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kinsey3furry300 · 3 years ago

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A very confused Star Wars Fan desperately tries to justify their belief that “Caravan of Courage” shows the way forward for the franchise. No, really.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve loved Star Wars. And I mean, all of it. The books, the games, the Lego, the spin-offs: I even enjoy the Holiday Special in a The Room so-bad-you-just-need-to-see-it sort of way. But particularly the films. But here is when we run into the big problem: I’m just the wrong age. The original trilogy launched before I was born, the prequel trilogy hit cinemas when I was already a teen and while I went and saw them and enjoyed them, I was at that age where I was self-conscious about seeing a “kids” film, and hyper-aware of how silly and cringy those films were in parts. So my indoctrination, my inoculation with the Star Wars bug didn’t happen in the cinema, and it didn’t happen with any of the main franchise works. It happened on home video, on a skiing trip in the French Alps in the early 90’s. I’d have been about 6, and this was the first time I’d ever been abroad other than to see relatives in Ireland. And I loved it: to this day I love skiing, but more than that, I have very, very fond childhood memories of this trip. This was shortly before I lost my biological mother to cancer, she’d have received her diagnosis just after we got back from the trip. This was when my younger sister stopped being an annoying screaming thing and became and became an actual person I could talk and play and share ideas with, this was before the combination my mothers long illness and my father having just launched his own IT start up meant I didn’t see him or her any more, despite the fact they were in the same house as me. This was this wonderful, nostalgic child-hood bubble when my family was intact, and nothing could ever go wrong. I skied all day with mum and dad, and would come back to the chalet in the evening. It was an English speaking chalet, I met my first real-life American there, and having grown up in the 90’s in the UK nothing was cooler than making friends with an actual American my own age. He had a hulk Hogan action figure with springs in the legs so if you put him on a hard surface and punched his head down, when you let go he’d jump really high in the air. We used to play with it together in the bath, back in that weird 90’s time-bubble when it was possible to convince two sets of parents that this kid you’d just met was you best friend in the world and of course shared bath time was, somehow, normal and appropriate. And fresh from bath time, tired from the day, the parents would give us some hot coco, dump us kids in front of the tv and grab the first shitty low-budget VHS they could find to keep us distracted while they went to the bar. In this particular time, in this particular place, that shitty low budget cartoon was the complete set of the 1985 Lucasfilm/ABC Ewoks cartoon, plus the two spin off movies, and to this day that cheap, kitschy, kind of bad series has a special warm and cosy place in my heart. I remember being enthralled by the world, in love with the characters, applied by the bad guys and the injustice they caused (to this day I’m still irate about that time Wicket lost his set of beads documenting his progress towards becoming a full warrior and the older Ewoks basically said, tough, you need to re-earn all those merit badges from scratch. This struck me as exactly the sort of bullshit an adult would pull, and pissed me off) and on tenterhooks about what would happen to the characters.

It was also, by a coincidence, the first ever Star Wars media I was exposed to, and the above combination of events probably explains a lot about me.

So I was surprised, the other day, when scrolling Disney+, to find they’d added Caravan of Courage AND Battle for Endor to the roster in my region. Surely Disney wouldn’t want their slick, cool brand associated with this old trash? Surely there could be no place for this in the post-Mandalorian Star Wars cannon? Surely this is a horrible mistake some intern made, right?

Unless…. What if I’ve miss-remembered? What if it’s not just rose-tinted nostalgia goggles, and it’s, in fact, secretly really, really good?

I rushed to my comfy chair, got a blanket, dimmed the lights, made some coco (with rum in it, because why the hell not?) and sat down to re-examine this lost gem.

And wow: it’s every bit as shit as you’d expect.

It has aged exactly as poorly as you’d expect a cheap, mid 80’s direct to video spin-off to age. Caravan of Courage? More like Caravan of Garbage, am I right?

And yet… I still enjoyed every moment.

And it was sitting there, in my pyjamas, watching a cheaply made direct to video cash-grab from just before I was born, seeing it again for the first time in nearly 30 years, and I realised something.

It doesn’t really matter if this film is bad, so long as I enjoy it. And if it doesn’t really mater if this is bad, then I, like many Star Wars fans, wasted a huge amount of time and emotional effort on being butthurt about stuff I didn’t like about the Rise of Skywalker and it’s ilk. Because somewhere, right now, a tired and frustrated parent is putting Disney+ on to keep their kids quiet for two hours. And they won’t think too hard about what they put on, so long as it keeps little Timmy busy for a bit. Somewhere, right now, a kid is watching Rise of Skywalker, and it’s the first Star Wars media they’ve ever seen.

And that’s okay. Because we don’t know what that kids home life is like. We don’t know if it’s good or bad. Maybe it’s great, maybe it’s about to take a dramatic plunge like mine did, and this moment here will be the cosy, warm memory they look back on in 30 years time, and that’s beautiful. They’re getting introduced to a fun, wonderful fantasy world that could be with them all their lives, through good times and bad, and as fans we should be happy about that.

Star Wars will never, die: it’s too darn profitable, Disney will never let it. And while I hope they learn from their mistakes and make sure every future Star Wars is a timeless gem of story-telling, statistically, if you keep making enough films, some of them will be bad. And while I’d like them all to be great, it’s still okay if they’re bad.

Because nothing can take away my memories of that week in that chalet. Nothing can take-away my memories of when they put the original trilogy on in cinemas for the special edition and I had my jaw hit the floor with how good it was on the big screen, not knowing or caring who shot first. Nothing can take away you memories of the Original Trilogy, the Prequels, or the Clone Wars. Nothing can tarnish the bits of the sequil trilogy that you like, and there are good bits in there.

But wait, what about continuity? What about the sacred, perfect written time-line that used to exist?

Well, what about it? Have you seen any other big, epic fantasy universe before? They’re all a mess. A work of fiction, particularly fantasy, can be extensive, or tightly written, but not both. Harry Potter is only seven books, and the last two feel, tonally, like they’re from an entirely different series. I love them, but the grim-dark kicked in so fast you’ll get whiplash. The Hobbit is a perfect written self-contained novel, and LOTR is *The* big boy high-fantasy trilogy: fast forward 50 years, and Christopher Tolkien is desperately squeezing every last drop of money out of his father’s corpse by finishing and publishing every unfinished note JRR ever wrote right down to his shopping lists. Even Dune goes of the rails with sequels. I can only think of four fantasy works that are both extensive and consistently tightly written, Song of Ice and Fire, Wheel of Time, Malazan: Book of the Fallen and Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe. And even then, the prequels and spin-offs mess with the timelines: the Dunk and Egg novella’s change some character’s canonical ages and timelines, Wheel of Time was going slowly off the rails even before the Jordan died, Forge of Darkness made what was a good metaphor for the creation of it’s world into a literal war deep in the past, and Sanderson’s first Novel Elantris got a re-write to bring it more in line with the rest of the shared universe. The MCU, oft held up as the modern example of tightly planned, well thought out ongoing storytelling, is a lie: it was never as pre-planned out as Disney wants us to think; the first Iron Man, apparently, barely had a script, with Downey ad-lib-ing most of his scenes. None of the MCU films are direct sequels to each-other other than Infinity war and Endgame. There are three Iron Man films, and Three Thor films, and none continue an ongoing story line across multiple films, and the Cap films barely continue an arc, but only where Cap’s relationship with Natasha and Bucky is involved. Much like these, Star War’s cannon is a complete, nightmarish, confusing, tangled, illogical mess. And it has been since 1984, as Caravan of Courage proves. It was never consistent and well planned.

And that’s okay.

I used to care about plot holes. I used to care about which works were cannon in Star Wars lore. I’m over that now. I’m happy to imagine the books, films and games not as a blow-by-blow historical account of a galaxy far far away, but as campfire stories from within this fun, imaginative world that we’re all invited to listen to. Stories that are in-universe myth and folklore, that we can all snuggle up and listen to while drinking highly alcoholic rum and remembering better times, knowing that wherever the future throws at us, no matter how the world goes to hell around us, we’ll still have the memories, and the ability to make our own new stories in the wonderful Star Wars world we all share.

And that’s okay. No, more than that: that’s beautiful.

Also Star Wars is completely unambiguous on the fact we’re allowed to kill fascists no matter how many times they keep coming back with a new logo, so that’s timely I guess.

So, there’s my hot take two-years after everyone else stopped caring about this stuff, as per bloody usual. Tell me why I’m wrong below, and does anyone else have any truly awful spin-off shows that they kind of have a nostalgic soft spot for?

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duhragonball · 4 years ago

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‘21

Amidst all the popular hype for seeing the end of 2020, it didn’t hit me until about lunchtime what the real highlight is that I’ve been waiting for: For the first time since 1999, the year finally ends in “numberty-number” again. It low-key irritated me that we had to call it “two thousand three” and I was relieved when “twenty-thirteen” caught on, but it still wasn’t right because it was too short, and now we’re back in the sweet spot, and I should be safely dead by 2100, so that’s one less thing I gotta deal with.

Really, even “numberty hundred” rings true to me. “Nineteen hundred” sounds like a year. “Twenty-one-oh-six” sounds like a futur-y year, which is even cooler. So did “Two thousand five”, until I was actually living in it, and it sounds even worse now that it was a long time ago and adults will talk about their childhood happening in that year. Daniel Witwicky would be old enough to get married and grow a fancier beard than me. That’s nuts. My point is that, honestly, it’s the year 3000-3019 that I have to worry about, so if I ever decide to go vampire, those will be the years I hide in the ocean or force society to reset the calendar, whichever’s easier.

I spent New Year’s Eve finishing Superliminal, which I bought on Steam after I watched Vegeta play it on YouTube. It has a similar look and feel to the Stanley Parable, so if you liked one you’d probably enjoy the other, although Superliminal has a different theme. I kept hoping I’d find some secret passage that I wasn’t supposed to take, and a narrator would scold me for finding the “Chickenbutt Ending”, but it doesn’t work that way. Superliminal’s all about puzzles and awesome visuals, but it does have the same soothing design aesthetics as TSP. Honestly, I enjoyed just wandering around in Stanley’s office, and Superliminal does the same thing with a hotel and several other settings. It’s nice.

This got me thinking about how I kind of did everything there was to do in The Stanley Parable, and I sort of wished they would add new stuff to the game, but I’m not sure there would be much point to that. I could play the older version, but it presents the same message, just with different assets. The Boss’s Office would look different, but it’d be the same game. And this got me thinking about various “secret chapters” in pop culture. Secrets behind the cut.

I first heard about this idea in the 2000′s, when fans invented this notion that there was a secret chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I read a website that tried to explain the concept, and of course it lauded J.K. Rowling with all this gushing praise for working an Easter egg into the book, a literary work of “well, magic.”

That pretty well sums up my distaste for Harry Potter, by the way. These days, JKR has thoroughly crapped all over her reputation and legacy, but in the 2000′s it felt like half the planet was in a mad rush to canonize her as a writing goddess, to the point where fans were congratulating her for writing secret chapters that didn’t actually exist. The idea was based on lore from the books about Neville Longbottom’s parents. They were patients in a mental hospital, and he’d go to visit them, and they would give him bubble gum wrappers, intended to demonstrate how far remove they’ve become from reality. The secret chapter lies in those wrappers, which all read “Droobles Best Blowing Gum” or some such. What if Neville’s parents were only pretending to be mentally ill, so as to throw off their enemies? Naturally, they would want to stay in contact with their son, so the bubble gum wrappers would have to contain coded messages. Said code involves unscrambling the letters on the wrappers to make new words, like “goblin” or “sword” or “Muggle” or “Dumbledore”. The problem is that you can also use it to make other words like “booger” or “drool” or “booobbiess.” Play with it enough, and you can make the code say anything you want it to say, which means it’s no code at all.

But the idea was that the not-yet-published sixth HP book would reveal all of this gum wrapper nonsense, and Neville would decode the messages and discover all of his parents’ super-cool adventures. I’m not sure why we needed a secret chapter if Book 6 was going to explain all of this anyway in several not-secret chapters, but that was the whole point. Fans didn’t have Book 6 yet, and they were so desperate to read it that they started trying to extrapolate what would happen next based on “clues” from the previous five. That’s like trying to figure out what Majin Buu looks like by watching the Androids Saga. I guess some wiseguy would have guessed that he’d resemble #19, but that’d just be blind luck.

And when you get down to it, this whole secret chapter business is really just a conspiracy. This is literally how Qanon works. Some anonymous jackass posted vague “hints” on an imageboard, and people went goofy trying to interpret them and figure out what would happen in the future. They call it “research” because they spend a ton of time on this, but there’s no basis to any of it. It took me a few minutes to figure out that you can spell “Muggle” with the words in “Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum”, but that’s not research and it doesn’t prove anything. But all these guys keep looking for “Hilary Clinton goes to jail next week” and lo and behold that’s all they ever find.

In the same vein, the gum wrapper thing was really a complaint disguised as a conspiracy, disguised as a “magical secret chapter”. At least a few fans wanted to see more Neville in their Harry Potter books, they wanted Neville’s parents, or someone like them, to have cool spy adventures or whatever else. The point is, they clearly weren’t getting what they wanted out of the printed works, but they didn’t want to turn against their Dear Beloved Author, so they started casting about for an alternative reality, one where J.K. Rowling wrote a cooler story and hid it in the pages of the one that actually went to press. So instead of just saying “Hey, Order of the Phoenix was kind of a letdown, I hope there’s more ninjas in the next book,” they said “Rowling is a genius because I wanted ninjas and she’s definitely going to give them to me, I have the gum wrappers to prove it.”

The same thing happened all over again when the BBC Sherlock show took a turn for the nonsensical. I don’t know from BBC Sherlock, but I watched the fascinating video critique by Hbomberguy, and it sounds like the show did tons of plot twists until it stopped making sense altogether in the fourth season. If you skip to 1:09:00 in the video, you’ll hear about fan theories that suggested that season four was supposed to be crappy, as part of a secret meta-narrative plan that would be paid off in a secret, unannounced episode that would not only explain everything, but retroactively justify the crappy episodes that came before. But it’s been a few years and it never came to pass, so I think we can call this myth busted.

Most recently, I think we’ve all seen a lot of talk about the final season of Supernatural, where I guess Destiel sort of became canon but only one guy does the love confession and the other doesn’t respond. But I guess he does say “I love you too” in the Spanish dub, which means the English language version was edited for whatever reason. It’s not exactly a secret episode, but the implication is that there’s more to this than what made it to the screen. So the questions turn to what the screenplay said, what the writers and actors wanted to do, etc. etc. My general impression is that SPN fans are a bit more used to crushing disappointment, so they’re not quite as delusional about this show being unquestionable genius, like Sherlock and Harry Potter. Maybe this is an Anglophile thing? Like, if you suck at something with a British accent, people will accept it more unconditionally?

I had seen something on Twitter about how there should have been a secret Seinfeld episode in the 90′s. Someone suggested it at the time, they tape a whole episode, then wait until 2020 to air it, because by then it would be worth a fortune. But they didn’t do it, because it costs a lot of money to make a TV episode, and if you don’t air the show right away, you aren’t making that money back any time soon. Yeah, you might recoup a fortune someday, but Seinfeld was making a ton of money then. It exposes the fannish nature of the idea. A fan would love to discover a cool secret chapter, but a content creator isn’t necessarily keen on making a cool thing and then hiding it where few people would find it.

I thought about doing this myself recently. Maybe Supernatural gave me the bug, but I thought “I’m writing this big-ass story, so what if I wrote me a secret chapter for it? Wouldn’t that be cool?” But no, it wouldn’t be cool, because it’d be the same work as writing a regular chapter, and the same stress I feel when I hold off on publishing it. Except I’d just never publish it, I’d put it in some secret hole on the internet and hope that some superfan who might not even exist can decode whatever clues I leave.

I mean, it’d be awesome if it got discovered and everyone loved it. “Hey, I found this hidden chapter! Mike’s done it again!” And I could bask in the glory. But what if no one finds it? Then I just wasted my time, right? I want people to read my work. My monkey brain needs the sweet, sweet validation of those kudos and comments, folks. Once I realized that, I understood why no one else would want to do a secret chapter either. Easter eggs are one thing, but the bigger bonus features they put on DVDs were pretty easy to find, and with good reason.

I think that’s what made the Stanley Parable so appealing to play, because it teases you with the idea that you can “break” the game and find some extra content that you weren’t supposed to see, but as you go exploring all those hidden areas, it gradually becomes clear that this is just part of the game; you were meant to find all these things, and that’s why they were put here. It’s hidden, but he secret aspect of it is just pretend.

I suppose that what I like about games like TSP and Superliminal is the illusion of secrets more than the secrets themselves. I like roaming through the hallways, having no idea what I might find ahead. I kind of wish I could open all the doors, and not just the ones the game designers put stuff behind, but the reality is that there’s nothing on the other side. I used a cheat code once to explore the unused doors in TSP and it’s just a bright white field on the other side. Interesting to look at, but not much of a reveal. Honestly, the doors themselves are more appealing than anything that could lay behind them.

And that’s probably what makes secrets so fun. They could be almost anything, but once you open the present, the number of possibilities drops to one. If they had ever made that Secret BBC Sherlock Episode, I doubt it would have lived up to expectations, but fans could amuse themselves by imagining what could have been in it. In the end, though, things usually don’t justify the hype. For every Undertaker debut at Survivor Series 1990, there’s a Gobbledygooker debut at Survivor Series 1990. It’s impossible to manufacture a secret with a guaranteed payoff.

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viktcrr · 4 years ago

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「maxence danet-fauvel & nonbinary」⇾ samuels, viktor, the senior radcliffe student’s records show that he/they are a capricorn and 24 years old. he/they are studying visual arts, living in noland and can be observant, ingenious, reticent & dependent. when i see him/them i am reminded of a sculptor’s hands clay-ridden, the insistent hum of tv static, and a crying preacher inside a dusty funeral home. ⇽「james & 21 & est & they/them.」

hllo !!! i’m james n here’s one of my big idiot muses <3 he’s not actually dumb he’s :/ a bit evil. bt thts okay hes still <3 beloved <3 LKDSFHLSADLKGFSHLKD anyways!

TW DEATH, HEAVY GRIEF, OVERDOSE / DRUG ADDICTION, HOSPITALIZATION, HYPERSEXUALITY, RELIGION MENTIONS, MENTAL ILLNESS

aesthetic.

old tvs and their static, worn tapes, horror movie screams, spilled ink, a sculptor’s hands, clay-stained, chicken scratch handwriting, messy notes, messy hair, scoffs and eye-rolls, bruised knuckles, sore throats, funeral homes and a crying preacher, shattered ceramics, knife fights, high ledges, vertically-striped pants, red lights, the moon shrouded in clouds, cigarette butts, graveyards and half-empty wine bottles, sitting there for hours and talking to nothing, about nothing, a god complex, gold rings adorning both hands, barbwire baseball bats, having never played baseball in your life, deep eyebags and broken mirrors, a permanent chip on one’s shoulder, yearning, longing, wishing.

basic info.

full name: viktor phillip samuels

nickname(s): icky vicky :/

b.o.d. - jan 2nd

label(s): the black hole, the crepehanger, the impious, the opaque, the tempest, etc.

height: 6′1″

hometown: rochester, new york

sexuality: pansexual uwu

stats

inspired by: beetlejuice (beetlejuice), sid (toy story), jack sparrow (pirates of the caribbean), francis wilkerson (malcolm in the middle), azula (avatar: the last airbender), vicky (the fairly oddparents), stu macher / billy loomis (scream), marshall lee (adventure time), bojack horseman (bojack horseman), any it’s always sunny character :/

biography.

born to mama and papa (preacher) samuels in rochester, new york - fifteen minutes after his twin sister, tatiana samuels. years later, rosa samuels joined the gang.

was an awkward, quiet kid growing up, he didn’t interact well with others and preferred being left alone to dig up worms and draw on the walls of their childhood home. the only exception was his twin, really.

as he got older he grew out of this, but instead became like … sort of an asshole? maybe to compensate for years of childhood awkwardness. he’s the sort of person who will bite the hand that feeds him & developed into a full time nuisance by middle school, unlike tatiana who was much more subtle about her conniving manners.

always has been a fan of ‘darker’ materials. grim & creepy morbid shit. probably the biggest tim burton fan, ever since he was a kid … not a good look for a preacher’s son, but he never really felt ‘in’ with the rest of his family to begin with. classic black sheep syndrome.

drew disturbing pictures as a kid that probably prompted one or two or five phone calls home to assure everything was fine.

just really had a knack for art at a young age, from drawing to painting to playing with clay. it’s always been his Thing and probably is the only thing he’s good at.

being twins with tatiana was hard. they were near opposite besides both being quite mean-spirited. tatiana handled being in public better, left a better image behind - but viktor had talent, more than she did. they loved each other deeply - y’know, those unbreakable twin bonds as cliche as it sounds - but found each other as competition for their parents’ attention. a rivalry for affection.

in high school is when viktor really started to act out. it started extreme, like losing his virginity in their church and vandalism around the neighborhoods. faked being possessed in the middle of sunday service & almost had an exorcism performed on him.

his only redeemable trait was like … just his sheer talent in the arts. was in a 3D art AP course and specialized in sculptures. he could pretty much create anything he wanted with enough dedication.

because he was the problem child, the one who deserved to be disciplined for all his antics, tatiana could sneak away and get away with whatever she wanted much easier. on the bright-side, for her, i guess.

not a very motivated person - wasn’t planning on going to college, much less going to radcliffe but his parents literally wrote & sent his college application for him because they weren’t going to house a deadbeat but had too much heart to kick him out onto the streets. cool!

he’s actually pretty smart but he just doesn’t apply himself. has a minor in english because he didn’t care for an extra course-load, but he’s good at writing & analyzing literature. is going to use it to write and illustrate his own series of children books with a style similar to tim burton’s. not for the kids, but because he likes to leave a trail of terror in whatever he does.

has been experimenting with himself since high school but college is where he really had started to crack down on himself. was out as pansexual & nonbinary by his sophomore year of college just … not to his parents, who don’t really need to know.

if you asked him if he believed in twins having a psychic connection with each other - he’d tell you he wouldn’t know. it felt believable at times, but sometimes he had no idea what was going on inside of tatiana’as head. on the other hand - viktor had always felt oddly transparent to her, like she knew all of his moves before he did. the only person who could predict him accurately.

( TW DEATH, GRIEF, OVERDOSE / HOSPITALIZATION BEYOND THIS POINT )

when tatiana disappeared, viktor knew something was up. it was a twist in his gut, pure instinct that something wasn’t right. and it wasn’t right - and when she was proclaimed missing, they couldn’t find her.

and when tatiana died - viktor knew. it felt wrong, something cut so severely in him he could pinpoint her death to the second. he didn’t know how, or why, but he knew it. knew it before anybody else had.

afterwards he went on a sort of bender. he’d begun to struggle with a mild drug addiction late senior year of high school / early college, but he was managing it up until this point.

his mental health had also sunk to an all-time low, when it’d never been great to begin with. (manic & depressive episodes. once fixated on a sculpting project for six months and then knocked it off the table and destroyed it as soon as he finished it for no apparent reason.)

tatiana’s body wasn’t found immediately, and when it was … viktor went off the rails. ended up overdosing & being hospitalized. spent six months in & out of psychiatric care after that.

came back to radcliffe to finish his senior year because … for the reasons above, he hadn’t been able to complete it. just wants to get his credits and get out of here.

is still dealing with a lot of trauma & grief, especially since the one year anniversary of tatiana’s death was this month (january) - causes him to spiral and be unpredictable in regards of his mental health. he stopped taking his medication, so. :/ some days are alright, other days are pretty bad.

UPDATE: now that summer’s come n go ... viktor hs been thru <3 a lot <3 recently. switched therapists (his :/ last one got her license revoked) & started new medications, went to a treatment center briefly ‘cos .. he wasn’t doing too well :/ bt now he’s back baybey! trying to be better n trying to be sober but ... :/

personality.

the human embodiment of a gremlin that was fed after midnight. a goblin, if you will. one of those cats with a narrow head and really big ears … that’s them!

a big horror & halloween enthusiast. loves the old campy horror movies & probably has an abundance of masks from different movies. dresses like a grimy millennial beetlejuice more than they should because they just … love those black & white vertical-striped pants.

can appreciate the lore & cryptids at radcliffe and likes to feed into the fear that surrounds them. is probably the cause of a few ‘anomalies’ and ‘paranormal sightings’ because they’re just … a jerk.

fashion alternates between e-boy (they would be tiktok famous if they were 17 & didn’t think that a majorly minor based app was weird.), millennial beetlejuice, and goth in a crop top & sweatpants. big fan of crop tops and a big fan of sweatpants.

they can be really fucking mean? petty, aggressive, a major instigator. will literally spit in your face for little to no reason, you could just look at them the wrong way. the kind of person who will stick their gum into someone else’s hair. other than that? they’re like … sort of okay. they’re not always mean, just a dick about 90% of the time lmao

like okay yeah they’ll call someone a stinky bitch for no reason except they feel like it and believes it. it’s fine, they’re fine, we’re fine.

despite the fact that they’re probably getting into a fight whenever, considers themself to be a lover and not a fighter but that’a primarily because they fuck a lot. uses it as a coping mechanism, like they’re this big fancy carnival show that’s like ‘come one, come all! fuck the dead girl’s twin brother!’ and it’s … a Lot. might have a problem with hypsersexuality but they’re not fully aware of it.

the preacher’s whore son, basically :)

pansexual & nonbinary, switches between he & they pronouns often and without a pattern, but they have such a fragile grip on their identity that you could call them ‘dog-faced bitch’ and they’d turn around like. sup.

vastly impulsive … like i said, they destroy their own creations for the fun of it. spends all teir money on useless shit, will cheat on someone because they feel like it & likes the thrill, screams into the night sky frequently like a cat in heat.

will also spend months creating useless shit for no reason too. spent six of them sculpting a hollowed out tree the size of them & then took a sledgehammer to it.

they’re very super dramatic. would play the organ at church when nobody was looking after them and service was about to start. would just churn out these super haunting, creepy melodies like they were phantom of the opera. would do the same exact thing at home on their keyboard with the pipe organ setting whenever they got grounded until their parents took it away HBDSJFNGKH

will absolutely not talk about their ‘time away’ because it’s not anyone’s business, not even their own younger sister. still refuses to talk about tatiana’s death, or their mental health, or their addiction (fallen back into it but it hasn’t gotten severe … yet :/), or anything involving their own emotions.

will just change the topic abruptly, no warning. asks about the jonas brothers instead and they fucking hate the jonas brothers.

that being said they’re absolutely not over tatiana’s death & it’s to the point of obsession over it. like there’s some kind of secret that needs to be uncovered, even though there just. isn’t. tatiana was their rock and they were pretty much dependent on her. kept them grounded. could control them when nobody else could, got into their head easier than others. it’s sort of like rosa lost two siblings that day because viktor hasn’t been the same since.

emotionally unavailable while also crying twice a day. cries during their brawls but still wins. is stony-faced when they tell you they cheated on you with your much hotter best friend.

will tell you straight up what they want from you, no bullshit & no beating around the bush. just blunt. if they want to fuck, nothing else, then that’s it. if they feel deviation or developing feelings then they’ll ghost in less than a second. is awful like that but feels no shame.

but also emotional as shit and it’s confusing. will cry on a whim and then flip you off if you try to console them or ask them what’s up. will bite you.

they go to therapy but they just fuck around and wastes their therapists’ time … also is fucking their therapist, but that’s neither here nor there. so they’re not really getting the help they need.

likes to be intimidating but not … with their body or anything because they’re a TWIG but uses their love & knowledge of horror and creepy shit to their advantage. has an abundance of fake blood. has channeled the energy of jack nicholson and used it on tatiana’s boyfriends before (also is a big fan of sfx makeup & has dabbled in it)

probably chases kids around with a chainsaw without the chain on halloween every year.

generally never doing good, both mental health wise & morally. would probably steal candy from a baby for funsies.

i don’t know if there’s a good to them somewhere deep down, but they don’t see any issues with themself either. nothing really breaks through to them anymore because the only person who ever made them stop and think about their actions was tatiana, and well, y’know. :/

an introverted reclusive type who doesn’t like most people or going out, but does so anyway if it means a quick high & a cheap thrill.

pretty observant and likes to analyze people even though they’re often like … partially wrong. judgmental because they like to make people feel bad, not because they’re a righteous mighty person. because they’re not. so like, a hypocrite!

wanted connections.

a roommate… but it’s an absolute nightmare to live with him.

enemies… because viktor would have a lot of them…

familiar faces… people who knew tatiana or of her / were her friends. maybe even those who dated her, and who viktor would’ve tried to intimidate / scare at any given chance :/

pitiful glances… people who take pity on viktor and he hates it sooo much.

hooligan gremlin kids… just a friend group of grown ass adults who do drugs and fuck shit up around town like they’re edgy teenagers.

high school girlfriend… probably the one he lost his virginity to inside his family church :/

childhood acquaintances… people who knew him from his youth.

exes… good & bad terms, but mostly bad terms because viktor is an actual demon. probably cheated on them.

soft… i don’t know if he’s soft towards anyone and/or is capable of it but we can try. we can try.

unrequited… either viktor just doesn’t like them or he’s holding back because he’s :/ got issues with relationships & is self-sabotaging as one does

enemies with Tension… of the … spicy kind if you know what i mean. wink.

friends… old friends, new friends, bad friends, good friends, close friends, frenemies, etc. i don’t know how many he had but if your muse likes to cause a ruckus and fuck shit up then viktor’s your man.

hook-ups… current or old. friends with benefits, one night stands, anything and everything because he fucks around a lot.

ride or die… friendship but make it extreme.

bad influence… he’s just toxic to be around and brings out the worst in people :/

bad egg… he’s gotten into a few fights :/ maybe you witnessed it. maybe you were in it.

literally anything i wld love all sorts of plots.

#ruhqintro #death tw #grief tw #drug abuse tw #addiction tw #overdose tw #hospitalization tw #hypersexuality tw #religion mention

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eradicatetehnormal · 4 years ago

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Fandoms Attacking Other Fandoms

So this is something that's been on my mind a lot and is one of the main reasons I left Twitter. It's fandoms attacking other fandoms because they think that the community is either toxic or just annoying. Twitter is a misrable place that i'd only recommend you going to Twitter if you're a masochist who wants to hate everything they enjoy. Otherwise, it's a horrible place to be. Especailly if you're a fan of a fictional franchise. I understand why people hate on other fans or other franchises. fans can be extremely invasive, particularly if they are overly passionate about their franchise. As someone who current favorite series is the Persona series, I can tell you, we can get really fricken annoying when we insist that our game is the god amongst video games and anyone who disagrees is bumbling idiot. These people aren't the majority though. They aren't the majority of any fandom. All fandoms are inheriently toxic by nature, whether it be stan culture, an anime, or a video game. "Well this fandom's pretty nice." No it isn't sis. If that fandom consists of more than 10 people, there is at least one obnoxious lore elitist, one person insisting that their headcanons are true and argueing with the elitist, and one rule 34 artist with a NASTY fetish. That's the nature of communities in general. If something attracts a lot of people, it will attract all sorts of people, some of which, will be cool and chill people, and some who are... A little less agreeable... But those disagreeable people don't make the people who are just trying to consume content of something they like disagreeable too. That's just those specific people. I remember the final straw for me on Twitter was everyone attack Persona 5 fans for like the 70th time that year because one person made a comment saying that TWEWY 2 looked like a Persona 5 ripoff to them. Yeah, that's pretty annoying, but that doesn't make you right when you say that the entire fandom for Persona 5 is a bunch of idiots who need to be purged off the Earth. Even if those comments weren't directed soley towards me, they were directed towards other people like me who absolutely adored Persona 5 even though most of us did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! So it still felt like it was personal attacks to an extent. I know I sound like a loser, but bro if a large group of people, who mind you, haven't even engaged with something with something that you fell in love with, that raises your spirits everytime you interacted with it, attacked it because of the actions of a few loud people, you'd be hurt too. I noticed that a lot of the people who do this tend to have an age bias too. Like, if a fandom has been around like since say, the 90's or early 2000's so do not have this same people throwing shit at them despite literally having a lot of the exact same problems. A good example is comparing the FF7 and Persona 5 community. The Persona 5 community tends to get a lot more slack for its annoying fans despite the FF7 fans possessing a lot of the same behavior - haven't played the other games in the series? ✔️

- Insistance that their game is the best game of all time and is absolutely revolutionary, and anyone who dare criticizes it is stupid? ✔️

- Pretentious waifu wars that go way to far? ✔️

#persona #persona 5 #fandom #fandom discourse #i really fucking hate twitter #i'm not saying we should attack ff7r fans for that one person who might come out with that dumb take away #i should eat right now...

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altviktcrr · 5 years ago

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『MAXENCE DANET-FAUVEL ❙ NONBINARY』 ⟿ looks like VIKTOR SAMUELS is here for HIS/THEIR SENIOR year as a VISUAL ARTS student. HE/THEY are 24 years old & known to be OBSERVANT, INGENIOUS, RETICENT & DEPENDENT. They’re living in NOLAND, so if you’re there, watch out for them. ⬳ JAMES. 20. EST. SHE/THEY.

hllo ,,, again ,,, this is my last child i SWEAR ,,, at least fr now ,,, hes also the most problematic one ,,, the most dramatic ,,, one of my absolute faves ,,, pleathe love him. as always if u wish to plot please like this so i can msg u !!!

TW DEATH, HEAVY GRIEF, OVERDOSE / DRUG ADDICTION, HOSPITALIZATION, HYPERSEXUALITY, RELIGION MENTIONS, MENTAL ILLNESS

aesthetic.

basic info.

full name: viktor phillip samuels

nickname(s): icky vicky :/

b.o.d. - jan 2nd

label(s): the black hole, the crepehanger, the impious, the opaque, the tempest, etc.

height: 6′1″

hometown: rochester, new york

sexuality: pansexual uwu

stats

biography.

born to mama and papa (preacher) samuels in rochester, new york - fifteen minutes after his twin sister, tatiana samuels. years later, rosa samuels joined the gang.

as he got older he grew out of this, but instead became like ... sort of an asshole? maybe to compensate for years of childhood awkwardness. he’s the sort of person who will bite the hand that feeds him & developed into a full time nuisance by middle school, unlike tatiana who was much more subtle about her conniving manners.

always has been a fan of ‘darker’ materials. grim & creepy morbid shit. probably the biggest tim burton fan, ever since he was a kid ... not a good look for a preacher’s son, but he never really felt ‘in’ with the rest of his family to begin with. classic black sheep syndrome.

drew disturbing pictures as a kid that probably prompted one or two or five phone calls home to assure everything was fine.

just really had a knack for art at a young age, from drawing to painting to playing with clay. it’s always been his Thing and probably is the only thing he’s good at.

his only redeemable trait was like ... just his sheer talent in the arts. was in a 3D art AP course and specialized in sculptures. he could pretty much create anything he wanted with enough dedication.

has been experimenting with himself since high school but college is where he really had started to crack down on himself. was out as pansexual & nonbinary by his sophomore year of college just ... not to his parents, who don’t really need to know.

( TW DEATH, GRIEF, OVERDOSE / HOSPITALIZATION BEYOND THIS POINT )

afterwards he went on a sort of bender. he’d begun to struggle with a mild drug addiction late senior year of high school / early college, but he was managing it up until this point.

tatiana’s body wasn’t found immediately, and when it was ... viktor went off the rails. ended up overdosing & being hospitalized. spent six months in & out of psychiatric care after that.

came back to radcliffe to finish his senior year because ... for the reasons above, he hadn’t been able to complete it. just wants to get his credits and get out of here.

personality.

the human embodiment of a gremlin that was fed after midnight. a goblin, if you will. one of those cats with a narrow head and really big ears ... that’s them!

they can be really fucking mean? petty, aggressive, a major instigator. will literally spit in your face for little to no reason, you could just look at them the wrong way. the kind of person who will stick their gum into someone else’s hair. other than that? they’re like ... sort of okay. they’re not always mean, just a dick about 90% of the time lmao

like okay yeah they’ll call someone a stinky bitch for no reason except they feel like it and believes it. it’s fine, they’re fine, we’re fine.

despite the fact that they’re probably getting into a fight whenever, considers themself to be a lover and not a fighter but that’a primarily because they fuck a lot. uses it as a coping mechanism, like they’re this big fancy carnival show that’s like ‘come one, come all! fuck the dead girl’s twin brother!’ and it’s ... a Lot. might have a problem with hypsersexuality but they’re not fully aware of it.

the preacher’s whore son, basically :)

vastly impulsive ... like i said, they destroy their own creations for the fun of it. spends all teir money on useless shit, will cheat on someone because they feel like it & likes the thrill, screams into the night sky frequently like a cat in heat.

will also spend months creating useless shit for no reason too. spent six of them sculpting a hollowed out tree the size of them & then took a sledgehammer to it.

will absolutely not talk about their ‘time away’ because it’s not anyone’s business, not even their own younger sister. still refuses to talk about tatiana’s death, or their mental health, or their addiction (fallen back into it but it hasn’t gotten severe ... yet :/), or anything involving their own emotions.

will just change the topic abruptly, no warning. asks about the jonas brothers instead and they fucking hate the jonas brothers.

emotionally unavailable while also crying twice a day. cries during their brawls but still wins. is stony-faced when they tell you they cheated on you with your much hotter best friend.

but also emotional as shit and it’s confusing. will cry on a whim and then flip you off if you try to console them or ask them what’s up. will bite you.

they go to therapy but they just fuck around and wastes their therapists’ time ... also is fucking their therapist, but that’s neither here nor there. so they’re not really getting the help they need.

likes to be intimidating but not ... with their body or anything because they’re a TWIG but uses their love & knowledge of horror and creepy shit to their advantage. has an abundance of fake blood. has channeled the energy of jack nicholson and used it on tatiana’s boyfriends before (also is a big fan of sfx makeup & has dabbled in it)

probably chases kids around with a chainsaw without the chain on halloween every year.

generally never doing good, both mental health wise & morally. would probably steal candy from a baby for funsies.

an introverted reclusive type who doesn’t like most people or going out, but does so anyway if it means a quick high & a cheap thrill.

pretty observant and likes to analyze people even though they’re often like ... partially wrong. judgmental because they like to make people feel bad, not because they’re a righteous mighty person. because they’re not. so like, a hypocrite!

wanted connections.

a roommate... but it’s an absolute nightmare to live with him.

enemies... because viktor would have a lot of them...

familiar faces... people who knew tatiana or of her / were her friends. maybe even those who dated her, and who viktor would’ve tried to intimidate / scare at any given chance :/

pitiful glances... people who take pity on viktor and he hates it sooo much.

hooligan gremlin kids... just a friend group of grown ass adults who do drugs and fuck shit up around town like they’re edgy teenagers.

high school girlfriend... probably the one he lost his virginity to inside his family church :/

childhood acquaintances... people who knew him from his youth.

exes... good & bad terms, but mostly bad terms because viktor is an actual demon. probably cheated on them.

soft... i don’t know if he’s soft towards anyone and/or is capable of it but we can try. we can try.

unrequited... either viktor just doesn’t like them or he’s holding back because he’s :/ got issues with relationships & is self-sabotaging as one does

enemies with Tension... of the ... spicy kind if you know what i mean. wink.

friends... old friends, new friends, bad friends, good friends, close friends, frenemies, etc. i don’t know how many he had but if your muse likes to cause a ruckus and fuck shit up then viktor’s your man.

hook-ups... current or old. friends with benefits, one night stands, anything and everything because he fucks around a lot.

ride or die... friendship but make it extreme.

bad influence... he’s just toxic to be around and brings out the worst in people :/

bad egg... he’s gotten into a few fights :/ maybe you witnessed it. maybe you were in it.

literally anything i wld love all sorts of plots.

#radintro #death tw #grief tw #overdose tw #addiction tw #hospitalization tw #mental illness tw #hypersexuality tw #religion mention tw

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scots-dragon · 5 years ago

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The Big Fucking D&D 4E Rant

Or, ‘That Time Wizards of the Coast Fucked Up D&D’s Lore’

At the risk of raising the spectre of edition war again, I feel like it’s worth going back and exploring that time that Wizards of the Coast fucked over basically all of their lore to chase a trend that wasn’t there. Admittedly this comes with the (begrudged) acknowledgement that quite a bit of of this is likely to be out of date now that fifth edition has been out for a good several years now, but that edition has its own problems and while I’m not really going to touch upon it now, my problems with it are many and numerous.

It should be noted from the outset that this is going to talk about fourth edition in a negative and critical context, but I’m not going to be talking about the rules of the actual game as a game. This is entirely centred on story, worldbuilding and lore, and how those were handled in fourth edition as compared to what came before. That being said, if you like fourth edition, and especially if you like its lore, I would not suggest reading further.

I’m going to go far beyond being critical in this; I’m going to get outright mean.

A shout out must go to Susanna McKenzie (@cydonian-mystery) for input and feedback on this.

I suppose the most important place to start is, in many ways, the beginning, by which I mean my own introduction to Dungeons & Dragons. Mostly because it’s directly linked to the main reasons why I consider the lore to have been ruined, but before I even start off with that, I’m going to have to tell you where the lore was before I can really adequately explain its downfall.

In Realms Forgotten...

Like many people of my generation, I got into Dungeons & Dragons first through the computer based role-playing games. Specifically I started off with various titles by Black Isle and BioWare in the late-90s and early-00s, with stand-outs including Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, and their sequels. What all of these had in common beyond being Dungeons & Dragons adaptations is the fact that they took place in the Forgotten Realms, one of the more famous settings thereof, and the lore of that world intrigued me far more than the rules alone.

This might not sound like much, of course, to a newer fan for whom the Forgotten Realms, and its central setting of Faerûn, likely feels just like that generic world that D&D just happens to take place in nowadays. But back in the day, it was far more than that.

At the time I was getting into it, local libraries and bookstores carried bestselling novels set in the worlds in question, so I could pick up a novel based around various characters who appeared in the games, like the drow ranger Drizzt Do’Urden or the powerful wizard Elminster. There was also this huge encyclopedic book of geography and deities and the history of the world, with a big fold-out map which is still stuck up on my bedroom wall even after moving house three times. It was perfect fodder for my young nerdy fangirl self to develop full-on special interests in this stuff.

And the level of detail and lore and nuance in the world and its peoples was immense, with even the tiny and obscure bits of the setting earning massive amounts of unique lore. The result was a world that felt like it was alive, vibrant, and lived-in. Like real people could live there, with colourful heroes and villains to encounter.

This, I think, was the unwitting downfall of the Forgotten Realms, but I’m getting ahead of myself because this is really only step one, and Realms are really only one part of it. There are in total three of them, and I’ll be going through the baselines of each of them before we move on.

Out to Planescape

If you’ve read through the core books for fifth edition, there’s a chance you already have some degree of knowledge of Planescape and what it is. Or more precisely you know about the core structure of the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse; the Great Wheel. A series of elemental inner planes and transitive planes, with a ring of sixteen aligned outer planes representing various combinations derived from the axes of law versus chaos, and good versus evil, centred around a neutrally-aligned central plane.

At the centre of this central plane is an infinitely tall spire, atop which lies the famous torus-shaped city of Sigil, the city at the centre of the multiverse. There are a few more bits to it than that, and there are actually differences between how it once was and how it now is. For instance back in the day, there was no such thing as the Feywild or Shadowfell, and neither one was present in the original structure as laid out in 1987’s Manual of the Planes for AD&D.

Once again, to say that this is barely scratching the surface of the planar cosmology and its general meaning to Dungeons & Dragons lore would be a gross understatement. It wasn’t long after the publication of the above book that there was a new campaign setting created called Planescape, which would centre entirely upon this cosmology and build it into the lore. This is where the city of Sigil was introduced, a place of weird concordance where demons, angels, and creatures far, far stranger than either rubbed shoulders in the street, and only the watchful eye of the mysterious and powerful Lady of Pain kept things from erupting into all-out war.

It was a world of disputes, where a myriad of factions representing various philosophical concepts went toe-to-toe with one another. All wrapped up in a tone not unlike a strange mix of China Miéville and Charles Dickens, with the local dialect and thieves cant giving a unique flavour that no major campaign world outside of Planescape can really manage.

Perhaps the most famous and lasting contribution that this setting has was the tieflings, aasimar, and genasi, referred to collectively as the planetouched. These were born from a mix of planar interaction with human bloodlines, in particular through the very old fashioned way that any hybrid is created, which is perhaps why tieflings were the more common. They carried the blood of fiends, and most commonly demons by way of ancestors who reproduced with succubi and incubi, though no two tieflings looked especially alike, with variable and strange features.

I’ll be getting back to these later, but suffice it to say that Planescape was an interesting outlier setting, far stranger and more creative than almost anything else in anyone’s catalogue. And it forms the second part of our list of ruined lore.

And back down to Greyhawk

There’s a very good chance that your knowledge of Greyhawk is pretty limited, because while one could make good arguments for the above only just being ruined when fourth edition came around, there’s a lot to be said about how Greyhawk’s been the forgotten cousin for a while now, though to the credit of the current staff at Wizards of the Coast, they did just release a full-on Greyhawk adventure with Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

Introduced in the late seventies and early eighties, the World of Greyhawk, taking place on the fictional planet of Oerth and in particular on the subcontinent of the Flanaess, was the personally created campaign setting of Gary Gygax himself. While not as detailed as the Forgotten Realms, nor as interestingly out-there as Planescape, it is nonetheless a pretty cool world overall with a fun pulpy atmosphere that gives it its own sense of weight and nuance.

However, after Gary Gygax left TSR back in the 1980s, some later creators took it upon themselves to more or less mock his legacy overall. Nonetheless it remains a popular location for fans and creators, and towards the late third edition there was a lot of good work done in reviving it, such as with a series of adventure paths published in Dungeon Magazine in the form of Shackled City, Age of Worms, and Savage Tide, and following that a big adventure module in the form of Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk.

Since it’s the most basic element, let’s start with how they treated Greyhawk...

Strip-Mining the Free City

To say that Wizards of the Coast ruined Greyhawk would actually be inaccurate because, to a degree, they didn’t actually use Greyhawk. At least, not fully.

What they did instead was create a ‘new’ campaign setting, sometimes called the Nentir Vale, that used a few scavenged and cherry-picked Greyhawk deities and also a whole selection of adventures and locations previously specific to Greyhawk. Notable examples of such on the larger worldmap seen in the boardgame Conquest of Nerath included the Tomb of Horrors, the Vault of the Drow, and the Temple of Elemental Evil.

The resulting setting wasn’t Greyhawk, but had enough pieces that it felt like an insult to it. Often having those elements be modified in such a way that they felt like mockeries rather than the original concepts. A big part of why that felt like mockery is of course that Nentir Vale, or the Points of Light setting as it was sometimes referred to as, didn’t really exist as its own fully-fledged world. There wasn’t really a campaign setting book, or much detail on anything outside of a few small locations.

This is a relatively small part of what Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition did wrong, but it’s a small taste of what’s to come. However as seen with the Greyhawk conversion guidelines for many adventures, and even the release of the recent Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Greyhawk itself seems to have survived while the Nentir Vale remains almost entirely forgotten except for mentions of the Dawn War pantheon on one page of the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

It seems like Wizards of the Coast realised it was a bad idea.

‘The Great Wheel is Dead!’

As we go back out to Planescape, we notice that — much like Greyhawk — it also isn’t there, as the entire cosmology and its thematic importance has been replaced with something so radically different that it’s practically a complete replacement. Just about the only part of Planescape that was kept was Sigil itself, but as shown repeatedly in the fourth edition version of Manual of the Planes, they obviously didn’t understand either Sigil or the Great Wheel in any real way.

I’m not going to talk about the World Axis much in direct terms, but instead more the mindset that was taken with regards to Planescape’s Great Wheel. Now this requires something of a diversion into an old pre-fourth edition preview document, and how it handled the Great Wheel and old materials.

The Great Wheel is dead.

One of my mantras throughout the design of 4th Edition has been, “Down with needless symmetry!” The cosmology that has defined the planes of the D&D multiverse for thirty years is a good example of symmetry that ultimately creates more problems than it solves. Not only is there a plane for every alignment, there’s a plane between each alignment — seventeen Outer Planes that are supposed to reflect the characteristics of fine shades of alignment. There’s not only a plane for each of the four classic elements, there’s a Positive Energy Plane, a Negative Energy Plane, and a plane where each other plane meets — an unfortunate circumstance that has resulted in creatures such as ooze mephits.

The planes were there, so we had to invent creatures to fill them. Worse than the needless symmetry of it all, though, is the fact that many of those planes are virtually impossible to adventure in. Traversing a plane that’s supposed to be an infinite three-dimensional space completely filled with elemental fire takes a lot of magical protection and fundamentally just doesn’t sound fun. How do you reconcile that with the idea of the City of Brass, legendary home of the efreet? Why is there air in that city?

So our goals in defining a new cosmology were pretty straightforward.

• Don’t bow to needless symmetry!

• Make the planes fun for adventure!

The ‘impossible to adventure in’ mindset towards the Great Wheel is entirely bullshit, which I think is best highlighted in the passage on the City of Brass. How can a plane of pure unchanging fire without variation also have a city-state? Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t without variation and they’re making shit up to justify their own nonsense.

The arrogance here is nothing short of infuriating. It typifies everything about the approach that Wizards of the Coast was taking towards Dungeons & Dragons at the time, and can only really be described as destructive.

There was nothing but an arrogance and often gleeful disdain for previous editions. Along with declarations of how it was so much better now, with the old version being bad for some reason despite that version having generated a huge fanbase, and a critically beloved computer role-playing game in the form of Planescape: Torment. And as with Greyhawk, they’ve done what they can to reverse that. The only elements of the new cosmology that remain are the Elemental Chaos as an in-between for the Elemental Planes, the Feywild, and the Shadowfell.

Wizards of the Coast once again seemed to realise where they were going wrong, and this is basically a recurring element of fifth edition.

Unfortunately, the World Axis and Nentir Vale aren’t really where the majority of my frustrations lie.

The Shattered Realms

To summarise the degree to which they basically destroyed the Forgotten Realms is going to take a while, simply because they were thorough. And it’s this that ultimately puts me into a position where I’m always going to be negatively predisposed towards Wizards of the Coast and their handling of Dungeons & Dragons.

As a bitof a preamble, fourth edition brought with it several substantial changes to the way a lot of the ruleset worked. And not just on a mechanical level, but on a lore level as it related to certain in-universe elements.. Basic concepts about magic and how it worked were altered at the baseline level, and in order to explain these differences it was decided by the higher-ups at Wizards of the Coast to implement a big huge event to explain the edition differences. This was something they called the Spellplague.

This is not the first time they’ve done that; they previously had the Time of Troubles, which worked to explain the relatively minor differences in magic between the first and second edition versions of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, killed off or replaced a few gods, and ultimately shook things up a little bit. This was not really met with widespread acclaim at the time, and many complained about it but ultimately it’s a series of events which were later picked up by BioWare for Baldur’s Gate so it’s hard to really complain too harshly.

And indeed, they did it again with the change-over from fourth edition to fifth edition, with the Second Sundering bringing radical changes that all coincidentally left things looking like the pre-fourth edition version of the Forgotten Realms. Like with Planescape and Greyhawk, Wizards of the Coast knew they’d fucked up. But unlike with those, there were more than a few scars that haven’t really been all that fixable.

And to show you what I mean, I suppose we can start with the map, as that’s one of the clearest indications, when put in comparison, as to just how much was changed.

If you scroll back up and compare with the original map, you can kind of see just how much they absolutely fucked the Forgotten Realms.

The basic idea behind the Spellplague was that the goddess Mystra was murdered, and in her death throes the entirety of magic went haywire. Blue fire erupted across the world, and left entire nations and segments of the landscape scarred and destroyed. Often, conveniently, hitting worst those places that would traditionally, in-setting, be inhabited for the most part by various peoples of colour. Going into exhaustive detail would be extremely difficult, but keep in mind that the most heavily-devastated looking locations tend to be those that are inhabited by non-white people.

At least one of the nations destroyed, Halruaa, was actually the homeland of a long-running half-elf wizard character of mine at the time.

Most major magic-user characters suffered extreme maladies to their spellcasting, either killing them off or rendering them powerless.

In a series of unrelated but contemporary events, the entire elven and dwarven pantheons were radically altered. Most elven deities who weren’t Corellon Larethian were revealed to be aspects of non-elven deities, and around half of the elves themselves wound up being renamed to ‘eladrin’ to match the bullshit new elf subrace from the fourth edition books.

The drow pantheon was similarly culled until only Lolth remained, and as part of that they slew the goddess of good drow, Eilistraee. What happened to her followers is probably a good example of how there was a good deal of racism involved. Basically, the drow who followed her were ‘cleansed of the taint’ that had turned them into drow to begin with.

Including lightening their skin.

This is an event that Wizards of the Coast hasn’t really broadcast much after their reintroduction of Eilistraee, and it’s really not hard to see why they’ve minimised it.

The human gods didn’t fare much better. The entire Mulhorandi Pantheon was removed, because apparently having real-world Egyptian mythological gods around was a little too much for them. They also did the same with Tyr, who was originally from Norse mythology, though left Silvanus, Oghma, and Mielikki. Possibly because barely anyone pays attention to Celtic pantheon deities, and the latter Finnish deity was the patron goddess of a specifically popular character from the novels.

And between destroying half of the map, eliminating half of the pantheon full of various fan favourite gods, and killing off a lot of major magic-user characters, you’d think that would be considered a bad enough result.

But then there’s the timeskip.

Wizards of the Coast advanced the timeline by approximately one hundred and five years, therefore killing off literally every major human character who didn’t have some kind of magical way of extending their lifespan. And in addition to the effects of the Spellplague, brought in a variety of huge geopolitical changes that replaced major governments and kingdoms with new and nearly-unrecognisable versions that might have shared a name.

I’m not going to go into much more detail on various other changes, but keep in mind that this is only barely scratching the surface. There wasn’t a single region of the Forgotten Realms left unaltered or unmarred by this event, and it ultimately can’t be seen as anything other than an act of vandalism. It’s not even getting into the fact that, for instance, entire sections of the landscape of Toril were replaced by segments of another world entirely so they could justify the introduction of dragonborn as a core race.

Which is incidentally why I dislike the dragonborn.

The events of the fifth edition changeover worked to mitigate a lot of this, but the sheer extent of damage done is so much that the modern Forgotten Realms is still only a pale echo of its former self. All because they wanted to chase the audience of fucking World of Warcraft of all things.

Seriously, fuck Wizards of the Coast.

#4e negative #D&D 4e #the spellplague #we all get drafted into the edition war #wizards of the coast critical #wotc critical #forgotten realms #an old rant that's been a long time in the making

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fyrapartnersearch · 6 years ago

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Harry Potter or Pokemon Originals; M// or F//

To recap my last post, it's been quite a harrowing number of months since I've last made a post here. I got horribly sick in late December and a number of rocky events happen IRL that made me drop roleplaying for a bit to recover from it, and then, lo and behold, when I finally turned back to my RPs, I forgot my roleplaying email's password. If we were roleplaying in the past, feel free to contact me once more.

My name is Jupiter, I'm 21, and I'm looking to roleplay original characters in HP or Pokemon with someone who is 18 or older, preferably 20+ as well. I'm fine with side pairings of any gender combination, but I'd prefer the main pairing to either be M// or F//. As a preface, I write a lot on average, so my post length varies between novella or multiple paragraphs. Third person, generally past tense, but I can do present tense as well if that's what you prefer. Doubling tends to be my default (but not a requirement!), so let me know off the bat if that's not what you usually go for!

For Harry Potter, I don't have a concrete plot in mind, but I do have some things I'd be interested in exploring! A setting in modern times as opposed to the original late '90's, exploring how the wizarding world and wizarding laws have shifted with the advandement of muggle technology; I'd imagine it was much easier to keep magic under wraps before smartphones came into the equation.

Something to do with prophecies could be interesting — after seeing all of those prophecies kept under lock in the Ministry (before they were destroyed, at least, lmao), it got me thinking of what the extent of prophecies were and if all of them were as severe as Harry's, or what another prophecy could be. It could be fun to explore something with our own characters in that vein? I've never done a "chosen one" roleplay before.

I like the idea of exploring lives post-Hogwarts since the main series doesn't really get into that (excluding Fantastic Beasts, which I can't stress enough how uninterested in I am. Similarly, I'm very critical of the world-building JK's done with expanding the universe, particularly with how sloppily she handled other cultures and their relation with her lore, so keep that in mind). However, I'm definitely up for writing some Hogwarts professor OCs! I've never done that before, so I'm interested. I'd like to either do that or have our characters in their later years at school and map out their lives/the plot from there.

I enjoy characters who are a bit different from the stock image of each house (for example, I have a bully/rude Hufflepuff, a lazy/friendly Slytherin, a cowardly/unassuming Gryffindor, etc) — that is to say, I enjoy characters who have more depth to them under the surface and aren't exactly what one would expect coming from the very basics of their houses. I'd also love to explore characters from Beauxbaton and/or Durmstrang as well! Going off of the books with both of them being coed schools, though. I have no idea why the movies made Beauxbaton a girls' academy and Durmstrang a boys'. Not required, but I'd love to have a Triwizard Tournament tossed in the mix. (I know it was disbanded after Cedrid died but shhhh.) Not as the main focus, but it could be fun to get into. Or maybe center the roleplay itself around either of those schools rather than Hogwarts and a few characters from different schools get wrapped in a nefarious plot of sorts? Exchange students could also be very fun. Ooh, and I've actually been really interested in somehow bringing a muggle into the mix? No idea how that'd work, but I just think it'd be really fun to have someone non-magical as a main somehow and needing someone without magic or something, haha.

Basically I just have, like, a ton of very minor threads and ideas I'd like to explore. I enjoy serious/darker plots, so I'd like to have a bigger plot that our characters bleed into!

For Pokemon, I also don't have a concrete lot in mind. I finally got my hands on Let's Go and Pokemon SWSH just dropped, so the nostalgia trip has been hitting me with severity; after binging Let's Go for the past week, I've been thinking of picking up other games I used to love when I was a kid, haha.

Given that I have no real plot in mind, I'm open to practically anything. Like I said above, I typically prefer darker, larger plots, which is something I'll sway for this universe! We could have a light-hearted, feel-good roleplay in this scenario. Still a plot, of course, but I don't mind if the vibe is less serious. That said, a more serious plot is something I'm open to as well! It's what I like, after all, haha.

I'm admittedly a big fan of trainer characters, but I think it'd also be interesting to have a character or two who use Pokemon more in their daily lives or for reasons other than training. I've seen people toss that idea out before but never really played into it before, so it'd be fun to expand my roles. Anyway, for characters and the plot, I'm sure we can come up with something together. I enjoy adventure/journeying plots, so something along that line at the very least would be fun.

As far as smut goes: it's cool with me but not required, so again, let me know if you'd rather not have it involved. My limits are the basic sort: nothing with underage characters/pedophilia, incest, noncon, bestiality, gore, mpreg, A/B/O, toilet kinks, things of that ilk. I also prefer to play switch characters in bed. I've spent way too many years playing with partners who only play bottoms in smut scenes, so I'm a bit burnt out on that.

This might sound rude, but don't come to me with one line or a few lines that basically just say, "hi I'm [Name] and I'd like to roleplay with you" since I'll just delete it. Tell me who you are, if you want to do M// or F// and if you want to double or not, if you have a plot or want to explore anything I've said or would like to brainstorm, what your limits are, your favorite sorts of characters/tropes, stuff like that. Just give me a solid idea of what you're looking for and what you're all about!

Also, please like... write in a way where we can both interact and have your character pull their own weight. I've done a lot of roleplays where I'm making all the decisions and writing all the action/inciting incidents, so please actively apply yourself as well! Roleplaying is all about equal effort, after all.

If you're interested in anything I've said or have your own ideas, my email is [email protected]. Feel free to contact me again if we have a roleplay that I fell through on, even if it wasn't an RP for what I've listed here. :)

#oc rp #multiple paragraph #long term #email #harry potter rp #pokemon rp #smut rp #submission

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timeagainreviews · 6 years ago

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The Eve of the Thirteenth

Recently I watched "An Unearthly Child," in preparation to write the first official article of Time and Time Again (TATA? Ok, I love that). But then it hit me that it’s a rather auspicious time to talk about the First Doctor’s first episode. With this being the eve of the first female Doctor’s first episode, it seems so appropriate. So I’m going to wait until after "The Woman Who Fell to Earth," drops. See what I did there?

I know this blog is meant to be about revisiting episodes, but the timing is just too good. Besides, it is my blog. However, this being said, I suppose I should share my hopes and expectations for series eleven.

Jodie Whittaker as "The Doctor"

Not since maybe Eccleston has anyone had as difficult a regeneration to overcome. While every actor new to the role feels a pressure to keep the show going, I’d say some feel it harder than others. Davison had to follow up an endearing seven-year run from Tom Baker. McGann had the pressure of trying to reestablish the show, as did Eccleston. Many people even said nobody could replace David Tennant. But the one I am reminded of the most is Patrick Troughton. Troughton was really one of those "make it or break it," Doctors. The concept of regeneration was far from established lore, it was rather a gamble.

Jodie Whittaker has a very similar weight on her shoulders. It’s another one of those "make it or break it" moments. The beauty is, I think she knows it. Everyone involved knows it. However, as much as I’ve emphasised on the pressures involved, I’m confident they chose the right woman for the job. She looks like a children’s show presenter in her costume, which is wonderfully coupled with her mad energy. For me, it’s never been about "We need a woman in the TARDIS," we need the right person in the role, and she’s perfect.

Doctor Who is the ideal show to change the gender or race of its lead. On a science fiction level, it makes total sense that the Doctor is able to change these things with ease. It’s almost laughable that it’s taken this long. It’s almost poetic. The Doctor- a man who has experienced thousands of years worth of exploration and change, still has something new to experience- womanhood. It is, as they say, about time.

The Companions

Honestly, I’m not that fussed over these companions. That’s not to say I’m disinterested or even upset with their casting. I feel confident they’ll all shine in their own ways, and live up to the show’s standard of companions. I think it’s cool that the Doctor’s friends this time around, are rather diverse. As a fan of older companions such as Wilf, or Evelyn Smythe, I am rather looking forward to Bradley Walsh as "Graham." Tamsin and Ryan both seem like they’re going to have some cute banter between the two of them. It seems pretty solid.

Many may say "That’s a pretty crowded TARDIS," but I like the bigger TARDIS crews at times, as they can be a nice way to add a new dynamic. The thing that would have actually excited me would have been a companion from the future, or past. Or even an alien companion. Not since Captain Jack, have we had anyone riding in the TARDIS who wasn’t from the present-day UK. We got teased with it in "Asylum of the Daleks," with Oswin, and again in "The Snowmen," but then we ended up with modern day Clara Oswald. I had even hoped for Bill to be from the 80’s or 90’s. Where are the highlander companions? The Keepers of Traken? I guess Nardol sort of counts, but come on.

Chris Chibnall

Mr Chibnall is probably my biggest worry for the series. As a writer, I’ve never been all that big a fan of his episodes. "The Power of Three," was one I found particularly dreadful. When the Doctor saved the day by pointing his sonic at a screen, I felt cheated. The little cubes amounted to nothing, really. It’s not that he’s a bad writer, he’s just a bit dull. He managed to make “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship,” less exciting than the name implies. That’s probably impressive on some planets.

Overall, I think he’ll do fine, I’m just worried he’ll be a bit boring. I hadn’t worried much until he said that no old baddies would return in series eleven. Which, is fine I guess, but why not? While the Daleks and Cybermen can be really overdone (especially the Cybermen as of late), there is a wealth of villains to draw from the Doctor’s rogues' gallery. One group I’d like to see her face off against are the Axons. Whittaker’s "Godspell" evoking threads call for retro baddies!

So long as Chibnall doesn’t get too dark like he did with Torchwood (which literally felt like a little boy excited over getting to say the F-word), I’d say he’ll do fine. Parts of Torchwood were a bit "lizard brain," to its credit. Doctor Who should always have a touch of the surreal. The first episode had it. An indestructible police box, bigger on the inside, that travels anywhere in time and space? It seems normal now, but even to this day, there’s nothing quite like it. Keep the energy up, and keep it weird, you’ll do fine, Chris. It’s not like you’ll get the series cancelled again.

The New Writing Staff and Production Crew

I’ll be honest, I don’t know much anything about the writers. I’ve looked them up and read about some of their stuff, but that’s about as far as I’ve taken it. I will say however, it’s nice to see so much new blood. Men, women, people of colour, many perspectives. Doctor Who thrives on being shaken up. I’m all for it.

As for the new production crew, it’s even more of the same- happy to see someone new. I know a few people were growing tired of the whimsical look of much of the Moffat era. And at times, I kind of miss the tacky trash TV look of the RTD era. From what I’ve seen of the series 11 trailer, we’re in for something a little more grounded in reality. The cinematography looks rather simple, the sets seem plausible, if not a little dull. I’m hoping they’re hiding the big knock you on your ass sets and cinematography for the actual episodes. I would not be averse to having a show that looked as colourful as the promotional artwork we’ve been seeing. It’s gorgeous. A feast for the eyes. If the leaked TARDIS console pictures are anything to go off, I’d say they’ve kept some rather exciting secrets from us.

Segun Akinola replacing Murray Gold

Music is such an important part of Doctor Who. The theme song is both haunting and exciting: portentous of the tale about to unfold. The Radiophonic Workshop, with geniuses of sound like Delia Derbyshire and Ron Grainer, pushed not only the atmosphere of the show to greater heights but music as well. In the same vein as musique concrète, they were pioneers of electronic sound.

Upon the reveal of Akinola’s appointment as music director, I promptly sought out his SoundCloud and spent an entire afternoon listening to his stuff. I was heartened to hear he was both melodic and ambient at different times. His music is minimalist, and percussive as well. One of my biggest criticisms of Murray Gold was that he was too safe a choice. For me, he never really felt strange enough for Doctor Who.

Perhaps I am an odd duck, but I miss the days of the Third Doctor driving his bizarre car to a soundtrack of muddy synthesisers that sounded as if they wanted to murder you. The closest Gold ever came to that level of greatness was the aforementioned "Asylum of the Daleks." The music matched the tone of the episode exquisitely. I had hoped to hear more of that experimentation from him, but he never really did. Akinola seems the kind of guy who just might take us to strange places.

As we all know though, the true test will be in his imagining of the theme tune. I was never a huge fan of the Capaldi era theme. It didn’t really, slap as they say. From what I’ve heard of Akinola’s work, I’m very curious how he’s going to approach it.

Well, friends, that’s it for now. We’ve got nowt to do at this moment but wait. The next time you hear from me, it will have already happened! I hope you’re just as excited as I am! Doctor Who series 11 premieres tomorrow, the 7th of October at 6:45 pm on BBC 1!

#doctor who #jodie whittaker #Segun Akinola #thirteenth doctor #bbc #tardis #tosin cole #mandip gill #bradley walsh #chris chibnall #series eleven

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funkaliciousfrog · 3 years ago

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I’ve finished Symphogear! I have a lot of thoughts and mixed feelings and it all ended up pretty long so it’s under the cut. Spoilers for the whole series ofc.

The more stuff I watch, the more I think that maybe straight-up action just isn’t for me. I can still appreciate a good fight scene, and some of my all-time faves are battle shonen like Jojo and Hunter x Hunter. Even so, whenever there’s an extended stretch of straight-up fighting, like a tournament arc or a 3+ episode long boss fight, my eyes tend to kind of glaze over. Action alone is just kinda boring, to keep my interest there’s gotta be something else going on like character development, or clever strategies, or humor, or really anything.

I think that disdain for pure action is the main reason why I didn’t get as much out of Symphogear as other people seem to have. It's main draws are really 1) hype 2) cool over the top fights and 3) the music (I’ll get to that later), and all the other parts of the show are the bare minimum necessary to keep it from falling apart. This especially showed in seasons 2-4, where the bulk of the episodes followed the same structure: the enemies to show up in the middle and start attacking something, the heroes show up to stop them and we get a ~cool fight~, and then one of the parties retreats. There’s still plot and character progression, but it’s sprinkled in around and in the fights. It’s a very 90s Sailor Moon filler episode vibe for me... which is a little concerning considering that Symphogear has 13 episodes per season and Sailor Moon has 50.

Some people clearly enjoy these episodes for their cool fights, but they wore on me after a while. It even took me out of the show a bit by reminding me that it owes its existence largely to character song CD sales. By the second season we’ve got 6 main characters who all need at least one new song every season, and only 13 episodes to get them all in. So, it felt like a lot of these fights were just there to get in the obligatory character song of the week so they can slap it on the CD.

The first season seems to be universally agreed to be the roughest, with dated animation, lots of edge, and bad writing. But, I actually enjoyed it the most. The messy plot and excessive amount of blood and explosions contributed to the show’s wacky over the top tone, even if in a so-bad-it’s-good way at times. Personally I don’t go out of my way to hunt for plot holes, and I can deal with some nonsense if it makes it more fun. And so, I had more fun on season 1′s wacky wild ride than with the more polished but also more formulaic later seasons.

Another thing I liked more about season 1 was the extra focus on a smaller cast of main characters. Like I mentioned earlier, by season 2 we’ve got 6 characters. So, each one only gets a few of dedicated scenes each, which isn’t really enough time for an actual character arc. And then after Maria’s group joins the heroes in season 3, our 6 main characters have to split time even further with the villains. It doesn’t help that I didn’t care much about most of the villains, with the exceptions of Dr. Ver (although mostly on a meme level since he’s just Sugita set loose in the booth) and the Illuminati (I’m a bit biased there as a Shouta fan but I did genuinely like them). There’s just not time to give meaningful attention to allllll those characters in 13 episodes.

But, in season 1 the main cast is smaller and the final villain only shows up near the end. So, we’re pretty much dealing with just Hibiki, Tsubasa, and Chris (and Miku ig). They all get enough time for a decent character arc, be it Hibiki finding her reason to fight, Tsubasa moving on from Kanade’s death, or Chris learning to play nice with others. As mentioned the writing isn’t the best, for instance even I have to agree that Miku getting angry at Hibiki for hiding literal classified military intel from her was pretty stupid. But, I still enjoyed the main trio’s arcs a lot and they got me more attached to them than any of the characters introduced in later seasons.

Although I’ve been complaining about the later seasons quite a bit, I do agree with everyone who has commented on how well the writers managed to pick up old plot threads and bits of lore and incorporate them into the current story. They even managed to make Fine’s crazy rant about being in love with God that came out of nowhere at the end of season 1 kinda make sense in XV, which is really quite a feat.

Now of course I have to talk about the music! My favorite OPs remain the two I already knew before watching the show, Synchrogazer (LISTEN TO MY SONG!) and Metanoia (LIIIIIIIVE!). None of the other OPs or EDs really stuck out to me, but admittedly I have a bad habit of skipping them if I don’t like them immediately. I do plan on eventually going back and giving them another listen to see if any of them grow on me.

To be honest most of the insert songs didn’t stick with me either. They were all fine enough and worked well in the context of the show, but over time it all starts blending together and they’re just not really something I’d listen to on my own time. The exception would be Tsubasa’s songs, since I always love a mix of pop/rock and traditional Japanese music, and Nana is in her element sounding great. For me no other insert song ever managed to top her first song, Zettou Ame no Habakiri. But I also liked the lyrics for Chris’s songs cause they were funny, Tsubasa and Kanade’s duet from the very first episode, and both of Carol’s songs.

Speaking of Carol’s songs, Minase Inori really surprised me there. I had checked out some of her own music before, but none of it was really my thing so I kind of forgot about her even though she was clearly a pretty good singer. But, she sounds even better singing in a more dramatic and aggressive style as Carol. Just listen to her performance at the Symphogear live! I think it would be cool if she got a chance to show off those chops and sing some more aggressive songs in her solo career. King Records has done the same transition from cutesy upbeat jpop to hard rock/jpop before with Nana... just saying... (tho like I said I’ve only listened to a few of Minase’s songs, so maybe she does go hardcore at some point idk)

And to wrap things up... that very last scene was kind of BS. What is this vague Legend of Korra nonsense, just admit it! Hibiki and Miku are IN LOVE!!!

#tldr: it's a 7/10 from me #this is all very subjective so i hope no hard core fans of the show find this and come for me #original

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mattsammonsez · 5 years ago

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Monday Myth: It All Has to Be Perfect All the Time

Too many people trying to get in, many people hot under the collar, tens of thousands of people wondering how Disney could have screwed this up, and many nervous investors and creators wondering if it would all fail.

No I’m not talking about the debut of Disney+ last Tuesday. This is about July 17, 1955, the opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Disney bounced back then, they’ll be fine after a rough start on Disney+, and once again “the mouse” offers a great lesson on seeing that you can’t always get everything perfect every time.

The launch of the Disney OTT service Disney+ is arguably the biggest content topic in 2019, and it arguably will have the biggest impact on the growing and changing world of streaming video content. Not thrilled with merely leasing its content to other streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu, Disney decided to take it in-house and do it the Disney way. Anytime a major player in an industry pushes all of its chips to the center of the table, all eyes are on the success or failure of such a bet. So it should come to no surprise that when Disney+ officially launched on November 12th with a litany of problems, quite a few people expressed joy that it was hardly a perfect debut. But after the outages of Disney+ streams subsided and business got back pretty much to normal, one could easily see the similarities to the debut of another entertainment platform 64 years ago... and how despite the rough start, Disney will again set the template for how something in the entertainment realm is done.

Before we discuss how the Disneyland and Disney+ fiascoes play in to broadcasting and content creation, I first have to highly recommend Neal Gabler’s “Walt Disney” for anyone who wants a great deep dive into Disney’s life and career. I bought the book in 2007 or 2008 and still consider it one of my favorites.

As Gabler writes, no one is really sure when Walt Disney decided to build a theme park, but it seems to be a combination of several factors. Disney always had a critical eye towards entertainment, and he had found travelling circuses and county fairs dirty and with little or no entertainment for adults. Disney was also a fan of model railroads, and toyed with the idea of a travelling model railroad city, tentatively named “Disneylandia”. Then there’s the cultural tension of Cold War life in America in the 1950′s, allowing Disney a chance to create and control an escape for the general public in a clean and fun environment. While the sole starting point is hard to pin down, Disney decided in the early 1950′s to build a theme park, and he decided that it needed to be done and operational by 1955 at a breakneck construction pace.

Disney had set the bar with short-form animation films in the late 1920′s, and created the feature-length animation film with Snow White in 1937. Disney’s magic touch was dulled in the 1940′s, and revived a bit in the early 1950′s with the release of Treasure Island and Cinderella. Still at the time, the Disney bottom line was merely good, not great. Walt’s dream getaway theme park would ultimately cost $17 million. Given that the smash film Cinderella netted the company about $6 million, the investment into a theme park that the general public hadn’t really made a voice for was to say the least risky at best.

But Walt Disney was driven, and driven to do everything right and on his timeline. He sold personal property, took a loan out of a health insurance policy, and got the fledgling ABC television network to cover the costs of the park’s construction. True to his wishes, the park opened on July 17, 1955, starting off with a 90-minute program on ABC showing off the opening day festivities. The day is still known in Disney lore as “Black Sunday”, as anything that could go wrong did.

The opening was supposed to be invitation-only for 15,000 attendees, but thanks to counterfeit tickets and even some entrepreneurial fence-hoppers, more than 28,000 people passed through the gates. The parking lot overflowed, traffic backed up for over 7 miles in to the park entrance, and a 100-degree heat wave made plenty of people literally hot under the collar. It would turn out these people couldn’t cool off as a plumber’s strike limited the number of working water fountains, and women in high heels sank into the freshly-poured asphalt on Main Street USA. Rides broke down, a gas leak closed portions of the park, and Tomorrowland would have to wait for tomorrow as many of the rides there were still under construction. The TV broadcast was also marred with numerous mistakes, hot mikes, and loss of transmission and attendees tripped over the bulky camera cables strewn across the park.

Fortunately, Walt Disney was so preoccupied with the broadcast he didn’t see or hear of many of the problems until later in the day, and that may have been a blessing for park employees as Disney was a notorious stickler for details. And in 1955 that was the question-- how could someone so focused on attention to detail fail at the grand opening of such a major project with so much at stake? It turned out that correcting the failures of Disneyland’s opening and improving the park experience became Walt Disney’s passion for the remainder of his life. Disney was famous for completing a major project and then moving on to something different. But this was different as Disney made Disneyland his second home, ironing out “the little problems” while dreaming about his “always incomplete” theme park.

Despite the “Black Sunday” experience, Disneyland drew more than 161,000 visitors in its first week, and tallied more than 3.6 million visitors by the end of 1955. Financially, the $17 million price tag was nearly paid off in 1955. Walt Disney Productions grossed $24.5 million in 1955, compared to only $11 million in 1954. For the first time since Snow White, Walt Disney’s business was a cash cow thanks to his theme park, and it continues today as the parks/experience segment of Disney’s finances account for $6.65 BILLION.

And that leads to the comparison to the Disney+ launch. Even with the stumbles in day one, Disney+ will likely become the leader of OTT platforms much like Disneyland became the model for what a theme park is. Disney invested more than $1 billion in content creation for Disney+, and the operations of Disney+ will likely cost the company $2 billion a year moving forward. But with the theme park business leading the way, and with the numerous arms of the Disney operations working well, the company can eat the losses on the streaming... at least early on. And that is bad news for the competition.

The competition has already responded, as Sony is bowing out of the streaming business by shuttering Vue in January. Netflix is already trying to stop the bleeding of subscribers, Apple is aggressively promoting its Apple TV platform, and Hulu will be totally under control of Disney by 2024 per an agreement reached last May. So much like detractors chuckled at Walt Disney in July 1955 over “Walt’s folly”, beware those who want to scoff at the awkward start to Disney+ this past week. Oh, and there’s the simple supply and demand issue... if a company like Disney that is often ready for larger-than-expected demand has trouble answering the demand of the consumer, that’s a good problem for Disney. Disney+ was a hit before everyone could get it, much like Disneyland was a hit before everyone could get to Anaheim to experience it.

So as content creators and broadcasters, what sage advise can we get from America’s wealthiest mouse when it comes to less-than-perfect performances?

You’re Not Always Going to Have Perfection: Of course, you want perfection, but we don’t live in a perfect world. Once you set your expectations to reality (i.e. “your best” vs. “perfection”) you’ll approach the execution of your work with the mindset of you’re giving your best in what you control and not trying to control the universe.

When Things Go Wrong, Don’t Panic: Whether it’s something in your control, or as it often is out of your control, don’t panic when something goes awry. Quickly but calmly look over the situation, how can you get it back on track, and most importantly move on from the snafu. Often the biggest execution goofs happen not when the mistake is made, but the bumbling attempt to pull it all together after the fact. Take a breath, make a recovery, move forward.

Strive for constant improvement, not perfection: Walt Disney was notorious for fine details, even bringing in a live deer to his studios so the animators could accurately nail down the movements of the creature for the film Bambi. Disney’s response to Disneyland is fascinating in that he saw the park as a living and changing entity, and it’s a good thing he did as Disneyland in 1955 simply wouldn’t work in 2019. In the past 64 years Disneyland has adjusted to consumer needs even though it’s locked into a 160-acre lot in California, and what can’t be done there has been replicated and executed through the numerous Disney parks around the world. Just like Walt Disney made adjustments after Disneyland’s opening, you have to make adjustments and constantly improve over time.

After you wish upon a star, visit SammonSez.com to see how we can help you strive for your best in am imperfect world of broadcasting and content creation.

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legitboom · 7 years ago

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Spidey and me

When I was seven years old, my dad came into my room and told me we were going to a Cingular store on the westside of Evansville, Indiana. Just thinking about the word ‘Cingular’ alone is a nostalgia trip. Remember that little orange guy who’d bounce around in the commercials? When cell phones were the fast and exciting future, not the overbearing present?

I’m getting ahead of myself. The reason we were going to this store was not to buy a cell phone, but to look at a car. I know very little about cars, and they’ve never interested me, but my dad told me this particular car was a Viper. It was very fast, had a big engine or something, I don’t know. Like I said, I could give a shit about the car. What stood out this particular time, however, was that this was a Spider-Man car.

I don’t remember why that interested me so much. Maybe I had seen some of the episodes of the old Spider-Man cartoon when I was a kid. I think, at some point, I had a Spider-Man video game but I never figured out how to play it. Whatever the case may be, I was very unfamiliar with the wall-crawler when I hopped in our SUV to see this car. All I knew was that it sounded cool.

We got to the store and, sure enough, the car was there - being displayed for promotional purposes:

That’s what it looked like.

I didn’t know this at the time, but my capitalism-fueled brain now realizes that Cingular was sponsoring the 2002 Spider-Man movie (trust me, we’ll get to that) and, somehow, that meant that they got to attract customers by traveling this car around the country. Or something. Who knows.

Their plan must’ve worked though, because my mom went in after a while to look at the cell phones at Cingular. She was traveling a lot back then, so she must have been thinking about getting one. She walked out without a cell phone - but with a large cardboard tube. I asked her what was inside, and she said - a poster.

From what I understand, every Cingular employee at this thing got a free promotional poster. Some woman behind the counter didn’t want hers (I guess it would’ve clashed with her apartment’s feng shui) so she gave it to my mom to give to me, the ‘runt of the litter’ at this event. As I opened the tube to pull out the poster, I figured it would be some corny advertisement for Cingular. Maybe it’d have a little picture of Spider-Man on it.

But, no. No.

I pulled out this:

It was an actual, full-sized, theatrical poster. I can’t explain why, but I was hooked. I hung the poster on my wall where it remained for probably five years. I had it up again in a nice store-bought frame when I was in college, though I’ve since retired it to make room-space for a clock.

Needless to say, for the next two months I asked my parents every single day if it was May 3rd. I had - absolutely had - to see this movie. I think by that point an X-Men movie had come out, but I didn’t give a shit about that. Batman, Wolverine, whatever superheroes were being splashed across the silver screen - they meant nothing to me. They weren’t Spider-Man.

Then, on May 3rd, 2002, I was ready.

I can’t remember which trailers premiered in front of Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie, but I remember everything else. I could probably write a (very rough) novelization of the movie right now without having seen it in several months. The performances are all so vivid, the colors are so flamboyant. I’ll probably get into trouble for saying this, but the upside down kiss in the rain is, in my opinion, the best scene in a superhero film and, dare I say it, the most iconic film sequence of the 21st century.

Yeah, it was cool.

Anyway, I walked out of the theater in a bizarre euphoric state that left me gasping for air. We drove home, I went to my room, stared at that poster, and wondered if there’d ever be more.

Of course, there was more. Raimi made two more Spider-Man films, neither of which topped the first and one of which was a disaster. Then they remade the first movie and it got a sequel too. By that point, I didn’t really care about the movie Spider-Man.

See, shortly after the movie premiered I graduated the second grade. I didn’t expect much to happen as a result of that, but something did. My dad came home and brought me this book:

I didn’t know it at the time, but Tom DeFalco was considered one of the premier writers of the Spider-Man comic series and an expert on all things Amazing Arachnid. I didn’t care about that at the time, though. I had an entire book about Spider-Man and I was going to read the thing cover to cover.

So I did. In fact, I can’t even read the book now because I literally read it to death. I took it everywhere and, fifteen years later, I’m afraid it would not sit well on my lap due to its current condition.

This book had everything - every tiny little detail about every character was packed into this thing. It made me realize that there was more to Spider-Man than movies or video games or toys (there was an extensive line of Spider-Man toys unrelated to the movie in the late 90′s). There was a Spider-Man world in the comic books that had been around for nearly fifty years. This was the ‘real’ Spidey. He had web shooters, not organic webbing, and his parents were spies for a secret agency called SHIELD. He didn’t wear glasses because he had bad eyesight - he wore them because they made him look smart.

Needless to say, I had to know more.

Here’s where things get crazy.

A few weeks later, I asked my mom to take me to the comic book store. There was only one in Evansville at the time. I walked back to where the comics were (despite their name, most comic stores do not specialize in comics, so they’re often limited to a small wall in the back or to the side) and looked extensively for anything that said Spider-Man on it. I saw the first one - didn’t even open it - and took it to the counter.

This was the cover:

I didn’t know it at the time, but what Marvel Comics had done was take a poll from their readers to determine the top 100 comic books ever released by the company. I thought I was buying issue one of a new Spider-Man series.

Nope, even better. On the inside, it was an exact replica of Amazing Fantasy #15 - the first ever appearance from Spider-Man by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

I mourn that comic because, like my DK Ultimate Guide, I read that thing to death. I should buy another copy on ebay one day.

Spider-Man comics, especially these older ones, were like a drug to my prepubescent brain. I saved up to buy at least half a dozen huge tomes reprinting the old stories. It never crossed my mind that Spider-Man had grown up, gotten married, and joined the Avengers in his current comic.

Years go by, and I stop reading Spider-Man comics. Partly because I couldn’t afford them, partly because the newer movies sort of disappointed me. Perhaps I was growing up and it was time to find a new hobby. So, for a few years, that’s what I did.

Fast forward six years later. I’m on some website, it’s summer vacation, and I’ll be heading to high school in a few weeks. I’m scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

And then something catches my eye.

Amazing Spider-Man #600, out today. I looked up the cover, just because comics that often reach large numbers like that often celebrate with a special cover, and saw this:

If you don’t think that looks cool as hell, I don’t know what to tell you.

I called up the local comics store and ordered it that day.

Now, unfortunately, that cover was one of many. I did get a swell variant cover drawn by Marvel’s then-Editor in Chief Joe Quesada, but I still wish I had gotten the beauty you see above.

The story inside captivated me like I was seven years old again. A Spider-Man/Daredevil team-up! The return of Doctor Octopus! Aunt May gets married...to the father of J. Jonah Jameson! It’s all nonsense to a non-fan, but to someone who had spent so long being captivated by the lore of Spider-Man and his amazing friends, this was all I needed to realize that my love of all things Spider-Man was far from over. It was only beginning.

Six years later, I have yet to stop buying each issue of Amazing Spider-Man as it comes out. That was issue 600, and issue 800 is coming up fast (and the same writer is still following up on plotlines from 600). There’s nothing quite like the twice-monthly thrill of seeing the Webbed Wonder swing into action on 22 pages of pure adventure. Call it whatever you want, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Today, a new Spider-Man movie is released in theaters. How strange is it that when I was a kid, Spider-Man was a role model? He was a ‘big kid’, a high schooler, and now he’s six years my junior in this new film! It won’t be long before I surpass the age of the Spider-Man of the current comics.

It just serves as a reminder that as I grow up and Spider-Man grows...down?...I will be watching these movies differently than I did all those years ago. I no longer jump for excitement at the prospects of a new Spider-Man movie because there are already so many great stories I haven’t even began to touch, but if this new movie is good and does inspire a generation like that first movie inspired me?

Well, that would be okay.

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