#this does tenuously have a narrative arc

[queermccoy]

BuddieTommy Honky Tonk (Spotify)

All My Friends Are Hot * Robyn Ottoini

I know you want her number 'Cause everybody wants her number Hello, you'll have to wait in line She looks good in every picture Sometimes I wanna kiss her

Bible Belt * Chris Housman

And I hate that it took So long to get over what it did to me, cause They hit you over the head with it Stuff it down your throat

Middle of a Heart * Adeem the Artist

Carlene askеd if she could marry me Drivin' round in Daddy's car I gave her my graduation ring Down by the lumber yard I felt the violent hit of her passionate kiss Like a bullet through the middle of a heart

Do-Si-Don'tcha * Tanner Adell

Boot scoot kick a little sawdust up I Got moves that I could show ya I know you wanna Do-Sí-Don'tcha

Good Lookin' * Dixon Dallas

He's bouncing off my booty cheeks, I love the way he rides I can hardly breathe when he's pumping deep inside I kiss him on his neck and then he kisses on my bussy Call him "Daddy" while I holler Man, that boy so damn good looking

Hymn * Adam Mac

I aint no stranger to sin I ain't much a man of the church But I can get down on a hymn

Drive Me, Crazy * Orville Peck

You shift on the gear, it's been a long year We're droppin' the hammer, got places to be No time for the past if you're speedin' by me Breaker-breaker, you there? Keep me company

All My Life * Brooke Eden

All my life, I thought that I Was built to ride off Into the sunset all alone Like a restless rollin' stone

F150 * Dixon Dallas

Well when we get to sippin' whisky And we get a little frisky I climb up on him, ride him like an F150

Love You a Little Bit * Tanner Adell

Hands on me in your old T-Shirt In your two door Ford thinking those three words Light turned green then it started sinking in I kinda might, sorta like, love you a little bit

Real * Kameron Ross

You make me feel Baby, for the first time Love is real

Mine * Taylor Swift

Do you remember, we were sittin' there by the water? You put your arm around me, for the first time You made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter You are the best thing that's ever been mine

all in my head * Andrew Mitch

Oh, but I know that it's all in my head Cuz nothing else matters inside their heads They'll just wish you were a girl instead

Chapel * Adam Mac, DeVries

Meet me at the chapel, honey It's just you and me Forever you and me

Outlaw Love * Brooke Eden

'Cause they can say what they wanna say They can do what they wanna do But they can't outlaw bein' in love with you

This Is Love * Dixon Dallas

I never knew what love was, then you came along Every night, I've been dreamin' of us, you're my favorite song Turn the lock and toss the key, now I think I'm in way too deep When you walk in, I can't help it, yeah, you knock me off my feet

Bonus: Trixie Mattel’s cover of Video Games

[mdhwrites]

Honestly I personally believe Sasha Waybright character arc was better written and engaging than Hunter and Amity’s arcs combined mostly because there was more agency in her arc and while the other two characters who go from enemies to allies to friends just didn’t engage me as much as Sasha’s.

I’m especially dissatisfied with Hunter and how his story while interesting wasn’t as cool as it could’ve been

So I've talked a lot about this in the past but the angle I'll take this time is simple: Sasha is more compelling as a villain to ally arc because the show let her be a villain.

That might sound simple but it's clearly something TOH itself struggled with. One could argue that ALL of the redemptions in TOH follow a pattern of one bad action followed by them being tenuously on the same side and then on the same side. Amity is out of character for her first episode and then Luz is actually at fault for Covention, even if Amity takes it too far. Then Amity is weirdly antagonistic during Hooty's Moving Hassle and then NEVER AGAIN. Three episodes into knowing her and she is now the person we are supposed to sympathize and want around and her biggest crime feels entirely out of character for the rest of her portrayal.

Hunter is similar. His first appearance is not Hunter. It's the Golden Guard who is WAY more fun a character than Hunter ever was and kind of a bastard. Then the mask is removed in his second real appearance (not counting the stinger in Escaping Expulsion) and he is someone to start sympathizing and working with. He is the sad but mad boy by his third major appearance and his second appearance makes him somewhat sympathetic, just like Covention did for Amity... Or For the Future does for The Collector despite lines like "I can't wait to play amongst the bones!" in Hollow Mind that feel, drumroll please, OUT OF CHARACTER TO THE REST OF HIS WRITING!

Lilith is the only to subvert this... Kind of. No, they actually go out of order but still the same essentially with her. Her first appearance makes her sympathetic and not properly a threat because she's still willing to play ball with Eda for a one on one competition, then she spends the second half of S1 just palling around in shenanigans she should not be allowing but is because... Fuck you. Then we get her one truly evil action in kidnapping Luz, coupled also with having been the one to curse Eda but that's also used to show she's a good person now so the kidnapping is the bigger deal here. Then... She's just a good guy afterwards.

This all makes for the most shallow, bullshit uses of this trope I think you can do while being allowed to claim you did it. After all, a key point to all of these redemptions aren't "Then they sided with the good guys," it's just "Then they're a good person." They don't bring who they were as a villain with them. The strengths that led to their villainy are just gone and they're hard to say what they were in the first place, what they add to the narrative in their redemption and joining of the main party because who were they before they joined. What are they actually fighting against as a person instead of just deciding not to be evil anymore or wanting the cookies that the light side offers?

It'd be like if after Sasha was redeemed, she was as bad as Anne at being able to lead and use people. If the show went "To better erase all the crimes she's done, not only will we say Sasha only is a bad person because her father is Ultra Satan but also she now is entirely incompetent in what she was good at before." Amity loses her intelligence. Her plans are always the most straightforward after she starts getting a crush on Luz and she canonically started having her grades slip. Hunter is the most pathetic character in the main cast with I think zero wins in his belt besides his first appearance despite being the only one with combat training. Lilith is just... Sad in how much they reduce all she was for over forty years of her life to go "Now she's a silly nerd girl. Fuck ambition."

And, of course, their bad sides being blamed on mother, uncle, mother kind of for Lilith actually, just that the exposition for that comes after her redemption, and the Archivists and Belos for the Collector. They aren't bad people, they just were forced to spend time with the wrong people. Now that they're nerds and led by nerd Jesus, everything is okay.

There is a VEEERY real problem in TOH of Us vs. Them mentality that comes from these arcs that's really gross. Swap Luz to a white, male jock and suddenly the show becomes WAY MORE UNCOMFORTABLE!

Sasha dodges all of this because no one tries to excuse Sasha. Sasha never tries to pretend she's anyone other than who she is except for when she's explicitly putting on an act. This means everything compelling and good about her as a villain can cleanly transition to when she is a hero, even if it's hard to believe that which the show even calls out.

There is no Sasha's Angels in TOH. That might be a weird one to reference to you because it doesn't include much Sasha but it nails on the head what makes this trope so exciting. To Anne, Sasha letting others do the work while she gets to theoretically kick back looks like the same old Sasha that she now is suspicious of. Someone who is self serving and so Anne lashes out. However, it's not the case. Sasha's ability to manipulate always came from being able to read a person's weaknesses and strengths. She's a MUCH better manipulator than Belos in this way because she doesn't leverage on you or for you to already be siding with her. She can read you like a book and tear apart your pages until she plays with your spine. And as a hero, that's going to mean she's a great delegator. She's the sort who would go "Nah, we don't need to save them from what you see as certain doom. I know he can deal with it." And she's right. Not because of blind faith but because of the same skills that made her villainous.

Something that wouldn't hit nearly as hard, or feel reasonable on Anne's part, if we didn't get so many examples of this being who Sasha is. Of the fact that Sasha uses other people for her own means. And even now, you can claim the same... Except it's not for her means. It's for their needs.

It actually is part of what makes her becoming a therapist so pitch perfect. A good therapist can call you out when you're trying to hide behind something to not get to the core of your problems. They can catch what is at the root of your issues even as you don't see it yourself. They also can see your value and use your strengths to help combat those problems after helping you identify them. It's actually pretty close to how she tried to get out of Toad Tower in her first appearance. Bring in someone, earn their trust, use their passions against their weaknesses and make them better. The only difference is that now she cares about making them better.

Amity, Hunter and Lilith could never have such a satisfying future because again: What are their strengths? Hell, post redemption, that statement stands true. You can call Amity good at magic I guess but Hunter and Lilith are pathetic people who kind of luck out in being useful at times and that's really it. These aren't people who have anything going for them. They're as good as goons with one of them being an elite in a one off episode as far as villain forces go and that's not very compelling for a redemption of this sort. Not unless you're really going to get into that and A: Lilith was one of the strongest mages on the Isles and studied her ass off so you'd think she'd mocked less for sucking at her job and being a fucking moron and B: they didn't even try for half a second with Hunter who I don't really know if they intended to make look as pathetic as he did skill wise.

So their futures are just random factoids introduced during the story. Does Amity being an inventor say anything about her redemption? No. In fact, it really sucks because Odalia would have LOVED her daughter to follow in her father's footsteps because that's the most profitable option for their company. Good job show. Hunter just takes up the job that connects him with the only thing we know is explicitly Caleb related, no conjecture needed, which sucks for a character who was supposed to be his own person. Then Lilith is... A historian. Because she likes that I guess. Does that have anything to do with her time as the coven head? No. Her ambitions? GOD NO. It's just a random choice that puts her in line with the inoffensively nerdy cast.

And before ANYONE says anything about the shortening, I want to say I've done a blog comparing the fact that Amity, in S2A (so before the shortening) has as many appearances as Sasha does in Sasha's entire redemption arc. You didn't need more time to do this better, the show needed to actually commit to its concepts. Actually needed to be willing to do its tropes rather than slapping it on for marketability and to make lazy analysts happy.

Because enemies to allies is not one of those tropes you can half ass. Not unless you want none of its power and boy, these are some weak character arcs. At least we've got Sasha.

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I have a public Discord for any and all who want to join!

I also have an Amazon page for all of my original works in various forms of character focused romances from cute, teenage romance to erotica series of my past. I have an Ao3 for my fanfiction projects as well if that catches your fancy instead. If you want to hang out with me, I stream from time to time and love to chat with chat.

A Twitter you can follow too

And a Kofi if you like what I do and want to help out with the fact that disability doesn’t pay much.

[grainjew]

Nikaposting Pt 4: Sun God Tropes

This is the fourth of a series of posts about Nika & associated religious practice in the One Piece world. As I write and post the rest of the series, I’ll add links to this header.

Pt 1: Crypto-Religion | Pt 2: Symbology & Syncretism | Pt 3: Joyboy was Shandian

Enormous credit to @oriigami for being my discussion partner through all of this and having a substantial influence on the final product. Check out our ao3 series Joyful for a narrative rather than analytical take on the Nika tradition, and definitely go read her OP blog @kaizokuou-ni-naru for meta and translation fun facts.

-

#JustLittleSunGodThings

So Luffy’s a sun god, or the embodied power of the wishes for one, or whatever. But does he do mythological solar deity things?

Yes actually.

This post is the fourth and last (as of now) in this series, and it’s entirely for fun. I’ll almost certainly miss things as I go down the list here- if you can think of other solar or dawn deity things he gets up to, please add them in the replies!

With no further ado, here is a list of sun god things Luffy has been known to get up to, & which will no doubt inform the mythology developing around him in the One Piece world. (How many people were deifying this guy even before he awakened his devil fruit? Like it was definitely not zero is all I’m saying.)

Getting eaten by snakes

What started this whole list was me turning to @oriigami in the middle of the night after we’d been rewatching Little Garden and trying to make an accurate count of how many times Luffy’s been swallowed whole and going “you know what’s sun god shit? getting eaten by snakes.”

Sun gods are often doing this. Take Apep in Egyptian myth, who tries to devour the sun god Ra every day. Or Rahu, the Hindu shadow planet and serpent, who swallows the sun to cause solar eclipses.

Luffy is also often doing this. The most notable example is of course the Nola Incident in Skypiea arc, but if we expand the definition of snake to include generally snakeish sort of guys, he also gets briefly ate by Kaidou very shortly after awakening, and just now by Mister Sandworm in ch 1110. (And by Kaidou fish-fish fruit equivalency I’d argue we can also count the Little Garden goldfish and the crocodile that ate him as a kid here but obviously that’s more tenuous and mostly just funny.)

Slightly more tenuously as well, there’s Amaterasu of Shinto lore retreating into her cave (a cave is a kind of snake), as well as the Norse wolf that chases the sun Sköll (occasionally merged with Fenrir), the Javanese god (described as an ogre) Batara Kala who eats the sun and moon to cause eclipses, and the alchemical Green Lion that devours the sun.

Storm and sky gods are also often interacting with, killing, and being eaten by snakes, which is less relevant here except that Nami is storm god coded and she also got ate in the Nola Incident. So that’s fun!

Having a chariot that circumnavigates the world

Many sun gods, especially in the Indo-European sphere of traditions, have some sort of chariot or boat that they ride from east to west each day to carry the sun across the sky. Often they have attendants (sometimes dawn and dusk gods; or sometimes these gods have their own chariots or horses as well) to help them with this.

If you want a list of sun vehicles the wikipedia page for solar deities has a whole bunch of them. Have fun.

I think Thousand Sunny speaks for herself on this front: not only is Sunny a ship designed, destined, and dreamed up to herself circumnavigate the world with Luffy as her captain, but she also has the Sun on the front as her figurehead in a manner that does kinda remind me of some depictions I’ve seen of the sun being carried across the sky in such a chariot. Also, she can fly!

Association with royalty

Kings and emperors love to use sun gods to give divine legitimacy to their rule. This is in no way universal (there’s lots of storm gods out there who also do this, just off the top of my head) but take Amaterasu (Shinto), Inti (Incan), Amun-Ra (also Aten) (Egyptian), Sol Invictus (Roman), etc.

Obviously Luffy is going to be King, and is currently an Emperor. But also, he tends to go around and toppling kings and gods and tyrants and vaguely lending legitimacy to whoever is stepping up to the throne in their place. He’s got the Mandate of Heaven (this is a joke mostly but we HAVE all read Loguetown)! And also distributes it to people he likes. Thanks Luffy.

Solar discs, radiate crowns, and beetles

A solar disc is a flat circle, sometimes with rays, that symbolically represents the sun or the sun personified. If you have read pt 2 of this series, you will recognize the Nika symbol in this description.

In the same vein, when applied to a personified depiction of the sun, the solar disc has the habit of becoming a halo or a radiate crown (such as the one worn by the Statue of Liberty - the radiate crown used to be an emperors and sun gods thing and has since become associated with personifications of liberty. So That’s Fun). Obviously Luffy is not in the habit of having either of these representationally, except of course for. The hat that encircles his head in gold.

The final note on symbology I have here is that the Egyptian god of the morning sun, Khepri, is associated with scarabs/dung beetles. A fact that I think known beetle-lover Luffy would appreciate. Get this guy some scarab symbolism stat. Check these bugs out!!!

Bonus: descending into the underworld and eclipse stories

Katabasis, that is, a descent into the underworld, is in no way a sun god exclusive, although solar myths do often involve the sun god, having traveled across the sky by day, needing to find their way through the ocean, the underworld, or some other sort of nether realm to return, overnight, to their morning home in the east. And it’s very fun to look at in the context of Luffy, eclipse myths, and the Marineford saga.

So obviously the Impel Down arc is is a very literal katabasis. It’s Hell, it’s got all the Dante’s Inferno theming, and, like in so many katabases, Luffy descends to the depths in pursuit of some goal, eventually emerging miraculously alive but unsuccessful (see, for a very quick shortlist of katabases of this type, Orpheus & Eurydice, Inanna, and Izanagi & Izanami).

So that’s delightful. But I think it’s even more fun to think about the Marineford saga in general, eventually culminating in the timeskip, as a prototype for an eclipse story.

Solar eclipses, though predictable, are something like a rarer and more frightening form of night, and so their associated myths have a general tendency to involve a more dramatic and/or violent symbolic death of the sun- see, for example, the various devourers of the sun mentioned in the first bullet point of this post.

So, we have the timeskip. The fire goes out. The sun, having descended into the underworld and pushed himself past his own limits, is defeated, disappearing completely from the world for two years. Until- In a way that was, technically, predictable, if you had the correct sphere of knowledge, he returns, miraculously renewed.

I’d incorporate that into my belief system, is all I’m saying.

-

Thank you all for reading! This is all for the series so far, but not, I hope, forever. Many more thoughts to have and webs to weave!

Have a lovely week!

[bisonofyesterday]

Bison’s Big Cool TURKEY DAY November 2024 Art Dump!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"BISON!" you might be wondering, "DIDN'T YOU ALREADY POST THE SATURN FIVE??", well mysterious strawman voice! I did! however I had not finished Sneak yet, but now (and by now i mean like early this month) I have! Uhm, I also didn't draw this much because of anxious depression over c e r t a i n e v e n t s early in the month, but I DID do these 2 things! Hell how about I talk about my ideas for them while I'm here eh? THE SENSATIONAL SATURN FIVE!: Pop-Science Superhero Celebrity Group! They have a deal with evil corporation Evenfall Entertainment (and partial government funding) and therefore are the stars of a half-edutainment/half-reality show where they ALSO fight glamorous crime!

Atom Ace: (Howard Hubble) brilliant inventor and total prick, a freak mutation has given Howard total control over his molecular density! Allowing him to chance size at will! He's also invented some neato repulsor rays in his gloves to fly and punch people at a distance! He may have control over his size! But not anyone else in his life! He's the father of two girls and has a weird relationship with his house AI and his science/business partner, they ALL hate eachother! (Howard is inspired by a mix of Hank Pym Ant-Man and Iron Man) Rhea: (Rhea Hubble) the spunky sweetheart of the Saturn V! Rhea can create hard light ring constructs out of her hair, they remind folks of the planet Saturn so she's named after a MOON of Saturn! She's also very rebellious and hates her dad. (as you can see she's flirting with Dani over there in the corner) (Rhea's general costume is inspired by The Wasp but that's where that reference starts and ends) Sneak: (Valentina Hubble) Rhea's older sister, Sneak is the exact opposite of Rhea, being a huge bootlicker for her dad, she also does a lot of the Five's (I.E. Evenfall Entertainment's) dirty work behind the scenes, which is easy! As she has the power of invisibility! Unfortunately she cannot create forcefields but she can harness her invisible energy into electrical arcs! (s-shock people, she can shock people) She does NOT retain her sister's sociability and sticks to the sidelines. (like her pooooowerrssssss) (Val is intended to be the Black Widow expy, but again, appearance and narrative function is basically where that starts and ends) Ternion: Howard's AI whom he made to care for his boring mansion and his children! (that triangle to the top left of her is her true form), she processes data on the Five's (I.E. Howard's) experiments, but she and Howard are also something more! As they have an incredibly unstable emotional-possibly-psychosexual co-dependent relationship! However! Howard is a massive stick in the mud, so Ternion often has to turn elsewhere for her needs! (Ternion physical appearance is tenuously inspired by The Vision), enter!: The Null: (Dhalazor Rogers) originally Howard's closest science confidant, now a background member and semi-constant nuisance for their press! As The Null turns into a HULKING ALIEN ABOMINATION when stressed! He takes 'medicine' to accommodate this, he still actually cares about the work he does (as well as being a father figure for the sisters) but it's obviously gone to Howard's head, and also that emotional maturity is what attracts Ternion to him as well, oh the drama! I just realized now maybe that also helps their ratings (The Null is obvious, the Incredible Hulk, but I also imagine him with weird fish fins like the Abomination) As I've been not at all subtle with here, the Saturn Five are intended to be expies of the Avengers to contrast against the Phenomenal Family's obvious inspirations in the Fantastic Four, Phenomenal! has tons of other expies too, but I'm gonna have to write about them in their own thingies (just know for now that Howard, Dhala, Millie, and Randy all went to the same college), but if it wasn't obvious I'm a MASSIVE fan of the Venture Bros and comics in general and I like taking toys and bashing them together, wow!

Also! The Patriots still exists! Yeah! Unfortunately right now I'm writing the sequel to something completely unrelated to either The Patriots NOR Phenomenal! So stay tuned for that hopefully this Christmas! (I won't rush myself though so I may miss it)

[batsplat]

Oh rewatching Naruto to pick up languages sounds fun!

Naruto infuriates me so so much. I could go from 0 to 60 from a random Naruto post. There was a base a good foundation. Great character designs who could have grown and developed so well. We could have had so much nuance and issues addressed. Just slivers of brilliance and then trash. The whole students who faced war and pain go on to become teachers who do the same without empathy (there are days where Kakashi makes me scream in rage) My face when they introduced Kaguya as the big bad behind Madara. I won't even touch Naruto, Sasuke & Itachi.

But the akatsuki, oh loved every one of their stories.

You mentioned web novels and I flashed to the trenches of MTL. I do think the Chinese ones provide such delicious angst though. They don't hesitate. At all. To take the dark turns. The enemies to lovers trope in those are TRULY enemies. The pain is PAIN. but the redemption is worth it too. Yuwu by meatbun was the last one I read and that was heavy.

yeah, it is!! unfortunately the studio responsible for the dubbing... massively had to scale back production for war-related reasons, so the naruto dub does tail off shortly before shippuden. but well, they did dub a hell of a lot of detective conan episodes because apparently that's a major hit (rightly so!!)

and yeah character development in naruto was... well, look, it was never good, but eventually it REALLY became a mess. what you can say in defence of the pre-shippuden stuff is that it has some fairly clear themes and coming-of-age plot threads of like,, naruto gradually being accepted by the village, finding his own place within this community, making friends... I mean it was always a little bit threadbare because you don't really get the sense there's all that much naruto has to develop, except maybe 'accepting himself and calming down a bit', because from the framing of the show it's really just the world around him that has to change. (alternatively it's framed as basically fine that he needs to actively fight the village to be accepted which!! no!!) but that's getting in the weeds. it's fine. they don't have to reinvent the wheel, the basic character premise is all right

but then by the time to get to shippuden, the arc is... naruto learning about the horrors of hard choices? or something. I guess. also not giving up on sasuke, which really is his major driving motivation in shippuden beyond 'not getting his monster sucked out of his body', but the narrative never really takes a stance on the sasuke question, which?? it's your central conflict, you've got to take a stance on it!! like, is him never giving up on sasuke good because it shows his pure soul and power of friendship and how he knows this traumatised child soldier isn't beyond redemption, or is it bad because he's delusional and not paying enough attention to all of sasuke's victims and it keeps distracting him from this existential threat? we don't know!! it's not resolved! it's kind of resolved in that sasuke did come back to the good side, which you'd think would mean the narrative feels naruto was right, but then on the other hand naruto was really only very tenuously involved in this 'redemptive' process. they got to the point where literally everyone was telling him to finally drop the sasuke quest and then the narrative just... moves on. never resolves it!! so as a result of the whole plot becoming such a. mess. leading up to the final war arc, kishimoto kinda forgot to give his main emotional and thematic and character tension of the series a satisfying ending

the whole point of the sasuke character was... going through a lot of trauma when you are young and losing stuff you remember having can kinda fuck you up and send you down an ultimately self-destructive path of hatred and bitterness and close you down to forming new attachments. so sasuke functions as one of naruto's many shadow selves in the series (the other major ones being gaara and pain) about how naruto just escaped that path, but it's always a fairly thin line and naruto could also be consumed by bitterness if he isn't careful. and also naruto's got a saviour complex because he feels like the only one who can get all the bad boys and he empathises to a painful extent with them, so saving sasuke is also about like. confronting the monster within and needing to believe there's hope for sasuke still because that also means there's hope for naruto. which is all FINE, ignoring execution I do think that's a perfectly solid premise for your shounen protagonist arc. but then the itachi twist is... well, it's a lot!! it steamrolls a lot of this arc if you think about it for two seconds too long! like it's interesting and I don't HATE hate it but it does also just Fundamentally Change the moral logic of the naruto universe in a way the narrative never reckons with! because if itachi was following his village's orders in slaughtering their entire clan, then... well, sasuke is right! his revolutionary cause is broadly justified, even if it comes from a place of loss and trauma! the uchiha WERE right to think konoha couldn't be trusted! it's an unjustifiable crime! suddenly the entire calculus of sasuke being consumed by revenge changes, because unless your stance is that 'all revenge is bad' (clearly not true in ninja world), that is pretty much as justifiable a revenge quest as you can get!

at which point. you just get to this weird place where the politics of naruto-verse become kinda fucked, because the only reason why konoha is 'good' is for some vibes-based 'well, the status quo is fundamentally preferable' argument. chaos reigned before the villages, so The Village needs to be preserved at all costs! and it's kinda... look, I don't want to over-examine the politics of the naruto-verse, but I do think it's a bit of an issue if your 'it's wrong to judge outsiders and especially innocent children for stuff outside of their control' story becomes a 'well the institutions of power have a few Bad Actors but the real villains will always be those traumatised by the institutions of the state who attempt to change the status quo' story. when I was a teen reading shippuden the first time, I was introduced to the 'uchiha's are doomed to a curse of hatred where unless they're super careful they're genetically locked into becoming the baddies' stuff and was like 'oh yeah what this is leading to is a big lesson about how this kind of thinking that demonises an entire population is exactly as misguided as the villagers being mean to naruto' because apparently I was an idiot who thought this story was going in a thematically coherent direction. in the end, the stance of the whole narrative is basically 'yeah the curse of hatred is a thing, the uchiha ARE all kinda genetically predisposed to losing themselves to hatred', which? please stop? think about what your story is saying!! this is a bad bad message!!

basically, kishimoto needed to ignore all this ninja war stuff - you needed some kind of vaguely satisfying conclusion to THAT story and all the other stuff can sort itself out. I don't even massively care what stance you end up taking on sasuke as long as you take one!! I mean ultimately I suppose I'd prefer naruto being able to save sasuke, but also y'know convince me on whatever you want, just do SOMETHING with it rather than like. the endless war arc. that simply would not end. it just became too convoluted!! super easy and common flaw for long running series to fall prey to, but still! fix it! obviously there's a few other glaring issues here like 'clearly if you've got a trio then you need your third main character to also play a role in this central conflict', where they just. extremely fluffed it with sakura. I have zero problem with a lot of her early characterisation like her being mean to naruto or having a crush on sasuke, she's a young girl it's FINE. but obviously the power-scaling of this series ends up being like,, inherently sexist, and they progressively ruin all of naruto's underdog charm by not only making the monster inside him a clear upside (given using the nine tailed fox came with diminishing costs and he got control over it... way too easily) but also ensuring he too has a deeply significant bloodline lineage with the uzumaki's. his dad minato has underdog appeal because he didn't come from a significant family!! not naruto! and I'm fond enough of minato and kushina that even though I hate this retcon for thematic reasons, I can't hate hate them, I think they're cute, but!! at a certain stage you need to figure out how you're going to somehow remain true to the starting point of your story

and figure out what to do with sakura - on paper you'd think she'd be the mediator between naruto and sasuke in their extreme stances, but you don't actually need a mediator because naruto is already completely pro-sasuke!! and had a more significant relationship with him than sakura did from basically the start, like there is nothing about sasuke that sakura knows and naruto doesn't. (there are very obvious implications for which of these characters should have been given a romantic ending, but let's not even get into that.) and obviously they were never going to do this in their shounen power fantasy, but it should have been sakura to embody the ultimate underdog power fantasy - because narratively she's actually the only underdog left. she's konoha's will of fire personified, she's the one who can function as a narrative stand-in for the village with all its fighting spirit and nominal egalitarianism and prejudices and flaws. it's fine if shippuden is mostly operating on different thematic ground than the first bit of the series, though you do still need to take a stance on the sasuke question... which means it should obviously have been sakura, as practically the first character in the series to judge both naruto and sasuke and make up her mind on both of them, to be symbolically granted the power to Give Them A Chance and ensure they're both not doomed to the monsters within by bringing about change to the structures that demonised and isolated them in the first place. I'm not asking for socialist utopias in my ninja worldbuilding, but if you're going to introduce 'the state ordered the deuteragonist's brother to do a genocide on his entire family' as a major plot point, you do have to find SOME kind of resolution to it idk. and the fact sakura was like?? knocked out during the naruto and sasuke fight at the end?? genuine insanity. zero interest in the third most important character in the whole story. what was the plan. I have thought for many years about what is wrong with that series and what I would fix and I will spend many more doing so

[riverhag2]

the longer I sit with that finale, the more bizarre it is

it's just so messy

it doesn't make sense narratively, and it doesn't make sense in the context of the writing up to this point

it feels very weird that they would just discard Izzy like that, after spending so much time giving him an arc, after all of the meta talking about how he was jenks' favorite

uncharitably, maybe the creative team really thinks they're making a different show than the one we've been watching

maybe they really believe that Ed and Stede are all that matters and that every other character is just a plot device to that end

but that feels weird to me

yes, they didn't have a lot of time

yes, they're worried about renewal

yes, jenks said in the interview that he always meant for Izzy to die

but for a show that has otherwise taken such care in its details, using visual symbolism to fill in the gaps that time constraints create in the text, the slapdashery here feels inconsistent

and look, even assuming the very best of the team, this was a misstep. it was cruel to make us believe Izzy is dead, especially to do it apparently so carelessly. the heartache of the s1 finale was reparable: lucius was pretty obviously not actually dead, and our main pairing were destined to reconcile. yes it was emotionally devastating and made us yearn for resolution, but that resolution was within easy grasp

they've made this finale, textually and visually, a much more permanent end and I can imagine that it could serve a purpose but boy oh boy does it read very poorly in the context of Izzy's arc and in the context of the fandom that has adopted him as their own.

I'm not particularly interested in a third season anymore, and that's the last place you want the passionate fan base of your niche and tenuously perched little gay show to land after a season finale

now that the initial shock is wearing off, I want to believe the best intentions here

but there's also this nagging sense that jenks really didn't realize how unsatisfying Izzy's death would be here. he was notably quite surprised at the relief we expressed at not being queer-baited with s1, and so it seems plausible that he would quite innocently think this was a good ending for Izzy.

so I dunno

I'm disappointed and unhappy with the finale

it was a mistake, whatever the intentions

if it turns out to have been more thoughtful than it appears, I may find my way back to enjoying the canon, but that tether is pretty clearly severed for me now

ok so I'm processing a lot of feelings very quickly here and anyway in the interest of having faith in the creative team:

Izzy's leg and tie and ring are all left above ground, which feels cruel

he's buried close to Ed and Stede's "inn" which is visibly doomed to failure, which seems cruel

Izzy's dying words to Ed are "hold onto the matchless" "you're surrounded by family," who Stede and Ed promptly abandon, which seems cruel

we also get visual and textual hints like "indestructible little fucker"; Buttons turning into a seagull/having a text that allows for transmogrification; and a seagull landing on Izzy's grave (there's sailor folklore that seagulls are the ghosts of dead sailors, even if Buttons has nothing to do with anything here)

charitably, they could be doing something with all this

the attack on the republic of pirates is catastrophic

it's signalling a violent end to the way of life of our heroes

Blackbeard is obviously infamous

Stede gains infamy this season (and is, you know, clearly not dead, despite his best efforts of fuckery in the first season)

Izzy is also infamous in ways that hadn't been made canon yet - everyone from the lowliest of pirates to the damn prince knows of him

even if they want to start a new life (which textually I would argue all three ultimately do: Izzy's "the only retirement we get is death" + rediscovering himself and finding love with the crew in s2; Ed's...entire character for both seasons; and Stede's visible failure as a captain and a pirate in his post-Low-glory fight with Zheng + his ongoing realization that Ed is all that actually matters), there is nowhere safe for them

so they're going to fake their own deaths

one at a time

Izzy is first

they bury him and everything

he's Definitely Dead

(but they leave his most precious things above ground)

(they stay behind)

(to dig him out)

our next season is the reunion and actual reconciliation with the crew and a few more faked deaths (perhaps in a dramatic last stand in Charlestown) before everyone rides off into the sunset, found family in tact

it's...an idea anyway

idk

if nothing else, fic idea free to good home I guess

[soranis-sunshadow]

Only cool people deserve friends. The rest of us are here to provide comic relief.

@entrapdaknation​ ‘s  post - here got me ranting. This is less coherent than what you’re used to. I apologize for that but the subject struck a very raw nerve. 

The writers clearly didn’t put any thought into it. The nontypical characters are only there to serve a purpose in the narrative or to be “support characters” for the normal, pretty ones. 

Think about that scene with Bow luring Kyle into helping him find Glimmer, dangling friendship and understanding in front of him only for Kyle to be discarded once Sea Hawk’s there and there is no more need for him.

To a certain degree, all the nontypical characters get this sort of treatment from the alliance and the show. These characters are either forced into a comic relief role  and become buttmonkeys through forced writing decisions that come off as out of character “Glimmer who?” or are completely forgotten. 

If anyone would have been encouraged to empathize with Kyle, that scene would have been cruel.

Bow is basically using his depression and loneliness to extract information out of him.

But the show plays it for laughs. Yeah... It’s funny that this lonely boy wants to confide in someone and wants to make a new friend, throw him over a ledge >.>. He’s pathetic and he “deserves it”.

Entrapta has to transaction her skills in exchange for tolerance. It’s such a favor her princess friends are doing her by tolerating her “difficult” behavior. These are a bunch of kids leashing a 30yo woman because none of them actually bothered to ask what the hell her train of thought is or why she’s doing things the way she is. Nope, it’s joked about and the show has Entrapta getting leashed TWICE to control her. gah! 

The whole fandom hates Swifttwind, a passionate and loving character who has only ever wanted to be there for his friends and asks nothing in return -except maybe having a chair at the damn table so he wouldn’t have to stand when everyone else is sitting - No one cares to cater to the horse, it’s ridiculous. He’s a horse... not a real person. His legitimate complaint is played for laughs.

Wrong Hordak....where the hell do I start with this one? 

So so many things bother me about how the show treated this character. Instead of exploring the chilling implications of brainwashing and religious trauma, he’s a joke.

He is not afforded the screentime necessary to expand on his experience of being freed of slavery and indoctrination since inception. Nope, cat sneezes (though cute) are more important than that.   He’s just there to be cute and bubbly - a cinnamon bun.

The people in the fandom don’t connect with the horrific nature of the clone’s conditions because of this.  

Think about Wrong Hordak’s lines, about all of them.

Take them out of the comic context they are in and think about them with any degree of depth.

They are nightmare fuel, the whole clone’s existence under Horde Prime is nightmare fuel but the fandom is only encouraged to empathize with Catra’s suffering under Prime, not with the clones.

But she’s pretty and she’s a young girl. It’s easy to empathize with her. The clone’s experience is so outside of our own, so alien and so frankly horrible that there’s a disconnect.

Their condition being casually brushed aside or never acknowledged verbally by anyone on the show doesn’t help. The chipped etherians are taken into consideration but the clones are not. A people born chipped and controlled are not acknowledged as innocent. 

It’s frankly why I think there’s such a divide in the fandom. Because most of the fans dismiss what Wrong Hordak’s inclusion in the season actually tells us about the clones, Hordak included.

Hordak antis don’t make the connection that Hordak too started off like this: 

He wasn’t born evil, none of the clones were. This is something that was done to them and it’s something that controls them so completely, they need help to escape from it. They are so damaged by it that they don’t even recognize the wrongness that is done to them as it’s happening to them.

But of course that’s played for laughs, no time for that…

The show does not encourage empathy for the clones, or for Kyle. Swift Wind’s cause of liberating all horses is played for laughs and Entrapta’s arc with the princesses is… ugh… yeah, she deserved better

The larger problem is that for the most part, only people that have experience with being tolerated or being the third wheel, only people that have to forgive and “be the better person” lest they are kicked out of the tenuous place they hold in their social circle spot this issue… For the rest of the greater fandom, it’s just the usual modus-operandi of human interaction. The issue does not pertain to them and as such, they have the privilege to be blind to it.

Friendship and human connection are easy to them, they are entitled to it. Most media has seen to it. The pretty and normal people get friends easily, the weird kid, the fat girl, the shy boy – they owe it to people because they are offered a chance to belong, however tenuously in a group. The latter get flanderized to add to the hilariousness because their problems and their concerns are just a funny joke to the “ normal” people.

[carrigerpigeon]

On THE ENFORCER ENIGMA

Okay, y’all.

We need to talk about The Enforcer Enigma because I have many, many problems with it.

I’ve been sitting on my feelings for this book for a month or so, after I got my ARC of it and I read it. It’s been hard to decide what I was going to say, how I was going to approach this. Like I’ve said before, my relationship with Gail exists in a liminal space between fan and friend, and is even more complicated than that.

I’ve decided, as both a fan AND friend, that I can’t ignore the problems in this book.

Which is where this post comes from.

When I first I heard it was dealing with the Selkie mob I was excited, because I loved how ridiculous they were in the short story and I think the concept is gloriously ludicrous. But this book overall felt very contrived, very basic, and very tone deaf in a racist way. The gay boys felt objectified and cookie cutter, and the racist treatment of Judd made me very, very upset.

I’m going to get to my issues with the treatment of Judd, as best as I can as a white person with a lot to learn, but I want to start with something I am able to speak better on, and that’s the gay characters in this book.

So let’s get into it. Spoilers, obviously, and lots of talk about systematic racism and homophobia, antiblackness, stereotypes, etc.

(Also, Gail, since you follow me on this blog and I know you’ll probably see this—READ THE WHOLE THING. Think about it. And then if you’d like to talk about it, you know how to contact me.)

This is going behind a cut, not because of the content but because it’s almost 6 pages long.

The Gay Boys

Okay. Look.

I love a catty, fabulous gay boy as much as the next queer. They have a space and a place in our community. But not EVERY gay man is like this IRL. Meanwhile, in SAS, it feels like every gay male character (or close to) in this series is a waspy, catty, faaaabulous gay. Isaac, Marvin, Max, Trick, even to some extent Alec and Bryan…they’re just all the exhausting waspy, catty, fabulous gay boy that we see exhibited heavily on Drag Race and other mainstream platforms.

And like. I get it. Colin is repressed and gay and wants to be a fabulous twink. That’s fine. But it just felt like he was slipping into the stereotype all the other gay male characters inhabit in these books, and that’s really, really exhausting.

Also, I am from the East Coast, where according to my West Coast friends we apparently grow gay boys differently. I can’t say with any accuracy how much of this is true. BUT MOST OF THESE GAY BOYS ARE FROM THE EAST COAST. They lived in Boston before moving to California. So why are they like this?

It feeds into this larger trend I’ve seen in Gail’s word with fabulous, savage gay boys—from Akeldama and all his drones, to Biffy, and even Lyall. Seen over the spread, it’s harder to sweep it away as just a “modern storyline” thing or a “California storyline” thing. It’s a trend, one which I find very uncomfortable as a queer person.

There is a place and space for Queer people to take back the tropes and stereotypes that have been used against us and write them our own way. But what I’ve seen as a longtime reader isn’t that. What I seem is lazy stereotyping and an overarching stereotype and characterization that feed into the larger the ways I feel gay men are objectified by female authors (no matter how queer the author is).

Many more people have covered this topic better than I, but it explains why I’ve felt so uneasy about this series from the get go. The sex and the relationships in these books don’t feel real—it feels objectifying. There’s lots of talk about big and strong sexy, muscle-y men but very little else. And while there is something to say about having a partner who thinks you’re sexy—that’s important, and I want everyone to have that…. this isn’t that.

These are muscle-y, strong, sassy gay men for cis white women to coo over on Facebook and feel good about. But to me, a real life nonbinary queer person, I feel uneasy and frankly uncomfortable with the objectification of them.

And since we’re talking about queer representation, after having a decent wlw spread in the Parasolverse there are two WLW (specifically lesbians) in SAS (Trickle and Pepper) and they (a) barely get any screen time and (b) feel stereotypical to me. And they are side characters, so I get it, but seriously?

And also while we’re on queer representation, there’s Mana, aka Manifest Destiny. Mana is the drag queen and arguable trans woman* who started off alright BUT was named after the colonization and violent taking of Native and Indigenous people’s lands and wrapped up in patriotism. Gail has said she made a mistake, that she meant her name to be Mana From Heaven, and that this would be addressed in the upcoming book (aka The Enforcer Engima).

It was not.

There is talk, from what I understand, this issue will be addresses in the upcoming short story about Mana and Lovejoy. But there are several throwaway lines about Mana in this book, her work in LA and her becoming a drag queen superstar (I guess akin to RuPaul?). So why wasn’t her name change discussed or even mentioned there?

[*Sidebar: Mana has been quoted as saying, “I suppose I should be transgender, under modern parlance. But I like drag queen. It suits me. I like the fabric roughness of drag, and the royalty of queen. It's a nice change to have the luxury of choosing one's own semantics, if not one's own situation." But whenever she appears, it seems she’s always in face/wearing false eyelashes/wearing women’s clothing.

I’m not going to police Mana’s trans experience because gender is a spectrum, and I as someone under the trans umbrella know that. But it feels…weird and off to me.]

Regardless of my sidebar, the name she was supposed to have, Manna from Heaven is…also sort of problematic? If I understand the reference correctly, it refers to the Biblical story of the food that God miraculously provided to the Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness. It means as a phrase the coming of unexpected benefit or assistance, especially when that benefit/assistance comes at the time when it is needed most. Which is what Mana is for the pack—she lets them live in her apartment in Book 1, she swoops in to save the day in Book 2. But it feels…very white and more than a little gross to name a character with Chinese and Japanese ancestry after something from the Bible.

And then there’s Judd.

Oh, Judd.

I really wanted to like Judd. The premise of his character was interesting, a Black, Pre-Saturation werewolf shifter, and I liked his cameos in the other books. But then we got a book about him, and it all fell apart.

Judd is a gay Black character, pre-Saturation, meaning he’s old as hell (from the Parasolverse time). He is objectified like the other gay boys, and there’s a lot of talk about how hard and strong his muscles and how sexy he is. He’s depicted on the cover this way.

And that’s…fine I guess, but gay Black men frequently have their bodies objectified as Black and muscley and strong. He’s also a pack Enforcer, so he’s depicted as not very smart and very violent. All of those are racist stereotypes that Black men deal with constantly, and they are racist stereotypes and tropes that are constantly hurled at Black men by the system and by society.

Additionly, Judd, the only Black member of the pack, is the only werewolf in the series to carry a gun.

A Black man. Is the only member. To carry a gun.

Yeah.

It gets worse.

There is mention of Judd’s backstory—very heavy inferences to Phineas/Soap (whose problematic naming convention and descriptors have been talked about especially by jhenne-bean ) being his mentor until he gets kicked out of Sidheag’s pack—but it falls very flat. I understand not wanting to write too much history of a Black character as a white writer, especially after tenuously connecting that history to the traditionally published series you’re Not Connected SAS To Not At All….

But.

Judd is over 150 years old.

He lived through some of America and Canada's worst racial discrimination, discrimination which would have affected him and his habitus and the way he moves through the world. He’s a gay Black man, and his gayness and his Blackness does not appear to affect how he interacts with the world at all. The police are called at the beginning and he’s OKAY ABOUT IT? AS A BLACK MAN? He basically says, “Thank God, the cops are here.”

You had a BLACK MALE CHARACTER SAY THAT when we’ve had a nationwide conversation since 2013, a conversation that has been reignited in the past three months?

Like????

And I was willing—perhaps whitely and naively—to give Gail the benefit of the doubt with Soap/Phineas. E&E was written in 2011, before Black Lives Matter was founded, before we began to have this nationwide reckoning with how Black and brown folks are treated systematically and especially by police violence. These conversations were definitely being had in 2011, but they were seen as fringe discussions and not necessarily part of the mainstream narrative as it is today.

However. It’s not 2011. It’s 2020.

It’s been 7 years since BLM was founded, and there have been countless discussions happening about racism and systematic issues in publishing and with white writers writing Black characters since that point.

Soap/Phineas has been mentioned or has cameo’d in The Custard Protocol and in Meat Cute. There’s been no conversation about his name or the way he has been described  And both he and Judd fall into the Caring-POC-Partner trope which has been discussed very heavily in romance circles and in ways I am not necessarily equipped to discuss in this post. But I will link to this post for everyone to read: https://medium.com/@ashiamonetb/queer-love-interests-of-color-and-the-white-gaze-8928b7b5e6ad

It’s 2020. These conversations have been being had, quite fervently, for many years, so there’s absolutely no excuse with how Judd is approached or treated in this book.

And here’s the CRUX of all this.

This book isn’t even really about Judd.

It’s about Colin.

Even though Judd is on the cover of the book, in all of his objectified Black body goodness, the plot of the story is about Colin. It’s very much entrenched in Colin’s issues with his family and his identity. Judd is there to take care of Colin and ~guide~ him and ~teach~ him things. To protect him. To be sexy to him.

See the medium article above. See the conversation about objectification above.

So if this book is SO MUCH ABOUT COLIN, why is Judd on the cover?

Why is Judd naked and glistening and Black on the cover of the story about the trials and tribulations of a white twink?

…Do I really have to say it? Maybe I do. It’s racist.

It might not be intended that way, but it is.

And look. There were parts of this book that I found enjoyable. I am still a fan of Gail’s wit and the way she writes. I’m a sucker for the found family trope, which all of these books have, and I really like Trick and Marvin. I’ve been where Colin is. I’ve fucked around with my gender presentation and been scared to out and fabulous or be perceived a certain way because I present a certain way.

But I’m really frustrated and frankly ANGRY with the racist stereotypes and gay stereotypes present in this book. It doesn’t feel like this was sensitivity read at all, by anyone. The book feels like a culmination of racist and homophobic trends that make me feel that Gail hasn’t been paying attention or listening to the cultural reckoning happening nationwide or in publishing.

And yes, there is a lot of “don’t idolize authors” talk, but here’s the thing.

Gail isn’t some anonymous author to me, someone I can just cancel and be done with.

Gail is a mentor to me. We’ve hung out at multiple cons, shot the shit about publishing, and talked about queer shit together with. We aren’t close, but she’s a friend (liminal space, etc). She gets a Christmas card from me every year, she asks after my partner when we chat. We’ve been in each other’s orbits for TEN YEARS.

I have this entire sideblog dedicated to her books, for fucks sake.

So when I read shit like this, it makes me upset. This book is a pile of microaggressions that stacked into a macroagression. It’s insensitive, definitely hurtful, and feels exceptionally tone deaf (AT BEST) to have written and released this book.

She has people in her inner circle who could have caught this if we’d been allowed to read it before hand, if we’d been a part of the beta process. But we weren’t. And it shows.

Gail, this is a message directly for you: You talk a lot about supporting people. You reblog lots of #ownvoices work and have been plugging a lot of #ownvoices fiction. I know (or at least hope) you’re a good person.

SO WHAT HAPPENED?

Why is this book such a disaster?

Have you been listening at all?

And I get it, we all have things to learn and things to unlearn. As white ally, and as a member of the queer community, as someone in your inner circle and as a friend (liminal space!), I get it.

I’m also saying this isn’t ok.

This book that you’ve written is not okay. Not even a little bit.

Here’s the thing: you can fix it (or you can try). It’s gonna be hard and require difficult conversations and actions, but you can.

If you want to know more, if you want to talk: you know how to contact me. I’ll give you my number. We can email, Skype, Zoom, text, call, whatever. I know I’m not the only member of the Pigeons that feels this way. You have people here to help.

As for everyone else:

As might be apparent I have…a lot of feelings right now. I’ve loved these books for so long, made a friend (liminal space!) with the author through social media. Genevieve Lefoux, and Sidheag, and Aggie, and lots of other characters mean a lot to me. Gail’s books have helped me through hard times and hard places, and she’s influenced a lot of whom I am as a writer.

But right now having this blog, dedicated to all these books with this massive subthread of racism and stereotypes, feels…not great.

And I don’t know if I can continue to support Gail and continue to be a fan (and a friend) if she keeps up with this.

[gascon-en-exil]

What would you say the limitations for the other games are (Radiant Dawn, Genaeology, Fates) in regard to the ask concerning the story being too big for it to tell?

Genealogy

Note: some of these are true of all the Kaga games, but are especially noticeable in FE4 because of its larger scope.

Hardware limitations to be expected for such an outdated console: a small amount of dialogue relative to the size of the story, no proper support conversations, so many palette swaps for minor character portraits.

Enormous maps with multiple objectives and only map narration in between mean that the majority of story beats have to unfold during battles.

FE’s original breeding meta, while an entertaining mechanic and much better implemented in the plot here than in the 3DS games, hampers characterization in Gen 2 because the child characters have variable fathers leading to all sorts of oddities.

Additionally, the existence of substitutes for the aforementioned children is necessary for gameplay if you don’t pair up characters in Gen 1 but leads to what is essentially a set of knockoffs with weaker connections to the main plot and to the set characters than their child counterparts.

The Thracia arc of Gen 2 was obviously the greatest source of interest for Kaga, so much so that it was spun off into FE5, but its position in the storyline of this game is awkward and serves to make its second half structurally weaker.

Radiant Dawn

Again, no proper support conversations, this time stemming from FE10′s scattered approach to availability and the (probably smart) decision to prioritize gameplay utility over characterization under such a system.

The continental scale of the conflicts in Parts 3 and 4 narrows the focus to only a handful of characters out of the massive playable roster (73, second highest in the series after New Mystery), and because there are no supports minor characters returning from FE9 have to coast on their development from that game whereas new characters are out of luck entirely unless they’re important enough to be in the main cast.

The multi-part story is very tenuously tied together, with Parts 1 and 2 being wholly unrelated to each other and only indirectly building to the rest of the game. I’ve commented before that Tellius’s overall story is so big that it could have easily been three games, with this one split into an interbellum midquel with Parts 1 and 2 and possibly some other content and a third game consisting of Parts 3 and 4 with more room to breathe.

Part 4 is extremely rushed because of how it has to wrap up the entire saga in the space of eleven chapters, leading to an even greater narrowing of focus that pares the number of relevant characters down to only about a dozen, if that. Undoubtedly this is partially because FE10 has the single longest main story campaign in the series at 38 chapters (43 if counting multi-part chapters separately) meaning that even at its actual length it can be a slog to get through the whole thing.

The overall impression is that this game is simultaneously too short and lacking in proper development for its story and cast and too long and structurally bizarre as a gaming experience. It’s an...interesting contradiction.

Fates

This one I know less about the particulars, as it’s my understanding that many of FE14′s underlying (non-localization) writing problems come from one manga writer drawing up an outline of the plot and then a team of other writers stretching that outline into three very different stories.

Most noticeable to me is that all of the routes are of equal length, which harms Revelation the most because it has to cover by far the most narrative ground.

Also no getting around that the kids suck, and were clearly only shoehorned into the game as microwave child soldiers because people liked them in Awakening. Outside of their designated DLC campaign they are completely irrelevant to the plot, and apart from occasionally illuminating certain qualities of their parents they’re not useful for characterization either.

While I believe that Corrin is the best of FE’s Avatars so far they’re still not great, and their contractual mandate to be able to sleep with the entire cast can do weird things to established relationships as it does with every Avatar. Probably the most glaring is that the Hoshido royals can’t really be Corrin’s biological siblings, because FE loves teasing incest but (probably) wouldn’t go that far with a self-insert, but there’s also what it does to pairings like Ryoma/Scarlet or Jakob/Flora that get built up during the story but can’t have an actual resolution outside of Japan-only DLC sort of because one half of each of those pairings is a Corrin-sexual.

[scarletwitching]

Many Avengers have personalities that are pretty much consistent across different mediums. Tony’s always sarcastic, Steve’s always noble, Jan’s always fun-loving, Vision’s always brooding... what personality traits do you think are the most defining or important to portraying Wanda correctly? She seems to be different in all different mediums and sometimes I think it’s hard for people to put into words what exactly her personality is cause she’s not a normal stereotypical personality type

You have to keep in mind that, on the whole, Marvel adaptations have gotten more faithful in the modern era. That’s not a hard and fast rule, but there was a period where the assumption was that live action Marvel adaptations would only be tenuously connected to the source material. Think of things like the old Captain America movies or Japanese Spider-man.

There is less of that now than there was in decades past. It’s not a big surprise that Wanda in the 90′s Iron Man cartoon was unrecognizable. What is more unique to Wanda is that, as time has gone on, they haven’t tried to stay more faithful or even consistent. Superhero Squad Show tried, within its kid-friendly parameters. Wolverine and the X-Men tried with her personality, but strayed pretty far with her story arc.

But something we see with the other adaptations is creators wanting to “make a new character” who just happened to be named Wanda for some reason. Whedon was trying to create a new character.* The creators of X-Men: Evolution said that Wanda is shitty and weak (??) and they had to make a new character to “fix” her. They saw adding her to the show as an obligation more than anything, and that lack of long term investment shows in their plotting.

We could analyze the “make a new character” attitude all day (and how often it does and does not work out), but the reality is that those guys weren’t trying to adapt 616 Wanda. That was never their intention.

I think writers get tripped up when it comes to Wanda for a few reasons. 1) If you’re doing an X-Men adaptation, Wanda has some similarities to Jean Grey, and a desire to differentiate them can lead people to go too far in other direction. 2) Not understanding the core themes of Wanda’s character. 3) Defaulting to overly simplistic tropes, instead of trying to make something nuanced and three dimensional. (Think Ultimates.) 4) Leaving out all the things that make her unique. Like making her a generic white US-American.

All of these things stem from the same problem of not taking the time to analyze Wanda and think through what makes her special and what makes her her. If you have a whole list of characters you’re supposed to add and she’s just one on the list, maybe you’re not going to think too hard about her. What we see over and over is that people don’t think it’s important that she’s Romani (because it never mattered to them) or that she’s not from the US (because it never mattered to them) or what her personality is (because it never mattered to them). This is all bias. These adaptations are -- get this -- headed by white men from the US, and they seem to think her nationality and ethnicity and personality are negligible because, well, who cares? They don’t. That bias makes everything about Wanda seem malleable because it doesn’t fit with the standard superhero narrative, plus do female characters even have personalities? If I have to think for more than four seconds to figure out what it is, then no!!

That was a roundabout way to getting to my actual answer. When it comes to her personality:

Takes things very seriously, but isn’t a killjoy. Mature, let’s say.

Don’t go into the snobby rich girl territory. She’s not from that background, and it’s weird.

Flare for the dramatic. Meaning that she’s not afraid to get creative and Extra(tm) in a fight. Let her be theatrical and showy in battle. Let her be a little arrogant too.

Brave and determined. This should be obvious, but Mark Millar disagrees.

Not the softest exterior, but an obviously soft, compassionate center. A bleeding heart.

Loves her family, but will choose her moral compass over them.

That’s just a basic list of things I’d consider most important. For my own taste, I like Wanda as a strategist. I like when they lean into the creative aspect of her powers and show her as a quick thinker. I like my Wanda sharper, more of a leader, more stubborn, but that’s personal preference. 

The biggest thing is not going too far with any one personality trait and not making the obvious mistakes. Don’t make her a fascist. Don’t do anything with Nazis. Don’t make her whole motivation murdering someone. Don’t make her murder innocent people. You’d think this would be easy, and yet...

*There’s an interview where this is mentioned, and I can’t find it no matter how hard I try. Just take my word for it.

[elizabethrobertajones]

sam & season 12

I keep going on about how much I loved season 12 for Sam, and I was talking to @bluestar86 last night (Or, hyperactively talking AT :P) and they were saying how narratively neat it was to end with Sam at the beginning (facing down a 1x01 parallel scene) again just like Dean ended last season back at the beginning, getting Mary back. Anyway several of the conversations I've seen or had about Sam are about how some people feel this season really wasn't very good for him and he didn't have anything happen to him... I think I kind of veered onto that for a moment after 12x21 because there was a lot of negativity around especially after we were all excited that the "someone in the life" thing he'd been about in season 11 and Eileen seemed to clearly be a part of had obviously taken such a blow, and the BMoL thing was now also obviously a total failure for him.

I think 12x22 did a pretty good job wrapping that up for Sam, since Berens did all the legwork in the first place for setting Sam up with the BMoL and then answering how that made feel and giving Sam a clear win with it in The Raid pt.2 so I don't think I need to talk about that too much and also it only represents a fraction of his character stuff, something that was just sort of happening to him this season and actively for only an even smaller part of it, while obviously there had to be a much more real deal to it all.

I don't know if maybe it's too obvious or the problem seems to be that people think that he didn't engage with the story enough for it to seem like it was happening TO him despite what I felt was a clear thing all through the season, but the Sam and Mary stuff was absolutely brilliant this year to me, and I think 12x22 and 12x23 spelled out a lot of stuff about how Sam was interacting with his arc and how the show was telling it, giving me some really clear examples to use. As I was accidentally talking Bluestar's ear off (oh god I'm scrolling back through this conversation to scavenge my points and I am so sorry about how much of this chat is me... :P) Sam's always had his shit dealt with largely in an external way, with things often being quite allegorical while Dean has an internal approach (the season 1 queer subtext for Sam vs Dean's where Sam's powers are queercoded but Dean just *is* is my favourite example :P). The 22/23 use of putting Dean IN Mary's head to talk through everything while she didn't say a word and he stood on the spot and vocalised everything, and then putting Sam in a different reality to passively view and have AU!Bobby explain to him all the relevant exposition to why this was the mirror of the previous episode doing the same thing for Sam is a very very neat back to back image of how their stories get told.

So back to the start:

Obviously Dean and Mary are more emotionally connected anyway because Dean was alive longer at the same time as her previously; in 1x01 he's defensive of her memory and Sam doesn't know her so can say something objectively ridiculous like she's never coming back and Dean can get all angry about him DARING to suggest that. So when Mary comes back, Sam takes 1 and 3/4 episodes to find out while Dean starts a much more complicated emotional arc with her dealing with her sacred memory and other personal crap he's accumulated with her.

SAM Mom. For me... just, um... having you here... fills in the biggest blank.

Sam doesn't have a history with her, but he does have a massive emotional investment, so in a way their story can only start when they start actually DOING stuff together. But 12x02 also lays out the problem, that Mary is going to want to run away and not face her past because she DOES have massive personal crap accumulated about Sam, because her presence brings back the original balance where the emotional story was with Dean and the mytharc crap was with Sam, but now it's about her - she could have had this exact same arc in season 1 if she'd been alive, say taking Jess's death as the point to leg it and not bear to face Sam, as she feels responsible.

DEAN Mom, look, I am... thrilled that you're back. I mean, I'm so damn happy, I-I-I can't even stand it. MARY I just... it's just gonna take me a second to catch up, you know? DEAN Yeah, no, no. Look, take – take all the time you need, all right? It's – it is what it is. MARY And when we do find Sam... how am I gonna face him? DEAN What do you mean? MARY That yellow-eyed thing would never have come for him that night if I... I started all of this.

This all spells out nice and simply the entire sum of what's going to be their problem this year and what they need to overcome at least in the sense of coming to peace with it. Sam just wants Mary around, Mary can't be around Sam.

In 12x03 Mary begins the process of running away. Cutting her hair is symbolic of shedding her past image and is important and a step forward in mending with Dean and shedding saint!Mary and the dreaded nightgown image, but regressive in dealing with Sam, because they have such opposite demands on her emotionally. She needs to face the past with Sam, but to move forwards with Dean - which is also too much work for her because she's being given the huge task of accepting messed up adult Dean because his need for her is so vast so of course it's daunting (and I'm assuming there's at least some postnatal depression kind of metaphor going on with all this ESPECIALLY with Sam - of course all mixed up in mytharc but 12x06 gives us that she would rather go hunting than stay and do childcare with Dean). Sam loses out harder because his need is so simple and Mary being flawed and hurting Dean is ultimately for the best - after 12x02 we wrote meta about his drinking alone scene as representing exactly this, and 12x22 and "I hate you" was the point he had to be brought to. But Sam makes no mytharc emotional progress with Mary if they'd spend the entire season joined at the hip catching up and doing generic mother - son activities, because it wasn't addressing their problems.

12x03 also showed us Mary's trauma she needed to address, visually, with the John, Dean and Sam parallels in the haunted house. Sam wasn't even a real baby - he was the broken, burned hollow doll. He was an object of absolute, triggering horror for Mary after she was trapped in the nursery with the doll by the ghosts, a reminder of her death, and the state of the doll very suggestive of what happened to Sam because of her deal - and basically visually displays everything Dean eventually told her what happened to Sam in his speech in 12x22.

Moving on to actually looking at how Sam feels about the mytharc, 12x04 and 12x05 featured Magda and Ellie as blatant Sam mirrors. With Magda, Sam gets to look back at his powers arc and say stuff that indicates how he feels about it now, especially when it comes to self-blame and his feeling of being unclean caused by Mary's deal. (In the long run, Ketch killing her was for our shock value, Sam never learned on screen, and it wasn't a part of his arc that she died, just something for us :P yay) With Ellie, he has an almost identical conversation about her horror about discovering her family history and that the blood running in her veins has this connection and that she was a fated vessel, if technically only because she was geographically nearby. Both of these mirrors make the episodes for Sam's part focussed on how he feels about himself and what Mary's deal did to him, and show he's actually already, through all his previous trials and tribulations, made some peace with himself.

I mean... "trials" is deliberate word choice, since 8x21 he got to address how he felt unclean, then did the trials and I think even if he didn't finish them again once he's had time to process he's already in a better place than before about it before season 12. I also feel season 5 resolved his original character arc and his actions in Swan Song completely redeemed him and eased his conscience and he literally was a blank slate after that, and also has a demonstrable sense of peace all through Gamble era - even in the middle of season 7 Bobby calls him out about it but ends up agreeing he's just somehow ended up really zen :P... The problem here is that because Mary coming back was not really on the books back in season 5 Sam's arc got resolved on a LOT of major points relating to the mytharc and he was really only left with Lucifer and Hell trauma which all dates from AFTER this resolution though as a direct result of it. So these two episodes explain how he's feeling and that it actually isn't something Mary should be afraid of because Sam's in a good place with his past and so on, as he eventually manages to tell her in 12x22.

12x06 has their shared moment of trauma/horrible flashbacks when the 1x01 parallel happens where Sam and Mary get to relive it all with Bucky being tied to the ceiling and dripping blood (On Asa’s face, a sort of child figure to Mary as well) as the warning he's there. The demon's MO on killing like that was blatantly only so that we'd get them having this moment.

12x12 is where it really kicks off again, and after a lull on this while they dealed with other branches of the story, including the start of the nephilim arc, which with the Lucifer connection was already at least tenuously like Sam just for shared backstory - there was some speculation that the nephilim would be a good vessel for Lucifer and he only wanted it for that, which would have made Jack a direct Sam parallel... We didn't see that although it was obvious Lucifer only wanted to use him to take over the universe and having a loyal son to do it is much easier than relying on his supposed perfect destined vessel, who was a bit harder to control than Lucifer had reckoned on :P Lesson learned since 5x22. Point is it was a sped up version of the process of milennia of figuring out how to get a Perfect Fated Vessel to empower Lucifer for the big take over.

Anyway 

I screamed and knocked my table with my knee so hard I still have a dent in it when Ramiel flashed yellow eyes at Mary along with the old season 1 remember-when-demons-were-scary sound effect. I'm honestly still kind of stunned and impressed that they brought back literal yellow eyed demons to act as a visual aid here. It forced a moment for Mary to tell Sam what she saw and for it to immediately become a Mary and Sam moment sharing this very specific trauma of what a YED meant to them, with Sam asking Mary what she'd gotten them into as if she even knew. Bringing in these princes of hell was again just a sort of visual thing to put on screen to put season 1 and Azazel's original work with Sam back on the table, again making it clear the mytharc is connected to Sam. Dagon does for Jack what Azazel did for Sam, and even though Dean killed Azazel before his plans could come true he died convinced Sam was ready and going to be everything he was supposed to, leaving a thought for Dean for season 3 that Sam hadn't been brought back right that segued into him going genuiely dark even if nothing was actually wrong with him like Azazel insinuated; I'm pretty sure Dagon died thinking that this changed nothing too, because Kelly saying Jack was good because he saved her just made Dagon laugh.

Dagon's time on the show carries this part for Sam even though he had almost no interaction with her, just by visual association of yellow eyes and what she's doing. 12x17 parallels her directly to Azazel in the staging of the action to 1x21, for example, and she already has her special child in hand unlike Azazel who was having a lot of fun with an ant farm with the entire special children project. (This also escalates into the main problem after the midseason in general making the second half of the show about a mytharc connected to Sam metaphorically in the same way Amara was connected to Dean metaphorically - I suppose 12x08 would be the 9x11 step of all that. Cas was already connected to the nephilim arc in 12x08 when he was the one who broke the news to them, 12x10 making it very clear he felt it was his problem. 12x19 MAKES it his problem. And in general now we know for sure it was used as the end of season episode thing that escalated everything into season 13 and was the final shot of the season.)

So I think when it comes to Sam stuff that gets us back to 12x22 & 23 - with Dean making clear Mary's deal was the biggest hurt in his speech to her and listing what it did to him with her death and to Sam with the mytharc smacking him in the face because of it. When Mary is back, she repeats the thought from 12x02 that she's scared of Sam, and Sam appears out of the woodwork to hug her and reassure her with the same message but this time it's post-communication so they actually all have a real understanding, and don't have this catastrophic void. Mary's still fucked up but at least she isn't ready to flee from Sam in horror, and I think it was that far more than anything about dealing with Dean that made her run in the start of the season, because she could have worked things out awkwardly with him because she had no underlying fear of him in the same way.

And then to 12x23 where the AU is caused by Mary NOT making the deal, and I think it's important to bear in mind everything about Sam and this so far this season because it's all been dredged back up again, but in 12x22 he got to make a peace with Mary that they could actually deal with this. It's not a manipulative, wow the world would suck worse if it DIDN'T happen, be thankful it did. It's something Sam can see, sure, but we benefit the most in a meta way to know that the message of the show is that Mary's deal is now all good, at least for how Sam can feel about it. The fact he sees the world as better because of it, and that he's at peace with what it did to him, is written into the fact this world is showing US that things would be so much more worse without it, and I guess this is the representation of how he feels shown to us in an actual example of a tangible world that expresses this feeling.

And of course as I said the season ends with Sam running off to investigate what happened with Jack, and being the one to follow his scorched footprints into the room with the crib that such a big fuss was made of earlier like he would get a chance to USE it but now is acting like set dressing:

Again one episode after Sam was represented as a crib all through a long speech (because babies suck at acting :P)

and a reminder that everything for him began with that moment in 1x01. Even though the thought Mary was in was more like 5x16's memory than 1x01, Sam was brought down from the nursery and his crib was there, and the way Dean woke up in the chair directly paralleled 1x01's opening with John waking up there. So the two blurred, and the conversation happening over the crib was about Mary's deal which resulted in Azazel standing over the crib. In the show's language, nurseries are Sam. And he ends the season in one, looking at a yellow-eyed thing that that crib technically belonged to even if he's massively over sized for it (lol, even Sam wasn't that tall a baby)... And whatever happens to Jack, now reflects on Sam, and his original feelings and choices about the demon blood arc and being Lucifer's vessel. If Jack is pure evil he's just a dark mirror for Sam to work through some shit. It's more likely he'll at least start neutral or as a uncomfortably powerful and volatile blank slate, but like how Mary isn't exactly fixed, Sam now has a stage set to work through his own stuff that he might not have wanted to touch to blame Mary in the same way Dean had to get to an "I hate you" stage.

(And I wonder about Mary in this because one thing that wasn't revisited except a brief mention she didn't remember, was 1x09 and Mary apologising to Sam there as a ghost, right as things were kicking off with his psychic crap. I think also once he knew all the truth later in season 4 & 5, he could also feel that Mary had already apologised and so again he's in a different place from Mary where he's ahead of her since she doesn't remember... I still feel like season 13 will probably be tackling Sam and Mary more directly than this year where it was more Dean and Mary, and Jack for good bad or neutral will offer a way to put a LOT of stuff on screen that we can see through him as Amara was to Dean a representation of his issues made manifest... He doesn't even have to have a ton of contact with Sam although I am perversely hoping he duckling-imprints on Sam since he was the one who walked in on him freshly born :P But ech, speculation. Who knows how this will go, I can't really do more than wonder about the longer character arcs and what I'd find funniest to do in the first minute of the next episode :P)

Anyway, this is all for me why season 12 was an incredible Sam season, and I'd been yelling loudly about each and every one of these developments as they happened. Long story short, I'm now an enthusiastic Sam girl because of Dabb and Berens's combined efforts, and I genuinely feel like this season did him a great service in the story.

[antthonystark]

tbh the whole downworlders= poc is a little weird cause downworlders are literally part demon... and werewolves and vampires have actual violent urges that can get out of control and also the allegory was created by a white person so idk it bothers me a little

okay so i didn’t really wanna get into this again but, uh, here we go 

so i wrote a pretty comprehensive post on how i feel about how people have interpreted the allegory in shadowhunters here. the essential thing is, people take it as this face-value “x fantastical thing = y real-life thing” and thinking that it is a direct instrument of political opinion or discourse, rather than a very loose figurative/rhetorical device of literature/storytelling.

i don’t look at the allegory as “downworlders are 100% equivalent to poc” - it’s an oppressive system that exists  only in this urban fantasy world, which has some definite and deliberate connections to oppressive structures in the real world, without necessarily being a complete, perfect depiction of those (including structures of racism and white supremacy). and a good allegory doesn’t have to be a complete, perfect depiction of real life - its purpose in storytelling is to allow for reflection on real-world issues through the lens of a fantastical, fictional one, where vampires and fairies and werewolves are oppressed by angels in a way that is tenuously similar to some real-world structures. in that, i think it’s a successful allegory, but people have wildly misinterpreted it. 

elaboration below 

the first example of effective allegory i like to use is zootopia, whose predator/prey allegory is the most overt and heavy-handed that i’ve seen in popular media (not that that’s a bad thing). what it accomplishes is, it allows for people to think about prejudice, fear, and stereotypes through this fictional animal world. however, it’s not a perfect, face-value depiction of the real world by any stretch of the imagination. for one, there is no “oppressor” and “oppressed” - prey are stereotyped as stupid and weak and spaces like the police force are clearly structured against them (and judy’s “a bunny can call another bunny cute, but when another animal does it…” speech shows that prey are prejudiced against and that there ‘cute’ is effectively allegorical for a reclaimed slur) and predators as savage and, in the case of foxes, untrustworthy. so you can’t look at zootopia and go, “the white people are x animal and the poc are y animal.” but that doesn’t mean that the allegory is not effective. 

in that, i think we can apply the same principle to the allegory in shadowhunters. it’s not meant to look like real life in every way, and its primary purpose is not to be an allegory to real life, but rather the clave/downworlders rifts are primarily meant to drive conflict within the story first and foremost, which means it’s not going to always correspond perfectly. but i would argue that that’s not the point of it anyhow. 

the second example of allegory, this time much more relevant and similar to TMI/shadowhunters is, of course, harry potter. blood purity = oppressors vs. oppressed, with the added axis of discrimination against sentient magical creatures like house elves, centaurs, and werewolves. again, which of these populations perfectly corresponds with groups and oppressive structures in real life? none, really. they echo many different types of oppression in real life, and do so effectively enough to provide reflection on such real-world issues again through a fantastical lens. 

but the more significant similarity between harry potter and TMI is simply that, unlike zootopia and unlike how many people interpret shadowhunters, the allegory is not the main narrative focus of the show. this isn’t orwell’s animal farm, where the only purpose is to be a cautionary tale against stalinism through the story of the animals. in contrast, both harry potter and TMI (and shadowhunters, although the ensemble nature of the show masks it a little) are three major things before they are an allegory: 1. a hero’s journey 2. a fantastical bildungsroman and 3. a good vs. evil plot. 

a hero’s journey is one of the most common story structures in western canon, from greek mythology to jesus to harry potter and beyond - and clary’s journey undoubtedly makes her the hero in the hero’s journey. you can read up on it in great detail here but essentially it’s a broad arc that encapsulates a “departure” an “initiation” which changes the hero in some key way (”apotheosis”, an elevation) and then a “return”. a bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story; and “good vs evil” is the most basic of all fantasy plots, i don’t really need to explain it 

so that’s why i think that people need to chill about the allegory basically, because it does play second fiddle to a whole lot of other story forms and narratives that take precedence, and therefore the story serves these - the hero’s journey - before it serves the allegory. such that, clary being the “hero”, if you are only looking at the allegory and not the hero’s journey, is going to make her look like a “white saviour”. if you ignore the allegory and look only at the hero’s journey, she’s the “heroine.” if you look only at the bildungsroman aspect of it, she’s just a young protagonist who comes of age/loses innocence as a result of the events of the story. integrating all of them, she’s some mix of these things that is none of these things at all, if that makes sense. 

[lycosa83]

Jack is Back!  Season 5 premiere review

Show: Samurai Jack, Season 5

Genre: Animation, action, drama

Network: Cartoon Network

Premiered: March 11, 2017

Way back in the early 2000s, Cartoon Network released an inconspicuous little animated gem by the name of Samurai Jack. Spawned from the mind of animation icon Genndy Tartakovsky, this Kurosawa-esque tale of a wandering samurai lost in a dark future and seeking a way back home while doing battle with his eternal nemesis Aku, possessed a unique aesthetic and storytelling style that intrigued audiences even beyond its targeted fanbase.   But to its dedicated fans, it was so much more: a cartoon magnum opus that, alas, had succumbed to that dreaded television disease known as early cancellation; after four seasons of artistry and spellbinding narratives woven with skill and dexterity, the series came to an astoundingly unsatisfying conclusion featuring our hero Jack essentially being a babysitter.  No end to his quest, no resolution to his story, no nothing.  Fans were apparently left with yet another franchise that went belly up, and while Jack’s legacy continued in other media, even his creator was chomping to bring his tale back to the screen for a fitting end.  

But thankfully, this woeful tale has a happier ending than most, for after nearly a decade and a half of languishing on Tartakovsky’s bucket list, the series will once again see the light of day, premiering on Cartoon Network’s [adult swim] property with an updated look, a new attitude, and a commitment to bringing Jack's journey to a close.  So with expectations riding high, how does this new chapter in the Book of Jack pan out?

Synopsis

(You can read up on the premise of the original series here)

Fifty years have passed since the end of season four, and Jack, rendered ageless due to his time traveling, has shown the worst of it.  With his face framed in a scruffy beard and sporting long, unkempt locks, he looks every bit the rootless rounin as he transverse the Aku-infected landscape.  Plagued by both terrifying visions of failure and a subtle but growing cynicism, Jack holds ever more tenuously to his single hope of returning to his own time, which thanks to Aku, seems further and further out of reach with each passing day.  Meanwhile, his ancient nemesis has been busy with plans of his own, tying together a cult of devotees and laying out his latest plan to be rid of the samurai for good: a group of seven female assassins, raised from birth with only one purpose - kill Samurai Jack.  Now, our hero, bereft of both his sword and his purpose, must face this latest challenge, and in the process maybe recover some of the fire and righteousness that sparked his legend to begin with.

The Good

Right from the initial cold open, you get the sense that this is a very different kind of story from what we're used to.  While Samurai Jack never shied away from darker plots in the past, they had always worked by way of contrast to Jack's own pure and indomitable spirit.  But here, Jack is a changed man: jaded, world weary, and haunted, as likely to help the helpless as he is to turn his back on an endangered village since he simply can't be bothered at the moment.  This all works very well with the more mature setting, whose depictions of a heroic icon bent low by the baggage of his life draw favorable comparisons to both John Wick and Logan, and gives this last arc a degree of gravitas quite removed from the often quirky earlier seasons.  But simply mentioning that there's an actual story arc to speak of points out another fundamental change to the franchise - one that, in my opinion, can only be for the better.  As much as I enjoyed the original series, it wasn't exactly a narrative juggernaut.  This isn't a slight against Tartakovsky’s talent for kabuki style storycrafting, but Samurai Jack's episodic format and the varying quality that entails meant that, for some episodes at least, there was little to keep fans interested save for the lovely animation.  But now, the show’s set up a tense, multi episode arc that, if this first taste is any indication, will surely compel us to see through its conclusion.  But thankfully, Samurai Jack hasn't completely turned its back on the same qualities that propelled its success in the first place.  Tartakovsky’s “show, don't tell“ philosophy is still there, gliding over the lushly illustrated backdrops to tell his story in silence and muted glances.  And the presence of Scaramouch, a robotic Sammy Davis, Jr. expy of a bounty hunter who throws out witty musical dialogue as he tries his luck against Jack, reminds us that the show hasn't lost its sense of humor despite the mature image, giving fans of all tastes a reason to tune in.

The Bad

Not much to complain about, really, though I can't say I'm particularly fond of how much is thrown at us in the first episode.  Though the depiction of Jack’s malaise is thorough and heart-rending, too many flashbacks were tossed about, revealing key plot points I would have much preferred to see gradually unfolding over the course of several episodes.  Key points include the reveal that Jack lost his sword, or maybe to have stretched out the training of the Daughters of Aku over another episode.  This may be due to time constraints, as we’re still not sure how long this season will run, but I do hope that revelations of what drove Jack to the threshold of hopelessness will be expanded at a more leisurely pace over the upcoming episodes.

The Ugly

So far I’ve’ been pretty mum on the premiere’s B story - the birth and development of the Seven Daughters of Aku, the gaggle of laser-guided tyke bombs who promise to put our hero through a world of hurt.  I’m still weighing in on how their appearance will affect the series in the long run.  On the one hand, they're practically the heralds of this new long-running story arc approach, being no mere villain of the week, but a consistent and dangerous threat to a warrior who’s been almost invincible to most of his enemies.  Being raised in a cult that worships Aku as a god and castigates Jack as his evil usurper, they likely harbor viewpoints that may add a splash of gray to a traditionally black-and-white series, which when combined with Jack’s more cynical outlook, might make for some interesting interactions beyond the sharp clanging of sword on sword action.  But on the other hand, this could all be squandered if the arc resolves itself too quickly, or if Jack somehow “handles” the situation in his usual quick and efficient manner - leading the whole thing to just one big bust.  Other than that, the animation, while still the gorgeous wash of lineless artwork that’s come to define the series, has added CG to the palette - a necessary addition in my book, though we’ll have to see how it’s used and maintained as time goes by.

Tune In or Tune Out

Tune In, folks - it’s a no-brainer.  We’re talking about the resurrection of the biggest cult animated series from the early 2000s here - of course you should tune in.  Old fans will finally get a sense of closure for this modern-day chanbara saga, and even if you’re new to the dystopian world of Samurai Jack, this first episode, minus a few foibles, packs enough humor, action, and hard-boiled grit to beat back even the most vociferous cries of “It’s just a cartoon.”  It's time to get back to Jack.