#unfortunately she is suffering from TOO much backstory in that its impossible for me to talk about without watching

[rosykims]

hyperfixating about your oc AFTER you finished playing the damb game is not a fate i would wish on anyone get me out of here !!!!!!!!!!!!

[sketching-shark]

I think we should start a protection squad (although they don’t need it because they can protect themselves) for Sun Wukong and Guanyin

“Begone monkie kid fandom trying to down grade these really interesting characters with interesting personality’s and backstory ( the both of them like seriously Guanyin backstory is so cool) to a villain wile trying to justify your angsty backstory (that are no where near as cool as monkey who fights gods and Person who has 1000 arms and heads to help people in need) for the actual villain”

So who wants to join

Me:*raises my hand*

Ps: sorry if I got Guanyin backstory wrong am not an expert on it.

Haha okay so some critiques on the jttw & associated media western fandom & fandom in general coming up, so please skip this upcoming text wall if you don't want to encounter my undoubtedly ~devastating~ words (i.e. don't like don't read as people love to say, & if I have to be inundated with images of my notp every time I go into the sun wukong tag then I imagine people can be chill with me expressing my opinions & giving people fair warning that I WILL be critiquing common fandom trends, but no need for you to see that if you don’t want to. Cool? Cool.)

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PFFFFFTTT oh man there are many times when I feel like signing up for such a protection squad...when it comes to the current western jttw & Sun Wukong fandom I do feel like I'm often swinging at a rapid pace between "well it's fandom & people are allowed to make the stories they want" & "I am once again begging my fellow monkie kid enthusiasts (& sometimes creators) to do more research into the og classic/show it more respect so you can avoid any potentially offensive/off-the-mark misunderstandings of the status & cultural context of the characters in their country of origin (I promise it's super interesting & I can provide you with links to free pdf copies of the entire Yu translation, i.e. the best one ever created, so feel free to ask!) & maybe also stop constantly stripping away all the nuance of Sun Wukong's character for the sake of either making him an entire asshole so your little meow meow can look completely innocent in comparison and/or making the monkey king's entire life & character revolve around said meow meow."

Like I get that fandom's supposed to be a kind of anything-goes environment, but one thing that honestly seems to be true of a lot of fandoms--and the western one for Sun Wukong & co. is certainly not immune from this--is that there often seems to be a kind of monoculturalization at work in what stories are created & what character interpretations are made popular. Across a multitude of fandoms, you frequently see basically nothing but the exact same tropes being made popular & even being insisted on for the canonical work (especially hasty redemption arcs & enemies to lovers these days), the exact same one-dimensional character types that characters from an original work keep getting shoved into, the exact same story beats, etc. And I get it to an extent, as fandom is generally a space where people just make art and fic for fun & without thinking too hard about it & without any pressure. 

This seems to, however, often unfortunately lead to the mentality that it’s your god-given right to do literally whatever you want with literally any cultural figure without even the slightest bit of thought put into their cultural, historical, and even religious context, even (and sometimes especially) when it comes to figures that are really important in a culture outside your own. For such figures--even if you first encounter them in a children’s cartoon--you should be a little more careful with what you do with them than you would with your usual Saturday morning line-up. It of course has to be acknowledged that there exists a whole pile of absolutely ridiculous & cursed pieces of media that are based on Journey to the West & that were produced in mainland China, but for your own education if nothing else I consider it good practice for those of us (myself certainly included) who aren’t part of the culture that produced JTTW to put more thought into how we might want to portray these characters so that at the very least (to pull some things I’ve seen from the jttw western fandom) we’re not turning a goddess of mercy into an evil figure for the sake of Angst(TM), or relegating other important literary figures into the positions of offensive stereotypes, or making broad claims about the source text & original characterizations of various figures that are blatantly untrue, or mocking heavenly deities because of what’s actually your misunderstanding of how immortality works according to Daoist beliefs. Yet while a lot of this is often due to people not even trying to understand the context these figures are coming from, I do want to acknowledge that the journey (lol reference) to understand even a fraction of the original cultural context can be a daunting one, especially since, as I’ve mentioned before, it can be really hard & even next to impossible to find good, accessible, & legitimate explanations in English of how, for example, the relationship between Sun Wukong and the Six-Eared Macaque is commonly interpreted in China & according to the Buddhist beliefs that define the original work. 

That is to say, I do think it’s an unfortunate, if unavoidable, part of any introduction of an original text into a culture foreign to its own for there to be sometimes a significant amount of misinterpretation, mistranslations, and false assumptions. There is, however, a big difference between learning from your honest mistakes, & doubling down on them while dismissing all criticism of your misinterpretation into that abstract category of “fandom drama.” The latter attitude is kind of shitty at best and horrifically entitled at worst. 

Plus, as I’ve discovered, there is a great deal of interest and joy to be drawn from keeping yourself open to learning aspects of these texts & figures that you weren’t aware of! I can say from my own experience that I’ve always really enjoyed & appreciated it when individuals on this site who come from a Chinese background--and who know much more about the cultural context of JTTW than me--have taken the time to explain its various aspects. It often leaves me feeling like woooooaaaahhhhhHHH!!!! as to how amazingly full of nuanced meaning JTTW is like dang no wonder it’s one of China’s Four Great Classical Novels. 

And I guess that right there is the heart of a lot of my own personal frustration and disappointment with the ways that fandoms often approach a literary work or other piece of media...like don’t get me wrong, a lot of the original works a fandom may grow around are just straight-up goofy & everyone’s aware of it & has fun with it, yet the trend of approaching what are often nuanced and multi-layered works in terms of how well they fit and/or can be shoved into pretty cliche ideas of Redemption Arc or Enemies to Lovers or Hero Actually Bad, Villain Actually Good etc...well, it just seems to cheapen and even erase even the possibility of understanding the wonderful complexity or even endearing simplicity that made these works so beloved in the first place. Again, I feel like I need to make it clear that I’m not saying fandom should be a space where people are constantly trying to one-up each other with their hot takes in literary analysis, but it would be nice and even beneficial to allow room for commentary that strives to approach these works in a multi-faceted way, analysis & interpretations that go against the popular fandom beliefs, & criticism of the work or even of fandom trends (yes it is in fact possible to legitimately love something but still be critical of its aspects) instead of immediately attacking people who try to engage in such as just being haters who don’t want anyone to have fun ever (X_X).   

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Anyway, I know I didn’t cover even half of the stuff you brought up in the first place anon, but I don’t want any interested parties to this post to suffer too long through my text wall lol. I was asked to try my hand at illustrating Guanyin, but as with you I’m nowhere near as informed as I should be about her, so I want to do more research on her history and religious importance before I attempt a portrait. I’ll try my best, and do plan to pair that illustration with my own outsider’s attempt to summarize her character. From what little I do know I am in full agreement that her backstory is so incredibly amazing...just the fact that she literally eschewed the bliss of Nirvana to help all beings reach it, and even split herself into pieces in the attempt to do so (with Buddha granting her eleven heads and a thousand arms as a result)...man, I can see why she’s such a beloved & respected deity. 

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 As for what western fandom commonly does with everyone’s favorite god-fighting primate...I can talk about this at length if there’s interest, but for this post I’ll just say that I guess one lesson from all of this is that for all the centuries that have passed since Journey to the West was first completed, literally no one drawing inspiration from the original tale in the west (lol) has come even slightly close to being able to equal or even capture half the extent of the nuance, complexity, religious, historical, and cultural aspects, and humor that define Wu Cheng'en's story of an overpowered monkey who defied even Buddha.

So thank the heavens we'll always have the original.

[bondsmagii]

Here’s something I really can’t explain.

To sum up: I shouldn’t be alive right now. I shouldn’t be writing this. I have no idea how any of this could have happened, but the fact you’re reading this now is kind of living proof that it did happen, so I suppose I’ll try and explain it as best as I can.

A little backstory for you. Way back in the late forties, my great-grandfather was a young man working with the local fire department. He came back after the war and just couldn’t settle into any kind of desk job, so despite my great-grandmother worrying about his mental state he ended up running into burning buildings for a living. Naturally he saw some messed up shit, but nothing haunted him more than a hotel fire that he attended.

At the time there had been an annual prize night for a local grammar school. Hundreds of kids and their families were crammed into the hotel’s large ballroom when a stray match lit up the curtains on the stage. Back in the day they weren’t exactly great about fire safety, and the walls and furniture were panelled or made with highly flammable materials. The whole room went up in minutes. Over one hundred people died, over half of which were children below the age of fifteen. It was an indescribable tragedy, and my great-grandfather – along with every first responder there – was scarred for life over the things he saw that evening.

My great-grandfather did his best to live with what happened, and for the most part he did well, all things considered. All of his grief seemed to be directed towards one little girl, who was never identified or claimed. She was badly burned but not unrecognisable; the theory was that her whole family had died with her, leaving nobody left to notice she was gone. She wasn’t the only person to suffer this fate, unfortunately – all told, five people were never claimed by families – but because my great-grandfather was the one to pull her body from the wreckage, he sort of became obsessed with her. He was preoccupied until his death with finding out her identity, and every year on the anniversary of the fire he visited her grave to lay a wreath. Unfortunately, he died without ever finding out who she was.

Fast forward a few decades, and I’m in my early twenties. My great-grandfather died when I was quite young, so I only had a small idea of this part of his history. It was, however, enough to make me wary of large fires – especially hotel fires. One summer, I’m visiting another city for my younger brother’s university graduation, and I stay the night in a hotel near the city centre. I remember fires were on my mind already, because initially they had tried to give me a room on the twenty-third floor, and I had politely refused and requested a lower floor. (An old maxim of my great-grandfather’s: never stay on a floor where you wouldn’t survive the fall.) Because of the graduation, the hotel was packed, and I ended up on the fifth floor in the end, but I figured it was better than nothing.

The first night was fine. The second night a fire broke out. The hotel had had some electrical rewiring done within the last month, and something went wrong. The fire smouldered for hours, undetected, before spreading into multiple parts of the ventilation system. Smoke and flame was pushed to all corners of the hotel before the fire cut out the power. Later, investigators would discover that the fire burned through the power for the smoke and fire detection alarms almost immediately – yet somehow the fire alarms went off. This is only the beginning of the inexplicable that night.

By the time the alarms woke me, my room was already filled with smoke. I had been drilled on this so many times as a child that it was instinctive for me to roll off the bed and onto the floor; only then did I start to panic. Luckily I had fallen asleep with the curtains open – the only time I had ever done that in a hotel – and the city lights illuminated the room enough to let me know the smoke was only in the top two thirds of the room, and not as thick as it could have been. I had time to crawl into the bathroom, wet a towel, and tie it around my nose and mouth. Then I crawled to the door and lay a hand flat on it. The door was cool, so I cautiously pulled it open.

In the hallway, it was pitch dark. This is the worst case scenario for any fire. Smoke disorientates people, and they feel ill from inhaling it. Panic compounds the confusion. People can get lost in their own homes – hotels are the worst place for something like this. People stand little chance of getting out if they haven’t memorised an exit, and even then it’s not foolproof. I should know. I always memorise exits, but when I went out of my room I turned the wrong way. I don’t know why. I was panicking, I was confused, and I just made the wrong choice. It should have cost me my life.

I realised my mistake as soon as I reached the end of the hall. The door there was propped open (fire safety hazard, I remember thinking, like it mattered at that point) but I could see no flames. The door led to the stairwell, and I had just crawled out onto it when the entire world went black. The smoke and flame had intensified, the fire sucking in oxygen and the smoke being forced up the stairwell like a huge chimney. It spilled over the edges of the landing and enveloped me even hunched on my hands and knees. My eyes began to sting and water; I couldn’t see anything. I crawled back and bumped into the wall, and for several long seconds that felt like minutes, I couldn’t find my way out of the stairwell. The heat was evaporating the water in the towel, and the sheer amount of smoke meant it wasn’t doing much good anyway. By the time I finally made it back out into the hall, I was coughing and choking. Panic made me pull the towel down. I only took the smallest breath before the floor tilted under me and I experienced a horrible rush of lightheadedness – with smoke so toxic, sometimes a breath is all it takes.

I kept crawling, heading back towards my room, now realising my mistake. At that point I was forcing myself to stay calm, but it wasn’t working. I had realised I had probably just gotten myself killed, and it was almost impossible to breathe. The temperature was climbing, and I knew the fire was close. I could hear screaming from somewhere nearby, doors slamming. Every single rational thought had left. I scrambled down the hallway in pure panic, and then I saw the child.

She was hunched down, looking right at me. She wasn’t in any kind of night clothing – she looked like she was still in the clothing she would have worn at the graduation ceremony, a neat little dress and polished shoes, a ribbon tied in her hair. She was perhaps eight years old at my best guess, and seeing her shocked some sense into me. Before I could speak or gesture to the direction she should go, she waved and then pointed.

“Come on, mister,” she said. “This way.”

Together we crawled to the other end of the hallway. Smoke was billowing from that stairwell, too, thick and dark though still not as bad as the other one. Either way it didn’t look good, but the little girl didn’t seem concerned – not even when we crawled out onto the landing, and the orange flicker of flames was visible several floors below.

“No,” I said. “It’ll be too hot.”

“Come on, mister,” she said again.

She began scrambling down the stairs, staying as low as possible. I could hardly leave her, so I followed.

The heat was unbearable, and by the time we were on the floor below, visibility was zero. The smoke was so thick and black that even the flicker of the flames had vanished; the only way I knew how close they were was from the heat and the deafening roar of it. Have you ever been near to a large bonfire? Have you heard how loudly it crackles? That’s nothing. Big fires, they roar. They sound closer to a freight train, a tornado. It’s a sound so loud that it sets off a primal kind of terror, even without the heat and the smoke to add to the danger. What I’m saying is that it’s something that’s very difficult to crawl towards, yet there we were.

I couldn’t see the little girl, but every time I began to panic she would reach back and touch me. The heat grew and I could smell my hair burning, my clothing threatening to catch. The floor was excruciating, and while I didn’t realise it at the time, I was in the process of receiving third degree burns on my hands and knees from the floor alone. I felt faint, the heat making my head pound. It seemed to drain my of my energy, and during those last seconds – as we passed directly past the floor where the inferno was at its worst – I was sure I was running only on pure animal instinct to get away.

Then we descended into the hallway below the fire, and it was all gone. The heat lingered, but it was nothing compared to what it was before. The smoke was hazy grey, high up by the ceiling. The little girl was tugging at me, and I realised I’d collapsed to the ground.

“Quickly, mister!” she said now. “Not far!”

In my pain and confusion, it didn’t occur to me that she wasn’t burned; that she had no difficulty breathing. She tugged hard at my clothing, and while I didn’t know that my clothing was alight at the time, later I remembered and wondered how she had done it. With her prompting and encouragement I made it down the last of the stairs and out into the hotel’s lobby, which was shockingly untouched. Alarms were blaring, but the room was free of smoke and many of the hotel’s employees remained there, grabbing people as they emerged, coughing, from stairwells and hurrying them outside. When I stumbled into the lobby I was immediately tackled by several employees who were, I was later told, beating the flames from me. I had stumbled into the lobby on fire.

I don’t remember anything else. I didn’t have time to mention the girl. I passed out, and was kept in a medically induced coma while my body recovered from serious burns. I very nearly didn’t make it, and when I awoke I had several months of painful operations and skin grafts to go. My hands were badly burned, though the doctors managed to save nearly all my fingers – I’m only missing the little fingers to the first knuckle, and while the scarring is bad I can use the hands well. My knees are badly scarred but functional. My back isn’t pretty to look at, but it doesn’t bother me now, not outside of itching in the heat. I forgot about the girl until just before I was released from hospital, five months later, but to my relief I was told that no children had died in the fire. Whoever she was, she had gotten out safe.

Almost a year later, my grandfather died. He was the son of my firefighter great-grandfather, and when my own father and I were around his house, sorting through his things, we came across some of my great-grandfather’s stuff. Medals, a few old photographs of the family, some letters. My father and I went through the pictures, my father pointing out relatives and telling a few stories here and there. What you would expect from such an occasion, really – but then I found an old picture of a little girl.

I recognised her immediately as the little girl I had seen in the hotel – there was no denying it. The picture was an unpleasant one, taken post-mortem, and while half of her body was badly charred the other half looked as though she could be sleeping. Her hair was the same, the bow singed but present. The dress was the same. I could even still hear how she sounded. Come on, mister! I was so shocked I didn’t say anything. My father looked at it for a long moment, and then he gave a sad sigh.

“I wish he had found out who she was,” he said. “That haunted him. He felt like he failed her.” He took the photo from me and looked a little more closely at it. “Nonsense, of course. He did everything for that little girl. I’m sure she would thank him if she could.”

She did, I thought. She did.

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/20/2020: PULSE aka KAIRO (2001)

There's a moment in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's PULSE (aka KAIRO) in which two college students stand before a computer screen, watching a program that consists of softly glowing white dots drifting across a black void. One explains to the other that this is a computer science project in which dots that make contact are destroyed, but dots that grow too far apart will be drawn back together. This is an explicit metaphor for our ambivalent modern existence, in which internet-driven isolation becomes increasingly unbearable, but intimacy seems impossible, and even somehow perilous. This is PULSE's thesis statement, which it explores by proposing that when there is no more room in hell, the dead will come online--a breach of natural reality that dissolves the crucially meaningful line between life and death, with apocalyptic consequences.

In accordance with its obvious themes, Kurosawa's enormously creepy thriller about modern alienation--a release that was perfectly timed for the dawn of the new millennium in 2001--features a cast of disparate characters who struggle to connect with one another as they each grapple with the supernatural disaster that slowly bleeds from their computer screens into the physical world. At the start, a group of coworkers discover that their friend Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi), who has fallen out of touch while obsessively working on a computer program for them, has committed suicide. That's putting it simply; actually, when Taguchi lets his concerned friend Michi (Kumiko Aso) into his apartment to retrieve the disc, he casually hangs himself in another room. The sequence is beyond chilling, and it's relevant for me to admit that when Michi first encounters Taguchi, I couldn't be sure whether she was talking to him, or his ghost. As the group investigates Taguchi's fate, they are each contacted by spirits from the other side, which causes the living to begin to fade from existence; first they lose their will to live, then they lose their rational minds, and ultimately, they lose corporeality. Meanwhile, young luddite Ryosuke (Haruhiko Kato) installs the internet at his home for the first time, and immediately, something starts logging on independently, sending him upsetting images of people haunting their own darkened apartments. Terrified, he enlists the help of computer science student Harue (Koyuki), and together they come to the appalling realization that the dead are returning to Earth through the internet, as the living drift senselessly away.

There is so much rhetoric about the alienating powers of the internet now, that it's hard to discuss the subject without feeling like you're just cycling through clichés cooked up by an older, future-phobic generation. PULSE avoids this pitfall by remaining stubbornly abstract. When the living encounter the dead, after the invariably horrifying moment of contact, the live victim first experiences a profound lethargy, indicative of an ever-deepening depression; we understand that while the fear of the returned dead is the most immediate concern, the shattering of definitions that this causes is what catalyzes the victim's transformation from quivering flesh to a moldering stain that eventually flakes away and vanishes. Seeing the end of the world closing in, Harue observes that if the dead are forced to continue to suffer the maddening monotony of their mortal lives, then what distinguishes a person from a ghost? As life and death meld into a homogenous mass, our dwindling protagonists search for answers, trying to dismantle the mysterious images and phone messages sent from the afterlife, but they only succeed at making themselves more painfully aware of the inevitable. The audience experiences the hopelessness of this misadventure along with the heroes, unable to make any satisfyingly concrete meaning out of the bizarre phenomenon that is taking over the planet. It seems that life is made worth living by the contrast between things, and the expectation of change and evolution--even the simple daily change of being able to leave one’s apartment, and commune with others. When these possibilities are eliminated, and the disembodying effect of the digital world takes hold, life essentially becomes a version of hell.  

Western audiences (of which you are probably a part, like me, if you are reading this) tend to balk at anything they can't fully understand, as if a film were a like a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces forming a rational whole, each piece having its own tidy function. As he often does, Kurosawa defies that longing for clarity and completion, and he gets away with it by building up an intensifying terror that feeds on our lack of understanding. Without a set of rules to live by--without a silver bullet, a wooden stake, or a detailed backstory--we are left with nothing to defend us against the appalling idea of the void gazing back at us, and ultimately absorbing us. Some characters in PULSE discover that they can seal the ghosts behind a door or window using red construction tape, but this doesn't always work, as an unfortunate young man finds out when he spots a frantic mass of tape plastered all over a solid wall, only to find the movie's most dreadful specter approaching him from behind. As far as one knows, there is no salvation to be found anywhere.

While preparing for this review, and trying to figure out how I was going to avoid the embarrassment of repeating the usual nonsense about how the internet desocializes you and rots your brain, I read an excellent review of PULSE by Washington Post critic Stephen Hunter. He observes wisely,  "Pulse is best enjoyed if it's not questioned too closely. It lives visually in a way it cannot live intellectually". The truth is, I think movie viewers would benefit from this attitude in general, remembering that no movie participates in our quantum reality; they are only windows to various emotional states, demonstrations of different ways to process and cope with experiences that we can rarely fully understand and control even in "real life". PULSE provides a near-perfect description of our collective loss of control in the face of unstoppable digital assimilation. And much like the movie itself, I have no comforting conclusion to offer.

[littlemisssquiggles]

I was watching Phoenix/Night’s chapter 11 review video, he had ideas of what’d happened to Oscar. One of them was that maybe he was able to get away from Neo and try to run away from her but he wasn’t fast enough to get away and somehow got captured by her. I assume that Neo took him to the Vault of the Relic of Creation where I assume the Oscar vs Neo fight is gonna happen. I believe it’s gonna parallel the Raven vs Cinder fight in V5, a fight for the two relics. What do you think about that?

Hey Chels. Hmm…I’m not sure about the vault part, fam.

Even if Neo managed to take Oscarhostage, why would she take him down to the Vault of the Winter Maiden? As faras the audience is aware of, Neo (and by extension Cinder) doesn’t know thewhereabouts of the Vault within Atlas Academy. Nor is she aware that Oscarknows about it either. While I agree with the part about a potential fight downin the Vault, I doubt it’ll be between Oscar and Neo. For me, I’m moreexpecting Oscar and Ironwood to have a confrontation either down in the Vaultor on the way to the Vault. My assumption is that Ironwood went down to theVault and is probably waiting for Winter to join him down there once she’sclaimed Fria’s power. That way Winter would open the Vault for Ironwood so thathe could use the staff’s power to hoist Atlas Kingdom into the orbit; removingthe kingdom and its citizens from Remnant.

However, my presumption on whatmight really end up happening is one of the following few concepts--

Ironwood will be waiting down in theVault for Winter only for Cinder to show up instead to challenge him for theStaff. A fight then breaks out however Ironwood is unfortunately overpowered byCinder who had the strength of two Maidens on her side after successfullyclaiming Fria’s power for herself; confirming much to Ironwood’s despair thatWinter Schnee---his right hand and top operative---had been killed by one ofSalem’s very own. Cinder then goes to kill Ironwood but he’s saved from neardeath by Oscar and Ruby arriving down in the Vault. Oscar then instructs Rubyto take the injured Ironwood to safety while he tries and stop Cinder fromtaking the Staff. A fight then breaks out between Oscar and Cinder, rekindlingthe fateful rematch us Pineheads have been itching for.

The alternative to this is Ironwoodwaiting for Winter down in the Vault but Oscar shows up. Since the othersalerted him of the General’s intentions, Oscar attempts to talk some sense toJames but at this point he’s too far gone. He won’t listen to reason. He eventrains his gun on Oscar. But just as it appears as if the two were going toclash, Cinder arrives down in the Vault to claim the Relic.

As a third alternative, Ironwoodgoes down to the Vault to wait for Winter. But as he enters the vault he isbemused to discover a narcissistic Cinder Fall already waiting there for himwith the corpse of Winter Schnee in one hand and the remains of a dismantledPenny Polendina in another which she wickedly lays at Ironwood’s feet; as if togloat of her accomplishments. A fight ensues between the two. At this time,Ruby and Oscar arrive at the Vault in an attempt to stop Ironwood. But as thetwo Rosebuds arrive down the Vault they are met by Cinder who has alreadysucceeded in gaining the Relic of Creation. With the staff in her hand, thingsget a bit topsy-turvy as Atlas begins to fall out of the sky as a result of thestaff’s removal leading to Oscar and Ruby to fight gravity and a dual-powered MaidenCinder for the Staff as a means of stopping the collapse.

Those are just a few ideas I have. Eitherway, my headcanon remains that Oscar willbe the one to fight Cinder in the end. I have a feeling that V7 endgamecould parallel V3 with Oscar sending his allies away to safety while he staysbehind to prevent Cinder from claiming the Relic of Creation. This way I canimagine Oscar embodying both Ozpin and Pyrhha--ensuring that his friends---thepeople he cared for and whose lives he was more or less entrusted with---madeit out alive before moving forward to do whatever he could to stop Cinder; evenif it meant sacrificing his own life to stop her. The last time, a Wizard ofLight challenged Fall Maiden Cinder, they lost. The last time Oz stood up toCinder, she killed him and that was back when she only had one Maiden power.

Somehow I kinda like the concept of Oscar challenging Cinder and avenging Ozpinby being the one to put a stop to Cinder. I don’t know what the CRWBYWriters’ plans for Cinder are. But in the event that V7 is to be her final curtain call, I feel like it wouldbe fitting if Oscar was the one tofinally do so.

@moondrop04, I know I told you Ididn’t like the idea of Oscar sacrificing himself for his friends. However I’vehad more time to think about it and now I can actually picture it beingsomething Oscar would do as a testament to his bravery. This doesn’t mean thatI think Oscar will die though. Nah. If anything I expect Oscar to fight Cinderand survive. I like the idea of Oscar sacrificing himself to try and stopCinder just like Oz. Who knows? Perhaps,in a similar fashion to V3 with Pyrhha, Rubyends up going down to the Vault just in time to find Cinder about to kill Oscar. At first she suffersdifficulty to summon forth her Silver Eye power as a result of the fear Saleminstilled in her in regards to her mother’s death by her hands. It’s a momentwhere Ruby finds it impossible toclear her mind long enough to think of positive thoughts to protect everyone.So in that moment, Ruby does the just thing. She basically emulates the advicethat Other Dimension Peter Parker gave to Miles Morale about becoming a hero inSpiderman: Into the Spider-verse.

“…Youcan’t always just think about saving everyone. You have to think about saving atleast one person first.” 

Or something alongthose lines since I’m paraphrasing here. Sobasically that’s what Ruby does. She thinksabout Oscar; how much he’s proven to care about her and their team sincethey met and the way he made her feel. Because in that moment, Ruby wasn'ttrying to save everyone. All she wanted to accomplish in that moment was protectingOscar. Because in that moment, saving him was all that mattered and she was notabout to let Cinder Fall kill another friend she loved ever again.

Soin a nutshell, Ruby is able to summon her Silver Eyes at full blast which issuper effective again Cinder who shrinks back from being exposed to the light.As Cinder lunges for Ruby, she is finished by Oscar who lands the final killingblow. Imagine if… crystalized stalactites with the the Vault. Perhaps Oscar could use the magic of the Long Memory to cause oneof the stalactites to fall on top of Cinder, crushing her before she could getto Ruby.

Notsure how to feel about Oscar killing someone, even if it is a villain. I don’twish for a repeat of what transpired with Bumblebee last season with AdamTaurus now with the RosegardeningRosebuds. I’m not even sure if Cinder will actually be killed off. I’mstill waiting to see what the PLOT does with her especially since we’resupposed to learn more about her backstory at some point for this arc trilogy.Regardless, still wanted to toss the idea on the table.

As I said to @daggerpawstudios inanother, I’m starting to like the idea of Oscar trying to get away from Neo. Soin that regard, I agree with Phoenix/Night. However where I deviate is that Ilike the idea of Oscar not being kidnapped at all. My headcanon is that Oscarsuccessfully escaped Neo’s attempt at taking the Relic off of him and iscurrently somewhere else on Atlas premises trying to get as far away from Neoas possibly. However V6 highlighted Neo being able to mask objects with hersemblance (as she did with Mistral airship), my idea is that currently Neo haspoor Oscar trapped in an illusion where he’s been attempting to find an exithowever Neo has disguised all the exits as dead ends, making Oscar think he wastrapped with no way out and with no way of getting in contact with his comradessince Ironwood locked off communication within the hero group.

I like this concept since it’s aninteresting way to show off Neo’s cunningness as a villain while additionallytesting Oscar’s resolve. I dig the idea of Neo messing with Oscar psychologicallythrough her illusions, making him believe he was all alone trapped in a maze ofher creation with no way of finding his friends. 

What’s more terrifying is thatNeo could also disguise herself as any of Oscar’s female allies, inclusive ofRuby. Oscar wouldn’t know where to turn and who to trust since, in Neo’sillusion, he wouldn’t know what’s fake from reality.

It’s cool since it provides an opendoor for Oz to return and guide Oscar in the same manner as he did back inArgus. Not to mention that it also provides an opportunity for Ren to debut hisevolved semblance. 

Imagine if…JNR hasbeen trying to find Oscar too but Neo’s illusion winds up confusing them aswell and keeping them from reaching Oscar until Ren reveals a new ability thathe’d been developing all season where he can possibly locate Oscar’swhereabouts by locking onto his emotions specifically. 

I really do that have afeeling that Ren might play a role in finding Oscar; especially in the eventthat he’s stuck inside an illusion that’s keeping him trapped inside and anyoneelse trying to find him outside. 

I like this concept a lot and I think I’llkeep that as my main hunch for RWBY V7CH12 until the episode debuts.

~LittleMissSquiggles (2020)

[polyamorous-mysme]

What's your opinion on Jimin and V? They both infuriate me because of the way they handled things in the routes. I think Jimin gets a little bit better at the end of his route, but V doesn't seem too. He doesn't tell Saeyoung about his brother, just shows up one day Saeran in tow and is just like 'I'm back'. Even if Saeran didn't want to go back yet, he could at least told Saeyoung what was going on.

tbh most of my opinions on every mm character is that you just have to completely disregard how Normal ppl would act given that the plots of mm are so wild and unbelievable. on the other had though i get why people have qualms w certain characters for how they handle the plot. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ eso si que es

But. as far as jumins route goes i think they just fucking did him dirty w it. with the second bad end/chats leading to it especially. I know it sounds weird to say given that it's his route but those few days are so fucking OOC for jumin. i mean I'll find my own ways to rationalize it bc it Can be rationalized if you care to, but not everyone will. because its fucking weird. not even the end itself but jumin leading up to it.

that being said i LIKE jumin and i like his route save for that. jumins hidden or has Had to hide his emotions and opinions his whole life. his father frequently brings new women in and out of his life, one of the only two people hes ever been able to trust has just committed suicide and he feels like he doesnt even Know either of them anymore, and then MC comes along getting him to open up making him Trust them again and hes worried something similar is going to happen. yeah yeah cat ran away whatever but to ignore what its ACTUALLY about is impossible. rika was one one of the only people and the only Woman he really trusted wholeheartedly as an equal and shes dead the cat she gave him is missing and being overprotective of MC is his one way of gaining control again. if I couldn't rationalize that though it absolutely would have skeeved me out from the get-go, though. so im not surprised Or affronted by the fact that ppl find it irredeemable ig.

now V. V is an even weirder story. he clings to rika from the moment they first met because dont ask me why. i dont know why. is she supposed to remind him of his mother? weird. is he genuinely just that nice of a person? probably. and rika is fucked. rika is traumatized and has been since young childhood. she suffers from what someone who doesnt experience delusions thinks delusions are or how they feel. whatever. and V loves her So Much that if she wont GET help he wont force her so hes going to do whatever He can to help her. until it goes really fucking wrong.

and let's all just be honest and say everything about seven and saeran and especially their backstory doesnt make sense. it ABSOLUTELY hinges on suspension of disbelief. but there are some aspects that do make sense. the stronger older brother in an abusive household is trying to keep himself And his sickly younger brother safe and sane. stumbles across v and rika and we already know mm doesnt Quite take place in our world as we know it and i know fuck all about typical korean life and families so I couldnt tell you why they didnt report their home life to the authorities from the get go. also this whole thing doesnt fucking make sense bc seven and saeran look like MAYBE 10 at this point and V is only 5 years older than them max but him and rika have obviously been together for a while and are Adults here. doesnt track. timeline dont make sense. angway.

but the way I see it is rika had Already started to plot mint eye yadda yadda here and knew that if the boys were separated she could control seven publicly as the stronger twin in a way that makes it seem like they're helping and protecting them both, they just have to be separated. seven can roll w the loneliness and grief of having to leave his brother behind as long as it means hes safe. and w saeran, she can use that same grief and loneliness to manipulate him a different way. behind the scenes. create her perfect believer who will do Anything she says because she saved him, why shouldnt she save everyone else? and j think by the time V realized just how bad rikas mental state was it was too late to Fix it. but he loved her he loved the RFA and the RFA loved rika. he didnt want to taint or tarnish her image w the reality of who she is what shes been doing etc.

after that it's a series of unfortunate events and fucking stupid decisions v thinks hes making for the good and sanity of everyone else. hes given himself a "I'm not a hero i just Have to bear all this by myself forever and fix it alone with no help and save Everyone in the end" complex that sure is with great intentions but leads down a rabbit hole of hurt and fuckery that he cant fix. ever. and I think he was worried about telling seven about saeran because if he had he KNOWS seven would have gone after him alone. and he would have been hurt or killed or worse. he would have been. and V was still trying to save whoever he could. save rika and Hope he could save saeran? save saeran and Hope he could save rika? who knows. I dont. I think V had the BEST intentions. i do. i think he was just a bit of a Rudely untrusting dumbass carrying them out.

but that's what mm is. MC is the character that is meant to push the characters into healing from their fatal flaw. yoosung is slipping from success because up to that point hes hinged his entire future on his older cousin. zen. i dont remember. has to find a happy balance between shooting for the stars but not hiding himself or who he is while doing it? something gay like that. jaehee pushes herself too hard to be successful. to not be a burden. to be financially and socially stable and safe above her own happiness. jumin is cold and untrusting and hides himself because the last time he wasnt/didnt, he got Hurt. seven is the same gay shit as jumin and zen with the added bonus of needing to learn that mc can make their own decisions wrt danger. v needs to stop carrying the world on his shoulders. saeran . . . needs to heal. learn that his life is not intrinsically tied to the lives of others and he can still love people but be his Own person, whole and healed. whether or not you the individual player believe that by the end of the route theyve gotten their first real step in the right direction is up to you.

anyway stream room 206 ep by elah hale on spotify.

[airlock]

airlock grades the Gharnef archetype

so, I got a random hankering to start a text post series where I launch myself off on reviews of each character from a certain villainous archetype in Fire Emblem -- and hey, it’s a reasonably nice time of the year to be doing posts like these, what with that new upcoming entry that we learn more about each day, isn’t it?

to kick off the festivities, I’m doing one of my favorites -- let’s see who wore the heavy robes better!

(do note: under cut are spoilers for... everything, and also a significant amount of me criticizing or blamming characters that you might like. you’ve been warned! but if you’d still persist, you childish sword lord, then come along and meet my challenge-)

the man himself

(6/10)

although the execution suffers from myriad flaws -- of which several can be touted to stem from storage space limitations in FE1 and FE3, but are inexcusably retained in the remakes -- it’s not for no reason that this fellow spawned a lengthy line of imitators.

the detail of his backstory and motivation is brillant; he’s a perfectly understandable villain without being remotely redeemable -- a much-needed class in antagonist writing for more recent entries of the series. he’s also effective as a terrifying, genuinely threatening villain, implacable and powerful.

unfortunately, however, his excellently written characterization is largely confined to flavor; it fails to inform his actions or the flow of the plot, and so, he tends to come across as a plot device instead of a character. even his takeover of Khadein is written very powerfully for something that isn’t seen and barely influences any of the game’s events. and although his sheer ambition in withholding Falchion to eventually betray Medeus ends up coming across as a plot action instead of something steeped in his essence. and this all to say nothing of his second appearance, where he fully forgoes being a character and behaves indistinguishably from a non-sentinent madness-inducing talisman.

overall, he’s a splendid concept for a villain that is ultimately laid low in execution, largely because, back in his day, the text wasn’t big enough to comfortably carry him, and the more recent incarnations were ineffective in expanding it despite having more than enough room to do so.

I also docked a point or two for being an antisemitic/anti-roma stereotype in his earlier incarnations, what with the hooked nose and rare darker skintone; the remakes thankfully eschew this by swapping out the nose and making the skintone outright inhuman, but the more recent Heroes design, while an improvement on many fronts, seems to roll back on this one.

church gharnef

(6/10)

unlike the above-mentioned, this one was in a remake that changed a lot of things; I mention this as a healthy preface to the fact that I am only familiar with his more recent incarnation!

like Gharnef above, he’s an unforgivable, but genuine villain; while a lust for power is hardly fresh as far as motivations go, the game does reasonably well at establishing that he’s already powerful and influential, and has fallen to cruel orthodoxy in a bid to eliminate threats to his power at all costs -- in other words, his characterization is timelessly realistic.

unfortunately, however, that much is all text, if not outright fanon; the story proper restricts him to behaving as an unconvincing cacklefiend playing at a kidnap-the-princess plot that the princess in question should’ve been too strong and too smart to fall prey to. making Celica a somewhat willing hostage instead of a helpless captive was a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t cover the distance; it would have been far more interesting if Jedah had gotten the chance to overpower Celica in the arena of genuine manipulation through theological debate -- and on the other coin of things, I’m sure his preying on Celica’s fears would seem a lot more organic if not for how dedicated the game is to telling her that she’s wrong before she even takes the steps across the point of no return.

he’s much like the original Gharnef in being an intriguing concept that falls flat on execution, although with both of those qualities amped up -- even more interesting in theory, even flatter in practice.

discount gharnef

(2/10)

sorry not sorry for nicknaming him that!

I believe I’ve said it a number of times and I’ll say it again: Manfroy is a manipulative villain in a setting full of people who don’t need manipulation to make bad decisions and ruin their own lives. he comes across as a plot device at the best of times, and as a null factor at the worst of times; he brings nothing to any cutscene that he appears in.

Seliph’s visit to the Yied Shrine alludes to his backstory -- that which he shares with the rest of the cult -- but this instance is even poorer than previous examples at establishing a plot presence; it not only fails to inform Manfroy’s choices in any interesting way, but it’s also outright contradicted by his actions sometimes (cfr: withholding the Naga tome, in a move that brings Gharnef’s playbook to mind but makes no sense at all for Manfroy).

points have been docked again for racial stereotyping, also; the sprite alone doesn’t make it very evident but he’s also got a face that can be used as a fishing pole.

irrelevant gharnef

(1/10)

Veld is a step beneath even Manfroy, as yet another pointless manipulative villain -- notorious for stealing a slice of agency from one of the far more genuine antagonists of the setting -- who doesn’t make his presence felt at all. I was halfway tempted to consider Raydrik the actual Manfroy here, even.

he retains one point only for not being a racial stereotype, for once.

the absence of a gharnef

(wha?/10)

Binding Blade, for all its highly repetitious usage of archetypes (being, in fact, arguably responsible for making them a thing in the first place, where they were previously just repetitive Kaga quirks), seems to have eschewed the Gharnef. this actually somewhat works in its favor; although the game’s plot is ultimately one of the shallower ones in the series, the lack of a core manipulative villain puts the focus on the self-interested factionalism that each country suffers from as they fail to mobilize a resistance against the primary villain. so, overall, an approach that would have worked out great in Jugdral.

monsterfucker gharnef

(8.5/10)

where Binding Blade had succeeded in building a plot that doesn’t need a Gharnef, its prequel was successful in the opposite: creating one of the most effective incarnations of the archetype to date, and making him front and center, to boot.

although all Gharnefs thus far have been manipulative villains, Nergal and his cronies are the first ones who show true skill in manipulation -- as in, conning people into acting against their interests, in situations where they otherwise would not have. through this, he cements himself as the primary antagonist and driver of the plot, where his predecessors were content, if dishonest, in serving a greater evil. and he brings very perceptible weight to the position, specially in the scenes where he presses the buttons of the heroes; although he fails to ultimately discourage them from defeating him, it comes across as a result of heroic strength, not of ineffective villainy.

that said, however he shimmers and shines as the heavy, he’s somewhat held back by his backstory -- one that only partially succeeds at informing his actions (however compelling it is when it does manage to do so), and worse, is largely locked to second-playthrough bonuses, where the story would’ve benefitted much more from naturally doling out his secrets along the way.

I also docked a half-point because the pseudo-turban and goatee arguably veer into the racial stereotype territory again, although he at least has the point-for of not having an outright gonk design (even when the turban goes off). I should be clear: it’s not that I oppose having nonwhite/nonwestern elements on an antagonist at all, it just comes across rather poorly when certain elements are only seen on antagonists, and especially if it’s always on the ugly ones.

twink gharnef

(10/10)

Lyon is the apex of plot-driving gharnefs, plain and simple. undeniably sympathetic, but impossible to save, whether he’s too far gone or was never redeemable to begin with -- and in fact, this ambiguity is easily the most brillant aspect of all of the writing in Sacred Stones.

he’s characterized effectively from wire to wire: his appearance, mannerisms and fond flashbacks do an excellent job of disarming the player while setting them up for a staggering plot twist, but the game is also not too hesitant to bring the plot twist to fruition and saves enough time to keep building on him past the point when the big secret is out -- sidestepping a pervasive trap that otherwise often causes plot twists to weaken stories. and all the way to the end, it’s difficult to narrow his character down to one narrative that doesn’t feel strictly like a personal interpretation; there are as many Lyons as there are players, right down to the point where he comes across differently depending on whether you’re playing as Eirika or Ephraim!

there’s also credit to be given to the remainder of the cast that effectively props him up; because he has underlings that behave strongly on their own motivations -- and sometimes beyond even Lyon’s control -- he spares himself from behaving as a plot device to focus fully on serving as the genuine core of the story as a whole. I suppose he’s a good delegator if nothing else, eh?

depression gharnef

(4/10)

unlike the above, Sephiran fails crucially in one regard: he’s set up as an extremely endgame plot twist, which, coupled with a frantic, breathless third act that insuffices to fully explore the implications of the reveals it dishes out, causes his reveal to land closer to shock value than to the completion of an arc.

while his backstory is breathtakingly fascinating, it serves exclusively as a footnote to eulogize him with; it’s not just that his actions don’t seem to be informed by it, but rather that his actions completely lack weight in the plot, making it even somewhat arguable to class him as a Gharnef at all. in Path of Radiance, he only appears as an irrelevant mystery, and Radiant Dawn coming out to accredit him for some number of Ashnard’s deeds fails to budge that one’s sheer weight and doesn’t change perspectives.

it’s quite a shame, because in concept, he could’ve been the next Lyon; but the execution is painfully fragile, and amidst the complex web of characters and plots in Tellius, his greater-scope motions fail to be felt whatsoever until the late chapters of Radiant Dawn’s Part 3.

DIWNLF gharnef

(0/10)

(that’s “dad I would not like to fuck”, incidentally)

it’s not for no reason that this guy is the only major antagonist that Awakening doesn’t let you trip over still alive and kicking somehow. he is 100% plot device, adds nothing to the story or to any single scene that he appears in, lacks in personality, doesn’t present any sort of challenge that isn’t erradicated without fanfare by the protagonists, and doesn’t even have any sort of a backstory.

and he’s a racist stereotype on top of all that, so he doesn’t even get a mercy point like his similarly irrelevant predecessor from Thracia 776.

I have not played the game with this gharnef

(??/10)

I don’t even know if he counts; I see a lot of back-and-forth in that regard.

anyways, what do you all think? “oh my god someone finally said it”, or perhaps “I will kill you but not as hard as you assassinated my favorite antagonist”? if the upcoming Three Houses is to have a Gharnef, do you have any hopes for what they’ll be like? this is all nice and open to replies and reblogs, folks! don’t be shy! yes.... do it... succumb to the temptation.......

[rylie-barton]

⌜   CIS FEMALE, SHE / HER   |   the hearse by matt maeson, gryffindor, infp   ⌟    ⏤   meet RYLIE NATALIA BARTON ; a TWENTY TWO year old who kind of resembles WILLA HOLLAND, don’t you think? she originally hailed from NEW YORK CITY where she lived with her parents, CLINT BARTON & NATASHA ROMANOFF (   MARVEL   ), but word is that she’s been making strides to rejoin shield and finish her law degree this past year. she’s always been pretty AUDACIOUS & COMPASSIONATE, but has gotten way more CODEPENDENT & PRIDEFUL since she woke up. maybe her ability of WEAPON PROFICIENCY and power of INNATE COMBAT can help in taking down the dome. you can check out her stat page HERE& her pinterest board HERE.

i was a woman who thought only of dead things                                        ( all the time ). i couldn’t HELP it.

part one of two : the backstory.    (   trigger warnings for talk of death, drug / alcohol abuse.

born on july 21st, 1996, to clint barton & barbara morse. the youngest of three children, lewis and callum were five and nine respectively at the time of her birth. 

her mother and brothers died in a house fire when she was just three months old ; the files concerning the accident are blacked out and encrypted, and the story given to rylie amounts to ‘your mother went missing in action.’ 

understandably, she’s always wanted to know more ; unfortunately, she’s never had the means in which to find anything out.

raised by clint. really loved, but vaguely overprotected. ‘aunt nat’ was in her life from minute one, essentially, a shoulder for clint to lean on and a motherly presence that rylie found she craved. in time, they got married. it never felt anything but natural.

she was raised alongside the rest of the next gen ; troy banner, dan rogers, calder thorson & phoebe stark. they were and remain the closest thing to siblings that rylie has ever had, and as the youngest, she got to annoy them endlessly and still be assured that whatever may have happened down the line, they would always have her back.

as a little girl, rylie’s dreams amounted to little more than being the prima balllerina of her company. if she couldn’t be that, she would have settled for being an award winning pianist. she was a remarkably ordinary little girl, the only thing completely out of the norm about her being the fact that her father had her trained from the time she could walk to use a weapon, and her stepmother had her taught well how to fight. 

her time in school was... tough, to put it mildly. she was homeschooled at certain points, and moved around a lot for others. kids could be cruel, and rylie’s self esteem was never destined to be that good. 

rylie’s lift changing can be pinpointed as the moment that shield enlisted her, along with the rest of the next gen. she was just a LITTLE KID - playing dress up in between recitals, saving the world before she’d ever really even lived in it. they were kids trained for war. how could any of them have ever been well adjusted?

she dropped out of ballet. she stopped attending her piano lessons. the only thing that mattered was working with her team. how stupid she feels, now, to have been so caught up in trying to be an adult that she forgot to have a childhood.

her friends meant EVERYTHING to her. 

she started attending the same school as phoebe because the other girl made a strong case to clint for rylie, so she wouldn’t have to go through another year of torment. she didn’t just LOVE her. she wanted to be her. to compare to the beautiful and intelligent and utterly flawless phoebe stark was something that she always knew would be impossible, but tried to do, anyway.

troy was her BIG BROTHER. he still is. when she was scared of storms, he would stay awake and hold her through the night to help her through. they teased one another mercilessly, but at the end of the day, they always knew just how much they loved one another - it was all in good spirit, and at points, it was what both of them needed. 

daniel, the voice of reason - not just for rylie, but for everyone. she always looked up to him, both as a leader and as a friend. he made good calls. he tried to do right by everyone. it wasn’t easy to do - and looking back, rylie hates how it all rested on his shoulders when he was just a KID - but he did it anyway.

and calder...- she’s always loved him, even when it was difficult. back then, it wasn’t. he was always a stoic, but how much he loved them all was evident. he was her training partner and best friend, always present, even when he didn’t know what to say, or do. 

the five of them were like some kind of mismatched breakfast club, but no one in the world understood what it was like to grow up with heroes for parents as well as they did.

and then PHOEBE died. rylie was sixteen years old. the rest of them weren’t much older. loki attacked avengers tower while their parents were away on a mission, and she tried to protect calder ; it wasn’t anybody’s fault except loki’s that she fell that day, but they all shouldered the guilt regardless. rylie never was the same. 

in the months after, rylie tried to numb the pain, the responsibility. she couldn’t sleep, so she took pills that were meant to help. when they didn’t, she took more. the subsequent overdose was swept under the carpet, the choice to send her to wda alongside the rest of the guys their way of trying to bring some life back to her, after. it was phoebe’s dream they were living, after all. maybe being there with them would help.

believe it or not : it DIDN’T. walt disney academy was living under the threat of the darkness at the time, and rylie was one of many students who fell victim. while on a mission with shield in late 2014, she was shot ; it was a horrible event that weakened rylie more than just in her resolve, and months later, the darkness took hold. under its influence, she hurt people that she didn’t know, and she hurt one’s that she did, too. her freedom was temporary, she and many other students were taken over once more, and troy saved the day by drawing out the good ; but enough had been enough. 

rylie turned to alcohol. the rest was history. she drank to sleep. she drank to get herself through the day. she drank when she was happy, when she was achingly sad, when she was just trying to feel something. she would go on weekend benders that bled into the weeknights when the littlest inconvenience happened, and drunk, she made some truly horrible decisions with some truly terrible people. she kept hurting the people she loved. she kept ruining her relationships. it became a cycle, wash and repeat.

whatever she might have had with emmett wicks, a rock she leant on during the early darkness saga, was gone as quick as it came. rylie got too involved too quick with alexander kaligaris, with disastrous results. we know how unhealthy that particular relationship turned out. 

shield suspended her from active duty in early 2017. she was over the legal limit to drive and still thought she could go on a mission for them, and she could have gotten her whole team killed. she didn’t, but it didn’t matter. they were right to do what they did, but rylie took it personally ; she lashed out. she made bad choices. she had lost the ONLY thing she really had left. her father wanted to pull her from school to try and help, and she point blank refused. it caused a rift between them, for understandable reasons. without her dad, without her family, without many of her friends - rylie just got worse. 

in the summer of ‘17, the school suffered from an earthquake during prom. rylie took a hard fall, and the resulting head trauma damaged her eardrum. it wasn’t her father coming back to support her during the subsequent operation to try and fix it that gave rylie a wake up call. it was her pregnancy, discovered a few weeks later ; rylie always loved, and alex always left. one mistake from the two of them caused a bigger one that spooked her. rylie made the choice to have an abortion. she took control of her own life, for once, instead of allowing it spin even more out of control - and she started attending alcoholics anonymous, almost immediately after. 

part two of two : what u missed on glee.

rylie has been sober for 21 months and counting. it’s as hard for me to believe it as it is for you all, i’m sure ; but she’s been doing BETTER. she’s been back training, brushing up on some old skills that she let get rusty. she’s healthy, too, the sallow look to her skin that everyone got accustomed to long gone. to say it was easy for her, or that she didn’t have moments of doubts, would be... totally incorrect. she’s just been fighting through.

she was one more bad month away from flunking out of her law degree, the last time y’all saw her ; but she’s picked up in the past year, really knuckling down to try and catch up, for one, and do better, for another. she’s still worried that she’s going to have to do an extra year, to finish, but she’s dedicated to doing so if she’s GOTTA. 

her relationship with her father? fixed. clint has always put rylie above all else, and never would have even required the apologies she gave, really. likewise with the relationship she has with natasha. both of them forgive her for her weakness, though it’s unlikely that rylie ever will. we love on ( 1 ) girl with a guilt complex.

the one thing that ISN’T fixed is her hearing, at least not 100%. she has a loss of fifty nine db in her right ear, and that’s probably never going to change. it makes her and her father even more alike, though i’m sure clint would have rathered the similarities not be so much. 

as of right now, she’s prepping for a hearing with the board of directors at shield on whether she should be reinstated as an active agent. she’s passed all of the physicals, and she’s been in therapy for about as long as she’s been sober, working through her issues. she’s still got miles to go, but they’re certainly optimistic. rylie moved past feeling hard done by a long time ago, and now she just... wants to be a part of the agency, again, in a way where she can actually be of help. 

[joemerl]

“A Swiftly Tilting Planet” is Awful and I Hate It

I don’t know if anybody cares about my opinions, but I built up a lot of bile reading this book and I have to get rid of it somehow.

Background

For those who don’t know, this is the third book in Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quintet, aka “A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels that you’ve never heard of before.” The series involves a family that goes on Science Fantasy-type adventures with beings sent from a vaguely-defined, vaguely Christian bureaucracy of magical aliens. I’ll discuss the previous books a bit, but the series is pretty episodic so we don’t really need to recap them. 

In this story, the world is about to end because a South American dictator has a nuke. Our protagonist, the psychic teenager Charles Wallace, must work with a time-traveling winged unicorn from space to prevent this catastrophe by entering the minds of people from the past. It is much less interesting than it sounds.

Spoilers to follow.

These One-Dimensional Characters Keep Giving Birth to Themselves Like a Flock of Infuriatingly Dull Phoenixes 

The main plot has Charles Wallace travel to ca. 1170, ca. 1693 (Salem Witch Trials), ca. 1865 and ca. 1930s (or whenever Mrs. O’Keefe would have been a kid), plus the then-present day of 1978. Along the way, he chronicles the histories of several families, which include, by my count, about 30 characters who have only half a dozen different names and two personalities between them. 

The Maddox-Llawcaes: Technically two families, but they keep intermarrying each other to the point where I’m seriously questioning how inbred their modern descendants must be. This family was founded by a bunch of cliché Native Americans (stoic, wise, and otherwise devoid of personality) who married some woke Welshmen, repeatedly over multiple generations. They’re good. 

Gwydyr and his descendants: Distant relatives of the above, but descended from their patriarch’s ~evil~ brother. They’re evil and lust after virtuous Maddox-Llawcae women.

The Mortmains: They’re evil and lust after virtuous Maddox-Llawcae women.

The O’Keefes: They’re evil and lust after virtuous Maddox-Llawcae women. Also, they seem to hate disabled people. 

This is arguably a sex-linked trait; the one female character from an “evil” family seems relatively alright, but when she marries a Maddox-Llawcae she still passes evil on to their descendants. This turns out to be the driving crux of this story: Charles Wallace learns that the dictator is descended from that couple and was corrupted by his ancestress’ ~evil~ genes. To avert the apocalypse, Charles Wallace has to change history so that the Maddox-Llawcae man marries a Maddox-Llawcae woman instead. 

It’s pretty much impossible to interpret this as being about upbringing; it’s about blood. "Gwydyr’s line is tainted,” Charles Wallace says near the end. “There is nothing left but pride and greed for power and revenge.” At another point, a Maddox-Llawcae immediately writes off his unborn half-brother as evil because he has a Mortmain father. And he’s right---Unnamed Mortmain Sibling grows up to be a criminal and dies in jail. Hopefully without managing to pass on his dirty, inferior genes first, amirite? 

It doesn’t help that, even separated by centuries, relatives are often described as looking alike and/or having variations of the same names. Of those 30ish characters in these families we have three Mad(d)o(c)(k)/Madogs, two Gwydyrs, five Rich/Ritchie/Richards, three Bran(don)s, two Matt(hew)s, two Duthbert Mortmains (yeah, because that’s a name you want to keep in circulation for 300 years), and most egregiously of all, four of the main female characters are Zyll, Zylle, Zillah and Zillie. (Technically there are three Zillahs, if you count middle names.)

Obviously, genetic determinism is a questionable moral. It’s also really annoying, because each time period has the same basic characters just going through a variant of the same plot. There is hardly any character development across 800 years of history, and no permanent change from good to bad or vice versa.

In a way, this even ruins the previous books---Calvin O’Keefe became a good guy despite his dysfunctional family, but now I get the feeling that this isn’t supposed to be a testament to his strength as a person, it was just his mom’s Good Maddox Genes breaking through the Evil O’Keefe Heritage. But hey, the focus on Mom O’Keefe was nice in this book, since she’s practically the only one who has an actual character arc. 

Though, as you’ll see below, she was not actually needed for this story at all.

This Universe Has No God, Just a Tyrannical Plot Outline

Charles Wallace is the protagonist of this story, but probably gets mentioned on fewer than half of its pages. Mostly, he’s just psychically possessing people, during which time he does not control them so much as see their lives and...vaguely influence them, sometimes. What I’m saying is, he doesn’t really do much in this story. His grand moment, in the penultimate chapter, is to vaguely influence Matthew Maddox #1 to vaguely influence Rich Llawcae #3 to not to get stabbed by Gwydyr #2. This saves the world, but seems somewhat anticlimactic after 287 pages of build-up.

What’s worse: he actually tried to make this story shorter, and save me so much suffering. Unfortunately, “God” wouldn’t let him. At least, for a certain sense of the word. 

The Time Quintet is sort of like Chronicles of Narnia in that it’s a Christian story, but you have to dig a little beneath the surface to realize that. L’Engle’s beliefs were also more liberal than Lewis’, and in this book they seem almost pantheistic: Charles Wallace’s help seems to come less from a personal deity and more from a sort of implied sentience of the universe itself. This usually comes in the form of “the wind,” which blows him and the unicorn to different time periods at its own whim. 

Charles Wallace’s arc is that he is apparently a control freak, and needs to trust God/the universe to lead him, or something. He figures out early on that the key to everything is in 1865, but the unicorn says that no, we have to let the wind blow us where it wants. Twice he tries to fast-track things, and each time he and the unicorn almost die as a result; thus he learns that no, he should not be relying on his own intelligence or logic, he should just ~go with the flow~ and assume that things will work out. 

So basically, Charles Wallace has been tasked by Vague God to prevent the apocalypse, but he’s not allowed to do anything to actually try to prevent it---he’s basically just pushed into random corners and told to stay quiet, with the hope that his presence will change history through osmosis. I find myself comparing this to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. While I have some criticisms of this subplot, in that book Harry is presented with a choice: do what he thinks will save the world (looking into the Deathly Hallows), or what the Omniscient God Stand-In says will work (finding Voldemort’s Horcruxes). That works well enough, but here, Charles Wallace is given the choice between his own ideas and no actual instructions. He’s told to save the world, and then criticized for trying. 

There’s a part where the Echthroi (demons who want the nuclear apocalypse to happen) try to trick Charles Wallace by preying on his ego. This involves telling him he was selected to save the world because he’s intelligent and psychic and is a generally moral person, all of which is true. He rejects this, as he is supposed to, and at the end of the book notes that the mission did not succeed “because I was intelligent, or brave, or in control,” but because he let the wind guide him. Which just leads me to wonder why he was the one chosen to save humanity, when Vague God could have sent anyone else, or just cut out the middle-man and had a unicorn tell Bran Maddox #3 whom he was supposed to marry. 

But what really makes this intolerable? Charles Wallace was right. The key to everything is in 1865, he eventually gets blown there anyway, and it’s the only place where he concretely needed to do anything. So why the hell did we need 40 awful pages set during the Salem Witch Trials?! To teach us that the Salem Witch Trials were bad? Even the whole part in ca. 1930s was pointless---the only plot-relevant thing that we got there were hints about 1865′s importance, which Charles Wallace had already figured out but was scolded for suggesting. Other than that, these sections were just used to hammer in the idea that Maddox-Llawcaes are always good and the other families are always evil. 

So, my rewrite: Charles Wallace goes to 1170 and sees Madoc and Gwydyr. Then he either a.) figures out the importance of 1865 with his family’s help, as he does in the book, or b.) goes to the 1930s and figures things out from the clues there, while also learning the fairly-interesting-but-technically-irrelevant backstory about Mrs. O’Keefe. Either way, he decides to go to 1865, thus justifying his role as protagonist, and the fact that he is actively trying to save the world is not treated as a moral failing. 

Comparisons to the Previous Books, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love at Bombs

This is my third Madeline L’Engle book, and really, these problems were present in the first two, even if they were less pronounced. Both ended with the protagonist (Charles Wallace’s older sister Meg, who arguably is more important than him in this book, too) saving the day with the Power of Love---meaning that she didn’t so much do anything as feel a certain way. Here, Charles Wallace does even less, just watching other people fall in love while his own character arc is in opposition to the actual plot. 

L’Engle’s strength does not seem to be coherent stories or complex characterization so much as weird, cool ideas---for example, a time-traveling space unicorn. But compared to previous books, this one is pretty down-to-earth; after hitching a ride on said unicorn, Charles Wallace mostly just watches people live fairly typical lives. While A Wrinkle in Time’s villain, a demonic alien brain, could theoretically wither at the approach of a sibling’s love, it’s harder to imagine a nuclear war being averted by nothing more than some shoehorned character development. 

For the record, I bought the fourth Time Quintet book at the same time as this one. I really, really hope that it’s better, but it will probably be a while before I get to it. 

Other Nitpicks

The whole clue leading to 1865 involves a book written by Matthew Maddox #1, who’s from that time. It’s about time-traveling unicorns and family feuds and the like, the basic idea being that he witnesses Charles Wallace and all the supernatural happenings and writes it down as a novel. Fine, okay, but people who talk about this novel keep emphasizing how revolutionary and amazing it was, which kind of feels like L’Engle just patting herself on the back for this awful, awful story.

At the end of the book, the time-traveling unicorn erases the memories of Charles Wallace and his sister Meg, for...some reason? I honestly don’t know why he did this; the pair knew about supernatural creatures even before this book, and they can still half-remember what happened anyway, so this seems pretty pointless. 

This line, from the 1865 arc: “When the sons of men fight against each other in hardness of heart, why should God not withdraw? Slavery is evil, God knows, but war is evil, too, evil, evil.” Not a bad point, but juxtaposed to the characters’ passivity I can’t help but snark: “Yeah, why can’t people just love at each other and magically fix everything, right?”

I’m Tough But Fair: Some Good Points

There are time-traveling winged unicorns from space. They eat moonlight, drink starlight, and hatch from eggs, as we see on a brief trip to their home planet. So yeah, L’Engle is pretty good at Science Fantasy weirdness.

Honestly, the other filler chapters were pretty good too, if only because they distract from the annoying main story. Even the purple prose about “the harmonies of the universe” are alright sometimes. 

Like I said, Mrs. O’Keefe could have been cut, but her arc, going from innocent little girl to crotchety old lady to redeemed old lady, was a good one. And her brother being named “Chuck,” like Charles Wallace, actually felt like it meant something instead of being yet another case of Generation Xerox. 

Along those lines, I like that the Murrays didn’t turn out to be some distant cousins of the Maddox-Llawcaes. That would have been annoying.

The 1865 arc was easily the best in the book. Even with the blood-based moral alignments, the characters still had actual arcs about overcoming disabilities, PTSD...like, expand this and cut out the stupid Salem Witch Trial arc, which was so, so bad. Also, was I just imagining it, or was Matthew #1 in love with Zillah #1? ‘Cause him arranging for her to marry Bran #3 is even more touching if he did. 

Conclusion

Um...the book sucked. 

I wrote this over three days, and it wound up being more than 2,200 words. Wow.

[paladins-moshpit]

Flying fists aka Boxing au

This is a mess born from discord but everyone wanted me to post it so here it is.

All anyone needs to know jumping in are the divisions i’m using which are: fly > straw> bantam > jr lightweight > lightweight > welter> middle > jr heavy > heavyweight

The two main organizations/Gyms that sponsor tournaments and everyone knows their names, that would the Magistrates and the Paladins, the rivalry is 100% fake but they play it up as much as physically possible for the hype factor.

Ash is the Middleweight headliner for the Magistrate gym, possibly even the champion. Her matches against Inara, the Paladins own middle-weight headliner, are something to look forward too as they fight for the belt. The two are both known rivals and household names.

Tyra is a Lightweight who’s trying to do the impossible and take on the entire middleweight division aiming to face Ash. Originally from the Sentinel gym who transferred over to the Magistrate after its collapse she’s now swapped over to the Paladins after her contract ran out. while her main goal is to defeat Ash she’s always wanted to fight her own gym-mates where there are real stakes lines up.

The sentinel was an Old gym that fell apart shortly after Viktor lost his title as Welterweight champion and was forced to go into rehab due to injury; Everyone just moved on to other gyms. viktors finally making his return to the ring on the Magistrates side with a new but shortly lived hairstyle. Not even strix would let him keep it.

Terminus is the Magistrate’s prime Heavyweight headliner with an undefeated streak coming out of a 3 year retirement. Previously he fought for the paladins and is a big point of contention for fans and papers alike.

Mal’damba is an ex-boxer forced to retire due to being a sufferer of Fibro, He created his own gym, uncreatively named Wekono with a certain snake as its mascot and pet. He now spends his time training and coaching other boxers, primarily Flyweights. This includes Ying a newcomer, 2 of her sisters,The eccentric Willo, Pip, and previously Fernando who is now the Middleweight headliner and champion for the Magistrate. The latter of which unfortunately is a personal headache of his due to actions in the aka “I didn’t train you to act like this”

Fernando joined the magistrate in order to emulate his old Shining Knight, the previous Middleweight champion that unfortunately retired when Nando was brought on board. The magistrate gave him a very hype-focused backstory believing he would be one of their hottest ticket sellers and Fern unironically believes it. Mal is usually brought back to assist in his training via personal request. This flirtatious disaster will flirt with just about anyone and can never seem to catch a break, even Skye wont return his flirting and is completely exasperated with him. 

Alongside Ash, Skye is a Major headliner for the Bantamweight women’s division on the Magistrate’s side. Her fem-fatale personality an over the top act put on for the audience and her opponent alike, while off the ring she has a somewhat different personality. This doesn’t stop her from briefly kissing her opponents mid-match in order to throw them off, especially if it happens to be Evie or Maeve. Evie (bantamweight) is an odd sort living with Skye that travels between gyms and orgs on a near daily basis, clearly not set to a contract but rather brought on for individual matches and thus you’ll never quite know who she’ll be fighting for next.

Maeve is an off the streets bantamweight up-and-comer quickly climbing her way up the rankings as the Sole Headliner and reason for the Cats-eyes gym staying afloat. Previously she used to fight in underground matches, where she would bluff defeat by letting her opponent get the upper hand early on before decimated them when most bets were placed on them; her opponents included both men and women. She was forced to take things legit when her face started getting recognized and thus started making less money.

Kinessa is a Lightweight who likes to hop around between gyms and tends to find herself sticking with the magistrate more often than not. The girl started off in the underground fighting in any ring she could until she caught the eye of Strix an ex-sentinel and current trainer for the magistrates main gym. While mostly fighting in legal matches nowadays this doesn't stop her from going back to the underground when she feels like it.

Khan is the Magistrates Jr. Heavyweight headliner and has the personality to boast for it with Lian standing in as his second and personal trainer right beside him. as Lian is a second for him so is Khan as second for her when she enters the Lightweight ring. The two are considered their own little team within the magistrate and are allowed to for lack of better term wave their own flag, House Aico is greatly respected within the ring.

Like Mal, Jenos has his own gym, granted established far earlier than Wekono. While never really producing any noteworthy Boxers before, Jenos managed to snatch up Buck an ex-wrestler and ex-sentinel and magistrate boxer for his own. In order to sell tickets the magistrate and jenos both love to play up his leaving as a treacherous rivalry.

Zhin is a self proclaimed lightweight “Heel” that does his best to hype his image as a ruthless tyrant, from his own little hole in the wall gyme that not many have heard from, however with him as its lead boxer it’s starting to grow a name for itself. No one has been able to tell him heels are not a thing within boxing yet.

Cassie is a Lightweight who’s new to the scene fighting for the Paladins trying to make a name for herself and attempt to stay out of her fathers shadow, Arturos who was considered a legendary boxer in his day. unfortunately people still remember him and keep refering to her as “Arturos’ Daughter” instead of her own person; she hates this greatly and goes to great lengths to distance herself even moving out on her own and living with Kinessa.

Like other paladins Cassie is currently training under Makoa, an old boxer and trainer who’s well established in the community, and Barik a commission for hire Trainer who’s seen traveling between both big-names. Usually can be seen making friends with Makoa’s grandson and second-in-training Talus who is far too young to be in the ring and very hyped to witness all the matches.

Seris works occasionally works as a cut-man for either side but her main focus is to be the on-site medic for emergencies alongside Grover the old doctor who’s been around long enough to see many champions rise, fall and return; including viktor and terminus.

Grohk is an ex-Boxer who took far too many blows to the head with a skewed perception of things, due to health concerns he now works as a hype styled secondary announcer for a small time gym alongside Ruckus. (Bolt is a big benefactor for both the paladins and the magistrate)

Kharne and Valera are both announcers for their respective organizations, sometimes even joining in on the other’s desk during tournaments to provide insight, with Vivian and Torvald sitting right beside Kharne. Torv more so focused on the analyst aspect of his work.

Interactions i couldn’t fit in:  Fernando consistently tries to flirt with Skye while shes training, getting completely ignored each time but when he hardcore falls for someone he begins to beg her for tips. Skye tries to ignore him but he just gets too annoying for it and threatens to tell someone she likes that she wasn’t just messing with them on the ring forcing the flirtatious master to help the disaster.

[jiang-xinfei]

Ok! Great news! Cause I finally have a backstory of jiang-xinfei which is gonna turn into wei-xinfei!

At first I thought being the daughter of wangxian or being the soul inside Stygian seal/yin iron that instead of a normal immortal that doesn't include in politics a-fei was different she turned into an immortal at the age of 18-22 and made the yin iron to sleep in/live in and that because the Yin iron was a powerful spiritual tool that xue chonghai fed resentful energy and xinfei couldn't resist it cause after all she was sealed there and put into sleep and when Stygian seal was created and destroyed although she has still his memories and all her original body turned into 10 yr old child and once the Stygian seal was purified she was able to get out and welp adopted by wangxian in the process.

But I got a better and well angstier ver! And I'm making it! 😃

So me like irl me died by accidentally falling into a pit as to why I'm there? Well I was lost on camping and that wasn't supposed to happen and "god" (heavenly officials) gave me a choice to be reincarnated as wwx older sister! And ofc I said yes cause I'm Overly obsessed by wwx story especially him and I love him(non-romantic) sooo I said yes(yes it is tgcf x mdzs au maybe even svsss idk) and since it a mistake death they gave me a chance to choose one of my belongings to become my spiritual tool and well obviously I chose the phone(in another world with my smartphone ref:)

And this is where it starts

And the process of reincarnation happens the rebirth of "insert name" and the birth of the first born child of the Weis wei-yue courtesy name xinfei and since I'm planning to at least lessen wwx burdens or entirely changing the past the moment wwx was born I spoiled and coddled him like no tmr all I did was for him and well he needed it cause in this world wwx was vulnerable towards resentment because resentment gathers towards him more than spiritual and since were a sanren blood also known as the disciples of balance it literally means everything needs to be balanced we can filter resentment to spiritual, or if were in a place theres no resentment we can filter spiritual to resentment, once the energy is slightly tilted off your life is in danger but not to much to death but slowly and wwx was overflowing of resentment and attracted resentment rather than both so he was always in bed or whenever we travelled he has to stay back or always near cangse, not allowed to walk, play around, and etc. Or he'll pass out

And when wwx was 3 and bedridden and we needed to meet the jiangs(I was 6) wwx stayed behind with only weichangze greeting and leaving right after

Before he left He was about to say that he needed to take care of wwx but I intervene and told jfm that wei-xinfei my younger sister needed father to take care of her since she was very week and was sick,I sent weichangze a wink letting him know I was kidding around(which I was in fact not) and he wanted to reprimand me but I shooed him away and cangse saw the wink and went along

So I introduced myself playfully as wei-ying courtesy wuxian 3 yrs old and a boy and since me and wwx was a splitting image with eachother like twins although I'm 3 yrs older and the same height as wwx and no i am not short wwx is just incredibly tall for his age(I'm sure in the future although I'm shorter than him I'm taller than an average girl) and not to mention I act like him only a bit calm and reserve sometimes but nonetheless I'm a splitting image of him (not that I was acting ofc it's just the fact that I'm reincarnated in the world I love and the mere fact I can lift wwx my favorite character/person his burdens up excited me to the point my hidden personality of causing mischief, pranks,curiosity, cheerful, funny, kind, caring, and self-awareness hidden by that bored lazy doesn't give 2 shits about the world persona that I built up washed away) so yes I'm a splitting image of wwx and also I kinda dressed like a boy especially like wwx does in the future like wearing black and red or anything that is black

(So jfm didn't notice anything when he came to pick wwx up later)

Anyways after all of that it was well known in the world that the youngest child of the Wei family I, Wei-xinfei is a fragile, easily sick, weak at cultivation, in near death kid. Not the genius, powerful core that is even as strong as changze(who although is weak compared to everyone but was still not strong compared to normal cultivators)who accidentally made a spiritual tool like yu ziyuans famous first class spiritual tool zidian by accident 😀in the cultivation world

Wei changze thought it was a bad idea that xinfei was known as weak and etc. But I said I like working in the shadows rather than up front and besides they'll know eventually anyways. So they left it at that and by the age of 8 weichangze and cangse sanren died

But we never went into the streets my plan was to bring us to our grandmasters mountain to train there but me and wwx always ends up late everytime we went there since the entrance of baoshan sanren was at random times it was almost impossible to know where it will open up if not for my phone so since we were always late and since I made/saved upmoney before our parents died with the help of my beautifully crafted toys and accessories we were able to meet ends meet for a year but that it our savings was dried so I made accessories that gives a lot of money and toys to sell to the shops loads of them at the same time thought wwx about balance and selfishness derailed him with it including some selfesness but always reminded him to put himself first before everyone else.

At the 3rd yr (wwx 8 Wei xinfei 11)And the entrance to the spirit mountain was opened at burial Mounds since we we were technically not harmed by resentment we can and also pay respects to our family we can go in with this no problem.

Unfortunately we were too late...

So we came back at the foot of the mountain sold a bunch of the accessories , charms, and toys and stayed for 3 days we sent off our journey we were at the outskirts of yiling when wwx was hit with a concerning fever

And we stopped by a near river to rest and attend to wwx . I left him behind a tree because he can't play in the water when his sick when a dog came and wwx was scared with dogs so he ran away from there with a fever and stopped and he was lost in yilling his head panging he stopped at an alleyway with no dogs and laid down.

While in xinfeis pov she searched for him frantically using whatever she could find with the family navigator it was a fire that glows in ur sub conscious mind to navigate ur blooded family or ur adopted ones although it has its downside if ur balanced just right yin and yang energys u can pinpoint exactly where they are or are they alive while if ur not and ur not balanced and filled with resentment yes u can be assured that the other person is alive the problem is ur sense of direction is clouded because after all resentment is everywhere it can pinpoint a general direction but it was troublesome if ur in a place filled with nothing but resentment while having more spiritual in ur body and not balanced with resentment u can only know there alive nothing is else nothing more there personification is gone in the world to put it simply there spirits and cannot be found though you'll know there very very much alive but that it.

And well yilling is so full of resentment especially with burial Mounds the direction was clouded and the more time went bye I could feel the lost of direction slowly out of earth. Meaning wwx was unconsciously filtering resentment to spiritual energy and his presence was slowly fading in xinfeis mind only seeing the flame brighten more and more. And looked and looked for him but he was never found. Something was getting in between them so they could never meet someone who-no it doesn't want them to meet and it's working it was always there even before like a reminder of what will happen and I just ignored it thinking it was nothing until our parents died it slowly shifted into a warning saying he couldn't stop what will happen and that it was hopeless but he still ignored it now... Now that small warning turned into a threat a threat saying that everything that had happened before will happen again but 100+ worse to both of them. She couldn't ignore it anymore but she couldn't stop it from growing too because she was too weak she can't handle this, this is a new dangerous being that once it's ready it will hunt both of them down growing and waiting in the shadows wanting to use there life, and suffering for amusement. And she hates it. She hates feeling useless but she can't help it.

And since then 3 yrs had passed since xinfei was now 14 and he still couldn't find her little brother she gave up everything about going to their grandmaster learned cultivation herself both resentment and spiritual and kept looking for him she already went to yunmeng but he wasn't there gusu, nie, lan, Jin anywhere he wasn't there or more specifically the thing his wwx his yingying from her... The only thing that she's still grabbing the hope too is the flame that was stronger than ever but thats it.

At the fourth year she came back to yilling just one chance and goes to the alleyway wwx was going to be picked up by yunmeng but... He wasn't there... Nothing was there... No life that indicated someone was living there... She... She changed the past... Again... And she didn't have any control of it... And it scared her... That somehow her existence here made everything worse... That somehow she was at fault... And that broke her she cried and cried in that alleyway didn't acre what the people looks sent to her. She just cried and cried.. .

And then a hand reached out to her.

It was the one and only legendary baoshan sanren the mother of her mom, her other family that is alive and well aside a-ying, her grand master, there grandmother...

Lol I might make another one but I'm really sleepy and shit I'll just finish this later as a head canon style or prompt style idc anyways bye!

[ladyloveandjustice]

Summer 2017 Anime Overview: Made in Abyss

With this post, I will finish off my overview of the Summer 2017 anime season.

 In my previous posts, I discussed what I considered to be the weakest anime I watched, then the middling anime, then some Really Good anime....and with my last post, I discussed one of the best anime I watched this season, Princess Principal.

Now here’s what I consider to be the other best anime of the season:

Made in Abyss

Made in Abyss takes place in a town whose way of life revolves around a mysterous abyss. The abyss has several levels, full of incredible creatures and properties, and only the best explorers can go deep into the abyss and live- and those who go all the way to the bottom are unable to come back to the surface ever again.

A young girl named Riko is an explorer in training fascinated with the abyss. She’s eager to follow in the footsteps of her mother, a top-ranked explorer who has been missing in the abyss for a long time. She discovers a robot boy named Reg, who came from the abyss but has no memory of it. Together, they decide to journey into the abyss to find Riko’s mother and discover Reg’s origins.

Hoo boy. Okay, so this show is very, very good. But do NOT let the cutesy art style fool you. IT IS DARK. and brutal. and bloody. It will absolutely not be for everyone. There’s a ton of shit to warn for. But for some of you, the positives will way outweigh that.

Made in Abyss is a show that just really blows me away with its world building. If you want intricate and gorgeous fantasy worlds (that are still terrifying and full of gritty danger), man does this deliver. Each layer of the abyss has so many rules and scary pitfalls, there is SUCH a variety of creatures and technology and the world and society Riko comes from is so well thought out in general- it’s detailed world building on the level I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do as a writer. Add a gorgeous soundtrack and breathtaking animation, and you’ve got yourself a masterpiece.

And that’s not even getting into the characters. Riko is an incredible and inspiring protagonist. The sheer force of curiosity and willpower is overwhelming. She idolizes her mother and is determined to follow in her mother’s footsteps

She’s drawn to the abyss and as the story goes on, her connection just gets more and more complicated. She’s very smart and scrappy and is an observer, a scientist, and an explorer. She’s cautious and reckless at the same time, and her drive to succeed is almost scary. She’s also very blunt and ill-mannered and doesn’t have much in the way of boundaries. She’s willing to undergo any trial and endure ANYTHING to complete her goal. Definitely one of the toughest ten year olds in all of fiction.

I also really like that she’s the product of a mother-daughter legacy. She’s driven to both meet and be like her mom, who was one of the top explorers of all time- she was called “Lyza the Annihilator”. Riko’s dad (a lower-ranked explorer) died when she was young and is very incidental to the narrative and her mother left her in the care of others so she could go on a journey in the abyss. 

This REALLY excites me, because it kind of narrative is always a father-son narrative. The Absent Parent Who Left to Go on a Journey/Do Something Important and the other Parent Who is Just Dead- in most narratives the former is the dad and the latter is the mom. Men are the ones who get to abandon parenthood and do world-saving/cool explorer shit that’s relevant to the plot, women are the parents who just end up dying.  See FMA, HXH, like almost any shonen, really. There’s a reason if a dad is absent he’s typically doing Plot Relevant things and if a mom’s absent she’s dead- women are expected to nurture, men can do other things. 

But no, for once it’s the woman who’s the important and active source of mystery.  And this time, it’s a young girl who’s determined to partake in the adventure and find out about her missing parent, and what’s more, she wants to live up to her. It’s a serious mother-daughter legacy story, and anyone who follows me knows how excited I get over those rare, rare stories. 

And the mystery surrounding Riko’s mom is HUGE. in the middle of it all is Reg the robot boy. Reg’s also a great character, and despite being a super strong robot, he comes across realistically as a struggling, vulnerable child. it’s easy to feel for him.

As a super-strong robot, Reg tends to do most of the fighting and stuff and there’s an emphasis on he feels a need to physically protect Riko- however, I think that’s balanced out by the fact he also wouldn’t survive if it weren’t for Riko’s strategy and direction. Riko is basically Reg’s battlemaster. Plus-there’s plenty of physically strong women in the show- Reg’s greatest challenge is a very terrifying, morally ambiguous woman and Lyza is implied to be a hyper-competent fighter too. Riko’s age and human vulnerability seem to be why she need protection than her gender, within the context of the show’s world. Riko is definitely scrappy and willing to step up to fight as well, and I have no doubt she’ll grow a lot as the story goes on.

Also, as a child, Reg quickly finds out it’s pretty impossible to protect Riko and himself on his own. Which is where the third protagonist, Nanachi comes in. Nanachi doesn’t come in until the end of the show, and it’s hard to discuss them without spoilers, but they’re an interesting character- smart, competent, loveable and with one hell of a backstory. They are also an intentionally gender-neutral/agender character, which is nice. There’s also another character with an ambiguous gender identity in the show, and they’re hecka cute.

The world of Made in Abyss is a vibrant and full one, full of intrigue and many incredible surprises and mystery upon mystery. But it’s also an incredibly brutal world. The show makes it clear from the beginning the Abyss is a harrowing place full of dangers, and the show REALLY doesn’t let you forget it. There’s an episode of the show- and everyone who watches it knows what i’m talking about- that is so incredibly disturbing, both in the sense of uncomfortable-to-watch gory body horror and general emotional discomfort- that I actually had to cover my eyes a few times. It is rough. 

And every indication is that things are going to get worse rather than better on that front. Nanachi’s backstory in particular is both horrifying and heartwrenching. It’s brutal and bloody and I nearly teared up.

I wouldn’t blame someone who considered Made in Abyss torture porn, because it is very intense suffering shown very rawly, and especially uncomfortable because it happens to children.

However, it doesn’t quite feel like torture porn to me and I’m not sure why. Maybe because there’s always a sense of hope that a lot of torture porn lacks. Maybe because there’s kind of a focus on the harshness of nature that the brutality seems to go with it.The show definitely wants you to be horrified and feel things, but it seems like part of journey rather than suffering for the sake of it. The character’s determination and struggles seem to be at the center of the suffering. 

And the suffering is never so much and so relentless that I give up hope or stop caring about the characters, which are problems i ran into with narratives like Game of Thrones or Attack on Titan. I still care about these kids and feel they can come out of this journey scarred but stronger. That may change later in the narrative, but that’s the sense I get so far. The gorgerous, intriguing elements of the show balance out the pain and darkness for me right now.

However, that’s not going to be the case for everyone. What constitutes torture porn is a very ymmv thing. So someone sensitive to that absolutely should not watch this show, I cannot overstate how hard it can be to watch.

Another big thing to warn for with the show is some unfortunate fetishistic undertones with the young cast. The characters tend to end up naked every few episodes- and while it’s not framed lasciviously and seems to go with the brutal natrualism of the world, when it’s coupled with enough uncomfortable running things it becomes a bit suspect. 

One running bit is an element of sexual humiliation with these young characters-specifically with Reg it’s noted several times that he does has a penis despite being a robot- the first time it’s mentioned is in the context of Riko examining him, where she blithely mentions stripping him, seeing it and testing whether it would break- this seemed to be a bit of a character note highlighting Riko’s naivety in her lack of understanding of boundaries and sex stuff and how she views things in a rather detached and scientific way. But it got downright inexcusable when an ADULT character who should know better checked whether Reg had one and humiliated him, which was done as a matter of fact lighthearted thing, despite being pedophilic sexual assault. Alongside this there’s this running idea that the main punishment in the orphanage Riko comes from is being “strung up naked”.

There also a few times sexual elements are introduced among the young characters- a hot springs scene where riko reacts with confusion to Reg apparently getting a boner at the sight of her naked, or one where Reg mistakes Nanachi taking off Riko’s clothes to operate on her as something sexual. These moments are hugely uncomfortable to watch considering the characters age, and there’s no reason they should really be included- while again, the moments aren’t constant and aren’t framed lasciviously, the fact they exist makes nudity that would otherwise have just struck me as incidental seem suspicious.

For me, it’s mostly ignorable- other than the hot springs scene and the inexcusable bit with the adult and Reg it honestly would have gone completely over my head- but it’s something to watch out for. Other people have also pointed out some other potentially fetishistic stuff that again, went completely over my naive head (i really often forget piss fetishes even exist). I think how blatant the whole thing is is really ymmv, but yeah, defintely something I have to mention, especially since it involves potential pedophilia.

It has some major bumps, but Made in Abyss is honestly a robust, beautiful, fascinating story I wouldn’t hesitate to call a masterwork. The visuals, the characters, the soundtrack, the worldbuilding, the details- it’s stunning. It’s not among one of the stories that has carved out an official place in my heart yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it really did just click with me as it went on. I can’t wait to see more of it, and if you think you can stand the elements I mentioned earlier, I encourage you to give it a shot. 

[willidleaway]

Star Wars, episode 8

There’s been a lot of divisive back-and-forth about The Last Jedi on the Internet, with opinions diverging so hard towards the three groups of

it was the worst thing ever

it was the best thing ever

it was okay I guess

that as I prepared to do my part in helping fund Disney’s Fox acquisition, I couldn’t help but wonder whether people were seeing three different movies.

And as a matter of fact, they kind of were.

In short: Having three subplots just because you have three main characters ... maybe wasn’t a good idea. One of them had a lot of good moments if you could overlook some gaping holes (and giant regressions from the original trilogy), one of them wasn’t terrible but was also kind of pointless and didn’t have to be, and one of them was just mostly needlessly stupid.

Overall, I came out of the theatre more impressed than not, but this movie isn’t one that stands up terribly well to any extended thoughts about it. I also fear that in many places Episode IX may have to bite off more than it can possibly chew, as if this movie hasn’t done enough of that as it is.

Spoiler-y thoughts behind the Read More break.

In less short:

the Finn subplot was kind of okay;

the Poe subplot was inexcusably flawed;

and the Rey subplot was—well, it wasn’t the best thing ever and had a few critical points of badness, but it had a lot of good moments and I can’t help but enjoy them.

I really can, for the most part, treat these subplots as three different movies. Finn’s subplot branches a safe distance away from Poe’s subplot rather quickly and never really integrates properly back into it. Rey’s subplot doesn’t join back up with either of them until the very end.

This was true of Episode V too, to a large extent. But there, at least, the trio had the decency to split into two groups, with Luke’s subplot seeing Yoda teach him and Vader pursue him, and Han and Leia’s subplot leading them (eventually) to Cloud City. But Episode V had just those two subplots for the most part, and a relatively tight ensemble of characters and locations.

This episode ... not so much. I personally would really have liked to see Poe join an expanded version of the Finn subplot, with the existing Poe subplot dropped or considerably downsized, and I really think this would have improved the movie. But as this will never happen, I may as well give thoughts on the triple feature as it stands. So, thoughts on ...

Finn’s Big Adventure: It was okay.

I did find Canto Bight interesting—it’s a side of the galaxy you don’t normally get to see in Star Wars, which is normally all about either the military and political centres of conflict or the grimier parts of town. We get a peek at the economic elite life here, and it’s apparently equally disgusting in any galaxy.

But Rose never really developed into her own character, I’m afraid. She had a cursory backstory of suffering and a consistent compassion, but was mostly defined by love for her sister and for Finn. The codebreaker took so many moral swerves that it was impossible to ever get a great handle on him as a real character, and his apparent argument of ‘well the First Order and the Resistance both use machines from the same suppliers so it’s all part of the system, man’ was just weird and frankly kind of disconcerting. I’m sure I’ve oversimplified that in some way, but not by much, I think.

This subplot also had to quite rapidly manage its own mission expectations, going through a few stages:

we’re going to get hold of a master codebreaker to gain access to a critical weakness in Snoke’s ship

okay, we’re just going to use whatever codebreaker we've found to gain access to a critical weakness in Snoke’s ship

okay, we’re just going to die on Snoke’s ship and hope the Resistance survives because we can’t actually do anything now

okay, everyone else is just going to die too

wait is that the Resistance cruiser ramming into Snoke’s ship

and that probably didn’t help this subplot being so utterly unremarkable. Really, it was a little odd that this was the subplot they kind of chose to end on, with the Force-sensitive child slave sweeping and looking up at the sky.

And really the worst thing is that Captain Phasma (and by extension Gwendoline Christie) was simply tragically wasted as a villain, which is bad because Captain Phasma is clearly one of the more competent and awesome First Order military personnel. Plus, more screen time with Captain Phasma could have given us more development of Finn. It wasn’t too late to show more of her after Episode VII. It is now.

Who Framed Poe Dameron: Be careful what you wish for. I wished for Poe to have more screen time, and look what happened.

What we’ve got here, to quote Cool Hand Luke, is failure to communicate—not just between the Resistance personnel, but also between the writers and the audience. Let’s take this one failure at a time:

Poe’s demotion. Why does Holdo bring this back up as if it’s that important? How far down is the rank of Captain from Commander? (In most real-world navies and air forces, isn’t Captain actually one rank above Commander?) Is that proportionate to his act of insubordination per se, or more proportionate to the severe losses he caused through that insubordination? And how rigorous is the Resistance ranking hierarchy anyway? Can they even afford to be rigorous about it, given how short-staffed they are (even before the Battle of Crait)? Han went from starship captain to a General in the Rebel Alliance basically right after he had been frozen in carbonite for a good long while. Are you telling me that it would be so difficult for Poe to get that far back up in no time at all?

The secrecy around the evacuation. Why wasn’t there just a standing plan known to all Resistance fighters of ‘look if things get really bad we have a base we can fall back to with a decent set of resources, and its location is definitely on a need-to-know basis but just so you know we will fall back to it if the First Order really start hurting us, so please don’t mutiny’? If no one else, how did Leia not trust Poe with this plan when she trusted him with retrieving a piece of the map to Luke?

Crait. How is this place uncharted to the First Order? Is their map information just that bad? Shouldn’t it be on the First Order’s maps given that the son of erstwhile Generals of the Rebel Alliance is in the First Order leadership? Where do the First Order maps come from? And regardless, wouldn’t it have become charted the moment the Resistance cruiser came out of hyperspace to try and make a run to somewhere within reasonable distance of it? How does galactic cartography work, anyway? Is that even relevant, given that a First Order flagship should probably be able to detect transports launching from the cruiser with or without life signs and track their trajectory anyway?

Some of this, I think, is hurt by lack of significant context about exactly what the Resistance is, what the First Order is, what their relations are to the Empire and the Rebel Alliance and the new (short-lived) Republic, what their standing is in the galaxy, what resources they have, and so on. Certainly the original trilogy was never quite as rigorous in this sort of thing as the prequels were, but after just a few minutes of Episode IV, you saw enough to know that the Empire ruled the galaxy under an iron fist, and the Rebel Alliance was a ragtag volunteer army. Here, the First Order is ... governing? Is it governing anything? Does it have provinces? Is Snoke on billions of propaganda pamphlets, pictured in his best dressing gown? Does it claim to be a legitimate continuation of the Galactic Empire, or merely a de facto one? And what of the Resistance? Is it funded by the new Republic? Well, I know their political centre was wiped out in Episode VII, but maybe they actually have a civilian government in exile ... or don’t they? If they have access to old Rebel bases and equipment, how did they end up with only one cruiser by the start of this episode?

This seems like nitpicking, but I am genuinely left a bit confused by the scope of the Resistance, which is apparently fine to rebuild even if the new Republic it sought to defend is in tatters, its allies have abandoned it, and its military strength is now small enough to fit in its entirety inside the Millennium Falcon.

I get that this episode is going for an ominous ending like that of Episode V, but as of the end of Episode V, the Rebellion still actually had bases and cruisers and fighters and Admiral Ackbar. It was just that Leia was shaken by the apparent loss of Han, a capable if reluctant member of the Rebellion, and Luke was shaken by revelations about Darth Vader. As of the end of this episode, the Resistance fleet is just the Falcon. There are people skilled enough to take down an entire military fleet with one starship, but most of them are Time Lords in a TARDIS and they aren’t in this universe.

Also, I’m not sure whether to file this under Poe’s subplot or Rey’s, but ginger!Tarkin is just hilarious. I’m sorry, I’ve got nothing against Domhnall Gleeson as an actor, but I’m pretty sure he’s being directed to ham it up as much as he can and it’s ridiculous and silly to the point of being wonderful. At the same time, his character’s a bit useless and the movie seems painfully aware of it.

The Last Jedi (that is, the parts of The Last Jedi that were actually about, you know, The Last Jedi): Oh, Luke, what happened to you?

No, really, I want to know and these movies won’t tell me. I want to see what happened to Luke between Episodes VI and VII in this brave new Disney-enforced canon, and it’s really unfortunate that this was not a core concern of the sequels. We got some inkling of it in Episode VII, sure, and now get unreliable tellings of what happened between Luke and Ben/Kylo specifically. But this simply isn’t enough.

As it stands, everyone telling the story seems to agree that Luke definitely showed intent to kill Ben, however transient. And that is so jarring given that we’ve been here before and overcome it, in Episode VI. The original trilogy was all about Luke succeeding where Anakin failed, overcoming his darker side and even pushing Anakin to do so in the very end. Given this, where Luke stands at the start of this episode—having attempted to kill Ben, mistrusting Rey so much—is undeniably a very abrupt regression that lacks any significant development to support it. What did it take to break the unbreakable cinnamon roll?

This is a fundamental problem with the plotting of the sequel trilogy. In fact, I wonder if it should really have been a trilogy. The prequels, of course, were forced to be a trilogy because Lucas had pre-emptively numbered Episodes IV through VI. But while there is a massive gap between the prequels and the original trilogy—and even within the prequels, which jumped from precious child Anakin to teenaged Anakin to war-weary Anakin—that was excusable because nothing terribly interesting happened in that gap to the Skywalkers or the Jedi. Darth Vader kind of kept on Darth Vader-ing, Luke had a fairly peaceful moisture farmer’s life with some occasional piloting excitement, Obi-Wan and Yoda went on their eccentric hermit ways, the Emperor kept on with his Galactic Empire, and most of the Jedi stayed dead.

The gap between Episodes VI and VII, as it stands ... not so much. Apparently in that gap we had

the re-establishment of a peaceful Galactic Republic

the establishment of a new Jedi Temple

the training of Ben Solo

the rise of Snoke

the fall of the new Jedi Temple

the rise of the First Order

which frankly should have been a movie or two, maybe even a television series. (It really could work. The gap between Episodes II and III were the entire Clone Wars, which of course had its own lovely series, cut short by the Disney/Lucasfilm acquisition.) In fact, I’m beginning to think the rise of Snoke and the Knights of Ren should have been the core of Episode VII, with Luke going into self-imposed exile at the end, until one day a mysterious young woman shows up and holds out a lightsaber, her face full of hope ...

... but that will never happen now. I wonder if it even could have happened in the 2010s, given the age of the original cast and the scenes that would be required of them. And frankly, I wonder if Disney/Lucasfilm, instead of making the abrupt jumps that they did between the original trilogy and the sequels, should instead have been making what they now plan to after this sequel trilogy—movies following completely new characters with their own stories.

And this is the good subplot, huh? Yes, yes it is.

There are moments in this subplot that I can’t help but enjoy, which is not actually true for either of the other subplots. Luke reuniting with Artoo was when Luke felt most like himself. The return of Yoda, with a surprisingly faithful CGI rendition and perhaps a moment of overpowered mischievousness, was kind of amazing. Rey and Kylo joining forces (Forces?), however briefly, was frankly surprising in just how effective it was. Kylo has actually risen above being ‘a child with a mask’ and become a far more credible character, if not a credible villain. Rey’s moment of self-reflection was ... not subtle, but still worked for what it was. The revelation of her parentage was exactly what it needed to be.

And Luke’s projection ... was a bit ridiculous—hadn’t he cut himself off from the Force for quite a while? Wouldn’t he need to retrain a lot before he was able to do that again and/or possibly for the first time ever, given that this is the first time we’ve seen Force Telepresence, which I would have thought was some kind of transient Force bond with every living thing in the vicinity, except apparently even droids can detect your projection? (So it’s definitely just a new Force power, because we didn’t already have enough of those and definitely had rules around those sorted out really neatly ...) I mean, it was awesome, but kind of odd and didn’t seem to really have concrete rules.

And really, if you were willing to overlook Luke not being himself for the majority of the movie and what might be a fundamental flaw in the planning of this entire sequel trilogy, this subplot was pretty good (and the one that I’d wager the critics paid most attention to). It sounds like I’m saying that facetiously, but I’m only saying it half-facetiously.

The one rather unsatisfying thing was the fact of Snoke’s anticlimactic end after all of the buildup around him (more so than how it played out)—but if Darth Maul can come back from being sliced in half, perhaps Snoke can too. Hmm, maybe not in this case. And that’s a pity, because Snoke’s motivations surely more or less inform Kylo’s motivations, and both would have been great to learn more about.

Final thoughts: So, basically what the writers of Episode IX have to do is

figure out how the Resistance is going to be a credible threat to the First Order when right now it fits inside an old Corellian light freighter

work in Leia’s off-screen death and pass her part of the story on to someone appropriate

complete Kylo Ren’s arc, without Leia

figure out if Poe actually has an arc to complete given that Poe’s screen time was taken up by setting up Finn’s subplots and inciting mutiny without much of a result, and given that the only ship he can now fly is a light freighter

figure out if Finn is actually going to do something useful this time

make ginger!Tarkin look like a competent second-in-command

actually show Poe being competent and not deceived by his superiors

congratulate themselves on outdoing RTD and Moffat in writing themselves into a massively tight corner for the final episode

That seems like a fairly tall order, and I don’t hold out much hope for answers here. If George Lucas were in charge, we’d have more answers than we needed. But JJ Abrams is in charge, and I’m afraid any answers we get here are going to just give rise to a thousand-fold more questions.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

On the droids: BB-8 was fantastic, as always. I still can’t get over just how expressive the design is compared to Artoo or frankly even Threepio.

I guess we also saw BB-8′s Imperial—erm, excuse me, First Order counterpart, which I really wanted to see do more. Kind of like Phasma.

On slot machine guns: Professor Layton did it better.

On the critters infesting the Falcon: Chewie, how dare you eat them.

Also, I think we’ve now potentially got the Star Wars equivalent of Tribbles. How quickly did those things take over the ship, anyway?

On originality: Say, do you remember a Star Wars movie where

the rebels are chased off their main holdout on a snow-white planet;

the Force-sensitive protagonist trains with a reluctant teacher on a remote planet with a submerged X-wing, dips into a cavern to confront the dark side of the Force, and ultimately interrupts their Jedi training to help the rebels;

the non-Force-sensitive protagonists seek out a rogue to help them, but are double-crossed and face dire prospects;

someone says ‘I know’ in an unusual context;

and the Force-sensitive villain reveals the parentage of the Force-sensitive protagonist, who is then asked to join them so that together they can rule the galaxy?

I mean, it’s not a straight-up recycled Episode V the way that Episode VII was a blatant remake of Episode IV, and the original trilogy codified a lot of modern sci-fi filmmaking to the point where it would not be possible for a sequel to not have some overlap with the original. But, to quote the judge from Ace Attorney, two coincidences at the same time seems more like a pattern to me.

Thinking about the submerged X-wing makes me a little peeved, actually, because it feels like the writers basically throwing the regression of Luke’s character in your face through one succinct image. It also feels like lifting the X-wing out of the water and flying to Crait in person would have been a less cheap way for Luke to go out, and actually would have also made for an extra nice callback to Episode V. Really, it’s surprising that this was so overlooked.

Random thoughts on the trailers I saw before the feature presentation:

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom looks like it’s going to be gloriously silly. Also, Jeff Goldblum’s memetic line ... finds a way.

Ready Player One looks good (did I spot an Overwatch character?) although that could just be the Van Halen music. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s mostly the Van Halen music.

Eek, creepy large lifelike anime eyes in Alita: Battle Angel. It looks like one of those images you see on the Internet where you splice real-life photos together to represent a cartoon character, except now with a multi-million dollar budget.

Incredibles II. This is where it’s come to, is it, Disney/Pixar? I mean, I’m going to reserve judgement because the trailer was astonishingly short on content, but are you going to really start ruining every perfect movie you ever made?

I have no opinions on Avengers: Infinity War since I don’t follow the MCU, but involving the GotG makes me worried for their safety.

[aretherelesbians]

Are There Lesbians? No

What Happens? Elloren is the granddaughter of the powerful Black Witch so everyone expects great things from her. Unfortunately, in a society that values magic over everything else, she has none.

The Verdict: I didn’t start reading this in order to tear it to pieces. I read it because I’d seen people make snaps judgements about a book based on a review rather than reading the damn thing themselves. Unfortunately here we are and I can’t get the hours of my life back I spent reading The Black Witch. Boy I wish I could. I can see where the author was going with this, and I think that with some editing it could be a thoughtful discussion of prejudices and how hard it is to overcome them, especially when raised in an insular society. The emphasis here is on the phrase “with some editing” because seriously I’m not convinced this book was actually edited. Sentence structure is often confusing, and characters have… well no character. Pretty much the only thing I enjoyed about this book was the world-building, it seemed like the only part of the novel with an actual research put into it. Unfortunately that’s not even remotely enough to hold up over 270 pages of novel (that’s about where I stopped, I don’t know how many more pages there are and I’m afraid to check.)

ANYWAY below the cut is a blow-by-blow of what I was thinking as I read. Some of them don’t have page numbers because I took screenshots and then forgot what page they were on (^▽^”)

"Where are you Sage? I wonder unhappily. She's been gone without a trace for well over a year. What could have possibly happened to you?"

Whatever happened to "show don’t tell"?! The whole page this was on was a disaster

It’s like a poor man’s Wicked, without the social commentary or good writing, also this world is like the inverse of the Black Jewels in that the men have all the magic instead of the women and also Black Jewels was well written.

It’s not til the beginning of ch.3 that we find out where the superiority complex comes from - first hint of irony "at least that’s what our holy book... tells us" p.31

Elloren continues to refer to the Selkie as "her" rather than "it" despite what her aunt says, which is nice but also the baseline. Unfortunately she also doesn’t question the Selkie’s designation as an animal, considers her as one would a puppy... "My brothers would agree. They’re staunchly against the abuse of animals" p.54

Elloren doesn’t question anything but then, when one is raised in a relatively insular society you don’t question. Things are what they are and there is no other option. It’s not until said other options are presented that you realise they were there all along.

She's still annoying tho

"A starlit sky overhead, we arrive, the carriage pulling up before Aunt Vyvian's three-story home, arching windows lit golden and an expansive, dark wooden staircase spilling towards us in welcome."

WHAT DOES THAT SENTENCE EVEN SAY???!!!!

"You don’t have to know anything, dear... I’ve taken you under my wing. And that’s the best place to be. Simply sit back, enjoy it and follow my lead." Pp.64-5 - Aunt Vyvian.

Elloren doesn’t seem all that interested in knowing outside the expected spheres however. It’s all well and good to not know certain ideas etc, but there is no desire to learn outside her immediate realm of interest ie. apothecary

The girls characterisation is painfully 2D. It’s uncomfortable and makes me hate them... if I consider them at all, I want to skip their entire first conversation

They’re only here for exposition

"'I know how much you have suffered, Kam.' The sorceress's face flinches. 'No. You do not.'"

This is good! I like this attitude. But still... that it’s so noticeable really says something about this book :/

There’s just some weird phrasing - start of part two reads like a tense change (it’s not but I had to read it twice)

"This Yvan Guriel doesn't even know me, I lament, glaring resentfully at him out of the corner of my eye. He has no right to be so hateful."

But it’s fine for her to hate/fear people she doesn’t know. Honestly, White People.

Do you have to add Yvan's race like its a prefix every time he’s mentioned in ch.3? We get it! He's a Kelt! You don’t need to keep mentioning it.

So much is happening in this book and it gets in the way of actual character development - first a ball now a tournament. Not to mention a university  welcoming assembly and various attacks which don’t do anything but solidify Elloren’s (and, maybe it’s supposed to solidify ours too?) hatred against the Icarals who have every right to hate her.

Feels like the Gardnerians are increasingly Jewish coded - lost people reclaiming the land of their holy book, priests wear black, and they have dark often curly hair. Apparently there is something later on about how the backstory they've been told isn’t actually true, so this line of thinking may all fall apart with that... but I didn't get that far...

Does this girl not know snitches get stitches? Why she gotta run to everyone for help. Do your own damn dirty work, I don’t care how weak you think you are

"Translucent black lines curl out from the wand tip, fluidly making their way toward me. I gasp as they flow and curl around my body. At first I feel a gentle pressure from the,, tickling at my skin, teasing. And then they tighten. It's impossible to resist as the swirling lines pull at my waist, my arms, my legs. I find it both exciting and disconcerting to be so much in his power. My feet skid over the grassy ground as he pulls me closer, until I’m right before him. Once there, he flicks his wrist, and the black lines dissolve as he languidly wraps his arms around me"

Creepy yeah, but I’ve read worse and Beautiful Disaster has 4 stars on Goodreads so...

She doesn’t even try to be nice, or anything other than hateful and disparaging (or a bystander) but expects everyone to be on their best behaviour towards her

"The chalky smell of minerals, as well as the acrid tang of Bornial flint, hang in the air, but it's freshened by the cool, clean scent of Spine-stone, and I breathe it all in without reserve" p.241

There is so much extraneous, unnecessary description here its exhausting - and I’ve slogged through Cecilia Dart-Thornton’s incorrigible listing so you know it’s bad

Elloren is just so boring at this point she’s all "I’m so weak why does no one like me" like bitch you don’t even try

Wow everything Fyon the Snake Elf says is almost word for word Snape. And here I was thinking that at least she'd done a bit of research with race names (alfsigr being one)

EVERY. FRIKKEN. TIME "I felt bad but then I remember one of the was mean to me once" jesus christ get over yourself

I got to chapter 17 p.274 before I decided enough was enough and life is too short

Never mind I just accidentally read the next page "Lukas's hot kisses" SERIOUSLY? I can't believe I just read that with my own two eyes. I’m out.