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neon-moon-beam · 3 years ago

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There’s More Evidence That Ingo’s Going Home Than Not

This is what I think, backed up by in-game evidence.

Also, let me preface this by saying that this is for those of us who want reassurance. I ask that you do not reblog this and add your theories that he won’t go home, and absolutely do not DM me your theories or headcanons as to why he won’t. I’m not interested in them, especially not from people I don’t know, and I will block you if you do this. I’m serious about this because my friend and roommate, 1863-project, made a post seeking reassurance and asking for spoilers confirming he went home, if they existed, when it leaked a few weeks ago that Ingo would be in Legends: Arceus the way he is. Instead she had strangers DMing her their theories without asking, which was rude and the exact opposite of what she’d asked for. Submas has helped both of us in different ways; neither of us wants to see Ingo trapped in Hisui. Spoilers start here.

First and foremost, this is a children’s game. Yes, it’s made so anyone of any age can enjoy it, but the lowest common denominator is kids whose age is a single digit. While there have been some darker moments, or even possible or actual character deaths, these happen off-screen, and almost always to the villain, or it happens to someone in the past we hadn’t met (think of the girl in B2W2 in the Strange House, or Cubone’s mom in Gen 1). The likelihood of them deciding to inflict permanent tragedy on Ingo, who is someone many players have met before and doesn’t deserve it, is low.

Factor in that Submas is incredibly popular, especially in Japan. 1863-project has covered this topic if you aren’t aware. They’ve gotten a decent amount of merch compared to a lot of other characters and certainly the other battle facilities, and the Battle Subway has been referenced in later games. Permanently splitting them up would be bad for the series.

A recent 2022 poll for the top BGM in PokeMas has had the Subway Boss/Gear Station theme leading. As of the time of this post, polling is still open, but given Submas’ original popularity in Japan and newfound popularity post-PLA, you pretty much know how this is going to go the Subway Boss/Gear Station theme won! Leaving Ingo in Hisui would clearly upset a large group within Pokemon’s fanbase.

Unova is next up for revisiting, whether that’s remakes, sequels, or a sequel/prequel like Legends: Arceus turned out to be. Ingo’s appearance in Hisui may simply be a hint at what is next to come (definitely Unova, maybe…a Submas-centric Legends? We can hope.) Given their popularity, it would be detrimental to have a game that revisits Unova only for fans to find out Ingo was left in the past and Emmet is devastated, or to just leave Submas out entirely.

Design-wise, Ingo and Emmet are a set. Of course they’re identical twins, but they have opposite facial expressions, opposite dominant hands, their names are derived from opposite directions (in English; in Japanese they are literally named “inbound” and “outbound”), opposite color clothes playing into the titles of the games they debuted in…It’s not entirely clear why they decided to send only Ingo to Hisui, but permanently splitting them up is bad from a design point as well.

Going along with this, Ingo and Emmet’s opposite visual designs play right into Gen 5′s themes of opposites, yin and yang, etc. Not returning Ingo to Unova, or having him be drastically altered from his Gen 5 design would destroy what are arguably the biggest visual representation of these themes outside of the box Legendaries (Reshiram and Zekrom), especially when they revisit Unova.

The amount of time and focus on Ingo in Legends: Arceus is HUGE. We don’t get to spend nearly as much time with the other wardens, and in Wayward Cave, the player doesn’t have the option of speeding through Ingo’s dialogue, or doing anything other than following him and hearing what he has to say. It’s essentially a playable cutscene. They wanted the player to know that Ingo remembers Chandelure and Emmet, even if he can’t remember the details. He’s also aware that he’s not from Hisui, but rather “another world”. Later he also remembers Pokemon trainers and battling, both concepts foreign to Hisui, where people are just learning how to be friends with Pokemon. The Gear Station theme even plays at the moment he talks about remembering this, a huge signal that he’s…starting to get…back on track (I am not sorry). He also never forgot the train stuff, despite Hisui not having trains yet, and he kept most of his subway uniform, likely due to the familiarity. Other characters that have experienced amnesia and/or removal from their original situation typically don’t remember anything and become someone else. Ingo is still there, even if he’s struggling to remember.

He’s also making no attempt to assimilate into the Pearl Clan or Hisui as a whole. The Pearl Clan took him in, was impressed by his abilities and trusted him enough to make him Sneasler’s warden, but that doesn’t go both ways. Again, he kept most of his original clothes rather than commit to the whole Pearl Clan look. We never hear him talk about “Almighty Sinnoh”, or even refer to Sneasler as “my Lady”. He does refer to her as “Lady Sneasler”, despite the fact that the Ride Nobles do not get the titles that the others do; this is likely just a mistranslation/general error. But it could also be a hint that he hasn’t assimilated, that despite being made a Warden, he hasn’t learned the finer details. He may also be giving Sneasler a title out of respect, but still, she’s never “his” Lady. How much does he truly serve her? How serious does he take the position when compared to, say, Lian, who not only will infodump on how great Kleavor is, but refers to Kleavor as “my Lord” often? Ingo could also be using a title as he has a very formal way of speaking, but he always has (this is especially evident in Japanese); he’s not picking up on local language here or in general. We meet him while going up Mt. Coronet, but the only other place we see him is Jubilife Village, which is interesting not only because most of the other wardens just disappear when they’re not relevant to the plot, being rematched, in the photo studio (or cutting your hair), but it seems to suggest Ingo is staying somewhere he’s comfortable—a city! Even though Jubilife is a village, it’s rapidly growing, and is the most densely populated area in Hisui. And whereas Arezu was concerned about running the hair salon conflicting with her warden duties to Liligant, Ingo never mentions Sneasler again. He starts running a battle facility at the training grounds and apparently never looks back.

Did Ingo even ever go to the Pearl Clan Settlement in the Alabaster Icelands? One NPC there mentions how good he is with Pokemon and the same NPC wonders where he came from during the postgame, but this could likely be to keep him on the player’s mind if they plan on doing more with Ingo/Submas in a future game. It would be interesting to find out that he never went there, or that he did and didn’t want to stay due to it being frozen and empty—Ingo’s team’s weaknesses lean heavily towards Ice (and Water) in 5th Gen. You can’t tell me he wasn’t sick of everyone who ever made it to him freezing the entire car with their Beartics and Vanilluxes. He also seems to be, at most, acquaintances with the rest of the Pearl Clan, suggesting he did not spent much time with them. Even Irida doesn’t seem too familiar with him; all she knows is that he showed up one day, has no memory of where he came from, and is good with Pokemon. That’s all anyone seems to know about him. He doesn’t seem to be making close friendships with people in Hisui.

Which leads to…Ingo is clearly unhappy. Visibly, he’s slouching, has bags under his eyes, and always looks zoned out. Despite his dialogue being very positive, it’s clear not knowing where he is, why he’s here, and not remembering his past are keeping him up at night and taking a toll. Contrast Anabel from Emerald, who reappears in SM/USUM, having lost her memories; she has her Pokemon with her and though she can’t recall her past, seems happier. Ingo doesn’t have his original team, and seems very unhappy. Personally I think if they wanted to leave him in Hisui, they would have showed him happier and assimilating into life there, heck, they probably would have thrown in Emmet and their Pokemon too! It just seems cruel to leave him alone and unhappy, and looking at Pokemon as a series overall, I can’t imagine this is the story they want to tell.

The moments he really seems himself are when battling the player, and he seems happiest when defeated, even saying his exact lines from 5th Gen and smiling. He also recites Emmet’s lines at times, further showing that he hasn’t truly forgotten Emmet nor his past.

Interestingly, NPCs will turn to look at the player, as well as turn and acknowledge any Pokemon you send out at them (specifically at them; you’ll know this happens when your Pokemon comes out, makes a noise and gesture at the NPC, then goes right back into the ball). But after Mt. Coronet, Ingo only acknowledges Pokemon, unless you actually talk to him. It almost seems like he’s zoned out or being detached, like he expects to go back any time and doesn’t want to get too invested in Hisui. This has been fixed as of the content update for Pokemon Day, but it’s still a little odd because he was the only character that did this, making me wonder if it was intentional, or just somehow Ingo was the only NPC that the developers didn’t catch. In any case they must have listened to all the people pointing it out, so here’s hoping they’re listening that people want to see Ingo and Dawn/Lucas go back to their proper time and place intact!

He also mentions not knowing what his purpose in Hisui is. It’s a little odd considering Arceus likely hand-picked him for something the way it picked Dawn/Lucas, yet Dawn/Lucas is directly given a mission with the info stored in their phone. I’m not sure why Ingo would not be directly told what to do. Maybe he didn’t have the latest phone and Arceus didn’t think his old one was cool enough? Who knows. Arceus works in mysterious ways. However, while Dawn/Lucas is told to complete a full PokeDex, in the process they’re teaching the people of Hisui how to befriend and live alongside Pokemon. Ingo is part of that too, but Arceus could have pulled nearly anyone to do that. Dawn/Lucas was likely sent back due to having completed Sinnoh’s PokeDex before and having dealt with a crisis involving Sinnoh’s legendaries. Ingo is one of the best trainers of his time, and possibly of all time if Arceus sent him to Hisui. He’s most likely there to teach the people of Hisui how to battle. A few NPCs mention battling happening in other regions, but it isn’t happening in Hisui yet. Very few people have Pokemon, and even less use them for battles. The few people you do battle often send out two or three Pokemon at a time, which take multiple turns, while the player can only send out one and is usually waiting unless they can outspeed multiple Pokemon. Rules for battles don’t seem to exist yet; someone had to go back and help Hisui out. (Not sure why doubles wasn’t deemed necessary yet—from a developer standpoint, it might have been too much to implement in a game trying out a completely different format for the series. It also seems like they haven’t made doubles as serious as it used to be in battle facilities for a few Gens.)

The “Thanks for Adventuring” picture includes nearly every major character, and every warden except Ingo. It’s a bit odd considering how much time was spent with him, and the sort of kinship between him and the player due to both not being from this world and having little to no memory, and the fact that he hangs around the training grounds after the Coronet Highlands missions. It seems to suggest that he fulfilled his purpose in Hisui in teaching people how to battle and was sent home. He may have done this before Dawn/Lucas finished the entire Dex, or maybe Dawn/Lucas is there because besides not wanting to omit the player from their own ending, by catching Arceus, they can go home whenever they’re ready to.

During the Daybreak Mission, Ingo does not get a callback as a warden. All of the other wardens show up at some point during the mission itself. Ingo is only seen after, when Kamado tells the player about new battle styles he wants them to try (that he had Ingo create). It seems the focus of the game is off Ingo as a warden, and while he still might have Sneasler’s bracelet, he’s basically gone from warden to running a battle facility. Considering that’s what he normally does in 5th Gen, and his character arc has taken this direction, it could be a sign that he’s going to go back.

Ingo’s current jobs in Hisui are becoming unnecessary, as well as not necessary for him specifically to do. A Diamond Clan member in the Diamond Clan Settlement mentions postgame that once people start living with Pokemon, they won’t have need for the Nobles’ protection, and we know from D/P/Pt/BDSP that Ride Pokemon are unnecessary in Sinnoh due to the HMs...or friendly Pokemon assisting (BDSP). Ingo seems to have left the Coronet Highlands and never looked back, but it seems that soon Sneasler’s services can be provided by other Pokemon. The Clans are coming together, people are starting to live alongside Pokemon, Hisui is rapidly changing, and the time of Wardens and honoring the Nobles as Pokemon who uniquely aid humans is coming to a close. Ingo may also be teaching people how to battle at the Training Grounds, but it’s a bit odd to think he needs to spend the rest of his life there doing so. After all, it’s Zisu who truly runs the Training Grounds and is the one who wants to start a school there (I have a post about that here). Ingo can teach someone all that he knows and have them take over. Interest in battling is rapidly growing and Kamado, Beni, Zisu, and most, if not all of the Security Corps already knew the basics. Ingo also began to remember a bit more once he started battling there, seeming to be leading up to him returning to present-day Unova. Should he go home, someone else should be able to step in where he left off.

Cogita refers to the player as “lost one”. Presumably this is due to the player character being sort of “lost” in time and space; they’re from present-day Sinnoh but have been sent to the past, and have amnesia (level of which is debatable and they seem to remember more as the game progresses). This is nearly identical to Ingo. So far we have not seen Cogita and Ingo interact, nor Cogita mention Ingo at all. But calling the player character “lost one” seems to imply that sometime later they will not be “lost” (sent home). And if the player character can go home, why can’t another character who is lost in the same way?

Regarding him still being around postgame, and, this is my opinion; I feel that the postgame isn’t really canon. Catching Arceus is the last thing you have to do, and can only happen with a complete PokeDex. People really wouldn’t like if they caught Arceus and the game stopped being playable. Postgame is likely a kind of limbo where you can complete any sidequests still unfinished, have rematches at the training ground, hunt for shinies, etc. This is fairly common with games as a whole (my other favorite series, Legend of Zelda does it by never saving after Ganon, or whichever other villain is defeated, perpetually leaving the player at the moment before, but free to finish anything else or mess around).

The Pokemon timeline is a little weird, with a few games being considered non-canon/AUs, but if Dawn/Lucas were around 12 during the events of D/P/Pt/BDSP, and they’re 15 in Legends: Arceus (as stated by Cyllene), and there’s several years between events in 4th Gen and 5th Gen, this could mean that Ingo was sent back to Hisui before the events of 5th Gen, in turn meaning he would have to be sent back. This is further suggested by Caitlin, who was 14 in Platinum, and is an adult as an Elite Four member in Unova. There’s easily at least four years, probably more, between 4th and 5th Gen; plenty of time for Legends: Arceus to take place between them.

Edit November 12th, 2023:

The Teal Mask DLC for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet features Perrin, a descendant of Adaman who has the player track down and capture a unique Ursaluna known as the Bloodmoon Ursaluna. When the sidequest is complete, she gives the player a Hisuian Growlithe, separating him from his older brother. Her dialog is a bit interesting: “But you know, Growlithe like these are known for living and working together in pairs. Even if they are separated for a while, I bet their paths might just cross again someday...so you raise that one with care in the meantime!” Now who does that sound like? Brothers working in pairs, being separated, but meeting again? It could just be a hint that Ingo and Emmet will be reunited, if they haven’t been already at the point in the timeline in which Scarlet and Violet take place.The devs have to be well-aware that many fans did not enjoy Ingo’s inclusion in PLA; if you check the official Pokemon...Twitter? account, most, if not all tweets related to PLA had many subtweets of people asking if Ingo would go home. Everyone is also likely aware that there have been issues behind the scenes which probably factored in to why PLA felt incomplete and never got a DLC; it’s likely if things had been kinder to the devs, we would have seen him (and Dawn/Lucas) go home, and this may be a hint that we can expect him to be perfectly fine in a future game set in Unova, or a hint at something to come.

I hope this provides some reassurance.

~Moonbeam

#submas

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mt-words · 4 years ago

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Can we get some dream smp fandom positivity posts? As someone who posts mostly analysis and has never once had someone say anything rude in response, I think we perceive the fanbase as more toxic than it is because of a few outspoken individuals. Y'all are pretty chill and I like you.

In no particular order-

I love that Eret’s fans come up with such cool theories, I swear she could give you two sentences of lore and I could see three five page essays on what it could mean about their character within an hour and each of them is unique, intricate, and makes logical sense.

I love the compilations Foolish fans make of him doing ridiculous things on stream, he’s a fun guy that never fails to make me laugh and everything I see from them embodies that energy to me.

I love how creative Hannah’s fans are, you take the awesome ideas she has and turn them into the most amazing designs and concepts.

I love that Techno’s fans might write a ten page essay about his character or just say they enjoy watching him do crime, and you never know which it will be because both come from the same people.

I love how Philza’s fans embrace everything he does with so much enthusiasm. His chat is a flock of crows? Excellent, they can work with that, you will see fifty incredible pieces of art and a hundred theories in the first hour and they’re just getting started.

I love that Niki’s fans are so careful to pay attention and not miss any details. It has been ages and I still see occasional mentions and theories about the “Dear Friend” letter.

I love that Fundy’s fans are very empathetic, they love to find and elaborate on the connections between characters and that’s pretty cool!

I love Tommy’s fans for their energy. They seem passionate about making things right and hopeful that no matter what your situation is things can get better. I’ve seen so many breathtakingly emotional art pieces from this side of the fandom.

I love that George’s fans unapologetically simp for him but then catch me off guard by making deep insights about his character.

I love how Bad’s fans are as genuinely sweet as he is, they’re willing to really look at everything that makes up a character and see the tragedy of it and have compassion about things. And some just want to see an egg rule the server, c'mon, it would be funny.

I love the running gag with Skeppy fans of making Skeppy critical posts, y’all are hilarious.

I love how Purpled fans play up his lack of lore as him being an incredibly powerful cryptid, and they’re right. He totally carried the wither fight on Nov 16th.

I love the balance Quackity fans have between a love of humor, justice, and darker topics. I think like Quackity they are often underestimated and thought of as the jokester side of the fandom to an extent, and then I start reading things they write and it’s well thought out and insightful.

I love that Tubbo’s fans love chaos, cute things, or both to an unhealthy extent. Seeing anything from them reminds me of princess unikitty in all the best ways, and then they turn around and throw a super in depth meaningful analysis at me in the next breath.

I love everything about Sapnap’s fans. Y'all are perfect. The writing and art from the born in fire line? Gold.

I love how Jschlatt fans are generally chill and just enjoy whatever they want to. Their favorite Manburg president was the one who publicly executed his right hand man and gave Dream a resurrection book for firepower, and he looked good doing it.

I love that Callahan has fans. You people are dedicated and I respect it. The fact that Callahan was one of the first names to pop up when everyone was trying to figure out who Harpocrates was even though he rarely involves himself with plot? Your influence knows no bounds.

I love that Alyssa’s fans are simply too powerful. She hasn’t played on the smp since way before I started watching and there are still people defending her barn and drawing pictures of her.

I love that Antfrost’s fans have taken so many ideas and just ran with them and made them awesome. Like him practicing magic? Perfect, he now carries potions and gets a wizard hat.

I love that Dream fans look at a character who has been portrayed as pure evil from many points of view and understand that Everyone has motives based on their situation, even if it isn’t handed to us in an easily understood way.

I love how Jack’s fans are so ready to support any action he takes. Crawling out of hell? Incredible. Killing a child? Good for him! Go team Rocket. Grieving the same child? Learning healthy coping, he’s the coolest.

I love that Connor eats Pants fans are the most reasonable people in this fandom. This is terrifying. Thank you for your service, you always make me smile.

I love that Punz fans unapologetically just love their capitalist mercenary. As they should, his presence always tips the scales and everything he does brings more depth to the characters and plots he interacts with.

I love how much Ranboo fans love complexity. Most of them aren’t afraid to admit that their favorite characters are flawed, because aren’t those flaws what make them interesting and relatable?

I love the variety of Hbomb fans. Half of them may be embracing the cat maid bit while the other half goes on about how impactful and cool L’cast is, but they’re all super chill.

I appreciate that Puffy fans take the time to understand so many perspectives. So many posts I see involving her tie in lore from other characters and find interesting ways to connect them and build them together, kind of like Puffy herself.

I love that Wilbur fans seem to approach the story like they’re solving a puzzle, carefully piecing together details from months apart to figure out how and why everything goes down.

I love how hard Ponk fans work to spread awareness of how awesome he is. Ponk says and does wonderful things and is very fun to watch. I never would have tried his content without them.

I love that Karl fans saw him wanting to be involved and started coming up with such cool ideas around his character that they actually made them canon. Correct me if I’m wrong, wasn’t the time traveler thing a fan theory at first?

I love the creativity Sam fans have with his design and their willingness to discuss complex moral issues. Sam is involved in some heavy lore stuff but he and his fans keep things entertaining and calm.

I’m sure I missed some things, please feel free to add on!

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serpenteve · 4 years ago

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what did alina starkov want, anyway?

People have been arguing for ages about the ending of Ruin & Rising. One faction says Alina losing her powers was misogynistic and needlessly cruel while the other says the ending is fitting because Alina always wanted to live an ordinary life with Mal.

I would argue the problem lies with Alina's mess of a character arc.

For the majority of S&B and the first half of S&S, Alina is a very passive character who wants nothing more than to run away with Mal. Though they changed it in the show, it was originally Mal who wanted to go after the stag and who wanted Alina to have the stag's amplifier because he thought it would give them a fighting chance against the Darkling. In S&S, Alina is terrified of taking a second amplifier because it goes against all the Grisha theory she knows, echoing the arc words of the trilogy: What is infinite? The universe and the greed of men.

It is only when Alina takes the second amplifier that she's allowed to grow a backbone. This is truly a bizarre writing choice because it all but forces the narrative to frame every active step Alina takes to forward the plot and her own character arc---whether that's deciding to rebuild the Second Army, or form a political alliance with Nikolai, or search for the third amplifier, or simply stand up for herself against bullies---as being manifestations of her creeping villainy.

Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the spectrum, there is her Muggle boyfriend who is there to remind us that this is not who she is, that Morozova's amplifiers are corrupting her, that he wants her to go back to the girl she was when she was more passive, vulnerable, and dependent on him.

Surely, there is a line between the heroine learning to trust herself and gaining confidence in her abilities versus the heroine giving in to corruption and becoming more power-hungry and evil? However, the narrative does not distinguish between these two very different arcs. Consequently, the reader is left in a bizarre place where we cannot watch Alina's character arc grow from passivity to maturity without being reminded of how ~evil~ she is becoming, despite there being very little textual evidence to back this up. We also grow to resent Mal because instead of him being a supportive boyfriend who is trying to help Alina navigate her own character arc, he is holding her back from her potential---not just in her powers but also in her personal autonomy.

At the same time, there are sprinklings of Alina's call to her dark side through the Darkling's offer of a throne. Ignoring how sincere his words may or may not be, Alina still feels tempted to join him and frequently thinks about the truth of his words---that she is no ordinary Grisha, that is useless to fight what she is, that she is capable of more than an ordinary mortal life, that he is the only one who can understand the eternity before her. Because readers expect to see a character arc where Alina grows from a scared passive girl to a strong independent woman, we grow to associate her longing for power as a natural evolution of her character development. However, the narrative wants you to believe Alina's development is not a natural progression of her character but rather a corruption due to her greed from the influence of Morozova's amplifiers.

Bardugo completely fails to set up an alternate character arc for Alina where she may grow in power and strength as a character, but does not become evil along the way. Her heroine's arc is completely strangled by the moral panic of the narrative. This is doubly emphasized by the plot: in order for Alina to defeat the Darkling, she must seek out the amplifiers out of necessity. This is framed as greed. In order for Alina to triumph, she must use all three amplifiers, but when she does, she is punished by the plot. But what other choice did the heroine have? It is not like there was some non-evil alternative for Alina to embrace and she deliberately chose the path of most greed. She is not punished for her actions like her male counterparts who seek power. In fact, you could argue, she can't be punished for her actions because her actions are not coming from a place of choice.

At the end of R&R, Alina is stripped of her powers and lives an ordinary life with Mal. As this is the epilogue, one must assume Bardugo meant for Alina's character arc to end in this way. Her character arc is meant to be a cautionary tale against the evils of seeking too much power. This moral aesop falls flat for a number of reasons:

"Power corrupts" is a popular moral message that it's gotten fairly cliche at this point

It's also so heavy-handed, I don't blame readers for expecting it to be subverted because of how much we were hit over the head with it

The strangely gendered way this moral lesson is delivered raises some eyebrows. Are male characters who are actually power-hungry such as Nikolai, the Apparat, and the Darkling not subject to the same punishments the narrative deals out to Alina?

Most importantly, this aesop clashes with Alina's character

In order for this greed corruption arc to make sense, the heroine really should have been an entirely different character who starts off the series with ambition and a need for power. We needed a heroine like Jude Duarte, Kestrel Trajan, or Aelin Galathynius. Someone who is already established as being capable, ambitious, and ruthless. Granted, I still think this would be a shit character arc because of the long history in which female power is demonized, but at least the arc would make sense for the character in the tradition of tragedies.

However, because Alina starts off the series as being insecure and not yet accepting of herself, we expect to see a character arc where she becomes more confident, emotionally mature, and maybe even a little ruthless. We don't expect her to suddenly become corrupted by greed (a character trait she never had to begin with, especially when she would rather run away and hide with Mal than deal with a geopolitical situation) and get punished for being "too ambitious".

To add to this confusing mess of an arc, Alina suppressing her powers leads to her being weak, fatigued, and malnourished. So she must use her powers in order to be healthy, but using her powers is what directly contributes to the rest of her character arc. The heroine cannot win.

In conclusion, Bardugo wrote a book where a naive scared girl gets manipulated into wearing an evil MacGuffin that turns her "greedy" and then gets punished for it, even though the plot offered her no alternative. Alina never wanted power but because a positive character arc meant a complete descent into villainy, we are left with a regressed version of the character by the end of R&R and a whole bunch of readers left scratching their heads about what the hell we are supposed to take away from this mess of a story.

TL;DR: Alina's character arc does not match who she is as a character. She was given an arc that is usually reserved for anti-heroines and tragic heroes with fatal flaws.

#alina starkov #leigh bardugo #ruin and rising #grisha discourse #anti leigh bardugo #darklina #long post #tgt spoilers #the grisha trilogy #why leigh why #viv metas

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spneveryseason · 3 years ago

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Results of the Supernatural Origins Survey: Part 2 of 2

Part 1

Part 2 has finally arrived! I hope you guys enjoy it and thanks again so much for participating.

Have you watched the entire show?

Pretty straightforward here: most people have watched the entire show, meaning here every single episode. However, significant portion (35%) have not. This encapsulates people who have missed and episode here and there, who’ haven’t seen entire seasons, and have barely seen any episodes at all.

Your relevant comments are below:

when i think about supernatural i generally think about seasons 1 to 9/10, because i stopped watching for a while after that but eventually got back into it. so my answers may be skewed in favor of those seasons? if that makes sense? like i love the general aesthetic of supernatural...... when it's about the earlier seasons. i am trying to be kinder and learn to love the later seasons but it's hard! anyways thanks for the survey it was fun <3

I’m curious to see if there are others like me who came into the show with Destiel goggles on, but quickly realized Sam is thee only character and then lost interest in Dean/the Big Ship. Also would like to add that I started with season 13 because I wanted to meet Jack and didn’t think I would end up watching the rest of the show, and I still feel a little guilty about it lmao

It's got a good foundation but it's inconsistent both in worldbuilding and characterization. I guess that's why fandom can just take off with it and make it fantastic

If you answered no, how much have you watched?

This answer was a little more varied, but for the most part people stopped watching up season 9/10. Second is up to season 12, third is the random scenes/episodes, and fourth is up to season 14. The specific seasons mentioned are generally seen as the weakest in the show’s run, so it makes sense that these are the spots where people would get frustrated enough to stop. Also represented here are people who watched the show in a non linear and scattered format.

Your comments are below:

The show was great until season 13. After that point, it lost its footing by trying to placate a vocal but misguided segment of the fandom. Jack was a stupid character that ruined the show. His story eclipsed the Winchesters' story, and that should never have happened. That ridiculous "confession" in episode 15x18 was just to satisfy the Destiel people. And the finale was a horrible disappointment lying squarely on Andrew Dabb's shoulders.

Hope I helped even though I technically havent watched it. Also, absolute worst theory for me personally is the Chuck Wins theory bc that means my baby boy Jack is being puppeted around hurting his family and I CANNOT take that. Also if they had framed the finale as a tragedy instead of a happy ending it would've made more sense.

I gave this show so many chances and it continued to disappoint every time. In the end all my interaction with the show is second hand/fan revisionism

I watched up to season 9 and between how that went and the descriptions i’ve seen of the later seasons, I’m not going to watch the rest.

What do you like most about the show?

Pretty clear winner here: what most people like about the show is the depth of characters, aka the emotional attachement to the characters themselves. Second was the platonic relationships, and third was the general aesthetic. This also tracks: the show’s characters inspired multiple emotional reactions from the audience, and many tended to get attached to one character or the other. Some of the write ins even specified characters that respondents enjoyed. This also implies that people stuck around the show primarily to see the characters and not for the plot or general themes.

Here’s what you guys said:

I really enjoyed how the show introduced one plot point (Chuck is God and he has written/controlled basically everything that has happened so far), then it made me shift my entire view of the point of the series. There's the old idea of the show (brothers fighting evil and saving the world and family) but that's Chuck's back cover blurb of his book summarizing the story. The real plot is underneath the control and puppeteering. It's The Truman Show. It's about these people who go from thinking they have free will, thinking they achieved it, then discover that they were still being watched and controlled. So they go on a journey to look God in the eyes and earn their first taste of free will in their entire lives. I'm just sad that most of them die before they can enjoy the free will or discover who they are once free. It felt like Truman slipped and broke his neck before he could step into the real world and that's how it ended.

While I think the show is terrible at following through on metaplots or character development, I am constantly in awe of how fantastic they consistently were with setups. Whether they show you a character in one scene and make them feel fully fleshed out or if they're starting out a new storyline and it seems so creative and laden with possibilities. Yes, they usually resolve it far too quickly (or with what feels like the most mediocre option) but the creativity behind the concepts is always a genuine source of joy for me.

things i love about the show? boy am i glad u asked!!!! i love sam winchester!!!!!! sam is why i wake up every day and sam is why i go to bed every night, sam is my reason for everything i do. i only apply for college bcs sam would want me to. everything i believe in is due to him. i love him. i am off to listen to my sam playlist now (also i am aware this paragraph implies that i am a destiel hater as per usual tumblr culture, but i am not. some of us are samgirls [gn] AND hellers. we just have the range)

I am incredibly deep into the complex jungian thought process meta for supernatural and although you can kind of lose yourself in the context of that and how much it actually matters, it got me interested in a lot of things i would've otherwise never learned about. I joke all the time and yes truly supernatural is deeply, deeply flawed even at it's core, but saying its a bad show as a reason to degrade myself (as alot of people do) doesn't feel right. I do legit love engaging with supernatural.

i unfortunately am very interested in something that the show itself fell flat on and nobody in the fandom seems very interested in, which is the lore. like we get what they read aloud when planning to gank the motw sure but i'm talking about the bitches we interact with constantly that's right angels and demons which we know actually surprisingly little about idk i might write up my theories one day for a podt that gets like. two notes

Supernatural is a mid-tier show in terms of being a CW drama but is top-tier for being good and camp. I like the serious emotional aspects esp wrt the brothers but would not be this into it if it wasn't batshit insane fun too

This show has really stuck with me because of how real the characters are and how easy you can connect to them and the story contains every genre and there’s always more to go with the story. This really was a show

I like meta analysis that breaks down where exactly characters actions don’t seem like ‘them’ because writers didn’t understand them, but where fans still find some way to make it coherent within canon.

I love how unintentionally and intentionally messed up so much of this show is. The relationships, the consent issues, the unanswered question of what a monster really is, oooh boy are they a lot!

It's got a good foundation but it's inconsistent both in worldbuilding and characterization. I guess that's why fandom can just take off with it and make it fantastic

Honestly one of my favorite parts of the show currently is the brain rot I get if I think too hard about the narrative potential that was never carried out.

I enjoy the Supernatural the fandom creates and manifests and writes. The actual show… hurts.

What do you hate most about the show?

What most people hated most about the show was the problematic narrative context, aka the elements of the show that had racist, homophobic, or misogynistic elements. Writing and plot were also popular choices. I believe the first part is pretty self explanatory, while the second is no surprise as the writing is well known to be disjointed and a little lost, especially later on in the show’s run.

Relevant comments below:

Sorry, this is a downer, feel free to ignore, lol. I watched the show in a vacuum for like 6 or 7 years, and it was fun. The fandom cult of the show that grew out of control as the show neared its end almost ruined the show for me. I hated the pandering of the writers to shippers, which is embarrassing and nonsensical from a plot perspective, and downright insulting to certain characters. I hate the obvious favouritism of Dean after Sera Gamble left the show, and the bizarre sidelining of Sam that began in season 10 and became ridiculous by season 15 - so ridiculous that people were baffled when Sam was the one to outlive Dean. I hate the demonisation (ha) of Sam for adopting a traditionally feminine role in TV and film, and I hate that he's still mocked or belittled for suffering r*pe, gaslighting and emotional abuse - often by characters beloved in the fandom. Basically, half the people who watched the show consumed it so differently to how it was supposed to be consumed I felt pity seeing their reactions every week. Like watching someone try to eat a sandwich via their rear end. Sad and weird and ruining my experience. Anyway. Stan Sam Winchester

will die mad that sam's addiction wasn't fully realized and i take it personally. i miss what the show was and mourn what it could've been. i used to see myself in sam but i had too much self esteem to keep watching him be victimized and pushed around and his own free will be like.. that. and i used to really like dean but he became so boring and controlling and close-minded and never learned and they didnt feel like brothers anymore. they felt more like cardboard cut outs and no longer like,, individuals. the thesis of the show started feeling like 'if your family is making you uncomfortable you grin and bear it and dont leave, dont change anything, because they are your family, and your family comes first, even before yourself and your own desires and aspirations', and as a gay mexican raised in a religious household that shit is so stinkyyyyy.

I really loved this show for a long time because of Sam's story and his connection to feeling monstrous but honestly the show never fully commits to this and slowly it becomes a deeply tragic story about abuse with the problem of the writers having no awareness of this reality and being able to deal with it effectively. everytime i though the show could go somewhere with sam's trauma or the fracture in Sam and deans relationship as an extension of John's mistreatment of them or even become a horror show where dean and sam's codependency is exposed/utilized as a psychological element. it just never happens. plus the show never crucified sam. lame.

Tbh my least favourite bit was whatever went on bts after/ around Covid. Misha was there but then he wasn’t. He was just breaking the law(?!) for a camping trip. The fact that there was 3 (THREE) montages and an extra ad break in the finale of the longest running sci fi show on American tv. Because they cut out Cas. They cut out the queer because god forbid we actually see ourselves in their all American Kansas red-blooded hunters.

Idk I kind of hate how the plot arcs are kind of abandoned in the later seasons and how the characterizations are not followed through, but in the earlier seasons I thought they did that really well and that’s one of the reasons why I like(ed) it so much.

Still mad about: the special children storyline being dropped/Sam losing his powers, the not-all-monsters are evil not being explored enough, Ruby 1.0 is the superior Ruby and more people should know that, MEG GETTING FRIDGED FOR NOTHING

if some writers & showrunners had stronger skills, cared a bit more abt the show and it’s stories, and cared less abt alienating/pissing off certain groups of viewers i think spn could have been much more cohesive and impactful

Supernatural had such brilliant ideas and plot points they consistently overlooked to drive a simpler narrative that was more able to fill the white man hero complex. It wounds me deeply.

Honestly, I just wish spn fleshed out it's main characters more. Dean has a shit ton of conflicting background information and Sam just doesn't have enough. Sam just deserved better tbh.

I wish I lived in the world where the supernatural writing room was not oddly preoccupied with how their soapy drama cw tv show appealed to white conservative men.

Do you enjoy participating in fandom?

When it comes to fandom, a majority of people enjoy participating only in their specific niche. However, people saying yes to general fandom participation was a pretty close second! This tracks as well, because the participants of the survey are in the fandom and are more likely to enjoy being there if they still engage to this degree.

Comments below:

The thing about Supernatural is- it’s an okay show on a surface level, as casual watching. Go down a level, start paying attention to the acting choices and stuff and it becomes frickin awesome. Another level down, you start noticing narrative inconsistencies and also the racist elements and you realize it’s a terrible show. Yet another level down, connecting the dots and thinking on a meta level and paying attention to the fandom? INSANE BRAINWORMS HOLY SHIT THIS SHOW IS SO AMAZING AND NOT ENTIRELY ON PURPOSE- WHAT THE HECK- In short- it’s simultaneously a terrible show and an amazing show, and you just gotta watch it with the right mindset, and make sure you’re following the right peeps in the fandom and blocking the people who are crappy, and you’ll have so much fun

The fandom is fun but only as experinced through carefully curated discords and only checking tumblr once a week. Probably my favorite thing is the volume of cool fanfictions! The last few fandoms I've participated in are much smaller I'd literally run out of fics to read, but that's never a problem here :) I started watching the show because of the Nov 5th memes. I connected with Sam the most as a character. The brother and family stuff along with the spooky creepy aesthetic is my favorite stuff about the show. Makes me wish I had chosen to watch this instead of the wholock stuff back in middle school when it was the hot thing. Supernatural has a ton of problems but overall I did still enjoy it a lot!

When I say the fandom isn't positive, that's not quite true. I love my corner of the fandom; they make me enjoy the show infinitely more, contribute to my brainworms, and add so many layers to the experience of watching the show. But as soon as I go outside my "section" of the fandom, it gets pretty rancid. The last survey results just reminded me of how much I disagree with so many other fans (how could you hate Cas???) in the other parts of the fandom.

i feel like its hard to talk about the experience in the supernatural fandom bc its like i love being here as in my little corner but also i hate it bc you can never keep to your corner and always have to beat uglies off with a broom… also please for the love of god can these people read anything other than tumblr excerpts from gender trouble and apply queer theory from the 80s to 2000’s television its making me break out in hives

I have a love/hate relationship with the show and the fandom. But I'm not sorry I found it or became part of the fandom. It's been a huge part of my life because I've been watching for 15 years and I still love discussing the nuances of the show whether they were intentional or not.

Honestly at this point I've separated my fandom experience from canon so much it's basically a separate entity by now, especially since my favorite ship is contained in like,, three-five episodes. It's just me and ten mutuals vibing lmao

Its so lovely to me that we have our own vocab and terminology and that we have theories like chuck won theory and the ghostfacers effect like i feel like a scientist kfjfkf

The fandom was significantly more tolerable when it was on livejournal.

Is the overall fandom a positive place to be?

People saying yes were given the edge here. Interestingly, when compared to the previous part, the numbers for yes were almost exactly the same as the numbers for enjoying fandom in a specific niche. However, this answer also indicates that many people enjoy participating in fandom while also believing the general fandom is not a positive place to be.

Here are your comments:

I love the show and i used to enjoy the fandom. maybe i’m just getting old and nostalgic. but i think a lot of the fandom has become too toxic and too wrapped up in trying to make the show something it wasn’t(?) i think there are certainly things that are best left to fanfic. i will always love sam, dean, and cas with all my heart, but the show became so outrageous and far fetched and downright blasphemous at times, and that’s saying a lot for a show literally about the supernatural. i think the show fell out of touch with its origins and the fandom fell out of touch with reality. i don’t know, like i said, maybe i’m just old and worn out from everything. don’t get me wrong, i love it so much, but i honestly keep to myself about it.

I enjoy the fandom, but its very clique-y, and it seems like if you're not in with a specific group you're not really in. I think it's difficult to get to know people and a lot of memes aren't explained unless you already understand them because you're in one of the it-groups. And I don't care about the actors or RPF and there seems to be a lot of that lol. I mainly look at memes, read fanfic on my own, and talk about the show with my irl friends who are also fans. Hope my answers weren't a mess, great survey :)

i know my answers are extremely negative but i really do like the show and fandom quite a bit ghkjfdghfk it is both fascinating and extremely frustrating to be playing in the world's most horrible and pessimistic sandbox, because on the one hand you truly can take any old garbage and turn it into a beautiful gem and that's so satisfying when it works out, but on the other hand the sand you are forced to work with IS soaked in homophobic piss. so.

I think you would all enjoy the show more if you stopped interacting with weird people online. I do Not Know Anything about Jared or Jesen. I cannot spell Jareds surname. And I am happier for it. Every time I think it would be fun to come on the little blogging website and look up the tag, there are people saying incredibly weird things. Also Dean should have gone back to Cassie Robinson instead of Lisa.

I think because Supernatural has so many episodes and ran for so long it offers a unique amount of longevity to fandom that are on par with Star Trek and Harry Potter, and it will be around for a long time. I met my soulmate through a destiel fanfiction, this show isn't good. Idk. There are SO many layers............... an onion…………

To be clear about the fandom, I definitely think some parts of it are toxic and can make things a drag on everyone else, but other parts of it are very enjoyable and that's why I'm still in the fandom.

I think the healthiest the fandom has ever been was during the superwholock days. We were honestly just having fun and I know it's cringe now but it was just so genuinely fun I look back to it fondly

I enjoyed fandom so much more a few years ago. Not so much anymore. It's gotten so toxic.

Is shipping your favorite part of the show?

A pretty big majority here ruled that no, shipping is not their favorite part of the show. This may be a surprising or unsurprising result depending on the specific parts of fandom that you’ve seen. Of course, the people the survey reached does have an impact on the validity of these results, but this large a skew indicates that shipping is not the overwhelming element of fandom as it may appear to be.

Here’s what you said:

I'm not going to lie, I really do love Destiel, but I get really frustrated when fans act like the show is ONLY about Destiel. Where we robbed? YES. Did the CW behave like a little turd baby? FUCKING YES. But those two are not the end all be all of the show, there are so many other characters and themes and story arcs that are so so wonderful, and those things are not wasted because the CW chickened out and behaved like bratty children. Also I'm sick of the double standard around Jensen and Jared. I see too many people defending Jensen's bad or poor behavior but shitting not just on Jared, but Sam, when Jared behaves badly or poorly. The characters are NOT the actors and I've had to many interactions with fans who don't understand that. I'M TIRED. I adore this show, I really genuinely do, and I've had great interactions with fans. My roommate/best friend/pseudo-sister is literally a 5'5 Ginger Dean Winchester and it's AWESOME, we talk Supernatural all the time even though we have very different views of the show and the characters, but online I've been seeing less and less civilness between people with differing opinions. I've also been harrassed for being a Sam girl over a Dean girl, which makes no sense to me. I relate heavily to Sam Winchester, of course he's going to be my favorite character, I understand his brain space in a way I don't with other characters. But some fans act like I've committed a war crime when I say he's my favorite character, (It gets worse when they find out Cas is my second and that Dean is only like my fourth favorite character, I still love him to pieces but gosh damn it, he does not have to be my favorite character! I've gotten genuine hate in my ask box over this!!!). Sorry this is such a long rant but it weighs heavily on me because it just seems to be getting worse since the finale. It makes me not want to interact with a fandom that I truly love dearly, and one that helped me survive one of the darkest points of my life. It sounds cheesy and fake, but this show genuinely helped me stop self-harming. I can't stand seeing how things seem to be shifting, even as I try desperately to surround myself with positive fans and fannish things. Also, Gabriel is not dead because I said so. He is currently on a date with Sam in the Library of Alexandria. They're going to get lunch in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon later. No one is really dead and rusty nails do not exist. Rowena is the Queen of Hell and Jack and Cas are co-leading Heaven and they are working with Rowena to make the afterlife as good and fair as it can be. John Winchester is still burning in hell though.

I said "Yes" to the "Is shipping your favorite part?" question because it's related enough, but my actual favorite part of this show is the whole "good Supernatural in our heads" bit. I love that there's so many potentially amazing ideas and compelling characters / relationships and instances of REALLY good writing that - even when the execution in the show sucks - we can build something there. Whether it's a "society if..." tumblr post or a half a million word fanfic, there's so many good things in this toolbox (and so many bad things that can be looked at in fascinating ways if you just hold them up to the light and turn them a little). On one site we've written over 100,000 ways for just *two characters* to love and want and deeply affect each other. That's so nuts (in a great way)!

There's a lot good and a lot bad about Supernatural, but my overall feelings on it are very positive. The ship wars that plague Tumblr have gotta be the most obnoxious part of the fandom - and I say this as someone who does occasionally enjoy ship content. To me, what makes the show great is its compelling and charming characters, and solid attempt at a tragic story about family, free will, and generational cycles, although unfortunately I found a lot about the last two episodes disappointing. It didn't quite stick the landing. Also, as an aside, the meta episodes ruled and were definitely one of the things that made the show memorable and set it apart, on my first viewing.

I enjoyed the show, but it got many times deeper and I joined the fandom to start thinking about it all the time when I started rewatching with shipping goggles on :D

If you have one, which ship is your favorite?

Destiel wins handily here with over half of these respondents choosing it as their favorite ship. The second place ship, Sastiel, is a distant second at almost 10%. This isn’t a very surprising result, as the ship is undoubtedly the most represented in fandom. A large number of ships were also represented, indicating that the shipping landscape is actually quite varied here.

Relevant comments below:

when i first got into this fandom in 2013 i was equal parts a sam girl and a destiel shipper but as time passed i became more and more of a bitter sam stan? i mean i still ship destiel (and it’s probably still my otp) but i don’t get people who make it like it’s the show main thing OR the most interesting thing to talk about. you have a show that focuses on PLATONIC relationships and then you go make it all about romance? like, it’s so rare to find shows that don’t focus on sexual or romantic drama as it is. also i wanna add that sam winchester is my main concern and idk who was she (me in 2013-14).

Watching for the first time in 2021 and I keep thinking “this is what the og Destiel shippers have been going through this entire time???” INSANE. Purgatory is gay. Dean absolutely fucked Benny. Hell, I would have fucked Benny.

dean saving cas from empty would have been the ultimate ending for destiel cause like it bookends their relationship with saving each other and the goddamn writers/network were too homophobic to actualize that

I wish the fandom didn’t so heavily focus on destiel or see Dean as a hero. I am a queer neurodivergent fan and while I am disappointed with the show, the fandom itself is so much worse.

Look i don't connect with romance of destiel really as an ace but im so indignant about the homophobia of it all that i ship it out of spite and make whole fanworks about it lmao

I wish the writers didn’t queer bait us as much they did. Destiel is a powerful story and shouldn’t have been treated like garbage.

destiel is endgame but megstiel was real. samwena supremacy

In your opinion, what is the show about?

Interestingly, the top three spots here are family related: first place goes to family don’t end in blood, second to family is hell, third to family and brotherhood. Free will, a main theme, is in fourth place. While these three themes of family are interpreted differently in these answers, the overwhelming consensus seems to be that the show is about family first and foremost.

Relevant comments below:

society if we got spn ending where sam married eileen and start a hunting community where you can go if you're traumatized by supernatural events (humans and monsters alike) it's not about killing monsters it's about sharing resources and helping each other and monster rehab/therapy (i think i saw a post abt sam helping people like magda? thats what inspired monster therapy thing like hes not just gonna be men of letters 2.0 establishing a new hunting network) hunters dont have to be isolated and depressed and alone you have a support system it's about COMMUNITY and monsters can coexist and dont have to killed :( as much as i like destiel if you kept the finale the same but added destiel at the end i still would have hated it, what spn needed to address was how it treated monsters, ultimately it keeps flip flopping on who "deserves" to be saved and if monsters can be "good", and it's pretty anthropocentric idk it's frustrating. i also dislike human!cas because he doesnt HAVE to be human to be accepted, monsters/creatures/angels can live alongside humans you dont have to turn them human :// also I really hated how dabb era in particular treated angels and there was such an easy fix for it in the end like it wouldnt have been hard to write rescuing cas from the empty also brings all the other angels back so heaven isnt practically empty with a three year old in charge. yes im a new fan but it would have been so healing to see the other angels come back anna and uriel and raphael and balthazar and hannah like at this point theres no reason to fight beyond regular insane family drama stuff so they argue and stuff but theres no genuine animosity anymore and it would have been a cool throwback to see them again anyway yeah angels are the coolest part of the show but sadly...... </3 also hated how the show kept insisting on keeping sam and dean isolated and killing off side characters etc. also they left adam in hell for ten years WHAT THE HELL adam and michael deserved better too, anyway i think people often attribute problems with the show itself to dean but it's not his fault and i love him (i hope this was coherent sorry)

I had a really hard time picking a favorite and least favorite aspect of the show! Overarching plots especially, because some I thought were very compelling and there were some that fell very flat for me. Also picking what the show is about is so hard for me to narrow down to one thing. To me, I feel like it’s a show about brothers and their found family trying their best to make the world a better place and save people/keep them safe. Wait actually I would like to say my least favorite part of the show was how overplayed the whole “what did you do to my brother” plot point was. It’s always the brothers choosing each other and it got stupidly repetitive any time they put that to the test.

"Are All Monsters Evil? Yes" made me laugh out loud because that's a great incapsulation of a huge problem I have with the show: no matter how many non-human people we meet and befriend, no matter how many times the main characters deal with feeling monstrous themselves, no matter how much we wrestle with the moral dilemmas inherent in the institution of hunting - we always come back to non-human demonization and Murder Is Cool as our central tenet, to the detriment of the show's story and character arcs :C Not only does it annoy me personally, it leads to nothing making any goshdarn SENSE at the end of the day! Justice 4 Jack

i mean it’s not so much family is hell as it is you are destined to become your father. cycles of violence infinitely more powerful than you are at play and you are completely helpless in the face of it. i think that sam dean and cas are each living out entirely different and contradictory narratives which i find really compelling

To elaborate on the last question: they spent so long on this humanizing the monsters plot that didn’t go anywhere. It was so horrible for real. Sam kept being like “I think this is a person actually” and then repeatedly Dean and other characters and the narrative itself told him he was wrong. What was it all for

that last question was kinda hard cos i honestly do not know what its about at this point. the secret good spn in my head is all about horror, found family and destroying the cycle of abuse but it seems canon disagrees with me :/ anyway love ur surveys ur honestly doing a service for this fandom

i genuinely can’t imagine watching this show for anything but “family is hell” bc like. damn it really is hell for these dudes. all they do is suffer and hurt each other and everyone else. i love it <3

I think this show is an exaggerated study of living with trauma, loss, guilt and redefines the meaning of what love really is ...depending on who's watching. Survival against all odds is a comfort.

I think the writers destroyed everything the show was about with the last two episodes and the only message left was gay love is powerful enough to defy god himself.

In the later seasons, the writers seemed to forget that family didn’t end in blood, wrote scenes for characters that went against their character arcs.

It's a really interesting study in generational trauma and toxic masculinity even though the creators kinda didn't mean to do that lol

Thank you to everyone who participated, and a special thanks to the people that interacted with these results. I really appreciate it! If you have any questions about the data and extra info let me know.

My 26th birthday celebration day 4: possession OR the end

#spn #supernatural #anases26 #sam winchester #dean winchester #castiel #Jack Kline #speaks #spn surveys

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skayafair · 2 years ago

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Questions and theories

Alriiiight then, are we going to talk about a few things that stand out ESPECIALLY after the episode?

Firstly, John.

The hints he actually used to be a human were scattered here and there throughout the whole show, and this episode just gave another one. Namely, a poem. Arthur never recited it, it was John who remembered the last line first, for Arthur to tell him that it was a poem. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a poem by Robert Frost, written in 1922, and published in 1923. The year when the action takes place is circa 1934. John’s been bound to the book for the last 10 years, so it was about 1924 when he got separated from the King. I have A LOT of questions. How did he learn that poem? Where did he hear it? Next, the song. You Call It Madness (But I Call It Love) was first recorded in 1931. Arthur apparently doesn’t listen to the radio much so he didn’t even hear it. Why does John say it sounds familiar then? How could hee hear it if he was in the Dark World when it was released? Something doesn’t add up. And, lastly, there’s a name. He said it was familiar. It doesn’t even has to be HIS name, maybe it belonged to someone he used to treasure but forgot.

We know the dates in the show don’t exactly correspond to the real world. Plastic Jesus was out in 1967, so unless Kellen wasn’t from the future (which cannot be excluded completely, in full honesty) it was impossible for him to know it.

It’s either there ought to be some timey-wimey with the Dark World and John’s existence there (he did say he lived countless lives there, didn’t he?), or I don’t get it.

But the thing is, John didn’t really change only AFTER the coma. It was him who told Arthur to pull to a stop because there was an abandoned car. He didn’t say a word against making baby’s well-being their top priority despite the fact that they clearly had more pressing matters at hand. He shows a wide range of eemotions right from the beginning. Coma and what followed after expedited the process, true, but it didn’t start it. I don’t think Arthur exactly teaches John humanity, because John had it right from the start. He just needed a nudge in the right direction, and while Arthur isn’t ecaxtly the best guide, he does the most importantt thing - he challenges John all the time, constantly pulling him into moral dilemmas, conflicts, fights, all his messy inner world. Human world. Which John seems to remember pretty easily even after he lost his memory - Yellow was very curious of the world around despite all odds.

(I have to make a separate note about Yellow and this whole memory loss deal here. I was sort of perplexed as of why it should have been such a tragedy. Loss of memory isn’t exactly a time travel. John already changed, so even if he didn’t remember some important period, he should have remained himself. And guess what, he did. Most of shows and books I’ve seen seem to dive the “like time travel” path, sadly, but Malevolent sets quite a high bar with characters developement, so I had some hope. Considering how fast things were progressing, I was about right and very delighted with what we got. So I wasn’t really surprised Yellow was so... not-evil-god.)

So, all in all, while I like the “person not human” idea the most, this is clearly not where the show is going, and it’s okay. But I’m really curious how this whole thing fits into time frame. I’m inclined to think the Dark World is yet to play an important role in the explanation, but would be happy to discuss other options.

Next, the loose ends.

I’ve started listening to the whole podcast for the 3rd time in a row, so some things stick out. First, it was the symbol the hag drew on a baby. Luckily we got somee crumbs of info 20+ episodes later, yay! Next, in Stanczyk house the corpse had a pendant taken from from it. Now we encounter a similar situation in Larson’s house, only the pendant here is in its place and has the same symbol. Soooo were Stanczyks involved in any way? Is everyone in Arkham and around in some kind of a cult?

Oh! Nearly forgot! When the hag abducted the baby, there was a dead woman, too. I genuinely thought she was the girl’s mother. Was it just me? Or is it some kind of a retcon?

We also have no info on how Kellen’s sister head ended up the way it did. There HAD to be some rituals, right? Or no... But they both heard voices, and Kellen told he’s been to Dreamlands. What connection do they have to all this?

Also, THE KNIGHTS. I really hope to get some closure! We were so close to at least ONE answer and... well, the guys are still in the mansion - or the mines, doesn’t matter much - so we can probably get it in a few episodes.

Next, either it’s still a mistery or I didn’t catch because the 1st arc is really blurry to me even after 3 times I’ve listened to it - who sent the book to Arthur? Who wrote the journal they read in the library?

And now there are two whole new cults apparently - of the Black Stone (yaaay I’ve read the book’s plot but it didn’t really help) and of the Fallen Star? I need to relisten @_@ But why is John so interested in it? Hope he’ll tell about it in the nearest episodes.

The Play

I didn’t see this discussed yet, but I’m just 2-3 weeks into the fandom, so forgive me if it was talked about already. So looking at the source material - The King In Yellow books - we have all elements mentioned, but one. The sign, the King, the mask, Carcosa (btw I didn’t catch - was it the undeground city, or the one they met Kayne in, or we’re yet to get there?) - everything was either used in the plot or mentioned. The only thing that wasntt is the play itself.

However, what we heard were quotes from it. And - Kayne’s words that everything is predetermined. He knows Arthur’s whole life - how?

My hypothesis is that the whole story lind of is the play, and the gods can watch it inacted in what’s real life for Arthur. And the cultists, too, maybe - or they have to make do with bits and pieces. That would explain how they knew about Arthur and John’s journey in details.

I have to say I really like the take on fate and free will here though. Kayne says it all: everything is predetermined, but it also has always been Arthur’s choice on what to do. It’s even stressed with John’s constant “It’s your call”. Because Arthur doesn’t know the script, and he makes his own decisions, predetermined or not. It’s like these two concepts are on different levels, so they don’t get in each other’s way, and I think it’s beautiful.

I probably forgot something but whatever, I’ll just make another post.

I’m eager to discuss, everyone is welcome!

#Malevolent podcast #spoilers #Arthur Lester #John Doe #john malevolent #theories #I NEED TO TALK OKAY

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madswonders · 4 years ago

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A Lesson In Romance #11: Actions

Spencer Reid x Fem!BAU!Reader

Genre: A little ✨spice✨ and a little ✨action✨

Warnings: Canon-typical violence, brief mentions of alcohol consumption, gun violence, mild (???) dirty talk

Word Count: 2.3k

Plot: Reader keeps getting caught in rom-com situations with Spencer Reid. This time, they pretend to be married.

A/N: I would like to dedicate this chapter to the Classy Restaurant Music playlist on Spotify for capturing the fancy restaurant vibes I needed hahahah

Masterlist | All chapters here!

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"You know, this is not how I imagined coming back here." You said quietly. Next to you, Spencer smiled.

Your eyes were still adjusting to the warm light, a stark contrast to the blue winter evening outside. This was your second time here, technically, but the sensation of his hand on your waist and the cool metal on your left hand made it all feel brand new.

"Table for Mr. and Mrs. Reid." He said to the hostess, calmer than you'd ever seen him before. You didn't miss the way he tugged you closer when he said "Mrs." and despite the truth of the matter, giddy smiles tugged on both your lips.

But it was the hostess' reaction that gave it away for you. When she glanced at your intertwined hands and matching rings with a soft smile, you began to realise why the two of you were chosen for this in the first place. The effect you had on each other was hypnotising.

Sending you and Spencer undercover as newlyweds was probably the easiest decision Hotch has ever had to make. His reasoning came from basic human psychology; people are drawn to extreme events, and while this generally applied to accidents and tragedy, it also applied to marriage and child birth.

In this case, few things would stand out more in a crowded restaurant than a pair of shiny new wedding rings, a large bouquet of flowers, and a bottle of champagne for two. And to top it all off, he had the two of you. Everything else came secondary.

Still, it was strange. Being isolated from the operation only made you more in awe of your team. Even under the duress of three hours, they operated like clockwork; devising a comprehensive undercover mission, building a profile for an unsub they didn't even know, and training an entire restaurant's staff in a handful of hours.

By the time the final pieces fell into place, all that was left was for you and Spencer to carry out the final stage of the plan.

Maybe it was the pressure of having the entire team rest on your shoulders, or this new "character" you had to play, but something felt different tonight. It was like electricity crackled in the air; you felt it when his hand lingered on your back, low enough that you felt a growing warmth in your belly, making you yearn for his touch long after he let go.

Maybe it was the stress from going undercover for the first time that made you trail your gaze down his suited figure, muscled and lean as a side effect of this job. Maybe that's why the image of him standing at the foot of your bed in this very suit couldn't leave your mind, until the physical action of squirming in your seat jolted you out of your own imagination.

"Penny for your thoughts?" Spencer locked eyes with you, his hazel eyes dark under the dim restaurant lighting.

"Just thinking about you." You admitted, placing your hand across the table. He took your hand in his instantly, his thumb tentatively resting on the jewel on your ring finger.

"All good things, I hope?"

"Nothing but good things."

"Well, perhaps I can add to that. You look beautiful." He pressed a soft kiss to your hand, his eyes crinkling playfully when your cheeks turned pink in response.

"How do I know you're not just saying that for our audience?" You whispered, eyes darting to his tie where the mic was hidden.

"If it weren't for our audience, I'd be saying a lot more, love." He replied lowly, and you bit back a thought you didn't want any of your colleagues to hear. You could already imagine them cringing as they listened in on your conversation, and the image made you giggle.

"Who are you, and what have you done with Dr. Spencer Reid?" You accused jokingly.

"When love is not madness, it is not love." He answered simply.

You thought for a moment, before the reference clicked in your head. "Pedro Calderon de la Barca. Interesting choice. You weren't lying about your education in classic literature, doctor." You looked impressed.

"I'm hurt that you even doubted it." He mocked insult, and you grinned.

"No, I'm just surprised."

"Wait until you see my actual surprise." He smiled, gesturing behind you as a waiter appeared carrying two plates in your direction.

"I took the liberty of ordering our food in advance." He explained. When you looked at him in surprise, he simply shrugged. “I figured I should expand my theory beyond breakfast.”

"And here I thought tonight couldn't get anymore exciting." You said, marvelling at the appetisers as they were placed in front of you two.

“You can reserve your compliments for when I guess everything correct, and I will.” He mock bowed.

“You're on." You giggled. "Now, can we finally have some of this champagne?"

Dinner went by smoother than you thought it would, and thankfully for your team listening in, your conversations steered away from thinly veiled flirting to classic films as the food appeared.

Not that it was any easier for you talk about Billy Wilder and Francis Ford Coppola with what was happening in front of you. Spencer had taken to playing with the ring on your finger while you talked, and each time his long fingers brushed against yours, it sent chills down your spine.

But it was when his leg brushed against yours underneath the clothed table that you felt yourself lose grip of your facade. The first time it happened, you even thought it might be a mistake. But after the second and third time, it was clear that Spencer knew exactly what he was doing, even if the innocent expression on his face didn't betray anything.

If you didn't know him better, you would even think that he liked it, teasing you underneath the restaurant table on case, where you couldn't act on it. Instead, you pushed away the thought and allowed your skin to prick with every touch; all the while you sipped on your champagne, taking the chance to observe the patrons around you through the rim of your glass.

Unfortunately, your luck was a little worse in the unsub department, and your concern only continued to grow as your entrées made way for dessert.

Before you entered the restaurant, the team had discussed the best-case-scenario for tonight — identifying and apprehending the unsub quietly before the dinner shift was up. But if you ran out of time, there was always one back-up plan, something that would definitely force the unsub's hand.

The good thing about having two unsubs now was that victimology became incredibly simple to decipher. What you and Spencer had considered inconsistencies at first, were now clear patterns distinguishing each one.

The first one was impulsive but experienced, driven purely by a compulsion to complete his pattern as fast as possible. Despite that, he had the sense to stick to high-risk victims and secluded locations, which made him so hard to catch in the first place.

It was the second unsub that was interesting. He seemed more controlled and calculating, choosing low-risk victims and public locations. The team profiled him as the narcissistic component of the original profile. The more high profile the victims, the more they attracted him.

And now that you’d spent the entire night drawing attention to yourselves, all you had to do was present an easy opportunity for the unsub to pounce — right into the BAU’s trap.

The moment Spencer beckoned you to come closer, you knew something was up. "Listen carefully, love. I'm going to call for the bill, and we're going to go outside. If I'm right about my guess, the unsub is going to be right behind us. Do you understand me?" He whispered into your ear, low and calm.

You made an obvious move to cup his cheek as you leaned back. "Can we go home now, baby?" You cooed. Yeah, you got him.

As you walked out of the restaurant, you intentionally stumbled as you clung onto his arm, letting out a loud giggle. Your gaze fixed adoringly on your date, even as Emily and Hotch called for their bill on your left, Derek and Rossi no doubt already rounding to the front of the restaurant from the back exit.

"Trust me." Spencer murmured as he opened the door for you, and when you nodded, he pulled you into one final kiss for the public. What you didn't expect was for him to move his hand down and squeeze your ass, causing you to let out a loud squeak at the doorway.

If anybody was looking at the two of you before, they were certainly staring now, and the doctor confirmed this with a low whisper. "He's coming."

When he finally caged you against his car, you had to remember not to go overboard for your listening colleagues, but you couldn't help but let out a quiet moan into his mouth as he pushed his leg lightly against your core.

"Sp— Spencer—" You breathed, locking your fingers behind his neck.

"Just hold on a little bit more, love." He muttered, cupping your cheeks with his large hands and stroking your hair. "Just a bit mor—"

You heard the sound of a gun cocking next to you as you broke apart, lightly gasping. A middle-aged man stood in the shadows, waving his gun aggressively. Bingo.

"Get into the car."

The two of you raised your arms warily. "Who are you?" Spencer shouted, moving to shield you from the unsub.

"I said, get into the car!" He yelled. "Starting with you."

"Okay, okay." The doctor conceded, unlocking the car and slowly getting in the backseat. He left some room for you to get in next, but the unsub trained his gun on you.

"Not you, sweetheart. I'm going to finish you right here." He narrowed his eyes at you. "Drop your bag on the ground."

Everything seemed to fall silent as you slowly lowered your bag, and your hidden gun, to the ground. When you stood back up with your hands in the air, the unsub slammed you into the side of the car and you groaned at the sudden impact.

You didn't need to gather your senses to know that his gun was pointed right at you.

"Leave her alone, James." Spencer threatened, already out of the car and levelling his gun at the unsub. All around you, the team moved into the light.

"FBI! James Luther — put the gun down." Hotch ordered.

The unsub looked shocked for a moment as he looked around, finally realising the situation he was in. His expression was unusually calm, and it chilled you to the bone.

"Very, very interesting. Are you a fed too?" He sneered down at you.

"It's over, James. Either you put the gun down, or you don't walk out of here alive." Spencer warned, but the unsub only laughed.

"I should have known that it was too good to be true. It's not often I get such a perfect couple, much less one with a wife this pretty." He drawled, waving the gun in your face.

"Spencer. I'm okay." You ordered through gritted teeth, already knowing what the genius was about to do.

"Look at her, so brave. Are the two of you even married? Or is everything about this fake?"

"I won't say this a second time. Put the gun down." Spencer repeated, cocking his gun straight at the unsub's head.

"T-think about this, James." You reasoned. "If you kill me, they'll kill you, and you won't be able to hear what the press will say about your murders after we expose you. Isn't that what you want? Don't you want to stop living in somebody else's shadow?"

The unsub's grip on his gun slackened. "They're not going to run a story on me. Why would they unless I keep killing?"

"They will if you give us the names and descriptions of all your victims, and we will make sure your face is front and centre for every single one." Spencer added. The unsub looked into both your eyes, seemingly searching for a hint of a lie, but there was none.

"Fine. Looks like the lady lives, this time." He gave up, dropping his gun to the floor and putting both hands on his head.

"James Luther, you are under arrest for the murders of Lucy Patt..." Derek recited his rights while dragging him away. You braced yourself against the car, catching your breath.

"Are you okay?" Spencer rushed over, sweeping you into a hug before you could even reply. You buried your face into his shoulder, tears welling up in your eyes involuntarily as you inhaled the familiar scent of paperbacks and coffee.

"I-I'm okay, baby. I'm okay." You mumbled, not sure if you were reassuring your boyfriend or yourself in that moment.

"It's okay, just let it out. You're safe now. I'm here. You're safe." He repeated, stroking your back as he kissed the top of your head again and again and again until you lost count.

You'd never been so relieved to arrive back at the BAU. Penelope was the first to give the two of you a big hug when you returned, fussing over the small cut on your face and the bruises on your arms, while you reassured her that you'd been cleared by the medics to go home.

"Good work today, both of you." Hotch called out from behind, shooting a small smile at you and Spencer. "Reid, take her home, and take a day off tomorrow. The two of you deserve it."

"You wouldn't be able to drag me into work tomorrow if you tried." You joked, and Spencer chuckled. For the first time, he wasn't about to argue with an order to take a break.

Nor was he about to argue when you asked him to come in to your apartment, or when you asked him to stay the night.

The only thing he wanted after tonight, was you.

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Tag List:

@blue-space-porgs @nobutalsoyes @lady-loves-a-lot @queen-flower @agentcarterisgay @totalmess191 @sapphic-prentiss @oops-all-ajs @spottedzebrasinpartyhats @mellowalieneggsknight @kenny-0909 || @averyhotchner @amesandpineapples @willowrose99

#mads fics #spencer reid x reader: a lesson in romance #spencer reid x reader #dr spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x y/n #spencer reid x you #spencer reid #dr spencer reid #spencer reid x reader fluff #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds fanfic #criminal minds fic #cm fanfiction #cm fanfic #cm fic #criminal minds #cm #criminal minds self insert #spencer reid x reader smut

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army-of-mai-lovers · 4 years ago

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Jet and Yue’s Deaths: Were They Necessary?

Two of the most common ideas I see for aus in this fandom are the Jet lives au, and the Yue lives au. I’ve written both of these myself, and I’ve seen many others write them. And while yes, fanfiction can be a great way to explore ideas that didn’t necessarily have to be explored in canon (I’m mad at bryke for a lot of things, but not including a Toph and Bumi I friendship is not one of them, even though I wrote a fic about it), it seems to me that people are mad that Yue and Jet are dead, to varying degrees. There’s a lot to talk about regarding their deaths from a sociopolitical perspective (the fact that two of the darker-skinned characters in the show are the ones that died, and all the light-skinned characters lived, is ah... an interesting choice), but I don’t want to look at it that way, at least for right now. I want to look at it as a writer, and discuss whether these deaths were a) necessary for the plot and themes of ATLA in any way whatsoever and b) whether it was necessary for them to unfold in the way that they did, or if they would have been more impactful had they occurred in a different way.

(meta under the cut, this got really, really, really long)

Death in Children’s Media

When I first started thinking about this meta, I had this idea to compare Jet and Yue’s deaths to deaths in an animated children’s show that I found satisfying. And in theory, that was a great idea. Problem is: there aren’t very many permanent deaths in children’s animation, and the ones that do exist aren’t especially well-written. This may be an odd thing to say in what is ostensibly a piece of atla crit, but Yue’s death is probably the best written death in a piece of children’s animation that I can think of. That’s not a compliment. Rather, it’s a condemnation of the way other pieces of children’s animation featuring permanent character death have handled their storylines.

I’ve talked about this before, but my favorite show growing up was Young Justice, and my favorite character on that show was far and away Mr. Wally West. So when he died at the end of season 2, it broke me emotionally. Shortly thereafter, Cartoon Network canceled the show, and I started getting on fan forums to mourn. Everybody on these fan forums was convinced that had Cartoon Network not canceled the show, Wally would have been brought back. And that is a narrative that I internalized for years. Eventually, the show was brought back via DC’s new streaming service, and I tuned in, waiting for Wally to also be brought back, only to discover that that wasn’t in the cards. Wally was dead. Permanently.

So now that I know that, I can talk about why killing him off was fucking stupid. Wally’s death occurs at the end of season 2, after the main s2 conflict, the Reach, has been defeated, save for these pods that they set up all over the world to destroy Earth. Our heroes split up in teams of two to destroy the pods, and they destroy all of them, except for a secret one in Antartica. It can only be neutralized by speedsters, so Wally, Bart, and Barry team up to destroy it. It’s established in canon that Wally is slower than Bart and Barry, and it’s been played for laughs earlier in the season, but for reasons unexplained, the pod is better able to target Wally because he’s slower than Bart and Barry, and it kills him. After the emotional arc of the season has wrapped up, a literal main character dies. There’s some indication at the end of that season that his death is going to cause Artemis to spiral and become a villain, but when season 3 picks up, she’s doing the right thing, with seemingly no qualms about her position in life as a hero. In the comics, something like this happens to Wally, but then he goes into the Speed Force and becomes faster and stronger even than Barry, in which case, yes, this would have advanced the plot, but that’s probably not in the cards either.

In summary, Wally’s death doesn’t work as a story beat, not because it made me mad, but because it doesn’t advance the plot, nor does it develop character. Only including things that advance plot or develop character is one of the golden rules of writing. Like most golden rules of writing, however, it’s not absolute. There is a lot of fun to be had in jokey little one off adventures (in atla, Sokka’s haiku competition) or in fun worldbuilding threads that add depth to your setting but don’t really come up (in atla, the existence of Whaletail Island, which is described in really juicy ways, even though the characters never go there.) But in general, when it comes to things like character death, events should happen to develop the plot or advance character. Avatar, for all of its flaws, is really well structured, and a lot of its story beats advance plot and develop character at the same time. However, the show also bears the burden of being a show directed at children, and thus needing to be appropriate for children. And as we know, Nickelodeon and bryke butted heads over this: the death scene that we see for Jet is a compromise, one that implicitly confirms his death without explicitly showing it. So bryke tasked themselves with creating a show about imperialism and war that would do those themes justice while also being appropriate for American children and palatable to their parents.

The Themes of Avatar vs. Its Audience

So, Avatar is a show about a lone survivor of genocide stopping an imperialist patriarchal society from decimating the rest of the world. It’s also a show about found family and staying true to yourself and doing your best to improve the world. These don’t necessarily conflict with each other, and it is possible for children to understand and enjoy shows about complex themes. And in a lot of cases, bryke doesn’t hold back in showing what the costs of war against an imperialist nation are: losing loved ones, losing yourself, prison, etc. But when it comes to death, the show is incredibly hesitant. None of the main characters that we’ve spent a lot of time getting to know die (not even Iroh, even though he was old and it would have made sense and his VA died before the show was over--but that’s a topic for another day.) This makes sense. I can totally imagine a seven year-old watching Avatar as it was coming out and feeling really sad or scared if a major character died. I was six years older than that when Wally died, and it’s still sad and terrifying to me to this day. However, in a show about war, it would be unrealistic to have no one die. Bryke’s stated reason for killing off Jet is to show the costs of war. I’ve seen a lot of posts about Jet’s death that reiterate some version of this same point--that the great tragedy of his character is that he spent his life fighting the Fire Nation, only to die at the hands of his own country. Similarly, I’ve seen people argue in favor of Yue’s death by saying that it was a great tragedy, but it showed the sacrifices that must be made in a war effort.

Yue

When we first meet Yue, she is a somewhat reserved, kind individual held back by the rigid social structures of the NWT*. She and Sokka have an immediate attraction to one another, but Yue reveals that she is engaged to Hahn. The Fire Nation invasion happens, Zhao kills Tui, and Yue gives up her life to save her people and the world, and to restore balance. Since we didn’t have a lot of time to get to know Yue, this is framed less as Yue’s sacrifice and more as Sokka’s loss. Sokka is the one who cares for Yue, Sokka is the only one of the gaang who really interacts a lot with Yue on screen, and Sokka is the one we’ve spent a whole season getting to know. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call Yue a prop character (i.e. a character who could be replaced by an object with little change to the narrative), she is certainly underdeveloped. She exists to be unambiguously likable and good, so we can root for her and Sokka, and feel Sokka’s pain when she dies. In my opinion, this is probably also why a lot of fic that features Yue depicts her as a Mary Sue--because as she is depicted in the show, she kind of is. We don’t get to see her hidden depths because she is written to die.

In light of what we’ve established earlier in this meta, this makes sense. Killing off a fully-realized character whom the audience has really gotten to know and care about on their own terms, rather than through the eyes of another character, could be really sad and scary for the kids watching, but not killing anyone off would be an unrealistic depiction of war and imperialism. On the face of it, killing off an underdeveloped, unambiguously likable and good character, whom one of our MCs has a deep but short connection with, is the perfect compromise.

But let’s go back to the golden rule for a second. Does Yue’s death a) advance the plot, and/or b) develop character? The answer to the first is yes: Yue’s death prompts Aang to use the Avatar State to fight off the Fire navy, which has implications for his ability to control the Avatar State that form one of the major arcs of book 2. The answer to the second? A little more ambiguous. You would think that Yue’s death would have some lasting impact on Sokka that is explored as part of his character arc in book 2, that he may be more afraid to trust, more scared of losing the people he loves, but outside of a few episodes (really, just one I can think of, “The Swamp”) it doesn’t seem to affect him that much. He even asks about Suki in a way that is clearly romantically motivated in “Avatar Day.” I don’t know about you, but if someone I loved sacrificed herself to become the moon, I don’t think I would be seeking out another romantic entanglement a few weeks after her death. Of course, everybody processes grief differently, and one could argue that Sokka has already lost important people in his life, and thus would be accustomed to moving on from that loss and not letting himself dwell on it. But to that, I’d say that moving on by throwing himself into protecting others has already shown itself to be an unhealthy coping mechanism. Remember, Sokka’s misogyny at the beginning of b1 is in part motivated by the fact that his mother died at the hands of the Fire Nation and his father left shortly thereafter to fight the Fire Nation, and he responds to those things by throwing himself into the role of being the “man” of the village and protecting the people he loves who are still with him. Like with Yue, he doesn’t allow himself to dwell on his mother’s death. This could have been the beginning of a really interesting b2 arc for Sokka, in which he throws himself into being the Avatar’s companion to get away from the grief of losing Yue, but this time, through the events of the show, he’s forced to acknowledge that this is an unhealthy coping mechanism. And maybe this is what bryke was going for with “The Swamp”, but this confines his whole process of grief to one episode, where it could have been a season-long arc that really emphasized the effect Yue’s had on his life.

In the case of Yue, I do lean toward saying that her death was necessary for the story that they wanted to tell (although, I will never turn down a good old-fashioned Yue lives au that really gets into her dynamism as a character, those are awesome.) However, the way they wrote Sokka following Yue’s death reduced her significance. The fact that Yue seemed to have so little impact on Sokka is precisely what makes her death feel unnecessary, even if it isn’t.

Jet

Okay. Here we go.

If you know my blog, you know I love Jet. You know I love Jet lives aus. Perhaps you know that I’m in the process of writing a multichapter Jet fic in which he lives after Lake Laogai. So it’s reasonable to assume that, in a discussion of whether or not Jet’s death was necessary, I’m gonna be mega-biased. And yeah, that’s probably true. But up until recently, I wasn’t really all that mad about Jet dying, at least conceptually. As I said earlier, bryke says that in the case of Jet’s death, they wanted to kill a character off that people knew and would care about, so that they could further show the tragedies of war and imperialism. Okay. That is not, in and of itself, a bad idea.

My issue lies with the execution of said idea. First of all, the framing of Jet’s original episode is so bad. Jet is part of a long line of cartoon villains who resist imperialism and other forms of oppression through violence and are punished for it. This is actually a really common sort of villain for atla/lok, as we see this play out again with Hama, Amon, and the Red Lotus. To paraphrase hbomberguy’s description of this type of villain, basically liberal white creators are saying, “yeah, oppression is bad, but have you tried writing to your Congressman about it?” With Jet, since we have so little information about the village he’s trying to flood, there are a number of different angles that would explain his actions and give them more nuance. My preferred hc is that the citizens of Gaipan are a mix of Earth civilians, Fire citizens, and FN soldiers, and that the Earth citizens refused to feed or house Jet and the other Freedom Fighters because they were orphans and, as we see in the Kyoshi Novels, Earth families stick to their own. Thus, when Jet decides to flood Gaipan, he’s focused on ridding the valley of Fire Nation, but he doesn’t really care about what happens to the Earth citizens of Gaipan because they actively wronged him when he was a kid. That’s just one interpretation, and there have been others: Gaipan was fully Fire Nation, Gaipan was both Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation but Jet decided that the benefits of flooding the valley and getting rid of the Fire Nation outweighed the costs of losing the EK families, etc, etc. There are ways to rewrite that scenario so that Jet is not framed as an unambiguously bloodthirsty monster. In the context of Jet’s death, this initial framing reduces the possible impact that his death could have. Where Yue was unambiguously good, Jet is at the very least morally gray when we see him again in the ferry. And where we are connected to Yue through Sokka, the gaang’s active hatred of Jet hinders our ability to connect with him. This isn’t impossible to overcome--the gaang hates Zuko, and yet to an extent the audience roots for him--but Jet’s lack of screentime and nuanced framing (both of which Zuko gets in all three seasons) makes overcoming his initially flawed framing really difficult.

So how much can it really be said, that by the time we get to Jet’s death, he’s a character that we know and care about? So much about him is still unknown (what happened to the Freedom Fighters? what prompted Jet’s offscreen redemption? who knows, fam, who knows.) Moreover, most of what we see of him in Ba Sing Se is him actively opposing Zuko and Iroh. These are both characters that at the very least the show wants us to care about. At this point, we know almost everything there is to know about them, we’ve been following them and to an extent rooting for them for two seasons, and who have had nuanced and often sympathetic framing a number of times. So much of the argument I’ve seen regarding Jet centers around the fact that he was right to expose Zuko and Iroh as Firebenders, but the reason we have to have that argument in the first place is because it’s not framed in Jet’s favor. In terms of who the audience cares about more, who the audience has more of an emotional attachment towards, Zuko and Iroh win every time. Whether Jet’s actually in the right or not is irrelevant, because emotionally speaking, we’re primed to root for Zuko and Iroh. In terms of who the framing is biased towards, Jet may as well be Zhao. So when he’s taken by the Dai Li and brainwashed, the audience isn’t necessarily going to see this as a bad thing, because it means Zuko and Iroh are safe.

The only real bit of sympathetic framing Jet gets are those initial moments on the ferry, and the moments after he and the gaang meet again. So about five, ten minutes of the show, total. And then, he sacrifices himself for the gaang. And just like Yue, his death has little to no impact on the characters in the episodes following. Katara is shown crying for four frames immediately following his death, and they bring him up once in “The Southern Raiders” to call him a monster, and once in “The Ember Island Players”, a joke episode in which his death is a joke.

So, let’s ask again. Does this a) advance the plot, and/or b) develop character? The answer to both is no. It shows that the Dai Li is super evil and cruel, which we already knew and which basically becomes irrelevant in book 3, and that is really the only plot-significant thing I can think of. As far as character, well, it could have been a really interesting moment in Katara’s development in forgiving someone who hurt her in the past, which could have foreshadowed her forgiving Zuko in b3, but considering she calls Jet a monster in TSR, that doesn’t track. There could have been something with Sokka realizing that his snap judgment of Jet in b1 was wrong, but considering that he brings up Jet to criticize Katara in TSR, that also does not track. And honestly, neither of these possible character arcs require Jet to die. What requires Jet to die is the ~themes~.

Let’s look at this theme again, shall we? The cost of war. We already covered it with Yue, but it’s clearly something that bryke wants to return to and shed new light on. The obvious angle they’re going for is that sometimes, you don’t know who your real enemy is. Jet thought that his enemy was the Fire Nation, but in the end, he was taken down by his own countryman. Wow. So deep. Except, while it’s clear that Jet was always fighting against the Fire Nation, I never got the sense that Jet was fighting for the Earth Kingdom. After all, isn’t the whole bad thing about him in the beginning is that he wants to kill civilians, some of whom we assume to be Earth Kingdom? Why would it matter then that he got killed by an EK leader, when he didn’t seem to ever be too hot on those dudes? But okay, maybe the angle is not that he was killed by someone from the Earth Kingdom, but that he wasn’t killed by someone from the Fire Nation. Okay, but we’ve already seen him be diametrically opposed to the only living Air Nomad and people from the Water Tribes. Jet fighting with and losing to people who aren’t Fire Nation is not a new and exciting development for him. Jet has been enemies with non-FN characters for most of the show’s run at this point. There is no thematic level on which the execution of this holds any water.

The reason I got to thinking about this, really analyzing what Jet’s death means (and doesn’t mean) for the show, was this conversation I was having with @the-hot-zone in discord dms. We were talking about book 2 and ways it could have been better, and Zone said that they thought that Jet would have been a stronger character to parallel with Zuko’s redemption than Iroh and that seeing more of the narrative from Jet’s perspective could have strengthened the show’s themes. And when it came to the question of Jet’s death, they said, “And if we are going with Jet dying, then I want it to hurt. I want it to hurt just as much as if a main character like Sokka had died. I want the viewer to see Jet's struggles, his triumphs, the facets of Jet that make him compelling and important to the show.” And all of that just hit me. Because we don’t get that, do we? Jet’s death barely leaves a mark. Jet himself barely leaves a mark. His death isn’t plot-significant, doesn’t inspire character growth in any of our MCs, and doesn’t even accomplish the thematic relevance that it claims to. So what was the point?

Conclusion

Much as I dislike it, Yue’s death actually added something to atla. It could have added much, much more, in the hands of writers who gave more of a shit about their Brown female characters and were less intent on seeing them suffer and knocking them down a peg, but, in my opinion, it did work for what it was trying to do. Jet? Jet? Nah, fam. Jet never got the chance to really develop into a likable character because he was always put at odds with characters we already liked, and the framing skewed their way, not his. The dude never really had a chance.

*multiple people have spoken about how the NWT as depicted in atla is not reminiscent of real life Inuit and Yupik people and culture. I am not the person to go into detail about this, but I encourage you to check out Native-run blogs for more info!

#jet #yue #bold text #italics #death tw #murder tw

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dathen · 5 years ago

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OKAY PALS it’s time to talk about foreshadowing

There are dozens of points in TMA commonly accepted as “foreshadowing,” even widely accepted as foreshadowing a specific thing. Some of these have turned out to be right, such as the scar theory or Jon’s feelings for Martin helping guide him from the Lonely, while others--such as the dozens of “foreshadowings” of Martin being lost to the Lonely in s4, have been forgotten as soon as they were proved wrong.

Let’s talk about foreshadowing a moment!

Foreshadowing is a literary device used to make plot twists and developments more natural--having everything come out of thin air with no context is just lazy writing, and less enjoyable for the audience. We love to look at a moment and yell IT ALL ADDS UP....vs. “where the hell did that come from.”

But there are other literary devices than foreshadowing! Sometimes information can be set up to play out an underlying theme, sometimes it’s simply meant for us to understand a certain character or point in time better, and sometimes it could be a contrast to what will happen in the future with different circumstances, etc.

A commonly-accepted “foreshadowing” moment is “Gertrude had three assistants, who all met unpleasant ends” from Leitner in TMA 80. I see this frequently brought up as evidence that no matter what Jon does, he will live to see all of his assistants meet horrible ends.

Now, this could be true, but more so from it simply being a horror tragedy where everyone is going to have a tragic ending than from Leitner dooming Martin with foreshadowing. Let’s look at that line with the lens of a different literary device: contrast.

In TMA 167, we learn the complexities of Gertrude’s attitudes towards her assistants. She changed over the course of her life as an Archivist, but one thing remained the same: her willingness to look the other way and to wash her hands of anything bad happening to them. Whether Eric or Michael being kept in the dark, or Emma’s cruel torments of Fiona and Sarah, or her own cruel sacrifices of Gerry or Michael, Gertrude shunned the responsibility to keep them knowledgeable and safe.

Jon has many, many flaws, but he is opposite in every way. This episode beats us over the head with this. “Gertrude would be lost in the hellscape and would give in to ruling her domain, but I haven’t because I have you.”

Jon hasn’t lost all of his assistants. He never has been willing to look the other way as they suffer. Gertrude had decades to notice what Emma was doing with Fiona and Sarah, and had to learn Eric’s fate from his ghost. Jon was desperate to know what was happening with Martin as Peter manipulated him, hating that he wasn’t able to make sure Martin was safe. Jon kept Tim and Martin in the dark before going to break the Web table, so that he would be on the front lines instead of them, rather than to make them more easily manipulated and sacrificed later. And even then he crumbled with despairing apologies afterwards and never kept anyone purposefully ignorant afterwards.

Looking at Leitner’s line in TMA 80, it’s easy to say “what happened to Gertrude will happen to Jon, it’s foreshadowing.” But look at their stories: Jon may still lose Martin, just like any real life couple might lose a mortal loved one to the dangers all around us, cause this is a horror story. But what happens in between matters. Here he is with him at his side, loving and being loved, his anchor to keep him from giving up to despair, his Reason. His story has already played out differently than Gertrude’s. To me, Leitner’s words appear to be a contrast between the two: Gertrude manipulated and sacrificed and lied to and enabled and tormented her assistants. Jon would pull himself to pieces for them, would dive into hell for them, would face off monsters alone for them, would place his fragile heart in their hands with trust.

I’m not losing you too. It matters. His choice to value others matters, no matter what cruelties the universe has in store for them.

#the magnus archives #tma #gertrude robinson #jonathan sims #tma spoilers #top posts #tma meta

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ckret2 · 4 years ago

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GVK spoilers below, about conspiracy theories

I’m gonna get around to posting all my GVK reactions but this one got long so I’m putting it in its own post.

The Monsterverse series, in both KOTM and GVK, has some pretty interesting things to say about conspiracy theories and ecofascism; but, unfortunately, it doesn’t REALIZE that it’s saying any of them, so it keeps dropping the ball and missing opportunities to explore them.

Starting with KOTM, “there’s too many humans so we’ve just gotta let some die and that’ll fix pollution 🤷” is like false ecofascist claim #1 but at no point in the movie was it challenged as unfactual, it was just presented as a sad truth that people have to do morally ambiguous things about. Except that it’s just literally mathematically not true!

Emma could be such a GREAT, believable character—especially in this world with, like, frigging QAnon nonsense getting such widespread traction—showing a compelling, realistic tragedy of how this normal, intelligent, well-educated white mom who otherwise is likely left-leaning (pro-environmentalism, pro-nature conservation, got a doctorate and generally more academia correlates with more liberal ideals) got sucked into a far right ecofascist doomsday militia that combines hokey pseudo-environmentalist propaganda with “in balance with nature” semi-religious mysticism, because she was exploited at a time when she was emotionally vulnerable (when her kid had just died) and was lacking healthy emotional support (when her husband turned to alcohol and then ran off).

... Except the movie never says that her “overpopulation” beliefs are WRONG. It says that they’re RIGHT, and she was just forced to choose between two losing scenarios—deliberately kill most of humanity to hopefully save a few, or watch humanity kill itself.

Nobody bothers to mention that the size of the population isn’t the problem, it’s the disproportionate pollution coming out of first world countries. Nobody bothers to mention that when Emma talks about “overpopulation” and shows a screenshot of an overcrowded neighborhood, it ain’t affluent downtown skyscraper condos in Europe or America that she’s highlighting, but large masses of poor people whose neighborhoods look “dirty” to the white woman’s eyes, despite the fact that they’re contributing the least to humanity’s carbon footprint.

Emma’s beliefs are empirically wrong, and if KOTM had ever demonstrated that, it would’ve been brilliant. Instead, it tries to say “she was right, she just went too far,” and in doing so loses an opportunity to make Emma a deeply believable, timely, realistic, well-meaning but wrong villain.

And now we’ve got GVK, which has swerved away from the ecofascism but doubled down on the conspiracy theories. Here, Emma’s daughter, who was raised for five years with what amounts to a survivalist doomsday cult’s beliefs, when faced with the grief of her mother’s death and the struggle of trying to reconnect to her estranged father, turns—again—to conspiracies to make sense of the world around her. Because that’s what Madison’s been raised with, and even though she got disillusioned with the particular “we know something special that the normal people can’t handle” beliefs that she was raised with, that kind of thinking is still what she knows. She’s still doing what her mother raised her to do! She’s still pulling the “hypercompetent highly-trained lone wolf ‘survivor’ saves the world” shtick that Jonah’s gang taught her to do—but it’s never brought up that it was screwed up to raise a child like that and it’s screwed up for her to still be interacting with the world like that.

At least THIS conspiracy theorist isn’t literally advocating for global genocide. Bernie’s focus largely seems to be on “this corporation is trying to screw people over and screw up the environment—” (because in Monsterverse, as in Toho monster movies as a whole, kaiju/titans and the environment are symbolically conflated, so if a corporation is messing with Godzilla then they’re messing with nature as well) “—so I’m gonna find out what they’re up to and be a whistleblower.” Which is great! Solid start! We’ve got a guy taking aim at big business and who says “when the weather Godzilla acts erratic, it’s not random chance, it’s because a big business is doing something it shouldn’t,” so it looks like we’ve got a leftist conspiracy theorist, that’s different, could be interesting to explore.

Except then he starts talking about governments serving a “global elite” and facilities built by “lizard people” and then we’ve swung right back around to the far right by casually dropping in a couple of antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Add that in with the whole “hollow earth” thing and damn, we’re namedropping a lot of antisemitic conspiracy theories, aren’t we? Granted, most conspiracy theories ARE antisemitic—but like, they could have dug around for some that aren’t. Have him talk some more about Roswell. Have him bring up things that we’ve actually got documentation happened and theorize that MKUltra research was used in Apex’s development of their pilot’s psychic mind link to Mechagodzilla. Have him bring up tailor-made-for-the-Monsterverse conspiracy theories that don’t exist here, “Monster Zero is actually the secret weapon of a nearby ‘Planet X’ that’s gonna invade,” whatever. Instead, nah, we went with the antisemitic ones.

Now, do I think the writers behind KOTM and GVK intended antisemitism? Do I think they’re closet alt-right trying to dogwhistle the fascists in the audience? No, I think they think they’re making fun of—or playing around with—what they see as harmless, unbelievable, way-out-there conspiracy theories. I think they know just enough about “hollow earth” and “global elites” and “lizard people” to make references to them, but not in a way that promotes the common antisemitic understanding of those theories as true. (Monsterverse’s hollow earth, a weird underground jungle where King Kong lives, sure doesn’t resemble the usual conspiracy theory.) To me, the way they were used suggests the writers didn’t deeply understand (or at least, didn’t deeply think about) what the theories really mean—nor what they imply about the beliefs of the characters who espouse them. Which is the crux of my issue with how the movies deal with conspiracy theories and ecofascists and so forth (beyond the fact that, hey, I just don’t like seeing likable characters casually referencing antisemitic beliefs): the writers didn’t think about the implications.

Because these things do imply a lot! For example, if, say, Josh, total newb to conspiracy theories, had asked about lizard people, I would have grimaced to hear it but I would have believed that he’s a teen boy that picked up the term at school and doesn’t know anything about what’s behind it. But on the other hand, I can’t believe a guy so deep in the conspiracy theory world that he bathes in bleach doesn’t know exactly what those conspiracies mean—or, even if he does somehow staunchly refuse to believe that “lizard people” is a code for “Jewish people,” that whatever circle of conspiracy theorists he runs with doesn’t use it as a code. Bernie didn’t pick up those beliefs in a void. I really doubt that’s what the writers wanted to imply about the goofy likable underdog with a podcast.

And sure, the “global elite” and “lizard people” references are presented like a “haha look how far out his beliefs are” joke—the same as the fluoride reference, which is basically Hollywood code for “bogus nonsense only complete lunatics believe” thanks to Dr. Strangelove—but at the same time, they’re never really disproven. Nothing he believes is challenged. Nor are any of Madison’s beliefs that she’s picked up from him. Everything they both believe is either a “wow that’s wild” throwaway joke, or else they’re presented as totally right, e.g. about Apex being up to dubious crap that’s irritating Godzilla.

Just like Emma, who was presented as in the wrong not because she was incorrect but because she WAS correct but took the wrong actions. And just like Rick in KOTM, who kept bring up the hollow earth theory like a running joke but then the joke was that he was right.

And that’s at the root of the issues with both movies’ portrayals of conspiracy theories. Aside from the jokes that are never explored (and therefore, never disproven), the movies say that, every time it matters, the conspiracy theorists on the fringe are correct, the heroes that need to be believed. Even though all (excluding Rick) are characters who have suffered deep loss, who have been hurt, who you can imagine as passionate but grieving people who turned to dangerously wrong extremism in their search for meaning... the movies don’t portray them as people who have been led astray by their pain, but enlightened by their pain. Which is what they themselves think they are, sure, but that doesn’t line up with reality.

The movies never forces them to grapple with how far they’ve gone astray from reality—and I think they should. I’d like to see them processing the revelation that their beliefs are wrong. Whether it’s as big as somebody trying to convince Emma that killing half the population doesn’t fix the pollution caused by corporations rich enough to weather a global hurricane, or as small as Bernie looking at Apex’s financial records and realizing the company’s money is going to the CEO’s vacation home rather than a reptile government and deciding to rethink those beliefs after they’ve checked out Hong Kong.

“Conspiracy theorist is right about everything” is already a common enough trope that Monsterverse isn’t breaking any new ground with it. And in a franchise like Godzilla, whose movies are rife with messages both allegorical and literal about environmentalism, corporate exploitation, the futility of military action, international politics, war crimes... letting the conspiracy theorists be wrong and showing that they’re wrong and what that wrongness can lead to would mesh far better with the themes of Godzilla.

Think about Jonah and Emma unleashing Ghidorah (who emerged from a destroyed ice cap and immediately caused devastating hurricanes—a perfect metaphor for climate change), and what that could say about how ecofascists who purportedly joined the movement because they support environmentalism are actually far more in bed with the destructive industries really at the root of environmental damage... if the movie acknowledged them as ecofascists.

Think about how Jonah collected Ghidorah’s head at the end of KOTM and by the time of GVK it was in Apex’s hands, and how this exchange demonstrates that “I want to unleash titans to destroy humanity to save the environment” Jonah the ecoterrorist and “I want to beat the titans to protect humanity” Simmons the billionaire CEO actually have far more similar ideals beneath the surface of their opposed goals—ideals that have less to do with the environment or with humanity and more to do with securing personal power and control... if the movie had explained how this exchange took place.

Think about how Madison’s mother died trying to mitigate just a little of the damage she did under the thrall of a doomsday cult’s skewed beliefs, how even though Madison broke free she found herself embroiled in similarly skewed beliefs just three years later, and how powerful it would have been if she recognized that she herself had walked right back into the kind of fringe beliefs her mother had led her into as a child, and if she had then resolved to learn how this kept happening to her and break this pattern... if the movie had ever let her realize that she was making the same mistakes, or even acknowledged them as mistakes.

There’s so much potential there, so many things you can see happening right beneath the surface... but the movies never touch on them. And so it looks like, in Monsterverse, all fringe beliefs are either right or harmless. And we never get the “disillusioned conspiracy theorist” story that could be so brilliant and that, right now, would be so relevant.

#gvk #godzilla vs kong #gvk spoilers #godzilla vs kong spoilers #godzilla #kotm #meta

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fishyfod · 4 years ago

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(Slightly) more organized thoughts on the V8 finale.

tl;dr I think the finale had some issues.

I’ll start this off by emphasizing again that this is my opinion, so read something else if you can’t handle negative criticism of RWBY. I say this because too often people in this FNDM can’t handle a difference in opinion without insulting or patronizing others, and I want none of that.

Now, RWBY’s general structural issue is a lack of time to fulfill all their ambitions, and they usually tend to neglect one aspect a bit more than others. In volumes 7 and 8 this proved to be quite a problem, because they wanted to tell quite a complicated story while introducing a fairly large amount of new and returning characters. I very much like the story they told in these volumes, but it must be said that the development and focus on the regular cast, and team RWBY in particular, has suffered for it. It’s not a deal breaker for me personally, but I do think it’s an issue.

So when I saw the finale episode only had about 20 minutes, I figured the best course of choice for RWBY would be to focus on the Atlas-only plots, and leave RWBY & co’s stories for the next volume, which by all accounts seems to be focused only on their character. And credit where credit is due, this is what RWBY decided to do with this finale. This doesn’t really solve the underlying issue that the main cast has yet again been relegated to such a minor role in their own show, but I can live with it.

I still do have a problem with how RWBY’s role in this finale was handled, and forgive me because this might be the least well-explained part of this review. The best way to describe it would be that, though I know I’m watching team RWBY, they don’t feel present in the finale? I struggle to put my finger on it, if it’s more an issue of direction or execution, but something about RWBY’s fight felt off for me.

By comparison, when I think of the episode before, I don’t have this issue. While the way Yang fell isn’t RWBY’s best execution, the reactions of RWBY to that fall worked quite well. There was individual focus on Yang falling, Blake screaming and raging at it, Weiss’s heart breaking into two, Ruby falling into more despair - the tragedy works because of it. I don’t feel the same about the finale, RWB fall almost as if they’re passerby rather than the main characters.

Again, maybe this is just me, maybe I’ll change my mind later. Whatever.

I think Cinder is the one I’m most satisfied with. She seems in character, she acts a lot like she did in her confident state during Beacon, and I did get the impression Salem knows Cinder is lying to her. I admit that I did not expect this direction for Cinder, it seemed like the right spot to have her break free from Salem, but it’s too early for me to call where her arc is going to.

The only nitpick I have with Cinder is how she offed Arthur. I felt like it could have a little more focus? I get that his death is supposed to feel completely inconsequential, but I wish there was just a little bit more there. Again, only a nitpick.

Vine - I think my opinion on Vine’s death is quite unpopular. It felt too last minute, without enough setup. See, while killing Harriet here would have its own set of issues, she was well developed enough where you could actively feel for her, while also expecting a possible death. I can’t say the same about Vine; Vine is only a teensy bit more developed than Elm, which isn’t a lot. He’s making a huge sacrifice, but the lack of character makes him seem expendable by design. It feels like the writers put all their efforts into threatening Harriet’s life, realized last minute that actually they could a lot more with her character (good call), so they shoved in Vine in her place because they still needed a bomb sacrifice.

On the flip side, three of the Ace Ops surviving and proving once and for all they broke away from Ironwood too, with Harriet and Marrow still alive - that is good. I’m not sure what more they’re planning to do with their characters, but it’s preferable to far worse alternatives I can imagine. We’ll see.

Then there’s Penny. sigh

I’m not sure what I can add that P5, bell or cosmokyrin, and probably a few others haven’t already said, but I don’t think it was well written. The whole body-thing in “Creation”, sure, I can accept that was a difference of interpretation. This? This whole, let’s resurrect Penny, develop her immensely as a character, reaffirm her autonomy multiple times over, avoid multiple deaths, only to die like this?

I know the common comparison people make here is with V3, and I can see where people are coming from. After all, Pyrrha and Penny’s deaths were impactful and tragic there, and most people agree that was well written. What’s the difference here? Some differences in circumstance are worth visiting here.

Penny of the Beacon era, lovable character that she was already, was not the most developed character. At the end of the day, most of what we knew of Penny then was in relation to Ruby - we knew Ruby cared for her a lot, we knew why they bonded, so we had setup as to why her death would impact the Fall so much. It works, because it gave enough focus on her for us to care about, but not overly so where the shocking factor of the Fall wouldn’t work.

With Pyrrha, I think we all knew the signs were there at the end of the day. I’d argue that Pyrrha’s very conception as a character lead to her death, she was just slightly too perfect for us not to expect a tragedy to occur. Importantly, her major arc in V3 sets us up to her death - through her conversation with Ozpin’s gang and Jaune, the introduction of Ember and the soul transfer device, killing Penny - by the time Pyrrha dies you’re prepared for it, and it still hurts. Even if the tragic scenario presented (losing Pyrrha because of the soul transfer) wasn’t the one used, dying because she tried defending the use of those powers from Cinder made sense. It was enough of a switch you weren’t bored because you expected everything to go to plan, but it wasn’t too drastic where you felt completely unprepared for what would happen.

The trouble with how Penny’s death was handled here, is in part because they just kept pushing us to the edge, making us worry about one tragic scenario, another way for Penny to die, only to alleviate our fears - only to kill her off anyway in a completely separate way. It happened so often in these two volumes, when we were already fresh off recognizing Penny wasn’t dead in V3, that rather than feeling like an expected death that is tragic, is feels like they toyed with out perception constantly only because they could. When you raise and lower death flags over and over in such a small amount of time, the tragedy you aimed to convey is lost. Perhaps unintentionally, the point no longer seems to be telling a tragic story, it’s only playing this cruel game of perception with the audience. What’s the joke about Jean Grey in x-men, that she keeps being killed off and resurrected so often it’s hard to care about it all? Is this how I’m supposed to look at Penny, RWBY’s Jean Grey?

Granted, I’m not sure that if they committed to one consistent death threat with Penny and followed through, that necessarily would’ve been better. I’m not sure how I’d think of RWBY if she died from the virus, for example. At least, however, I’d be more confident in saying that was a difference of direction, rather than a difficult writing choice to comprehend.

It’s only fitting I’d talk about Winter now, huh? I think you all know my stance about her as a character, I’d argue that she, Ironwood and Cinder were the best handled characters in these two volumes by a fair margin, but the finale leaves me very conflicted about her.

On the one hand, it’s everything I want. Winter’s confrontation with Ironwood is like a mix of Blake facing off against Adam and Yang confronting Raven, and while not as impactful in terms of storytelling, they do deliver on the same fronts. Winter calls out Ironwood for his lies, establishing once and for all it was by her volition she broke off, her conscience that was always better, and there is something poetic about her gaining the Winter Maiden powers to fulfill her goal of protecting others.

...but I can’t separate this from Penny’s fate. And it frustrates me to no end, because I love her connection to Penny, I made comparisons of how it reminds of Bumbleby’s relationship, it drives their characters forward so much, heck, I like that Penny took a part in taking down Ironwood with Winter, in a sense. But because Penny’s death feels so contrived, its connection to Winter almost cheapens the importance of their relationship with each other. And it doesn’t seem quite needed either, since they individually as characters already broke free from Ironwood.

I can sort of see that I am supposed to interpret it as a tragedy, and I do indeed think Winter getting the Maiden powers is tragic for her character (not unlike Spring Maiden!Yang theories), and I am excited to see where this is going. I thought this was the end for Winter’s major impact on the story, but there’s a whole other arc waiting, and Penny’s a major part of it too.

To say I’m conflicted about Winter would be an understatement.

The actual silver lining, for me, is the post credit scene. Volume 9 is an opportunity for RWBY to try and change some of the problem I presented initially. My hope is that by focusing almost exclusively on team RWBY, with Jaune and Neo, and putting less emphasis on developing the settings of giant-tree-land and not over-complicating the plot. Hopefully, this would allow them to focus on developing the main cast again, in in particular addressing some of the main issues presented; notably, the Bees confessing, Ruby maybe reaching her breaking point, Yang’s issues being addressed, and hopefully something more individual for Blake and Weiss as well. Neo is an interesting curveball to throw into this equation, and I have a decent amount of hope with Jaune (although then I remember it’s probably going to be about Penny, and, ugh...).

Yeah, that’s all I have at the moment. If you want to talk about it, my inbox and DM’s are always open. If you disagree with me that’s fair, just give me the minimal amount of respect rather than being an ass about it.

#RWBY/#RWBY Spoilers/#RWBY Crit #RWDE #my posts

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