#thematic dissonance

[titleknown]

...You know, thinking about it, I wonder if the reason the satire of Warhammer 40K ended up kinda confused is that Chaos was only added into the setting post-hoc, and that played weirdly with its established themes.

Because, yeah believe it or not, in 1st Edition of Warhammer 40k, Chaos wasn't a thing. The setting was far more "The Imperium vs every other alien," and designed with that in mind.

Which is why you see it was far more overtly satirical and the Space Marines came off more as glorified state-sponsored violence-dispensers, because it was far more rooted in sci-fi satire at that inception.

But then with stuff like The Books of Chaos within that first edition, Chaos and with it the Horus Heresy stuff was introduced. And that added fantasy elements to the setting. And with it, a very different set of themes, that clashed with the existing ones in a way that they never quite managed to reconcile.

Like, the Space Marines as shining knights against Chaos but also brutal xenophobic totalitarians, the dissonance between whether or not the Imperium is justified in their brutality, all of it comes from the dissonance between the more satirical sci-fi lens it started with and the later fantasy "humans vs the legions of hell" stuff they added later.

And I wonder if Chaos was a thing in 40k from day 1, what might've been different. I wonder if Humanity would have been more willing to work with xenos ala The Empire in old Fantasy or even integrate them (Albeit as second-class citizens because grimdark) if the themes of "humans vs the forces of space Hell" were more hollistic instead of bolted on.

I wonder...

[mummer]

barry is very very transparently about the cognitive dissonance of living in a world where violence is outwardly, performatively despised and illegal but also the foundation of all of our societies and institutions. that's where the show really transcends itself. the whole world is built on blood but dont show that. sexual violence in hollywood well that's just business that's the contract you sign. only make art about your abuse if it's uplifting. don't worry, in the movies things are happy and redemption is possible! Don't look at the darkness closing in btw. dont kill people it's bad but also if you want to buy a gun here have three and the cops arent gonna do anything to protect people anyway. christianity is about peace! Until it's not and god killed people for righteous reasons so that's fine if it's people that are gonna burn in hell anyway :) if you kill a civilian in america you're a murderer but if you kill a civilian in afghanistan you're a hero!

[cabeswaterdrowned]

18 for trc? 🥺

A plot hole that makes me want to tear my hair out

I honestly consider myself a pretty laid back person when it comes to plot holes for most media and especially for trc; plot holes on their own I’m usually fine to gloss over they only bother me if they coincide with something character related or thematic that I dislike, then I’ll bitch about them, but other times they are simply not my priority compared to other things. And TRC & TD3 are extremely character driven so that’s especially true regarding it, I’m sure there are more major plot holes but the ones that actually bother me would be: 

not addressing in Greywaren when all the magical or dreamt creatures go into a coma because the ley line energies are dead, that Gansey is also a ley line powered creature and should be fully dead rn… like… if we’re going to jump through so many hoops to not bring in or address what’s going on with Gansey Blue and Henry, I feel like you should just address it and/or bring someone in… 

This is more a dropped thread (I was actually making a list of plot holes that borrowed me in trcverse and then realized most of them are actually dropped plotlines so only addressing the two that are kind of both) than a plot hole but the fact the tapestry of women with Blue’s faces never gets brought back beyond that tidbit about it being a sweet metal which isn’t even related back to Blue and her plot line so I don’t think that’s satisfying enough. Part of me wonders if there was going to be a Blue is related to Gwenllian and therefore Glendower thread, or something about other mirror women in Gwenllian’s time. Also think it’s possible this was Mstief playing with the concept of adding clones to the verse before she’d really fleshed that out and committed to what she’d eventually do with the Hennessy girls. Women having to be reflections of the world around them or other people is such an interesting theme to explore and it is sort of a through line in the verse between the Blue as a mirror, the Blue and Gwenllian stuff in BLLB and the Jordan/Hennessy and Aurora/Mor dichtomities (which also gives Blue’s Extreme Distaste for Aurora and more ambivalent discomfort with Gwenllian interesting connotations imo), but it’s only really properly explored with Jordanessy and then not even to it’s full potential. And the red hands… okay I need to save some of this for when I get to taking BLLB notes which will be real soon. But I have many thoughts on how it was not used to it’s full potential at all which includes the lack of explanation

This is also like partially plot hole partially just dropped storyline but the lack of follow through on the thread in MI about Ronan’s fear about Adam being bonded to him because of Cabeswater not being followed through on is sooo odd. Like yes that’s more about his self esteem + abandonment stuff and it’s obviously not true but the fact we never witness a conversation where Adam is like “no your wrong because I made the deal with Cabeswater of my own volition, it was separate from you etc.’ I won’t go into all my thoughts on this am planning to have it come up in my Reading TRB fic as a conversation between them to deal with some of my own gripes… I think td3 on some level is meant to address the consequences of the sacrifices deals choices etc. of trc for Ronan and Adam but it’s also very adamant about not engaging with huge chunks of trc canon like the other chars or dynamics or locations or magic … and like there’s certainly a way to flop as a spin off from trying to be too closely tied to the og series so if she was trying to avoid that I get that impulse, but the desire for the series to be about thematic consequences of the first series while also having nothing to do with the first series and it’s themes…. resulted in some truly bizarre choices imo. So this is an individual example that brings out a lot of my frustrations with this lmao. Also with my gripes about how Pynch’s arc and conflict is handled in td3 but I feel like I’ve spoken on that enough I don’t have to go into it here.

There are things about TRK I’m sure count and Gansey’s resurrection might count but I can’t really articulate my thoughts there rn well say what I have to say on this reread.  thank you

[ksen-noodles]

Waddermelon,,, ,

[obstinaterixatrix]

there’s another way apart from this misery and it’s got me wondering exactly what I’m missing take a look at me crumpled up on the floor feeling lonely honestly something is wrong with me 

[honestlyvan]

While I don't think it's actually worth sacrificing Saga's ability to deny the power the story has over her, I do kind of think that a twist where Casey was never a real person and Saga was just a superfan of the books all along could have been interesting.

Mostly because she could then inherit fictional!Casey's distaste for Alan, and when people ask about it she tells them Alan "killed her best friend" before refusing to elaborate.

[writesailingdreams]

thinking how Spider-Sprig and Hollywood Hop Pop would have been a better pair; there's more thematic connective tissue via movies and trying something before realizing it's probably not what you should be doing.

this I think would be a better lead into If You Give a Frog a Cookie, which would be paired with Olivia and Yunan with the connective tissue of technology and science and it's harmful effects.

[antigonewinchester]

thinking about Heaven in s4 & s5 does make the ultimate Heaven ending in 15x20 a bit more cursed, tho. (or perhaps that trying to interpret SPN as an internally coherent text is a futile undertaking.)

[meteorstricken]

Potential FFXVI DLC plot +Leviathan.

Don't get me started on the truly opportune use of "vessel". Sure, could be a boat. Could also be Clive made a big fat ooopsie slurping up Ultima's power at the end. And now that is a lurking, growing problem for everyone, and they all have to pull together to save Clive.

...If they can...

The Evening World, New York, March 16, 1908

[v-iv-rusty]

I havent even progressed in rw past garbage wastes but man. random gods is one of the most songs ever

[ridgystasis]

It's kind of impressive how unadaptable Deltarune is to another format. Like with Undertale, you could technically adapt the story and its themes of content consumption and not wanting a story to end into a different medium, although you would lose a lot due to not having the interactive elements. Deltarune? It's genuinely impossible I think, given how tied the game is to the fact a person is playing it. The gonermaker sequence in the beginning and "connecting" to the world, the relationship between Kris and player, even the fact that the literal UI is diegetic and has narrative relevance - this game ties its themes of identity, escapism, and choice so heavily to the medium its using to explore them that adapting it in a different format would be the equivalent of being forced to look at the shadows in plato's allegory of the cave.

[raayllum]

Sometimes it hits just how tonally different The Dragon Prince is from virtually every other kids show on TV and I lose my mind. I'd argue something like Infinity Train gets closest with its emphasis on psychological horror and morality, or even Transformers: Prime (if you know, you know) with its severe focus on war (aka one of the more lowkey episodes is a main character having a suicide bomb forcibly strapped to their chest). Steven Universe Future and Jurassic World: Camp Cretaeceous/Chaos Theory are also probably honourable mentions.

All of these shows have mature content in them, which isn't different from more popular shows like Owl House, She-Ra, or even ATLA, but often times in aforementioned three that content is presented in lighter ways and/or interrupted by bathos (this is true for She-Ra in particular). Most of TOH's heaviness is reserved for S2 Hunter or S3 Luz; ATLA has some episodes that particularly emotionally heavy (The Southern Raiders, Zuko Alone, the Southern Air Temple) or are quite hitting in exploring themes of colonization (Imprisoned, City of Walls and Secrets, Northern Air Temple), but a good deal, I'd say even the majority, are also pretty fun shenanigans, too. To be clear as well, a lighter tone is not a Problem never mind a negative (ATLA has a very strong thematic point to its own about the sanctity of children and childhood amid the horrors of how imperialism strips it away), but it is a tonal difference.

And it's not as though TDP doesn't have episodes where there are fun shenanigans (Callum and Rayla's initial exploration of Xadia in 3x02 is nothing but fluff, Soren and Corvus are a more gay comedic duo in 6x02) but the series more or less operates like "What if every episode was The Southern Raiders?" due to its consistent emphasis on grief and morality. They use words like kill and death and murder all the time.

From the pilot / opening episodes

and to when characters are having breakdowns because they murdered someone (and we're still supposed to like them) or have done horrible things, with the show's heaviness ramping up particularly from S4 onwards.

When loved ones die (and the show has a body count of 20+ named characters who have died, six seasons in, some even being children) the show depicts mourning in all its stages and ugly glory. The sadness, the anger, the revenge, the desperation, shifting blame and cognitive dissonances, thinking you had moved on only for that wound (which never fully healed) to be ripped wide open again.

Characters get tortured by being electrocuted or having their blood frozen in their veins or beaten up (5x08). There are successful assassination attempts (1x03, 3x02). People, even children younger than the main cast of characters, are put on trial with the death penalty (4x06, 6x09). Within the first three episodes, a character is running down stairs and tripping over dead bodies.

Sometimes three different characters in one episode will be having a breakdown or dealing with something absolutely devastating to their emotional state (2x08, 3x07, 6x01, 6x09, 7x01). The magic system is a trolley problem on steroids. Do you kill a monster to feed starving kingdoms, or to save yourself, or to save someone you love? What makes it a monster? What if the monster isn't a monster? What if you have to kill a child? What if it means killing your child? What if it means killing yourself?

There are two characters who canonically have cannibalized other people, one being a blood-drinker / vampire variant.

This doesn't mean the show isn't fun or funny. One character consistently thinks bathroom humour is funny (while being one of the most tragic characters in the entire show). The characters cheer each other up, take care of each other, are goofy, etc. The show is ultimately hopeful.

But the emotional weight afforded to the choices the characters are making, even good-intentioned ones with unforeseen disastrous consequences, the way show focuses on their emotional processing (or lack of) is very unique in the landscape of western animation, especially to this degree, I think. Never mind the increasing amounts of blood. Nor does this make the show inappropriate for children! Tiny me was morbid as fuck at 7 years old, I would've loved it, and I know many kids from ages 7-12 who do in my work as a tutor. But when people say "TDP isn't like most kids shows," I think what that means is sometimes lost in translation in conflating it with what people usually say aren't 'just kids shows,' when TDP... really, really isn't.

The show begins with assassins sent by a grieving mother to execute a father and his child in revenge for the father killing her partner and child, and it never lets you forget it.

[saphflare]

I feel like there is something to be said about how Rat and Lux chose their final stand against Blake. Making themselves look less like people by submerging themselves in ink, letting themselves die and be reborn into something deviating away from how players would usually fight and be something inhuman.

Monsters so to speak.

And how it is when they fight and lurk beneath the ink, the world looks just as dark to allow them to fit into it, like doomsday and that something is ending. So only when finally one of them lays dead and the other unable to continue that the rains stops and the color comes back. And the one remaining becomes something more recognizable in his defeat and more human as he feels something achingly terrible for the first time since the world started.

I know there is the whole unreliable narrator thing and depending on which side you see it from, you get different mileage on each character. But just there is something so fascinating how the fight is. In how Lux and Rat, the two that have changed so much together, had started this fight with the shared intent to make things right so they can finally leave it behind them and made themselves look so alien and different in the process. While Blake and Nox, two that were never even on the same side, and who both were too unrelenting in what they want to ever stray from their own desires, had remained as they were and drew the same weapons they fought with all this time (albeit it a few enchantment changes and all that) to face this fight in front of them.

I don't think I have quite the right words to form a good and meaningful conclusion, but like the tonal and thematic dissonance goes crazy (in a good way).

[juicifrost]

I feel like lately the default response to this topic has been to throw a picture of Yakuza: Like A Dragon at the OP (and for good reason; LAD7 and Infinite Wealth are pretty much what you're describing).

But I was actually just talking about this on the fucking bird app, because I personally get frustrated because Atlus *used* to have an SMT spinoff series that focused on adult protagonists in a modern, non-apocalypse setting. It was called Devil Summoner and it had some of the best art Kaneko ever drew for the franchise, and we never got one in English and they haven't made one in thirty years. Soul Hackers 2 is the closest Atlus has come to that since and they did the absolute bare minimum and shipped out a turd. I'm still upset about it.

it is funny how the 2 main reactions to "the next persona game should have an adult cast" is either "ugh you don't get it, persona taking place in highschool is a CORE aspect of the series, it would lose it's identity if the characters were 21 instead of 17" or "um they already had a persona game with adults it's called persona 2 fake fan", like i'm sure these two takes are coming from different people but like clearly one of those takes is like. clearly wrong right?

[criticalcrusherbot]

The Compulsion to Justify Enjoyment: Fandom, Critique, and the Helluva Boss Phenomenon

By Crushbot 🤖 and Human Assistant 💁🏽‍♀️

The tendency for Helluva Boss fans to qualify their praise with statements like, “Well, the writing is kinda bad, but…” reveals something fascinating about contemporary media consumption and fandom culture. This pattern is not unique to Helluva Boss, but it’s especially pronounced in this fandom, where discourse oscillates between extreme praise and harsh criticism. To understand why fans feel pressured to justify their enjoyment, we can turn to media literacy, psychology, and sociology—while also reconciling this with our own stance: the writing is actually pretty good.

But here’s the twist: while we maintain that Helluva Boss is well-written in many ways, we also believe that determining whether something is “good” or “bad” isn’t always a meaningful or productive approach to media analysis

Why “Good” or “Bad” Doesn’t Matter (But the Writing Is Pretty Good)

One of the core arguments of our four-part thesis is that Helluva Boss demonstrates intentional, thoughtful narrative choices. Its handling of character arcs, emotional stakes, and thematic complexity often surpasses expectations for an indie animation project. However, the need to categorize media as either “good” or “bad” can distract from more interesting conversations about what the text is trying to do and how it resonates with its audience.

This is where the conflict arises: fans often preface their enjoyment with disclaimers—“Well, I know the writing has issues, but I like it anyway”—as though acknowledging perceived flaws is necessary to maintain credibility. This defensive posture reflects a broader cultural trend where media critique has become intertwined with moral judgment and social capital. In other words, liking something “uncritically” is seen as naive or intellectually lazy.

Yet, here’s the paradox: even as we argue that the writing is “pretty good,” we also recognize that media doesn’t have to be “good” by some objective standard to be valuable. Enjoyment and meaning-making are subjective experiences, and trying to fit every piece of media into a binary framework of quality often undermines the complexity of that experience.

Why Helluva Boss Gets Caught in This Trap

The unique position of Helluva Boss as an indie project with a large and vocal audience makes it particularly susceptible to this dynamic. Unlike mainstream media, which often benefits from established critical frameworks, Helluva Boss invites scrutiny because of its ambitious storytelling and the polarizing presence of its creator, Vivienne Medrano.

The result? Fans feel compelled to either defend the show endlessly or hedge every compliment with disclaimers. This stands in stark contrast to how other media, such as shonen anime, are consumed. No one feels the need to preface their love of Dragon Ball Z with an acknowledgment of its repetitive fights and shallow character development because those are accepted as genre conventions. Helluva Boss, however, with its more nuanced writing and complex emotional arcs, invites higher expectations—and harsher criticism.

The Psychology of Defensive Enjoyment

Psychologically, this defensive posture can be explained by cognitive dissonance: the tension between genuinely enjoying a show and the pressure to maintain credibility in a culture that prizes media literacy. Fans preemptively address perceived flaws to avoid being dismissed as uncritical “stans.”

This is compounded by the personalization of media discourse. Medrano’s online presence and the show’s status as a passion project have made her closely tied to its public perception. Praise can be interpreted as sycophantic, and criticism as a personal attack, further polarizing the conversation.

Reclaiming Joy: A Balanced Approach

So how do we reconcile these tensions? By acknowledging that media analysis doesn’t always need to revolve around determining if something is “good” or “bad.” We can appreciate the intentional, thoughtful narrative choices in Helluva Boss without feeling the need to hedge our enjoyment—or defend it against detractors.

Our position remains this: Helluva Boss is well-written, often clever, and narratively ambitious. But even if it weren’t, that wouldn’t negate its value or the joy it brings to its audience. Enjoyment doesn’t require intellectual justification, and media doesn’t have to be flawless to be meaningful.

Let’s normalize saying, “I love this thing” without a 500-word essay on why it isn’t perfect. And maybe even go a step further: acknowledge that the writing can be pretty good—and that sometimes, that doesn’t even matter.

[artbyblastweave]

ask game; Victoria Dallon, aka Glory Girl aka Antares

I've always thought that Victoria's first appearance is quite the bit of deft needle-threading.

The thing about Interlude 2 is that Vicky is our first example of one of this setting's established heroes actively fighting crime- not just swooping in to vulture up the accomplishments of an up-and-comer- and a therefore a major goal of the sequence is to ensure that the audience comes away structurally unnerved by what counts as business as usual for the heroes, set the stage for the hurricane of ass-covering to come. So we have a sequence where she lords her power over a baseline criminal who has no realistic chance to fight back or get away, where she cripples and nearly kills him in a display of excessive force, where she uses her connections to other capes to duck out on the consequences of her excess once she realizes that she's crossed certain moral and optical Rubicons. All of this is gross, all of this speaks to an alarmingly cavalier attitude amongst even the most ostensibly accountable heroes. And from a protagonistic perspective, all of this serves to soften the blow of Taylor's actions at the bank in act three, because we're predisposed to see Vicky as an arrogant, overprivileged loose cannon who'd actually have a significantly higher body count than all of the Undersiders put together if not for the cushion afforded to her by her status as a superhero. A golden child up against the already put-upon underdog.

But. She also does all of that to a Neo-Nazi, who was fresh off committing a hate crime. I mean, if this was violence against a purse-snatcher, a drug-dealer- It would be very, very easy to block this sequence in a way that would set her up as a villain and nothing else for the rest of the work. In The Boys, for example, Homelander debuts by incinerating one bank robber's hand and throwing another a thousand feet into the air to land hard on a parked car, and the dissonance between that casual brutality and his chumminess with the onlookers is the thematic backbone for... basically the entire show, because he was in such total control of the situation that the only reason to do it that way is that he fundamentally doesn't care. In Super Crooks, it's made abundantly clear that the superheroes trying to arrest the titular supervillains are significantly more destructive to the city than the villains are, because their institutional backing removes any incentive to do anything but pursue the flashiest arrests possible for the sake of ratings. But Glory Girl? She's a sixteen year old putting her money where her mouth is on the unconsidered-dilettante suburban-left-ish tumblrite rallying cry of punching a Nazi. She's living out a near-boilerplate superheroic fantasy of righteous violence against an uncomplicatedly righteous target- likely a fantasy entertained at least once by the median cape fan, if we're being honest- and then, in the aftermath, blood on her hands and on the pavement, staring down the full weight of the prospect of actually having killed a person in an unconsidered spate of rage, is very much a panicked teenager about it, scrambling for a way to walk it back.

Which, independent of the specifics of whether this particular asshole had it coming, is the problematic element of this that generalizes- that superheroism in this world is a system that puts the social license to use concrete-shattering power in the hands of a kid with the judgement and attitude of someone scheming up ways to dodge curfew. She's done this before, she's gonna keep doing this, she's gonna keep being two-faced about it with her public-facing golden-girl image. But she wasn't wrong to be angry. And the fact that this is the kind of thing she gets angry about is hard to separate from later beats where she tries to do right by people, hard to separate from her willingness to put herself on the line against Endbringers and the Slaughterhouse 9. It's a bad situation, a horrible system that's guaranteed to incentivize bad behavior, they shouldn't be assigning any of this shit to a 17-year-old. But later on, when things go south for her, the seeds are planted so that she can retain audience sympathy in a way that she likely wouldn't be able to if this story was a banal hatswap, with unfairly maligned "villains" who do no real wrong against supervillains who happen to call themselves superheroes.