#she's a very difficult character to work into things without a concrete narrative

[remesrobotics]

Eris

SRN.011 - エリス “-and nobody will ever miss you~”

Good Point - Adaptable Bad Point - Being herself Like - Flowers Dislike - Getting punted

3’1” (93.98 cm)

A Stardroid whose primary function is holographic impersonation; you’d almost never see Eris in her true form, as she spends most of her time in the forms of other robots. She possesses truly staggering scanners and a massive drive for storing not only the appearances and personalities, but also entire memories of the robots she seeks to impersonate, making her disguises nearly perfect, pending how recent her scans are. However, her impersonation keeps her regularly in touch with other robots, ensuring they stay pretty up-to-date.

This does make her effectively genderfluid as probably 95% of the robots she could impersonate in the setting are male. On the downside, her disproportionate amount of time spent acting like others does make her own personality growth a bit stunted, and she is very scatterbrained, indecisive, and anxious when not impersonating anyone.

Apart from her arbitrarily insect-like appearance, her smooth golden plating hearkens to the Golden Apple of Discord.

Though her closed ‘apple’ form is far too large to fit ‘inside’ a majority of her holograms, she not only looks but physically feels like whoever it is that she is impersonating through space-bending BS Alien Magic-Tech. Pinpointing where her real body is masked and damaging it directly through the hologram with piercing damage will drop it, though hitting the hologram anywhere else will incur simulated damage on the hologram. As a result, she is primarily weak to cutter weapons.

Originally built exclusively for espionage, she basically exists to piss people off and start arguments by pretending to be other people, and spreading misinformation.

Eris lacks her own ‘signature’ weapon, since she primarily utilizes slightly weakened copies of those of whoever she’s impersonating (a good way to tell a robot is Eris in disguise is to notice subtle limitations in their abilities; the best is to just have the person she’s impersonating catch her doing it), but she can also emit a scrambling AOE pulse/’buzz’ that temporarily stuns and disorients other robots with glitch-like hallucinations, but it deals no damage.

Technically associated with a dwarf planet in the Sol system, her original allegiance was to Sunstar and Terra... but upon being sent to 'investigate' Antares, she was captured. To avoid destruction, she pleaded to be spared, promising that she would work as a double agent. While Antares had no intention of really having a planet minion, she nevertheless allowed it on the basis that Eris stay out of her way for the most part, and spend most of her time just sowing distrust and mayhem.

This is the reason behind Eris' single antenna; she used to have two, but the one that was destroyed was effectively her 'transmission' antenna, the one for reporting back, so with it gone she's believed by the others to be 'dead', which allows her some extra buffer for shenanigans until she's caught the first time. 

While there is no clear proof, the subtle animosity between Eris and Pluto hints that Eris was likely responsible for his demotion in ages past, even before Eris defected.

- Dubiously Canon Offshoot -

If she were to have an empty-eyed HEC/SEE/Giga variant, she would forego espionage entirely in favor of overdriving her hologram powers to use two ‘disguises’ simultaneously, creating nightmarish, melted-together ‘hybrid’ hologram bodies.

[disregardcanon]

upon a spies are forever rewatch, i've sorted through some of my feelings a bit better: the positives and the negatives

okay, so the stuff that i do really enjoy: the choreography, most of the musical numbers, tatiana and cynthia's characters in general, the running theme of torture as weird foreplay with owen and curt, and then the concepts of gay spies during the lavender scare era.

things that i really do NOT enjoy: barb's entire deal. she didn't feel like a very fleshed out character and i didn't enjoy the joke or feel like her presence added anything. the concept of a scientist with an unrequited crush on the gay spy lead is fine, but it just wasn't executed very well in my opinion.

susan's entire deal. what was up with him? why was he there? what did he want? like i feel like the scene with him and the foreign dignitary was supposed to show a bit of period typical queerphobia but it just. came off too much as a transphobic punchline for me to really buy it. also still don't know what his narrative role was really supposed to be.

the nazi deal. i GET IT! i don't even necessarily think that it was done all that badly for the genre it's parodying, i just did not enjoy it.

sergio was fun and funny, but i think that he needed a wig or something to distinguish him better from owen carvour. i know that the perils of having the same actors playing many parts are difficult, but it wasn't just me but all three people i've showed this to that assumed that sergio was owen carvour because it happened so soon afterwards and the costume change was so minimal. if it wasn't intentional (which i think if it was that was a bad move) then a bigger visual change could have been made

things that i almost enjoyed/areas that i would dig into:

there were a lot of elements that i felt like almost came together, but didn't quite get there. for one, the theme of curt needing a support system and not being able to do it all alone. for that to work for me, i think that he and tatiana should have started working together more concretely on a more permanent basis. i also would have liked more of them just being good friends. personally, i would have put our comphet revelation a bit earlier to give them more time to work that out and deal with working together.

beyond the theme of curt needing a support system, we have the attempted theme of whether it's good or bad to have individual humans spying and controlling so much of the fate of the world. is the finese needed to accomplish this a GOOD thing? are the secrets worth it? what would things look like without these hurdles, with computers doing the job and no one being allowed secrets anymore?

this is a VERY interesting concept, especially paired with the concept of the cold war, mccarthyism, conformity, the lavender scare, and a pair of gay spies who are very much in love and have no room to be so. but we didn't get a whole lot of room to sit with that, you know? we spend so much time with characters who don't really keep to those themes, a love interest-villain who's in disguise, and a farcical plot that only furthers his goals tangentially.

above everything else, i think that spies are forever doesn't quite know what it wants to be? the concepts that it plays with are so interesting, but it doesn't spend enough time with them as opposed to the more shallow elements of the farcical aspects to do much with the parts that i was most interested in.

i don't even necessarily think that it had to be what i wanted it to be, you know? it could have gone in a direction that isn't focused on questions of secrecy, queerness, the myth of a single great man, and community and focused entirely on the farce of the spy genre, but it raised those questions and didn't follow through, which made the other things that it was doing in a different direction weaker too. it just... wasn't enough of any of things it was playing with

which makes it a very frustrating but tantalizing piece of media for me.

[animalinvestigator]

Id love to hear your extensive belle character analysis

x2. It's a bit difficult to just broadly say anything about belle because, like pretty much every character in petscop, theres about 20000 different ways you could look at her and a lot of mechanisms that we only get little glimpses of, so a broad question like "what's belle's DEAL" is hard. No one knows for sure, and i think thats very deliberate; ultimately, petscop is a story presented to us by as early as the 9th episode through a filter of what the family considers "important" and what contributes to their narrative, and belle is tacitly not that, unless she happens to be near to the other things that ARE important to them (Rainer and paul, namely.) and thats actually probably a big part of her big inner conflict -- I'm gonna get more into it under the cut.

Essentially her entire conflict, character arc, and motivations, are only visible during the instances in which it intersects with Paul and care's. Here's a few things we know about her without having to extrapolate:

Belle is lina leskowitz's adopted kid. The where, when, why, and how of this is never stated. Garalina/rainer may have been involved. See new life letter in 23 and OST ending. As demonstrated in 22, she seems to be pretty insecure about her status as "family". She's touchy about it.

Sometime around 1995-1997, belle was involved with the initial testing of the game, when she became involved with rainer, who appears to have attempted to rewrite her identity-- the mechanisms, timeline, and reason for this is something we can only make educated guesses about. (All of this information is in episode 12; it must be between 95 and 97 because petscop did not exist until 95 and rainer either died or disappeared in 97.)

Belle has a copy of the game that she has apparently left on in accordance with rainer's instruction since ~2000. She is extremely knowledgable about obscure functions of the game, and adept at a skillset unique to it -- note her speedy in-game typing, knowledge of the nifty function, and expertise with the piano.

Contrary to the implication in the game that she is "stuck" somewhere, this is only true of her in-game avatar. The reason why she became softlocked in her room is pretty apparent considering the way rainer talks about the results of their collusion in 12. Nonetheless she's free to do whatever in the physical real world. See episode 22. (Game theory HATES this video because paul and belle go hang out at 7 11)

Belle is at least at the beginning of the series feigning ignorance about her involvement with the game. We learn in 22 that she is the person who paul was initially addressing the videos to, and that person also apparently expressed doubt about whether or not paul was lying about petscops existence.

Belle is in some capacity at multiple points in the series sharing a physical space with marvin, and passing his messages along to paul. (This assumes pink tool is belle, but their handwriting is identical if you look at it, so I hope that's not too contentious.) See episodes 5 and 7. She seems to have some ulterior reason for wanting to get the machine in the game working.

This is slightly less self evident, but it appears she does have a degree of genuine care for her brother; she tries to get him out of a dangerous situation in 23 though its ultimately futile, is apologetic about the circumstances, and appears to attempt to comfort and reassure him in the OST ending -- I'm going to talk about belle like she might be a pretty self serving person with some emphasis on how it negatively effects paul in a minute, so i thought it was important to list this too.

And honestly, that's about the extent of it. Everything you could possibly come up with is entirely composed of those 7 things that are essentially everything that's even remotely concrete. Everyone has to draw their own conclusions on how they feel about belle from all of that. There's a couple other bits and bobs of evidence that are more questionable that I'm also going to bring up, but that's the meat of it.

From this base of evidence i've put together some things that make pretty decent sense to me. I can relay them to you, but they're no more true than anything anyone else could assume given the same evidence. Maybe it will make sense to you, maybe it won't.

One last thing before i lay it out, I can't really get into the deeper reason why I think this way because it would be an even longer essay, but i'm working off the assumption belle's adoption had very little or nothing to do with petscop. Some people will talk about her being adopted into the family because of her participation in the testing but thats contingent on the notion that garalina is like an actual company and I literlaly cannot get into that but for the sake of simplicity we'll assume that the timeline goes belle was adopted -> belle tested petscop -> events as opposed to belle tested petscop -> belle was adopted -> events.

The way i see it is this: the core conflict driving belle's actions both leading up to and during the story is an insecurity in who she is and where she fits in her family. the family outside of lina, paul, and rainer, seem completely unconcerned with her; they crop her out of videos, they don't seem even remotely bothered or interested when paul mentions her, they don't seem to care much about her presence at all. if this is the way things have been since she was a kid, it would explain her insecurity in the present when referred to as 'not family'; and rainer would be exactly the type of person to see a child being treated that way and figure that he could "fix" it, espescially considering his apparent belief that someone can be subsumed into whatever "family" means to him through certain means (see caskets in episode 20). No matter what exactly it was that happened there, the result is the same: it appears to have messed her up pretty bad. She ended up in a transitory in-between state ; whatever this process involved, she started it, she made significant progress, and ended up permanently changed by it, but she never completed it. In this way, belle is stuck between two selves, and with rainer gone, she has no """Guidance"""" as to how to consolidate them. This is where i think her behavior in the actual meat of the series comes from. It seems that she came to the conclusion at some point that this in-between state was very real, and that she needed to finish what got started back when she was a kid. ...which would explain pretty well why she's consisntely subjected herself to the game for such a long time. things like the needles piano that she's become exceptionally good at were both portions of the process she was apparently taught could rewrite her identity (and maybe make her a real member of the family) and also the only things she could access from her little softlocked room. for an absurdly long amount of time, she's been practicing, trying to find some kind of solution that could close the loop so to speak. to me, this is her deal. she wants to Be Finished. she seems to take it extremely seriously. whiiiiiiich gives her reason to be colluding with marvin: he is aware of how to do that, and it seems like he tells her how. even though this is clearly not a beneficial situation and in petscop 5 seems to be putting her in active physical danger, she has freedom to come and go as she pleases and still willingly and continually gets involved with marvin. the way i see it, Its an extremely elaborate self harm game that she's playing in a desperate bid for closure. this is why i've recently started to feel like she might not actually be as averse to paul playing the game as i initially felt . her getting out of her softlocked room is something that only paul could help her with, and only paul could gather the other 500 pieces necessary to power the machine -- the process requires both copies of the game with pieces in it (marvin's copy does not have them.). in a wacky coincidence, belle seems to be able to have the ability to manipulate some portions of the game world, and the door that allows paul into the main corridors below the plane opens up with a tone that is distinctly linked to the times belle fucks with the game world. as unsafe of a situation that it put paul in, belle's big chance to finally resolve this 20 year old internal conflict that seems to have been commanding her life since she was a child opened up the second paul found that game. and when you think about it , espescially given pauls very stubborn personality, "I don't believe you" is not a very good way to get someone to not play a game. in fact, it kind of sounds like something someone would say when they realyl want you to play a game! Just some food for thought. ultimately, she does end up finishing the process, before paul does -- her egg is in the locker, finally, after 20 years of her menu space sitting there unused and incomplete. doesn't seem like she feels very good about everything that happened though.

Hopefully my logic makes sense here. I feel like i've integrated the information in the way that makes the most sense to me, and hits hardest! As always all of this is just the way i put together the informaiton presented and not at all something that I consider textually correct, it's just my own inner world here.

Sorry this got extremely long, but if you have any questions about any of it, I'm happy to answer too : ) Hopefully it was interesting to hear about

[zedecksiew]

In The Light Of A Faded World

This morning Sharon and I talked about having thoughts about the end of our current world.

Not apocalyptic thoughts of nuclear fire or zombie-world cruelty. Just the little things: the effort we'd need to put, to make rainwater potable. Lack of access to coffee and washing powder. That sort of thing.

+

Was reminded again of the text I wrote for Derek Kinsman's TTRPG "In The Light Of A Faded World". A game where you play small animals rooting through the ruins of a once-human earth.

I am very proud about the work I did for this. A short story about a trio of animals exploring a shopping mall (explicitly modelled after 1 Utama); character blurbs for all the various types of animal you can play---mouse, stag beetle, frog, etc.

Tried to do with them the same thing I try with all my game texts: force the words to do many things at once.

The fiction bit in "Faded World" works as:

a full narrative (an agama lizard wants to get an apple from an abandoned arboretum for her tortoise mentor);

an example of play (here's how you, playing as a tiny animal, might approach difficult challenges);

a sample adventure location (the 1 Utama-inspired setting has branching terrain, discrete encounters, etc).

The character sketches I am particularly pleased with.

Each prompts you with a obvious physical ability (frogs sing; rabbits run)---but there are roleplaying angles to leverage from these traits: the mantis worries about their predator mentality; the mouse has complexes associated with her big-ass family; the shrew loathes his own gnawing hunger.

+

Of the writing I did in 2021 I am personally most proud of the stuff in "Faded World". I'd never tried animal protagonists before---ie: animal protags closer to the animal than the anthropomorphic. I always thought that it'd be hard to write them without being naff.

The ease I had with this came from Derek. In designing the game he does the simplest, neatest thing. In suggesting settings, Derek says:

"If you are playing with local friends, use your municipality as the setting ... What happens to your beach? Main street? Downtown? Your home?"

The ease I had with this also came from Amanda Lee Franck, who made all the art. I remember her talking about her process.

In walking around, taking reference photos, in making her illustrations, Amanda imagined her eye at the eye-level of the creatures she was drawing: at branch-level, at grass-level.

+

The ease I had with this comes from the same place, I think. Maybe because of where our minds are, nowadays?

Maybe because the meaning of a human being trying to live in (as opposed to clinging on to) the ruins of the Anthropocene is to live as an animal. At ground level, with more attention paid to rainwater and the earth between concrete.

[arkus-rhapsode]

MHA Chapter 315 Discussion-An Almost Great Conclusion, But Misses It’s Mark

Hi guys, Rhapsode here and it’s time for another MHA discussion. I haven’t really done one in a while, but after reading 315, I had a lot of thoughts I was working through. And before I start I want to say, I do not think this chapter is overtly bad. I think there’s a lot of good ideas to it, and overall nothing objectively bad. However, as the climax to this Deku vs Lady Nagant fight, I felt it didn’t quite hit its mark (pun not intended).

If you want my brief opinion of this current arc of “solo Deku”, I actually enjoy it quite a bit. I’m happy Horikoshi refocused on Deku after such a long war arc. As well as Deku FINALLY be proactive in his hero duties. No longer on the rails of the school setting. And I have especially enjoyed his current fight with Lady Nagant.

In terms of sheer action, it’s got a tried and true set up of a sniper battle, but then adds to it by taking the fight into the air. The action is hectic in all the right ways with the unpredictable bullets cutting up Deku as he dodges them with Danger Sense. As well as the introduction to a new quirk of OFA.

But where this fight really shines is Nagant and her origin. Lady Nagant was hero assigned to maintain the illusion of order by getting rid of potential threats and heroes up to no good for the Hero Safety Commission. Until being told to kill in the name of improving society and any of her activities being covered up finally weighed on her and she killed the then president of the Commission and placed in Tartarus. While she’s only hunting down Deku because she’s assigned to, she says that even if AFO wants to rule the world, it’d be more transparent than a return to the status quo.

It’s honestly a great reveal as it finally puts out in the open the actual corruption in the system that’s hinted at, but was never really delved into. But now it also finally has Deku confront the problems of the status quo that he’s grown up in. This isn’t an ideological battle like with Stain on the definition of hero or reaching people who have fallen through the cracks of society like Gentle. This is real flaws with the system that people have had faith in from the mouth of someone who has done their dirty work.

It’s something I think a lot of people have wanted to see. And I’m glad Horikoshi finally did dive into it the structural problems of hero society.

So how does this all get resolved in 315? How does all this end? Well after Lady Nagant targets Overhaul and shoots at him to make the situation harder for Deku to focus, Deku without hesitation goes into trying to save Overhaul (despite knowing Overhaul is a villain), Deku homages All Might and then shatters Nagant’s arm, and finally Deku makes an observation that Nagant wasn’t really going to hit Overhaul and that if she seeing the darkness of society, she knows where to expose it as she still has the heart of a hero. Nagant should join Deku.

But then AFO activates an explosive power right as Nagant is coming around. The blast fries her as Hawks arrives and we’re left on the cliffhanger of “is she going to survive.”

Now after reading this, my feelings have been… mixed. Let me get out this out of the way there is nothing with this chapter I disagree with: I have no problem with Deku making an emotional appeal to Nagant, I have no problem with AFO acting like a heel, and I have no problem with Nagant not being fully evil and never intending to kill. I know that last one has upset some people, but given Nagant’s backstory of killing innocent people for others because they told her so is the reason she fell off her path in the first place. So it makes sense she never intended on killing anyone.

And I know some people have nitpicked how it’s the female villain who isn’t fully evil, but that honestly doesn’t matter to me. As narratively, this arc started with the attack by Muscular and Deku couldn’t reach him. So it’d make sense to potentially end this mini arc on an example of Deku reaching and reforming a villain. It also helps that Nagant has actual layers to her motivation that could actually allow her to be swayed away.

Now my real issue with this chapter is honestly a problem that I was afraid Hori would do after he introduced just how messed up the Commissions back dealings, it’s that Deku doesn’t really take any concrete stance on what should be done about this status quo. Instead, Deku focuses more on telling Nagant she is a real hero and he ultimately wins her over after showing how much a real hero he is.

While Nagant uses the term “fake”, “sham”, and “phony” when discussing heroes and hero society, it doesn’t address the bigger issue. Namely that she feels this way because of the corrupt and unheroic things the Commission has done to maintain faith in it. Deku offers no actual answer to the very real and very hard question she poses.

And his only real response is this:

(I’m being generous as there can be something lost in translation here and it’s a bit on the flowery side )

While Deku did acknowledge this world isn’t Black and white and he’s saying she can expose corruption if she works with them, he dodges actually offering a solution to her concerns about the status quo. Instead more time is devoted to the same kind of “I will save anyone” appeal he always does.

And while one could argue Nagant’s only on the side of AFO because his reign would keep the Commission from having the power they did, even if she doesn’t fully believe in him. She still poses why being ruled by AFO has its appeal to her and Deku doesn’t actually counter that. No pointing out the obvious anarchy that could result from this or how AFO uses even the people he claims to love like Shigaraki. Deku doesn’t rebuff anything and once again passes the tough decisions onto other people. With Hawks appearance here at the end and his baggage about killing Twice, I can very easily see cleaning up the commission as becoming his motivation going forward. Once again resolving Deku of actually needing to make hard calls or form stances.

This is compounded by the fact AFO just blows Nagant up. It really doesn’t matter if you rebuff anything that AFO has said or offered to convince Nagant to join you, there’s no way she’d work with him after he attempts to kill her. Which feels like it undercuts this conversation about morally gray society.

Look we all know that AFO is evil. The audience knows and this is absolutely what he would do, but if you’re trying to give all of the illusion that we’re finally confronting issues with society and bringing this up and why we would get people loyal to AFO or people like the liberators or people like stain. And trying to sway someone away, then just having him nuke them for having a change of opinion. then it undercuts any actual ambiguity of a clash built on addressing moral grayness. Which I feel is always been one of the strengths of MHA.

I was not expecting Deku to have a thesis on how he plans to dismantle the shady parts of society. Or go full Eren Yeager and become his own revolutionary. But when confronted by a villain who isn’t like Shigaraki or Toga or Twice, who fell through the cracks in the system and needed a safety net like Deku wants to be, Nagant was a part of the system. The corruption of society runs deep in her motivation and Deku doesn’t really address it beyond acknowledging its flaws. And yet his actions of “true heroism” are enough to sway her. It just feels incomplete. There is a brief line that you can interpret of him wanting to clean up the system, but it feels way too short for a moment like this. Deku being confronted by all the darkness of a system he admires should cause him to make some kind of stance.

And no, I’m not going to speculate on if Lady Nagant is actually dead and this will finally forced Deku to take a firmer stance or what have you. I do want to keep these discussions at least relative to when they are released and in this moment the thing that wins over Nagant is the same “save everyone”/“inspiration by example” Deku usually does. Which doesn’t feel as satisfying a conclusion as it could be.

Not helped by a good chunk of this chapter being taken up by explaining all the bits and bobs of OFA’s power system and finally explaining what exactly his third quirk does. This feels like padding when I wanted the space could’ve been used for character dialogue or a continuation of their conversation about the status quo.

I do want to repeat though that there is nothing outwardly bad with this chapter. There is no real objective failure in the writing. It’s just a case of, “ this could be stronger.” And that’s the frustrating part.

Tl;dr there’s a lot of things that are good about this chapter from a technical and narrative level. The natural progression of characters and the switching of allegiance makes sense.  however it’s just all shy of really living up to a lot of the stuff it sets up about society and going back to the status quo. As Deku doesn’t seem to have any real concrete stance beyond his usual.

And because a lot of the things around it are very good it makes it a lot more noticeable when it doesn’t quite stick the landing. Not helped by what feels like nothing more than padding with the explanation of quirk ability instead of character introspection about this very legit and difficult revelation. There is nothing outwardly bad, it’s one of those cases of something that could be an 8-9/10 ends up more as a 5-6/10.

That’s my opinion at least. But I am extremely interested in seeing where Hori goes with this. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.

[fictionadventurer]

@lady-merian, Well, now you’ve made me curious. How does each chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe end? I’m going to use the same categories I used to classify the Hunger Games chapters, but there are a few things that alter how these endings function in this book.

Genre: This is a portal fantasy, not an action-adventure book. To borrow terminology from Orson Scott Card, this is a Milieu story rather than an Event Story. The tension comes as much from exploring a new world as from navigating a plot, so a lot of the revelations and narrative changes aren’t going to be as dramatic or devastating as they might be in a more intense narrative.

POV: Rather than a first-person narrator, this book has an omniscient narrator who can show us things that the main characters don’t know about. This means that chapter endings are classified by how they function for the reader rather than the characters, since we know things that the characters don’t know.

The Categories

Bombshell: A surprise event or revelation occurs that’s outside the characters’ control. We want to turn the page to see the fallout from it.

Cliffhanger: Something is about to happen or be revealed, but we’re not sure what it is yet. We turn the page in the hope of learning this new information.

Tension-builder: We’ve just learned some new information that  makes the situation more difficult or stressful.. It’s sort of a long-term cliffhanger--we know this is going to have an effect on the story, but not necessarily at the beginning of the next chapter.

Initiative: Characters are about to or have done something to take action.

Resolution: Main conflict of the chapter has been successfully resolved.

The Chapters

Chapter 1: Lucy has just entered Narnia and seen a faun. The faun is startled by her and drops his packages. Bombshell.

Chapter 2: Lucy comes back to the spare room and announces to everyone that she’s alright. Resolution.

Chapter 3: The witch demands to know what Edmund is. Edmund says he doesn’t know what she means, and says he’s at school, but it’s the holidays now. It’s a very odd place to end a chapter, since the next chapter picks up with the same argument, and this is the second time that the Witch has asked what Edmund is.  I’ll call it a Cliffhanger, since we’re waiting to find out what the Witch means by asking “what” Edmund is.

Chapter 4: Edmund and Lucy are going back to the wardrobe. Edmund feels sick knowing that his siblings are on the side of the animals and he’s sympathetic to the witch. Lucy says, “What fun we shall have now that we’re all in it together.” A nice little bit of irony that serves as a Tension-builder.

Chapter 5: The four children hide in the wardrobe (and they don’t shut the door, because you never shut yourself in the wardrobe). Cliffhanger.

Chapter 6: Edmund and Peter argue if they can trust their guide, and Edmund points out that they don’t know the way to get back home. Bombshell.

Chapter 7: The children have just finished a meal with the Beavers and Mr. Beaver says it’s time to get down to business (and that the snow means no one will find tracks if someone’s trying to follow them). The gentlest form of Cliffhanger. We’re about to get an infodump, and we turn the page to learn the answers to questions, but it’s not a dramatic need-to-turn-the-page-now kind of tension.

Chapter 8: They’ve just found out that Edmund has gone to the White Witch, and the Beavers tell them they have to flee immediately. I’m going to call this a Bombshell, because Edmund’s defection is a huge surprise to the other three, and the announcement that they have to leave feels like an extension of that surprise.

Chapter 9: Edmund has just told the witch where his siblings are, and the witch orders her sled without bells to be prepared. Tension-builder.

Chapter 10: After everyone enjoys tea and sandwiches in the cave, Mr. Beaver tells them it’s time to move on. Initiative.

Chapter 11: The dwarf tells the White Witch that winter has been destroyed and it’s Aslan’s doing, and the Witch says anyone mentioning that name will be instantly killed. Tension-builder.

Chapter 12: Peter, still shaky after killing the Wolf, kneels before Aslan and is dubbed Wolf’s-Bane. “Whatever happens, never forget to clean your sword.”  Peter has just been prepared for the coming war. Initiative. 

Chapter 13: Aslan announces he’s made a deal and the Witch has renounced her claim on Edmund. When the Witch questions his promise, Aslan roars, and she flees for her life. Resolution.

Chapter 14: The children cover their eyes as Aslan is killed. Bombshell.

Chapter 15: Aslan brings the girls to the Witch’s home and they find themselves in a courtyard of statues. A resolution, because Aslan is alive, the journey’s over, and they’re safe, but as I’m reading it, it feels like a mild Cliffhanger, because we’re still curious about what Aslan’s going to do next.

Chapter 16: Aslan’s forces join the battle; Peter’s tired forces cheer, Aslan’s forces roar, and the enemy gibbers. Cliffhanger, since we’re not told how the battle goes, but an extremely joyful one, since it’s clear that circumstances are on the side of good. (And the first line of the next chapter tells us the battle was over in minutes). 

Chapter 17: “And that is the very end of the adventure of the wardrobe. But if the Professor was right it was only the beginning of the adventures of Narnia.” Resolution of the whole story, but with a tantalizing promise of more.

Observations

The children are pulled along by the narrative and make no decisions for themselves (at least in the chapter endings). Even in the two chapters that end in Initiative, other characters are telling the children what action to resolve upon: Mr. Beaver tells them to keep moving after tea and Aslan tells Peter to go forward in the fight. And in both cases, they’re just continuing actions that have already been happening: the flight from the Witch and the battle against the Witch’s forces. This is part of the function as a middle-grade portal fantasy. First off, they’re children, who usually need authority figures to tell them what to do. Second, the characters are just vehicles to explore the world; we don’t need to explore their struggles with finding the right course of action. We just need them to go along for the ride so we can see more of Narnia.

Only three chapters end with neat Resolutions: Lucy coming back from meeting Mr. Tumnus, Aslan sending the Witch fleeing in terror, and the very end of the book. The first one serves to set the tone: this is a place where you can go on wild, fantastical adventures, but don’t worry because you’ll get home safely in the end. (It’s like those two chapters are a miniature form of the entire book). The second one gives us a moment of triumph before the ultimate, heartbreaking defeat of the story’s lowest point. And the last one is there because the book has come to an end (though we do get imagination-firing sequel promises).

The tension-builders all relate to the villain’s wider plot. They all relate to Edmund, and two of them come when Edmund is with the Witch and separated from his siblings. This makes sense, because the villain’s plot is the only large-scale thing happening in this otherwise very immediate quest story. The story isn’t driven by tension between the characters (except the tension introduced by the Witch). It’s a very concrete “we need to go here and do this” kind of story, which provides more opportunities for the promises of immediate resolution that we get from cliffhangers and bombshells.

The cliffhangers are all very mild. It’s not “oh no, are they going to be okay?” It’s a much gentler, “I want to find out what happens next” or “I want to find out what’s going on.” We turn the page, not necessarily because we’re worried about the characters, but because we’re curious. This makes sense with the portal fantasy structure. The story is driven by that sense of wonder and curiosity.

The bombshells are the hardest-hitting moments of the story. And this story provides plenty of opportunities for them, since the children aren’t the ones driving the narrative. The four bombshells actually provide some of the turning points of the story according to Seven-Point Story Structure.

Plot Turn 1(The character’s world changes): Lucy discovers Narnia in the wardrobe

Pinch 1 (forces the characters to action): Learning that they don’t know the way home forces them to continue with the adventure, but the third bombshell is the actual pinch point that forces them to act, because Edmund’s defection is what them to flee from the Beavers’ home.

(Midpoint is Peter joining the battle after meeting Aslan)

Pinch 2 (lowest point): Aslan’s death

This function of the bombshells makes sense according to the demands of the structure. The midpoint occurs when the characters move from reacting to taking action, so it can’t come from a bombshell, but the Plot Turns and Pinches happen when the characters are faced with events that are outside of their control.

All this is fascinating to me, because we have an story where the main characters make almost no choices, yet the underlying structure is still present and still satisfying. The characters aren’t driving the story; they’re just swept up into it, yet it works because a portal fantasy is driven by wonder and curiosity. We’re the ones going on this adventure, swept up by the story with no control over where it goes, so the story functions best when the characters themselves lack that control. The story’s momentum comes not necessarily from life or death stakes, but by the readers’ curiosity to know what happens next or what’s around the next corner. And yet, because so much of the story is outside of the characters’ control, we have opportunities for bombshell revelations that provide the story structure. There are a couple of odd chapter endings, but Lewis knows what he’s doing, and can keep up the tension in a way that’s appropriate for the tone of the story. No wonder this book has become a classic.

[rotworld]

Voice and Style

an anon asked:

Do you have any tips for learning how to write in a different writing style?

and honestly i just went off the rails lmfao this is a long post, but hopefully it's useful. i wasn't 100% sure what you meant by style, but i assume you mean more along the lines of "voice" than the difference between like narrative, persuasive, etc. but let me know if you meant something else! what i'm going to do is 1) talk about voice in writing, 2) author voice vs character voice and examples, and 3) actually answer the question. i promise 1 and 2 are relevant to get to 3!

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to start we need to break down what "voice" is. this is a term that gets thrown around a lot when people talk about writing, and i've heard people get a little heated about it lol but i'll give my take at least. there are actually two kinds of voice: the writer's voice, and character voice. we'll start by focusing on the former.

describing an author's voice is tricky, because it's largely subjective. some parts of it are concrete and easy to analyze, while others are down to the author's personality, perspective, and life experience. while it is something that you continue to hone as you gain experience, it isn't something you can measure or "rank" comparatively. so...what the hell is it lol

if we boil it down to the simplest components, here's what i think goes into voice: tone, syntax, word choice, and perspective. this isn't all that voice is, but these are the fundamental building blocks, and the way you use them is a mix of personal preference/affinity, your level of experience as a writer, and who you are outside of writing.

->tone is often described as the "attitude" of your writing, the mood you evoke with a combination of the other components. in "twelve moments in the life of an artist," david sedaris recounts his struggles with an attempt at an art career and a meth addiction, simultaneously. the subject matter is difficult and emotionally distressing, but because it's sedaris writing it, it's fucking hilarious. it's funny because of the tone, the ridiculous statements he makes, the witty observations and the flippant way he describes things. someone else could write the same story and make it a dramatic tragedy, but sedaris' tone is one of humor.

->syntax is the way a writer constructs their sentences. i know this sounds boring lol but it can play a huge role in a writer's voice. when do you use long and complex sentences versus short and simple ones? do you use repetition, and for what purpose? when do you use active or passive voice? for example, "the monster bit him" vs "he was bitten by the monster." these sentences mean the same thing but have a subtle difference in where the focus is. these might seem like small, insignificant details, but they can drastically change how a work sounds. the rhythm of your writing also ties into syntax.

->word choice is just how it sounds: what words do you use when you write? are you more of a "purple prose" type who likes flowery, detailed descriptions, or are you more sparse and "beige?" do you use certain phrases of colloquialisms?

->perspective is straightforward, too. do you like or have a tendency for 1st, 2nd or 3rd person? there's some variation in 3rd person, too, like omniscient 3rd or close 3rd. i think a writer's strength and preference in this, as well as when they deviate, also contributes to their voice.

but what about character voice? this is kind of similar, but limited to specific characters and how you portray them. it includes their dialogue and word choice but also their perspective or worldview, their opinions, and their personality expressed by their interactions. it's the kind of thing that differentiates characters speaking even without a speech tag to label them. there might be really extreme differences between character voices and the author's voice, depending on the character.

i always feel kind of narcissistic using my own work as an example lmao but i think changeling is a good example, since each passage is super focused on a particular character and their perspective. in first person, or close 3rd like this, a character voice can come out in narration. huntress sounds like this:

The hunt ends. Her catch, meager. Still, she will not waste it. Wolf Mother travels far to see the meat put to good use.

She walks the crossroads, strange paths through the strange world. Sniffs out the road she needs and steps through thick fog. Darkness gives way to orange autumn haze. Eternal harvest season. Blackened corn rots on the stalk. Machinery rusts in the fields. Bloated animal bodies decay in old barns. It is sad and stifling, the stench of forgotten things. And there—the farmer’s son. Lopsided boy. He stands on his porch, wiping blood and grime from his hammer. Distrustful, he watches Wolf Mother. Above, a slow-turning weathervane creaks.

her sentences are often short and choppy. the unusual syntax (the hunt ends. her catch, meager) gives it a feeling like a feral stream of consciousness. rotten corn, machine rust and bodies decaying are visceral, smelly descriptions because her sense of smell is especially strong and she relies on it to interact with the world. in contrast, ghostface sounds like this:

He’s hanging around Haddonfield when She comes calling, because he doesn’t have a realm of his own. Oh, no, no, no, of course it’s not a problem. He doesn’t mind at all, honest! It’s just, you know, he’s real good at this whole ritualistic murder thing. Got a knack for it, you might say. He was something of a professional before he ever got brought on board with an impressive résumé spanning most of the continental United States—not that he’s bragging, of course. He’s just experienced, motivated, highly-organized, versatile, and frankly, overqualified.

this is almost conversational. he's "hanging around," he's "got a knack for it," like the way you talk to a friend. his narration has a very informal and emotive vocabulary. he talks about his skill at murdering people like he's at a job interview, and he's extremely arrogant. my hope, as the author, is that all of this comes across and you get a strong sense of these characters just from brief passages.

finally, we can go back to the original question lol how do you write in a different "style?" i think you have to analyze different styles and voices, and figure out what you're going for. do you want to write something dreamy and surreal, or more dry and sarcastic? what tone are you going for, and how can your usage of word choice, syntax and perspective help you attain it?

i'm giving you homework lmao track down your favorite book and try analyzing the author's voice. take some notes on the tone, and if it contrasts the subject matter or genre (is it cynical? is it nostalgic? is it a lighthearted, fairy tale-esque fantasy or a more somber, gothic one?). also pay attention to the word choice. how vivid or descriptive is the prose? does it evoke certain imagery or themes? (in kraken by china mieville, a story about a giant squid that goes missing from a museum and the chaos that follows, he uses a lot of water and squid metaphors.) use the elements of voice listed above as a checklist of things to look for. if there's a certain writer you want to emulate or take inspiration from, studying their work like this could help a lot.

one last thing: since we talked so much about voice, i want to ask why you want to change your style. you can ignore this part if you want lol this is just a pep talk and something i think is good to mention. if you want to focus on differentiating character voices, or trying out a new style for fun, that's awesome! you can and should experiment with style, but remember that your voice as a writer is something unique to you. it's not something that you have to fundamentally change. we can all learn from other writers and hone or refine our style, but i think who we are on a personal level affects our affinity for certain stylistic choices that form our voice.

for example, on a scale of purple to beige, i lean pretty lavender lmao but i'm not ashamed of that! i was influenced a lot by writers who have a (capital R) Romantic flair to their prose, so i like flowery language and descriptions of nature. if it gets too purple and "in the way" of the story, then sure, i might need to trim down certain passages. but my affinity and tendencies aren't something i'm going to get rid of altogether, rather something i'll practice so they're super polished. once you identify your voice, i think you should embrace it and roll with it.

[amysgiantbees]

I need to yell about the Witcher 3 or I’ll explode and I’ve already accidently deleted this once.

The Witcher 3 is enormously sexist. I hate on principle anything that has hard and fast rules according to sex, especially in fictional settings, considering that sex is a spectrum and a social construct to an extent. But Witcher’s only being men makes even less sense since the reason given why is that women are weaker. Which again, is awful and incorrect.

Moreover, all the druids I’ve seen are men, all the Witchers are men, sorcerers can be anyone. Men literally can be anything in the Witcher. Whereas not only are women’s options severely limited but they must deal with societal sexism along with that.

Furthermore, the Witcher is SO white. Not only does it make the character design very repetitive and dull but it’s difficult to distinguish between NPCs sometimes. As well as the obvious racism of wanting to explore fictional racism with elves and dwarves but balking at being anti-racist in the game’s design.

I could also deal without the fat jokes. It really shows that if these white men creating this don’t find historical accuracy edgy or titillating – like including rape and gore – they ignore it. Because from the time periods they were borrowing from there would be less makeup especially in war times, people – including women – would be much hairier, and plus size people would be seen as conventionally attractive. Being plus size meant that you were of a higher class and had the funds to overindulge and not work, and the rich have the time to shape and indulge in the trends. So, they are envied and emulated and seen as more attractive like they are now. Also, there were more people of colour in Europe – the place inspiring this setting – than the Witcher itself has. So, it’s confusing that the modern representation of something is less diverse than the historical setting.

The writers being uninterested in anything that does not relate to them is shown in Ciri’s relationships in the game. Ciri can be practically naked surrounded by other near naked women but her only option for initiating any romance is with a man. She is bisexual but it does seem like the writers would rather ogle than give even representation. Not that her concrete stating that she prefers women isn’t representation. But is confusing when there are two siblings that you can only kiss the male one.

The lack of they/them pronouns is awkward in the dialogue, making it very stilted and grating. As well as actively taking away suspense. I never believed for a second that Uma might be Ciri. Giralt could talk about it all he wanted to, but he kept referring to Uma as HE. So, it was obvious from the beginning that he was the elven man she’d been travelling with. Making the twist instantly ineffective.

Side note, I despise that woman all wear heals constantly. It just looks so bizarre. I can deal with some stylisation, or slightly less than practical travel wear. But stilettos in a swamp? There’s no way a sane person would. It just doesn’t work at all and actively brings me out of the narrative every time there’s a close-up of them.

Also, it is a real cop out that the writers won’t allow their “big strong manly protagonist” wear high drag, just Yen’s pants when the boys are having a night together. If he’s so masculine a dress shouldn’t change that.

The romances are embarrassing. Why does Triss shoot herself in the foot and “friend zone” herself by calling Ciri her little sister? You are interested in Geralt, so even if you don’t want a mother like relationship with Ciri a sisterly one is not particularly appropriate. Do you want Geralt to see you like a child? Considering how immature you can be – which I’ll get to – you’d think you’d try not to make him see you in a paternal, platonic, or just patronising way. It’s confusing why she pretends to be drunk at the party. For one it is very desperate and cringy. Secondly it is very inconsistent with the character that was just confidently taking charge of this mission. Thirdly, you’d think she’d want to show she’d change from lying to him previously *cough* from the inane plot contrivance so the previous game could happen *cough* by being completely honest with him now.

Yennifer on the other hand seems too often come across as more sexual fantasy than fleshed out character. Yennifer’s character is also inconstant. I’m wondering if these men have ever spoken to a woman before. She is motherly, protective, determined, no-nonsense, confident in her convictions and knows her own worth. She’s flawed too, scoffs at people’s cultural and religious practices. Which I wish she grew more from; she could have shown faith in Vesimere from the beginning when it came to his ritual with Uma to show she regrets the garden and interrupting the wake and is trying to be better. Or maybe seeing the usefulness of what Vesimere did could have led to a tender conversation with Geralt about how this has made her see that maybe she should have done some things differently, found a different place to cast the spell, spilt some blood for the goddess. A flawed character is a well-made character but here is where she seems more object than person. When she gets unnaturally angry at Geralt for not wanting sex. Like how dare you do not want to play with the toy that we created. To compare it to another RPG game Dragon Age has its faults but at least the player is always given the option, and never punished for not wanting sex in a romance. Otherwise, I quite like Triss, she kind of necessarily pulls Geralt’s head out her ass but sometimes she is a bit too mean, nut usually with context it’s understandable, I think. Also the unicorn is just gross, like not to yuck anyone’s yum, but it’s nasty. 

Also like if the general insensitivity and ignorance written into the game wasn’t there and there was more than two queer characters as far as I’ve seen, I would think that Elihal‘s portrayal could be nuanced in how gender and sexuality do not dictate gender expression. But considering the game as a whole their character feels very “look at this weirdo” “no homo”. Cowards. 

The ableism is also just abhorrent. They would likely argue that the ableism featured is historically accurate - which I’m not confident that’s true - but then don’t have any representation of visible disabilities or just a variety of disabilities that would be historically accurate. 

Also it’s just disappointing that you don’t get hang out with Triss and Kira at Kaer Morhen during the Uma quest. 

[aspoonofsugar]

Were there moments when you found a character disarmingly human? When you found a character shockingly harsh? When a character was both of these things? (I hope this isn’t a weird question. I’m just trying to reassess the expectations I bring in as a reader vs. the expectations actually set up by the author).—BSD Chat Anon

Hello again!

I think the concepts of “human” and “harsh” vary according to different people :). When it comes to me I have made two lists with characters I deeply love and I tried to explain why. What is more, I talked about characters in general here and I shared some thoughts here as well.

In short, I think that when you write a character in a story, the best thing you can do to make them human is ironically to schematize them by giving them a flaw and an objective. I personally think that in this way, as your story become more complex, so do the characters. In some cases, the schematic flaw you gave them in the beginning might become more layered and difficult to pintpoint and to describe through words. After choosing a flaw, I think one can work on a more superficial characterization (the way they look, likes, dislikes, hobbies, abilities, etc.). I think it is great when this characterization ties with the flaw they will have to overcome and is coherent with it. Alternatively, it can be used to better shape the plot (for example, if you have a character who will have to fight, you should give them some fighting capabilities; if they must solve puzzle in a sci-fic world they can be given knowledge of technology, etc.). If you must write a story with comical undertones, you can write different characters to embody different kinds of irony or comedy and so on. Finally, you can add motifs to make their journeys more symbolic.

All in all, I also think that everyone likes different characters and may have different ways to write their own characters. That is also why the characters made by an author can be recognizable and be all similar somehow, even if they may appear completely different on the surface.

Finally, to better answer your question, I will talk about four characters I have not mentioned in previous lists.

1) Claire Stanfield (Baccano)

I love Claire. He is very interesting both meta-narratively and as far as his characterization is concerned. All in all, he seems to me as a child who can’t grow because of his incredible talent at everything. As a matter of fact, he acts according to a simplified vision of the world and to child-logic. However, because of his abilities, he never meets real struggles, which could truly let him change this perspective, so he does not mature. An other insteresting aspect is that, all in all, what Claire wants is really simple. He wants to be good at his job, no matter if it is assassination or being a conductor or a circus artist. He wants to help his family and to build a new one with a woman he loves. These are such normal things that it is funny how he is able to twist them in something amazing because of his personality.

2) Chuuya (BSD)

I started loving him because of the episodes in season 3, where his background is revealed. I love his inner struggle concerning Arahabaki and how he hides a very frail sense of self behind a flashy exterior. Fifteen offers us a very good explanation of why he became who he currently is and showed that he is a pretty layered character with different issues tangled in an identity crisis. What is more, I love how different details in his design, like the gloves and the hat, find deep and meaningful explanations in his background. It is the kind of characterization that I love. Finally, I find his relationship with Dazai potentially very interesting because of how conflictual and contradictive it is.

3) Soren and Claudia (The Dragon Prince)

They are my current obsession. I think they are very well written characters and they have the merit to be very well-rounded and easy to use in multiple contexts (for comedy, for plot, for character moments, etc.). I also think they are a good example of how a generic exterior attribute can be linked to something deeper within the character. As a matter of fact, Soren is a crown-guard and his talent lies in combat. Claudia is instead a prodigy in dark magic. It is clear that such talents make so that the siblings have different methods to face problems and can contribute to the plot in different ways. However, their respective abilities are nothing more than a concrete projection of their flaws. Soren’s ability in fighting is symbolic of his need to prove his strength, while Claudia’s talent in Dark magic represents her refusal of loss and of conflict. At the same time, these two internal problems are also connected to the way Soren and Claudia’s parents treated them. Soren’s unhealthy desire to prove himself is born by his father’s lack of love. Claudia’s refusal of conflict is born by her parents’ divorce, which resulted in her mother’s abandonment. As you can see, they clearly end up as pretty layered characters because of how everything in their characterization is coherent.

When it comes to them as singular characters, I would say that I love how the story lets Soren show more of his intelligence without changing the core of his character. The intelligence he shows in season three is mostly emotional and is rooted in his warm personality. In a sense, he makes good use of qualities he had always shown, but that were underused because he was too focused trying to prove his worth through his strength. I especially liked that he showed that his talent as a crown-guard did not lie in his physical strength, but rather in his ability to protect the king. Throughout season 3, he protects Ezran physically, but also emotionally to an extent. For example, he makes sure that Ez, after escaping prison, has his favourite food and that he is given the means to reach the people he would want to meet the most.

As far as Claudia is concerned, her flaw is an extremely interesting one. As a matter of fact the traits, which lead to her spiral are the same which can save her aka her love and loyalty for her loved ones, coupled with her hate for conflict. It is really interesting to see how the narrative twists these attributes and shows how they can be detrimental. This is conveyed pretty beautiful especially because, since the beginning, Claudia’s character is a well made mixture of cute and terrifying. You can spot chilling traits, but they are well camouflaged by her likability and good intentions. Finally she has a spot in my heart because she is a dynamic example of air-headed genius (aka one of my favourite tropes). It is good to see a character like her receive a pretty complex and dynamic arc.

5) Agathe Arkrome (Witch Hat Atelier)

I love her! She is a pretty well made example or rival/deuteragonist character. She has extremely obvious flaws (she wants to be the best to the point where she can willingly and unwillingly hurt others), but she also quickly displays likable traits and starts developing a very interesting relationship with the lead. I think that this relationship has the potential to truly become interesting as the story progresses and I can see it both becoming deeper, but also more conflictual. I would love to write more about her, but I am waiting for her story to delve more into her past, so that her character can be explored more!

Thank you for the ask!

[bladekindeyewear]

Reading Homestuck^2 as of Page 28.  I’m glad we’re resolving the lack of conversations between these two, it’s really working well so far.  > ==>

So we’re calling this a “prattle”, huh?

I’m not sure how to describe everything that’s going on here, this playful skip of depicting actions by narrating them intentionally, but I like it somehow.

Some stuff about ABBA, too, not that I’d get it as I don’t really music.

Hm, interesting discussion about these capsules.

DIRK: But beyond that, they're a convenient and effective means of subtle psychic suggestion at a distance. TEREZI: 1T DO3SNT S33M 4LL TH4T SUBTL3 TO M3 DIRK: Well no, it's not. DIRK: At least, not for us right now. DIRK: But that's because your presence as a guiding influence has been revealed. DIRK: Earlier, when I hadn't realized you were there, it was more difficult to discern.

Yep, setting up mechanics for us to play with later.  This is nice.

DIRK: That's what you get for nosing around in our secret storeroom. DIRK: I'd ask you not to contaminate the ectobiological equipment with your own genetic material, but, TEREZI: Y34H TOO L4T3, SORRY >:|

Dammit, that’s right.  You’re seeding a whole damn planet and time-traveling forward somehow so you can hijack a session, right?  I can’t see the game treating you kindly for that sort of indiscretion.

Eugh, creepy.  Terezi can still be controlled directly, and she knows it.  And there’s shit he wants to hide from her.  Euugh.

(Is it John’s corpse or something?)

> Dirk: Get this show on the road.

A “N31GH” code, huh?  Good taste, Terezi.  Very character-appropriate.

Rose is feeling ominous about getting this started, huh?  She should.

ROSEBOT: But if I had to describe it, I'd say that misgivings, hunches, doubts and so on are supported on a foundation of un-knowing. ROSEBOT: And along with that absence of knowledge comes a commensurate feeling of dread or worry. Fear about the potential calamity yet to come.

Hmm.  (Trying to parse anything meaningful besides the obvious, and Rose going for a Homestucky start-of-adventure paragraph.)

ROSEBOT: As though in this moment, luck isn't either strictly real or not real, or somewhere inbetween, but absent of meaning completely. ROSEBOT: Luck took one look at our itinerary from here on out and said you'll just have to go on without me. DIRK: Luck rolled over the other side of the dictionary and said not tonight sweetheart, I've got a wicked fuckin' headache. ROSEBOT: Exactly. ROSEBOT: Except now I'm the one with the migraine.

Mhmm.  Because what you’re trying to accomplish isn’t gonna work out the way you think it is, but that fact’s actually quite possibly a good thing for you and everyone else.  Hard to put that in a cut-and-dry good or bad, isn’t it?

> ==>

DIRK: We scanned for Sburban technology, so we know for sure this is the right planet. Wheels are already in motion and all that.

Huh.  I guess if you found the right planet to use, it WOULD already have the tech paradoxically seeded on it, wouldn’t it?

ROSEBOT: It's like the notion I was trying to describe was so conceptually insubstantial, so resistant to concrete definition within any meaningful frame of reference, that even thinking about it as an idea made *me* somehow existentially unsound. ROSEBOT: And not in the way I used to always feel, back before John made the choice to validate our canonical existences axiomatically. ROSEBOT: Foreboding I can deal with. I'm a Seer. Sooths are mine to say. ROSEBOT: But this is different.

Perhaps “Void”, but in the less “misfortune” sense?

Hm.

(Did the heroes bring Roxy on the other ship? I fucking hope I don’t have to go a whole adventure without any more Roxy.  Or fun Void heroes, anyway.  ...Crap.  We’re going to get new characters. That’s right.)

Despite what she thinks, little by little Rose begins to feel her head clear of concern, semantically dubious or otherwise. Her understanding of my ascended existence doesn't include this degree of metanarrative potency, so her doubts as to my words' healing powers are understandable.

Fuck you. Fuck you. FUCK. YOU.

You’re taking this otherwise smart, wonderful character and systematically BEATING OUT OF HER the ability to question her circumstances or doubt her path with a narrative stick.  You’re killing everything that is her, robbing her completely of her will as your title implies.  I don’t like seeing Rose vividly, constantly KILLED at the will level.  I wonder if it’s going to STOP anytime before even the halfway point of this story.

...Heh. “Chaotic-lawful”.  Hehehe. (Or H3h3h3, rather.)

As you know, I have many splinters. So many, I used to find it overwhelming to contemplate them all. Depressing, actually. It was a feeling I could never escape from. The feeling that my sense of self was limitless. That I was forced to exist as a small facet of my own potential, while drowning in an ocean of my greater persona, and all the terrible things I was fully capable of. I was trapped as a limited version of myself who was still burdened by the concern for what it meant to be good, struggling to keep himself from drowning in an overwhelming body of potential which had no concern for human morality whatsoever.

Hmmmmmm.

But that struggle finally ended a few years ago. My head isn't fighting to stay above the water anymore. There isn't even a metaphorical head to speak of. I'm only the water now.

Right, the Ultimate Self.  Essentially encompassing and accessing your whole Heart at once, every disparate definition of yourself pulled together.

(Which makes it even more throw-up disgusting that Rose is currently achieving this same state and STILL being enslaved by Dirk.  He’s not just enslaving Rose, he’s enslaving ALL of Rose, the entire concept she represents.  And deluding her utterly in the process.)

> ==>

DIRK: What's that noise I'm hearing. DIRK: It sounds a little bit like a cat being caught in a ventilation fan. A sort of... DIRK: Inhuman screeching, combined with the grinding of metal. DIRK: Are we even going to make it to the ground? ROSEBOT: Oh, no, ROSEBOT: The ship's fine as far as I can tell. ROSEBOT: That's just Terezi laughing. DIRK: Oh. DIRK: She's... enjoying this, isn't she.

Pfffffff.  :)

> ==>

Nothing familiar about this planetary body, far as I can tell.

Ah, that “to be continued...” was pretty hard to see.  Guess that’s it for now!

This is definitely going to be fun, if still at least 30% soul-crushing.  It really is really, really hard to see Rose like this, at his mental-manipulating mercy.  Luckily -- if we can even call it luck -- we probably will see very little comparatively of Dirk’s party, and more onscreen of the others in the Hero party or whichever new... humans? (Hybrids even, maybe, if Dirk’s especially ambitious?) ..make up this session’s players.

And I’ll be blogging the whole way through, I suppose.  See you then!

[marginalgloss]

the red telephone

The thing about Control is that I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where I’ve felt such a vast difference between a game’s artistic and technical quality and its total lack of thematic and narrative depth. 

There is a good case for saying that this oughtn’t to be a problem. It’s long been the case that if a video game is entertaining enough, any further ‘depth’ (by the standards established by other media) is unnecessary. This is why we don’t much care if the story isn’t good in Doom. The sense of being there and doing the thing is enough. But Doom isn’t drawing on influences bigger than itself. Clearly it’s been influenced by a variety of things — from Dungeons and Dragons to heavy metal album covers and Evil Dead and everything in between — but Doom is not referential, and it’s not reverential. Doom is complete unto itself. Control is not complete.

Horror films and ghost stories and weird fiction are best when they are about things. Think about The Turn of the Screw and The Thing and Twin Peaks and Candyman, to pick a few examples off the top of my head. They work not just because what we see and hear and read is mysterious. They are compelling because they have intriguing characters and thematic resonance. The Babadook is not just a story about a monster from a book for children. Night of the Living Dead isn’t just about, you know, the living dead. By comparison I find it hard to say that Control is about anything, but it presents itself as adjacent to this kind of work. It is a magnificent exercise in style which trades in empty symbols. It wraps itself in tropes from weird fiction in the hope of absorbing meaning by osmosis.

It feels like a wasted opportunity, because the setup is not without interest. You play as Jesse Faden, a woman supposedly beginning her first day on the job at the Federal Bureau of Control, a mysterious government organisation that deals in high-level paranormal affairs. The FBC is a feast of architectural and environmental detail: a vast Brutalist office complex with an interior that seems to be stranded in time somewhere around the mid-1980s. Everything is concrete and glass and reel-to-reel machines and terminal workstations. It’s frequently stunning.

Unfortunately most of the staff are missing because Jesse’s visit to their headquarters coincides with a massive invasion by the Hiss, a paranormal force which has taken over the building. The Hiss is a sort of ambient infection that turns people into mindless spirit-drones, chanting in an endless Babel. (Conveniently, most of those drones are present as angry men with guns. There are also zombies, and flying zombies, for variety.)

There is, obviously, more to Jesse than meets the eye. She spends a lot of time talking to someone nobody else can see. But there isn’t that much more to her. Like every other character in the game she is a monotone. There is no reason to believe she has any existence outside the plot devised for her here. Similarly, the other characters you meet exist only as the lines they speak to you. It works only when the effect is entirely, deliberately flat: the most compelling person in the game is Ahti, the janitor with a sing-song voice and a near-indecipherable Finnish accent. He is nothing but what he is — he has no past, no future. He has all the answers, if only you knew what questions to ask.

Control is undeniably stylish. The interiors are striking, vast, spacious. Even on the smallest scale the game has a great eye for little comic interactions via systemised physics. You can shoot individual holes in a boardroom table and watch the thing splinter apart into individual fragments. You can shoot a rolodex and watch all the little cards whirl around in a spiral. If a projector is showing a film you can pick the whole thing up and the film will reveal itself as an actual dynamic projection by spiralling and spinning madly across the nearest walls. (Speaking of film, the video sequences with live actors are great fun, and this being a Remedy game, there’s a fantastic show-within-a-show to be found on hidden monitors around the FBC.) And all of this before I mention the sound design — the music, which is full of concrète mechanical shrieks and groans — and the endless sinister chanting which fills the lofty corridors and hallways of this place, The Oldest House. 

All of this is very, very good. And most of the time it’s quite fun to play. I mean, you can pick up a photocopier and fling it at enemies. It’s never not fun when almost anything can be used as a projectile. And then you get the ability to fly! At its best the combat in Control feels messy and chaotic — in a good way — but in a way that has little to do with typical video game gunplay. Staying behind cover doesn’t work because the only way to regain health is to pick up little nuggets dropped by fallen enemies, so most of the time you have to use your powers to be incredibly aggressive. The result is that often you feel like the end-of-level boss — a kind of monster — throwing yourself into conflict with a team of moderately stupid players who think they’re supposed to be playing a cover shooter circa 2005. 

That you are given a gun at all seems odd. The gun feels like a compromise. The gimmick of a single modular pistol that can shape-change into a handful of other weapons is neat, but those weapons are just uninteresting variations on the same old themes: handgun, shotgun, machine gun, sniper, rocket launcher. The powers are more interesting and powerful. But of course the gun has to be there; can you imagine them having to go out and sell this game without a gun in it? What would Jesse be holding on the front cover? 

A gun is an equaliser. It evens the odds between the weak and the strong. But if you’re already strong it doesn’t feel worthwhile. You’re clearly so much more powerful than everyone else you meet in Control that after a while you begin to wonder why the game is also frequently quite hard. The omission of any difficulty settings is notable in a game of this type; it suggests that the developers were committed to their vision in the way that might recall Dark Souls. In fact the hub-like structure of the game is pretty clearly influenced by From Software’s games, and though it’s nowhere near as challenging, it seems to be reaching towards the same kind of thing.

It’s a game which demands you take it seriously as a crafted object. But then it has all these other elements cribbed from elsewhere — the generic level-based enemies with numbers that fly off them when shot, and the light peppering of timed/semi-randomised side activities, both of which made me think of Destiny. So there’s games-as-service stuff wedged in here too, and it doesn’t sit at all comfortably with this supposedly mysterious, compelling world that you’re supposed to want to explore.

This isn’t a horror game. There are one or two enemies with the potential to induce jump scares, but given that you can always respond with overwhelming force, it’s never really unsettling. But it’s clearly been inspired by horror. A source often mentioned as an inspiration for Control is the internet horror stories associated with the SCP Foundation wiki. From there the game borrows the idea that unlikely everyday objects can become sources of immense cosmic power — hence we see items like a rubber duck, a refrigerator, a pink flamingo, a coffee thermos imprisoned behind glass as if they were Hannibal Lecter. A pull-cord light switch becomes an inter-dimensional portal to an otherworldly motel. The great part about this is that these little stories can be told effectively in isolation; it’s always interesting to come across another object in the game and to discover what it does. (The fridge is especially unpleasant.)

But experiencing this kind of thing in the context of an action game is entirely different to stumbling it on it online. SCP Foundation is pretty well established now, but still, there’s a certain thrill in stumbling across something written there in plain text, titled with only a number. When those stories are good, they can be really good. Given the relative lack of context, and the absence of any graphical set-dressing, there’s room for your imagination to do the heavy lifting. 

In Control these fine little stories are competing for attention with all the other crazy colourful stuff going on in the background. You read a note and you move on to the next thing. You crash through a pack of enemies and the numbers fly off them. There’s never a sense of the little story fitting into an overall pattern. That lack of a pattern can be forgiven in the context of a wiki. In Control, these stories start to feel irrelevant when you never come across an enemy you can’t shoot in the face. In a different format, or a different type of game, this kind of rootless narrative might be more compelling. 

But what is this game about? There’s a sister and brother. A sinister government agency. Memories, nostalgia. A slide projector. It’s all so difficult to summarise. When I think about the game all these words seem to float around in my head, loosely linked, but not in a way that suggests any kind of coherence. The game always seems to be reaching towards some kind of meaning but it only ever feels hollow. It feels flat. Yet all the elements that are good about Control must be made to refer back to these hollow, flat signifiers. Sometimes the flatness works for the game, but mostly it doesn’t.

Today, it’s hard to see that anyone could see the point in establishing a website like SCP Foundation if it didn’t already exist. Viral media is not what it was in the first decade of the 2000s. Written posts that circulate on social media have a shorter half-life than ever. It’s almost impossible for any piece of writing over a few hundreds words to go viral in ways that go beyond labels like ‘shocking’, ‘controversial’, ‘important’, etc. ‘Haunting’ and ‘uncanny’ don’t quite cut it. This kind of thing doesn’t edge into public spaces in the way it used to via email inboxes, or message boards, or blogs. 

Perhaps the weird stuff is still out there. Perhaps we only got better at blocking it out. With the arrival of any new viral content, today’s audience is mostly consumed by questions of authenticity, moral quality, and accuracy. If you think this creepy story might be ‘real’, you’re a mug. If you promote it you might be a dangerous kind of idiot. And that’s fair: there are a lot of dangerous idiots out there. Yet there’s something to be said for an attitude of persistent acceptance when it comes to the consumption of weird stuff on the internet. I know I become gluttonous when I come upon such things. I want to say: yes, it’s all true, every word. I’ve always known it’s all true. 

[sweetsmellosuccess]

The Sátántangó Experience

How exactly does one prepare to watch a 7.5 hour film? A bit like what you might do in preparation for major surgery: Pack a bag of necessities (in this case, water and protein bars), kiss your loved ones goodbye, and try to make peace with your god. Or, maybe less dramatically, treat it as you would a long train journey, one that takes you through some harrowing terrain on half a rutted track before depositing you to your eventual destination.

Of course, this sort of conception of time is entirely relative: If you have to drive somewhere that takes half an hour, it feels unduly long; but if the trip were normally three hours long, and you somehow found a shortcut that would cut the time down to 30 minutes, you would be flying on dulcet wings for that amount of time, and think you were blessed by angels. In other words, spending an entire standard work day watching one film might seem excessive, but it all has to do with your expectations.

In my case, I was at Philadelphia’s newly renovated Lightbox Theater at the University of the Arts to take in Béla Tarr’s magnum opus Sátántangó, all glorious 450 minutes, in a new 4K restoration (it’s currently playing at select theaters across the country). Armed with my snack survival kit, and safe in the knowledge that we would get intermissions at roughly 2.5 hour intervals, I settled in to watch what has been described as a masterpiece in cinephile circles, and currently resides at number 36 in the most recent Sight & Sound critics’ poll.

Tarr’s beyond-bleak film is broken up into 12 segments, each having to do with a failing farmer’s cooperative in Hungary during the last throes of communism in the late ‘80s. Each section has its own feel and perspective  —  some of them are more lighthearted, others are desolate beyond measure  —  but all expertly shot in low-contrast black and white (by Gábor Medvigy), which renders the people and landscape in various tones of drudgery grey.

It originally opened in America as part of the 1994 New York film festival, at a time when Hungary was undergoing a transformation from Communism to shaky democratic capitalism, so it served as a kind of epigraph to the era, a showcase, as it were, as to the imperfections of a political system built on a promise of human egalitarianism that proved to be depressingly difficult to put into practice.

The landscape makes up a lot of Tarr’s vision, the flat, moody farmland upon which the collective has been toiling, and the unceasing rain and wind that constantly pelts the characters as they venture outside for one business or another. As the film opens, the collective  —  made up of three couples; a curious “doctor” (Peter Berling), who spends his time spying on the others, making copious notes in his stacks of file folders, and daily drinking his considerable body weight in Palinka (Hungarian plum brandy); and the cagey Futaki (Miklos Szekely B.), who has to walk with a cane from an unspecified accident, but seems a bit more shrewd than the others  —  is anxiously awaiting their annual wages, which come all at once and is meant to get divvied up amongst the members equally.

Early on, there are various halfcocked plans from individuals to try and steal the small fortune for themselves, reflected in much idle talk about meeting that evening and decamping for parts unknown, but that ultimately come to nothing. However, when word reaches the group that the mysterious Irimiás (Mihály Vig, also the film’s composer) is, in fact, not dead as they had been told, but alive, and returning to the collective he started, the group dynamic is thrown akimbo, with various members fretting for their future, and, one, the owner of the local bar (Zoltán Kamondi), furious at the thought his business will be taken from him. 

Just why they respond like this remains vague. In ensuing segments, we see Irimiás, along with his associate, Petrina (Dr. Putyi Horvath), navigating through a police interview  —  where the local Captain informs them they will be working for him now in ways unspecified  —  though it appears the collective had very actively planned on not having to include their former leader (and his right-hand man) in their financial arrangements. As for the non-collective characters, including the aforementioned barkeep, and various prostitutes sitting idly around, the collective is virtually their only business, such as it is, so they, too, await this potential flood of cash eagerly.

As the segments begin to collect, they also begin to fold upon themselves: Scenes that we see from one vantage point in an earlier segment are revisited later on, from the perspective of a different character, enabling a thrilling moment of realization that the stream of time we’re following has breaks, jumps, and hiccoughs throughout. Never more poignantly than a moment with a young girl peering into a window of the bar  —  one of the only lit buildings in the otherwise dismally dark countryside  —  watching the adults inside drunkenly dancing and cavorting.

About that girl. Easily the most emotional moment of the film involves her, but not first without the audience paying a heavy price, depending on your empathy for other creatures. Before the film screened, during its introduction, we were made aware that there was a scene of animal cruelty involving a cat somewhere in the proceedings. The sympathetic presenter, himself a cat lover, suggested looking away for parts of that segment, though a friend of mine in attendance who had seen it before assured me looking away wasn’t really an option. Fortunately, he also told me that the cat in question wasn’t actually hurt, and was still alive at the time of a 2012 interview with Tarr.

Needless to say, my worry about this poor cat dominated my experience in the early going: Every time I saw a feline in the background of a scene, I worried that it was coming up, such that it was almost a relief when it finally happened. The situation is this: Estike (Erica Bók), the young daughter of one of the local prostitutes, caught up in her world of half-fantasies after being sent out of their apartment by her working mother, holes up in an attic with a grey tabby. At first, she pets and cuddles him, but eventually, she desires to control him, bend the cat to her will. To the cat’s increasing discomfort and fury, she grabs him by the front paws and rolls around with him, all the while muttering how she alone can determine its fate. Looping up the poor fellow in a net bag and hanging it from a post, she goes downstairs to mix a batch of milk with some rat poison powder and force feeds him until he dies (though in actuality merely tranquilized).

Wandering around the farm that night with the stiffened body of the cat tucked under her arm (a prosthetic, the director assures us), Estike runs into the doctor, shuffling outside to refill his giant jug of brandy, shortly after peering through the window of the bar. Eventually, she lies down amongst the deserted crumble of a bomb-blasted church and takes the poison herself.

As gruesome as the segment becomes, its haunting evocations permeate the rest of the film (though not immediately: in a jarring juxtaposition, the very next segment takes us back to the bar, where everyone is still dancing wildly about to a loopy accordion refrain —  only towards the end of this extended scene do we see the face of the soon-to-be-dead Estike peering inside). Eventually, Irimiás does indeed return, in time to give a moving eulogy for Estike, while at the same time transitioning the group towards his next vision, a new farm some distance away where he assures them they can finally live freely and thrive. All he needs to achieve this goal for them is the money they just received from their previous year’s efforts.

With nowhere else to go, and no other plan on the horizon, the members of the collective dutifully deposit their wages on the table in front of their leader. He sends them out to pack their things so that they may meet with him in a couple of days at the new farm he’s selected.

Gathering their miserable belongings, the group reassemble and trudge down the muddy road on foot, as the rain pelts down on them without ceasing. Distressingly, the members don’t have any proper rain coats  —  in an earlier soliloquy in the bar, Kráner (János Derszi) laments that his leather coat is so old and stiff he has to bend it in order to sit down  —  so they wear their woolen winter coats, which do little to keep them from getting soaked in the heavy fall rains.

As they make their way to this new destination, it’s clear that Irimiás is up to something. Most obviously, he could make off with their wages and move on, but it turns out his scheme is less direct than just taking their hard-earned money for himself.

Towards the second half, Tarr’s penchant for long, elegantly composed shots gives gradually away to more adventurous camerawork, including a single steadicam shot in the woods that’s like something out of a Sam Raimi film. There are extensive elliptical shots with the camera spinning slowly on an axis, this particular effect never more effective than when after the group arrives at their new farm, yet another dilapidated series of box-like concrete buildings. Once they dump their belongings and lie on the floor of the unheated, broken-windowed main house, trying to sleep, our narrator makes one of his occasional VO appearances to describe in intimate detail the dreams each character is having.

It’s a shot that could have served as an excellent final salvo, one would imagine. Indeed, by the last hour of this opus, time and again, Tarr arrives at what might be considered a conclusive moment  —  in this, the confusion is aided by his particular style: It turns out many films end on a superbly composed, static long shot  —  only to keep the narrative flowing, circling back, eventually to the original farm, where the doctor, having just returned from a stint in a hospital, begins to narrate, again, the original opening lines. Such is the perfection in this device (the segment is titled “The Circle Closes”) that once you finally arrive there, it’s clear there could be no other ending that would have sufficed.

When finally the film ended, it was later in the evening. I met up with my compatriots also in attendance, and the three of us ventured back out into the city, heading to a bar where we could nurse a beer and attempt to articulate the tangled mass of feelings and impressions of the previous nine hours. In one of the very few bars in the city that still allows smoking, appropriately enough, we debated about the film in an atmosphere swirling with the poisonous fumes of an earlier era. It seemed hopeless, but still necessary, somehow; like bidding farewell to someone already in a coma.

[animebw]

Binge-Watching: Carole & Tueday, Episodes 19-21

In which a lot of things happen all at once, but the flaws in the second half’s writing become impossible to ignore.

Crashing Down

I am having trouble figuring out how to talk about these episodes.

That’s not a new occurrence on this blog. The peril of writing about art is that every so often, you won’t be able to figure out how to put concrete words to the abstract, intangible experience it leaves you with. Honestly, I’m surprised I haven’t been confounded in this way more often. But there’s a hell of a lot that goes down in this penultimate stretch of Carole & Tuesday, and it’s left me feeling... very weird about how to process it all. There are some huge emotional culminations for multiple characters here, big leaps forward in the overarching plot, an overall sense of dominoes cascading as the dam finally breaks and everything rushes inevitably toward the climax. This should be the big, explosive bombshell that really kicks Carole & Tuesday into high gear. But for a series of events that should have left me saying “Oh shit!”, the actual feeling I more came away with was, “Oh.” I’m not really sure I would call them bad, because I don’t think they are, but they’re definitely emblematic of the awkward, uncertain feeling that’s been dragging this second half down. And there are few harder reactions to write about than uncertainty. Give me something I love or hate, I can fill out pages talking about it. Give me something where I’m not quite sure where on that spectrum I fall, and I’ll struggle to compose a single paragraph.

So what’s going on here? Why has Carole & Tuesday’s second half felt so off to me? Is it that we’ve introduced weighty, topical political themes to a show that was previously content to be wholesome and simple? Maybe, but it’s been executing those ideas well enough; Watanabe’s smart enough to acknowledge that the people pushing for the most aggressive, tyrannical anti-terrorism measures are often those who profit the most from terrorism’s presence in the first place. Is it my discomfort with Watanabe’s episodic style creeping back in? I’m sure that’s part of it, but it’s not like the first half was a perfectly structured linear narrative either. And the songs certainly aren’t getting worse, so that can’t be it either. Something a lot more abstract is going wrong here, something far less related to the actual content of the story and far more related to the mechanics of how that story is told. And looking at it from a broader perspective, I think I might have an idea of what my issue is:

Carole & Tuesday’s second half is doing a really ineffective job of establishing setup and payoff.

Planting and Payoff

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the concept of setup and payoff to some extent, so I won’t waste much time elaborating on it. Suffice to say, most elements in stories work best when you can tell where they’re coming from and what effect they leave behind. It’s the classic Chekov’s Gun principle: if you tell your audience there’s a gun on the wall, they’re gonna expect that gun to be fired before everything’s over. And what’s kneecapping Carole & Tuesday’s second half is that it’s consistently flubbing either the setup of the payoff. It’s either not firing the gun on the wall, or it’s forgetting to tell us about the gun until it’s almost time to fire it. As a result, instead of events feeling like they’re leading somewhere, we’re getting stuck in narrative cul-de-sacs, doing loops without going anywhere until suddenly we’re on an entirely different road than the one we were on before. Angela’s stalker subplot doesn’t see to have any impact on her character once it’s finally resolved; Black Knight could have been axed from the story without changing anything about the direction she goes in, and it ends up feeling like a waste of time. And once that’s done we’re right back to digging into Angela’s difficult, borderline abusive relationship with her mom, except then it charges right into a huge emotional climax for that arc, and it’s like the story realized it forgot about that subplot for seven episodes and decided to overcompensate by rushing right to the big moment.

Carole, meanwhile, runs into similar issues with her reunion with her former refugee friend Amar, now a politically incendiary rapper named Ezekiel. At the very least, Carole’s past has been built up enough that Ezekiel doesn’t feel like he comes out of nowhere, but it is a little weird that we’re only just now learning about this person who apparently was Carole’s only friend in that refugee camp. I suppose I wouldn’t mind that much, but then I think back to all the time we spent getting to know Carole’s father in episodes 13 and 14 and I realize; we haven’t spent a single moment thinking about him since he left back for prison, so why the hell was he even there? Dan’s presence in this story hasn’t had any noticeable impact on Carole after his setup, so he could have easily been cut without changing anything important, and that time could have been spent doing a little more setup for Ezekiel. He could still enter the story at this point, but maybe we learn more about him in flashbacks from Carole, or Carole notices him earlier and it’s a longer wait until they finally re-connect but that tension is always there? Because as is, it feels like Carole’s father got too much focus for the small impact he had, while Ezekiel didn’t get enough focus for the large impact he had, and he’s already dead by the time we’re just starting to care about him (I think? It was a little unclear). It’s poor time management on the show’s part, and I say this as someone who knows painfully well what poor time management looks like.

Song For the World

So where does that leave us when all i said and done? Well, it leaves us much like the characters of the show itself: conflicted, uncertain how to proceed, and staring down the gaping maw of a world that feels like it’s slipping more and more into darkness. Angela’s just been hit with a bomb that Dhalia isn’t her real mom, and the revelation that her years of playing the perfect child slave to someone she wasn’t even born to has sent her spiraling into pills and despair. Spencer is determined to stop his mother’s political scorched-earth campaign no matter the cost. The emotionless Tao, who apparently is responsible for why the AI in this show is so humanlike in behavior- he figured if he could recreate human emotion in machines, he might be able to understand it better- has run afoul of the space fascists, and he’s decided to tear the whole damn system down using all the technical know-how stored in his head. And then there’s Carole and Tuesday, who respond to the increasingly difficult situation the only way they know how: resolving to share their music with the world and hoping they can shine a light in the darkness by doing so.

Naive? Possibly. But despite its faults in the narrative department, this show hasn’t lost a single ounce of its ability to make you believe in the power of music. Ezekiel’s incendiary hip-hop tirades against immigrant oppression, Angela’s epic showmanship as the exerts ownership over her life in the midst of Ertegun’s ridiculously hammy comeback, the hauntingly beautiful song Carole and Tuesday sing in the church as a requiem for all they’ve lost... whenever this show just shuts up and lets the music do the talking, all my complaints just fade away. It can get you hyped as hell and jamming along to epic pop orchestrations, or it can transport a crowd of thousands of concert-goers to the intimate, quiet comforts of Carole’s apartment at dawn. As long as it can keep leaning on the power of those songs in the final stretch, I think it’ll turn out okay. Just one more session to go now, Carole and Tuesday. Don’t let me down now.

Odds and Ends

-”We could try some stage banter.” As much as I would love to see you embarrass yourselves, maybe save that for another time,

-Woof, for this to be the first time Tuesday sees snow...

-”Ah, it’s on fire!” TUESDAY YOU FUCKING DISASTER I LOVE YOU

-”We were friends in the facility. Not in a romantic way.” THANK GOD FOR THAT

-”They treat us like we’re criminals when we’ve done nothing wrong. They want to silence us.” Yyyyep.

-And there’s Carole pushing her anxieties aside and pretending to be over them again. Eesh.

-Okay Carole’s birthday is on Christmas which means Tuesday can get her two celebrations in one and no it’s fine I didn’t need my heart today why do you ask

-Today in Tuesday Accidentally Commits Microaggressions Against Her Girlfriend: Santa was never much comfort to the poor and disenfranchised.

Wow, this show went by fast, huh? See you next time for the finale of Carole & Tuesday!

[crystalelemental]

While I’m busy annoying fans of Genealogy with my general disinterest in its cast, here are some other characters I have strong opinions about:

Sigurd’s not nearly as interesting as people make him out to be.  The main action leading to him being branded a traitor was super avoidable and his squire even points out that he’s making a mistake.  His “romance” with Deirdre is one of the most shallow things the series has produced, and literally none of the awful events of Act 2 would’ve happened if he had just kept it in his pants.  His actions during the war are made with good intentions that often lead to further conflict, but most of the critical actions that cause disaster were super avoidable and complete his fault.  Good job, moron.

Arvis is also a putz.  Look, I get it.  His entire point is that he’s trying to build the world for the better, but is highly questionable in his means.  Cool concept!  Problem is we spend like no time with him, and the only indications of this are his discussions with Manfroy, where he talks about how he’s not going to persecute them like in ages past, but he’s also definitely not going to let them revive the baby eating god they worship.  Okay, solid.  The issue is, he knows full well he carries Loptyr blood, and that’s why Manfroy is sticking around.  And suddenly, Manfroy appears with some lady with amnesia, and is oddly insistent on you fucking this woman and having kids.  Did...did you never think about who this woman was, or why Manfroy’s so invested in her sex life?  This is not a difficult conclusion to reach, buddy.

I mentioned Eldigan, but it bears repeating: I hate the Camus archetype, and he’s one of the most annoying.  “I am honor-bound to follow my lord’s every command, I cannot join you and must instead try to get them to see reason.”  Yeah, and you know who else had this exact dilemma like two chapters ago?  Jamke.  Guess who’s on our side now, after realizing how fucked up his king was?  Jamke.  There’s no reason you couldn’t do this too.  Honestly, every time the Camus archetype shows up for a leader who is a complete buffoon, I always think of Wallace’s supports with Kent in FE7.  How his king ordered him to capture his daughter and bring her back from the plains, no matter what.  But when Wallace saw the love she shared with the man from the plains, he let her go, because he knew his king would never forgive himself if he tore Lyn’s parents apart.  Wallace put what was best for his king ahead of the order, and the entire moral is that, even if you’re punished for it, your duty is not to the title, but to the person, and you must act in the best interests of the people you serve, not blindly follow a command that would cause everyone harm.  So yeah, I don’t care to hear about the honor-bound idiots who are given plenty of chances to do the right thing but insist on staying with a sinking ship that’s also on fire.

Deirdre is a non-entity, so there’s really no point in talking about her.  Seriously, she exists almost entirely to produce the children that will be plot-critical in Act 2, but otherwise has effectively zero agency.  She shows up and immediately wants to fuck Sigurd, spends one chapter helping, and is immediately kidnapped afterward to be brainwashed and become Arvis’ wife.  Then she dies off-screen before the events of Act 2.  But she and Sigurd just loved each other so much!  They just saw each other and had such an overwhelming desire to fuck, it must have been love!  At least Deirdre’s excuse is being secluded away from men all her life and not knowing how to handle these feelings; what’s Sigurd’s excuse?

Quan and Ethlyn are actually wonderful.  No complaints.  But I do have another for Sigurd.  Hey, remember when they died?  Remember when Sigurd is told that people were ambushed in the desert and everyone’s dead, and he pieces together that it was his sister and his best friend?  Remember how that comment is all we get for his reaction to their loss, how it’s never brought up a single time ever again, and how Sigurd shows absolutely nothing about the devastation of this loss?  Yeah, but hey, it’s fine, you don’t need more dialogue to make a compelling story.  It just would’ve been nice for Genealogy to be a compelling story by having characters actually matter more than they apparently do.

Ayra’s cool, but her brother’s an idiot.  In her conversation with Quan, she mentioned that Quan’s suspicion is correct, and that the king was not responsible for the deaths of those from Grannvale.  A random lord took action without consent, so the king had that lord executed, and went to make peace with Grannvale, only to be assassinated along the way.  So what does her brother do?  “We gotta go to war.”  Uh...you know you’ll be slaughtered, right?  “Yeah, but my honor, though.”  Gen 1 was mostly a bunch of morons given political power and asked to play intelligently.  They all fucked up.

Lewyn...okay, I don’t like Lewyn.  I get his whole thing is running from responsibility, and being tired of the in-fighting over the crown, but his solution of just leaving is petty and childish.  It’s not that there isn’t some level of understanding there.  He’s just not doing it for me.  I do, however, appreciate how self-loathing he is in Gen 2.

No one else in Gen 1 really matters at all to anything substantial, so boy, it’d have been nice to have support conversations to flesh out everyone else a bit more.  But hey, maybe the sequel, right?

Seliph is pretty cool.  I don’t have a ton to say, but his story kinda allows him to take an easier route to power, with a more clear antagonist and the world at large being more united in his cause of overthrowing the empire.  Not particularly compelling, but not doing anything stupid or uninteresting.

Leif inherits being awesome from both of his parents, who were also awesome.  His sister, Altena, is also really cool.  Altena in particular actually gets a lot.  Having been taken in by the man who killed her parents, she’s grown up thinking that he is her true father.  Her character is in a position to act more as a bridge between two smaller nations that have constantly been at war, having the bloodline connection to Leif and to Leonster, while having her upbringing in Thracia and feeling a family connection to Arion, the true son of Travant.  She’s one of the better characters in this game, I think.

Ares is actually one of my favorites in this entire game.  He and Lene have great supports, but more importantly, you know what sets Ares apart?  Having a brain cell.  As soon as he realizes the corrupt lord he works for sent him out to the front lines and has likely taken Lene captive, he immediately turns coat, intent on killing everyone in his way to save her.  Thank you, Ares.  Thank you for being better than your father, who would’ve meekly decided he can’t disobey orders because he’s totally too honorable and not a fucking coward for letting his sister almost get killed.

Julia...oh my god, I have so much to say on Julia.  Has anyone following me noticed I kinda like the Eirika archetypes?  The female characters that are mostly really collected and quiet, occasionally have a showing of fire, and are ultimately either heavily under-utilized and ignored by the plot or given a story that’s really not very good despite how strong their character could’ve been if the story weren’t...the way that it is?  That’s Julia.  I adore Julia.  She spends most of the game not doing much, mostly being silent and also an amnesiac.  She gets like two conversations with Seliph, and they’re...they’re okay.  Nothing exceptional, just...okay.  But hysterically, once she’s kidnapped, she starts to show the makings of a really great character.  She’s compassionate and understanding to her father, who’s realized what a dingus he was, but pushes back against Julius/Loptyr and is pretty up-front about how willing she is now to kill her brother if it means stopping evil from being unleashed in the world.  She refuses to go quietly, and claims she’ll fight them to the end.  And, you know...is promptly brainwashed and spends the entire chapter as an enemy until Seliph kills Manfroy and lets her snap out of it.  Not even just talks to her, that won’t work unless Manfroy’s dead.  She doesn’t even get enough agency to break free of control under her own will.  This is the issue with Julia.  She should be fantastic.  She’s a character who carries the blood of both Naga and Loptyr, the greatest good and the greatest evil of this world.  Within her is a very concrete expression of the good/evil dichotomy that all humans face, and through her actions she chooses to do good for the world, yet acknowledges the potential for evil within her and struggles against it.  That’s super compelling!  Hell, that’s the most compelling character narrative in this entire game!  And what does it amount to?  Jack fucking shit, because her declaration of intent is immediately sidelined for her to be controlled by another for the entire chapter and made to do evil, until the male hero breaks the spell for her.  Only then is she allowed to confront her brother and actually show agency.  Her character arc should’ve been the diamond in the rough, and all the agency and development she brings to the table is immediately undermined.  Julia, sweetie, you deserved so much better than this.

Ugh, that one hurt to complain about.  But since we’re on the topic, Julius.  We’re supposed to be sad about how he’s completely taken over by Loptyr and needs to be stopped.  But...we never really know anything about Julius.  At all.  Julia talks a bit about how he used to be kind, but that’s...that’s it.  There’s no effort to have her and Arvis share stories about what the family used to be like, or give any indication of how close they were aside from saying it was the case once or twice.  So the plight of Julius, the boy who’s possessed, is completely lost on us, and as a result, Julia’s decision to fight against and kill her brother if that’s what it takes, feels a little less impactful, because you just...don’t have any emotional attachment to what’s being lost.

Ishtar is another Camus archetype, but a rare one where I kinda like her?  Kinda.  She’s come far enough to recognize that Julius is killing people and it’s a problem, and does her utmost to circumvent his violent tendencies and save people.  So why doesn’t she just leave?  Well even that’s pretty taken care of.  She was the betrothed of Julius.  She loved him.  Which means she’s another character who could’ve had meaningful dialogue about who he used to be to build up tension, but we’re not talking about that now.  She stays in part because of that love, but also because he’s violent, and seems to have his eye on her at all times.  She’s effectively stuck in an abusive relationship, unable to make a move for fear of what retaliation he might exact on her or the people she’s trying to keep safe.  That’s a way more compelling reason for a character to stick with an awful ruler.  It sucks, but at least it’s ultimately understandable, unlike Eldigan over here.

Oifey and Shanan I feel like should be more interesting characters, but they don’t really get enough time to be much else.  And if those two, who are meant to be prominent, got very little, you can kinda guess that the rest of the cast has basically nothing going for them.

Honestly, a lot of the events of Genealogy at large feel super avoidable, and largely created by idiots being allowed to make decisions.  But on the smaller level, and especially within Gen 2, I feel like all the game needs is support conversations and maybe more dialogue that didn’t focus so heavily on bloodlines.  The history is interesting, but it comes at the expense of most character development, and that’s really not a good trade.  I know people hate when I bring it up, but maybe if the maps were actually chunked and made into several smaller chapters, we could use wind-up and conclusion to castles being taken as a means to fill in more character moments, instead of just having quick exposition dumps and moving on.

[stardustizuku]

well i guess we’re doing this

@skating-jellyfish @scintillant-h @quasargirl

ASK AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE  

The Westernization of Magical Girl Genre

By StardustIzuku aka me 

AKA the 2k magical girl essay people wanted me to talk about.

A lot of people were asking about this, wow.

Magical girls. Glitter, cutesy names, stuffed animals, and puns. What is there not to love about them?

It was only bound to happen for it to be tried in the west. Much like transformers, which were a westernization of gundam, Magical Girls are going through their rocky paths to that idolized version of Magic targeted towards small girls.

There are a few shows that are borrowing these themes today in children’s cartoon, so I wanted to talk about them. How they managed to miss the mark with some fans, and why their following is significantly smaller of the likes of Sailor Moon.

Here you have today:

The Westernization of Magical Girl Genre

The thing about Magical Girls is that the plot is often very predictable. It, quite frequently, does not have that much of a great romance, and its villains are basic to the core.  

So, why do we like them if they’re, supposedly, so shitty?

Well…The answer is

Two Things:

The feeling. 

The message.

This is the core of the Magical Girl’s success. If it has a nice feeling but no good message, you get things like kamichama Karin. If it has a bad feeling but a good message, you get things like Madoka.

(Which are in my opinion the two worst things that could have happened to Magical Girl genre)

And having said this, there’s two shows I wanna talk about today. One is SVTFOE and the other is Miraculous Ladybug. Two westernized versions of the Magical Girl genre…And both fail to recreate the very specific beauty of Magical Girls. As they struggle with its own voice, they get something that feels genuine but ultimately disassociated from the genre.  

I will first start with the easiest to tackle.

Miraculous Ladybug;

It does everything right in the regard of plot, romance and villains. It’s a real classic of Magical Girl storyline that could be easy to get behind.

And while I do watch it, I do not feel the love I know I could for it.

The reason is simple: because of the feeling it gives off.

I think the biggest mistake Miraculous did was making it 3D. This means it’s technically easier to make, yes. But it also deteriorates the very particular aesthetics Magical Girls have. And this makes it drop quality.

It feels less magical, and more real. Less sparkles, more concrete. And taking into a count the fact that it’s set in Paris? This show should be looking ethereal. But instead it looks very plain. It feels…wrong even.

There’s also a very key aspect that I think it’s missing: the team. It’s taking them way too long to form the team. Time that could have been spent making the team -Ayla, Chloe etc- feel closer and work through their difference is instead focused on them individually.

And that’s good, since it has a “Monster of the Week” narrative. But it lessens the impact. We are two seasons in, and we have a very lacklustre incomplete team.

By episode 43 -the time im writing this- Sailor Moon was already meeting Sailor Venus -the last Sailor Scout- and heading to the final battle. Sakura was friends with Meilin and biding goodbye and saying thanks for the memories. In Tokyo Mew Mew Zakuro and Mint -the closest girls on the team- were having one of the most emotional fallouts in anime history. Even Amu had finally unlocked her god damn Amulet Diamond and was essentially already friends with the “evil” Utau.

But 43 episodes in Miraculous ladybug and we have three out of the supposedly five characters of the team, queen bee is loosely alluded to, and we haven’t seen Ayla interact with them as superheroes that much.

Its strange, if you ask me, for a team to be presented this way. When are we going to see them start trusting each other? When are we going to see them work together? Ladybug and Chat are good, but how could the team as a whole even remotely begin to feel so close?

Ladybug has the heart and the intention to be a good Magical Girl adaptation…but it simply lacks the resources to make it actually work. It’s wasting so much time in stuff that does not advance the plot, or round up the characters. It has more useless filler than sailor moon.

And that’s not even kidding, because by this point, may I remind you, Sailor Moon is like two episodes away from ending its first season.

Over all, it just feels a bit plastic and stiff.

However, credit where credit is due.

They nailed the romance.

When it comes to romance in MG it falls under two categories:

1.- The straight forward plot with pinning girl. (eg. Sailor Moon, Mermaid Melody)

2.- The dreaded love triangle between the bad guy and the nice guy. (open a shoujo manga)

And Miraculous Ladybug did a pretty interesting thing, fusing the “bad guy” with the “good guy”, in chat and Adrien.

It’s like telling you Ikuto and Takase are the same person. Or Kishu and Masaru are the same guy.

Pretty crazy, if you ask me.

It also solves the “who will she chose” narrative that drives everyone insane. Instead it’s replaced with a slow burn that makes you keep watching. You know they’ll end up together, but you want to know how.

It also keeps the “he’s in love with my alter ego” trope that to this day is a MUST in any magical girl, just because its super fun and never gets old.

So Miraculous Ladybug is very close to becoming the true magical girl adaption we all wanted. I would say it could be better, but there’s a reason why it has a large following.

It did many, many, things right. It just needs a push. I’d rank it number two in Magical Girl Goodness.

Now, let’s jump to a more difficult thing to tackle.

Star Vs The Forces Of Evil;

At first glance, you’d think SVTFOE is a love letter to classical Magical Girls. And while it does borrow a lot of aspects from animes like Sailor Moon and Sakura Card Captor... The more I look into it, the more I see it as faulty westernization of it.

As I said before there are a few things that make a Magical Girl show shine.

The feeling, and the message.

And while Star certainly has the feeling, making it feel crazy but fun and cutesy, the message is…

Very different.

As a matter of fact, I don’t think SVTFOE has a bad message. On the contrary, it’s a pretty damn good one…But the thing is…It’s not one MG often have.

Magical Girls messages are one of two things -although they sometimes mix:

Finding yourself, and the power of girl’s friendship.

Messages that are really cliché, but they thrive because in a society where girls are shamed for being who they are, Magical Girls encourage them to be brave. To seek solace and friendship in one another.

SVTFOE is…different.

Something that really pisses me off, is how Star’s only female friend is Ponyhead, someone who doesn’t really give emotional support.

Girlfrienship is being thrown away, shown as toxic. While Marco and Star’s relationship is put in a high pedestal. Despite being clearly a romance.

Star’s message is nice in a superficial level. Fight racism and stand your ground.

But, it’s also about doing it alone. That no other girl will support you, and that even your mother sometimes will leave you alone. In recent episodes, even Eclipsa left Star.

This is teaching girls to be brave on their own.

The antithesis of typical Magical Girls.

But, we as girl are stronger together. We are not alone, we shouldn’t have to fight alone.

It also shows that fists are more powerful than kindness. It’s kind sad, from my point of view.

The message in SVTFOE is ultimately flawed.

There’s no team. It’s just Star and Marco.

Which brings me to another point:

The plot is good, the romance is the worst I have seen in my life, and the villains are very complex.

Nothing like a sample MG anime.

The romance specially, has jumped through a lot of stages. First being the straight forward pinning girl narrative, then switching to the bad guy vs nice guy (tom vs marco), then switching the roles of the good guy vs the bad guy…And honestly who knows what comes next.

SVTFOE has thrown away any pretence of being a magical girl adaptation long ago. Nothing it has comes remotely close to what a magical girl storyline is. For fucks sake, she doesn’t even have a stick now.

WHEN HAVE YOU SEEN A MAGICAL GIRL WITHOUT A STICK THINGY.

It’s, overall, a very individualistic tale. As a westernization of the genre…it speaks more about the culture we live in than the concept.

I’d place it right below Miraculous Ladybug as an adaptation, maybe 3rd place.

But there is one cartoon that is a neo Magical Girl I love.

The first seasons of Steven Universe;

It has everything, from the healthy girl’s friendship message, to the aesthetics, the kindness on its core, to the monster of the week formula.

Early seasons of steven universe did this phenomenally. Capturing the true essence of Magical Girl. And even then, I would not be able to tell you when exactly it stops being a westenazation, to when it is its own thing.

The actual lesbian romance is without a doubt the best adaptation they could have done, since there’s obvious subtext in early magical girl’s.

But even in episode that are relatively new, you see the contrast. Escalating villains, healed with compassion and offering a hand (Blue and Yellow Diamond), and a Big Bad Villain (white diamond) that needs to be stopped. Not to mention Rose being the Pink One™ and having an alter ego, which was the one Greg fell in love with.

There’s an ethereal beauty that followed Steven Universe during its earliest seasons and that’s why I do think it’s the best westernazation of Magical Girls so far.

[theonceoverthinker]

OUAT 4X10 - Shattered Sight

Today, Emma and Elsa attempt to break the latest curse to hit Storybrooke! But what will be the prICE of such an action?

...These puns are awful! And they must be a pain in the GLASS for you all to read! XD

Okay, there’s a review under the cut, so be COOL and check it out! (How did it take me ten episodes of this arc to come up with a “cool” pun?)

Main Takeaways

Past

It’s kind of hard to revisit this flashback. And that’s not because I don’t like it. I really do. The story points, actions, and framing hit every note they need to. Emma is completely sympathetic, we can see very clearly how things were going so well for Emma and Ingrid only to fall apart, and the pacing works so well as to make their relationship feel organic.

When I say it’s hard to revisit this episode, it’s because I realize I wanted to ask myself how much Ingrid loves Emma and how much of her actions are driven solely to get herself a sister. It didn’t occur to me until the cocoa scene with Emma and Ingrid that that was something I even needed to think about, but once I did, it became something I didn’t want to ignore either.

Because it is a question worth asking. In so many ways, Ingrid succeeds in making Emma feel loved, valued, and special. She sees what makes Emma tick and addresses those problems and Emma’s life improves as a result. So how much of that was Ingrid loving Emma for just being Emma and how much of it was loving the person that Emma would become.

Obviously, the latter plays into the narrative. There’s a line at the carnival where Ingrid says she wants to be like a big sister to Emma, which, in addition to being an awkward line, does remind the audience that for as much as Ingrid’s making Emma happy, that motivation of her being the third sister is never too far away from the front of her thoughts. And speaking in terms of the broader narrative, Things go wrong when Ingrid focuses too much on the sister Ingrid wants Emma to become and not on who she is and the fact that she’s still growing both as a person and her abilities.

That said, there’s also a scene in the present which segues into the past where Ingrid looks at her stolen memories and lovingly pulls out hers of the moment she announced her intentions to adopt Emma. And when Ingrid gets to know Emma and spends the time really communicating with her (Ex. Giving Emma pranking advice), there seems a genuine growth of love for the person Emma is beyond the magic. And in the end, when Ingrid dies, when she won’t use her as a sister, still calls Emma special in a loving way.

After rewatching the episode, I think it’s a bit more nuanced than 100% of the way one way or the other, but I do lean a little bit towards mostly loving her because she was a sister. It’s a bit more narratively concrete in how its portrayed by the text and it allows for Ingrid’s final revelation regarding Emma as she dies to feel more like her arc’s come full circle.

Present

This is probably the funniest episode of the series. The Shattered Sight curse is both shown to be a force of intimidation but something that’s given liberties to be funny as hell due to the little planning everyone was able to do before it hit. Everyone’s giving their heart and soul into making their performances something so off the walls and hammy that there doesn’t need to be a long-lasting effect of it while still touching upon points that one could reasonably expect them to make. And at the same time, the violence going on both in the police station and out in the streets is effective in painting this curse as something that does need to be stopped while still allowing for us to go along for the ride and enjoy it!

Okay, now let’s move on to the less than fun part of this review.

The actual defeat of the Shattered Sight curse...well, there’s no kind way to say it: It kind of sucks. So much gravitas is put on Emma being the one to defeat Ingrid and unlike other subversions of that setup such as the one found in the Zelena arc, it doesn’t work as well here. I get the nucleus of what they were trying to do -- Ingrid’s defeat is supposed to be the culmination of Ingrid’s character, not Emma’s and Ingrid’s problem was the way she refused to accept family that didn’t come equipped with magic and Anna being the one to set her straight sounds right on paper. There is a part of me that likes that decision in that respect and was built up well enough with the message in the bottle from the premiere. It solves Ingrid’s problem. The problem with that approach comes down to two things. First, Ingrid isn’t the character sticking around after this arc: Emma is. Second, it ignores all of the buildup of Emma accepting her magic and makes the resolution feel shallow. While yes, Emma accepted her magic two episodes ago, just the fact that Snow was pointing out how it would be used in defeating Ingrid showed that this arc wasn’t done just yet. And the fact that Emma isn’t the one to take Ingrid down stands out even more in the face of Emma being a large focus of the flashback and the further buildup of her being the Savior that’s been put into nearly every Emma-heavy episode this season thus far. So to not see her magic play a part in some way -- even if it just meant that Emma was the primary supplement to Anna reading the letter by protecting her from Ingrid’s blasts -- feels like a let down. It’s also not helped by the fact that the sequence is stretched out by Ingrid needing to almost knock Anna, Elsa, and Emma out to read the letter, stretching it out.

Stream of Consciousness

-Look at that fabulous mohawk! How much money does that dude need to pour into hair gel every day?!

-I love how the realms of story are so inherently hammy that Ingrid doesn’t even question Madame Faustina’s giant act until she fucks up! XD

-Why is no one attacking Ingrid? XD Like, I’d want to fuck up her shit!

-I gotta wonder how much being a Savior actually pays! XD

-”I don’t believe killing is the answer.” ...Neither does half of this fucking town.

-”If it comes down to her or the town, I’m gonna do what has to be done.” I like how Emma continues to follow the advice Regina gave in the last episode: As a ruler, one has to make difficult choices, ones you might not be okay sitting with, morally speaking, but need to make all the same.

-”This is what I get for being subtle!” That’s right! You get one of the most memorable OUAT performances EVER!

-Damn, I love how Rumple exposits his plan to Killian. I’ve said before how he’s a Magnificent Bastard, and this scene might be the best showing of that yet. Rumple’s going to twist circumstances to make himself the hero without even a shred of guilt and I love it. It’s so Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain-y! XD

-I also love how there’s more than one night where the stars in the sky match up with the stars in the hat.

-Is it bad that I really want to try Carrot Sherbert now? Like, Ingrid’s plan would’ve been exposed in seconds by the same people who try all of the Oreo flavors (Which is me)!

-I wonder, do you think the ribbons also make them immortal?

-I know that on some level, spooking Kevin should be a parenting no-no, but given how much of an asshole that kid is and that the spider was rubber, I am totally on board with this revenge!

-Ingrid looks so cute in her PJ’s!

-Did really no one want to beat up Killian outside of Will Scarlet? XD

-”Those things sound terrible, but they’re also romantic. Can’t you see that?” When did Anna become such an accurate voice of the fandom? XD

-”I killed the Evil Queen’s mommy and I said I’m sorry, but I didn’t mean it.” Is it bad that a large part of me is pretty happy about that considering how bad the handling of the aftermath of that murder was in Season 2 was? XD

-”Maybe without an equal, but not without an opposite equally as strong.” PHYSICS SAVES THE DAYYYYYY!!!!! XD

-”Emma, you’re a bit prickly, but you’re certainly not hatable.” Elsa, you are my girlfriend now! I don’t make the rules! <3

-I love how Emma knows Regina well enough that she knows EXACTLY how to make her hate her enough to destroy the ribbons.

-”This is a great lesson, Emma. If you push yourself and ignore the flickering lights and the distractions of this world, you can accomplish anything.” Okay, I know that this line is played semi-seriously, but how long do you think Ingrid herself was distracted by said flickering lights and distractions? Because Killian and Zelena have had their share of having to adapt to our modern world. I bet Ingrid did too and for far longer since she didn’t have friends to teach her! Like, just imagine Ingrid on a subway for the first time! XD

-Okay, baby Emma’s face as Ingrid tells her she’s gonna be adopted actually makes me cry. Like, this girl has been passed over so many times and finally, she thinks she’s going to get a real home with someone who she loves and loves her. And just knowing that that doesn’t work out makes me lose my shit with tears and feels!

-”The next part should be easy for me.” “What’s that?” “Be prickly.” I love this subtle bit of sass from Emma.

-I like how Emma has to take a pause and process “garden topiary!” XD

-”Dirty? I bathe quite frequently, thank you very much.” XD This line always gets me.

-I like how Kilian first tries to get through to Henry to open the door before forcing his way in with the potion. That was a nice and subtle way of showing respect for Henry’s judgment.

-Given how many schemes Henry’s put together, need I even ask his favorite movie after such a clear “Home Alone” stunt.

-I like how this scene between Killian and Will is basically a meta-narrative about how the season treats him as a whole. Will’s a funny distraction that takes up time, but is so avoidable and inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

-Not gonna lie, I think Harry might actually be more powerful than even Emma at her most adept. Look, I love her, but Harry’s naturally talented and received the education necessary to understand his full potential as a magic-yielder where as Emma’s had a few lessons, but has otherwise mostly been going off of instincts and the odd book she and Belle find.

-Damn, baby Emma coming to the conclusion that Ingrid’s a psychopath is utterly heartbreaking :( .

-I LOVE how Regina pulls David into this for his whining!

-I also love how apparently, the Shattered Sight curse has no effect on anyone’s love for baby Neal! XD

-Dude! Regina has a sword with a black blade! That is the absolute coolest thing ever!

-Damn, Ingrid’s outfit as she enters Storybrooke is ALSO super cute and stylish! Fuck what I said earlier! This woman knows how to adapt!

-I LOVE the spinning camera effect as Ingrid wills herself into Storybrooke! Also, I like the story point that Ingrid, like she advised Emma to do, trusted her instincts as she looked for her third sister before pulling out the scroll, as this scene implies that this was the first time she used it.

-Ingrid, they don’t want to be your sisters! And you’re really more their aunts than anything. STOPPPPP! Girl, you’re looking desperate! XD

-...The most unrealistic thing this show has put in front of me is that Henry’s favorite ice cream flavor is cherry vanilla! What the hell, show?! XD

-”DO NOT WAKE MY BABY.” She might not, but you definitely will screaming like that! XD

-This fight scene between Snow and Regina is so hammy and I love it! Hell, even the music is along for the ride! Listen to how over-the-top it gets!

-”I WAS 10!!!!” BEST LINE!

-Ingrid’s death music is goosebump-inducingly beautiful!

-Okay, Dopey is so fucking adorable throughout this whole episode! He will not get mad at or attack anyone, chooses to stay by his brothers’ sides despite their danger, and when it’s all over, he adorably catches snowflakes! Best dwarf!

-”Well, perhaps you can say my heart wasn’t in it.” A Golden Hook scene with a PUN! Best scene!

-Good job to Killian! Listen, Rumple is just barely hearing him out and he knows it’s already a risk to ask for Emma’s safety, but he goes further and asks for everyone’s safety, risking Merlin knows what from Rumple!

-Rumple is looking to take over the world! He is officially a Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t here for that! XD

Favorite Dynamic

Snow, David, and Regina. The greatest strength of this episode is how funny it is, and no dynamic is better proof of that than these three. Josh, Ginny, and especially Lana go above and beyond to deliver their hammiest performances. And not only that, the writing supplements that hamminess perfectly. Petty and ridiculous complaints are blown up to epic proportions and scathing cuts are made, but the outlandish and over the top way it’s all handled allows for the group laugh ending to make this perfect amount of sense. Additionally, we get to see a kickass sword fight, quips GALORE from all three parties, and we even see bits of the real Snow and David shine through when both their child and each other are threatened. This dynamic is just a spectacle to watch and it really made the episode an unforgettable classic!

Writer

Scott Nimerfro and Tze Chun are our writers for today’s episode. Scott has greatly improved from his debut episode and Tze’s is a solid debut himself. The exaggerated tone of this episode allows for a lower bar to entry for both writers and they absolutely nail it. Regarding that ending, I feel like they really paid attention to the first six episodes and then stopped before “The Snow Queen” got started! XD

Culture

What can I say about Ingrid?

Ingrid’s an interesting character for me. She’s the first villain since honestly Regina that’s set up as entirely Emma’s. It’s not that I haven’t liked less Emma centric villains -- if you’ve been reading these reviews, then you know I ADORE Pan and have gushed about Cora and Zelena in the past, but Ingrid’s relationship to Emma is a big point of mystery for her character and, while denied as the ultimate thing that defeats her, really gets explored throughout the half season. It fills in another tragic aspect of Emma’s past that is just as heartwarming as it is heartbreaking to watch. Additionally, she allows for the show to have an ice villain, capitalizing on the interesting threat that Elsa would’ve brought to the show if she was the villain (And that in itself creates an interesting mystery) as well as serve as a means to explore “The Snow Queen,” the original fairy tale of which Frozen is based off of. I also like her interactions with Rumple too. These two have a good dynamic that makes me think of two gods looming over the masses as if they were their playthings and the way they play chess with the lives of others and cooperate when it suits their needs is interesting.

I like the balance between making Ingrid sympathetic and disturbed. You get the sense that Ingrid really wants the connections she makes with Elsa, Emma, and even Anna in the “Family Business” flashback to be genuine. Not only that, but Ingrid very clearly loves her sisters. She wears her ribbon every day and only trades it away so she can physically join them in the outside world. But at the same time, Ingrid shows she is not above manipulating those she wants to be her sisters into doing the things she wants them to do, whether by threatening their lives or the lives of those they love, forcing the hands of those they love, or setting them up to be framed or put into a dangerous position and this is not framed as a positive thing at any point except arguably when it comes to Ingrid being a foster parent to Emma. And her comeuppance is likewise framed as something that she caused for herself because of the person who she let her powers turn her into. This is all very effective material that’s paints a complicated antagonist.

Finally, the scroll given to her is what allows people to enter Storybrooke and is alongside Anton’s beans as something that revolutionized how people traveled for the rest of the series. It opened the doors once more for people to get in and out, allowing for higher stakes in conflicts and more characters to be explored.

At the same time, she doesn’t rank as highly for me as the original usages of Pan, Zelena, or Cora. Ultimately, I feel like her biggest was in her backstory with her sisters. Ingrid’s entire motivation comes down to the fact that her sisters were unwilling to accept her, so instead, she searched for new ones. She goes on and on about how her original family rejected her and as a result, she does whatever it takes -- up to and including manipulation and murder -- to get new sisters. And we’re supposed to believe that yes, tragically, her sisters feared her. However, because the story was so dead set on Ingrid’s sisters being accepting of her and her magic until Helga’s death -- the tail end of the flashback and Gerda’s reaction to that comes off as a cliffdrop of fear more than anything -- it screws up because Ingrid’s sisters almost never feared her. Had they feared her from the very beginning and stayed with her out of fear more than love, this arc of Ingrid feeling rejected by them and wanting a new family would’ve made more sense. Instead, it makes it seem like Ingrid didn’t appreciate what she had until it was gone and Gerda was an idiot about it.

Overall, Ingrid’s a complicated presence in this series and I do like her a lot. While she’s not as cohesive in a lot of ways, especially compared to some of our past villains, there’s enough good and even great things about her to make her a character to appreciate and even love.

Rating

8/10. Apart from the less than stellar conclusion, this episode really does make all of it’s marks. It’s funny as all hell, allows for the cast to really branch out into off-the-wall over-the-top performances, and its past segment does hit the emotionally tragic core that it needs to.

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So while the Frozen Arc wasn’t all fun and games for me, I am going to miss it when it concludes next time. It’s unique and domestic and really funny at its best and introduced some great characters.

Thank you for reading as well as to the fine folks at @watchingfairytales and the awesome @daensarah! See you next time!!!

Season 4 Total (87/230)

Writer Scores:

Adam and Eddy: (16/60)

Jane Espenson: (20/40)

David Goodman and Jerome Schwartz: (30/50)

Andrew Chambliss: (14/50)

Dana Horgan: (6/30)

Kalinda Vazquez: (14/40)

Scott Nimerfro: (14/30)

Tze Chun (8/20)

*Links to the rest of my rewatch will no longer be provided. They take posts with links outside of searches and I spend way too much time on these reviews to not give them that kind of exposure. Sorry for the inconvenience, but they still can be found on my page under Operation Rewatch.