#this was actually my first attempt at doing a proper structure for this series

[quicksilver-rain]

We're continuing on to Olympus on the mythical landscapes! Once again, @/shophomegrowncrone on Insta killed it with her perfume and I like to think I killed it with this postcard! :)

[trishmishtree]

Another year, another recap: a list of things I sewed in 2024

So...I kicked off the year by not doing any sewing in January or February.

In my defense, I was starting a new job and doing paperwork and moving across the state at the time, and most of my sewing things were still in cardboard boxes in my parents' guest room. Figured I'd start small when I finally moved and unpacked all my worldly possessions, so I revisited the cape I made for Capetember 2022 and added slits so that I can still use my arms without letting cold air in. I also added pockets for my phone and keys. Photo not included because, well, it looks the same as it did in 2022, just with arm slits.

Then I made this hand-embroidered Regency reticule. It's based on the one in the Rijksmuseum. It's cute, it's functional, and I made it as true to the original as I could, thanks to video footage from Sewstine on Youtube, who actually got to study the extant reticule and see the hidden side panels.

Then I got sick of back-lacing myself into Regency stays that never seem to fit my scoliotic torso correctly, so I made the c0rset a la parasseuse. They take like 30 seconds to put on and actually give the correct shape, and now I finally have regency stays that work for me. I'm not including pictures of myself wearing them, but here they are laid flat:

Then in April, I finished my red and white floral 1780s Italian gown ensemble. Technically, I'd made the overdress in 2023, but at the time I hadn't added the hooks and eyes that would allow the skirt to be bustled up in the back, and I still needed to make the contrasting striped petticoat. It's not a true HA recreation because I put all the structure directly into the bodice lining, instead of making a separate pair of stays to wear underneath, but all the other under layers are period correct, including the split rump I made to go with it. I also made an attempt at the American Duchess 18th century cap, but I made it out of limp, flimsy cotton batiste instead of linen, and it doesn't look right, so I'm going to have to revisit that once I make a proper 18th century linen shift and see how much leftover fabric I have after that. Oh, and I hand-embroidered some garters for my 18th century stockings but never bothered to take pictures because I don't like how they turned out.

In May, I also made this generic 18th century petticoat to go under my Italian gown ensemble, because the visible striped petticoat kept grabbing to my stockings and the fabric of my shift.

Also in May, I made the blue Regency pelisse. Base pattern for the bodice part is Black Snail’s #0323 regency spencer c. 1810-1815. I just altered the sleeves and added the long skirt. The oak leaf rouleaux pattern on the front of the bodice is from this pelisse from the Cincinnati Art Museum, though I wasn't going for a direct reproduction.

Then came the Edwardian nightgown, based on an actual pattern from the era. I wish I had had more fabric to work with because the final hem is less full than I would prefer, and the sleeves could use maybe 2-3 inches of ruffle to length them.

I forget why I didn't sew anything in June or July. Maybe I had gone back to fix a fit issue with the regency pelisse? I don't know. But in August, I hammered out three more projects.

I've been working on creating a series of body blocks/slopers for myself so that I can then use them to draft whatever patterns I want. I currently have a basic modern princess seam bodice block, a sloper for a generic blouse (which I've used to adapt multiple Edwardian shirtwaists, because I really just need it to fit the neck and shoulder region), a basic regency bodice block, an 18th century conical bodice block, and a bunch of circle skirt templates. I've been meaning to make a new set of Edwardian combinations (because I totally used the wrong weight of fabric on my first attempt), but I wanted to test out my drawers pattern first, so I made a pair of basic drawstring shorts to wear under my skirts for work, just for a bit of extra coverage. They function okay, but they're going to need more fullness in the legs to work for Edwardian costuming, so I didn't take any pictures, and there will probably be several more rounds of wearable mockups in my future.

My second sewing project in August was to revisit my old gathered-front regency partially-bodiced petticoat. Now that I had a functional regency bodice block pattern, I basically installed an entirely new bodice, reduced the amount of fullness in the front gathering, and also added about an extra yard and a quarter of fabric to the back of the skirt, since the original skirt hem was a little too narrow for walking comfortably. Regency skirts may look slim, but they should have at least 2 yd (preferably more) in the hem circumference in order to look and function correctly. The new and improved petticoat could basically be a dress on its own, minus sleeves.

And finally in August, I made the historybounding princess skirt. I've already detailed my grievances with this skirt in my original post, but it was basically an attempt to have a warm skirt to wear to work in the winter, but it requires a c0rset (and undershirt and c0rset cover and petticoat) to look correct, so I basically only use it for casual cosplay/Halloween costumes now.

Moving on from that dud, in September, I went back to regency and altered my new and improve bodiced petticoat pattern into an actual evening gown pattern. This dress came out exactly how I wanted. It would probably be my favorite thing I've made this year, except that it has a 2-foot train that is very unwieldy.

I had quite a bit of large scraps leftover from the gown project. My friend from residency was expecting a baby around September, so I used some fabric scraps and made her a ruffly baby dress. Since baby was due in September and I wasn't sure whether the weather would still be warm enough for white frilly summer dresses, I decided to make the dress in a 6-9 month old size so that baby would be able to grow into it come spring/summer. (Spoiler: baby came in mid-September while it was still reasonably warm. Oh well. At least she'll get to wear it in the spring. And now I have a birthday twin.)

In October, I embarked on my most ambitious project of the year and made my first pair of 18th century stays. This fabric is 100% not HA, and I did a combination of hand-stitched and machine-stitched channels, but everything else about the stays is historically...adequate. It's boned with zip ties because I didn't want to waste a whole roll of $$$ynthetic baleen on my first pair of (fully boned) stays when there was a 95% chance I'd screw something up. Pattern is self-drafted, and my only gripe is that I made my mockup half-boned and it fit perfectly, but I switched to fully boned for the final stays, and that affected the fabric's bias stretch, and I had to add a stomacher to give myself more room.

Then Halloween was approaching, so I made a witch hat from scrap wool coating fabric from my cape and wool skirt projects. Wish I had made the brim wider and the crown taller (it's just a little too small proportionally all around), but I didn't have a stiff enough interlining material, and the whole thing was floppy enough as it was. I'm just going to have to get more fabric and proper millinery buckram for next year's Halloween project.

Speaking of Halloween, I ended up not using the witch hat at all. Instead, I made what I'm calling the Anne Shirley blouse. It's another Edwardian shirtwaist I self-drafted from my basic blouse pattern. It's not an exact match to the blouse she wears at the end of Anne of Green Gables (1985), but I couldn't find a narrow-striped black and gray cotton shirting-weight fabric. Trust me, I looked for months. The final blouse is pretty, but the ruffle needs to be redone because it makes my shoulders look too wide for the wool historybounding princess skirt I wore it with, and the collar needs to be taken in a couple inches because it's too loose right now. And I need to make a proper ankle-length Vicwardian walking skirt some time in the future before I can put this project to rest.

November was another slow month for me, between the results of the you-know-what and our impending doom and I just couldn't find the time or motivation to do stuff for fun. I did have a 2-yard length of deadstock burgundy polyester chiffon in my stash that I had been holding onto for about a year without a clear project in mind for it, so I used it to make a Greek chiton. No pictures included because I'm probably only going to wear it as an accessory with my regency gown (because those white regency gowns are basically OG historybounding).

December was another weird month. I had just seen the Wicked movie and was drooling over all the costumes (designed by THE Paul Tazewell), so instead of sewing clothing to wear for myself, I went back to my roots and made a modular origami doll of Glinda, then sewed her bubble dress from actual fabric. It was a lot like draping a dress, except with a miniature dress form.

Then, because the doll is like 6 inches tall and I had a bunch of fabric leftover (I only got a quarter yard of each and even that was too much for a 6" tall doll), I used as much of the scraps as I could to make another Glinda bubble skirt but big enough to fit my brother's cat. (Neither of our cats likes to dress up, but my cat is too big for the skirt to fit, and his cat is pure black so a black Elphaba dress wouldn't show up on her). I don't think I took a picture of the skirt when I finished it, and now I don't have it because I gave it to him for Christmas. We'll just have to see if his cat lets him put the skirt on her long enough to get photos.

It looks like I accomplished even less sewing this year than I did last year, and 2023 was a down year too, but I don't feel that unproductive. This list was something like 21 projects, so I'm still averaging about one project every 2-3 weeks, which is reasonable since I'm working a Big Girl Job now. I do have more days off per week since starting this job, but my free time is now clustered into 2-3 day periods (during which I also need to remember to cook, eat, clean my living space, do laundry, shower, sleep, prep for the work week, etc.), instead of being spread out more evenly throughout the week like when I was in residency, so that probably has something to do with my productivity level.

Or maybe it's because my projects in 2024 are more intricate and involved than, say, making a batch of small things like baby bibs and tailoring hams, or so I'm spending more time on each project. There were also several other projects I started in 2024 that are currently still in my Unfinished pile, and I'm slowly working my way through them in the hopes that they'll make it onto next year's list of things I sewed in 2025.

Oh, and in other news, my sewing machine broke on 01/01/2025, and it broke even more when I tried to fix it FML, so I'm either going to have to take the thing in for repairs (if anyone even still fixes this old crappy cheap model) or buy a new slightly less crappy one secondhand. So expect to see even more hand sewing from me. I might even take up Stephanie Canada's Butterick walkaway dress challenge 2025 but do it by hand just to see how long it takes.

[lakemojave]

I feel so bad that I didn't actually play resident evil 6 for my project last year. I based a lot of my opinions about it based off how wild its narrative content was and secondhand accounts about its gameplay. It's very easy to say "it's bad" just by looking at it, but playing the game itself reveals much deeper, more fundamental flaws that you don't get just watching a video essay or let's play.

Resident Evil 6 is attempting to be so many kinds of games at once, so it's actually so many kinds of bad at once. The first ten or fifteen minutes of the game are a slow crawl through dark corridors and university ballrooms; there are no enemies, just a series of tutorializing sections and thin attempts at building a tense atmosphere. It's extremely slow and dreadfully boring, which is crazy because all of this happens within seconds after shooting your best friend, the zombified president of the united states like a rabid dog.

It moves to a city in the midst of the first wave of a zombie outbreak, then a cathedral filled with traps, then a secret lab, then like three layers of medieval dungeon. The tone and genre intention of this section varies wildly, but it seems to be a repeat of the spare parts of Residents Evil one through four: first the abandoned opulent structure, then the burning city, then the gothic architecture complete with spike traps. The city section is actually really good because at this point there had been no reimagining of the Raccoon City destruction in a modern console, so the level of chaos and manic destruction at play with the return of more classic zombies to the series is extremely refreshing and fun. Then the cathedral happens and, after a pretty boring cemetery maze, there's a really good sequence of co op puzzles that harkens back to classic Resident Evil design. It's a good series of levels--the problem is that it's derivative.

It's not just derivative of it's own series, actually. For all the references to past games, Resident Evil 6 is assembled mostly from the spare parts of other popular action games from the 2010s. There's lots more mobility mechanics, way less ammo scarcity, absolute heaps of weak zombies, cover mechanics, swimming sections, and quick time event after quick time event. Combined with the artificial widescreen black bars, it's riffing off of Uncharted, Gears of War, and David Cage style design so closely. So many of the dungeon props and layouts look almost exactly like levels from Dark Souls or Skyrim, and when we get to Chris' campaign the tone is almost indistinguishable from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Is there an aspect of game design that was popular in the 2010s, or even just happened to appear in games that were popular in the 2010s? That mechanic is absolutely in Resident Evil 6.

When RE6 has an original idea, it is so patently ridiculous and unhinged that my immersion is immediately shattered and I can't possibly take the game seriously. When RE6 is borrowing an idea, it is so bland and anonymous that my immersion isn't given the respect it needs to form whatsoever. RE6 fluctuates between these two moods so repeatedly and with so little warning that experiencing the game first hand is like going to a haunted house and, instead of actually getting the proper experience, a guy in a room just beats the shit out of you. Is it scary? Technically it is, but not in the way I wanted, not in the way I enjoyed, and the experience was so painful that I could barely process what was happening.

Like all bad horror movies, if you're gonna experience Resident Evil 6 at all, I insist you do it with a friend. That is the only way to salvage the experience--to suffer with someone else.

[agirlandherquill]

Written In Smoke - The Inceptive Letter

Now, for the first post of this series I thought I’d begin with something simple, explaining the name - Written, because of course I’m a writer and I adore the clickety-clack of keys (and writing with a fountain pen in a notebook when I’m outlining plot, which is a new little venture I’ve begun doing) and Smoke, because it’s a weekly account of events, nothing is going to be completely solid, and my memory will have gaps even if I attempt to note things down, and also because much like the flow of ink upon paper, life is similarly fluid too, in my mind at least, it’s very much like smoke - full of substance, beautiful, chaotic, and full of little moments (which I completely adore) and thus the use of smoke, because little moments disappear so quickly but the remnants remain with you forevermore, and that’s as much of an explanation as my mind can conjure, which for me at the very least, composes the introduction to this series!

And now to move on to the main substance of this post - much like the ingredients of a perfect dish, the parts are still a work in progress, so bear with me whilst I work out which to include and how to structure it

 (And come up with working titles for each section, which is part of the fun!)

A Glimpse Through Time - little bits about me and what I’ve been up to this week

This week marked the end of a chapter, a very important one, because I completed (some may say survived, barely) my final three papers and today was my final day of academic normalcy - everything from here-on-out is completely and utterly unknown - no more Lit, Bio, and Chem to worry about for the summer at least, which is very, very daunting but I did it, I made it through and hopefully my work paid off - we shall see in a few months time, but i’m not ready to think about that yet - Having to say goodbye to the people who have taught me for the past few years was difficult but I made it through with no tears, a few hugs and cards written, which was lovely, truly, and I’m grateful for every minute of it.

Other than completing the final obstacle toward the free-fall that Is adulthood (I say that as though the feat isn’t impressive, because it sure would be to me two years ago), only a few things have happened this week:

(I’m making this a list because who doesn’t adore lists? Perhaps only me, but that’s more than okay)

Stuff Your Kindle Day was yesterday, and my poor, poor kindle has to suffer with the acquisition of 50-odd books (I haven’t dared to count past that, and it was my first actual SYK day despite owning a kindle for 9 years), and I have no idea if it has the storage for it, so that’ll be fun to work through

I made a bet to watch star-wars, now of course i’ve seen most of it (movie-wise, definitely, and 3/4 of mandalorian minus s3 because let’s face it, I’m as behind on that as I am with Witcher, which is soon to be rectified but anyway redirecting back to Star Wars) but very little of the shows and it’s been so long I hardly remember the plots and such, which I’m very much looking forward to re-experiencing for the first “proper-ish” time - so I’m starting with Solo, then steadily working my way through ANH, ESB, ROTJ, Mando S1, Mando S2, Boba Fett, Mando S3, TFA, TLJ, TROS, TPM, AOTC, Clone wars (movie and plot-vital eps, I was given a list), ROTS, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka - all of this in exchange for my friend to watch The Boys (I’m going to rewatch it all, then finally see Gen V, hopefully in time before S4 ends and I can watch the last few eps as they come out, like I did with S3)

I decided I want to go on a trip over summer, just me, which is frankly terrifying but I’m really excited - I’m thinking of Bath, possibly, because the Jane Austen Museum is there (Persuasion is the love of my life and i’ve only read it twice, I also need to read more than simply that and Pride and Prejudice) and a few doors down is Mary Shelley’s Museum too! It’s a trip that’s doable in a day, by train, which is pretty perfect for my first solo excursion - so bear with me since that’s in the works

To end this list I’m slipping in a note about a brief-exchange that my delusional mind brands rom-com noteworthy (only it’s not, unless it maybe is? i’ll leave that to the reader to decide), I gifted my chemistry lab-partner a chocolate bar and a note of gratitude because it’s down to him that I survived the practicals (only kidding, I’m not THAT dangerous, but we were the most successful pair in the class which was pretty awesome), and enjoyed the chem course even more than I thought I would - and on the final day (today, insert anxious and clueless screaming because it feels far, far too soon for everything to be over) on the way out, he gifted me something in return - I never thought a chocolate bar would make me want to cry and giggle at the same time, but there you go (part of me prays he will not notice the existence of my Tumblr, but it’s possible, and if he ever reads this - I am so, so, sorry, but either way my appreciation is known, and that’s good enough for me, and he’s very, very sweet)

Now, what else is there to include in this section? Oh, I know! The nightmare that is the vast variety of things that entertain me - cough, slightly melodramatic of me, but you’ll see what I mean momentarily,

Books - I’m roughly 120 pages into the Wheel of Time, which I already know will become my LOTR (assuming that is an actual phrase and not something my brain has made up, which is highly likely regardless - it’s also a slight reference to Ready Player One, since Kira reread LOTR every single year), because who doesn’t love danger, fantasy, and a delicious almost undecipherable prophecy? If I don’t re-read this book every year I will be incredibly, incredibly surprised. Fighting sleep one night this week I sought out my kindle, which had been sorely unused these last couple years, and I started to read Interview With The Vampire, and I’ve spent a couple hours reading it today, I’m about 25% in according to Kindle stats, so I’ll see how it goes. Surprisingly though, I stumbled across Perks of Being A Wallflower on Kindle Unlimited today - and 5 hours later, with a couple of breaks scattered between, I finished it, about twenty minutes before writing this section - and let me tell you, that book was a LOT, but a good lot? i suppose? And I’m glad I finally got around to reading it - It’s also given me the urge to reread All The Bright Places which I read for the first time last summer, and it’s beautiful, and so, so good,

Shows - Seeing as it’s the weekend I’m making my way through Dexter, I’m currently 3/4 through S4 and loving it, it’s INSANE, I’m also watching Shameless US, I’m on S6 and it’s actually baffling me how much I’m enjoying it (Lip is my favourite character, and this season HURTS me with how much it hurts him, mild spoiler possibly? apologies if so), I’m also going to start rewatching the Boys as aforementioned, seeing the dark side of superheroes is so incredibly genius, if not disturbing, and there’s plenty of that in the show to look forward to experiencing again, so wish me luck dear reader,

Music - I listen to a LOT. That’s the honest truth. Lots of genres, lots of people, but I’ll try and pick out some of the things I’ve been listening to this week: Outlander S1&2 Soundtrack (I’ve only seen up to s2, and after reading the first book last month it was perfect timing for exam season), Like That by Bea Miller (I rediscovered this recently and it fits so well with the characters in my head, and even though I haven’t been writing lately, believe me, I’ve been plotting), Trouble by Camylio (it reminds me of the main characters in my currently not fully-written book, as in the work I need to complete/redraft after I finish Ruin’s Reprisal), Ludens by Bring Me The Horizon (does this song really need an explanation? It’s just that good) and finally, to finish off this little list of things that I’ve hearing a lot this week, The Other Side by Stephen Sanchez, which is so so good

Spills From The Ink-Pot - writing, writing, and more writing

Seeing as it’s Friday, and today is the start of my lengthy, well-needed summer, there’s not an awful lot I can tell you all for writing progress, but so far this weekend I did manage to re-read the chapter I’m editing and the progress I’ve made in it so far, which was super helpful, and by the end of this weekend hopefully I’ll have that chapter all finished, and then afterwards have a lot more to share with you all next week!

But to make up for my absence from writeblr and being unable to post anything these last few weeks, I’ll add this in:

Just a little glimpse into my workspace/theme/whatever you wish to call it on Scrivener - that's right, I'm a Scrivener girlie, and I'm so glad I invested in it last May (take part in NaNoWriMo camps folks, you get 50% off, which is what I did, aka £25 for permanent use as opposed to £50, which is still really good compared to Word etc, in my opinion) - and a sneak peek at some of my Chapter Titles, which I really do love coming up with,

(if it's blurry I do apologise, but you get the gist, hopefully)

Incase it’s not obvious, this account was written in parts, over the course of Friday and Saturday (11pm today, roughly), since I lost the battle against exhaustion and fell asleep before I could finish compiling this lengthy post (that’s not a complaint, i’m really enjoying writing this) so I’m finishing this very first post a tad later than initially planned, but these things happen, and that’s all right - you’ll also notice my battle with autocorrect and its capitalisation, sometimes I win, sometimes I lose, but I’d rather not go back and correct things this late at night, so apologies for that slight blunder but I promise the next post will be all properly formatted with headers and capitals (as soon as I figure out how to include headers, and make them, hopefully trusty procreate comes in handy, but we shall see)

So that’s it! The very first Written In Smoke is completed, compiled and heading your way - I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it, this is unknown territory for me and it feels as though I’m baring another piece of myself to the world, but it’s worth it, I knew it when this began, and I know it now as I write these last few lines, so if you’ve read this far - thank you, and I’ll see you all next week for the next entry in this series!

~ A Girl and Her Quill

p.s. if there’s anything else you’d like to know about, let me know! suggestions are greatly appreciated (cough, somewhat desperately needed because I have no idea what I’m doing)

p. p. s. being the utter genius I am, I pressed save as draft rather than post, so this is coming out even later than originally planned - whoops!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Tag List! (if you want to be notified when a WIS post comes out, interact with this post :) )

@lead-to-code @catwingsathena @nothoughtsjustmhaandotherthings @thestorywitch @lunaeuphternal

@theaistired @frostedlemonwriter

[h-worksrambles]

A while back on Reddit, I saw a post that asked ‘list your favourite and least favourite thing about every Kingdom Hearts game. And I thought that seemed like a pretty fun thought experiment. So I wrote down my own answer to that here: The best and worst thing about every Kingdom Hearts game (that I’ve played):

Kingdom Hearts 1 (my personal favourite)

The best thing: I’m tempted to say the story, because I think 1 does an especially good job at telling its otherwise simple story through the gameplay. But instead I’ll go for the general gameplay structure. KH1 is the only game in the series to remind me of a Zelda game. Instead of going all in on action RPG combat through hallway maps, the level design combines combat, exploration, puzzle solving and even platforming. No other game in the series has even attempted this since (KH3 came closest). And it greatly adds to the immersion. I would’t say any KH game has quite made you feel like you’re going through Disney worlds entirely. But KH1 is the closest and kinda reminds me of wandering through Disney theme parks. That immersion also adds to the sense of atmosphere, which is easily at it’s best on this game

The worst thing: The camera/controls. Platforming may be a nice splash of variety, but it’s a lot less less fun when it doesn’t actually control well. Sometimes it just feels like you’re being asked to do things the controls can’t reliably pull off. And the zoomed in camera makes combat visibility much worse. KH1 is already one of the tougher games in the series and this exacerbates that for the wrong reasons.

Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories

The best thing: The story. Sora and Riku are tested in new ways that showcase new sides to their characters. This was a good introduction for the Organization into the series. Marluxia is chilling as a main threat, and we get my boi Axel and my girl Larxene. They feel like a genuine threat and are mysterious but not exhaustingly vague. Donald and Goofy get proper character stuff for once. Riku’s arc is a standout that begins to subvert the series’ very black and white depiction of Light and Darkness in a way the series frankly hasn’t even attempted since.

The worst thing: The combat. I like customising decks but the actual combat falls apart in execution. Sleights are either godly, or pathetically weak with no inbetween. And every fight feels the same as they generally consist of spamming the same OP sleights in order to win…assuming the RNG gods bless you with the cards to actually pull off those sleights reliably.

Kingdom Hearts 2:

The best thing: The combat. God the gameplay in 2 is so good. You have so many more options than in the first game and practically all of them are viable. And Critical Mode especially practically demands that you know how to use all your tools effectively if you want to make it through. The controls and general flow are on point. It’s sharp, it’s kinetic, it has a low skill floor but a high skill ceiling. Absolutely superb.

The worst thing: The level design. Sadly 2 is where the series got so focused on combat that it turned into a hallway simulator. Instead of bringing back puzzles, platforming and exploration with the better controls, the game just cuts them out instead. This streamline the game sure, but now it lacks a lot of the flavour. And of course, this is largely done because your movement abilities are all tied to Drive forms, making them entirely optional, which I don’t think was a good move at all.

Haven’t played Days so no comment:

Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep:

The best thing: The soundtrack. This might be my favourite OST in the series. Aqua’s theme, Rage Awakened, Dismiss, Unbreakable Chains, a fantastic set of overworld themes (with Enchanted Dominion being my favourite). It’s varied, it’s evocative. It’s Yoko Shimomura firing on all cylinders.

The worst thing: The repetition. On a macro level, doing all 3 campaigns is very tedious. Terra, Aqua and Ventus’ stories aren’t distinct enough to make playing them feel varied. They all blur together outside of a few good moments. On a micro level, this version of the Command Deck has all the same problems as Re:COM. It’s shallow. easily broken, too dependent on RNG, and makes every fight feel the same.

Haven’t played Coded.

Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance (my least favourite not counting the mobile games)

The best thing: Symphony of Sorcery. One of, if not the best Disney worlds in the entire series. A fantastic musical gimmick to its sound design that makes the world feel weird and abstract in a way I wish more of DDD’s levels were. Actual platforming and light puzzle solving for the first time since KH1. And some good character stuff, including letting us see a younger Mickey, and the iconic Dearly Beloved scene between Sora and Riku.

The worst thing: The story. If you follow me, you’ve heard me give this rant before. A mess that constantly finds new ways to meander and waste your time, spends half its runtime nostalgically pandering to the previous games instead of doing anything new and butchers most of the characters. People give this game flack for the time travel but there frankly the least of my problems. The dream world premise screams wasted potential too. The only good thing is some very cute interactions between Sora and Riku, but both of them are so flanderised that even that feels hollow.

Dropped Union Cross after 200 or so chapters and just watched the cutscenes. TLDR, New characters are fun but the gacha is disgustingly invasive.

Kingdom Hearts 3:

The best thing: The variety. 3 bucks the trend of the handheld games with their heavy linearity and repetitive encounters with the most varied experience by far. You have more options in combat than ever, which means every encounter can be approached differently. It’s not quite as well balanced as 2, but I love just how much is at your disposal. The level design is FINALLY more open and closer in style to the first game and there’s just enough world gimmicks and minigames to spice things up. Exploring the sea in the Caribbean is easily my favourite of these gimmicks.

The worst thing: The pacing. I won’t say the story itself as my thoughts are very complicated and tbf, I don’t think BBS, DDD or X did a very good job setting up this finale. But 3’s pacing of its story is inexcusable. This game uses the exact same structure as DDD, and much like that game, it wastes your time. Clearing a world gets you a few cutscenes carrying on a couple of disparate plot threads, you get an Organization encounter mid world if you’re lucky, and everything else is crammed together at the very end. This game had FAR too much story to wrap up to afford to waste time like this. A restructuring of the first half alone to decompress the climax and allow for more character moments would do this story wonders, for all its other faults.

Haven’t played Melody of Memory.

And there you have it. The biggest pros and cons of each Kingdom Hearts game I’ve played. Which hopefully doubles as a kind of mini summary if my thoughts on the series as a whole. Feel free to reblog and tell me your favourite and least favourite parts of these games. I’d be interested to hear!

[k00299539]

Movement Project Week 3 - Animation 01 - Trust the Process...

So like I wrote before, I expected to begin Week 3 actually participating in a Workshop and I feel the need here to preemptively defend myself a bit and mention that I did in fact show up on Monday morning. I even emailed Mary Conroy who suggested I join the workshop on Week 4 instead, so I'm hiding behind that excuse for the moment.

Anyway with all the workshops halfway through their two week block structure, I realised I could now only attend a maximum of two workshops for this project or in other words, I'd missed the boat on one entirely. And even though I love animation, it was also the easiest to do at home by myself and thus received the boot.

So now I just have to produce some animated work at home by myself to the standard of quality expected from a hands on workshop with expert tutors... walk in the park... :(

Above: Deja Vue

I guess the first thing to do is refer back to my mind map and explain my thought process here. I think by now as I write this at the end of Week 4, I've come to understand "The Spiral" as my central theme, but the dumber version of me who existed a week ago somehow beat around that bush without ever landing on that keyword. I was seriously drawing spiral staircases while still unable put words to my thesis. Anyway...

My train of thought basically went from "Kinetic/Parabolic/Geometric" to "Rotation" to "Spiral Staircase". This later led me to wider influence of the "Op Art" (or optical illusion art) world.

Above: You have no long how far back I had to scroll to find this again...

Actually looking back on I'm slightly abridging the timeline here, after all this was whopping week-ish ago. The staircase idea likely took seed in my head after seeing the above gif online by indie animator @PunchUsagi on Twitter. The quality of their work speaks for itself obviously, but it was less the stellar character acting that captured me and more the (seemingly) simple* five frame background animation loop of a camera tracking down a spiral staircase. You can even see how clearly my sketch above borrowed from this animation.

*definitely, absolutely, factually, 1000% NOT easy...

Trying to replicate PunchUsagi's work led to a couple of complications. First, I tried so many times to imitate this looping staircase effect but short of tracing I just couldn't get it right. Second, even though I know I've seen this kind of effect in animation before (Yu Yu Hakusho) I can't for the life of me track down any good reference material. Short of having some kind of Dewey Decimal ass brain for animated staircase scenes, there's really no good way to search this kind of thing.

So having (temporarily, at least) shelved that after a series of attempts, I moved on to similar but slightly less challenging prospect; animating a revolving staircase, except from a static, head-on view. I thought this would be a good exercise to stretch my 3D muscles in Blender as I'd never attempted to make anything like that before. I had a rock solid plan though, it was called "The Array Modifier"

Above: I tried to make a GIF where I would navigate to the array modifier as some sort of joke and then I actually couldn't find it cause Blender 4.0 changed the menu around...

Moving on...

Above: Behold the awesome power of the array modifier, master of stairs and making thereof...

So naturally I made a cylinder as the column of the stairs and a step whose height was an even divisor of the cylinders length to ensure an proper fit. At time I had no idea how engineers and architects measured the amount of steps need to encircle the circumference of the central column, and as you might accurately infer from that sentiment, was in over my head as a certified stair expert...

Above: That which precipitates the fall...

A column and a step, all I need now is my trusty, handy-dandy, 100% absolutely failproof companion; the array modifier...

What could go wrong?

Above: What went wrong...

Oh no.

So I realised that the array modifier is great for making straight, linear, decidedly not-curving stairs. Of course this clashed greatly with my idea of a y'know, spiral staircase. It was back to the drawing board...

Above: My saviour

But not for long! As this slightly outdated video showcased a method where you create an empty Plain Axes object at the centre-point of the cylinder and use that as the offset for the array modifier. I don't know why it wouldn't work using the cylinder as the offset value but I'm going to assume it has something to do with God challenging me.

So with that figured out we were home free...

Above: Why?

Oh No.

Basically this was a result of me not understanding the engineering or architectural design behind spiral staircases, as I alluded to earlier. In fact I've actually been recreating all the screenshots for this post cause I'm stupid and never document anything, and I actually couldn't even replicate this mistake at first. That's correct I am unable to succeed at failure...

Anyway the problem was that I failed to align the steps to the centremost point of the cylinder, which is necessary for it to coil properly. The other mistake I made while less important structurally was equally displeasing aesthetically. If you want the steps to perfectly encircle the circumference of the cylinder, you have to actually plan ahead and do the math to ensure that outcome. This particular math has already left my head (to make room for all my clever thoughts, no doubt) but this video by a real guy with actual qualifications sums it up better than I could:

Above: My other saviour

And finally we're on to the end result. I am now a master 3D staircase maker, capable of bending geometry to my will... I can also make little animations like this cool turnaround!

Above: Literal minutes of hard work...

Tumblr looks to be fucking up that video so I'll re-render it and try again tomorrow but for today I honestly can't be arsed.

Looking back I've probably spent too much time covering the "How?" and not enough covering the "Why?". I'll rectify that in a later post and get more into what I want to accomplish using spirals in animation, but for now you can probably gauge my overall mental energy level from the second half of the above paragraph's lone sentence. For now, me tired, me sleep.

[iceclew]

Theories about my fav show on a lazy Saturday, well hello why yess??

But first things first, I'm HYPED for your OC!?! *throws half-eaten shawarma on the floor* *excited clapping* ヽ(๏ ∀๏ )ﾉ

I feel the struggle though... that's basically the reason I haven't made a proper kaiju OC yet... I just don't feel 100% comfortable with my concepts/designs… and I feel like I cannot properly grasp how I would do ”my take”  on kaijus ‘cause there is a lot of open bits, you still can fill in with you’re own imagination, such as how do they look like and why. Where as your close-up char study on kn8 is a GREAT inspiration for kaiju ideas!! (°A°)/

I had some cat or dog like kaiju ideas as well, but it didn't really click for me, so I have no proper use for them. But when I think of cat-like kaijus I have a strong vibe for Matatabi which is a more feral attempt, and for a more humanoid version I'm quick to think of a kitsune like version, but I also kinda feel some Anubis like vibes as well, with more black body parts. the body part is indeed the tricky one, because I so fcking want to add clothing... probably the reason why I went with my first option and went with a feral (not necessary standing version). in addition I played around with diff. poses, cause since we're doing humanoid morphs, it's a good thing to stretch anatomy a bit to get a diff. style.. I feel like heads are easier to me (once again lol) and I am struggling with bodies as well..

Anyway here's some of my studies/try outs. 1st one is very reference based, I just wanted to get a feel for several poses/designs.

Oh, and I’d like to add my ideas/assumptions for Kaijus as well here.  (oh yeah, peak English as always, for those you couldn’t have guessed lol)

where do kaijus come from? It’s still an unsolved question, and so the connection/fusion between kaiju and human is of course as well. So my theory starts at this point actually. *slaps whiteboard in the back* what is kaiju, my friends?!

the laws of physics are like a "don't know, don't care" situation, at least to some extent, since many of them fly (not the ones that fly like birds, I'm thinking of kn14), and besides, the attacks are not just bursts of energy, but for example streams of flying fish, water manipulation and so on..

which gets me to my next point, that is quite important when I think about design/concept: for now, I do not see any fixed regulations on what kaijus are made of or what they look like.. a big amount of them is “dragon skin”-like, with vital organs, ok.. But I feel like that’s not necessary the case for all of them. Examples: again KN14, Kn4’s wings, Maybe KN11 is more water-based/frog-like? xD, KN2 and KN8 having seemingly bone-like structures in the design, PLUS the yoju we saw right at the beginning of the series, that had an interesting stand-alone look with humanized face and fur parts, plus puppet like features to it (could be because the manga was very much at the beginning of the series, with a lot of things undecided yet, but still interesting to me) Then there's Bakku who is furry and very much looking like a real tiger. And last but not least there is KN15 that *could* be able to shapeshift (or it was an illusion, we don’t know that)

Short interlude, I head a moment of shock when I got back to the first red kaiju we see in the series, and realizing the scales and patterns resemble KN8 A FUCKING LOT???.. but again.. the dragonish-like style is sorta recurring ..f.ex. Kn2 has a very similar design as well..... nah..it's a long shot.. maybe just a wild guess even.. (also don’t mind me re-crying to first chp kafka and reno, because they are just . <3 ;_;)

BUT with all that said, I feel like there is still a pattern here? Like.. even if they do not all have all the same traids, miscellaneous things are popping up again and again. The skin, the scales, and also extra interesting to me - the spine and collarbone parts. And you know what I simply can’t wrap my head around just yet? Why is the combat suit looking like the KN8 design? The collarbone and the spine part? It is simply a meta design choice so Kafka would be a good pendant to Mina when in Kaiju form? probably?

So all this got me thinking - what if the kaijus original source is human based after all. Design and behavioral is based on cultural values, memories, inheritance, maybe actions... (maybe from individuals, but also larger groups, families, city’s population) → this would a.) explain regular reappearings from kaijus in special areas; b.) the phenomenon of kaijus to be more or less a problem solemnly in Japan (since the population could be bound to cultural premises) 

I admit this is rather close to the JJK approach of curses, but I would think of it more like - humans influence their surroundings, areas the life in, and the kaijus are like an earth born answer to it…? And their designs/traids are probably influenced by it. 

KN9 would be a creature that mastered altering these premisses by its will somehow, and Kafka might be one of the few humans that is not just subconsciously altering the kaiju’s form, but is also mixed into it. Therefore maybe kn8's body could have a big resemblance to Mina’s suit, since this is one of Kafkas deepest wishes, of what he would want to look like himself someday.

I would feel like there would be a lot of options for this constellation to work with greater time-spans as well... former carriers of ‘Tiny’ influenced the kaiju’s design/looks the ways you explained as well and now this is what came of it plus Kafka mixing in some combat suit ideas..without his knowing that is..

A bit of a Theory. {Kaiju Number 8}

So I've been spending some time sketching out this OC idea that I have and her whole thing is that she's like Kafka and is a half Kaiju. Her transformation is supposed to look like a mixture of Bakko (Mina's tiger) and Kaiju Number 8. I'm sitting here looking at the first take on the design and I'm hating it because it's just looking like a muscular Furry in a mask so I decide to add on some extra details to her Shoulders and Thighs/Waist to tie in the fact she's an offshoot of Kn8. As I'm turning design ideas in my head, I decide to have it take on a more samurai look as a sort of nod to the original host of the Kn8... bug? Dragonfly? Mini Kaiju? Progenitor? Progenitor. (From now on though, I'm just gonna use sonicsura's term for the thing and call it Tiny)

And I'm tossing the ideas around in my head and suddenly I'm thinking "Wait. Kafka doesn't have pauldrons in his design? And the Samurai does?" And now I'm wondering why that is? And the longer I'm thinking about it, now I'm wondering why he's wearing a suit in the first place?

(This is the only shot of the samurai that I can get off of Google images, apologies)

Now I can hear what you would be saying, "No shit he's wearing armor Zushi! He can't be caught by the public in that form, less they murder him on the spot!" I understand that is still very much the case and it's of course better to fight alongside a group of people when they aren't actively viewing you as a threat at the same time, so the armor in this case can help him blend into the crowd as he fights.

But hear me out for a second. Traditional samurai armor has a LOT of layers, and if they were wealthy enough (Which most were) they typically had a helper (Though, most were expected to have knowledge on how to put it on/take it off themselves) And I know we joke about Kafka's Kaiju form having a thick ass, but when paired with the idea of someone in that specific form, wouldn't it be difficult to don armor over an unusually shaped frame? Even if the armor was custom made and he had someone he trusted to help him put it on, I still think that the armor crafted would have a distinctly different look about it. So much so that I think that it would show up in history book, wouldn't it? You can't tell me that there wouldn't be a chapter dedicated to an oddly shaped samurai in and around the Meireki era that had notable displays of super strength and agility. He fought to help humans in their endeavor to protect humanity from the kaiju, he had to, at some point, do something crazy and superhuman considering we are just now seeing what that samurai went up against thanks to the latest chapter.

This is where most of my theory is. Kafka's Kaiju form didn't always look like that. My theory is that not only does Tiny function as a biological version of a Numbers suit, something happens at the point of the user's death and it absorbs whatever the user is wearing at that moment and recycles the fit onto the next user. I'm starting to think that in the first iteration of the human Kaiju form, it looked a lot different than what we have now. I'm leaning towards it looking something similar to the Colossal Titan from AoT.

No natural armor, just exposed, heightened muscle. That way, having the samurai armor makes more sense because now he has protection. Now he won't get injured as much as he taps into his super powers and can still move around easily AND blend in with the rest of the soldiers.

While we can't confirm for sure if the samurai is the only iteration of Kaiju Number 8, I'm going to again lean on the Numbers suit comparison and say that Kafka can only see the samurai due to 1) Tiny can sense what they're about to go up against and the Samurai is the most knowledgeable on the subject. Or it's most likely 2) The samurai is the most recent user and it has the easiest time coming to the forefront of Kafka's psyche. It should also be said that it's not said one way or the other whether or not Kaiju number 8, or more specifically Tiny, existed before Number 9's time, only that 8 really hates 9. I do want to point out something that I've noticed from the Kikoru verses 15 fight where she starts seeing her mother, that her mother is also wearing the Numbers suit. Which, I mean, sounds like another No Shit Sherlock situation, but I think it adds something interesting to the lore behind the suits

The suits can still "see" their wearer, even as a suit. While 10 is the only suit that can talk back, the others can, in a sense, invade the wearer's mind (Since the suits don't come with visors) and project an image of the previous wearer's actions, even down to what they were wearing at the time. Which, of course, makes sense because how could they if the suit isn't active any other time. Which brings me to my next question, "What if whatever Tiny is can do more than that?" If it already fundamentally changes the user into a Kaiju, core and all, who's to say it can't also absorb what they're wearing at the time?

And if that IS the case, why doesn't Kafka's Kaiju form look more like a samurai suit of armor instead of the glowing six pack that we get? Here's my ongoing thought. Let's assume for a second that the placement of the core doesn't change from User to User, since the placement of Kafka's core is centered around his heart (Thank you for the breakdown kujoestars). It can be confirmed via logic that the previous samurai is dead, but lets play with the how.

To kill a Kaiju, you hit its core, so to kill a Human shifting Kaiju, you hit its chest. What if the samurai got hit in the chest so hard, he not only died from it, it destroyed his chest plate. So when he died, the only thing that ended up getting absorbed at time of death was his helmet, his face mask, and his pants, leaving his chest open in the next iteration and thus revealing the glowing six pack we've come to love! (And some of us hate, but we ignore them because we don't care, it's glow-in-the-dark abs.)

I don't know about you, but I feel better having said this. Even if I'm going to be called crazy and be debunked seven ways from Sunday. And I'm also aware that this might not be the easiest to follow along, but all this is coming from some half formed thoughts that I had at the tail end of my work day, so excuse the shitty frame work.

(Bonus thought. If this is the case and Kafka dies (IN THE DISTANT FUTURE) he's probably more than likely going to be wearing the defense force suit. If the next reincarnation on n8 puts on a defense force suit (and we're assuming they're going to be even more technologically advanced at this point) what would happen? Would it still read a 0%, or would it give an Error 404 code and say something like "It is not advisable to wear one suit over the other" "Uuuhhh... they're not wearing another suit..." "Huh, that's weird, don't know why THAT could be happening. *Sweating bullets*"

[wordsandrobots]

It occurs to me that I've now watched all the past Gundam shows I'm inclined to. So how about a totally arbitrary personal ranking? Here are brief opinions on each iteration of the franchise I've seen, mostly surface-level, bad to good, intended purely to get them out of my head and mark the 'achievement' of having binged quite so much giant robot nonsense. Every one of these shows will be someone else's favourite and I respect that. I too have things I like a lot that other people don't. That's how it goes.

(I stress this chiefly because there's a new Gundam airing right now and that probably makes this a really bad time to start weighing in with opinions on the internet. For the record, I am watching The Witch From Mercury too, but consider it way, way too early to say what I think of it.)

So, first up, let's exclude the ones I bounced off too hard to finish, which are Mobile Suit Victory Gundam (1993) and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED (2002). I quit each after a few episodes, so I don't feel like I can form a proper assessment beyond 'I didn't like it'. I will probably continue with Mobile Fighter G Gundam (1994) some day but that too is hovering at the 'I'm not sure this is worth it' mark – it's just not the kind of show I enjoy.

Also – honourable mention for Code Geass. Utterly batshit crazy, tonally all over the shop, and possibly the worst attempt at anti-imperialism I've ever seen in my life. If that's even what it was going for, which I am not sure it was. Frequently delightful anyway and the slashiest closing art you could imagine.

Now on to the Gundam shows I actually got through. Mild spoilers to follow so everything else will go under this cut.

Mobile Suit Gundam AGE (2011) – Actively fascistic. Not intentionally, I don't think, but while it's got a decent structural conceit, it's off with the birds in its grasp of how conflicts actually work and ends up relentlessly painting an abandoned underclass as the aggressors. I realise part of the point is flipping that around at the end. My point, though, is that it fails to land in the worst way possible. Plus all three of its protagonists are extremely irritating.

Mobile Suit Gundam F91 (1991) – I . . . can barely remember anything that happened except that watching this was like pulling teeth.

Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory (1991) – Top Gun with mobile suits was an experiment worth doing but the cast is pure cardboard.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack (1988) – I originally watched this without the full context of the preceding series and honestly, coming back afterwards doesn't really improve things. I'm not sure I have a strong opinion, except that a lot of it feels deeply mean-spirited.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway (2021) – I'm dropping this low primarily because I despise the battle animations. They make the mistake of assuming 'at night' means 'dialling the contrast down' and it undercuts the visuals entirely. Textbook example of poorly implemented CGI ruining an otherwise well-thought-through creative decision. Beyond that, it's mostly OK, I guess.

Mobile Suit Gundam (compilation movies; 1979) – Yes, I wimped out on watching the whole thing but in my defence, I don't like Amuro Ray very much. That said, there's a real charm to the animation that very few of the other series ever match. This show renders guys being dorks like nothing else. And I do absolutely see why it lasted. It's a rough first draft but there's a lot to get the teeth into, even if it is, ultimately, not my thing.

Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket (1989) – Technically leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessors both in terms of animation and story construction. Absolutely unafraid to be soul-crushingly cynical, which works to its advantage. Also not my thing but I respect its ambition.

Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt (2015) – Same, really. Plus a test case in how far empathy for people on the side of the space-Nazis can be pushed. Actually, it's worth pausing on that because the contrast being 'extremely psychopathic' Federation pilot Io and 'generally sweet-ish' Zeon pilot Daryl highlights the grey vs grey morality inherent to the Universal Century (UC) timeline. At its best, that leads to genuinely nuanced stories about what conflict does to both people and ideals when various factions use them to vie for power. At its worst, it leads to a total muddling of audience sympathy and political message. Thunderbolt is, I think, squarely in the middle.

Mobile Suit Gundam 00/Mobile Suit Gundam 00 the Movie: A Wakening of the Trailblazer (2007/2010) – This, for me, is what's called a Curate's Egg – parts of it are very good. Get yourself someone who looks at you the way Patrick Colasour looks at Kati Mannequin. Or if you're into it, the way Kati looks at Patrick. The super-soldier stuff is interesting in ways the Newtype idea generally isn't. And random cross-dressing is always welcome. However, I can't say I like it overall. Rooting early sections in 'resolving' real-world conflicts is tasteless and it's the epitome of Gundam not understanding pacifism as an ideological position. It also plays straight the idea of humanity making an evolutionary leap to godhood, which I don't enjoy for a wide variety of reasons.

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (1985) – Honestly, I'm mainly giving this such a high ranking because the English dub gives Char such an incredibly sexy voice. On balance, I'd say I enjoyed more of this than I did of 00, but it probably ought to go lower for being an example of that thing a lot of Gundam shows do which is having interesting female characters, then doing feck all with them or mashing them into teeth-gnashingly bad unrequited love subplots.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Unicorn (2010) – I am putting this ahead of 00 and Zeta because it's a technically superior piece of story-telling, with a much clearer idea of what it's doing. And it does indeed do some things very well; they're just not ones I gel with.

Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ (1986) – And now to stress that quality does not necessarily equate to enjoyment, here's the comedy one placing above Zeta and Unicorn. Well. 'Comedy'. It's not necessarily especially funny. But I find the characters and set-up to be generally more appealing than a lot of the UC shows, and some of the slapstick works pretty nicely. Plus, you know. Haman Karn. Who doesn't love a dastardly villainess? (I actually do think she's one of the more interesting UC antagonists, albeit mainly when she's in active contrast to the others.)

Mobile Suit Gundam Wing/Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz (1995/1997) – I am delighted by the story Gundam Wing's many fans have hallucinated into existence. I genuinely think it's a lovely example of how fandoms construct and expand on things only gestured to in the original text. Which is the nice way of saying coming back to this 15 years on from first watching it was a bit of a slog. There's something very theatrical about Wing, in that it does a lot with narration and flimsy set-dressing. It's insanely ambitious in what it's attempting and I have a lot of nostalgic affection for it. But in the end, I think it's less than the sum of its parts.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Twilight AXIS (2017) – Very lightweight and inessential. Nevertheless, an interesting exercise in telling a complex story with extremely limited space.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin (2015) – OK, fine, I'll admit it. I might not rate a lot of the Universal Century stuff but watching Char connive his way to power is fun. And this assays the original animation style very well, even if the CGI mobile suits jar in the extreme. Overall, this is a case of general quality boosting where I'm prepared to rank it.

Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative (2018) – Proves you can go a long way with a decent soundtrack. Also, I think I prefer stories about people caught up in the wake of Newtypes than about the Newtype characters themselves. Benefits from knowing the wider UC backstory going in and not necessarily 'good', but definitely enjoyable.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team (1996) – Dumb as rocks, driven solely by machismo and excitement, very dodgy in its handling of sexual politics, and the single most fun piece of UC media I have watched. A case of hitting a genre so squarely in the bullseye, forgiving its faults is easy. Gundam as an 80s action flick and it knows it. Has one of the few UC protagonists who fully commits to giving the Federation two middle fingers and peacing out of their bullshit, and ends in a surprisingly sweet and thoughtful manner.

Gundam Reconguista in G (2014) – I could not begin to describe to you the plot of Reconguista and I'm not sure anyone involved in writing it could either. However, I did find the main characters to be a delightful bunch of total numbskulls to hang around with for twenty-six episodes. Also one of the more successful aesthetic shifts in the Gundam franchise. I suspect this is the one that will have the greatest influence on the current iteration's look and feel.

After War Gundam X (1996) – I covered much of my thoughts on this already. A great final act twist and all the benefits of streamlining over continuity wrangling. Nicely focused on the idea that what humanity screws up, humanity can undo (in both senses of the word). I admit to ranking this highly partly to spite the reviews quoted on Wikipedia, which are straight up wrong; it does have a lot of flaws, just not the ones those reviews point to. But also I really enjoyed it. It does Wing's breakneck geopolitics better and UC-esque themes with greater clarity. I'd love to see this setting and cast developed more, so it's a shame it's joined Reconguista in G as the also-ran of the franchise.

Turn A Gundam (1999) – Where to even start? Beautiful to look at, audaciously clever in how it relates to the other Gundam series, a wonderful, engaging cast of characters, and the splendour that is Harry Ord's fashion sense. Manages the rare trick of having an intelligent, genuinely meaningful identity switch plot, as well as showing that Gundam can treat pacifism with respect and real engagement if it tries. Brought down in places by lazily racist genre tropes and gets a touch rushed towards the end, but overall a very solid show. All this and the main mobile suit is referred to by its moustache throughout. What more could you want?

Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans (2015) – This. I mean, this is what more I could want. After making the experiment over the last year and change, I'm quite happy to declare that I am not a Gundam fan, I'm an Iron-Blooded Orphans fan. For me, this one stands head and shoulders over the rest in terms of plot, characters, aesthetics and general vibe. While I've enjoyed going back and seeing first hand where the self-references come from, I think this is the only Gundam show that is ever going to occupy so much real-estate in my mind as to fixate me on writing fan-fic for a solid year and a half. I won't bore you by repeating stuff I've said in my other posts on the subject. However, I would quite honestly recommend this as A Good Show to anyone interested in the mecha anime genre, with the upfront warning that it is plotted as a tragedy and should be approached as such.

And there you have it. Again, this is all personal feelings and not intended as any slight on anyone with a different opinion (I will probably look at you askance if you say AGE is your favourite, but only because I had such a visceral negative reaction to it, it's going to take me a while to be open to reassessing). Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to being pathetically ill in the most annoying way possible.

[the-desolated-quill]

WandaVision: ‘Subverting’ Good Television - Quill’s Scribbles

(Spoilers for the first five episodes)

Hey everyone! Well... it’s been a while, hasn’t it? The last time I wrote a proper review or Scribble, people still thought the COVID crisis would be over within a month. The poor saps. But I thought that as a special way to mark this year’s Valentines Day, we could take a closer look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s shittiest power couple in their new Disney+ show WandaVision.

The first of many MCU spin-off shows that nobody asked for, broadcast exclusively on Disney’s totally unnecessary streaming platform, WandaVision is about everybody’s favourite whitewashed Nazi experiment and her red sexbot boyfriend as they try to fit into a suburban sitcom neighbourhood without arousing suspicion.

Yes, you read that correctly. The MCU has a sitcom now. My life is now complete.

Sarcasm aside, I was legitimately curious about WandaVision because of its unusual setting. And considering one of my most common criticisms of the MCU is its total lack of creativity, anything that’s even a little bit subversive is bound to attract my attention. Of course ‘subversive’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘good.’ I could hand you a canvas smeared with my own shit and call it subversive. That doesn’t necessarily make it good art. And that’s exactly what WandaVision is. A canvas smeared with shit.

So lets split this critical analysis/review/angry bitter rant into two distinct chapters. The first focusing on the plot and setting, and the second focusing on the characters. Okay? Okay.

Chapter 1: Bewitched

Critics seem to be utterly enamoured with the whole sitcom gimmick, and it is a gimmick. As far as I can tell from the episodes I’ve seen, the sitcom setting serves no real purpose whatsoever other than to make the show ‘quirky.’ Which I wouldn’t mind, believe it or not, if the show was actually funny. There’s just one problem. It’s not.

Now in some ways describing why a sitcom doesn’t work is often futile because comedy is largely subjective. What I find funny, you won’t necessarily find funny and vice versa. With WandaVision, however, I won’t have that problem. I can demonstrate to you precisely why WandaVision, objectively, isn’t funny. And it all comes down to one simple thing. The stakes. Or rather the complete and total absence of stakes.

The show makes it very clear from the beginning that none of what we’re seeing is real. The cheesy theme song, the era appropriate special effects (mostly. It’s actually very inconsistent), the joke commercials, and, in the case of the first two episodes, which are in black and white, the appearance of red lights and objects in Scarlet Witch’s general vicinity. (Gee, what a mystery this is).

Basically Wanda has brought Vision back from the dead and created this sitcom world for them to inhabit. I’ll explain the stupidity of this in Chapter 2. The point is none of this is real, and that has a negative effect on the comedy because the very nature of comedy is suffering. Take the plot of the first episode. Wanda and Vision have to prepare a dinner to impress Vision’s boss. If they fail, Vision could lose his job and the couple could be exposed as superheroes. If this were a normal sitcom, it would work. The stakes are clear and it would be satisfying to see the two struggle and overcome the odds. But here, we know it’s not real. If it’s not real, it means there’s no stakes. If there’s no stakes, it means there’s no suffering. If there’s no suffering, there’s no comedy.

It would be one thing if the unfunny sitcom stuff lasted for like the first ten minutes or so before making way for the actual plot, but it doesn’t. Oh no. It doesn’t even last for the first episode. Out of the five episodes I’ve watched, four of them are almost entirely about these unfunny, objectively flawed sitcom homages, each set in a different time period. The fifties, the sixties, and so on. And what’s worse is that nothing that happens in them is plot-relevant. That gets relegated to the last five minutes of an episode. So you’re forced to sit through twenty five minutes of boring slapstick and puns in order to catch even a whiff of actual story. Which begs the question... who is this for exactly? It can’t be entertaining to Marvel fans, who have to slog through all this pointless shit so they can figure out what the fuck is going on. Comedy fans may get a kick out of the sitcom pastiche at first, but after four episodes, surely the joke would wear thin. So why is it in here? Clearly someone in the writer’s room absolutely fell in love with the idea of doing a Marvel sitcom, but nobody put in any time or effort to figure out how it would work in context.

I cannot stress enough how bad the plotting of this series is. As I said, the vast majority of a thirty minute episode is about shitty sitcom plots that aren’t funny and don’t have any impact on the story, only to then tease you with a crumb of actual plot in order to keep you coming back for the next instalment. Admittedly it’s an effective strategy. I was more than ready to quit after Episode 2 until that beekeeper showed up out of the sewer (don’t ask. It’s not important). WandaVision essentially follows the Steven Moffat school of bad writing. String your audience along with the promise that things might get more interesting later on and that all the bullshit that came before will retroactively make sense by the end. Except, as demonstrated with BBC’s Sherlock, that doesn’t work. And even if it did, it wouldn’t justify wasting the audience’s fucking time. And that’s what the majority of WandaVision is. A waste of time.

The only episode that doesn’t follow the sitcom format is the fourth episode. Instead it basically exists to explain all the shit that happened before. The shit that the audience, frankly, are smart enough to figure out for themselves. Wanda created the sitcom world as a way of coping with the loss of Vision, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, we got it. Thanks. It doesn’t advance the plot or anything. It’s just a massive info-dump. But by far the lowest point was when Darcy (by far the most annoying character in the first Thor film and is just as obnoxious here) was sat in front of the TV, watching the sitcom and asking the same questions we were. Not even attempting to look for answers. Just reiterating what the audience is thinking. Like this is an episode of fucking Gogglebox.

In the end it becomes apparent why the series is structured the way that it is. It’s to hoodwink people into subscribing to Disney’s stupid streaming service. If you think about it, there was no reason for WandaVision to be a TV series other than to lure gullible fans in with a piece-meal story buried in a mountain of crap. This isn’t a TV show. It’s what is cynically known in the world of big business executives as ‘content.’ They’re not interested in entertaining the audience. Instead they crave ‘engagement’, which isn’t the same thing. Watching WandaVision is like staring into the void, waiting for something to happen, while Disney charge you for the privilege.

Chapter 2: I Love Lucy

So the plot sucks balls. What about the characters? Surely if Wanda and Vision are likeable at least, it’ll give us something to cling onto.

Well as I was watching the first episode, it suddenly hit me that I couldn’t remember anything that happened to them in previous films. I knew Vision died, but other than that, I couldn’t tell you significant plot details or their personalities or anything. Not a great start.

See, up until now, Vision and Scarlet Witch have been little more than background characters. So already there’s an uphill struggle to get us invested in their relationship, especially considering we haven’t actually seen that relationship develop. In Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Scarlet Witch is killing people because she’s pissed off about Tony Stark killing people (you work that one out) until all of a sudden she stops and joins the good guys because the script said so. Vision meanwhile is introduced as a convenient deus ex machina to beat Ultron and gets no real personality other than he’s a robot. Captain America: Civil War comes the closest to giving Wanda a story and personality of her own as it’s her actions that cause the Sokovia Accords to come into effect, but she never gets any real growth or payoff as the film is heavily focused on Cap and Iron Man’s penis measuring contest. And as for Vision, all he does in the film is accidentally cripple War Machine. No real character or arc there as such. And then we have Avengers: Infinity War, where Wanda and Vision are now sporadically in love and on the run until that pesky Josh Brolin, looking like a CGI cross between Joss Whedon and a grumpy grape, comes along and rips out Vision’s Infinity Stone to power up his golden glove of doom, and the film treats this like a tragic moment, except... it isn’t. Because we haven’t really had the time to properly get to know these characters and see their romance blossom. So instead it just comes off as hollow and forced.

WandaVision has the exact same problem. Apparently Wanda was so distraught about Vision’s death that she broke into a SWORD base, stole his corpse, brought it back from the dead... somehow, and then enslaved an entire town of people to create an idyllic lifestyle for her and her hubby while broadcasting it as a sitcom to the outside world... for some reason. Putting aside the dubious morality of it all, it’s impossible to really sympathise with Wanda or her supposed grief because we’ve barely spent any time with her. Had the Marvel movies taken the time to properly explore the characters and show us their relationship grow and develop, this might have had more emotional resonance. But no, it just happens. In one film they barely speak to each other and in the next they’re a couple. No effort to explore how they feel about each other or any of the problems that may arise trying to date a robot. It just happens and we’re just supposed to care. Well I’m sorry, but I don’t care. You’re going to have to try a little bit harder than that I’m afraid. What’s worse is that, thanks to the whole fake sitcom thing, it’s impossible to really become invested in Wanda and her plight because the show has to constantly keep us at arms length at all times in order to keep up the pretence that this bullshit is somehow mysterious.

Looking through the WandaVision tag, it amuses me how many people say that she’s acting out of character. And yeah, her actions are a bit of a head scratcher. Why would an Eastern European’s ideal life be an American sitcom? Why a sitcom? Why kidnap an entire town? Why keep changing the decade? None of it makes sense, but you’re wrong for thinking that Wanda is behaving out of character for the simple reason that Wanda has never actually had a character. In fact, ironically, Wanda mind controlling an entire town and forcing them to do her bidding is probably the one consistent thing about her as she did this in Age Of Ultron. In interviews, Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany described how they used actors like Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick Van Dyke as influences, which is really funny because they’re straight up admitting they don’t have characters and even now they’re still not playing the characters, instead emulating the work of far better actors.

As I was watching the show, it became abundantly clear that not only do Marvel not have the faintest idea what they wanted to do with these characters, but they also straight up don’t give a shit about these characters. Wanda in particular has had a rough time under the tyrannical regime of the House of Mouse. First they cast Elizabeth Olsen, a white woman, to play a Romani character, then systematically erasing her Jewish roots, even going so far as to put a cross in her bedroom in Civil War, and now the character is being butchered even more by forcing her into an American sitcom housewife role that she apparently willingly chose for herself, which is laughable. I mean say what you like about Magneto in the X-Men films, at least they actually depicted his Jewish culture. At least they recognised his Jewish background was important (though not important enough to cast a Jewish actor apparently). Wanda’s steady cultural erasure over the years is incredibly insidious and judging by Olsen’s comments in interviews, where she called Wanda’s comic book outfit a quote ‘gypsy thing’ unquote, it seems nobody has an ounce of fucking respect for the character or the culture she’s supposed to be representing. (and to all those kissing her arse saying it was a slip of the tongue, she has been repeatedly called out for using the slur in the past, so at this point I’d describe her behaviour as wilful ignorance)

If you want further proof of how much Marvel doesn’t seem to care about Wanda, look no further than her brother Pietro, aka Quicksilver. At the end of Episode 5, Wanda brings Pietro back from the dead, except it’s not Pietro. It’s Peter Maximoff, the Quicksilver from the X-Men films played by Peter Evans, who coincidentally is not Jewish or Romani either. So Quicksilver has the dubious honour of not only being whitewashed three times, but also twice within the same franchise. But should we really be surprised at this point? It’s Marvel after all. The same company that whitewashed the Ancient One in Doctor Yellowface and claimed it wasn’t racist because Tilda Swinton is ‘Celtic’. But now I’m going off topic. My point is that this isn’t a simple case of recasting an actor like Mark Ruffalo replacing Edward Norton as the Hulk. WandaVision actually acknowledges the recast in-universe, which makes no sense. Why would Wanda bring back her brother, only to make him look like a different person? We the audience may be familiar with this version of Quicksilver, but she isn’t. That would be like me bringing my Grandad back to life and making him look like Ian McKellen. He’d be perfectly charming, I’m sure, but he wouldn’t be my Grandad. 

If Marvel really cared about the characters or narrative consistency, they would have brought Aaron Taylor Johnson back. Instead, now they have absorbed 20th Century Fox into the hellish Disney abyss, they use X-Men’s Quicksilver as a means to keep viewers from switching off and so that people will write stupid articles and think pieces about whether the rest of the X-Men will show up in the MCU. It’s like dangling your keys in front of a toddler’s face to distract them from the rotting corpse of a raccoon lying face down in the corner of the room.

And it’s here where I decided to stop watching the show because fuck Disney.

Epilogue: One Foot In The Grave

You know, I am sick and tired of the so called ‘professional’ critics bending over backwards to praise these god awful films and shows when it’s so clear to anyone with a functioning brain cell how bad they truly are. WandaVision is without a doubt one of the most cynically produced and poorly structured TV shows I’ve ever seen. Its riffs on classic sitcoms are pointless and self-indulgent, the writing is terrible, the characters are unlikable and unsympathetic, and it’s entirely emblematic of what the entire MCU has become of late. And it’s only going to get worse as Disney drowns us with more ‘content’ to keep the plebs ‘engaged’. In short; pathetic.

[odi-et-amo85]

edit: All of these are my personal viewing experiences. I tried my best to be polite about them, but please don’t be rude when my opinions aren’t the same as yours. 🙏

I know that someone (might have been a mutual) tagged me in this, but the tag didn’t work. Yet I saw my url and thought by myself, “I should remember this.” 😬 Yet a week has passed (of me postponing and not being sure whether I could fill out the whole thing), and now I have forgotten who the kind person was who selected me for this challenge. Whoever you are, kob khun ka. 💚 So, here we go:

1. Your all time favourite bl and why: This has to be A Tale of 1,000 Stars; I cannot explain exactly what it is that makes it so unforgettable for me. Perhaps it’s because it was my very first BL. But whatever it is, the entire atmosphere around it makes it my all time fave: the unconventional story, the characters, the underlying message, the location, the humour, the metaphors (hornbills my beloved 🥰). Whenever I feel gloomy I go back to AToTS, and I use the OST as my goodnight music. In short, this one has a special place in my heart.

2. That one bl that scarred you for life: That would have to be Until We Meet Again. No hate, because overall I like the show quite a lot. (Cute main couple, lovely second couple, I could see the structure of the script was pretty well constructed. What rubbed me the wrong way was the way UWMA handled KornIn’s suicide. Suicide is already a very heavy subject, and the reason for it in UWMA is even more heartbreaking. On top of that the explicit manner in which the suicide scene was filmed. My criticism is not intended as a conservative stance against any “taboo” or “contentious” subject. (For heaven’s sake, ≈ 90% of my tv experience consists of lgbtqa+ content!) But I do think that as a show runner you should pay a lot of attention to how (segments of) your production may come across. Especially whenever you include events in your script that either show people affected by some kind of mental illness (and yes, I think feeling so despairing that you think taking your own life is the only option left for you qualifies) or the serious problems members from the lgbtqa+ community encounter (in this case parental homophobia so severe that it drives both sons to do the unthinkable). I think media should first and foremost be entertaining. Not the cause of many triggers and ripped open wounds. You may call me a nitpicker for this, but I think UWMA could have done better in this respect. Finally, what bothered me were the “flashback” scenes in which Dean and Pharm were confronted with vivid memories of a trauma that wasn’t even their own. Truly, I get the concept of Until We Meet Again. And I can certainly appreciate that idea. But I think the same effect could have been achieved with a less intense visualisation of something so psychologically taxing as suicide.

3. Is there any bl that made you feel very single: I am actually single 😂, but if I’m honest, I don’t mind it one bit. In fact, in this stage of my life, I like being on my own. So I can’t name a show here; for the simple reason that I don’t have any negative feelings about being single. 🤷‍♀️

4. If you could change one thing from a bl, which one would it be? I would probably get rid of a couple of side-plots in Oxygen, so that Phu and Kao could get a proper development of their love story. I really liked their dynamics and I thought the idea of genuinely having to winning someone’s trust –rather than “just” winning someone’s heart– was a very original plot. Phu had serious issues with bonding with anyone, not just Kao, and the plot that we saw depicted revolved wholly around Phu trying to open up, and Kao attempting to win Phu’s trust. That was beautiful to see, but I would have loved to see them really get together at some point. Maybe this series just deserves a season 2 🤔, or they should have made PhuKao’s subplot less complicated. Anyhow, this was just a waste of potential.

5. That one bl you detest (don’t hold back): Obviously I could’ve gone for really problematic shows like TharnType. But that would be a choice of which I didn’t really expect a lot to begin with. So instead my answer would be this… Please, please promise you won’t all desert me for this. 🙀 Here we go: Make It Right. BAM, there you have it. And the reason…apart from the (ususal) cringe expressions and inappropriate sex jokes, it’s a pretty small segment of the entire show. But it’s the scene where Frame “overpowers” (sorry I don’t know how else to describe it than that) Book on the bed and tries to kiss him. Book clearly isn’t into it, and objects, but to no avail. A sort of intense house track starts playing and it’s clearly implied they take things to the next level. Curiously, “the day after,” everything seems to be quite okay. But the whole scene leading up to this is just very very problematic and borderline assault to me. What frustrates me the most about this, is that in the remainder of MIR Book and Frame are an adorable couple. It’s touching to see how patient Book is with Frame when the Frame gets depressed. But the aforementioned thing just ruins it all for me. As for the other couples, they were fine I guess but not very impressionable to me. I think the premise of this bl show was good, but the execution made it a disappointing experience for me.

6. Your top 5: 1.) Not Me; 2.) My Engineer; 3.) He’s Coming to Me; 4.) Ingredients; 5.) Dark Blue Kiss

7. That trashy bl that you lowkey like: 2 Moons 2 (I don’t whether this generally considered “trashy”, but it’s my guilty pleasure 🤭)

8. Your favourite Korean bl (it’s important we know): That has to be You Make Me Dance. ☺️ I have a huge weakness for dance combined with romance in tv series. Must be some kind of adolescent nostalgia… 🥲 Why that is, you can read here.

9. But also your top 3 for kbls: Honestly, YMMD is the only Korean BL I ever watched! 🙈 So, I am going to cheat and answer with a top 3 non-Thai BLs. 🤫 1.) Utsukushii Kare 🇯🇵; 2.) Papa & Daddy 🇹🇼; 3.) Mr. Cinderella 🇻🇳

10. Season 2? Which One? Oh, definitely My Engineer (but I’m pretty sure we’re not going to get it rip 😢)

11. A bunch of dramas will air soon. Which ones are you most excited for? Between Us (don’t know whether this is a 2nd season or a parallel story) – Moonlight Chicken & Cupid’s Last Wish (bc EarthMix 😸, but I feel more confident about the former one) – Never Let Me Go (I have a very strong feeling this one is either going to be legendary good or legendary trash 👀) – Check Out (I will be honest, this one is not necessarily about the plot 🙆‍♀️)

12. Tag them! Please only do it if you want to, no pressure! Tbh, I think the vast majority of my bl mutuals has already done this. But if you haven’t, please consider yourself tagged! 😘

@thequeenofsastiel (bc I’d like to hear more of your opinions 🙂)

@onstoryladders (so you have someone who tagged you <3)

@noxclara (so you’ll watch more bl 😌)

@ghosttotheparty (bc you’re awesome and I just wanted to tag you ^^ -> and perhaps a new interest of yours will emerge 😉)

[beautifulterriblequeen]

B2:S - Chapter 4

Much of this series will be about the differences and additions in the novel version, and how they contribute to my understanding of story canon. But there will be character appreciation, the odd theory and headcanon, and suchlike as well.

Here be Viren being villainous, Rayla, Claudia, Soren, and Callum, and tons of culture clash themey stuff

and a tw: animal death, Claudia why

Spoilers for Book Two: Sky below.

Viren's scenes in Book Two: Sky are all amazing because they're full of worldbuilding and character building details. I love to study the word choices used from his perspective. They're so tasty. Like how he forced a servant, and also Soren, to carry his messages to the rookery, so that he never had to go himself. I'm really curious why Viren is forcing a servant, whose job is literally to serve, here. He really only has to ask. Maybe he was mean about it on purpose, or maybe he picked a servant who was afraid of birds just to flex on them. Whatever the reason for the word choice, Viren doesn't seem to like servants' jobs, it seems, especially when they take him somewhere with poop on the floor. It makes it all the more ironic that he sweeps Runaan's cell clean himself, then, humbling himself before he finally figures out the mirror.

Viren's secretive, right down to his very carefully chosen words to those around him, but his true thoughts shine through even more clearly in the book than in the show. He knows he's been sneaking and hiding stuff, and he knows that some of those actions would be called treachery. Stealing the king's seal to forge royal documents is up there on the treacherous list, but it's apparently not there alone. Ah, Viren, such a villainous delight. What have you gotten up to?

The way he thinks of and treats Crow Master is ageist and classist, but certain lines also hint that Viren has spent a lot of time memorizing the finer points of proper courtesy, and he expects others to have done the same. There are many reasons someone might put forth such effort: a commoner trying to better himself to be noticed by a kind prince is a nice version. A sociopath learning to fake caring about rich people so he can blend in with them is less nice. Superconveniently, the skills a young, earnest Viren might use to feel worthy of Harrow's attention will serve him just as well when dark magic ravages his empathy and he has to lie to everyone about how dead he is inside in order to keep his position of power. Until he's not lying anymore and he straight up threatens poor Crow Master with death unless he sends illegal mail for him. There's the Viren we know and uhhhhhh

Rayla and the blue rose! It's so fun to see inside her head here. She acted swiftly in the last chapter to save herself from Claudia's sleep spell, but now that she has to lie there, that thorn really hurts! She wishes she maybe had a different plan instead of playing asleep.

I hope Rayla only calls Claudia's voice "awful" because of association. I love Claudia's raspy voice! It's so neat! Rayla immediately recognizes it as Claudia's, from the castle and identifies her as a dark mage, with a clanky-metal warrior beside her. She gets mad at Soren for apparently calling killing a sport, even though that's not what he said at all. Soren's using an unfamiliar, maybe old-fashioned term, and Rayla's taking it very literally. It's like Viren and Runaan are arguing through them. A fun little example of culture clash.

Also digging the fact that Rayla knows what sleeping breathing looks like, as opposed to awake breathing, for the purposes of faking someone out. Did she just. Perch in a tree over Runaan and Ethari as they napped after a picnic and watched them sleep, or did Runaan help her sneak around the Silvergrove to spy on sleeping elves for training purposes? Also, raise your hand if you've faked sleep breathing to fool someone. that's not just me right

Rayla's sass is a constant delight. Whenever she's up against an enemy, she is outwardly fearless and full of witty taunts and comments, and I love her so much. where could she have learned this from I also love that she can't help but flex on Soren about her technique. It seems that her attitude is part "never show fear" and part "humans are liars."

Claudia and Soren were trying to kill Rayla to save the princes from her. But Rayla was also intent on killing both of them right back. And she wasn't ever gonna tell Callum and Ez about that. Woah. First Harrow, now this. That whole "death and secrets" thing really sank in with her, didn't it? Crack voice in the back of my brain: Ethari does know Runaan stabs people, right, he does know that?

Interesting change of detail from show to book: in the show, Claudia overheats Rayla's swords with some green splattery goo from a little glass jar. In the book, uhhh. She grabs a live bird and squishes it to cast the spell. Eew. Really making a point of dark magic's inherent violence today, I see. Got it.

"Rayla, pipe down." Callum still has a ways to go on how to win friends and influence people here. Everyone's shouting, he's interrupted to save Rayla's life (or so he thinks), and when Rayla shouts that his friends tried to kill her, he tells her--and no one else--to pipe down. Followed soon by "but a 'good' elf." Ahgod. He doesn't think he's taking sides, but he's got two humans versus one elf, and he's a human himself, and his underlying biases are showing. He's 14, and he's willing to learn, though--and he really does learn and grow over time. But this version of this scene was just. So. Painfully. Awkward.

I feel like this version was part of a larger theme I'm seeing throughout the first half of the book, emphasizing that Callum comes from years of having a crush on Claudia, and it takes many scenes with Claudia and with Rayla to shift through several gears with each of them in order to facilitate the possibility of breaking with Claudia and then also of falling for Rayla, in a way that feels organic within the structure of the story being told.

Also Callum super has a type and it's Girls Who Will Commit Murder. I don't make the rules.

Rayla's defense just attacks Callum's word choice: "What do you mean, 'but a good elf'? Do you know any bad elves?" And I just. Rayla, honey. You're not in any better of a spot than Callum right now. Your mentor literally stabs people to death. You're both literally assassins. Some humans could accept most elves, but they might draw the line at assassins.

But this tiny clash in the midst of this war, this single exchange of words, is such a great microcosm, the war made personal. It's early enough in their adventure and their growth that they're still sounding a lot like their parents. And that includes Claudia! She demands to know how an elf can be good, and Callum allows that it's possible for good elves to exist, but he has to be the one to say it, not the actual elf behind him. And the actual elf behind him insists that her kind are all good, thank you very much, and implying otherwise skirts very close to "humans are liars."

It's quite a tangle, but having the main characters tangled up like this shows us that as they untangle themselves in their own personal situations, they're learning things about human and elven hearts, about relationships and family, and those things are universal truths which they can use to help them understand other people's troubles, as well as the larger issues involved in the war they're trying to stop.

Callum assessing--and then reassessing--his confidence level. It's adorable, and it serves to show that his first scrambling attempt to make peace, in which he messed up a little but at least no one died--won't be his last. He's not really sure how this is gonna go. Everything is new. But he's dedicated to peace, and he's not giving up. He did just run in between Soren and his target while Soren was holding a sword.

He keeps doing that. Standing in front of people who have their weapons raised in his direction. And he does it with a ridiculous amount of chill. Is this Sarai's influence on him? Considering that Harrow has kept his distance, maybe so! I'd love that.

This chapter ends with some fun relationship drama when Callum gets butterflies in his stomach at being around Claudia again. She tucks a strand of hair behind his ear, and he forgets all about telling her about smashing her primal stone. He instantly worries that Rayla saw her gesture, which of course she did. Callum's nervousness and Rayla's glare feel to me like they're supposed to fit into a tactical box instead of a romantic box, but I can see how it could be interpreted the other way. Callum just intervened in a fight that Rayla completely intended to end by secretly killing Claudia and Soren, so in Rayla's mind, she's probably convinced that Callum intervened to save his girlfriend's life, while he's sure that he just saved Rayla's. She's probably angry because Claudia's gesture is making her think that Callum only seemed to be trying to save Rayla when his true intention was to save Claudia all along.

Dun dun dunnnnnnn.

[beevean]

SEGA and the eternal issue of the Sonic-Amy dynamic

[Translator’s note: here’s the original article written by @latin-dr-robotnik​, originally written on the 26th of August 2018]

While the Bowsette phenomenon shattered the internet into a thousand pieces, it seems like the Sonic fandom is splitting itself over a completely different matter: the eternal discussion over Sonic and Amy’s dynamic, and how much it can be considered official from SEGA’s perspective.

Note: this article ended up becoming the first part of a trilogy. Stay tuned for the next two parts!

The main culprit of this new chapter of the discourse is, believe it or not, the official SEGA Shop.

Emi Jones (I don’t need to introduce her, most people in the fandom know her) brought the attention on the description of one of the new clothing pieces that appeared in the shop for Amy’s 25th birthday, which essentially invited us to “celebrate 25 years of Sonic the Hedgehog’s girlfriend”. This short sentence generated a chain reaction in the fandom, both positive and negative, and it brought to the light once again the eternal question: is it really possible that they’re actually a couple? What is the official position of SEGA about this? There are good arguments for both sides.

Eggman: If you fight my robot, we’ll be disqualified and you’ll never win that couch for that whiny little girlfriend of yours.

Sonic: SHE’S NOT MY GIRLFRIEND!

*wrong answer noise*

Sonic Boom – S1E41

First and foremost, who is Amy?

Note: the article is based on Cutegirlmayra’s research in different magazines, in the games’ canon, in the differences between Japan and the West, in the structure of the relationship, and in SEGA’s marketing.

Note 2: while there will be mentions of other medias such as comics and TV series, this article will explicitly focus on the dynamic between Sonic and Amy in their official Modern versions, that is, from the videogames.

Since her official conception in Sonic CD, Amy has simply been considered our blue hedgehog’s girlfriend without any issue, but Sonic Team looked for a way to make this common cliché a little different. So a “unique” dynamic was established between them: Amy is the one chasing Sonic, Sonic tries to avoid her explicit affection, but despite this they are destined together, both in the proper canon (according to Amy’s tarot cards the two are made for each other) and outside of it (SEGA’s directives). This means that their dynamic is written in an implicit manner, and it’s never clear if Sonic wants to flee to a different galaxy to get away from Amy or if he wants to stay with her forever. Officially, there have been signs both in favor and against it, and the rest is normally left to the interpretations of the fans. Nevertheless, SEGA of Japan and SEGA of America (with the complicity of Europe) have radically different ways of dealing with the Sonamy dynamic.

Sonamy in Japan

The relationship between Sonic and Amy, with its twists and turns, is deeply rooted into the Japanese culture of the ‘90s. According with the material found by Cutegirlmayra, Sonic and Amy are a couple in Japan, no doubt about it. This simple vision is due to how the Adventure era games were written: Sonic is much more gentle and subtle with Amy, to the point that there is a clear difference in tone in the Adventure 2 scene when Sonic, about to be sent off into space in a capsule, tells Amy to take care of herself. Japan didn’t have this vision of an openly hostile Sonic or of a totally-obsessed-to-the-point-of-violence Amy, in their culture and in the game scripts everything is much more serene and acceptable. At the same time, the situation is kept under control thanks to the mandates that SEGA strictly enforces over how to write the characters: for example, one of the most infamous ones is “Sonic can’t explicitly show affection to Amy Rose”. This kind of control allows SEGA of Japan to avoid problems like the ones in the West.

Then we have Sonic Channel, the official Japanese website for information and art, where once in a while events about Sonic and Amy take place, with fans sending their fanart of the official couple.

And finally, we can’t forget Sonic X, that, despite not being part of the official game canon, clearly shows the agenda of SEGA of Japan and Sonic Team for the two characters: dozens of scenes that imply something more, many songs about love/lovers and, well, everything about the famous Episode 52 ending.

Sonamy in the West.

In the West things became more complicated. On one hand, the West came to know Sally Acorn before Amy, and the way they presented the Sonic/Sally relationship was, without any doubt, much healthier in SatAM than, for example, Sonic/Amy in Adventure (note: I purposefully won’t mention Archie Sonic here). At the same time, the differences in translation of the original Japanese scripts, and the cultural differences between these two countries on opposite sides of the world, radically changed the personalities of both characters, giving us the infamous “hysterical fan” Amy in Adventure and Heroes, the one who chases Sonic to force him to marry her. The general public’s perception quickly opposed these attitudes, seeing that they could be potentially toxic and that they undermine the very nature of Sonic. Sonic X did little to help in the West due to the strong censorship process it received when translated from Japanese to English. By 2006 the damage was done, and subsequent attempts to modify Amy’s personality, so that she was not as effusive with Sonic, have been tried over the last decade to repair their dynamics, with a little help from Sonic Boom (where the dynamic is so well written that, in the penultimate episode of season 2, Sonic literally stops racing Tails and Knuckles at Amy’s request to go buy ingredients for the cake he was making - Modern Sonic wouldn’t do that in a thousand years) and from the direction Ian Flynn has been taking the comics he’s been involved in. SEGA’s mandates were applied in the West as well, but relatively late and as a consequence of some things that were slipping out of control, like Archie Sonic. Both Flynn and the writers of Sonic Boom had to find new ways to present the characters, adjusted to both Western cultural patterns and also to the mandates of a Japanese company. Anyway, thanks to the recent accomplishments, we can deduce that the rigid structure of the official mandates is going through some changes that could mean a new agenda from SEGA to represent the Sonamy dynamic.

All of this information leaves us with the last question, that brings us back to the topic of this article and concludes it:

Could Sonamy work today?

In the last 5 years we’ve seen a series of important transformations, both in the way Amy sees the world, her responsibilities and Sonic (ex: Sonic Lost World), and in the way Sonic himself treats Amy. Sonic Forces took some pages from Boom’s book when it came to their personalities, and it seems to be the beginning of a new era, made explicit by that description appeared in the SEGA Shop that sparked today’s discussion.

In 25 years, we’ve seen Amy chasing Sonic all over the world, living a life of adventures that contradicts her dreams of a stable life and a marriage, according to her declarations in games like Adventure. At the same time, Sonic never stopped seeking adventures all over the world, both alone and with his friends, of which he became the protector, including Amy. For the Sonamy dynamic to work today, I think the most obvious solution would be for the two of them to go on adventures together. How we see love has changed a lot in the span of 25 years, and Sonic and Amy would fit well the modern stereotype of those couples that travel all over the world to find adventures, and that we see in those posts labeled “Relationship goals”; at the end of the day, Sonic and Amy are this, stereotypes that follow a certain pattern. What’s more, such a relationship can still be kept subtle and true to official mandates if we add the rest of Team Sonic to the equation, which is basically what Sonic Boom did.

No need for kisses, no need for grandiose love declarations, weddings, or forming a family. All of this would even be extremely out of character for Sonic, and I’d hate for something like this to happen. Team Sonic is the only family he needs, and the Sonamy dynamic could benefit from the adventures, the anecdotes and the moments they spend together. A race at sunset, the view of a mountain, defeating a giant robot together… that’s how I would see a canonical relationship possible, and indeed I’m not the only one who sees it that way - remember IDW Sonic #2? [Translator’s note: the article is in Spanish and outdated]

And let’s not forget about this scene from IDW Sonic #2: Sonic tells Amy that she can come on an adventure with him, but Amy refuses Sonic’s offer because of her responsibilities. Small changes like these have the potential to be slowly integrated into the official canon, and we have already seen how in Forces Amy barely bothers Sonic with her feelings.

So, when the eternal question of whether or not Sonic and Amy would work as a couple comes up again, you can say, yes! Yes, it can work without Sonic having to sacrifice his freedom, or Amy her dreams! The current context is making way for this, and while I may not think this whole SEGA store thing was completely intentional to drive the fandom crazy, I do think it’s time to start accepting the validity and potential of the couple. At the end of the day, everyone will ship what they want anyway, and that’s perfect. It will sound cliché, but remember that phrase that always circulates on social networks: "There are best friends who look like a couple, and couples who look like best friends."

[thejudgingtrash]

One of the things that gave me a trip when I finally looked into the PJO fandom now was finding out that a LOT of folks disliked or hated HoO. Considering that it was first work of Riordan's that I had read, and I'm actually quite attached, it was one hell of a shock. ESPECIALLY when I learned all the legitimate reasons of why people had issues with it. Really did open my eyes. But damn.

Yeah. If you start the other way around it can be overwhelming, so I’m sorry about that. Also doesn't help that most people are ruthless, but it comes from love (mostly). So don’t take it to your heart!!

We criticize but still love what we criticize and only wish for it to be improved and for Riordan to be responsible with the half-assed attempt he created.

Yes, some people do go overboard with their critiques or jokes or whatever, but I think that’s rather a minority as I’m sure you come to find out. No one’s seriously malicious or wants to shed blood or whatever other weird claims have been floating around here.

Heroes of Olympus wasn’t per se a bad idea, it was unfortunately the lack of proper execution and delicacy that brought a sour taste to it. I did send you Marti’s master post with most of the issues the series has and the large consensus that resonates. It just seemed like greed and an author detached from his own work were the result of the saga. 

If you don’t really have the background from PJO, you certainly aren't as attached to Percy, Annabeth, Grover, Luke and the rest of the characters from the first series and have an entirely different view on the structure of the Greek and the following Roman side of things. 

Pretty sure that it would be worse with people that started with The Trials of Apollo, but well that’s not really the point. But we went from the clarity of PJO (even if it reads as incredibly white and also has its own fair share of problems) and step into the puddle of mud called HOO.

With the upcoming shows and some tweets from Becky Riordan, I do have hope that the next generation will receive an improved version of PJO (also TKC) and mayhaps even the other spin-offs which include the Roman and the Norse saga.

[invisibleinorange]

Bridgerton’s Adrift | 21/?

Chapters: 21/? Fandom: Bridgerton Rating: M Warnings: Presumed Character Death Relationships: Colin Bridgerton/Penelope Featherington,  Eloise Bridgerton/Penelope Featherington(besties),  Bridgerton Family Dynamics, Simon Hastings/Daphne Bridgerton Characters: Colin Bridgerton,  Penelope Featherington, Eloise Bridgerton, Anthony Featherington,  Benedict Bridgerton,  Portia Featherington, Violet Bridgerton,  Pretty Much Everyone (at points) Additional Tags:  Bridgerton, Polin Summary:  Unexpected bad news arrives for the Bridgerton Family (and friends) regarding Colin's travels. This will be a series that is set after "The Duke and I" or season one of the show. It is a companion piece to "Goodbyes".

Anthony almost wished he’d brought a gun with him if only to send a warning shot.  It wasn’t that he didn’t love Benedict but he was beginning to regret stopping at Aubrey Hall for reinforcements. He’d never seen Benedict like this.  They were barely stopping, barely sleep and when he’d try to get a few more hours he’d get snapped at because they ‘weren’t going to make it’.

He had assumed a few things about Benedict’s feelings when he’d promptly left town upon Colin’s return but he hadn’t know things were this bad.   Anthony liked to think that he knew his siblings pretty well considered he was the oldest.  He’d always known Benedict to be a bit more emotional than the rest. He wasn’t as dramatic as some of the others though.

Benedict tended to suppress and bury things until they could be suppressed no longer. Anthony had seen things bubble up in his younger brother plenty of times over the course of their lives.

Apparently, this was one of those situations.

He knew better than to try and get in the middle of it.  More than anything he was terrified of what Benedict was going to do when they made it to Scotland.  There were too many unknown factors here.

For starters, he didn’t know if they were going to make it before Colin could successfully elope.  Second, he didn’t know if the suspicion was even correct or if it was that they’d even find them there. Anthony was honestly terrified to think of what he’d be dealing with if they didn’t find them.   His mother would be the least of his worries.

By the time they reached, Northumberland with a clear view of the River Tweed exhaustion was threatening every moment. Anthony couldn’t stop because he knew Benedict would not aside from pausing to interrogate people in passing about where across the bridge people went to wed.

It earned a few curious glances since there wasn’t a woman with them.  Benedict clearly wasn’t thinking about how it might be coming off and Anthony’s insistence that they were brothers seemed to be the only think preventing someone for reporting them for attempting to undertake illegal activities.

The little stone inn on the other side of the bridge looked precisely as they had been informed it would.  There wasn’t much to it.  It was so unassuming and yet there was something about the structure that made seemed to leave both Bridgerton men silent, terrified.

After riding through England like an absolute mad man, it was Benedict who seemed to completely freeze at the sight of it.  His tall form locked into place and the color drained from his features.

“We haven’t gone this far for you to just stop now, have we?” Anthony asked, turning on his heel to gaze at his little brother.

Benedict just shook his head lamely.

Anthony couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.  He knew he just had to pause and wait for Benedict to snap out of it.

While he was waiting he saw Benedict’s expression change though and he had no choice but look back toward the structure.

“Ben,” a voice called out, followed by a sea of loose red curls moving out of the door.  The body that the red curls, moved toward them and hugged the frozen boy which was definitely not appropriate but it didn’t stop her.

“You know, I’m here too,” Anthony said making a face.  

Penelope laughed at that and turned to greet Anthony with a nod.

“What are you two doing here?” Penelope asked gaze moving between them.

“Where is Colin?” Ben asked finally regaining use of his tongue.

Based on the look on his face,  Anthony wasn’t sure if he was asking this to truly know where their brother was because they didn’t see him or because he intended to murder him. If he could have gestured for Penelope to maybe not answer that without Benedict seeing, he very well might have.

“He’s had to go a ways to collect to a Priest Dickson,” she said before shaking her head. Priest Dickson apparently had a reputation for performing marriage rights and could come join them there for the right price.  “Apparently, he’d decided to enjoy a day of leisure at home since it’s the slow season.”

“So you fools really are doing this?” Anthony asked.

“That was our intention. I presume you’re here to try and talk us out of it,” Penelope said with a nod.  Her gaze moved from Anthony to Benedict who was being remarkably quiet.

“No,” Benedict replied before Anthony could.

Anthony didn’t really plan on stopping it either but he was admittedly surprised to hear that come out after all of this.

Penelope looked conflicted by this information and relieved all at once.  Anthony couldn’t help but see the way her gaze seemed to be trying to pierce the wall that Benedict wasn’t letting down.

“I promised to look after you,” Benedict said after a long moment. “You don’t have to have any sort of special wedding but you do have to let me be the one who gives you away.”

Anthony threw a hand up at that, another moving to massage his own temple.  He’d been dragged half-way through England, nearly died with exhaustion for that when they could have just gotten there after the deed was done.  

Blood on a wedding day probably wasn’t a good omen, so not murdering Benedict was going to be his wedding gift.

Considering the fact, Penelope’s response to the words was tears told Anthony that Colin might be the one to commit the Fratricide.

--

Colin did return as expected with a man that even he had been unsure about as priest. He had no choice but to give it as pass if he wanted to do this. He knew that when it came to these things, half the time the ‘priests’ were just simple village people who had the ability to sign legal documents.

It was a bit of a shock to return and see his two brothers there.  Admittedly there was one that gave him more rise to concern than the other. His mind raced back to the conversation he’d had with Benedict before he’d fled to the country and a part of him feared was there to put a stop to this.

Jealousy raced into him that he couldn’t begin to control and irrationally he did wonder if Penelope was going to back out. What if she’d come to her sense and didn’t want to marry him? What if she realized that she preferred his brother?

“I defiled her,” he announced to his brothers in a moment of panic, knowing that if her honor was in question there was absolutely nothing they would do to stop it.

Penelope’s eyes widened at that, catching the complete change in Benedict’s posture threw herself between them.

“It was consensual,” she assured, keeping her voice low. “I wouldn’t use defile to describe it.  Your brother is clearly out of mind.”

Anthony debated stepping in before there was actual blood spilled but decided that he was too tired for that and he was just going to stand there and let Penelope handle it. She was doing well enough.

Benedict relented at her request, not pleased to hear that Colin couldn’t even constrain himself long enough to make it proper first but it had been her choice.

“Out of my mind in love,” Colin said pointedly.

“Jealousy,” Anthony coughed into his hand.

This earned him three glares.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to begin the proceedings,” the man who’d come with him said, so they did.

[hangingslothcentral]

Here’s what writing an episode of Spirit Box Radio looks like...

If you’ve ever wondered how episodes of Spirit Box Radio are written, here’s a little overview of that process!! If you like this, I can also write up a similar breakdown of the sound design process!

Most, but not all, episodes are born in the ‘Episodes’ section of the Show Bible. The Show Bible is a document of epic proportions - 50k in length and growing every day - which contains all the essential information about the show, from the continuously evolving methods I use to edit different character voices as I learn more and more about audio editing and production, right to ‘sketches’ of the episodes for all three series of the show. There is also a large section called ‘Ideas and Notes’, where I’ll write freeform dialogue between characters and keep track of themes and ideas to try and keep them consistent. These are all numbered, and referenced in a seperate spreadsheet I have of all the characters with significant and/or speaking roles in the show.

The full break down is under the cut!!!

The grandaddy of the the plans in the Show Outline, where I go over all of the main ideas I want to be talking about in the show and roughly mark out the outline of the shape of each season. The first draft of the Show Outline was very messy and rough, but subsequent versions are broken down into Season-by-Season chunks, all talking from a multi-series perspective so as to place the ideas of the show along a three-series-long arc.

Season Outline

Season Outlines take those ideas for the shapes of the series from the Show Outline and refine them further from a beginning-to-end-perspective. I'm a goal-oriented writer, which means my story ideas tend to come from a very ‘the end’ kind of place, and the stories that lead up to that ending are all about serving that ending. Quite often the ending itself changes a long over the planning and writing process for me, but that’s the great thing about a plan! Once you have it, you can change it if you need to. What a plan does, however, is provide you with a framework for understanding what bits of a story you have, and what bits you still need to make.

The three seasons of Spirit Box Radio are quite deliberately split into two halves. There are lots of reasons why and one of them is that it gives you a very specific kind of shape to be working from. A season with a mid-season break has a part one which has it’s own escalation of tension and climax, which comes at the mid-point of the season-long escalation, where the story might otherwise sag a little.

Beyond splitting the plan into Parts 1 & 2, I typically also break episodes into ‘Blocks’. This is partly practical; I can refer in conversations with my guest writers to where it falls in a specific block of episodes, and where that block fits in the story as a whole, and it also makes splitting up the episodes for sending out scripts to my actors a lot more straight forward. Part 1 of Season 1, for example, was broken into three blocks; episodes 1.1-1.7; 1.8-1.13; 1.14-1.20. I won’t go into detail about how this effects the structure of the episodes themselves, but it’s usually about building characters up to making a certain decision, or following a certain subplot more closely before pulling away.

Episode Sketch

A ‘sketch’ is a very brief summary of what needs to happen in that specific episode. This can be concrete, like ‘find [x] item’, or vague, like ‘establish that Character A has Trait Y’. Sometimes I’ll make a note to include a specific sound or character beat, or I’ll reference a noted scene from the ‘Ideas and Notes’ i think would fit in there. It’s usually at the sketch summary stage that I figure out whether or not there will be other characters in a specific episode. The sketches for almost all of the episodes in Season One were written between August and October 2020.

Episode Plan

This stage takes those necessary elements from the sketch and fleshes them out into a coherent story. The key thing about podcast episodes is that they have to be able to be entertaining on their own, minute by minute, as well as serving the whole series (I talked a lot more about this in the last episode of Hanging with the Sloths on Patreon which is only £2/equivalent pcm to access if you’re interested!!)

Whilst I’m making my episode plan, I’ll look back at the sketches for the episode I’m working on and those before and after it, and refer to the series outline where I can, to make sure I’m keeping a handle not just on the individual pacing of the episode, but the pacing of the show overall.

I like to have Episode Plans done by about a month before I need to have a script finished.

The Script Itself

Spirit Box Radio scripts are either agonising or happen in the blink of an eye. I do not have a set approach to how I write an episode. Sometimes the plans come with sections of dialogue written months before and I’ll drape the rest of the episode around those moments and see where I end up. If there is a character other than Sam in an episode, I’ll typically attempt to write that section of the script before the rest, so that I’ll definitely have it locked by the time I need to send it to the actors. 

Any script that is for other actors (i.e. not me) has to have notes, direction, and additional information included to help the actors give their best performance. That’s difficult sometimes because I guard my show secrets closely, so it’s often a game of working out how much I can tell an actor without including spoilers for later important plot points unless absolutely necessary, and how to supplement gaps in their information. I’ll usually compare a character to a character from something else as a shorthand for performance.

This means there are two versions of every script which needs to be seen by people who aren’t me. My scripts, which I call the master scripts, have all my audio cues, breaks for drinking water in recording sessions, character notes that are Top Secret, sound scaping ideas, specific sounds I’ll need to use at different moments, and specific audio cues. As I get better at sound design, my version of the script only gets messier and messier to look at. Sometimes, when I’m writing scripts, I’ll actually even start with sound design notes now!!

Script Locking

This is the point at which a script can no longer be changed. Scripts with other characters in them have to be locked before scripts for just Sam, because they need to go out to actors and I need to ensure that I have time to go back and ask them to redo things if necessary, and also to make sure they have proper time to rehearse and organise read-throughs as they’d like to. That means sometimes sections of an episode are locked way before other sections are even written. This can be challenging as a writer because sometimes I’ll come back to a section which I know still needs work, and find I��m extremely limited in what I can do because I’ve already sent an actor a script to record from - sometimes for later episodes, I’ll have the lines from otheres already recorded and ready to go before I finalise some of Sam’s lines for a specific episode.

Sam is recorded a minimum of three weeks before an episode is due to air, and I’ll record in 3-episode stints, usually. I like to have the scripts locked a week before I record so I have time to read them through at my own pace, but sometimes I won’t manage to have them locked until three days out. On one hateful occasion, I threw out an entire script after I’d recorded an episode and re-recorded the whole thing the day before airing. I do not recommend doing this and whilst I am much happier with the result it was an agonising experience because once I’d rewritten and re-recorded that episode I then had to edit it before it was due for release, a process which takes about six hours minimum. I was making tweaks until 20 minutes before the episode went live. Do not recommend.

Editing

Speaking of editing, the final stage of writing an episode actually happens in the cutting room. Sometimes episodes are simply Too Long. Sometimes stuff that worked on paper just don’t work in audio. Sometimes I can’t say a word correctly for the life of me and have to cut a whole sentence to cover it over. More rarely, but still often enough an occurence it bears mentioning, I’ll realise in the editing process that a conversation is better in a different order than the one given in the script, and pull and move around the dialogue to adjust the flow. Sometimes I’ll move sections about a bit to accomodate similar problems with narrative flow.

Annnnd that’s it! That’s what the process looks like!

[thanksjro]

Dark Cybertron Chapter 4: Rung is the Most Dangerous Man Alive

There are so MANY of you.

So, when last we left off, the Lost Light had VOMPFed into a massive body of water, or at least something water adjacent, and was surrounded by guys. Let’s see how this plays out.

Ultra Magnus is dubious about this whole “being completely surrounded by tiny little dudes” thing, but Mainframe’s got a pretty good read on the situation, given that he’s the one actually looking at the screen for the radar. Off in the background, Brainstorm and Perceptor discuss the structural intent of the Lost Light. Perceptor alludes to the fact that there’s more than one way to be alive as a giant space robot, introducing the term “warm-wired”, which I don’t recall ever being addressed after this issue.

Er, well, no, they’re not actually, Magnus, they’re Ammonites. Way to stereotype, dude.

For this issue’s tie-in toy, Hasbro chose the Mini-Con Centuritron. Only problem with that was that Centuritron wasn’t at all established within the IDW universe. Mini-Cons also hadn’t been established, at least not in name. There were little guys running around, but they weren’t Mini-Cons. So, what to do?

In the proper tie-in issue publication- not the issue that was sold in comic shops- certain lines of dialogue were changed to help establish that Mini-Cons were a thing, by calling the Ammonites Mini-Cons. In the standalone issue, the terms are used interchangeably, mainly because none of the folks in the lime-light this issue went to the bar on Hedonia where we met the Ammonites.

So where did these little buggers come from? Perceptor has a theory, which he shouts with so much vim and vigor he briefly turns the world around him into an anime background.

There you go, shippers. There’s where the name comes from. Hope it was worth the last 82 pages.

Anyway, Ultra Magnus decides that he’s going to talk to these guys. It goes about as well as you’d expect.

And that’s a series wrap on the crew of the Lost Light! Let’s give them a hand, folks!

Over on Cybertron, that awful black dusting thing is still going on, so much so that the sky has been blacked out like there’s a major forest fire going. Things are looking rough for ol’ Starscream; even Scoop, the nicest man to ever friggin’ live, is a bit cross with him.

Scoop makes this known by heading a mob to yell at Starscream, pointing out that he’s got a big ugly black mark slapped on his chest, a mark that means he’s obviously going to bring about the end of days. Rattrap attempts to protect Starscream from these harsh words, promising that they’ll figure this thing out. Whether or not Starscream will get to keep his crown after today remains to be seen.

Back on the Lost Light, Roche’s lines have left and been replaced by event-standard artist Raiz, as the hole blasted in the ship hemorrhages water on all our beloved friends.

Skids enters the narrative to fill Magnus in on what exactly they’re facing, and Getaway predicts a pun. Magnus decides that it’s time for recess, because they’ll be going outside for this fight.

Of course, if you’re going to go underwater for a battle, you’re going to need some ability to be evasive. None of these guys turn into submarines or ships though. What to do?

Meet Rodimus’ midlife-crisis within his midlife-crisis, the Rodpod. It’s garish, silly, and very round. Nobody’s terribly impressed with it, but it’s what we’ve got.

Smashcut to everyone outside- Atomizer is firing off arrows somehow, someone let Swerve have a gun that wasn’t his My First Blaster, and Rung has a fucking stick.

In the Rodpod, Skids, Whirl, Ultra Magnus, Perceptor, Brainstorm, and Getaway for some reason, are packed in like sardines. We’re really pushing Getaway in this, aren’t we? Their job will be to protect the fuel quills of the ship- those red spiky doohickeys sitting on top of the roof.

Y’all ready to see Rung get scary?

Rung dodges the fist of an Ammonite with a deftness usually reserved for people who aren’t skinny little nerds, spouting off his character stats as he hands this guy his own ass. With a fucking stick.

I want you to imagine a chorus of 50 air horns going off right here. Clearly he is a force of nature not to be reckoned with.

Then the moment passes and he gets bodychecked. Also, he’s got bushy-ass people eyebrows in this. Make of that what you will.

The Ammonites begin combining, becoming larger and larger until they’re bigger than the ship, only for Whirl to blast a hole in them and pass right on through.

Over in the Dead Universe, things aren’t looking so hot, and it’s not for the reason you might think. See, Rodimus and Hardhead have decided to have a go at it, Hardhead poking at the fact that Rodimus just up and left Cybertron for everyone else to clean up, while he went on a space-cruise. Rodimus reminds everyone of the Remain in Light arc, then claims that if needed, he’d come back to Cybertron to take things over, but somehow I feel as if his heart isn’t exactly in that promise. Cyclonus looms in the background, looking like a night demon. He doesn’t contribute to the conversation, but it’s nice to know he’s still here with us.

The conversation gets turned around to the Primes, and how the last several really sort of sucked. When Cyclonus is asked about his opinion on the matter, it’s revealed that he’s fucking dying. So we’re going to have to deal with that. Also, Nightbeat’s here now. No idea how he got ahead of the group, considering he doesn’t seem to have a ship.

Back on Cybertron, over with the Titan, folks are slowly disintegrating. Frenzy looks absolutely terrible. Nobody’s really sure what to do. Ravage wants to fight a guy 800 times his size. Soundwave hears screaming with his special powers. Down in Crystal City, Megatron is the one screaming, as Shockwave pokes at him with something that’s probably medical equipment, but looks like a wrench and a paring knife hooked up to a car battery. Shockwave is still willing to give Megatron a seat at his weird logic table, but Megatron don’t want that shit. Metalhawk is also here, which is nice, I guess. Shockwave lets Megatron know that Nova Prime and Galvatron are still alive. Megatron tries to appeal to Shockwave over the fact that he’s important, but Shockwave has some bad news for old Megsy:

Then he hits a switch and activates the space bridge in Megatron’s chest, and robots start bursting out of his chest as he screams in anguish.

…Roberts wrote this scene, didn’t he?

Back at the Rodpod, the fellas are getting chased by the Ammonites, looking like a giant ammonite themselves. Using evasive maneuvers, they dive into an abyss. Only, it’s not an abyss.

It’s Metroplex’s eye hole.

Ewwwwww.