#people have been enjoying villains and flawed characters and characters with different moral compasses in general for as long as fiction ha

[straycalamities]

the fixation of fandom these days on there always being a Black and a White. A Right and a Wrong. A Villain and a Victim. is soooo fucking tragic and frankly REALLY DAMN ANNOYING

especially in stuff where like..if THAT'S your priority? you've missed the entire damn point. and yet it always is. so loudly.

look beyond your blorbo. your kintype. your CC. your f/o. look beyond your otp. look beyond your found family dynamic and actually absorb what's going on with the other characters. i'm begging.

honestly do a study on the characters you hate most or care about the least. take a half an hour to put yourself in their shoes

no this isn't an anti-shipping, anti-kinning, anti-selfship, or anti-blorboing post, because i don't think those are the things that inherently ruin characters or tags or whatever other ppl think. but if you do do that, it'll make it even better if you look at a larger scope beyond that as well I promise

[kustas]

Sorry for the incoming long rant.

I just rediscovered your blog, and I always enjoyed your thoughts on WHA and wanted to rant a little bit. I found a post of yours talking about how WHA is getting less nuanced and I feel the same way. I feel like in an effort to make every character feel like a person, the manga treats everyone’s issues as if they’re on the same level. I’m not sure if that entirely makes sense, but it feels like the manga is trying to make you sympathize with everyone to some extent, even though that doesn’t really work. For example, there is a chapter that pissed me off so much that I had to put the manga on pause. It’s the chapter where Coco shows off a spell that can clean water, and the townspeople are uninterested because they don’t need it. And the moral of the chapter is that Coco should make her spell for everyone. No. No no no. These people need to learn some damn compassion and realize that they need to help end what suffering that they are able to. The moral of the chapter should’ve been that these people need to stop thinking of only themselves. Everything else was aimed at them, so Coco’s spell didn’t need to be for them. It shouldn’t have been for them. There is also the situation with the knights. You went into this already but who gives a shit if they are offended by a grieving husband taking out his anger in them when they are a part of the system that caused his grief. The manga wants you to sympathize with everyone, and while I don’t think these people should be one dimensional their issues should not be treated on the same level as others. Anyway, sorry for the weird long rant, it’s just everyone treats this manga like it is The Most Flawlessly Progressive Manga Ever and your one of the few I’ve found who acknowledges is flaws without devaluing its strengths

Thank you for your ask! I agree with what you're saying and think you worded it very well. It's a bit of a shame it's so rare to find people openly critiquing the series in the community, while it's nothing serious (and minimized by being a bit of a hermit, lol) I've seen some animosity for doing it, I assume because many assume critiquing art means you don't like it or are opposed to what it's trying to do! Which isn't true. Granted Witch Hat Atelier contains many an obvious fantasy metaphor for real life social issues it should be under more scrutiny than normal if you ask me, because those are serious topics that affect people's real lives. I do have faith in the author's serious handling of touchy topics, but in the execution there are things I'd do differently for sure...

The manga wants you to sympathize with everyone, and while I don’t think these people should be one dimensional their issues should not be treated on the same level as others.

WHA has in its writing strong expectations from the reader regarding how you think of its cast I find hard to read through a lot - the latest arc in particular, comparatively, has much of its character based moments revolve around if they're good or bad in a way that implies it'll change how you think of a character and it disturbs me. Qifrey and Sasaran are two early examples of characters that do *not* play into that - Qifrey's beginning arcs simultaneously show him as a shady manipulator and genuinely good teacher who betters the life of his students, and it participates so much to the dramatic tension. Sasaran is a villain of the week who while shown to be a huge cunt, has a backstory that implies his original motives were not nefarious ones, and his life was not easy.

Compare this to a character like Dean who, as much as I'm a fan of his concept, falls rather flat because he's, depending on the chapter, pushed as good/bad to the reader, regarding his moral alignment. Characters who are just meant to be despicable don't have the same level of attention placed to their writing which is a similar issue. It feels insecure, like if the story was saying: we have those important characters, their role is to bring up difficult situations, please don't hate them, like them, see, they're nice too! And giving them chosen positive traits. People don't work like that and it feels cheap. Fandom's obsession with villains should show well a character being despicable doesn't make them unlikeable, and I'd like WHA's characters to be less "good"/"likeable" myself to make them a bit more human. This would detonate a fandom nuke given I still regularly see passionate debates about how mean and terrible characters like Agott or Custas are but hey

As for priorities in the depicted suffering of characters in universe - yeah, it's true some scenes feel a bit off in that department...the water cleaning scene you mention did not rub me the wrong way too hard, because it's centered around Coco, who's our main character, the story bending to give her a central role makes sense, and her unique position in witch society and how it relates to helping others are, with the responsibilities of witches, very important to the story. The apprentice backstories are an earlier example I had trouble taking too seriously because while they're all terrible, tiny silly Riche and her brother's experience with physical child abuse felt drawn with the same intensity as Agott being pushed to mental disarray by her rich fancy perfectionist family. It's all hard to complain about and might sting less if the writing was a bit less dramatic and preachy, but that might just be a me issue, I've seen many fans praise WHA's writing wholeheartedly, so...

What I am hoping is that the latest arc will conclude and lead to the shorter previous structure and we'll get individual attention brought to character stories, one after the other, instead of the all at once formula going on right now... We'll see!

[kingdarkstalker]

hello, I'm glad to have seen this since I don't really participate in online fandoms of media I enjoy, so sometimes I just form one opinion about a thing and then it never gets challenged. I read the first arc in elementary school, I'm a teenager now, and I guess I just want to know if, in your opinion, it would be weird or like, idk, bad, to reread the books I own. I mean, it's been a comfort series for so long. and I've been super oblivious to the fact that I somehow interpreted everything way differently than it was written. like how I thought the dragonets dealing with their abuse differently was just showing different coping things, and didn't even notice that sunny was rewarded for her reaction and everyone else wasn't. I thought Coral was meant to be a villain, Webs was meant to be pathetic and an enabling bystander, Darkstalker was meant to be morally gray, and every single character was meant to be flawed and would continue to change and grow off screen after the books. it seems silly or maybe cognitive dissonance for me to have just somehow convinced myself that like, there was an implication that all of the "solutions" to the conflict were not perfect and required continuous work to keep slowly improving over time. like it's so obvious now that the things I imagined happening off screen were headcanons, yet somehow I conflated them with the canon and convinced myself that glory broke up with deathbringer, sunny finally realized that kestrel dune and webs didn't have some sort of reason to abuse them and some people are terrible and not worth her compassion, everyone stopped being mean to stonemover, and everyone dismantled the monarchies, and the hivewings, even though they weren't killed (except for wasp), were held accountable and forced to confront the fact that they actively benefited from the societal oppression of silkwings and genocide of leaf wings and did nothing about it. also I really thought that clearsight taught pantalans her language but also learned their language and both sides exchanged knowledge of cultures. so now that I've finally realized that the canon is nothing like how I interpreted it, I don't know how to feel about the concept of rereading them or finding comfort in them. I mean I know I can like something and critique it but this is more than plot holes and mistakes. it's racist propaganda and I can't believe I never noticed. it's weird because I feel like I never want to read them again, but also like I want to reread them more with sticky notes and highlighters and change it to be what I want it to be. I also don't know how I'm going to interact with my friends that are fans of wof now... I'm scared of confrontation but I definitely feel like I need to tell them about it.

there is one thing that I disagree with you about. to me it seems like you are saying that people need to treat darkstalker with more nuance rather than just big bad guy, which, yes, I honestly didn't realize some people even thought he was 100% bad? but then you say that clearsight was awful and stuff, but she was also a child, with what I interpret as an anxiety disorder. and her paranoia about darkstalker becoming a murderer hurt him, but she wasn't...choosing to be paranoid, right? i see people on here wishing her death and I just don't see how that's different from people wishing darkstalker to be turned into peacemaker. and lots of people hate on indigo but she was also just very paranoid and distrusting of anyone (especially animi, except fathom) because of her and fathom's PTSD. like, is that not also valid? like can't they all be morally gray and nuanced? idk if I misinterpreted what you and other askers were saying though. also I acknowledge that I might not even have that opinion if I didn't relate to clearsight for a lot of the legends book.

overall I'm just so baffled at how i managed to do the mental gymnastics to believe that so many problematic things just... didn't happen? or were retconned off screen?? like how did my brain even do that? it's like I was reading different books entirely.

howdy, happy to have been able to provide a different perspective!

no, not at all. despite the problems with it, reading wings of fire does not make you a terrible person, nor does enjoying the story or the characters that tui created. i dont think WOF is necessarily as harmful as it could be, but what concerns me about new readers is simply that they may not read past tui's very surface level (and often incorrect) commentary about things like abuse and bigotry. but that doesnt mean you cant still enjoy the world imagined and the potential it holds. reading things with mistakes--especially re-reading them--can help you recognize what patterns to look for while reading and/or avoid while writing, etc

like you said though, re-reading it with the awareness of tui's misguided or sometimes even malicious messages is unpleasant. especially thinking about the great potential of it all. if you feel like you have the energy, i do encourage going back and making notes on what you'd change! you've already reflected on the problems very carefully, everything you summarized was very similar to how i felt on first realization

i truly hope your friends are understanding and willing to take a second look at WOF from a critical lens. it always feels horrible having a comfort media sort of dissolve so you can see its ugly bones (trust me ive gone through it too), but whats important is what you learn from that media and, if necessary, separate yourself from it, while taking the things that were comforting and making them your own

re: clearsight, i definitely agree with your points, and admittedly i have been bias in my earlier posts about her. she definitely was struggling with overwhelming anxiety, and any young teen who can see every future is going to have a different way of coping about it. clearsight isnt awful for being paranoid or trying to control things her own way (turning herself into a religion is another thing), she's an awful character because her flaws are rewarded instead of properly explored. i feel like moonwatcher was a better example of a character struggling with that kind of mental state and how it affects their loved ones

cause like, with clearsight, the problem i have isnt even the actions she took that were harmful as a child. darkstalker did plenty of that himself, they both together were an opportunity of how the same kind of mental instability is delt with. problem is, clearsight is portrayed by tui sutherland as Correct The Entire Time. like, she was right to be paranoid. she was right to think darkstalker was evil. she was right to have zero faith in him, because she was right that it was inevitable. this could have been a very self-fulfilling prophecy type of arc where both characters were destructive to each other, but clearsight is literally rewarded for her lifelong anxiety by essentially becoming a prophetic diety, and getting an exotic husband to have her dream kids with. this was the way tui sutherland wrote clearsight on purpose--to be a supposed underdog, to be the "good" mentally ill child (shes certainly not an abuse survivor like darkstalker, she has a healthy home life and support system) and she never acts out in the way darkstalker does, she in fact is portrayed as an underdog-turned-goddess. which would make for a great villain, but tui seems to write clearsight as a relatable and admirable figure, while reserving her narrative punishment for the problem children like darkstalker

TL;DR i dont think clearsight herself was awful as a child, just that she made awful decisions and is written awfully with an awful message lol

indigo i have less to say about because you're right, shes essentially just extremely traumatized for all the right reasons. i do think that the way tui justifies her fear and hatred towards animus magic (and therefore, an intrinsic part of who fathom is) as an ableist "theres only a matter of time before they snap" kind of implication that contributes to tui's weird "mentally unstable people are dangerous and will kill you" take. even if turtle later disproves this, indigo never grows past "all animus are evil and fathom must never do magic ever or hell be a monster" which i guess just doesnt feel fair to fathom

try not to feel so down on yourself though for not immediately recognizing all these problems, especially if you're young. we're all constantly learning new things, and not being aware of something doesnt mean you dont care about it. its never too late to go back and re-evaluate anything that you consume or create, with the new things that you've come to learn since then!

[theggning]

I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on Curie, if you have any.

Sure thing! Apologies in advance if I get any of this wrong, I don't personally hang out much with Curie so I had to do a bit of brushing up on her.

Curie's key role in the meta is another facet of the theme of "what makes a person a person." She single-handedly displays the differences between robots and synths and through her we get a lot of what we know about the nature of synths and how it feels for her to become one.

But before Curie becomes a synth, she's another example of a rather unique robot. She starts off quite sophisticated and unusually intelligent-- though unlike Codsworth, her unique personality and knowledge were programmed into her, not developed over time. The Vault 81 scientists loaded into her all of the great academic works they had on hand (she lists Kant, Einstein, Born, Darwin, Curie, Faraday, Turing, and Braun) along with her initial capabilities as a medic and a doctor. Also unlike Codsworth, she hasn't become accustomed to the wasteland, nor traumatized by it-- nor does she even have the capability. Curie has spent the past 210 years trapped in the secret section of Vault 81, and since the deaths of the scientists, she has been completely isolated from human contact. Thus, she is incredibly booksmart, while being... quite unprepared for the horrors that greet her in the wasteland outside.

My favorite description I've ever seen of Curie is "a doctor coming to the slow, horrified realization that nobody washes their hands." She has a picture of the world in her mind that's dictated by science, math, logic, reason, and ethics-- and as a still, quite basic robot, she's baffled when reality doesn't match up to this. Just like Sole, she emerges in a world that resembles what she knows and yet is completely strange and oftentimes very hostile-- she's just doing this with the capabilities of a robot reconciling observations against what was literally programmed into her.

I think there's a fandom tendency to infantilize Curie to some degree, or to play up her naivety to the point of farce. But Curie isn't clueless, or stupid. In addition to her scientific knowledge, she has a very firm set of morals and ethics and will speak up or push back if she feels the Sole Survivor is behaving poorly. She is one of the "good" companions who approves of kind acts, and she is a pacifist, if she can help it. She's philanthropic, but also more scientifically-minded than the other "good" companions-- notably, her approvals all lean in favor of helping scientists and supporting the advancement of knowledge. She supports the Minutemen and the Railroad-- but also the Brotherhood of Steel, since their knowledge and preservation of technology strike her as more important than their feelings on synths. She is pro-synth and disapproves of the enslavement or mistreatment of synths, but when the Institute is destroyed, she chiefly expresses sorrow for how much knowledge was lost. She disapproves of Dr. Chambers' cruelty, but dislikes it if you kill her-- cutting short any contributions to science she could have made. Curie is kind, but she's also ambitious, logical, and values "big picture" scientific advancement.

Really, if there was any companion besides X6-88 who could fit an Institute mindset, it's Curie. She has more compassion for people than anyone in the Institute does, but it's interesting to compare her logical, pragmatic beliefs to the faction that has taken them and twisted them to evil purposes. (Am I saying that Curie would make a terrifying villain if she were to slip too far down that road of logic and pragmatism? Maybe I am...)

This pragmatism extends to her desires to become a synth. Curie comes up with the idea mainly because she feels her scientific ambitions cannot be reached unless she feels inspiration, which she's not capable of as a robot. She insists that her new body will allow her to do good for humanity, and to her, this justifies any ethical problems around transferring her into the braindead G5-19 (Curie doesn't understand Glory's hesitation to let her friend's body be used in this way-- because as a robot, she's literally incapable of empathizing with her.) It's only after Curie opens her eyes in her new body that we understand what a stark difference it is, and how many new and frightening things she's feeling for the first time-- emotions, wayward thoughts, urges to breathe and eat and sleep-- hell, fear is a new concept for her. Her robotic brain worked in numbers and data and programming, and all of a sudden she's capable of all these other things that could never be replicated by data. Curie's transition clearly illustrates the difference between a robotic brain and a synth brain- a human brain, for all intents and purposes.

(I've always thought it takes a special kind of dingus to travel with and befriend and even romance Curie and yet still proclaim that synths are "just machines." You'll see PLENTY of them, but boy oh boy, that's quite a load of cognitive dissonance going on there. Or creep, depending on the argument.)

Which leads me to one of the hot-button topics when it comes to Curie: the romance. While Curie's romance does fall under the umbrella of the "Born Sexy Yesterday" trope, I think this aspect of it is a bit overblown. Like I said, there's a real tendency in fandom to infantilize Curie, or make her seem more clueless pwecious uwu cinnamon roll than she really is. But the difference between Curie and most of your standard issue Born Sexy Yesterday waifs is that Curie isn't helpless, nor childlike, nor incapable of standing up for herself. She's both extremely intelligent and fully confident in her morals and beliefs. She asks for the Sole Survivor's support with her emotional transition because she already trusts them as her friend, not because she has no one else or can't handle it on her own. From early on in her affinity convos, Curie expresses attraction to the Sole Survivor, and approaches learning about these new feelings with the same enthusiasm and curiosity that she does everything else. It's her attraction, not begun by the Sole Survivor manipulating her or tricking her into it. I feel like a lot of surface-level descriptions of the romance disregard Curie's agency, as though she's a bubble-headed innocent who's completely vulnerable and clueless about the mere prospects of attraction, romance, or sex.

Now, that said... did Curie have to transfer into the body of a conventionally attractive woman for her plot to work? No. Does her romance scratch the itch for people who like Born Sexy Yesterday? Yeah, probably. Is she designed to be Prime Waifu Material*? Undoubtedly. Is it my cup of tea? Nah. But different strokes for different folks**. I don't think Curie's romance is inherently bad or anyone should feel bad for enjoying it, or her as a character. She's extremely intelligent, cute, and wholesome, and if that's your type, then embrace her!

* Like oh my god, this is video games, Curie's entire character and romance could have been done so much worse.

** And seriously, I'm not about to judge someone for falling in love with the cute waifu-bait romance when I'm over here lusting over Strong Flawed Sad Tragic Himbo Whom I Can Save With My Love.

It ain't like they didn't cater to my tastes, too.

[mindibindi]

Beyond disappointed in Ted Lasso. What were they thinking?!

The writing is a complete betrayal and insult to Rebecca’s character and Hannah’s skills as they’re being seriously underused. It’s also insulting Sam’s character.

Hoping someone pulls Rebecca’s head out of her ass tbh. Sam shouldn’t be getting caught in the crossfire of her looking for romance. I know he showed up at her doorstep but she still should’ve turned him away, and not even messaged him in the first place.

Hey, I'm with you, Anon, though we do seem to be in the minority. Sam is definitely not blameless here, he is also in the wrong. But if one of them is more in the wrong, it is Rebecca. I can't speak to whether her head has left her arse as yet because I have quit watching (at least for now). I hear she called it off with Sam in the most recent ep, though not because of any major crisis of conscience or because anyone in her inner circle expressed any reasonable reservations in response to her bad behaviour. And to be honest, I'm not sure we should need to hope and pray that Rebecca's precocious god-daughter, her slimy ex-husband, or the brutal British press will act as a moral compass on this ill-advised relationship. Both Rupert and the press have been set up to some extent as the villains of the piece. And a 14 year old should never have to school her elders on what is and isn't acceptable. Nora's needs have already been neglected by Rebecca for far too long.

If a moral position is to be taken on this, it needs to be taken by the show (because stance matters) and/or by its characters. But the show has for the most part depicted this relationship as ill-advised but ultimately hot, sweet, funny and romantic. As for the characters themselves, Sam has shown at least once that he has some moral backbone but seems to be adorably clueless when it comes to fucking his boss who keeps trying to set boundaries with him. Meanwhile, Rebecca's whole arc in s1 was about learning not to misuse her power for her own selfish ends. In season one, she misused her power within the club in order to exact revenge. In season 2, we have seen her misuse her sexual power, though I still cannot see to what end. I'm a bit at a loss as to what exactly she gets out of this 'relationship' but then I'm a grown woman so I have absolutely no interest in sleeping with a Harry Potter enthusiast barely out of his teens. I couldn't think of anything less sexy and more ick. I was certainly hoping for better character development for her this season.

As to what the writers were thinking, obviously I was not in the writer's room, but I would guess that they were thinking that any drama is good drama, people are stupid and fan devotion will trump any meaningful critique. In other words, they were thinking exactly how every other television writer thinks, despite the fact that this show posited itself as 'not like other TV shows'. This, to me, is where the blame really lies. Not with the characters or with the actors who are doing their best to sell this ludicrous turn of events. It must be noted, however, that both actors were completely blindsided by this relationship that had supposedly been so cleverly foreshadowed. Newsflash: if the people actually living these stories did not see this coming then you haven't foreshadowed shit. Sure, there were a handful of people that paired Rebecca with Sam but this does not constitute proof either. Fans have free-range to imagine and re-imagine characters. In some cases this may extend to imagining relationships between characters who have barely, if ever, interacted. There may be little to no evidence that these characters have even clocked each other's existence and some fans will still ship it. The existence of a handful of shippers does not legitimise such a problematic and divisive plotline making it onscreen.

But wait!, you might argue, this may not be a case of a popular show seeing just how far they can stretch fan devotion. This may not be a case of fan service to a handful of shippers. After all, the creators mapped out the entire three-season arc of Ted Lasso before they even pitched it to Apple. This was their brilliant plan all along! To which I would say: then maybe they should've rethought their second act based on people's strong reactions to their first. Ted Lasso was touted as the show we all needed in 2020. The writers and creators have all marveled at the chord it struck considering it was conceived prior to the pandemic and all the chaos it wrought. And while there is something to be said for having/sticking to a creative vision, there is also something to be said for being flexible and responsive to your audience and the cultural zeitgeist with which you're engaged. Season 1 of Ted Lasso told its story so gently, without creating distrust, division or unnecessary anxiety. It did not treat its audience like a gaggle of stupid lemmings to be led over a succession of narrative cliffs. THIS is what I mean when I say the show has broken with its brand. And look, this whole dark forest thing would be okay if the narrative arc was as well-crafted as s1. Season 1 gave us meaning, cohesion, comfort, sense in a senseless time. It was an almost perfectly crafted season of television. And I kept the faith for 6 episodes, despite the first half of s2 being pretty damn wobbly. But the follow-up to this stellar debut has been less than extraordinary so yeah, perhaps they should've thought a little harder about what made s1 so special before throwing it all out the window.

But wait!, I hear the faithful say, you don't know how things will pan out yet! Wait until the season is over and everything will make sense! But -- wearily and once again, I say -- we should not need to wait until the end of the season to understand what the hell is happening. By this point (over halfway through the season and show) we should have a v clear idea of the show's themes and the characters' arcs. And tbf, from what I can tell there are some fab things happening in other aspects of the show that I wish I could watch and enjoy. But my biggest fear at this point is that they are going to use Sam to solve Rebecca's childlessness. That, like Rupert (because the parallel cannot be avoided), she will become pregnant with a young fling and the show's attitude to this relationship will ultimately be: oh well, it was a bad idea and didn't work out for them but it was all for the best in the end cos who can be mad about a cute lil baaaayyybbbeeee??!! If they do go down this path then I will definitely be abstaining from the rest of the show. I will simply recall my repeated viewings of s1 with fondness tinged with regret at just how badly they fucked up a good thing.

Ultimately, Anon, I think this may be a case of there simply not being a diverse enough perspective in the writer's room. I am not saying that every single woman or every single person of colour will necessarily object to this relationship. I am simply saying that women and people of colour will be more sensitive to the issues of gender and race that are relevant here but that have not been fully or sensitively acknowledged in the writing of this plotline. Neither am I saying that Rebecca is the first woman to sleep with a man much (much, much, MUCH) younger than herself or indulge in an ill-advised relationship. But the comparison with Rupert both works here and doesn't because Rebecca is not being written like a white woman, she is being written like a white man. Realistically, only a white man can engage in this kind of hugely imbalanced relationship seemingly without any major moral qualms or societal ramifications. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this kind of relationship is reserved for all the Bills and Joes and Brendans and Jasons out there -- not for the Rebeccas and definitely not for the Sams. We are way beyond the point in feminism where we believe that liberation is simply the right for a white woman to behave as badly as a white man. The truth is that whatever wealth, power and privilege Rebecca has, the rules are different for men and women. She will not be treated the same as Rupert if and when this affair is uncovered. She will be treated far more savagely than Rupert ever was and Sam will be treated far more savagely than Bex was. This is not an argument for the equal treatment of these two relationships. It is an argument against how the relationship between Rebecca and Sam has been envisaged, i.e. through the wrong perspective. In writing from a 'neutral' white male pov, the show has invisiblised all the many issues activated by this storyline and revealed a blindspot that was always there.

As much as I loved and still love season 1 of this show, it has definite blindspots when it comes to representations of race and gender. There are at least two moments in s1 that stand out for me as being so obviously written by a man. Not necessarily because of what they do but because of what they don't do: what is missed, absent, unacknowledged. I was willing to overlook such minor failings in a debut season for many reasons. But s2 seems to have exacerbated these minor flaws rather than correcting them. And here I can't help thinking of Tina Fey speaking of the diversification of the writer's room at SNL during her tenure as co-headwriter. This notoriously male-dominated environment only began to shift and produce better work when a greater diversity of minds, voices and persepectives was allowed in the room. In this richer environment, she notes, different jokes played differently. Different sketches made it to air. Different perspectives were represented and different performers were celebrated. I can't help wondering if this plotline would have made it to air if there had been a female writer, a writer of colour or both further up the chain of command to challenge the ideas of the straight white dudes in charge.

One of the reasons I didn't think Ted Lasso was for me was that it centred a straight, white, cis-het, able-bodied man who rose to a position he didn't earn. That is just not a pov I would normally choose for myself, especially now that there is such a rich array of alternative perspectives through which to view the world. But I think the show won a lot of females fans with its first season largely due to its portrayal of Rebecca. She is the first person we meet. She is arguably the protagonist of s1. And while she would have been figured as a villain in previous pieces, the show never took that stance with her (because again, stance matters). Other elements like the depiction of female friendships, all centred around Rebecca, made this show female-friendly viewing. But imo, the major reason this show won over female fans (this one, at least) is because, in this post-MeToo, post-TimesUp era, it stood up and said: domestic violence is not okay, we stand with women and all victims of abuse, we will defend you, we know words can hurt, we know it can happen to anyone, we know all about toxic masculinity, we do not take this lightly and we will support you in your healing. Needless to say, this is how women hope men will act when they speak of their most difficult experiences but it is not how they always do.

The shift away from Rebecca this season has however meant that the white male experience is more centred than it was in s1. Rebecca's journey to recovery, health and happiness has been trivialised and sidelined, reduced to a highly questionable sexcapade. Meanwhile, we get overwrought manpain at every turn. We get Beard wandering around London (no, I haven't seen it and no, I don't need to. We've all been raised on white dudes thinking they're genuises when they have a figurative wank all over our screens). We get NO queer represention at all. And the only other female characters on screen are in care/service roles to men. The father/son, mentoring and toxic masculinity themes are all still there but they're no longer balanced out by ANY other competing perspective. One of the reasons I was okay with Ted failing upwards in s1 was that he used his power and privilege to lift up others. He was the one in service. He used his enormous privilege for good, as anyone with such privilege must. (Admittedly, it could be argued that this is just another version of a white savior narrative).

My point here is that I'm not sure that peeking behind the mask at the sad clown is as revolutionary as some might believe. We love it because it's familiar. But this is a narrative with a long and problematic history. Do I believe in tearing down toxic masculinity in all its forms? You bet. Do I believe that patriarchy traumatises men as well as women and every other minority in existence? I mean...nowhere near as much, but absolutely. Do I believe in men expressing their feelings and going to therapy? Wholeheartedly. But I am also aware that 100 or so years ago, we were in a very similar place with our narratives. Everyone is looking for a recapitulation of modernism and frankly, this might be an indicator of just that. Whenever women and people of colour have demanded rights and recognition, there has always been a resurgence of tales about just how frickin' hard it is to be a white man. Minority genders and non-white people have never in western history been as visible or vocal as they are now. So forgive me (or don't, I don't care) if I critique a show not only for centering fathers, sons, boys and men but for blindly and boldly writing one of its only female characters and one of its only black characters as if their gender and race just do not exist. There are many other power differentials at play in this relationship, including age, experience, wealth and position, but race and gender are the two that patriarchy is most invested in invisiblising. So I don't care how brilliant they think they are, I will not trust the writing of a bunch of white dudes trying to tell me that race and gender are irrelevant.

[goneseriesanalysis]

Caine Soren

Hiya guys, so here are my thoughts and opinions on Caine from my re-read of the first book. I was planning on writing this quicker but my ADHD told me no. I’m prolly gonna write up a bunch now though because I’m ✨in the zone✨ Also, apologies but this is another long one because I am physically incapable of being concise 

Spoilers for Gone down below

Original Opinion: Most of my criticism on him as a character came as a result of later development so I’m not quite sure whether that will change as of yet. But as far as his role as a villain, I really enjoyed his character and what he brought to the story.

New Opinion: I still maintain that Caine is a good main villain for this book. I found him to be waaaaay different and way less competent than I remember, but boy is he interesting. I have so many thoughts on Caine and it was a real struggle getting them all down.

1.) CAINE’S APPEARANCE:

Ok so we are first introduced to Caine in chapter 14 through Sam’s POV. We see him standing apart from the other Coates kids “wearing a bright yellow V-necked sweater instead of a blazer.” This is obviously done to set him apart from the other Coates kids, and (forgive me for going all English teacher on you) the colour yellow has connotations of corruption and deceit, which fit in pretty nicely with Caine as a character. Sam then goes on to give us a more detailed description:

“He was handsome, even Sam noticed that. He had dark hair and dark eyes, not much different from Sam himself. But this boy’s face seemed to glow with an inner light. He radiated confidence, but without arrogance or condescension. In fact, he managed to seem genuinely humble even while standing alone, looking out over everyone else.”

This is one of my least favourite descriptions in the whole book because it simultaneously manages to tell us almost nothing about Caine’s appearance whilst making me cringe so hard that my muscles start to atrophy. Seen as we get very little description of Sam, telling us that Caine looks like Sam is pretty much useless – although it nicely sets up the brother twist – and dark hair and dark eyes could mean anything. Are his eyes blue, brown, black?? Is his hair black or brown?? Who knows?? Not me. And don’t even get me started on his face glowing with an inner light. Because no. I hate this line so much it actually hurts. I thought at first it may be in reference to his connection with the gaiaphage. But that makes no sense. It reminds me of the scene in The Great Gatsby where Nick describes Gatsby’s smile for about half a page and he just sounds ridiculous. I will admit the last two sentences give a good example of Caine’s ability to charm and manipulate those around him but the rest is just aaa

We also learn that he is handsome, which is then followed by what I consider to be a writer’s greatest sin. “He was handsome, even Sam noticed that” – Every. Single. Time a male character describes another male character who just so happens to be attractive in any given book from any author, we get this line. It is the writer’s equivalent of saying no homo and I’m going to make it my personal mission to call them all out on it.

Ok moving on – sorry about that. Rant over.

Sam then says that “His voice was clear and just a little higher, maybe, than Sam’s, but strong and determined. He had a way of looking at the crowed before him that made it seem he was meeting every person’s eye, seeing every person as an individual.��� This is good at further establishing Caine as a leader, and shows his relationship with crowds, it gives the reader some indication of his ability to control. He is able to easily win over those of Perdido Beach with his charm.

Caine gets referred to as being attractive by a few other characters throughout the book, but the last main description we get of him is from Drake’s POV in chapter 20:

“Caine sat in his over-large leather chair, the one that had previously belonged to the mayor of Perdido Beach. It made him look small. It made him look very young. And to make matters worse, he was chewing on his thumbnail, which made it almost look like he was sucking his thumb.”

This description is kind of reminiscent of the scene with Sam and the shirt that I talked about in my Sam Temple post. He has taken over the mayor’s chair but he is not fit to take on the position of mayor. Whereas Sam’s weakness in leadership stems from his insecurities and doubts, it is Caine’s narcissism and over-confidence that make him unfit to lead. Michael gives Caine the compulsion of biting his thumbnail when he is nervous. This is a habit that people often pick up to deal with challenging emotions is a less destructive way (as opposed to having a meltdown or getting angry) and works nicely for Caine’s character. It shows that while he does have his moments where he loses control, he is capable of controlling himself to a certain degree, making it seem more likely that someone like Diana might align herself with him. This also helps to further the idea that despite his narcissism and delusions of grandeur, he is still just a kid. And of course sets up the idea that Drake is somewhat resentful towards Caine.

2.) CAINE’S PERSONALITY:

Caine’s personality is a difficult one to analyse as there are two main aspects to it – the personality he projects in order to manipulate people and his actual personality – and sometimes the line between these blurs to the point where it becomes unclear which one we are seeing. One thing that I did notice is that in this book we don’t actually get a Caine POV until the Thanksgiving battle, so we mostly see him through the eyes of Sam, Jack, Drake and Diana, who all have very different relationships with him.

As I mentioned before, we first see Caine through Sam’s POV, where we are introduced to what I’m gonna call his fake personality. Michael uses phrases such as “Caine appeared interested” alongside Astrid’s commentary, which lets the reader know that Caine is not what he appears to be, but of course the general population of Perdido Beach are not aware of this. One criticism I had towards the way that Caine’s character is portrayed is that it is initially hinted that the reason he is able to gain such control over people is because of his proficiency in manipulation and his superficial kindness (such as when he comforts the kid who asks for his mum). And yet he manages to fool almost no-one?? Astrid, Sam, Edilio, Albert, Mary and Howard all immediately see through his façade, which makes it hard to believe that this is how he gained such influence over people. (And of course all the kids at Coates who were cemented saw through it too). In fact I found myself to be kind of confused as to why anyone follows him at all?? Is it just a fear of his power?? That’s… a little disappointing. He doesn’t become mayor because he charms the population. He becomes mayor because no-one else wants to do it, and no-one can be bothered to oppose him. And even when people start to become more afraid, they aren’t afraid of Caine. It’s Drake. Although, you of course have to take into account the fact that these are just children who want someone they can look towards for help and guidance. Perhaps Caine’s persuasive abilities are less about using his charm to completely win people over and more about him being able to take advantage of situations that are presented to him. He has just enough superficial charm and makes just enough beneficial changes (such as laying down rules and protecting the food) that people are willing to overlook some of the more sinister things that he does.

That being said, I think my main issue with so many characters being able to see through Caine so quickly, is what it says about or “hero.” Sam doing nothing to stop Caine, despite him clearly knowing that Caine is bad news makes him seem a little selfish?? His insecurities stop him from doing what is right, and while it is good to have a flawed hero, his willingness to allow Caine to terrorise Perdido Beach up until he threatens Sam personally seems less like a small character flaw and more like a pretty big lapse in morality and compassion. Would Sam have ever taken control if Caine hadn’t kidnapped him?? If Sam had been fooled by Caine’s manipulation that would imo have made both of their characters better fit their respective roles of protagonist and antagonist.

That being said one of my absolute favourite lines regarding Caine is “Then let’s go in together,’ Caine said. He turned and marched purposefully up the church steps. The rest of the chosen fell in behind him.” in chapter 14. I think this perfectly captures the contrast between what Caine says and what he does, and I really love it.  One of Michael’s strengths is adding little throw away lines that can perfectly sum up a character and their intentions. And this idea of Caine saying something but meaning something else is pretty central to his character – the biggest pay-off we get from this in book 1 is him promising to protect the little’s and then (horrifyingly) feeding them to the coyotes in the final battle. This was a scene that I did not previously remember and man did I feel some emotions when reading it. There wasn’t even a second thought, absolutely no indication of remorse. I know a few times it’s mentioned throughout the books that the difference between Caine and Drake is that Caine only does what is necessary – but the scene with the coyotes really contradicts that idea.

Caine’s ‘real personality’ imo is shown in little moments throughout the books. By Caine’s real personality, I’m referring to the part of him that we don’t really see at all in this book, the part of him that is only really hinted at by Diana, and occasionally Drake. Even when Caine is around Diana and Drake, he still tries to keep up a persona – this time that of a cold and detached boy with little to no emotions. But this isn’t really who he is. I think the ‘real’ Caine is an extremely emotional person (although I would like to clarify that by emotional I mainly mean angry and sometimes scared) and there are a couple of moments where this does shine through. There are a few times where Caine loses his temper with both Drake and Diana, using his powers to injure them and to reiterate the power he has over them. I think this shows how insecure Caine truly is, despite what he would have others believe. He only ever breaks character when his authority is mocked or threatened, even if the threat holds no real intention (such as Diana’s jibe after he kisses her). I do find it interesting that, at the core, Sam and Caine are quite similar. It is how these insecurities manifest and project themselves that really define them as different. Caine’s insecurities also shine through in these quotes from Diana:

“Yes. Sam is a four bar. And Caine would freak.” – Chapter 29

“Caine, despite his over-sized ego, his looks, his charm, was terribly awkward with girls.” – Chapter 39

Caine needs to be in control. He needs to be the most powerful person in the room at all times, and the only two people who can really be considered a threat to him in this way are Diana and Sam. Sam is his main threat and Diana, of course, holds a certain amount of power over him due to his feelings towards her. However, any time that Diana seems to be gaining or trying to gain more power (most notably when she makes fun of him for kissing her and when she tries to make him call off the coyotes) he reacts with violence. But I’ll go into that more when I make a post about their relationship.

Another thing that I noticed about Caine that I hadn’t previously remembered is that, he’s a bit of a coward. We first see this in chapter 34 when Little Pete frees the Coates kids “Caine was quick. He backed away, turned, and ran for the building.” The one thing that really got me about this is that he didn’t wait for Diana. He just turned and saved himself. Which kind of brings into question why Diana stays with him. Does he offer protection?? He certainly didn’t here. He literally abandoned her and ran for the hills. The other time we really see this side of him when he uses Astrid as a human shield in chapter 45. Diana even comments on this, telling him to “be a man for once.” I don’t have much else to say about this, but I think it’s an interesting aspect of his personality that certainly makes it easier to dislike him.

Now the last thing I want to talk about in regards to his personality is chapter 36 (the chapter where Drake gets his arm cut off). Caine gets in three good moments during this scene, the first one being:

“It’s not Diana or Chunk or even me,’ Caine said. ‘It’s none of us, Drake. It’s Sam. It’s Sam who did this to you, Drake. You want him to get away with it? Or do you want to live long enough to make him suffer?”

This is one of my favourite Caine moments in the book, and it’s really one of the only times that we see his manipulation actually work on someone. He knows exactly what to say to Drake in order to shift the blame in the direction he wants. Forget that I left you behind to deal with Sam and the escaped kids yourself. Forget that Diana is sawing your arm off. Just focus on Sam. And I think this line had such an effect on Drake’s psyche (which I will explore more in my Drake post) and really excellently shows off Caine’s ability to take advantage of a pre-existing situation in order to benefit himself.

The next two moments are where I really think the lines between Caine’s persona and the ‘real’ Caine blur to the point where it’s unclear which side of him we are seeing – and I think there is an argument for both although imo I feel like it’s his persona that we are seeing.

“It’s the only way to stop the pain,’ Caine said, almost showing some emotion, some pity. ‘The arm is done for Drake-man.”

“Don’t cut off my arm,’ Drake cried. ‘Let me die. Just let me die. Shoot me.           ‘Sorry,’ Caine said. ‘But I still need you, Drake. Even one-handed.”

So, we first get the idea that Caine, at least somewhat, feels sorry for Drake. Drake’s injury is horrific and it’s clear that other characters, such as Jack and Diana, who are usually nothing but hostile to Drake (and rightfully so) feel some sympathy towards the situation. Now it’s also important to note that this scene is from Drake’s POV so we don’t actually know if the sympathy Caine is showing is real, is part of his attempt to manipulate Drake, or isn’t there at all and is just something that Drake wants. (I think the last option is entirely plausible as Drake often seeks praise from Caine, so in a situation like this it makes sense that he would seek some empathy). However, Caine then goes on to refuse Drake’s plea for death… because he needs him. Not because he’s a friend – or even just an ally. Not because he doesn’t want him to die. But because he needs him. That’s cold. And it’s really cold to tell him that – which leads me to believe that the almost sympathy Drake sees earlier on was never there, or at the very least was just a manipulation tactic. Caine cares so little for the people around him and I find it quite funny that it was his treatment of Drake (the person probably most deserving of it) in this scene that really showed me how much of a villain Caine can be.

3.) CAINE’S MOTIVATIONS:

Why does Caine do the things he does?? Why does he need to be in control?? And while we don’t really get much insight into Caine’s head in this book, there are a few good moments which allowed a reader to speculate as to what his motivations are. The first moment that really stood out to me was in chapter 39, where Caine tries to open up to Diana about his parents:

“I always had the feeling, you know? That my family wasn’t my real family. They never said I was adopted, but my mother – well, the woman I thought was my mother, I don’t know what to call her now. Anyway, her, she never talked about having me. You know, you hear moms talking about going into labour and all. She never talked about that.”

From this, we can see that Caine always felt like an outsider within his own family, he always felt like he didn’t belong. And this seems to be a pretty big motivator when it comes to Caine’s need to take over, to have power over everyone else. If he has control, then he will always have a place. He will always belong because the world will be his. Caine never fit in in the real world, his narcissism (and probably psychopathy) distanced him from other people right from the get go. But in this new world, in the FAYZ, Caine has a chance to be important, to be a ruler and he’s willing to do pretty much anything to get that. I think this idea, of his need for power and control stemming from the lack of acceptance and belonging he felt with his family, is emphasised in chapter 46, during the poof:

“Caine seemed spellbound, unable to tear his gaze away from the gentle, smiling face, the piercing blue eyes.                                                                        ‘Why?’ Caine asked in a small child’s voice.                                                             […]                                                                                                                          ‘Why him and not me?’ Caine asked.”

This is the only time I felt the slightest bit of sympathy for Caine during my re-read of this book. He is 14. A kid. He spent his whole life feeling like and outsider and now he knows that a woman he knew, a woman that he saw almost every night is his actual mother. That she also knew this and yet never tried to talk to him, to explain, to do anything. And now he’s looking at ‘her’ and all he wants to know is why. Why did she give him up?? He lacks empathy and many other emotions that allow healthy relationships with others, yet he still wants people to have that connection with him. He needs him and rely on him. So his solution is to gain enough power, enough authority and control so that people have to listen to him and have to rely on him. He doesn’t care how many people he hurts or pisses off, because in the end, if he gets what he wants, that won’t matter. He’ll be too powerful for it to matter because they’ll still need him anyway. And that’s why “All that matters is winning. So save it.” – Chapter 45

4.) CAINE’S INTENTIONS/ HIS ROLE AS A VILLAIN:

Caine’s intentions are pretty obvious from the very first time we meet him in chapter 14. And, of course, it is these intentions that really define his role as a villain. Now, in chapter 14, it never outright says that Caine’s intentions are to take complete control over Perdido Beach. In fact, Caine tries to make it seem like he wants to make a collaborative effort to help them all move forward. But once again, his actions contradict his words, most notably in these lines:

“Orc grunted, shifted the bat from right hand to left, and stuck out his thick paw. Caine grabbed it with both his hands and solemnly looked Orc in the eye as they shook hands.”

“But Caine grabbed his elbow and manoeuvred him into a handshake.” [Referring to Sam]

“Caine had moved confidently towards the altar.”

These lines subtly show that, whilst Caine talks about working together, he is really the one in charge. He is the one dictating what is happening and when it is happening, forcing Sam and Orc to shake his hand. Giving them jobs so that he can keep an eye on them (Orc) or keep them out of the way (Sam). And of course, he won’t stand with them in the church. They don’t sit around a table and talk as equals. Caine has to be up at the front. He also gets extremely angry when other people make demands, or give an idea that he can’t take credit for. The most obvious example of this being in response to Howard telling him that they wouldn’t be working for Drake.  “Sam saw a coldly furious expression appear on Caine’s handsome face, then disappear as swiftly as it had come.” This is then followed up by Caine ripping a 12ft cross off of a wall and launching it at them, so it’s safe to say that he doesn’t appreciate his authority being challenged.

Later in the book we then get more obvious examples of his intentions, as his role as the villain is fully unveiled:

“Caine, to the surprise of no-one who knew him, had taken over the mayor’s office.” – Chapter 15

“Number one says Caine is the mayor of Perdido Beach and the whole area known as the FAYZ.” – Chapter 16

After Caine basically walks into Perdido Beach, tells everyone what to do, and gets away with it, he begins to be more outright with his intentions. He immediately takes over the mayor’s office, and makes his new title of mayor the very first rule to be enforced. He isn’t really all that secretive about his intentions, at least not after the initial meeting. I think this is a measure of his confidence – he doesn’t feel at all threatened by the people of Perdido Beach. I think one of the reasons that Caine is such a good villain, is that when he is in control, he isn’t that bad?? I mean sure, having Drake as sheriff is less than ideal, but Caine himself is not a bad leader. He comes up with rules that both make sense and do actively increase the quality of life of those in Perdido Beach (minus the no magic tricks rule). It’s only what Caine is willing to do in order to get that power that actually makes him the villain. Once he has it, he’s not really a threat?? And then of course, we get Caine’s fantastic little speech in chapter 42 that really just sums up all these ideas in much less words:

“What was I supposed to do? Coates? That’s it? How do you not see what an opportunity this is? We’re in a whole new world. I’m the most powerful person in that whole new world. No adults. No parents or teachers or cops. It’s perfect. Perfect for me. All I have to do is take care of Sam and a few others, and I’ll have complete control.”

Because if it wasn’t for his ego, if he hadn’t attacked Sam, if he hadn’t used Drake to cause fear and enmity, he would have had it. He would have gotten his complete control, because no-one else really wanted to be in charge. The fool is his own worst enemy.

5.) CAINE’S POWERS:

So, the last thing I wanted to discuss about Caine, is his powers. To me, it seemed whilst reading that his powers are almost an extension of his personality. Caine is naturally a very domineering person, and so it makes sense that his power is the ability to control things with his mind. The first time we see Caine’s powers (also the first time we see anyone purposefully use their powers) is in the church:

“Caine sighed, raised his hands, and used both palms to smooth back his hair.                                                   There came a rumble, up through the floor and pews. A small earthquake…                                        […]                                                                                                                                                                   But then came a rending sound, steel and wood twisting, and the crucifix separated from the wall. It ripped free of the bolts holding it in place, like an invisible giant had yanked it away.                              […]                                                                                                                                                             The crucifix toppled forwards. It fell like a chain sawed tree.                                                                                                             As it fell, Caine dropped his hands to his sides. His face was grim, hard, and angry.                                                                                                 The crucifix, at least a dozen feet tall, slammed with shocking force down onto the front-row pew. The impact was as loud and sudden as a car wreck.” – Chapter 14

I like how, similarly to the way he talks, the first time we see a display of his power, he is hiding it – his body language is suggesting one action whilst he is actually doing something else entirely. This again makes me feel like the powers are an extension of personalities (and I will give other examples of this is later posts).  I also noticed that the use of his powers is almost always as a response to his anger, something that Sam also learns to do thanks to Astrid’s guidance. These two scenes are great examples of this:

“Caine’s smile was cold. He raised his hand, palm out. An invisible fist hit Sam in the face. He staggered back. He barely stopped himself from falling, but his head was reeling. Blood leaked from his nose.” – Chapter 21

“Caine reached back over his shoulder with one hand, not even looking back. He spread his fingers, bared his palms. The fallen portion of the wall came apart, brick by brick. One by one, as though each brick had sprouted wings, they lifted off and flew. The bricks hurtled past Caine’s head and through the open door as fast as machine-gun bullets.” – Chapter 31

Unlike Sam, who often uses his powers as a defence strategy, Caine always uses them as a method of attack. He attacks Orc’s gang, Drake, Sam and Andrew – not as a last resort, but as a warning. He likes to make a big display of his power in order to deter people from actually engaging in a fight. Although when it does come down to an actual fight, he tends to be a little less confrontational and a little bit more of a coward. I mean come one. Hiding behind Astrid was low. At least this is the case in book 1.

Next, is the development of his powers. Unlike Sam, we know that Caine did not discover his powers alone:

“Several of us developed strange powers, starting a few months ago,’ Caine said conversationally. ‘We were like a secret club. Frederico, Andrew, Dekka, Brianna, some others. We worked together to develop them. Encouraged each other. See, that’s the difference between Coates people and you townies. In boarding school it’s hard to keep secrets. But soon it became clear that my powers were of a whole different order. What I just did to you? No one else could do that.”

The Coates kids formed a sort of support group for each other, which is why they have such a good understanding of their powers, as opposed to Lana and the Perdido Beach kids, who either hid their powers or else didn’t discover them until the FAYZ began. One thing that I do find interesting about this, is that the Coates kids all seemed to develop their powers pretty late. Caine says that the powers started a few months ago, and yet Sam first used his 14 months before the FAYZ began. I think that goes to show how the Coates environment really gave Caine the ability to experiment with and foster his powers, which is why he has such control. He achieved in a few months what is took Sam over a year to do. (One thing that I think would have been nice to have is perhaps in a later book some flashbacks on the Coates kids working together to do this. But oh well)

Thank you so much again for reading, and please feel free to add your thoughts. Next up is Diana and I have a lot to say about her. :)

[meikuree]

list 10 different female faves from 10 different fandoms

I was tagged by @chocochipbiscuit for this ages ago but I’m only getting around to this now because I wanted to find a time when I could just sit down and GUSH about my faves with abandon... hence the lateness... thank you for the tag though, i love doing these things!! this got LONG because i am horrifically verbose, so i’m putting this under a cut:

1. aerith gainsborough (final fantasy vii): probably my earliest fictional crush/fave ever... one of my siblings used to let me watch her play ff7 when i was eight or nine-ish and i've loved aerith since then. i adore her because she's so selflessly compassionate and nurturing -- she's been through an incredible amount of loss and metaphysical loneliness (as the last remaining person of her race) but she still channels her energies towards Greater Causes and uplifting others! and she's still wonderfully modest and down-to-earth about it all and just a Thoroughly Good person in general... one of my comfort characters :,)

2. bethany hawke (dragon age 2): honestly i love all the women in the DA series & can wax poetic about them all in equal degree, such that sticking to one fave per game is in fact even harder than the time i had to sit for the final exams for my degree, but... bethany is probably one of my first picks. i've always found it interesting how she's in immediate senses the more pleasant of the two DA2 siblings to get along with and at the same time someone who is Good but willing to fudge her morals just this side of ambiguity a little. that sort of goodness that coexists with moral flexibility and understanding of practical realities is what draws me to her... basically Goodness With An Edge. also the fact that she is in fact very wise beneath her innocent/youthful exterior and Quietly Competent and is someone who gravitates towards mentoring others while in abject structural/personal circumstances in some storyline choices!! i have a type!!

3. furiosa (mad max fury road): i really love furiosa's story and the way her background and heritage drives the plot. the fact that she's tried to keep her heritage alive all these years... the way she derives her strength and identity from the community where she was raised by women... and then the moment she realises that her old community is gone always get me GODDDD. and then the fact that that moment catalyses one of the most profound realisations in the film afterwards, and leads to the protagonists turning around to revolutionise a violent regime afterwards!! it's all about the loss, and resilience, and quiet, stalwart persistence in spite of it all.

4. franziska von karma (ace attorney): i like hypercompetent characters. franziska is, in the narrative, a woman who was a hypercompetent child prodigy. but i don't love her for that; i love her for the development she undergoes afterwards when she learns to accept failure and become more emotionally measured in general (i think... it's been a while since i've played these games). i also find it very funny that she's mean and abrasive to everyone but has a soft spot for women and young girls like pearl and alternately CARES deeply about how they perceive her or goes out of her way to help them. #franziskaisalesbian anyone?

5. janai (the dragon prince): um, she is incredibly beautiful. honourable warrior who is deeply loyal to her sister and homeland and then learns to look beyond received narratives about racial enmity and hatred? i'm sold. i also love the development of her relationship with amaya.

6. ianthe tridentarius (the locked tomb): honourable mention to this horrible, gremlin girl for being the reason I picked up these books!! she’s a walking bag of moral transgressions and I Enjoy It So Much, IT IS SO REFRESHING. I also appreciate the fact that her particular brand of abhorrence is presented in the narrative free of moralitis, or sententious attempts to link it to gendered failings (e.g. the failure to embody ideal precepts of gender)... which is the treatment Evil Women are often subjected to in stories. Ianthe is Rotten, full stop, and there aren’t any notable attempts to graft an exonerative backstory over it, but also no attempts (yet) to unfairly penalise her for Garbage Moralistic Commentary. at the same time she’s not blandly, beigely villainous either; she is capable of a certain degree of care, however warped or fucked up its actualisation might be. she is complex! in all, a very delicious character. 10/10.

7. harrowhark nonagesimus (the locked tomb): breaking the one-fave-per-fandom rule for TLT because it is that special. I don’t regard harrow as a fave in the sense that I “love her with all my heart” like with aerith or bethany (gideon would take that place, actually -- she's the moral compass of the series!) — it’s more that I love the trajectory she undergoes in harrow the ninth. but I also really enjoy how thorny, difficult, and (morally, but not only) complex she is. I find the meditations on her grief, loneliness, and devotion in Harrow the Ninth comforting and beautiful, as do I the framing of her insanity/madness.

8. billie lurk (dishonored): oh boy, I love how jaded and embittered she is, and the way she's very flawed and human as well... the broad thematic flavours in her backstory of regret over committing ~irredeemable crimes~ and being haunted by your past, and dwelling within the grittier side of life are all very compelling to me! her perspective as someone who is Not A Chosen One and an anti-heroine is refreshing too

9. leliana (dragon age: inquisition): cheating for this one by counting this as a separate game from DA2, hah. she is immensely Intimidating and Cool, i love that she specialises in the domain of spymastery and subterfuge! she is also complex, but some of the things she stands out to me for are that particular brand of realistic, Rugged Faith she has, and the way she's clear-eyed about the sacrifices it takes and ruthlessness she has to wield in service of it

10. pieck (shingeki no kyojin): yes, the character i have written every single one of my 16 fics about in one form or another was bound to make it into this list somehow. honestly i DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO SAY... it's all there in said fics! and there's too much to encompass in one brief answer. but: it's things like her quiet unassuming competence, the way she Takes Responsibility even when she could do the easier thing of resting on her laurels and/or succumbing to despair, her gritty resigned optimism, and the way she takes her obligations to others seriously & twines both ruthlessness and generosity within herself... she's a lot more complex than initially observed by many people, in my humble opinion, and there are still threads to her i’m teasing out to this date!

i’ll tag: @lightdescending @todustagain @kallistoi @leksaa90 @rose-gardens @acerinky @frumpkinspocketdimension @whiteasy no pressure!

[margotverger]

top 5 best hannibal takes and worst hannibal takes. go

okay i’m going to do this generally on what other people’s takes (that i’ve seen or read somewhere) are because none of my hannibal takes are bad. 

top 5 best:

that margot should have been butch in the tv show and that the margot/alana romance could have been developed a little more, i’ll elaborate more on the butch angle in top 5 worst, but i think while i enjoy marlana in s3 (who doesn’t) i do think that there could have been a Little More to it, especially since there was admittedly a lot of gratuitous metaphorical work on a visual or verbal level in early s3 that didn’t... really do much after the first few, and that i think bryan fuller definitely got a bit self-indulgent. while i love s3 i think it was weaker because it got quite ensnared in feeling like it had to explain everyone’s individual recovery (not a bad thing necessarily and the looping narrative definitely had this feeling of “time has been changed, mutilated, adjusted after mizumono”, but on a narrative level it could have probably still been achieved but left more room for things to. Happen) and i think that some of the excess could have been trimmed to allow for more margot-alana development beyond simply talking about taking revenge, i would have loved to see some genuine conversation that only affected both of them that made us realise just why alana would raise the child with her, why they would get marriedーalana having very little dating life and presumably trauma around relationships since her immediate ex tried to murder her and is also a serial killer, and margot having been traumatised repeatedly due to being a lesbian in a very homophobic family, they deserved some space in order to explore why exactly they mean a lot to each other. even a singular scene that didn’t depend on taking vengeance on the men who hurt them would have given us enough i think. 

lara jean chorostecki’s hot take (implied) that freddie would have a wife. groundbreaking. love that. regardless of bryan fuller i am assuming with full confidence that freddie lounds has a wife after the timeskip

autistic will graham. enough said. hugh dancy’s only stupid thing was saying will isn’t autistic. that was a sin. will graham is autistic

lesbian abigail hobbs. lesbian abigail hobbs!

the hot take that hannibal doesn’t do its women characters justice, this isn’t just about deaths (i do agree that for the gothic horror narrative characters are doomed to some extent, and i don’t overly grieve over deaths that came too early, so i’m not too fussed) but on a writing level, bryan fuller definitely tries to portray himself as a very woman-positive author who introduces feminine energy - and he does! but at the same time there is a lack in developing relationships between women, and for a story to truly give space to be a genuinely woman-positive story there needs to be strong relationships between women that don’t depend on men; obviously since hannibal’s presence is insidious and infects everything, as is his luciferian ways, and will’s often the binding agent, this can’t be entirely avoided but regardless of hannibal they can exist, on some small level, individually. we saw that a lot in s1! between abigail and freddie and alana and abigail mostly, plus there was a small glimpse at it in season 3 with bedelia and chiyoh (underrated imo i would love to see further into why bedelia has her views of chiyoh and what that means ... i hope they interact again if hannibal s4 comes to pass!). so it proves there is room for it. it doesn’t need to be every episode or even have a huge arc but seeing hannibal pass the bechdel test more than like. twice a season would be nice!

top 5 worst takes:

that bedannibal is more romantic than hannigram (lol)... i love bedelia and bedannibal a lot but that’s just. hm. incorrect

that hannibal has never loved anybody except will. i’ve wrote about this before but i think that’s a deliberate misunderstanding of the character hannibal. what is unique about hannibal and will’s relationship is not the presence of love but the presence of being changed by that love; transformation is at its core, the openness to being adjusted or altered... recognition, seeing, understanding, and that allowing compassion not only for the other (in hannibal’s case) but for the self (in will’s case). hannibal loves a lot, but his love is not separate from crueltyーi think this is where people misunderstand. just because he is willing to hurt or harm people isn’t, in the narrative (not in real life), because he doesn’t love them. his cruelty is because he loves people enough he wants to bring them to the height of their being, in extremis. he loved alana, which is why he showed her a chance at mercy. he loved bedelia. he loved jack. he loved abigail! he loved bella especially, and he genuinely mourned. these went beyond fascinations; these were genuine expressions of affection, love, whether they be platonic or romantic or familial. hannibal’s flaw is not that he is incapable of love. and personally i think to disrespect his relationships with other characters (who are all women, black or both lol) in order to further isolate the white m/m relationship is... not ideal. not a sign that someone is wholly prejudiced but i think it’s something we should be critical about, especially when hannibal through word of god is confirmed to love other people. 

bryan fuller’s own take that margot being femme is somehow less prejudiced or problematic than if she was butch. i haven’t read the book yet but i already know that margot’s portrayal as a butch lesbian was problematic but thomas harris is . undoubtedly prejudiced in many ways and that’s a fault of him, not a fault of the existence of being butchーbeing butch isn’t just a “stereotype” it’s a genuine mode of existence, it’s an intricate relationship with gender, sexuality and love, and butchness deserves to be represented as something beautiful, desirable and complex... instead of just deciding she should be conventionally feminine because that’s somehow more progressive. but then again he also made her have sex with a man so you know. lol

ANY take that involves over-analysing who is a top or who is a bottom and then rendering the characters into homophobic/fetishistic stereotypes. it’s ugly! it’s weird! keep that shit away from me. also any take involving “dark!will”. again that just does the character of will disrespect lol. the whole point of will is that he is morally complex and perhaps beyond the human scopeーhe is not just an echo of hannibal... i’ve seen one too many fics where will just becomes a savage brutal unfeeling murderer who only cares about hannibal after s3. like please watch the show

that hannibal is a narcissist/sociopath... or any other ableist interpretations. not every villain is a narcissistic (a genuine disorder) sociopath (just another word associated with npd etc) just because they do bad things. they’re very real disorders that people deal with and are infinitely more complex than just a character having a god complex and killing people. the whole point about hannibal is that he exceeds what is considered neurodivergent and while i don’t mind if people with similar disorders relate to him (much like how i relate to will’s autistic traits) i think a lot of bad comes from people throwing the label sociopath around because it becomes dehumanising and leads to further stigma against truly vulnerable people. 

basically any trope that just does a character a disservice or neglects the actual story in further of fetishistic thinking, prejudiced thinking, ableist thinking... will graham can be autistic because of his empathy (i’ve seen it implied that he can’t be because of it when, as a very empathetic autistic person, hyper-empathy is a very common if not universal symptom, it just appears differently) and hannibal is not a sociopath just because he kills and eats people. and we should all have a little sip of critical thinking juice

[docholligay]

Doc Loves His Dark Materials

If I were going to regret anything about HDM, it would be that I wasn’t in high school until I read it. If I read it when I was a child, I would have been full-tilt obsessed with it. It was precisely the sort of thing I was always looking for and could never find. 

There are a great many YA books that delve into the realm of fantasy, but few of them that inhabit such a fully realized world. Lyra’s world, as it is set up, immediately takes you in, and it manages to almost have an air of urban fantasy, a world that is clearly different from ours, but not so different that it requires a lot of jargon or that it becomes difficult to understand. It is our world, but only off a few clicks. 

Daemons are my favorite “personality sorter” of any of the YA books that have them, which is many, because everyone loves to put themselves into boxes while claiming labels are stifling. I also rarely see much discussion about daemons, and I assume this because it’s much more difficult than one’s Hogwarts house or anything like that. Your daemon’s form is intrinsically tied to who you are at your core, and Pullman is utterly unconcerned with overexplaining how they work, and how they are chosen for you, outside of that. 

Lyra Belacqua is a fantastic main character in that she has true flaws which are immediately apparent to the reader. It is not that she is plain, and put upon by life, she is not some brooding orphan looking to find herself. She is spoilt, and impetuous, and willfully ignores all the privileges of her life. She is a willful and skilled liar, and there’s a great deal about Lyra that’s not particularly likeable at all, and yet for all that, she feels more fully realized. She is a girl who must come into herself. 

And all of this, of course, ties back into the fact that Pullman does not treat his young readers as if they were incapable of handling deeper themes and ideas, or that they can’t read. The narration is often lyrical in quality, the title of the series is cribbed directly from Paradise Lost, and from time to time the book itself quotes poetry. It believes that young readers are capable of higher things. The concepts of grey morality, of desperation, of sacrifice. His Dark Materials is not afraid to question the very wisdom and usefulness of God. 

To this end, as I referenced above, Pullman does not feel the need to drill things down to the exact point. It’s actually a lot closer to adult books in this way, that it expects that young readers are also capable of drawing their own conclusions and coming to their own ends. Every time I thought it was going to put too fine a point on something, it would stop, right there. 

That is not to say it’s a perfect series, as nothing in life is perfect, and occasionally I roll my eyes at Pullman’s preachiness, but it’s few and far between. Most of the series is a deeply textured, complicated children’s series about maturity, heaven, the difficulties of one’s parents, and also there are witches. 

Spoilery below the cut

This is one of my favorite YA series of all time, and might be my favorite if we break it into age groups, being as A Series of Unfortunate Events is clearly meant for a much younger audience. Northern Lights/The Golden Compass (spicy take! The Golden Compass is a better title than the original! It fits with the pattern of The Subtle Knife and the Amber Spyglass, and also with the overarching Series Title of His Dark Materials. Why are you booing me, I’m right.) 

I think all YA series want to make their characters’ flaws into eventual strengths, but I don’t think any (that i’ve read) do it quite so well. Lyra’s stubbornness and lying, storytelling, save her ass more than once in a way that doesn’t seem coerced or cheap. I love that eventually she learns how to be less of a liar, and more of a storyteller. That her life can be as interesting as the falsehoods she used to tell, it feels very much like my own experience of becoming and adult and discovering that I had plenty of interesting things to say without telling a lie. 

Lee Scoresby is my favorite character of all of them, and I adore him, and his arc is so good, so entrenched with that classic Western sense of just wanting not to be involved, and being unable to stop yourself from getting involved. I was, of course, sad when he died, but there was literally no more fitting end for Lee than what ended up happening, that sense of sacrifice and willingness to die for the sort of idea that a person can hold, that utter loyalty. I still haven’t watched the HBO version partially because I’m not sure I can fucking handle him being played by Lin Manuel Fucking Miranda. Who also played ~the cockney lamplighter~ in the new Mary Poppins because I’m not allowed to enjoy anything. 

People are often surprised that I love HDM because it’s intensely anti-religion, and indeed, there are a handful of times that Pullman’s edgy atheist act annoys me. But in fairness, it’s MOSTLY not my religion taking the punishment, in that Pullman, like most Culturally Christian Athiests, assumes all “abrahamic” religions are the same, despite all three of them (or four, if you count protestant as its own thing) being vastly fucking different in approach and belief. So, really, I don’t get hit that much. But also rather than JUST being like “RELIGION MAKES YOU NAUGHTY” which is about as deep as it goes in The Golden Compass, it ends up taking the tack that God is nothing but a powerless old man who WANTS to die, who is being held up only by those who wish to bring war and strife. What a concept! Amazing! Not where I expected it to go at all. 

Also the fucking courage to show dissolving into the world as being preferable to some form of eternal life? FUCK ME. I was so absolutely struck by that, as a religious person who, probably 70% of the time, really can’t deal with the concept of an afterlife. It seems so overwhelming to me. I thought the whole thing was done beautifully. 

And its not as if he doesn’t punish both the religious and not alike--despite everything, Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel both end up hurling through the abyss because neither of them could every really move from their positions. In bringing down the Voice of God, they also must destroy themselves, built around this idea of upholding god and destroying god in equal measure, they cannot stand without him. I mean shit! You’re not gonna see that in Harry Fucking Potter, which built up the necessity of a hero’s sacrifice only to pull it out of the ass. 

The way that Lyra’s parents are both villain and hero, at turns, and how you come around to be like, ‘Wow, you are both assholes” even though they are on opposite sides, is remarkable. How many times how you read YA and it’s been like “oh my long lost and/or dead parent is wonderful!! How I love/miss them!!”? HDM does not fuck around with parents. Lyra’s parents are enemies and completely corrupt weirdos, Will’s mother needs him to take care of her in a way that is NOT made cute, and his father just fucking fucks off and dies the minute Will meets him. It’s a thing I didn’t realize I saw so little of in YA until I saw it here. 

I completely expected, braced for, and readied myself for Will and Lyra to end up together, and I was so fucking pleased that they don’t. It’s refreshing to be proven wrong, to have an author not decide that the boy and girl need to get together at the end of it. And it’s remarkably low drama.

[victorianoir]

Now I'm dying to know your thoughts on Chuck and Sarah during the first half of season 3! And the second half for fun too, if you want !

As much as I adore the show, their use of the honeypot spy trope always grossed me out a lot. I’m just going to put that out there. Too many women spies especially were put in that position and the implications of Sarah in season 3 episode 1 were pretty obvious and it was gross. 

I do think that with that business aside, Sarah gets a lot of shit from particularly male fans of the show, because of how she reacts and then acts during the first half of season 3. And I get it, the whole relatable-nerd aspect of Chuck Bartowski for a lot of guy nerds who are fans (and girl/nonbinary show fans too!), so seeing him hurt, seeing him get treated “like dirt” by Sarah makes folks angry.

But holy shit, just stop for a second and look. Sarah Walker is a human being. She isn’t just an idealized hot rad spy woman who then has to shut her mouth and suck it up when she’s treated like crap. One of the biggest faults in Chuck and Sarah’s relationship from the get-go is a lack of proper communication, and the beginning of season 3 is the catalyst of that. He doesn’t tell her the decision he’s thinking about making. Neither of them actually verbalize how they feel. And suddenly, she’s like “LET’S RUN” and he’s like “YEAH OKAY” and then he waits until she’s AT THE TRAIN STATION with their tickets, ready to abandon every part of her existence, her career she’s been in since she was practically a teenager, going against everything to get him out of the clutches of the CIA and NSA which is what he’s always said he WANTS, to be with him ......... and he doesn’t explain WHY but he rejects her and leaves her standing there. 

Add to that the fact that her boss basically FORCES her back into that situation with him. Where she’s stuck with the memory of the rejection, trying to help him become a spy, something she thought he didn’t want--the opposite of what he always said he wanted, Mr I Just Want to Be a Regular Guy Again. She’s stuck watching him become a different person, a potentially worse, broken person like the CIA made her (in her mind) ... for her, she realizes. She thinks she’s broken a good man. Or at least, she’s going to be forced to support and help him BECOME broken. That’s fucking torture. The fact that people are so awful and vitriolic to her and give Chuck a pass has always infuriated me.

I mean, I’m not vilifying him, either. He’s also human and he’s imperfect. It’s just infuriating that Chuck’s allowed to be a stupid fool and misstep and make bad decisions and not know how to act/react, and go off with Hannah and HAVE SEX WITH HERRRRRRR and lead her on like that .................... He gets “poor Chuck”. Sarah has her heart broken, her soul further damaged, the one person in her life she ever truly trusted with her heart threw it back in her face, and she treats him with anger, she ends any chance of a real relationship, and she spends the first half of season 3 terrified that she’s the reason Chuck is on the same path she took...she knows better than anyone where that path leads. Should she have sat him down and told him? Should she have poured her heart out to him and told him why she’s so pissed? Maybe. If she was perfect, she might have known to do that. But she’s not perfect, and CHUCK fans don’t give her the same room to be imperfect or lash out in hurt.

I didn’t enjoy the dumb quadrangle the show did with Chuck, Sarah, Hannah, Shaw. Hannah and Shaw weren’t good characters. UNTIL Shaw went bad. He was so boring I didn’t expect it, and then BOOM, all of a sudden he was a really good villain. Like REEALLLYYYYY bad, but a great villain for the show. When he added slithery bitterness and snark to the boringness, it gelled really well. Hannah was just like .... tossed out and it was weird. Like, totally just a plot device with no dimensions or story. That was not great writing imo.

ALL OF THAT BEING SAID, I do think Chuck and Sarah needed that absolute MESS (minus the honeypot barf-worthy parts) because it forced them both to GROW THE FUCK UP. They were both still so immature, still putting each other on this podium of perfection. They needed to mess up and take one another off of the podiums, see each other as human beings who could hurt and be hurt. That’s what happens. And I commend the creators for doing that. What came out of it was absolutely fantastic character growth. Chuck becomes a confident spy who finally sees Sarah not just as this bad ass spy woman with a heart of gold he wants to be like and be with... he sees all of her, understands her value with all her flaws, and is in complete and total love with her. Sarah starts to actually understand Chuck on a way deeper level, she sees his flaws too, but she also sees he’s even better than she ever thought--not because he’s incorruptible, not because he’s perfect and a moral compass personified. He is corruptible because he’s human, he makes mistakes... but he isn’t corrupted because he’s just THAT good, even with his missteps and flaws. She falls truly and deeply in love with not just a nerd, but a good spy and a good man. And it helps her find more value in HERSELF as a result. 

Once Other Guy happened, I really thought the writers got their mojo back in stride. I mean oh my God, Other Guy, Honeymooners, and the episodes after it are absolute GOOOLLLLLLDDDDDDDDDDD. 

[reyloforcebalance]

TROS: Is This What You Wanted?

When I walked into The Last Jedi two years ago, I wasn’t a huge Star Wars fan. I’d seen the original trilogy as a kid and enjoyed them but their appeal was mostly nostalgic. I’d seen and quickly forgotten the prequel trilogy, and if I’m being honest, my viewing of The Force Awakens was similar. It was a fun ride, but I didn’t feel compelled to revisit it after seeing it in theaters. Like the rest of the franchise, it struck me as a movie to turn your brain off to.

 The Last Jedi was different. My first thought walking out of the theater was when’s the last time I’ve seen that kind of depth in a franchise film? I had criticisms of the movie’s pacing and plot, but these were far outweighed by my fascination with its visual and moral complexity. It was rich in symbolism and challenging questions. Characters made mistakes and had to grapple with the consequences. Their views of the galaxy and the nature of “right and wrong” were deepened. For the very first time, I walked out of a Star Wars movie really wanting to think through what I’d seen. These were the some of the themes that lingered:

-       The Jedi’s view of the Force was flawed/limited

-       Perhaps the Force is more complex than dark and light (or more complex than dark= evil, light = good)

-       It’s not always so easy to tell the villains from the heroes

-       Compassion and human connection can bridge even the deepest ideological divides

I was so enraptured by these themes, I found myself drawn into fandom for the very first time in my life. I started writing and reading fanfiction. I joined discord servers and made new friends. I became part of a community that was equally stimulated by The Last Jedi, and I spent more hours than I’d like to admit imagining how the themes I listed above would evolve in the next film. I was excited, invested, and intellectually engaged.

Then, I saw The Rise of Skywalker. 

Words cannot describe my disappointment. Since Friday, I’ve been trying to be fair and consider the bigger picture. Maybe The Last Jedi truly was a misstep? Star Wars films have always been more about action and world-building than complex characterization, and I can understand why some might crave a return to form.

But that does little to change the feeling that I got baited and switched. The Last Jedi promised new depth in the Star Wars universe, movies that would continue to preach hope and heroism but in a way that acknowledged human flaws and complexity. The Rise of Skywalker, in contrast, is the epitome of a “movie to turn your brain off to.” If you think too hard about any one scene, character and plot holes are glaring. The Last Jedi was certainly not free of similar mistakes, but I could forgive them because the movie challenged me to think. The Rise of Skywalker seemed to go out of its way to challenge nothing and no one. It gave spectacular visuals, fast-paced action, and brief heartfelt moments that were out of place in a convoluted and frenetic plot.

As I continue to grapple with my disappointment, the thought that needles me most is that THIS is what the majority of viewers wanted out of a Star Wars movie. I’ve been so involved in the post-TLJ fandom that I must’ve fooled myself into thinking that there are plenty out there like me who don’t just want great action but characters who struggle with hopes and fears that hit close to home. It’s like I thought I was in a crowd, but now I’m looking around and realizing I’m on an island and the mainland is faraway.  

Is The Rise of Skywalker really what most people want out of a Star Wars movie? Was the depth and complexity in The Last Jedi such anathema that it needed to be retconned? Are there really so few who looked forward to a Star Wars movie that not only excited but challenged us?

Am I in the minority?    

[professordorian-blog]

Snape, Dumbledore, and Judgement. [Meta]

I’m sure this has been said by greater literary analysts than myself, but I deeply enjoy the inverse parallel of Snape and Dumbledore’s progressions in Harry’s regard.

Part of what draws us to these books is the journey through Harry’s maturing perspective. The early books sparkle with the naive gossamer of childhood, which slowly melts away as Harry ages. But this is not a story of the descent into cynicism. Rather, it’s about the bittersweet nuance of reality. Snape and Dumbledore are the equal and inverse literary tools that illustrate this concept.

Take Dumbledore: He begins the series as a saintly, fatherly archetype who can do no wrong in Harry’s eyes. He seems to embody everything that is good and selfless, and child-Harry attaches his loyalty to the man so completely that he’s able to summon Fawkes.

As the books progress, Harry finds his early assumptions challenged. He finds out that Dumbledore has left a trail of mistakes in his life. That his good intentions were sometimes executed with morally questionable methods, or were tainted by ulterior motives. Overall, Harry’s image of Dumbledore emerges as something complex. He sees that Dumbledore tried to do good in the world, but sometimes went about it in the wrong way; that he gave Harry a foundation of care and support, but failed him emotionally in other ways; that Dumbledore served the political ideals Harry fights for, but sometimes put ideology above people.

Then take Snape: He begins the series as a veritable Vaudeville villain in Harry’s eyes. All he needs to go with his bat-like wardrobe and sallow sneer is a well-greased mustache to twirl. Harry has hardly spent ten minutes in the same room as the man before Snape becomes Suspect #1 in his Scooby Gang shenanigans.

This viewpoint, too, is challenged later on. Harry discovers that once upon a time, Snape was the victim and his father the villain. Although Snape became the Death Eater that Harry always condemned him to be, Harry leans that Snape also experienced deep remorse and shifted his path to one of atonement. His image of Snape becomes one of a tortured man who struggled against his own mistakes. He sees that Snape took his pain out on others interpersonally, but also that Snape was putting his very life on the line for the same people he tormented. That Snape's apparent selflessness is complicated, though not invalidated, by obsession. That Snape lives the life of someone who cannot escape the fact that he has done unforgivable things, which both motivates him to be bravely self-sacrificial and degrades his empathy.

What both these evolutions in viewpoint have in common is that they arrive in the middle. Snape starts in the black, Dumbledore starts in the white, and they both arrive in the gray.

This is true maturation: a departure from the mindset where people are easily boxed into extremes. A departure from the illusion that there is such a thing as a "good person." Although neither mentor can live up to the "white" end of the spectrum, Harry concludes that he admires them both in the end, because he sees that their shades of gray are as good as it gets. They were imperfect actors, struggling to make a difference in a hostile, tricky world.

This ultimate maturation and revelation is embodied in the fact that Harry names his son Albus Severus Potter. This gesture shows that Harry has absorbed the lesson in its completeness: that the people we judge to be good are often flawed, and that the people we judge to be evil are often more sympathetic than we realize. That it is the bravery of people who try to do good despite their own demons that is worthy of our admiration. Not the flawless execution of the morally perfect, because those people do not exist.

I would add that this authorly appeal to the importance of nuance is the precise reason why Snape and Dumbledore are such uniquely divisive characters in the fandom. Strict criterion for good or evil, where a person is only allowed to occupy one definition or the other, is as old as time; it was not invented by this generation of progressive youths any more than it was by the generation of progressive youths before them. Nor before them. Nor them.

To a mind that can only oscillate between outright condemnation and idolizing admiration, Snape and Dumbledore would both fall firmly in the "black" category. Any attempt to discuss the complexity of their actions or motivations would seem a defense of their most unforgivable qualities and mistakes. To such a mind, the lesson of the Harry Potter books is not one of moderating one's reflex to judge, but one of disillusionment and cynicism. To such a mind, Harry's instinct to vilify was correct, and his instinct to admire was a regrettable naivety that had to be shattered.

I don't want to live in such a mind. I imagine it is a rather bleak place to be.

The last thing I will say is that Harry donned a note of compassion when discussing both Snape and Dumbledore, in the end. The quality of compassion is to human flaws as bravery is to fear. It is not an emotion to lock away behind a maze of superhuman criteria, but rather an emotion that exists to meet those who don't live up to our conceptions of what a perfect recipient "should" be. The ability to give it in spite of our own disappointment is what makes it compassion.

I hope more people in the fandom will absorb the underlying message of this narrative as they grow, mature, and evolve.

[tyrantisterror]

Well Made Futility: Infinity War Thoughts

I saw Infinity War for a second time and have some thoughts.  SPOILERish thoughts, so, y’know, a cut here for the sake of those who care about such things.

I mean, I actually think this movie is better if you know what you’re in for going in, but I’m weird so what do I know.

So like... Infinity War is fucking difficult to evaluate.  It’s a movie that does something completely unprecedented in film - while we all enjoyed joking about it, no single movie crossover has attempted to weave this many VERY different stories, characters, and (especially) tones into one coherent narrative before.  It is a crossover unlike any other in film.  And it’s mostly successful!

but

I know we all like to dunk on Marvel’s films because they’re popular and make a lot of money, and all of us have an inner hipster who hates things that are successful regardless of their actual quality or content, because fuck that man we’re not normies we only like things BEFORE they’re cool.  But as a person who loves “genre” fiction - i.e. Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, anything that isn’t set in standard reality - the Marvel movies have been kind of revolutionary.  Genre films had gotten so LIMITED before Iron Man, and it was stupidly limited at that.  We could accept that a billionaire fury who punches criminals could walk into a police department without making everyone burst into laughter, but we couldn’t accept that a strange chemical bath would permanently bleach a clown-turned-criminal’s skin.  We could accept a guy getting powers from a spider OR a guy being really good at science but not both. We could accept a guy growing claws out of his hands, but god help you if that man also wears something other than black skintight leather.  Everything had to be “grounded” and “real”, and I put quotations marks around those words because what they REALLY meant in the context of Hollywood was “boring.”

but

And then Marvel slowly chipped away at that.  Not at first - Iron Man and The Hulk were about as restrained as the superhero movies that preceded them, but slowly the movies conditioned us to accept weird shit.  Thor brought in Norse mythology and a certain kind of magic, although they dressed it up as “advanced science”, because we were in a transition and that was a concession they could make.  Captain America took us out of modern day - a risky idea, period piece action movies are never a sure thing - and also introduced the idea of a serum that can turn you into either the ULTIMATE BEEFCAKE or a red skinned skeleton man depending on your moral compass, which is PRETTY FUCKING WEIRD when you think about it.

but

Then The Avengers happened.  Before that movie came out, every conventional Hollywood line of thinking told us it would fail.  Movies with multiple heroes don’t succeed.  That’s why Batman and Robin sucked, right - too many heroes?  And Batman and Robin, why, that’s the worst film ever!  Spiderman 3 had too many villains!  You can’t have more than two super powered guys in a movie - that’s just movie law!  Having more than two super power guys is box office poison.

but

But The Avengers wasn’t.  Maybe most of you don’t remember it because we’ve had 10 years of these Marvel movies and their success seems like an inescapable fact now, but The Avengers defied expectations by being both good AND a box office success - a ridiculously lucrative one at that!  The Avengers took a huge fucking risk and it paid off.

but

Then it happened again.  People assumed The Avengers was as weird as you could go.  Critics were CERTAIN these movies would peter out eventually, that they couldn’t keep doing the impossible.  One of these risks had to doom them.  And a lot of critics looked at one movie on the post The Avengers slate - Guardians of the Galaxy - and said, “That’s the one - that’s gonna be the turd.  A movie about a talking raccoon and a tree monster - two RIDICULOUS character concepts that sound more like jokes than something a studio would actually put in their action movie - along with some d-listers no one but hardcore nerds care about, all directed by a guy best known for gore-filled low budget b movies?  That’s going to kill Marvel.  There is no way that film can be good, much less a financial success.”

but

Guardians of the Galaxy was not just good, but it’s the best series within the franchise.   Yeah, fuckin’ fight me on it nerds.  (no actually don’t I’m voicing a subjective opinion in this paragraph I don’t actually give a shit about ranking movies like this)

but

Even when their movies weren’t game changers, they were still solid and fun.  Whether or not they’re your cup of tea, Marvel’s superhero movies are never worse than “good.”  Some of them are “great.”  Some, like The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Black Panther, are arguably transformatively great.  At the very least, these films taken as a collective whole have changed the way we approach Genre Films.  They have redefined what is possible - they reminded Hollywood that suspension of disbelief is a malleable thing, even if some studios haven’t quite grasped the concept yet.

but

Which brings me back to Infinity War.  Like The Avengers before it, Infinity War brings different characters from many different stories with many different tones and styles and, to an extent, genres/subgenres, and blends them into a coherent and emotionally resonate whole.  It requires you to have seen at least the majority of the previous DECADES worth of movies to work, but that’s not a flaw - no more than, say, the twentieth chapter of a novel requiring you to read the previous 19 at any rate.  Infinity War needs those previous films to function, and to its credit, it not only uses what they built, but does so in genuinely surprising ways.  You didn’t think you needed a Rocket Raccoon/Thor team up in your life, but this movie proves you did.  You also didn’t think you’d see Rocket Raccoon genuinely reach out to Thor (who, to him, is a relative stranger) and try to help him through his grief, but it happens, and it’s a legitimately interesting moment that movies both characters forward in their respective arcs.  This movie is more than just taking a bunch of toys out of a toybox and smashing them together (though yes, there are parts of it that are very much that - these are action adventure movies, after all).  Characters develop and bounce off each other in glorious and meaningful ways.  There is a weight to everything beyond the obvious, mercenary Hollywood mandate to make as much money as possible by getting fans of all these different franchises into one theater.

but

The movie even tries to rectifies some of the franchise’s most notable flaws, in particular their lack of decent villains.  You could count the number of actually compelling and interesting villains from the previous 18 films on one hand.  Thanos, the big bad of this film, finally gets us to the other palm.  His motives are understandable but NOT justified - that is to say, you can understand why a person may believe what he believes, but at the end of the film you know for a fact he’s wrong.  Thanos is a bad guy whose evil plan will destroy countless lives, but he manages not to be the cartoonish caricature of a villain whose over the top “destroy the world” motivation makes no sense.  It’s nuanced, is my point.  I don’t think he’s the best Marvel has offered us - he wouldn’t crack my top three just yet - but he’s miles above most of the competition.

BUT

So here’s the crux of my review.  When I got to the ending of the movie - an ending that, admittedly, I spoiled for myself ahead of time, because I do that for most movies ever since I got majorly burned by Jurassic Park III when I was a teen - I couldn’t stop thinking about it, because it’s... it’s a paradox.  Not just the ending, either, but the whole movie.  This is a film that both does and doesn’t work.  It is both an amazing feat and... and fundamentally broken.

And it all has to do with those 18 films before it.

Ok, so: if taken as its own story, that is to say, as just it’s own thing, not the part of a greater whole... then the ending of Infinity War is exactly the ending this story needed.  This is Thanos’s story more than anyone else’s, when you get right down to it, and from the perspective that this movie is meant to tell his story and his story alone, the ending is the only one that would fit.  Thanos gets everything he wants, at the cost of everything that mattered to him.  His crazed vision finally comes true, and the audience feels the full weight of how horrible that is. That ending - that maddening, confounding ending, where almost every hero we’ve come to love over 18 goddamn films is killed with the snap of his fingers - shows us exactly why we can’t let monsters like Thanos come to power, and how even the monsters like Thanos himself are destroyed by following those mad dreams through (a point reinforced by the cameo of a long forgotten past villain, Red Skull).

However, as I said before, you really CAN’T take this movie on its own.  Structurally it DEPENDS on you seeing those previous films.  You have to have seen them just for this movie to make sense, and to be emotionally affected by it you must also have cared about those movies and their characters.  This movie is a sum of those parts.

And as a followup to those 18 films - as a part of their greater whole - it fails.  So many characters we followed and love - Black Panther, Spider-Man, every fucking guardian of the galaxy except Rocket and maybe Nebula if we count her, just to name a few - is killed off in a literal instant.  With the exception of Loki, each of these deaths kind of renders their preceding journey pointless.  Peter Parker was just starting his journey in his preceding film - so was Black Panther, so was Dr. Strange, so were many of the others.  Imagine if Hamlet was killed in act 1 of his play - everything about him would be unresolved, and all of his supporting cast would have no anchor to the plot since the conflict they’re involved in is removed with Hamlet’s death.  You’d have to start over.  Other characters are farther along, but with rare exception, none of them had what could be called a satisfactory end.  If the deaths in this movie actually hold true, then most of the preceding 18 movies have been broken.  They are wastes of time.

Of course, a savvy person would note that literally every character killed in this movie has been cast in the next Avengers film, due out next year.  Spider-Man and the Guardians have announced movies with release dates after that one, too.  Black Panther’s sequel has been announced although the release date has not.  These deaths are highly unlikely to stick.

BUT if that’s the case, well... then this movie’s broken again, because now that ending has no weight.  Now that ending is pointless - in fact, this whole movie is, because it’s all just going to be undone by the next.  Either this film was a narrative waste of time, or the preceding 18 were.  There’s no other option.

...but...

There is, I suppose, a possibility.  A faint one, admittedly - I have no idea if they can achieve it.  There’s a possibility the fourth Avengers film could find a way to make this movie’s weight hold while still putting all those dead characters’ stories back on track.  Infinity War was conceived as a two part film story, after all, even if they dropped the “Part 1″ label come release.  No matter how much this film wants you to think otherwise, it is just part of whole - and maybe, just maybe, the second one will make the first work WITHIN that whole.

I don’t see how it can, but then, I didn’t see how they could make me care about fuckin’ Rocket Raccoon.  And Guardians of the Galaxy is, as I said, the best one.

If I were a betting man, I’d bet on this movie ultimately being a narrative cul de sac - a very well made, but ultimately pointless entry that is invalidated by what comes after it.  If that ends up being the case, then that’s kind of sad - but there’s a chance they may make it work after all, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s not to bet against Marvel.

[reyloeyesofmist]

Bustle.com  is becoming pretty Anti-Reylo as days pass by. Unfortunately there are too many articles online as predictable, sanctimonious and anti as the one I'm goint to comment on. Have a look at this "beauty": https://www.bustle.com/p/why-rey-kylo-ren-can-never-be-redeemed-no-matter-how-much-reylo-fans-ship-them-7737310 By OLIVIA TRUFFAUT-WONG Spoilers ahead for The Last Jedi. Gather 'round, Reylo shippers, it's time to have a talk. The Rey and Kylo Ren ship that set sail when The Force Awakens was released in 2015 has only gained steam in recent weeks, thanks to The Last Jedi. But, fans of the ship will have to face the harsh truth that Rey and Kylo can never be redeemed as a couple, because as much as it may pain you to admit it, Kylo is actually pretty damn awful. Even putting aside the fact that he's a murderer who killed his own father, Kylo hasn't really proven himself capable of being a friend to anyone, let alone a lover. Now, that's not to say that the Reylo ship doesn't have merit. Do Kylo and Rey have an undeniable chemistry in The Force Awakens? Yes. Is their Force connection unlike any other relationship we've seen in the Star Wars universe? Yes. Are Rey and Kylo both super hot Force badasses who could take over the galaxy together as one awesome super couple? You bet. But, just because the Reylo ship is fun to take a ride on, that doesn't mean it should actually happen. In reality, if Rey and Kylo Ren's relationship were to become canon, it might just become the most toxic relationship in the Star Wars saga — including Anakin and Padmé — and here's why. Kylo Is A Straight-Up Murderer & Probably A War Criminal

I’m fed up with this kind of articles about movies, they are getting really annoying and tyring, so I’m goint to add my two cents about Reylo and anti-articles on Websites.

Reading that article made me feel secondhand embarrasment, at least this is what I felt when I read it, because it's so terribly unprofessional and so wrong. It's the kind of article that might belong in a personal blog because people are entitled to their own opinions, however warped they are, but it should have no place on a site that readers can take seriously. It has nothing to do with criticism on a movie. Instead of focusing on the movie itself this writer extrapolates the story to accommodate it to her personal opinions and makes judgements of value on fan's views on life, expectations and what they should like or enjoy in a story. This article is not about TLJ, it's about policing what viewers should enjoy, and what's worse, whether people should be given a second chance after making mistakes and who deserves to be loved. What does this have to do with the quality of a story? Nothing at all. Also, this person feels entitled to tell others who is to be seen as a war criminal, a terrorist or an abuser in a relationship. We Reylo fans are not children (at least many of us aren't) and it isn't her job to educate us or show us what is morally acceptable or not. This is about a community, the Reylo community, and this person feels entitled to tell Reylo stans and anyone who happens to like Reylo what they think or enjoy is wrong. She doesn't criticize Disney, the writers or LF for the story they have given us, she criticizes a certain group of fans who just happened to understood and enjoy the story they have been offered. We are not responsible for Reylo and what it represents. If she thinks what is on screen is so toxic, she should complain to the right people, those who made this story possible, not to the fans who enjoy it. If authors paid any mind to this kind or articles which unfortunately have become so common these days, all pieces of fiction would be utter trash. If all the characters in a story had to be models of perfection and paragons of virtue, they wouldn't reflect the real world, to start with, their characters wouldn't be relatable, because despite what this person seems to think real people are far from perfect, more often than not relationship aren't exactly healthy, people have bad moments and love isn't about finding yourself a Mr Perfect who can do nothing wrong. If you find yourself a Mr Perfect lucky you, but do flawless people really exist?  Most of us aren't perfect and if we want acceptance for our flaws and forgiveness for our mistakes we should be able to give others a chance. It's not right to jump on high horses and judge others so harshly. If this woman was right, reading Shakespeare plays or Greek tragedies would be immoral, and enjoying westerns or action films, for instance would also be wrong. There should be no villains or morally grey characters in stories and all the characters should be unrealistically good. What a bore! There would be no tension and no drama. This article shouldn't be taken seriously, but the problem is that many people will read it and the site has a responsibility towards its readers. This kind of articles send a bad message and perhaps even try to have an influence on what the writers will do with IX. The article is laughable but its intentions are shady, at best. I'm really sick of finding this kind of articles that do no favours to movies or viewers. A journalist's view on what is terrorism, a war crime or anything of the sort is not what readers usually look for when they read an article about a movie. She is even wrong when she says Kylo is abusive when Rey is the one who hurts him physically, breaks his heart and betrays his trust. If she didn't trust that he would let her go after he killed the master who'd been manipulating him for years for her sake, then maybe the problem was hers and not his. Pretending she was going to accept his offer and take his hand and summoning his lightsaber instead felt very much like betrayal to a man who already feels betrayed by everyone and who only trusts her at this point. Of course she didn't have to accept his offer, but was playing a trick on him and leaving him unconscious and vulnerable the right thing to do? Her decision nearly cost him his life. She took her choice and her priority wasn't him, this is not new for Ben Solo, it's the story of his life repeating itself. Is Rey abusive, is she a bad person? I don't think so, but she isn't perfect either, she is just human. She feels something for Ben, but perhaps she isn't ready to accept him for what he is, and love is about acceptance, not about changing those we love. He needs help to find his way again and she is not responsible for his salvation, but if she loves him, maybe she could support him with her love and faith. It's her choice. In the end, he'll have to save himself but as Mazz says, he needs her help. In fact, what she did for him has already made a different and thanks to her he got rid of Snoke. But I'm digressing, an article about a movie shouldn't try to have an influence on people's moral compass, and enjoying stories about flawed characters doesn't mean you condone what these characters do. Another thing I find disturbing is how some people think once a person falls because they've lost their way or have made terrible mistakes there's no way back. What message is this? How is it right to show children that if a person makes very bad decisions it'll be impossible to come back home or try to find the right path again. I don't think this is a good message for children. It isn't a good message for anyone. It's a bleak and hopeless message.

[pessimisticpleasure]

The Walking Dead - A Few Thoughts On Rick Grimes

I’d like to start this opinion piece by stressing the word OPINION, giving you a spoiler warning for episodes up to and including ‘Still Gotta Mean Something’, and asking you to bear in mind that I love the character of Rick and that I’m writing this out of genuine confusion and sadness about the direction of his character recently.

Contrary to most fans, I’ve quite enjoyed the latest season of the Walking Dead, or parts of it at least (I mean, compared to last season we can’t really complain). There’s been some stand-out episodes and action but the one thing that is bothering me at the moment is some of the character choices that the writers are making. This includes the total sidelining and lack of development for Daryl, killing off Carl right when his character was finally flourishing and, the basis for this post, the hugely questionable actions of Rick which are never addressed in the show.

The first time I felt genuinely uncomfortable with the actions of the main group was back in season six when they killed the Saviours while they slept. At the time I questioned the actions of the so called ‘good’ group because that seemed like a very not good thing to do because, well, it isn’t, but I reminded myself that within the confines of the world they live in which is to be fair, ruthless and cutthroat that maybe it could be reasoned away.

And just as I tried to mentally justify that I have tried to condone Rick’s actions because up until recently I adored his character but towards the end of last season and this whole season  I’ve been really uncomfortable with the ‘good guy’ killing people who really don’t need to be killed. As Rick said himself ‘only one person has to die’ (and then, you know, killed like four people in the next scene). I have so little faith in him now that when he found the baby at the saviour base I was honestly surprised that he didn’t kill it. I think the expectation in any media is that the ‘good’ side kills as few people as possible outside of a designated ‘battle scene’, and perhaps if it was more cleverly written I might commend the show for turning that expectation on its head but the issue is that it isn’t and with Rick especially it seemed without much cause that this was his policy one minute and then suddenly, it wasn’t.

When Carl died I really thought that would be Rick’s turning point for him to think ‘yes, I have been a bit trigger happy of late, let’s maybe only kill people if we have to’. Instead they had Rick lie to Carl as he was dying and carry on the way he was and maybe you could argue grief if he hadn’t been doing that way before Carl died. Weirdly, instead of using his death to re-humanise Rick the writers seem to have put Negan on that path and while I’m enjoying seeing his human side (because he was starting to wear really thin on me) it feels so backwards.

Please don’t misunderstand me - I understand that Negan is bad, I am well aware he is extremely flawed. However viewing it objectively, he is actually better than Rick AT THE MOMENT (because Negan has definitely been evil forever whereas Rick’s fundamental character was not always like this).  It really bothers me that I’m meant to root against a character who actively attempts to kill as few people as possible while supporting Rick and his never ending murder spree of anyone who’s ever seen Negan. One key difference I will admit is that Negan seems to enjoy killing people whereas for Rick it is a genuine means to an end but for me that’s not enough of a distinction to condemn one while supporting the other, the intention is irrelevant when the action and the consequence are the same.

The thing is, I’m never sure if we’re supposed to question this sketchy element of Rick’s character because so few fans actually do. To have him allied with Morgan in his actions last night feels significant because Morgan is a character who is going crazy and having a crisis of conscience, so surely having Rick on the same killing spree is meant to force fans to second guess him? The latest episode is also called ‘Still Gotta Mean Something’ which to me implies that morality and honesty still have their place in the world despite Rick’s actions to the contrary. It also seemed significant that Rick’s most questionable action to date occurred in an episode with Negan at his most vulnerable and human. And yet many fans don’t even blink at what Rick does and I think a large part of that is that the writers are scared to call Rick out on committing horrible acts even when we see them play out on screen in case of fan backlash because, while people usually have other favourites, Rick has always been likeable and a good, sturdy protagonist and flipping this is a risk. They don’t even go so far as to have other characters question him on screen, not even Carl while he was there as the moral compass truly did. They’ve also kind of backed themselves into a corner because without a big event having him flip back seems nonsensical, really using Carl's death would have been perfect.

I see all the time arguments between Rick and Negan fans where the Rick fans defend him by saying ‘well, he’s good’. But I can’t buy that for a lot longer, no he’s not as bad as Negan but that doesn’t make him good, and without starting to back up that claim with evidence the writers are going to have an uphill battle because while some diehards will defend any of his actions to the death, I imagine that more people will begin to question where we draw the line between good and bad because it’s becoming more and more like the only difference is we haven’t spent the last 8 years watching the Saviours and we care about the characters we know rather than the good and bad being separated by different actions, goals, and values like they should be.

I understand that for a lot of people the primary draw of The Walking Dead is the action and having a protagonist who fuels this is what drives the show but from early on, this show set itself apart with the fantastic and rich characters who were a part of this action but also principled and well-developed. Rick was always someone who partook only in what violence had to occur, defending the prison, fighting his way out of Terminus, biting a guys neck out to save his son (I still sometimes fondly remember how badass that scene was) while also seeming to have a moral element - he fought Shane in season two when he displayed the same tendencies towards uninhibited violence that Rick has far surpassed now, kicked Carol out when she murdered their people even though she felt she was justified, and importantly believed in people enough to take them into the group even when they might be a danger, distinguishing himself from past villains he was pitted against.

I’m sad to say that the Rick I loved might be gone - either the writers have really lost their way or this long, confusing path is leading somewhere I don’t want to go. A one-eighty turn seems unlikely at this point but I’ve still got my fingers crossed - c’mon Rick, your son begged you on his deathbed to be how you used to! When they say ‘we’re taking the show back to season 4/5′ they better mean that literally, like everything that happened since was a dream and all the characters get a reset because my heart cannot take this any more.

[willidleaway]

Star Wars, episode 8

There’s been a lot of divisive back-and-forth about The Last Jedi on the Internet, with opinions diverging so hard towards the three groups of

it was the worst thing ever

it was the best thing ever

it was okay I guess

that as I prepared to do my part in helping fund Disney’s Fox acquisition, I couldn’t help but wonder whether people were seeing three different movies.

And as a matter of fact, they kind of were.

In short: Having three subplots just because you have three main characters ... maybe wasn’t a good idea. One of them had a lot of good moments if you could overlook some gaping holes (and giant regressions from the original trilogy), one of them wasn’t terrible but was also kind of pointless and didn’t have to be, and one of them was just mostly needlessly stupid.

Overall, I came out of the theatre more impressed than not, but this movie isn’t one that stands up terribly well to any extended thoughts about it. I also fear that in many places Episode IX may have to bite off more than it can possibly chew, as if this movie hasn’t done enough of that as it is.

Spoiler-y thoughts behind the Read More break.

In less short:

the Finn subplot was kind of okay;

the Poe subplot was inexcusably flawed;

and the Rey subplot was—well, it wasn’t the best thing ever and had a few critical points of badness, but it had a lot of good moments and I can’t help but enjoy them.

I really can, for the most part, treat these subplots as three different movies. Finn’s subplot branches a safe distance away from Poe’s subplot rather quickly and never really integrates properly back into it. Rey’s subplot doesn’t join back up with either of them until the very end.

This was true of Episode V too, to a large extent. But there, at least, the trio had the decency to split into two groups, with Luke’s subplot seeing Yoda teach him and Vader pursue him, and Han and Leia’s subplot leading them (eventually) to Cloud City. But Episode V had just those two subplots for the most part, and a relatively tight ensemble of characters and locations.

This episode ... not so much. I personally would really have liked to see Poe join an expanded version of the Finn subplot, with the existing Poe subplot dropped or considerably downsized, and I really think this would have improved the movie. But as this will never happen, I may as well give thoughts on the triple feature as it stands. So, thoughts on ...

Finn’s Big Adventure: It was okay.

I did find Canto Bight interesting—it’s a side of the galaxy you don’t normally get to see in Star Wars, which is normally all about either the military and political centres of conflict or the grimier parts of town. We get a peek at the economic elite life here, and it’s apparently equally disgusting in any galaxy.

But Rose never really developed into her own character, I’m afraid. She had a cursory backstory of suffering and a consistent compassion, but was mostly defined by love for her sister and for Finn. The codebreaker took so many moral swerves that it was impossible to ever get a great handle on him as a real character, and his apparent argument of ‘well the First Order and the Resistance both use machines from the same suppliers so it’s all part of the system, man’ was just weird and frankly kind of disconcerting. I’m sure I’ve oversimplified that in some way, but not by much, I think.

This subplot also had to quite rapidly manage its own mission expectations, going through a few stages:

we’re going to get hold of a master codebreaker to gain access to a critical weakness in Snoke’s ship

okay, we’re just going to use whatever codebreaker we've found to gain access to a critical weakness in Snoke’s ship

okay, we’re just going to die on Snoke’s ship and hope the Resistance survives because we can’t actually do anything now

okay, everyone else is just going to die too

wait is that the Resistance cruiser ramming into Snoke’s ship

and that probably didn’t help this subplot being so utterly unremarkable. Really, it was a little odd that this was the subplot they kind of chose to end on, with the Force-sensitive child slave sweeping and looking up at the sky.

And really the worst thing is that Captain Phasma (and by extension Gwendoline Christie) was simply tragically wasted as a villain, which is bad because Captain Phasma is clearly one of the more competent and awesome First Order military personnel. Plus, more screen time with Captain Phasma could have given us more development of Finn. It wasn’t too late to show more of her after Episode VII. It is now.

Who Framed Poe Dameron: Be careful what you wish for. I wished for Poe to have more screen time, and look what happened.

What we’ve got here, to quote Cool Hand Luke, is failure to communicate—not just between the Resistance personnel, but also between the writers and the audience. Let’s take this one failure at a time:

Poe’s demotion. Why does Holdo bring this back up as if it’s that important? How far down is the rank of Captain from Commander? (In most real-world navies and air forces, isn’t Captain actually one rank above Commander?) Is that proportionate to his act of insubordination per se, or more proportionate to the severe losses he caused through that insubordination? And how rigorous is the Resistance ranking hierarchy anyway? Can they even afford to be rigorous about it, given how short-staffed they are (even before the Battle of Crait)? Han went from starship captain to a General in the Rebel Alliance basically right after he had been frozen in carbonite for a good long while. Are you telling me that it would be so difficult for Poe to get that far back up in no time at all?

The secrecy around the evacuation. Why wasn’t there just a standing plan known to all Resistance fighters of ‘look if things get really bad we have a base we can fall back to with a decent set of resources, and its location is definitely on a need-to-know basis but just so you know we will fall back to it if the First Order really start hurting us, so please don’t mutiny’? If no one else, how did Leia not trust Poe with this plan when she trusted him with retrieving a piece of the map to Luke?

Crait. How is this place uncharted to the First Order? Is their map information just that bad? Shouldn’t it be on the First Order’s maps given that the son of erstwhile Generals of the Rebel Alliance is in the First Order leadership? Where do the First Order maps come from? And regardless, wouldn’t it have become charted the moment the Resistance cruiser came out of hyperspace to try and make a run to somewhere within reasonable distance of it? How does galactic cartography work, anyway? Is that even relevant, given that a First Order flagship should probably be able to detect transports launching from the cruiser with or without life signs and track their trajectory anyway?

Some of this, I think, is hurt by lack of significant context about exactly what the Resistance is, what the First Order is, what their relations are to the Empire and the Rebel Alliance and the new (short-lived) Republic, what their standing is in the galaxy, what resources they have, and so on. Certainly the original trilogy was never quite as rigorous in this sort of thing as the prequels were, but after just a few minutes of Episode IV, you saw enough to know that the Empire ruled the galaxy under an iron fist, and the Rebel Alliance was a ragtag volunteer army. Here, the First Order is ... governing? Is it governing anything? Does it have provinces? Is Snoke on billions of propaganda pamphlets, pictured in his best dressing gown? Does it claim to be a legitimate continuation of the Galactic Empire, or merely a de facto one? And what of the Resistance? Is it funded by the new Republic? Well, I know their political centre was wiped out in Episode VII, but maybe they actually have a civilian government in exile ... or don’t they? If they have access to old Rebel bases and equipment, how did they end up with only one cruiser by the start of this episode?

This seems like nitpicking, but I am genuinely left a bit confused by the scope of the Resistance, which is apparently fine to rebuild even if the new Republic it sought to defend is in tatters, its allies have abandoned it, and its military strength is now small enough to fit in its entirety inside the Millennium Falcon.

I get that this episode is going for an ominous ending like that of Episode V, but as of the end of Episode V, the Rebellion still actually had bases and cruisers and fighters and Admiral Ackbar. It was just that Leia was shaken by the apparent loss of Han, a capable if reluctant member of the Rebellion, and Luke was shaken by revelations about Darth Vader. As of the end of this episode, the Resistance fleet is just the Falcon. There are people skilled enough to take down an entire military fleet with one starship, but most of them are Time Lords in a TARDIS and they aren’t in this universe.

Also, I’m not sure whether to file this under Poe’s subplot or Rey’s, but ginger!Tarkin is just hilarious. I’m sorry, I’ve got nothing against Domhnall Gleeson as an actor, but I’m pretty sure he’s being directed to ham it up as much as he can and it’s ridiculous and silly to the point of being wonderful. At the same time, his character’s a bit useless and the movie seems painfully aware of it.

The Last Jedi (that is, the parts of The Last Jedi that were actually about, you know, The Last Jedi): Oh, Luke, what happened to you?

No, really, I want to know and these movies won’t tell me. I want to see what happened to Luke between Episodes VI and VII in this brave new Disney-enforced canon, and it’s really unfortunate that this was not a core concern of the sequels. We got some inkling of it in Episode VII, sure, and now get unreliable tellings of what happened between Luke and Ben/Kylo specifically. But this simply isn’t enough.

As it stands, everyone telling the story seems to agree that Luke definitely showed intent to kill Ben, however transient. And that is so jarring given that we’ve been here before and overcome it, in Episode VI. The original trilogy was all about Luke succeeding where Anakin failed, overcoming his darker side and even pushing Anakin to do so in the very end. Given this, where Luke stands at the start of this episode—having attempted to kill Ben, mistrusting Rey so much—is undeniably a very abrupt regression that lacks any significant development to support it. What did it take to break the unbreakable cinnamon roll?

This is a fundamental problem with the plotting of the sequel trilogy. In fact, I wonder if it should really have been a trilogy. The prequels, of course, were forced to be a trilogy because Lucas had pre-emptively numbered Episodes IV through VI. But while there is a massive gap between the prequels and the original trilogy—and even within the prequels, which jumped from precious child Anakin to teenaged Anakin to war-weary Anakin—that was excusable because nothing terribly interesting happened in that gap to the Skywalkers or the Jedi. Darth Vader kind of kept on Darth Vader-ing, Luke had a fairly peaceful moisture farmer’s life with some occasional piloting excitement, Obi-Wan and Yoda went on their eccentric hermit ways, the Emperor kept on with his Galactic Empire, and most of the Jedi stayed dead.

The gap between Episodes VI and VII, as it stands ... not so much. Apparently in that gap we had

the re-establishment of a peaceful Galactic Republic

the establishment of a new Jedi Temple

the training of Ben Solo

the rise of Snoke

the fall of the new Jedi Temple

the rise of the First Order

which frankly should have been a movie or two, maybe even a television series. (It really could work. The gap between Episodes II and III were the entire Clone Wars, which of course had its own lovely series, cut short by the Disney/Lucasfilm acquisition.) In fact, I’m beginning to think the rise of Snoke and the Knights of Ren should have been the core of Episode VII, with Luke going into self-imposed exile at the end, until one day a mysterious young woman shows up and holds out a lightsaber, her face full of hope ...

... but that will never happen now. I wonder if it even could have happened in the 2010s, given the age of the original cast and the scenes that would be required of them. And frankly, I wonder if Disney/Lucasfilm, instead of making the abrupt jumps that they did between the original trilogy and the sequels, should instead have been making what they now plan to after this sequel trilogy—movies following completely new characters with their own stories.

And this is the good subplot, huh? Yes, yes it is.

There are moments in this subplot that I can’t help but enjoy, which is not actually true for either of the other subplots. Luke reuniting with Artoo was when Luke felt most like himself. The return of Yoda, with a surprisingly faithful CGI rendition and perhaps a moment of overpowered mischievousness, was kind of amazing. Rey and Kylo joining forces (Forces?), however briefly, was frankly surprising in just how effective it was. Kylo has actually risen above being ‘a child with a mask’ and become a far more credible character, if not a credible villain. Rey’s moment of self-reflection was ... not subtle, but still worked for what it was. The revelation of her parentage was exactly what it needed to be.

And Luke’s projection ... was a bit ridiculous—hadn’t he cut himself off from the Force for quite a while? Wouldn’t he need to retrain a lot before he was able to do that again and/or possibly for the first time ever, given that this is the first time we’ve seen Force Telepresence, which I would have thought was some kind of transient Force bond with every living thing in the vicinity, except apparently even droids can detect your projection? (So it’s definitely just a new Force power, because we didn’t already have enough of those and definitely had rules around those sorted out really neatly ...) I mean, it was awesome, but kind of odd and didn’t seem to really have concrete rules.

And really, if you were willing to overlook Luke not being himself for the majority of the movie and what might be a fundamental flaw in the planning of this entire sequel trilogy, this subplot was pretty good (and the one that I’d wager the critics paid most attention to). It sounds like I’m saying that facetiously, but I’m only saying it half-facetiously.

The one rather unsatisfying thing was the fact of Snoke’s anticlimactic end after all of the buildup around him (more so than how it played out)—but if Darth Maul can come back from being sliced in half, perhaps Snoke can too. Hmm, maybe not in this case. And that’s a pity, because Snoke’s motivations surely more or less inform Kylo’s motivations, and both would have been great to learn more about.

Final thoughts: So, basically what the writers of Episode IX have to do is

figure out how the Resistance is going to be a credible threat to the First Order when right now it fits inside an old Corellian light freighter

work in Leia’s off-screen death and pass her part of the story on to someone appropriate

complete Kylo Ren’s arc, without Leia

figure out if Poe actually has an arc to complete given that Poe’s screen time was taken up by setting up Finn’s subplots and inciting mutiny without much of a result, and given that the only ship he can now fly is a light freighter

figure out if Finn is actually going to do something useful this time

make ginger!Tarkin look like a competent second-in-command

actually show Poe being competent and not deceived by his superiors

congratulate themselves on outdoing RTD and Moffat in writing themselves into a massively tight corner for the final episode

That seems like a fairly tall order, and I don’t hold out much hope for answers here. If George Lucas were in charge, we’d have more answers than we needed. But JJ Abrams is in charge, and I’m afraid any answers we get here are going to just give rise to a thousand-fold more questions.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

On the droids: BB-8 was fantastic, as always. I still can’t get over just how expressive the design is compared to Artoo or frankly even Threepio.

I guess we also saw BB-8′s Imperial—erm, excuse me, First Order counterpart, which I really wanted to see do more. Kind of like Phasma.

On slot machine guns: Professor Layton did it better.

On the critters infesting the Falcon: Chewie, how dare you eat them.

Also, I think we’ve now potentially got the Star Wars equivalent of Tribbles. How quickly did those things take over the ship, anyway?

On originality: Say, do you remember a Star Wars movie where

the rebels are chased off their main holdout on a snow-white planet;

the Force-sensitive protagonist trains with a reluctant teacher on a remote planet with a submerged X-wing, dips into a cavern to confront the dark side of the Force, and ultimately interrupts their Jedi training to help the rebels;

the non-Force-sensitive protagonists seek out a rogue to help them, but are double-crossed and face dire prospects;

someone says ‘I know’ in an unusual context;

and the Force-sensitive villain reveals the parentage of the Force-sensitive protagonist, who is then asked to join them so that together they can rule the galaxy?

I mean, it’s not a straight-up recycled Episode V the way that Episode VII was a blatant remake of Episode IV, and the original trilogy codified a lot of modern sci-fi filmmaking to the point where it would not be possible for a sequel to not have some overlap with the original. But, to quote the judge from Ace Attorney, two coincidences at the same time seems more like a pattern to me.

Thinking about the submerged X-wing makes me a little peeved, actually, because it feels like the writers basically throwing the regression of Luke’s character in your face through one succinct image. It also feels like lifting the X-wing out of the water and flying to Crait in person would have been a less cheap way for Luke to go out, and actually would have also made for an extra nice callback to Episode V. Really, it’s surprising that this was so overlooked.

Random thoughts on the trailers I saw before the feature presentation:

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom looks like it’s going to be gloriously silly. Also, Jeff Goldblum’s memetic line ... finds a way.

Ready Player One looks good (did I spot an Overwatch character?) although that could just be the Van Halen music. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s mostly the Van Halen music.

Eek, creepy large lifelike anime eyes in Alita: Battle Angel. It looks like one of those images you see on the Internet where you splice real-life photos together to represent a cartoon character, except now with a multi-million dollar budget.

Incredibles II. This is where it’s come to, is it, Disney/Pixar? I mean, I’m going to reserve judgement because the trailer was astonishingly short on content, but are you going to really start ruining every perfect movie you ever made?

I have no opinions on Avengers: Infinity War since I don’t follow the MCU, but involving the GotG makes me worried for their safety.