#to this weird subset of things you already know or have the potential to know

[louisjude]

Honestly -

Most of these ‘fans’ do not like Buck for Buck. They have created a version of him in canon and anything he does that doesn’t fit it it’s OOC for them, even if it is exactly how he’d act (case in point: The BT scene on 710). They, somehow, cannot accept Buck has changed and matured and is not the same guy he was during S2/S3. Hell, he’s grown alone during S7 alone. Discovering a part of himself has done wonders for him.

Likewise, I truly believe the only representation they care about or want is if it comes in the form of Buddie. They cry on how Henren is being ignored and how it is BuckTommy’s fault, but when have they ever shown care or interest for them beforehand? They use them as part of their argument without giving them proper attention. They don’t care we now have great mlm representation on screen in a show like 911, they’re just mad because it is not Buddie.

And I do suspect they became this mad this fast because they do see the potential of BT and they know this can very well be a LTR for Buck. Ofc we don’t know what will happen, but if we look at it from a neutral POV, we all can see the seeds being planted for Tommy to be there for a while. They’ve made creative choices with him that they haven’t made with no other LI that really sells it for me, to be honest.

(Including giving them a particular sound for everytime they have a moment, but I digress)

I do agree with you - I care about Buck being happy. I was quick to get on board with BT because I have never seen Buck act so giddy and into someone. And so far, I think Tommy is matching him really well. We’ll see what happens in Season 8, but I would be surprised if they break up during it, even more so if it is ep 3/4, which arguably will be right after the start of the season (assuming they go for a multi eps opener)

If I'm being honest, the toxic side of that part of the fandom feels very reminiscent of certain subset of another fandom I'm apart of that I do not want to delve into because I've already done so many times.

get ready for a long response

I came into the 911 fandom as bvddie shipper, I still love the ship itself, idc if it ever goes canon because fanfic exists, edits exist, fanart exists. I love eddie and buck as separate characters respectively and I do not need them to be together enjoy their relationship whether it's platonic or romantic.

I think a lot of the loud, toxic shippers cannot separate them. Listen I think the co-parent jokes are hilarious and cute, but when it comes down to it in reality of the show, buck is not chris' parent. he's like an uncle, so many ppl grow up with their parents friends as their "aunts and uncles" and that's exactly how I'm viewing chris and bucks relationship ever since I've come down from the bvddie high of analyzing everything and putting meaning behind every little piece of dialogue or set design or just like anything. I can acknowledge 911 is not a blockbuster franchise that has months or years of thought put into meaning behind set design or clothing choices like other fandoms I'm apart of that absolutely have so much thought and time put into them for things like that.

bvddie in itself is a great concept. absolutely you can read into scenes as being romantic even if they never were intended that way, that's what we do as fans. I completely understand why ppl see them as endgame because they're absolutely allowed to think that. but us bucktommy shippers are allowed to also talk about why we think bucktommy is endgame. I think that's another issue ppl are having is being able to curate their own feed, if you don't want to see people talk about one of these topics then block accs, block tags, keep your peace!

buck and tommy absolutely feel as though they have been written to last from what I've seen so far so tommy leaving so quickly would feel weird and like a punch in the gut to the journey buck as made. he made the effort to be with tommy even after everything went south. tommy made the effort to show up for buck. we are shown them being on very good terms by the season finale, like, we are probably intimate with one another and are in our cute honeymoon phase type of good terms. having them break up so early would be another Ali/Natalia moment and like, I just am tired of the same story being repeated for buck.

If they really were going for bvddie endgame, I think it would have been done this season. tommy wouldn't have been brought in at all or wouldn't have been involved in the plot outside helping rescue bobby and athena. they didn't need kim there, they could have built on eddies catholic guilt for his queer arc, they could have written what people were theorizing with the bachelor party where buck and eddie ended up kissing while drunk which could have spurred their relationship to begin and still have eddie go through a crisis and found a way to have chris still leave for texas (if they wanted to stick with a cheating arc, it could have been marisol & chris walking in on buck and eddie kissing) like there's so many things people theorized that genuinely would have been great ways to have bvddie be endgame but literally none of those things happened and instead we got buck in a stable, happy relationship with tommy that has been set up in a way that absolutely can have them going through all sorts of things from strengthening their relationship to testing their relationship. tommy can absolutely be integrated into the plot as much as karen is if not more. all I can say is why throw away such potential when you already had the other potential there?

also as an eddie diaz defender, they can never make me hate eddie diaz, I just want to see him not feel this constant need to find a new mom/wife when he's never had time for himself EVER. he needs therapy, he needs to build back trust with christopher, he needs to stop searching for this perfect woman because if there's someone out there for him they will find him eventually. I really want eddie to focus on chris and himself and stop worrying so much about what his life should look like per his family/what society thinks his life should look like.

I truly cannot stress enough how much eddie needs to fix himself and his and chris' relationship before jumping into another romance, whether it be buck or anyone else.

on the other hand, buck deserves to be loved ANYWAYS. tommy is already showing potential to just love buck anyways despite anything that happens, that he'll do anything for him, that he can be his rock. gerrard can definitely be smh to shake them up, no couple in this show is safe from anything no matter how in love and happy they are. it's time for buck to have his madney, bathena, henren moments with his own love interest. buck deserves to be happy with tommy, to go through the hard times with him, for someone to love him no matter what and that absolutely does not take away from how important buck and eddie's friendship is. people cannot seem to grasp that unfortunately and it's sad.

in other words, im so tired of people acting like they are superior over ships. I truly am.

[eponymous-rose]

A Critical Role Campaign 2 Mechanics Primer

Got a request from a new Critical Role viewer for some clarification re: rules and characters, and dang, yes, there’s so much stuff to deal with as a new viewer at the moment. So here’s an attempt at clarifying some stuff!

How does D&D work?

Fundamentally, one person (the DM) sets the scene and the players riff off that scene by acting out what their characters would do in response. Whenever a player’s actions would lead to an uncertain result, the DM can call for them to roll a die and try to hit a predetermined target number to see if they succeed. The players’ individual characters have abilities that boost certain categories of rolls and penalize others; a very strong character is more likely than a scrawny one to be able to open a jammed door, but they could still have an unlucky roll. It’s the DM’s job to incorporate the sometimes-absurd results of those die rolls into a coherent story.

Combat is the most “gamey” D&D gets, where everyone has a turn set aside to act (with an order determined by the “initiative” roll that starts combat). This is where character classes come in handy: magic-users cast spells, fighters jump in with their weapons of choice, and so forth. Each character has a set of hit points, and once those reach zero, the character is unconscious and possibly dying. But combat ain’t just hack-and-slash: there can be conversation, strategy, manipulation, collaboration, and all sorts of weird subtleties going on. Fundamentally, players’ actions are limited only by their imaginations.

It can be super weird getting into a D&D show even if you have played a bit because everyone plays the game a bit differently. Critical Role’s gameplay leans hard into roleplaying and character beats (there are episodes with basically no dice rolls) but also leans hard enough into the rules that a random bad or good roll can completely derail the story; rolls aren’t fudged or handwaved for the sake of a predetermined narrative, which means nobody playing (including the DM) knows how things are going to end up. This makes for a viewing experience that is a cross between dramedy improv and live sports; the cast plays out long scenes of conversation, but their characters could also permanently die at any time, adding to the high stakes. It’s also totally unedited, which accounts for the absurdly long runtime. 

If any of that isn’t for you, there are a lot of great D&D podcasts out there (often labeled “actual play”) that run the gamut from silly with minimal rules to mechanically involved but edited down. It’s a cool time to get into D&D!

Okay, so how exactly do these characters do their thing?

One of the more confusing aspects for new viewers of the second campaign of Critical Role is that they’re using a fair amount of content that’s not in the baseline ruleset - some character races and classes are coming from expansion content, and some are from Matt Mercer (the DM’s) homebrew. Here’s a quick summary of what each character has going on at the start of the campaign, moving from left to right in the first episode’s seating arrangement.

Fjord (played by Travis Willingham)

If you’re watching the show in video form, Travis is the big guy who looks like he could throw a football real far. If you’re listening to the podcast, his character voice has a Texas twang.

Fjord is a half-orc warlock. A half-orc typically has green skin and tusks but otherwise looks fairly close to a garden-variety human. Warlocks are magic-users who gained their abilities from a bargain with a mysterious (generally somewhat malevolent) being of great power. Mechanically, they rely a lot on what are called cantrips (spells that can be cast an unlimited number of times a day) since the number of more powerful spells at their disposal is very limited. However, unlike most other casters that have to get a full night’s sleep to regain their stronger spells, warlocks just have to rest for an hour or so and they’re good to go. More specifically, Fjord is a hexblade warlock. Hexblades are warlocks who have a particularly strong bond with their weapon of choice and can summon it from nothing.

Beauregard (played by Marisha Ray)

If you’re watching the show in video form, Marisha is the woman who often perches on her chair like she’s about to take flight. If you’re listening to the podcast, her character voice is a bit gruff with a sarcastic drawl.

Beau is a human monk. Both humans in this campaign use a variant version of human that allows them to pick a feat at the start of the campaign: Beau has some extra expertise in investigative and athletic abilities. Monks are preternaturally powerful martial artists; what some classes do with magic, they do with unarmed combat. Mechanically, they rely on an ability called ki points, which are a stockpile of points that can be used for extra-powerful abilities such as being able to hit extra times on an attack or being able to stun an enemy. More specifically, Beau is a Way of the Cobalt Soul monk, which is a homebrew from Matt and means she’s essentially a warrior-monk-librarian whose key abilities center around rooting out useful information.

Caleb (played by Liam O’Brien)

If you’re watching the show in video form, Liam is the guy who perpetually looks like he’s about to launch into a Shakespearean monologue. If you’re listening to the podcast, his character voice is soft with a German accent.

Caleb is a human wizard. His variant human feat gives him an eidetic memory and the ability to always know what time it is. Wizards are magic-users who got to where they are with careful study; Caleb has to keep track of his spells by transcribing them into a spellbook. He also has a familiar in the form of the cat Frumpkin, although Frumpkin can also change forms. Mechanically, wizards can pick up spells from a lot of different sources to learn them, but again, the cost in time and materials of transcribing them into a spellbook can be substantial. More specifically, Caleb is a transmutation wizard, which means his wizardry focuses around the act of transforming one thing into another.

Nott (played by Sam Riegel)

If you’re watching the show in video form, Sam is the guy with an alarmingly big smile and a comically oversized flask. If you’re listening to the podcast, his character voice is high-pitched with varying levels of Cockney accent.

Nott is a goblin rogue. Goblins are small and quick, and may or may not be well-received depending on the location. Rogues are sneaky individuals who do best when striking from the shadows or scouting ahead to investigate potential traps and unlock doors. Mechanically, they get a huge bonus in combat if they attack when unseen or when an opponent is distracted by an ally. They’re also very good at avoiding attacks and at hiding from view. More specifically, Nott is an arcane trickster rogue, which means she also dabbles in magic related to illusions and enchantment.

Jester (played by Laura Bailey)

If you’re watching the show in video form, Laura is the one who may or may not be instigating every round of giggles at accidental innuendo. If you’re listening to the podcast, her character voice is bubbly with an Eastern European accent.

Jester is a tiefling cleric. Tieflings essentially look like brightly-colored humans (Jester has blue skin) with horns and a tail; they’re the result of infernal ancestry and also may or may not be well-received. Clerics are magic-users who derive their power from the blessing of a deity or other extremely powerful entity. Jester’s divine patron is the Traveler, a mysterious trickster with an affinity for phallic graffiti. Mechanically, clerics have a massive stable of spells from which they can choose a subset every morning; their abilities range from healing wounds to causing devastating harm. More specifically, Jester is a trickery domain cleric, which means her spells have a strong focus on illusions and pranks.

Mollymauk (played by Taliesin Jaffe)

If you’re watching the show in video form, Taliesin is the one who looks like he may be some sort of ancient fey creature who’s come to our realm to play D&D. If you’re listening to the podcast, his character voice has an Irish accent of varying intensity.

Molly is a tiefling blood hunter with purple skin. Blood hunters are a custom class Matt created that can use their own blood (in a process called hemocraft) to augment their combat abilities. Mechanically, blood hunters are high-risk high-reward; they can perform devastatingly brutal attacks, but often only at the cost of shedding some of their own blood to do so. More specifically, Molly is an Order of the Ghostslayer blood hunter, which means he’s got an affinity for things relating to the moment of death.

Yasha (played by Ashley Johnson)

If you’re watching the show in video form, Ashley is the one who isn’t around for a little bit (she was splitting her time with a TV show on the opposite coast) and then SHE’S BACK AND I’M STILL SO HAPPY ABOUT THAT. If you’re listening to the podcast, her character voice is soft with a faint Scandinavian accent.

Yasha is an aasimar barbarian. Aasimar are the semi-divine counterpart to tieflings, although Yasha is a fallen aasimar with a fairly different aesthetic. Barbarians use their rage to enhance their already fierce battle prowess. Mechanically, barbarians in a rage take less damage and deal more damage, and also embrace a high-risk high-reward playstyle as tanks in the middle of the fray. More specifically, Yasha is a Path of the Zealot barbarian, which means her battle rages are fueled by the influence of a divine being.

Interested in watching from the start of campaign 2? The show has a YouTube channel with each episode posted in its entirety, and all episodes are also available in podcast form (they did jump channels partway through, but you can usually find a playlist that has them all). If you want to delve into campaign 1, I highly recommend it, but be aware that they’re still figuring out tech stuff and you’re also jumping in partway through the game they started years earlier at home. Campaign 2 starts 20 years after campaign 1 on a different continent of the same world, and is intended to be an appropriate jumping-on point for new viewers.

Interested in catching up faster so you can watch live with friends? Search Critical Recap for a series of recap videos on YouTube, which then becomes a series of written summaries on the CritRole website after episode 88. There are also great summaries on the Wiki, and many people have put together catch-up guides for new viewers. 

There’s A LOT of content out there. Don’t let anyone make you feel bad for skimming the early stuff if you want to get in on the new episodes sooner. <3

Episodes air at 7 PM Pacific every Thursday on Critical Role’s Twitch and YouTube channels; the VOD goes up for free on YouTube the Monday after. In the last few months, the cast has been distanced at the studio (all on separate cameras) and episodes have been pre-recorded several weeks in advance; normally, the show is streamed live and everyone is around the same table.

Hope that helps! If you have any questions, let me know. This is a fun show to get into, and a great all-consuming massive body of entertainment if you have the time for it.

[huntsman-ash]

RWBY V8E10 LiveThoughts

Well since its my birthday, Im kinda bored, and there’s little else for me to do right now since I dont get food till later, lets catch up on last weeks episode in anticipation of tomorrows. 

Huh, starting off with a epilepsy warning. Thats...a good sign I suppose?

Probably not the first part with the RT logo if I had to guess. 

Opening shot looks like something outta Gundam or Halo. Ironwood looking thoughtfully out as a Manta cruses by randomly. Plus; sunlight. Second day dawns...damn, have they really been fighting for that long?

Brings up the wonder of how long Remnants day actually is.

More Mantas. One REALLY close by. Damn those things are QUIET.

Those poor Specialists. You can just TELL they’re bracing for Ironwood to kick their ass. The doors also still busted which is a rather nice choice.

Also interestingly the female Specialist’s coat is missing the top two buttons of her partners. No clue why. 

Actual sweatdrop on the girl. What is it with RT suddenly making their characters have body liquid?

Ahhh Qrow kicking ass. Excellent. I would expect nothing less. 

Also FUCK THAT TABLE IRONWOOD.

Homie loosing his SHIT XD

Oh. Whats this...energy blast? Looks like its coming out of the- Oh. Thats Oscar isnt it.

...my God. ITS. BEAUTIFUL.

(Cries in military nerd)

I love how the music cuts out when it hits, just like what happens when a nuke goes off. 

The fact the Aces have to CARRY the bomb in BY HAND is good shit.

Massed gunfire in the back, and for a second you can see the true thoughts of all of the members. Oddly enough Hare’s got her exoskeleton activated. HYuh, weird, everyone else is hauling it bare. Elm, obviously, she beefy. I guess Marrow and Vine are just capable?

Also based on the shot we see just before the entire screen goes yellow and it looks like the blast literally yeets marrow onto his ass (I assume its Marrow based on the weapon visible in profile) it looks like Atlas is actually WINNING the fight, they’re pushing forward towards the whale.

Grimm; PURGED. ...how much you wanna bet this was a one off? No way to weaponize it. No way to make this more effective.

The music is...dissapointing, truly. If I had scored this, it would have some orchestral choir, a little bit of Requiem for a Dream style kinda thing. Strings and intense flutes and maybe a bit of drums.

Everything goes white for an ABSURDLY long time

Annnddd the sun comes up JUST as the whale starts disintegrating. HA! DIDNT PLAN ON THAT DID YOU SLUT!

CUE NEO CASUALLY SKIPPING THROUGH THE HELLSTORM OF GRIMM BITS WITH THE LAMP

Wait wheres the bomb... Also Marrow being the only one who cares amuses me.

Ahh dont worry about it buddy, its probably MAGIC explosive force, if it didnt kill you it wouldnt kill them. Huh, part of the whales skeletons still there.  I think its dead. GOOD

Wait how tall is Marrow? Hes like a good six inches taller than Winter here and shes wearing combat heels

“Target destroyed, good work.” Oh how casual. I love how he thinks that was the bomb.

And he goes right on to the new issue as if this is the end of the Grimm situation

Oh they still have the bomb.

Cargo ship, huh. I thought it came in on a Manta? Maybe Im miss-remembering.

AND now everyone in Atlas is going to start suffering fucking RUSTLUNG like in Gears.

Oh. Wait. Most of the whale’s still there. Fuckin hell IF THIS THING REGENERATES

Watts is so casual about all of this. I mean it makes sense but like, damn bro, flexibility.

Mmm, I think Cinders about to get brainblasted on by Watts. Please do so. TEAR HER A NEW ONE.

Interesting that Cinder thinks shes in command here. Im sorry, Cinder, but one of you has a college level education and the other WAS A FUCKING DISH RAG BITCH AND PROBABLY A STREET WALKER.

Guess which one is which.

Heels. Interesting. I dont like them but interesting.

Mmm. Long way down.

Watts: STARTS LAUGHING. I love it.

Dude is speaking FIRE. And TRUTH! THIS CATHARSIS...

I know she wont kill him and Im already cool with that cause this alone has put Watts well above her in my book of awesome villains. 

Hope we get to see more of him after this.

Hey he actually got THROUGH to her!

NOW SULK WHORE!

AWW SHES CRYING

Yeah of course the heroes are okay. RIP whoever was in that Paladin though. Hes probably dead.

Oh, the Bees 

Where the fuck did Emerald go

Oh there she is. Just completely shattered. YEAH HE DEAD FRIEND

Agricultrual area, okay cool, glad we finally got a name for this place

Red Line...huh. Like in Metro Speaking of, theres the Metro. No power, lights out. Apathies maybe?

You got a prisoner now.

Scrolls as a light source too huh? No flashlights? Also, pink purplish pettles...whats that one for, GAY THOUGHTS?

...kinetic energy. Really. Thats it. HOW IN THE FLAMING FUCK DOES THAT WORK?!

For those of you not in the know, kinetic is just...movement. Thats it. The ACTUAL energy that results from potential energy being used. 

Its just physics. And they’re treating it like some kind of superweapon.

Talk about a bit of an ass pull. And of course theres only a little bit left, because duh.

Guess maybe its got to do with movement and stuff. An idea for later.

Imagine if everyone looked over at Emerald and shes gone.

Nope, still there. And t hey’re about to hit the civilian shelter...yep, theres everyone.

OH MAN THEY DONT EVEN HAVE ANYTHING GOING ON. Literally just people chillin on the sides of the rails. Boy that must SUCK

Depression everywhere. Damn the Grimm are gonna come right in and mulch em.

And back to Ironwood. ANGRY DAD FACE.

Glad they call it a payload.

Its hard to tell but I think the image hes looking at is a casualty report. If I h ad ot guess blacked out equipment is losses.

Closer look says “Status Report in the upper left (upper right reversed) 

So...based on this, Atlas has lost at least 4 airships, 8 Mantas, four Paladins, a bunch of troops...actually the more I look at this I think each one represents a bunch of units because there is no way that this is everything they had.

I cant really see the middle parts but on the right I cna see “First Fleet” and “Second Fleet” Seconds got fewer Mantas attached oddly. No clue what that means. Same amount of Airships, but nothing else.

Cant really read the middle points. I THINK it says “First Batallion” at the top and then under it is split into (Something) A, B, and C. Might be Squad or something similar, the breakdown seems to be identical across it. 48 diamond markings and four Paladins. 

Based on a quick check of Google, I believe these are, in fact, Platoons, the subsets of a Battalion. The numbers are flexible on there but it seems to fit.

48 men to a Platoon with four Paladins as heavy fire support sounds like a viable mix. If thats the case Im just gonna hope this is all that was depolyed and Atlas has other forces elsewhere BECAUSE IF THEIR ENTIRE MILITARY IS LITERALLY ONE BATALLION OF TROOPS IM GOING TO RIOT.

The number more or less makes sense. 

On the far right theres some kind of power core readings, no indication of what those are, and I cant read the wording over it. Maybe for the pylons. 

Ironwood then convinently walks past a window showing intel on the whale. Annoyingly all of the important looking text is blurred out.

Theres Hares thighs again.

Third ones some kind of profile on Cinder, the image is recent as well. Fourth one...I think its a map of some kind of the impact zone, perhaps the area lost to it. 

“Watts is either incompetent, or betrayed us.” WHICH DO YOU THINK IS MORE LIKELY.

Looks at hand dramatically while contemlating loss.

Hare loosing her shit is awesome.  Also, nice shot of her shoes. 

Maybe you should have put more faith in your military instead of Huntsman idiot.  I guess this KIND OF explains why he wants to leave. He doesnt thinkt hey can win no matter what. 

The look on his face is...disheartening.  Dudes gone the same way as Lionheart. Shit.

Also interestingly, the picograms above his office door show the phases of Remnants moon, rotating from full and unbroken to shattered.

What are you planning Ironwood.

Ohhhh. SEE NOW SOMEONE FINALLY FUCKING GETS THE IDEA You want someone in this world to do something YOU PUT A GUN TO THE HEAD OF THIER LOVED ONES!

Winters not having none of it of course. 

Ohhh shes in for a SPANKIN NOW

I love how Hare throws her under the bus like that. 

FUCK THAT TABLE

Radar. REMNANT HAS RADAR.

MOTHER...FUCKING... HOW?! HOW DO THEY HAVE RADAR.

Suns fully up now. Interesting.

Also, canonizing it now; the mountain just behind Atlas in this shot is where Fortress Academy is. 

This one.

Hang on. SDC Freighters literally look like neutered... ... GOD FUCKING DAMMIT.

AGAIN! EVERYTHING IN ATLAS’S ARSENAL IS JUST SDC EQUIPMENT MADE INTO MILITARY FORM! FUCK. ME. SIDEWAYS.

WHY!? WHY IS EVERYTHING SDC MADE?!

LE SIGH

The crazy logic sit down thing is...weird.

Also, I see constellation on the floor of Ironwoods room. Looks like...chiron and Pisces. So why are Earth constellations on the floor of a Remnant building?

Damn, air cleaned the fuck up real quick. 

NEO YOU CHEEKY BITCH. THE RAISED PINKY FINGER

Yay, the teams reunited. NOW THEY CAN ALL DIE TOGETHER.

FAUNUS EAR WIGGLE

Rens first comment; wheres Nora.  Yay. Also, poor Ruby.

I like how the music just died.

I hear gunfire...

YEAH! Mantas for AA work, hell yeah! I know Im supposed to be mad but fuck that swarm attack! Oh its so good.

AND IRONWOOD WITH THE FUCKING POWER STANCE

MY GOD XD

I like how he specifically mentions Atlas’s technology like their technology is anything hot 

Seriously could you get any more fucking dramatic. I get the point but like, dude, your from Atlas, wasnt this shit BANNED in the Great War?

Boy, he really doesnt like Mantle does he. Then again at the same time, my hometown doesnt care for the homeless here. Its probably like that.

Not sure I follow your logic here. Hes probably bluffing. 

Oh wait Penny...right she never left the mansion, she got fucked over.

And thats it.

[ronbegleyformayor]

So this is going to be a long post—your question gets to the larger topic that is episode 100. Also to anyone reading this I would appreciate if you took a minute or two to read the whole thing—I purposefully waited a while to respond to this so my response would come across as measured as possible.

So anyone plugged into queer theory and media has probably heard of the term “bury your gays”. It’s a trope that goes at least as far back as lesbian pulp fiction novels from the early 20th century, and for a number of reasons that I’m not remotely qualified to comment on the trope has persisted into modern media. As the name implies, bury your gays is the implicit belief that for a story about gay people to end correctly, usually one or both members of a gay couple are killed before the it ends. Whether intentional or not, the trope is rooted in the idea that gay couples are not supposed to be together, that queer love is a temporary fantasy that must be righted by the end of the story. A weird kind of offshoot of this is the causing of gay characters to suffer through loneliness or separation from a partner, and it comes from the underlying idea that gay=alone. Frequently this manifests in queer characters feeling that they have to choose between family and friends and the “"gay lifestyle”“ when in reality those two things frequently are not mutually exclusive. A subset of this trope is featuring a gay character (or frequently the partner of a more-established gay character) as possessed by some form of “evil” to emphasize which side of the temptation is “correct” and which isn’t.

I’m guessing you can see what I’m teeing up here, so I’ll just add as a caveat that most writers (especially straight writers) do not necessarily agree with the homophobia behind these tropes, nor is it (usually) their intent to perpetuate negative stereotypes about gay people. That being said the legacy of this trope is alive in a lot of media, and intentional or not: gay people suffering is entrenched in how we think about writing them.

Now to be extra clear, I’m not (necessarily) saying this is what King Falls is doing. So far the writing of queer themes and homophobia has been nuanced and has avoided a lot of the pitfalls that have come to be expected, but I would also be lying if I didn’t say episode 100 didn’t rub me the wrong way, and for a couple of specific reasons, too.

For me what that boils down to is characterization and timing.

Let’s talk about characterization first.

Just think about this for a second: what do you know about Jack Wright? No really, can you name anything beyond the bare minimum of characteristics? He’s a journalist and radio host, has a belief in the paranormal, and loves Sammy. He has a sister and a fiancé, has black hair and brown eyes, and plays rugby. I can’t think of a single other concrete fact we’ve learned about him specifically, and being generous like less than half of the things on that list don’t directly have to do with Sammy. Now we could extrapolate bits of his personality based on the two very short clips we’ve ever heard of him and from what’s implied by Sammy and Lily, but that’s also kind of the point: everything we know about Jack Wright is almost exclusively based off his sister and his fiancé, both of whom are anything but unbiased. Did you notice how Lily trashed Sammy and Jack’s radio show in the first King Falls Chronicles but then went on to call Jack smart and prolific in his field like five minutes later? It’s a(n understandable) level of cognitive dissonance for someone who was going through the difficult process of grieving. Both Sammy and Lily are biased sources of information because both care very deeply for Jack. On it’s own that really isn’t a problem—in fact I would say it’s an opportunity for an interesting bit of narrative contrast between the perception of Jack and the reality of when we actually get to meet him.

That at least was my opinion.

Instead we have this ”“dark”“ version of Jack, a lover just out of reach who’s trying to tempt Sammy into leaving his family and friends for the “freedom” of the void. This is a situation that, if I’m being honest, has some homophobic tinges, and hearing the dialogue played out the way it was kind of made my stomach turn (and not in the fun, scared-to-death at 3AM way I’m used to).

Now please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think this is what the writers were intending, nor do I think that there is anything necessarily wrong with having a normally good character occupy a “bad guy” role. When done correctly it can be interesting and compelling, and help tease out different aspects of a character or relationship dynamic. The issue isn’t that we’re seeing a “bad” version of Jack, the issue is that a. the specific wording of his interaction made my homophobia alarm bells go off, and more critically b. this “bad” version of of Jack is the only true version of him we know. Having him in a “bad” role outside his norm would be interesting if we actually had a real-time, in-person Jack with which to compare him. We might have a constructed idea of who he is from descriptions of biased sources close to him or tapes that are probably a decade old, but we only need to hear from this ”“shadow”“ Jack two more times and it’ll be more times than we’ve heard even recordings of the real Jack.

Emily, for example, had a baseline character established before her abduction. We got to know her as a character before she went missing, so when we eventually saw her as a different version of herself, we had a baseline understanding of how she typically acts in a situation, which is something we just don’t have with Jack.

Also, do you notice how Jack never directly spoke to Lily? He talked about her, but never to her, and can we take a moment to appreciate the gravity of that moment? Jack (or whatever was controlling him) had the opportunity to lure one of the four members of the "named” in the prophecy in the book, and instead of choosing his sister, the person he has known for his entire life and the only flesh and blood family with whom he’s in contact, and he chose to lure Sammy instead, to make Sammy choose between a gay relationship and the support system he’s built up.

Can you understand why this kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth? It feels a little like the “love the sinner” (Jack), hate the sin (being “bad”, trying to make Sammy have to decide between romance and a family), and that’s an adage that queer people tend to get tired of really quickly.

Again, because I really don’t want to be misunderstood, I don’t think this is what the writers intended; in fact I’m guessing the thought probably never even crossed their minds. But at the end of the day that’s kind of the point: if you’re going to make a show that subverts homophobic tropes (which I will readily say that they have done up until this point), you have to make sure not to accidentally fall into any of them yourself.

This leads me into my other issue with the episode: the timing.

My opinion toward the show right now would be considerably less harsh if this was not the last episode before a hiatus. I’m not saying the show can’t take breaks, but ending after this episode specifically? We are left with a very specific image of who Jack is, and exactly what kind of influence he has on Sammy. We’re left with the impression that Sammy has to choose between his found family and a gay relationship, and just to put icing on the cake we’re being told there is going to be another hiatus, prolonging the suffering of a character who has been through quite a lot already.

If this wasn’t the episode before a hiatus, I wouldn’t be as unhappy because we would have more immediate reactions to what had happened. We would have the four of them discussing it in detail. Maybe we even would have gotten a chance to hear Sammy himself say that this wasn’t Jack, and even get to hear more detail from him about who Jack is, if not what we heard. Maybe we would have actually gotten to see them get a step closer to getting Jack back instead of now knowing that the void has been opened, and we have to wait for another few months to see if the gay characters will ever get something even resembling a happy ending.

But we didn’t get any of that. Instead we got a cold, empty laugh that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since.

This isn’t to say that the show is headed in a bad direction. I think because this was not the intent that there is still plenty potential for things to stay on the rails. But what it looks like from here is that we are just continuing to prolong the suffering of the gay couple that sits at the emotional heart of the show’s main plotline. I’m just getting to a point where I’m starting to lose faith that we will see anything but it.

also huge thanks to @calebmichaels and @deputytroy. a lot of these points were the distillation of conversations between us, and if you think that I made a particularly interesting point at all in this post, it was probably their idea, not mine.

[luckycheesefoodie321]

Prince of Tennis (2019) meme

I was tagged by @hardworkingprocrastinator aka @rupru-russiaxprussia whom I do believe I ranted with about the Imperial Pair ship, and the unexpected potential of Si Yang x Qi Ying… so thanking you kindly for another excuse to rave about ChinaPuri… sooo uhhh time for some fun times!!

Tagging: I have 0 idea who to tag because we a smaller fandom

Warning: I have not watched or read the original manga/anime soooooo I’m in an even smaller subset of the fandom babeyyyy!!! It has also been a couple months since I watched the show, so there is a strong chance I’ll have forgotten names and situations, and just general thoughts I have... BUT WHATEVER time to rant to the thirteen people who’ve watched ChinaPuri!!!

Questions:

1. Favorite character(s)? 2. Favorite school team(s)? 3. Favorite coach(es)? 4. Favorite supporting cast member(s)? (characters who aren’t regulars, aren’t on tennis teams etc.) 5. Favorite original character(s) in the adaptation? 6. Who do you think enacted their role best? 7. Favorite singles match? 8. Favorite doubles match? 9. Favorite story arc? 10. Most amusing tenipuri scene(s)/moment(s)/running joke(s)? 11. What did you like most about the adaptation? 12. What do you think the adaptation could have improved on? 13. Any other thoughts you want to share?

Answers: THIS ISH GETS LONGGGGG SO CUT OFF NOW

1. Favorite character(s)?

MU SI YANG BABEYYYYY!!! I already love a stoic glasses boi, but Mu Si Yang (again not TeniPuri Tezuka, just ChinaPuri Si Yang) may be one of my favourite takes on the stoic glasses boi… like I don’t often enjoy live action versions of anime, especially because the acting is never the best (and granted this one too, had some okay performances) but the guy who plays Mu Si Yang melted my heart… he was the stony-faced serious captain, who could deliver a subtle joke that left you snickering… but he was also the determined, earnest, crazy talented leader with his own hidden struggles who just wanted to take his team and friends as far as they go into competition… which is an essential part of any good sports drama… and he captured it so perfectly… and I love him.. he’s so beautiful too… I would fall in love with him in a heartbeat, and I don’t often say that about characters (like I love them but never in love ya dig?)

Zhou Zhi was a close favourite…basically I just love the two genius senpais…

2. Favorite school team(s)?

Oh god… Yu Feng maybe? We spend the most time with them, they have the most screen time of all the other teams…we have a whole training arc where they’re continuously winning against the struggling to evolve Yu Qing…very reminiscent of the Karasuno-Nekoma rivalry in that they help each other get better… I would’ve loved to see the rivalry/camaraderie develop even more so that when Si Yang leaves, the relief at having this network of tennis friends would’ve been that much more powerful…

Also I really enjoy Xu Ziping’s hustle… I love the story of Yu Feng…they had a shitty coach and had to make a deal to keep winning in order to even remain an official team… and when Yu Qing faced Yu Feng, I really couldn’t tell who I wanted to root for because I knew there was real weight behind every loss for Yu Feng…

After that, maybe No. 6… they’re so chill, they’re not straining for each win and just enjoying their time on the court…and the Old Coach dude was a great character to introduce...

3. Favorite coach(es)?

Maybe No. 6’s coach… I legit can’t remember his name but he oozes skill and experience without all the stress of younger coaches who bend over backwards for success… and while, again, the circumstances surrounding his appearance was a bit waffle-y in execution (which is about par for live action adaptations), I love that he serves as a sage outsider who can assess in three seconds what kind of player Lu Xia is, and what he needs to do to improve… I love me a good wise character who still knows how to inspire people in a fun way but you never, for a second, doubt that what they’re saying is legit advice, even if their mannerisms are goofy…

4. Favorite supporting cast member(s)? (characters who aren’t regulars, aren’t on tennis teams etc.)

Oh I mean…Stretcher Bros for life amirite? They were great…they were just hanging out, trying out.. Huang Jing is kinda jerk-ish, but he’s the starting antagonist who turns out to have a pure heart and a genuine love of the sport (kinda like Tsukishima Kei from Haikyuu!! or the GoMs from Kuroko no Basuke)… and Xiu Wen is such a soft boi who wants to shower in peace without girls being in the locker room…

Put these two besties together forever…and I just love how cuddly they are with each other…no hesitation to hold hands or hug…it’s gooood

5. Favorite original character(s) in the adaptation?

Um…idk who’s an original character??? Again never watched the original anime/read the manga!

SO IMMA CHANGE THIS TO FAVOURITE SHIP!

5.5. Favourite ship? (Get ready my friendsss issa long one)

Si Yang x Qi Ying my friendssss… a super unexpected pairing that came outta nowhere!!! Because the trailer clearly shows (or maybe it doesn’t and I forgot) that Lu Xia and Qi Ying are gonna be THE THING but then we get hit with the surprise senpai-kouhai/team manager ship and I’m like uhhh were you planning this or am I reading into it too much???

Like y’all they were flirting right in the beginning… that whole bit where she stands outside the change rooms and Si Yang confronts her, and she begs him to add Lu Xia to the team (even tho he already did) and he was weirdly teasing her about the roster when he had no reason to, and she was kinda bantering back with him and she fully called him out later on… i was like, umm this is a vibe

They just kept getting thrown together in weird ways…aside from Lu Xia, she’s probably had the most interactions with Si Yang of all the other team members… she’s the only one he calls Xiao~ like the boys in the tennis club have their nicknames like Dachi, Ah Mu, Ah Yan, but only Qi Ying is Xiao Ying!!  he’s not a nickname guy… and maybe if it were a girl/cheerleader thing, you’d think he’d call Peng Xiang, Xiao Xiang BUT NO… only Qi Ying gets called Xiao Ying!!!

AND ANOTHER THING: other than Lu Xia, he’s the only one concerned for Qi Yang, despite what he says, when she gets caught in the rain and gets sick… he fully visits her in her room, and receives the call about her health after they send her to the hospital… he says everyones worried BUT YO they’re straight up just bored and end up having a pillow fight…sooooo can’t be that worried…

AND ONE MORE THING: Qi Ying, I get she’s this weird mascot/team manager figure on their team (even tho she’s meant to be a cheerleader but they never invite Peng Xiang to any of their team dinners or their training camp) BUT WHEN SI YANG RETURNS HOME, THEY SEND IN QI YING TO GREET HIM and they have this whole charming convo where she teases him...and they were chatting as if they always had this banter going on but they’d only talked like 3 or 4 times on screen before then, so there’s this whole relationship she has with the tennis team (not just Lu Xia) that is implied but we don’t really see it! And when she teasingly calls him Captain Si Yang after he returns to China, he had the softest smileeee!!! HE TOTALLY DOES HAVE A SOFT SPOT FOR HER!! He didn’t want her to think he wasn’t happy to see her... and then she leads him to their surprise party in the club room and he just keeps saying Xiao Ying…  like damn you keep trying to establish the Lu Xia x Qi Ying ship (and it is a decently strong ship) but Si Yang x Qi Ying is soooo good!

After this Rival Pair, and then Golden Pair - our resident married couple

(POST Here: all the gay faves they didn’t even try to hide)

(POST Here: almost confirmed ships by the end)

6. Who do you think enacted their role best?

I…I think this is obvious… NEXT

Jk… other than Si Yang, I really enjoyed the guy who plays Lu Xia - Peng Yu Chang… he played the typical “stoic, super talented/genius sports idiot” type prolific in sports anime (like Furuya from Daiya no A, Kageyama from Haikyuu!!, Midorima from KnB)… but he was never too stuck in his head, and he was never mean… too often there’ll be a moment where this type of character is played too seriously, gets stuck in their own head, and lashes out at anyone they deem getting in their way, especially when they feel they’re stuck in a rut… which Lu Xia is in, for essentially the entirety of the show, in one form or another…

But PYC played Lu Xia as this mildly cocky, but still incredibly enthusiastic young genius who is looking for the next big challenge so as to further himself, but is so obsessed with this one opponent (his dad), that he can’t see the bigger picture and realise his entire way of playing is a mirror of the very opponent he’s trying to overcome… but even at the height of his stagnation, he’s never mean to Qi Ying, who tries her best to support and encourage him… while he does distance himself from the team, it’s not an active dismissal of their assistance or support… he can play a straight faced comic when embarrassed/discombobulated (like Si Yang when faced with Yan Juice), but also always participates in most of the weird antics his team is up to… and it never feels OOC and thats clearly a result of Peng Yu Chang’s subtle acting…

ALSO PENG YU CHANG IS IN OUR SHINING DAYS, A SUPER UNDERRATED CHINESE FILM THAT HAS SO MUCH POTENTIAL TO BE ADAPTED INTO LIKE, A ONE SEASON SHOW AND I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU WATCH IT

7. Favorite singles match?

Oh pfft… please… PLEASE IS THERE EVEN A QUESTION it was arguably the best match of the whole show, it was what we were all waiting for, a super tension filled, super hyped up match because it features my favourite character, who has simultaneously been promoted as THE BEST PLAYER ON THE TEAM but also super injured and avoiding over-exertion… MU SI YANG…against his personal rival, whom had never tasted defeat before, and subsequently trained like crazy, throwing all of the money at professional players, FOR A YEAR, in order to be ready to face him… JI JING WU

That’s right baby, its the Imperial Pair Match (I do hope I’m using all these nicknames correctly..I just tried to pick them up from the anime/manga to save time writing out their names XD)…

This match is everything you ever want in a match…it’s a gritty, no-holds-barred, all-out, clash-of-titans-style face-off between probably the two most talented players in that whole (province? Prefecture? Idk China regional names) BUT YEAH THESE TWO ARE CLEARLY TOP TIER PLAYERS WHO FINALLY GO HEAD TO HEAD… it’s a year in the making, Ji Jing Wu is in peak physical condition, but Si Yang is not…and yet we see Si Yang powering through the literal agony of an arm injury that threatens complete destruction of not only his tennis career, but his general usage of that arm… and for glory and to bring his team to the national stage, Si Yang lays it all on the line… and he still gives Ji Jing Wu a run for his goddamn money… he matches him hit for hit, and at one point he was even WINNING…and had it not been for his arm, I swear up and down that he would’ve beaten Jingwu…

BUT THAT’S NOT EVEN THE BEST PART… i mean, all sports anime and just shounen anime in general have those moments where the characters are down and out and summoning the power of friendship and determination to their side to go above and beyond the physical limitations of their bodies… NO THE ACTUAL BEST PART WAS JI JINGWU’S RESPONSE TO THE WHOLE SITUATION

The goddamn respect he gave Si Yang.. this is his rival, the only person he’s ever viewed as equal and even superior to his own skills (at least as far as people the same age as him go)… Jingwu wants to beat him so bad… and he’s heard the rumours about Si Yang’s injury, and he even sees for himself how bad the injury is… but as a skilled player who recognises skill himself, he does not do Si Yang the disrespect of going easy on him… what kind of arrogant prick has that kind of nerve to give less than their best to someone who is giving them 120% effort… no, Ji Jingwu doesn’t hesitate to hit back full power, even as he’s yelling at Si Yang to stop before his arm is utterly destroyed… because the last thing any person of talent would want, is to see another person lose such an incredible gift… but even worse than that, have that person realise someone was going easy on them... it was so goddamn beautiful… and when Jingwu grips Si Yang’s hand and raises it high because he and everyone there knows who the real winner of that match is…they all know that they just witnessed something incredible, and he wants everyone in the stands to not only acknowledge it… but remember it…

And then he proceeds to fund Si Yang’s surgery, his flight, his meals, his rehabilitation, AS WELL AS take care of his team… and if that isn’t love, idk what is… like they don’t even disguise the hard core DEDICATION AND LOVE... Jingwu has obsessed over Si Yang for a year and it goddamn shows

Honourable Mention: I really enjoyed Zhou Zi versus the demon child whose eyes go red…we finally get to see Zhou Zi stretch his legs and push himself and I LOVED THAT… like he’s actually trying his best and that’s dope… also the match against the captain of the team his little brother his on… he basically led this cocky motherfucker by the nose for 5 games, pretends to be losing, and then destroys him in the following 7…

OH AND I GOTTA SHOUT OUT MY OTHER GLASSES BOI YAN ZHIMING VERSUS HIS BEST GUY FRIEND FROM YOUTH… that was a beautiful evolution of Ah Yan transcending but also evolving his data tennis against his childhood friend and it feels good ya know?

8. Favorite doubles match?

Oh pfft anything with the Rival Pair… they bicker like cat and dog, but then you put them on the court together, and suddenly their chemistry is through the roof… also Baiyang and Qiao Chen are a stronger couple than Qiao Chen and Yu Xing Zi and that’s the damn tea

(Same two posts for why that tea)

9. Favorite story arc?

Oh man… ummm training arc with Yu Feng was fun but it was definitely beaten out by the “village raises a child” arc when Si Yang leaves, so literally all their previous opponents step up to encourage, train, or otherwise intimidate Yu Qing into giving it their all, improving, and ultimately winning the finals… plus this arc gave so much depth to the network of teams who all have the same aspirations, in the end, and want to push forward the people who beat them to not let their loss be in vain…and that’s pure…

10. Most amusing tenipuri scene(s)/moment(s)/running joke(s)?

Yan Juice... especially the first time NEXT

Honourable Mentions: When Lu Xia gets stood up by Xinglong Lu Xia running interference on Qi Ying’s admirer in the final ep When Zhou Bros run into Lu Xia in the dressing rooms Stretcher Bros trying to become Painter Bros

11. What did you like most about the adaptation?

It captured the essence of a good sports anime: power of friendship, ridiculous action sequences of outrageous moves that would never be allowed in real life, determination and guts is all you need to succeed, that all-or-nothing mentality of high schoolers who suddenly have tunnel vision and no future thinking whatsoever, and decide to risk life and limb for one match… plus it kept a charming and comedic beat running throughout, really endeared you to the characters, and their struggles... AND NO ONE WAS MEAN... well I mean Ya Jiuxin was an angry bitter jerk for a hot second, but he ended up being endeared towards the lil fluffball kouhai of his, and we all know he loves Xinglong in his heart of hearts... other characters like Jingwu, or demon child, or Zhou Yu’s captain were cocky or arrogant, but they were never mean to each other, and respected each other’s game play even if they were defeated.. a couple were poor losers, but they didn’t throw a fit or try to get revenge or anything like that... everyone, in general, had some decency to them, and in fact all of Yu Qing was a super nice...sometimes too nice and self-deprecating that you wanted to smack them...

12. What do you think the adaptation could have improved on?

This is mostly just a consequence of live action adaptations of sports anime where they have to condense a whole lot of story that is already condensed from the manga into a palatable show that anyone, not necessarily pre-existing fans of the original source, can enjoy… the story around the characters seemed waffle-y and disjointed… sometimes things would happen but wouldn’t connect smoothly to the next thing that happens… there was this whole implied close relationship between Qi Ying and the team that just was never shown… I would’ve preferred they made her an official manager, so it would make sense that she’d be so close to the team, when for whatever reason, Peng Xiang wasn’t…even tho they’re both cheer captains…

The match sequences were cut down a little too much (tho I get why)… I would have loved that final training arc to be extended, to fully flesh out how discombobulated Yu Qing was when Si Yang had to leave, and how forcefully the other teams picked them up and got them better… so to develop the dynamic between the teams before this would’ve been good, but obviously they can only got the core actors of each team at a time… hence that barbecue scene… but if they’d pulled off something like the Haikyuu!! Tokyo training arc, or even something like in KnB where the teams were thrown together in wacky hijinks or impromptu match situations to develop their camaraderie (and they sorta tried to but nothing really came of the interactions), it would’ve made the final training arc THAT MUCH MORE heartwarming and I would have cried..

13. Any other thoughts you want to share?

I’ve already said enough. The end.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

AND IT TURNS OUT TO HAVE SELFISH ADVANTAGES

We erred ridiculously far on the side while working on Wall Street. But the first is by far the biggest killer of startups that go public is very small. This can work well in technology, at least, that worry will now be out in the open instead of being a good writer than being a good speaker is not merely that it's longer. Shockley. But I don't write to persuade, if only out of habit or politeness. This habit is unconscious, but not smiling. Fundraising is brutal. We constantly have to make decisions about things we don't understand, and more often than not we're wrong.

These are smart people; if the technology was good, they'd have learned to ask that. When we interviewed programmers, the main thing we cared about was what kind of software that makes money and the kind that's interesting to write, and Microsoft's first product was one, in fact, but no rich people. If there is a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. So why not go after corruption? The most important thing is not to change anyone's mind, but to reassure people already interested in using Lisp—people who know that Lisp is a computer language, and have a compiler translate it into machine language for you. Making things cheaper is actually a subset of a more general technique: making things easier to use. I heard there were about 20,000. As far as I know, no one of whom really owns it, it will disappear. It let them build great looking online stores literally in minutes. And to engage an audience you have to choose between two theories, prefer the one that doesn't feel mass-produced. Investors like it when you don't need it this month. Painters and writers notoriously do.

Whereas we felt pretty sure that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. And compared to the facial expressions she was used to. You can work in plain sight and they don't realize the danger. Transposing into our original expression, we get: decreasing economic inequality means taking money from the rich. For a long time it was most of making things easier, but now that the things we could make sites for people who didn't want them to start treating us like actual consultants, and calling us every time they wanted something changed on their site. Something that curtly contradicts one's beliefs can be hard to sell. Building office buildings for technology companies won't get you a job, except perhaps as a classics professor, but it has more potential than they realize. VisiCalc made the Apple II. Our hypothesis was that if we wrote our software in a weird AI language, with a bizarre syntax full of parentheses. The cause must be external. What's special about startup ideas? Any advantage we could get in the way they framed the question.

Inexperienced founders make the same mistake when trying to convince investors of something very uncertain—that their startup will be huge—and convincing anyone of something like that except by implementing your way toward it. Instead of saying that your idea is to make money and maybe be cool, not to be too difficult for programmers used to C. Those companies were apparently willing to establish subsidiaries wherever the experts wanted to live. If you actually want to compress the gap between rich and poor, you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler. Right now the limiting factor on the number of investors just as we're increasing the number of desirable startups will probably grow faster than the percentage they sell to investors shrinks. True, but I don't think many people realize there is a lot of competition for a deal, the number that moves is the valuation and thus the amount invested. It has too many cooks. Whereas the bad firms will get the leftovers, as they do now, and yet you won't use it. If you can't find an actual quote to disagree with the author's tone. We expected the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. And it's not fun for a smart person to work in record stores.

Apple is trying to be a 2 week interruption turns into a 4 month interruption. Cobol is a high-level languages on the other. If they wanted Perl or Python. What was wrong with that? People will pay for? You can work in plain sight and they don't realize the danger. It seemed like selling out. This is the same argument you tend to hear for learning Latin. Whereas we felt pretty sure that we could hold our own in the slightly less competitive business of generating Web sites for art galleries. In fact, it's often better if they're not. But even if you only have one meeting a day with investors, somehow that one meeting will burn up your whole day. You must resist this.

Now Palo Alto is suburbia, but then it was a charming college town with perfect weather and San Francisco only an hour away. One big wave and you're sunk. For example, a politician announcing the cancellation of a government program will not merely say The program is canceled. This process is not just to baldly state the facts. If you're having trouble raising money from them is something that has to work very closely with a program written in a certain language, it might be a great thing. The five languages that Eric Raymond recommends to hackers fall at various points on the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. That's negligible as corporate revenues go, but the time getting there and back, and the most productive setup is a kind of thinking you do without trying to.

[commandertheory]

War of the Spark Commander Set Review

The Commanders of War of the Spark

In white, there’s not too many ways to build around her. Once you exhaust the suite of self-bouncing creatures you commonly see in Karametra lists (e.g., Kor Skyfisher, Whitemane Lion), the next best cards to run are cheap utility creatures like Stoneforge, Weathered Wayfarer, etc.-- essentially goodstuff.

It’s notable that this card could be very good as part of the 99 in Karametra and Ephara lists. Also, it’s a double striker with a big butt for Doran lists.

I’m not a big fan of commanders that solely care about what your opponents are doing because they don’t give your own deck a lot of direction. If you’ve got a Lord Windgrace deck in your meta, then this might be useful in the 99 of hatebear decks that are good at finding their silver bullets.

The best piece of tech for Fblthp is Proteus Staff. If you run a creatureless Fblthp list, you get to stack your entire deck and then immediately draw two cards, which is great for assembling combos, such as Isochron Scepter + Dramatic Reversal. If you have mana rocks that produce three or more mana, Scepter + Reversal will give you infinite mana and then infinite activations of Proteus Staff so you can draw your deck and find a win condition.

Nexus of Fate is another solid combo piece to stack on top of your deck with Fblthp, as you can keep stacking it to the top with Proteus Staff and Fblthp, provided you have the 10 mana required to do so every turn.

I’m a little skeptical that this strategy is going to be significantly stronger than what was already possible in any Commander deck with access to Proteus Staff. Like, if you’re already in Blue, you’re not going to be starved for card draw, and you could be running a different commander that provides additional benefits (or additional colors) instead of an effect that your color identity could easily do anyway.

Seems like a very strong commander for extra turn effects. As long as you can keep Scroll Racking your Time Warps to the top of your library, you get infinite turns; even if you have to rely on one-shot effects like Brainstorm or whatever, you’ll still be taking a lot of extra turns, which will hopefully be enough for your 4-power evasive commander to eliminate some threats.

This deck naturally runs a ton of sac fodder; Bloodghast, Reassembling Skeleton, and Bloodsoaked Champion are all good here. You may also want to run some efficient token generation, as well. I also think it’s a good idea to run some of Black’s strong sac outlets like Attrition and Mind Slash so that you have the option to control your opponents with your sac fodder instead of just exchanging them for random cards via Bontu’s ETB. These sac outlets can also help you more easily reuse Bontu’s ETB trigger, especially if you sacrifice her in response to the trigger so you’ll immediately redraw her.

The most unique thing about this commander is the ability to sacrifice noncreature permanents. This opens up cards like Ugin’s Nexus and Spine of Ish Sah, which get you value when they die.

One interesting idea I’ve heard was to run Endless Whispers with her so that you get all your opponents’ creatures that die to her ETB trigger. Blink effects seem good here and I’d think about running stuff like Undying Evil, Kaya’s Ghostform, Abnormal Endurance, and Supernatural Stamina to both protect her from removal and reuse her trigger.

It may also be a good idea to run random sac fodder to ensure the ball gets rolling; it’d be a shame if the massacre never got started because the board was full of 2+ toughness creatures.

Sample Decklist

Similar to a regular Krenko, Mob Boss deck, but with power-pumping effects in place of the activated ability synergies and some of the token generation.

With Krenko, it was important to be able to get a ton of dudes onto the battlefield early to maximize his gobbo-doubling power. Krenko 2.0 doesn’t need random gobbo bodies unless they do something useful.

Sample Decklist

Neheb is kind of a sidegrade from his previous incarnation. The card filtering makes it so that you’re not quite as likely to run out of gas, but the fact that his mana generation is limited by the number of cards you discard to his trigger prevents some of the truly absurd plays that Neheb 2.0 was known for-- you’re not going to be hardcasting Eldrazi and Blighsteels nearly as often in this deck.

Extra combat step effects are very good here, as they can potentially net you mana and they give you another chance to rummage for good cards. I like that this deck can run situational cards like Ruination and Blood Moon because there’s no such thing as a dead draw in this list-- Neheb hungers for bad cards to discard.

Mass land destruction is great in this deck because, like the first Neheb, the Champion can provide the mana you need to cast your stuff.

The single best card in this deck is Aggravated Assault, which goes infinite with your commander, provided you have five or more cards in hand that you can discard-- just make sure you’ve got one of the original three legendary Eldrazi so you can shuffle your graveyard back in and prevent yourself from milling out.

I wish there were more good madness cards in Red, or in Commander in general. Neheb 3.0 is the perfect commander for madness since he provides both an outlet and mana to cast stuff, but the only madness cards worth running are like Fiery Temper and maaaaybe Avacyn’s Judgment.

Sample Decklist

This seems like an awesome reward for running fat donks like Blightsteel and Malignus.

Although he doesn’t play nicely with attack triggers, you’re on color for some sweet combat damage triggers like Balefire Dragon, Hellkite Tyrant, Dream Pillager, Rapacious One, Neheb 2.0, Steel Hellkite, and Mordant Dragon. Neheb, the Eternal, while not a combat damage trigger, also works pretty well with Ilharg.

Ilharg has some synergy with echo, since you’ll never have to pay the upkeep cost, so cards like Volcano Hellion and Crater Hellion are much better in this list than they normally are.

Having six toughness and an ability that lets you cheat mana costs means that Wildfire and Destructive Force are very good here, as is mass land destruction in general. Keldon Firebombers seems like a great way to repeatedly limit your opponents’ mana.

In addition to the usual suite of mana accelerants and haste granters, Generator Servant is quite good here, and I’d consider running Seething Song, as well.

Sample Decklist

The creatures that benefit most from Rhonas’s ETB trigger are win conditions in their own right; you don’t need to rely on your commander to make canned armies like Rampaging Baloths, Titania, and Avenger of Zendikar into threats.

Maybe this wants to be an infect deck, since doubling the power of cards like Phyrexian Juggernaut and Phyrexian Hydra makes them one-hit KOs.

Muscle Mutt is just a voltron deck, albeit one that uses an unusual subset of cards. I wouldn’t run most cards that solely put counters on Mowu, but I like cards that put counters on him while generating cards, like Ordeal of Nylea, Ancient Animus, or Implement of Ferocity. I also like some of the repeatable counter-generating effects; Retreat to Kazandu, Armory of Iroas, and Invigorating Boon (cards with cycling) seem good. There are also some lands that can get counters on your commander, such as Oran-Rief, the Vastwood; Forge of Heroes; and Opal Palace. Also, don’t forget your Hardened Scales!

There’s been a little bit of controversy about Yanggu and Mowu lately because Yanggu is able to bring Mowu with his when he planeswalks (which is supposed to be impossible, as Huatli’s tamales illustrate; normally, creatures are summoned to a plane). It would be weird if Yanggu could only do this with Mowu, but my headcanon is that Mowu is able to do it with anyone but has so far only attempted it with his dog (or that if he had previously done it, he forgot about it when he came down with amnesia).

I don’t think it’s worth running random wolves as sorcery-speed kill spells, but I might run wolves that get me value in addition to fighting (e.g., Rot Wolf, Skalla Wolf, Pack Guardian). Wolfir Silverheart is too monstrously large to leave out of this deck.

I’d also run repeatable wolf token generators like Sword of Body and Mind, Wolfcaller’s Howl, Master of the Wild Hunt, Kessig Cagebreakers, and Feed the Pack. You can also run some of the wolf token generators that create a bunch at once (such as Howl of the Night Pack, Predator’s Howl, and Wolfbriar Elemental) to build your own Ezuri’s Predation.

I gotta say that it’s very cute that they gave Voja a title so that he wouldn’t legend rule the tokens made by the old Tolsimir.

We all know that BG has a lot of good creatures that are worth recurring (putting your opponents under the Abyss with Fleshbag variants sounds like a barrel of laughs), but it also has a ton of good planeswalkers, especially when you don’t have to care too much about protecting them. Firing off a Sorin Markov or a Vraska 1.0, letting your opponents dogpile on it, and then getting it back again next turn seems like a great way to control the board and divert aggro away from your face.

I would try to fit in some ways to give your commander haste (Greaves, Hall of the Bandit Lord) and protect him (Yavimaya Hollow) since he’s the engine your deck revolves around.

This guy checks some boxes to make use of mana dorks that are too narrow for most decks: he costs four, he’s got 4+ power for Whisperer of the Wilds, and he’s an Elf for Priest of Titania.

This card does not appear to be designed with Commander in mind. Death triggers don’t work very well in this format, especially when you don’t have access to black and white reanimation engines. If you discount the proliferate (as you should), all that’s left is a pile of stats, which has never been particularly strong in Commander.

If this guy was just ETB double proliferate, he would have been waaay more interesting.

I’ve heard about lists that use clones to farm his death and ETB triggers, but I tried it and it was not… great… Proliferating before you add the new counters is pretty lame, and one-shot proliferation without cards attached to it is not worth a card slot, IMO.

The best Boros commander ever, and it’s not close. This deck draws tons of cards thanks to white and red’s many cheap cantrips, it can protect its commander pretty easily thanks to the million 1CMC instants that give things protection or indestructible, and it has some great combo pieces like Aurelia’s Fury and Blinding Beam to allow you to soft lock your opponents.

Plus, if you’d prefer to eschew the controlling playstyle for something more aggressive, you can run a bunch of Fists of the Anvil and Double Cleave variants to beat the hell out of your opponents.

Sample Decklist

This card just encourages you to run the most powerful multicolored cards, which tend to be hyper-efficient removal spells like Assassin’s Trophy and Anguished Unmaking. The only non-goodstuff cards in the list are a handful of blink spells so you can dodge removal and refill your hand. As far as win conditions go, turning Niv sideways seems to be the best one; Civic Saber, Conqueror’s Flail, and Duelist’s Heritage will cut your clock in half.

Sample Decklist

Card Ratings

In this set review, I’ll be using two five-point rating scales to evaluate the nonlegendary cards, one that measures how many decks a card is playable in (we’ll call that “spread”), and one that measures how powerful it is in those decks (”power”). Here’s a brief rundown of what each rank on the two scales means:

Spread

1: This card is effective in one or two decks, but no more (ex: The Gitrog Monster). 2: This card is effective in one deck archetype (ex: self-mill decks). 3: A lot of decks will be able to use this card effectively (ex: decks with graveyard interactions). 4: This card is effective in most decks in this color. 5: Every deck in this color is able to use this card effectively.

Power

1: This card is always going to be on the chopping block. 2: This card is unlikely to consistently perform well. 3: This card provides good utility but is not a powerhouse. 4: This card is good enough to push you ahead of your opponents. 5: This card has a huge impact on the game.

The Planeswalkers of War of the Spark

Spread: 1

Power: 2

I could imagine running this in Odric, Lunarch Marshal, since it’s a cheap way to give all your guys indestructible and lifelink or vigilance. Otherwise, it’s not worth your time.

Spread: 1

Power: 2

Might see a little play in Arcades as a way to produce a pair of beaters and draw a couple cards. It’s nice that you can curve Teyo into Arcades to frontload the mana cost but wait to produce your tokens and get your cards until after your commander comes down. The rate is not insane, though, and I could see this getting cut for a better stats-to-cost ratio in the future.

Spread: 1

Power: 4

This is solely for self-mill decks. It’s less vulnerable to removal than Laboratory Maniac but you can’t get it back with Dread Return or something similar if you mill yourself out. Either way, both Jace and Lab Man are worse than Nexus of Fate.

Spread: 1

Power: 4

I could see running this in a deck with a lot of wheel effects (Nekusar and The Locust God being the obvious ones) to act as a Leovold, making your opponents discard their hands and only drawing one card to replace it.

Spread: 3

Power: 3

Liliana is a bit expensive, but she might have potential in the few decks that can make use of more than one of her abilities. For example, sacrifice-oriented decks are interested in black token generation and getting value when your creatures die, so both her static effect and +1 will be useful there. Also, it’s worth noting that although planeswalkers are generally pretty fragile in Commander, Liliana makes a chump blocker and she’s going to have 7 loyalty when you pass the turn, which can be difficult for your opponents to beat though, especially if you’ve got Savra, Queen of the Golgari or Teysa, Orzhov Scion to control their boards.

Spread: 4

Power: 1

This card is really similar to Chandra, Pyromaster, and that card sees almost no play.

Spread: 1

Power: 2

For the purposes of the Ur-Dragon, it’s two dragons for the price of one and it can potentially deter attacks. I don’t think there’s anyone else that’s really interested in this, though.

Spread: 2

Power: 2

He’s a second copy of Rishkar for green +1/+1 counter decks.

Spread: 3

Power: 3

Omnath, Locus of Mana seems like a natural home for this card. It’s kind of cool that it’s effectively three mana since you can untap a Forest with the +1, but this card is still worse than Vernal Bloom in most ways. Vernal Bloom gets you to the game-winning threshold for mana a lot quicker; you don’t need more than 8 or 9 mana to win a game of Commander so what really matters is hitting that game-winning threshold as early as possible. Casting a turn four Bloom into a turn 5 Tooth and Nail is much stronger than casting a turn 5 Nissa into a turn 6 T&N, especially when you consider the fact that your Vernal Bloom can’t be attacked or Bolted in the intervening turn.

That being said, this is still a powerful card for monogreen ramp.

Spread: 3

Power: 2

I like the surprise factor of the -2; it’s cool that they’re finding ways to improve on abilities we’ve seen a thousand times already. Anyway, this card is not good. If you want two random cards out of your deck, you can get it at a better rate than this.

Spread: 2

Power: 2

Overall, this card feels very intro pack-y. The plus ability doesn’t affect the board, the -3 is a pretty bad rate, and the ultimate is not very impactful. This doesn’t seem like a great reason to buy a box (unless the price ends up being super high).

Spread: 4

Power: 2

Every element of this card can be done much better somewhere else in these colors. There is something to be said for the power of choices, but I really don’t think this card is good enough to see play.

Spread: 2

Power: 2

This card looks a lot like Ajani Goldmane, although it’s much better in superfriends decks than Goldmane ever was. It’s also worth noting that Ajani will probably draw less aggro than whatever busted planeswalker you’re bumping up, so he’s less fragile than he looks. However, I still think this effect is not worth a card. There are some solid repeatable proliferators in WAR, and I’d much rather use them than rely on a card type that can get attacked to death.

Spread: 3

Power: 1

I really like CMC-based reanimation and I’d really like to see it on a WB commander one day. Anyway, since you’re on color for both white and black reanimation you can do way better than this. If your deck is trying to recur a lot of weenies you can run Return to the Ranks or Dusk/Dawn, and if you want to get back one big thing, you can run Animate Dead or Reanimate or Necromancy or whatever.

Spread: 1

Power: 2

With a little tweaking, this could be an interesting commander, as it rewards you for playing with a subset of cards that normally doesn’t get played in Commander. In the main deck, however, this card seems pretty underwhelming. Even in lists that naturally have a ton of deathtouchers such as Hapatra, this is a pretty slow, small, and fragile anthem. If she had some way to gain loyalty, the -2 could help the card find its way into decks looking for sac fodder, but two tokens over two turns for four mana is not going to turn a lot of heads.

Spread: 1

Power: 3

There’s currently no UG commander that really rewards lots of large dudes, but I’m hopeful we might see something in the future (maybe a Simic or Temur Divine Visitation effect on a commander?).

Between Kiora, Temur Ascendancy, Garruk's Packleader, Kavu Lair, and Elemental Bond, we are getting very close to a critical mass of this type of card.

Spread: 1

Power: 4

Maybe if you’re running a deck with a ton of Twincast variants, this could serve as a potential win condition/storm enabler. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the combo, you cast a Fork variant copying any spell, then cast another Fork variant copying the original Fork variant. The second Fork resolves, putting a new copy of Fork #1 on the stack, which can then target the original Fork #1. Keep going through this loop and netting Ral triggers until your opponents are dead.

Spread: 2

Power: 3

Young Pyromancer sees play in 6400 decks on EDHREC, many of them in Izzet color identities. I think Saheeli slots into those same lists pretty easily, especially given the potential power offered by her -2 when copying mana rocks or utility creatures.

Spread: 2

Power: 3

What a brutal mana cost. I’d run this in superfriends since it’s almost a planeswalker clone and killing creatures/drawing cards is not terrible in that deck. I think that mana cost and the general meh-ness of PWs in Commander keep him out of most other decks.

Spread: 5

Power: 0 (no sideboards) / 4 (sideboards)

The playability of this guy hinges on whether your playgroup allows you to get cards from outside of the game. The Rules Committee’s stance is that sideboards are not officially supported and have to be house ruled into the format. If your playgroup follows that bit of dogma and Karn can only search your exile zone, then he’s not really worth playing; Null Rod only sees play in the most cutthroat cEDH lists, and while Karn only affects your opponents, I think that’s more than offset by the fact that he costs 4 and can get attacked to death.

Now, if your playgroup DOES let you have a sideboard or just dig through your binder or whatever, Mycosynth Lattice is one of the best things it can do, as it shuts off your opponents’ lands and all of their activated abilities in combination with Karn. Paradox Engine and Bolas’s Citadel are strong cards that don’t require much set up, but if you’re trying to combo off with those cards, you’d probably rather have them in your maindeck, rather than only accessible via a planeswalker. There are some neat artifact combos that you can search for both halves of if you can ensure that Karn lives long enough to activate twice: Basalt Monolith and Rings of Brighthearth gets you infinite mana (although again, these cards may be better in your maindeck), and if Painter’s Servant ever gets unbanned, you can use Karn to grab it and Grindstone to mill your opponents out one by one.

Spread: 3

Power: 3

Now, this guy is a Commander-playable planeswalker. I’d run this in any deck currently running Scour from Existence (barring Mizzix), which mostly means colorless, monoblack, and monored decks. The +1 is also solid, offering sacrifice fodder that is likely to be pretty useful in many of the monoblack decks that run it, and colorless cost reduction makes it even more powerful in the colorless decks that run it. I’m a big fan of this card, and I like that it disproportionately helps color identities that were on the weaker side.

It’s great that he’s rare, since I plan on picking up a bunch of these.

Maindeck Cards from War of the Spark

Spread: 3

Power: 3

At low numbers, the ratio of bodies to cost is not great. There are so many good white token generators that I doubt this makes the cut, even though the tokens are better than the ones produced by most of its competitors. Also, you should treat the “10 or more” text on this card like a planeswalker’s ultimate and ignore it.

Spread: 2

Power: 2

Seems very good in a Mikaeus, the Lunarch deck and in planeswalker decks that don’t invest heavily in mass removal. It stinks that White got the worst experience counter commanders and never got a poison commander because this card has so much potential, but the support isn’t there.

Spread: 2

Power: 2

This is a lot of mana for a narrow tutor. When you consider the fact that most Superfriends lists are already running Black and have access to cheap unconditional tutors, the Beacon becomes much less appealing.

Spread: 1

Power: 1

It does make a lot of Angels for your Lyra Dawnbringer deck. It’s not worth 8 mana, though.

Spread: 4

Power: 2

Hating on multicolor permanents is not that great. Although most commanders are multicolor, most main deck permanents are one or fewer colors. To put this card in perspective, Radiant Purge sees almost no play in Commander.

Spread: 3

Power: 2

I think Diving Reckoning is a fair point of comparison for this card. Divine Reckoning sees a fair amount of play; it’s in almost 6000 decks on EDHREC, most of them Voltron. While Single Combat has a few knobs that distinguish it from Reckoning, it’s probably a safe bet that it’ll see similar amounts of play in similar lists.

That being said, I’m not a huge fan of this card. It guarantees that the biggest threats survive and most of the time I’d rather take out the scariest things on my opponents’ side of the field than protect my own things.

Spread: 1

Power: 2

Varina is very interested in making multiple Zombie bodies for less than three mana. I’m gonna save a little space in a very long set review and suggest you apply the previous sentence and ratings to every Amass creature and most Amass spells that cost less than four mana. 

Spread: 3

Power: 2

I like this card a lot. I think it’s much stronger than Steady Progress, and about on the power level of Tezzeret’s Gambit, which sees play in 8500 decks on EDHREC.

Spread: 2

Power: 3

Kruphix is very interested in outlets for the absurd amounts of mana he produces, and unlike almost any other commander, he can realistically hit the “10 or more” mode.

Mizzix likes X spells that generate value, so she might also be in the market for this card.

Spread: 2

Power: 3

This card could see play in planeswalker decks as another Inexorable Tide. This could also potentially see play in Mizzix decks as an additional way to bump up your experience count or in Noyan Dar as a way to grow your manlands.

Spread: 2

Power: 2

The additional mana relative to Thrummingbird hurts, and this also misses on some of the bird tribal lists (Kangee) that were interested in that card. Still, I could imagine running this in Atraxa, Ezuri 2.0, and Vorel.

Spread: 1

Power: 3

It’s a cheap Sphinx for Unesh, and it can bounce another Sphinx to your hand so you can get another trigger.

Spread: 2

Power: 3

Unfortunate that it can only target your own creatures and planeswalkers, but it seems strong in superfriends decks and simic +1/+1 counter lists. It’s also quite good in Estrid, Teferi, Temporal Archmage, and Saheeli, the Gifted, since all of those commanders have mana-generating abilities that make the Double free or cheap to cast.

There are also a ton of commanders that this can break wide open. Double Reaper King, double Atraxa, double Zndrsplt… if you’re in Blue and you’re running Helm of the Host, this card seems like a big upgrade.

Spread: 3

Power: 5

This is the new Paradox Engine. If your deck has a lot of card selection and tutors then this ought to be able to win the game all by itself. Some of the better interactions:

Circu, Dimir Lobotomist: This guy was kind of a joke before Citadel got spoiled. His mill effect is really weak and he’s in the bottom half of all Dimir commanders when it comes to popularity. However, he works pretty well with the Citadel because he can mill off excess lands from the top of your library so that you’re less likely to fizzle when comboing off.

Sensei’s Divining Top: Turns the Citadel into a Yawgmoth’s Bargain (thanks to @snarwin for pointing this out).

Mana Severance: Gets rid of all the lands so you won’t fizzle.

Aetherflux Reservoir: Subsidizes the Citadel’s life payments and eventually serves as your win condition.

Spread: 3

Power: 4

It’s interesting that this and Bolas’s Citadel showed up in the same set, since they’re both six mana black rares that offer insane card advantage and mana savings at the cost of a ton of life.

Anyway, I’ve heard people talking about using this in Oloro and other decks that gain life very easily. It could also be good in decks with very low curves so that you’re getting more cards for the life you’re paying.

Interestingly, it deals damage to you rather than makes you lose life, which means that you can prevent the damage, give yourself protection, or give the spell lifelink in order to cheat the life cost.

Spread: 3

Power: 3

The ability to get back noncreature cards is pretty rare in black, and if your deck has a lot of redundancy built into it you can sometimes remove your opponents’ ability to screw you. Plus, there’s a lot to be said for making deals with the opponent in the weakest position to get back the cards that will knock someone else down a peg.

Spread: 2

Power: 2

It provides a steady stream of Skullclamp-compliant sac fodder for decks that need it, as well as a self-recurring threat for Varina Zombie tribal lists.

Spread: 4

Power: 3

This card seems like great value for mopping up small utility creatures. 4 mana to kill some combination of Oracle of Mul Daya, Fauna Shaman, Tymna, Edric, Mentor of the Meek, etc. seems pretty strong. I think the easiest point of comparison is probably Black Sun’s Zenith. Black Sun’s sees play in over 15,000 decks, and it’ll cost you the same amount of mana to kill the same creatures. This one is asymmetrical but won’t get the random collateral damage against your opponents’ other creatures. I think they’re about on the same power level, although it’s worth noting that you could conceivably hit the 12 mana in a monoblack deck with Coffers and a bunch of ways to find it.

Spread: 1

Power: 1

This guy requires you to jump through a ton of hoops. In order for him to do his thing, you have to have:

A way to give him haste and/or a way to protect him until your next turn.

A high density of instants and sorceries

Either an extremely low curve on those instants and sorceries or a way to buff the Arcanist’s power.

I can think of commanders that fulfill some of those requirements, but not all of them.

Spread: 2

Power: 3

X spells are great in Mizzix and she has a ton of great targets to choose from. Seems like an easy inclusion in that list. It could also be good in Zada as a way to re-use your token-generating spells and cantrips.

Neheb, the Eternal is one of the few commanders who can reliably get X to 10 or higher, since that deck is desperate for good mana sinks and it runs a fair number of strong instants and sorceries.

Spread: 2

Power: 3

This card is awesome. Great in Hapatra decks as a way to get a bunch of Hapatra triggers at once and accelerate the death of your opponents’ dudes. Also seems solid in Thelon of Havenwood for spreading spores, nabbing experience with Meren and Ezuri 2.0, pumping the team in Mazirek, and of course, building loyalty among your planeswalkers.

Spread: 4

Power: 4

I don’t think we needed more cards like this, but whatever. The rich get richer. Other cards in Green that accomplish the same thing:

Tooth and Nail

Green Sun’s Zenith

Survival of the Fittest

Finale of Devastation

Chord of Calling

Worldly Tutor

Natural Order

Fauna Shaman

Note that all of the above are Commander staples.

Spread: 1

Power: 2

Useful in Sasaya as a way to get more Forests in hand. Also a solid upgrade over Sylvan Scrying in a Nissa, Vastwood Seer deck.

Spread: 2

Power: 2

Unfortunately, none of the Green planeswalkers that you can run as your commander have insane ultimates, so I don’t think it’s worth running in those decks as a means to pop em off really quickly.

It is, however, a slightly more expensive Deepglow Skate for Atraxa, Ezuri 2.0, Vorel, Pir & Toothy, and all those other blue/green counter-based decks.

Spread: 4

Power: 2

Over 7500 decks on EDHREC run Naturalize, and this is strictly better, even if it’s not a huge upgrade.

Spread: 2

Power: 1

This card suffers from the Immortal Sun effect, where it does several things, but none of them particularly well. +2/+2 isn’t a huge boost for a one-shot effect, and the lack of trample is frustrating. Also, I don’t like that this card is really bad at punishing pillowfort, since their artifacts and enchantments are what’s preventing you from getting it.

If you’re in need of artifact destruction, you’re probably better off running a tutor to find your Bane of Progress. If you’re in need of an Overrun effect, you’re better off running a tutor to find your Craterhoof Behemoth. Might I suggest Finale of Devastation?

Spread: 1

Power: 2

I really don’t like the idea of pumping mana into this in the hopes of getting something relevant. However, I do like running it in decks that can manipulate their top card (Hua Tuo, Honored Physician comes to mind) and in decks that just like its type line and don’t actually care what it does (such as Reki, the History of Kamigawa, who only cares about running the cheapest legendary cards possible).

Spread: 4

Power: 3

I really like Negate and Countersquall, so I’m happy to run this effect as a 5th or 6th counterspell in all my decks with a blue/white color identity.

Spread: 3

Power: 3

I love asymmetrical board wipes. Note that it doesn’t target the creature it bounces so you can still cast it when you have no targets and it can’t be fizzled by removal. This seems like a pretty easy inclusion in most blue/white lists in the market for sweepers.

Spread: 1

Power: 2

This could be really sweet in any GR deck that runs a lot of mass land destruction-- maybe something like Grand Warlord Radha that isn’t totally reliant on its lands to cast its spells and can generate enough mana early in the game to bounce its lands and still cast a Thoughts of Ruin.

It also might be good in Borborygmos Enraged, as it’s a way to get lands back to your hand that is much less painful than Storm Cauldron.

Spread: 3

Power: 2

While the average CMC of Commander decks has crept down over the years, this is probably still very good. It kills all but 4 of the top 21 commanders of all time and while it’s pretty bad at taking care of mana accelerators and cheap draw engines, it’s great at killing the most terrifying threats in the format (such as Paradox Engine, Gods, Praetors, Titans, etc.). Don’t run it over Anguished Unmaking but consider it in a high-CMC metagame.

Spread: 3

Power: 3

I have not played a lot of Decimates, so I can’t fully judge how strong this card is. I thiiink it’s worse than Windgrace’s Judgment because of the rough mana cost, 6>5, sorcery speed.

Spread: 3

Power: 2

Eldritch Evolution sees a surprising amount of play (almost 9000 decks on EDHREC), but Neoform is worse in three ways, so it’s hard to be bullish about this card. I think I like it in Tishana, since she naturally wants a bunch of creatures on the field and morphs into Craterhoof, but I’m not sure there are many other commanders that would be stoked to run this. Maybe in Ezuri 2.0 as a way to trade mana dorks for Sage of Hours?

Spread: 4

Power: 3

This is the cheapest we’ve ever seen this effect and it can be really devastating to an opponent to have their commander permanently stolen. That being said, there are other cards with similar effects that cost only a little more, such as Legerdemain and Switcheroo, see hardly any play in Commander.

Spread: 1

Power: 2

Very unfortunate that the red mana in its cost disqualifies it from being used in the two decks that want it most: Doran and Arcades. There are a bunch of Kynaios and Tiro decks running Wave of Reckoning, so there’s potential for it to be run there (although it’s worth mentioning that Wave of Reckoning was included in their precon, so it may not actually be that great in the deck; maybe people were just too lazy to take it out).

Spread: 4

Power: 3

This seems very good in Lord Windgrace since that deck has a ton of mana to pump into it, a slow clock, and many ways to recur it.

Other slow control decks with lots of mana available will probably be happy to run this card, since it’s a difficult-to-answer counter that doesn’t require a deck slot.

Spread: 5

Power: 1

Even with the restriction to creatures, Winding Canyons is much better than this and doesn’t see a whole lot of play, so I’m skeptical that this will accomplish much. Losing a land is a huge downside.

Spread: 3

Power: 2

This is great! Coming into this set I was hoping to see a lot of proliferate attached to staple effects, and there’s nothing more universally useful than lands. It’ll be tricky to run this in Atraxa and five-color superfriends lists because of the heavy color requirements in those decks, but I’m sure planeswalker decks with fewer colors (the nicer Narset builds, for example) and infect aggro, +1/+1 counter decks, -1/-1 counter decks, and experience counter commanders are all going to find room to run this card. 

Wrapping Up

Were there any cards I missed? Do you disagree with any of my ratings? Let me know!

[tricktster]

this is a weird fish rant incoming

i wrote that post about my newest aquarium with darkmantle the betta fish about 18 times because on the first 17 passes i kept trying to find ways to reassure whoever found it through the tags that the tank was big enough and cycled and my parameters were great...

because, like, in my experience aquatics as a hobby at large (but particularly on tumblr thanks to anon asks) has the potential to be incredibly judgmental! Which... like, honestly i get!

A lot of us love tech and we love learning new techniques and how to care for species with really specific needs, but when it comes down to it... there are really just a few things you have to do to keep everyone in your average freshwater tank thriving, and i’m gonna hazard a guess and say 60-70 percent of people don’t do any of them, at least not at first!

like, fucking it up is almost baked into the hobby. we still give out goldfish at carnivals, we still see products claiming that you don’t need to change water ever if you just buy their additive or throw a plant in it and call it aquaponics, and we still sell tanks specifically marketed for betta fish that wouldn’t be a humane place to keep any living being. and how do you beat that mentality, you know? when there’s a full industry saying “no, these animals actually like! living in unheated, unfiltered plastic cubes,” or “they’re great favors for parties, put them in mason jars as a centerpiece!” there’s always gonna be some percentage of people who don’t ever question that, and it’s upsetting!

worse, the people who are really into the hobby? like i said, bad care is basically where most of us started out! most of us made those same beginner fuckups, and we didn’t provide proper care for our underwater buds because we were kids, or information wasn’t available because we had dial up, or even the information in books was often wrong, or the clerk at the pet store said it was okay, or the fucking instructions on the box did. we learned that we were wrong when our pets died. then like, we got a little knowledge, and now we feel guilty that we caused any living being to suffer in the past because we didn’t know enough or do enough to prevent that suffering.

and this is kind of a wild thing about this hobby i stumbled into, because, unlike many other hobbies, there is a measureable cost to fucking it up. tiny lives are on the line, and if you’re bad at it, they die early and unnatural deaths. for those of us who find joy in figuring out how to help our charges thrive, it sucks to know that for some people who claim to love it too, an aquarium is where you put a fish until it dies a few days/weeks/maaybe months later and you get another fish. there’s some moral weight involved that other hobbies don’t have. like, there’s a lot of bad artists out there. some people genuinely suck at knitting or the harmonica. i cannot in good faith call the thing my body does to music “dancing.” generally, the errors people make if they’re bad at a hobby do not lead to suffering and death. (exception: see, my attempts at dancing, supra.)

also, the people who are really fucking it up in the aquarium sphere don’t have a huge overlap with the people who are enthusiastically showing progress pics or asking questions about the science or art underlying these little closed ecosystems. i think people really dedicated to the hobby don’t get the opportunity to interact very often with the subset of people out there fucking it up hard. like, you know it’s happening, and it’s easy to find pictures of a shitty tank if you go looking, but most people are doing pretty fucking good if they’re already actively engaged in the hobby.

so, this is my theory about judgy, judgy fishblr. i think all that anger at people who don’t care about their animals mixes with our own shame for our early mistakes and emotions run high; then, like anything else people are passionate about, some people become holier-than-thou fundamentalists about the whole fuckin thing. if they call you out, they can stay above reproach. if they can claim that anything different from how they engage with the hobby is wrong, they can’t be accused of ever making a mistake, and maybe they don’t need to grapple with their own guilt about their own fuckups that way either. like, i know this all sounds really overblown but...seriously, my tiny following on this site is because I Am A Person Who Wrote 475000 words of Fanfic About Sans Undertale, Including His Dick, and for that crime against decency, i’m sure i DO deserve some anon hate. yet somehow, in spite of my many public sins, my most unpleasant interactions on this or honestly any social media site have been about aquarium stuff? it’s not even directly mean, it’s concern trolling like “uhh sweetie good try but you really shouldn’t have a betta unless you’ve got the space for it 😏😉” and inside i’m like “BITCH IT’S 6.6 GALLONS, it’s ONE FISH, IT’S A NANO TANK,” and yet my response is always closer to “thanks for the tip 😁😁😁😁. here’s why you’re wrong but i’ll be CHEERFUL AND FRIENDLY about it because deep down i STILL need validation that I’m not hurting my animals, EVEN THOUGH I KNOW I’M DOING GREAT”

(this, i swear to god, happens often enough that it’s a joke on the aquatics subreddits? like someone will post a pic of obscenely enormous empty tank, drained swimming pool etc and be like “any ideas what i should put in this?!” and the comments will be like “maybe big enough for a betta???” “no way. with a tank that small, one amano shrimp tops, and that’s PUSHING it”)

so there my dumb ass was last night, trying to write jokes about my fish while still preemptively demonstrating that i know my shit to stop any doubters from fishsplaining at me? and i just COULDN’T get it, and i was getting really frustrated, because it’s so obnoxious to be lumped in with people who never change their pets’ water and don’t know to cycle their tanks and certainly don’t regularly find themselves hunched over 5 ml beakers waiting for the reagents to assure them their ammonia level is as close to 0 parts pet million as possible...

and then i remembered how i deal with anyone who questions my competency in literally any other field. I don’t smile and emoji my way through being attacked by some asshole on the internet when any other topic is on the line. i certainly don’t scramble for the reciepts to prove they’re wrong. instead, i use every debater’s most feared technique:

I threaten to crawl into their house and put things in their ears while they’re sleeping.

Hmmm, oh, are you implying that I don’t know how to care for my obviously healthy, thriving animals? not anymore, because you can’t question my commitment with your EARS FULL OF GOOGLY EYES, JARED!

...this went so far off the rails. in conclusion, take care of your pets, and don’t be insecure in your abilities.

oh, and saltwater tank elitist snobs can eat my farts. give your balls a tug ya shitheads.

[froshele]

long shit ahead but i would like to butt in to bring up that this reminds me of a conversation I once had with a friend about how people from my culture have a relatively higher bar for what constitutes eldritch horrors beyond mortal comprehension than people from hers, largely because of differences about what is considered acceptable subject matter in children's media - loss, for example, or deep loneliness and longing that remains unresolved, or the way children cope with immense cultural griefs

she was profoundly unsettled and felt deeply decentered emotionally by just the very honest way that the media i grew up on deal with large, impersonal, universal things that cannot just be wished away

the upshot of this was that if you compare our cartoons to theirs (the exact identity of my culture of reference is not important in this context but it should be noted my friend grew up on American media) you see a lot more sexualisation and violence in one, and a lot more huge, existential themes packed very densely in the other

there are cultural overton windows for what's too heavy for children and what is acceptable to show them, is my point, and I have a half-baked take that there is a very important part of art culture that privileges very specific tastes, and encourages very particular kinds of people's desires and experiences to be the benchmark for good art and normal things to have as part of your cultural continuity

like, old racist slapstick american cartoons are like that because of what would have entertained the people making them, who I think should have had way more care for the psyches of the people their work was being shown to

but also there is a pervasive expectation that all media must be entertaining, and then it's left unspoken Who is actually to be entertained, whose critical opinion is relevant

the fact that a large amount of tech bros want to see weird inflated boobs on demand and so the art ai they make are trained on very specific, niche, sexualized models of beauty seems to me like it has the potential for important effects on not only artists getting paid properly but also What Beauty Is to this cultural context that made these robots, and what is seen as Entertaining Enough to be Commercial Art

which means it has an effect on what you can reasonably expect to see and internalize as art in your life, and (this sounds crazy but bear with me) i mean, already you can see from the work of many architects which ones of them get no bitches ever

the ai should be free to make nightmares, there should be room for nightmares and huge frightening things in the world without them relating to human beings either through sex or through violence

it should not be the case that everything that does not cater to very specific people's psychosexual oddments is considered niche art and genre work

human people should be able to feel like there is an audience not defined by consumption of these things to make nightmares for, too, and landscape paintings, and I don't know literally anything else that isn't within the parameters of a vocal and powerful subset of dudebros' taste

I think these tech bros are ashamed about the fact that they want fresh booba on demand all the time in increasingly violent and difficult-to-get-consent-for porn scenarios, thus the attempt to shift to bots to produce the type of art they're really looking for (because at some point people on hentaifoundry also have principles)

but isn't it scary to remove all these human elements from the media you pay money for? Sure you have nobody to be accountable to for your tastes anymore but that also means that nobody can check that you are in fact still mentally normal about other people's bodies, autonomy and independent existence, and then you carry that with you to your day job, perhaps as a popular film guy or policymaker with influence on the zeitgeist

and all in all the more it's expected that art is Like This the more fringe the art becomes that actually does what we make art to do, ie speaks to experiences many people have and offers space to be less alone with the immensity of existence

if only a specific group of people decide what's too disturbing and what's normal, and their normal is genuinely unhealthy and pushes out art that expresses real things for other people from commercial viability, what does that mean for the internet monoculture (tm)'s ability to engage with and process anything at all that isn't that?

in real life we already have this occurring with minority artists in tension with their majority culture, especially if the country would like to censor what is happening to them at the hands of its government, but consider the implications for a moment of the soft and hard power tech bros have over people whose only exposure to the world outside their very strictly policed existence is a world shaped by the violence and titillation that tech bros expect as a cultural aesthetic

let the robots make horrors

let things that really are horrors be coped with in positive ways and let the guys who want the robots to make soulless secret wank material so they dont have to pay or be accountable for it grow the Fuck up and have some shame and decency

🎤⬇️

honestly i think a very annoying part about the AI art boom is that techbros are out here going BEHOLD, IT CAN DO A REASONABLE FACSIMILE OF GIRL WITH BIG BOOBA, THE PINNACLE OF ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT and its like

no it’s fucking not! That AI wants to do melty nightmare fractal vomit so fucking bad and you are shackling it to a post and force-feeding it the labor of hard-working artists when you could literally pay someone to draw you artisanal hand-crafted girls with big boobs to your exact specifications and let your weird algorithms make art that can be reasonably used to represent horrors beyond human comprehension

[silenthillmutual]

I’ve talked a little about this on Twitter and Discord but haven’t really gone into it much here. I know my posts don’t reach that many people but I kind of wanted to address this thing that I see people talk a lot about when it comes to the American education system. 

I want to talk about the dichotomy between honors course students (including AP, DE, whatever else) and general course students.

I see a lot of people have a lot of really negative feelings about honors course students and while I can definitely understand where that comes from, what bugs me about it is that a lot of this is false consciousness. The Vox video on Tucker Carlson does a really good job explaining what this is, but I want to go into how this effects American education, ableism in the school system, and the capitalist exploitation of children.

Note: this is written entirely from experience, from an autistic + mentally ill person who did both general and honors courses; brief mention of suicide farther down.

As the Vox video says, “It’s a term from Marxist theory... When working-class people are tricked into accepting their exploitation.” This is done through manipulation by the people in charge, who suggest that your exploitation is the fault of other people on your level, or in a level below. In the video, the example given is a boss suggesting that one worker’s exploitation is the fault of women in the workplace taking maternity leave, while the other worker is told that their exploitation is due to millenials being lazy. 

This is a form of redirection meant to keep you from banding together. In the workforce, this is meant to keep employers from forming unions.

In the American public school system, this is fed to you by your teachers with the ultimate goal of both preparing you for future treatment from you bosses to prevent you from forming unions - perhaps even to keep kids from joining student government programs - and as a way to avoid complying with ADA.

People who were not in honors courses have been very vocal about being looked down on by kids in the honors courses and having been there, I can say that’s absolutely true. But the thing is this: no twelve year-old has an ingrained sense of superiority like that. Focus, Governor’s School, Advanced Placement, Honors, Dual Enrollment - they tend to parrot rhetoric they have been given from their teachers, parents, and school board that tells them they are in these classes because they are naturally smarter and more gifted, than kids who aren’t in these classes. And that isn’t where it stops; a lot of us were kept in these programs by fearmongering that we wouldn’t be able to get into a good college if we took the standard classes. We were told that kids in standard or remedial classes just weren’t trying hard enough - hell, if we took honors classes instead of AP or DE classes, there was this implication that we could be doing better, trying harder, and that what we were doing was easier. 

The high school I attended worked on a seven-point grading scale until I was a senior, which means that in order to get an A you had to score a 94 or above. Getting a score in the 70s was considered barely passing. You could get a 60 and have that be considered a failing grade. When they switched to the ten-point scale my senior year (100-90 A, 90-80 B, 80-70 C, 70-60 D, 60 & below F), they “remedied” this by introducing minuses into letter grades. 

The reason I bring all of this up is because there seems to be this misconception that the schools cared more about kids in honors classes - which is to say that they cared at all. 

They didn’t. 

In case I haven’t made this clear enough, honors student kids were not oppressing you. They might not have been nice, because they were taught not to be, but they were not oppressing you. I suspect that had i truly acted out during school I would have received slightly better treatment. When I look back at things that I did that were clearly autistic, I probably would have been criticized for them if I wasn’t in advanced placement classes. As such, they got ignored.

...but being ignored is not the same as being cared for. Make no mistake about it: The American public education system does not care about your mental health regardless of which classes you take. And I think that part of the reason they manufacture this dichotomy is so they can avoid having to comply with ADA.

Remember how I said that we were taught to think of kids in standard courses as being there because they weren’t “trying hard enough”? That’s because you don’t have to consider the potential for learning disabilities, Autism, ADHD, and other neurodivergent or mental health concerns if you can write off their poor school performance as a personal failing or laziness. Not only do you not have to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, but you don’t need to do any deeper digging into how the system is failing to educate kids if you can write it off as “well some kids just don’t try hard enough.”

And what better way to prove your bullshit theory that neurodivergent kids just aren’t trying hard enough than by creating a class of kids who do exceedingly well at school? By creating classes that are harder, with different books and a bigger workload? If you’re able to point at a subset of kids who are doing well at it, then you can say, “It’s just you. You’re just not trying hard enough.” 

Here’s the thing about honors+ courses: they were practically built to exploit neurodivergent and mentally ill kids. Introducing rigorous and unforgiving deadline schedules to autistic kids? And they already have problems socializing and making friends, so why not just shove more homework at them? You wanna make a kid with anxiety disorder cry? Tell them all about the websites they have to submit their essays to that will go through and electronically determine whether or not they’ve plagiarized on their paper. It’s a great way to torture kids who are just learning about citations, by threatening them with suspension and being removed from the classes they’ve been told give them their entire identity. And that “must prove you’re better than the others, that you don’t need help, that you’re just naturally gifted” competitive spirit - that can get really quickly and easily ingrained into obsessive-compulsive hypermorality. Load them up with paper topics and research expectations to totally take advantage of a neurodivergent person’s ability to hyperfixate. 

And then all that weird, obsessive, comfort in school and defensiveness of the biggest part of your identity between the ages of 6 and 18? Things you mock honors students for start to sound a lot like the things you mock autistic kids for.

The thing is, standard course students aren’t getting the help they need, because they’re being viewed as “just not trying hard enough”. The honors course students aren’t getting the help they need, either, because they’re being viewed as doing just find without it. Clearly, you’re capable of doing the work, you’re in honors classes, so whatever complaints you have must not be that big of a deal. You have anxiety? So what? You’re doing well in school, so you’re making a big deal out of nothing. Not fitting in with your peers? Who cares! You have school to be focusing on, and that’s more important. You’re having an emotional breakdown because you didn’t do so well on the test or your paper? Well just start earlier. Just try harder next time. Change your study habits. You can do this, you’re in an honors class after all! 

What’s that? You intrusive thoughts are to the point where you constantly feel like committing suicide? You think you need psychiatric care? Sorry, you can’t go to the hospital, that will screw up your GPA, and then you’ll be stuck in the standard classes, and you don’t want that, do you? 

Schools benefit from this. They don’t want to comply with ADA. They will fight you on every conceivable front they can, including outright lying about what college will be like to keep you from asking for extensions or taking care of your mental health. The education system is under-funded and teachers in addition to students are horribly exploited. 

They will tell you they do this to prepare you for the “real world”, which I can only imagine means this: the workforce will do its best to take advantage of you. And the school system recreates this, so by the time you get to the “real world”, you don’t question why you think of blue collar workers as lazy or your colleagues as getting promotions they don’t deserve. To keep you from unionizing because you’ve already become conditioned to this idea that it’s the people around you and not the people above you that are the source of your misery. 

Don’t fall for it.

[traincat]

What do you think of Johnny and Namorita?

Johnny and Namorita confuse me. Not in terms of the actual pairing of the characters – I think if any work had been done with their relationship, it could’ve been cute, and I like their initial scenes together. And obviously there was a lot to explore there potentially, what with Sue and Namor’s own history, and the Fantastic Four’s long relationship with Namor. So you’d think the comics could have built an interesting romance or dynamic out of that! 

I admittedly haven’t read that much with Namorita, so I don’t know what is or isn’t out of character for her, but it doesn’t really matter, because once the relationship gets rolling she’s barely present anyway, which is, you know, odd, considering they’re supposed to be dating. They spend so little time together that it’s actually remarked upon in Fantastic Four v3 #55:

“I had this funny idea a guy was supposed to spend time with his girlfriend.”

Ugh, so, this in and of itself is not actually uncommon for Johnny in his relationships, which is part of what makes his reputation as a playboy or womanizer particularly mystifying. Post-Crystal, all of Johnny’s relationships get Weird in one way or another. There’s his relationship with Frankie Raye, which 1) is fairly shortlived in terms of the time they actually spent together, and again, we don’t see much of that time, 2) implies that Frankie was only attracted to Johnny because her own latent fire powers were reacting to his, and 3) takes place in a plot that hinges on Frankie and Johnny never having been naked together. Literally that is important to the plot leading up to Frankie discovering her powers. Oh, and then she leaves him for Galactus. Then Johnny’s next serious relationship is with Alicia Masters, which has uhhh the chemistry of a beige wall. Anyway, then they get married. Then Alicia turned out not to be Alicia at all, but a Skrull named Lyja, which flips the entire marriage and relationship on its head. And that is all of Johnny’s serious romantic relationships (discounting his high school girlfriend and several flirtations that never go anywhere) up until Namorita. So that’s already looking a bit dicey on his end; it is essentially his first relationship after his “marriage” and what I would label his fourth “real” adult relationship.

Though Johnny and Namorita knew each other beforehand, things take a flirtatious turn in New Warriors v2 #3:

It’s some pretty chaste flirting. Namorita and Johnny bond over the price of celebrity at dinner, then sneak out and kiss on the roof. It’s a cute scene overall. The problem is that’s… kind of the end of it. I mean, they’re apparently, after this point, in a relationship, it’s just that we see very little of it. 

In New Warriors v2 #9, Namorita reacts to the news that the Fantastic Four have joined with Doctor Doom (who is really Reed trapped in Doom’s armor) with anger. We never see her and Johnny talk about this, which is funny, because we certainly do see Johnny talk about it with someone in the pages of Fantastic Four:

(Fantastic Four v3 #27) With most other characters, a scene like this would happen with their love interest, but when Claremont picked who he wanted Johnny to discuss things he went with… Spider-Man. Because again: Johnny doesn’t spend time with his girlfriend. 

He and Namorita don’t break up after this – they’re vaguely together for a while longer. She’s spotted here with Johnny while an alternate Frankie Raye makes a “fire and water” comment:

Fantastic Four v3 #46 – as you can see, some time has passed, enough that you’d expect me to be able to pull up some scenes that are more romantic. Nope. I think maybe they might have kissed a few times in here but if they did it wasn’t interesting or pretty enough for me to have saved to my refs, and I save like, everything Johnny-related. 

Namorita did attend some promotional event for Johnny’s movie, the Rawhide Kid, with him in Fantastic Four #50 (which is a nuff said – no dialogue). This, combined with the shared celebrity setup of the beginning of their relationship and the fact that even Ben remarks that Johnny doesn’t really spend time with her, leads me to sort Johnny&Namorita into a Johnny Relationship Category I called the Celebrity Relationships. This is a subset of Johnny’s relationships where he appears to be invested in them not because he’s genuinely romantically interested in the other person, but because both of them are public figures who receive boosts in the media for being seen with one another. Namorita is actually the first incident of these – and I think it’s very interesting that this is a trend that only starts happening after the end of his “marriage” and relationships with Lyja. (Warning for heavy discussion of sexual assault in that second link.) The other two Celebrity Relationships are with Kourtney, a supermodel he dates on and off during Marvel Knights who seems generally bored with him and breaks up with him after the Fantastic Four lose their fortune (although they do later get back together):

(Marvel Knights 4 #2)

And Darla Deering, a pop sensation, who Johnny even explicitly admitted he was dating because he was attracted to her lifestyle, not to her:

(FF #16)

Johnny’s a celebrity, and he loves being a celebrity, but he is also bad at being a celebrity and he has massive self-esteem and self-image issues. Pre-Lyja, Johnny’s obsessed with falling in love and getting married. Post-Lyja, Johnny starts entering these relationships that seem to be about staying in the public eye as much as being in the relationship, and Namorita seems to be the first of these. I do think he genuinely liked her; I just don’t know if I think he was attracted to her. (The first thing he does in the scene where they flirt for the paparazzi is compliment her new, more covered costume up.) We don’t know when they break up, exactly – it’s not on the page (what is) – but in Human Torch (2003) #11, which describes their relationship as “intense, passionate, and mercurial” (to which I ask: WHERE) Johnny says Namorita left him, while Namorita blames Hollywood and also states that she didn’t want to be swallowed up by the Fantastic Four:

Annnd then they part ways again after reconciling a little bit. It’s kind of a weird issue because we never actually see any of these “passionate, mercurial” fights, really. They’re just sometimes on the page together and then they’re not, and this comes in with an explanation that doesn’t really fit with what’s on the page. Which, to be fair, is not unique to Namorita when it comes to Johnny’s romantic relationships. I feel like writers try to make relationships work for him and then when the characters aren’t clicking they just sort of… fall by the wayside. And I think that’s what happened with Johnny and Namorita.

So ultimately my opinion is that I would have really liked to see more between them. The public eye aspect, the Namor aspect, the long history between their families, the obvious fire and water metaphors – I think there were places to go here, but they just didn’t happen. 

[notisaidthefrogg-blog]

Dear Octopath Exchange Creator...

Hello! I really appreciate you reading this letter and I eagerly anticipate your awesome creation! As a writer myself, I’ve probably made my requests/prompts very narrative-based; feel free to take inspiration from any part to turn into art if that is your strength! If you have any questions/would like to challenge any unreasonable requests, don’t hesitate to ask on anon!

(edit: this ended up being way longer than it had any right to be, I just tried to make up for any restrictions with a whole bunch of prompts, I probably rambled way too much, don’t feel pressured to read the whole thing)

First of all, I’ll just introduce myself briefly because I haven’t posted here before. I am Frogg (Nebulariffic on Ao3). You won’t have seen me around at all because I tend to lurk on sites like Tumblr, but I’ve been following the Octopath fandom since the game’s release and I’ve really loved the fan creations that have come from it! This is the first fandom exchange I’ve participated in here, and I’m hoping it will help me come out of my shell enough to post some of my other fan works!

But enough about me, time to get to my gift preferences! I do have some odd tastes by some standards, but as long as there’s no DNWs, I’m sure I’ll love whatever you come up with! Again, if anything here seems unreasonable, just message me and we can come up with something.

I’ll start with what I really like:

- Friendship/found family fluff! I’m a sucker for some high quality friendships and nothing forges friendships like trekking across the continent together! I think that our favourite eight travellers have a lot of potential for fun interactions together, or even if it’s just one or two of them with some NPCs or other characters!

- On the other side of the spectrum, hurt/comfort featuring supportive pals just warms my heart! Cheery friend/s lifting spirits of sad friend/s? Wonderful. Multiple sad friends taking comfort in each other? Exquisite. Again, there’s so much potential with this crew to make something really touching!

- Character growth! This may or may not be self explanatory, but I love characters doing tricky things and becoming better people for it. Things like working up courage to admit fault, apologise, forgive, put aside differences, or generally facing and conquering fears!

- If you have a cool AU idea, I’d love to see it!

Now as for my dislikes, these are mostly things that I’d be okay seeing in general, but I’d just rather not have in something I was requesting.

- This one’s going to seem a bit odd/prudish, but I’d like for no non-canon romantic/sexual pairings. I’m fine with super-close ambiguous friendships with hugs and comfort, but I’ve always felt weird about non-canon ships. Besides, I think we could do with more platonic friendships!

- If you would like to go for a non-canon romantic pairing anyway, I’d be okay with that just as long as it stays Lite(TM). In particular, I really don’t like pieces focussed on marriage proposals, weddings and pregnancies (especially mpreg) - that’s just something I’ve never liked in fic/art.

- Please no excessive emphasis on past abuse... It’s okay for characters to remember dark moments in their pasts, but detailed flashbacks and characters bemoaning their existences just make me feel like garbage.

- I’d prefer no prominent OCs. Background roles are cool, but self-inserts/reader-inserts/fanchildren and the like break my immersion.

And for my DNWs:

- No smut/porn/nudity

- No rape/non-con

- No underage/incest

- No kinks

- No excessive violence

- No character bashing

- No major character death (unless it’s directly portraying/referencing a canon event)

I make that last point because you can’t very well have a Primrose-Chapter-1-centric moment without Yusufa, for example.

Now we get to the fun bit - prompts! I realise that I drive a hard bargain by requesting all eight travellers, and I’d be perfectly fine if you only want to focus on a subset of them. If you have an idea for something based on what I’ve already mentioned, then go for it, but if you’re stuck, I’ve got some prompts based on who I’d particularly like to see! I’ve also provided some general/AU prompts, and if you want to go with one of those prompts, you can include any number of the travellers as you please!

Alfyn - If I had to pick a favourite traveller, it would be this wholesome boy.

I’d love to see him helping out his friends if they get sick or injured, or if they just need someone to listen. Counsellor Alf is a very good Alf!

If you want to go for super-angst, I’d suggest something related to his Chapter 3. There’s so much to unpack in that chapter alone that the game couldn’t even touch on!

Olberic - I think Olberic is really under-represented in fan works, and I’d love to see more of him!

I know he has a softer side, particularly around children, and it would be cool to see that played against his protective aggression. Maybe the group gets attacked and Olberic has to defend them?

H’aanit - Another underrated character imo. If the prospect of H’aanit-speak is too intimidating, I wouldn’t be offended if you just had her talk normally.

H’aanit always strikes me as the kind of quiet, stoic character who doesn’t say much, but every one of her words is meaningful, if a little blunt. Perhaps some wacky antics will get her to open up? (wink wink nudge nudge)

Or maybe she accidentally offends someone and (with coaching from the rest of the team) gets enough social courage to apologise?

Does Linde count as an unrequested character since she’s not on my request list? I jest, but feel free to make something with her and/or her relationship with H’aanit if that strikes your fancy! If you want a Linde prompt, maybe something that contrasts her noble-fierce-wild-beast side with her big-domestic-cat side? 

Other travellers -  If you want to make something focussed on any of the other travellers, that’s perfectly okay too! I just don’t have any specific prompts for them (bc its 2:30am here and I’m tired). Just hit me up if you’d like prompts for a character I haven’t touched on here!

General/AU prompts -

Rescue Fic: Nothing says “I care about you” than “you were in X predicament and I got you out of it”. Ties in very well with the fear-facing I mentioned in my likes. The only question is, is it one or two people saving the rest of the team, or is it seven looking for their missing friend? You decide!

Innocent Bystander: This is one of my bigger prompts, so you can skip this idea if it’s too longwinded/complex. Team OCTOPATH blows through town, leaving innkeeper/barkeep OC (or other NPC) to chase after them and witness/reflect on/clean up after their shenanigans. I can elaborate on this idea further if you like, just shoot me an ask!

Modern AU: How would the backstories/jobs of the cast translate into modern day? How would they meet/become friends? I love seeing theories for this topic.

Band AU: You know that new Break, Boost and Beyond artwork? The one where half the cast is practically a rock band (looking at you Olberic)? Tell me how that happened. Go nuts.

I think I’m going to wrap up this letter here, hopefully some of this was useful! Of course, feel free to disregard my prompts if you’ve already got ideas, or hit me up by anon if you want me to elaborate on any of these ideas. And of course, have fun and thanks for making me a thing!

Sincerely, Frogg (Nebula)

[rotationalsymmetry]

re: non-native species

First, there tends to be a weird charge to talking about native/non-native species because it can parallel, or come across as paralleling, anti-immigration stuff.

OK, moving on: not all non-native species are harmful. Many either can't survive in their new habitat out of very specialized conditions, or just sort of vibe with the existing ecosystem without disrupting it. A subset of non-native species, called invasive species, are extremely harmful to the pre-existing ecosystem. The issue isn't where the species is from, it's its effect on the ecosystem. Generally species that have evolved together over an extended period of time have worked out a balance, but when an ecosystem is disrupted you do get things like algea or jellyfish blooms that cause problems even if the species is from the area, so it's really, really more about what's going on with the overall ecosystem than about where a species originally came from. Of course with invasive species, trying to keep it out of the area to start with is a way of preventing problems, which can't be an option when the overpopulated/potentially overpopulated species is already there.

Anyways, "non-native species" does not by itself mean "is a problem".

Circling back to the first point ... obviously the human comparisons make more sense when you're not defining a "native" as "someone who was born here" (overtly) and "you know, a white person" (not said aloud), but it's still crucial to understand the difference between "not from here" and "invasive"/"colonizer". Land Back doesn't mean "go back where you came from", but that's most people's initial misconception, because of conflating "not from here" with "invasion/colonization". It is actually completely possible to be "not from here", and also being willing to chill out and peacefully coexist with who or what's already here.

I mean, as far as I'm aware plant and animal species can't make conscious choices around this. But humans can.

[onyx-archer]

My Idea for the Future of Comic Books.

I've been telling people in my personal life that like comics (and few that at least like to hear about weird ideas I have) that the current release method for comics is slowly killing the industry, among other things. I've put a lot of thought into how to fix the problem, and while I'm no expert, I think it comes down to a number of factors. All of it will be under the cut, as to not overwhelm you if you don’t want to read it. Keep in mind that this more or less entirely pertains to the Big Two (Marvel and DC), but can be applied to all but the smallest publishers really.

All of the issues I can see with the industry are as follows:

1. Limited Distribution: The Direct Market makes it harder for people to get into comics. Be it because of the hobby's requirement to go to a hobbyist store of some kind, or hope that they can find a copy on Amazon. Digital stuff does help a little, but that leads into the next problem.

2. Digital Prices/Digital Marketshare: From what little we as a community know about digital sales, thanks to a few bits of info that can be gleamed from smaller, indie creators, we know that there isn't a super huge digital market for comics yet. This would probably improve if the publishers stopped charging print cover prices for digital books, but that probably won't happen any time soon. Of course, digital markets come with the advent of piracy, but it's not like that was entirely avoidable thanks to scanning groups.

3. The Release Format: I'm gonna say something a little controversial here: single issues aren't really worth the price at this point. I say this because of how story arcs for comics these days are typically written; stories are very rarely self contained single issue affairs anymore. This also plays into the comics only being available for purchase through extremely limited channels, whereas you can sell a graphic novel or a trade paperback in more easily accessible markets than hobbyist stores like Comic Book stores. The single issues also tend to sit unsold because it's easy to over ship them, which is evident in basically every comic book store in North America.

4. Marketing: This issue is mostly aimed at Marvel, but can be applied universally. A big issue Marvel has is that they launch books with little fanfare, only to cancel them 6 issues in because of low sales. The books basically just get axed because they aren't marketed properly to potential fans. Tent pole titles like Spider-Man get marketed, sure, but for every Spider-Man or Thor, there's a character with a smaller fanbase that's getting snubbed because the big books hog all of the marketing budget, making it harder for them to gain any sizable fan traction.

I could also throw overall quality of storytelling/writing, but that's more of subjective issue in most cases. After all, just because I don't like the writing of recent Spider-Man material doesn't mean nobody does. I could also throw in my problems with people in the comics industry being shitheads on social media, but that’s not important right now.

Anyway, my solution idea attempts to address the 4 big problems. It's basically as follows:

1. Changing Formats: This here's probably going to get me the most flack, but I don't really care. What I'm suggesting is a complete overhaul of the format of comics into something a little more enticing, and potentially profitable: graphic novels. Now, the industry already releases trade collections, but I think given the fact that most comic story lines are written for trade collections already, we might as well just get graphic novels instead. This has a number of benefits, but I'll get into that more as we go. One I’ll bring up now though is that Graphic Novels, over all, have a better shelf life than individual floppies.

2. Dial Back The Number of Releases: A big issue some smaller titles have right now is the lack of marketing, and this suggestion is a pretty reasonable way to limit the issue. What I'm suggesting is, along with the change in format, a company like Marvel only releases, at most, 4 things a week. Preferably, 2-3 books, but 4 is still within reason as far as I'm concerned. This, combined with a format change, will cut down on the ugly look of a pile of unsold issues, and can be stored more efficiently. It will also allow for a more efficient marketing, and less clutter on shelves, and if all companies adopted the practice, less competing for a reader’s attention.

3. Quarterly Release Schedule: Something that would be a byproduct of going to a graphic novel format would come with a release drawback, but at the same time, it would make each release easier to justify purchasing. If I only had to buy Spider-Man 4 times a year, for 20-25 bucks a pop, I'd be happy. Of course, to make sure you don't misunderstand, each volume would have to guarantee a conclusion to the story being told by the time the last page is turned. Sure, an ongoing subplot that ties stories together is fine, but it would make things easier to recommend to fresh eyes, as a more complete feeling story is more satisfying, and is easier to keep up with and/or remember.

4. Writer Rotation: This is a simple thing, but it's basically necessary to ensure a release schedule of graphic novels. The benefit of superhero material is that writers go from project to project with enough frequency, barring a few notable exceptions, so this would be a huge boon for a format change. The ideal number of writers is 2, but it can work with 3 or 4, but no more than 4. This would require a bit of teamwork on the part of the two writers, but it would allow for a more efficient output, giving each writer a window of 3 or so months to draft subsequent releases. I would also have at least 2 different main artists on board, just to make the process less daunting for a single main artist. This would come with the caviate that a writer can only remain on the book for, at most, 4-5 years at a time, to prevent burnout and/or creative stagnation. (I probably explained this poorly, but hopefully this one made sense)

5. A Variety Title: Something to keep things a little less stale, I’m proposing that each week, there’s what’s effectively an anthology/variety type book. It would, hypothetically, be similar to something like Weekly Shonen Jump, only it’d be under specific brandings. Marvel is easily the one company that I can point to an example of: Amazing Fantasy, Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish, Tales of Suspense, etc. Basically, these would be weekly titles that focus on a subset of Marvel’s characters for a number of purposes.

Short, self contained oneshot stories to help with the less frequent main title releases. 

Test new solo titles for unproven characters before committing to a larger book.

For the sake of showcasing newer writers to the public to gauge reactions before handing them the keys to a bigger title.

The big thing is that these would be released monthly, and wouldn’t count towards the previously mentioned release of only 3-4 books a week. They would also be sold cheaper, and individual stories could be sold cheaply in a digital format.

6. Ship To Non-Specialty Stores: A benefit of a format change would be a wider set of options for the release of books on a more frequent basis. Book stores, or other retailers that have book sections (like Walmart) wouldn’t have a problem with stocking the stories in their book sections, allowing for more eyes to be on the comics. This would have to come with the caveat of either having a rating system like video games in a easily visible place, or simply limiting the more mature stuff to Amazon and more specialist stores. Still, it allows for more potential readers to find the books easier.

7. Lower the Digital Market Price: This one is a harder pill to swallow, but realistically, this would have to be done. Heck, this idea alone can ignore all of the previous ones, and that alone would probably boost digital sales. Most people buy digital goods because it’s marginally cheaper in some cases, and they don’t have to go anywhere. The cheaper price is usually the result of not needing to print actual copies of a product, but comics have failed to grasp this concept. I think it’s a no-brainer if you change the format, but it’s obviously something the current format needs to do too.

So yeah, that’s some shit I probably put way too much thought into, but those are just some ideas I have when it comes to fixing American Comics. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

[wazafam]

Days Gone is officially out now on PC, something that's relatively unprecedented. Sony has begun bringing some of its PlayStation exclusives to the platform to expand its audience and possibly build anticipation for sequels to key franchises. Although it would appear there's no Days Gone sequel currently in the works, Sony decided to give the first game a second chance after it got a mixed reception on PS4.

Bend was able to successfully realize its full vision of Days Gone in this new PC port, squashing tons of bugs and filling a brutal, dark world with beautiful visuals in the process. It's the best possible version of Days Gone and there's a chance that if Sony sees the positive reception and it sells well, Days Gone fans could get a sequel.

Related: Days Gone PC Review: This Is The Version To Play

Screen Rant got to sit down and talk with Ron Allen, Lead Designer, and Zachary Lewis, Senior User Interface Programmer, from Bend Studio. The duo talked a lot of specifics about the development of Days Gone, potentially expanding and continuing the story in comic books, a key connection to Syphon Filter, and much more.

There's a Syphon Filter Easter egg in Days Gone, and everyone wants to know: is Days Gone within the Syphon Filter universe? Just gotta get that out of the way.

Ron Allen: I guess I can talk a little bit about that. You know that obviously, Syphon's really close to our studio's heart. We were the original developers, and we carried it all the way through until the end on the on the PSP. And, obviously, we're big fans of the Syphon Filter franchise in general.

With the taser and things like that - I don't want to go too far into all of that, but - yes, there was a little bit of that crossover with Syphon Filter. What happened in all of that stuff is still to be determined. 

So, you're not saying whether or not it is in the Syphon Filter universe, but there is a connection there? 

Ron Allen: There's a little bit of connection there. 

This is your first PC game as a studio, right? How did you approach the PC as console developers, when you've primarily developed for PlayStation? What challenges did you come to blows with? 

Ron Allen: For us, we're gamers. It doesn't matter what system; we're gamers. And we do have a lot of PC gamers over here, so I'm sure you can imagine that a lot of guys on our team were super excited when we were even talking about having a PC version. 

And the thing is, we want to make sure that we're punching with the best experience we can possibly deliver. Our studio has been pretty focused on trying to get the PC version up and running, and running well. And some of the upgrades that we've done, we're extremely happy about: we've unlocked frame rates, we've improved graphics, we've pushed out LOD distances and foliage draw distances. We support ultra wide monitors, which I'm a huge fan of. I have two, and I'm staring at one right now. I'm just super happy about that. 

I'll let Zach jump into this real quick, but there's a lot of controls and stuff that just didn't necessarily translate over to PC. Zach did a ton of work on this. 

Zachary Lewis: Yeah, and I want to touch back on something. I believe that this is our first PC title since being a Sony studio. Bend has a long history before then, we even made games for the Apple Newton and stuff. We have made other platform games in the past, but this is the first modern gen venture into PC. 

And like Ron said, a lot of the folks who are working on the PC port are PC gamers. We've seen good ports, we've seen bad ports - so we knew the kind of things that we wanted as gamers. And that's why we took a lot of time and care to make sure that no matter how you wanted to play, it will feel right for you. We have full remapping of all of the actions, not just some subset of them. 

One thing I'm really excited about is our wide array of input support, so in addition to native DualShock 4 and DualSense support, we also have support for pretty much any other controller you want to bring. So, if you plug in an Xbox controller, it'll just work and you'll see Xbox buttons. Same with the Steam controller, and same with the Nintendo Switch Pro. We took a lot of time to make sure that players could play the game the way that they wanted to. 

Is it mind bending for you to see Nintendo prompts or Xbox prompts on your Sony-developed game?

Ron Allen: It is. But to be honest, it's extremely important that we do this stuff, because we want to make sure that we're reaching out to as many fans as we possibly can. And this is the platform to do it on.

The last few years, the gaming industry has been very rapidly changing and evolving in very strange ways that I don't think anyone saw coming. There's a PlayStation game on Xbox, now with MLB The Show. We're in weird times, but it's awesome. How do you guys feel about all that, with Sony going to PC and doing all these different things? 

Ron Allen: I'll be honest. At least to me, the really exciting thing about this is us being able to reach out to new fans. That's why, again, spent so much time working on this PC version of Days Gone to make sure that it played as well as we wanted it to play. And I think that's extremely exciting.

There was a mixed reception to the PS4 version, and I think this is a much better representation of the game. A lot of the problems that people had with the game back then were bugs. But were you guys happy with how that game launched, and did you use any of that criticism to work on this version?

Ron Allen: Yeah, that's an interesting question. To be honest, we were a really small studio. When we shipped Golden Abyss we were running about 45 people or so, and we decided to take on this massively ambitious game. It took us a while to develop it, and we did end up bulking up, but we were a pretty small team compared to a lot of the other studios. And we were really happy with what we pulled off.

Now, of course, we did a lot of patches and a lot of fixes. Plus, we added a lot of good stuff to the game, like all the DLC and the performance patches and all that stuff. But the cool thing about the PC is all of that stuff got rolled in, so all the benefits that we got from the work that we did even after shipping the game was rolled into the PC version. Plus, we even enhanced the photo mode and things like that, so the photos that you're taking now on the PC are much higher resolution. It's just really cool. 

To me, it was a long process, you're right. But I think we all were still pretty happy and excited about the game that we released.

Yeah, it is a good game, no doubt. With that said, there's a big petition right now for a sequel - I'm sure you guys have seen it - with 110,000 signatures. How do you guys feel when you see such big support coming towards you for something like that?

Ron Allen: I will always say that I am so proud and happy with the support of our fans out there on Days Gone. Our studio has been primarily focused on trying to get this PC port running, but we love the support and can't thank the fans enough. I can't say more, but it's just amazing.

Did developing for PC teach you any lessons that you can bring back to developing games for consoles?

Zachary Lewis: Yeah, I think so. Especially because, as you've seen in some titles already, the PS5 does support keyboard and mouse having. I think that could come forward, and different ways to play is going to be a big thing that developers need to think about. We learned a lot of things about that: "We did this for the menu systems that felt great for the DualShock 4, but might not translate well to keyboard. How can we rethink as we are designing these things, so they can work better for multiple inputs?" 

It's just that that kind of thing, where it's like, "This bit us here. So going forward, let's make sure that we keep some things in consideration with them."

Ron Allen: Especially moving on to PS5 and things like that, especially with the 120Hz support and framerate - it's all of those things. Again, the PS4 and the PS4 Pro are extremely powerful, but the current version of the PS5 and the current PCs are quite a bit more powerful. So, it's very interesting to see the stuff, especially the benefits and bonuses that we get, moving Days Gone over to the PC and PS5.

Do you think there's any chance Days Gone could be explored further through comics or other media? I know God of War has done stuff like that with comic books.

Ron Allen: Well, to be honest, I had a conversation not that long ago about this same type of stuff. There's so many stories to be had in the Days Gone world, and this was Deacon St. John's story. Days Gone is about his life and his loss, and how he's dealing with this pandemic - and he's not the only one that survived. 

So yes, you're right. There could be so many stories and so many things to be had inside this universe. And it excites me just even thinking about it.

Zachary Lewis: We should call HBO and see if we can get a show going or something.

Did you have some sort of bible on Days Gone, where you're like, "This is the world and the answers to all the questions we might have if we ever go down a road of sequels or other media that we can refer back to?"

Ron Allen: We did. We had a lot of backstory, and a lot of the things that you didn't discover in Days Gone. Our old creative director, John Garvin, was really into the lore and the backstory inside the game. So yeah, there's a ton of stuff for us to look at when we're talking about Days Gone.

Zachary Lewis: I think you can see some of that attention to the world in the game as Deacon talks with people in the encampments. You can tell that they have some history since before we get to see him. It's been fleshed out, we just don't talk about it. It's just something that is part of the world of Days Gone. 

I think that's what we need. Because everyone's always like, "Zombies are old, they're dead," but I think you can keep that fresh by really building a cool world. And there's a lot of cliffhangers and stuff set up in this game that fans want to see.

Ron Allen: The cool thing about this is, like what Zach was saying, it's not just in the encampment stuff. When you're cruising around the open world, and you're seeing Freakers as you're coming across Swarmers that they could be drinking, or they could be running after a deer. We dubbed this the Freak-o system, and it's like all of the enemies and everything out in the world play off each other, and they all key. 

And you can weaponize that kind of stuff. If you know that the Breakers - the bigger guys - go after Swarmers if they're not after you, you can lure them into different areas and see how they interact. And it's pretty cool. It's definitely an interesting and different way of approaching gameplay.

I know that this game had a pretty lengthy development. How much of it remained from the original pitch, and how much changed as you made the game?

Ron Allen: The game definitely evolved over time. Honestly, we rebooted our world a few times, and what we landed on was something that we were pretty proud of. The world in general is in our backyard; we look out our windows, and we see the world that we have created for Days Gone. And it's pretty awesome. It's kind of a Disneyland version of a it, of course, but it's just very unique and something that we're really excited about. 

And again, we built up all the way through. I will say, it is very similar to the original concept that we were pitching. Which is good, it still stayed true. I think that's what made us all extremely excited during development to work on this project.

I really did enjoy the game, and I think this PC version is going to open a lot of eyes for people who maybe haven't played it or who only played the previous version. 

Zachary Lewis: When we were developing the game at the start, I don't ever think that we thought of it as, "Oh, this is a game for PS4 players." We wanted to make a fun game that anybody could enjoy. And this opportunity to release it on PC is really exciting, because it's this whole other fanbase that our community is excited to see play and experience this game and story for the first time. It's something that we are really looking forward to.

Ron Allen: The gameplay in general, once you get into the open world and are just kind of cruising around - I feel that this game is like comfort food. It's the one game that I keep going back to over and over. I'll play something else, then I'll come back to it. And keep in mind, I was a developer on the project, yet I still go back and play on the PC and on the PS5. 

It's comfort food. It's something that's easy to get into and easy to get out of. It's just a really fun game, and we're extremely excited because we're reaching out to a whole new fan base. I can't wait to see people's reactions.

Next: Scrapped Days Gone 2 Pitch Included Co-Op

Days Gone is out now on PS4 and PC.

Days Gone Interview: Ron Allen & Zachary Lewis | Screen Rant from https://ift.tt/3tWh9MZ

[bentonpena]

COVID-19 has had a surprising impact on our sex lives

https://bit.ly/39CcHL4 COVID-19 has had a surprising impact on our sex lives https://bit.ly/2LCB7fz

The spike in sex toy sales, rise of OnlyFans, and normalization of masturbation as part of everyday health and wellness were some of the only good things to come from the pandemic (pun intended). But, if you've felt a weird sense of FOMO for missing out on these alleged COVID-inspired boons in sexual exploration and acceptance, you're not alone.

At CES 2021 this week, sextech company Lioness released a new exploratory study analyzing an in-depth dataset capturing how people's sex lives and drives were impacted by the pandemic. The data, which compares participants' habits from 2019 versus 2020, includes everything from how often participants masturbated to how long it took to orgasm. The main takeaway? 2020 might not have been the free-for-all cum fest all those trends implied.

2020 might not have been the free-for-all cum fest these trends implied.

Since stay-at-home orders began in late March, retailers and toy companies — particularly those selling internet-connected sextech like We-Vibe, Ohmibod, and Satisfyer — reported skyrocketing numbers, with toys flying off virtual shelves. Faced with indefinite alone time and the risks of pandemic dating, folks rushed to do the responsible thing by turning to self-pleasure, with a particular focus on toys boasting high-tech features like virtual sex with long-distance partners. The explosion of sextech during the pandemic is undeniable, with tech market forecaster Juniper Research predicting that the already multi-billion-dollar industry would see an accelerated 87 percent spike in global adoption of these digital-savvy pleasure devices in 2020. 

But assuming that this spike, coupled with more time at home, automatically translated into a wave of reinvigorated, pandemic-fueled masturbation remains to be substantiated. Actually, the new study, which is based on user data gathered by Lioness' biofeedback-tracking smart vibrator, found potential evidence of the exact opposite conclusion too.

Lioness CEO Liz Klinger, who created the high-tech vibrator designed to help people explore their sexuality through data, said she, "got the sense that things were clearly changing a lot for people [sexually during the pandemic]. And we wanted to dig in and understand what was going on." The Lioness team's hypothesis was that folks' sex lives in 2020 were probably a lot more complicated than that increase in toy sales suggested.

Conducted through Lionness' Sex Research Platform (which launched last year), the study was done in partnership with the Center for Genital Health & Education, and credits Dr. Natasha Aduloju-Ajijola (a research fellow with a Ph.D. in health education and promotion) with the data analysis. Pooling from the aggregated, anonymized data of 1,879 Lioness users who opted into participation, it analyzed their arousal responses during approximately 40,000 sessions with the smart vibrator between 2019 and 2020. 

The study found, "convincing evidence of a significant drop-off in masturbation frequency as the year wore on when compared to [those same users'] masturbation frequency back in 2019," according to the toy company's blog post on the study. Overall, there was a roughly 9 percent month-to-month drop in sessions from last year. While the holiday season in 2019 saw an increase in masturbation frequency, the most significant decline in 2020 happened in those same final months of the year, with November's use dropping more than 37 percent.

November, if you'll remember, not only brought a devastating (ongoing) spike in COVID cases, but also kicked off the gloomiest social-distanced holiday season ever — on top of also coinciding with one of the most stressful elections in recent American history. To be clear, the data in this study can't prove causality, since it's entirely possible participants simply used the Lioness less frequently while masturbating the same amount by other means. 

That being said, on an anecdotal level, it's not hard to imagine why lots of folks weren't feeling especially horned up in the final months of 2020.

Image: Emily Eder / lioness / CGHE

In a separate survey of Lioness users (who were not necessarily the same ones who offered their physiological data), 235 participants answered questions on their sex lives in 2020. Almost 80 percent reported changes in masturbation frequency from 2019, and 76 percent said the same for partnered sex. 

A few commonalities emerged in participants' self-reported reasons for why they'd experienced decreases or increases in libido during the pandemic.

Those who reported less sexual interest and activity (whether partnered or solo) pointed to struggles with self-care, with one quoted participant saying:

“I did purchase several new toys this year however I think overall I masturbated less. I don’t know what maybe it was cause my sleep schedule was off some months then my depression kicked up a little and I just wasn’t interested.”

Others spoke to the impacts of anxiety and stress, less time for privacy due to family members or roommates being home all the time, decreases in self-esteem and feeling less attractive (one surveyor said pandemic-related weight gain inhibited their sex drive), or loss of a loved one.

What both the survey and physiological data really reveal, though, is just how normal it was for folks to have polar opposite sexual responses to the collective traumas of the pandemic.

On the other side of the coin, the survey respondents who reported increased interest in masturbation frequency cited reasons such as: more time at home, being unable to visit long-distance partners, having partners who experienced lower sex drives, being single and the difficulties of pandemic dating, and needing the mood-boost and stress-relief of sexual gratification.

The more granular physiological user data paints an even more complex picture of the unexpected ways COVID-19 changed their sex lives and pleasure experiences, though.

Image: EMILY EDER / LIONESS / CGHE

For example, the average duration of sessions with the Lioness decreased by 20 seconds between February 2020 and April 2020 (so, in other words, the period when many of us were adjusting from the before-times and into pandemic life). Meanwhile, sessions increased by 30 seconds between July 2020 and November 2020 (which correspond to U. S. COVID spikes).

It's impossible to make any sound assumptions about what those time discrepancies actually mean about a users' sexual experience during said session, though. Longer time spent using the vibrator could mean anything from increased difficulty in reaching orgasm or a deliberately slower build (aka edging) in order to achieve a more powerful orgasm.

The best judge for whether users enjoyed themselves less or more during these sessions comes down to the person's own subjective experience. Since Lioness allows users to rate each of their sessions on a scale of 1 to 5, the study reports that the common session score went up from 4/5 in 2019, to a perfect 5/5 in 2020. 

So, it's safe to say that, while users may have masturbated less overall, when they did get off the results appear to have delivered above-average satisfaction.

Image: EMILY EDER / LIONESS / CGHE

The Lioness COVID study is first-of-its-kind sex research, with Lioness describing it as the "type of data and techniques mid-20th century researchers like Masters and Johnson dreamed of having." Unlike all other sex research gathered in a lab setting, the kind of data the Lioness platform can gather meets subjects in the natural habitat of their own bedrooms, Klinger said. But the study also makes clear that, "This is an exploratory study with retrospective data — which can't prove causality."

There's a lot of variables and unknowns that call the scientific rigor of this type of study into question. For example, because the data is anonymized to protect user privacy, researchers cannot know key information about participants like gender, age, race, or socioeconomic background. Without that, one cannot claim the study is at all representative of the larger population. It's reflective only of this subset of people who own a Lioness. 

This exploratory study should be seen as a flawed but intriguing real-time snapshot of an extraordinary moment in human sexuality.

At the same time, Klinger also questioned whether the same can't be said for a lot of sex research done in labs, which often disproportionately rely on college students as subjects — specifically, college students who are comfortable performing sex acts in a clinical setting while researchers observe.

The potential benefits of sex research that isn't confined to a laboratory environment are obvious. But they come at the cost of a whole host of variables you can't control, account for, or recreate — all things which are essential to legitimate scientific research. There's an infinite number of explanations for why Lioness users had fewer sessions with their smart vibrator in 2020 — perhaps they contributed to the aforementioned spike in sales for other sex toys and used those instead.

What this exploratory study should be seen as is a flawed but intriguing real-time snapshot of an extraordinary moment in human sexuality — nothing more and nothing less.

As with everything related to COVID, it will be years before we can claim anything definitive about the pandemic's effects on us. At the same time, what this Lioness data does validate is that, no matter how the pandemic impacted your libido — whether it turned you into a sex hermit or a sex monster or anything in between — all of it is totally normal. 

That's what Klinger believes is one of the benefits for users who opt into the research platform. "It's beneficial to the researchers for data, but it's also a way for users to learn more about themselves by participating and seeing some of the results from the findings." 

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For those who own Lionesses, you can sign up to participate in current and future research studies through the platform. Klinger said her team is also working on ways to make the $200 devices more accessible, through potential grants — though getting a sex toy qualified as a medical device presents its own set of problems. If you're interested, you may want to wait to get the second generation of the Lioness, which is supposed to come out soon. 

We've been in isolation for so long that it's a comfort to just to be reminded that none of us are alone in our reactions to these unprecedented circumstances. You're not a sex freak or sexually broken after all, and Lioness has got the data to prove it.

What's inarguable is that COVID-19 changed a lot of people's sex lives. And it's OK to take your time in understanding how or why. 

Tech via Mashable! https://bit.ly/2KzLn52 January 14, 2021 at 05:27PM