#rather than watsonian

[sleepdepravity]

Oh, i feel the same (from what i’ve seen so far) and i guess in this hypothetical, while you could sort of touch on these qualities in the one chapter that he’d be alive, you wouldnt really get the deep character development that (i assume) will come (at most its something like a realization he can have thanks to kaede that will be a bittersweet conclusion to his life). But sometimes you have to make sacrifices for the sake of playing a spunky lesbian piano girl

[liedownquisition]

Jason Todd's timeline and "Age"

So, there's a lot of discussion of Jason Todd's age esp as relative to other sidekick vigilantes, particularly Tim and Mia. I believe the exact words are usually something about a "grown ass man beating up/trying to kill teenagers."

DISCLAIMER: This particular post is specifically regarding the "grown ass man vs teenagers" statement, I have posts regarding the "tried to kill them" portion and other stuff like "seriously Jason Todd is like being shot by a marshmallow gun compared to what goes on directly before and after him in these incidents, also you don't bitch about the right stuff, also a lot of you prop up characters who are Objectively Worse, and no that's not hate on your fave it's just me calling out hypocrisy". It just takes time to find digital copies of the panels I'm using. NOTE I AM NOT JUSTIFYING HIS ACTIONS. I'm just saying y'all blow it out of proportion for petty character hate. Like, shit, they're superheroes. Jason's soooo fuckin' tame. He's not even framed as a big deal to the teens it's only the adults that think it's that much of a problem.

Courtesy readmore post cut:

Now, to start off, we all know Jason died at 15 & a few months off from 16 (if you want me to dig up panels, sure, but I figured at this point that wasn't in question). Tim at this point is somewhere between 12-13, and we have this panel in Lonely Place of Dying which takes place a few months later:

So that's a ballpark of 2-3 years between Jason and Tim.

But Tim's age is really fucky and they keep de-aging him tbh. We can extrapolate that his confrontation with Jason was between the ages of 16-17 bcs it's after the arc where he has his incredibly shitty 16th birthday in Robin Vol2 #116 and before Red Robin where he's stated to be 17. This would put Jason between 18-19 at the time. (If you really want me to find panel sources for Tim's birthday and his age in RR then, sure, but I don't think they're necessary. I used it more as a guidepost for Jason's age, since we have a clear idea of what the age gap is.)

At least, on paper.

Mia for her part I've had a hard time finding like, on panel mentions of her age and if anyone can direct me to it being explicitly stated I'd love that. I'm rereading old comics but it's a LOT of comics to hunt down & dig through. To my understanding she was fifteen when Ollie first met her, and there's at Minimum of about a year and a half between that to her meeting Red Hood, more likely at least two? because there's at least few months between that and her joining the Titans, the Doctor Light stuff, then One Year Later, and then returned to Star some 3 months after Ollie came back to run for mayor? And then Jason not too long after. So, two years feels safe. Puts her at 17-ish, Jason at 19-20

Once again, I specify: on paper.

People would happily point out at this point that the upward stretch of a 4 year age gap is a "huge gap in maturity." And yeah, under normal circumstances, I'd agree.

But, and this is going to get contradictory bcs I found Two different timelines (BOTH written by Winick, lmao), and depending on how you read it it could be up to three different possibilities. Let's Start with Batman Annual #25: Daedalus & Icarus.

Timestamp before Jason's resurrection, which is pretty well known at this point:

Next, him waking up from a coma afterwards, when he escapes the hospital:

Now the above could be interpreted as either 1 year after he died if we're assuming that it's using the same "start" point to count as the resurrection (unlikely), or one year after he came back (more likely).

Next, the timestamp right before a guy recognizes him and sells him out:

And, finally, the timestamp before being put in the Pit:

That is, count it up, between 3-3 1/2 years where Jason was dead, in a coma, or otherwise not particularly... cognizant of the world around him. His ass is NOT developing emotionally, socially, or mentally like this, which pretty handily bridges the gaps there. Taken at face value, Jason's maturity level is going to be, unironically, younger than Tim's in the wake of these setbacks.

Now, if we go to Lost Days issue 1, it doesn't specify how long he was dead, nor how long he was in a coma, so we'll just carry those two over, what we DO have is this from just after Talia brought him home:

This puts him as being on the streets for five months, so we're at just shy of two years so far. And then we have this:

Which is right before Talia puts him in the Pit.

So, in summary: 6 months dead, 1 year coma, 5 months on the street, and something like 1-1 1/2 years with the League which...

Actually puts us on almost the exact same timeframe either way. 3 to 3 1/2 years. It just changes whether Jason was on the streets or with the League for longer.

And is utterly incomprehensible because comic timelines are a freaking nightmare.

If we're being generous, then that would put Jason at a minimum of 19, maybe toeing the line of 20 for UTRH, again, on paper, because like hell are you convincing me he did less than a year's worth of training abroad throughout Lost Days. Yeah maybe they trained him in fighting while he was catatonic, muscle memory and all that. But the other teachers that we KNOW of? The bombs, guns, probably something to get him up to date on handling all that tech we see him using, Egon, potentially arguably All-Caste if you want to draw from n52...

but you'd have to knock at least a year and a half off of his internal/personal development from death & coma, at minimum. Maybe you could argue he was somewhat developing while in his "the lights are on, but nobody's home" phase, you can't say it's at the same level as a normal person might when going about their day to day life, and it's difficult to measure. But he's not hitting the kind of milestones that he should be for his age. I wouldn't put him at anything less than two years behind. So if we use our upper estimates on Jason, and lower estimates on both the developmental setbacks and Tim/Mia's ages that gives us:

Jason toeing 20, mentally 18, fighting Tim at 16. 2 year gap, kind of stretching the physical age gap if we assume Tim had just barely turned 13 when he showed up to be Robin. - OR LESS

Jason maybe 21, mentally 19, fighting Mia at 17, two year age gap again. Honestly, still not that big of a difference - OR LESS

And, to be frank, that's not even counting the mental development issues that come from the intense physical trauma from dying - and I swear to fuck don't give me the "He's not the only one who died he's not special" speech.

HOW MANY OF THE OTHERS YOU'RE USING AS A GOTCHA LOST, *GESTURING AGGRESSIVELY ABOVE*, LITERALLY MULTIPLE YEARS OF THEIR LIFE.

Not counting adults, of course. Barry lost years, Hal lost years, Ollie I think also lost a couple years? but A) they came back still adults, bodies pretty much the same. B) While Jason's body didn't go through a magic growth spurt in canon, it did still grow esp while with the League.

I'll eventually get around to Titan's Tower & GA#72 (tbh, there are other people who've already done Titan's Tower and it'd probably be better than what I do, so I'm more going to focus on the latter, but there IS a specific part of the former that drives me nuts that I don't see brought up a lot), and maybe if we're feeling spicy all my issues with UTRH starting with how Winick is just as guilty of retroactively writing Jason as being inherently a bad penny since his Robin days as any of the other "modern" writers. Like, bud, Severe enough Head Trauma is legitimately enough to change someone's personality, not to mention trauma. It wouldn't hurt your narrative for that eerie difference, the Shade of What Once Was if you're really going for RH being Like that.

Final addition: I swear to god if you use my post to start up some kind of petty-ass ship war or flame other characters I will immediately turn off reblogs and replies I am Not Dealing With That Shit, please and thank you.

Anyways, @glitter-stained, your interest made me decide to actually put the work in now to pull it up rather than passively gather stuff to dump whenever discourse pushes me over the edge so, here ya are. Looks like you did have it closer on the mark than I did.

[magiefish]

Something I've kind of noticed about a lot of the academic scholarship I've read about Frankenstein / Dracula / Jekyll & Hyde is that everyone just seems to completely dismiss/ignore the characters as actual characters most of the time unless they're the Main Guys. Like, they'll go really in depth about Victor or the Creature's motivations and backstory and spend ages talking about Jekyll's relationship to Hyde and stuff, but the second it comes to characters like Enfield and Elizabeth or Lanyon and Clerval or frankly the Entire Rest of the Cast of Dracula, they just immediately seem uninterested. They'll just sort of vaguely gesture in their direction and go 'Oh yeah X and X thing happens to this character and here's a one sentence summary of their personality which doesn't really matter because this entire cast is interchangeable, anyway, onto the next theme' and half the time their One Sentence is just textually incorrect (looking at the New Woman/Traditional Woman descriptions of Lucy and Mina). And the reason I find this so baffling is because with other analysis I've read (e.g. Great Gatsby stuff) people seem to actually slow down and consider the characterisation and motivations of the cast as a whole with like. Nuance. Like they sit down and treat the characters as multifaceted and complex and having actual relationships with one another, and then you get to these books specifically and no one seems to care? Like they'll go really in depth with various interpretations and historical context for the Big Guys, and then never apply the same sort of examination to anyone else, and if they do, very rarely and probably only for one other character e.g. (Utterson or Mina).

If I had to posit an explanation, I would say its a combination of the archetypal nature of the title characters and the admittedly patchy writing of these books (which arguably lends to their archetypal status). I think academics kind of assume that the primary draw of these books are The Big Guys and the expansive themes and ideas they cover and that everyone else is just a pawn there to enable the narrative around the Big Guys, and the propensity for film adaptations to scrap or rewrite characters probably compounded this impression. And while I think this is at least partly true, the thing is, these characters were not always archetypal Big Guys. They originated in stories alongside *these* other characters *specifically* and it is worth asking what it is about the rest of the cast that makes the story interesting as well. Because, let's be real, if there was approximately no interest in the fucking *narrators* of Dracula, the best friends of Henry Jekyll, or the victims of the Creature, the original readers would have been completely bored out of their minds for most of these novels and public interest in them would not have been as great as it was. All of these novels were stories before they were myths, and academics should not be letting pop culture eclipse them unless they're specifically talking about the relationship between the two.

Overall, I just feel like academics are not only shooting themselves in the foot, but also doing a disservice to these stories by not bothering to investigate the other characters because frankly. It's lazy. It's lazy to dismiss an entire cast and basically skim read any sections involving them just because it's easy to focus on The One Guy. If you people really cared about themes, you'd understand that characters are inextricable from them. Like shit dude I see more care given to characters in essays about Greek tragedies, you guys are waaaay fucking behind

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

re: s5 episodes 6 and 7

going into watching the x files, one of the very few things i knew about, because i had consulted my best friend wikipedia, was the emily plotline. i knew it was coming, so in a way it felt inevitable, and my reaction to finally reaching it was approached from the in-universe knowledge that this was how it would be from the start.

but now that i read the notes on my liveblog post, i think about how i would have interpreted the episode if i had not known that fact, or had i been a contemporary viewer. i think i would have also felt frustrated that they decided to give the female lead a baby over two episodes and then kill her off and act like nothing happened. i think i would be frustrated with that, especially when i have other, existing complaints about the way women are treated in this show. how once again the plotline, from its very core, revolves around removal of scully's reproductive agency. and i think that rings even more true nowadays.

it's interesting to imagine my reaction had i not known it was coming. because the foreshadowing was there, what with the abduction plotline and the clones and the earlier babies in tubes and hybridizations and blah blah blah. but i guess i would have thought (or hoped) it was handled in a different fashion.

we'll never really know what my first thoughts would have been had i not known what was eventually going to happen, but hearing your thoughts from seeing it is making me ponder.

[leupagus]

So I'm sure there's different versions of this

But the one my cantor* told us when we were in Sunday School was this one:

Two rich men go to a cloth merchant's shop. This merchant is known for having beautiful silks, even though he has but a small humble store in the outskirts of town — so small that his infant son is sleeping on one of the chests!

These rich men want to buy these silks, so they demand to see them at once.

The merchant says, "I am sorry, they are not for sale today. Come back tomorrow and I would be happy to show them to you."

The rich men, knowing that this merchant is a Jew, think "ah-hah, he wants more money!" So they offer him a tremendous sum.

"I am sorry, they are not for sale today. Come back tomorrow, good sirs."

The rich men are puzzled, but they double their price. Quadruple it. Anything this merchant wants, they can give him.

"I am sorry, they are not for sale today. Come back tomorrow, if you please."

So, the rich men leave, annoyed, but they present themselves the very next day and sure enough, the merchant goes to a chest and pulls out the most beautiful silks that these rich men have ever seen. And when they offer to pay, he will only accept the price that he himself has deemed fair — many times less than even the first offer these rich men made.

"But why would you not give us these silks yesterday?" they ask, happy but baffled as they (or more probably their servants, but the cantor didn't get into that) pack up the silks to leave.

Just then, the merchant's wife comes in from the back, carrying their infant son. The merchant smiles and says, "Because my child was sleeping on that chest, and I did not wish to disturb his slumber. His peace is more precious to me than all the money you, good sirs, could ever provide."

[pttucker]

"Oz's steel is the strongest in the < Star Stream >. Securing suitable weapons is an utmost priority." After declaring such, Yoo Joonghyuk didn't even wait for our permission and simply went on his way. Companions looked at me, silently asking if this was okay, and I replied with a simple shrug of my shoulders.

I know that a split party works out best for Dokja's plans anyway, but I do love the idea here that Joonghyuk has to ask their permission before leaving the group.

That's not how this works.

That's not how any of this works.

Dokja's other companions are looking at him like "uh...is it cool for him to just leave like that?" 😂

Meanwhile Dokja just shrugs because he has spent over ten years watching that guy and he knows very well that Yoo Joonghyuk does not ask if he can do something, he declares that he's going to do it, and really all you can do is adjust your plans accordingly.

Or, in Dokja's case, already have Joonghyuk's lone wolf shtick accounted for in said plans.

[acewizardinspace]

The truth is, sometimes there is no watsonian answer.

Lets say for a moment a character is established to hate the color green. Then in one scene we see them wearing a green scarf. This is never mentioned or explained. It can be fun to come up with watsonian (in universe) explanations for this behavior. Maybe he got it from this other character who loves green, or maybe he changed his mind. But when those explanations actually directly contradict what happens on screen, then there is a problem. Lets say it is impossible for him to have met this other character and gotten a gift, or he mentions his hatred for green again two episodes later meaning it is impossible for him to have changed his mind.

Now your fun watsonian headcanon instead of adding meaning actively detracts meaning. Now it makes the story worse not better. Now the story stops making any amount of sense because you insist on calling attention to something the creators never wanted you to. This can be fun for AUs and headcanons, please keep with it! But it is a shit basis for shit literary analysis.

The truth is, sometimes his scarf is green because that is what the costumer designers had on hand. The truth is, sometimes there is no watsonian answer.

[pricechecktranslations]

Hi, I’m an editor from the Evillious Chronicles wiki! I wanted to ask your opinion of the wiki, what you do/don’t like about it, and any improvements you would like to see made?

Oh geeze. To be honest, I don't really have anything to say. I stopped really caring about the wiki a long time ago.

I had complaints in the early days when I first joined, for sure. I didn't like how translations were handled, the article writing quality was absolutely terrible, there were too many assumptions being made with too little information, etc. But over time most of those issues have been resolved, and I've lost the need to argue or debate on there. I'm close friends with one of the former admins, and so when she finally left the wiki I lost any actual imperative to pay attention to it.

I've also never felt hugely invested in being in the fandom itself--for me, the point of the wiki was just that it was the only place you could go to get or share information on the series, period. But part of the reason I translated all the novels was so that you wouldn't have to. That English speaking fans could enjoy Evillious while bypassing the fandom entirely, if they so chose. I'm sure there's still people who see it as a place to get together and talk about Evillious, but for me the wiki is just a helpful supplementary resource rather than a main source of information and discussion.

Doesn't help that "Fandom" as a whole has restructured their wikia system so that it's harder for me to navigate it easily. I used to still pay attention to what people were saying in the forums for a while, but that was when forum activity was quick and easy to follow. I can't be bothered to figure it out again.

[tortoisesshells]

409.

[kimberlyannharts]

Aisha literally gets cornered in the stone guardian fight and had Rocky not intervened she would have probably died but because she didn’t call OUT to Rocky it’s not demonized

And people over look how Adam was getting bullied as well in that same fight like… it’s never talked about

But Kimberly finding herself in the tough spot like 3 times and needing support and Tommy coming/calling out makes them codependent or like she’s weaker?

Make it make sense people

People overlook the guys having problems because of the misogyny but yeah I don't like how people use it to pick on Kim specifically. Especially when the interpretation of her just being "a damsel for Tommy to save" has colored people's perception of her for years

And yes part of it you can blame on writers being bad at writing women but a majority of it is simply viewers either not paying attention or just remembering what they want to remember lol

[the--highlanders]

jamie violence moments

[ask-killer-kristophgavin]

((Question for the mod: where in the AJ timeline are we? Is this the seven year gap? If so pheonix is already disbarred and Kristophs doing the fake cordial-but-also-really-petty friendship thing right? Is it before that? I don't think that's the case, but I just wanted to know.))

((Oh! Also- this may be kinda meta, but I wanted to know how the audiences messages were coming in. Is it like a chat? How do they separate ones that are for Apollo VS Gavin then? Are they voice invoices? I think that'd be cool sjsvshsdvge. Are they letters? Like.. what's happenin here 🤔 (my main concern with this is to figure out if A: we can make loud noises by screaming etc, OR if we can whisper, B: to figure out if Gavin reads EVERY message or if we can sneak em by to get to Apollo) ))

//the timeline is very vaguely 'pre aa4' by like a year maybe, or a half year. As foe the audience messages... I have no idea how SPECIFICALLY, but they are electronic. I assume any pictures that are sent in also come as recordings/photos in the case of that one asker that sent Kristoph the magical items. Ty for asking!

[dandelionjack]

joke’s on you, the answer is “the whole show” because our protagonist is a shapeshifter

[starlit-mansion]

the last post had so many tags that i lost the last quarter of them. i am embarassed

[tsaomengde]

The Villeneuve Dune(s) can be broadly interpreted as one of the two possible futures Paul sees in the original novel

Spoilers below for Dune Part Two. (And for the original novel, but that's been out since the 60s.)

He had seen two main branchings along the way ahead--in one he confronted an evil old Baron and said: "Hello, Grandfather." The thought of that path and what lay along it sickened him.

The other path held long patches of grey obscurity except for peaks of violence. He had seen a warrior religion there, a fire spreading across the universe with the Atreides green and black banner waving at the head of fanatic legions drunk on spice liquor. Gurney Halleck and a few others of his father's men--a pitiful few--were among them, all marked by the hawk symbol from the shrine of his father's skull.

"I can't go that way," he muttered. "That's what the old witches of your schools really want."

Obviously the Doylist explanation for why there are differences in the new films is that the original book is 60+ years old and has certain elements no longer in cultural vogue that were adapted out or altered to better fit modern sensibilities, and I'm all for that. But I did find it interesting that there is an explicit moment at the end of Part 2 where Paul confronts the Baron, utters the "Hello, Grandfather," line, and kills him.

This isn't necessarily because there is any one choice that Paul makes throughout the course of the two movies that leads here instead of to the jihad. In point of fact, most of the changes that drive him here are caused by choices made in the adaptations of the films.

The causal chain that leads to Paul undertaking the spice agony is his failure to predict the attack on Sietch Tabr, rather than his failure to predict Gurney's attack on Jessica; this is, of course, necessitated by the omission of the Harkonnen scheme in part 1 to impair Thufir's Mentat efficiency and potentially drive a wedge between Leto and Jessica by framing Jessica as the traitor. The final push that causes him to make the decision is, of course, the vision he experiences of an alternate future in which he didn't have to kill Jamis, with Jamis counseling him to climb as high as possible before the hunt so he can see as far as possible. (In other words, he ignores Stilgar's advice of not listening to the djinn.)

Similarly, his killing of the Baron is necessitated by the adaptational choice to keep Alia as a fetus so the audience doesn't have to deal with a two-year-old talking like an adult and killing the Baron, which they probably did because it would have been distracting.

However, I might argue that a Watsonian explanation for the film omitting the two-year time-jump lies specifically with Paul's decision to explicitly disavow the prophecy when Jessica undergoes the spice agony, and to explain to the Fremen that her survival is because of her Bene Gesserit training. He then attempts to secure his position with the Fremen through secular deeds, rather than letting Jessica carve a place for them with the BG prophesy.

This disagreement between the two of them causes her in turn to take a more active approach in cultivating Paul's status as Lisan al-Gaib, which accelerates the timeline of the Fremen being ready to submit to him. In turn, Paul focusing more strongly on guerrilla war against the Harkonnens accelerates the timeline of Feyd-Rautha being put in charge of Arrakis and cracking down hard in the north, leading to the aforementioned crisis point of Sietch Tabr being attacked without Paul's foreknowledge.

Notably, while we do see the shrine of Leto's skull in the film, we only see it in a vision; there is no moment in the movie where Paul explicitly finds his father's remains and enshrines them. Hence, going from a strict interpretation of the film's "text," this is not the future in which the legions are marked by the shrine, because the shrine doesn't exist. It is the other future. The compression of time means that Paul and Chani's relationship is much newer and more fragile and doesn't survive the strain of his apotheosis, and that's what sickens him most.

Of course, the "Hello, Grandfather" path also leads to the jihad, because Paul's tragedy is that his very existence was always going to lead to it, regardless of what he chose to do.

And Paul saw how futile were any efforts of his to change any smallest bit of this. He had thought to oppose the jihad within himself, but the jihad would be. His legions would rage out from Arrakis even without him. They needed only the legend he already had become. He had shown them the way, given them mastery even over the Guild which must have the spice to exist.

Obviously none of this passes explicit, close scrutiny, and is more of a fun "if you squint and look at it a certain way it kind of makes sense." I expect that the line was put in as a nod to the original book, no more or less, but making up head-canons like this is fun for me and if even one other person finds it edifying then I consider sharing it time well spent!

[ckret2]

minor nitpick but does VENDOR not capitalize THEIR own pronouns when referring to THEMSELF? also while reading that bit I realized that yeah, Bill would have no idea what VENDOR was, as vending machines as a concept wouldn't work in a two-dimensional world

I think when I was first picking THEIR pronouns I considered all capsing I/ME/MY but then didn't for reasons I don't remember because that was at least half a year ago. And a few days ago I suddenly realized aw man it would be really cool if VENDOR uses (and all-capses) the royal WE. But I didn't think of it earlier.

I can't be assed to go back and change THEIR first person pronouns when I'm working with a zero chapter buffer and am just barely squeaking out each week's fresh chapter, but when I'm posting chapter 61+ to AO3, the royal WE might be something I edit in.

(Since VENDOR's never referred to THEMSELF with all caps pronouns and you're only just asking now, I suspect it's partially because THEY called THEMSELF "Vendor" in the latest excerpt instead of VENDOR. My doylist explanation for that is THEIR logo is literally spelled "Vendor" in THEIR actual art because initial caps got me that retro 50s appliance brand aesthetic I wanted better than all caps did; and my watsonian explanation is that if some actual IRL human beings can have their signatures in all caps even though they'd properly spell their name with initial caps if they were typing it in an email or something, then VENDOR can sign THEIR name with initial caps for the aesthetic even though THEY'd properly spell it in all caps.)

And ye of little faith! You can totally make a vending machine work in 2D.

Did you know that the first vending machines were designed in Egypt nearly 2000 years ago and dispensed holy water or wine in exchange for a coin? This isn't relevant, I just think it's a cool fact.

But VENDOR's so big, so alien-looking, and so filled with planets that Bill wouldn't immediately make the connection that THEY're a vending machine. Imagine seeing, like, a 200 story tall steel fridge. You might initially mistake it for a weirdly featureless windowless skyscraper with a weird decorative wave coming out of one side rather than recognizing it as a fridge with a handle.