#where they foreshadow so hard in like s1 what happens in the latter seasons

[lunatheskier]

I will never get over how s1e8 of merlin is called The Beginning of the End and it's all about how they save Mordred and then Mordred ends up killing Arthur

[kryativelogos]

tl;dr : Scarlemagne Deserves at Least SOME of our UwUs (spoilers for S2)

I just finished watching Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts’ second season and gosh, Hugo is such an interesting character to consider. Like wow, they really exposed this guy (and Lio), hard. This post will break down his past, why he ended up going bananas (haha- get it?), and potential routes for this character in a future season. WARNING: Long-ass post ahead... again

The mysterious Scarlemagne is first introduced in S1 as this Victorian/Elizabethan-era (sorry, I don’t really know my history beyond SIX) loving, piano-playing mandrill who was controlling humans and trying to basically take over the world. In the first season, we only see him as a bit crazy and with no reason behind his want for world domination, as most villains do. We get hints of a history between Kipo’s dad and a-once-known-as Hugo, but aside from that, we know next to nothing about our main antagonist. In terms of S1′s Scarlemagne, I saw him as calculative and clever, he had a backup plan and was teetering between a composed civilian and instinctual animal. Because of all the foreshadowing, I was glad to find an episode in season two (2) that delved into Hugo’s story with Lio (specifically Ep8, although throughout the season there are clips of the two’s history together).

In S2, we find out that Scarlemagne was once one of the last non-mutated animals in the world named Hugo. Lio and his wife, Song, were his caretakers and experimented on him to discover and isolate the gene that caused the animals to mutate. As Hugo grew up, he learned how to read and play the piano by Lio and Song. The couple loved Hugo as if he were their son and honestly, they really wanted what was best for him.

However, it was unclear how long Lio and Song had mutated Hugo and how long he was used as a milking machine by Dr. Emilia. These two scenes were strictly a montage to the audience and that’s why I believe we need to cut him some slack (just like how Kipo did in this season). If we’re going off of Hugo’s point of view, we need to consider that he was in a box for his entire life before escaping to the surface. Since we don’t know how long it was before Dr. Emilia discovered Hugo, I can only assume that there was simply enough time for him to learn/read about the old ages when monarchs were still a thing. He may have a larger vocabulary, but socially, I believe his mental age has got to be no more than 14 years old. I say this because his behavior during his time with Lio and Song (such as when he was playing the piano before he got caught) was still respectful, open to learning about the surface before it came crumbling down, and he was caring - especially with the unborn Kipo. That means he wasn’t introduced to distress until after Dr. Emilia had found him.

Even after Dr. Emilia started abusing him, he was still visited by Lio (as seen in the montage - Song was most likely busy with managing her own mutations and Kipo) but these visits were limited. Meaning that Lio was no longer teaching, and more there to provide accompaniment and comfort. Therefore, if he was still mentally at 14, he certainly did not grow to experience any sense of negative emotions aside from Dr. Emilia; even then, he shut out most of those emotions and kindly did this for Dr. Emilia for the sake of Kipo and her family - his family. So without learning that humans could be “bad” or had mixed emotions aside from loving - thanks to Lio and Song - Hugo grew up incredibly ignorant of the “outside world” and believing that humans had his best interest at heart. This is apparent when he defends humans once up on the surface and generally shy/awkward when he meets the goth apes. Again, this is because of his literally sheltered childhood where he lacked the social interactions he needed to develop as he grew up.

So because of all this, when Hugo notices not only that Lio left him behind, but didn’t look for him, didn’t trust him to hold Kipo, and even gave her his own blanket, the anger and all of these pent up negative emotions come rushing back tenfold. In terms of character, I think the way he received the news was very appropriate for the show. He didn’t know how else to think. So going off of the one book he was obsessed over and just trying to cope with the betrayal, Hugo goes off to make sure nobody ever feels left out again by forcefully uniting all of the mutes and turning the tables on the humans that he once trusted. Hugo took advantage of what he was given to try to make means of what he was feeling in his heart. I mean throughout the last two episodes you can see Kipo really getting through to him, but I believe that he was/is so full of grief and anger that he pushes away that lost feeling of being loved as a defense mechanism so he could never get hurt again.

In the final episode of season two (2) Scarlemagne was carted away with the TimberCats and was genuinely astonished that Kipo would willingly sacrifice her sanity to save mutes. This is a foil to when Lio left Hugo behind. Leading up to this point, Scarlemagne had pegged all humans to always think of themselves before anyone else, so when he finds out a human would go out of their way to help a mute, aka someone like him, he doesn’t know how to compute. I think in a future season the show could really work on a redemption arc with this character. Scarlemagne is still socially ignorant - he doesn’t understand what complex emotions are, and if Kipo was already starting to open up his heart this season, I don’t see why she won’t continue to try to help him in a future season. My only hope is that Kipo won’t take what her dad said to heart, that Scarlemagne will never change, and that she’ll continue to be as stubborn as ever to help those in need.

The other route I can possibly see happening is Scarlemagne turning into a mega mute, as in, no longer humanoid and going complete animal. This would be an interesting route to take since we do see a progression of him going slightly more insane by the end of the season. We have to also consider that the formulas given to Hugo were the same given to Kipo and Song, who both turned into mega mutes that lost their sanity. If this were the case, however, I feel like two consequences would occur: (1) any character development for this character from that moment on, would be wasted (2) progression of the plot may become stale given that there is no longer a clever antagonist and solely an enemy that needs to be taken down, which can be a hit or miss with the audience and the show becomes more or less one-dimensional. So in my opinion, a redemption arc, though cliche, would be a much better route to take, although I wouldn’t mind seeing how the plot changes if they choose to do something like the latter.

What do you guys think? I’m always up for discussion - and as always this was just a fun post, so please don’t judge me based on this! Thanks~

[qqueenofhades]

I know you dont watch GoT anymore. And that Braime and Sansa are your favorites. But I know you've read the books and are obviously really interested in the story. And I was just wondering what your thoughts are on the whole Jon killing Dany thing? Is that something you can see happening in the books? And if it is do you think it'd be in the same context as the show did it?

Ahaha, welp. Just jumping right in there.

(Also, you never have to apologise for asking GOT/ASOIAF questions. I obviously have been a fan for 16 years and wrote fuckin’ TNR with its half-million-plus words, so I clearly do have Thoughts on the story/characters, especially with the bag of lukewarm cat vomit that was s8 of the show.)

I already answered this ask discussing how much I hated the Mad Queen Dany thing, both because a) it was horrifically badly handled and b) these mediocre misogynist douchegobblers have managed to outdo themselves in terms of the gross messages they’ve sent about women, after 8 seasons of that. (These are the same people who made Sansa say that she was grateful for her rapes and who claimed that Dany’s turn into madness was foreshadowed by her having a “chilly” reaction to the death of her abuser, Viserys, in s1, so…. make of that what you will.) I’m not saying that it was narratively impossible, especially since GRRM has been toying with the same thing in the books and has more than his own share of Male Author Syndrome. But at the start of 8x04, Dany is in Winterfell, perfectly sane, toasting Arya as hero of the battle. By the end of 8x06, she’s crazy, a war criminal, and dead, murdered by her boyfriend, because… well, something something plot reasons. Even if you didn’t like Dany or were rooting for her to go mad or whatever, that was wildly badly handled.

I personally think it would be pretty gross for GRRM to also go down the Mad Queen route, though at least if he does, we will have had Dany’s POV chapters beforehand and presumably something resembling a justification and a building narrative momentum toward it. But she also got stuck in Meereen for so long because by his own admission he didn’t know what to do with her there or how to get her out of the situation and moved onto Westeros, which remains, theoretically, her outstanding goal in the books. It would obviously not be outside the realm of possibility for this to happen, given GRRM’s focus on “grittiness” that the show took to max factor 5000. I would still find it reductive and trying to make a Clever Postmodern Point and etc if it happened in the books, because literally why invest us in a character this long, especially one who has tried so hard to overcome the circumstances of her past/to not be her father, and then just do exactly that? Obviously there would be elements of Shakespearean tragedy to it, and if done well it could be compelling, but I personally just have a different approach to fiction and what people want out of a story (especially one now as famous as GOT/ASOIAF and how universally betrayed everyone seems to feel by the ending). I’m not saying Dany’s ultimate ending needs to be sunshine and roses and getting what she wants, because often character arcs and resolutions become all the more powerful for being subverted and thwarted (think the “I said I wanted [x] but [y] was there instead” sort of endings). But whatever it is, it needs to be…. not that.

Also, Jon in both books and especially show has been the epitome of Mediocre White Man. I stopped watching in s4, but Kit Harington’s acting was so wooden and the writing for him was very much Standard Misunderstood Brooding Fantasy Hero that I could barely pay attention to his scenes. I find him somewhat more interesting in the books, though ADWD dragged for everyone and it was obvious GRRM was writing in circles. But everyone has noticed that especially in the show, Jon does absolutely bupkis. His ass is constantly saved by the women in his life, he makes an absolute hash of any power that he is given and doesn’t want it anyway, and his ultimate ending was…. going back to the Night’s Watch (as their idea of satisfying narrative storytelling is to literally put everyone back where they were in the very first episode, apparently). Never mind the fact that there’s no need for the Night’s Watch, but the point is, even the fact that Jon is Rhaegar and Lyanna’s son ended up being relevant for like half an episode. That has been one of the major plot points/secrets of the books (although not so much anymore) and it just…. fizzled out like a damp squib. Dany actually TRIED for multiple seasons to be a good ruler and to learn how to handle power and become a queen, so for her to have to be the one to die for Jon to once again do diddlysquat is… well, as I have said before, the misogyny leaps out. They ended up wasting so much potential and so many other things that were also foreshadowed (and far more convincingly than “wah wah she was gonna go evil!”). For this? So Jon can just go brood in the snow again? Cool.

Not to mention, I find it gross on principle that Dany’s boyfriend had to be the one to kill her, especially after rape/sexual violence/loss of agency was such a big part of her early-season storylines (and how horrifyingly and grossly that has been handled on the show overall). We’re obviously supposed to sympathize with Jon in this scenario and to feel that it is justified to “stop a tyrant” or whatever. Also, if the episode was going to be called “Queenslayer,” why the fuck wasn’t it Jaime fulfilling the valonqar prophecy, another thing they forgot about, and killing Cersei, at great personal grief/cost, to once more stop an insane monarch from burning down King’s Landing? But that, of course, would be actual character development/overall arc, and they preferred to also trash that by having Jaime “killed Aerys Targaryen literally to save half a million innocent people and lived with his reputation being destroyed ever after” Lannister unironically claim that he never cared about the lives of the innocent and only wanted Cersei. After she again tried to kill him and Tyrion like three days ago, not even to mention what they did to Brienne and with that whole arc, but I will have a ragestroke if I think about it too much. 

Basically, the ending wasn’t “bittersweet.” It was tragic, reductionist, ham-handed, hugely disappointing for everyone who put years of investment into these characters, and ended up in the amusing position of making Bran Stark the younger and more beautiful queen who comes to cast Cersei down. He became king because… reasons? Whatever? And he knows literally everything about everyone thanks to being the Three-Eyed Raven, so there’s no way that can go horribly wrong. He has basically done nothing except sit in a wheelchair and look creepy for several years now, his arc has never been remotely about being king, and Isaac Hempstead-Wright himself is apparently on record as saying he genuinely thought it was a joke script when he read it. This after both Emilia Clarke and Kit Harington broke down over learning what happened to their characters/Kit apparently realized it for the first time at the read-through and was horrified. Emilia already talked about wandering for five hours and having a crisis and calling her mom and asking to be talked off the ledge like….. fictional choices/characters completely aside, that’s a gross thing to do to your actors. I know they’re all proud of their work and they have apparently and understandably been defensive about the existence of the petition to rewrite s8, but they’ve all been pretty clear, while still being professional and supportive, that there is stuff that they’re just as much WTF about as we are.

Basically, as everyone keeps saying, the acting, cinematography, visual effects, music, etc was clearly up to as high a standard as ever, but was betrayed fundamentally and comprehensively by this god-awfully shit writing by a couple of hacks who clearly rushed the final season to get on to ruining working on Star Wars. They have also been on record about saying “you can’t do what the audience expects or it’ll get boring blah blah blah,” which is a profoundly flawed storytelling strategy if you’re paranoid and trying to outsmart your audience and do something that nobody has ever thought of because you’re an Intellectual Postmodern Commentator On Our Violent Society. If your audience can guess where a story is going, but are still surprised by major twists along the way that then make sense in hindsight, you’ve done your job. If you’re relying on grimdark and cramming in gimmicky plot twists and deus ex machinas and Shocking Moments rather than authentically developing your story, it’s going to bite you in the ass in a big way, as was just proven. 

Nobody expected a completely happy ending from GoT. But the fact that they went to such lengths, especially in s8, to build up characters/ships (Jonerys, Braime, Gendrya were all torched after major canon moments completely unexpected by fans, especially the latter two – why even include it unless to just be more Tragique, and Gendrya is the only one that has even a chance in the future since half of it didn’t end up idiotically dead) and then just wrecked all of it…. as I’ve said, good endings don’t need to be rainbows and unicorns and kittens. But if you’ve asked eight years of audience investment, there has to be something that makes it worth it and that doesn’t make everyone feel like they were duped and stupid to get involved in the first place. They have been beating the “it’s a hard world and bad things happen to the characters” drum for all they’re worth, but… it’s just bad. You can analyse and ask why the hell they did things and so forth, but it’s bad. At this rate, the show should have either ended after 8x03, or they should have taken the money HBO offered and done the proper 10 episodes and let Bryan Cogman write all of them. He was the only one who appeared to remotely give a shit about the characters, and since D&D wrote the last four episodes themselves, yeah, this disaster is on them.

Fortunately, I left the show years ago and have TNR and am used to ignoring their version of things. And I knew all along that they never really got the characters or the story. But I feel really bad for everyone who has had this thrown back in their face, and it seems like a communal disenchantment with this ending is going to enter the pop-culture consciousness on a possibly unprecedented level. So if GRRM does do the Mad Queen Dany killed by Jon in the books (though he has apparently called the show’s ending “traumatic”), I’ll probably still not like it. He has a chance to sell me it on/justify it to me narratively, which the show categorically failed to do. I don’t think I will, just because as I said, I don’t like anything about it, but yes.

Anyway. This is a long post already, and I probably have more to say still, but it’s pretty obvious I think it’s just really, really bad, and that’s about the essence of it.

[commandervisor]

whats good dorter now do swr for that meme

the first character i ever fell in love with: Agent Kallus. It was either the promo video or the actual pilot episode itself, but in all likelihood, the sideburns were probably involved somehow. If anything, I will say that the second character is Tua, the moment she stepped into the shuttle way back in DoD. Like, yo.

a character that i used to love/like, but now do not: Darth Maul. But his usage of his EXPERIMENT 2000 DEGREE KNIFE on Kanan’s eyes, Ezra’s innocence, but most importantly, the Inquisition, is the last straw.

a ship that i used to love/like, but now do not: Kanan/Seventh, since FPJ and SMG are married, yeah. Didn’t last long, since now it’s Fifth/Seventh and I don’t particularly trust a majority of the fanbase anymore to make legible, sane, and legal fanwork where Kanan isn’t in a relationship with Hera/where Seventh is in a relationship at all. Yikes.

my ultimate favorite character™: don’t make me choose

prettiest character: All the female characters look good, and as for the ‘handsome’ kind of pretty, Kallus, Kanan, and the prettiest Lasat in the Galaxy.

my most hated character: Kind of hard to like the I/r/o/n Squadron, since their episode had poor characterization for them, building solely off of them being S1 Ezra clones. They could definitely improve though! And I do have a few headcanons on what they’ve been up to since that episode.

* And I definitely LOVE Zeb, that’s why I hate how they keep… ‘minimizing’ him? Like in “Warhead”, as funny as it was, I didn’t like that the crew and the others were like 'woah you can think?’, 'that was actually very smart of you!’, 'ugh can’t you take charge of the base for one day without trouble’, etc. The writers are obviously trying to show us that Zeb is much more than muscle, but c'mon, really? This kind of stuff is how you treat the audience like they’re goldfish as well as disrespecting the character. Instead of conveying the message that 'Zeb is both smart and strong!’, it comes off more as 'Zeb is strong, but secretly smart!’ or something condescending like that.

my OTP: Mallus, yeah yeah yeah whatever

my NOTP: S/a/b/3/z/r/a, it seems clear to be that they’re just supposed to be like brother and sister. I don’t like a majority of the shippers because they seem to be missing the point (like I remember reading the comments of a clip of where Sabine hug-grabs Ezra in the jetpack chase scene and 90% of it was full of shippers that I swear couldn’t have been older than 12.), but I will say that I like some of the fanart.

favorite episode: “Droids In Distress” (I don’t know, I just watched it a lot back then; in hindsight, I’d say it was a good start to the show), “Empire Day”, “The Honorable Ones”, “The Forgotten Droid” (again, I don’t know, I just liked AP’s and Chopper’s dynamic), “An Inside Man”, “Trials of the Darksaber”, I can safely say “Through Imperial Eyes” because Kallus rests in pepperoni. 😎

saddest death: Hearing Tua died in tSoL way back during Celebration 2015 hit me pretty hard, actually.

favorite season: Season 1 + parts of Season 3, mainly the latter half so far.

least favorite season: Season 2 + the timeskip/transition to Season 3, because it felt like it was rushed; there’s a disconnect between the episodes, especially in the latter half (I suspect it’s due to the writers still being in a TCW mindset, where arcs with completely different stories happened one after the other — not that I’m saying that it’s okay for the writers to do, especially because their intent is obviously for SWR to be in a different format. It’s just that I can see why it happened and I hope that at this point in time, they can at least learn from their mistakes…).

So because of that, new information and the problems are just rapid-fire out of pretty much nowhere instead of foreshadowed or anything like that as well as being solved in a flash, like:

* Hera’s some years of father-daughter estrangement with Cham are dealt with in one episode.* The Inquisitors should’ve done more to build up their credibility, like I thought Seventh was gonna be a rival to Kanan and challenge him as a master to Ezra, but I guess that got given to Maul in the S2 finale.* Fifth is apparently blind, but they didn’t do nothing with that, they could’ve foreshadowed something about it with Kanan, and they also seemed like he was gonna be Seventh’s rival or something (at the time, I imagined it like Ventress and Grievous during TCW), but he ended up just being her lackey.* But no, and then everyone in-universe was like 'eh’, so that ended up being reciprocated by the audience as well.* Also, while we’re on that topic, as 'memetic’ as it was, helisabers really did worsen their credibility than it already was.* I honestly was kind of on the fence about Sabine for a while, since I didn’t like that nothing at least semi-permanently bad happened to her until Season 3 and I just generally don’t like haughty characters that don’t seem to struggle.* Kallus being smug for like the first half of tHO like he’s always been up to that point, and then when he tells his backstory, that attitude is GONE for the rest of the show and then we don’t even get to see the transition from him as a loyal and ruthless Imperial that seemed to enjoy the hunt, to someone who is about the exact opposite.* Ezra’s storyline suffers from something similar, like it looked like it was going somewhere with obsessing with the Sith Holocron and/or doing much more questionable things, but that only gets touched upon in SoS because all of it already happened during the timeskip, so by the time we see Ezra, it’s instead just an excuse for the writers to start having him do more action-y stuff and be problematic (like tWJ).

I like most of the ideas behind them, it’s just that there’s definitely much more to be desired out of them. Yeah, I guess they could do a novel/short story/whatever about these things like the timeskip developments, but that seems kind of sloppy, telling the explanation afterwards instead of showing it when it was the most relevant. I want the writers to respect their characters (and therefore, us) more. It’s certainly possible to do, but it’s not constant; it just comes and goes, as seen here and in TCW.

character that everyone else in the fandom loves, but i hate: I definitely like/love Chopper, but the memes about him being a Dark Lord or a Darth undercover or whatever are being run into the ground.

my ‘you’re piece of trash, but you’re still a fave’ fave: Agent Kallus, Governor Pryce. Inquisitors technically didn’t make the choice to be this way, so I didn’t count them here.

my ‘beautiful cinnamon roll who deserves better than this’ fave: the Inquisitors. And Tua.

my ‘this ship is wrong, nasty, and makes me want to cleanse my soul, but i still love it’ ship: Mallus, Fifth/Seventh, yeah.

my ‘they’re kind of cute, and i lowkey ship them, but i’m not too invested’ ship: Kanera.