#part 8 was on its last arc by the time i caught up

[violentlydefending]

i love getting into things when they're about to end it's perfect. least amount of waiting for new stuff until completion but also getting to join in on the excitement of finales as they come it's great

[orpheusilver]

care to elaborate on the miles venom arc?

YES okay so. the thing abt the symbiote is that (like any good corruption arc) it feeds on and amplifies the worst traits of a character, which is pretty straightforward in peters case - his biggest issue is his anger, usually manifesting via retribution (eg. "i missed the part where thats my problem", hunting down uncle bens killer), so his origin story is always the great power/great responsibility thing so he learns to temper that rage. what the symbiote does, practically, is force him to unlearn that foundational character arc and regress to his worst self

since the symbiote really really loves aggression peter parker is literally its dream guy but miles is a little more complex. hes definitely susceptible to that same anger (eg. wanting to "make kingpin pay", the entire sm2 martin li arc) but not as often and nowhere near as hardcore, so the peter playbook wont work as well for him (and also it would be fucking boring. weve seen that shit like 8 times already (not saying symbiote peter is boring i just think modern iterations need to explore new aspects to avoid treading the same ground constantly (sm2 does this very fucking well (also yuri lowenthal is a great va for peter like right up there with josh keaton (i think this many parentheses means im off topic (the adhd demon got me))))))

SO. whats miles' major issue he needs to overcome in his origin story? full disclosure i have not read the comics (but i heard they had some issues with his initial characterization anyway? which is fair enough tbh writing the successor to such an iconic guy is Fucking Hard) so TO ME PERSONALLY!! spider-verse miles is the definitive iteration of the guy and like. we all remember the whats up danger scene, his origin arc is overcoming self-doubt and learning to believe in himself ("its a leap of faith", "youre on your way, just keep going") which, alongside social anxiety (eg. the itsv "everyone knows" scene, sm2 "are you mad at me? it sounds like youre mad at me" dialog), seems to be part of some general anxiety issues. this is pretty well supported by the recent "the spider within" short film (which funnily enough is very fucking reminiscent of some sequences in kravens last hunt, not relevant but kinda cool) which also shows how miles responds by self-isolating, similarly to ps5 miles when peter ignores him

the symbiote can exploit his self-doubt pretty easily, the inherent power boost will do most of the heavy lifting to make him feel like hes not good enough without it - what if he runs out of web at the worst moment? what if hes not strong or fast enough to save someone? what if hes caught mid-costume change because hes so used to the suit changing itself? the more valid the (inital) concerns the better imo

the social anxiety is a tricky one but i think if miles traps himself in a doom loop of self-isolation he might spiral into genuine paranoia, which combined w/ the patented symbiote rage could lead him to lash out at people around him. "everyone secretly hates me so im gonna avoid being around people" -> "i feel alienated from everyone i know so im gonna avoid them even harder" -> "am i 'okay'? why would you care? what are you playing at? fuck off and leave me alone" -> "nobody wants to interact w/ me so everyone who does must have ulterior motives and is therefore a threat to me/my family/my city" -> "im completely isolated but bad things are still happening so people must be conspiring against me w/o my knowledge" -> "literally everyone on earth is out to get me and i need to fight them about it"

from there i think the ideal conclusion is pretty self-evident - miles takes a metaphorical leap of faith (calling back to the lesson learned in his origin arc) by actively choosing to trust someone, reach out and ask for help w/ removing the symbiote and dealing with the contemporary big bad (potentially his local peter variant bc hes got experience w/ symbiote removal and it would tie into the "leap of faith" motif but idk)

so tldr: a miles symbiote arc would be different to peters arcs in some (very interesting) key ways - rather than unbridled aggression he could be characterized by intense anxiety, manifesting as paranoid self-isolation and a sense of dependence on the symbiote suit, and would end the arc by reaching out for help in a symbolic leap of faith

[chemicalbrew]

2023 game list, part 2: more like one game six+ times 🥉

I'll be honest: I separated this year's list into two parts mostly for ease of editing (the first part had ten lengthy entries I got tired of scrolling past long ago), but also... I thought it would be nice to have a clear divide between games I was not quite happy with and the few games that managed to impress me this year. If for some reason you want to see me being salty first, you can click here, but other than that... we're good to get this show on the road!

Ys IX: Monstrum Nox (PC, 2019; 2021 port) [♪ New Life]

This one will be more of a rapid-fire ramble, because, even though I enjoyed the game and am willing to defend certain aspects of it, there's little doubt that it's one of this series' weaker outings. Really, it making it onto the second half of the list is mostly due to bias and the fact that this series' core systems (most of which any Ys fan is painfully familiar with) are consistently good, mindless fun. Anyway, here's my more scattered thoughts I can't be bothered to stitch together:

The soundtrack is mostly an obvious downgrade and largely forgettable - literally the only tracks that stayed with me even a little are the one linked and, surprisingly, Marionette, Marionette, but that's to be expected of nu-Falcom :(

The amount of references to past games Monstrum Nox has shows good self-awareness and is something I was absolutely not expecting. I'm just familiar enough with Ys to pick up on most of them, so I wonder how subtle they are for those without the knowledge.

I actually loved being confined inside Balduq and forced to explore every nook and cranny of it, even more so because of how it contrasts with the openness of Ys 8. They pulled no stops when it came to committing to the aesthetic, and I was caught off guard with how much I liked it all. A highlight to me is the graffiti you can find all over the streets!

The new gift abilities greatly expand traversal options, even if implementation of them is not exactly free-form. A bold idea and one I enjoyed greatly. Otherwise, there isn't much major change in how exploration and battling works from 8, but there really doesn't need to be, I think. They fixed the fucking raid mechanic, and that's all that matters - even if the equivalent of it feels horribly tacked on.

Most people would say the Monstrum designs are over the top, but I personally don't care. They all slap, especially Doll and Adol himself, of course (I was ogling that long hair even before the game came out, hell yeah). As for their personal arcs, nothing really stands out the way Dana did in 8, despite each character getting their own time to shine, but I can forgive an Ys game for not bothering with complex characters. In particular, the development surrounding Jules and the conundrum with his disabilities, while somewhat barebones, didn't feel disrespectful at all and was a super pleasant surprise.

(screenshot that doesn't have much to do with anything, I just liked it)

The homunculus twist at the end of the game came out of nowhere and ruined my final impression of the story greatly. That's all, really.

Chained Echoes (PC, 2022) [♪ Standing Tall]

One of my clearest memories of Chained Echoes is the amount of people I'd seen among circles of RPG fans crying out last December that this is the game that was going to snatch the title of GOTY right from everyone's noses. Admittedly, this is one of those silly cases where I recall being intrigued by the name of the game alone (how often does that even happen these days?), and the rest was just a bonus - yes, even the impressive pixel art and soundtrack.

This makes me think I'd had healthier expectations of this game than most people, but even then… The truth of the matter is that Chained Echoes will never leave the shadows of the classics from the 90s it proudly claims to be inspired by. In trying to make itself stand out and match its own ambitions, it forgets itself and fails to leave a lasting impression - I can certainly say I enjoyed the time I spent, but when I remember more about fighting sentient vegetables than how the game actually ended, something is obviously wrong.

Now, I loved smacking the hell out of those vegetables - the battle system is decently refined for the most part, and values your time greatly. To me, the most notable features of the process are those shamelessly taken from Chrono Cross, and for good reason: if there's anything that game nailed, it's the on-field enemy encounters, automatic resource restoration between battles, and what's probably one of its more well-known ideas - lack of EXP in a conventional sense. Chained Echoes wholeheartedly embraces those conveniences, almost as if to ask 'Why isn't all this standard yet? It's the 2020s!', and I find myself agreeing. The unique systems this game presents on top of everything are hit or miss (particularly the mech combat, the part that remains grindy through the dumb proficiency system), and combat may not be perfectly balanced (if you weren't shredding through mobs with Sierra, what were you even doing?), but… Everything surrounding combat just felt so full of fresh potential, and took so little time besides, with the already quick animations whooshing by at the press of a button, that it was extremely easy to forgive any faults.

There are many creative changes made out of battle as well - the most interesting of them being the reward board. It's simple to explain - very early into the game, you unlock a list of objectives spanning the entire world map, laid out on a grid. The tasks themselves range from 'enter the area' and 'beat this specific monster type' to 'beat a miniboss without taking damage' and 'open every single chest you can find'. The cool part is that, while each square provides a reward on its own, there are bigger fish to fry, as there's a separate list of items you get by filling out squares adjacent to each other! It's genuinely impressive how effective this elegant system is at getting you to engage with the world you explore… at least until you realize how ridiculous the late-game tasks can get. And even here, there are misguided ideas that threaten to ruin the gameplay flow - for example, the gem system, that was likely inspired by its simple and functional counterpart in Xenoblade 1, is exceedingly convoluted and involves lots of boring fishing for item drops for somewhat negligible advantages.

It's when the game stops copying the greats that bigger cracks begin to show, though. As a whole, Echoes' writing is a weak point - both because it seems to favor shock value and piles of barely logical twists over anything coherent towards the finish line, and because this game's sole creator took great pains to write the script entirely by himself, in a language that's not his own (guy's from Germany, if I remember correctly). Being bilingual myself, I'd like to say I can imagine how much of a struggle that must have been, and you seriously have to respect the hustle, but it doesn't mean that the end result of all those efforts isn't faulty and should be safe from criticism.

This is a game that very clearly would have benefited from just one more person looking over the script and flow of the plot - if practically every main party member winds up traumadumping to keep the player's attention as tropes they'd probably seen in Chrono Trigger before play out… once again, something has gone terribly wrong, especially since most of said characters weren't too appealing in the first place. This makes Chained Echoes one of the RPGs where the G part is stronger than the RP part, for better or for worse. But it's fun while it lasts, and not the worst way to spend 40 or so hours!

Pokemon Black (DS, 2011) [♪ Relic Castle]

Everything went precisely as I predicted, with the exact problems I imagined I would have, but I finally managed to find the mystery of what makes the series tick for people, both on a general and personal level. Pokemon has spat on some of my detrimental gaming tendencies (as in, the urge to explore everywhere that exists and obtain everything that moves) and in the same breath provided an experience that, in all its flaws, either objective ones or stemming from my own misunderstandings, proved to be surprising at every turn. It's, uh, really cool.

Now here is a funny thing: I cheated. In the literal sense. And I did that a lot. Here's what I used in Black, just cause I can put it out there:

full exp share without needing to swap your whole team in (they should just make this a toggle in the settings, the fact that they never have, not even in newer entries, is baffling.)

forcing any Pokemon within the regional dex to spawn. I probably wouldn't do it ever again, cause now that I understand what Pokemon wants to be, I also see there's really no point to forcing Pokemon to appear just to box them - it's harder to get any sort of bond with your creatures going that way. In addition, a lot of the alternate Pokemon at least get shown off in mandatory fights, so there was no point fretting over not getting to see them (you have no clue how happy I was to see N with Reuniclus, it just felt so right). The series is lying to you - the real joys are NOT in catching them all.

Season switcher (since I played 90% of the game in December, and it took less than a month to beat, it kinda sucked seeing the dreary winter variants all the time. I don't really blame the feature itself, it's just that I don't like real-time-sensitive things in games - especially when they're linked to unique rewards. I loved Deerling and the concept behind it, but just because it was December, I'd have been robbed of its illegally adorable spring variant without cheats! Boo.)

Spawning phenomena and random encounters at the press of a button. Probably the key improvement to the experience! Call me spoiled by modern RPGs, but I have grown from disliking pure random encounters to disdaining them, and this allowed me to segregate area exploration (which was enjoyable in its simplicity and layering through the dowsing machine) and making sure my catching and leveling is up to par while I chill out listening to different pieces from this game on loop or catching up with a stream - two goals that, to me, kinda don't mesh that well on their own. Especially with the normally horrible phenomena appearance rate.

Suffice it to say, my experience with this game was not quite the intended one, but I am still glad for it - it allowed me to get over my preconceptions and expectations of this storied series and, at least to some extent, prepared me for whatever entry I will choose to engage with next (likely Black 2). Next time, I won't be bending the game to my whims quite as much, but I feel like my frustrations with this series heavily relying on missable content will always remain.

With this silly kind of disclaimer out of the way, let's try to talk about Pokemon Black itself. The first thing I remember is just how linear it was - you walk through route after route and claim one badge after another until you find yourself facing the champion, which is where the game finally pulls its rug from under your feet. By now, it should be obvious that I enjoy not having to fuss over what to do next, so I found this to be a boon, but I could absolutely understand longtime fans being irritated by how little choice you have in matters.

Speaking of which, Unova robs you of choices in another infamous way - for the duration of the main story, you're forced to use the new additions to the Pokedex. Once again, this is something that bothered me less than it would most people, doubly so because a lot of the seemingly commonly hated new (for their time) designs actually appealed to me a fair bit. If there's only one Trubbish and Vanilluxe fan on this earth, it's me, or however that meme went - I would give my limb and soul for object Pokemon, I think that's one of the best ideas of the series ever.

The graphics certainly aren't much to write home about and didn't truly age gracefully, but nonetheless, they likely stand the test of time better than the entries following would, and are more than serviceable. With sweeping camera angles, detailed Pokemon sprites and larger-than-life vistas greeting you as you bike from town to town, it's clear this game wanted nothing more than to impress players, and I'd argue that it succeeded, given the timeframe of release, and especially the region Unova was inspired by.

The music, however, is where the game really shines - with town themes ranging from sweet and cozy to ones that end up never quite leaving your mind (remember how Driftveil City became a huge meme? Oddly, I feel like that's enough proof of how awesome the soundtrack is), character themes that feel tailor-made and convey more about them than their own dialogue sometimes, and sufficiently catchy battle music (with the standouts, of course, being reserved for the more… legendary encounters).

When it comes to the story, I... appreciate it existing. It was what I came to this game for, but I ended up staying more so for the team that I lovingly chose for myself and that carried me from dungeon to dungeon. It's not bad by any means, and I can see why people want the series to even try something like this again, but what's bold for this series is overdone for many others.

That said, they really nailed basically everything about N, dear god. I love him so much. And while I might not be familiar with how the series usually handles rival characters, I enjoyed getting to compare and contrast between Cheren and Bianca's personal struggles. Cheren's theme is a banger, to boot.

PS. I hope whoever decided Volcarona should evolve at level 59 explodes somewhere, that was NOT worth it.

Shin Megami Tensei IV (3DS, 2013) [♪ Aboveground Urban Area C]

BEHOLD, MY DEMONS! (pictured: not demons)

Holy shit, an actually fun dungeon crawler from the company behind the ever so boring Etrian Odyssey that I decided to play only thanks to Tumblr memeing on the glorious Black Market theme? Who woulda thunk.

If you say you play this game for the plot, I will not believe you. I'm here for the character design (equal parts silly and god-tier, which, going by my opinion on Xenoblade 2, is just what the doctor ordered), the surprisingly exhilarating kill-or-be-killed battle system designed around finding and capitalizing on weaknesses, coupled with the distinct gameplay loop of fighting, coercing and fusing demons, the incredible atmosphere every grossly pixelated texture seems to ooze, and most of all, what might be one of the greatest soundtracks in all of gaming, to me.

The music is what single-handedly turns what would otherwise be a forgettable, convoluted and at times almost offensive experience into something outstanding. Combined with the broad strokes with which SMT4 sets up and gradually expands its setting, it's jaw-dropping just how big of an impression the game can leave you with while utilizing what feels like the bare minimum in terms of visuals (I mean this in the best way possible! I love when games make the most of their limited resources). It's a shame, then, that these two qualities practically carry the game on their back, riddled with flaws as it otherwise is.

Seriously though, the storylines manage to be simultaneously straightforward and messy somehow, to the point where even the self-proposed 'golden' route is easily questioned by a player who's willing to give it a minute of thought. There's enough to latch onto here for impressionable people, but the truth is, SMT4 loves to oversimplify complex matters in favor of haphazardly committing to extremes, which in turn ruins its leading characters - each in their own way, as they refuse to grow and develop most predictably, even if you go out of your way to give them a chance.

(how the fuck are you supposed to take a game that has this textbox in it seriously? This is divinity talking, you know)

The worst part about it all is that while it's you, your player character, influencing the world, you're not really given an explanation of how your actions change things until it's already too late and you're left on your own to gape at how you trying to be nice to people actually led to what's functionally an elitist genocide. That is, if you weren't like me and didn't end the game prematurely with the ending that wipes out everyone instead of most people that are baselessly declared filthy and unclean. And if you want to see a path that pretends to be more reasonable, you have to use a guide and jump through hoops and fetch quests beforehand. Yeah, sure, that's fine.

I'm sure there are many more things people more familiar with SMT could critique when it comes to this entry (especially since I mentioned nothing about the Chaos route, which I frankly don't remember), but the fact that even me, a complete newcomer to the series, ended up less than impressed with SMT4's overall message... has to say something, no?

And yet, the experience remains unique and, in the most literal sense of the word, addictive. Maybe it's just my monkey brain willing to give games a pass if their mechanics click with me hard enough, but... It's fun to explore a kingdom and city in turn, to uncover bits and bobs on your map as you hunt for relics, to overwhelm your enemy in a single Press Turn, and even to get lost in the horribly designed Domains, all the while the literal coolest music you've heard in your life keeps playing. And soon enough, you come to feel that strange familiarity and comfort as go through the motions and backtrack to Mikado for the 100th time.

I'll be honest, this shit is why I yearn for more dungeon crawlers to love (that aren't just Brandish...) all the time. Hopefully I'll eventually man up and play another entry in this series, so I can better understand what the core fanbase appreciates and wants from Shin Megami Tensei as a whole.

Octopath Traveler II (PC, 2023) [♪ Cait's Theme]

(Someone tell me who had to sell their soul to make such gorgeous boss sprites...)

I missed my chance to engage with OT1 back in the day (mostly because I was put off by middling reviews), so to see the series spring back to relevance this year was actually a lovely surprise, especially with me gaining appreciation for HD-2D after playing Live A Live. It really felt like everything had aligned for me to get the most out of Octopath 2! Even more so because this game is a shining example of how to iterate on a sequel.

Most fans say there's barely any reason to return to 1 after playing 2, and they're frankly right. It would be harder to say what 2 did not improve on than to list all the positive changes! But here I am, trying to explain just how many elements had to combine to create my actual favorite RPG of the year. Here we go!

First off, this is the prettiest HD-2D game yet, pulling all the stops when it comes to polishing the style. There are more refined details in the scenery, every sprite looks buttery smooth, and with the new day and night cycle, OT2 is extremely eager to show off just what its lighting engine is capable of. This game is simply a treat to look at no matter what you're doing, and the soundtrack matches the ambition it exhibits.

There are more voiced cutscenes than before and you can let them autoplay - a small but vital quality of life change. The main stories have a decently varied structure compared to the previous game's rigid formulas, and the sidequests generally value quality over quantity (though they're still not much to write home about, and they're a pain in the ass to actually find and keep track of - this game has the most useless journal of any RPG).

One of the core elements of the battle system - the jobs your characters can use - are rebalanced and made easier to understand, and there's more of them to discover for yourself. As a whole, the tools you get to use in battle are greatly expanded, but more on that in a bit.

Lastly, it's easier to witness the cast interact, because they fixed the travel banter system! (Can't believe they made so much of what makes these characters likeable so easy to miss before...) There's more of these interactions to see, too - Crossed Paths, quests tailored to specific character pairings, are a genius addition to the game, if somewhat underutilized. They actually bothered to try and tie the eight stories together, as well, compared to the pathetic whimper the first game ends with! Though whether the attempt was successful is debatable, what's there is not half bad.

While I do believe I would have laid my eyes on this game eventually no matter what, due to the praise it's been getting in circles of RPG fans (I wish OT was more recognized than it already is, even if it is decently popular. The potential the series has is off the charts), what really pushed me was Hikari's very existence. One look at him, and you just know he's gonna be involved in an epic struggle and have to fight for his friends - and that's exactly what he does. It's glorious, and fits the overall message\vibe of the series - that is to say, getting to go on a journey and find new friends for your cause and new experiences - exceptionally well. This is why I, and most people, would probably recommend you start with him, though of course, you're free to do what you want.

Being relatively free to explore instead of roped along to go places like a traditional RPG would is a double-edged sword, especially because Octopath locks in your first chosen character, so they usually get overleveled, but at the same time the game expects you to have a functional (evenly geared and leveled) party of eight by endgame, which you might not be aware of and only have four peeps prepared. This could be solved with a simple toggle to give benched party members the same amount of EXP, or - and they literally do this in the endgame, so why not before?! - let us freely swap any time instead of only getting to do it in towns.

On the other hand, getting to watch eight (seemingly) disjointed stories unfold makes for a refreshing experience where you never know what (or who, at first) you will find. The travelers are divided half and half between two continents, but on my run I screwed it up - I got really curious about what's up north, which led to me finding Osvald early (and his chapter 1 warning scared the crap out of me for no reason, lol), so three characters were from the west and one was from the east. It's not nearly as big of a deal as I make it sound, especially later on with more options available, but before you discover such things and adjust yourself to what the game wants from you, it can feel quite challenging.

Speaking of challenging, I loved how the battle system in this game works - even if it's your typical turn-based bells and whistles with a job system attached, at least at first glance. The jobs themselves, while probably not groundbreaking or anything, still succeed in giving the party members their own ways to shine and even diversifying their movesets, thanks to the mechanic that lets you freely mix and match jobs! You can optimize to your heart's content, or mess around and go with the prettiest outfits.

(look at them!! just look!!)

The bread and butter of this series, however, the Thing it does to distinguish itself from myriads of other turn-based games, is the Break and Boost systems.

Break is simple enough to explain - each enemy you face boasts a certain number of shields, and before you figure out their weaknesses and break through, you're unlikely to deal any significant damage. Finding weak points can be cumbersome at times, especially if you don't have a Scholar to reveal them for you (I admit to looking them up occasionally instead of wasting SP\BP with Analyze), but it still doesn't take too much time, even less if you know the one trick to it. And your reward for doing so is getting a free turn to dish out damage (or set up buff combos)!

Boosting is an entirely different matter, though. In addition to the usual health and skill points, your party members gain a boost point each turn (provided they didn't use them on the last turn). You can have up to five points in reserve, and you can use up to three in a single turn to augment your chosen move - from simple damage increases to attacking multiple times in a turn (to break shields faster) to making buffs and debuffs last longer… basically everything gets much better if you boost. There are even special moves called Divine Skills that require 3 BP to use in the first place, and funnily enough, they range from game-breaking to actually kind of pathetic.

What's more, each character has special actions in and out of battle that are mostly unique to them - for example, Castti, the apothecary, can concoct powerful brews to aid you or damage the enemy, and in towns, she can chat up NPCs to get information by day or put them to sleep with specialized herbs by night. Meanwhile Hikari, the warrior, can learn skills no one else can by fighting NPCs one-on-one, which can be extraordinarily useful or... something like this:

The NPCs themselves don't seem too impressive at first, but as you make use of your characters' Path Actions, you realize that most of them have a small story to tell almost entirely through game mechanics, reminding you how vital worldbuilding is to an open-ended game like this. Robbing children of candy with Throne or getting to uncover short, but ridiculously dark backstories with Osvald never got old.

OT2 adds a cherry on top of all these layers by giving each party member another unique move in Latent Powers, which, too, can be either ridiculously overpowered (hello, free concocting?! why yes, I want to give my entire party 2000 HP, 200 SP and 1 BP at literally zero cost!) or incredibly niche (Osvald really got the short end of the stick here - you're better off boosting his actual spells than using his latent, which at best is only useful when Mugging and feels like an afterthought.).

And before all of that even starts, you have to pay attention to how you kit out your party. It's not just about what equipment has the bigger numbers - you need to consider its secondary effects, too, but more importantly, you need to pick the right secondary jobs to have a party that's truly well-rounded. If you explore the world thoroughly enough to unlock lots of job licenses, the sky's your limit, really - but the idea is to have a healthy balance between weapon types and skills while playing into each character's natural strengths.

You'd think having to make so many choices would feel overwhelming, but there's plenty of opportunities for the player to acclimate to the system and make it work for them. And they better learn the ropes quickly, because in boss battles, Octopath expects them to use every one of the tools they have. The game doesn't really go out of its way to explain how your skills can synergize to wreak havoc upon anything that stands in your way (sometimes before the enemy even gets a chance to act!), lending a sort of simple and pure joy to the moment when it all just clicks, when you begin to try out one bonkers combination after the other (does Critical Scope work on magic spells? Just how powerful is poison in Challenge fights? If I make Osvald a thief, will he still hit the damage cap with Aeber's Reckoning?), and they all just… work. Before that point, the game isn't afraid to kick your confused ass to the game over screen, but if you experiment, it won't be too long before you emerge victorious every time. To be rewarded like this for taking in your every option is immensely satisfying.

I also have to give a shout-out to the voice work done for all these battles specifically - every character gets a unique line for every move in every class, and they react to fellow party members breaking enemies or getting low on health. Really, the amount of detail in this one specific regard is just insane. Add to this the fact that you can fight at double speed with a press of a button (sure, this is nothing compared to how 6x turbo mode in Trails spoils you, but it's better than nothing, and for a game like this, it's enough), and battles in OT2 flow like a spring breeze, especially since, due to gear mattering more than level, you're not really encouraged to grind throughout the main story… or stories, as it were.

You'll have to forgive me for spending so long rambling about gameplay intricacies before getting to the game's actual draw - the eight different plots it offers you and the open-ended structure that comes from it. The truth is, most of these stories start out with a bang, but few of them have really enjoyable resolutions, and even less will manage to impress seasoned players.

Not to mention that, aside from the skit-like travel banter, they're completely isolated from one another, further lending to the feeling that your party members are less characters and more movesets. This is likely the most common complaint the series gets, and I have to say, it felt odd at first to me as well, but by now I'm a little tired of seeing people rag on the lack of connection between the stories. Having smaller vignette-like stories instead of an overarching plot is something you never see other RPGs do nowadays, it's one of Octopath's selling points, it's practically its beating heart, and it's something done with purpose. An artistic choice not being something you're used to is no reason to completely disregard it, even if there's room to grow and improve.

And plenty of room there is - while the stories have enough meat to them to enjoy what's happening in the moment, the boss fights in them are as cool as always, and the voice work accompanying all of the scenes is just lovely (though it can be poorly mixed on occasion - looking at you, Ori!), the core of the individual tales is usually somewhat basic and a little underdeveloped, if not downright nonsensical. Ochette's story could probably be put in a Pokemon game with very little changes, and, sorry to say, I don't mean that as a compliment. Having the plot revolve around catching legendary creatures to save the world had me mostly snoozing, controller in hand.

Or take, for example, Partitio and his charming, resourceful butt. It's hard not to love him, but if you think about what he's doing for more than a moment, it doesn't quite make sense - how do you go about squashing capitalism on the entire continent on your own, much less by ushering the world into the industrial era? Isn't that having too much faith in people?

Even Hikari, who started as my favorite and ended just the same (Howard Wang killed it as his voice actor, let's be real), doesn't have a particularly compelling plot going on. His story of having to take off to reclaim his kingdom is, I'd wager, one with more wasted potential than others, given how the whole cursed bloodline subplot just went nowhere. And don't get me started with Throne - I got spoiled on what happened at the end of her story and refused to believe it until the farce was staring me right in the face.

The exception to this would probably be Castti, whose tale of self-discovery and determination, while still playing out by the books, ended up genuinely touching all the same, with a natural escalation of the stakes in it and a wonderful conclusion that integrates gameplay mechanics particularly well, having you personally concoct the remedy to save a whole region and give them peace.

The one thing that elevates every one of these plots, every failure and success of this game, is its soundtrack. I'm not sure if I wholeheartedly prefer this OST to the first game, but they're both just outstanding. While it was easy for me to pick a single favorite to show off, it's hard to overstate just how awesome Yasunori Nishiki's work is as a whole, and we'd be here all day were I to keep pointing out the majority of the music as the masterpiece it is. The themes for various locations are lovingly crafted to suit the mood, with an awesome choice to add ethereal vocals for some of the night themes to make it more atmospheric (my favorites are Roque Island, Tropu'hopu, and, of course, the kingdom of Ku), and the character themes are particularly well thought out, expanding on their personalities in ways the text never quite could. Shout-out to both Agnea's theme and her Song of Hope, and the ways they tie her whole plotline together!

Octopath Traveler II turned out to be my sleeper hit of 2023, and has done so much more for me than I expected it to. Now there's nothing left for me but to yearn for an even more polished and expansive continuation to the series!

A Hat in Time (PC, 2017) [♪ Heating Up Mafia Town]

I feel like I owe much of my enjoyment of this game to my inexperience. 3D platforming is one of those genres that is practically integral to gaming itself (and collectathons, more specifically, are niche only in the most technical sense), yet before playing A Hat in Time I'd refused to engage with anything of the sort out of sheer principle. "What fun is there in getting perpetually lost while trying to hunt for pointless thingamajigs scattered all over?", I'd think to myself. I'd see people online wax poetic about the old classics like Banjo and Spyro and such and find it all completely incomprehensible.

In comes Hat Kid, and from the word go it's obvious that the name of her game is… silliness. After all, the question isn't 'why should you sow fear in mafia goons and crash onto filming sets', it's 'why shouldn't you do that?'. And as you get roped in by the absurdity of these subplots thrown at you, with so many NPCs having a goofy one-liner or three to say, you realize that behind these layers of charm are solidly crafted sandboxes for you to just enjoy yourself in, coupled with delightful sections that are, for all intents and purposes, obstacle courses.

I enjoyed the latter much more, as I tend to do, but they're two different sides of the same great coin, so to speak. And aside from a couple specific levels that gave me a headache (like the long-ass parade level, the infamous Alpine Skyline hub with how long traversal takes in it, and ESPECIALLY The Twilight Bell. Holy shit, that one just wasn't fun for me after a while), exploration was rewarding, and pretty smooth sailing - with good variation in level structure and near endless attention to detail (be ready to sit there like 'they made a unique animation just for that?!').

A part of what made it so easy to enjoy was how simple the movement in this game is - what you have at your disposal is, essentially, a double jump and a dive, which can be canceled out of. That makes it great for someone like me, who still fears being forced to get acquainted with a complex control scheme in a game with movement as the focus (the 'why press three buttons when one would do' approach), but at the same time… it means that there's only one optimal way to move through the world quickly, so dozens of hours in, I felt as if I could repeat the button combination endlessly in my sleep.

Sure, there's badges that can change your experience substantially - making you dash faster, or turn into an ice statue in lieu of a ground pound, or use a goddamn hookshot, or a bunch of other things, but… having only three slots for them, and knowing one of them will probably be always taken by something like the No Bonk badge (which feels like an essential quality of life feature) is severely limiting. I would love it if there were more slots to prevent constantly having to compromise and switch badges around… or a slightly expanded base moveset for Hat Kid.

On a more positive note, I loved the more tightly directed and difficult experiences that the optional Time Rifts offered. Finding them might not have been half as fun as clearing them, but the reward was more than worth it almost every time. And that's to say nothing of the game's presentation, which is sublime in how stylish it is. I could see people being set off by how the art style feels purposely crude at times, but personally, I couldn't care about that less - it only adds to the charm, in fact.

The music, meanwhile, is peppy and upbeat every step of the way, and fits the mood of the game perfectly. Even though you find yourself revisiting the same levels numerous times, there are always new versions of the tracks you've come to like, and neat twists to the traversal process - it's obvious how much A Hat in Time wants you to relax, be entertained, and enjoy the ride. That might come at the cost of it not telling a particularly gripping story, but it's hard to hold that against the game. Sometimes you just want to bonk mafia goons on the head for a while, you know?

Tower of Heaven (PC - Flash, 2009) [♪ Indignant Divinity]

There is no prize as precious as that which you have lost.

Tower of Heaven, to me, is about going back to the roots - in the literal sense, as your character gets cast down and smitten by lightning over and over, and in a sense that's more meta, as there's definitely a sort of through-line puncturing the developer's offerings; one that presents itself in subtle ways, but is plain to see regardless with every game you boot up, and every death that makes you chuckle at your own subpar execution. So, in essence, me playing this platformer (on my birthday, no less! good to know there's something you can rely on even on otherwise middling days) became this experience about paying respects to foundations laid in the past so I could better appreciate the legacy they leave in the future.

It's kind of a tall ask for a game this small and niche (and Flash having been murdered in cold blood absolutely does not help! Everyone say thanks to that one post about Flashpoint that was making rounds back in the day, it made my mission to experience this game that much easier!!!), and I do admit to over-exaggerating the feeling, but still, it's hard not to feel affected in any way, as insignificant as it may be, while playing Tower of Heaven. The presentation is subdued and few words, and hours, are spared to explain your situation. It's just you, the blocks and doors that comprise simple levels in front of you... and a godly force seeking to work you hard as you try to go ever higher.

But as you walk through the first door on your way, the soulful music kicks in and begins to swell (if I were any more nerdy, this game would have probably become my favorite example of leitmotif usage at the drop of a hat. People who complain about this soundtrack are cowards), and your journey starts to grow more complex, little by little. As the levels slowly expand, so do the rules the mysterious force encumbers you with - combining to demand you make a singular, perfect path forward for yourself. This feeling of honesty and straightforwardness between designer and player is one of the key things this developer simply never fails at, and a part of what made me fall in love with it all in the first place.

The twists along the way may be small, but none of them feel like a waste, and as the game comes to an end, a familiar theme of standing up for yourself and facing a world unknown comes to the surface, and you can't help but feel... accomplished, if only a little. It was you who started this journey and you who brought it to its inevitable end, after all! But when you see the credits, plainly stating your basic stats, you might gawk a little. Secret rooms? What secret rooms?

With that simple move, you're encouraged to spend just a little while more - looking around, polishing your movement, paying more attention. It's not like the secrets are hard to find (or are, indeed, worth anything - it's incredibly fitting that the rooms contain treasure that is of no tangible worth to the player), but it's the fact that they were there all along that elevates the experience.

Tower of Heaven might not have much to say, but it says what it has to gracefully and concisely, in ways that many other games simply do not. And even as you inevitably fall, it makes you remember - there's always somewhere to go. Always a place to make for yourself. No matter who might be saying otherwise.

Pause Ahead (PC - Flash, 2013) [♪ Hiatus]

In many ways, this game is treading familiar grounds, but it manages to expand upon them gracefully. There's a greater sense of mystery to this one, and a lovely meta-narrative that never feels overbearing - not to mention the obvious difference in presentation and the gameplay change Pause Ahead is named after.

With a light tap of the Shift button, you can ground the level to a halt... while retaining momentum yourself. Knowing when to stop and go is key to making your way forward, as you're, once again, at times belittled and at other times besought by a mysterious voice. And, of course, you're free to simply abuse and spam this feature just to see the small easter eggs and jokes it hides. As should be by now expected, the little things like this make it feel like no time or space is wasted executing a small, but powerful concept, and iterating on it over time.

As you clear a stage, you are treated to a quick playback of all attempts you've suffered through to get this far, reminding you of your persistence and the power you wield in this strange, somehow lonely world. This may be little more than an escape attempt, but it's uniquely yours, and you're free to take your time with it as you please. This, coupled with small, but consistent details like the messages in the fake pause menu I mentioned, leads to a pleasant feeling that you're getting as much out of this game as you put in, and it's relishing your time spent with it as much as you do.

Just like I said before, there's something about the tight design of these compact experiences that is hard to find elsewhere - a sort of wordless understanding that gradually forms as you experiment with the small pool of options given, and manages to stick in your memory long after you put the game down. And that's to say nothing of the tiny, yet meaningful and insanely catchy soundtrack this game boasts, and the return of secrets to haunt you, this time even more expansive.

In just about every way, Pause Ahead is a solid hidden gem that doesn't ask much of you - at least, not outright - but gives you plenty in return: a challenge to overcome, a moody setting to enjoy, a feeling you'll be seeking and failing to find elsewhere for all time. ...or maybe it's just me?

OverPowered (PC, 2014) [♪ A True Hero and More]

I honestly think you should close this page right now and go beat this thing - I left you a link right there. I promise it won't take long, and I'm sure you'll come back with a smile on your face.

Obviously, the one thing that makes OverPowered really impressive is the time constraints it was made under - without them, it's probably just a blip on most people's radar, not even worth looking over.

Fortunately or not, I'm not most people, and I simply came into this little game looking for more of what I'd come to expect from the dev - enjoyable platforming, music that sounds like a balm to my ears (I still remember when I was doing research and I audibly went 'THAT flashygoodness?'), and witty humor that aims to subvert expectations - and succeeds every time. I got all of these things and a hearty chuckle or two, so I have no complaints.

Katana ZERO {again 💿💙} (PC, 2019) [♪ Silhouette]

Killing is the only time we're able to touch that thing we were never able to have.

What can I say? Katana ZERO is significant to me on a personal level, to an extent very few games, if any, ever have been at this point. A lot of this comes from the fact that I… knew it would be so, but at the same time had no clue. It's hard to explain - call it a gut feeling, but even in 2021 I knew there was something outstanding here, something I was tapping into, and even resonating with, but not quite as deeply as I could have been. That knowledge lingered, buzzed in the back of my mind like white noise - even as my hands would begin to ache from how much I'd been playing, how hard I'd been trying to open myself up to the game, even when the memories began to fade a little.

While I was playing, however, I was constantly aware I'd been ignoring the fine details, afraid to rise to the mechanical challenges the game offered, sometimes afraid to admit to myself how much I enjoyed KZ at all - as if it'd been a crime to recognize how it left me yearning in a haze few things can hope to match. When I tried to look back at it, I almost felt desperate to find some flaw, some excuse to lie to myself and mask the passion this game had awakened in me, for a time; and even then, I could only point to how the game's plot fizzles near the end in an attempt to set things up for the future that still hasn't come yet, eager to leave you with a feeling of uncertainty that stings all the more with how pointedly efficient KZ is about nearly everything else.

(see also: images that get funnier with time)

And even now, putting it to words, I just feel silly and dramatic - probably because, despite everything, a small part of me still feels inexplicable shame, thinks I ought not to be obsessed with something like this, something small and unfinished. An experience that some people (who are very wrong) would say is trying too hard.

It's not silly, though, and I have to remind myself of this often. Every time I come back to this game (and I've come back many times over the year - so many I lost count, including the refresher run I did last week, before writing this. It's amazing how much a passing, almost laughable thought can end up haunting you, but that's neither here nor there), I remember how much there is to love about it - how hard it is not to love it, when you realize just what it is you're dealing with, when everything slots into place and the world before you whirs to life in an almost literal fashion - and live it does, no matter what.

This is a story about finding choice where there is none. It's about discovering the truth, staring it in the face just as it has been watching over you, and resolving to do something about it - with whatever little means you have. Because what matters is trying. Without that, what can you do but remain trapped, objective unfulfilled?

But here's the thing: to most people, it's probably not quite like that. It's hard to describe something that hasn't finished telling itself, after all - but these days, that bothers me far less, if at all. If nothing else, it's hard not to appreciate the irony of it - not knowing the future when once you'd thought you'd all but had it. Even if this story's ending never sees the light of day, I feel like I've come to understand it far better, in its current state.

The unquantifiable, almost mythical extent to which KZ goes to immerse you in its world (or, at the very least, in Zero's shoes), if you let it, is one of its most important qualities. Everything this game does, from the more obvious mechanics like slightly branching dialogue options (with the lovely twist of being able to interrupt people) to the subtle touches like the way KZ uses vibration (one of the very few games to do it right, and I'll die on this hill), hides its (surprisingly plentiful, given its length) secrets in almost plain sight, or takes great care in the details of its entire user interface or goddamn dialogue formatting... it's all in the service of immersion, and that goal is masterfully achieved.

Even after spending more hours than most people would with this game, I keep discovering minute dialogue changes, tiny graphical touches, or new options to try that I can't help but smile at. Yes, some of it stems from the strange sort of fear I had that just... kinda prevented me from exploring, but not all - you'd be surprised at just what you can see if you pay attention to your choices.

And that's to say nothing of how pretty KZ manages to make everything look (and sound - you know you have a problem when you get attached to sound effects), how it perfectly walks the tightrope of letting every happening on screen breathe and speak for itself while still allowing it to remain a spectacle (look, I might not be an expert, but I love how this game frames its cutscenes and uses lighting to enhance things further). It tells you that every moment is precious - simply by wasting nothing itself.

Of course, there are more obvious ways the game respects you and your time: interrupting dialogue doesn't just lead to interesting results, but can also save a bit of time; there are a few clever skips (tied to secrets, as well) built into the levels themselves, and you have an option to respawn instantly when you restart a room (or at literally any time, if you bother to assign a quick restart button). This last thing I want to bring special attention to, because I think it spoiled me beyond belief (just look at me complaining about Celeste earlier!).

On top of this, something awesome that makes a return to Katana ZERO from its predecessors is a dedicated speedrun mode, allowing you to engage with the gameplay and practice on your own terms. And like in the other games, using it is in no way a requirement - while there is an achievement tied to speedrunning the game, nothing in the interface itself urges you to push yourself if you don't want to. The ranking system is as important as you allow it to be, and for my part, I'm mostly content with the meager results I got (bet you were wondering why I put that emoji in the title... hopefully it's clear now. If I get a silver ranking one day, I'll be beyond content.). More action games should aim to be as instantaneous and responsive in all aspects as KZ is, and I'm completely serious about this.

The last (but absolutely never the least) thing I want to bring up is the soundtrack. It's the piece in this elegant puzzle that makes everything come together, it makes every moment shine on its own merits and stay in your heart. It's easy to point to the more obviously appealing tracks that accompany you as you actually play, and the way they perfect tension and release (i.e. Delusive Bunker or the ever-so-awesome Overdose), but there's something to be said about the subtler pieces too. End of the Road never fails to tug at my heartstrings. Hell, hearing Come and See at the end of every run still makes me want to explode. And beyond that, well...

Have you listened to Chemical Brew yet? - Tumblr user chemicalbrew

To conclude, Katana ZERO may lack the universal appeal that true classics have, but I believe that at some point it will have carved out enough of a niche of itself to become a cult classic. I would love nothing more than to have a reason to feature this game on my list a third time (we'll have it one day. I'll keep waiting, this much I know), that's how much my love for it has grown. And, really… I hope it never diminishes.

PS. Believe in yourself! 👹 Also, if you're one of the people who has supported me this year as KZ made me descend into insanity, if you're one of the (surprisingly many) people who I managed to convince to give it a chance with my passion, thank you ever so much. And have a nice 2024!

[bracketsoffear]

A very, very late 'character that I wish got submitted' post for a Stranger avatar submission since I wasn't there to do anything about it. But I digress, let's talk about this guy, who I'm sure some of you may (or may not) be familiar with:

Yes, this guy. The guy with a ridiculously long self-introduction that people made into a copypasta. Yoshikage Kira, the main antagonist of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part 4: Diamond is Unbreakable. Let's see what we have here; business suit, shirt, and a tie. If there's nothing remarkable about him (maybe besides his tie), good; that's what he wants you to think.

For a big part of his life, Kira prefers the comfort and solitude that can be found from being in the background. Yes, he's good at academics and sports, that all should've got him some more acclaim, but he'd rather be third place on purpose, getting himself average grades. He'd rather blend in with the crowd, becoming a faceless stranger. This continued to his adulthood, where he seeks to "live a very quiet life" and integrate into society. Except, Kira grows up to be a serial killer, specifically going after women who have beautiful hands (by whatever fucked up metric he gets from the Mona Lisa and goes by). And so Kira puts up a mask; the mask of a hardworking man, the mask of a law-abiding citizen, the mask of yet another townsman in quaint little Morioh. The monologue I've mentioned earlier is one he mentions once he's caught for the first time. Here it is in its full glory:

"My name is Yoshikage Kira. I'm 33 years old. My house is in the northeast section of Morioh, where all the villas are, and I am not married. I work as an employee for the Kame-Yu department stores, and I get home every day by 8 PM at the latest. I don't smoke, but I occasionally drink. I'm in bed by 11 PM, and make sure I get eight hours of sleep, no matter what. After having a glass of warm milk and doing about twenty minutes of stretches before going to bed, I usually have no problems sleeping until morning. Just like a baby, I wake up without any fatigue or stress in the morning. I was told there were no issues at my last check-up. I'm trying to explain that I'm a person who wishes to live a very quiet life. I take care not to trouble myself with any enemies, like winning and losing, that would cause me to lose sleep at night. That is how I deal with society, and I know that is what brings me happiness. Although, if I were to fight I wouldn't lose to anyone."

While comical at first (as is about nearly everything in JJBA), the monologue shows that Kira stresses as much as he can that he's simply just someone else who refuse to get into any unneeded conflicts. Just another stranger in the background, doing and minding his own things.

His Stand (basically a superpowered extension of one's soul), Killer Queen, at first doesn't seem to fit with the Stranger. In fact, it's abilities matches the Desolation much closer, what with it making explosions and instantly deleting things in fiery smoke. But it's what Kira does with it that counts; tapping into the Stranger, Kira uses his Stand as his primary murder weapon, blowing up his victims and leaving no traces of both the killer and the killed. Even outside of that, the Desolation and Stranger seems to be on mutual terms, as the Cult of the Lightless Flames was commanded by Nikola to burn down Gwydir Forest (MAG 89)

And then, we finally get into the entire Kosaku Kawajiri debacle/arcs; "Yoshikage Kira's New Situation", and "My Dad Is Not My Dad". Hoo boy. Just by the title of that last arc, Kira reeks of so much Not-Them energy; specifically MAG 77. Let's start with the first arc.

"Yoshikage Kira's New Situation" kicks off with a wounded Kira, fresh off a battle with Koichi (one of Josuke's allies), finding a man named Kosaku Kawajiri. He then coerces and drags along Kosaku to come with him to a salon ran by Aya Tsuji, whose. Aya's Stand, Cinderella, allows her to switch the attributes of people. Kira then swaps faces and fingerprints with Kosaku, who he already killed, effectively taking his place. Sounds familiar?

As 'Kosaku Kawajiri' (or should I say Not-Kosaku), he now has to live a someone else's husband and a father. His 'wife' finds his behavior just off enough compared to the real Kosaku to raise some suspicion; He cooks for her and take breaks in-between to clip nails, he uses a razor instead of an electric shaver, he somehow has enough money to pay the landlord instead of financially hitting rock bottom. But Kira plays it off as mundane, family things. He tries to fit in, pretending to be someone he isn't, hiding his true nature as a killer by putting on the mask of a good husband. His 'son' Hayato, starts noticing just how wrong his 'dad' was; after all, why would someone need to practice their own perfectly fine handwriting?

We reach the aptly named "My Dad Is Not My Dad" arc, where the situation escalates further as Hayato eavesdrop Kira saying that he doesn't need to kill him to hide his identity. From this point on, every time the Kawajiri 'family' gathers, tension fills the air as 'Kosaku's' wife remains unaware of who the man next to her truly is. The entire thing from Hayato's perspective reads like a Not-Them statement, with Hayato knowing full damn well that the man in front of him is simply someone or something else pretending to be his father, and he is now engaging in chats and family bonding time as if nothing is wrong. Kira bathes with his 'son', as if spending family time with Hayato when in truth he's telling him that he knows what Hayato's doing regarding his identity, leaving hints to warn him of not going too deep.

In short, Kira is the twisting of mundane and familiar into the weird and unfamiliar. Kira may be a serial killer, but his fear doesn't lie in violence and murder, or the destruction that comes from his path; his true fear lies in the fact that, before anyone figures it out, Kira, the killer, could be anyone; Kira could be the grocery cashier that you just checked out with, Kira could be the salaryman who keeps to himself but works well, Kira could be your quiet but diligent and nice classmate. Just about anyone can be worse than what they present, putting on masks to hide monsters. You Do Not Know Him, and that scares you because the monster of a man known as Yoshikage Kira could be anyone you know or have met before.

.

[metalandmagi]

Hi....If you don't mind, can I ask, what are your top 10 (or top 7) favorite media (can be books/ manga/ anime/movies/tv series)? Why do you love them? Sorry if you've answered this question before......Thanks....

Not exactly a top 10, just 10 things I like. In no particular order:

1 Captive Prince: Favorite trilogy of all time. Best enemies to lovers romance out there and such well written characters with a perfect example of an unreliable narrator. I'm ruined for this trope forever.

2 Death Note: My first anime that I was utterly obsessed with, so it will always have a place in my heart. It was the first piece of media I saw that focused on a morally corrupt character. I love a good cat and mouse game, but ironically, I think I'm the only person who doesn't really ship L and Light. And when I say I love Death Note, that means the last half too!

3 Fruits Basket: An anime I didn't appreciate until I was older. I love its messages about dealing with loss and loneliness, and it's got a good blend of humor and drama with insane family dynamics. I love the family drama!

4 Vinland Saga: SUCH. GOOD. CHARACTER. DEVELOPMENT! I love it because it's a story that feels big and small at the same time, like massive events are put in motion but it's all because of the relationships between the characters. It has an interesting lesson about the nature of humans and how we're influenced by who raised us (without necessarily glorifying the Vikings)

5 To Your Eternity: I have to say, it's really only my favorite up to the Renril War arc (I'm caught up on the manga, and let's just say I think it should have stopped after that). My favorite take on immortality I've ever seen, with such a well written main character. The story really grabs you by the throat from the very start.

6 Undertale and Deltarune: My favorite story driven games. I just like all the different story lines, the humor, the character designs, and all the fun hidden secrets.

7 Treasure Planet: My favorite movie. No, not just my favorite Disney movie. My favorite movie of all time. Pirates in space! A good flawed main character who doesn't end up with a romantic interest! Great music and animation! Funny as hell!

8 Six of Crows (duology): I love a good heist, and this one is top notch. Fantastic characters with a solid found family dynamic, A+ worldbuilding, super funny, and deals with trauma well. And they were the best part of the Shadow and Bone series.

9 The Song of Achilles: Perfectly written friends to lovers. And I love seeing the rise and fall of Achilles as a character that seems so human and so inhuman at the same time.

10 Haikyuu: I'm obsessed with sports anime, and this is one of the best. All the characters are so unique and feel very real. It's super funny with a good balance of sports action to dramatic character moments.

[fefairys]

when did you get into adventure time? i cant remember if you've said it before sorry fjdhfjfj i think for me it was some time in 2019 after it had ended but it's still really special to me :] i caught most of season 1 on tv over the years but that was it for a while

oh i got into adventure time when it was just starting in 2010 when i was 9! it was my favorite show as kid! i would literally write reminders on the fridge when a new highly-anticipated episode was coming out and would make sure everyone in my family knew this was ADVENTURE TIME NIGHT and i NEED the tv!!! i kept up with it religiously for a long time, and would theorize with my brother and school friends about it (my school friends who did not seem as interested in the Lore as i was lol)

but i fell off keeping up with it around season 7/8 because we stopped getting cable. for big event arcs like islands and elements, i would go and pirate those episodes and then when the finale came out i watched it on its own with no context at the time lmao

it was an enormous part of my childhood and shaped the way i think about storytelling and my sense of humor. it is my favorite piece of media ever and i owe it a lot <3 i haven’t been consistent in posting about it cause my obsession with it wore off for a while there since most people had moved past it since it ended so fionna and cake is really allowing me to be full on insane about it again like i was in middle school and it’s really fun :’) if u go back in my archive i have posts in my adventure time tag dating back like 8 years haha!

and then like last year i did a big rewatch/finally watching some late episodes i never saw and finally had Everything. and then i just finished another rewatch a few days ago :)

i could talk about what it means to me for forever but i’ll end it there cuz this is already long 😅

[heleentje]

💕 self-love time! talk about which ones of YOUR creations (edits, artworks, fanfics) you like the most then send to other creators to do the same 💕

(Sending on = optional.)

Oooh, it’s going to be really predictable if I talk about Moonlight, but I’m still going to talk about Moonlight. I cannot properly put into words how happy I am with the way it turned out (but let’s try anyway).

(Cut for spoilers and, in true Moonlight fashion, also length)

I’ve told this story here and there, but Moonlight originally came from three things: my refusal to accept the Champions’ deaths, my general melancholy upon defeating Ganon and leaving behind the freedom of botw’s Hyrule, and my amusement when the game resets to your last save upon beating the story.

That last part got me thinking about how terrifying it would be for Link to wake up after beating the Calamity and finding himself having to face it again. Originally Moonlight was just a few drabbles in my notebook (the scene in chapter 5 where Link seeks out Revali was actually a later reworking of one of the very first scenes I wrote for it). The story was on the backburner for several months, but all of a sudden I decided I wanted to write it anyway.

The idea that Zelda was also caught in the loops was an early one, but it was not part of the original outline. That little tidbit only came about when I’d already picked the title for the story, and so the whole song the title came from (Shalott, by Emilie Autumn) suddenly became weirdly prophetic (the full line that the title is part of is And there’s moonlight every single night/ as I’m locked in these towers).

Speaking of titles, the chapter titles are almost all from Vienna Teng songs, and picking them out was often a lot of fun! Thematically, I’d say the most important songs were Level Up and Enough To Go By. Enough To Go By provided the title for chapters 8 (If my love could keep you alive), 11 (praying you aren’t out of range), and also Ginneke’s This flooded sky, three parts of the overall story that are deeply connected when it comes to emotional beats. Chapter 11 is the logical consequence of the events that transpired in chapter 8, and this flooded sky of course takes place during chapter 11.

(If my love could keep you alive is also my proudest title achievement. It applies to just about every character in that chapter.)

Level Up, in turn, lent its lyrics to the final chapter (Day number one in the rest of forever, because it could never be anything else), but also chapter 5 (Dynamite the dam on the flow). Going back earlier, it was also the title inspiration for another fic of mine, Your own heart that matters. YOHTM was a large part of the foundation of that chapter, so it seemed only fitting.

It’s no secret that Moonlight got extremely out of hand, I’ve joked about it often enough. My original idea for the story truly was only 30k (final word count: > 170k). When my first chapter came in at 7k, I was still foolishly hopeful. The first chapter needed to do a lot of setup! Surely the next chapters would be shorter!

I think I was disabused of that notion partway through chapter 2.

But for all that it got out of hand, I am still very happy that it did. The intended cast was originally a lot smaller: Link and Zelda, with Revali having a marginally bigger role than the other Champions, and everyone who wasn’t one of those six only appearing towards the final chapter.

Fortunately for me and for the story, the characters did not agree with that.

And I am extremely happy that I got to give not only Link and Zelda, but also the Champions and even the successor Champions something like a distinct character arc. The most difficult characters in that regard were probably Daruk, Urbosa and Teba, because they generally have their shit together, so it’s not like they need any deep character conflict or development. But we adopted the adage of ‘stable, not static’ for them. They don’t need to change who they are as people, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have their own worries and concerns, and make decisions based on that.

(I think, in the end, Harth got a little more of an arc than Teba, especially since we set him up as an intentional mirror for Revali.)

Speaking of Daruk, there was a time where Ginneke and I feared that he’d be sidelined compared to the other Champions. And then chapter 8 happened and suddenly he became a big part of the story :D

So let me talk about Ginneke. (And yes love, I know you were the one to send me the ask, but let me gush about you anyway <3)

Moonlight wouldn’t be half of what it is today without her. We refined that very first outline through hours and hours of conversation and bouncing ideas off each other. She is almost single-handedly responsible for the role Purah ended up playing in this story, as well as Link being explicitly genderqueer and Yunobo’s entire plotline.

The latter two both found their origin in Carry Them Inside You, the first of the sidefics, so let me gush about those for a moment! They’re all explicitly canon to Moonlight, and while we tried to stay fairly light on the references in Moonlight proper, you will absolutely get the best reading experience if you read the sidefics alongside the main story!

Because Moonlight only has Link and Zelda as POV characters, the sidefics were our best way to show what went on when they weren’t around (or, in Carry Them Inside You’s case, what Link was doing that he didn’t want Zelda to know about). An attentive reader may have even caught a few reveals before they were shown in Moonlight proper: the Champions still being alive was all but stated in there’s no turning away, and a soft yellow moon gave more context to Mipha’s actions in chapter 9. Some of our biggest Revali knives were shown in This flooded sky before they made it into the main story (and one never made it into the main story at all, because Revali isn't talking).

(If you know Enough to go by, then the title of This flooded sky also carries a hint towards Revali’s final plan: I’m wanting your anger/ I only want to see if I can shake you out of sleep/ And bring you out under this flooded sky/ At any price)

And of course, Ginneke’s writing is absolutely spectacular in all of them!

Going forward, the POV will probably not remain limited to Link and Zelda alone. There’s a lot going on in Hyrule, and they definitely don’t know all of it.

I am extremely happy with how both of their stories came out. For Link in particular, I think I succeeded in creating the same sense of isolation that’s characteristic of early botw, before you really set out into the world. We debated heavily whether we wanted the first four loops to be so repetitive, but I’m glad we did in the end, because it really worsened Link’s state of mind and set up the events of loop 5 and onwards.

And by that same token, I’m glad that the world expanded after that, first with Revali and then the other Champions, and then the rest of Hyrule as well. Despite the somber tone of it, chapter 11 was one of my favorite chapters to write, because I finally got to put the rest of Hyrule front and center.

(And also because it’s where any chance of Zelda and Revali ever having a cordial relationship gets killed deader than the leviathans. Zelda and Revali each consider themselves responsible for Link’s death, and they are projecting that guilt onto each other.)

Zelda and Link’s relationship was another favorite part of mine. Sometimes I reread the earlier chapters and I’m struck by how distant they were, compared to their closeness in the final chapters. They really didn’t know how to act around each other, especially since Link had lost most of his memories and their relationship was always a bit fraught to begin with. But I’m glad they evolved past that.

And I’m firmly of the opinion that Link would always chafe at being confined to a formalized court environment again. He feared that possibility from the very start (and it was part of the reason why he put off fighting Ganon for so long), so it was very liberating when he finally got to say outright ‘no, I don’t want that’, and still find a way to support Zelda, if only from a distance.

And Revali, oh Revali… In early chapters, we often joked about Revali and Purah fighting for the tritagonist position. And while Purah eventually got the title when it came to plot developments, Revali definitely earned it for character developments.

He’s a mess of contradictions. He doesn’t want to move on, but he’s ready to sacrifice his life so that Link doesn’t lose his. He longs to be a part of Rito Village again, but he’s convinced that the Rito will either disdain him for failing to take down the Calamity or only see him for his title. He feels so much guilt about failing to save Link that he takes all of it out on Zelda. It should come as no surprise that his scenes were among my absolute favorites to write, even if they were often very difficult to get right and needed multiple rewrites to hit on the correct tone.

Mipha probably got the second-biggest role out of all the Champions. When she regained her Grace in chapter 8, we realized she would remember that loop according to the rules we’d established. And that made her a perfect person to both serve as a voice of reason to stop Zelda and Revali before things really got too bad, and also call out Link on some of his shit later on.

Daruk quickly became one of my favorite characters to write (best Champion). He was unceasingly supportive, even when Link didn’t particularly want to hear that, but Yunobo being so intimidated by him was always something that weighed on him, and he tried very hard to present himself as unthreathening. Perhaps he even went a little overboard there, but he genuinely is extremely proud of Yunobo and would have been no matter what Yunobo chose to do.

In the end, it was Urbosa who probably had the least involved plotline of all the Champions, but having her around was still a massive boon for Zelda, and eventually Riju. One of the things we really wanted to make clear was that Urbosa was not here to take the title of Chief back from Riju. If Riju asked her to, she might have accepted, but it needed to be very clear that she did not outrank Riju, nor did she want to. (And if Urbosa sees a lot of Zelda in Riju, well, obviously.)

I’d also be remiss in not mentioning some of the other characters: Purah, our plot tritagonist, who was instrumental in figuring out exactly what was going on and providing Link and Zelda with some much needed help in those first few loops. Riju, who among all the time shenanigans is one of the few people concerned with the political implications of a Hyrule without the Calamity, who is such a perfect mirror of Zelda: forced to bear a burden that by all rights should have been her mother. Sidon, so concerned for Link, so eager to fight by his side that he’s the one who finally hands Zelda the solution to their problem, so willing to defy his father (and Dorephan, still mourning the child he already lost and terrified that he’ll lose yet another one). And Yunobo, always casting himself in the shadow of his famed grandparent, but so much braver and smarter than he gives himself credit for, who probably did more to turn the tide in the final battle than any other character.

(Also Teba, who is in a constant state of ‘what are all these fucking children doing here?’)

Okay, so I’ve spent almost 2000 words talking about Moonlight already, and I can probably get in another 1000 if I really wanted to. But suffice to say, I’m extremely happy with how that story came out. It’s probably the best thing I’ve written to date, and I think I pulled off just about everything I set out to do.

Of course, absolutely none of that would have been possible without Ginneke, who helped refine this vague idea of a story into something actually worth reading. It was an absolutely wild ride, and while writer’s block hit me hard at several points, I’m really glad we got to the end of it.

There’s more to this universe, though it will probably involve a lot less time shenanigans! I think I’m quite solidly done with those for a little while.

[starlight-time-machine]

Week in Review

02/04/2024 – 02/10/2024

Sunday

Manga Sunday time. Okay.

Girl Meets Rock good. Surprisingly considered character writing, and the possible aroace rep is fun.

Undead Unluck good.

Dandadan good.

Magilumiere good.

One Piece good.

Cipher Academy… I love this manga so much that it’s hard to sufficiently express the depth of my affection. I love the story, I love the writing, I love the characters, I love the designs, I love the art, I love everything about Cipher Academy. While I’m miserable at it coming to a somewhat untimely end, I’m grateful that I was able to read this masterpiece every week, because sometimes it was truly the only thing that kept me going. Even though its puzzles were truly nigh-impossible to solve, the heartfelt emotional core of the manga shone through clearly in its story and characters. I love Iroha as a protagonist – he may seem weak, and he’s gone through unthinkable things, but he still has the strength to learn and grow and reach for his unreachable ideals while inspiring others along the way. I love Toshusai’s intimidating aura and hardheaded beliefs that hide her pure desire to have friends and call each other cute nicknames. I love Kogoe’s mad scientist schtick and her One Point Lessons and her catchphrase and how even though she tries to come across as a cool and unhinged scientist, she can still be caught off guard and act more like a regular teenage girl. I love Tayutan’s emotionless puppy-dog retainer role and her fierce loyalty to Toshusai and her purposefully holding back all the time so as to not hurt people and her deep loneliness because of that and I love her twilight eyes. I love Yukako’s butch design and how seriously she takes things even if it’s a dance battle. I love Enchan’s moe sleeves and how she can be cute and cool at the same time and while she may seem naïve, the way she saw through to Iroha’s heart and vowed to support him was so amazing. I love Anon’s mysterious and morally ambiguous motivations and wily nature and how she constantly breaks the fourth wall and while seeing her get bullied was fun, it was even more fun to see moments of sincerity from her. I love Yosaimura’s protagonist aura and natural charisma and that one panel where she’s scaring the daylights out of Kogoe and how she’s always looking out for the interests of the group in terms of morale and cooperative harmony. I love Byu’s gun eyebrows and how she likes to hide under tables. I love Cipher Academy. This story and its characters will live on in my heart for a long, long time.

Monday

The new Undead Unluck was fun. When I see those hyper-detailed close ups on eyes, I know I’m in for a decently directed episode. I love how Billy’s plan was partially foiled by him not taking into consideration how Tatiana would still like him enough to attack him when Unjustice’d.

Finally read through the ending of Perilous Journey and I feel genuinely emotionally moved… Stewart has done such an excellent job of giving each kid their moments and subtle conclusions to their character arcs. From Kate mastering the regurgitation trick and her general physical prowess and her choice to step away from the cycle of violence to Constance accepting and utilising her precognition, to Sticky overcoming his shame with strength and resilience, and to Reynie finally believing in Mr. Benedict and realizing that his disillusionment with humankind is a disservice to its inherent goodness…this is so good. But indeed, it’s extremely perilous, and the stakes have been raised significantly since the last book. S.Q. is also a really tragic figure to me…seeing Mr. Benedict manipulate his kind nature was so chilling and sad. I know exactly what he means when he says he’s dealt a blow to the best part of S.Q., and I too hope he recovers instead of delving further into hatred. Overall, what a wonderful adventure book. I only give scores to books on my bookshelf, so this one gets a strong 8/10.

I’ve gotta get through my library books before I return them on Friday so I tried reading The Plentiful Darkness by Heather Kassner, but the writing style felt so uptight and purple prosey that it turned me off right away, so that’s going to be a pass from me.

Next up was Thin Air by Michelle Paver, which I picked up after reading and thoroughly enjoying her other ghost story, Dark Matter. And the similarities between the two are definitely striking – slightly pathetic male protagonists running from the world by traversing the limits of the Earth, forming bonds with dogs, light touches of repressed homoerotic feelings (?? I can’t believe she did this twice LOL I respect her so much for that), etc. While I liked the setting of Dark Matter more and its slowly encroaching dread and isolation (versus Thin Air’s constant threat of physical danger), I do like the setup of the complicated relationship between Thin Air’s protagonist and his brother, and it’s refreshing to get full blown conversations and arguments. The brother relationship is the emotional crux of this novel, and I thought it was genuinely compelling and filled with the realistic contradictions of love and hate between siblings (the part when they were digging the ice caves…when Stephen talked about how no one else remembers the things from their childhood and no one else would call him that nickname again…). But of course, it all led to the expected conclusion…I can’t help but feel that Paver just wrote the same book again lol I mean, it’s still a satisfying arc to watch play out, but it’s just lost a bit of the surprise factor. But I quite like her writing style and how she instilled dread through the vivid and careful descriptions of the mountain and the characters’ surroundings, and the part with the rucksack seemingly slowly inching its way towards Stephen was wonderfully horrible, as was the truth about what happened to Ward. I’m just glad to have read another adult fiction book that I enjoyed. (What I’ve realized is that a lot of contemporary popular fiction is just about characters being introspective or talking to other characters and not doing a whole lot…and what I want is an actual story where things happen and characters go on a journey or adventure…which is difficult to find outside of fantasy or sci-fi. Why can’t they write books about adults going on puzzle solving adventures too…)

Tuesday

I tried reading Press Reset by Jason Schreier, but after the first chapter I realized I wasn’t as interested in video game industry history as I thought I was (especially when I didn’t recognize or care about most of the games being mentioned here). And also it felt like the same old story – big conglomerates screwing over workers just to make their bottom line a little better. It’s especially depressing to read this when we’re only a month into 2024 and there’s already been over 1000 layoffs in the gaming industry and talk of an incoming crash, so I didn’t feel like reading any further.

Wednesday

The last book I have from my library haul is The Name of This Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch, which is the first of another book series from my childhood. As a kid I loved the meta writing and the “kids solving puzzles and going on an adventure with interesting artifacts” formula, and as an adult I still enjoy it, but I can see the places where the book is somewhat lacking. There’s no real impetus to the kids deciding to head out on this adventure, since what happened to the magician was so vague, but I get the feeling the author just wanted to get the ball rolling so whatever. I like Cassandra and Max-Ernest’s personalities and quirkiness and I like how unique and memorable their respective living situations are (surprise gay grandparents??? I can’t believe I didn’t remember this, or I guess I didn’t clock it as a kid. And Max-Ernest’s half-and-half gimmick is fun).

Thursday

It’s DunMesh Thursday, and today I’ve made 汽水肉 (too lumpy, should’ve added more tapioca starch) and fried hash browns (they fell apart in the oil…should’ve added more flour and made them thicker…). In contrast to my bad cooking, though, the episode was super duper good. This was one of my favourite chapters from the manga, as it featured Chilchuck, my favourite character, trying to get through a conundrum by himself. I loved all the squishy and wiggly animation, I loved the direction, I loved the voice acting (Chilchuck’s voice through the ages, Marcille asking him how old he is, Laios info-dumping about mimics…), god everything was just so perfect and fun and funny.

Finished reading The Name of This Book is Secret and it was just alright. I just feel like there was never any real incentive for the kids to do all these things – like, I didn’t get invested in Cass’s guilt over Benjamin and I don’t buy that Cass and Max-Ernest are such close friends when they’ve only talked to each other for like five scenes. And then it was hard to buy that Cass was a hardcore survivalist when she goes into the Midnight Sun with absolutely zero planning or foresight. The whole adventure arc just felt weird, and I wish the singular puzzle in the Midnight Sun was more naturally integrated (why on earth would this secret passageway built in an evil villain’s lair have a helpful riddle for you to figure out the passcode). And then the kids getting these cool rewards at the end just felt so unearned… I’ll read the rest of the series, but it’s sad that this ended up in the Baccalario camp rather than the Stewart one.

Friday

Drag Race Friday yayyyyyy I’m so tired of Plane Jane because her “arc” feels like it was manufactured in a lab to get screentime and I hate it. The main challenge was fun, though, and it was nice to just see the girls in the workroom chatting with each other for a majority of the episode. Personally I would’ve put Nymphia’s look in the top over Dawn’s, but I’m also fine with her taking a safe placing because I feel like it doesn’t do well to stand out too much at the front end of the competition.

Satuday

After thinking about it for a bit, I think I’m obligated to induct harmoe as a whole into the STM awards because I love literally every single one of their singles and albums and songs. As my friend and I always say, harmoe never misses.

Other than that, it’s Chinese New Year so all I did was lie around and eat snacks.

[thesugarhole]

last day i have to put up wit train strikes and waking up so so early to get here on time and for the waiting times between. so im reading romac in between. on phone so no funny business. stopped at bench and men

anyway

dont ever ask a woman her age a man his salary and vitaly how the geography of romac looks like

eureka was apparently partially new york but i know bc of worldwide photo shoots they later use places like paris on the bg so thats funny. i guess whale arc (is the whale stuff still there?) multiple alien and monster and annet chases and various flying machines could get you there, if the world map is still about the same

i guess im pointing it out bc i saw someone make a weird map connecting. idfk or even remember but the atlantic ocean wasnt there anymore

"He could only communicate with me via a copyrighted form of speech available to the Unconnectable population- talking loudly."

thats not copyrighted to unconnectables thats copyrighted to portuguese* come ooooon man

everything in this world needs a fookin loicense god what a nightmare

🤨

sorry i just dont buy this. first of all from having read the original comic before second of all because hes just some guy in both versions (who just happened to work for g-dir, best of the worst type deal) and third of related to the second of, it all feels like they pushed a role on him he didnt even knew existed and it all went downhill from there.

if he really was one of the catalysts of the apocalypse though rather than just being caught up in the aftermath (alongside PILOT!!!!) and omitting all that in previous POV logs for the unreliable narrator trope, then sorry tumblr sexy man that never was. i cant defend you here. you looked at yourself, said 'i can make her better' and then made her worse

number 2 also i just noticed. "infi"? miss ai generated number 8 pendant that ruined one of my favorite sequences in the original comic with 'is this a set ALMOST MISSED MY TRAIN STOP I THOUGHT WE WERE AT TUE ONE BEFORE

""Are you, really?" Infi raised an eyebrow. "Even that bench you're sitting on is charging you infractions. If enough tickets pile up, the Dexes will come and take you away. You know what they do to big debitors, Sven. You know what they turn people into. I'm sure you won't like wearing a smile on your face forever.""

ok so. if i recall correctly people in too much debt get killed and turned into dexes and idk if all dexes do the same job but in pilots case he became a debt collector or something. aka kill more people to create more dexes

and in most panels of him pre apoc without the pilot gear he didnt seem too thrilled about anything, facial expression wise. what im getting to is, it could be something added in the rewrite but it would be interesting if part of his character design had a smile stapled on whether he likes it or not.

well for what its worth hes happy now, only vaguely aware of his past

anyway- svens gone but the seagull lived? i dont think this bench would know if its the same seagull. also how are you talking to it? the bench lost whatever little mind it had djhgsjfj and this is positive character development

The User flickered peculiarly and suspiciously in my time-worn sensors, just like... Infi did.

AI girlie nonsense aside i guess shes's intriguing me a bit. if anything she's the true unconnectable leader and scapegoated snippy. but also youre still not baiting me with the "is captain infi???" rewrites. i know how to count. (<- gonna look foolish if this later happens anyway. "am i that out of touch? no. its the author thats wrong") (speaking of counting haha very funny that sven and steven, names sounding like seven, meet infi, represented by an 8/infinite, and some undisclosed time later the somewhat sentient bench they were on meet captain (also known as seven). basic homestuckology

these side little detours into the world that was are fun i think. but again, most (all? honest to god i dont remember anyone named infi being a part of anything going on) of this was already in the original so ya

[leori-the-unlearned]

A Full Documentation of Tangle’s Tail’s Abilities (to the best of my knowledge)

Of course, we all know it stretches, but it also does a bunch of other subtle things, and I’ll go ahead and list any specific details that aren’t technically abilities but I wanted to list anyways.

table of contents… -Individual Powers -Maximum Length (has cool math) -Durability & Power -Sentience…? -Conclusion

Individual Powers:

-> Extending in length -> Variable thickness -> Elasticity -> Articulated fur

I list ’elasticity’ separate from ’extending’ BECAUSE… Tangle’s tail extends out more similarly to a tape measure than pulling a rubber band further out. If it merely stretched, also, her tail would retain only four dark stripes (the tip, the base, and two between) - instead, her tail is shown with far more when it’s lengthened.

I think these four listings are the base powers Tangle’s tail has - other abilities fall into one of these four, and you can’t exactly collapse any of them into one of the other categories without losing some important distinction. And the fur-hand is really something of its own.

Also, as a result of Tangle’s tail being a working muscle instead of just a rubber band, she can control whether it stretches or not at will. Maybe she relaxes her tail to stretch it elastically, meaning then it flops about and she isn’t actively moving it, and while she’s moving it to use as a weapon or grapple it is being tensed and doesn’t rubberband…

Oh, and variable thickness isn’t exactly a superpower, but Tangle’s tail can do it anyway, so I’ve listed it. If you go by her model, her tail is thicker than her body, but plenty of times it appears thinner than that in the comics, so I like to think she can just fluff it up or smooth the fur flat whenever she wants.

Maximum Length:

According to some calculations I eyeballed and made up, Tangle’s tail has a maximum length of at least 160 feet, up to maybe 300-something feet. ….That is quite the wide range, but as I said, I made the calculations up. Feel free to actually math it out, or look at my calculations and take a headcanon.

This is just going by how Tangle stretched her tail out to use as a barrier against zombots during the metal virus arc; estimating the space between lampposts to be 8 feet at minimum, and her wrapping around 5 different lampposts at minimum, 4-5 times each. So that’s 8 feet, on the gaps between 5 posts (so 4 gaps) to have a 40 foot range, times 4 times it goes across that length… easily 160 foot minimum length. If she stretches across more posts, add another 32 feet (8’ • 4 wraps) and see what you get! (Imagine how many miles of blood vessels there are in that…)

Of course, it seems Tangle can’t stretch to her maximum length on her own, at least not if she wants to be quick about it. It still gives her some leeway to be a living pulley belt.

Durability & Power:

Tangle’s tail is, likely, stronger than either of her arms. I mean, it punched open a safe door (granted, that was after the safe had exploded… but since the safe survived the explosion anyways, it was built to last, and also is a 100lb+ metal door she punched aside). She can also just combine her tail and arm strength by tugging on her tail as it tugs something else. I don’t have numbers on this, but it’s useful.

As for durability, it took a handful of badniks exploding violently without being more than singed. Which might only be average durability for a Main Character anyways, but can still be stated for the record. Elasticity might also increase its durability, like how Monkey D. Luffy is made of rubber and can’t be hurt by blunt force attacks.

Also, I caught this stat comparison in the Sonic Forces (Mobile) stats once.

Sentience..?

I don’t think this is a common theory, but I wholeheartedly refute it. Tangle’s tail is a body part, and I don’t think it has a secret octopus arm-brain in there; just regular reflexes and it being a limb Tangle is skilled in using.

Also, it would give Whispangle a permanent, awkward third wheel. No thanks.

Conclusion:

I don’t have any poignant single line or paragraph to say. I just wanted to present some facets of Tangle’s tail that aren’t often talked about, and raise the question of how long it actually stretches. If you’ve got additions or something to refute, please share them!

[spqromani]

The Void Century

SPOILER ALERT!!!! do not read this if you are not caught up to date with the manga

I'm terrible at gatekeeping information. Or understanding them. This is kind of a 'checklist' of things I'm looking forward to see uncovered/explained in depth.

1. What was the Great Kingdom's deal?

Like, were they evil tyrants or something like that? Did they hold power over several nations just like the WGOVT does?

2. Why did 20 kingdoms unite to tear it down?

Doflamingo uncovers at the beginining of the Dressrosa Arc, that an alliance of 20 kingdoms was made to face against the Great Kingdom during The Void Century. What was their common goal? What united these 20 kingdoms to go against it?

3. Who created and used the Ancestral Weapons?

We are aware that Poseidon is an actual living breathing person who was the princess of a country, so I wonder if she used her powers during the war against or at favor of the Great Kingdom. However, the other two weapons were most definitely created by someone. Did the Great Kingdom create them or was it a joint effort of the 20 kingdoms?

4. What part did Shandora and Wano take on the war?

It seems that Shandora and Wano are the most ancient civilizations in One Piece, along with the Minks, but we are already that the Minks are aligned to Wano through the Kozukis. What I want to find out is if Shandora was allied to the Great Kingdom and what exactly was Wano participation in the war of the Lost Century.

5. Why did Wano close its borders after the war?

6. Why did Wano deliver poneglyphs around the world?

I understand Fishman Island's Joy Boy poneglyph, it was probably delivered by him himself or sent there under his command. And the Minks' Road Poneglyph because of their alliance with the Kozukis. But why did Alabasta and Shandora receive them as well?

7. Why the hell did Alabasta refuse to move to Mariejois? Pure principles? They were never a family of assholes?

This is really intriguing for me. Doflamingo states that the royal families of the 20 kingdoms, that won the war against The Great Kingsom, all agreed to move to Mariejois, the Holy Land, situated on top of the Red Line. All, except for one - The Nefertaris of Alabasta. That means that whatever reason united the 20 kingdoms to fight together was probably a big picture kind of thing. They weren't all best friends jealoud of the Great Kingdom.

8. WTF is Uranus, man?

One of the poneglyphs in Wano better have an explanation about Uranus because I am running out of tolerance time to receive info about these weapons. And it must the most dangerous one out of the three, otherwise why hide it for so long?

9. Why TF did Toki have to travel to the future to find a way to enter Wano?

Oden says during his flashback that he found out, upon arriving at Laugh Tale, that Wano was open to the rest of the world during The Void Century. And if Toki came from 800 years ago, that means she lived during the time Wano was open to the outside world, why was she not able to enter the country then? Why did she travel in time with a mission of getting there?

10. Why the hell did Ohara have one as well?

One poneglyph, I mean. I just remembered that.

11. Where the hell or who the hell has the last Road Poneglyph?

12. Does Pluton still exist? Is it hidden?

I was confronted by a random fellow fan saying this. For years, I always thought the Water 7's shipwrights were the ones who had the blueprints to build Pluton. But apparently, they actually have a counter measure one, to build in case of the actual thing being revived? And Crocodile was looking for the actual thing? Like, it was never destroyed and just hidden away? And apparently the poneglyph in Alabasta had the location of it? I don't know, tbh. I'm confusion.

ANSWER: (ONEPIECE #1053) Tengu, the old man who took care of O-Tama, is revealed to be Kozuki Sukiyaki, Oden's father. Robin asks him where is Pluton, affirming that the Poneglyph in Alabasta said it was located in Wano, after all, and Sukiyaki answers that it is there! :) (23/07/22)

13. WTF is up with Tequila Wolf?

That's the bridge Nico Robin was warped to by Kuma after Sabaody. Apparently, it has been under construction for at least 700 years. That means the Celestial Dragons themselves must have ordered the construction of this bridge right after the formation of the WGOVT. It's located in the East Blue, also. May be an important info.

14. The Will of the D.

15. Do the "D." people have anything to do with the Great Kingdom?

Some people say the D. might have been the royal family of the Great Kingdom. If yes, then what family? The Monkey D.s? The Gol D.s? The Trafalgar D.s? The Marshall D.s? What D. family! There are several of them!

16. Also, they are supposed to be the Celestial Dragons's "natural enemy", what the hell does that mean?

17. What stopped Joy Boy from fulfilling his promise?

Anyways I would love a one piece "appendix" kind of book - like, One Piece World 101 for Dummies

[igniting-quill]

hi i dont think i can send asks on your other account so i'll do it here

So my dumb prompt is (for my prompt ask game challenge thing - not sure what it is either okay shhh im TIRED)

Helga and Serenity meet and Helga discovers what guns are

Shenanigans ensue

This is in response to a post I made on my other account @uc-beepboop. That sucks that you can’t send asks in the other account. Perhaps it’s because it’s my side account? IDK. Anyways, I tried to take your tired prompt into an actual sustainable fic and I ran with it. Also will probably brush this up more, but expect it on the good ‘ol ao3 some time. Some time may range from 3 business days to 3 months. Depends on when I’m satisfied.

Characters: Helga Hatebad (Arc 8: The King is Dead) and Serenity Sapphire (Arc 9: Once Upon a Crime)

Preface: This would technically not work because of the timeline difference between Arc 8 and Arc 9. I think Serenity and Helga were alive during the same time, but Idk how old Helga is, so I didn’t know how to write that. Due to this time gap, I elected to ignore it and just write Serenity and Helga as they are in canon. That being said, I took them as they were pre-Arc and plopped them into this questionable time-bendy fanfic. 

Enjoy.

—

BANG.

The sound, piercing fast and loud, halted Helga Hatebad in her tracks. It was like a fireworks blast, but with none of that ending sizzling noise. Threatening and so efficient too! It had the power to emit a sound that caused her, shocked, to stop walking. Then, it was gone in a second, the only evidence of its existence was the auditory whiplash ringing in her ears.

Helga was just about to leave for the plane of fire. She left, for the time being, for some Hatebad family gathering, so she bound over to Glacrian for a short visit. But now, she really needed to go back. Her cute, giant, slobbering hellhound was waiting for her on the other side. 

However, after that noisy blast, her curiosity beckoned her to go investigate. It sounded like some sort of contraption, made of physical parts that were non-magical… maybe a weapon. She was a weapon maker, so if her guess was correct, she would love to see what was in store.

She grabbed ahold of her Hatebad-made battleaxe, placed a hand on her Hatebad-made plate armor, and finally combed through her Hatebad-made beard. She proceeded to stroke her facial hair, considering the possibilities, while sauntering over toward where the sound came from. She squinted, shifting her gaze around in hopes of seeking answers to her questions. 

Instead, she saw a busted window on one of the local Glacarian banks, The Glacarian Bank. It was an obviously Lovejoy-owned property, the rival family to Hatebad’s, so Helga didn’t particularly care for the destruction. She approached the wreck, and with her last remaining braincell, decided to squeeze her small dwarven body through the jagged broken glass of the bank’s window. 

Only after she managed to land inside did she consider the implications if she got caught. The Lovejoy’s would find yet another reason to go after the Hatebads. Helga shrugged. Oh well. She walked deeper into the bank, but paused once she noticed that there was someone else past the corridor. There was a harengon. From the back, long hare ears that drooped from her head, an old yet well-cared for leather jacket. Now, she seemed to be fiddling with some contraption in her hands, some stick-like wood that was meshed with different metal pieces. 

Helga took another step forward, only for her foot to crunch against a piece of glass on the floor, shattering the quiet and giving away her location.

The harengon jumped up in surprise, but once she landed, she turned around and confidently turned the gadget towards Helga, a sharp metallic portion pointed at the dwarf. 

Nothing about this weapon clicked with Helga’s background knowledge. What was it? How did it work? Could the Hatebad's manufacture those and add them to their new products line?

“What’s that?” Helga asked, gesturing towards the unidentifiable weapon.

“Are you a Lovejoy?” The harengon asked, ignoring Helga. The bunny did not sound that threatening. What it looked like, at least to Helga, was that the harengon was stalling for time. Well, why not appease an audience?

“Me? A Lovejoy!” Helga laughed. “That’s the funniest thing I have ever heard. First of all, the Lovejoys are high elves. I’m a mountain dwarf. Second of all, I’m Helga Hatebad, and my family, the Hatebads, hates the Lovejoys! It’s a rivalry. My mother, especially, hates their guts.”

“Oh. Wait so you hate the Lovejoys?”

“Yeah.”

The harengon pointed the pointy weapon downwards leaned in. “So… you won’t tell on us?”

“Well, you’re doing us Hatebad’s a favor, so I’m not inclined to.”

For a moment, the harengon looked suspicious. But, in a way that showed that she was a little too trusting, she extended her hand for a handshake.

“Serenity Sapphire. I’m here with a crew and we’re breaking into the bank. Either we got hired by somebody or Art, my boss, just wanted us to do a mini-heist for the fun of it.”

“The Lovejoys are rich, they’ll be able to afford spending a little cash for you.” Helga nodded approvingly. She didn’t bring up that, these days, the Hatebads also had a lot of money as well. “Also, I you didn’t answer my question.” 

“Shoot.” Serenity said, asking for Helga to repeat the question again.

Helga pointed towards the item held in Serenity’s hands. “As a weapon’s maker, I have to know: what is that?”

“This?” Serenity shifted the large apparatus in her hands. “This is a gun.”

“A… ‘gun.’” Helga approached the new word hesitantly. “What does it do?”

“It shoots bullets.”

“Bullets?”

“You know. The way a cannon shoots cannonballs, but here it just happens on a smaller scale.”

Helga pointed to the shattered glass on the ground. “Is that how you broke the window?”

The harengon looked sheepish. “The first shot, yes. Gun’s are a pretty new weapon, so I never knew how bullets would react with glass. Turns out it just kinda goes through. It made a tiny hole, some cracks around it, but it didn’t do much more to weaken the structure. Juniper gave the rest of the window a nice kick, and that’s what really broke it. All I caused was a loud sound. So yeah, I got put on guard duty instead of getting to do any of the fun stuff.”

“Can I see the… gun in action?”

Serenity shook her head. “Julian chewed me out bad. I mean, what brought you here? The noise right?”

“Yeah.”

“Exactly. Julian was all like, ‘that’s the downside to a gun! The sound of it firing is real loud, everyone will hear it Serenity, that’s a stupid idea.’ But, I argue, that what it loses in subtlety it gains in power.” The gun was larger than Serenity herself, so she stretched the full length of her arm to showcase the weapon. “For a long distance attack, you load up the bullet and then shoot an enemy with a press of the trigger. Up close, I can fight with the bayonet.”

“The sharp part right?”

“Yes, attached to the end of a gun’s barrel. At least, I think, that’s what my dad called the sharp part when I last talked with him about the gun? The gun’s from him, and he got it from a guy… Bor— Ple? I don’t know. It's written on the side of the chamber.”

Helga looked at the name “Borple” and proceeded to immediately forget the name, unknowing that she would meet a member of the artificer family later.

Serenity continued. “I honestly don’t know too much about guns, only that it is the first of its kind. Something like a bow, a canon, a sideways firework, all with a dagger-like point at the end. My old man, Mr. Sapphire. gave it to me when I told him I wanted to become a criminal.”

Helga cackled at that. “Hilarious. You know, my mother was apparently a criminal in her younger days. A sky pirate.”

“Wait, that’s so cool. I’d love to meet her”

“Yeah, right?”

Suddenly a blaring alarm rang across the bank, intruding right into their conversation.

“Serenity!” A voice yelled out. “We gotta go, we’re gonna get caught!” 

A door opened from the far wall behind Serenity. A purple tiefling with stark white hair, giant curled horns, and blank white eyes appeared. In their arms they struggled to drag out a giant black bag, presumably filled to the brim with money. Yet, even as they failed to drag it, the bag already had giant rips that proceeded to stretch larger and larger. That was probably from the shattered glass on the ground.

“Do you need help with that?” Helga shouted above the loud shrieking pitch of the alarm. “I’m quite strong.”

“Now… Who are you? Serenity’s friend or something?”

“Riot… uhhh” Serenity shrugged, “Long story.”

“We won’t make it in time, slowpoke. Give me that.” Another voice called out. A figure emerged from the door: an aasimar with bronze skin, blue eyes, blonde hair, and only one wing. She was already carrying a lot of her own luggage, which she held above the sharp pieces of glass on the ground. It was clear, she was straining to hold onto everything, but still attempted to grab ahold of the tiefling’s, Riot’s?, load. Out slid a few coins, but it did not seem like the one-winged aasimar even noticed.

Everyone proceeded to dart out of the building, away from the crime scene. All the while, Helga and Serenity ran side by side, huffing and puffing out breaths of exertion.

Helga looked up, noticing the setting sun, golden light seeping through the allies of Glacaria. She really had to go now. Oh, her poor hell hound was waiting for her to come back while she went on a whole side quest adventure. 

“I think—” Helga sucked in a breath as she ran, “this is where we part ways.”

“Aww—” Serenity panted, but was already beginning to split off in the direction her crew was running towards. “I guess,” Breath, “I should follow,” Breath, “this money on the ground,” Heaving breath, “It was nice meeting you!”

“Same!”

The harengon finally darted away, ignoring how the butt end of her gun dragged on the ground.

Ah, what Helga would give to learn more about this exciting new weapon. But duty called. Helga jogged away from the crime zone, and slowed down after she got out of range. Hopefully Serenity’s crime gang would be smart enough to prevent people from following their physical money trail and snatched some Lovejoy money while they did it. Helga headed back towards the plane of fire.

[llamakenma]

Hellooooo to you! Congratulations on reaching a milestone!

Can I request prompts #5 and #12 together? The character can be either Suna from Haikyuu or Gojo Satoru from Jujutsu Kaisen. Thank you!!

note: hello! i chose gojo so i hope you don't mind! and thank you so much!! i hope you will enjoy this!

request: prompt 5 ("I pushed you away because you deserve better") + prompt 12 ("Could you see me like that, just for a moment? Pretend I mean something to you.”).

join my 500 follower event --> prompt list here!

----

the relationship you have with gojo satoru was simply blissful, every part of it made you content, made you feel that you were more than enough: you knew gojo felt the same way, you knew through his actions- from the grand ones to the tiniest ones- that he was in love with you as much as you were with him. there was nothing to complain about, nothing to be angry about- your relationship was what they had called ideal, one where both parties deeply cared for each other.

yet, as perfect as you were with him, things started to take a turn for the worse as your relationship steadily grew in years; gojo satoru no longer made time for you. he was no longer present at the dinner table at 8, complimenting your cooking or feeding you the vegetables he still refused to eat. his presence on the bed was simply left as a presence, there was no soul nor matter there- all that was left was the heat of his presence that was slowly melting away. along with this, dates were no longer a thing- the late-night movie marathons were buried deep under the blankets you once you to share, the amusement park rides never felt more empty as you sat alone on the ferris wheel that looked down onto the city, and the inside jokes you had made with him were no longer at use, it was slowly tearing you apart with the roaring silence of each second.

and so it came to the ending arc of your relationship with him, the part in which confronting him was harder than raising a child. you had prepared yourself, emptying your load of tears days before this talk was to come- you knew you would not be able to mutter a word at the sight of his face, instead would be drowning in the flowing pool of your lingering sadness and loneliness. you inspected every curve and slope of his face: the way his snow lashes seemed too long yet they laid perfectly on the rim of his eyes, how the small threads of his kiss his forehead just like how you used to, and the curve of the cherry tinted lips that you loved to chew on, teasing him every time he would bend down to share a passionate kiss with you. every aspect of him was simply just perfect.

'i am breaking up with you gojo. i have moved my things to my apartment, you can keep this one.' you said as you stood up, approaching him to hand the house keys.

'goodbye gojo, i hope you live a great life.' you whispered your final words of the relationship, as you walked out the front door, leaving gojo in the trance he has yet to leave.

gojo satoru knew this was coming sooner or later- he had anticipated this moment long before, yet perhaps he should've prepared even further, and do research on just how bad heartbreak actually could be. he could feel the tears that rimmed his eyes, threatening to fall, just like how he was mentally starting to fall apart. sobs and sniffles escaped, yet upon his blurry vision, he could see the delicate half of a heart that hung from your keychains- the one he had gifted you on your first anniversary, and now the ones you had both equipped on your house keys- his house keys. he could feel the needles that pierced his heart, and he could only reminisce the last smile you had left him with- the smile that didn't reach your eyes, unlike the ones you would give him every morning when he woke up, unlike the ones that would spark a gleam in your eyes and make him fall head over heels once again.

everything suddenly felt more hollow than it should be, it felt empty- empty without you by his side.

it was a good four years before he met you again, coincidentally at the corner cafe that you would often visit with him when you were together- yet this time you were with another person- one that had captured your heart, and someone that was far from him. you had yet to notice him, for you wore the biggest smile as you stared into the eyes of your significant other, laughing at possibly the joke they had just told you. you held the same look of love that you once gave him- no, maybe one with even more love.

he knew he should be happy, after all this time, and especially since this was what he had truly wanted for you- to be happy in the arms of another. yet, the lingering love he still felt for you pushed him to talk to you, as you finally sat alone in the booth.

'hey, y/n. is this seat taken?' he started.

you turned around to meet his eyes, giving him a friendly smile, 'no, gojo, make yourself comfortable.'

meeting him had caught you by surprise, especially when you had not seen him since the time you had ended things with him. your fingers wrapped around the cup of coffee, as you tried to divert your attention from the awkward silence that enveloped the booth.

' i saw a person with you earlier, are they your partner?' he asked.

'yea. i've been with them for two years now.' you raised your head to answer him.

gojo could feel his heartbreaking once again, as he saw your eyes gleam at the thought of a person that wasn't him, a smile creeping onto your face. despite this, he knew you had questions for him, the fiddling you did with your thumbs was still present.

'out of the blue gojo, but it used to bother me a lot on what actually made us drift apart. was it something i did? was i not enough for you?" you blurted, trying to clear this burdening feeling once and for all.

gojo gave you a smile before he answered, ' no y/n. it was never you, i should have told you when you had ended things with me, but i was too much of a coward to go after you to call you back. it was me. i just felt like you could've been way happier with someone who wasn't me, ya know? i pushed you away because you deserve so much better y/n, someone like the one you are with now. so, it was never your fault y/n.'

you had doubts on yourself all along, every inch of the free time you spent was on what made him pull himself away from you, just what had made him stop coming home early so he could spend time with him. sure, the thoughts lessened when you started a relationship with your partner, nevertheless, the thoughts continued to haunt you. yet, it was him- it was his insecurities that had broke the lovable bond, it was his selflessness and feeling of being selfish- the thought of him holding you back was what had led to all of this. sure, you had your own share of insecurities when it came to the relationship, after all, the man that sat in front of you was breathtakingly gorgeous.

you smiled down at your empty coffee cup, the weight that used to sit on your shoulders finally vanishing at his words.

'thank you for answering me gojo.' you said, as you stood up, gathering your things. " i hope to see you around again."

as you turned his back on him, readying to leave the shop, you felt a sturdy arm on your wrist, telling you to turn around and meet its owner.

' y/n, could.. could you please see me like that for a moment? pretend i mean something to you. even if it's just for the last time.'

the gentle look of your eyes met his, this wasn't the look of love that you had given to the person earlier. this was simply just a look of courtesy, paired with a soft smile that apologized.

'sorry gojo, i don't think i can do that. but i was happy when i was with you gojo, i really, and truly was.'

[year2000electronics]

good morning. so every member in team bleck has a member that sort of ‘parallels’ the five member ensemble of the heroes and tippi. bleck parallels mario as the leader, mimi and peach are the girly girls, o’chunks and bowser are the muscle, and that leaves the last two-

(long post incoming)

the fact that 8-3 and 8-4 have luigi and dimentio paired off with eachother pretty much implies that he’s intended to be luigis parallel, and that nastasia and tippi are also parallels. not to be overly thorough again but i’m gonna spell out a lot of the ways both these parallels work

luigi and dimentio:

- have matching colour schemes (luigis inverted green and blue becomes purple and yellow, and vice versa)

- have the obvious parallels thanks to moments like in 6-1, 8-3 and 8-4 where dimentio and luigi/mr l have extended dialogues alone

- on the topic of mr l and dimentio, both of their major design traits are their masks and how one can’t be recognized with it on, and one’s true intentions can’t be recognized thanks to their mask always smiling

- carson mentions that dimentio was turned away once by the count before seeing that he had potential, much like luigi wasn’t allowed to come on adventures in pm64 until mario saw him handle himself in ttyd (this ones a bit of a stretch admittedly)

and just overall the fact that luigi and dimentio are the only remaining pair means they’re obvious parallels

tippi and nastasia:

- have mirroring but similar form transformations (tippi from human to flying creature, nastasia was implied to change from a flying creature to a humanoid)

- both are from blecks past, but only one of them was his love

- both of them sacrifice themselves in the name of love for the count (nastasias may have been platonic or familial), but only nastasia lives to see the end of the ordeal

- both are the one ‘non playable’ character in the group- you cant REALLY play as tippi and nastasia doesn’t get a boss fight

- pretty much the ‘brains’ of the group, the one that speaks on behalf of bleck/mario a lot of the time

HOWEVER. what if i told you i could also make the argument that THIS is also an equally valid interpretation.

now obviously the game pretty much confirms that luigi and dimentio are parallels through their fights but i could also argue that luigi/nastasia and tippi/dimentio have some parallels of their own, and why i wanna highlight this i’ll talk about later

tippi and dimentio:

- unlike the other parallels, tippi and dimentio are actively made so that dimentio can’t be tattled. he is literally the only miniboss or major npc like this (aside from maybe nastasia as she has no true overworld encounter)

- at the beginning of the game, both of them are the characters with the most mysterious pasts, as in little to no information is given (tippis gets given later, again i’ll come back to this)- dimentio is the only bar story that doesn’t help out much in terms of his past or lack thereof

- both of them have teleported a character to the safety of flipside in the events of the story (tippi in ch 4 and dimentio in the ch 2 interlude, though teleporting is part of his niche in general)

- have elements that may or may not hide a “true” face (is dimentio’s mask his face or is he just like that?)

- tippi and dimentio’s “moments” together are a bit fewer and far between compared to the others, like her strange out of place “i know you. you’re that...” and the fact that she’s the only one who survives dimentio’s ch 7 nuke (when he tells her directly he’s her enemy) and the fact that despite luigi being onscreen and PLENTY mouthy in his actual fight with dimentio, TIPPI is the one who talks back to you in dimentio’s optional game over

- this ones a bit of a stretch as it’s heavily based on theories that i don’t even believe myself but if you believe dimentio is the magicians son then both tippi and dimentio have a pseudo connection to pixls

luigi and nastasia:

- both are seen as the ‘right hand’ or ‘number two’ for their respective ‘number ones’ (mario and bleck) and generally play off of more subdued versions of their designs (nastasias glasses vs blecks monocle, her white clothes vs his beige cape and hat, her light blue vs his dark blue, luigis proportions being a bit more average compared to mario and a more subdued green colour scheme)

- both have a deep affection for bleck/mario and this is largely in part due to their pasts with them, where seeing their ability and kindness made them believe bleck/mario was truly brilliant (nastasias lines and backstory imply that she was around to see bleck as blumiere which would imply she knew him just as long or longer as tippi did), they also have spent more time by bleck/marios side than the others, comparatively

- both almost never have things on their own, their escapades are mostly ‘side stories’ (but they still DO happen: i’ll give tippi and nastasia the fact that they do hover around mario/bleck more than luigi hovers around mario BUT nastasia isn’t always around bleck, does her own thing, and is even in a meeting when bleck isnt vs tippi only ever leaving marios side when she’s forcibly removed)

- much like luigi and dimentio have their moments, nastasia and luigi also share moments (mostly in the first part of the game, keep it in mind): the most pivotal part of the direction luigi goes in this game is when he gets caught by nastasia, and nastasia is the one who tells him not to mess with the wedding

- in addition, many times throughout the game nastasia details to count bleck each minions defeat, often just telling him the messages they relay or punishing them herself, but specifically when it comes to mr. l’s disappearance, she says she’s the one at fault

- you could also make another design argument that mr l’s mask could also be a parallel to nastasias glasses as a large part of her character also comes from her glasses as they do the fact that mr l can’t be recognized- theyre her weapon (the red rims are also a bit of a gut punch when it comes to that)

- both of them wind up ‘taking count blecks place’ (as the final boss, and as the one to get hit by dimentio’s fatal blow) (interestingly this also puts them both out of commission for the final boss)

- this ones a big stretch but nastasia is seen openly sobbing at the end and luigi is the one of the four heroes who’s the most prone to tears (according to tv tropes at least)

so with all that being said, Why. why did i make this post. i’m sure i could draw comparisons to fuckin uhhh luigi and idk BONECHILL if i had the time on my hands. well the reason why is because i wanted to think about... what if we all looked at spm like this.

in the beginning, nastasia and luigi are in fact eachothers parallels, nastasias logic vs luigis emotion nastasia being the villain to defeat luigis hero yadda yadda yadda. but as the story goes on more and more of the luigi/dimentio parallel begins to happen. and this is because starting with chapter 5, dimentio begins to show his hand- to the heroes, but also to the audience. more of his plan is succeeding, and as count bleck grows more reluctant, this story becomes less and less about how to defeat him and more about how to stop the chaos heart from doing its thing.

we all know how that story goes though, how dimentio usurps the count and takes luigi with his little pizza hands. but i’m thinking that luigis parallels, luigis villains are really supposed to represent the arc 1 villain and the arc 2 villain- both nastasia and dimentio are the ones who are trying to make the man in green choose the dark prognosticus as the true prophecy, it’s just that as the story goes on, dimentio is the one who seizes control of the story. even to the effect that he’ll shift the very structure of the team around so that HE will do battle with luigi. so that HE is the one who is the obvious representative of the ideal host for the chaos heart.

cos who ELSE would it be, right??? :o)

*and here comes the obligatory disclaimer that obviously i’m not trying to say that THIS is concrete 100% what the writers meant. i just think this is an interesting interpretation i’d like to explore

[sepublic]

Amelia’s Alzheimer’s?

           From what Owen Dennis told us, Book 5 of Infinity Train would’ve been a movie, covering Amelia’s takeover of the train… Which, I don’t know if Book 5 would’ve gone over her takeover, AND her eventual arc post-Book 3, but; I believe the implication is that like Book 4, this movie would’ve been a pure prequel, set in the past. A good look and further contextualization of Amelia’s past sins and how she got into the headspace she now has, in order to set up for a future Book where she finally gets her proper arc.

           That leaves just three other books… One about Guilt, the next about Revenge, and the last of Acceptance. Book 5 is about Grief fittingly enough, and we know that Book 8 (Acceptance) would’ve delved into a passenger with alzheimer’s, whose condition would’ve kept them from engaging with the Infinity Train’s intended function properly. Owen Dennis mentioned how this final season would’ve been based on his own experiences with his grandfather, who had a similar issue in the past.

           It’s easy to assume that Book 8 would’ve been about a whole new character, which leaves either Books 6 or 7 for the resolution to Amelia’s arc- But what if that’s not the case? The Book 8 protagonist would be pretty old, presumably, so…

           …What if Amelia was the Book 8 protagonist? What if, by the end of the series, Amelia’s age would’ve caught up to her, and she’d start developing alzheimer’s- Further complicating her attempts to get her number down, especially when she can no longer remember Alrick like she used to!

           Think about it- Amelia as the final protagonist would be a neat book-end to the series, given how we began with her as the final antagonist of Book 1. The show starts and ends with Amelia, who alongside One-One and Samantha the Cat (and arguably Randall) are basically the core, central tenet characters of the entire show. The resolution of Infinity Train is the resolution of Amelia, who serves as the passenger most entwined with the train, having once been its conductor even!

           Not only that, but with how Amelia’s character serves as a means of criticizing and showing the fallibility of the Infinity Train, how she’s able to game the system, how she works in a place to criticize One-One’s direction with it… And her having to deal with alzheimer’s could continue that theme of Amelia’s character being a commentary on the flaws of the Infinity Train, if it can’t account for her memory loss!

           Amelia’s memory loss would be difficult to work with, if we’d only gotten to know her in just Book 8; But now we have Books 1, 3, 4, and 5 (at the very least!) to bring background and context to her life-story, and it’s a LONG one too! Setting up Amelia’s past in great detail, going into the intricacies across the entire show… It could be setting up the audience to remember all of this, when Amelia herself can’t- So we can get a better idea of her frustration, of how she ended up here when Amelia herself is confused, etc.! We gain a deep and intimate understanding of Amelia’s past for her, in preparation for the memory loss of Book 8.

           Owen talking about how Book 8 would’ve been based on his own experiences, watching his grandfather deal with amnesia- From a meta sense, the audience could serve Owen’s role! We’re the younger people, watching Amelia, our favorite old lady, grow across the series… We get attached to her, she’s basically like family, so naturally it hits harder to see her lose her memory. It’d be a meta way for Owen to really capture what he experienced in real life, by having the audience take his position when observing the character of Amelia.

           From an in-universe standpoint, perhaps Hazel could serve as the proxy for Owen! She’s more or less Amelia’s daughter in the technical and arguably figurative sense- We don’t know exactly how their relationship would progress, and the last time we had hopes of Found Family for Hazel, it didn’t quite work out… But regardless. Perhaps Hazel, as a kid with relation to the older Amelia, would’ve gotten to grow up with her surrogate caretaker, learn to value and appreciate her and vice-versa; And then we see from Hazel’s pained perspective, the loss of Amelia’s memories. Perhaps Amelia losing her memories of her times with Hazel, even!

           This could tie Amelia and Hazel’s stories together, especially with how linked the two are, with Hazel resulting from Amelia’s failed attempts to bring back Alrick! And Hazel has a few of Amelia’s memories- She remembers taking ballroom dance lessons, because Amelia was drawing upon those memories when trying to recreate Alrick. Hazel could serve as a young guide to comfort Amelia, a genuinely emotional connection, someone who remembers what Amelia can’t, in the absence of Alrick.

           Book 8 would’ve been about Acceptance- AKA the final part of the 5 stages of Grief, when dealing with the death of a loved one… And Grief is the theme of Book 5, Amelia’s origin story! Amelia would accept the death of Alrick at the end of Book 8, and perhaps Hazel could learn to accept the death of Tuba and another family member in Amelia… In the sense that yes, Amelia is leaving her too- But Hazel will learn to move past Tuba’s death, and perhaps her own experience can help Amelia as well. They can grieve for Amelia’s memories, for Alrick, etc.

           It’d also be an interesting and frustrating challenge for Amelia- As someone who no doubt has at least some pride in her intellect and mind, having her own mind start to degrade… It’d really put her into an interesting headspace, and force Amelia into that acceptance of what is inevitable, that some things she really can’t change. And of course, this could deal with theme of acceptance, of how Amelia clings to her past with Alrick; Having her memories of him start to fade could really shake this up, and force her to re-evaluate her life and values, her priorities… Perhaps decide to instead focus on the Now and Future, accepting that her past with Alrick is not only long-gone, but possibly due to be forgotten. That she can love and appreciate what it did for her, but Amelia has no choice but to move on- Even without those memories, without that past, she still has a future with Hazel and everyone else to keep living for.

           For all we know, Samantha the Cat could even come into play here! She’s someone with access to people’s tapes, among them none other than Amelia’s- And before she gave it to Simon, Samantha also had the ability to create new tapes from passengers on the go. Samantha is a long-lived denizen, at least about 150+ years old, she’s lived and seen the entirety of Amelia’s reign, and was likely there since the very beginning; Owen Dennis did allude to Samantha being present in Book 5… Specifically, he suggested that us seeing Samantha kill someone was a possibility, amidst One-One or Amelia committing murder instead; And that of course suggests that, regardless of whether or not the Cat kills someone in Book 5, she’d still be a prevalent character.

           Samantha having that past with Amelia, and her own conniving nature, could possibly lead to her conflicting with Hazel, perhaps recounting memories differently, or trying to tell them in a way that’d sway Amelia to her side, who knows? It’s also worth noting that she’s someone who has regret and loss in Simon… So perhaps if she served as a central cast member for Book 8 (befitting my point about Amelia being a book-ends kind of character), Samantha would’ve learned to accept the death of Simon, and/or help Hazel and Amelia move on as well. It’d be a fitting and appropriate farewell, I believe, to have Amelia and Samantha, two main-stays since the beginning, have their arc at the very end of the series.

           And Hazel? Hazel could be representative of a new generation, to step up and take the mantle passed down. One-One’s own input would be fascinating, because like Samantha and Hazel, he has quite the past with Amelia, and a lot of significance and understanding of her sins. And with his control of the Infinity Train, I can see him attempt to recreate Amelia’s destroyed tape, or even try to create a new tape for her, to try and get around Amelia’s memory loss. The Infinity Train selectively deciding which memories it only thinks are important could lead to disagreement with One-One and conflict, exposing the flaws of the system- And/or, the Infinity Train might come across a roadblock because it can’taccess Amelia’s memories anymore!

           This could be a culmination for One-One’s arc as well, as seeing his failure to account and accommodate Amelia’s alzheimer’s, leads him to decide to make MAJOR reforms to the Infinity Train as a result! Maybe he’ll even stop the whole process of kidnapping passengers (while still letting the denizens function and roam freely). Him and Amelia have an unusual, kind of at-odds but not really, sort of frenemy relationship; They’re working together, they’ve been enemies, they’ve collaborated, each was the reigning conductor at one point. We could have Samantha as someone with negative recollections of her time with Amelia, One-One with overall netural ones, and Hazel with positive associations! Three different people with different pasts and interactions with Amelia, to provide their own input on their time with her, and thus help her rediscover her past…

           …Or, at the very least- Come to terms and accept who she is, and finally move on. And, it goes without saying that Amelia’s dilemma with her huge number could be complicated by her Alzheimer’s, if she can’t remember things- And it’d be interesting to see how it might fluctuate, if at all. Perhaps Amelia’s progress actually gets pretty good, but THEN the memory loss begins to kick in, and that frustrates her. It’d teach the lesson that progress is not linear, that sometimes you might backtrack, you might think you’re so close, only to have retread the same path… And sometimes you’re tired of the journey and just want to get to the destination, to the final stop at the end of the railroad. We could have Amelia learn to accept help from others, to not try and seize control for herself as all-powerful Conductor, to gain some humility amidst her pride in her own ability and intellect…

           We could have Amelia awkwardly navigate the train without her memories, stumbling across and slowly figuring out what needs to be done in order to lower her number, with just the number’s movement as an indicator, and no memories to work off of! Her only hints are whenever her number moves to a certain situation, so Amelia really has to work backwards… Through trial and error, figure out what needs to be done; Perhaps a callback to Grace and Simon, who had no guidance and struggled with figuring out what their numbers expected of them.

          It’d be an interesting book-end to THAT point, especially since it was Amelia who unknowingly contributed to Grace misinterpreting the function of her number, so then having Amelia rectify this with herself, learning to properly figure out what her number means, and then accepting that without going into denial like Simon did… It’d really show the growth of her, but also the series, and of course the fact that Grace and Simon were literal kids, and Amelia is a seasoned adult. And of course, there’s the existential questions, if Amelia is a different person without her memories, if those sins still apply if she can’t remember them anymore, if she’s essentially disconnected and detached, etc.

          We might see Amelia operate without any memories of her grief with Alrick, see how she is without that- And it might concern and frustrate Amelia, because she could conflate moving past Alrick, as being the same as getting rid of him truly… And the memory loss certainly doesn’t help. Who is she without her memories? It could lead to an identity crisis that echoes back to Book 2’s themes. Amelia without memories might learn to rediscover herself by looking into her past, perhaps existing without recollection, just this number she slowly figures out how to lower. Perhaps having a new, more detached/objective look at her own past, from a perspective as someone who doesn’t remember them, so it feels like the recollections of a stranger- It might contribute to Amelia really coming to terms with happened, with herself, and finally Acceptance.

           It really could be the culmination of the series; With how the age of protagonists for each Book gets progressively older, Amelia’s elderly age and Alzheimer’s would’ve been the end of the line, the final stop/destination for the train. It’d make Amelia the central Passenger of the show, who we’ve been following since Book 1, watching her progress, in a sense seeing her grow up- And then finally seeing her grow old and suffer from Alzheimer’s. The journey of the Infinity Train could be the journey of Amelia, from her boarding the train, to the final destination, literally and figuratively. It could tie into the arcs of Hazel, Samantha, and One-One, and finally deconstruct the Infinity Train with an outsider who did exactly like that!

           What do you guys think? I think it’d be quite the experience to watch Amelia grow and struggle as a person, so it really does feel personal and intimate to us, when we know her memories, only for Amelia herself to lose them... A fascinating, bittersweet study and journey of Amelia, but one we accept, because the journey made the destination worthwhile.

[itsclydebitches]

RWBY Roman Holiday: A Review

Hello, everyone, and welcome to my review of RWBY: Roman Holiday by E.C. Myers! Given my tendency to discuss this franchise at great length, I thought I'd start with a tl;dr section for those who might just want my general takeaway, not a deep dive into some of the novel's specific flaws and strengths. So with that in mind... 

Did you like the book?

I did! Let me put it like this. I'm incredibly critical of any RWBY material nowadays, I haven't had the energy to read #realbooks for a while, and I still managed to finish this in five days, even while stopping every few pages to take notes. So it was entertaining enough to hold my attention, unlike Before the Dawn. Is it a perfect novel worthy of nothing but endless praise? No and I'll delve into the many problems below. But is it also one of the better RWBY installments I've engaged with lately, including recent Volumes of the webseries? Yeah. If you're still emotionally attached to the show or these characters, I recommend giving it a try for the sake of nostalgia. 

But isn't there a bunch of creepy stuff in it? Didn't Myers turn Roman into a pedophile? 

No, he didn't. As I suspected, the rumors that we've been hearing lately probably came about from taking certain moments out of context, or by blowing up some pretty minor implications, or by straight up reading interactions between an adult and a minor in very bad faith. Purity culture and a desire to drag RWBY combining to create an argument that, frankly, isn't supported by the text. Are there jokes and interactions that some readers might find uncomfortable? Yes, but it’s no worse than what RWBY has already established as a canonical part of their world and writing style. See: Yang's interactions with Junior in her Yellow Trailer. If you're a fan of Roman and have held off only because you're convinced the novel ruined his character, I personally don't think that's the case. Breathe easy. 

I'm still worried about how the novel treats disability though. Specifically Neo's muteness. 

I was too, but I'm happy to report it's a pretty tame portrayal. If anything, I have more to say about the intersection between Neo's semblance and her sense of identity. Suffice to say though, Neo never speaks in the novel, there's no ridiculous reason why she can't speak (no reason is given at all, it’s simply a part of her), and only the bad guys pressure her into talking. Meaning, the bad guys from her and Roman’s perspective. Obviously she and Roman are both villains in the RWBY world, but when it comes to respecting each other's needs they're definitely, comparatively better than the rest of the cast. 

So there were no problems? 

Oh no, there are definitely problems lol. Let's just say they're not offensive enough to bother the average RWBY fan. At least, most of them (probably) aren't. If you're not neck deep in the franchise's struggles and actively thinking about how this novel does (or does not) fit into the larger RWBY-mythos, there's a very good chance you'll like the book, passing over everything I’m about to mention without a backwards glance. Hell, even if you're looking for problems there's a good chance you'll enjoy a lot of other aspects, just like I did. So I recommend taking a chance on the book far more than I recommend steering clear on principal alone. 

Okay, with that out of the way it's time to dive into the nitty-gritty!  

FYI I'm pulling my quotations from the paperback edition and, as is probably already obvious, this is not a spoiler free review. So tread carefully!  

Part One: An Imbalance of Protagonists

Would you like RWBY: Roman Holiday? Well, that might depend largely on which of its main characters you're most interested in. If it's Roman, you may be disappointed, despite the fact that the book is evenly divided between his and Neo's perspectives. This is, fundamentally, a book about Neo. She is the one undergoing all the character development. She is the one who is driving the plot. Roman just sort of exists within a criminal status quo until he bumps into her — almost exactly halfway through the novel's 308 pages — and then becomes caught up in her training, her desire to concoct new schemes, and eventually her family's problems. I don't want to make it sound like Roman is unimportant to the book, he's obviously there and he does things, but we're not given the same level of insight into him like we are Neo.  Frankly, I can think of only two significant revelations, both of which we might have easily guessed based on Roman's established characteristics: his mother abandoned him when he was a kid and he once worked for one of the main crime bosses in Mistrial, specifically Lil' Miss Malachite. Otherwise, everything Roman does and experiences is precisely the sort of stuff we saw him do and experience in the webseries. He commits petty crimes, fights people with his cane, and does it all with a dramatic flare which, notably, Myers writes quite well. 

This lack of impact on the story seems to stem from two decisions. First, Myers never jumps forward or backwards in time (with the exception of two small scenes that explain how characters got to a point we saw in the last scene/chapter). Though this definitely helps to keep things from getting confusing, it means that we never go farther back than Neo at 8 years of age and we're always looking at what both characters are up to at the same point in time. Given that Roman is a decade older than Neo, this means that, unlike her, we never get peek into his childhood. When she's 8 he's 18, already an adult and committing crimes in Mistral. A lot of Neo's development is inevitable, just by virtue of starting her story so young. She has to mature, develop her semblance, go to school, try various ways of being independent for the first time... Roman gets none of that. He's an adult when we meet him, his character fully formed and, since we already know that character from the webseries, we're given no new insight into him or how he developed that identity, just a reconfirmation that it exists. 

More of an issue though is that Roman isn't allowed an arc over the course of the novel. The man we meet on page 9 is precisely the same man we end with on page 308 — with the minor exception that he now has a partner in Neo and that, sadly, is a lesson he learns instantaneously. For the first half of the book, Myers sets up the expectation that learning to trust and, specifically, learning to trust someone like Neo is the great conflict that Roman will have to work though. He's very cynical in his own head, as we might expect: “On the streets, on your own. You only watched out for yourself. Anything else was a weakness. Anyone else was a liability” (14). No sooner is this perspective established than Roman is meeting people who challenge it. While babysitting the Malachite girls, they provide advice on how to improve his chances of pulling off heists: 

Melanie and Miltia, simultaneously: “You just need the right partner.” 

Roman: “Maybe. I just don’t believe anyone is going to watch out for me as much as I will” (41). 

After betraying Lil' Miss and fending off his peer Chameleon, she sadly announces that "you might have gotten what you wanted after all if you hadn’t been in it only for yourself. If you had allowed yourself to trust someone” (87). Myers isn't subtle about the theme here. 

Yet when Roman meets Neo, that trust is immediate, despite spending his entire life rejecting the idea of a partner, despite the viewer having just read about numerous other people who Roman spent years fighting beside and still didn't come to trust, Neo forms an instant, powerful connection with him — one that can't be explained by her saving his life when they first meet. Even Roman himself acknowledges that it's just another debt to repay. They simply click, with no explanation as to how that occurred, or even a serious acknowledgement that this is out of character for them both (what with Neo never having had a friend). Neo gives him the name "Neopolitan," knowing it's her true name now and, thus, a more personal offering than her birth name "Trivia." Roman gives her his entire life story during their first meal together. Roman also spends all of his money on Neo's modified parasol and at the novel's end continually offers to sacrifice himself so that Neo can escape. Neo thinks a lot about how Roman is the only one who can understand her through body language alone which, kudos to Myers again, he does describe her movements with enough clarity to sell that understanding (even if Roman does sometimes make leaps in logic that feel a little unlikely). “She really missed Roman. Most of the time she didn’t need to say anything and he knew exactly what she was thinking” (249). It's heartwarming. As someone who enjoyed their relationship in the webseires, this is likewise a joy to read. It's just that it... kinda came out of nowhere. 

Far from this just being an issue of Roman trusting when he's never trusted before, Myers sets up a conflict of loyalties in Neo that is then immediately dropped. She finds herself surprised by Lady Beat — the headmistress of the academy Neo attends — unexpectedly liking her insights and, in exchange for privacy and a more in-depth curriculum, agrees to help her capture Roman. Prior to this agreement, Neo considers helping the Malachite twins take Roman out when they corner him because then they might be Neo's friends instead of her bullies. That motivation makes perfect sense to me. Of course Neo would be more interested in assisting the two girls who attend school with her and improving her daily life over helping the random guy on the street, even if Roman's vulnerability (that's what Neo latches onto: a moment where his mask slips and he shows true fear) sways her towards helping him in the end. When she reunites with Roman later, he requests that she help him spy on Lady Beat... and Neo turns him down. So there's a very clear precedent here of Neo being out for herself, looking to improve her relationship with the other high society ladies she's spending most of her time with. The road to favoring Roman over them will be a long one. What will convince Neo to switch sides? 

Nothing. Soon after Neo thinks about how she's duping both Lady Beat and Roman (the reasoning there is never really explained) and from then on her focus is entirely on Roman, with likewise no explanation as to why she chose him in the end. “Roman clearly had some trust issues to work out, but Neo was going to prove to him that he could count on her” (219). Why this sudden desire to prove herself to Roman? No idea. The novel skips over the majority of their bonding. Yes, there are a few key scenes — Neo saving him, Roman giving her the parasol, etc. — but a single sentence reveals that Neo has been training with him for months now, bypassing the slow development of trust and Neo's changing thought process about what side she should choose. 

Or rather, there are explanations for Neo's decision, but they all occur after Neo has already chosen Roman. There are two major revelations that we're only told about much later in the novel: that Neo is suddenly dissatisfied with her life at school — “Neopolitan was having second thoughts. As much as life at the school had improved, more and more it felt like it wasn’t giving her what she needed” — and that Lady Beat is the head of a major spying conspiracy across all of Remnant (more on that later). Either one of these could have been the catalyst for Neo giving more attention to Roman and, eventually, growing quite close to him. A general dissatisfaction with her life, the revelation that Lady Beat isn't the kind of criminal Neo wants to support...either would work. As it is, her devotion to Roman seems to immerge randomly, fully formed and unshakable, with these ‘I guess the school and Lady Beat weren't that great after all’ justifications tacked on much later and, thus, presented as incidental to Neo's devotion. “[Roman] was basically the only thing that mattered to her in the world right now" is the conclusion Neo comes to without a lot of work put in to explain how he reached that point in her life (248). 

And I can see how this happened. We already know that Neo and Roman are a tight-knit duo from the webseries — Neo's love in particular has been emphasized since Volume Six — and so Myers banked on the reader applying that knowledge to the novel. He wrote the story of what Neo and Roman did prior to meeting, he wrote the story of their friendship prior to the webseries... but he didn't really write how that friendship came about. It's treated as a given, despite the huge number of reasons why that friendship should be rocky (or even non-existent) at the start, to say nothing of many fans' interest in getting an answer to the question, "How does an established villain who trusts no one wind up partnering with a girl a decade his junior?" The novel tells us that this unexpected outcome does, in fact, occur, rather than taking us through the journey of how such an outcome is possible. This is by no means a new problem in RWBY and, admittedly, Myers' depiction of the relationship isn't as noticeably a problem as some others in the webseries, simply by virtue of Neo and Roman being the focus of the novel and the reader knowing that they do, in fact, end up as partners. It's a lot easier to buy a shaky journey when you already know the inevitable conclusion, but that doesn't mean we couldn't have done a better job of showing it. 

Which, to get back to the original point of this section, means that Roman never has that arc about learning to trust someone. He just does trust, the moment Neo comes on the scene. Personally, I think this rapid-fire growth is particularly egregious given everything else we learn about Neo and Roman’s histories. Meaning, just like Roman's cynicism about trust is introduced early on, so is his hatred for the rich elite. In fact, Roman's poverty and the disdain that has bred are arguably the most prominent aspects that Myers added to his characterization. As seen in the novel's excerpt release, Roman's introduction is robbing a rich man coming out of a club where he shows more interest in humiliating and harming the man than just getting his stuff and running. Which, to be fair, isn't solely due to the man's status as a member of the elite. The novel develops both characters' sadist tendencies — “He’s vicious. He brutally beat a man just for his coat. He was having fun” (21) — but the man’s status isn't a non-factor either. Roman's internal thoughts say a lot about how stupid, rude, gullible, pathetic, and inept he thinks the rich are. At the start he's not just taking the man's coat because he likes it, but because he’ll need it to survive the Mistral winter, what with living in a shelter under a bridge and all. We learn that his obsession with survival is born of poverty — “Ma’am, when you don’t have anything, surviving is more. You’ve gotta start somewhere” (20) — and that Roman will go to any lengths just to meet his basic needs, potentially with a side of some comfort. For example, he knowingly risks his life by pissing off Lil' Miss just to get two days of food, baths, and a bed. As Roman puts it, those two days are worth it, even if it means the rest of his life is potentially forfeit. 

So this is a man driven by a desire to live in comfort, manifesting in a hatred of the rich that is so powerful Roman breaks the man's knee just for the hell of it. He's touchy about any comment on his upbringing too: "Roman froze. 'So that’s it. You think you’re better than me. Because you went to school? Learned a trade?'" (80). And, to be clear, this is a hatred of the high society rich. The kind of wealth that's never earned. Roman has a healthy respect for the well-fed crime bosses who have pushed their way to the top, just as he plans to. Not those living cushy lives at the expense of him and others. 

And wouldn't you know it, his partner to-be is a pampered little rich girl. 

"There's the conflict," I thought. "Roman doesn't just need to learn to trust, he's got to trust someone born into extreme luxury. How is that going to happen?" Well, again, it didn't. Neo and Roman's class difference is ignored for 99% of the novel, with the other 1% used for casual banter between them. It's not that Roman isn't aware of Neo's pedigree, so to speak. He finds her through the uniform she wears, the symbol of an academy that rich girls attend. When they share their first tea together, he notes how daintily she eats the sandwiches, more evidence that Neo has had manners drilled into her at a young age. When he finally gets confirmation that she's not just rich, but really rich — flying to her parents' mansion — Roman is just kinda moderately surprised, throwing in a comment about how someday that money will be hers and isn't that nice. Roman's hatred of the elite disappeared for Neo's sake, just like his trust issues did. There's no working through these differences, just an erasure of them so the novel can jump straight to them being the perfectly in synch duo we know from the webseries. 

As a side detail that I think demonstrates this imbalance rather well, hair is used as a marker of identity throughout the novel. Neo moves from being jealous that other girls are allowed to style their hair how they please, to making her hair entirely pink with her semblance, changing that to half brown instead, buying pink dye so she no longer needs to waste energy on something she wants to be permanent, and ending with her getting some white streaks even as she chooses to leave the name Vanille behind. Each change coincides with an aspect of her development and it works quite well. In contrast though, Roman has only setup, no follow through. Unlike the short cut we're used to in the series, Roman starts the novel with a long ponytail that characters frequently comment on. The twins steal his hat and beg to braid his hair when they're bored. Neo seems iffy about the style choice. A couple other side characters make vague references to imply that he should get rid of it — something, something it doesn't actually suit him. So surely we'll see Roman cut his hair sometime before the novel's end, visually representing his growth, just like Neo's changing color has represented hers (ending with a color mix that reflects neapolitan ice cream)? Nope. Not unless I missed it. The foundation for that change is there, but Myers never capitalizes on it, despite obviously knowing what he's doing with Neo. 

So if you want more Roman content, the kind of content we saw in the webseries, great. You'll love the novel. If you want to read about Roman undergoing any significant change, including a dive into how he came to trust Neo of all people, large chunks of that story are missing. In true RWBY fashion, there are plenty of details that allow readers to fill in the blanks for themselves, but the canon itself is, sadly, lacking. 

Part Two: Neo's Magical Identity 

We've established then that Neo gets the lion's share of the development and, frankly, most of it is good. Knowing she's set to become a villain, I loved reading the gradual move from understandably lashing out — Neo throws an umbrella at her father's face when he's being an emotionally abusive dick — to becoming just as stoically cruel as Roman — she launches a woman out of the back of a plane. Did she have a parachute? Who cares. There's a lot here to like about Neo's characterization, with Myers finding a nice balance between keeping her playful and not making her feel like a caricature (helped immensely by spending so much time in Neo's head). However, the one part that arguably fails is the development of Neo's semblance and, consequentially, her identity. 

To be clear, I absolutely get what Myers was going for and it's basically what I assumed was going on when I read the excerpt: Trivia (Neo's birth name) has an imaginary friend she calls Neopolitan and, over time, she realizes she is Neopolitan. The imaginary friend is who she wanted to be all along, not just the person she wanted to spend time with. I like it! Who among us hasn't imagined a badass, smooth-talking, beloved version of ourselves that impresses everyone with a Mary Sue-esque ease? (Or, if you haven't, guess I'm outing myself here lol.) It's a pretty relatable idea. Trivia imagines a girl with the power to dress how she wants, style her hair how she wants, with amazing acrobatic skills, a take-no-shit attitude, fun ideas to implement... but she also has Trivia's heterochromia and muteness. It's the perfect combination of Trivia's unique traits and the confidence/freedom she longs to have. Of course when given the chance she grows up to be Neo, even going so far as to take that name. It's what she always wanted. 

The only problem here is that in the RWBY world, Neo can't just be an imaginary friend. She's a manifestation of Trivia's semblance. As we learn later, the things Trivia creates are as real as real can be, provided she keeps up their existence. You can touch the wall. You can count the money. You can wear the clothes. They're less illusions than short-term creations — as Team RWBY realizes whenever they wind up attacking a Neo duplicate instead of the "real" thing — and that puts an odd spin on just how imaginary Neopolitan actually is. She's not imaginary at all. She's a real person that exists in the real world, it's just that this existence is temporary and dependent on Trivia's aura. 

The novel supports this by constantly writing Neopolitan as a distinct personality from Trivia. Not just the polished version of who she is slowly becoming, but an individual in her own right. Neo makes decisions that are fully her own, contrary to or even entirely unknown to Trivia. To highlight just a few examples: 

Trivia is unsure about sneaking out of the house so Neo "shoved her into the hall" (25). 

Neo "looked on jealously” as Trivia drinks a milkshake, implying a desire to have one and the knowledge that her current physicality doesn't allow for that. If she is Trivia, shouldn't she likewise be enjoying the shake? 

“She shot Neo a questioning look... before she realized what Neo had in mind” (92). Their thoughts are presented as separate and there's no instant mind-reading. 

Neo catches Trivia when she leaps out of a window, surprising her with the save. Trivia never planned for Neo to do that, Neo did it entirely on her own. 

There are lots of other instances like this, details that establish Neo has a person separate from Trivia (this confusion regarding their names should make that clear enough), no matter the fact that she's made out of aura. I mean, we've got Ozpin existing only as a soul in other's bodies. RWBY isn't exactly in a position to get nit-picky about personhood. More specifically though, Neo is presented as a bad influence on Trivia, an outside force enacting on her in harmful ways. Neo's introduction establishes her as the troublemaker to Trivia's more obedient personality: “But those were her parents’ rules, and Neopolitan never cared about those.... She bounced up and down on the cushions the way she wasn’t supposed to” with a “taunting smile” (2). Her father comments on this multiple times, saying that Trivia can't hide behind an imaginary friend. She's responsible for her decisions. And while yes, that's true, that level of responsibility changes when Trivia summons Neo into the world. During a fight with some other teens, they can suddenly see Neo and Neo, independent of Trivia, punches one in the face, making her nose bleed. That seems like a real person making her own, real decisions to me. So it was never Trivia doing things and then trying to foster responsibility off on an imagined cohort, it's a child bringing another, magically-based person into existence and being influenced by her since before the age of 8 (considering that Trivia and Neo have clearly been playing with each other for a long time when the novel starts). There's even a moment where Trivia seems to realize all this, acknowledging that sneaking out, breaking up her parents' party, causing a scene... all of it was Neo's idea. “That had to be Neo’s influence again. Trivia had to stay in control." 

But the idea of control is never actually explored. Despite establishing Neo's individuality and having Trivia comment on her influence, the second half of the novel abandons that for the expected, 'Trivia was Neo all along' reveal. There's a very strange moment where Trivia's mom slaps Neo, causing her to shatter and... that's it. “Neo had been so much more to Trivia. Now she was gone” (98). Neo is, apparently, gone for good, despite the fact that she should return the moment Trivia's aura does. Neo has been with Trivia since she was a small child, nearly her entire life and at least 7 years by this point in the novel, so why did a single slap send her away? That's not explained and, much like the ‘Why has Neo chosen Roman?’ question, the fact that Trivia did try to bring her back several times and failed is mentioned chapters after Neo's absence is presented as an inevitability. The order of events needs some reshuffling. 

Despite this confusion regarding why this change happened now, the explanation seems to be that Neo isn't really gone, Trivia has just realized for the first time that she is Neo. No need to summon up a separate person when you are that person and the novel, from then on, is peppered with constant reminders of this. 

“Trivia was on the verge of exhaustion, but she kept burning the last of her Aura to hold Neo together. To hold herself together” (96). 

Realizing she is Neo: “Trivia smiled. She took in a deep breath. She felt complete for the first time. She felt like herself” (99). 

“You must be Trivia,” the tall woman said. If I must, I must, Trivia thought (126).

“She wrinkled her nose. Her name still felt like a coat that didn’t fit right. She would need to tailor that, too” (153).

“Losing her friend was Trivia’s first step towards putting herself back together and embracing her true, best self” (152). 

“Wearing this [outfit], she almost, not quite, knew (or remembered?) who she was—not as a student or a daughter, but as Trivia Vanille," except the clothes are “the kind of thing Neopolitan would wear” (152-3). 

On not being able to summon Neo anymore: “She had realized that Neo was really just another aspect of herself” (175).

Though there’s also the occasional implication that she's not actually Neo, just someone highly influenced by her: “No, [fully pink hair was] too much of the other girl [Neopolitan]," so she settles on that half pink (Neo), half brown (Trivia) combo (153). 

As said at the start, it's a "twist" that works perfectly well... provided you ignore the magical elements and the amount of work done to establish Neopolitan as her own person, not just Trivia in a shiny, future glamour. Far from the empowering victory I expected to feel in watching Neo become who she always wanted to be, I found the whole situation to be somewhat tragic. Magic created a fully realized person who egged Trivia towards bad behavior since she was a young child, until Trivia comes to the decision that she should just embrace their personality 24/7. It felt less like the growth of a character into who they were meant to be and more like a manipulated kid taking the place of the person who used to exist alongside her — the only friend she ever had before Roman. Given that Neo is a villain, that's a pretty interesting idea for how the good girl goes bad... but it doesn't feel like Myers meant it that way. Rather, we're supposed to accept the simplest reading, that Neo was just a projection of Trivia's internal self, never-mind her individuality, her pressuring influence, her existence as something real in the world provided Trivia has aura. It's a much messier depiction of Neo's identity than that ‘She had an imaginary friend who she admired and eventually took her name’ setup. When magic is involved and a character's mind is creating fully realized people to stave off loneliness... that's a whole other kettle of fish. I don't actually want to delve into a psychological reading here — I simply don't have the expertise for that — but suffice to say, Neo's muteness might have been handled well, but there's a lot more to interrogate regarding her mental state and how much leeway we give to, ‘It's a fantasy series, just run with it.’ 

Part Three: You're Dodging Those Rumors, Clyde 

I admittedly am. Let's take a break from deep dives into characterization to instead tackle Roman Holiday's — undeserved — reputation. I get it. At this point the RWBY franchise is, frankly, a poster child for offensive content and workplace problems. In the last two years alone we've dealt with horrific crunch culture, sexual harassment allegations, an arguably glorified assisted suicide, bad comparisons to real life politics and dictatorships, a huge reversal on the show's disability stance, one subreddit banning another over criticism, a collective YouTube response to the fandom's behavior, iffy choices regarding Mother's Day merch, accusations of queerbaiting, a resurgence of using Monty's death to forward or dismiss arguments, continued worry over whether the bees will be made canonical next Volume... and honestly, that's just some of the big ticket subjects. RWBY's story, workplace, and fandom have a lot going on, much of it bad, so it's no surprise to me that people are primed to see the worst at every turn. Why wouldn't we be? At this point it's a pretty justified response. 

However, in this case it's unwarranted. Let's tackle Neo and Roman first. Yes, they're a decade apart in age and yes, there are some details that could, potentially, imply romantic interest on both sides. But they really are tiny and the novel confirms nothing. Indeed, the back of the book's summary says, "Just like every story, every friendship has a beginning..." So that's the focus here and all the ambiguous hints, importantly, happen after Neo is confirmed to be 18 years old. Roman takes her to a fancy tea shop only because he owes her. “It certainly wasn’t because he wanted to impress her or anything” (189). Neo blushes when he compliments her semblance. Twice Roman jokes “Don’t worry, it isn’t flowers” when Neo is opening up her parasol present (212). Neo also acknowledges Roman's looks at one point: “With his tousled orange hair, dressed like a street punk, he didn’t look much older than her. In fact, he was kind of cute” (184). The most intimate they get though is at the novel's end: “She leaned over and kissed Roman on the cheek. His face went red," though this is immediately followed by "It was fun to mess with him sometimes” (307). Honestly, the most overt "hint" towards a relationship is probably the title itself, a play on the 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday. But upon reading the novel, I think it's clear Myers chose that title only because Roman's name is, you know, Roman and the plot somewhat mirrors the idea of a reporter getting involved with a princess. Only in this case it's a criminal getting involved with a high society girl and "involved" just means a crime spree, not a romance. 

So is there something there? Maybe the start of something, if you're willing to read into it, but to me it comes across more like the two of them poking fun at social expectations — he's the guy so he "must" be getting the girl flowers; she's the girl so she "has" to kiss him on the cheek — rather than anything serious. Even if Myers had developed a relationship, Neo is both an adult and at least Ruby's current age, if not a year older, so if some fans want her to start a relationship with the 14-year-old farm boy housing her ancient headmaster, is a ten year age gap really where we're going to draw the line? I know that makes a lot of people uncomfortable — frankly it makes me a bit uncomfortable too, more-so because of the difference in their life experiences (Neo is still a student, Roman a long-established criminal) than the actual gap itself — but we should be wary about when personal squicks turn into unfounded, "This is a sin!" purity culture. And for the purposes of this conversation, the point is that there is no relationship. If anything, Roman is just as aware of Neo's age as the reader is. He initially thinks he's looking at a “little girl” only to quickly realize “She was also older than her diminutive height suggested, maybe about the same age as the Malachite twins” (168). But, as we'll get to in just a sec, Roman very much treats the twins as the kids they are too. Roman even refers to Neo as a "kid" until she makes it known she dislikes it (183-4). He drops the term, but that doesn't mean the mindset disappeared. 

As for the twins, they're the only other minors that Roman spends time with. Lil' Miss instructs him to act as their body guard while in hiding, which means he spends over a week living with them. Frankly? I think it's a really wholesome part of the novel — or as wholesome as the villains can ever get. That's when the girls get bored enough to steal Roman's hat, toss it around a bit, and beg to braid his hair. Myers does a good job of balancing Roman's bad boy attitude with a clear indulgence for them. He doesn't actively like the twins (who does Roman like besides Neo?) and ends up orchestrating a ridiculous plot to get out of "babysitting" them (another indication that he's well aware that they're kids), but he doesn't wish them any real harm. He even cares about them in his own twisted, villainous way. We get to see a moment where Roman tries to convince the girls to escape from a grimm, leaving him behind. We might have been able to write that off as Roman just saving his own skin in the long run — Lil' Miss would kill him if any harm comes to her girls — but there's no need to fake comfort: “Roman squeezed Melanie’s hand reassuringly. He needed her and her sister to remain calm” (52). As one of the other goons observes, “You’re bluffing. It’s obvious that you care about [Miltia], which means you’re up to something” (51). Much later, Roman's thoughts confirm this when the girls are older, more powerful, and trying to kill him: “He’d had to endure their dance recitals when they were little. He’d clapped for them at gymnastic competitions. Now they were trying to do a number on him... He didn’t want to hurt the lil' brats, despite everything, but he couldn’t let them take him down” (166-7). Really, I like everything about this. I enjoy how this humanizes and complicates Roman without undermining his status as a villain. I like the loyalty to their mother it shows in the twins that they'd turn on a man who was so involved in their childhoods. It's just fun to read about a badass bad guy trying to manage bored pre-teens with superpowers and a crime boss mom. Their relationship isn't something I expected from the novel, but I'm glad we got it. There's nothing here to imply the twins are uncomfortable with Roman, or that Roman is inappropriate with them. Anyone who balks merely at the idea of a grown man, quote, "babysitting" two young girls is working from bias and bias alone. 

There is, however, one inappropriate comment made by a goon and an assumption made by Miltia, both of which Roman refutes. First, the goon asks if Melanie is Torchwick’s “new girlfriend” to which Roman responds, “You know who it is... She’s just a kid, big man” (47-48). Later on, we get

“Cute,” [Roman] said. 

“Flattery’s not going to work on me anymore,” Miltia said. 

“I was referring to your moves, not you” (158).

Now, we could drag Myers for including such "jokes" and misunderstandings to begin with, but that's why I mentioned the Yellow Trailer at the start of this review. It doesn't feel right to single Myers out for something Rooster Teeth has already embraced, especially when he's the one working to mirror their original product. Yang deliberately toys with Junior and Junior willingly goes in for the kiss. Jaune blushes at older moms eyeing him up at the crosswalk. Nora tells Ren not to look up her skirt in the middle of a deadly fight. Neo and Cinder both go to Atlas in scantily clad outfits because it's more important for the women to look sexy than it is for the show to stay consistent about the dangers of the tundra. Much of RWBY has that frat boy energy about it. I'd be shocked if nothing snuck its way into Myers' work too. But Roman the pedophile who ogles the twins and manipulates a kid Neo? That just doesn't exist. 

Part Four: Déjà Vu, Anyone? 

I dithered about whether to include this section, simply because I don't want anyone to misunderstand what I'm trying to say... yet at the same time, I'm not entirely sure how to articulate the problem I have here. Or if I'd even consider it a problem at all. In the end, "déjà vu" is the best term I can come up with. I'm not saying that Myers is lazy in regards to plot and choreography. I'm definitely not saying he's plagiarized. What I am saying — the only thing I'm saying — is that there were a lot of times during the novel where I went, "Okay, we've seen this before." Whether or not that's bad I'm... not sure. 

Let's start broad. When the excerpt dropped I mentioned that Neo's situation sounded pretty very to Weiss' and I stand by that claim. Actually, having read the novel now, I'd say it's a LOT like Weiss' story. Neo is the daughter of an incredibly wealthy family, suffering from an abusive father, a more loving but absent mother, whose only freedom stems from her semblance and combat abilities. Alright, let's dig deeper. Like Jacques, Jimmy's abuse is on full display for the viewer/reader. I could give you a laundry list of examples, but here are just a few: 

Jimmy is frequently described as barely controlling his anger around Neo, “there was rage behind his shadowed eyes,” etc. (4)

There are times when she is "suddenly afraid" of what her Papa will do to her (35).

When Neo is taken home by the cops, they reveal that they didn't even know that Jimmy Vanille had a daughter. That's how sequestered she's been.

He and his wife lock Neo in her room when they go out, which means that when she starts a fire she had no way to escape, no one to open the door for her, no way to call for help (her scroll is engulfed in the flames). Neo ends up chancing a fall from the window. 

He comes very near to hitting Neo at one point before backing down. 

Later he drugs her and, again, locks her in her room. 

As said, I could go on. There are a few inconstancies across the novel that, frankly, I've come to expect of Myers' work and RWBY in general, which I bring up now because it messes with the abuse plotline a bit. There's supposed to be a shocking moment when Jimmy grabs Neo tightly by the arms: "Trivia stepped back, appalled. Papa had yelled at her, punished her, even ignored her over the years, but he had never hurt her before” (97). Except she’s forgetting that, at the very start of the novel, Jimmy grabs her by the ankles, pulls her out from under the couch, and proceeds to shake her upside down while her hand bleeds. I'd say that's a pretty intense, physical interaction, making squeezing Neo's arms fail to have the impact Myers was looking for. Similarly, when Neo finally snaps and throws her parasol at her father's face, it's because “The things she had claimed for herself were just more stuff her parents had paid for," meaning, everything she stole on a shopping spree her father made sure to pay for twice over. It's not the ableism, abuse, isolation, and the like that Neo reacts to, even though she clearly struggles with those throughout the novel as a whole. So there are disconnects at times, but the point is this man is an abusive asshole to his daughter until she learns to literally fight back. Sound familiar? 

What particularly struck me was that both men have built their abuse around how the family is perceived. Both are obsessed with their image and how their daughter does or does not serve it. Jacques yelling at Weiss for speaking out about Beacon could be swapped with Jimmy yelling at Neo for not speaking at all. Jacques has maintained his wealth by exploiting the faunus in dust mines and getting in deep with criminals like Watts. Jimmy maintains his wealth by getting involved in illegal dust trades and getting in deep with criminals like the Xiongs. Both try to justify their actions in the name of perpetuating both that image and that wealth: “the things I have to do for that money” (5). Both lock their daughters in their room when they can't control them anymore. Both keep portraits in the hall that “showed her and her parents posing together as if they were a happy family,” a symbol of this familial deception (271).* Both have more compassionate, terrified, but ultimately enabling wives that, the story reveals, have secretly been spying on their husbands this whole time. Just as Willow set up all those cameras and gave the footage to Weiss, Carmel is using the camera in her pin to acquire information on Jimmy, with plans to use it to help Neo. By the time Neo's solution to the "What now?" question was to fly Roman back to her mansion and drink tea for a while Volume 8 style, complete with a Sun-Blake style shock that this is her house — sure you don't mean the tiny one behind it? — I was honestly wondering just how far we were going to stretch these parallels. I don't want to make it sound like these characters are identical (Carmel isn't an alcoholic for one thing)... but they share enough characteristics and distinct details to feel, well, a little weird. It also feeds the fandom's question, "Doesn't RWBY know any villain backstories except abuse?" 

*(As a side note, I initially thought the book's cover, showing a young Neo with two brown eyes, was a mistake. Turns out her parents had the painter get rid of her pink eye because they were ashamed of it, so kudos to the cover artist for keeping that consistent!) 

The similarities between Neo's backstory and Weiss' are absolutely the most obvious example here, but there were two other, smaller déjà vu moments I wanted to toss out, both involving combat. Myers has, at times, repeated fights almost exactly in order to cover two character's perspectives. I get the need to rehash plot in that manner, but he tends to focus on the exact same details back to back, making for a boring read. That incredibly nit-picky criticism aside, it means that I was already aware of combat moments that I'd seen before, not just in Roman Holiday, but RWBY in general. Does this description sound familiar to anyone? 

Neo hopped up lightly onto the broad blade. Rin tried to shake her off. Neo vaulted away just as the Huntress activated the flames, somersaulting over the Huntress. She planned to land behind her and whack her with her sword, but Rin turned and kicked high while Neo was still in the air. The Huntress’s foot connected with Neo’s stomach, knocking the wind out of her and knocking her clear across the room (199). 

If it's not familiar don't beat yourself up because it really is a minor similarity (and, in fairness, there's only so many ways you can write combat...). But take away the swords, replace them with a parasol and scythe, and you've basically got Ruby and Neo's interaction in Volume 8. Ruby tries to land a hit on Neo, she turns, kicks high while Ruby is still in the air, and she flies across the platform, knocking the wind out of her. We've also seen the 'Landing on a broadsword to get close to an enemy' bit with Tyrian and Qrow. But again: minor. What's a far less minor repeat of combat techniques is seen between Roman and Chameleon. Basically, Chameleon is Ilia, minus being a faunus and thus framing her abilities as a difference she's shunned for. Her semblance allows her to camouflage at will, giving her a major stealth advantage in a fight. Which means that when she goes after Roman, things get exponentially harder when the lights go out. But then it's better for Roman when a fire starts. He beats Chameleon and she helps him in the end because she's always been in love with him, even though Roman didn't love her back. If you're going, "Hey, that's the basic plot of Blake and Ilia's fight!" then yeah, me too.

It's not the whole novel. I don't want to make it sound like Roman Holiday is just a stitched together version of previous RWBY content because it's absolutely not. At the same time though, there were enough major similarities — and enough smaller ones that started standing out as a result — for me to raise an eyebrow. As said, I'm not entirely sure what to make of this eyebrow raising, or even if I want to label it a criticism at all. You all can decide what you think. 

Part Five: Wait, Now There's Not Enough RWBY? 

Yes, I contain multitudes and contradictions. As does this book. Even while Roman Holiday repeated some pretty familiar RWBY elements, there were times when the novel didn't feel very RWBY-ish at all. Part of the problem is that it lacks what's arguably the most crucial part of RWBY’s world building: battling grimm. Safe behind the walls of Mistral and Vale, we only see one grimm in the whole story, a captured Capivara that one of the crime lords uses to dispose of people who have displeased him. Roman and the twins barely get more than a few hits in before it escapes upstairs, leaving the kill to happen off screen (and why the grimm ran is another problem entirely. Again: we'll get to that). So although there are plenty of battles between people throughout the story, it doesn't feel quite like RWBY to me without the show's first and most significant antagonist. 

More than that though, Myers goes back and forth between emphasizing RWBY's unique, cultural elements and putting them aside entirely. When he's including them, it's great. We learn that there's an old saying “You can’t put the moon back together” which yeah, of course idioms would develop around the shattered moon (151). Honey Wine, a night club singer, paints her face with red dust as a symbol of both wealth and her dare-devil nature — one stray spark and the dust would ignite, blowing her and potentially the club up too. Yeah, of course people would come up with foolish, ridiculous ways to use this resource if they had it. During one of Neo's lessons, a passage for diction practice goes like this: 

The gruesome Grimm grew greedy. Get that greedy gruesome Grimm, Gregory. Go, Gregory, go. The greedy gruesome Grimme gorged Gregory. Good-bye, Gregory, Good-bye. The gory, greedy Grimm gave a gruesome grin (175).

Yeah, of course the elite would develop silly lessons using grimm as examples! We've got math problems about Johnny and his dish soap (yes, I'm quoting the Vine), so why wouldn't this world use grimm in the same way? Especially those who are rich and privileged enough to never encounter one. 

When it's good, it's good. When it's not... I don't want to take Myers to task for this because, in his defense, much of what makes the book feel generically modern has been seen in the show. Like computers. Or video games. Still, when these things are mentioned frequently it undermines the fantasy/sci-fi core, especially when Myers keeps the standard terminology. Why is a phone called a scroll, but a TV is still called a TV? Why are cops patrolling normal sounding malls with normal sounding guns? Neo sneaks out at one point and it struck me that, up until she uses her semblance against a bunch of bullies, there's nothing to distinguish this outing from a realistic portrayal of an average girl getting a milkshake. None of this is helped by the times when Myers slips on the terminology that is unique. Roman describes what he steals as "cash" rather than "lien" (105). One moment we're getting phrases like “She wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box," the next it's "or rob a convenience store for a six-pack of Dr. Piper” (44, 239). So is RWBY a world that has all the same products we do — crayons and TVs — a world that's different, but only because the author is making it different in a humorous way — Dr. Piper — or a place with a unique culture and history — scrolls, lien, shattered moon idioms? It's a challenge every fantasy writer has to face. Can you have a French braid in a world without France? Some will say no, others will bank on the reader's understanding that you can't change up every aspect of our language. You'll drive yourself nuts if you try. So I'm sympathetic, but it's nevertheless noticeable when Myers seems to remember that he's writing a fantasy world, tossing in "bullhead," "oh my Gods," and "thank the brothers" in a single scene, as if he’s making up for the whole chapters where that work is missing. Take out the grimm, take out semblances for a good chunk of the plot (since Roman doesn't have one), get iffy about the details... and you're left with a story that sometimes feels more generic Young Adult than it does RWBY. Enjoyable Young Adult, but a little lackluster in the world building all the same. This isn't a book where girls turn into rose pedals, lamps grant wishes, and teenagers fight giant mechs. This is a story where a guy uses a cane to beat people up, a girl uses illusions to shoplift, and the final confrontation is basically a shoot-out. Not bad by any means, just not the level of insane "The gun is also a gun!" nonsense that has become RWBY's brand. 

Part Six: Stupid Plots (and Strange Details) 

If Roman Holiday lacks a lot of that RWBY insanity, then that means nothing stupid and ridiculous happened, right? Lol of course not. The novel suffers from what I think of as the, "Well that's convenient" problem. In its immense defense though, it's nowhere near the level of, say, Amity suddenly being ready to go. The world's rules do not bend for Neo and Roman... they just wind up experiencing things that can test the reader's sense of disbelief at times. For example, how likely is it that two huntsmen will waltz into a bank in the middle of Roman robbing it? Very likely, apparently. Why not just have them respond to a silent alarm? Well, because of reasons we'll tackle in Part Seven, so we're left with the iffy coincidence of two trained professionals being at the right place at the right time to show the reader a fight. It's a fun fight though — love the use of dust in it — so we'll let that pass. After all, if coincidence serves the reader's entertainment, aren't they ultimately a good thing? 

Far more frustrating in my opinion is when disaster is illogically postponed and characters are written as incredibly stupid in order for a protagonist to get by. In this case, Neo. One of the major reveals of the novel is that her father has been stealing dust from the Xiongs and hiding it beneath Neo's bed. We're supposed to believe that a moment of Lil' Miss shooting into her room sets this volatile dust off, resulting in an explosion that kills both of Neo's parents (side note: she intended this), but the dust didn't blow up when Neo started a fire in said bedroom, a fire that then proceeded to consume the entire top floor? ...right. 

When Neo isn't conveniently surviving non-explosions, she's duping people left and right with her semblance, despite the fact that she, of course, can't speak. This trick becomes less and less convincing as the novel goes on. First, Neo drugs her tutor (that poor woman) and pretends to be her to escape the house, holding a one-sided conversation with her father as he walks her to the door. He finds nothing strange in this. Later, Neo sneaks back in by pretending to be her mother and though this time her father catches her, it's because “If you want to know whether someone is lying to you, it’s all in their eyes” (70). Not because, you know, his "wife" inexplicably won't respond to him verbally. Finally, Neo takes the place of Xiong, traveling with his assistant for over thirty minutes, and never once do any of the goons question what's going on with their suddenly mute boss. This includes interactions like Neo holding out her scroll and just staring until the assistant gets that she should follow the GPS, and the need to ignore the fact that Xiong, characterized as quite talkative throughout the novel, is suddenly quiet as a mouse. Neo's muteness should have been a severe limitation on her ability to masquerade as others, not something the story outright ignores in an effort to move the plot along. 

The novel is peppered with such coincidences, small inconsistencies, and just downright strange details. Roman notes that the police haven't arrived to his robbery yet, only for the next sentence to say they were swarming in. Later he "pulled on his bonds, testing whether he could slide one of his hands free, but he’d been tied up real good” but then again, a few sentences later, “He craned his neck to try to look out the front window. He managed to unbuckle his seat and hop to the front” (259). Like forgetting how rough her father has been in the past, Trivia bemoans the fact that she can't wear anything that Neo would, something in pink and white, for example, forgetting that her former "adventuring outfit" consisted of a white tank-top and white sneakers with pink hearts (26).* She also claims that the Roman illusion she sends running from the twins is her first long-distance use of her semblance, even though she just got done recalling the time she created a butterfly and watched it fly until it was "out of sight" (170). The novel writes out Neo's texting as dialogue even when someone else isn't speaking it aloud — something I initially made a note to praise it for. This is her version of "talking" after all — only for the texts to suddenly become bolded halfway through the book. As for strange details, Myers seems to like giving his antagonists a lumpy food to indulge in — Lil' Miss forces Roman to eat her cottage cheese, Xiong oatmeal with the consistency of cement — and Roman, quite oddly, decides to cover his spider tattoo with a grinning pumpkin. (Were they a thing in A Clockwork Orange? It's been years since I read it...) Neo learns to fly a plan by watching Xiong's assistant start it up and then, I kid you not, pulling up a How To article. Perhaps my favorite bit though is when Roman reveals his master plan to gain a monopoly on Vale's coffee industry and successfully does so by attacking one (1) warehouse. This is treated with the utmost seriousness. 

*(Second side note: the color brown is tied closely to Neo's backstory; to the person her parents wanted Trivia to be. She has her brown hair, only one brown eye, is introduced in a brown dress, wears a brown blazer and pants that her parents bought, and attends Lady Browning’s Preparatory Academy for Girls, the school meant to turn her into a 'real' lady.) 

That last bit though, the coffee heist, feeds into my biggest problem with the book's plot. @superzerokarasu​ and I have been talking about this the last two days, acknowledging it as one of the book's bigger flaws. (And, Superzerokarasu, if tumblr actually tags you, feel free to ignore this absolutely massive wall of text. I just wanted to give credit for the conversations 👍). Basically, towards the end of the novel it is, quite randomly, revealed that there is an important Room at the academy. Important enough that the story capitalizes it — that's not my doing. We haven't heard at thing about this Room before but Neo, apparently, has been trying to sneak into it for weeks. She knows Lady Beat is hiding something in there. Did we know this, especially since we've spent half the novel in Neo's head? Nope! No sooner has this mystery been introduced than Neo is solving it, much like how the group solves the problem of using Ambrosius moments after his rules are explained. Neo throws up an illusion of an empty hallway, picks the lock on the door, and discovers that Lady Beat has been spying on everyone who ever attended her school through the small pins students and graduates wear. This means she has access to private information about important people all over Remnant. Shocking! Neo reacts to this discovery by tearing the hard drive loose, there are some confusing suggestions about how this information will save them from Lil' Miss and Xiong, and then Roman sends the information to a news station, revealing all. Thus ends the world-wide conspiracy we just found out about. 

It's muddied. It's ridiculous. It, most importantly, comes out of nowhere. There's absolutely no buildup to this mystery, just a sudden announcement that it exists and, wouldn't you know, here's the conclusion. Superzerokarasu is correct that this problem could be solved by increasing the academy sections and fleshing this mystery out. I'm of the opinion that it could also be solved by eliminating it entirely. Why in the world do Roman and Neo need to grapple with a world-changing reveal, especially when the rest of the novel is so tame? Roman shakes money down from other small-time crooks. Neo learns diction and combat at school. Roman leaves the Kingdom to avoid Lil' Miss. Neo sneaks out of the house and goes on shopping sprees. She saves him from a street fight, he takes her out to tea, they proceed to rob convenience stores. Their conflicts take place on such a small scale that this conspiracy plot feels ridiculous compared to the rest of the novel, even if it did have better setup. In contrast, their big coffee heist likewise feels ridiculous for how small it is. As a duo (not Neo as an individual, now that she's involved with the Relics and such), they operate in a pretty specific niche of small crimes conducted for villains with large plans. Given the number of times the novel brought up that Roman should start stealing dust, I foolishly thought that the novel would conclude with them stealing dust. Why coffee? Why conspiracies? Why shootouts between two crime bosses on Neo's front lawn? Let them pull off an epic dust heist together, tying it back to Neo's family since her father is already neck-deep in the illegal dust trade, all of it setting up the characters we'll meet in the webseries: street crooks now stealing dust for Cinder. That's their specialty. Why not start that specialty here? 

Instead we get a bunch of hurried plot points that, of course, will have no bearing on the first eight volumes of the webseries. Which brings us to... 

Part Seven: Roman Holiday's Impact on RWBY

Quite obviously, this isn't a novel that exists in a vacuum. Roman Holiday, given that it is presented as an official Rooster Teeth product, is likewise meant to fit into the already established canon. This has been a challenge for Rooster Teeth in the past — important lore winding up in card games, mischaracterization in other novels, worry about how the upcoming game will re-tell events we've already seen — but has Roman Holiday perpetuated that trend?  

Well, yes and no. Which is never a particularly satisfying answer, but in this case there are both aspects that are working and aspects that aren't. Let's tackle the good first. 

Myers includes a lot of details throughout the story that help fill in RWBY's gaps. In this case, it's not information the viewer should have gotten in the webseries in order to have a complete understanding of the situation, but rather things that simply help connect the two works together, adding depth to what we already know. For example, there are those before mentioned times when characters suggest that Roman start stealing dust. “You aren’t the first person to suggest that. Maybe I should look into that...” (216). I do think it's a missed opportunity not to make a dust heist the climax of the story, but that doesn't erase the fact that this still functions as excellent setup for the webseries' premiere. We know RWBY opens on Roman robbing a dust shop. Now we have a better sense of how and why he got into that line of criminal work. 

We likewise get to see the origins of Neo's parasol, not just how she got it (Roman), but also what led her to wanting that kind of weapon in the first place (struggling with the heaviness of swords, getting attached to a parasol she stole, impulsively using it to attack her father, escaping the fire with it and realizing that the ability to float from high places is an asset). Something else I particularly like is that Myers was careful to explain how Neo became so adept at fighting. According to the webseries, there are only three paths you can take: go to combat school like Ruby, live on the streets like Roman, or live outside the Kingdoms like Blake. Neo, as a rich girl kept within high society, doesn't fit any of those models, so Myers introduces an Academy that seeks to train young women for any eventuality, even an attack. Neo learns how to smile, sew, cook, courtesy... while also taking classes in acrobatics, combat, ballet, and fencing. All the girls train with a combat instructor — “I know this isn’t a combat school, but by the time we’re done, you will be as skilled as any Huntress in Remnant” (201) — and, not only that, but she undergoes some pretty intense testing. Balance is taught by “balancing on a tightrope twenty feet in the air, with no net below you. Lady Beat believed in ‘though love’—without the love part” (146). It's a teaching method that makes Ozpin's cliff test seem a little less insane and it highlights one of those fantasy elements of RWBY. When your students possess aura that can save them from a twenty foot fall, it's slightly more reasonable to include that as a challenge. So when Neo starts following Roman around, it doesn't feel off that she can keep up with him. She's been trained, has practiced her semblance alone, and gets additional tutoring from Roman himself. Myers neatly dodges the question of how a non-Huntress and such a privileged girl — unlike Nora or Cinder — became to be as talented as Neo is. Privilege actually bought her that knowledge, which Neo then combines with Roman's street smarts, making her the formidable fighter we know and love.  

However, for every nice tether there is between Roman Holiday and RWBY there's a moment of worldbuilding that messes with our sense of the webseries. Or at least raises some pretty big concerns. 

Given that we just came off of Volume 8, it's no surprise that I read the novel with an eye for hints about how these future events — the destruction of Atlas, evacuees in Vacuo — might impact the rest of Remnant. What Myers gave us... doesn't look good for RWBYJNOR's decision, or the theme Rooster Teeth was going for in Volume 8. Meaning, the show took on a very black and white view by the end of the Atlas arc. Ironwood is an irredeemable bad guy, Atlas is full of racist trash and deserves to sink, the heroes made the best decision possible given the circumstances. Myers' novel introduces some nuance that, sadly, doesn't serve that black and white view well. He describes Mistral as, frankly, suffering the exact same problems as Atlas. “The city elevator didn’t come down this far, to keep more of a buffer between the haves and the have nots... people at the base of the mountain had no business topside” (10-11). Sounds like the sort of divide between Mantle and Atlas, huh? With the exception that one elite is stationed on top of a mountain instead of a floating city. It's a class issue Neo confirms as a kid when she sneaks out to the lower districts, thinking that, "she was never, ever allowed out alone. ‘For your own safety,’ they said” (25). Rich, racist elites who think themselves better than everyone else isn't an Atlas problem, it's a Remnant problem. RWBYJNOR solved nothing by leaving the place behind (and having one citizen hold hands with a faunus) and the fact that the story acts as if things are better now that Atlesians can’t have picnics on a floating city is... a problem. We already knew RWBY struggles with its racism and classism themes, but moments like this continue to add fuel to the wildfire. 

Similarly, the novel spends a not insignificant amount of time referencing Atlas as the technological capital of their world. We knew that already too, but hammering it home now, post-Volume 8, emphasizes the damage the group has done. No Atlas, no technology. Pretty much any technology, given how often it’s said to come directly from Atlas, or cloned from Atlas originals. 

Regarding the evacuation, Myers gives us a moment where Roman outright rejects Vacuo as a place to escape to: “Vacuo was a good place to hide, but the desert was probably one of the few fates worse than Lil’ Miss. And while there was a thriving criminal element, it wouldn’t be particularly welcoming to a newcomer. There was no future for Roman there” (88). So the desert is a fate worse than a crime boss and Vacuans are so unwelcoming one individual won't risk going there... and now our heroes have dumped an undetermined number of evacuees in that desert, heading towards a Kingdom that doesn't want them. Obviously Myers needs to come up with a reason for why Roman ends up in Vale where Neo is, but doing it this way just highlights so many of Volume 8's problems. Specifically, that the group made such a world-altering decision when it arguably was no longer necessary and, more importantly, did so without once considering the consequences that seem obvious to everyone else in Remnant. Vacuo is the last place anyone wants to escape to... so why was that the heroes' first choice? "Because the show hasn't gone there yet" isn't an answer. 

There are a couple smaller problems throughout — muddying the waters between semblances and magic again; emphasizing how many people unlock their semblances as kid and rely on their aura to get by, bringing up the question (again) of how Jaune was so ignorant — but I just want to cover two more issues here. 

The first is what I mentioned above about the one grimm the novel has. Suffice to say, the grimm ignores the three fighters in front of it (Roman and the twins) and runs off because... well...

“Grimm are drawn by emotion. You never controlled it. It killed your enemies because most people you drop in here are going to be afraid. They won’t be able to fight back. But as far as I can tell, these girls don’t feel anything. And I’m not afraid to die... Anger can be a more powerful emotion than fear” (54-5).”

Let's tally up the problems with this speech: 

The idea that Roman experiences no fear despite being cornered by a massive grimm, in a tiny room, in enemy territory 

The idea that an ability to fight back increases the chance of the grimm running off to pick other targets (if that were the case, the group would never finish any fights) 

Claiming that they're also left alone because the twins "don't feel anything" which is obviously ridiculous  

Reframing Roman's lack of fear into, specifically, not fearing death. Again, a grimm doesn't care whether you fear death or no

Saying that the anger of the boss all the way up in his office is a stronger draw than the three people currently attacking the grimm

It's just a lot of nonsense, bending one of RWBY's most basic rules to give Roman a cool-sounding speech. Cool provided you ignore what the speech is actually implying, that is. Why bother with this? Just let the grimm break down the door halfway through the fight, moving the fight into a new space with new people causes chaos, Roman either escapes then, or he kills the grimm first and escapes afterwards. Better, in my opinion, to give the story a single grimm kill than introduce a bunch of philosophical complications about how much these characters definitely don't feel fear and one man's anger is suddenly a grimm magnet. It's just a strange scene and, looking back, the only scene where I really went, "What?" As evidenced by this entire review, I have problems with certain aspects of the novel, but none actively made me question what in the world Myers was trying to accomplish. This moment is the exception. 

Finally, I'd like to briefly mention the ways in which Roman Holiday messes with our understanding of the huntsmen profession. Again, this is nothing new. From Blake and Yang shrugging off Adam's death, to Weiss asking if she can arrest her father, the true purpose of the job seems vague, especially when you toss in what they're legally allowed to get away with. At first, the novel seems to support the idea that huntsmen are responsible for defending the people from both grimm and criminals, especially in the cities where walls do most of the work of keeping grimm out. Roman worries that huntsmen will show up to put a stop to his robbery, there's a bounty for him “posted on all the Huntsmen job boards," and then, later, two huntsmen do show up to his bank heist and try to stop him — that coincidental timing (176). "It’s kind of refreshing to fight a bad guy instead of a Grimm for a change," says one, implying that their primary focus will always be grimm, but they're also not going to ignore criminal activity. I get that. I buy that. It fits with what else we've learned about the job from the webseries: students attend school specifically to learn how to fight grimm, but they're capable — and expected — to use those skills for the people's benefit, no matter what form that comes in. Hence, jobs like Jaune acting as a crossing guard. It works.

....Aaaand then Myers blows that understanding right out of the water. 

“[The huntsmen are] being fined for destruction of public property and reckless endangerment. This isn’t the first time they’ve been reprimanded for using excessive force and gross misconduct. The Vale Huntsmen Guild reportedly is considering suspending their licenses (118).” 

So wait, never mind, apparently huntsmen aren't supposed to stop bank robberies that they walk in on. Or at least, they're not supposed to stop them using "excessive force" and resulting in the "destruction of public property." Problem is, there's no way to battle another fighter of Roman's skill without doing property damage and, potentially, putting civilians in danger. The strength of Yang's punch blows small craters into the floor. Weiss uses dust that causes minor explosions. Ruby swings her scythe in such large arcs she could easily hit someone if she's not paying attention. Within the context of RWBY's powers, the huntsmen here didn't use "excessive force" because aura, semblances, dust, and insane weaponry are all staples of combat. So... what are they meant to do instead? Find out if Roman is just a normal dude and, if he's not, back out like, "Oh sorry. We can't fight someone our equal because that would require, you know, fighting. We'll wait for the police to capture you. They'll have a much better time without training, semblances, or any other combat resources, I'm sure..." 

This single excerpt sends us right back into the "Huh?" territory. What are a huntsmen's responsibilities then? What are they legally allowed to do? And why are these expectations so inconsistent across the franchise? I know the answer here is that the group was pardoned by Ironwood, but it still seems absurd that we watched them steal military property, attack an official, cause a major grimm attack, and actively hide from the authorities... and all that's presented as fine. But trying to stop the guy currently robbing a bank? Well, that’s a suspendable offense. And we know this was taken seriously because Roman runs into one of the huntsmen later, a Roch Szalt, and we learn that his license wasn't just suspended, he lost it entirely. These side characters are out of their livelihood for defending the people while RWBYJNOR gained licenses for endangering them. There's something fundamentally wrong with your world building when your protagonists primarily get by on such massive inconsistencies. 

Part Eight: The Last Section, I Swear

This is another aspect of the novel that I really hesitated over including, just because I do think there's a line between legit criticism and unkind nit-picking. In the end though, enough of a trend emerged that I thought I'd toss it out, especially since I've recently been pondering the question, "How does RWBY treat its women?" The answer should be obvious, right? This is a show about four girls fighting evil! Yet as the webseries continues, fans are noticing more and more divergences from that initial premise. Like creating a world where women are almost never in the primary positions of power. Like giving Jaune and Oscar the active, plot-forwarding scenes that should belong to Ruby and her team. Like that frat boy mentality I mentioned earlier on. The purpose here isn't to analyze that aspect of the webseries, I simply wanted to lay out where my thoughts were while reading Roman Holiday. 

The disclaimer? Neo is great. The strange intersection between her identity and her semblance aside, I think she's entertaining, well-rounded, and the fact that she is given not just half the book's chapters, but that focus mentioned in Part One, resulted in a well-developed character. However, outside of Neo the women are frustratingly built around the same thing: sex appeal. Honey Wine is the club singer whose semblance lowers customers' inhabitations, acting like a Remnant version of a siren. The twins — despite those pedophilia rumors about Roman proving unfounded — are the butt of girlfriend/"You're cute" jokes, drawing attention to their developing looks more than their combat skills, strategies, etc. Both Lady Beat and Carmel, Neo's mom, possess that older woman charm expected of high society ladies. They're dangerous because they can acquire information and they acquire that information by looking the part: pretty smiles, fine clothes, figures that catch the eye. Even Lil' Miss, an established character with a lot of power at her fingertips, isn't exempt from this. When Roman first meets her he observes that fashion is clearly a part of her strategic mind, “a plunging neckline and purple corset distracted Roman even more” (19). Distracted, meaning, that Lil' Miss deliberately makes herself look hot so all the straight guys will lose their heads. 

It's a bit more heavy-handed than just some over-used archetypes though, particularly when it comes to making Roman the guy that every girl wants — even when that's just him assuming they want him. Lil' Miss, again, suffers that treatment. “'Is she flirting?' he suddenly wondered. He hadn’t ever considered that she might like him, but if that was the case, he could use that to—” (57). In a similar situation played straight Chameleon, Roman's peer, is introduced with the statement that “She considered him a friend, and plainly wanted more than that" so Roman "continued to string her along” (45). It's that Ilia/Blake dynamic, just with added cruelty and a gender setup that carries completely different implications. Even the minor characters aren't safe from Roman's charms. Lisa Lavender — you know, Remnant's reporter? — receives flowers from Roman after she labels his robbery “one of the most brazen displays of lawlessness” she's ever seen (117). It's not presented as the villain being creepy though. When Roman contacts Lisa directly, we're given a verbal joke about her maybe interest. She loves... the ratings he brings in. Just the ratings. Of course. 

It's worth noting that Chameleon isn't just reduced to a silly crush whose love allows Roman to escape, she's also the character who "has" to be naked in order to make the most of her semblance. Despite writing in an Atlas cape that blends into various backgrounds, Myers still emphasizes the absolute necessity of this woman fighting naked: 

“She didn’t wear much clothing these days, both because it thwarted her natural camouflaging abilities, and because when she chose to show herself, it could be quite distracting... she stripped for added stealth—it wouldn’t be the first time” (81, 85). 

It's a writing choice that I personally despise. And make no mistake, it is a choice. In a world with magical abilities and futuristic tech, there's no reason to make the presumably young woman — we're never given an age, but Chameleon is written to be particularly naïve — getting naked in front of others, especially a man that is stringing her along. Clothes only "thwart" a magical ability when the author says it does. Why can't semblances make outfits camouflage too? Because then there wouldn't be an excuse for the hot women to strip. 

Particularly for more important characters like Lil' Miss or Lady Beat, these aspects are not the sum total of their characters... but there's enough there to be wince-worthy if you're already sick of such trends; already keeping an eye out for what RWBY writes in regards to gender. I think a good way to summarize Roman Holiday's idea of feminism is when Neo is staking out a coffee shop and Roman asks her to bring him a coffee when she comes back. She returns with an empty cup reading, "Get your own coffee." It's clearly meant to be this empowering moment — how dare the man ask for food like she's some servant! — except it's ruined by the context of the situation. Namely, that Neo is already at a coffee shop. And Roman isn't rude about asking for one. And they've already traded presents in the form of a crazy expensive parasol for her and a new hat for him. Asking your crime partner, who just happens to be a women, to pick up a coffee on her way home when it’s clearly not a hassle, is not the outdated insult Myers seems to think it is. And that's what a lot of these choices are: details that don't break the novel by any means, but come across as out of touch none-the-less. 

Part Nine: The End (Okay, This is the Final Section) 

The novel concludes with Roman and Neo flying off together, avoiding the authorities, nothing they have to do except "set the world on fire" (208). It's a rather bittersweet ending given Neo's certainty that no one will ever catch them because we know, eventually, Roman will die and Neo will be left alone. I quite like ending things on that optimistic note, both because it fits their current mindsets and because it adds that extra, emotional punch for the reader. Their story isn't done... but it will be soon. 

And thus ends my review as well! Review? Analysis? Little mix of both, I suppose. Hardly the most succinct thing I've ever written, but what did anyone expect. Final thoughts? I still liked the novel. Despite everything above — despite re-wading through eight major problems I had with the text, ranging from minor preferences to arguably massive mistakes — my overall takeaway remains, "I'm glad I read it." It's been a long time since I actively enjoyed a RWBY story; where my entertainment and appreciation of the writing outweighed the problems I had with it. I know I'm far from the only one currently dissatisfied with the canon, so if you're looking to re-ignite some of that old, RWBY spark? Give Roman Holiday a try. 

And, of course, thank you for reading! 💜