#sorry if im pointing out the obvious

[auuwmk]

what kimcom was doing with the group regression was the same as what kdj was doing with twsa:

using all their knowledge of the scenarios and changing the course of the story

hsy literally takes kdj's role as the "protagonist" and kdj (49) gets sidelined -> kdj taking yjh's achievements and role as a protagonist and yjh gets sidelined (somewhat)

doing it to save someone and change someone's fate (because he deserves be happy, because his story shouldn't end this way, its just not fair)

[cowboyunderscore]

marmeladov’s death scene: is it a metaphor for raskolnikovs descent into nihilism?

marmeladov had essentially had a death wish for a while, drinking excessively to deter his suicidal thoughts, but as soon as the carriage hit him, that was it. he was dragged to his apartment, cared for frantically by his family and friend, to no avail. when the doctor came in, he told them it was already too late, and that anything they did now would be useless, as the damage was done. next, the priest comes in, and marmeladov dies surrounded by the people whose lives he stole.

raskolnikov had been spiraling within his napoleon theories and poverty for some time, falling deeper and deeper into a nihilistic pattern of thought. when that happened, it seemed like the ultimate irredeemable, lost forever to his hopelessness, action (the carriage) his friend and family nurse him through sickness, combat his ideas, but its little use (raskolnikov and katerina’s attempts to revive marmeladov) svidrigailov, fully down the path of nihilism, becomes who raskolnikov will become should he refuse to surrender. its the only thing to do, but anything he does will be of little use (the doctor revealing marmeladov is “on his last gasp”). he finds some semblance of faith (the priest entering the room) through lazarus, through sonya, and ultimately confesses and avoids becoming “a svidrigailov” (avoiding the fate foreshadowed by marmeladov dying).

so, given the parallels: is marmeladov’s death a physical manifestation/representation/foreshadowing of raskolnikov’s potential fate???

thoughts?

[justaz]

merlin (immortal) giving arthur (pendragon) the only blade that could kill him

[ominous-horse-noises]

main takeaway from certain fan reactions to the finale is this:

the final scene with ankarna was so meaningful to the bad kids' arcs and how they made peace with being wronged by people they loved, and if all you can focus on is that the rat grinders didn't get much screentime, then you don't love dimension20 and you don't love this world: you want to be playing your own hs themed dnd campaign and you're mad the oc versions of the rat grinders you made up in your head acted ooc. these are not your characters and this is not their story.

[detectivemiku]

has shinichi ever been in danger? like has he ever been kidnapped, harmed, or had his life threatened? because obviously 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘯 has, but what about shinichi?

this line that ran says here implies that he hasn't ever been "in real trouble" before, but if he had been kidnapped or injured, surely she would be aware and not say this?

here conan is entirely caught off guard. clearly he isn't used to being unable to defend himself against a culprit.

if we look through all of shinichi's cases pre-conan, there's only two that could be considered "dangerous"

the first time he meets kaitou kid, he threatens ran and shinichi. obviously WE know that there's no danger, as kid would never hurt innocent people, especially not his own nephew.

the second time is the new york case. shinichi is actively pursuing a serial killer, but here vermouth isn't directly threatening him, she only makes a move to harm ran, not shinichi. and by the time she does point her gun at him, shinichi is confident she won't hurt him.

now if we look at current timeline shinichi

this is the only time (that I can find) where someone puts specifically shinichi in danger, not conan. no one else actively tries to harm him as a high school detective.

now, we don't actually see a lot from shinichi's first childhood, so the evidence is limited. but I don't think he is seriously harmed or threated until conan, there just aren't many opportunities for it to have happened.

while shinichi solves many cases, I think people forget that he mainly works as a 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵 of the police, in which he's called in to cases that the police have already worked on, and in theory is as safe and secure as possible. there's not really room for someone to attack or gain the upper hand against shinichi in these scenarios.

obviously this doesn't account for any cases shinichi ran into on his own, we all know how much of a murder magnet conan is. but the thing is, that's 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘯. I don't believe shinichi was a murder magnet at all.

the biggest evidence is in shinichi's first case. it's obvious he and megure don't regularly cross paths at this point, and considering shinichi spends most of his time in megure's district, if he were to run into crime, they should be familiar with each other.

another point: ran isn't used to gruesome crime scenes. in the current time in the series, ran would not be nearly this shocked to see someone beheaded, and that's all happened in just six months. considering how shinichi spends most of his free time with ran, if he attracted crime in his year of being a high school detective, surly she would have been present and had time to get used to murder scenes like this.

the police are always surprised to see shinichi already at a crime scene, and there's no joke about him being a "shinagami." you'd think if shinichi had the same track record as conan for stumbling onto cases, the police would react in a similar way to how they treat kogoro and conan. all of his current day cases the officers show surprise and delight when shinichi shows up, which could be more surprise to see him at all, but the same is true for that first roller coaster murder.

now what megure says here in the aquarium case 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 be interrupted as "of course you're at the crime scene, like always." but I think he means "of course you'd be the only person described as a cocky young fellow."

I really think the very first time shinichi is ever in any danger from his detective work is at the very beginning with gin and vodka. it explains why he's so self assured and cocky, and doesn't have any restraint for running into danger. conan is way more cautious and paranoid than shinichi because he 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘴 danger first-hand now. shinichi never had any reason to be worried about his own safety because he's never faced any negative consequences until conan.

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[boycaca]

I think its somewhat telling that the gnosis was placed inside the shouki no kami rather than scara containing it in his chest the same way that venti did with his gnosis. I get that its probably more so because scara needed a much grander body for his god form and the electro gnosis just so happened to be at the centre of it… but i cant help but think of it as the games way of telling us that he truly is not fit to contain the gnosis, even in peak form when all his powers are unleashed, he still needs to build a whole new body as the gnosis’ vessel, that the so called “heart” he thought was rightfully his would not actually make him satisfied or fulfilled, as it seems to be the embodiment of all of scara’s obsessions

[rolandkaros]

one day we will talk about how tennis fans talk about/treat players they find attractive versus players they dont…………

[deus-ex-mona]

has chizuutan been sitting this close to aizo in class all this time…?

[glitchdollmemoria]

honestly about to go through my villain arc. employers will go on and on about being inclusive of people with disabilities but still require standing for jobs that can be done sitting down, or a job description will say "walking" "on your feet" etc and not specify whether or not wheelchair usage counts for that by their standards. sometimes it feels like wheelchair users are expected to all be geniuses who can afford to go through years of college, as if to make up for our disabilities. it isnt fair and i just fucking want to survive in a world thats stacked against me and people like me

[givemewallywestorgivemedeath]

Feeling very violent rn so here's a very controversial opinion:

Everything after season one of Young Justice sucked.

Look, I know I'm obsessed with the show but that doesn't mean it's good, it means that I'm too deep into it at this point to get out. There are good moments within the other seasons but in general? They were not good.

I'm sorry. I understand that they wanted to be creative and have a neat narrative and deep lore and all that. And they do! The narrative and lore is extremely deep.

But the plot? The characters??

Season one was an actual functional show that balanced character development, plot and dialogue with world building, lore and messaging.

The other seasons do not do that.

Season two bounced back and forth between like 16 characters. We got some development for some characters but even that was minimal compared to the character development in S1. And this isn't me complaining that the og group wasn't in S2 enough. That's not my issue. I would've loved to focus on a new group and I think that Jaime, Bart, Ed and Gar would've been super cool to focus on. I loved what character development they did have and I craved more.

But the problem? The problem is when you have 16 fucking characters that you are trying to develop and shove into a coherent plot and have actual meaningful scenes. There just wasn't enough focus on S2. Imo, S2 was meh because the characters got left by the wayside. The plot, dialogue, world building, lore and messaging was fine, there just seemed to be a lack of heart/warmth in the show because of the characters. It's hard to get invested.

Then holy shit. S3 introduced more characters. And the plot got more contrived and 'big picture' to the point that it started to abstract. It felt like nothing mattered. There were no stakes, you were just watching things happen. There was 50 fucking things happening an episode and 80% of it was lore/world building. It felt like I was studying for a fictional history exam.

I'm pretty sure the main character in S3 was earth 16. Just the entire universe. Because goddamn. We checked in on almost every living being and EVERYTHING was a plot point. Most of it wasn't even relevant to anything happening in the season. Man it was.... it was bad.

And at that point it just wasn't enjoyable at all to watch. I probably should've stopped watching but at that point the sunk cost fallacy had already kicked in. I knew it could be good. Maybe it could be good again. And people were constantly praising it as cinematic genius so I was like 'okay well maybe I'm missing the point? Maybe you aren't supposed to enjoy shows? Maybe this is fine?'

But season four broke me.

The creators heard that people were frustrated by the lack of character focus and the episodes following 72 characters and the episodes switching between 50 different subplots every episode and their solution? Their solution was to take allllllll the different unconnected plots and, instead of evenly spreading them throughout the season, jam them all into 'arcs'. So you had a bunch of mini seasons consisting of 3-5 episodes dedicated to a cast of ~5-8 characters (some of them new). And each of these episodes had unconnected a plots, b plots and c plots.

THAT IS NOT A SOLUTION

Holy shit that is not a solution.

Not to mention the overarching plot of the season, in which we had no fucking clue what was happening until the final episodes where everything became a speedrun to wrap everything up. We literally had no idea what the main plot was until it was ending.

Good god it was bad. It's bad writing!

I know people liked it and good for them. You should like what you like and you don't have to justify it. But for me it was insanity. I'm sorry I actually don't want a season long subplot where Beast Boy is depressed and sleeps all day. I would be cool with it if it had anything to do with the larger story but, surprisingly, spending five minutes watching Beast Boy sleep every episode didn't make for compelling storytelling.

I'm still not over how we didn't even know who the main villain was until the end of the season. And then all of a sudden he does a villain monologue to tell everyone his evil plan and his motives. Super cool actually. I love it when I have no idea what the stakes are for the majority of a show. It's incredibly good storytelling when you leave the audience in the dark about a major player in the plot for all of the plot. And then doing an info dump evil monologue in the final episodes to rush through the explanation??? Fucking fantastic and not a sign of terrible pacing at all.

I'm just so frustrated. The show isn't about being a show anymore. The show is an entire cinematic universe shoved into 20 something episodes. It's desperate to tell every single story at once, audience, pacing and good writing be damned.

I'm so tired of the constant praising of Greg. His whole 'i don't write endings because life doesn't have endings' and 'i don't write cliffhangers, I just leave things open ended' thing is pretentious bullshit. I'm tired of pretending it's not. A good story has an ending. Stories are not life! Some of the best shows I've ever watched had planned endings. And oh my god. The cliffhanger thing... that's just semantics my guy. Greg you write cliffhangers. You can insist they aren't but I'm going to call a spade a spade.

It's also.... I'm fine with explaining things, in fact I love it because it's an excuse to talk about the stuff I love, and I have a fairly decent knowledge of comic book lore. So, I could not only understand what was happening in the show but I was also super enthusiastic about explaining it to people. But hey Greg? Hey buddy? If 90% of your audience doesn't know what the fuck is going on and needs to be familiar with super specific obscure comic characters from the 70's then you might have a problem.

I think I realized halfway through s4 that the most enjoyment I got from an episode was when an obscure comic character would cameo in it. But then I realized that a) they generally weren't explained at all and b) 50% of the time they weren't just hanging out in the background and they were vital to the plot. So to understand who the fuck they were and what the fuck was happening you had to be familiar with... well all of DC comics actually.

Anyway this rant is getting long and unhinged and I don't think there's a point so I'm going to cut myself off even though I have so much more to say on the topic. I think my general point is just that I didn't enjoy watching the later seasons and it's chill if you did and we should all respect each other's opinions ✌️

[koheletgirl]

fucking incredible how like twice a week they will assassinate Some Hezbollah Guy and then when the inevitable retaliation comes they'll let us burn. repeat indefinitely

[cultofthepigeon]

trying to find good critique of the fallout show is impossible because most people will surround one (1) solid legit genuine criticism with 10 other "criticisms" that boil down to "i didnt understand the games and the show doesnt follow my canon"

[trans-estinien]

people really love to conveniently forget trans men exist when they talk about feminism. or if they dont they make us out as also part of the problem as if we somehow are able to have the same amount of privilege as cis men. absolutely wild

[todayisafridaynight]

At which point did you realise that the plot of IW is ass? I've seen people complain only about the ending or the halfway point where the teams separate, while I was already actively rolling my eyes like four-five chapters in

i think the moment i fully accepted that IW's story was. Definitely A Story was the moment ebina announced 'bleach japan'. like i think leading up to that point i was thinking to myself 'oh i hope i see X happen' or being like 'i wonder where this is going' and that sort but the proverbial bucket of ice was definitely that moment

[broke-on-books]

No way that just happened