#there haven’t really been stakes for the characters for a while

[queer-ragnelle]

I'm honestly kinda disgusted by the way a lot of authors just seeped their misogyny onto Guinevere to make her so horrible, lol. effectively destroyed a lot of people's view of her and she gets blamed for everything?? people keep shitting on her, saying Lancelot should be shipped with "someone better" and I'm just really annoyed because.. Guinevere is horribly characterized by these weirdos authors 💀. It does not take much to portray her as a complex character while also not making her shitty on purpose because you don't like her for her affair, lol.

I love her so much and it's disappointing how she's been treated :(( which is why I'll never be able to hate Guinevere or her ship with Lancelot

My friend it’s honestly so exhausting at this point. It’s not even limited to writing Guinevere herself as insufferable, but writing other characters behaving worse toward her than they ever were in medlit. Arthur hitting and degrading her when he cheats on her? (Warrior of the West by M. K. Hume) Lancelot using her for political gain and never loving her at all? (Enemy of God by Bernard Cornwell) Owain blocking her passage as she flees danger? (Legend in Autumn by Persia Woolley) Agravaine threatening to rape her? (The Road to Avalon by Joan Wolf) Gawain threatening to rape her? (Guinevere by Lavinia Collins) WHO are these characters bro you got me fucked up!!! The subtext here is that the authors hate Guinevere (read: women) so much they’re willing to warp everyone around her to treat her like garbage!!!

“Guinevere is bad because she has sex outside marriage.” Yeah so does Arthur. He fucked his own sister. In the dark. Leading her to believe he was her husband. So there’s Mordred, but there’s also Loholt and Arthur the Less etc. Arthur has many bastards from his extramarital affairs. (Vulgate and Post-Vulgate) Yet he isn’t canceled. Hm. Wonder what the difference could be? Let’s investigate. Seems authors treat Morgause and Morgan similarly to Guinevere. Gee, what is the common denominator here? Meanwhile in medlit, Morgause didn’t commit any crimes—she didn’t rape Arthur to have Mordred, she never neglected her children, she never cheated on Lot, and she didn’t prey on young men, she had ONE consistent lover who was younger than her AFTER her husband died. And she was murdered for it. (Post-Vulgate) Yet every other author writes her as a rapist (The Once and Future King by T. H. White), child grooming (The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart), pedophile (The Book of Gaheris by Kari Sperring), trying to put one of her sons on the throne (many examples). Now, Morgan is evil. But not for lewdness, for trying to murder people. In literally every source. Hello. It’s very simple. These authors are ridiculous. They care more about highlighting their opinion that fictional women having sex is BAD than writing a good story. When there are plenty of actually bad things happening in medlit they could condemn instead. You know, like the misogyny? Burning Guinevere at the stake??? You couldn’t make this up. It’s the utter disdain for the material for me. Assuming these dumbasses are even reading the material. Write something else where I can’t see it. (To be clear, I don’t even hate all the books I listed as examples, but they are unfortunately examples.)

Thankfully I haven’t encountered the blogger discourse regarding this. At least not lately. My advice to anyone who sees people shitting on something you like is to block them. Just do it. Fuck that noise. It’s not worth it.

Also I have to laugh at ship discourse about Guinevere/Lancelot. Of all pairs! It’s so unserious. They’re not some random comphet duo from the newest tumblr trending fandom. They’re mythological characters from a medieval literary tradition. Lancelot was created for her. In the 12th century. That was 900 years ago. It feels juvenile to reduce them to ship discourse. Especially because the story is fluid, it can be reshaped to fit the author’s narrative. So if Guinevere sucks, it’s because they made her that way. This is the epitome of making up a girl to be mad at.

“Oh but in Knight of the Cart—” Shh stop talking. If you’re pulling out KotC like some “gotcha” about Guinevere’s treatment of Lancelot, then you’re lost, buddy. You may be seeking entertainment in the wrong place! Guinevere and Lancelot aren’t real. Nobody was “abused” because they’re characters, narrative tools, to tell a story. Guinevere is flawed. Nobody ever said she wasn’t. If that’s too much complexity for you then I don’t know what else there is to say.

Honestly? Nobody is obligated to like Guinevere. I think it’s stupid to dislike her but the real take away is—if you dislike Guinevere so much, hate her even, why the are you writing so poorly about her? She’s as old a character as Arthur himself. Show some fucking respect or get out.

Anyway I’m going to end this with a recommendation! Today I started the third book of Sharan Newman’s Guinevere trilogy. The first two, Guinevere and The Chessboard Queen were utterly AWESOME!! Lots and lots of named women, like Guinevere’s mother Guenlain, Cador’s wife Sidna and daughter Lydia, Guinevere’s handmaiden Risa, and so on. The one downside is Morgause and Morgan are your typical modern retelling baddies, but overall it’s two thumbs up from me. Many points of view, but Guinevere is fascinating and complex and most importantly she is beloved!!!!!! Really hoping it stays enjoyable through to the end. Miss Newman is still in print, so I encourage everyone to seek these books out at your local library or from your favorite bookseller. Here’s a quote from book 2, The Chessboard Queen.

[inamindfarfaraway]

The Morality of Mabel and Dipper Pines

Warning: Dipper Levels of Overanalysis Ahead

I’d like to make it clear at the start that I love both of these characters equally and they’re both good people, just in different ways. But I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Mabel’s flaws and less of Dipper’s, so I’d like to contribute to the discussion of their respective characters by exploring a divide between them I haven’t seen talked about much.

Mabel really wants to be a moral person. She places a lot of intrinsic worth in the concepts of ethics, like kindness and fairness and the wellbeing of others. Being a bad person could be considered her worst fear. It’s definitely up there with her other greatest fears of losing her relationship with Dipper and the inevitability of change, and those fears developed later largely in response to Ford and the baggage he brought with him.

Dipper just doesn’t care about that as much. That isn’t to say he’s a bad person! He's compassionate, selfless, brave and unquestionably heroic by the end of the show. They both are. But it sticks out to me how differently they think about ethics. For example, Dipper literally kills Wax Sherlock Holmes, while Mabel is so averse to hurting someone’s feelings that she can’t bear to break out of a false, one-sided relationship with Gideon until Dipper's life is at stake. You see what I’m getting at here? But I have more evidence! Buckle up, this is gonna get long.

Compare how they treat their rivals, Pacifica and Robbie. These are ordinary humans with no real authority over them who, age and class gaps aside, they're basically on even footing with in confrontations, so this is a good metric for how aggressive they are when upset and how much they hold grudges in mundane situations.

In “Irrational Treasure”, Mabel is deeply hurt by Pacifica’s mockery to the point of giving up her silly identity, and sets out to prove her wrong that she can be competent. But at the end, when presented with the opportunity to destroy the Northwest family’s fake prestigious legacy that they use to justify putting others down, she declares, “I’ve got nothing to prove” and lets it go. She’s secure in herself. Her motivation is satisfied. Why bother putting more pain and strife into the world? It’s Dipper, who has been only been hurt by proximity to Mabel, who insists on exposing the truth specifically to spite Pacifica and takes away that “Man, revenge is underrated. That felt awesome!” Revenge is arguably a form of justice, especially in this sense of revealing an unfair lie, but still, he takes great pleasure in bringing an enemy down for the sake of it, not to fix the damage they did.

In “Fight Fighters”, Dipper’s vindictive streak returns. He manipulates the ridiculously powerful Rumble McSkirmish into brutally beating up Robbie on the fraudulent charge of murder, threatening Robbie’s life. He didn’t realize Rumble would try to kill Robbie, but he was fine with him severely injuring him. Rumble is a fighting game character, a superpowered master martial artist. Robbie is a normal fifteen-year-old. This is not a sportsmanlike matchup. By the end Dipper learns his lesson and takes responsibility, but so does Mabel about hurting people to try to have a perfect life and people still complain about that!

In “The Golf War”, Mabel is again the twin with a bone to pick with Pacifica, but Dipper takes her rivalry more seriously than her and is more willing to be mean about it. He encourages her to cheat when she doesn’t want to, justifying it because Pacifica is “cheating at life”. Understandable, but still underhanded. While Mabel bonds and buries the hatchet with her rival by the end, outright declaring their rivalry to be stupid, Dipper holds onto it, refusing to forgive Pacifica at all. He disapproves of Mabel's offer to give her a ride home afterward, despite the pouring rain and her absent parents. He still wholeheartedly considers her “the worst” and tells her so to her face at the beginning of “Northwest Mansion Mystery”, even though he saw her and Mabel help each other in their fight against the Lilliputtians and Pacifica thank Mabel and accept her apology.

In “The Love God”, Mabel’s compassion is on full display. She makes it apparent that she wants everyone she knows to be happy, to the point of making a chart to show her friends’ feelings with stickers, and goes out of her way to help Robbie just because she doesn’t think any human being should be so lonely and sad. Dipper initially has no sympathy for Robbie’s misery and sees the twins and his old friends leaving him to rot as a good thing.

Dipper is more emotionally invested in hating people and willing to play dirty. Mabel prefers to see the best in people, forgive, deescalate conflict and turn enemies into friends whenever possible, and has more respect for honour and sportsmanship.

Compare the insecurities they highlight in "Society of the Blind Eye". These could have been their last words spoken with their memories of the summer, so they are fully candid and vulnerable.

Mabel confesses, “I only love some of my stuffed animals and the guilt is killing me!” She reprimands herself for not having sincere affection for all the people in her life… who are inanimate objects, hence this being a joke about how immature and overly sentimental she is. But she’s telling the truth! Not being honest about your feelings toward someone who loves you (as toys are assumed to love their kids) is wrong. It’s something a bad, or at least flawed, person would do. We also know that it’s something Mabel can do with real consequences - she loves Dipper unconditionally, but her frequent teasing of him instead of letting this on damages his self-esteem more than she intends and often realizes - and when she does realize as in “Little Dipper”, she’s ashamed of herself. Her guilt is that she’s failing morally, that she hurts the people around her despite her good intentions.

Dipper admits, “Sometimes I use big words and don’t actually know what they mean. I mean, I’m supposed to be the smart guy! If I’m not the smart guy, then who am I?” He primarily thinks of his worth in terms of competence. Dipper is generally not that confident, at this point in time. He has an intense drive to prove his worth. He is acutely aware of his physical and social shortcomings. But the one thing he knows that he does well is analytical, deductive and strategic thinking, and so to always have value he’s built his entire identity around being particularly intelligent. He’s the planner, the mastermind, the guy with the specialized knowledge and important big words who people have no choice but to respect and listen to, because a lifetime of loneliness besides Mabel has taught him that given a choice, they probably won’t. Except just like Mabel’s all-loving attitude, there’s an element of performance. He doesn’t know everything; he’s inherently irrational to a degree like everyone else. So he tries to seem smarter than he is. His guilt is that he’s failing intellectually and practically, that he isn’t contributing enough to be worth something.

This is where Dipper diverges. He wants to be ethically good less than he wants to be good AT things, and respected for it. But they both beat themselves up when they don’t live up to their self-assigned archetypes of All-Loving Hero and The Smart Guy, when they aren’t good enough by their own unreasonably high standards.

"The Last Mabelcorn" deconstructs Mabel’s fixation on her moral perfection. Celestabellabethabelle, who I will henceforth call C-Beth for short, manipulates it to keep her out of the unicorns’ way. She makes manifest Mabel’s fear that she isn’t good enough no matter what she does. We see Mabel push herself further and further to try to prove herself, much like Dipper in episodes like “Dipper vs Manliness”, and emotionally unravel until she’s miserable, self-loathing and openly listing her vices in a way never seen before. But this isn’t productive! Wallowing in shame doesn’t motivate her to be better! She needs to learn that although she isn’t perfect, the virtues she has are good enough to work with to both get out and kick C-Beth out of her head. She decides to stop worrying about meeting an impossible ideal of goodness and just focus on doing good, by using efficient (if violent, and therefore immoral under certain paradigms) methods to protect her family. Her plot in this episode has its detractors and I understand the criticisms that the message wasn’t handled as well as it could have been. But I think it does okay. Mabel definitely reevaluates her need to feel like a good person here. She switches from prioritizing what’s important to her, the validation of being "pure of heart", to what’s important to others and in the bigger picture, simply getting the unicorn hair to keep Bill out of the Mystery Shack.

Finally, compare the twins’ disastrous errors in judgement in “Scary-Oke” and “Dipper and Mabel vs the Future”, when they both accidentally unleash terrible forces of evil upon the town and set in motion a local apocalypse.

Dipper recites an incantation from Journal 3 that causes the dead to rise as bloodthirsty zombies, desperate to prove to the government agents before they leave that the supernatural is real and warrants their help investigating, driven by both his desire for knowledge (his tool to feel secure in himself) and more immediately his fear of being dismissed as unworthy. He is emotionally vulnerable, but still creates the dangerous situation on his own initiative. Since he doesn’t need a blacklight to read the spell and the beginning of the episode established that he’s already familiar with all Journal 3’s visible entries, he knows what the spell would do. He doesn’t realize how many zombies will appear or how dangerous they’ll be. But he is aware that there are risks. Plus, the Shack is hosting a party full of innocent civilians and Mabel has explicitly asked him not to interfere with weirdness. The one thing she told him not to do that night was raise the dead! And what does he do? Raise the dead.

Mabel is actively deceived and manipulated into giving who she believes to be Blendin Blandin, an expert in time-altering technology, what she believes to be an item of such technology, with the intention of warping time to extend the summer for the town. This is a selfish choice. But on top of how emotionally compromised she is, sobbing in despair after “the worst day of [her] life”, consider her internal logic: the end of summer is going to mean the trials and tribulations of growing up for both her and Dipper, and they won’t even have each other if he gets his way; Wendy is already going through that and has told her how awful high school is; she overheard at least some of the Stans’ conversation at the end of “A Tale of Two Stans”, meaning she might know that Stan will have to give up his home and business once the summer is over; and she and Dipper both have true friends here who they will miss and be missed by, as opposed to Piedmont where we only see them supporting and comforting each other and never hear of any friends. And it isn’t like she’s the only one having fun! Stan is happier than ever, Ford is back home, Dipper’s come into his own more than she could ever have anticipated. He’ll still get to delve into the mysteries of this town that he loves so much. But she’ll be there too. If you want more Gravity Falls, you can see where she’s coming from. She genuinely thinks that “just a little more summer” would be a positive experience for everyone, with plenty of good reason. Yes, she’s recklessly messing with powerful forces that she doesn’t understand. Yes, she isn’t nearly as suspicious of this sudden miracle solution as she should be. But she has no evidence that this would harm anyone.

Their responses after making their mistake are also noteworthy. They’re both horrified and remorseful. But Dipper expresses no concern for the agents for the rest of the episode when it looks like they’ve been killed due to his actions. He even nonchalantly remarks that he thought they were dead when he sees them again. Mabel, however, reaches to stop Bill and begs him to “wait” before he knocks her unconscious. Then she’s imprisoned in Mabelland, which is designed to make her never want to leave and based on how it only occurs to her after she renounces it that the neon colours and repetitive background music are too much even for her, may additionally have a direct, though subtle, influence on her mind. So she’s a little distracted from her guilt. But by risking her life to fix the repercussions of her actions and save the town, she shows much more responsibility for the townspeople’s lives than Dipper showed for the agents he’d tried so hard to impress. He just happily went about his business for weeks believing he had two people’s deaths on his conscience. Never even looked into whether they survived.

These differences in their personal moral philosophies add another layer to the parallels between the two generations of Pines twins. Typically, Dipper parallels Ford and Mabel parallels Stan. But less so here! Like Mabel, Ford very staunchly believes in abstract moral theory, namely that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. He holds a grudge for weeks against Stan saving him from being lost in the dimensions through the portal, because it endangered the rest of the world by creating the Rift. It was a good deed with good intentions… but it didn’t only make life better for everyone. To Ford, that means it isn’t good enough. Hmm, which younger twin has a problem with judging anything short of ‘pure good’ to not be worthwhile? Also like Mabel, Ford’s self-righteousness is often hypocritical, considering his pride, selfishness and willingness to disregard the possible negative consequences of his actions, e.g. trusting Bill and building the portal in the first place.

Like Dipper, Stan is willing and ready to use underhanded methods to win against his enemies, to lie, cheat, steal and leverage assets he doesn’t really have the right to. He’s more inclined to be aggressive, spiteful and smug. As for holding grudges, even to an unreasonable extent, he personally despised a nine-year-old child even before he knew that the child was a bad person. He would absolutely summon Rumble McSkirmish to attack a rival for him. He prides himself on his cunning, another form of intelligence, and prioritises being good at what he does best over holding the moral high ground. He is shown to have lifelong insecurities about Ford being better than him in other fields (and thus explicitly valued more by their father); so his pragmatism is his way of trying to always be useful to the people he loves, and indeed a key way he shows them his love.

[speedofsoundsketches]

I know you aren't a fan of IDW Sonic comics, but I wanted to know your opinion about the Phantom Rider thing and the fact that Sonic is hiding his identity, do you think it's something out of character?

Hard to have an opinion on something I don’t keep up with regularly or read lol so I’m just going on my limit gleanings of what’s going on in the premise.

I’d say that Sonic feeling a need to hide his identity for any reason is weird since he’s pretty forthright with letting his actions speak for themselves even if people react negatively to it. That’s the whole gist of Black Knight when he’s warned how taking down Arthur will warrant a negative reputation to which he reacts with “well, thems the breaks. Can’t always be a hero!”

It speaks to his inherent confidence and presence of character that he’s unbothered by peoples opinions about him. He’ll always be his authentic self and won’t apologize for doing what he‘s decided is the right thing to do in the moment. And when he has been in the wrong or hurts someone unintentionally, he’s able to own up to it. He only feels bothered if he’s getting credit or blame for things he DIDN’T do.

I can only see Sonic hiding his identity if a conflict was a highly sensitive operation that warrants it, like a hostage situation and he’s gotta sneak in to find the victim before going nuclear on whoever did it. Like, if revealing himself too early would end up endangering said hostage I guess.

This is a public race where far as I know, it’s just an info collecting situation, not really one with high stakes like someone’s life is in the line? Idk again I haven’t read it, can only make opinions on the premise.

I kinda feel that it’s just a justification to put Sonic into a cool tokusatsu inspired racer uniform which idk why needing to hide one’s identity would be required to put him in some cool drip while racing against the big baddy lol

[aardvaark]

only murders in the building s3e8 spoilers ahead!

this is the best photo i could get of the strips of paper that have been pieced together so far. all we can see is:

"02/16/2023

mmence on

sion, and

until and

(line gap)

society,

performing

composer

however,

right to

where it"

now that’s… fairly vague, lol. not too much to be gathered, except that it relates to the play itself - words like "performing" and "composer" seem to show that. in other words, it’s probably not the autopsy report or someone’s diary. the first unfinished word is probably "commence". this makes it sound formal. again, unlikely to be a diary or a letter to a close friend or something.

so what could it be? personally, my current standing theory is that it’s Maxine’s review. i have a few reasons for this:

we know that Maxine has written a review. yes, she was originally writing by hand and her pen ran out of ink, but she mentions in episode 2 that it was some of her best writing which sounds like she had finished it later, plus it’s her job to write these reviews, im sure she must have finished it. and so there exists a "vitriolic" absolute pan of the play somewhere. one that we’ve never seen and which Maxine didn’t show to Oliver. maybe we can’t see it because it’s been shredded.

the language, from the small bits we can see, would make sense for a review. first she states when the play "commences" for its opening night. then she reviews the various elements of the play, such as the "performing" and notes things like who the "composer" is and whether they did a good job. the word "however" makes me think that the writer is giving some sort of a negative opinion there. which, you know, is what the review is.

Maxine is a character we were introduced to in the second episode but really haven’t explored. i don’t necessarily think she is the murderer; in fact, i can’t even think of a motive she’d have. but, i think they introduced her for a reason.

a scathing review could absolutely generate anger or violence in someone. imagine you’ve put your heart and soul into your performance or crew role for months, only to get insulted and for the show to be an utter failure. it could mean the end of your career or the loss of a lot of money.

but even if it is Maxine’s review, and even if someone was upset by it, why would that lead to Ben’s death? i do have a theory for that. it might not be the correct one, but it’s my best shot at the moment:

Cliff and Donna (the mother and son producer people) have repeatedly expressed that this play is high stakes for them. it’s Cliff’s producing debut and they need it to be perfect. the problem is, the show was far from perfect - something that they may have already realised to an extent, but which that pan confirmed. plus, a terrible review by a famous reviewer would lose them money and reputation. if one or both of them got their hands on Maxine’s review, it makes sense that they’d destroy it and want to put an end to the show in a way that can’t be blamed on them. an accidental death on stage - with the autopsy report altered to day there wasn’t any poison, and we know it was altered cause it was negative for meth - would solve their problem, as well as draw them a lot of press attention (any publicity is good publicity), and finally, would prevent the review from ever being published because no one would publish a scathing review of a recently deceased young man’s performance. i can imagine that the producers would have access to and knowledge about the set and theatre, which would allow for the spooky ghost stuff that seemed like more than a coincidence in "Ghost Light". they’d also have access to Ben’s room to plant the poison cookies (because c’mon, he was clearly talking to a plate of cookies in the dressing room video).

additionally, Donna’s speech to Loretta in the bathroom makes me suspect her more. and Loretta’s song, while clearly more about sacrificing herself for her own son in that moment, could double as meaning that Donna would kill for Cliff’s sake to protect his reputation in the industry. and as Loretta says, poisoning as a murder method tends to point to a woman murderer - this is actually true according to data on homicides. Donna is a woman, she would do anything for her son, the review would ruin his reputation in her mind, she poisons Ben to end the play.

then there’s Ben’s apologies in episode 1. to Cliff… well, he forgets Cliff’s name for one thing, and then he basically just says he’s sorry for being so annoying to them and complaining about his dressing room. then he continues to complain about his dressing room before moving on.

while Donna may have done the first murder, i don’t think she did the second. perhaps it was Cliff, pissed at his non-apology and wishing the man was dead for real. perhaps it was someone else entirely (probably a man since they haven’t had a male murderer so far and have even pointed that out).

but again, this is still a very loose theory based solely on the possibility that that document is the review. what else do y’all think it could be? or what else could have happened if it is indeed the review?

[nostalgiclittlespace]

Hi 🙋‍♀️

How are you doing ?

I have a request- fandom : Disney’s the great mouse detective

Characters : Cg! Professor Ratigan & Little! Basil { infant/ baby age }

Little info : Basil is someone who would bottling up their regression to functions on his job or other "important " things unfortunately resulting in him involuntarily regressing in bad timings.

Story : Basil was involuntarily slipping while having a fight/argument with Ratigan, he noticed it right away and tried to pause the fight & take care of the little detective dispirited Basil protesting (involving biting). After the fit eased off, Ratigan was now comforting a now regressed Basil in his arms.

{ sorry if it’s too long, & take your time with it }, please ? 🥺

Ok, so first of all, I am so, so sorry for taking forever to finish this and I can’t thank you enough for your patience. Between work and sickness, the past month has been crazy. However, I hope you liked the finished product. It’s actually on of the longest request fics I’ve done at nearly 2000 words, so hopefully that makes up for the delay :)

Again, Thank you so much for your request and patience, and sorry for the wait! PS, I hope the characterizations are okay; I haven’t watched the movie in a hot minute! Also, it takes place in a post movie AU in which Ratigan lives and now he and Basil have a love-hate relationship. Enjoy!

SFW AGE REGRESSION FIC. DNI IF NSFW, KINK, PROSHIP, OR SIMILAR. DO NOT REPOST TO OTHER SITES.

Title: The Little Mouse Detective

Pairing: Little! Basil & CG! Professor Ratigan

Description: Basil, yet again, has been working too hard. Work has to come before his personal time, after all. Unfortunately, Professor Ratigan does not share his sentiment, especially after seeing how badly a case has worn the poor mouse out. (Takes place in a post-movie AU, in which Ratigan lives)

Word count: 1968

The Little Mouse Detective

Work came before regression.  That had been Basil’s rule since the beginning.

He had to put his work, his cases before his personal comfort sometimes.  Because sometimes their lives were on the line; he just couldn’t fathom being selfish enough to put his enjoyment above that!

However, while he had maintained that simple rule for himself since he began his work as a detective, admittedly circumstances had changed.  Namely being the presence of Professor Ratigan.

Ever since their confrontation at Big Ben, the two had reconciled.  Instead of allowing the professor to fall off the clock’s immeasurable heights, Basil had pulled him to safety, and thus the rivalry had changed.  Instead of sworn nemesis, they had an odd partnership.  Ratigan would occasionally show up or even work the cases alongside Basil.  

In some ways, this was a grand improvement over their previously perilous adventures together.  As long as Basil didn’t interfere with Raigan’s business, then the rat would offer his personal perspective and advice on the cases.  But on the other hand…

Unfortunately, Professor Ratigen did not share Basil’s sentiment of ‘work-life-balance-which-really-means-only-working.’  

“You should take a rest,” the professor would always note when he saw him scrubbing his eyes sleepily.  But Basil would never relent, even when his mind was far too foggy to make proper progress on his work.

“You are looking rather weary.  How are you supposed to keep up with me if you are in such a state?” Professor Ratigen would say after a long, tiring, and tough case.  “I’m fine,” Basil would always reply tersely, even when his emotions were running high and his exhaustion left him ready to cry.

Basil shook away his irritation, trying hard to refocus on his work.  Even if Ratigan doesn’t understand nor approve, I have more important things to worry about!  I can rest later.

He gazed upon his endless notes, determined to solve this case before taking any more personal time.  This was just too high-stakes to fathom taking a break!  A family of mice had their entire family fortune stolen–and they were counting on him to find it!  

His scatter-brained mind and strained eyes absorbed as much information as they could, staring at the papers strewn across the desk.  Even if his thoughts were only running at half their usual speed, something was far better than nothing.

Even as the night sky and its moon shooed away the sun, Basil did not take its invitation to rest.  Though the sun had long since set, though his whiskers and ears drooped with exhaustion, he did not allow himself to be deterred.

He didn’t bother looking up when the door opened and the familiar footsteps of Professor Ratigen filled the room.

“Working late again, Basil?” the rat noted.

“Mhm,” the mouse nodded without looking over.  His voice was small and tired when he responded.  “And what are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by,” Ratigan replied.  “Though I presumed you would be enjoying yourself and not working so late again.”

“This is important work,” Basil argued, beginning to nibble on his finger restlessly.

I have to finish this, Basil thought, despite the anxious, exhaustion pulling at his mind.  Truthfully, he wanted nothing more than to curl into a ball, and rest.  Maybe gather a few small toys to keep himself busy, have a snack before tucking into bed for the night–

“You live to work, don’t you?” Ratigan huffed in disapproval.  “This is why I get goons to do my dirty work, you know.  So I can have time to relax.”

“Well unfortunately, I don’t have goons,” Basil huffed, feeling his temper rise.  

Ordinarily, he could keep a level head, but between his fatigue, cloudy mind, and Ratigan’s repeated insistence, he could feel his ire rising.  The urge to stomp his foot on the ground like a much younger child was high, though he resisted the temptation.  The last thing he needed was to give Ratigan another excuse as to why he should take a break.

“Perhaps you should find some,” the professor mused, “then you could afford some time off.  Though, finding some intelligent enough to connect the dots as you do might prove difficult.”

“Exactly.  I must do it myself, and will continue to do so,” Basil huffed, “so if you don’t mind I should like to get back to work.”

Professor Ratigan went silent for a moment, and the young mouse naively believed he had won the subtle argument.  However, much to his misfortune, Ratigan was not ready to put the issue to rest.

“Really, I don’t think it is wise for you to sacrifice your health when you are so obviously worn out–” Ratigan began, but Basil was quick to cut him off.

“I’m fine!” his voice came out harsh, frustrated, and childishly insisted.  “Leave me alone!”

Ratigan stared at him for a long moment, the silence stretching between them as Basil turned away again to focus on his writings.  However, as he re-read them for the tenth time that evening, the paper was abruptly snatched away from him by Ratigan.

“Give it back!” Basil cried, jumping up and trying to retrieve his notes.

“You may have them back tomorrow,” Ratigan replied curtly.  Basil didn’t take his insistence well.

“I won’t!  I want them back now!”

Much to Basil’s chagrin, he could feel his words become watery and slurred.  Not now, he lectured himself.  Taking care of this mouse family was far more important than whatever his brain was trying to do.  Nevermind its desire for peace and rest–that could wait until later.

Basil, being so much smaller than Professor Ratigan, struggled and failed to retrieve his papers as they were tucked neatly into one of his suit pockets.  Despite his growing hysteria as he clawed at the man’s shirt in vain attempts to find them, Ratigan remained mostly calm.  He stared down at his once-arch-nemesis with furrowed eyes, analyzing his every sluggish and uncoordinated movement.

“Give it back!” Basil tried to yell, but instead fat tears rolled down his cheeks to display his irritation.

“Not right now,” Ratigan replied coolly.  “For now, you will rest and take care of yourself for once.  If you have any plans on stopping my schemes or someone else’s, then you must be at the right mental capacity for it.  You will rest.”

“No I won’t,” Basil argued, this time not resisting the urge to stomp his foot on the ground.  

When Ratigan’s infuriatingly calm expression did not change, only looking concerned and curious, Basil collapsed to the ground in utter bitterness.  He flopped over and scowled deeply while his watery eyes leaked more tears down his face.  He wanted to lecture himself over his weakness; his face dragged down by exhaustion mixed with this display of emotion must look positively pathetic to Ratigan.  However, Basil could not find the words nor the motivation, his focus narrowed to the fact that he hadn’t gotten his way.

Initially, Ratigan did not move.  Standing over the mouse detective’s wilted form, he wanted a long moment for him to bounce back to his normal self.  After all, Basil was never one to take defeat, especially not in such an emotional manner.  That being said, it didn’t take a genius to reason that he had overworked himself to an extreme yet again.  It had undoubtedly worn down on him, and these were clearly signs he had regressed–something Ratigan had not witnessed him do for quite some time.

Ratigan kept his tone even and neutral as he leaned closer to the mouse, “don’t you see that you need a rest?  Let me help you to your bed and–”

“No!” Basil whined as Ratigan tried to pull him to his feet.  Frightened and offended by the sudden touch, he did the only thing he could think of: sinking his sharp teeth into the professor’s hand, which had grabbed his forearm.

Ratigan hissed in surprise as the young mouse bit him, and he fought to keep his own feelings under control.  Normally, he would not tolerate such an attack, but reminding himself of Basil’s current mental state, he kept his cool.

Carefully and wincing, he pried Basil’s jaw open.  Only for it to snap closed again the moment he attempted to pull his hand out of his mouth.

“Basil,” Ratigan muttered, tone even but serious.  He kept with his same statement, “you need to rest.”

“Noooo,” Basil whined between clenched teeth.  He tried to swat away Ratigan’s free hand, the one currently attempting to open his mouth, but his uncoordinated movements did nothing against the rat.

“Rest,” Ratigan repeated.  “You have worked hard and done well, but at the expense of your own health.  We can discuss a plan for your future work schedule another time; now is not the moment to debate it.  However, now is the time for you to calm yourself.”

Basil stared up at him, his eyes batting tearfully as he processed his words.  His body bounced with sobs.  His jaw gradually loosened, releasing poor Ratigan’s fingers from his powerful, toothy grip.

Cautiously, in case Basil decided to bite him again, the professor drew his fingers away from the mouse’s mouth.  Thankfully, no such attack occurred.  

Instead, Basil slumped over completely, giving up control over his enervated muscles.  Entirely limp, he curled into a miserable pile on the floor; and he looked perfectly miserable.  

The mouse whined quietly to himself.  His mind was far too drained to process any of the swarming feelings in the chest except for one: tired.

He forgot all about the work he was ‘supposed to’ be doing, solely focused on the concept of a nap.  To rest.

His subconscious argued otherwise, nagging at him to pull himself together; there were people who needed him for goodness sake…

But he couldn’t bear to do it.  He couldn’t bring himself to gather off the floor, to argue with Ratigan until he returned the papers, or to complete the heavy quest of returning his focus to the present moment.  His body and mind had betrayed him instead as they went completely slack and refused to move forward.

“Are you ready to rest then?” Ratigan inquired, taking in the sight of the detective.

It took several seconds for Basil to process what the words meant, then he gave a single, slow nod.  Rest.  Yes, please.

This time Ratigan was much more careful in his approach, kneeling beside Basil on the ground.  He waited a few seconds for signs of hostility, but was only met by extreme fatigue.  And, when the mouse gave no further responses, other than closing his eyes wearily, Ratigan dragged Basil into his arms.  He kept his movements slow and sure, just in case he startled him, but Basil seemed far too tired to care about anything he did.

“The floor is hardly the place to sleep,” Ratigan remarked.  “Perhaps it would be best if I took you to bed.”

Whatever Basil thought of the idea, he gave no indicative response.  He remained entirely limp, allowing himself to be lifted off the floor and against Professor Ratigan’s larger form.  Even if he did want to put up a fight, he would doubtfully do any good in his current state.

Not that he’s really ‘want’ to anyway.  Ratigan was surprisingly gentle and careful as he lifted him off the ground; an action he never would have imagined coming from his former enemy.  Basil even remained completely relaxed as he was carried out of his study, away from the work that had taunted his overworked mind for so long.

“That’s it; rest,” Ratigan’s voice rumbled through his half-asleep thoughts.  “Your work will be ready when you are.”

With that, Basil couldn’t fight off his sleep any longer and succumbed to its peaceful invitation.

[bluedalahorse]

Blue’s self-absorbed YRS3 “revisions”

I’m someone who liked many parts of Young Royals season 3 and enjoyed it overall, but didn’t like other parts of it. As someone who enjoys breaking down story structure and character arcs and such, I’ve thought a lot since the season aired about what I would have done if the season had been in my hands and I’d been allowed to make revisions.

I decided to finally organize some of these ideas into a post. This post will be a bit broad, as I haven’t done a rewatch in a while, but I can see myself getting more specific after I do my annual Christmas-season rewatch of the entire series. (Soon!) So maybe that will show up later, in a future post. Or maybe it won’t and I’ll spend all my time writing fanfic.

These are, of course, solely based in my opinions, and my personal likes and dislikes as a writer. I’m sure there’s other ways the series could have gone. You might have different ideas of how to “fix” things for your own personal preferences, and that’s ok! This is a post that might appeal to some fans and have the opposite effect on others. But I figured I’d post anyway, because isn’t that what tumblr fandom is for?

Anyway, here are my unsolicited suggestions…

Part I. Return Felice to her investigatory roots

At the end of season 1, Felice got to be a detective and figured out it was August who leaked the video.

In season 2, Felice acts as Wilhelm’s sympathetic ear. (Wilhelm owes her compensation imo.)

I wonder about a version of season 3 where Felice could have been the gatherer of stories from her fellow Hillerska students. Not in a way where she’s solely doing emotional labor, but in a way where she’s trying to uncover the truth about the school and give the school inspectors the information they need to make their decision. Maybe she starts out thinking things at Hillerska aren’t too bad for most people, and her own negative experiences are a fluke. But the more Felice digs, the more she realizes the system has problems. This would integrate nicely with Felice coming to realize her friends are kinda fake, and rebuilding her relationship with Sara.

(I also would really love to see a conversation between Felice and Nils about what it’s like being two of the only students of color at the school, and in a “model minority” sort of way. Even an awkward, halting conversation. Ever since I read it in a fic snippet, I want MORE.)

I don’t love that they cut away from Felice’s interview in canon. I wish we’d actually gotten to see it, so we could feel the impact her testimony had. And maybe in a storyline where Felice is a more deliberate gatherer of stories, we can see her impact multiplied. I want her to feel like a key part of the decision to close Hillerska down!

Part II. Let Sara navigate an abortion storyline

I’m actually shocked this didn’t happen in canon. There were so many little moments that felt like foreshadowing for a plot where Sara is pregnant. On so many levels the show is about the line of succession to the monarchy, and also the question of whether or not we become our parents. What better way to make this question feel urgent and relevant than a storyline where Sara could be pregnant?

Obviously Sara’s feelings are the most important here, and I think it would encourage Sara to think about her own parents a lot and what she inherits them, the way she already is thinking about them in season 3. She’d also be processing her own shame and loneliness, and I think her potentially being pregnant might add to her reasons for self-isolating.

At the same time, this kind of plot would also add increased depth and stakes to Sara’s relationships. Sara and Simon? Both of them are becoming adults, and both experienced rather tumultuous first loves with some intense risk associated with them. Sara and Felice? Time to explore the role that women play in the class hierarchy, and how much emphasis is placed on reproduction in the Hillerska culture. Sara and August? August is still grieving his dad, so the notion of him potentially becoming a parent could throw him through an emotional loop. Pretty much all of these are grounds for rich storytelling! Again, I am shocked the writers didn’t choose this as a plot because it ties so many things together.

Of course there’s one relationship the show could choose to develop further…

Part III. Give Wilhelm and Sara a tie to one another

One of my biggest disappointments in season 3 is that Sara and Wilhelm didn’t get to build a relationship with one another in season 3. After all the time paralleling one another in seasons 1 and 2, it really felt like a letdown. They only exchanged one line!

Building on the idea that Sara could have started the season pregnant, I wonder what could have happened if—somehow, in episode 1 or 2–Wille walked in on Sara holding a positive pregnancy test. We’d have to somehow maneuver them into the same space, and that might be challenging, but I don’t think it’d be impossible. We can be creative!

What I was hoping for was a situation where Sara and Wille have a conversation about this, and Sara’s freaking out a bit, as she would be. And Wille actually manages to calm her down, and talks her through getting abortion pills and finds a way to stay with her on the day when she takes them. They see that day as a temporary truce between them, at first, though of course it allows them to open up to one another a little bit, and they begin texting even just a little bit, when they can. They agree to keep the abortion a secret, and promise to not even tell Simon about it. Of course, Sara opens up to the other main three over the course of the season, by her own choice.

If Wille helping Sara through an abortion storyline is too much, him helping her navigate a pregnancy scare could potentially hold similar emotional weight. I’d also like to see Wille meaningfully interact with a female character where it isn’t him and his mom in conflict, or him over-relying on Felice for emotional support without giving much in return. Like can we just have unexpected reproductive rights ally Wilhelm? As a treat?

Part IV. Give August and Simon a tie to one another

As I envisioned this Sara-Wilhelm scenario in my head, I realized it could be balanced out by a parallel storyline where Simon and August have to interact with one another in new ways. The season opens with the legal settlement between them, but it’s clear that the legal settlement doesn’t create catharsis. I actually like this decision. I wish we had gotten a chance to see Simon and August interact around their conflict, though, because the Simon-August conflict and the Wilhelm-August conflict were set up as two very different conflicts in season 1. By season 3 this had somehow become “Simon and Wilhelm together against August” which… I didn’t love. I’ve written about that before, so I won’t rehash it too much here.

So I asked myself what would happen if Simon and August were the ones who got into a fistfight in the library, instead of Wilhelm and August, and then it’s Simon and August who are thrown into mediation together with Boris. I get why Wilhelm and August were the ones fighting canonically, and it wasn’t a decision I hated. But in the universe in my head where Sara-Wilhelm interaction is happening, I like the idea of Simon-August-Boris interaction happening alongside it.

What follows is an opportunity for August to make real restitution to Simon, and for Simon to have a real chance to articulate how everything with the video on down affected him, and tell the truth to August. I’m basing this not in my own silly little thoughts, but in what I’ve read about restorative practice and how it can be used to work through these kinds of incidents. Simon and August don’t have to forgive and love one another and suddenly be besties, but it would be interesting to see them come to understand one another, especially given the things they have in common, and maybe talk more authentically. The scene where Simon notices August’s disordered eating tendencies during the sit-in would also have a lot more resonance if they’ve been in these mediation sessions together.

And then it could lead to my next idea…

Part V. Keep the Erik reveal, but change how it’s delivered

I know a lot of people didn’t like the Erik reveal. It was one of my favorite parts of the season, and built on a lot of what I imagined to be true about the characters. I cried when Malte delivered his monologue.

What if August doesn’t tell Wille it was Erik who oversaw the homophobic initiation? What if he tells Simon instead?

And then Simon is sitting on this piece of information knowing that Wille is grieving Erik, but that the truth could come out at any time, and it would hurt Wilhelm more. Simon is agonizing over whether to tell Wille the truth. Then, sometime during Wille’s birthday celebration, as the family tension escalates and Simon feels increasingly uncomfortable with the family’s verbal hagiography of Erik, he tells Wille.

Wilhelm is furious and breaks up with Simon in response. Simon leaves the palace. I feel like this would be an interesting twist on how their relationship has played out in the past—usually we have Wilhelm pursuing Simon and Simon setting boundaries, but now we have Wille shutting Simon out when Simon confronts him with something he needs to hear but doesn’t want to.

And over the next few days, Wille seeks out August and asks him, why would Simon say this? to meYou know this wasn’t true, that Erik wouldn’t do this, you were there. And August corroborates what Simon says, which leads him and Wilhelm into a difficult—but ultimately cathartic conversation—about what it means to grieve highly flawed people. Maybe there’s even a callback to their conversation from 1.4, where August talks to Wilhelm about grieving his dad. As a coda, August encourages Wilhelm to go and make an effort to win Simon back. August has lost his romance with an Eriksson sibling, so he knows how much the heartbreak hurts. He thinks Wille still has a chance with Simon, so he pushes him to do that. And thus the endgame endgames the way fandom wants it to.

In my mind this still leads to Wilhelm leaving the monarchy. It could even end in Wilhelm and August leaving behind the monarchy together, in solidarity. I’m leaving that open for now, but I like thinking about this as a storyline that could have been.

Thanks for reading if you read this far! I enjoy filling up my brain with these thoughts.

[f0xgl0v3]

Camp Half Blood Schedule

As of now I have 14 pages for the schedule and describing stuff and activities and it’s all mush, my brain is mush and please I want to go home and see my family 🥺😭😭

In all reality this is a combination of procrastinating reading Tower of Nero because all the characters I really care about have been drop kicked out of the narrative and I’m at my grandparents house. I have nothing to do and I have a horrible sense of time so let’s get into this (plus sometime down the line I’ll go over HoO re-imagining like. Camp Jupiter processes but I’m reading some books about the Roman legion so I’m gonna, tough that out and then report back lol)

Disclaimer!! I don’t know what time is, time is something that eludes my brain and the only summer camp I’ve been to was a Christian one with a foster family because I was bored that summer and I said why not (I’m not Christian but it was funny). Also I like completely forgot if there is anything in the books that actually have schedule lore. I forgot most things with CHB to be honest.

So anyways, actual meat and potatoes

7:30- wake up and get ready. Yes 7:30 sounds reasonable to me. It gives the kids 30 minutes before breakfast and campers can wake up before the ‘official’ time.

On Fridays we have cabin inspections, dictated by the arbitrary ‘one day we picked someone to do it first and now we’re on a rotation’.

8:00-8:30; breakfast time, yes you only get 30 minutes for breakfast we have things to do and does it take you more than 30 minutes to gobble up breakfast? (No judgement it took me 2 hours to eat lunch one time) but If I ever let the other 13+ pages of notes come to light they’ll be more in depth stuff about. Everything, but breakfast time includes

- one cabin setting up the Dining Pavilion

-Everyone offering to the Gods

-Morning announcements!

-yum actually eat food

-plate staking/cleaning up the tables

8:30-10:00; the first activity. The activities are your going to the arena, or the forge, all that jazz. Uh, there’s a board in the Big House where counselors set up the schedules (as in signing up for activities n stuff and coordinating) I’ll get into it someday. Maybe.

10:00-12:00; Activity 2/downtime. Because pinky swear just chilling is an activity. Downtime is important. I wrote down that cabins can sign for the same thing back to back if they so wish. Also the rules are looser than the words clinging onto my brain so really anything happens. It’s CHB they laugh in the face of a rule.

12:00-12:30; Lunch time. Nothing special about it. Uh ,:3

12:30-2:00; third activity. Action packed days for the win!

2:00-4:00; fourth activity time. Also probably when most of the campers start cabin revolts. No one agrees on a schedule most of the time.

4:00-4:30; actual specific free time. Some moments to gather round and chill out. You’ve already spent most of your day, doing something.

4:30-5:30; activity 5. Most of the time this can just be a continuation of the free time.

Don’t ask me what those extra 10 minutes are for no one really ever knows

After 6 o’ clock no one is allowed on the lake. Sorry man

6:00; also the beginning of Dinner. Dinner goes as planned, usually with some Camp wide event happening because of course. Can’t have good stuff here at camp/j

7:00; Camp Sing-a-long times!

7:30-8:00; your stuck in the Cabin circle but at least you get those last few minutes to hang out without the threat of harpies later in the night.

8:00; all campers enter cabins for like getting ready to go to bed and stuff. Get your last conversations in

8:30; official curfew is in effect. No one can leave the cabins except for counselors who need to plan the next day because they aren’t planning their full week on Sunday.

I have notes also on like. Everything else ,:3 Chiron gets lessons and the Cabins have to do those and stuff. Sorry I haven’t been, posting long posts like this for a while lol. I’ll probably get some HoO re-imagined Camp Jupiter content out once I finish this one book I’m reading and have my CJ notebook (yes I do have a whole notebook dedicated to CJ there’s my fun fact). Also, at some point I’d like to introduce Charlico (Chiron’s WIFE) to CHB if possible. Love you Charlico/j

Okay ,:3 I think I sound a little delirious, tomorrow I have to get on a plane and after that I have to go stay a week at someone else’s place. I’ll see all of you soon to talk about the forge or something. Or maybe I’ll finally get my master lists all sorted out and stuff lol.

[tornrose24]

After finishing rewatching all of The Ghost and Molly Mcgee, these are my thoughts.

I think this is the one time in who knows how many years I’ve been invested in something that came from Disney. I haven’t seen this kind of passion project in a long time and sadly I don’t know if I’ll ever see that magic again for awhile, considering how Disney itself has suffered with many poor choices.

As for the show, a lot hits different when you know how it ends. Certain moments become a lot more meaningful with that knowledge.

I’d say first season was the better of the two. There was far more at stake and the story was building up to its climax in numerous ways compared to season two. The threat of The Chairman and the discovering of the duo’s friendship is very much felt in more episodes compared to Jinx.

Scratch’s character development is really noticeable in season 1, but in a way Molly’s is as well, given how one learns to open up and learn kindness and optimism while the other also needs to learn to open up in other ways, as well as grow into the wise, yet still optimistic teenager she becomes at the end of the show.

Season two… the stakes aren’t as great here. As stated by others, the Chens are overall not given much as a threat for season 2, and Jinx is used too sparingly so the penultimate season does feel a bit rushed. I honestly would have taken out some episodes from this season and replaced them with ones that could have addressed this, especially had the creators known they’d only get two seasons. Though of course they did not when starting out and it’s surreal to think that–had things gone right–we’d be waiting for season 3 right now.

However, I’m still sticking to my initial thoughts regarding ‘The End.’ I still don’t think it was necessary for Scratch to forget Molly.

The first problem is that this plot point is already one a lot of us are familiar with (I’ve seen it quite a lot in my case). Doctor Who used it (before it got changed), Spiderman No Way Home used it to a painful extreme, and Gravity Falls temporarily used it in its own finale. There’s a novel called ‘Just like Heaven’ that is a more romantic version of TGAMM, and it ended with memory loss as well (though the movie has a happier ending). I feel sad, but I also feel angry, which leads to my second problem.

Molly and Scratch’s friendship is the heart of this show. We were entertained and moved by it, as well as how far they would go for each other. So when Scratch forgets, we feel Molly’s pain as observers to her and Scratch’s story. We want Scratch to live his life as a human, and we wanted him to go out and see the world, but he should NOT have had to forget Molly in exchange. I know we always have to say goodbye and that there are some people who were special to us that we might/will never see again, but dear lord, being forgotten is a certain type of pain that hurts even worse. 

Rewatching/remembering certain scenes is now more painful, knowing now that Scratch will forget them. Him saying that he’d hate to forget Molly was too cruel. When I was getting cloer to revisiting ‘The End’ I was feeling reluctance to continue on, and not just because I was almost done with the re-watching. When Scratch merged back with his body and the screen turned to white, I had to fight the urge to shut the episode down and pretend things went differently. That’s how much it hurts when it’s not just a casual viewing. I know these characters ultimately belong to someone else, but I wouldn’t want to put them through that kind of suffering.

Had I been in charge of the show, but kept the idea of ‘taking risks is what makes if worth living,’ I would have used one of two different endings. One where its the same, but Scratch remembers Molly. The other would have been a time skip, when Scratch returned to Brighton with Adia and he reunited with Molly who is a little older but is still the girl he knew.

But… I do appreciate the small ray of hope that was given. That Scratch’s behavior as a human and certain use of words–as well as calling Molly by name despite supposedly never hearing it before-fuels a lot of hope that one day Scratch will remember and he will reunite with Molly one day. That even a few writers proposed a reunion story where Molly hugging Scratch would trigger his memories to come back gives me hope that there's still a possibility in that story. (If anyone tells me I'm stupid to be thinking those things, please don't because I care about those characters THAT much.)

Until then, we have aus, what ifs, and fan fics to fix that.

So… I don’t know when I’ll rewatch the whole show again, given the emotional toll. I’ll still revisit some episodes and scenes. But I’m grateful that Disney allowed this show to exist–it deserved more love and attention. If this had to be the very last good thing to ever come out of Disney, I’ll take it.

[rahkshirock]

Hypognosis RPG

Hey yall, Name’s Lynn and this is the start of a series of posts I’m going to be writing about the game I’ve been making for a while now. The current draft is one that I’ve been doodling around with for 2 years, and now that it’s looking like it might be playable in some capacity in the next few months, I figured I’d do my best to spread the word and see if I can’t get some eyes on this.

So what is Hypognosis? It’s a game about character's limitations, blind spots and frustrations. it's a role-playing game born out of my love for and frustration at a lot of other fantasy rpgs that I’ve seen and played. It’s a project to try to replicate the sorts of tense situations and decisions I see in other kinds of fiction, that I really want to bring to the table and play out with my friends, but just haven’t been able to.

Put another way, when I see a great sword fight in a show or movie, it rarely looks like one that I play in an rpg. The points at which tension is built are different, the stakes are different. I can’t play out the tension of fencer’s footwork, of the sting of sweat dripping into my eyes as I attempt to gauge when my foe’s attention wavers. Now I could *role-play* those things for sure. After all, it's collaborative storytelling! You can *say* whatever you want and it’ll be the case! However the *games* themselves rarely have rules that support those sorts of things. And I needed to try my hand at it to see if I could.

Now let me quickly say that I’m not putting down the thousands of excellent games that’ve been made over the last decades, both by big publishers and by small-time hobbyists like myself. I’m under no illusions that I’m putting forward something revolutionary or that any one piece of this project hasn’t been done before and perhaps better in a multitude of games. But there is a creative spark within me that If I don’t exercise, it will burn me up from within. I adore role-playing games! And when I love something I inevitably want to try making my own, whether it be painting, music, video game or tabletop rpg. What I want most of all is to create, and to let other folks have fun with what I create in turn.

So, let's ask that question again: what is Hypognosis? It’s a game set in a dangerous and fractious world where people have very recently been given access to miracles and elemental magics. Players pick from a wide array of heritages and motivations born out of the history of the world and the conflicts that arise from it. Factions within the setting move to unearth ancient secrets, expand their power, or to invent new technologies. The world is moving, and the players will drive it and be driven by it, forced to act on their limited perspectives and ability.

On a more immediate level, this is a game about rolling dice. The GM sets the stakes and situation, and the players assemble a pool of dice of various shapes to try to affect it. Their characters’ skills and the circumstances of the action determine the size of the dice used, from the D4s used as penalties to D20s used for wildly powerful but unpredictable forces. Once the dice are cast, the players barter for re-rolls and trigger abilities until the effect resolves. Some players might add two dice together to count as one larger number, others tally up the numbers of doubles and triples to contribute to the number of successful dice. The act of rolling dice is shared among all players no matter the role they play, but the outcome of the same roll can vary dramatically depending on who rolls it according to their Fate, the closest thing in this game to a character class. 

Teamwork is not just encouraged with a simple bonus to rolls, but with the overlap of abilities between characters applying to the same roll, letting them debate and cooperate exactly how to finesse a bad roll into a narrow success. Simultaneously, drama between characters in the group intentionally drives wedges in carefully laid plans, causing strife in crucial moments… or in what should be simple tasks.

This brings us to combat, a (very fun and engaging) tragedy when groups clash over failed communication or clashing goals, and tension is at maximum. Movement and Positioning plays a crucial role, with characters dancing in and out of each other’s range. But this game doesn’t ask for a carefully drawn grid or measuring tape. Instead distance is measured in whether characters are Pressed against each other, Close within each other’s reach, circling each other’s Orbit, or Far enough that they aren’t concerned with each other at the moment. Moving away from an opponent is the most sure-fire way to protect yourself from harm, but also removes your ability to harm them in turn.

Focus is the main resource a character tracks, a measure of their all-too-finite attention in battle. Trying to get a grip on the flow of the battle farther than one’s own hands is a herculean task when you see a big guy in heavy armor bearing down with a hammer. Rather than simply bludgeoning your way past the opponent’s defense to drain their Life Force, instead leverage the time available to force the opponent to react to your tempo, wearing them down through a brutal flurry of well-practiced and efficient swings to deliver a mortal blow when their focus wavers and they’re too dazed to stop you.

Whether attacking one opponent or an absolute horde, whether working alone or as an entire group, dice rolls are quick and singular. The same roll that determines if a character’s blade strikes true will also determine the amount of strain it inflicts on the enemy and the wounds which may result. In the same way, a GM will make one collective roll for an entire army of opponent units attacking, assuming they’re all in the same group. Hopefully this will help to pare down on the length of combat in what is objectively a pretty complicated system.

All in all, this is a massive project with a broad scope and a broader fictional world that i want to breathe life into. It’s going to be a long time before it’s done, but I want to play it sooner than later, and maybe make enough money to feed myself while doing so. As such, while I’m writing more posts like this in the next few days, I’ll be working on my main focus this last year: a playable dungeon crawl in the universe with a prototype of my game’s engine. If you’d like to help me make this a reality, please donate even a tiny bit to my Ko-fi at https://ko-fi.com/rocketdog96. every little bit helps!

[asukiess]

I got really into the Loveybug train after seeing that original post. I am really into Canon Divergent AUs especially those that change a character in a certain direction that is key to their personality.

So I ask you, what would be the "Chat Blanc incident" in the Loveybug AU?

I know Cat Walker happened way before the Cat Walker episode, but this is fanfic, the timeline is more of a guideline. So would Loveybug or Chat Walker get the Chat Blanc treatment?

this is such a good question, thank you for the good good idea!! first of all, I also wanna say that I’m glad you’re enjoying it, and I wanna invite @pisoprano & @blur0se to share their thoughts as well 🥰 (and anyone else interested of course!)

I’m very much a “throw ideas at the wall like spaghetti” so here’s the ideas that marinated:

It’s hard to have Ladybug destroy the whole world as the stakes were quite different for Chat Noir, buuuuuut! Since the AU is about the major transformation of Ladybug, let’s think about what would send her to the breaking point.

1. If she’s already distraught about having Chat Noir unintentionally refuse her confession, we could have an Elation-style Loveywalker kiss where he “comes to his senses” and apologizes because Adrien doesn’t feel this aligns with Catwalker’s ideals, he not supposed to fall in love, and she becomes Akumatized.

2. Loveywalker have their own shared Jubilation dream but instead of it sending an already distraught Chat Noir to the brink and almost cata’ing Damocles, Loveybug instead becomes disillusioned and feels that loving someone is truly, truly out of the question for her. Kinda bringing back that early S4 Marinette where she was convinced she wouldn’t ever be able to date. So, Loveybug wears white like she would to a wedding but white is also used in mourning flowers so it’s like mourning a life she’d never be able to live. Meanwhile, Catwalker is trying to convince the girl who was always reassuring to him that his love was never wasted, the girl who inspired him to realize he was worth so much more than just being CW, that made him realize he could love again after Ladybug, that while he knows love is difficult, she’ll be able to have that life someday too.

3. Classic trope where maybe Lila manipulates those around Marinette like she promised (maybe just the situations idk) against her so Loveybug is left feeling isolated, alone, and therefor becomes a physical embodiment of feeling that unloveable.

AND there’s a few white ladybugs in nature so!! there’s even one with a heart shdhdjdj

Personally, I LOVE the idea of Blanc-Catwalker but I haven’t ever been able to pin down concrete ideas myself.

thank you again for the ask!!

[flimflamfandom]

Washboard Blues, and other Vignettes

Vignettes (I guess they call them Imagines these days?) I wrote in the Lackadaisy Discord, plus one that’s original on here.

There are 4 on offer: -You’ll Thank Me When You Grow Old (Discord) -If Only She Knew (Discord) -Washboard Blues (Discord) -You’re Gonna Look Fine (new for this post)

I also allude to an original character from @ladybugkisses ! I don’t really include her, it’s mostly about Rocky, but she’s there so I’m tagging it and mentioning Ari. Give her a follow if you haven’t already!

You’ll Thank Me When You Grow Old

Rows of sunlight snuck through the blinds in the dorm. It was cold - drafty, and wet outside, with typical dorm room quality insulation (that is to say - bad insulation) made for a rather frigid experience. 

Still, Helen was wrapped up in the covers, Olivia was in a thick bath robe - And Ivy was nowhere to be seen. That is, until the door crept open, revealing a rather bleary eyed Ivy, still in clothes from the night before - party clothes, with a hastily thrown on tweed jacket. 

Olivia peered up from her glasses while reading, like a disappointed mother. "You're home early." She said, a snide lilt in her voice. 

"I...stayed at a friend's place." 

"Sure you did." Olivia stood. "And I bet you sat there and played dominos all night, too?" Olivia walked over to her bed, and got a few things from the shelf nearby. 

"Olivia, what does it matter if-" 

"It matters that you're out so late! I was worried sick!" 

"Freckle is nothing to worry about, he's a good man!" "He works at that no good, low down Daisy-whatever. I bet he'll die in some awful shoot out anyhow." 

"Olivia!" Ivy gasped, as she removed the jacket, and her evening sleeves, "How dare you say something like that!" 

"It's true! What's next? He gets you tied up in it?" 

"...well..." 

"...IVY. MICHELLE. PEPPER." Olivia seemed mortified. "You're NOT gonna keep doing that! You'll get killed!" 

"What does it matter to you!?" 

"We're your FRIENDS, Ivy! Don't we mean ANYthing to you?" Olivia fought on a sweater, and got her shoes on. "...I'm going to class. I don't want to hear about...mobsters or whatever." Olivia put her hands on Ivy's shoulders. 

"You'll thank me when you grow old." 

Olivia walked out the door. Ivy stood there. She sniffled. Helen rubbed sleep from her eyes. 

"...oh, morning Ivy," She yawned, "Did you...see Oli? She wanted to talk to you." 

"...how did you sleep through that?" 

"Sleep through what?" 

"Nevermind.”

-

If Only She Knew

Calvin sat there as the record player warbled. Something about a washboard. He sat, nervously, in Mitzi May's office. Ivy was there, too. The two seemed to be in fairly hot water. Calvin and Ivy'd been caught by Mitzi in the broom closet as it were. Ivy, still in her green dress, looked up at Freckle. 

"Think you'll have to stop working for the Daisy?" 

"Maybe." 

"Well. Always the Marigold." She said. 

"Not in my life." He said. "If I'm forced into retirement I'm going-" 

The door opened. Ivy gripped Clavin's hand. Mitzi stormed in. "I must admit, I'm awfully cross you two chose to do this on the clock." 

"Mitzi, with all due respect, Calvin's hands were hardly near my-" 

"It's not about that!" Mitzi said. "I do NOT want to hear the details! What's important is that you should NOT be doing that at work!" 

"I'm NOT on the job!" Ivy remarked. "It's my night off!" 

"Calvin is very much on the job." Mitzi replied. 

Calvin looked down. "...I, eh...I was...staking someone out." 

"...why didn't you say something!" 

"I tried, but you kept kissing me before I could say words!" 

"I do have a nasty habit of that." Ivy said. 

"I like that nasty habit." Freckle went a bit red, and drooped his ears. 

"Aww, Calvi-" 

"Excuse me." Mitzi said, sternly. "...I'm not gonna make you two stop seein' each other, that'd be too much. But Ivy, you ask me if Calvin's workin' next time." 

"...fine." 

"And you, Mr. McMurray." Mitzi said. "What are your intentions for my daughter?" 

"...beg...pardon?"

 "Your intentions." 

"...for your daughter?" 

"No, I haven't got a daughter." 

Ivy blinked. "...you said daughter." 

Mitzi's ears stood up. "...I said Ivy." 

"You called me your daughter!" Ivy gasped. "Does that mean-" She smiled brightly, "You love me like a mom!?" 

"Ivy, please, I-"

 "Does THAT mean I'm Ivy may? I like that! I like Ivy Mcmurray more, though~" She cooed. 

"Ivy, I-" 

"You two GET OUT!" Mitzi nearly chased them out with a stick. She sighed. 

"...that girl..." 

If only she knew.

-

Washboard Blues

Glitz. Glamor. Fame. Fortune. All these things came with running the newly successful Daisy. The dresses, the drinks, the fine friends, the gorgeous parties. 

And Mitzi was stuck washing clothes, before such a party, because Wick was 'indisposed'. 

"...You've got 3 maids and a secretary." She grumbled as she scrubbed. "And none of 'em could come to help with things?" She hung something else out. She huffed, and let out a sigh. "I ain't some dainty little housewife, Wick," she spoke, to no one in particular, "if you're not even gonna marry me why make me wash the clothes?" She sighed. "Atlas never made me do that." She grumbled. "I bet ZIB wouldn't! She yelped. "I bet he'd LOVE to wash the clothes from time to time! Closest he gets to a goddamn bath." She sighed. 

"...no, no." She shook her head. "Wick's...injured." She rolled her eyes. "Here I go again, cursing the sick and needy." She got back to scrubbing. She hummed to herself, and sang. 

"Mornin' comes with cloudy skies and rain...my poor back am broke with pain....My man's sleepin', I just scrubbin', chillin', weepin', I do rubbin' age a-creepin', clothes a-tubbin', all day long..." 

She sighed, alone in the back yard, stretching her back and grunting. Her joints cracked. And then... 

"...You know, Zib," She looked over to him, "You really don't have to play that on sax." She said. 

"How am I not gonna play Hoagy Carmichael?" He walked over, and put his instrument down, carefully. 

"What're you even doing here?" 

"Band's entertaining here tonight...I see you've got a bit of the washboard blues, huh?" 

"He's got a bad back, his maids are all sick, and Lacy is already on cooking duty..." She shook her head. 

"Just bad luck on his part." 

"Hmm." Zib shrugged. "You're right, you know." 

"Hm?" 

Zib cupped her chin. "I wouldn't make you wash nothin'." 

"...su...stop." She batted at him, playfully. She smirked. "You're too much." 

"If you say so."

-

You’re Gonna Look Fine

“...Rocky?”

“Hmm?”

“You’ve been looking in the mirror for something like 30 minutes.” Mitzi said, crossing her arms. “What’s got into you? You got a court date or somethin’?”

“Not a court date,” Rocky said, “A REAL date!”

“With who?”

“Ari!” “...it doesn’t ring a bell.”

“You wouldn’t know her, anyhow.” Rocky said, dismissively. “She’s beautiful! She’s got this fiery red fur, and white tailtip, like a...fox or something! How wonderful she is, how delightful, how-”

“Rocky,” Mitzi shook her head, “I understand you got a date goin’ but frankly there’s an awful lot of work to do and I don’t want you mussin’ that suit beforehand. I-...where are you even goin’ at this time’a day that requires that sorta dress?”

“Why, only the finest establishment in town!”

“...”

“HERE!” Rocky said. “For pancakes.” He suavely straightened his tie.

“...for pancakes?”

“She never had ‘em.”

“Rocky-” Mitzi pinched the bridge of her nose. “I do hope she likes you, because I can’t imagine a lotta other women doing so.”

“Do I look okay?”

“You’re gonna look fine.” Mitzi said. “Maybe a little over dressed for a breakfast...you look like you’re on your way to your wedding!”

Rocky sighed dreamily. “I suuuuure aaaaam...”

Mitzi chuckled a bit, and batted his arm. “You really are perplexing.”

“Is that her in the window?”

Standing there was a girl, with...fiery red fur, and a white tailtip. She looked reluctant to enter. Mitzi looked over. “Well, Rocky, you know how to pick ‘em, I’ll give y’that.”

“What if she thinks WE’RE talking though?”

“...despite my better efforts I look like I could be your mother, Rocky. Go ahead, open the door for her!”

“Alright...wish me luck, Miss May, ol’ boss ol’ pal o’mine!”

“Mhm.” Mitzi walked up to the office, and sat in her desk.

“...if THIS doesn’t work out for him, nothin’ will.”

[candycryptids]

Well, now I have to pop in and ask YOU a question. Which is hard because looking over all your characters pages, I'm sobbing on the fucking floor... I love them all so much????

But! I'd really like to know what sparked Chuusday's interest in technology and how did she get so good with it?! ♡

N..nobodies ever asked that before 🫣💦 So I’ll hammer some of the details out for you RIGHT MEOW! A 2sday-Wednesday special :3

Actually we’re gonna cover a lot of ground I haven’t talked about openly before so settle in

Chuu’s fascination with Machines n the like started REAL early, early when she was small. She wanted to…. Disassemble things. Crates, shelves, alchemist tools of the trade, Mammets… carts… she wanted to lay it all out. See how it fit together. And then MAYBE put it all back together again. And she lived on an island, in a port town, with her mom (an actual Viera) who was continuously unwell and kept getting worse every time she got better and sick again, and the sunseeker chirurgeon who was trying to treat her condition, and his partner, another sunseeker who if I recall correctly, was an alchemist. So. The house she was staying in had no shortage of things a Viera with curious + grabbing destructive hands shouldn’t be grabbing.

It takes coaxing to get her to start putting stuff back together again all the time, and by that point at least she’d stopped trying to pry nails out of things (wooden objects were a pain, she found, to take apart, and piece back together, the wood sometimes was old and slightly rotted, the nails came out unkindly, the shapes were often simple.)… things with screws and bolts were… fun. Her dads (in her mind, they were her dads, but out loud, it was sir, and mister) kept trying to send her out on Missions (chores; your mom isn’t doing well, we don’t want you to have to keep hanging around the house while her every breath rattles and her every cough is harsh and wet. Chuu knew. She was 14. It wasn’t hard to figure out…) for, small stuff. Fetch quests; go pick up ingredients for dinner, or hunt down this one small herb on the cliff side above town for this tincture I’m trying to make to help alleviate the cough symptoms. I have enough for now but having more to replenish what I’m using isn’t bad.. low stakes, yknow.

And when her Mom finally passed from her illness the pair kept Chuu on (Chuu herself will not comment on the her mom and the dads’ relationship, but I CAN and I’ll tell you those fuckers were poly. They might never have slapped a label on it but the love was there. It didn’t start that way, but it certainly was that way by the end.)

This ended up wildly off track didnt it. (Let me get it back on track, and in so doing gracefully gloss over the chunk of history I’m unclear on 💖)

She gets REALLY good at what she’s doing when she signs on with the Garlean Empire. It wasn’t… a hard choice. There was nothing left tying her down where she had been by that point; they’d offered direction, room, board… and, well… her current skills were enough to get placed under Midas’ guidance.

And she found that. Magitek is incredibly interesting compared to whatever she’s had her hands on before and she loves it. Purpose. Drive. She learns how to build things that she’d never dreamed of before under Midas’ guidance. She helps refine designs for two legged heavy artillery a lone person can pilot. To deal with the enemy. She does not think about who the enemy is. The enemy is a problem, and the Machine, glorious, flawless, violent, is the answer.

And then they blow up Bozja. Midas with it. An entire city, wiped off the map. She finds that the numbers- subjects- on the sheet that they’d been running experiments on have faces. Haunted, tired faces, with dull eyes and drawn cheeks and small hands. Children. You can’t just quit, but Midas was gone. Cid was missing. Nero was a thorn in her side and she didn’t want to continue work under someone less competent, or pursue someone else’s dreams. So …. She went missing too. Crashed an airship into Thavnair and stripped the wreckage to the bones for coin. Went into temporary hiding in Kugane, then Ul’Dah, and finally fell in with the slightly sketchy free company she’s with now. She maintains their airships and submersibles and they don’t ask where she came from 💖

I think I got a lil lost in the reeds and I was supposed to go to sleep like 4 hours ago but I kept turning this question over in my mind like a rubrix cube despite my best efforts >v>; The Long And Short Is; she’s always wanted to know how stuff worked, and falling in with Garlemald for (cautiously estimating her time there at about 30+ years) helped her understanding grow in great leaps. Around the start of 2.0 she awakens the Echo (Thrice damned Migraine Creator) and doesn’t realize it’s use until her next encounter with Allagan tech (where she interfaces on a personal level and. It kicks her new obsession up. And… allagans did quite a bit of soul research… it is, somewhat, why there is a Tuesday.)

… 🫣 thank you for the question !!!!!!! I’m. Hopin this makes even a lick of sense, ahaha… some of the stuff I had partially cemented in my mind… I had to fix, after reading the actual lore and wiki -w•;; but not much.

[blogger360ncislarules]

The warm comedy “Ghosts” has been a hit for CBS, despite facing an at-times claustrophobic feeling over the years, perhaps spawned in part by being a show launched during the pandemic. Star Rose McIver, who plays Sam, broke down Season 4’s premiere for TheWrap and teased how this season opens up multiple new pathways for the show to explore and for new characters to enter its orbit.

The premiere of Patience

That first new pathway comes with the debut of new ghost, Patience, played by comedic actress Mary Holland (“Nightbitch”), in Thursday night’s premiere titled after her character. McIver praised Holland’s season-opening arc playing the traumatized Puritan ghost — but shared that the character had initially left her apprehensive due to an existing “Ghosts” prude.

“I had been a little concerned with potential overlap with her and Hetty as characters, Patience and Hetty being the sort of rule setters of the house,” McIver explained. “But it was incredible to see, when they’re next to each other in the episode, how vastly different their characters are, and how progressive Hetty has become in her own funny way.”

As we saw with the end of the premiere, Patience is set to stick around for a beat — and seems likely to continue to pop up even beyond her initial arc.

“I think we all know Mary is awesome to have around. So I’m sure she’ll be back plenty,” McIver said.

Holland brings experience as a prolific Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre performer. McIver said that she started taking UCB classes herself while working on “Ghosts.”

“She’s able to make a character that could be so finite and at risk of really being dull or being the buzzkill of the party,” McIver shared. “It’s sinister energy, but she’s so energetic and so thoughtful and plays things so many different ways. I mean, in the true improv sense, she really is in the moment.”

Expanding the show

But Patience isn’t the only new character set to help open up the show’s world. Next week’s episode brings the debut of another new character to “Ghosts”: Sam’s dad, played by Dean Norris (“Breaking Bad”).

“It’s notable that we haven’t met him for three full seasons,” McIver noted. “We’ve had multiple Christmases, and there’s never really been mention of him. And so the stakes are very high when he appears,” McIver explained.

“They’re able to kind of reconnect in a way, and that they hadn’t for so long,” McIver shared. “The tough guy exterior with a sensitive heart inside is just always very fascinating to me, and I think he plays that better than we could have ever hoped for.”

That lets McIver play something new as well.

“It gives us a little bit of insight into Sam’s longing to fit in and to have a family, and a fear of abandonment, which is quite nicely paralleled with some of Patience’s fear [and] experience of abandonment,” McIver added of the ghost’s background, left stranded in the dirt underneath the mansion for centuries. “We start to understand how our characters’ history has informed exactly where they are now in a special way this year. And that episode, for me, was obviously very helpful for understanding Sam.”

The show is set to continue expanding this year as Sam’s partner Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) opens the bed and breakfast’s new restaurant, offering another way for new characters to come into the series.

“Anything that opens up the universe is very helpful for us,” McIver shared. “Obviously, we’re in a house a lot of the time. There’s the same characters inside a house. And to have this restaurant is just kind of an injection of fresh blood coming in.”

Jay will be teaming with the show’s recurring contractor Mark (Tristan D. Lalla) to run the restaurant, also giving Jay a new playground.

“That’s really awesome for Utkash to get to play such a distinctly his storyline. And, I mean, they haven’t shown themselves to be flawless business people yet with the B and B, and I think you can kind of anticipate, certainly, things don’t go smoothly on the restaurant front either,” McIver said.

She compared the coming dynamic to that of classic farce “Fawlty Towers.”

“‘Fawlty Towers’ moments, struggling to manage the hotel with 12 people who are expecting customer service — that works well for me,” McIver said.

Rolling with a tumultuous four years

The season premiere of “Ghosts” comes following a strike-shortened third season, as well as McIver having her first child in between seasons. The star, along with the rest of the cast, has had to get used to a tumultuous run ever since launching as the Covid pandemic began.

“I mean, this show, we did our pilot table read on March 13, [2020,] like the day the world shut down, and it’s been sort of ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’ to get here,” McIver quipped. The show finally premiered in the fall of 2021. “We moved [shooting] locations, from L.A. to Montreal. We survived a strike, we survived a pandemic. We survived multiple characters, actors on the show having babies. It’s been this very wild ride.”

The New Zealand-born actress reflected on how being a new mom has informed the way she plays Sam.

“Being a mum, a new mum, definitely gives you a different perspective on things,” McIver said. “It’s quite interesting that it’s sort of paralleled in Sam having to learn that she can’t be pleasing everybody all the time, and she can’t accommodate everyone all the time.”

McIver said that she’s been feeling spread thin in her real life, while also acknowledging that she’s in a fortunate position.

“It tempers your eagerness to give yourself up in order to be what other people want you to be,” McIver said. “And I feel like it’s given Sam a bit more depth for me and a bit more to sort of chew on, that that feels very personally resonant with trying to navigate all sorts of different worlds at once.”

A witchy Halloween episode

McIver shared her excitement for the forthcoming Halloween episode, the third episode of this season, which she previewed includes Patience leading the house in accusing Sam of being a witch.

Holiday episodes “bring out such a strong viewpoint from all the different characters,” McIver said. “They always obviously deal with family a lot, specifically in the Christmas episode, but just what it evokes of the child within the character is really interesting. And obviously, in a Halloween episode, irrational or rational fears come into play.”

“The sense that Sam is believed to be a witch, and everybody has a very different take on whether that’s possible or not, whether that matters or not,” McIver teased. “It’s just a perfect little fly in the ointment for the ghosts to navigate this this year.”

Being the lead in an ensemble

The actress’s role has evolved over the years as McIver has worked to give the ghosts a spotlight.

“Early on for Sam, when you’re navigating 10 characters on a show, she’s a facilitator. In most ways, she’s conveying other people’s stories. She’s an engine pushing things,” McIver said. “Until recently, a lot of it has been trying to get out of the way.”

She shared her desire to make the whole ensemble shine, even though she’s the lead.

“It’s interesting being the lead of a show where, really, I feel like I’m trying not to take up too much air time,” McIver said. “You know, the show is called ‘Ghosts,’ and it was about me trying to illuminate aspects of their lives.”

Beginning in Season 3 and into Season 4, though, McIver said that she feels she’s getting the chance to find how to create humor with Sam herself.

“There’s a lot in Sam’s desire to be liked and to seek approval that, to me, is the heart of what’s funny about her, and endearing, and infuriating,” McIver said. “It’s been really kind of a treat this year as we’ve had more time and we do these breakaway storylines to indulge Sam as Sam, not Sam as who she is to the rest of the family.”

McIver said that she has a better understanding of the character now and that we’ll see multiple sides of her this season, including continuing her work as a writer. She also pointed to “strange alliances” beginning to happen between certain characters as something to watch out for.

A musical episode?

McIver and her castmates have expressed their interest in doing a musical episode before. While we have yet to see one come to fruition, the desire for one remains, McIver said.

“The sense of performance within performance is really fun,” McIver said. “I think there’s so much to mine from it. And so that element, for me, of a musical would be wonderful, to see who people project and who people believe themselves to be and want themselves to be.”

That’s a theme that McIver said happens throughout Season 4. “There’s a lot of facade. And a lot of people impersonating people.”

That includes new ghosts visiting the show, McIver teased. They’ll also have an ally in dealing with some of the dilemmas that their secret ghosts provide for them with Jay’s sister returning to the show, already knowing what’s going on, McIver noted.

Getting deep

The show has tackled surprisingly deep topics at times, but McIver emphasized that they know it’s all about the jokes.

“People aren’t tuning in for a TED Talk. They’re not coming to hear a lecture on the state of the world and the human condition,” McIver said, “they’re coming for a comedy. So whatever we do has to be palatable and have a certain amount of levity and escapism, for the end of people’s long days at work.”

The subject matter of “Ghosts” could feel darker, but McIver pointed to the natural pairing of comedy and tragedy as helping the show avoid that, as well as inspiring fans to wrestle with bigger issues.

“It’s been quite interesting actually meeting people at conventions and things, and hearing the way some of the personal stories have really touched them, and people being able to have conversations about the afterlife in a way that they hadn’t, or of mortality,” McIver shared.

What makes exploring dark topics work for the show, McIver said, is to offer the conversation “but without finite answers.” She added, “We’re not trying to be moral police or to tell everybody, ‘this is how it works.’”

Facing a changing industry and what comes next

Through all of the show’s growth, McIver expressed her thanks for both working on “Ghosts” and being able to maintain a career across different TV shows, including her run as the lead of “iZombie.”

“At a certain point, I feel like it’s just dumb luck,” McIver said. “I’ve been incredibly lucky to be signed on shows with great creators who have ideas that have longevity.”

She also recognized that this is even more the case as the entertainment industry goes through some historic shifts.

“We’re all so insanely appreciative for the jobs we have,” McIver said. “Especially in this crazy climate, to be on something that not only keeps going and that is fun, but is evolving.”

She expressed her excitement about the way a show continuing lets you keep getting deeper — though she concedes that it’s a bell curve, and you might run into some issues if you went “40 seasons or something.”

“The texture that you’re able to get when fans and cast and crew alike all know who these people are, a little bit, and start to anticipate decisions and be surprised when they’re not exactly what they expect — it just gives a whole new life to something,” McIver said. “Season to season, it’s growing more and more, and it doesn’t feel tired at all. If anything, it feels like it’s really waking up for me. This season, we get to explore less just characters’ backstories, and more of the dynamics between them and how their histories have informed their current decisions.”

[gengor]

So I like bcs and brb a lot but it’s kind of been bothering me that I haven’t seen much talk about this in regards to either show bcs or brb and I’m not the best person to elaborate on this but I do wanna talk about the way the show writes it’s Latino characters and follows up on them in bcs. 

I’m not gonna get into all the ways breaking bad uses Mexican culture in offensive ways to show Walter’s dissent into dangerous territory bc im hoping that this is obvious to most people. What I am gonna talk about is the way bcs fails to respond to this criticism in a meaningful way. 

So better call saul is a show thats essentially about exploring nature, nurture, and one’s own free will over the person they choose to become. It’s about humanizing Saul into someone we can understand and empathize with. In the time in Jimmy’s life when he was trying to improve as a person he had his brother bait him and manipulate him into committing felonies bc he wanted to feel superior. People in his life drilled it into his brain that he was incapable of being honest so why even bother? The phrase ‘he was born like this’ gets used more than a few times. The show also gives a lot of character work to Mike as well. And although Mike was never painted as malicious he can be incredibly indifferent to the pain of other characters. Bcs let us see emotionally heavy scenes with him where he’s more vulnerable than he ever was in breaking bad. So theres an established pattern of adding more complexity to one of the one-dimensional ‘bad guys’ of breaking bad by making them act differently than how they would in breaking bad. Can you see where I’m going with this?

Rewatching the show after I’d already seen it gave this weird thematic dissonance to way the show reintroduced any Salamanca character. Like as soon as we see Tuco we as the audience are supposed to be in on the joke. Like…Oh, we know that guy already. And of course, the show plays with the audience already knowing Tuco while Saul doesnt to dangle the high stakes of the situation in front of us for drama. Because we as the audience know that Tuco is and probably always was hot-headed and violent to satirical degrees. Other characters even chime in to reiterate that Tuco was always like this. Every single Salamanca family member is treated this way.

 And bc of the way bcs is trying to redeem and humanize it’s previously established white characters just makes this kind of even worse than breaking bad to me. Bc people were vocal about how breaking bad employed a lot of anti-Latino tropes within its writing so you'd think that bcs would try and take this opportunity to amend the writing a bit right? 

You could argue that this is what Ignacio’s character is supposed to do for the show. He’s a Jessie parallel. He’s not really a bad person he’s just incredibly in over his head. And while I do appreciate his presence in the show and like him I feel like it should have been more than just him. 

By far the biggest missed opportunity here to me was the lack of humanization that Lalo got. And I get he’s popular, I feel like that mostly due to how Tony Dalton played him in a very charismatic way. But god he was such a missed opportunity for a thematic follow-through. The way other characters talk about the Salamancas is exactly the kind of predetermination the show is trying to critique with jimmy. When Ignacio is roped into spying on Lalo to aid Gus in killing him he goes in already being incredibly suspicious of Lalo due to his family. He has reason to want this guy to be evil since he’s got to help kill him to save his own skin and his father's. He not only assumes this guy is evil based on his family, he /needs/ Lalo to be irredeemable. Then you're telling me that against all themes and narrative storytelling devices Lalo is just conveniently the guy he assumed he would be. Like, imagine if Lalo got to be a Jimmy parallel, a guy who’s acting out the role people assume he's supposed to fill bc no one thinks he can be anything else. Not humanizing Lalo and ignoring the potential to explore and humanize any other previously established or mentioned latino characters…its like the show is breaking its own thematic statements in order to keep the racism. 

[ninjamelissajulien]

An Analysis on Cole vs Vangelis

I have previously stated that the Cole vs Vangelis fight between The Upply Strike Back and the Son of Lilly is one of, if not, the best fight in the entire history of Ninjago and I am willing to stake my reputation on it due to the many layers of the fight. 

1: Cole stands for freedom and self expression, always willing to show his face and to fight for what is right. Previous notations have mentioned how in episode 9- the Royal Blacksmiths- Cole’s monologue to his father is a rather strong parallel to coming out to one’s parent as queer. “I want you to be proud of me too.” “I have something to tell you. All these years I haven’t been [what you were expecting of me]. I’ve found something that I’m really good at [found something that I love]. Dad, I’m a Ninja [I’m Queer].” [Author is using Queer as a generalization of numerous headcanons of Cole’s identity and avoiding cementing of one idea]. Cole has used his self expression to stand up against bullies, using his past as a dancer within his fights (Triple Tiger Sashay in S2e25, Return of the Overlord, and s12e9- Two Steps Forward One Step Back. Midair splits in s13e10, Dungeon Crawl. Dancing in Balance) as a way to connect to his father while maintaining his promise to his mother to always stand up for what is right, to stand against those who are cruel and unjust. 

2. Cole’s Unbelievable Ambidextrous Skillset: Connecting to the previous analysis to the Blades of Deliverance and their connections not only to Cole and Lilly’s color schemes (Black and White) but also the parallels to grief and death. Cole wields both blades simultaneously with extreme accuracy, endurance, and skill. Watching the fight in e15 frame by frame, you can see how Cole moves from one blade immediately into the second fluidly. 

Cole uses all of his strength with every single blow. Sparks literally fly on numerous occurrences between the Blades of Deliverance and Vangelis’ staff (Pudao?). Cole also manages to forcefully drive Vangelis backwards at least 50+ feet in a single motion, using the brunt of the blades as connection points, until Vangelis throws him to the side. 

Cole also uses his shield as a third weapon alongside extra protection against the Skull of Hazza’Dur. This, unfortunately, is the only season that features the Ninja using shields (which they really should use more often as they worked very well in creating bulk wall defenses). Cole not only has to keep his attention on the main threat of Vangelis, but also the satellite Skull attacking him from all sides, including from behind. He angles himself so the shield gets the brunt of the damage and hit. When he is knocked off of his feet, Cole throws the shield onto his back to take the landing blow and gaining traction to get back to his feet. 

Cole manages to hold off Vangelis and Hazza’Dur until the Blades shatter under a direct hit from the skull. Even then, without his shield and the Blades, Cole manages to connect to his inner power and unlocks the Spinjitzu Burst. Noted as a parallel to his true potential, Cole connects to a struggle within his heart that kept him from discovering who he really is. In the Royal Blacksmiths, Cole has to reconnect to his father and find a pathway to his future as a Ninja rather than hiding away in a lie. In the Son of Lilly, Cole understands the legacy that his mother left behind and finally steps outside of the shadows she left in Shintaro to create his own light. Cole embraces his promise to his mother, his path as a Ninja, and unlocks the Burst and defeats Vangelis. 

Master of the Mountain has a lot of depth and symbolism in connection to legacies, grief, and finding yourself- common motifs that surround Cole’s character. Not only has his color scheme been connected to Death (Black, with Lilly’s color being white, alternate connective color to Death in other regions), but he was also connected to Death through his time as a ghost. Cole had to deal with the disassociation of not only being disembodied, being separated from the team physically, mentally, and even emotionally, but also through depression. “I don’t feel anything anymore.” Not only as a ghost being unable to physically touch, but also through emotional disconnection and lethargy. Cole’s (previous) main weapon was a scythe, a symbolic iconography to the Grim Reaper. 

Master of the Mountain is one of the best seasons throughout the entirety of the Ninjago Canon for developing Cole, his past with his mother, his bond to Master Wu, allowing Kai and Nya to have a teasing yet strong sibling relationship, and to have a beautiful emotional climactic battle for the Ninja who has been shoved to the side for too long. 

-as a side note, author learned that both Netflix and the YouTube episodes for the Tooth of Wojira skip the In Loving Memory of Kirby Morrow during this research-

[lemonsrosesandlavender]

🤔👻✨🫘

🤔 Are there any new characters you want to write about?

You know what, not really? I’m quite surprised by that. I’d like to finish my Minthara/Gale and Lia/Nine-fingers stories, but they’re underway, they’re just not done yet. But I have such a full docket right now that I don’t have a strong urge to write for anyone else!

👻 Is there a new genre you'd like to write?

I think I’d like to return to my original novel, which I’ve been stewing on… which I hope will land somewhere between adult coming-of-age and slightly black comedy? … “literary” fiction I guess, which feels utterly wank-y to say but the stakes are normal-life-size and so is the setting, and it’s about a character coming to some understanding of themselves and the mental health problems they keep running away from. So it probably fits.

✨ What's one area of your writing that you think needs the least amount of improvement?

Tough one. I feel like there’s room for improvement everywhere, but I can’t always see it… but then vice versa, I can’t see what needs least improvement. But I’ll have a go and say that I’m pretty good at keeping characterisation consistent and tracking characters’ motivations through a fic. If I’m ever stuck on a chapter, I go down to brass tacks and ask myself what my characters truly want in this moment - and what they think they want - and guide myself up from there. It’s my magnetic north that I can always find.

🫘 Spill the beans. What's a new project you're doing this year?

Ooooh. Ok, well, I’ve talked about all sorts of possible future ideas previously, but one I haven’t mentioned at all on Tumblr is that there’s a delicious prompt in my drafts asking for a follow-up to the oviposition fic in Archmage, Slut, about what happens when Rolan can no longer hide the eggs. I had a fun conversation with @littlemisscactus about Derryth spotting he’s buying a lot of “pregnancy” herbs, and realising what’s up. She’d deeply not care (or want to know any more details) but Rolan would be excruciatingly embarrassed, and I think that could then make a great jumping-off point for a conversation with the reader character in that fic. (And subsequent smut obviously, there would be so much smut). It’s really taken my fancy so once I sit down to it I reckon it’ll be a decently long oneshot!

(Thank you prompter, and sorry it’s going to take a while <3)