#salty read

[calicohyde]

i hate when ppl act like the only reason to not like a "sad" ending is because you can't take it or whatever. personally as a tragedy enjoyer, i hate a poorly written ending. i hate an ending that is just kind of a bummer. i hate an ending that feels mean-spirited to the audience. i hate an ending that's redundant. i love a sad ending that is thematically consistent, poignant, and bespoke to the rest of its narrative.

[somecluelessidiot]

Remus: Keep an eye on James today. He's going to say something stupid to Regulus and get punched.

Sirius: Sure, I'd love to see James get punched.

Remus: Try again.

Sirius: I... will stop James from getting punched.

Remus: There you go.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

(Accidentally mis-clicked enter on my last ask. Here's the full "ask")

What he says...

VS What I read...

("us" as in him and WWX, not the spider just to be clear)

They should make an adaptation called 'The Unfiltered', where Lan Wangji says exactly what's on his mind.

[the-ratmans-shiny-rock]

Actually so mad at all these grown ass people ridiculing tsats and nico and will for not acting like adults?? They're 2 traumatised 15 years olds, they're navigating their first relationship while navigating their traumas and being dorks because God forbid a teenager acts like a teenager and not a 31 year old.

YES, nico and will ARE allowed to gush about star wars and talk about singers and fictional charaters they would date because all teenagers do that and it is not out of charater it's just a NEW PERSPECTIVE.

You're allowed to critique any peice of media but if you're gonna do it when you've only read the FIRST FEW CHAPTERS and it hasn't even been out for a week yet?? Yikes my dude

[twinksintrees]

this bastard doesn’t deserve bram’s cunty look someone get him back in his ugly ass rat bastard outfit

[river-bottom-nightmare]

hmmm okay i’m seeing the “dick grayson is a ray of sunshine” tag increase in popularity and i feel as though i may need to clarify that whenever EYE use it, the “dick grayson is a ray of sunshine” tag is not adorable harmless smiley optimistic ball of sunshine dick. to ME dick grayson is a ray of sunshine (brilliant and brutal and furious in a way that is impossible to dream of being until you meet him) (he is simmering and sharp and too bright to look at head on, raise a hand to shade your eyes) (he burns the skin of your arms and your shoulders and your cheeks until your flesh is blistered and red from prodding, in pain and glad for it, or darker and bronzed, grateful to be touched by him at all)

[larmegliamori]

Oh so you said that Dante's Divina Commedia is a fanfic? And that Virgil is his literary hero and he had a creepy crush on Beatrice ever since he was nine? All of this while ignoring the whole cultural system of his century? Wow you're so funny and original! Should we clap? Should we host a party? Should we invite Dante himself

[seagreenstardust]

Every clickbaity MHA article has the most frigid takes

“Bonus chapter canonizes fan-favorite couple”

Yeah, that dap and “let’s talk more after ghosting each other for eight years” just screams romance also didn’t know the ship could sail without either of them ever telling the other they liked them? Also bkdk is the tenth most written about couple on ao3 so “fan-favorite” might be a stretch

“Deku and Bakugou’s Final Goodbye is Heartwrenching”

What final goodbye was this? Oh, the one where they casually said “see you later” to each other after Katsuki told an oblivious Izuku he was his type? There was no “final” goodbye, Izuku literally invited Katsuki to lecture more for his class but go off I guess

Plus bkdk was absolutely sloppy making out in the back of Kats car 24 hours later ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[fractualized]

Hey yeah so I've seen this funny bit about Bruce before, from "I Know" in Detective Comics #1000.

But I didn't realize that the off-panel person telling that story is JOKER.

Which we can derive by how he's explicitly given the squiggly speech bubbles, as he so often is.

So there we go. It may not be a canon story but Bruce has officially cried in Joker's arms in a comic. AND NOBODY TOLD ME

[skylar-325]

i choked on my lemonade XD

he’s gonna bring this up all the time isn’t he?

kdj: hey why didn’t you text back when i asked you what you wanted for dinner?

yjh: oh you mean it’s not written in your damn book?

[ipostmysimpingstuffanonymously]

My entry for the SatoSho Discord Weekly Prompt: Just Friends

[thatswhatsushesaid]

jin guangyao’s tremendous capacity for both cruelty and compassion is core to his character. trying to insist that he is one to the exclusion of the other (and let’s be real: it is normally the former rather than the latter) does a disservice both to mxtx for writing him that way, and also to jin guangyao's role in the story.

[jdorian]

some of you might be unhappy to hear this but an interview mentioning that Eddie would want to hang out with his bestie of 7 years and the guy he hung out with at least 3 times a week and who he introduced to his son within weeks of knowing him, when said son no longer lives with (or speaks to) him, especially during a time he isn't dating 2 women simultaneously, being alone bar his coworkers and friends who are clearly very busy with other things...

all of that has nothing to do with one ship or another and maybe for once we could just acknowledge that he is his own character, more than ever before probably and just not act like there is something weird about that or as if it Must Have romantic intentions one way or another

the man is lonely you all, ofc he's gonna lean on the people he's still got left, it's the least surprising thing ever

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

The fandom can't make up its mind on what's supposed to be a joke and what's supposed to be serious because the show can't either half the time. It's a tonally disjointed mess that wants to have absurd over-the-top humor as well as a plot and moments of drama, romance, and angst that demand you see the characters as people and feel for what they're going through. Except you can't do that without also treating the dumb bullshit in a somewhat grounded way. Like, you're still dealing with the same characters. You can't just go "Oh, that? Let's ignore that!" the moment it's no longer convenient to you. You've opened this can of worms and now you have to sleep in it. So, every character flip-flops between two different versions of themselves depending on what the writers need in any particular scene.

This is not to say surreal humor can't be used right alongside characters you're supposed to empathize with, Teen Titans (not Go) did that and it worked. It's just that the absurdity can only come from the setting (Mad Mod, Mother Mae-Eye, pretty much anything Control Freak is in) or from designated joke characters (Date With Destiny). Teen Titans never had the main characters acting in clearly absurd ways as the butt of a joke unless those characters were brainwashed somehow, because the writers knew that would ruin any of the more grounded moments they wanted to write. The writers of Miraculous missed the memo on that one.

I don't disagree. A perfect example is Derision where the show takes all of the bad jokes about Marinette's crush and decides to take them seriously as if you can possible take them seriously without making Marinette come across as unhinged and dangerous. You can't, which brings us to the topic at hand: how do you even begin to understand these characters when the show is constantly making character-breaking choices?

My approach - and the approach I recommend others take if they're going to keep watching the show - is to focus on the characters' cores and reject anything canon does to violate those cores. I don't argue for this stance because I love the characters so much that I only want the good things to count. I take this stance because, if you don't, then the characters fall apart. There is no way to make them work as fully realized characters while embracing every choice canon has made. Miraculous has massive characterization issues that go well beyond the humor.

For example, Adrien has multiple moments of terrible behavior that are played in a serious manner such as the moment in the episode Frozer where he tries to start a fight with Ladybug in the middle of an akuma attack because she wouldn't accept a rose from him earlier:

Setup

Ladybug: I can't accept this rose from you. I told you already. I'm in love with someone else. Cat Noir: I know, M'lady. But if he weren't here, would things be different between us? Ladybug: Well, you know, I can't even begin to imagine him not being here. I'm sorry, Cat Noir. I really gotta get going, and you better do the same. (Swings her yo-yo to head back home; Cat Noir is sad, looking downwards, with one petal of the rose falling.)

Payoff

Ladyice: Cat Noir. We need to set up a trap for whoever turned the city into a giant ice rink. (throws yo-yo) Icecat: (bitterly) My feline instincts prefer to track and observe before I attack. You go your way, I'll go mine. Ladyice: Please don't tell me you're mad at me about the rose. Icecat: There may be a certain chill now between us. Ladyice: I get it, but we should really focus on saving Paris right now. Icecat: We don't always have to do everything together, after all. It's not like we're a couple. (skates away)

There's no way to argue this off as a bad joke. While Adrien has every right to feel hurt, those feelings don't excuse him acting like a pouting child in the middle of an akuma fight. It doesn't excuse him acting like this at any point! Ladybug is not a villain for telling him no. She wasn't even mean about it!

I clearly fully agree that Adrien looks awful and selfish here, but I'd still argue that it's not something that should be used to define Adrien's character if your goal is to tell the "ideal" version of Miraculous. "Ideal" being the version that canon seems to be going for based on the overall picture we can sort of make out if we back way, way, way up and look at the extremely abstract picture canon is clumsily painting.

Unless canon is going to do something monumentally stupid, Adrien is Marinette's endgame romantic interest. It's also clear that there is no plan to cut him from the team. He's going to be Chat Noir for the rest of his life or at least well into his adulthood. This means that he is supposed to be a good hero who deserves his miraculous just like he's supposed to be a charming and cute romantic lead. These are the two things I keep in mind when trying to shift through canon to figure out what writing choices I should fully embrace and what writing choices I have to either ignore or treat as true flaws that get an actual character arc. In my book, either approach is fine because most of the characters are deeply flawed at this point and you can't give them all arcs without bloating the story to nonsense levels.

My goal with this approach is never to say, "oh, that moment shouldn't count in terms of how people feel about the character." It's more, "that moment goes so hard against who this character is very clearly supposed to be that I can't take it into account if I want to tell the kind of story that Miraculous is trying (and clearly failing) to tell."

As an example, let's list off Adrien's worst behaviors. The things that make him look terrible:

He sucks at communicating his needs and feelings, leading to multiple moments where he gets mad at Ladybug for things she's totally unaware of

He has quit or considered quitting without warning multiple times and only one of those was because of something he did "wrong" (NYC Special)

He puts his feelings before the safety of Paris on multiple occasions, even going so far to purposely miss akuma fights to see what happens

He is incredibly pushy about his crush, often ignoring Ladybug's feelings on the topic by continuing to bring it up even after she asked him to stop

There have been multiple instances where he almost cataclysmed multiple people in a fit of anger

His love for Ladynette isn't strong enough to let him break free of things like akumas and nightmare dust even when he's looking her in the eyes making him a pretty crappy romantic lead

People will argue that some of this behavior makes sense for his character because of the abuse that canon has technically introduced, but that the writers seem blissfully unaware of. I don't disagree with that argument, but that doesn't change the fact that none of this is acceptable behavior for a hero and Adrien is a hero who keeps doing these things. A sad backstory doesn't give you the right to behave poorly without consequences.

At the same time, if I fully embrace these elements of canon, what I get is an Adrien salt fic where he loses his miraculous for good while Marinette finds her real true love or even just a non-salty fic where Adrien leaves for his own meatal health and gets replaced by someone who can handle being a hero right now. Canon's not writing either of those, so the only way to engage with these flaws while enjoying canon or aiming for the same end goals as canon is to say, "I guess this doesn't count" or "I guess I need to tone this way down and work through it via a character arc" or even "I guess that was just a bad joke maybe?"

That is the essence of what I mean when I call myself a writing salt, character sugar blog. It comes from looking at canon and seeing that there's simply no way to embrace the worst moments and the best at the same time. We're not dealing with a coherent plot and/or complex characters. We're dealing with a nonsense plot that will warp the characters to bizarre shapes to make random ideas work even if those idea go wildly against canon's end goals.

As an example, Glaciator and Frozer should not exist in the same universe or, at the very least, something should explain why Chat Noir randomly changed his stance on Ladybug's crush from acceptance to pushiness. As is, the pieces don't fit together. The behavior is too contradictory. Remember, this is how Glaciator ends:

Perhaps Ladybug will love me someday. I mean, like, I love her. I have to believe. In the meantime, her friendship is the best gift of all.

Where did this version of Adrien go? Why did he regress in Frozer? There's no in-universe reason. It happened because the writers weren't ready to let the love square date or grow close, but they also wanted the love square to cause drama, so Adrien ends up looking terrible just like Marinette ends up looking terrible when it's her turn to cause love square drama. Her terribleness takes a different flavor so it can be hard to realize that this is a systemic issue, but that's what it is. It's deeply frustrating, but it also clearly stems from cheap writing and not quality characterization.

This is also why my stance is that canon as a whole only supports my Doyalistic core-character analysis style of approach. The writing is too poor quality to do Watsonian analysis where you embrace the full picture and try to put it all together. The closest I'll get to Watsonian analysis is pointing out how much the writing botches a Watsonian take by showing you all the way the writing contradicts itself, twisting into a nonsense pretzel of frustration where the payoffs never satisfy! (See the season four rant for an example or anything where I talked about Chloe's supposed damnation arc.)

There are even characters where canon is such a total mess that you can Doyalistically argue for two separate takes! Gabriel is a perfect example. He is all over the place and his ending was so poorly handled that you can make strong arguments for writing him as a cold-hearted villain or a sympathetic villain without the end result feeling like it spits in the face of canon because both takes maintain his one core element: villain.

That's the big thing I keep in mind when I look at the characters and the lore and the plots and try to come up with versions that the average fan would like. I don't think that there's one true version of any of these things, but I do feel comfortable saying that there are versions that will very clearly only appeal to people who are salty about a specific thing that canon did poorly. That's not who I want to appeal to in my adaptions, so while I'm not going to argue that those takes have no backing in canon, I will argue that those takes are not supported by canon as a whole. Embracing them requires you to take the worst parts of canon at face value while ignoring what canon is clearly trying to do with the overall story.

I get the appeal of that, but it's not fun for me because that approach feels like rolling around in the mud with the pigs. I don't want to sink to canon's level! I want to have fun! That's why I talk about how to make canon into its best self, not its worst self. If you want its worst self, just go watch the actual show. I will be shocked it if disappoints you.

[stagefoureddiediaz]

Gotta love returning to tumblr to discover that the t’s are still being salty over me being right about bucks oversized clothes and trying to twist things to fit their narrative and claim others and myself were wrong!!! They clearly need to gain some basic reading comprehension!!

Always good to know I’ve managed to have made that much of an impact that people who hate me just keep on mentioning me!!

WWED - he’d find joy in it by dancing around in his tighty whities - I don’t have any of those but I am dancing 😂😂😂

[fyodior]

raw, raw, gentle handshake, raw, CERVIX FUCKING