#really had to crank the contrast with this many points being plotted

[piratesexmachine420]

Bored in class

[the-insomniac-emporium]

J Watches Arcane: Episode 3, Random Thoughts/Play-by-Play

Back at it again, ready to have my fucking heart ripped out (if the ending if the last episode is any indication of what's to come). Under read-more because I have lots of thoughts! Okay, well, plenty of them are jokes, because I haven't been the same since watching MST3k. But also the episode starts with a monologue about drowning, and as someone with personal experience in that area, well, had to add in my 2 cents :D

Includes time-stamps for watch alongs/curiosity.

Reminder: These thoughts are just initial observations, and are subject to change. Some scenes hit different in retrospect, and some thoughts end up being null by the end of a scene (though I try to note that, if things change soon enough for me to write it down).

(0:43) "Ever wonder what it's like to drown?"- Silco. Uh, it's like coming home?... Movie reference aside, I know what it's like to drown, and lemme tell you, it's just as horrible as you've always imagined :)))

(0:55) "There's peace in water. Like it's holdin' you, whisperin' in low tones to let it in."- Silco. Maybe it's because I almost drowned close to shore, and was in water less than a foot taller than I was (for reference, I was between 3 and 5 years old, and this is literally one of my earliest memories), but gotta disagree here. The waves crashed over me, over and over again, screaming at me to just stay down. No whispering, no soft caresses. It was like being beat to death, like getting kicked to the dirt, and stomped on. Repeatedly. Fucking sucked.

(1:20) "But then there's this thing, in your head, and it's raging"- Silco. YES, we agree on this. Pressure building in your chest, body struggling, fighting endlessly, even as the shadows start to creep into the corners of your vision. The water holds you down, but by God, your body will not let you go gently. You will not take a breath, will not flood your lungs, until it is the only choice. Flashing imagery aside, the visuals felt like a very accurate representation of the moments right before you pass out. Contrast between giving in to the unrelenting water and the strive to keep flailing.

(1:55) "For that I thank you... old friend."- Silco. Oooh la la, some of the first real hints towards Silco's complicated character. Since starting the show, I've heard a little bit more about what specifically people love about it (thankfully without many spoilers), and I'm looking forward to learning more about Silco!

(Intro/Opening Credits) Woot! I think I recognize almost every character in the intro now :D

(3:50) Oh, wait a second, are we doubling back on the trope subversion? I mean, okay, it's a common thing for either a father figure or an older sibling to give themselves up for the sake of the youngin. But it's less almost-maybe-cliche if Vi is the one who goes with the enforcers/takes the blame, even if she technically is the ringleader who orchestrated the crime. Maybe. Hmm. At the moment, as I am watching this, I'm not 100% confident about my trope analysis, so I might revisit this at another time.

The point is that I'm a bit surprised, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Should probably finish the scene before I say anymore, though!

(5:25) DAMNIT, this is why I shouldn't make comments before finishing the scene. Also fuck! Fucking fuck, man! Good shit.

(6:18) "This wasn't the deal!" The fuck did you expect, mate? You gonna trust a man with a glowing eye and a crime syndicate to keep his word? Amateur.

(7:15) At this point I am really wishing that I didn't have any vague ideas about future plot points (as in I wish I hadn't had anything spoiled), because right now my brain is reeling, trying to figure out how the hell we're gonna get from point A to point B.

(7:30ish) Viktor is kinda cute? Idk, the lil face he made when Jayce said that they need to "crank it" amused me.

Everything about that scene with Vander and Silco was fucking superb. Tasty lore, contrasting visuals, wunderbar voicework, etc, etc.

(13:34) "Wait, this isn't my bedroom"- Viktor. My man, you are officially the fucking best. Adorable.

Mel is gorgeous and I am a very smol, weak-willed gay.

(16:40) "I can't lose you, you're all I have left"- Vi. Characters love to say this, but they never seem to realize how it feels to the person they say it to. Vi tells Powder that she can't help save Vander, because it's dangerous. But that just means that Vi might die. Powder might lose her. There's no good solution, obviously, which is why lines like this hurt so much.

They're just leaving Powder there? I know that without Benzo, and with Vander captured, they don't really have any adults they can trust. But can't they at least have her hangout with Ekko? Small traumatized children need emotional support. They can cry together or something

At first I wasn't sure about having such an intense undercity plotline run concurrent with science experiments in Piltover, but on second thought it makes perfect sense. Jayce's experiments are somewhat of a parallel to Silco's weird drug shit. They're both endeavors to enact change, though the methods and intentions are very different. "As above, so below" and all that. Could probably write a longer post about this parallel/contrast.

(18:16) Seeing Powder having an emotional breakdown is... not fun. I mean, obviously, this isn't intended to be a happy scene or anything. I'm just stating that I am having emotions!!! Also reminded of my own breakdowns at her age, so, ya know, that's fun (/sarcasm).

(18:40ish) "I can help them"- Powder. OH NO. OH NO. This VERY MUCH feels like the lead up to that one spoilery meme I saw. This is going to backfire horribly, isn't it? fuck, man, I am not ready for this. Also my food is cold :( this episode has a lot more to it than I expected

(20:48) GOD, the look on Vi's face when she realizes that this is a trap, my heart hurts man. Not quite as bad as the last episode, when Vander realized what Vi was planning, but still... Definitely a testament to the facial animations.

(22:21) Rock 'em, Sock 'em, Robots! Uppercut! Ding ding, we have a winner! Fuck 'em up, Vi! I am amusing myself with these words to try and counter the inevitable heartbreak that this show promises me!

At what point does Silco pause and realize that Vi is the biggest badass in the building, and that maybe trying to kill her is a bad idea? If he had somehow gotten to her earlier and convinced her that his plan to fuck up Piltover was going to work, she probably could have done 95% of the work herself. Or something. I mean, a loser like Deckard + drugs = unstoppable monster. But a badass like Vi + the drugs? Not the kind of beat you'd want to mess with. Maybe that's part of the problem, tho. Maybe Silco picked someone like Deckard to experiment with because he's easier to manipulate. Idk, rambling, not really putting much thought into these... thoughts.

(24:23) Not gonna lie, Drug!Deckard reminds me of husks/indoctrinated people from Mass Effect, just purple instead of blue.

(25:18) hehheh. angry lil hipperdipper or whatever his name is. funny.

(27:14) Forehead bonk!

(28:42) POWDER FALLING FROM THE BUILDING MIRRORING SILCO FALLING THROUGH THE WATER FROM THE START OF THE EPISODE??? FUCK.

damnit. the meme I saw. was indeed. a spoiler. rip Ben-10 (Mylo is voiced by Yuri Lowenthal, who voiced one or more of the versions of Ben 10) and Goggles

Vander pushing himself out of the rubble = Spider-Man in the iconic "if this be my destiny" scene. I mean, not directly or anything. It's just vaguely similar, and I really love the Spider-Man scene, so the similar vibes are making me emotional, okay?

(32:16)... forehead... bonk...

Drug!Vander has more of a pink tint, compared to the strong purple of Deckard, and I'm not saying it's a connection to Vi (and her hair), a subtle sort of thing, but I'm also not saying that it's not connected.

(34:44) "Take care of Powder"- Vander. this line hurts a lot more when I think about what I've heard regarding future episodes.

(35:52) WHAT THE FUCK, VI. maybe this is just, like, a personal thing. but I never, ever understand when a character's response to trauma is to hurt other people (obviously Vi will regret this choice, and it's not what she would do if she had more time to process everything that just happened). of course, my personal response to excessive emotions is to direct all anger/desire to cause harm at myself, which is very clearly a result of my childhood trauma and mental health issues, and isn't healthy (I mean, hurting other people is also not healthy. neither option is good, is what I'm saying). this scene just. fucking HURTS so much.

(35:56) "Because you're a jinx!"- Vi. First of all, hate that this is how Powder gets her name. Second of all, that's not even true! Vi left her behind to keep her safe! Again, I know that Vi is going through an inconceivable amount of trauma right now, I am just pointing out reasons that make everything about this hurt more.

(36:29) this hurts. so much. Vander's last words were literally telling Vi to take care of Powder, and now Vi's walking away while Powder cries after her. Why am I watching this. Oh my god. This hurts my heart. So much.

Oh. Oh. So is Silco going to take Powder in/take care of her out of some weird empathy, because her sister just abandoned her, just like Vander betrayed Silco? Is that what this is? More parallels? Hmm. Painful. I need a nap.

[langwrites]

Lang Plays Fire Emblem: Three Houses

So a while ago I said I was planning on playing the story routes in this order: Blue Lions, Black Eagles, Church of Seiros, and then Golden Deer.

The Golden Deer made a liar out of me.

So, here’s an approximation of What Happened During Verdant Wind.

So many spoilers below the cut, you guys. I do a lot of route comparisons.

Okay, I’ve been staring at the “which house do you want” selection screen for an embarrassing amount of time.

This shouldn’t be hard. I had a plan.

But no.

I clicked the Golden Deer, just like that. What the fuck, Claude. I blame you.

Immediately upon talking to this rop of students again, I can feel the difference in the social group from what the Lions were like. The latter were really a bunch of noble kids around their prince, and they felt really tight-knit. Classic Fire Emblem starter crew.

The Golden Deer is the fucking Scooby Gang.

First impressions of individuals:

Raphael, thank goodness, is the one character who absolutely has his shit in order. Sure, he’s bad at book work and thinks everything comes down to MUSCLES, but all of his emotional issues are handled by the time he arrives at Garreg Mach. He’s the brightest of sunshines.

Ignatz needs some more confidence in his art, and also I want to see his painting of Seiros. Now, if only both of his offensive stats and growths weren’t incredibly bad.

I was so close to making him my dancer. Just because he sure as hell wasn’t gonna be useful anywhere else.

Lorenz! I don’t like him. His haircut is a monstrosity.

Leonie! We are going. To be. Besties. Even though the timing of your support conversations are incredibly bad.

Marianne no please don’t be sad everyone loves you

Hilda is the greatest enabler I have ever seen. By which I mean she enables other people to do all her work for her.

Lysithea is going to have the last word with God. And especially he Death Knight.

And finally Claude! Teamwork makes the dream work, so obviously meme work does the same.

I’m sorry.

PRE-TIMESKIP

Mock battle! Marianne’s great and I love her and also the only healer oh god.

OKAY. I have access to New Game+ bonuses. What do I do first?

Immediately crank the Professor Level stat to max to avoid ever having to run short of activity points again.

Next, raise all skills I can’t easily get to at least Rank D+. HEAVY ARMOR IN PARTICULAR.

Third: Boost supports with people whose support ranks are an absolute pain in the ass to earn. Lookin’ at you, Rhea.

Also, put glasses on Byleth (named “Yuri” for this playthrough). Glasses are the bomb. I am the evil genius.

LEVEL GRINDING TIME.

It’s a lot harder with Blacksmith access being story-locked, but I can do this!

As a direct result, every single battle after this point is a complete curbstomp in my favor. Because the grind don’t stop.

I broke a lot more weapons than last time, though.

I will befriend Leonie and Ferdinand if it’s the last fucking thing I do. I will befriend everyone, and I will not get timeskip-locked out of supports! >:(

Ferdinand was my first recruit. Oh dear.

Okay, there are like five born cavaliers in this game. Leonie, Ferdinand, Lorenz, Sylvain, and I guess Dimitri if you’re on the right route.

Last time, Sylvain was a great paladin and a decent Dark Knight before he started getting one- or two-stat level ups for like thirty levels. Similarly, Dimitri was great until all his ultra-secret-awesome promotions didn’t use a fucking horse.

Contrast Leonie who, despite sitting out 99% of the game out of spite from me getting locked out of her support chain, went to endgame with a ten-level deficit and still rocked.

Ferdinand didn’t count since I failed to recruit him last time and he died. These two facts are directly related.

I didn’t use Lorenz at all; I recruited him to keep from having to kill him later.

This time, Lorenz straight-up sucks, Sylvain did the terrible level dance for like the entire game, and Dimitri’s not recruitable.

Contrast, again, Leonie. Her support chain with the player character is hot garbage, but she plowed through most of the game as a mainstay of my team and made it to Bow Knight first out of anyone.

Bernadetta and Ashe as Bow Knights don’t even come close to being as durable as she is, except for Ashe’s absolutely bananas Resistance. 29?! WHY?!

And Ferdinand is also awesome. His only real weak point is Resistance, but he doesn’t need it. He dodge-tanks everything, is faster than Leonie, and has two Saints’ relics he unknowingly stole from Seteth.

He still talks in MLA format, though.

I started putting off recruiting people so I wouldn’t have to level-grind them up to par with the rest of my team.

But if these people wanna join, of course I’m saying yes.

Lord Lonato’s rebellion and Miklan yoinking the Lance of Ruin feel way less relevant on a Golden Deer playthrough than on a Blue Lions one. None of the Herd really know who the hell these people are.

I say that despite having already recruited Sylvain for this playthrough and deploying him in the relevant level. He wasn’t treated as there by the game’s preamble cutscenes.

At least the Holy Mausoleum stuff feels more...handled? Claude actually asks questions about rebellion and about the “assassination plot,” where Dimitri didn’t really.

OKAY SO there’s this whole plot thing where Flayn goes missing for a month. With the Blue Lions, this is handled like a manhunt. Dimitri’s seriousness about the issue rubs off on everyone except Sylvain, and Felix actually correctly identifies the culprit almost instantly. He doesn’t know he’s done it, though, because basically everyone is just throwing out accusations. Manuela is the real MVP.

CONTRAST THE DEER. The very first meeting reads like a Scooby Doo episode, when they’re piling up clues and throwing out suggestions like the gang of goofball teenagers they are. Claude’s got this group running like Persona 4′s Investigation Team. None of them are jaded or frantic, they’re just doing this.

Why did Rhea entrust the investigation to a herd of teenagers.

Anyway, the rest proceeds as usual.

I don’t know why the game tries to drop the same set of hints for each route. “OoooowoooooOOOOoooo, your house leader might be the FLAME EMPEROR.”

The Flame Emperor wears heels. And is still too short to be either Claude or Dimitri. Especially Dimitri. Who the fuck let this kid get so tall.

The only real result of all this bullshit is that my wyvern-riding sniper of doom is not available during the first map where Yuri personally beat the Death Knight into the ground.

Which, by the by, was hilariously cathartic.

It doesn’t exactly matter, since the only unit who can make real use of the Dark Mage and Dark Bishop classes is unrecruitable, but bragging rights.

Remire Village’s drama is about as bad while playing as the Golden Deer. One of the foreshadowing cutscenes, though is excellent:

Claude actually finds a book that depicts The Immaculate One before its debut, only to have it confiscated by Seteth and learn that it wasn’t a library book at all; it belonged to “Tomas.” Like, all of his suspicions--which he shares with the player--start lining up. Censorship! Monsters! Sword of the Creator! What the hell is going on here??

Dimitri’s version of the cutscene involves him being caught investigating Lord Arundel by the player and Sothis. Which--since his route doesn’t meaningfully deal with the Morlocks faction aside from steamrolling them as incidental opponents--seems kinda useless.

Kicked the Death Knight into submission again out of spite.

Sylvain was useful! Mostly because I had him sit there and distract the incidentals while Claude and Lysithea cleaned house, but still!

Claude is the only lord character who seems to understand that the transforming Morlock faction probably needs to be taken more seriously. For the remainder of Part One, no one does so.

Rhea you’ve got some ‘splainin to do.

Marianne’s my team’s dancer this time. She’s a sweetheart. She seemed happy to be asked and to pursue the lessons, and being able to use Physic is a good trait in someone who’s nearly always going to be waaaaay behind the rest of the group.

Dad-stabbing happened.

Again.

Boop boop Solon’s dead.

Again.

Dear diary: I learned the definition of irony and set the Flame Emperor on fire.

I kid.

But Claude took her out in one completely overpowered shot, because crits are a thing, Flame Emperor class skills don’t reduce damage enough to survive it, and his Dex stat is through the fucking roof. And he was on a wyvern at the time because fuck it, why not.

Claude’s reaction to all of this is a minor letdown compared to the fully-rendered cutscene in the last route.

This would become something of a trend--taking out OP bosses with unexpected critical hits.

I didn’t expect to like Lorenz and now I do. How.

This is hilarious simply because he seems to be the only character that Mercedes hates. What the fuck, man.

Once again, Edelgard invades! Once again, I drop someone unexpected on her head!

Not really. It was Yuri.

Yuri does the timeskip shuffle and we’ll see everyone again after a nap.

FIVE YEARS LATER.

Aw, Claude was waiting for Yuri to show up. Adorable.

The post-meetup fight is actually harder than it was in the BL route, despite excessive level-grinding. This is due to three factors:

Claude is automatically on a wyvern, meaning that he has inherent class vulnerability to archers on a map with at least five of them. And less range than they did, for some fucking reason.

Lorenz and Ignatz started out on the same corner of the map and both of them are shitty offensive units who could barely kill a mage between them. (Neither of Ignatz’s offensive stats cracked 20 for another thirteen levels.)

I don’t have Ashe and his personal skill Locktouch, and nobody started with a Chest Key or Door Key, which meant I had to keep various enemies alive long enough to steal all of their stuff. And the enemy item drops came up one short of the number of chests on the map. I want my stuff, dammit.

LET’S MAKE A SCENE.

Randolph, as a boss in Verdant Wind, did not get any better at figuring out when he’s outmatched. Therefore, I killed him with Raphael again.

At least he straight-up died this time.

Claude didn’t even get to set the damn place on fire.

Ingrid is turning out to be way better of a unit this time than she was last time. She’s a little slower, but a lot stronger.

FELIX, WHERE THE FUCK WAS ALL THIS STRENGTH HIDING LAST TIME. YOU’RE TEN POINTS AHEAD OF THE GUY WHO HAS STORY-BASED SUPER STRENGTH.

AND SPEED.

Iiiiiiiiit’s JUDITH!

She only shows up on one map in the entire Azure Moon route, and that’s a damn shame. She’s so cool in Verdant Wind.

A lord-class character who isn’t also a Lord! WOO!

Also her spies are better than anybody’s apparently.

I am choosing to believe that because Ingrid’s family is related to Judith’s, her badassery in this route is the direct result of meeting her distant cousin and absorbing badass radiation.

There’s something funny about having to pull one over on Lorenz’s dad to get anything done. The Great Bridge falls not to power, but Claude baiting Count Gloucester’s entire army to be somewhere else. (FEAR THE DEER.)

As a result, Ladislava dies alone. (As opposed to taking Ferdinand with her due to plot shenanigans.)

Lysithea and Ferdinand’s paralogue was really quite sad, for all that the only named guy who died was deeply unsympathetic. Ferdinand’s dad was an asshole, but he wasn’t the asshole for this particular scenario, and now both of his parents are gone. :(

Felix...hasn’t heard from his dad in a while. Worrying.

Oh, and Caspar’s uncle is still dead, in case we were keeping track of that.

Dorothea’s happier with Ferdinand alive. She did an impression of the Gatekeeper. :3

Gronder Field! FUCK.

I delayed playing this chapter for two solid days because I already knew what was gonna happen. Specifically: Edelgard gets injured and evacuated, and Dimitri drops of exhaustion just in time to get run through like ten times by the Emperor’s rearguard.

I eventually got my shit together enough to do the thing.

Marianne, Raphael, and Ferdinand went after the Kingdom army first. Leonie and Felix hung back and then reinforced them after taking out the archer on the central hill.

Claude killed everyone in the center of the map, which meant Edelgard set the entire hill on fire and if Bernadetta had not been recruited she would’ve burned to death there on the spot.

Ahem.

I sent Yuri to clear the entire left side of the map by herself.

She succeeded.

Raphael KO’d Dimitri with a luck Gauntlet crit, got blasted down to half health by a Warlock, then plunked ineffectually at Dedue until Marianne used her Levin Sword to sort him out.

Ferdinand killed everyone else on that side of the map.

Claude once again got the kill on Edelgard with a lucky crit, after Yuri had killed everyone else (up to and including the Demonic Beasts) single-handedly.

And then the plot moved on. Hilda’s account of Dimitri’s death was awful, Dedue’s reaction was worse, and off we go to punch Edelgard’s teeth in.

Again.

Annette’s dad is probably dead now.

Felix’s, too.

(I THOUGHT WE WERE DONE WITH THE DAD-STABBING.)

FOOOOOORT MERCEUS.

No matter how many times I think about it, Claude’s Almyran army reinforcements only make so much sense. How the hell and fuck did he manage to sneak an entire foreign army across a whole country to help with one battle?

But hey, they’re here, and Claude almost admitted the reason why he could do that. And the arrow greeting between him and Nader was cool.

(Spoiler: On top of being the Alliance’s leader, he’s also the crown prince of Almyra!)

The Death Knight had the gall to run from my army.

Yuri punched his ticket for the third time, which was not the charm.

And then Fort Merceus took an intercontinental ballistic missile and suddenly defeating the fort’s garrison feels a lot less triumphant.

Spot the miscolored eyes in this cutscene!

Welp. Fuck it, we’re off to Enbarr. Time to also punch Hubert this time! What a change of pace.

Eyyy, it’s the Enbarr map. I totally forgot to bring Seteth and Flayn along to check out the opera house, despite a whole bunch of characters talking about how they totally wanted to check that place out at some point. No room for deadweights in a map that has SO MANY ARCHERS.

Managed to get the special dialogue between Ferdinand and Hubert, and now I’m sad again.

Killed Hubert with Claude.

And because this is a two-part map, we immediately run off to chase down Edelgard. Due to the player army not doing a really weird 180 in the middle of the plot to kick Cornelia out of Fhirdiad, she didn’t have time to turn into a giant demonic thing! She just has WAY TOO MANY MAGES.

Strategy: Forget what Door Keys are, split the team by Avoid rating, and go to town.

Claude nearly died thanks to a critical mass of Gremories and Mortal Savants (and still, what the fuck is that name), but Dedue-as-guest-character didn’t, so I count that as a win! His defense was so high that the Giant Demonic Beast couldn’t even scratch him.

Claude, Petra, and Ingrid all having Alert Stance as a skill means dodge-tanking is hilariously easy.

Also, Ingrid was supposed to just take a chunk out of Edelgard’s HP bar for the final assault and ended up crit-killing her on the first attack. With a bog-standard silver lance.

Weird as the situation turned out, I guess that means one of Dimitri’s friends really did avenge him after saying they would. Even if Dedue was the only one who had a special cutscene about it.

We rescued Rhea! And the characters being happy about it doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. I want answers, same as Claude, and being forced to RP Yuri being oh so worried about Rhea’s safety felt incredibly disingenuous.

Claude actually yells at her over the “...” she seems to think is an explanation. THE TIME FOR SECRETS IS PAST.

WHY DID ALL THIS SHIT HAPPEN.

WE’VE BEEN AT WAR FOR FIVE YEARS.

A WHOLE BUNCH OF PEOPLE DIED HORRIBLY FOR BASICALLY NOTHING.

Incidentally, this is why I didn’t end up playing Edelgard’s route as planned. Her logic for kicking two other sovereign countries in the balls felt incredibly self-centered.

At least Catherine’s happy. Same with Alois and the rest of the Church crew.

They are soon going to be not as happy.

I’m filling out the ENTIRE support log before endgame. I have absolutely no idea what characters are going to end up together as a direct result.

The last conversation? Seteth and Manuela’s A+ support!

Because so many of the support conversations are romantic at A/A+ level, I guess we’ve managed to turn this ragtag army into a polyarmory.

Oh boy, Thales sure is a sore loser.

I say, as though I didn’t kill EVERYONE he knew over the course of an hour and also split his skull open under Seteth’s axe. His racism would have keeled his ass over before death set in.

That sure is a ICBM.

GOD DAMMIT RHEA, THERE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A Q&A SESSION AFTER THIS.

WHY DOES EVERYONE WHOSE JOB IS EXPOSITION UP AND DIE.

Meanwhile: THE UBER-DEAD PEOPLE.

Claude, your route is batshit. What is this genre anymore?!

I wanna point out that, despite seeing Rhea/Seiros do the dragon thing, the player character never told Claude what the fuck that was about. I feel like one of the first things I would have done after the class reunion would be going, “By the by, did anyone else notice the fucking dragon?!”  WHO IS ALSO THE POPE???

Bah.

ANYWAY. Looooong-overdue exposition time!

I notice that Rhea didn’t out Seteth or Flayn, which was nice of her.

Claude, she can turn into a fucking dragon. I don’t think immortality is that far from being plausible.

GOD DAMMIT NEMESIS, CAN YOU FUCK OFF FOR TEN MORE MINUTES.

Uuuuuuugh fine, fuck everything, I’m putting your head on a pike.

CLAUDE, THE SWORD OF THE CREATOR LOOKS LIKE A SPINE.

OF COURSE IT’S MADE OF BONES. A BUNCH OF THE HEROES’ RELICS MOVE ON THEIR OWN!

The frantic music is not helping.

Time to kill a bandit king.

“My flabber is completely gasted by now.” Okay, that made me laugh.

Nemesis’s boss mechanic is pretty neat. To kill him at all, you need to kill all of the minibosses in the level and take down his friendship-based-plot-armor.

Or it would be, if I didn’t already make a habit of steamrolling everyone else on the field before tackling the boss at the end.

CUTSCENE.

Cutscene lesson: “Fuck honor duels.” It’s time for CHAIN SWORD LIMBO.

Claude, your bow shoots LASERS. SINCE WHEN.

Also getting kicked across the field by a dude twice his size didn’t seem to actually affect his mood much.

Awww, Yuri smiles now. Adorable. :D

AND THAT’S A WRAP.

Pairings: Yuri/Sothis (mostly to get them out of the way and see what everyone else would do), Claude/Petra, Raphael/Marianne, Catherine/Shamir, Lorenz/Mercedes, Ashe/Annette, Felix/Sylvain (bad end; the former straight up disappears), Seteth & Flayn wander off, Manuela/Dorothea, Lysithea/Linhardt (again), Leonie/Ignatz, Ferdinand/Bernadetta, Caspar/Hilda, and a couple of people are alone. Cyril gets to actually be a student after the story’s done, though!

Whew, that was fun. Gonna mix up the pairs a bit next time I play through the endgame and see what happens.

[mittensmorgul]

The tnt loop is attempting to kill me with 4.20 and 4.21 today. So right after Cas was about to give the Critical Information to Dean until Heaven snatched him back for a good brainscrubbing, Dean’s dealing with what they think is the way to STOP the apocalypse, while Cas knows the apocalypse is imminent. So Dean and Sam are arguing over who is “strong enough” to kill Lilith, while the angels are just sitting back and waiting for them to get on with it, knowing they’ve secured Dean’s oath of loyalty, assuming he’ll just say yes to Michael when they tell him to.

But the Major Plot Twist of s4 is coming up in the next episode-- the goal was never to stop the apocalypse, but to ensure all the steps to start it happened in the precise way necessary to free Lucifer and have his and Michael’s vessels broken enough to give them an instant yes, game over, the end.

I’m thinking this is going to come around again, this Oh Shit Moment, where everything they’ve been working toward is gonna turn around and bite them hard, especially now that on the surface everything finally looks safe again. Well, aside from whatever Jack has become, and the deal with the Empty that nobody but Cas and Jack know about yet.

Sam’s hallucinations are just so horrific. I’ve written about this so many times, and it’s not the focus of this post, but it at least merits a mention for context. His “young self” is disappointed in him for failing to escape the life and be “normal,” his hallucination of Mary assures him he’s strong and by contrast Dean is weak (paralleling Ruby’s poisoned words that secured Sam’s dependence on her and her influence over him), and his hallucination of Dean shows us exactly how Sam feels about his older brother... and it’s really not flattering, despite being a toxic hallucination brought on by demon blood...

But back to the point of this post:

BOBBY: Well, I don't like this any more than you do, but Sam can kill demons. He's got a shot at stopping Armageddon. DEAN: So what? Sacrifice Sam's life, his soul, for the greater good? Is that what you're saying? Times are bad, so let's use Sam as a nuclear warhead? BOBBY: Look, I know you hate me for suggesting it. I hate me for suggesting it. I love that boy like a son. All I'm saying is maybe he's here right now instead of on the battlefield because we love him too much.

Isn’t this exactly the path that Jack has been on for a good long while now. Not just his soul-consuming need to use his powers to help his loved ones in 14.14, but this goes back to before he ever lost his grace in the first place. Before he was even born. He has always believed he was born for a reason. He may not always have understood what that was, and he’s struggled to understand himself and his powers and purpose, but Lucifer conceived him to be a tool for power, and Kelly’s influence inspired him to be a force for good, without placing any other expectations or limitations on him.

Which makes me think back to Jack’s “visions of the future” he used to manipulate Cas way back in 12.19, and the literal blind spots we know this sort of prophecy and foresight entail. Because wasn’t that the whole entire kicker of s4? In s4, it worked in Heaven’s favor, but in s5, Free Will won out over all the prophecies.

Knowing the “future,” getting any sort of glimpse at a potential possible future reality, is inherently manipulative. Either it becomes a fait accompli, or else it inspires actively working against the undesirable future. The question then becomes which actions unwittingly drive them closer to that undesirable future, and which actively steer them away from it, inevitably altering the potential outcomes. Because s4 proved that the harder they tried to work against destiny, the closer they came to bringing it to fruition, mostly because they were working from a forged playbook filled with alternative facts. The entire plan they were told would stop the apocalypse was actually what would bring it on. Like Dean says in 5.01, who knew killing Lilith was a BAD thing?

Is it any wonder why I trust exactly ZERO prophecies made on this show? Exactly. Like Dean, I’m always looking for the loophole, the manipulation, the lie inherently built in to any revelation of “destiny” or “prophecy.”

But back to 4.21. While Sam was having visions of Mary begging him to make her death “mean something,” by using his demon blood powers, and convincing him that Dean is weak and could never do this himself, Dean’s outside being manipulated into a different, yet still just as irrelevantly misleading path:

DEAN: Can he do it? Kill Lilith, stop the apocalypse? CASTIEL: Possibly, yes. But as you know, he'd have to take certain steps. DEAN: Crank up the hell-blood regimen. CASTIEL: Consuming the amount of blood it would take to kill Lilith would change your brother forever. Most likely, he would become the next creature that you would feel compelled to kill. There's no reason this would have to come to pass, Dean. We believe it's you, Dean, not your brother. The only question for us is whether you're willing to accept it. Stand up and accept your role. You are the one who will stop it. DEAN: If I do this, Sammy doesn't have to? CASTIEL: If it gives you comfort to see it that way.

It’s all still entirely misleading, not giving Dean enough information to suss out the truth for himself. While Sam’s down chained to his cot hallucinating a version of Dean “putting him in his place,” and rejecting him because he’s turned himself into a monster, for the sake of a selfish power grab, as if Sam’s motives were to elevate himself to this place of power, we see Dean upstairs and how he REALLY feels-- not how Sam’s darkest thoughts perceive Dean’s feelings to be...

Which closely parallels Jack’s own darkest thoughts about himself. His entire struggle over whether he was good or evil, his fears over the fact that no matter how much good he might try to do, there’s always the chance that he could fall short or fail entirely, the fear that his own power could betray his best intentions. And after 14.14, with his soul potentially compromised, there’s every real possibility that his power would overwhelm his intentions without that buffer of humanity to stop him, much like Donatello exposing himself to the demon tablet did.

And again, back to 4.21:

BOBBY: I'm sorry. I can't bite my tongue any longer. We're killing him. Keeping him locked up down there. This cold-turkey thing isn't working. If—if he doesn't get what he needs, soon, Sam's not gonna last much longer. DEAN: No. I'm not giving him demon blood. I won't do it. BOBBY: And if he dies? DEAN: Then at least he dies human!

Dean’s concern was almost entirely for the state of Sam’s humanity. And we already know the lengths Dean has been willing to go to protect Sam from becoming a “monster.” Just look at early s6, and the bargain Dean made with Death in 6.11, and then everything that sprung from that. And this all obviously goes back to the “job” John gave Dean in 2.01-- to save Sam from becoming that monster, or else to kill him if Dean fails and Sam becomes that monster.

Jack’s been exerting his will over others since before he was born, and he continues to do that in s14. He hid his illness, his weakness, and when he discovered the new source of power he could use to achieve his goal of killing Michael, he seized it with both hands. Literally! Look!:

But like Sam in 4.21 and 4.22, is this really going to achieve what he believed was his desired outcome?

Because Michael’s taunt to Jack sounds so much like what Sam believed were Dean’s motivations in wanting him to stop what he was doing in 4.21. Michael called Jack a child, belittling him. And in 4.21, Sam believed that’s what Dean was suggesting-- that he wasn’t strong enough, or that he was somehow corrupted or even just didn’t understand...

SAM: Stop bossing me around, Dean. Look. My whole life, you take the wheel, you call the shots, and I trust you because you are my brother. Now I'm asking you, for once, trust me. DEAN: No. You don't know what you're doing, Sam. SAM: Yes, I do. DEAN: Then that's worse.

Because Sam really DIDN’T know what he was doing, as blinded as he was by Ruby’s lies and manipulations, not to mention the addiction to demon blood and the power it gave him.

Sam did have his doubts, even as he and Ruby were driving to his destiny. He wondered if Dean had been right, but again was manipulated via the forged voicemail from Dean. We learn the entire year, or perhaps even longer from the moment Ruby first entered his life, had been one long con leading to this moment, the ultimate betrayal leading him directly to his meticulously orchestrated “destiny.”

Hello, Lucifer.

So what does this mean for Jack going forward? That is certainly the question.

[theonceoverthinker]

OUAT 2X14 - Manhattan

I don’t have a pun for this time, but I wanted to say that this is probably one of the episodes that I was the most excited to cover for this rewatch for a few reasons. First, I haven’t watched it since my initial watch of the series so apart from the broad strokes of the story, I’ve forgotten a great deal of it. Second, it’s one of the biggest and best received episodes of the season from a General Audiences standpoint from what I understand. Third, I’ve never had a real opinion on Neal because I binged Seasons 2 and 3, so this episode will provide me the opportunity to do just that! Finally, it takes place in New York and who doesn’t love New York!

...Don’t answer that! Anyway, I hope you’ll read my review of this episode which is just under the cut, so I’ll CUT to the chase. Ha! Turns out I did have a pun in me! Okay! Let’s get started!

Press Release While Mr. Gold, Emma and Henry go in search of Gold’s son Bae in New York, Cora, Regina and Hook attempt to track down one of Rumplestiltskin’s most treasured possessions. Meanwhile, in the fairytale land that was, Rumplestiltskin realizes his destiny while fighting in the Ogres War. General Thoughts - Characters/Stories/Themes and Their Effectiveness Past We gotta talk about the forking Seer and how she relates to Rumple. First, on a strictly aesthetic level, look at the way that the Seer moves her hands as she asks for water! It looks a bit like how Rumple moves his hands when he gets the Seer’s powers. Also, even her voice is sing-songy in the scene as per the captions, matching Rumple’s. Second, on a more narrative level, it’s really interesting to examine just how much of the Seer ended up becoming part of Rumple. When we see Rumple first become the Dark One, while manipulative at times, because said manipulation happens with Bae as a child, it’s played as more of manipulation that any authority figure could conceivably do cranked up to 11. And when he’s not with Bae and he’s dealing with others, he’s blunter, not as cunning as he grows to be later. But the Seer, like him in later flashbacks, picks upon more vulnerable parts of Rumple’s psyche, like how she brings up Milah and Rumple’s fears of his past and cowardice.

So I know that there are some complaints about Rumple’s discussed reasoning for turning back from the Ogres Wars was changed to being about Bae to about Rumple’s cowardice, and I actually couldn’t disagree more. This entire flashback’s setup isn’t about Rumple’s excitement to be a father, but about how he is more scared than he realizes of fighting and dying in the war. That’s how, as I mentioned before, the Seer initially gets him: by mentioning his father’s cowardice and his desire to stray away from that path. In the next flashback scene, Rumple shows much more explicit fear at those harmed in the war and one of the most poignant lines from that scene is about praying for a quick death and the final words he says to what he thinks is the Seer is “and I’m gonna die.” I honestly feel like this was a revelation that was always supposed to come out. It doesn’t lessen Rumple’s love for Bae or that that loves is any less powerful, for he wants to live for Bae, but from a story perspective, the main throttle of Rumple’s decision to harm himself does lean more towards cowardice. Hell, even Milah hits the ball on the head: “You left because you were AFRAID.”

“It will require a curse -- a curse powerful enough to rip everyone from this land.” Note that the Seer says this as Rumple’s asking for the truth about him finding his son to be revealed. I feel like people forget about this line and how it pertains to Rumple’s journey back to Bae. Many in the fandom (Myself included) mock Rumple for needing a curse to traverse realms while there are many other ways to travel them as revealed over the course of the series. Now, I get that yeah, to an extent, that’s true. New magical MacGuffins are introduced so that new characters can be introduced and so that we can see our current cast battle the fairytale elements with their modern mindsets and emotional problems (I personally find it more annoying when it’s mocked to the point where it’s used as an actual story critique, forking Cinema Sins and the mentality they’ve introduced for many who criticise films over minute details rather than how the work functions as a story -- this is why you will never see me take a point off for a plot hole). But back on topic, Rumple was told by both the Blue Fairy and now the Seer that he’d need a curse to get back to Bae, and so he kept that in mind. Present I know that a major point of contention is Emma not telling Neal about Henry when he brought up the idea of something good coming of their relationship, and I think it’s more of a complicated situation, one akin to both her initial lie to Henry in “True North” and her decisions in “Fruit of the Poisonous Tree,” where to say that something is objectively right or wrong is missing the point. Yes, Emma shouldn’t have lied and the episode is very explicit with how that was the wrong decision. However, look at what she’s dealing with. A vulnerable time in her life is now being further bastardized with the knowledge that it was all a conspiracy and while I like Neal, he didn’t exactly broach the subject with tactful bedside manner, instead trying to rationalize something so personal and painful to her. Also, I want to point out how Emma on some level knows this. That’s why she calls Mary Margaret in the very next present scene. But she doesn’t do the right thing. Look, this isn’t the easiest episode to be an Emma fan during, and I know that well. And I swear, I’m doing my best to keep my fan goggles off, but I’m not going to pretend that it’s not a nuanced situation when it is. And finally, Emma is chewed out for her decision. Henry gives her a “Reason You Suck Speech,” calling her just as bad as Regina, a line that hurts but is justified and given with an appropriate level of painfulness from an eleven year old. And even her initial apology isn’t enough.

So, that first confrontation between Rumple and Neal. Wow. What I like about Neal as he pertains to Rumple is that he immediately gives Rumple no leniency. I talked about this briefly during my review of “The Return,” but this is such an important distinction to Rumple’s other biggest loved one, Belle, who has somewhat looser parameters. From the second Neal sees Rumple again, he’s blunt about his intentions and exactly what he thinks about what Rumple’s capable of. I don’t want to say that there’s no love there, but it is pushed back in terms of Neal’s priorities, buried under decades of bitterness. And at the same time, while full of love, Rumple is still using his old tricks to get Neal to talk to him. He leverages his deal with Emma for more time to talk to him and while it works, it only serves to get more ire out of Neal. Rumple’s apology is likewise undeniably sincere, but the manner in which it is both gotten and attempted to be implemented completely miss the point that the anger produced can’t be healed so easily. I mean, just look at Neal’s face when he says that there’s magic in Storybrooke. Every benefit of every doubt is abandoned like the Stiltskin boys across portals. That having been said, with three minutes of time for an apology, I feel like we almost got more out of Rumple’s apology to August in “The Return” than we did here. Where are the tears? Why isn’t Rumple saying as much as he possibly can? It’s not enough to take points off or anything, but this meeting is partially what the first season and a half were building towards, and I kind of wanted more umph to it. That also having been said, I get that because Neal is a different person from August’s rendition of him entirely, of course the reactions are going to be different, and Neal’s speech after he’s done talking blows the conversation away. Credit to Michael Raymond James because in this scene, he completely kept up with Robert Carlyle, and that’s not always an easy feat, especially in such an emotionally charged scene. Insights - Stream of Consciousness -It is so bizarre to see Rumple and Milah happy. It’s a great contrast to how bad things got between them and is a great show of how Rumple’s cowardice really affected Milah, turning her from someone who looked so content into the miserable woman from the flashback in “The Crocodile.” All throughout the scene, they’re so dopey-eyed and in-sync towards the end. I honestly would love to read a fic where they managed to come to terms with their past and maybe be able to forgive each other, and I know I’m alone in this, but there is a story there. -”My weaving days are over.” *thinks about how in roughly 250 years, he goes by Weaver* Suuuuuure, Rumple. -Okay, seeing an adorably excited non-Dark One non-present timeline Rumple is just the best. Robert Caryle really shows Rumple’s youth here, excited, bouncy, full of music and light. It’s an honest job and plays against the cowardly spinster we see in “Desperate Souls,” the blunter Mr. Gold and the silly, but frightening Dark One version of Rumple, it makes for such a unique contrast! -Milah also gets such a unique contrast in another respect, being the more cautious half of the relationship compared to how she is after Rumple arrives home. -”But to the world?” So, when in the series finale, the idea of “the Rumplestiltskin the world will remember” came up and kept being echoed like it was this important thing, I felt that it kind of came out of nowhere because I hadn’t ever seen Rumple concerned with his legacy beyond the more isolated well being of his children, grand and great-grandchildren, and wife. However, as I hear this line, it makes a bit more sense to me, especially because this is the same episode that discussed the Henry prophecy, which was also touched upon in the series finale. -So, Rumple does that bug-eyed thing that I complained about in the last episode, but here, because the confrontation between Rumple and Bae is impending and is isolated as the main reason for his concern, it works sooo well! -Killian, thank you for breaking up that horrible mother/daughter moment! -”Names are what I traffic in, but sadly, no.” This line cracked me up! XD -”I’m not answering anything until you tell me the truth.” That’s a pretty solid rule of thumb, Emma. Neal’s definitely no villain, but just going forward, that’s a good mindset to have! -”I am the only one allowed to be angry here!” She’s got a point, Neal. You’re not really explaining yourself in a way that you’d be justified in being angry. -I love spotting bloopers as they’re happening. It’s like the OUAT version of finding Hidden Mickeys! -”My son’s been running away for a long time now.” When?! He ran away ONCE and he wasn’t even trying to run from you. He was trying to take you with him, in fact! Did you forget that?! -Henry and Rumple get a great scene! -I know you’re Baelfire.” Fun fact, last year at NJ con, I got this question wrong in the true/false game. But now I know the truth, and I’m coming for you again, Jersey! -Gotta give all the credit in the world to Jennifer Morrison here. There’s so much pain in her voice as Neal’s revealing the truth to Emma and Jen just captures how Emma’s barely holding her shirt together because now even more of her life has been shown to be a lie, and this time, a more vulnerable memory has been made even worse because of this new knowledge. -”To remind myself never to trust someone again.” That is such a tragic line. Even as Storybrooke has done a major job of changing Emma’s mindset in that regard, you do still see bits of that distrust in her personality. That’s why I like the concept of Emma’s walls being a constant in the series. -”You’ll never have to see me again.” Neal, you do know that your father is clearly still chasing you, right? You think he’s gonna give up so soon? -I like how as Rumple agreeing to watch the Seer, you can already see that his face has fallen and that he’s grown more haggard, showing some of that fear already striking him now that some of the initial adrenaline has worn off and the reality of the war is settling in. -”Who are you?” Jeez Belle, why not say “hi” like a decent person? -Regina, you know, instead of playing The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, it could be easier to, you know, look in her bag instead. -David, Thanksgiving with your family would be the best thing EVER! -Apparently, Bae learned to be a locksmith from Rumple. Neat! -Another great use of the weather from OUAT! The snow really helps to accentuate the dire straits of the war and is just adds a nice bit of texture to the scene so that it’s not just dirt against a night sky. -On the opposite end, Rumple hurting himself, especially as someone who is overcoming some serious orthopedic issues right now, is so uncomfortable to watch. Rumple’s screams actually gave me shudders. -As if I didn’t have enough reasons to praise the living daylights out of Robert Carlyle, just look at the moments when he enters Neal’s apartment. It’s the first glimpse that he gets of everything his son went through as a result of his actions and it’s subtly heartbreaking. -To add to this Robert Carlyle acting chain, his eyes as he screams “tell me” is forking hysterical! -Rumple’s splint makes me so uncomfortable. Go see a better doctor! -”A strong name!” Rumple straight up indignation as he says that cracks me the fork up! -I like Milah’s buildup of frustration as Rumple arrives home. At first, she’s almost smiling as she tells Rumple Bae’s name, but as she quickly confronts him and learns the facts, she gets angrier until we see the beginnings of the misery that sets off “The Crocodile.” I also want to note that Milah’s anger is for Bae’s sake, not for her own like in “The Crocodile,” and I think that is such an important distinction. A lot of people condemn Milah for her choice to leave Bae and my degree of agreement with that statement varies if you’re asking me to view it in terms of her choice as an individual vs comparisons with other characters, but I think it’s important to show that love for Bae. -forking hell. Die, Cora! -I think I do enough of a job complimenting the effects team to be able to laugh at the New York backdrop during Emma and Henry’s conversation. -I ADORE the design of the Seer, by the way. The stitched up face and the eyeballs on her hands is just so cool! -It’s interesting to note that the last scene of the flashback happens after the events of “The Crocodile’s” flashback, as Rumple states that his wife ran away, and not “died.” -Rumple, to quote a magnificent show of great quality, “If you could gaze into the future, you’d think that life would be a breeze, seeing trouble from a distance, but it’s not that easy. I try to save the situation, then I end up misbehaving. Oh-oh-o-o-o-oh!” (I’ll write a ficlet for the first person to tell me what I’m referencing). -”Okay. I get it. We’re all messed up.” *Takes a deep breath* Ookay, Neal. You sent Emma to jail, and while it may have helped break the curse, it also put her through some serious shirt. You don’t get to make light of that. -”In time, you will work it all out.” Yeah, about 250 years, but he does get there, and it’s pretty freakin’ awesome when he does! Arcs - How are These Storylines Progressing? Rumple finding his son - I probably should’ve listed this as an arc long ago, but I forgot. In any case, Rumple finally found him! The journey from the start of the series here was a fantastically well done one! I feel like it never dragged or took any longer or shorter than the season and a half that it ended up lasting. And now, it kind of gets a second life. Rumple is now physically with his son, but emotionally couldn’t be further from him, and we get to see Rumple trying to bridge that gap. I don’t remember liking this part of it, but on concept alone, it’s so fascinating to see that next step. Emma lying to Henry - I like that Emma gets to have a flawed moment with Henry and that Henry actually reacts to it so negatively. For a season and a half now, Emma’s been Henry’s hero so of course when she not only lies, but to such an extent, he’s going to have a bad reaction because he’s put her on a pedestal. Not only is it an interesting character moment for Henry, but as I mentioned before, it’s a good job on the narrative’s part in punishing Emma for her lie. Favorite Dynamic Rumple and Henry. To be honest, Neal and Rumple should absolutely go here, but their entire conversation is more story based, and I talked about them ad nauseum up in that category, so why not highlight another dynamic? Rumple and Henry are so supportive and kind to each other here, and it feels like both good foreshadowing of their familial relationship, a show of the progress both characters had made thus far when it comes to how they treat their loved ones, and a tragic setup for not only the let down they both get from their respective loved ones, but also of the prophecy. For the latter one, for most of he episode, it felt a little weird seeing Rumple talk to Henry so softly despite knowing the prophecy. It felt a bit like him raising a pig for slaughter. However, the end of the episode makes it clear that Rumple was just now remembering the prophecy as he watched Neal and Henry bond, and it works well enough for me. Their time together in the episode is just so gentle and in an episode that’s more or less full of harsh moments (those gentle moments included in hindsight), the break that Henry and Rumple give is desperately needed. Writer Adam and Eddy are really good at writing intricate storylines. When you look at their other episode like the “Pilot,” “A Land Without Magic,” and “The Queen of Hearts,” you notice that the situation the characters are put into are never so simple. Just like someone can’t or shouldn’t be expected to straight-up hate Regina in the “Pilot,” one can’t or shouldn’t be expected to hate Emma, Neal, Henry, or Rumple here (Except Cora. We can hate Cora allllll we want), no matter who you’re a fan of. That’s because they’re careful with their framing and character work as to never let one forget their full picture. And I think that holds especially true in “Manhattan.” Culture In my intro, I said I was excited to finally get an impression of Neal for myself. When you’re in a certain shipping camp like I am (Captain Swan), Neal tends to be thrown through the ringer. Hell, even my best friend in the fandom hates him. However, when you’re as anti-salt as I am, you tend to take a lot of the shirt thrown at him with a grain of...well, salt. This is part of the reason why this rewatch appealed to me so much. I always found Neal to be pretty average in my book. I remember liking him, but not having much of a reaction to either his actions or his death in Season 3 (I also feel like I should disclose the fact that I wasn’t in either of the shipping camps throughout Neal’s entire present existence on the show), and I feel like I’d be remiss not to talk about him a bit now, especially as this is his debut present episode and affords him the most perspective.

So here goes.

I like Neal. I don’t love him. If you asked me to line up every character in the show, he’d probably end up near August, and I like August too, though not as much as major characters like Rumple, Regina, and Emma.

What’s appealing to me about Neal is his non-exaggerated blunt personality. The way he curb stomps Rumple’s apology is so in-your-face, as if to scream to an audience that already finds sympathy for Rumple that his pain matters too and it will be paid attention to. This works by keeping him a sympathetic character, but also giving him a compelling dynamic. As for Emma, that bluntness also helps, but in a way that makes Emma more sympathetic. I mentioned before that Neal’s exposition about his part in the conspiracy of sending Emma to jail was less than ideal, and it’s part of what contributes to her decision to lie about finding him. Neal is a bit of a jerk, obviously not devoid of either the heroism or love of his former selves, but it’s a character quality all the same and a good one, especially because to my memory, it stays around and is pretty organic. It paints the trauma that he’s had at the hands of the world since his abandonment as it’s such a stark contrast to his Enchanted Forest self.

Rating Golden Apple. What a great episode! It goes in with the promise of payoff for quite a few major story elements and does exactly that. It’s unwaveringly harsh in many respects, but that’s why it works as well as it does. Neal’s addition to the main cast shakes things up and provides new opportunities for characters, for as harsh as it is to watch, seeing Emma lie about Neal and be punished for it was a good narrative choice, and the flashback was utterly fantastic in its storytelling! Flip My Ship - Home of All Things “Shippy Goodness” Swan Fire - Listen to that vulnerability as Emma says Neal’s name and that happiness that Neal just can’t keep out of his voice as he says Emma’s! That’s just fantastic! Also, he keeps the dreamcatcher! Also also, that “leave her alone” was romantic as all hell! Captain Floor - I’m very pissed at myself for not mentioning the best ship ever at any point before this. Like, Killian and the Floor just belong together, and to not acknowledge that was a callous mistake on my part! My sincerest apologies to my reader base, and I beg for you not to think I’m at all an anti! ()()()()()()()()() It feels so good to give this season a high grade again!!!! Woohoo!! Thank you for reading and to the fine folks at @watchingfairytales for putting this project together!

Next time...someone DIES!!!

...I’m saying that like we all don’t know who it is that dies… ...Please come back…I’m so lonely...

Season 2 Tally (124/220) Writer Tally for Season 2: Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis: (39/60) Jane Espenson (25/50) Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg (24/50) David Goodman (16/30) Robert Hull (16/30) Christine Boylan (17/30) Kalinda Vazquez (20/30) Daniel Thomsen (10/20)

Operation Rewatch Archives

[erasermind]

“The End of His Rope”

Plot Synopsis: Blank Slate notices Martin has been acting strangely lately and visits his apartment to investigate why.

...

Do you all remember, like, 3-4 years ago when I posted a fanfiction here about Martin and Blank Slate? 

Well, if you do, you’re in luck, because I rewrote that horrible fanfiction and made it better! I hope you all enjoy!

 Friday night at 12:00 AM I had gotten into my car to drive to my friend Martin’s apartment. It was late to be visiting, I knew that, but I also knew that Martin didn’t go to bed until 3:00 AM on nights where we didn’t have class the next day, so I didn’t worry too much. I hadn’t seen Martin in quite some time, which was very uncharacteristic of him. The first day he was absent from class I had just figured he was sick or something. I wasn’t too concerned with it. But, then he didn’t come in for a whole week. Even when he would still be recovering from an illness, he normally wouldn’t skip class. Not to mention the fact that I couldn’t recall any sicknesses that lasted full force for more than a week, but what did I know?     I had tried to call him multiple times now, but whenever I did, it always went to voicemail. This also hadn’t been concerning the first couple of times. I knew Martin would often disconnect his phone from the wall so he didn’t have to pay so much on his phone bill (I don’t know if that really helped, but I always humored him with it.) Nevertheless, even if he did this, he would always call me at least once every two days to talk or whatever, sometimes more. I live in a neighborhood relatively close to his apartment, but not close enough that we would want to be wasting gas constantly to visit each other, and I wasn’t much of a walker, so phone calls were important to us.     But…he hadn’t been answering his phone…and it had been more than a week now. I knew I shouldn’t worry about him; he always told me not to do that, but I couldn’t help it. I think it’s just…what I do. For a while, Martin had been acting…really weird, in contrast to his normal, subdued behavior, that is. Lately, he’d seemed really distant toward a lot of people, even me. I could tell he hadn’t been sleeping well because he always came into class with these huge bags under his eyes, and he normally didn’t have those. I tried to ask him about them, but when I did he became really irritated and said he didn’t want to talk about it. At the time, I didn’t want to press it and make him angrier; him being angry at me at all was almost too much for me to handle. 

     So I let it go, for a while at least. His strange mannerisms became a bit harder to ignore when he suddenly started insisting that I not come over to his apartment. He always loved hanging out with me, but one day, he just sort of…stopped. I had thought it was my fault at first; I had thought I had done something to make him upset, but I couldn’t think of anything, and he wouldn’t talk to me about it. We’d converse in class and on the phone at night, and he’d come over to my parent’s house to hang out, but I would never go there. Even if I were to bring it up, he would immediately shut me down and insist that his apartment was way too messy for the both of us to be in, as if he was embarrassed about it or something. But I knew he didn’t care about that. I had been over there when there were so many clothes and half-empty pizza boxes on the floor that you could barely see the carpet. Why was he suddenly so bothered by the thought of me seeing his apartment dirty? I really didn't have an answer for that. The only thing I could figure was that he was lying, and that wasn’t the real reason he didn’t want me coming over, but how was I supposed to know the real reason when he wouldn’t tell me? So, I was forced to believe him.     I didn’t want to invade his privacy, this is why I hadn’t tried to come over sooner. I was even a bit hesitant leaving my house that night because I didn’t want him to be angry at me for doing something he had blatantly told me not to do. But I was running out of options. He wouldn’t answer his phone, I hadn’t seen him in a week; I just needed to know he was okay.

    I gripped the steering wheel hard as rain pounded down onto my windshield, making it a bit difficult to see the road in front of me. I reached over and turned the crank that made my wipers move faster. The music playing on the radio was doing little to help my racing thoughts. I recalled he’d also been muttering things under his breath and chewing at pieces of his hair a lot, especially when we would see each other. Many of the nervous ticks I knew he suffered from were beginning to actively show themselves in the past month or so. I knew Martin suffered from paranoia and anxiety some of the time, but it wasn’t ever something that he’d let show. He was embarrassed by it. I understood the feeling. He always thought that he needed to be the person whom people went to whenever they were upset. He was the listener, the helper, not the victim. Some of the time I feel like that crushed him, not feeling like he could talk to people about his problems. I can’t imagine not feeling comfortable enough to vent about things. I had no doubt that this was part of the reason for his strange behavior. He must have been suffering from these things more than usual lately, and I hadn’t even thought to try and help.     My face twists painfully as I grab the steering wheel harder. No, I couldn’t have known about this. Martin was being secretive about what exactly had been bothering him. He was cutting himself off so he didn’t have to talk to anyone. He’d done this before, and for a while I’d been none the wiser. But I was helping now, and I wasn’t gonna let this continue. I kept telling myself this, but surprisingly it didn’t do much to help ease my mind.     I turned right into his apartment complex’s parking lot. A few cars were scattered here and there. The building was mostly being rented out to students studying at our college, so most of the occupants I suspected were out partying right about now. I spotted Martin’s green Vauxhall Viva and pulled into the spot next to it. Stepping out of my car, I used my hands to shield my head from the rain, unsuccessfully. I didn’t bother to lock the doors, not that I had anything worth stealing inside of it anyway. If people wanted to take the box of Kleenex in the back seat, they were more than welcome to. I started toward the stairway leading up to the second floor, slightly picking up my pace as I felt water seep into my shoe through the hole worn into the bottom.

    The rain took a toll on my hair, making it stick to my face. I didn’t care all that much; I was used to it doing that, and I barely thought Martin would mind. I arrived in front of his apartment door and knocked on it a couple times before figuring he wasn’t gonna answer. It was a good thing he’d loaned me his only spare key for emergencies. I was at the point where I considered this situation an emergency, and I reached into my pocket to grab it, only to find that Martin’s door wasn’t locked in the first place. It stood slightly ajar, so slightly that you would only notice it was open if you were standing a couple inches from it.

    That…made me even more worried. I didn’t like the implications of Martin’s front door being left open, and I quickly stuffed the key back into my pocket and pushed the door forward. After a couple millimeters, it halted, as if something heavy was blocking it from the other side. I furrowed my brow and shook my head, confused. Putting my entire weight up against the side of the door, I pushed again, managing to get it to budge just enough so that I could slip inside.     Things smelled stale in the living room of his apartment. I could make out the scent of rotten fruit coming from somewhere close. I figured his kitchen was the culprit, as it was only a few short steps away. The flat was almost completely black; all of the lights had been turned off. I stumbled around in the darkness for a while, noting that while I walked, I was kicking what sounded like cans out of the way. Were there soda cans on the floor, and what heavy object had been blocking the door? I smacked my hand against the wall next to the doorframe where I knew the light switch was. I felt it almost immediately and flipped it up, but the lights didn’t come on.     “Really…?” I muttered to myself, more troubled than annoyed, while flipping the light switch up and down a couple more times without much success. Had Martin forgot to pay the electricity bill or something? I sighed and reached back into my pocket for the small flashlight I carried around with me that was clipped to my novelty keychain. Convenient that I just so happened to have it on me at this very moment. I pressed the button on the side before I even took it out of my pocket, and once it was out, it illuminated the room perfectly.

    A chill went down my spine as my vision adjusted to the light. From the state I saw the living room in, I could tell immediately that something was wrong (not that I hadn’t been subtly thinking that all this time; this had only confirmed my suspicions.)     The place looked like it had been completely ransacked. Cans and various other garbage littered the floor. Half of it appeared to be food waste, as if someone had been eating in the living room and decided to just throw their trash onto the ground. I looked to my left. Wallpaper on the walls of the lefthand side of the living room had been ripped, giving the illusion that someone had torn it down. The cushions meant for the couch laid a good five feet away from it and had been partially unzipped so some of the stuffing inside was popping out. Martin’s television wasn’t on top of his entertainment center. I looked to my right. Martin’s dining room table, one that he had been using even though it was plastic and meant for the outdoors, was flipped upside down and missing one of its legs. The two chairs that used to stand on either side of it were absent. I uncovered one of them laying folded up in the kitchen. The other one was nowhere to be found. Piles of paper were scattered near the kitchen’s tile floor. From what I could see, each piece had something written on it.     I took a few more steps farther into the room. What…was this? What happened, why did Martin’s place look like this?    “Martin?” I called out into the darkness of the apartment. No answer. I sighed and watched my feet as I turned around, absently kicking more cans out of the way. As I looked up I finally caught a glimpse of what had been blocking the front door when I had initially tried to come in.     It was the TV, sitting up against the doorframe, its screen completely busted as if someone had smashed it in with a baseball bat. Pieces of glass from the screen were scattered around it, and I jumped back instinctively when I realized I was very close to stepping on them. I had no idea why it had been used to block the door. It hadn’t been very effective. It was almost as if someone didn’t want people getting inside of here, but also hadn’t cared enough to grab an object that would have posed a significant problem for someone trying to open the door. Had…Martin blocked it like this?

   Even more confused now, I turned back around and stumbled across the room toward Martin’s bulletin board, making sure not to step on anything lying on the floor.     “Martin??” I call out again, slightly louder this time. No answer. If Martin was here (and I knew he was here, his car was still parked in the lot outside,) why wasn’t he answering me? Was he asleep? How could he sleep when his apartment looked like this?

    I needed to find him. If he was anywhere, he had to be in his room, which was down the hall to the left of me. I turned and started toward it, my stride fast and wider than normal. The uneasy feeling deep in my chest was getting worse by the moment. The door to the room was shut. I reached over and grabbed the knob with a shaking hand before turning it. It gave way easily with a long, drawn out creak that made my hair stand on end. When I swung open the door, a waft of air from the inside blew into my face.     The air from that room smelled like nothing I had ever experienced before. Stale and horrible and rotten. I let out a grunt of shock, leaning as far away from the room as I could while immediately having to suppress my urge to vomit. To this day, I still haven’t found the right words to describe how truly terrible it was. All I knew for sure in that moment is that it was the smell of something decaying. I didn’t want to have to enter the room after that, but I hardly had a choice. I let out another disgusted moan as my stomach twisted, threatening to empty its contents once again, before pulling the edge of my sweater over my nose to help filter the smell out. It didn’t do much for me in the long run. I pointed my flashlight into the room and pressed forward, taking a couple steps inside. My heart was pounding out of my chest. Where was Martin?

    I quickly shuffled backwards to check the light switch in this room as well. Similarly to the one in the living room, it too didn’t turn the lights on. It looked as though the power was out for the entire apartment and had been for a while. I swiveled back around to observe the overall state of the room. It was just as messy as the rest of the flat, possibly even more so. The sheets on Martin’s bed were left in a crumbled heap at the edge of it and I noticed that his bedside lamp had been supposedly smashed against the headboard. I took a few steps toward the mess, noticing that something made a crunching sound under my feet as a moved, which caused me to jump. I felt uneasy; this noise was the only thing I had heard in the entire house since I had entered. It was stiflingly quiet.

    I peered over to the far right wall of the room, a section of it that had been eerily dark this entire time. Laying scattered all over the floor were various crumbled sheets of notebook paper. I paused for a minute, surveying the mess before I noticed that some of these papers had been tacked up to the wall along with a couple Polaroid photos. I walked over to the them slowly, once again making sure to avoid any random items that had been thrown onto the floor. Once I had managed to make my way over to them I leaned forward, squinting at each the photos. They had been stapled to the wall. They didn’t seem to be of anything in particular; most of them were blurred out and stretched, as if they had been taken while in motion. I couldn’t make sense out of any of them.

    I leaned back and scrunched up my neck so my sweater would stay over my nose and reached down to grab one of the sheets of paper from the floor. I sloppily unfolded it in my hand and let my eyes dart over the surface. The paper was covered top to bottom with strange, seemingly unrelated words that had been written in chicken scratch. I could just barely make out what they were supposed to say, but I could tell that this was Martin’s handwriting. I remember seeing words like “breathing” and “splitting,” repeated multiple times throughout the message; it was as if it had been written while Martin was having some kind of panic attack. As my stomach sank, I let it go, watching it slowly fall back down to the carpet before I heard a noise behind me.

    My heart skipped a beat as I quickly whirled around, shining my flashlight sporadically  throughout the room. I felt my legs lock in place as I tried to find what had made the sound, but everything looked exactly the same as it had when I entered. After a few more seconds I heard the noise again, coming from the right side of the room. It was just barely noticeable this time and sounded similarly to a creak, like something was being put under pressure. I looked over, my eyebrows furrowing. The only thing I figured could have made that sound was the door on Martin’s closet, which I noted had been left slightly ajar. I pointed my flashlight toward it and just stood there in silence for what seemed like a long time. For whatever reason, as I stared at it the pit in my stomach became larger. Especially after not being able to find Martin anywhere else in the house, I was becoming increasingly more curious, but at the same time something deep in my mind was telling me that I should not go and open that door. Something felt off about it, but I didn’t know what.

    I swallowed the lump in my throat and closed my eyes tightly. It was just a closet; what exactly did I think I was gonna see in there? I knew if I wanted to find Martin, I had to check it. Whether or not I felt confident, it was hardly my choice to make. I let the breath I had been holding hiss out between my teeth and walked forward. The closer I got to it, the more I noticed the putrid smell that had been permeating around the room. I wanted to get this over with. I ignored the tight feeling in my chest and reached over to grab the sliding closet door, hesitating for only a split second before thrusting it to the side with a grunt.     The first thing I saw even before I shined my flashlight into the closet was the silhouette of something large and bulbous. The smell was almost unbearable now and I reeled back in disgust, gagging instinctively. I covered my nose and mouth with the palm of my hand and swung the flashlight up toward the closet so I could see what was hanging in front of me. I screamed when I was met with the face of a bloated, discolored man looking back at me. I stumbled backwards and tripped on a bottle, causing me to fall over onto my tailbone. The flashlight fell with a clatter a couple inches beside me, still pointed at the closet. It illuminated the hanging figure’s feet, which were just as purple and pale as the rest of the body was.

    I gritted my teeth and let out a horrified moan as I scratched desperately at the carpet below me, attempting to scurry away from the open wardrobe. My back hit Martin’s bed a couple seconds afterward, making a loud ���thump.’

    “O-oh…” My voice quivered as I tried to grab the flashlight from the ground. It took a couple times, but eventually I found it and shined the light back up at the top of the closet. I felt my whole body shrivel up when I saw the man’s face again.

    Inside of the closet was a barely recognizable, badly decaying corpse that hung from one of the wardrobe’s highest hooks. The entire body had swelled to double its original size, and the skin on its face looked like leather, yellow and bruised and discolored, a sickening mix of blue and purple.  A belt had been wrapped tightly around the person’s neck as if it had been used to hang whoever this was.

    My eyes flickered back and forth as my mouth hung open in disbelief. Surveying the corpse closer, I eventually noticed its clothing: a black sweatshirt with various shapes sewn onto it. And its hair…It was green and curly and looked as though it was about to fall out. What…the fuck? I felt a lump develop in the back of my throat as a sickening revelation hit me like a freight train.             Oh, god….this figure, this…this body…

    It was Martin. I was looking at the rotting, lifeless body of my friend, Martin Aubrey. I remembered this exact outfit. It looked as though it was being uncomfortably stretched over his stomach. And the hair…it…it had to be him. I didn’t know anyone else with that haircut, and even if I did, why would they be in his apartment?

    I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. No…no, this…this wasn’t right…I couldn’t be seeing this correctly. There was no way Martin had hung himself, absolutely no way. He…he was too happy, he wouldn’t do this. So, he had been in a rut, that wouldn’t have made him do this, right? It had just been a little hiccup, he was…feeling under the weather, that’s all. I brought my hands up to my forehead and hit them against it hard, trying to clear my mind. I was hallucinating, I was too tired, something had to be wrong here. Martin wasn’t dead, he wasn’t in front me dead, something was wrong and when I opened my eyes again it would be fixed, surely.           I took a few seconds before I swallowed hard, opened my eyes, and looked back into the closet. The same, mangled body stared back at me. My face twisted into an even more horrified expression when I realized this was actually happening. I held the flashlight close to my chest, clutching it with both hands as it shined toward the ground. I couldn’t stand looking at his face anymore. He looked so…deformed….He hardly resembled himself. How long had he been in here? I focused my gaze on the ground below him. The kitchen chair that had been missing when I entered the house laid on its side under his feet. A chair, kicked over onto its side…he really had done it. I was in shock. Martin had hung himself.

    My stomach rumbled loudly, a clear sign I was about to vomit. I pursed my lips and clambered up to my feet as fast as I could, determined to get away from this room before it happened, but it was already too late. I had only taken a couple steps before I clutched by abdomen and bumbled forward, emptying the contents of my stomach onto the carpet. I finished within a minute and looked back up, my head spinning. I needed….to get help. I needed to get help, the police or something! If Martin’s lights weren’t working because he hadn’t been paying his bills, then it was pretty likely that his phone line had been cut as well. I had to find a working phone so I could get help, but all the sudden I found that my feet wouldn’t move.

    My friend was dead. That phrase kept repeating itself in my mind.

    Martin was dead…that’s why he hadn’t been answering his phone. That’s why he hadn’t shown up to class in a week. It was all starting to make sense. No wonder he cut himself off from me, he was planning his own suicide!

    A whimper escaped me as I finally managed to unhinge my own feet from the floor. I lumbered toward Martin’s bedroom door, my pace quickening with every passing second. I was too overwhelmed to notice my teeth grinding together, or the tears that were rolling down my face.

    “Oh God, n-no!” My voice hiccuped in my throat when I threw open the front door.

    “HELP! ANYONE, PLEASE!!”

[raptorific]

i've been scrolling through your blog for a bit and i just wanna say that i think that D.C. went through a rough stage a while back and marvel took full advantage of that shit and it sucks like DC could make the superhero movie of the century and people would be like :/ it's D.C. tho n not marvel while marvel can crank out some ass shit that they wrote in three days and as long as it has some "cool" actor people will praise that shit like it's fucking jesus himself in movie form n just ughhhhhh

I mean, I honestly don’t think DC’s had much of a rough stage since the unspeakably bad Burton-Schumacher Batman films of the 80s and 90s. Their film studio was just about dead after that and they tried to make a few other things happen but they just sorta fizzled at best and crashed and burned at worst. “Batman Begins” frankly revitalized the superhero genre and the Nolan series maintained relative consistency in terms of tone and story for the seven years it spanned. 

The Nolan Batman movies were a catalyst for change in the genre for a couple of reasons, but the largest of them is that suddenly superhero movies were actually viewed as, like, legit movies and not just shallow popcorn films. DC and Marvel took two very different approaches to this. 

DC doubled down on the Nolan series’ more grounded, human, artistic take on the superhero genre and tried to showcase their superheroes as flawed and vulnerable, which is great because it’s kind of their comics’ strong suit. Marvel went in the exact opposite direction and created movies that were outlandish fantasies-- and this is not a dig, outlandish fantasy is a hell of a lot of fun and it was necessary for them to establish a distinct identity that plays more to their comics’ strengths. 

See, DC is more character-oriented and Marvel is more story-oriented. It’s why DC can basically have a whole graphic novel where Batman just sits around introspecting and have it be good, and why Marvel can tell a more compelling story about characters nobody’s ever heard of. When they try to take on the other’s strengths, you end up with something unwatchably bad, which brings me back to the subject of DC’s supposed “rough patch” and the quality double standard where DC delivering anything short of absolute perfection is marked as a miserable failure while Marvel can phone it in and still have people rave about their movies:

DC’s films, since the Nolan trilogy revived their film studio from the brink, has had exactly one major misstep, and it happened because they tried to emulate the success of Marvel’s smash success “Iron Man” in tone with the Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern film. Believe it or not, Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, and Suicide Squad were all relatively successful films commercially and were enjoyed by most of their audience. The people who hated them were much louder and more obnoxious about it, but DC’s movies actually do have a passionate fanbase and they’re really only gaining more fans with each movie they release. Their one major flop was “Green Lantern” and the main problem with that is that most people aren’t gonna enjoy a faithful adaptation of Green Lantern comics because Green Lantern comics are by and large inaccessible

Marvel, on the other hand, produces more Misses than Hits. They’ve got some amazing films (Iron Man 1, Captain America, CA:TWS, Avengers 1) but they’ve also got a whole bunch of films that are bland and mediocre at best and soul-crushingly unwatchable at worst (Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, Civil War, Age of Ultron, Guardians of the Galaxy, the list goes on but so many of their movies have been so forgettable I can’t be bothered)

So this sounds like I’m refuting your point, but I think it really says something that DC’s films are considered to have had a “rough patch” of one movie whose biggest fault is that it was mediocre compared to the more recent superhero fare of Iron Man 1 and The Dark Knight, while Marvel can produce hours upon hours of tangled inaccessible shlock that’s led to people being so fatigued by their universe that the most exciting thing a Marvel trailer can contain at this point is "indications that they’re finally going Off Brand”

Anyway yeah you’re right on most counts, specifically that Marvel’s early successes largely came from an attempt to distinguish themselves from DC’s most popular superhero films, which were very insulated in terms of continuity (Batman Begins and Superman Returns, for example, don’t reference taking place in the same world as one another) and people really liked Marvel’s movies having clear crossovers building to a team-up (Fury mentions the Avengers in “Iron Man,” Tony shows up in “Incredible Hulk,” Tony’s dad is in Cap 1, Natasha shows up in Iron Man 2, etc.) and there was a really satisfying payoff to that in “The Avengers”

The problem is that now every movie just tries to up the ante on that payoff and we get diminishing returns. Do you know how many superheroes need to be in a Captain America movie at all? One. Do you know how many superheroes played a major role in the plot of Cap 3? I count eleven off the top of my head, and that’s for a solo movie! By contrast, Avengers 1, a team movie with an ensemble cast, had seven superheroes playing a major role if you count Fury as a superhero (which IMO you should). And instead of trying to deliver something new in other films, they just keep trying to double down on “look how much continuity!” to the point where I’m honestly fatigued just looking at the poster for “Infinity War” because at my last count there were over two dozen main characters and ScarJo has threatened us with even more cameos and crossovers than that. 

That’s one of the (many) reasons I’m looking forward to Black Panther. You know who I didn’t see in that trailer? Anyone from any other goddamn marvel movie other than Black Panther. It looks like they’re finally trying to deliver something new instead of just trying to deliver something that’s The Same But Louder.

Anyway point is you’re right that Marvel spent their first five years setting up a payoff and have spent the five years since delivering that payoff trying in vain to get lightning to strike a second time, and unfortunately their formula is treated as the scientific standard for superhero films to the point that making a movie that doesn’t adhere to that formula is seen as a failure for some ungodly reason

[kcaruth]

Movie Mania: Top 10 of 2018

This one was difficult. Those who have followed this blog for a while will know that for the past two years I have done a top 15 list of favorite films. That is largely because 2016 and 2017 cranked out so many great films, and I could not restrict myself to 10. However, 2018 turned out to be a rather lackluster year for film, in my opinion. Sure, there were some high points, but overall it was disappointing. It was actually easy to stick to a list of 10 this time, and those 10 films are all deserving of praise. I just wish they had some tougher competition to go up against. I digress, though. I now give you my spoiler-free list of favorite films of 2018.

Honorable Mention: Bumblebee

A collaboration between Travis Knight, the director of Kubo and the Two Strings, and Hailee Steinfeld? Count me in!

I stopped following the Transformers franchise after 2011′s Transformers: Dark of the Moon. One can only endure so many mind-numbing Michael Bay explosions before all of his or her brain cells die out. Here is a fun exercise that one of my college professors taught me; try it next time a Michael Bay Transformers movie comes on. Every time there is a cut, tap a pen or pencil or clap your hands. Frankly, it is quite overwhelming and hard to keep up with, and it is difficult not to notice every single unnecessary, jarring cut after becoming conscious of them through this exercise.

Contrast that with 2018′s Bumblebee. At Knight’s direction, the film forgoes most of those flashy explosions in favor of a more intimate approach to actual character development. Knight wisely chooses to keep the audience grounded and focused on the human characters, namely Steinfeld’s Charlie Watson, a teenage girl who is still struggling to come to terms with the death of her father while harboring resentment of her mother for remarrying. As far as the robots go, while the other Transformers movies went overboard with filling the screen with as many Decepticons and Autobots as they could, Knight really only has the titular Bumblebee and a couple of Decepticons hunting him down, ensuring that the action scenes and the film itself do not feel too bloated. Bumblebee is the course correction that this franchise so desperately needed.

#10: Eighth Grade

I was cringing throughout the run time of Eighth Grade, but somehow that is a compliment to this film. Uncompromising in its excruciating honesty, Eighth Grade hits the bullseye when it targets the audience’s empathy for an anxious 13-year-old during her last week of eighth grade named Kayla Day, played by Elsie Fisher. As his debut feature film, writer-director Bo Burnham has stated that he drew inspiration from his own struggles with social anxiety, so the script feels genuine and absent of any Hollywood edits. While Kayla is certainly the main focus of the film, Burnham provides a surprisingly touching character arc for her single father, Mark, played by Josh Hamilton. Mark desperately attempts to connect with his teenage daughter, but it seems like all she cares about having a connection with is her phone and social media. With themes of mental health, heavy use of social media, and sexuality, Burnham delivers one of the most uncomfortable scenes I have ever sat through in a movie theater, which is most likely exactly how he intended it to feel.

I cannot help but compare Eighth Grade to 2016′s Edge of Seventeen, another coming-of-age comedy-drama about a teenage girl by a debut director. If I was given the choice between the two films, I would pick Edge of Seventeen, which I believe is much more re-watchable, garnering that intended empathetic response from the audience with half the cringe. Both are brilliant, but those who have not seen Edge of Seventeen should do themselves a favor and give it a watch.

#9: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

With so much hate and negativity in the world today, Morgan Neville’s documentary about Fred Rogers is a shining beacon of hope that restores one’s faith in humanity. Using archival footage as well as interviews with those closest to Rogers, Neville paints an intimate portrait of the man who welcomed audiences into his neighborhood through his pioneering television program. Without deifying Rogers, Neville shows how this American treasure dedicated every fiber of his being to teaching children how to be upstanding human beings who care deeply for one another, despite our differences. This documentary proves that Rogers’ lessons were not just for children, though. In fact, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? often feels like a one-on-one session with Rogers, encouraging audience members that they are all capable of good through simple acts of kindness.

#8: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Unfortunately, this American western is sure to fly under most people’s radar because it was a Netflix release that I do not recall having much fanfare and advertising. Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, this film is an anthology of six different vignettes set in the American West. Sporting a stellar cast with the likes of Liam Neeson, Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Zoe Kazan, Brendan Gleeson, and more, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs flexes the Coen’s signature style of dark drama and black humor while impressively tackling all of the sub-genres within the greater Western genre.

Each of the vignettes are tied together by death in some form or fashion. While my ranking of them changes from day to day, my favorite and least favorite remain consistent. It is virtually impossible to not fall in love with the first vignette, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” which is about a cheerful outlaw known just as widely for his singing as his gunslinging. The final vignette featuring a handful of characters cramped together on a stagecoach ride called “The Mortal Remains,” on the other hand, feels somewhat out of place and ends the film with a bit of a dud. Along the way between these two vignettes, however, viewers encounter enchanting tales of a bank robber, an impresario and his artist, a prospector, and a wagon train on the Oregon Trail.

As the Coen’s first film to be shot digitally, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs boasts some impressive cinematography, especially when it comes to wide sweeping shots, like any decent Western should. It also features a wonderfully delightful score that I desperately hope gets an Oscar nod. Not a week has gone by since I have watched this film where I do not find myself humming one of the songs or music from it. The acting throughout the different vignettes of the film is topnotch, and the actors look like they are having a blast in their roles.The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a fun time that leaves viewers longing for more time in the American West. For those who cannot find the time to sit down for the whole film, I must urge them to at least watch the first vignette about Buster Scruggs, which is worth the price of admission on its own.

#7: Isle of Dogs

Set in a dystopian Japan, Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animated Isle of Dogs tells the story of a boy searching for his dog on Trash Island after an outbreak of canine flu. Voiced by an all-star cast including Bryan Cranston, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, and Bill Murray, Isle of Dogs is an epic adventure with its fair share of plot twists along the way. Alexandre Desplat provides a brilliant score for the film that matches Anderson’s comedic quirkiness and thematic choices. I would not consider myself a fan of Anderson’s distinct film style, but I do consider myself a huge fan of dogs and enjoyed Isle of Dogs. (Get the title of the film? Pronounce it out loud quickly. I Love Dogs.)

#6: Game Night

Game Night made me laugh out loud like I have not done in a long time at the movie theater. Starring Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, the film follows the hilariously ridiculous premise of a group of friends whose game night gets wrapped up in a criminal escapade. In addition to Bateman and McAdams’ great, fun chemistry as the husband and wife duo of Max and Annie Davis, Jesse Plemons’ portrayal of Gary Kingsbury, Max and Annie’s weird neighbor, delivers some moments of pure laughter. For a film that is high on laughs, Game Night manages to string the audience along with its surprisingly competent mystery, complete with reveals and twists that both shock and amuse viewers. Be sure to stick around for the credits and post-credits.

#5: A Quiet Place

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big baby when it comes to horror movies. I absolutely loathe jump scares and will watch horror movies through my fingers if I am forced to watch one. However, I had heard so much positive buzz about John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place that I could not allow myself to make this list without seeing it first, and boy am I glad I summoned the courage to see it. A Quiet Place is a masterclass in tension, tone, pacing, sound design, and character development.

The plot centers around the Abbott family in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by blind monsters that attack any source of sound with their heightened sense of hearing. Nothing is known about the origins of these monsters, only that they have wiped out most human and animal life on Earth. In this hopeless world, Lee and Evelyn Abbott struggle to fill their children with hope for the future.

The performances in A Quiet Place are some of the best of the year. The actors have an added degree of difficulty of having very minimal to no dialogue during the entire film, so their facial expressions and body language have to do most of the talking. One of the more impressive feats of A Quiet Place is the characters communicate in American Sign Language, and the actors actually learned ASL for the film. Millicent Simmonds, who plays Regan Abbott, is deaf and knows ASL, so she was able to help her co-stars with ASL, make corrections, and suggest improvements.

Krasinski has said that A Quiet Place is all about parenthood. Along with this theme, the film contains many Christian images and themes that are fascinating to pick apart and ponder. With so much depth, A Quiet Place delivers an original story that grips audiences. Although I did not see it in theaters, I am sure that people could hear a pen drop in their viewings.

#4: Bohemian Rhapsody

For all of its inaccuracies, creative liberties, and unevenness, Bohemian Rhapsody took the world by storm as the highest grossing music biopic and reinvigorated a love of Queen and its leading man, Freddie Mercury. Rami Malek runs away with the film as he disappears into his role as Mercury, so much so that audience members might have to pinch themselves to remember that they are not watching the real Freddie Mercury. Seriously, Malek has to be a surefire Oscar contender for this performance. Not only does he masterfully recreate Mercury’s mannerisms and moves onstage, he also channels his pain and feelings of isolation to bring audiences a fully realized depiction of the superstar. The supporting cast is good too, although Malek’s stellar performance does overshadow them, through no fault of their own.

For its finale, Bohemian Rhapsody gifts audiences with one of the most moving, memorable set pieces in all of film for 2018, the 1985 Live Aid concert. In a word, it is epic. Bohemian Rhapsody teaches lessons of acceptance, love, individuality, and the power of music and leaves viewers wishing they could have had a few more years with the amazing Freddie Mercury. This is one of those instances where the majority of critics should be ignored. Even if viewers are new to Queen, they should not miss this film.

#3: Green Book

Bolstered by fantastic performances by Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali, Peter Farrelly’s Green Book takes a relatively unknown true story about a concert tour to the Deep South in the 1960s with African-American pianist Dr. Don Shirley (Ali) and his driver/bodyguard, Italian-American Tony Vallelonga (Mortensen), and tackles its subject matter without being too heavy-handed and maintaining respect for its characters. The script treats Vallelonga and Shirley as real human beings. Contrary to most film tropes, neither completely changes his character after a single event or incident. Instead, that change occurs slowly over the course of their road trip. Both men learn from one another, despite their disparate backgrounds. Mortensen and Ali are both worthy of Oscar nominations, though I think I would give the edge to Mortensen.

For a film about racism, identity, and the dangerous Jim Crow South, Green Book remains accessible to all audiences. It is full of heart and is brimming with that feel-good aura. As Mick LaSalle wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle, Green Book is “so big in its spirit, that the movie acquires a glow. It achieves that glow slowly, but by the middle and certainly by the end, it's there, the sense of something magical happening, on screen and within the audience.”

#2: Annihilation

I have not stopped thinking about Alex Garland’s Annihilation since it came out way back in February. Garland, the director of one of my favorite films released in 2015 Ex Machina, puts together an impressive cast starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novotny, and Oscar Isaac to deliver a truly intoxicating film that leaves audiences deep in thought well after the credits roll. Based on Jeff VanderMeer’s novel of the same name, Annihilation follows a group of scientists who enter a mysterious quarantined area known as the Shimmer. Inside the Shimmer, flora and fauna undergo uncontrollable mutations. The scientists explore the Shimmer in an attempt to learn its secrets and discover what happened to the military team that was sent in before them.

The atmospheric, bone-chilling score sticks in viewers’ memories and adds to the intense tone of the film. Speaking of tone, Annihilation might bring audiences to the verge of suffocation because of how breathtaking it is. It has possibly the scariest, most dreadful scene of any film from this decade that comes from the stuff of nightmares and leaves audiences haunted. For all of its terrifying elements, however, this sci-fi film also showcases some downright gorgeous scenes that let the imagination run wild. Unlike many sci-fi films these days, Annihilation is not afraid to slow down and let scenes marinate in viewers’ minds. With so many avenues to explore as far as themes go, from ethics to grief to depression to humanity’s propensity for its own self-destruction, Annihilation is a film that should be talked about for a long time to come.

#1: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

This was the easiest decision on my whole list. No other film came close to the number one spot after I saw Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I remember seeing trailers for this film throughout 2018, but I did not have high expectations for it and almost blew it off. After all, with all of the Spider-Man films we have had in recent years, how could this one stand out apart from its animation?

The hype is real. Spider-Man is one of the most well-rounded films of 2018. It expertly balances its genuinely funny comedic moments with its emotionally moving dramatic ones. It takes risks that pay off with its bold storytelling, which is full of charm and satisfying superhero action. There is obvious care and attention to detail poured into every frame of this film, a work of art that is a love letter to superhero comic books. The creators of the film wanted it to feel like "you walked inside a comic book," and they hit it out of the park. The computer-generated animation works in concert with line drawings, paintings, dots, and various comic book art styles to make the film look like it was created by hand. It even has word boxes and bubbles that somehow are not too obstructive or distracting. As Todd Howard, the director and executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, is famous for saying, “all of this just works.”

For such a large ensemble of characters voiced by ingenious choices like Mahershala Ali, Hailee Steinfeld, and Nicolas Cage, Spider-Man gives each of them equal footing while keeping the spotlight squarely on Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), the new Spider-Man. Lily Tomlin voices what may be my favorite version of Aunt May, and many other Spider-Man staple characters make great appearances.

The soundtrack is catchy and fits the bill for what a kid Miles’ age would listen to. There are tons of Easter eggs for hardcore Spider-Man fans to uncover, and there are pop culture winks and nods that most people familiar with the Spider-Man franchise will understand and enjoy. Of course, the late, great Stan Lee has a touching cameo, one of his best yet.

Every part of this stand-alone story feels fresh, and the characters have so much depth to them. It is hard to come up with an original concept that reinvents the superhero genre, but Spider-Man has done just that and more. This revolutionary, culturally important film was a joy to watch, and it may go down as the best Spider-Man film yet. Certainly, it has to be a serious contender for the best film of 2018.

The following are a list of all of the films I saw from 2018, in no particular order:

·         Green Book

·         The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

·         Pope Francis: A Man of His Word

·         My Hero Academia: Two Heroes

·         Black Panther

·         Annihilation

·         Game Night

·         Ready Player One

·         Isle of Dogs

·         A Quiet Place

·         Avengers: infinity War

·         Deadpool 2

·         Solo: A Star Wars Story

·         Incredibles 2

·         Ant-Man and the Wasp

·         BlacKkKlansman

·         Bad Times at the El Royale

·         Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle

·         First Man

·         Ralph Breaks the Internet

·         Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

·         Aquaman

·         Bumblebee

·         Bohemian Rhapsody

·         Bird Box

·         Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

·         Eighth Grade

My 2017 film list: http://kcaruth.tumblr.com/post/171040800751/movie-mania-top-15-of-2017

My 2016 film list: http://kcaruth.tumblr.com/post/156340406236/movie-mania-top-15-of-2016

[mrjoelgarcia9]

Let’s Talk The #PowerpuffGirls "Reboot”

I was not planning on ever writing this post, but I think I should put the effort into explaining why The Powerpuff Girls “reboot” is not an awful mess.

For my thoughts on the “reboot”, feel free to keep reading.

I will start this post by noting that I am not a huge fan of this franchise, but I do remember liking the original series when it first aired. I watched most (but not all) of the original series, the film, a couple of episodes of the Powerpuff Girls Z anime, and the anniversary special. It had great characters, a great balance of comedy and action, and great animation.

Ever since it was announced, the “reboot” has been a point of critique towards the network by how they have been unable to come up with any new shows featuring female protagonists (aside from Steven Universe). Fans have considered it as part of the network’s unholy trinity of reboots alongside the Ben 10 reboot and satirical Teen Titans Go!

At first, I thought the “reboot” would be based on the 2014 CG special Dance Pantsed. It was OK and had decent CG animation but featured a badly dated plot centering around a parody of Dance Dance Revolution (in 2014) and Ringo Starr randomly referencing “Let It Be”.

When I found about the actual animation, I assumed the show was trying to resemble the original’s later seasons (which by then had switched over from hand-drawn to computer animation). I was surprised to find out that the show recast the titular characters, even though their original voice actors are still active, yet brought back everyone else. It was especially odd since Tara Strong, the original voice of Bubbles, was already reprising her characters (Ben Tennyson & Raven, respectively) in both aforementioned reboots.

I have seen a few episodes and can only say that it is watchable...

...but it does have one big problem.

The new voice actors are OK but their performances sound more like they are doing impersonations of the actors they replaced than of themselves. The animation is excessively bright. It wants to resemble the original show’s later seasons but instead looks like someone cranked up both the TV’s brightness and contrast.

The writing is really dull and the show’s tone is heavily comedic. While the original did mainly focus on comedy, it did know when it was OK to get dark or dramatic. This "reboot” does not and instead tries too hard to be funny and relevant with outdated memes. The original villains are rarely featured and new villains are constantly being introduced, most of which are badly underdeveloped and look like they were taken straight out of someone’s fan fiction. The only new villain I found original and different was “Manboy” since his episodes were admittedly funny.

Like both the Ben 10 reboot and Teen Titans Go!, this show is intended for a new generation of fans. However, if you have noticed my use of quotation marks, there is just one big problem: This "reboot” is actually a continuation.

There are too many elements which show it to be a continuation, such as an episode explaining what happened to Ms. Bellum, a lack of an origin episode, and the Girls now attending elementary school. With that in mind, it is now supposed to take place after the original final season which last aired in 2005, four years before its target demographic was even born. While the original has continuously been airing in reruns since it ended, either on Cartoon Network or Boomerang, it is still really odd that Cartoon Network decided to make this show a continuation instead of a proper reboot.

In comparison, the Ben 10 reboot does not require viewers to have seen any of the previous series or films.

As a continuation, it is similar to Dexter’s Laboratory. Two years after that show originally ended with a TV film (Ego Trip), Cartoon Network revived it for two more seasons. It also featured a new animation style, recast the titular character’s voice actor (because the original voice actor had retired by then), and was more comedic than the first two seasons. It was good but not as great as the first two seasons.

The 2016 Powerpuff Girls reboot is neither the worst reboot or continuation ever made. It is a “So Bad It’s Good” type of show where it may be a mess but is a watchable mess despite its flaws. It is also far more watchable than either the Ben 10 reboot or All Grown Up! (the awful and unnecessary continuation of Rugrats).

The Powerpuff Girls “reboot” airs every day on Cartoon Network.

Until next time, thank you for reading!

[bakechochin]

Book Reviews - Railsea

Railsea - China Mieville - In the spirit of ‘new year new me’, I decided to begrudgingly give Mieville another shot, and I found it perfectly readable but no better than the other Mieville works I’ve read - So straight off this world is fucking awesome, and more importantly is consistent within itself -> Like obviously I’m a great fan of the usual Mieville weirdness, but the shit in Kraken seemed incongruous with the London setting and Perdido Street Station was just an infernal clusterfuck -> This book, by contrast, presents a weird setting with down-on-their-luck nomads hunting giant fuck-off moles (and occasionally other animals), but because that’s the whole vibe that the world is going for, it works a lot better than something like Perdido Street Station, which didn’t have an overall vibe as much as it just had a bunch of kooky concepts thrown together in one mishmash gallimaufry - It’s a young adult book, but I wasn’t too fussed because a) I’ve read other enjoyable YA books in the past and b) if Mieville’s attempts at writing adult fiction include the kind of repulsive gratuitous shit we got in Perdido Street Station, I’ll happily opt out of that -> The limitations of the young adult subgenre that I was anticipating didn’t really negatively affect all that much to be honest; there’s still violence but gratuitous gore is replaced with brief and ambiguous descriptions of injuries, and because of the protagonist’s own innocence, more salacious subjects never really come into play, so I’d say it works out quite well - I really fucking loved the Moby Dick allusions in this book, and I love how it cranks that shit up to eleven; sure, Moby Dick had one captain Ahab, but in this book, every fucking captain is an Ahab, so hell yeah I’m down with reading everyone’s crazy stories about those bastard animal nemeses - What’s more, the dramatic fights and encounters with giant moles, whilst few and far between, are fucking, and I mean fucking amazing, especially the last climactic fight against Mocker-Jack which I will not spoil the specifics of because it’s easily the best fucking part of the book - Mieville irritates me because even though I’m generally averse to his work, there are recurrent themes in his work which I love; this book does a better job at handling the idea of industry in place of religion than Perdido Street Station (which I thought was kind of silly and a bit of a deus ex machina regarding how it resolves some of the more farfetched elements of the plot), and I fucking love Mieville’s particular brand of made-up slang, which in this book gave us words like ‘diggiters’ and ‘spinecandy’ - The ending was infinitely better than the endings of other Mieville books I’ve read; aye it does have the same problem of trying to resolve matters really quickly, but it was quite nice and hopeful for the future of the characters, and was a relatively satisfying way to end the book - I always bitch about stuff like this, and I don’t want to seem like a shitty reader because I can’t remember names, but this book really takes that complaint and runs miles with it; as cool as it is that all the names in this book are unique and nothing like real-like names, it makes it a bitch to try and remember them all, especially when right at the start you’ve suddenly got the names of eight fucking people of seemingly varying levels of importance thrown at you, and it was a bitch at first trying to remember them all -> And then as the plot progressed, I realised that ultimately none of them are that important, with any of them being able to feasibly perform any role, and what little character development these side characters go through is kind of irrelevant when all the side characters are pretty much interchangeable - Mieville’s wanky metanarrative began to really piss me off as the book went on; like I was already kind of on the precipice, like not fully engrossed in the story, and I wanted to try to get more into it but the flow kept on getting interrupted by Mieville just spouting some shit like ‘oh man look at all this story stuff going on, oh shucks I wonder what these other characters are doing’, and it really took me out of the story - The pacing was pretty notably off in the book, which kind of links in with some of the other points here but is ultimately prevalent throughout, and for all the interesting bits there were just as many monotonous bits with not a whole lot going on - I has a few problems understanding the importance of the family behind the world-changing plot devices that the blurb boasts of, because ultimately they don’t seem like major players in the overall world with their achievements being understated or only mentioned vaguely, and the family members who are still alive not really becoming relevant until a good one hundred and fifty pages in -> Like yeah it’s established that they’re looking for the end of the world or some shit, and the characters seems to think that this is like the coolest thing ever, but I didn’t really understand the significance of finding this when ultimately most people in the world think it’s a myth and therefore shouldn’t really give a shit about it - This is the most petty minor complaint I can give, but it pissed me off that Mieville doesn’t use the word ‘and’ in this book, but instead uses the ‘&’ symbol constantly, and even tries to contrive some bullshit reasons as to why this is the case in the context of this world - stop doing this Mieville, don’t be a shit -> I could probably use this very petty example as an overarching reason as to why I don’t like Mieville’s work as a whole; these incredibly simple and inconsequential things in his works are given such complex and wholly unnecessary and totally shite explanations, and I don’t want to read chapters just chatting shit about how the serpentine look to the ‘&’ symbol reflects all aspects of this world - 6.5/10

I have a load of other book reviews on my blog, check that shit out.