#she looks super sinister in that fourth shot

[morgana96]

Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015) - Nightra

[emachinescat]

The Casket of the Armadillos (by Edgar Allan Nope)

A Psych Fan-Fiction

by @emachinescat

@febuwhump day 9 - buried alive

Summary:  When Shawn confronts a grad student turned murderer, he learns a very important lesson a very hard way: Don’t piss off English nerds - especially the homicidal ones. 

Characters: Shawn, Gus, Juliet, Lassiter, Henry

Words: 5,924

TW: panic attacks, buried alive, claustrophobia

Note: If you liked this classic lit-inspired Psych fic, you can always check out this one I wrote, inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird: The Finch and the Mockingbird 

Keep reading here, or on AO3!

If you enjoy, please consider liking, commenting, or re-blogging, and you can follow me for more content like this! :)

I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up.  Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones.  For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them.  In pace requiescat!

- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”

Her name was Olivia Hale, she was a twenty-three-year-old grad student at UCSB, and she was working on her doctorate in American lit.  She was attractive in a cute librarian sort of way - short and petite, with long, curly auburn hair she kept in a bun and oversized glasses with thick lenses, and a smattering of freckles across her slightly upturned nose.  She knew a little bit about everything when it came to literature as a whole, a rather impressive amount about American literature, and absolutely everything there was to know about the life and works of one Edgar Allan Poe.

She was also batshit crazy and currently pointing a .22 pistol directly at Shawn’s head.

“Don’t move,” she growled, disengaging the safety.  

Shawn did a cursory glance around the empty classroom, looking for anything at all he could use to his advantage, to distract her or attack her with or - worst case scenario - to use as a shield.  But Olivia had found him snooping around on the tiny fourth floor study room that she’d been given to use by the department chair as her thesis headquarters.  She’d really made herself at home here, piling books and journals and what seemed like hundreds of loose sheets of paper on every available surface.  

But he was stranded in the middle of the room, with nothing close enough to use as a weapon, and so Shawn used the most powerful tool he had, one that had saved his life and many others, wooed women all over the country, and ordered more chili cheese dogs than he could count.  

He started talking.

“Look, Olivia, I get it,” he said soothingly.  Slowly, in the most non-threatening  manner possible, he lowered his hands.  Olivia gripped the pistol tighter but didn’t shoot.  “I know what happened.  You didn’t mean to kill him.”

Her eyes were wide and fierce, her lips pursed into a thin line.  “No,” she admitted.  “It was an accident.  But he was going to--”

“Yeees,” drawled Shawn, slowly raising his left hand and putting it to his temple, very well aware that he was probably pushing the limit with all of this movement after she had expressly ordered, at gunpoint, for him to stay still.  “I see it.  Dr. Graves was feeling guilty, wasn’t he?  A fifty-five-year-old professor with a fancy PhD and tenure, and a devoted wife and three kids and two grandkids, to boot.  The perfect life.  But oooh, it wasn’t enough for him, was it?”  

Shawn immediately answered his own question, something that he had become exceptionally good at over the years since he was usually the only one who could keep up with himself.  “Of course not!  What’s the perfect job and family when you’ve got a smokin’ hot, super smart student in her mid-twenties who thinks you’re the most impressive man on the planet?”

She sneered, and Shawn noticed with some trepidation that the hand holding the gun trembled just the tiniest bit.  When she spoke, her voice warbled with rage.  “My age and appearance had nothing to do with it - and even if it did, there was nothing wrong with our relationship!  We were perfect for each other, intellectual equals.  We were on each other’s levels - he was my soulmate!  So don’t you dare belittle what we had like that!”  

Ah.  So he had hit a nerve.  This could now go either one of two ways, in Shawn’s extensive experience in being held hostage: Either she would get fed up and send a bullet screaming through his body, Garth Longmore style, or she would let her emotions distract her, and cause her to make a stupid mistake.  Obviously, Shawn hoped for the latter.  

Now Shawn had to make a choice, because he could proceed in one of two ways: Either he could back off and try from another angle, or he could further antagonize her into (hopefully) making a mistake.  Naturally, Shawn went with the latter.

“Sure, sure,” he agreed airily.  “Older men and younger women do it all the time.  But to say there was nothing wrong with your relationship?  The man was married, and you were his student.  I’m not the headmaster here -”

“Dean,” she corrected sharply, and this further proved that Shawn had pegged her correctly as a know-it-all literature wunderkind who had to be right one thousand percent of the time.  “This isn’t Hogwarts.”

Shawn gave a tiny shrug.  “To be honest, all big schools look like Hogwarts to me.”

“Because you have the mind of a child.”  The words were accusatory and patronizing, but Shawn flashed a dazzling smile.

“Thank you,” he said.  Before she could respond, he continued his earlier thoughts, “Even though you were the ‘perfect couple,’ you were furious with him for even suggesting that you stop seeing one another.  The affair was too risky, and he missed his wife.  He wanted to tell her the truth, fix things.”

“It would have ruined everything!” Olivia hissed, and the sound of her voice sent shivers down Shawn’s spine.  There was an unhinged quality to it, something raw and dangerous that he hadn’t sensed before.  He fought the sudden urge to backpedal as far away from her as possible.  “We were perfect together!  And if he told his wife and she let it slip, I would be kicked out!  All my research, all my time and work here, everything would be gone!  He had no right to make that decision for me, to take away my future!”

“Maybe,” said Shawn, and it was like he was watching from outside his body, because he knew that what he was about to say was a big mistake, but he was helpless to stop the words from tumbling from his lips, “you should have thought more about your future before you pursued your married Shakespeare teacher.”

Fury etched itself into every feature of her face, turning her from a beautiful librarian to a feral monster, but her voice was slow and measured as if it was taking every ounce of self-control she possessed not to shoot him where he stood.  “He taught Southern. Gothic. Masterpieces.”

Shawn tried to backtrack, to undo whatever damage had been done by his unpredictably big mouth.  “But,” he pressed.  “Killing him was an accident.  You didn’t mean to push him down four flights of stairs.”

She considered this.  “No, I didn’t mean to kill him,” she reaffirmed, and then an odd calm smoothed out the angry crevices between her eyebrows - the peace, perhaps, of having come to an important decision that she knew was absolutely right.  Shawn recognized the look because he’d seen it on others’ faces before (very rarely, if ever, had he seen it upon his own).  “And I don’t think I will kill you, either.”

Whatever Shawn had been expecting, this wasn’t it.  Everything about this woman screamed insane and vengeful.  If Shawn lived, he would turn her into the police, and she would go to jail for a very long time.  She was incredibly intelligent - surely she knew this!

And then she clarified, and the world started to make sense again - though Shawn would have honestly been perfectly content in this alternate reality where the bad guy suddenly has a miraculous change of heart.  “Well,” she amended, “I won’t kill you directly.  I’ve never shot anyone before - I only have this little guy here because I’m a young, pretty girl on a big college campus, and I have two night classes.  Besides, your death shouldn’t be so easy.”

Shawn swallowed.  “Olivia, you don’t have to do this.  You haven’t intentionally killed anyone yet.  If you turn yourself in now and cooperate, your sentence will be a lot shorter than if you kill me - directly or not.  Because make no mistake, even if you kill me, you will still get caught.  The SBPD has some damn good detectives, and they’ll bring you down even if I don’t.”

She didn’t respond to him directly.  Instead, her expression was flat save for the dark gleam in her eyes, and she intoned words that in and of themselves had no meaning to Shawn, but that still managed to strike a chord of fear deep inside of his soul.  “‘The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.’”  Shawn was utterly unnerved by this point; it was like she had been taken over by something both sinister and incredibly well-spoken.

And indeed, in many ways she had, as Shawn soon found out, she was quoting the beginning of a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

Presently, however, Shawn had no context for her strange words or sudden shift of demeanor.  His skin crawled and his heart pumped with more get-up-and-go than he’d ever been able to muster in his whole body before.  “Uh, Olivia…”

“Move,” she ordered.  

This time, though it was contrary to his nature, Shawn did what she said without arguing.  This side of the student, with stolen words sliding evilly from her mouth, was a million times scarier than the enraged Olivia who had very nearly shot him between the eyes.

She marched him out of the room and down the three flights of stairs to the main lobby of the English building.  It was dark outside, nearing midnight, and Shawn kicked himself for thinking he was clever for coming to investigate this late.  He’d thought she’d be at home sleeping.  He should have realized that as a grad student, sleeping was the one thing she wouldn’t have time for!  And now he was in very deep trouble, alone, and no one knew where he was.  He should have waited until morning, until the building wasn’t deserted, should have at least called Gus and told him what he was doing.  But it was a college campus, and she was a tiny little literature nerd - it should have been safe!

As she forced him down one flight of stairs, then two, then three, and finally, into a stairwell off the beaten path that had to be unlocked with a key card - which she had - she continued to encant, her voice slowly losing its flatness and growing into something twisted and sing-songy with every word.

“‘You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a threat.  At length I would be avenged; this was a point, definitely, settled - but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk.’”

“Olivia--”

It was as if she hadn’t heard him as she shoved him into the basement, and now her voice stilled from a chant to a slow, measured whisper..  “‘I must not only punish but punish with impunity.’”   

Shawn wasn’t sure what impunity was, but it sure as hell didn’t sound good.

Their final destination ended up being a small, partially finished storage room near the back of the basement.  Dusty boxes and rusted cabinets and archaic old computer monitors lined the walls and cluttered most of the walking space.  Shawn was reminded grimly of a school supply graveyard.  

Olivia stopped him when they came to a brick wall that had been busted through to fix some issue with the pipes - Shawn saw the water stains on the concrete floor near the break in the wall, and there was a brand new water pipe joined to an old, yellowed one at about eye-level in the small open space between the bricks and the drywall beyond.  Shawn also noticed that the new bricks had been neatly piled up near a sealed bucket that almost certainly contained mortar, right outside of the hole.  Someone was in the process of walling this section back up.

“Nice wall,” Shawn joked, relieved that Olivia had finally stopped her creepy recitation and desperately trying to lighten the mood and bring things back to some sort of normal - honestly, he’d take being threatened with the gun again to the horror movie stuff he’d just witnessed.  “I bet all the other walls are jealous of it.”

It was a lame joke, but her eerie dramatics had him all kinds of messed up.  He expected her to tell him to shut up, or to threaten to shoot him again, or to actually shoot him, but instead she asked him a question in that same cold, calm voice as before.  “Have you ever read ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ Shawn?”

Shawn blinked.  “I make it a point not to read anything that’s not a magazine from the 80s or WikiHow articles on ‘How to Escape from Dangerous Forest Animals.’”

The corner of her lips lifted in a mockery of a satisfied smile.  “Good.  Then you’ll get to experience it for yourself, first hand.  Just wait until you get to the ending!  You’re going to love it.”

Somehow, Shawn doubted that very much.

Still holding the gun on him with one hand, she reached her free hand into the cross-body bag she wore and pulled out a pair of handcuffs.  Shawn groaned.

“Come on!  What college student just carries handcuffs in their school bag?”  Then he remembered that this particular student had until recently been having a passionate affair with her teacher.  “Wait - never mind.  It makes perfect sense.”

She laughed, even though what he said wasn’t even remotely funny.  The sound of it was strange and discordant - light and tinkly with a threatening undertone that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.  Then she gestured at the hole in the wall and ordered, “In.”

Shawn had known it was coming, but had tried to shove that knowledge into the corner of his mind - something that was quite difficult to do for someone with a photographic and eidetic memory - in an effort to convince himself that even she wasn’t that cruel.  He tried to appeal to her one last time: “Olivia, it’s not too late to stop this.  I mean, are you really going to do this to another human being - seriously, look at this place - it’s dusty and moldy and I’m almost certain there’s no room service!  If you’re going to chain me to a pipe, why not do it in a five star hotel?”  When she nudged him with the gun, eyes gleaming with something dark and triumphant, he reluctantly stepped into the small space and implored, “I’ll even settle for a seedy motel off a poorly lit backroad.  I’m not too picky.”

She didn’t answer him as she stood on her tiptoes and handcuffed Shawn’s wrists around the pipe, cinching them so tight that the metal dug into his skin and he doubted that even his dad’s lessons on escaping handcuffs wouldn’t be much help here.  Already he could feel his fingers going numb, and his shoulders and back had started to ache from the hunched position he was forced to take due to the height of the pipe and the awkward angle of his arms.  

Well, Shawn thought glumly as she smiled at her handiwork and carefully backed out of the small space, maybe all wasn’t lost.  Surely someone would come down here and find him. This place was dusty, but it couldn’t be abandoned - work still needed to be done down here, after all.  And he could always yell for help once he was sure Olivia was gone.  She was booksmart, but maybe she wasn’t criminally minded.  He might be in for an uncomfortable night, but in the morning someone would find him and he could have his vision and the cute little psychopath would go to jail for a very long time.

He waited for her to leave, but instead, she used a crowbar to pry the lid off the bucket of mortar, and the pit in Shawn’s stomach became a whole-ass trench.  He should have seen this coming - his heart pounded madly against his rib cage as if trying to free itself, with or without him.  He couldn’t blame it.  “Olivia, please,” he said, and this time, there was no joke, his voice imploring and terrified.  “You don’t have -”

Again, she cut him off.  “How would you like to hear a story before you die, Shawn?” she asked in a tone so casual that she could have been asking him if he wanted to grab a taco.

“How about you tell me a story and then I don’t die?” Shawn bargained weakly.

“Mmmm… If you stay alive, my whole life will be ruined,” Olivia reasoned.  “And I have worked far too hard to allow that to happen.  So.  You just stand there - quietly - and I’ll tell you the story of Poe’s most beloved tale of revenge.  I won’t tell you word for word, of course - we don’t have time for that - but for posterity, I do have it memorized.”  She sounded grotesquely proud of that fact.  “It’s my favorite of his stories, after all.”

And so, as she slowly began to brick up the hole in the wall, with Shawn trapped, helpless and in a dissociative state of panic, she told him the story of two men with really stupid names that Shawn somehow managed, despite his raging fear, to file away for later as possible nicknames for Gus.

“Our story starts in Italy, during the carnival, and our narrator is a man named Montresor, who has a grudge against his once-friend, now-foe, Fortunato…”

The story was an interesting one, even to Shawn, who preferred watching over reading and especially over listening any day.  And as it turned out, Olivia was a really good storyteller.  If he had been in any other position, Shawn might have actually enjoyed the suspenseful tale of revenge.  

But as he stooped there and was forced to listen, all he could think about was about how terrified this Fortunato guy must have been, and then he started wondering how long it had been before the man hadn’t been able to hold his bladder or… other things… anymore, and then about what had happened when he was too tired and dizzy to stand up, if the manacles on his wrists had pulled so hard against his flesh that they cut into him, and if lack of water or oxygen killed him first, all the while he knew that he wasn’t asking these questions for the sake of the fictional character.  He was asking them for himself.  Olivia had made it exceedingly clear - for a literature scholar, she was surprisingly un-subtle about any underlying meanings or motives - that Fortunato’s story was now to be his story.

It wasn’t until she had begun discussing with rapture the brilliance of Poe’s use of the Italian carnival as the setting of a story about murder (because of its abandonment of social order, whatever that meant) and had built up all but the last two bricks, leaving a hole around Shawn’s eye level, that came to the most horrifying realization yet.   He’d been so focused on his own thoughts and fears with Olivia’s words washing over him like an acid bath that he’d barely registered that the dim light in the hole had been darkening incrementally with each new brick placed.  Now he came to the bone-chilling understanding that once she placed those last two bricks, he would be completely in the dark.

He was going to die, alone, terrified, and in utter darkness with fear as his only friend.  He thought in that moment that he might die of a heart attack before he could even think about dehydrating or suffocating.  Honestly, it sounded like an easier way to go.

“Well,” said Olivia finally.  “I can’t say that it’s been a pleasure to meet you in any way, Shawn, but I suppose I should thank you.  Ever since I found out about this unfinished wall down here, I’ve had this unscratchable itch to recreate the titular scene from my favorite Poe story.  You gave me the means and justification to do it!”

Shawn was so overcome by the surging sea of fear and early-onset claustrophobia that he couldn’t even muster up the gumption to make a joke about the word titular.  Instead, as Olivia knelt down next to her bag, rooting around for something, he jerked madly against the handcuffs, desperately searching for any give in the metal or the pipe he was handcuffed to (or even his wrists, at this point he wasn’t picky).  But the pipe was new, and it was sturdy, and so was the fitting that connected it to the old one, which itself didn’t seem too keen on budging, either.

A sick grin teased at Olivia’s parted lips.  “Oh, Fortunato tried that too.  But then he stopped crying and struggling and chose to die with a shred of dignity.  But I highly doubt dignity is something you’re capable of.”  

And then, with the finality of fitting a lid to a coffin, she slapped a piece of fluorescent pink duct tape over his mouth and a fresh wave of panic ravaged Shawn’s everything.  He didn’t remember this happening in her retelling of the story!  Then again, the Fortunato guy had been sealed into catacombs deep underground.  Shawn was in the basement of a heavily trafficked university building.  Someone would actually hear him if he called for help, so she took his voice away from him too.  He couldn’t even sing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” to pass his time or distract him from the inevitable.  As if it wasn’t bad enough that he would die in the dark, he would die in the quiet too - and silence was, as his incessant need for chatter plainly proved, Shawn’s worst enemy.

“Goodbye, Shawn,” Olivia said, and she added one brick, layered on the mortar, and then gave her captive one last satisfied glance before adding the last brick and leaving Shawn in total, impenetrable darkness.  He would never forget that last, terrible look in her eyes before his world went black - she was no longer human; she had elevated herself to the level of the storytelling gods and she relished in the twisted power she held over the life of another human.

As her footsteps clipped away, her voice, obscenely gleeful, called out, “In pace requiescat!”

***

The next ten hours were the worst of Shawn’s life, and they consisted of five main elements all bundled together into a nightmare that would stalk him for the rest of his life.

Cold.  It was the middle of January, and though it couldn’t have been less than forty-five degrees outside, the basement - especially behind the walls - was chilly, and with the musty smell and the dust and the pitch black, Shawn was reminded far too much of a grave and knew that he might as well be in one, because this was going to be his.  It was the kind of cold that bit deeper than the skin and wormed its way into the very core and dug its icy fangs in and refused to let go - the chill of death, an open invitation from the dead to join them in their home beneath the ground.  He shivered a lot, but he couldn’t be sure if it was the cold, or the panic.  It was probably a little of both.

Dark.  The darkness that surrounded him had an unreal nature that could easily trick the eyes into thinking that they were already closed.  It was oppressive and thick, pressing in from all sides, inky black water dredged from the depths of the sea.

Shawn had never been a fan of the dark, but neither did he exactly fear it.  That changed the second that the last brick was put into place and he found himself in a darkness so severe that were in not for the feeling of floor beneath his feet he could have been suspended in the depths of space so remote that not even stars could reach.  The darkness swarmed his senses - it had a physical presence, and it didn’t lessen, never permitted Shawn’s eyes to adjust to it in the slightest.  It just hung there, surrounded him, assaulted his mind with its infinite arsenal of nightmares.

After experiencing true darkness, Shawn would never sleep without a nightlight again (which unfortunately meant he couldn’t judge Gus anymore for using one, either).

Pain.  At first it was just the pull of his shoulders, the ache in his back.  Then, about five minutes after he’d been sealed up, he realized his wrists were screaming with agony - he must have torn them badly when he fought to get away, but the adrenaline staved off the pain until now.  He vaguely wondered how deeply the cuffs had cut - it felt like the skin on his wrists had been flayed - but quickly remembered that it didn’t matter where he was going.  

Then there were the hunger pangs, and they mingled with the cramps from holding his bladder longer than he ever had before, and at some point muscle spasms in his arms and chest and legs joined the choir of suffering.  At one point, he shed a few tears, but they could have just as easily been from anxiety or exhaustion, which itself produced its own kind of pain - he longed to sleep, but his body refused to allow him even that comfort until the very end, right before he was rescued, as if he were being forced on pain of death to endure the pain of death right up until the very moment of his painful death.

At least he didn’t have too much trouble breathing.  There must have been a crack somewhere in the wall in front of or behind him, because fresh air was entering somehow.  He did, several hours into his imprisonment, begin finding it difficult to pull in a full breath, and by the time he was rescued he was giddy with light-headedness, but he didn’t know if it was from the air quality or exhaustion or panic or from being forced to breathe only through his nose for hours, but he really didn’t care.

Quiet.  Even worse than the cold and the dark and the pain was the quiet.  The tape over his mouth prevented him from doing the one thing that could bring him comfort in even the most difficult of situations.  Talking was what Shawn did - he utilized mindless prattle to distract bad guys, to make people underestimate him, to quell fear and panic in himself and those around him, to annoy and wheedle those whose opinions meant the most to him (and who he was most afraid to be real with), and most importantly, to distract himself from all the pain and baggage that his exceptional memory had filed away for him throughout the years.  Talking nonsense meant that he wasn’t thinking about or acknowledging the parts of himself that arguably needed the most attention, those bits that were scared and unsure and hurt and vulnerable.

Shawn had always detested silence, and now it had invaded so intimately that even he could not drive it out.

And all of these culminated in a constant, agonizing state of absolute, unrelenting fear.  

Panic attacks are horrific things that take your natural instincts in potentially dangerous situations and turn them against you in the cruelest of ways.  They suck the air out of your lungs and make your heart pound so fast and so hard that you are convinced it’s going to give out in pure fatigue and never make it to that next beat.  It makes your skin crawl like there are thousands of spiders nesting there, and your chest hurts and your breath is short and stunted and you know you are dying, that the next breath will be your last, but it isn’t, and the fear just continues and sometimes you curl into a ball or rock back and forth or scratch at your skin.

Panic attacks generally last anywhere from five to twenty minutes.  Shawn was stuck in a state of raw, unfiltered panic for ten hours.  When the EMTs at the scene took his heart rate, it was 160, had been the entire time he’d been buried in a collegiate tomb, knowing that he was going to die.

Put simply, Shawn Spencer spent ten hours in his own personal hell.

***

It was nearly three in the afternoon when Detectives Juliet O’Hara and Carlton Lassiter, with the help of a frantic Gus and a worried Henry that tried his damndest not to show how worried he was, made the final connections in the case and tracked down the woman who had slept with and then killed her lover like a hyper-intelligent, book-loving black widow.  Juliet and Gus remained on the college campus to continue investigating while Lassiter and Henry went on to the station to question Olivia.  She had refused to say where the missing psychic detective was, however, and only offered one bitter phrase, spoken in another language that sounded to the questioning party like a curse being placed on their heads: 

“Nemo me impune lacessit.”

It was Gus who figured it out after Lassiter related the cryptic saying over the phone.

“I know that phrase!” he exclaimed to a swell of raised eyebrows.  “It’s Latin! It means no one wounds me with impunity!”

“You speak Latin?”  Juliet seemed impressed.

“Not much.  But I recognize that particular saying, because it’s from a story that gave me nightmares my entire sophomore year of college.”  He shuddered.  “It’s from the second-most terrifying Poe story.”  He didn’t elaborate on what the first-most terrifying one was, largely because he didn’t want to give the others fodder to use “The Tell-Tale Heart” against him like Shawn already did.  Then the full implications of the words sunk in and he gasped, “We have to find Shawn, now.”  The horror in his expression sent a chill down Juliet’s spine. 

“Gus - what the hell are you talking about?”  Henry was no longer trying to hide the panic in his voice.

“It’s from ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ Gus clarified, his own panic making it difficult to express himself clearly.

“Guster, this is hardly the time for you to have a glass of wine,” Lassiter barked.  “Now stop talking in riddles and just spit it out!”

But Juliet had now made the connection as well and answered for Gus.  “Oh my gosh - isn’t that the one where the guy is sealed into a wall and left to die?”

The dread in Gus’s eyes said it all.

“He’s got to be somewhere on campus,” Henry reasoned, and his voice shook the tiniest bit.  “Lassiter and I are on our way back to you now.  In the meantime, check with the school and see if there are any places that are easily accessed and under construction.”

No one said it aloud, but the possibility that her words hadn’t been a hint at all and that Shawn was somewhere else entirely hung in the air amongst them.  It was funny, Juliet thought - though it wasn’t funny at all - she urgently needed Gus’s theory to be right, because otherwise they would have no leads, but at the same time, she was terrified of the implications if it were true.  

Her heart felt as sick as Montresor’s when he placed the last brick as she and Gus raced to the administration building and prayed they weren’t too late.

***

When they broke through the wall, the sight that greeted them was one that would never leave them - any of them.  Even Lassiter, who made it his sacred duty to remain unfazed by anything his job threw at him was visibly disturbed.

A moment of silence, a beat where time stood still and everyone was afraid to move, and then - 

“Shawn!”  The four rescuers surged forward as one, but Henry got there first, his trembling fingers groping for a pulse - thank God, but it was racing, dangerously fast, and in the background he heard Lassiter radioing for an ambulance.

Shawn woke up as Henry gently peeled the hideous pink duct tape (an affront to all duct tape everywhere) off of his mouth.  It wasn’t a gentle waking, a flutter of eyelashes or the murmuring of a name - it was violent and erratic, fueled by terror.  

Henry had had to deal with panic attacks before - mostly Gus’s when he took the boys camping together, but once or twice when Shawn was really young and he’d had a bad dream.  This one was the worst that he’d ever seen - Shawn woke with a muffled yell, panting through his nose, writhing, tears streaming down his face, eyes squeezed shut against the trauma he’d been subjected to, and he threw himself against the handcuffs so fiercely that Henry feared he’d break his wrists.  

Soon his wrists were freed, though, and Henry, with the help of Lassiter, helped a weakened Shawn out of the wall and into the basement and lowered him to the floor.  Henry sat with him and rubbed his back and spoke quietly to him, Juliet took his hand, and Gus reassured him while Lassiter ran up the stairs to check on the ETA of the ambulance.  

Twenty minutes later, Shawn had been placed onto a stretcher and carried up the stairs and out into the sunlight - sensing the warm rays, he opened his eyes only to pinch them shut again as the brightness after so many hours in the dark nearly blinded him.  He had been given something to calm him down, and he would be going to the hospital to be checked over and observed overnight, and a psychiatrist would be sent in to evaluate him in the morning, and everything was moving so fast that Shawn leaned over the side of the stretcher and deposited the remnants of the last thing he’d eaten, nearly twelve hours before.

“There’s one thing I still don’t get,” he gasped as he was eased back onto the stretcher.  “Where do the armadillos come into her plan?”

The EMTs exchanged a concerned look at the stretcher, probably wondering if there had been some carbon monoxide poisoning after all.  Gus, however, just rolled his eyes.

“Amontillado, Shawn.  It’s a kind of wine.”

“The story is called ‘The Casket of the Armadillos,’” Shawn argued stubbornly, going so far as to cross his arms over his chest, pulling at the IV in his right hand.  

Gus was going to argue, to insist that he’d actually read the story (and why the heck would someone fill a casket with armadillos?), but then Gus saw the plea in Shawn’s hazel eyes, that need for jokes and silliness, and understood that his best friend was clinging onto his last shreds of control.  

“You know what - I forgot,” Gus corrected, shaking his head and giving himself a light smack on the forehead for good measure.  “It is ‘The Casket of Armadillos.’”  He glared out at Henry, at Lassiter and Juliet and the EMTs, defying them to challenge his claim.  No one did, but they all shared a similar baffled expression.

Well, they could deal with their confusion, Gus thought protectively as he watched Shawn and Henry disappear into the ambulance.  Shawn had been through a night of unspeakable horror, so if it was armadillos he wanted, then it was armadillos he was going to get.

[ducktracy]

126. the blow out (1936)

release date: april 4th, 1936

series: looney tunes

director: tex avery

starring: joe dougherty (porky), lucille laverne (bomber)

this is a cartoon i’ve been looking forward to reviewing for quite awhile—it’s certainly one of my favorite dougherty-era porkys. well, to begin, this is porky’s first solo cartoon! not a beans in sight (sorry, beans!). tex’s first interpretation of porky was a bloated, ravenous father who screams “WHOOPEE” a lot. now, he’s characterized as a cute, naïve kid, a role he’d make up in the large majority of tex’s porky cartoons. even as far as 1941, porky’s age is mentioned to be 7 years old in tex’s porky’s preview. also worth noting that the bomber is voiced by lucille laverne, who you may recognize as the evil queen from snow white just a year later. in terms of sunopsis: a hungry porky longs for an ice cream soda, yet he’s short on money. however, his prayers may be answered as he finds out doing favors for people earns him a quick buck. his biggest favor of all—returning a bomb to a mad bomber.

menacing music underscores an overhead shot of a local building. a sinister laugh offscreen is brought on by a mysteriously cloaked figure, who placed an alarm clock in front of the building. the figure darts away, the clock ticking forebodingly as a trail of smoke pours out of it. and, of course, BOOM. newspaper headlines pour in (with a keen eye, you’ll spot that they’re addressed to podunk journal, podunk express, etc etc) detailing the bomber’s acts, one newspaper gloating a $2,000 reward if captured. all the cop cars are called, phone lines and telegram wires burning up as the search for the bomber ravages on.

police sirens wail in the distance as a shot of a dingy old alley pans to an exposed basement window. zoom into the pitch black darkness, the same sinister laugh from before piercing our ears as a bat flies into view. the pans are very well thought out and well structured as we pan through the basement, finally getting a good glimpse of the bomber, hard at work.

if i had to make a guess, i’d estimate chuck jones does the closeup of the bomber making his time bombs (chuck liked to play around with shadows, and there’s a sinister shadow behind the bomber at work—it also aligns with his style, and he even gets an animation credit. i can identify the bob clampett scenes with certainty, his style really sticks out to me). lucille laverne provides a great, obnoxious, sinister voice... as she should, since she was probably recording for snow white around the same time. “a clock, a little dynamite, a black bomb, a few firecrackers, some lovely skyrockets, and ya have a little time bomb that will blow up a CITY!”

the bomber masks himself, draping himself in his black cloak and donning his hat. he does your stereotypical villain walk, covering his face—i love me a tex avery villain. almost always a very obvious parody. everything with tex is to be laughed at, to be funny, to be made fun of. the bomber ponders where he’ll strike next, scanning a city map. he circles off a random area, crossing over it for good measure, and he furtively creeps out into the street, ready to strike.

elsewhere, porky is deeply invested in an ice cream parlor, his face pressed against the window. a sign advertises an ice cream soda for 10 cents. inside, we get a good look at the frothy goodness as an offscreen waiter places a straw inside. another offscreen hand grabs the drink, and we’re met with porky’s smiling, hungry face, eagerly observing as the offscreen customer slurps away. porky’s face quickly turns crestfallen, and soon he’s frowning at an empty glass.

however, he’s undeterred. porky reaches into his pocket (literally just his own flesh, a reoccurring detail that i just adore) and pulls out five pennies, narrating “five pennies! just enough for an ice cream soda!” he struts confidently into the parlor with his outstretched hand, a lovely score of “fella with the fiddle” (his theme for this cartoon, also the name of a merrie melody and also whistled by porky as he gives a camel a bath in little beau porky) backing him up. he marches to the counter and asks “one ice cream soda, please!” unfortunately, the offscreen waiter has to break the news—“too bad, sonny. you only have half enough pennies for a soda.”

porky’s grin melts immediately as he dejectedly trudges away, hands in his “pockets”. suddenly, inspiration strikes, and our little haggler zips back to the counter, bargaining “well, how about a half of one, then?” still a no. having exhausted every option, porky mopes on the sidewalk. a passerby drops his cane, and porky halfheartedly returns it to him, not even realizing he’s done anything. the man offscreen expresses his gratitude by offering a penny to porky.

suddenly, porky snaps his head to the sweet copper that lies before him in an outstretched hand. he eagerly accepts the penny (“oh boy! a penny!”). bob clampett animates his little jig as he does a dance, throwing the coin up in the air, whirling around just in time to catch it in his back “pocket”. a reoccurring gag that’s funny every time, perfectly and sardonically capturing his glee. he rubs his hands together, scheming, almost making a “grinch face” (chuck jones will provide many a grinch face in his cartoons, as he should) as the gears turn. doing favors = money = ice cream.

thus launches a favor spree. tex’s strong sense of timing furthers the potential of porky’s motives and transforms a mundane idea into something hilarious and likable. who doesn’t want to see him get his soda? porky rushes in just in time to hand a woman her fallen glove, and sure enough she repays him. another penny earned, another jig performed. any subtlety at porky’s desire to earn cash is quickly dropped as he puts on his best “cute” pose, pulling in his body and closing his eyes like the dickens he is, putting out his hand. more subtlety lost, more eagerness gained as porky literally rockets forward at super speed to reunite a woman and her wallet. another victory jig. just as things couldn’t be any brighter, porky finds a nickel on the ground. a whole five cents, just what he needed! as he’s about to bend over, a scottie dog zooms forward and snags the coin, flashing porky a toothy grin and tipping his hat before walking away. porky simply stares back in bewilderment and grief.

now, we pan back to the dingy, dark alleys as a familiar snicker rings out once more. the bomber creeps around the sidewalk, hiding behind the “blotz building”. the coast clear, he sneers “here it goes!” as he turns the clock on, and foreboding ticking begins. he creeps forward, warily placing the bomb down at the front of the building. the bomber knows that his work is done as he hurries away.

what he DOESN’T know, however, is that he was a witness: a stuttering, chubby, porcine witness. porky is just tickled to see the bomber turn the corner. he scoops up the bomb, mistaking it for a regular clock, and approaches the bomber, who’s crouching behind the corner, eyes squeezed shut and ears plugged as he braces for impact. timing sharp as always as he slowly opens his eyes and spots porky holding the clock in front of him... and wastes no time screaming as he does a take. what a great juxtaposition—porky’s naïve oblivion, arms outstretched to return the clock like the good little civilian he is, and the harsh screech of the bomber as he recoils immediately, sinister and ugly and (relatively) smart.

a perfectly hilarious distance shot of the bomber making a break for it, zigzagging through the streets as poor little porky hobbles behind with such good intentions. i love that this is a precursor to tex’s droopy cartoons—largely relying on a little pest that follows you EVERYWHERE and is at every turn, no matter where you go (tex’s first droopy cartoon, dumb-hounded—which i highly recommend—is a glorified take on this cartoon). the bomber seeks refuge in a garage, sliding a door shut in front of porky. of course, porky pops in from the other end, proudly handing out the clock to the bomber who recoils once more and darts away.

the bomber scales a tedious amount of fire escapes, climbing to the top of a building, where he’s greeted by a familiar pig. back down the flights of stairs the bomber goes. laverne’s vocal characterization is side splittingly hilarious and obnoxious, and tex’s knack for humor and speed totally make this cartoon something great. it’s a basic plot, really, and could have been handled disastrously in the wrong hands (no offense to jack king, but i’m sure this cartoon wouldn’t have been half as funny or endearing if it were in his hands). porky greets him at the bottom, just completely clueless as to why this mysterious man keeps screaming “NO!!!!” at him. desperate, the bomber dives into a manhole.

you just can’t go wrong with this. the bomber creeps around in the dark, surely alone now. that little idiot couldn’t have possibly have crawled down in here. yet, a lit up sclera and the visible face of a clock (a clever creative decision that totally just sells the joke) prove him wrong once more. the bomber runs the opposite way in the darkness, and yet again he’s met with that stubbornly optimistic pig.

frantically, the bomber dives out of the manhole, diving into another, followed by porky. out once more, pinning the next manhole cover down so porky surely can’t escape. what he fails to notice is porky crawling out of another manhole in the foreground. instead, the bomber barricades the manhole cover with a traffic sign, snarling “now i’ll fix the little pest, so he’ll be blown to pieces!” porky is right next to him, both of them utterly clueless for different reasons. now, the villain whips towards the audience and sneers “WHETHER YOU PEOPLE LIKE IT OR NOT!” tex was famous for breaking the fourth wall for a reason. it works. similarly, a fourth wall breaking villain would be pivotal to the plot of tashlin’s the case of the stuttering pig.

porky latches onto the villain’s cloak, blankly staring at him wordlessly. he’s literally like a baby that will NOT stop looking at you, to the point of borderline uneasiness. it’s literally that, but amplified. and it just works out fantastically. the bomber is absolutely clueless to two things—his little parasite, and to the two police officers who recognize the bomber. police sirens scream, as does the villain. he runs as fast as he can, and porky holds on with an iron grip, just flailing along for the ride. a hilarious distance shot of porky flopping around behind the villain, the cops commenting “look, the kid’s got hold of him!” “yeah! the little fella’s got plenty a nerve to tackle a mug like that!”

thankfully for the bomber, the chase leads right into his hidey hole. he spends a great deal of time tediously locking a stack of doors, celebrating his victory. the coppers bang on the door as the villain barricades himself in, sneering at their futile efforts to get him out. great setup as his smile is quickly paralyzed, offscreen ticking growing louder. of course, pan over to reveal the unflappably optimistic porky beaming as he holds out the time bomb. the bomber throws aside his barricade and bursts out the door, diving straight into the police van.

porky rushes outside and drops the smoking clock inside the van where the bomber is locked up in. the cherry on top as porky facetiously poses, making a spectacle of himself as he coyly sticks out his hand and puts on his best innocent act. the car drives away... a bumpy ride ensues as fireworks explode one after the other, the car jumping and rocketing around.

back to porky, who’s still posing coyly for his earnings (now animated once more by clampett). a man says “here’s your reward!” as he drops a hefty sack of dough in porky’s palm. he buckled beneath the weight as he possesses $2,000 worth of coins in his grubby little hands. absolutely ecstatic as he tosses the bag into the air, doing his jig. the bag explodes on top of him and he’s covered in coins. a man walks up to him, paper and pencil in hand as he asks “what’re you gonna do with your reward, sonny?” porky inhales before launching into a quick, breathlessly excited “i’m gonna buy me—i’m gonna buy me—i’m gonna buy me—“

what else? he’s gonna buy him $2,000 worth of ice cream sodas, that’s what. porky slurps down soda after soda, a victorious “fella with the fiddle” blaring as an underscore. he pauses his feast to smile and wave at the audience—iris out as he sucks down more dairy goodness.

i love this cartoon, and this is my favorite cartoon we’ve seen so far. it’s such a feel good watch. is it stupid? absolutely. break it down and you’ve got porky running around for 4 minutes while a guy screams one word replies. yet it’s SO much more than that. porky’s personality in this short is more than all of the personality we’ve seen in the past 125 cartoons combined. he’s phenomenal (i may be biased since he’s tied for favorite with daffy, but...). tex perfectly captures his childish spirit. innocent, naïve, oblivious and bumbling, yet smart enough to know that if he can put on an act he can earn a quick buck or 2,000. timing is everything in this cartoon, and it works out just fine. the scenes never feel TOO tedious, though there are some that definitely lose just a little bit of their punch. not much, though. laverne’s deliveries are fantastically obnoxious. she definitely cheeses it up, and it certainly works in her favor. the villain is an obvious parody, and works exquisitely well as a foil against the brutally honest demeanor of porky’s. is this tex’s best? no, not at all. but it’s a memorable short that i always find myself coming back to, and it always puts a smile on my face. you DEFINITELY need to check this one out. it’s just too good!

link!

[aandreajasmine]

Wednesday 4th December 2019 - Guy McKinley: Artist Study

Today we were asked to look at the artworks of Guy McKinley, but before doing that I decided look into his background and life as an artist but also a person swell. He was born in Liverpool, UK in the year of , but moved to Manchester, UK to pursue to his freelance art career. Since 2003 McKinley has been creating artworks heavy with colour, shape and also have influences from Japanese culture and native/ historical artworks as well as his childhood having a great influence on his artworks of today.

Today we were asked to look at the artworks of Guy McKinley, specifically his ‘PUCA Festival’ collection and compare and contrast them to each other as well as to our new and current brief: ‘Seekers.’ Upon searching his name I could see that he was well known around the art community as well as to the public making his art decently mainstream but also standoffish due to his use of colour, line, shape and texture. By using different techniques and styles in these fields of art, it creates an immediate narrative in the audience’s mind, whether they intend or not, thus making the artwork itself more involved with the audience and the artist (Guy Mckinley). 

This is his first piece in his ‘PUCA Festival’ collection. It has been named ‘Morrigan’. Before doing any research on the name or the character shown, what I understand and collect from this piece is a creepy and sinister looking female hag crow/ raven looking character with long hair suggesting mystery and  the unknown. Caressing skulls that seem to look like they’ve been painted with gold to make them extremely valuable and limited. One of which has arrows sicking out of the eye sockets implying that that person who owned the skull had died by an arrow to the eye this linking to out brief since we’re being tasked to look at fantasy and use historical facts to establish their presence more, this works as Harold Godwinson was killed by a shot to the eye thus linking it back to this original artwork and our brief connected to it. 

After doing some research on the word ‘morrigan’ I now understand that it come from celtic mythology meaning ‘phantom/ great queen’ that is deep related and associated with heavy themes such as: war, death, destiny and fate. Now with this understanding I can now look at this artwork in a different light and take from this that this character that she is meant to be a majestic but corrupt queen due to the great juxtaposition of the themes need to the title. It also implies that the themes of ‘everything is not as it seems’ since the themes linked to the title again, putting topics like destiny and fate on their heads since they normally have connotations of positivity and joy, but played in this context they go again the norm and imply negativities. It could also imply that she is here to help and safely bring the dead and destined to the other side, this could be the netherworld or hell, while keeping their statuses of royalty and superiority amongst the dead. 

This is the second piece of the ‘PUCA Festival’ collection, called ‘Fionn.’ Again, before doing any deep research into this piece, what I could understand from this artwrok is the charater being depicted in this is meant is meant to be a soft warrior type of character that is meant to be outward fierce apperance mean to scare away possible threats, this is shown with heavy detail in armour implying that their armour has been tampered with and possibly enchated wiht a sort of spell of intricute healing and restoration. I immediately got a vibe of this character being the protagonist of a show or at least a good charater and I got this from how McKinley has subtly and creativly used shape in this to create a charcter that is strong, devoted and deadly aswell as being/ looking soft, kind and trustworthy. By using shapes mainly consisting of circles and rounded shapes, even in places that normally have sharper and pointed edges - the ram horns, it has given this warrior character a soft and calming and reliable edge to it and I honestly thing that is amazing and super creative being able to add it into their work like this. 

After doing some reseach on the title of this piece, I have learnt that this ‘Fionn’ artwork could be linked to the ‘Fionn MacCumhail’ of irish mythology who was known to be a mythical hunter/ warrior character that is fair haired. By linking this to our current brief you could say that they link since it could have inspired the main character/ protagonist of cartoon network and Pendleton Ward’s ‘Adventure Time’ where the main charcter shares the same name - Finn and the same warrior personality as well as having an extremely comforting and completly approchable exterior/ outward appearence. When looking at my initial thoughts on the piece and the research on it itself, I have come to see that what I initially had thoughts on were baisically correct / accurate thus coming to the concluion of McKinley’s work and the narritives linked to them are extremely clear to the audience helping them and the average viewer to undertsand their work with only a glance at the work itself. 

This is the third piece featured in the PUCA Festival collection and it was called: ‘Puca.’ Once again, before looking into this piece and doing instense/ deep research into this I took it to myself to analyse it and give my interpretaion of that narrativee I could see in this piece. To start this, I just want to say that this is my favourite piece in this collection, I find it extremely enticing as the animals look like they are fixed into the main enchantress/ witch looking character’s long and lively hair while still keeping the animals looking like they were still on their own individuals and rabid animals of their own. This keeps it intresting as they all seem to be giving off vibes of their own while still not taking away the from the main attraction - the enchatress in the center. I also like the how use of colour was applied to this piece as the yellow is used all throughout each character but mainly focused on the lady in the middle, since all eyes would be on her at a first glance. She could also be seen to be as a shapeshifter or type of morphing charctarer that could morph into animals and other beings to change her apperance and lure potential prey into their doom or death in the end. The yellow tribal marks that seem to be littered all over her body seem to make her look possessed and dissorientated wihle still composed and in control of the situation itself. The animals themselves, the cat, rabbit, goat and ram, could be used in this piece to create false senses of security since both a cat and rabbit are seen as ‘cute’ house pets that are innocent, kind and carefree in many/ most environments.

After doing reserch on this piece, I come to understand that ‘Puca’ is commonly known in irish folklore as a very neutral that, if wanted, could hinder or help and could even alter communities this including spiritual and marine like communities. Once researched it was well understood that this ‘Puca’ creature is most commonly interpretted in as monkey- hare hybrid like charcaters. This is intresting as this piece by McKinley was intrepretted as a female figure with many creature- like appearences

This is the fourth piece in the PUCA Festival collection and it has been dubbed ‘Red Men’, once again I decided to decipher this by my self and try to guess the narrative. What I could understand from this picture is a character who is guarding a safe area or a tunnel to more dangerous space. The charcater shown, resembles an antagonist or a minion of the antagonist, I think this because of the lack of being able to see his face and only being only to see their eyes coloured only with bright colours like white and yellow making them pop out more. Also, being accompanied with a larger flame placed infront of the face and the heavy use of line width and texture that runs throughout, making it seem alot darker, deeper and spookier. Even though the yellow used is still very present, adding a sort of light souce from the large flame, but due to the majoity use of the black, the yellow seems to be muddied out and dulled out making the overall artwork darker and mysterious.

Once researched, it was originally hard to find any thinformationn on it snce the term ‘red men’ is so vauge, but after some precise searching, it came up as ‘far darrig’/ ‘fear dearg’ - translating to ‘red man’, apparently they are known to be classified as soliditary fairies of the same type like leprechauns. This doesn’t link to any of my own narrative since it’s seeming possitive but my narrative isn’t and instead is more negative implying that he is a guard of death/ death related character.

This is the final piece in the PUCA Festival collection, it has been named ‘Boann’ once again, for the last time, I decided to create my own narrative before doing the research. The character displayed looks to be like a mother nature like character, showing love and a caring compassionate character aswell as an all seeing persona. This is hevaily implied with the bright yellow flowers that are littered at the forgroud of the artwork accompanied with the fish heads that she is holding and the rams head and horns that are placed on her head. By having the rams head’s horns being curved and non angular, it makes the the charcater seem more softer and kinder to the viewer. The halo like background behind the character’s head makes them seem holy, beloved and omnipotnent beyond compare thus attracting the viewers eyes towwards the head of the charcater, bring the viewer to the eyes of a bright yellow eyed character primarily in a monochramatic colour scheme making the artwokr more appealing for the eyes and kinder in comparison with the other pieces featured in this collection. The scales on this goddess like persona put her on a more celestial plane since she can no longer be connected to huaman culture due to her dractic appearance, background and now skin in general. 

Once researched, I came to understand that ‘Boann’ was known to be a celtic goddess mythology, she is known to be a goddess of inspiration, poetry, fertility, knowledge and creativity. This is portrayed in this artwork with how the colours are used how she is placed in the artwork as a whole and the use of negative space to make look clean and pure.

In the end I came to reaslise that this whole collection was a commissioned piece by Guy McKinley for an Irish festival that slightly relates to the halloween period, relating to the spooks and scares that come with it.

[aion-rsa]

Marvel’s WandaVision Episode 6: MCU Easter Eggs and Reference Guide

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This article contains WANDAVISION spoilers through episode 6, possibly beyond, and for the wider MCU.

It’s Halloween in Westview, and WandaVision is going all out. From the most comics-accurate looks for Scarlet Witch, Vision, Quicksilver, and even Wiccan to an eerie “Wicked Witch of the West” getup for Agnes, this episode isn’t messing around with its pop culture references. Oh yeah, and the whole thing feels faintly like an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, too!

Let’s get to work, because there’s a lot to unpack on WandaVision episode 6…

Halloween in Westview

The episode’s title is “All-New Halloween Spooktacular!” which on its own already sounds like the kind of cover blurb you’d see on an issue of Marvel Comics. Marvel in particular is known for using the “All-New!” designation, sometimes in titles for the books themselves.

The first issue of the second The Vision and the Scarlet Witch series from Marvel Comics took place on Halloween night, so the pair have a history of canonical adventures around the holiday. That story had absolutely nothing to do with the events of this episode, though.

Sitcom Influences

The format and intro are definitely supposed to resemble Malcolm in the Middle, which began in January 2000. Tommy and Billy both break the fourth wall to talk to the viewer just like Malcolm (Frankie Muniz). The theme song practically tells you to stop questioning the reality of Westview and just enjoy what’s going on. How very Mystery Science Theater 3000 of them.

We wrote more about the sitcom influences of episode 6 here.

Pietro, Peter, and Quicksilver

Nope, nothing complicated about the whole Peter/Pietro/Quicksilver thing at all. Nothing we had to write an entire article about to try and make sense of, nossir.

The recap makes sure to show Avengers: Age of Ultron footage just to drive home that we have two different versions of Quicksilver here.

Interestingly, Peter’s speed effect is very much how his power was represented in Age of Ultron, not how it was in the X-Men films. He seems to have at least SOME of the memories of MCU Pietro…assuming that’s who he is in the first place.

Tommy says Billy is afraid that Uncle Pietro is a vampire. Well, we do see him in an undead form later on, so close enough! Plus there’s a strong chance that he represents an entity that’s trying to siphon energy/magic from Wanda.

Pietro is quick to point out that he has the “XY chromosome.” Any excuse for him to announce the letter X, considering which version of Pietro we’re talking about.

He mentions “‘Uncle Peter’ to the rescue.” The Evan Peters version of Quicksilver was referred to as Peter Maximoff.

Pietro dresses as the comic version of Quicksilver, as does Tommy, who has the same powers (while claiming to be dressing as the cooler twin, a slam on both Billy and his mother).

At one point, right before Pietro and the kids run off, Tommy describes something as “kick-ass” and Wanda repeats, “Kick-Ass?” out loud. The movie Kick-Ass starred Aaron Taylor-Johnson (the MCU Quicksilver) as the titular character while Evan Peters (the other Quicksilver) played his best friend.

Pietro and Tommy say, “I feel the need for speed!” The quote is from 1986’s Top Gun. Also, Tommy’s superhero name in the comics is Speed, so there’s that. If we stretch realllllly (unnecessarily!) far, we can connect the upcoming Top Gun sequel to Marvel, as it stars Miles Teller who played Reed Richards in Josh Trank’s woeful Fantastic Four reboot.

Wanda lashes out at Hex Pietro when he is cavalier about Vision’s fate – “It’s not like your dead husband can die twice.” The taunt is super cruel and doesn’t feel like something either version of her twin would say. Wanda’s violent reaction certainly speaks volumes about just how attached to this manifestation of Mr. Maximoff she is – not very.

Wanda doesn’t seem to fully trust this version of Pietro, who knows a suspicious amount about what’s really going on here. He’s asking a lot of painful, pointed questions she’s not ready to address.

Peter’s tattoo says “MoM” – Multiverse of Madness, Mother of Mutants, Magneto’s Own Mutants, or a red herring? We’re sure the internet will have fun theorizing regardless.

That You, Mephisto?

Some of Uncle Pete’s exclamations have strong Mephisto energy “Unleash hell, demon spawn!” “The kids need a father figure” “Damnit, if Westview, New Jersey isn’t charming as Hell…” Has the rumored Marvel Comics villain behind all this integrated himself in the The Hex passing as Pietro? We shall have to see.

The town’s theatre is called the Coronet. Classic poem ‘The Coronet’ is written by an English metaphysical poet called Andrew MARVELL. It’s about a dude who knows the sins of man led to the death of Christ. He tries to make a new crown for Christ’s head in a bid to atone, but finds that there is sin in this too, as the devil is entwined in it and therefore he might achieve some glory with this new creation. Fitting.

Wiccan and Speed

Billy and Tommy are starting to resemble their comic book counterparts more and more. Billy in particular is wearing his “Wiccan” costume from the comics, and Tommy continues to conform to his “Speed” color scheme…except when he dresses like his Uncle Pietro as Quicksilver.

Ellis Avenue

Ellis Avenue is an odd reference. Warren Ellis has written many, many comics, but nothing of note with the characters involved in WandaVision. The closest thing would be Marvel Ruins, a dark, cynical, horror version of the Marvel Universe where everything went wrong. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver had very minor appearances in there.

The closest other thing would be Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., a probably non-canonical series that teamed Monica Rambeau, Machine Man, Boom Boom, Elsa Bloodstone, and The Captain teamed up to fight…lots of weird shit, to be honest…including several reality altering threats.

Agnes

In her daze, Agnes mentions getting lost, with Vision pointing out that she supposedly grew up in this town. Agnes also talks about making a “wrong turn.” This might have something to do with Agnes’ claim in the first episode that she didn’t actually come to town until AFTER Wanda and Vision had (jokingly citing a visit from her mother-in-law as the reason).

Agnes’ crazed laughter goes perfectly well with her witch costume, giving off some wicked Wizard of Oz vibes.

Agnes’ license plate number is either DA1 B2C or 0A1 B2C. Whichever it is, this is an incredibly generic plate number, either a nod to the artificiality of Wanda’s overall illusion or perhaps an indicator that Agnes is creating this as something that looks “fake” in order to further blend in. Which brings us to…

Is it possible that Agnes is “faking” her confusion here and in episode 5?

Similarly, her “naughty” sweatpants had a rather sinister, possibly demonic, font to them, didn’t they?

Scarlet Witch

Wanda describes her Halloween costume as a “Sokovian fortune teller” while dressed as her comic self. Vision is also his comic self, but is identified as a professional wrestler.

Vision

Vision is apparently supposed to be dressed like a Mexican wrestler, but c’mon, even though it’s no longer era-appropriate there was a Honeymooners-esque “Man From Mars” joke right there!

When Vision collapses to his knees on the ground with his cape blowing in the wind, the shot is composed much like his death scene in Avengers: Infinity War. Wanda’s magic is again the culprit of his demise, albeit unintentionally this time.

Vision showing how selfless he is again – even as he’s being ripped apart he’s trying to save the people of Westview instead. Another pure reminder of Vision’s introduction in Avengers: Age of Ultron when he proved he was worthy enough to wield Mjolnir.

Vision apparently has no memory of being a member of the Avengers, which is certainly strange.

Thanks to Wanda, Vision is an Avenger Disassembled!  Get it? Anyone? No?

The Yo Magic Commercial

Yo Magic is a yogurt snack, but the commercial has a real strong Shark Bites vibe. Shark Bites were terrible, you probably would have died too if that was all you were allowed to eat on a desert island.

“Snack on Yo Magic!” MIGHT indicate that someone or something is feeding off of Wanda’s deal here, or perhaps she is channeling the mystical energy of someone even stronger than herself to keep The Hex alive.

There’s yet another reference to the Infinity Stones in this commercial. This ad features a kid alone on a desert island who grimly ends up looking like ol’ Red Skull on Vormir – he’s the sole (Soul) survivor. There’s no doubt in our minds these commercials are all about both the stones and horrible moments from Wanda’s past.

Cataract

SWORD director Hayward’s top secret project “Cataract” included experiments on Vision’s body, as revealed by Darcy. A cataract is “a cloudy area in the lens of the eye that leads to a decrease in vision” – has Hayward weaponized Vision? He’s definitely up to something nefarious.

The Cataract is also one of the stages in X-Men vs. Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter.

Westview

The town motto on the altered billboard when the Hex expands is “Westview: Home is Where You Make It.” This was less visible on the earlier version, although the juxtaposition of the old and new billboards calls to mind the “Twin Pines/Lone Pine” sign from Back to the Future. 

The Coronet theatre’s marquee features The Incredibles (2004) and The Parent Trap. The former is about a superhero family who retires to the suburbs, and the latter is about reunited twins! Both properties are owned by Disney. The Incredibles have often been likened to the Fantastic Four, and in September, 2019 director Brad Bird publicly shot down rumors that he was in the running to helm Marvel’s First Family reboot. The voice of Frozone/Lucius Best in The Incredibles is none other than Samuel L. Jackson aka the MCU’s own Nick Fury! It’s likely that The Parent Trap in question here is the 1998 version, given the time period. This would help place this “era” of Westview somewhere between 1998 and 2004.

Wanda expands The Hex to save Vision, sucking in most of SWORD and Darcy, too. Since we now know that when you are enveloped by the barrier it changes you on a cellular level, Wanda could accidentally be creating a range of new superheroes. How much bigger can The Hex get as Wanda’s anger grows and how many people will it affect?

Monica Rambeau

Darcy unveils evidence that Monica’s DNA has been altered by crossing the barrier of The Hex twice. It seems like she’s well on the path to becoming her superpowered comics counterpart. WandaVision is turning out to be our longform superhero origin story for Monica Rambeau! Of course, Darcy has also now been pulled through the barrier – will she be affected in the same way?

Darcy and Jimmy Woo

Monica and Woo are off to meet her “guy” who will help them – who will it be? We have our theories.

Darcy is seen wearing a Mickey Mouse watch when she’s hacking into Hayward’s files. Probably no need to point out this Disney connection!

Among the names of the people who drop down when Darcy is emailing Jimmy Woo:

James Gadd – works in post-production at Marvel Studios

James Alexander – a visual effects producer on WandaVision

Back in episode 4, Darcy referred to the other people she was travelling with to the SWORD camp as “the full clown car.” The joke pays off again in episode 6 when a bunch of SWORD gets sucked into The Hex and turned into clowns.

As far as we know, Jimmy has still not identified the Westview man in witness protection he’s been searching for since episode 4. This mystery will survive another week. What if it’s…Pietro? Nah. Unless…

Random Marvel and Halloween Stuff

In the background, one kid is dressed as an off-brand Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat. The first Mortal Kombat came out in 1992, fitting a more ’90s aesthetic.

Someone is dressed as Jason Voorhees, and his sweater is striped like Freddy Krueger’s, the peanut butter to Jason’s jelly. The iconic slashers faced off in 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason, so it’s a mash-up that suits the time period.

Wanda tossed Quicksilver over some fake tombstones. One of them is for Janell Sammelman. Janell Sammelman worked on WandaVision as a first assistant director.

Pietro and the kids are shotgunning “Kane Cola” which on the one hand sounds like it could be an “extreme” ‘90s/early oughts drink like Jolt Cola or Surge (remember those ridiculously stupid commercials?), but with all the X-Men teasing they’re doing, maybe Garrison Kane was a soft drink magnate in the MCU before his powers manifested. No? Ok.

Could Wanda asking about the kid in the orphanage who “had the skin thing” be a reference to maybe another mutant kid? Former Brotherhood colleague Toad?

One of the houses is made up with a sign that says “Macabre Mansion.” They’re …probably not referencing best-forgotten Marvel villain Madam Macabre or similarly obscure Moon Knight villain Dansen Macabre (get it?).

During a flashback, Billy and Tommy are shown playing Dance Dance Revolution, which came out for home consoles in 1999. Also, in their room, on the right, is that Dogpool? A dog doll colored in the style of Deadpool?

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Wanda closes apps (people) to reduce load times. Or maybe they’re video game NPCs. In any case, it’s disturbing.

The post Marvel’s WandaVision Episode 6: MCU Easter Eggs and Reference Guide appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[eric-coldfire]

They’re not great.

Ultimate Spider-Man was Nick Fury recruiting Spider-Man to join his team of teenage superheroes that he could mold into next gen Avengers. Iron Fist, Luke Cage, White Tiger, and Nova. First half of the series was Spider-Man learning to be a team player and working with others (ugh) while fantasizing about being an Avenger one day (barf). Second half of the series was Spider-Verse shit, so the same thing but with Spider themed heroes. Biggest crime of that was when they introduced Spider-Girl, they reveal she’s not his daughter from the future, she’s just genderbent Peter Parker who is a thousand times a more competent hero than him.

Worst thing about Ultimate was the Family Guy style humor, Peter/Spidey would crack a joke or make a sarcastic remark and then he would break the fourth wall and reenact the same joke/remark. (Example, Norman asks if Peter knows Spider-Man as a student in high school, Peter says, “oh yeah, he sits next to me in Spanish class”, cut to Peter Parker sitting next to Spider-Man wearing a mustache and sombrero while playing a guitar and singing in Spanish. Shit like that, every goddamned episode.)

Marvel’s Spider-Man was apparently Disney’s first Spider-Man cartoon and it’s famous for being incredibly cheap looking. They heard Peter Parker was a science nerd so they cranked that character trait to 11 and broke off the knob. Like Peter is retelling the night Uncle Ben was shot by breaking down the composition of metal from the bullet that killed him.

Now I think the show got cancelled because it was so poorly received, but the goal was to have Spider-Man team up with Miles, Gwen, Anya, (who all went to the same super science school and would get their own Spider powers) and together they would fight the Sinister 6 or something because suddenly Peter can’t do that shit on his own.

Not really directed towards you, but about that “What if Spider-Man had his own Titans” question, there was a reply that basically said “Wasn’t that already done with Marvel’s Spider-Man/Ultimate Spider-Man cartoons?” If I recall weren’t those two known to be incredibly awful?

I wouldn't know since i haven’t watched either. 

[tigerlover16-uk]

Final Thoughts on The Shadow Dragons Saga. Dragon Ball’s lowest point.

You know, it’s kind of strange. The reason I started re-watching GT is because I thought I was going to enjoy it. I liked it just fine as a kid. I’ve always been one of those people who thinks fans have been way too harsh on it over the years, and it’s really not that bad. I expected to come out of this saying “It’s not just bad. It’s okay, sorta” and with plenty of nice things to say.

Instead I hate it. Like, I legitimately despise GT. And that’s weird, because when I was on the Baby Saga I thought I was having fun, aside from all the many things wrong with that. Super 17 made me need to take a break because my God, that was a chore. But I thought the Shadow Dragons Saga was going to be another good saga outside of it’s ending, because that’s what I always thought it was as a kid.

Who would have thought it would actually be terrible.

Let me make this clear once again. If anyone reading this like’s GT and this saga in particular... there is nothing wrong with that. Your opinion is valid to you and you deserve to enjoy it. Don’t read this if you want that enjoyment thrown into question. Because I don’t like it, and in fact I think this is the worst Dragon Ball story ever told outside of Dragon Ball Evolution and Episode of Bardock. And I will not pull any punches in explaining why.

The saga actually started off fairly good, the shadow dragons initial introduction as they spread across the earth was terrifying and the general idea of the dragon balls being corrupted and becoming a group of evil dragons bent on destruction is a tantalizing concept that seems tailor made to be the final Dragon Ball story and end the series on the perfect note... and then we meet Haze Shenron, and he gets hurt by some rubble falling on his foot. And it becomes clear this is all going to be really unsatisfying.

One problem I have with the shadow dragons is the set-up... THEY MAKE NO SENSE! So, apparently the dragon balls actually absorb a fair amount of negative energy every time they’re used, and that energy dissipates over a century, so they’re only supposed to be used once every hundred years because if they’re overused the dragon balls will crack and summon these evil shadow dragons that have the power to destroy the world or even the universe...

how and why? No seriously, how does this make any sense from an in universe perspective? Why would Kami design his dragon balls to take in so much negative energy and create planet destroying monsters? He was the guardian of the earth, and he gave humanity the dragon balls to help the planet recover after King Piccolo’s rampage and encourage them to do wonderful things with them. It was only later on that he came to regard humanity as selfish and greedy, and he got over himself after meeting Goku. WHY would he willingly create something that could destroy the planet he swore to protect and possibly the universe? The implications for his character here are just as disgusting as with the black star dragon balls.

Or is it the Namekians that decided that dragon balls should operate this way? I seriously can’t imagine the supposed peace loving Namekians would be stupid and reckless enough to design their magical wish orbs with such a glaring design flaw. They gave Porunga the ability to grant 3 wishes at once, and had those be prizes for contests they held. How come THEY never had to deal with this nonsense?

Or did they? Because according to Old Kai, this thing with the Shadow Dragons? IT’S HAPPENED BEFORE! A planet has supposedly been destroyed by something like the shadow dragons in the distant past. And it’s NEVER explained how, when, why, whatever! What was this event and how did it happen?

Did the Namekians have another planet that got destroyed by shadow dragons when they overdid it with their wishing before and they had to move to Namek? Did they give a set of Dragon Balls to some other race? If so, not only does that not make much sense given the namekians attitude about the dragon balls when they were introduced, but it would make them all look like idiots! Or did another race create their own Dragon Balls? Because if so that’s horse hockey and devalues both the concept of the dragon balls and the Namekians uniqueness in their ability to create them.

That whole incident they mention raises a barrage of questions that never get answered. But most of all... WHY WOULD THE NAMEKIANS DESIGN DRAGON BALLS WITH SUCH A FLAW!? Why did they never do anything to stop something like the Shadow Dragons from happening when they’re shown as being to alter their dragon balls? Or if they did with their own dragon balls, why did they never tell Dende how to fix that fault with the earth’s dragon balls? Why did they never warn our heroes about the dangers of overusing the Dragon Balls? Why did Old Kai never bring them up when he had the chance considering how angry he gets at the Z fighters when the Shadow Dragons are born? Why did King Kai never bring up that this could happened when he’s had Kami use the Dragon Balls to grant his own wish before? Why was all of this information apparently never relevant until now when it’s all too late and none of the characters who should know this was a possibility ever did anything to stop this disaster from happening? WHY WHY WHY?

The entire aspect of the Shadow Dragons been born from all that negative build up makes no sense given the logic and events of the previous two series. I get the meta commentary at play in how the dragon balls are an over used deus-ex-machina, make everything better again plot device throughout the series, but this idea that the Shadow Dragons came about as Karma for Goku and friends “Abusing” the balls makes no sense. Like Goku brings up at one point, almost every wish we’ve seen get made in the series was for a good cause. And the earth, nay the entire universe wouldn’t exist right now if the characters didn’t have the balls  handy. Their wishes were selfless, they’re exactly the sort of things Kami WANTED people to wish for when he made the darn things. Why would he set it up so that not only would people be punished for doing that, but that the one Shadow Dragon that’s so noble that he’s borderline good to start out and pulls a full on face turn later is the dragon formed from the one entirely SELFISH wish in the entire series? I get what they were going for thematically, but both from a logical standpoint and even thematically, nothing about the logic applied to the Shadow Dragons makes a darn lick of sense.

How are these things so powerful anyway? Shenron was easily killed by King Piccolo, who while he’s a great villain let’s be honest, is an absolute creampuff compared to every major villain of Z and isn’t even a millionth as powerful as Majin Buu, who at this point in GT should be able to be one-shot by SSJ4 Goku. Shenron’s power had a number of limits, and he was useless at stopping anyone that was stronger than Kami. Who would have gotten his butt kicked by a saibaman. And without kicking it’s butt beforehand like Yamcha did. I legitimately can’t believe that the dragon balls are capable of becoming beings as powerful as the Shadow Dragons are presented simply by storing up a bunch of negative energy. And don’t give me the excuse of “It’s magic, we don’t have to explain it” Because NO! You DO have to explain it! You’re not allowed to pull a stunt like this and never explain yourself outside of a brief handwave.

And if the fact that this saga is built on an even bigger, completely illogical contrivance than the Black Star balls wasn’t a problem, the presentation of the Shadow Dragons makes them an insulting waste of an idea outright.

The first Shadow dragon looks like a deformed frog and is a complete wimp, only getting an advantage over our heroes because of a cheap gimmick and because Goku and Pan didn’t just kill him straight away, and the two are healed in a contrived manned so they can finish the guy off anti-climactically. The second Shadow Dragon literally loses because it starts to rain. Oceanus Shenron is the only one of the first four dragons to actually be okay, but she feels like she would fit in more as a one off villain than as one of the final bosses of all of Dragon Ball. Then the fourth shadow dragon starts off looking like a big mole rather than a dragon and has a personality that seems more comic relief villain than anything, and while he does get threatening in the second episode he’s in, he loses in the STUPIDEST manner possible by outright sabotaging himself.

These guys come off as pathetic and incompetent. The Shadow Dragons should have been terrifying. This saga, and GT as a whole, was meant to be the grand finale to all of Dragon Ball. These are the final villains... and they feel like antagonists ripped out of old, cheap Saturday morning cartoons! They’re a joke at worst, and they quickly feel irrelevant once the last two Shadow Dragons are introduced and it feels like the story actually starts there, making them feel entirely pointless!!

Speaking of, Nuova Shenron is the only good character out of the lot. He’s an amazing idea for a character, the embodiment of the Four Star dragon Ball giving him a personal connection to Goku. His powers make him a believable threat and he puts on a good fight, and he actually has a sense of honour and his interactions with Goku were great. He was actually interesting to watch... which makes it disappointing that he also doesn’t get nearly as much screentime as he deserves to fully utilize his characters potential to the fullest. Especially when they did briefly bring him back and that in the most frustratingly stupid and ill-explained manner possible. So that just makes me want to slap my forehead.

To be fair Eis Shenron is a decent villain too, being intimidating and interesting in his own right for how sinister and underhanded he is and how he plays off Nuova, so props there, but he’s not around very long and he and Nuova are quickly killed off to make way for Syn/Omega Shenron... who’s dull.

Honestly, if you’re going to have a character be the final villain in a franchise that includes such awesome and delightfully memorable villains as King Piccolo, Frieza and Cell... you really should go all out. And Syn Shenron actually does start out very intimidating, he has a cool design and he’s very threatening and a real powerhouse with some good dialogue between him and Goku... and then everything goes to heck with him halfway through the episodes he’s featured in, because after the Gogeta episode frustrated me beyond all belief, I started to find him extremely tedious and boring.

The problem is, Omega Shenron has no personality or character. He’s just generically evil, he has no interesting quirks or personality traits. Frieza, Cell and Buu all had charm and personality to them, even if they weren’t the deepest and most complex characters. Omega Shenron though? He’s only got sheer power and intimidation on his side, so he’d need to rely on being cool and the fight with him being amazing... and the fight starts out good, but once Vegeta shows up and declares he and Goku should fuse, it becomes infuriatingly tedious with one awful, head-bangingly annoying contrivance after another packed with no end of stupid moments, topped off by the method Omega Shenron is defeated being EXTREMELY forced and annoying. I already made several posts detailing the worst of these episodes, so I’ll just link them here to not repeat myself pointlessly:

http://tigerlover16-uk.tumblr.com/post/158242242114/unpopular-opinion-im-sure-but

http://tigerlover16-uk.tumblr.com/post/158274497694/gt-episode-62

http://tigerlover16-uk.tumblr.com/post/158276790249/gt-goku-is-a-gary-stu

Needless to say though, the final half of this saga is AWFUL! And Omega Shenron himself becomes a tedious, boring, lackluster villain that pales in comparison to the awesome baddies that came before him. Just like the whole lot of these stupid dragons. The entire second half of the saga is badly paced, the fights are badly done and full of stupidity.

We get an entire episode that interrupts the fight between Nuova Shenron and Goku to flash back to everything that happened to Vegeta in Z... despite the fact that the show doesn’t do anything to explain things to anyone who hasn’t watched the previous two series before now and throughout the show it just assumes the viewers have watched Dragon Ball and Z and would know what they’re talking about for the most part. The saga doesn’t take Vegeta’s character in any new or interesting directions, it’s just same old same old characterisation and him becoming a super saiyan 4 to try and catch up to Goku and help him out... which outside of Gogeta he’s not actually helpful at all and just gets his butt handed to him repeatedly by both Omega and briefly Nuova Shenron. So he doesn’t even get to be cool despite getting the then ultimate super saiyan transformation. Why’d we waste so much time recapping his character arc then? If you didn’t offer a proper explanation to who Piccolo was when he showed briefly in the Baby Saga and then later to die, then why extensively recap Vegeta’s character when at this point anybody still watching GT would have been fans who know this stuff?

No one gets to do anything besides Goku! Everyone just stands around, makes comments, looks worried, and gets slapped aside by Omega Shenron without putting up anything resembling a fight. The Z fighters didn’t even contribute to the universal spirit bomb, for crying out loud! Even Pan, who the show still seems to want to pretend is the secondary main character, is only really useful against Oceanus Shenron, and even then Goku probably could have won without her if she’d just powered up.

This entire saga was built on contrivances, pathetically tedious and uninteresting villains, and stupid, stupid, STUPID moments and nonsensical ideas and plot holes that just leave me feeling completely unsatisfied and sorry I even thought about watching it. This thing is stupid and thoroughly unentertaining.

And do you want to know why this is so bad? Why all of that makes this the worst saga in Dragon Ball history? Because this was meant to be the end!

In Japan, GT aired literally a week after Dragon Ball Z ended. With Toriyama having no involvement outside of character designs and the name of the show, Toei made GT to be the final chapter of the Dragon Ball story. The Shadow Dragons Saga was meant to be the grand finale to the entire franchise. Yes, today we know that only the manga is truly canon, that’s what the fandom mostly agrees on. But people who were following the anime as it was airing and just the anime wouldn’t know that. The people who were desperate to see what happened next after Z’s ending weren’t going to immediately argue semantics. People in the West watching GT right after Z ended weren’t going to wonder that when information and the debates on what’s canon weren’t anywhere close to clear cut, and still fully aren’t today. And it’s not like it made much of a difference to Toei’s mindset making the series at the time.

GT was made to be the definitive ending of the story of Dragon Ball... and they blew it in EVERY CONCEIVABLE WAY! First they said “Screw you” to everything Toriyama set up with EoZ by tossing Uub and the majority of the supporting cast to the wayside, regressing the story right back to the beginning by having a rehash of the Pilaf saga, only IN SPACE and a lot more boring and unengaging. They derailed Pan into an annoying, unlikeable brat who does get more sympathetic after the first saga, but as I explained in my Baby Saga review was still a COMPLETE WASTE of a character in every other way. They turned Goku back into a kid in a pathetic attempt at pandering. And then when they realized this didn’t work, they desperately tried to correct this by making a saga more in tone with Z. Which was marginally good, but that still had a ton of bad and mishandled elements that made the derailment of the Dragon Ball stories natural progression all the worse.

Then they made a saga where the premise was a dollar store knock-off of Fusion Reborn, except horrible and boring and which made the few villains they actually did bother to bring back look pathetic or like complete jokes, especially Frieza and Cell. And by extension the supporting cast, worse than the last saga but not quite as bad as the shadow dragons saga did. And just for added measure, they also made sure to destroy any potential to be had with the idea of bringing back Android 17 for a dumb, stupidly designed try-hard fusion villain with a MUCH blander personality and have him be killed off in the most mean spirited manner possible without even really capitalizing on the potential drama of the situation. Oh also, let’s treat krillin as more of a prop to move the story along rather than an actual character. Not that we didn’t just reduce him to a random joke the last time we bothered to acknowledge his existence or anything.

And THEN they end it with THIS insulting, pathetic, ill-conceived, BORING AND ANNOYING MESS of a Saga with one of the WORST handled climaxes the franchise has ever seen. It even feels like this saga was just ripping off elements of the Buu Saga, but making them horrible and not putting in the same effort that originally made them work there. As if they’re admitting that Toriyama’s ending for the series was perfectly fine already, but they’re going to take a dump on it anyway by completely derailing everything he’d set up with his stories epilogue, tell their own garbage stories, and then do their own take on the ending that they want to play up as the REAL one so they can take all the credit for concluding the franchise. it really does feel just that pretentious. Especially with that final episode.

Because my God, I’ve wanted to rage on this since I started watching GT again. This is the one thing about this show I’ve genuinely hated since I was a kid and didn’t understand what quality storytelling even was. I don’t care what anyone has to say. I don’t care about the excuses for why this is truly the best ending for the franchise. Because in my humble opinion:

THE ENDING TO GT IS HORRIBLE!!!

So, after all of that nonsense I’ve already ragged on about this saga and especially the last half of it, Shenron suddenly shows up, revives Goku after he seemingly passes on, and then uses his final wish to restore the earth, declaring that he’s going to leave the earth for an unspecified amount of time because of all this mess and humanity needs to learn to get along without the Dragon Balls... and then Goku just randomly decided to leave with him, never to be seen again...

(Shakes with barely suppressed rage, and then takes a deep breath).

This ending makes no sense. So, the one time outside of complaining about people taking too long to make their wishes that Shenron decides to have any autonomy, it’s to basically go “Screw this, I’m outta here”? WHY!

Okay, I get why, the explanation he gives makes enough sense in context. But like I’ve raged on, the entire thing with negative energy building up in the balls and the Shadow Dragons makes NO sense in regards to the previous series internal logic and the actual purpose of the dragon balls. So after this contrived mess, how does Shenron get to decide he doesn’t get to be summoned anymore? He’s never shown this level of freedom before, he was created to serve a purpose and he should be under Dende’s authority now since Dende revived him after Kami merged with Piccolo. He’s not a free spirit as far as we’ve ever seen, he’s an asset used for the planets betterment and defense that as far as we’ve seen is under the authority of his creator. Him just going off into parts unknown so suddenly is just head scratching.

But I guess this isn’t my real issue with the ending. I could ultimately buy this if this really was meant to be the ending of Dragon Ball as a whole, so why not give the Dragon and the series name sakes a send off too while we’re at it. No, my problem is GOKU!

What the HECK, man? So after Shenron declares he’s leaving, Goku, without even a moments hesitation or any consideration to his actions, and after everything else that’s happened and after his family and friends had just been terrified they’d lost him... just hops on Shenron’s head and decides to leave earth to go train, never to be seen again?

What’s the matter with you, Goku! He doesn’t even give a proper goodbye to his confused family. He just mentions to Vegeta that he’s responsible for looking after Earth now, says “Bye everybody” and then he and Shenron just leave??? and the only people he actually gives a reasonable length goodbye to are Krillin, Master Roshi, Turtle and Piccolo... WHAT?!

And yeah, Goku leaves the planet inexplicably and never comes back as long as everyone who knows and loves him except Pan is dead and buried! He only briefly shows up a hundred years so Pan can glimpse him at a tournament where his and Vegeta’s great, great grandchildren are fighting, but then when she tries to meet up with him Goku just vanishes, letting her believe she was just seeing things and then just disappear again as we get a flashback sequence of Dragon Balls history, a narration about how “Thus ends the story of Dragon Ball” and Goku hovering away on the nimbus while saying “‘Til we meet again, guys!”

...

...

... Goku, you inconsiderate, absent minded, oblivious, self-centered, selfish, stupid, ignorant, hypocritical, scatter brained, JACKA##!

WHAT THE *BLEEP* WAS THAT ABOUT! You know, I despite all the discourse about “Oh, Goku’s a bad father!” or “He’s a selfish idiot who only cares about training and keeps abandoning his family!” Because that’s straight up NOT TRUE. But whatever anyone wants to argue about this ending. Whatever anyone wants to bring up in his defense, there is objectively no justification or argument against this instance. This time, it is an objective fact. In this ending, Goku ABANDONED HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS! On a moments notice and with no consideration to what he was doing! With no explanation! And never came back! For the sake of training and going on an adventure, or at least that’s what we assume, he never does properly explain himself or what is even the deal here! And when he finally comes back briefly he doesn’t even offer a hello and some comforting words to his last living “Loved” one. Just walking out on her again. What... what is even the heck.

This and the fact that he spent five years training with Uub where he apparently never bother to visit his family or never let them know how he was doing, despite the fact that from all we see they were apparently just on the Lookout for a good chunk of that time, pretty much justifies the idea that Goku is a deadbeat that’s willing to abandon his family and friends at the drop of a hat just to pursue his own interests.

At least when he went to train with Uub at the end of Z, he had a decent enough reason since he was slowly getting older and earth needed a new protector for when he was gone, and he promised to come back and visit his loved ones whenever he could. And we can easily interpret they’d visit him since he wouldn’t have gone all that far. It was sudden, rushed, a little confusing of why Uub was the choice for successor when Goten and Pan were right there and could have been handled better. But it was a believable progression for his character at that point given all his experiences and ended on an open ended, but ultimately optimistic note.

This... this is contrived, last minute nonsense that I cannot conceivably believe Goku would ever do. At least not like this. The guy just up and leaves. No hugging his wife goodbye. No last words for his children or granddaughter. No words of encouragement for his student Majuub (Also, why the heck did you waste FIVE YEARS of your life on this kid while leaving your family in the dark about where you were and when/if you were ever coming back if you’re NOW going to turn around and tell Vegeta you want him to defend the earth in your absence while Majuub is RIGHT OVER THERE! Glad you have so much faith in him, you little prick!). No reminiscing over things with his first friend Bulma, who’s instead left to do that herself.

He just reminisces about “The good old days” with his best friend and mentor and has a quick sparring match with Krillin before vanishing on them. And then goes to see Piccolo, the guy who got stranded in hell due to the illogical contrivance that is the black star dragon balls and Goku’s actions, and instead of explaining to King Yenma WHY Piccolo went on a mock rampage in Otherworld and vouch for his friend to get him out of hell, which he sounds like he’s not enjoying being there and the ogres seem to just be content using him as a body guard for crowd control, he just says “Yeah, I’m leaving now, hope they bail you out of here someday, dude” And then vanishes on him too. I know that was meant to be a hopeful note in context, but the way I just describe it is how it really FEELS like it plays out when you stop and think about it.

This ENTIRE ending makes NO LOGICAL SENSE from a storytelling or character standpoint. It paints Goku’s character in a very uncomfortable light and ends with a future where every character we know an love is dead, and the only one left alive is the annoying brat from this show that the majority of fans HATED! How is THAT a good ending!

Honestly, it’s even worse when GT seems to go out of it’s way to glorify Goku and paint him as this “Ultimate heroic” type. The nuance of his character slowly fades away the longer this series goes on for, and he just gets characterized more and more as a generic “Noble hero” type of character, and I still SWEAR this show is where people get the Superman comparisons from when there are points, especially when confronting the fourth shadow dragon where he just prattles on and on about things like “Killing is wrong”, where he went on about it to the extent that it became pandering. he only acts close to his normal self in the Baby Saga, otherwise in the first saga he’s mostly a blander version of his kid self, in the Super 17 saga he’s a pale reflection of his Z self minus several important character flaws and traits. And then in this final saga, he’s just a full on GARY STU throughout that then pulls a stunt like abandoning everyone he ever knew and loved for no good reason.

It’s made all the worse show constantly glorifies him. They downplay his negative qualities unless it’s something for comedic purposes and try to present him as this super pure, noble hearted hero type that’s all about doing good and saving people. They make such a big point throughout the show about how much Goku cares about the earth, how important it is to him and how much he cares about his family and loved ones. So it just comes off as all the more jarring, hypocritical, disgustingly selfish and NONSENSICAL when he just up and leaves the way he does without even a moments hesitation on explanation, or sympathy to his confused family who were just grieving for him after all the horrible things that had just happened. Chichi doesn’t even realize he’s leaving, she stops to comment about what she was going to make him for dinner, for Christ’s sake! Only Vegeta and then later Pan realizes what’s really going on, and they’re not happy about it.

His deciding to leave also comes off as irresponsible. Because, after the show had continuously made the supporting cast increasingly pathetic and irrelevant in actually contributing to saving the day, Gohan outright acknowledges before the fight with Omega Shenron that Goku’s the only one who ever seems capable of doing anything useful when the worlds in danger... and Goku pretty much nods and goes along with that. And between Vegeta’s ineptitude in the fight and everyone else constantly failing in their efforts to help and being irrelevant throughout the show, it legitimately feels like the show is making it an explicit truth that no one but Goku is capable of saving the world from all the threats it faces... and then he just leaves and tells Vegeta he can fend for himself? After the show acknowledges that little annoying tend without doing anything to disprove the idea? Wow Goku, you care so much...

then again, that wasn’t the only time the show tried to pull an inappropriately jerkish move with him. Since after the aforementioned incident with the fourth Shadow Dragon, Goku proceeded to pull a horribly jerkish move when, after Pan had been absorbed by the shadow dragon, suffered excruciating pain after Goku was nearly forced to kill her, and she was left battered... he dangled it’s dragon ball in front of her face as she was regaining consciousness and joked that it was the dragon getting ready to absorb her again, terrifying Pan just for a laugh... when realistically, such an incident would have left any normal person with a SEVERE case of PTSD and doing something like that would have probably triggered her, resulting in a possibly fatal heart attack considering the damage she’d already took! WHAT THE F###, YOU LITTLE S###!!

And again, THIS little idiot is still frequently glorified, being the only character that gets to do anything useful and the show treats him as this all living, perfect hero. The narration at the end even says that he’s going away so that he’ll return when the earth has need of him again, painting his actions here as noble and Goku like he’s some mystical, King Arthur-esque hero who’s destiny it is to always save the world and he pretty much exists only to be the hero of the universe.

Except that misses the POINT of what kind of a hero Goku is. He doesn’t choose to be a hero. He’s not some destined hero of legend born for the sole purpose of being this biblical saviour. He’s not space monkey Jesus. He started out as just some good natured alien kid who just happened to always be in the right place at the right time.

Adventure literally found him when Bulma drove into him one day looking for his Dragon Ball. He kept stumbling into conflicts when he was just doing his own thing in the Original Dragon Ball. Sure he was always happy to offer  help to people he saw were in trouble, because he was a good person but he never once sought out conflict. Trouble found him, and he was just doing what he fought was right or defending his family and friends, doing good along the way. He was happy to just live peacefully with his wife and child after beating Piccolo Jr.

He had other motivations like a lust for battle, which caused him to make risky, sometimes selfish or just reckless decisions that, while they often worked out for the best in the long run, could have ended badly and make Goku seem questionable. But he always realized when he’d made a mistake and tried his best to fix it afterwards. He detested people doing evil things, and while he’d try to minimalize collateral damage and would occasionally lecture villains on their heinous actions and call them out, he never did it while talking like he’s some sort of paragon on truth and justice. Outside of the dub’s “Hope of the universe” speech, but I agree outside of that and some minor instances the dub didn’t change his personality TOO much.

Goku was a kind and loving person and he’d gladly save the earth where he could, but it wasn’t his job. He never acted or treated himself like some traditional hero type, and the show and manga never pretended he was. He was just always there because situations lead him to the point where he’d have to get involved in conflicts and he’d do his best to prepare and overcome them and help whoever he sees is in trouble, while still trying to have a life outside of that, occasionally persuing his own interests which mostly revolved around fighting and martial arts anyway.

Goku is a very realistically written kind of hero. He’s grounded, and that’s part of what makes him great.

That ending and a lot of GT’s treatment of him seems to want to fill him with this sense of grandeur and mysticism and this whole destiny, higher calling thing, despite the fact that goes against his prior portrayals and the ending of Z. It misses the point of his attempts to pass the torch to Gohan and then later Uub at EoZ. Goku didn’t intend to always be the when the earth needed him. He realized his mortality and while he’d never intended it, he came to understand that the earth frequently depended on him and it would need someone else to do so when he was gone. Thus, training a successor. So as well as making him look like a complete inconsiderate, reckless a-hold, the ending also completely derails the entire direction Toriyama intended for the character just to put Goku on a pedestal above everyone else, with the implication that no one CAN be a hero because that’s HIS job, now and forever. Which is nonsense and disrespectful to all the other characters that actually did meaningfully contribute to saving the world before. Way to miss the point. I guess that’s why they call it Goku Time, huh?

What a load. This series completely derails Goku’s character by the end after first turning him into a bland Gary Stu and outright makes me want to punch him at the end despite the fact that he’s usually my favourite character.

And that and everything else I’ve mentioned is why I know hate GT. It misses so much of the point of Dragon Ball. It breaks the story, 3/4 if not more of it is unenjoyable for me, it arrogantly tried to position itself as the true finale to this legendary franchise while completely missing the point of the story and completely destroying the set-up left to it by Toriyama for an actual proper continuation. And it does so while having the most unsatisfying, frustrating, badly written final saga possible that just feels like it spits on the legacy of everything that came before it.

I could go on, but I’m getting sick of writing this, I don’t want to save this for tomorrow or whenever since I already said I’d get this written up today and I don’t want to go back on that. It’s getting late and I have other things to do. There’s a lot more I could elaborate on, and maybe I will in future posts. But I think I’ve made my point.

Gt is bad. It derails the story, does insulting and despicable things to many of it’s characters, especially Piccolo, Buu, Kami, Pan, Uub, 17 and Goku. It presents us with unsatisfying, boring, and STUPID stories with only one marginally above average story that’s still full of holes. It destroys potential for so many characters and ideas for more stories, with an ending that closes the door on any kind of continuation, or at least one featuring our main character. It tired to pass itself off as the grand finale, but spat in the face of Dragon ball, Toriyama and every fan that had been following Dragon Ball all the way to the end. All while trying to present itself as good and seemingly wanting to pat itself on the back for doing what Toriyama did with his ending, only better by going several steps further. Failing because of it’s terrible context and writing.

If GT were canon, it would outright BREAK the story of Dragon Ball, and make so much of what came before feel like it was all for nothing in the grand scheme of things where it was all leading to, especially with that ending. And no, the fact that we’re know firmly decided on the fact that it’s not and the show is practically irrelevant does NOT make any of that any better. Because it’s still true within the context of this show.

I’m getting tired. I don’t know what else to say. Maybe I’ll write more again, maybe I won’t. I definitely don’t want to go back and watch this show again any time soon, that’s for sure.

If you like it, good. But please, don’t try to argue with me over GT. I will not budge with these opinions. This is how I feel, and nothing will change my mind. I won’t keep ranting about it unless I’m pressed to. I don’t want to force my views on anyone else and I respect the opinions of others who like this show. I’m happy that there are fans that love this series and find joy in it, really. Even if I don’t agree with people on things, it makes me happy to see people enjoying themselves regardless of what others think of a product. I love the Star Wars prequels and Scrappy Doo and the 3D Sonic games, after all.

But i stand by my case. Dragon Ball GT is awful. Possibly one of the worst things to ever be done with the franchise. And without a doubt, the worst ending the series could have asked for. And boy, am I glad we have Super, because whatever it’s faults, it proves that we can and will have more shows, more stories with Dragon Ball and these characters. GT didn’t end that potential. It doesn’t matter. Thank you, Toriyama.

And, after several months between watching and mulling things over, those are my final thoughts on Dragon Ball GT.

@kairi-yajuu Oh right, I believe I promised to link you this? Hope this jumbled mess and that reply I left yesterday help make it clearer. I have an ask about why I like Super more if you want me to link my answer to that to you when I get to it eventually?

[chimepunk]

i saw the les mis national tour tonight and it was everything i needed today

ok i haven’t seen les mis on stage in like? four years? so please bear with me if any of this is like a normal thing in most productions it GOT TO ME ok. also i love grantaire so i watched him a lot therefore a lot of this is about him

valjean at the beginning of the show reminded me a lot of flint from black sails for some reason i.e. gay, angry, and hates the government

javert had a very weird accent at first?? like king george in hamilton but he couldn’t pull it off as well so it was just hard to understand him but it smoothed out as the show went on and he fucking killed stars

also really cool lighting during stars!!!! there were little pinprick of light in the backdrop and as the song gained intensity they got brighter and more showed up until the end and they all faded back to normal

parts of it were re-scored a bit which was really cool! like during valjean’s soliloquy at the whirlpool of my sin bit where it gets all heavy towards the end of the song most of the orchestra faded out and it got this very sinister vibe with like heavy drums?? and marius’ entrance in red and black was highlighted by acoustic guitar which was really nice

the final battle also sounded different to me but i don’t know what it was? whatever it was though it sounded great

costuming!!! first of all enj had long blonde hair BLESS and in his first appearance he was dressed in almost all black and very conservative like in the books but he had a red waistcoat to keep that revolutionary flair that the stage show loves

also montparnasse!! i’m so used to productions ignoring who he is and making him just as grimy and gross as the rest of patron minette but he wasn’t this time!! he was dressed SO nicely compared to the others like #dandyofthesepulchre i missed you

the lighting?? just gorgeous in general and used SO well

also the set design was fantastic and huge and had a million little balconies and hidey holes around

they used a projector screen to show movement in certain scenes which was especially cool in the sewers and during javert’s suicide. they really made it look like you were watching him fall from above

that whole scene was really intense tbh like. his hair was all over the place and the lights were angled just slightly up at him which made him look gaunt and he spent half of it already standing on the bridge railing. and then during the falling bit they slowly darkened out the bridge and the rest of him until his face finally blinked out it was so cool

i dreamed a dream was so angry!! i’ve never seen it done that way before! usually its sad like woe is me my life is awful with maybe a brief moment of frustration but she was full on pissed. like running back and forth across the stage angry like FUCK YOU THOLOMYES HOW DARE YOU LEAVE ME angry it was great

marius was so GOOFY like the lovestruck puppy he’s supposed to be 

in a heart full of love marius was down on the ground and cosette was up on her balcony like romeo and juliet and when he looked down for a second she raced off stage and when he looked back up he trailed off and then very embarrassedly sang i’m doing everything all wrong! and stamped his foot until she reappeared downstairs

he also spoke the line “i don’t know what to say” in a very flustered and squeaky voice it was adorable

eponine’s voice was super interesting? it was lower than i’m used to and very rich which sounded fantastic, especially in her harmonies

grantaire was VERY drunk in this production, he spent most of the show slumped in the corner or stumbling around. unless he was talking or following enjolras he was always just slightly out of the light on the side of the stage. the amis kept trying to take his wine away and he wasn’t having it

in the middle of red and black one of them grabbed it and they played a game of keep away while enjolras lectured very seriously

r was also really close with gavroche in this show like they were always side by side and r was whispering in his ear constantly

when eponine died gavroche threw himself in grantaire’s arms and clung to him for ages

i have so much to say about drink with me holy shit. first off, grantaire’s verse always gets me and of course it was the first thing that made me cry in this production

it was also so angry? which i’ve never seen before it’s always kind of resigned and defeatist and the other boys look like they’re having minor existential crises but are still determined to keep going. but this time he was borderline insulting? he was YELLING and was clearly so frustrated and upset that his friends were going to die for some pointless thing and was taking it out on them. like it started a fucking fight on stage people were pulling him away from other people and he didn’t calm down until enj intervened

which was also ? so gay?? like he looked so concerned about grantaire and he leaned in to comfort him and went straight for holding his face in his hands and genuinely looked like he was going in for a kiss but then grantaire pulled away and walked off to side stage

he ended up leaning face first against the wall side stage clearly so overwhelmed by how much the situation sucks and all the fight had completely gone out of him. but gav !! ran up and hugged him from behind and r turned around and kneeled down and just pulled him into his arms it was so sweet and so heartbreaking

the final battle was also A Lot. the choreography and staging was waaay different than i remembered it being which caught me super off guard like i was trembling and trying not to full out sob by the end of it. i might have bruised my moms arms i was grabbing her so hard

first off gavroche was heartbreaking as always. but as soon as he was shot grantaire (who was center stage staring up at him climbing over the barricade) screamed NO so loudly and enjolras caught his body and looked absolutely shocked. he turned and handed him to grantaire really carefully and r walked to the front of the stage and laid him out straight and folded his hands on his chest and just. sat there numbly for almost the entire rest of the battle

grantaire also didn’t fight at all which was super interesting to me because usually he’s doing something at least but this time he just sat and drank wine and hung out with javert off to the side

ok i don’t remember if this is a regular thing but i’m pretty sure enjolras usually dies on the last big note in the final battle? but he went out super early this time and just kind of careened behind the set

and in super quick succession after that r realized he was gone, got up to check on his other friends, and on each beat he moved back and forth across the stage and a spotlight hit as he saw each of them lying dead on the ground and during the last swell of music in the scene he grabbed his bottle, and climbed the barricade lifting it in the air and was shot at the top on the last note

it happened so quickly and it was so not what i was expecting i was in absolute shock

after the barricade was cleared away a guy walked through with a cart and enj was lying in it with his big red flag but javert stopped him to pick up gavroche who was still lying right where r left him and put him right next to enjolras

in turning all the women set candles on the stage and during empty chairs at empty tables all the boys came out behind marius, with enj grantaire and gav at the front, and they all (including marius) picked up each of the candles in sync until marius turned around and they all stepped back (still totally in sync with marius’ movements which was excellent) and blew them out until marius’ was the only one still lit as the rest of them disappeared

during the thenardiers final song at the wedding thenardier broke the fourth wall and asked the “maestro” to “make it tutti frutti”

unrelated to the show itself but the man sitting next to me was clearly not feeling it during act one and spent a lot of it texting but by act two he was a lil bit drunk and got SO into it he was leaning forward with his hands over his face and making impressed noises and hand gestures when people hit great notes and after empty chairs he saw me crying and leaned over and was like!! that was amazing! that guy’s voice is incredible!

also after it ended he looked so happily surprised and told me “that second part was really something! that was intense!”