#which is partly great because I’ve expanded on them so much

[dannybobany]

Went to clean up my discord and stumbled upon years old messages with oc stuff I thought was lost to history (by which I mean that when I first started with the characters who I currently refer to as my main oc’s they were actually gacha life characters I was making a dumb little series which as since been deleted and I THOUGHT there was no real evidence of until I stumbled upon tones of stuff about I’d sent to a friend at the time)

Not to expose myself here but the stuff a younger me was coming up with was WILD, apparently there was an entire love triangle plot I completely forgot about and I found evidence of two characters I assumed were fully lost to history, also literally all of them are white which is genuinely shocking to me because like half of my current cast is poc I genuinely forgot they used to be white… there’s also just a lot of very weird characterization and several of these characters have since gone from teenage sidecast to adult characters deeply integral to the story

There’s just so many layers of “oh god I forgot about that” and I’m spiraling about it holy shit

[kindheart525]

What do you love the most about MLP: FIM?

To be honest a lot of it comes from nostalgia and the fandom! I was 10-11 when I first got into MLP and 15 when I joined the fandom as a next gen artist, so I’ve really grown up with the show. Without getting into too many personal details, watching MLP comforted me during some very medically difficult periods in my life, and being part of the fandom helped me feel like I had a community during some lonely and frustrating high school years (I wasn’t bullied, I just didn’t have very many irl friends).

I know many MLP fans have a similar story of “growing up with the show” and/or the fandom helping them through tough times so my answer may seem a little cliche, but it’s true. There was a period in my teenage years where I lost interest in the show itself and only engaged with the fandom, but in the past year I have started watching the show again. It’s not the MOST well-written television show to ever exist but that fact is to be expected from a kids’ cartoon. Still, it was great to see how much of it still holds up, partly because of childhood nostalgia but also because the characters are genuinely great. Twilight Sparkle was even more relatable to me having watched her journey just before graduating college. Applejack and Rarity also have so many traits that are relatable to real adults even though they are living in a TV-Y rated world. At the very least, they create the kind of show that parents can watch with their children and mildly enjoy. I know MLP is not for everyone, but I can definitely see the lasting appeal.

It’s my time in the fandom that has been the best part of my MLP experience, for many reasons. I know a lot of people have mixed feelings on the fandom because of the drama and toxicity that it sometimes creates, but I think every fandom has its bad side. The MLP fandom isn’t uniquely horrible. I’ve been incredibly lucky to be part of the fandom at a time when it’s more comprised of young adults (and when I first joined the fandom, fellow teenagers) who also grew up with the show like I have, which has led me to make a lot of connections with like-minded people. One of which is my best friend of 7+ years @glitterfleshgum who I am eternally thankful I crossed paths with. Our friendship is one of those rare gems that goes far beyond our mutual love of MLP and even fandoms in general, the kind that we know will last long after our mutual fandom has died. Even now we support each other in so many ways that have nothing to do with MLP. One of the great things about fandom is being able to make connections like this because we definitely aren’t the only ones with a story like this. She and other friends have also helped me expand my interests in music and TV, which has truly enriched my life in being able to see new experiences and gain new sources of inspiration in my own creative repertoire. Thank you so much ❤️

And of course there’s all the stories I’ve gotten to write! MLP has given me so much inspiration for fanfiction and original characters that have really improved my writing skills and broadened my creative outlook over the years. I’ve always loved drawing and making up stories as a child, and my time in fandom has allowed me to do those things in a way unlike ever before. I know MLP isn’t unique for having so much creative potential and that fanfiction and next gens exist for almost every piece of media ever, but I’m really glad I had MLP has been my outlet for such creations.

In short, my answer has much less to do with the MLP: FiM show in itself, but all the ways that being a fan of it has and continues to enrich my life!

[tenshiharmonia]

I'm currently watching a let's play of Tales of Vesperia, and I must say, I'm still a little sour that they didn't expand more on Elucifer (or Elucifur, as it is spelled in the French version*). I mean, sure, he is long dead when the party finally hears of him, but still, he played such a pivotal role in the history of their world, both past and present. And I'm not even taking into consideration what happens during the ending of the game.

Truly, there are so many unresolved things about this guy. What happened to his apatheia, for example. We can see Duke mourn before a tombstone on Ehmead Hill that is supposedly Elucifer's. But as we know, Entelexeia don't leave corpses behind them when they die, so could it be his friend's apatheia that he buried on that cliff ? I mean, the scene in Yormgen shows that he much prefers to "return" them to aer, but one can only wonder if he actually could have brought himself to destroy what is essentially the soul of the person he held the dearest in the entire world. Granted, if Elucifer’s apatheia was still around, one could think that Duke would have been a little more enthusiastic when hearing about the possibility for his boyfriend to be reincarnated. But then again, considering how unnatural he thinks the process is, it could be brushed off as him not being thrilled at the idea of his dear comrade being defiled like that...

Another theory I’ve seen is that Elucifer’s apatheia was stolen and used by Alexei to power Heracles. I mean, according to a conversation in Halure, the dude was reportedly ginormous. At least as tall as the town’s giant tree (then again, said conversation also states that his body is buried under Ehmead Hill, so it has to be taken with a grain of salt). So it’d make sense for his apatheia to be quite big, and the one that powers Heracles is probably the biggest we got to see. Also, I could easily imagine the guy talking with the deep voice that thanks the party when they destroy the crystal to save the capital (which would in turn match what we know of Elucifer’s character, as he was a gentle soul who would obviously object to his power being used to cause such a cataclysm). But then again, I’m having a hard time accepting the idea that Duke would have let Alexei - or the Empire for that matter - run away with his partner’s apatheia...

Anyway, if Elucifer’s apatheia is still intact, it begs the question : what happened to him when they all were converted into spirits at the end of the game ? Sometimes, I like to think that he would have been reborn as Aska, the great spirit of Light. Although I must admit that it’s partly because I tend to subconsciously use Aska’s model from Xillia 2 (I’m sure you know which one I’m talking about :p ) as a mental placeholder for what the guy might have looked like. I mean, his daughter sported quite a lot of avian features, so I guess it’d make sense for him to look like a big bird. Besides, if I recall correctly, Duke describes his golden form - at least in the French version - along the lines of "his friend lending him his strength", indicating that it's something he learnt from Elucifer. So I don’t think it’d be too much of a stretch to assume that the Entelexeia sported a similar palette when he was alive. Which, in turn, would go pretty well with the idea of him having an affinity for Light. And I’m not even talking about how his name alludes to a certain angel also known as the "bringer of light"... I’m just brainstorming, of course, but I think that you can see where I’m coming from.

That being said, I also kind of feel like being reborn as an elemental spirit wouldn’t really be "enough" for an Entelexeia as powerful as Elucifer, if you see what I mean. So maybe he could be reincarnated as one of the franchise’s traditional higher spirits, like Maxwell or Origin. The latter is usually revered as the king of spirits, so it’d make sense for him to be born from the one who was regarded as the king of the Entelexeia. Then again, I’m just sorting ideas here, so don’t take any of this as definitive headcanons (supposing that headcanons can even be definitive...).

Speaking of kings and headcanons though, I also like to picture Elucifer as a descendant of the Spiral Draco, which Duke describes as "the ancient king of the Entelexeia". Maybe not his son, but his grandson. I mean, as I said, Elucifer was also regarded as a king among those mighty beasts, so it’d make sense if he inherited the title. Moreover, if we take into consideration the previous point regarding Duke’s golden form and how he may have learnt it from Elucifer, it’d give a new layer to the way the Fell Arms react to Duke’s power during the third phase of the final battle, as they were made using the power of the Spiral Draco. Besides, while the Entelexeia are usually born directly from aer, we know for a fact that they can also produce offspring - although the exact details of the process were obviously left to the imagination -, as demonstrated by none other than Elucifer himself.

Anyway, I don’t think I have anything to add on the matter, but still. As you can guess, the relationship between Duke and Elucifer is one aspect of the game that I find infinitely endearing and fascinating**. And I still resent the game for its unwillingness to elaborate on the topic. I mean, come on ! They didn’t even let us get a glimpse of what the big guy might have looked like ! And it’s not really an uncommon stand that, as excellent as the game is, a good chunk of its characters could have afforded to be fleshed out a little more... With that being said, thank you once again for your attention. It’s always a pleasure to share my thoughts with you guys. I’ll make sure to write a follow-up if I think about anything else, but for the time being, take care. ^_^

 * I must admit, I kind of prefer the "fur" spelling. Sure, it makes the etymology slightly less perceptible, but it also makes him sound like an extremely fluffy guy. :3

** It goes without saying that I like to picture them as having been more than friends, but obviously, it’s only a matter of personal interpretation.

[lediz-watches]

Dragon Age: Additional Material

I’ve been playing Dragon Age again… multiple times… through DA:O and DA2, but not Inquisition because ugh. And it’s been making me think about marketing, and The Dragon Age Problem.

I would like to call it a Bioware Problem, but it’s not. Bioware does have many problems, but the one I’m dwelling on is pretty unique (within Bioware’s franchises) to Dragon Age – it’s about the multimedia marketing strategy. And don’t get me wrong, they are not alone in this strategy – a lot of producers think it’s a great idea. But I have yet to see it work with anything that is not aimed at selling children’s toys.

The general idea is this: you have one main form of media, which is your expensive driving force. It’s what you pour the money into, it’s what people spend the most money on. But then you use as many other (cheap) media forms as you can to add onto that, adding lore and story and depth, so that people will either seek out that other media, or pick up that media first and become drawn into the main driving force. The idea is that you hit as many things as possible to create a franchise. You’ll hit market share, you’ll have fans grow up with media, you’ll have die-hard fans buy everything regardless of quality, it expands, it grows, it generates income.

Think Hot Wheels, Barbie, Disney… Pokemon was the great success story in this strategy, because they have video games, the anime, multiple manga, trading cards, toys, books, playing cards, jewellery, clothing, homewares, food…

And people have grown up with pokemon, and they’ve given it to their kids, and it continues. So of course all producers think they should emulate Pokemon.

Dragon Age was always kind of intended to be a young adult take on this strategy. They weren’t shy about it. From the very beginning, Dragon Age was supposed to have comic books, novels, they were angling for TV deals, they desperately wanted an MMO to spawn… but they’re just not good at it. Partly because young adults don’t like buying anything, and Bioware’s main audience is young LGBT+ which uh… Pirate Audience, my friends. Partly because adults are not…

Kids are going to buy whatever has their favourite character’s face slapped on it. Quality isn’t as important, because chances are they’ll grow out of it before it breaks. So you can produce lots of cheap merchandise and mark it up and it will be gobbled up by the consumerist market because kids do that. Adults, on the other hand, have bills to pay and lives to live. You want us to buy merchandise, it better either be functional, really cool, or at least exceptional quality. So yeah, not great for consumerism.

So they focussed on additional media, and you see them pushing this agenda with Dreadwolf now, as they say ‘you have to read/watch/consume this extra stuff to understand the story!’

Don’t get me wrong, it doesn't not work. Some people will consume the additional media, but I’ve never heard of someone coming in to the franchise from these sources. And while I have seen people gush about the shipping (because Bioware knows their fanbase), outside that the most positive reaction I’ve seen to additional material is a kind of… begrudging acceptance. Like ‘yeah, well, I want to get as much lore as I can, so I guess I need this.’

And so I find it obnoxious, not just from a fan perspective, but also as someone on the edges of digital media production. Because in good marketing, additional material is advertising. You shouldn’t need to know everything to enjoy one aspect of the strategy, but everything should entice you to purchase the main product. That is good marketing.

In Pokemon, you can just watch the TV series. You do not need the games, but I cannot tell you how many adult fans I know who gave Pokemon Sun and/or Pokemon Moon a chance because XY&Z was a good show. But the two things were actually unrelated. And you don’t need to know anything about the franchise to enjoy the toys, but kids will watch the show or play the games to see their toys moving in real time.

Disney is dancing on a similar knife edge, actually. Because for decades, Star Wars was the proof of concept for what Pokemon perfected. You didn’t have to watch the movies. You didn’t have to watch the TV shows. You didn’t have to buy the toys, read the books, whatever, you could just enjoy a single piece of media for what it was, and chances were it would entice you back into watching those old movies. Whereas now… you can watch the first season of The Mandalorian without context. You might get a bit confused, but you can do it. In season two, there’s important characters who you’re clearly supposed know. I haven’t tried yet, but I’ve been told you can’t watch season three without watching The Book of Boba Fett, which relies on you having either watched The Mandalorian or read some of the books and arghhhh! I do not have time for this, Disney!

And marketers are so confused about why this strategy isn’t working. Clearly the pirates are to blame.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in academia, but this is one of those areas that if I had gone down that path, I’d want to study. Because that disconnect between marketing and consumer strategy is fascinating.

But anyway, Dragon Age. I loved Dragon Age Origins. It remains my favourite game of all time. I enjoy the gameplay, building my characters, forming my team and weaving their growth together. I loved reading the lore, I love thinking about the world, I adore my Wardens and the impact they have on the people around them. I have three Wardens that I consider fully fleshed out characters, and three more that I dabble in for funsies.

I enjoy Dragon Age II. Hawke’s story is a beautiful tragedy filled with love and hope and characters I want to get to know. The gameplay is okay, though you’re really just jumping between dialogues, and the voice acting is incredible. I have two Hawkes that are fleshed out, and a third I dabble in because he's the follow-on from my favourite Warden.

I very barely tolerate Dragon Age Inquisition, because I actively dislike the Inquisitor, and I don’t really like the gameplay. The voice acting is beautiful (Freddie Prince Junior, where were you hiding that talent?!), but they tell a story I am not comfortable with. And frankly when I play the game I find Solas even more eye-roll inducing than DA2 Anders, so the fact Dreadwolf is named after him…

And now this line from Bioware about required reading? When I’ve always found the additional material subpar at best and demeaning to my babies at worst?

Look, I’m just saying that Outside Xbox is going to have to have some incredible sponsored content before I’m going to even consider picking up this game.

But—and this is my reason for writing this—Dragon Age lore does actually give itself to additional material that I would love to see. I want to know more about Maric’s story. I want an HBO or Paramount+ adaption of DA2. I wouldn’t mind an Amazon Prime animated series about the original Inquisitor.

Those are the stories I want. And I’m going to rant about them over on the main blog. Because there’s very little in the actual additional material that I enjoy consuming.

It could have been so good...!

[concentrateandpush]

Just like Charles had promised, he barely let me stay not pregnant. Baby is only 11 months old and I’m 40 weeks pregnant, which is unheard of with twins. I’ve been up all night with the little one and she’s at that point where EVERYTHING is interesting, fingers in plugs, stuffing bread into where it doesn’t belong.. we’ve gone through 3 iPhones because they just done belong in the bath. But, she’s beautiful and eagerly awaiting the arrival of her little play mates.

“Sweetheart, are you going to have nap time? Then when you wake up, Daddy’s going to be home?” I smile, trying to entice her into the idea. She shakes her head and just runs wild, it’s not that I don’t want to play with her and keep her entertained, it’s that I physically can’t at this point. “Up! Up!!” She smiles to me and I just can’t resist her face and so I get up letting her pull me to where ever she wants. “Ake! Ake!” She smiles, anything but fucking baking “Oh angel.. Mommy’s really tired” I sigh and kneel down “what about drawing? Or even.. even swimming?” I offer and her eyes light up.

Luckily, we have a pool in our garden, a decent sized one. “Okay, come on” I nod and get her changed before getting myself into a one piece. Once we’re in, she’s loving life, she’s like a sea creature, she’s always been great in the water. I look down at my stomach and give a gently brush over the top “we’re ready for you babies” I whisper. As if by magic, I start to feel an all too familiar pain. Biting my lip and just observing, I watch my stomach as it tightens slightly. I had already gotten my mucus plug, so I knew it was coming, but it takes me by surprise.

I ride through a few easy contractions and then decide it’s time to get out “Okay, sweetheart, time to get out” I smile and laboriously grunt as I pick her up and climb out. She senses something isn’t quite right, I know this because there was no nagging to stay in there. I check the time and sigh seeing that it’s still a while before Charles comes home. I settle her down and get her on the couch in a big towel and wrap one around myself, just trying to ease the pains as they come in and let out.

A while goes by and I check the time again, he’s late, baby is passed out on the couch with some kids show playing in the background and I can’t carry her up to bed at this point. Things are getting harder and I find myself squatting as I hold onto the kitchen counter, panting and trying to not wake her. I reach for my phone and call him, letting it ring and ring until he picks up “Babe? Im so sorry, work was crazy” he explains and I cut across “I need you here, I’ve gone into labor” I explain. “Shit, okay.. I’ll have Mom come and pick her up” he says fast and I shake my head “no you know she won’t let us do this alone” I sigh. “Okay, okay.. I’ll.. what about Juno?” He offers and I nod “yeah, just.. just get her here” I say as I clearly get closer to another contraction.

With in minutes, Juno comes in and looks around, I’m still on my knees in the kitchen. “Juno! She’s asleep there, she should sleep through, please just.. don’t tell them that they’re coming yeah?” I ask and she nods “I’ve got you, I won’t say a thing.. I trust you won’t say a thing in a few months when it’s my turn” she smiles softly and I beam at her “you’re kidding me?!” I ask as I get up and go to her, wrapping my arms around her “that’s amazing, I.. I’m so happy for you” I giggle. “Thank you, I’m ten weeks” she blushes. I knew that her and her girlfriend wanted a baby, but I didn’t expect her to do it at 17 and I have no idea who the dad is, but her face.. she’s so happy. “I’m so proud of you” I smile and tuck some hair back behind her ear.

“Babe?! Lena!?” Charles shouts and Juno shakes her head as if to say not to tell him. “I’ve got you” I whisper and rub her back before shouting “kitchen!”. “It’s our secret” I nod to her and squeal excitedly before he comes through. “Hey Juju” he smiles and rubs her back “hey bro, I’m going, I just came for Missy” she smiles and gets her bag and heads on out, leaving us alone.

“So you’re okay?” He checks and I nod “they’re still pretty far apart” I explain and drop the towel, letting him see my belly through the tight suit. I watch his face and see his nose flare “fuck” he whispers. I can’t help but smile as I lead to the couch “coming?” I ask and he nods, following as I go. I lay down and open my legs “I guess I need to make room right?” I ask shyly and bite my lip “I mean.. the head is going to be huge at forty weeks and I’m so tight..” I sigh, watching him get all hot and bothered.

“I..” he starts and I laugh a little “we have time, I’m not feeling movement or anything.. want to stretch me?” I offer and he swallows thickly. “There are some objects over there.. I want to push before I have to push” I say softly and he just gets up and goes for them. I go to take my swimsuit off and he shakes his head “I want that on.. I want you to struggle” he says calmly and I nod “as you please sir”.

He comes back with an inflatable ball, looking at me and I nod “you need to put it in.. how can I push it out otherwise?” I say innocently. He nods and picks up some lube, rubbing it all over me. He slides his fingers in and I groan a little before he pushes the ball in and starts to inflate it. I feel it expanding inside of me, I wouldn’t be able to play for long before baby works their way down. He starts pumping, I usually do two, maybe three. “You need to feel like you can’t do it.. practice” he smirks and I swallow thickly.

Once it’s in, I start to get a contraction and I look at him, immediately zoning out and needing to focus properly. “Come on.. this is the time to push” he tells me and my eyes widen. I pull both legs back, which is already uncomfortable, and I push a little but it scares me “babe, no, I can’t.. deflate it” I demand and he shakes his head “you need to push” he says dead pan and I start to panic, I get on my knees and look at him as I push again, cupping myself as I try to get it out. “Come out!” I groan, the contraction is not helping as I pant and wriggle through the pain. “Babe! Get it out!” I panic and he smooths my belly “it’s okay, you can do it”

“You don’t-“ I cry before pushing a finger around it “you don’t understand, I can’t get it out!” I sob and start to grunt, pushing as hard as I can. “Get it out! Get it out!” I scream “Purple! Charles, purple!!” I scream. Our codeword. “Fuck- fuck baby, I.. hold on” he says as he deflates it, pulling it out and tossing it aside, holding me and pulling me into him “baby, babe I’m so sorry, I thought-“ he starts and I shake my head “it hurt too much” I cry and just sob into him. He holds me, rocking me gently until I fall asleep. I need sleep so bad and he knows that.

I wake up about 3/4 hours later with an excruciating pain in my lower abdomen. “Mmm.. Charlie..” I grumble and rub my belly “Charlie?!” I shout seeing he’s not there. I immediately fall into a birthing breathing pattern, slowly trying to get on top of the pain until I feel a stabbing down below. “Unghh” I groan and reach to hold it “babe?!” I shout before starting to whimper through the pain. “Okay, I’m here, I’m here.. easy, babe, easy” he coaches me and I bite my lip, opening my legs again.

“Okay, we need to break these waters” he sighs and I nod, still working hard through the contraction. I’m opening up already, whether it’s just swelling or the baby, I don’t know. He pushes two fingers inside me and then nods “you’re so close” he smiles “about an eight, but we need to do this” he says softly as he puts on some gloves and a mask. “Ms Lovell” he winks and I laugh a little, the pain wearing down. “I’m just going to feel around and try to break your waters” he smirks.

“Yes doctor” I nod and lay back a little, watching him. The baby is filling me, it’s so hard but he has to have his fun. With in seconds the next contraction arrives, they are on top of eachother. “I need to hold your hand” I grumble and reach out feeling for him. He keeps his fingers inside me and then gives me his other hand. I feel his thumb on my clit, it’s all so much. “Nghh” I grunt “ahh! Baby!” I cry out as he starts to rub my clit so fast that it hurts “p-please!” I ask before he dives in and starts to suck on it “f-fuck” I mutter, the pain, the pleasure.

He starts to finger fuck me as he does all this and I just shake my head holding onto the pillow “Charlie!” I shout “Charlie! Charlie, Charlie!” I scream, partly in pain, mostly in pleasure. That’s when I feel it, the bag of waters explode inside me and flush out. I grip my thigh tightly and look to Charles “fucking hell” I mutter as I look down at the puddle in between my thighs.

[pkmatrix]

An Ambitious Idea

I’ve really not posted much of it here, but for the last few weeks I’ve had access to the DALL-E 2 Text to Image AI and have been playing around making various pictures.  One of the first ideas I had, although I didn’t start experimenting until more recently, was in uncropping films - taking movies that were originally filmed in Academy Ratio (4:3) and expanding them to 16:9 or Cinemascope (21:9).

Here’s some of my experimental results:

ORIGINAL ACADEMY RATIO FRAME FROM RODAN (1956):

AI GENERATED CINEMASCOPE FRAME:

ORIGINAL ACADEMY RATIO FRAME FROM RODAN (1956): 

AI GENERATED CINEMASCOPE FRAME: 

ORIGINAL ACADEMY RATIO FRAME FROM A WILD HARE (1940):

AI GENERATED CINEMASCOPE FRAME: 

ORIGINAL ACADEMY RATIO FRAME FROM A WILD HARE (1940): 

AI GENERATED CINEMASCOPE FRAME: 

As you can see, there’s some INCREDIBLE potential here for using DALL-E 2 and future Imagery AI to expand the frame of content originally produced in 4:3 Aspect Ratio.

Now, there’s a whole other conversation to be had about whether or not this SHOULD be done - Aspect Ratio is a major element of filmmaking, and films are produced with their specific aspect ratio in mind, but on the other hand this seems like it could serve as great alternative to pillarboxing older TV shows like Bonanza or The X-Files which were intended to fill the whole screen but today are pillarboxed because modern TVs have a wider aspect ratio.

So, my ambitious idea:  I want to take an old Bugs Bunny cartoon and, using DALL-E 2, expand the WHOLE CARTOON to Cinemascope as a demonstration of the concept.  I’m aiming at A Tale of Vienna Woods, a segment from A Corny Concerto (1943) - partly because it’s one of my all-time favorite ‘toons, but also because it’s SHORT.  It’s only the first half of the cartoon and runs less than three minutes which, IMO, makes it an ideal test case.  The hardest part I imagine dealing with is that the cartoon has some tracking shots and I’m not QUITE sure how to handle that.  But the stuff that’s still frames?  I think it can be done!

I’m going to take a closer look at the cartoon tonight and try to work out how many generations from the AI I’ll need to do it.  I’m pretty sure I’m good enough at Photoshop and Premiere to piece the results together.

[tossawary]

I'm sorry this feels real weird, but I love PINTWILF a lot, and the fact that you really expanded on SQH's role and everything. And I really loved that you added the other unnamed peaks and melded them in, everything that you wrote about the peaks actually really fleshed them out and their roles. So what did you name the three other peaks, and what are their roles? I think I only really understand that Xi Jiao is an animal/beast peak?

It’s not weird! I’m quite pleased with the sect logistics I’ve been writing in PINTWILF (from a humor angle, not a realism angle) and so I’m happy to talk about it. This is the order of peaks I’ve been using in PINTWILF: 

(1) Qiong Ding Peak - Peak Lord: Yue Qingyuan (Canon) 

Apparently they’re responsible for general affairs. I’ve always assumed they’re also responsible for dealing with other sects and politics, outside of peak-specific specialties where another peak lord has the authority to represent the sect. 

(2) Qing Jing Peak - Peak Lord: Shen Qingqiu (Canon) 

Peak of scholars and strategists. I assumed from there that they would also be responsible for a lot of library and archive-related duties, and that they would have some talisman and seal experts, etc., and that QJ and QD would be closely tied in many matters. 

(3) Wan Jian Peak - Peak Lord: Wei Qingwei (Canon) 

Peak of sword masters. I assumed that this meant both martial weapon specialists and sword smiths. I also assumed that this could be expanded to many kinds of metal work. Where WJ and AD meet is probably where a lot of non-weapon-related fabrication happens. 

(4) An Ding Peak - Peak Lord: Shang Qinghua (Canon, minus #?)

I’ve seen people put An Ding anywhere from 4th to 12th. I’m not sure that An Ding has a canonical number. I prefer An Ding being 4th because of 1) how closely Qiong Ding and An Ding’s work would be tied and the importance of logistics, but 2) mainly how funny I think it is if SQH is only three murders away from being the sect leader. 

SQH: “Wei Qingwei, you cannot die. The chances of Shen Qingqiu and Yue Qingyuan offing each other is too high for you to die on me. YOU’RE MY LAST LINE OF DEFENSE. DON’T MAKE ME BE SECT LEADER.” 

(5) Xian Shu Peak - Peak Lord: Qi Qingqi (Canon)

It’s unclear what specialties XS has, probably because it only existed in PIDW as the “hot lady peak” (and MXTX never actually expanded it post-transmigration). It’s never come up, but I kind of dig the idea of XS doing some textiles work, anything from weaving fine fabrics to rope-making. (Who makes stuff like Immortal Binding Cables? It could be Xian Shu.) 

(6) Xi Jiao Peak - Peak Lord: Tang Qingling (Non-Canon) 

Yes, this is an animal/beast peak, because I’ve seen it brought up in a few fics, and I thought it would be funny for SY to be entranced by the idea, only for SQH to go, “Bro, I hope you have the stomach for blood and literal shit, because that’s where they butcher monsters for parts and collect crap for fertilizer.” 

I also like the idea of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect having actual pipelines based on the specialties, which make it a very profitable and efficient sect. (Also, where are they getting their food? Do they have livestock? Do they buy it all from the surrounding towns and cities? Xi Jiao is me deciding that, yes, they have livestock.) Liu Qingge brings in a monster, it goes to Xi Jiao, then the parts go out again to Wan Jian, Qian Cao, Zui Xian, and others. to become armor, medicine, potions, etc.. Or maybe just to An Ding to sell. 

(7) Bai Zhan Peak - Peak Lord: Liu Qingge (Canon) 

They make people who fight good. 

(8) Qian Cao Peak - Peak Lord: Mu Qingfang (Canon) 

Trains healers and makes medicine. I assumed that they would grow as many of their own plants as they could and do a lot of plant breeding. Medicine could also be a great source of income for the sect (another reason why QC is one of Shang Qinghua’s favorite peaks). 

(9) Ku Xing Peak - Peak Lord: Wang Qingjie (Canon, minus # and peak lord) 

The peak name is canon, but I can’t remember if they have a canonical number and they don’t have a canonical peak lord. They’re all all-male peak with an ascetic lifestyle, living akin to monks. 

I think I decided that they specialized in talismans and the creation of other spiritual tools, including and as well as ceramics. So, they work closely with many of the other peaks, but especially An Ding in supplying other peaks. I can’t remember why I decided this. I think maybe I decided that Ku Xing might have a philosophy that “to create purifying objects, the maker must also be free from impurities”? Hence the ascetic lifestyle. 

I also thought it would be funny if Ku Xing and Qing Jing had a little bit of a rivalry going on. Shen Qingqiu makes very good talismans and Wang Qingjie is NOT angry about it (in the way of someone trying not to be angry). 

(10) Zui Xian Peak - Peak Lord: Zhang Qingyan (Canon, minus # and peak lord) 

Again, the peak name is canon, but I can’t remember if they have a canonical number and they don’t have a canonical peak lord. This is the peak that apparently specializes in alcohol. 

So, I decided that they might as well be responsible for brewing other potions and solutions. Maybe they have people who specialize in alchemy. Qian Cao and Wan Jian and Xi Jiao (and nearly every other peak) probably do their own brewing of certain things, but it probably helps to have someone else dedicated to brewing on a large scale. Qian Cao grows the plants for a common medicine, then ships them to Zui Xian for mass-production, and the An Ding takes the result and sells it to all the nearby towns and cities. 

Zui Xian probably saves and makes Cang Qiong so much money. 

(11) Long Sheng Peak - Peak Lord: ??? (Non-Canon) 

This is a newer invention and I haven’t come up with a peak lord yet, but they’re named after “The Dragon’s Backbone” and they specialize in plants and agriculture. This is my “this is how the sect gets fed” peak, alongside Xi Jiao. 

Maybe they don’t grow all the sect’s food themselves, but they support and work with the surrounding towns and cities to make sure that the local harvests survive all of PIDW’s horrible plants and monsters. Sometimes you need cultivators who can tell you why this year’s harvest is haunted and what to do about it! Maybe Airplane invented the equivalent of magical locust swarms and didn’t think twice about it, so someone has to deal with that! Maybe they grow the materials for Xian Shu’s textiles work! 

They work closely with Xi Jiao, Qian Cao, Zui Xian, and An Ding. 

(12) ??? 

I haven’t actually named the last peak. I haven’t really seen a need to invent one yet and it’s kind of been a in-joke with myself. It’s fun to imagine people being like, “Cang Qiong has twelve peaks, right? What’s that last one called again? I can never remember what that last peak is called.” 

Notes: 

I imagine that most of the peaks’ specialties overlap in one way or another. An Ding, Zui Xian, Qian Cao, and Long Sheng each do some agricultural stuff, but Qian Cao and Long Sheng (especially LS) do most of it. And so on. 

Cang Qiong Mountain Sect also doesn’t have to do everything in-house. Shang Qinghua also has to make orders from other sects and merchants for stuff that Cang Qiong either can’t make or don’t have the space/time to make. I just like the idea that CQ is so powerful partly because they’re so independent. 

If I keep the details loose, I can get a lot of fun humor out of it. 

[firelxdykatara]

Katara x Aang :3c

are you trying to get me in trouble

-cough-

no but in all honesty, my genuine feelings about kataang boil down to three major points: 1. it's boring, and does not jive thematically with either of their character arcs, to the point of, 2. actively hampering character development on both sides, and 3. katara deserved better.

points expanded under the cut. (please, if you're a kataang shipper and you see this, just keep scrolling. i've tagged it appropriately and put the bulk under a cut and at this point that's literally all i can do lmfao.)

send me a ship and get my (brutally) honest opinion!

1. It's Boring: This is the most subjective point on the list (I mean, in fairness, it's all subjective, but I have evidence from the show and post-canonical materials to support my other points; this one is just preference), but there's just... nothing to kataang. It's cute (when it's not actively aggravating), and... that's about it. It's not even that I dislike friends-to-lovers as a shipping trope (though it's not my overall preference), because there are a lot of friends-to-lovers couples that I do ship (kanej comes to mind, also will/elizabeth from potc, karolsen from supergirl, romione and hinny from hp, among others), but one thing that I think all of those couples have that kataang doesn't is that both sides of the pairing are teens or adults when they get together, with teen/adult dynamics and issues and stories to deal with, rather than one half being a teenager and the other being literally prepubescent.

And don't get me wrong, I have no problem with age gap ships in general. And as far as atla goes, Katara, at 14, has the same age difference from Zuko (16) as Aang has from her, and it's never stopped me--because both Katara and Zuko are well into puberty when they meet and I have no problem picturing them being into one another and growing together as they enter adulthood. Aang, on the other hand, is a child. And he acts like it. Which wouldn't be a problem, if the show weren't expecting me to believe he is a) ready for a romantic relationship, and b) ready for one specifically with Katara, who is not only older and far more mature but is specifically cast as his caretaker in a very maternal role for the entire show's run.

This show asks me to believe that a teenage girl well into adolescence is going to be attracted to and develop romantic feelings for a pre-adolescent child--and it asks me to believe this while showing us otherwise that Katara's type is actually older boys with fabulous hair and angsty pasts in all of her other potential romantic dalliances--and then enter into a relationship with him, all while ignoring the elephant in the room that is the fact that she was basically acting like his mother for the entire series to that point. (Something that is heavily lampshaded earlier in the very same season.) That just stretches the bounds of credulity way too far for me, especially when there's no evidence that Katara herself would get anything out of their romantic relationship.

There's nothing there for me to sink my teeth into. No delicious development, no parallels where they help each other grow, no internal conflicts that they have to work through together, nothing. Certainly no reason for me to actually believe Katara feels (or would grow to feel) anything for him other than the platonic affection of a caretaker. I can easily believe she loves him dearly, as a friend and quasi-little-brother, but I just can't see that developing naturally into romantic love--not the way it's presented in the show.

And even if they did manage to at least make the development of Katara's feelings believable, unless they changed something fundamental about the nature of their relationship, it'd still be boring, so.

2. It Actively Hampers Their Character Development--On Both Sides: I've written before (extensively lol im so sorry) about how kataang is actively detrimental to Katara and to Aang. In short (because ye gods this post is already getting long enough), Katara is narratively harmed by being shoved into a relationship that completely ignores her stated feelings--a relationship that had been presented as a one-sided puppylove crush for the vast majority of the series--and it inhibits her growth as a character in ways that become far more obvious in the comics and lok, where the very same creative forces that lead to her beginning a relationship with Aang in the first place reduce her to 'the Avatar's girl' and very little else, all the way through to the end of LoK (where she is a Healer and the Avatar's wife and, again, very little else).

As for Aang:

As to how this relationship is detrimental to Aang (other than the comics and LoK nonsense)? Just take a look at book 2, when he’s trying to learn Earthbending from Toph. Katara constantly coddles him. Much of the time, she’s afraid to be anything other than gentle and understanding with Aang--partly because of her fear that if she pushes him too far, he’ll run away. (Which he does, several times.) But sometimes, what Aang needs to grow is a sharp kick in the slats, which Toph was more than willing to provide--and which worked. Katara was great for teaching Aang to waterbend, but he needed more than that to grow as a person. And he can��t get that while he’s in a relationship with someone who will apologize for getting upset when he was very explicitly neglecting her.

In addition, it is pointed out by Guru Pathik at the end of Book 2 that one of Aang's chakras is blocked by his attachment to Katara. Aang takes this to mean (incorrectly) that he has to stop loving her in order to become fully realized as an Avatar, but this is actually part of the problem--because the issue isn't that he is in love with Katara, it's that he's possessively attached to her. He believes himself entitled to her love in return, rather than selflessly loving someone regardless of whether or not they return that affection. (This is obvious come the EIP episode, where Aang demands to know why he and Katara aren't in a relationship already--because he kissed her without asking [or even checking to see if she'd be ok with kissing him], which he phrases as mutual even though it very much was not, and he gets angry and violates her boundaries when she says that she is confused and doesn't want to think about it right then.)

It is his attachment to Katara--the need for her to return his love, the belief that she will and it is only a matter of time before he gets what he wants--that he was supposed to let go of, not his feelings for her in general. Unfortunately, while he pays lipservice to doing this (far too late for it to be useful--if he'd stayed with the Guru for five more minutes and unlocked his chakra there, that battle would've gone very differently), he almost immediately backtracks on that development come book 3, and there isn't another single whisper of Aang maybe growing up and moving past his one-sided and possessive crush and realizing that even if Katara doesn't feel the same way, it doesn't mean she loves him less or that their friendship is less important.

What really needed to happen, for Aang to grow as a person and become fully realized as an Avatar, was for him to grow up. To realize that his feelings were not of paramount importance, and that even if he was in love with Katara, he was not entitled to her love in return. He should have been able to move past his need for her to love him back, in order to get past that stumbling block, unlock his chakras, and regain the Avatar State in time to face the Firelord. But he didn't. As a result, they had to find some other way to just give him the Avatar State (a well-placed rock) and the means to defeat Ozai without killing him (the deus ex lionturtle) and his entire character arc just fell apart in the third act rather than reaching a satisfying conclusion.

3. Katara Deserved Better: This really ties into how her romantic relationship with Aang hampered her own development, but I'm still bitter enough about it that it gets its own bullet-point. And the biggest single reason I could never ship kataang--the thing that would've turned me off even if there were substance and a halfway decent storyline for them--is the fact that Aang kisses her without her consent (for the second time) in Ember Island Players, Katara gets angry at him and storms off, and then..... she walks out onto the balcony to make out with him.

With nothing to bridge that gap.

It's bad enough that a show aimed at children had a scene where the child protagonist kissed the object of his affections without her consent when she didn't want him to (made explicit by her angry reaction)--and this is absolutely an issue when the show is aimed at children and it may well be the first experience they've had with consent issues portrayed in media--but this moment is never addressed again. Katara just decides--completely off-screen--that she does love him Really and walks out to make out with him in the epilogue. There's no conversation, no apology for violating her boundaries, no discussion of why that was wrong or any indication that Aang understands what he did and why it upset her. They don't have a single one-on-one interaction between that kiss and the epilogue, and the only other time they are on screen together, Aang yells at her and storms off.

So, even leaving the comics and lok aside, Katara deserved much better from her own romantic plotline. In fact, she deserved to have one, rather than simply being the oblivious object of Aang's affections, given a couple moments where she blushes but otherwise remains completely ignorant of his feelings (she looks shocked and upset when he kisses her prior to the invasion, and then she completely forgets that even happened because she's confused as to what Aang is even talking about during EIP until he brings it up; that's not the behavior of a fourteen-year-old girl who was kissed by someone she was developing romantic feelings for), before the epilogue where it becomes clear that she figured all of that out off-screen and had feelings for him after all.

She's a main character, not a side-character written in solely to give one of the mains a love interest. She deserved a romantic plotline of her own. (She could have had one with someone else, with very few changes made to what was actually on-screen prior to the epilogue, but that's another conversation entirely.) She deserved to have her feelings considered at all important by the person she was going to be paired with in the end, rather than having him just assume she felt the same way and then get mad at her for never giving any indication of it when he'd never asked about her feelings to begin with. She deseserved agency in her own romantic narrative, and she just didn't get that with Aang.

So yeah, at the end of the day, my biggest issue with kataang is that it involved doing Katara dirty, and she's my favorite character and she deserved so much better damnit.

[thelightofthingshopedfor]

do you have any thoughts on Loki's "death" in TDW? like, was he somehow planning something like that (i don't think so but stilll)? how did he even survive, let alone manage to glamour himself and get back to Asgard so soon after being stabbed?? i have so many thoughts and feelings about TDW but i can't stop wondering about all this

oh I very much have thoughts! for various reasons, I think it was a very real injury and Loki absolutely believed he was dying--partly because I like that better in terms of whump, angst, and characterization, but also because it's just...simpler? that was the actual behind-the-scenes intent when the scene was filmed, for one thing, that this was it for Loki and it was supposed to be a sacrificial, redemptive death, and as far as I know the filmmakers didn't change anything about the actual scene, just added the bits that let him come back. for another, if it was fake--if Loki decided in advance at some point to fake his own death or he took advantage of a split-second opportunity when he confronted the Kursed--that just raises so many questions about how much of it was faked, and how he was able to do it at all when Ragnarok in particular went out of its way to establish that Loki's illusions aren't solid to the touch and in fact can't do much of anything except stand there and talk. for that matter, Loki's play in Ragnarok actually has him expanding on what he's sorry for specifically, with Thor forgiving him for each one, and...I mean I know the play is mostly supposed to be funny, but to me the additional detail provided by the play just strengthens my impression that he was being sincere when it really happened.

the show does complicate this by establishing that Classic Loki was able to create a solid illusion that fooled Thanos, and at this point I am honestly not sure whether or not his nexus event being what it was means that Classic Loki essentially didn't exist as a separate being until he did that. so it's...possible that Classic Loki was better at illusions than Sacred Timeline Loki because they actually did have somewhat different histories. but as far as I can tell, we're meant to understand that they were the same person right up to the point of divergence, when for one reason or another Classic Loki made a different choice than Sacred Timeline Loki did. (my general thought there: Sacred Timeline Loki thought about doing what Classic Loki actually did, but he discarded the idea because he wasn't confident enough that it would work, and he was positive Thanos wouldn't leave both him and Thor alive--so he gave Thanos a reason to kill him instead of Thor. Classic Loki was just a little more scared to die or a little more confident in his abilities, I guess.)

(I am only okay with talking about Loki's death, this many years later, because I only ever consider it in a context where he came back later or didn't fully die to begin with, because I am a normal person with normal issues about fictional characters.)

anyway, TDW. even with the baseline assumption that the injury was real and Loki believed he was dying, which is my firm belief, there's room for a lot of different options in terms of Loki's intentions and the reasons for his survival, and I guess I'm not...married to any of those options over the others? I usually approach it in fic with the idea that Loki believed he was dying, woke up again after all, and was like "...well great, I guess I have to deal with this now." but he could have been badly injured when he woke up, or he could have been in much better shape because his body healed itself quite a bit while he was unconscious, or he could have actually died and come back to life for a lot of different reasons, or it's possible the injury wasn't as bad in the first place as Thor and Loki both assumed, or Jotnar have some of their vital organs in different enough places that his body kinda shifted internally as he was dying and then the injury was no longer fatal, or Jotnar can kind of go into a hibernation-like healing coma that would look like death to anyone who didn't know better, or...honestly, there are tons of options for the actual mechanics of Loki's survival. at that point I think it's reasonable to assume Loki decided for a lot of different reasons that he didn't want anyone to know he was still alive, at least not yet, so he patched himself up with the magical equivalent of a big bandaid and went back to Asgard in disguise. he might have intended to overthrow Odin before he went there, or it might have been a spur-of-the-moment decision when he actually confronted Odin, based on something Odin said or did--and he could've had a lot of different motivations for that too, which we really don't know because we never see what happened between them.

now, I do think one aspect of all this was premeditated, which was: the second Loki left his cell, I think he had absolutely zero intention of walking back into it, and all his actions afterward had the underlying motivation of not going back to that cell even if he didn't have any firm plans on how he might accomplish that. I think he probably considered a lot of options, and deliberately faking his own death was one of them, but I don't think that's what he actually meant to do at that particular moment because there were way too many variables for him to have planned it. I think he would've been okay with actually dying and was maybe more reckless for that reason than he would've been otherwise. if he'd made it to the end of the battle when Malekith was defeated, maybe he would've tried to sneak off or convince Thor to let him go. I can't remember if I've said this in a fic I've actually posted or not, but I think it occurred to him that if Thor wouldn't let him go, he could force Thor to kill him instead (probably using Jane as leverage), so there was a sense of relief when things unfolded the way they did because now he wouldn't have to do that and he could die loved instead of hated.

so, I mean...the whole thing is complicated, but because there's so much we don't know about exactly what happened, pretty much any speculation can answer the questions as long as it fits the facts we do have.

[snarktheater]

Hey, d'you have any French book recs? I'm trying to work on my French, and rn I have downloaded one of my favourite book series' French translations, but I figured maybe books already written in French might work better? Also have you read the Ranger's Apprentice series? 1/2

RA's def flawed - the books' narration does like to point bright arrows at the protagonists' intelligence, and the last few books def have the tone of 'old white man trying to write feminism', although at least he's trying? - and it's aimed more to the younger side of YA, but it is still a very fun series, and I can ignore the flaws fairly easily, at least partly due to nostalgia? This rather long lol but I'm wordy.

I'll start with the second question: no, although every time the series is brought up I have to check the French title and go "oh, right, I've seen these books in stores". But I've never purchased or read them. It sounds like something I probably would have enjoyed as a teen but I just missed the mark, and these days I'm trying to drown myself in queer books, so that probably isn't happening.

As for your first question, geez, I haven’t read a French book in years, so this is gonna skew middle grade/YA, though that may not be so bad if the point is to learn the language. I will also say that as a result, these may read a little outdated.

I'll put it under a cut, even if Tumblr has become really bad with correctly displaying read mores. Sorry, mobile crowd.

It's also likely that old readers of the blog will have seen me talk about most of these. I don't feel like going through old posts.

One last thing: while I was curating this list I took the time to make a Goodreads shelf to keep track of those.

The Ewilan books by Pierre Bottero

(It's a testament to how long ago I read these books that these are not the covers of the edition I own, and I can't even find those on Google. I'm settling for a more recent cover anyway since it'll make it easier to find them, presumably)

There are at least three trilogies (that I know of) set in the same world.

The first trilogy is essentially an isekai (so, French girl lands in parallel fantasy world by accident) with elements of chosen one trope, though I find the execution makes it worth the while anyway.

The second trilogy is a direct sequel, so same protagonist but new threat, and the world gets expanded.

The third one is centered around a supporting characters from the previous books, and the first couple of books in it are more her backstory than a continuation, though the third one concludes both that trilogy and advances the story of the other books as well.

Notably these books have a really fun magic system where the characters "draw" things into existence. It's just stuck with me for some reason.

A bunch of stuff by Erik L'Homme

I have read a lot of this man's books, starting with Le Livre des Etoiles.

They also skew towards the young end of YA, arguably middle grade, I never bothered to figure out where to draw the line. They're coincidentally also using the premise of a parallel world to our own (and yes, connected to France again, the French are just as susceptible of writing about their homeland), but interestingly are set from the point of view of characters native to the parallel world.

It also has a very unique magic system, this one based on a mix of a runic alphabet and sort-of poetry. I'll also say specifically for these books that the characters stuck with me way more than others on this list, which is worth mentioning.

This trilogy is my favorite by Erik L'Homme, but I'll also mention Les Maîtres des brisants, which is a fantasy space opera with a pirate steampunk(?) vibe. I think it's steampunk. I could be mistaken. But it's in that vein. It's also middle grade, in my opinion not as good, but it could just be that it came out when I was older.

Another one is Phaenomen, which was a deliberate attempt at skewing older (though still YA). This one is set in our (then-)modern world and centers a group of teens who happen to have supernatural powers. I guess the best way to describe it is a superhero thriller? If you take "superhero" in the sense of "people with individualized powers", since they don't really do a lot of heroing.

...I really need to brush up on genre terminology, don't I.

The Ji series by Pierre Grimbert

This one is actually adult fantasy, though it definitely falls under "probably outdated". It is very straight, for starters, and I'd have to give it another read to give a more critical reading of how it handles race (it attempts to do it, and is well meaning, but I'm not sure it survives the test of time & scrutiny, basically).

If I haven't lost you already, the premise is this: a few generations ago, a weird man named Nol gathered emissaries from each nation of the world and took them to a trip to the titular Ji island. Nobody knows what went down here, but now in the present day, someone is trying to kill off all descendants from those emissaries, who are as a result forced to team up and figure out what's going on.

I'm not going to spoil past that, though I will say it has (surprise) a really unique magic system! I guess you can start to piece together what my younger self was interested in. Which, admittedly, I still am.

Once again, this one also has a strong cast of characters, helped by rich world building and the premise forcing the characters to come from many different cultures (though, again, I can't vouch for the handling of race because it's been too long).

The first series is complete by itself, though it has two sequel series as well, each focusing on the next generation in these families. Because yes, of course they all pair up and have kids. Like I said: very straight.

A whole lot of books by Jean-Louis Fetjaine

OFetjaine is a historian, and I guess he's really interested in Arthurian mythos especially, because he loves it so much he's written two separate high fantasy retellings of them! I'm not criticizing, mind you, we all need a hobby.

The former, the Elves trilogy (pictures above) is very traditional high fantasy. Elves, dwarves, orcs, a world which is definitely fictionalized with a pan-Celtic vibe to it. The holy grail and excalibur are around, but they're relics possessed by the elves and dwarves with very different powers than usual. Et cetera.

Fetjaine also really loves his elves (as the titles might imply), and while they're not exactly Tolkien elves, there's a similar vibe to them. If you like Tolkien and his elf boner, you'll probably like this too. And conversely, if that turns you off, these books probably also won't work for you.

This series also has a prequel trilogy, centered around the backstory of one of the main characters. I...honestly don't remember too much about it, but I liked it, so, there you go, I guess.

I said Fetjaine did it twice. The other series is the Merlin duology, which, as the title implies, is a retelling of Merlin's story. Note that Merlin is also in the other trilogy, but it's a different Merlin; like I said, completely different continuities and stories.

This one is historical fantasy, so it's set in actual Great Britain, and Fetjaine attempts to connect Arthur to a "real" historical figure...but, you know, Merlin is also half-elf and elves totally exist in Brocéliande, so, you know. History.

Okay, that's probably enough fantasy, let me give some classics too.

L'Arbre des possibles et autres histoires - Bernard Werber

Bernard Werber is a pretty seminal author of French sci-fi and I should probably be embarrassed that the only book of his that I read was for school, but, it is a really good one, so I'll include it anyway.

It's a novella collection, and when I say "sci-fi" I want to make it clear that it's very old school science fiction. It's more Frankenstein or Black Mirror than Star Trek, what we in French call the anticipation genre of science fiction: you take one piece of technology or cultural norm and project it into the future.

It has a pretty wide range of topics and tones, so it's bound to have some better than others. My personal faves were Du pain et des jeux, where football (non-American) has evolved into basically a wargame, and Tel maître, tel lion, where any animal is considered acceptable as a pet, no matter how absurd it is to keep as a pet. They're both on a comedic end, but there's more heartfelt stuff too.

L'Ecume des Jours - Boris Vian

(no cover because I can't find the one I have, and the ones I find are ugly)

This book is surrealist. Like, literally a part of the surrealist movement. It features things such as a lilypad growing inside a woman's lungs (and, as you well know, lilypads double in size every day, wink wink), the protagonist's apartment becoming larger and smaller to go with his mood and current financial situation, and more that I can't even recall at the moment because remembering this book is like trying to remember having an aneurysm.

It is also really, really fun and touching. Oh, and it has a pretty solid movie adaptation, starring Audrey Tautou, who I think an international audience would probably recognize from Amelie or the Da Vinci Code movie.

I don't really know what else to say. It's a really cool read!

Le Roi se meurt - Eugène Ionesco

Ionesco is somewhat famous worldwide so I wasn't even sure to include him here. He's a playwright who wrote in the "Theater of the Absurd" movement, and this play is part of that.

The premise of this play is that the King (of an unnamed land) is dying, and the land is dying with him. I don't really know what else to say. It's theater of the absurd. It kind of has to be experienced (the published version works fine, btw, no need to track down an actual performance, in my humble opinion).

The Plague - Albert Camus

You've probably heard of this one, and if you haven't, let me tell you about a guy called Carlos Maza

I'm honestly more including this book out of a sense of duty. The other three are books I genuinely liked and happen to be classics. This book was an awful read. But, um. It's kind of relevant now in a way it wasn't (or didn't feel, anyway) back in 2008 or 2009, when I read it. And I don't just mean because of our own plague, since Camus's plague is pretty famously an allegory for fascism, which my teenage self sneered at, and my adult self really regrets every feeling that way.

Okay, finally, some more lighthearted stuff, we gotta talk about the Belgian and French art of bande dessinée. How is it different from comic books or manga? Functionally, it isn't. It really comes down more to what gets published in the Belgian-French industry compared to the American comics industry, which is dominated by superheroes, or the Japanese manga industry, which, while I'm less familiar with it, I know has some big genre trends as well that are completely separate.

The Lanfeust series - Arleston and Tarquin

This is a YA mega-series, and I can't recommend all of it because I've lost track of the franchise's growth. Also note that I say "YA", but in this case it means something very different from an American understanding of YA. These books are pretty full of sex.

No, when I say YA I mean it has that level of maturity, for better or worse. The original series (Lanfeust de Troy) is high fantasy in a world where everyone has an individual magical ability but two characters find out they're gifted with an absolute power to make anything happen, and while it gets dark at times, it's still very lighthearted throughout, and the humor is...well, I think it's best described as teen boy humor. And it has a tendency to objectify its female characters, as you'll quickly parse out from the one cover I used here or if you browse more covers.

But still, it holds a special place in my heart, I guess. And on my shelves.

The sequel series, Lanfeust des Etoiles, turns it into a space opera, and goes a little overboard with the pop culture reference at times, though overall still maintains that balance of serious/at times dark story and lighthearted comedy.

After that the franchise is utter chaos to me, and I've lost track. I know there was another sequel series, which I dropped partway through, and a spinoff that retold part of the original series from the PoV of the main love interest (in the period of time she spent away from the main group). There was a comedy spin-off about the troll species unique to this world, a prequel series, probably more I don't even know exist.

Les Démons d'Alexia

Something I can probably be a little less ashamed of including here.

Some backstory here. The Editions Dupuis are a giant of the Belgian bande dessinée industry, and for many, many years I was subscribed to their weekly magazine. That magazine was (mostly) made up of excerpts from the various books that the éditions were publishing at the time; those that were made of comic strips would usually get a couple pages of individual scripts, while the ongoing narratives got cut into episodes that were a few pages long (out of a typical 48 page count for a single BD album). Among those were this series.

For the first few volumes, I wasn't super into this series, probably because I was a little too young and smack dab in the middle of my "trying to be one of the boys" phase. But around book 3 I got really invested, to the point where I own the second half of the series because I had canceled by subscription by then but still wanted to know more.

Alexia is an exorcist with unusual talents, but little control, who's introduced to a group that specializes in researching paranormal phenomena, solving cases that involve the paranormal, that kinda stuff.

As a result of the premise, the series has a pretty slow start since it has to build up mystery around the source of Alexia's powers, but once it gets going and we get to what is essentially the series' main conflict, it gets really interesting.

Plus, witches. I'm a simple gay who likes strong protagonists and witches.

Murena

There was a point where my mtyhology nerdery led me to look for more stuff about the historical cultures that created them, and so I'd be super into stuff set in ancient Rome (I'd say "or Greece or Egypt" but let's face it, it was almost always Rome).

Murena is a series set just before the start of Emperor Nero's rule. You know, the one who was emperor when Rome burned, and according to urban legend either caused the fire or played the fiddle while it did (note: "fiddle" is a very English saying, it's usually the lyre in other languages). He probably didn't, it probably was propaganda, but he was a) a Roman Emperor, none of whom were particularly stellar guys and b) mean to Christians, who eventually got to rewrite history. So he's got a bad rep.

The series goes for a very historical take on events, albeit fictionalized (the protagonist and main PoV, the titular Lucius Murena, is himself fictional) and attempts to humanize the people involved in those events. Each book also includes some of the sources used to justify how events and characters are depicted, which is a nice touch.

It's also divided in subseries called "cycles" (books 1-4, 5-8 and the ongoing one starts at 9). I stopped after 9, though I think it's mostly a case of not going to bookstores often anymore. Plus it took four years between 9 and 10, and again between 10 and 11. But the first eight books made for a pretty solid story that honestly felt somewhat concluded as is, so it's a good place to start.

[shinelikethunder]

So I mentioned offhand in another post that my read on Will and Bedelia’s therapy sessions in s3 is that she’s trying to manipulate him into killing Hannibal before Hannibal can come kill her. I’d like to expand on that a little, because tbh it’s one of the more opaque parts of the show, and NBC Hannibal is a show that’s already cagey about coming right out and saying what it’s doing. Even this reading is kinda provisional--it’s the only explanation I’ve come up with that makes sense to me so far, and I’d welcome discussion and alternate interpretations.

I’m working off a couple of base assumptions here:

Despite the show’s appearance of sometimes moving from one bizarre tableau or inscrutable conversation to another on pure dream logic, and despite how well it holds up when you watch it in “sure, this might as well happen” mode, when we’re shown something happening it’s usually because it advances some character- or plot-related story beat. Likewise in-universe, characters don’t do things for no reason, they have an agenda (or multiple conflicting agendas), even if Hannibal’s agenda is almost always “fuck around and find out.”

Bedelia’s overriding motivation is her own survival. If she’s involved in a situation, she needs to be able to maintain control over it; if she can see it going south to a point where she’ll lose control, she’s ready and willing to peace the fuck out entirely. Once that prerequisite is satisfied, she’s also motivated by curiosity--at least partly because access to information, which can then be withheld or selectively revealed, is her main lever of control--and probably some amount of paradoxical attraction to danger and violence. She doesn’t experience much if any compassion; her horror of violence is mainly at the breach of control it implies and the creation of a situation that could very quickly get out of hand.

So. What’s going on in Will and Bedelia’s therapy sessions? Well, the first angle of attack there is--why the fuck are Will and Bedelia having therapy sessions anyway? What’s the agenda? Will’s the easy one there, he’s overflowing with agenda--questions and resentments about what happened in Florence, a reactivated need to understand his own relationship with Hannibal, a need to talk things over when he “can’t just talk to any psychiatrist about what’s kicking around my head.” But Bedelia? She has peaced the fuck out. Why’s she getting involved again?

Process of elimination time:

She’s not taking patients for shits and giggles. The only one who’s ever convinced her to make an exception to her retirement is Hannibal, who had an extraordinary amount of leverage over her at the time. And she seems to be making a killing on the lecture circuit, so it’s not like she needs the fee.

She’s not particularly interested in Will for his own sake. She’s heard enough about him from Hannibal to do a competent job of dissecting him, but doesn’t make much or any effort to learn more. In fact, I’m pretty sure she’s the only psychiatrist on the Dark Psychiatry Murder Show to demonstrate no professional curiosity about him whatsoever. She only knows him in relation to Hannibal (his patient, his friend, his victim, his nemesis, his ex...) and that’s still how she relates to him in their sessions.

She doesn’t particularly like Will either, and she sure as hell isn’t trying to get on his good side.

She might be enjoying the opportunity to talk over her own relationship with Hannibal in a way that’s significantly closer to the truth than anything she can say in public. But it’s also a risk, and she manages it carefully--both the disclosure of information, and her getting involved at all.

The most in-character motivation turns out to also be the one that makes the most sense: Bedelia’s trying to save her own ass. She’s seen where the pieces are on the board: the Red Dragon, Will being brought back to consult on the case, Will inevitably consulting Hannibal. She’s seen that Hannibal is once again in a position to exert influence, stir up trouble, and potentially seize an opportunity to escape and come after her. She knows Will exerts more influence on Hannibal than anyone else in the world. So what’s she going to do about it? What's she trying to persuade him of?

Well, let’s take a look at the lines of conversation in her sessions with Will:

Perhaps most surprisingly to him, she’s the first person to spot Hannibal’s whole Murder Husbands/”we’re just alike” conception of Will’s potential and flat-out tell him it’s not going to work. As inconsistent as his compassion may be, it’s just as deeply rooted as his attraction to violence and neither one is going away--they are in perpetual tension except in the rare situtations where he feels like violence is the compassionate thing to do to prevent suffering.

If he was hoping to somehow save Hannibal, “manage” him, or push his monstrousness in more tolerable directions, well, look how well that turned out. Bedelia tried it too in Florence and, again, look how well that turned out. 0/10 do not recommend.

No matter what, as long as he and Hannibal are in each other’s orbits, they’re both absofuckinglutely stupid with mutual obsession and neither of them will be able to turn away.

Hannibal has hurt him terribly and will continue to hurt him as long as they’re within each other’s reach.

“The next time you have an instinct to help someone, you might consider crushing them instead. It might save you a great deal of trouble.”

I don’t know about you, but it looks an awful lot to me like Bedelia’s systematically going through the 3 Endings of All Hannibal Fanfiction and telling Will to get a fucking grip because all of it’s impossible. Can’t live with him. Can’t live without him. Just as she steered Hannibal to his “I have to eat him” epiphany in Florence, she’s trying to steer Will to the conclusion that the only possible ending here is with one or both of them dead.

I’m still chewing over where that goes in the last couple episodes of s3. So far my best read on that is that Will is stubbornly resistant to being steered and it drives Bedelia up the goddamn wall. Thus her incandescent fury and brazen emotional manipulation when she thinks he ought to be laser-focused on what Hannibal just tried to do to his family, and instead he volunteers for a half-baked plan that ends with someone he despises getting thrown under the bus. She’s got an incredibly slim case for pinning the blame for Chilton’s fate directly on Will*, and she must know it because she’s pushing his buttons like crazy to sell it to him. But she’s genuinely furious--and, Bedelia being Bedelia, it’s not out of moral indignation or compassion for Chilton. I suspect her line of thinking is that if not even this is enough to get him vengeful against Hannibal, and instead he’s pulling stunts like the TattleCrime article, well, she’s acutely aware that she’s on the list of people Will despises. Maybe she’s directly in the line of fire, maybe she’s just acceptable collateral damage, but either way Will’s "solutions” are creating a risk for her where she was trying to eliminate one.

-

* Will’s entire contribution to the plan was “So I really bad-mouth the Red Dragon in TattleCrime and give him a shot at me to lure him out”--he intended to assume all the risk. Alana was the one who suggested a professional voice to validate the trash-talk. She also volunteered Chilton for the part, explicitly because he was a fame-seeking idiot with his head too far up his own ass to see how much danger he’d be putting himself in. Being one of the four people in the room to watch Chilton dig himself into a hole, then adding the finishing touch of “let’s split the picture credit 50/50 too!”, makes Will kind of a dick for going along with it. But like fuck does it entitle him to the credit for engineering the whole situation. He wanted to put Chilton at risk--the exact same potential risk Will himself was assuming, in exchange for his shot at the same reward.

Bedelia’s out on a limb here and she knows it. If she had an actual case, she wouldn’t have to resort to openly manipulative jabs at Will’s sore spots about touch, external influence on identity, and fostering false trust. Or recycle Hannibal’s “Was this a potential outcome you foresaw? Congrats, that’s participation!” tactics for fostering false complicity. Trying to manage the risk of someone else’s violent behavior and failing isn’t “participating” in violence unless you’ve got a vested interest in shifting the blame. Bedelia’s not a reliable narrator here, and she blames Will for Chilton... why? Probably because she was angling for Hannibal to be the one he threw under the bus.

[itsclydebitches]

I’ve been thinking about what you’ve written in regards to what the audience knows vs. what the characters know, and how different characters and their motivations are twisted to make “our heroes” always look good. I wonder if this would be more bearable if we didn’t see other characters interact, and only saw the plot through Ruby’s perspective. Then we could see these plot issues and demonization of characters (ironwood,Ace Ops, etc) stemming from Ruby as a flawed narrator. What do you think?

I think either writing choice has its pros and cons attached. Yeah, keeping to Ruby’s perspective may have helped to emphasize how limited  — and therefore flawed  — her view of a situation is, as well as helping to build the mysteries in RWBY, perhaps even creating new ones. After all, if your story is restricted solely to your title character’s knowledge, you can highlight the incorrect assumptions she might make while simultaneously providing twists for the viewer. You avoid that confusion between what we’ve seen and what the character has experienced, giving us a more cohesive understanding of the situation. Either we buy into Ruby’s perspective, or we acknowledge she may be/is wrong because we know she doesn’t have all the information. That would be part of the point of the tale. 

On the other hand, a limitation like that can get very frustrating for the audience. One of the more recent examples of this that I’ve seen is Steven Universe. Limiting the story to (mostly) what Steven experiences worked well in the early seasons, particularly since the show was initially all about him discovering his heritage. But as the “Universe” of our show expanded beyond Stephen himself, it arguably got harder to tell such a massive story through one (admittedly important) boy. Your character will need to very conveniently stumble onto plot points pretty much constantly, otherwise they can never be introduced, and characters that aren’t a part of their immediate world  —  what is Lars doing in space? How did Peridot and Lapis bond?   — are largely left behind. Which, admittedly, has happened to characters like Glynda too. But if we were to impose that limitation than the introduction of lore and conflicts in RWBY would have to change significantly. We would no longer get to know what the villains are up to outside of face-to-face fights, we would no longer see Pyrrha going through accepting the Maiden powers, etc. On the one hand, this might make the writing stronger in places  — Salem doesn’t come across as ridiculous if she’s just a shadowy figure Ruby has yet to meet, rather than us having to watch her literally sit around  — or it might make it more frustrating  — how happy would fans be if Pyrrha died fighting Cinder and we only found out why from Qrow’s fireside chat a volume later, this huge chunk of her growth happening off screen and reduced to a few lines of dialogue? 

Writing a big fantasy tale from just one perspective requires a knack for creating persuasive reasons for why this one individual always hears about/encounters the Important Stuff In The Story, the ability to tell a great tale around the fact that they haven’t learned/figured out a lot of Important Stuff, and/or a character who is driven to chase after answers at all costs, so the audience can eventually learn them too. Ruby... is not that character. I keep coming back to her absolute indifference towards the crazy stuff going on around her, particularly in the later seasons. She used to be a character eager to dig into mysteries (like the White Fang), but became someone who doesn’t ask about her silver eyes, doesn’t ask about Ozpin’s experiences post-lore episode, only barely asks about Maria’s life as a SEW, etc. Imagine a RWBY where we only knew what Ruby did and Ruby was still this girl who hears about Major Plot Points and simply shrugs, going off on her little side missions instead of chasing the main story. It would be the frustration we currently experience times ten. Villain council, maidens plot, inner circle, JNPR’s early development, 2/3rd of what we’re getting in Volume 8... all of it would be erased to watch Ruby very suddenly hear about a magic power she has, then ignore it. Ruby learns some more stuff from Qrow, then ignores it. Ruby suddenly rips the rest of the lore from Ozpin... then ignores it. What’s going on across Mantle and Atlas? Who knows, Ruby has been sitting in a mansion for a good chunk of the time. RWBY’s semi-omniscient perspective is, sadly, the bulk of our interesting content and that’s partly because Ruby is so lackluster as a protagonist right now. 

[impalementation]

I’m doing a rewatch since btvs just got added to prime video and am just beginning s2. Watching When She Was Bad is super interesting knowing the events post-The Gift. Do you have any thoughts on how Buffy acts in relation to her trauma from being killed? I think her actions (as well as the other Scoobies responses to those actions) in s6 are completely foreshadowed in that particular episode of s2.

Man I love When She Was Bad, I’m always hyped to talk about it. I had a great exchange with @visitingthefuneralhome about it, that talks a bit about her handling of her trauma that you might be interested in. Putting the rest under a cut for length.

I agree that lot of season six is foreshadowed in that episode. Not necessarily intentionally, but definitely in the sense of establishing patterns of behavior that season six continues. I’d rope Anne and Dead Man’s Party into this too, since those are also episodes in which Buffy and the Scoobies are responding to an end-of-season trauma.

Two big things stand out to me about these three episodes. First is the fact that Buffy consistently responds to trauma by isolating herself, and has difficulty talking about her problems with her friends. In When She Was Bad she isolates herself by acting out, and not talking about how her death affected her. In this other post I made about the episode, I talk about how the episode uses imagery around gaze to show how Buffy is hiding herself from her friends. Similarly in Anne she isolates herself by literally running away, and in Dead Man’s Party she once again struggles to talk about what she’s really dealing with. Similarly to how Buffy will isolate herself in season six by not talking about heaven and spending all of her time with Spike.

The Scoobies, for their part, desperately want Buffy to be okay, and act confused that she isn’t. In When She Was Bad they wonder why Buffy’s acting like such a “bitca”, in Dead Man’s Party they’re hurt that she abandoned them and have that whole party confrontation scene, and in After Life and Flooded (and other parts of season six), they crowd around her and fret about the ways she isn’t acting like herself. In all of these cases, a lot of that Scooby response is based on not really understanding what Buffy is going through--partly because Buffy doesn’t communicate it, and partly because they didn’t experience it themselves. In When She Was Bad they don’t understand that she was traumatized by her death until the scene where she destroys the Master’s bones, in season three they don’t understand the degree to which she was traumatized by killing Angel until the end of Faith, Hope & Trick when she admits that Angel had his soul, and in season six they don’t understand that she is dealing with having been pulled from heaven until the end of Once More, With Feeling.

I mention in that post I linked on gaze in When She Was Bad that there’s an interesting similarity between the bone-smashing scene and the heaven-revelation scene in that they both have long lingering reaction shots on the faces of the Scoobies. In both scenes, Buffy is center-stage and all of them are looking at her, finally seeing her. That imagery of “everyone looking at Buffy” shows up in other places, too. I made a connection between Dead Man’s Party and Bargaining, Part 2 once, because both have shots of all of the Scoobies gazing at a returned Buffy. And I also once pointed out how that’s a repeated visual motif in early season six: Buffy standing opposite a crew of uncomprehending Scoobies. (Hope the references to past posts aren’t annoying, I get excited when I can finally link a bunch of disconnected observations together). Point is, the show makes a strong connection between trauma and isolation for Buffy, both because of Buffy’s own actions and because of how that trauma can set her apart from her friends. As Buffy will make explicit in Conversations With Dead People, her trauma is all tied up in her hero-ness and slayer-ness and leader-ness, all of which already set her apart.

BUFFY: I feel like I'm worse than anyone. Honestly, I'm beneath them. My friends, my boyfriends. I feel like I'm not worthy of their love. 'Cause even though they love me, it doesn't mean anything 'cause their opinions don't matter. They don't know. They haven't been through what I've been through. They're not the slayer. I am.

These next few paragraphs are a bit self-indulgent, BUT: to loop back to that first post I linked, the show also makes a consistent connection between trauma and agency for Buffy. The ur-source of Buffy’s problems is being the only Slayer, something she didn’t choose (instead, she is the “Chosen One”). In Prophecy Girl, this lack of choice is emphasized by the fact that Buffy feels beholden to a prophecy, to fate. Ie, something she has no choice about. And despite the fact that she survives her death, that death is still very much a symbol of her lack of agency, especially because she didn’t even choose to be brought back to life either. Similarly in season six, she is brought back to life by her friends. There was no choice there. The season six resurrection feels especially like a betrayal of Buffy’s agency because her sacrifice in The Gift was framed mostly positively in a way her sacrifice in Prophecy Girl wasn’t. In Prophecy Girl she didn’t want to die (“I don’t wanna die”), and there’s no indication that anyone besides her can fulfill the prophecy in that episode. Whereas in The Gift she willingly chooses to sacrifice herself instead of Dawn, and is shown to be at peace with that decision. (I’d actually even say that Buffy’s depression in season six isn’t about having died, the way it was in When She Was Bad--it’s about having to be alive, and carry on with all the difficult things associated with that.)

With this in mind, I tend to see a lot of Buffy’s traumatic responses as being about her trying to assert agency in whatever way she can, even if it isn’t necessarily healthy or nice. So her taunting Xander in When She Was Bad is about her exerting control over him and Angel, feeling like she has power. I think you could also see her self-isolation as being about agency, in that if she pushes her friends away she’s chosen for them to not understand. Instead having to deal with the ways that they wouldn’t understand her regardless. (That’s a bit more headcanon-y on my part though).

In this light, Buffy in season six actually has a really interestingly complicated relationship to agency. On the one hand, she struggles with having been brought back to life, and having to deal with all of these obligations that she didn’t choose. But unlike in the earlier seasons, when she chafes against duty, and asserts her right to a “normal life”, Buffy in season six kind of doesn’t want agency. So for example with Spike, on the one hand, she’s the one who instigates the house-sex in Smashed (agency), but she only does so after Spike tells her that she came back wrong, which allows her to not be responsible for that choice (not-agency). Note how in Dead Things Buffy breaks down after Tara tells her that there’s nothing wrong with her, in part because it means that all of her choices were her own all along. There’s interesting ambiguity about whether Buffy is trying to get control of something (“I just wanna feel”) with Spike, or lose control. Similar to how there’s interesting ambiguity about whether Willow wants to get or lose control via magic. 

So part of my read of season six is that Buffy getting “healthy” again involves her wanting and accepting agency again. Getting back to that “I don’t wanna die” from Prophecy Girl. I like this read because of how it expands on Buffy’s earlier trauma responses, while also being distinct from them. In season six, Buffy partly responds like she’s always responded to bad things happening to her--isolating herself, being “bad”, etc--but the added layer of her abdicating agency shows how apart she really feels from herself, and how unengaged in life she really is. It’s what distinguishes Buffy being traumatized in season two from her being depressed in season six. If something bad happens once, you rebel against it. But if bad things keep happening, you rebel by just giving up. And in order for Buffy to move forward, she has to find a way to feel that not-giving-up is worth it. 

[happymetalgirl]

Album Chronology - Death

The whole ranking-albums-from-worst-to-best has been done to death to the point of staleness at this point, but mostly due to the format, at least to me. I’ve read so many damn worst-to-best lists at this point that they’re all kind of predictable even when they’re seemingly trying to force some kind of novelty or surprise factor by putting a fan-favorite or highly revered album really low in a ranked list. It’s all gotten pretty dry at this point, plus, to me, I can’t help but see a little bit of futility in compiling lists for active artists whose next release will render such a list so quickly obsolete. I honestly had the idea of doing something tier-related to make it less rigid a year or so ago, but lo and behold, tier-list videos are the newest horse getting beaten to death. So rather than jumping around an artist’s catalog and tossing in some spicy hot takes, I figured why not take the chronological approach and trace the story of the artist’s creative trajectory, and not spoil the #1 spot by revealing the #2 spot.

So why do these kinds of lists? Also, why Death?

I make this little chronology to offer my insight into Death’s discography partly for the reason so many others have made similar rankings: to appreciate Death’s music and the huge legacy Chuck Schuldiner left through it. But I also make this because I do think my perspective on Death is a somewhat unique one, at least among Death fans. Chuck Schuldiner was an incredibly talented musician and a beloved figure within the world of metal, and that aspect of his legacy has undoubtedly been enhanced by the untimeliness and unfairness of his passing. The guy certainly had a strong presence on the stage and a certain charisma off of it, and his cherishing of animals surely resonates with me as well. Death was also hardly my first death metal band, so I do think that gives me a bit less of a nostalgic perspective on their legacy. I still enjoy a lot of the same things about Death that most fans do, and at the end of this list, it might not really end up being all that shocking or controversial, just a slightly tempered version of what most fans would make. I’m pretty long-winded, so I’ll cut the intro and get into the music: Death.

1987 - Scream Bloody Gore

I have to reinforce my position right from the get-go about having a more measured view of the band’s catalog because the spicy takes come right out of the gate with Death’s debut album, Scream Bloody Gore. The sour really isn’t all that sour and it comes with a little bit of sweet right afterward too: I think this is Death’s worst album. But that just means it only gets better from here, and I do still really like it. It’s a classic in its own right that started Death on a more solid footing than the average debut project in very new territory at the time and I again do genuinely still like it a lot; I own it, along with the rest of the band’s catalog, on vinyl. But it is, as I mentioned, a first step into new territory, and rather naturally primordial, which indeed has its own appeal in the context of the era it came from and for which it deserves tremendous appreciation. There is indeed a lot to appreciate here. I love the persistence of the bass line in the title track, the hooks of songs like “Zombie Ritual” and “Baptized in Blood”, and the amped up Slayer-inspired extremification of thrash metal that would only snowball further as the band and the genre they helped pioneer progressed. But the primary role Scream Bloody Gore served was to lay the groundwork for Death to expand upon in that early era that would itself later become the groundwork for their more ambitious progressive tilt during the second half of their career. I’ll throw it out right here just to get it outbid then way, it’s not exactly a hot take, but some Death fans are partial the other way; it’s probably already evident, but I prefer the band’s second era from Human to Perseverance. Personally I think bands like Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corspe were more suited to this primal gory form of early death metal, and I think Death would have wound up being seen as merely a pretty good band in a tier below those guys if they had stuck with what they were doing with their debut and the two albums that followed for the rest of their career. Again, Scream Bloody Gore is by no means a bad album, or even a rough start, kind of a Kill ‘em All sort of debut that laid solid foundations and allowed for greatness to follow but indeed stands well enough on its own.

7/10

1988 - Leprosy

The band’s sophomore release just a year later showed immediate signs of improvement. The trimmed track list with more meticulously groomed songs (and a greater density of sick riffs) produced several live staples for the band, like the title track, “Left to Die”, and especially the ever-traditional concert-closer “Pull the Plug”. But there was more than just better riffs and more focus on perfecting the songs here. The production on Leprosy was clearer than the band’s debut the year before, and the writing was generally more sophisticated too, incorporating a bit more flashy technicality that would soon escalate to an echelon that would end up characterizing their sound more comprehensively. Soon-to-be vestigial characteristics of the debut album still remained: tons of wailing Slayer-sequence guitar solos, thrashy blast beats, the focus of palm-muted tremolo riffing, and more fantastical, brutal lyricism. But Leprosy presented these more mid-brow elements in a more impressive arrangement than its predecessor.

8/10

1990 - Spiritual Healing

My personal favorite of the band’s grittier first half of their career, Spiritual Healing was really just a more consistent continuation (to my ears at least) of the refined early death metal sound of Leprosy. The band were starting to develop a more signature style of riffing, as well as soloing that they would take with them into their next four albums. By now most of the gory detail was taking the backseat to Schuldiner’s psychological analysis of certain “Defensive Personalities”, parasitic religious manipulation by televangelists, and prenatal cocaine exposure. The more high-mindedness of Spiritual Healing also ushered in another ramp up in the band’s technicality that made the progression into the heady technical death metal of Human a rather natural one. The band’s last album in their so-called “traditional” or “brutal” or “classic” death metal era played around a lot more with the dynamic range of the genre and it really ran the gamut of what Death had done up to that point within that style of death metal and beyond, the title track being my personal favorite example of this ability the band had to contort the genre to fit their more expansive needs while keeping everything in the confines of death metal. It’s my favorite song on the album and of this era of Death’s career. At this point, Death had pretty robustly demonstrated their ability with the genre in its more primitive form, and evolved it along the way quite a lot at that, to the point where they really had nothing more they had to say with the style, an impressive feat after three albums. Sure they could have probably spun their tires in the mud for a few more albums (knowing now that Chuck Schuldiner sadly only had a little more than a decade left), but the direction this album had the band heading in was pretty apparent. The only question was if the band would take the leap into the upper echelons of technicality and explore the new frontier that they were headed toward. Thankfully for us, the band had plenty of ambition left in them. As for the last album of their first half of their career, it’s hard to find many complaints with, and one that capped off this era of Death in complimentary fashion.

9/10

1991 - Human

After reaching their peak with bruntly aggessive death metal, Death’s fourth album began a second act for the band, one that sought to elevate their style to a more progressive form of death metal. It was a change that was pretty strongly indicated by the direction the band had been heading in and the step up in technicality on Spiritual Healing. Human takes the solos and the fast-paced guitar passages and bass lines to new extremes that the genre had never seen before, and the lyrical shift to more heady, cerebral, existential themes fit well with the significantly increased musical complexity that the album introduced. The technically dazzling yet infectious riffing of “Together as One” and “Flattening of Emotions”, the still-tasty hooks of the former and “Suicide Machine”, and the tasty percussive rhythm of “Lack of Comprehension” made those songs live staples. The band were still kind of finding their footing with the compositional aspects of this new realm, but the grounding in the aggression of their previous work with the voyage into the techy unknown was a good thing to start with and a good way to explore some new sonic territory while safely tethered to what was effective for them previously that produced some pretty impressive results.

8/10

1993 - Individual Thought Patterns

Carrying forward the ambition for significantly increased technicality that began with Human on to their fifth album, Death were still getting the hang of things with Individual Thought Patterns, which isn’t all to surprising or something to impugn the band for given the difficulty mode that had selected to play the creative game on, and the band still made some significant improvements with the integration of the hyperspeed technicality into their sound. Even more than the subsequent Symbolic, Individual Thought Patterns made the technicality so much more of a focus where, to me, this was Death’s first bonafide technical death album. Human was definitely pretty technical, but on Individual Thought Patterns, Death cut the cord and let themselves float off into the dizzying cosmos of instrumental technicality and tailored their compositional practices to fit that need. If there was any contingent of fans struggling to keep up with Death’s progression or hoping for a scale-back to the more brutish early albums, they were left behind with Individual Thought Patterns, save perhaps for the consolation of more traditionally groovy closing track, “The Philosopher”, but rampant speed-fests like “Overactive Imagination” and odd-timed melodic groovers like “Trapped in a Corner” quickly became fan favorites. If there’s one thing Individual Thought Patterns lacked, it was balance, but that wasn’t going to be a problem for very long...

8/10

1995 - Symbolic

Ah, Symbolic, there’s not gonna be any surprising bucking of the trend or “bold” underrating here. In a catalog that so many fans regard as perfect, Symbolic stands out as the most common fan favorite, and for good reason. The album synthesized everything that had made Death such a force to be reckoned with in the death metal world. Weaving together the early era’s delicious primal grooves, the elevated technicality that had become a solidified facet of the band’s style, and their newly blossoming progressive inclinations, Symbolic remains the band’s most comprehensively representative and accomplished work, the best place for any newcomer to the legendary act to start, and the best album in their acclaimed discography. The song-writing is tight and interesting from start to finish, seasoned with both tasty riffs and captivating displays of technicality that enhanced the songs rather than the players’ appetites for indulgence, and kept consistently interesting with frequent tasteful dynamic shifts and surprising twists and turns. I would undoubtedly go on forever if I were to detail the brilliance of every song on here, the majestic melodies and winding structure of “Crystal Mountain”, the catchy commentary on mass surveillance of “1,000 Eyes”, the invigorating double-bass of “Misanthrope”, and the iconic riffing of the opening title track. Instead I’ll quickly highlight two songs that seem to go unnoticed that I find particularly beautiful for the unexpected compositional moves Death makes on them. The first is the song, “Without Judgement”, which abruptly drops its techdeath winding to hypnotize with a gorgeous and emotive melodic solo that seems rather uncharacteristic for Death that I just love, and the second is the closing track, “Perennial Quest”. It’s the longest song in the band’s discography up to this point, only to be just marginally eclipsed by “Flesh and the Power It Holds” on the subsequent album, and it embarks on a similarly proggy and melodic odessey to that of “Crystal Mountain”, but it’s the somber and mournful electric/acoustic outro that would soon become all too tragic for Death fans to listen to that concludes the album on such a heartfelt note in such beautifully fitting fashion. There’s no other moment like it in Death’s catalog, and it’s always a solemn, conclusive reminder of just how much light Chuck Schuldiner and Death brought to this world and how lucky we are to have albums like this. I’ll end my sentimental bit here and conclude by briefly summing up my thoughts on the album. Symbolic is Death’s magnum opus and a masterpiece among masterpieces that captures nearly everything that makes Death and death metal appealing and that had made the genre so predominant for decades since, and beyond being their best, to me, it is a perfect album.

10/10

1998 - The Sound of Perseverance

Death’s final album seemed to set them on yet another new musical course after the second run through the steady improvement over the course of a three-album cycle. The longest album of the band’s seven and including the longest songs in their catalog on average, The Sound of Perseverance took Death on quite the progressive joyride, and surprisingly (to me at least) it kind of split and confused some fans who had just gotten used to the band’s digestible technicality on Symbolic. Granted, I was just a little baby bitch boy when this came out, but personally I don’t see why this was such a shock to the system for so many fans (apparently), the band had always been pretty ambitious and this was a pretty logical next step for them to expand their continually expanding sound. The structures on the band’s seventh album are less conventional and more packed with extensive technical passages, and the band do pull out a good few more surprises than they ever did in any album previously, like the acoustic/electric guitar-solo instrumental “Voice of the Soul”. But The Sound of Perseverance is by no means any kind of contrived over-indulgence in ideas grander than what the band could accomplish or frothy wank-fest. The band was already developing a bit of a progressive bend in the previous three-album arc and they simply took it to the next level the same way they did with their instrumental technicality on Human. And fans did indeed vibe with plenty of songs on The Sound of Perseverance, with the impressively vocally high soaring “Spirit Crusher”, the angular and unpredictable “Scavenger of Human Sorrow, and even the lengthy, and indeed structurally confounding, prog-techdeath monolith “Flesh and the Power It Holds” making their way into the band’s setlists on their last tours. And of course the album ends on the well-earned, fun, high-octane cover of Judas Priest’s “Painkiller”, which finds Schuldiner incredibly nailing the songs high melody with his high-pitched death shrieking style (and finishing with never-before-heard clean vocals). For the reputation it has for eschewing balance for high-minded progness, The Sound of Perseverance is by no means a hard pivot from or unrecognizable from Symbolic. Its bold expounding upon aspects of their sound that already seemed pretty evolved while remaining musically engaging and not sacrificing what made their previous work appealing, and sheer magnitude and impressiveness of the band’s third venture into new territory again do sometimes make me question whether I like it more than Symbolic. While it did seem to pave the way for another new mind-blowing era of Death that death took away from us, The Sound of Perseverance has become a glorious and aptly titled swan song and a testament to the band’s and Schuldiner’s relentless ambition and, indeed, genius. Eternal cheers to Chuck and to Death.

9/10

And that’s it, eleven years and seven albums that continually revolutionized death metal and paved the way for so much of what we hear today. Anyone reading this of course probably knows most of all of this, but it’s still astonishing to think about how much Death did for the genre in such a relatively short time, and, for me at least, even having already been a pretty big fan of Death, listening to these albums from Scream Bloody Gore to The Sound of Perseverance, it reminded me more viscerally of the quality of the music and respected legacy of the band that I have always intellectually acknowledged and agreed with, which I figured I’d share here. If, somehow, you’ve come across this and you’re not into Death or death metal but you’re open to it and interested, you’re in for a treat. Put on Symbolic and just enjoy the trip down the rabbit hole.

[not-xpr-art]

Art Advice #2 - How to beat art block!

Hi again everyone!

This is the second instalment to my Art Advice tag offering hints and tips for artists of any skill level! 

This time I’ll be going into ways I’ve found that help me to combat art block or creative ruts. Of course, these may not work for you, and a big part of art is learning about what things do and do not work for you, but I hope it at least offers some advice to anyone who struggles with art blocks!

How to beat art block. 

Getting into an art block can be one of the most frustrating things as an artist. Especially if you’ve tried to dedicate a window of time to drawing something, only for your brain to ‘nope’ out and give you no motivation. I’ve found it can often make you feel worthless as an artist, particularly when you see fellow artists continuing to produce countless amazing artworks, and this kind of self depreciation only adds to your inability to produce anything. 

And I’m not about to suggest some magical cure of art block, since I don’t believe there is one, but I hope that my advice can at least help lead you towards getting out of these vicious circles of art block & self deprecation!

Tip #1 - Explore other mediums 

I feel like as artists we get incredibly ‘comfortable’ in the mediums we’re familiar with. For me, that’s digital and pencil drawing. I’ve been doing pencil drawing for as long as I can remember, and digital for a little over 7 years, so I’ve become very comfortable in using them. 

However, I think that a good way to not only help combat art block, but also to expand your art horizons, is to step out of that comfort zone into a new field of art. 

Of course, I’m not saying that I expect every artist to go from pencil drawing for 10 years to suddenly picking up a paint brush and doing some oil painting. But instead that every so often maybe just try and dabble in mediums you’ve not used as much, or haven’t used before at all. A lot of shops sell pretty inexpensive paints, pens or pastels nowadays, not to mention a quick Google search will give you tips on how to use the particular medium if you’re not sure how to start. 

A thing I want to mention here, too, is that I think it’s important to not to expect yourself to be automatically ‘great’ at a particular medium. For example, last year I did my first embroidery piece. I had wanted to do embroidery for a long time, and did actually enjoy it a lot (even if it was incredibly time consuming lol). But I found myself dissatisfied with the finale result. 

And in a way this is because I expected myself to be perfect at embroidery after just one attempt, which is ridiculous of course, since any kind of art takes years and years to ‘master’. And when I look back, I can’t help but think ‘why does it have to be good in the first place’? Why did I put this pressure on myself to be a sudden Master of Embroidery, when surely the main goal of any kind of art is to some extent the enjoyment of the process? 

This is still a mindset I think a lot of artists will relate to, and is something I’m trying to combat myself. 

Recently I painted some fake plastic eggs inspired by the Polish folk art tradition ‘Pisanki’. They took a long time, and my neck hurt a lot from being hunched over and painting little dots, but honestly I really loved the whole process of them! Painting on 3D objects isn’t something I do a lot, and I also rarely do purely pattern-based work like this, so it was a real deviation from my comfort zone.

In a way, exploring other mediums is like a creative respite. Giving yourself a break from what you’re familiar with not only helps you to be inspired by a wide range or arts, but when you return to the mediums you enjoy the most, I’ve actually found you appreciate them even more!

(Really, nothing makes me more appreciative for digital art than painting a wrong dot on the surface of an egg and not being able to rub it out...)

Tip #2 - Try different styles

Another tip, similar in many ways to the first one, is to try different styles of art every once and a while. 

Like with materials, I think we as artists can get overly caught up in ‘our style’ of doing things. Whether this is a particular stylised or cartoonish way of drawing, or doing realistic art, or even sticking to a particular colour scheme. And I think especially in the world we live in, where artists have to make themselves as ‘consumer friendly’ as possible, which often means having a ‘recognisable brand’, it can feel like we have to do our art in a particular way, otherwise people will lose interest in it. 

I think this is harmful for a lot of reasons. Partly, I feel it stifles artists creativity to force themselves to do one style and one style only. I also feel it assumes that non-artists are so single-track minded that if an artist were to post works of art that involve different styles, then they would immediately lose interest. 

So my advice to any artist who has a particular style is to once in a while try out some different styles. It doesn’t have to be big pieces, and it also doesn’t have to be the polar opposite of what your style actually is. But instead if can be as simple as doing a ‘style challenge’ (something I’ve done in the past), or even just trying a different way of drawing or painting! 

In a way, changing your medium and changing your style occasionally go hand in hand. I particularly find that how I draw people will change with the kinds of mediums I use, or even when I start using a new brush with digital art.

For example, I recently did this super quick sketch of Kiki Layne, because I really loved the reference image, and it came out a lot more stylised than my art usually is. And this is almost entirely down to the brush I used (which was an ‘ink’ style brush, in comparison to the ‘pencil’ or ‘pen’ brushes I usually use for sketching). 

This isn’t a drastic change in style for me, but I do think even trying to do rougher or messier styles of art like this can allow you to see your art in a new light! 

(A side note here, but I already pretty much change up my style with every piece because I have no interest in being ‘marketable’ lol... But I’m definitely not suggesting everyone should be like me, just every so often changing up your style I believe can be really beneficial!)

Tip #3 - Changing subject matters

This one is essentially the same as the other two, and I’m sorry if this comes across as repetitive, but I think another great way to help beat art block is by changing up the kinds of things you draw!

Being predominantly a portrait artist, I rarely go out of my way to draw things like trees or birds or cups or whatever. But I know that often when I feel myself entering a kind of creative rut or art block, it’s because I’ve been drawing too many people & my brain is sort of all people-d out lol... 

(this is a tree I drew in oil paints midway through last year because I was feeling particular people-d out at that point)

So I think occasionally drawing other things, and going out of your art comfort zone, can help to improve your creativity. And hey, who knows, maybe you’ll end up incorporating something you drew randomly into a new artwork!

TL;DR (/conclusion)

So, remember that exploring other mediums, changing up your regular style and choosing other subject matters can all help in beating art block! Of course, you don’t have to do them all at the same time, but instead just dipping in and out of them as you produce your regular work can be highly beneficial! 

I mainly wanted to make this post not to say that by doing all three of these things, you’ll magically be free of art block forever, because that’s just not true. (I’m someone who does a lot of these things pretty regularly, but still gets into art blocks every now and then). I instead wanted to inspire you to deviate from what you are usually drawn to as an artist. 

The world is your creative oyster, so don’t be afraid to explore it! 

~

I hope you enjoyed this post about ways to beat art block! I may make a part two if people are interested since there are a lot of other things that I think can help in improving creativity!

[askbloatedbellyblog]

How about Yurio for Thanksgiving? It's at least plausible for him seeing the international stage he's on with others?

Lucky for you, I’ve actually already written this exact thing already as a fic. (which I realize is another fic I really need to transfer over to AO3 as well. Which is a project... I just haven’t done.)

All kidding aside (especially since I’m answering this one past Thanksgiving because it’s Yurio), I think that Yurio goes all out for the Thanksgiving experience. 

To me, Yurio already has a tremendous appetite so he’s already hungry often, but three other factors I think he’d take to the extreme on Thanksgiving. One is it’s already a mass gluttony day where everyone is kind of given a free pass, two is that he’d want to maximize his eating starving himself, and three that he’d look at it as an opportunity to show he’s better at another thing than others. So he might starve himself even more than a day before, have actually trained himself to eat bigger quantities, and then still keep his stomach expanded the whole time he was fasting by drinking lots of water (he sacrificed his bladder to help with a feast later). For at least a day before Thanksgiving, Yurio’s stomach is growling and gurgling and more between having nothing in it or water. He’s already grumpy a lot but I’m sure this makes it worse other than when he can brag about how much he’s going to eat and show them how it’s done. I wouldn’t be surprised if his stomach would be the type that would let out a bunch of groans together and loudly, enough that people even not next to him will wonder if he’s okay. 

Then on the day of, it would depend on what style of Thanksgiving he was having and how much was prepared. Because if I had my way, I’d love for Yurio to have bragged enough that extra portions were made just for him or that he had the goal of making sure that the table was cleared with him eating the majority. There is the conflicting thought of either having Yurio in jeans (blue or black because I think he’d worn both?) and eating until the button pops on them, or having Yurio in his ballet pants because they would be the perfect Thanksgiving pants. Being how Yurio is and likes to show off and be the center of attention, I think it’s probably a mixture of both with Yurio eating in his jeans strictly to pop them, then once he’s done eating and needs to relax, he changes into ballet pants and maybe even shows off his belly (either standing or sitting) since they would give the most room and also be tight around his bloated gut. 

As far as eating goes, I think Yurio would full on stuff his face especially at first, just chowing down as fast as he can because he is STARVING. Sitting down his stomach would growl loud and make the rest of those at the table raise some eyebrows, then even while he’s eating at first, his stomach would still be demanding it. I think I can see Yurio being the type that would get up and reach over the dinner table especially if it was a big spread and it was faster for him to just get up and get more food than it was to wait. I think Yurio would also be the type that would love the challenge of popping his pants button for both himself and the shock value, especially if someone doubted that he could. I think his first goal in eating would be to make sure to try everything on the table, and then just try at least everything on the table to then gage what to focus on. 

Yurio would for sure be a burpy mess, partly with food still in his mouth while he was chewing and probably ignoring any pain until he was done swallowing. I think he’d probably stop and pause and force out a burp that was stuck in his throat before he continued on then smirk to himself and go back on. He’d finally pop his pants button and let the fly unzip a little. He’d maybe even tense his stomach to try to force it open and then relax back in his chair for a moment and purposefully let out a big belch, then pat his belly in contentment to watch for the reaction of everyone, then wait a bit to survey himself and what’s left of the meal, before diving back in. 

The great mental image here is two fold of Yurio reaching over the table with is pants still buttoned and reaching WAY over and letting his full belly hang there a bit (not caring) as it dipped over the food and EVERYONE has to watch. Then the second part is after he’s popped his pants button and then allows his stretched belly to grow out a bit more. As he reaches over, it shows off his open pants more but more importantly allows his bloated belly to sag from how heavy and full it is in front of everyone while he just doesn’t care. He’s in it to win it, even if it means devouring everything he can. 

Eventually Yurio starts to slow down and struggle, that’s when he slows down, taking a long time to chew with strained swallows while sipping on his drink but he doesn’t let himself stop. He would grunt and hiccup, rubbing his belly to try to calm it down, take a deep breath, then take a few more bites. He may have a second wind once it’s time for dessert where he wouldn’t be up to how ravenous he was when he first started but with a sense of renewed furor, allowing him to consume at least a couple pies a la mode, plus various other desserts. It’s also possible that in spite or encouragement especially with Yurio’s various bragging that the hosts of the Thanksgiving come and drop off even more food in front of him. A gallon of ice cream, some extra ham, another tray of stuffing, anything. Yurio bragged about no leftovers and they would take him at his word. By the time he’s done, he’s as stuffed and done as the turkey he consumed. 

For a moment I think he’d just sit at the table leaning back in a post glut daze, just enjoying the fullness and pain but also satisfied on how much he was able to consume, even though he’d hurt and wince every time he has a case of the hiccups or his stomach cramps up. He’d rub his belly but if he caught anyone watching him, he’d make sure to rub the sides of his stuffed solid gut and try to make it more pronounced or even try to force out a burp for good measure. After the haze lifts a little bit, I think that’s when he’d finally get up with a struggle and change into his ballet pants, that allow him to be less constrained. He might try to hide his bulge a little with an oversize shirt but it’s obvious how full and bloated he is and again lifting his shirt up in a chair to play and rub his belly and be proud that he conquered the eating holiday. Then he might end up falling asleep on the couch or chair with his belly out that he was rubbing and now everyone can see. Just don’t make too big of deal out of his epic binge, or he’s liable to do it again.