#unless you are doing some kind of movie in the future or a comic spinoff... i dont see the point of not showing us Evelyns face

[theprinceandthewitch]

What is annoying about the updated Hollow Mind portraits is that they legit think this amends the fact they didnt bring Caleb and Evelyn up in the show… like dude, I shouldnt have to read sources OUTSIDE OF THE SHOW to get story clues. And they STILL dont show us what Evelyn looks like? Even though they added new portraits? Um… okay…

[davidmann95]

Your power is mine: thoughts on Kingdom Hearts’ newest, oddest character

Finished Final Fantasy XV over the weekend. Mixed feelings to say the least, but it does give me an excuse to talk about Kingdom Hearts again, specifically this weirdo:

And how it feels like most of the people discussing Yozora and trying to figure out what his deal is are missing half the point. Yes, there’s the apparent connections to Sora and Riku, and there’s his meta association with Noctis and the entire real-life corporate backstory there intertwining with the in-game narrative to an unknown extent. But when he’s discussed as some kind of fusion of Sora and Riku, or a literal reincarnation of Noctis, or that Verum Rex might end up a real game, or something similarly straightforward in terms of “he’s going to be a very important central character going forward”, the ideas or at least the tone of how they’re presented seem to miss an absolutely critical component of how he was introduced to us, in a way that shapes not only him but by extension the entire future of the franchise and its thematic concerns:

We aren’t just supposed to be surprised he’s important because he’s real where we thought he wasn’t. We’re supposed to be surprised because he’s introduced to us as a self-evident gag character.

Not that we’re not supposed to take him seriously where it counts: it’s clear he has an important role going forward and is a force to be reckoned with. But no matter what deep, foreboding connections to the Keyblade and Master of Masters may lie within his backstory that may determine the fate of more universes than one, he will never not have had the hilariously inauspicious beginning of being a toy played by Rex the Dinosaur. He doesn’t even have the dignity of being introduced as a game on one of the plot-heavy original worlds! He’s a throwaway gimmick to spice up one of the filler Disney segments, literally a child’s plaything.

Even before we learn the context he’s being presented in...well, look at him. He’s like Riku, who’s cooler than Sora, and Noctis, a Final Fantasy character and therefore cooler than all this Disney stuff, but also he has a LASER SWORD and a CROSSBOW - that are clearly functioning as cool future tech instead of dopey magical powers - and his eyes are MYSTERIOUS MISMATCHING UNNATURAL COLORS and he fights GIANT ROBOTS with a dude in a fedora in a city straight out of the REAL WORLD to save a helpless lady/prize: truly, let no mistake be made, he is VERY, VERY SERIOUS INDEED, AND ALSO, RAD. TO THE MAX. He’s every attempt at reframing contemporary Final Fantasy as slick and modern and cool dialed up and up and up until the tone breaks, without the barest hint of self-awareness even as it advertises its action figure tie-ins. I don’t think that his little Keyblade pattern on his jacket being near-impossible to spot unless you’re looking for it is just to preserve the surprise, but also because the sight of the big keys with the Mickey Mouse logo on them would be anathema to his entire vibe, so important as it may be it must be squirreled away where it can’t make him look dumb. Heck, when Dylan Spouse announced on Twitter he was playing this major character in a childhood favorite franchise of his, surely knowing more than we do about Yozora, his description of the part was “I have lived out my edgy JRPG character fantasies...I even got to say ‘Sorry, but I don’t lose.’” We’re supposed to receive him off the bat as Square Enix, and more specifically Tetsuya Nomura, poking fun at themselves, going ‘yes, we suppose this is all getting to be a bit much, isn’t it?’

And then he enters the story for real.

Obviously he’s much more than a joke now, but the idea of him as something off, something that doesn’t fit in these games, endures. His episode isn’t just in a modern cityscape but skinned in the graphics of the grittier, more detailed style of the Pirates of the Caribbean world meant to evoke photorealism rather than the look of the rest of the game. He interferes with the gameplay in ways no other enemy does, stealing your items and weapons (we’ll get back to that). When he casts you into a void to be attacked by the mechs, it’s not a pure empty white but a mass of abstract polygonal space, evocative of the visuals of early game development. What details we do get of his backstory frame him as a counterpart to Sora on a parallel journey all his own, but the associations with his other source material in Noctis are considerably more...cutting. Credit to @kitsoa, whose own extensive musings on Kingdom Hearts’ increasingly overt metafictional concerns brought to my attention the obvious parallel: that Yozora being changed ‘beyond recognition’ with his heart replaced by another’s is a reasonable, albeit scathing description of Noctis’s revised character in the shift from the Nomura-helmed Final Fantasy Versus XIII to the largely overhauled Final Fantasy XV (and by the same token, the Nameless Star’s identity being stolen comes across as a shot at Versus XIII’s Stella Nox Fleuret being entirely replaced by Lady Lunafreya. Who, by sheer coincidence, would have been corrupted in planned but cancelled DLC into a monster of darkness).

While the comparisons to his source material are not only intentional but textually overt - his introduction as a real boy is literally scored to the FFXV theme music - so is the distancing from that material, given that if Nomura simply wanted to use Noctis the very premise of Kingdom Hearts as a series could have allowed him to use Noctis, and even change him to fit his original vision however he wished given the design and backstory changes to the other Final Fantasy characters involved. Yozora has a distinct role in which he’s still meant to represent that tone and aesthetic, and all signs point to that being because as that representation, he hardly seems an endorsement. He’s a parody, offered up in a demeaning context and tangled up narratively in real-life creative bitterness before being placed as an antagonist, however well-meaning (though keep in mind every secret boss of his kind before - other than Julius, I suppose - went on to become an endgame boss later on), in the player’s path. He may not be a villain, but all signs seem to indicate he’s a figure to be regarded as a contrast to the heroes.

And it’s in that role as a contrast that I have my own theories about what his deal ultimately is, thematically if not plotwise.

For those who saw this in the Kingdom Hearts tag and aren’t superhero fans, that’s Superdoomsday, introduced in Grant Morrison’s run on Action Comics about 8 years ago. One among many takes on an ‘evil Superman’ from a parallel universe, the twist with his world is that rather than a survivor of Krypton, he is literally the materialized concept of Superman - imagined by his reality’s Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen, who created a machine which could bring ideas to life - that when sold to a corporation was reimagined in service of wide public appeal into an all-powerful, uncompromisingly brutal monstrosity clad in armor somewhere between an iPhone, 90s Rob Liefeld battle gear, and Nazi regalia, who ultimately journeyed into the multiverse to stalk and kill other incarnations of Superman, seeing them as competition to his domination of the ‘market’. “The curse...of Superman...” murmurs the dying Kent of that world, “...he becomes anything you want...him...to be...our world...wanted that...”

Yozora is...probably not exactly a 1:1 to that. But as a counterpart to Sora, it absolutely seems as if the main factor by which he contrasts him is that he’s ostensibly the sleeker, edgier model, new-and-improved. He reworks Sora’s story arc and aesthetic into something theoretically cooler and more palatable, steals his power, ‘saves’ him by sealing him away to presumably fight in his stead and thereby take his place as the lead. He is the protagonist so many feel Kingdom Hearts has needed for years, the somber AMV-ready Secret Movie tone and aesthetic stepping into center stage at last rather than maintaining a sunshiney Disney-esque child hero lead to anchor the assorted conspiracies and horrors of much of the rest of the tale. The manner in which he is presented as to make metatextuality an in-universe concern (to call back to Grant Morrison again, his next work after Action Comics was Multiversity, where a major plot point was that the events of parallel universes were unwittingly documented in each others’ pop culture; in that case comic books, in here video games) for Kingdom Hearts to explore in the next main entry is I believe so as to ask what, in fact, Kingdom Hearts as a series should be; is it a Disney series with some incidental Final Fantasy stuff in it? A Final Fantasy spinoff with some Disney elements cluttering it up that should maybe be discarded as it grows up? Something all its own? Is it time for Kingdom Hearts to get Serious? Even if the Kingdom Hearts as imagined by a marketing executive vision of Verum Rex isn’t what’s next, what is, as things get darker and that vision is now part of the narrative whether for good or ill?

So yeah it looks like Kingdom Hearts IV is Kingdom Hearts vs. its own Gritty Realworld! Urban Fantasy AU fanfiction for the soul of the series, and I am extremely here for it.

[aion-rsa]

Could a Walking Dead Negan Sequel Happen?

https://ift.tt/3hdhAPD

If there’s a clear theme permeating the early, Alexandria-focused episodes of The Walking Dead’s extended eleventh and final season, it’s that Negan seems to be a dead man walking. While proving useful since he was freed from years of incarceration, his survival seemingly hinges on sticking with a group whose leadership still carries traumatic memories of his many sins, notably the night he—with a cruel comedic flair—brutally bludgeoned their loved ones to death with a barbed-wire baseball bat. However, Jeffrey Dean Morgan seems intent on continuing to play the character beyond the show’s endpoint, despite his diminishing chances.

Morgan has been playing the sardonic Svengali survivor for over five years, having debuted in a most impactful way—figuratively and literally—in The Walking Dead’s Season 6 finale for a cliffhanger moment that became a cynically controversial waypoint for a significant population of the show’s viewers. Yet, despite being the character embodiment of a divisive moment, Negan’s arc has made quite the evolutionary curve over the years, going from the powerfully villainous leader of the Saviors to downtrodden-but-dangerous prisoner to his current status as an alienated group member who, despite his best efforts to gain acceptance—notably killing enemy leader Alpha—remains a pariah. In fact, his abrupt execution remains firmly on the table by leader figures like Maggie and Daryl, especially in the wake of a recent moment of recidivism, in which Negan left Maggie to a herd of walkers (she survived). Yet, Morgan expressed to TV Line that he still sees a substantive future with Negan.

“I do love Negan,” says Morgan. “There’s an amazing opportunity to dive a lot deeper into this man who I think has become very interesting the last few years. I’m certainly not opposed to keeping him alive for a bit longer and finding out more about him.”

Of course, said opportunities potentially lie with the lofty plans that AMC revealed last year for content beyond the endpoint of The Walking Dead mothership series, which ends its legendary, decade-plus run sometime in 2022 with Season 11, Episode 24. Most pertinent among them is the planned anthology series, Tales of the Walking Dead, which will not be chronologically bound by the events of the final season, thereby facilitating episodes centered on long-dead characters, one of whom by that point could be Negan himself. However, Morgan also teases the possibility that Negan could even get his own spinoff, a move that would mirror the still-untitled Daryl & Carol sequel series. That show will chronicle the post-series-finale exploits of the franchise OG characters, who are expected to ride a motorcycle across unexplored areas of the contiguous post-apocalyptic United States; a move that essentially endows them with plot armor for the duration of the final season.  

Read more

TV

The Walking Dead is Basically Little House on the Prairie Now

By Alec Bojalad

TV

Could The Walking Dead: World Beyond Jadis Casting Set Up the Rick Grimes Movies?

By Alec Bojalad

“There’ve been things discussed with me and network people,” teases Morgan ever so carefully on the potential of a Negan spinoff sequel. “We’ll see. I mean, Negan could still find his way six feet under [before Season 11 concludes], so that could be a problem unless it’s a prequel.” Indeed, with AMC’s airing (not counting AMC+ advance releases) of The Walking Dead’s final season currently only three episodes into its grand total of 24, the task of survival will especially become a marathon-like haul for Negan, given his current status.

Yet, notwithstanding the possibility that these interview comments are a red herring for Negan’s imminent death in Season 11, something seems to be motivating Morgan’s clear desire for a prospective future past the main series, lending the comments a sense of earnestness. Indeed, he makes a minor disclosure about the extent of his knowledge for The Walking Dead’s future events. “[T]here are still stories to be told with Negan,” he states. “I kind of know how the season has worked itself so far, and we’re cracking open windows here and there that would lend themselves to more [of] Negan story.”

Tellingly, the alleged discussions that Morgan had about Negan’s future don’t seem to center on the character’s past, which was showcased prominently—albeit in an incomplete manner—in this past April’s Season 10 finale, “Here’s Negan,” which was an adaptation of creator Robert Kirkman’s 2016 comic book miniseries of the same name. That’s because Morgan is more interested in Negan’s future—at least, in the event that he actually has one—rather than the open-book nature of his past. “I’ll be very honest with you, if I was to do more, I would like to move forward with the story and not backward,” he states with frankness. “We’ve shown these different sides of Negan over the past few years. Now, I’d like to see, after this ends, what happens to him next. I find that possibility to be a lot more interesting than going back in time.”

Preference aside, Morgan isn’t entirely dismissing the idea of revisiting Negan’s past for a post-series reprisal of some kind, seeing as “Here’s Negan” left an open field for most of his early apocalypse activities. With the contemporary-set plot of Negan’s temporary escape from his Alexandria imprisonment as its center, the episode delved into flashbacks about his life during the onset of the undead apocalypse. Here, we saw the heretofore non-existent priorities of the loud-mouthed philandering gym teacher abruptly change into to a desperate attempt to keep his beloved cancer-stricken wife, Lucille (Morgan’s real-life wife, Hilarie Burton), alive as the supply of life-saving chemotherapy drugs dried up. Thusly, when a group of bikers extorted Negan over the last supply, thereby leading to Lucille’s death, a Heisenberg-like metamorphosis ensued, first via the revenge he extracted, and also by his incidental rescue of Laura (Lindsley Register), which gave him the misbegotten entitlement of being a savior, to whom tributes are owed, thusly serving as the basis for his eventual group’s name and methodology. Interestingly, showrunner Angela Kang has expressed a desire to properly showcase the origin story of the Saviors at some point, be it as a run on Tales of the Walking Dead or some other method.  

AMC

While the story retroactively remade Negan into a tragic figure, it’s doubtful that Maggie, Rosita or Daryl—each of whom experienced his past big-bad-era firsthand in uniquely personal ways—will be able to conjure any sympathy for the man. In fact, the same could be said of segments of the fandom who—akin to Morgan—prefer to see the mythology move past plot points for which we already know the ending. “I loved what we showed [of his history] in ‘Here’s Negan,’ but now we’ve done a lot of that story,” he says. “We could do a short series on how the Saviors came to be, which would be kind of interesting, but I’m more looking forward.”

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

For now, fans will have to follow along with The Walking Dead Season 11‘s weekly Sunday night run on AMC, and its advance premieres on AMC+, building toward a mid-October hiatus. Subsequently, limited series spinoff The Walking Dead: World Beyond will start its second and final season on Oct. 3. Shortly after that, veteran spinoff series Fear the Walking Dead will shift focus to the Geiger-Counter-clicking literal fallout of its explosive season finale when Season 7 commences on Oct. 17.  

The post Could a Walking Dead Negan Sequel Happen? appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3n9Z6Dc

[putris-et-mulier]

Those of you who want to start reading comics but don't know how to start

comixology is doing a BOGO sell on Marvel comics, specifically the most popular ones. Quick overview and recommendations for those who might be overwhelmed with the choices. But the word "Marvel" in your promotion code when you check out.

I'm going to try to just give you one sentence or a panel to recommend all the X-Men ones, because you know I'm recommending all of the X-Men ones. But I will let you know what's in it, vaguely.

I'll add more panel examples but I need to do something and the sale ends on the 13th

"Recent Jumping On Points!"  

Moon Knight Vol. 1: Lunatic – I love this series. Moon Knight is a lot like Deadpool and Legion in that they are all mentally ill characters that no one really seemed to know what to do with but Jeff Lemire got the series and he's been doing an amazing job. It will be confusing but it's confusing even if you have read the old comics, the whole thing is kind of his perception of reality so… If you like mentally ill Jewish male protagonists that need to be protected, you'll like this

Gwenpool, The Unbelievable Vol. 1: Believe It – she's a recent Deadpool spinoff I haven't really started to get but I will soon so if you do get this I'd like to hear your opinion

X-Men '92 Vol. 1: The World Is A V – this is a continuation of the 90s cartoon but it jumps ahead in the story so even people who have seen the cartoon know everything you and it's written with the expectation that you probably haven't seen the cartoon

and there is Jubilee

Spider-Man/Deadpool Vol. 1: Isn't It Bromantic – now everyone who says "I wanted to read that" can. It's as ridiculous as everyone says it is. More so, actually.

Deadpool: World's Greatest Vol. 1 – if you want to start reading the most recent Deadpool comics just start with this

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur Vol. 1: BFF – it's comic book about a little girl and a dinosaur, it's adorable

Wolverine: Old Man Logan Vol. 1: Berzerker – this is what the movie Logan is based off of

Spider-Gwen Vol. 1: Greater Power – what if Peter Parker died and Gwen became a superhero and was in a punk band with Peter's ex girlfriends: best premise ever

All-New Wolverine Vol. 1: The Four Sisters – you might also want to check this out if you like Logan, currently the Wolverine in "old Man Logan" is in the 616 but Laura has just become the official Wolverine

All-New X-Men: Inevitable Vol. 1 – okay, so the original X-Men (Cyclops, Marvel Girl Jean Gray, Archangel, Iceman, Beast) travel forward in time so right now in the 616 we have adult versions of those characters, the ones we've always had, and now the teenage version of those characters which are technically the same characters but taken out of time when they were teenagers and just formed the X-Men, before everyone died a bunch of times. The book isn't as confusing as the explanation but I think some of you might like it because when Iceman traveled to the future he outed his older self as being in the closet and in this book we see his teenage self, straight from the 70s (pun intended,) try to figure out how to live like a gay guy in this century.

Also, baby Cyclops

Extraordinary X-Men Vol. 1: X-Haven – this is about the school refugee children in the X-Men put in Hell (Limbo) because the Earth is too dangerous. Also a genius premise

Uncanny Avengers: Unity Vol. 1: Lost Future – I've talked about this one a ton, it's the one where Rouge, Deadpool, Cable, and Quicksilver (and Captin  America, and blah blah blah) are working as Avengers

"Recent #1's"

Death Of X (2016) Issue #1 – Cyclops died (yes, he will be back eventually and there is still the teenage Cyclops running around hating himself)

IvX (2016-2017) Issue #1 – a lot about X-Men is about bigotry and eugenics and this one is another angle on that. What if two nearly extinct races have to exterminate the other to live?

Deadpool: Back In Black (2016) Issue #1 – this is about Deadpool and Venom hooking up for a while

Jessica Jones (2016-) Issue #1 – if you haven't seen the Netflix show, you should and if you have seen it and liked it you need to read this. Jessica just got released from prison and is separated from Luke and hiding their child and you have to read a few issues before they start to tell you why she went to prison and all that other stuff

and look at her shirt

Civil War II: X-Men (2016) Issue #1 – skip it. It's not bad, it's just boring

"Popular Marvel Collections"

Avengers vs. X-Men – the X-Men find a way to save their race and the Avengers try to exterminate them again. This is the series I always mentioned when people say that Captain America isn't a racist

House of M – what of Scarlet Wtich cast a spell that mutants should disappear and then Magneto becomes king and everyone was happy, kind of

X-Men: Days of Future Past – this is what the movie was based on but it's good and they didn't give all the leading roles to Wolverine. I love this book, a friend and I would act it out when we were kids which was probably pretty alarming for the adults

Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe – I'm the only one who didn't like this series so based on statistics you will like it. Eh it wasn't that bad. You get to see an alternate universe Deadpool shoot an alternate universe Spider-Man in the head and this was before he did it those last two times in the 616

Astonishing X-Men Vol. 1: Gifted – Cyclops tries to make the X-Men good guys again… With Emma Frost. She was that chick that always dressed in white in Days of Future Past but, again, she's actually cool in the comics. I think some of you would really like her, her character is like "what if a girl had the dream of becoming a school teacher but she was born as such a marginalized and targeted race so she grew up to teach in a segregated community in a school for child refugees of your race" and tack on "what if a girl was so conventionally attractive that no one took her serious despite her being very intelligent so she learns how to use her sexuality and her passing privilege to manipulate people"

Ultimate X-Men Vol. 1 – no unless you have nothing else to read

X-Men: Second Coming – it's about Deadpool's ex-husband's daughter that Cable kept strapped to his chest 

X-Men: Battle of the Atom – read this after all new X-Men, at least the first one. Now a mutant group from the future travels back in time to take out the teenage versions because every future is a dystopia and everyone believes the only way to is to murder yourself in the past

and we get a bunch of new teen mutants and their parentage… Is very X-Men. Look how cute Shogo is meeting his mother's teenage past self 

Guess who this dude belongs to

If you ship Xavierine you have to read this

X-Men: the Complete Age Of Apocalypse Epic Book 1 – this is an alternate universe story so I'm not sure if you want to read it but the art isn't as bad as the cover makes it seem

Hawkeye Vol. 1: My Life As A Weapon – this the series in which they actually keep Hawkeye deaf and integrated wonderfully into the story

All-New X-Men Vol. 1: Yesterday's X-Men – the teenage X-Men travel to the current timeline and meet their older selves.  

Runaways Vol. 1: Pride and Joy – Runaways is always cute. It's about a group of kids who all had evil villains for parents and they ran away from their homes and tried to be heroes 

"Marvel Women of Power"

I think you guys know what you want in this category but the Spider Woman one is the one in which she tries to fight crime while she's pregnant. Thor is Jane Foster (she is the current Thor because Thor is in a timeout) while she's at the last stages of terminal cancer. She Hulk is a lawyer. Ms. Marvel is the girl that was in the news for taking over the legacy name AND being Muslim and it's actually made by Muslim women.

X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga – everyone has read this. Even people who have never read comics. Through osmosis. Don't be the last one…

X-Treme X-Men Vol. 5: God Loves, Man Kills – Also read this

X-Men: The Complete Onslaught Epic - Book One – if it sounds good read it but I don't think is very applicable to anything that's going on right now in the comics or movie

Wolverine: Weapon X – if you can stand looking at Wolverine any longer

X-Men: Inferno – This one is going to be pretty confusing to be one of the first things you read but if you know about Jean Gray and Madeline Prior in all that you'll enjoy it 

New Mutants Epic Collection: Renewal – remember in Deadpool that character Negasonic Teenage Warhead? She is a new mutant, they are the mutant students that graduated and are trying to be X-Men. There's going to be a TV show based on this but I'm not sure if it's going be based on anything specific. The first members are Karma who is a psychic lesbian who eventually becomes an amputee raising her younger siblings as a kind of single mother, Sunspot is a Brazilian guy that kind of explodes a lot in all senses of the word, Moonstar is a young woman from the Cheyenne nation who is eventually a VIP and gets a flying horse, Cannonball is an innocent country boy that is "pretty much invulnerable when Ah'm blastin" 

It is like One Tree Hill if one tree Hill was about racism and general bigotry… and blastin'

Keep in mind that this is the beginning so these characters are adults now and the New Mutant lineup changes (obviously they have to eventually graduate to X-Men)

Wolverine By Claremont & Miller – this is what the movie "The Wolverine" was kind of based on so if you like it when Wolverine pretends to be Japanese you should pick this up 

Uncanny X-Men Masterworks Vol. 1 – if you want to start from beginning but want the ease of reading the collections

the Max stuff is the 616 Marvel characters in an R-rated universe

Journey Into Mystery Vol. 1: Fear Itself – this is when Loki was a teenager and they don't usually read these books but I really got hooked because they were better than I thought they would be 

Substance"> Young Avengers Vol. 1: Style > Substance – remember the series about a teenage Avenger group and no one turned out to be straight? This is the beginning of that

no to all the Ultimate stuff

Read all the X Factor and X Force! Uncanny X Force is the one with Deadpool and it's my favorite Deadpool of all time. I've talked about X Factor little before, that's when Rictor and Shatterstar finally get together. If you saw Logan you saw the first appearance of Rictor who is going to be in new mutants

this is the kid that plays him, Jason Genao

he is the kid at the table and this is from a Law and Order because I thought maybe it would be more familiar to everyone. So since we are starting with him as a kid I really hope if/when we see Shatterstar they do a throwback to his old hair and make a kid wear an extremely long blonde mullet wig on

[seajudge70-blog]

The Gifted is over for now, and so are a couple of its major characters

Since we last left the beleaguered mutants and mutant-adjacent characters of Fox’s possibly-doomed X-Men spinoff series The Gifted, they’ve been doing what they do best: constantly changing sides. Say this for a series that sometimes threatens to move quickly while going nowhere: It didn’t save a bunch of reversals for the season finale, a move that would have shamelessly mimicked the events that ended Season 1. No, before the finale even aired, there were change-ups and switch-backs and feints aplenty: Andy Strucker, the wayward aspiring edgelord, finally returned to his family. His fellow Inner Circle member Polaris, the smart-mouthed, revolution-hungry daughter of Magneto, became a spy for the Mutant Underground, accidentally got Sage killed, made the same reversal, after (further) revelations about Reeva’s extreme methods for her pro-mutant group. Blink left the Mutant Underground to join the Morlocks, then got killed... or, it seems, stuck in some kind of portal purgatory. (Wherever she is, it’s no longer in the MU.) Less officially, Caitlin Strucker has pivoted from reluctant and protective mom figure to fiery freedom fighter, and Reed Strucker is now a murderer! Which Andy finds very relatable.

I’m not trying to recap every development of the past couple months. Suffice to say, there’s been a lot of group-hopping, and a lot of those groups getting backed into different corners and shooting powers and/or bullets at each other. “oMens” dispenses with voluntary side-switching, though it also quickly dispenses with the Strucker family reunion, as Andy and Lauren get snatched back up by the Cuckoos just as they’re plotting their latest out-of-the-corner escape, from their Purifier-surrounded apartment building. Reeva, mostly undaunted by the defections in her ranks, wants to use the combined Strucker powers to destroy the Sentinel Services building.

And she succeeds! A whole damn building gets destroyed without a whole lot of fanfare before Esme’s slight hesitation allows the Mutant Underground to recapture their youngest members. None of this feels as momentous as it probably should, because “oMens” performs an uncommonly adroit—for this show anyway—act of refocusing the story from a multitude of drawn-out, season-long arcs to a particular character’s particular fate in a kind of back-to-basics move.

Usually back to basics is not where I want The Gifted to go, because it involves returning to the Struckers, who are consistently the least interesting and most irritating characters on this program (sometimes actively, sometimes just by default). But while the episode’s additional flashbacks are written in the same clunk-on-the-nose style as the typical cold opens without the benefit of brevity, the scenes from the marriage of Caitlin and Reed do build to something: Reed’s sudden decision to go up against Reeva, knowing that her attempts to knock out his powers will backfire, destroying her... and him.

And he succeeds! And there is the episode’s more momentous explosion, despite the smaller number of casualties. Reed Strucker dies, and Stephen Moyer is presumably off of this show, if there’s even still a show for him to be off of. (More on this in a moment.) Reed was, as mentioned, never my favorite character on the show, and Moyer’s performance always felt a bit too workmanlike to transcend how stodgy the character has been written. But I admit, I found his sacrifice, and his family’s devastation, affecting. On a less emotional level, I admire Gifted creator Matt Nix (who penned this installment, his first one in a while) for seeming to understand what a corner Reed had been written into, either defined by suppressing his powers, or defined by not being able to control them. To make such a serious, controlled personality realize that his destiny in all this (ugh, but I’ll allow it) involved surrendering control—at least of his body.

This move takes out season-long Big Bad Reeva, too, and I have to say, she turned out to be sort of a disappointing villain. Grace Byers certainly cuts a stylish figure in the part, but Reeva pretty quickly settled into the predictable kind of movie/TV ideologue, willing to game the results in order to hasten violent revolution on her side, blah blah blah. The most notable aspect of her character wound up being the strange visual cue that through some combination of framing, the Byers performance, and a profoundly dopey-looking depiction of her mutant power, Reeva often looked like she doesn’t have use of her arms. Now she has use of nothing.

It’s a satisfying end for Reed and a relief to be done with Reeva, but “oMens,” in typically fast-paced and mostly entertaining fashion, does point to just how much of this season has consisted of rapid piece-moving, a sort of perpetual motion that’s often fun in the moment but can feel wearying and repetitive over the course of 16 episodes; I think the slightly extended season was a mistake, and if anything, this is the type of show where 10 would be fine. Especially considering that even with more episodes at their disposal, the resolution of the finale felt a little rushed: Reed dies, the Struckers mourn, Polaris and Eclipse are reunited with their daughter, Morlock Erg (Michael Luwoye, whose increased role has been a pleasure of the last bunch of episodes) joins the group for real, as does Esme (great additions, also basically not commented upon at all). Another reconfigured group—and another cliffhanger, as Blink returns, looking futuristic and Future Past-y, ushering everyone through a new portal.

Whether we’ll get to actually see what’s on the other side is, as ever, in some doubt. The Fox-Disney deal is about to close, and if the new studio doesn’t want a mostly pretty successful X-Men movie franchise on its hands (it doesn’t) and already has MCU and Star Wars plans for its streaming service (it does) and can wash its hands of ancillary X-Men stuff (it can), and wants to treat anything that’s not Ryan Reynolds playing Deadpool as ancillary (it does), well, it doesn’t look great for the modestly rated, if somewhat appreciated, The Gifted Season 3... though maybe it will get yet another stay of execution based on the Fox Network as we know it maybe not having time to wind all the way down and reboot itself as largely sports and reality by September 2019. There are definitely moments in “oMens” that feel like they’re protecting the show’s fans for both possibilities: Most of the characters get some resolution to their emotional journeys, while the Blink thing assures fans that it’s not over, unless it is.

But that’s sort of an X-Men thing, too, isn’t it? I mean, it applies to a lot of superhero comics, but the X-Men in particular feel like a neverending strife generator. The movies reflect this, too: Days Of Future Past fixes the timeline, but Logan’s timeline still leaves plenty of room for heartbreak. The Last Stand gets justifiably erased from continuity, but then Dark Phoenix comes around and Jean looks like she’s wearing almost the same stupid goddamn Evil Jacket. Some of this, as in the comics medium, is pure franchise-driven cynicism: We gotta keep the series going even if we don’t have a plan, until such time as the plan gets scotched for unrelated corporate-merger reasons. But I think one reason I respond well to the X-Men characters on film and TV is that this neverending fight isn’t entirely mercenary. It’s also sometimes how the world works. If there’s any non-obvious, non-telegraphed truth in the earnest pulp of The Gifted, that might be it.

Stray observations:

OK, comics nerds, get to nerding: Are they just teasing a second, lower-budget Days Of Future Past riff with that Blink thing, or is there another storyline this Blink reappearance is queuing up?

There were such big doings a-transpiring with the Struckers this episode that I didn’t have rom above to mention how the mutants’ latest escape involved Thunderbird subjecting himself to an all-out chain-wrapping, speed-ramped, mailbox-throwing brawl, with a coda where he punches powers into Erg! I don’t have anything smart to say about any of that; I just thought it ruled.

Did Polaris say “the whole dang government” in her first scene? Dagnabbit, she really is softening.

“In a way, I feel like we’ve been preparing for this for a long time,” Lauren says about powering up with Andy, without so much as a wink. Yeah, Lauren. Like maybe 16 episodes? Or 29?

Caitlin, explaining her cache of guns: “I don’t have an X-gene. I figured it was the next best thing.” Her superpower is a bunch of guns; Caitlin is basically the Punisher now.

This season of The Gifted has really leaned into its stylized camera angles; canted angles have been all over these episodes, and “oMens” used plenty of low-angle shots, too. A nice way of keeping the show comic-book-y without getting too crazy.

Maybe I missed more details on this earlier in the season when I was watching merely for fun and not for recappery, but... the Purifiers are a crazed race-war militia, right? And law enforcement never really bats an eye at this? This episode includes a tossed-off explanation that the cops are willing to look the other way when they surround the apartment building, but Jace Turner (whose big journey seems to be a never-ending circle) is leading a full-on gun battle in the streets, and it’s not the first time. I get that maybe the show thinks it’s doing commentary here, but I feel like after a series of escalating firefights, the cops would not be looking the other way, or if they did, they’d just see another Purifier gun battle.

Is this the end of me writing about The Gifted?! If so, thank you guys for watching along with me! I’ve really enjoyed taking this regular dose of X-Men methadone in between the movies, and I’ll be bummed if there’s truly no more Fox-era X-Men stuff after this summer. Don’t let Tony Stark be the one who builds Cerebro!

Source: https://tv.avclub.com/the-gifted-is-over-for-now-and-so-are-a-couple-of-its-1832881840

[davidmann95]

Some Kingdom Hearts future thoughts

Have to get ‘em out! Went into some thoughts with my psuedo-review of III, but I’ve got others and stuff worth expanding on. I’ll put them under the cut since it clearly goes into spoilers, except for my boldest, most controversial guess: along with being announced either this year or next (since Kingdom Hearts has never reached the end of a calendar year after a release with nothing on the horizon) I think Kingdom Hearts IV is going to be a 2022 release. I recognize that sounds like an intensely generous timeframe, but I have several reasons:

1. Above all else by far: once again, Square Enix and Disney are going to be on Nomura’s ass, nose to the grindstone, to get him to start delivering these on a consistent basis again. Do you think they’re looking at Kingdom Hearts III topping sales charts and thinking “well, it sure was worth the wait”, or do you think they’re going “gosh, these are some nice sales, sure would be nice if it came out years ago and we had a bunch more similarly-selling titles by now, let’s try and aim for something closer to that in the future”. Especially-especially since Nomura and the actors aren’t getting any younger and the series is at a point where the core fanbase for the franchise as-is is going to be the primary target rather than new audiences, which means it has to wrap up in a timeframe where that’s still a viable market. So rapid, priority development and few if any more spinoffs. I mean, not as if there’s really a handheld platform for them to be on anymore.

2. My understanding (and this is going somewhat into the technical side of things, so I’m going thirdhand here based on what I’ve heard from others) is that the lifecycle of the current console generation isn’t going to run out for quite a bit yet, so they can reuse a lot of the assets and whatnot from III.

3. A big deal was made about Dream Drop Distance coming out on the 10th anniversary of the franchise, and given 20 is a much wilder number for this series than most equivalents when it’s about a single cast of characters going through a single story, I can’t imagine they won’t want to push that as at least a similarly big deal.

4. Finally, when things don’t go as catastrophically off the rails as III did, these games seem to have a fairly consistent 3-4 year development span (even III, once they announced the beginning of development in 2013, would have come out 2017-early 2018 if not for switching from Luminous to Unreal Engine), and for the reasons I listed above I think this is going to be on the speedier end of that.

* Firstly: the main discussion I’m seeing at this point regarding IV is “it’s gonna be a Kingdom Hearts/The World Ends With You/pseudo-Final Fantasy Versus XIII crossover!”, and I really expect and hope that isn’t the case. Not that I’ll be pissed if it is, I’m sure it would still be rad, but it strikes me as both unlikely and the lesser outcome. I don’t know that I see the powers that be diverting resources in one of their biggest cash cows towards a sequel to one of their minor games - one that’s already been in Kingdom Hearts, meaning its inclusion here wouldn’t reasonably be a huge enough deal to base a lot of the full story on - and a way to reimagine another project. And for that matter it strikes me as conceptually small-scale given the setup. Nomura went with a name in Yozora that doesn’t just have the bent meaning of Sora’s name but actually literally sounds like him, went with a setting that aside from the one cameo sign mainly screams to viewers “Sora’s suddenly in the real world, holy cow”, and unless I entirely misread it Verum Rex was presented as a total self-roast in Toy Box. It doesn’t strike me as spot-the-reference (even though that’s 100% in there) nearly so much as establishing a tonal contrast to Kingdom Hearts.

I joked initially about this being a Flash of Two Worlds! (linking to a description for non-comics readers who are here because I tagged Kingdom Hearts)/’Kingdom Hearts goes to war with its own gritty fanfic’ setup, but...I actually suspect that’s pretty close to what’s going on here? This seems like a send up of Final Fantasy’s relative self-seriousness and over the top Super Cool characters, as a contrast to Sora’s goofy open-hearted sincerity and optimism. It’s the Secret Movie aesthetic that some want not just more prominent but as the actual main tone of the series morphed into an entire universe all its own, and Sora, out of place, has to find his way through and back home even as the real threat mounts, and probably has to save this world and get through to its heroes who aren’t likely prone to grinning through off-the-cuff monologues about the heart. That is not only entirely my kind of ridiculous meta jam, it feels like a logical next step for the series: if the first trilogy was in part about growing up, the next (and I suspect last, as the Master of Masters and his Foretellers have been set up as the primordial antagonists of the entire mythology and this is where they’re coming to the fore; my old theory of Eraqus being the big bad of an intermediary trilogy looks solidly shot to hell) could very well be about reaching adulthood, in which case it makes sense Sora would have to pass through a near literal fire of Adolescent/Adult Cynicism.

* Speaking of where Sora ends up: I kinda doubt he’s literally dead, or that if he is it’ll last past the opening of the game. They’ve already made a big theatrical production of Sora dying twice now, the second time in the most literal way possible and just a few hours prior to this, so while third time’s the charm I think there’ll be more to it than that. The again common thing I’ve been seeing is that he’ll have to play the Reaper game to win his life back (not something I’m much familiar with but I think I’ve got the basics), but again, while it’ll certainly be part of the game I don’t think TWEWY is going to be the big thing here (like they’d really make that a bigger deal than the Final Fantasy elements have been), and he just dealt with the afterlife and had to essentially play a game to win his soul back, and this wouldn’t even be a game he’s unfamiliar with. My impression is he’s incorporated back and whole - if likely powered down from the ordeal to justify him being back at level one - and the mystery is less whether or not he’s truly alive so much as how he ended up here and how to get back.

* On the other end of things - and I realize it’s a risky prospect to suggest after her getting a shockingly small role compared to everyone else in III was the damning weak aspect of its otherwise basically perfect finale - I think this is where Kairi is actually going to start to come to the forefront. She and Riku would be at the head of a search that everyone would be a part of (they were there when it happened, they know death is negotiable in their world, and they’re good people who all owe him), her especially since he’s her boyfriend - they may not declare it outright but there’s clearly no ambiguity between the two of them as to their situation anymore - and the one he sacrificed himself for, and she’s out there fighting now even if she’s inexperienced. And Riku seems like he’s going to end up lost himself on the search, leaving her behind as the sole Destiny Trio representative. So even if she isn’t a playable co-lead I wouldn’t be surprised if she was the one going on a more traditional Kingdom Hearts adventure searching with the rest while Sora and later Riku deal with the genre mindfuck. On the bright side if nothing else, she’s died twice now too and they’ve both been presented as dead in a “maybe this time for real” way for a finale, so while again third time’s the charm, I figure she and Sora are relatively bulletproof from here on out.

* Speaking of Riku, while this seems more like an old-school proof of concept trailer from I and II rather than the more recent actual scenes, meaning his appearance might well change just as Kairi was different in I’s Secret Movie than she really was in II, it’s very notable that he hasn’t aged at all. So likely instead of another tragic I to II scale timeskip of Sora being lost from his friends, it looks like IV will be picking up immediately and the search for him won’t take long to succeed. Also speaking of Riku, I seem to see people thinking he’s with Namine now? Not that that seems impossible, but while the scene as a whole is romanticized in that it’s basically a princess being carried away by chariot to her happily-ever-after, it reads to me less as an actual romance than Riku fulfilling his ‘brother’s promise. Though if Square/Nomura does want to really get into romance with the next trilogy, since Sora/Kairi is locked down maybe they’ll just say fuck it and do a whole Riku/Namine/Xion/Roxas Love Square situation.

* Actual prediction rather than analysis of evidence: I suspect this is the last major time the Destiny Trio is going to be split up, at least in the searching-for-each-other, not-knowing-if-everyone’s-alive sense. I was the search for Kairi, II for Riku, and now IV for Sora - that cycle looks to be completing. Wouldn’t be surprised if V and/or the finale was finally the three of them as the adventuring party as fans have wanted for so long, with III as the grand finale to Sora/Donald/Goofy.

* It seems early to predict the main villain, but at the same time everyone was accurate in assuming a Keyblade-wielding Xehanort would be the final boss of the trilogy circa 2006, so I’m gonna go ahead and say Xigbar/Luxu is gonna be the end-all with IV. The Master of Masters is still the end of the road, and perfect for it because he’s a real-world normal savvy guy who can manipulate this world of straightforward classical adventurers with ease, while Sora at the opposite end of the scale is silly and sweet even by that world’s standard. But Luxu addresses the same ideas in a way that’d be perfect for this game in particular as it seems to be set up, he’d be the villainous connective tissue as this game moves from one trilogy to another, and he has the dangling personal thread of the ‘reward’ he suggested was coming for Sora. Or hell, since now it looks like she’s at least somewhat privy to what’s going on, maybe Maleficent will finally step back up.

EDIT: Ooh, just remembered, speaking of what Xigbar says to Sora, his Olympus conversation also predicts Sora’s fate? The whole “if you leap in to save somebody, you might just end up in the clutch needing to be saved yourself” lecture, i.e. the premise for IV. Maybe his teach isn’t the only one privy to future events?

* Not both, they’ll wanna space it out, but I’m like 70% sure this is where Marvel or Star Wars are gonna happen.

* Finally, while I’ve heard speculation that the Mystery Star is one of the Foretellers or the person who died in that Union X game, I don’t think she’s one of them given it’s a new voice actor and she cites a name Sora knows. More likely she’s ‘Subject X’ (I went ahead and looked up the Secret Reports, haven’t gone back and done all the bonus challenges myself yet and won’t I imagine for some time), who does seem to be from that time but is I think someone new.