#wankery

[firstprinced]

sometimes i go through 911's tag to go through what everyone said when the ep aired and reblog gifsets and its just like. some of yall are so fucking weird over a firefighter show. it would be weird even if it was some intense psychological thriller. just weird.

[rattkween86]

WHY ARE PEOPLE OUT HERE BEIN UGLY IN THE INBOXES TONIGHT?!?! IT IS SUNDAY. SUNDAY IS FOR TV, BLANKIES, A WARM DRINK, AND MOURNING THE PASSING OF ANOTHER WEEKEND.

JUST BE FUCKING NICE.

[rivaigaychou]

no no let them cook you well know erwin would abandon levi in that forest because hes too fucked up to be useful to him xD hange on the other hand would never they were ready to give up everything for levi

Your 5 lines message is also longer than Hanji's backstory and Lebihan's development combined.

[prokopetz]

Inverted Animal Crossing where you play as the fuzzy alien "mayor" of a community of ostensibly human villagers, with the unstated meta premise that this is a game made by whatever species the player character is, from a developer who's only ever read about humans and never actually met one.

[grassangel]

Currently I'm steadfastly calling him the '60th anniversary Doctor' or '10 yet again'/10.3 if I'm being particularly grumpy about it.

(Ncuti's Doctor is either 15 or just Gatwa!Doctor)

okay whovians are we feeling tennant's return being referred to as the 14th doctor or do we need to rebel against rtd's decree with a nickname of our own

[nfinitefreetime]

Write Your Own Blog Post

Have you ever abandoned a long-term hobby? Not, like, because you weren’t physically capable of it any longer for some reason or some external reason, but just realized you weren’t interested in something that you’d been doing for decades and stopped doing it? Not asking for any reason. Really. (And absolutely not talking about the blog.)

[grassangel]

Thoughts on GO2

Spoilers ahead

So I might just be a bit pleased with myself that I read Bad Grace, oh, 15 years ago? Which I always muddle up with Manchester Lost, but is definitely the superior fanfic because it's actually kind of likely. And given the ending of GO2? Very definitely likely that like Bad Grace, the second coming of Christ is going to be a girl and she, like Adam, will agree that Earth's quite nice actually. (And be implied to get together.)

Which will make some fans complain that Gneil has been reading fanfic on the sly, but like. that's the hallmark of good fanfic: working with the same ingredients and stirring in a similar fashion landing you a similar dish. And the Good Omens fandom is over 30 years old, there's been plenty of time to experiment with technique and ingredient combos.

And possibly also why Gneil has emphasised he can't read fanfic, because yeah, this does happen often enough that writers/authors will tread the same path as fic writers and have to prove their independent working.

Am I a bit miffed that the third act isn't Heaven, Hell and humans waging war against God? A little. But I suppose my personal second act headcanon of Heaven & Hell vs humans as the official third/final act is good too.

Anyway, I did feel the six episodes was a bit too long for what Gneil admits is pretty much a bridging season to get everyone into position for how the sequel would have started. Even if having s1: 6 episodes, s2: 6 episodes and s3: 6 episodes all lined up read like 666 is very funny. I did like that we finally got a bit more of Crowley Questioning things, Aziraphale's awful 'the poor have more chances to do good!' stance and showing, if not saying, that demons are from angelic stock. (I might have been mentally shouting 'Angelic stock!' every time I saw Crowley in his heavenly disguise before watching this season.)

There was a lot of 'Aziraphale and Crowley through history' - which yes, we all loved the cold open in s1, but I at least liked it because it was a depiction of The Arrangement and how it came about - and these bits in this season were decidedly NOT about The Arrangement. (Though again, I did like how we were shown Crowley is skeptical of this whole 'God's plan' thing.)

I would have appreciated more layering to the narrative and more parallels to Crowley and Aziraphale. Yes, we got Maggie and Nina, Gabriel and Beezlebub, but both of those pairings barely featured. Personally I'd have included Beezlebub in the Job sequence to further ram home the whole 'equal but opposite' thing. I'm surprised there wasn't a flashback to Jane Austen's heist with pointedly familiar people, and I would have rather had that than the WWII sequence, which rather lacked the opposite, but equally incompetent, heavenly snooping. Maybe have Nina and Maggie going around after Aziraphale and Crowley talking to the other shopkeepers about Nina's stance on the lights. Have a bit more demonic grumbling about Beezlebub - whether about her being a hardass trying to track Gabriel down or her not doing much since the Armagedidn't. Also, more of the fly and Jim being protective about it.

Because yeah, the last episode didn't quite feel earned. It would have felt more fitting to keep the general last 10 minutes, but like how Maggie and Nina aren't a certain thing, Aziraphale and Crowley aren't either so what is the point of the kiss? Like keep Aziraphale's notion of turning Crowley 'good' (please read that in the same way Michelle Gomez said 'good' in an extremely thick Scottish accent as Missy) and his extremely misguided belief that Heaven is good because they're heaven, but less kissing and more appealing that they're the same and humans don't need either demons or angels to do good or evil. (I personally love to hate Aziraphale being an asshole, and that was possibly the truest to the book part of the series.) (And while I do love a 'Crowley turns back into an angel' fic, I pretty much only like it when it's incidental/he does too many 'good' things/God decides to fuck around.)

No notes given on Muriel. I love her and want to be her friend.

[verecunda]

There are certain shippers in certain tags who seem intent on setting themselves up for a fall, and... oh god, I just can't be doing with it. Why can't shipping just be a fun wee bonus, a fun game of "what if?" on the side? Why do some people insist on making it the be-all and end-all of their enjoyment of the actual material, and building up their hopes on whether Character A and Character B kiss or not? (Especially when the source material isn't romance-focused!) The result is always the same, and it's always ugly, and no one ever seems to learn from it. I'm seriously considering blocking certain blogs, which I don't really want to do, because I do like reading some of the shippy meta, but fuck, I just can't be bothered going through this particular rodeo yet again.

Why does it matter if it's canon or not? People, that's why we do fic and art and all that in the first place - to explore the roads not taken in canon.

I'm seeing people saying things about feeling "anxious" about a series finale in case Ship X don't get together, or being "traumatised" because the actors of Ship Y have been saying in interviews, "We love the whole idea of people shipping these two, but we don't know if they're actually going to get together." And if this isn't just glibness, and they are genuinely feeling anxiety and trauma over these things... I'm sorry, but they need to stop. They need to get off the fucking computer and get some help, because it's not healthy to invest that much of your mental health in something that isn't real.

[cilil]

Ok class repeat after me:

It's ok to like evil and "problematic" characters.

They're not real, they haven't hurt anyone

Their victims are not real either, nobody is hurt

They're merely a vehicle for storytelling and entertainment

There is no need to tear other characters down to justify their actions

They're not you. Them being wrong or bad is not you being wrong or bad

There is no need to make up arbitrary rules and moral codes to justify your taste in fiction

Their fictional actions and morals have nothing to do with the real actions and morals of real people

The only hurt parties are the people affected by your negative and aggressive behavior

[stumpyjoepete]

Does anyone want to defend The House That Jack Built?

Von Trier was criticized for making movies that were pointlessly shocking. And (in response?) he made a pointlessly shocking movie where the director-insert-character is a serial killer who is defending his murders as "art", as he's being led through hell by Virgil. And the movie depicts the serial killer as a pathetic, self-involved unreliable narrator skating by on dumb luck whose life's work is shit and whose narcissism ultimately damns him even more so than the murders do. And his arguments about art are entirely undercut by Virgil, by the ending of the movie, by his own inability to depict himself in a sympathetic way, and by the fact that his arguments are stupid.

So... either von Trier disagrees with his critics but mounted the worst possible defense as some sort of joke, or else the whole thing is that "Honestly great call from the haters" tweet in feature film format. Either way, what exactly is the point.

[thereallovebug]

People are allowed to post whatever they like on their own blog but this example of gatekeeping virtue-signaling really chaps my ass. I don’t recall getting any memo *checks notes* announcing that someone has been assigned boss of the GO fandom in order to pass judgement on fellow fans based on who they ship. I’ve written about this before, so I’ll just add the link here:

[exosentient]

Do we know the Doctor hadn’t had their regenerations limited as others had? I don’t think it ever said it hadn’t. If the code, the genetic basis Tecteun obtained, was widely deployed to change others deemed worthy into having unlimited regenerations, and then later alter this expression to artificially limit then, then the genetic basis in the Doctor will be similar, and their regenerations can be artificially limited too. I’m pretty sure it’s not stated anywhere the Doctor was special in powers or anything after their genetic code had been cracked. One of the misunderstandings about the arc, imo. (Tecteun said it was the Doctor’s morality that was the biggest threat to Division, on top of being pretty smart.)

If the Doctor WAS unique after all such that their regenerations aren’t limited, the Time Lords could simply just erase their memory (again) or edit their history or alter their limitations in some other way, if not just kill them. The Time Lords have certainly fucked with the Doctor enough times in the old series to have done that, let alone the new.

The Moffat era had enough dickery around with the regeneration limit to imply it was probably removed anyway. So even if the Timeless Child had had limitations imposed on them before the Hartnell Doctor ran away with the TARDIS, they probably don’t now and we don’t have to think about it again.

EDIT: This story parallels that of the “immortal” genetic code stolen from a mis-treated Black woman Henrietta Lacks, that has been used ever since. It is probably inspired by it. The story is about colonialism, empire (*cough* Brexit) and the disconnect of adoption. (The recent-ish BBC sci fi series Orphan Black had similar themes, btw.)

EDIT 2: Humans now have the technology to edit a grown person’s genetic makeup (CRISPR), even though it is still in its infancy. Both this and the story of Henrietta Lacks were prominently in the news a few years before the Timeless Child arc, who knows. Science fiction tends to get inspired by current events. Pretty sure the themes in Wild Blue Yonder are inspired by the social discourse around AI’s uncanny valley.

question because my lore is rusty. but if the time lords erased the doctor's/timeless child's memories and got them to think they're just another time lord etc etc what was their plan for after the doctor had more than 12 regenerations. like were they thinking they'd just trick them into thinking they'd been given more regeneration cycles each time the 12 ran out or were they like well we'll probably have run through our regenerations by then so it's not our problem... we got plany off time...

[rivaigaychou]

No, the reason ppl hated the alliance chapters isn't bc of "the lack of ereh uwu"... These chapters sucked ass, but let's not pretend Eren is the main draw, when he isn't even in the top 2 when it comes to popularity. The most loved characters are Levi and Erwin. And the best selling volumes in the history of SNK are the ones from the uprising arc, aka the ones with Erwin and Levi as ""mcs""

[prokopetz]

The constant rolling disaster that is Overwatch's game development aside, what really perplexes me about how Blizzard is handling the broader franchise is their continual insistence that a canon narrative exists in spite of their equally continual refusal to tell anyone what it is.

Like, okay, the events of the games aren't canon. Fair enough: the games are multiplayer-only, and you can't account for player actions.

Oh, and the animated short films aren't canon either – they're properly understood as in-universe propaganda, not depictions of actual events. That's a little high concept for you guys, but fine.

But surely the comics are canon, right? Well, no; some of the comics (we're not telling you which ones) were canon at one point, but the writing team has decided to go in a different direction.

My dudes, what is left? The weird Source Filmmaker porn? Is that canon? Well, apparently it's at least as canon as anything else!

[littleapocalypsekitten]

Okay, so my fellow Spop fans will recognise this annoying tumblr (and maybe twitter?) behavior: Someone dirtying up a fandom tag and character tags with their personal crusade to "cancel" the character. Ugh! GROW UP! Trigun fandom right now is honestly the most chill fandom ever, but I just had to block someone who was trying to cancel Vash the Stampede because of his "problematic" fake-perv behavior in the original anime (which was created in the 1990s) and a movie created in 2011 (where the writers really did some weird things). Anyone who pays a single lick of attention knows that Vash is a Bugs Bunny-level trickster who uses fake-stupidity to throw people off guard and has (an unfortunate) habit of doing creeping-on-women to get them out of the dangerous situations that follow his tail. When it comes down to brass tacks, he actually will 1. Pretend to be passed out drunk in order to avoid taking advantage of hookers hired for him by the mayor of a town he saved 2. Take the very drunk lady he's been fake-creeping on to try to dissuade her from a revenge-plot to her own hotel room, let her pass out on a bed and not only not take any kind of advantage of her, but leave her a surprise breakfast of donuts. 3. Is deeply ashamed of the multitude of scars on his body, which he "does not want ladies to see" and so nothing's going to get that far with him, ever. 4. Is cited by HIS CREATOR / the manga-ka to "avoid romantic relationships" (because of his special circumstances). And he's the HERO of the series! Not even a villain, but a hero who is even more heroic than most heroes! (Soft-hearted, has a vow against killing in a very violent world). (For Spop fans... think male version of Adora, but somehow even more so). And, it's like, we've got some little pipsqueak edgy-mcedgelord knowingly going up against an ENTIRE fandom, probably just to annoy us. I've blocked them. But, you know... I suppose every fandom on tumblr is going to get at least one of THOSE at some point.

[zarvasace]

Another Point in Favor of Vidow

By this point, many of us in the Four Swords manga fandom are aware of the relationship that is (or maybe isn't) implied between Vio and Shadow. I agree that it is up for some debate, but also my opinion is that the relationship is as clear as it can get, operating within the bounds of its context—that is, early-2000s Japan, kids' manga, the bias against gay couples.

This is just another pin on the conspiracy board of red lines!

The moon is present in three main places during the Vio/Shadow arc—very first (and most damning) when the two meet one-on-one, once in a panel showing the Fire Temple that the two are hanging out in, and once behind the two as they ride on the dragon to cause chaos. (Many thanks to @hauntinghyrule for helping me find those!)

There is a common belief in Japan that the author Natsume Souseki once told a student that their translation was wrong. They'd translated "I love you" as "kimi o aisu," and he thought it was far too blunt. He was a product of the Meiji era, and preferred the idea that the Japanese language should be more poetic and subtle. He then proposed the idea that instead of "ware kimi wo aisu," one should say "tsuki ga kirei desu ne" instead, which translates to English more as "the moon is beautiful, isn't it?" (You can read more about that, and why the guy might not have actually said it, here!)

You can see where I'm going with this.

Whether or not Souseki actually said it, the phrase is widely understood to be a sideways way of saying "I love you." The moon has a lot of meanings in Japanese culture and language, and I won't say that this is the interpretation, or if our lovely authors meant this at all, but they might have. They seem fond of hinting at it. ("We feel blessed that the characters' feelings came across so clearly.")

If we can read into the presence of the moon as presence of romantic possibility, what happens then? Well. A lot.

When Shadow first approaches Vio, he's seen hanging out on top of a pine tree with the moon bright and full behind him.

This isn't the actual manga panel, I don't have that right now, but this art was based on that specific scene, and you may recognize it. There are a few other panels this scene that Vidow shippers like to call out—Vio's apparent blush when Shadow casually moves his sword away (a power move regardless of intent that made me fall in love with him), or the way Shadow hangs on Vio when persuading him to turn to the dark side. If we can read the moon's presence as a hint towards romance, then it's pretty clear what's being implied here—there's an element of seduction.

The second place we see the moon is just after Vio and Shadow's heart-to-heart on the balcony, one of the only canon interactions between them during this period without a lot of plot happening. Here's the panel I mean:

Like hauntinghyrule pointed out, if the moon is visible here, it was likely present during that conversation. That feels like reaching, but I think it's pretty significant that we can see the moon in this panel, too. It's here for that bonding moment. It's part of establishing the tone and setting. If the moon is inherently romantic, then so is this scene.

And then the third panel that the moon is seen in is this one, Vio and Shadow flying on a dragon to bring chaos and fire:

If the moon means romance, then this is a date. They've had their moment, they're in love, all is going well.

It might not mean that much. I could be veering into atla-levels of overanalyzation, for sure! However, this feels like something that could definitely be intentional. "月が綺麗ですね" is understood to sort-of kind-of mean "I love you," turning the moon into a symbol of implied love.

And...it's very thematic, even if it isn't intended. Come on. The moon, hinting toward unspoken romance in some of the scenes where Vio and Shadow's dynamic is at its most stable? Dramatic. Amazing.

...You could read even more into it, and say that Vio is Shadow's moon—reflected light of the Hero or the Princess, guiding him to see the good, a desirable light in the darkness that Shadow insists he has to stay in. There's something lovely about that interpretation, too. :)