#that's the general audience for you

[ariadne-mouse]

Tumblr media analysis gothic: In my personal opinion, based on my own individual perspective, which may not be aligned with the perspectives of others, and which is predicated on my own individual understanding and interpretation of the text, wherein the themes, characters, and events have notable elements of ambiguity such that a multitude of interpretations are possible and understandable, and said interpretations of mine are influenced by my own personal background and attributes, believe - but not at the exclusion of belief that other people may believe differently, and with full acknowledgement of the heretofore described subjectivity of my stance, which is an opinion, though I do believe in it and also wish to convey it in a persuasive manner that others will find compelling due to my argument in its support which I personally find to be well-evidenced in the text and elucidated by my interpretation of the text, on which I will elaborate at length considering all angles in order to minimize misunderstanding of my analysis - again, acknowledging the ambiguity and subjectivity at play in my interpretation - that

[thefloatingstone]

The older I get and the more terrible takes I see the more in favour I become of gatekeeping

[jewishgirlrevolt]

8x09 Thoughts. I'm done with Eddie Diaz

I tried to write about this episode previously.. and I am going to send a second note to ABC about some of what I will outline here.

So let's talk about the good first. As utterly predictable as the serial killer plot was, it was a WILD ride. JLH is an amazing talent and I am SO looking forward to her and Abigail Spencer playing more off one another next week.

Buck with the dog was so cute. Also excellent choice in dog. Props to K9 casting.

Now let's get to everything else. Sorry this got really long. Under the cut.

TLDR: Eddie Diaz is a jerk. I don't have any desire to root for him anymore, and I don't care what happens to him. Buck has his flaws, but I want to root for him and for BuckTommy to get back together.

Buck helping Eddie find a subletter was not Buck being bad or bratty. I think he was genuinely trying to help Eddie find someone suitable. But he was also dealing with a lot. He's still not over Tommy, and now he's dealing with his best friend leaving. So it's Buck not thinking through and brain to mouth connection short circuited.

Eddie, meanwhile, didn't even tell Buck he had found a serious option until after he had made a down payment. How is Buck not supposed to feel abandoned? If I were moving away, I would let my best friend know the situation long before this.

Ok, so Buck is told to leave, and he notices he doesn't have his keys, or phone, and overhears Eddie saying to a potential tenant that "He doesn't have any ties here." Which is Bullshit for 2 reasons. 1. It shows Eddie doesn't consider the 118 as anything more than coworkers (if they were friends he would have told them his plan earlier on so they could work out and help him while finding a replacement). And 2. TIA PEPA and his cousins LIVE IN LA! Continuity error or not, I don't know. I don't care. This post is already horrifically long.

Now during the fight, Eddie is super mad at Buck and honestly...had he had ONE normal conversation with Buck this all could have been avoided. Buck comes back to apologize after revealing the situation to the team, something Eddie should have done weeks ago. What Eddie does is shit on Buck. And it wasn't necessary. Now! I've had fights with friends, I've been frustrated on occasion with my best friend. But I would never in a million years even THINK to use their insecurities in a fight against them. That's cruel and while Buck didn't handle the situation in the best way, Eddie was way too hard on him. Cause again, Eddie could have resolved this with one conversation. And we know Buck would never be upset with Eddie for choosing Christopher. But I think Eddie knows deep down that he's making another impulsive and stupid decision. Wow Eddie really has one brain cell. And he's clearly projecting that insecurity on Buck. But it's not Buck's job to validate Eddie's half-assed ideas. I think it was @nephilimeq's amazing post that really hammered in the emotional maturity and avoidance Eddie so

What we see is Buck's biggest fear shown, the idea that people tolerate him/care about him as long as he is useful.

Because Buck has done so much for Eddie. He took care of Christopher and was there for both of them at the drop of a hat. And Eddie by comparison.. and I know friendships aren't always 50/50. But it feels like this friendship is like 95% Buck and 5% Eddie.

I think it was @nephilimeq's amazing post that really hammered in my problems with Eddie. It's that he hasn't matured emotionally and faced his emotions and actions. And that's why I am so done with Eddie. And why I fully support Buck getting back together with Tommy.

Now Buck has his flaws, there's stuff he could have handled better this episode and the narrative needs to have him grow, and of course get back together with Tommy, who sees him and loves him, flaws and all. And it is clear that Buck isn't just dealing with Eddie leaving, he's still not over the breakup. And pile both of these things together... he needs a hug. But Eddie was in fact a complete jerk about the whole thing. This episode for me also shows why not only is B*ddie not going canon, even if it did, it would not be a good relationship because I don't think Eddie knows how to have one.

I don't really care if Eddie comes back or not because Eddie's not a character I want to root for anymore. I hope he's able to repair his relationship with his son for Christopher's sake though.

[clairenatural]

okay but you see sam has ALSO fallen for dean's act. sam also believes dean to be the macho, daddy's soldier, beer boobs cars guy he presents himself as. this is why sam makes fun of dean whenever he even lightly steps out of that mold and thinks it's harmless banter instead of attacking an insecurity. it's why he laughs when john talks down to dean in the early seasons and it's why he seems surprised when dean is more comfortable with himself in the later seasons. it's why he just scoffs but doesn't push it when dean puts up a front and refuses to talk about his emotions and just accepts whatever excuse he makes at face value. it's why he offers dean a strip club to make him feel better when cas dies. and this isn't his fault!! dean has spent a very long time perfecting this image in front of everyone and ESPECIALLY to sam because along with it comes safety and security and stability and the only person. who has consistently been able to see through it. is castiel

[notbecauseofvictories]

I've seen that "the immortal loses their loved one but not their loved one's family; what if the immortal stayed close, followed them down the generations?" post a dozen times, and I understand it's intended to be sweet---but every single time I see it, all I can think is that it's straight-up the beginning of a horror story.

[nathaniacolver]

amanda overton is the wlw writers' GOAT nobody talk to me

(link for the article)

she said let's give LESBIANS everything the straights have already had time and time again

i knew the romeo & juliet teas were real

she had all the right inspirations. tomb raider, mass effect, tlou. gosh i love her.

THIS IS WHY CHRISTIAN AND ALEX ARE ALSO THE GOATSSSSSSSS wow i need more feminist men in my life bro.

yuri cocaine YURI COCAINEEEEEEEEE

YURI COCAINEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

amanda overton, every single oldest sister lesbian in the entire WORLD owes you their very lives.

[lavendercoded]

I dont get how so many hotd fans hate Alicent considering that she literally had to watch as her best friend, the most privileged woman in the realm, did whatever she wanted while facing very few repercussions when Alicent spent her teenage years being raped by Rhaenyra's dad and raising his kids and her best friend didnt seem to care that much. If that were happening to you, you'd also snap and attack someone with a knife, let's be serious here.

[cryptvokeeper]

Also idk maybe it was too subtle but. when oppenheimers wife takes him by the shoulders and says, “stop trying to make people pity you for the sins you committed” like. I just kind of figured that was a pretty explicit indictment of his actions and makes me struggle to take the “Oppenheimer is just a movie about a sad white mans feelings” arguments in good faith.

[dreamtydraw]

Started playing obscura, here is my current opinion :

[dykealloy]

Bisexual lighting generator

[aingeal98]

One thing I didn't expect to love about the finale is the fan reaction to the final scene. Because the narrative intent is very clear. Innie Mark chooses himself over his outie, something that's been a clear theme running throughout the season. It's bittersweet and painful because of Gemma, but we're supposed to also be celebrating, that the innies are choosing themselves. That Mark chose Helly over what his outie wanted.

And yet when I go on social media and look at fans reactions, so many of them didn't feel happy for innie Mark. Gemma is their main concern, and he made Gemma sad so fuck him!

It's so simplistic and emotional but I kind of love it? This character we barely knew until 2x07, this attempt at doing something interesting and deeper with the dead wife trope, we're supposed to care about Gemma, of course we are! All of outie Mark's actions are driven by his love for her, they had to make them convincing, make us root for them. But we're not supposed to care about her more than everyone else, more than the characters we've been following since the beginning. And yet somehow the actors and writers and directors just did their job too well, because in that final scene I'm seeing so many people ignore everything else going on to focus solely on Gemma and her pain.

And I love it. I don't care that fans are ignoring the themes and the story and the basic morality of innie vs outie Mark. I love how much Gemma is loved. She's a side character, she's thematically in a fight for narrative control through outie Mark, and innie Mark won this round. And yet despite how well written and acted and shot and built up those final moments are, so many people care primarily about HER. What should be a moment of bittersweet triumph is turned into pure tragedy by so many fans, because that's what it is for Gemma and she matters. More than anyone else.

[lizzybeeee]

You absolute buffoon. You troglodyte. You've been swimming in your Scrooge McDuck money pool so long that whatever fucking brains you had are jammed with coins and its dribbling out of your gaping mouth you dingus. You are the moral equivalent of a leech and have brain capacity smaller than fucking whoville.

[utilitycaster]

this was a good panel and I'm glad I watched it specifically because Taliesin deservedly has a reputation for coming up with fairly philosophical concepts behind his D&D characters, but also on another level he is just like "what if there were just wretched guy with so many things wrong with them. fucked up, right?" and it nearly always slaps

[rawliverandgoronspice]

re: sympathetic ganondorf vs evil for evil’s sake ganondorf, i think this is misrepresenting and underselling what’s actually offputting to people

“i’m evil because i’m evil” or “i’m evil because demise is evil” and the associated lust for power simply for its own sake has always been lame and low effort. there’s a reason it’s “shit tier” on the classic “villain motive tiers” thing

“i’m evil but there’s enough nuance to make the player at least somewhat sympathetic to me even if i’m still ultimately a bad guy” is a good thing that people like? i’ve never personally interacted with a zelda player who thinks windwaker ganondorf ruined the character or anything - he’s generally regarded as the gold standard of villain writing both in and out of zelda. this is roughly “high tier” on the tier chart

“actually TWIST i’m not evil at all, it’s the good guys who were evil all along, i’ve done nothing wrong and i’m completely justified in my righteous quest against the status quo, you’re the real secret true villain for being complicit in preserving it” is technically regarded as “elder god tier” on the motive tier chart but i would personally label it as “oscar bait tier”. these things *can* be compelling in conversation with the existing landscape, but often it comes across as a deliberate effort to subvert the audience’s expectations for the sake of being unpredictable (or worse, for the sake of proving you’re the smartest one in the room). in separate works where this conversation/critique is the entire point (eg. Watchmen or The Boys), that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the audience sets their expectations accordingly. in an established, long-running franchise, however, this almost always reads as dripping with contempt for the audience, like walking into a room and going “you morons like this shit? let me, a person much smarter than you, explain what it’s Actually about, because you’re an idiot if you’ve been a fan of this series before now”

on top of that, in the context of a series like zelda, this type of story feels myopic and disrespectful to the future of the series. “welp i burned down the 20+ years of lore behind this character so i could do a deconstruction, good luck using them in any capacity in the future, sounds like a you problem”

all this is to say, i think it’s a bit disingenuous/strawman-y to suggest that people put off by this want ganondorf to have 0 depth at all. there’s a lot of room for different kinds of depth, it’s just that the trend of the last decade has been for “depth” to mean “condescending deconstruction”

Hey!

Thanks for taking the time to write this ask, I think it warrants an interesting conversation. To me, there's like, a lot of things about what you're saying, and tbh I do see where you're coming from --in part.

First thing first... No yeah unfortunately some people Are hostile to even WW Ganondorf. It's been a rising trend in the fandom since TotK was released --people being very against the concept of any additional complexity to the character, either not getting it or considering anything he says pure manipulation that doesn't even warrant a conversation, literally making fun of people who were intrigued by this and wanting more out of this particular thread. This position not only absolutely exists within the fandom --less so on tumblr, I'll agree there-- but it's not even hard to stumble upon as a pretty regular opinion that gets tossed around. I had some interesting asks thrown my way, let's say. The idea that Ganondorf is a remotely interesting character that deserves more thought than what he gets is very much Extremely not the norm, and the very fact that you, as a fan, likes him as a guy is perceived as weird and missing the point by a lot of people. Like a lot a lot of people.

So I'll just... I guess I haven't clarified my position in a while, so I will reclarify my position on our favorite evil dude: I do like him perfectly fine as a villain, I do not want him to be "redeemed" by the narrative, I think he works fantastically as an ongoing threat, I think they could make him even scarier and more offputting and that would be super fun and thrilling... and I also think he already is complex. Like, inherently. Everything Nintendo has been putting into him since his first appearance is complicated --even their attempts at flattening him back in TotK do not fully work because they can't scrub him of the extremely loaded ideas they injected into him from the get-go. Nobody forced Nintendo to do a Mega Orientalism when inventing him, nobody made them write the NPCs to have this super weird antagonistic relationship to the gerudos in OoT, nobody made them have all this lore of the one man born every hundred years, raised by twin witches --and then nobody made them press on that tension point in Wind Waker explicitely, and then, in a more subtle fashion, in TP too. Nobody forced their hand when it came to having the strange "round ear" situation, suggesting (confirmed even, in additional canon) gerudos are born unblessed. The fact of the matter is: everything to make the relationship between Hyrule and the gerudos complicated has been there since 1998. There's no need for a Switcharoo to prove that anyone is smarter than the audience: everything messy has always been baked within the worldbuilding itself. It's in the cartridges already!!

Perspective on it is what could change, though --because, except in Wind Waker, we never get even a hint of a sense that we should think, as an audience, that Hyrule's super weird relationship to the gerudos is maybe questionable. Worth thinking about at least. Which, given the optics, is wild to me that to bring this particular can of worms up is still very largely considered crazy talk within the fandom (that, or the Sheikah situation across the series, also insane in many ways). And yes, it would perhaps lead to themes that are a bit heavier than what Zelda has been overtly dealing with (though, again, Majora's Mask exists --and I do find a lot of unpacked ideas in the Wild Era, like the very unquestionned gerudo bridal pipeline, very uhhh unfortunate already if I'm being honest --even moreso because it is unquestioned). But Zelda, when well handled narratively, can do wonderful things with evocative subtext, open doors never fully crossed, a lynchian pressure on what should feel offputting. We don't even need a sad monologue about it. It doesn't even need to be handled explicitely. But I think the pressure point is just better when understood and incorporated in some form, instead of being denied so hard the world itself start to feel incomplete and unlived.

I do want to say... I get what you mean with the whole "oscar bait" thing. There has been, historically and in recent years, a tendency to be driven by an external, almost panicked sense of morality rather than by the internal drive of a story, its internal thematic logic. I also do think it can feel very corporate, very "Disney looking back at its own movies and scrubbing off everything Buzzfeed deemed problematic in 2014 while making everything glossy and lifeless and awful" and it's not that great!!! and tbh I can't say I would trust Nintendo to handle any appreciation for the fact that the story of an eternal golden kingdom cheering on beating the evil outsiders who want to corrupt everything good and pure and blonde about that perfect inherently good place, is like, extremely not neutral. It absolutely is a delicate thread to weave, and I agree that putting a definitive end to Hyrule is probably not the smartest IP move to do. But, Hyrule doesn't have to be condemned as Bad, it can be merely complicated. And ongoing, regardless. To keep on with the Disney parallel: The Lion King would feel weird if we started to peel off the internal politics of the hyenas, it's just not the right place for it, when everything about this story revolves around the Righteousness of the Divine Right to Rule. But if the Lion King was an ongoing series that had been looping on itself for a while... wouldn't it make sense to figure out how to achieve majesty by studying other angles too, eventually? Is it that strange to suggest the exercise is like, possible? That it can be handled with artistry and soul?

I feel like... Yes, to acknowledge Ganondorf's humanity --not even to coddle it, just to acknowledge it-- implies taking in everything that makes him who he is, and that might rattle some foundational ideas about why this ancestral fight is even happening in the first place. I also do not think it means that he must be Good now. He can still punch a child and cackle maniacally, he can still be unredeemable --he can still destroy himself and others out of the most unconstructive spite ever, and we can still see the purpose in defeating him while basking in the "yea....." left in his wake (Wind Waker did that!!! Wind Waker did that and then we had more Zelda games!! crazy how that happened). This is hardly undoable. It does take some narrative skill, and some commitment to taking a bit of a risk, but Ganondorf is genuinely unmanageable as a character if you insist on your refusal to acknowledge his foundations --and I think it's partially why TotK's story is such a mess. He sells a TON, but you can't have him breathe slightly too loud without risking the entire world falling apart. They did try in TotK, so very hard, and to me they still failed--as insane as he behaves, Hyrule still doesn't come out of this looking good or particularly justified, because the very central core of Ganondorf's character is to be subjugated, and then rebelling in a destructive and brutally selfish, uncompromising manner that ends up robbing him of humanity --and the discomfort of that premise will therefore always haunt the conversation. Nintendo dug themselves into that mess. I feel like a lot of the Ganondorf fans I know merely... point at that. At the mess. And I feel like the longer the games avoid this mess, the more coats of spinach green they slather ontop of his skin, and the more nonsensical characterization they pile up, and the more Ganondorf will become a parody of who he once was, and what made him compelling to begin with.

And to top it all off, as if he wasn't contentious and complicated enough to handle already, they leaned into the internet turning him into a sex symbol for some fucking reason??? Yeah I genuinely have no idea how Nintendo will manage this dude moving forward, because to me, he is, at best, an endless source of (very lucrative) headaches, and at worst a ticking time bomb. I'm not sure how long they can get away with that TotKification strategy, is what I mean.

(Also: I tried to not overdwell on all the incredibly complicated conversation re: race and orientalism, but it's borderline impossible to have this conversation without acknowledging that I have never seen a major pop culture villain receive more pushback against "woobification" than him, and I don't think it's a complete coincidence let's say :) )

[tae-shimura-is-my-wife]

Regarding the "SP pushed the ichiruki agenda" there's an argument that people often misses, because yeah if they brainwashed everyone to ship IR why would this exactly be a problem? "Is because they erased canon ships moments!1!1!!" ok but how did they know? Did Kubo told someone in the studio which couples were going to be canon? The "biggest" IR filler scenes (that Kubo adored mind you) were BEFORE the couples become canon, so it doesn't make sense to blame them for not adding it? Also Kubo never complained about it, neither when it was airing neihter when the manga ended.

Also Kubo talked about IR having matching underwear as merch and did the honeymoon spread drawing, of course the studio wouldn't think that giving more fanservice is a bad thing when the author himself acts like this 😭. They probably thought IR was going to be the endgame.

[orionsgirdle]

with a lot of this alicent hightower analysis something becomes very clear about how women are perceived in media. when she has a baby she gets the #MOTHER character tag and all other traits disappear. she must now exist solely for her children. all her motivations must be related to her children.

compare that to how viserys is treated by the fandom and the mainstream media. yes he is a father, but he's also a husband who loved his first wife (even though he killed her). he loved his brother. he loved his valyrian history, his little dragon figurines. people have no trouble understanding him as a full-fledged, flawed character with conflicting motivations.

alicent though? why is her sole focus not on making her son the king like in the book? how dare she have conflicting, contradictory desires outside of what her children want? it's like if a mother's reason for existing is not her children then what is the point of her being there?