departure, I felt bad for her. Hopefully, we haven’t seen the last of her though.

I really enjoyed the overall episode’s blending of the serious and comedic. I think they’ve finally achieved that perfect balance they were looking for and I hope it persists, instead of bleeding into morosely overserious or completely out of place comedic.

There was an awkward bees moment where Blake tries to help Yang reach for her bag only for Yang to say she doesn’t have to do that, citing that it will be a bit awkward at first but she is genuinely glad to have her teammate back. I hope this isn’t the end of their drama because there definitely NEEDS to be a long tearful discussion about the repercussions of the fallout of Volume 3.

There is a brief bout atop the train with new Grimm(which I will get back to) before RWBY and JNR decide they need to separate to protect the people from attacking Grimm. Why you ask? Well because Ozpin decides to casually let everyone know, and I point out that even Qrow was surprised, that the Relic attracts Grimm. 

It seems the poster will indeed reflect the emotions of the girl’s this volume as this raises Ire with both Yang and Weiss, Yang asking why would he keep this from them? Before he can respond though, Ruby cuts her off and says it doesn’t matter, to which Yang and Weiss have the biggest “Are you fucking kidding me?” looks. I’ll be honest I didn’t see Blake’s reaction just because of how strong Yang and Weiss’s were, which makes sense given their disillusionment from Raven. Also, Ruby’s scythe surrounding Oscar/Oz on the poster symbolizing her protecting him seems like it will be something that plays out.

Jaune and Ruby share a moment, Jaune making Ruby promise she’ll meet them in Argus before going through with their plan of Jaune amplifying Ren’s aura to mask the entire front of the train while RWBY, Qrow, and Oz/Oscar stay in the back trains. 

Jaune’s semblance mastery is kinda insane already that and he has a shit ton of Aura since Ren was able to do that no problem and Jaune also healed an insignificant character’s severely bruised arm that got pinched between the tunnel and the wall after the tunnel ceased the first bout. Not to mention, we have even more proof of his large Aura capacity as that was at least a good few dozens of people in the train cars. This is going to prove to make some interesting combos later given we saw how fast Weiss could summon in Volume 5 after being affected by it #JauneistooOPPlzNerf

So as to the question I bet you’re all wondering...

How’s the action?

Now I don’t claim to be any animation guru and can’t point out finer details here but the action seemed more well-paced and much cleaner than anything in Volume 5. 

Some Highlights are as follows:

Ruby actually fighting decently and not just a bunch of motion blur scythe swinging.

Ruby saving Weiss with her semblance atop the train when the tunnel forces them to retreat.

Weiss Ice skating/leaping off her glyphs atop the train. Personally, I thought this was one of the best flair decisions combat wise.

Fun Yang and Blake 1v1 moments.

Amazing cinematic 1v1 of Qrow vs what I assume was the Sphinx Grimm all the others were much smaller and what I assume are Baby Manticore Grimm as concept art one was HUGE.

Amazing team RWBY moment (without ship names sadly) where they need to restrict the Sphinx’s movement to help Qrow. Yang puts herself on the opposite side of the team where Qrow is and draws it’s attention while Blake throws her ribbon of Gambol Shroud over the top of the Grimm’s torso. As it falls downward, Yang shotgun blasts Gambol shroud several times, the ribbon rewrapping around the Grimm several times before she jams it into the ground, holding it as Blake pulls on her end, effectively restricting it. Weiss then comes up and glyphs each of the wings of the Grimm freezing and then subsequently shattering them.

The moment culminates with a split screen showing both Ruby’s and Qrow’s faces, before each of them sniper/shotgun momentum themselves forward, each in scythe form. Qrow and then Ruby is shown to spin in a 360 spiral similar to what we’ve seen Ruby do before, executing the Grimm as it releases a final fireball. I thought this was beautiful to look at and a Nice touch illustrating Ruby was clearly trained by Qrow as mentioned in the very first episode of the show.

The fight ends as the train gets derailed (I can’t remember why but the fireball either blocked or derailed the track somehow I was too busy processing the above badass moment). Weiss quickly thinks to soften the blow gravity glyphing everyone atop the train as they crash.

Everyone is fine post-crash but I DID notice that the relic previously attached to Oscar’s hip is now missing. Which I will assume will lead into the next episode where we see Ruby find it in the shot from the trailer, as another point in the trailer shows it on her hip. 

The Episode ends with the strange old woman (Who I keep calling Katara thanks to a tumblr post on here lol) saying that was close. My money is more on her being a silver-eyed warrior than a maiden but only time will tell!

All in all, I loved this first episode, it felt very refreshing and fun to watch and I hope this momentum continues through the rest of the volume!

The night ended with the few people tracking me down after the movie, saying I was hilarious and inviting me out for some food, drinks, and theory-filled good company! Can’t wait to see what comes next!

[raflovestuffs]

That is who you are: Chapter 12

First l Previous

“We're no longer safe here” ~ “We have to fight for their freedom”

Okay guys, here we go, here’s my theory for HTTYD3 end I made 3 years ago... 

Now the trailer came, I’ve seen a LOT OF SIMILARITIES with this fic so that’s why I want to share this chapter with you now. So please Guys, read it even if you don’t read the rest of my story. This chapter is really important to me and I want to know your opinion on it.

This will be my birthday gift to Mr. Dean DeBlois because this man inspires me so much...

I want to thanks my bestfriend because you’ll see his art in this chapter and also because this fiction is dedicated to him because like Toothless for Hiccup, he’s my bestfriend. I also want to thank all the HTTYD fanartists who illustrated this fiction @leffie-draws-fanart, @winxrus and also @raidesart ;) Thank you a lot guys! I also want to thanks all the people who helped me corrected it @wolfie-dragon-rider, @JoyOfBerK and @chiefhiccstrid who always supported me in this fic as well as @poppys-fanworld. A big thank you to my french friend @megtoons who helped me translate it! <3 And above all, a big thank you to my previous translators and to my dear translator @whosthatgal! Thank you so much girl <3

Now, enjoy it.

“Astrid, wake up!” I screamed, shaking her to force her to open her eyes.

She woke up, confused, and rubbed her eyes before the sound of the horns registered.

“Oh no…” she whispered.

She got up quickly and threw herself into my arms. We held each other tightly. I pushed her away gently and caressed her cheek with my thumb. I smiled bitterly to her. She held back a tear.

“We have to do it...”

“No, no! I don’t want us to be apart! Not again…” she cried while holding me really tight.

I rubbed her back to reassure her as best as I could, when my mom came in suddenly.

“Hiccup…” my mom began, but she faltered.

“Astrid, Astrid… Calm down,” I begged her. “Everything is gonna be okay…”

My words didn’t seem to comfort her much, and with regrets, I left her in my mom’s arms. I kissed her on the cheek.

“I love you, Astrid.”

“Me too, Hiccup,” she said sadly.

I addressed a grateful smile to my mother and got out of the house, taking Inferno with me. Toothless was not far behind. I had never seen the village so prepared; every person found their place and knew what they had to do. I ran to Heather’s hut and once there, I found her at Fishlegs’ side.

“Oh Hiccup, finally!” she exclaimed.

“We were waiting for you,” Fishlegs added.

“Sorry, I was with Astrid and—”

“It’s okay,” Heather said while putting her hand on my shoulder, understanding.

Snotlout and the twins joined us not too long after, coming from next door.

“So, how’s the situation?” I asked.

“Eret is leading the ships with his men, there are already a lot of casualties… and Drago’s army is almost at the village’s doors… Gobber and Erik are trying to slow them down as long as they can, but Drago will be here soon.”

“Thank you Fishlegs; we’ll be ready in time.” “Okay, so I’m going back now!”

Heather walked close to him and kissed him passionately— then Fishlegs climbed on Meatlug with clumsiness. He was a bit shook, poor guy.

“Follow me!” Heather ordered.

We moved towards the village square, very closely followed by our respective dragons. Hundred of vikings, men and women, were waiting for us.

“Your army,” she declared with a smirk.

“Heather, I—”

“Come on chief, go on now…”

I was afraid. Afraid of taking the floor, afraid for all these people who were ready to give their lives for Berk and were counting on me, afraid of taking my responsibilities. Then, I thought about Astrid; she would have wanted me to be strong and to take it. So I did it:

“Northern peoples, vikings, men and women, the fight we’re going to lead will be difficult, there will be blood, there will be tears but don’t forget the reason of this fight and remind yourself of Drago Bludvist’s acts… Don’t forget who you fight for and above all, don’t forget what we fight for! We fight for peace! For giving a better place to our children! So fight for peace! Fight for Berk!”

I had grown in strength over my speech and I had yelled my last sentences. I never thought I’d be able to be so confident. The crowd answered me with war cries and swinging of weapons. Heather, Snotlout and the twins started it too, they motivated the troops even more. And they all cried my name… It was a strange feeling.

Once this fuss ended, everyone took their positions, and I found myself at the helm of a whole army with Heather as my right-hand.

“Form ranks and get ready!” I ordered.

I turned and found myself facing Heather who was looking at me with a shifty look.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Seems like you’re enjoying it.”

“Enjoying what?”

“Leading armies, of course!” she exclaimed like it was obvious. “That’s not my thing Heather…”

“Oh come on Hiccup, admit that’s exciting!”

“I don’t see what’s exciting about leading a war, Heather. This is very serious.” She pouted and lowered her head then she turned around and put a hand on my shoulder.

“You don’t look well.”

I answered nothing, on the spot. Of course I didn’t look well! With all this pressure that was on my shoulders, I had a hard time to think straight. Plus, I was very worried about Astrid. I hoped above all that nothing happened to her. So yes, I was totally stressed and I obviously didn’t feel right. I ended shaking my head.

“Hiccup, you know, I can understand why you’re worried, but you have to ignore it during battle, for your men and for Berk’s sake.”

“No, Heather, you can’t understand. Astrid means everything to me, she’s the love of my life, don’t you see? And we’re going to be parents… so no, I can’t ignore it because if I do, I’m forgetting what I’m fighting for, Heather…”

“Excuse me… I shouldn’t have said that… I know Astrid and you are having a really hard time and I—sorry.”

This time, I was the one to put my hands on her shoulders.

“Heather, it’s okay. It’s me, I’m easy to tease these days…”

She smiled.

“Even worse than Astrid…”

Now, we just had to wait.

Valka led me with the other women and the children to the Great Hall. We were walking fast and agitation was at its peak; children were scared and wouldn’t let go of their mothers’ hands. We crossed the village which was outfitting the warriors with weapons, we saw the troops get co-ordinated and the dragons get prepared to fight. How I longed to be with them… We finally reached the Great Hall. Valka pulled me in a remote corner of the hall and asked me to sit down.

“Thanks but I’d rather stand,” I replied abruptly.

I already had a hard time dealing with staying behind—she wouldn’t force me to sit down either. I didn’t belong here with all those poor people. I was supposed to protect us and I couldn’t do it by staying here… I was suddenly reminded of Hiccup’s words:

“Astrid, please, for once in your life, be reasonable… If you won’t do it for me, then do it for the baby.”

And he had put his hands on my belly. I instinctively put mine on it. Hiccup was right, it was unreasonable—but at the same time, staying here to do nothing but wait was eating away at me. I walked between the villagers’ little groups; some women were singing hopeful songs while others were telling old heroic legends to children. I stopped sometimes to listen to the fables too. I was talking with people and trying to reassure them and give them hope. I continued strolling into the Great Hall until I returned to Valka.

“You really have the making of a chief’s wife,” she said.

I smiled at her and came sit next to her to hug her.

“Thank you Valka…” I whispered.

But we were interrupted by the sound of horns. Drago had just penetrated Berk’s compound.

“Toothless, are you okay bud?” I worried.

“What is it?” Heather asked.

“He felt something…”

“DRAGONS!” the troops shouted.

Heather and I raised our heads simultaneously. Armoured dragons were populating the sky. Gobber and Erik came running, followed by their men, yelling that Drago was coming. Heather and I reacted right away by commanding the dragon riders and managing the air attack. Snotlout and the twins did the same. Gobber and Erik took the lead of the land forces. Drago’s men moved by the hundreds towards the center of the village while destroying everything in their path. The fight had just begun.

I’ve never seen a war before and even less participated in one. The concept of battle was all new for me, so when I saw the thirty armoured dragons coming—that I had trained in Göteborg—it took me time before I gave my orders. I examined them for a moment and that’s when I knew something was wrong.

“Wait!” I cried, stopping my men with a hand signal.

“What? What is it again?” Snotlout grumbled.

“Their eyes… Look at their eyes! They’ve been conditioned!” I exclaimed.

“You mean—”

“Yes… They’ve been programmed to kill us…” I whispered.

I addressed all the dragon riders out loud. “Remember what we told you in training? Well… It’s is all the more true now! These dragons are fearsome so be even more vigilant!”

“Charge!” Heather finished.

And we leapt to the attack. We killed dragons. I followed Toothless in each of his movements, fighting against dragons deprived of soul and much stronger than I have imagined. However, I didn’t feel to be actor of the battle, Toothless was the one to fight to protect me. I was just a spectator of all this killing, it was all going so fast… I couldn’t analyse the situation anymore… until I fell.

Toothless and I fell down in the middle of the one-on-one skirmishes that separated our army from Drago’s. I was blown away by the violence I was seeing—I’d never seen men fighting like that before. A warrior didn’t hesitate to stab a sword into his opponent’s back or separate him from one of his limbs. Drago’s men and mine were killing each other in front of me. The smell of blood was everywhere and the warriors’ cries blended into those of their victims; the noise reverberated across the battlefield.

One of my enemies speed up to me, and dismounted me swiftly from my dragon. I could only count on myself to cope. He hit my arm with his arm, the shot was straight and so was the pain.

Thankfully, he had only slightly hit me thanks to my shoulder protection, which had cushioned the blow. I drew my sword in the second that followed, I needed to retaliate quickly before he could gain the upper hand. I struck at his arm and successfully freed myself from his grip. I ran through the fray, not without difficulty. I used my sword to push through the crowd and took a look to the right, to the left, looking for Toothless, but I didn’t see him anywhere. In my frantic sprint through the battlefield—inevitably—I fell. I really blamed my prosthetic leg at times. I started to get trampled when I felt a hand pulling my collar—this is it, this is the end.

“What are you doing here, Hiccup?!”

“Gobber?” I asked, opening my eyes.

He put me on the ground.

“So?” he insisted.

“Yeah… uh… I fell down and—Toothless he… I don’t know where he is…”

“Well then, let’s get some altitude, and we can find him, can’t we?”

I clambered onto Grump behind him, and we flew over Berk to find my dragon. The battle raged on, but from the air we could see that Berk was resisting well. However, the enemy troops weren’t backing down in the slightest—and I still couldn’t see Drago. But where was he hiding for Thor’ sake? I couldn’t have the time to think about this question, Toothless was there, right below us, and he was about to be shot down by Drago’s trappers.

“Right there!” I shouted while pointing the finger at him.

Grump steered us down to him right away. I stopped an arrow from hitting its target and shooting him in the heart. I ran to him to jump on his back and pat him affectionately on the head.

“It’s gonna be okay bud, I’m here… Come on, taking off!” I screamed.

Gobber did the same and we dodged a final barrage of arrows. He addressed me with a nod and went back with Toothless to the other riders. I examined my dragon on the way and didn’t find anything alarming, only a small notch on his left ear and some other scratches. He saved himself but for how long again? If we hadn’t arrived in time, he could have been dead by now… If I couldn’t protect my own dragon, how could I protect all the others from Drago? In all the commotion, I almost forgot the reason why he was fighting this war: he was attempting to cast the dragons from the surface of the Earth! So I noticed the battlefield where the men were blustering was covered by an infinite number of dead dragons’ carcasses. The battle had just begun.

It had been more than five hours since the battle began outside. My patience had its limits, and this situation was really pushing them. I stopped bouncing my leg and stood up and began walking round and round in the big room with my arms crossed.

“Astrid, please, sit down…”

“No, I don’t want to sit! It’s unbearable, I can’t take it anymore not knowing what is going on! I wanna know!” I said, fed up.

“Astrid… Calm down… you said you had cramps at the bottom of your belly, are they gone?”

“No… it’s still hurting… and the baby doesn’t want to stop kicking, it’s really annoying…”

“That’s because it can feel that you’re stressed… One more reason to sit down.”

“No! I don’t feel comfortable when I’m sitting… Ouch…”

I gritted my teeth, I didn’t want to be weak, I couldn’t be.

“Astrid…”

“It’s okay. I’m fine,” I said, catching my breath. “I’m gonna ask the men if they have more information outside.” “Astrid, you already asked them less than a hour ago and they told you they didn’t have any information…” “But maybe now they do?” I said, a little upset. I went in the direction of the middle of the Great Hall but before even walking two steps, I had a sudden wave of nausea due to the cramps getting closer and closer to each other. Adding to this, the kicking didn’t stop. I held my belly with one hand and leaned against a pillar with the other. My head started to spin, and I heard Valka’s voice calling me as she rushed to my side.

“Astrid! What’s wrong?” asked Valka, apparently really worried.

“My… my head hurts… the cramps are getting worse and worse,” I whimpered.

Valka took me by a shoulder and forced me to sit when we got close to a bench. She put her hand on my forehead and wiped it with a handkerchief.

“You are burning up and covered with sweat… maybe you’re—”

She didn’t have the time to finish that I screamed while holding onto her shoulders. It was like the pain was penetrating my stomach. I felt a hot fluid pouring down and wetting my legging.

“Oh my gods!” Valka cried, smiling. “Astrid! The baby is coming!”

I was hit by confusion.

“What? Now? Like right now?” I sobbed.

“I’m gonna bring Gothi!”

“No, no stay with me, Valka! I’m so sorry for earlier… stay!”

She stayed by my side and ordered someone else to bring Gothi.

“You’ll see, everything will be fine ”, she said with a calm voice. Only, I was more afraid than anything. I didn’t understand what was happening to me… I wasn’t usually that emotional. “But it’s too early! I’m not ready—and Hiccup should be here! Oh my gods, I won’t be able to do this without him… Valka, please, go bring Hiccup!” I sobbed.

“Astrid, calm down. I’m gonna go, okay?”

I nodded and Gothi arrived with two other women, healers maybe. Valka left me alone with them and went to find Hiccup.

“I’ll be back in no time! ” she said.

I stood not without difficulty and went to a corner of the hall, safe from any nosy looks. They put me on one of the hall’s tables where they had many layers of sheets.

“And now, breathe!”

“Snotlout!” I screamed.

I couldn’t see him through the flames that were eating the stables. Catapult attacks had set the stables on fire and we were trying to save trapped baby dragons inside who were too young to fly. Everybody got out with babies in their arms except Snotlout, who was still inside. I screamed his name again—no answer.

“Hiccup, we still need to evacuate all these dragons…” reminded Heather. “But we can’t just leave him!”

“Hiccup...”

Just then we saw a shape emerging in the midst of the flames—it was Snotlout, not without burns, but alive. “Snotlout! Oi, oi… oi!” he chanted, punctuating each word with a cough.

“Snotlout! I thought you were…” “Dead? Oh come on Hiccup…” he said dryly.

I was relieved—Snotlout was safe and we could continue our improvised rescue. We were making our way as fast as we could from the stables to the Dragon Academy, when suddenly I saw my mom riding Cloudjumper towards us at full speed.

“Hiccup!” she yelled.

She finally drew up by my side.

“Mom? What are you doing here?”

“Hiccup, you need to come. It’s urgent…” she began.

“But I can’t leave the battle! I’m commanding an army, and…”

“Astrid is giving birth!”

“Uh...what?”

“You’re gonna be a dad!” she smiled.

“What, now? But I…”

“Go, Hiccup!” Heather reassured me. “I’ll take the lead, don’t worry. Go!” I let my friends go under Heather’s command and I joined my mom. We headed in Astrid’s direction, flying once more over the battle that was under us. We finally arrived behind the Great Hall; my mom invited me inside and kept our dragons outside, not without Toothless’ disagreement. Dodging our way through the crowd of elders and children, we made our way to the back corners of the hall where curtains, made out of two sheets, were standing. I stopped before going in.

“Go on, go, she’s waiting for you,” said my mom before pushing me in.

Astrid was lying on a table, legs spread and her back raised; she was in pain. I ran to join her by her side. When she saw me, she let out her tears. I held her tightly against me.

“Hiccup… I was so scared for you… I’m sorry…”

“Shhh… I’m here now,” I whispered while caressing her face.

“Okay Astrid, let's go again,” ordered one of the women who were assisting Gothi. “One, two, three… push!”

Astrid’s face twitched when she did what the healers told her to do, but she shook her head left to right, completely helpless.

“I can’t!” she moaned.

I didn’t know what to do to help her, so I took her hand and I sustained her back to support her.

“Come on babe, you can do it!” I cheered.

So she pushed once again while tightening her hold on my hands, letting out a long painful scream before taking a breath again. “We can see its head!” said Valka.

Astrid turned her head to me with a smile, and I smiled back to her.

“Just a little more Astrid…” I said rubbing her back.

“One more time, push!”

Astrid pushed with all the strength she had, she yelled in pain and soon, her screams were joined by other, smaller cries—those of a baby, our baby.

“It’s a girl, congratulations!” said one of the women.

Gothi cut the last thing that linked our daughter to her mother and showed us a little newborn, dirty and covered in blood. Astrid didn’t even have time to catch her breath before Gothi put the little girl in her arms. Astrid took her carefully and held the child gently against her chest. A big smile drew on her lips, she was filled with joy.

“Hiccup… we made this…” she sighed, happy.

(art by @winxrus)

I caressed her hair and I kissed her cheek, I was the happiest man in the world.

“I’m so proud of you Astrid… you fought till the end.”

“Thank you Hiccup, thank you.”

I was about to answer when a massive sound echoed in the room—it was an explosion.

“I’m gonna see what that was.”

“Hiccup!” yelled Astrid. I got out and saw men trying to reinforce the main door which had just been damaged.

“Hiccup! What are you doing?” my mother exclaimed.

“I need to see what happened outside!”

I went out from the Great Hall and hurried to go before it. When I finally reached it, Heather was there with a few men to protect the Great Hall’s doors from… Drago’s attacks. He was on a huge dragon and was laughing out loud about my men’s fate. I joined them to help and Drago addressed me.

“Eh! Finally, here’s the Dragon Master! I thought you’d never come out of your hole…” he said.

“Drago…”

“Now, let’s finish it!”

He had yelled the last words. He started to shoot at anything that moved but his true target was me. I turned my head to see where Heather was when I heard her screaming:

“Hiccup! Watch out!”

She stood in front of me before I took Drago’s shot. The violence of the impact drove me about ten meters away, I searched to scout the area but I could barely see and then there was nothing.

It was dark, I hated the dark. I was afraid of the dark because I couldn’t see anything and it made me nervous so I lit a candle. I was alone at home. Daddy wasn’t home yet. So I waited for him while drawing. And one hour later, I heard the house’s heavy door opened, I hurried in the direction of the door to see Daddy.

“Daddy!” I yelled.

He took me in his arms and hugged me tightly. I loved when Daddy held me like that.

“I came to say goodbye, Son. Daddy’s leaving for a very long trip, okay?”

I sulked, I didn’t like when he was leaving for a long amounts of time.

“Why are you always leaving for a long time Daddy?”

“Hiccup, you know it’s to find the Dragons’ Nest. I have to go for a long time, that’s how it is. But Gobber will be here.”

“But I want you to stay with me!”

“Son…”

I didn’t want to listen to him anymore, I went back to my room to lock myself in it. I sat down on my bed, brought my legs against me and started to cry. I was sad Daddy left, he never listened to me…

After a while, I heard big footsteps on the stairs, Daddy was climbing. Quickly, I dried my tears with my arm and I put myself under the heavy blankets. Daddy entered with a candle in his hands. He knew I was afraid of the dark. He put it on the bedside table next to me. He leaned next to me and kissed my forehead. I took him in my little arms and held him very tight.

“Good night Daddy.”

“Good night Son.”

I put my head on the pillow and he tucked me in. Then he bounced back and left in the door’s direction but before he got outside, I addressed him one last time before he got away.

“I love you Daddy.”

I heard the door shut.

“Me too Hiccup, me too.”

I felt my eyes about to open but I fell into nothingness again.

Toothless was slowly moving towards me with those terrifying eyes. I begged him to stop but he kept going.

“Stop!”

That’s when my dad came out of nowhere.

“Son!” he cried out.

“Dad! No!” I screamed.

My dad jumped in front of me and took Toothless’ kill shot.

My dad had saved my life, and Heather had exactly done the same thing.

I opened my eyes. Toothless was over me and protecting me with his wings. I looked around me and saw Heather down, a few meters away. I stood up quickly and ran to her. I took her in my arms, she was still breathing but her face was pale and her eyes almost closed.

“Heather! Please, stay with me, Heather!” I shouted.

“Hiccup…” she whispered.

“Yes?” I sobbed.

“Thank you…” she said, closing her eyes.

“No! No, Heather! Don’t leave me! Heather!”

Heather was dead in my arms. No words could define my pain. She was like a sister to me. I cried while holding her her cold, dead body against me, inconsolable.

I was tired of always being protected, my dad, Heather, Gobber, Toothless, Astrid… I couldn’t let anything like that happen again, it was out of the question. I was going to put an end to this, once and for all.

Fishlegs and the other riders came shortly after the incident, he was distraught. Enough people were taking care of Heather now, so I could go. Some people tried to stop me, but I was more determined than ever. I mounted Toothless and took off at full speed. My goal: find Drago. 

Toothless and I looked around us, but Drago was not hard to find. He was nested on the edge of the island with his gigantic dragon. Once I was close enough to him, I asked Toothless to fire his most powerful plasma blast, and it made him fall from his dragon.

Toothless landed only few feet away from him. I climbed down and threw my fire sword on his cutting pike. I didn’t miss my target, I took his stake, got my sword back and threatened him with both, making him recoil. He raised his hands while laughing unrestrained, insanely.

“So? What’s the Dragon Master is gonna do now that he has weapons in his possession?” he sneered.

He could laugh as much as he wanted, but he didn’t scare me anymore. I moved towards him, more intimidating this time.

“You had no right! She didn’t do anything!” I shouted. “She was innocent!” I called out.

The rage tensed my words up.

“You will pay for what you’ve done Drago… For everything you’ve done…”

I rushed over to him and stabbed his stake right in his heart. He instinctively reached down to weapon that had sealed his fate, and staggered back. He fell down from the bank and sank into the ocean.

I had done it in anger, but part of me was still celebrating. I just put an end to the war.

I flew away on my dragon’s back to the Great Hall, where the doors were standing open. I rushed inside to meet Astrid, who was waiting for me in tears. We held each other tightly.

“Hiccup… What’ve you done?” she sobbed.

I put my head on her shoulder, powerless and lost, on the verge of tears.

“I killed Drago…” I confessed with an inaudible voice.

She slightly moved away from me to put her hands on my shoulders and read my face.

“Hiccup…”

“I know, I know… It wasn’t how I wanted it to end! But Astrid, I’m tired of being protected… I’m the one that has to protect you! A chief protects his own…”

She brought me back into her arms to hold me tight against her once again.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked after a while.

“I need to see our daughter first, then I’ll tell you.”

She took my hand and I followed her to the other side of the hall, my mother was waiting for us, our baby in her arms. She gave the baby to Astrid, who then gave her to me. I held her carefully, rocking her gently.

“Hello, you…” I said, gently whispering.

My nerves disappeared and a tear rolled down my cheek, I was so happy. “My little dragon…” I smiled. “I already love you so much if you only knew… Daddy will always be with you… always…” I said, leaving a small kiss on the top of her head.

“Heather. Her name is Heather,” Astrid inquired, bending over me while putting her head on my shoulder by holding me against her.

“Heather…” I smiled, moved.

…

“Are you sure about it?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure Astrid. I will not go back on my decision.”

“All right, then.”

“Let’s go.”

I grasped her waist and we moved outside, hand in hand, to the village center. Astrid let me take the place on the small platform before the other villagers gathered around me. I waited for silence and I began.

“People of Berk, today is a day of mourning for all of us here. We’ve won the war against Drago, but the sadness and pain he brought us will be with us for a long time. A chief protects his own, and today, I failed to protect you. I’ve been told often that I was a peaceful man, but I killed a man today. I was supposed to bring our worlds together, but look at this mess! Hundreds dragons and men died today! This kind of bloodshed will never happen again, because I can still make one decision to protect us all.”

I paused.

“I declare dragons exiled.” Disagreements erupted immediately among the villagers, but I kept going, raising my voice.

“There have always been men like Drago and there always will be. If he’s not the one to exterminate the dragons, somebody else will! As long as dragons live with us, they won’t be safe and neither will we. That’s why I’m asking for this exile, for the common good. I know it’s hard for you—it’s hard for me too—but it’s for the best, believe-me.”

A deafening silence started to fall when, suddenly, they began to make a sign I easily recognized. It was my father’s sign, a fist raised to the top. Soon, the whole village made the Viking’ salute. They just approved my decision.

Farewells were extremely difficult to make. Every vikings and their dragons had met on the middle of the village to say goodbye one last time. It was very emotional to see the love we had for them expressed like that. I wasn’t exiling them for nothing, and my people knew it. If we wanted to save them from extinction, that was the right thing to do.

I arrived at Toothless’ side. Astrid and Stormfly were close to him, their arms full. I caressed the head of my dragon while looking straight in the eye, I smiled faintly at him. I presented him the auto-tail I made for him and Astrid had remade. He started to step back, I held him back.

“Hey… Toothless… I know you don’t like what is going on. But I’m doing this for your sake and you know it,” I sniffed.

He approached and rubbed up against me, then he licked my head. I slightly laughed and hugged him once again.

“Thanks Bud.”

I installed his new tail and made sure it was working before standing in front of him. “Here you go. It’ll serve you more than me…” I said, joking.

Astrid came behind me and moved towards Toothless, wrapping her arms around him.

“Goodbye Toothless, thank you for everything you’ve done for us…” she murmured.

She relaxed her grip and put her hand on my shoulder before stepping behind me again. I took Toothless in my arms one last time.

“I will never forget you, Bud. You’re my best friend… I’ll see you in Valhalla…”

He seemed to begrudge and made a sad noise. I finally released him and stepped back to find Astrid’s embrace. She grabbed my waist while holding me tight against her, supporting me as best she could.

Every dragon gathered around Toothless, who gave me a last look before flying away. All the others followed him and few wingbeats later, all the vikings were already at the island’s borders, calling to their dragons one last time while waving goodbye. Two tears rolled down my cheeks as I watched the dragons flying away forever.

...

Four years later…

“Daddy! Tell me more about dragons!” Heather exclaimed.

“Heather, it’s getting late…”

“Please!” insisted the brown-haired and blue-eyed girl.

Astrid came inside the room and sat down on the bed, next to her daughter.

“Come on Hiccup, if it makes her happy!” Astrid added.

I sighed. I couldn’t refuse anything to the two greatest women of my life.

“Fine, what do you want to know?”

“Tell me how you became friend with Toothle!”

I laughed heartily.

“Ah sweet heart, it’s Toothless…”

“Oops… Sorry,” she apologized while smiling.

I came closer to Astrid and her and started my tale.

“There were dragons when I was a boy…”

[isagrimorie]

[initial reactions] Justice League

TLDR version: I liked it. I liked it a lot. It had its problems-- pointed look at the camera-- but considering all it had to contend with? I really liked the finished product.

I can actually see myself watching a three hour director's cut of this.

Going through point by point of the movie, Good points and some nitpicks and some ugly, but bringing it all together with the Happy.

This is going to be a surprise but for the few people who know me, I actually wasn't impressed with Avengers. I thought the visuals were so-so, and it brought home what I thought when I first watched Serenity. Joss Whedon is not a good movie director. He can do a passable job on TV but he is no Jonathan Nolan nor is he a JJ Abrams. He doesn't have the visual eye for it, and he tends to go back to his old stand-bys.

(I mentioned it in my initial reactions of Thor: Ragnarok, Joss Whedon wishes he was Taika Waititi but he's not even close.)

Zach Snyder on the other hand? Despite my issues with his other movies, no one can deny that Snyder paints a fantastic visual picture. It is his strongest suit. In this movie he delivered in spades.

This is a really, really great getting the band together movie and the thing that made this work a lot: the characters. They sparked off each other, and you can tell they were having a lot of fun making this movie.

We got to see the Amazons be awesome!

We got to see a lot more of Hippolyta doing action stuff and it was awesome and wonderful! For anyone who wished they saw Queen Hippolyta fight more, we see that! A lot and it's so awesome!

And then she sends out a flare and it was such a heartwarming moment because she knows only one person in the outside world will understand and her whispering as in prayer: 'Hear me, Diana.'

It broke my heart a little because Diana hasn't seen her mother and amazons in a while and then she had to hear from Steppenwolf that a lot of Amazons died. Also, this gives credence to my theory that in BvS, when she decided to help, she was actually on her way to find a way back to Themyscira.

Okay, so the elephant in the room is the treatment of Diana, Amazons, and Lois Lane terrible. Wellllll.... it's not as bad as reported but after watching Wonder Woman, I cringed in a lot of scenes.

The controversial new revealing costumes where there. I don't know why they needed to, and when I saw them standing next to Amazons who are in regular armor costumes, they stand out.

Then the unnecessary camera angles, especially when Diana is standing in front of the camera. It's like a study of male gaze directing vs someone who consciously works against it. I cringed everytime there was butt shot and an upskirt shot. It wasn't a lot but there were enough that coming from watching Wonder Woman, it was bad.

I didn't really need to see that gag about Barry falling on top of Diana and accidentally grabbing her boobs. I did not need to see that. It had Whedon's fingerprints all over it and just NO. NO NO NO NO.

Then there's Arthur Curry loudly telling Diana she was beautiful etc., and then revealing he's actually sitting on the Lasso. They didn't need that and the only important thing we got there that once upon a time the Amazons and Atlanteans were at war. You can practically see Whedon's work there.

Going back to the happy: Danny Elfman to score the movie was the best move ever, and that's one positive cookie points for Whedon. Because the iconic Batman score is there and strains of the iconic Superman march too! Honestly, there is a reason why those were iconic. Star Wars kept to its musical score with other composers just expanded on John Williams work.

Although, I wish there was a Justice League score too. I was waiting for it, actually.

WB really should've let Snyder direct a solo Batman movie because I can practically feel how much he loves Batman everytime he was on screen. This is not a knock by the way, because I would like to watch Snyder's translating Batman graphic novel on the big screen like he did with Watchmen.

I love Diana's relationship with Victor and I love that she keeps wanting to reach and support him. I love how she was mentoring him.

I love how this is about Victor accepting his gifts (as Diana called it) and being the right person to stop the Mother Boxes. He upgraded machinery when needed and found information they needed in time. I still wish for a Cyborg movie, though.

Arthur Curry was advertised but I don't have a lot to say yet I feel that Aquaman will answer a lot of questions but Mera was awesome and he was able to hold off Steppenwolf which is a feat in itself.

Barry Allen was funny and so very young with his own issues, he was like a kid in a candy store when he arrived in the bat cave and his crush on Diana was cute and I don't begrudge him that (the moment with Arthur though, that I wanted to cut out).

Bruce is working over time to get a team started out, and clearly doing this to work off his guilt, Diana calls him on it. And dammit, I'm weak but I ship Bruce and Diana. I can't help it! It's Justice League and JL animated has primed me for shipping Diana and Bruce together, okay?

They never got together in animated but I love that they're playing this as a frisson of tension between them, and that it's mostly Bruce who is kind of pining/crushing over her, in his Bruce way.

But I am also not about Bruce being an asshole to Diana, throwing Steve to her face to 'push her' or whatever. I'm glad that Barry was all: if she murders you, we'll hide the body for her.

I did love the conversation between Bruce and Diana after, and it cleared up the century of not doing anything thing BvS tacked on. I love that Diana revealed that she might not have been visible but she's been fighting for all that time just not leading. 'Because leaders get people killed.'

There's a story there which I hope we can get in her next solo movie, also: Diana casually strolling into Bruce's heavily secured building and in BvS one-upping him in a Spy vs Spy game--- Agent Diana Prince in her next movie Y/Y??????

The CGI. I really try very hard not to notice the CGI but I can't help notice the CGI. All Sci-fi/Superhero movies have this problem, particularly when it comes to the CGI villain. I see no reason why they couldn't used make-up and light CGI, because even the actor had a hard time bringing his villain to life. There's a reason why I liked Hela as a villain, because that was Cate Blanchett acting and not a CGI version of Hela. Even Zod and the other Kryptonians with him were easier because they were not CGI villain.

Someone should put a moratorium on CGI villains.

Unfortunately, there's even a more egregious use of CGI and that's the mustache gate. I do not get why they didn't go with bearded Clark instead of.. waves hand that.

I like Clark in this! I've always thought that Man of Steel 2 should've gone first than BvS, watching BvS then this just kind of solidified it. There were moments in MoS that I loved and thought would continue but Snyder just doubled down on the other part I disliked with BvS but JL felt like it was continuing on with the the tone of the parts I loved in MoS.

I was honestly surprised how they went about the resurrection. There's no fortress of solitude so there was no regeneration matrix but there is the Kryptonian ship and the Mother Box.

Clark's resurrection seem to give a second wind and a happiness that was missing in BvS but had more in common with in the final moments of MoS. I wish though, that Lois had more to do.

And how is it Lois and Diana have never shared a scene together??? This is the second time she mentioned her devotion to the truth, I mean, Diana is all about the truth. Truth is her province. It's where she lives! LOIS AND DIANA NEEDS TO BE FRIENDS DAMMIT.

I liked that Diana was the voice of reason, and even Arthur came around to her way of thinking, in a way that feels like he has experience about people coming back wrong.

Full disclosure: I was afraid they were going to make Diana that wet blanket friend who breaks every body's fun but she had a point which Arthur came around to. They've seen their fair share of things like these going pear shaped.

Fortunately, after the mandatory fighting against the newly awakened Clark things turned out for the better.

Seriously though, Diana taking Clark's headbutt and giving one of her own. AMAZING. He only won that round because he had the advantage of getting more force behind his headbutt via flying. Headbutts are an Amazonian Hello.

Not a fan of Diana being Worf'd just to show how super extra powerful he is, I'm just consoling myself that she either has most of her powers locked away (like in the comic, removing the vambraces would unlock her full potential as a demigod).

I do like that even though Clark had the brute strength, Diana had experience on her side, she fought Steppenwolf like a warrior. Seasoned and skillful.

Also: 'On my lead.' Diana led the team on the ground! I AM HAPPY ABOUT THAT.

I love the final fight there were so many iconic moments and its stitched together really well, one of the biggest issues I had with BvS was how Snyder painted a beautiful picture but it's a moment divorced from the flow of the story. Here it came together pretty well. The iconic moments were iconic without taking away from the story.

I like that they took note of what people had issues with and worked with that feedback, bringing in more color and lightness to the movie while still maintaining the gravity of the situation.

Do you know what else I love? That the final blow was Diana's with an assist from Clark. Because she lives up to her name -- Godkiller.

other moments I liked:

The Superman and Flash race, I love it. It is universal law, a Super and a Flash must always race.

Diana lasso-ing the bank robbers and then greeting a crowd of little girls.

Diana handling the artefact with revenance.

Victor openly working with his dad in the Star Labs

Barry pushing the sword to Diana.

Diana with the red robe over her armor. I love it.

Speaking off, Hippolyta's Helmet!

Luthor finally acting like Luthor and not like an evil Mark Zuckerberg. Also, he freaked out about Clark, what about Diana, who is an actual demigod?

Speaking of demigods, the guy throwing lighting bolts young Zeus or Ares? And when is Diana going to handle lightning? She's the last survivor of the Pantheon, she must inherit it too, right?

WAS THAT ATHENA OR ARTEMIS??? IN ANY CASE I AM HAPPY TO SEE A GODDESS.

[platoapproved]

okay you know what, you know what, the day has come, i woke up about 10 seconds ago and i guess i dreamt about a past life where i worked in a sodium factory because i am feeling salty and it’s time for me to talk about all the stuff i hated about wonder woman. if you’re not feeling that, please don’t click below

i get how badly people want canon bi representation but this movie was so not it. this movie wasn’t CLOSE to it.  diana was not shown having any sort of relationship with any kind of emotional depth much less equality with any other woman on themyscira. they all saw her as like, a beloved little niece, basically.  she barely interacted with anyone apart from her mother and aunt, for more than a line or two.

diana had no woman friends the whole movie

i’ve definitely seen (and not read, you better believe i scrolled on by with a scoff) people talking about the diversity of amazons on themyscira but like. giving diana a black nanny who goes running after her to show us what a mischievous scamp she is as a kid? that’s not progressive. having one of the only other black women be an unnamed warrior she fights against, whose only traits are that she’s the Silent Strong Unfeminine Bruiser Tank Lady? and we know that diana has become a true warrior when she can best The Butch One? super... just super DUPER not progressive.

having etta candy be this frumpy, fussy, ineffective suffragette whose only real function is to be exasperated by steve but also love him as a boss? and by extension make non-themysciran women look like silly side characters in the history of the world? ugh.

i saw a different post talking about how badass it was that etta noticed the spies first or something blah blah like. honestly. stop trying so hard. please stop trying to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse y’all. she was supposed to be the Funny Loyal Fat Side Character who gets a few chuckles out of the audience but has no depth whatsoever.

the entire film erases the efforts of women before and after wwi, both around combat, in government, socially, everything. like every time i think about the fact that diana doesn’t speak to another woman for 95% of the last half of the movie, and these board room dudes act like they’ve never heard of a woman ever DOING anything in their lives, i get hives and want to reread the section of the well of loneliness about women ambulance drivers in wwi. and also to have a shower.

women have ALWAYS been instrumental in their own liberation.

stop making jokes about victorian/edwardian dress being restrictive as if it’s the height of feminism. the history of women and their clothing and how it was liberating and repressive is so much more complex than a stupid joke about her tearing a dress.

like, as if there weren’t plenty of women by wwi who were dressing in “men’s” clothing, and changing the fashions as they saw fit

literally everything about dr. poison like, it’s such an UGLY portrait of so many things

making a women scientist seem Evil and unnatural

associating her disability with her desire to hurt people

making it seem like disabled women hate non-disabled women for being Pretty and Desirable, don’t act like that scene with Steve was meant to be anything other than “see, she’s really just pathetic and jealous because no man has ever wanted to kiss her, look at her”

she was nothing more than a pawn in the end. someone who was easy to manipulate because she was An Ugly Woman

stop saying the movie subverted the born sexy yesterday trope. stop it. every single one of you knows it was 100% that, and nothing but that.  diana talking with naive confidence about how she has read ye olde themysciran porn doesn’t undo that. in fact it only contributes to it because it’s setting her up as someone who knows about sex in ~theory but not ~practice

them giving the Racist Stereotype Side Characters one token line each that humanizes them does not make them fully fleshed out characters. stop talking about Drunk Loud Scottish dude as great representation of PTSD. stop applauding the line about wanting to be an actor but being the wrong color in a movie that is so. so. so white.

one line vaguely referencing white people’s horrific genocide against native americans, one that never comes back and has no repercussions on the story, is just not good enough. also, not gonna mention slavery or anything? not even a bit? ok.

also stop saying the movie subverted the male gaze, you guys saw diana’s outfit. i saw so much of gal gadot’s thighs. and i’m gay, my dudes, i was into it. i loved it. but it’s not like this movie didn’t objectify women. you know that it did. stop trying to make it not what it is.

also, stop saying the scene with steve was only ~the female gaze. i have less ground to stand on for this one because not an atom of my body has ever or will ever find anything about chris pine desirable but that scene was played in a way that would be appealing to certain men

ohhhh it’s a naive beautiful woman gazing at his penis and she’s ~never seen one before, and he just lets her look, like you know there are creep-ass dudes who were into that, and it was ultimately just one scene and he was fully modestly clothed the whole rest of the movie.

looovvveee is the only remedy against waaaaaarrrrrr someone fucking kill me.

i mean i’m a sap but “the answer was love all along” isn’t really a conclusion that flies for me in a movie dealing with a nonfictional war that happened for complicated economic political and social reasons involving nationalism and capitalist greed and all kind of shit, lots of actual people actually died, its’ not like OH NO WHY DIDN’T ONE OF THEM REMEMBER TO LOVE????

david thewlisface ares? stupid.  like using him in that flashback? not a good call.

those glasses steve got diana were so fucking LAUGHABLY not time period accurate like he just got those from warby parker a week ago it’s supposed to be 1918 or whenever the fuck at least try a goddamn little bit

diana’s costume should have been more colorful and the texture of her armor was weird and looked bad

i don’t know a whole lot about wonder woman but it’s 10000% rather go back and rewatch that two-parter from justice league where diana becomes Gal Pals with that princess who is about to marry vandal savage and has to rescue her, that was better in almost every conceivable way than this film

“maid of honor” season 2 look it up just sayin it’s on netflix

i’m really glad a lot of you found a lot of things to love and be happy about in this movie but honestly it’s exhausting seeing people on tumblr contorting themselves to talk about how it’s A Revolution, Never has there been Anything Like This About a Woman when yes, there has, and done better

love the movie if you want! i enjoyed it a lot! i saw it twice

but stop acting like part of the process of loving it is to say that it is diverse, or progressive, or any of this shit that it’s so. not. 

this article is great go read it. i don’t agree with ALL the points necessarily but damn. good and brutal.

please, like i’m begging you please. just go watch xena. shhhh. shhhh i know. the foley is cheesy the production values are really low on the first few seasons and yes it’s not like xena never fucks up on race stuff because hoooo boy. but like. xena is 7 seasons of a woman warrior kicking ass in a vaguely ancient greco-roman world, and it has 10000% more interaction BETWEEN women, and women who are campy villains not just because of disabilities, and there’s so much homoeroticism and heart and badass flipping and it’s just. it’s so good.

it will heal your heart. it will make you realize you deserve much much much much more than the crumbs that wonder woman gave you. go watch xena instead.

[tyrion4pm]

This "Catspaw" theory is wrong (almost certainly)

To be clear I'm talking about my own theory here, not bad mouthing someone elses. Basically I saw some dots that COULD line up, but after looking around a bit I hadn't seen it before and in the very off chance it turns out to be true wanted to stake my claim on it. Sorry about it being a bit long winded or if it's already out there. It's a different take on the "Catspaw assassin". My theory is he wasn't a random hired killer. He wasn't hired by anyone. It had nothing to do with Brans fall, the weapon wasn't given to him, and not only wasn't Robert's dagger, but wasn't even a "dagger" (originally) So there's already a lot to unpack here before I say I it was Howland Reed, and that's why he's been (seemingly) absent in the story. He's been in it. Just very briefly before dying on Brans floor. So the first obvious problem is why didn't Ned or Catelyn recognize him. This is a broken tormented husk of Howland Reed who's been drinking himself to death for probably over a decade at this point. There was a reference to him being described by his daughter as "having been brave, strong, and smart in his youth". She's describing him like this in the past tense. Other than that his description is pretty much "small like all Crannogmen". The catspaw assassin is described as a small, dirty man in filthy brown clothing that smells of horses. Being small isn't much to go on obviously, but think of the difference in descriptions between when Robert Baratheon rebelled as a handsome young warrior, and what he had become by the time he died. He looked like if a giant bag of hairy laundry could get the booze sweats. He would have been unrecognizable to anyone who hadn't seen him since the end of the war, and that was after living the good life. Howland is said to have not left the neck since the war. Robert became king, Eddard became Warden of the North, and Howland went home to rule the swamp everyone has to troop through to go kill each other in places with dry ground. Although to be clear, I'm not saying it has anything to do with resentment of his position, but the burden of knowledge he's been carrying all these years. Only Ned Stark and Howland Reed survived the fight at the tower of joy. And they both then learned the entire bloody atrocity filled civil war that upended society as they knew it, was based on a lie. Even the men they had killed at the tower were protecting Neds sister, not keeping her captive. Ned swore to keep his sisters secret, so Howland had to keep it also. But I haven't gotten to the bad part yet.  Jojen. "In his childhood Jojen nearly died of greywater fever. While he was near death, he was visited by a three-eyed crow that gave him the gift of greensight causing him to experience prophetic dreams known as greendreams." A lot of this theory is based on the darker take on the three eyed crow that a few people have mentioned before. 3eC is not Brynden Rivers anymore than the ironmen became Starks when they took over winterfell. When faceless men disguise themselves with a face they've taken they experience the deads emotions and memories and when Wargs stay in the mind of an animal too long they etc, you get the idea. (This part I actually do think is accurate) Brynden Rivers didn't become the three-eyed crow. The three-eyed crow warged into and took over Brynden Rivers. Rivers was already thought to be a powerful sorcerer and taking him over probably expanded the crows power. I'll try and hurry this up. Howland had watched Jojen grow up with the 3eyed crows "gifts" and was probably as aware of anything about the future that Jojen is, including when he'll have served his purpose and will die. Howlands past present and future are already a lot of weight to carry, and now he know it's time to send his children off to probably die so a trickster forest demon can move onto its next more powerful host, who the crow will groom until his powers are ready, then invade like a parasite. That host is the child of his friend Ned Stark. That's what he was being "merciful" by preventing. He may have sent his children, he may have believed it was the right thing to do, but he's been struggling and conflicted about everything he knows, and at some point the weight of it all caused his to snap. As for the "dagger", the idea is at some point Howland found his way to the 3eyed crows cave (or the children had) and found "Dark sister". It was built smaller and more slender than a typical sword, so the handle may have been about the right size, maybe a little on the large side but usable for a dagger. The silver he was carrying might have been to pay off the smith who was skilled enough to convert the Valyrian steel blade down to size. But when it came time to pay, something set and already spiraling Howland off, and there may be a carved up smith somewhere out there. Crannogmen use "guerilla tactics"  and he wasn't going to be battling his way through a crowd. He was going to be quickly eliminating one target, whatever happened to him from there didn't matter. But he couldn't blend in walking around with a full length sword.

Why was it important to use that blade? Valyrian steel is good for monster killing. He may not have known if the crow was already in the kid, or what kind of magic things could be protecting the crows next vessel. Turns out a dire wolf was, which again was just awful luck for Howland. Howland was a great fighter in his prime, but not only was he long past that, but this was something he really didn't want to do. As hard as it was already going to be he runs into Catelyn. The boys mother and the wife of his closest friend during the war. But it's kill him or let him be taken over by a demon, so he's dead anyway and this way prevents the crow gaining more power and doing it within the Stark family. But still running into the kids mother is going to throw you off your game no matter what. He may have even spent the week around the castle seeing the life her and Ned had made with their family trying to work up the nerve to follow through, with either letting the crows plan happen, or putting an end to it, as they walked past him for days never so much as making eye contact with him. Unable to recognize him with what the years of drinking and stress had done to him. There's the problem with ownership of the blade already being established, but there's a lot of weird confusion about that. It's a Valyrian steel dagger. Anytime someone see's a Valyrian steel sword, which there are only like a couple hundred or so of in the known world, people freak out like the audience in old footage of a Beatles concert. They name them and pass them down for generations. But apparently that's just swords because the reactions to being asked about the dagger seems to be calling it "plain" which by the nature of what it is, it really can't be. But also most of the people asked never actually see it. The only person who has a clear answer about the dagger is Little finger, and of course he's lying. I think he just saw an opportunity to start a fire and jumped at it. He knew Catelyn was champing at the bit to put the assassination attempt on the Lannisters, and just gave her the answer he knew she was dying to hear. Putting himself in the story lets him be able to speak about the dagger with intimate familiarity so there's no chance it's a misidentification and also doesn't cause the kind of suspicion that just going "It's a Lannister knife, they did it!" would. Even though that's exactly what he's doing.    

Varys see's it and says he doesn't know anything about it. Weapons are an important resource. Valyrian steel is incredibly rare and valuable and this one supposedly changed hands through a bet. Interactions like weapons and things of value being up for contention really should catch his attention. I don't think he's holding information back, I think this isn't the blade people think it is and he's really never seen it. When he sees Little finger make up a story about it, he knows he's lying but doesn't get involved and lets things play out.   When Jamie points out the problem with Little fingers story all he actually confirms is Tyrion wouldn't bet against him. He has some vague idea about Robert having some dagger, but he never see's the blade he's being asked about. He's got sort of a memory, from a drunk party few years ago of something that kinda sounds like what they mean maybe, and everyone takes that as "Ok so now we know Robert actually had it." He's not confirming anything. He's answering like he's under the impression the blade is already known to have come from them and is scanning his memory to give as best an answer as he can, and a book  later (I think that's right) Tywin says "Robert had left a hundred daggers in his armory, but that the only knife the king ever used was a hunting knife he received in his youth from Lord Arryn". This is to Tyrion and the Starks are out of position to do anything about it by that time so he has no reason to lie.

The Lannister brothers decide Joffery hired the assassin, which makes no sense. In the early stories we knew Joffery was bad, but as this point we know he was never patient, calculating or subtle. He was not going to wait a week for an outside peasant assassin to commit a "mercy killing". A Joffery plot would be more like having Clegane kick down the door and Joffery runs in and sets the bed on fire. As the guards rush in Joffery is swinging from the chandelier cackling like the wicked witch screaming "Hey look at that crippled kids I murdered!" And all this is if he hadn't spoiled his plan by telling everyone he was going to do it over and over again at dinner.     Howlands wife Jyana has been running his affairs in his name for years while he's been in a downward spiral and continued to after his death, which she doesn't actually know happened.     I can see why GRRM is taking so long to finish the new books. This was supposed to be about 2 paragraphs long. So I think I got everything. That's not Roberts knife, Joffery wasn't behind it and the 3 eyed crow is evil are all things I actually do think but other people have already talked about them with a lot more clarity. The assassin being Howland Reed and the dagger being Dark sister are possible and no more crazy than a lot of very popular theories, but I doubt it. It's more like a "What if..." idea than an actual theory.  

[lady-bluebird-luv]

Chapter 94 First Reactions

The images in this post are from Chapter 94, “The Boy Inside the Walls”. The images in here are actually of this translation, but I’ve covered my bases. The information is reliable. We have a lot to cover, so let’s get cracking.

The chapter opens with the Marleyian warriors returning from the front. According to Gabi, they’ve returned from their hometown. Is this the same hometown that Reiner and Bertholdt have spoken so fondly of? Looks like it.

The town is named Rebellio. As in “Rebel?” Well, well, well.

The chapter goes on to explain that Reiner no longer risks getting his powers taken away.

Reiner actually seems to be doing quite well for himself. He’s the Vice Commander, whatever that entails, and he’s clearly a senior member of the warriors. What failure did Reiner take responsibility for? Probably the failure to capture the coordinate. Whether or not Reiner deserves responsibility for that failure is debatable. He didn’t act alone - although, to be fair, it’s not as if Marley can punish Bertholdt, who’s dead, and Annie, who’s out of reach. In any case, Reiner has made up for his failure since then, probably with actions like shielding Zeke on the field of battle.

The chapter cuts to Falco, who wonders exactly how loyal Reiner is. He recalls the conversation the two of them had at the end of the previous chapter, when Reiner told him to save Gabi. The fact that Reiner choose to speak to Falco, saying dangerous things, makes Falco wonder if Reiner isn’t completely loyal. Falco himself also isn’t completely sold on the cause, and the fact that Reiner would choose to speak to him makes him wonder if maybe Reiner knows.

Interesting. Falco isn’t exactly erupting into rebellion, but that sentiment sounds awfully like he’s questioning the Marleyian government and their mission. Zeke is up to something - although I’m not sure what, and if it benefits the Eldians - and he doesn’t want the government to know. Now Falco (maybe). I can’t see Galliard turning traitor, I don’t know enough about Pieck to say for sure, and Colt is too close to Zeke for me to think he would, either (whether Colt gets roped into Zeke’s own plans is another story).

More importantly, is Reiner thinking the same thing Falco is? I think so. Reiner won’t rebel against Marley. He’s been too loyal time and time again for that to be probable. However, he spent time on the island and got to know the “devils” on a personal level. My guess is that he no longer agrees with Marley’s policy towards the Walldians.

The warriors return to the Eldian district. There are a really sweet couple of panels that show the warriors being welcomed, including Pieck and a man that presumably is a family member - a father, or grandfather?

Zeke greets his grandmother and grandfather. They’re glad to see him returned safely, and they tell him they’re happy that he completed his mission. This is how Zeke responds:

Zeke strikes me as a bit of a wild card. I’m not sure of his agenda, but he definitely has his own goals. His own mission, maybe. What it is, I don’t know.

Gabi meets her parents, who tell her they’re proud she could save the lives of Marley’s soldiers while she was away at war. They tell her that she’s going to be the greatest warrior. As in, ever. I find it sad that members of a group that their country loathes so much would be so willing to protect said nation. The Eldians within the walls are locked away, branded with armbands and set aside for “privileges” that lead them to early graves. It seems to me like the Eldians within Marley should criticize their own country instead of fighting the Walldians and whatever wars Marley becomes involved in. Then again, the Eldians in Marley see the Walldians as demons, not kin.

I’m interested to see what happens to the Eldians when the titan technology becomes obsolete. Without titans, they can still serve as foot soldiers, but their main purpose no longer exists. What will the Marleyian government do with them?

There are some Marleyian soldiers waiting for treatment outside a hospital. There’s a theory that one of them might be Eren on a mission for the Walldians. At this point it’s mostly speculative, but I don’t put anything past Isayama at this point.

Gabi and Reiner have dinner with their family. Gabi brags about her adventures on the front. Reiner doesn’t say anything while her family congratulates her. He maintains a stormy expression. When Gabi’s Aunt Karina (Reiner’s mom) asks Reiner if he thinks Gabi will become a warrior, he says that he’s sure she will inherit the Armored Titan.

If Reiner really thinks that, he’s not confident in Falco’s abilities to become his successor. Or maybe he thinks Gabi is just better. If Reiner wants Falco to Inherit the Armored Titan badly enough, maybe he’ll take matters into his own hands.

This is both sad and frustrating. Gabi’s aunt says that if the Walldians are eliminated, the Eldians will be happy. honestly, that’s far from the truth. Again, what happens when the Marleyian government decides there’s no use for the Eldians anymore?

What makes these Eldians “good” and the Island Dwellers “evil”? That’s one side’s perception of another. Gabi might believe that it’s true, but does that give her any right to kill the Walldians? Is that justice? Is that doing the right thing? She might think so, but something tells me Eren and co. disagree. In fact, as far as they’re concerned, she’s probably one of the people in the wrong. Or is the Marleyian government in the wrong for spreading their propaganda and brainwashing their soldiers? I think you could take every character in this godforsaken story and say that they’re somehow “in the wrong”, but whether or not they actually are is just a matter of perspective. Ultimately, everyone in SnK has done some horrible things to someone else. Everybody is somehow “evil”�� from somebody else’s perspective. It’s one of the reasons I love this story so much.

I hope the characters realize that they’re all at least partially “evil” and try to move past it, but that’s not realistic. Maybe someone will try to rise above the petty fighting. At this point, my money is on Zeke, if only because his plans seem to be the most impartial.

Reiner doesn’t seem to pleased about this whole exchange. He’s definitely not jumping in to agree with Gabi. I would say the Walldians aren’t devils in his eyes.

Fear is powerful. Force enough of it down someone’s throat, and they’ll do just about anything. Fear doesn’t even have to center around something very big to be effective. A fear of spiders can seem just as crippling as a fear of the devil. If the Marleyian government encourages enough fear of the Walldians, it doesn’t matter how silly the conflict is.

I like getting a look at the regular Eldians in Marley. These aren’t the restorationists, or even really the warriors. This is a family living in a cruel world, finding some joy around the dinner table and having a conversation.

Finally, the conversation turns to Reiner. Gabi says that it must be hard to talk about the Walldian devils when Reiner spent time living with them. Reiner ends up discussing some of the “devils” he saw, including Sasha.

Reiner acts like he discounts his old teammates. Sasha’s love of food is her gimmick, but that’s not the only thing she has. Jean doesn’t only care about himself. Connie isn’t just an idiot. Marco, in the end, begged for his life - he didn’t only care about other people. Eren might have started out only thinking of revenge, but he’s not just some angsty, loud little kid. Mikasa won’t follow him blindly. If she thinks he’s being stupid, she’ll let him know.

The fact that Reiner’s descriptions are so out of touch show two things. First, he knows them personally, and he’s creating a slightly ridiculous pretense. Second, it demonstrates how silly the Marleyian persecution of the Walldians is. They’re not clean-cut, purely evil devils, and they have to grasp at straws and skewed interpretations to defend their opinion. The way Reiner words his argument actually makes it seem like he includes Annie, Bert, and himself with the devils.

Reiner actually slips up a bit and calls the group “diverse”. Gabi corrects him by asking what that means - aren’t all the Walldians exactly the same, pure evil? Reiner quickly assures her that they are, but he isn’t fooling us.

There are a few things I want to address here. First, it’s hard for the Walldians to try to right wrongs when they don’t know what they did wrong in the first place. Granted, they’ve reached the basement, so they have some backstory, but for a long time they were completely ignorant of the world they lived in. Of course, the Eldians in Marley don’t know that. If they did, it might be harder for them to hate the Walldians. Nobody knows the full story, and so they create suffering for everyone involved. Again, it brings up the question of who’s really in the wrong. Is it the Reiss family, for keeping the Walldian population ignorant? Once again, that’s a matter of opinion.

Additionally, I don’t think the world gives a flying fuck about whether or not the Eldians are good. That might be what the Eldians believe, but it isn’t true. The world probably has their own opinions about the Eldians, but there’s no proof that those opinions mean anything. Besides, the idea that the whole world would come to a consensus that the Eldians are good is hard to believe, especially when Marley uses them as weapons. I doubt that the Mid-East alliance thinks the monsters they fight on the battlefield are good. This is just another example of humans trying to convince themselves that they’re moral, just people, when in reality they aren’t.  

It seems to me that time and time again, we see governments ruining their people for their own benefit. Marley instills fear in their population for soldiers and to quell Eldian rebellion. The Reiss monarchs keep their people complacent at the cost of valuable information.

The chapter continues with Reiner’s backstory.

Reiner’s mother expresses a wish to be Marleyian, and Reiner says that this served as his motivation for wanting to become a warrior.

We see a couple panels of Reiner’s training, where we see him struggle to keep up with the other warriors in training. He does ultimately pass, however, and is selected as a candidate for a titan.

A lot of the major characters in the story are trying to move towards freedom. Eren and Co. want to be free of the walls. Reiner, Gabi, and the other warriors want their people’s name to be wiped clean. However, their searches leads them into conflict with each other. The Walldians and the Eldians clash. In trying to claim their own freedom, they threaten each other’s. This comes up a lot in the real world, too. Look at every competition ever: In one person wining, another has to loose. It’s a sad truth of life.

A young Zeke mentions that they will soon inherit their titans. However, of the seven cadets, only six will be chosen. Reiner is confident until Galliard reminds him that he’s the weakest of the warriors. What is he good at? Annie is already the best at hand-to-hand combat. Betholdt has Reiner beat when it comes to markmanship. Marcel is the strongest. Pieck is smarter than Reiner.

We learn that Reiner’s best scores come from a test on which he wrote about his loyalty to Marley. This is another reason why I find betrayal improbable. Reiner has always been so deeply set in his loyalty. Between that and his wish to be Marleyian, I find it hard to believe that he’ll turn against the homeland. And then there’s this:

Woah angel, take it down a few notches. To be fair, this is a flashback from years ago, but Reiner is loyal to the point of paranoia. He’s scared, and maybe looking for a way to distract everyone from his inadequacies.

Galliard punches Reiner, and Marcel has to hold his little brother back. Galliard yells some more and tells Reiner that he’ll have to wait alone in Marley for thirteen years. He implies that Reiner won’t get a titan, so he’ll have to wait until one of the warriors expires before he can take their place.

Galliard was hardass even before his brother died. The Jaws titan is loyal but he’s also a bit harsh. To be fair, if my first name was Porco, I’d be a bit pissed too.

The warriors walk away. Bertholdt stays behind to offer Reiner a hands up. Annie also stays behind. Reiner laments that Galliard is probably right. Bert, always the optimist, says that Reiner’s loyalty shouldn’t be underestimated.

Bertholdt seems rueful that they only have thirteen years. He asks Reiner if he’ll be able to handle all his aspirations in such a short amount of time. Reiner is confident that in thirteen years, the warriors will be heroes that saved the world from the Walldians.

The irony is that Marley seems like a bigger threat to the world than the Walldians. The Walldians aren’t starting wars with other nations. Until recently, the vast majority of them were willing to stay within their walls, and their military was ineffective against the titans. Marley, on the other hand, is an industrialized nation with machine guns and child soldiers that wreck havoc on the battlefield.

The chapter ends with a young Eren, siting by the river and wishing something will happen. Armin runs up to him. This is interesting, too. There are a lot of Reiner/Eren parallels in this chapter.

All in all, I’m pleased with this chapter. It isn’t action-packed, but there’s a lot of information squished into relatively little space. I’m happy to get some of Reiner’s backstory, and maybe a hint at the RBA beginnings. I still have plenty of questions I want answered though (Where’s Levi? And Hange?), and I want to know if some of the rumors are true (Jean in charge of the survey corps, Connie growing his hair out), but overall, I’m sated. Nobody is dead, which is a blessing.

[differentkindapiratemovies-blog]

Narrative Theory Essay

Discussing the perceived oversaturation of narrative archetypes in modern media with reference to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory.

“As the old saying goes, there’s nothing new under the sun. For fans of movies and TV, that means that every story that can be told already has been. But sometimes, the movies that seem to be retelling a well-known story TOO closely are singled out, accused of being a ripoff, copycat, or unoriginal. There's no more famous (or successful) example than James Cameron’s Avatar: a story of a human being welcomed into a native tribe, who betrays their trust, but eventually saves the day by fighting on the good side in the end. As soon as the movie hit theaters, people dismissed the billion-dollar blockbuster as a ripoff of Fern Gully, or even Pocahontas before it. The truth is... it’s telling the same story told by dozens, even hundreds of famous films. But that’s not a reason to attack it, or any other re-skinned movie myth.”

It’s common to have the notion after coming out of a movie theatre that the experience was strikingly similar to the previous time you went. There is a common thread line throughout all of movie and storytelling history. Since the dawn of man, the human race has used narratives and stories to communicate ideas and emotions with each other - usually either trying to capture a part of history or with the purpose of fictional entertainment value. However, primarily I believe narratives are there for communication, being carefully crafted by storytellers of all different generations. Cave men used to draw on the walls of their caves and their fire would illuminate the images, causing them to flicker back and forth to create the earliest animation and stories recorded. Some of the most prominent fictional stories ever created, including religious texts such as the Bible, are stories we haven’t stopped recreating in two thousand years. I refuse to believe that it is the only formula that works despite being undoubtedly effective. Some might think of it as a stale structure.

Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, first theorised in Hero Of A Thousand Faces, and Tzvetan Todorov’s structure of narrative are commonly combined to create a story that seems to resonate with the majority of an audience and seemingly never ceases to fail. Movies such as The Matrix and Star Wars use both these theories in order to make up a successful story. (Although debatably the whole original trilogy acts as the entire journey seeing as Luke Skywalker, the main character, is at his lowest in the finale of the second movie resulting in a pitfall ending). George Lucas, the creator and director of the first Star Wars film, considered Joseph Campbell to be his friend and mentor.

“My last mentor was Joe... who asked a lot of the interesting questions and exposed me to a lot of things that made me very interested, a lot more in the cosmic questions and the mystery… and I've been interested in those all my life but I hadn’t focused it the way I have until I had got to be good friends with Joe.”

George goes on to say he took the mythological and religious ideas behind narratives and simplified them for a modern audience. Perhaps it would be beneficial to drop religion altogether when writing stories for the modern and less religious generation.

The Dragon Quest video game series also follows these rules with the main character literally referred to as “The Hero”. The journey of a character rising up, facing hardships, being at their lowest then being born again for their worlds to be restored to equilibrium is something I think people either feel like they can relate to or, probably closer to the truth, is fantasised about and idealised. Everyone would like to be hero in the story, overcoming their problems and saving the world. Joseph Campbell says this in his book Hero With A Thousand Faces.

“The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realisation. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realisation transcending all experiences of form - all symbolisations, all divinities: a realisation of the ineluctable void.”

There’s something gripping about watching this structure play out, and it is engaging for an audience - but they’ve seen it thousands and thousands of times before. As much as I appreciate movies that put a creative spin on the traditional structure of narrative, I really respect and love movies that go against the curve. Obviously this happens quite frequently but probably not at your local Odeon cinema - mainstream media is often streamlined for the purpose of easy consumption. For example, I enjoy films from the Marvel universe, but all too often they all play out in the same format. You could argue that companies have monopolised certain narrative structures and have a tendency to recycle them.

However, films like Richard Linklater’s 1991 day-in-the-life-of debut Slacker go against traditional “hero journeys” and plot point one/plot point two narratives, instead working like a series of loosely connected vignettes; in each scene we spend time with a different character and closely follow events occurring in their lives in real time. There’s no arcs, no beginning, middle or end. No rebirth, just a movie about strange characters hanging out in Austin, Texas, on a sunny day. It’s not an art film or particularly experimental. It’s just that, well, nothing happens. It’s an accurate depiction of reality. It's what real life actually is. I don’t wake up every day and go through a hero’s journey. We may develop as people and these situations can occur, but nine out of ten times life just isn’t like that. We wake up and things stay the same and in life, at moments when the credits are supposed to roll after we’ve achieved something, after we’ve overcome something, it just kind of keeps going. Life moves on and our “arcs” and problems to overcome reset, or new ones appear like a constantly stream of wildly uneventful sequels. New problems come up and sometimes they’re never solved and sometimes people don’t change. In my short film “Campussies!” I was really interested in trying to capture a kind of nothing day and interactions with strange people - not really making anything particularly interesting or high tension. The short was also influenced by Linklaters’ other seminal film Dazed and Confused, however that follows a slightly more traditional take on story telling, depicting a character develop throughout the movie. Jim Jarmusch is another director who often uses abrupt endings and whole scenes that literally stop moving forward. A lot of people say there’s almost an amateurish fine line however I believe this to be completely intentional.

In my narrative-based website I recreated the story of Homer’s Odyssey, a very classic tale that has been recreated and re-skinned many times over many years. Through the website, I make you, the person, interact with the story and go on the hero’s journey by yourself. There is only one correct path however the “reincarnation” implies you are constantly reborn until you get it right. Little is told about the situation in my narrative purposely, so that you can project what you would like onto it. It’s about a person, you, traveling from somewhere dangerous, perhaps enemy territory of some kind, and getting back home safely, set in a nonspecific period of time. However the roads are dangerous - filled with sword wielding enemies and no consistent place to be safe from the elements.

There’s other forms of narratives we’re told in between the lines in media such as what we’re told about certain people; these are pervasive narratives. On television we are exposed to poverty porn, depicting that all low income people are a certain way - intended to give the viewer a sense of superiority. In eighties movies we’re told that punks are ruffians and troublemakers. There’s an endless list of mainstream movies from that period showcasing punks as “bad guys”, such as The Terminator (a movie chock full of visual cues) and The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2). Of course there were movies made with more of a punk rock sensibility, such as Return Of The Living Dead, and exploitation movies of the time in which punks were portrayed as the “good guys”. This was most likely due to the media’s take on punks during the movement in the late seventies. The papers themselves named these angry kids “punks” and they wore it as a badge of honour in response to the criticism - that they were a bunch of violent thugs who held switchblades, beat you up and stole your lunch money. Their anti-establishment ways often had them the basis for dystopian movies. In actuality, it wasn’t really like that at all and personally I would feel safer if I saw a gang of whatever the modern day equivalent of punks are. Although I would agree with the anti-establishment sensibilities, most aren’t true anarchists. They’re not gonna mug you.

Again, another example of pervasive narrative we are consistently exposed to is the connotation between women and make up. Media tells us that it is the norm and it’s heavily tied to what is considered the standard of beauty for women. However, anyone of any gender can choose whether or not to wear make up. In my photography piece “Three Studies of a Woman in the Sun” I photographed my subject both wearing make up and without, one subverting the expectations of a photographed woman in modern media and one showing how she often feels comfortable. I often wonder why women choose to wear make up and why it improves their confidence. Do they truly believe that it makes them feel more in touch with their identity, or perhaps we live in a misinformed society in which it is more acceptable for one gender to present themselves a certain way, when in reality it doesn’t really matter and there’s not much of a difference. John Berger had this to say about the representation of women and their identity in the media.

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

My three portraits as part of my DCMP Photography brief are of my friend and artist Katie. Shot on a Canon, I wanted to capture her identity through three images. The middle image you see in the three panels on my blog is her in a natural environment and utterly neutral. That one is relatively light in tone due to the summers day behind her, however she's looking off and something implies it’s more melancholy than the photo lets on. Perhaps the uplifting summer isn’t enough to hold her inner more negative emotions, or that maybe the summer is no longer a good thing in light of the summer getting hotter and hotter each year. Maybe this isn’t a summer of celebration, but one of the end of the world. The bottom one is a real captured moment of her closing her eyes perhaps to imply her shyness in an industrial area, somewhere I often find comfort due to high containers and is generally aesthetically pleasing to me almost because of how not pleasing it is. The top one is how Katie would usually be and dress in her own environment, the lighting highlighting how she expresses herself through her own image. I like how the darkness is almost bleeding in around the edges of the photograph. I experimented with lighting a lot with this one and took several different photos that were the contender for the third portrait. Here, now she is herself, she seems to project more confidence looking directly into the camera like this time the camera is invading HER space as opposed to the other ones where she’s almost a part of the scenery. Now she’s out of the sun, she is the one who is shining. Notice how she also seems to fill up the frame the more comfortable she gets.

Unseen stories hide in advertising and movie posters. In these places you will find signs that speak to us sub-consciously. The movie posters for most horror movies will always use the colour red. Why? Our brain tells us when we see red that there’s danger and that the film will most likely contain plenty of blood. We understand what genre the movie is without even being told so due to semiotics. This can be seen on the movie poster for Shaun of the Dead where the doors our main character is standing behind are red, with white text to pop and in other iterations red text. You see he is surrounded by zombies, hoarded by them, most likely foreshadowing to what the movie is going entail. This is the same in food advertisements. If you watch a television ad about food the colours and aesthetics used often will tell you about the product. Most of the time, fruits and vegetables will be wet, to make them seem fresh and often whoever is starring in the ad or the dialect of the voiceover is who that product is for. If there is a voiceover speaking in a cockney accent then it’s marketed toward the working class, but it’s all just an illusion using stereotypes to manipulate the sub-conscious and the masses into relating to it. It does this all without ever actually telling us.

I wrote a short science fiction script called “The Great Hydration War” and shot a scene from it. In this scene, I did my best to make every shot tell us something. I played around a lot with power dynamic and it’s constantly changing using nothing but visual clues. When our main character thinks they are in control, the camera angle is low, making them seem large and powerful, but when the villain gets the upper hand you’ll see that they have the power. When they are both pointing guns at each other you’ll see that they’re both at the same level and share the power of the scene because it could go either way. Jazoor, the main character from the script who is from outer space, sees a figure after returning to Earth for the first time in years. Unsure of who it is, we see them in a wide shot, impersonal and unidentified. But when they stand up and Jazoor realises that it’s her twin from back when she grew up on the now ancient Earth. “It’s you!” Jazoor exclaims. With what she knows she gains the power to deal with the situation. She’s got this. However she’s flooded with doubt; “You sure?” Says the Dryborg, an evil futurist cyborg whose one weakness is water. The camera swoops up, leaving the character feeling vulnerable with no idea what kind of situation this is now. Then she brings up her gun, bringing the power back to her. I did this throughout the entire scene and tried my best to make sure I was expressing the characters feelings and positions in the scene through the camera angles even though obviously it’s quite a non-sensical script and a mildly ridiculous scene. I thought about the lighting, as the scene was based on an alternate reality Earth in the past where the sun is blue so I made sure all of the scenery were glowing in this blue light which I managed to do in post-production. The costumes were designed by myself and my friend who played the characters. I wanted something science fiction-esque, but obviously I had no budget and not a lot of time, so I decided to try to take the comedic route and rely on it having more charm than actually trying to make the audience believe what was going on. The scene is a pivotal part of the larger structure and story that I had written, however the storyboards for the scene were in fact drawn before I wrote it.

Even when I wrote the script I realised I sub-consciously loosely followed the hero’s journey, most likely because I take so much inspiration from movies. Even when writing, I instinctually had thoughts like “yes, now this kind of scene has to happen”. It was very condensed but it’s still there. We begin the story introducing our hero Jazoor, she continues to go on a journey across the universe before falling and being at her lowest in the third act before facing off her demon she’s been fearing the whole film. She overcomes the Dryborg but not in the way she probably thought. However, I did forget to film the character limping throughout the scene.

Everything is a journey, our lives are one. They’re not always structured how we want them to be but they’re a journey. Every day when we wake up we begin a new micro journey, a new chapter in a much bigger story that is how we view our lives. Stories are almost telling us how to live and that what we’re doing is okay. In my opinion modern mainstream cinema is stale, and I find it hard to believe that in just over a hundred years of film (and a few thousand for storytelling as a visual medium), storytelling has already dried up of all its originality and that we just keep repeating ourselves. Perhaps it's time we took a look at how we structure and create our characters and stories and try to make something more relevant and authentic. Stories reinforce our sub conscious beliefs behind our morals, between good and bad. People don’t want to be seen and thought of as the bad guy within society, hence why most stories are in fact about what we perceive as the “good guy”, the hero. I always find something to latch on to when enjoying a film, something to reassure me that I have my humanity or reassure me when I feel like I don’t have it - and that it’s okay if I don’t.

I don’t like to talk about the internet or politics in context of any work because I feel like those are things that have tainted some elements of different art forms. The only issue with making movies people can relate to is that also means you don’t want to offend anyone, which almost seems like an impossibility in recent years. Too much is focused on these subjects but perhaps that’s why people like movies. Social and political commentary have made many movies hits throughout all of time, but I believe a lot of the time story and characters are being sacrificed out of fear of offending or not being politically correct. It doesn’t seem to matter which stance you take within media, there will always be people that disagree. The internet has given everyone a loud voice and usually it's used for criticism. In terms of relating to a movie, I don’t think it should be a case of representation of sexual orientation or race, it should be about values and character - although I suppose it is human nature to want to relate to something or something who appears like us. Whatever the case, we need to relate to character as a person, and become engaged in the narrative. I think that is is why Campbells and Tzvetan’s theories and myths are continued to be used to this day, because they work.

I would personally love to see more change and experimentation in mainstream and modern cinema, and not to have to constantly and actively seek it out. Even recent movie posters are directly copying each other with the use of colour and framing, which directly relates to the signs we use to communicate information with an image. It would be refreshing to really open up the limitations and possibly of narratives - or in some cases close them off completely.

Bibliography

The Matrix. (1999). [video] Directed by L. Wachowski and L. Wachowski. United States: Warner Bros.

Star Wars. (1977). [video] Directed by G. Lucas. United States: 20th Century Fox.

Shaun of the Dead. (2004). [DVD] Directed by E. Wright. United Kingdom: Universal Pictures.

Slacker. (1991). [DVD] Directed by R. Linklater. United States: Orion Classics.

Dazed and Confused. (1993). [DVD] Directed by R. Linklater. United States: Gramercy Pictures.

The Terminator. (1984). [DVD] Directed by J. Cameron. United States: Orion Pictures.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. (2019). [DVD] Directed by G. Miller. Australia: Warner Bros.

The Return of the Living Dead. (1985). [DVD] Directed by D. O'Bannon. United States: Orion Pictures.

Campbell, J., 1949. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. 1st ed. United States: Pantheon Books.

Square Enix. 1986. Dragon Quest. Video Game. Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft.

Berger, J., 1972. Ways Of Seeing. 1st ed. United Kingdom. Penguin.

George Lucas. (1999). “George Lucas in Conversation With Bill Moyers”. Bill Moyers. George Lucas Tells Bill Moyers About the Mentors in His Career.

Dyce, A.D. 2016. How Every Blockbuster Movie Tells The Same Story. [Online]. [8 July 2019]. Available from: https://screenrant.com/how-all-movies-same-secret-truth/

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Books I read in 2018

* = Re-read Check out past years: 2012, 2013 (skipped), 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. Follow me on Goodreads to get these reviews as they happen. 1) You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier 2) Binti by Nnedi Okorafor 3) Veins of the Earth by Patrick Stewart 4) McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh  The ending is clear almost from the first page, but you keep reading anyway*. Great stuff. *It's almost as if there is MORE to enjoying a story than being surprised by the ending???? 5) They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy  Ah yes, the violent and bloody underbelly of....the marathon dance craze??? Marathons that last upward of a MONTH??? Incredulity, if nothing else, keeps you reading right to the end. 6) What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing by Peter Ginna I've no interest in becoming an editor, but as an author I figured there'd be some useful stuff in here. From that perspective I'll say this - writers, even ones who only want to self-publish, would do well to breeze through this to get a better understanding of a process they've been through or want to go through, but also a better understanding of the editors themselves. 7) Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander 8) The High King by Lloyd Alexander 9) The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander 10) The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories by Denis Johnson 11) Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane Beautiful stuff, and a great reminder of all sorts of precious sensations to be found out in the world or in your childhood memories. 12) Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches by John Hodgeman I like John Hodgeman in general, but honestly haven't dug any of his books of false facts or the stand-up routines centered around such things. That stuff just feels like someone scatting nonsense (Blood tornado! Deranged millionaire! DOG STORM! Yeah!) to the tune of a particular vibe (the doodles in the margins of your high school notebooks). But it's clear the guy can be a consummate storyteller and so I happily picked up this book of his ostensibly true tales. It's charming, funny, and sincere. Huzzah! I look forward to whatever comes next from Hodge Man. 13) The World of Late Antiquity 150-750 by Peter R.L. Brown  14) The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch 15) The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Scammell (Translator) 16) The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander  17) Blindsight by Peter Watts 18) Killing Gravity by Corey J. White  19) How to Thrive in the Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow's World Today by John Thackara 20) Echopraxia by Peter Watts 21) The Colonel by Peter Watts 22) The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God! by Joe Eszterhas It’s a big book of quotable notables intermixed with a guy who really wants you to know he slept with Sharon Stone. There’s some chuckles to be had, especially if you’re irritated by Robert McKee, but let’s just say I’m glad I got this half-off from a used book store. 23) The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks   Writers of fiction would do well to read this. 24) Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It  by Kate Harding *25) The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut 26) Red Clocks by Leni Zumas A reminder that dystopian tales don’t have to be cranked to eleven, and are often much more effective that way. 27) Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG by Goodman Games I don’t normally include RPG books in this list, but at about 450 pages I reckon this one earns a spot. I had a lot of thoughts about it, which you can read here. 28) Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria by Lin Carter   Look man, either you want to read a Conan rip-off where a convenient flying ship pulls our hero out of trouble at Just. The. Right. Time. or you don't. Nothing I say here will change that. I dipped into this soon after discovering the infamous Appendix N reading list. 29) Dear Life by Alice Munro 30) A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History's Most Orthodox Empire by Anthony Kaldellis 31) Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future by Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann 32) Writing the Pilot: Creating the Series by William Rabkin 33) Ways of Seeing by John Berger If you've already done some university level art studies you may find most of this old hat.But if you haven't? It's a great primer, and I strongly recommend it. Heck, I wish I'd had it put in front of me in high school. 34) Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado 35) A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah 36) Polyamorous Love Song by Jacob Wren This book came out a few years ago. Just a few days ago I found it on the dollar shelf at a great used book and record shop in Montreal (Cheap Thrills). I never bother with stuff from the dollar shelf because it's usually about as good as the price suggests. But. The title & cover grabbed my eye. Then I stood and read the entire first chapter, not because I needed that much to erode any skepticism but because it gripped me. Your mileage may - nay, will - vary, of course. For me, the contents of this book were exactly what I needed. It might be what you need too, especially if you are someone who creates any kind of art and is struggling with it in the face of an increasingly rabid world. 37) Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith 38) Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed by Jacob Wren 39) Rich and Poor by Jacob Wren 40) Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh   41) Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh 42) Room to Dream by David Lynch,  Kristine McKenna A great book whose format of a conversation between biography and autobiography really works! Both halves strangle the "lone genius" bullshit almost right out of the gate and, especially in Lynch's chapters, there's some kind of amusing punchline at the end of every other paragraph. An excellent read that is enjoyable even if you haven't seen every minute of his creative output. 43) Warrior of World's End by Lin Carter  This book contains a sentient metal bird called a "Bazonga" and a chapter called "Flight of the Bazonga", to give you an idea. It's fun and dumb and yes. 44) Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler 45) Twelve Tomorrows by Wade Roush (Editor) *46) A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh   47) The Dying Earth by Jack Vance I was going to write my own review but then I saw BIll's here and it's just so much better than what I was going to say, as well as echoing much of my own thinking. 48) Dune by Frank Herbert It is Dune. 49) Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison This book does not in fact contain the famous twist from the film. That changes a lot, an awful lot. Frankly it evokes, read now, climate change at least as much if not more than overpopulation. I'm not sure if I'd recommend reading it, frankly, though not for any lack of talent on Harry Harrison's part. 50) Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell  51) Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film by Patton Oswalt 52) The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason by Chapo Trap House *53) Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut   Though it gifts us a few of his best quotes, such as “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”, I feel like Mother Night is only necessary reading for completionists. It often feels like a short story filled out to novel length, and lacks any of the fantastic or meta-textual elements of his other works. 54) Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana: A Visual History by Kyle Newman,  Jon Peterson, Michael Witwer, Sam Witwer STATS Non-Fiction: 20 Fiction: 34 Poetry Collections:0 Comic Trades: 0 Wrote Myself: 0