#or if there’s some third iteration that came before that inspired them both

[vagueiish]

so are daemonculaba the broodmothers of warhammer? or are broodmothers the daemonculaba of dragon age?

[hpowellsmith]

Hi!

I know it's a bit unusual, but I wanted to ask what was the inspiration for the Cute Guys and what was your initial plans for the series before you eventually put it aside? Was the PC going to meet more people until the series' closure? Seeing Valentine's released and having played them a few months back kind of got me curious again.

Thanks for your time and wishing you a nice evening 👋☺️

Aww thank you, I always love talking about those games - Aquarium was my first ever completed Twine and Thanksgiving was my third I think? - and I have a lot of fondness for them.

Long inspiration etc related rambles below:

Inspiration wise, Aquarium came about from a prompt from a friend: I posted asking for prompts on a whim as I'd tried making a couple of Twines before but I hadn't finished them. I had played quite a few Twines at that point and a handful of dating sims (though romance-wise I had mostly played things like BioWare RPGs where romance was on the side of a larger plot). And it grew into Aquarium.

I have a deep and abiding fondness for characters connecting, or not, with each other while there are other things going on beneath the surface, I liked the idea of a PC having an internal life that the player doesn't always see, and I really enjoyed the parts in Aquarium and Thanksgiving where the PC can't bring themselves to do certain things (you might see those bits if you get along with Sebastian or Tommy particularly well).

The PC, their life, and some of the other characters - the PC's father, Sebastian and Tommy in particular - are very loosely based on a web of characters, archetypes, and plots from, variously, my wife and my interactive writing, novels, and TTRPG characters, too sprawling/complicated/ long-standing to tease out. When I made Aquarium some of those characters had been rattling around in a variety of iterations for around eight years already - which meant that I both felt confident writing them, and changing them a lot for the purposes of this particular version of them. It was nice to be working with familiar elements for my first IF.

As for plans, I did partially make the final one in the series called New Year's, with the PC at age 29, which was less bleak than Valentine's and which I got much further through making. It's quite different to both the others, and there's a new person in it who the PC's hanging out with. I can't entirely remember but I think I made it before I made Valentine's, and then decided to try Valentine's to fill in the gap between Thanksgiving and New Year's - but Valentine's didn't work out so they both sort of lay dormant for a long time.

That said, the points at which I decided to make each one were fairly spontaneous! With Aquarium I was teaching myself Twine, with Thanksgiving I was learning to make a bigger game and do the countdown thing and such, and New Year's is more... plotty, I guess? Larger in scale certainly.

I'm strongly considering taking another look at New Year's. It stalled because I moved onto other things and I started second-guessing about it not being complicated enough and adding more, but really it's very close to being complete: I playtested it a couple of times today and even if some of the style isn't exactly what I'd do now (I'm more into having the PC's dialogue be shown onscreen these days, for instance) it seems solid.

[blossom-hwa]

✍️ Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to other writers you know. Let's spread some self-love!

shawNAAA it's so good to hear from you <3 thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about myself because I will do it any chance I get :D

A Yellow Scarf in Winter - I think this is probably the best thing I've ever written. This story was the first time I really felt like I succeeded in achieving my goals with a story - writing emotion is something I really try to do correctly, and because music has always made me feel so deeply, I wanted to be able to capture the subtle emotion of one of my favorite pieces in this work. I'm very happy with how it turned out, and honestly, I just love this story even more every time I rewrite it (it's gone through over four iterations at this point).

the things we lost along the way - this story...ugh. I have so many feelings about it, both good and bad (mostly because I'm trying to expand it now and I love it but I hate it 🥲). But it genuinely means so much to me. As I was writing my second or third iteration of this story (the latest one that was posted), I was working through grief in a way I'd never had to before, and I think this story carried it through in a really beautiful but heartbreaking way. I'm very proud of this story, and I look forward to posting a new version of it in the near future :)

If You'll Have Me - sometimes stories just bounce out of me and this was one of them. My summer 2022 baby <3 Bridgerton got me FUCKED UP for regency era aus (s3 is about to do it again) and I loved the result. It was just so much fun to write and I was very happy with the result :D

Look at the Butterflies - I'm not convinced I know where this story came from, but as ursa said...my love language is safe spaces, and this is just a manifestation of it. I've outed myself but eh. Whatever. The poem that inspired it was beautiful too <3

Swing! - man...this was the fucking HEIGHT of my marvel fixation and I still have no regrets. I love mark and my mc....my babies....this story was like the first time I felt like I really wrote actual 3D characters?? man I just love mark and mc so much they're my literal babies <3

Honorable mentions: Worn-Out Soles / Light the Pyres / Purple Sky / Forever, and Always

[the-lesser-dog123]

I feel like you’ve actually hit a couple distinct cause-ish things that could all lead into “lego stories”

Danny Phantom and Miraculous definitely have lots of fanfics based on trying to build on missed potential.

But I’d argue that what originally led to Worm as a sort of fic-sandbox is quite different - more so the power setup rather than actual missed potential in the story.

And then MHA falls into both those camps.

Worm

My first iteration of this post was just long thing about Worm because I’m most passionate about its fanfic landscape, but now I’m adding a bit about the others so this is just one category category before those (if an overly long one).

The thing with Worm is that its canon is actually really good. Seriously, the story’s characterization can be amazing at times and it creates tension far better than the vast majority of fics I’ve read. I kinda want to start to list examples but honestly it’d get rather long…

It’s certainly not a bright/happy story, but that isn’t a failing; it’s kinda inherent to the premise. A story about imperfect people in a broken world making decisions that are often wrong couldn’t not be dark, and it never to me felt like it entered into “grimderp” (excessive darkness to the point of stupidity).

Yes, it absolutely still has its flaws (e.g. the timeskip was kinda weak, I feel like Sophia should have been written a bit differently towards the end, and ah yes, Taylor is totally straight. Sure. Just ignore her… everything) but I wouldn’t call it nearly as broken as some others. And the actual issues it has are entirely different from what most fics try to tackle.

Because some worm fic writers aren’t really as interested in what canon’s story is. Early on, many came for the powers, and that’s shaped things in the fandom since.

A common selling point you might hear people use for Worm is characters exploring their powers thoroughly. Taylor “just” has bug control and yet she gets so much mileage out of it thanks to her creativity with fully exploiting its potential.

Because of this, SpaceBattles—a forum with a lot of powerscalers and that ilk—took to the setting as a playground for exploring their ideas for powers, not because they were particularly invested in the story or world. And thus a lot of relatively shallow altpowers got written; just kinda loosely following approximately-canon but with their own powers inserted instead.

Those fics then inspired other authors who drew on aspects of them, and so on. Fanfics building on fanfics building on fanfics, gradually drifting away from canon. Eventually, it became self-sustaining. There’s an entire group (of both readers and even authors) that’s fans of worm fics rather than Worm itself.

Thus, those fanon characterizations have become sorta… solid. Common across lots of fics regardless of the original canon. Lisa as a woobified victim who’s only a villain because of Coil, Armsmaster as almost robotic with no social skills, Alec as a devil-may-care gamer without canon’s level of trauma, etc.

Hell, common fanon even changed one of the main gangs in Brockton Bay. The Merchants were nobodies at the start of canon; Coil’s gang was the third major power alongside the E88 and ABB. The Merchants only became worth mentioning after Leviathan when they could gather together the people who had lost everything.

And since that “wormfic fandom” is essentially its own community of just fanfics, it will reach the types of people who love fanfiction (and therefore are more likely to write their own fics), contributing to the lego box-ish setup of that side.

And like there isn’t anything inherently wrong with liking the fanon version. I’m a bigger fan of canon but it’s not somehow evil to enjoy something else more. I’m certainly a fan of a number of not-canon-accurate fics too. I’m just pointing out that I’d argue that Worm’s huge fanfic landscape isn’t really based on fixing issues in canon, but instead more on like, remixing fanon’s things.

And also like, this isn’t to say there aren’t any big Worm fics that are more “canon-y”. There absolutely are. Silence is Not Consent, for example. But they’re a very different vibe from the fanon side.

Danny Phantom and Miraculous Ladybug

I’m grouping these two together since I don’t have nearly as much to add about them.

These are the ones that I feel most match your description - they have some really great ideas but also flaws that leave lots of room for people to want to try their own reworked versions.

And once those versions get enough material added to them, they can also become the same sort of self-sustaining, not-quite-canon communities.

Also the DP x DC crossover has a weird relationship with DP itself. It often uses a lot of the common DP fanon, but it’s not exactly the same as the non-crossover fandom part. Sorta like its own distinct also-self-sustaining subsection.

Though it’s even more unique from the other lego box fandoms in that it sorta… doesn’t have a canon? It’s a crossover; it has two canons to build from but isn’t that solidly based in either.

My Hero Academia

Oh boy, it’s both types!

It’s got plenty of concepts that were never fully explored in canon for the enterprising fic author to dig into.

The full extent of All For One’s criminal empire, the layout of hero society (and often the corruption within it), quirk discrimination (whether against the quirkless, mutants, or those with “villainous quirks”), more creative exploitations of people’s quirks, and so on.

Tons of foundations to build on.

And it’s also a setting that can be easily used as a power sandbox a la Worm’s altpower scene.

Quirks can be basically anything, and the basic “become a hero” plot setup offers an easy path to follow while exploring the power. Just slap your new power onto Izuku and it’s essentially ready to go!

And that ease of access is bolstered by the school setup providing an easy plot railroad. Izuku’s just a student, so most of the workings at UA are essentially out of his hands. You can cause all the character changes you want and still stick to canon’s events almost 1:1 with barely any extra finagling.

Like even if Izuku is suddenly super confident and suave and can create miniature suns by chapter 2, the battle trial can still be set up exactly the same way as canon. Sure it’d play out a bit differently, but what does that actually change in the grand scheme of things? They’ll still go to the USJ soon, the Sports Festival will likely still happen, etc.

Or of course you absolutely can go and switch things up if you want something a bit more unique. Maybe the classmates are changed around, maybe the Sports Festival is different, maybe the villains recruit different members, maybe you let your setup changes actually butterfly out, and so on.

Lego Stories

There are times when I've considered the idea of a media of the sort that is so bad, we want to fix it.

You know the type. Miraculous Ladybug, Worm, Danny Phantom--these are works that are really cool in concept, and have really cool moments, and have the potential for truly great worldbuilding and stories... but the execution falls flat. Works that get you angry over what could have been. Works that drive people like me to rewrite them in our heads, where fanon becomes more popular, more accepted, and maybe even more well-known than the canon.

I would like to propose a name for this type of work.

I call them Lego Stories, because if you follow the instructions you make a fun enough little setpiece, but the real fun begins when you take it apart and put it back together your way.

Worm is probably the best example of this. There are so many pieces to it that would make a truly great story, if they were just rearranged a little. Or a lottle. And we, the fanfic authors, are the ones who see the shape we want it to be and work towards it.

Anyone in the Worm fandom can probably name three or more fics they've read that they'd call better than canon. Harry Potter and Miraculous too.

The first example that springs to mind at the moment is @zoe-oneesama's Scarlet Lady comic. It's a retelling of Miraculous that diverges from the moment Marinette recieves the Ladybug earrings, because Chloe steals them instead. Everything that happens in the comic is canon, but a little to the left; all the pieces are there, but put to a better use, in my opinion of course.

Any fanfic does this to an extent, of course. A Lego Story is one that leaves lots of room for fanfic authors to explore. Some works are too tight to squeeze anything new in, and writing fic for it is a constant struggle; instead of Lego, they're a stack of cards that could collapse if you move anything. But that's a conversation for another day.

[stardestroyer81]

If the Fated Acolyte and Quincy T. Page are any indication, it's no surprise that I love creating self-inserts that are designed as faithfully to their source material/time period as I can manage! And after discovering two games that would ultimately shape this blog into what it is today— Rivals/Lovers of Aether respectively— it only took a couple of days before I decided to design a self-insert for the Aether franchise.

And I did! ... sort of.

Because designing a Rivals/Lovers of Aether self-insert would involve choosing an animal to base myself on as well as drawing him anthropomorphically as well as taking what I would come up with for his Rivals design and make a Lovers-accurate design based on it... the prospect of a Rivals/Lovers S/I was easier said than done.

However, I did have a general idea of what I wanted his character to be like for both iterations, and before long introduced Psycha, the Clairvoyant Enigma, to my blog in this post right here! It was after I uploaded this post that I began scouring the internet for inspiration on how to design an anthropomorphic sheep character, and while I did ultimately begin a sketch of Psycha's Rivals counterpart...

Longtime followers know which counterpart came first.

And as of today, February third...

It's been a full year since the creation of Psycha's Lovers of Aether design!

Personally, of all of the OCs and self-inserts that I've shown off on this blog, I think Psycha may very well be my ultimate favorite. While I make sure to design all of my self-inserts to have an aspect that I have— whether that means their personality or what they look like— I find that Psycha is the absolute closest to who I am as a person (Barring the fact that he's a 4'10" sheep, of course).

So, some time after I began speaking of him more and more in various posts on this blog, I knew that I wanted to draw him again for the one year anniversary of the design of his Lovers of Aether iteration. I initially intended on drawing up a completed art piece of his Rivals of Aether iteration, which is pretty much finalized by now, though...

I think it's safe to say that Psycha's Lovers design is the definitive Psycha.

Some might notice two interesting details in this drawing of Psycha; firstly, he's not wearing his usual blue plaid flannel. I realized when going into drawing him again that I had only drawn Psycha without it once, and that sketch didn't even end up being posted. I figured I ought to draw him in just the t-shirt he wears underneath it for a change— it's also the first time you get to see his full 'Supaboy' shirt design, which is modeled after the Super Famicom logo!

Secondly, proudly pinned to his chest is a heart-shaped bi flag pin. I decided to include this because, in all honesty, I didn't start embracing the fact that I was bisexual until a little after I designed Psycha, which was when I knew for certain that I swung both ways in terms of gender attraction.

It's kind of an unwritten rule at this point that all of my self-inserts are bisexual, though the most bi S/I of them all is for certain Psycha. Even in spite of his sheepishness, I feel as though he would be proud to show off who he is with such a pin, and it fits his design a lot better than I expected it to. Perhaps I'll make it a permanent addition!

I'm really proud of this drawing of Psycha, seeing as in some ways it's a fully realized version of this sketch, and I hope that you've enjoyed reading about the process of this art piece of Clairen's very canon love interest!

(As a side note... hey, Dan Fornace and @elranno, since it was decided to add the four new workshop rivals to the Rivals lineup... can we make Psycha canon to the Lovers universe for real? 👀)

[theovergrowth]

(( just wanted to talk about Titus when I use him in other projects (dnd campaigns, maladaptive daydreams, etc) cw for child death, murder ))

(( So I think of all the different ways I’ve used or thought about Titus and Macrides’ story, there’s only been one instance that they both survived and got to be with each other. And that was only because my dnd party worked really hard for it. ))

(( when I first made Titus he was EXTREMELY DIFFERENT. He was always 14 in my head, he was always in a modern magic setting, he had a different name, his backstory was that he stabbed and murdered his older brother and had to run away from home and the police, then was taken in by a father who was also on the run from his own stuff. Later, that father would be squashed and stretched into macrides. I was edgy and young and as I got older and less sad and angry all the time, Titus and Macrides were born. ))

(( when I first created them for a dnd campaign where I was a player, the story went like this: Titus was a child when, mysteriously, his father disappeared in the forest. The overgrowth did not exist in this story, and I put more focus on the idea that Titus was searching for his father and too terrified to stay in the forest, thinking something took his father and it may have still been there. ))

(( in the third iteration is when the overgrowth came in. I had really gotten attached to Macrides’ character while playing as Titus (in my notes, I always had Titus’ journal entries detailing the journey, but they were all written as letters to his father he would show when he found him). So when I made my first dnd campaign, Macrides was The Overgrowth, one of two main BBEGS. The story was this: A technologically advanced empire released a man made virus on the world, hoping to make profit from selling the antivirus and weaken their opposition. Macrides was a demigod of nature who lived in the forests with his adopted human son. The virus was released and while Macrides was safe, Titus became ill and died. Macrides then goes on a bloody rampage against humanity, consumed in grief, and the party must stop him, upon which he would decide to join them in their revolution against the empire. It was a messy story, with lots of too-complex parts, but that’s where the overgrowth started. ))

(( and then! There were lots of other vague differences that aren’t super important to mention just because it was just very minor things added or subtracted ))

(( and then I made this blog, still seeing them in a dnd setting, before going back to my roots with a modern fantasy setting, while taking inspiration from stuff like “Midsommar” and other media about cults, along with my own experience of living in a small village in the middle of the forest and people I’ve met! ))

(( and recently, I put Macrides and Kid Titus into another campaign I made! There was an artifact in the form of a mask that destroyed or altered memories and Macrides, being a powerful Archfey, opted to guard half of it. When the party came to the forest, they were attacked by some fey creatures and a 12 year old Titus who was controlling the forest to go against the party. When they explained that they needed to find Macrides and wanted to help keep the mask from hurting ppl, he stood down and took them to his father. Macrides was in his overgrowth form, the mask embedded in the bark that made up one side of his face. He barely recognized his own name, barely even recognized his son, and in general seemed confused about who or where he was ))

(( the party entered the mask and fought a creature called The Lost, an eldritch horror that disoriented its opponents while sapping away their hope and memories. They killed it, freeing Macrides from the thrall of the mask. Immediately, he held his son close and thanked the party profusely, offering each of them a boon. It was the happiest ending they ever had. ))

[carminite-wyrm]

Watched Mumbo's Last Life ep. Immediately got hit by the writing inspiration and ended up with this lil ficlet. This was also inspired by a bunch of those posts about how the server itself has a presence/vaguely malevolent vibing spirit that induces the Violence Vibes, that are floating around but for some reason I can't find right now.

Also yeah there are spoilers for Mumbo's Last Life SMP Ep 1, so the ficlet itself is under the cut for the time being.

Upon stepping onto the server for the first time, Mumbo briefly wondered whether accepting Grian’s invitation to the second iteration of his survival game of a server was a mistake. The very air of the world was charged with something ominous, something borderline feral, which was quite different compared to the ambient calmness-chaos of the Hermitcraft server. It almost was tinged with the metallic tang of steel and blood, which Mumbo thought was…probably unsurprising given that the entire point of this game they were going to be playing involved death, and eventually enough death that only one person would be left standing.

He sat through the several minutes of explanation of the rules, which, judging by the reactions from the previous Third Lifers, had been much altered since the last time. Briefly looking over at some of his fellow newcomers, he wondered whether they too could sense the strange hostility of the world that they were now within. He turned his attention back to the rest of the group, and for the briefest of moments, he could almost sense the anticipation rising amongst them all, a rising expectation of bloodthirst that would surely only worsen the less lives they had. There were knowing glances being traded, of duos and alliances that had been iron-strong once, and now were up in the air, whether they would split for new horizons, or retain the old bonds forged in blood and war in that previous world.

He was not ashamed of the fact that the moment they started, he bolted well away from them all.

He was an engineer, a master of redstone. Fighting was not one of his strengths, not like Grian or the other participants of Scott’s monthly tournament. And any skills he’d had in terms of direct fighting had no doubt deteriorated slightly, what with his whole ‘Peace, Love, and Plants’ thing in the current iteration of Hermitcraft. At least he’d gotten pretty good at running away from danger.

And there was already a wealth of danger, from what Mumbo could tell, as he slowly encountered the others, most having already formed pairs and groups, having found others that they (for the time being) could trust to watch their backs.

His encounter with Joel and Lizzie was fraught with fear as an accidental swing set both of their wolves on him, and Mumbo swore that the local wildlife of this world was so much more aggressive than that of home. Even if Joel and Lizzie were rather apologetic about that whole mess, which Mumbo honestly did appreciate, even if he was quite happy to leave them be for the time being.

The churning chaos surrounding Scar was…intimidating, to say the least. It had taken him a bit too long to notice how his armour was fake, and that had made Mumbo a lot calmer, once he realised that Scar was very underequipped. But the ease with which the man talked, spinning his words as if they were threads of gold, unnerved him, brought to him too many memories of when the man was charged with Vex magic and Vex mannerisms. Except he couldn’t even feel or see the presence of the Vex, and that was unnerving, the knowledge that Scar wasn’t acting under the influence of those fey creatures, that this was probablyall Scar himself.

He was, at the end of it all, rather relieved when Grian eventually came along and dragged him off to the Southlands, and the ensuing comedy of the barrage of ‘A-HA’ puns did a lot to take his mind off the worrying atmosphere of the world around him. It almost felt like he was back at Boatem, if not for the fact that some of the laughter felt a little borderline manic, and he was vividly aware of the fact that all four of his groupmates had already done this once before, had lived, warred, and died on the original iteration of Third Life. In fact, he was fairly certain that at least two of the people here had been actual enemies for a bit, and wasn’t there that whole thing about people thinking Impulse was a traitor when in actual fact he wasn’t betraying them?

All in all, Mumbo wasn’t certain how long this sense of comradery would last, although he hoped that he’d be able to keep them together for as long as possible, even with the ever-present doom of the Boogeyman role, the mechanic that would guarantee that, no matter what happened, someone would lose a life each week. He still appreciated it though. Appreciated the fact that even with the blood-tinged energy that suffused this world, even if his four allies were probably already accustomed to having the faintest hint of oncoming dread accompanying their every thought and move, they were still able to find something genuinely amusing about the world around them.

At the conclusion of their first session, Mumbo leaned against his newly built bunker, admiring its fairly-sturdy stone walls. He’d probably add some more defences to it next time, but for the moment, he did feel a lot more reassured with the presence of four solid walls, and a roof over his head.

The others had laughed at him, slightly, for building such a fancy tower-bunker, compared to their much taller structures of cobble and stone. Mumbo got it, he honestly did. Resources were going to be scarce in this world in a way completely unlike Hermitcraft, and he’d used most of what he’d already gathered on a build that would more than likely get destroyed in the coming weeks.

But, for now, until he got used to the feeling of tension hanging subtly in the air, at the lingering promise of future bloody violence, the familiarity (and safety) of a bunker was exactly what he needed.

[keikakudori]

Meta question + Aizen said he was surprised that the power of his Espada was not equal to his. Was that sarcasm or was he truly surprised?

send me a topic to write a meta about my muse on

ohoho thank you this is genuinely one of my favorite underrated lines of his.

it was neither sarcasm nor surprise, in truthfulness; aizen was disappointed. we've seen how strong the espada are, all of them; kubo made a point of displaying that to us time and time again. aaroniero i could understand being taken down the way he was because he decided to toy with his food instead of just eating her ( don't you make a joke on my post, peaches ) and zommari had the unfortunate luck of having to deal with byakuya. still, if mayuri had not shown up when he had, then szayel would have easily killed renji and ishida but kubo’s a coward who won’t kill heroes.

yet we saw how much trouble kenpachi had with nnoitra and grimmjow and ichigo beat the shit out of each other and when it came to the tenkai kechuu, the other captains struggled visibly against starrk, barragan, and hallibel. if the vaizard had not shown up when they did, i am extremely positive that we would’ve seen toshiro, shunsui ( and ukitake ) as well as soifon taken out of the fighting for good. that didn’t happen, of course, but the way the fights were going? yeah, the captains were not going to win. or if they did, it would’ve been very chancy. we saw how much power they were putting into trying to stop the espada, both in the fake karakura town and in hueco mundo ( though mayuri did that with szayel and i mean szayel brought it on himself because he didn’t do the tactical thing of retreating and observing. ) and i think that says a lot about them.

hell, ulquiorra KILLED ICHIGO before their fight was over.

so i mean ... when aizen says that the combined power of the espada is lesser than his own, he is not exaggerating.

it’s fairly obvious that there is a significant power gap between aizen and the espada which makes one wonder - just how strong is aizen, exactly? he takes hallibel out without any issue when toshiro, hiyori, and lisa were putting in so much effort to beat her with only two hits from his blade. he stops komamura’s bankai with his bare hand ( he does i’ve checked and that’s the second time he stops a bankai bare-handed ) and then just goes on to plow his way through the captains and vaizard without any effort on his behalf whatsoever.

so it was not sarcasm and it was not surprise; he was genuinely disappointed because he had had more faith in them than that and yet the espada ... failed. he put in time and effort of assembling them and the ones we see are, in my opinion, the third iteration of the espada ( which is vaguely supported by canon ) which means that aizen has had plenty of time to work on refining them for yeas now, hunting them down and making them his blades.

i think he expected they would have been able to do more. but not a single of his espada managed to do more than hurt the captains; some more, some less. kenpachi himself said that if he didn’t start taking things seriously, he was going to die in his fight with nnoitra. so the espada are certainly a threat! and if the vaizard had not shown up when they had, i do entirely believe that we would’ve seen dead captains on the battlefront. it’s just so telling though that as soon as aizen decided to step onto the battlefield himself ( and sometimes i wonder just how much shinji showing up when he did inspired him to suddenly change things up because i do believe aizen would’ve been content to still sit back and watch, no matter the sudden arrival of wonderweiss and fura at that point in time. ) that attacking him saw everyone failing at taking him down.

honestly, the only two people there that day who were of any significant threat to aizen were gin and yamamoto and aizen very meticulously planned things out where yamamoto was concerned. he would not have expected any of his espada to take him out, thus wonderweiss, but it’s still so telling that aizen took out not only all of the official captains who were there that day but the vaizard ( who we know are stronger than regular shinigami ) in no time at all.

so yeah, that line of his? pure and utter disappointment because he thought that the espada would have done more. i think he was anticipating they would hurt the captains more, perhaps even kill one or two of them. it didn’t bother him at all to face everyone when he did, or how he did, of course; even if everyone had been at full strength, he had already seen their tactics, their power, and more. they wouldn’t have ever been able to touch him. he was disappointed because it was proof, in his eyes, that even they weren’t as good as he thought they were. hell, he didn’t even kill hallibel despite his disappointment; he simply ... discarded her.

they had proven to be a disappointment, after all.

[rosesloveletters]

long post, but it’s for Heath:

For the past couple of days, I’ve been working in a different medium than I’ve previously posted here before. I talked with @ajokeformur-ray because her collage wall of Arthur Fleck/Joker inspired me and, with her approval, I moved to make my own which will be dedicated overall to Heath Ledger, as well as my F/Os and the importance of them in my life.

I needed this. Currently, the walls in my bedroom are bare. I truly believed that becoming an adult meant shedding all of the things that were physically once a part of you and so I took down every poster, tapestry and wall-hanging I own. I only have my signed cds, one framed photo and a calendar hanging up now. I was lying in bed one night, staring at the bare walls beside my bed and I decided I wanted to be me. Heath has inspired me. I create because of him; he is my muse. I want to make something that, whenever I look at it, I see him.

I would like to share a couple of my pieces with you, if I may:

The first piece (sunflower) was created yesterday, whenever the inspiration first began to flow. I’ve always described Heath as being like sunlight. Looking at him is like stepping into bright daylight after a long and unforgiving period of darkness. So I painted him in a way I knew only he deserved: a sunflower, because he is both sunshine and life. Over the course of the year, I’ve gathered lots of quotes that remind me of him. I chose “stay close to people who feel like sunshine” for this piece because it is the singular quote I have returned to countless times when I look at him. He is my sunshine and his warmth is infinitely stronger. At the bottom, I listed my favorite line from Taylor Swift’s song Daylight “I once believed love would be burning red, but it’s golden like daylight”. Whenever Taylor released Lover, I despised it. I had just come through a horrible relationship and the last thing I wanted to hear about was love. I didn’t have a S/O, so why would I want to listen to or identify with an album dedicated entirely to that? I was on my way to work, the day after I had re-discovered Heath and his work and this song came on and it was like hearing it all again for the very first time. In that moment I realized that this album wasn’t just about lovers, but it was just about love. It’s about choosing love over hate and not letting your fears, hatred or the things that cause you pain define you. Your love is yours; the most important thing it taught me was to love myself. I’ve always connected this song with Heath because of this moment that I still cannot quite explain. It sticks with me because it opened my eyes and it showed me self-love, which is something I’ve needed and, without it, I never would have been able to appreciate Heath in the way that I do. 

The second piece is a poem I wrote and have dedicated to him. It is entitled Gold Rush, specifically named for Taylor Swift’s recent song of the same title, because while listening for the first time, I immediately drew parallels to Heath (give the song a listen and you’ll understand, I’m certain.) I wrote this poem back on July 28th, but I have restructured some sentences and altered its final draft. All of the lettering was done by hand, by me; this was my first attempt at traditional gothic calligraphy and I am very proud. 

In both of these two pieces, I used a gold sharpie for certain aspects because  if Heath was a color, he would be gold.

The third and final piece so far, was created today. It took several hours and is a concept I am the most proud of and it is completely inspired by Heath and his own creativity. Depicted are the sun, the earth and the moon, as a direct reference to Heath’s very own, self-designed, tattoo which resembled the same iteration. The gray, circular pattern of the background is a reference to his other well-known, self-designed tattoo of the center of the universe. Underneath the three celestial bodies, I added the English translated version of the latin quote “pedes in terra ad sidera visus” which translates roughly to “with feet on the ground and eyes in the sky”. (I used a more relative version that was spoken by Theodore Roosevelt: “Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground.” 

I will continue to piece together the things that make me feel close to Heath; he drives me to create and to learn and to thrive as the person I am, as well as the one I want to be. I admire him deeply and I can only thank him for giving me the inspiration to take on this project. 

[jochmus]

A Discussion of One Approach to a Universal Characteristic

I have felt inspired yesterday to make this attempt as a text post on Tumblr. By the subject’s weighty history and definition, it should by no means be an easy endeavor. However, there are two individuals from my readings that have inspired me, named John Locke and George Polya. Although I own both of the texts that interest me by these men, I have not read those specific texts unfortunately. Another influence was the eloquence of Euclid’s axioms, indeed I have not read the Elements either except for like the first page. I tend to become distracted very easily, and this is not something that I am very proud of. 

Now I must reveal my passion for the works of Ramon Llull. He was the guy behind the most complete version of Characteristica Universalis, but that is only because he managed to inspire Leibniz to come up with his Characteristica, which was never really worked on or implemented, and the system that Llull created is called Ars Magna, in four distinct stages. The term Ars Magna itself with regards to Llull refers to the Ternary Art, which refers to the wheels or volvelles that he used have elements or principles being divisible by 3. Furthermore this also by coincidence is the third phase of the art, but the phase and divisibility of the wheels are distinct things. 

Enough of Llull. Leibniz is really the only person to be regarded here, as it can be assumed that he wished to update Ars Magna to the science of the time and his own distinguished opinion. That being said, he never managed to create such a thing, but merely wrote to his collaborators and associates about what a proper implementation of this Universal Characteristic would look like. His letters are somewhere in the order of magnitude of 10^5, which is a complicated way of saying 10,000. Indeed I do not remember the estimated number from the Wiki, but I do believe it was something like 30,000. 

By the way, the Wiki does list 21 different attempts at Characterica Universalis, which is the number if I recall correctly, that this scholarly text on Llull mentioned that the man had written this many different version of his system. Quite interesting, but I cannot lower myself into base numerology. That has been superseded. To return to Ramon Llull for a moment, the man allegedly got his system from the Sufis. This precursor system is called Zairja, and there are a couple of texts available on that subject, one written by modern scholars and another written by a Tunisian historian who wrote the Muqaddimah. A hint for those of you curious about the latter text: The chapter about Zairja is in the third volume of that text, and is available on the Internet Archive. 

Back to Leibniz; for some reason essay writing is quite tiring. From what we can discern about what he stated that this system would look like, well I have some bad news. Leibniz simply took the diagram that Empedocles created in antiquity and said “There.” What I mean by this is that Leibniz just took the four elements and their supposed connections, in doing so adding another four nodes to the diagram, and being content with drawing lines between said nodes in order to ratiocinate (think) on paper. Anyone can tell that this is follysome since we now know for a fact that the Classical Elements theory is rubbish. In fact, I have a hot take that it was not only responsible for the idea of “race,” but also the idea of depression. I have created an acronym for the various iterations of Classical Element theory, that is “EHTR” (pronounced ‘ether’) or Element-Humor-Temperament-”Race.” Indeed this may come as quite a shock everyone, but Kant the philosopher was really racist and decided to rank the “races.” I am not going to get into this, but I will say that it may have become esoteric or something through the likes of Manly P. Hall, who mentioned the same scheme Kant used, albeit reordering some things, after the latter mapped it to an analogy about the caste system mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita. I can feel the cancelation brewing already. 

There are probably many different ways to attain this Universal Characteristic. I find that I have provided enough introductory information on this subject, so let us move on to the main part of this essay. Unfortunately, this whole thing was spurred on by a feeling of grandiosity, so I really don’t know how valid my intuition is. Furthermore I forgot what it was that I could use to implement Charicterica Universalis. That being said, I think it was along the lines of a study of analogy, using mathematics, so that we could potentially describe the various processes that underlie reality. The other part was a return to metaphysics proper, or the three general distinguishing features of it according to some textbook, those features being categorization (which is what I consider to be important in particular with regards to this endeavor), thinking and a sense of supremacy regarding the method. Personally I really don’t think that the last one means much, and is in fact a detriment to updating philosophy as should be periodically done in my opinion. Science will always push the boundaries. 

I am going to split the remainder of this essay into three parts: The first part will be about analogy; the second, categorization; and thirdly an obscure paradox that I came up with last night, as a bonus for making it to the end of the essay. You could just skip to the paradox, if you would like, in fact I will bold the title for you, in case I have wasted too much of your time and am boring you. 

On Analogy

I envision analogy as not something fundamental, as the man who wrote Zen and the the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance stated that analogy is irreducible to sub-elements; and I argue against that position taken by the author of that text. I am honestly getting tired of writing and I have written the later parts of this essay before I wrote this part, so here goes nothing. 

In the next part I briefly mention knot and graph theory. I envision analogies as graphs, as I was inspired by Schrödinger’s book What is Life that the genetic material was a crystal. Not true, but why could this crystal represent mimesis, as opposed to “genesis?” (Genesis as in genes, an improper way to say that mind you.) Yes, I really think that this is the case, but it does sound kind of crazy now that I have it on paper after having it in my mind for a few years. I don’t know. I dislike the designation that Dawkins created for such things, the “meme” which he literally took from some German scientist with the same first name, and removed the ‘n’ in mneme to create this Internet garbage we see today. 

Then there are the developments with the idea of metaphor. I don’t really feel like getting into these because I am too tired and I keep making typing mistakes. Just know that it is possible to limit portions of the structure of the analogy to make it more congruent with other analogies or structures. Lastly, it really feels like the literary criticism movement is starting to claim all of the universe as its “text.” That is a portion of Structuralism, at least, according to PhilosophyTube. She stated that Structuralism started as literary criticism, and what do we as human beings do? Why we map the text to the whole of the universe. Some could argue that is a kind of metaphysics were it to be loosely understood. ...

On Categorization

The general gist of what I am thinking of here is that Ars Magna’s major issue is that it is not chaotic enough, if that makes any sense. What I am attempting to get at here is the thing about the questions generated in that system solely referring to the statements created. There is no architecture or complexity there to be studied and afterwards engineered, as it is just base multiplication to generate the questions. What I would like, is for the creation of the questions to be irreversible and chaotic, indeed those are separate things, much like the weather. Knot theory, or graph theory would come into play here, I am not sure which but that is what my intuition is telling me. Also, many statements could be superimposed to generate a set of questions, or a single question. Hopefully my mathematical studies will enable me to investigate this further in the future. 

It must be stated now that the whole category term does apply in my opinion to Ars Manga. This is because the system abstracts the categories into a table of about 54 “elements” which are then combined a second time to produce very short strings of text, for instance “BCD.” Of course, the strings could very well be longer, and could incorporate more intricacy in this manner, but it is really the interaction between all of these strings which constitutes the architecture of the system, although this is done in a manner contrary to the mainstream Lullists, which is an anachronism, really. 

Case in point the categories must translate into natural phenomena and vice versa. At the same time, if the categories were generative, then they must be irreversible in order to be as intricate as possible. The sky is the limit with this, “New Lullism.” I don’t feel like explaining any more, but if someone wants me to tell them about why the standard categories must be reversible, and the generative categories the reverse, then I will explain this another day. Indeed, it may be a false distinction; there may very well be four types of category system, that is:

Standard reversible;

Generative reversible (Ars Magna);

Standard irreversible;

Generative irreversible.

That is all for this part.

The Paradox

There is a possibility for a Universal Library, but the one available on the Internet is not feasible for conducting research on, because it is an art website and is not powerful enough to locate texts and be practical. I am talking about an implementation for the Universal Library called the Library of Babel. You can visit the website at libraryofbabel.info. I do not have the energy to disclose the theory behind this whole thing right now, but on request I will write about it another day. 

The mathematical constant “pi” supposedly does not repeat. Yet there is a trichotomy to be established here, when the constant is juxtaposed with the Universal Library, either; 

1). The Universal Library is effected by Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (was stated by two separate mathematics professors to likely be the case);

2). Pi does indeed repeat minute portions of itself after a significantly large computation of it is conducted, with an upper bound order of magnitude of around 10^5000. Note that this is a back-of-hand calculation;

3). Pi cannot be mapped to the Universal Library.

This trichotomy may indeed be defective as I am not trained in logic, and also I had to make up the last one as I forgot what it was. Oh well.

Thank you very much for reading all of this. Have a swell day. 

[maxparkhurst]

How did you create your characters? What was your process?

TMI Tuesday:  How did you create your characters? What was your process?

// <offers out a chair> You’re going to want to sit for this. It’s going to be a LONG story. For those who’re looking for a short answer: I’m actually in the middle of creating these two. Edits and tweaks are always being made to make them appear real and true. And it’s thanks to everyone on here and in-game that they’ve progressed so much. 

Now for the long version. 

<buckles seat belt> 

Evolving as an Author:

Maxinora and Augustine Parkhurst are a culmination of ideas inspired by a myriad of things. The process of creating them isn’t linear. It has a lot of pit falls, unexpected twists and turns, and a ton of hills. To understand how we got the current versions of these two, we need to go back a couple years ago. 

It’s the summer of 2012. In efforts to get me off of his account, my Dad gifted me my own. This was when I made my first ever serious roleplay character- a hunter named Evelon Holmwood. Well, at the time I spelled it like Evavllyn but...Yeah. We’re going to gloss over that fact. Now, Eve was my pride and joy for the last several years. I played this character nonstop, refusing to play or write about anyone else. In retrospect, I used this character more as therapy than anything of creative merit. 

Eve’s story was basic at best. But I got better with story-telling the older I got. Unfortunately, her story got so convoluted that I had hard time salvaging anything from it. Now, you’re probably asking: How does this relate to Max? Fear not. I’m getting there. It was around this existential crisis that a mutual friend of my boyfriend and I convinced us to leave WoW and hop on SWTOR. My boyfriend was more than eager to make the switch but I was skeptical. Leaving WoW meant leaving Eve. And was I ready for that? 

He assured me I was and helped me make a character on SWTOR. This was the first iteration of Max. A bounty hunter from Nar’Shadda named Maxinora Fenrik. My intentions was to make her a lowkey copy of Eve. At this time, I wasn’t very confident in my writing abilities and liked to stay in my lane. But, the more I roleplayed this character the more she took on a life of her own. She evolved past Eve and exceeded my expectations. Playing a new character bolstered my confidence and while I no longer play SWTOR -due to OOC reasons- I still have fond memories with this character. I enjoyed this character so much that I reused several components of her design when making Max. Some which include her name and being blind in one eye. 

I flipped between the MMOs when Legion dropped. Expenses started to pile up and between the two subscriptions I didn’t have the time to play both. In the end, WoW won my affection and I made a Blood Elf because I had friends on Horde Side. Rorien Hawkthorne was her name. A drunk artist and master assassin. She’d be the second iteration of Max. She had an older sister complex, an affinity for being melancholy, and it was my first experience with playing a character who could kept secrets- or tried to at least. Another new character under the belt and I was feeling a little more confident in my story telling abilities. I’d probably would’ve kept playing that character if not for OOC drama happening in a guild I was in. The fallout had me jump back to the Alliance where I indulged in creature comforts. It was back to Eve. 

Tumblr made an entrance in my life around then as I ventured forth with a refreshed look on my hunter. I salvaged what I could and made a half-decent story. A lot of her misadventures are still posted up on her blog @evelonholmwood​ On the side I made the third iteration of Max. A fire mage and blacksmith combo by the name of Rowan Celwick with her younger brother Thomas Celwick.  They were just two orphaned kids trying to make a life in Stormwind. Rowan was an arcane drop-out and blacksmith wannabe and Thomas...Was...Well? Thomas? A glorified side-piece? A way to garner pity for Rowan. I didn’t place a lot of emphasis on them or their characters. My main focus was Eve. But these two would be the underlying foundation of Max and Auggie’s characters. 

I eventually took a hiatus from WoW and focused on more personal writing. The details are boring so I’ll gloss over it by saying that creating a character completely from scratch was the final push in the right direction for me. Fast forward several months to a year aaaaaand BOOM! Pandemic. 

Writing is an escape for me. It’s one of my best coping mechanisms during trying times. And when nothing else works, I over indulge in some Warcraft. So, I resubbed. There was hesitance when re-entering the RP scene. I didn’t leave Eve’s story off on an convenient note. For lack of better phrasing, I wrote myself into a hole I couldn’t get out of. So, with the help of my boyfriend, I decided it was time to give Eve her happy ending and shelf her for good. 

Which put me in a dilemma! Who was I going to RP? Well, you remember the Celwicks? They became my newest project. 

The Creative Process: 

I knew the Celwick story was weak and read much like a middle-school fanfiction. Revising was a must. But there were integral pieces to their story which I enjoyed: 

Familial Sacrifice 

Juxtaposing concepts

Intertwined Fates

These were themes I could work with and evolve. Keeping these in mind, I started to deconstruct the Celwick story line. They were no longer Gilnean but Kul’tiran. This prompted a name change from Celwick to Parkhurst. And I won’t lie, I like the sound of Parkhurst better than Celwick. Thomas became Augustine and Rowan became Maxinora (Mainly because I actually HAD the name Maxinora and not Rowan). The little changes got me hyped for the characters. 

Next, I started to trim away the unnecessary details that bogged down the narrative. Things that either didn’t fit or made the timeline too convoluted were replaced. Pyromancy was a great example. The age I wanted Max to be wouldn’t yield to her understanding of Pyromancy. At least, not to the level I WANTED it to be. SO, I turned it into lament’s magic. Alchemy. (I also always wanted to play an alchemist since watching FMA) 

A girl with two professions seemed excessive as well. I had to look at why I wanted her to be both an Alchemist and a Blacksmith. The answer was simple. I just liked the juxtaposition of an intelligent woman being rough and tumble. Which made me ask: Was Blacksmithing necessary to achieve that imagine? The answer was no. To pay respect to her previous iteration, I made their parents blacksmiths. It also let me keep themes of fire in her concept. The change in profession brought on a change in her appearance. I made her a little more slender to fit with the alchemist appeal. 

Max’s aesthetic was brought on by my previous characters.  Rorien inspired more internal facets of Max while Fenrik inspired outward appearances. Max’s auburn was strictly a decision made on the fact that I had one too many character’s with black hair. There wasn’t any other reason for it. 

Designing Max was easy. The real challenge was with Augustine. Up until that point, all I had to go on for his character was Tommy Celwick and...Well. There wasn’t a lot there. He wasn’t much more than a poorly used trope and I considered doing away with him all together. But I realized that I REALLY liked the trope and I liked what he did for Max’s character.  So, I buckled down and made myself think through all the reasons why Thomas Celwick -AKA Augustine Parkhust- needed to exist. 

I decided that I needed him in order to present themes in Max’s story. He was the foil to her character. Cynic older sister? Meet optimistic brother. He also appealed to not only the three themes listed above, but also the newest one I wanted to explore: two sides of the same coin. Max and Augustine are simultaneously the same, having similar traumas, and yet different. If for nothing else, Augustine could help propel Max in the right direction. Be her moral compass, you know? With a bit of half-assing here and there, I managed to get a decent character out of Augustine. Took the cliche nerdy brother idea, physical design and all, and ran with it. Shortly after I  made their Tumblr account. In no way did I expect this BOY to take on a life of his own. Like, Auggie knocked on my brain’s door and was like, “Yeah. No. I’m not a side character. Give me my own story...” 

Which will bring me into my final point! 

The Characters Write Their Own Story: 

I’ve never been able to sit down and plan a story. My mind doesn’t work in such a structured fashion. It wanders and explores. When I’m creating, I’m watching. Watching the scenes play out before my eyes as these characters take what I’ve given them and grow into something almost independent of me. The basic pieces of Max and Auggie’s back story, along with character design, were purposeful. Yes. But everything that came after was THEM.

It’s cliche, I know, but I can’t describe this experience any other way. These two grew outside of my influence and now dominate a space in my brain. They talk, work, and interact without me. I mean...Not REALLY. But...It feels like that. It feels I’m watching through a keyhole and just recording what I see as their story plays out. 

I guess a better analogy is me being the director. I’m watching the movie in the stands as two actors improv. On good days, I’m in control and rework scenes until I’m satisfied with the results. Try this. Move here. Say this. On bad days, I don’t see anything. My actors went home. The lights are off. Show’s cancelled for the day. These days make me sad...But they’re worth it because on the BEST days...The best days Max and Auggie run the whole show, and I am watching through the keyhole as their story unfolds little by little. 

It’s truly magical. 

The last part of their creation was the voice. Character voice, for me, is like building muscle. You need to work out. Start small and work your way up in weight. Every little piece I wrote made their voices stronger; and that’s including asks and threads. Interacting with other characters helped to flesh them out as people. And while it was hard and intimidating at first, it’s started to become easier. 

Wrap-Up

My method is messy and untrained. I don’t claim to have any secrets. My knowledge of writing is mediocre at best. But I’m having fun. And that’s were the real magic of any character comes in. Fun. Because if you aren’t writing about something that sparks your soul- either with love, happiness, hatred, etc- then it’s nothing more than a forced, hollow husk. Writing is meant to evoke emotion. At least in mind. And want to express complex emotions and share them. In a perfect world? My characters -any of my characters- resonates with someone. They become the escape someone needed. That’s the ultimate goal. 

It’s thanks to all of you that Max and Auggie have come this far. It’s from their interactions with others that they’ve managed to evolve into something incredible- especially Augustine. He just kept shining brighter and brighter until I felt obligated to make him an in-game character. So, you all are just as much a part in the creative process as me. Thank you! 

And a special thanks to my boyfriend for always being a sound board for my rambling ass <3 

THANK YOU FOR THE ASK, ANON! Sorry I posted an essay...<3 

[nerianasims]

Billboard #1s 1985

Under the cut.

Foreigner -- "I Want To Know What Love Is" -- February 2, 1985

One of the quintessential 80s power ballads. It's actually kind of interesting if you think about it enough. He's not in love yet, but he's gotten sick of not being in love, so he's asking someone he's in the pre-love stage with to show him. Though he's had "heartache and pain" before, and doesn't know if he can face it again. It's not consistent. I feel like it's a missed opportunity, but oh well. It's good enough for what it is.

Wham! -- "Careless Whisper" -- February 16, 1985

Oh my god I love the saxophone in this. The music throughout the song is so incredibly sexy. And this is the kind of song George Michael's voice was made for. He's totally capable of sounding both hot and in agony at the same time. I actually adore a whole lot of cheating songs -- mostly, though not exclusively, the tormented kind. Drama! Love! Sex! Angst! Gorgeous.

REO Speedwagon -- "Can't Fight This Feeling" -- March 9, 1985

<3. He keeps singing "r"s like a pirate, but he doesn't go as hard on the other consonants, so I'm good with it. Lyrically, this song sounds like it might be two songs mashed together. "What started out as friendship has grown stronger" or "my life has been such a whirlwind since I saw you." Well which is it? Except I've had that happen. I love this song.

Phil Collins -- "One More Night" -- March 30, 1985

This is a depressing heartbreak song without the saving grace of any of Phil Collins' neat drum stuff. Blah.

We Are the World -- April 13, 1985

Whoo boy. I was 8 when this came out. Obviously I loved it. All the kids loved it. Now, though... I'm sorry, but it's bad. Really bad. Many others have gone deeply into why it's bad. I feel acutely embarrassed listening to it, so I'm just running away from it as fast as possible. (Remember all those celebrities singing "Imagine" in their mansions in 2020? I blame this song for that.)

Madonna -- "Crazy For You" -- May 11, 1985

This is one of Madonna's most straightforward love songs. Maybe the most, period. This or "Cherish," and this is a better song. It's lovely. Like Olivia Newton-John, Madonna can act a song. (Unlike in most movies she's been in.) But what I'm thinking about now is learning in this article that her label wouldn't let Madonna release "Into the Groove" as a single. That song was huge. It was played on the radio all the time. If it had been released as a single, or maybe if Billboard had tracked songs then like it does today, it would have been a massive smash, definitely #1. "Into the Groove" is also the best song of her very early career. "Crazy for You" is good, but not nearly as special.

Simple Minds -- "Don't You Forget About Me" -- May 18, 1985

As I am "Gen X", I am supposed to deeply connect with The Breakfast Club. I was 8 years old when it came out. My life as a teenager was nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, like that movie. I didn't recognize any of the "types." I liked the movie when I saw it in college, mostly, but the whole sexual harassment turns into a relationship deal was not seen as cool any longer. The "jocks vs. nerds" thing also felt very dated. The school in the movie was bigger and richer than mine, but it's a fantasy.

Anyway, though I don't feel much about the movie, its breakout song was really good. It does speak to a real fear both in graduating high school and during young adult relationships. I haven't forgotten the people I knew in high school, as far as I know, but obviously they don't have the same importance to me any longer. I'm Facebook friends with a lot of them. And very much not with a couple who were the most important then, because we grew apart -- or blasted apart. One of the nicest girls I knew in high school thinks there's a war on Christmas. Another keeps trying to get me to join her MLM. One of my best friends became my first boyfriend, and I don't regret that, but it was also a semi-disaster. And others... we just have nothing to say to each other any longer.

So, Breakfast Club: I don't connect with at all. "Don't You Forget About Me": Speaks to something very real and timeless.

Wham! -- "Everything She Wants" -- May 25, 1985

What a dick. Songs in which the narrator is a colossal jerk are perfectly fine, of course, but this one gets under my skin. He's whining about his wife getting pregnant when she's dissatisfied with their life and that they're broke. As if it's something she chose to do to him. She's stuck creating a whole other person with her blood and flesh, and he thinks it's all and entirely about him. I really hate it.

Tears for Fears -- "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" -- June 8, 1985

I can't hear this song without thinking of this Baldur's Gate fan trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdd06d2nids. Speaking of which, I am incredibly excited for Baldur's Gate 3. I've been reading the early access reviews on Steam, and anything anyone is saying that's negative is stuff I don't gaf about (except bugs), whereas the positive stuff, I care about deeply. I hope it's got some of the feeling of that trailer. Um, right, Tears for Fears.

Honestly, though, it works best as a Baldur's Gate theme song. I don't think everybody actually wants to rule the world. It sounds good though. And pretty different from other stuff around it. But I like Lorde's cover better, and not just because it fits so wonderfully with all sorts of fantasy stories.

I usually play a paladin or paladin-type the first time in fantasy RPGs, but I'm thinking bard this time.

Bryan Adams -- "Heaven" -- June 22, 1985

He's been with this woman since they were young, and while they've broken up and gone through rough patches, now they're together forever and they're "in heaven." Bryan Adams knew exactly how to write a song that would become a hit. I used to not mind it at all, but it also means nothing to me. The chorus is catchy as hell though. So catchy that I ended up waking up with it in my head and it would not leave for hours and hours, so now I resent this song.

Phil Collins -- "Sussudio" -- July 6, 1985

I refuse to believe anyone ever told Phil Collins he was too young. He was born middle-aged. Anyway, the narrator isn't supposed to be him, so it's fine, but it's still kinda funny. He's got a crush on someone who doesn't even know his name, but "she's all I need all of my life." Um. The music is repetitive, the drums aren't as interesting as Phil Collins at his best, and I don't like the lyrics. I don't hate it, but I don't like it either.

Duran Duran -- "View to a Kill" -- July 13, 1985

I'm not sure I've ever heard this song before. It's about as good a song as the Bond movie they wrote it for was as a movie. In other words, it's bad. I'm not even sure there's a melody. Just a mess. "Ordinary World" would have made a far better Bond theme, but of course that was the 90s, when Duran Duran decided to try to make sense both lyrically and musically.

Paul Young -- "Every Time You Go Away" -- July 27, 1985

I like the high keyboard notes in this. They're sort of haunting. The rest of the song is musically pretty good, too. Lyrically though, it's only passable. This woman keeps leaving him every time "the leading man" shows up, so I guess he's the backup. Why does he keep waiting for her anyway? There's no hint in the song. I'm kind of embarrassed for him.

Tears for Fears -- "Shout" -- August 3, 1985

I think "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" is a better song than this one when done by Lorde. But I think "Shout" is a better song than Tears for Fears' original iteration of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." The chorus seems clear enough. But the verses are not. "They gave you life/ And in return you gave them hell" makes sense in isolation, but then there's a bunch of stuff that doesn't go with it. Like "I'd really love to break your heart" -- wtf? But the music is really good. 

Huey Lewis and the News -- "The Power of Love" -- August 24, 1985

This was the big song for Back to the Future, and it meshed beautifully with the movie, but it doesn't need that association to be a great song. "Don't need money, don't take fame/ Don't need no credit card to ride this train/ It's strong and it's sudden, it can be cruel sometimes/ But it might just save your life." Yep. It's sort of Motown, sort of rock, and I love it. (Also: "Stronger and harder than a bad girl's dream." Heh.)

John Parr -- "St. Elmo's Fire" -- August 24, 1985

Of all the John Hughes movies I have not seen and do not plan to see, St. Elmo's Fire sure is one of them. The song is about a disabled man who inspired people by rolling himself cross-country in his wheelchair for charity, which has absolutely nothing to do with the movie. I'm disabled, and I just... okay look, what he did was admirable. But we shouldn't have to be inspirations to be counted as worthwhile, and I've been told I should die because I can't produce for capitalism, so you know. I've got some personal issues with this and I'm gonna move along.

Dire Straits -- "Money for Nothing" -- September 21, 1985

This is not Dire Straits' best song, but it's an awfully fun one. I watched the video tons when I was a kid. (That sound is Tipper Gore falling to the floor in a dead faint.) The music is great rock. And the lyrics are very true-to-life. You can either sanitize people or present them as they are honestly, and I know which I prefer.

Ready for the World -- "Oh Sheila" -- October 12, 1985

The band's from Michigan. The English accent at the beginning of the song is fake. That's a good preview for the song, which sounds like a 3rd-rate Prince knockoff at best. Blech.

a-ha -- "Take On Me" -- October 19, 1985

The video totally ripped off one of my aunts. Somehow or other, they saw into the little comic she drew for me about someone going into a land of drawings to rescue someone else in a romantic adventure, years before 1985. Anyway, this song is great musically, massively synthesizer heavy without sounding artificial. Though I can only understand maybe a third of the lyrics as he sings them. I've always understood "It's no better to be safe than sorry" though. Yep, at least when it comes to romance, which is what they're singing about here.

Whitney Houston -- "Saving All My Love for You" -- October 26, 1985

It's not better to be safe than sorry, but that doesn't mean it's good to be an absolute idiot in matters of romance either. Nor is it good to be a colossal jerk. That's what the narrator is here -- the "you" she's singing to is married. And he won't leave his wife and children, though he used to say he would. The lyrics seem to say that's she's accepted the situation, but the way Houston sings it, I think the narrator's trying to get him to leave his wife -- and children -- for her still. This makes sense, as it puts some kind of passion and sense of story into the song, which without Houston's singing would not be there. The narrator certainly never acknowledges that what she's doing is wrong in the slightest iota. This song could be done in a way that works. But it's a completely sincere ballad. So, no. I despise the narrator, I despise the man she's singing to more, and the whole thing leaves me feeling gross.

Stevie Wonder -- "Part Time Lover" -- November 2, 1985

No one's thinking anyone's gonna leave anyone in this one. It's about cheating, and the thrill of it, but then at the end, he's found out his wife's cheating on him too. "I guess that two can play the game/ Of part-time lovers." This kind of funk groove is one way you make a song like this. It makes the whole thing sexy and fun, and the lyrics also work even beyond that ending, because they acknowledge it's wrong.

Jon Hammer -- "Miami Vice Theme" -- November 9, 1985

My parents didn't watch Miami Vice. And then I never felt like watching it in re-runs when I got older. I don't recognize this song. It's an energetic instrumental, but there's so much going on, I keep trying to figure out if there's a main musical idea anywhere. Nope. Just lots and lots of synth. Headache-inducing.

Starship -- "We Built This City" -- November 16, 1985

Blech. This song sounds both unfinished and overproduced somehow. The chorus seems designed to be catchy with absolute ruthlessness by people who didn't really care, and no one involved even seems to want to bother to fake it.

Phil Collins & Marilyn Martin -- "Separate Lives" -- November 30, 1985

This is supposed to be heart-wrenchingly sad. Well, it does tank my dopamine, but that's not what a good sad song does. A good sad song makes you feel better. This one makes me need to turn on something high-energy after about 30 seconds, before I sink into bleakness. It's aggressively boring.

Mr. Mister -- "Broken Wings" -- December 7, 1985

This was one of the first songs I recorded from the radio. On my pink tape deck/radio that was a sort of a mini boom box. I've always had my own tape player since I can remember, but that was a definite upgrade from the Sesame Street one. I was 9 then, so getting more seriously into music and developing my own taste intentionally, rather than simply absorbing what was happening around me.

Anyway, the song. It's about a relationship in trouble, and he wants to stay with her. To me it sounds like she has been so seriously hurt (and not by him), that she can't trust anyone, and he's laying himself on the line for her. That has spoken to me deeply ever since I first heard the song as a child. Moving on to the music: While the lyrics are repetitive, the music is not, which is what makes the song so good. It's a beautiful song.

Lionel Richie -- "Say You, Say Me" -- December 21, 1985

I look forward to Lionel Richie no longer being on the charts. This song was on the soundtrack of some movie I've never heard of. I wish I'd never heard of the song. Totally artificial glop.

BEST OF 1985: "Don't You Forget About Me" by Simple Minds  WORST OF 1985: "We Built This City" by Starship

[aion-rsa]

Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat: The Many Ways the Crossover Almost Happened

https://ift.tt/38sRB2j

Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, the game that really kickstarted the fighting game genre, has turned 30 this year. To celebrate, Ryu and Chun-Li are appearing in Fortnite. It’s par for the course for Ryu, who has been in so many crossovers to fight everyone from everywhere. Ryu has crossed over with the cast of Tekken, the guys from King of Fighters, the Marvel superheroes, just about everyone under the Nintendo banner, GI Joe, Power Rangers, and even Family Guy for some odd reason. Ryu and Street Fighter have crossed over with nearly everyone.

Yet for some reason, the number one dream fighting game match-up has never happened. Yes, we’re talking about Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat. These two giants of the fighting game industry have never exchanged blows despite being household names from the very beginning of the fighting game boom of the early 1990s.

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been some close calls or that they haven’t brushed shoulders in the past…

The Beginning of the Rivalry

The first iteration of Street Fighter II came out in February 1991. This was the sequel that made good on the promise of the 1987 original, which had great ideas that it couldn’t really execute. It would be bold to say that Street Fighter II perfected the formula, but it was such an improvement that it’s still incredibly playable to this day. It was a lucky break for Capcom, who would go on to milk the game’s success with several new editions of the title, from 1992’s Champion Edition all the way to 2017’s Ultra Street Fighter II: Final Challengers for the Nintendo Switch.

If you’re a fighting game aficionado, you know the history. The success of Street Fighter II sparked a boom for the fighting game genre. In Japan, SNK released Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting right on the heels of Capcom’s hit, while Alpha Denshi gave us World Heroes in ’92. Meanwhile, in America, Midway Games was planning its own Street Fighter II competitor, which was originally meant to be a tie-in game for the movie Universal Soldier starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. When that project fell through, Midway turned to the much gorier Mortal Kombat, a fighting game that digitized actors instead of sprites, an innovative approach to animation at the time.

Released on October 1992, Mortal Kombat was a major hit, and Midway quickly put out a sequel, Mortal Kombat II, six months later in April 1993. The third game would be out two years later. Mortal Kombat was speeding through its early days with cabinet after cabinet, while Capcom was focused on re-releasing newer versions of Street Fighter II. After making bosses playable, adding new characters, and tossing in other bells and whistles over the course of various upgrades, the studio concluded the game’s original run with 1994’s Super Street Fighter II: Turbo.

That meant that at a time when the internet was in its infancy, these two popular franchises were mainstays of print gaming magazines. Announcements, previews, reviews, secrets, tips, and so on. If your early ’90s magazine didn’t have at least a page dedicated to Street Fighter and/or Mortal Kombat, then get your eyes checked because you weren’t looking hard enough.

In 1992, Electronic Gaming Monthly famously pulled an April Fool’s Day gag on readers where they took the Street Fighter II mistranslation, “You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance,” and insisted it was a reference to a secret boss fight that involved working your ass off in the game in a way that was outright impossible, making your way through the game as Ryu without taking a single hit until your battle with M. Bison (and that was the “easy” part). The joke led to many stressful nights for gamers, who were finally told the truth about the hoax the following December.

But Midway took the idea of a secret boss more literally. Using the Sub-Zero/Scorpion ninja sprites, Midway introduced a green-clad fighter named Reptile, a seriously difficult opponent that you could only fight in arcade mode under some seriously ridiculous circumstances. Reptile was added in the 3.0 version of Mortal Kombat, making him the first secret boss in the genre’s history.

Capcom would eventually catch up with Akuma, a character extremely similar EGM‘s design for Sheng Long, in Super Street Fighter II: Turbo. By then, Midway had thrown in three more secret boss fights for Mortal Kombat II, and even SNK had already introduced Ryo Sakazaki as a secret final boss in Fatal Fury Special.

Brushing Shoulders

The Mortal Kombat series really thrived as a gorier and campier alternative to Street Fighter II‘s more fundamental approach to the genre, but that didn’t stop Midway from taking a couple of jabs at Capcom. In-game, secret characters would occasionally pop up before rounds and say something cryptic for the sake of helping the players figure out how to unlock their fight, a nod to the Sheng Long joke. But there were more direct pokes at the competition. For instance, Jade would occasionally appear for the sake of asking, “CHUN WHO?” and vanishing. Midway also included “RYU” as default initials on Mortal Kombat II‘s high score board. Cute.

Meanwhile, Capcom stoked the fire with a commercial for Street Fighter II: Champion Edition for Sega Genesis. It featured a security guard at a toy store coming across a box for the game. Blanka’s arm would thenreach out and grab the nearby box for Mortal Kombat and crush it into smoldering trash.

But it wasn’t all jabs. The two companies crossed paths in other interesting ways. In 1993, Malibu Comics published a Street Fighter II series for only three issues before having to drop it because Capcom was unhappy with Ken Masters’ grisly fate in the story. Around the same time, Malibu also launched a Mortal Kombat series, and the publisher would actually batch issues of both series together and send them to vendors.

Read more

Games

The Strange History of Street Fighter Comics

By Gavin Jasper

Games

The History of Mortal Kombat Comics

By Gavin Jasper

Hasbro double-dipped when it came to action figures too, releasing sets for both Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, complete with weapons and special vehicles. But while Street Fighter characters were treated like part of the GI Joe line, and were even featured in commercials where they all hang out and beat the crap out of Duke, Mortal Kombat was kept separate from Hasbro’s most popular figures.

Nintendo also used both franchises as major selling points for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The SNES ports for Super Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat II both played big parts in Nintendo’s Play It Loud ad campaign. One such commercial even had a guy getting a massive Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat tattoo on his torso.

But the closest thing we’ve ever gotten to a real crossover between the two games was through their Saturday morning cartoons. Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm were both released as animated follow-ups to their live-action movies, although they were directly inspired by the games themselves. On Nov. 16, 1996, both series, as well as Savage Dragon and Wing Commander Academy, took part in a long-forgotten crossover event based around a hero named the Warrior King and his search through the multiverse for a special orb that controls the weather.

The Warrior King played a major role in his Street Fighter episode as the romantic interest of Chun-Li, while in Mortal Kombat, he merely made a quick cameo as a shadowy figure running through a portal. Regardless, both stories involved the villains (M. Bison and Shang Tsung) wielding the same mystical orb.

No, the crossover ain’t much, but that’s still more than what we got in Wreck-It Ralph. Although the Disney movie featured M. Bison, Zangief, Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, and Cammy, it didn’t bring in any official Mortal Kombat characters to face them. Instead, the movie included “Cyborg,” a blatant Kano knockoff with the same cybernetic eye, goatee, and zest for heart-ripping. Why didn’t Disney just use Kano? Probably because he’s a Warner Bros. property. Still, missed opportunity.

Copying Test Answers

The video game adaptation of Street Fighter: The Movie will always be a fascinating novelty. Released in 1995 in arcades, the game not only copied Mortal Kombat’s digitized actors but it actually featured Jean-Claude Van Damme, the actor Midway had been unable to secure for its own Universal Soldier tie-in years earlier.

Interestingly, whenever Capcom sets out to make a totally new Street Fighter game, the studio usually chooses to go in a new art direction. Street Fighter V is the exception, although Capcom did initially start with a more photorealistic art style before nixing it and going with “Street Fighter IV but extra.” So, when Capcom tapped Incredible Technologies to put together the video game version of Street Fighter: The Movie in 1995, it was at a time when the publisher was also considering using the digitized Mortal Kombat style for Street Fighter III. Thankfully, Capcom decided not to go in this direction.

Midway hilariously dipped its toe in Capcom’s waters a bit more blatantly in 2004. Mortal Kombat: Deception introduced a fighter named Kobra who was supposed to be the latest human POV character, only evil. But Midway initially named him “Ken Masters” due to his physical similarities to the Street Fighter character. The studio included “Ken” in a beta version of the game provided to the press, with the express direction NOT to mention the character.

Guess what happened next. A German publication posted the images of “Ken Masters” anyway, suggesting Mortal Kombat vs. Street Fighter was finally happening. Sadly, no, this was not a teaser for the long-awaited video game crossover. It seemes Midway just hadn’t come up with a proper name for “Ken Masters” yet.

Capcom did throw in a cute reference to Mortal Kombat in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. The game featured Nathan Spencer, the Bionic Commando, whose cybernetic arm could shoot out like a grappling hook and grab opponents from far away. When doing that to yoink an enemy towards him for a haymaker to the face, he’d quote Scorpion’s famous “GET OVER HERE!” Nice.

Not the Right Fit

Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon admitted in 2008 that he’d tried to make Mortal Kombat vs. Street Fighter happen at one point but Capcom wasn’t interested.

“I’ve always wanted to cross MK over since about MK4, or something like that. I’m a big fan of all of the other fighting games, Street Fighter, Tekken. I always thought, wouldn’t it be cool to have MK vs. SF and MK vs. Tekken? We pursued some of those ideas to the extent we could but we always ran into some kind of road block and couldn’t do it.”

A full-on roster vs. roster situation was out back in the ’90s, but these days, guest characters are a normal part of fighting games. Tekken 7 alone includes representatives from Street Fighter, Fatal Fury, Final Fantasy, and The Walking Dead. Mortal Kombat and Injustice have gone all over the map with their DLC choices, including slasher villains, ’80s action heroes, Spawn, Hellboy, and even the Ninja Turtles. When a fighting game announces a new season of DLC, you usually know to expect at least one crossover character to be included in the package.

For 2019’s Mortal Kombat 11, Boon reached out to Capcom once again. Wouldn’t it be neat if a Street Fighter character got in on all the gritty time-traveling action? While we don’t know which character Boon was interested in using, many fans theorize Akuma would have been the perfect fit. But Capcom said no.

Here’s what former Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono had to say about it:

“It’s true that a proposal for a Street Fighter character in Mortal Kombat was rejected by Capcom, but it wasn’t me personally! There were many people at the company that felt that it wasn’t a good fit for our characters. I actually met Ed at the Brazil game show and spoke to him personally about it. So it’s true – but I didn’t make the decision!”

So why didn’t it happen? Probably because Mortal Kombat 11 is banned in Japan due to all the gore and extreme violence.

“I understand why people want it,” Ono said at the time, “but it’s easier said than done. Having Chun-Li getting her spine ripped out, or Ryu’s head bouncing off the floor…it doesn’t necessarily match.”

Maybe one day. For now, we’re left waiting for Ryu to finally get over here.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Special thanks to tabmok99 for helping with this article. You can check out his Mortal Kombat know-it-all YouTube channel here.

The post Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat: The Many Ways the Crossover Almost Happened appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/30veXj9

[newstechreviews]

In a slightly different world, Fargo season 4 might never have happened. After the FX anthology drama ended its third season, creator Noah Hawley admitted that he didn’t have an idea for a follow-up. And, he figured, “the only reason to do another Fargo is if the creative is there.” So, if there was to be a sequel, Hawley estimated it would take three years. That was in June 2017.

Thirty-nine months later (it would have been 34 had COVID not temporarily halted production), the show has reemerged with a story whose timeliness is obvious. It marks a significant departure from the earliest seasons of Fargo, which pitted good and evil archetypes against each other in arch, violent crime capers that ultimately erred on the side of optimism. Season 3 flirted with topicality, from an opening scene that hinged on Soviet kompromat to a hauntingly inconclusive final showdown between the latest iterations of pure good—represented by Carrie Coon’s embattled police chief Gloria Burgle—and primordial evil (David Thewlis’ terrifying V.M. Varga). Five months into Donald Trump’s presidency, that ending simultaneously reflected many Americans’ fears for the future and suggested that the battle for the human soul would be an eternal one. You can imagine why Hawley might have considered it a hard act to follow.

Instead of trying to top the high-flown allegory of its predecessor, the fascinating but uneven new episodes tackle conflicts of a more earthly nature: race, structural inequality, American identity. To that end, Fargo season 4 ventures farther south and deeper into history than it has gone before, to Kansas City, Mo. in 1950. For half a century, ethnic gangs have battled over the midsize metropolis. The Irish took out the Jews. The Italians took out the Irish. Finally, just a few years after a brutal World War in which fascist Italy numbered among the United States’ enemies, the Great Migration has brought the descendants of slaves north to this Midwestern city whose complicity in American racism dates back to the Missouri Compromise.

This upstart syndicate is led by one Loy Cannon (Chris Rock in a rare dramatic role), a brilliant, self-possessed power broker who doesn’t relish violence but is determined to exact reparations from this country, on behalf of his beloved family, by any means necessary. Loy’s deputy and closest friend is a learned older man by the name of Doctor Senator (the great Glynn Turman, all quiet dignity). In an early episode, the two men walk into a bank to pitch its white owner on an idea they’ve been testing out through less-than-legal means in the Black community: credit cards. (“Every average Joe wants one thing: to seem rich,” Loy explains to the banker.) He turns them down, of course, convinced that his clientele would have no interest in purchasing things they couldn’t afford. We’re left wondering how the ensuing saga might’ve been different if Loy and Doctor Senator had been allowed to channel their considerable intelligence into a legit business.

Elizabeth Morris/FXSalvatore Esposito and Jason Schwartzman in ‘Fargo’

The Italians, meanwhile, are starting to enjoy the rewards of their newfound whiteness—a largely invisible transformation marked in The Godfather by Michael Corleone’s relationship with naive WASP Kay Adams. (In keeping with previous seasons’ allusive style, Fargo often playfully evokes Francis Ford Coppola’s trilogy.) In the wake of their capo father Donatello’s (Tommaso Ragno) death, two brothers battle for control of the Fadda clan—a crime family that has Italian-accented patriarchalism written into its very name. Crafty, spoiled, crypto-corporate Josto (Jason Schwartzman, doing a scrappier, cannier take on his Louis XVI character in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette) has long been Donatello’s right hand. But his younger brother Gaetano (Salvatore Esposito, imported from Sky Italia’s acclaimed organized-crime drama Gomorrah), a brawny brute who came up in Sardinia busting heads for Mussolini, stands between Josto and the consolidation of power.

Generations-old tradition dictates that if two syndicates are to share turf in Kansas City, their leaders must raise each other’s sons. These exchanges are supposed to be a sort of insurance policy against betrayal; never mind that they never work out as planned. So Loy very reluctantly trades his scion Satchel (Rodney Jones) for Donatello’s youngest (Jameson Braccioforte). The boy finds a protector in the Faddas’ solemn older ward, Patrick “The Rabbi” Milligan (Ben Whishaw, humane as always), who double-crossed his own Irish family in an earlier transaction.

Ethelrida Pearl Smutny (E’myri Crutchfield from History’s 2016 Roots remake) is the show’s other innocent youth, a bright and insightful Black teenager whose parents (Anji White and indie rocker Andrew Bird) own the poignantly named King of Tears funeral home. Every Fargo season needs a personification of goodness, and in this one it’s Ethelrida. Not that her virtuousness makes her life any easier. In a voiceover montage that opens the season premiere, she tells us that she learned early on that, as far as white authority figures were concerned, “the only thing worse than a disreputable Negro was an upstanding one.” Her inscrutable foil is Oraetta Mayflower (Jessie Buckley), a white nurse neighbor whose patients tend to die before they can experience too much pain. Oraetta’s quaint Minnesota accent (another Fargo staple) belies the racist views she politely but unapologetically espouses; she seems fixated on making Ethelrida her maid.

Elizabeth Morris/FXE’myri Crutchfield in ‘Fargo’

It’s fitting that Oraetta is both the most tangible link to Fargo’s home turf and the first character who ties together the mobster’s story with that of the Smutny family. As her loaded last name suggests, she seems to embody a particular form of evil that has been a constant in American life since the colonial period: white supremacy. Oraetta harms, kills and plunders with minimal consequences. No wonder she has eyes for Josto, the first Fadda who knows how to wield his white identity, building alliances with government and law enforcement that would be impossible for the Cannon syndicate. (Josto’s version of Kay Adams is the homely daughter of a politician.) “I can take all the money and pussy I want and still run for President,” he boasts at one point.

The reference to our current President’s briefly scandalous Access Hollywood tape is so flagrant as to elicit an involuntary groan. It’s lines like this that expose the limitations of Hawley’s attempt to fuse the topical and the elemental. Fargo still creates an absorbing, cinematic viewing experience, with painterly framing, pointedly deployed split-screen and arcane yet evocative needle drops. A not-at-all-gratuitous black-and-white episode could almost stand on its own as a movie. And, as in past seasons, the show gives us many remarkable performances: Rock may seem an odd pick for a gangster role, but the same shrewdness and indignation that fuel his stand-up persona also simmer beneath Loy’s measured surface. The pain Whishaw’s character carries around in his body goes far beyond what can be conveyed in dialogue. Bird broke my heart as a meek, loving dad. But in his eagerness to make a legible, potent political statement, Hawley struggles to find the right tone and keep the season’s many intersecting themes straight.

Elizabeth Morris/FXJessie Buckley in ‘Fargo’

The show is simply trying to do too much within a limited framework. Fargo wouldn’t be Fargo without some eccentric law enforcement, so an already-huge cast expands to fit a crooked local detective with OCD (Jack Huston) and Timothy Olyphant—whose roles on Deadwood and Justified made him prestige TV’s quintessential cop—as a smarmy, Mormon U.S. Mashal who snacks on carefully wrapped bundles of carrot sticks. Yet Hawley also realized that he needed to break from previous seasons that, like the Coens’ film, cast a white police officer as the avatar of goodness; hence Ethelrida, whose investigation into her city’s criminal underworld takes the form of a school assignment, and whose soul is stained by neither corruption nor white privilege. She’s a wonderful character, but her and Oraetta’s story line can feel peripheral to the gang war.

With such a crowded plot, it’s no wonder the show can’t maintain a consistent tone. Each season of Fargo creates a hermetically sealed moral universe, doling out divine and definitive justice to each character according to their position on the spectrum spanning from good to evil. In the past, its archness has served as a self-aware counterbalance to the sanctimony inherent in such a project. And there’s still plenty of irreverence in season 4, particularly when it comes to Hawley’s depiction of the Faddas, Oraetta and the other white characters. But there’s nothing funny about the oppression and discrimination that Loy, Doctor Senator and Ethelrida face. Each of their fates is shaped at least as much by a society that is hostile to people who look like them as it is by the moral choices they make as individuals. So the scripts give them the dignity they deserve at the expense of inflicting earnestness—along with frequent reminders, such as Schwartzman’s Trump line, that the story’s themes remain relevant today—on a format that isn’t built for it. Realistic characters and absurd ones awkwardly mingle.

Hawley’s attempt to correct his show’s political blind spots is laudable, and some pieces of the allegory work well; the ritual of ethnic gangs trying—and failing—to work together by raising each other’s sons makes an inspired metaphor for America’s fragile social contract. Even so, Fargo seems fundamentally ill-equipped to address systemic inequality. Though that failing may well render future seasons similarly flawed, if not impossible, in our current political climate, it doesn’t negate the pleasures or insights of what remains one of TV’s most ambitious shows. Like this nation, the new season is a beautiful and ugly, inspiring and infuriating, a tragic and sometimes darkly hilarious mess. As frustrating as it often was to watch, I couldn’t look away.

[bettsfic]

Please bestow is with your Dark thoughts Betts. When they used Hozier’s ‘somewhere in the woods’....put a fork in me I’m done.

when i had to pause the show to google “quantum superposition” i realized that i wasn’t enjoying the direction it had taken. 

mostly, i have questions.

where did the fifth martha come from? the one adam killed with the god particle? she wasn’t on the same path as eva’s martha and never got the face scar but she died? 

what were magnus and franziska doing when bartosz and jonas were being cranky in the nineteenth century?

bartosz says that jonas’ appearance got all fucked up because of traveling but? where did he travel? how did he get the god particle to work?

where did those fucking round time/world machines come from and how does everyone know how to use them without being taught?

if young noah sees agnes kill older noah, doesn’t he already know that jonas betrays him, before he even betrays him? (i might be remembering that wrong)

if there’s an original world that deviates in 1986, am i supposed to believe that every single character born from time travel just doesn’t exist in the original world? and if that’s true, doesn’t there mean there would have to have been a first loop to tie the rest of the knot, and if that’s the case, then the first iteration would be distinctly different from the rest? this is the biggest plot hole in the entire show 

am i supposed to believe that jonas’ existence is such a bad influence on bartosz that he’s a burnout in adam’s world but a goddamn nuclear physicist in eva’s?

if both eva and adam’s world came from the same initial point, what set off the differences? why are there so many color differences and architectural mirroring, which implies the architects and designers across both worlds are the same but prefer mirrored layouts and different color palettes?

did eva want the loop to continue and adam wanted it to stop? for all they reiterated what both of them wanted, i still can’t tell how they were in conflict? 

where did the third claudia come from, when we watched claudia prime shoot her in the head?

how is everyone suddenly able to travel at any point in time and presumably any space, when before they could only go in 33 year intervals?

where did the broken time machine come from that claudia gives to adult jonas, who gives it to tanhaus who then discovers time travel?

what was the result of tanhaus’ experiment that split the original world? did he see any results or was he just like “damn that was a bust” and have no idea he superimposed 3 realities on top of one another?

why is the bunker a bunker all of the time except for 1986 when it suddenly turns into a fully furnished boy’s bedroom complete with a television set? and why did the first time machine require killing boys when technically the time machine itself is a paradox, because it has always existed? (but again, the ending implies there was a first time loop, so it can’t have always existed)

why did eva’s apocalypse result in a bunch of sand??

adam presumably spends 33 years trying to figure out the god particle or whatever, but eva in her world just...has it already? who figured it out?

how does the noah in eva’s world exist if there’s no jonas to take bartosz back in time to meet silja, who wouldn’t have been born anyway if hannah didn’t go back in time to spite fuck egon?

who fucked helge? 

am i the only one who thought noah was going to start making out with jonas after charlotte kidnaps herself?

in the original world, regina isn’t with aleksander. does this mean boris doesn’t murder anyone in the original world, and does that mean the murder was a result of time travel? and since the murder happened outside winden, are we supposed to believe that the time travel that happened within winden had a greater affect on the entire planet? or did he only not show up so that bartozs couldn’t be born and therefore fuck adam’s sister and have agnes, who fucks adam’s son, and have tronte?

if tronte isn’t regina’s father, who is?

why does charlotte spend so long in s1 and 2 developing her character as a sharp-witted skeptic only to immediately begin doing adam’s bidding? 

when egon arrives in eva’s world to help hannah give birth, do they just both die in the apocalypse? and if so, why did eva bother to send egon back at all? and also, in eva’s world egon doesn’t even know hannah so why tf would he care?

what is katharina’s name in the original world if hannah isn’t in 1954 to inspire helena?

if adam and eva’s rhetoric revolves around “if you don’t work for me, everyone will die” why is it then suddenly okay to make sure most of the characters never existed at all? 

are we sure the apocalypse doesn’t happen in the original world? does that imply that the apocalypse is the result of time travel? did claudia travel to the original world to confirm for absolute certain the apocalypse didn’t happen? since it was kind of her fault in both worlds?? and does adam-world claudia meet up with original-world claudia at all to tell her the situation? if not, why wouldn’t she??

am i supposed to believe agnes voluntarily fucked the original, or is this a coercion situation in order to have tronte? 

am i also supposed to believe agnes would never go back for doris? that she put her allegiance to adam above everything?

why did they spend all of s2 trying to solve the detective’s brother’s murder if they only mentioned it in passing in s3? just, aleksander admits to bartosz that it happened, and that’s it? 

why are there so many people who hit other people with rocks (and a fire extinguisher)?

why is everyone crying in nearly every scene?

lastly and most importantly, WHAT HAPPENED TO WOLLER’S EYE?

i have more questions probably but they’re impossible to answer because they’re either plot holes or rhetorical. i still love the first two seasons, but the third fell prey to what i feared would happen, which is that the ambition of the conflict became too unwieldy for its container. my biggest disappointment is the major time travel plot hole, which had otherwise been so seamless. i found myself this season not really caring about the characters at all, because everything was so focused on plot, which imo is what made s1 and 2 so special, a show that values its characters over the ingenuity of its plot. s3 does not hold that same standard. there’s a bizarre amount of crying that does not at all add to the emotional stakes. i wasn’t bored while watching, but i definitely was not as compelled as the first two seasons.

i know this show will never have a lot of fic, but here’s an incomplete list of fics i’d die to read:

noah/elisabeth falling in love after the apocalypse 

jonas/noah post-apocalypse friends to lovers to enemies 

jonas/bartosz 19th c. friends to lovers to enemies

agnes/doris reunion and HEA

egon/hannah 1950s unrequited angsty love 

adult!jonas/hannah s2 mother/son time travel shenanigans

adult!jonas/teen!martha 19th c. sad angst

literally anything that addresses and fixes some of the plot holes

ultimately i think the show ended on the right and inevitable beat, but the path it took to get there didn’t make any sense, and i think would have been better utilized if the writer stuck to honoring the characters rather than exploring the thematic implications of time travel. 

[scarletgardensrpg]

UNDEAD ♦ THIRTY-SEVEN ♦ ASCENDANCY

CECILE BUCHANAN is the Resurrector of the Ascendancy and second-in-command to De Dominee. Killed and resurrected by Nikolaas in the Red Room, Cecile is the first recorded Undead to walk the Earth. The circumstances of her death and revival are peculiar and scientifically unreplicable thus far—the product of extensive experimentation prior to her exposure to the 197th iteration of PM-GRNT, her body reacted to the chemical abnormally by simultaneously killing, then reviving her as a semi-conscious rotbeest following consumption of Nikolaas' blood. This genetic anonmaly, wherein she never developed a true rotbeest state, enables her to survive without PM-GRNT 197. She and her brother, Evander, are responsible for the initial Scarlet Death.

BIOGRAPHY

tw: gore, implied animal cruelty

At fifteen, she was already vicious. The dog's fucking dead, what am I supposed to do about it? Revive it? She was still in her Sunday clothes: Valentino kitten heels and a jumpsuit the color of wet ink. Six rubies and a rosario dangled from her ears. By the quiet, seething look in Julian's eyes, she knew it was taking everything in his power not to rip them out. They stood opposite of one another in the foyer, six unbreachable feet between sister and brother. Mr. and Mrs. Buchanan were God knows where. Evander was drinking on the beach. And the Dobermann was dead. Don't be a baby, Jules, Cecile said, and turned to go, pleasure heavy in her gut. You have others. She'd do anything to hurt Julian, if it meant that pretty expression would bloom on his face: wrath, spreading like blood in water.

- ❀ -

It came down to three things: she was a bastard, she was a girl, and she was second-born. Senator Buchanan made his preferences clear, and that preference burned through every designer dress, every blank check, every Maserati and summer house in the Hamptons. What good was it to look good, live well, when every nice thing felt like an IOU to Julian? Why pander to her older half-brother when he already looked at her with cold, patronizing eyes, as if she were a particularly troublesome dog to keep on a tight leash? Maybe Evander could live like that, hanging onto his every word and lolling after him mindlessly—but Cecile could not swallow the indignity of it. Her girlhood was one turbulence after another: the burn of her cheek where her stepmother struck it, the noxious silence of every family dinner, the freezing bath tile against her knees when she would bite down on her knuckle to keep from screaming. She would grow into a cruel, mean girl. A bitch. She would prowl boarding school halls at midnight with predatory calm, one hand gripping a bucket of gasoline; the other a lighter and match. You're making it worse for yourself, Evander said, after the third expulsion. Is getting kicked out for arson your grand strategy for earning Papa's approval? But by then, she was just angry. She was just trying to kick hard before going under. Fuck Papa's approval, Cecile said, and rolled herself another joint.

Eventually, Papa ran out of ideas. He met with doctors, businessmen, then a scientist and lawyer, both young. Harvard brats, Cecile learned, one ear pressed to the mahogany door of her father's study, who were working on something that was sure to intrigue you, sir, and certainly Julian. Because, of course, Julian had a place in this room of important silhouettes; he'd soon become one himself. Cecile's twenty-first birthday present was a swig of vodka and a biochemical test subject consent form. Evander had looked so terrible, signing his own set of paperwork while Julian simply watched them from the other side of the desk, Papa's hand on his shoulder. See? Cecile leaned over in her seat to poke Evander in the cheek with a single manicured nail. We're the same in this family's eyes. Disposable vermin. Terrible, harsh silence. She was looking at Julian, and found all of it unspeakably funny. Twenty-one years of Cecile's best efforts at nightmarish behavior—and here he was, winning in a landslide. Even she couldn't have dreamed up something so cruel. She was drunk on rage. She was dizzy with fury. And yet, when she addressed him, her voice was soft as a lily. You know, Jules, I really should've killed the other two dogs.

Later, they would call her helpless. A young, naive woman, dragged kicking and screaming into the Red Room, terrified for her life. As if Cecile has not spent every waking moment raising hell and terrorizing others. They would forgive all her sins, it seemed, so as to make room for the greater one: for what was a wealthy Senator's troubled, bastard daughter to two people in pursuit of divinity? One was inappropriate; another was utterly sacrilegious. Cecile supposed it was the easier narrative to tell; Eve, tricked by the devil to bite the fruit, could still claim some morsel of innocence at the trial of God. But, of course, the truth was, Cecile had never once been interested in innocence. She would always go after what she wanted with teeth and nails. She would always worship herself before all others. Nothing frightened her anymore. Whatever elixir they were perfecting for Julian, she would taste it first. Chemicals, poisons, pain—all of it was but a symptom of eventual power. And, ah, in her did power rise. Whatever she had become under Nikolaas' guileful hand, it was heady and powerful and utterly inimitable. Half-beast and half-woman, waist-deep in death: was Cecile not single-handedly responsible for ending a world? Did she not raise rotbeest after rotbeest, and let the ones she adored most feast upon her own flesh until they were returned to consciousness? Later, they would call her helpless—and perhaps, in comparison, the spiteful little girl of her past was helpless. But not anymore. Divinity lived within her now. She had swallowed God whole.

CONNECTIONS

NIKOLAAS – LOVE DESTROYED, TOO. Is she in love? Not with him. With his jungle garden of a mind? Maybe. Maybe it's psychological delusion, wired into her for survival's sake in the Red Room. Maybe it's a product of dying and living again by his hand, of having known what his blood tasted like in her mouth. Maybe it is simply true, unadulterated friendship, forged on strange foundations. I'm your one and only? She teases him, and licks the rim of her champagne flute. He is, whether aware of it or not, afraid of her. Or, more accurately: afraid of what he is capable of creating. After all, she has him to thank for a number of things—her untempered darkness, her gift for passing that same darkness to whomever she pleases with a single bite, her freedom from a past life that would have chained her to Julian. But, in spite of the wondrous creature he has forged from blood and science, Nikolaas refuses to spawn another like her; perhaps because he can't stomach the flesh it requires, or perhaps because he sees what she is capable of. Cecile doesn't mind—she's rather possessive of him, and dislikes the idea of sharing. She has followed him to Amsterdam, as she is sure she would follow him anywhere—to hell, to the ends of the earth, to heaven with a torch. They've made something beautiful since then: an ascending legion of the restless Undead, fed on a new drug that will carry them to dizzying heights. Cecile plans to rule someday with Nikolaas by her side. I'm your one and only, she says again, and this time, it's not a question.  

BLUE, DIMITRI, & JACQUES – BLOOD HOUNDS. They carry within each of them a vicious appetite for disaster—her appetite, dark and divine enough to swallow a city whole. They are perfectly cruel, unrivaled in beauty, unmatched in prowess—and of the hundreds of Undead who call her Mother, Blue, Dimitri, and Jacques remain her undisputed favorites, all raised on her blood. They are the three she looks upon with cold pride and infinite expectation; the standard by which all her other creations are measured. Do they share Blue's labyrinthine mind, her measured capacity for torment? Can they wear violence with grace and allure, as Dimitri does? Does Jacques' bizarre madness gleam in their eyes? The collective name Cecile gives them is fitting: for they are her dogs, her beasts, her children. She commands: Kill for me. Die for me. Live for me. And like good pets, they always oblige. She does not need their love, and shows them very little of her own—but still she demands their loyalty, their fear-tinged worship, and a promise to accompany her to the ends of the world. As their Resurrector, this is an eternal debt they owe to her. 

JULIAN & EVANDER – BLOOD IS BLOOD. The funny thing is, Cecile loves them. She loves them as all families are condemned to love one another, from birth to death to beyond that, too. One simply cannot discard of convenants made in blood—as much as she wishes she could. Julian, princely and immaculate, has always inspired murderous pursuits within Cecile: some ugly roiling mix of jealousy and resentment for her older half-brother that has seized her since girlhood. He has never taken her seriously. Instead, he insists on taking care of her, on filing away her teeth so she will stop biting his hand; not understanding Cecile can never be the sort of girl to accept condescension for benevolence. Now, stronger and standing on a level playing field with him at last, she finds herself continuing to provoke him, even word from her mouth a harsh lashing she hopes will make him flinch. If she is yearning unconsciously for the nod of respect she never once received while alive, Cecile will never say it out loud.

As for the youngest Buchanan, Cecile regards her little half-brother with less hostility—but contempt nonetheless. Brilliant, handsome Evander, who could aspire to great heights, if he didn't have such an inferiority complex when it came to Julian. She had hoped to make him into someone worthier when she killed him—but if he'd rather sulk uselessly in the cementary, fine. The fact that her brothers get along with one another just fine, even now, is a source of confused frustration for Cecile—and if she must be honest, once an injury to her feelings as well. They have always seemed to get along better with one another than with her—and being the bastard daughter, Cecile used to find it hard not to feel bothered. Of course, many years have passed since then. In death, Cecile is calm and calculative, unfazed and secure in her own power. She harbors some resentment against Julian for his complicity in selling her and Evander to the Red Room—but the satisfaction in having come on top regardless outweighs it. The matter of her killing Evander is also...well. Her baby brother was not appreciative of that gesture, possibly. All in all, she wouldn't say she's on good terms with either one of her siblings—but alas, blood is blood. For all their complicated histories and intertwined grievances, Cecile suspects they will always be apart of each other, for better or—more likely—for worse.  

OPEN ♦ FC: OLIVIA MUNN