#regardless what you think of the series

[eri-pl]

Thought 1: Charlie Vickers has the right kind of smile for Finrod.

Thought 2: I remember a post where someone suggested Annatar being similar in looks to Finrod, to mess with Celebrimbor's head.

[pharawee]

Maybe you need to sleep longer and deeper, so you can see more details of your dream. You're the one who told me that this dream isn't like the others.

—I SAW YOU IN MY DREAM · Episode 11

[elisedonut]

i know I've talked about this before but i love the concept of Percy and who he's with getting the same kind of treatment from the family (read mostly Molly)

and Percy handling it in a complexly different way to how Bill did

I always think of him getting into a serious relationship a few years down the line so he's healed a bit and offended as hell over his mom still not trusting his own decisions and trying to set him up with random women(because it would be girls sorry Molly is homophobic but just doesn't realize it) when his SO is literally right next to him

I know that she doesn't actually ever mention the Bluer age gap so really she likely wasn't bothered by that part but I think that would be different if Percy was with a boy tbh

like I think she would complain about the age difference between Perclin

also i think the idea of her inviting like Luna (or like Romilda Vane if you want to play into how she sees love potions as whatever plus shes even younger) is neat because of how messed up that would be and having her be like 'it's different' no no it's not

She honestly thinks shes helping like thats really important when it comes to Molly imo

that she honestly thinks shes doing something good and that Percy would be happier with someone else

shes just you know wrong and hasn't figured that out

So she just doesn't understand why he's fighting this so much when she knows best she knows her little boy far better then anyone else she knows he needs someone better someone worthy of him so she just doesn't get why Percy getting so mad about it

on the bright side

because Percy left once before shes more willing to listen to reason whenever he doesn't talk to her for like a week or storms out of a dinner because she said something and he was at his limit

He'll get her to understand eventually

[centaur-dreaming]

Yes im crying who's fucking asking

[biblically-accurate-dca]

KILL!!!!!!!!!

[the-somwthing]

Welcome to my little meta analysis essay called

Why do we misremember Flower Husbands as being “nicer” than it was?

Disclaimer: I’m not here to talk about whether or not FH is “toxic” or anything like that. It’s just a fact that many old fans rewatching FH POV and new fans who are watching it for the first time after seeing fan content tend to be surprised at how they actually behaved in the series compared to how everyone remembered them being back in the day. This will NOT go over whether or not I think FH is unhealthy or whatever and instead just discuss why I believe this phenomenon has happened.

So, if I try to make this a fancy well written essay, I’ll be here all day, so I’ll just get to the point. 3rd Life came out during the DSMP era of mcyt. MCRP has been around for ages, but the DSMP style of RP (which I’ll be calling “smp rp”) was pretty much popularized by DSMP, mostly towards the end of 2020. For reference, 3rd Life started early 2021, so there’s about a half a year between these two events, and DSMP kept going for years so 3rd Life was absolutely happening during the golden era of DSMP.

But what does DSMP have to do with this? Well, it sort of created this idea of “lore” and only specific things being “canon”. You can make fun of me for the way I worded that, but you know what I mean, DSMP was weird about that stuff. I don’t really blame them as it was kind of a new style of RP they accidentally spawned, but still, it was a confusing time for SMPs.

3rd Life was actually less like DSMP and more like the modern SMP RPs, where there’s no (known, lol) scripted events and the fandom itself deciphers what is or isn’t “canon” rather than it being told to them, with mostly everything being considered canon. HOWEVER, I do believe that DSMP’s style did still affect the fandom, specifically with the topic of this essay, Flower Husbands.

But why would it only really affect Flower Husbands? Now we get into a rough topic: shipping discourse. Back in those days, shipping in the mcyt fandom was heavily frowned upon. Moreso than it is today (I know it’s still around, but it was a lot worse the earlier we go lol). I’ve even seen old relics of ppl saying flower husbands should only be portrayed as platonic cuz it’s wrong to ship them, despite their team name literally being husbands. But more importantly, for A LOT of people, flower husbands was the One Ship people felt “allowed” to ship, BECAUSE it was canon. So they would allow FH and shun every other ship.

My point isn’t actually that, with it being the only “acceptable” ship everyone tried to make it more wholesome, though I suppose that could be a contributor. But my ACTUAL point is where all the things I laid out finally close in on each other:

Ships were a Dangerous territory in mcyt fandom, and ships being “canon” was something a lot of people weren’t prepared to deal with. People don’t want to get too close to RPF territory, but back in the day their ideas of c! vs cc! wasn’t as great, so they default to the DSMP Rule of “if it’s stated to be roleplay, then it’s canon to the characters, if not, it’s noncanon and just the CCs hanging out”.

You see where I’m going with this? When trying to follow this rule for a character relationship where they don’t explicitly state what is or isn’t RP, they hear “we’re married” and instantly mark that as canon to the characters since it clearly isn’t true to the CCs, and tend to block out anything else, otherwise you’re risking it not actually being true to the characters. Especially when it’s things like Scott saying something mean about Jimmy; that directly contradicts the “these characters are in love” thing, so it must not be canon, right?

But wouldn’t people still remember that these things happened, or did they actually straight up not process any of it? My answer to that is: of course everyone was paying attention, but with the context that it’s the CCs playing a video game, all of the teasing and other behavior seems WAY less serious. It just looks like average friends playing a hunger games smp together. And as I explained earlier, the fandom was ONLY processing this as a CC thing, so Scott’s treatment of Jimmy never stood out because that’s just how it is playing games.

Back to DSMP, I’m not active in that fandom anymore but I’ll see snippets sometimes, and I’ve seen the claim that beeduo was actually boring in canon and the fandom was the one that made it interesting. I feel like this is exactly what happened with FH. Nobody was actually expecting anyone to go hard into romantic roleplay, so the fans just take whichever pair says they’re getting married and fill in the blanks themselves. And that was normal back then, it wasn’t fans making stuff up for no reason, it was kind of expected of us.

So yeah, I personally believe that this whole confusion about FH is a result of its time. Whether you want to finally look at the actual substance of the relationship rather than following weird rules about what is or isn’t “canon”, or you believe that since FH was from a time where romantic RP was confusing and weird it would make the most sense to take into account the time period it came from and ignore the less appealing bits in favor of the fanon, I don’t really care honestly. But man isn’t this an interesting situation.

[forcebookish]

it's not lost on me that top shoves mew against a wall and tries to kiss him but when mew stops him he backs off in the same episode that boston shoves top against a wall and gropes him but doesn't stop when top tells him to stop

seems to be lost on a lot of other people though😒

[chipistrate]

People really need to give Steel Wool a break sometimes, man- They messed up with Security Breach and now people act like EVERYTHING wrong with modern fnaf is all exclusively their fault when it's really not.

[beevean]

Lenore, Hector and Alucard are by far the biggest victims of the sudden 180 in direction done by Season 4, both due to the team probably wanting to give everyone a "happy ending" at any cost after Season 3 got criticized for being glorified torture porn, and also due to Ellis leaving mid way, which most likely caused other writers to have to fill in the gaps

I'm particularily convinced that the Lenector stuff was added by the other writers because it literally has no sense of organicity with the dynamic as it was written by Ellis in S3, which was still shit, but this feels like a completely different kind of shit. Ellis liked his misery porn, he doesn't strike me as the type to suddenly turn and write a cutesy fluffy ship between an abuser and her victim, even considering his...background. You'd think he'd have doubled down even more on the edgy bullshit, but Lenector as it is in S4 feels like the kind of stuff a stereotypical crazy shipper on social media would write, which leads me to imagine that Lenector was added after the asshole's departure because some folks at Powerhouse really thought the two looked so cute together

Alucard's and Isaac's stories give me the impression that the writers needed more time to bring their vision to fruition, but for one reason or another they rushed things. Alucard takes one episode to get over his trauma and the implication that he'd be grappling with mistrust and misanthropy is never addressed, Isaac becomes Jesus overnight and then peaces out in the middle of the season after an epic speech. However, if I imagine being a viewer who has just finished S3 and has to wait a year to see how it ends, I can imagine their development happening, just not this sloppily.

The Lenector plotline is too jarring. Part of me still believes that this one screenshot:

was meant to echo Hector's "flashback" of him killing his parents, and be a hint of him going on a blazing rampage.

Which, in theory, happens! But 1) it's for the sake of resurrecting Dracula, after two seasons spent getting beaten over the head that he lied to him and wanted to destroy mankind (which makes his horror at Carmilla's plan of conquering the world immensely hypocritical); 2) despite having complete control of his Night Creatures, he still leaves the "epic" flight to Isaac, who at this point has ascended to the status of Creator's Pet; 3), most importantly, the scene makes a fine point that Lenore is special to him and she must be protected, after the previous six episodes showed them "bonding" and conveniently ignoring all the abuse, forced BDSM and treachery she used to trap him. All together it feels like a subversion for the sake of a subversion, like they kept the original idea but made it less dark at the last minute. And I could have accepted it as a subversion of expectations, if there was more focus on Hector's character (hah) and less focus on how ✨cute✨ they were or how 🥺sad🥺 poow widdle Lenore was. Considering that from what I heard she became a fan-favorite overnight, in theory because of her "nuance" but let's be real it's because she's "hot", I can absolutely see the writers deciding to make her more sympathetic in an attempt to make them happy. If S3 feels like an amateurish torture porn fic on FF.net, S4 def feels like a coffee shop AU lmao.

I don't know what happened in S4. I don't know if they had planned a 5th season, but were forced to condense everything in one: perhaps with one more season, the transition between "I made you into my pet! :D" and "This is why I like you. You're capable of actually listening to me 🥺" would have made more sense. I don't know if other writers entered the fray, even though Ellis is the only one credited in S4. I don't know if Ellis himself was strongarmed into writing fluffy shit because the executives heard the complaints that S3 was poorly received due to being a cynical waste of time - ironically, erasing all conflicts made that season even more of a waste of time.

We can theorize. But much like a rushed game is still a faulty product not deserving of full price even if you can pity the working conditions of the devs, the final result of NFCV is of a rushed, poorly paced, poorly thought-out mess that ended up making an offensive joke of the serious themes it wanted to include.

[tricorderreading]

Star Trek 8: The Enemy Within (en)

when the parts of his personality that give him a backbone are forcibly removed, kirk leans heavily on spock to help keep him upright as captain

(thank you for the feedback - the rest of the episode novelization's excerpts are under the read more so they can be read together)

and finally, quite possibly the weirdest part imo

[fromtheseventhhell]

They're so twins-coded

[countdown-til-sanders-take-over]

this is a formal apology for every time i've read ur fnaf theories, gone "ah... of course! yes!" and then forgotten to respond

This is a formal apology for every time I've read one of your asks, not immediately had a TQ&/E, and forgotten to respond

[neon-danger]

call me crazy but I don’t hate the umbrella academy season 4

[bibiana112]

I like this happiness can be found in any world speech putting the focus on the fact that being able to compare between a hypothetical less tragic version of events is in itself what causes unhappiness and dissatisfaction sure for the characters it's literal timeloops but real things like anxiety and ptsd often trick you into losing focus of the good things in the now and to lose yourself in the what could have been

[nvexe]

I guess it's because she appeared recently in the anime but there's a sudden uptick in people telling me izu is 17 mostly on twitter but here too? girl I know because I read the manga... if you read it too you'll stop saying this

[red-black-aesthetic-bout]

I have enough characters now to run the bracket!

submission link will stay open until 9 pm as planned. more submissions will help me in deciding which characters to include, but it isn't the only factor I'm taking into account