#so really I might be able to make the V1 work but Im NOT going to try if what Im gonna do is fall in an uncontrolled way | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

loversgothic · 1 year ago

Note

Maybe you've done it already and I missed it, but what would Gabriel's two-week-notice look like in the Ultradanse AU?

This has nothing to do with any other comments you have made about feral Gabriel or any other desire to see how he changes from The Gilded Nightingale to The Nightingale.

:3c. OOOHH. WELL

ive been really trying to think about that hard, since comparing the characters to those in fairytales and ballets tended to skew the story a bit.

and uh... my descriptions wont be the best.. im not the best at explaining things in ballet terms moreso just based on my perception of the art form and what i see in it through my eyes.

also im gonna go off of the concept that ultradanse is almost like a stage performance, a show

the most i can do to describe how it looks is to compare it to my vision for the first encounter with Odile/V1... because of the way i designed his lil costume he has a sort of princely look, and even though hes yknow. out to kill V1 because V1 traversed past his warnings, his dancing with V1 then is much more... poised. it might feel a bit distant, maybe it might even seem like hes unsatisfied doing it, as at the time there is no personal connection with V1, no love nor hatred. its not romantic, hardly so. i dont know if this is a good example, but i was thinking abt Prince Siegfried's dancing in Waltz: Tempo di valse...

once V1 is pretty much responsible for his 2-week notice, i like to think Nightingale/Gabriel starts to match V1's high energy, his grace is kinda going out the window... itd be much more intense. if its a pas de deux hes probably getting his fucking hands all over them like hes about to tear them apart. hes abandoning that princely facade. i feel like though in the second half a pas de deux between them would make them slow their pace. now that both of them are dancing together and able to match intensity, it starts to slow down into something more... romantic? yeah :3 i like to think this, this is where any romantic tension starts

now about how he changes from the gilded nightingale to the nightingale. you see... after their second encounter, Gabriel is convinced hes going to die, after all thats what he was told. once he returns from heaven, he seeks out V1 to ask of one final request. he doesn't want to die lonely, and asks V1 to dance with him until the final hour runs out. V1 has no reason to accept his request, other than something pulling at it do so and the possibility it could take a little bit more blood before he's gone. dancing together, progressively Gabriel becomes weaker and weaker.

i REALLY wanted to keep this secret for a scene i wanted to draw but honeeesttlyyyy i dont think its too bad if i share it. after all, im not sharing V1's feelings here. im sharing Gabriel's :3

i had this whole.. plan

my thing abt pas de deuxs is that. i like to find symbolism in the fact that traditionally, the male dancer is supposed to support the ballerina to be able to perform moves she typically wouldnt be able to on her own without someone holding her.

towards the end of their dance, V1 switches positions to hold and uplift Gabriel instead, who has this entire time been in the place of the male dancer. in his approaching final moments V1 lays him down on the ground. he's hardly moving, and V1 holds onto him, finding itself not wanting him to just... disappear.

now im still figuring out HOW i want this to work. but i thought abt V1 in desperation, grasping onto the sides of his helmet and ripping his helmet in half being the symbolic thing that sets him free. the thing about the gilded nightingale, is that the armor is the bird's cage. Gabriel's design in this AU only really has the helmet and no other armor, so it just... makes sense to me. this is what sets him free. how the transformation works though? i am.. still thinking about it. you might need to give me a bit to think about that

#im trying not to make that transformation magical girl esque LMAO BUT ITS SO HARD NOT TOOOOO #.txt #ask #sorry for rambling meoww #ultradanse au #crazy? i was crazy once #im considering redesigning ultradanse gabe a little again im not sure why

20 notes · View notes

sineala · 4 years ago

Note

I was going through an 2009 era livejournal post where it was mentioned that most of Tony's relationship were 'sexual form of self-flagellation'. With that out I love Whitney/Tony in a relationship, is there any way you can see that working out?

Oh, man, anon. This makes me regret that I have not yet posted the story that was going to be my Cap-IM RBB last year, because I literally have a 150,000-word answer to this question in the form of fanfiction. The short answer to this question is: no.

(The longer answer: HELL NO.)

If you want me to get more complicated than that, I will say that, in all fairness, there is an era of canon in which I could have seen Whitney/Tony actually working out. But that eventually ended, and for me there's a point of no return after which any chance of this being a good, healthy, or lasting relationship becomes impossible. And since then, Whitney's grasp on reality has gradually declined to the point where I don't think that she's currently mentally capable of seeing Tony as anything other than someone who could be a personal possession of hers, a thing, an object, a prize, rather than as a living human being with his own agency. (Basically, Marvel seems to have taken a look at her and thought, "Wow, she's crazy," and it's... kept getting worse. And worse.)

Let me now provide a brief summary of the Whitney/Tony relationship, because I went and read at least fifty issues so I could write the story that none of you have read yet. Anyway. This got long enough that I think I will use a Read More.

So Whitney first appears in comics way way back in Tales of Suspense v1 #97, and continues appearing in early Iron Man v1, where she meets Tony for the first time, but also has a bunch of feelings for Jasper Sitwell. (Note to MCU fans: Sitwell is not secretly Hydra. He is a big nerd, though.)

The Whitney/Tony relationship really kicks off in Iron Man v1 #17-19, one of my personal favorite arcs, in which a LMD Tony builds attempts to become Iron Man (this is always a good plot) and Whitney kidnaps Tony because she initially thinks he's the LMD, and she's working with Midas, who wants to use the LMD to infiltrate SI. It's great.

By this point Whitney has incurred her Tragic Facial Scars and has her mask, but Tony doesn't care about the scars and, as we see in #19, is clearly interested in her anyway. He's very sweet.

She appears a few times after that, basically leaves him for Sitwell, and then comes back in a big way in Iron Man v1 #91, posing as Krissy Longfellow, his new secretary. Whom he asks out, yes. Eventually Tony finds out who she is, and by Iron Man v1 #104 or thereabouts, they are definitely in love, Tony takes her to a house he grew up in, and also Whitney reveals that she knows that Tony is Iron Man. Which she is fine with.

Then they kiss very dramatically, and it is the most unintentionally-hilarious kiss I have ever seen, because neither of them take off their masks:

I like to yell CLANK CLANK whenever I read this.

By the next issue, #105, they are very seriously together:

They are together for about ten more issues, and this is the era of canon where I think it honestly could have worked out for them. Sure, Tony is contemplating abandoning being Iron Man and an Avenger, so he'd have to come around on that, but this is when they were at their healthiest, generally speaking. They were in love. They were happy. They were happy right up until #116, when Count Nefaria (Whitney's father) died, and she blamed Tony for her father's death and left him:

So I think that was pretty much it for their shot at having a stable, healthy relationship. Because after that Whitney basically... is evil. And I think there could be, as you say, an element of "sexual self-flagellation" in there, because Tony does still care for her as a person, although I don't see that he's necessarily interested in a romantic relationship with her again. He just wants her to be good again. He wants to help her be the good person he thinks she can be, but after this point she pretty much starts to lose her grip on reality, and I don't think she's capable of being that person.

Every subsequent appearance of Whitney in volume 1 was later retconned as being a clone (because comics gonna comics), but every time she shows up in it it's basically to seek revenge for the death of her father (who of course comes back to life, but that's comics for you) and also to get Tony back, because no one else could possibly love him as much as she does. She tries to kidnap Bethany Cabe. She works with Obadiah Stane against Tony. She tries to bodyswap herself into Bethany to get close to Tony. You get the idea. These are not the actions of a particularly stable person.

But one of the more agonizing things about Whitney -- at least, one of the things that I assume is most agonizing to Tony -- is that she could have been good. Maybe she can't be now, but at one point the capacity existed in her, and we know that because one of her clones, Masque, is in fact a very good person. Toward the end of volume 1, Masque actually ends up joining the Avengers. And I would think it's very hard for Tony to know about Masque and not think that Whitney could have been her, that there's some way he could have helped Whitney become that person, if only he'd known how, whether or not that is actually possible for him to do. (Hint: it's not.) I think he blames himself for not being able to save her. Maybe that's more of the same self-flagellation.

Meanwhile, Whitney does things like lock herself in a bunker in Nevada with a bunch of her clones, which does not strike me as a great move, sanity-wise. In The Nefaria Protocols in v3 (Avengers v3 #32-34, Thunderbolts v1 #43-44), she teams up with the Avengers to fight her father, but she's not sure whether she can trust them at first.

Avengers v3 #33 is actually really sympathetic toward her; the whole thing is narrated from her POV:

Eventually she ends up attempting to betray the Avengers and get them all killed, and she is stopped only when Masque shows up and sacrifices herself to prevent her doing so, at which point Whitney decides maybe she should save the Avengers after all before leaving. I think this is probably the nicest that canon has been to her in years, and she still nearly murders all the Avengers in the process.

After that she has a few other appearances, the most salient of which is probably World's Most Wanted (Invincible Iron Man v1 #8-19), in which, as we all know, she kidnaps Tony and is generally obsessed with him. Here in Invincible Iron Man v1 #16, Tony is in the middle of having his brain deleted and yet he still remembers that Whitney is not the best person, and she would really like to run away together with him because she apparently thinks that's a thing that's going to happen:

She shows up again in Bendis' run and as far as I can remember she's portrayed pretty similarly there. She's trying to steal magical artifacts. She and Tony meet up. She tries to kill him. The usual. There's a nice splash page in Invincible Iron Man v2 #2:

Her most recent relevant appearance is actually, if you can believe it, a few months ago, in Doctor Strange: Surgeon Supreme #5 and #6. Someone has been stealing magical weapons from Strange and selling them on the black market and -- surprise surprise -- it's Whitney.

(I was actually very surprised, yes. She is, uh, not typically one of Strange's villains.)

Whitney, you see, wants to be loved:

So she's selling all these weapons because, yes, she wants to be loved. By Tony.

What the hell, Whitney? How exactly is that going to work?

Anyway, Strange needs to neutralize the magical weapons, and to do that he needs to enter Whitney's mind to find the code that will do that, and, well, this is what the inside of Whitney's mind is like:

Her mind is one hundred percent made up of her obsession with Tony. This is it. This is her brain. She is a mess. She is out of touch with reality.

And you'll never guess what the code is. Or maybe you will.

She thinks that she's in love with Tony. And she thinks that this is what love is. And she is very clearly not okay.

Because Strange is a doctor and is determined to try to help people, he offers her a new mask that will heal her:

Whitney declines:

She runs away. And that's the last we have seen of her.

So, yeah. Based on all of this, I am of the opinion that Whitney/Tony cannot possibly work out at this point in canon, because -- although she still believes she loves him -- she is very obviously no longer mentally capable of understanding what love actually is, and she's not looking to change that. We have literally seen inside her mind, so we can in fact know what she thinks. She just wants to possess Tony. And that's not going to be good for anyone.

Would she have been better than this if she'd stayed with Tony instead of leaving him when her father died? Maybe. We can't know. A lot of her instability seems to revolve around her inability to possess Tony, and, well... she would have had Tony, so maybe that wouldn't have happened. Or maybe she would have become consumed by possessing him even more. There's no way to know. And given that she's capable of this kind of break with reality, it's also possible that if it hadn't been Tony, it might have been something else entirely as a focus for her delusional thinking, and at any rate she's clearly not interested in receiving the psychological help that she definitely needs.

Man, do I love reading about her, though. And someday I swear I will post this 150,000-word fic about why they should never, ever, ever get back together.

#Anonymous #replies

44 notes · View notes

xiaolongpunch · 7 years ago

Text

Rwby’s redemption

I’ve started watching rwby ever since the summer that volume 2 was released. My friends made me watch the four trailers and I was immediately captivated by the breath of fresh air the show promise from its beginning. Four badass girls with unique weapons and abilities? I was already hooked from that point. I binge watch volume after that day, and I immediately got harry potter vibe with the school aspect of the show. I also understood from the get go the the 8 characters we were introduced to in the beginning would be the main cast, that being team RWBY and team JNPR.

This is where my first critique comes in, and it won’t be directed at rooster teeth or miles-kerry or even monty, but rather at the fandom. Volume 1 wasn't shy at showing us who the important characters were, how? The were coloured in and we got to know their names in the first few episodes. The rest was either shadowed in, appeared a couple of times, or simply never be seen again. We knew the main cast was the two teams, and other subsequent characters were more side characters, exemple: Cardin and team CRDL, Velvet, Ozpin, Glynda, Roman, and the other professors and Sun. And one of the major complaints that volume 1 gets is that it was focused on Jaune to much. Statistically speaking, his arc lasted 25% of volume 1, lasting from episode 11 to 14. Other arcs from this volume included Blake’s, Weiss’s conflict with Ruby and probably other minor ones I won’t speak about. Blake’s arc lasted from episode 15 to 16, buut continued into the subsequent volume. Making for 12.5% of the first volume, and about, well the entire volume. Volume 2 was dedicated into busting the white fang and Roman, which directly tied into Blake’s arc from Volume 1, making it the longest arc up to this date since it is still continuing into volume 5. The third arc was the conflict between Ruby and Weiss, although somewhat minor, this arc still lasted for a couple of episodes spread apart from one another. The point being, Jaune’s arc is minor compared to other arcs happening in the show, since his only lasted 4 episodes in volume 1 alone. Sure he had speaking times in other volumes, but none revolved around him, and yet the fandom is still bitching and moaning that jaune is taking too much space. As mentioned before, Jaune IS one of the main 8, not liking him as a character is totally fine, but saying he is taking too much space is somewhat overreacting since he is one of the main characters.

Let’s go on, from V1 came V2, and to this date, it is probably one of my least favourite volumes. I feel like they focused a bit too much on the characters motivation during the mountain glenn arc. What was the point of Oobleck asking everyone why they wanted to be huntresses? It was a bit awkward and I feel like they could've gotten the same result, if not more, if they made the team sit down around a campfire and make them ask each other their motivation. They would’ve shared some exposition through, shown team rwby bonding, something the fandom has been asking for a while now (Something I will touch later on) aaand they would’ve been able to touch a lot more on Blake’s ongoing arc that way. Btw, this is how critiquing something is done, by talking about what felt wrong and give an example on how they could of improved themselves. I’ve seen way to many people complain and complain and never even explain how they could've improve on what they complained on, and then call what they did ‘critiquing’, but im digressing. Overall, they did what they wanted, expose us to more backstory and motivation, show us a bit more of who the characters are by telling us where they come from. This volume honestly showed me why Ruby is more childish in nature, and it also help set up what they wanted for her next volume. It showed me why Weiss is so cold and distant sometimes, it showed us why Blake acts the way she does..you get the point. It also helped setting up the next volume, which was a real plus.

Next comes V3, and I feel like, like the show, this was where the fandom started to really fall and divide. A reason why people started to become more toxic might have been because of Monty’s death. People started to think that because he died, Miles and Kerry started to ruin the show from his original idea. Especially after a controversial letter came out, you can read it here if you’d like. From that point, it was a shitstorm of fighting, between people who believed shane and people who didn’t. I have read the letter, and personally, I feel like they were some things right and some wrong. Shane seemed to have this idea that Monty was the only one planning the show, but it was with Miles and Kerry, Monty provided the ideas, MK wrote them out. Gray even addressed what the future of RWBY would be, and he mentioned this.

“For those wondering, Monty was heavily involved in shaping the future of the world of Remnant. His story ideas will live on, and you will also be able to see some of the animation he'd begun working on for Volume 3. For some time, the team has known the direction in which the next volumes will be headed, and Rooster Teeth is committed to bringing these tales to you.”

Like I said, you decide if you want to believe shane or not, but I think its clear that Monty planned his show with MK years ahead. And some of the ‘Critiques’ the show got addressed the wrong issues. That volume also sparked the lgbtq representaion controversy, ship wars begun, like I said, a shitshow began. It was also the volume that rwby turned dark and characters died off. And for some reason people got angry at MK for killing them off, because they thought it wasn't Monty’s idea. Except it was, and here is some other complaint. Roman was a major villain, you can't kill him! Actually he was said to be unimportant to the main story plot, and unfortunately I can't find the panel, but I remember that someone in the crwby mentioned that roman was kept alive longer than intended because he was like, but was eventually going to get killed off. Next was Penny’s death, not much complain on that side other then people saying they were sad she died, so nothing to say on that part. But the major character death that got lots of complaint was Pyrrha’s. People had two complaint about, it went too far, and that she was only meant to further Jaune’s character.

To address the first point, I will actually let Gray explain.

“Have we said thanks lately? Thanks again for sharing the story with our youngest audience members out there, it means a lot to us and we take the responsibility to heart. In return, we wanted to take a sec to reiterate some things. We've said from the very beginning that the story of RWBY is actually a pretty long journey, with all sorts of complex changes and themes over time. Because we can only put out so many episodes per year, and the story has been focused the way it has the first couple years, some viewers might assume that this is all there is to the show. Nnnnope. Much like other multi-year narratives such as the Harry Potters, Avatars (the airbending kind. well, the animated, not the live... look, the good one) and Star Wars...Warses... Warii? Forget it -- like other continuity-heavy sagas out there, RWBY will grow up over time. Our characters will be put to the test as the stakes get greater and the full scope of the story is revealed. The tone and imagery of the show will occasionally go darker and more mature. ...You did happen to notice the opening sequence that has been in front of the show all year, right?”

This comes from a blog post surrounding how dark rwby has turned. And I want to emphasize one particular point, because this will counter EVERY complaint on how the show is progressing in terms of change. RWBY was never meant to stay light hearted and happy, it was meant to grow and change, just like many other series out there, and the fact that people complain about it, is in my opinion, kinda ridiculous. When V3 came out, I understood this because it was new, but now? Really? You want change and character development, but complain once the plot thickens and the nature of the show changes? What kind of hypocritical shit is that? I also believe that Monty said that he got inspired by Games of Thrones in some aspect, and that was early on in the show, so death was going to be a thing, I guess the fandom just wants to ignore that though.

The second point is actually a bit more founded. But because of two sides. MK poorly handled team bonding, we barely got any bonding from any teams so we didnt know what they meant to each other other then a few things here and there. And the second side is the fandom’s collective hatred towards Jaune. The fandom complains that Pyrrha’s death was solely to further Jaune’s character, so im guessing they totally ignored her arc in v3 that actually explained why she decided to fight Cinder or why she died, or just simply decided to ignore, knowing the fandom, I wouldn’t be surprised with either reason. The fandom sometimes forgets to piece things together, to read between the lines. It was clear that Pyrrha had an internal conflict about becoming the maiden, and Jaune, being her combat partner, decided he wanted to be there for her, which only fueled the fandom’s belief that this arc was somehow around Jaune. I feel like fandom is honestly just pulling reasons out of their ass to hate on Jaune at this point, yes he did wrong things, but did anyone ever sat down to think that this was actually kinda the most natural portrayal of a teenage boy? Im digressing here, but Pyrrha’s was far more then Jaune, it was a sign, the show basically told us “Hey, things are getting serious, how serious? Welp a main character died trying to accomplish her goal” And her death couldnt of been more brilliant. It was extremely well executed, the symbolism behind it is incredible because it shows that the show isnt a fairy tail, not everything ends happily ever after, and most of all, it furthered Ruby’s character.

A lot of people dont realize that one of the premise of the show was loss of childhood and innocence. Ruby’s character is the very essence of that. And they broke her to pieces in V3, they killed her best friend, and then a close friend. She unlocked her powers and loss her innocence she had for the world. She grew so much as a character it that volume and its sad to see people not looking further then their noses to see how much has been happening in the show to focus on jaune and other minor things like ships.

To go back on Jaune’s portrayal, he is literally a fuckboi in v1/v2 and a bit of v3. Like, thats what his character is, you can hate it, hell I did, but screaming and shouting that his character needs to change because of that is fucking ridiculous, not everyone is meant to be liked, sometimes best portrayals are the ones that actually make you feel something strong about them, and the typical mary sue.

Lets move on, V4 in my opinion was the most poorly handled volume, for many things.They took to long to show how certain character grief and they didnt handle character development extremely well. Nora and Ren’s arc was...short, too short. I felt like they could of really digged into their childhood and their relationship since they grew up together, but they missed out on it. They tanked to show Ruby’s grief, or as the fandom would say, complete lack of. And the plot exposition from Qrow was too fast and really poorly handled in terms of delivery. I feel like they could’ve taken more time to explain some things like magic and the maidens, because the way it was delivered was more like it was speaking to the audience. The filled in gaps on what the audience didn’t know rather then explaining to the character what the hell was going on in their lives.

And I have a major problem with how the fandom ‘critiqued’ this volume. Again, the major complaints were not story, or plot related, they decided to complain on ships and portrayal, which btw is a valid thing if there is an actual problem. For exemple, they non-stopped complained on how Ruby seemingly didnt show any grief, but let me explain to you. People are different, whereas one person might cry their hearts out to someones death, another will feel sad for a bit and move on. We saw Ruby react to Pyrrha’s death, she unlocked her powers because of it. And there is many reason why she might have been shown grieving. Think about how much shit she went through, she saw her school get destroyed, three people she knew died in front of her in one night, she unlocked some weird magical power which she knows nothing about, her sister seems to hate life now, and her friends are mostly gone. Do you seriously think her mind has the time and effort to grief about ONE person dying? No, nobody would in fact, she probably is still in shock of everything that happened. Another reason, which was actually proven in V5, is that she doesn’t grief, she moves on. And they also foreshadowed it a bit, but I will talk about it in the V5 review of this.

The next thing people complained about was black sun, and how ooc blake felt during those moments. Again, I want to remind you that character development is a thing, and traumatic events may several affect someone’s view in life. The reason why Blake seemed ooc is because of her fears becoming a reality. Her friends got hurt because of Adam, she became paranoid, to the point of almost drawing out her sword to the captain when she was confronted. Sun on the other hand didnt experience all of that, and he thought he was doing the right thing by following her because he wanted to help her. And I saw sooooo many people saw he is a predator because she flinches when he touches her, but also completely forgets or ignore she acted the same way when her own mother hugged her. She is scared shitless of everything, this was probably one of the better handled character development in the volume, and the fandom seemingly ignored all of it to let their hatred go through.

The most blatant problem with V4 however was the animation, and I will let the youtuber Cake in his series “Animation analysis”. He really nails the head of what is wrong with the animation, and I highly recommend you watch this small serie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxP3lBW7wm4&list=PL-wKaeXzYOmbnc0cRXxGD0TEY5wgCUipw

I wont speak about Yang, because honestly, this was the one time the fandom is right, her ptsd arc was poorly handled and not well executed at all.

Then came V5, or as I like to call it, Rooster teeth’s redemption arc. This volume, imo, was so heavily touched upon to appease the angry mobs of the rwde tags its honestly kind of funny. Ship wars? Heres more character development surrounding all the characters involved in those ship and their view about each other. Poor character development? Heres ruby actual griefing and explaining how she moved and sooo much more character for the main cast. LGBT representation? Here's the first confirmed lgbt character! They did so many things right and so many things to fix past problems, and yet, the rwde tag is still greedy…

Volume 5 has done a lot of things right, and a lot of those things were things the fandom was asking since the beginning of the show. I believe it was partially RT testing out that if listening to us would actually change anything, and Im afraid the rwde side of this fandom is proving to them that nothing that they will do will change anything, and thats saying something about the rwde tag and the fandom in general.

Lets hit a few things that happened that rt did right. First being, Ruby’s grief. In V4, most of the fandom outcried for Ruby to show how she grieves the death of Pyrrha and Penny, and we got it. And just like I had thought, she moves on. The writers pulled our heart strings by using Monty’s signature quote “Keep moving forward”. This probably wasn't a last minute decision, since we did get a hint of it when Qrow mentioned the same thing to Yang in V3. And we all know how close Ruby is to Qrow, and he probably taught her to move on rather the grief when death hits someone close to you. The fandom, of course, was blind to all of it, and it dishearten me to see that. Because the fandom keeps asking for better writing, and when the are shown that MK can foreshadow things and give hints of two people’s relationship and that the fandom ignores it, it shows that they dont really care, and are probably finding reasons to hate rather then actually seeing their wishes come true.

Yang’s ptsd. V4 poorly handled this, they showed some sign of her illness but it was rushed and it felt unnatural. But rt did try to change this in V5. The random jerks of her hand and arm is a genius idea, it shows that she still suffers from her trauma even though she is trying to be strong for her own sake. This might be hinting at an actual ptsd episode later on when she fights. This is one thing rt did right and are showing they are listening.

First Lgbt character. Spoiler warning, if you havent watched V5EP8 then skip to the next point to not spoil yourself. So in the latest episode, Ilia was revealed to be first lgbt character, she is a lesbian/Bisexual character who is in love with Blake. And not surprisingly, the fandom find reasons to hate this decision rather than rejoice that rt is actually listening to them. This next part is a message straight for anyone who is criticizing ilia as the “villain lesbian” and say its problematic. Do you understand how hypocrite you are? You headcanon characters like Cinder, Salem, and Neo as lgbt, people who are actually show to be pure evil but hate and try to villainize the only villain who’s reason to be villain is due to her past? We have been shown why she chose this path, we have been shown why she sides with Adam at this moment. It hurts her to do so, we could see it when she ordered to kill Blake’s family, we have seen how conflicted she was to have captured Blake for adam, the only character who’s villainy is actual ambiguous and actually is a complex character because of it and you downgrade her to a “Bitter/Jealous murderous lesbian”? FUCK OUTTA HERE, that is completely hypocritical of everything you ever said, she is everything you ever wanted in a character and you still manage to be angry at rt for it?! Do you even hear yourselves sometimes? You wanna complain about something that is lgbt related? How about the lack of it, we have one, they have shown us they are listening so keep on insisting on that representation. You want to complain how the lack of complex character? Criticize MK for the lack of backstory for a lot of the main character, and a lack of personality shown. You want to complain about villains? HOW ABOUT THE ACTUAL BITTER AND MURDEROUS ONE ADAM FUCKING TAURUS. Stop being so blind jfc, there is so many other obvious things wrong about the points you are complaining about and yet you chose to bash Ilia, fucking incredible.

Rwby has a lot of issue, im not denying that, but its time for the fandom to stop complaining about ships and minor problems that have been fixed. Start critiquing instead of complaining and demanding. RT wont listen to you if you only demand things from them, start showing them explicitly what is wrong with the show and offer them solutions in a calm manner. Showing no evidence and not showing solutions is not critiquing on your part, its pure and simple entitlement. My final point is this. We dont own the show, some of us pay for a subscription, but that doesn't make them any more entitled to demand things from rt about their show. You can absolutely critique them for errors, but do it right. Show them what went wrong, explain why its wrong, and show and explain a possible solution. Complaining and whining isnt critiquing, its entitlement of something we dont own. Im probably missing some things I have thought of pointing out in this, and this is highly opinionated in some parts. But I hope my points do make some sense, and I hope anyone who reads this actual give a thought about the points I made. If you disagree with me, by all means, point out what was wrong with what I said and offer your counter-argument, like I said, some of it is facts and some of it is opinions, so let’s debate.

#rwby #rwby5 #rwde

59 notes · View notes

moonbittern · 8 years ago

Text

hi im here to talk to you about how sinister totally meant for scott to end up with charles

first of all, to lay some groundwork – we know that sinister was pretty much 100% in control of everything happening at the orphanage

(x-men legacy #215)

sinister was obviously concerned with keeping scott away from too many outside influences - the only significant relationships scott built with people away from sinister’s influence (that we know of) were robyn hanover and the bogarts, all of whom were, in the end, either manipulated or killed by sinister in order to further convince scott that building relationships with other people just wasn’t worth it. he wanted scott to be dependent, malleable, and entirely within his sphere of influence.

another point i’d like to bring up before getting into the meat of this post is that we can safely assume that sinister knew quite a bit about scott’s mutation before scott ever left. some accounts of the plane crash state that he actually manifested during the plane crash; x-factor states that he at least first became aware of his mutation while in the hospital; whenever you want to place it, it’s clear that scott manifested well before his supposed manifestation in new york as a teenager.

so! with that said, let’s talk about what happened when scott ran away from the orphanage

(there’s going to be a lot of silver age talk here, and yes i know a lot of the silver age is kind of dubiously canon at this point and yes i know sinister didn’t exist yet but it’s really all we have for this period of scott’s life)

we know that scott was in new york with the orphanage’s supervisor for an optometrist visit.

(x-men v1 #39)

so...sinister already knows about scott’s mutation, and he’s going to know better than anyone what’s going on with his eyes (or at least that’s how he would see it, but at this point given how much time he’s been studying scott it’s probably true). even if, for some reason, he felt the need to legitimize something about scott’s “eye condition”, he could’ve just pretended to be an optometrist and been like, yep, you definitely need these custom-made ruby quartz glasses that i just happen to have in my pocket here. it’s not like anyone’s going to question him.

and even IF there was a real need to bring scott to new york for any reason, i am fairly certain that mr. lamb and/or the optometrist were probably sinister (both were at least under his control) bc as we established above, sinister was very concerned with how scott interacted with the outside world. (there’s a reason the orphanage is set in a tiny fictional town in classic x-men rather than in omaha.) he’s not going to let this kid, his genetic prize, go wandering around one of the most populated cities in the country unsupervised.

before we even get to scott running away, there’s another panel i want to bring out here:

(x-men v1 #39)

ah yes, the, ahem, totally legitimate not-mind-controlled optometrist. that one.

(also, hi charles)

again, even if sinister did actually have scott go see an optometrist, there is no way he wasn’t at the very least meddling with his memories of scott. either sinister just straight-up sent a letter to the fbi about the kid or he wanted the optometrist to do it - it just doesn’t make sense that he would have let this happen if he didn’t want it to. i can’t stress enough that scott is the result of a lifetime of work on sinister’s part (well, more than a lifetime, but you know) and the key to creating the mutant weapon who would be able to defeat apocalypse - sinister has literally been working towards this goal for almost a century. he is an incredibly powerful telepath who is able to keep scott in situations he has complete control over and he is absolutely not going to allow his prize to get away from him.

unless, of course, he wants scott to get away.

consider: you’re an immortal geneticist under the thumb of a being you can’t hope to overcome on your own, and you’ve been following (and likely manipulating) two bloodlines for decades in the hopes that they will produce someone who can beat apocalypse. both of these bloodlines have just produced powerful mutant children of about the same age. one of them is in your care, but you’re getting frustrated with making his mutation work the way you want it to. the other is being taught by an old subject of yours.

you already have both of their dna and (probably) the ability to combine them if you want. there’s no reason for you to keep the one you have; you’ve considered killing him, but what if you were to throw him in the path of your old subject?

you never know what might happen.

(it’s creepy as fuck, but this is sinister we’re talking about here) (also, homebaked is always better than storebought)

so, a couple things happen here - scott’s powers “manifest” suddenly while in new york, and he takes off. which wouldn’t be that surprising if not for all of the above - we know that scott had manifested previously, and we know that he was being conditioned by sinister to keep his glasses on (though it’s not clear if his beams were actually coming out of his eyes before this point or if sinister was just making preparations):

(x-factor v1 #35)

we can also assume that sinister wouldn’t have let scott run away when a lot of his manipulations had been focused on making scott dependent on him. and even if all of this was somehow just some giant oversight, he should have been able to track scott down and take him back before charles got to him - after all, sinister already had his hooks pretty deep in scott.

jack may or may not have been an accident; personally i prefer thinking that sinister had kind of let scott off the leash just to see what would happen (although im sure he would have been able to snatch him back if need be), and also knowing that charles had the scent and would have been more than capable of taking on someone like jack. he probably just didn’t worry about it too much, content to see how his lab rats behaved in the wild.

to wrap this up, i mostly made this post because i was thinking about the bit from x-factor where sinister is talking about how charles “stole” scott from him so he had to make madelyne to lure scott away from the x-men and also make a baby with him, and how none of that really makes sense. (i don’t have an explanation for sinister saying that other than “0% of this post was simonson’s intention”; maybe sinister just likes playing the victim, or he was trying to downplay his power or something.) i’d already put a lot of this together but i wanted to write it all out and see if it still made sense to me, which it does. in the end this is really just me trying to make sense of bits of canon that don’t necessarily fit well together at first glance, but i think it pulls together into a pretty convincing (if largely accidental) narrative.

#this took so long to write omg #i probably got some details wrong and my excuse is that im tired #scott summers #nathaniel essex #abuse //sdf

74 notes · View notes

ubizheroes · 7 years ago

Text

Link Strategies that Stand the Test of Time: A Tribute to Eric Ward (Link Moses) – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

This week, we pay a special tribute to the late SEO pioneer Eric Ward. His link strategies formed the foundation of many of today’s smartest approaches to links, and in this Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers several that are as relevant today as they were when Eric first started talking about them.

https://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/7sbz8rln2n?videoFoam=true

https://fast.wistia.net/assets/external/E-v1.js

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are paying an honorary tribute to our friend, lost but not forgotten, Eric Ward.

Eric was one of the pioneers of the SEO industry. In fact, he was a link strategist and a creator of links for websites before search engines even valued links on the internet. He was the very first link marketer that Amazon.com hired. He had a testimonial from Jeff Bezos on his website, from Google’s Matt Cutts from many years ago, and worked with hundreds, if not thousands, of organizations to improve their link strategies.

Beyond that, Eric was a remarkable contributor to the field of SEO through conferences and events, through webinars, through his blog and his Twitter account, and through countless conversations with SEOs like me. In fact, Eric was one of the first people who helped me to understand how link strategy worked, and I have many, many fond memories of him.

I’d also like to say that Eric and I had a number of phone calls and emails over the years about mental and emotional health. I know that’s something that both of us have struggled with. I know that it’s something that many of us in the entrepreneurial and technology worlds struggle with, and it’s an issue that deserves more openness and more attention. I hope that we can do that and that I can do that here at Moz.

But, of course, this is Whiteboard Friday, and since we’re honoring Eric, what I want to help today with is talking about some of his link strategies that stand the test of time. These are high level concepts, which we often dig into the very weeds and the details here on Whiteboard Friday, but I think it pays to pull back a little and think about links from a big-picture perspective.

For those of you who are active link builders and link strategists, much of this might be familiar. But I bet for your clients, for your teams, for your bosses, for the people that you work with, this sort of strategic level thinking sometimes goes ignored, and it means that you don’t always get the credit that you should. So let’s take some of the lessons. These are just a tiny handful of the plethora of value that Eric has provided over the decades that he had been in our field.

1. People and organizations link because:

First off, Eric liked to talk about why people and organizations link, and I think there’s actually some excellent tactical and strategic thinking in here.

A. Content is deserving of their recognition

First off, he talked about how the content that they would link to is actually deserving of their recognition, which I think makes intuitive sense, but is something that is often not considered in a link building list. When we create our lists, we sometimes ignore that.

B. They have a non-financial incentive to link

Which makes sense. If you’re trying to get someone to link, they need to have a reason, an emotional reason, a business-driven reason, a partnership-driven reason. If it’s financial, of course, the search engines will penalize it or eventually penalize it.

C. The right person made them aware that the citation should exist

This was the form of work that Eric concentrated on particularly early in his career, when he was a very tactical link strategist, and I think it makes great sense, but is so often ignored, that we don’t find the right people in our organizations to make that connection, that we don’t actually make the organizations that should link to us aware of why a link should happen and where it should exist, and that this work, while very manual, is also very powerful. It can drive direct traffic, and of course it drive rankings in search engines.

D.The content actually matters to their audience

That whoever you’re reaching out to, this reason, this incentive needs to connect with their audience. Otherwise, Google is unlikely to count that link, and visitors are unlikely to click on that link. I actually think personally that the two might be related, that there’s some form of browser level data, user and usage level data that Google is using here.

E. That content is new (or recently updated)

I found this fascinating that Eric pointed out that it is vastly easier, vastly easier to get content to earn links from its audience, from a target if it is new or recently updated. It’s much more challenging to do that with older content, which is one of the reasons why a lot of the strategies or a lot of the tactical elements that he proposed, when working with his clients, centered around: How are we going update, redo, or make something new that is going to cause all of these things to be true? I think if you can check off these five, you have got a great set to be able to go out and pitch people on why those links should exist.

A quote from Eric: “Identify and contact venues that would be inclined to care about the new content enough to write about it and/or to link to it.” I think that really is PR. That’s public relations, just in a digital marketing capacity and really a huge part of what successful outreach looks like.

2. Great execution is a result of strategy and planning

Next up, great execution is a result of strategy and planning. I know. Who knew? What’s true in every other part of the business world and every other part of the world of things that get accomplished is also true in link building? Yes, it is.

A. Strategy flows from understanding your topic and online space

Eric liked to say that strategy flows from a deep understanding of the topic and the space, which is why a lot of these services that you might find online, that are very inexpensive or very scalable, don’t work very well in links, because they don’t have that deep topic and deep space understanding. When you have a deep understanding of the topic and the space, you can better target your link earning abilities.

B. A blueprint of how to earn links from various types of targets dramatically increases the odds of success.

So two interesting things in here. If you have a blueprint, that means you have a structure for how you’re going to target and how you’re going to outreach. If you consider various types of targets, and Eric mentions a number of these on his website. I’m planning to link to link to a bunch of resources in this Whiteboard Friday from Eric around this. If you choose those various types of targets, you will over time discover which ones are consistently high performing for you and have the best opportunity to earn you the links that will make a difference in your campaigns.

Eric would say what we do, and he’s using “we” here to refer to link strategists rather than just link builders, “What we do is to help content find the audience it was intended for and the audience find the content.” I love that. It has a beautiful simplicity to it, but also a deep strategy that unfortunately a lot of link building campaigns don’t pay attention to.

3. Short-term thinking leads to devaluation, penalties, and poor results

Eric was extremely passionate, if you ever spent time with him or listened to one of his webinars or interviews, he was very passionate about this idea that…

A. Links that would exist, even if Google and Bing did not, are almost always the ones that provide the most value. That’s both in traffic and in rankings.

Eric had this wonderful nomenclature. He was known as Link Moses, and Link Moses had these commandments about link building. He said, “The link schemer may eat today, but the link earner eateth from a bountiful table for a lifetime.” I think that’s a beautiful sentiment.

Folks, if Eric has provided you with value, and I can assure you that if you are in the link world, almost all of us, who have anything worthwhile to share, have earned our ideas from people who have learned from Eric or from Eric himself. His family is grieving, and it would be wonderful if we could help show them support. Geraldine and I, my wife and I have done so, and I’d encourage you to do so as well.

Danny Sullivan, who’s now with Google, but of course who was behind Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies and then Third Door Media, has set up a donation page that will go directly to his family at bit.ly/ericward2017. I think it would be wonderful if the Moz community and all of us who have benefitted so much from Eric’s help over the years paid him that respect. Thanks very much.

Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Moz Blog https://moz.com/blog/tribute-to-eric-ward via IFTTT

from Blogger http://imlocalseo.blogspot.com/2017/11/link-strategies-that-stand-test-of-time.html via IFTTT

from IM Local SEO https://imlocalseo.wordpress.com/2017/11/04/link-strategies-that-stand-the-test-of-time-a-tribute-to-eric-ward-link-moses-whiteboard-friday/ via IFTTT

from Gana Dinero Colaborando | Wecon Project https://weconprojectspain.wordpress.com/2017/11/04/link-strategies-that-stand-the-test-of-time-a-tribute-to-eric-ward-link-moses-whiteboard-friday/ via IFTTT

from WordPress https://mrliberta.wordpress.com/2017/11/04/link-strategies-that-stand-the-test-of-time-a-tribute-to-eric-ward-link-moses-whiteboard-friday/ via IFTTT

0 notes

ubizheroes · 8 years ago

Text

How Does Google Handle CSS + Javascript “Hidden” Text? – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Does Google treat text kept behind “read more” links with the same importance as non-hidden text? The short answer is “no,” but there’s more nuance to it than that. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains just how the search engine giant weighs text hidden from view using CSS and JavaScript.

https://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/ehdc609c4f?videoFoam=true

https://fast.wistia.net/assets/external/E-v1.js

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat a little bit about hidden text, hidden text of several kinds. I really don’t mean the spammy, black on a black background, white on a white background-like, hidden text type of keyword stuffing from the ’90s and early 2000s. I’m talking about what we do with CSS and JavaScript with overlays and with folders inside a page, that kind of hidden text.

It’s become very popular in modern web design to basically use CSS or to use JavaScript to load text after a user has taken some action on a page. So perhaps they’ve clicked on a separate section of your e-commerce page about your product to see other information, or maybe they’ve clicked a “read more” link in an article to read the rest of the article. This actually creates problems with Google and with SEO, and they’re not obvious problems, because when you use something like Google’s fetch and render tool or when you look at Google’s cache, Google appears to be able to crawl and parse all of that text. But they’re not treating all of it equally.

So here’s an example. I’ve got this text about coconut marble furnishings, which is just a ridiculous test phrase that I’m going to use for this purpose. But let’s say I’ve got page A, which essentially shows the first paragraph of this text, and then I have page B, which only shows part of the first sentence and then a “read more” link, which is very common in lots of articles.

Many folks do this, by the way, because they want to get engagement data about how many people actually read the rest of the piece. Others are using it for serving advertising, or they’re using it to track something, and some people are using it just because of the user experience it provides. Maybe the page is crowded with other types of content. They want to make sure that if someone wants to display this particular piece or that particular piece, that it’s available to them in as convenient a format as possible for design purposes or what have you.

What’s true in these instances is that Google is not going to treat what happens after this “read more” link is clicked, which is that the rest of this text would become visible here, they’re not going to treat that with the same weight that they otherwise would.

All other things being equal

So they’re on similar domains, they have similar link profiles, all that other kind of stuff.

A is going to outrank B for “coconut marble furnishings” even though this is in the title here. Because this text is relevant to that keyword and is serving to create greater relevance, Google is going to weight this one higher.

It’s also true that the content that’s hidden behind this “read more” here, it doesn’t matter. If it’s CSS-based, JavaScript-based, post load or loaded when the HTML is, it doesn’t matter, it’s going to be weighted less by Google. It will be treated as though that text were not as important.

Interestingly, fascinatingly, perhaps, Bing and Yahoo do not appear to discern between these. So they’ll treat these more equally. Google is the only one who seems to be, at least right now, from some test data — I’ll talk about that in a sec — who is treating these differently, who is basically weighting this hidden content less.

Best practices for SEO and “hidden” text

So what can we discern from this? What should SEOs do when we’re working with our web design teams and with our content teams around these types of issues?

I. We have to expect that any time we hide text with CSS, with JavaScript, what have you, that it will have less ranking influence. It’s not that it won’t be counted at all. If I were to search for “hardwood-like material creates beautiful shine,” like that exact phrase in Google with quotes, both of these pages would come up, this one almost certainly first, but both of these pages would come up.

So Google knows the text is there. It just isn’t counting it as highly. It’s like content that isn’t carrying the same weight as it would if it were visible by default. So, given that we know that, we have to decide in the tradeoff situation whether it’s worth it to lose the ranking value and the potential visitors in exchange for whatever we’re gaining by having this element.

II. We’ve got to consider some creative alternatives. It is possible to make text visible by default and to instead have something like an overlay element. We could have a brief overlay here that’s easily close-able with a message. Maybe that could give us the same types of engagement statistics, because 95% of people are going to close that before they scroll down, or they’re going to receive a popover message or those kinds of things. Granted, as we’ve discussed previously on Whiteboard Friday, overlays have their own issues that we need to be aware of, but these are possible. We can also measure scroll depth by doing some JavaScript tracking. There’s lots of software that does that by default and plenty of GitHub repositories, that are open source, that we could use to track that. So there might be other ways to get the same goals.

III. If it is the case that you have to use the “read more” or any other text hiding elements, I would urge you to go ahead and place the crucial information, including the keyword phrases and the most related terms and phrases that you know are going to be very important to rankings, up in that most visible top portion of the page so that you maximize the ranking weight of the most important pieces rather than losing those below or behind whatever sorts of post-loading situation you’ve got. Make those the default visible portions of text.

I do want to give special thanks. One of the reasons that we know this, certainly Google has mentioned it on occasion, but over the course of the last few years there’s been a lot of skepticism, especially from folks in the web design community who have sort of said, “Look, it seems like Google can see this. It doesn’t seem to be a problem. When I search in quotes for this text, Google is bringing it back.” That has been correct.

But thanks to Shai — I’m sorry if I mispronounce your name — Aharony from Reboot Online, RebootOnline.com, and I’ll link to the specific test that they performed, but they performed some wonderful, large-scale, long-term tests of CSS, of text area, of visible text, and of JavaScript hiding across many domains over a long period and basically proved to us that what Google says is in fact true, that they are treating this text behind here with less weight. So we really appreciate the efforts of folks like that, who go through intense effort to give us the truth about how Google works.

That said, we will hopefully see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

from Moz Blog https://moz.com/blog/google-css-javascript-hidden-text via IFTTT

from Blogger http://imlocalseo.blogspot.com/2017/06/how-does-google-handle-css-javascript.html via IFTTT

from IM Local SEO https://imlocalseo.wordpress.com/2017/06/09/how-does-google-handle-css-javascript-hidden-text-whiteboard-friday/ via IFTTT

from Gana Dinero Colaborando | Wecon Project https://weconprojectspain.wordpress.com/2017/06/09/how-does-google-handle-css-javascript-hidden-text-whiteboard-friday/ via IFTTT

from WordPress https://mrliberta.wordpress.com/2017/06/09/how-does-google-handle-css-javascript-hidden-text-whiteboard-friday/ via IFTTT

0 notes

ubizheroes · 8 years ago

Text

The 6 Values (and 4 Benefits) of Agile Marketing – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by AgileJim

You’ve probably heard of agile processes in regards to software development. But did you know those same key values can have a huge impact if applied to marketing, as well? Being adaptive, collaborative, and iterative are necessary skills when we live in a world where Google can pull the rug out from under us at a moment’s notice.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, we welcome guest host Jim Ewel, founder of AgileMarketing.net, as he describes what’s important in the agile marketing process and why incorporating it into your own work is beneficial.

https://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/em8z5sq2zn?videoFoam=true

https://fast.wistia.net/assets/external/E-v1.js

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans, this is Jim Ewel. I’m the blogger behind AgileMarketing.net, the leading blog on agile marketing, and I’m here to talk to you today about agile marketing.

Agile marketing is an approach to marketing that takes its inspiration from agile software development. Like agile software development, it has a set of values and it has a set of benefits, and we’re going to talk about those values and benefits today.

6 Values of Agile Marketing

Value number one: Responding to change over following a plan.

It’s not that we don’t plan. It’s just that we don’t write 30- to 40-page marketing plans. Instead, every quarter, we write a one-page plan that specifies our goals, our aspirations to get everybody on the same page, and then every two to four weeks, we reset our priorities. We say, “This is what we’re going to get done during this two- to four-week period.”

Value number two: Rapid iterations over “big bang” campaigns.

In traditional marketing, we get together in a room and we say, “We’re going to run a campaign for three to six months to a year.”

We hash out the idea of what we’re going to do for that campaign. Then we communicate to the agency. They come up with creative. They review it with us. We go back and forth, and eventually we’ll run that campaign for three to six months. And you know what happens at the end of that campaign? We always declare victory because we’ve spent so much money and time on that campaign that every time we say, “It worked.”

Well, we take a very different approach in agile marketing. We take an iterative approach. We start out with a little strategy. We meet for half an hour or an hour to figure out what do we think might work. Then we figure out how to test it. We measure the results, and this is very important, we document the learning.

If something doesn’t work, we test it out and it doesn’t work, it’s okay because we’ve learned something. We’ve learned what doesn’t work. So then we iterate again, and we try something else and we do that, we get that cycle going in a very effective way.

Value number three: Testing and data over opinions and conventions

Here, again, the importance is that we’re not following the highest-paid person’s opinion. No HiPPOs. It’s all about: “Did we test it? Do we have data? Do we have the right metrics?” It’s important to select the right metrics and not vanity metrics, which make us feel good, but don’t really result in an improvement to the business.

Value number four: Many small experiments over a few big bets

And I like to talk about here the 70:20:10 rule. The idea behind the 70:20:10 rule is that we spend 70% of our budget and 50% of our time on the things that we know that work. We do it broadly across all our audiences.

We then spend 20% of our budget and 25% of our time modifying the things that we know that work and trying to improve them. Maybe we distribute it in a little different way or we modify the content, we modify what the page looks like. But, anyways, we’re trying to improve that content.

And the last 10% of our budget and 25% of our time, we spend on wild ideas, things where we fully expect that only about 2 or 3 out of 10 ideas is really going to work, and we focus those things on those creative, wild ideas that are going to be the future 70% and 20%.

Value number five: Individuals and interactions over one-size-fits-all

Now, I like to think about this in terms of one of the experiences that I have with SEO. I get a lot of requests for link building, and a lot of the requests that I get are form requests. They write me a little message that they’re writing to hundreds of other people, and I don’t pay any attention to those requests.

I’m looking for somebody who really knows that I’m writing a blog about agile marketing, who’s interacting with me, who maybe says something about a post that I put on Agile Marketing, and those people are the ones that I’m going to give my business to, in effect, and I’m going to do some link building with them. Same thing applies to all of our marketing.

Value number six: Collaboration over hierarchy and silos

One of the key things in many marketing organizations is that different silos of the organization don’t seem to talk to each other. Maybe marketing isn’t talking to sales, or marketing hasn’t got the ear of senior management.

Well, one of the things we do in agile marketing is we put some processes in place to make sure that all of those groups are collaborating. They’re setting the priorities together, and they’re reviewing the results together.

4 Benefits of Agile Marketing

As a result of these six values, there are four important benefits to agile marketing.

I. The first is that you can get more done

I’ve taught a lot of teams agile marketing, and, as a whole, they tell me that they get about 30% to 40% more done with agile marketing. I had one team tell me they got 400% more done, but that’s not typical. So they’re getting more done, and they’re getting more done because they’re not doing rework and they’re working on the right priorities.

II. Getting the right things done

Because you’re working with sales, you’re working with senior management to set the priorities, you’re making sure with agile marketing that you’re getting the right things done, and that’s important.

III. Adapting to change

Part of our life today in marketing is that things change. We know that Google is going to change their PageRank algorithm in 2017. We don’t know exactly how, but we know it’s going to happen, and we need to be able to adapt to that change quickly and accurately, and we put processes in place in agile marketing to make sure that happens.

IV. Improved communications

Improved communications both within the marketing team and, probably even more important, outside the marketing team to sales and senior management.

By representing what we’re getting done on something like a Kanban board, everybody can see exactly what marketing is working on, where it’s at, and what they’re getting done.

So that’s agile marketing in a nutshell. I’d love to hear your comments, and thanks for watching.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

from Moz Blog https://moz.com/blog/6-values-agile-marketing-whiteboard-friday via IFTTT

from Blogger http://imlocalseo.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-6-values-and-4-benefits-of-agile.html via IFTTT

from IM Local SEO https://imlocalseo.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/the-6-values-and-4-benefits-of-agile-marketing-whiteboard-friday/ via IFTTT

from Gana Dinero Colaborando | Wecon Project https://weconprojectspain.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/the-6-values-and-4-benefits-of-agile-marketing-whiteboard-friday/ via IFTTT

from WordPress https://mrliberta.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/the-6-values-and-4-benefits-of-agile-marketing-whiteboard-friday/ via IFTTT

0 notes