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rachelbethhines · 4 years ago

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Vintage Shows to Watch While You Wait for the Next Episode of WandaVision - The 60s

So the 60s is the era that Wandavision pulls most heavily from for it’s inspiration. So much so that one could make the argument that each of the first three episodes are all set in the 1960s. Episode one pulls from the early 60s with multiple Dick Van Dyke refences, episode two is very Bewitched inspired, and episode three is aesthetically very similar to The Brady Bunch which started in ‘69. As such it was hard to narrow down the list for this decade and I had to get creative in some ways.

1. The Andy Griffith Show (1960 - 1968)

The Andy Griffith Show gets kind of a bad rap now a days for being, supposedly, a conservative’s wet dream. People claiming it as such have apparently never actually seen the series. Oh yes, it’s very much set in white rural 60s America and will occasionally present the obliviously outdated joke, but the story of a widowed sheriff being the only sane man in a small town full of lovable lunatics, who prefers to solve his and others problems with negotiation and hair brained schemes as opposed to violence has far more in common with modern day Steven Universe than whatever genocidal fantasy fake rednecks have in their heads.

As the gif above shows Andy Griffith was very subtlety progressive for its time. Andy was a stanch pacifist, pro-gun control, treated drug addicts and prisoners with respect, and all the women he would date had careers, ect. and so on. It’s not a satire making any sort of grand political statements but the series had a moral center that was far more left than many realize.

But if it’s not a satire, then what type of comedy is it?

The Andy Griffith Show excels in what I like to call, ‘awkward comedy’. See everyone in Mayberry is far too nice to just come out and tell a character they’re making an ass of themselves, so therefore whoever is the idiot punching bag of the episode’s focus must slowly unravel as everyone looks on in helpless pity until said character realizes the folly of their ways and the townsfolk come together to make them feel happy and accepted once more. Wandavision takes this polite idyllic awkwardness and plays it up for horror instead of laughs.

2. The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961 - 1966)

The creators of Wandavision actually met with Dick Van Dyke himself to pick his brain and learn how sitcoms were made back then. Paul Bentley also took inspiration from Van Dyke in his performance of the sitcom version of Vision, while Olsen stated Mary Tylor Moore had a heavy influence on her character of Wanda. But more than just being a point of homage, The Dick Van Dyke Show was hugely influential in modernizing the family sitcom and breaking a lot of the unspoken traditions and ‘rules’ of the 50s television era. It’s also just really, really funny.

3.The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962 - 1965)

Bit of a cheat here. Alfred Hitchcock Presents actually started in 1955 as a half hour anthology show, but in ‘62 the show got a revamp and was extended into a full hour tv series. I knew I wanted The Twilight Zone to be covered in my episode one recap, but ‘The Master of Suspense’ couldn’t be forgotten. While The Twilight Zone reveled in the surreal and supernatural, Alfred Hitchcock pioneered the thriller genre and made real life seem dangerous, horrifying, and other worldly.

4. Doctor Who (1963 - present day) vs Star Trek (1966 - present day)

Just like how westerns dominated the air waves during the 50s, science fiction was the center of the cultural zeitgeist of the 60s. From Lost in Space to My Favorite Martian, space aliens and robots were everywhere. So naturally I had to name drop the two sci-fi juggernauts that still air to this today. If you thought that the rivalry between Star Wars and Star Trek was bad then you’ve never seen a chat full of Whovians and Trekkies duking it out over who is the better monster, the Borg or the Cyberman. But which one has the more influence over Wandavision?

Well Star Trek owes it’s existence to sitcoms. As with The Twilight Zone before it, Star Trek was produced by Desilu Productions and it’s co-founder and CEO, Lucille Ball, was the series biggest supporter behind the scenes, lobbying for it when it faced early cancelation. As with all things sitcomy, everything ties back to I Love Lucy in the end. However despite that little backstory, it would seem that the series has very little to do with Wandavision itself beyond being quintessentially American.

I would argue that Wandavision owes much to Doctor Who though. Arguably more so than any show mentioned in this retrospective. Time travel, alternate realities, trouble in quite suburbia, brainwashing, people coming back from the dead, ect... just about every trope you can find in Wandavision has also appeared in Doctor Who at some point. As a series that can go anywhere and do anything, Doctor Who was a pioneer of marrying genres in new and interesting ways.

5. Bewitched (1964 - 1972) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965 - 1970)

It’s hard to pick one series over another because they’re essentially the same show. A mortal man falls in love with a magical girl who upends their lives with magic filled hijinks as they try their best not to have their secret discovered by the rest of the world. And both have their fingerprints all over the DNA of Wandavision.

There’s only two core differences; Samantha and Jeannie have completely different personalities, with Sam being confident and knowledgeable and Jeannie being naïve and oblivious, along with their relationships with their respective men, Sam and Darrin being married and in love at the start of the series and Jeannie chasing after Tony in the beginning in a will they/won’t they affair, finally only getting together in the last season.

6. The Munsters (1964 - 1966) vs The Adams Family (1964 - 1966)

Fans of these two shows are forever sadden that there never was a crossover between them. Because they’d fit perfectly together. Both shows are about a surreal and macabre family living in American suburbia and disrupting the lives of their neighbors with their otherworldly hijinks. Sound familiar?

The main difference between the two shows is the way the characters viewed their placement in the world they inhabit.

The Munsters were always oblivious to the fact that didn’t fit in. They just automatically assumed everyone had the same personal tastes as them. Whenever they encountered anyone who behaved strangely around them they would write that person off as being the odd one rather than questioning themselves. As such the main cast was structured like a stereotypical sitcom family who just happened to be classic movie monsters.

The Addams were well aware that they were abnormal and they loved it! They lived life with in their own little world and didn’t care what anyone thought of them. As such the characters were far more colorful and quirky as individuals but there was little in the way of refences to other horror franchises beyond just a general love of the twisted and strange.

7. Green Acres (1965 - 1971) and the Rual-verse (1962 - 1971)

So the MCU is not the first franchise to bring viewers an interconnected universe to the small screen. Far from it, as sitcoms had been doing this for decades, starting with the ‘rualverse’. Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres were all produced by the same company and were treated as spinoffs of each other, complete with crossovers and shared characters and sets.

Of the three, the last show, Green Acres, has the most in common with Wandavision. A well to do businessman and his lovely socialite wife settle down in small town America on a farm in order to get away from the stresses of city life, only to find new stresses in the country. Eva Gabor, herself a natural Hungarian, plays the character of Lisa as Hungarian making her one of the few non-native born Americans on tv screens during the cold war. Despite her posh nature and original protests to the move, Lisa assimilates to the rural life far easier than her husband, Oliver. Who, as the main comedic thread, can’t comprehend his new quirky neighbors’ odd and often illogical behavior.

8. Hogan’s Heroes (1965 - 1971) and Get Smart (1965 - 1969)

So as comic fans have been quick to point out, it’s looking like both A.I.M. (Hydra) and Sword (Shield) will be players in the story of Wandavision. To commemorate that here’s two shows to represent those opposing sides. Although in truth, neither series has anything else in common with each other but I need to condense things down someway.

In Hydra’s corner we got Hogan’s Heroes. A show all about taking down Nazis from within.

I love, love, love, ‘robin hood’ comedies where a group of con artists try week after to week to pull one over the establishment. The Phil Silvers Show, Mchale's Navy, and Top Cat, just to name a few examples are all childhood favorites of mine. However while those shows had a lot of morally ambiguous characters, Hogan’s Heroes has very clear cut good guys and bad guys, cause the bad guys are Nazis and the show relentless makes fun of the third reich as should we all. In fact I was watching Hogan’s Heroes while waiting for the GA run off election results. Fortunately my home state decided to kick out our own brand of Nazis this year.

For Shield, we got the ultimate spy spoof, Get Smart. Starring, Inspector Gadget himself, Don Adams, as the bumbling Maxwell Smart. Get Smart, is a hilarious send up of Cold War espionage but the real selling point of the show, imho, is Max and his co-worker 99′s relationship. You can cut the sexual tension in the air with a knife all while laughing your ass off.

9. Batman (1966 - 1968)

First was Superman and then came Batman. Yet while Superman was a serious action show, Batman was a straight up comedy. Showcasing that superheroes could indeed be funny.

Also shout out for Batman being the only show on this list to have an actual crossover with it’s competitor, The Green Hornet.

10. Julia (1968 - 1971)

Since episode two features the first appearances of Herb and Monica, let’s highlight the first black led sitcom since the cancelation of Amos ‘n Andy over a decade earlier. The show focuses on single mother and military nurse, Julia, as she tries to live her life without her recently decease husband, who was killed in Vietnam, as she tries to raise their six year old son on her own.

The series is cute. It’s more of a throw back to earlier family sitcoms where there’s no fantasy and life lessons are the name of the game. It’s the fact that the main character is a single black woman is what made the show so subversive and important at the time.

Runner Ups

There’s much good stuff in the 60s, so here’s some others that didn’t make the cut but I would recommend anyways.

Car 54, Where Are You? (1961 - 1963)

I call this the Brooklynn 99 of the 1960s. Bumbling but well meaning Officer Toody longs to do good in the world and help anyone in need, but often screws things up with his ill thought out schemes. He often drags his best friend and partner, the competent but anxiety riddled, Muldoon into his escapades.

Mr. Ed (1961 - 1966)

The grandfather of the sarcastic talking pet trope.

The Jetsons (1962 - 1963 and 1985 - 1987)

Hanna-Barbera often took popular sitcoms and just repackaged them as cartoons with a fantasy theme to them. The Jetsons has no singular show that it rips-off but is rather more a grab bag of sitcom tropes that feature, robots, computers, and flying cars.

The Outer Limits (1963 - 1965)

The Outer Limits was The Twilight Zone’s biggest competitor in terms of being a sic-fi/horror anthology series.

Gillian’s Island (1964 - 1967)

The only comparison to WandaVision I could think of was that this is a sitcom about people being trapped in one place. But by that point I was running out of room on the list. Still it’s one of the funniest shows on here.

So yeah, this took longer than expected cause there’s a lot, here. Hopefully the 70s will be easier. Which I’ll post on Friday.

#wandavision #sitcoms #1960s #dick van dyke #bewitched

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engekihaikyuu · 4 years ago

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Hyper Projection Engeki Haikyuu - The View from the Top 2

What’s In Tokyo Interview Translation with Daigo Kotarou, Akana Ryuunosuke, and Kiyama Ryuu

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“The View from the Top 2” will be the closing chapter in Engeki Haikyuu’s five-and-a-half-year history. As the performance draws nearer and nearer, what is your current state of mind? Daigo: Since this will be the final production for Engeki Haikyuu, we’re definitely more enthusiastic than usual, and I’m so excited I’m thinking, “Can we get started already?” Akana: We’re working very hard at rehearsals and really putting everyone’s strengths together to show people this incredible climax for Engeki Haikyuu. We want to deliver the best show we can. Ryuu: I haven’t been back since “Fly High,” when I made my appearance as a representative at the national youth training camp. This will be the first show to feature Kamomedai High School and the first to feature a match of ours. When I think that this will also be the last time, I get a little sad. I don’t want to have any regrets, so right now I’m just exhausting myself giving it my all everyday at rehearsals.

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Full interview and more photos under the Read More! Please do not repost my translations

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Daigo: Ryuu-kun hasn’t been with us for about a year and a half, but just like the last time we were in a show together, he is a kind senpai who looks after me and speaks to me very candidly. When I mess around and drop honorifics like, “Hey, Ryuu!” he’ll just mess around right back and say, “I’m your senpai, you know!” (laughs) Ryuu: It’s already a running gag now. (laughs)

Daigo: Ryuu-kun has always had such a welcoming aura ever since we first met, so it doesn’t really feel like there’s any distance between us. I can ask him for advice about anything. But this time we have the Kamomedai High cast in addition to Ryuu-kun, and so I keep carefully probing around to see when it might be good to talk to them (wry smile). But Ryuu-kun always bridges the gap, and I’m very grateful for how attentive he is. Also, Ryuu-kun's movements and dancing are really clean and precise. I kind of want to mimic him, so I’ve actually been observing him in secret for research. He hides such amazing potential! I’m talking about all this because this is an interview... but I don’t actually want to admit all this. (laughs) Ryuu: Kota doesn’t praise me like this at rehearsals so I’m really happy to hear that! Man, interviews are great. (big grin) Everyone: (laughs)

Since starting rehearsals, what’s the teamwork on Kamomedai been like? Ryuu: We haven’t yet managed to gather everyone in the cast yet. But when it comes to the cast members who are at rehearsals right now, we’ve been trying to define our individual roles little by little, and gradually in response we’ve been getting more coordinated as a team.

Kiyama-san, do you have a specific image in mind of what kind of team you want to create? Ryuu: I talked about it with our director, Worry Kinoshita-san, and with the elements we aim to show on-stage, we'll be a team that’s a sort of hybrid between Shiratorizawa and Aoba Johsai. This the Spring High National Tournament quarterfinals, and we’re the powerhouse team that stands in Karasuno’s way. So the image we’re aiming for is, “When they’re strong, they’re strong, and when they’re excellent, they’re excellent.” And I want to really get into that aspect.

From your previous experience, do you have any particular advice for your teammates? Ryuu: The parts that you create as a team make up a huge portion of Engeki Haikyuu, and the way we craft this play is very different from other plays. At the very beginning, I did tell them, “It’s going to be tough, but it’s important that you get used to the Engeki Haikyuu method first. Let’s work hard!”

Daigo-san, Akana-san, this will be your 4th time with this production, so how has the Karasuno Team powered up compared to before? Akana: We’ve become a really solid unit! Things like, “Right now, we should have this,” or “Now is the time when we have to do that.” Any one of us can just give a little comment like that, or judge the atmosphere, and we get to work. We don’t even have to talk, we’ve gotten to a point of incredible mutual understanding. Daigo: We’ve spent so much time together, so now we don’t even have to talk to be in unison on counts or with timing, so rehearsals proceed really smoothly. Of course we discuss the acting portions with Worry-san, and I hope that we can have a nice friendly rivalry with everyone on Kamomedai as we work to create this play.

I feel like this will unfold into a really speedy match that keeps us on the edges of our seats, but how are you personally thinking of crafting all this? Daigo: Rather than a series of scenes with really hectic matches, we want to draw focus to individual emotional moments... In particular with Karasuno Ace, Azumane-san, but each individual player’s emotional journey too, and Hinata and Hoshiumi’s “Battle of the little giants.” We’re going to show our relationships with all of our past rivals even more we did before. It’s going to be a little bit different from how we’ve presented things up to now where it’s felt like a festival no matter where you look around on-stage. We’re paying more attention to the drama of it, and I feel like this is turning into a production with an appropriately dramatic ending. Akana: From last spring’s “The Strongest Challengers,” we’ve been steadily progressing with all of the Spring High matches. Even if it’s a really tough match, in their hearts, the players are having fun just playing volleyball. That’s the image we’ve portrayed, and for those of us on that stage, we’re also feeling the exact same and having fun. So I just want to look the Kamomedai cast in the eye and together enjoy the fun of volleyball.

What about you, Kiyama-san? Ryuu: As a team, we’re being very conscious of becoming one cohesive unit, and for me as Hoshiumi Kourai, I’m thinking about how much influence Hinata and Kageyama will have on me and how best to show that. I also personally want to be able to push Nosuke and Kota with my acting. As an actor, the biggest aim is to master the role and see how much you can move people’s emotions, and this is of course essential for Engeki Haikyuu as well. So that’s what I really want to focus on.

Now I know that Engeki Haikyuu rehearsals can be particularly rigorous, but do you also add on additional voluntary practices and training? Daigo: I do 100 shuttle runs every time we finish rehearsals. I sweat it out, go home, eat, take a bath, prep for the next day, and then go straight to sleep! It’s basically exactly the life of an athlete on a team. (laughs) Akana: Everyday after we finish rehearsals, I go with Yamamoto Ryousuke (Tsukishima Kei’s actor) for extra weight training. Normally I do a bit of weight training on my own even during rehearsals, but in order to make my body even bigger than before, I haven’t skipped a single session. I’ve also been very conscious about my protein and carb intake. Daigo: It’s crazy how much he can eat. On Nosuke’s desk at rehearsals, there’s basically a mountain of rice balls. Akana: Yeah. Even if I feel like I’m gonna throw up, I make sure to eat every bite. (laughs) Ryuu: After “Fly High,” I actually started training with a parkour instructor in order to prepare for our match against Karasuno. Akana: Ehh?! That’s insane! Daigo: That’s why all your movements are so clean!! Ryuu: Parkour is a sport where you eliminate all unnecessary movements, so adding my parkour training, I now have more variation and range in what I can do for this show. All of the ways in which I can express myself have expanded thanks to other shows as well, so I would like to keep on this track.

And now I’d like to ask about your memories from past tours. Can you tell us about a particular scene or a particular line that left an impression on you? Daigo: For me the tour that left the biggest impression on me was our most recent one, The Battle of the Trash Heap. It was so fun to be in a play together with Nekoma’s Takato-kun (Kozume Kenma’s actor). Even after the tour, we continue to contact each other in our spare time, and I’m really happy that our relationship has progressed to that point. He motivated me so much, and because of him I now aspire to become someone who can also influence everyone around me the way he did. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Takato-kun is an inspiration to me.

Do you have any motivational or supportive words from that beloved senpai then? Daigo: I was honestly so happy that Takato-kun, whom I admire and respect, said to me, “I love Kota’s acting.” And I’m sure that he’ll come to see this tour as well, and I don’t want to disappoint him, so I’m really keeping his words close to my heart (laughs). I want to face this play with complete sincerity and with all my heart.

Akana-san, do you have any scenes you can’t forget? Any lines that are precious to you? Akana: This isn’t a specific scene, but what’s precious to me is Engeki Haikyuu itself, because it really taught me how precious it is to see something through to the end together with your teammates. We move around so much it’s absolutely exhausting, but the sense of accomplishment you feel when you safely accomplish a tour is incredible. And it makes me happy because every time I can also really feel how much I myself have grown and improved. I feel like this production hasn’t just helped me establish the baseline for my acting career, it’s taught me important things for just life in general. .

And for you, Kiyama-san? Ryuu: The tour that left an impression on me is “Fly High.” For “Fly High,” I was part of the youth camp and even with just that, I was like, “I have this much stuff to do?!” So it was rough, but the Karasuno cast had about double the amount we had to do, and even so everyone was just at heart having fun with volleyball. That left an impression on me. I can pound my chest and say that we made a really fun show! The fact that we pulled it off and met our goal is a source of pride and confidence for me.

Kiyama-san, what’s the most important thing you’ve received from your time with Engeki Haikyuu? Ryuu: “Don’t leave people behind.” In any sequence, if even one person loses count, everything comes to a halt. And when that happens, there are people who will get appropriately upset with you. It might feel like they’re being strict and unforgiving of your mistakes, but it’s because they think of you as an equal, and so they have expectations of you and love for you. And that is why I’m able to get a grip and never give up, no matter how rough it gets. Daigo: I feel like if you go through the Engeki Haikyuu experience, it really improves your social skills and thoughtfulness. “Even if it’s hard, don’t run away.” “What should I do to best foster my relationships with these people?” These are things above and beyond what an actor normally thinks about. But if you hold back for even a moment and slip up, people get hurt. We have acrobatic routines that are that precarious, so it's really important to be constantly communicating with each other and to never let up our focus. I feel that through Engeki Haikyuu, and of course other shows too, I've really taken to heart that this level of consideration is necessary for everyday life too.

And lastly, please give us something that those of us who are looking forward to the show should keep an eye out for. Ryuu: This work is going to cram in a huge amount of content, so it may be difficult to grasp everything on one watch, but there is a very important them eat the center of all of that. I think that it’ll be a production that fans of the manga will enjoy, of course fans of Engeki Haikyuu, and even people who may be watching for the first time. We’re in the midst of putting all of our effort into making sure of that. Please come to see our gallant figures one final time. Akana: The focus will be on Hinata and Hoshiumi’s “Battle of the Little Giants,” on the bond between Hinata and Kageyama, and the relationships between Karasuno High and all of the rival schools that we’ve defeated to get here. As Ryuu-kun said, this production is going to have a lot of things to keep an eye out for. Engeki Haikyuu is about Passion, Courage, and deep Emotion, so I hope that people will come to see us at the theater and take that all in. Daigo: In the manga, there’s a famous line that Coach Ukai says during the Shiratorizawa match: “Volleyball is a sport where you’re always looking up.” We hope we’re able to convey all of the emotion behind those words to the audience, especially given the current circumstances. We’ll try with all of our might to do so through this play. Engeki Haikyuu began about five-and-a-half-years ago, and the time that our generation has spent running with this baton is about two years. Engeki Haikyuu is popular around the world, and this production is one where I can pound my chest and say, “It’s fun! It’s interesting and great!” I think I will be able to convey that to many many people. I would love for you to see that with your own eyes until the moment that the final curtain falls. Please look forward to it!

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You can read the original Japanese interview here: (x)

Please do not repost my translations! This includes screenshots of bits and pieces taken out of context, especially if they don’t link back to this full post. If you appreciate the work I do for this blog and want to support my translation efforts please consider donating a ko-fi! (x)

#Haisute #Engeki Haikyuu #Hyper Projection Engeki Haikyuu #Final Show #View from the Top 2 #interview translation #translation #akana ryuunosuke #daigo kotarou #kiyama ryuu

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snorlaxlovesme · 4 years ago

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full thoughts on the chaos walking movie? I want to hear more about it lol I haven’t seen it yet

it just...it felt like TKONLG but without EVERY GOOD PART, you know?

scene-wise, the closest individual scene we had to anything in the book was maybe the scene where Viola read Todd’s mother’s book to him? (even that wasn’t the same bc that was also the scene where we find out he’s illiterate, and he lets her read it right away, so there was no deep-rooted embarrassment about not being able to read). also it happened in Farbranch. BUT, like it captured the emotion of the OG scene a little, where Viola is reading to Todd and he’s hearing his ma’s words and getting emotional about it.

but all the stand-out scenes from the book, i.e. saying goodbye to Ben and Cillian, meeting the girl and getting hit in the head with a branch and bandaging her anyway, ALL of the Aaron fights, the bridge, the massacre of Farbranch, the song of Here, the Spackle, Todd’s illness, the waterfall scene, Haven, NONE of that was in the movie. so imagine all the really important and powerful moments gone

also all the overarching themes? those are gone too. todd becoming a man is HUGE deal in the books. even in his horrible awful town he just wants to feel like he BELONGS and he’s the one person in the entire town being ostracized. two of the biggest secrets in Todd’s whole world are kept from him for the majority of the book because he’s “not yet a man”. it’s important to him. and once todd realizes the connection between Prentisstown maturity and murder, he spends the rest of that book WISHING he could be a killer. wishing he could have that kind of strength and seeing himself weak for not being able to kill.

all of that?? gone. movie!Todd often chants the familiar “I am Todd Hewitt” (and sometimes “be a man”) when he’s nervous or trying to cover something in his Noise, and has a little tiff with Ben and Cillian at the beginning of the movie bc the Mayor sees Todd as a man while Ben and Cillian do not. (that’s a weird little bit though bc the movie never really explains why the Mayor had such an interest in Todd). but that’s about it in terms of coming-of-age material in the movie. and about murder. seeing as he doesn’t. kill. the. Spackle. let that sink in.

also like. the Noise is shown as a CONCEPT but not as a theme. the THEME of Noise is that, and I quote

“In this world of information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.”

or perhaps

“Knowing a man’s thoughts ain’t knowing a man.”

or even

“Knowledge is dangerous and men lie and the world changes, whether I want it to or not.”

in this movie, Noise would be described as like. a nuisance at worst and a superpower at best. you can hear most of every man’s thoughts in the movie, though not a constant, never ending stream. just just bits sporadically at either plot-convenient or comedic times. the Mayor (and at one point Ben, and at one point Todd) uses his Noise to construct illusions around people kind of similar to that Jake Gyllenhaal villain in Spiderman: Far From Home.

but neither of these two main examples really SHOW the themes that Patrick Ness showed us in the books. that Noise is powerfully ANNOYING; that it can quickly break down relationships between groups of people; that it can be manipulated making large lies still possible.

like, remember when in the books, Todd and Viola get to Farbranch and poor Todd is absolutely GOBSMACKED that 1. the women are ALIVE and 2. the men and women are living together?? in harmony?? what the eff?? and you see Hildy in Tam’s Noise and just how much they genuinely love each other and Todd is like “damn we ain’t in Prentisstown anymore Manchee”. and you can just see based on the contrast that Prentisstown people are a whole different breed compared to the kindness of Farbranch?

in the movie Todd has a few moments of inner dialogue where he’s like “oh man that’s a woman. that’s nuts” and then we move on. his world should be turned upside down here and its not. and the difference between the two towns is that they kinda just made it seem like, yeah, Noise is annoying so we have the men sleep separately from the women so we all get a little peace, and it’s fine. that’s how Farbranch deals with it. it all just feels very blasé

(i can’t remember specifically where this happens, probably either in Farbranch or cutting back to the Prentisstown men getting ready to march, but at some point a leader ends up saying something to a crowd of people and you can see how just one sentence spreads through an entire group of men and how they all start amplifying it and getting more and more panicked and i did think the mob mentality was cool. it reminded me of the beginning of The Ask and the Answer were the Mayor is addressing the citizens of Haven and you get that moment where the whole crowd flinches over the words of one man.)

and in all of this I’ve barely mentioned Viola. my wonderful girl. how they’ve massacred her story. god.

all of Viola’s development for the first half of the book is tanked from the start bc you SEE the crash, you see her stealing food from Ben and Cillian’s house (that’s the inciting incident of the movie), she talks to the Mayor in Prentisstown almost immediately after Todd finds her and his Noise helps everyone locate her, she talks to Todd a lot before getting to Farbranch after they escape Prentissown. the book does a LOT of work for Viola by having her mute and scared for the beginning and slowly showing how she comes to trust Todd. and how even after their incessent bickering in Farbranch they still choose to escape together because they know the army is after them specifically and they’re all the other has. that progression is really important in the book, as well as afterwards when we see how snarky Viola can actually be when speaking, how she thinks this entire planet is BACKWARDS and she can’t wait til her ship comes and shows them a thing or two about how to live.

movie Viola, well. she wants to find a way to communicate with her ship. she’s under the impression that since her scout ship crashed they’re gonna assume she’s dead and leave her behind. even though the Mayor brings up the settlers a lot after he learns about them, Viola curiously never really brings them up in any other context besides they need to come and get her. like it really made it sound like she planned on calling them, having them scoop her, and then they’d all just fucking leave, i guess. i don’t know what her end goal was besides CALLING HER PEOPLE which became the main point of the movie. the Mayor trying to find Todd and Viola so he could....use her to contact the ship?? that was also kind of unclear. and Viola trying to get to a communicator possibly so she could get the hell out of dodge. idk if that was her actual plan, but it was certainly what Todd was thinking, enough to where I was wondering if he was going to sabotage her mission in order to force her to stay (yeah. yeah. he had that energy about him and it was grosss)

and quickly, since all the animals couldn’t talk the way they do in the book, Manchee was more of a cute prop than anything. i could have gotten over it if he was useful in any way, but he never even like attacked a dude to save Todd or anything like that. so when he died it was sad on a dog-level but not a character level, since besides sitting next to Viola like twice while she cried he really added nothing to the story. also the shock of animal death was greatly reduced already since Todd’s horse that he used to escape Prentisstown from got a broken leg after he rode him off a cliff, so Todd used the knife (off-screen, thank god) to put him down. so Manchee getting killed was kind of lessened a little since my man Whiskey got nixed like 40 min earlier in the film.

this is getting long so I’ll cut it here since I’m gonna probably post about this a thousand more times. but yeah. if you watched it completely divorced from the books you would probably think “that was a cool concept but also what was the point of any of that” which is basically what most people thought based on the review headlines i’ve read. and if you are an avid book fan you’re gonna think you’re watching something else entirely.

#chaos walking #chaos walking movie #cw movie #chaos walking spoilers #violaeade #long post #ill def be posting about this more bc its all ive thought about for days #@ everyone i am always willing to discuss chaos walking #if you wanna send me an ask or DM me im open for business #kelly got an ask

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kaizokuou-ni-naru · 5 years ago

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Some Reasons I Love One Piece

So I set up a poll to ask what I should do for my 4000 follower milestone, and something like 85% of the responses to my poll said you wanted me to do a compilation of stuff I love about One Piece! So hell yeah, get ready for me to talk about pirates for way too long (a sentence that could also serve as an accurate blog description).

Before that though, lemme just say- thank you all! Seriously! When I started this blog I figured I’d be extremely lucky to end up with like a thousand followers, and now I have four times that and it just keeps growing, which just constantly baffles and amazes me. I adore every one of you, and you’re providing me something fun and productive to do in quarantine, and I love you for that.

Anyways! Let’s talk good shit.

Let’s start with Luffy. The whole story starts with him, after all.

I love Luffy, just as a character. He’s one of my favorite protagonists in anything, ever, when ordinarily protagonist characters don’t really appeal to me all that much. I genuinely think he might be my favorite character in One Piece now that I sit down and really think about it. I love how unconventional of a main character he is- he actively shuns the idea of being a hero and is in fact the most chaotic neutral motherfucker on the planet, and yet he’s so friendly and loyal and fun that you straight up can’t not love him both in-universe and out.

I also love the Strawhats just in general, both as a group and individually. Found family is one of my all-time favorite story tropes, and they do it better than like, the vast majority of stories out there. They’re all so completely unique from each other and play off each other so well and they really do feel like a family. I love how often Oda just shows them fucking around and hanging out. (One of my only gripes with post-timeskip is how much time they spend split apart.) I think it says a lot about them that I struggled so much when someone asked me to rank the Strawhats a few months back and had to rearrange the list like four times. I just!! Love them all!!

One of my favorite things about One Piece is that it’s the story of Luffy’s rise, and that it occurs in a world that’s so solidly scaled and well-developed that all progress he makes actually feels tangible and impactful. Some of my favorite moments in One Piece are the ones where we can see how far he and the crew have come and see other people’s reactions. His reappearance at Sabaody after the timeskip is my favorite scene in the manga, full stop. His entrance at Marineford and all of the Decks of the World cover stories delight me for the same reason.

Speaking of the worldbuilding, god it’s so good? I think one of the greatest potential strengths of a long manga is that its just got so much time to establish and build on so much information, and sometimes that leads to mangaka kind of tying themselves in knots with too much lore and explanation, but Oda just fucking nails it.

I recently read a conversation during Zou where the Strawhats are talking to Inuarashi, Nekomamushi and the Wano folks about all their mutual acquaintances on the Roger Pirates- Brook asks about Crocus, Franky mentions Tom, etc- and I had a moment where I realized how in pretty much any other series all those connections might seem contrived, but in One Piece it works so well. So much time has been dedicated to establishing all these facts and characters and connections over years and hundreds of chapters that when they do come together, it just feels so satisfying.

Like, at Twin Cape Crocus mentions he was a ship’s doctor and then mentions Roger as the Strawhats leave, at Thriller Bark we find out he’s Brook’s friend, at Sabaody in conversation with Rayleigh we find out for sure which ship he was a doctor on and that he joined them to look for Brook’s crew- and it all just falls together so nicely. One Piece is maybe the strongest series I’ve ever read in terms of how it establishes its characters and concepts and how they all fit into the world and cross over and connect with each other. The world of One Piece is huge, but it also feels so alive and interconnected, and that’s just wonderful.

I love how hopeful One Piece is. I was talking to a friend a couple months ago who doesn’t watch it, and she kind of dismissed it as ‘a show where nobody dies.’ Which- setting aside the fact that that’s just not fucking true- my first response to that was, “So?” I think it’s nice that we can all know for pretty much certain that the Strawhats will achieve their dreams in the end. There’ll be a happy ending, and Luffy’s going to be Pirate King, we’ve known that from the start. The fun is in seeing how they get there.

Aside from a few specific cases, I also really like how Oda does his character writing just in general. The female characters in One Piece generally get a bad rap, largely from people who haven’t watched the show and judge it on the (admittedly exaggerated) artstyle, but fuck if I haven’t seen such a widely varied and developed and flawed female cast writing-wise since- I don’t even know. Oda does a really good job of giving his characters, both male and female, unique and memorable personalities, which is super fucking impressive considering just how many there are. Similarly, I’m impressed by how new characters are introduced without getting repetitive or annoying, and very often those characters are really fantastic. I could talk about all the different One Piece characters I love and why, but we would legitimately be here all day.

I also love how unlike a lot of long-running series like this, characters don’t just go away when their time in the spotlight is done. In just about any other series, characters like Buggy and Coby and Crocodile would just be gone and never to be heard from again after they’ve served their purpose. Instead you have the stupid clown villain from the second arc becoming a fucking shichibukai several hundred chapters later, and it makes sense in the context of the story! The whole concept of the cover stories works really well towards this aspect of One Piece, letting us see what all these other characters are up to without taking attention off the main story. This fits in with the interconnectedness I mentioned earlier, too.

And I like how (and I know there are people who will argue this, I have had them in my inbox, but I do not care) One Piece has stayed so strong for so long. I’ve mentioned before that both of my favorite big arcs are pre-timeskip- Alabasta, for the civil war storyline and great supporting cast and villains, and W7/Enies Lobby, for the epic emotional highs and lowers + ANOTHER great supporting cast. But like, I’ve been enjoying the more recent arcs just as much! Honestly, now that I’ve finished Dressrosa, I think it definitely ranks up there among my favorites as well, for how chaotic and fun and high-stakes the whole thing felt when I was binging through it. I’m only a few chapters into Whole Cake Island so far but it seems very promising, and I’m really excited to get to Wano from what I’ve seen of it.

I haven’t even really touched on the art yet, either. I know the artstyle turns some people off of the series, for how kind of cartoony it is sometimes and how different it is from most other series, but honestly I just love it. I wasn’t sure about it at the start but it grew on me very fast. Hell, I have a whole tag (which I should use more) dedicated just to appreciation of pretty panels.

And the action scenes in One Piece are so fun and expressive and creative and almost always at least a little silly just by the nature of Luffy’s powers. I don’t think I’ve ever been bored during a One Piece fight. And the splash pages are frequently just breathtaking. I’m a writing person, not an art person, so I’m bad at putting this kind of thing into words nearly as well, but- yeah. One Piece Art Good. (My friend Narramin also has a really, really good series of posts about how great the visual storytelling in OP is starting here that I highly recommend, if you’re interested.)

Finally, I think my favorite thing about One Piece is that it’s all one story, start to end. I kind of touched on this above with the worldbuilding thing, but you can see what a ridiculous degree of thought and planning Oda has put into his story, and how well everything comes together. It’s the main aspect that got me to give One Piece a try in the first place- I heard how good and thought-out the long term storytelling is, and I just eat that shit up. I don’t think I’ve ever had the level of trust in a creator to handle and end their story satisfyingly that I have in Oda. It’s a good feeling.

#took me so long to write this post that im now like #a third of the way to 5k #which is ridiculous #feel free to ask me to elaborate on any of this!!#i write better meta when i have a single topic to focus on fjdsh #which is one of the reasons this took so long #so yeah ask box open!!#jonny talks #one piece #not japanese #long post #opmeta

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norgestan · 4 years ago

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crisana, norandro, jorgeva and amira x dani

ha, anon just wanted all the canon couples. fair enough!

CRISANA:

see, skam s3 is my favorite season of all time, but it has never been because of the love story. isak's story hits in a lot of sensitive places for me, and isak was also the first main character i encountered that was my age. i have a really special connection to him for that reason. on the other hand... i enjoy evak for what it is, but i never saw a future for their relationship after the season ended. in a lot of ways, isak's season ended just as their relationship started, a trope that i've never liked because how am i supposed to think that they will last? how am i supposed to know how they will work as a couple? it's just, ugh.

i had similar thoughts about crisana when i watched s2, except that the love confession scene and cris as a character made it even harder to get into the couple. moreover, the way people brush other characters' roles and presence on other seasons because they're so caught up on cris and joana is like... blegh. like it makes me forget that they're actually a well-written couple at times. because imo, og they never did anything really interesting with evak once they got together. but eskam........ oh, dear eskam.

there's something so beautiful about thinking of all the girls, the teenagers that will grow up watching a relationship like theirs on popular media. their entire subplot (??? can i even call it that) in s4 is proof of how GREAT of a relationship they turned out to be. like, i just wanna SCREAM thinking about it because, how is it possible that eskam saw evak and said "we're gonna make this SO good and we'll take our time and then tie it up in an incredibly satisfying and emotional way" and then did exactly that!!!!!! the way they respect each other, communicate, genuinely try to get to each other without dumb miscommunication. the way they understand each other and lift each other up! the way joana knew how to recognize cris' intelligence when everyone was telling her she's dumb, the way cris knows how to make joana feel worth it and show her affection in such a selfless, loving way. their last scene on joana's pov in s4 was the first time i cried during that season, just because it was all wrapped up so beautifully. because eskam understood that although the appeal of their relationship comes from the soulmate status of every evak couple, they had to also put in serious work to make it all work and they also managed to get that across with grounded drama, and also a hopeful message for people struggling with mental disorders. like AAAAAAAAAAAAA god what a great couple they are. maybe i'm too much of an eskam bootlicker but they're genuinely the best evak there is. i'll die on this hill. i'm so happy young wlw get to watch them as a guideline of what they should expect of a relationship.

NORANDRO: already done :)

JORGEVA:

i mean... it's eskam's fault, without a doubt. i love what eskam did with them in s1: the change of pacing, the way they created jorge, the little story changes to make it more nuanced, i think come together in a pretty satisfying way to show a teenage romance with no real support to last for more than a while. i don’t think eskam fully got the gist of what jonas was supposed to be, but it’s for the better if we think of the message in season 1. for that reason, jorge is like the one jonas who i really wouldn’t mind coming back to his eva. so why don’t i like them?

the answer is simply that i don’t enjoy their trope and i don’t think eskam made a real case of eva and jorge getting back together. they work well as friends, sure, and it’s clear as day that jorge still has feelings for eva, sure. but like, what tells me that they’re just ready to go all in again? eva goes through a really great arc and i would definitely agree she’s in a good place to be in a relationship again, but we know NOTHING about jorge’s journey. he’s just, silently pining on eva and that’s it. i do think it’s sweet and the hints of their lost romance throughout the show are wholesome, but there’s just nothing more to it. jorge and eva work AMAZINGLY as friends! i don’t see why they should push a romantic endgame for them. in my head, eva kissing jorge at that party was just a mesh of the excitement of a new era, the nostalgia of ending highschool, the high of being on this place with someone she really cares about, stuff like that, but it just ends there, and it’s great that way. nothing about eva’s character really led to her aching to be in a relationship again, and for me it feels right to end things with her being single and surrounded by great friends.

MAYBE if eskam had devoted some time showing us their progress and romantic potential instead of trying to convince us that kasim was a real, compelling character. maybe. lol.

DAMIRA:

(god, i don’t know how long this will be LOL)

i have. so many thought about this fucking pairing. let’s see what we can do LOL. the thing about damira is that i don’t think it’s a pairing that eskam had in mind when they laid out the first two seasons. the little hints of a friendship/childhood crush that happened during cris’ season really got the fandom and they quickly became the most popular non-canon ship in the show, so that’s where i think eskam said “okay, let’s run with this”. but it’s just...... meh. like i can tell that relationships like crisana were carefully crafted (well implemented in nora’s season, greatly wrapped up in amira’s season) but i cannot say the same for dani and amira. it’s almost like virihugo, where they just started giving each other Eyes on the middle of season 3, out of NOWHERE. it just feels forced to me and so i never really felt anything for the couple in question... like, for starters, i think nora and miquel were WAY more shippable than those two, strictly talking about their setup.

if you ever saw any of my posts during s4 then you should know how i actually feel about how they developed their romance (check my anti damira tag for more?) and i don’t wanna go through all those specific points again... but damira is not only an infuriating romance, but also a bad pairing in a narrative setting. like, damira clearly exists to answer amira’s questions about how would the future of a romance with a white guy would be, right? does she get an answer? no she fucking doesn’t, their final clip is like “after all these weeks, we still have no idea so we’re gonna cut things short, go back to our initial dynamic, and wait to see if amira any of us change our minds <3″. so like, even in that sense damira is a HUGE waste of time, and just like everything that happens to amira during her season it has no lasting impacts on her character or her settings.

and personally, i love couples where they’re both equal, and communicate at last, and both make great efforts to change so the relationship can flourish. this is why i offer so much praise to norandro and crisana, where in the first couple both character go through tremendous character growth and work through their problems individually before getting together, and in the second couple they show them clashing and fighting just to display their resolutions and show how willing they are to actually talk to each other and keep their relationship stable. dani and amira, on the other hand.... blegh. eskam wants me to think dani is a knight in shining armor for liking amira but that’s all he ever does. he doesn’t defend her in front of his friends, he doesn’t make efforts to get to know her and her world, he doesn’t communicate his real feelings to her, and the one time he did he humiliated her in public. like, idk, like, even MIQUEL explicitly defended nora when his roommates berated her for not drinking alcohol LOL.

at the end of the day the problem with damira is that it completely misses the point of yousana and its target audience. making yousef a white guy is not necessarily a bad choice if you implement it well (which eskam didn’t do btw), but you have to take into account that sana’s season exists to make a primarily white christian-raised audience relate and stand up for the muslim characters in the show. when the lazier partner of the main couple who makes zero efforts to work on the relationship happens to be white, it just means people will be sympathetic of him, and nor amira - and that’s exactly what happened in the show. people either thought amira was being too harsh by laying conditions for dani before they even began dating and making sure he respected her boundaries, or just wanted all the drama to go away soon so amira could kiss dani by the end of the season. so like, yeah. terrible stuff.

i would’ve liked damira’s impact on the season and amira’s journey a lot more if it had been about a one sided childhood crush from amira’s part. i thought their friendship was charming up to s3, and i simply hate that dani is literally in no way an older brother figure for the girl squad, since it’s a dynamic that’s lacking in the show and it would be a nice way to make dani be some sort of non-creepy eskild for the girl squad (but noooo, his only interactions w the gs are hooking up with eva and dating amira. smh). it would’ve been fun to have amira intimately dealing with those feelings just to learn a lesson by the end of it, at the time that she also falls for her muslim love interest - which is actually the isak/jonas/even dynamic when you think about it, also something that eskam didn’t really do with cris’ season. but also, all of this would mean that eskam had to do the good writing thing for s4, which they kinda forgot to do throughout the entirety of the season so, yeah.

#answered #skam españa #crisana #jorgeva #damira #i don't think this warrants the a/nti tag but let me know if you think otherwise!

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mysticalspellsister · 4 years ago

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History of Tarot Cards

Some misconceptions about the beginning of the Tarot place the first deck in quite a while of a wide range of individuals since the beginning. The theories about the makers of Tarot cards incorporate the Sufis, the Cathars, the Egyptians, Kabbalists, and the sky is the limit from there. Notwithstanding, the entirety of the real verifiable proof focuses on northern Italy at some point in the early piece of the 1400s. Despite what many have guaranteed, there is no verification of the Tarot having begun in some other time or spot. Years and years before the Tarot was conceived, customary playing a card game came to Europe via Arabs, showing up in various urban communities somewhere in the range of 1375 and 1378. These cards were a transformation of the Islamic Mamluk cards. They had suits of cups, blades, coins, and polo sticks, the last of which were seen by Europeans as fights. Like normal playing a game of cards, the Tarot has four suits, which fluctuate by the district. Over the long run, this would incorporate French suits in Northern Europe, Latin suits in Southern Europe, and German suits in Central Europe. The decks likewise included courts comprising of a ruler and two subordinates. Afterward, the bonehead, the trumps, and a bunch of sovereigns were added to the framework.

At some point before 1480, the French presented cards with the now-recognizable suits of hearts, clubs, spades, and precious stones. It wasn't until after a lot of this had happened that, at some point in the primary portion of the fifteenth century, somebody made the first deck of Tarot cards. A deck was appointed by Duke Filippo Maria around 1420. The painter Michelino da Besozzo was given something to do making a 60-card deck with 16 cards having pictures of the Roman divine beings and suits portraying four sorts of birds. The 16 cards were wins viewed as "bests". The duke had created a novum quoddam et exquisite triumph forum, or "another and stunning sort of wins". These were for no reason in particular not for fortunetelling.

Presently, the Visconti-Sforza Tarot is utilized altogether to allude to inadequate arrangements of roughly 15 decks from around 1460, presently situated in different historical centers, libraries, and private assortments throughout the planet. These Italian cards were at first used to play another kind of game. This was like the game scaffold, notwithstanding, there were 21 unique cards that filled in as perpetual trumps. These could be played paying little heed to the suit that was driven, and they outclassed every one of the conventional cards. This was known as the "Round of Triumphs" and it turned out to be uncommonly famous, especially among the upper decision class. Then, at that point, as the game spread all through northern Italy and eastern France, changes were frequently made to the photos and the positioning of the trumps. Nonetheless, they for the most part bore no numbers on the actual cards.

Around 1530, "tarocchi" first showed up. The justification for such a name change is obviously in light of the fact that somebody made the advancement that the round of wins could be played with normal cards by basically proclaiming a specific suit to be the trumps toward the start of each hand. Thus, "wins" turned into an equivocal term, and another word was expected to allude to the conventional round of wins. In this manner, the word tarocchi came into utilization, although its historical background stays a subject of guess. The word Tarot isn't Egyptian, Hebrew, or Latin. It's anything but a re-arranged word, and it doesn't hold the way into the secret of the cards. The soonest names for the Tarot are on the whole Italian. The cards appear to have at first been known as the "carte da trionfi", or "cards of wins". Then, at that point, the word tarocchi started to be utilized in Italy, while the Germans utilized "tarock", and the French enrolled "tarot", or all the more appropriately "Tarot".

What's more, mid sixteenth century artists utilized the secret weapons to make stanzas called "tarocchi suitable", which portrayed renowned personage and women of the court. It turned out to be increasingly more mainstream to utilize the trumps to create sonnets depicting character attributes in a manner that was definitely more complimenting than that of contemporary mental profiling. It wasn't until a lot later that the cards turned into a well known method for anticipating what's to come. Concerning this, a Tarot perusing is actually a custom regardless of whether formal attire and gear are not utilized. By the common arrangement of their meeting up for the express reason, a kind of agreement is shaped between a querent and the mediator of the prophet. The soonest printed composition on Tarot cards utilized in this sort of way appears to have showed up in Italy around 1540 in the work Le Sorti by Marolino. Be that as it may, the main unambiguous proof of Tarot divination, as it is usually perceived, can be found in Bologna at some point in the mid 1700s. Obviously, it is realized that customary playing a card game were associated with divination as right on time as 1487, so it is sensible to guess that the Tarot may have been too.

There is no proof that the early Tarot had Kabbalistic or Hermetic qualities, and it should be perceived that the cards are a result of the early Italian Renaissance. During this time a variety of ways of thinking flourished. These went from soothsaying and Pythagorean numerology to Hermetic and Christian philosophies. Any, or all, of these topics, might have engraved themselves into the later plans. Clearly a significant part of the symbolism is drawn from the Christian culture of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. In any case, it should be perceived that the Tarot has as of late become a mainstay of the secret practice, acquiring impact from different exclusive ways of thinking. Along these lines, it wasn't until hundreds of years after the Tarot sprung up that enthusiasts of the mysterious in France and England experienced the cards and saw exclusive implications in the cryptic imagery of the cards.

In specific conditions, it was unavoidable that elective religions or otherworldly thoughts would need to shroud themselves in secret codes, painstakingly protected and spread the word about just to the started. Along these lines, the Tarot fills in as a fundamental abstract of reasoning and folklore that presents the cyclic idea of life and passing in an image framework that can be perceived by youngsters, uneducated people, and researchers the same. A Tarot deck fills in as a huge mother lode of mysterious legend. It is a bunch of exclusive cheat sheets intended to enlighten even the most scholarly understudy of the esoteric secrets. From various perspectives, the Tarot is a middle age comparable to contemporary devices of brain research, for example, the Rorschach or TAT test. The cards can be a guide to mental mindfulness and otherworldly turn of events, hence going about as an aide along your way throughout everyday life.

This interest with the cards prompted the current standing Tarot has as a mysterious relic and apparatus of divination. The principal such recondite reference to the Tarot showed up in "The Fame and Confession of the Rosicrucians," distributed in 1612. In this assemblage of composing, the Tarot was given the name ROTA. It was portrayed as a gadget that will be counseled for data concerning the past, present, and future. Then, at that point, the Comte de Mellet, whose short article on the Tarot was distributed in Court de Gebelin's Le Monde Primitif, in 1781, was quick to compose of a Kabbalistic association between the Hebrew letters in order and the Tarot. In that very year, Antoine Court de Gebelin made his own Tarot deck and asserted that the Major Arcana was an old Egyptian book containing secret insight. Afterward, Alliette took up Gebelin's thoughts, under the turned around name Etteilla, and he considered the Tarot the "Book of Thoth."

Etteilla asserted that his Tarot deck reestablished the first Egyptian plan. Etteilla additionally designed present day cartomancy utilizing spreads. He would even spread out a whole deck of cards in certain readings. Also, his card implications were the supporting of contemporary Anglo-American Tarot. The representations of French-fit trumps withdraw significantly from the more seasoned Italian-fit plan, leaving a considerable lot of the Renaissance figurative themes. The original of French-fit Tarot decks showed up around 1740 and portrayed scenes of creatures on the trumps. Be that as it may, around 1800, a more prominent assortment of decks were created, for the most part with veduta or class workmanship. In any case, Etteilla's interest with the connections between the Tarot and the Kabbalah prompted revelations made by Eliphas Levi, who promoted the associations between the Kabbalah and the Tarot in his 1856 work, The Dogma and Ritual of High Magic. This was the set up design that Samuel Liddel MacGregor Mathers would later expand on to frame the Golden Dawn Tarot deck.

Mathers, the top of the Golden Dawn, would ultimately record these obscure traits of the Tarot in a great original copy entitled Book T, written in 1887. Their work zeroed in a ton on the Major Arcana ("Greater Secrets"). This normally comprises of a progression of cards now and then start with the Fool as number 0 or finishing with it as number 22, contingent upon the deck. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn caused the Tarot to relate with the Kabbalah all the more intently by putting the Fool card before the Magician, rather than before the Universe. They additionally traded Justice with Strength. All the more significantly, they arranged the implications of the Minor Arcana comprising of 56 cards, partitioned into four suits of 14 cards each. Then, at that point, a significant occasion in the change of the Tarot happened in 1910 with the distribution of A. E. Waite's Key to the Tarot which was given with an entire 78-card deck of elusively planned magnum opuses. These incorporated the development of scene plans for the pip cards, which were painted by Pamela Coleman Smith who was an individual from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, alongside Arthur Edward Waite. Rider was only the distributer.

The Rider-Waite deck has since become the most well known form of the Tarot among the majority. In any case, in 1944 another individual from the Golden Dawn composed a stunningly better book entitled The Book of Thoth. This powerful original copy was carefully assembled by in all honesty the well known and notorious Aleister Crowley himself. Then, at that point, he dispatched Lady Frieda Harris to paint what might turn into the Thoth Tarot in 1969. The outlines of the deck highlight imagery dependent on Crowley's fuse of symbolism from numerous different disciplines, including science and reasoning and different mysterious frameworks, as portrayed exhaustively in The Book of Thoth. Crowley initially planned the Thoth Tarot to be a six-month project pointed toward refreshing the conventional pictorial imagery of the standard deck. In any case, because of expanded extension, the undertaking at last traversed five years, somewhere in the range of 1938 and 1943 and the two craftsmen passed on before distribution in 1969 by the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), which they were the two individuals from. All things considered, the Thoth Tarot has gotten a standout amongst other selling and most well known decks on the planet.

Like the Sistine Chapel, the Tarot is an ideal combination of craftsmanship and otherworldliness. This has assisted with making the Tarot a foundation of present day mystery and an inconceivably helpful apparatus for specialists the world over. I have actually utilized the Thoth Tarot for over 25 years now and albeit numerous different decks have come out since the 1960s, I trust Crowley's deck to be the genuine finish of the cards. While every one of the prior endeavors outlined their point in a straightforward type of a pictorial story, Crowley effectively disconnected the themes by communicating the significance of the cards in a mind boggling imagery. This does, notwithstanding, make it hard for a layman to utilize the deck. Notwithstanding, the fact is that all that has paved the way to this second has assisted with guaranteeing that the Tarot will fill in as the essential system whereupon resulting Western mystery will be established.

From various perspectives, the cards recount the most established story of humankind finishing the Fool a "saint's excursion", as depicted by Joseph Campbell. This additionally harmonizes with the early stage symbolism of the mind, which Carl Jung called paradigms. In the most specialized sense, accomplishing the Philosopher's Stone and climbing the Tree of Life is equivalent to the Fool's Journey through the Major Arcana. They are altogether steps to Enlightenment. All in all, the Tarot talks the normal tongue of the human spirit. Thusly, it tends to be viewed as the reason for the current images and codes of esoterica, following right back to the Italian Renaissance. In this way, the cartomancers of the world have the keys to everything in it. Eventually, the Tarot is an authentic pictorial authoritative handbook for the mysterious lessons of the ages. Accordingly, it has been with us for quite a long time and it will stay with us for centuries…

#tarot tarotcards tarotreading tarotreadersofinstagram tarotreader tarotcommunity tarotcard tarotreadings tarotdeck tarotcardoftheday tarotar

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margotverger · 5 years ago

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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

#ty lear <3 <3 #bluebeardsbride #inbox

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probablyobsessingovertv · 4 years ago

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My Opinions on Varchie, Bughead, and Barchie’s Chemistry

I know a lot of my fellow Varchie/Bughead shippers strongly dislike Barchie. One of their biggest arguments against the pairing is that they lack development over the past four seasons and that seemingly, this cheating scandal has come out of nowhere with very little warning or sense attached, which I agree with. It does feel like Betty and Archie’s (especially romantic) relationship has been very minimally developed over the last few years, making this seem sudden, unexpected, and in my personal opinion, not logical. Especially considering how good, strong, and healthy Betty and Jughead’s, and Veronica and Archie’s relationships appeared in S4. I didn’t really think that we were headed for infidelity or dishonesty, secrecy or betrayal. Not at all. I understand and respect why, from a drama and entertainment standpoint, it was done, but within the story, to me, it just doesn’t really make much sense. I hope most Varchies/Bugheads/ maybe even some Barchies or “on the fence” Barchies at least, could agree with that.

Another major argument for the anti-Barchies is the lack of chemistry shared between the characters and even more so, the actors, KJ and Lili. Now I don’t totally disagree with this, however, I believe there are different forms of chemistry that actors can display.

(Before I begin, this is entirely my opinion, with my terminology and categorizations, my ideas of where each fits, etc. All me, no actual research done other than looking at scenes of Riverdale to find examples. It is 1000% okay to disagree with me or to think about this differently. This is just my interpretation as a long-time teen drama tv watcher and someone that spends way too much time analyzing fictional characters, actors, and relationships of all kinds. I have no expertise or credibility in this. I’m just doing it for fun. Also, I believe this can be true in all industries and all relationships, not only in entertainment or on a fictional tv show/movie.)

First, there is Working chemistry. As in two people or a group that just make sense when they are together. There is a natural ease and comfortability between actors that makes those scenes flow well and makes the actors’ portrayal of the friendships/relationships their characters have a lot more believable and enjoyable to watch. KJ, Lili, Cami, Cole, Mads, Vanessa, Casey, etc, all possess this chemistry with each other. It’s obvious that they enjoy working with each other. They enjoy each other as people and that comes out on screen very well I think. Their irl close friendships and trust between each other definitely make this a lot easier and more authentic in the show as well as in interviews and promos for sure, which is one of the reasons I’m really drawn to this show. (Examples: Core 4 scenes at Pop’s, group scenes in musical episodes, the family groupings, the romantic pairings, one on one friendships like Betty and Veronica, Archie and Jughead, Kevin and Betty, Cheryl and Veronica, the list goes on.)

Emotional/Relational chemistry is similar to working chemistry, but I think it’s a level deeper. This can occur between short-lived romantic relationships, such as a character’s rebound or fling, along with family members, friends, neighbors, etc. I most commonly associate this kind of chemistry with primarily words and sometimes actions or deeds. Childhood best friends are a really good example of this to me, such as Betty and Archie in my mind. This chemistry means that actors/characters deeply trust each other and this trust has usually been built up and developed over the course of many years. The people involved are usually very comfortable with each other, again, trust one another in scenes, and depend on each other. A huge characteristic of relationships that include emotional chemistry is the ability of these characters to be vulnerable with one another, to have deep, meaningful conversation, know how to comfort one another, and the desire to protect, be there for, support, and look after each other. I like to call these brother-sister relationships sometimes.

Though most serious romances possess a large amount of emotional chemistry, a relationship that contains solely an emotional bond cannot progress further, such as a lasting, healthy romance. In my opinion, this is where Barchie’s relationship can be categorized.

Consequently, I greatly disagree with anyone who says KJ and Lili don’t have any chemistry with each other whatsoever. In nearly all of their scenes since S1, we can see that Betty and Archie care deeply for each other. They really trust each other. They feel safe and comfortable with one another and feel the need to protect the other from any kind of harm or danger. They have been there for each other through some very painful and difficult circumstances and have been constant sources of comfort and safety for each other since they were children. They grew up together. They know so much about one another and have been through so much together. KJ and Lili do a fantastic job with this kind of chemistry. Very emotionally driven scenes, scenes of saying what the other needs to hear, being a shoulder for the other to lean or cry on, giving advice to help each other through the trouble they face in their lives, having a good time together, being emotionally vulnerable and honest, showing up when the other needs them, and occasionally letting their emotions get the better of them and, in Archie and Betty’s case, believing that chemistry is a different kind than it really is. (Ex. Archie helping Betty calm down after the Black Hood and breaking up with Jughead for her in S2, 3x5 Archie’s escape when Betty gets him out of the pipe and hugs him, Betty working with Mary and Sierra on Archie’s case to prove him innocent, the glances out their windows. Look, they have good emotional/relational chemistry is what I’m trying to say.)

However, Betty and Archie have only ever kissed while broken up with or in a fight with the character they are most associated with romantically. (And the plan to help Jughead in S4, but that doesn’t count since it didn’t really have any romantic intention and was purely (at least initially) a ploy to distract everyone from the truth of Jughead being alive.) KJ Apa and Lili Reinhart have amazing emotional chemistry. It’s obvious that they care about and trust each other as real life people as well as their characters. They are clearly close in real life and have a pretty similar relationship to Betty and Archie from my observation. KJ and Cami also have phenomenal emotional chemistry with clearly a very deep trust or at the very least, the front of one, between each other as people and scene partners. Cole and Lili obviously do as well, and I could argue that the majority of actors on Riverdale share this emotional chemistry with many of their costars.

What I believe KJ and Lili, not particularly to fault of either of them, lack, is Physical, Sexual, and/or Romantic chemistry. I believe this is the only kind of chemistry that can’t be forced or faked. Physical chemistry is most often displayed in serious, long-term dating relationships and marriages, but can also show up in various other relationships in some circumstances. This usually comes in handy when actors/characters are kissing, hugging, holding hands, innocently touching like rubbing hands, holding faces or playing with hair. This can also be in the forms of heart eyes, certain smiles or flirty glances, etc. I see this as very intentional and almost second nature to most actors portraying couples. Actors with a lot of physical chemistry have to be incredibly comfortable with and trusting of each other. As has been said on countless occasions, lots of romantic scenes in films and tv are very very staged so making them look authentic, unplanned, attractive, and believable is a whole nother level of talent and trust in my opinion.

Most pairs of physically compatible actors tend to come up with their own ideas and improv some “coupley” gestures or ways of showing affection towards each other’s characters in ways that make sense for the story, those characters’ individual personalities, and the relationships between them. The first couple on Riverdale that I think of with strong romantic/physical chemistry is Archie and Veronica. KJ and Cami being the actors that portray them, of course. They have incredible physical chemistry and Varchie are also often seen as an overall very physical couple, constantly wanting to be near and touch each other. Yes, they also kiss, make out, and even have sex often on the show, but their physical chemistry really shows in the little things if you ask me. The overall show of physical affection displayed towards each other is truly so beautiful and looks so real and believable on screen. It’s especially obvious when actors are so comfortable and so invested in their characters that they come up with their own little moments for their couple that they know fans will enjoy. For KJ and Cami, they seem to find 100 different little ways to hold hands or to be very affectionate by touching each other’s hair and having specific movements or gestures they do every time they kiss that real life couples would definitely have, and overall using pretty simple facial expressions and body language to portray the love and the very believable (to me) relationship between Archie and Veronica.

Cole and Lili’s portrayal of Betty and Jughead is also very physically authentic, such as when Cole kisses Lili’s forehead or how she was laying on him in the season 4 Halloween episode. Vanessa and Mads and Choni have great physical chemistry too, due to how much they trust each other and how comfortable and close they are with each other in real life as best friends. Some of those little moments could be suggested by the director, but I know many of the small things are not scripted or directed. I do believe that genuine, physical chemistry is natural and cannot be fabricated. It sure can be exaggerated or diminished by good actors, but it really can’t be entirely faked without being very obvious in my mind.. All this to say, I believe that Betty and Archie lack that physical/romantic connection and I personally think KJ and Lili just don’t naturally have the same level of that chemistry as they do with Cami and Cole. Again, that is not remotely a diss to either actor. Some pairings just don’t work like others do and that’s not because the actors are incapable or “not talented enough” to portray it.

The casting team struck gold with KJ and Cami’s and Lili and Cole’s chemistry and that is very rare to find, especially for an entire cast to be so authentically compatible with each other. In conclusion, I am not completely against the idea of Betty and Archie as a couple, but I’m just not a huge fan of it because I don’t think it would be as realistic or believable as Varchie and Bughead are, solely based on the natural, romantic chemistry the actors have with each other. Not to mention the story and what makes the most sense in that regard.

TL; DR: I don’t blame you. This is my mind at 2am. Basically, I believe there are three major levels of chemistry between people, especially actors and the characters they portray.

1) Working Chemistry: pretty much people (actors) that genuinely like one another, get along, and make the relationships of their characters believable and enjoyable on screen. (aka the entire cast of Riverdale)

2) Emotional/Relational Chemistry: Kind of similar to working, but a level deeper. I refer to these as “sibling/family-esque” relationships. Usually expressed through words and sometimes actions or deeds. This is where I personally believe Betty/Archie’s relationship is.

3) Physical/Sexual/Romantic Chemistry: Everything from flirty glances to making staged romance scenes look authentic, to coming up with sweet little gestures to show affection. I believe this cannot be faked/forced entirely. Physical chemistry is something I believe Veronica/Archie and Betty/Jughead display incredibly well. In my opinion, this is what Barchie lacks. Both the characters and the actors that play them. Not dissing either of them, they’re obviously phenomenal actors and KJ/Lili have amazing emotional chemistry, I just personally think the romantic chemistry between them isn’t as strong as KJ/Cami, Cole/Lili, Madelaine/Vanessa, etc.

*If you made it this far, you’re also in too deep with this show. I’m kidding, I love you. Thank you for reading all of this. I would absolutely love to hear what you think.*

Also, thank you Freya @loverofthor-2 for proofreading and encouraging me to post my brain dump yet again. ❤️

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idthellyeah-blog · 5 years ago

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A totally timely and significant review of Rancid’s “...And Out Come The Wolves”

(I honestly don’t remember when I wrote this, maybe 2015. Definitely just got jacked up on something and decided that I needed to write a track by track review of an album I loved when I was a cool punk teen. It has just been sitting in my Google Drive patiently waiting to be posted.)

I remember the first time I ever heard/saw Rancid was when the video for “Salvation” off of their second album “Let’s Go” premiered on MTV. Such an 80’s/90’s kid thing to do, discovering a new band by seeing a music video on TV, ugh. I thought the leather clad mohawked bad boys were amazing and perfect and so cool...that I immediately tried to spike my hair using gelatin (tru punx only) and got a leather jacket (did not look that cool and was very sweaty). When “...And Out Come The Wolves” came out the next year (1995, I’m old AF) I was totally enamored and had found my #1 favorite album of all time (that lasted for like a year until music got better). I was supposed to go see Rancid at a big show in Omaha, I lived in a small town called Columbus that was roughly 90 minutes away from the big city...but the day of my mom didn’t let me go because I had bad math grades. I reacted the way any entitled white teen did, by laying in the garage and crying and playing their album. That show wound up being a huge to-do when fans tore up seats in the venue and threw cushions at the band leading to Rancid not playing Omaha for a long time. I missed out on some cool bad-ass punk rock shit, first world problems. Fast forward to today when I decided that I, Ian Douglas Terry, needed to write out a song-by-song review of this quintessential punk album. I’m a real music nut, and obviously very good at structured writing...so here we go! (Rock on)

1. Maxwell Murder - Oh boy, this one starts with like a subway train sound and then the beginning of a killer/complicated Matt Freeman bass line. That dude SHREDS the bass, and even has a wild solo in this song. That’s tight. Why did they stop letting him sing? He sounded like a fun Muppet on their first album and I loved his songs. Maybe he wanted to focus on just shredding the bass and using tons of pomade.

2. The 11th Hour - This song is great. It is poppy and upbeat and about a woman having dreams and demanding answers. Hell yeah. I love good punk music that supports women and feminism and figuring out where the power lies (spoiler alert, it starts and ends with you). Remember how Brody from The Distillers left Tim Armstrong for the dude from Queens of the Stone Age? And then he got all fat and got a beard? I can completely relate to that, and have been there sans beard.

3. Roots Radicals - This song RULES. I had to look up what “Moonstompers” were and who “Desmond Dekker” was. I remember trying to relate to this like it could somehow compare to living in a town with 20,000 people and the nicest Wal-Mart in the tri-county area. Remember how there was that Spanish language cover of this on one of those “Give Em The Boot” comps that Hellcat put out? That was real tight.

4. Time Bomb - Hit single baby! This had a huge hand in getting punk kids into reggae/ska for sure. Killer organ solo, lots of rude boy shit going, I loved it so much. Tim Armstrong totally re-used lyrics from the song “Motorcycle Ride” from the previous album...which is hilarious. Like c’mon dawg...you should know your own lyrics. I learned how to do the solo from this and felt like a guitar god (it is a very easy solo, like almost too easy).

5. Olympia, WA - I love songs like this that are about cities that the band isn’t from...so you have to fire up your imagination (or just read the lyrics) and be like, “What went down in Olympia, Washington????”. Turns out it was mostly hanging out on different streets in New York and playing pinball with Puerto Ricans while wishing you were with a person who you were sleeping with in Washington. Hell yeah, just like Shakespeare.

6. Lock, Step & Gone - Songs about docks were HUGE in my youth. Dropkick Murphy’s had like eight songs about boys on them, and this Rancid song alludes to them. I loved all of the blue collar, working class ideology that had nothing to remotely do with my comfortable upper middle class (not sure if that’s accurate because my parents were teachers, and like is there even a middle class any more?) life. This song definitely sums itself up at then end when it says “There’s a whole lot of nothin”.

7. Junky Man - Another theme that I could definitely relate to in a town of 20,000 people with like ten people who did meth...Junkies! This song is pretty great because the dude from the Basketball Diaries does some sick poetry in it...that movie was nuts. I like that song that he later wrote/sang about all the people he knew who died. The only way poetry can be cool is if the person is an insane drug addict with cool/sad stories to tell. Otherwise it is just loud diary reading.

8. Listed MIA - At this point I wholeheartedly agree with this song, “I’m checking out”. I don’t know if I ever really liked this song or if this was just part of the “I accidentally left it playing after the first four songs that I liked were over”. Lars says the derogatory f-word for homosexuals in it, because people called him that word...that doesn’t seem cool man. I get that it rhymes with “maggots”, but maybe give white dudes in the Midwest less reasons to sing that word out loud.

9. Ruby Soho - This is one of the best songs ever, hands down. It is beautiful and you can barely understand what Tim Armstrong is saying but it is wonderful. I feel like deciphering his lyrics led me to be able to understand most speech impediments, so hell yeah. This song is about loving someone a lot but having to leave them because it isn’t working out. This song was the blueprint for every romantic relationship I’ve ever had in my entire life so it might be a gypsy curse.

10. Daly City Train - Oh hell yeah, fun Reggae drums! Through punk and ska I grew to appreciate Reggae, but through being bummed out about that culture’s deep seated homophobia and the fact that most of it is super repetitive and boring and for dad’s on vacation. I’m just glad that 311 taught me to love those smooth Caribbean sounds again (oh god am I joking or am I serious, I can’t tell any more please save me).

11. Journey to the End of the Easy Bay - I can still play this bass line and was very proud of myself the first time I half-way pulled it off. It doesn’t sound as smooth and nuanced as the way Matt Freeman plays it, but goddamn it I think that was the height of my skill as a musician. This song rules themes about needing to belong and finding a place with people who thought and felt the same as you...and then losing it as everyone grows out of it. This was most of my early 20’s. I grew up in a scene with similarly minded people, it eventually ended and I still have contact with some of those people but that point in my life will never be replicated. I finally belonged somewhere and was part of something bigger than me. Now I do comedy and it is bleak, entitled, and sad and mostly alcoholics talking about their dicks. Please take me back.

12. She’s Automatic - This is not a bad song but a very confusing way to describe a woman. I get that it means she is effortless in “the way that she moves” but maybe I’m not giving Lars any poetic license because he looks like a guy who punched books. This woman sounds great though, and I’m sure they dated for three months. Revisiting this and that era reminds me that I almost had sex with a girl at the first X-men movie...man, being punk ruled.

13. Old Friend - Back to the Raggae! This song is pretty great, but they really missed an opportunity of selling this to a heartburn medicine company. “Good morning heartache, you’re like an old friend come and see me again”...that would be perfect for a commercial of a guy eating a giant plate of lasagna and making a “Oh boy, I did it again!” face. The Transplants sold a song to that fruit shampoo, maybe this is something I can retroactively help negotiate.

14. Disorder and Disarray - I love when punk bands have songs about “business men” being evil and the industry being bad. Like when Against Me were part of an Anarchist collective and then on a major label putting out really bad music. Rancid was at least on Epitaph, which while arguably not “cool” it was at least run by a kind of punk dude who is responsible for the biggest/shittiest corporate garbage of a festival, The Warped Tour. This song has a part towards the end where they talk to each other like David Lee Roth would do in Van Halen songs, that rules.

15. The Wars End - I get that this is a song about little Sammy being a punk rocker but at this point I think they should have admitted this album was fine with 10-12 songs and maybe some of these were super repetitive and unnecessary. It's like you’re forcing it. I can’t imagine the dude who recorded it had a lot of fun and he probably fell asleep and was startled awake and had to pretend like he’d been paying attention the whole time.

16. You Don’t Care Nothin - This starts out with the exact chord progression from Journey To The End Of The East Bay….c’mon guys. You Don’t Care Nothin about being succinct and making your songs individual expressions of art! The themes even seem like something they’ve already gone over. I’m going to eat some soup, brb.

17. As Wicked - Is this a different song or a weird breakdown? Oh, it’s a different song. Well...this soup is pretty good. Chicken Noodle, but the chunky kind. It isn’t amazing but it is good. I should really cook more. Maybe I’ll order Chinese later.

18. Avenues & Alleyways - I don’t really have a problem with this song because it has the “Oi oi oi” chant that the bands I was in during High School would do and we had no idea why other than popular bands doing it. It is very catchy. It sounds like the other two songs were just building up to finally getting your attention back. Plus it has a breakdown with people clapping, that is always fun. This has to be the last song right? It is the perfect last song on an album!

19. The Way I Feel - FUUUUUUUCK! What? Really should have ended the album on that last song, it had a good “anthem” vibe and at least wrapped this up into a somewhat sensible endeavor. This song could have been stuck in the middle somewhere, or maybe just not recorded with about seven others? The Way I Feel about this album is that there are some parts that hold up and are still fun to listen to, but the rest of it just seems like I’m being forced to read my own teenage diary and it is boring and sad. Nostalgia is a bummer, I can’t imagine having Rancid still be my favorite band. I’d probably still wear a chain wallet and spiky bracelet and be one of those obnoxious old drunk weirdos I see at shows that stick out like crazy sore thumbs. Bummer dude.

Oh wow, what a journey (to the end of the east bay, am I right?)...I’m glad I was finally able to get this review out so people could finally know what this album means to me and my generation of lazy weirdos. This took me six months to write and I should be congratulated for being a journalist with tons of integrity and great taste. True punks never die, they just eventually chill out and shop at Kohl’s.

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scoutception · 4 years ago

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Final Fantasy II review

One of the most interesting parts of the Final Fantasy series, and a big reason why I’m so fond of it, is that every main series game takes its own approach to the gameplay. From the job systems of III and V, the Materia system of VII, the Junctioning system of VIII, or the straight up action combat of XV, every game has a different focus that makes them stand out, and while the results can certainly fall short at times, it’s still something worth commending. For example, take the subject of today’s review, Final Fantasy II. For the second game in the series, and a game that came out in 1988, it’s a huge step up from the original game in a lot of ways. A much more detailed plot, containing several defined playable and supporting characters, a much more experimental battle system, the introduction of many elements, gameplay and otherwise, that would establish a true identity for the series, away from just being a ripoff of Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition, it’s an impressive and critical step forward for the series. Unfortunately for the game, it hasn’t been 1988 in over 30 years, and it’s now easily the weakest game in the series in my opinion. As for why that is, well, that’s what we’re taking a look at today. As with the first game, I’m reviewing the PSP version. Note I’ll be pretty lax with spoilers, so take caution, if you actually care to avoid spoilers.

Story: Final Fantasy II takes place in an entirely different world than Final Fantasy I, a tradition that every main series game would follow. The peace of this world is shattered after the rise of Emperor Mateus of Palamecia, who, bent on world domination, raises a fearsome army and unleashes the denizens of Hell upon the land, conquering a large portion of the world. The city of Fynn organizes a large resistance effort, only to be attacked by the Emperor’s army, forcing a small remnant to flee to the town of Altair, establishing the Wild Rose Rebellion, led by Princess Hilda. During the fall of Fynn, four youths, Firion, Maria, Guy, and Leon, attempted to escape as well, only to be attacked and left for dead by the Emperor’s soldiers, with Leon going missing as well. Rescued by the rebellion, and healed by the white wizard Minwu, Firion, Maria, and Guy, having nothing left to return to, and wishing to search for the missing Leon, join the rebellion to fight back against Palamecia. Meanwhile, the Emperor, his army having taken heavy losses taking Fynn, takes to devising much less conventional methods of establishing his rule, starting with a massive airship called the Dreadnought, meant to scare the populace into obedience, on threat of total destruction.

Compared to the very light plot of Final Fantasy I, the story here is much more involved. Instead of wandering between locations more or less aimlessly, there’s always an explicit plot reason to go to new locations, the party being given tasks like finding mythril to supply the rebellion with better equipment, or trying to recruit potential allies. Compared to the party in the first game just being completely blank slates, the party consists of the more distinctive Firion, Maria, and Guy, with the fourth slot being filled by various guest characters that come and go as the story goes on, such as Gordon, the prince of the fallen kingdom of Kashuan, and Ricard Highwind, the last of the dragoons, and there’s actually an established side cast, including characters like Hilda, the leader of the rebellion and princess of Fynn, Paul, a noble thief assisting the rebellion, and Cid, a former knight who maintains the world’s only airship, with this notably being Cid’s first appearance in the series.

Final Fantasy II is also very noticeably darker than the first game. While the plot circumstances of the first game weren’t exactly cheerful, with the world falling apart due to the influence of the Fiends, outside of a select few towns, this wasn’t very obvious, and the game overall carried a bright, adventurous feel. Not so with Final Fantasy II, where the Emperor is a much more prominent and ruthless villain who’s already conquered or ruined a majority of the world, always keeping another plan on standby, and staying one step ahead of the heroes. Many characters die over the story, from random NPCs to even temporary party members, and the game overall carries a prominent melancholic, empty feel to it, one that’s very impressive considering the time it was made.

To be honest, however, it actually goes a bit too far in this regard. Almost everything the protagonists accomplish comes at the cost of allies dying, or something preventing them from fully completing their mission. Many NPCs are pessimistic about the chances of humanity being able to win against the Emperor, and so much destruction is wrought upon the world by the end that it seems there’s not even much left to save. From the very beginning of the game, which starts with your party instantly being destroyed in an unwinnable battle, the game is nothing but a constant stream of death and hollow victories, with plenty of characters you can find mourning their losses, and there’s very, very few points in the story that offer any sort of relief from it. Combined with the Emperor barely seeming bothered by anything the party accomplishes, and running circles around them more than a few times, it’s very easy to simply lose any investment in the story.

The characters unfortunately only add to this lack of investment. It’s hard to hold it against the game, but the main party of Firion, Maria, and Guy is still easily the least developed cast in the series. They have little dialogue to themselves to begin with, and have very minimal personality traits, especially Firion, who pretty much only exists to be the hero by default. Additionally, whereas in most RPGs, the cast’s varying personalities and skills tend to gain importance, here, the only skill any of them have is Guy being able to talk to beavers, which only comes up once in a way that doesn’t even affect the story, and, again, they have nearly no personality otherwise, which totals out to each of them having, at best, 1 moment each throughout the story where they’re not completely interchangeable with each other, which barely elevates them above the completely blank slate party of FF1.

The guest party members and NPCs fair a bit better, but not by much. The guests tend to be at least mildly interesting, like the fatalistic Minwu, the cowardly Gordon, who learns to be courageous as the story goes on, to the pirate girl Leila, but they’re still nothing special, and there’s surprisingly few other NPCs, most of which aren’t too memorable either. Even the Emperor himself is about one of the most stereotypical evil emperor characters you could have, not helped by the very few scenes he gets. That’s not to say he’s a bad villain, though. His successfulness does create a presence that looms over the entire story, and he pulls off one of the coolest plot twists in the series; after being killed by the party in a very easy battle late in the game, he simply returns as a demon himself, having become far, far stronger than he had ever been in life, to the point of taking over Hell itself. It’s such a unique and unexpected twist on the seemingly weak political villain that it alone cements the Emperor as one of the more memorable villains in the series. Overall, while the writing of the game is quite impressive for the time, and laid a good deal of groundwork for the improved writing of future entries, it’s just passable at best nowadays.

Gameplay: Here’s where things really start falling apart. On the surface, not much the combat doesn’t seem terribly different from Final Fantasy I, with it still being a standard turn based system with basic commands like attacking, using magic, and defending. The big differences in Final Fantasy II’s combat lie in the character progression. The first game had you simply selecting a party of 4 classes at the start of the game, gradually making them stronger across the game by leveling them up and acquiring specific equipment and spells for each, like pretty much every normal JRPG. FF2, on the other hand, uses a much more complex system. Every party member is capable of using every weapon and learning every spell, in the process abandoning the D&D system of set spell charges and instead introducing the traditional MP system, and characters are not set in specialized classes and roles. Instead, FF2 discards the usual EXP based leveling system, and instead uses a stat leveling system, where the individual stats of each character level up separately depending on the course of battle, and while each character starts with predetermined stats that favor a particular role for them, with enough grinding, you can still reshape them however you wish. This stat growth system would later be used and refined for the SaGa series, and it’s a very ambitious attempt at improving upon the party building system the first game established.

In total, there are 12 main stats that can be increased through battle: HP, your health points, which is raised in regular intervals, or losing HP in battle, MP, magic points that allow you to use spells, which is raised by having MP reduced in battle, Strength, which determines your physical attack, and is raised by using the attack command, Magic, which determines how much MP you get when it is gained, and is raised by having MP reduced in battle, Spirit, which determines the strength of white magic spells, and is raised by casting white magic in battle, Intelligence, which determines the strength of black magic spells, and is raised casting black magic in battle, Stamina, which determines how much HP you get when it is gained, and is increased by losing HP in battle, Evasion, which determines how likely a character can dodge physical attacks, and is raised by being targeted by attacks in battle, Agility, which factors into evasion calculation, and is raised by having high evasion, and Magic Defense, which determines how resilient a character is to offensive magic, and is raised by being targeted by offensive magic in battle.

However, it doesn’t stop there, as individual weapon types and spells also have levels that can be raised, which is done so by gaining skill points in them by attacking or casting them during battle. Once enough skill points are gained, they advance to the next level, with the hard cap being 16. Gaining weapon levels allows that character to be more accurate and attack more times at once with that type of weapon, and raising spell levels increases their power and makes them more accurate. Each weapon type, consisting of swords, spears, axes, staves, knives, bows, shields, and unarmed, have different attributes, such as spears being a relatively balanced type, with lower individual power than swords and axes, but higher accuracy, while bows are allow characters to attack from the newly introduced back row, which makes them immune to physical attacks, but prevents them from attacking with any other weapon type. While focusing on one weapon type with each character would seem the most efficient, the game only tends to give you one or two weapons of each type at a time, many of which have good boosts in power or added effects, making focusing on a few different types a decent idea.

Shields are unique in that, while equipping them doesn’t raise your defense as might be expected, and actually lower your attack, they give large evasion bonuses that makes dodging attacks much easier, and have the chance of blocking a physical attack completely even if something does connect, all of which increases as you gain levels in it. As for other defensive equipment, you have heavy and light types of armor, with light armor giving less defense bonuses than their heavier counterparts, but not weighing nearly as much, and thus leaving you much more evade. As for spells, they start out very underpowered, and have awful accuracy in the case of buff and debuff spells, but become much more effective after a few levels, with the downside of them costing more MP to cast with each level gained. Characters can learn up to 16 spells, and are free to remove them at any time, at the cost of having to level them again from scratch if they ever relearn them. Instead of simply learn spells by buying them in towns, spells are instead learned from tomes, which can be bought from shops, found in treasure chests, or dropped from enemies. Using them on the field teaches a character that spell, while using the tomes in battle instead casts a high level version of the spell, at the cost of losing that tome.

Unfortunately, as creative as this all is, this system has some serious issues. The main one, which you have already guessed, is that the game is incredibly, incredibly grindy because of these mechanics, and in a much worse way than most other RPGs. While not every stat is going to be important for each character, depending on how you build them, there’s still a lot of things it forces you to keep track of. Even if you want to make a dedicated mage, sticking in the back row with a bow for the whole game will leave them with so little vitality and HP that they’ll just be uncomfortably fragile, and with the magic attacks enemies have by the endgame, you really want to keep them in the front row for a good part of the game. Most spells, including important ones like Life and Esuna, for reviving party members and removing status effects respectively, while extremely useful, have such horrible accuracy to start that they’re completely useless before you level them up, and the weapon distribution is quite unbalanced, with swords having easily the best selection even in the midgame, essentially leaving most other types as stopgaps.

While you might level your important stats a good bit just naturally going through areas, trying to deliberately level any of them is a commitment. While HP, strength, spirit, intelligence, and magic defense tend to come easily enough, increasing stamina often only happens through the loss of a large chunk of their maximum HP, which, obviously, preferably doesn’t happen on a regular basis. This goes likewise for MP and magic, which is rather irritating, as not only do you need more and more MP as your spells level up, but ways to restore MP are extremely limited and costly. The bizarre loop of agility factoring in to evasion increasing, while itself only leveling up based on your current evasion, means that the only reliable way of increasing either is to equip the lightest equipment you have. While leveling up weapon levels is easy enough, especially since you can dual wield different types at once, leveling up spells is a much slower process, with casting low level spells during random encounters, even those that won’t actually help at the moment, often being one of the only feasible ways to get them leveled quick. You may even be tempted to ignore magic beyond simple spells like Cure because of the individual effort needed, but the game will quickly hammer the importance of magic into you; from the randomly encountered flans and bombs that either have absurd physical defense or tend to explode if not fully defeated in one turn, with magic being the only reasonable way to take them out, to mandatory bosses that hit quite hard, and also have enough physical defense to make physical attacks nearly worthless without absurd grinding, you’re not getting through the early game without dedicating some time to magic. On the flip side, another early dungeon has a boss that outright absorbs magic, making physical attacks the only way to beat it.

The game has quite a reputation for being brutal, and it’s not inaccurate, with most dungeons being more than glad to beat you down without remorse, and there’s tons of troublesome enemies to be found throughout the game, doubly so if you try to go for all the treasure chests in the area, as many of them are guarded by encounters called monster-in-a-box, which are often much more powerful than other encounters around. Most bosses are more than happy to make your life miserable too, especially the infamous Lamia Queen and Behemoth. However, this difficulty is in no way fair or well designed. While the growth system can easily leave you unsure as to whether or not you’re prepared for a dungeon, since you have no easy guideline to go off of compared to standard leveling, that’s not even the worst of it. The design of the dungeons, and even the world map, are horrible. There’s tons of doors scattered throughout pretty much every dungeon, and 90% of them lead to dead end rooms with raised encounter rates. There is absolutely no way to tell which doors are dead ends and which are necessary to progress, so you’re reduced to trial and error, which is extremely exhausting when there’s so many doors per dungeon, and you’re almost guaranteed to get into an encounter before you can leave each one, and if you’re tempted to ignore any doors when they don’t seem mandatory to progress, in many of those cases, there’s treasure rooms hidden among them, once again with no way to figure out other than guessing.

The world map, on the other hand, is one of the best arguments against open ended world design there is. Compared to the first game, there are almost no physical obstacles barring where you can go, other than a few rivers that are only crossable by canoe, something you get almost immediately, and a few areas only accessible by boat. Instead, you’re kept out of where you’re not supposed to be through the Dragon Quest 1 method of having the random encounters kill you horribly. The problems with this method are twofold: not only are the borders between where you’re supposed to be and where you’re not very thin, to the point of running into late game enemies just outside of the first town if you go just a biiit too far to the left, compared to Dragon Quest 1 often using bridges as visible borders between areas, but it just doesn’t really fit with how the game is designed. Dragon Quest 1′s pacing is rather relaxed, as while you do have plot objectives, the game doesn’t rush you to fulfill them. You’re meant to just hang around the areas you can survive in, grinding your way up and getting whatever equipment you need until you feel confident to move onto whichever area seems to be designed for next. In Final Fantasy II, you’re constantly being sent back and forth between areas to get new orders or do whatever the plot wants of you at that moment, but while the game loves telling where to go, it’s pretty bad at telling you how to get there, with its often vague directions being spread out between NPCs in multiple towns, to boot. While there is a map of the overworld you can access, it can still get pretty annoying having to meticulously check where you’re going, and you’re still liable to being decimated just because you wandered into a harmless seeming area. One nasty example comes after completing Kashuon Keep, not too far into the game. You’re expected to head back to Altair, which is on the other side of the world and is quite a bit of a walk, but heading south soon loops back to the Altair area, making for a much shorter walk. Trying to put this idea into practice, however, sends you across the large Palamecian desert, full of enemies more than eager to tell you that this area is still a few dungeons away from being accessed. It’s not completely unsurvivable, and can be safely traversed by finding the nearby hidden Chocobo, but it’s still a nasty situation after a very irritating dungeon.

The biggest, and most frustrating, source of difficulty, however, is that the game stubbornly refuses to tell you anything about what’s going on behind the scenes. There’s so many mechanics left unexplained that cause a lot of difficulty if you don’t understand them. For example, every enemy has a stat called rank, which determines how many skill points for your weapons and magic you’ll actually get by using them on said foes. Essentially, if your weapon or magic levels are higher than the enemy’s rank, you need to use that weapon or spell more times in that battle based on the difference between the numbers to actually get any skill points. Not an unreasonable system, and you can view every enemy’s rank in the bestiary, but the game never directly addresses this, and even the most powerful enemies only go up to rank 10, effectively softcapping your skills and spells at 10, which often leads into having your party attack each other to bypass the entire mechanic, a depressingly efficient solution most of the time. Other stats the game never cares to explain are evasion and magic defense, which both display both numbers and percentages. For evasion, the number represents the number of attacks that character is capable of dodging, as physical attacks strike multiple times per round, and the likeliness of evading each attack. With magic defense, the number represents the number of attempts at avoiding a status effect can be made, and the percentage represents the chance of successfully doing so. Despite the name, the stat does not reduce damage taken from magic attacks.

On the subject of magic, the spells available to you are also plagued with unneeded complexity and vagueness. First off, the descriptions for many spells tend to only give you the barest idea of what they actually do; Aura “Enhances effectiveness against various foes.” It never tells you what enemy types count, or that it only becomes effective against certain types as its level increases, you just have to hope that it’s working whenever you use it. Barrier “Raises a barrier to defend against special attacks.”, again giving you no indication as to what it’s actually protecting against. Shell and Wall both claim to raise magic defense, but give no obvious indication how they’re actually different from each other, and Dispel claims to remove protective magical barriers, which lowers the target’s magic defense, even though you may infer that it removes buffs, like in later games. Other spells tend to be redundant or very situational. Basuna removes temporary status effects, compared to Esuna removing permanent status effects, which is near worthless since not only do temporary effects wear off after a number of turns, but they go away after battle regardless, and are rarely effective enough to waste a turn removing. Fear increases the likelyhood of enemies fleeing battle, which is not only rare to actually work, but is worthless, since you don’t get any credit for defeating any enemies that do flee. Sap reduces the MP of the target, which is not only rarely likely to work, but counterintuitive if you have the infamous Osmose spell, which saps large amounts of MP while restoring the same amount for the user. Status effects also have different elements to them, namely body, mind, and matter, with most enemies having different resistances. Some spells, like Stop and Paralysis, have the same effect, but different elements, and keeping track is both difficult, both remembering which spell is which element, and what enemies are actually affected by each element, and nearly pointless, since the effects are rarely worth bothering with in favor of just attacking. Matter elemental spells, however, are rarely resisted by most enemies, even bosses, and mostly comprise of instant death spells like Mini, Break, Teleport, and most infamously, Toad. Not only does this game make instant death spells effective, it makes them downright overpowered, with almost every encounter being capable of being solved through judicious application of Toad.

But the peak of all this is a special property that some enemies, like ghosts and the final boss, have applied to their physical attacks: a draining effect that not only restores their HP by the amount of damage inflicted, but specifically inflicts 1/16th of the target’s maximum HP per hit, with them eventually attacking 8 times per turn by the final dungeon. To sum this up simply, this makes heavier equipment worse than worthless. Not only will the defensive power do nothing to protect from this damage, but it actively weighs you down and destroys your evasion, guaranteeing you’ll take all those possible hits unless your did some extreme evasion grinding. You’d be protected better by not wearing anything at all, because at least then you’ll make use of all your natural evasion. Unless you want to constantly heal your characters for half their health everytime you run into specific encounters, you have to dedicate a lot of your time, or most of your run through the game, to getting their evasion leveled enough that this isn’t a problem. Knowing this can be the difference between fruitlessly blowing all your resources and breezing through effortlessly, and there is a certain weapon, the Blood Sword, that has this same draining effect, which can singlehandedly annihilate the final boss once you’ve figured this out. While there’s a few other smaller issues, like several encounter formations that cannot be ran from for no apparent reason, other than possibly being formations used in certain monster-in-a-box encounters, those are the main issues, and being aware of them, and having the information to circumvent them, makes the game much, much easier. If anything, it makes the game extremely breakable. From physical attackers that dodge everything thrown at them, to spellcasters that can wipe out encounters with a single cast, it doesn’t take much to erase the difficulty once you know what you’re doing.

As for bonus content, there’s Soul of Rebirth, a bonus mode unlocked after completing the main game, first added in the GBA version, which focuses on several characters who die in the course of the story finding themselves in what they think is the Jade Passage, the path to Hell. While a cool concept that has a really neat final boss of its own, namely the light side of the Emperor, who split off from his dark half after death and instead took over Heaven, it still has issues of its own, namely that most of the party are guest characters in the main game, and carry over the stats, equipment, and spells they had when they left the party, meaning if you didn’t bother training them and stripped them of all equipment before they departed, you’re in an absurd time. The mode is also quite short, and only consists of two dungeons that are just mirrored versions of the final two dungeons of the main game and a town. A neat addition, but not much more than that. Other than that, the only optional content to find in the main game is the Arcane Labyrinth, a bonus dungeon added specifically for the PSP release. The game uses a keyword system where you can learn important terms from NPCs, and ask about those terms to get directions or a bit more plot. It’s sort of neat in concept, but in practice it doesn’t amount to much other than make it slightly more annoying to find out what to do, especially if you manage to miss a keyword. The Arcane Labyrinth, however, revolves around its use. In order to progress past the entrance, you must select a keyword at the portal to the next floor, which then takes you to a specific floor based around the keyword you chose. Almost every floor has a little sidequest to solve, like defeating specific enemies or giving items to NPCs, which give you new keywords exclusive to the labyrinth, or hints for some of the trickier floors. While they can be kinda annoying to do, you only ever have to complete them once for their reward, and can otherwise run straight to the exit on subsequent visits.

Every floor requires you to select keywords for the next, with 45 different floors being available in total, and the Arcane Labyrinth is actually split into 3 sections, with the northwest section requiring four floors to be visited, the northeast seven floors, and the south ten floors, though while you can’t visit the same floor twice in the same section, you can choose repeats in separate sections. There is much more strategy than simply randomly selecting floors, however. Each keyword belongs to a different category, which cause different reactions depending on your next choice. Picking keywords in the same category in a row cause better treasure to spawn and lower the encounter rate, while picking something in a category that opposes it, such as a matter and materials floor after going through a magic and spirits floor, has the opposite effect. Even more importantly, each playable character has a set of keywords that resonate with them, to varying degrees. This becomes important after finishing all three sections, which unlocks the Arcane Sanctuary. Within is Deumion, the master of the Labyrinth, who summons a superboss, Phrekyos, to test you, with its strength varying depending on how many keywords you’ve gotten through the story, making it beatable even in earlier parts of the game. Beating Phrekyos allows you to get a reward from Deumion; if you picked enough keywords that resonate with a certain party member, you will be able to get their ultimate weapon, which not only have tons of power, but confer massive stat boosts when equipped. If your keywords didn’t resonate enough, you only get an elixir, something that you can buy, albeit with absurd amounts of money. The optimal keywords for the main party are only unlocked in the endgame, but it can actually be worth visiting early for the party members that are used in Soul of Rebirth, as the weapons make it much more manageable, though visiting too early can end with you being much too powerful compared to how you should be. A special set of keywords also allow you to see Deumion’s past, leaving you able to either peacefully receive from him the Revive spell, or fight him as the ultimate superboss for the Destroy spell. Both are disgustingly impractical, but it’s a neat idea nonetheless. Overall, the Arcane Labyrinth, though still rife with its own set of frustrations, is actually one of the more enjoyable bonus dungeons I’ve come across, with a very creative concept that actually leaves you curious as to what the next floor could hold.

Overall, while the gameplay of Final Fantasy II has some interesting ideas, it’s held back by an irritating lack of explanation as to how it works, the overly grindy design, and just plain poor design and execution. It’s a miserable experience that makes even other early JRPGs seem appealing, just because their grinding is so much simpler to handle, and I need to note, this is the most polished version of the game. Between bugs, a horribly limited inventory, and even more absurd design decisions, like stats sometimes decreasing instead of increasing, or weapons massively decreasing magic accuracy, and increasing skills taking even longer, any version earlier than the GBA version is even more infuriating and even less playable.

Graphics: Final Fantasy II is actually a quite nice looking game, as with the rest of the Final Fantasy releases on PSP. Locations have a lot of detail to them, like ambient effects like rolling fog, and noticeable lighting effects, with a few areas like Pandemonium having pretty fascinating designs, and there’s some pretty good looking cutscenes for bigger story events. Spell animations are pretty neat, and attack spells have a nice detail where their animations become more elaborate as you level them up more. Characters even finally look accurate to their original art by Yoshitaka Amano, unlike earlier versions, though that’s not necessarily a positive: between Firion’s random mishmash of materials and colors, Maria and Guy’s awkward, half complete outfits, and the terrifyingly gaudy Emperor, this is possibly the tackiest looking cast in the series. The monster designs, on the other hand, are top notch. After Final Fantasy I’s bestiary was lifted almost entirely out of D&D, this game introduced a lot of original and iconic enemies, like the coeurls, the bombs, the malboros, the adamantoises, and the behemoths. It even introduced chocobos, though it’s easy to miss their existence, as their confined to one spot on the world map that’s decently hidden. While there are still a lot of oddities like vampires and giant mantises, it’s still one of the biggest advancements in the series in this regard. The enemy designs also excel in that they look much more threatening than in the first game. These enemies literally come from Hell, and look the part. I’d even go so far as to say that this is the best looking Final Fantasy game on the PSP, and has some of the coolest enemy designs in the series.

Sound: Final Fantasy II’s soundtrack was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, as usual, and remixed by Tsuyoshi Sekito for the remakes. All things considered, it’s my least favorite soundtrack in the main series. That’s not to say it’s bad at all, and there are some great tracks like the Rebel Army Theme, the somber main theme which plains on the overworld, Ancient Castle, the Tower of the Magi, Battle Theme A, typically used for major boss encounters, and Battle Theme 2, the final boss theme. However, as an overall, it’s just not quite as good as the soundtracks for the rest of the main series, to me. It also contains my least favorite version of the Prelude, being just a bit too high pitched for my liking, and my least favorite battle theme, sounding way too intense just for regular encounters, and quickly becoming grating not too far into the game. The soundtrack is good in its own right, and is worth a listen, it just doesn’t quite reach the heights that some of the others do.

Conclusion: Overall, I give Final Fantasy II a firm not recommended. Though very ambitious and important for its day, its story, design, and mechanics have aged like milk compared to the other Final Fantasy games on the NES. While technically still perfectly playable, especially with deeper knowledge as to how the mechanics work, it doesn’t make for much fun at all. You’re better off keeping your distance from this entry. Now, with this absurdly long review finally done, finishing this game, and the subject of my next review, hopefully to be soon, have convinced me I need a break from older RPGs for a while. Till next time. -Scout

#final fantasy #game review #long post #jrpg #final fantasy ii #square enix

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yourpakichic · 4 years ago

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Episode 24 Thoughts

-What a fucking entrance by Babaanne. I hate her already. Like she really came prepared and attacked Serkan, Eda, the company and their relationship all in less than 15 minutes. SHE BROKE THE DAMN FLOWER CASE. I fucking hate her guts. I like how Serkan was in control of his emotions and even tried to help Eda process through the surprise of events. It’s funny she think she’ll build a relationship with Eda by forcing her to marry someone and ruining Serkan. Ma’am give it your best try.

-Okay look. I’m completely on Serkan’s side regarding this. I understand Eda is taken aback by the grandmothers appearance but I think Serkan deserves better to just be abandoned. Again. They were finally moving on and getting to the point of making steps to fix their relationship and now suddenly Eda wants to run away.

-Not the grandma trying to make it seem like Eda wants to talk to her in front of Ayfer. Like woman, she was raised by Ayfer. Don’t play dumb games.

-I think Serkan has a plan on how to deal with Grandma. No way would Serkan Bolat let someone come in and threaten his company and his family. Even if he is changed and more softer now. Serkan does not mess around when it comes to work. I’m actually okay with Grandma threatening Serkan’s company because if that means we’ll get to have the smart, tricky, and always-one-step-ahead Serkan Bolat back. The one who ruined Kaan. The same one who was intelligent enough to dumb down his own presentation in order to work with Eda during their separation. I miss the fire and conflict that Serkan used to bring. I love soft Serkan but I want him to have his edge back, especially in regards to Art Life and the holding.

-That stand off between Eda and Grandma gave me life! Honestly Grandma knows how to make a threat, like even I was scared! But she doesn’t know Eda Yildiz like she thinks she does. Eda Yildiz has gone through too much loss to lose anyone else. And to give into anyone else. It’s clear that grandma has a soft spot for Eda. And I think somewhere deep down, Eda has a soft spot for grandma too that we haven’t seen. It’s clear that Grandma is going to use Eda’s love for Serkan as her weakness. I just hope Eda doesn’t give into it. Both her and Serkan have been through too much to lose each other now.

-Why does every other couple have honest, deep conversations about their relationship and problems and childhoods than Eda/Serkan? Jeren and Ferit have had a more direct and honest conversation about thier upbringing and struggles and relationship. Engin and Pyril had a honest conversation about theirs. And we’re playing back and forth and games with Eda/Serkan. This is absolutely ridiculous. Where as we should know more about Eda/Serkan as individuals and have more progression in their relationship, it’s the complete opposite. Don’t get me wrong, their games and back and forth is cute and I certainly enjoy it but there are so many missed opportunities for honest and deep conversations that would strengthen their relationship.

-You know what really confuses me? How Eda when she knocks at Serkan’s door, says she can’t be with him and she tells him nothing can happen between them all night but then she acts all touchy and girlfriend type with him. Like she’s so fickle with it, it makes me cringe. That man has been honest with her and is really trying and she like.... plays with him. It’s just so stupid.

-I knew that Balca was crazy but this bitch is straight up PSYCHO! The fact that she set all this up just to gain some sympathy points with Serkan!

-And people used to say Serkan’s pride is high? Have you seen Eda’s pride? She complains he’s not there but she won’t even call him or anything!

-I feel like Eda only wants to be with Serkan to spite the grandma. Because on one hand she’s like there’s nothing between them and then the next in front of grandma, she acts as if they are together. I know that she’s been through a lot and the grandma is a huge problem for her but she shouldn’t play around with Serkan. He has proven himself. Bettered himself. He deserves to be happy. She deserves to be happy. And clearly, they are happy. Together. So for once, can she throw her logic away and listen to her heart.

-Not at their happiness lasting 2.5 seconds. My babies really can’t catch a break.

Overall: it was an enjoyable episode. I’ve come to terms that SCK is going to be nothing but a mess. It’s all over the place. Both with characters and plot. But I will still watch it and enjoy it. I will complain about it too because honestly how can you not. I want nothing but happiness for both Eda and Serkan. I am so happy to see the growth in Serkan upto this point. The way he handled himself in this big situation with grandma. It was mature and responsible. He didn’t let his emotions get the best of him. I also understand Eda’s reaction to her presence. She has every right to be emotional and want her out of her life. I enjoyed Eda and Serkan scenes even though some of was absolute crap writing. It’s all really due to Hande and Kerem’s acting. And their ability to make me enjoy the scene even if it makes zero sense. Honestly I want a little bit of the old Serkan back. When it comes to his business. One of my favorite things about him was his ability to put people in their places when it comes to work. I want that same fire and edge when fighting grandma and fighting for his company. As for Eda, it is time for her to grown up and show some maturity. I could excuse her behavior toward Serkan because he did hurt her. He broke her trust. And her heart. And she had every right to question his love. But I think he has proven himself beyond point. She needs to make a decision because Serkan has a limit too. In all honesty, I have very low expectations from the show from this point on. I will just continue on this journey and hope for some enjoyable scenes.

#edser #sen cal kapimi #serkan bolat #hande erçel #eda x serkan #kerem bürsin #knock on my door #sen cal kapımı #eda ve serkan #eda yildiz

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doof-doofblog · 4 years ago

Text

"Can I Get Some Help Here, Please?!"

Monday 7th December 2020

Hello again everyone! Hope your week is going well so far! Wow what a lot I have to catch up on! Last week ended on such a cliff-hanger, I'm really excited to see what this week has in store. We already have a list of suspects who could be Ian's attacker, but the interesting question is, could there be more?! Either way, I'm really looking forward to seeing everything unfold. I think it's going to be a long time before we find out who attempted to kill Ian, what do you guys think?

I'm going to jump right into Monday's episode, let's take a look at what the aftermath of Ian's attack will show. Ooooo I do think this was a very clever episode, it started with Ian's lifeless body still lying on the Queen Vic floor, Ben suddenly appears as he's leaving the pub. First question that pops into my mind - what was Ben doing at the pub?! (Looking forward to seeing his turn of events!) From across the Square he can see Sharon and Karen talking about little Albie, he seems to make his escape before anyone else sees him. As Sharon returns to the pub, she finds broken glass all smashed along the bar and on the floor, to which then she finds Ian lying on the floor. Her face looks in shock, but as Kathy ends up appearing at the Vic, finding her son in a state, the main thing that catches my attention is that Sharon isn't as hysteric as Kathy. Sharon seems to be sat away from Ian and just appears to be watching and taking in the scene before her, her face is cold and her tone is low as she explains to Kathy that she's called an ambulance. Just from the way she's acting, something tells me she knows more to this attack than she's letting on - is she the culprit or did she witness what happened but is keeping the information to herself? I don't know, something about the way Sharon acted in that scene seemed really dodgy to me! What if, somehow, she had found out the truth about the death of her son, Dennis, and took it upon herself to get revenge on her friend? It's a possibility, right?!

As the morning breaks, the attack on Ian is on everyone mind! Everyone is wanting to know every little bit of detail, the neighbours on the Square are watching from a distance as they witness the police swarming around the Queen Vic pub and the words "Burn In Hell" are graffitied on the pub door. I love how some of main suspects that we're aware of are acting on edge, Tina for example fears that the police are going to come knocking on her door, the previous episode we saw her return to her house covered in blood, washing the blood off of her hands and then having a huge cut on her lip. I think she maybe feels guilty for confronting Ian and feels as if she has the need to tell Kathy, so she makes the biggest mistake by ringing Kathy (I'll explain why later) and admits that something happened between them. Later on in the episode, Shirley finds her sister in a right state after waking up from the night before, with a fresh cut lip. Shirley knows something has happened and urges her sister to tell her everything, Tina reveals that she confronted Ian at his house and there was a big of a scuffle between them which caused Ian to fall, this is completely new information to us, but it does give us an insight to Tina's side of the story. Interesting the most valid point in her story is that their encounter happened at the Beale household, Ian was found unconscious at the Vic - so there could be some chance that Tina might not be to blame - what if Ian went to the Vic later on and got confronted by someone else? The only thing that would put Tina in the frame is if he went to the Vic after their encounter and somehow collapsed from his head injury. It's a very interesting scenario.

Another local resident who is fearing for his life is Max, early in the episode it looks to be night time and he appears to be texting someone stating "Don't worry about Ian!" - something tells me he's texting Linda. Linda is also returning home quite late in the evening, (the night of Ian's attack) - she walks in to her apartment and interestingly walks straight to the tap to wash her hands, Mick is sat in the corner of the room in the dark as he questions where she had been. Again, interestingly Linda informs her husband that she's in fact been for a walk - but where exactly?! As day breaks, it seems to be Max's name that seems to be everyone lip's, everyone knew that had some kind of rivalry going on, but would Max take it a step further and attack Ian? Later on, Max finds Linda on the Square and pleads for her to give him alibi - from their discussion, the night Ian was attacked, they spent the evening together. It that why Linda wants everything to be so secretive? So Mick doesn't find out? But another possibility could be is - what if they spend the evening together, get intimate, they begin to fret about Ian and maybe Linda takes it upon herself to make a visit to the Vic before she heads home, which would could be why she returned home so late?! Max thinks that they need to cover each other's back if the police come questioning them, and it seems that Linda agrees, that later on she approaches Jack and informs him that regardless that the community and gossiping and thinking it was Max who attacked Ian, she informs him that Max was in fact with her when Ian was attacked. She then asks Jack to keep it to himself, much to his annoyance and shock, but he insists that no one on the Square will need to know that little bit of information. So Linda could also be a suspect as well as Max, who knows?!

The other two suspects that we're aware of is Stuart and Rainie, Rainie appears to have gone missing, has she maybe done a runner after having a confrontation with Ian? We see Stuart on the phone to her pleading for her to come home, however he also seems to mention that he's messed up big time and he needs her home. What could Stuart be referring to?! The previous episode we see him burning items at the allotment, what could he burning? Getting rid of evidence of blood on his clothes maybe after attacking Ian? What other reason would he need to go the allotment and burn things? As the episode progresses, we see him trying to ask his brother, Callum, whether he has any news or update as to who attacked Ian, of course Callum informs him that he's not allowed to reveal anything to him, even if he had a lead or not. Personally, I don't think it was Stuart or Rainie, I have a feeling that maybe they both confronted Ian individually, but none of them are responsible for his attack, that's just a personal opinion anyway.

Now the two main suspect in the Panesar family is Suki, however I feel we've seen a lot less of her - which kind of makes you think it could be here? Less obvious, right? She mentions how it was inevitable that someone would be out to get revenge on Ian after everything he's done. But interestingly, later on in the episode, she happens to question to her son, Kheerat, if he was careful? Careful with what exactly?! He reassures his Mother that he's always careful, but she then happens to remind him that she already has one son in prison and she doesn't want another one going in the nick! What the heck could these two be referring to?! Did Suki maybe rope her son into attacking Ian?! Again, that is another possibility!

The last few suspects on the list are Bobby and Peter. As Bobby watches from a distance as the police swoop across the Vic, he is visibly shaken. Peter appears from the house seems to sarcastically question whether their Father has been arrested again, it's then that Kathy drops the bombshell on the brothers that their Dad is actually lying in hospital, fighting for his life after being attacked the previous night. They both look in shock, but also have a slight look as if they're hiding something. As they go inside, poor Bobby seems convinced that it's his deceased sister Lucy who has returned to get revenge on their Father. He informs his brother that he saw the blood on the living room floor, he recalls coming home and finding blood on the floor, just where Lucy had died. Could that have been the encounter between Tina and Ian? Who's blood did Bobby find?! Peter recalls the conversation they both shared the previous day, agreeing that it should be their Dad who's dead and not Lucy. Peter informs his brother that they cannot let anyone know about that conversation, it must stay between the two of them - otherwise people are going to start asking questions about the two Beale brothers. As Kathy gathers some belongings of Ian's to take to the hospital, Peter mentions that this is being too hard on Bobby and he needs to take it easy, suddenly Kathy questions where Peter got a bruise on his face from - interesting! Where did that bruise come from? Peter instantly shrugs it off!

As everyone gathers at the hospital to be at Ian's side - everyone being Sharon, Kathy, Ben and Bobby. It's clear to see that 3 out of the 4 of them are looking shifty. As they wait for news on Ian, Ben hurries in to the room - claiming to his Mum that he came as soon as he heard the news about his brother. Of course, the first question out of Ben's mouth is "Do they know who did it?". Only as he's looking shifty, Bobby can't seems to keep still, he's very fidgety when it comes to his stance and playing with his hands again. Altogether the family wait to hear news about Ian, when Ash approaches them and reveal that Ian is slowly waking up, Kathy appears to be the only one relieved to hear the news. Ben almost looks annoyed, Bobby looks sad and almost as if he's going cry and Sharon is just silent. Later on as Kathy is sat with his Mother, she questions him what happened - only Ian looks as if he's not all there, he may be awake but his speech is slurry and he can barely open his eyes. It's clear he's suffered trauma to the head, could there be any lasting brain damage? He breathes deeply as he softly and slowly begins to talk to his Mum, he confirms that he remembers the night in question, importantly he says he remembers who attacked him. It look as if he's beginning to start a new sentence, he happens the mention the name "Tina" before all the hospital alarms start blaring and nurses come rushing to his aid. Kathy is absolutely stunned to hear Tina's name being mentioned - however, something tells me that Kathy might get the wrong end of the stick. Ian beginning to say something else before the alarms started blaring!

Does this mean that Tina will end up being to blame for his attack? We know that Luisa Bradshaw-White will be leaving her role as Tina Carter very soon, her exit is looming, will she end up either being arrested and put in prison for a crime she didn't commit? Or will Shirley maybe persuade her to go on the run! I love how there are so many different scenarios and speculations flying around the Square right now. This is truly EastEnders at its best with a classic WhoDunIt storyline! However, something tells me that Ian won't be out of the woods yet, it's been revealed that closer to Christmas, Ian's attacker may strike again!! After Friday's episode, I feel that this episode kind of teased a few more suspects, here are some other characters who could be involved in Ian's attack:-

Linda Carter

Shirley Carter

Kheerat Panesar

Dotty Cotton

Sharon Watts

Phil Mitchell

Kathy Beale

This storyline could go on for weeks and week, so many different characters are in the front line of this attack, could it be one of them? Or someone who's more in the background? Someone not so obvious? What do you guys think? I think as these episode continues, it's going to maybe rule out one suspect after another as we begin to hear and see their individual encounters of what they were up to on the night in question. I hope you've enjoyed reading this blog, I'm really looking forward to seeing this story progress. One thing is for sure, it's going to be such an explosive Christmas on the Square, I can see it coming! I'll be back very soon with another blog. Enjoy the rest of your evening folks! Love you all xXx

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wordsnstuff · 6 years ago

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Guide To Writing Will-They-Won’t-They

This is also available on wordsnstuffblog.com!

– This subject has been highly requested and I get a lot of questions around it. Most romance writers have experience toying with this dynamic in character relationships, so I figured I’d create a guide for those who love the delicious tension of a will-they-won’t-they relationship, because they’re difficult to do correctly, and when they’re not done right, it can throw a whole story down the drain.

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When They Do End Up Together

Make sure it’s not too... convenient. It’s bad technique to build and build onto tension just to provide an easy, clean-wrapped resolution that makes the conflict seem insignificant. If people are hesitant to get together or stay together, there is a good reason, and that shouldn’t be glossed over by the ending.

When They Don’t End Up Together

Make your reader see that this isn’t a tragedy. If two people don’t end up together, there’s a reason, and it’s a valid one, and just because two couples really like each other or even love each other, doesn’t mean they’re right for each other, and at some point both of them will know that and let that stand. The message shouldn’t be “salvage every potential relationship because if you don’t your life is over”, it should be “some relationships just aren’t right, and love is a choice, not a feeling”.

When The Issue Is Constant Conflict

Constant conflict is a bad sign. Occasional disagreements and arguments are okay, and healthy in most cases, but they should always be resolved peacefully. If a couple can never seem to do that, and that’s the purpose for repetitive breaking up/getting back together, then they probably aren’t right for each other. Please don’t send a message to your readers that couples that constantly fight to the point of deciding they would rather be with someone else than work through it ever ends in a healthy and satisfying way for either party.

When The Issue Is Lack of Communication

Lack of communication is applicable to most will-they-won’t-they relationships, and most relationship tension in general, but I want to specifically mention this because it’s not only lack of communication about initial feelings, but the lack of communication about how the relationship is going, what each partner wants out of the relationship, and what each partner does and does not enjoy in a relationship. These can all cause repetitive breakups because they seem more ambiguous a problem in the moment, and usually cause the “I just don’t think this relationship feels right”, which a character can forget easily once the relationship is over, making them return to their old partner immediately.

When The Issue Is An Existing Dynamic

(The specific request I’m addressing mentioned friends-with-benefits, but this is an SFW blog so I’ll be answering this generally; but yes that is what this section is.) If two characters have an unusual relationship, such as being best friends, which prevents them from trying to level up the relationship out of fear, this provides so many opportunities to build tension from the very beginning. Use this to your advantage, but be original with it. This is an extremely popular trope, and can put off an audience immediately if it shows signs of being completely cliche.

Pacing The Tension To Be Endearing Rather Than Stupid

The tension needs to be built up steadily, but it needs to be reasonable and each instance where the tension is demonstrated needs to be reasonable and fit into the context of each scene. If you avoid thinking about how your tension will come across, more likely than not, it will feel dumb and unnecessary rather than endearing.

Common Struggles

~ effectively writing moments of interrupted tension... Do it at the near-boiling point. This should be the climax of the tension, where they’re right near getting to the point of understanding each other, and they’re finally about to get together and someone or something, even themselves, gets in the way and brings them back to square one.

~ Balancing tension between characters... Moments of tension should be balanced with moments of genuine enjoyment of each other’s company. A lot of tension will be somewhat uncomfortable for the characters, and therefore uncomfortable for the reader, and you need to break that up with fluffy, romantic moments or it will be.. awkward.

~ At what point does tension become irritating rather than entertaining?... When the reasons for the tension become illogical or repetitive. If you’v written the same “we’re two loners at a party” scene three times with no variance in events, that’s irritating to the reader. New and unusual sources of tension through exciting instances of action and reaction between the characters that builds to a near boiling point where the reader and the characters share a longing for some resolution (due to genuine investment in the relationship growing) is entertaining.

~ Avoiding predictability while keeping the trajectory... You can keep your story exciting and on the same track by using subplots to introduce conflicts that draw the reader’s attention away from the way the relationship is growing before delivering a major twist that affects, but doesn’t halt or change the way in which the relationship is growing.

~ Not making the characters’ reluctance unreasonable... Each character should have personal and logical reasons for avoiding addressing their feelings that the reader can empathize with and understand. It’s as simple as that.

~ Will-they-won’t they that spans large periods of time... If the will-they-won’t-they surrounds a relationship that spans huge amounts of time (such as one that is spanned over 50+ years) can be depicted very well as long as you choose the moments and events that you include in the actual storytelling very wisely, and sparingly. There should be a balance of events told from the present moment where the tension is at a near boiling point, and events that establish how the relationship has grown and continues to, and why it took so long to do so.

Resources

Resources For Describing Emotions

Resources For Plot Development

Resources For Romance Writers

Kiss Scenes 101: How to Write The Perfect Kiss

Novel Planning 101

How To Write A Good Plot Twist

How To Foreshadow

Commentary On Social Issues In Writing

How To Make A Scene More Heartfelt

20 Mistakes To Avoid When Writing Young Adult Fiction/Romance

Tips On Writing Skinny Love

How To Perfect The Tone In A Piece Of Writing

A Guide To Tension & Suspense In Your Writing

Writing Arguments Between Characters

Planning A Scene In A Story

Tips On Writing Intense Scenes

DISCLAIMER

I know that the primary audience of these articles write stories for young adults or a little bit older, and I don’t want to be preachy and tell you what you should and should not convey in your story. However, I want to remind all writers that no matter who your audience is, the manner in which you convey things does impact each individual readers’ mindset and views in some way.

Please be aware of the way your story frames things like potential abuse, unhealthy behavior, and toxic relationships, because it’s not the presence of these things that is harmful; it’s the way you frame them, glorify them, or romanticize them.

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blueeyeswhitegarden · 5 years ago

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My Hero Academia, Hunter x Hunter.

My Hero Academia:

don’t watch period| drop if not interested within 2-3 episodes| give it a go, could be your thing| 5 star recommendation

fav characters: I really like Midoriya. He’s just so likable, endearing and sympathetic. I really like Todoroki’s character development. Iida has had some really cool moments too. Uraraka is just so sweet and upbeat. Eri is a new favorite as well.

least fav characters: It might be a cliche at this point, but that would easily be Mineta. He is indeed the worst and the only good thing about him is that he gets little screentime to do the whole gross pervert gag. I’m not a huge fan of Kaminari either since he tends to hang around Mineta, but at least he can be funny and got a good chance to shine during the Provisional License Exam arc.

fav relationship: I really love Midoriya’s student-mentor relationship with All Might. They truly care about each other and I love seeing All Might basically go from this idealized hero to a friend and father figure for Midoriya. I also like Midoriya’s friendships with Todoroki and Iidya. He was able to help both of them through difficult situations and it was nice to see them become closer with each other over the course of the series. Bakugo and Kirishima’s friendship became much more endearing than I expected as well, especially when I initially thought it was going to be one-sided.

fav moment: There are a lot of great moments, but a new favorite moment for me is Eri choosing to be saved. Honestly, episode seventy-six is easily one of the best episodes of the series to date. The insert song was beautiful, I loved how determined Midoriya was to save Eri and Midoriya vs. Overhaul was terrific. But I started crying the moment Eri broke through Overhaul’s emotional manipulation to grab Togeta’s cape. She is a traumatized child, been treated like a monster her whole life because of her Quirk, has been abused both physically and mentally by Overhaul and thought that the only way to stop people from dying around her was to stay with Overhaul. Seeing Midoriya chase after them and then Togeta’s cape gave her the courage to break through years of trauma enough to realize that she needed to let them save her. It was a beautiful moment that made me instantly love Eri.

I also really love the lunchroom scene with Midoriya, Iida and Todoroki. It was a short scene, but it really showed off their friendship so well and how they all support each other. I also loved that Iida said the same lines that Midoriya did before they left for their internship. He saw that Midoriya was bottling up his feelings just like he was before and wanted to at least offer some reassurance.

headcanons/theories: I don’t really have any theories or headcanons for this series.

unpopular opinion: I’m still not a huge fan of the Midoriya and Bakugo pairing. Their relationship has improved, but their dynamic for the first couple of seasons bothered me too much. Season one Bakugo reminded me way too much of bullies I had to deal with, so that stung a bit.

how’d you find it: I didn’t watch it until it started airing on Toonami. I watched the first season there, binged watched season two and the bulk of the third season within a week and I’m currently watching season four on Funimation’s website.

random thoughts: My Hero Academia is one of the few shows that lives up to the hype for me. It is a shonen series to its core, but it’s shonen done extremely well in my book and I look forward to pretty much every episode. It’s a solid series that is worth at least checking out.

Hunter x Hunter:

don’t watch period| drop if not interested within 2-3 episodes| give it a go, could be your thing| 5 star recommendation

fav characters: I really like Gon and Killua. They work so well together, but they’re also really good characters individually. Leorio turned out to be more likable than I thought he would, although I think he needed more screentime. Meruem is easily the most interesting villain in the series. Biscuit is such a fun character and easily the best female character in the cast.

least fav characters: I don’t really like Hisoka. He’s strong and intimidating, but I find him too creepy for my tastes, especially during his fight with Gon in the Heavens Arena arc.

fav relationship: Gon and Killua’s friendship is the heart of the series. It provides so much growth for Killua in particular and I honestly don’t know how the series functions without having the two of them traveling together. Mereum and Komugi’s relationship turned out to be sweeter than I expected. Meruem found a genuine connection with another person, which gave him more humanity than he initially thought he had. It was also strange for me to become a fan of their pairing in the same episode where they both die.

fav moment: I really like Gon’s emotional breakdown over Kite’s death. While the anime not including Kite prior to the Chimera Ant arc weakened the impact to a degree, it still worked because Gon’s main focus throughout the bulk of the arc was to save Kite. He was so sure that Kite was alive and they just needed Pitou to heal him. But then he was hit with the reality that Kite was long dead and it crushed him. The emotions were so raw and intense with Gon going back and forth between anger and sadness. The way he defeated Pitou was so harsh and brutal, but matched with those emotions. It didn’t feel cheap either since Gon nearly died from using that much power and as far as I’m aware, still can’t use Nen in the manga. It was an intense moment that really felt like a natural progression for Gon’s character during the arc.

I also love Leorio punching Ging right in face. Even with knowing that Ging allowed Leorio to do that, it was still immensely satisfying and made up for Leorio’s minimal screentime.

headcanons/theories: I don’t really have too many theories or headcanons for this series either.

unpopular opinion: I still think it was a massive mistake to bring Kite back to life. He still is technically a different person and just has the original Kite’s memories, but it felt like a cop out way for Gon to not really have to deal with Kite’s death. Maybe it will be better depending on whatever role Kite has in later arcs, but I think it would have been better if he hadn’t been reborn as a Chimera Ant. I’m not sure if this is an unpopular opinion, but I have no idea why Colt had so much screentime during the first half of the Chimera Ant arc if he wasn’t going to be involved in the second half. I’m still disappointed that he doesn’t get to be reunited with his sister or his birth mother, so that could have been resolved if the last Chimera Ant was Colt’s human sister reborn like I initially thought it was going to be instead of somehow Kite.

how’d you find it: I watched the dub on Toonami. I could have gone through the series faster with the subs, which might have helped with the pacing a bit, but I like the dub voices, so I was okay with that.

random thoughts: Hunter x Hunter is a really good series. It has really solid battles, the powers are unique and the expansions on Nen feel pretty natural. I also think that it tackles training arcs really well. We get to see enough of Gon and Killua’s progress to where their increased powers feel believable and earned, but they don’t feel like they’re dragging this out either. It might be more intense or violent than people would expect from a shonen series, but it’s worth checking out at least.

Thank you for asking. ^_^

#Asks #My Hero Academia #Hunter x Hunter

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