#not sure yet. a lot of these plot details I’ll iron out as I play the dlc again

[kyngsnake]

I understand the appeal of the Miraak redemption arc, and I did at one time write a 40k fic about that exact premise, but a “they make each other worse” dynamic is calling to me this time around

[wangxiandecoded]

Episode 9

Previous Episode | Next Episode

(Spoilers for the whole show ahead!)

Lan Zhan remembers what Wei Ying had mentioned about the puppets the first night at Cloud Recesses showing he remembers quite a lot about him, he just doesn’t let on.

NHS is a big mood in this scene, an absolutely useless gay depending on two warrior gays to save his life. But he’s hindering their flawless team work so Lan Zhan uses the silencing spell on him.

This dialogue is so uncalled for and delivered in a way that makes you think Wei Ying just wants to see Lan Zhan have an outburst, kick back and admire how hot that is.

Wei Ying’s “you can go ahead and blame me for everything that is wrong with this world but my man has done nothing wrong in his life ever” smile.

You didn’t have to expose him like that but thank you, Jiang Cheng.

Wei Ying’s “sorry I accidentally did a hetero thing, let us please not remember this for the sake of my clean conscience” smile.

Yet Another Plot Device To Show Off Wangxian’s Chemistry

The Dire Owl subplot is one of the dreamiest scenes on the show and a fight sequence that proves Wangxian own the patent for words like soulmates, symmetry, equilibrium, balance, yin and yang, mirrors and their derivatives.

Here’s something that’s bothered me : Wei Ying calls for Lan Zhan twice and he doesn’t answer him the first time even though he looks searchingly in his direction. It is only when they knock into each other the second time that he explains the fog is a hallucination caused by the Dire Owl. (But of course Lan Zhan doesn’t need to answer him, the red string of fate will inevitably help them find the other.) 

Clear-headed as he is, did he for a second believe that the Dire Owl was making him hallucinate Wei Ying’s voice the first time, and is that why he ignored him? Because Lan Zhan’s mind could be the spotless sea of tranquillity it is, but Wei Ying has now become the shrillest thought that breaks through and demands his attention. He doesn’t respond though, so he must have been sure Wei Ying is safe.

For Lan Zhan, Wei Ying will do even the impossible. He’ll try his best to seal off all his senses and mute his head that’s forever brimming with thoughts. 

Ok, pause. I cried when I watched this for the first time and let me tell you why. The implications of this fight scene are astounding. We all know Wangxian are soulmates who can confront anything together but did we know that they could feel and find their way to each other even when their senses are completely shut? I mean, how attuned to someone’s existence do you have to be to achieve that? They are hyper focusing on nothing but the Dire Owl and yet moving perfectly with eyes closed in an outrageously impressive synchrony. They can feel the other’s presence and have utmost trust in each other to shield their direction. They move as if they’ve spent infinite lifetimes by the other’s side mastering this skill; they leap, spin and swerve like they think with the same mind. The way they fit together is to die for, nearly impossible and the legendary stuff from stories that we all wish we could have with someone in this existence. If I was whatever that stood in Wangxian’s way, I’d be terrified and call it a day. They are not just soulmates, they are The Original Formidable Soulmates™. 

Wangxian Are Here To Kick Queerbaiters In The Ass

This fantastic display of battle prowess by the two heroes fighting back-to-back is one of the many things that convinced me The Untamed is not like the other stories out there. Simply because every stop of their journey is too romantic and the others don’t come close enough. It is an injustice to compare or group their relationship with the ‘dude bro, no homo’ chemistry that bromances usually sell. Lan Zhan and Wei Ying are two people who are so passionately devoted to and absolutely belong with each other, they are soulmates not just in the minds of the audience or because the creators were afraid to make them something more, but soulmates by their own admission. There are other factors that strengthen their already supergay case like the absence of a female love interest in their lives and their flirty interactions being genuinely adorable as heck, as opposed to just isolated instances of b(romance). And it really, really, helps our case that the novel is canonically gay but it is also remarkable that a show that’s teeming with gay subtext can exist at all and go on to become one that is widely embraced by everyone, casual watchers and shippers alike. 

Lan Zhan and Wei Ying's chemistry gives all the Western superheroes a run for their money. We no longer have to wonder what it looks like when two queer heroes who are in love get to kick ass together. See, this is what happens when you have the guts to invest in a gay romance. This show looked censorship in the eye and said gay rights anyway. (I’m going to digress from this show for a sec and just plainly weep for all the queer pairings on mainstream media that we shipped but couldn’t see the light of day because of the homophobic people behind them. It is great that the truth still lives in our hearts and the millions of words on ao3. But life feels a lot sweeter to know with certainty that our heroes are in love this time and celebrate the fact that the people who made this show knew and honoured that very well, that they honoured the audience. In my eyes, CQL is the unparalleled forefather of gay romance from now on. Because reading these epic queer stories is one thing but watching Wangxian’s story unfold along with the entire world means believing in the power of gay love. And seeing our favorite heroes in action makes the characters we look up to so much more real.)

Lan Zhan comes flying like the Prince Charming he is to break the shackles of heteronormativity trying to kill his soulmate! Hell yeah, king! Save us from that straight trope that’s been choking us since time immemorial.

We did not just see Wei Ying pretend to be dead so he can outsmart the bird and simultaneously get Lan Zhan to save him just because he likes that sort of thing. Nope, totally didn’t happen. 

Oh, hello Ah Yuan! Details like this prove the show is well worth multiple rewatches.

There is nothing more uniquely Wangxian than the million thoughts they share with each other through mere glances, the frequency of which steadily increases. Who knew you could speak with zero articulation? Not having a soulmate sure sucks for the rest of us mortals. I doubt the audience can truly grasp the depth of their communication but I’m pretty sure it goes like this most of the time. 

Wei Ying teasing Lan Zhan that the Goddess Statue tried to kill him because she had a crush on him is all kinds of hilarious. Lan Zhan looks somewhere in between “Wei Ying, we’re talking about the fate of the universe, stop being gay for 2 seconds please,” and "STFU, just because I can find my way to you blind doesn't mean I will hesitate to Silence you again."

Wei Ying Is Crumbling All Of Lan Zhan’s Walls

Most people maintain their distance from Hanguang-Jun, the Noblest Of Them All, he whose robes command respect and inspire fear. There is hence something very sweetly domestic about Wei Ying latching on to his silk tassel while subtext-whining, "Where are you going Lan Zhan, I refuse to live without you", and "Ugh Lan Zhan, you're so lost without me, ok fine, I'll help you.” It’s like he granted himself the lifetime entitlement of being Lan Zhan’s nuisance-companion the night they met, and thank goodness for that because Lan Zhan wasn’t going to let anyone into his life. Wei Ying is the exception who managed to charm his way into his heart and dissolve his barriers.

Notice Wei Ying even turns down free alcohol for Lan Zhan. And the sheer undisguised panic on his face that Lan Zhan is going to leave him alone after all the bonding activities he made sure they went through is endearing comedy at its peak. 

We see Lan Zhan no longer believes resolutely in His Ways and lets Wei Ying persuade him to believe there is a better one. This is a great 𝙙𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙡𝙤𝙥𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩 for them because they’re communicating.

Lan Zhan doesn’t fight him anymore, period. 

The Yin Iron starts acting up and Wei Ying is immediately there for Lan Zhan, gently grounding him. He can feel the horror and pain Lan Zhan has seen in the vision because of course he can. But does Lan Zhan see how much Wei Ying loves him and hurts for him? He has to. In moments like this, Wei Ying’s presence shows how wrong Lan Zhan is in wanting to do everything alone. We all need a friend in life. And it was destiny that led them to each other because their lives would’ve evidently been a lot lonelier without the other in it. 

Episode 9 shows Lan Zhan warming up to Wei Ying some more : he has stopped being antagonistic altogether, lets Wei Ying pull him around, freely accepts his help, shares many glances with him and is ready to blast anything that lays a finger on Wei Ying sky high. (Of course we see that Wei Ying exaggerates needing his help most of the time. He plays the “I’m a frail man desperately in need of Hanguang-Jun’s protection” card because swooning into the arms of his lover is one of his favorite things. And not even Lan Zhan calls him out for it. They’re just so whipped for each other.)

[galacticlamps]

Tagged by @the--highlanders​ ! Thanks!

How many works do you have on AO3?

13

What’s your total AO3 word count?

76,200

(oh what a nice even number - I should try to mess that up as soon as possible, shouldn’t I?)

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Aw man is this intentionally worded to be really hard to answer? I get that it says ‘written’ and not ‘posted’ but then what constitutes a ‘fandom?’ I definitely wrote fics for stuff I was interested in long before I even knew the word ‘fic’ - I did it throughout my childhood, and then in high school, and while I didn’t do it as much in college, it still happened from time to time. So a lot of the books/movies/tv shows/plays/musicals I wrote things for aren’t really fandoms, and frankly, I had to check my old folder just now to even remember some of them existed. I’ll just list the ones that I know for sure had fandoms, since that’s more fun (and embarrassing), right?

Obviously Doctor Who, classic and modern, Torchwood, Sherlock Holmes (ironically more of these seem to be about the books, but yes, I will admit, some for that tv show too), Les Mis, a couple different Marvel comics & movies, Good Omens, hell, I even found a Night Vale fic in there just now.

And I know there are other older things not even in that folder, some of which never made it to a computer at all, so if I had to ballpark a number I’d probably say around 25ish but really, who knows?

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Across the Gap

On the Spot

Expectations

Shards of Memories & Fragments of Glass

Itemized

(this was fun, I’d never noticed Ao3 even had a stats page until now lol)

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I try to! Sometimes I take a long time to do so but for the most part, I usually get around to it. The rare exception would be if I first saw the comment when I was super busy/distracted and then felt like way too much time passed before I noticed it again, that it might be awkward if I said something at that point.

I do genuinely enjoy hearing what people think, but I’m also weirdly terrified of making anyone feel like they have to reply to my comments. I know that’s probably a little strange, but it’s actually a large part of why I made this Ao3 account in the first place - my original one, from high school, is followed by some long-time friends of mine who aren’t interested in this fandom, some of whom are involved in art & writing professionally. The thought of anyone like that reading something I wrote out of friendliness or even just curiosity and potentially having to pretend they liked it for the same reasons stressed me tf out, so I like having this virtually anonymous one because I can relax knowing that anyone who reads or interacts with something I wrote has probably done so only because they wanted to, rather than feeling obligated, and there’s no pressure on them to be nice to me about it if anything I write or post annoys them - so I really hope nobody who does just know me as an anonymous blog has ever worried about offending me by not replying to something, trust me, I’m perfectly happy with it!

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

I don’t think I’ve really written any angsty endings? I guess the answer would have to be Reckless just because it involves the characters arguing about sad/weighty things and there isn’t really any solution to those issues - but even then I think I ended it with a kind of acceptance that stops it from really qualifying as angst? I also set it in the the same universe as other fics, so maybe that doesn’t even count as an ending? Am I that bad at ending things on angst? Lol

Do you write crossovers? If so what’s the craziest one you’ve written?

Obviously none of the fics I’ve posted are crossovers but I’m trying to think now if any of my WIP’s are - I’ve definitely poached setting/premise ideas from other media, but in terms of actual crossovers . . . I’ve got a few cross-era or cross-Doctor, a few involving Torchwood, but that’s already the same universe, so the only thing that’d qualify as a true crossover would be some vague pieces of a fic where Jamie, Zoe, and Two end up on the Enterprise, since I think the 60s series of Star Trek and Dr Who feel kind of compatible, don’t they? In fact, aren’t there like officially licensed crossover comics or something? Or did I make that up? Idk, and the ideas are very loose, so it’s not much of a WIP either

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Nope, never

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

I’ve never written smut, but I’m wondering if it’s possible that could change soon. There’s a longish multi-chapter fic I’ve been working on for a frankly embarrassing amount of time, and the plot does call for a sex scene at one point towards the end, but I can’t seem to make up my mind on how - uh, I guess the word is explicit? - it should get. I know I could easily do a fade to black/implication thing, but it’s kind of a source of contention and anxiety for the characters, so to skip over writing the actual scene and just revisit them afterwards rings of “and they slept together and now everything’s fine!” which feels kinda cheap to me - in this context, anyway - and not the right payoff for a long fic that’s otherwise more of an interpersonal drama/slightly a period piece, if I had to place it in a genre. I feel like my aversion to actually writing the scene might just be prudishness I should get over, or maybe just self-doubt, because I know I’d rather have a well-written, funny, character-development-supporting sex scene than nothing at all, but since I’ve never had any interest in writing a scene like that before, I don’t know if I can do it well, and I also don’t want to ruin a fic I’m otherwise proud of by doing it badly... ugh I have to figure this out

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I seriously doubt it

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope

What’s your all time favorite ship?

I mean, it’s gotta be Two & Jamie. I’ve shipped things before with varying levels of investment, but I’ve never been able to use the term ‘otp’ in a literal sense until I came across them, and now it’s already basically gone out of fashion, go figure!

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I’m not sure if I have one? My WIP doc is huge, but I don’t actually intend to get around to finishing everything in it, so I’d like to think that anything I’ve currently singled out to complete can actually get done.

That said, I do have a few AU’s that I don’t really plan to finish, but it might be cool if I could. Two of them are for all the main + some supporting characters of the Second Doctor’s era - one’s a modern day school teachers AU, and the other is a typical fantasy/fairy tale AU. Another is just Two/Jamie, based on Doctor Faustus (specifically the Marlowe play version) but right now there are two different versions of the ending coexisting in my head. I’ve written parts of scenes & some gen. backstory for all of those ideas, but I don’t know if I’ll ever try to finish them, or what form a finished product would even take - a series of one-shots set in the same universe? one long multi-chapter fic with some kind of overarching plot? And the amount of context/worldbuilding a big AU like these would require might not make them very appealing fics for people to read, so maybe it is better if I just keep them to myself, since in my head I already know what’s going on in those worlds lol.

What are your writing strengths?

I honestly don’t know. I haven’t had a creative writing class since middle school, and since then I’ve only ever shown creative writing to others in a fandom context, so it’s been a while since I’ve discussed it or gotten critical feedback. I suppose when I work in other arts or even academic writing contexts, people usually say I’m kind of insightful or at least detail oriented, which might just be another way of saying I overthink things, but I like to imagine I’m decent at finding little points of interest to expand upon.

What are your writing weaknesses?

If you’ve read this far I feel like you must know what I’m about to say: I do not know how to be concise.

Usually when I’m writing a fic, I put down the dialogue first on its own, leaving out the action of the scene and whatever plot/context led there, even if I’ve already figured all of that out. But then when I go to add those things in, they’re always longer than I wanted them to be. I don’t mind writing something long, but I don’t want my fics to be a slog to get through either, and there can be a point at which the stuff I’ve added for context overwhelms the stuff that I wanted the fic to be about in the first place, so it becomes a structural/proportion issue too. I haven’t completely given up on any fics because of this yet, but there’s one I’ve been struggling with for a couple months now - probably because I’m even second-guessing myself on which scenes need to be written out and which can just be referenced like a recap. Hopefully I figure that one out soon.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

((this is karma isn’t it? i posted a fic last week with two words of gaelic in it and was worried about that and now this is karma))

In general, I don’t want to do it. I feel like you’ve gotta have a really good grasp of a language to write dialogue & speech patterns for someone who’s a native speaker, and since I’m far from fluent in any language the characters I write for are, I wouldn’t feel confident writing any significant amount of dialogue in, say, Gaelic.

As a sidenote, though, I kinda love it when other people do it, particularly for Jamie. Irish (Gaeilge) and Scottish (Gàidhlig) are both languages I’ve wanted to learn for a long time, because my family’s fresh out of living speakers of either & I think that’s a shame, but I started with Irish and at the moment I’m still very much learning it. As different as they are, it still helps me understand parts of lyrics or texts that I come across in Gàidhlig fairly frequently, so when it comes up in a fic I get to feel like I’m being responsible and practicing, and it’s great when I can actually understand what’s being said.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

I’m gonna go with Harry Potter even though that’s probably not a perfectly accurate answer - it’s almost certainly the first thing that has a fandom that I ever wrote for, but it was in a notebook when I was a kid and never something that I even typed on a computer, much less posted online or shared with other members of a fandom. But even then, I’m sure it wasn’t the first pre-existing fictional universe I ever set an original story in, because I did that a lot when I was a kid, it’s just hard to remember those clearly or on any kind of timeline.

What’s your favorite fic that you’ve written?

I’m very partial to Across the Gap, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that ranked first on the kudos thing above - but I’ve also got a soft spot for So Merrily We’ll Sing. It’s so self-indulgent it feels silly saying ‘it was so easy to write!’ but I guess having a fic that’s already just 100% headcaonons and fluff tied together by a song you really love does prevent it from being much of a labor (I also managed to refrain from making that one unnecessarily long, so that’s another win there)

tagging @terryfphanatics and anyone else who wants to do it - sorry I’m bad at remembering whose tumblr goes with whose Ao3 account, but I really would be interested to read this if anyone else feels like answering them!

[calligraphist-artemisia]

Field of Flowers

Written for the Kidge Spring Event! 

Prompt 7: Daffodil | Unequaled Love, New Beginnings

Summary: It was just another normal day for Youtuber Katie "Pidge" Holt. She and her boyfriend were going to spend a few hours recording some stuff in Minecraft for their channels and then probably wrangle their friends into a few rounds of Among Us. Except Keith has a question designed to derail all of those plans. 

Also posted on AO3 under the username Kishirokitsune

❀ - ❀ - ❀ - ❀ - ❀

Pidge settled in at her desk and took a look around to make sure there was nothing odd in the background of her webcam. There was only her cat, Tesla, who was relaxing in his carpeted tree, which was sure to thrill her viewers. On the desk in front of her were two monitors, one which displayed all of her recording details, as well as the service she and her boyfriend were using to communicate while they played. The bigger monitor was showing the main screen of Minecraft.

She put on her headphones and adjusted her mic. “Keith, can you hear me?”

“Yeah, I hear you. Everything all set up?” he asked.

Pidge glanced up at her webcam as she nodded. “Yup! I'm just going to put you on mute to run through my intro and then we can get started. You can hop in if you want and I'll join once I'm ready.”

“Sounds good. I'll see you in a few.”

She quickly muted the audio for his channel and gave it a few seconds to make sure she couldn't hear him as he loaded up their game. Then she sat up straight and began recording. “Hey, everyone! I'm TechOwl and today we'll be jumping back into Minecraft with the always handsome KHawkins. As always, there will be a link to his channel in the description and I encourage you to check out his stuff as well.”

Pidge hit join and easily found their usual world, typing in the password so she could join. She waited to unmute until the world had loaded in and caught Keith in mid-sentence when she did.

“...tower and arming it with bows and arrows, so I'll need to expand the chicken farm. Pidge will probably – hi, Pidge – probably help with harvesting flint,” Keith said.

“I'll see what I can gather up while I'm mining,” Pidge said as she opened her inventory to try and remember where she left off. She had a whole row of iron pickaxes and plenty of wood and coal, so she had probably come up to drop off everything in the vault beneath their house and to grab some food. “Actually, let me see what's in the Vault first.”

“You're back at the house?”

“Yeah, I think I was getting food. My bar's pretty low,” Pidge responded. She directed her character through the trapdoor in the corner and rode the ladder down 25 blocks to a room she'd carved out during their first few videos together. Double chests lined the walls and also had signs to go along with them. She went to the section for stones and took a peek into the box labeled 'gravel'. “We only have a stack of it. I'll go find more once I get some food. There's probably a vein of it somewhere in my tunnels that I haven't bothered collecting yet.”

“It'll be a while before I need it, so there's no real rush,” Keith told her. “I still have to build the watchtower and I won't get to that until I'm finished with the gardens.”

Pidge frowned as she went back up the ladder to get into the food chest in their house. “I thought we had way more gravel than that. Have you used any?”

“I used a few stacks of that and the sand to make some concrete a while back,” Keith said.

Pidge guessed that meant they were nearly out of sand as well. It was a bit of a venture to get to the desert biome where she'd harvested most of it, but that could wait for a while. “Anything else I can mine for you, oh-masterful-builder-of-the-world-above?”

“No, I think that's about it,” Keith responded, his tone light. “I thank you for your service, oh-lady-of-the-deep-earth.”

Pidge snorted with amusement as she grabbed a stack of food and ate until her hunger bar was full. She kept a few cooked pork chops in her inventory and put the rest back before turning to go back down into the complex labyrinth of her mine. She got halfway down the ladder before she swore and turned to go back up and fetch more wood, filling up the empty slots in her inventory so she could drop off the extras into the Vault. She kept one full stack of 64 wood blocks on her and then ventured through the double doors leading into the mine.

Pidge spent the next hour combing over her tunnels and collecting any gravel she came across using the iron shovels she specifically built for that purpose. She also collected a decent number of chunks of flint and took all of it back up to the surface with her once she was through.

All the while, she and Keith carried on a conversation for the sake of entertaining their audiences – their banter was often something that was most talked about between their fanbases, with numerous jokes gaining meme-like status. Their friends were fond of quoting those memes back at them whenever they played games together.

“Hey, where do you want all of this gravel and flint?” Pidge asked once she was back in the house. Once again, she had to pause to grab a snack from their food chest as she started taking hunger damage.

“Gravel can stay down there. I have a double chest at the bottom of the watchtower. The flint... yeah, go ahead and bring the flint up to me. I'm at the top. You should look over the edge and check out the garden from up here too. I'll stand on the side you should look over,” Keith said, sounding as though he was leaning away from his microphone. “Hang on, I've gotta run and get something. Go ahead and come up.”

“On my way,” Pidge responded.

She left the house and then looked up, spotting the watchtower immediately. It was a massive wooden structure that stretched high into the sky, though it didn't look like it was all the way up to the build height. She stopped at the base to drop off the stacks of gravel and then hopped on the ladder and rode it all the way to the top. It was there that she found Keith's character standing motionless to one side.

“I'll just drop these off here first,” Pidge said, cracking open the single chest that was next to the ladder. She dropped off the 24 flints and then backed out of the inventory so she could enjoy the sky-high view of the gardens that Keith had spent several sessions working on.

She hopped up on the side where he was standing and looked down. She could see the food garden off to one side, stretching down along the plot of land they took the time to flatten out. To the left of them was a field of flowers and as she looked at them, she realized they spelled something out.

“Wait...” she breathed as her mind caught up with what she was seeing.

Spelled out with red flowers was the question: “Will you marry me?”

Pidge tugged off her headphones and turned in her chair, ready to run downstairs and confront her boyfriend, but he was already there in her office, waiting for her with that soft smile on his face. “Keith?”

He walked into the room and knelt down in front of her, taking her hand with his own. “I've been in love with you from the first day we met. I didn't know it at the time. It took a few people pointing it out to me. Or, well, a lot of people,” he chuckled, “but eventually I figured it out. I never thought I would have the opportunity to find such happiness in my life and it's thanks to you that I have. I can't imagine spending the rest of my life without you in it.”

Pidge hiccuped as she tried to breathe in, reaching up to cover her mouth even as tears of happiness began to spill from her eyes. “Keith...”

Keith cracked open a tiny black box and held it out for Pidge to see the slender silver ring inside. It was inset with three green jewels – not the traditional diamond, but she'd never been fond of those anyway. “Katie Holt, will you marry me?”

She nodded, swallowing thickly so she could try and get the words out. “Yes! Yes, I will.” She slid out of her chair with a breathless laugh and into his arms, unable to wait until he could slip the ring onto her finger. She pressed a kiss to his cheek and then another and another until Keith was shaking from laughter and had to ask if she even wanted the ring.

Pidge pulled away from him, a great big smile on her face as she held out her hand in response, allowing him to put the ring on her finger. And then she dove right back in, kissing him with all that she had to make up for her lack of words.

❀ - ❀ - ❀ - ❀ - ❀

Bonus Scene

“Coran! Coran, you have to come see this!” Allura shouted in excitement.

She could hear him running down the hall from his office, where he was working on editing their newest video together, and was soon striding over to her side while asking if everything was alright. Allura responded with a smile and by hitting play on what she had been watching.

“...-ver the edge and check out the garden from up here too. I'll stand on the side you should look over,” Keith's voice came through the speakers.

Allura eagerly watched Coran and knew the exact moment when Keith's proposal was revealed by the way Coran suddenly squealed in delight. She glanced back at the screen in time to watch it fade away from the flowers and then fade back in with a photo of Pidge and Keith, who were smiling at the camera. Pidge held up her left hand so a beautiful ring could be seen. It was also accompanied by the words: “She said yes!”

“How exciting!” Coran said, grinning broadly. “We must do something to celebrate! Dinner, perhaps? I'll call Hunk and begin preparations!”

Before Allura could agree or disagree with his idea, Coran was gone. She laughed softly and took out her phone to send out a warning to the rest of the group so they wouldn't be too blindsided.

It was certainly an event worth celebrating.

[dorizardthewizard]

Galactik Football: Season 1

I completely forgot that I wrote a load of ramble as I rewatched GF during  lockdown, so uh here’s a sort of review for season 1!

------------------------------------------------------------------

First of all, the concept and setting is just so unique and wild I mean, football in space against aliens but with magical powers too? Epic. Superpowers are pretty common in sports cartoons and anime but here there’s actually an explanation for them, and they have significance for the world of the show. The concept of the flux sets up for an entire sub-plot of wars with weapons of mass destruction, corrupt mega-corporations ruling the galaxy, space pirates… the world feels very lived in, and makes you want to know more about the goings-on outside of the football games.

The pirate business doesn’t overshadow the Snow Kids though, because their personal drama and journey to becoming a better team together is interesting enough. Basically, this is a space opera with football sprinkled in. For such a big cast, most get good development and there’s no clear main character. This leads into me rambling about each character, because I never really appreciated the diversity of arcs when I first watched it as a kid :’P

Rocket:

He starts out pretty timid, doesn’t fight for his dreams, and has a habit of running away from confrontation (like when the others found out he was Aarch’s nephew) that follows him into season 2. He’s stuck tending to flowers (ironic, since he himself isn’t allowed to grow and bloom), but by the end of the season, he’s more authoritative and confident enough to suggest strategies to the team. Also has a habit of hiding his feelings and underestimating his importance to others, which he works on in season 2.

Tia:

You’d expect her to be more calm and similar to Rocket, and sure they bond over being out of the inner circle of the Snow Kids, and also both having emotionally unavailable parents, but she’s actually far more headstrong than she seems. I mean, she was willing to do anything to be in Aarch’s team, even faking her parents’ consent and almost dying when her ship crashed! (Plus that scene where she uses the breath is epic, that music? Chef’s kiss) She’s not perfect though – she’s very empathetic (like when they arrived on the Ryker’s planet and she was the most upset by the conditions there), and relates to Rocket, so she wants to give him the happy family she didn’t have, by reuniting him with his mother. Although well-intentioned, it’s preeetty invasive, and though it turned out okay in the end, she really should have consulted with Rocket first, especially after finding out his mother wasn’t dead, but had left them. For all Tia knew, she could have been a really shitty person.

D’jok:

Very clear ego problems :P He doesn’t know his past and doesn’t have much of a future on Akillian, so he pushes himself to achieve some great destiny, then feels like everyone else isn’t on the same level as him if they don’t do the same. He gets more than he bargained for when it turns out that Sonny Blackbones is his dad, and he realises what’s really important to him in the final match. Namely, he realises that the reason he found it so difficult to sabotage the match isn’t because he wanted to win at all costs, but because he doesn’t want to betray his team – he wants to win together with them.

Althooough, I was never entirely sure about him scoring the penalty before knowing Sonny was safe, like sure he didn’t know Sonny that well yet so maybe felt closer to the SK but dude, you just sentenced a man to death. I think the life-and-death situation by itself was enough to get him to rethink his priorities. Maybe they could have made him more aware that the whole galaxy was at stake if he lost the match, but that motive for scoring the penalty isn’t as satisfying for his arc I guess.

Micro-Ice:

To this day, I have no idea why he was named that :’P He’s the first Snow Kid we meet, which makes for a fun start to the show since he’s such a smart-ass and a joker that keeps getting in trouble. He could have easily been nothing but comic relief, but he isn’t. He’s actually pretty pessimistic and doubtful about his skills, and covers it up with jokes and fake confidence. He didn’t even want to go to the try-outs, to avoid disappointment if he didn’t get chosen.

The self-confidence issue keeps building up with things like being put as substitute initially, being the last person to get the Breath, and D’jok and Mei getting together, finally driving him to run off with the pirates thinking he isn’t really needed on the team. He also lets jealousy get the better of him, souring his friendship with D’jok and forgetting that Mei is free to choose whoever she likes. He eventually realises he’s wrong though, and comes back. I also love his friendship with Artie :’D

Mei:

She starts out ambitious, which in itself isn’t a bad thing, but she’s willing to throw others under the bus for personal gains. Then you start to see it’s because of her mother’s influence – always pushing her to do better. When Mei starts to actually have feelings for D’jok, she starts to care about him and regrets breaking up his friendship with Micro-Ice. Eventually, she manages to stand up to her mum and is happy playing the position she’s best at.

The execution cooould be a little better because at times it leaned a bit into the “overambitious woman who needs to be put in her place” trope. It only really comes down to little details, like why did Aarch refuse to let her try out as an attacker when he was forming the team? Back then he had no idea who she was or what her skills were?? He didn’t even want to consider the idea later when Micro-Ice left, which felt more like an emotional reaction than a tactical one. But anyway, it’s alright overall and I love that she got to score the winning goal despite not being an attacker.

Thran and Ahito:

Having a narcoleptic goalkeeper is just genius, and makes for some fun last-minute saves. Also love how despite being asleep half the time, Ahito’s the one that knows what’s up :’P Thran is also really underrated but there’s more to talk about with these two in season 2.

Also wanted to throw in some appreciation for how the older characters are written – usually the adults in kids shows are more on the side-lines, but in Galactik Football, they’re also pretty flawed and interesting. For example, Aarch isn’t the perfect, wise mentor – whether he did it for glory, to escape bad memories or a combination of both, he still left his brother and planet behind when they needed him most, and now he’s trying to make up for it. Norata’s not perfect either – he denies Rocket his dreams partly to protect him, but also out of bitterness towards Aarch and fear of being left alone again. Also, there’s a variety of different families being represented in the show – single parents, adopted parents, rich, not so rich, neglectful, supportive, ambitious, non-existent… and with some of them, this plays a key role in the Snow Kids’ characters.

The show might not be the most technically amazing, okay, the 2D animation is not the best, but the designs are pretty diverse and I miss that 2000’s style with the outfits :’P There are lots of locations with pretty backgrounds, and very varied planets that reflect the people living there. I also like the comfortable sci-fi design – it’s futuristic-looking enough, but more colourful than some of the CGI bores we get in movies these days.

The 3D animation is better – they reuse motions a lot but at least they shake it up a bit by using different characters and camera angles. Speaking of camera angles, there’s some really interesting ones and camera movements that really make the matches dynamic. Honestly, having CGI in the 2000’s that doesn’t look super ugly and dated now is great, partly because they transferred their designs to 3D really well and partly because they didn’t try to do much rendering on the models.

ALSO THE SOUNDTRACK SLAPS THEY DID NOT HAVE TO GO THAT HARD ON THE OPENING THEME AND THE SCORE SOUNDS SO EPIC ALL THE TIME

I don’t know how to end this so if you actually got this far, I’ll just say season 1 was the best one for me! There’s some parts and characters I left out but that’s for another time. Sinedd and D’jok’s rivalry deserves its own post :’P

[eirenical]

1 and 2 for the writing meta prompt please!

Thank you, @flamingwell

[If anyone else would like to send questions, here is the list. ^_^]

1. Tell us about your current project(s) – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

Oooooooh boy. Well, I have quite a few. XD So, how about we just go through the ones I have actively open in Word right now?

Legacies Found: The Untamed, sequel to Legacies Lost. This is a giant canon divergent AU that I've been working on for well over a year at this point. There is one key thing that I changed (and in the interest of spoilers, I'm not going to say what, but if you're curious and don't mind spoilers then, by all means, come ask and I'll tell you all about it. ;D) and it affected everything in-universe, some for the better, some for the worse. Here's the AO3 summary:

Sixteen years ago, the Yiling Patriarch died, a victim to his own hubris and the Yin Tiger Seal. Hundreds of cultivators from many different sects died with him that day, their souls forever doomed to find no rest, even in death. On this, the 16th anniversary of the battle of Qiongqi Pass, Jin Ling is determined to make pilgrimage, to try to put the spirit of his long-lost father to rest. He finds much more than he bargained for, and what he finds… will change everything.

And in the sequel, things have progressed significantly from this point, but the people involved are still broken in various ways, not quite at the point of healing yet, but getting there. The plot is opening up to the wider world and new characters are going to be introduced, and I'm having a lot of fun writing it, but it is SO MUCH SLOWER GOING. OTZ

Mirror, Mirror: I talked about this one extensively in this post, and it hasn't really progressed any further from there. XD This is a Guardian AU based on a short film that Zhu Yilong did with Li Bingbing called "Into the Mirror" (there's a link in the other post).

Reclamation: *eg* For anyone who's been following my Whumptober series (yes, I know we're WELL past October OTZ) of fics that I've been writing for Granting You a Dreamlike Life, this is the latest in the series. This monster is already almost 18K words and it's... it's a LOT. The story is a canon-divergent AU that starts out mostly overlapping canon during episode 35 and begins to diverge somewhere between there and episode 36. I leaned REALLY hard into the whump on this one, went really self-indulgent and wrote the fic that I would most want to read for this fandom, because I was pretty damned sure that no one else would write it or would take it as far and as dark as I wanted it to go if they did. And this particular story is the darkest of the bunch so far. ^_~ I'm not going to link directly to this one, because this is definitely a HEED THE TAGS situation, but if anyone's interested in some really, REALLY dark GYADL fic... hit me up and I'll be happy to tell you more. ^_^ (And for those who just want to look for themselves, you can find it under #eirenical does whumptober or on my AO3 where the series name is "Indefinitely." ^_^)

2. Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project

I think I've talked enough about my current projects, so how about some future projects for this one? ^_^

(...and how about under a cut because this is getting kind of long...)

The Lost Tomb Reboot

I have... several fic at the plotty stage for TLTR, and I just added a new one to the list this morning. XD

Ershu fic: So, for anyone who's been following my TLTR journey, you know I'm obsessed with Ershu. I LOVE HIM. I LOVE HIM SO MUCH. And you know what happens when I love a character, right? Right? I WANT TO BREAK THEM. *coughs* Anyway, something happens to Ershu in S2 of TLTR that I won't go into detail about because spoilers, but essentially, he's betrayed and ends up in the hands of the person who betrayed him with no one else being the wiser and with him helpless and unable to tell anyone. And there are just... all KINDS of dark, fucked up possibilities there, and just like the Whumptober series, I AM going to write that fic, even if no one but me ends up reading it. ;D

Probably post-canon domestic bliss fic: For those of you who enjoy WHIPLASH ;D, I just honestly want ALL THE SOFT DOMESTIC IRON TRIANGLE. ALL OF IT. And I want Wu Xie and Ershu to have an opportunity to sit down and actually TALK about things (e.g., their need for a family heir), instead of trying to one-up each other. Special appearances by all the ducklings, Xiao Bai's girlfriend, and Lia Jiale and Jia Kezi (...my fic, my rules, we ignore canon when we want to ^_^) having an ...oh moment, and sweet, soft cuddles for Liu Sang and Kan Jian because they're adorable and I love them, too. (I have no idea if this is all going in one fic or if it will be a series of slice of life things, but I just want everyone to get their happily ever after IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK???)

Post-canon Huo Daofu and Xiao Ge... time-sharing Wu Xie?: IDEK what to call what's going on here, but... yeah. XD (See, @elenothar, I haven't forgotten! ;D) To crib from another post... I really do think that Xiao ge loves Wu Xie and loves being with him and all that that entails, but that he gets… restless.  A little feral cat, if you will.  And he just needs to wander off and be on his own for a while sometimes.  And I would love to see a permutation where it’s just kind of understood that he and Huo Daofu just kind of… share Wu Xie.  ^_^  Not in a threesome way, but in a way that they both understand each other’s claim on Wu Xie and neither of them wants him to be alone, so they just kind of… work that out between them.  Like he's a time share. (OMG, I have to be careful of how often I use that phrase for this fic or I'm going to end up calling it that as a title. XD)

DMBJ x Highlander xover that I just came up with literally this morning: No, seriously, this LITERALLY just popped into my head as I was waking up this morning. It was a wild fucking ride, too. O_o;;; ANYWAY, I'm probably going to make a separate headcanon/plotty post for this one, but basically I just randomly woke up thinking... Duncan was an antique dealer in the late 80s/early 90s in the US. Wu Xie is an antique dealer in China, now, and his family has been involved in the antique trade for a... VERY long time. Maybe Duncan did some business with the Wu family. Maybe he met Wu Xie as a kid. Maybe he knew Xiao ge even EARLIER than that (like 100 years earlier). Maybe post-canon Highlander, Duncan starts getting back into the antique trade by helping to quietly repatriate artifacts and comes to China to deal with the Wu family to do that, and meets Wu Xie again... and Xiao ge. And has a WTF moment because Xiao ge ISN'T an Immortal like he is, but he doesn't look a day older than when they met 100 years ago and just... WTF?? And Wu Xie is looking at Duncan and looking at Xiao ge and having a WTF moment of his own because is EVERYONE immortal except him and Pangzi?? And... I just think that would be a lot of fun to play with. ;D

Guardian:

The Care and Training of a Former Megalomaniac V and VI, maybe?: OK, so this idea isn't really concrete, but I still want to play with it. I want to do something to tackle Ye Zun's past with the Rebel Leader and the trauma that that left behind, and I'm thinking he'll end up having a good (...drunk) talk with Da Qing about it.

Another idea I had (MUCH more concrete) was based off my own poor lazy bb. He LOVES to catch bugs. LOVES IT. He gets SO EXCITED and SO into it... but sometimes the bugs fly up to the ceiling. And Gabriel is comfy in my lap and doesn't want to move. So he will swat at the bug... halfheartedly. And then he will turn around and complain to me when it won't come down to be swatted at again. Like I can somehow make it come down so he can play with it? IDEK. XD ANYWAY. I had a vivid mental image of Da Qing doing this to Ye Zun and somehow convincing him to actually... bring the bug down. Using his powers. And someone at the SID detects Ye Zun using his powers so ZYL and SW race home... to find Ye Zun... using his powers... to tether bugs for Da Qing to play with. And I just think that would be hilarious. XD

...I think that's everything in the mental kiddy right now? XD

[sou-ver-2-0]

You haven't talked much about the floor masters (except Midori). What are your thoughts on them? Any theories?

This is a great question!! Thanks for asking me. I am a villain stan, after all.

I think YTTD's Floor Masters are worthy villains! They're deliciously evil and they contribute a lot to the setting. I love how their absurd designs make the Death Game look like a bizarre, even magical place. They help me feel like I've been transported to another dimension where our normal rules don't matter. 

What I appreciate most about the writing for the Floor Masters is how Nankidai gives them distinct personalities. Each Floor Master we meet sets a different tone for a new level. That's a satisfying feeling since the variety gives the story depth. The Floor Masters in Chapter 2 had especially compelling arcs. And I expect that we'll get more development for the surviving villains in Chapter 3.

As for theories? I'm on board with the theory that Sue Miley, Tia Safalin, and Gashu Satou are likely humans instead of dolls, since they all bleed. However, I don't understand why they would need to pretend to be dolls. Is it just to unsettle the participants? What meaning could there be to having a mix of human and doll Floor Masters? I really don't know. Metaphorically, maybe the significance of showing the Floor Masters bleed is to remind the player that we're in the real world after all, in spite of the Death Game's otherworldly appearance? I can't even fathom what the literal reason could be.

I'll share some brief thoughts about each non-Midori villain beneath the cut!

Sue Miley: She's the most simplistic villain, and I respect that. Sue Miley has no pretenses about being a bad guy. She's simply sadistic. That works perfectly for Chapter 1, when we're just learning about what our heroes are up against. Sue Miley immediately sets the stakes high with her powerful presence.

I vaguely recall that she was up to mysterious work behind the scenes in Chapter 2, but I honestly don't remember that part well. (Sorry!) I just started playing the game with my sister over the weekend, so hopefully I'll get a better grasp on the details when we reach that part! I do think it's really interesting how Sue Miley has a conflict with Gashu Satou in Chapter 2, though I'm unclear on why she didn't trust him. Perhaps Sue Miley didn't realize that Gashu would be willing to die for his beliefs? And she was worried that he would let the participants escape? Is that all there is to it? That sounds like the simplest answer, but I'd like to see Sue Miley's reaction for confirmation.

In any case, I'm sure that we'll see more of Sue Miley in Chapter 3! She might get a layer to her personality, or she might continue to be her good old sadistic self.

Rio Ranger: Aahh, I admit that Rio Ranger is the villain who disturbs me the most. Probably because he's more sympathetic than Sue Miley, so it's easier to understand where his sadism comes from. And that gets under my skin! To see a doll so jealous of humans that he would torture them so cruelly. The way he treats the dead also horrifies me. He seems so childish--it's clear that he just needed to be treated better and he wouldn't have turned out so bad.

My impression is that Rio Ranger is a popular character, which kinda surprised me haha, but you must understand I'm sensitive! Lol. Maybe I'll enjoy him more for "fun" reasons the second time around? To be clear, I think the writing for him is great. I think the writing for all the villains in Chapter 2 is fantastic. He just...makes me upset haha.

I do have a wild theory related to Rio Ranger, which is that his father-son relationship with Gashu could be foreshadowing for Midori's relationship with Meister. But that's a topic for a Midori-centric post! 

Tia Safalin: Ohoho, she's definitely my favorite!! I love this sad wicked woman. 

What's ironic about my arbitrary feelings is that she's also very disturbing, much like Rio Ranger. She's more sympathetic than Sue Miley because she seems to have a conscience of sorts. We feel as though she ought to know better. At times, she is more sympathetic than Rio Ranger, because we don't want to believe that she would be capable of being as cruel as him. And this makes Safalin's cruelty the worst of them all, because it's tinged with betrayal. 

Safalin is evil in a realistic way. There are plenty of people, especially women, who use their tears to shield them from culpability. She also has a delightful motivation; she's in this for science! If I were a Floor Master--with my timid personality and curious nature--I'd probably be most like Safalin. She's like a dark mirror. I love that about her.

Gashu Satou: Fascinating man, wow. That plot twist broke me. What I like most about Gashu is that he seems to give us the clearest hint of what the meaning behind Asu-Naro is. As Kai wrote, "This Death Game is not for pleasure nor revenge. To the organization, it is an inevitable mission. ...That is what my father believed. The organization drove my father mad."

What is the true mission of Asu-Naro? We don't know, but Gashu certainly embodies the feelings in Kai's words. Gashu is not here for "sadistic pleasure" like Sue Miley, or "revenge against humans" like Rio Ranger. To Gashu, the Death Game is like religion. He is willing to die for its mysterious goal.

There are real people like Gashu too--folks who are brainwashed to support horrible causes. He's absolutely the villain who hurt my heart the most by shutting out the last thread of hope for our heroes. Gashu's spiteful suicide has the opposite effect of his son's Kai inspiring suicide. While Gashu gave his life in support of a death cult, Kai gave his life to resist a death cult. I think that the writing for Gashu is incredible.

Maple: I realize that she's not technically a Floor Master--she's an Obstructer--but I thought I'd still mention her. I like that Nankidai came up with another unique personality for her. She's very affable. Midori is also friendly, but his cruel streak is more obvious. Maple doesn't look sadistic or scientific... Why is she here? Is she simply the most robotic of these villains? I'm curious how Nankidai will develop Maple as a villain, but since we don't have much to go on, I don't feel that strongly about her yet.

...

Getting the chance to write about these characters made me appreciate them more! Thanks again for asking!

[borhap-au]

Gwil x bookstore employee.

You recognized Gwilym from one or two of your classes, you had the same major in college. He usually sat behind you, and you of course didn’t know it, but he was much more interested in what you were doing than what the professor was saying. He tried to talk to you a few times, sometimes even got the courage to do it, but he couldn’t come up with a good enough topic, so he usually asked about school projects and homework, therefore obviously the conversations ended pretty soon.

You wanted to talk to him as well, but you didn’t want to make the conversation awkward or force it to make it longer. Plus he usually only asked about college stuff, so naturally you thought he’s not interested in you, just asking for some crucial information to pass the class.

The situation slightly changed when you started to work in a bookstore nearby.

The first time Gwilym came there, he honestly didn’t know you would be there, let alone work there. He just wanted some books to read on a spring break. When he saw you in the shirt with the bookstore’s logo and understood you worked there, he thought about a plan to be able to talk to you more and get to know you closer. He didn’t come up to you yet that day, hiding behind the shelves of books, and it looked a little bit as if you were playing hide and seek. However, the next time he promised himself to be more courageous and prepared for the meeting.

He came up to you one day, with a smile on his face, and you immediately smiled back.

“Gwil, hi! Didn’t think I’ll meet you here,” you welcomed him and put the books you had in your hands aside, as he caught you while you were sorting them.

“Oh, you definitely will meet me here a lot. I love reading,” you smiled wider hearing that. What a nice change, to meet a guy who likes reading. All of your male friends were too busy playing videogames all day.

“So, did you get something? Or want me to recommend you a good read?” you raised your brow looking at him. He immediately nodded at your proposition, as he wanted to ask you himself, but didn’t know how to do it.

“Yes, please. I just finished all the series I was reading and need some new ones,” you nodded your head hearing that and looked at him.

“So, what did you read? I could recommend something based on that,” he then proceeded to name several series, some of which you also started reading. You then took a minute to look through the books. “Hmm… You really read everything that was there. But… What about “The Dark Tower” series by Stephen King? You may like it.” He looked at the back of the book to read the summary and then nodded smiling.

“Sounds like fun, I’ll take it,” you took the books he wanted to buy and brought them to the counter.

“We have a discount for extremely nice customers,” you winked to him, making it quite obvious that there was no actual discount, different from the one for employees, which you were planning to give him. You told him the price of the books and he gave you the money, but he didn’t leave immediately after, as you were sure he would.

“When are you finishing?” he asked and you tried to hide both the surprise and the smile. You looked at him.

“In about forty minutes. I just need to finish putting those books in order and then close the bookstore. Why, do you want to talk about books some more?” you smiled at him. Gosh, he was so handsome.

“About books, but not only. I’d like to take you out for coffee or tea, if you wanted to come with me…” you chuckled quietly and that reaction caught him by surprise. “…or not?”

“No, no, I would like to come with you. It’s just that it rhymed, it sounded like a poem,” he smiled as well. “So, do you want to stay with me, or will you come back after I close the shop?”

“I can stay. I can even help you if you want,” you were a little hesitant about it, but finally you agreed.

“But you know, you really don’t have to,” you assured him while he carried a pile of books so you didn’t have to walk for them every single time.

“I know, but I want to,” he smiled and you decided not to dispute the matter with him anymore. Actually, you could really use the help, so it was like heaven listened to your earlier cursing about the weight of the piles of books and big boxes and decided to give you a break.

“Actually, this book should be good for you too,” you said while unpacking another box. “It’s a new one, I started reading it in class, it was quite interesting for me. I’m planning to finish it on the weekend.” Gwilym smiled to hide his embarrassment. Actually, while he was looking for a reason to talk to you, he saw you carrying that book and decided to buy it and read it as well, just so the next time he sees you, he can say ‘oh, you’re reading that?! What a great choice, I just finished it last week!’ and hopefully the problem with the topic of the conversation would work itself out after that.

“Oh, I’m also reading that book, I got it from my friend. Once we finish, we can discuss the plot and everything. I mean, if you want to. I just like to share my opinions with others, create new theories or backgrounds for the characters,” he smiled a bit, because he knew it made him sound like a total dork and a geek.

“Actually, I’d love that,” you smiled. “I already have a few theories and I will like to share them once we finish the book,” oh, he was relieved.

Gwilym found it both ironic and annoying how trying to get to know a girl you like when you’re shy resembled being a total creep and stalking someone. He did not go as far as to check your Facebook profile back to the day you’ve created it, he didn’t even try to check if you have an Instagram account. However, whenever he had a chance he admired your beauty from a distance, like a teenager with a crush, and tried to pick some small details he could hang on the next time he’s trying to start a conversation. He hated his shyness, but you actually found it quite cute. Despite the fact you cursed your own shyness whenever you wanted to talk to him more, but couldn’t, because you were overthinking every single word and once you decided to speak, the moment passed, and it was too late.

Soon, when Gwilym figured out the pattern you had for sorting books, he didn’t just carry them for you, but he also started helping out with putting them in place as well. It was especially useful when you had to go to help the clients and he was left alone with the boxes. You honestly thought you will have to stay overtime to do it, but with his help, you finished right on time.

“Give me a second, I will just change and take my things and we can go. Promise it won’t be long,” you smiled apologetically, but he didn’t have a problem with that.

“I’ll just wait here, reading,” you chuckled quietly.

“Well, I promise I won’t be so long that you’ll finish the whole bookstore.” After that you went to change and it took you just a couple of minutes to be ready, but of course you made sure your make-up and hair were on point. You were also thanking yourself for choosing one of your favorite shirts for today, the one that nicely highlighted your assets – your cleavage and collarbones.

When you came back to Gwil, he smiled involuntary on the sight he had before his eyes.

“You look great,” he smiled as he opened the door for you. You blushed immediately.

“Thanks,” you muttered quietly. Once you closed the bookstore, you headed in the direction he decided on. You felt awkward with yourself, being inexperienced in the whole dating world, but with Gwilym you somehow felt more relaxed, because of his friendly personality and his everlasting smile. When you went to the cafe, he insisted on paying for you, and you finally gave up, promising the next time you’ll pay. You both took hot chocolate, as you decided it was the best drink for talking about books.

“Do you come here often?” you asked, looking around, while you sat at your table. You both immediately chose the one in the corner, away from people, without consulting one another beforehand about the options.

“Yeah, actually, I come here on the breaks sometimes. I like the atmosphere here,” he explained, while making himself comfortable in the big armchair.

“I can see why. It’s a perfect place for a cozy afternoon with a book. I don’t know why I haven’t been here yet. It’s quite close to my workplace after all…”

Somehow the conversation didn’t feel awkward between you two. You proceeded to discuss various books, characters, theories and fandoms and it was as if you met here every Friday for a few months. And it soon became that. He often came to pick you up from work, you always told him when you found some nice new book to read. You also watched the same TV series, so the conversation topics soon expanded, and it felt more natural and easy with every single time.

One time, after a few weeks of your meetings, Gwilym surprised you at work, without earlier giving you any hints that he may be coming. He didn’t let you know simply because he didn’t know himself if he will get the courage to come that evening. You were surprised, but in a nice way, and you welcomed him with a hug.

“I’m finishing in a few minutes, so we can go somewhere. Maybe to the cinema, for the new superhero movie and then for a dinner, how about it?” you had to say it all at once because you knew that if you hesitated, you wouldn’t say it. It was the very first time you were to meet outside college, your workplace or that cafe. You were too shy and insecure to assume he liked you the same way you liked him, but you prayed for it. That’s why you decided to invite him on a proper date, rather than just for a two-people book club meeting.

He nodded, but was sort of in a different place mentally, so you naturally took it as a “no” in a sense that he did not like you back. However, he then gave you a notebook. It was a black notebook with no design on it, so you looked at him a bit surprised. Then you decided to just open it. While it opened on the first page, you saw a question written on it, in Gwilym’s neat handwriting.

“Will you be Mary Jane to my Spiderman?” was the sentence on the page, with some doodles of spider webs and the Spiderman himself, with his heart pumping out of his chest. You looked at it with disbelief and then at him. After a few seconds you nodded and hugged him tightly.

“Yes! Yes, of course I will,” you smiled widely and he hugged you back, quietly sighing with relief. He kissed your cheek.

“I’m sorry for being so cheesy. I was just too scared to say it out loud,” he muttered embarrassed, actually blushing, which makes him look even cuter.

“I find it very sweet. It’s going to be our notebook, for our memories. And book reviews!” you joked and he smiled hugging you and taking you off the ground, spinning you around, as you squeaked quietly, scared to kick some books off the shelves in the process.

He leaned down to put you back on the ground and you looked at each other. You both intuitively moved a little closer to each other and you ended up kissing. What a beautiful view that was, like right from one of the books you read. Outside there was raining, that’s why Gwilym came in a little wet, and now you were kissing right next to the glass door of the bookstore. It made you look as if you were on a cover of a book. And it truly was a beautiful love story.

[sweetiepie08]

RebelZ Chapter 6

Invader Zim fanfic

While analyzing Zim’s PAK for weaknesses, Tak discovers strange coding that sends her on a search for answers. The clues lead her to uncover a conspiracy that governs all of Irken society. When the truth sends her on the run, she has no choice but to return to the one place the Tallest would never willingly go: Urth.

Meanwhile, Dib has noticed odd changes in Zim’s behavior. Has the invader simply grown bored of his mission over the last few years, or is there something more interesting going on?

People who asked to be tagged: @incorrect-invader-zim , @messinwitheddie, @reblogstupids, @cate-r-gunn, @agentpinerulesall​

If anyone else would like to be added to the tag list feel free to message me. Also, if you’re on the tag list and you changed your name, please just let me know.

Chapter 1. Chapter 2. Chapter 3. Chapter 4. Chapter 5. Chapter 6. Chapter 7.  Chapter 8.  Chapter 9. Chapter 10.

[-]

Dib flipped through the streaming services, looking for something to watch. The documentary had ended, pizza had been eaten, and Gaz had gone upstairs to fix some emergency with one of her online gaming groups. He knew he had surveillance tapes waiting for him on his desk, (or worse, college applications) but he wasn’t ready to check up on them just yet. He was actually enjoying some downtime for once, and he didn’t want it to end.

Then, he heard the all-too-familiar sounds of an alien spaceship landing outside.

Nope, he thought as he hit play on whatever show he landed on. Didn’t matter what, so long as he could pretend he couldn’t hear what was going on in his driveway.

Some muffled arguing came from the front door, followed by the bell ringing. Dib turned up the volume. Not getting out of this chair.

Loud pounding began, accompanied by cries of “Dib-human! Open this door!” Dib turned the volume up as loud as it would go as the pounding continued.

“Jesus Christ, Dib!” Gaz shouted from upstairs. “Just answer the door!”

“Fine!” Dib shut off the tv and stalked to the front door. When he opened it, he found two Irken idiots.

Zim and Tak hung off each other and drank from plastic bottles while their robot pets bolted right in and made themselves at home. “Hey, you grew into your head,” Tak said, lazily pointing her claw at him.

“You know, Dib, there’s a lot of reasons to hate your planet,” Zim slurred, letting himself in. “You keep chihuahuas as pets, some of you refuse to inoculate against deadly diseases, and that Game of Thrones finale was garbage! But at least you don’t need identification to buy gingzor, and that almost makes up for it.” Zim punctuated his short rant by taking a long swig from his bottle.

“And look,” Tak said, pulling a box of ginger snaps out of a plastic shopping bag, “they had edibles.”

“Are you guys drunk? What is this?” Dib grabbed the bottle out of Zim’s hands. He checked the label, gave it a sniff, and took a small taste. Yup, it was exactly what the label said it was. “This is just ginger ale.”

“Eee-yup,” Zim said, swiping his bottle back. “Your light brews aren’t as potent as the ones we’ve got on Irk, but it gets the job done.”

“Wait, are you guys seriously telling me your species gets drunk off ginger?”

“Why?” Tak asked, shoving a cookie in her mouth. “What do humans consume when they want to forget the futility of existence?”

“Uh, alcohol, usually.”

The two Irkens locked eyes, then burst into laughter. “Seriously?” Tak squealed, wiping a tear from her eye. “That’s an antiseptic.”

“Humans really are stupid,” Zim agreed.

“Not that kind,” Dib grumbled, knowing he would be ignored. Then he felt his temper boil. “What are you two doing in my house?!”

“Oh yeah,” the two brushed past him and hopped on the couch like they owned the place. “We need to crash here for a while,” Zim explained. He turned on the tv, got blasted by an old episode of The Office, then turned the volume down.

“Why?”

“We uncovered a conspiracy behind the Irken empire and our government tried to kill us.”

“I discovered,” Tak corrected. “They just caught you harboring me.”

“Eh, details.”

“The point is,” Tak went on, “we’re both marked as traitors and we need to lay low for a while.”

Dib could have sworn his ears perked like a dog’s. An intergalactic conspiracy? There was a story here so juicy he could almost taste it. Still, as he watched the earth’s total Irken population spill ginger ale on the couch and grind crumbs into the cushions, the only question on his mind was, “why here?”

“Need your lab,” Zim tossed off as if it should have been obvious.

“So? Why don’t you go back to your base and use your own lab?”

“Can’t.” Zim took a teal cube out of his pocket and tossed it in Dib’s direction.

Dib caught it and brought it up to his eye to inspect. “What’s this?”

“My base.”

“Your whole base is in this?” Dib strained his eyes, looking at the cube. “What’s going on? How did this even happen?”

“How far back in Irken history do you want to go?” Tak asked, popping open a bottle.

“Wait, you mean you’re actually going to tell me?”

She gave a non-committal shrug. “Eh…”

“Hold on, wait right there.” Dib zipped upstairs to his room, grabbed a notebook, pen, and recorder, then zipped back down. He grabbed a chair, hit record, and poised his pen. “Let’s start at the beginning.”

[-]

Dib scribbled furiously, trying to keep up with Tak’s slurred ramblings. Zim interjected occasionally to add something or explain an Irken concept, but it was clear exactly who the conspiracy hunter was.

“So, anyway, that’s when I realized this parasite has been controlling our entire society for generations and, you know, it’s just a real buzzkill to find out you’re basically living food.”

“I see,” Dib said, making a note to ask about this library planet later (maybe get coordinates?). “And this parasite has been masquerading as the Control Brains.”

“Not ‘masquerading’ exactly,” she explained. “They always were the Control Brains.”

“And, just to make sure I got this, the Control brains are what, again?”

Before they could answer, he heard a loud “eh-he-eh-hm.” He looked over to see Gaz standing in the kitchen doorway. When he met her eyes, she curled one finger, ominously beckoning him over. “Uh, one second, guys.” He put down his pen and followed Gaz into the kitchen.

“Make this quick, Gaz,” he said, peaking back into the living room. “These two are giving me everything.”

“Okay then,” she said, her voice displaying her irritation. “Just answer me this: why are there two destructive aliens drinking like civil war amputee patients on our couch?”

“Revealing their government’s secrets, that’s what,” he answered with unbridled glee. “Turns out, ginger gets them drunk and when they’re drunk, they have no filter. They’ve been rambling on and on about their creepy big-brother-like society for an hour now. Look at all these notes.” He shoved the notebook in Gaz’s face and flipped furiously through the pages. “As long as I keep them drunk and happy, they’ll keep talking. Which reminds me…” He took out his wallet, grabbed a bill, and handed it to Gaz. “Go to the store and buy them out of ginger ale. We can’t let them sober up.”

“Five bucks?” Gaz said, wrinkling her nose. “I assume you’re planning on reimbursing me for the grocery bill later.”

“This isn’t about money, Gaz.”

“Then dig a little deeper, Scrooge. I know your part-time at Dad’s lab pays more than this.”

“And you make plenty off of your twitch gaming streams,” Dib argued. “Come on, this is about furthering human knowledge.”

Gaz raised her eyebrow in her ‘you’ve got to be kidding’ way. “You’re offering me $5 to drop everything, go to the store, and buy out their entire supply of ginger ale without reimbursing me for the bill.”

“Uh…yes?”

She scoffed. “Get a pulse.”

Dib pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed the corners of his eyes. Was she seriously arguing with him about money at a time like this? “Look, what if I give you an acknowledgement when I publish this baby? Like, say, in the forward?”

“You mean the part no one reads?”

“Uh…”

Gaz let out an exasperated huff and looked into the living room at the two Irkens. “So, they’ll really ramble on and on if you stuff them full of ginger, huh? About anything?”

“Yeah, pretty much. We managed to stay on topic so far. I mean, Zim did go on a tangent about the Game of Thrones finale, but we got back on track.”

Gaz smiled. “Did he, now? About what?”

“Something about Westeros crumbling as soon as the credits rolled. I don’t know. You watched that show, not me.”

“Hmm…” Gaz murmured, looking pointedly at Zim. Oh no, she was thinking… Worse! She was plotting!

“Gaz? What are you doing?”

She threw him a wicked smirk and sauntered into the living room. “Hey, Zim!” she called, clear as a bell. “That Game of Thrones finale sucked, right?”

“Don’t even get me started, Dib-sister!” Zim called back, slapping his hand on the couch. “Zim has never seen such a staggering drop in quality!”

Dib dropped his face into his hands. Was it too late to offer a twenty?”

[-]

“I guarantee Dorne and the Iron Islands rebelled as soon as they stepped out of the Dragon Pit.” Zim said, splashing ginger ale on the couch with every gesture. “I’ll bet they only voted ‘yes’ on Bran because this would be the easiest reign to overthrow.”

“Exactly!” Gaz said, slapping the arm of her chair. “Dany promised Yara independence two seasons ago. There’s no way she’s just going to watch him hand his sister a kingdom and not demand what’s owed to her.”

Dib twisted the notebook in his hands as he listened to them rant. They’d been at this since Gaz brought up the subject.

“And what was with them acting like Dany was in the wrong for executing Varys?” Zim added. “He tried to assassinate her!”

“As if Jon didn’t execute a child a few seasons ago for the same thing. And it was obvious that kid was coerced into it by the higher-ranking Night’s Watch men.” Gaz said. “You’ll notice Dany didn’t execute the child Varys manipulated into poisoning her. And he only thought she was ‘mad’ because she stopped listening to his shitty advice.”

“Their ‘advice’ lost her the Dornish forces, the Iron Fleet, and Highgarden’s armies,” Zim agreed.

“Plus another dragon and her best friend. And when she goes into mourning, he’s all ‘Welp, she’s clearly gone mad. Time to put her down like Old Yeller.’ Oh! And what was with Tyrion’s ‘everywhere she goes, evil men die’ speech? Like that’s a bad thing? Yeah, I know. That’s why I liked her.”

“You know wat she should have done?” Zim said. “She should have flown her three dragons to the Red Keep like she wanted to do last season. She could have taken the city with fewer casualties.”

Gaz nodded in agreement. “Maybe even no casualties if King’s Landing surrenders immediately.”

“Then she’d have all three dragons and all the armies in the Seven Kingdoms to fight the White Walkers with!” Zim added.

“Yeah, then maybe there’d be enough time to make the army of the dead live up to the hype! Nice Long Night. Lasted about six hours.”

“What is this show?” Tak asked. “I want to watch.”

“Enough!” Dib burst, jumping out of his seat. “Enough Game of Thrones! If you want to keep complaining, go on the internet and do it! Now can we please get back to you two spilling the secrets of your evil intergalactic empire!”

“There are no more secrets, human,” Tak snapped. “We’ve told all. The only other information I could find is on this.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a square, plastic information drive. “But this technology is too outdated to decode. So, unless you have access to an ancient computer…”

Dib took the square and held it up to his eyes. “This just looks like a floppy disc.”

“Really, Dib-beast?” Zim scoffed. “Your planet’s technology is antiquated, but it’s not that archaic.”

“Actually, that’s pretty outdated for us too,” Gaz said, “but our dad’s got a computer graveyard in the attic. Maybe we can get one of those to work.”

Tak regarded the disc suspiciously. “You’re serious? You think you might be able to get it to work.”

“It could be possible,” Dib answered, eyeballing the disc. It looked about the right size and shape. It may at least fit into the disc drive. “It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve gotten Irken and Earth technology to work together. It’s worth a shot.”

[-]

After about an hour and a few trips to the attic, they found an old monitor and hard drive they managed to turn on. As the computer booted up, they compared the Irken disc drive to a standard floppy disc. Dib was right. They seemed to match up.

“You really think this has a shot?” Tak asked again. She looked skeptical they whole time the were getting set up, but as the computer whirred to life, Dib thought he could detect a hint of hope in her voice.

“It could,” Gaz answered. “If the magnetic polarity is the same as we use on earth, the computer might be able to read the disc.”

Dib nodded along. While he was good with technology, his area of expertise was more on the engineering side. Gaz was the one with an affinity for coding.

Once the computer was ready, they popped in the drive. They all gathered around the monitor and held their breath. A buffering window popped up on the screen and they let out a collective gasp.

After a few minutes, the picture went black and green Irken text scrolled up across the screen, accompanied by, what sounded to Dib, like a series of chirps, clicks, and hisses. “Um, is it supposed to be making that-”

Tak and Zim threw a sharp hiss in his direction, then went back to staring intently at the screen. When Dib quieted and listened harder, he realized the sounds came from an organic voice and had a deliberate pattern. Holy shit, it’s reading the text! This is their language!

The voice stopped and the screen froze on another set of Irken symbols.

“Oh, my…” Zim choked out, eyes still glued to the screen. “We’ve got to write that down!”

“MiMi,” Tak commanded, “my tablet.”

“Wait, what was that?” Dib asked as he watched the two aliens scramble to scribble down the symbols on the screen. “Was that guy speaking Irken? What did they say?”

“Yes,” Zim answered. “And those are coordinates to the next place we need to go.”

“You mean, I need to go,” Tak cut in. “I’m the one who uncovered the conspiracy, remember?”

Zim scowled and stomped up to her, getting in her face. “You made this my problem when you crashed at my house, drank all my gingzor, and got my base cubified.”

“Why would I ever team up with you?” she shot back.

“I’m every bit as Irken as you are,” Zim argued. “I deserve answers as much as you.”

“Will someone please tell me what that thing said?” Dib shouted. The two stopped their bickering long enough to cast him an icy stare.

“Well,” Dib growled impatiently. If these two thought they were going to force their way into his home, spill ginger ale on his couch, tell him about an intergalactic conspiracy, and not let him in on the details, they had another thing coming.

“This doesn’t concern you, human,” Zim snapped.

“You two waltzed in here expecting me to hide you form your creepy totalitarian government and let you use my lab. Unless you want me to throw you out on your ass…”

“Fine, fine,” Tak said, waving an arm dismissively. “That voice claimed to be Krislotch. He confirmed that he left the clues that lead me to discover the truth about the Control Brains. He also claims more information is waiting on a planet at those coordinates. I must go there next if I want to solve this mystery.”

“We must go there,” Zim but in.

“This is my conspiracy, Zim,” Tak growled, turning back to him. “If there are more answered waiting on that planet, I will be the one to find them.”

“Oh yeah?” he said with a smirk. “How you gonna get there? I’m the only one with a working ship.”

“Dib’s got a ship,” Gaz chimed in. She turned to Tak. “Actually, I think it’s your ship.”

“You!” Before Dib could say anything, Tak had already jumped on the coffee table and grabbed his collar. “You have my ship?!”

“Uhh…”

“Take me to her!”

[-]

“wha-wha…WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!”

They group stood in the garage and stared at the collection of barely-held-together parts, also known as Tak’s ship. Dib had to admit, his last few forays into space hadn’t exactly been smooth sailing.

“It doesn’t look like this all the time,” he tried explaining. “I’ve gotten it to work. But, you know, sometimes things happen… and when they happen, I have to convince the ship to let me fix it again.”

“And why is she blue?”

“Um… I like blue?”

“Stupid human!” Tak spat, rushing up to her ship. “You have no idea what you’ve been toying with!”

“Fine,” Dib grumbled under his breath. “Only repaired it multiple times of the last six years but whatever…”

“Ship,” Tak commanded, laying a hand on the ship’s windshield. “Respond.”

“Biosignature detected,” the ship said as it began to light up. “You are Tak.”

“Yes, yes, ship! It’s me!” she cried. Dib could almost swear there were tears in her eyes.

“Hmpf, what took you so long?”

Tak looked taken aback. “I was, uh, had a lot going on, you know? Schemes and such?”

“And you never once thought to check in on your ship?”

“When I have to eject, I thought I’d lost you forever,” Tak explained, pressing both hands on the windshield. “I never wanted to leave you behind, but I’m here now. I can take you back.”

“Hey, wait a minute…” Dib protested. He started forward, but Gaz pulled him back.

“It’s her ship, dummy.”

“And how exactly did you get here?” Ship went on.

Tak hesitated. “Well, I…”

“I knew it,” Ship huffed. “You have a new ship now, don’t you?”

“It’s not like that,” Tak insisted. “Yes, I needed a new ship to get around, but I swear, it was a simple matter of transport. That ship means nothing to me. I would trade every other ship in the universe for you.”

The ship went quiet, as if thinking it over. Dib found himself oddly captivated, like when he’d accidently get sucked into his grandmother’s soap operas. He quickly shook himself out of it. This is ridiculous. She’s talking to a ship.

“I don’t know what to believe,” Ship finally said.

“I promise, Ship, I will fix you myself and, after that, I will never even look at another ship again.” She gently caressed its side and the engines purred.

“I will allow you to repair me, for now. After that, perhaps I can allow you to pilot me again, in time.”

Tak smiled and continued to pet her ship while it continued to purr. The scene was almost sweet until Zim decided to break it up.

“Well, well, well,” Zim said, a smug smile on his face, “looks like I’m the only one here with an operational ship.”

Tak only hissed in response.

“So, I guess I’ll be taking those coordinates and be on my way,” he continued, “unless someone wants to grovel for the chance to accompany me.”

Tak stomped up to Zim and unleashed a cavalcade of Irken at him. Dib wasn’t sure what she said, but if cricket/bat/snake could cuss someone out, he imagined it’d sound something like that.

“Okay,” Zim squeaked out, looking up at Tak who now towered over him. “I suppose I could let you come, but only because you asked so nicely.”

“I’m coming too,” Dib declared.

Tak and Zim both turned to him with questioning looks on their faces. “Uh, what?” Zim said.

“I’m coming. I want to see what’s on that planet, too.”

“This doesn’t concern you, human,” Tak spat.

“Excuse me? Who’s house are you two crashing at? Who’s ancient computer did you use to get those coordinates? And who’s been keeping your ship running while you’ve been got?”

“We don’t need-” Zim started, but Dib cut him off.

“Yes you do,” he shot back. “You need my lab to get your base working again. You said so yourself. And Tak, you need my garage and my tools if you’re going to fix your ship. If you want to stay here and use my equipment, to fix your stuff, you need to let me in on the conspiracy.”

The two Irkens looked at each other intently, as if holding a telepathic conversation. Dib briefly wondered if they could communicate semi-telepathically, or at least through pheromones. They did have antenna after all.

Finally, they broke their stare down and turned back to Dib. “Fine, the Dib can come,” Zim conceded.

Dib felt a jolt of excitement jump through his body. “Yeah, Gaz and I-”

“Nope,” Gaz said, turning on her heals and heading back inside.

Okay, so no Gaz. Aw well, he could at least count on her to cover for him while he’s gone. “I will get my space travel equipment and be ready to leave within the hour.”

“Yeah, fine, whatever,” Zim said, and he and Tak headed back inside as well. Dib went further into the garage and began preparing the things he’s need for the trip.

“You’re seriously going to let him come along?” Tak asked as they walked away.

“Eh,” Zim said with a shrug. “If the Dib-worm wants to come to a dead planet where total species-wide genocide took place, let him.”

Dib let the helmet he’d been holding clang to the floor. “Wait, what?”

[chanyeolyh]

aight i’m gonna have to request that none of you look really hard at this account because it is -75% finished and it’s ugly and that’s just not my aesthetic, i swear. i’m stella and i am always late for everything and if you cannot accept that as who i am then... honestly i understand i'm tired of my shit, too. i'm bring this charismatic asshole, chanyeol, to everyone. he's difficult and it's okay if you want to fight him, i understand. message me or like this if you want to plot and i'll come knocking at your inbox door!

* — ⌜ kang1, yoon jeonghan ⌟  ↝  has anyone else seen the kang heir walking around the hill lately ? their name is CHANYEOL and they are the kang’s oldest child. they’re twenty-four and currently a graduate student and paralegal, making their parents proud, i would hope. i heard they can be very playful but lately they’ve been quite manipulative. don’t tell anyone, but someone told me he’s just like his mother. i wonder if that’s true ?

trigger warning: mention of death

∽ to be quite honest chanyeol is the time to taunt you while your parents aren’t looking and get you in trouble while smirking and sticking his tongue out behind your parents back. he’s that bad kid that parents love and compare their children to. doesn’t really really have a reason for being two-faced. blame it on his mother, after all he learnt from the most two-faced person of all. ∽ grew up with a great father (who was kinda absent in his life??? usually busy??? but chanyeol loved his dad and understood) and a not so great mother who crushed him under her expectations. kinda feel like he had it worse growing up, because at first he was the shining star and then after his younger sibling was born, he was deemed a disappointment and the other sibling was promoted for shining star. chanyeol understands. he was better and naturally talented. chanyeol was the type who had to work hard to be acknowledged. thought he’d love no longer being under his mother’s thumb, but turns out he’s a normal kid and still craved his momma’s love and attention. ∽ surprisingly, and probably to his mother’s disappointment, he’s never hated or envied any of his siblings??? even if he was no longer the favorite and his mother had pretty much written him off as “no longer the best”, he freakin’ loves his little buddies and honestly views them as the best things that happened to him??? give him big brother of the year award, will 100% kill for his siblings. ∽ do not get him wrong, he knows just how twisted he can be and is… he hates being compared to his mother, but he’s more like her than he’d ever care to admit, and he blamed her for trying to mold him into a mini her. literally was told that no one in the world mattered except himself, and people were obstacles he had to climb over and use. ∽ does his best to make sure his siblings do not end up like himself or his mother because his own dynamic is toxic and bad and being a manipulative son of a bitch is the last thing he’d want them to be. a little hypocritical because he will adamantly insist they not do something and then turn around and do it himself, but he’s already tainted so he doesn’t see it as a big deal. ∽ siblings can do no wrong in his eyes??? don’t talk bad about him or he’ll make your life hell. king of spreading rumors, but usually has a good reason as to why he’s spreading them… for furthering his own goals or revenge. yep. good fantastic reasons. ∽ the death of his father kinda made him worse??? his father was always telling him not to do this, to consider other people, etc. but he doesn’t have that influence any more and his mom??? she plays so dirty??? silently at war with her, but damn do they look like a perfect mother - son out in the public eye. his mother was probably indifferent toward him at first, however since he’s been snooping around she’s also trying to bring him down. unfortunately for her, he’s a better snake than she is. ∽ the local polite thinks he’s a bad son, however, because he straight up accused her of doing something fishy but all they saw was a heartbroken woman sobbing loudly about losing her husband. they were old and quick to jump to a damsel’s defense, so the case is closed but he’ll pry it back open with his teeth if that’s what it takes. ∽ was going to pursue a career in music (in fact graduate with a degree in music), however now he’s interested in law. doesn’t plan to be a prosecutor, however being a paralegal has its perks and he’s learnt a lot. working to become a private investigator because as long as he doesn’t get caught, he can be as dirty as he wants. ∽ has his own place, but depending on where his siblings are located (if they also live alone/with him/with their mother), he often stays at the family home to be closer to his siblings. might be a dad bit paranoid something might happen to them. but behind closed doors, his mother has begun to threaten him and the easiest way to attack would be his beloved siblings. doesn’t have a fear that their lives are in danger, but wouldn’t put it past her to try and turn them against him??? ∽ actually really likes investigating things and the prosecutor he’s a paralegal for really let’s him be hands on so he’s learnt what he can’t do, what he can do and what he can’t do but can so long as he doesn’t get caught. ∽ honestly, chanyeol is a snarky and sarcastic guy, but it’s not hard for him to make friends either??? somehow charming and affable, but it’s really hard to know whether or not to take him seriously??? also have to be mad careful what you say around him, he's very interested in drama and he will spread things around if it benefits him or he simply does not like you. :) ∽ naturally flirtatious but 95% of the time he’s just trying to have fun and doesn’t really mean anything. noncommittal af. has had maybe one or two serious relationships and in those he either broke someone’s heart or someone broke his. and yet his bedroom is a revolving door so. honestly hooks up with people as a stress reliever but at least he’s up front about it, if you catch feelings it’s not on him; he’s surprisingly against leading someone he’s sleeping with on. unfortunately, he is not against leading someone he's not sleeping with on. ∽ surprisingly playful??? likes laughing at others??? really likes riling others up, if you give him a good reaction you’re just gonna be a target for him. usually not malicious, it’s just entertaining for him. ∽ veryveryvery private. he’ll ask a hundred questions about your personal life, but his lips are sealed in regards his. cryptic af and also very flippant??? his mind can change on a dime??? ∽ confrontational??? kinda??? but more as a source of entertainment… he’s got issues. ∽ very fake. very much a chameleon in that he changes colors to fit any situation. a pathological liar, kinda??? lies a lot. ∽ kinda just a bad guy. but it’s because he has hard time opening up to others and being vulnerable??? his mom really messed him up so he’s a less put together version of her. less lethal as well, as in he’s actually capable of loving and caring about others. 

give me enemies. people who can't stand him and people he can't stand. did he start a rumor about your muse? can't stand his fake persona? someone who got in trouble as a kid or teenager? couldn't stand your parents constantly compared you to saint chanyeol? maybe he's jealous of your muse for some reason? called him out on his mommy issues and struck a nerve so now he's trying to get back at you?

give me an ex best friend who everyone was like, "if you see one, the other isn't too far behind" and then one year they were at each others throats??? why??? what happened??? no one knows, but everyone knows it had to be big.

there's a rumor going around that you're dating. ironic because the two don't even get along??? but he loves getting under your skin so he's feeding the flames and subtly suggesting that the rumor isn't baseless.

need a convincing fake boyfriend??? chanyeol volunteers for tribute, but you owe him one. :)

a best friend or two??? "chanyeol your a son of a bitch, but that's okay", you can see past the grime and know he has a heart of... well, not gold, but it's shiny! that bestie who goes out and gets drunk with him and listens to him wax poetic about his piano. probably one of few who know he actually really did love the piano.

someone who thinks he's crazy for quietly investigating his own mother??? probably doesn't have all the details on his family life, and because you're taking such a "noble" approach he can't stand you. 

general friends??? ride or dies??? partner's in crime??? friends only when drunk, anything but when sober??? soft friends he must protect??? a squad of manipulative assholes???

he doesn't do relationships and that's probably because you broke his heart. :(

absolutely no one is surprised he broke your heart, everyone told you he was bad news but you didn't listen. what happened??? do feelings linger??? or just bitterness??? does he feel bad or not???

friends with benefits. no strings attached so it's all cool. or maybe you're getting attached??? or, what the hell, he's getting attached???

you two fist fought once. and you'll do it again.

someone who wants to help him with his investigation??? honestly, he might show it, but it'd mean so much to him.

aspiring pianist or just a curious hobbyist who is bugging him to help them learn how to play??? for some reason, he just can't say no.

someone very unlikely that he has a crush on??? no one would guess he'd ever fall for this person and even he's super confused??? 

people with cute, innocent crushes on him. he'll either think it's really cute or he's about to tease the hell out of you if he finds out.

an ex, but it's complicated??? they keep coming back to each other and then swear it won't happen again. 

a childhood friend who misses the sweet boy he used to be??? chan's very uncomfortable around them because they remind him of a better version of himself and he doesn't think he can ever go back to that.

need a rumor spread about someone??? go to chan. i will literally have him spread it in threads.

rivals!!! for any reason. 

a good influence that is soft and nice to him and brings out his sincere smiles!!!

you dislike one of his siblings and he's just Not about that??? or maybe he likes you but you hate his sibling(s) so he's conflicted??? to be friends or not to be???

idk really anything

i'll make a sexy list of sexily written plots when i get this mess of a blog under control

i'll also do a stats and bio pages

forgive me i am slow and lazy

[softspideys]

Supernova (Part II) (Peter Parker x reader)

summary: you’re the newest recruit to the avengers. the problem is, no one is quite sure of what your powers are yet.

warnings: none

word count: 1.4k

pairing: peter parker x reader

a/n: thanks for reading everyone! now that there’s a lot of detail/plot set up, we can move on to meeting peter in the next chapter. hope you enjoy :) feedback and reblogs are always welcome!

The next few weeks of your life seemed to pass by in a blur, giving you barely any time to think or breathe. One second everything was normal, and then the next it had changed so radically you almost felt like an imposter, living in someone else’s shoes.

You knew the adoption process was a tedious and lengthy one, and often took weeks, months, or even longer to place someone with a family. But you quickly found out, not for the last time, that as soon as the name Tony Stark got thrown into the mix things instantly sped up. You walked out of your foster home the next day with him as your legal guardian.

You made the drive up to the Avengers Compound with him, his ironically-named driver Happy, and Black Widow herself (who insisted on being called Nat). They left you alone for most of it, seeming to sense how overwhelmed you were.

As someone who had grown up entirely in the city and never even ventured past Woodlawn, you were enthralled, gazing out the window at the rolling hills and trees that passed. Sometimes you went for miles without seeing any houses or buildings, and the concept was mind-boggling. The sky was clear and blue, and aside from the radio softly playing up front, there was no noise. This was where you’d be living now.

Although you knew you were going to miss the constant movement of New York, your favorite bodega and the different sounds and smells, you knew you were heading to something different, something better.

When Happy turned off the main rode and began to pull down a long driveway, you straightened up, looking out the window. You were surprised to see a group of people standing in front of the entrance to the compound. “What’s going on?” you asked.

“That’ll be the welcoming crew, I expect,” Tony said from the passenger seat.

“That’s for me?” you said, hardly able to believe your eyes.

“Let’s just say this has been a long time coming,” Nat said with a wry smile. “Everyone’s very excited.”

“Do they know I can’t do anything?”

“Yet,” Tony said, turning around to look at you. “Can’t do anything yet. And that’s not the point.”

You sat back in your seat, swallowing hard. Happy stopped the car and the three of them got out, but you remained where you were, clutching your suitcase to your chest. Tony was the first to notice, and you saw him gesture to the others to go on ahead.

He came around to your side of the car and opened the door. “This hardly seems more interesting than what’s out there,” he said.

“I didn’t think I’d be meeting everybody today,” you said quietly. “I’m just . . . I’m not sure I’m ready yet. I’m sorry.” You looked down at your lap.

There was a pause, and then Tony squatted down so you were almost eye-level. “Hey. Look at me.” Reluctantly, you did. “We can sit out here for the rest of the week if it’s what you want. I mean, I’ve got some meetings tomorrow and I know dinner is already on the table, but—” You laughed weakly at this, “—if that’s what it takes, then that’s fine. When you go, I go. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I know this is a lot. But we’re not really that scary, I promise. Well, maybe Romanoff is. But everyone else? Big softies. As long as you don’t pose a threat to international security, then we’ll like you.”

You nodded. You took a few more deep breaths before handing Tony your suitcase and unbuckling your seatbelt. He clapped you on the shoulder and led you over to where everyone was waiting.

Part of you couldn’t believe that this was actually happening, that you were even meeting the Avengers, much less joining them. The other part of you was confused to see how normal they looked in street clothes.

The first person to greet you was a tall, handsome blond man you’d recognize anywhere. He shook your hand with a strong, purposeful grip. “Hello,” he said. “It’s so nice to finally meet you.”

“Captain,” you managed to stammer, trying not to think about the picture of him that you’d kept in your diary when you were younger. “It’s nice to meet you too.”

He’d laughed, flashing rows of bright, perfect teeth. “Please. Call me Steve.”

“Yeah, that’s Steve and he’s perfect,” another man butted in, rolling his eyes. “I’m Sam.”

For the next few minutes, you shook about a dozen hands as everyone introduced themselves, even though you knew all of them anyway. Pepper, Rhodey, Bruce, Clint, Bucky, Scott, Carol, Thor, Wanda, Vision. You learned that not all of them lived there full-time, but had made the trip to the compound just to see you.

“Where’s the kid?” Tony asked as you tried not to stare at Thor’s muscles.

“He’s coming up tomorrow,” Steve said.

Tony rolled his eyes. “Figures. I told him to be here today.” To you, he said, “Parker is the only one missing, but you’ll meet him sooner or later. That’s Spider-Man, by the way.”

You’d always had a special interest in Spider-Man, considering you were both from New York. It was impossible to watch an episode of the nightly news without seeing him on it in some form or another. The fact that you were going to meet him and learn his real identity was thrilling.

“Does he live here full-time, too?” you asked.

“No,” Steve said. “He’s out in Queens during the week, but he usually comes up to train on the weekends. Good kid.”

That didn’t tell you much about him, since Steve was the type to call everyone kid regardless of their age. You didn’t have time to dwell on it, though, because then Pepper said, “Do you want to see your new room?”

Truth be told, this was the part you were looking forward to the most. You’d never had a room of your own, always sharing with whatever foster siblings you were living with. You didn’t even care how big it was; just having a space of your own was good enough.

“Can I?” you said eagerly. She laughed.

“Of course. We’ll let you put your things away and get settled.”

You followed her into the compound, trying to take in the dozens of massive, spacious rooms as you walked down the hall. Pepper gave you a vague tour, saying things like, “This is the movie theater,” “That’s the small training gym–the big one is on the other side,” etc.

Finally, she turned down another hallway. “Carol, Natasha, and Wanda’s bedrooms are in this wing. Carol doesn’t use hers often, but the other girls will be around,” she said, stopping in front of a door. “This one’s yours.” She opened it and let you go inside first.

It was pretty big, with a full-sized bed pushed up against the wall and a desk on the opposite side. You could see a walk-in closet, and there was a big window that looked out over the grounds. It was perfect.

“We figured you would want to decorate it on your own,” Pepper said, gesturing to the bare walls and plain comforter that covered the bed. “But if you’d like, we can go shopping for some things.”

You weren’t sure if you could even speak, so you just nodded. She smiled, rubbing your shoulder. “Things are going to be different now,” she said. “This is yours. No one is going to take it away from you. Okay?”

Taking a deep breath, you managed to say, “Thank you, Ms. Potts.”

“Call me Pepper,” she said. “Dinner should be ready soon. You’re welcome to eat with all of us, but if you want to spend some time alone and unpack, that’s perfectly fine too.”

“No, I’ll eat with everybody,” you said quickly. Most of them had made the trip down to see you, so it was the least you could do. Besides, you’d have plenty of time to scope out your surroundings later anyway.

“Wonderful. We’ve got a few minutes, so I’ll just come get you when it’s time.” You nodded gratefully and she left, shutting the door behind her.

You exhaled, staring first at the large room in front of you, then at your small suitcase that had all your possessions. Unpacking was going to be a breeze. Through your window, you couldn’t see everyone, but you could still hear them talking.

You listened to the mixture of their voices, from Tony and Steve’s good-natured back-and-forth, to the low, amused rumble of Thor’s, to the sharp laughter of Natasha’s. You could smell something delicious coming from somewhere in the compound, probably dinner.

Part of you couldn’t believe that this was going to be the rest of your life. The other part was just glad that you were finally home.  

[michelles-garden-of-evil]

Ian Martin’s Strange Paradise, Part II: The Top 5 Worst Things

Last week, I listed my top five favorite things about the first 44 episodes of Strange Paradise, when Ian Martin was headwriter and when the show had a very different feel to it than in the final four weeks of the Maljardin arc. But no creative work is perfect, and, despite my fondness for this show, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think that the writing for early Maljardin had several glaring flaws. Unlike Danny Horn, I don’t think that Ron Sproat was a better writer than Martin (actually, I consider Sproat the worst writer on SP), but that doesn’t mean that I don’t also feel that his writing needed some improvement. Note that this entry is specifically about the writing during this period, so things outside his creative control (e.g. the Conjure Man’s questionable casting) will be excluded from the list.

That said, here are my top five least favorite things about the writing in the first nine weeks of Strange Paradise:

5. Cheesy dialogue

More specifically, (1) bad jokes and (2) slang that was already outdated when these episodes originally aired in 1969. This one is #5 because, while these lines are cheesy, I can’t hate them because most of them make me laugh. Even my personal least favorite of Jacques’ jokes, the “pose” line from Episode 18, is kind of funny in an ironic, anti-humor sort of way, like the dad jokes that have become fashionable in recent years. While there are some jokes in this show that I find genuinely funny--Elizabeth’s Song of Solomon joke, for instance, or “the lady doth detest too much”--most others are the epitome of cornball. Sometimes you hear both in the same episode: Episode 21 is loaded with Devil jokes/puns that would be unforgivably corny if Colin Fox didn’t possess enough charisma to sell them, and yet the same episode also features a genuinely hilarious double entendre. The good jokes sneak up on you, sometimes amidst a hurricane of bad ones.

As for the slang, some comments that I’ve read mention that it was largely out of date even in the late sixties. My good friend Steve (with whom I often discuss SP) has told me that “you might not be aware of how campy that slang sounded in 1969 since you obviously did not live through the Sixties--this happened with a lot of TV shows during that period, the most egregious examples being the various ‘evil druggie Hippie’ episodes of DRAGNET.” Apparently Martin became infamous for using outdated slang later on when he wrote for CBS Radio Mystery Theater, putting lines like “I dig a man who’s far-out!” and “I think bein’ around here’s gonna be kicks!” in the mouths of some of his younger characters. Even if he had used up-to-date slang, it most likely would have still aged poorly (as slang typically does), especially for generations born after phrases like “the most” and “making the ___ scene” fell out of use.

4. Slow pace and excessive repetition

This one is also low on the list, because slow pace and repetition weren’t flaws when the show originally aired, but instead have aged poorly because of advances in technology that made them unnecessary. Before the advent of the programmable VCR, you had to be able to catch the program you wanted to watch on time or have someone you knew catch it on time and record it--which, in 1969, would have meant an audio-only tape recording. This meant that only the most fortunate and/or most loyal viewers would have been able to watch Strange Paradise every day, making it necessary to recap all the major events in subsequent episodes for those who missed out. This is also likely the reason why early SP (like most soaps of the time) has a relatively slow pace: if too much happens in one episode, you have to recap more and the people who missed the big episode are more disappointed.

Nowadays, with DVRs, video streaming, and DVD sets--not to mention certain legally-questionable means--it’s nearly impossible to miss an episode of your favorite show (with few exceptions), making extensive recap largely obsolete. Screenwriters can cram as many plot points as they want into one episode and no longer have to write five episodes of the other characters reacting to the news if they don’t want to.

Even so, just because the constant recap served a function at the time doesn’t mean I have to like it. It gets annoying hearing the same plot points reiterated episode after episode. Like I said while reviewing Episode 21, “if someone were to remake this show for Netflix or another streaming service, they could safely ignore about 75 percent of the original scripts and condense the remaining 25 percent quite a bit without omitting anything important.”

And don’t even get me started on the lampshading of absent cast members, like in Episode 9 when Jean Paul and Quito wasted two minutes searching for Raxl just to slow the plot down. It’s nothing compared to Ron Sproat’s “we must search for Quito” filler episode in Desmond Hall (Episode 78), but still, those scenes were pointless.

3. Extreme artistic license with certain historical/cultural details

Although Ian Martin did a surprising amount of research on certain subjects for Strange Paradise, there are some subjects where he either didn’t do enough research, or (more likely) made extensive use of artistic license. The first one is his portrayal of Jacques’ wife Huaco as an Inca princess despite their marriage occurring over a century after the fall of the Inca Empire. I discussed this all the way back in Part II of my review of the pilot, where I invented the theory of Jacques traveling back in time to marry her, but other possible explanations include Huaco being a 17th-century descendant of Inca royalty (as the Quechua people are still alive today), extreme artistic license, and/or critical research failure. I don’t know if we would have eventually gotten a good explanation if Martin had continued writing the series, but we would need a damn good one for the approximate equivalent of having a 21st-century character marry the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief and accept it considering that this is a fantasy series, but it still creates a lot of plot holes that need to be filled.[1]

Another example of artistic license about which I feel more ambivalent is the conflation of voodoo with the Aztec-inspired indigenous religion of Maljardin, which I’ve discussed before both in my Episode 23 review and Part I of this post series. I’m not sure if this is genius--religious syncretism is a real phenomenon throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, and some people today do syncretize the vodou Serpent God with Quetzalcoatl--or just an instance of Martin playing fast and loose with facts. I would like to think it’s the former, but it could just as easily be the latter (hence why I referenced it on both lists--I have mixed feelings about it).

2. Annoying inconsistencies

Does Raxl know that Jean Paul is possessed by Jacques Eloi des Mondes? Does Vangie? Why does Jacques’ portrait disappear in some episodes after he possesses Jean Paul, but not in others? All three of these things vary from episode to episode, and change annoyingly often as the plot demands. Steve and I have also discussed this subject in the past, and he believes that Martin used this device to make the story easier to follow; if that’s the case, it appears that he used Raxl and Vangie as audience surrogates, especially for new viewers or people who didn’t tune in every day. But surely there were other ways to do that without creating continuity errors? It may have served a function, but that doesn’t make it good writing. What Martin is essentially doing is filling and reopening the same plothole, episode after episode.

Regarding the portrait, I don’t know how much to blame Martin’s scripts for this inconsistency and how much to blame the directors, as I don’t have access to any SP scripts beyond the pilot script and the Vignettes. However, I’m going to assume that he’s at least partially to blame, because at least the pilot script mentions the disappearing portrait (which literally disappears in all three of the Paperback Library novels), Also, while none of the characters ever mention the portrait vanishing (unlike in the tie-in novels), some of his episodes have characters looking at it while Jacques is controlling Jean Paul and commenting on the uncanny resemblance. See also the diegesis tag for more discussion and analysis of the disappearing portrait.

1. Tim’s subplot

It should surprise none of my regular readers that Tim’s subplot is my #1 least favorite thing about the first nine weeks of Maljardin. I’ve already written an entire post about why I dislike this subplot, so I’ll keep my discussion of it here brief. Jean Paul saves the life of artist Tim Stanton when he hires him to paint Erica’s portrait, but then does nothing to make the commission easy for him--which is not a bad set-up for a plot in and of itself, but the execution is terrible. Tim chooses to use Holly as his model despite her barely resembling Erica, and Martin mostly uses their subsequent interactions to drive the old, tired, clichéd plot where two people who bicker and hate each other at first eventually fall in love (or at least he appears to be setting that up[2]). The payoff for the Holly portrait subplot finally occurs in Episode 33, but it’s underwhelming (not to mention barely recapped) and the already bland Tim quickly becomes a background character. In short, his subplot is a boring waste of time and should have either had more payoff or--preferably--been scrapped altogether.

That concludes my list of the worst things about Ian Martin’s Strange Paradise. Stay tuned for my review of Episode 45 within the next two weeks.

{<- Previous: The Top 5 Best Things }

Note

[1] Interestingly, there is a possible (if unlikely) historical explanation for Huaco’s sister Rahua having “skin as white as goat’s milk” and “hair like ripened wheat.” An early Spanish account of the Chachapoya people (aka Cloud People) of the Northern Andes describe them as “the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen, and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas’ wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple.” Assuming the Spanish account isn’t made up, this proves that reality is sometimes unrealistic.

[2] Thankfully, given the soap opera genre, it’s unlikely that Tim and Holly would have stayed together forever, even if they had eventually fallen in love during their painting-and-bickering sessions. Even so, that doesn’t make it a good subplot.

[x0401x]

Hi there! Just want to thank you so much for translating for the VE fandom! I've been looking through your VE posts and noticed you mentioned how anime!Gil is completely different from LN!Gil. I agree with you and was wholeheartedly disappointed in the anime. I was hoping you could elaborate more on your thoughts, where you thought anime!Gil and anime!Violet went wrong and how they were different from the anime. Sorry if you've already made a post on this previously. Thanks again!

Hi! You’re welcome!

This reply took me long enough, lol. I haven’t gone too much into detail, or else I’d just end up writing a bible. It still turned out long as hell, though, so I’ve put it under a cut.

I really didn’t know how to begin with this. “Where they went wrong” kinda implies that those two were going right until some point, and that’s just… not the case. They were a trainwreck from start to finish. And it’s kind of impossible to really discuss this without touching upon the massive fails in the writing of the entire show. It does try to convey important messages to the viewers, but mostly with visuals and repetitive lines, never with the actual plot or the characters. You get an inkling of what the story was attempting to do with them, and that initial idea is what seems to stay with most people, because there’s nearly nothing beyond it.

As director Ishidate has stated more than once before, he made changes to the story because he thought the novel was, in his words, “too orthodox”. But watering it down meant watering the characters down too, Gil and Violet more than anyone else. And this results in a show that ironically fails to grasp its own themes and cast — the personalities and conflicts get lost in the details and have to be patched up with excuses that end up displaying how little the show trusts its own audience. It keeps spelling out plot devices and character traits in an almost robotic manner, with very scarce effort put into actually showcasing them in the situations and dialogues. Everyone is too one-dimensional and the main plot line is repeated over and over instead of being alluded in parallels or even just slightly more intelligent exchanges. Animators like Ishidate have grown dangerously used to committing a grave narrative suicide: to give vague and unconvincing reasons for things to be the way they are and expect the audience to take it all as is simply because it was stated there. Everything is oversimplified because they clearly want the viewers to get invested in the emotional baggage of the show, and only the emotional baggage, because they think that’s all we get invested on. They forget that details are necessary for the whole experience.

These problems are recurrent in Violet and Gil, and they never stop. I’ll start with Gil, since he was mentioned first.

Gilbert Bougainvillea is a very complex, humane and multi-faceted character in the novel. What’s interesting is that he doesn’t look like it at first, so he surprised many readers in volume 1 with how caring and endearing he can be. And I mean caring for real. Anime!Gil seemed like a poor excuse for what he was supposed to represent, which in turn made him into a walking contradiction. In the novel, Gil is by far the person that emphasizes the most with Violet, because the two of them are two sides of the same coin. This is where the anime falls short most frequently. They at first look like polar-opposites, but are absolutely not, yet the show portrays them as such. Novel!Gil is gratuitously kind and righteous, and he’s brave and pure-hearted enough to stand by his values no matter what. He’s used to giving up everything for the sake of other people, but he has morals that he holds to the roots of his very being, so he always chooses to donate himself to what he deems as good causes. And once he has his mind set on an objective, he doesn’t mind playing dirty to achieve it, as long as he’s not hurting anyone. That’s exactly the same as Violet, and Gil isn’t the only one who sees himself in her — Hodgins and Dietfried also notice how alike the two are. Novel!Gil relates to Violet on a spiritual level, and he knows first-hand how she must feel. He’s been there and done that. And that’s why she’s his number one priority. His purpose in life is to protect her and keep her in a healthy lifestyle within a blessed working environment and a loving family. Quite literally, all he wants is to make sure that she’s happy, and he’s active and vocal about it. He’s also an unapologetic and unabashed feminist, so he completely approves of her doing anything for a living — she doesn’t need to live her life like an ordinary woman and whatever she wants for herself is fine, as long as it’s not too dangerous.

Apparently, his personality is one of the book aspects that Ishidate believed to be “too orthodox”. He depicts Gil the way you’d expect any male creator to depict a man — a brooding martyr figure who only has a heart of gold in fleeting moments that get replayed again and again in flashbacks to serve as justification for Violet’s undying love. He makes very little strides and there’s a lot of flawed reasoning behind his affection that makes it oddly disconnected, which is the fact that said affection is barely ever there. Gil hardly treats Violet like a person, let alone an equal. Violet is ready to give her life for him anytime, and as we see in the last battle at Intense, he’s ready to cling onto that to save his own life. Ishidate doesn’t shy away from making very evident that he thinks it’s okay for Gil to do only the minimum to earn Violet’s respect and trust, like it’s a given and all he’s required in order to earn her love is to exist. This is very visible in scenes like the one where they first met. Gil seems to shield Violet from the abuse of his brother, but shows next to no distress or even interest over it as he doesn’t even question where she came from or why Dietfried was treating her that way. There’s also the scene where he takes her to one of his family’s residences, and she has his jacket on, just like in the novel… yet he’s letting her walk barefoot in the snow without giving a single flying fuck. He then leaves her side as soon as he instructs the maid what to do with her, not looking back. I also hate that scene where he gets back home and she bumps into him and falls on her butt. He just stares at her and makes no effort to help her back up. But the one I hate the most is that festival scene where he nearly thanks Violet for fighting so well in battle. I mean, she’s killing people for him. She, a literal child, is in the frontlines of a long-lasting war, risking her life and committing mass murder for his sake. That’s literally nothing to be grateful for. Especially not when he’s supposed to love her. And I despise that he only stopped himself from finishing the phrase because he noticed the bruises on her.

Another major defect of the anime was changing Gil’s backstory. Anime!Gil was, by the looks of it, just a rich kid who enlisted simply because that’s the family tradition. And if you take away Gil’s backstory, you take away the viewers’ reason to empathize with him. Why? Because that means he’s morphed into someone who can make choices. Erase any factor that binds Gil to doing what his family and his superiors make him do, and what you have is a grown man with his free will intact. And he uses none of it to help Violet. Anime!Gil was always given the opportunity to say no. He could’ve said no to Dietfried and sent Violet straight to the Evergardens, he could’ve said no to his superior officer and not taken her into the military, or he could’ve at least said no to assigning her to the men’s troops. He didn’t because there would be no story otherwise. Novel!Gil is always attempting to save Violet from the war and from herself, while anime!Gil’s actions beg to differ. And so, anime!Violet’s obsession with Gil stems from the fact that he was the first to treat her remotely like a human being and that, for a long time, he was all she had. None of that fate thing, because it’s also “too orthodox”. But without the fate element and without Gil having no control whatsoever over how he feels about Violet, he’s straight-up a pedophile. If he feels regular romantic love for Violet, who is in her mid-teens, that’s pedophilia right there. This one is my biggest beef with anime!Gil, and I don’t take criticism for it.

Now Violet. Not to be rude, but I see so many people talk about how interesting her anime counterpart is, yet I rarely ever see anyone going in-depth on it. It’s like the way the fans talks about the show. Literally every single person who comments that they liked it always says the exact same thing: “I cried during every episode”. I sort of feel like most of them are just reproducing what they see other people say out there, which is probably what got them interested in watching it in the first place. I don’t mean this with ill-intent; it’s just seriously the impression I get from looking at the tag. I’ve accompanied it since the novel came out all the way back in 2015, and when the show was running, believe it or not, I didn’t really see much of those comments. It started becoming a habit to say it after episode 10, which seems to be the highest-rating episode (the irony being that it was the closest the anime ever got to the novels). Hence why it feels to me like some people just say it on automatic, and I get the same vibe from the fans of anime!Violet.

I’ll just be blunt here: the main difference between anime!Violet and canon!Violet is that canon!Violet was made to be liked by girls and women, and anime!Violet was made to be liked by men. I have already said this before, but Violet is the very definition of independent professional woman in the novel. She’s educated, confident, strong, reliable, altruistic and overall well-versed in at least a little bit of everything. Half of it is due to luck and half of it is her own merits, but all in all, she was created not just to be relatable but also a character that people could look up to. Meanwhile, anime!Violet was clearly made to be waifubait.

I can’t really stress how little thought was actually put into her portrayal and development. We never truly see her internalizing the lessons that she supposedly learns in each of the self-contained episodes. We only ever witness her displaying sudden significant hints of emotion at convenient times, paired to her either repeating what she was told earlier by one of the characters or taking an extremely obvious conclusion to a question that was already half-answered by someone else. Because of this, Violet’s growth process has an unsteady pacing in the anime and mostly feels disjointed. In comparison, novel!Violet is usually not the point of view — she’s often in the role of observer, and we notice through the solutions she comes up with for her clients’ issues that she does have a very humane connection with them. We also notice through the clients’ opinions on Violet that she shows subtle changes at certain specific points, such as smiling just a little when she manages to not only accomplish her duties but also help solve their problems. This makes her more real and believable because, unlike the anime, it presents no abrupt alteration to the essence of her person. She’s growing in her own way, but it’s still easy to tell. It’s also very clever to have Violet be disliked or misunderstood by her clients at first because she’s so aloof and apathetic-looking, but then she grows on them after they actually understand her, and the readers can absorb that from them. I’ve seen many people complain that they can’t really empathize with anime!Violet, but in the novel, the author takes care not to let this happen, and it really doesn’t.

What upsets me the most is that anime!Violet is overly infantilized. We all know that director Ishidate loves her like a father loves a daughter; it’s been said by himself and his colleagues quite a lot. That’s cute and all, but it made her depiction extremely shallow. The biggest problem was making her 14 in the anime. I still struggle to understand what would’ve been so bad with keeping her as a 17-year-old. Sum that up with removing many of her merits and adding forceful childish traits, such as being okay with changing clothes anywhere in front of anyone or pouting when she’s frustrated, and you have the perfect recipe of what waifu junkies like to be spoon-fed with. In my opinion, anime!Violet was a downgraded tragic heroine played in a cheap and boring way to attract tearjerker lovers.

I hope this has covered enough of my take on the matter. ✌️

[mst3kproject]

Exo-Man

Failed series pilots were very much part of MST3K’s stock in trade.  We’ve sat through San Francisco International, Stranded in Space, Code Name: Diamond Head and I’m sure there were others.  I generally recall all of those movies being kind of dull and lacking in personality, and I can’t imagine this 70’s superhero mess being much better.  I don’t think anybody in Exo-Man was ever on MST3K but Jose Ferrer (the first Latino actor to win an academy award, for 1950’s Cyrano de Bergerac) was once in a movie called Zoltan, Hound of Dracula, which I am deeply remiss in not having seen yet.  You may also recognize Harry Morgan, who was Colonel Potter on M*A*S*H.

Dr. Nick Conrad is a wacky physics professor of the type nobody has ever encountered in real life.  He’s somehow both smart enough to invent anti-gravity and memory plastic, and stupid enough to chase after a fleeing would-be bank robber.  The latter stunt, set to wakka-chicka Mitchell music, makes Nick the target of a mafia assassin, who kills his lab assistant and leaves Nick himself paralyzed from the waist down.  He wallows in self-pity for a while, but then rediscovers his passion for invention and builds himself a suit of armor that will allow him to walk again… and to take on the mob single-handedly.

I don’t know why they called the movie Exo-Man.  That name is never used in the dialogue.  I guess the more accurate Fiberglass Avenger just wouldn’t have sounded as cool.

The first thing you’re likely to notice from the plot summary is that Nick’s story starts off as Dr. Strange and then takes a hard left into Iron Man.  I’m pretty sure the latter at least was an intentional ripoff, with bits of the first thrown in, knowingly or not, to distance Exo-Man from Marvel’s lawyers. What’s funny is that posterity has actually made it a hat trick: the movie opens with a weirdly homoerotic jogging scene, so now he gets to be Captain America, too!

Exo-Man is a really stupid, often boring, and consistently ugly movie.  The actors are mediocre, the music bland, the effects terrible, and stuff is made to look ‘high tech’ by sticking lots of blinky lights on it.  Way too much time passes before we get to the action and when we do, we find a deep pit of disappointment.  Yet at the same time… I kind of enjoyed it.

A major part of why has got to be the incredibly dopey super-suit the main character wears, which looks less like ‘Iron Man’ and more like ‘Fiberglass Commando Cody’.  It moves really slowly and I doubt the guy in the costume can see very much.  Nick controls the bottom half of it using switches on one sleeve, which appear to have simple functions like ‘sit’, ‘walk’, and ‘jump’ (there is, of course, no ‘run,’ because nothing happens fast in this movie). He puts the thing on by lying down in what looks like a tanning bed (or maybe one of those contraptions from Avatar).  My personal favourite is the warning light labeled malfuntion.

All this is in a movie that sometimes manages to be surprisingly subtle.  We are introduced to Nick while jogging, we watch him play tennis with his girlfriend, and see him maintain this exercise regime even while he’s supposed to be under police protection.  These shots are in brilliant sunshine, and the camerawork is as active as the subjects. Post-injury, Nick never outwardly complains about his inability to participate in sports, but we now see him sitting in his wheelchair in dark surroundings, with the camera held perfectly still.  We feel that he has lost something he loved dearly, and we never need to be told it outright.

We are also introduced to Nick as somebody who is devored to furthering minorities.  His two lab assistants are an east Asian student and a Jewish one (the latter identified as such by a surname, rather than appearance), and the reason he was at the bank was to help a Latino student get a loan.  Again, the script trusts the audience to get this without having to draw attention to it through dialogue.  These minority characters are, of course, still just accessories to Nick’s story. The Jewish guy in particular is there to be fridged – its his death that leads to Nick flaunting his police protection and getting hurt.  But the effort was made to say that minority rights are important to Nick, without hitting us over the head with it.

Theme-wise, Exo-Man is about a man coming to terms with a disability.  I should preface this by saying that I am not disabled, so my perspective is necessarily biased.  If anything I say below is offensive, that is out of ignorance, and please let me know so that I may edit or delete the review and do better next time.  I was actually pretty impressed by how the script and director handled the life-changing nature of Nick’s injury… mostly.  I’ll start with the bad stuff.

The attack on Nick comes with a heaping helping of victim blaming.  As an important witness in the bank robbery, he was offered police protection.  The assassin tries to get around this by putting a bomb in his car, but one of the lab assistants borrows the car for a late-night pizza run, and gets killed in Nick’s stead.  This leads Nick to deliberately place himself in a vulnerable position, hoping to draw the killer out for capture and punishment.  In the hospital with a broken back, Nick blames the police for failing to protect him, but I’m pretty sure the movie wants us to think that this is really Nick’s own fault.  Like the tragic accident victims in Days of our Years, he has nobody to blame for his own misery, or that of his loved ones, except himself.

After that, however, the movie’s treatment of Nick’s disability improves quickly.  His girlfriend Emily leaves him, but that’s not because he’s in a wheelchair, it’s because he’s too busy wallowing in self-pity to even let her into his apartment. Later when he apologizes to her, she takes him back and they resume their happy relationship, and the fact that they can’t play tennis together anymore is not an issue.  She does not treat him as something to be pitied, she speaks to him on his eye level, and they avoid that weird trope of having the abled partner sit in the wheelchair-user’s lap.  Emily loves who Nick is, not what he can do.  His colleagues and students, likewise, treat him with respect and help him with his chair, and never make the latter feel like a burden.

By the end of the film Nick has come to terms with his disability.  The suit he’s built is not a cure for his condition: in fact the first time he wears it out, it breaks down and he needs help getting back to his high-tech armored van.  It’s a tool he has built for a purpose, and he doesn’t feel the need to wear it in non-superhero situations.  Based on what we see, he could have built a legs-only version to wear under his trousers and let him go jogging and play tennis again, but that is no longer who Nick is.  And when and whether to wear the suit is always Nick’s own choice, not something imposed on him from the outside.

Of course, it would also be really helpful in later maintaining Exo-Man’s secret identity, and I suspect the writers were thinking of that a lot more than they were of things like parents forcing questionable ‘cures’ on disabled children.  The secret identity probably would have been a big deal if the pilot had sold, but in this stand-alone story, I thought the suit worked well as a metaphor about a disabled man at peace with himself.

Exo-Man also takes a quick little peek at the morality of vigilante justice, although this comes in pretty late and clearly isn’t something they wanted to get into in any detail.  The first person Nick confronts in the suit is the assassin who actually beat him up. He says he didn’t go into this encounter with any real plan… perhaps he just wanted to scare the guy.  What ultimately happens is that the assassin climbs a drainpipe to get away from the terrifying robot man, the pipe comes off the wall, and the man falls to his death.  Nick feels this is his fault, and so the next time he takes the suit out he does so with a particular goal in mind: he wants to capture the mob boss and provide evidence of his wrongdoing to the police, not to kill anyone.

The mob boss’ name, by the way, is Kermit Haas, which is probably the least intimidating name a movie has ever given to its big bad.

Would that work?  Is evidence a guy in a robot suit left in your dumpster for you admissible in court?  Isn’t where stuff was found kind of important?  I honestly have no idea and I’m not sure how to go about finding out.  People might wonder why I want to know and I don’t think saying it’s for my blog would allay their suspicions.

At the end of Exo-Man, I was more entertained than not, but mostly on the level of laughing at the dumb-looking suit and appreciating the fine art of ripping off comic book characters.  If that’s your kind of thing then this movie ought to put the fun in malfuntion for you. If that’s not your thing, well… this is an MST3K blog.  What are you doing here?

[littlepurinsesu]

V Watches MagiReco - Episode 13 Review

*Spoilers for Magia Record Anime Episode 13*

(This review will focus on Episode 13 only. I will be writing a separate review for the anime season as a whole!)

I have so many mixed feelings about this episode that I honestly don’t even know where to start LOL xD There are some parts that I hated and some that I loved, and so many reactions ranging from “WTH WAS THAT?!?” to “UH OKAY...” to “OMG YASSSSS!!!!!”

I’ll going to try my best to unpack my thoughts as coherently as possible, but this review will probably still end up being the most incoherent of them all because of all my mixed feelings for all the changes the anime made xD

To start, Mifuyu is definitely more antagonistic in the anime compared to what I remember of her in the game lol. And honestly I feel cheated that they always seem to tease us with some kind of confrontation between Yachiyo and Mifuyu, but the latter always summons that giant moon and escapes before anything can happen. It’s honestly a little anti-climactic and a bit of a waste, what with all the tension they’ve been building between these two, but then again, it doesn’t really happen in the game, either, so I guess it’s not really the anime’s fault for not “delivering” haha :P

Alright, since I’m going in chronological order, may as well get the biggest disappointment out of the way first: Iroha and Yachiyo’s argument. I don’t think I can even begin to put into words how utterly disappointed I was with this part, seeing as it was one of the most crucial plot points in the game and definitely one of Iroha’s most shining moments. Firstly, the way Yachiyo revealed her wish lacked emotion and impact for me. The music didn’t even change, and there was no sense of this being the revelation of a huge secret/mystery that the story has kept under wraps all this time. At least they added a nice flashback sequence to show Yachiyo’s past and the reasoning behind her wish, rather than having it all just come out of her mouth verbally, so props to them for that, but I was still quite unimpressed with the way they went about this pivotal moments.

Next up in my complaints is the Rumour. I was so, so, so ready to see my girl Iroha finally standing up and holding her own in a battle, especially considering how weak she’s been portrayed throughout the past 12 episodes. I was expecting an intense fight with the Rumour--some struggle, some more determination, anything. But no, another case of what I call the “one-shot curse”. Iroha literally just ran up to the Rumour, aimed her arrow, shot, and BAM it’s gone. One of the most crucial battles in the story lasted about 20 seconds in total (yes, I was so petty and pissed off that I went back and counted lmao), and the way Iroha suddenly “powered up” so drastically made no logical sense to me at all. We never even saw her gradually increase in power or fighting capability throughout the story so far. Heck, she’s hardly even done anything in the past battles, and suddenly she can one-shot a Rumour all by herself? How. Pray tell, how.

And the final major complaint that follows on from this chain of unhappy ranting: Iroha and Yachiyo solidifying their friendship. I did like the way the screen melted away to reveal Iroha standing in front of Yachiyo, almost like a mirror image. Sadly, that’s the only thing I liked about it LOL. Iroha getting angry at Yachiyo was such an important development and such a huge moment for our protagonist, but here it just... doesn’t happen? She’s still the same smiling and gentle Iroha we always knew. Which is nice and all, but in my opinion, we really needed to see kindhearted and soft-spoken Iroha truly snap. We needed to see Iroha speak up and tell Yachiyo to cut her bs and to declare herself the leader. And the way Yachiyo accepts so quickly and hardly even tries to put up an argument is just... I don’t even know what to say anymore apart from constantly question why they had to rush so many crucial moments, to the point where they had zero emotional impact. I often wonder if I’d still have these complaints if I didn’t play the game and have expectations of how I wanted/wished/expected certain things to be adapted. So I dunno, maybe I wouldn’t have a problem with these things at all if I went into the anime blind ^^;;

Oh, and another thing that made zero sense to me was how Iroha went from being perfectly normal to unable to walk or talk within the span of about two seconds. Logically, I get that she probably used up too much magic one-shot-ing that Rumour just before, but they could’ve at least had her show some signs of physical strain during her talk with Yachiyo so that the sudden transition of her physical state doesn’t feel so abrupt and out of nowhere. I guess this is a minor detail that I can let slide, but it just reminds the viewer again and again of the problems that come with rushing. And rushing for what? Well...

The second half of the episode is an obvious answer. They were clearly rushing these game-story moments to fill up the rest of the episode with anime-original content. And while I’m still bitter at what the cost was, I will ironically say that the second half of this week’s episode had some very pleasant and interesting surprises! (Apologies for all the salt and negativity so far ^^;; Finally, onto the positives!)

I’d been wondering for a while if we were going to meet Holy Mami this week, even though the anime had already established Mami as a member of the Wings of Magius earlier on. And I did genuinely like the way they portrayed Mami in this scene. She legitimately looks out of her mind at some points, and it’s clear that the truth about Magical Girls has taken a huge toll on her mentally. Her mini battle with Yachiyo was short but sweet, with lots of nice movements and imagery, especially this shot right here:

The ribbon concealing her eyes and her Soul Gem (aka her soul and her actual self) is a really, really nice way of depicting that Mami is not really in her right state of mind, and that her current actions aren’t really her. I know a lot of fans didn’t like the brainwashing thing in the game, and even though it looks like they’re still keeping that in the anime (judging by Mami’s behaviour, she definitely seems brainwashed to me), at least they’re portraying it in a nice way. By the way, I applaud Yachiyo for being able to defend herself against Mami for so long with a whole person on her back xD

Sayaka was probably my favourite thing out of the entire episode. Again, like with Holy Mami, I was really hoping we’d get to see her this week ^^ I loved how her entrance parallels the way she saved Homura from Mami in Rebellion, and I’m sure hardcore fans will pick up on that before her identity is even revealed ;) Sayaka was never my favourite character out of the Holy Quintet (even though I still liked her a lot!), but oh my gosh she was amazing in this episode. I think it’s something to do with the cape? Maybe it’s the cape LOL but gosh she really did seem like a knight-in-shining-armour askjfha;sj (♥ω♥*)

And back to Mami... that part with her losing her mind (literally) after Sayaka shows up was creepy but also perfect. I like that she seemed to temporarily regain her sense of self when talking to Sayaka, but then just the talk of her guilt and shame and everything just comes back to haunt her again, and we see her succumb and lose herself once more. I didn’t think her transformation into Holy Mami would be portrayed in this way, but this is better than what I imagined. You actually get a sense of how painful the process is, and feel how much against her will it is to fall to a point where she’d hurt her friends and other innocent people. The whole idea is disturbing, but each time I think back on her reaction to finding out the truth in the original anime, this really doesn’t seem too far-fetched at all.

That entire battle between Mami and Sayaka/Yachiyo was kind of cool and kind of weird at the same time xD Honestly I can’t imagine Sayaka and Yachiyo to be able to run around freely with that many bullets flying all over the place, much less repel all of them, which Sayaka is shown doing at one point xD Iroha using her Doppel again is another thing that I didn’t really like, though. I just really don’t like how Iroha is always shown to be utterly useless fighting in her Magical Girl form and always has to end up relying on her Doppel to do anything. (Except for that previous battle with the Rumour that I discussed just before. Let’s not get me started on that again lmao.) But it’s nice to see Yachiyo using her Doppel as well (it looked really cool!), and I really liked that minor detail about how easy it is to lose yourself when using your Doppel. It’s not something we think much about when playing the game because of the game mechanics, so it’s always interesting to think about what the Doppels entail from a story perspective :) Anyway, despite some logical inconsistencies and Iroha resorting to her Doppel yet again, I did really enjoy this battle, and it definitely made up for the lackluster “battle” that we got with Iroha and the Rumour. We can really see where the budget went this week, huh xD

I also really loved how Touka literally just sits there sipping tea and ignores all the chaos happening around her. She shows no desire to help Mami or step in just in case something happens to her (since Mami’s on their side now and all), which, to me, really goes to show how purely cold-hearted Touka is. Or has become. (Shhh game spoilers xD)

And while we’re on the topic of Touka, I’m going to talk about how much I absolutely adored that final scene. It’s hard to visualise it while playing the game, so seeing the scale of the Wings of Magius was possibly frightening. We’ve always known that there are heaps of Feathers, but just seeing them all packed together in one big creepy dark hall, all cloaked and hooded, really goes to show the immense size of this cult. It’s not just some small club created by a few girls. The scale of this cult is insane. As for Touka’s speech? Inspirational. And I say that with full knowledge of the Magius’ crimes and wrongdoings. Honestly, with the way she speaks, I can’t imagine many Magical Girls being able to say no and walk away if they knew The Truth already. Touka is one amazing and charismatic speaker, and even though we’ve always known that she had to be to some extent to get so many Feathers, seeing it in action was truly a different experience. Terrifyingly persuasive and frighteningly charismatic, that child.

And that is why I applaud Rena. She’s able to stand among so fellow Magical Girls, listen to someone preach about salvation after literally just finding out the truth and learning about her own inevitable fate, not know of the dark side of the Magius, and still be able to walk away. Rena gained a new level of respect from me with that one simple decision, and I already loved her heaps before this. And Kaede really did join the Wings of Magius, huh :O We even got a shot of Kuroe! Welcome back (?), girl! xD

I quite liked how they showed the rest of Team Mikazuki joining in such a subtle way. It’s much more impactful to tease it like this rather than straight-up showing you the process of them joining right from the get-go. The way they end the season like this leaves a very haunting and unsettling feeling, especially considering that Iroha gets taken away from Yachiyo as well! Now that definitely wasn’t in the game!!! xD I was expecting the season to finish with Iroha and Yachiyo back at Mikazuki Villa alone and swearing to save the rest of the team, so this definitely came as a HUGE surprise to me. I’m really curious as to how they’re going to go about this change, as well as the change with Kaede joining up and the obvious Kuroe thing. (Btw Sayaka literally sweeping Yachiyo away like Prince Charming almost had me swooning LOL Sayaka was seriously SO COOL in this episode!)

And finally, we have Alina. I’m honestly still pissed off at how they handled her introduction, and wonder if anime-only fans can even tell that she’s a Magius and not just a Feather or some other kind of position (like Mifuyu), but I did enjoy the final scene of her. I think it makes it quite clear that Alina is going to be one of the Biggest Bosses, even among the antagonists, and the way she name-drops Walpurgisnacht was not what I expected but a pretty good decision, in retrospect. Anime-only fans will definitely feel that sense of familiarity they want just by hearing that name. Since this Witch is so iconic to the original anime and we probably won’t be seeing her until the very end of the next season, I think it was a nice idea to drop the name here to keep those anime-fans who expect lots of explicit PMMM references happy and hooked. In fact, the combination of Holy Mami and Sayaka’s appearance and the mention of Walpurgisnacht all in one episode makes me think they packed them all into the season finale to ensure that these anime-only PMMM fans will be back again for the next season (since us game players will almost definitely be back anyway haha xD).

Oh, and that ending song is so good! I loved “Alicia”, but this song was a really nice way to end the season and had a definite kind of “season finale” feel to it.

So yeah, that basically sums up my thoughts for this jam-packed episode xD Lots of stuff I feel could have been handled A LOT better, but also a lot of stuff that was absolutely amazing. The second half was significantly better than the first; that fight with Holy Mami and the ending with Touka and Alina were definitely the best parts.

I’ll be writing up another review post for the season as a whole and posting it separately, so I’ll end this one here and save my overall impressions for that one ^^ If you’ve read to the end, thanks so much for reading and I hope to see you there as well ღゝ◡╹)ノ♡

[cyberramblings]

Sonic & Tails: Ideas for a new Sonic Plot and Partner System

So, first off, there is a game called Sonic & Knuckles. It is basically just the second half of the overly ambitious Sonic 3. It is not Sonic 4, but it is a standalone game. Anyways, there isn’t a game called Sonic & Tails yet, so let’s make that happen.

Regardless of that, I wanted to talk about my vague conceptualizations of a Sonic game plot. I WANTED to continue my thoughts on other Sonic characters, but my stupid brain can’t stop thinking about “what if Sonic and Tails fought?” Again, this is getting into some borderline fanfiction territory, but I write the blog AND the rules.

Piggybacking off my previous post detailing my thoughts on Tails, I had said that I liked the idea of Tails taking over Robotnik’s lab after he is defeated once and for all (or temporarily, I don’t expect Sonic Team to kill off the main villain, as much as I’d pseudo-ironically love Sonic Adventure 3 to open with Eggman’s funeral while Sound of Silence plays like the overly edgy funeral scene from Watchmen 2009).

Now, this is also getting into some serious Marvel Civil War or Batman v. Superman territory, but stick with me. I feel like one of the most underutilized aspects of Sonic as a series is the cast of characters. Maybe it is just me, but I feel like Sonic fans want to see their favorite obscure character return or see as many characters as possible. Even the most trivial characters have a cult following in the weird Sonic fandom. It was really cool to see the obscure Sonic the Fighters characters return for a boss fight in Sonic Mania, even if they were just an illusion. I am proposing a Sonic game where nearly every characters returns to make up the boss fights.

Now, the first issue with this idea is that typically the “rival” battles in Sonic are a bit hit or miss. Fights against playable characters in the Adventure IMO felt pretty flat and uninteresting. Now, 2D Sonic has some better boss battles against the likes of Metal Sonic and Knuckles and the same goes for Generations, so maybe those could be emulated. Regardless of gameplay, I’d like to see all the weirdies like the playable cast of Sonic Heroes, The Fighters, Emerl, Blaze, Gamma E-102, etc. return at least as boss fights, if not as playable characters, even if they are just piloting the mechs that would typically be piloted by Eggman. I get zero excitement from fighting Eggman anymore, but just put Rouge’s model in the cockpit and suddenly its way cooler with more potential for unique boss dialogue.

So far I have proposed a Civil War-style plot where Tails goes a little bit off the deep end and a Sonic game where the boss fights are all the beloved recurring characters. It should be obvious how these two parts fit together. Perhaps the dual story structure of Adventure 2 is overplayed by this point, but obviously it would fit in with these ideas.

To get into the nitty gritty and provide an example of what I am imagining, consider Metal Sonic. I can easily see a plot that starts with Tails reconfiguring Metal Sonic to be “good”. This bring back a classic character in a new way and allows for a lot of angles for the plot to go, of course borrowing from various Iron Man plots and the Buffy-bot from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

One idea from Sonic Adventure that I would really like to see return is the ever-evolving nemesis concept. Even if Sega never really brings back Chaos, I’d love to see a rival that increases in power as the game goes along. This could totally tie in with my previous idea, with Metal Sonic becoming more powerful over the course of the game, possibly with the acquisition of the Chaos Emeralds like Chaos does. Metal Sonic already has been shown to take on a few different forms, such as at the end of Sonic Heroes.

Another story beat that I’d like to see replicated is the end of Adventure 2 where Sonic and Shadow have to team up. Now, in this hypothetical Sonic & Tails game, that would obviously be Sonic and Tails teaming up, but I’d also love to see them bust out Mecha Sonic as a kind of retconned prototype of Metal Sonic from Sonic 2/3 as a last resort too.

I also love the story beat of all the playable characters at the end of Sonic Adventure bringing the depleted Chaos Emeralds to Sonic for the final fight. I would love to see something like this but a little more weighty. I have a clear mental image of something like the Breath of the Wild loading screen that shows your level of progress though the game, but instead with Sonic endlessly walking towards the camera as the game loads, surrounded by more and more characters walking towards the screen as you rescue/recruit them.

Personally, it seems like Sonic games struggle to balance multiple playable characters, so I’d settle for something like Advance 3 where you pick a partner that enables new moves. I would prefer to find a way to include every possible character as playable, but I would settle for a 3D Sonic game where Sonic (and maybe characters that control near identically like Metal Sonic, Shadow, Silver, Blaze, etc.) is the only playable character, with characters like Tails, Knuckle, Amy, Big, etc. are relegated to the partner role, but swappable.

Playable Characters:

Sonic: Everything normal

Metal Sonic: Just make him control like he does in Adventure 2: Battle, so faster than Sonic but with less moves. I don’t think Metal Sonic has ever been canonically playabe, only appearing as a boss fight or playable in racing games or bonus modes, so that would be my biggest request.

Shadow: Just Sonic but slipperier and please give him a teleport instead of a homing attack

Silver: Again, just Sonic but make his double jump more offensive to represent his telekinetic abilities

Blaze: Her name is BLAZE and she has FIRE POWERS in Rush and Rush Adventure, so please just make her control like Sonic but with a fiery homing attack or her fire hover from Rush

Espio: Just give him some kind of limited invisibility or maybe the tornado attack as a reference to Heroes

Mighty: He could probably be thrown in with his moves from Mania, but this is reaching

Jet: Probably asking too much, but he’s never been playable in non-racing game, so even seeing him with his board in a main game as a kind of joke would be cool

Assist Characters:

Tails, Cream, Charmy: Obviously, limited flight with slightly different characteristics. Cream could alternatively have the Chao attack from Advance

Knuckles, Rouge, Tikal: Either a limited glide or the digging

Amy: Piko Piko Hammer as an attack or as a big jump. She could also maybe be a Sonic-like characters, but I feel like she was shoehorned into the speed role in Heroes

Big: I just like seeing this dumb idiot return. It seems like asking a lot for the fishing rod to be used as a grappling hook, so maybe he could just have a big area attack

Fang/Knack, Bark, Bean: I mean, maybe just show up and fistfight some enemies?

Vector: Something music based, realistically

Chaos: Again, this is reaching, but maybe this ties into Tails taking over Eggman’s research

E-1XX Alpha, Gamma, Omega, etc: It is asking a lot to have all the robots return, but I’d love to see them all as slight variants of “shoot a bunch of missiles” or limited hovering

Omochao: Personally I’d love to see this little guy as an assist who just never shuts up, maybe with some hidden secret-unlocking potential

Vanilla: She doesn’t have a lot of game appearances, I’d take anything

G.U.N. Commander: Again, I just think this would be kinda funny. He could summon robots or just fire missiles

Eggman Nega: Not sure why he would help the main characters, but I’m always rooting for weird stuff like this

Wave, Storm: They could function like Tails/Knuckles or grant a temporary board for tricks or whatnot, maybe like the skateboard powerup from Sonic Generations

Tails Doll: This is dumb, but it would be fun to see as a little throwaway easter egg

So, that was a bunch of random nonsense directly from my brain, but you probably get the idea: find a way to include a lot of characters in the plot and the gameplay. Do I expect any of this to ever happen? No. And honestly, I’d prefer to see another game where I can actually play as characters like Rouge, the robots, Amy, and Cream.

ONE LAST THING: There should really be a Sonic rhythm game. They have so much music, both the classic songs as well as the Crush 40 songs, with tons of remixes of both already existing and even more possible. It would fit perfectly with the gameplay of Sonic, you could just have the notes appear as obstacles or powerup boxes. There are a million different ways to slice it, but it just makes too much sense to ignore. I don’t have enough ideas to make a separate post, though. Maybe I’ll make a playlist sometimes of songs I’d like to see included, but the issue is that it would be way too many songs. As with the main point of this post, I would love to see many different playable characters with very slight changes to their properties.

ONE LAST LAST THING: Since Sega hates localizing Puyo Puyo games, they should just make a new Mean Bean Machine with HD graphics and all the various Sonic characters represented somehow and then release it internationally either as Mean Bean Machine or just Sonic Puyo Puyo. Again, I didn’t have enough ideas for a whole post.

FINAL FINAL FINAL RAMBLES: I kinda wanna play Sonic 06 since I actually just recently found out that Rouge, Omega, and Blaze are playable, but the disc is 20 bucks at gamestop for 360. I also kinda wanna play Unleashed, but not enough to buy it. I really get more excited when more characters are playable, which makes me wish I enjoyed playing Sonic Battle more. I also have my eye on Chronicles if I can ever get the patience to actually sit down and play it. At this point, I should just make my own dang original game or story inspired by the things I like about Sonic.