#this takes place in the reboot universe so this may not even be canon anymore once the new PS5 rolls around

[turquoisephoenix]

What’s A Little Galaxy-Wide Destruction Between Friends? - Chapter 2

Chapter 1

Five days after saving the galaxy from the Deplanetizer, Elaris is greeted by an old friend, who wishes to talk to her, vent a little, and give her life advice. Unfortunately for her, her old friend also happens to be a freshly transformed robot version of a dangerous criminal madman that everyone believed was dead. Elaris & Dr. Nefarious friendship Characters: Elaris, Dr. Nefarious, Lawrence, Qwark (mentioned) ————————————————

Author's Notes: I also mainly wrote this to write down a headcanon I had for why Dr. Nefarious wanted to blow up Umbris as his main plan in the movie, when a galaxy-wide explosion leading up to "just" city-wide takeovers and roboticization kinda seems like a downgrade on the evil scale. Plus at the end of the day, Nefarious kinda is a goofy idiot in addition to being an evil mastermind.  

Also because Elaris is a gamer and we stan a gaming legend.

----------------

Three weeks had passed since the incident on Umbris and Elaris couldn't be happier.

The weapons technician was grinning from ear to ear as she entered her workplace, practically bouncing on her heels as the events of today's meeting still making her giddy. She set down a bunch of cardboard boxes she was holding down on an empty table and pumped her fists in the air. A scream of joy filled the air.

At last! She was moving out of the broom closet and getting a proper laboratory! They finally listened to her! No more bottles of cleanser and pails of dirty water! No more having to say "excuse me" and awkwardly shove past the janitor to get to her office! No more terrible smells!

At first the process was as slow as it always was - everyone kept pushing back her appeals because they kept saying they had more pressing matters to attend to, where would we find the space, surely this could wait when we just saved the galaxy, Qwark has another book signing today - but then she did something that they didn't expect from a passive nerd like her. Elaris dug in her heels and let herself get a little angry about this issue. She'd raise her voice a little bit, she demanded a little more respect, until finally the group listened.

In other words, she channeled a bit of her inner Dr. Nefarious.

But just a little bit. The part of him that didn't want to murder anybody.

Elaris looked at the corkboard in her office with Dr. Nefarious's photo still pinned to it, where the perfectly happy and organic Nefarious smiled with the blissful unawareness of what would happen to him after that picture was taken. She couldn't help but smile back, even though the person in the photograph tried to blow up the galaxy - with her in it - last month.

She really did have that weird dream meeting with Dr. Nefarious to thank. As the days went by, she started to see that one incident with the robot version of Dr. Nefarious sneaking on her spaceship and coaching her on her job as less of a thing that happened and more like a vision. A spiritual calling if you will.

Sure, it felt real. And for a while, she earnestly believed that it was real. But as the days went by and as her brain thought about it for a little while longer, Elaris began to rationalize to herself that no, it didn't happen and her patrol shift near Umbris was so boring that she fell asleep and had a strange nightmare of a screaming zombie robot telling her to quit her job.

Which is why she wasn't worried about the notification from a "DrN42" popping up on her account after she started an online session of Resistance: Fall of Blarg after her shift.

Apparently they were already friends and their last online activity was years ago, but it was an older game so she thought nothing of it. She accepted and settled into her chair, also thinking nothing of it when the voice chat booted on. She cracked open a can of Nanotech Gamer Fuel Cola ("the drink of true 133ts!" as it said on the side) and adjusted her headset.

"What's up, DrN42." she said into the microphone, in the tone of voice she used for livestreams.

"Testing...testing..."

Elaris made a tiny yell and jumped, her can of Cola flying out of her hand and crashing onto the floor.

Yes, there was no denying it. The voice on the other end of voice chat was Dr. Nefarious. The Dr. Nefarious that was supposed to be dead. The Dr. Nefarious that was supposed to be a figment of her imagination.

Immediately she remembered why the username was still on her friend's list - before he quit the Galactic Rangers, Elaris would try to get him to blow off a little steam by playing a couple online matches, usually after he got into another shouting match with Captain Qwark. She remembered days where both of them were standing side by side in the crowded broom closet, their shoulders touching as they were both in The Zone...

She shook that memory away before she dwelled too hard on it, her face flushing. She hated how much she missed the company of a criminal mad scientist.

That also meant she didn't just imagine that one meeting back on her spaceship. The weird robot in her dream that was yelling to a Lawrence over a cellphone and breathing like he still had a pair of lungs was real and now he was playing an online game with his old work username. Her mind reeled at the revelation.

"I heard a yelp so speakers seem to be working..." he said calmly, snapping her back into reality.

"How...." she stopped herself. "Okay, seriously, what are you even doing?" Her brain was still trying to play catch-up with what was going on. She fought to calm herself down - it's not like he could physically threaten her over an online game or anything after all - as a harsh metallic voice filtered through her speakers.

"I ran into a bit of inventor's block. Managed to get the wi-fi working from the crash site and worked my way there." he explained evenly. She couldn't see, but back on Umbris, he was currently sitting in a chair made out of stolen spaceship parts and twiddling a small wrench in-between two claws as he gently tweaked the sensitivity of his game controller, which was a Frankensteinian chimera of scrap metal and loose wires sitting in his lap.

Behind him, Lawrence was silently dusting. Lawrence didn't want to play, which was fine for Nefarious, because he didn't want to construct a second controller.

"You..." Elaris was still having a hard time making sentences work.

"If you must know, if you take about five repair droids and rip the wiring and chips out of their miserable carcasses, you can cobble together a working game controller out of them." his voice remained calm and at a normal speaking volume, but running underneath it was a seething undercurrent of hatred. "All you really need is some soldering materials and a small screwdriver."

"This is insane." she said, stating the obvious.

"I get that a lot, yes." he continued. Lawrence made a quiet amused noise under his breath but Nefarious wasn't paying attention. "It takes an additional two repair droids for the headset-"

"What if I tell the Galactic Rangers that you're still alive?" she blurted out suddenly, the words falling out of her mouth. She immediately clapped her hands over her mouth in an act of instant regret, but Nefarious didn't seem phased.

"Then you'd have to explain to them how you'd know this information, Elaris." he answered. Even though she could only hear his voice, she could just feel the smug smile crossing his metallic face. "And wouldn't that be an awkward conversation to your fellow galactic heroes?"

Crud, Elaris thought to herself. No wonder he was so calm.

"I'm also using a frequency jammer so don't try tracing my connection back to me. One of the first things I learned during my untimely stay in a prison cell was how to leech wi-fi and go completely undetected..!" he said with a sinister voice, his words taking on such an evil tone that didn't betray the fact that the main reason he learned how to leech wi-fi was because he didn't want to miss any seasonal events in League of Legendaries and wanted to keep his place in the top PVP DPS lists.

"Are you going to use this as blackmail?" she said in a tinier voice than she meant to.

"N-No?" he said incredulously, taken aback. The way he said it instantly defused most of the tension hanging in the air. He sounded almost hurt, of all things. "Calm down, Elaris. I just want to play Resistance and I just happened to see you online. What kind of person do you take me for?"

'Someone who's backstabbed everyone he's ever worked for?' flashed through her mind and while she didn't say it out loud, Nefarious could practically read her mind from the long silence that followed, which caused him to clear his cybernetic throat in embarrassment. There he goes doing the non-robot things again. At least he was consistent.

"I just want to play one online match. You know...for old time's sake. After that, I'll disappear. What do you say?"

She wasn't sure what made her say yes. Was it something in the tone of his voice? Was it curiosity? Or did she believe this was another weird dream, similar to the previous weird dream back when she was patrolling Umbris?

'Stupidity, probably' she thought to herself as DrN42's character loaded into the waiting room. She did the wave emote. In response, DrN42 shuddered a bit and then started walking into a wall. She heard grumbles of annoyance and the angry hammering of buttons as DrN42's attempt at emoting proved disastrous. He managed to get the dance emote working before he sank into the decorative pool that was in the training area map and drowned.

"Are you having any problems there, buddy?" she asked as he respawned and then proceeded to get his character wedged between two bushes. The hammering of buttons continued echoing into her ears.

"Ever had all of your fingers surgically removed and replaced with sharp, clumsy metal claws meant for rending organic flesh and not much beyond that?"

"No?"

"Well....that makes one of us...." he said glumly as his character lurched forward right into another wall. He controlled like someone who never played a video game in his life. He found the fire button and his character started shooting wildly into the air.

"Did you even practice beforehand?" she said in amusement, watching him figure out the controls.

"N-no...." he admitted sheepishly. His character fell into the pool again. "I'll say I have bad lag!"

"Well, too late for any regrets because our match is starting." She warned him, her eyes locked on the countdown clicking down on the HUD. A smile of amusement crossed her lips. This was going to be a virtual trainwreck and she was ready for it.

"Wh-what-"

Before Dr. Nefarious could finish his weak protest, they were both immediately loaded into bleak post apocalyptic ruins. Shades of brown and toppled skyscrapers surrounded them from all directions. Elaris adjusted her headset like a grizzled war veteran as the heavy metal soundtrack of Fall of Blarg flooded the broom closet.

To say that Nefarious "sucked" at this game was an understatement, and possibly an insult to creatures that sucked things for nutrients. Nefarious was so bad at this game that Elaris wondered if there was a correlation between his sudden drop in gaming skill and his unwanted transformation, and made sure to make a mental note to never turn into a robot. He played worse than someone who intentionally played bad for cheap clicks on YouTube, and that was saying something. Elaris was positive was one of his deaths was because he accidentally shot himself in the face with his own weapon, and she didn't even think that was possible in Fall of Blarg.

"Wow buddy, you're kinda bad at this game!" Elaris said as she killed the soldier that was camping on Dr. Nefarious's body and keeping him from respawning.

"SHUT UP, I'M REALLY RUSTY!" was his response.

Elaris couldn't help herself. She was on the battlefield of Resistance: Fall of Blarg - a game where she livestreamed with the Galaxy's greatest champions, a game where she ruled with an iron fist as Queen. He was in her domain now and not even his new robot form could protect him from her fury.

"Oh no, are you already getting rust?" she mocked playfully.

"NOT HELPING!"

"I could suggest some derusting agents, I know you're new to the whole robot thi-"

"WHAT WAS THAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU, MY HEADSET'S ACTING UP!"

Elaris broke out into a fit of laughter, which caused Nefarious to nervously chuckle on his end. She couldn't help it - as absurd as this situation was, she was having a lot of fun. Not even with the wild difference in skill level between her and her partner did her foes stand a chance. She was in Gamer Mode and nothing can stop her now.

One online match became three. Then five. Then nine. Every match, Elaris carried them to victory. While she did enjoy playing babysitter to a wildly flailing partner that drew enemy fire, Dr. Nefarious was a fast learner and actually figured out how to not suck and die on the battlefield. By the fifth match, some of his old Galactic Ranger skill began to come back and soon he was able to pick off one or two kills himself. Still not as good as Elaris, the Iron Queen of Resistance, but at least he wasn't so much of a dead weight anymore.

And honestly, she was having the best gaming session in months. She missed having a gaming partner. In this brief happy moment of leeching company wi-fi to keep her own Internet bill down, Elaris forgot she was playing video games with a scary robot monster that once pointed a giant space station sized weapon at Umbris and tried to blow up the entire galaxy.

'Umbris...'

The exhilarating rush of video games soon gave way to curiosity. Elaris checked the clock. She had been gaming with a bloodthirsty madman for a solid hour now. Normally she was out of Galactic Ranger Headquarters much earlier than this, even during days where she hung back to fix a few bugs on overtime. Now, she wanted to use the voice chat to its full advantage rather than blast enemy soldiers.

"Hey Nef." she said, setting their group to private and cancelling their next match.

"Hrm?"

Elaris looked around. She checked behind her to make sure there was no one walking down the hallway of HQ and then, after a brief hesitation, she lowered her voice and asked the question that was burning on the back of her head, even though she was dreading the actual answer.

"Why did you want to blow up Umbris and kill everyone?"

There was a quick cackle of disbelief - a sudden, pointed "HAH!" - over the other end.

"Where did everyone in the Solana Galaxy get this idea? How is blowing up Umbris going to kill everyone? Umbris is an uninhibited wasteland where Qwark has his stupid training base for squishy meatheads! I thought my motive would be crystal clear in me targeting that worthless mudball of a planet! No one would miss it!"

"W-what..." Elaris uttered in disbelief as her team partner suddenly broke into a rant befitting of a true gamer.

"Don't think I don't read the news! I've been seeing the propaganda from both Qwark's autobiography and that holovid that I was planning to "wipe out everything". Why would I wipe out everything? There's no one to gloat to when you wipe out everything! What did everyone think I was going to do - go to the Bogon Galaxy and march up to the doors of Megacorp like "guess who has six fingers and blew up billions of people"?"

He drew in a breath to calm himself; yelling at Elaris didn't feel nearly as good as yelling at Qwark or at some weird Lombax kid. "I swear you try to atomize one city in a fit of rage and everyone thinks you're a genocidal maniac." he added at last.

She thought back about the Deplanetizer and the holovid made in honor of the heroics of Ratchet and Captain Qwark. They added a couple scenes for Dr. Nefarious about how he was going to reduce the Solana Galaxy into space dust. The planets were perfectly aligning and Umbris has an unstable core - it just made sense that he would've planned this all out.

"Whoa whoa whoa, you mean to tell me that you set up the Deplanetizer to blow up a planet with an unstable core - a move that would've set off a chain reaction and wiped out everything in the galaxy including yourself - entirely by accident?"

"Yes!" he said instantly. There was then an awkward pause as his brain caught up to him. "...wait that would've actually destroyed the galaxy...?"

"Yes! Yes that would've destroyed all the other planets!" she barked back, a little louder than her normal speaking tone.

He went silent for a long period of time, a disconcerting period of time that made Elaris wonder if he lost connection.

Finally he spoke, and his voice was suddenly really quiet.

"I didn't know that..." he admitted.

"WHAAAAAT?!" she screamed.

She couldn't help herself. Anger was flooding her senses and clouding her thoughts. Maybe it was the heat of the online battlefield but she did not like the idea that Nefarious almost killed her - not because he wanted to! She accepted the idea that he had devolved into a bloodthirsty killer at this point! - but because he didn't know a goddamn thing about geology.

"Wait but that means you would've died too..." he added as his brain put the pieces together.

"YES! YES I WOULD'VE DIED, YOU IDIOT!"

He didn't answer, but his embarrassed silence really said it all.

"I swear do you actually spend longer than fifteen minutes thinking your plans through!?" Elaris said, her voice raising in volume until it became a harsh, almost Nefarious-like yell.

"Wow Elaris, you're getting really mad at that game! Is your teammate a total noob or something?" Ratchet called from the hallway. He had caught the last thing that Elaris had said as he was walking by, a doughnut still hovering near his mouth. Ratchet was usually one of the last people to leave Galactic Headquarters on account of all the extra-curricular training he liked doing.

"Yes! Yes, he's very much a total noob! He's normally much smarter than this but he nearly went and got everyone killed!" Elaris yelled back, gesturing vaguely at the screen where both her and DrN42's characters were staring at a poorly-textured wall.

There was a mild chuckle from the Lombax. "Okay Elaris, talk to you later!" and with a quick wave of a hand and a Lombax tail, he was gone.

Another awkward silence descended between them as Elaris fought to get her emotions back under control. It felt weird being the angry one. She was so used to being the calm, collected nerd next to the angry, raging nerd back when the two of them worked together as the Nerd Herd. She was used to being the one that would calm Nefarious down, not the other way around, and her gaming partner on the other end knew it from the way he hesitantly tried to help.

"Are you okay there, Ellie?"

Ellie. Like a needle puncturing a balloon, all of her fury drained out of her body when she heard that nickname. It had been years since she last heard anyone call her that pet name, the name she said her grandma used to call her one day while she and Nefarious were trying to fix the ammo capacity of the Bomb Glove, and just the tiniest act of him remembering it calmed her down. Her shoulders sagged.

"I swear you can be so stupid sometimes!" she said, but there was no fire behind her words anymore.

"Okay okay...so I made a rookie mistake!" he said with a chuckle. Was he humoring her? Was the killer robot actually trying to make her feel better? Why? "Next time I'll plan better! The best part about being a supervillain is that you can always try, try again until the heroes lose!"

"How did you make it all the way through med school and then build the blueprints for a giant space station armed with a planet-destroying laser without knowing a single thing about astrogeology?" Elaris said, her face resting in one of her palms.

"How was I to know planets had different cores?"

"That's something you learn in the fifth grade!"

"I never did really pay attention to geology in school..."

Despite that, Elaris felt better. Even though it still kinda stung that she almost died because Mr. Loose Cannon didn't think too hard on the consequences of his own actions, thinking about the previous game sessions brought her happy mood back. She found herself smiling again. He may have allied himself with Chairman Drek and nearly killed them all, but deep down he was the intelligent yet idiotic nerd that she shared a broom closet with, and that brightened her mood in a strange, confusing way.

"Sorry for yelling at you, Nef. I did have a great time!"

"I did too!" he shouted back, his mood immediately bouncing back now that Elaris was happy again. The Galactic Ranger decided not to think too hard on the fact that Nefarious seemed genuinely concerned for her. This situation was already weird enough as is.

"Well, I gotta go now, but thank you for talking to me back on Umbris. I wouldn't be moving out of the broom closet and into an actual laboratory if it wasn't for you!" When he didn't immediately reply back, only giving her a stunned silence in return, she didn't even wait for an answer when she turned off the game. Satisfied, Elaris finally removed the headset and ran a hand across her head. It really was time she got back to her apartment. Leftover ravioli didn't eat itself.

She got up from her chair, took one step, and immediately heard the sad, fizzy squish of her foot colliding with a cola puddle that had been laying there for a solid hour.

Elaris sighed in mild disappointment. She couldn't leave yet.

"I spent two bolts on that soda too..."

------------

"Did you have fun, sir?"

Dr. Nefarious looked up at Lawrence as he fiddled with his eldritch abomination of a gamer rig, his claws entangled in some loose hanging wires and a wide, childish grin on his skeletal face. His handcrafted gamer PC made from Deplanetizer guts and some repair bots was like a new pet to him, and he cherished it as such.

"Did you see us, Lawrence!? We won every match! We annihilated everyone that stood in our way! No one could get past our defenses!" he shouted with all the giddy excitement of a grade schooler. He was gesturing wildly, communicating as much with his arms and hand movements as his face, and from the way he was wrapped up in his PC wires, it was a miracle he didn't strangle himself or trip over.

"Masterful work. I can see why you're so popular with the ladies." Lawrence quipped, sounding about as excited as someone filing paperwork at the DMV.

"And then she told me she actually took my advice and then thanked me for it! She listened to me! You remember, back when I first became a robot! She listened!"

"I think she likes you, sir."

"I think she does! Isn't that wonderful, Lawrence!?" he practically screamed.

This would've been a happy moment, and indeed the mad scientist could feel a warm, fuzzy feeling spread through the circuits in his chest as his mechanical heart fluttered, thinking about his old science partner, if Lawrence didn't immediately chime in with a curt "So why didn't you ask for any of Captain Qwark's patrol schedules or passwords from her again?", ruining the moment instantly.

The warm happy feeling went cold. The excitement bled out of him.

Oh right. The real reason why he logged onto Resistance: Fall of Blarg around the exact same time as Elaris. The reason that Elaris had almost guessed before they ended up just fooling around in an online video game. His diabolical revenge scheme that he had cooked up after he realized that he and Elaris still had each other friended. His fullproof plan that would lead to Qwark's demise.

Dr. Nefarious sucked in a breath and dragged a hand slowly across his face, suddenly feeling very tired.

"Oh..."

[hekatekun]

The metanarrative’s grand narrative: Osomatsu-san’s characterization throughout the franchise

The growing cynicism throughout the entire Osomatsu-san franchise shows itself in season 3 with more prominence than anything prior. I think that’s pretty common amongst any “long-running” gag comedy - replacing a plot with spiteful commentary that’s admittedly pretty hit or miss at times. However, it invariably creates a negative but pretty funny character growth, and I love the way the show (I’m including the movie too as “canon” material considering season 3 has referenced it way too many times for me to disregard) has set up this metanarrative across seasons. Long post ahead.

Obviously, Osomatsu-san is self-aware and has a casual relationship with itself. No linear plot (though S3 seems to be trying it out and I’ve enjoyed it - I love that they’re willing to experiment), rather a collection of unrelated skits; and so it points out its own metanarrative because of this “lack of consequences.” With comedy comes impermancy and Ososan AND -kun will always bounce back from that week’s insanity. From the Oxford Dictionary, a metanarrative is “a narrative account that experiments with or explores the idea of storytelling, often by drawing attention to its own artificiality.” Basically: a story about stories.

On top of this, is what I’m calling the “grand narrative,” which is often used interchangeably with metanarrative, but here I’m making a distinction to make it less confusing. Of course, Ososan is a story about stories, but with that comes a story it’s not directly telling, which is where most of the (little) character development is taking place. This is what I’m going to call the grand narrative of a show whose premise is being a meta-aware comedy. I’ll admit I’m by no means an expert on these subjects, but storytelling methods are something I enjoy trying to analyze. As a media format, Ososan really utilizes the fact that it’s a tv show.

Right off the bat S1E1 makes it clear what to expect: Nothing. Not a damn thing. But, the show had already been cleared for this first season, so it has to be produced. This same episode’s preview is done by Osomatsu, which I’m just gonna quote instead screenshot because there’s too many.

“...we plan on properly starting the anime the next episode.” “...you ended up with an extra minute, so you need me to do something to fill it?! Actually, is this anime going to be okay with episode one being like this? I’m getting worried about how the rest of this is going to be...” “There, I used up a minute! [EPISODE ENDS]”

Episode one is not only batshit referential, but downright mocking the state of anime in 2015. Which, truthfully, I don’t have much to comment on in that regard, as I’m not an avid anime fan. However, it does this under the premise of being indecisive about what kind of anime they wanted the Osokun reboot to be. 

They’ll do just about anything to stay popular and relevant considering that is, quite literally, all they have going for them as characters in the series and just being characters in general. They may be pieces of shit, but they’re likeable pieces of shit. The dynamics they’ve built upon to be entertaining is encouraged, and they’re basically just roleplaying different skits and fucking around.

All the AUs! All the skits! They’re just playing! They’re just fuckin’ around!! They couldn’t come up with any interesting plot nor could they “graduate” from being anime protagonists and join the real world, so they just fuck around and make a gag anime!

Even if we follow both as the audience, the show makes a difference between the what’s them in their “normal life” (crazy begets crazy, no?) and what’s their “show.” But, really, that’s just one way to look at it, as they don’t really follow any rules as a show. I could say the Joshimatsus are separate characters from the sextuplets, and it’d be a “correct” interpretation. It doesn’t really matter - I’m choosing to examine it all as being the six of them just running around and playing, because being entertaining and having fun is all they know as characters. Besides, having it blended together beyond recognition reinforces how it prioritizes entertaining us, the audience, above logic. Storytelling doesn’t need to make absolute spatial-temporal sense for it to be enjoyable to fans.

In any case, that mentality really seems to be what pushes their character development negative, as they look to reinforce habits and rituals despite them being really detrimental for them in the long run. They know they’re popular characters as is, and with really everyone from staff to fans encouraging this behavior further, so they see no point in fixing what isn’t really broken.

I found this 4 year old article from Manga.Tokyo discussing the Ososan phenomenon in Japan because while the craze died off pretty quickly in American anime circles (which deserves a whole other post), Japanese fans went fuckin’ nuts.

This portion caught my attention, as it makes sense that entitled and enabled asshole children would grow up to be entitled and enabled asshole adults. The article also goes on to compare them to idols (even beyond the F6 spoof) and that they are rooted in being comfort characters above all else. 

It’s worth a read, especially because Japanese fan response is what drives majority of the content post-S1, and, inevitably, ties into their character development. 

They know that they’re Characters, particularly Protagonists. You know what happens to protagonists? Everything works out. Just about every single story created has stuff working out for protagonists. In fact, we have a whole genre made that separates stories with bad tragic endings from our Normal Stories. Ososan is a comedy, not a tragedy, so surely there’s gonna be some payoff somewhere along the road, especially as the seasons and other content are still being pumped out. To a self-aware, entitled, enabled protagonist, assuming everything is just gonna work out for you isn’t that far off from your narrative truth.

However, Ososan is a gag anime, and a lot of gag content (like 4koma mangas) is dropped for other projects before any emotional cathartic ending is provided for characters and fans alike. So, three seasons and a movie later, nothing has happened. It’s a great idol cash cow with a Family Guy filter, and the characters (and writers) don’t even bother to hide it anymore. And I know I’m being hypocritical concerning my definition of “canon material” but I think this portion from one of the drama cds “Choroplex” basically summarizes my point:

CHOROMATSU: Wait, don’t make this into a gag! You don’t even care about becoming employed, right? KARAMATSU: There’s no way that could happen... CHOROMATSU: What kind of future are you imagining? Is it nothing but this? [HUGE PAUSE BEFORE THEY MOVE ONTO SOMETHING ELSE]

They’re parodies of themselves and are running out of ideas. Stagnation and decay is normal, if not unavoidable, at this point in time for them. They’re just 20 somethings who’ve hit a wall but they’re too scared and insecure to bring about permanent positive change. It’s easier for them to fall back into normal patterns and joke off the rest.

They have an antagonistic relationship with expectations. They can’t handle a single iota of expectations, or responsibilities. They’ve never needed to worry before, so why bother now? Once the biggest hits on the block, now they’re just guppies in the ocean, and there’s nothing they believe themselves to be able to accomplish to keep up with this big brave new world. This is epitomized in S3E15, where old man Osomatsu tells a bastardized version of the Tortoise and the Hare, blatantly projecting his feelings onto it. Again, too many screenshots so let me pull more quotes (bolding for my own reference):

“The place that the tortoise thought was the goal was not actually the goal. His journey down the road of life still continued on. The tortoise was quite tired, but he continued running anyway.” “No one actually knew who was in front anymore. There are too many people above you.” “After the tortoise found out how society worked, he thought, ‘So this is the difference in talent? No amount of hard work is going to fix this. All right. I’m done competing with others.’”

S3 has left more questionable endings than its counterparts. The last 2 skits I referenced don’t even a gag to them, and the marriage skit doesn’t play music for the entire second half of S3E5. There’s more involved too. I haven’t even brought up the rice ball twins becoming actual entertainers in their universe, or how they introduced this whole AI subplot only to reject it because All Six Of Them aren’t interested in expanding their little corner of the world. Here’s a transcript of the ending preview from S3E1:

“Hey, hey, Osomatsu here. I thought we were saved from being replaced, but I guess we get new characters next week. Man, we’re busy. New encounters, changing surroundings... We’re NEETs to begin with because all that is a pain. I guess a lot can happen after three seasons. [EPISODE ENDS]”

The sextuplets’ mindsets are extremely self-centered, which is also an environmental thing (the parents don’t even really care that they’re NEETs, for one) and an understanding of what they ought to be (epic successful protagonists). They also have a very black and white mentality, all or nothing. They’re extremely sheltered, and once they realized where they stood in society at large, they just gave up. To them the world is divided between winners and losers, and somehow, “inexplicably,” they found themselves to have fallen from grace. But they’re protagonists, that has to count for something! Everything’s gonna end up okay, right? Well... what this show has told them: No, not at all. They are consistently compared and warned of Iyami, and are perfectly aware of this fact, and have come to internalize it as a truth rather than a reversible self-fulfilling prophecy.

Too many screencaps, taken from the S3S5 marriage discussion:

JYUSHIMATSU: I wonder if we’re gonna get married someday, too. CHOROMATSU: Well, I mean... probably? I’m not exactly sure, but... TODOMATSU: What? You’re gonna get married, Choromatsu-niisan? CHOROMATSU: Huh? Well, yeah... someday.

Surprise! They have commitment issues! The same group that couldn’t commit to a fucking plot! Though their personality issues have several factors involved, I can’t overlook the theater motifs abound. Life’s a stage, and they’re performing entirely unscripted and it shows.

Do I think all of this is 100% intentional on the writers’ part? No, probably not. There’s also an extra layer here regarding contemporary Japanese commentary that I’m not familiar with, so I just ended up focusing on the characters. I can’t be in the writers’ heads, but whatever decisions are being made by executives regarding censorship and “compliance” are reflected in these character changes that result in being significantly more bitter and defeatist.

In the all or nothing, winner-take-all mentality, the only way to save face at this point, in their minds, is to own up to it - act like it’s what they wanted all along. And, hey, it’s funny to watch, right?

“Why is Osomatsu all my examples”, you might be asking. Well, he’s the damn blueprint for it all. The leader of the bunch, the first personality to grab your attention, has had all his issues projected and ricocheted in their echo chamber.

Ultimately, my point here is that you could think their “canon characterizations” (though canon means nothing in a show like this) as being intertwined with the nature of their self-aware existence. They’ve shown you all their tricks, the smoke and mirrors are getting boring, and they’re stalling long enough the story seems to be moving on without them - in spite of them. And when something genuinely threatens their way of life, they don’t know how to respond.

You can play it all straight, of course. Remove the meta jokes and all the same plot points can be hit, but, as a slapstick comedy, it’s able to easily add this additional layer in that I appreciate. I’ve said it in my last post and I’ll probably say it in more, but with comedy comes sincerity - the caveat of all the cartoon violence is that, on some level somewhere, this is how they really feel.

[illusion-reality-steve]

Stress’ last 5 brain cells react to Steve Saga returning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFj1Z3UGt_I

Brain Cell #1:

BC 1: *hard at work writing the Mite Steve AU, building it on the foundations of the abandoned, broken season 2*

BC 1: Writing is so much fun :D Especially when you don’t need to stress about following canon anymore.

BC 1: *phew* *steps back and admires the Mite Steve AU so far* Great work!

*THUNDER*

God Steve: *appears* Hi.

God Steve:

God Steve: *pokes the Mite Steve AU*

The Mite Steve AU: *collapses, reduced to dust*

God Steve: Sorry, that AU is no longer possible thanks to my existence.

BC 1:

BC 1: :’)

(Lol, don’t worry. I’ll either continue with the Mite AU as it is, ignoring the new episodes, or make some adjustments to fit God Steve into it. I’ll think of something.)

Brain Cell #2:

BC 2: THE STEVE SAGA IS BACK. OUT OF ALL THE POSSIBILITIES. FIRST STEVE IN SMASH, AND NOW STEVE SAGA IS BACK. OCTOBER, YOU’RE AN ALRIGHT MONTH.

BC 2: STEVE SAGA SEROTONIN, YEEEEESSSS

BC 2: AAAAAAHHHHH

Brain Cell #3:

BC 3: *looking at every frame* WHERE IS HE?! WHERE IS ILLUSION STEVE?! WHERE IS MY DISASTER SON?! AAAAAAHHHH

BC 3: AND WHAT THE HECK, GOD STEVE?! ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!

BC 3: RESETTING THE WORLD?! BRINGING THE WORLD BACK TO ITS HAPPIEST STATE?! MAKING EVERYONE FORGET THE OLD WORLD SO THE NEW WORLD IS FUNCTIONAL?!

BC 3: YOU ARE RIPPING OF ILLUSION STEVE’S ARC. WHHHYYYYYYY

BC 3: *salty grumble* This is probably how the Hypno Steve stans felt when they saw Illusion Steve’s similarities to Hypno Steve :c

BC 3: But come on, man, another repeat of Illusion’s plan? With nothing unique added to it? Seriously, where did whatever God Steve had with Alex and Emerald Steve go? Why didn’t he even mention that? Why is he suddenly so chill?

(Edit: Whoops, I mistook God Steve as the same character who got mad at Sabre. I thought the episode confirmed that he was the one who attacked them with bedrock, but it didn’t. Sorry about that.)

Brain Cell #4:

Alright, Imma drop in instead of BC 4 for a real talk.

I’m....concerned about Sabre/Elan. The man behind the videos. I thought the Steve Saga was gone for good and Rainbow Quest was gonna take over. And this Steve Saga episode seems to be set up to be a semi-reboot. It’s literally a brand new timeline.

I’m worried that he made the Steve Saga return because of fandom pressure. Or may he’s having writer’s block and made this just to get the creative juices flowing.

I just hope Elan knows what he’s doing and won’t have as big of an issue with plot holes and characterization this time.

Who knows. Maybe he needed to take months off the Steve Saga so he could finally know how to continue it.

idk. This is just speculation. Please don’t take my word for it.

Brain Cell #5:

I’ll also be speaking here because I already got some theories.

I don’t have any evidence. I’m going based on my intuition, and the headcanons I’ve made in the past about what happened after the Ender Crystal explosion (Bedrock Steve, Sabre’s multiple egos, Mite Steve AU, etc)

Also, side note: I’m kinda scared that the continuation has some similarities to the setup of the Mite Steve AU, which takes place after season 2 XD Like, bruh.

Anyways, God Steve is very out of nowhere. He changes everything, including the assumption that Origin Steve was the original Steve.

So I have a theory: God Steve isn’t actually a Steve. He isn’t from this timeline. I think God Steve is Sabre/Elan.

God Steve created the Steve Saga and other universes like how Elan created the Steve Saga: by imagining a story idea and building it with his creativity. God Steve is scolding at Sabre, in frustration with himself of how much of a mess season 2 is. And he isn’t actually a Steve, but he names himself after them because he’s very fond of the Steve Saga and wants it to be a part of his identity.

How did God Steve become a separate entity? I think when Reality Steve separated Sabre from his account, God Steve was created. This is similar to how Light Steve was created when Sabre separated Rainbow Steve into the basic Color Steves. God Steve and Sabre are also similar to Galaxy and Void’s dynamic. So this is a nostalgic, classic Steve Saga trope.

This can be supported by the fact that God Steve is OP enough that he literally dragged Lucas, a player outside of the server, into the Steve Saga server.

Anyways, if God Steve turns out to be evil and Sabre feels immense guilt/responsibility over God Steve, it’ll be so nostalgic and heartwarming if Galaxy comes to the rescue. “Sabre, you didn’t give up on me when you realized Void Steve was a part of me. I’m not gonna give up on you either! You are better than God Steve. You can defeat him!!”

Overall:

I have very mixed feelings about this. This plot doesn’t feel fresh, and I’m worried that there is no plan. And this entire episode felt more like a fanfiction than an actual Steve Saga episode. However, I’ll follow the series if new episodes come. Because I am Steve Saga trasssssh. (And I don’t want to fall behind on episodes, like what happened to me with RQ :’) )

I’ll probably like it more if Illusion’s in it. And Alex. And Emerald Steve.

If Illusion’s in this and he meets God Steve, he better be salty that God Steve stole his evil plan and attempt to fight him. He might die if he tries that and I will cry a lot of that happens, but at least it will be in-character.

I also have a feeling that Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet Steves will be used in this continuation.

[m00nslippers]

Just a few more of Jason Todd’s feats (Part 2)

Part 1 | Part 2

This is continued from Part 1, where I went through most everything relevant in the Preboot-era for Jason that I’m aware of. The exception to that is the events of Countdown which does feature Jason but also had him fighting extra-dimensional people so there is not much relevance to the main DC universe, and Lost Days where he doesn’t fight anyone who has ever fought anyone else of note. Happily, Jason kept the vast majority of his stories as canon after the reboot, so the only things from Part One that are questionable are things that don’t take place in Batman comics. I totally forgot Nightwing: Brothers in Blood though so I’m adding it, even if it isn’t canon anymore.

As before, I’m listing the major fights where Jason fights against skilled vigilantes or assassins, basically people skilled/important enough that you can use the match to measure his ability, so I’m discounting fights with nobodies and goons and low tier vigilantes/criminals.

To reiterate from Part 1, Jason is often in a position to kill his opponents, so in many matches he could technically win at any point, but he chooses not to. In the New 52 and beyond Jason acts more as a hero/protagonist in many cases so he runs a lot less and fights other Bats less often. But as before in the case that he does run or the fight is inconclusive, I’m just going to call it a ‘tie’. I’m going to rate the outcome of matches as such:

Win - Jason kills, incapacitates, checkmates or otherwise defeats his opponent.

Tie with an advantage - Jason escapes or stops the fight with less damage than his opponent or having achieved more goals.

Tie - More or less an equal amount of damage, or goal achievement on both sides.

Tie with a disadvantage - Jason escapes or stops the fight with more damage than his opponent or not having achieved his goal.

Loss - Jason is captured, incapacitated, checkmated or otherwise defeated.

Let me just preface this by saying that many fights in the New 52/Rebirth, especially any instance where Jason fights alongside other batkids--especially Tim and Damian--Jason is purposefully made to look incompetent and the other superior, contrary to pretty much everything we know about Jason and Damian or Tim’s skills. Not that Tim or Damian are bad fighters, but Part 1 of this series makes it pretty damn clear that Jason is superior to both in skill/ability--which makes sense, he’s bigger and older and been fighting longer, there is no shame in that. So take the fights that involve them with a grain of salt, because most of them paint one or both characters as OOC. I usually try to be quick with the summaries of fights but I’m going to go into why some of these fights don’t make sense.

Nightwing: Brothers in Blood (1996)

Nightwing (Jason Todd) vs Nightwing (Dick Grayson)

Win - Jason actually saves Dick from falling off a building right before this, which Dick doesn’t really appreciate. They roll about fighting on the rooftop a bit with Jason seeming more playful while Dick is furious, ending in Dick hanging off the side of a building Lion-King style and Jason slashing his hand to drop him, effectively winning the fight.

Nightwing (Jason Todd) vs Nightwing (Dick Grayson)

Win - Dick leaps off a catwalk to try to fight Jason in civilian identity, which is silly but whatever. They trade some good blows but in the end, Jason knocks Dick out and escapes.

Batman, Incorporated (2012)

Wingman (Jason Todd), Redbird (Damian Wayne), The Hood and El Gaucho vs Merlyn, Sportsmaster, and thirty of the best League Assassins.

Win - Jason just walks through these guys. Damian shoots Merlyn with an arrow which was helpful but completely unnecessary and Jason electrocutes the guy. El Gaucho and The Hood help out but they struggle throughout. Jason casually takes out anyone who gets close. I only bother mentioning this fight at all because we are explicitly told these guys are THE BEST THIRTY assassins the League has, including named guys like Sportsmaster and it’s a joke. That is the level Jason is at.

Red Hood and The Outlaws (2011)

Red Hood and Starfire vs Lady Shiva, Manbats and Bronze Tiger

Tie with an advantage - Jason starts this fight chained to a pillar, which he gets out of in the blink of an eye. He then proceeds to punch out some manbats, gets in a fight with Lady Shiva, which he wins with a nerve strike, though it’s implied to be cheating by the dialogue, and then trades blows with Bronze Tiger. Granted, he gets in a tight spot with Bronze Tiger, for Star to jump in and assist. I’ll call it a tie, but anytime you take out Lady Godamn Shiva it’s a win.

Red Hood vs Ra’s Al Ghul

Win - This fight has more going on than just the martial arts, there’s magic Well of Sins/All-Caste stuff going on too, but generally speaking it’s a sword fight between Ra’s and Jason, in which Jason has the upper hand throughout and in the end he strike Ra’s down and strips him of the power of the Well of Sins.

Red Hood vs Ravager

Tie - Jason and Ravager are pretty evenly matched but it’s likely neither are trying their hardest because even after they stalemate each other, the fight ends and they go about their business.

Batman And Robin (2011)

Red Hood vs Robin (Damian Wayne)

Tie - By his own admission, Jason isn’t fighting his hardest against Damian. They exchange blows, Damian at one point has Jason at sword point, but Jason pulls an electrified baton like Nightwing’s, only Damian isn’t there, he’s escaped with his objective, which is Jason’s Red Hood helmet. So you may wonder why I classify this match as a tie when Damian seemed to get away with his objective. Well, it’s because Jason’s helmet can be remote detonated. Jason technically has Damian at a checkmate, but he’s not going to blow up his baby brother so I’d call this a tie.

Red Hood vs Batman

Tie - Jason is compromised through this whole fight but despite feeling betrayed and anxious he manages to hold it together pretty well. He and Bruce trade blows that results in a similar amount of damage but neither are really trying to win they just want to hurt each other. In the end, Jason is the one to decide to stop fighting and walk away.

Batman Eternal

Red Hood vs Batgirl (Barbara Gordon)

Loss - Even though Jason really is purposefully not hurting Barbara, because she’s been mind-whammied to think he’s the Joker, it still shows him getting his ass kicked more than it probably should. Basically Jason losses because he’s not trying to win. The win is waking Barb up, which he does, so it’s hard to tell how useful this fight is to gauge his abilities.

Batman & Robin Eternal

Red Hood vs Orphan (Cassandra Cain)

Win - Jason pretty clearly had the upper hand in this fight, though Cass gets some good hits in. Jason checkmates her twice, Cass breaks the first one when Jason is distracted on the phone with Dick, only for Jason to get her in another that could have resulted in real injury if Dick hadn’t stopped him from landing the blow.

Red Hood and Red Robin vs Bane

Tie with a disadvantage - First of all, Tim just gets in the way in this fight but it’s presented as if he is the smarter/superior fighter/strategist somehow. Jason gets a good hit or two on Bane even if he takes some bad hits too. But Tim straight up throws some birdarangs into Jason’s chest like an idiot and then when Bane manages to get Jason down, Tim pulls Jason’s gun and ‘checkmates’ Bane...except who in the hell believes Red Robin would actually pull the trigger to kill Bane? Nobody, so it’s a stalemate at best. This fight is dumb and Tim especially is written stupidly in this fight but I’d be remiss if I didn’t include it.

Red Hood and Red Robin vs Azrael

Tie with a disadvantage - This fight is less out of character but is still stupid. It shows Jason on the ground right at the beginning but doesn’t even show how/why that happened. Red Robin refuses to run when Jason tells him to, as if he’s going to have better luck against the guy, and jumps into the fight with Azrael. He knocks off his helmet somehow but then pretty much gets whooped, at which point Jason gets a good knock on Azrael, steals Tim and escapes.

Deathstroke (2014)

Red Hood vs Deathstroke

Win - Granted, Slade says his healing factor is compromised in this fight, but when it comes down to it, that doesn’t make him fight better, just bypass damage. They trade blows pretty evenly but as soon as Slade seems like he might get a real hit on Jason, our Jay just shoots him and it’s over.

Robin War

Red Hood vs Robin (Damian Wayne)

Loss -  This fight is short and completely stupid. Jason doesn’t land a hit, Damian essentially knocks him out with the ground.

Red Hood and the Outlaws (2016)

Red Hood vs Artemis of Bana-Migdall

Tie - Artemis has an overwhelming strength advantage over Jason, shattering his helmet with one punch and deflecting his bullets, but Jason does manage to briefly knock her out with the tazer in his bodyarmor, which some might call a win, but considering he was on the ropes most of the fight seems like a reach. After this they team up, and the fight ends without a clear victor.

Red Hood and Artemis of Bana-Migdall vs Orphan, Azrael, Batwing and Clayface

Loss - Hey, remember those fights with Azrael before in that trash comic that shall not be named? This is a more accurate representation of Jason’s strength. Jason starts off fighting Batwing, Clayface and Azrael, which he seems to easily be able to handle individually and in twos, while Artemis takes on Orphan and gets a hit in on the other opponents when there are openings. The fight seems pretty well in hand until Bizarro is taken out, causing Jason to turn to save him, at which point Batwing tasers him with a shot in the back. Despite technically losing, Jason was clearly superior to any single fighter on the other side who participated.

Red Hood vs Batman

Loss - This is the only time Jason has ever outright lost to Batman, but he was compromised and rushed through the entire battle, having been trying to rescue his friends and then reacting to their presumed death. He made a few defensive maneuvers and counters but it was clear he wasn’t trying to fight, whereas Batman beat at Jason, even when he was checkmated. Despite being rescued by Arsenal at the end of the battle, Jason definitely lost, but it’s difficult to say how invested he was in winning to begin with.

Teen Titans (2018) Annual 1

Red Hood vs Robin (Damian Wayne)

Win -  Jason starts off the fight trying to avoid fighting or hurting Damian. He lets Damian get in a number of hits on him without retaliation, until Damian pulls some kind of box that seems to upset Jason enough to get a real fight going. At this point Jason destroys Damian, the kid really never had a chance. And Damian resorts to trying to stalemate Jason with a suicide bomb, which Jason calls Damian’s bluff on and just leaves the battle with Damian defeated.

Conclusions

Fights from the New 52 and onward involving Jason are inconsistent compared to those before the reboot.

In his own title he fights mostly within a team and has few solo fights with street-level martial artists to really gauge his abilities.

The few times he does though, it upholds the skill that he is shown to have in the preboot era, showing him defeat Lady Shiva, Ra’s Al Ghul and survive in a match against Bronze Tiger, Ravager and Artemis of Bana-Migdall.

Taking into account all of his feats, it’s pretty easy to point out which fights are outliers: every fight with Tim in Batman and Robin Eternal and the fight with Damian in Robin War. Some other fights in Batman Eternal are also suspect.

Before these instances Tim never really had much chance against Jason in past fights. He could get good hits but for the most part he was on the defensive and absolutely nothing has changed to make him suddenly superior enough to perform better in fights or treat Jason the way he does in those comic runs. Jason is just completely written out of character in those runs. He doesn’t even act like himself most of the time.

Similarly Damian beating Jason at all is stupid, especially since it’s later shown Jason is still superior enough to Damian to basically toy with him. Damian being shown easily defeating Tim is also dumb because Tim tends to do better against Jason than Damian so really Tim should be a slightly better fighter than Damian.

A number of other fights also show Jason not dodging big, clearly telegraphed punches or dive kicks that make him look really incompetent, and which he would never be shown getting hit with in his other appearances.

The only fight involving Jason in those comics I’m not dismissing out of hand is Jay vs Cass. Cassandra fans will probably be upset with Jason beating her, but with Jason easily beating Shiva, and Cassandra also shown beating Lady Shiva in Detective Comics, it’s consistent at least. I’m tempted to say she wasn’t really trying, but considering Jason was about to open her up, that would be a pretty dumb decision. Unlike Jason, all of Cassandra’s appearances from the preboot have been completely retconned, so you can’t take any of them into account in this new iteration of her.

Basically just anything involving Jason in Batman Eternal and Batman and Robin Eternal and Robin War is stupid and you shouldn’t base your idea of his character on either of those runs because they’ve proven themselves to be inconsistent with EVERYTHING ELSE EVER WRITTEN ABOUT HIM.

Honestly the only good thing about his appearances in those runs is he consistently has the best one-liners.

[ordinaryschmuck]

Top 20 BEST Animated Series of the 2010s-7th Place

>Insert long exaggerated sigh here<

It’s here that I really, really, REALLY hope nobody that I know personally is reading these.

(Also, sorry that this was a day late)

#7-My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (2010-2019)

The Plot: In the land of Equestria, a unicorn named Twilight Sparkle moves to a happy little town called Ponyville to learn about the magic of friendship. There, she meets her best friends Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Fluttershy, and Pinkie Pie. Together they’ll do what most friends do. Which is to sing songs, defeat creatures who seek to destroy everything, and learn that friendship truly is magic.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. Hell, I knew what you were thinking before I even explained the plot: “Isn’t this just a show for little girls that twenty-year-old losers fell in love with? How is this in the top 10?!” Now I’ll be the first to admit, there was a time when I didn’t get it either. When I heard that a fanbase grew around a My Little Pony reboot, I thought people were losing their minds. But, on one fateful day in 2014, my curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to watch ONE episode that seemed interesting to me. Unfortunately, it was the first episode in season two, and I had no idea what was going on within the first few minutes. So then I decided to watch the entirety of season one and then ONLY watch that episode in season two. And the episode after that because apparently, it was a two-parter. And then I watched the next episode after THAT because it also seemed interesting to me, plus the episode after that, for no reason other than I just wanted to. And then I watched all the rest of the series until the season four finale. And the two spin-off movies called Equestria Girls and Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks. Soon, I found myself reading fan-fiction, writing fan-fiction, looking at fanart, and even reading these spin-off comics that aren’t even canon, but I just couldn’t leave this magical world because it TOOK ALMOST A WHOLE YEAR FOR THE FIFTH SEASON TO PREMIER! ALL BECAUSE I JUST WANTED TO WATCH AN EPISODE WHERE A CHAOS CREATURE MENTALLY BROKE OUR MANE CHARACTERS! AND YES! I DID WRITE MANE INSTEAD OF MAIN BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THIS SHOW DOES TO YOU! IT MAKES YOU SO ACCUSTOMED TO THE WRITING AND LINGO, THAT’S WITHIN BOTH THE SHOW AND IT’S INSANE FANDOM, THAT YOU’LL END UP CATCHING YOURSELF FROM SAYING MANEHATTAN INSTEAD OF MANHATTAN!

>SCREAMS WITH INSANITY<

…

So as you can tell, this show is surprisingly good once you get infested.

The biggest hook it has is the animation. While it doesn’t beat The Amazing World of Gumball’s quality, it is pretty impressive when considering that it’s all done in flash animation. Most flash animated cartoons tend to look cheap and slow, and Friendship is Magic is thankfully one of the rare exceptions. The movements are insanely smooth, and the facial expressions are pretty comical to look at. Even in the background of scenes, viewers will notice a lot of little jokes the animators put in. Seriously, the biggest reason why I kept watching the series for so long was that it was nice to look at (which is the case for most people, from what I’ve heard). And the best part? The animation somehow gets better with each passing season. And only 0.1% of the time does it show it’s cheapness, which isn’t that big of a deal considering there are two hundred and thirty-two episodes with a twenty-two-minute runtime. That’s nearly five thousand, one hundred, and four hours of animation that’s good for 99.9% of the time. While you could argue that it’s not the best, it is still pretty good animation quality.

Another thing that drew me in was the comedy. Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean Friendship is Magic is the funniest show on the list (that also goes to Gumball). Humor is subjective, and just because I found myself laughing with this series, that doesn’t mean everyone will be on the same page. That being said, I was surprised by the fact that I found the show funny in the first place. It’s hard to pinpoint what type of humor the show relies on (for me, at least). For some cases, Friendship is Magic has dialogue-based jokes that use smart or random lines to get a laugh out of audiences. Other times it's visual humor that requires slapstick or comical facial expressions that will make people laugh. But while its comedy falls between two different spectrums, that doesn’t change the fact that I find myself losing it every once in a while. Even during some of the worst episodes of Friendship is Magic, there’s at least one line or gag that got me to chuckle at least once.

However, both the animation and the comedy cannot top the main selling point of this series: The characters. Friendship is Magic might just have one of the biggest cast of characters out of any show on this list. Most of them manage to be funny, relatable, and are downright likable to watch. What’s even more astonishing is how well this show handles character growth. To be fair, there can be certain characters whose development is slow, but for the most part, everybody grows significantly with each new lesson they’ve learned. There are even moments when the characters say something along the lines of “I’m no longer that pony I used to be anymore because I finally learned how to change.” However, this doesn’t mean that every pony in the show is worth the time. There are a few unlikeable characters, but they’re either meant to be unlikable, forgotten after an episode’s end, or are redeemed after a triumphant return.

This is good because it’s the characters that make the stories in the show work. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is split into two different storytelling genres: Slice of life comedy and adventure fantasy. And unlike Steven Universe, it’s Friendship is Magic that mixes both these genres together perfectly. I’m not joking when I say that an episode where Twilight rekindles an old friendship can be just as intriguing as an episode where Twilight fights this soul-sucking centaur made to look like the devil. Hell, some fans even argue that the slice of life episodes are even better than the adventurous episodes. Because while the adventure episodes are cool and action-packed, it’s the slice of life episodes where the characters are allowed to grow the most and are actually given time to be themselves. As for the grand adventures, while their fun to see, the cast is forced to stick to their central personality traits to move the plot forward.

Unfortunately, as fun as this show can be, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. Not because there are elements that I think are bad, but because there are elements that might turn people away from watching. And the most significant repulse this show has is also the most important hook.

Yes, the characters in this show are great, but there’s also a lot of them. Some might even say too many. By season nine alone, there are a total of twenty-seven different characters that have the possibility of taking/sharing the spotlight in an episode. And that’s not even counting important figures, recurring antagonists, supporting characters, and even recognizable background ponies (yes, that’s a thing). Because if you want to add those to the mix, you’ve got yourself a total of one hundred and twenty-seven characters (give or take). That is one hundred and twenty-seven different names, faces, and personalities to try to keep track of. Luckily the personalities are easy enough to remember, and it’s mostly the most (in)famous figures that make a return. Even for some of the obscure characters, the show is kind enough to give a brief recap so the audience can get caught up. However, this is reasonably a lot to take in for a casual viewer. Case in point, in season eight, the show decided to add six new characters to the main cast, and it only took me a season and a half to learn their names correctly. It’s even worse since these “new” characters can sometimes feel like carbon copies of the Mane Six (Yes, that’s how the main six characters in the show are referred to as. Deal with it).

And the excessive amount of unnecessary characters are just one issue to deal with. The lessons that the show teaches are another. Before I say anything, I want to clarify that this show has fantastic lessons it teaches kids. In fact, there are even great lessons that are perfect for adults and only adults (know your audience, I guess). However, here’s the thing about morals: Not everyone will share the same view on what’s good and bad to teach children. Every person on this planet has their own life experiences, and with those experiences come different ideas of how the world works. One person can believe that a lesson is good, where others view it as awful and potentially dangerous. Things get especially bad when specific morals are misinterpreted or taken too literally. The best example is the episode “Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep.” I believe that there are two possible lessons within the episode. One is that to truly be forgiven, a person must seek forgiveness from themselves and others. The other conceivable moral is that the cure for self-destruction is to get over it and move on without any professional help whatsoever. Now, take a wild guess on which lesson gets talked about more. And in all honesty, I blame poor/rushed writing that causes specific morals to be muddled, as well as a person’s own life experience in whether or not you find an episode’s lesson to be intriguing or insulting.

Another thing that depends on one’s own personality is (kinda spoilers ahead) how this show handles reformations. I may have commented on how Steven Universe uses redemption poorly, but it’s even worse in Friendship is Magic. This show seems to have the idea that the transition from bad to good is as simple as flipping a light switch. Now, on the one hand, this is not something I should be mad about. The show’s title is Friendship is Magic. So, of course, the series would push that making friends will lead to peace and prosperity. Where making enemies will lead to war and violence. The problem is that from a storytelling standpoint, it isn’t that entertaining. Or, at the very least, not as much as it should be. The art of a good reformation is taking the time for the transition to be believable. Characters suddenly deciding to become good seemingly out of nowhere will do nothing but have audiences rip their hair out of frustration. It doesn’t help that most of the villain’s reasoning and backstories are pretty pathetic when they actually should be sympathetic. However, while the reformation itself can be frustrating, I personally think some characters are made more intriguing post redemption. Don’t get me wrong, these villains were great as they were, being the perfect mix of both funny and terrifying. But when the show actually allows characters to grow and deserve the hand-er-hoof of friendship, they begin to have more fascinating personalities to dissect. Now, not everyone is going to feel this way. And if you genuinely believe these villains were better as villains, I can absolutely see why. But for me, I’ve come to enjoy how far these ex-cons have come from their more evil days. 

But none of this compares to the final controversial element that this show has to offer, where there is a fifty/fifty chance that you’re either going to love it or hate it. I, of course, am talking about...the songs. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has four different types of songs. Depending on the episode, these musical numbers have many purposes. They can move the story forward, only work within the episode’s context, try to one-up Disney, and reveal everything you need to know about a character. Now here’s the thing about the music: I don’t hate it. I’ll admit that the lyrics are pretty lackluster most of the time, but at least most of them sound pleasing to my ears. But I have heard how some people seem to hate these little numbers, and I’m willing to put money on that fans even skip them. Everybody has their own tastes in music, and there’s nothing I can do to convince them otherwise. Only respect their opinions and hope they do the same to mine.

In the end, your enjoyment of this series, once again, depends on who you are. Some of you might think this is a dumb kid's show that should only be viewed by children. Some of you will understand that this show has great characters, comedy, and animation, but you just don’t think it’s for you. And some of you might be like me. A person overwhelmed with curiosity over the weirdest phenomenon in the last eleven years and ended up being pleasantly surprised with how magical the show turned out to be.

(And just a heads up, you don’t have to watch the Equestria Girls spin off series or movies in order to enjoy Friendship is Magic. EG isn’t technically canon, and the only noteworthy thing that makes it worthwhile is Sunset Shimmer. And while I personally don’t hate it, I completely understand how others will. But you do need to see My Little Pony: The Movie (2017), though. It surprisingly plays a big part in season 8 and beyond.)

[starwarshyperdrive]

I’m concerned about the Star Wars canon

I’ve always been a huge Star Wars fan but didn't follow the old EU (extended universe) because it was too convoluted and well.. a bunch of gobbledygook (granted there were some good bits in it, who doesn’t love the Thrawn trilogy even though he is pretty much a different character now), so I actually welcomed the new canon. Start over with a clean slate and make sure everything is connected, makes sense and feels Star Warsy. So far the story group has done a decent job, even though there were some questionable bits and pieces. As hardcore Star Wars fan and apologist I can force myself to get behind a lot of things and I was cool with the Bendu somehow, but the Clone Wars Mortis arc, as well as space whales and the world between worlds really rubbed me the wrong way. A lot of people are celebrating Dave Filoni as savior of the true Star Wars spirit and he is certainly an inspired artist and nice guy but I once again have to wonder whether or not some of the comic bookish stuff REALLY fits the Star Wars universe. Yeah I know ‘it’s a huge universe bla bla’ but do we really have to accept everything?

Someone recently described hardcore fans (such as myself) as a ‘cult’ and Star Wars Celebration to a religious ceremony and if I’m being honest and self-reflective I can’t really argue against it, but that’s also why you always need to check yourself and not just ‘swallow’ everything without questioning it. Keep a critical eye. Things like time travel and other super hero stuff ( I haven’t seen any of the recent Marvel or DC movies) have no place in Star Wars. Of course Star Wars is for everyone, but does that then also mean we need a Star Wars romcom, a Star Wars coming of age movie ..or ..?  I don’t know..porn? Leave that to fan fiction. 

Star Wars was always more about mythology, some sort of buddhist Excalibur and I am seriously concerned that at some point the ‘people in charge’ will forget that and it will become a shallow bubble gum entertainment focus on ‘what is selling at the moment’. A good example are - again - all the super hero movies picking up on trends. I don’t want a Thor Ragnarok Star Wars movie with a Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack. Don’t make everything the same. Keep Star Wars unique. Keep ‘that Star Wars tone’.

‘XY doesn’t UNDERSTAND Star Wars’ is an overused and abused phrase and in so many ways pointless as there are many facets to Star Wars especially now that we have generations of fans who grew up with the prequels, the Clone Wars, Rebels or even Resistance - I should point out that I actually liked Resistance because it’s not tempering with the mythology - but the lore has been laid out in the original trilogy and everything needs to acknowledge that. We cannot have some Terminator-franchise kind of disaster a la ‘Ezra traveled back in time and actually was there with Yoda on Dagobah’ or what not. 

By now it’s common knowledge that - despite what they say - there has been no overall plan for the sequel trilogy, which is quite concerning and feeding into my concerns that it’s all downhill from here (after The Rise of Skywalker and the Mandalorian or course). I know a lot of people who vehemently defended The Last Jedi when it came out, mostly as a reaction to all the stupid hate it got for the wrong reasons and I am one of them myself, but most of them are admitting now that there is something off about the movie. It is written into a corner and not picking up on the clues given in The Force Awakens. It has some amazing scenes and I will keep defending it, but there are some scenes that just don’t feel right and leave a bad aftertaste. I frequently rewatch all the movies and besides Attack of the Clones it’s the only one where I think ‘Now I have to endure THAT bit again’. I go to a lot of Q&A and it’s interesting to see how people who have worked on the movie feel the same. Even if you 100% loved it and it’s your favorite movie ever, let’s be honest - the humor is completely out of place. Fart jokes in The Phantom Menace > Your Mom jokes. And it’s just too long. Of course we all want MORE Star Wars, but where does it end. Would you go and see a 6h movie? If you are a good filmmaker you should be able to say what you want to say in the same about of time as the other movies. But that’s just my personal 2 cents. It just felt like someone who was hellbent on doing his own thing for the sake of doing his own thing and not for the sake of the story. Don’t get me wrong. It was a great idea to (spoiler alert) kill off Snoke that casually, so the movie has redeeming qualities that save it for me. Then again, as a Star Wars fan I WANT to like it. I still watched it 13 times or so. I was in the room for the trailer reveal at SWCO. I want to take ownership and be part of the hardcore fan community, but they shouldn't bank too much on it. I still want a good movie. I’m not gonna be meek and mild about something contradicting the core mythology. Ryan Johnson is allegedly still doing his trilogy and then there is the Benioff and Weiss trilogy. They didn’t exactly do a great job wrapping up Game of Thrones and left fans in awe about how the show ended and have not really proven that they can handle a franchise well either. Will all off them have free rein and just go to town on a Star Wars story as they please? Am I the only one who finds this a bit odd?!

I trust JJ Abrams to do the right thing and I hope my trust is not misplaced. I think the allegations of The Force Awakens being a A New Hope reboot are misplaced as there are also a lot of similarities to The Phantom Menace, so.. if you’re a fan you know what comes next.. ‘it rhymes, it’s like poetry’. So it makes sense. So I think ‘he gets it’..

My main concern in the new canon overall. I made an effort to get all the publications of the new canon, but the books and comics already started to get weird again. Star Wars always had a slight alien but yet familiar vibe and some stories feature people smoking cigars, drinking coffee in the morning and doing other stuff never depicted in Star Wars before. How long until someone gets a Star Wars burger at Star Wars McDonalds or orders Star Wars pizza while watching Star Wars HoloNetflix. I’m sorry. That’s ridiculous. It’s not automatically Star Wars just because you use Star Wars terminology like death sticks or Nerf steaks. Watch the movies and make an effort.

 And now the novelizations of the movies are apparently not considered ‘hard canon’ anymore because the authors didn’t know the direction the next movies are going, so the clues and hints may be completely useless. So why do I force myself through some really not very good books then (others are great, no generalization here)? That’s quite alarming. Wasn’t the entire reason they got a story group to avoid that? What’s with all the loose ends?  That's also why I think they will shy away from using canon characters in the movies (for the most part). Its easier to have a self contained canon universe where you can introduce Purge Troopers in a comic and then have them in a video game. I once read an interview with one of the Star Wars authors who invented a character and then got told ‘give him that name / make him this person’ instead of having this particular character in mind from the start. This is how you lose consistency. I’m well aware that over hundreds and thousands of years that’s EXACTLY how ancient history was written, which is why there are flood legends all over the world and why Jesus and Mithras are pretty much the same person, but they DID NOT HAVE A STORY GROUP and ancient mythology hasn’t been written over a course of a few years.

At the same time it’s interesting how there seem to be purists who are very determined to bring that original Star Wars vibe back. Like Jon Favreau with The Mandalorian. And like I said earlier about Resistance. Its so much easier to do that if you stay away from the mythology. It’s really tricky and so much could go wrong. The stuff introduced in Rogue One like Guardians of the Whills and the temple of Kyber is a perfect example how it’s done. Some of the stuff in the Clone Wars and Rebels is the complete opposite, so I’m really curious to see how Dave Filonis involvement in The Mandalorian pans out. He is really great with stuff like Mandalorians, Clones and I even came to accept Ashoka after reading the book and seeing her all grown up as Fulcrum, but I’m very skeptical when it comes to his ‘mystical side of the force’ interpretations.

In conclusion I know that I sound like a preacher and George Lucas repeatedly stated it’s ‘just for 10 year old kids’ but tell that to all the dead Bothans.

Please just don’t ruin Star Wars.

[fallen-gabrielle]

The MLP comics are fine (and so is the extended universe)

I will talk about the comics and the extended lore the rest of the medias provide us with more world building. For those who haven’t read the comics, there will be major spoilers, so read at your own risks. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!

Of course, there are Bronies who still consider the comics as non canon. Just like there are Bronies who consider the Equestria Girls as non canon. And same thing with the chapter books.

Others call all that the “extended universe”.

Me? I like Equestria Girls, I like the comics, and the chapter books too. OF COURSE THERE ARE INCONSISTENCIES (< that’s the main reason people don’t like the comics/chapter books/etc, which I think is stupid), the authors don’t have the time to check everything with the show, but they do their best (and especially vice-versa). The show writers don’t follow the comics (and the rest...) because they simply don’t have the time. The comic writers make sometimes references or even sequel to some episodes because they watch the show (show writers don’t read comics and chapter books).

So I consider the “extanded universe” as canon. I don’t care about plot holes, DC comics and Marvel comics have lots of those, and a ton of alternate universes too (reboots, earth-two shenanigans, etc). So why being so hard on the MLP comics ? I really don’t get it. If the reason the comics crush people’s headcanons, I’m sorry, but that’s a lame excuse.

I can understand that the whole “I can’t keep up with all of that” thing, but using it as an excuse for hating the comics (and others medias) is kinda dumb.

And because Hasbro said  “anything that is said in the cartoon, it is primairy canon above any others medias“ is the source of many arguments inside the fandom. That and if they use comic books characters in the show and no one read the thing before, viewers would be confused by what’s going on.

I still think the MLP lore is well developped with the addition of the comics.

Let’s make a recap for what we have in the MLP medias (except the toy line):

The show;

The comics;

The chapter books;

Equestria Girls franchise.

Now, let’s see what kind of comics we have :

The main serie (Friendship is Magic, ongoing)

The Micro serie (10 issues)

Friends Forever (38 issues, replaced Micro Serie)

FIENDship is Magic (5 issues, released at the same time of Friends Forever in April 2015)

Legends of Magic (12 issues, replaced Friends Forever)

Ponyville Mysteries, “sequel” to the eponymous chapter book serie (5 issues, replaced Legends of Magic)

Nightmare Knights (5 issues, replaced Ponyville Mysteries)

The movie prequel (4 issues, released before the movie)

Annuals (somehow ongoing, you may never know *shrugs*).

Now, the list of the chapter books :

The “main serie”, featuring one character;

The Equestria Girls ones (even tho most of them are just book version of the EG movies and specials);

The Princess Collection;

Ponyville Mysteries;

Beyond Equestria, books that features one of the main characters with characters from the Movie.

Yup, that’s a lot.

With all of this, it is certain that the lore of Friendship is Magic was expanded. But alternate worlds in the comics are not the first alternate worlds the franchise has.

There are alternate universes mentioned in the show.

Remember the season 5 finale? There are SIX different timelines :

Sombra war (King Sombra wins);

Everlasting Night (Nightmare Moon wins);

Changeling Invasion (Chrysalis wins);

Total Chaos (Discord wins);

Ultimate Destruction (Tirek wins);

Industrialization (Flim-Flam win).

Each being actually CANON. They are just not the timeline the show is following. That makes them ALTERNATE UNIVERSE, in a sense (just like Flashpoint).

I know that an universe and a timeline is not quite the same, but it still parallel worlds.

So why rejecting the alternate universe that appear in the comics? If we consider everything canon, we have :

1. The Main Equestria (pun not intended)

I’ll call it Equestria 1, from the show and which has 6 different timelines. In a way, the timelines still exist as parallel worlds. So if using the right magic/spell, it may be possible to visit the alt timelines. I’m not going to arg about it like in The Flash, because science isn’t really used in Friendship is Magic, so yeah, don’t start the science talk about alt timelines in a cartoon with magical horses.

2. The Equestria Girls world

From Equestria Girls duh where everyone looks like humans. Sunset Shimmer, who is from Equestria 1, stays there because Hasbro don’t want to mix her with the main show (fight me, this is the real reason why she’s not back to Equestria).

3. The Mirror-verse (comics)

I know that TECHNICALLY every alternate universes are “mirror-verses” because the portals to every alt worlds are mirrors, but I call this one Mirror-verse because every characters are the total opposite from Equestria 1. All the good guys are evil, and all the evil guys are good.

In Reflection (main serie, issue 17-20), the two alternate worlds became so “close” that the merge between them could have destroy them both. The King Sombra from this world stored all the evil of the Mirror-verse inside of him to restore the balance.

Also, this King Sombra is in love with Princess Celestia from Equestria 1. Mmmh... Maybe that’s why people don’t like the comics : their waifu is actually taken (well, not anymore after Reflection). We haven’t heard of this alternate universe since then.

4. The Shadow-verse (comics)

Alternate universe that appears in Legends of Magic and the Annual 2018 (that is a complement to Legends of Magic). This is also the world the serie Nightmare Knights is taking place (see more below).

This is also a personal fan-made name for this universe : this is the one where an alternate Pony of Shadows (aka alternate Stygian) is superpowerful. He defeated his version of Starswirl the Bearded. But as a real power hungry villain, he wanted more. He tried to corrupted the Celestia and the Luna from his world but his Starswirl stopped him from doing so.

But between this moment in the past and in the present day, Green Pony of Shadows (yes, that’s how I’ll call him, because he has green fire/shadows) contacted his counterpart through his dreams: apparently, he succeded to corrupt his Celestia (his Luna seemed to be too weak to resist corruption). So of course, Princess Luna and Stygian from Equestria 1 decided to rescue Celestia of Shadow-verse. But soon they realise that Green Pony of Shadows is not in charge in this universe anymore. It is Eris (Discord’s cousin) who rules the place with the staff of Sacanas (staff used by the Storm King in the Movie). We don’t know yet which world/universe Eris is from. I assume for now she’s from the Shadow-verse.

This is the plot of Nightmare Knights. We already saw easter eggs to previous villains (including Grogar). There is a King Sombra who looks like King Sombra from Mirror-verse. Is he the same Sombra who travel to Shadow-verse or is he the Sombra from Shadow-verse and he just looks like Sombra Mirror-verse post corruption ? I know this is just a reference, but there are TWO Rarities : Nightmare Rarity and Rarity corrupted by dark waters. So did they come from Shadow-verse or alternate worlds where one is corrupted by the Nightmare Forces and the other one by the dark waters ?

Also, what happened to Green Pony of Shadows ? Should I keep calling this the Shadow-verse since Eris is in charge now? I don’t know, we’ll see.

5. Unknown Atlernate universe (TCG)

Yes, even the trading card game proposes an alternate unviverse in which Solar Flare/Nightmare Star (a corrupted version of Celestia) rules her world with an iron hoof. An alternate universe so horrifying that Starswirl from Equestria 1 had to destroy the portal so that no one will know about it (also, he probably didn’t want to see Solar Flare coming in Equestria 1).

I personally prefer Solar Flare over Daybreaker. I really thought that Celestia’s evil counterpart would be it but noooooooo, Hasbro don’t know everything in their own merchandises. They are the one creating inconsistencies. 

The comics created a few controversies

1. Nightmare Forces controversy

The oldest question : which princess is the best ? Back then, we can only choose between Celestia and Luna. And of course, most people choose Luna for her tragic backstory.

In the second arc in the main serie (issues 5-8) Nightmare Rarity, the story is kinda the same as in episode 4, season 2 Luna eclipsed.

It’s about her acceptance of her past and stuff like that. What the comic brings and it’s what most Bronies are not happy with is the Nightmare Forces. So, according to the story, it would be an outside force that corrupts Princess Luna into Nightmare Moon. Yeah, no : using that excuse to glorified the character is lame. Making her a slave to something wasn’t well recieved within the fandom.

The arc is supposed to happen after the episode, that’s why it is a little confusing.

But the comic never stated WHERE the Nightmare Forces come from. And I think people have tendecies to forget who Luna is : an Alicorn. What’s the connection, you ask? Well in episode 13, season 5 Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?, Luna created the Tantabus, a creature for the sole purpose of punishing herself for her past mistakes. What IS the connection, you ask? SHE IS A FREAKING ALICORN, that means she has a magic more powerful than anypony in Equestria. If she was able to create the Tantabus out of guilt, it is possible she created the Nightmare Forces out of envy and anger. It’s like her magic and feelings created another personality, Nightmare Moon and when she was defeated by the Mane 6 and the Elements of Harmony, her evil personality and its magic (the Nightmare Forces) were simply rejected from her body/mind and went to the moon waiting to come back. That’s what happens in the comic. The Nightmare Forces took over Rarity because being a bearer of an Element, that makes the rest of them useless.

There is a rest of Luna’s magic in the Forces and they started to act as a whole new entity after their separation.

Of course, this is only a headcanon, but it is the best explaination I can come up with to keep the Nightmare Forces and Luna being the only responsible for her actions (instead of putting the blame on something exterior).

2. Deers controversy

In the show, there are deers who appear to be non sentient. They look like they are being enslaved by the ponies.

In The Root of the Problem (comic main serie, issue 27-28), the story introduce us to a race of sentient deers who lived in the Everfree Forest (they are kinda the elves of Equestria) with their king, Aspen, being the ruler of their civilisation. 

Since the show writers can’t add characters from the comics because it would confuse everyone, we will probably never see King Aspen in the show. Not everyone follows the comics, and not everone follows every comics.

3. Seaponies controversy

See this for more details.

I may be the only one to think about it, but I don’t care.

The Umbrum and the Pony of Shadows

I won’t hide it, King Sombra is my favorite villain of G4.

So much potential and awesome look. I was a little disapointed with his lack of screentime.

So of course I started to have headcanons about him. I learned to not go too far with them because when the canon backstory has to be revealed, it will crush my headcanons. So I waited a little to know more about King Sombra. And I was blessed with FIENDship is Magic issue 1 !

This issue tells us his origin story : he is from a tribe/kind of ponies made of shadow and darkness called the Umbrum/Umbra (I actually don’t know the plural), the shadow ponies. These ponies represent hate and fear, they are the perfect opposite of the Crystal ponies, them representing love and hope. There is a need of balance : day and night, light and darkness, fear and hope, love and hate.

Now, while I was super excited to read the arc Siege of the Crystal Empire (main serie, issue 34-37), I have to admit that despite the good premises, the writing and setting were UNFORTUNATELY lacking of quality. The so called villainous league of second rate antagonists that serves NOTHING to the story, Radiant Hope’s character (the worst Mary-Sue I have ever seen), the part where Cadance (the princess of LOVE, btw) was able to use HATE magic without getting a headache (while when Twilight did it, it was hurting a little) AND IT WAS NEVER TOUCHED UPON IN THE LAST ISSUE !!!! Just like King Sombra’s character in the season 3 premiere, a big disapointement because of the wasted potential...

Despite all that, the issue expands more about the shadow ponies (I’m trying to cope with what I can, ok?). We see their true form: 

Nightmare fuel

We know they attacked the Crystal Empire, leaving nothing but despair until Princess Amore created/found the Crystal Heart (Journal of the Two Sister) : the only weapon/artefact fueled with love and hope, the total opposite of what the Shadow ponies are, full of hate and fear. Since then, the Umbrum are trapped inside a prison, the Crystal Heart needs to be “refilled” with love every year (the purpose of the Crystal Fair) in order to keep the Empire safe and sounds from them.

A lot of stuff happened 1000 years ago, huh ? The Umbrum left nothing but DESPAIR. Keep that in mind, it’s going to be important.

The Umbrum were also mentioned in The Movie Prequel issue 4, they are well known outside of Equestria. I wanted to see this sign so bad in the Movie, because that meant the Umbrum were canon to the show, meaning the comics too. Alas, no such sign in the Movie :(

But that doesn’t explain where they come from, and you’re going to ask : “Okay, but what’s the connection with the Pony of Shadows? Because it is the title of this paragraph.”. I’m coming about it.

I think that the powers of Stygian, aka the Pony of Shadows, and the Umbrum magic ARE THE SAME/COME FROM THE SAME SOURCE.

Think about it. The Umbrum are the shadow ponies, and Stygian became the Pony of Shadows. Except the similar names, something hit me while watching Shadow Play, part 2 (episode 26, season 7) :

Pony of Shadows: [laughing maniacally] Welcome to the Well of Shade! When you turned your backs on me, I discovered this place. The darkness spoke to me of a power beyond any I could imagine, and I listened. The shadow and I became one. Soon, all of the realm will be the same. Then all ponies will feel the despair I did when you cast me out!

What if the Hollow Shades (the town where they are in this episode) was the home of the Umbrum ? They would have just travelled to the Crystal Empire for conquest or something like that (it failed, since they were trapped after they attacked), leaving the Hollow Shades empty. When Stygian was rejected by the Pillars, he was full of resentment : he tried to do something good but the Pillars thought he was just being jealous of their powers/status. So somehow, Stygian found the Well of Shade, and well, his quote says it all. It is possible that the place still had a few of the Umbrum magic and he was so resentful and full of hate for his former friends that he was able to channel the shadow ponies’ magic. It is even possible that the Umbrum looked more like Stygian in shadow form, and their famelic looking faces are just side effect of a curse/their fight against Princess Amore and the magic of the Crystal ponies. 

So if we consider the comics as canon, many things can be connected and explained more in detail than the show wants to tell us. The lore just got bigger and deeper.

And it would be a shame to just stick to one media just because it could crush your own fantasies. If you don’t have the time, it’s okay: if one day you are bored, I recommand to read the comics : it’s worth it.

I spend my whole night writing this thing.

[fyrapartnersearch]

Are you a beast?

Then look no further! (sorry for the strange title. Couldn't think of a better one at the moment :P) Call me Gil! Didn’t have that much luck the first time I submitted my ad. I hope it’ll change with my second try :)
 If you reach out to me, please be sure not to ghost me after the first few messages before we even get to the Roleplay itself. I am sick and tired of it, frankly. 
Apologies if this came off a little bitter, but this has happened so many times to the point where I took a break from roleplaying altogether. Now that my rant is over, let us move on with the fun stuff :) I am currently searching for a literate, mature (preferably 20+ partner) writer with a vast, creative mindset willing to push some boundaries. Someone who is not afraid delving into darker themes, or come up with new fresh ideas for a fantasy plot. Someone who is willing to commit to a long-term Roleplay. Are you that someone? I’ll swing you a few facts about me:

I am a 20+ woman, living in Europe, currently studying at a university that is fairly time consuming. With that being said, I am able to type out 3-4 messages per week. I think tis a good solid rate that can get the plot going. Depending on my schedule, my frequency will increase or decrease. Not to worry, I will let you know as soon if there is something coming up that might influence the Roleplay. I love detailed paragraphs that describe the scenery and emotion of one’s character. If you are someone comfortable or only willing to type one-liners, you are going to find your match here, sorry. I only role-play on either email or goggle docs.

Summary:

    Above the age of 20, thus mature and open minded

    Paragraph writer

    Detailed

    Experienced with 10 years under my belt

    Preference to doubling

I love a good brainstorming! Once we get to know each other, I would love to do a bit of brainstorming, a gathering of ideas that we can utilise for the story. I have an idea that we can shape a bit more to fit both of our narrative. 
Here’s a detailed description of my style and boundaries that I have for a potential RP. How I write: I am a multi-paragraph sort of writer, which means that frequently, my writing will exceed at least 500 words, and upward of 1000+ words. I love detail in description, and I am actively seeking someone of the same infamy. Generally, I tend to write in the 3rd person. But it can change based on the situation. My partner should have a basic grasp on grammar, punctuation and somewhat of an interest in erudite writing.   The genres I am into: I am versatile when it comes to genres and settings that I like to focus on. Supernatural is my bread and butter, especially urban and gothic fantasy, but also very much mythological stories. But I am not opposed to tapping into science fiction, action, romance, crime, action or thriller genres, though my most favourite is a combination of both fantasy and science fiction. What has struck my interest lately, is a world with gargantuan titan like monsters battling against each other, causing all sorts of havoc and devastation. I was heavily inspired by Pacific Rim, Godzilla and other monster themed movies, films and games. We could forge something original along those lines, like a clash of titans, ancient deities and creatures believed to be myth who now awakened to take back the world by storm. Romance: I openly play and accept characters of both genders, preferable m x f pairings, but I am open to m x m and f x f relationships as well. I have more experience with m x f relationships, so I might excel in this category more than I would do with the others. I do not fade to black - instead I encourage erotism and tastefully written romance scenes. The passion must be felt, even if its just an intelligent description of someone’s stream of thought. Characters, the center of attention: Faceclaims, GIFs, drawings, mood boards or just a plain physical description is absolutely welcome / sufficient. I am not someone who necessarily requires a face claim for a character in order ‘to get the picture’. There are many instances where I could not find a suiting match for my character’s definition, so I resorted to drawing them myself or leaving it with a simple description. Characters should have flaws - that is a no brainer obviously, because its what makes them most interesting and compelling to read. I think we’re also far past the Mary Sue and Gary Stu issue, so I am certain that anyone who messages me, is capable of forging great characters. World building & plotting: An active Roleplayer is wanted in this category, without a doubt. I love to build but I tend to lose interest real quick when I get the feeling I’m the only one who puts effort into it. I can’t do the thinking for two people, so I implore anyone to at least share the burden (which should not be regarded as such in the first place, because Roleplaying is a fun hobby and nothing more). Too often I find people shying away from it in this regard. If I feel that I’m carrying the weight of the world-building part with specific ideas, I will end the Roleplay with immediate effect. Be bold with your ideas! A bird cannot fly with only one wing. Content: I find writing erotic, dramatic or action packed scenes very enjoyable. I don’t hinder myself when certain subjects are mentioned that may be uncomfortable for the general public. But then again, as a reminder, a Roleplay is not reality but fiction. For example situations that heavily imply and involve brutality, mayhem, psychological and physical torture are things that don’t really bother me in a sense, because again, it is fiction. Characters should be fully fleshed out, even the not so pretty parts of one’s personality and actions.

Limits: I don’t do necrophilia, pedophilia & and any sort of underage pairings, bestiality, vore, toilet play, furries and other strange fetishes. What I’m also not particularly fond of are oneliners, text-talk ‘grammar’, or emails with the subject: ‘Hey wanna rp?’ or ‘RP?’. I also note that my partners must be around 20 years or older, I will accept no younger partners, sorry. The last thing I tend to avoid like the plague are slice of life Roleplays, because lets face it, our own lives are pretty much slice of life. Original plot lines / pairings I am absolutely down for are:

Supernatural x Human (non supernatural)

God x Human

God x God

God x Demigod

Demigod x Human

Witch / Warlock x Human

Witch / Warlock x Hunter

Witch / Warlock x Witch / Warlock

Monster x Human

Antagonist x Protagonist

Bully x Victim (sort of..)

Criminal x Regular citizen

Criminal x Cop

Soldier / Warrior / Knight x Civilian

Royal / Noble x Peasant

Royal / Noble x Traveler

Mentor x Apprentice

Knight x (Female in disguise) Knight

etc.

The list goes on.

Also, if an original doesn’t really suit your fancy - I am willing to do canon Roleplay, although I don’t feel as much inspiration for it as I do for an original story. I’m also very picky about it, so apologies if there aren’t too many things listed here:



Marvel

DC


Pacific Rim

Star Wars

Star Trek


Castlevania

Berserk

Carmen SanDiego

Harry Potter

Witcher

Dark Souls

Bloodborne

Devil May Cry (The original series, not the reboot)

Shadow of the Colossus

Kingdom Hearts 
God of War

I highly welcome ideas and other takes on a story. If you crave something different, I am down for it as well :) If you are still reading, congratulations! xD 
The journey has come to an end and I am glad you’re still alive! Usually I would also list my Discord on this platform, but since Discord did an update on me recently where I can’t log into it anymore - I thought it be better with email. That way I can better assess the person. Email is much safer and more professional that way. Contact me here! EMAIL: gilgameshmercury@gmail.com Hope to greet you as my new partner!

-Cheers

[mrsspidermanmaryjanewatsonparker]

Let’s debunk this hot trash

“Part of the problem in front of Marvel Comics is the Marvel Universe is one long, mostly-unbroken line since its inception in 1961's Fantastic Four #1. There have been retcons, changes, tweaks, and cuts, but by and large it's a straight run. The universe has seen a number of resets, but it's mostly been returned to the state that long-time fans are comfortable with.”

Why is this a problem? Marvel is the highest selling comic book company in America and the long continuity is objectively not a problem.

It’s just something people incorrectly claim is a problem.

By the 1990s Marvel already had shittons of complicated continuity that had been going longer than most other long running franchise stories.

The readers back then jumped on ship just fine.

The AMOUNT of continuity you have is never the problem it’s how you manage it. In the days where every issue was treated as someone’s first and made accessible the amount of continuity was never a problem.

“Marvel Comics as a whole and the current creative stewards of its characters have to roll with 57 years of punches. They have to take the good and the bad. In the case of Spider-Man, the current writers, artists, and editors have to occasionally tackle the fact that Peter Parker hit his wife, made a deal with Mephisto to wipe out his marriage, or that Gwen Stacy had sex with Norman Osborn. ”

They don’t HAVE to deal with any of that.

They already dealt with the first of those things and simply SHOULD deal with the other two by erasing them.

But it’s also not like the presence of those things (sans OMD) is a huge hamper on the storytelling abilities or sales of the writers.

“Many of these are moments that readers and creators would simply like to forget, but they're a part of the fabric of the character. ”

Yes and welcome to ‘This is how a dramatic character on serialized fiction’ works.

“With Marvel's Spider-Man for PlayStation 4, Insomniac Games had the chance to start from scratch. They get to pick and choose what works for their version of Peter Parker and his alter-ego. The only backstory he brings to the table is that which Insomniac has carefully considered. This allows the team to drop the facets of Spider-Man that maybe didn't work and play around with some new ideas that might be better. And if Marvel's smart, they should steal some of what Insomniac Games did here.”

Why?

Insomniac already stole from Marvel.

Sales and storytelling potential for Spider-Man is NOT hampered by large continuity or even negative patches of it for the most part.

When bad stories happen so long as they are fixed then things get to move on. Even something as bad as Sins Past isn’t overly a drag because the story itself is so nonsensical it might as well not be canon, people have isolated and ignored it and the scope of the damage it can cause is fairly limited, it doesn’t really cut to the heart of the franchise. The time he hit his wife on the other hand was dealt with and moved on from.

So the existence of bad patches doesn’t really matter. Doctor Who has had no end of bad stories merely in it’s TV incarnation (to say nothing of it’s plethora of spin-off media which are all canon to varying degrees) and all those things still happened. But the show is still going strong and hit stratospheric popularity in the mid-late 2000s and early 2010s.

Hell the Simpsons is still going despite there being at least 20 years of mediocre-bad stories.

“I'm going to be honest. I'm not a huge fan of Mary Jane Watson. I don't necessarily have a problem with the character, but I've never really been a fan either. The marriage of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson was done on a whim and many writershated it at the time.”

Oy vey this shit again.

The marriage was not done on a whim. Stan Lee, the creator of Spider-Man wanted it to happen and EIC Jim Shooter decided to synch it up with the comics.

At the time Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz had been building up to Peter and MJ’s wedding with the intention of her jilting him.

But the build up from them, and other writers like Peter David, was still there.

Only the outcome changed.

As for this ‘many writers hated it’ thing, the article links to ONE writer’s opinion on the subject.

If we actually look at the majority of Spider-Man writers to have written for Spider-Man during and after the marriage we see most of them were okay or neutral on the subject.

David Michelinie wasn’t thrilled with it, but he came on side eventually. Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz were the same. Matt Fraction wasn’t too sure about it but wasn’t innately against it either. Nick Spencer clearly liked it. Howard Mackie has given statements indicating he was against it at a time but might over all be neutral. Roberto Aguirre Sacasa has never said anything on the subject to my knowledge but his work implies he’s supportive of it. Mark Millar has never said anything on the subject. J.M. DeMatteis, J. Michael Straczynski and Peter David have been outright supportive of it, as was probably Todd McFarlane, Jodie Houser and for sure artist Ryan Stegman.

Oh and Stan Lee the creator of Spider-Man. Let’s not leave him out.

Compared to that we have Roger Stern, Terry Kavanagh, John Byrne, Paul Jenkins, Gerry Conway and Jim Owsley who were against it.

Conway’s opposition was possibly due to his going through a divorce at the time. Stern’s opposition was based upon his idea of MJ being stuck in the Silver Age but he wasn’t innately opposed to Spider-Man marrying in general. Jim Owsley on his linked to blog (where he routinely lies, including claiming Ron Frenz was potentially suicidal when he never was) had a stupid sexist rationale for disliking the marriage. John Byrne is creepy shithead who would’ve preferred Spider-Man was dating underage girls anyway and along with Terry Kavanagh never wrote a good Spider-Man story in his life. In Kavanagh’s case he never even wrote a good story in his life.

So of all those people only Paul Jenkins dislike of it wasn’t unjustified. But he was an outlier.

Every other writer either liked it, was neutral on it, disliked it for nonsensical reasons or didn’t know about good storytelling in the first place to make citing them worth a damn in the first place.

And aside from aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall of this...does the author realize Peter and MJ’s relationship and MJ’s whole character doesn’t begin and end in the years they were married?

Like he talks about their marriage as though this being bad proves their relationship and her character is bad when there was 20+ years of MJ prior to that.

“I think Peter has had better love interests over the years, including Gwen Stacy. ”

And the author would be wrong.

Gwen Stacy is neither better nor more interesting that Mary Jane.

That’s why THEY KILLED HER!

“Part of that is giving Mary Jane something to do. She's been a model and an actress, but the books were always more concerned with the superheroics, so you never really got the chance to feel her drive there. She was a nightclub owner, but again, the same problem persisted. ”

Except Spider-Man stories ARE NOT MORE CONCERNED WITH THE SUPERHEROICS!

My God. How the fuck can someone have read any number of Spider-Man stories and not realized, oh yeah, the book is about Peter’s life over all and his normal life is as if not MORE important than whoever he is punching this month.

By this logic Harry Osborn, Aunt May, Flash Thompson and literally every supporting cast member who isn’t J. Jonah Jameson or like Ashley goddam Kafka, is a better supporting character than Mary Jane.

Mary jane doesn’t have to be involved in the superhero side of Peter’s life because the Spider-Man series isn’t about that. It’s about his life in general and sometimes one blurs over into the other but not always and frankly if you go by the classic stories not even most of the time.

That’s why on the occasions where such things did happen it was a big deal.

“Other than supporting Peter Parker, what did Mary Jane Watson really want? ”

To be an actress

To be taken seriously as more than a model

To support her sick cousin

To earn a psychology degree

To avoid commitment

“Sometimes she just wanted Peter to not be Spider-Man anymore, which is a downer of a conflict.”

This is another lie.

The ONLY times during which Mary jane didn’t want Peter to be Spider-Man were during the Clone Saga when she was pregnant, he’d retired and Ben Reilly was the new Spider-Man and new main character (meaning there was no issue there) or during the Mackie/Byrne reboot where she was being written deliberately out of character as an act of sabotage.

Unless the author meant like in specific stories where Peter was injured and she didn’t want him to go off and be Spider-Man at that moment or in that specific context, as opposed to wholesale retiring. At which point...how is this a downer conflict? It’s a starkly realistic and emotionally justified conflict in a series built off the back of realistic emotions because Spider-Man is a human drama and soap opera FFS!

“Sometimes, things are good... ...sometimes, they're not.

Go to the article itself and notice the second image the author uses.

If you’ve ever encountered similar lines of anti-MJ/anti-marriage argument before those panels, that artwork or stuff similar to it might strike you as familiar.

Why?

Because it’s from the exact same story. Maximum Carnage.

Every asshole who tries to make this argument uses Maximum Carnage, one of the worst Spider-Man stories over all to bolster their claims. The repetition of scenes from this story (and usually the same scene) is telling because it’s either cherry picking from a notoriously bad story and pretending like it represented a norm (and removes it from important context FYI) or...these people don’t know what they are talking about and just parrot one another with the same examples.

“Over in the Ultimate Comics line, writer Brian Michael Bendis would give Mary Jane a career choice that dovetails well with superheroes: journalist. See, the reason DC Comics' Lois Lane works is her driving motivation—to be the best investigative journalist in the world—puts her on a path to run into Clark Kent and Superman. ”

Yeah and the problem is that MJ worked as well for decades even when she wasn’t a journalist. Shit she worked for the majority of Ultimate Spider-Man’s run prior to her becoming a journalist!

Yeah, remember that tiny piece of vital information the author conveniently ignored. For MOST of Ultimate Spider-Man’s 10 year tenure with Peter Parker as the lead character Mary Jane wasn’t a journalist!

Shit, she worked for her school paper so the idea that it made her involvement in heroics more organic is pretty bullshit.

More importantly prior to her journalist job Ultimate MJ’s role and function within the narrative was strikingly similar to her 616 married counterpart!

“Her intense curiosity and lack of self-preservation makes her endearing; the audience knows what she wants and the lengths she'll go to get it.”

And MJ’s goofy deameanor at times, inner strength, sociable nature, insecutirs, struggles with guilt and commitment make her endearing.

“So Insomniac decided to take the Ultimate version of Mary Jane and play it up to Lois Lane levels. She's an investigative journalist at the Daily Bugle searching for more on the recently-arrested Wilson Fisk. Her own adventures put her on the path to meeting with Spider-Man. You get that moment where they're both asking, "What are you doing here?" and you realize there's old, unmentioned romantic history. MJ already knows Peter is Spider-Man and she's fine with that side of his life. ”

And it works great...in a video game setting where you truly are spending 90% of your time in the middle of action and the plot needs to be entirely in service of that plot.

But in the context of a comic book more about the normal lives of the characters than revolving around superheroics and starring the most famous character (who’s clad in red and blue) of one of the two biggest companies in the world MJ as a journalist would die on it’s ass because it WOULD just be derivative of Lois Lane.

I mean Jesus Christ people also deride Black Cat and Norman Osborn for being derivative of Catwoman and Norman Osborn even though they deviate in big ways. But if Spider-Man major love interest/wife literally also became an investigative journalist and primarily interacted with Spider-Man (at least within the context of the main plot) within that role it would literally just be Lois Lane.

“This Mary Jane's problem is one of equal partnership. She's a great, inventive journalist. Sure, she could die on an investigation, considering where she decides to focus her talent, but in her mind, that's no different from a police officer or firefighter dying in the line of duty. The truth is important. This flips the dynamic a bit; her problem is that Peter doesn't acknowledge that she's also right where she needs to be. She's his equal, even if she doesn't have fancy Spider-powers. ”

  MJ was Peter’s equal in the comics too.

 Being someone’s equal as a person doesn’t mean doing the same job as them, working in the same line of work or directly contributing to the superhero action.

 You just need to be an equal in your personality and agency which in-universe MJ has had.

 This is to say nothing of how by this logic Alfred, Batman’s FATHER FIGURE, is not his equal or how Ganke Lee in Miles Morales comics wouldn’t really be HIS equal either or how, again, Spider-Man stories do not innately codify the superheroics as MORE important than the normal life stuff.

  “It's a great change.”

 Yes it is, in the context of a video game.

  “This Mary Jane is funny, a bit headstrong, and leaps sometimes before she looks. ”

 You mean just like comic book Mary Jane.

 “ Comic Mary Jane has many of these facets, but it's tough to get a grasp on what she really wants outside of Peter. ”

 Unless you’ve literally read the issue immediately after Peter meets her where she makes it clear she wants to be an actress. Or read any comic in the interim where she wants to have financial security, be taken seriously, reconcile with her family, indulge in/get over her commitment issues, help her cousin, learn psychology, etc.

 “Journalism doesn't have to be the answer, but there needs to be one that intersects with the lives of Peter and Spider-Man. ”

 No there doesn’t. In the real world couples jobs don’t have to intersect. Many of Peter’s supporting cast members do not have jobs that intersect with his life outside of the fact that they are his friends and/or family. This is true of other heroes too.

 MJ being Peter’s friend/girlfriend/wife is enough of a reason for her to intersect in his life and be featured in this stories, beyond that she can be given subplots of her own just like many other characters had.

 Two of the best subplots in Spider-Man involved Flash Thompson. One of them was his and Betty Brant’s affair and the other was his struggles with alcoholism. These were problems that for the longest time Peter wasn’t even aware of but they were compelling and entertaining unto themselves because Flash was a great character and we cared because he was Peter’s friend. However these stories also at no point ever really involved Spider-Man’s life. It was strictly confined to the problems of Peter Parker’s world.

 MJ’s job can be much the same.

 MJ’s normalacy is in fact a MAJOR reason why so many fans love her so much and why so many people love Spider-Man himself.

 Why make her more like Lois and her dynamic like that of Lois and Superman, those two characters who famously are awesome but also not as relatable as Spider-Man and MJ!

  “With Insomniac's Mary Jane, everything just clicks into place.”

 As would it for comic book MJ if you bothered to pay attention.

 “The problem here is Marvel never sat down and explained how this worked. Again, Peter's death was the impetus for Miles becoming Spider-Man. In the Ultimate comics, he had the powers long before he actually put on the costume. Miles' creator Brian Michael Bendis never sat down and explained the new backstory before he jumped over to DC Comics. We don't know the specifics of why this version of Miles took up the mantle, the question of his motivations always remains a bit fuzzy.”

  No it isn’t. Miles wasn’t REBOOTED into the 616 universe. He was integrated in with everyone’s memories altered around.

 His backstory was the same as in the Ultimate Universe he just literally, physically migrated over.

 Miles motivations were thus the same albeit undermined from a creative POV.

 “When the title of Spider-Man was passed on in the Ultimate universe, that made sense. But the question the Prime universe needs to answer now is: Why do they share the title? ”

 Because that was Miles’ chosen title and Peter gave his blessing for it and on a meta-level it is intended to represent how anyone can be Spider-Man.

 “Peter has offered it to Miles, but why does this version of Miles want it in return?”

  Because Ultimate Peter died and Miles wanted to honour him.

 It isn’t the case of he just ALWAYS existed in this universe. You cannot time travel back like 15 years into the 616 Marvel universe and locate baby Miles Morales He literally, physically doesn’t exist there.

 “That's really why these new versions of the characters work. I can see what they offer Peter and what he offers them in return. ”

 Comic book MJ offered Peter a human connection, a friend, a confidant, someone to support him and companionship.

 Why does she need to offer any more than that when in real life no one is hinging their deeper relationships upon the basis of what that person does for them in terms of their jobs or hobbies.

  “And that facet is sometimes missing in the Marvel Comics iteration. ”

 No it isn’t.

 “I see what they offer Peter, but sometimes it's hard to see what they get out of the relationship.”

 MJ gets a friend, companion, someone who understands and supports her, someone who helps emotionally fulfil her and make her a better person and sometimes someone who can help her in times of emotional and physical crises.

 “Great artists steal, Marvel. The comic publisher is already bringing Insomniac's Spider-Man into the the universe with the upcoming Spider-Geddon crossover (shown below). Now it's time to steal certain facets of the storytelling for the universe. Marvel Comics is stuck with the millstone of continuity around its neck, but that doesn't mean there aren't new directions the company can move Spider-Man and his amazing friends toward. ”

 Marvel has never rebooted it’s history since 1961.

 DC has done so in varying ways 5 or 6 times.

 Marvel outsells DC.

 Of all iconic characters owned by DC, Batman’s history has altered the least from one reboot into the next.

 Batman outsells every other DC character.

 In the 1980s Marvel fans had no access to the internet, few information books or other resources and few reprints with which to catch up upon the 20-25 years worth of history for the characters and of the few resources they did have not everyone had access to them.

 Marvel comics sold more physical copies back then than they do now.

 The highest selling Marvel titles of the 1980s and 1990s were the X-Men related titles which had objectively the most complicated, convoluted and least accessible .

 So STFU about too much continuity oh my God!

[cryptoriawebb]

I want to talk about something. Something very personal and dear to my heart. Before I do, however, I’m going to ask right now that anyone stumbling onto this either takes the time to stop and read this in full, or carries on with their business, leaving this post untouched. I’m not here to talk about shipping. I’m not here to talk about which characters “are” better and what is and is not “canon.” I know the Sonic fandom is a toxic place filled largely with a young and/or aggressive audience. That’s fine. I was part of it once--on the younger end and adamant about who belonged with who.

I’m not, anymore. Nor do I have patience for any silly comments regarding these points. This is not about the fandom. It’s not about shipping and it’s not about blanket character statements.

This is about me, and how important the Archie Sonic comics were to me. 

I don’t remember how old I was when I first stumbled upon the world of Sonic, but I do remember what it was. The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehow used to air on one of Disney’s many channels, and one day my brother saw it for the first time. He described it to me, and for a while I hadn’t a clue what he meant. I remember trying to picture the series and my gosh, I was off the mark, design-wise. Regardless, I eventually did see the show and we used to watch it together in the morning. It was strange and silly and I didn’t think much of it, but I loved Sonic’s catchphrases, the theme song and Tails. 

Sometime after that, we found the OVA at a video rental store (remember those?) I know a lot of people out there don’t think very highly of it, but I was young, and at the time didn’t have any Sonic reference beyond the cartoon. Honestly, I preferred the OVA after watching it. It was darker than the show, with a different type of humor I must have found more appealing. It was also one of the first anime-type-things I’d ever seen. I loved the design, this interpretation of Tails and Robotnik and I also quite liked Knuckles, having never seen him before. 

I suppose I should state right now I was not allowed to play video games growing up, and the first computer I remember entering my home was in the very late nineties. Even then, we didn’t play a lot of PC games, mostly Disney and things like Clue Finders and Freddie Fish.  At some point I know we discovered a sega collection of old Sonic games, and Sonic R, I just can’t remember when. 

Anyway, after that, my next “Sonic medium” came in the form of advertisements for Sonic Sega Dreamcast. I don’t remember what I found so appealing about it, but I very much wanted to play this game. At this point I was pretty obsessed with the OVA and had acquired a lot of old toys relating to the Dreamcast game. Alas, twas not to be, and that was it for me and Sonic..

...until my brother picked up issue #110 for me at a store. I’d never seen a Sonic comic before--had no idea such a thing existed, and believe me, I carried that thing everywhere. The art and story I found incredibly confusing, as did I the side story about Sally and the Sword of Acorn. Who was Sally? How did she know Sonic and Tails? I hadn’t a clue, but I loved the art. A lot. If I were to go back and try reading that comic now I’m pretty sure it would fall apart...the cover’s already been detached from the pages ^^;

Sometime later, I was in a comic book shop--my brother and I loved super heroes and we were starting to get into manga--and I found #114. In it, I discovered a sort of continuation to #110, as well as another beautifully illustrated story by J.Axer. Imagine my surprise to discover not only more characters I’d never seen (Bunnie, Antoine and Rotor) but Amy Rose! Whom I knew, vaguely, from my toys and what I knew of Dreamcast. Like my previous comic, I loved this one so much it also fell apart. J.Axer’s art really fascinated me, I would trace and try to mimic it all the time. Artists today look down on such things, but through the course of doing what I did I broadened my horizons and grew to be a better artist. 

It wasn’t long after that I discovered Sonic SatAM. I was thrilled. Sally, Bunnie and everyone else in a TV show of their own? Why was I not aware of this? I must have rented those videos a thousand times. There were only two or three available, with a handful of episodes each, but I didn’t care. I admit I was a bit saddened to see Tails as a mere side character, but that was the only drawback. I knew this story, or part of it--Sally’s father, King Acorn, I’d seen him before. I knew Knothole, Snively--I knew all of it. It was...amazing, quite frankly, and I’m sure I talked about it a lot...to such a point I started annoying my brother. But again, did not care. I had all this insight and I couldn’t get enough of it. So when I stumbled into another comic shop one day and found several back issues (#100, #103, #104, #105 and a few others) I knew there was no going back. 

I admit, I can’t remember if I found those back issues before or after I realized it was a monthly series, but either way, once I did, I became a steady collector for the next ten years. I ordered back issues, specials, drew art and comics regularly...even when I got older and my interests tapered, I still collected. This world was so in depth, the art--at least most of it--detailed and rich--and I loved all of the characters. All of them. To me, these comics were the meat enhancing the bare bones that was the video game universe. I preferred them to any other incarnation I’d seen prior, and to be quite honest, I still do.

 I can’t speak for the video games now--I know they’ve grown and added characters and I’m sure there’s a lot to be said for that world--but the last video games I played were Shadow and Sonic Heroes. I did watch Sonic X for a while, I just...didn’t care much for it. Shadow was the only one I felt matched the same thought, tone and creative care the comics had, and that’s because they adapted his history pretty well, at least I think so. 

The comics had their ups and downs; I’m not the biggest fans of the #130s, but before the reboot, I really felt things were on a strong track forward. That said, I desperately feared the end of the Freedom Fighters...especially Sally Acorn. I remember actually crying about it to one friend. Since discovering her, Sally has been and remains my favorite Sonic character. 

Please note again, my thoughts are my own and I’m allowed to have them.

Now then...Sally Acorn. Her and Bunnie, fluctuating occasionally because Bunnie reminded me of my favorite X-men growing up (Rogue) but I’d always come back to Sally. I know some people don’t like her. That’s fine, not everyone is going to like every character. For me, though, Sally was one of few tomboy characters I knew of as a child. Yes she was feminine, but her femininity never overwhelmed her. She never felt over-romanticized, at least to me, and I really appreciated her modest design. It always bothered me female animal-type-characters were heavily dressed while the boys rarely wore full clothes. I liked that she broke that norm, it fit her personality.

Her relationship with Sonic felt very buddy-buddy, too, as much as romantic. Like they were really equals, despite differing status and power. Sally’s sacrifice remains stapled to my memory; it is, I think, the defining nature of her character. Her “true” character, I think: what comes out when it’s down to the wire. I’m really impressed with how she’s grown over the years. Not only how she chose to “end” her life but how strong she became after breaking up with Sonic. I don’t at all believe he held her down--and unlike some people I wasn’t bothered by the slap. I just wasn’t. I am, however, so happy she was able to become the Sally I grew up reading, the one I was first introduced to, once again before her final moments. Above all else, she and the Freedom Fighters proved to me you don’t need special powers to be a hero. 

Sonic may have been the ace in the hole, but every one of the Freedom Fighters brought something unique to the table. Watching them evolve over the years--from one universe to the next, powers, kids and otherwise--has been such a wonderful experience. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, I’ve invested for so long...I only wish I were able to see how the original story intended to progress.  I tried describing the comics to a friend recently, particularly where it left off before the reboot. He was incredibly surprised by how vast and dark it was. 

I’m going to confess I stopped reading shortly before Sonic rebooted the universes. I have read scans of that initial first issue, but once I discovered the story wasn’t going to continue, I lost a lot of my drive to collect. I’m not going to talk about Penders here--I think we all share mutual feelings in that regard--but in my opinion it was absolutely the defining nail on the coffin for this twenty+ year run. He remains one of few people I find incredibly difficult to forgive. I’m a firm believer in forgiveness, but I grew up reading Sonic. I wanted very much to continue reading it, to see the characters I love continue growing. I can’t do that, anymore. None of us can. 

I don’t expect to see Sally and the others carried over to IDW. The Sonic gaming side of things has evolved so much from where it started out: most readers today know of the Freedom Fighting crew through the comics only. If it’s true Sega sees a different creative vision for their franchise, I think this is finally goodbye...I said goodbye years ago, but it’s final now. The comics as I knew them are over. Another staple of my childhood, already reinvented and reimagined, gone for good. The chances a new generation will find the comics, reboot or otherwise, and meet and connect with the characters I loved the way I loved them, rather than through internet fodder they don’t understand are fewer now and far between. That hurts me, it does. As a creative individual who held this so close to them, one thing I’ve always wanted is for people to discover something and experience what I did. Understand in their own way why myself and I’m sure so many others held onto the comics as long as we did. It’s not about shipping, it’s not about what’s canon or who’s better than the other. It’s about something else entirely. For me, it was an expansive, inclusive and ever-changing world. It was following a show that made something equally impressive from so very little and nurturing it until it took on a life of its own.

Maybe I’m a little dramatic, a little theatrical, but if you've stayed with me through this entire confession I hope you can forgive me. I loved these comics. They were a part of my life for a very long time, and I’m going to miss them, indefinitely.

Thank you, Archie Team, for creating something wonderful. Thank you SatAM and yes, even thank you, Sega, allowing them the chance to give us these memories.

[davidmann95]

I have a friend who theorizes that, because we've already fucked with Flash time travel shit, they may use that to do a weird reboot of the universe after or during Justice League to change things more to the way that people actually want it to be. Thoughts on this idea?

Look, anon, I’m sure you’re coming from a place of good intent, but if Geoff Johns’ reintroduction of the character and 3 seasons of television have taught us anything, it is that Barry Allen time travelling always - always - creates more problems than it solves.

Somebody remind me sometime to share my super-depressing pitch for the final episode of The Flash. The best part is that it’s not actually a theory, but rather a horrifying inevitability we’ve already seen play out multiple times taken to its irrefutably logical conclusion!

Anyway, the issue with rebooting the movies in-universe is that, well, that’s really confusing. I had my own silly pitch along the same lines (rooted in how to do the common “have the movie heroes turn out to be the Justice Lords and get beaten by the real Justice League/have the Squadron Supreme show up in the next Avengers movie to be defeated” fan pitch of the universe being presented as fundamentally flawed and then ‘fixed’ in a way that actually fits with what we’ve seen and doesn’t destroy everything), but even in there I acknowledge it’s a far from optimal solution. At least in comics when they do that there’s typically an acknowledged canon of stories to draw from when you start everything over; with the movies, you’re pretty much starting from scratch. I would be curious to see if movies could pull off the “we have to fix the shared universe” story in the same way as Avengers showed the shared universe was a possibility - Civil War I think toed into that territory - but ideally, that’s a story that shouldn’t need to be told in the first place, and since it’s trying to beg you to love it again rather than get you invested in the first place, it’s inherently more of a gamble as an admission of vulnerability.

On the whole, I think a soft ‘relaunch’ would serve the universe better, same as what DC’s trying to do right now in Rebirth, or what Marvel did in 2012 with the first wave of NOW! Rewriting reality to retcon Zod while keeping Henry Cavill as Superman would smack of stubbornness, and I suspect the moviegoing audience would be far less forgiving than your average comics collector; just stop mentioning it. Don’t bring it up anymore, or Batman blowing up just so many dudes. Stop flattening everything out to gray, put Superman in a better suit and start making better movies, paper over the worst aspects - they’re already at least somewhat willing to do that, with Superman killing Zod literally never being mentioned in BvS - and I think people will be more willing to forgive the brand than if they went for the obvious desperation move of rebooting again. Comics can get away with it because they last for all intents and purposes forever, and continuity crap accumulates for decades at a time until it needs flushing out; these movieverses can only last for so long in a given iteration, and stopping one to start another rather than riding it out to a natural conclusion isn’t going to be a great look. Spider-Man was only able to pull it off because there was a serious, unprecedented major change in play that gave people real reason to think this would substantially improve the situation; X-Men tried a straight reboot and judging by Apocalypse’s reception can be safely said to have failed, with their biggest property now being the one that makes fun of all their other movies. I say make Justice League more upbeat, do one more ‘realistic’ Superman movie grappling with those issues (because they are worth exploring, and I worry the failure of these movies could dissuade creators from going into them as part of the package of trying not to fail the way these movies did), and then draw a line in the sand and declare a new day. If they do it right, that’s all it should take. Even if it isn’t, they’ve already made the foundation, at this point they have to live with it.

As far as Barry Allen goes, I do want to see a Crisis on Two Earths movie with the CW shows crossing over and teaming up with the movie characters - I genuinely suspect they might already be building up to that, between total 70s/80s DC nerd Geoff Johns taking the helm of both the shows and movies, and the first episode of Flash making clear some kind of red-skies Crisis happens in 2024, around when the movies would probably be ready to tackle it. Crisis is the obvious thing for the movies to build up to anyway, since Darkseid can’t be The Big Thing thanks to Thanos being the main event over at the competition, and if you’re doing a story about parallel universes colliding anyway, why not draw in both audiences there with such an obvious gimmick? Throw a Superman Beyond movie on top with a Cavill/Hoechlin/Cain/Welling/Routh teamup leading into a Final Crisis movie to close out both universes, and I’m a happy camper.

[spynotebook]

Image: DC Comics. Action Comics #977 art by Gary Frank and Brad Anderson.

The end of the Superman Reborn event has given us a major new evolution in Superman’s saga—a Man of Steel who is a singular mix of his pre- and post-New 52 versions of himself. It seems like the umpteenth time in recent memory that Kal-El has had his origin tweaked, but this time it’s a turn of events that could have some wide-reaching implications on DC’s current continuity.

Today’s Action Comics #977—by Dan Jurgens, Ian Churchill, Hi-Fi, and Rob Leigh—has kicked off a two-part epilogue to the mind-and-reality-bending events of Superman Reborn. We get to see just what’s changed in Superman’s classic origins, as Clark, still hazy about what went down with Mxyzptlk’s machinations, returns to the Fortress of Solitude to re-learn his past.

In a lot of ways, it remains a very familiar story. Krypton is still gone, the Kents still find Kal, and in the present day, Clark is still a Daily Planet reporter, married to Lois Lane and father to Jon. But all the little details that have been tweaked seem to imply one thing only: while this Superman is an explicit merging of his Post-Crisis on Infinite Earths self and his New 52 self, it’s really the Post-Crisis incarnation that’s coming out on top, re-establishing itself over the New 52.

First, we get to go back and see Krypton before its destruction—a Krypton that, unlike the New 52 Superman’s origins, is depicted as a much more eclectic utopia. The New 52's Krypton borrowed a lot of elements from John Byrne’s own post-Crisis depiction of Superman’s homeworld, inhabited by an emotionally reserved people driven solely by their desire for scientific advancement. Before Flashpoint ever happened, much of that depiction was erased in Superman: Birthright in 2003, a Mark Waid/Leinil Francis Yu miniseries that brought back the idea of Krypton as a paradise on the brink of disaster, but the New 52 went back to Byrne’s vision... something that’s now been erased once more with a more Silver Age-inspired view of Kryptonian society.

Additionally, when Kal-El arrives on Earth as a baby, the Martha and Jonathan Kent that find him appear to be in a much brighter place than their New 52 counterparts. In the New 52, Martha had recently been through a miscarriage before finding Kal-El, informing her decision to take the alien child in as her own, but the Kents we see here simply just never had a child before deciding to raise Kal. A picture of an older Jonathan with his baby grandson—glimpsed in Clark’s cubicle at the Planet early in the issue—also seems to hint that the tragic fate he and Martha suffered in the New 52 (a car accident that ultimately claimed both their lives) hasn’t occurred anymore.

Beyond that, Clark had a pretty typical teenage life as he does in most versions of his origin story (although in another diversion from the New 52, it appears Clark’s powers didn’t manifest until he was in his teens—in the New 52, he has displays of his power at a much earlier age). He grows up with Lana Lang and Pete Ross as his best friends, and with Lex Luthor as his teenage rival.

Even when we fast-forward to the present, a lot of what used to be canon before the New 52 is suddenly back again. Lois and Clark work together and are married, Daily Planet editor Perry White is Jon’s godfather. If anything, the only real acquiescence to the New 52 version of events included here is an offhand mention that Lois and Clark still live outside of Metropolis—presumably at the farm that the pre-Flashpoint Lois and Clark hid out on when they first came to the New 52 universe in the Superman: Lois and Clark miniseries, to avoid being caught by the then-alive New 52 Superman. Otherwise, the intention seems to be clear: while this is a merging of these two takes on the Man of Steel, it’s much of the original pre-Flashpoint reality that’s won out as “canon” rather than the New 52.

As Action Comics #977 only brings us up to Clark’s arrival in Metropolis, there’s still a bit more of his early days as the Man of Steel we don’t know about yet. We’ve yet to see the full ramification of the two Supermen merging on the wider DC Universe, either.

The seeming implication of all this is that the birth of the New 52 reboot back in 2011 didn’t erase the past of DC comics and replace it entirely with a new universe. It instead seemingly split these characters into two alternate existences: the existences fans had been reading for decades, and the shiny new one of the New 52. We’ve had other inklings of this, such as the return of Eobard Thawne as a Zoom who remembers his death in Flashpoint in the pages of The Flash #19.

Superman’s own merging of his pre-and-post Flashpoint selves, and affecting his timeline, appears to have started some kind of chain reaction that is helping to merge these two “splits” into a whole again—a process which seems to favor restoring DC’s pre-New 52 continuity. So far it’s mainly on a character level, like with Clark, Zoom, and the re-emergence of the old Wally West. Could the actions of Superman lead to this “merging” for other major characters like Batman and Wonder Woman? At what point do we actually start seeing this on a universe-wide scale?

All this tweaking and merging is building up to something big—something that, presumably, will culminate in the reveal of Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan and the reasons behind his meddling with the reality of the DC universe as unveiled back in Rebirth. Even if we don’t know why just yet, at least we know that Superman’s got his history put back in place for now.

[m00nslippers]

Jason is a clever bitch and I love him, in RHATO Issue #32

Okay now we’re finally moving Jason closer to the Winick version that I think is most people’s favorite Red hood--it’s not there yet, but we’re seeing the hints. The cleverness, the charm, the unrepentant sass. Oh yes, we are going places, I like what I see.

Let’s dive in here.

Whoever made that post about Jason not even needing a cover story about being dead to revive his identity was kind of prophetic because here his cover is basically, “So I wasn’t actually dead. no more details, that’s it.” Which is pretty dang close.

And I’m not sure how he managed any of this without Bruce or Alfred finding out but that is damn impressive. We know they didn’t know because we see Alfred’s reaction shot to seeing him on TV. If we don’t see him interact with a few of the other Gotham vigilantes, (or at least see a reaction shot of them all like, “What!? Jason?! The guy we had to physically blackmail to attend galas is running a casino with parties every night? That Jason?!) at some point I’m going to be pretty disappointed, to be honest.

Also, as we already knew from the solicitations and previews, Jason is taking over the Iceburg lounge and looking fancy while he does it. I love it. Jason can put on an act with the best of the batboys. Look at this well dressed man! And his hair! He has hair again, praise the Lord, hallelujah!

Completely unrelated note, that reporter has some really fancy cuff earrings or something and I’m jealous.

I’m validated for noticing Suzie Su was behind Jason in the previews. She and her sisters are part of his crew basically. It’s actually nice to see villains/characters return, too often they are just one-shot or one-note baddies but Suzie has been there since New 52 RHATO and she got a bit of humanization in the Annual when we meet her sisters. She’s not just some creepy fat lady that creeps on Jason, she’s a big sister who is trying to do her best for her family and I like that Jason acknowledges that and brings her and her family in on his scheme and even gets them out of the crime business sort-of by giving them mostly legit employment.

The way he has a bunch of ladies following him around kind of reminds me of Dick with the girls from St. Hadrian's a little bit. But they were all super into Dick and these girls don’t seem interested in Jason at all except as like a boss, which I like.

Jason, this is the kind of thing you should ask about! Ugggghh ~

Wingman looked older in the last page of the previous issue for some reason, maybe he’s died his hair or something. So we still don’t know what’s going on with him. I was hoping we’d get something, a hint but we’ve literally got nothing to go on here. I honestly think he has some kind of direct relation to Jason. Either he’s his dad’s mind in a different inmates body, or maybe a lost cousin or brother or something, or has something to do with the future like he came from there. It’s got to be one of those things, nothing else makes sense that I can think of.

LOOK AT MY BEAUTIFUL BOY! JUST LOOK AT HIM. LOOK AT THOSE EYELASHES AND BLUE EYES AND THAT SMILE.

Anyone would be charmed. I think Jason is too much of an introvert to like this kind of public job exactly, but I also think he’d be good at it. Dick might be better, because he’s just a natural extrovert, but Jason is still up there. He’s a good actor, and he really cares about people so he’d take care of those he’s in charge of. Jason would be a good boss.

“Started from the bottom now we’re here,” that’s a Drake lyric.

Could these guys be bigger dorks?

Notice that Jason didn’t kill the guys that were causing trouble, he had Miggs (his nickname for Miguel) roll them off to the docks in a ball made with his powers and those dorks were totally right, the room he made was pretty gucci. You got taste, Miguel.These weren’t necessarily real bad guys, they were just punks, and Jason might be killing again but he doesn’t just kill any idiot that gets in his way or causes trouble.

Also, technically they might have been right about Night cheating, we don’t actually know how ‘legit’ the Su sisters are playing things.

I’m sort of torn on the way the colorist is depicting Miguel’s powers, like I miss the glowiness a little bit from New 52 Teen Titans. These look a little too much like normal bricks? But technically that might be better for Miguel, they can pass as normal bricks instead of a power when they have to. They looked clear or white before when the guys walked in there so maybe he can control their color/transparency and glowiness? I still would like to see them look glowy though.

A few things about Miguel: I think these panels illustrated pretty well what their dynamic is supposed to be. I know Jason called Bizarro his ‘friend’ but let’s be honest here, Bizarro isn’t Jason’s friend--he’s his little brother.

Jason compares Miguel to Bizarro and I think that’s key, he sees Miguel as like a little brother that he wants to help. He’s got powers that he doesn’t understand and people keep coming after him for them. I think with Miguel and Tim it was closer to a friendship of equals at least as far as Miguel saw. He admired and respected Tim as a leader and how he always seemed to know what to do, but in the end Miguel was older than Tim, he didn’t feel like he could completely lean on him. It looks like Miguel may have latched on to Jason in that way, since he has the bat-authority too and actually is older than him and a genuinely caring guy. And look at my boy Jason! He comforts and accepts him immediately, it’s so sweat.

Goddamn it, Jason is a good older brother! He’s the best freaking older brother, damn Bruce and the whole family’s bat-morals, man! You’re all missing this! He could have this with Tim and Damian and Duke and even Steph and Cass! He would love that! He would be so good at that! It’s a goddamn tragedy, is what it is.

Also it’s interesting how Miguel acknowledges the reboots, so are his powers related to reality-warping or something so he can sense it? Or it could just be more of this suggestion that a lot of people in the DC universe right now have memories from the previous continuity, so like it all kind of happened even if it technically didn’t type of thing. I kind of thought Miguel’s powers were energy projections made with his mind, like psionically, but maybe they are literally creating matter or something? I don’t know. I really need to read more New 52 Teen Titans to understand him and his powers.

And that line, “A loaded weapon in the hands of a confused teenager. What could go wrong?”

Wow, Jason, you really went there. Referenced you’re own crazy head-state when you went after Bruce in Under the Hood.

Jason is so self-deprecating, you guys.

“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer. “ This is apparently a quote from Die Hard, because of course it is. Jason is literally Jake Peralta from Brooklyn 99 confirmed.

Ugh, Lobdell’s version of Bruce is just such an asshole!

First of all, Jason hasn’t ‘betrayed him’ not even once, he was emotionally compromised and broke their agreement because he was acting on those feelings. He made a mistake. And Bruce cared more about his rules than Jason’s intentions or feelings or any of the good will they’d fostered in the last year or two. He acts like Jason sold him out or lied to him, when he never did any of those things.

Also, I don’t think saying, “stay out of Gotham and never come back or I’ll throw down and toss you in Arkham” is another chance, okay? It’s not like Jason got anything out of that deal, it was just Bruce not wanting to go through the trouble of hunting him down outside of Gotham because he straight-up knew that he wouldn’t be able to!

That Pretty Woman reference...

The funny thing is, Jason is more like the character who says that line than Bruce is. Bruce, kicking Jason out of the bat-family, is the one who is making the mistake. He could have had an ally, had say in what Jason did, had some limited control over him if he’d just forgiven him or talked to him at all, but because of his pride now he has none of that.

Now this, this is my shit right here. JASON HAS BRUCE BY THE BALLS. By going public with his identity he’s effectively made himself untouchable by Bruce. He’s got the identity of every Gotham vigilante in his hands, and honestly I really doubt Jason would ever give them up, even out of spite or hatred, he never did before when he could have, (he didn’t tell Hush Bruce’s identity, he just didn’t deny it when Hush figured it out, and we’re not sure if that’s even canon anymore anyway.) but it’s partly Bruce’s own doubt in Jason that is keeping his hands tied! That and the fact that if even one of his kids is outted as a vigilante it really puts the suspicion on him.

But seriously guys. Smart Jason is what Iive for.

God, Jason calling him dad, but only because he’s ‘playing up the act’ of civilian Jason Todd, has got to hurt Bruce. Assuming Lobdell’s version of Bruce has any actual feelings of affection for Jason, otherwise it probably just grates.

Lol, okay, so the situation seems to be that Jason dropped in to the Iceburg lounge to pay Penguin a visit. Cobblepot went, “Oh no! That damned Red Hood is here, hide me!” Ran into his panic room and locked it and Jason was just like, “Well, isn’t this convenient,” and made it so he couldn’t get back out.

And then presumably gangster-rules applied and Jason just got all his businesses because he said they were his and no one wanted to argue? I guess? Lobdell doesn’t give satisfying explanations, you guys. This is a testament to that.

I’m not going to lie though, this is pretty satisfying.

Alright, so I’m really excited for more you guys. This is not a perfect issue, a lot of things are hand waved, Bruce is acting even more out of character than usual, and we still have no dang clue what’s going on with Wingman, but there are definitely things here I like, and i’m looking forward to more.