#they know she exists (unless the event she gets introduces in retcons it) shes all they need left to be complete BLEASE

[killjoy-prince]

vbs luka has showed up to at least 2 lives already plz come home and be formally included to the street sekai im begging

[neoclassic-sonic]

What about the rest of the Forgotten Sonic Characters?

With Sonic Mania Plus comes two returning characters, Mighty and Ray! After 20+ years they’ve finally made their comeback ever since their debut in the segasonic arcade game! Even the Hooligans have made a semi-cameo appearance in the form of the Heavy Magician’s illusions in Mirage Saloon Zone! Since Mania is a celebration of every Sonic game ever it was nice to experience these old characters revitalized back to life!

But with the revitalization of old characters, what does that say about the state of the rest of the forgotten sonic characters? Will they ever see the light of day again? Do some have a more chance of appearing again? Or are they doomed to obscurity? Let’s review the list, starting from when they were introduced and their last major appearance! Starting with:

Sonic CD’s Rosy the Rascal (1993) Latest appearance Sonic R (1996)

I’m sure all of us were disappointed when she wasn’t playable in mania plus. But! With her appearance in the christmas special, she may become playable in the next sonic mania game! Or at least a cameo other than an Amy Doll.

Sonic Triple Trouble’s Fang the Sniper (1994), last appearance Sonic Fighters (1996) and you know what? Let’s throw in Bean and Bark (1996), last appearance Fighters Megamix (1996)

“Hey! What’s the big idea! We just saw them in Mania! You even said they were in Mania!” Well that’s where you’re kinda wrong kid. I said semi-cameo. The hooligans did not actually appear in Sonic Mania, at least not in their actual forms. Right, remember those three were just illusions by the magician. While those were references sure, those aren’t actually the hooligans. While their appearance in a next game like mania is less likely (given they were mirage saloon’s gimmick, and they’ve already had their representation) I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t at least one reference to them in the near future.

Next up! Knuckle’s Chaotix’s Chaotix! (1995) with Espio’s last appearance in the Sonic Fighters (1996)

“Uh hey, what gives? The Chaotix crew have already appeared in modern games, they were just in Forces and Vector is in TSR! what are you on?” Well what I’m on, you see reader, is on Iizuka’s bullshit! You see since their first modern appearance on Sonic Heroes, Takashi Iizuka has stated on record that the modern chaotix crew is not the same characters as the ones in the 32x game. You see when development on the chaotix game was shifted from sonic team to another developer, the story hadn’t been written yet. Same with the characters characterization. That’s why you have a sophisticated 16 year old Charmy. Hot headed detective Espio. Pacifist nomad Mighty. God-fearing, music-loving Vector! While some of the character traits were carried over (like charmy being the glue that held the chaotix together, mighty is still a pacifist in mania, vector still has his headphones, while espio’s detective shtick got applied to the whole crew), they were basically new characters. Even though the chaotix game was viewed noncanon for years, with countless references to it in sonic mania, it seems that sega is much more willing to accept the chaotix as it was. It is very likely that this may get retconned (given how bullshit some of Iizuka’s statements on plotline are), they even might actually cameo in the next mania game if ever! 

Tails Skypatrol’s Witchcarters! (1995)

Finally some actual forgotten characters! Bet you didn’t know they exist huh! Well you probably do if you’re reading this list, but i digress. Introducing the witchcarters, Carrotia the Rabbit, Fockewulf the Wolf, Bearenger the Bear and Witchcarter. These characters served as one-off antagonists and henchmen in this spinoff game, where they were left ignored for around 20 years until Archie Sonic’s Eggman’s Dozen arc where they were given redesigns to fit the modern era. They are the less iconic of the two groups of antagonists that Tails has had to fight. But they are very likely to appear in the next mania-like game.

Tails Adventure’s Battle Armada (1995)

Oof another Game Gear title but one that’s more memorable than skypatrol! Along with a metroid-style gameplay, we are introduced to the battle armada! Speedy, his father and Dr. Fukurov are a few of the notable casts introduced here! For around 20 years they were ignored until Archie Sonic (again). They are given a much bigger role compared to the witchcarters! The idea of Speedy as a rival to Tails like metal sonic is to sonic, is such an interesting concept to me! they have a greater chance of appearing in the next mania like game as compared to skypatrol!

Sonic the Fighter’s Honey the Cat! (1996)

Yeahhh, ok let’s be blunt. I love honey the cat. But she probably won’t appear in a game any time soon. Here’s why: She’s basically the mobian version of an already existing character (candy from fighting vipers). She’s a hacked character in the arcade version, removed from the gcn port and an easter egg in the latest port. She was only limited to cameos in the comic before finally debuting properly in the sonic the fighters arc in archie sonic. While Sega has definitely been more lenient with her, unless there’s another fighting game that will come out, honey won’t be appearing any time soon. (and if she does I really hope they use the rest of the fighting vipers cast too, Pane the Boar exists now! and it’s not like anyone’s using the IP! I’d like it if they just,,,, retooled fighting vipers and it’s characters for a sonic fighting game spinoff without sonic characters haha)

Sonic R’s Metal Knuckles and Tails Doll (1996)

Sonic R introduced the counterfeit counterparts to the other 2/3s of team hero. Metal Knuckles and Tails Doll. While I bet they were only created to fill out the roster, we can’t deny that their designs are cool. I don’t want to rule them out because they’re 3d characters since Bean and Bark made 2d appearances in mania, but it’s a mystery on what kind of role they’ll fulfill. Metal Sonic’s first appearance in CD was explicitly clear that he was your rival, someone to beat. These two’s appearances are kinda shoehorned as someone you have to race with but there’s no backstory. Unless there’s racing challenge in the next mania game or these characters are retooled to being a miniboss, they probably won’t appear in a major role in the next mania game, if they ever appear it’d probably be as a background cameo. (which is a shame!)

Sonic Adventure DX and Adventure 2 Battle’s Tikal and Chaos! (1999) latest appearance Tikal-Sonic Runners (2015) Chaos(illusion)-Forces (2017)

Finally we’re out of the classic era and into the adventure era! The adventure era is regarded by a lot as either a. a transitional era between classic to modern sonic, or as a part of the modern sonic era. either way this is where tikal and chaos’s first and playable appearances were made. Now this is a weird case since Chaos came from the Master Emerald and Tikal is a ghost. In their ending you can see them hanging with the chao. Ever since then they’ve been MIA. While I thought they went back into the emerald, it seems that it’s actually questionable what happened to their fate. Will we ever get to see them again? Well this is where things get pretty dicey here on out. These characters don’t have “Classic” immunity, meaning they dont have the possibility to appear in the next mania-like game since they aren’t classic. Unless we have another storyline regarding the echidna colony (unlikely due to penders) then we probably wont see tikal and chaos in a major way any time soon.

Sonic Shuffle’s Void and Lumina (2000)

With character designs looking more akin to NiGHTS into Dreams than a sonic characters, void and lumina are the more different looking characters. Opting for a more fairy look instead. Sonic Shuffle is a board game somewhat akin to mario party. These characters were one-off characters, and i guess that’s it. Unless sega makes another board game using the mainline sonic universe (not storybook sonic) then we won’t see these two again anytime soon.

Sonic Hero/Advance 3/Battle’s Vanilla and Chocola and Emerl/G-merl (2003-2004)

Woof, that’s a lot of characters. So let’s tackle them one by one shall we? Vanilla is Cream’s mother. Kidnapped ala princess peach style in the advance games, she is cream’s driving force to join sonic’s team into taking eggman down. Likewise, Chocola is Cheese’s brother. These two chao are pets of Cream. Chocola is Cream’s driving force to join team Amy into taking down eggman in sonic heroes. Emerl was a robot that died in Sonic Battle and Gemerl is the reconstructed gizoid from emerl’s remains, after the events of advance 3, gemerl lives with cream and vanilla, often portrayed in the comics as the bodyguard for the two. So how likely are they to appear? Well not anytime soon by the looks of it. They only appear if Cream has a heavy role in the story, and with each passing installment cream has been getting lesser roles. I like to think of Cream as the “next sonic”. She has the drive and the heart to become the succeeding hero. I’d love for her to get her own series of games where she is the hero. But unless she gets more roles or she gets her own spinoffs (not likely), these three wont appear anytime soon.

Sonic Riders (2006) latest appearance for storm-Sonic Free Riders (2010) for Jet and Wave-Olympics (2020)

Sonic Riders introduced three babylon rogues. Jet was introduced as Sonic’s rival when it came to races, a title loosely held by metal and shadow (metal was created to be sonic’s rival at everything and shadow was conceptualized as being an antithesis to sonic, jet is the first to be his rival in speed only). Given the nature of these games it’s actually a surprise as to why they didn’t appear in team sonic racing, or in their two previous racing games. Jet and Wave appeared in the olympics 2020 recently but storm has been mia lately. When the next racing game does come out and when they expand their roster we might see the babylon rogues debut in some sweet rides!

Sonic 06′s Elise

Unless it’s in a remake Elise has no chance of returning back due to the whole nature of 06 (and it’s storyline)

Sonic and the Secret Rings and the Black Knight’s Shahra, Merlinus, Caliburn

Not likely given that they are one-off characters in a storybook.

Sonic Rush Adventure’s Eggman Nega and Marine (2007)

I’d really love for Marine to appear again. Eggman Nega appeared in Rivals, he even appears in the olympic games, why can’t marine appear again? Sadly, unless we get a game that involves the sol dimension, these two are out of the question.

Sonic Chronicles’s entire cast (2008)

Haha. no. Most well-known as the first rpg-like game that involves the sonic characters. This game introduces Shade along with other characters. However due to the Penders lawsuit, these characters are now off limits, even to sega. this may also be the reason why we have not seen gemerl again.

Sonic Unleashed’s Lah and Chip (2008)

Chip is the Light Gaia and Lah was made for the special. We probably won’t see these characters again despite having the best writing so far.

Sonic Colors’s Yacker (2010)

Yacker didn’t fare well compared to the rest of his wisp friends. and honestly? I don’t feel too bad. while he may appear if sonic ever does need a flagship representation for the wisps, i doubt he’ll have another big role like in colors.

Sonic Lost World’s Zeti (2013)

Cause let’s face it, only Zavok and Zazz are in the limelight recently. The Zeti are a very polarizing addition to the sonic cast. they don’t have the same rep as the wisps, yet they’re designs are a bit too unique to just be left behind again. What sega’s doing now though is a bit disappointing. Half ass shoe horns into plots. Well at least for TSR, which is a racing game spin-off. We also saw this in forces (along side chaos and shadow of all people). I just hope this isn’t a trend that persists. Either make a proper plot or don’t include the character at all sega. as to when we’ll see them again, that is up to sega. this is a bit of a cloudy are cause sega doesn’t seem to be afraid to use them, but for some reason they arent too confident either.

Sonic Boom’s Sticks.(2014)

Unless There’s another boom game or Sticks is redesigned to modern standards as opposed to boom standards, we’ll probably not see her again. which is disappointing.

Sonic Forces’s Infinite and OC character (2017)

They aren’t really forgotten since it’s only been 2 years. But infinite’s basically been forgotten already! He has no appearances in other games outside forces. Not even in team sonic racing, you’d think he’d be a shoe in, but he isnt! You’d think the make your own avatar would be something that’d be implemented from everygame onward (ngl it was the only good thing about forces) but it’s also isnt seen in tsr. which seems like wasted opportunities!

[khdiscussions]

KH and Disney: What Disney Does Not Do To Your Ships

Hello all, I’m supposed to be on hiatus but I want to try to address my biggest fear for the fandom before we get there with a meta a little different than my normal flavor.

So hey anybody remember 2010. The time when AkuRoku was still a major force in fandom and purity culture didn’t drive them off the map. I do too. You remember how if you met an AkuRoku shipper in that time period there was a 25% chance that they argued that “Disney banned Nomura from putting AkuRoku in the games because they’re a homophobic company and he wanted AkuRoku in all along and they forced him to put in Xion to the games just to break up AkuRoku” and then cited some interview without linking it because the interview didn’t exist?

Because hey, that’s what we’re talking about today!

As we all know Chikai/Oath/Don’t Think Twice is a song with a lot of romantic connotations. The focal point of these connotations has fallen back in line with the SoKai/SoRiku communities and I do think they’re right. One of these two Sora ships is going to become canon by the end of the game, be it through strong implications or a canon kiss? Well, who knows besides those lovely individuals who bought stolen copies of the game and wait the month like the rest of us are. That’s not what we’re here to discuss though.

We’re here to discuss an old fandom trend that I’m very worried could make a return depending on what direction the ships go in, and where not to place your blame.

(But first: I would like to redirect attention to my standing earlier. Who the ever living fuck should give a shit about canon ships? Fandom is fandom and have fun with your ships and if you don’t like the canon one ignore it. It isn’t that hard. Actually it’s really easy. I’m still in denial about Voltron s8 and am just pretending it didn’t happen because I’m unhappy with it. A ship being canon does not make it superior, nor does it mean you have to like it.)

So let’s talk about how if SoKai becomes canon (or just alternatively - SoRiku doesn’t) it doesn’t mean there was executive meddling from overseas at Disney because Disney is actually a very surprisingly pro-gay company.

(What no this definitely isn’t an excuse for me to talk about how far Disney has come with handling all things LGBT+ on my KH blog what would make you say that???)

While many people will cite the earlier films Walt had a hand in as the first signs of the LGBT community getting a voice in Disney, that actually isn’t the case. I could go on and on about linguistics, but to say it in a nutshell, the first time the LGBT community ever found a true voice with the Disney company was in 1991, in my hometown of Orlando at a place near and dear to my heart.

In 1991, a small event was organized in which visiting gay tourists were encouraged to don a red shirt and attend the Magic Kingdom, showing that they weren’t afraid to be who they were. The event was met with your usual disgruntled homophobic protestors, but they did manage to successfully enter the gates, thus leading to one of the biggest events today for gay individuals everywhere. While Gay Days is not officially hosted by Disney (the event was not started by Disney and they didn’t pick it up), Disney is proud to support it. I’ve been to the parks around the days of Gay Days, and while year round we see things like gay Mickey ears and the like, they go all out. A special rainbow embroidery comes out for the ears, they release special treats, and even make shirts just for people who are here for the event. They even had a small section in World of Disney for the gay stuff along with some general rainbow merchandise. (It’s by one of the doors, I only noticed it for the first time Saturday, I wanna say it’s in the rooms next to the mugs.)

Disney also has a history of hiring LGBT individuals as well. George Kalogridis, the head of the Walt Disney World resort, is gay, which I should note he came to us from being head of the Disneyland resort first. And who can forget one of Disney’s iconic songwriters, Howard Ashman, was a gay man who died of AIDS back in the early 90s. He was so beloved that at the end of the final project he worked on, Beauty and the Beast, he has a special tribute. (”To our friend Howard, who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul.”)

But what about the film company. Well, I mentioned the early Disney history earlier and while there are things like linguistics to account does that mean they’re entirely barren? Wellll...no. Several characters in Disney history (among which include the Three Caballeros and Timon and Pumbaa being among the most famous, but several villains are as well) are coded and can easily be read as gay by anybody perceptive enough to pick it up, and Ursula’s design was based on a real life drag queen. While I don’t personally believe in giving credit for making these characters gay (Unless they retcon today), they are worth noting if we’re touching upon a comprehensive history of Disney and LGBT+. What I would truthfully consider the first time we see any sign of Disney supporting gay anything in their films would be 1998, with Mulan’s very own General Shang. Pretty sure most people have heard the argument for bi Shang, but if you haven’t, the gist of it is Shang falls for Mulan before he learns she’s a girl, and so since he loves her regardless of her gender, he’d be bi rather than straight. Unfortunately, I don’t think Disney has spoken up on this and since he ultimately ends up with Mulan as she is, there isn’t much to confirm it.

We then return back to more coding (Jumba and Pleakley, Kuzco, etc.) as we leave the 90s firmly behind us and head into the 2000s. Not a lot really happened here beyond that for a really long time either. Until we arrive in the 2010s. 

When it came to LGBT rep in the 2010, the first real notice of it would be in 2013, where we got double the attention. In 2013, Disney announced that their Disney Channel Show, Good Luck Charlie, would feature a gay couple, though the episode didn’t air until 2014, and was the second to last of the series. Meanwhile coming out at the end of 2013 was Frozen, in which we see Oaken and his husband in the scene where Anna and Kristoff first meet. The trend continues three years later, where it turns out Judy’s neighbors are also gay.

Then finally, in 2017, we stop getting just small hints here and there. For all the movie’s faults, Disney’s live action Beauty and the Beast introduced the first confirmed gay character with Le Fou, followed by in late 2017 a Disney channel show known as Andi Mack had an entire arc dedicated to a character understanding his sexuality and coming out.  Then in 2018, Disney confirmed that a character in the Jungle Cruise movie coming out next year, a main character in the movie I should add, will be gay. We, unfortunately, don’t have all the information at this time because the movie is still in development, buuuuuuuut hopefully this ends up going somewhere, especially since it is a movie based off of one of Disney’s biggest original attractions.

So where does that leave us in regards to KH3? Well hopefully I’ve made my case well enough to show that Disney, especially in the past five years that KH3 has been in development, has made enormous strides in their showing of gay content and hopefully will continue to grow as time goes on (Hey Walt Disney Animation Studios, you guys have like...nothing right now). But more importantly to the point of the meta, I want to prove that if SoRiku, or any other gay ship in the series, doesn’t become canon, it isn’t Disney’s fault. Disney is a supporter of the gay community as a whole and has already included representation in the past and has plans to in the future, and to argue that they aren’t shows a lack of understanding of the history of just how far the company has come.

Let’s leave the “Disney banned Nomura from putting x paring in the games” arguments in the past where they belong, shall we?

[emeraldspiral]

Legit though, unless there’s a major shakeup, like a new director or different writers being brought on or something, I don’t think I’m going to be seeing the next FB movie, at least not in theaters. The visual style is ugly and the big set-pieces aren’t that interesting. The characters and dialog aren’t interesting. The ideas and themes are underdeveloped. The plots are aggravatingly dull and confusing with poorly constructed mysteries that have little to no payoff and a bunch of useless scenes that do nothing but give our heroes something to do to kill time until the finale. The tie-ins with the main franchise consist of characters existing and nothing else. We don’t get any new insight into their characters or into events previously alluded to, which is basically the only reason for these movies to even exist in the first place.

Like, I get that this is part 2 of like a 9 part series or something. But, I would argue that aside from Captain America 2 and 3 and maybe Thor 3, pretty much every non-Avengers movie after phase 1 didn’t really need to exist. They’re pretty self-contained and don’t do much aside from introducing Infinity Stones to actively set the stage for Infinity War. But most of them still manage to be decent movies that don’t waste your time, and even the bad ones like Thor 2, Iron Man 2 and 3, and Ant-Man & The Wasp are still better than either of the FB movies.

If they wanted to wait until later in the series to really get into the meat of Grindelwald’s rise to power and his eventual defeat by Dumbledore, they could’ve done it the same way they did Voldemort’s storyline. Like, from books 1-4 they keep us occupied with stuff like “What are they hiding in the castle?” “Where’s the chamber of secrets and who’s opening it?” “Why is a dead man showing up on the Maurader’s map?” and “Who put Harry’s name in the goblet?” before we get major developments to the overarching plot like Voldemort returning fully to life, Dumbledore dying, Voldemort’s origin story, Death Eaters taking over the school and the Ministry, the prophecy, or the horcrux quest.

Why couldn’t they have had the first movie just be about Newt finding his lost monsters and had the second movie just be about him trying to solve the mystery of Credence’s origins and only have little hints of Grindelwald’s involvement, instead of continuously cutting back to him so he overshadows the plot and makes you wish Newt would wrap up his bullshit sidequests so he could be more involved in the actual main plot?

Gawd, speaking of the Credence origin story plot. I just... Rowling wrote 7 perfectly competent mystery stories before this. She clearly knows how they’re supposed to be constructed, so I don’t know what happened with this one. Like, to begin with, the question of “Who is Credence” wasn’t compelling in the first place. Like, the whole previous series pretty firmly established that bloodlines aren’t important. Anyone can be a witch/wizard and being pureblood, halfblood, or muggle-born doesn’t determine how good you are, or whether you can even do magic at all. So even the fact that Credence is special because he managed to survive well past age 10 as an obscurial doesn’t automatically suggest that he’s got to be related to someone important, anymore than being strong with the force does. Literally no one was asking who Credence really was after FB1. Then they try and make us think Credence is Leta LeStrange’s brother. But we didn’t know anything about Leta and her family beforehand, aside from the fact that Bellatrix is the wife of one of their descendants. We didn’t know Leta had a brother before, let alone that he’s supposed to be dead, so the idea that he’s alive and also that he’s Credence mean’s nothing to us. Then they drop that prophecy angle on us.

“A son cruelly banished, despair of the daughter, return great avenger with wings from the water.”

But we don’t know the prophecy until right before it gets debunked, nor do we know a lot of the stuff that we were meant to believe tied into it until that same scene. We don’t find out about about Kama being Leta’s half-brother and his mother being stolen by LeStrange ahead of time or about the prophecy mentioning an avenger, a despairing daughter, a banished son, water, and wings. So we can’t connect the dots between the LeStrange family symbol being a raven, and what happened to the family, to the elements of the prophecy and be misled toward the false-conclusion that Credence is the long-lost LeStrange brother. We’re just kind of told straight-up that he could be, even though Leta says he’s dead. But we don’t know the circumstances so we can’t even make guesses about how her brother could’ve survived. So I guess it’s a misdirect to make us think the mystery is “How did he survive?” rather than “Who else could it be if the LeStrange brother angle is a red-herring?” But that doesn’t really feel like how misdirection and red-herrings are supposed to work. Like, imagine if in Philosopher’s Stone, Harry and the gang concluded that the Philosopher’s Stone was the thing they were hiding in Hogwarts and that Snape was after it, but instead of the reveal that it was actually Quirrel who was after it and all the incriminating stuff that Snape did was actually him protecting the stone, the twist was that it was a horcrux instead of the Philosopher’s Stone being hidden, or something.

On top of that, once we find out he’s not, we can’t look back on the clues we overlooked because of the red-herrings and see how the actual answer makes sense, because there weren’t any overlooked clues and the answer doesn’t make sense. Like, the only way Credence can be Dumbledore’s brother is if the established timeline of his parent’s deaths was either retconned or a straight-up lie. So how could we possibly guess, just from the fact that the Dumbledore family also has a connection to birds, that it was the Dumbledore family and not the LeStrange’s that the prophecy referred to? We also don’t know anything about why Aurelius was on the boat so even if we did have reason to believe there was another Dumbledore, we don’t have reason believe he was “cruelly banished” and there’s no indication that the Dumbledore family had an “avenger” who returned from water. Literally, the “wings” part was the only piece of the puzzle that the Dumbledore family had, so who would ever come to that conclusion when the LeStrange family had all the pieces?

[fuckyeahblackwidow]

@darklabrynth replied to your post: So do you prefer the more solidified history or the more malleable one?

Short answer: it depends.

Long answer: I'm a historian, so I like having dates. And I do think that Brubaker's approach, with everything precisely dated, set in specific time, instead of vague time, adds a sort of narrative heft— it gives you a when and a where, and not just a long, long ago. So I understand that impulse.

With the Winter Soldier retcon specifically, I think Brubaker laying out a specific timeline like he did was almost necessary. You have to remember, there was a time when Bucky stayed dead, and when people thought he should stay dead. Bucky coming back wasn't like Wolverine coming back after being "dead" since the last big event. Bucky was coming back after being dead since the modern Marvel universe began— his death was the loss of innocence that brought Steve into the current timeline, with all its complications. A storyline that brought Bucky back therefore had to preserve some sense of that original tragedy but also provide an engine for future stories— a story where Bucky was found amnesiac, ancient, and in a hospital bed, presumably to die shortly thereafter doesn't really provide something new, does it? But if Bucky survived the war and is active enough in the present day to be interesting, you also have to explain how he hasn't aged in that time.

So the dates were— I'm not totally sure they were necessary, but they were convincing, which is what the story did need to be. They also helped answer some of the other questions that inevitably arose from bringing Bucky back. How come Steve hadn't run into him before? Well, he'd been decommissioned since the eighties, well before the Avengers fished Steve Rogers out of the ice. See, even though Brubaker's story was defiantly nailed to a time, it made use of the sliding timescale. Because of the sliding timescale, the fifties through the eighties are basically dead years in the Marvel timeline— everything that was actually published then now happened in 2010. So Brubaker could plant a whole character there and it made sense that no one had met him. The exceptions, like Nick Fury, were few, and could be explained specifically in the comic itself.

There are also thematic reasons I think it also worked— Captain America is already a "man out of time" story, and Cap and Bucky are both obviously pinned to the a historical era. Because of this, a the Captain America mythology already features lots of temporal alienation and lots of Nazis who have somehow survived WW2.

Moving Natasha's origin back to the 1950s is trickier. Paul Cornell's Deadly Origin builds off of Brubaker's plotlines and uses a similarly dated approach— we see Natasha as a child in 1928, for example. But while Brubaker was essentially creating a new story and plopping it into an empty timeline, Cornell was mushing a lot of existing stories together and then sticking dates on them. This doesn't work nearly as well, because most of these stories are things that happened onscreen already. By fixing Natasha back to the Cold War, many of her older stories read differently. Like, for example, her romance with hotshot rookie Hawkeye might come across strange if read with the knowledge that she's actually sixty years older than him. Or the constant death and rebirth of her ex-husband Alexei— is he also, then, unaging? Is Ivan? By pinning his story to specific dates Brubaker could avoid plotholes like this, pinning Natasha to specific dates creates them.

Natasha had never previously been concieved of as a timelost, immortal character, and her many decades of prior stories weren't necessarily equipped to handle a retcon of that scope. To his credit, Paul Cornell really tried to make it work, but he also had to use mind control and false memories to do it, which are plot devices I'm not very fond of. Creators, though, are still running into this problem, because while temporal alienation isn't an important theme for Natasha, her past is. A good example is the recent Samnee/Waid run with Weeping Lion, someone who lost a relative to Natasha as a child, and has nursed a grudge since. The way the story is told he'd have to be around Natasha's age— but instead of explaining his apparent immortality, the comic just ignores that and presents the parts of his story that matter. I think that was the right call. Fans like me, who know and care about continuity, and how Natsha's actually 88, can no-prize themselves an explanation. And fans that don't know or don't care aren't subject to a narrative aside that clutters the story and makes things more confusing, as explaining Marvel timelines always does.

I think that's the approach I'm most in favor of for Natasha for now: be vague enough about flashbacks to let people imagine the origin story they want. Dating will make things confusing. Explicitly retconning the "Natasha is secretly 88" thing will also be confusing, because then how does she know Winter Soldier? Best avoid it unless you have an good reason, and imo continuity porn is not a good reason.

On the flipside, Nadia Pym is an example of the storytelling opportunities the sliding timescale brings. Hank's first wife, Maria, died a very long time ago, but because Marveltime is really compressed, you can introduce a character with an interesting legacy built in. And you wouldn't really get that if you played strict with the idea that the Red Room shut down in the 1970s. She can just be a teenager and it works and doesn't need to be impossibly complicated, like this answer.

[traincat]

Thoughts on who the woman on the cover of 2-in-1 #5 might be? Issue #3 mentions a mysterious woman who says she can help but like who is she?????

This being the cover in question – short answer is, I don’t know. She doesn’t look to me like any particular Fantastic Four character on first glance; if the hair were darker, I’d say they were somehow doing my beloved Alyssa Moy justice, but no, seems she’s still a crushed brain and/or a robot her unnecessary boyfriend constructed. Justice for Alyssa Moy. Anyway, based on just that glance, I’d wager she’s a new character. 

But. But. There’s one other scenario that occurs to me. I think it’s pretty unlikely, but I’m going to talk about it anyway, because:

And I’m sorry anon, but I’m going to use this answer to finally write my updated meta on this subject of Lyja, the Skrull Johnny unknowingly married while she was in the guise of Alicia Masters, tackling the nature of the retcon, some really bad writing, and the truly baffling reaction to this from future comics only doubling down on the creep factor. Warnings for discussions of rape.

But Traincat, you might say, didn’t you talk about this for like six hours on Stormcast? Yes, I would answer, that unfortunately just led to more thoughts on the subject, as I had to reread the issues in question.

All 100+ of them.

See, this is actually the storyline that got me to read All of Fantastic Four, where before I had mostly been bouncing around post-Heroes Reborn (everything south of 1998) and the original Lee/Kirby run. And I have problems discussing this storyline, because it makes me uncomfortable in a number of ways. First because I find this storyline, and more importantly the way it eventually played out, deeply uncomfortable, in part because it refuses to ever let itself confront how deeply uncomfortable it is. It’s always pulling back from the edge in way that seems hollow and more than a little victim blame-y. Second, because of my own personal paranoia issues, this is like, my literal nightmare scenario, although I think that’s the least important aspect of my discomfort with it. It’s very unlikely I’ll accidentally marry an alien spy, but trust me I’m on the lookout for the regular variety.

Third, because of the misogyny that is frequent in fandom, I’m often uncomfortable criticizing female characters in love interest roles, which was how the character was initially presented to me and how in fact most canon after the fact treats the character, however, I am going to suggest, erroneously they do so. But Lyja isn’t a Karen Page, Mary Jane Watson, or a Gwen Stacy, and my criticisms are not grounded in her perceived worth as a romantic partner for Favorite Male Character. More over, Lyja doesn’t exist out of context of this relationship. Her only appearances center around it. And another important aspect is that I don’t even think you can properly view Lyja as one character, because half of Lyja’s appearances aren’t, strictly, actually Lyja. The character at the time the comics were being written was not intended to be her, and so you enter a weird stretch of canon where I, at least, because of the way I read comics, have to simultaneously examine it two ways: pre-retcon and post-retcon.

A retcon is, by definition, a piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events, typically used to facilitate a dramatic plot shift or account for an inconsistency. In this case the retcon was used for the former, and actually, I think it works quite well for its purposes. It’s just that it tells one story and then refuses to commit to it.

But to backtrack. I’d been vaguely aware of Lyja for a while before I decided to sit down and read this from the beginning, mostly through fandom osmosis and the Marvel wiki. She was always presented to me as an actual love interest who, if they had a particularly melodramatic plot, at least also had a real relationship with Johnny. This, I’m going to argue, is not the case, not in the least because when discussing this you actually have to discuss three completely different relationships: the originally intended Alicia-as-Alicia and Johnny, the retconned Lyja-pretending-to-be-Alicia and Johnny, and Lyja-as-Lyja and Johnny.

But to start at the very beginning, Johnny and Alicia, who would later be retconned into Lyja, began a romance during John Byrne’s run on Fantastic Four, following Ben’s decision to stay in space after the initial Secret Wars. It’s a time of emotional upheaval within the team: Ben’s left the team, replaced by She-Hulk, and Sue’s just suffered a miscarriage.

Here, in Fantastic Four #267, Johnny and Alicia embrace in the hospital. Like I said above, there’s two ways to look at every Johnny/Alicia scene before the retcon: with the intent with it was originally written, and how the retcon reframes it. The original scene is lovely, actually – Johnny and Alicia, two of the closest people to Ben and Sue, embracing in the hospital and leaning on each other in their grief.

With the retcon, it becomes something very different. This is canonically Lyja’s first one-on-one contact with Johnny. Her mission is in shambles – Alicia was specifically picked, it would be revealed after the retcon, to be replaced under the belief that an agent masquerading as one of the Four would be discovered, but a Skrull disguised as Alicia, one of the closest people to the Four, might be able to slip detection. But if Ben isn’t part of the team, the role of his girlfriend becomes less valuable. She won’t be able to get as close to the Fantastic Four as her mission requires unless Lyja manages to ingratiate herself some other way. Reed and Sue are a married couple who just suffered the loss of their child – they’re too complicated. She-Hulk’s also a newcomer, so cozying up to her as a confidante doesn’t provide much security. Johnny’s the obvious target – and he’s vulnerable. He’s missing Ben and grieving for his lost niece. What starts as a bittersweet scene of two friends comforting each other becomes, with the retcon, a moment where Johnny’s grief and emotional vulnerability is used against him.

Cut for length.

(Fantastic Four #358, the issue immediately after the Lyja reveal.)

Maybe the thing about this retcon and the subsequent handling of it that bothers me is that it actually really works. If you look at it with the retcon in place, it doesn’t feel out of place even though I’m sure it was hastily cobbled together – there’s only one issue’s worth of build up to tip the reader off that something’s wrong before the “Alicia” Johnny married is revealed to be a Skrull. But if you’re going to pull a twist as dramatic as this, you need to commit to it, and address how dark this is, and how every aspect of Johnny’s life was violated for the sake of Lyja’s mission – and, later, violated all over again because Lyja wanted to continue the relationship, heedless of Johnny’s wishes.

In Fantastic Four #275, we’re shown the aftermath of Johnny and Alicia’s first time together:

This is, for the record, more or less the closest thing there is in canon to a Johnny Storm sex scene, which is odd for a character who’s often categorized first and foremost as a womanizer: a morning after scene where he does, in fact, seem regretful, or at the very least uncomfortable. It’s interesting to think about that aspect with the retcon in place. Is Johnny uncomfortable because he feels on some level that something is off? It’s a strange scene with or without the retcon (John Byrne both wrote and drew this stretch of Fantastic Four, so you can’t blame a writer-artist disconnect). Without the retcon, it certainly seems like he’s trying to back out of the relationship, but Alicia isn’t on the same wavelength, and with it, “we’re neither of us children” is a very manipulative line from Lyja. She knows from a previous discussion before they got together that Johnny’s youth is something he’s self-conscious about, that he doesn’t really feel “adult.” (Alicia, for the record, is at least a few years older than Johnny. Byrne identifies her as having met the Fantastic Four when she was 19, but then Byrne also retconned a large gap in between Reed and Sue, and introduced Ben’s famed Aunt Petunia as a woman much younger than her husband.)

Johnny/Alicia, pre-retcon, is a strange relationship. There’s a lot of big romantic talk, but very little chemistry between the characters, and I have to confess: I think this was always about Ben, and the betrayal Ben feels when he comes back to Earth and finds that Alicia, his on-again, off-again one true love, and Johnny, the closest thing he has to a younger brother, have gotten together. 

There is this panel where Johnny talks about how in love he is, and how he’s never felt this way before…

… but it’s hard to take it seriously as something special when this is not unusual for him at the beginning of a relationship, flame-heart and everything:

I once went looking for what John Byrne thought of the retcon without much luck, but I did turn up an interview where he said that, while the characters hadn’t told him where they were going yet, he didn’t think he would have married Johnny and Alicia when he left the book with Fantastic Four #294, which is curious when there’s a scene where Johnny seems about to propose before he’s interrupted by Fantastic Four business. 

That being said, the timing of Byrne’s departure didn’t leave much choice but to get Johnny and Alicia married – there were only six issues until Fantastic Four #300, and any time there’s a hundred issue mark, you want a big story like a wedding. And the marriage is where things get tricky, both, I think, from a storytelling perspective and from a common problem with larger canons and fandom osmosis. If you say two characters were married, it implies certain things: that they were in love, at least. The problem being that Johnny and Alicia never had real chemistry, not like Ben and Alicia do and not like Johnny and Ben do. Because, as I’ve said – this was always kind of about Ben.

Alicia: Sometimes, when we touch, I can’t help but think of Ben.Johnny: Oh thank God it’s not just me.

Whenever a post-retcon comic tries to treat Johnny and Lyja’s relationship as a normal comic book romance, they usually use the marriage in defense of that, calling Lyja Johnny’s estranged wife, but leaving aside the fact that Johnny didn’t know who he was actually marrying, that implies that the marriage was happy and stable. Which it wasn’t.

From almost the very beginning, there were problems. Shortly after the wedding, Reed and Sue decide to leave the team and the superhero lifestyle so they can better focus on raising Franklin. Ben, the new leader of the team, is tasked with finding their replacements. His first pick is Sharon “Ms. Marvel” Ventura, another plotline I could scream for one hundred years about for a badly handled rape subplot, and his second is Crystal, Johnny’s first real love. Crystal is at this time recently separated from Quicksilver, who she’d left Johnny for, and Ben partially does this with the intention of putting strain on Johnny and Alicia’s marriage.

This is five issues after the wedding. Johnny and Alicia only returned from their honeymoon an issue before. If you have to keep the fictional romantic relationship you’re writing interesting by introducing a new love triangle just five issues after the wedding, then you’ve got a problem with the relationship you’re writing.

The thing is, Ben’s scheme almost works – from the start, Crystal’s presence shakes Johnny up and makes him doubt his relationship with Alicia. If you did a shot for every time he thinks, in anguish, “I love my wife” like he’s trying to convince himself, you’d get pretty drunk. But Johnny’s always been depicted as pretty intensely monogamous – cheating isn’t something he does, despite the character’s in-and-out of universe reputation. So he and Crystal just pine dramatically at each other until she leaves the team.

There’s a lot to unpack in the newlywed issues – not in the least the fact that, despite their married status, we never see Johnny and Alicia in bed together, not even in a non-sexual context. If you compare them to Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson, who were also married in 1987, the difference is shocking:

The comics leave no doubt that the Parkers were sleeping together, but Johnny and Alicia? The only real evidence on page they’re having sex is that when Lyja initially lies about the baby, Johnny certainly seems to think it’s possible. Again I note the lack of chemistry between Johnny and Alicia in the early days. They’re almost laughably unsexy, especially for a pair of newlyweds, moving into their own apartment only to move back to the Baxter Building (and back with Johnny’s family) almost immediately. There’s a real lacking sense of intimacy between them, coupled with Johnny’s emotional affair with Crystal. Then there’s the entirety of Fantastic Four #332 where, while captured by rogue Watcher and held unconscious, Johnny dreams of his perfect world, wherein – and I’m not joking about any of this – he dreams that Franklin unintentionally used his reality warping powers to make Alicia love Johnny instead of Ben, ultimately undoing the changes and reuniting Ben and Alicia.

“He – made us fall in love–!” “He made us get married – live together –!”

With or without the retcon in place, Johnny’s obviously unhappy in his marriage. It’s interesting to think of this issue as him subconsciously recognizing that he’s being manipulated, but unable to pinpoint the source of that manipulation. He knows he’s been forced into the marriage, but he doesn’t know how. But this issue makes it very clear that at least subconsciously, he feels forced.

If the marriage had been working in the story, they never would have pulled the retcon and revealed Johnny was married to a Skrull impostor. But it wasn’t, and there’s a problem with Johnny and divorce – which is simply that he’s never broken up with anyone before in his life. (Literally, he’s never ended one of his relationships.) If you view his expressing regret in FF #257 as a clumsy attempt at it, then you can see how quickly that got shut down. Johnny is the unhappy party in the relationship, but he would feel like getting a divorce would be a failure – instead he dreams up a scenario where Alicia was never REALLY in love with him at all.

Besides, it’s not DRAMATIC to have them just say the marriage wasn’t working and call it off. It’s a comic book! It’s supposed to be aliens and clones and robots! I actually don’t think the retcon in itself is bad. It’s everything that comes after it.

In Fantastic Four #356, the cracks begin to show. (The reveal of the retcon is very sudden; I’m going to assume that the decision was made as of the writing of this issue.) “Alicia” expresses her doubt at being able to fix a melted sculpture and is unable to recognize her stepfather, the Puppet Master. In #357, Reed invents a machine that would register the specific brainwaves of the inhabitants of the Baxter Building yadda yadda to prevent intruders and “Alicia” reacts with hostility.

“I would prefer to have Johnny and me move out of here… than to subject myself to a needless health risk!”

This bit has always been very telling to me: with her assumed identity under threat, Lyja threatens to separate Johnny from his family if they don’t comply with her wishes. This would also be why she tells Johnny she has some “news” for him (implying that she’s pregnant) before Ben and the Puppet Master reveal her identity: she can tell him she’s pregnant, then say the Baxter Building is dangerous. New York is dangerous. They should go somewhere else. She’s lived with him for a while now; she knows he doesn’t have any solid support network aside from his family. If he’s cut off from that, he’s essentially isolated, an even easier victim.

(When Lyja says she loves Johnny, I believe the character’s declarations to be genuine. There’s certainly no conflicting statements that say otherwise. And it makes sense that she would love him. Lyja in her own way is a victim – she was selected for the mission because of a failed relationship with her commanding officer. She was told she would be playing the part of Ben’s girlfriend. She was doubtlessly made to expect a monster, since the Skrulls view the Fantastic Four as their enemies – instead she ended up with Johnny, who is warm and kind and sweet. At this point in the story I don’t think she wanted to isolate him specifically to be cruel, just that she saw the end coming and wanted to preserve things as long as possible. But his continued fantasizing about being with other people, coupled with his anguished declarations that he has to honor his vows as a superhero, don’t exactly spell reciprocation of these feelings when you look at them up close, and he was manipulated into this relationship for ulterior motives, and it doesn’t negate that what Lyja attempted to do to preserve her assumed identity was abusive on top of the way she’d already infiltrated his life. Lyja can love Johnny and do terrible things to him, which, intentionally or unintentionally, was what was written.)

Anyway, yadda yadda, Ben and Alicia’s stepfather reveal Lyja’s Skrull status, Lyja says she’s pregnant with Johnny’s baby, the Fantastic Four and Lyja go to space to rescue the real Alicia from where she’s been held in suspended animation by the Skrulls, a battle ensues and Lyja appears to die, confessing with her last breath to Johnny that she’d lied about being pregnant. For the sake of the argument, I will note that Johnny says he loves her as she’s “dying” – but to be fair, he thinks she’s dying, and he’s barely had time to process everything, as evidenced by the fact that when they recover the real Alicia, he still attempts to act like her husband, even knowing he was never married to her. I think it’s fair to say he’s in shock and I don’t think you can take that statement of love as solid proof of his romantic feelings towards Lyja specifically, given all of the other evidence. The Fantastic Four return to Earth with the real Alicia, and publicly announce her sudden divorce from Johnny, since of course she was never involved with him and is in fact still in love with Ben. Alicia is notably traumatized by the swap – Lyja sold her apartment, her works. Alicia canonically feels violated by the incident, and I have got to say, her reactions are some of the few during this period that feel realistic.

“All of my old clothes – everything I’ve ever owned – was tainted by that alien! You can’t imagine the sense of violation I feel!”

Johnny enrolls in ESU and tries to move on with his life. Except this is comics, so, haha, nice try. Lyja, not dead after all, violently attacks Johnny on the ESU campus, attempting to murder him for “abandoning” her and “their baby”, which she now claims is real. In the ensuing battle, Johnny’s forced to go Nova to save his life, and in the process he burns down the ESU campus.

If you’re familiar with Johnny, you know that this is his worst fear realized: his control stripped, his powers doing immense damage. He can’t be sure at this point that he HASN’T burned hundreds of innocents to death. (It is conveniently stated later than, somehow, no one was hurt in the sudden explosion, but that’s always felt very handwave-y.)

When Johnny’s taken into police custody, he sees Lyja in the crowd and panics since after all she did just try to kill him. Afraid for his life – afraid of her – he flames on and escapes police custody, ending up a fugitive for a matter of time. At a certain point, Lyja ends up allied with the Four. Why would they allow this? It’s difficult to say. Because she claims she’s carrying Johnny’s baby. Because Reed is distracted with other matters. Because Sue’s evil Malice persona is starting to reassert itself. Because Ben’s secretly so grateful the real Alicia didn’t actually marry Johnny. Because, frankly, at this point in time: the writing is just not very good.

Okay, like. It’s hard to tell at this point what Lyja honestly believes. She’s been surgically altered without her consent, given laser powers and been implanted with an egg she would, after its removal from her, convince Johnny was their child but was actually a monster designed to kill the Fantastic Four. Honestly, I’m not going to read this part again, and it’s NOT crystal clear within the main Fantastic Four text, but I do believe at one point Lyja may have genuinely believed herself pregnant before the truth was revealed to her, but either way she knew significantly before the hatching and intentionally chose not to tell Johnny in order to be close to him. She definitely knew before she “gave birth”, even going so far as to punish him for being taken aback by the egg. 

“My new friend here is more attentive and more attractive than you ever were!”

The writing here suffers from two things. First, there’s a lot of showing and not telling. We never SEE Johnny reacting badly to the egg, only thinking wistfully of how it’ll be nice to hold his child when it hatches. Second, I suspect the creative team had very little planned ahead and were making things up as they went along, and that they hadn’t yet decided WHAT was in the egg, hence Lyja’s very vague “I MUST tell him the TRUTH” statements to herself. (She does not tell him the truth.)

It also might explain the truly baffling writing decisions in a Namor comic published during the egg baby period: in it, a shapeshifter disguises herself as Sue to sleep with Namor. When Namor discovers what has happened, he – and everyone else, both the characters and the narrative – are very clear on the fact that Namor was raped by this shapeshifter. All of this happens with Lyja and Johnny standing right there, and the comic doesn’t even seem to realize the problem. Lyja even weeps over the fact that her fake egg baby could have been harmed, which could, of course, be explained at the time that the creative team on Fantastic Four hadn’t decided that the baby was for sure a fake yet.

That being said, the baby WAS confirmed to be a fake, one that Lyja definitely knew about at this point, and everything that came before has to now be viewed with that light. And it’s disturbing to me that neither Johnny’s family nor the book itself ever treats Lyja like his rapist, even when the  same situation is applied to a different character. At worst it treats her as obsessed with him, but in a harmless sort of way. But that wasn’t what was written when you actually look at it. She explicitly used the egg – which actually housed a dangerous monster – as an excuse to violate his space, to be close to him when she knew otherwise he wouldn’t want to be around her.

“After months of bitterness, you and I had finally found some warmth. Was it so wrong to crave that?”

In a word? Yes.

I’ve always liked this scene, as much as I guess I can like any of this stretch of Fantastic Four, in #392, where Johnny finally explodes. “Did you honestly expect we could ever have a life together?”

(This is one of the reasons I find it hard to read comics in the MC2 continuity; I’m trying to have a good time reading about Peter and MJ’s teenage daughter and every once in a while it gets shoved in my face again that, oh yeah, this is the continuity where they decided to have Johnny married to his rapist and stalker.)

But Johnny’s anger towards Lyja – for invading his life, for lying about a baby in order to be close to him not once but twice, for violating every aspect of his life – is treated as almost childish by not only Lyja, but also by Sue, who tells Lyja she’s welcome to stay at the Baxter Building even when Lyja’s lies and her refusal to let Johnny go have chased Johnny from team and from his family in order to get away from her.

But Lyja doesn’t stay at the Baxter Building. Instead, she creates a new identity to follow Johnny, first just around New York:

And then out to Oklahoma, where he’s accompanied ESU student’s Bridget O’Neill’s archaeology dig as an excuse to catch up with his friend Wyatt Wingfoot.

Stalking! Extremely possessive behavior! How romantic! And by “how romantic” I mean yikes. It’s kind of unbelievable to me that anyone wrote this without the narrative explicitly condemning Lyja’s actions – but it doesn’t. If anything, it treats it as quirky. But the idea that someone could attack you, lie to you, attempt to manipulate you – and then turn around and start stalking you, wearing an entirely different face, when you refuse to continue to let them in your life is completely horrifying. 

I think part of the reason this might all be so weird is because it was written by men who a) felt uncomfortable that they’d written a male character, especially one like Johnny, whose youth and emotional vulnerability are often played up, as the victim in this narrative and tried, unsuccessfully, to pull away from it instead of following it to any logical conclusion b) can’t really imagine this kind of violence being perpetuated against them as men, or, if they can, find something titillating about the idea of a beautiful woman committing it or c) buy completely into the fantasy of having a hot alien chick obsessed with you, ignoring everything else in favor of that, like this Mark Millar interview seems to imply:

That’s the least Johnny dilemma of all time, by the way, in that it is a description of Peter and Felicia’s early relationship, but moving on.

Lyja, under the subtly-named guise of Laura Greene, proceeds to date Johnny in her new identity, while simultaneously working with the Fantastic Four as herself, and it’s not any less bizarrely written or creepy than the rest of this, not in the least because while several other characters discover Laura Greene’s dual identity, no one tells Johnny. Not Ben. Not Psychic Teen Franklin (long story): 

“And if I tell him… it means betraying her trust!”

He’s your uncle, Psychic Teen Franklin, and I’m pretty sure telling him he’s been tricked into unknowingly dating his stalker overrules that, but okay.

Roberta, the Fantastic Four’s robotic receptionist, goes through this twice in both Fantastic Four and Avengers Unplugged:

“I hate having to date Johnny this clandestine manner, but if he knew I was really his shape-shifting ex-wife, he would never see me!”

I am going to scream.

It’s totally cool that Reed built a robot receptionist with sensors delicate enough to catch any impostor who might slip by, but apparently never installed anything like an ethics routine.

“Curse you, Johnny Storm, for making me sneak around this way!!”

That’s right, it’s apparently Johnny’s fault Lyja has taken on an entirely new identity in order to keep herself in his life when he told her in no uncertain terms they had no future together after she took the form of his friend in order to spy on his family, used his grief over the death of his niece to get close to him, married him in that guise without his knowledge of her real identity, attempted to separate him from family, tried to kill him, causing him to burn down a campus in order to save his life, and lied not once but twice about a baby, once when what the “baby” actually was was a monster designed to kill both him and his family. Totally weird how he doesn’t want her in his life. Look, the writing here is atrocious, but that doesn’t stop this from being spectacularly victim blaming behavior.

Another weird thing about this period is how, while Johnny and “Laura” are dating, she doesn’t really seem to like him, at least not how he is, criticizing his attempts to compliment her:

“Trite, simple-minded and unimaginative – but, still, rather sweet!”

And, bizarrely, almost emulating her life as “Alicia”, dismissing his suggestion of a movie as “pedestrian” and instead suggesting they go to a sculpture gallery, where Johnny is clearly uncomfortable:

Not that this period of comics seemed particularly concerned with realistic emotional reactions, but being in a sculpture gallery would have to dredge up unpleasant feelings for Johnny. Nevertheless, Lyja pushes for it, even when he expresses his discomfort.

tl;dr, because we’re getting to the end of this, eventually Johnny discovers Laura is Lyja. It’s wrapped up very quickly, because there’s a world-threatening crisis going on. To sum it up, the Fantastic Four and the Avengers would after this be trapped for a period of time in a pocket universe created by Franklin Richards. Lyja was not trapped with them, as they were essentially living out a reboot of their early days. When they returned to the main universe, Johnny remarks briefly on Lyja’s disappearance, but she wasn’t heard from again until the Secret Invasion event in 2008, more than ten years after her last appearance. (Secret Invasion fittingly involved a Skrull invasion force having been secretly planted on Earth for years.) 

During Secret Invasion Lyja, in the guise of Sue, launches the Baxter Building (housing, at the time, Johnny, Ben, and the children) into the Negative Zone. When confronted by Johnny, who believed her to be Sue at the moment, she attempted to convince him that Ben had been replaced by a Skrull.

Okay, in the interests of ending this incredibly long post: what happens next is that they fight a Negative Zone inhabitant who attacks them, they kiss, it’s weird, Lyja blames Johnny for never contacting her, saying he could’ve looked up Laura Greene in the phone book, Johnny remains rightfully mad at Lyja, but is reluctant to leave her in the Negative Zone at the end. 

The problem is still this initial scene. Lyja later says she took Johnny to the Negative Zone to protect him, as she’d been ordered by the Skrulls to kill him. But if that’s true – why try initially to trick him into believing she was Sue? Why try to convince him that Ben was a Skrull? What was she planning on doing if he’d bought it? Was the goal to take Ben out of the picture – again, to remove his support network and leave him alone with her? And the two comments on his intelligence – “[Thinking]’s not exactly your forte” and “You’re many things, Johnny, but genius is not one of them.” Part of my problem with Lyja is that ever since she made her initial return after her apparent death, there’s always been an edge of cruelty to her interactions with Johnny. She belittles him even as she repeatedly invades his life, essentially telling him he’s not good enough and also that he can’t escape. It’s an uncomfortable read on a lot of levels.

Lyja ultimately stays in the Negative Zone to find herself. It’s not a bad exit for the character, because the character does need to find herself beyond this incredibly toxic dynamic – if I could be sure it was the exit. I know Robinson had planned to bring her back had his run not been cancelled, and given how she’s addressed – by Johnny telling Ben he doesn’t think he’s ever been in love the way Ben and Alicia are, but that “his Alicia” is the closest he’s ever gotten – makes me doubt that all of the abuse was going to be, you know, actually addressed. (It also again frames Johnny’s marriage to “Alicia” as a happy one, and not one fraught with doubt and a deep, if never fully explored, desire on Johnny’s part to have it dissolved.) 

Having written all of this, I do have to say I really doubt it’s Lyja and do think the “mystery woman” in question is probably a new character. It’s just 1) I live in fear and 2) Lyja was referenced at the beginning of Two-in-One #2, though likely just because as I’ve noted on other posts discussing Ben and Johnny’s recent separation, the beginning of the Johnny/”Alicia” relationship is the only other significant serious fight between Ben and Johnny.

tl;dr your local Traincat talks herself into a crisis over one line, then talks herself out of it while writing incredibly long reply anon probably wasn’t asking for. Lyja and Johnny’s relationship is not a romance and I would really like to stop seeing it framed as such and, instead of the weird revisionist history that seems to pop up regarding the character, I’d like for comics to admit that Johnny is the victim in this situation rather than doubling down on the “oh! The Human Torch! That playboy!” myth. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[orangedodge]

Instead of flooding my blog with a deluge KH posts, I figured I'd do just one in-depth one about the end reveal.  

At least until the next trailer comes out, and my inner nine year old breaks out once again.

So despite Nomura's limitations as a writer, and his occasional technical naivete, I've always been a bit surprised that he's never really given his due as a director. He has good storytelling instincts, and can be skilled at framing information on screen to highlight what he wants, while making his audience ignore what he doesn't want them to pay attention to. His team can also cut a trailer very well. The 2.8 trailers were masterful at presenting actual spoilers, but framed within an artificial context that hid their meaning, and led to the audience anticipating story beats that did not actually exist. The respective natures of Aced and Gula as people, in particular, was something he was highly successful at concealing.

E3 trailer spoilers below the cut

The first E3 trailer drop, which I think we're calling the "Frozen" trailer, reminds me a lot of what he did last time, with those 2.8 trailers. The reveal at the end, and it's implication that Aqua is now evil, is driven by two lines,

SORA - "I wont let her fall to darkness"

and

AQUA - "You're too late"

The combination is framed to suggest that it's specifically too late for Aqua, but as these lines occur in two entirely different scenes, and this structure is unlikely to be preserved in the actual game, the thematic bridge they create is an artificial one. It's unknown what the full context of each scene actually is, particularly the latter scene with Mickey, Aqua, and Riku. Instead, Aqua's lines are being set up with by potentially false context by Sora.

What actually happens in that scene? I think the position of landmarks, and the continuity in way the scene is lit, is sufficient to establish that it most likely takes place within the same span of time as the previous trailer's Riku and Mickey scene, in which Riku's Way to Dawn Keyblade was broken.

By combining the two Riku scenes, I would posit that the chain of events is as follows: Riku and Mickey arrive at the Dark Margin > Aqua attacks them in her new shadow form > Mickey is disarmed, and Riku's Keyblade broken > Aqua stops fighting and reveals herself > Aqua picks up Mickey's Keyblade.

If the line "This Keyblade..." is native to that scene, and not something that was simply placed out of context in the trailer to create false context (a trick Nomura used with Phantom Aqua's dialogue in the 2.8 trailers), then it could be possible that she didn't recognize her opponents until she saw that Keyblade. Either way, I believe it's likely that she fought them until they were both disarmed, whereupon she stopped, and revealed herself to them.

Two things grabbed my attention,

Is breaking Way to Dawn, the Keyblade with one of Xehanort's creepy time-travel spy eyes (that we've been warned about), actually an inherently aggressive act? She appears to have been completely shrouded/cloaked in darkness, if not actually invisible (if that was a Red Eyes effect Mickey was under), when she arrived. Assuming that the two Riku clips are in fact one continuous scene, than it seems as though she didn't let them see her until that Keyblade was out of the way.

Why pick up Mickey's Keyblade? It was established ages ago that a Keyblade can't be stolen from its wielder, so unless that's being retconned, I don't see why she'd benefit from picking it up unless to demonstrate to them that she's still capable of doing so. And that's being done in a state where she's not just possessed by darkness, but seems to have been totally transformed into it. The only precedents I can think of for that are Anti-Sora and Ansem. Anti-Sora didn't have access to Keyblades, and Ansem could only wield one through Riku's body (and presumably Riku’s heart, since he lost his access to the Keyblade once he cast that away).

So is Aqua currently fallen to darkness? Almost definitely, unless this is just Phantom Aqua messing with Mickey, or a physical manifestation of an impression she left behind when she lived there, or the result of some unique circumstance like Aqua-removed-her-Heart-from-her-body or Aqua's-looking-for-Ven-in-the-realm-of-sleep that that would render her condition a temporary side effect.

Is she 'norted? It seems probable, but I'm not one-hundred per cent sure that it actually follows from what's been shown. Xehanort's never shown the ability to discorporate into dark fog or become invisible, I mean, and it seems like that would be a fairly useful ability to make use of if he had it. It seems not unreasonable to assume that it's therefore an ability newly unique to Aqua, and not something connected to a 'norting. I'm going to leave the changers to her hair aside because it's appeared that shade before (for example, in the daylight Wayfinder sequence at the start of the 0.2 trailer), and I'm not sure how much of the color change is being influenced by the lighting conditions, or even if the lighting is finished. The eyes seem like a big give away that she's 13th 'nort, as we've only ever seen glowing amber eyes in humans with Xehanort's vessels... but we don't actually know why he has those traits in the first place.

It could be nothing of consequence, just a unique aspect of his character design that made an easy shorthand for showing who he was possessing. Or it could be that amber eyes are actually meant to represent something in this setting (connection to Heartless?), and what specifically that is just hasn't come up yet, except as through the brothers and sisters 'nort. So it's possible that her eyes don't really mean what we assume they do, and it's just a fun way to use the trailer to mess with us.

(And because this series is so weird, it may also be worth remembering that incomplete beings have been shown to take physical forms influenced by the expectations of the people viewing them. Think Xion's magic flippy-floppy hood, or Aqua perceiving Ansem as Terra. So depending on what the meaning of Aqua's shadow form actually is, the way she appears to Mickey might not be what she actually looks like, as opposed to just the material consequence of how he expects her to look, reflected back upon his own reality. I... ugh. This series is something else.)

(There's also a possible exception to the only-'norts-have-glowing-eyes rule with Terra, who did have glowing amber eyes before he was 'norted, but portions of those cut scenes may now be apocryphal)

But even if Aqua is 'norted, does it automatically follow that she's now an evil puppet of the arch villain’s? I'm going to just throw this out there, and give a hard no. Could be! She could be evil now, she could even be a boss fight and a resulting fetch quest to fix her Wayfinder to bring her back to normal, or be a recurring super boss introduced to give the heroes someone more threatening to fight than Vexen and Marluxia, or anything else. But it's not absolutely necessary and it's a truly strange assumption to make, given past experiences with 'norts and people consumed by darkness.

Riku was 'norted for... really the entirety of the first three games in one way or another, and after a few initial close calls, he got his second wind, and was fine. Vanitas and Braig both seem to do whatever they want; it just so happens that they want to be evil, but I don't think Xehanort has ever shown any supernatural capacity—resorting instead to threats and possible torture—to modify their behavior if they wander off to undermine him. Terra is... well his body has been possessed for decades now, but also obviously is not being controlled in any meaningful way, unless Xehanort actually planned to choke himself and get whipped in the face by chains. Axel also didn't seem to have any problems with just throwing Xehanort out, when he was a heartless shell that theoretically had compromised means of resisting a takeover.  

So Xehanort is clearly not always in complete control of his vessels, other than Young Xeno (himself), Ansem (his own literal heart), and maybe Xemnas (some proportion of his own heart in Terra’s empty body), who could all be unique exceptions. And even the vessels that have been with him the longest have habit of doing as they please. I should find it strange should Aqua be the absolute only exception in the series. And thinking on it, all that's really said of the final confrontation is that you have 13 seekers and 7 guardians... but there's not really a rule that they have to form two opposed teams and stick to them no matter what.

To just fly off into blind speculation though, what I'm personally leaning towards is the possibility that Aqua has just become a part of the realm of darkness. That Mickey is “too late” to reach her before a point of no return, and now she just cannot leave. She doesn't sound particularly angry, or upset to see him. It sounds like she's just stating a fact, or just speaking with resignation. Mickey and Riku, in the clip where Way to Dawn is shown broken, also do not seem as defeated as one might expect them to if they had experienced complete and total failure. They seem pretty sure of themselves, whatever has happened.

I'm hesitant to add this in, given my own bias, but it actually seems not unlike they're saying goodbye. Perhaps just letting go of something, if they've failed and are moving on, or if Riku is just saying goodbye to the chapter of his life represented within Way to Dawn. Or they could be getting ready to split up.  

I've seen a lot of speculation, that I think rings true, that Disney would prefer for Mickey to not be involved in the final fight, whacking recognizable humans in the face with a sword-like weapon. The rumor's line of reasoning follows that he needs to be swapped out for someone else, and Aqua seems like the most fitting possibility. Maybe literally? One stays, so another can go? Thematically, she took on Terra's punishment for him, trapping her there in the first place. Mickey taking it on for her, so she can leave, would be a fitting continuation. And it seems to be what he wants. Edgy, traumatized, Mickey Mouse is a weird concept to introduce to a story, but it almost pulls it off where his trauma re: Aqua is concerned. This is clearly meant to be the great unhealed wound in his life, and to not just free his friend, but take her place in the underworld for a while is one way to help him patch it.

[kimmysfandomblog]

🔥 for the dr3 anime. Have at it. (Before I forget I just wanna say I agree 110% about your opinion on Ko's sexuality. Single-target sexuality, I think it's called?)

Thanks for the ask, Hyun :) Sorry I took so long, but I have a lot of feelings when I write about this subject ^^; I accidentally... wrote you an essay ;;;;;;;

(And also, thank you so much!!! I never knew that existed, but it sounds very much like how I headcanon Ko!)

Unpopular Opinion on DR3, huh? I feel like I am generally... aligned with how most of the fandom view DR3?  DR3 was written poorly, DR3 ruined some characters (specifically a certain girl I love), DR3 had a bad mastermind/main antagonist, DR3 retconned  things poorly, etc. Like, honestly, the only thing I can do is actually tell you something I like about DR3, lol.

I guess one unpopular opinion would be that DR3Z Episode 3 is still my favorite out of all of DR3 (Hope Side included)!

I think when someone refers to their favorite episode in DR3, it would be something like Hope Arc, maybe an episode of Future Arc (like in Episode 6 when we were super hype about possibly Kamukura being there instead of Hinata and all these boats coming on their way). While I was also super hype about that, and I may have watched Hope Arc 20x times that day because my boy Hajime Hinata is safe and Happy, I have to say, I just like DR3Z Episode 3 more. It wasn’t completely satisfying (I don’t know if any episode of DR3 can be said to be completely satisfying, especially once you’ve finished the series), but it made more of a lasting impact on me.

First of all, I think one of the things that made me attached to it is that this is a much more Hajime-centric episode. We start with Hinata’s POV, and it shifts only a few times to other perspectives (Like Fuyuhiko’s, or Sato’s). WHen I finally got to know and love th DR2 cast, I was prepared to be excited for DR3 and getting to know their pasts. I first saw the DR3 trailer not knowing what they were talking about until they released the game on team, so when I rewatched it in anticipation, I got excited! One of the things I definitely wanted was more of Hinata! He was, and remains, the best DR Protagonist! I kinda figured that we would get more of Izuru than of Hajime, but I wanted to at least get more out of his motivations, and, yeah, we kinda did! It wasn’t what I thought we would get, what with a few mentions of his parents, but not so much of what they were like, but parts of Episode two, and all of Episode three were made to explain it a bit. SOme stuff, we already know, or could guess, such as that Hinata was desperate for a talent, and that be acquiring a talent, he would get Hope (Or a meaning to his life).

However, we get some additional info. Firstly, in Episode two, it is mentioned that HPA is paying for his tuition, should he enter the Hope Cultivation Plan, implying his parents are not as rich as we thought (DR2 made it seem like they were, since his parents were mentioned in that sort of flashback sequence). That puts a lot of pressure on him... not to mention they give him some time to decide. By the start of Episode three, he mentions he only has a week left. Within that one week he has left, he is acquainted with both sides of the decision, represented by Chiaki, representing the Ideal solution, where he wouldn’t need the project to have Hope, and Natsumi, representing the, I guess you could say, “Logical” solution, as in that no one alive cares about anyone unless they have talent, and HPA is giving it to him with no monetary cost to him, or his parents.

Now, we know that Chiaki is technically right, that even without a talent, you can have hope, but the problem is that she doesn’t have that same perspective. She does have a talent, and those words she learned from Yukizome can only help her because they were meant to say that Talent shouldn’t restrict Chiaki from doing what she wants, just for the fun of it. Hinata, meanwhile, has much less freedom in this Talent-driven society he is stuck in. No one will acknowledge his existence without talent, and because of  that, he can’t do anything even if he wanted to. By the end of this episode, he sees this flaw because unlike Nanami, Natsumi has the same perspective he does. She dies and it looks like as if no one cares at all about her death.

Now to Natsumi, she is the character struggling with society’s rules that you have to have a Talent to mean something. Both of them actually believe in these rules, and they are both desperate to get into the Main Course, but for Natsumi, the need is greater. She has a brother and his bodyguard who are both acknowledged as Ultimates, yet though she probably spends time with them both, Natsumi was left out. She was deemed, by society’s leaders in HPA, that she wasn’t enough for them, so how could she be enough for her brother? She would do anything for the same opportunity Hinata got. Hinata, who had been stuck with Reserve Course students that were all trying to accept they were nothing more than Reserve Course students and would never move on to the Main Course, now has come across someone similar to him, who has also refused to give up on their dream of being acknowledged as something special.

Hajime feels like the Hope Cultivation Plan is his only chance to finally be happy and proud of himself, but at the same time, he is, by nature, skeptical that such a plan would. It’s too good to be true (and it was, of course). The episode starts off with him looking up the school’s website, which doesn’t give him any real results. He’s only got a week to decide left, and he’s not completely sure yet if this is the right way to go even if, in his head, he desperately wants this to be the solution. It would be easy, and would benefit him and his family. But, with that doubt he still has, he latches on to Nanami’s words that he won’t need talent to be happy. THese words sound right. They sound like this is something that exists. But, it isn’t proven. In fact, it is disproven by Natsumi, first by her denial of his words that Talent isn’t everything (because it is something to enough people for it to matter), and secondly, when Natsumi dies despite coming from an influential family, and when she dies, her death is covered up with lies and unsatisfactory answers. This girl who he only just came to know and kind of befriend is dead, and he could do nothing about her death. He even pieces together that Sato killed her by chance, and that there was something clearly wrong with Sato to begin with, but then she is dead. Two classmates, now dead, and both of them had their deaths covered up. Hajime is not dumb, he can put pieces together (He didn’t need as much help in the trials unless someone was withholding information (usually Komaeda)). He knows exactly who to ask, and would have investigated it, but is stopped by Juzo.

He of course doesn’t know Juzo is trying to make sure he doesn’t dig too deep and gets targeted by HPA for revealing too much, but Juzo really doesn’t know how to talk with anything other than physical language. As in beat up a 15-16-year-old kid into submission, but you know. Juzo is just one more reason on top  of Natsumi’s death that he accepts the plan. Juzo validated his thoughts that he, nor anyone that lacks talent, matters.

It’s really heartbreaking to see Hinata like that, however I suppose, in his own way, he thought of the project as his way of breaking the mould of normality he was stuck in. You know that he needs to become Izuru Kamukura, you know it has to happen, but it does crush me how he had to come to the “realization” he is worthless otherwise to do it, through two deaths and his own degradation by Juzo. (and being saved by Chisa... probably not what he wanted.)

I find it interesting that the person that represents accepting the Hope Cultivation Plan is Natsumi, because we know if Fuyuhiko had ever heard her speak the words she did to Hinata, he’d have denied it. He’d have said she deserved to be in his place, that she would have been the better clan leader, that even though she didn’t accept his role, he would always introduce her as is Ultimate Little Sister, and no old men and drunk scout can change that.

If Hinata could have known that by being such a supportive friend, his friends would value him more than just as someone who has an Ultimate Talent, or EVERY Ultimate Talent, and that he provides all the difference just by being himself, I don’t think he would have turned to the Hope Cultivation Project.

But that isn’t how things went. Hinata, had no proof that Talent was truly meaningless. Society kept on validating that Talent meant much more than someone not acknowledged to have any.

Oh... I got.... way off topic ^^;

Well, overall, this was an emotional episode. I get why people don’t like it much: They really rushed the Twilight Syndrome MurderCase, to the point of not even showing the events in the minigame. I also wished for more Natsumi and Hinata interaction, or have this episode split in two (and take place instead of Love SOup incident, please). I found Satos’ character to be ver much lacking as well, since they reduced her to some kind of yandere-like personality (although thinking back, was she like that in the Twilight Syndrome Murder Case?) However, for what we got? It’s still something that I really love! It gave us an insight into Hinata, and an awesome character to boot!

(I also kinda skipped over the Hinam bits, but the Fountain scene was pretty sad, even if I’m really ehh about the way Nanami sees he’s hurt and still offers him to play, and other weird things like that involving those two... Like I swear Nanami would be way more concerned about his wellbeing in DR2 and pick up on the obvious bad signs and act on them more)

[aion-rsa]

The Flash Season 7 Premiere Adds New Layers to Mirror Master

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This article contains spoilers for The Flash season 7 episode 1.

The Flash season 7 premiere episode, “All’s Wells That Ends Wells” isn’t quite a traditional season premiere. In nearly every way that matters, it’s an episode held over from the pandemic-shortened season 6, and an episode with this very title was supposed to end after what ended up being that season’s finale before all of this nightmarish real world stuff intervened. But considering how strong that season was, all this means is that it get The Flash season 7 off to a particularly strong start…one that isn’t afraid to make major changes to what we thought we knew about the Mirror Master both past end future.

Not only do we get new and shocking information about Eva McCulloch, one of the best villains in this show’s entire history, but this episode even does a serious bit of retcon work on two previous villains, notably Rosalind Dillon (The Top) and the former Mirror Master, Sam Scudder.

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What happened to the first Mirror Master?

Before Eva McCulloch, we had been introduced to another villain who went by the name of Mirror Master. The Flash season 3 episode “New Rogues” introduced Sam Scudder, a criminal who used to run heists with Leonard Snart long before he became Captain Cold. Scudder and his girlfriend Rosa Dillon were hanging out in a warehouse with their ill-gotten gains when the particle accelerator explosion happened and they were caught in the wave. Like so many other folks in Central City at the time, they gained powers.

Rosa was able to give people severe vertigo, and distort their sense of balance, making them feel as if the world was spinning around them, hence her nickname, “The Top.” But Sam vanished at the time of the explosion…and emerged from a mirror three years later. It turned out that Sam was able to create “Einstein-Rosen bridges” with any highly reflective surface, allowing him to travel between them at tremendous speeds. Or, if he chose to hang out in that mirror dimension, time would pass slowly. Dillon and Scudder were stopped by Team Flash (as you might expect), and that was basically that…

…except for one additional adventure later that season, when Barry had to travel to the year 2024 and found a Central City where Top and Mirror Master were the top of the Central City crime food chain. That future never came to pass, though, thanks to the events of the season three finale. (See? The Flash has been messing with timelines since long before Crisis on Infinite Earths started changing stuff!)

Anyway, Scudder was assumed to be in his Iron Heights cell with no reflective surfaces until tonight’s episode, where he makes the briefest of appearances before being shattered by Eva. Eva coming back to kill a lesser Mirror Master who only made a couple of appearances would be cold enough on its own, until the first of the shocking revelations: Sam Scudder wasn’t real, he was merely a mirror duplicate created by Eva. The first, according to her.

Wait…what? No, it makes sense when you think about it. The actual Sam Scudder, the crook who used to be in Snart’s gang was definitely real. The most likely scenario here is that he was killed by the dark matter wave from the particle accelerator explosion, either when he was hurled into the mirror or shortly after. The “Sam” who emerged from the mirror three years later with mirror powers was the duplicate, and it turns out it was Eva pulling the strings. Not only that, she’s been in on it for quite some time.

Of course, that wasn’t the only big revelation about Sam, who mirror duplicate or no mirror duplicate was never the criminal mastermind he appeared to be. Rosa was pulling his OTHER strings as it turned out. That’s a scenario to unpack another day if we’re going to see more of Rosa this season. In any case, the guy who we previously knew as the Mirror Master was anything but, and there’s no doubt now that Eva is the one true Mirror Master.

Unless…

Wait…is Eva a Mirror Duplicate as well?

Eva, as well as the audience, had been operating under the assumption that she had been grievously wronged by her husband, and that she had been flung into the mirror dimension and abandoned while he reaped the benefits of their company. As it turns out, the truth might be something else entirely.

Now that Eva is back in our world, we see her watching the security footage of what happened the night the particle accelerator exploded. However, things unfold a little differently than she thought. Eva was flung across the room with tremendous force as the dark matter wave hit, and apparently died after striking a mirrored wall. Her husband, far from reveling in her demise, was as horrified as one might expect at the sight of her apparently lifeless body.

But if Eva died that night, that means that the Mirror Master (Mirror Mistress? Is that official?) we all know and love is a mirror duplicate. But it’s an additional and disturbing layer to perhaps the most layered big bad we’ve ever had on this show. One of the things that has made Eva such a fascinating character is how relatively sympathetic she has been.

But if that understandable motivation is gone, as well as her entire humanity, what does that mean for her going forward? Keep in mind, this is essentially a season six episode, and Eva’s story probably wasn’t initially intended to continue very long into season 7. Is this the start of a potential redemption, or will she (for lack of a better word) completely shatter under the knowledge that her very existence is a lie?

We’ll find out in the coming weeks!

There was another Mirror Master

One other thing to consider, technically, Eva isn’t the second, but the third Mirror Master that we know of. Back in the episode that introduced Sam Scudder, Harry Wells spoke of an Earth-2 Mirror Master named Evan McCulloch who used a “mirror gun.” That Mirror Master shares a name with the second comic book version of the character and a power set with the first. He has presumably been wiped from existence and memory along with Harry Wells and his entire version of Earth-2 (which isn’t to be confused with the Earth-2 of Stargirl).

Flash Facts! Mirror Master Edition…

The episode pays tribute to Mirror Master history in two subtle ways.

When Eva shows up to murder Sam’s fake ass, they’re at the old Broome warehouse where we first met Sam and Rosa. John Broome was the genius Flash writer who co-created so many of Barry’s iconic villains, including the Evan McCulloch version of Mirror Master.

Where’s that warehouse? 119th street. The second appearance of the Mirror Master (Sam Scudder…whew, this is getting confusing) came in 1961’s The Flash #119 by John Broome and Carmine Infantino. Since Eva is our second screen Mirror Master, the second appearance thing is appropriate. Plus, it’s our second visit to the Broome warehouse, and I’m sure there’s something in here about reflections or something if we think hard enough about it. Maybe we shouldn’t.

We’ll have more on The Flash Season 7 in coming weeks!

The post The Flash Season 7 Premiere Adds New Layers to Mirror Master appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[tumblunni]

Hi, I'm the anon who sent the messages about Rotom-Cyrus to TWJ. I wanted to explain myself. There are two books in Rotom's Room: one written by Charon where he says he found out about Rotom "by pure chance." So Charon is involved with Rotom (prob why he has that card) but he isn't the one who met Rotom as a kid. I don't want to spoil exactly what happens in USUM incase you haven't reached that part but it does basically confirm Cyrus is the one who wrote that account.

aaaa that suuuuuckscos literally its fuckin a book signed by charon how was i meant to know that oh the other book right next to it isnt by charon alsoand the trading card has no meaning whatsoeverand we’re just giving more sad backstory to a guy who already had a sad backstory and nope charon has no backstory whatsoever and was just super evil and everyone was right for all these years telling me i’m a jerk for liking this characterand right when basically the same thing just happened with faba seriouslyharmless comedic villain in sun and moon, is shown apparantly redeemed in the postgame, but NOPE now its retconned and he was The Most Evil One and something something lusamine isn’t bad anymore and everything she ever did is now being done by faba in the animecos hey yknow thats what i get for giving the benefit of the doubt to ~ugly people~seriously fuckin everyone hated faba right from when he was first revealed, you had people predicting his ENTIRE PLOT based on just one picture of him and his name and no information whatsoever on his personality. we all just fucking knew what was going to happen because he’s a science man with an ‘ugly’ face and he’s ~flambouyant~and then charon fuckin literally existed to be the ~worse man~ who was added to make cyrus more redeemablethats how he was treated in both mangas. he was made more evil just so cyrus could be redeemed, which was POINTLESS because we all already believed he could be redeemed! and fuck we even all already thought he had cute moments with his pokemon as a kid, geez! there’s a hundred fanarts of that same scenario but with murkrow or zubat or magikarp or houndour or sneasel...just fuckin the pokespe manga wrote a personalityless charon who murdered a child and was outright shown not being friends with rotom and actually hating rotom and getting his ass kicked by rotomand then in DPA we get not only More Evil Charon Who Kills People but also he’s drawn really stupidly over the top scary while everyone else is big eyed shoujo dorks. and our protagonist believes that everyone is redeemable except charon. lets show cyrus committing far more evil acts than charon ever did in the game, lets show him being ooc as fuck and talking about murdering pokemon while surrounded by graves. but THAT IS OKAY and our hero will insist on saying he’s redeemable but NOOOPE charon just fuckin steals some money and has an ugly grandpa face and he gets no such sympathy. he just exists to make you forget that moment of cyrus being ooc double evil. cos we literally retconned that charon was responsible for all cyrus’s evil acts last arc, even though he wasnt even in the fuckin story yetand like now my only damn consolation here is that the character i connected with when i first played the game is AT LEAST NOT THAT EVIL. but all the potential signs of headcanoning him as not evil were all false and i just should have known it. and apparantly its a better and more worthwhile plot to just give sad childhood man another pokemon he knew in his sad childhood, and the thing i thought was Really Cool And Interesting Writing didn’t actually exist. like seriously i was fuckin literally suffering from the same abusive childhood cyrus has in his backstory back when i played dppt and i DO NOT KNOW WHY but i ended up connecting with this stupid grandpa more than him and it saved me in a dark time more than him. back then i was a stupid fuck and i hated cyrus cos i saw myself in him, like i didnt want to admit that i was in an abusive family and i wanted to hate him for daring to want to take revenge against the world that fucked him over. i felt he didnt have the right, like I didnt have the right..so yeah i didnt even fully realise cyrus’s backstory until i replayed the game as an adult, but the one thing that did hit me back then was how unexpected and cool it was to turn our opinion of this jerk grandpa on its head. like i mean whoa! i didnt hate him like everyone else did, i found him pretty funny, but still i wasnt a big fan or anything until i saw that diary entry. like charon does LITERALLY NOTHING in the plot there is no reason they should have added him in a third version, he has no reason to exist unless he was meant to be the guy who introduces rotom’s new forms also added in the game. and it was such a mind blown moment! it doesnt even make him less evil! like “whoa this evil guy used to be a good kid once” could still work even if it WASNT a sign of him having potential redeemability, like it makes him so much more personally evil and horrible if he abandoned his best friend or something. I was so dissappointed you don’t get a boss battle with him, cos i went and caught that rotom and was hyped to defeat him with the pokemon he once betrayed and like there’s NONE OF THAT ANGLE if it was cyrus. it doesnt make rotom any different than any of his other pokemon that he owns right now and we know he already cares about, cos he has a crobat.and it JUST DOESNT MAKE SENSEbecause the journal SOUNDS like charon!they both talk all smart guy style but it felt more formal like how charon talksand like how charon boasts a lot, but the journal has him boasting about his friend instead. it sounds too enthusiastic to be cyrus...and like we already know where cyrus grew up as a kid and it wasnt eterna city. and he doesnt have a secret lab in galactic hq also in eterna city, like charon does. and also he’s not like friggin fifty years old so why would his childhood poke-friend be in a wrecked abandoned house if it was just ten years ago or something. and also why would they give charon this trading card where they draw the 100% evil guy having a vaguely genuine smile on his face and not looking like rotom hates him and he’s got it caged up or anything and also why would the card’s effect be all about friendship and why would they define him as The Rotom Guy and why would they even bother to give a trading card to charon if charon is a pointless character who never did anything important and had no actual relevance to this rotom wifi event except apparantly stealing a bunch of diaries from some other guy who was really responsible for it all. and why would they bother to point out that someone signed the diary if it wasnt the guy who wrote the diary, and also we are not going to sign the diary by the guy who actually wrote it. like if it was meant to be cyrus whey didnt they make it clearer?? nobody could be expected to have figured that out!also why does charon have a second rotom room in silph co in HGSS which timeline wise means he would have had it before DPPT and he’s talking about finding a rotom by chance before he ever found this diary that doesnt really belong to him. like why would he build an entire lab of form machines if he didnt own a rotom yet? how would he know enough to make them actually work for rotom if he never owned a rotom yet?why did nintendo decide to do all this if i wasnt supposed to reach the conclusion that charon had ANYTHING to do with rotom???why didnt they make it fucking clearer. why couldnt i have been saved years of clinging to this stupid ass headcanon and basing a lot of my taste in stories on the whole concept of ‘wow that was so fucking cool how they took a one dimensional looking villain and then turned it on our head with a cool reveal and made me super eager to see future stories with him’ and hey we’re not ever gonna get those and also everyone else was right and i should just give up and agree that ugly looking granddads will always be eviland why the fuck did i somehow link my self worth to such a random ass headcanon for a random ass character like seriously could someone have properly explained cyrus’s plot to me as a kid so i could have had him stop me from committing suicide instead. like seriously if they’d just made cyrus’s grandpa less hard to find and explained the plot more clearly and explained that he was the rotom kid AAAAAAAAARGHand i really didnt fucking need this, usum, right after also people started telling me that lusamine is ~really good~ and her whole child abuse plot is gone now like ha ha ha ha fucking ha lets crush bunni on two damn levelsand what is my fucking luck that this happened to happen right on the same day when i got some stupid ass anon hate and also had a horrible nightmare about my abusive fatherlike seriously dude who sent me this ask im really sorry ive had such an incoherant babbling reply to it, its just been a really bad day for me and like.. im not freaking out because of this minor headcanon being proven wrong, its just like i was already freaking out and having some random irrelevant headcanon bullshit happen right now is REALLY bad timing to push me off the edgehopefully i can calm down and come back and give a more coherant response of like.. why i headcanoned the different thing and why I’m sad its not true, even though i’m happy for you that your personal headcanon did become true instead.but like it sucks to be told ‘nope you’re not allowed to have your favourite character, his one and only personality trait was just a misconception you had’ during such a really bad timing of such an already bad daynintendo could u give us like a sassy science villain gramps who DOES have a redemption plot? or at least a plot that isnt ‘exists to be worse than the main villain’? like seriously why did it happen twice. i was happy at original sun and moon cos it felt like faba as charon but better written but then NOOOOPEjust...god...what.what sort of fuckface up in heaven decided to throw all the bad shit at me today and not at least spread it out across the rest of the week?

[mittensmorgul]

i love your s12 spn meta post, i love how you've analysed things and looked through different angles, but i have to admit. sometimes i feel that us fans of the show think more complexly about the characters and scenes than the writers themselves. they've shown continuity errors and character development mistakes time and time again, and the queerbaiting is frustrating as fuck. it doesn't make sense to me that these people are the same ones orchestrating such fantastic plotlines.

(i ran out of space for that previous ask) but again, i sincerely mean no disrespect to you or to the creators of the show. it was just my two cents. i'm sorry if you find it offensive in any way, i definitely did not mean for it to come off as rude! :(

Hi... I didn’t take it as rude, so you’re fine. :P

(I probably wouldn’t have posted it on anon, though, just because I don’t see the show as being fully of continuity errors and character development mistakes, and “queerbaiting” is in the eye of the beholder and seems a harsh statement to level against a writing staff that is comprised of several LGBT writers. Especially when they have been addressing queer characters and issues in serious ways, and absolutely not making them the punchline of a joke or dismissing them. It’s a word I would not throw around so casually.)

***On second thought, after typing ALL of this out, I feel like having spent the whole morning on it, it should be on my blog... I hope that’s okay.

Half the point of my rewatch (which, oops, I’m behind on because TNT showed a ten episode marathon the morning after a new episode aired, and the new episode had to take priority over the old) is to point out how consistent ALL of these things are.

There’s a post I like very much that I just saw again yesterday:

People should probably learn the difference between “plot holes” and “things I didn’t like” or “things the franchise plans to explain in the future” or “things film makers didn’t think they needed to explicitly explain because they thought you had critical thinking skills”

I didn’t reblog it because it’s already somewhere on my blog from ages ago, but especially relevant to s12, because of the way they’re telling the story.

99% of the time what looks on the surface like a “plot hole” is actually an expansion of canon, and yelling PLOT HOLE! or RETCON! just because something seems different means there’s a reason for the difference now.

Like the fact we’ve seen several shapshifters who don’t shed their skin like puddles of goo and can just *poof* into a new form. We’ve had shifters like this since s6 when we learned about the alphas. Truly powerful shifters don’t need to shed to change form.

(on a practical level, it makes the prop department’s job easier because they don’t have to create goo puddles, but also they’re able to use a shifter’s ability to change instantly as a plot point, and have done so several times very effectively. Like in 12.20 when Ketch was torturing “Mary” and punched her, so the shifter took on HIS form. They couldn’t have done that if they hadn’t introduced this more powerful strain of shifter before.)

Technically, everything that’s happened since 4.01 would fit the strictest definition of plot hole, because it had already been established that angels did not exist. And yet... here were angels.

Cas said in the past that angels were now walking the earth for the first time in two thousand years, so the fact he’d been down here in a vessel in 1901 must be a plot hole too... unless you assume that Cas’s previous statement was both specific and hyperbolic (which really isn’t a stretch, angels have always avoided certain truths in order to manipulate us). Angels as a whole hadn’t embarked on a unified mission to earth in the last 2000 years, but we know that Lily’s first encounter with Ishim in 1901 was because SHE SUMMONED HIM. She performed a magical spell that BROUGHT AN ANGEL TO EARTH. And the events of their relationship unfolded to the point she felt compelled to summon yet another angel (Akobel) to protect her from Ishim. Well, suddenly there’s a whole flight of angels coming to kill her, you know? It’s not the sort of story that any of the angels involved would be cheerfully chirping on about.

Point being, if Lily Sunder was capable of summoning an angel, there’s probably been OTHER people over the course of human history who’d tried it too. All of heaven may not have descended like they did in s4, but here and there, angels very well may have been watching over us.

It’s not a plot hole, it’s an expansion of canon. It refines our understanding and reminds us that we don’t know everything about the entire history of that universe.

I think there’s two kinds of people: Those who see something they think is a “mistake” in canon and scream PLOT HOLE! and get upset about it and think the writers are idiots, and then there are those who see that same thing and wonder how does that fit with the information I already have and then try to understand.

Sometimes a plot hole is just a plot hole (like the time travel nonsense in 12.13 that turns into a strange loop of infinitely decreasing returns), but most of the time it’s really really not.

As for characterization “errors”, most of the time they are incredibly purposeful. Like the whole scene at the beginning of 12.15. People are STILL shouting, “Out of character! Dean hates germs! He would NEVER do that!” and therefore MISSED THE ENTIRE POINT OF THAT SCENE.

Which was SAM standing there staring at Dean THINKING THE EXACT SAME THING.

Dean was putting on the performance FOR SAM. He KNEW Sam was lying to him about where the cases were coming from, and Dean’s not a moron. They visit the MoL, and suddenly a few days later Sam’s got a “magic phone app” that finds cases for him? Yeah, Dean wasn’t about to let Sam keep lying to him, and yet Sam was STILL lying to him even after two weeks of hunting, so he kept upping the Disgusting Quota trying to get Sam to break and confess. Because if he just comes out and asks Sam directly, he continues to lie and give him weak excuses. There’s more to it than that, but that’s the basics right there...

The one characterization thing that actually bugs me was the scene in 9.04 where Sam and Dean are watching Game of Thrones with Charlie, and Jensen and Jared DECIDED TO SWAP LINES because they felt that Sam was the one who would read the books, and not Dean... (Robbie Thompson, who wrote the scene, is still grumpy about it, too). Because DEAN DOES READ. And in this scene HE was the one who was supposed to be mirrored to Charlie through their mutual love of this particular brand of nerdery. It sort of wrecks the entire characterization of the episode, in which Dean’s usual “performing Dean” persona was SUPPOSED to fall down in Charlie’s company, and he would casually and comfortably admit he enjoyed reading the epic fantasy series (which, really, we know Dean reads fantasy novels... he’s a huge effing nerd).

Why do you think in 11.04 (also by Robbie Thompson) he wrote the line about Dean knowing that the phrase “god helps those who helps themselves” was from Aesop and not the bible? Because Jensen COULDN’T JUST HAND THAT LINE TO JARED. He HAD to admit he read. Because Performing Dean is one thing, but when he’s not trying to project that facade, he’s brilliant.

So yeah, 99% of it is 100% intentional. It’s our job as viewers to think about why. You can absolutely watch the show as a passive casual viewer (and the most casual viewer wouldn’t even NOTICE the things that get called plot holes or characterization mistakes), or you can see those things that seem not to make sense on the surface and look for the reason they struck you as being slightly wrong. Because if you dig just a little bit deeper, it opens up an entire new level of understanding about the show.

The writing is NEVER going to hand you all of that deeper characterization on a plate. That would make for TERRIBLE writing. All they want is for the characters and the plots to stick with us, so that we DO turn these issues over in our heads, so we DO think critically about them, and hopefully come to some compelling and fascinating conclusions. Or at the very least we’re eager to tune in again the following week to see if our suspicions are confirmed.

This is a hook that writers have been using since writing was a thing. This is how stories are told. Not just in the words, but in the negative spaces. We’re not just supposed to consume stories, but in the very best way, the best stories also consume US. They make us into an active participant in the narrative, and force us to consider the world and characters on our screens as real people.

That’s how all of this works.

[goatyellsateverything]

Final Thoughts: Ouija (and sequel)

These were good. These were very good. I’m even wanting to add these to my own collection, I liked them so much. I dont go looking for specific movies to buy when I buy horror, usually. The only ones I specifically sought out to get were the original IT, the remake IT, and Krampus. I’ve got a bunch of others but they were all just picked up randomly at pawn shops and dollar stores.

Typically, for me, most horror movies are just one watch and done. Even ones I like, I dont often want to watch them again. I think its because the scares aren’t usually interesting anymore. I’ve seen it so whats the point? Usually, it takes really good effects, unique and interesting writing, or its just a cult-y cheese fest thats fun to dive into from time to time.

The Ouija movies fall into the first two points.

The effects were great. They had this really great effect of white smoke taking over the eyes that was just beautiful. The lip sewing was really realistic looking. It wasn’t massively gory, but it was realistic enough to make me physically cringe whenever they showed it.

The writing was great. They use the fake out several times flawlessly and even use it to foreshadow events later. The twist in the first movie was great. It seems to be more and more rare these days in horror media that if there is a mother or father figure ghost they aren’t the evil one and are just trying to keep their child from killing indiscriminately. Its a fairly common thread in “true” haunting stories, but its becoming less and less common in media unless its based on a “true” haunting story. I dont know. I just really like the misdirection in movies. At least when its done well.

I dont want to just gush about these movies as if there is no criticism to be had.

Because, boy, have I got quite a bit of criticism for them.

These movies suffer from what I call the Annabelle syndrome. They made a good movie with a vague notion of what happened before but nothing concrete, then the movie becomes a hit and they decide to do a prequel sequel BUT the original writer and director aren’t involved in the second movie. Because the original writer and director aren’t involved, some key details are missing or retconed.

Spoilers, btw, like all my final thoughts tend to be.

The first movie brings up news stories that laid out a pretty clear timeline. Daughter goes missing for a period of time, enough for an investigation to happen, and enough time for people to begin speculating the mother had something to do with it. Then, after some time, the older daughter kills the mother during a supposed mental breakdown and she confirms the accusations that her mother killed her sister. Fast forward to the movie when older sister tells the protagonist to find her sisters body and cut the threads on her mouth. Protagonist and friends find the sisters body, laid out on an alter, covered in a sheath, with what I think is amethyst on her eyes. Its an extremely significant detail when you learn that amethyst is used to sooth negative energies like anger, hatred, guilt, sorrow, and pain. It encourages acceptance of lost ones and helps the living heal, move on, and let the dead rest.

In my mind I’m thinking, little sister will be overwhelmed by the evil spirits and the mother will be forced to kill her own daughter in order to trap the evil spirits. She’d use amethyst to try and sooth her daughter’s spirit that was overwhelmed by the evil she allowed into their home through the board. Then, some time later, the older sister is taken over by the evil spirit and she kills her mother. She comes to and due to the grief over her sisters death, the guilt of killing her own mother, and the overwhelming evil spirit riding her like a sports car her mind breaks. But the spirit isn’t totally gone from her and it continues to torment her because it wants its original host back, so when protagonist comes to her, the demon tells her it will leave her if she lets it back in its original host.

Thats not exactly what we got.

The backstory of the house and the evil inside are elaborated on and its actually really interesting. Through some pages written by Doris (the younger sister) while she was possessed. They were written by a Polish immigrant named Michel who came to the US after WW2. He’d been held in one of the Nazi camps, I’m betting Auschwitz, and was experimented on by “the devils doctor.” He ended up on the streets in the US and was eventually put into a mental institute. While there, he recognized the doctor from the camp and the doctor knew he’d been recognized; so he takes Michel from the hospital to his home where he’d continued his work in secret. Michel says dozens of others were in the house and tortured by the doctor. Their tongues were cut out, their vocal chords were severed, and their lips were sewed shut just so they couldn’t make noise when people were in the house upstairs. “Doris” eventually reveals that the spirits were still inside the house (because their bodies were still there, thus they played the “game” in a graveyard) and they were now controlling her body.

Great. Ok. So mom put the amethyst on Doris’ eyes to sooth the other spirits in her body after being forced to kill her. Right?

NOPE.

Lina, the older sister, is the one who sewed up her sisters mouth. Her dad (whos dead) told her to do it through some ghost mumbo jumbo. Mom (who had been chained to the stone table the doctor had used) wakes up after the fact and finds her little girl, well, dead with sewn up lips. Lina tells her she had to, to stop the voices. She comes up, seemingly to comfort her mother, only to stab her and reveals her clouded eyes that showed she’d become the spirits new host.

From there, my original theory was pretty correct. She ends up in the mental institution and her “sister” (the spirits) is still with her.

But the timeline laid out by the newspapers in the first movie no longer exists and all the fan fair around Doris’ body is never explained. We just go straight from Lina sewing her sisters mouth shut to Lina stabbing her mother to Lina in the institution. Who covered her with the burial shroud? Who put the amethyst on her eyes? Who boarded up the doctors old room? Who took all their mothers fake psychic stuff and put it in that room? Who REMOVED all of the doctors tools (because they aren’t there in the first movie)?

If you dwell on these inconsistencies it can sour the ending of the second movie if you allow it to BUT I think the good of these movies outweigh the bad.

The lack of answers IS a big negative but I think the story overall, the characters, the acting, the effects, and the atmosphere outweighs the retcons introduced in the second movie.

I really enjoyed these movies and I highly recommend them.