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nobodysdaydreams · 1 year ago

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1, 5, 32 and/or 71 for the ask game! Hope you’re doing well, don’t forget hydration and sleep!

At long last I am beginning to clean out the inbox. Thank you Katie for the hydration tip and for the asks!

(1) Do you prefer writing one-shots or multi-chaptered fics?

This is a hard one to answer. One shots (I consider anything less than 20k words a one shot because I have a problem, and I don’t think I can write real one shots😔), are easier in that they don’t take as long, and I can get the idea out, show you all my story, and get feedback relatively quickly. However, once a one shot is written, it’s written, and then it’s back the drawing board to come up with new ideas. Whereas with really long multi chapter fics, the idea keeps going, there’s always something new to think about, another “one shot” or character moment or twist to weave into the story, and I love seeing your reactions and how invested different people get into different subplots and storylines. What is frustrating about multi chapter fics is that there’s a lot of delayed gratification involved for me and for you as the reader, because I have twists and ideas in SOS that I want to show you and talk about and I can’t yet, because we’re not there yet, whereas for something like the Martina Redemption fic, it’s technically a multi chapter fic, but they’re short chapters, and I wrote it all over a long weekend. Whereas I’ve been writing SOS since January and rotating the idea for it since before I even got a tumblr so… yeah that’s over a year now dang. So I’d say multi chapter fics, with the acknowledgment that there is probably a balance to be had somewhere in between the two extremes. SOS is a lot of fun to write, but I don’t think I could commit to writing another huge multi chapter fic at the same time, whereas it’s a lot easier to balance multiple wips when they’re one shots.

5. Do you like constructive criticism?

Interesting question. About my writing or in general? For my writing I’d say yes, but so far I haven’t gotten any. Which might be a good thing, although I did say when I first started writing fic, “hey I’ve never done much or any creative writing before, so if you have any feedback on things I can improve, please let me know”, but I haven’t gotten anything yet so I guess that means I’m doing okay? At least I hope. As for criticisms of myself or my blog in general, I’d accept constructive criticism on that too, as long as it’s worded nicely and doesn’t trigger my RSD.

32. Name three of your favorite fanfic writers.

Ah, fishing for compliments I see /j /lh. But please do not make me choose so many of you are so good! I want to tag every fic author in the fandom, and yet I’m so paranoid I’ll forget just one or two people and would never forgive myself. So besides you @myfairkatiecat (obviously), I’ll say the authors whose stuff I’ve read the most recently: @sophieswundergarten (for her amazing Sticky fic I seriously cannot hype that one up enough), @phtalogreenpoison (the Reynie is Curtain’s prodigy AU is incredible), and @heyitsthatonesmolgay because I am waiting on the edge of my seat for the greatest fear AU it sounds so good (check out snippets here and here)!

71. When it comes to more complicated narratives, how do you keep track of outlines, characters, development, timeline, etc. ?

Very good question. For my longer stuff, I start with the scenes and moments I have pinned down in my head that inspired the fic, bullet point the scenes in chronological order, and then write in the details that go in between and ideas for how to get from bullet point A to bullet point B and how I can write in additional “one shots” or impactful and interesting character moments to make those transitions seem less like plot filler and more exciting and fun to read and have it add something to either the characters or the story. Then when I’ve already written part of my fic, I still try to keep track of unfinished plot threads, cliff hangers, or things I plan to explain later (e.g., What happened with Sticky’s parents? Where did Isaac and Lindsey go? What’s up with Miss. Perumal’s past?). As for the characters, I do try to take the time to flesh out minor characters, because you can do that a bit more in a novel vs. tv format, but I also try to make sure I keep the main characters interesting and don’t create an unbalanced plot. I’ve talked about this before, but an unbalanced plot happens in a lot of shows where a few characters have these big mysteries that the whole fandom is super involved in and then these other main characters either end up with filler or their character development gets backtracked and rerun because they don’t know what to do with their storylines (this was one of my season 3 worries when season 3 was gonna be a thing and you can click the link to read more if you’re curious). I try to make sure all the main characters get some focus, and I also do that by letting some characters establish themselves before I start writing about other ones. For example, in SOS, that started as mostly Curtain and his friends, I establish a sense for their dynamic, and then Nicholas and his friends came into the story, and I’m slowly bringing more focus on Rhonda and Number Two, and as I’m going into season 2 I plan to write a lot more with Number Two especially, because of all the time she spends with Curtain and Nicholas in the compound.

I hope this answered your questions and thank you so much for the amazing asks (and yes, I will be drinking water). I hope you have a wonderful day! 🥰🥰🥰

#Bod's Answers #Thanks for playing!#And yes I'm hydrating #And I'll get to the rest of my inbox soon!#You all are amazing and I appreciate you all very much!#mbs fanfic #ask game #mbs ask game #fanfic ask game

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allsassnoclass · 3 years ago

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i wish you’d write a famous musician and road crew tech fic! the pairing that comes to mind first would be muke since they both play guitars, one of them being the guitar tech for the other, but i could also see any of them being a tech for someone else. i really loved your mashton au you did about dancer michael and solo musician ashton and something i liked about it was that one of the characters, in this case ashton, was still existing within the music world, it brought this sense of realism that i really enjoyed while also having some cool elements that only an au can bring, in this case having michael as a choreographer! i’m thinking that this same idea could be translated into a techie fic, and i thought of it right away for this game for you because of that! what are your thoughts? is that something that could be of interest to you?

oooooo, this idea has a lot of elements that i like!!! i've always really liked famous/less-famous dynamics, and i really like that they'd be out on tour together. tour fics are so much fun with all of the different locations and the liminal feelings, plus the close quarters of the tour bus ensure that they spend time together. i also like the idea of this being a muke fic, simply because i haven't written much muke and i'd like to post more fics for them! however, i honestly am not sure i know enough about guitars to make one of them a guitar tech, but I definitely know enough to make one a sound or lighting technician! there are so many good options for tour crew jobs, and either way they get to watch the set every night (either from backstage of the back of the house).

so we have a solo musician (let's say luke, since he already has solo music) and a techie, and over the course of their tour (a north american tour? a world tour? a european tour? idk, there are options) they grow closer and closer. maybe this is michael's first time working with luke, since luke just switched labels/management teams and lots of his road crew switched as well, or maybe michael is new to the team for other reasons, but either way they both take a while to learn how to work with each other. a few late nights on the bus and backstage in dressing rooms let them warm up to each other, and *feelings* start to occur! there's be more to it than that, probably some sort of external conflict (luke last album wasn't well-received and he doesn't know how to continue making music that he enjoys, michael is running from something in his past and the road is his escape but the past is catching up to him, something else that they'll have to work through?), but that's the basic vision i have in my head!

send me “I wish you’d write a fic where…”

#ask #anon #iwywafw 2 #partner steps was easier because it was only two weeks and i have a lot of knowledge/passion for dance already #whereas this one would have a longer narrative timeline and i know less about the subject matter/would have to research #but i do like tour fics a lot #i wrote one for a different fandom years ago and i had a good time #thank you for throwing this idea my way <3 i will add it to my very long idea list #i really want this year to include a lot of posted m/uke fics #i'm trying for that so i like that this is an idea for them

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xiyao-feels · 3 years ago

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☕ If WWX died, LWJ would grieve for the rest of his life and never date again. If LWJ died, WWX would grieve for a couple months/years and move on with someone else.

This is a really interesting question, and I've been thinking about it on and off since I got it. I think I disagree, but possibly not for the reasons you'd expect.

First, though, I do want to disclaim that while obviously I'm going to try and ground this textually, I'm much less familiar with the (non-xiyao-relevant) wang//xian parts than I am with the xiyao-relevant stuff (which granted does include a bunch of wangxian stuff), and in general I've spent much less time thinking about wang//xian.

Okay, with that out of the way...

So, first of all, I definitely agree that LWJ would grieve for the rest of his life and never date again. (Insert standard bitter xiyao rant about how in wangxian this tends to be viewed as romantic whereas obviously what LXC needs to do is move on, right? But I digress.) It's consistent with his canon actions after WWX's death, it's consistent with the parallels to Lan An and his partner and with Mama and Papa Lan, it's consistent with everything we know about his interest in WWX historically, it's consistent with.... basically everything. No argument here.

Looking at the second part, though, I think there's two questions. First, would WWX move on at all? And second: would WWX move on with someone else?

At this point—for the first question, I honestly, honestly don't know. I really don't. On the one hand he didn't cope great with JYL's death! On the other hand the circumstances there were rather extreme, and honestly, while he clearly still cares about people from his previous life, and still grieves for JYL, in the present timeline he does mostly seem to have moved on. In general he's a moving on kind of guy? It's part of who he is; it's part of why the (Wang//xian) happy ending that we get actually works as a happy ending for them, despite, narratively speaking, kind of requiring the complete destruction of his previous life.

On the other hand the idea that he would move on like that *really* doesn't fit with the kind of story this is. And then there's this:

He thought about it some more. Wen Ning didn’t know where he was going, but he didn’t know either, did he? In the beginning, when he was with Lan WangJi, he never thought about this problem at all. He took it as granted that they’d continue like this without change. But after tonight, maybe he and Lan WangJi wouldn’t go back to how they were ever again. Without Lan WangJi, it seemed as if it wasn’t too impossible for him to roam the world on his own.

But a voice in Wei WuXian’s heart told him with clarity, No, you can’t.

The words he said back on Koi Tower really proved to be true. The current Wei WuXian couldn’t do without Lan WangJi.

(ER, ch 97)

This definitely suggests that he couldn't at least move on easily. It could also definitely be read as suggesting he can't move on at all…on the other hand, "the present WWX" could be contrasted with a hypothetical future WWX, and not just the WWX from before. (This is one of those times when I really wish I could read Chinese.)

So I'm really not sure. (Though I do think it would definitely take longer than a couple of months if he did.)

But let's look at the second question. Consider the case where he does move on. Would he move on *with someone else*?

I really don't think so, because I think it would be really hard to find someone else who WWX would actually be interested in having a relationship with.

We see him interested in LWJ from the very beginning. I don't think he's in love with LWJ in his first life, but he's absolutely interested in him. He continually teases LWJ and pokes at him and tries to get a reaction. We see him call out to LWJ when LWJ is looking at him and the other students after LQR's first lesson (ch 14), teases him wildly in the library over the course of multiple days (ch 15), teases him on the hunt they all go on to Biling Lake (ch 16, 17), teases him coming back from Caiyi Town with wine (ch 18), teases him in the Cold Springs (ch 18), teases him with the rabbits (ch 18), remembers him after on a hot day at Lotus Pier (ch 125), is drawn to him and teases him again despite failing to recognize him at first at the archery contest (ch 45), is drawn to him during their time as Wen hostages (ch 51-55), teases him at the Phoenix Mountain Hunt (ch 69) and when LWJ is at Lotus Pier (unbeknownst to WWX presumably to visit him) (ch 71). He enjoys spending time with him, I think the meal in ch 74 is a good reference here. We just don't see him react this way to anyone else! And while it's kind of funny to imagine he has a dozen such relationships and the one with LWJ is just the one we're looking at in the flashbacks, I don't think that's actually textually supported.

We might ask, why is he drawn to LWJ like this? And this isn't a full theory of WWX's initial attraction to LWJ and it's not meant to be, but I do think he likes getting a rise out of someone with LWJ's personality; he appreciates LWJ's competence; and he appreciates LWJ's beauty.

He repeatedly comments on LWJ's good looks (as does the narrative, lol). I'm not going to quote them all but this passage cracks me up (ER, ch 14):

Before this, Wei WuXian never had the chance to carefully examine the front of his face. Now that he had a look at it, he started to think random thoughts, He looks quite nice indeed. Yet, if only those girls could come and see him with their own eyes. Looking as bitter as if everyone had offended him or his parents died, it wouldn’t matter no matter how nice his face looks.

(ER, ch 14)

See also ch 13 ('Wei WuXian emphasized, “Very pretty.”'), ch 14 ("After a thought, he realized that Lan WangJi did look pretty"), ch 17 ('Wei WuXian smugly tossed the toquat in his hand, and suddenly pointed at him, “Sisters, do you think that he looks handsome?”'), ch 45 ("Along with that overly-pretty face of Lan WangJi’s, now that they met again, Wei WuXian’s eyes had momentarily been blinded by his looks"), 65 ("He was so beautiful that it seemed unreal. Caught by the moment, Wei WuXian was somehow entranced"), ch 92 ('Wei WuXian laughed, “I can’t compare to him. He’s much more handsome than I am."'), ch 125 ('Wei WuXian thought about it for a moment, “Maybe just a bit more handsome than me.”'), and many more.

His interest in and appreciation of LWJ's competence is likewise well-established—see ch 13 (“Lan Zhan’s skills were quite good.”), ch 38 ('Wei WuXian touched his chin, “Hmm. He’s good. Of course. He’s really good. He’s the best.” As he talked, he couldn’t help but break into a smile.'), ch 48 ("Hearing Nie MingJue praise Lan WangJi’s level of cultivation, Wei WuXian felt a strange surge of happiness"), ch 109 ("Wei WuXian gaped in astonishment. He’d long since known that Lan WangJi had shocking arm strength, but this… was a bit too shocking!"), ch 115 (*"HanGuang-Jun, your moves are pretty fast, huh?*"), ch 122 (“That’s why I said you were incredible. The couple of times from over a decade ago were the only instances when I fought you with the YunmengJiang Sect’s swordplay, weren’t they? Recalling them after listening for such a short while—isn’t that incredible?”), and many more.

As to his desire to make LWJ react, again this isn't a comprehensive survey and isn't meant to be, but see ch 15 ('Satisfaction was plastered all over Wei WuXian’s face, “Good thing that I helped him achieve this ‘first’. You all saw it, didn’t you? The self-restraint and etiquette that Second Young Master Lan was praised so strongly for were all weak and useless against me.”'), ch 55 ("Wei WuXian, *Absolutely nothing works on him. He’s not at all as interesting as how he was a few days ago, face as dark as the bottom of a pan, speaking with actual tone, even biting others when he was mad. But one shouldn’t hope to see such a Lan Zhan so easily. I probably wouldn’t be able to see it again until the end of my life.*"), ch 115 ('Wei WuXian was immediately overjoyed, speaking on purpose, “Could it be that when Lan Er-gege was young, he didn’t pay attention to reading and writing because I was the only thing he could think about?”'), ch 122 ("As he spoke, he pushed the candle toward Lan WangJi, wanting to see if his earlobes were red."), and many others, plus I think it's clearly part of their sex life.

Now again this isn't a complete theory of Wangxian, but even limiting ourselves to these three traits—LWJ is unusual in any one of them! It's genuinely hard to find someone has LWJ's type of personality (but who reacts so beautifully to WWX), or someone who's as competent as he is, or someone who's as beautiful as he is, never mind all these three traits in one person.

On top of this, however, while this is part of why he's attracted to LWJ, I think part of the reason he *actually falls for* LWJ is that LWJ always has his back. This is less amenable to long-list-of-obvious-quoting than the earlier points, but consider these three excerpts:

Fleeing Carp Tower after confronting JGY goes sideways (ER, ch 50):

After the “mnn”, he added, “I am here.”

Hearing the words, something that Wei WuXian had never felt before sprouted within his heart. It was like sorrow. His chest hurt a bit, but also felt a bit warm.

He could still remember how, back in Jiangling, Lan WangJi came all the way to assist him, yet he didn’t appreciate the kindness at all. With all kinds of disputes, the two of them often parted with disapproval.

But what he hadn’t expected was that when everyone feared him and flattered him, Lan WangJi scolded him right in his face; when everyone spurned him and loathed him, Lan WangJi stood by his side.

Letting himself fall from a tree when they're going around Lotus Pier (ER, ch 87):

All of a sudden, an abnormally strong impulse surged into Wei WuXian’s mind.

He wanted to fall down again, just like back then.

A voice inside of him said, If he catches me, I’ll…

At this point where he thought ‘I’ll’, Wei WuXian let go. Seeing that he fell out of the tree without any warning, Lan WangJi’s eyes immediately widened. He shot forward just in time to catch Wei WuXian, or one might say, be caught by Wei WuXian.

[...]

He wasn’t scared of falling. All these years, he’d fallen many times. But falling on the ground still hurt, after all. If someone was there to catch him, it’d be more than wonderful.

And crucially this moment after LXC has explained that LWJ is in love with WWX (ER, ch 99):

At first, he did those shameful, theatrical things in order to make Lan WangJi feel disgust and throw him out of the Cloud Recesses so that they wouldn’t meet each other again, going their separate ways. Lan WangJi wouldn’t have failed to see what his real attitude was. But even when this was the case… he still chose to keep him by his side, refusing to give Jiang Cheng the chance to approach and make things difficult for him. He answered all questions, granted all requests, indulged him and forgave him again and again. Even when faced with Wei WuXian’s myriad of almost cruel teasing, he was still able to hold himself from crossing the line.

Again, while I'm certainly not saying this is the only reason, I do think it's fairly clear that part of why WWX falls for LWJ is that LWJ will always, always, have his back, always, always, be "on his side", no matter what.

And like, this makes sense! It's quite romantic, and I think this is in part a reaction to having lost basically everyone else, including especially Jiang Cheng/his place in the Jiang.* But the problem here is... how can I put this... even in his day-to-day life WWX is fairly unrestrained, and then sometimes he does things like run off and fight to save the Wen. The latter is admirable, and the former can at least sometimes be charming, but it's not really consistent with being committed to other responsibilities. Even the former can cause some difficulties—think of how he blows off JC about fighting with Jin Zixuan and such, for example, or how he goes about the Phoenix Mountain Hunt, and as to the latter... JC didn't expel him from the Jiang clan and fake a fight with him for fun, you know? He had the entire rest of the Jiang clan he's responsible for. It's not that he doesn't love WWX, and deeply, but he's not willing to put WWX over the rest of his clan. (I realize the Wen are also involved here but just focusing on WWX for now.) But LWJ is willing to put WWX over his clan! Absolutely willing! As LXC's speech reveals! He's willing to back up WWX through everything. And this is true in big ways but it's also true in small ways—ignoring the way he's treating LWJ's bunnies (ch 65), helping him steal lotus pods that belong to someone else (ch 90), basically saying it doesn't matter if WWX abides by the rules (ch 114), feeding him soup he loves at the banquet instead of the Lan stuff (ch 115), backing him up when he lies to some kids about how counting works (ch 126).

I realize this description might make it seem kind of unbalanced, but I'm focusing on what WWX gets out of the relationship here, not what LWJ does. (And he clearly does get a lot out of it!) But even so "be on my side no matter what" is a pretty tall order if you're someone who has other responsibilities—and pretty much everyone in this setting does, either to their superior or as a superior to their subordinates. (LWJ does too, it's just that LWJ mostly has responsibilities that he can carry out while going around with WWX, and they both know that if it comes down to it he'd pick WWX over those responsibilities.) And it's especially a tall order when the person who needs that is, frankly, a chaos gremlin with a very individual sense of morality who'd ended up with an alliance of clans devoted to taking him down before…and who could at least theoretically end up in that same kind of trouble again.

So: would WWX move on? I don't know. But would he move on with someone else? I really doubt it, because LWJ is compatible with him in specific ways that would be enormously difficult to find again.

* I recognize he does still have WN but a) WN does actually have the higher priority of LSZ and b) he pretty clearly doesn't think of WN in this way

#as ever thank you v much confusion-and-more #for looking this over and helping me make it much stronger #if you've been wondering why all the wang//xian quotes lately: this

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atalana · 6 years ago

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Alright, I’ve just spent 17 hours absorbing the epilogue, and in true Dirk Strider fashion, I have Thoughts.

I had plenty of responses I’ve been considering to this, about two hours ago I was honestly thinking of just dropping in with a fuckin one liner like “So Dirk Three wrote the epilogue” (Dirk Three kinda did write the epilogue, and I’ll explain that too), but we’re on the fucking essay train now and no one’s getting off it any time soon so it’s time to dive into this fucker and get it all off my chest.

Under the cut you will find essays on Dirk, cherubs, ultimate selves, both major Dirk fics (Detective Pony and Theatre of Coolty), a bunch of story bullshit, and my severe love for all Homestuck characters

(But very little criticism of the epilogue, I am no longer about that life)

So the prologue is important here. It’s the main bit of accurate information we have, not tainted by an unreliable narrator. (Well, it is, but less so). The prologue tells us that, with the characters outside of canon, they are becoming their ultimate selves, particularly the characters most susceptible to such knowledge, like seers, or heart players.

Now Homestuck wrestles a lot with the idea of the ultimate self. It is, as defined by the text, the true thing a person is, an amalgamation of every possible version of themselves. It is not a viable human being, because that’s not how human beings work. It basically amounts to Hussie’s character rules, like, there are some ways that these characters will be always, some things they’re prone to, things they like, decisions they’re likely to make, but who the person is within that is subject to extreme change depending on circumstance. The four people who embody this narrative most clearly are Vriska, Terezi, Davepeta, and Dirk.

I’m still not 100% sure on why the ultimate selves outside of canon thing is, but my best guess would be this - within the story, there’s a definite timeline, right? Like, these are the things that are written down, this is what you can see, the word of god (loaded phrase, thanks Dirk), the things that you look at when trying to apply death of the author (even more loaded phrase, thanks Hussie, also thanks Calliope). There’s more than one timeline, sure, but that’s the point, everyone is who they are within that timeline, affected by what happened to make them who they became. Outside of canon is, well, outside of the story. They’re not affected by the story here, they’re just characters. This is a fanfiction site. And what does fanfic do best? It takes the characters, takes who they are, pulls them out of the story, and shoves them in wherever it likes, to become whoever it is they become. And thus who the character is exactly becomes murky and confusing if you’re trying to jam them all into one thing, and it all gives Rose Lalonde a headache. Ultimate selves.

Davepeta liked their ultimate self, it helped two kids who were otherwise struggling with unsatisfying ultimate selves to become a better whole.

Vriska took the proactive approach, by which I mean bullying her other selves into letting her become the ultimate Vriska, which was ultimately useless and gave her no ultimate self at all

Terezi saw her ultimate self, and is still processing what that means for her (but also Terezi is still in canon, so she’s immune to epilogue bullshit)

And Dirk, god, poor Dirk. Dirk was terrified of it. Because he could see his ultimate self and he knew that’s not the kind of person he wanted to become. (And this is where I start using the Theatre of Coolty numbers because there’s no other way to get through this, if you haven’t read/seen it you 100% should, but as a general note, Dirk One is the main Dirk we know, Dirk Two is Brain Ghost Dirk, Dirk Three is “Trickster Dirk” but actually revealed later to be Hussie, Dirk Four is Hal)

Because here’s the thing. Dirk’s ultimate self is him, but it’s also Hal. It’s also BGD. It’s also Bro. And Dirk One was never as bad as he thought he was, but he surrounded himself with copies of himself, so he knew how bad he could be, and tried everything he could to avoid it. We have actual canon confirmation on multiple occasions that Dirk would so much rather kill himself than become the kind of person capable of hurting his friends. Which only got worse after he met Dave and realised Bro existed, like, that just doubled his resolve to Never Be That Person.

(Hey, fun hypothetical, if you kill yourself to stop yourself becoming a bad person because you know it’s inevitable but you’re too good a person to want to go through with it, is it heroic or just? Because I would like to have a lengthy discussion with the god tier clock!)

God, there’s so much I can write on the subject of Dirk’s ultimate self. Because you can see every version of him inside there, there’s Bro in his possessiveness, Hal in his need to fuck with people for no real reason, BGD in his hyper critical nature (beyond what is normal for all Dirks), Dirk One in his desire to never let anyone hurt him again. (God, the “I’ll never let you break my heart again” line hurt so much, because like… I can feel Dirk One in that line, but it’s delivered by ultimate Dirk, and ultimate Dirk isn’t the kind of person who would have even been heartbroken by Jake’s actions. Dirk One poured his soul into that relationship and Jake responded by ignoring him, and like, this isn’t a dig on Jake, because that did make Dirk very intense and hard to deal with, but as Calliope so beautifully put, the children left alone are those who most despair at being ignored. And every version of Dirk was so very alone.)

When sending initial thoughts to my friend, I wrote “Ultidirk is Dirk One but without the compassion or empathy and with an apparently infinite supply of horse tranquilizers”. Which was mostly a joke, but does get down to the core of the problem. Dirk One and Ultidirk aren’t really that different, when it comes down to it. But there’s one crucial element that makes all the difference. Dirk One’s life philosophy is “This is a me problem, so I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure you don’t have to deal with that problem, at any cost”. Ultidirk’s life philosophy is “This is a me problem, so I’m going to make it everyone else’s problem. And it turns out that without basic human empathy and morality holding him back, Ultidirk will just… fucking declare himself God, and use that alongside his powers of manipulation to just write a new story in which he is the villain. Very little changes in the scale of things.

(The other main difference is that Dirk One is scared to exist, whereas every other Dirk is scared to not exist, that’s the stuff, good callback, etc etc, that line fucking killed me, and also killed whatever remnant of Dirk One was still lurking inside Ultidirk and god I want to hug him)

(I also want to extract him from Ultidirk and bring him on an Ultidirk murdering quest bc he would be 100% down for that without a second’s hesitation but that’s a bit hard to do)

Now you may be wondering why I brought up Theatre of Coolty if I was only gonna refer to Dirk One as Dirk One and not touch on any of the others. Well, it’s true, saying Dirk Two and Dirk Four when I have simple three letter names for both of them is a bit ridiculous. But then we get to Dirk Three.

Now here’s the thing about Theatre of Coolty. Dirk One appears in Homestuck, as alpha Dirk, in Dirk’s usual shirt with the orange hat. Dirk Two appears in Homestuck, as brain ghost Dirk in god tier pyjamas. Dirk Four appears in Homestuck as Hal, and he wears a red hat because he’s Dirk in a different colour scheme, also because the sprite Hussie eventually made for him based on fanon had a red hat, all’s sorted there.

But Dirk Three? Trickster Dirk? Never appeared in Homestuck. They tried, but it was still Dirk One. Dirk is immune to cherubic influence (remember this point too, it’s important), because his concept of self is so present (and also because he’s depressed as fuck, but that doesn’t necessarily exclude you, it’s just the presence of both at once). And who does Dirk Three turn out to be? Well, they said it from the start, Theatre of Coolty is about the presence or absence of god, who definitely will show up at some point. Dirk Three is Hussie in a Dirk costume, Dirk Three is God, Dirk Three is The Author.

Dirk Three is Ultidirk. Congrats, all four Dirks have officially shown up in Homestuck, to whatever extent this counts as Homestuck, an extent which has been thoroughly documented by its own existence bc this is Homestuck (kinda) and you gotta lean into the bullshit or you’ll drown in it.

So yes, this was penned by Dirk Three. Who is also Lord English in two different metaphorical ways now (The trickster element, and also the fact that the epilogues insist on making Jane a second Condesce, which in this analogy puts Dave as himself and Dirk as, you guessed it, Cherub Master of All. Which is additionally insulting as fuck because Dirk grew up in that apocalypse and would never contribute to recreating it, if Jane ever was inclined to, which she isn’t, but you know).

And LE’s major force of opposition? Adult Calliope. (Also, like, Vriska, but symbolically it’s the other cherub.)

Which brings me to the main point of this essay, and that is that all of this? It’s a cherub fic. And we knew this, from the moment we were offered that choice. Meat or Candy? Well, neither of them are sustainable food sources for humans, not with the meat uncooked like that. They’re not satisfying endings for us either. But it’s all cherubs eat. (Well, that and special stardust, but that was Caliborn’s intermission. This is Calliope’s offering.)

Which again feeds back into the AO3 metaphor because from their introduction, Caliborn and Calliope have been fandom inserts, representing all of us, for better or worse. They read the story, come up with the theories, they write the fanfic.

And Calliope’s trying so hard. But she’s not human. She doesn’t get it, not on a way that connects with the characters, only with the text. Cherubs spend their lifetime alone. Cherubs only have black romance. Cherubs think trickster mode is an acceptable way to solve problems.

And, as Dirk pointed out back when he was still himself, everyone getting married and having a bunch of babies for no reason doesn’t solve shit.

Without a solid timeline, everyone became susceptible to becoming their ultimate selves. Ultidirk is a dick with the powers of actual capital g God, and none of the remorse of Dirk One, so he took control of the narrative. And so Calliope, the fanfic author, the one with the power to write a new story (with the exception of Dirk, as previously mentioned, he’s immune to cherub bullshit, and John and Terezi, who are still in canon), tried to help everyone realise their full potential.

But she made them selfish. She made them solitary. She doesn’t understand how humans work, so they became parodies of themselves. In meat, there’s a plot, but it’s insubstantial, because no one is truly themselves, facing a Dirk who lost himself years ago. In candy, it’s fluff with, again, no substance. It’s trickster mode calmed down. Everyone gets married and has babies, but it makes no sense, and everyone’s miserable.

And John Dirk and Terezi are the only ones who see it, because they’re the ones who haven’t been given to Calliope. But what’s the point, when they’ve lost their power over the story? What’s the point of gaining power if you’re not yourself anymore? (And one way or another, they all die in the end.)

The rest of them… Well, they do the things the narrative implied they would do, but usually in the worst possible way.

(Aradia and Sollux have been canon neutral since 2011 and they like it that way)

And now we go back to Detective Pony, like everyone and their mother have analysed already. Because yeah, these two things have so much in common, but also, some really crucial differences.

Both are stories in which Dirk takes control of the narrative, in which he is fought for control by another author figure, in which he considers his own role in the story, what he’s created, who’s got the authority (I still love that pun so much), and eventually forces the characters to come to the conclusion that he needs to be defeated, because at the end of the day Dirk is still hopelessly suicidal and like most problems the kids have, this is never addressed outside of ironic bullshit. (Not to him anyway, it’s kinda addressed in candy but I think if you’re talking about someone’s suicidal tendencies at their funeral it’s too fucking late).

But Detective Pony is ultimately a heavily veiled love letter to his friends. Detective Pony is Dirk exploring what he fears becoming, it’s him learning to let go, and eventually he relinquishes control of the book to the characters in it (as does Jeanne Betancourt).

Meat is Dirk’s notice of ownership over his friends. It’s him glorifying having become that thing he used to fear, it’s holding even tighter to everything he fears losing, and ultimately neither he nor Calliope trust the characters enough to pull back. They’re both obsessed with it, in both iterations, this battle between the two of them, even though it was never supposed to be about either of them.

But Detective Pony has an original story, with a timeline. It even has a second solid story for Dirk to come from, since Homestuck itself explicitly states when and why Dirk made it. When Detective Pony sits down to analyse which version of the text is better, it has that substance to fall back on. Jeanne Betancourt’s version is boring but kind. Dirk’s is interesting but cruel. And because the characters are all solid people, not their hazy ultimate selves, they have agency too, and can decide their own fate.

When Dirk analyses whose version is better in the epilogue, his whole reasoning is that neither is good. The characters rarely have any agency. Even the few moments, between Roxy’s void powers and Dave’s ability to stand up to Bro (which, by the way, so proud of him, how many people do you know who, in a situation where their childhood guardian and abuser literally became god and tried to thought influence them into doing something they kinda wanted to do already, would have the mental resilience to say “no, this isn’t me, stop that” and stand by that? Dave is the strongest goddamn character in this whole comic, holy shit), are only hints of who they were as real characters in the story. Dirk takes control, in one version, because he’s lost himself to Ultidirk, who’s overly concerned with how stories are supposed to be written, and tries to wrestle Homestuck into a shape he finds interesting. In the other, Dirk kills himself before he can hurt anyone. (And before anyone gets on my case about Dirk’s reasoning being he’s lost his purpose, his purpose was always protecting his friends.)

But Calliope’s not helping them either, just piling them full of romance and fluff and selfish parodies of themselves and thinking that’ll work out. Giving the villains “redemption” without ever actually letting them redeem themselves. Explaining all about their tragic backstories without doing anything with it. To bring back a very old quote, it’s like when Mario gets the star. He wins, but he’s denying himself many powerful moments of catharsis.

Just with less happiness, more death, and a bunch of weirdly political teen drama. And then when Calliope gets distracted by Ultidirk and gives up, everything unravels completely, but it also lets them live a life which does let some of the characters be happy, in a weird roundabout way. It’s dysfunctional as fuck, but these characters care so much for each other, not even being in a weird self melting fanon bubble could erase that completely. (And then things get buck fucking wild because this is still Homestuck we’re talking about)

(Though seriously, I could have done without the Jane is a fascist thing, she deserves better than that. Like what was the point of decrockertiering her if she was just gonna go right back to that? Also I love Dave but he barely has a leg to stand on in most of those political arguments anyway given how he completely destroyed LoHaC’s economy and once accused Karkat of communism for captchaloguing a chair. And while I’m complaining, Jake English is still not being allowed to consent to fucking anything.)

I’m not sure why this was written. I’m not sure why a lot of things in Homestuck were written, honestly. It’s certainly not a satisfying ending, but I don’t think it was supposed to be. It’s not disappointing either, and it’s definitely interesting, with all of Homestuck’s trademark humor.

When I first wrote this halfway through candy, I’d written the following as an ending:

“But if we’re going to triple kill the author, I think this is just ultimately validating everyone’s own interpretation of the ending. You can’t write everyone’s fanfic at once. You can’t be a cherub, or a god, we don’t write fic about people’s ultimate selves. What you can do is provide a timeline for them to exist in, and a better one, where they have a chance to be the people they have the potential to be. And just to be happy, in a way that feels real.”

But honestly, now? I think the point was just to fuck with us, and also do a fuckton of exposition about canon and the nature of reality

So fuck it, let’s end on a relevant Dirk quote

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prairiedust · 6 years ago

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Red or Green? The literary and folk themes of Oroborous

Red or green is the official state question of New Mexico as ratified by the legislature in 1996. Order anything at any restaurant, even a burger in some places, and you’ll likely be asked “Red or green?” Do you want red chile sauce on your entree, or do you prefer green chile? The “state question” can sometimes reveal geographical origins-- red sauce is supposedly favored in the northern half of the state, while green is more popular in the south (I lived in the south, and you could easily get either one anywhere so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .) The best green chiles are grown in the south, so maybe that has something to do with it-- like wine grapes, chiles from different parts of the state have different flavor profiles. Green chiles from the Hatch area are world famous.

But it’s important to remember that the sauces are made from the exact same fruit. The difference is all in the timing. Green chiles are harvested early, unripe, then roasted and chopped up and canned or put in the freezer, whereas red sauce is made from chiles that have been allowed to ripen fully and are then (typically) dried.

It’s all about timing. Let your chiles stay on the plant too long, and you miss your chance at the magical elixir that is green chile sauce.

Timing.

The sister stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are, to a great extent, about timing. They are about waiting, about vigils, and about being at the right place at the right time-- or the exact wrong time.

(If you have not already read this rundown of Snow White in season 14, I suggest at least reading a few of the translations of the original folktales here or here. And cw the Sleeping Beauty story called Sun Moon and Talia is dark. I’ll be discussing the difference between the original material and the Disneyfied stories somewhat. Usual disclaimer that this is lit crit and not spec, why you ask, because I am a hundred years old is why.)

I want to say first that Steve Yockey in Ouroboros did a truly wonderful job allegorizing the story of Snow White, which has been teased for a while now. In the Grimms’ Snow White, as in other tales of that type, Snow White has been 1. run into the wilderness by her stepmother, B. taken in by a group of dwarfs, Three: then poisoned by that stepmother and fourthly laid to rest in a glass coffin. While the story has been poked at over the course of several episodes, Yockey sums it all up again in this one.

Dean-- along with the rest of TFW 2.0-- has been traipsing around New Mexico looking for a peculiar monster. Trope one. From the screen shot it looks like they’ve possibly been through Clovis, Roswell, Albuquerque, and finally made it up to Raton. As far as wildernesses and in-between places go, New Mexico is the most liminal state in the union-- many people in the country think it’s part of Mexico and if you think that’s a joke when I was a senior looking at colleges I had two well respected schools send me their foreign student applications. Roswell. AAAAaaaaahhhh Roswell. Roswell is the city that straddles reality and science fiction. They fry ice cream in New Mexico, they eat both ripe and unripe chiles there, and they have old mountain forests and arid white sand deserts within fifty miles of one another.

Another nod to the Snow White story is the Ma’lek Box that Dean mentions again-- B-- it can be seen as an allusion to Snow White’s glass coffin (in other versions, it is merely ornate or sometimes bedecked in rare gems but it is definitely something that she alone can not get out of… being dead and all...)

Finally, when the Gorgon knocks him out and Michael escapes, Sam tends Dean’s wounds while he is unconscious, which fulfills the traditional Snow White requirement for someone other than the king/prince to affect a physical change in the heroine’s state-- cutting off an enchanted dress or jostling the coffin so that the bite of poisoned apple can be coughed out-- in order to bring her back to life. Walt Disney and his studio added the “first love’s kiss” into the Snow White matrix in 1938, not even a century ago, but it quickly took over the narrative-- Disney also brings the story into a more accessible reality for modern viewers, he introduces the prince into the actual storyline earlier than in the folk tale, and then has him awaken her with The Kiss. Which do we, as an audience, prefer? The rabbit-hole of darker, more psychological Snow White tale types, or Disney’s recent and overwhelmingly iconic romantic reimagining?

Red or green?

Yockey gave us green, the version that has not ripened into what most people know as Snow White through the Disney cinematic behemoth.

The other duality in this episode is that we have Sleeping Beauty being referenced simultaneously with Snow White’s allegory.

Sleeping Beauty is Cas’ story and elements from that tale type can be seen in how the Gorgon stalks and overcomes his prey. The Gorgon uses sex to snare a human for consumption-- he says he’s an opportunist but that women have begun to be more cautious now that they are “waking up” from a long period of oppression. Sleeping Beauty’s deep sleep comes as the result of a symbolic sexual awakening-- in the more recent stories that awakening comes from the machinations of an enemy, so it is more a violation than a sudden innocent awareness. Where am I going with this? I don’t even know, this seems like it belongs in a different essay. What I’m trying to say is that the Gorgon uses sex to put people into a state of paralysis, and the evil fairy (known in the Disney movie as Maleficent) used a sexual metaphor to lure Briar Rose to her doom before she was ready for that kind of encounter. We are asked to contemplate the symbolic aspect of the Gorgon’s predation because he also uses a symbolic act-- eating eyeballs-- to see into the future and thus subvert the natural order of time.

In Sleeping Beauty, the evil crone/Maleficent also subverts the timeline by jumping place in line. She was not invited to the party in honor of the infant princess, but after nearly all of the other wise women have given Briar Rose their blessings, she breaks in to curse the baby. There is always one fairy left who, while not powerful enough to nullify the curse, can modify it to a deep sleep instead of death. In Ouroboros, TFW2 exploits the fact that Cas and Jack exist outside of the workings of Fate to defeat the Gorgon, but not without great cost.

Which brings us to The Wrong Kiss. I didn’t even want to meta the Sleeping Beauty stuff because of the kiss, seriously. So. What happens to Briar Rose is tragic, but in the three most famous versions of the story she comes out of her enchantment because a prince falls in love with her. Jack, here, as a result of Cas’ deal with the Empty, is no longer in the Sleeping Beauty story, he is not a Prince but a Giant-Killer once more, and the antidote he administers to counteract the Gorgon’s venom will not work. Once he activates his giant-killing powers, he can heal Castiel. (In the reciprocal, Cas is an agent of the SB story and the antidote works on the dude the Gorgon was about to eat because Cas administers it. It’s a very meta way of treating the folklore theme by both subverting it and keeping certain characters strictly within the parameters.)

Jack finally lives up to his name as a Giant-Killer when he takes out Michael. In Appalachian and English Jack Tales, Jack is always clever, sometimes to the point of unscrupulousness, but in the story Jack and the Beanstalk he is a naive picaro who betters his circumstances through reliance on his simple nature as much as his wits. Often “Jack” does not change as a result of his adventures, as most fairytale heroes do, but like many other mythological tricksters he operates outside the bounds of normal morality. Jack Kline has managed to hold onto his innocence despite initiation into the Winchester clan. Now that Jack has, presumably, burned off some large portion of his soul, it will be interesting to see how his picaresque nature might actually change. Because the story of Jack the Giant-Killer? Not the same story as Jack and the Beanstalk. The Giant-Killer is the story of a deadly clever young man who defeats several giants as well as Lucifer using mainly his wits and is afterward given a place on King Arthur’s Round Table. The story in its entirety borrows from Cornish, Welsh, and Briton mythology, echoing other simple folktales as well as hearkening to high heroes of the Mabinogi. Jack has become larger than life. (AN I started this before Peace of Mind, I’ll get to that one by the end of the season maybe :P )

In a less meta sense of course, this episode is one huge mythological allusion-- Cas refers to Dean’s imprisonment of Michael as a “herculean” feat, the MOTW is a Gorgon (and traditionally gorgons were a trio of cursed sisters in Greek legends,) and Dean enthusiastically references the 1981 Clash of the Titans film twice. In a /more/ meta vein, Andrew Dabb quotes the more recent Titans movie in a tweet on this ep’s airdate. I find that exciting because the story of Perseus in CotT features a descent into the underworld, and again while I flirt with speculation here I would REALLY like to see these nerds freaking raid the Empty.

As for Snow White and Sleeping Beauty now? Red or green?

It feels as though the Snow White story has possibly been tied up and tucked away now, solving the riddle of the “red or green” sister stories. Michael, Dean’s evil rival, is dead. Pretty sure. Whether his grace is contaminated and will have an adverse effect on Jack remains to be seen. See drsilverfish’s lovely analysis of the oroborous symbolism in the last two episodes for more discussion about what it means for Jack to have consumed Michael’s grace. But. Unless there is a Ghost of AU!Michael coming up, he’s gone.

We are left, however, with Cas’ deal with the Empty-- he gets to operate under normal parameters as long as he does not exceed the minimum threshold of happiness (and I want it to be an accidental or unexpected moment, unlike a lot of meta writers, but then that isn’t spec it’s just what I hope for.) And what does that mean for destiel subtext? I don’t know. Honestly, this is a little too intense for me, I am not “canon positive” or “endgame positive” and this episode freaked me out. Analytically, though, it places the subtext at a really interesting place. It means the princess who gets rescued from an enchanted doom is still on the loose, still avoiding Fate, and the prince is still out there having Adventures in the Woods. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#the folklore of supernatural #snow white #sleeping beauty #sister stories #spn meta #the title of the next episode is killgingg me

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shotfromguns · 6 years ago

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Overall, I think Avengers: Endgame was... about as good as we were going to get, given who was involved in making the film and what had already been established (or had failed to be established) in previous films. It was for sure massively better than Age of Ultron and a noticeable improvement over Infinity War. But there were still plenty of flaws (including things they easily could have fixed) and a few things that outright frustrated the hell out of me.

My thoughts on Endgame follow under the cut. There will obviously be spoilers. This is for @pantsvaporation, but anybody else is welcome to read/comment/etc. as well.

I was pleasantly surprised that there was a minimum of obvious “actors swinging at CG enemies that hadn’t even slightly been described to them.” And while there were definitely places the film could have been tightened up, I had been expecting the three hours to feel noticeably slack, whereas the plot never seemed to me to drag at all. In retrospect, maybe I should have been less surprised by that, given that it was directed by Russos, who were also responsible for CA:TWS, which remains the most perfectly paced action movie I’ve ever seen.

Given the length of the film, however, I am fucking furious that the only (and MCU first-ever) LGBT “representation” we got was one of the Russos as a nameless extra in Steve’s support group who was framed as a mlm through the pronouns of who he was on a date with. 181 fucking minutes, and you couldn’t find room for less than 60 seconds to show us Valkyrie with a girlfriend? Carole Danvers got that amazing (as my girlfriend often describes my current look) ‘90s dyke aesthetic after the time skip, but she couldn’t have a wife? And, of course, anybody and everybody else was given a Big Case of the Not Gays, including and especially the male characters people have enthusiastically been shipping with each other due to the historical nigh-complete dearth of women in the MCU films (Tony, Steve, Sam, Bucky... and I will have more to say about Steve).

I did cry a few times, especially towards the end, which I honestly hadn’t expected to. But it all felt very... emotionally manipulative? For example, I didn’t cry at Tony dying, per se. I did cry at Pepper reacting to his death, his daughter, Happy, etc. It felt like they sort of realized that by this point Tony had become extremely unsympathetic and that they’d probably overly telegraphed that he was going to die, so they needed to make us sad about it by ensuring we were thinking about how other characters would feel about his death, versus how we ourselves felt about it.

And we sure did get a whoooooooooole lotta time to show the audience how sad everyone felt about Tony to ensure we did, too. But there was (a) very little for Natasha, who died in this film saving the universe even more tragically than Tony did, given that she didn’t even know her sacrifice would work to get the Soul Stone, let alone whether the rest of the plan would work even if she did; and (b) almost none for the characters who died in Infinity War and didn’t get a Comic Book Death resurrection through Bruce snapping or past!Nebula breaking literally the entire premise of the film (more on that in a bit). The Vision got a two-second reference, not even by name. Loki got just a flash of a cameo, with Thor not bringing him up once that I can recall, being completely focused on their mother even in a time when they were both still alive. Heimdall didn’t even get that much, nor was he even referenced; nor were any of the Wakandans who died so that Scarlet Witch didn’t have to lose her creepy robo-boyfriend (which, whoops, she did anyway). Regardless of how obnoxious some of these character and/or their fans may have been, they still very much should have mattered to the other characters, who should have been mourning them just as much as they were mourning Tony. And yeah, sure, anybody who didn’t get Thanos’d had had five years to mourn the ones who died in Infinity War, but (a) to anybody who’d just been brought back, they were still freshly dead, and (b) even the people who were around for those five years are probably dealing with that grief all over again, not least of which because they had the others who died then returned to them, and because not everybody (especially not Thor) had even properly gone through the whole grief process in the first place.

On the topic of Thor, boyyyyyyy howdy was it frustrating how thoroughly Endgame finished off the way that Infinity War had started cutting the entire legs of his Ragnarok character development out from under him. If it weren’t for the momentary appearance of a handful of characters from Ragnarok, the movie literally might as well not have happened: Thor no longer cares about being a leader for his people, he’s back to leaning on weapons instead of relying on himself, and he seems to have completely forgotten Loki after having finally reconciled with him. And making Thor fat as a joke was not only fatphobic and unfunny but really undercut the narrative’s ability to make the viewer take his trauma seriously, because of a continuously competing tension between “you’re supposed to laugh at how he looks” and “how he looks is supposed to make you sad” that was never really resolved. There was no “you’re laughing at this, but then you realize what it actually means, and you feel like an ass for having laughed.” It was clearly set up to be, “you’re laughing at this, but then you realize what it means, and you feel a little sad, but don’t worry, there will be plenty of more times when ‘Thor is fat now’ is a punchline.”

As for the film’s humor as a whole, while there were some genuinely funny moments that were well positioned in the narrative, the movie overall felt like it frequently ran into the same problem as Star Wars: The Last Jedi, where the writers were so desperate to have characters constantly quipping that they constantly undercut their own poignant moments.

Probably the biggest actual plot hole is, unsurprisingly, the time travel. They initially did an... okay job of justifying why the characters couldn’t just change the past (though it wasn’t until Bruce got to have his chat with Mx. Yellowface that it actually got in any way coherently explained). But after they did all that work of establishing that they couldn’t just change the past, for capital-R Reasons...

They did uhhhhhhh a whole fucking lot of changing the past. A few of these things could be at least fanwanked away. Maybe past!Steve forgets future!Steve telling him Bucky’s alive because he got knocked unconscious immediately afterwards. Maybe Tony’s chat with his dad had always happened. Maybe Steve had always spent decades with Peggy. But there is no way Sitwell et al. wouldn’t remember Steve pretending to be a member of Hydra, which would significantly alter the events of The Winter Soldier if they weren’t smart enough or lucky enough to verify that Steve wasn’t also a mole and therefore realize he was an “imposter” before one of those Hydra sleeper said something to past!Steve to make him suspicious. And Loki grabbing the loose Tesseract and poofing is a massive change in the timeline.

Their enemies did a whooooooole lot of changing the past when past!Nebula brought past!Thanos and The Gang through to the future, including effectively permanently restoring Gamora, i.e., someone who’d been “irreversibly” sacrificed to obtain the Soul Stone.

Once these things happened, there was literally nothing to explain why (a) the future!Avengers couldn’t at least bring back Heimdall, Loki, all those Wakandans, the Vision, Natasha, and Tony by pulling them from earlier points in the timestream, and (b) why the future!Avengers couldn’t just take their set of Infinity Stones to a point before all of this shit happened and prevent it from ever having happened. Which isn’t to say the writers couldn’t have cooked up some sort of internally consistent explanation, e.g., “this Gamora is basically stolen from the other timeline, which still exists on its own independent axis, and the Avengers wouldn’t kidnap their friends out of another timeline and leave that version of themselves without the person they want to restore just to have that person here.” But they didn’t bother, which presumably means no one involved in making the film even noticed the utter inconsistency.

Speaking of utter inconsistency... Steve. Steven fucking Rogers. Hooooooooboy. That ending was the biggest, stupidest, cheapest piece of schlock I’ve seen in a movie for a long fucking time. Let’s leave aside the fact that he chose to leave behind two perfectly good boyfriends and the fact that he barely said boo to Bucky, despite the film having reminded us how important Bucky was to him by having his name literally be the thing that so shocked past!Steve that future!Steve was able to beat him. You’re seriously telling me that Steve was still pining soooooooo badly for Peggy that he would literally risk the entire timeline so they could have their Hetero Happily Ever After? (Bucky, Sam, Tony, Angie: I’m so sorry, bbys.)

Yeah, sure, Peggy and Steve being parted was sad when it happened. But they’d been colleagues for a handful of years, then maybe sorta friends, and then kissed once, in a speeding car, just after they finally admitted they’d both been crushing on each other pretty hard the whole time because they were on the way to possibly both die. That is not “the love of your life” who you spend the rest of time sighing over. That’s, like, the guy I casually dated for a bit over a month in 2011 because, while we hit it off amazingly well, I didn’t want to get serious when he’d be moving in about a year once his postdoc was done, who sure enough moved to the east coast a year later and then abruptly died of a heart attack a few years after that. Is it tragic that he’s dead? Absolutely. Have I sometimes thought, “Gosh, I wonder what could have been”? Sure. Did I decide that I would never ever again date or even look at anyone else, because he was the only person for me in all of space and time? Lmaoooooo no. I am, in fact, deliriously happy with my current girlfriend, who I also happen to think is way better for me than he ever could have been.

It was already established that Peggy got married in the original timeline (in CA:TWS, Steve watches some footage in which she mentions that during the war he’d saved the man she eventually married). This means that either (a) Steve supplanted her original husband, which is pretty gross, especially if he didn’t tell Peggy “oh hey btw you originally married this other guy, wanna go check him out first,” or (b) Steve was Peggy’s husband all along, and she just obfuscated that. Either way, in the timeline we end up with, somehow for 50+ years this incredibly well-known woman and sometime Director of SHIELD was married to a man she kept absolutely secret and hidden, which somehow no one ever discovered the secret of or even ever commented on, apparently. It also means that, when Steve showed up on her doorstep, both of them agreed that (a) it was more important for them to play house than for Steve to ever openly use his abilities again and (b) Steve would sit on his ass and twiddle his thumbs through every major crisis he knows is coming over the next half-century. If the MCU serum slowed Steve’s aging the way the comic serum did, this might be slightly understandable, because they could justify it as, “Well, Steve will go back to adventuring after he closes the loop with his original timeline, and this will basically be an extended vacation.” But Steve did age (and they presumably had no expectation that he would not), meaning that he wasted decades of active time at most acting secretly and anonymously from the shadows. You really think that these two incredibly dedicated and driven heroes would both agree to that? Sure, I could absolutely believe they’d take the opportunity to finally get that dance. But there’s no way that Peggy wouldn’t have booted Steve’s ass out of bed and back to the 21st century, and it’s highly unlikely Steve himself would have so much as seriously considered staying for more than a more leisurely farewell and proper closure.

Steve’s Hetero Happily Ever After also further complicates the issue of that time travel plot hole I mentioned. If the stones were plucked from one or more divergent timelines (or changes made while grabbing the stones then caused the creation of divergent timelines at those points)... how did aging!Steve end up staying in the same timeline as the rest of the future!Avengers? It seems like it should be impossible for all these things to be simultaneously true, which means either I’m missing something huge or at least one of them is a huge fuck-up in terms of the plot’s internal consistency. EITHER the changes to the past happened in (or spawned) one or more divergent timelines, which is why, e.g., Gamora could be brought forward from her past and now be alive in the future without altering the past that led to her being brought forward in the first place, in which case aging!Steve would have spent his life in an alternate timeline and old!Steve wouldn’t have been able to come visit all his buds on the day young!future!Steve left to return the stones; OR everything took place in a single, unified, undivergent timeline, which would mean Steve could drop into the past and take the long way back to the exact point in spacetime he left, but the changes to the past would have altered the past events, meaning that because Thanos and The Gang skipped forward and Loki is at large with the Tesseract, the events of Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok, Infinity War, etc. never happened, and we’re also back to having no reason why other dead people couldn’t be pulled forward from their past timeline, why Thanos couldn’t be stopped by time-traveling the stones to before he retrieved them and using them to stop him, etc.

Various other issues:

The “monstrous” single woman who can’t get pregnant sacrificing herself so that the virile man will have his wife and children restored to him is... not a good look. Also, it’s weird how “we don’t trade lives” when it’s about a robot coded as a white man sacrificing himself to save half the universe (though apparently even at the time a whole bunch of Wakandans was fine, whoops, remember all the Black people who died trying to stop Thanos from getting to the Vision, weird how those lives were okay to trade), but when it’s about Natasha or Clint throwing themself off a cliff, immediately they’re both all, “Yeah, it’s gotta be done for the greater good.”

Thor getting to be the one to axe Thanos’s head off instead of, you know, like, oh, I don’t know, Nebula? The woman he abused and tortured pretty much her entire life? Bad. Inappropriate. Disappointing.

Everybody kept talking about how the characters who got Thanos’d in Infinity War were their “family.” For Rocket, I believe it; one thing the GotG films actually did well was to establish that level of relationship for those characters. But the Avengers? Lmaoooooo. The MCU Avengers were not a fucking family. The MCU Avengers spent every single movie at each other’s throats. If you wanted us to believe they were even friends, you should have given us at least one film of them seriously working as a team instead of against each other.

Holy shit, do I not care about Clint Barton’s Manpain(tm). Also, if you want us to see how far he’s “fallen,” maybe do something other than giving him the worst mohawk I’ve ever seen (including one done backstage after a show and one a friend gave me in my bathroom in college) and a boring tattoo and having him badly pick up an ugly katana-esque sword to kill objectively bad guys.

Bringing Scott back was easy enough that a rat walking across a panel after five years of that shit sitting in a storage facility could do it, and yet no one else tried even once? Somebody saw all that shit set up, and went, “Welp, guess they’re all just dead,” instead of, “Hey maybe this running equipment indicates an experiment in progress that we should maybe investigate”?

The “let’s line up all the named women” shot in the final battle was the most patronizing display of pandering I’ve seen in the entire franchise. Not only did it make no sense for them all to be in the same place at the same time with no men even in the shot, but... they were utterly ineffectual? It was like, “Gosh, how will Carole ever make it through that??? Oh, she’s got US, GIRL-FRIENDS, DID WE MENTION WE’RE ALL LADIES, BUT NOT QUEER OR ANYTHING.” And then... Carole immediately blew straight past them, because her power level is so off the charts compared to almost every other named woman in the MCU, many of whom are simply very, very skilled peak human heroes versus being superhuman.

Speaking of superhuman abilities: Why wasn’t every time-travel suit an Iron Man-style suit like Rhodey’s? Obviously he needed an exoskeleton bit to walk, but since Tony took the time to build him a beefed-up full suit, why didn’t he do the same for everyone else?

Along that same line of stupid decisions made around the Vitally Important, We Only Get One Shot At Fixing This time-travel mission, why didn’t they wait until everyone was in better shape? Thor was clearly still an emotional wreck, and if Rocket hadn’t been on the ball, it would have cost them one of the stones. As soon as you’re traveling back in time to fix something, unless there’s a hard limit on how far you can go back (which there wasn’t), you literally have the rest of your lives to get ready for it, so can and should take as much time as you need to prep (and even over-prep) for that mission. A little more lead time also would have given someone the opportunity to go, “Hey, wait, why don’t we first make a quick stop to just grab more Pym Particles, so we have more flexibility with destinations and do-overs?” Or even, “Why don’t we make these suits modular? That way, they can join into a single unit for each team on the way there, thereby saving a bunch of charges, but also split off into individual suits with everyone having enough juice to get home individually just in case someone gets split off. That will leave us with a bunch of extra Pym Particles in case something goes wrong.”

Other than meta reasons like “we want there to be a big epic fight,” why was it such a struggle to fight Thanos? The Avengers very nearly beat him in Infinity War, when he had five of the six Infinity Stones. Here, he had none, and they still barely squeaked out the victory by the skin of their teeth.

Thanos’s rapid switch from “I’m gonna kill half of all living creatures to uhhh save the universe somehow” to “I guess I’ll just wipe out everything and make an entirely new universe” once again highlighted how deeply stupid his original plan was. If he has the capacity to re-create the entire universe, why doesn’t he just... make more resources, if that’s such a fucking problem? I mean, also, spoiler alert for the real world: It’s not. It’s always been an issue of distribution, not amount. People aren’t starving to death because there’s no food; people are starving to death because of capitalism. So unless you target your population elimination at capitalists exclusively, killing off a bunch of people is going to maintain exactly the same problems of unequal resource exploitation and distribution.

Speaking of which: Why is post-Thanos Earth presented as a mellow semi-paradise (except for everybody being sad about all the dead people)? The loss of half the world’s population would have been catastrophic, cascading into many more deaths. Nor would it have solved inequality... or even resource “over”-utilization. Earth hit a population of 3.85 billion (i.e., half the current ~7.7 billion) around 1972, which many people currently alive have personal memories of not actually being particularly idyllic. This also highlights once again how deeply stupid and nonsensical Thanos’s original plan was, given that his “solution” could easily become obsolete in another 50 years... or even sooner, given that Thanos also cut all non-human creature populations in half, which would have not only reduced related resources available for human consumption but devastated ecosystems worldwide.

There has been a huge official campaign to persuade audiences to not spoil the movie for others. As a general principle, I’m a fan of encouraging anti-spoiler culture, but I think it says a lot about this movie in specific that the studio has put in so much effort to try to stamp out spoilers: i.e., they’re worried that the only real draw it has is people finding out assorted plot points. If your film can be easily replaced by a bulleted list of who’s alive or dead at the end of it, it’s... not actually a good film.

ADDENDUM MAY 5, 2019:

Okay, so, per the Russos, the reason Steve's Hetero Happily Ever After DOESN'T break the entire rest of the film is that it happened in an alternate timeline, and he just jumped back to the MCU prime timeline later... somehow. I still think that's shitty, lazy filmmaking, because in three hours they absolutely should have, you know, made that more clear (or... at all indicated that's how it played out). But at least it keeps their time travel mechanics from completely breaking their own plot.

But that means that in THAT timeline there were two Steves. Which means the BEST-CASE SCENARIO is prime!Steve hooked up with that timeline's Peggy after being 100% honest about who he was, alt!Peggy... chose a different version of Steve over her own Steve, for... reasons?, and then together they found and revived alt!Steve, at which point prime!Steve was like, "lol sorry bro, she's my wife 'cause I missed my chance with prime!Peggy, but at least now you're not frozen for any longer than you already have been."

Other options include:

Prime!Steve pretended to be alt!Steve while leaving him in the ice, counting on him not getting rescued until alt!Peggy would be nearly dead.

Prime!Steve helped rescue alt!Steve, then left alt!Peggy and alt!Steve to have their personal Hetero Happily Ever After while he... married some other random person?

Prime!Steve straight-up murdered alt!Steve to take his place.

Prime!Steve and alt!Peggy rescued alt!Steve, and she married both of them. (Somehow I don't see Disney going for that option.)

ADDENDUM MAY 12, 2019

I just read another interview, this one with the writers. Buckle up, because there’s even more embarrassing shit.

McFeely: I mean, we did all of this before Ragnarok.

Markus: Yeah, initially we were writing drafts prior to Taika coming onboard. And it was once they got underway and they were off in Australia making the movie and it was clear that they were discovering new facets to Thor, Chris Hemsworth wanted to make sure that this new loosened-up Thor didn't vanish immediately upon returning to the Avengers world. And so he and Taika flew to Atlanta and we had long meetings with them and watched some footage and got a sense of the new Thor tone, and it worked perfectly with where we wanted to go.

... ... ... ... Literally WHAT FUCKING PART of Infinity War and Endgame matches AT ALL with Thor's character development from Ragnarok? I was all ready to go, "Oh, okay, that makes sense" at the reveal that this was written before Ragnarok. But then, nope, they admit that they just have no fucking idea what they're doing and think they actually integrated its changes WELL. JFC.

McFeely: So where we hit upon it was in order to become their best selves, Steve had to find a life, and Tony had to lose his.

Boring idea and poorly executed to boot. (Not to mention the extreme cringiness of “finding a life” necessarily requires “marrying a woman and having babies in the suburbs.”) How are they getting paid money for writing this trite?

Fandango: So people are asking... Does this mean an old Captain America was hanging out this whole time while another Captain America was saving the day?

Markus: That is our theory. We are not experts on time travel, but the Ancient One specifically states that when you take an Infinity Stone out of a timeline it creates a new timeline. So Steve going back and just being there would not create a new timeline. So I reject the "Steve is in an alternate reality" theory. I do believe that there is simply a period in world history from about '48 to now where there are two Steve Rogers. And anyway, for a large chunk of that one of them is frozen in ice. So it's not like they'd be running into each other.

HAHAHAHA HOLY FUCKING SHIT okay so NOT ONLY do the director and writers have COMPLETELY DIFFERENT IDEAS about what the fuck happened at the end (did they... not discuss this with each other? at all?), but the WRITERS' version is the one that is THE MOST OUT OF CHARACTER. HOLY SHIT.

McFeely: So we've always thought that the most perfect conclusion to [Natasha's] arc would be to die for her new family, or to sacrifice greatly for her new family.

GAG GAG GAG GAG GAG GAG GAG

McFeely: We toyed with not doing that, and we had another version, and several women on the crew said, "Don't you dare take that choice away from her. The heroic thing is for Natasha to do it, not for Hawkeye to do it."

these are definitely real women who actually exist

Fandango: Do you think there's a world where we see the adventures of Captain and Peggy either on the big or small screen?

Christopher Markus: Possibly. I think maybe all I did was Steve was a stay-at-home dad and Peggy went to work at S.H.I.E.L.D. I don't know that there were any adventures.

lmaoooooooooo

Imagine being this bad at knowing your own characters. Imagine thinking either Peggy OR Steve would just give up their life to play house when there's important work they could be doing.

#Analyzing film #Avengers #Avengers: Endgame #Tony Stark #Steve Rogers #Thor #Natasha Romanoff

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jacksgreysays · 4 years ago

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I had a truly ridiculous idea--maybe because my brain is still stewing in TUA land but also is simultaneously constantly thinking about Tetsuki Kaiza and Shikako Nara in different universes, but basically...

What if both?

And, first of all, I have never thought about Tetsuki Kaiza ever meeting Shikako Nara which is wild because, as previously said, I am almost constantly thinking about putting them into different universes. They're not inherently mutually exclusive, my brain just never considered putting them in the same timeline. Maybe some part of me was like: hey, two OCs? That's a lot. But then I reconsidered... is it?

Anyway, the fact that it's a TUA crossover which sparked the concept is also wild.

And while originally I said Tetsuki wouldn't be a Hargreeves because she wouldn't add/change anything significant, somehow that no longer applies if Shikako is also a Hargreeves. If they're both Hargreeves, Shikako is Number Nine and Tetsuki is Number Eight. I'll get into that a little bit later, because before then I just want to say:

The mental experiment to have both Tetsuki and Shikako exist simultaneously in the same universe was so illuminating into who they are as characters and how they interact with people who aren't necessarily their friends/family but are definitely allies who share too much to be comfortable but not enough to be close.

The main conflict or, maybe, difference in personality that would lead to their dynamic is that Tetsuki, for all that she is convinced she doesn't mind being alone (she is far more of an introvert than Shikako, but moreover Tetsuki's actually a little bit misanthropic) is bad at independent motivation. Whereas Shikako, who genuinely likes people and is charismatic in her own way, functions far better by herself considering her tendency for paranoia and secret keeping always gets in the way.

Or, more simply, Tetsuki subconsciously defines herself by her relationship to other people. Shikako is most at peace when she stops playing by other people's rules.

Even more simply: Tetsuki is a follower/protector. Shikako is a hermit/innovator.

This reflects in their respective series/recursive fic, too. Tetsuki's narrative doesn't really start until another person is there to bounce off of, whether as a guide, someone to protect, or someone to fight. I could go through her entire list, but instead lets focus in on the one where its most prevalent: Iron Will.

No matter which version I actually run with, Gui's introduction to her is the start. Then she is set up either as a foil to Jet of the Freedom Fighters and/or Azula and her actions are always about supporting or thwarting them while making sure her chosen allies (mostly Gui, and then whichever side she's actually on) are protected. Her solo feral child and/or bounty hunter/assassin training times is nothing narratively. She doesn't grow emotionally from those stretches of time and so they wouldn't be elaborated on.

Whereas, in both Dreaming of Sunshine canon and many a recursive fic, Shikako's emotional growth is an entire, engaging story arc. Her struggling with the practicalities of war versus the philosophies of peace is a story. Her deciding to be a shinobi even though she a) has a should-be-debilitating disability, b) knows the true horrors of what the future holds, and c) has no guarantee that her efforts will be rewarded is literally what makes Dreaming of Sunshine work. Tetsuki is frequently dragooned into a subservient lifestyle or, very quickly, drafts herself into the nearest soldier's role.

Also consider, in this Viridescent and whatever this DoS+xxxHolic inspired thing is, Tetsuki works for Yuuko and then Watanuki when he takes over as an employee and doesn't mind whatsoever. Shikako essentially goes from magic-less to Death's apprentice and the Lady Cosmos, etc (basically the equivalent of Yuuko/Watanuki) out of sheer determination.

All that being said--and with the additional fact that, as far as Tetsuki's rank goes in Konoha she only gets up to tokubetsu jounin (and even that later in her career) while Shikako makes jounin pretty early on--Shikako outranks Tetsuki both in combat terms and administration/leadership. So long as they can establish themselves as allies (most likely through the password/codes, Tetsuki would pretty easily (and happily?) defer to Shikako in terms of decision making. Tetsuki would also pretty easily give a summary of her own capabilities to Shikako so as to most effectively be deployed, whereas Shikako would DEFINITELY hide a significant amount of her abilities from Tetsuki and Tetsuki would be unlikely to see that as unfair.

Now to the TUA crossover (and, again, this is such a wild idea that I would never write it, but its also such a wild idea that if I don't articulate it my brain will not let me rest) under the cut!

Reiterating the idea that the higher the number the more powerful/less tractable the person is, Tetsuki is Number Eight and Shikako is Number Nine. I may very well write some TUA fic eventually so I won't exactly go into the reasoning behind most of the canon numbers, but consider: Ben | Number Six is just an unstable jinchuuriki. Vanya | Number Seven has a wide array of abilities but its all sound based (or, rather, requires access to sound).

Before putting Shikako into the mix, I actually wasn't sure if Tetsuki would be a good Number Eight largely because I wasn't sure if she remembered her past lives. If she doesn't, then in terms of raw power she may actually be less than Vanya. It's her experience/versatile use of her abilities that would make put her ahead in a fight. On top of that, without her memories (or Shikako) Tetsuki would be far more obedient to Reginald which would--if we're going with that more powerful/less tractable scale--make Tetsuki Number Seven and Vanya Number Eight.

But I did not like that. Mostly because changing the canon numbers feels wrong. But also, again, Tetsuki by herself in TUA does nothing for the narrative. It's far less interesting than Lila in Season 2 and that's already a questionable plot point.

With her full memories/experience Tetsuki would be able to take on Vanya in full White Violin mode in a fight. Maybe not win every time, but enough. Yes, Tetsuki wouldn't be able to destroy the moon, but she would be able to take out Vanya before she could build up to that amount of power. The way I think of it is: Vanya can single handedly end a battle. Tetsuki can single handedly stop an army. There is an overlap, yes, but the difference does exist and it is important. (Shikako, in comparison, could easily stop a war.)

Then, with Shikako as Number Nine and a more preferable commander than Reginald, not only does the probability of a Tetsuki victory increase, it also becomes unnecessary. Because, again, for all that Shikako is more efficient on her own, she does genuinely like people and her affection/protectiveness for those she loves does sort of lead her into doing manipulative and/or morally questionable things on their behalf.

Shikako | Number Nine would still be crazy powerful and spitefully never use them in front of Reginald nor as part of The Umbrella Academy, the vigilante team. But she also gets to eat her cake and have it, too, because Tetsuki can, essentially, be her boots on the ground to protect their siblings who are child soldiers/vigilante. And Shikako can help Vanya wean herself off the medication/rumor combo and secretly train her powers behind Reginald's back.

Tetsuki | Number Eight wouldn't think to hide the fact that she has powers from Reginald, but she would be reluctant to share her more subtle/complex abilities from him as she rediscovers them. Eventually, she'll make them available for Shikako's use the more they begin to trust each other more as allies in the hell that is the Hargreeves manor.

Timeline wise, it goes like this:

Same mysterious birth circumstances, purchased/brought to the Hargreeves manor, nothing changed from canon except there are two additional babies.

At around three years of age,

Number Nine is cognizant enough to recognize that Reginald is a terrible man who wants to exploit them for their superpowers. She decides not to use any of hers where he would discover it.

Numbers One through Eight, unfortunately, do.

However, both Numbers Eight and Nine know better than to call the man father or dad. (Number Nine remembers her dad and would never sully the term. Number Eight doesn't hold any particular fondness for the concept, but even less fondness for the obvious predator).

Four through six years of age,

Number Seven's powers, lack of control, and subsequent rumoring/sedating/reprogramming occur as in canon.

Number Eight, understanding that her previous lives' training would help her in this life, uses techniques from Konoha that Number Nine recognizes.

Number Nine suspects Number Eight is from Konoha, but not yet vice versa.

Seven through nine years of age,

Numbers One through Six and Number Eight are trained as The Umbrella Academy, a team of elite child soldiers/vigilante.

Number Nine mitigates the worst of Reginald's abuse as best she can while also sussing out Number Eight as a fellow Konoha shinobi reincarnation and ally/subordinate and also also beginning her campaign for social independence for both herself and Number Seven.

(Violin lessons as per canon for Number Seven, but also piano lessons for Number Nine. Ballet/gymnastics/chess/shogi/etc for both. Academic excellence such that either or both of them can be very young doctors--whether MD or PhD. The more skills they can accumulate in order to bring "glory to the Hargreeves name" despite not being part of the superpowered vigilante team, the more outstanding/famous they'll be, the easier/sooner they'll be able to escape Reginald's sphere of influence. But obviously, Number Nine phrases it in terms of "return on investment" and/or wagers the lessons through games of chess/shogi?)

Ten through thirteen years of age,

Grace offers names to the children. Numbers One through Seven accept (or don't) as per canon. Number Eight asks for time to consider the name offered. Number Nine rejects the one Grace offers and reclaims the name Shikako. Number Eight vaguely recognizes the naming convention as belonging to the Nara clan, but not the individual name.

(Discussions of alternate universes/timelines are brought up in the dark of the night when no one can hear them. The discrepancies are interesting but ultimately insignificant in their present situation. More importantly, Number Eight was a tokubetsu jounin of T&I who specialized in longterm undercover missions. Shikako was a jounin who rebuilt a department from scratch, won a war, and was candidate for Hokage.)

Shikako tells Number Eight to choose her own name. Number Eight becomes known as Tetsuki.

The Umbrella Academy make their debut as the superpowered vigilante team as per canon. Tetsuki gets the codename Thunderbolt.

Number Five does not jump into the future and get stuck in the apocalypse--whether that's because Shikako has helped him with his calculations or because Tetsuki is enough of a challenge during training to keep him from the worst of his arrogance or because Vanya doesn't cause the apocalypse is up in the air. Again, I am not writing this wild idea.

Shikako (and Vanya) Hargreeves accumulate fame and various accolades as early as feasibly possible for human prodigies (for example, the youngest chess grandmaster is 12 years old.) This continues as they get older as well.

Fourteen through seventeen years of age,

Ben does not die. How fucking dare. Tetsuki would never let that happen on her watch. Also, maybe Shikako has done something such that he can more easily control the eldritch horrors.

(Is he literally a jinchuuriki? Does she make a stabilizing seal and also create a mental safe space so he can talk to them without being afraid? I do not know.)

The missions of The Umbrella Academy start to bring more publicity than actually doing good. Diego and Tetsuki push back. Tetsuki is arguably better at pushing back. Following Shikako's lead, she negotiates for skill investment (EMT training? Internship at the local firehouse? It's not quite as splashy as Luther going to space or Allison body guarding/dating teen pop stars, but its still good press, so Reginald allows it)

Shikako (and Vanya) Hargreeves continue to accumulate fame and accolades--possibly to the annoyance of Allison who hasn't yet or is only now just breaking into Hollywood via the Disney Channel Star route as per canon? Or perhaps she has already joined them in their quest for fame and accolades. (Youngest Olympic gold medalist was 13 years old, but age restrictions have made that impossible to match. They make do. Youngest ballerina laureate of the Benois de la Danse was 20 years old, they have time.)

Eighteen years of age,

Hargreeves siblings leave the manor (or don't) as per canon.

Shikako and Vanya no longer need the Hargreeves name or fortune since they have one for themselves. The siblings who need and want help to establish themselves outside said Hargreeves name and fortune are made aware it is available. Some are too prideful to accept.

Luther does not leave and so, despite her hatred of the place, neither does Tetsuki (no member of the Family gets left behind, this is something she learned even before Konoha.) Besides, the first responders of the city actually enjoy working with Thunderbolt who is professional and bothered to learn at their side and whose response to crises isn't just violence (it also doesn't hurt that she's literally fire proof).

Diego enters the police academy as per canon. (Is he kicked out for attitude problems as per canon? Perhaps not. Perhaps he succeeds because while Tetsuki went the EMT/firefighter route, she bullied him into working at the police precinct and getting an understanding for the aftermath of their missions. The sheer amount of paperwork for a bank heist/hostage situation interrupted by superpowered teens must be wild. Out of stubbornness/competition he stuck through it)

Nineteen through twenty three years of age,

the siblings that left grow and learn and heal (slowly, but still.) Maybe, beyond the pall that is Reginald Hargreeves, they feel comfortable enough to drift apart and join the rest of the “ordinary” world. Maybe not.

Luther and Tetsuki--frustrated but determined not to leave him alone under Reginald's thumb--continue to go on missions. Neither get critically injured on a specific mission involving biochemical threats that could have led to Luther being used as an experiment for a particular ape-like serum. But maybe they fail the mission

(Maybe Tetsuki fails the mission in order to save Luther? Tetsuki was once Kakashi's student, too, in a different timeline than the one Shikako came from. Not for long, and not so affectionately, but she learned the same lessons anyway). Maybe Luther gets sent to the moon regardless. Either way, Tetsuki is forced to stay.

Twenty four years of age,

Tetsuki dies (as per her usual canon).

The siblings convene at the Hargreeves manor. They mourn their lost sister.

(Shikako also mourns the loss of her fellow Konoha comrade, the closest connection to home she had for all that they were from different versions of it.)

Klaus cannot see her ghost no matter how hard he tries to conjure her. He is sober.

The siblings disperse once more, life goes on, there is no apocalypse.

[[Alternate twenty four years of age,

Tetsuki nearly dies, unlike her usual canon.

Instead she is recruited by The Temps Commission. She is the most effective member of The Umbrella Academy; far more tractable than Five and less loyal to Reginald Hargreeves than Luther. The others have their strengths and weaknesses, she has considerably more of the former than the latter.

They want to cause the apocalypse. They think she will help them. She takes the job.

(They do not know she was once a tokubetsu jounin of T&I who specialized in longterm undercover missions. They do not know she is loyal to Family above all. They do not know all of her abilities and certainly none of Shikako's.)

Alternate twenty nine years of age,

(Shikako stopped a god from destroying her world when she was a teenager.)

The Temps Commission never stood a chance.

There is no apocalypse.]]

Ask Box Advent Calendar 2020

Not a prompt, I'm afraid! Just wanted to say firstly, thank you so much for all the hard work and beautiful writing you bring to the DOS community; I've been reading your fics and blog for years, and it's very awe striking to me how large and brilliant all the creators are in, and you are one of my favorites. Secondly, I wanted to ask if you have seen the Umbrella Academy on Netflix? I'm already tossing over the idea of Shikako in that universe to myself lol

Thanks, anon! I haven't been as active lately (both in the fandom and writing in general) so it means a lot that the stuff I have done is still being appreciated. This is probably weird to say but I do miss the DoS fandom even though it hasn't exactly gone anywhere--or, I guess it's more like I miss the state of mind I was in when I was more active in the DoS fandom? There was something about it where my creativity and productivity were both just in synch creating a fun sort of feedback loop within itself. Now it's like... the desire is there, but I'm slogging through a swamp to drag the ideas out of me. Don't get me wrong, I do still enjoy it, but man do I miss that DoS self-renaissance from before.

Nonetheless, I'm honored to be counted as one of your favorites, and thank you again for your kind words :D

Re: Umbrella Academy on Netflix, I have seen it and I love it! (Both seasons, since I don't actually know when your ask came in. I think I like season 2 better than season 1, but obviously season 2 would make absolute no sense without season 1 so hooray for both.) And I also have thought about Shikako in that universe. I think with most new universes I encounter my brain automatically tries to put in either Shikako or Tetsuki Kaiza depending on which one fits better or which scenario feel right.

For example, in Boku no Hero Academia, I can't help but feel like Tetsuki would have been age-mates/classmates/friends with Todoroki Touya. It doesn't feel right to have her be the same age as the canon Class 1-A (well, I have a weird idea that kiiinda does that but involves time travel semi-angst so...) Whereas for Shikako, well, I wrote stuff about that. And while I could imagine her as Todoroki Touya's age and it does work, she just fits better the other way.

For Umbrella Academy, Tetsuki Kaiza doesn't really fit. Or, at least, not in a significant way? She has more of a "consultant/outside contractor for The Commission" vibe via the Dimension Witch than anything else. I mean, maaaybe she is one of the strange 43 babies born mysteriously with powers, but even then I don't think she ended up with the Hargreeves.

In contrast, when I think of Shikako in the Umbrella Academy, my brain is immediately like: oh, she's Number Eight.

And, here's the thing, I know within the world the siblings with the lower numbers were perceived to be the better/stronger/favored of Reginald Hargreeves, but like. Obviously not true. I didn't read the comics/graphic novels, so I don't know how accurate this is, but I'm pretty sure the higher the number the more powerful/less tractable the specific person was. And whether Reginald knew that or not is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, like, obviously Shikako who is crazy powerful and knows that's all Reginald wants from her and has withstood far better brainwashing/propaganda (and he's not even good at it) would never even show a peep of power. Out of spite. And solidarity with Vanya. But mostly out of spite. And also, considering Shikako's ride or die for her friends and more so for her brother, you know she would be all about mitigating Reginald's truly terrible parenting/training for her new siblings. And I just think there's a lot of space for her within the Hargreeves family relationships (or the dysfunctional lack thereof) for her to make small but significant changes.

[In contrast, Tetsuki would just be throwing more dysfunctional fuel into the fire. Depending on how much she does or doesn't remember, she would probably fall into the might is right trap and use force to establish herself in the Hargreeves hierarchy. Not because she wants to be Number One, but because she mostly knows the best method for survival is through shows of power. It doesn’t really contribute much to the story to have her as a Hargreeves, tbh, which is why if she were in TUA, she’d be elsewhere]

Shikako as Number Eight not using her powers out of solidarity for Vanya (while also simultaneously training Vanya to get her powers under control), commiserating with Ben about the call from the Horrors/Eldritch being from the Other Side (either because her powers are Void based or the experiences of Gelel/Jashin), snarking/collaborating with Five because he needs someone to push back and not just either ignore him/shut him down.

Is she haunted by ghosts from her former life? Could she help Klaus come to terms with death and the dead way earlier than in canon? Would Allison, seeing the sister solidarity of Vanya and Shikako, try to reach out to join them rather than ignoring them? Do Diego and Luther stop caring so much about ranking when its clear that Shikako doesn't and is all the happier for it?

I dunno, anon, it's a fascinating thought exercise.

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agentxthirteen · 7 years ago

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What if Agent Carter is Peggy’s daydream?

I just had this thought earlier, so please bear with me. What if Agent Carter isn’t canon, it’s one of Peggy’s daydreams while working at the SSR?

Evidence below the cut

Howard There’s a dichotomy in how Howard is portrayed in the movies versus Agent Carter. We know from the Iron Man movies that Howard is - at the very least - distant - to Tony, and the tie-in comics show he’s emotionally and sometimes physically abusive. The movies work this in by showing Howard’s digs to his son, his yelling at Tony to stop playing around in Iron Man 2, how much more Tony got along with his mom in Civil War. The First Avenger shows that Howard is a huge fan of his own - it doesn’t show him being abusive, but it shows him to be fascinated with two things: Himself, and Steve Rogers. And we know one of Tony’s problems with Steve is that Howard always seemed to like Steve more.

But in Agent Carter, Howard is a bit of player, but he’s essentially a good guy. Why? From the narrative aspect, we need Howard to be a good guy because we, the audience, have to be able to root for him, and root for Peggy to succeed in helping him. This Howard is one where no one would ever dream of him hurting Tony or being a bad guy. He might be busy with his job, but he’s not a bad guy.

In the interest of this theory, though, this is the Howard we get because this is the Howard that Peggy knows. She can’t imagine that Howard would ever hurt his child - hell, she can probably barely conceive of Howard turning into a family man, and so we get a version of Howard where no one would ever dream of this Howard striking Tony. We get the version of Howard who goes to a woman he knew years before to help him when he’s in a tight spot, instead of a virtual army of lawyers and private investigators, and who will happily repay in an opulent apartment so she’ll never have to worry about where to live ever again.

Steve Peggy and Steve are supposed to be an epic relationship in the MCU, but what if it wasn’t? The movies show them having a crush on each other, kissing once, and then Peggy moving on to a husband, kids, and grandkids, and Steve eventually trying to move on, too. Markus and McFeely confirmed that the two of them only ever kissed once. According to the Marvel timeline, Peggy and Steve knew each other for less than two and a half years. And we see in The First Avenger that they have crushes on each other for even less time than that. Peggy only gets one scene in The Winter Soldier (where she explicitly talks about how she had a full, happy life, and her only regret is that Steve didn’t get the same chance), and she gets a funeral in Civil War, where the writers and the Russos confirmed that Peggy was Steve’s last tie to his past, other than Bucky. There’s no mention of romantic love, because, well, Peggy moved on decades before and was no longer in love with Steve, and Steve had accepted that they would never have a relationship in 2012, possibly even when he went into the ice in the first place, and had been trying to move on himself for a couple years. So why do people think Peggy and Steve are this huge, epic romance when the movies don’t present it that way at all?

Because of Peggy, that’s why.

Peggy had a crush on Steve. All it ever came to, canonically, was a kiss. But her crush on him didn’t disappear when he did. Suddenly, she has this mission/daydream where she has a physical part of him. Her daydream helps her let go of him. And while the movie had to deal with the fight against Hydra, Agent Carter has more time to delve into her crush. Remember, she was possibly 19 but lying about her age to serve in the US and saying she was 21 (depending on what source you use - I saw a post somewhere long ago that showed two different DOBs, making her 21 in the States but 19 in the UK at the same time). Either way, she was YOUNG in The First Avenger. She had a crush on an international hero. It’s perfectly normal that the crush would run deep for her, particularly given all Steve did.

It also explains why the other Commandos referred to her as “Cap’s girl” and why there was a radio show where a character clearly based on Peggy is rescued by Steve, but why we never see any of this anywhere else. In Peggy’s fantasy, she and Steve DID have a chance to be together, and everyone more or less knew it and approved. She was the Chosen One. Which... anyone who’s been on earth for any degree of time knows that if a woman is dating a famous guy that others want to get with, it’s... incredibly unlikely that the woman is going to be liked. Look at fandom’s treatment of women, especially canon love interests, even in the MCU.

In her daydream, she and Steve had more than just a kiss. She was a respected member of the Commandos, respected enough that they would come if she called them, whereas in the movies we rarely saw her with them because she was assigned to Phillips. Again, we don’t see her close ties to the Commandos in the films - she storms the base with them and Phillips, is present at some planning meetings, that’s it. After the comforts Steve about Bucky, she refers to him as “your friend.” That’s the extent of their interactions. But in her daydream, she’s a heroine who was deeply loved and respected by everyone, where even the Commandos follow her orders because she’s amazing and because she’s “Cap’s girl.”

Ultimately, her daydream helps her get over her crush on Steve and move on to the guy in her office who might have a crush on her. Which brings us to...

SSR & the resets Why the hell didn’t Peggy jump to SHIELD at any point in the series? Why, at the end of S1, do we get Peggy saying she knows her own worth, and that’s good enough for her, but no one else except her office crush recognizes her worth, even though she has constantly outsmarted them and proved her worth?

Because in her daydream, she has no conception of SHIELD happening. This daydream takes place at the SSR, and she knows that when she comes out of her daydream, she’s still going to be where she started. So the daydream ends the same way it began, as far as her work goes. A bunch of coworkers who don’t respect her as an equal.

So she starts and ends each season almost the same way she started, quietly back at work at the SSR, with the exception of a transfer to Los Angeles to be near Sousa in S2. Which might mirror her considering a transfer in S2, and this daydream is the way of trying it out for size?

Jarvis While Howard is on the run in S1, he leaves Peggy - not with his legion of lawyers or investigators or their investigative tools - but with his butler. Who also follows Peggy’s orders and acts essentially as her sidekick. Her Bucky, her junior agent.

Am I saying she imagined Jarvis? Nope! We know he exists because Tony named his AI after Jarvis. I’m saying that she might have met Jarvis once or twice and she incorporates him into the daydream because she needs someone outside of the SSR, who has ties to Howard, and who will do what she says and can come through in a pinch. She might know that he’s married - but doesn’t know much about his wife - i.e., why we don’t see her in S1. So she imagines him to be what she needs to solve the case. This also indicates that each season is a different daydream - she didn’t know Jarvis’s wife in S1 because she didn’t yet know enough about his wife to imagine her well enough yet, only meeting her after S1′s daydream and thus including more about her in S2.

Michael The daydream theory also explains the set-up for Michael to return. The writers left it open-ended, but they implied that HE was the “M Carter” in the file, meaning he was alive after all.

But what if he isn’t? What if Peggy just daydreams that he might be alive. That there might be some sort of Russian program like she encountered in S1 with Faustus that might have taken her brother? In her daydream, she has the chance to rescue him. She would have saved him, they would briefly have been happy - or had the hope of it - and then he would have gone off before the end of the season again, and things would have gone back to being the same at the SSR, only this time with the hope of seeing Michael again, alive and more or less well. She’s setting herself up for another daydream, this time where she gets to save her brother.

Angie It would also explain why Angie didn’t feature more in S2. Plenty of people have noticed it was odd that Angie wasn’t in LA for acting and was written out of the show until pressure convinced them to feature Angie in at least one scene (the musical scene - a daydream within a daydream). But when you’re daydreaming about a different place, you tend to also cut back on which people you know would be there and then daydream entirely new people - both heroes and villains. So it would kind of make sense, right? Angie might have been a friend or a roommate in S1′s daydreams, but they aren’t close enough (assuming Angie found out about Peggy’s spy career in a daydream and still doesn’t know IRL) that they’re besties, and thus Peggy daydreams a different crew for her LA daydream adventures.

Jason Wilkes & the love triangle There were also complaints about the love triangle in S2, but if Peggy is daydreaming, it makes sense that there would be some romance to her daydreams, even daydreams where multiple people love her at once. Hell, her crush died, her last daydream was about getting over him and letting go, and now she’s bored of that sad crap and ready to daydream about something new. Working how crushes might work with different people, deciding which one she wants to follow up on... Peggy might have preferred to weigh the options in her mind, which is not only fine, but smart. Consider before engagement, etc.

As for Jason Wilkes, if the show is really just a collection of Peggy’s daydreams (S1, S2...) then he makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE. People have talked since the show came out about the show’s problem with white feminism, but this explains why. Because it’s from Peggy’s POV. She isn’t going to know enough or understand enough to portray racism realistically in the late 1940s. She might have heard things, she might even have witnessed some things (the MCU likes to gloss over the brutality and ugliness of racism), but she has never been seen seeking to understand the depth of racism the same way she seeks to understand the depths of sexism, because one of these doesn’t apply to her. So her daydream version of Wilkes lacks the more subtle presentations of racism. Outright racism? She’s there, calling it out and being an ally. But as the writer of the linked article (which is incredible, btw) points out, there’s no way that some people at the SSR wouldn’t be outright racist, and no way others wouldn’t be at least a little bit prejudiced. I posit that we don’t see that because the daydreams are from Peggy’s POV. She doesn’t see them as racist, she doesn’t see the microaggressions, the subtleties, the intricacies, and thus, she doesn’t think to put them in her daydreams, glossing over them the way so many people gloss over ugly things they don’t understand, things that make them feel awkward and uncomfortable, and thus things that they don’t want to see or address.

The technology Peggy has access to all sorts of technology, thanks to the SSR and Howard. Do we ever see it outside of the show? It doesn’t turn up in the movies, as far as I’m aware, and I haven’t watched enough of Agents of SHIELD to know if it turns up there. But Peggy grew up in the golden age of science fiction and worked at the SSR. She would have been able to imagine these weapons for herself. And it’s no surprise that Zero Matter tied in to Doctor Strange, because dark matter isn’t an entirely new concept.

The one-shot I think the Agent Carter one-shot is canon and was always meant to BE canon. The problem is, both the show and the one-shot are set in 1946. When they were writing the series, though, McFeely said he wanted Peggy to grind away in the SSR for a while longer, that they didn’t want her set up SHIELD that fast.

But if the show is just a daydream, it still allows for both to be true. S1 would be her daydream in S1 before Howard sets up SHIELD. She imagines herself working for a different boss - Dooley, who dies respecting her and her skills. Meanwhile, her boss IRL, Flynn, is never so much as mentioned.

Then there’s the S2 daydream, taking place later in the year, where she thinks about transferring to LA to be with Sousa, who has already transferred.

There was going to be another daydream, where she rescues her brother, but then the phone call comes in, and, knowing her skills and built up on heroic fantasies where she’s more than equal to the task of taking out one little gang, she takes on a mission Flynn didn’t want her to take. After that, she’s busy building SHIELD.

I.e., the show wasn’t cancelled so much as Peggy had to wake up and go to work.

Flaws with the theory I’m sure there are some? I’m interested to see what other people think. LET’S DISCUSS.

#tv: agent carter

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parkpavilion · 5 years ago

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Gleeful Abandonment of Restraint: An Interview with Howard Rodman, Author of The Great Eastern

Some months back I ran across a rather mysterious book. It bore no title, nor any other identifying information, just a bold strip of white text across an otherwise dark cover: “It's like twelve of your favorite movies at once, in full Sensurround.” It would take a far stronger man than I to resist that temptation, let me tell you. I opened it straightaway and didn’t put it down until I was done. What I had in my hands was an advance copy of one of the most singular and multifarious novels I’ve encountered in a good long while. The only thing I didn’t like about it was knowing that I’d have to wait to be able to share it widely.

The Great Eastern tells the true story of the SS Great Eastern, a technological marvel of the Victorian Age. Designed and built under the direction of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (yes, his real name), it was, at the time of its 1858 launch and for decades afterward, the biggest ship ever to sail. The details of its construction, the disaster of its launch, and its eventual triumphant role in laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable make for a gripping read.

There’s much more to the novel, though. In addition to being a sober historical account, The Great Eastern is also a fanciful tribute to the greatest tales of adventure from the 19th century. Wrapped around the reality of the monumental steamship is a rip-roaring plot that sees the anti-heroes of Moby-Dick and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea do battle with the fate of civilization at stake.

So wait, you’re saying. An obscure English engineer describes his love for metallurgy and manufacturing for pages at a time while Captains Ahab and Nemo make grandiloquent speeches and engage in all manner of creative steampunk-inspired violence? Yes, and it works. Remember how the players in Hamlet said they could perform any kind of drama, discretely or in combination? Author Howard Rodman has taken up their challenge and danced with exquisite grace along the knife edge separating fact and speculation to produce an incomparable tragical-comical-historical-industrial, a brand-new fictional genre of his own devising.

Finding out a bit more about Rodman and his varied talents, I realized I shouldn’t have been too surprised by the sheer muchness of his book. As well as being a novelist, he is professor of screenwriting at USC's School of Cinematic Arts; a member of the National Film Preservation Board; and thanks to the French government, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres [Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters]. Among his screenplays is Joe Gould’s Secret, based on the life and work of one of my favorite writers, Joseph Mitchell.

The Great Eastern (book, not boat) was successfully launched this week, and to celebrate its maiden voyage, Howard Rodman was kind enough to answer a few questions for me. Read the full interview below, and read the novel as soon as you can.

--James

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James Crossley: Why did you choose to cast fictional characters as your protagonists rather than their real-life creators, Herman Melville and Jules Verne?

Howard Rodman: My previous novel, Destiny Express, set in Berlin’s pre-War filmmaking community, featured two real-life protagonists, Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, as well as a number of “walk-ons” (Brecht, Goebbels, et. al.). It seemed more fun, this time around, to borrow characters already fictional: to inhabit the figures that Verne and Melville created rather than the authors themselves.

JC: Does that choice say anything about historical fiction or speculative fiction as genres? As I ask this I'm thinking that this two-part conversation between Kim Stanley Robinson and Francis Spufford would have been even more interesting as a triangle with you at one apex.

HR: Much of what I’ve written, as a fiction writer and as a screenwriter, has been set in period. I do love the research that writing historical fictions necessitates, the density of vocabulary, timeline, technology, that the world-building requires. What’s more fun than to discover the exact right word, now near-extinct, for an object or routine no longer part of our daily lives?

But as to the distinction between historical fiction and speculative fiction—that membrane is more than permeable. Caroline Edwards maintains [in the article linked above], correctly I think, that all historical fiction is alt-history. As proof: the authorial community can only answer the Munchausen question (“Vas you dere, Sharlie?”) in the negative. So we’re all of us making shit up all the time. Which is, of course, a tradition that goes back to Beowulf, the Iliad, and far beyond.

JC: Do you think your film background makes this a particularly cinematic work? Or is writing a novel a completely separate artistic activity?

HR: When I’m writing screenplays, I’m tightly constrained by format: 117 pages and you’re out; no digressions; each page must give you a reason to turn to the next one; and a stringent injunction against getting inside your characters’ heads (as opposed to showing what they say and do). For me, writing fiction is a gleeful abandonment of those restraints. On a good day it feels like freedom; on a bad day, like mere reaction formation. (Bad-boy acting out.)

To make matters more confusing: the book’s been optioned, and I’ve been contracted to write the film adaptation. So I need to summon both wild imagination (so as not to simply pour amber over the published tome) and appropriate restraint (the abovementioned requisites of screenwriting). I find refuge in that old saw of Gide’s: “Art is born of constraint … and dies of freedom.”

JC: Why employ a chronology that leaps back and forth over the years?

HR: I was interested in certain chronological rigors (months were spent dadoing and rabbeting the Verne, Melville, Brunel timelines), but also in deploying the narrative in the order I hoped would best entice the reader. The back-and-forth was intended—and whether it succeeded is not for me to say—to incite many small mysteries. Whereas a strict chronological narrative might succumb to and then, and then, and then.

JC: If I wanted to get highfalutin' about it, I'd say that The Great Eastern is highly polyvocalic. Less insufferably, I'll just say that its very coherent story is actually told in bits and pieces by a number of very different characters. Was this an accidental effect or the residue of design?

HR: Ahab and Nemo are, I’d maintain, the two great anti-heroes of 19th-century fiction. But both of them are, in their own ways, opaque. Melville doesn’t even tell us Ahab’s first name; the biographical details of Nemo’s life are withheld from Twenty Thousand Leagues and rendered only telegraphically in Mysterious Island. Thus from the beginning I wanted to give them their own subjectivities, their own voices: a Nemo with the carriage and diction of a Cambridge-educated Indian prince; an Ahab with the wild take-no-prisoners American yawp of an Iggy Pop or a William S. Burroughs.

Building from there, I wanted a Brunel voice, finding the sentiment within the engineer’s precision, the hesitations beneath the relentless can-do. And toward the end knew I needed yet another voice, that of Ahab’s lover, a character less mythic than the three previous, but no less crucial.

JC: I hope this isn't a spoiler, but I'm not sure that you've done the commercially astute thing and left yourself open for a sequel. What are your plans for your next book?

HR: Nemo dies at the end of Twenty Thousand Leagues. He dies again at the end of Mysterious Island. The Great Eastern assumes that the second death was as provisional as the first. And building upon this: that the well-known deaths of Ahab and Brunel were equally contingent.

Not to indulge in plot spoilers, but one may safely assume that there is no death in The Great Eastern so definitively documented as to preclude a subsequent reappearance. I can say no more.

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ladyeternal178 · 8 years ago

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There is no Song In My Heart

Dear Adam & Eddie:

If you’re going to try and rip off Joss Whedon this blatantly, you need to not be so phenomenally bad at it.

Seriously: the infant son of a hero and a villain is kidnapped away from someone that was taking him to be hidden from one of his parents for his own safety. He is taken to a demon dimension by his kidnapper, where they raise him like their own child and train him to serve their agenda. When he gets back to his parents’ dimension, barely any time has passed for them but he’s a fully-grown adult because time flows differently where he was raised, and he starts going after the good guys and his family because of the machinations of the bad guy that raised them.

Am I talking about Gideon from Once, or Connor from Angel? The only way to tell them apart is the fact that Connor actually managed to beat Angel a couple of times, whereas Gideon has never gotten the better of Rumple. Even when Gideon was using the Dark One dagger, Rumple outmaneuvered Gideon at every turn. Somehow, A&E managed to make the son of the Dark One, a character that could’ve been a huge wild card that completely realigned the balance of power in Storybrooke, totally fucking useless and only slightly less relevant to the story than the dwarves are.

But now they’ve also completely wasted the potential of a musical episode at the same time they were trying desperately to pull it off by using a similar set-up to BtVS’ Once More With Feeling.

See: Once More With Feeling used magic to make everyone burst into song, too. And it played with the idea that music, when combined with magic, can be used as a weapon. But where The Song In Your Heart utterly and completely failed to live up to its spiritual predecessor is that, rather than having the musical curse woven into the modern setting and illuminating something about the characters’ current emotional states, or revealing something critical that had been kept hidden from the others before now, they decided to cram yet another flashback confrontation between Snowing and the Evil Queen into an already overfull backstory.

All in the name of giving Emma’s massive inferiority and martyr complexes an opportunity to rear their ugly heads again and then allowing for a deus ex machina, a/k/a Henry, to come in and rescue her from them.

It makes no sense that Fiona and/or Rumple didn’t go after Henry when they were rounding up everyone in Emma’s immediate family to use as hostages. Henry might not be able to use his author powers to affect the Final Battle, but he’s still the Truest Believer. He above anyone would be the person most likely to keep Emma from being mired in self-doubt, since he has absolute faith. And maybe Fiona doesn’t know about that part, but Rumple does, having been privy to the events in Neverland and therefore knowing the reason why his father wanted Henry’s heart.

Not to mention that Henry is Emma’s son. You’re trying to tell me that the woman who turned herself into a fairy and very nearly used the Dark Curse’s precursor to banish all children in the Enchanted Forest to another realm in order to protect her own son didn’t think that holding the Savior’s son as a hostage wouldn’t get Emma to do anything she wanted? I doubt it, considering she didn’t even have compunctions about harming children to achieve her own ends before she became a fairy. And it’s not like his adoptive mother/step-great-grandmother, step-great-great-aunt, grandparents or step-father-to-be were in any position to stop her from hurting Henry, considering they were all her hostages, too. So why have she and Rumple leave Henry out there free to act instead of using him to leverage Emma?

Answer: A&E decided that the plot device they wanted to use was cool enough that the audience would ignore the plot hole and forgive the deus ex machina needed to pull it off. And they were wrong on all three counts.

The hard-won admission by Buffy to most of her loved ones that she’d been in Heaven when the Scoobies had resurrected her at the climax of Once More With Feeling was a cathartic paradigm shift for the characters and a gut-wrenching emotional pay-off for the viewer at the same time. We’d been hanging on the edges of our seats waiting for that reveal to happen, and the way we got it was pitched perfectly. Emma’s emotional epiphany in The Song In Your Heart didn’t have the same impact because we’ve been here before. We’ve been watching Emma re-learning this lesson in various ways since the Neverland arc in Season 3, and A&E are clearly running out of ways to keep convincingly putting her through this particular emotional journey.

But I think perhaps the biggest sin this episode commits is the aforementioned shoe-horning in of the musical confrontation between the Charmings and Regina. The Song In Your Heart isn’t even the first episode this season to be guilty of throwing something into the characters’ pre-Curse lives to set up a Chekov’s gun that will be used in the very same episode. But even with the pre-first-Curse timeline being a bit murky, A&E are running the raggedy edge of feasible when it comes to how much they’re trying to claim happened between the Charmings’ wedding and Regina’s first casting of the Dark Curse.

Magical settings don’t give you carte blanche when it comes to how much can reasonably fit into your backstory or timeline, and the advent of online fandoms with on demand access to re-watch, scrutinize, analyze and categorize every event in every episode has largely eliminated showrunners’ ability to rely on Bellisario’s Maxim when it comes to them prioritizing the cool factor of a plot device, twist or arc over the cohesiveness of their world-building. Flashbacks to the time before the first Curse are this show’s stock-in-trade, but even in the context of a musical episode, this vehicle could’ve been used in far better ways than it was here.

For example: in the modern Storybrooke era, the Black Fairy has cast a spell compelling the characters to sing what’s in their hearts because there’s something she needs to know from one of them that will give her an advantage in the final battle. They’re singing because truth potions/spells don’t necessarily get people to speak the truth of their hearts, but music always gets at the emotions we think we’re keeping hidden even from ourselves.

You could’ve had Snow & Charming waxing rhapsodic about their own wedding which dovetailed into a flashback about the ramp-up to the ceremony we saw in the pilot. You could’ve had Regina singing about how her mother’s pursuit of revenge, and her own, have robbed her of getting to have a wedding day like Emma’s, paired with a flashback of the Evil Queen observing the preparations for the royal wedding and finally snapping over Snow getting to have the happy wedding that she and Daniel nwere permanently denied. You could’ve had Zelena singing about how everyone’s making such a huge deal out of the wedding and it’s not as important as they’re all building it up to be before slowly revealing that, unlike Emma, she has no one that cares enough about her to want to give her a special wedding day and she is still mourning the one person that would’ve possibly ever wanted to marry her to begin with.

And then at long last, you have Emma singing about how she’s happier than she’s ever been and looking forward to marrying Hook, but the part she's not letting anyone see is that she’s frightened of losing the family that it’s taken so long for her to find and build and accept: if not to the Final Battle then to some other evil because there will always be darkness for the Savior to fight. That she knows they’ll carry on if she dies because that’s what they do, but she doesn’t know how she’ll go back to being alone again if something happens to them because she needs them to remind her that she’s no longer a lonely, unwanted orphan girl.

Cue the Black Fairy now knowing what she needs to know and cursing the town so that when Emma wakes up the morning after her wedding, she’s alone, isolated from everyone she loves, and she has to face the Final Battle without the support system she’s come to rely on to remind her of her own self-worth.

Was this episode fun for the OUaT cast & crew to make? Probably. The actors certainly seemed to be having a ball with the musical numbers, and some of the vocal performances were unexpectedly good. But it didn’t really serve the overall narrative, it didn’t give us any insight into the characters that we didn’t have already, and the emotional pay-off didn’t have anything to do with the musical device. The emotional pay-off was the wedding, and while I’m glad they didn’t fuck around with the actual ceremony (ruined weddings are one of my top five most-hated plot devices ever), there was no dramatic tension at all in the 50 minutes leading up to that moment and no interesting character development to make the time feel like it was spent wisely.

A&E should’ve called Papa Joss to consult. We would’ve gotten an episode with some heart for the songs to be in.

#once upon a time #ouat spoilers #ouat season 6 #episode 6x20 #the song in your heart #Adam and Eddie strike again #negative review #what were the writers thinking #was everyone on the creative team very stoned?#i'm a cranky bitch when my shows let me down #papa joss #joss whedon #joss whedon did it better #ats #btvs #once more with feeling #wasted potential #missed opportunities #serving the narrative comes first

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invertedfate · 8 years ago

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Attack of the Asks! ...Again.

My inbox has over 350 messages. I THINK IT’S TIME to fix that. So, consider this the first of many jumbo ask dumps where I will (hopefully) answer those questions you’ve been dying to see answered. Also, apologies for the repost. Tumblr accidentally posted it BEFORE I was ready.

Well, I’ll put it this way. IF No Mercy is an expanded campaign with at least six major boss battles. My goal is to explore cause and effect rather than replicate the original UT No Mercy mode. The story will be more thorough, and I aim to explore how these iterations of the characters would handle the threat of an actually hostile human. Make what you will of that.

Golly, wouldn’t that be something? Hehehe…

Alphys Takes Action is a pretty cool song, I will admit, and that does sound neat. I’m just hesitant of basing IF music off of other fantracks overall. One Shall Prevail has a Backbone influence, but recent iterations have made it more unique. I like that.

Imgur is the go-to site for most AU makers, but bear in mind that you may have to manually rearrange all of your caps. Imgur can be a bit temperamental.

I have a few vague ideas of how an IF + Fell combo might work, including Pap as a wacky, Dr. Eggmanesque scientist trying to make Frisk his sidekick among other shenanigans. I think he’d still help Frisk, but do so in more dangerous ways to prepare them for their deadly circumstances, whereas Sans would be a more legitimate threat and Undyne… I think she’d be even more consumed by her thirst for justice against humanity to a point that it’s ALL she focuses on anymore, and she’s more distant from her friends and the monsters that once looked up to her. IF Undyne may be fixated on getting that final soul, but while it has left her desperate, aggressive, and with tunnel vision, she’s not so consumed by it that she only cares about revenge. She still actively works to make monsters’ lives easier and make their dreams come true. I feel that fear would be a central theme in IF + Fell, with monsters wearing red and black and generally being more aggressive as a response to their fear of humanity (inspired by voltra’s Underfell interpretation). In the aftermath of the war, there’d be a mentality that only the strong can survive, thus the kindness and compassion innate to monsters would be suppressed in favor of hardening themselves off to a more hostile world. Thus, Alphys would probably be more cold and disciplined as a result of having to suppress her weaknesses. Whereas IF Alphys tries to bury her emotions and act the part of a strong leader, in the case of IFell, the mask would have consumed the poor girl, and her passionate, nerdy side would be deeply bottled up. MTT himself probably take on his human annihilation robot status with a bit more gusto while still serving as the Underground’s shining star. Probably more of a propaganda figure, though I think deep down he’d still hold humanity in high regard and desire to see their strength and convictions firsthand. I think he’d also be extremely protective of Napstablook, acting as a bit of a bodyguard for his ghostly cousin. I can’t say much about Toriel and Asgore due to IF spoilers, but on the whole, I think IFell would be less about edge and more about helping these monsters see that there IS still room for love and compassion in the world, allowing them to open up once more and embrace their true selves. Flowey, however, would be the same sassy weed we know and love, because it’s an IF derivative, and I like my Flowey’s manipulative and wicked. Siding with Frisk would be a matter of convenience, as humans ARE strong. Also, I think it’d be funny if he remembered canon and was like, “Oookay, when did everything get so dark?”

That’s basically the angle I run with on the whole. The fact that Chara in the No Mercy route states that the player’s guidance is what led them to their conclusions leads me to believe that Frisk’s choices impact whether they choose to see the world in a hopeful light or believe that the only way to proceed forward is through power. I’m also inclined to believe that the path of the No Mercy route leads them to believe that Asriel’s pacifism was wrong and, thus, he betrayed them, thus he is an obstacle, whereas Paci proves that Asriel’s choice not to kill was not without merit, culminating in them offering the memory that ultimately opens the door to “SAVING” him in the final fight. Thus, IF Chara remembers all this, thus they are already predisposed to Frisk’s kindness while also fully aware that Asriel won, that he reset the timeline in a significant way, and that Flowey likely sees the potential in this outcome. And yes, even the noncanon IF No Mercy will be influenced by Chara’s memory of canon paci.

Well, it’s certainly possible!

;) I couldn’t resist. IF, after all, is its own entity.

Final Fantasy may not be an anime, but it is obviously anime inspired, appeals to a similar demographic, and has had movie and anime spinoff materials. :P And yes, the references for LEsser Dog were rather apparent and intentional. ;)

FL Studio 12.1 and 12.3 (depending on the computer I’m using at the time). My go-to soundfonts include SGM, 8bitsf, THe Ultimate Megadrive Soundfont, Arachno, HQ ORchestral 3.0, Touhou, Earthbound, and the VSTs Realguitar, RealPC, Shreddage, Magical 8bit Plugin, and more.

We talked it over and decided that Frisk will still speak due to their dialogue being so integral to the story. However, if the game does reach completion, there would be more dialogue options so that the element of choice remains. As for Frisk being absent, you’ll just have to wait and see.

Aw, thank you so much! I’m always doing my best to make IF enjoyable and unique, so I’m happy to hear it’s paid off.

Again, thank you! I will say that I have every intention to see the main run through to the end. As for geno and anything else that may come after, I am making it my goal to get there, but on the off chance that I DON’T, I will of course reveal the plans. But again, my goal is to see things through to the end.

Undyne and Sans have a.. complicated relationship. Some of it I may delve into later, but as for her reaction at the end of the bonus, she is VERY aware that Sans is not to be messed with. He’s smart, he’s skilled, and his opinion of her isn’t the highest these days. She’s frustrated that he can’t see that humanity has OBVIOUSLY taken too much from monsterkind and believes that letting a human stay close to Papyrus puts his safety at risk whereas Sans thinks she’s being reckless, disregarding Papyrus’ feelings, and once again biting off more than she could chew. But perhaps it wasn’t always that way.

Jerry would thank you, but it seems he’s too busy eating cheese puffs and smacking his lips. But I’m glad you liked it! My goal with IF is to make it unique and surprising, as there are already so many role swaps out there.

Indeed. ;) Not that I have anything against folks liking Uswap, but meta jokes are fun.

I’ve heard bits of their work, but I really do need to listen to more. It’s quite an ambitious and fun project to say the least!

@ut-scramble-saga Chara is definitely up there. I mean, even aside from the lovely spritework created by E-Clare, ScrS Chara fascinates me due to their circumstances. Ten years in the Ruins, alone, has obviously shaped them in some saddening ways. There are cuts in the Ruins walls and pillars to show that they’ve had their share of fights. Knives hidden in their house as a result of paranoia from fending for themself at such a young age. Gardens to provide nourishment monster food likely lacks. They have matured in a way where they have clearly survived, but their loneliness coupled with the loss of their parents and just how quickly they grow to care for Frisk despite their views on humanity... it’s frankly touching and compelling from a narrative standpoint. Though I also adore Tale’s End Flowey and Sans for how unique their dynamic is. Papyrus!Flowey may lack a soul, but he tries so very hard to be good, and his relationship with his brother is so bittersweet. Sans clearly still loves his brother and does his best to recapture the bond they shared before Pap got dusted, but knowing that Papyrus can no longer feel love as a Flower... that he’s only pretending, grasping at emotions he no longer possesses... it hurts in all the right ways. Knowing what I do about Storyshift Chara, I could gush about how tragic and thought out they are, but as the Snowdin kids are so popular, I’d rather draw attention to the tragedy that is Storyshift Asgore. He is so kind, genuinely wishes to help Frisk for selfless reasons, yet it is clear that the determination experiments have taken a toll on him psychologically. He offers up his SOUL to them, despite the loving family he’d be leaving behind. He is THAT burdened by his mistakes, and it hurts so much, yet it’s so very ASGORE. Just. Hug the goat dad, okay? He is a sweetheart that must be cherished.

Thank you so much! Alphys and Mettaton’s friendship is tragically overlooked in fanworks, so I aim to fix that with IF. As for Frisk’s flaws... hahahaha... This child is a piece of WORK.

Yes.

#asks #inverted fate #no mercy run #sans #undyne #chara #ask dump #genocide run

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sage-nebula · 8 years ago

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Zelda is on my mind, so, Zelda!

My issue with the Zelda timeline is not that there’s a branch where “this is what happens if the Hero of Time dies in the fight against Ganondorf.” I think that actually makes a lot of sense. My issue with the Zelda timeline is how the original OoT split (adult timeline vs. child timeline) works out.

For the first bit, it makes sense to me that there’s a timeline split where the Hero dies because that’s just how Time works. Time, at least in my mind, is like an extensive, massive tree branch that we’re all traveling down, and every single time we make a choice a new branch splits off that one. You can also think of it like a road, and these are forks in the road, whatever. When we make a decision, new branches split off from that. There’s the branch we decide to start traveling down, but the other branches, representing events that don’t occur or choices that aren’t made, are still there. They still exist. And since they exist, there are things that happen on them, there are events that occur because of them.

So we take this situation, with Link fighting Ganondorf. On one branch, Link succeeds and wins the fight. Ganondorf is trapped in the Sacred Realm. On the other branch, Link dies. He is murdered and Ganondorf’s reign continues unchallenged. Both of these branches exist, because they have to, just as Link’s death at any other point in OoT technically should exist in separate branches as well (though since Ganondorf’s reign continues unchecked, they all mostly lead to the same end result, with the exception of if Link dies prior to getting all three Spiritual Stones---that should be its own path). The same is true for any other Zelda game, really, and it’s true for other characters dying as well. The way a timeline looks is that it’s less like a line with a few branches, and more like a series of infinite roads and branches, all continuously splintering and fracturing, some only marginally different than their neighbors, others radically so. In this line Zelda dies in the seven year game because she’s killed by a Gerudo soldier while masquerading as Sheik. In this timeline over here, Saria dies in the Forest Temple before Link can save her. In this one over here, Ganondorf dies because he chokes on a piece of pita bread, and so on and so forth. Maybe in this other timeline no one dies, but Death Mountain erupts. Sure, everyone is saved, but Kakariko Village is completely decimated from the lava, and so on and so forth.

What we see as the Zelda timeline is---or should be---an extremely simplified version for our consumption based on the events that are relevant. All of those other timelines absolutely exist, because they must, because this is how Time works, but we don’t see them noted because they’re not relevant. The “Hero dies” timeline is relevant because Nintendo has figured out what happens after that point. The other possibilities are there, but right now we don’t need to know about them. They’re not relevant.

So I’m more than fine with the “Hero dies” branch of the timeline because it makes sense. None of us saw it coming, but it makes sense. The other part, though . . .

Oh boy.

So, long before Hyrule Historia was released and the actual timeline was revealed, my friend Andy and I got into a three hour fight---a fight with actual yelling---about the Zelda timeline. Keep in mind that this fight was from something like midnight to three in the morning, and we weren’t angry so much as we were passionate, but it was still a very heated discussion that involved our mutual friend/Andy’s roommate Pedro yelling at us to shut up about it and stop (which was kind of hypocritical, because this was the same guy who would give twenty minute speeches about his philosophical beliefs, would allow us to say one sentence, and then say “no no no” before he went on another twenty minute speech, but nonetheless). This timeline argument was, specifically, about how the branch in the timeline occurred. We both agreed that the split occurred with OoT. However, we disagreed with how that split should carry out. To summarize, our arguments were as such:

Andy:

The split occurred when Zelda sent Link back in time. This left the Bad Future/adult timeline, where Link no longer was, and created a new future from the child timeline.

Me:

Zelda sent Link back, yes, but the true split hinged on Link’s decision after that. Namely, in one version of events he chose to go to Termina (Majora’s Mask), which resulted in him not being there when Ganondorf broke free and wreaked havoc, leading to the ocean future (Wind Waker) in which we are specifically told that the Hero of Time did not come when called. In another, he chose to stay in Hyrule, leading to him being there when the time came and Ganondorf being imprisoned again (Twilight Princess).

And we all know who ended up being right, but I still disagree with it.

Andy---and Aonuma---feel that the change comes dependent on where Link is, physically, at the time. The way that Andy and Aonuma feel is that Zelda physically sent Link’s entire body back through time, leaving the Bad Future completely open and defenseless for Ganondorf to come back and wreak havoc (never mind that the Seven Sages have all been awakened in that timeline, and thus it should logically lead to Twilight Princess and not Wind Waker, but nonetheless). Because the Hero is physically present in the child timeline, and can warn King Daphnes (who for some reason listens to a ten year old stranger he doesn’t know versus his ten year old daughter???), everything is fine in the Child Timeline, whereas it is not in the Adult Timeline.

I still vehemently disagree with this.

I disagree with the fact that the split occurs when Zelda sends Link back. In fact, I feel that Link going back, warning Daphnes, and averting that Bad Future (as Nintendo says he did) means that the Bad Future just . . . shouldn’t exist anymore. It’s been averted. They saved Hyrule, Hyrule is still suffering, Zelda sends Link back to fix this mistake, and he does. Ganondorf gets imprisoned as a result of him warning Daphnes. Then, some time after that, Ganondorf breaks free. In one timeline, Link has gone off to adventure in Termina, and Hyrule is defenseless. This leads to Wind Waker. In another, Link said “nah, I can live without Navi” and never went to Termina, therefore he is there to save Hyrule and say “not this shit again,” leading to Twilight Princess. That is when the split should occur, that is what makes sense. I can see Andy’s reasoning that “but the Bad Future does exist, you can’t just wipe a branch off the map like that,” but I feel like that’s precisely what you are doing if you go back to specifically negate the event where that timeline happens. And even if it still exists, technically, in the context of your story and the things relative to your narrative, it doesn’t. It’s like---in Majora’s Mask, Link specifically keeps traveling back to the start of the three days in order to save Termina. Of course he can’t save everyone in every Cycle, but at the end of the game everyone is saved regardless, from the Moon and otherwise. The timelines where they aren’t are now rendered null. We aren’t doing anything with them anymore. That’s Hyrule’s Bad Future, I feel. That’s the “Adult Timeline.” The split shouldn’t be dependent on whether or not Zelda sends Link back, but rather dependent on the choice Link makes of whether or not to leave Hyrule, which has been a choice that he canonically does make since 2000. Particularly given that Wind Waker followed Majora’s Mask, I honestly thought for years that the Hero of Time’s absence when the people needed him in Wind Waker’s backstory was a direct result of him being gone from Hyrule as a result of his quest in Termina.

So yeah, tl;dr, my unpopular opinion is both that I’m A-OK with the Hero Dies timeline, but I still take issue with when the split occurs in the rest of the timeline (or rather, how it occurs). I don’t jive with all this Adult Timeline and Child Timeline nonsense. I much prefer a “if we have MM, we have Wind Waker” and “if we don’t have MM, we have TP” type of split. That makes the most sense to me. Nintendo’s other convoluted nonsense? Nah. Leave that on the wayside, son. They messed it all up.

(Andy was pretty happy to win the fight years later, though.)

#unpopular opinion meme #tofukitten

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epic-design-project-blog · 8 years ago

Text

TEACHit Preparations

Week 5

For once there was no cooking by the team in our design meet-up. We were treated to a hand made, authentic Italian risotto prepared by a chef from Argentina! We topped it off with a glass of French, red wine each and a Magnum for desert. To see his recipe scroll to the bottom of the post.

K***’s Service Masterpiece

On a full stomach we sat back and listened to K*** talk us through two brilliantly illustrated, users journeys showing how different users would utilise our digital education platform:

The first journey involved an individual who discovers an opportunity to enter the therapy field in his local town. He uses the digital platform to build up the skills he needs to develop this career path. Through the digital platform he is hooked up with local experts who are able to offer him internships, mentoring and situated learning. He goes to the local therapist’s clinic for instance, to sit in on a session and build professional experience.

The second user journey illustrated how a user could build their skills in a more independent and self-initiated way through the platform. The user formed a learning path with a digital timeline of goals and milestones. To build the necessary skills that the timeline showed she needed, opportunities in the voluntary sector were highlighted. By gaining skills and experience in volunteer work the user was motivated to learn by doing meaningful work in their local town, subsequently helping their community as a positive by product. E*** and A*** were intrigued by the user narratives, A*** pointed out how valuable this local, voluntary work could be and how skills might be endorsed by the NGO or company the user volunteered for.

K*** also showed an illustrated vision of the learner timeline which would be created when the user signed up to the platform. The learner timeline is a record of all the skills of the user and also outlines future skill tracks and milestones which will help the user achieve an overarching goal. The goal could be “become a nurse”, “enter the design field” or “start own company” for instance, whereas milestones are more specific and might be “finish thesis” or “complete drawing of cartoon”. K*** mapped out how the user could identify a goal through a number of pre-set tags such as “become an expert in...” then “the design field” as a sub tag for instance.

Key Questions

K**’s service concepts were great food for thought! Our team review of her user journeys boiled over into a discussion about the ethical issues surrounding volunteer work and skill validation. We questioned:

• Does volunteer work undercut paid professionals?

• Does this matter if the learner is not an expert and the quality of their work is less? Expectations will be lower from the receiver of the learner’s service.

• Is volunteering for local projects or NGO’s more motivating because the learner feels like they are supporting a good cause?

• Who decides which NGO’s and companies will be linked to the platform? Does Pearson decide or is the platform open source and community led?

• How is the learning validated? Is there a stamp or certificate provided by Pearson or is it peer certified through reviews and recommendations? What if the learner’s work is of poor quality and they receive a bad review even though they have tried their best?

This final question about certification stimulated a lively debate amongst our team about our own peer review experiences with taxi services, code camp, italki, tandem partners and other services. The team shivered as we joined the dots between the desire for recommendations and “fake-nice” behaviour which was outlined in Black Mirror. Keep an eye out for an in depth post on our digital learning experiences coming your way soon!

The Learner Timeline

We moved on to mapping the learner timeline which we agreed is a core component of our concept.

We realised this timeline is incredibly flexible, it can:

Help “lost-learners” who don’t know what they want to do to identify potential career paths. by mapping their skills against people on linked

Help people who know what career they want identify the key skills they are missing

Support learners in reflecting on how they learn the best by using Ai to visualise your “learner style stats” and make suggestions

Link you to the community by highlighting comparable learners on the same skill tracks as you or find you a learning buddy to motivate you

Highlight sidetracks and other career possibilities by showing the careers of comparable learners or identifying other learning routes based on the learners interests

Supports motivation by helping lost learners form a clear, overarching goal (which can change over time) then breaking that down into milestones - bitesized paths on the skill track which are clear and manageable

Reinforces learning through reflection by mapping out your learning patterns and filtering other potential routes

We reflected on the fact that Ai playing a key role in the learner timeline made it seem like anything and everything was possible! We knew the value of our concept could get lost so we decided to pin down the minimum viable product - in other words, the value proposition.

Value Proposition - From Losties to Indies!

The team decided, once we set aside the bells and whistle the key ingredients of our timeline are:

Help the learner set their goal and break that down into clear milestones

Support reflecting on learning i.e. learning through reflecting

Document & celebrate success, motivating the learner

Fluid/dynamic/smart leaner planning

Identify the unique way each learner learns best

E*** described the learner timeline as a meshwork in the sense that it is not a clear, straight path but may have sidetracks or twists and turns as the learner changes their goal or changes career direction. We know that the career ladder no longer exists in the conventional sense - with employees at the same company for 50 years working their way up from a junior to a senior position. Transitionals may change their career up to 10 times in their lifetime, within or outwith the original field they were trained for. Why doesn’t learning reflect this?

A*** pointed out that perhaps a learner journey should look more like a tree than a straight “track” with many possibilities branching off it, just as she had visualised in her moodboard.

E*** went on to compare the learner timeline as offering the capabilities and tools to “guided learners” that “independent learners” already have. In other words:

Those people that learn best are those who have a goal and can access the skills and information they need to learn to achieve that goal.

When learners do not know what they are aiming for their learning stops making sense and they feel demotivated!

Number 2 is a pretty grim situation we have all experienced at one point or another. The feeling is summed up very well by one of our interviewees:

“When I was an undergraduate... I wasn’t seeing the bigger picture. In a modular a type of education the teachers of different content and modules didn’t communicate - so sometimes content from different teachers would overlap and I thought it was a waste of time. Or I didn’t get why I was being taught that. I didn’t know the overall goal of that year so I really didn’t like it.” - Female interviewee, age group 30-40

Combining the timeline with the TEACHit model is a way to test the effectiveness of the timeline and the hypothesis that the best way to learn is through teaching. This is also supported by our desk research and learning theories.

TEACHit Aims and Expectations

The team is excited about the upcoming TEACHit bootcamp, February will be full on for our learner H***! However, we realised we need to make sure to evaluate our level of success against our goals. Our learning goals for TEACHit are:

Does peer-to-peer education motivate you to stick to your goals more than other types of education?

How effective is project based learning and clear goals at motivating the learner?

Which learning activity is the most successful (e.g. reflecting, teaching, situated etc.)?

There are other questions we will keep in mind, but still need to decide whether they are a core value of our proposal or not:

How does active compare to passive learning in terms of effectiveness?

Is learning by teaching effective?

How do we implement learning in a “meshwork” format rather than a “ladder” and is it more effective and relevant to the user?

How important is the community connection for motivation? This could be in the form of a learning buddy or partner for instance.

TEACHit Templates

Our final activity for this design session was to reflect on our teaching and research methods for the learning sessions with TEACHit learner H***. We decided there should be communication between the teachers, a mid-point review and templates used by both the teachers and learners to help them reflect. Our question template asks the student/teachers questions such as:

How did you prepare for the lesson?

At which point did you feel most engaged and why?

At which point did you feel bored and why?

Which learning method did you find most effective?

Did the learning session meet your expectations?

We are looking forward to making a second paper prototype of our timeline which will test and ultimately co-create with our learner H*** in the coming weeks. For now, over and out!

_______

Risotto

You will need (serves 4):

1/2 onion 1 pepper 150g Chicken in pieces 150g Parmesan Butter 1tbsp Vegetable Stock 6 mushrooms Olive oil Dash of red wine (optional)

#Risotto #black mirror #Education #2027 #Innovation #Learning #TEACHit #pearson #D&AD #future of education

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abigailmillardblog-blog · 8 years ago

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Unit 9 & 10 Documentaries: Evaluation 2

3rd March 2017

Pre-production

During this part of production process I barely had any paperwork to complete because I already had completed it from last time, the only thing that I had to complete was the screenplay which I completed within a couple of weeks.

Production (filming)

Originally I had most of what I needed for the documentary and only had to film a few filler shots that would intentionally help transitions from one interview to another. The main focus of these shots were for transitions for the interview with a support worker, my teacher as well as most of it being visuals for my own segment that just was consisted of a voice over.

Post Production (editing)

Once I had all of my new footage there were a lot of issues that I had faced during my editing, the first being how I couldn’t find the project that I used for my documentary and the second issue being editing it down to fit the limitation of 7 minutes.

The issue of me being unable to find the project I used to edit my documentary the last time meant that I had to use the timeline from the final piece and import into a new project and edit around it. The only consequence of this would be that a few parts of my documentary were already edited in such a way that no matter how much I shortened the length of certain phrases that people said in a interview the transition from one clip to another clip would be noticeable either way because of how poorly I cut that particular clip. Not only this but a lot of the background that I used within my documentary before came as one piece so I had to separate it from the main timeline, this was something that I had to have help with as I wasn’t confident on how to do it. In regard to the audio however a lot of the time there was a lot of hiss from certain pieces of audio within an interview, in particular the interview with the support worker so I had help in altering it so the hiss isn’t heard as much and lowering the volume on certain parts of the interview with the support worker as well as turning the volume up on the audio for the interview with my teacher since a lot of the time their voice wasn’t loud enough to be heard.

On the other hand the issue of time limitation got to me the most when I came to edit, since I had in total 45 minutes worth of footage and a lot of things said within the issue I found necessary for the documentary. So it took me a while to figure out what pieces of information to include within the documentary and what needed to be cut out. I think I found this a little bit more difficult than it needed to be as i was thinking more about content then time length. Furthermore following the narrative of my original idea of how I wanted to edit my documentary the fundamental idea remained, which was voicing different angles of people who suffer from depression from the perspective of someone who doesn’t get help for it, from a family member and the perspective of someone within the NHS that has suffered from it before. However the idea of voicing the opinion of someone who hasn’t been to a GP about their depression got cut out so that only pieces of how the interviewee describes what it feels like shows out more instead.

As well as the previous issues that I have mentioned another issue I faced that was more personal is how I think I was a little too over ambitious for this documentary, trying to use animation for the documentary introduction as I stated in the presentation for my documentary where I’m still trying to figure out how to do that. However overall I think the finished version of this documentary came out a little to what I imagined it, as close as it could get in terms of how it was edited and in some cases filmed.

Feedback

After looking back on the finished version of the documentary I picked up on some things that I found effective and things that needed to be worked on some more.

- The first two facts on screen come up too fast for the audience to read as well as certain names. In addition to this, the first two facts of depression coming up to fast for the audience seems partially effective if it were images instead of words but it’s words and as the visuals proceed within the documentary it comes across as not consistent as the length of time the facts are put on the screen for the viewers to read are much longer than they are for the first two that appear on screen.

- The introduction to the documentary that transitions to the first interview is somehow effective because it automatically grabs the reader’s attention with the narrative. For an example the introduction is consisted of cut away from an interview with someone describing what depression feels like is effective for the audience as it automatically the audience a very strong impression on what the documentary is about other than just reading the title. So it gets straight into the illness as the topic of discussion.

- Visually there interview with the support worker had too much dead space.

- I think that the facts that appear for a short time throughout the documentary would be better if they all linked into what each person had to say within the documentary as this didn’t always happen and if it did it would help the audience to understand certain aspects of what was said more.

- Notable cut away’s visually make it odd to the audience I think because it just seems out of place.

-The use of music at the beginning of the documentary in particular is effective, especially when used as background music for the introduction as it’s tone fits the nature of the documentary.

- More music could have been used as a background for interviews I think.

-More footage to go with the voice over could’ve been more effective rather than just the one that uses one location.

-The music at the beginning of the documentary is slightly too fast I think.

Target Audience

I think that this edit of the documentary appeals more to my target audience because it has more information about the topic of discussion than it did in the previous edit so it engages the audience more, as well as the fact it has more visuals for the audience whereas in the previous edit a lot of footage seemed too long so it would be less engaging for the audience. Furthermore the documentary in its self I feel is relocatable to the audience as it voices the opinions of people who suffer from depression as well as those that know someone who suffers from depression so it doesn’t come across as asking for pity as that’s not what the intention of the documentary, rather making people aware of depression and advising those who don’t understand or accept how to set their frame of mind.

For my final project I am writing the script. I have looked at Skillset in the past but I did look at a series of other websites which I have put on my blog. I found out that development of plot and characters for TV is more gradual than in film where characterisation has to be done more quickly..

For inspiration I studied the work of David Benioff who writes Game of Thrones with his writing partner DB Weiss. I love fantasy fiction and I learned that Benioff adapted parts of The Iliad (about Troy) to help him with the plot of Game of Thrones.

I also looked at some script websites like Simply Scripts and read part of the script to Sin City to help me with my final project. The research I done for this unit will help me understand more of what

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