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ninthhousesteel · 2 years ago

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fucking hell

i stayed up till 4 am to watch vol 2 cuz i thought it’d be good and it was good!!

Good ol’ queer bait thats what it fucking was.

I’m sorry that the duffer brothers felt that this was good enough writing to finish something amazing, and i am willingly ready to partake in a rewrite of vol 2 because this was blasphemous. (apologies ahead of time for the sheer amount of ranting i am going to do)

okay like first?? steve??? just. no. that whole spiel about the six ‘nuggets’ (that wounded me) and him LITERALLY SAYING THAT LIKE HES STILL IN LOVE WITH NANCY AND HE WANTS HER TO HAVE S I X KIDS WITH HIM ITS LIKE HE DOESNT EVEN KNOW HER BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW SHE AINT BUILT FOR THAT. ALSO nancy was in the middle of talking about robin, a person for whom they both care about, and its like he just redirected the conversation onto him. it looked like someone tried to inject more ronance but then someone else just like sidestepped it into Steve/Nancy, which was SO bad. Steve and Nancy shouldn’t be a thing. they just cant give each other what they need. Same with Jonathan and Nancy. Honestly, I did enjoy their relationship in all the past seasons, but s4 its been so strained and weird and the fact that Jonathan didnt even come clean to her at the end about the college apps was just ridiculous, and the exact moment i knew that they weren’t going to last. even their interactions at the end seemed weird and stiff, like neither of them really wanted to be there. (I hope they dont make her get with either of them. And maybe im just a diehard Ronance shipper, but Robin and Nancy make the most sense!!!)

Second point- Robin and Vickie

10000000.999999% unneeded and unwanted and unfunctional. If youre going to give the only explicitly confirmed gay character a love interest, the worst thing you could do was use the ‘oh no my crush is straight oh wait no she dumped him and now i think she likes me’ trope. tired, overdone, nasty. not even to mention the fact that Vickie is just. a straight (haha) up clone of Robin. They are the same person. They could be revealed to be cousins in s5 and i wouldnt be surprised. It’s tasteless and pathetic to watch. And it’s even more hurtful, because so many of us fans genuinely are in love with Robin and invested with her because we can connect to her the most, and the Duffers just cop out of a genuine and amazing relationship (ronance) and just turn to the basic and unflavorful This Was Obviously Written By A Straight Person relationship of Robin and Vickie.

And Max. And, you know let’s loop in Eddie too. Since they both died. Oh wait.

I’m not even sure to tackle Max’s death. i love her SO MUCH. she’s my second favorite character (right behind Robin). if i was in that situation, i would have let her die. its just easier, and we dont even know if, once dead, she even wanted to come back. this trope of bringing someone back always has consequences, which is why im not really a fan of it in the first place. it requires delicate writing because the situation can get bad very fast. and as of vol 2, im not sure the duffers can do it. (that being said, obviously i dont know their plan for max, but plots like these are kinda hit or miss yk? its just such a big thing)

Eddie’s death was anything but compelling. Like, i knew he was dying but i was kinda…. bored? idk if thats the right word to use, but it just felt kinda off. and the fact that no one addressed it besides Dustin, like, Eddie had so many more friends. and in my mind i think the whole ‘eddie died saving a town that didnt love him’ was more of a white lie for his uncle, because eddie didnt owe Hawkins anything. i mean, it does make him a hero in the way that everyone who helped was a hero, but not everyone needs a ‘redemption’ arc to better be accepted by society. like, his whole thing was kinda that he was different and he didnt care what other people thought. and he had so much potential too!!!

this is long lmfao sorry if i jump into your asks later because i still have more grievances

st4 spoilers

no need to apologize for the long ask because everything you said is true

i know duffers will never actually let ronance happen but Why push stancy it just doesn't make sense to the plot at all please just let nancy pull her self worth away from whichever boy she chooses duffers let nancy be single challenge

and im grilling them for putting in the whole six kids thing ESPECIALLY with the word nuggets it wasn't cute it wasn't funny it made me literally gag

AND VICKIE im

i love amybeth and nothing of this is directed to her bc she was getting paid to play a role and i love her <3

BUT THE DUFFERS let vickie be a barely present and exact carbon copy of robin just to serve as her love interest. how fucking lazy is that? they see how popular robin's character is Plus she's the only confirmed queer character (since they wanna be ambiguous with will) on the show and they just throw her with an underdeveloped character for diversity points... and with the whole extremely similar personalities thing yeah vickie started to ramble but robin said like 4 words and ik thats just bad writing and they don't actually care about my girl but im choosing to interpret it as she got over vickie which Good For Her

max my poor angel they really did just use you for bait </3 and sadie doesn't even know her role in s5 yet and its breaking my heart can we have anything nice Also why go after one of the girls.... one who's been abused her whole life too like give her of all people a happy ending

eddie was such a wastef character :( he was so original and fresh and he could've helped robin break out of her shell more but the duffers had to keep up the boring old pattern and kill him and his death was Meaningless because he could've just climbed to safety but noooo we can't have nice things now can we. and the fact that no one addressed his death what the hell

#im livid #st4 spoilers

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davidmann95 · 4 years ago

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How about those JL storyboards?

In case you haven’t heard, Zack Snyder is putting on display the ‘storyboards’ - i.e. a rough plot summary accompanied by some Jim Lee sketches - for what would have been Justice League 2 and 3, or as this puts it 2 and ‘2A’. You can see them here (I imagine better-quality versions will soon be released), and read a transcript here. This is evidently a very early version: this was apparently pitched prior to the release of BvS and Justice League being rewritten in the wake of it, with numerous plot details that now don’t line up with what we know about the Snyder Cut, plus it outright mentions it builds on the originally planned versions of the Batman and Flash movies. But it’s a broad outline of what was gonna go down, and while I initially thought it was Snyder throwing in the towel, the timing - paired with the ambiguity left by the necessity for changes, including that this doesn’t factor whatever that “massive cliffhanger” at the end of the Cut is - says to me he’s hoping this’ll be a force multiplier behind efforts to will sequel/s into existence. He’s probably right.

I’ll be discussing spoilers below, but in short: with this Zack Snyder has finally lived up to Alan Moore, in that like Twilight of the Superheroes I wouldn’t believe this was real as opposed to a shockingly on-point parody if not for direct, irrefutable evidence.

Doing some rapid-fire bullet points for this baby to kick us off:

* Folks who know the subject say a lot of this is a yet further continuation of Snyder doing Arthuriana fanfic with the League reskinned over those major players, and I’ll take their word for it.

* I don’t know whether I love or hate that in Justice League 2 the Justice League are only an extant thing for the first scene, and then it’s Snyder giving everybody their own mini-movies. It’s compressing the entire MCU “loosely interconnected solo stories leading to a single big movie later” strategy into a single movie!

* Funniest line in the whole thing: "Even Lantern has heard of the Kryptonian, worried that he's under the control of Darkseid. He heard his spirit was unbreakable." Hal what fuckin' Superman movie did YOU watch? Second funniest being “IT WILL GIVE HIM POWER OVER ALL LIVING LIFE”

* 90% of the plot I have nothing to say about, it’s generic stage-setting crap. That to be clear is the ‘shocked it’s Snyder’ element, it feels so crassly commercial in a way I can’t believe is coming from the BvS guy.

* Most of what I have to say is unsurprisingly gonna be about a handful of characters but Cyborg’s happy ending being “he isn’t visibly disabled anymore!” is not great!

* The Goddess of War battle with Superman...never pays off? No clue why it’s there.

* What I’d originally heard was that the Codex in Superman’s blood was the last key to the Anti-Life Equation and that’s why Darkseid was coming to Earth. It’s not like all of this wouldn’t have already been averted by Kal-El’s pod smacking into an asteroid on the way to Earth so it’s not as if this makes it any more Superman’s fault, and it would have at least tied all this back to the beginning of the movies, but I suppose that was either fake or from a later draft.

* I have NO idea how this was reimagined without the ‘love triangle’, it’s the central character thing and the entire climax flows directly out of it!

* Darkseid’s kinda a chump in this, huh

Anonymous said: So: Does Zack Snyder hate Superman?

Look: the hilarity of this when Cuck Kent has been a go-to Snyder cult insult towards ‘inferior’ takes on Superman for years cannot be understated, yet at the same time I can almost wrap my brain around where Snyder’s coming from with that as the end for his take on the character. He talked in that Variety piece on how his interest in Superman is informed by having adopted children himself, and Deborah Snyder is the stepmother to his kids by previous relationships, so I can see where he’d be coming from, and I can even imagine how he’d see this as ‘rhyming’ in the sense of “the series begins with Kal-El being adopted by Earth, it ends with him adopting a child of Earth!” In the same way as MARTHA, I can envision how he would put these pieces together in his head thematically without registering or caring what the end result would actually look like. In this case, Superman raising the kid of the man who beat the shit out of him who Batman had with Clark’s wife, who earlier told Bruce she was staying with Clark because he ‘needed her’, suggesting if inadvertently that this really honest to god was a “she’s only staying with Superman out of pity, she really loved Batman more” thing.

But Clark is nothing in this. He’s sad and existential because of coming back from the dead I guess, then he’s corrupted, then time’s undone and he woo-rah rallies the collective armies of the world (interesting angle for the ‘anti-military/anti-establishment’ Superman he’s talked up as) as his big heroic moment in the finale, and then he stops being sad because he’s adopting a kid. So his big much-ballyhooed, extremely necessary five-movie character arc towards truly becoming Superman was:

Sad weird kid -> sad weird kid learns he’s an alien, is still weird and sad, maybe he shouldn’t save people because things could go really wrong? -> his dad is so convinced it could go wrong he lets himself die -> ????? -> Clark is saving people anyway -> learns his origin, gets an inspiring speech about being a bridge between worlds and a costume -> becomes superman (not Superman, that’s later) to save the world, albeit a very property-damagey version, rejects his heritage he just learned about and space dad’s bridge idea -> folks hate him being superman and that sucks though at least he’s got a girlfriend now -> things go so wrong he considers not being superman but his ghost dad reminds him shit always goes wrong so he should be good anyway, which sorta feels like it contradicts his previous advice -> immediate renewed goodness is out the window as he’s blackmailed into having to try and kill a dude but the dude happens to coincidentally have some things in common so they don’t kill each other after all -> big monster now but superman keeps supermaning at it because he loves his girlfriend and he dies -> he’s brought back, wears black which apparently means now he likes Krypton again? -> he has work friends now but he’s still sad because he was dead -> evil now! -> wait nevermind time travel -> rallies the troops -> his wife’s having a kid so he’s not sad anymore -> Superman! Who gives way to more Batman.

Do I think Zack Snyder is lying when he says he likes Superman? No. I think he sincerely finds much of the basic conceits and imagery engaging. But I don’t think he meaningfully gives shit about Clark as a character, just a vessel for Big Iconic Beats he wants to hit. Whereas while for instance he’s critical of Batman as an idea (at least up to a point), he’s much more passionately, directly enamored with him as a presence and personality. So while Superman may be the character whose ostensible myth cycle or arc or however it’s spun might be propelling a lot of events here, it’s a distant appreciation - of course the other guy takes over and subsumes him into his own narrative. Of course Batman is the savior, the past and the future (though if he’s supposed to be Batman’s kid raised by Superman there’s no excuse for him not to be Nightwing), the tragic martyr to our potential. Admittedly the implication here is also that Batman can apparently only REALLY with his whole heart be willing to sacrifice his life to save an innocent, for that matter apparently his great love, once said innocent is a receptacle for his Bat-brood, but he and Clark are both already irredeemable pieces of shit by the end of BvS so it’s not like this even registers by comparison.

Anonymous said: That “plan” Snyder had was utter dogshit. Picture proof that DC & WB hate Superman. Also I love how you’re like Jor-El: Every single idealistic take you had about Snyder, his fandom, and BvS was wrong. Snyder’s an edgy hack, his fanbase just wants to jerk off to their edgy self-insert Batgod as he screams FUCK while mowing people down with machine guns, and the idea that BvS said Superman was better than Bats was completely wrong. You know what comes next SuperMann: Either you die or I do.

In the final analysis, beyond that mother of god is there sure no conceivable excuse for the treatment of Lois in this? The temptation is to join that anon and say as I originally tweeted that these were “built entirely to disabuse every single redemptive reading of the previous work and any notion of these movies as nuanced, artistic, self-reflective, or meaningful”.

...

...yeah, okay, that’s mostly right. Zack Snyder’s vision really was the vision of an edgelord idiot with bad ideas who was never going to build up to anything that would reframe it all as a sensible whole. He’s a sincere edgelord genuinely trying really hard with his bad ideas who put some of them together quite cleverly! But they’re fucking bad and the endgame was never anything more than ramping up into smashing the action figures together as big as he could, the political overtones and moral sketchiness of BvS while trying to say something in that movie reverberated through the grand scheme of his pentalogy in no way beyond giving his boys a big sad pit to rise out of so when they kicked ass later it’d rule harder, and all the gods among men questions and horror and trappings were only that: trappings. Apparently he’s really pleasant and well-meaning in person, but at his core his art as embodied in a couple weeks in his 4-hour R-rated Justice League movie meant to be seen in black-and-white all comes down to that time he yelled at someone on Twitter that he couldn’t appreciate Snyder’s work because it’s for grown-ups. He made half-clever, occasionally exciting shit cape movies for a bunch of corny pseudo-intellectual douchebags, folks latching onto and justifying blockbusters that at least acknowledge how horrifying the world is right now even if the superheroes are basically useless in the face of it if not outright part of the problem until a convenient alien invasion shows up to justify them, and a handful of non-asshole smart people who vibe with it but...well. ‘Suckered’ is a harsh word, and definitely doesn’t apply to all of them re: what they’ve gotten out of it up to this point and would (somehow) get out of this. But it doesn’t apply to none of them, either.

#Justice League #Zack Snyder #Superman #Batman #DCEU #Opinion

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atomicblasphemy · 3 years ago

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I was bored and decided to speculate on the upcoming Owl House episodes

Buckle up, this got way longer than anticipated.

Often I tend to have as much or even more fun with TOH’s b plots as with the main ones, and seeing the memes the fandom I guess that’s kind of a normal feeling. But this last episode didn’t really have one and I’m pretty glad it didn’t.

Here’s how I’ve been thinking of the show, specially when it comes to episode structure. Pretty much in the first few scenes they will go like “hey, here’s an idea.” Then they go on the rest of the episode showing why that is not such a good idea. Case in point, Understanding Willow’s “out of sight, out of mind” only for the episode turn out as an argument for therapy, or that grom episode with Luz unable to answer her mom’s messages only to do so by the end of the episode (even though that is not a full solution, but still, she’s the main character and that looks like it will a main source of conflict until the show’s end... probably). On today’s episode I feel like it came out in two ways: from Luz perspective it came in the form of her indulging King’s narrative and self-image; on his case, well, it pretty much boils down to that whole identity crisis thing.

In other words, although in a certain way there are two big stories being told they both are a part of the same plot line. Moreover, King is a part of the show’s main trio.

Now, this may just be my own perception, but I feel like the last five or so episodes were kind of meant to be some turning point for specific characters, in this sequence: King, Willow, Luz, Amity, Eda, Lilith. Those episodes seem, again, at least to me, to mark some form of shift in the characters story. For Lilith it was her betraying the Emperor, for Eda it was learning who cursed her and her imprisonment for Luz’s sake in a way (learning she grew to care for Luz over her own well-being), for Amity it was her taking a first tangible step towards getting out from her parent’s dominion (which culminates in the events of EE) and becoming her own person, for Luz it was confronting the fact her biggest fear is somewhat related to guilty about how she left her world and her mom and finding in herself (and the friends she made in the Isles) the fortitude to actually confront all that, for Willow it was what I said before (which, btw, ends her whole arc that started on the conjuring episode, the whole thing about her and Amity’s friendship). The only one of those I can’t really see clearly what the episode’s point really was is King’s Really Small Problems.

Again, going on a bit of subjectivity here but I feel like that episode was kind of the show’s lowest point so far. First of, there’s the fact that Willow, Gus, and especially Luz don’t apologize to King because, I mean, they were pretty much about as guilty for everything that happened as him. They did either hijack or forget his day with Luz, so you know... Buuut, still, if I were to hazard a guess as to what the point on that episode I’d say it circles around the line “The King of Demons misses nobody.” early in the episode being contrasted by “Demons do crazy things when they’ve been missing someone.” In other words, the point of the episode, to my best guess would be him starting to deal with a shifting sense of identity.

So, this brings us to the current season. If I’m right in my understanding of Really Small Problems, then that’d mean that Echoes of the Past is picking up on that episode’s thread. Likewise, the same can be said about Escaping Expulsion. And in a sense, both King and Amity’s (moreso in Amity’s case, admittedly) arc seem to have in a way concluded with those two episodes. Moreover, going by the episode’s synopsis the next upcoming episodes seem to also doing something similar: either picking up a previous storyline and finishing it, or starting new ones. Separate Tides would be a bit of an exception, since it was the premiere and had to reacquaint the audience with the world and characters, but even then I feel it sets up a potential point of conflict for Luz in the form of her guilt over Eda’s loss of magic.

Then, again, going off a limb here, but I’d guess that, from episodes 2 to 8 the main objects will be, in this order, Amity, King, Lilith (going by the trailer implying we’ll see her beast form), Gus (who thus far didn’t really have a longer story arc beyond The First Day), Luz, Eda (which, given how it introduces a new character from her past I’d imagine it would mark the beginning of a new arc for her). But I feel bored so I want to elaborate a bit further.

Episode 4: Lilith, maybe (this part is pretty esoteric, to be honest), possibly, starts to come to grips with the consequences of sharing the curse while, due to mamma Clawthorne’s visit, seeing their past in a more nuanced fashion. I mean, Mamma Clawthorne is in the beast keeping coven, her presence while her first born daughter literally turns into a best could make for some interesting potential stories. Anyhow, I think some other interesting thing will have to do with Eda. As I said I can’t really see an arc or something along those lines happening with her as of right now. Now, bare with me while I go on a bit of a tangent. So, in Understanding Willow Willow herself is the object of the story, however in that episode we also get to see the cause of them falling apart was Odalia and Alador threatening Amity indirectly. By doing that the upcoming conflict regarding her gets established. Then next, at the Grom episode, we as the audience learn that Amity is at least attracted to Luz. There’s no point on getting too deep into this beyond this: her crush on Luz works as a strong reason, from her perspective, to stand up to her parents. Then at the Grudgby episode we see her taking active steps towards getting more agency in her life from them when she chooses to play against two people her parents sanctioned as suitable companions. Eventually this would culminate in the EE episode as I already talked at length about. The reason I’m bringing all of this up is because I get the feeling Eda’s upcoming story will follow some similar lines, whatever happens here (and will either be developed or solved on episode 7) will be set up at this episode.

Episode 5: As I said, I don’t really see clearly what Gus’ main conflict is, and I would imagine that this episode will either make that more evident or outright introduce it, so I don’t feel I’m in the position to speculate the specifics. However, we do know that the B plot is Lumity and I’ll need to dwell on this one a bit longer. After season one, I had this guess that this ship would become cannon somewhere between episode 3 at the earliest and 7 at the lastest. The reason I thought so, and I still think there’s no solid reason to reject this hypothesis, was that after WiLW the only thing standing in the way from Amity coming clean about her feelings was probably her relationship with her parents. UW set that up, WiLW took a first step in that direction, EE went through with it. Moreover, I thought that’d be in line with what we had shown of the show’s pacing up until that point. So, basically the situation I see here goes along the lines of setting up a new source of conflict for Amity (in the form of Luz eventually leaving the Isles), and for Luz in the form of (if my guess of Lumity becoming cannon in this specific episode is correct) the start of a new relationship, something she never experienced before, which would make her question whether or not she actually wants to go back to the human realm, or at the very least muddy the water a tad. However, I am not so dead certain they’ll become cannon (and, btw, by cannon I mean simply an unequivocal sign that their relationship changed, however the showrunners decide that should look like.) Moreover, that only gets accentuated if the thing she’s helping Luz with is a portal. In other words, my “prediction” that it’d become cannon around this time was mostly due to me feeling that turning them into a will they won’t they at this point would be tantamount to the show chasing its own tail, but that’d feel uncharacteristic of the show, in light of the first season. That being said, if I’m right about there being this upcoming conflict about Luz having to decide between the Isles and the human realm (which may or may not keep on developing until the shows finale, but I digress), then it wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. If handled well her being uncertain as to whether or not to take the leap with Amity could potentially be an interesting way convey her internal conflict. Still, I think that having those two be together would be more effective in give her one more strong argument in favor of staying in the Isles. Besides, there’s my thoughts about the following episode which would make the will they won’t they approach redundant. Also, the fact Amity is the one

Episode 6: Pretty much would pick up on the place it left Luz in the previous episode, again, if and only if my speculations so far are right. Two things the synopsis doesn’t really make clear: why Luz is having problem hunting a palisman; and who the foe in question is. Now, I know we see her carrying Golden Boi’s staff. I’m choosing to ignore this for now because I would actually have Boscha (who we see in one of the teasers), and who would kind of go along with some hints at her redemption like that “you’re a really good friend...” line. Besides, if this palisman thing is a part of Hexside’s curriculum it would make sense that she’d be in the same situation as Luz. Not to mention that Golden Boi helping her gain access to a weapon she can and most likely will turn against him and his boss seems pretty odd. Ultimately, however, the identity of this foe is inconsequential. The main point of interest for me is the reason why she is having trouble finding herself a palisman. We don’t know the specifics of palisman adoption or creation, so I will try not to depend to much on it. But here’s the gist: getting a palisman as a commitment not only to the palisman itself but to the world. Whatever happens between her and Amity and going by the mad logic I’m using, her sense of belonging would probably be completely scrambled even before the episode starts. Being made to make a commitment like that in midst of an existential crisis of sorts as a means to create internal conflict in Luz, that’s what I’m trying to argue is the point of this episode. Also, before I move on to another thing I think is pretty important and I’ve decided to say it now because I don’t want to rework the structure of a rambling session that’s already way longer than I expected: we see Camilla in the trailer, I think this would be the best moment to put her. The reason for that is simple enough. In the A plot we see Luz trying to decide where she belongs to, and working towards becoming more and more part of the Isles figurative landscape; on the b plot however we would get to see in the form of Camilla that she still has a home in the human realm, that there’s still someone who loves her a lot and is doing everything within her power to get her back or at least to ensure she is safe and sound. Not to mention, it would be a great moment to bring up those letters we see at the end of the Grom episode, but I’ll get to that when I get to that.

Now, that important thing I wanted to talk about: the overall message of the show. I think I said this before but my favorite thing about Luz is the effect she has on the other character, essentially she is the catalyst to their growth. She is the one that ensured Willow would confront her past with Amity resulting in her getting rid of the hang ups that were holding her back allowing her to forge her own path. She is the reason why Amity chooses to stand up for herself. She is the reason why Lilith is capable of hope to rekindle her relationship with her sister thus empowering her to break away from the Emperor. She is the reason why Eda now has some reason to, as she put it herself, “stop wasting away her magic”, she gives her something to look forward to. Hell, even if we are just starting to see it, I’m positive we can make an argument that she’s why King became more open to the possibility he is not who he thought he was, making him see himself more as who he is to the people he cares about than a dethroned king of demons.

In a sense Luz seems to find all other characters in something of a stagnation point of their. A sort of fatalistic view of their own identities, be it in a more “ontological” sense, according to my interpretation, as in Lilith and Amity’s case, or as products of Lady Luck’s whims as for Willow and Eda. {Sidenote: For me at least Lumity’s mutual crush always made more sense on Amity’s end than on Luz’s and in a certain way it still does despite EE. Case in point, if I were to pin point the precise moment her feelings towards started shaping up in a way that makes infatuation possible it would that “I’m not a witch, but I’m working hard to become”. If what I’m saying is not absolute non-sense, then this would have been a “Holy shit. You can actually do that? You can actually have enough agency over your own life to that extent do something like that?”. I mean, their following interaction, at the library has her looking like “Ok, maybe I was just a wee bit of a needlessly belligerent dick just now” after she pushes Luz away from her offering to help when reading to kids.}

To put it succinctly: the message of the show is that your identity, who you are as a person, is not the product of a pre-existent essence but of who you actively choose to be. That even if one is not capable of deciding their circumstances (like Willow, Eda, or Amity), that are the choices one makes as they go about living their lives that determine their identity. And by centering Luz’s core conflict now as where her belonging lies only for it to be solved at the show’s finale by having her, the main character, effectively having to make this choice, to realize she belongs to wherever she decides she belongs to would be a pretty poignant way to get this point across.

So yeah, if my guesses so far are right this may as well be one of the show’s most important episodes.

Anyway, back to my esoteric predictions about the upcoming episodes...

Episode 7: Eda and Rayne. Now, I don’t to sound like a party pooper or something, but we don’t really have a reason to predict those two having a romantic connection. There’s no reason to necessarily refuse this possibility a priori either though. I mean, the further I get into the future episode the less I have to work with in terms of speculation. We don’t really know where her story is heading, and I feel like I already covered it enough when I was talking about ep 4. But there are two things I want to point out. First, like Mama Clawthorne, Rayne is a figure from Eda’s past, so whatever conflict she may have to sort through from now on stems from her past. The specifics are up to anyone’s guess, so yeah, it is perfectly possible that those two were a couple or something along those lines at some point in the past. But other than that picture that shows that they were somewhat close, we really don’t have much to go by. Second thing, and this is not really all that important. If the foe from episode 6 is not Golden Boi, I think this will be the episode on which the two interact (again, that picture of Luz with his staff, we know they will get to interact at some point, and this seems to be the one episode out of all we have a synopsis for that depends the least on Luz for the main story).

Episode 8: Just imagine me blowing raspberries. I got nothing for this one, except that: a - I really hope Axel Rose does not get to be a guest voice acting role, same goes for Slash and that bassist I keep forgetting the name of; b - I hate this expression, but this really strike me as a “filler episode”, or a breather as I’ve seem someone put it. Still, as much as with anything else I could be wrong here.

But before I move on, there are three very important characters I haven’t talked about enough thus far at least in terms of speculation. Gus, Willow, and Bellos. So I’ll address the three of them just now. Bellos: he is the force that will ultimately make Luz confronting the question about where her belonging lies all but unavoidable; essentially - and I know I must sound like a broken record, but if and only if my take is right - his actions are not all that important to the story and its message because he is less of a character and more something akin to a force of nature. Gus: again, not so sure where his story will go or if he even has one in a more strict sense as the other characters. Frankly that’s one of the aspects of the show I find the hardest to form an opinion on, unlike the others he sort of feels complete, that makes him pretty neat but also means that there’s less stuff you can do to him, less places you can take his character and develop it. That being said, I think he has a function in the show and he fulfills it pretty nicely. Besides, they can always just go and introduce new aspects to him we just can’t foresee as of now (which might as well happen in episode 5 for all we know). Either way, I have nothing but adoration for this precious boy. Now, Willow. As I mentioned, as far as I can tell her character got pretty much done with at Understand Willow. It was really weird for me when I watched that episode because it is until now my absolute favorite of the series (although Echoes fro the Past is putting up a pretty solid fight), the first thing I thought afterwards was “Idk how many seasons the show has left, but it feels a bit too soon for a defining moment like this and I don’t know what else they can do with her.” I mean, you could argue that the Grudgby episode seems to kinda sorta set up a conflict between her and Boscha, but that story seems to concern more Luz and Amity’s characters, especially the ladder. Willow and Boscha act more as a means to make Amity take that first step and for Luz to learn not to start a mosh pit in a Radiohead concert. That being said, I feel like she is now in a similar position to Gus’: either a new unforeseen source of conflict for her or they simply leave her to occupy a fixed role in the story. Personally, I’d much rather they introduce new stories and conflicts for them, not only that would help push for that overall message I was raving on about, but I also just wanna see more of them. I adore all characters in this show, I have fun with them and want to keep doing so until the show ultimately ends.

Almost done, I promise. Just a tad more of your patience, that’s all I’m asking. I will not revise or edit this so hopefully I’m still making a semblance of sense. I mean, if you’re reading this sentence then it probably means I am. Otherwise I can only ask you one thing: why?

Now, Eclipse Lake, or episode 9. As I said when talking about episode 7, we are now in too distant a territory for me to feel any confident as to my basis. Take all of this as more wishful thinking than anything else. So, you know, if you have a tin foil hat at hand now would be a good time to put it on.

Going by this episode’s synopsis as well as episode 5′s it makes it sound that Amity will become steadily a more central point to the whole portal conundrum. She is the one going on about it more than anyone else. There’s a first a fairly obvious reason why she put herself in that position: she has a gargantuan crush on the girl and wants to spend as much time as physically possible with her. There’s also a secondary reason why she would want to do that, and for that I’d need to bring up those letters Camilla has or had been receiving.

Now, I’m aware I can’t really make an ironclad argument for her being the one writing them. However, it is more than a bit suspicious that those letters would be brought to attention immediately after we see a piece of writing that we know for a fact was written by her and seeing how closely those two handwrittings match. Not every piece of scenary put by an author necessarily be a Tchekov’s gun, but this one reaaally looks to be the case, still circumstantial evidence so tin foil hats or whatever. Moreover, as I on at length before, Amity’s story up to this point was that of someone learning to be her own person and aim for her own goals, in this sense I can see her decision for writing those letters as an early and not stellarly thought out way to do that even if well meaning. Like a poorly articulated if good intentioned act made by someone who doesn’t really understands why she’s doing what she’s doing, what it entails, or what the full length of the consequences could be. I mean, she is a kid after all, and she is bound to have a few hiccups along her way to self-discovery. Again, I’ll get to it when I get to it. Lastly, however, the second reason why she would have a reason to volunteer to help Luz with her portal situation: if she is the one sending those letters then she has access to some form of a portal herself, be it fully functioning like Eda’s or just capable to dispatch smaller objects that’s not really the point. The point is that, if all I’m saying is right she will be put in a very strange situation. If she is possession of a portal and is “helping” Luz find one, then she’d essentially be lying to her much like Luz herself is in a sense lying to Camilla. Moreover, she’d be at this point one of the characters with the largest amount of reasons to delay Luz’s return to the human realm as much as possible, meaning that the question she’ll have to answer would probably go along these lines: do I act in self-interest, lie or maybe even do some sabotage, and make sure I keep the person I’m growing to love next to me, ooooor do I act accordingly to this love and help her achieve her goal which could potentially mean I’ll never see her again?

Also, season one’s finale had an ambiguous title. Young Blood, Old Souls can just as easily be taken as referring to Eda as well as to Lilith, the two focal points of that episode’s conflict. Likewise here, “Yesterday’s Lies” could be taken as either a reference to Luz’s lies to Camilla, or these hypothetical lies Amity may be telling Luz. That means, in this hypothetical mid-season finale I’m conceiving here these two would be the focal points of conflict (maybe alongside Camilla).

In any case, a possible counter to everything I’m saying here is Dana stating that romance was not the show’s endgame, and that is not what I’m suggesting. I have more to speculate on Amity’s role, so going from that I can say that this would in a way be a continuation of what we saw in EE. Something like: Okay, so you want to become your own person, in order to do that I’ll have to make some tough decisions, here’s your first one. It’s like confronting this infant who just took its first steps with the knowledge she’s actually running a marathon.

Anyhow, I don’t really feel well equipped to speculate on how things would play out on Luz’s end so let’s shake things up a bit and try to see things from Camilla’s perspective before getting to the long awaited conclusion. And by long awaited I mean me, this was more tiring than I expected but what the hell, I’m almost done. I can see the finish line already, so yeah.

So, Camilla. What we know given the trailer and the Grom episode is essentially this: she is most likely aware Luz never made to the Reality Check Camp in the first place, and that regardless of where she is there’s someone who (up until the Grom episode) was sending her these comforting messages. If and only if, all I’ve said is right then well have a line of communication between one of Luz’s big arguments for staying in the Isles and her biggest argument for coming back.

Hold on to your tin foil hats, y’all need it. Because my next point is: once Camilla finds out that the letters she’d been receiving up to that are more than a bit sketchy (her ooooohhhh face at the trailer could be that) and if she has some means of responding to them, which I mean... That’s the closest thing to a lead as to Luz’s whereabouts she has, she most likely would confront this hypothetical Amity if that’s the case. If the stars align just right there’s a pretty good chance Amity would give the broad strokes of Luz‘s situation in as much a cryptic fashion as she can, as well as start creating some form rappor with Camilla. Meaning that that choice she’d have to make as I mentioned before would get this extra layer of nuance, because now she knows beyond any doubt that if Luz does cross the portal she’d be with someone who deeply cares about her. Moreover, if I’m right about Amity’s upcoming conflict centering around her apprehension with Luz crossing the portal, her correspondence with Camilla could be a way for her to overcome this fear, for better or for worse. In other words, Camilla possibly unknowing giving her potential daughter-in-law the necessary tools for her to grow as a person. And honestly, I think that would be a pretty cool story.

And that could cause a pretty interesting dynamic between the three of them: Luz not sure as to who she wants to chose to become and most likely getting very upset once she learns of Amity’s lie, whilst still wanting (I don’t really have a defense for this I just think it’d be interesting) to keep her first romantic or potentially romantic relationship, while also being worried as to how things would be with her mother considering her own lie; Amity lying to Luz, while trying to balance out her on desires versus her loved one well-being; and Camilla having mixed feeling about Amity or whoever wrote those letters (they did lie to her after all), worrying like crazy about Luz and also feeling a tad upset at Luz’s lie.

And holy shit I think that does it. I’m done.

Anyone, next finale is “Luz x Camilla x Amity”, that out of the way like Lilith x Eda and Lilith x Luz, my guess is that season 2.5 finale would be “Gus and Willow x Luz” or “Luz x Eda and King”, the finale finale therefore would most like be Luz x Luz.

Ci vediamo.

{Couple of edits I just thought would be important:

1 - I know that considering what I’ve said regarding the mid-season final may seem like a bit too much for a 20 something minutes episode. But I mean, this fandom and Amphibia’s seem to overlap quite a bit, and we all saw the metric ton of information they threw at us during True Colors. All that I’ve said seem to me well withing the realm of possibility.

2 - In the EXTREMELY unlikely chance I’m absolutely on point on everything I’ve just spouted (Despite being purposefully vague. But oh well. We can argue the semantics of vagueness some other time) I’ll consider this fandom as owing me a rendition of The Number of the Beast’s cover art (the album, not the single... not even I am morbid enough for that) featuring the Owl Beast, Belos and Kikimora or the Golden Boi. I call it the Owl Maiden. Will I go aggro if no one does that? No. Do I have means to demand it in any forceful way that would grant that I’d get to see said rendition? hahahaha I obviously don’t. Will I be poutty? Yes, that will 100% happen. But really, that would be for the benefit of us as a community. I mean, that look pretty awesome and you can’t argue otherwise.}

#The owl house #Luz Noceda #Toh King #Willow Park #Gus Porter #Lilith Clawthorne #Eda Clawthorne #Amity Blight #Camilla Noceda #Boscha #Rayne toh #emperor belos #toh golden guard

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annebrontesrequiem · 3 years ago

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So since I’ve seen a few people discussing the changes to Rina’s character in a positive light (all of these posts were btw very interesting with very good points so I’m not trying to demean anything or anyone) and since I made a very short post about it yesterday discussing my initial feelings - which were distinctly negative - I think I’m going to go over my thoughts again.

So, as I said yesterday I didn’t like the way they changed Rina’s character. I think part of it is because I find plots centered around misunderstandings really irritating - like if I have to read one more Shakespeare play centered around that I’m chucking the whole folio out the window. Another part of it however is that this volte face by Rina puts Rena in a really awkward position, a position that was already really awkward from Satoko’s decision to inject her.

So, what am I saying? From a logical perspective this change makes complete sense. It makes sense to make Rina a sympathetic character because in doing so you get to explore the ways that Satoko is completely warping the world around her, world’s that seem more and more determined to roll in Rika’s favor, so to speak. On top of that making Rina a sympathetic character also introduces a layer of complexity to Rena’s story - something that her dad slapping her also does but apparently that was in the original VN which I need to finish reading I digress. Making Rina sympathetic, willing to change to the point that she actively tells Rena this, it’s written to show how much Rena’s paranoia from Hinamizawa Syndrome is self-destructive. Rena is robbing herself of a better life by letting herself be controlled, by not reaching out to help, by simply following the programming of Hinamizawa Syndrome.

Except that doesn’t work in this case. Satoko is the one who injected Rena, to the point she’s supposed to be at L5 (which I wouldn’t say she’s at that stage based on actions but idk she’s really mentally strong I digress). This isn’t some tragedy of Rena not reaching out for help because she’s been purposefully pushed to the extreme, to the point of no return. There is no time in this arc in which Rena can take the initiative to reach out for help. Her killing Rina is no longer a symptom of the isolation that characters push themselves into by not believing in one another, it’s simply the result of Satoko’s plan.

Going back to this idea of logical perspective, because of extenuating factors, this change should work perfectly fine. Gives depth to a character, adds to the idea of how much the worlds are being manipulated by Satoko, wow we’ve covered all the bases. But the problem here is because Rina changes at the drop of a hat, because we don’t see the loops which could have driven her to change from being part of a scheme with Teppei to willingly disconnecting herself from Rena’s dad, from an emotional perspective this doesn’t work, at least not for me.

I mentioned Shion’s arc in the initial post and I think that it’s still a really good example. The reason that Shion’s arc works so incredibly well is because all the characters she deals with are fully fleshed out. We’ve seen her friends who obviously have the potential to care about each other deeply. We’ve seen the good the characters she brutally murders, and we’ve also seen their flaws. For example Mion does all in her power to help Shion escape her situation, but she is still so frozen by her place as heir that she let’s her sister’s nails get torn off for this weird idea of “taking responsibility”. Almost all the characters in Shion’s arc feel in some ways cruel, but they’re also very vibrant, and because of that her arc works so well. We can sympathize deeply with Shion while still also feeling terrible about the characters she’s murdering, understand that they were in no way deserving of being horrifically murdered.

The reason this works though is because of the literal hours of groundwork laid on all these characters. All the mundane stuff we see from their perspectives, the club games, the commenting on uniforms and names and all that (this is more specific to the VN). That’s the reason that Shion’s arc works so well. If that arc came before all the others then it would be frankly awful. It’d be hard to sympathize with either Shion or the rest of the Hinamizawa gang. It’d feel like watching some terrible person murder some other terrible people. Wow, this is every slasher film.

While Rena’s actions certainly don’t go as far as lazy slasher films, I do think it sort of taps into that similar vein. Logically I understand why this arc exists, but emotionally I just feel sort of… vaguely disapproving. I don’t feel really awful for Rina because I’m suffering from character whiplash, and I don’t feel awful for Rena cause it feels like she’s going on a rampage for no damn reason. Which yes, in the original arcs there was also no damn reason, but the slow buildup of characters and paranoia worked so well that you didn’t feel that way. Again this swings back to Satoko injecting Rena. We already saw the groundwork, but immediately turn the dial up from 10 to 100 lost all the content in between, which is sort of imperative for stuff like this in my opinion. And Rina’s quick switch makes this even worse. Not to mention that she seems to have lost braincells because someone cryptically telling you no one comes to a garbage dump while wielding something that obviously looks like a weapon just, this isn’t a slasher film please. Redeemed Rina doesn’t have to be stupid Rina please she doesn’t have to be an idiot.

As much as I also loathed Teppei’s redemption (I’m not letting that off the hook that still irritates me immensely) at least the writers did some sort of effort to show his thought process, even if that thought process was absolute nonsense. If that had been shifted to Rina’s character, maybe it would’ve worked better. I mean Rina in the original is a terrible person who literally tries to murder a child but I do hate her less than Teppei. Because Teppei, well, no redemption for him.

This is way too long so I’m going to stop while I’m ahead. I hope I explained my perspective well.

Tl;dr: This is an example of logic v emotion, planning v execution. Theoretically making Rina a sympathetic character adds a lot of depth to the story. But due to rushing, poor laid foundations, and the bias of an entire preceding, instead the attempt just falls flat. It increases my sympathy for Rina, yes, but in a sort of vague and superficial way. And as for Rena, well it’s hard to feel much for her at all that isn’t a holdover from previous emotions.

I genuinely liked the two first episodes of Sotsu and I am excited to see where this goes. But this decisions is still something I’m not wild about, and I just wish at the end of the day it had been done better. This whole thing is 2.2k words long (I’m so sorry).

#higurashi #higurashi sotsu #higurashi spoilers #mine

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alatismeni-theitsa · 4 years ago

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16 anti LO anon opinions

All under the cut

(1) Fastpassers are also probably mad bc when smythe post fastpass title on twitter(which was heathers musical song ripoff) everyone was so hyped up and excided, they thought this gonna be about "Underqold badass queen Persephone " or something with her trail or something big with her, but no, they got Minthe flashback that didnt change anything in the story

(2) Fastpassers are annoyed bc this episode was flashback of Minthe. Two previous fastpasses got pretty big(and stupid) revals(leto is bad guy,apollo and artemis may be zeus child and last but not least Cronus awakening) so they were hopping for something more not a filler wpisode that changes nothing in to the story bc there were wpisodes that make Minthe more "symphatetic" than this one.

(3) Am i the only one a bit concerned that a Minthe episode made LO fans demand their money back but apparently episodes and a planned redemption over Apollo, who R*PED the main character, was met with fans sympathizing with him and feeling bad for judging him "too soon"? They can accept a sexual assaulter having mommy issues to excuse his bad actions, but a boring filter episode about Minthe, who we know will be killed by the end anyway, gets outrage? That doesn't sit well with me.

(4) oh my god the LO fans hated the minthe fast pass so much they actually made LO's rating start to go down 😭 most of us here dont even like the comic but none of us would purposely review bomb it over a boring episode over a character we didnt like, thats so entitled!

(5) Adding on to the recent fastpass, it was extremely boring. I get that you can't please everyone but the fact that Minthe is having a backstory now just feels like filler.

This is the main issue I have with Rachel's story, she has so many characters but chooses to develop them at the worst times. If we got this backstory earlier in season 2, this would make sense. However, the fp before this one ended on a cliffhanger. You'd think it'd continue but no, we just get Minthe backstory.

I'd rather see an Apollo backstory, he's an active villain and would be interesting to see his motive.

Minthe doesn't have a compelling motive other than jealousy.

(6) I can't be the only one who thinks the new hairstyle updates for characters like Apollo or Eros look weird right? Eros literally looks like an adult version of one of his siblings Storge (who has curly permed hair and was holding a hamster)

(7) That Lo eros panel ... oof. Wheres his hairline going? He had a damn 7 head. Also at least for awhile the men had a different face from the women, but I guess they’re also women now, facial features wise?

(8) On a side note: why the fuck is Eros so ugly in this episode😭

(9) SMYTHE DOES NOT ONLY HAVE A DD/LG KINK, SHE A L S O HAS A PREGNANCY KINK!!! WHY ELSE HADES WAS SO *SMIRKY* ABOUT THE WHOLE FERTILITY GODDESS THING BACK WHEN HE AND PERSEPHONE WERE AT THE BEACH???? i swear to Allah this shit gets even more and more disgusting.

(10) This is something i see so much but LO especially but why do all of them have boring ancient clothes? It's always white or tan sheets or maybe black if it's someone in the Underworld. I'm going more off ancient images but shouldn't the gods especially have more grand and detailed clothing options? i get it's probably harder to design based off colorful skin tones but it's not impossible. it just seems so much of the comic design feels very flat, so if the story can't hold up then the art should.

(11) The main problem I had before with lore olympus was its cliffhanger syndrome. Like, why do some many chapters leave on a cliffhanger and for no reason at all? Like when Hera got hit and nothing happened. When I was experiencing the episodes coming out in real time, it drove me mad.

It's gotten better recently but that's probably because the three recent episodes (fastpass) felt more like filler.

That's the main reason why I feel like the plot is being dragged out. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for cute character moments and creators getting money but, LO is slowly becoming less and less interesting. I literally skipped around in most of the fasspasses because it really wasn't interesting. The only thing memorable about all of the fp episodes is the beginning and end, the middle is just kinda there.

(12) Ampelus (psyche)'s eyes used to be golden/yellow but now its coloured purple lmao

(13) Wtf is happening in lore olympus?! Now they want to bring cronus back and do another war?!? Are they crazy nothing like this didnt happen in mythology and obviously not bc of persephone(in comic her pink tree in underwold will give crounus power and life). It supposed to be romance not whatever fuck this is now.

(14) I feel like if I was at Henson Co. or Webtoons with a tv deal on the line, I would make Smythe to hand writing duties to a pro or take a hiatus seriously plan everything out, because all these new plots are distracting from what people signed up for, which is to see HxP get together and the myth. It seems like filter seeing as any TV adaption wouldn't cover most of it anyway, so why even include it? If RS wants it over sooner than later, this isn't how you do it, she's just procrastinating now.

(15) I find Demeter in LO just confusing. If she’s so overbearing and controlling, why would she ever allow Persephone out of their domain to live with Artemis in the city? Even the most liberally easy going parents don’t let their naive children out into the world like that with people they barely know, yet the supposed helicopter parent does. Why not literally literally lock her up? Especially when Persephone can’t control her powers and is desperate to hide that she killed a village of people? Demeter knows she’s a danger to others yet let her out anyway? That doesn’t sounding overbearing to me. It sounds like she’s right to want to hide her away. Persephone is a bigger threat to everyone else than they are to her. More so, actual controlling parents do give their children phones to keep easy tabs on them, yet LO Demeter doesn’t? She could constantly call Persephone or check up on her without physically needing to be there, yet they don’t do that. What modern parent would let their child leave home without a way to contact them? If anything, she’s extremely loose on parenting her and lets Persephone do/have whatever she wants. The controlling helicopter parent premise too is undercut by the fact LO Demeter ends up being right in wanting to hide her daughter away because within a month of leaving home Persephone is drugged, kidnapped, threatened by several people, r*ped, blackmailed, is close to dropping out of school, attacked by shades, and had a mental/emotional breakdown, many of those things being linked to her future “caring” husband. I just don’t buy it. Demeter ends up looking correct by anyone who isn’t blinded by the rose colored glasses of HxP.

(16) If I'll ever bother to read LO I'll do so only to see how horrible exactly it is.

#anti lo #answered

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haleigh-sloth · 3 years ago

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I don’t know if you discussed this, but what’s your thoughts of the panel of Toga biting the bird? I’ve heard a couple of takes paralleling that to Hawks, foreshadowing something in the future

UGH MAN

If only Hawks wasn't so tied to the Todoroki plot line, I would SO go for that foreshadowing.

Not to say that Toga should kill Hawks. Absolutely not.

But when I saw that idea going around it came to mind that Toga MIGHT be tempted to try to kill Hawks, but she'd get stopped and reminded that killing him isn't the answer. Like in my head it played out as Ochacko stopping her and helping her shift her POV.

BUT

I think that Hawks's character is just too tied into the Todoroki plot line. The only villain I see him facing off with/going after is Touya. Because Enji has to sacrifice himself to save his son, and it's not like AFO or some rando villain going after Touya is interesting.

No, if Hori hasn't completely given up on Hawks's foreshadowing then he'll go after Dabi, which will be his next lowest point (after Twice) and then Endeavor sacrifices himself (doesn't die though because he just won't) and Hawks ends up hurting Endeavor physically, and in that shocking moment realizes that by hurting Endeavor's son, he'd be hurting Endeavor emotionally. And he'd realize that his way of thinking is wrong and that could lead into some actual internal struggle and self reflection about Twice and we could get Hawks's character back from the bowels of Endeavor's redemption arc. Lol.

The way I explained up there^^ is still very tied to Endeavor but at least that way he comes out of Endeavor's redemption as his own character that reflects on the crime he committed and has internal struggle, and like...his personality, whereas if Hori backs out of making Hawks a "villain" (not an LOV villain, that was never gonna happen) and just uses him for Endeavor's redemption the way he is right now....well you might as well say good bye to Hawks lol. Like right now he's hardly even a character he's just.....there for Endeavor. Ugh.

Sorry that tangent probably wasn't what you asked for. So to answer your question:

As interesting as it'd be for that Toga bird panel to foreshadow some confrontation between her and Hawks, I don't think it's going to mean anything in the long run? I say think because anything is possible, and honestly, versions of BOTH scenarios I described could happen in canon. But I'm just not as set on the Toga/bird panel meaning anything in the long run mostly just because of Hawks's involvement in Touya's story.

#bnha #bnha asks #anonymous #bnha predictions #bnha endgame #boku no hero academia

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murasaki-murasame · 3 years ago

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Thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu Ep6

Let’s just file this one under “top 10 shittiest anime deaths” *badum-tish*

Thoughts under the cut.

I feel like in a lot of ways this episode kinda highlights the highs and lows of the new series, and how it feels like it’s trying to be like three different stories at the same time and usually only succeeding at being one of them.

This episode, and this arc in general, as a standalone part of the franchise was actually really good, and delivered on the promise of ‘what if Mion actually became the culprit in one arc’, but as part of the answer arcs for the new series it just continues to feel kinda pointless and predictable. I still think that a lot of this has to do with them trying to be both a sequel and a remake at the same time, but unlike with the Rena answer arc, I honestly feel like even new fans could have guessed everything that happened in this arc, since it didn’t actually go into anything that wasn’t already discussed in Gou. So even on that level it doesn’t really feel like it’s providing essential answers that couldn’t have been worked out in advance.

It’s kinda weird how little this arc actually explored anything about Mion and Shion that wasn’t already shown in Gou, considering how much stuff from the VN related to them hadn’t been covered. A lot of their backstory stuff ended up not exactly being relevant to how this arc played out, but it just feels like a weird thing to gloss over when they’ve spent so much time going over stuff from the VN as it is.

Though on that note, I’m really curious about how they’ve made absolutely zero reference to the fact that Mion and Shion swapped places as kids, or anything about Mion’s tattoo. At this point I have to wonder if maybe Ryukishi just doesn’t actually like that plot point in hindsight, and is choosing to effectively write it out of the story here. I can see why, though, since from what I remember it kinda verges into being a twist for the sake of having a twist, and doesn’t actually do much for them as characters that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

The lack of basically anything to do with Shion’s backstory and her relationship with Satoshi still feels a lot more iffy, but at least some of this stuff feels like intentional revising on Ryukishi’s part. Which I think is a really interesting aspect of the new series as a whole. It feels like he’s taking the chance to look back on the VN and show us how he feels about it after all this time. The stuff with characters like Teppei and Rina seems to be his way of making up for them being shallow villains in the VN, and Satoko being evil here seems to be in part inspired by how little agency or control she had in the original story. I guess the big issue here is that a lot of people probably just straight up disagree with the things that Ryukishi thinks of as being problems with the VN that he’s trying to ‘fix’ here, but I think it’s really interesting to see him do this sort of thing, even if it’s messy and overly ambitious and doesn’t fully work.

For the most part I agree with all the criticisms about these arcs feeling like a bit of a waste of time as we wait for the story to eventually loop back to the Nekodamashi cliffhanger. Even from the perspective of this being mainly for the sake of new fans, it feels kinda strange to see such straightforward ‘this is what was happening behind the scenes in the question arcs’ style answers, with lots of reused footage and basically zero twists or reveals. The VN’s way of designing separate arcs that provide answers for the question arcs was more satisfying, and Umineko went even further with that by just vaguely going over the basic keys to figuring out all the how-dunnit mysteries of the question arcs, and everything else about the answer arcs there was just a continuation of the meta plot. So it feels kinda weird to see him loop back around to the opposite end of the spectrum here.

It makes me wonder if there’s some sort of larger meta mystery going on here that’ll become more apparent in the next arc, and will reveal that we didn’t actually know everything that was going on like we thought we did, but at this point I feel like it’ll probably all end up being a lot more straightforward than we predicted. But there’s still the looming specter of the meta plane stuff, the hints dropped about where this series fits into the wider WTC universe timeline, and the fact that the whole point of the new series in the first place seems to be guiding Rika and Satoko down the path toward becoming their Umineko counterparts. So all of that stuff makes me think there might be some curveball twists going in the future that expand the scope of the story, but I have no real idea what to expect from that, and if it’d even feel satisfying. As much as I’m a diehard Umineko fan who loves the idea of this being a Lambda and Bern origin story, I still worry that the execution might not work once we get to the end. I also don’t really think that anything the series does in the final arcs will completely make up for how predictable these first few answer arcs have felt on a week by week basis, lol.

In general it gets me thinking that in spite of how predictable the answers have been thus far, I’m largely clueless about how I think they’ll actually wrap up the overarching story with Satoko and Rika. It feels like there’s still a lot of different directions they could take it in, and a lot of it depends on just how far Ryukishi wants to go with tying this into other WTC works.

For one thing, I’m not even sure how to expect them to follow up on the Nekodamashi cliffhanger. It’s at least hard to imagine how they could stop Satoko from shooting Rika then and there, considering how this episode in particular went. And one way or another, we’ll have to see how Rika and Satoko handle being in a situation where they both know what’s going on with each other. I think it’ll then just depend on what Satoko’s mental state is like at that point, and also what they plan on doing with the whole looper-killing sword thing. I think Ryukishi’s implied multiple times now that the next arc will start to test Satoko’s resolve, and going by her attitude during the infamous gut-ripping scene, as well as her traumatized reaction to the punching glove box prank, I think she’ll be much less confident in her goals by that point, and probably more willing to talk about what’s going on.

I don’t think it’ll be as simple as ‘she just gives up and everyone forgives her’, or even ‘Rika beats up Satoko while everyone cheers and they all move on and abandon her’, though. I think there’ll be some kind of balancing act between redemption and punishment, but I also think that ultimately it’ll also tie into the Lambda/Bern origin story stuff they seem to be going for. I think I’ve said this before, but my best guess for how this will end is that the looper-killing sword will be used to separate their ‘meta selves’ who are aware of the loops and stuff, while leaving behind their regular physical selves who thus lose most/all of their memories of the loops. At least that way they can have their cake and eat it too by showing how Lambda and Bern became witches, while also having separate versions of them that get to stay behind and mend their relationship or something. But I’m not even confident about all of that, lol.

It’s also worth noting that the key visual for Sotsu features Satoko and Rika as teenagers, and the OP also features that pretty heavily, along with an ominous scene of the other main characters as teenagers. So that makes me think that the story will somehow get back to that whole time period, which makes me a bit more unsure how the last arc will go. One option is that the final Nekodamashi arc will just keep going until they become teenagers again, but the way those scenes are presented in the promo material makes it seem like Satoko and Rika’s relationship is still bad then. So maybe on the other hand we’ll just go back to the original Matsuribayashi timeline where Satoko first met Eua, but I feel like that’d probably be the happy ending where everything goes back to the original timeline and they all end up reconnecting again, so I’m still not sure how the ominous presentation of the teenage characters might play into that.

Either way, I think all of that stuff will probably just come up in the final arc. The next one will probably be covering Tataridamashi and Nekodamashi from Satoko’s perspective. The next arc should be where things start to shake up, but I still think they could easily cover both of those arcs in just five episodes. Nothing much seemed to be happening with Satoko until the final days of Tataridamashi, and I can’t imagine there being much to explore with how she set up the rapid-fire loops in Nekodamashi.

With what’s been hinted at about the next arc not going according to Satoko’s plans, and her resolve being tested, I think that this will probably be where things go entirely out of her control and she starts to doubt whether or not she should continue with her plans. Specifically I think that being in a new loop with Teppei being nice to her, and watching everyone else try to save her from her [perceived] abuse, will start to sway her toward thinking that maybe that sort of timeline is worth staying in, even if it means giving up on controlling Rika.

One way or another I think Ooishi went crazy all on his own. I think Ryukishi explicitly said in an interview that Ooishi went L5 naturally, and I think the manga version of Tataridamashi made it clear that Satoko was genuinely thrown off by how things went there, so she probably didn’t want Ooishi to kill anyone. I can see how he might have gone off the deep end by interrogating Teppei and realizing that there was basically a witch hunt going on against him, but I’m not sure how he would have ended up specifically blaming Rika unless Satoko pushed him into it. Either way, Teppei probably really did attack Keiichi at the end of the arc, and we know that Satoko just has one syringe to use, so at most she probably injected Teppei and then Ooishi went L5 naturally.

I’m also curious to see if/when Satoko learns about Rika being given the power to remember her deaths, since that’d also go a long way toward explaining what her intentions might have been with how that arc ended. I think Satoko is at least aware that Rika doesn’t remember how she dies, so I’m at least not sure what she’d try and accomplish by setting up a loop that only goes to shit at the very last second. It feels like it wouldn’t do a whole lot aside from making Rika confused in the next loop. But Rika only gets her ability to remember her deaths after that loop already ends, so Satoko could have only known about it if there’s some sort of conspiracy going on about Hanyuu. Which there probably is, since her whole presence in this is weird and her deciding to give Rika a new set of powers was always super suspicious, but still.

I’m also curious to see if we get any real payoff to the idea that Satoko’s looping is causing more and more people to remember past loops. Especially when it comes to the main club members, since there’s various moments in Tataridamashi and Nekodamashi, both in the anime and manga, that seem to imply that most of them are starting to remember things.

Even though the execution of this whole new series makes me a bit more wary about how any sort of new anime for Umineko along these lines might pan out, I can’t help but still really hope this is leading to something like that. For one thing I just think that if he’s going for a Lambda/Bern origin story with this, at the risk of alienating lots of existing fans, I think there should at least be a more concrete payoff to that than just ‘ok now you can go back and read the Umineko VN’. But I think there’s a lot of potential to be had with some sort of remake or sequel to Umineko where he gets a chance to revisit it after more than 10 years. One of these days I should still just make a whole post about my hopes and predictions for what could be done with any sort of new Umineko anime, lol.

Anyway, this got longer than I planned, but all in all I enjoyed this more than it probably comes across like I did, lol. Even if the plot’s been kinda boring, I think Sotsu has done a great job of elevating it with good direction and visuals. The moment to moment pacing can still be kinda choppy, and sometimes the presentation of flashback scenes is confusing and ambiguous, but in general it still feels entertaining to watch unfold, and the brutality has a lot of impact. I’m just hoping that the rest of Sotsu is more ambitious and surprising than these first two arcs have been.

#murasaki rambles #higurashi #higurashi sotsu

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marithlizard · 4 years ago

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First Impressions: RWBY v8c9, “Witch”

"Witch", huh? Presumably Salem. Are we going to get more backstory lore? Because YES PLEASE.

The Atlas army vs. the whale whose teeth loom like mountains on the horizon. They look like toys. I can't help thinking these soldier mooks equal any Huntsman in courage, if not in skill. And this is the first real large-scale action any of them have seen - that anyone in the world has seen in their lifetimes.

eyy Ren has gotten over the snappishness as well as the despairing angst. Suddenly gaining control of his evolving Semblance must help a lot with the feelings of powerlessness. (And though we haven't seen him use it on Jaune or Yang, I'm thinking being able to know for certain how much your friends care about you and have your back is a source of power in itself.)

They're discussing fairy tales MY HEART

Ozpin continuing to confirm he has handed over the reins completely to Oscar. I don't like this about the accelerating merge, though. It feels like we're going to lose Oz very soon. And yet, Jinn's vision definitely showed us Oz and host coexisting in middle age. Did they not use magic in that lifetime? Or is the merge somehow not about "losing" either one of them?

Team FNKI in a line of regular soldiers! They've got to have mobilized all the students, but I wonder if we'll see any others besi- Neon. Neon you are wearing rollerskates to the apocalypse.

...well, why not?

Marrow, YOU'RE just a kid. You can't be more than a few years older, and you're not that much more seasoned. Though I understand the feeling.

So, Hazel, you're ready to rejoin fact-based reality? Or at least listen to someone who pretty much definitionally can't be lying?

(Actually...the only information we have about Jinn comes from her, and it'd be a hell of an interesting twist if she was editing facts to fit her own agenda. I don't think it's very likely for meta reasons, but it'd make a great fic premise, wouldn't it?)

Huh. He sounds much much calmer, and like he's been thinking through everything for the last few hours.

....what? He's not even going to ask??? THAT is a surprise. The existence of Jinn and knowing Oscar gave him the password in good faith were enough to deradicalize a violent extremist. (Wish it was that easy in RL.)

Oscar's little wave

(You know, now that I think of it, Ozpin has never interacted with Jinn himself. She's greeted him twice and he hasn't answered. Does he resent her for not answering his predecessor's questions more helpfully? Mistrust her? )

yes rescue Emerald good

"Just to be clear" - oh god I thought that was Salem's voice and nearly jumped out of my seat.

"I'll come back for it" crap crap crap Hazel's redemption arc is going to be short, painful, and fatal. And Salem will keep the lamp, if not have the password.

And we'll just all turn our backs on the divine artifact-entity and walk away. I guess they don't think she's enough of a person to say goodbye to?

And our eavesdropper is...the one person who CAN'T summon Jinn or ask her a question.

Oh no. No. Please don't have the fandom descend into "Jinn is ablist" discourse. (ETA: upon thinking further I take it back, the gods suck and providing a Relic that not everyone can use is in its way a tiny symbol of their callous attitude to people. )

RJY working smoothly together, nice.

Robyn said people are always suspicious of her, and her truthsense ability has a clearly visible limiting condition. But Ren can apparently read the emotions of everyone around him all the time without them knowing. Surely that would make a lot of people uncomfortable. (Although I expect the writers to ignore this, and will be pleasantly surprised if they explore it at all.)

That's always the way isn't it, you roll a 4 on your concentration check right when a demonic jellyfish is floating by.

Huh, they separated from Oscar? And Hazel is worried about him? I'm still dizzy from the speed of this 180.

uh...hi, Salem. Nice...weather outside the whale today? Seen any good dismemberments lately?

Hazel, you are a terrible liar and you can't bluff. Admittedly the stakes are a lot higher here than in the weekly WTCH poker game.

Salem NYOOM

No one can accuse Yang of not understanding the core competencies.

"Juan"??? I did hear that correctly, yes? Marrow not remembering Jaune's name is hilarious. And I was about to say understandable, but no, they worked with the Ace Ops for weeks! Did you just have him mentally filed as "the blond himbo tank"?

O-kayyyyyy. I can't blame Emerald, but this could go so horribly wrong so fast.

Isn't Hazel-disguised-as-Oscar way too heavy to pick up like tha- OHHHHHHHHH. Now things make much more sense. Oscar was the one worried about Hazel earlier, and failing utterly to bluff. Infinitely more in character.

Awkward Semblance is also extremely convenient in short-cutting negotiations. Nice.

I do not, in fact, have any doubt that Winter would blow up her sister. And in this situation I can't say it's the wrong thing to do. As far as they know their bomb is the only hope.

Wow. I really did not think we’d go to toe to toe with Salem herself at this point in the plot. It's so traditional to save the final boss fight for, well, the final boss. She's terrifying and unstoppable, but not actually more terrifying than the giant whale.

Her regen is just like the Hound's body morphing, but far smoother and faster with a thousand "deaths" of practice.

She sounds more normal right now, oddly. Her voice is lacking both the measured slowness and the resonance it has when she's making speeches. I like the idea of that falling away when she's surprised and exasperated.

Our heroes are very very lucky that RWBY is not a darker show, or those Grimmhand restraints would be doing a lot of gross agonizing damage with their nails. There's no reason she'd want to be gentle at this point.

Yeah, there's the sonorous voice again. Although it wavers again with that "Why do you Keep. Coming. Back?" Does she not know? How can she not know, Jinn's vision said Ozma told her everything. Perhaps she means: why do you keep fighting me instead of hiding like the hermit.

Yang, don't give her information, gah! "Her again." She sounds pleased. I think we are going to find out Summer's fate this volume after all. Salem will reveal it to break Ruby’s spirit. Prediction: it will work.

(EDIT: I completely missed the significance of Yang calling Summer “my mom”. Wow.)

She definitely intends to turn Emerald into something like the Hound.

"No more Gretchens." Oh, of course that's what Oscar said he needed before they could leave, the cane.

Hazel's life expectancy is minutes long but at least it included a satisfying KAPOW. And every single sparkly crystal he owns. Somehow he seems smaller here, less bulky than he did at Haven. Less a titan and more a man.

yigh he's pounding her into mush. Which he has several times before, apparently. This is all to buy you time, Emerald, why are you not running. (I know, I know. She's never had someone actually help her and care about her, only scraps of affection to establish control. At this moment Cinder's hold on her is breaking forever.)

(Neo, on the other hand. Will she bring the lamp to Cinder, who frankly has been a totally crap partner and deserves no loyalty? Is she still after revenge? My bet is still firmly on her planning to backstab Cinder as soon as Ruby is gone. But beyond that, we don't know her thoughts at all. She might join the heroes, or disappear like Raven to hide while the apocalypse works itself out.)

That's true, Oscar, but what can you do to stop her?

Hah! Clever, Hazel. And she's actually screaming in pain from the fire, whereas she didn't make a sound when being pulverized.

What does the cane DO? It's impressive as heck, but I can't tell. Channeling his magic, certainly. Are we going to lose Oz right now? With no chance to talk to Ruby or Qrow or anyone, to reconcile? It seems all too likely, and such a waste.

Which makes me think, in turn, that perhaps we will lose Oscar too in a way. Unexpected - I have always thought the merge would end with Oscar holding all the memories. But maybe he won't be quite either of them anymore, even if he remembers both and the others still call him Oscar. And that thought also makes me sad.

Anyway, good episode, though now the title doesn’t seem particularly relevant. Hazel was much more the focus.

#rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby v8 spoilers #rwby volume 8 spoilers

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purplebass · 4 years ago

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Alastair and Matthew Analysis

I’m here with my quick ideas again... but I thought how Alastair Carstairs and Matthew Fairchild are “parallel characters” or “mirroring characters”, which means that they can seem like the sun and the moon, black and white, but truthfully share some storylines, goals, interests that may not seem clear if you don’t analyze them.

Daddy and Mommy Issues

Both Matthew and Alastair have/had problems with one of their parents. Alastair doesn’t seem too close with Elias at the moment, and the reader is led to believe that it’s because Elias was an alcoholic and Alastair always had to clean after him and he’s tired to play the “father” because he’s the older brother. These are just smoke screens that probably cover @cecilyfightwood‘s theory that Alastair isn’t Elias’ son and that he hates his father and probably his mother as well for lying to him. It surely is a traumatic experience to discover you are not who you believed you were. Meanwhile, Matthew used to be paranoid about his mother because Alastair (it isn’t casual that was him, my friends) spread the rumor that Matthew was the result of an affair between Gideon and Charlotte, thus making him resent his mother without knowing for sure if what Alastair said was true. And we know what happened. Matthew lost a sister, while Alastair’s mother is pregnant. Like I said, NOT casual at all. Alastair spread a rumor about Matthew (that wasn’t true) that could apply to himself, maybe because Alastair already suspected he wasn’t his father’s son. Perhaps he did it to transfer his pain and anger to another person, even if by doing this he didn’t just hurt Matthew, he also hurt Thomas. Why Matthew? For one, he is Charles’ brother, and I think at the time of the rumor Alastair was already in love with Charles. Being Charles, Charles... perhaps he hurt Alastair and he was indirectly hurting Matthew in return? Because he couldn’t hurt James and Christopher. No one would believe their parents to be unfaithful to each other (well because they are identical to their parents and you can’t question they are their parents’ kids, it would be crazy. While Matthew’s parents don’t have blonde hair). It’d be easier to believe that Charlotte and Henry weren’t tight because in TID it is what some people of the Clave think too. This is a plot device, and it is also a strong reason for Matthew to despise Alastair. Now what I think? I believe that we’ll indeed discover more about Alastair’s heritage and we’ll probably seem him trying to come to terms with it and with everything he’s done, and I’m up for it, because Alastair has a great potential. As for Matthew, he still carries his guilt for having unwillingly killed his sister in the form of a small flask in his vest. So in the next book I hope he realizes that he needs help with his drinking problem before it’s too late, because it is a serious matter. They’d both need a therapist. lol.

They are both rude but fluffy inside

Alastair and Matthew are those types of characters that are often described as rude, difficult, arrogant, etc. but when they take their masks off - they both wear masks - they are loyal and protective and they just want one thing in return, even if they don’t dare to voice it out loud. The one thing that seems impossible for them to get: they want to be loved. Alastair was a bully. He said that he chose to be the bully to feel powerful and not stomped on, which means that despite the bad things he did, deep down he is redeemable. Which means the real Alastair is someone else, someone who is afraid of showing the world who he truly is. Matthew is not a bully but he is also rude, and doesn’t easily trusts strangers. He doesn’t have many friends, and even his closest friends, including his parabatai James, don’t really know the real Matthew. Who is the real Matthew Fairchild? We still don’t know. Unlike Alastair who covers his true self with bullying, Matthew covers his true self with alcohol. See, even here Alastair’s specular character has the same issue as his father Elias. Again, not a coincidence. They both seem to act as if the world is their playground in different ways: Matthew flaunting his eccentric clothes, Alastair being overly rude - but truth is they are both insecure. It’s a façade. They both carry guilt and drown their sorrows in two opposed ways: Alastair runs head on to his issues by aggravating them because he’s passive-aggressive and Matthew runs from them by getting drunk.

They love(d) each other’s sibling

Alastair loved Charles, Matthew’s older brother. During their scenes we see that Alastair is different, more open, more vulnerable. He lowers his guard. He also is 50/50 like this with Thomas, because in Paris he spent time with him and when they were working on the antidote, Alastair lowered his guard again, trusting Thomas. Alastair loved Charles but then he figured that he was an ambitious man and he had no place in his heart like he wanted, and liked Thomas more. Well, truth be told, Alastair always seemed to have had a soft spot for Thomas, but perhaps he never thought he would like “like” him. Matthew did the same thing, but in reverse and in the opposite way. He liked Lucie in the beginning, but Lucie repeated several times that she didn’t like him that way, thus nothing romantically ever happened between them. (sadly, because I think Matthew and Lucie had potential as a couple). Then Matthew realized he liked Cordelia, Alastair’s younger sister. From their first scene, it’s clear that Matthew thought Cordelia was nice because of her Oscar Wilde mention, but he fell for her after Cordelia always said nice things to him, like the fact that she doesn’t find Matthew ridiculous.

My conclusion is that Matthew and Alastair’s journeys will be different, yet similar, because they have these plot devices that tie their stories and intertwines them together. And it’s gonna be cool, because Matthew and Alastair are those characters that seem so broken beyond repair and angry and complex and my favorite type of characters. You know why? Because they often make you feel dramatic feelings, angst, bitterness, tear your hair out, but if their redemption journey is written well, they also make you cry of joy and give you a heart-warming: woah, they did it! Hopefully, that’s what we’ll say in the end. Because it’s true they have the numbers to make you feel deeply, but they are also the characters who could risk their life and make you cry, but for different reasons. I really wish CC won’t resort to that (death) because of the tragic traits Alastair and Matthew have.

#matthew fairchild #alastair carstairs #thomastair #fairstairs #chain of gold #chain of iron #tlh #the last hours #theories #my edits

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stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale · 4 years ago

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Do you think there'll ever be another TWDG? I'd like a game about Ericson before TFS with the twins, or a game following new characters.

I don’t know if there will ever be another twdg, but if there is one in the future, I really hope it either follows a brand new cast of characters or if they feel they have to rehash old characters, they leave Clementine alone and create another 400 Days type of game where each episode follows a different character we’ve already met.

I’ve talked about that idea plenty of times in the past so I won’t rehash that here, but as for following a brand new cast, I’d be game if Skybound wanted to create a branching game like that. Think ANF but without Clementine shoved into the plot.

That’s my biggest thing about another twdg- I don’t want any more Clementine. Look, I love Clem but the final season was a great send-off for her. Her story is over. She has a home, she has family, and she’s happy. I know they like to beat the horse into dust, but c’mon.

And I know there are players out there who are all bratty about it like “No Clementine? Then I don’t want it and neither should you.” I know they exist because I see them pop up all the time. Not only that, but I was around when ANF came out. I remember people pissing on Javier Garcia because he wasn’t Clementine. God forbid we explore this universe through the eyes of someone who dares not to be Clementine.

Which, btw, of all the things to piss on about ANF, Javier Garcia is not one of them. You’re just a dingus.

I just know that if there’s another twdg that’s centered around Clementine, it’s not going to be good.

Unless they take years to figure out how to make all of the choices made throughout tfs matter WITHOUT murdering everyone at Ericson for the sake of all players starting in the same place [like with Kenny and Jane in ANF because everyone loved that, yeah?], rendering tfs next to pointless, and don’t completely assassinate Louis/Violet’s characters... then I don’t want it.

That’s also why I’m not keen on the idea of an Ericson prequel game. Like, look... I want more Louis content. I want more of the Ericson crew. Trust me, I do... but I don’t want it if someone who didn’t even work on the original game is going to come in and fuck everything up. I don’t want more content if that means they completely butcher these characters and our choices.

Like, it’s bad enough that we have Robert Kirkman out here being like “There may or may not be another project with Clementine in the works~! Only time will tell! Might wake up feeling adventurous one day! Feelin’ cute, might ruin some storylines and fuck up some canon, tehe~!”

I just.... stop.

I’m so tired.

No one wants this.

What’s funny is that we sort of talked about this during the Before the Storm stream. For those who don’t know, Before the Storm wasn’t made by the same developers as Life is Strange. So, brand new writers, new voice actors... and if you watch some of the writer’s talk about the game, they say that it’s a game made by fans for fans. This is super apparent when you play through it. It plays very much like fanfiction, which isn’t necessarily bad because fanfiction isn’t inherently bad- some fanfics out there are better than the source material they’re based on, y’know?

But upon learning that, I ended up falling down a rabbit hole of thought about what if something like this happened with tfs?

Because can you just fucking imagine...?

Some indie game company approaches Skybound, of hell, Skybound themselves being like,

“Hey, we loved the final season of twdg. Huge fans. We know that old Telltale is gone but we have an idea for a prequel game about Ericson. It’ll follow Louis and Violet before the events of tfs since everyone loved them, but Sterling and Gideon won’t be reprising their roles for reasons. In fact, none of the voice actors will be coming back and we’ll replace them all with voices that are stiff and have zero charm. And no, none of the original writers will be back either, but like it’s fine we’ll just go to Kent’s tumblr if we have any questions or whatever...

“Us brand new writers also wanna tackle what happened with the twins, give a half-ass ‘redemption’ arc to Marlon, bring in a new enemy that’s completely unnecessary and doesn’t make sense at all, give the players choices that mean nothing because it’s a prequel and won’t affect the original game, and probably set part of the school on fire. It’s like... a metaphor or something.

“We’ll only focus on the surface level parts of Louis and Violet’s characters [i.e. “Louis funny man make joke” & “Violet sad lesbian eat chicken nugget”] rather digging into the deeper, more interesting parts of their characters in order to appeal to fans, but we’ll include lots of Vinerva lesbian fanservice to make up for it even though they have no chemistry.

“Also, Louis has nightmares about his dad and Violet accidentally burns down half the school because of angst. They blame it on Aasim and that’s the real backstory of why Tenn is burned and why Marlon was in charge and not Aasim. Oh, and you won’t believe the amount of foreshadowing we plan on putting in this.

“Oh, and it turns out that Mitch murdered a dude to save Louis and Violet. Because I dunno, apparently fans liked him, too, so we gotta tap into that? It’s a game made by fans for fans.”

...I just.... nope. I’m sorry, but I don’t want it hahaha

Like... I don’t think it’d be Before the Storm levels of bad... but I don’t think it’d be great either. I’m just not very trusting when it comes to this, in case you couldn’t tell....

But if they wanted to tell a story with a brand new cast? With a fresh new start and had to actually put effort into making us care about these new characters as they tackle new situations within the apocalypse? I’m game. Go ahead, do that. You got nothing to lose, go for it.

#asks #twdg clementine #twdg louis #twdg violet #twdg marlon #twdg aasim #twdg mitch

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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The Walking Dead Season 11: Who Lives and Who Dies

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This Walking Dead article contains major spoilers.

Many of us thought this day would never come, but as all of The Walking Dead‘s characters know very well, everything that has a beginning has an end. Season 11 of AMC’s flagship zombie drama will be the show’s final run of episodes, but fortunately it’s an expanded season. Fans will get 24 more episodes, broken up into three parts, before the show — and a few of its characters — meets its end.

And it wouldn’t be a season of The Walking Dead without a few big deaths along the way. As we have in past seasons, we’ve made some predictions regarding who will bite the bullet in season 11. For the final time, here are the characters we think are on the chopping block and the ones we believe will live on to remember them after the credits roll on the series finale.

Keep track of all The Walking Dead season 11 deaths below:

DEAD

Roy (C. Thomas Howell)

Prediction: Dies

Result: Dead

Roy took an arrow to the face during a Reaper ambush.

Gage (Jackson Pace)

Prediction: Dies

Result: Dead

Gage stabbed himself in the chest twice, attempting to kill himself before being devoured by walkers in a train car. Zombie Gage was then put down with a shot to the head by Gabriel.

ALIVE

Pope (Ritchie Coster)

Prediction: Dies

I’ve never seen a guy more likely to die in the first half of a Walking Dead season than Pope, the leader of the show’s newest villains, the Reapers, who themselves strike me as filler villains for Maggie and Daryl while the real story at the Commonwealth develops. I assume the Reapers will be out of the picture by the time Alexandria needs to turn its attention to the much larger settlement in the second part of season 11.

Pamela Milton (Laila Robins)

Prediction: Dies

The Governor of the Commonwealth is poised to be the final season’s big bad. A bureaucrat hellbent on preserving the way things were before the zombie outbreak, Milton even established a caste system within her settlement to propagate class inequality. She represents everything that was wrong with the world before the fall of society and the complete anti-thesis of how the Alexandrians do things.

If you’ve read the comics, you know how Pamela’s story ends in Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s story, but the TV series is known for taking sharp left turns when you least expect it. One thing we know for sure is that the Alexandrians will have to reckon with Pamela’s rule before the series finale.

Lance Hornsby (Josh Hamilton)

Prediction: Dies

A Commonwealth acolyte and bookkeeper of the community, Lance is one of Milton’s chief personnel, helping her run the settlement’s government. He’s also seems like cannon fodder to me as things heat up between the Commonwealth and Alexandria, an early death that could spark a conflict between the two factions.

Mercer (Michael James Shaw)

Prediction: Lives

Mercer is loyal to the Commonwealth but there are more sides to him than his distinct orange military armor lets on. He’s one of the most interesting characters of the comic’s final storyline, and it would be a shame to lose him before we can see his story through.

Elijah (Okea Eme-Akwari)

Prediction: Lives

Elijah made his debut in one of the most WTF moments of season 10 when he rescued Aaron and Alden from the Whisperers. For weeks after his reveal, people wondered who the man in the steal mask could be. When he returned in the final six episodes of season 10, the show just kind of moved on without fleshing him out, which is unfortunate since he looks so cool! I’m going to assume that the series is saving a big Elijah-focused episode for later in the season and that he’s too awesome to kill off. You don’t just introduce a blade expert in a steel mask for no reason!

Virgil (Kevin Carroll)

Prediction: Dies

Virgil has a lot to atone for after kidnapping and drugging Michonne in season 10. At the end of the season, we learn that he’s found a disoriented Connie in the woods. His redemption arc will likely include helping Connie survive on the walker-infested road back to Alexandria. Will that eventually involve a final sacrifice to save her?

Connie (Lauren Ridloff)

Prediction: Lives

Connie’s been through a hell of a lot in the past season. After surviving an explosion, a cave-in, and an entire walker horde, Connie’s made it out of Whisperer territory but is still a ways from home. Expect part of season 11’s story to be about Connie’s odyssey and ultimate reunion with her sister and Daryl.

Lydia (Cassady McClincy)

Prediction: Lives

Lydia was at the center of Alexandria’s conflict with the Whisperers for a season and a half. With Alpha and Beta defeated, and their faction all but obliterated, I have to wonder what Lydia has left to do on the show. That said, the writers have continued to find interesting ways to explore this character, and someone has to live on to lead the next generation of Alexandrians. I think Lydia is in it for the long haul.

Magna (Nadia Hilker)

Prediction: Dies

Magna was sidelined pretty quickly after her introduction. While a reunion with Yumiko seems like the logical direction for her story, The Walking Dead universe is a cruel one. She could be headed toward tragedy.

Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura)

Prediction: Lives

In season 11, Yumiko is inheriting a major storyline from the comics that likely means she’ll survive the final 24 episodes of the series. Of course, the TV show could always alter that storyline to bring a tragic end to Yumiko’s story.

Luke (Dan Fogler)

Prediction: Dies

It’s pretty wild that Luke has survived as long as he has. A man of the arts hardly has a place in the cruel world of this show, but he has clumsily persevered thus far. But if the writers are planning an especially bloody final season, I’d put Luke on the short list.

Kelly (Angel Theory)

Prediction: Lives

Kelly has been one of the best late additions to the show. It would suck for her to finally reunite with her sister only to meet an unexpected end.

Alden (Callan McAuliffe)

Prediction: Dies

Another candidate for the chopping block. I’m surprised he’s even made it this long.

King Ezekiel (Khary Payton)

Prediction: Lives

Yes, Ezekiel has thyroid cancer, and were he in Alexandria, that would mean his inevitable death. But the Commonwealth is a different ballgame, an advanced settlement in the comics that will likely have the doctors and surgical resources needed to save him. That is, if Ezekiel isn’t caught up in Milton’s caste system.

Jerry (Cooper Andrews)

Prediction: Dies

I love Jerry and don’t want to see the tank with a heart of gold go. But if the season needs an early death that pulls at the heart strings, Jerry is a prime candidate for a midseason casualty.

Father Gabriel Stokes (Seth Gilliam)

Prediction: Lives

Gabriel has evolved so much since his debut in season 5, becoming one of Alexandria’s key leaders. He’s come so far and even survived longer than his comic book counterpart. I’d hate to see him go so close to the end. So I’m just going to say he lives.

Aaron (Ross Marquand)

Prediction: Lives

Aaron seemed destined to die seasons ago, too kind and trusting to survive this long. But here he is, still fighting and surviving. He’s lost the man he loves, his arm, and many friends — and it’s all hardened him into a war machine. It’d be a shame for him to die now.

Rosita Espinosa (Christian Serratos)

Prediction: Lives

In the comics, Rosita’s head ended up on a pike during the Whisperer war, but her TV counterpart has persevered. It’s difficult to predict where her story goes at this point, but since she survived her comic book death, I assume the show’s writers have something in mind for her in season 11.

Eugene Porter (Josh McDermitt)

Prediction: Lives

Eugene has become an unlikely protagonist going into season 11. From a mulleted coward hiding behind his intelligence so that others protect him to the Alexandrian leading his people to the Commonwealth, Eugene is central to the plot of the final season, and I think that means he’s safe. Plus, Eugene is hilarious, and The Walking Dead can always use a little comedic relief.

Judith Grimes (Cailey Fleming)

Prediction: Lives

Result: Lived

NO.

Rick Grimes Jr. (Antony Azor)

Prediction: Lives

Nah.

Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan)

Prediction: Lives

I think The Walking Dead is going to end with one last big death, one last sacrifice before the credits roll on the massive zombie drama. Like Rick in the comics, one of the major characters of the TV series will likely become the martyr who inspires change inside the Commonwealth’s walls. Negan would probably be on the short list for this big moment from the comics, a villain finally choosing to do the right thing for a cause bigger than himself, a fitting conclusion to his seasons-long redemption arc. But Jeffrey Dean Morgan recently teased that he was already having discussions with AMC about a potential Negan spinoff after The Walking Dead has concluded, which means the former Savior leader is safe…unless the Negan show is a prequel.

Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride)

Prediction: Lives

This one’s an easy one: Melissa McBride is getting her own spinoff that will follow her character after The Walking Dead series finale. That means she’s safe.

Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus)

Prediction: Lives

Norman Reedus is joining McBride for that spinoff, so he’s safe, too. The actor even told us what the Daryl and Carol show will be about.

Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan)

Prediction: Dies

That leaves The Walking Dead with one logical choice to pick up Rick’s final storyline from the comic. It’s Maggie. It also makes a bit of sense from a logistical standpoint. Lauren Cohan has already left The Walking Dead universe once before to pursue other small and big screen projects. She’s back for the final 24 episodes of the series as a welcome legacy character but that doesn’t mean Cohan wants to stick around for longer than that. I assume Cohan’s returned to bring closure to her character, not to prepare for a spinoff.

Let us know your predictions for The Walking Dead season 11 in the comments!

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courtneystriker · 5 years ago

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My Thoughts on the HG Prequel

I just finished reading The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and I got to say, my feelings are mixed. Below I have an entire review for the story which included how I felt, the expectations, the biases I had going into the new book, and how I felt after reading. Please note there will be spoilers. Also this review isn’t meant to hurt anyone and if you absolutely love the book so far...good! Enjoy it fully! As an aspiring writer myself and someone who studied in college/loves creative writing I’m well aware that people just have different takes on writing. Glad you are enjoying it :)

Anyways, here it goes…

The Expectations

As the Hunger Games series is one of my favorites of all time, I had a strong bias to like this book. Since it was first announced, without knowing any details, I was extremely excited and optimistic. I re-read the entire Hunger Games series twice beforehand in preparation; once with my fiancé and once on my own. The only thing I really wanted, knowing that it took place during the tenth hunger games, was that the arena reflected how new the hunger games were. Then, when we learned what the series was about, people started voicing some concerns or were disappointed by the plot, instead wanting it to be something like Finnick’s arena, Haymitch’s, Mags’, etc. etc. I was not among this group. However, I understand where they were coming from, because I always thought the idea of the first Quarter Quell (the one where the districts voted for the tributes) was an extremely interesting concept.

Yet I think these things are best left explored in fanfiction as they add nothing to the series and Suzanne Collins did an excellent job just giving us enough information to get the idea. At that point it’d just be a book on details, which could fall short or be a gimmicky, cheap way to keep people reading the series and keep her name relevant. And wasn’t that part of the message in her series, the thing Katniss so heavily criticized that gave a great irony to the books? Who would watch children killing each other for entertainment? Meanwhile, we as the reader are reading these books as a form of entertainment. Plus, Suzanne Collins so skillfully painted the illusion of knowing but not fully knowing their stories that it’s haunting, and I think that is one of the many reasons (along with the battle royale trope being naturally compelling, liking the characters, etc.) that a lot of us are more drawn towards these stories rather than (at least for me) a book on Snow.

That being said, I was not against the idea of a book on Snow because I find villain characters, especially grey ones, to be very interesting to read about, and I was pretty certain Suzanne was going to handle this beautifully, especially since you could already feel this atmosphere coming off of Snow in the Hunger Games series. I know some were really concerned about a Snow redemption arc, but to me it felt very obvious that it couldn’t be and it would be more of him sliding into evil.

I did have other concerns when I read the description for the first time. I could not believe they went with the whole tribute from District Twelve thing again. I loved Katniss and District Twelve, but I did not want Katniss 2.0. I said right from the beginning to my fiancé that she’d have to make the tribute from District Twelve extremely different for me to get on board (though I was holding on faith that Collins would). It just felt cheap and gimmicky to rehash the District Twelve thing, it sort of made me feel the same way I would have if she had written about one of the games I mentioned above. Sure, it’d sell, but it wouldn’t add anything to the series. I was thinking she better not hunt, sing, or have any qualities resembling Katniss really.

Another thing I worried about was the love story they hinted at in the description. It just didn’t make sense to me. Because how was Snow going to ever support the games if from an earlier age he fell in love with a tribute and vowed to protect her? Then later he’s all like pro-hunger games? Just this itself could weaken the entire series if done poorly, because it would weaken the main antagonist’s motives for not only the prequel but also the Hunger Games series as well. I kept thinking either the girl has to die in the arena betraying Snow somehow (which is what I was hoping for), Snow will have to betray her, or perhaps he would have been faking love for her for some sort of personal gain I couldn’t imagine. Either way, I thought it weakened the story's appeal to me. Yet overall I was still excited, desperately waiting for the book’s release.

And now that I have read it, I have to say it felt forced at a lot of parts and lackluster overall…

*Spoilers start here*

My Review:

Suszanne Collins’ writing style is one I’ve always loved and has consistently appealed to me. Even though this book is written in 3rd person (which some may like less if you don’t particularly like third person) it holds up well against the original series. So I really had no complaints in this regard besides the excessive use of songs (felt like fanfiction a bit). I think if you liked the original series and don’t mind third person you’ll feel right at home with her style.

The concerns others had about Snow’s redemption are completely dismissed in this book. Like I had predicted, she writes about his fall into evil, and although it’s not black and white evil (as I don’t like anyways) you can very much tell he’s a bad guy and that the hardships he faced in life only further pushed him towards obtaining status and power. Overall, he feels true to the character when we end up seeing him in the Hunger Games series, and his journey to power fits the images Finnick painted in Mockingjay. He is very well characterized in the book and perfectly unlikable while maintaining an intriguing internal dialogue (although it does occasionally feel tedious, but not enough to bother me; others may feel differently).

The way he is written is very much in line with Collin’s great characterization, one of the reasons I always loved The Hunger Games. All the characters felt like real people. They all had an extreme depth to them and I felt they all resembled people I had actually met in real life. There were little to no characters that relied solely on gimmicky personalities to get by. Even very minor characters that seemed depthless and swallow at first--like Katniss’s prep team--had more to them. So I thought going into this book I had nothing to worry about in that regard. I didn’t even really spare it a thought, but boy was I wrong.

I think Snow and Lucy Grey were the only characters that had (at least partly) the depth that the original Hunger Games cast had. I’ll discuss Lucy Grey later but first let me talk about some side characters. Where to even begin really? There’s a LOT of characters in this book. Frankly, way too many, which I think contributes heavily to the lack of depth in the characters. Honestly there’s so many that the names of characters were hard to keep track of while listening to the audiobook (my hard copy of the book was still in the mail and I didn’t want to wait). Things got a bit clustered in my mind quickly. There were twenty-four tributes, twenty-four mentors, Snow’s family, The Dean and Drs at the university, Snow’s Peacekeeper crew, and the Covey, and those are just the groups that I can cluster together. At least, the ones I remember having names and getting introduced, but I think that’s everyone really important. There was no real time to develop or get to know them really, which made the tributes’ deaths more meaningless as I could barely recall their names. It caused impactful scenes to weaken significantly overall and it made characters serve only to characterize and amplify Snow’s fall into evil.

Here’s what I mean by that. The head Gamemaker, Dr. Gaul, really was the character I hated the most while reading this. She was just evil without reason (one of the weakest villain types with little to no personality besides being evil). She even made creepy rhymes as if she was in some sort of horror movie, and the entire point of her character was to contribute a lot to some of the forced plot points driving Snow’s moral decline. For example, there were all her tests, which seemed contrived and all directly connected to getting Snow to think the Hunger Games was a good idea. She was seemingly supposed to be a Dr. Mengele type character, as this book has a lot of Holocaust-esqe imagery. I’m fine with irredeemably evil villains, but instead of getting the depth that a Dr. Mengele character could offer (as some may know, many children that were part of his experiments actually said he was kind and gave them candy, and I find that deeply haunting to this day.) She is a flat, one-dimensional character whose entire personality could be described with one word: sociopath. Evil people are master manipulators, which is how they get away with evil things. I think at one of the funerals she puts on a good public face, and she seems to have power, money and influence. Yet the book doesn’t show this seemingly present quality nearly enough to make her a haunting character. Instead we get nursery rhythms and clearly driven lessons towards evil at are contrived. Like “Write about what you most liked about the war” or the assignment to improve the hunger games? Like what class is this? Why are they taking it? And why are the young kids of the influential deciding this instead of the influential people themselves?

Another character I feel was just there for Snow’s development and to represent an opposite viewpoint but lacked Collin’s usual depth is Sejanus Plinth. As a District 2 citizen whose family got rich off the war and moved to the Capitol, he is the main opposing viewpoint of the book, presenting Snow with a chance to do the right thing. I’ve seen people say he’s a Peeta-like character, but I completely reject that idea. He lacks in the charm Peeta has, relishes in self-pity (although he’s completely justified in his sadness and has a right to be upset), and while he has a heart like Peeta, he ultimately doesn’t know how to use it. Instead of working within his position to get influence like Peeta so masterfully does, he’s hot-headed and continuously makes poor decisions that ultimately don’t help anyone. It’s like he wants to help but doesn’t know how as he’s driven completely by emotion without reason. He too contributes to some forced scenes, particularly my least favorite in the book; when they sneak into the arena. Overall, he just falls flat for me. Again, I feel I don’t know anything about him beyond what he contributes to Snow’s story line and he doesn’t come across as realistic. It’s like Collins just wrote how someone would normally react to the hunger games, slapped a district number on him and went on her merry way.

I just wasn’t prepared for these sort of characters when the Hunger Games series made even the smallest of characters stand out dramatically. I feel neutral to annoyed by most characters in this novel. I could expand this portion, and maybe if people inquire I’ll elaborate on some of the other characters as I have strong opinions on them, but this post is already getting long, so I’ll move on to Lucy Grey.

Lucy Grey is by far my favorite character even though she is bordering towards being a character from a fanfiction. Not quite a Mary Sue in my opinion but there is a certain connection to fanfiction I made with her. You may have guessed some issues I had with her by reading my expectations earlier in the post, but that has not displaced my love for her. Her personality is very different from Katniss’s, or even Peeta’s or Haymitch’s. She had a different type of charm than all of them, is a natural performer, and seemed more extroverted. Also, the whole idea of the Covey and her “not really” being district was intriguing. It really highlighted the displacement that war can cause and how people can just be in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Although I was confused on how much mobility between the districts there were….and did District Twelve have a fence or no?) It really emphasizes one of the main themes of the book, extreme prejudice against both Capitol and District. Her spot sort of in between really drives home the point that there's literally no difference except extreme poverty, and even then there was poverty in the Capitol, only better hidden. Her bright mood (and clothes), her poised attitude, and her optimism made her endearing. She was confident in her skin yet still held the fear of a sixteen year old going into the hunger games.

There were only two main things that bothered me about her, which was of course the direct connections made to Katniss (which I’ll elaborate on) and the forced “love” story between her and Snow. I suppose that has less to do with her and rather more to do with my dislike of that subplot. And I'm a sucker for some good romantic subplots, but yikes!

I think having one strong connection to Katniss was all that was really needed in this book. I really liked the idea of that connection being the Hanging Tree Song, as I can only imagine how it made Snow feel watching “The Mockingjay” sing it in the propo. Despite me not liking that fact that Lucy Grey is also an enchanting singer as that felt like directly stepping in Katniss’s territory, I did enjoy the little twist of Lucy Grey writing the song. Yet the connections between the two when the plot took us to District Twelve went too far. It felt like it took away all of Katniss’s special places and things. The lake, her katniss roots, her gift towards music, her fondness for the meadow, sneaking into the woods, etc. I think one solid connection would have solidified their bond beautifully. Having so many seemed like it was really trying to force the reader to make the connection when it was already painfully clear I guess? Plus, having Lucy stand out at her reaping ( the whole song part read like a bad, contrived fanfiction bit to me) and having people care about her in the Capitol while moral questions of the hunger games were still surfacing made me start to think...isn’t this how the rebellion for Katniss got started? At least partly. I get it’s a different time. Too close to the war. It just felt way too similar. I guess Collins was going for the idea of a lost rebellion that in a way Lucy Grey started that Katniss later revives. Yet it feels like that invalidates the specialness of what Katniss does in the original series as it’s already happened; it just got erased. I guess history repeats itself, but I really just didn’t like it. I could see the appeal to some extent, and it could be a beautiful connection, but it just wasn’t for me.

Now on to the plot, which is the last thing I’ll talk about as this post is getting ridiculously long. A lot of the plot felt very forced or contrived, which was another shocker coming from Collins because her pacing and plot was done really well in the original series. Of course, a lot of this was driven by Dr. Gaul and Sejanus Plinth as the entire plot hinged on the moral debate of the hunger games these two represent. Other plot points just hinged on what happened to establish the games. I mean the rebel bomb explosion seemingly only happened to change the terrain so Dr. Gaul can then bring up the idea of the different arena and how that made the tributes act differently, thus creating the crazy arenas we see later in the series. I do have some praise for how Collins established the disparities between the earlier hunger games and the ones we see in Katniss day. From the way they lock the tributes up, don’t feed them, the spotty coverage of the arena, etc. All of that was exceptionally well done. The only complaint I have was that so many tributes died before they even got to the arena (though not because I wanted to see them fight). I had been expecting one to escape or something to further establish that this was new territory and was waiting to see how they handled it in earlier times, but I wasn’t expecting that many to die before the arena got started. It just seemed like a huge Capitol failure that they advertised loudly. I really wasn’t expecting that level of incompetence, just an escaped tribute that threatened to embarrass or harm the fragile beginnings of post-war Panem. Instead, most of the pre-arena stuff felt disastrous. A lot of the mentors' deaths felt forced, and it was weird that the academy never really came under fire at all from all the rich and powerful parents whose children were getting killed because of the mentor experiment. Like it seemed there should have been some interaction there, but there wasn’t. Maybe some was passively mentioned but still, it could have been a whole subplot that further established the debate of the hunger games.

While the pre-arena up to the break-in to the arena felt like the most forced part of the book and certainly I felt it needed more workshopping plot wise, it also harbored some great and powerful scenes, like Arachne pulling the sandwich away from the tribute while she was starving and laughing about it. Basically, all those interactions of poverty and captivity meeting the citizens of the Capitol were done well, but nothing spectacular (unlike the scene of Katniss screaming at Buttercup at the end of Mockingjay which is heart wrenching.)

The last plot point I’ll talk about is the “love” story. I wasn’t a fan, but it was sort of what a lot of the plot hinged on and led to the great scene at the lake between Snow and Lucy Grey. How easy it was for him to betray his “love” for status. This led to some of the most interesting and evil internal monologue Snow had in the entire book. I honestly feel the ending scene, the interaction Snow had with the jabberjays and Mockingjays in District Twelve, and the lynching scenes were among the strongest and most memorable.

The love story again felt forced (sorry I’m using that word so much it’s just so accurate) into the story. This hindered the book from having a strong plot in the same way the weaker characters caused forced interactions and plot points to move things along. Yet at the same time the kind of abusive and lackluster nature of their relationship throughout the book fit perfectly with the ending. Unfortunately, it didn’t really make it very compelling for the reader. Luckily Lucy’s personality kept my interested during these parts. I wouldn’t say their relationship was poorly written at all; in fact the way it was written makes perfect sense. I just think the plot relied too heavily on their “love”, which was gross because of the way Snow is, and the reader knew it had to inevitably end in some kind of betrayal or reveal that there was no love at all. This creates tension for the reader, but I kept wondering: if the love plot had been ditched could we have gotten a stronger plot altogether?

So overall, like I’ve said I’m really conflicted. I know I focused heavily on things I didn’t like, but honestly the book was well written in some regards, plot bouncing between really compelling and a little contrived, the two main characters being written well enough but other characters not so much. Some connections between Lucy Grey and Katniss made at the end were powerful, I loved the Covey, Collins still excelled at writing a lot of the social issues/scenes in the book, and honestly the idea of Lucy Grey being completely forgotten in the Districts that hurts my soul a little. Nothing compared to the feelings I got in any of the Hunger Games books but there’s still something there.

I really hope someone made it through this long ass post. The book was entertaining. I mean I listened to all 16 hours of the audiobook in like a day. I can’t wait until my hardcover comes so I can look through it. Maybe once I know what I’m getting into I can enjoy the book a little more than I did, because right now it’s sitting at very average for me. Maybe I went in with my expectations too high? I certainly like the Hunger Games a lot more and probably always will. Honestly, I love new content, but I’m also the type that likes firm, planned endings to stories (even though it hurts to let things end and the fandoms can suffer from lack of content). I think fans can oftentimes get caught up in what they want and pressure the writer into writing more, which ends up a disappointment since it wasn’t originally planned in the series from the beginning. While I don’t think this is by any means the case with Suzanna Collins or that Lionsgate even pressured her to write this book (I don’t like conspiracies of that sort of thing as a writer myself that plans to have a series in which a book comes out many years after the original part of the series is released), I do wonder if this is the end of the Hunger Games for good. I sure hope so, especially if she would be writing about the other victors. I love them too much and really don’t want to feel similarly about their books, and like I said at the beginning, it wouldn’t add to the series just to my guilty pleasure lol.

Hope you all have enjoyed your reading of the book more than I did :) Again sorry if I wrote anything to upset you! Please if you loved this book ENJOY IT! I’m actually kind of jealous if you did. Feels like missing out on something special.

#The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes #suzanne collins #tbosas #lucy grey #coriolanus #Dr. Gaul #Sejanus Plinth #Hunger Game Prequel #Hunger Games #Katniss #Peeta #hunger games series #review #catching fire #mockingjay #books #writing

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misssilencewritewell · 4 years ago

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Overall review of wizards. Spoiler warning. This is just my opinion. If you enjoyed it, I’m happy for you. I think it was far too rushed.

Five episodes in we finally started to get introduced to interesting characters. But the pace never slowed down long enough to understand their role, their personalities, purpose, etc. It was a quick flash of ‘Oh that’s cool-and they’re gone...but I wanted to see more and understand...’ The quick glimpse of Angor Rot (my boy 😭) Why did he fish Morgana from the river? He hates humans...I’m confused??? He has magic. Did he learn from the evil magic squad?

The graphics are incredible. It looks amazing but I feel like for me to have a connection to this part of the story it had to have been longer. Another ten episodes of us getting to know Douxie in Arcadia would’ve been nice. When you dump as much information and new things on viewers it’s just too much for us to handle. I was so distracted by going “the heck is happening” to ever bond with Douxie. This makes me sad because I was enamored with him in Trollhunters. Also, he went from super suave bad boy to derpy bard boy. Not necessarily bad...but personally, I enjoyed his confidence in Trollhunters. Straight up hit a gum gum with a guitar. Not a magic one...just a regular guitar. Chad move. But this...felt weird. I personally think it would’ve been a much better plot twist had he been Mordred. Would’ve given him a darker edge, a vendetta, an interesting character arc. His goal to be to avenge his mother Morgana and kill Merlin/Trollhunters. Instead we find out that he’s basically a edgy, awkward bard. Which isn’t bad but not enough character development for me to be excited about any apparent growth or newly discovered powers.

Steve Palchuk (while I love his character) was unnecessary to this plot. I would’ve preferred Eli. His brains would have been helpful and I think his comedic relief would’ve fit better than Steves. Steve’s jokes just didn’t seem to land. The comedy relief was not timed right. Again, I absolutely loved Trollhunters and 3 Below...but there was never a moment to stop and catch your breath to know the world and characters which made it difficult to enjoy.

I still don’t fully understand how magic works. Douxie taught Claire for a minute and that was it and now he’s her teacher? Morgana and Merlin walk to the other side and say that sorcery dies with them but Claire and Douxie are left. Magic is...emotion? Kinda? Idk they never explained. 🤷‍♀️

Arthur’s character was...confusing to say the least. He misses his love and hates “dark” creatures because they killed her. But he comes back from the dead...to atone for his sins...by being evil? That didn’t make sense to me. Same with Morgana coming back and him being like sup sis! Know I tried to kill you but we are blood family! His super quick switch to asking for trolls help and loving his sister again was unexplained and made 0 sense. Just make him a dislikeable character and leave it at that. Sometimes it’s better to keep things simple. Over complicated plots can be messy and unenjoyable.

Morgana going from villain to hero was expected but executed poorly. She would flip like a switch and I just couldn’t sympathize with her as much as I did when she was a villain. I enjoyed her passion while being dark. Her redemption arc could’ve been handled so much better. Her having a romantic thing with Merlin and Merlin betraying her becoming the true villain while she is thirsty for revenge would’ve been top tier world building. We got butt jokes from Steve instead.

Strickler and Nomura. I want to see them. Especially back then? Oh they would be so evil and dark and I LIVE FOR IT. Especially since we love them now. It’d be cool to be reminded of their past. Back to the Jim smelling of human without being a changeling. Could’ve seen more on that and an interaction with him. They’d be fascinated I’m sure. Morgana created changelings but that could’ve easily been explained that she was working behind Arthur’s back the whole time. Working with Gunmar and creating changelings to infiltrate the castle while pretending to be submissive in court to Arthur and Merlin. It would explain why Changelings value cunning even more so and it would’ve been more believable than her talking to Claire one time and saying “yes! I’ll just tell my bro he crazy and needs to stop! Thank you kindly foreign hand maiden with dark magic!” Like there’s no reason for Morgana to trust her. Use her...sure. She would want Claire power, but Morgana’s character was far too rushed to make sense. I miss it when she was just a villain.

Also...Jim gets stabbed by a blade and they don’t call his mom? They don’t let her know her son could be dying? She’s a doctor. She doesn’t know much about the dark Magicks but she’s so smart and Strickler is her boyfriend. She should’ve been told. She should’ve shown up. I love her character and she adds a lot to the dynamic. Steve was the focal point far too often.

Bular. (Inhaled deeply). I missed him so much. It was cool to see Gunmar and Bular again. Bular I feel could’ve been interesting to build more too and I’m grateful for what we received. He obviously was more impressionable than his father. Morgana saved him and he immediately vouched for her while touching his fathers shoulder saying softly “she spared my life.” Like...Bular is an excellent character because even when fighting Jim in his final moments, Jim talks to him about dad issues and you can see Bular think about it and ultimately decide his fate. Just...ugh yes I missed the angry tall charcoal man.

Confusing part though...Gunmar and Bular declare that forest their own. Jim and Deya are there and watch as they scare off Arthur. You’re telling me they just let them go??? When they’re trying to recruit trolls for the war? They just go welp...see ya. Nah. There should’ve been dialogue there. The strange troll that smells of human but isn’t an impure. Cue the changelings. Could’ve been an awesome Segway into the life of the gum gums because honestly...Arthur was a douche and I sided with the Gum gums. Like yeah they eat people but Arthur was so...weird and uncomfortable to watch that I’d rather see the Gum gums who make no qualms over what they want or who they are.

The...giant dragon that’s the familiars dad. No reason for him at all. An attempt at a quirky dad character that landed flat. He went from oh lemme get you a cup of tea to DONT ChALlenge Me BoY I KnOw KaRAte!!! And I was like...ummmmm excuse me??? And then he went on to give a lesson on grief and show pictures of his son and I was like Soooooo we aren’t burning Douxie to a crisp? We are just going to throw in a quick ill timed lesson on grief?

The fight between Krel, Claire and the gang vs evil Jack Frost, eye ball raven, and evil Arthur electric boogaloo. Instead of showing the fight they did a recap. That fight would’ve been so awesome to watch and instead we got a recap of them getting their booties kicked. It’s an effective time saver but lazy story telling.

The fawn earth bender woman is important because she was part of the secret magic club and decided she didn’t want to kill people anymore...or something. As if her club ever lied to her about what they were about to do. Like Oh we are killing people? I thought you were joking for millions of years.

They all need her back to do...something evil that I can’t remember which I assume the movie will be about. I want more lore on evil Jack Frost and eyeball raven. They just were like “Congrats Morgana! We are the cool super old magic squad. We are the dopest thing in this show and we won’t say anything about ourselves besides a vague description in under 3 secs that leave our viewers confused and disappointed because they want more.”

Like seriously. They were the best part. Their intro was on a flying castle and I kinda hate that their intro was Merlin yelling “Oh no! Them!” Like we are supposed to know what and who they are. Build up is so important for an aundieces understanding. Like who they are? What they want? What they are? I spent the first half of the show mostly confused and the last half moderately confused and bewildered.

In conclusion, not my fave. It lacked the charm and quirkiness of 3 below and the depth and character development of Trollhunters to deliver a mediocre segway to a film. I really want this film to do well...but they will be on a time crunch and I was not impressed with how they handled this one in ten episodes. Fingers crossed the movie does better.

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