#so have some shitty non-evidence backed up analysis

[scottishgremlin]

a little hazy on the actual definition, but i see aiden and seiji as character foils. the comparison is provided directly by pacat in multiple instances imo, most notably in fence: redemption:

both characters have their areas of expertise - aiden romance, seiji fencing - and insecurities about the limitations of that expertise; aiden is pining over harvard, while seiji is scared he won’t keep up with jesse. however, they contrast in how they operate as people, providing the contrast that makes me think of them as foils of each other. aiden is flighty, avoidant and scared of commitment but has lots of potential and talent, which allows him to coast by. seiji, on the other hand, is diligent, driven, and scared of falling behind (implied he’s not quote unquote naturally talented?). seiji is also portrayed as not always being able to understand others’ emotions, while aiden is great at it and uses it to his advantage when fencing. i really enjoy seeing all of their interactions and i hope there’ll be more in fence challengers: long shot.

also, the background in the panel seiji says “you fence like you’re afraid. you fence like you can’t fence without tricks” is purple, which is used to represent the character of harvard throughout the comic… seiji poking at aiden’s weakness…

[impostoradult]

Please don’t forget: Supernatural is a Camel

This is gonna be a long, rough thing to write. 

Where to start....

Stories Are Logical, Except When They’re Not

I keep seeing meta posts from Supernatural fans arguing Cas will/has to come back and Dean will/has to reciprocate his love somehow because it’s the only thing that makes sense! Followed by paragraphs of very coherent, insightful analysis drawing on tons of perceived foreshadowing (in episodes like “Fan Fiction”). It is all very logical, using substantial evidence and piecing it together in a very compelling way. Your college English teacher would be very proud. 

And I’m not here to take a firm stand on whether Cas will come back or Dean will somehow reciprocate. I can say, with all honesty, at this point I truly have no idea (about either). 

But I do want to take a firm stand on something else -- just because a plot line or an ending in a story makes sense, just because it draws on a ton of foreshadowing, just because it follows beautifully narratively and thematically from what came before it, does not mean that’s what’s going to happen. 

I wish we lived in a world where that was true. But as Game of Thrones taught us (and Lost, and HIMYM and Dexter, and, and...) stories can fail to live up to their promises. They can violate all of their emotional build up and all their internal logic. They do it all the time, in fact. Stories are faulty, human-made things, and TV most especially, by virtue of its production by committee, is particularly subject to mediocrity and misguided choices because of that. 

Which leads me to something I think we as a fandom need to reckon with before the finale airs. One of the glaring faults with the meta of the Chuck storyline is that it traffics in the fantasy that Supernatural (and it’s main characters) are now ‘free’ of the sinister Powers that Be intervening on their lives and making them shitty. And believe me, I actually think it was a stroke of genius making The Author the final big bad in many ways. But the truth is, while Chuck may be rendered powerless now within the story of Supernatural, the Powers that Be were still intervening on the finale of the TV show Supernatural. The Author within the narrative of Supernatural may be impotent, but the The Author(s) of Supernatural are still very much pulling the strings here. And in some ways, it’s even worse than I’m making it sound. 

Who (Actually) IS Chuck/God/The Author?

One thing a great many of us have failed to acknowledge or properly grapple with, in our understandable haste to revel in the Chuck-as-Bad-Author storyline, is the fact that TV shows have vast committees of authors and authorial influences. And often the badness and mediocrity of a TV show can (in part) be traced back to this collective and therefore heavily compromised nature of its production. TV shows are camels, and Supernatural may be the most camely camel of them all. 

So, who all is on this vast, camel-making committee? 

At one level, it is the group of writers who actually script the show, and do so (to some degree) collectively. But there is also the production company (Warner Bros.), the network (The CW), the constellation of production people who have significant authorial influence (directors, producers, editors, production designers, etc.), the actors, and yes, to an extent, the fandom/audience. We are part of this committee too, in the broadest sense. (We KNOW we’ve influenced the content of Supernatural) 

And even beyond THAT, there are non sentient forces also exercising power on Supernatural’s production and content. COVID-19, actor contracts/availability, the current and transitioning TV landscape (the 20+ episode season mandate of traditional broadcast TV, reduced ad revenue from traditional broadcast distribution, differing incentive structures in the streaming marketplace, global market distribution making up a larger share of entertainment profit margins in than in pervious eras, etc.). 

TV production is an exercise in epic compromise with all kinds of human and non-human/non-sentient powers and forces, exactly none of which does anyone unilaterally control. We are all in and part of this process, and we are all constantly compromising with one another as the process happens. There is no singular person or even singular committee pulling the strings here. No one (in particular) is Chuck, and everything is Chuck. 

I am Spartacus, and so are you, and so is Dabb and Berens and Bucklemming and Singer and Peter Roth and Jensen Ackles and Misha Collins and Mark Pedowitz and COVID-19  and, and, and, and, and...

Chuck as a singular Big Bad (Author) works in the context of narrative. But at the meta level, what makes “Chuck” such a bad author is not bad writing ideas (necessarily), but more the fact that everything happening is happening via contentious committee. Everyone is compromising with everyone, and the result is, well, this sometimes beautiful, sometimes lame, sometimes infuriating, sometimes genius, sometimes offensive, sometimes endearing, sometimes just plain fucking weird camel:

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

As much as I enjoy reveling in the idea that one could rob the conditions of production of their negative influence, that one could overcome the power of The Machine, you can’t. That’s literally impossible. TV shows just have conditions of production, always. There is absolutely NO getting outside of that. 

And the horror we all need to face is precisely the fact that there is no Deus ex Machina that one could kill, or cajole, or disarm, or come to an understanding with. There is no God in the Machine. There is no specific, singular, namable person or entity who is the ultimate arbiter here. There is just the massive constellation of interconnected forces pushing and pulling against each other until the compromise is manifested. 

I’m not trying to be pessimistic. Sometimes things made by committee, manage, against all odds, to turn out great. But that’s more the exception than the rule. (Why do you think the vast majority of TV is mediocre to bad?) 

All I’m trying to do is remind everyone that the meta Chuck is still alive and kicking and capable of ruining the story, or at least keeping it from being particularly satisfying, regardless of what makes sense narratively. 

Who knows, maybe Thursday night will bring us a unicorn, or at least a really nice horse. Just don’t be too surprised if what shows up is a camel. 

[dappersheep]

Food Fantasy: An Analysis on what killed a Golden Goose (2/3)

Welcome back. Before we get started, disclaimers again! I do not own the game or its characters, nor do I claim to know the history and future of the game. What I am entitled to are the thoughts and opinions written within this post. You may or may not agree with the points spoken of here. This post also remains untagged from the main foofan tag. Only my followers will see this.

We are now on the second part, so let's go forward under the cut!

Elex

And here we have our beloved global publisher that most of seem to have Stockholm Syndrome for. Don't lie, at least half of us are still playing this damned game due to sunken cost fallacy, sunken time fallacy and the cute/hot jpegs.

In 2018, everything started out fine. Sure, maybe we had some translation mishaps here and there -coughwe'llgettothatwreckagelatercough- but overall, Elex was running the game fairly well. Rewards were on time, we had active social media and support, and a discord was set up!

Hint: Please note I use quite a bit of sarcasm in most everything I say.

And then somewhere along that road, things got derailed. And I mean it like, we're in the midst of a trainwreck in slow motion and we've only cleared the initial collision and still hurtling forward or backward into a steel wreckage ticking inferno.

Problems started cropping up as early as late 2018, just a few months after the game was launched in July.

⦁ Art contest mishaps. You know when you hold an art contest on Facebook out of all places with its shitty tagging system, you're bound to have entries lost to the void, people forced to register an FB account just to participate (seriously, who even has an FB account that isn't just there to appease family members?) and having to wrestle with figuring out how FB's tagging system works. Add to that the panel of judges happen to be Elex staff who don't have a good eye for good artwork (we actually had a kiddy figure drawing win over a well drawn one during the last contest!) and that they ALSO weren't very good at organizing such contests on FB... well, we had several grievances over that.

⦁ Region blocked FB announcements. Strangely enough, I stopped getting announcements around Father's Day of 2019 while everyone else outside of SEA kept getting updates. Turns out that someone on Elex's staff really didn't like SEA players or was just really bad at fixing the settings for the group and never bothered to revert it back. It didn't matter in the long run though, because...

⦁ Abandoned social media platforms. FooFan Twitter, FooFan Facebook... they all floated slowly into the void and was never heard from again. And this was before the 2020 pandemic.

⦁ Remember what I said about Discord? Yeah, apparently, they opened one up a little too early and the staff in charge of it knew zero about how to setup and mod a discord community, and didn't even have the manpower needed to mod the influx of members that came in! Suffice to say, they had to get help from top players and mods from the FB groups to come in and sort things out because someone kept pinging @ everyone every few seconds other than the usual chaos that comes from a server with no filters and people trying to turn the discord into Global Chat 2.0, minus Russian hours.

⦁ Also in line with the point about abandoned social media platforms, they've also mostly abandoned the discord too and only pop in once in a while to check the bug reports or lost accounts. You have a slightly better chance of response with the in-game support. Only slightly. And there's a running joke with several variations on the main discord that the Owner account of the discord server was manned by an intern-kun who never bothered to pass it on to the next unfortunate soul left to maintain this game.

⦁ Favoritism. Funtoy is also guilty of this but they don't publish the game for Global. If you're a top spender the likes of maxing out your cash rebates within the three months or so and you kept spending even beyond that, Elex could possibly invite you to a funky little club where your voice is more important than say... 99% of the playerbase. On top of that, if you keep spending, you could technically also ask for stuff like getting this frame over that frame, or well.... delay certain features from coming to Global for over a year. Now you can simp AND be heard! (Note: In 2021, it's possible that that club may be dead too, as all things shall be)

⦁ SJW Friendly. I don't know if Funtoy themselves have anything to also do with this particular decision... but it's saying something that after a certain little tiddy tantrum from the community side, Elex decided not to announce anything about a certain event's fate and when asked by it by other parties (not me) they either lie through their teeth, or beat around the bush with a non-answer.

⦁ Partial translations, mistranslations. Now, I understand that a lot of Chinese grammar and semantics are confusing to translate properly into several other languages, but you'd think Elex would have given their translators more context to the character or the mechanic to avoid such mistranslations that later set off gender debates or worded the skill/artifact description a little clearer. That is... unless Elex really is hands-off trying to get to know this IP from the start and only gave it the most bare minimum of English where they can cut costs for it, so people can understand it 'well enough' to throw money at an obviously not beta-read quality game.

⦁ No translations. Yes we do have certain parts of the game that are in Chinese since forever since xx patch. Some characters' voiceline texts are still in chinese, especially during the Pledge scenes. More recent artifacts are also in chinese with no announced translation in sight. And don't get me started on the Food Soul bios, or lack thereof.

⦁ Delayed events. Prime example? We had weeks of minor events/no events and still Elex managed to eff everything up for our second Anniversary in July 2020. We ended up getting the Croissant event in late August with barely any apologies and compensation for the delay... and this likely would have never arrived as 'early' as it did if people hadn't been railing about where our Anniversary event was. As it stands, we are several minor events behind CN, at least a year and a half's worth behind. I know Global had requested heavily for more spaced out events (to save resources, not that it actually worked with all the nerfed rewards we get) compared to CN but this is extremely ridiculous.

⦁ Delayed permanent features. Hm... Guild Wars, Sky Tower, Bar, that Wuchang Fish Showdown... several Quality of Life updates.... that new permanent pool update... Food Souls still missing their JP voice packs... Food Soul Bios... *slowly ticking off more than I have fingers and toes*

⦁ Customer Support is whack. You'd be lucky if you got someone who understood your problem/inquiry right off the bat AND did something about it efficiently. You'd be luckier if they answered you honestly if you were inquiring about event updates or other buggy features or reporting hackers.

⦁ The Great Turkey and Apple Incident of 2020. Well, if you were around for that little SNAFU during the Turkey re-run event, you'd know a percentage of people suddenly got logged out of their accounts and had a baller of a time trying to get their accounts back. You were especially unfortunate if you were playing on an iOS account because even if you did bind it (like a responsible player should be doing), you probably still wouldn't get it back in time to rank properly during Turkey. Some Android players also experienced this, but it wasn't as bad as what the iOS players experienced. And then there was the compensation mishap for that too.

⦁ Hacker-chan and not-so-uwu Hacker-teme. Hacker-chan is a meme. Hacker-chan was a harmless player who regularly topped in Top Showdown every week for a time to send a message to Elex just how easy it is to hack the game in certain rankings and invited Elex to ban them every time, just to test how competent Elex is. In the end, Elex has proven to be incompetent and also glaringly stupid about how their published game works. Hacker-teme is a collective of individuals over time who have cheated the game during important ranking events or in somewhat important permanent battles. If you tried to report a Hacker-teme with evidence to prove it -and trust me, people repeatedly have-, Elex would tell you that they're not cheating and/or lie through their teeth that they're 'investigating the case' and then not do anything about it and let them keep their event ranking and thus get the rewards while someone who actually worked hard/whaled hard to get the spot gets denied. In one case, they believe that if an account has rebate points and the player level is at least around level 80, then the hacker-teme is obviously playing the game fairly. Never mind that their units happened to have low to no artifact nodes opened, and not high in ascension.

And that is the end of the Elex saga. I'm aware there's likely more things about Elex that I've missed, but feel free to add on to this analysis post with your own thoughts.

The last part of this trilogy is probably what many of us are waiting for, for obvious reasons.

[theangryjikooker]

Hi!

I'm the Anon who asked if I needed to be army to be a jikooker. Thank you, I liked the way you answered by not being toxic. I don't consider myself an army because I don't contribute into BTS stuff like many do. Also, army sometimes scare me. So without the label I feel more comfortable.

Alright so to your questions towards the end, I knew BTS but never explored them. Bwl was on my playlist because of Halsey, I never cared to know their names. But then purple hair JK started dancing on my Instagram reels, I wanted to discover them. I tried but still couldn't connect with them. A compilation video of BTS skinship popped up. Hobi kissing JK neck, pink hair JM kissing JK neck, rest I don't remember. So I wanted to watch on what context they were all kissing each other 😂😂

Saw few interviews, episodes from run/bon voyage/its/etc. This is how I learned about almost everything in BTS. Started loving JM JK flirty interactions, saw jikook analysis and anti analysis videos and the comedy compilation also. I say I don't have a bias but I can't neglect jimins charms anymore.

Anyway the point is BTS music is groovy, I like it. Jikook, I like the idea/theory of their love story that circulates in the fandom. I look forward to jikook vlives and ot7 vlives (because jikook will be there). Rest members I don't really look forward to but have no hate for them. They exist so BTS exist and so jikook exist in here. Respect to all of them. It's like I love my Mom but that doesn't mean I don't like my aunt/grandmother/sister/dad(?).

Don't know if I am making sense but I believe, to be an Army you need to explore all members even though you have bias? I don't and I can't put the efforts because of my laziness. I consider myself just a fan of BTS and not army.

Hi, anon, thank you for following up! ╰(*°▽°*)╯

I hope you haven't been getting criticized liking Jikook but not being an ARMY, that's pretty shitty of people to say that. I get where you stand, too: I really have a hard time connecting with other K-pop bands, but a member or two might stand out to me, and I end up keeping some kind of track of them (but lazily and inconsistently). No shipping, though, I'm stopping it at Jikook. 😂

LMFAO @ the comparison with the love for your mom but not your extended relatives. But yeah, I get what you mean. Not being interested in the other members doesn't mean anything more than not being interested in them, and that's fair. I appreciate you coming back and letting me (and anyone else reading this) know that shippers aren't cut from the same cloth. I would argue that non-ARMY shippers have more interesting things to say because they're technically "outsiders," and it can be further evidence that Jikook might have a little something-something going on, or at the very least have enough sparkling chemistry that can attract viewers even outside of ARMY. I find that cool.

I think the belief amongst ARMY (and I would assume other fanbases of other K-pop acts) is that to be an ARMY, you have to respect all the boys. That is first and foremost what ARMY prioritizes. Some ARMY even frown on shipping and think the practice itself is disrespectful, but to each their own. Liking a group's music is part and parcel of what it means to be a part of their fanbase, but no one is stopping you (nor should they) from looking into members that you're intrigued by. You're not claiming to be an ARMY, so that shouldn't be offensive to anyone (it shouldn't be offensive to anyone, but I can only speak for myself).

If you ever have any other thoughts on Jikook jikooking, you're always welcome to share them here! 💜

[bordeauxatdusk]

Mystique (A Detroit: Become Human Fanfic) Part 1

 Read the full fic (so far) on Ao3 here!

DISCLAIMER this fic is about gay android detectives in 2038. Please know that I am a BLM supporter and that I do not write in this in support of our current shitty criminal justice system. 

Forget-me-nots.

The dead woman’s eyes were the same color as the flowers in her hair.

She was poised, artfully, in an elegant position that looked almost like a sculpture. Rigor mortis held her in place. The crown of forget-me-nots was integrated with an elaborate veil of white lace that fell gracefully down her back.

The bloodstained silk wedding gown she was wrapped in extended outward, rippling over the room, which was staged like a movie set; a host of antique items and classic still-life objects had been structured to frame her. Elaborate globes mingled with vases of flowers mingled with stacks of old yellowing books, covers frayed. Warm light streamed in lazily from large arcing windows, illuminating the oakwood floors of the room.

The light glinted off the pearl dagger embedded in the woman’s chest. In front of her, a gold-leafed, leather-bound edition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet had been left open to the infamous scene:

“O, happy dagger, this is thy sheath.”

A human would undoubtedly call the scene beautiful.

To Nines, however, it was simply another murder.

He was capable of appreciating beauty, although many would be surprised to hear it. (Some people were surprised to hear that androids were capable of any abstract thought at all.)

Nines understand the concept of aesthetic value perfectly well. What he was not capable of understanding was how humans, in their love of aesthetic value, sometimes seemed to discard logic and reason.

The concept of a beautiful murder was immaterial to him. It was still murder. Whether it was committed in a wide-open oak room or in a rotting gutter made no difference.

Nines would hunt down and eliminate the murderer either way.

He was glad that Gavin felt the same, although Nines was concerned that he seemed disproportionately unnerved by something. What exactly it was, Nines couldn’t tell.

He knew that Gavin was upset partially from the rising levels of adrenaline in his scans, partially from the fact that Gavin’s pupils were dilated and he was beginning to fidget in the way he typically expressed distress (tapping his fingers together and pacing, mostly) and partially from the fact that he was increasing his profanity from its normal rate of about every one in fifteen words to every one in ten.

Nines had spent a lot of time analyzing Gavin Reed. Perhaps an irrational amount.

It hadn’t helped much.

Nines guessed that the cause of his partner’s distress must be some deeply-held psychological trauma. Humans often experienced it, and Gavin personally had suffered a difficult childhood. Whatever the reason for his distress, it must be very serious.

“What the fuck do you mean, ‘ I don’t know ’, Tina?! ” his partner was currently yelling into his phone. “It’s a simple goddamn question! Do they have jalapeno poppers or not?!”

Fascinating.

Nines was well equipped to read Gavin, but very poorly equipped to understand him. The difference, he felt, was vast. He was... displeased by it. Androids were predictable, generally. Deviants much less so than non-deviants, of course, but they were still more logical than humans. At first Nines had been convinced that Gavin was simply uncomfortable expressing his emotions, but the android had begun to discover that Gavin himself was often unaware of them.

Perhaps there was some unpleasant memory jalapeno poppers evoked for his partner. He would have to ask later. Nines would have preferred to have Gavin leave the room and take a few minutes to calm down, but he had learned recently that it wasn’t an option. Apparently, Nines doing what he was designed to do and examining the physical evidence without Gavin’s interference meant he was “being a fucking know-it-all” and a “stuck-up asshole.”

“Look,” Gavin had said a few weeks ago, waving a hand dismissively to try and distract from the fact that he was clearly upset. “ It’s no big deal. Just don’t keep fucking asking me to leave in the middle of crime scenes, okay?”

Nines had been unable to see the point of this request. “ Gavin, you were clearly disgusted by the scope of the damage done to the victim.”

“Well, yeah,” Gavin had muttered sulkily, “but you don’t need to be all weird about it. Look, Nines, I want to do my job. Let me do it. Even if I’m not really helping, just let me feel like I am, okay?”

Nines had been even more confused. “ If you aren’t going to help, why are you so determined to be there? Humans aren’t exactly well-equipped for forensic analysis to begin with. I don’t hold it against you.”

It had escalated into a full-blown fight that left Nines more confused than ever until Gavin was finally able to articulate that he didn’t want to feel useless.

The absurdity and simplicity of the answer had caught Nines off guard. Gavin Reed, useless? They had won a medal together just six months ago for solving an incredibly dangerous case, saving the lives of ten other officers in the process (and possibly the entire DPD). Their success had almost entirely been due to Gavin. Useless?

Nines strongly disagreed.

He had told Gavin so. Nines always said what he meant.

Gavin had huffed under his breath.

“ Alright, shit, I get it,” he’d said, trying and failing not to smile. “You’re a big fucking suck-up.”

Nines knew enough about humans to understand that the insulting response had roughly meant, in Gavin-language,“Thank you, Nines. I’m flattered.”

What confused him is why Gavin didn’t just say that instead.

Humans never said what they meant. It was inconvenient.

Gavin's voice snapped him out of his reverie.

“Hey, Robocop. You find anything?”

Nines blinked. Gavin was staring at him, phone in hand, waiting.

Nine shook his head. “This crime scene is so elaborately staged, I can’t move through it without risking disrupting the evidence. Every object in this room is potentially a key to solving the case. There’s a very low probability the killer managed to set this up without leaving some traces of his presence behind-- fingerprints, hair, DNA. It would be better to wait until forensics arrives, and allow them to do their job. “

Gavin wrinkled his nose, thinking. It was a habit of his.

(One that Nines found extremely distracting, but it wasn’t the time for that.)

“Is something bothering you, Detective?” Nines asked.

Gavin huffed. “Yeah, stop calling me ‘detective.’ You know my name.”

He paused for a moment, sighed, and then gestured to the scene in front of them.

“It’s this whole thing, Nines. I hate it when they do this shit. It’s so fucked up. Trying to turn something so horrible into something pretty, or romantic, or-- I don’t know. You’ll see. These cases are always hell to investigate. We can’t let a single drop of this leak to the media, or else this poor girl is going to be on the front page of every newspaper across the country. ‘The Girl In the Wedding Dress’, or some shit like that.”

Nines didn’t understand. “I’m not sure I’m following you. You don’t want her case to be publicized?”

Gavin shook his head. “Hell no. How do I explain this? Okay. This girl, she’s not fucking Juliet, right? What's her real name? You know it already with your facial recognition?”

“Ashley Briggs.”

“Okay. She’s not Juliet. She’s Ashley. Ashley was a whole person, with a life and family and friends, and then some fucking creepy asshole murdered her and dressed her up like Juliet. The media’s problem is, they like stories with publicity. They like stuff that has a nice ring to it. Ashley Briggs, not so much. ‘The Girl in the White Dress?’ ‘The Woman in White?’ some other bullshit like that? They eat that up.  A picture of a pretty girl in a wedding dress with a dagger in her chest? That’s the kind of stuff they eat for breakfast. They love it, Nines! It’s like the Black Dahlia. If any of this gets out,  nobody will give two fucks about Ashley Briggs, but they’ll all love her death."

Gavin stopped for a moment to take a breath, hands gesturing wildly, eyes narrowed in anger.

"Rumors will be everywhere. Poor Ashley’s family is gonna have to deal with photos of their little girl murdered and dressed up in a fucking wedding dress all over every tabloid in the grocery store for the next eight years. And not a single one of the people obsessed with ‘Juliet’ is gonna give a shit about Ashley. Everyone’s gonna see her how the killer saw her, how he wanted us to see her, how he set her up: as pretty tragic Juliet in a wedding dress. Nobody is gonna know or remember Ashley Briggs. Don’t you see how fucked up that is? They never give a shit about the victim, even though they pretend to. It’s always about the fucking killer and his ideology.”

Nines was stunned. He had never considered that aspect of a crime before. Looking at it from that perspective, it did seem disturbing.

“They’ll romanticize her murder," he finished for Gavin, who looked almost too angry to continue.

Gavin nodded, shoving his hands in his pockets. “The most fucked up part is, that’s what he wants. Her killer staged her this way because he’s trying to put on a fucking show. This is a murder with a message, we just don’t know what it is. I hate that those bastards always seem to get the attention they want. People always remember the killer, but they never remember the victim. Hell, how many people do you think could name a single victim of Ted Bundy? Or Jeffery Dahmer? Or any of the other sick bastards that decide to take their sexual fantasies out on so many innocent people that everyone forgets about?”

Nines raised an eyebrow. “We don’t know that this murder is sexual in nature.”

Gavin huffed. “Nah, but there’s a pattern when it comes to motive and method. There’s tons of examples. Um. Execution-style gunshots to the back of the head are cold, professional. Victim’s turned away, there’s a distance between them and the killer. No eye contact. Hired killers, a lot of the time.”

Gavin demonstrated with a finger gun, eyes distant, like he was remembering cases he’d seen before.

“Stranglings are personal, and a lot of the time they’re sexual. Killer’s up close, right in their face. Looking them in the eye, watching them slowly die, hands-on contact. It’s ‘intimate’ for those fucked-up pieces of shit. They’re normally sexual sadists. Hate those ones.”

Gavin’s brow wrinkled in disgust as he demonstrated.

“Stabbings are personal too, but in a different way. Bloody, aggressive, painful. Personal vendetta, lots of times. Someone close to the victim with a grudge. Betrayal maybe, ‘cause there’s anger behind it. Besides, she’s staged as fucking Juliet. Who do you think her Romeo’s supposed to be? The mailman?”

Nines hummed in response. He didn’t doubt Gavin’s theory, but any investigation should work from the external to the internal. The solid evidence should be interpreted to form theories, not theories interpreted to fit the evidence. The second an investigator began to let their personal opinions dictate the situation, they became biased.

“I still believe we should wait for the evidence to be analyzed before assuming anything.”

Gavin crossed his arms. His body language throughout this speech had been aggressive. Nines’ scans told him that Gavin was intensely angry.

“I’m not fucking assuming, I’m theorizing. If the evidence says something different then I’ll change my tune. I’m just saying, maybe the fact that she’s being staged all pretty in a fancy room in a wedding dress mirroring the suicide from goddamn ‘ Romeo and Juliet’ might have some tiny romantic undertones, Nines.”

“So perhaps we should interview her neighbors first.”

“Hell yes, we should,” Gavin said. “Starting with whoever found the body.”

He started to turn away to head out the door.

Nines stopped him. “Gavin, wait.”

He twisted back around in surprise. “What?”

Nines pressed his hands together, standing stiffly. “Are you angry with me?”

Gavin stopped in his tracks and paused for a moment in an emotion Nines was unable to read. There was a second of tension, and then Nines’ partner seemed to crumple inward as he sighed heavily, shoving his hands back into his pockets.

“No,” he said to the floor by his feet. “Sorry. It’s this case. Stuff like this- it’s fucking creepy. I get all tense. Of course I’m not mad at you, dumbass. I’m just- I’m not good at expressing shit, y’know. ”

Nines walked up to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Is there anything I can do?”

Gavin’s entire demeanor changed, going from aggressive to something much more vulnerable instantly. It was a switch that, even though they’d been together for six months now, Nines had rarely seen.

“No,” Gavin said softly. “I just want to catch the bastard. Otherwise, cases like this, they always stick with me. I’ll- I’ll see her everywhere. Ashley, I mean. In mirrors, reflections, dreams. Asking me why I couldn’t do it. People always act like murder investigations are some cop-show badass bullshit, but they aren’t. The pressure’s gonna be hell. We’re gonna have to go through her whole life and dig up a lot of secrets. Everyone has graves that are better left buried. Take my word for it, it’s gonna suck. And even if we find the fucking bastard, he still might get off. Normally, I can distance myself from it, I guess, but when it’s something this creepy- I just- I don’t know if I can do it. There's something about this case. I have such a bad fucking feeling about this whole thing. It’s driving me crazy. ”

Nines reached out and wrapped his arms around Gavin, pulling him close. It was meant as a comforting gesture, and he noticed with satisfaction that his partner’s distress seemed to decrease.

Nines was beginning to understand how to react to Gavin’s moods, even if he didn’t always understand the reason why they were happening. They had both worked dozens of homicide cases. Nines didn’t understand how this case was any different, but it didn’t matter. He was programmed to adapt to human unpredictability.

He never knew what to make of Gavin’s hunches, though. They were objectively irrational, and they were also always right. It drove him insane. It defied reason.

Then again, nothing about Gavin was reasonable.

“We’re professionals,” Nines began, “and-”

“And you’re hugging me in the middle of a fucking murder scene,” Gavin interrupted, voice muffled from pressing his face into Nines’ shoulder, “like a true professional.”

“You needed a hug. Let me finish. We’re professionals, and there’s a lot of potential just in this room for the killer to have made a mistake. The chances of him staging all this with zero forensic evidence left behind are very low-”

“Mhmmm,” Gavin said, leaning into the hug.

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Nope,” Gavin muttered.

Nines sighed.

He gently pulled Gavin away from him, brushing off his partner’s coat, which was eternally covered in cat hair.

“We need to go interview the neighbors. Listen. We work very well together. We’ve faced near-impossible odds before. Compared to our last big case, this will most likely be easy.”

“Nothing’s ever easy,” Gavin groaned. “Especially not in fucking homicide.”

“Well then, we’ll support each other, just like last time.”

Gavin smiled wryly. “Are you going to break a rib and give me a concussion again?”

“That highly depends,” Nines said, “on whether or not you plan to shoot me a second time.”

“You told me to!”

“I was paralyzed and all my communications were disabled. I couldn’t tell you to do anything."

“Your light flashed!”

“My LED,” Nines said, raising an eyebrow, “never stops flashing, unless I’m decommissioned.”

Gavin shoved him-- an adorably futile effort, considering he didn’t move even a fraction of an inch.

“Come on, smartass,” Gavin said. “We have some friendly neighbors to interrogate.”

[toflyandfall]

YAY :D! OK, I wanted to please ask what your thoughts were on Dick and Shawn's relationship. Did you feel it was in character? Did you feel it made sense? Did you want them to last or did you feel it came out of left field and didn't make any sense? How did you feel about the pregnancy scare and how they broke up ("I know what I said/did was shitty but we can fix this. We can make this work!") - does it sound like Dick? I'm also happy ur still here. I'm so used to asking you & Shelly so thank u!

I'll be honest with you, anon--DC burnt me hard with the Spyral travesty and then putting Tom King on Batman and keeping Seeley on Nightwing, so I don't keep up with current DC comics.  I don’t enjoy them and nearly without exception I don’t find them to be written well or in character. However, you're very sweet and I want to help fill the meta void in your life, so I read through Dick and Shawn's arc together and here's my analysis.

 I’m dividing this into two parts.  The first half will be as objective as possible and analyze your questions on whether Dick seems in character, what he says during the break up, etc.  It’s roughly chronological, starting when we first meet Shawn and continuing through to the break up itself.

The second half I’ll put under a readmore, as it’ll answer your questions about my more subjective opinions about the arc.

 Let’s start by looking at Dick’s previous and most happy relationships to see what good indicators for an in-character relationship would be.

  Getting physically involved with someone -before- having a secure emotional connection with them is not in character for him.  All of Dick's major relationships have been preceded by extended periods of mutual flirtation and bonding before physical overtures.  His most significant and longest lasting romantic connections began by building emotional and romantic attachment before sexual intimacy, frequently paired with a shared history together that precedes even the flirtation.  

There’s significant canon evidence that he’s demi sexual: a comprehensive, though hardly exhaustive, collection of it can be found here and here (the latter half of the second link relates to the Grayson series specifically, but overall it offers a nice long view on his relationship history since character creation and also addresses beyond-canon factors at DC that impacted some relevant canon writings.)  Whether you use the label demi for him or not, it’s canon that he’s not comfortable jumping into bed without a secure emotional connection.

 So let’s look at Shawn’s relationship with Dick through the lens of relationships in which he was the happiest and most comfortable.  Those relationships have these things in common:  

He has a stable, safe emotional connection to the individual.

He is willing and comfortable engaging in banter and flirtation.  

Relationship is based on mutual respect and affection, often paired with shared history together.

Now, let’s look at Shawn’s relationship.

Their ‘history’ together (as Defacer and Robin) is antagonistic, and their interaction in the past leave Dick feeling uneasy. Sure, he seems to think about her situation, but as this panel reads, the kindest that can be said of any emotional connection there seems to be here is one-sided pity.

Nightwing #10 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Once they meet again, she’s his boss.  Even or perhaps especially in the world of #MeToo, it’s important to address workplace relationships, particularly boss/employee scenarios, with care and sensitivity.  Seeley sidesteps this by just…having her later quit the non-profit she founded and giving Dick her position for a while.  However, even if she’d just worked in HR at an equal level with him when they met instead of being his boss, let’s look at the amount of participation he shows in their first meeting:

Nightwing #10 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

There is a lot of her talking and almost none of him.  He’s not engaged in their interaction here.  Where he tries later as Nightwing to engage more personally, he’s immediately shut down.  The most dialogue we hear from him is in his own head—in their first meeting, the ratio of her dialogue to his is literally 22 sentences to 9.  Of those 9 sentences, one is a lie he gives to avoid establishing an emotional connection with her, another she interrupts, and three of which were less than five words long: “Sorry.” “You can call me Dick” and “Thanks, Ms Chang”.  Even taking the workplace environment into account as best we can, this is not meeting any of the three criteria for Dick to be feeling emotionally attachment or attraction.  No one would look at those 9 almost-sentences and that flashback and say, “Ah yes, this man is deeply infatuated with her.”  

This is made even more jarring by the fact that the internal narration frequently doesn’t match the actual scenes we’ve witnessed.   

Nightwing #11 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Nothing about the few sentences Dick has managed to finish around Shawn when this narration comes up has said ‘attraction’, physical or otherwise, but the dialogue here reads like Dick was laying the flirtations on thick every time he saw her.  Same with when they talk about the flashback scene later.  There’s a lot of cognitive disconnect between what Seeley wants to tell us happened and what we actually see and hear and have evidence of between the characters.

If you’re wondering why I’m examining these initial interactions with particular depth, it is because frankly, these are the most interactions the two have together for roughly the first five issues of their ‘getting to know each other’ phase...and when they reunite at the end of those issues, we are supposed to believe they are already heavily, life-changingly in love.  So, for all intents and purposes, this scattered handful of conversations is all we have to analyze to examine whether this fits the qualifications for whether Dick would feel comfortable and emotionally attached enough to approach a physical relationship.

We have three chances in their various guises for Dick and Shawn to meet and start developing that all-important rapport.  This is our first initiation to their relationship and it certainly doesn’t read as a positive one.  The next one, she yells at him and kicks him out—again, a whole page of her dialogue to a fragmented sentence of his.  The third one, the flashback panel posted above, they don’t even speak to each other. Two of them are actively red-flags of being unable to establish a closer connection with that person; the third is a neutral connection.  This is not the kind of two-way interaction we see where he’s comfortable and interested in someone, and this is not an emotionally secure connection.  

Shawn disappears for three issues or so, during which they have, obviously, no interactions.

The very next after that, by the end of it, she lunges into him to kiss him.  

The next issue after that, they’re evidently in honeymoon heaven and already shacking up.  

Trust me, we’ll be going over that under the readmore later.

Back in the area of the objective, if you ever need to know the number of days Tim Seeley thinks is needed for two people with self-admitted enormous trust issues to form the ideal Hollywood manic pixie dream girl relationship, we were given a careful timeline.  

68 days—first date

Nightwing #15 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

62 days—first intercourse.

Nightwing #15 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Six days.  Not even a week.

They’ve met each other, then met each other’s parents and are living together and are one baby scare away from the suburbs in less time than it takes for someone to finish a semester at college.  It took literally longer for the issues of Nightwing where Shawn was an absent character in her own arc to get published in our real lives than it did for their on-panel romance to go from not even knowing each other to Nightwing (not Dick, but Nightwing) kissing Shawn (not Defacer, but Shawn) upside down in the middle of the city.

Trust issues, amirite?

Nightwing #15 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Meanwhile during that mostly off-panel ‘dating’ period we have these wildly out of character moments. In particular, there are two noteworthy things.

Shawn says she never would have pinned Dick for being a traditionalist.  

That directly contradicts…well…most of the statements people close to him have made of his dating views, and also his own self-stated views of them, whose top tracks include things like “…this might sound unhip, but I feel strange about living with someone I’m not married to”, “I gotta be honest, Roy—I couldn’t make love to someone I didn’t really love”, and “Love should be between two people”.  

We have a direct parallel of an in-character Dick moment walking someone home after an early date to use for comparison.  

Nightwing #31  

Things Dick does in this panel: reassures his date there is no pressure for sex and the night will not be ending that way, plan out just about the most traditional date experience, and engage in light-hearted mutual bantering.  

Additional relevant context around this panel: Dick and Clancy have known each other for months and have a friendly, mutually respectful connection.  Dick’s turned down a sizable number of invitations from her because despite living in the same building, the vigilante life made it difficult for him to make and keep plans.  This is their second date because Dick had to bail in the middle of their first.  It took months both in comics-time and in real-time of developing a mutual interest to lead up to that first real date.  And by then, the reader is invested in the status of that relationship, too.

To contrast the then vs now, we also have in that same moment with Shawn Dick, of all people, ignores a phone call without a second thought in favor of trying for a booty call. On the first date.  Let’s take a look at Dick and Clancy’s first date, 9 issues earlier than the one we just saw.

Nightwing #22  

Dick is a chronic workaholic, with all the associated inability to disconnect from his work while in relationships even during date night or intimate moments. It’s perfectly reasonable, considering that with his lifestyle choice, that phone call could be life or death for someone he loves, a stranger, or many, many someones, and it’s put significant strain on his past relationships when dating those not actively in the superhero lifestyle.  Clancy is, again, a great example of this--despite genuine interest on both sides, he blew her off at least half a dozen times because of vigilante emergencies before they even got to their first date.  And then despite their great rapport and a genuine interest in being there, he still ditched her in the middle of it when his phone rang.

What we see in Seeley’s Nightwing #15 not only runs directly contrary to significant chunks of his history and personality, it also tells a deeply upsetting story of a world where exists a horndog Dick Grayson who would risk other people’s lives to get laid with a chick he’s known less than a week.

They handle vigilante interruptions more in character in later issues once the relationship is established, but...yikes. 

Not in character.

We’re going to take a little jump here to move from discussing whether their relationship is in character for Dick to whether their breakup was in character.  

In general, it actually is pretty in character for Dick to panic himself into commitment in a romantic relationship even if he’s not really sure about it.  Dick is very interesting that way: he runs away from platonic relationships under tension, either by throwing himself into casework or by literally setting up in a new location.  If his romantic relationship is undergoing trauma, however, he's very capable of reacting the opposite, like in this example with Kory.

Team Titans #2

There’s even an awkward Devin Grayson incident where he thinks a woman is serial-murdering her husbands, fake-marries her to solve the case, uncovers the real killer who wasn’t her, and feels bad enough afterward that he offers to date her for real. (An interesting side-note: this makes Devin Grayson responsible for not one but two of Dick’s emotionally compromised almost-marriages. This one, at least, came before she jumped the shark with the dreaded Catalina Flores arc.)

Nightwing Annual #1

So let’s take a look at where Shawn’s exact circumstance falls in against those.

  To me, the lines that sound the most like Dick are actually the lines he says that cause their break-up.  

Nightwing #23 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Dick has a lot of darkness and anger in him. He’s a lot like Bruce and he’s a lot scared of how much he’s like Bruce.  We’ve seen several timelines where Dick’s had biological children and we’ve also seen how he tempered Damian’s darkness when Bruce was lost in the timestream.  Though this arc and timeline does not show it well (and that’s a whole different meta), we have the advantage of having known how Dick behaves as a father in a way this particular Dick has never had to experience.  And we know that when kids are in the picture he does work hard at repressing or concealing his anger and darkness to be a good role model, often in a way he isn’t sure he has the capacity to do when there are no children involved.  Despite some of the specific phrasings being iffy, the general sentiments here do feel like legitimate concerns Dick would have.

With this knowledge, that moment felt significantly more honest to Dick Grayson’s character than most of the rest of their relationship.  

Nightwing #25 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

The actual break-up dialogue itself is…well, it’s not out of character, exactly, because as shown, Dick has been known to clutch onto potential romances hardest when he feels they’re about to slip away. But the delivery of it isn’t in character.  Yes, in general, Dick has a temper and he lashes out. However, he’s clearly aggressive and angry in this panel, where previous experience has showed us he should be at his most emotionally vulnerable and pleading.  Dick, who is a generally emotionally closed-off person despite his extroverted demeanor, reacts to these kind of romance scares by showing emotional vulnerability in ways he frequently is unable to do during the relationship itself.  And the panel that he’s apologizing for as being a crappy thing to have said, is…as mentioned, the panel that comes closest to a consistent Dick Grayson.

And the thing they’re fighting about is that Dick missed a job interview because he was doing Nightwing things.  Shawn fell in love with Dick knowing he was Nightwing (somehow), he’s been Nightwing the whole time they dated, constant interruptions and all, but she breaks up with him because somehow 'the thing I always loved most…you.’ apparently wasn’t one that included the Nightwing schedule.  She also seems to be both blaming him for wanting the baby and also accusing him of not wanting it.  At the risk of getting off-topic and subjective, I’ll be honest and say Shawn’s dialogue here makes no sense to me at all.

Dick’s tried not being Nightwing, in both pre-52 and new-52.  Dick spends a fair amount of pre-52 time either bouncing from job to job or lacking a day job entirely.  In both pre-52 and new-52, the Dick she’s claiming is the one she’s always loved the most…doesn’t exist anywhere I can think of. Certainly not anywhere during their on-panel relationship.

Now that we’ve looked at what we see of Dick and Shawn on-panel, it’s time to talk about the impact this has off-panel.

I happen to have been re-reading a lot of Chuck Dixon’s original Nightwing’s run lately.  And here’s the thing.  Clancy’s been showing up consistently in that run as someone Dick could be attracted to for for oh, about...two full graphic novels now (that’s 17 single-issues) and they haven’t so much as gone on a date, let alone shared a smooch. It takes 20 issues before they make it to the first date we saw from Nightwing #22.  I don’t remember if she’s in every single issue of that period, so I’m going to round down by probably a lot and say that’s a minimum of a year when this was getting published for us as readers to get to know her and how she interacts with Dick, to get interested and invested in a potential relationship.  In comics-time, it’s weeks before Dick actually sees her face, not just hears her voice.  Even if you’re reading post-publication like me, that’s hours and hours where we watch she and Dick bond and banter and develop a mutual interest.

That’s build up.  That’s emotional investment developed over time.

I’m not saying every single relationship has to take more than a year’s worth of issues on-panel to develop.  However, she does summarize one of the single biggest struggles for DC’s cadre of writers over the last few years.  Basically, the problem I have with this beyond just the characterizations is the same that made me stop reading from New 52 onward: DC constantly trying to skip out on the process of creating meaningful emotional build-up or connections but still expecting to cash in on an emotional payoff.  

You can’t go from ‘kissed once’ to ‘been together for years like an old married couple couple vibes’ off-pages like Nightwing #15 tries to do.  Even if you expect the readers to believe the protagonist now feels that connection (which, frankly, I don’t), we don’t have that connection to the relationship.  It’s a cheap paper cutout with no actual emotional content behind it--why should we care if it tears under pressure?  We have no stake in it; we don’t know why the protagonist has a stake in it.  It’s meaningless.  

As a reader, my experience with Shawn and Dick’s relationship is as follows: a) they meet in a scenario where she is his boss (strong do not date vibes) b) they meet as vigilante and paroled ex-villain and she doesn’t even let him finish a sentence (would not date) c) they show a flashback where they don’t even speak to each other (Robin pities her; no ‘date/no date’ vibe data gathered), d) they share a confusingly out of nowhere ‘emotional’ moment that didn’t match up with my prior understanding of either what I extrapolated from the flashback or what I saw in their on-panel interactions (vibe check, please??) then she disappears for several issues into police custody (no ‘date/no date’ vibe data gathered)  The very next time she sees him, she betrays him  (STRONG do not/would not date).  Then all of a sudden at the end of that issue she kisses him.  

My context for their relationship is based on two ‘emotional’ conversations of dubious quality and consistency, one ‘look’ where their dialogue contradicts my own understanding of the on-panel events, a shouting match or two, and a very major betrayal that just happened to work out alright for everybody but is never actually addressed.  Most of her introductory arc where we’d be piecing out how she fits in with Dick and how they interact together, she isn’t even there for.  They’ve known each other for less than a week.  I the reader have known them for, in my case, maybe an hour of read-time. 

And the very next time I see them, I’m supposed to believe, and more importantly, feel emotionally attached to the fact that They Are The Most In Love Couple To Ever Be In Love.  

Trying to put a timeline on intimacy as a gimmick instead of establishing genuine emotional connection never works.  Yes, maybe we knew that one person in high school or know someone in college who falls hard and often and met and married someone within two months, but Dick Grayson has never been that person.  Maybe this style of flashback manic pixie romance would be more believable if they’d tried it on a different character with a different history and personality, but it especially never works on a character like Dick Grayson with a strong history of being slow to decide his feelings and even slower to jump into bed. 

In order to work, the entire arc that follows with the kidnapping by Pyg is predicated on the fact that I, the reader, am supposed to already care about Shawn’s relationship with Dick, and that I, the reader, believe in the validity of Shawn’s relationship with Dick and in Dick’s commitment to it.  But I haven’t been given time or reason to do either of those things by the time that arc starts.  

You cannot shortcut relationships and expect them to be meaningful to the reader.

So they threw in a baby.  Because even if you don’t care about a relationship, everyone cares about babies.

Throwing in a baby to up the emotional stakes is just a further step up that same problematic cheap-shortcuts ladder I was talking about: like in a stereotyped failing marriage, if you feel like you have to add a kid just to put meaning into your relationship again, maybe what you actually need to do is take time and consider what that relationship is built on.

[itsclydebitches]

Let me start by saying that I love all of your meta and analysis soooo much especially the ones about Ozpin. I was curious to hear what what do you think are some legit motally grey things/mistakes he did, not the garbage the haters love to throw around. The only things I can think of are either in an impossible situation with only shitty options (where I don't really consider the decisions as immoral since morality needs agency and the chance of a better choice) like with Pyrrha and Oscar (1/2)

Thank you, anon! And honestly? I couldn’t agree more. I often say that Ozpin has made mistakes partly so that people don’t blow off the points I’m trying to make with, “Oh an Ozpin stan. Ignore her, she thinks he can do no wrong and thus can’t provide an objective opinion.” But honestly? Not all mistakes are created equal. There are mistakes one makes because they’re selfish, foolish, didn’t bother to take precautions---things that are preventable and therefore invite heavy criticism and an acknowledgment of responsibility. However, there are also mistakes that, as you say, are simply outside of your control. You don’t have the information available to make an informed and therefore better choice, or you simply just have bad choices from the get-go. For me, the vast majority of Ozpin’s mistakes are the latter. 

Overall, I think the largest mistake he bears responsibility for is prioritizing his love for Salem over basic ethics. AKA, choosing to become a wannabe god with her and encouraging this mentality that they are intrinsically superior to everyone else in Remnant. Granted, there are many other factors involved in this, including Salem’s status as a creature now consumed by darkness (she was heading down this road no matter what Ozpin may have done differently) as well as her abuse towards Ozpin, her manipulation, and the sheer overwhelming terror of the goal Light set him. Which just reinforces that all Ozpin’s mistakes are understandable to one extent or another. He’s human and his mistakes resonate because, if people are honest with themselves, they’d probably admit, “Yeah. If I found the love of my life again I’d be tempted to ignore Light’s warning about her too. If I was offered a life of luxury and power under the guise of protecting the people, I might cave and go along with that as well...” We get how Ozpin got to that point, we may admit we couldn’t have done better, but we likewise understand that the man he became, regardless of how he got there---from natural human desires to abuse---isn’t okay. As Oz and his host ask themselves, “What are we doing?” And we see how he comes back from that edge. How he rejects that sort of power later when it’s offered to him after the Kingdoms were reunited. Ozpin learned from his mistakes. 

Which adds further complications to his choices in the present day. Just as Ozpin learned that the world doesn’t need him as an all-powerful figurehead, he likewise learned that sharing secrets leads to nothing but the worst kind of consequences. The first time he reveals what he’s hiding? His wife announces that she’s going to take over the world, then murders their children, then him. A more recent time he reveals information? A very close friend betrays him to said wife. Tries to kill him. Nearly kills his allies. Is eventually killed himself. The latest time he was forced to reveal information? People are shouting, grieving, he’s punched into a tree, the one friend still at his side completely rejects him. 

The fandom points to Ozpin’s lies and secret keeping among the group as his greatest mistakes and yes, objectively I agree. Without context I can say no, he shouldn’t have made a promise if he didn’t intend to keep it. He should have just told them that there were questions left, or that the relic attracted grimm. But the thing is that context is there and it always matters. I’ve spoken before about how I think Ozpin made that promise with precisely zero expectation that he’d ever be put into a situation where he might conceivably break it, that I’d also hesitate to tell a group that there were invaluable questions left when they were clearly eager to use them recklessly (which they then did), and that keeping the grimm aspect secret was the only logical course of action because telling them would just attract more. But even ignoring all of the potential justifications attached to each choice, I simply don’t believe we can ignore Ozpin’s trauma. I might not have lied to people like that, but I haven’t been horrifically traumatized for a thousand years whenever I do tell someone information. Ozpin has been conditioned not to tell people and though yes, everyone technically has free will, trauma like that will “force” you to take what you perceive as the only safe option. It fucks with your perception and your understanding of what even is an option in this situation. Ozpin simply no longer has the ability to go, “I’ll trust them!” like the others around him do and their reactions certainly didn’t help teach him otherwise. Imagine that for a thousand years you’re punched every time someone lifts their hand. Then someone you’ve just met demands that you stop flinching whenever they raise theirs. No matter how much you may want to stop, you can’t. Not immediately on someone else’s order. The human experience doesn’t work that way. 

(As a side note, the reason why I emphasize a thousand years so much is because I believe the extent of the trauma and its implied consistency is really relevant here. As is the close tie between that trauma and Ozpin’s choices. There are many other characters out there who I don’t believe “But they had a hard life!” excuses their actions: Snape, Bakugo, recently what I’ve read of Yennefer---among others. It’s notable to me that Ozpin didn’t endure traumatic events by revealing information and then, say, go abuse his students for years. Or tell someone to kill themselves. Or take over someone else’s mind. Not only is his trauma more extensive than the vast majority of characters we meet, but he hasn’t used that trauma as an excuse to get away with horrific---and unrelated---choices. The love of my life rejected me and then died... so I’m going to abuse eleven-year olds under my care. My mom is demanding and people cater to me too much... so I’m going to gleefully beat up my weakest classmate. I dealt with being ugly for a good chunk of my life and now can’t have kids... so I’m going to take away someone’s autonomy and endanger a whole town. Unlike most other characters with tragic backstories, Ozpin has a one-to-one correlation between that hard life and the mistakes he’s made: people hurt me when I tell them things... so I just won’t tell them things. By keeping that strong connection it eliminates the possibility that Ozpin is just using his trauma as an excuse (knowingly or otherwise) and he is, notably, still a good person beyond those very specific choices. We see his horror at the decisions he has to make. We see his endless attempts to be as kind towards others as possible. We see how much he’s fought not to allow his trauma to warp him into a person he’d despise. A person like Salem. Just like not all mistakes are created equal, for me not all people making mistakes are equal either. I’m less likely to forgive your mistakes if you’re an all around horrible person. You’re clearly a good person trying your best? Your mistakes are easier to stomach and, as discussed above, I’m more inclined to assume that these mistakes stem from things outside of your control. If someone who has been nothing but cruel to me lied I’d automatically be pissed. If someone who has been nothing but kind to me lied, I’m inclined to ask them why they did that, expecting that there’s a good reason attached to that decision.) 

So did Ozpin make mistakes? Technically yes, but I think they were mistakes largely outside of his control. Either he only had shit options available to him or he was in a position where the group demanded something of him that his mental health simply wouldn’t allow. People have to remember that we’re not Ozpin (insert obligatory, “He’s fictional” here). We have more options available to us when it comes to our choices, simply by means of not having gone through what he has. His choices are always limited, both by outside factors and his own experiences, and they likewise always have inevitable downsides. Ozpin doesn’t get the luxury of choosing anything that turns out well. 

As a final note, with Volume 7 underway I’d say that another potential mistake has been introduced: making Pyrrha the Fall Maiden. Meaning, unless the story reveals that Winter actually can’t become the next Winter Maiden due to her age (unlikely given that others have said the non-canonical age limit is 30), it raises the question of why he’d choose a 17 year old over a 20-some graduate. However, to me this is pretty clearly a writing issue. The creators were more concerned with keeping the story revolved around RWBYJNR than they were the implications of having Ozpin choose Pyrrha over a more suitable adult. So though yes, I’d technically consider that another mistake.... obviously not much Ozpin could do against his own creators lol. 

Which finally leads to me saying that although Rooster Teeth seems to want us to believe that Ozpin is a morally gray character, they haven’t succeeded in writing one well. That characterization requires a fair balance between what most would consider “good” and “bad” traits. Not a good person presented with only bad choices. Or a character so horrifically conditioned that his ability to make a better decision is almost impossible. We wouldn’t call a person who was manipulated or forced into doing bad things a morally gray character, nor would we use that term if, somehow, they were sick and that led to those choices. That’s how I view Ozpin, mentally as opposed to physically sick. After a thousand years he needs evidence that trusting people and giving them his secrets won’t result in him being hurt. Until he’s shown that, expecting him to trust people just because they insist they are trustworthy is like asking someone with a broken leg to run you a race. They can try, but good look expecting them to succeed. 

[cosmic-cactus2]

laws of attraction | spencer reid x reader {Chapter One}

Description: "The law of attraction is the attractive, magnetic power of the Universe that manifests through everyone and through everything. It is part of the creative power of the Universe. Even the law of gravity is part of the law of attraction. This law attracts thoughts, ideas, people, situations, circumstances, and the things you think about." She was cynical about love. She didn't believe in soulmates, or fate, or that the universe brought you together. She believed in science, facts, and statistics. Her experience had taught her that love didn't exist, so she wasn't hell bent on finding it. But when she gets bumped up to a job working for BAU as a personal forensics analyst at Quantico, she meets someone that might just make her believe in love again. He might have too. {SET AFTER SEASON 13 OF CRIMINAL MINDS}. Warnings: adult language, some adult themes. Couple: Spencer Reid x Female Reader. A/N: Hey guys! I want to thank you all for reading this today. I’m literally brand new to tumblr so I have no idea how this works but here’s a try I guess. 😂 I post more frequently on Wattpad and I have more stories there so check out my account on there: cosmic_cactus. You can also read chapters of this story ahead of time there. ——————————————————————————.Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three

new start. ⊱⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⊰

You were confident in the statement that your love life was pretty non-existent. Not by choice, obviously; since you were young you'd always been the hopeless romantic type, always hung up on fictional stories of love fueled tragedy, like Romeo and Juliet. You had taken a fondness to screaming breakup songs in your car on your way to work, often finding yourself sitting in the car in the parking lot for a few extra minutes.

Your life was also very bland and unnecessarily boring. Everyday was the same monotonous routine-

Wake up in the small cramped bedroom. Eat the same shitty tasting breakfast cereal you ate every morning before brushing your teeth to make the taste even worse.

Get dressed in the same old boring uniform-which you didn't see a use to since it was always covered with a lab coat-and head off to work.

Jam out to music that made your makeup run while stuck in a traffic jam, get yelled at by your boss for being late, then head to your lab station to find 6 million fresh evidence bags on the table for you to analyze (you were a forensic analyst for the [your hometown] police department). And it wasn't even cool evidence either, just finding fingerprints on t-shirts and cellphones.

Then when that was over you go home, strip down to your pajamas, turn on a romcom or horror movie, cry and eat ice cream, then go to sleep at 1:36 am just to wake up the next morning and do it all on repeat. Not to mention looking at old family photos that reminded you of a past with so many dark secrets and skeletons in the closet you desperately wanted to throw away and burn.

And to exaggerate on the fact of a terrible love life, none of your relationships seemed to work out. 9 months, 10 months, 2 months, a week, and most recently, a year and a half. It was like Cupid decided to take a day off whenever you went out to find any sort of love. Either that or he just decided you were the one he wanted to give the middle finger.

But today you had a new start. All of the work it took for you to get here seemed to be worth it, like you were finally back on track.

You'd just ended the year and a half long relationship with an extremely toxic, manipulative, borderline psychopathic ex-boyfriend who did not take it well, so it was a good thing you were leaving the state far far away from him. When you'd gotten the call about getting the job, it was like whatever god was above had answered your prayers.

Instead of your boring monotone job working at the PD, you were headed to Quantico Virginia to be an on-site forensic specialist and analyst with the FBI's famed Behavioral Analysis Unit. You'd be working in the FBI lab on normal days and local cases, but would be traveling with the team whenever out of state cases came up. It was like a dream come true; you could see everything you'd ever wanted to, travel, and get paid for it.

That perpetual smile landed on your face as you lugged the suitcases up the stairs of your apartment building and to the door. You opened it with a click, looking at the fresh looking apartment, only filled with a few basic pieces of furniture like a sofa and chair. A kitchenette was in the corner of the room, and a hallway branched out to lead to a much bigger bedroom than your last one and a cleaner bathroom than the last. You put your bags down inside and closed the door, waiting for your boxes to arrive tomorrow.

"Time for a fresh start."

[emperorren]

I know a lot of new shippers came along after tlj and don't know the true craziness of antis, but 2018 was still a frickin mess! For example, November(i think) last year, antis invaded the reylo tag with total bullshit. it's better now that tumblr have sorted out the tagging system, so posts stay were they're meant to, but last year wasn't all sunshine and roses. So shippers who say they're post tlj still should have been around for that shit show.

that’s just a fraction of what the overall discourse was in 2016 though. I mean, main tags can be avoided (I never go there, for example, because there’s too much trash to begin with, antis or not). But in 2016 my entire dashboard was like this. Half my mutuals were like this, general sw blogs couldn’t be trusted, Leia fans couldn’t be trusted, Anakin stans couldn’t be trusted, and bloggers I previously loved suddenly started paying lip service to anti rhetoric calling us sickos and abuse apologists and internalized racists and so on. And I had it relatively easy, compared to other shippers who got death threats and triggering content in their inbox.

The "let us all hold hands and sing the kumbaya" attitude from TLJ Reylos is extra annoying when you realize that many of them were casually liking and reblogging antis' vitriolic posts between TFA and TLJ. I have seen so many of them humorously admitting to it. "Haha I used to think Reylos were crazy but after TLJ I was like hot damn their chemistry is great!"

That’s true. I’m glad that at least some antis came around and fell in love with the reylo dynamic, and I believe in redemption arcs lol, but some OG reylos were actively bullied and doxxed and suicide baited and they 100% have a right to avoid contact with people who previously supported or tacitly tolerated that kind of behavior.

I was in a GC for another fandom last year, totally unrelated to SW, but when I offhand mentioned I was a Reylo it turned out a couple people in the same GC were antis and shit hit the fan. The highlight was prob someone who I thought was my friend bringing up a selfie I’d sent her of me and a male friend at a concert, and trying to use that as “evidence” in an argument that I was straight and he was my boyfriend. Because, you know, a Reylo has to be lying about being queer, because of Reylo

Oh anon, I’m so sorry this happened to you. It’s shitty. It’s literally doxxing, and a horrible betrayal of trust on your ex-friend part. Queer Reylo erasure was unfortunately very common in anti circles. Antis seem to think only white cishet normies can love Reylo---not because it makes any sense, of course, but because it’s the demographic they know they can relentlessly and remorselessly bully while still pretending they’re woke and fighting for a good cause or whatever. And when they’re presented with evidence that actually a lot of Reylos are queer, or non-white, they either assume it’s a lie or bend over backwards to prove that those Reylos have “internalized” -ism.

And what you said describes very well the atmosphere many of us found ourselves in---with people you thought were your friends, or at least nice mutuals, suddenly turning against you or supporting discourse that painted all of us with the same brush as racists, misogynists etc.

I'm so so glad new reylos don't have to deal with the toxicity now that was felt back then. I was new a few months before TLJ came out (mostly because I completely forgot SW was a thing & then I fell upon the wonderful OG reylos' meta), and even that brief amount of toxicity drove me to delete my Tumblr account. I made a new one since then, but I still feel too nervous to make any posts of my own. I tend to just reblog everyone else's thoughtful posts. Thank goodness for blocking buttons & tags. 

I think things changed not just because Reylo got objectively more mainstream and is practically canon now, but also because there’s much more honest discussion about the toxic aspects of this culture. And we Reylos had a part to play in this. We fought back (like other *problematic* shippers did), and we forced anti culture to reveal itself, rather than keep lurking and infiltrating fandom discourse in a underhanded way. We made block lists and recognized potentially toxic patterns in bloggers with a certain theme or certain buzzwords in their blog description. We engaged in public discussions and more and more people started coming out and denouncing how uncomfortable they were with anti arguments. When needed, we closed our ranks and made it clear antis’ feedback on our shipping activities was not welcome. In short, not only we created an environment where our ship could thrive, but we contributed to the rise of an anti-anti culture, which is strongly pro-inclusiveness, pro-intellectualism, pro-intersectionality, pro-nuanced meta analysis, whereas classic anti culture is getting old and relies on the same stifling, reactionary arguments from 5-6 years ago.

[lotarclasspects]

The Homestuck Epilogue and Analysis of the Text as a Whole (brief)

EPILOGUE SPOILERS AHEAD 

As many of you in this fandom have recently born witness to: The Epilogue is finally here. It begins with a prologue, with John being disillusioned from the world and Rose telling him that him going back is essential. In the beginning of the story we are introduced to the idea of things which, viewed from the lens of the greater story, are not necessarily measured in terms of one person’s moral stand point of “Good” or “Bad”, rather Essential and Inessential. This is the axis upon which Vriska turns, this is the path of events which Rose can see, and this is the stage upon which the conflict of our two Narrators comes to pass.

To understand the Epilogue, we must first, briefly, summarise some of the core themes of Homestuck. These, in short being: The Agency of the Characters, The Narrative itself as the Villian, and the meaning of Freedom. 

We will begin with the meaning of Freedom. What it means to be Home Stuck. Homestuck is not named simply as a joke about the start of the story, but its name rings true as an abstract way of representing the main objective of its characters. To win, and be at peace in the new Universe. For you see, much like Problem Sleuth, they only leave the house at the very end. But this only makes sense if you understand the Symbols because as Rose Lalonde, Seer of Light, One who Understands the Narrative’s Focus, explains: “The symbols holdall the power”. As you are probably all aware, the entire story focuses on the fates of the characters as they toil through the Alpha Timeline. As we later learn, this “timeline” is not the one which leads to the most fortuitous outcome, nor is it one which allows all characters to have equal relevance or fulfillment. It is simply an extremely specific series of events which allows the main villian of the Text, Lord English, to exist, take pleasure in his wanton destruction, and then die and be reborn all in a circuitous loop. Sure, the kids “Stop” Lord English in the end, but their Victory is more defined by their escape from their terrible, dire, and tragic situation. They enter their “Roles” by way of Sburb, which is symbolised by a House. A human house, a troll house, it doesn’t matter. It ends with them escaping through the door never to be truly seen in the comic again. They finally leave The House, and by House I mean the Narrative, which for the purposes of this examination is essentially interchangeable with Lord English himself, because in truth that’s what he represents. 

Lord English is the main villian of homestuck, but what he represents is a core theme of understanding the story. Lord English’s character design is essentially made to be a charicature of Andrew Hussie himself, the worst, most vulgar and horrible parts of his prior works. Gamzee, shitty clowns, Equius: Horses, Dirk, the narcissism and stuckupishness of his own narration, and Caliborn. The “Tortured Artist” who complains that “Internet Teens” don’t understand his “Masterpiece”. Sound familiar? But he also represents the Narrative itself. The awful cycle which the characters are subjected to suffer in. the Lord of Time itself is a classpect which means “One who Controls Time, One who controls Others with Time, and One who controls Endings, the wrapping up of plot threads, and Certainty” Which is exactly what the Alpha Timeline is. Lord English is representative of a DM, or storyteller who insists that everything must be done THEIR way, who is rigid and controlling about what they WANT to happen being what HAS to happen and any deviation of the sort will either be not allowed or punished. Therefore, the villian representing this shows a core theme and belief of the story. That controllers and rigid authoritarian storytellers are something evil. Theyre the bad guys here. On the flip side, The Rigid Authour’s nemesis in the end is the Muse of Space, Calliope. Someone who “Inspires others with her Creations, Inspires Creation, or Is inspired By creation, expansion, worldbuilding, and co-operation.” She is a caricature of the Fandom. Who desires collaboration and working together. This is a core element of SBURB, that a good session (Which in and of itself borrows themes from both GAMES and STORIES) can only happen from a collaboration and understanding between individuals. This is a core element of the Epilogue. 

Now, to understand how this all ties into the Epilogue, it first needs to be understood how fucking Meta homestuck is, and WHY the Narrative is the villian. It’s because, for a story to happen, the characters must suffer. Endure drama, heartache, weird adventures. Because otherwise there would be no story. Kevin from Home Alone gets left behind every year. If he was a real child, he’d probably need therapy about that in his older years, but Kevin is not allowed to have a happy, non abandoned christmas, because then they wouldn’t be able to make any more Home Alone’s. So Kevin has to suffer for the Narrative to continue in its existence. Precisely the fact why Homestuck ended where we couldn’t see them walk through the door. If we were to see that, then they wouldn’t truly be free of the narrative because the sole ability for us to be able to witness that would mean they’re still trapped. This is why the credits are in the format of Snap Chat. It allows the audience to have a small window into their lives whilst showing they’ve truly escaped and are allowed to live like real people.

But here again comes our problem. For the Epilogue to exist as a compelling story, the characters would have to experience conflict for that to happen. But the Epilogue does something interesting. It formats it in the style of a Fan Fiction. Because whilst Homestuck plays with the ideas of how restricting a story would be if the characters were real people, the Epilogue plays with the idea of what is, and is not Real to a story in the first place. What can be considered “ Canon”, and does that really matter. In the Meat and Candy halves, as referenced by Dave later on in the Candy section, when you flip a coin, in the short instant before it falls the two offshoots of the result of that perfectly equal choice come to exist. This was the nature of Calliope asking John which he wanted to pick. By doing so, she gave the opportunity for an alternate version of himself to live where he would die and so forth. The John who ate the Meat may have died but by doing so allowed all of creation to continue. Even though he didn’t get what he thought he wanted, he died in a relationship with terezi after his life had meaning again. Candy john got what he wanted. A relationship with Roxy. He got to live. But these things, in the end were not what he’d hoped them to be. His other self got to be with terezi. The same is true for the other characters. Karkat lost the presidency in Meat, but in Candy he proved he’d make an excellent leader. In Meat, Davekat became canon, but in Candy dave lived to be romantically unfilfilled but he got to meet Obama and achieve an ultimate catharsis of the self.

But the thing is, these choices, in a sense ARE perfectly equal. There is no evidence in the Narrative, that one is inherently more Canon than the other, because it is directly stated that they both exist outside of Canon. If both exist outside of Canon but are not Fanon are they both True? Or is truth relative. I believe that the Epilogue was a way of seeing what reality would bring to these characters, whilst filling out two different paths. One where they got something and one where they didn’t. And this also comes to the sub plot of the battle of the two narrators. As Calliope mentions in Candy, when it becomes obvious that the speaker had an agenda you begin to wonder whether it simply came to light who the speaker was or if they had been using their subtle passive influence all along. We barely even notice in Meat, because Dirk’s typing quirk is identical to the quirk used by Andrew Hussie himself. Whether he is simply an alternate version of Dirk Strider in canon... up for debate. But this also begs the question. If the stories are outside of Canon, and the Authour can change, then who is the executive on saying what happens and doesnt? The Epilogues are explorations. Not closures, but exploring what would happen in situations. It offers the idea that anyone could narrate about a series of events happening outside of canon,and it would be just as feasible and valuable as anything else outside of Canon. Therefore... Your fan fictions have just as much narrative Truth as those, and if those had some truth at all then do yours also? Or if your own stories are false then so are they. These are not meant to be taken as the “missing link” of the end of Homestuck, but simply filling a gap where a prior hole has already been filled. The end of the story seemed to have the characters so briefly meet but here it was FILLED TO THE BRIM with dialogues. So take of it what you will, because in the end, what it meant by “Above the Line, All is true and below it is all things which are insignificant” means that literally whatever you imagine could happen has an equal chance of happening in another “Outside of Canon” timeline. But what it meant by “The Important and the Unimportant will never again meet” is that Homestuck itself will never explore these things. That was it. What happens next... Is up to all of you.

-The Knight of Breath

[musicrunsthroughmysoul]

It’s time to grow up, and it’s been time for an embarrassingly long time. Very long and probably offensive post below - do NOT say I didn’t warn you.

I just had an impulsive thought, but I’m gonna back it up with good evidence, so don’t judge me or try to stop me just yet.

I can’t be in the Beatles fandom anymore.

I know that doesn’t sound that significant, but, um...well, I write for the fandom, for a particular, very small, pretty unpopular part of the fandom, but I do, nonetheless. And maybe it’s because that part of the fandom is the only thing I’ve been interested in for an enduring three years or so and so I notice and analyze a lot about it. Well, I think my reason for leaving wouldn’t just be related to that part of the fandom, though.

Maybe the analysis started when I finally found I was able to properly critique George Harrison, the man I, and seemingly along with most of this god-forsaken site, considered a saint. Well, on that subject, let’s just say that even SAINTS (the ideal ones, mind you) know how to respect women, complete with not treating them like commodities he could toss aside when he was done with them. Yes, maybe that’s harsh, but I don’t trust men who don’t respect women because I really haven’t been taught to trust men otherwise. So there’s that.

But then the other part, again/still has to do with George, but it also extends to the other Beatles, too, and that is...infantilization. I feel like the only way people realistically justify their love for the Beatles is through their ability to infantilize them because, let’s face it, all of them at some point or another were pieces of shit. John beat his wives, Paul slept with ten billion women as did George (THAT’S AN OVERSTATEMENT FOR ANYONE POLICING THIS POST, GOODBYE), and Ringo beat his wife(/wives), too. None of them were statuesque human beings (and yet, here we are, all over the fucking world...), and yet people still heroize them like they were flawless. 

In some people’s defense, I will say that those more interested in the Beatles’ MUSIC than the musicians as people are probably on the right track and doin’ well; there’s nothing wrong with admiring someone’s talent and being inspired by it. But I feel like this needs to be straightened out: the Beatles as people really are hardly people to look up to and base your values around. Maybe, arguably, NO ONE ought to be used as a singular example to base one’s values around - I think a lot of good people have acknowledged their humanity and their unwillingness to be represented as role models, and I think they’ve really got the right idea. In other words, it’s good to “take notes,” so to speak, but USE YOUR DAMN JUDGMENT, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE.

Now, to get back to the thought I didn’t quite finish about the Beatles being infantilized - seriously. If someone does discover the ability to critique them, they can’t seem to do so without further stating, “...but I love them, anyway.” If you can’t justify your love or admiration for them as otherwise pure, then you’ve got no justification to begin with. (And by pure, I don’t mean “non-sexual” or “pure of heart” type of thing - speaking on the Beatles, a pure love would be love that only considers the music and not the people who make it. Shocking concept, I know!) But I’d argue that the type of justification for loving/admiring the Beatles that ends in “...but I love them, anyway” inherently infantilizes them because it’s still being used as a way to justify and excuse their bad behavior. If you do not know these people personally, you are not obligated to love them unconditionally, which is what is being attempted (even while still attempting to critique them harshly, sometimes). Another point is, by justifying your love for them, you’re not only excusing their poor behavior, but also, in fact, PROMOTING it. Like I said, if you don’t know these people personally, then you’re not obligated to love them unconditionally, and thus, if they fuck up, THEY PROBABLY DON’T DESERVE YOUR ABIDING LOVE AND ADMIRATION UNLESS YOU ADMIRE AND THUS CONDONE THE SHITTY THINGS THEY’VE DONE.

But now, in less general examples, I’m gonna lay on some more shit about George that I’ve noticed in the fandom, in any part of the fandom, mind you. This is also the main reason I’ve finally come to the realization that I can’t associate myself with this fandom anymore (look, I’m not saying I’m perfect and that I realized this shit way before like I should have, because I didn’t, evidently why I’m writing about it now as am I finally realizing it - so basically, I’m not trying to fault anyone who hasn’t come to the realization themselves, yet, just that they SHOULD if they haven’t and SOON): I’ve noticed people infantilizing THE ABSOLUTE HELL out of George Harrison, and I suppose for the longest time I ignored it (because I thought it was gross and I do try to ignore things I think are gross), but now I’m not ignoring it any longer. People talking about the way he lost his virginity, about the way Paul always treated him (referred to him as his little brother), about the way JOHN always treated him, and thus people have seemed to learn that it is okay and that it’s always okay to treat George like A KID. Well, see, that’s how he’s gotten away with all of the bullshit that he has - because everyone’s infantilized him and thus excused his shitty behavior. BUT that’s not all...I’m also GROSSLY UNCOMFORTABLE and ALWAYS HAVE BEEN with the way people have portrayed and perpetuated George’s relationship with Paul, focusing on the way Paul has always treated George like his superior and older brother even though, as George has stated countless times, he’s “only 9 months older than him” (that seriously is not a big difference...that’s literally like two babies, one right after the other, in age/time difference. One LITERALLY RIGHT after the other. Hello, do we all know how long pregnancy generally lasts? Sorry to be gross, but I’m JUST SAYING). Of course, considering I was a fan of George for the longest time, I also was always uncomfortable with the way John and George’s relationship has been portrayed - that John, so much older than George, couldn’t be bothered by the inferior pest. So it obviously started with the Beatles, themselves, infantilizing George, and of course everyone else has perpetuated it...however, the means in which I’ve seen fans do so are often highly inappropriate and make me UNCOMFORTABLE AS FUCK via the pedo/incestuous vibes. Yep. Not joking here. I don’t joke about that shit.

Of course you could argue, “But it’s just fanfiction/fanart, it’s not real!!!!!1!!” And trust me, my dudes, no one knows that argument better than me. But it’s still the MESSAGE that is put across, the morals that are being valued and promoted here. THAT is what I can’t accept any longer. I can deal with the fact that it’s fictitious and someone’s art and therefore it should have some semblance of respect, but when it crosses moral boundaries, that’s when I have to say, “HIT THE ROAD, JACK; GOODBYE, JACK.”

So basically what I’m saying is: straight and oversexed Beatles, gay Beatles, friend-Beatles, idealized and perfect Beatles, however-the-fuck-they-exist-in-your-head-or-writing-or-art I don’t care for anymore. I want no part of the people who were the Beatles, and if I continue to appreciate anything related to the Beatles anymore, it will strictly be under the subject of their music and nothing else.

So yeah, what I’m also saying is, if anyone who follows me and read all the way down to here and knows of the fanfiction I write, well, my good reader dude who I appreciate otherwise, I’m sorry, but I won’t be continuing any more. But thanks for reading my writing even though it’s highly inappropriate and I don’t condone any of it anymore. Sorry, again. Maybe eventually I’ll write something I’m proud of, but that shit was not it.

Thanks for not enjoying not killing me not getting into any arguments with me surrounding this shit because I truthfully cannot be fucking bothered at this time reading.

[lit--bitch]

Current-Reads (10/05/2020 - 17/05/2020) 🍎🐔

(Disclosure: Don’t think I know anyone this week (and sadly Édouard Levé is no longer alive) and I don’t know anyone personally working within these publications/presses bc I am a loner, apart from Hobart actually I do know EE from Hobart.) Preface as always: Every Sunday without fail I throw up the freshest literature and photography I’ve read over the week, sometimes it’s a book, or a piece I saw in a magazine or an online zine, maybe it’s something I saw on social media, etc. If I add ‘RECOMMEND’ next to a few of the titles, but that’s not to say I don’t recommend all of them, I just love some pieces more than others. Not everything will be everybody’s cup of tea, yanno, c’est la vie. And any titles that you see in bold are hyperlinked so if you click or tap them they’ll direct you straight to the source… or shopping basket.   I check all the writers and their social media (i.e. I stalk them and their bios) to make sure I absolutely get their pronouns correct, I don’t just blindly assume hes and shes, etc. So in case anyone’s concerned about that, dw I do this shit properly.

This week’s been weird, I’m starting to feel like I’m dissolving a bit. The lockdown feels like culture now. The last time I went to a bar seems like a dream. Some of the work I’ve read over the past few days has compounded this dazed feeling I’ve been having, and I’ve been dipping into a lot of work which was published way before this pandemic hit, like back in September 2019. I’ve been rereading Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait which is one of my favourite books. I’ve been reading a poet I came across in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Carolee Bennett. I discovered a new writer I’ve fallen hard for, his name’s Richie Hofmann and I’m torn between talking about his recent publication in Hobart and the piece he did in The New Yorker a while back (I guess I’m gonna talk about both), his poetry is so delicate and intimate, it’s like it breathes on the back of your neck. I loved Michael Sutton’s poems on 3:AM Magazine’s Poem Brut series and am now anticipating his next collection. Sarah Cavar’s a complete family / hstry was another piece in 3:AM which I kept reading over and over. 

***

Sarah Cavar’s a complete family / hstry, 3:AM Magazine, (RECOMMEND): The discourse around hysterectomy in writing generally tbh, is very small, practically non-existent. The number of people willing to talk about it outside of a medical, clinical sense is rare. Like abortion, it’s something people don’t talk about, they rarely unpack it in essays or poetry or what have you. It would be kind of obvious to say here that Sarah Cavar’s piece on 3:AM is brave (which of course it absolutely is), because how many people do you know are talking about hysterectomies in the context of trans-identity? But it’s the way they write about this experience, with an enviable, vivid gift for description. Sentences I loved: ‘Blood is a lineage. It begins in the toilet, rings of icing suspended in liquor. [...] The following morning I am discharge with my age-restricted scars [...] ‘The stitches were dissolving; they said goodbye in crimson streams. [...] Finally I told her to leave the room, wrangling my vagina, this traitorous beast’. Another line I love, which is just so powerful, ‘There is something poetic in scarring the site of the umbilical cord. I deny the very people whose (re)productive efforts rendered me possible; upended the dynasty whose heterosexual ehiteness brought them from poverty to vermount and priceless menus.’ It’s articulate and personal and deeply self-aware, and it’s that way from the off. Immediately I was drawn in by that play on words in the title, ‘a complete family / hstry’, hstry playing on history and hysterectomy here. There’s parts to this piece, this self-reflective voice which reminds me of Sontag’s diaries, the way Sarah breaks lines (this is particularly strong in the NOTES — ESSAY ENDING section). They also have a flair for dialogue, a way of pulling a reader into their periphery and having these difficult conversations with family members, wrestling with discomforting terms like ‘ramifications’. The violence of the relationship one has with their body, ravaged by identity. Internalising the reaction from parents whose hopes of becoming grandparents is no longer. As essays go, this is one of the most insightful, articulate and self-aware pieces of transgender literature I’ve ever read. It’s something that myself, I’m not at all equipped to understand, because I don’t share Sarah’s experience, I can’t pretend to believe I even get it. But they write with accessibility and profundity, acknowledging their being as the final sentence in their family tree (what a powerful thing to hold). A writer to watch.

Michael Sutton, poem brut #92 — music / lyrics, 3:AM Magazine (RECOMMEND):  The fusion of note as word and as trebel clef, reinvented into fantastical illustrations. The first piece on here has a ‘creature-ness’ to it, I wonder of the animal in the notes pegged as sheets of music. Some of them feel more like graffiti, and I’m perplexed by what these new lyrics intimate, their renewed musicality in being cut up and stuck elsewhere. These are amazing pieces and I’m anticipating this collection’s release from Hesterglock Press in July.  

Carolee Bennett, ‘Prettier When You Smile’ in Glass Poetry (RECOMMEND): I don’t know how I came across this piece, but it was published two years ago. I hungered for the nostalgia of sitting in a bar and eavesdropping on conversations, as Carolee Bennett does in this poem. Her note about this piece is really interesting, and I wouldn’t have guessed it as a partial collection of fragments from conversations, it kind of wrestles with the subjective voice as commentary and the objective role as listener to these ongoing conversations around her. There’s a solitude to the writing, but it’s not ill at ease with it, it’s comfortable solitude on a bar stool. I really loved this line: ‘The ones we love depart. / We squeeze in and out of anguish / like bees, no opening too small. The hive begins / with single cell. Our vocabulary for this kind of busy work is limited: disease, / disease, disease.’ It’s a really beautiful, complicated cocktail straddling thought and response, and reminds me of a time where we could do that, we could sit in a bar and listen to a human’s hum. And the themes of disease, death and intimacy in ‘Prettier When You Smile’ are more evident and conscious in our minds today, in an ongoing pandemic. Bowie says it best: Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do. Richie Hofmann, ‘The Romans’ (Hobart) / ‘French Novel’ (The New Yorker) (RECOMMEND): I read Richie’s first piece in Hobart this week and thought it was so delicate and vivid. Then I stalked him a bit and read more of his work. There’s something pre-Raphaelite about his writing, I don’t know if that sounds shitty and pretentious, but I just see his poems are paintings in my head, or even sculptures, like they seem to embody an architecture to them. It’s just the way he reminisces and articulates his lovers; it’s almost metaphysical. ‘French Novel’ in particular I just found fragrant, it’s like I could smell red wine and bedsheets and humidity and snow slush. I can sense the texture. And then ‘The Romans’ had a movement and a colour to it I could just see and feel. He has a flair for articulating scenery; as a reader, I’m in his eyes and I’m absorbing every detail. I could feel this new lover wafting the Polaroid, the shake. The tangibility of his memories is so potent, you feel as if you’re there, not as a witness but actually within the experience. 

Édouard Levé, Autoportrait (RECOMMEND): I started reading Édouard Levé just over a year ago, and it was in this tumultuous episode of my life where I wasn’t really writing. If I did, I was forcing myself, and living in London was making me feel really depressed, although I now wonder whether that was more because of my MA and not the city. Édourd Levé was the best thing I got out of my course, and he came at a specific juncture when I was trying to understand how I could merge writing into photography, without taking photographs. I was investigating that relationship between the written and the visual. Autoportrait is a photo album in sentences. It’s a portrait of Édouard Levé himself, who committed suicide in 2007. He crafts this text masterfully, each sentence is like the shutter firing inside a camera, capturing an image, a new angle to his personage. For that reason it’s an intensely personal read. He oscillates between memories in time within the act of writing as memory, there’s a kind of meta-ness to it, a cubist quality to the text as a whole. He doesn’t start with his birth to his current present, rather the structure of the work is a series of non-sequiturs, a stream of consciousness stuck between frames. Sentences are mostly short, the longer you read, the more investigative and analytical it feels, into a forensic analysis of what makes Édouard, Édouard. It’s a book I go back to all the time, and the more I replay this series of images, the more unreadable it becomes. It’s also particularly surreal and disconcerting reading it now, as an artefact of Édouard Levé when he was alive. There is a coldness to his voice, a dismissiveness, and from the off it’s clear that his mental disposition, his depression, is a huge force in his life, the central focus to which all his perceptions, his affirmations, his unbothered demeanour seems to emerge from. The acuity of his self-description is pained by disconnection to the world around him, and that’s synonymous with the way he articulates himself in  disconnected fragments. It’s one of those books you can read once and walk away from, but it leaves you altered and dazed, like the way you feel after watching a strange film in a dark cinema, returning to daylight. And since I picked up that text to read in class, Édouard Levé’s always stayed with me. 

***

That is everything from me for this week. I will be taking next week away to read Ariana Reines’s A Sand Book. It’s a big one and it’s gonna take me some time to read and think and write about it. I’ve also figured out that the quality of my reviews will generally be better if I give myself more time to sit down and think, so I’m going to be posting my reviews now every other Friday as opposed to every Friday (or around then, past couple of weeks it’s been on Sats and Suns). My reviews do border on being full blown essays, and they take a lot of time to put together because I prefer to go into detail. Obviously I can’t keep generating these big pieces in a week turnaround at a quality I’m happy with, that was always going to be too ambitious of me. BUT I don’t think Current-Reads will change, because I’m always reading small bits throughout the week anyway, and I’m happy to keep doing that every Sunday still. 

NOTE TO WRITERS I AM REVIEWING: If I’ve said I’ll review your work and given you a date for when that review will be, that will still be the date I’ll review your work for. It won’t change. Scout’s honour. 

[valkyrie-echo]

Project Echo, Part 2: Chapter 12 (Agent Ivanou)

Part 2 Summary: A new enemy surfaces with a team of the Avengers’ greatest foes, hand-picked for their destruction. Meanwhile, Inessa’s pre-Hydra past begins to surface, casting doubt on where her loyalties truly lie.

Chapter 12: Agent Ivanou

"Verify Location, Agent Ogden."

"Sector 7G, all quiet," she yawned loudly over comms to illustrate just what she thought of these patrols.

Her C.O. was impatient, "You think I like running this B.S. every night? Grab a coffee from Mess and drink fast- you're due in 7H in twenty."

"Sir yes sir," she turned to the security camera and saluted sarcastically. Between SHIELD raids and break-ins world over by agents of just about every intelligence agency, Hydra was stepping up security big time. That meant everyone pulled 12-hour duty. Even when they came out of the shadows, Hydra wasn't this on-edge. Agent Dennisson had really fucked them over in New York. Ogden was there- though she thankfully never saw combat. Whatever the Avengers unleashed, it was enough to scare the pants off the upper echelon. They were on full lockdown lately- even she didn't know what precisely had gone wrong nearly two months before.

Agent Ogden walked the dark halls, filling in a mental map of the base as she explored. The only good thing about all this- she hated only having a partial knowledge of the layout, but now the patrols were providing her with valuable intelligence. If she could visualize where she was going, she didn't have to rely so much on faded (and often misleading) signs painted on corners.

Project Echo. That was all she knew. Whatever the hell went wrong in New York, that's where the answers were to be found. Some failed experiment to make a second Asset, just like the Winter Soldier (who, incidentally, is what turned it into a threat against Hydra in New York). Ogden would kill to get her hands on that file.

Three lefts and a flight of stairs later, she was in Mess. Half the base was there working their way through the coffee supplies. Commander Burke kept threatening to ration it- not that supplies ever got that low. He just liked to bitch. "Your biggest cup of your strongest stuff," Agent Ogden flashed her security card to silence the grumbling of scientists waiting in line, "I know you've been waiting, but I've got to keep your asses safe, so quit bitching."

"Always the charmer," Ogden smiled and accepted her cup from the cook.

"Agent Calvin, I thought you were the day shift?" it was nearly two in the morning, his lot wouldn't be making their appearance until around five.

The young man returned her smile, "And miss seeing my favorite Agent? I was thinking we could patrol together. It's tough, very lonely work."

"And I've always preferred it for just that reason," Ogden walked over to a condiment station to hunt down some cream. Calvin followed.

"You've been off since New York," he pouted, "it can't have been that bad. You didn't even see action, right?"

She headed out of Mess back towards section 7. Calvin followed, "I was with the clean-up crew, and we didn't exactly have anything left to clean up once the Avengers came in."

"The Avengers we could have handled. Have you seen the footage?"

"No," Ogden stopped, interested, "you have?"

"Sure, I was acting as Burke's errand-monkey a couple days ago and got a view of it. They've been playing it non stop in the briefing room. There are three new Avengers- all big threats."

"Three? Seriously?" There was sudden feedback in her comm and she jumped. After a second, it cleared.

Calvin winced, "Sounds like Supervisory Agent Hayes is getting started on the sauce a bit early- or is it late for you guys?"

"He sounded sober enough when we cleared 7G," she grumbled.

"Where were we?"

"Three Avengers."

"Oh, yeah, well, how much do you know about the fall of the Triskellion?"

"I was at the Academy then," she shrugged, "I know about the helicarriers, Captain America and Black Widow working with some new face. Oh, and we lost the Asset then too."

Calvin nodded, "So they are two of the new Avengers- the Winter Soldier and Falcon, as they're calling the second guy. We'd have been OK in New York if that was it- Dennisson probably would still be dead, but we had armies all over. The third was this shadow-chick. Some failed experiment run loose. The kid literally made an army of shadow-monsters to cut through our men in the streets. Really freaky sci-fi stuff. They think the Avengers got the kid out of the Asylum after it exploded. How weird is that?"

A chill crept down Ogden's spine, "Shadow-monsters?"

"I guess that was the ability they were trying to harness. She could, like, summon shadows and apparently teleport with them- analysis of the footage has the top-brass crediting her with gathering the lot of them in one place before the massacre began." Calvin abruptly noticed the color draining from Agent Ogden's face. "Hey, you alright?"

She ignored him and pressed the 'talk' button on her radio, "Agent Hayes? Do you read me?" there was nothing on the line. She switched to a general channel, "Anyone read?"

Again. Nothing. Calvin cursed, "How many times do we have to send engineering to fix that shitty transmitter before they finally just get a new one?" She turned back towards Mess and walked quickly. The air was almost growing colder- or was that her imagination? "Yo! Ogden! Where are you go-" his voice cut out suddenly. Ogden didn't break stride, but she glanced behind her.

Half of him was under the hall light. The other half had ended up on the far side of the hallway. Agent Ogden picked up her pace- running now. She activated her imbedded comm- the one Hydra knew nothing about, "Agent May, do you read?"

A moment later there was a reply, "Agent Ivanou, we weren't expecting you to check in for another three hours."

"Was SHIELD tracking what happened in New York?"

May's tone was hard, professional, "That is not part of your mission parameters. You are to observe and report only. You don't concern yourself with our end of New York, just Hydra's."

"Agent May, just tell me one thing because it's important, I have to know- Project Echo, was it a person? A girl?"

"Yes, why? Do you have intel on her?"

"What was her name? Who was she?" Agent Ivanou rounded the corner into Mess- and walked in on a massacre.

What was a moment ago a room full of soldiers, scientists, and personnel was now a room of corpses. Several lights had been damaged, throwing shadows across the room. In the darker shadows, creatures moved. Bodies would occasionally vanish, leaving no trace they were ever there. It wouldn't take too long to empty the entire room. That was what she'd been sent on patrol against- attacks that left no evidence anyone had ever been to Hydra's bases. It was worse than the attacks by Captain America or the Winter Soldier. An enemy they couldn't track.

"You aren't cleared to know that, Agent."

"Please, I'm not asking as a SHIELD agent, I need to know who she was!"

Ivanou felt a shiver and turned abruptly. Behind her was a girl- older than she remembered, but younger than she should have been. Evidence of torture- now healed- showed clearly on the rippled skin of her arms- burns, cuts, the shining skin that grew back when the original was peeled away. The girl hesitantly looked up, met her eyes. "Nadi?" Ivanou whispered.

Inessa couldn't tell at first who the Agent was, not until she spoke. She'd changed so much. Without realizing what she was doing, she spoke, "Mallory?"

Chapter 13: Tough Decisions

[enrychan]

comparison mass effect andromeda / dragon age 2, yeah or nope? i hear that a lot around the fandom

short answer: nope

extremely long answer [lots of MEA negativity and Personal Opinions™ under the cut, you’ve been warned. Please don’t read if you enjoyed the game and/or you are tired of hearing negative things about it, believe me i totally understand the feeling]:

alright i’m not going to act like DA2 wasn’t disappointing because yes, it was. especially after a game like DAO which remains among the best RPGs i’ve ever played. so I would compare MEA to DA2 because they are both disappointments. that said, i still disagree with the part of the fandom that says they are similar because of the “smaller story” and/or “the focus on the characters”. DA2 is a smaller story than DAO, but it’s laser focused on the delivery of that story within a three chapters arc, and through its characters. Exploration is almost non-existent and the fetch quests are few and so unimportant you can skip them without missing anything. The companions are the true narrative and emotional center, and each one of them has a personal mission during each one of the three chapters of the story. Some of them (especially Anders and Fenris) represent a piece of the problems and politics of Thedas and force Hawke to make decisions regarding those problems. Their growth and fate depend almost entirely on their relationship with Hawke and on the choices of the player.

On the other hand, MEA is all over the place. it gives me a number of huge maps filled with nothing but fetch quests that don’t make the narrative proceed in any way and are entirely forgettable. The game also gives me a humongous researching/developing system for weapons and armor with an absolutely ridiculous and confusing as hell UI, which requires three different currencies (milky way tech, kett tech, remnant tech), that you have to collect by scanning things, just to research the projects for said weapons and armor, not to mention the materials to actually build the fucking things - which come in like six or seven different levels, so if you want to update your weapon or armor to the next level you have to gather the materials all over again. That’s insane. At some point I just skipped that mess altogether and went through the rest of the game with my shitty level 2 gear because i was sick and tired of scanning and gathering and researching just to discover lately that i didn’t like how my new weapon worked and i wasted time for nothing. Obviously that meant the combat was much harder for me than it needed to be. There is a more in depth analysis on the researching/developing system in this review, if you’re interested. I’m not going to delve into the ridiculous implications of having to scan the rebels’ tech on Kadara to get milky way tech currency, like on the Nexus they don’t have, I don’t know, archives or books on their own technology?

I’ll also add that while the combat is probably the best part of the game, and it’s much more dynamic than in the trilogy, it’s still much less fun for me because they took away the option to order your companions to use a certain power, preventing me from planning any tactic or combo. this also had the side effect of creating another layer of separation between my Ryder and her companions; like there weren’t enough already, with the mediocre writing and everything else going wrong in this game. Basically I always fought like I was alone and most time i actually was because my two companions were KO and i didn’t care, as they were almost useless to me.

I should probably add that the quest design in MEA is atrocious, the worst of every bioware game i’ve played - and i played most of them. for almost every mission i was required to go to a certain planet, than back to the ship, than back to a planet, then back to the ship… each time going through unskippable cutscenes and loading screens. Luckily for me when i played the game they already patched the galactic map, letting me skip the cutscenes of the voyage between planets, which are very pretty at first but at the fifteenth time they start to really grate on your nerves. And despite the patch, the voyage is still very slow compared to, say, ME3. I cannot even imagine the pain of the day 1 players who were forced to suffer through those unskippable cutscenes hundreds of times. Some missions (the worst ones imo) require you to follow a signal through more than two solar systems, reading a series of five or six “false positives” or whatever, before finally finding the “real one” and conclude the mission; an utter pain in the ass and a complete waste of time. I understand that MEA had huge problems during its development, but this kind of stuff has nothing to do with those problems and everything to do with artificially extending your gaming time with boring activities, just to say that the game is “100 hours long”.

At this point I want to make clear that I would have forgiven everything - the fetch quests, the confusing crafting system, the awful quest design - if Bioware gave me a good protagonist and/or interesting companions. Not even a good story really, I didn’t even care about that, just give me a fully flashed out crew with clear motivations and backgrounds and I’ll be happy. That’s basically the reason why I forgive every shortcoming in DA2 - and there are a loooot of those. But nope, Andromeda fails there too.

With the exception of Jaal and to a lesser extent, Cora, the loyalty missions of the companions are completely disjointed from the main story and universe in which they are set and don’t make us understand more of this new galaxy in any way. This lack of relevance would still be ok if the relationship between the companions and the protagonist and/or the protagonist’s choices actually mattered (like in DA2, where the companions’ loyalty determines who lives and who dies in the end) but unfortunately they don’t, and i mean at all.

Speaking of the protagonist, again the comparison with Hawke doesn’t hold. Hawke could have three very distinct personalities which made them somewhat memorable, for good or bad. Ryder on the other hand has two or more kind of replies that are almost always the same, just with slightly different wording (as this video says: do you know the difference between “now we are building again” and “this is vital to our progress”? - not that i agree with everything said in that review but here i agree completely). Ryder fares even worse if compared to other bioware protagonists like the Warden, who had a wide range of reactions that in some cases could even include outright killing their interlocutor. Combine this with the almost complete lack of choices and/or consequences in MEA and you get the most forgettable and boring protagonist of a bioware game to date; and yeah, I’m including the Inquisitor, because while the choices of dialogue in DAI were similar to those in MEA, at least the facial animations were decent so you could have a connection with your own protagonist on some level.

To be clear, it’s not lost to me what the original intention was with Ryder’s character arc. Ryder is specifically written as inadequate, uncharismatic and sometimes incompetent, because they weren’t the intended heir to the title of Pathfinder. They kinda found themselves thrown into that role and had to adapt. On its own that’s not a bad character arc at all. On the contrary, it could have been even more interesting than Shepard’s, who was a leader even before the first mission in ME1. Unfortunately there is no actual character arc for Ryder, only premises. Ryder never becomes more charismatic or assertive during the story, in fact they make very few choices at all, and even those few have little to no consequences both in the main story and in their relationships with the other characters. Ryder is just kinda there, reacting with various shades of tone to other characters actually making choices. Again compare that to Hawke’s arc, since we are discussing whether or not the two games resemble each other. In DA2 there is a simple premise (Hawke is a poor refugee who runs from the Blight and has to survive in an unforgiving city like Kirkwall) and a very clear payoff (Hawke becomes one of the central political figures in Kirkwall, while ironically still not being able to save their own family and, possibly, friends). With Ryder there is a clear premise but no payoff. At least not on a personal level, which is important in creating a connection with our character. Of course the story goes on anyway, but it doesn’t seem to actually affect my protagonist or change them in any way, so it remains almost irrelevant to me.

Everything said until now would be already experience breaking on its own, but it becomes even more remarkable in Ryder’s specific case, because Ryder comes with an extra passenger, aka SAM - and SAM is a very invasive extra passenger. To the point that most of the time you’re convinced it’s not actually Ryder the one in charge of that brain, or of the Pathfinder team. 99% of the time it’s SAM who solves problems and tells you and the others what to do. Sometimes is becomes frankly annoying. I’m not even talking about the vaults. You have to solve a murder case? SAM doesn’t just gather the evidence, oh no, he also tells you exactly what the evidence means and how it must be interpreted, like Ryder is too stupid to connect the dots. You intervene in a beating or a robbery on Kadara, either to stop it or just to understand what’s going on? SAM tells you not to get involved. And guess what? Ryder does exactly that, instead of, idk, telling SAM to shut the fuck up? SAM also becomes downright unbearable on Voeld and on Elaaden where it keeps telling you that the temperature is rising or falling or that it’s within acceptable range. I don’t know if they finally patched the thing but god was that annoying.

In any case my point is, since it’s actually SAM and not Ryder that does all the work, you have the distinct feeling that you are not actually the protagonist in this story, just a vessel. That could have been a cool premise if, for example, Ryder leaned too much on SAM and then halfway through the story it was taken away or shut down. That could have been a dramatic moment of growth for Ryder, where they were forced to finally rely on their own strenght and actually become the Pathfinder humanity needed. But again: cool premise, no payoff. SAM is taken away only near the end of the story and Ryder almost dies because of that. And even when they can’t access their SAM during the final mission, there is still the SAM inside the other Ryder sibling’s brain to tell them and you what to do. In short, Ryder is almost entirely dependent on SAM throughout the entire story, making them even less memorable as a protagonist, if possible.

Unfortunately, the same could be said of most of the characters that populate Andromeda and particularly the Tempest. Jaal is relevant only because he is an angara, the only new friendly species introduced in MEA (another disappointment), but he is otherwise completely forgettable on his own. It’s repeated over and over again how the angara have an extremely open behaviour towards each other, expressing feelings without many constraints like we do, but the problem is, without good and complex facial/body animations, that kind of behaviour is hard if not impossible to deliver. I think that’s one of the main problems with Jaal’s character. The other main problem is of course the writing, always generic and kind of vague. For example when you ask him about his relationship with the Moshae, he tells you that she “inspires” and he “loves her”, but he doesn’t give you anything that actually communicates that inspiration and that love, even only through the tone of his voice (has anyone given some direction to these voice actors?). It’s only telling without showing. Compare that to Dorian talking about Felix, for example. With just one image (Felix sneaking him treats from the kitchen while he was studying) he gives you an idea of both the person that Felix was and his relationship with him.

Cora is similar to Ryder in the fact that her character has good premises, but no payoff. She has two main character traits: she was trained as an asari commando and has great admiration for them; and she was the second in command under Alec Ryder, so she should have become the Pathfinder, but she didn’t. Aside from the fact that in my opinion she repeats that she was trained as an asari commando a little too many times, like she wanted to be 200% sure we got the message, and that becomes kind of annoying after a while… if we take a look at her character arc we see that there is a great disappointment when she finds out that the asari heroine that she admired the most lied about the death of the asari Pathfinder for her own personal gain. This should have set in motion a series of consequences on her character journey similar to those Liara experienced when she found out that the Protheans weren’t actually the ethereal, moral beings she thought they were, but instead they were conquerors and imposed a totalitarian regime on the galaxy. But while Liara at first gets angry and sad and then she slowly accepts to re-examine her own previous work under a new light, no relevant change can be seen within Cora’s character. More on this comparison can be found in this excellent video. In a similar way, her other main trait (the fact that she was the designated successor to Alec but she didn’t get the Pathfinder title in the end), also doesn’t have any payoff. In fact she is just slightly disappointed/irritated at first but she gets over it very quickly (even if Ryder is clearly not the charismatic figure humanity needs) leaving little to no consequence on her relationship with Ryder. In these conditions, the scenes in which she talks about her hobby ring hollow because I didn’t previously build my relationship with her on anything substantial, so I don’t really care about her plants.

I’d say the only companion who gets a very simple but complete character arc is Peebee, because she starts as kind of an outsider in the group, extremely afraid of commitment (the writers made sure it was super obvious with the “I live in an escape pod” thing), and in the end she learns to relax a little and trust Ryder and the rest of the crew more. Unfortunately I also found her annoying as hell since her first appearance, so that didn’t do a thing for me.

I could go on with the other companions, but this reply would become a bible. I’ll just add that the “good premises - no payoff” thing includes non-companion characters as well, Reyes for example. For the first 40/45 hours I didn’t romance anyone because, well, I found every possible LI either boring, paper thin or annoying af. That’s something I never experienced in any other Bioware game, but hey there’s a first time for everything I guess. Then I went to Kadara, I met Reyes and honestly he was a breath of fresh air. I’m not saying he was particularly deep or complex, but at least he was somewhat charismatic and charming (also, that accent), so I decided to romance him. Unfortunately both his character and his romance get no satisfying closure, as there is literally no change whatsoever, external or internal, if you let him kill Sloane; and you can’t really confront him on the fact that he used you and lied to you, even if you romanced him so it should have been kind of a big deal. bigger deal. whatever.

I’m not preteding that something like this never happened before. Speaking about the Mass Effect trilogy, Jacob is the most infamous example of boring, not entirely flashed out companion. Moving to the most recent Dragon Age, I’d say Blackwall also suffers from something similar, since he has good premises (she is vague and evasive at first because he’s lying about his true identity) but little payoff (even after the big reveal he remains pretty vague and generic about himself and his own story, nor he behaves even slightly different than before), though he’s still more interesting than the majority of the MEA crew. The point is, some shortcomigs are normal and expected and, if counter-balanced with other high points, they can be forgiven. But Andromeda didn’t shine in any way. Outside of combat the gameplay was boring and clunky, basically go from point A to point B, scan stuff, gather stuff, repeat. The sudoku puzzles were boring af and honesly ridiculous. No one ever solved them before you? is everyone in the Heleus cluster a moron?

In fact, the whole foundation of the story is that no one in the Heleus cluster could gain access to the vaults and activate them, despite having known and studied them for centuries. One day a complete stranger from another galaxy comes and solves everything in literally five minutes. And I’m supposed to believe that. I mean my suspension of disbelief can stretch a lot, but this is a little too much for me. Also that makes the angara seem like a bunch of idiots, which is not exactly flattering for the only new friendly species we meet in Andromeda.

The writing in general is poor to say the least. I understand that the writers were included too late into the project due to the huge problems experienced during the earlier stages of development, but some of these mistakes are super basic, like writing from the POV of the omniscient narrator instead of the POV of the characters. So we get dialogues in which the characters know that they are in no real danger even though they have been shot, they are about to get shot, they risk getting spaced, and so on and so forth.

I get that the writers were aiming at something completely different from the grim, fatalistic atmosphere of ME3, but the problem is: if the script doesn’t take itself seriously, why should I take it seriously.I mean I’m all for jokes and lighthearted moments, there were a lot of those in the trilogy and i loved them (most of them), but the entire MEA script doesn’t seem to take itself seriously. The stakes SHOULD be high - the Pathfinders have the responsibility of 100.000 souls on their shoulders - but not for a moment you feel that burden, that responsibility.

Even the real reason of the voyage itself (escaping the Milky Way before the Reapers annihilate every advanced organic society) is kept secret from the player until you gather all the “memory triggers” your father left behind. Until then the whole Initiative - a huge, extremely dangerous and exceedingly expensive project - is presented like a fun stroll through a new galaxy, just because “we are explorers” and we like new beginnings and whatnot. This is another incomprehensible narrative choice that doesn’t make sense, no matter how you look at it. If you played the trilogy, the Reaper threat is certainly no surprise to you so the “plot twist” doesn’t work. If you’re a newcomer to the series you don’t even know what a Reaper is so the “plot twist” still doesn’t work. Not to mention that for some reason Alec Ryder’s “memory triggers” are scattered on planets he never even visited in his life. Instead of placing them somewhere among his things, idk, family pictures, books or music he loved, where it made sense to find them?

And even after you discover everything about the Reapers, and that everyone back in the Milky Way may have been dead for the last 600 years, there is again no consequence in the story or in the dialogues whasoever. Not even Ryder seems to be particularly affected by the terrible news. But we should be happy because we found out that their mom is still alive! Too bad we don’t care about her because we don’t know her. Exactly like in the beginning we didn’t care about Alec’s death because we didn’t know him. Those are extremely basic narrative mistakes. The whole experience is on this same, boring, safe, non-consequential level. Bioware is so much better than that.

(sorry for the long rant. I had a lot to say)

[racingtoaredlight]

Top 10 top 10 pick QBs who were / are worse Jamarcus Russell

I saw some guy on Twitter making a joke that involved the assumption that Jamarcus Russell was the acknowledged worst QB of the last 40 years (and somehow made Deshaun Watson comparable to Michael Vick? It was dumb on multiple levels) and it got me spewing nonsense on that accursed website that got some great responses on other terrible QBs.

If you’re expecting a rigid analysis of bad QBs from the bowels of NFL history, you’ve come to the wrong place. But if you want my own list of highly drafted QBs that were actually worse than Jamarcus, here’s a listicle!

Before I dive into my own junk opinions I want to throw out some names that were crowd-sourced from twitter but don’t meet my criterion of highly drafted: Rusty Lisch (h/t Jay Vee), Scott Tolzien (h/t Butters), and Brodie Croyle (h/t Jayhawk.)

I’m doing a little bit of fact checking but not much as I let these fly. I’m using profootball-reference’s AV stat and looking for top 10 draft picks that never reached the lofty highs of Jamarcus’s AV of 7 in 2008.

1. Akili Smith, Bengals, #3 overall pick 1999

There are surprisingly few embarrassing pictures for a guy who was so incredibly bad. Akili stands out in my mind as being the worst guy I ever saw trying to play QB in the NFL and the numbers back that up. ANY/A is a stat that is used sort of widely. A good QB season is usually around 6 or 7, 5 and above is at least useful, Akili’s for 2000, the only season he started a majority of his team’s games? 2.81!

2. Art Schlichter, Colts, #4 overall pick 1982

I wanted to put Cade McNown here since he was in the same draft class as Akili Smith but he was picked just outside of the top 10 so I went with this classic piece of shit. People who love Ohio State will tell you that Schlichter could have been good without his personal demons but I’m here to tell you, folks, nothing supports that. I know he didn’t ever play there but the Colts were so high on what they saw from the #4 overall pick in 1982 that they drafted John Elway at #1 the next year. Schlichter didn’t play much but when he did he was among the least efficient QBs to ever suit up in professional football.

3. Heath Shuler, Washington, #3 overall pick in 1994

Heath Shuler gets too much credit for being a bad politician and not nearly enough for being a bad quarterback. I remember when he first got on the field in 1994 my dad was really excited by his strong arm and agility. Within a couple of weeks he had given up completely on Heath Shuler. Shuler’s last season in 1997 in New Orleans is a masterpiece of bad QB stats in the modern era. Statistically the Saints would have been better off not playing anybody at the QB position rather than let Shuler go out there.

4. Andre Ware, Lions, #7 overall in 1990

I hate to do this because that card there with all of his passing numbers listed played a big part in me becoming the draft loving, Heisman obsessed idiot that I am today. I probably should have considered just how many INTs are listed there but that’s not how my 13 year old brain worked. Ware did absolutely nothing in the NFL and I’m finally coming around to the realization that it wasn’t because the league was wrong and that he deserved more chances.

5. David Klingler, Bengals, #6 overall in 1992

The second Bengals pick and the second Houston Cougar to show up here, Klingler is great because NFL teams fell in love with him in 1990 for doing the same shit as Andre Ware but with even more INTs, then fell out of love with him in 1991 because he showed he couldn’t handle pressure and didn’t really have that great of an arm and the Bengals still took him at #6 overall. He did a lot worse in his career than I would have guessed and I already thought he was bad.

6. Todd Blackledge, Chiefs, #7 overall in 1983

Why, yes, that is Todd Blackledge getting sacked by Brian Bosworth. Blackledge getting drafted over Jim Kelly and Dan Marino is goddam unbelievable but you know what’s great? Even taking him over Tony Eason looks like the stupidest pick in the world and Eason is in a distant 5th place out of the 6 QBs picked in the first round of this fabled draft. Eason merely sucked. Blackledge is an all time bad player who managed to never start more than half of his team’s games in a season.

7. Kelly Stouffer, Cardinals, #6 overall in 1987

Stouffer never played a down for the Cardinals who drafted him after Neil Lomax had a career worst year in 1986. Is this cheating for the purposes of this post? Stouffer never actually signed with the Cardinals but they did trade away his rights for a first rounder and two second round picks. The Cards didn’t do many things right in those days but they dodged a bullet with Stouffer and got a good return in theory (I can’t find who they actually drafted with the picks but I’m not trying very hard) for his year of non-service. Lomax was pretty good again in 1988 but got hurt and retired. Stouffer did start 16 games for the Seahawks... over parts of five seasons.

8. Ryan Leaf, Chargers, #2 overall pick in 1998

After all these years and all of the words written about how bad he is it is shocking to look up the numbers and see just how bad Leaf was on the field. This guy was considered more or less equivalent to Peyton Manning coming out of school and the Chargers swore up and down they would have taken him at #1. For perspective on how bad Leaf was, Andre Wadsworth (#3 overall) and Curtis Enis (#5 overall) produced demonstrably more value for the teams that drafted them.

9. Jake Locker, Titans, #8 overall in 2011

Apologies to Miz but there’s actually no supporting evidence to suggest Hurt Locker would have ever been good even if he hadn’t been hurt all the time. In his defense the lows were not as low with him as they were with Jamarcus but the highs also weren’t as high and that doesn’t say much for his ability to actually play.

10. Blaine Gabbert, Jaguars, #10 overall in 2011

A lot of people think Colin Kaepernick’s case is unwinnable because they don’t think there will be any smoking gun of conspiracy but 1) people are stupid even when they have the job you want, 2) Blaine Gabbert played on the same teams as Kaepernick the last few years. Gabbert is still on an active roster and will probably get snaps this week. When Gabbert got the 49ers job away from an injured and suffering Kaepernick in 2015 he actually looked slightly better. And that was the best one guy played and by far the worst the other guy has ever played. Care to guess which is which? Gabbert is atrocious and has a long body of work to carry my thesis. 2011 was the year the draft occurred during a work stoppage and teams went bonkers drafting QBs under the (correct) assumption the league could force the union to accept a rookie salary cap and wage scale. That’s why Locker squeaked onto this list and how Gabbert got on here, as well. NFL teams haven’t been quite as overdraft crazy in the years since no matter how bad teams are due to poor QB play. My theory is that Gabbert was so bad that teams are scared to exploit an obvious market inefficiency - a high draft pick costs roughly backup QB money so if you miss you have a shitty backup but if you hit you have the most important position in sports at a dollar premium.

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[itsclydebitches]

Jinn: A Quick Character Analysis

So some people are Big Mad about my recent asks regarding Jinn---yay gleefully deleting more shitty anons!---so instead of engaging with them I thought I’d try to better articulate for others what about Jinn’s interactions with Ozpin gave me the sense that at best she’s indifferent towards him (in a way she’s not indifferent towards Ruby) and at worst actively dislikes him. 

We obviously don’t have many scenes to work with and what we do have relies a lot on tone and body language. With that in mind, let’s start with Jinn’s first appearance. 

She’s clearly thrilled to be let out. She stretches, exclaims---”Wonderful!”---and immediately sets about explaining who she is and what she does. Her entire attitude is a blend of happy relief and educational info dump. However, this changes when she starts to say that there are still two questions left this era. Ozpin cuts her off with, “That’s enough!” and after a pause Jinn finishes her thought and says, “It’s a pleasure to see you again, old man.” 

On the surface? Very friendly. A greeting and a nickname, what’s wrong with that? Problem is the tone and the context. For one Jinn prefaces this with a haughty little laugh. She’s amused by Ozpin’s distress here and his attempt to keep her from making things worse. It reads very much as a “You think you can order me?” which wouldn’t mean half as much if we didn’t see Jinn adhering to Ruby’s whims just a few episodes later. Second, Ozpin’s distress is pretty obvious. If I see someone again after a long stretch and they’re looking like this 

Then me saying “it’s a pleasure to see you again” isn’t a true greeting. It’s an insult. Think Southern sarcasm: “Bless your heart” and “Well, isn’t that nice.” Everyone knows you’re not really happy here and if you are, it’s in response to feeling superior---like if that acquaintance of yours is on his knees and trying desperately to keep you from talking. If I laugh and tell someone it’s a pleasure to see them again right when they’re in the middle of a breakdown? I do not care about this person. At all. Now granted, sarcasm can be a pretty subjective thing. As a non-RWBY example, I’ve been fascinated by the different readings of Crowley’s “Oh you’re an angel. I don’t think you can do the wrong thing” from Good Omens. It’s canonically sarcastic in the book, but Tennant’s tone in the TV adaptation is iffier, poised somewhere between the expected sarcasm and heartfelt earnestness. I think an argument could be made for the same ambiguity here, depending on how each person reads Jinn’s tone/body language, but for me? I don’t think she’s actually an ally of his. There’s too much “pleasure” stemming directly from his fear, her body language becomes much more arrogant, and that “old man” doesn’t come across as an endearing nickname. This is the pose of someone happy to see someone else down on their knees. 

Later on, Jinn is our narrator for the lore dump and to be frank I don’t have time to go back through all of it, but what does stand out to me is one of her final lines of the episode: “and though I gave him my answers... not all of them were to his liking.” Again, a lot of Jinn’s character is subtle, but that phrasing feels like it’s... blaming Ozpin somehow? It’s drawing attention to the fact that he was upset in a way that implies he shouldn’t be. I gave you my answer. It’s not my fault you don’t like it. On its own it means next to nothing, but combined with all her scenes it feels like another dig. Remember, Jinn is essentially speaking to the group here. Her narration is for their benefit. Imagine you were saying to a group of people, “I told him his mother died and that wasn’t to his liking.” It’s an invitation to judge the person. Let’s talk about his ‘absurd’ response to this objectively horrifying news. 

Which then leads directly into her “You can’t,” a phrase that I’ve always read as bordering on pleased. Though again, I acknowledge that others will read the tone differently. At the very least though, Jinn doesn’t sound remorseful here, nor apologetic, nor even just resigned. Given that she was created by the God of Light and has no reason to want Salem to succeed---she should WANT to help Ozpin---it ends up sounding like she’s taking him down a peg, similar to her attitude towards him in the snow. Earlier Jinn goes, “He believed he could fulfill his promise to the God of Light,” essentially framing Ozpin as... foolish? Naive for thinking he could do the task he was told to do by her creator? There’s nothing about Jinn’s words, tone, or body language that suggests to me she’s happy to help him in any way. Rather, she seems pleased by Ozpin’s backslides and his distress. 

EXCEPT, that is, when Jinn interacts with Ruby. We all know the scene. Ruby’s eyes have failed, she glances at the relic, and desperately calls out for Jinn to stop time. After explaining that she doesn’t have a question, Jinn acts all stern... but it’s just that. An act. A second later her expression morphs into a real smile. 

Jinn is like an authority figure who knows they need to admonish a child for something they did wrong, but can’t help but be secretly pleased with their actions. Her warnings are completely undermined by that happy ending, telling Ruby that her plan “was clever.” Jinn is (stupidly) impressed here and is giving Ruby a bunch of preferential treatment. She says she knows Ruby didn’t have a question, but decided to give her the time freeze anyway. She says she knows Ruby doesn’t seek knowledge, but she’ll offer some anyway. She says she was wrong to do this, but then undermines that with smiles and praise. 

Why would Jinn do all this? I personally don’t think there’s a reason outside of “Ruby can do no wrong in Volume 6. Apparently.” Some people have brought up that Jinn doesn’t want Argus destroyed, but there are a ton of holes in that argument. We’ve seen no evidence elsewhere that she cares about Remnant as a whole. If she did care why caution Ruby against using her again in the future? How does she know these few seconds are going to do any good? Logically they shouldn’t. Ruby spends this time talking to Jinn, not coming up with a new plan, calming herself down, etc. This moment is essentially wasted and Ruby just happens to hit on the needed mindset for her silver eyes the second time around because the plot needs her to. Nothing in her interaction with Jinn prepared her for that. In addition, Ruby’s eyes didn’t actually save the day. Cordovin’s drill did. Yes, freezing half the grimm helped keep it in place, but I highly doubt that with all these fighters they couldn’t get a mega-sized monster to hold still long enough for Cordovin to slam her equally giant weapon into it. Jinn’s little bout of special treatment didn’t do much, if anything really, and is thus not a justification for why she’d give that special treatment in the first place. 

What’s a more likely reading? What we see elsewhere just a minute later. Cordovin suddenly decides to let Ruby go... just because? There is no reason based in logic or her characterization that explains this decision. It exists solely because Ruby is our protagonist and the plot needs her to not be in jail. Same applies to Jinn. Why give her preferential treatment? Because she’s Ruby and Ruby has spent the last few episodes being rewarded for all her mistakes. 

Which brings us back to Ozpin because the reverse holds as well. Why would Jinn express arrogance towards Ozpin? Satisfaction even that he’s beaten down and failing in his quest? Because it’s Ozpin and the theme of Volume Six is that Ozpin can’t be trusted. RT wasn’t interested in providing any counterpoints to that, so why would they suddenly do so with Jinn? If she’s actually welcoming towards him, trusting him, kind towards him, treating him in any way that actually acknowledges how important he is, that undermines the rest of the group’s attitude. You don’t want the all-powerful, magical being greeting him like an actual ally when everyone is currently supposed to hate him. Jinn as a character is crafted to fit into the tone of the group. They distrust Ozpin and they adore Ruby, so she’ll be haughty towards Ozpin and preferential towards Ruby. 

So yeah. Thoughts articulated. Until there are more scenes with Jinn, that’s all I’ve got. Peace  ✌️