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sladewilsonisanantihero · 3 years ago

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The Original Intent of Terra and how Deathstroke got the bad end of the stick for it

Okay, Deathstroke Children (Idk what to call you guys because fellow Deathstrokers would end this conversation immediately), I found the time to do this, so let's get to it!

(Note: My original laptop broke with my comics, so I have no images to spare, so it will be sourced. Another note: Many words will be in bold. Partly so that for those reading will not lose track.)

But if tl;dr:

Cold Hard Truth: Everyone from Terra fans to Deathstroke fans needs to stop seeing these characters as real people.

Original Terra wasn't human trafficked or whatever sob story people want to label her with. The CREATORS intended her to be written as Evil without the mental illness and to die for the shock value. They had Raven, The Literal Empath, spell this out in Judas Contract. As for Deathstroke's involvement, he was shoved into her creation story, and Marv Wolfman himself recognized his mistake in doing that.

And for those calling Deathstroke a nazi, Original Terra had nazi-like beliefs where common people should fear and serve them or be killed off just because they're 'special'. Again, BLUNTLY stated in the Judas Contract. So if you're going to call Deathstroke a Pedophile, we'll call OG Terra a Neo-Nazi. (But I highly advice for Deathstroke Fans to not start that kind of war, but I had to say what I had to say.)

Don't get me wrong. (Hopefully all) Deathstroke fans know that their relationship was wrong just like Marv Wolfman, and we do not support pedophiles! But Slade isn't a pedophile! He was never intended to be written as one! It was a mistake made on many levels and should be rewritten like OG Terra's Evil Neo-Nazi-like personality, instead of being thrown into cancel culture.

Also for Deathstroke fans, don't get upset over their content and begin any argument emotionally. Just enjoy whatever good content we can get and support it if you can. Hopefully we'll get our Deathstroke movies and so on!

So I've briefly chatted with one of you over the matter with Terra/Tara Markov and how upsetting it is about how people refer to Slade Wilson as a Pedophile. That is a serious accusation that would make it very uncomfortable to argue about since it can easily make it seem like we justify the actions of pedophiles, and that we are part of pedophile culture that does exist in social media space.

AND WE SHOULDN'T, AND FOR ANTIS READING THIS WE WON'T.

But there was a time when I used to have a blog called friendlyremindersofsladewilson, where I defended Slade and put the blame all on Terra. I was 14 at the time, and looking back at it, I am not proud of it because I realized now as an adult how I defended it for most of the wrong reasons, but still stand with the fact that SLADE IS NOT A PEDOPHILE.

And since this took place when I was so young, it compelled me to write this post because I fear some of you are really young, too, and may end up in this regretful position.

So to make it clear, what Slade had been written to do is a crime, and we should acknowledge it, but not in the way as if it was a crime acted out in real life.

What I mean by that is that there's a clear separation between fiction and reality where one isn't real (Duh!). In this case, it's about the mistakes made between fiction and reality. In reality, mistakes made by the person responsible is on the person. In fiction, mistakes made is dependent on the creator's intent, and sometimes the creators can make mistakes themselves.

Most notably Terra's:

Tara Markov/Terra was created by Marv Wolfman and George Perez.

In Marv Wolfman's literal website, he stated in his online "What the-?" column:

"Which leads to Terra. That was easy. George and I wanted a Titan who betrayed the others. we also wanted to play against every reader conception of who characters are. George and I knew her whole story before we began and we knew she would die. We set the story up with her trying to destroy the Statue of Liberty to show she was the bad girl, but we knew if George drew her as a cute kid everyone would simply assume she would be ‘turned’ from the dark side because that’s the way it was always done which is why that wouldn’t be the way we did it. Tara was insane an stayed that way right until the moment she died. By the way, she IS dead. I don’t know what other writers will do with her – if anything – but if they want to honor the original series they will leave her dead. The Terra from Team Titans was – as stated – some kid the villain kidnapped and physically and mentally altered her into looking and acting like the original. But she was NEVER the real Terra."

And it should also be noted that he stated before this statement that:

"...Only mistake I think I made with him is having him have a physical relationship with the 16 year old Tara Markov. That was wrong."

So Marv Wolfman himself recognizes that what he did was a mistake, but his intent on Terra was never to write a victim.

And quick note: Insanity isn't written as a mental illness here. It's written like how many villains are labeled as insane for having skewed beliefs that deviates from the common good.

Terra truly had some nazi-like beliefs where she BELIEVED that everyone who wasn't 'special' like her and the Teen Titans deserved to be treated like shit because they weren't 'special' like them. She bluntly said it herself in the Judas Contract.

As for George Perez's comment in an interview I found in this website:

"GEORGE: Tara was just a cute little girl, although I based a little bit of that on my wife Carol’s sister, Barbara. A little upturned nose… Barbara does not have the teeth that Tara had. I wanted Tara to be a girl who looked normal. Which also means her death caught everyone even more offguard.

Tara, she was made to be killed; she served her purpose. That was it.

ANDY: You didn ‘t get any attachment to Tara?

GEORGE: No, because I knew we were going to kill her. So I deliberately used all the things to make her as likeable and cute as possible, so people would never believe we were going to kill a sixteen-year-old. And she was a sixteen-year-old sociopath. She was one of our cleverest gimmicks; we deliberately created her in order to lead everyone astray. So we couldn’t build any fondness for her, ’cause we knew full well what her whole motive for existence was. Her existence was basically to keep the stories interesting; we were tossing a curve that no one would have expected.

ANDY: You didn ‘t even love to hate her, huh?

GEORGE: No. I loved handling her, because she was such a good idea. But she was an idea. Not as much a person. She was there to show exactly how much their humanity can be one thing they have to be careful about, the Teen Titans have to be careful about. . . they can be too trusting, or their own weaknesses can be used against them."

Terra was supposed to be a representation of An Evil Betrayal of Trust and That Not All Cute Girls Are Good.

But they took it too far by making her sleep with Deathstroke because they wanted to truly make her look evil by literally sleeping with the enemy. Y'know because this was the 80s, and women having sex was an evil act back then, and that point of view has somewhat or barely improved 40 years later.

Deathstroke was just shoved into this idea, and Marv tried and perhaps failed at trying to undo this mistake with his talk with Beastboy (Tales of the Teen Titans issue #55) and before his confrontation from Wintergreen (Deathstroke (1991); Chapter 35).

So just as I had stated at the top in the tl;dr, it was a mistake made on many levels and should have been rewritten out just as many had done with OG Terra's true personality, and be done with it.

Random person: "He still slept with a 16-year-old."

And it's not that hard to make other heroes and villains do this mistake. Because again, it's all fiction. Deathstroke's fictional. As in Not Real, so we could literally undo the damage by rewriting this mistake. Or make it worse by making Terra the rapist by her using her Earth powers to bind Slade down and force him, and you can't deny that it's plausible. Because she's fictional. Anything can happen. So why didn't Slade tell Beastboy whether he slept with her or not, maybe it was because he really didn't want to but he was forced into it. And that's just something you can't dump on a very emotional man who was trying to kill you a moment ago.

ALL THE POSSIBILITIES BECAUSE IT'S FICITIONAL!

But ANYWAY, I went way too dark there.

Ending on a brighter note: Personally to all Deathstroke fans, please value your mental health, please don't start any arguments that'll compromise it, and continue supporting Deathstroke in whatever way you can!

#Deathstroke #Slade Wilson

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ladylizaelliott · 3 years ago

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Cruella 2021

Given my blog’s predisposition to being one of the places online to get some Cruella meta, fashion spams, character analysis etc, it only seems appropriate that I give some thoughts about the latest incarnation, Gillespie’s “Cruella”

First off, for those of you new to this blog, I am a massive Glenn Close fan who rediscovered the glory of her Cruella de Vil a while ago and decided (on reviewing the live action film), had some ideas about her character that compelled me enough to write my own fan fiction; Dearly Beloved. So walking into this movie, with background on nearly ALL the Cruella’s in various canons (book, animated film, live action, TV Series, Once Upon a Time) I knew I’d have to walk into the latest movie with the biggest grain of salt you could possibly carry as a human being.

That being said, this movie is entertaining, but it isn’t a Cruella de Vil story.

You lost me within the first ten minutes. I really wanted to give this movie a chance, but saying her two tone hair was GENETIC and not a choice: Weak. Saying her mother was MURDERED BY DALMATIANS VIA CLIFF YEET; Ludicrous. Jumping that hurdle in the first ten minutes already gave me a lot to get over. Giving a sociopathic, empathy devoid woman a backstory that is in any way resembling a ‘rags-to-riches’ just doesn’t fit. She will NEVER fit that mold no matter how hard you try to shove her in. Putting her in a punk aesthetic, without any true understanding of what real punk means, is them trying to pigeon hole a character that doesn’t belong into a marketable genre. It didn’t work. Surface level perhaps, to anyone who doesn’t know shit about this character, yes, she can be anyone you want her to be.

They had chances in this film to break their mould. They didn’t. First being as much as they toot their horns about being progressive, pro LGBTQ, they gave us a gay character that was *implied* and never confirmed. Cruella in the 1996 movie is queer coded. See my Dearly Beloved tags for those receipts. There is certainly a balance you can hit to make a villain who is queer, and whose queerness is not a TRAIT of their being a villain, just a fact of their life.

Second, skin the fucking dogs. You did a massive buildup to make us hate these THREE particular Dalmatians. The moment I thought she may have actually skinned the Baroness’s dogs to make her signature coat, I said out loud “Okay, make it canon, GO THERE! She’s that ruthless!” And when they didn’t, I was disappointed.

Also, talking to her dead mother by a fountain just hit me so hard as a Disney Princess trope and it just grated me. Like, no, Cruella doesn’t love. She obsesses, she possesses, so trying to make her into this Princess mold of ‘Talking to my dead mother at a fountain’ to me was laughable and the big climatic “Born Bad, and a little bit Mad!” scene I was almost ready to walk out.

Finally, Disney just loves to continue the trope of one of a women’s main traits of villainy stem from the fact that they vehemently do not want children. The Baroness is no exception to this trope. Disney just doesn’t want to face the fact that sometimes truly terrible people come from all kinds of parental situations and it isn’t the fault of the woman who didn’t want the child in the first place. It has to be from someone who at the news of being pregnant, tears apart their house. Indifference was my key to unlocking the cruelty of Cruella’s parentage, not flat out “I’m a career woman so I’m evil for not wanting children”

Also, the last five minutes. No. Her being the one who gives Anita and Roger their Dalmatians is one of the most laughably stupid tie-ins I have EVER seen. They marketed this movie SO hard as a being an origin story and a prequel, and then you give us THAT SHIT? She wants to skin their puppies, and you make her the one who gives them to them? What in the ever loving fuck.

So yes, rename all the characters, or I may actively refer to this character as Estella Von Hellmann, not Cruella. This is not an origin or a prequel, it is its own separate AU that makes her unrecognizable. Which is fine, original stories, go for it, but to make me believe that this woman becomes anything resembling the woman in the animated or live action canons ain’t gonna happen.

This movie is an alternate universe with a massive budget. And if they had TOLD me that going in, I’d have a lot less problems. But they didn’t.

#cruel 2021 #ladylizaelliott rants #cruella de vil #i have more thoughts Im sure #dearly beloved

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jereviendrai · 4 years ago

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||| ooc; does every character on this blog have bpd symptoms? is this problematic, considering they’re all villains or would-be villains? is there a way to give a villain a mental health disorder without stigmatizing the disorder? well--

OH AND BIG TRIGGER WARNING FOR A WIDE RANGE OF MENTAL HEALTH TOPICS SUCH AS: eating disorders, mental illness, stigmatization of mental illness, self harm, suicidal tendencies, and a fuckload more. I don’t go into detail. There are just mentions. I’m not gonna say a bunch of graphic shit, I promise! If I went into graphic detail, this would turn into a PhD thesis proposal, and that’d be WAY too long to be worth writing. Also I have BPD, but I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert on the subject. I’m not. My word is not law, but it’d be nice if my word was taken into consideration.

this post got so fucking long and disorganized jesus christ

The answers are: yes, not inherently, and absolutely.

I want to get into the mental health of all three characters in a second, but I think it’s important to talk a little about the other two points first. That said, though -- yes, they’re all borderline. All three of them! And they all experience it differently! I will come back to that. Anyway--

I feel like it’s important to talk about villains, mental illness and stigma. There’s a really common (and insanely lazy) tendency for writers to explain a villain’s villainy by simply saying, “oh, well they’re a psychopath,” or, “they’re just crazy.” This is not only lazy and offensive, but it contributes to an unfair stigma against the mentally ill.

Mental illness might, say, compel someone to steal a chocolate bar or snap at someone out of anger. It might make a person’s emotions volatile. It might make someone unreasonable. They might suffer delusions of abandonment, of some plot against them, of people’s secret intent to humiliate them, etc. They might suffer and handle their suffering poorly. They may cause harm. But that doesn’t make them... evil. It makes them complex. And how they react to and handle their negative actions says more about them than any diagnosis could.

When you have a villain with a mental illness, you need to examine how the illness is hurting them. Write about how it hinders their progress. Write about how isolating it can be for them. Write about the impact and struggle. Not how the illness makes them so evil or so irredeemably awful. The illness should be what humanizes them and helps to make them relatable. No matter how untouchable and powerful your villain is, they have some personal struggle that is independent of their villainy. When done correctly, it can go a long way in fleshing out your villain and adding interesting inner conflict!

I know, I know. You might be asking, “yeah, but don’t people with mental health issues sometimes cause harm directly related to their symptoms?” To which I say: yeah, duh, of course. Just like a depressed person might say something mean when they’re having a bad day. Just like someone with ADHD might make someone feel like they aren’t being listened to. Just like someone who has social anxiety might make a friend feel unloved. Just like mentally healthy people also occasionally cause harm.

I’m not saying mental health issues don’t cause problems and maladaptive behaviors. I’m just saying it doesn’t... make someone inherently bad -- real or fictional. And I need people to internalize that.

ANYWAY ON TO THE CHARACTERS AND THEIR BPD

(i know, you’re probably like, “dude oh my god shut up and get on with it” sakjlfdkjsa)

I’m going to be referring to the four subtypes. I know these are controversial to some people. Some really don’t like these labels, others feel comforted by them, etc. They’re just to make it easier to talk about this whole thing. No one fits neatly into any one subtype! Some people don’t resemble any particular one! Everyone is different! Don’t box people into these subtypes if you haven’t been given consent, thanks!

Mr. A / Clark Donovan Mr. A is a classic example of the Quiet Borderline. Someone with quiet BPD mostly directs their symptoms inward. It’s harder to detect than other types, as the symptoms that are most prevalent are mostly expressed, well, inwardly. Self-esteem issues, self-blame, insecurity, withdrawing emotionally, pretending you’re not angry when you are, self harming tendencies, suicidal thoughts, etc. He’s also kind of clingy. Mr. A is an extremely loyal person to a fault. He is a people pleaser and will go to the ends of the Earth to make his loved ones happy, even if it hurts him. This is of detriment to him, as he often finds himself getting hurt on behalf of people who might not care as much as he does. He’s let a lot of bad people into his life solely because they made him feel loved, wanted and useful. He views everyone he loves through rose-tinted glasses and only takes them off long after he’s been laid to waste by them. He has terrible issues with self-image and has thus developed an eating disorder. He also has severe depersonalization/derealization disorder, which is a result of how his mental health interacts with his reality-warping powers. It creates a lot of anxiety with him, watching himself phase through things and bend the world around him on a whim. His motivations in life are connected to this, but his motivation to do evil things is not. He wants to bring other superpowered people together as a united front against humanity, as he feels that humanity is a threat to their continued existence. This has nothing to do with his mental health issues. The part of it that does tie in is that he’s painfully lonely and has chronic feelings of boredom, so being surrounded with a shit ton of different people mitigates that. It’s a motive for him bringing people closer to him, but it is not a motive for him to launch an attack on all humanity. He’d be really offended if you tried to accuse him of doing this on the basis that he’s just a bit ill. His illness literally just makes him crave contact with other living beings just like him. He sometimes does bad or stupid things because of this, but it literally has nothing to do with his motives as a villain. As an addendum of sorts, Mr. A’s alias and reluctance to use his given name (Clark Donovan) are a result of identity issues he suffers due to his BPD. He finds it hard to maintain a stable sense of identity, so he just... doesn’t.

Ivan Chanteur Ivan closely resembles what we like to call an Impulsive Borderline, comorbid with ADHD. He is an impulsive person, as the name of the subtype suggests. He’s a thrill-seeker who suffers from extreme levels of chronic boredom, which he desperately tries to combat by any means necessary. Staying still and doing repetitive tasks is literal torture for him. If he cannot get up and move and do whatever it takes to keep himself feeling fulfilled and occupied, he is probably going to fucking lose it. When he is actively vocalizing his boredom on a regular basis, this means the chronic feelings of boredom have reached critical mass. It’s not just boredom. It’s anxiety, it’s agitation, it’s existential dread, it’s an inability to focus, it’s pent-up energy that needs to go somewhere and can’t just stay in him anymore. If he can’t get it out in healthy ways, he usually resorts to self-harm or less-than-healthy pursuits. He’s been known to dabble in drugs, self-harm, occasional promiscuity on a bad night. While therapy’s helped him get a handle on it, there’ve been a lot of stressful and traumatic things going on in his life have have made it a lot harder to keep himself in check. Ivan is pretty charismatic, able to cast a wide net and catch all sorts of people in his social web. He has a sort of natural magnetism that, on a superficial level, should make him quite popular. But underneath it all, he has difficulty trusting people long enough to actually let them into his life. He’ll act like an open book, only to slam himself shut and reshelve himself before anyone can get anywhere near the end. He’s easy to befriend, but difficult to get close to. This has caused him to feel lonely and frustrated. He wishes he could easily form deep connections, but it’s hard and it hurts him. In addition to all of this, he engages in a wide variety of attention-seeking and risk-taking behaviors. He often spends time with people who are not good to him, simply for the thrill of it. This has often gotten him hurt, but he finds it hard to cut this habit in spite of everything. This leads to a lot of frustration and self-hatred, as it makes it hard for him to protect himself. Every time someone hurts or betrays him, he beats himself up over it and tells himself he should know better by now. All that said, though, he’s come a long way in therapy. He’s not quite able to keep a handle on all of it all the time, but he’s managed to secure one or two decently stable friendships along the way.

Eve Laurier Eve is particularly difficult to talk about, but I’m going to try my best. Eve is what happens when you make a conscious decision to be bad. He knows beyond a shadow of doubt that what he’s doing is wrong, but he feels so wronged by the world that he just cannot seem to motivate himself to care. This... again... has nothing to do with his BPD. If anything, it’s his struggles with this disorder that keep him at least somewhat... grounded in reality. Eve suffered a personal tragedy -- the loss of his twin sister in a housefire. Though ruled an accident, he cried foul play. Consumed with grief at the loss of the only person he felt could truly understand him, he vowed to find the culprit and make them pay. This set him down a path of vengeance that would make John Wick blush. Eve grew up as the heir to his family’s criminal enterprise. This put him in a position of power the very moment he was born. This also left him exposed to a lot of terrible, violent crimes from a very young age. Because this was normalized by his family, he internalized and compartmentalized any misgivings he had about violence. By the time he was ready for university, he had been thoroughly trained to carry out hitjobs on behalf of the family. He was a weapon from the moment he left the womb. He was groomed to do terrible things, and it’s because of this ongoing and continuous trauma that he developed his particular cocktail of mental health issues. He mostly fits in with the label of Petulant BPD. Repeated and violent trauma did a number on him, leaving him angry and hurt over what his parents let him fall victim to. He also experiences feelings of self-loathing over the part he feels he played in his own trauma, despite the fact that it started in early childhood. He is self-defeating and self-blaming. He has a difficult time expressing his feelings and has angry outbursts fairly regularly, often resulting in self-harm and suicidal ideation. He’s been known to reach for the nearest mind-altering substance just to get out of his head for a bit. His mood swings are intense and leave him feeling fatigued and anxious. He has severe social anxiety that sometimes manifests as cold indifference. He also has issues with control, has paranoid delusions about the people in his life and doesn’t often believe it when people say that they care for him. He will find any and every piece of evidence that points to the contrary, even if he has to make it up himself. This usually ensures that he’ll end up alone again. He doesn’t have very many close relationships, if any at all. His BPD is not the reason he hurts people. Any hurt caused by his BPD is directed at himself, not at others. His BPD is a direct result of what actually has primed him to hurt people. It’s a direct result of trauma. He’s traumatized. And no, trauma is no excuse for what he’s done -- but his BPD didn’t make him kidnap and torture Ivan while he waited for Ivan’s parents to send in the ransom. That was all Eve. That was his conscious decision to make, in spite of everything in his head telling him how awful and wrong he would be to do such a thing. He knew it was wrong and ignored it, as he was under the impression that Ivan’s family had a hand in his sister’s death. If anything, his BPD aggravates his feelings of shame and self-loathing when he does precisely what his parents had been training him to do his whole life.

Anyway-- I hope this was helpful or at least interesting.

The point I’m trying to make here is that mental illness isn’t some kind of ultimate litmus test of good and evil. A disorder doesn’t make you good or bad. It’s just another facet of who you are.

So... to that end... please for the love of fuck stop using personality disorders as the reason for someone’s villainy. Please. I am begging.

I wrote a bunch of BPD villains in various stages of villainhood because I have BPD and this disorder often makes you feel like you’re evil, a monster, etc. Honestly, on good days I feel like an inherently bad person who consciously chooses to do good. That’s very flawed and I know that logically I’m not inherently bad, but that’s kind of what stigma does. It makes you feel like you’re inherently bad. And that feeling influenced how I write all three of these characters.

This is an incoherent mess but today’s the day I find out if I have coronavirus and I’m so fucking stressed out and hopped up on DayQuil. Thanks for reading any of this, I guess?

#||| ooc;#||| canon; ivan chanteur #||| canon; mr. a #||| canon; eve laurier #||| canon;#PLEASE READ THIS I SPENT SO MUCH TIME #I LITERALLY SPENT HOURS ON THIS FOR NO REASON AKLJFJSAJDLKSKJDKSL #i'm listening to 'the spider' by weezer and it's a fucking mood right now #fucking christ ok tumblr lags so goddamn much when i open this in my drafts so i need to post this now #also yeah i guess this is me telling the world i have a personality disorder hi surprise i'm Messy and Traumatized who knew haha

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toaarcan · 5 years ago

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Sonic X, Sonic Heroes, and IDW, or: How a bad anime from 2004 spoiled a comic from 2019.

Now, I haven’t been following IDW Sonic all that closely. I get regular updates from Nemesis via Discord, and additional info from some of the Tumblrs I follow that are invested in it, but I don’t really have a desire to touch it myself. Here’s why.

There’s a multitude of reasons for this. Starting with the background of Sonic Forces wasn’t really a good place to begin from, and being based on present-day game lore in general was always going to hurt it, mainly because SEGASonic canon is currently a confusing mess of retcons brought on by Iizuka taking the J.K. Rowling approach.

Wait, no, he’s just saying stupid shit that contradicts previous canon, not trying to score woke points and hoping nobody notices the frankly terrible stereotypes and TERF tweets. Iizuka is taking the Greg Farshtey approach.

Added, as anyone that’s had experience with my opinions will tell you, I started falling out of love with Ian Flynn’s writing somewhere around Issue 200, and moved to outright dislike during Mecha Sally, and to make matters worse I started noticing that some of the flaws in the 200-247 era were also present in the 160-199 era, retroactively making those harder to go back to.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I kept up with Archie for the SatAM cast. SatAM reruns back in 2004 were my Sonic, moreso than anything else, and even now I still have way more attachment to those two seasons of animation than I do to most other aspects of the franchise, warts and all. So Archie providing me with additional content for said characters was a major draw for me. I’d generally put up with a lot just to get myself more SatAM content.

That in itself is a large part of why I fell off the Archie train during Mecha Sally. The entirety of the SatAM cast were removed from the regular lineup, just leaving three SEGA characters with their personalities stunted, even if that didn’t make sense in-universe. But that’s a discussion for another day.

So being written by someone whom I no longer enjoyed the writing of, set in a mess of a canon with a thoroughly shite game as the main basis, without the cast I read the previous comics for gave me little reason to invest in IDW Sonic. It wasn’t for me, I’d just keep reading Transformers and move on.

Then MTMTE/LL ended with a heart-twister and Ex-RID ended with a giant Unicron-shaped fart, and the new comic is dull as fucking dishwater and started by killing off one of my favourites, who was also one of the franchise’s confirmed LGBT characters. So now IDW is getting none of my money. Which is good because I’m broke.

Tangents aside, my lack of interest wasn’t something set in stone. If it turned out that the comic was actually really good, then sure, I’d try it. I was up for being proven wrong. But so far, I haven’t felt compelled by the responses from the internet. If anything I’ve been more turned off.

I could talk about how zombies are really fucking boring. I could talk about how SEGA’s recent confusion over what to do with Amy has combined with Ian’s need to include a Sally-esque character to make IDW Amy into Sally Lite. I could talk about how Ian seemingly fundamentally misunderstood everything that was cool about Neo Metal Sonic and somehow managed to reduce him to a boring Eggman minion in an arc where Eggman was out of action due to amnesia… But I won’t.

Instead I’m going to talk about how the comic has done something that would legitimately make me think twice about picking it up even if the FF were to debut tomorrow.

Yeah, I would pass up a SatAM fix because of this, that’s how much this ticks me off.

Now, I presume that if you’re reading this, you have a favourite Sonic character. And you probably feel pretty strongly about how your favourite character is portrayed. If they get a bad run in a game or two then you probably get a little salty about that. Tails and Knuckles fans in particular, as of late, seem to be the ones getting the short end.

Well, my favourite character in the entire franchise is Emerl the Gizoid. I will take Gemerl as a worthy substitute, they’re basically the same character. And the comics have been doing them dirty since the Archie reboot.

(Sidenote: I will be referring to Emerl with male pronouns from this point on. The Maria-soul thing isn’t as widely known as I’d like it to be, so I’m going to compromise for the sake of keeping the focus on the actual point)

However, not everything about this can be laid at the feet of Ian Flynn. Arguably his portrayal of said character is merely a symptom of a long-running issue that has plagued Sonic storytelling for roughly 15-16 years now.

But before we get into that, let’s get into something important: Why Emerl is my favourite Sonic character.

Part 1: Emerl in Sonic Battle, or “How I learned to stop worrying and love the Gizoid”.

This game doesn’t get enough love.

Now, I totally understand why it doesn’t get enough love. There are game design choices, like the grinding and the repetitiveness of the story mode that really drag it down, and because of that, Battle can become a slow-going and tedious experience, and that’s a real shame, because the story that’s hidden in this game is a thing of beauty.

Like most Sonic games from the 2000s, this game introduces a new character to join Sonic’s list of friends. Unlike the games that aren’t SA2 and Sonic Rush, this new character is actually good (This is hyperbole, Omega, Silver, and Shade were fine too).

Emerl enters the story as a mute, barely-functional robot that doesn’t do much of anything for a while, and only seems to come to life when Sonic locates it and attacks it. However, as the robot absorbs more Chaos Emeralds, slowly a personality starts to form, largely pieced together from other characters’ traits.

Emerl, as he is dubbed, is initially childlike and naive, but as he grows he develops a sassy streak, and his speech becomes a lot more developed. Maturity sets in, as Emerl grapples with his own nature, particularly the legacy he carries from the ARK, and Shadow’s ongoing turmoil with regards to the whole “Living Weapon” deal. Ultimately he becomes a hero, following in the footsteps of his mentor, parental figure, and closest friend, Sonic.

That’s right, Sonic, not Cream, is Emerl’s closest friend. We’ll get to that.

But this heart-warming story of Sonic becoming a dad for a robot doesn’t have a happy ending. Despite Shadow and Rouge finding a way to neutralise Emerl’s destructive Gizoid programming, Eggman has a way to reactivate it anyway, driving Emerl into a berserk rampage. This is kind of the one sticking point I have with the game’s plot, Eggman shouldn’t have been able to do this after Shadow and Rouge neutralised Emerl.

Additionally, while Emerl was on the ARK getting Maria’s soul crammed into him, Gerald also added a self-destruct mechanism that would trigger if he ever went Ultimate again.

So with Emerl quite literally exploding with all the power of the Chaos Emeralds, but his destructive programming forcing him to turn Eggman’s latest Death Star knockoff on Mobius/Earth/Sonic’s World, Sonic races up to confront his mecha-child, and things take a turn for the Old Robot Yeller.

In a moment that really deserves more attention, Sonic confronts his own child on the bridge of a space station, while Emerl is running on the power of the Chaos Emeralds and outputting more energy than he can physically take, and they fight. In the space of thirty seconds, they have a ten-round knock-down, drag-out brawl, and at the end, Sonic stands triumphant. Without using a single transformation. Yeah, that’s how powerful this guy is, that’s not travel speed, that’s combat speed. Looking at you, Death Battle.

It’s not really clear whether Sonic outright defeats Ultimate Emerl, or just survives long enough for his opponent to reach his limit and self-destruct, but the end result is the same. Sonic cradles a robot that became his own child over the course of the past few weeks, someone he raised from a baby-like state into a mature and heroic individual, and Emerl looks up at him and asks “Sonic… am I going to die?” And despite Sonic desperately trying to get him to keep it together, Not only does Emerl die, but he’s aware that the end is coming, and bids farewell to all of his friends as Sonic pleads with him to hold on. Shadow is equally distraught, his only friend with a connection to the ARK, someone he can call a brother, someone who carries the soul of his deceased sister within him, is dead.

Emerl: “Sonic I don’t feel so good.”

Like it’s canon that Eggman basically murdered Sonic’s kid.

And goddamnit this ending hits me hard. It frustrates me that Eggman was able to pull a means to drive Emerl into his Ultimate freakout mode out of his arse, but other than that, it’s so gutwrenching, I love it.

Gamma’s story from SA1 gets a lot of praise on the Internet, but for me, this is even better. It’s like Gamma’s story, but if Gamma was actually central to the plot of the game and the characters other than Amy gave a shit about him, and gave a shit about him for longer than a single cutscene, after which they are never mentioned again. Hell, due to Chaos Gamma being a thing, Gamma gets more love from the other characters in Battle than he does in SA1.

But, unfortunately, it doesn’t end there.

Part 2: (Sonic) Anime was a Mistake, or: “Sonic X ruins everything.”

I’ve made my dislike of this anime quite clear in the past. The characters are flanderized, Sonic is a B-lister in his own damn show, the villains are weaksauce or boring or both, the plot is only remotely close to good when its cribbing from two videogames which told the stories in question better, and for the first two seasons the entire show actually revolves around not Sonic, but the least relatable audience surrogate ever made. The third season would continue to include him, but shove him (And everyone else) to the side in favour of a Pokemon whose only move was “Flashback”, making audiences the world over question why he was even there in the first place.

Oh, and it also near-singlehandedly destroyed the thin shreds of character development that Tails, Knuckles, Amy, and Eggman had received in Sonic Adventure 2.

All four of these characters had been significantly enriched by the then most recent console game. Eggman had been revealed to be motivated by an admiration for his grandfather, Gerald Robotnik, but in the same game learned that Gerald had lost his marbles and programmed the ARK to smash into the planet and kill everyone on it, probably including his surviving family, i.e. little baby Ivo Robotnik. Gerald betrayed Eggman posthumously, and it’s clear from Eggman’s interactions with Tails during the credits of the game that this is giving him a lot to think about.

Knuckles is a weird case because most of his characterisation in SA2 is conveyed via… the lyrics to his rap music. Yes, really. He gets minor growth through the cutscenes, most notably in his decision to shatter the Master Emerald early on. Having already reassembled it once after it was broken in SA1, he’s now confident that he can do it again, so is willing to break it to prevent Eggman or Rouge stealing it. Via the rap lyrics, however (Yes I just wrote that), we also learn that Knuckles is slowly warming up to Sonic, gaining a greater respect for him, that he is more in-touch with his history and ancestors after SA1 (Though fortunately not in a Ken Penders way), and that he’s also struggling with feelings for Rouge, a plot element that went completely out of the window after this game.

Tails and Amy, however, get it the worst, as both went through arcs in SA1 that are followed up on and expanded in SA2. Amy had come to the conclusion that she didn’t need to rely on Sonic for everything, and that she would make him respect her as a hero in her own right. And while Amy is clearly in way over her head throughout the events of SA2, she still makes a significant difference, not only freeing Sonic from his cell on Prison Island, allowing Tails’ invasion to be a distraction and stealing a keycard to facilitate it, but of course, she later saves the world by motivating Shadow to join the fight to stop the ARK drop.

Tails had a similar plot, about learning to believe in himself as a hero, without having to rely on Sonic, and in SA2 he gets to prove it, not only partaking in the same rescue operation as Amy and fighting Eggman on even footing, but effectively taking command of the heroes and becoming their new leader, and for the first time, Sonic defers to him.

And then Sonic X came along and fucked it all up.

Eggman became a clownish antagonist with no semblance of nuance, and he actually got off the easiest.

Knuckles became a loud, dimwitted loner who got tricked by Eggman constantly, which would go on to be his personality for the rest of the franchise, ultimately culminating in the travesty against all sense that was Boom Knuckles.

Tails was reduced to a wimpy taxi driver, incapable of doing anything without his giant mecha plane to sit in. This was largely exacerbated by the presence of Donut Steele, who usurped his role as Sonic’s best friend and sidekick for two seasons, a problem which only got worse in the third season when Donut Steele suddenly became a genius inventor too, encroaching even more into Tails’ territory. Tails did get himself some more focus in S3, but only to make googly eyes at the Pokemon, a role which frankly could’ve gone to literally anyone else and would have made no difference on the plot. I would say that Tails being involved in a romance story at all is weird, but given the comics and Boom the weirdest thing about this latest tragic love story for the kid is that the Pokemon was actually close to his own age, because outside of this it really does seem like Tails goes for older ladies. Though she did turn into an adult at the end so I guess that counts?

But Amy arguably got the worst of it. Not only was her crowning moment in SA2 taken away from her and given to Donut Steele, but the poor girl had her promising character arc cut short and replaced with an obsessive, unhealthy fixation on Sonic, combined with a violent temper and an eagerness to smash anything that displeased her, Sonic included, with a giant hammer. Her admiration and crush on Sonic were warped into her being a possessive, mean-spirited stalker, whom only got away with it because she was an anime girl and therefore it was cute rather than creepy.

I want to take the time at this point to stress that stalking is not okay, under any circumstances. A girl obsessively following an older guy and threatening him and everyone around him with violent assault if they ever so much as imply that he isn’t interested in her is not cute, it means it’s time for a restraining order. Sonamy is not cute.

Now that I’ve swatted that particular hornet’s nest with a cricket bat, let’s move on!

I’ve always found it ironic that, despite being the adaptation with the most oversight from SEGA and Sonic Team, and the most endorsement from them too, Sonic X had easily the worst characterisation of any of the shows at the time. But, for all its faults, I can’t blame everything that went down in the aftermath on it. It had a comrade-in-arms. Mediocrely-written arms.

Part 3: Partner in Crime, or “Sonic Heroes also ruins everything.”

Sonic Heroes has a lot to answer for. And I mean a lot. It was the beginning of the franchise’s obsession with references to the classic games, it codified the really awkward ages for certain characters, and it seemed to be dedicated to completely unpicking everything established in the Adventure duology.

Shadow’s sudden resurrection is one thing, at least they had the graces to include a means to preserve his sacrifice via having him be an android, the blame for that not taking should be laid at the feet of his own game.

But the rest of the cast? Ohhh boy. Sonic’s still fine, he didn’t change much in the Adventure games, but then there’s Tails. Despite all the development he went through in SA1, in this game he needs to turn to Sonic when Eggman returns, and honestly this whole setup could’ve been fixed if Tails sought Sonic out not for the sake of having him lead the charge, but rather simply to recruit him into the counterattack he was already planning. Nevertheless, throughout the rest of the game Tails is almost as wimpy as his X counterpart, not helped by the voicework he’s given. No offense to William Corkery, who was probably like six when he recorded his lines, but this what you get when you choose actors via nepotism, rather than talent. But at least he does something.

How about Knuckles? As the other side of his derailment, Knuckles just turns up in this game, buddy-buddy with the characters he was only just starting to warm up to before, and blatantly not caring about the Master Emerald until Rouge mentions she’s going to steal it at the end. This will combine with his becoming a dumbass in Sonic X and become basically his entire character for… ever. Even in Forces, where he’s supposed to be doing slightly better as the leader of the resistance… but he’s a dumbass, and even Ian Flynn, who kept Knuckles as competent and intelligent in the Archie comics (Making the best version of Knuckles we’ve had in forever), kept this ongoing in the IDW comic. The Forces prequel portrays him as deciding to become leader of the Resistance (To an empire that hasn’t actually formed yet) purely to be a glory hound, and then goes on to establish that he was basically a figurehead while the real work was done by Amy, of all people.

And speaking of Amy…

Yeah, poor Amy is basically her Sonic X counterpart. But worse. I didn’t think that was possible, but at least X’s Amy seems to care about her friends. In Heroes, we’re treated to an equally violent and stalkerish Amy, who ostensibly starts searching out Sonic because he’s implicated in the abduction of Cream and Big’s pets, but when they actually catch up to him, Amy clean forgets why she is looking for him in the first place and tries to force him to marry her. Despite being twelve.

Y’know when Amy said she wanted to marry Sonic in SA2, she was joking, right?

This is why I find the idea of Amy being the real leader of the Resistance frankly absurd: Because the only time she led anything, it was a team that consisted of herself, a small child, and a man less intelligent and aware of reality than said small child, and she completely forgot their actual objective the moment she set her eyes on Sonic. Add in an unfortunate stint of very poor eyesight that got less and less understandable with every instance, and we got Amy’s rough personality for the next decade.

While Knuckles mostly stagnated at the same level of stupidity during that time, Tails got worse and worse, losing all of his badass traits with every game, a factor only increased by the “Sonic only” mentality costing him playable status, until he reached his nadir in Forces, cowering in terror from Chaos 0, and crying out to Sonic to save him, despite knowing full-well that Sonic was captured already. Amy, meanwhile, limped along at the same level until about 2014, where it seemed someone at SEGA finally realised that A) Having the only female character you regularly use be a pink-coloured gender-bent version of your male hero whose only function is lusting after said hero doesn’t and shouldn’t fly in this day and age, and B) violent stalkers aren’t cute, and dropped this trait. Unfortunately, this has been more of a lateral move than a fix, as, much like Antoine in the comics, they forgot to give her anything substantial or fitting after she lost her negative traits, leaving her a bland and dull character, and when you’ve had a character be consistent for ten years, even if they were consistently bad, then changing it without cause or warning is still going to be jarring and awkward.

Part 4: Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right, or “Why the fuck did this happen?”

As I said in Part 2, Sonic X was made under heavy oversight from Sonic Team, and was heavily endorsed by them at the same time. There were promos for the show inserted into Sonic Adventure DX, a few episodes were released on GBA cartridges, and it received a long-running comic from Archie that ran alongside the main book, even after the show had ended. Additionally, characters that debuted in games from 2002-2004 were restricted from appearing in Archie’s main book for years afterwards (Which will become relevant later). The third season was commissioned solely off of the response to the first two, and primarily overseas response, hence why the original sub was never aired in Japan.

Sonic X was huge. And with that in mind, it’s plain to see that the portrayals of the characters in Sonic X were intended by SEGA. Yeah, all that horrible characterisation was intended as the vision for the franchise going forwards, and subsequent games were adjusted to match it.

And unfortunately, not only did this have a serious impact on the main cast of the games, but it had an even worse effect on Emerl.

Part 5: Emerl in Sonic X, or “Emerl vs. ‘Emel’”

Sonic X’s original mission statement was to adapt Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, and Sonic Battle. Why they skipped Sonic Heroes, despite Shadow being a major player in Battle’s story, I don’t know.

For whatever reason, the show took a full season to actually get to the first game adaptation, SA1, and instead spent the first 26 episodes on bland episodic “adventures”, in some kind of strange reverse-Isekai series. However, once it got there, the adaptation work was fairly faithful to the source material, which the exception of Donut Steele’s being crammed in to the plot. However, he mostly followed Big around, and since Big was the least involved in the game’s plot, he didn’t disrupt too much.

Sidenote, after 26 episodes of filler, the actual SA1 adaptation only lasted six episodes.

SA2 was likewise only six episodes, but with the exception of Amy’s big scene, it likewise wasn’t too bad. Tails suffered this time around too, which is somewhat surprising since he was mech-dependent in the anime anyway.

After some more filler, which introduced the Chaotix and then did nothing with them, Emerl finally made an appearance, albeit they got his name wrong.

‘Emel’ looks like Emerl, and somewhat works like Emerl, but might as well be completely different. ‘Emel’ stays completely mute for the entire time he’s around, never advancing much beyond Emerl’s initial silent, pre-first Emerald persona. He does get better at fighting, but he’s limited to only absorbing a single skill at once (Except for when he isn’t).

Dispensing with Battle’s interesting, rich, and heart-twisting plot, Sonic X instead has ‘Emel’ linger in ensemble for three episodes, before condensing the entire game’s premise into a two episodes of really bland tournament arc, where Sonic himself doesn’t actually fight and we get two rounds of Donut Steele being a dick to his friend and his father.

‘Emel’ wins the tournament, and is given a Chaos Emerald, and just when you think it might kickstart him becoming an actual character, instead it just drives him insane and he immediately becomes a pathetically weak version of Ultimate Emerl. After kicking the crap out of the entire cast, he is defeated by Cream and Cheese, because even though he can take on Sonic, Knuckles, and Rouge at the same time and win, along with Tails, Amy, Donut Steele and everyone else, he… can’t handle two opponents at once.

This is stupid.

You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about Sonic’s relationship with ‘Emel’, and that’s because he doesn’t have one. The wonderfully-written parental bond that these two characters share in the games is completely excised, and instead the focus is put on Cream. Bare in mind, Cream is so inconsequential to the actual game that she doesn’t even get mentioned individually in Emerl’s dying speech like Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Shadow do. Instead she’s just grouped in with Amy.

This is also stupid.

And as a result of this, it means that what is arguable base form Sonic’s most impressive feat just doesn’t happen in the anime, instead Emerl dies because he is lightly kicked a bit by Cream. Yeah, unlike the Advance games, Sonic X’s Cream is not an unstoppable engine of destruction, she’s basically just a small child who can sometimes fly.

Instead of Emerl’s tragic speech and Sonic’s desperate attempts to keep his son alive, we get treated to a prolonged scene of Cream crying over the death of her “friend”, something that is probably meant to tug at heartstrings but doesn’t because Cream’s voice sounds like nails on a chalkboard.

And Shadow isn’t even there! He doesn’t come back until a third of the way through Season 3, and never meets ‘Emel.’

This is really stupid. And, for those keeping track, that means of Sonic X’s originally commissioned 52 episodes, and the full series run of 78 episodes, a stunning total of seventeen of them were actually adaptations of the games that the series was supposed to focus on, leaving us with 61 episodes of what might as well be filler.

And, unfortunately, that franchise-wide initiative had damning consequences for Emerl.

Part 6: Gemerl and Sonic Advance 3, or: “An incomplete resurrection.”

So, Gemerl. I know his name is apparently G-Merl now but fuck that I’m calling him Gemerl. If the comics can do it then so will I.

Gemerl is the worst thing Eggman has ever done to Sonic. Like, there is no contest. Some of his other schemes might be more destructive and generally evil, but in terms of personal pain inflicted, nothing has topped this.

Eggman salvaged Emerl’s corpse, and brought him back to life as a mindless murderbot under his control. So not only did he kill Sonic’s robo-son, but he also brought him back as a weapon.

Come the conclusion of the game, Gemerl predictably betrays Eggman, steals the Chaos Emeralds from Sonic, and goes on another rampage. I have… headcanons about this fight, but that’s something to worry about later. What’s important is that, once again, Sonic is victorious, and Gemerl’s defeated body plunges into the atmosphere.

Fortunately, Tails is able to bring Emerl back properly this time, presumably using the Chaos shard that was left over at the end of Battle’s finale. So, it’s all a happy ending, right? Sonic has his child back, Shadow has his connection to his history restored, and Emerl is alive and well, right?

Wrong.

See, the vile spectre of Sonic X rears its ugly head once more, and sabotages this conclusion. Gemerl doesn’t return to Sonic, in fact we never see him reunite with his father. Instead, Sonic X’s version has enough clout now to take precedence, so Gemerl is now Cream’s playmate.

Bear in mind that Emerl’s idea of a fun game is all-out combat against his friends, and Cream doesn’t like fighting (Even if she’s really good at it in Advance 2 and 3).

And then he never shows up again. Even when Cream is part of the game’s plot, like in Rush or Generations, he’s not there, and most egregiously, in Sonic Chronicles, where Cream is not only an active player in the plot, but so are Gizoids, the creators of said Gizoids are the main antagonists, and Emerl himself is mentioned… Gemerl is not there.

But he did make it into the comics, for better or worse. Mostly worse.

Part 7: Embargos, knock-offs, and misused tropes, or: “Ian Flynn dun goofed.”

For a long while, Emerl/Gemerl was barred from the Archie comics, due to the Sonic X embargo, and when it was lifted, he didn’t appear until the reboot. We did, however, get a suspiciously similar substitute in the form of Shard.

Shard was the original Metal Sonic, but when he was brought back and rebuilt for the Secret Freedom arc, he was given a colour scheme ostensibly derived from Metal Sonic 3.0, but one shared with Gemerl, and a personality that was a lot like a watered-down version of Emerl’s own.

On some level I can understand Ian’s decision to bring back Metal Sonic v2.5, rather than use the character that seems to have been an inspiration for this new incarnation in some way. He’d need a fully-formed Emerl, necessitating a skip over the whole story, since there wasn’t room for an adaptation during the Mecha Sally arc that the Secret Freedom story was framed within. Heck, for all we know, the similarities between them may simply be a pretty sizeable coincidence.

But then the reboot happened and Gemerl finally joined the comic cast. And to say it was underwhelming would be an understatement.

You’ll notice that I said “Gemerl” rather than “Emerl”, because his entire story was indeed skipped. The events of Sonic Battle and Sonic Advance 3 had both happened already. This wasn’t Ian’s decision, as far as we know, his intention was for the comic to start over from the beginning. However, due to the interference of Paul Kaminski, who wanted a softer reboot, Ian was forced to fill the characters’ active histories with a large chunk of the games’ stories. Battle and Advance 3 were among those that had already happened, so Emerl made cameos in both incarnations via flashback… which unfortunately led to a plot hole.

See, Advance 3 and Sonic Unleashed are rather difficult to keep in the same continuity, because both share a common plot element: The world breaking into seven pieces.

For a long while, it was generally assumed that the handheld games and console titles were only semi-canon to each other. This avoided the awkward question of “If the Gaias were already there, why didn’t they emerge when Eggman broke the planet in Advance 3?”

Ian shoved them blatantly into the same continuity, and gave no attempt to explain what was different about the Advance 3 world-break compared to the Gaia incident, which served as the backbone to the reboot’s three year long Shattered World Arc. Why didn't the Gaias wake up during Advance 3? Because that's now a question we have to ask of the comics' world.

When Gemerl finally showed up doing something other than yard work for Vanilla (Despite allegedly being Cream’s friend, Cream spends all her time with the rest of the cast, and Gemerl is basically Vanilla’s maid), it was to get effortlessly dispatched by a brainwashed Mega Man with a terrible name in the extremely lacklustre Worlds Unite event.

This one was more than a little bit of a slap in the face, considering that Emerl and Mega Man are very similar in concept- robots that can copy the abilities of other characters- but Emerl is demonstrably more powerful. Now, if Ian had established that Gemerl had been nerfed when he was rebuilt, either by Eggman or by Tails, that would be fine. But he didn’t. In fact, Gemerl is given the title bubble “Super Gizoid”, implying that he’s stronger than a regular Gizoid.

Worlds Unite is generally pretty bad for having its corrupted heroes easily curbstomp every other character around, to the point that the only thing that can stop them is each other, but in Gemerl’s case it really serves no purpose.

This is the only thing that he actually does in Worlds Unite. He shows up to get beaten up and make Mega Man look stronger. That’s it.

This is something that TV Tropes refers to as “The Worf Effect”, a trope wherein an established powerful character is defeated easily by a new character, in order to demonstrate the latter’s power. Now, there’s nothing wrong with using this trope, but please note that I said establishedpowerful character, which Gemerl wasn’t.

At the point that this comic released, Gemerl’s last appearance in any Sonic media was over ten years prior. None of the comic’s intended target audience would remember him, and they wouldn’t know why defeating him was impressive. And this was, in addition, a terrible way to introduce him to new fans. Though the worst part is easily that this was unnecessary. Mega Man had already defeated everyone else, and had established his power pretty well just on them, and he was about to get removed from play permanently in the next issue. There was really no reason to throw Gemerl under the bus for this.

He made one more appearance in the event, getting controlled by the Zeti along with every other robot, and after that he got bopped on the head and just flew away.

Later, he’d make another appearance in the Panic in the Sky arc, and while his portrayal was far from the worst thing about Panic in the Sky, it only adds to the issues caused by the previous showing.

Gemerl makes one appearance, and promptly gets pinned down by the Witchcarters and Team Hooligan. Bear in that one of those groups are the joke villains who nobody takes seriously, and the other are a gang that was defeated by Tails before he met Sonic.

Archie Gemerl was a character who only existed to lose to villains in a vain attempt to make them look better, and that’s legitimately all Ian ever did with him, which makes me wonder whether he disliked the character. And it didn’t even make the villains look good, when you think about it. For anybody that was actually the intended audience for this book, Gemerl had no significance. He was just a robot that got beat up all the time. But for anyone like me, who does remember the games he appeared in, it stands out, not as good writing, but as a blatant narrative device and misused trope.

In this situation, I would simply rather Gemerl never appeared in Archie. At all. If Ian wasn’t going to give him time to shine, or at the very least be an adequate member of the supporting cast, he shouldn’t have used him at all.

Part 8: A Fresh False Start, or: “Wait, how did this get worse?!”

And now we arrive at IDW.

The one nice thing I can say about Archie Gemerl is that at least his personality was mostly on point. He read like a generally accurate take on the character that Emerl was at the end of Battle, which is what he’s supposed to be.

The same cannot be said for IDW.

In the pages of IDW, Gemerl acts like the most generic robot. He speaks in emotionless, stilted sentences with little in the way of actual grammar, leaving him to read like a poor man’s Soundwave, or Soundwave in one of those comics where the writer can’t decide whether they want him to speak normally or adopt his speech pattern from the G1 cartoon, so they just sort of do both.

Emerl pretty much never talked like this, as far as I can recall. His speech development is much more reminiscent of a child learning words, and the only time when he did adopt a more robotic speech pattern, it was a clue that he was slipping back into his destructive programming. He only spoke like a generic robot when he was in mindless destroyer mode.

He gets thrown for a loop by a simple logic flaw, unable to reconcile “Protect Cream and Vanilla” with “Don’t kill the zombots”, and has to be talked out of killing everything around him, when the entire point of Gerald’s modifications to the Gizoid was to make him a bringer of hope rather than destruction, and give him a compassionate heart.

The part of Battle’s story where Cream imparts a pacifistic mindset doesn’t frame her as being right. In that part of the game, they are cornered and under attack by hostile but ultimately mindless drones, and when she convinces Emerl to stop fighting, he almost dies. It’s Cream that learns the lesson there, that sometimes fighting is okay.

This character is already compassionate, he shouldn’t need to be talked into not killing the zombots by a small child, nor should he need her to point out that they’re innocent people who have been made this way by Eggman, because he was made into a killing machine by Eggman twice, and the first time he did die because of it. The character that lay dying in Sonic’s arms, scared and bidding his last goodbyes to his loved ones shouldn’t be the one experiencing this struggle when Omega is also in this arc.

That’s it, really. He’s not Gemerl. He’s a second, less goofy Omega. And it boggles my mind that, despite getting Gemerl’s character, if not his combat abilities, down almost perfectly in Archie, Ian is now subjecting us to this travesty.

Like with the Archie example above, therein lies the crux of why the steady decline of Emerl/Gemerl that began with Sonic X is pushing me away from IDW: I don’t want to read Ian’s take on this character, because, to me, No Gemerl is better than Badly-Written Gemerl,

This isn’t the first time I’ve said this, either. Way back in 2016, when I complained about Ian’s portrayal of Gemerl in Panic in the Sky, I said that the way he handled characters that I liked tended to make them the least likeable parts of the stories he wrote. As well as stating my dislike for his handling of Gemerl, I also stated that I used to really like Fiona Fox, moreso in concept than in execution, but under Ian’s pen she was largely an insufferable antagonist, little more than a trophy to make his pet recolour look better, and almost every story she was in only added to the “List of reasons she needs to stop lying to herself and just start the redemption arc already”. Additionally, I said that I didn’t want to see him bring back Neo Metal Sonic or Mephiles in any context, and we got the former, and it was exactly as bad as I thought it would be.

So, that’s basically why I don’t want to read IDW. That’s why, even if the aspect that was a big sticking point for me back when the comic launched was to be undone soon, I still probably wouldn’t pick it up. Because I don’t want to see my favourite Sonic character continue to be written badly by a guy that should know better, and has done better in the past.

If he were simply screwing up Gemerl’s personality the first time he wrote him, I would file it away under the same category as “Emel”, but the fact that he’s done better before, in a book where he had greater restrictions on what he could do with the characters, really settles this as an interest-killer for me.

Well done, Mr. Flynn. I legitimately didn’t think you could make me actually miss SEGA’s tighter control, but you somehow managed it. I would be impressed if it weren’t so sad.

#Sonic #Sonic the Hedgehog #Sonic X #IDW Sonic #Archie Sonic #Emerl #Gemerl #Emerl the Gizoid #Gemerl the Gizoid #Critical #Sonic Heroes

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acooleg · 5 years ago

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hi welcome to the self-insert herosona au (ficlet below)

It had been early one winter morning when Yoshie received a text from Hawks. It had been a simple series of texts, asking her how she had been, what she had been up to... It was all very mundane things that people that stood on the borderline of acquaintanceship and friendship spoke about - compelling stuff, but nothing truly deep.

Conveniently, it had been her day off; she was free to take as long as she wanted in replying and keeping the conversation going. Between making breakfast and curling up on the couch with her dog, a mug of tea, and a large blanket she would respond, feeling somewhat pleased that Hawks was the one instigating the conversation. He hardly ever spoke to her if it weren’t for official Hero work - maybe he was finally warming up to her, wanting to approach a real life friendship?

During a brief lull in conversation, she pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders and inhaled slightly. It still smelled like Dabi and his cigarettes - while she appreciated his natural scent of firewood and cheap cologne, she didn’t like the cigarette smell. She’d either have to break him of the habit or convince him to not wear the clothes that smelled so strongly of them when he appeared.

(He’d probably use that as an excuse to bully her, but she’d be willing to let that happen if the thick smell of cigarettes went away. He’d say something like, “The Hero’s scared of a little second hand smoke?” Yes, of course, it smells bad.)

Her phone buzzed against her thigh and she glanced down, pushing glasses up her nose as she brought the phone closer to her face. Hawks was asking her to meet up for coffee. At... noon? Well. It wasn’t super late to get coffee. And Yoshie needed a reason to get out of her apartment for the day - she had only gone outside once to take her puppy dog potty. The pair could both use some more exercise... And there was that pet friendly adoption cafe nearby. She could always see what kind of animals they had up for adoption while they were there, too... Hachi was becoming an old lady and could definitely use some younger company while she was at work.

So she responded with her request and almost immediately got an excited ‘Yes!’ as his response. She could only blink at the strings of emojis that followed it before giggling loudly. Hachi, her loyal black lab, perked her head up slightly to stare at her, blinking her big brown eyes twice. She settled back down when Yoshie smoothed her palm over her head and ruffled her ears. “I’m gonna have to go put clothes on, sweet girl, but then we’re goin’ for a walksie!”

But Yoshie didn’t immediately move, sipping from her tea and staring at her phone. She wanted to call Dabi, if only to hear his voice for a second. They weren’t... quite a couple, but she found herself oddly infatuated with the Villain. It went against most of her moral code but... Well. The heart wants what the heart wants, yeah?

She sighed and tapped on FaceTime, hoping to maybe also get a glance at his face. It rang a couple times before he picked up and she lunged for her phone, holding it towards her face. “Good morning, star shine, the sun says hello!” she reflexively greeted, unable to help the goofy smile spreading across her cheeks.

Dabi just stared at her impassively, though there was the slight twitch of his lips. An almost smirk. (She was learning what got him to smile.) “What do you want?” he asked blankly, glancing up and at something behind his phone.

Yoshie could hear Fua in the background, hear how she was relentlessly teasing someone there. She could hear the teenage girl’s (Toga, right?) maniac giggles and someone’s angry grunts. It seemed that everyone at the bar was awake.

“I just wanted to hear your voice,” she answered honestly, moving to lean against the side of the couch, smooshing her cheek against the arm. He just gave her a look, one brow quirking up ever so slightly.

“You’re awfully attached, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question as much as it was a statement. She shrugged and hummed a lackadaisical response. “That’s dangerous, Miss Hero. Falling for a Villain.”

“Says the one that always finds a way to get into my apartment.” He was grinning now, dark and foreboding.

“Maybe you should lock your doors and windows better.”

She was smiling softly, teasingly, a shit eating look on her face. “That was a reference to you sweet talking your way in, but thanks for admitting that you break into my house. Hachi’s a terrible guard dog.”

“Maybe you should train her on what bad people look like better. She falls into my lap every time I show up.” She looked back to her lab, who had closed her eyes and fallen back into a snooze. She was friendly - if sge introduced her to someone, she liked them immediately. But she also had a knack for trusting the right people...

“I don’t think you’re a ‘bad people’ so she doesn’t need to know.” He had stood up on his end, wandering thorough the hallways of wherever he was at. She had sat up ever so slightly, the blanket falling from around her shoulders. “I’m gettin’ coffee with a friend today!” she suddenly spouted. While the silence that frequently fell between them had become comfortable, Yoshie still hated the silence. Things happened in the silence. “We’re gonna go to that adoption cafe near me! I’m bringing Hachi and I think I might see if there’s anyone she gets along with - she gets lonely when I’m gone, and I think a younger puppy would be good for her!”

He had settled in some dark corner, leaning against the wall. “...you’re awfully domestic when you’re off the clock,” he muttered. She tilted her head at the statement but didn’t question it. She glanced at the time and realized she needed to get ready, standing up and moving towards her bedroom. She didn’t drop the blanket - it trailed behind her like a cape. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Well. I like you and I try to keep the people I like informed of what’s goin’ on in my life,” she answered truthfully. She set her phone on the top of her dresser as she dug through it, finally deciding on a ridiculous sweater and leggings to wear. Without thinking, she pulled her tank top off. “And, like... Well, you just admitted you sneak into my house, so if I do get another dog it’d be best to let you know, right?”

“...do you also strip over FaceTime for people you like?” She leaned over her dresser to stare at him through her phone, purposefully not putting her sweater on yet. Her cheeks flushed at his nearly embarrassed face.

Then she smiled and pulled her sweater on, fluffing her hair out of the collar. “Nope! I only do that for you.” She adjusted her phone to lean against the wall, keeping him propped up. Then she reached for the waistband of her shorts, giving him a lecherous grin. “Wanna see me take my pants off?”

“I will hang up on you, Yoshie.” He looked terse, serious - a cover up for his embarrassment? (Oddly enough, she was struck by a thought; Shoto did that when she would compliment him during his internship.)

She giggled and stepped closer to her dresser, effectively hiding her lower half. “You’re no fun, Dabi,” she playfully chided as she changed. They continued speaking about whatever stupid things they could think of as she finished getting ready. He watched in silence after a couple moments, taking in how she carefully made sure all her things were in order.

“You’ve checked your hearing aids twice,” he muttered after a moment. It wasn’t unusual to see her buzzing around her room, but she stopped by her dresser several times. He remembered from previous experiences that she kept most of her hearing stuff up there.

She shrugged as she made sure the right one was secure, “I wanna make sure I don’t go deaf while at the cafe. Hawks doesn’t know sign language, so I gotta--”

“Hawks?”

Yoshie was taken aback by the not quite venom in his voice, peering at him through her phone. He was staring at her evenly, darkly, brows furrowed ever so slightly. “Uh. Yeah? I do have other Hero friends than Fua, you know that right?”

“You’re getting coffee with that over sized chicken?” His scowl made her insides twist, something almost like fear tightening in her stomach. Did he have a grudge against Hawks? She couldn’t recall a fight between them, so why was he getting bent out of shape?

She could only tilt her head in curiosity, “Yeah? We’ve done some work together in the past, you know. He just wants to get together and talk, you know. Like friends do.”

He growled deep in his chest. If it were a different situation, it might’ve been hot. This was just... weird. “Be careful around him,” was all he offered with a click of his tongue.

“He’s a Hero. I’m a Hero. What do I have to worry about?” He didn’t respond. She crossed her arms over her chest. “I can’t be careful if I don’t know what I’m looking for, Dabi. You can’t just - you can’t just say that and then not elaborate.”

“If you trust me, you’ll be careful.” Oof, he went right for the kill.

“Of course I trust you.” She reached for the phone, holding it level with her eyes. “I may not agree with you, but when it comes to us, I trust you. I’ll... be careful, I guess? I don’t know why but I’ll be careful. Okay?” Without thinking, she pat her chest twice. It meant understood in Japanese sign language.

He smirked at both (his grasp on JSL had grown exponentially since knowing her, so the physical touch of her understanding was rewarding). “That’s a good girl.” She rolled her eyes at that. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“So I can break into cute girls’ apartments while I’m out?”

“Who said you were cute?”

“Rude.” She snickered, offering him a peace sign with her palm facing her chest. See ya in JSL. “Bye, Dabi. Love ya!”

“Bye, Yosh--wait what.” She had already hung up at that point, dropping her phone into her purse as she collected her things, humming ever so slightly. She slipped on her boots and jackets, sinking into the fluffy fur of the collar as she hooked Hachi onto her leash.

She locked up her apartment and started on her way, Hachi looking happy as they began to wander towards the cafe. Her day off fell during the work week, so the complex was basically deserted, save for a couple mothers and their young children playing in the park in the center of the complex. They were all bundled up for the cold weather, although the kids were expressing their want for snow.

The young children stopped her as she passed, playing with Hachi for a few moments before losing interest and wandering back to their mothers. She waved on her way out, picking up the pace and falling into a light jog. She glanced at her watch, selecting the appropriate playlist for an optimal good mood without offsetting the natural winter around her. (It’d be really obvious if there was a pocket of warmth around her.)

Hachi kept pace with her, panting excitedly as they navigated through the mostly empty sidewalks of the city. Yoshie couldn’t help but hum along to her music, although she did turn it down so she could hear the sounds of the city over top of it.

It wasn’t a super long jog to the cafe - maybe 15 or so minutes - but she was thirsty by the time she got there. As she opened the doors, she was struck by the scent of delicious coffee and sweets, as well as the smell of young animals. The lobby was separated from the cafe itself by a half wall, with a cute young girl leading people in to their booths.

Yoshie looked over the half wall, searching for Hawks and also to see how many puppies and kitties they had wandering on the floor today. Hachi jumped up as well, trying to peer over it. She wasn’t tall enough.

Being a good mom required her to pick the old lady up and help her look over the wall. Her tail thumped into her chest. She laughed, “I spoil you, you know that?” But the dog didn’t respond, too infatuated with the puppies that were coming her way.

“Ah, you brought your dog?” Yoshie glanced over her shoulder, the hostess having returned to collect her. She nodded with a small smile. “Have you been here before? Is your dog registered to our Friends List?” (It was a registrar of outside animals kept on file to make sure they were fully vaccinated and passed their in-house behavior test.)

“Yep! Hachi’s been here before - I got her from you guys five years ago, actually!” She smiled as she put her dog down, stepping towards the hostess as she pulled out her wallet. She showed her the official registrar card and was cleared to walk back. Because of who was coming, she requested one of the private rooms in the back.

The last thing she wanted to do was get swarmed by Hawks’ fangirls while she was out with him.

Hachi had already sniffed out an ideal companion for the day - from the tag around his neck, his name was Kuriru and he was a pit bull/terrier mix. He stared up at her with beautifully blue eyes, his black nose sniffing back at her. So Yoshie requested to spend some time with him and they made their way to the private room.

She had ordered a melon bubble tea and a selection of cake pops on her way in, snacking idly as she played with the dogs. The private rooms were nice because they were secluded from the rest of the cafe and came stocked with dozens of toys. It also had a fully functional kotatsu, so those that sat inside were right there with their chosen playmate.

Hachi absolutely adored playing with the puppy, showing him the ropes of how to play with toys. Yoshie couldn’t help but smile as she took a sip from her tea - although the enjoyment from it was short lived as she snorted it out of her nose when the sliding door was thrown open. “Yoshie, are you in here--stop coughing, did you swallow wrong?”

The woman turned to him, scowling deeply, “You startled me, asshole.” He shrugged and shut the door, coming to sit across from her. He stretched his legs under the kotatsu and she shuffled a bit, making sure to keep her feet from underneath of him. Hachi and Kuriru had come up to sniff the newcomer - and then promptly made themselves comfortable in his lap, deeming him safe. The waitress came in to take his order before immediately dipping back out.

He was busy petting both dogs, a boyish grin on his face, which meant it was the perfect time to stare at him critically. Dabi had told her to be careful - but why? He wasn’t in his Hero gear so that probably meant it was his day off. And he didn’t look any worse for wear or anything. Or, like, evil or anything.

When the waitress returned with his coffee and croissant, she dropped off a bowl of water and dog food as well. That prompted both dogs to get up and got eat, finally giving him some space. He lifted his mug to his mouth, eyes meeting hers. “Oh! I didn’t realize you wore glasses, Yoshie. Or that you ever wore your hair up. I’ve always seen it down!”

She shrugged awkwardly, “I usually wear my hair down to hide my hearing aids, or ‘cause I’m wearing my Hero gear. And... I’m usually in contacts because glasses rest on my hearing aids weird, but my eyes were starting to hurt so I pulled these bad boys out.” She tapped the side of the frames, “But it’s cute, right?”

“Yeah. You’re really cute like this! You went for a Harry Potter look with the frames, right? All round and such.” He set his coffee down, keeping his hands wrapped around the mug. His finger tips were red as they stroked the ceramic contemplatively. He didn’t look away from her, though, keeping his gaze level with hers.

“Yeah... Harry Potter. Definitely not because they’re cute.” His smile had fallen with his eyes, both drifting down and away. And while one doesn’t have to smile to look at peace, he definitely didn’t look at peace with that frown. He seemed... derisive. Nothing like the laid back man Yoshie knew. “...are you alright, dude?”

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, “There’s just been a lot on my plate lately.”

She rolled her eyes with a smirk, “Yeah, yeah, tell me all about it, Mister Number Three.” But when he didn’t return her chuckle with one of his own - or a smile, or nod, or anything - she felt the coolness of dread fall into her stomach. Dabi’s warning be damned; she had known Hawks for a few years now, and she knew his personality. He was never this melancholic or morose. “Shit, man. What’s wrong? Can I help you with something?”

Amber eyes flicked up to hers once more, eyebrows stitched together tightly. He was... nervous? Worried? What was wrong with him? “I’m a little worried that if we start this conversation, you won’t like where it will lead.”

Black eyes blinked right back, determination setting in on Yoshie’s face. She wanted to make this right for him, whatever it was. Maybe that’s why he suddenly reached out - he needed someone to talk to. “I’m a Hero, Hawks. I can deal with uncomfortable things. Please, just tell me what’s wrong. I wanna help you.”

They stared at one another for several seconds. He scrubbed one hand down his face, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You asked for this, Yoshie.” She tilted her head ever so slightly. “How long have you been involved in the League of Villains?”

She had apparently chosen the wrong moment to take a drink of her bubble tea - it once again found itself spewing out her nose and making her choke. She smacked one fist into her chest, her right hand signing what repeatedly. He just stared at her.

“I-involved with the League of Villains!?” Yoshie finally coughed herself out of her choke. “I’m not involved in the LOV. What in the fuck would give you that idea!?” She had never assisted them in their crimes. She didn’t even know where they were located! She wasn’t involved with the League. She was - she was involved with Dabi and that’s it!

Hawks sighed as he drew his phone from his jacket pocket, “I told you you wouldn’t like this. Yoshie. How long have you been seeing Dabi.” He slid his phone towards her and she paled at the picture before her. Who... who the fuck...

It had to have been from the first time Dabi had come over - she was supporting him, one of his arms wrapped around her shoulders and her other arm wrapped around his back. She could see the blood dripping from him.

He had even made a snide comment about how the press would go crazy if they were ever to see her helping him. She had made some remark about how she hadn’t become a Hero for the press, but to save people that needed saving.

He reached across the table and scrolled to the next one. It had been taken from outside her apartment window. Dabi was shirtless on her couch, chest wrapped in bandages. She was on the floor in her PJs, staring at the TV while playing a game on her Switch. That was from, what, the first or second time she had saved him from some stupid brawl?

And each one that followed was increasingly more intimate, until the final picture was a graphic picture of their first time making love. She was too petrified to blush out of embarrassment.

“H-how.” She looked back to Hawks, who looked almost pained. “How did you... How do you...” The terror in her voice only served to scare her even more. She could feel the ice climbing up her neck, freezing her breath, stopping her heart. The music she had purposefully kept on wasn’t helping. She was seizing up in terror.

He knew. He knew she and Dabi knew one another. He thought - oh god he thought... Her career as a Hero was over. She’d have nothing - nothing - nothing left...!

“I’m going to ask you again, Yoshie. How long have you been involved with the League of Villains?”

“I’m not involved! I - I. Look, I’m not even dating Dabi! I want to, oh my god do I want to scoop him up and take him out of that situation, but - but I am not helping the League of Villains. You don’t have to believe me but that is my truth.” She was hyperventilating. Only her closest friends knew of her relationship (or lack thereof) with Dabi. How did he find out? “Who... told you, Hawks.”

“Yoshie, I...” His voice was wavering. She was crying, rubbing at her eyes aggressively. Hachi felt the change in mood, coming over and sitting beside her master, rubbing her face into her arm. “I was put in charge with bringing an end to the League. So I’ve been following all the active members as closely as I possibly can. No one told me. I found out myself.”

So no one had told him? ...and he was in charge of this all on his own?

Kuriru had found his way into her lap. She was crying as she pet both animals - but she nodded nonetheless. “S-so that’s why... you’re so stressed?”

“Yeah. And... when I found this out...” He scrolled back to the first photo - the one of her helping Dabi. “I thought it was just a coincidence. I know you; you’ll save anyone that needs it. I thought you didn’t know the whole situation - that you just rescued someone you thought was hurt. But then... He kept showing up, and you kept getting closer to him, and.” His voice cracked, “You have to understand that this information has to go to my higher ups.”

“I’m gonna...” She sobbed, pressing her head into Hachi’s fur. “I’m gonna lose everything.” She was shaking, and the ice spread to the kotatsu. A small storm had rolled from around her.

“No. No. You’re not losing everything.” She looked up to him. He had a fierce look on his face. “I won’t give these pictures to my higher ups if you agree to help me. I can tell them I’m bringing you on as extra help, as one of my trusted allies--”

And the ice, storm, and tears on her cheeks evaporated in just a moment as the roaring fire exploded from her, red hot anger and disbelief coursing through her. She managed to keep it controlled, not burning the area around her, but it was bright and everywhere. “Are you... blackmailing me, Hawks?” she seethed, voice scratching against her throat.

He shook his head. “’Blackmail’ isn’t right. Consider this... motivation to work together.” Their gazes found one another again. “This is to make a better, safer world. A world where us Heroes aren’t stretched so thin--”

“You want me to use my relationship to infiltrate the League and bring them to an end?” Her voice was only a couple notches below a scream.

“...yes. I do.” Hawks sighed and pushed himself back, leaning on his hands and staring at the ceiling. “If it makes this any better, I’m also a double agent. I’ve had to do some things I’m not proud of in order to gain their trust so far. They won’t even let me see their leader, Shigaraki. Dabi’s his proxy.”

Yoshie glared at him. “This is why Dabi told me to be careful.” Without thinking, she scooped the puppy towards her chest and pushed Hachi behind her. Protecting them. “And if I say no?”

“You know what happens if you say no, Yoshie.” He stood up and looked almost remorseful. “I’m sorry you got involved with this mess. I’ll... cover the bill today. And the adoption fees - you were gonna get that one, right?” She didn’t answer, instead choosing to glare at him. He shrugged and rubbed the back of his head. “I’ll get this all cleared away with my boss. We’ll be in touch soon, alright?” She turned her head and gave a stiff nod. “And Yoshie... don’t tell Dabi about this.”

He turned away in time to avoid the heat from the fire suddenly roaring from her again, and to avoid the cold from the ice spikes that climbed their way towards him, only stopping at the door.

#my hero academia #boku no hero academia #mha #bnha #my hero academia fanfic #boku no hero academia fanfic #mha fanfic #bnha fanfic #bnha oc #mha ocs #my hero academia oc #boku no hero academia oc #herosona

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pass-the-bechdel · 5 years ago

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Marvel Cinematic Universe: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

Yes, twice.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Eight (34.78% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Fifteen.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Neither characters nor plot are engaging enough to hold strong interest, making the film feel longer than it is, plus there’s one character in particular whose behaviour seriously rankles. It’s not a terrible movie, but it is thoroughly uninspiring.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Liz manages a brief pass with her mother before the dance. Liz says goodbye to Betty.

Female characters:

Betty Brant.

Liz Toomes.

Michelle.

Marjory.

May Parker.

Karen.

Mrs Toomes.

Pepper Potts.

Male characters:

Adrian Toomes.

Mason.

Peter Parker.

Happy Hogan.

Tony Stark.

Jason Ionelli.

Ned.

Flash.

Abraham.

Mr Delmar.

Gary.

Steve Rogers.

Coach Wilson.

Shocker.

Aaron Davis.

OTHER NOTES:

Ah, here’s Peter’s video log from Civil War, where he has no idea why he’s even there and it’s completely irresponsible and inappropriate for Tony to have brought him in on something catastrophically dangerous with no preparation and none of the knowledge necessary to make an informed decision! I hate it. This makes me extremely hate Tony. I know I mentioned it already when I reviewed Civil War, but it’s super-true and not going to change any time soon.

See, this thing where Peter is sacrificing academic and social experiences to hang out for Tony’s promised phone call? That’s on Tony. You can’t just rope a kid into your bullshit and then kick him back out into the world with a vague false promise and no follow-up of any kind. That’s not how kids work. It’s not fair to people in general, but it is especially not how kids work.

Peter having to run because he’s in the suburbs and there are no tall buildings is probably the best gag in this movie.

The inclusion of that little detail about the Washington Monument being built by slaves. Mmmhmm.

I find the plotting of this film very dull and predictable, like ‘oh, and now we’ll have another action set piece, now some cutesy highschool stuff’, etc, and as such I feel it drags excessively and I’m just sitting here waiting for each bit to be done with so that we can get to the next, so that it can be over too, because I’m not attached enough to any one or thing that’s happening for the predictable beats to hold internal interest. That said, the Washington Monument piece is pretty good.

The ludicrous ferry accident, not so much.

Tony shows up, lot of shit-talking, blaming Peter for not magically intuiting information which Tony didn’t give him. Urgh. I deeply, deeply hate this version of Tony.

Toomes reveal is the most inspired choice of the film. Keaton kills it on Toomes’ own revelation of Peter’s identity.

This movie sure does go on.

This ‘screwed the pooch’ joke makes me want to bleach my ears. Also, this whole Avenger/press conference business is still Tony completely failing to appreciate how he’s upended this kid’s life; the right thing to do in this situation is not to lean into it and go ‘ok, but what if I upended it...more?’, just like the right way to deal with it was emphatically not to just kick the kid to the curb to figure things out for himself after that initial upending. I imagine I would have enjoyed this film sooo much more if I were not raging at Tony throughout.

Ok, let me just purge on the Tony thing before I go any further, otherwise I’m never gonna be able to focus properly on the rest of the movie. I hate what they’ve done with Tony. That’s obvious. I really, deeply disagree with it. Tony was a hard character to get to like, but the Iron Man films did really solid, intelligent work at achieving it despite the many and sundry hurdles, and the key to that was the fact that they had Tony, consistently, recognising the ways that his actions hurt others and then making the effort to fix that and fix himself, not just blowing it off, making some flashy gesture or throwing some money at the problem and then breezing on out like everything’s fine and none of it’s on him. The Avengers films - particularly Ultron - did significant work at tarnishing the character development of the Iron Man films, and then Civil War came in and - amidst the many, many sins Tony committed in that movie - handed the introduction of Spider-Man over to Tony in an act of incredibly irresponsible and reckless child endangerment, which this film proceeded to double-down on by having Tony completely fail to be a reasonable, thinking adult at any point. Frankly, I don’t feel that Tony’s initial decision to involve Peter in Civil War is forgivable, there’s no walking that back, but the least he could have done is to recognise that fact and make appropriate amends, which - as above - does not mean ignoring the kid any more than it means pandering to his hero complex. It makes me feel really, really old to be saying it, but Peter is a minor, he doesn’t have a strong perspective on the world yet, but he’s also old enough and wise enough that he can’t just have people throwing rules at him and expecting obedience; he needs to be treated with the respect of having things explained, but he also needs oversight because he isn’t mature enough to make choices without it. He needs guidance. That’s the position which Tony actively puts himself in and then fails to follow through on, and it leaves Peter feeling that he has to prove himself, that he has to further endanger himself in order to win the mentorship that Tony promised. As a character response and an emotional position for Peter, that’s great story fodder and logical follow-on from his introduction, and I can’t fault that. For Tony Stark though, who manages to both start and end this movie without actually learning anything, it makes me infuriated beyond belief.

THAT SAID, let’s segue to the natural place: to Peter. The good news is, if this film gets only one thing right, it’s that very precise balance of Peter’s age, with all its accompanying tumult; Peter is mature enough to feel like he’s in control of his life and choices and capable of taking on new, big, adult things, but not mature enough to realise the limitations that come with his age in terms of experience and worldview. He has that ‘teenagers think they know everything’ factor, but without it being conveyed as either too arrogant or too whiny to be palatable. It’s a tough ask for teen characters, generally, as the creative forces behind them are almost invariably adults (and usually have been for quite some time), and it’s hard to recapture the mentality of a teen once you’ve grown beyond that mentality yourself. When Peter declares that school doesn’t matter anymore because he’s ‘probably never coming back’, he’s gonna become an Avenger and that’s his whole life plan right now, no real details, no clarity in what exactly that means for his day-to-day life or where he gets his income or how things might go in the long term, that’s a classic teen moment for him: his future is a concept, all of its parts internally encompassed, and it’s not just that he dismisses the questions, logistics, and concerns that an adult would know to raise, it’s that these things don’t even occur to him in the first place. Peter is in this middle-position, the transition from child to adult, and he’s not as far through that transition as he thinks he is (teenagers never are). Altogether, I may not be enamoured by this film, nor am I especially compelled by Tom Holland’s take on this character (he’s not bad, he’s just...not that enthralling, either), but the particular pitch of Peter’s mentality is spot-on without being, in itself, just another tromp through dull and overwrought teen-angst cliches.

The rest of the movie, on the other hand...I feel kinda bad about spending that over-long first paragraph railing against a certain billionaire who could have done us all a favour and not been in this film (or at least, not as prominently), giving Peter more of a chance to explore his spider-self and what it means to his life on his own terms, instead of being so heavily influenced by how he fits into the wider universe, and then maybe we could have fleshed out more of Peter’s normal life in order to make all the extraneous pieces of this story more meaningful, and less, y’know, extraneous. As-is, I don’t feel like I’ve got a lot to say about it, it’s fairly generic and unremarkable, and while there are some good set-up pieces - Toomes’ whole descent-to-criminal-enterprise-due-to-economic-pressures thing has great narrative potential and scope for reflection upon capitalism in the real world - the story never explores any of those pieces enough to even half-ass a real analysis of the idea. Toomes is rendered a mostly stock villain, the same as Liz gets little to make her more than a bland Love Interest, May is an interchangeable maternal figure, and Ned - while fun and easily a highlight in a cast that’s hardly vying for the title - is also a bit of a heavy-handed stereotype sitting in the comic relief/sidekick chair (the fact that he essentially references this in-story, fourth-wall-denting style, does not make it less uninspired). And I’m not sure how we’re supposed to see Zendaya’s MJ as anything other than a gimmick at this point, kinda seems like she was literally only there so that her preferred name could be used as a weightless ‘reveal’ at the end. Like I said up in the notes, I found the movie to be excessively predictable in a bad way, bringing me out of the viewing experience to count off the minutes and story beats, and as such, even though this is not the worst film Marvel has churned out to date, it is one of my least favourites. I know there are a lot of people who loved it, who love Tom Holland’s version of Peter Parker and found this movie light and fun, and it’s not that I can’t see where they’re coming from with that...I guess it’s just that whatever parts of the story are self-contained are so recycled from so many other films of this ilk, I can’t find anything to attach to, and then the rest of the story which could have been spent making something a little more interesting from those basic, predictable bones, instead is wasted on an over-emphasis on placing this movie into the MCU’s larger framework (an ironic waste of resources since you can easily skip this film without getting confused watching the next MCU movies with Spider-Man in them, Infinity War and Endgame). Anyway. I fear I’m just gonna start repeating myself for lack of anything else to say; I don’t care for this movie, it had at least a good little piece of heart in it but it wasted too much time on things which did not enhance this story or the wider universe anyway, I hate Tony Stark now. The end.

#Marvel Cinematic Universe #MCU #Spider-Man: Homecoming #Bechdel Test #female representation #Spider-Man

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braverytaught · 6 years ago

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anyway i promised i’d talk about my reaction to cog and like, idk who cares, but i’m here on my soapbox anyway

obviously don’t fuckin read any farther if u haven’t seen it, i’m going in hard with the spoilers

i’ve talked about the mcg cameo and we’re ignoring that

they did dumbledore so fuckin dirty

they did queenie so fuckin dirty

the whole plot was a confusing and kind of pointless-in-and-of-itself setup for the next three movies, which i understand is necessary in some sense for a very long story like this, but if you can’t make a movie’s plot enjoyable and understandable as its own being, then you haven’t done a good job. cog’s primary function cannot be to lay the groundwork for movies that haven’t come out yet; it has to stand on its own, and i’m not sure it does

grindelwald’s kind of a joke

if you’re going to make nagini a character (and we all know the issues with that in the first place), you could at least bother to give her a personality

they did leta dirty too, she deserved more than a one-movie character arc

i don’t think tina’s characterization was badly done, but i do think she deserved more time, and they did a really bad job of showing the status of tina and newt’s relationship in the intervening nine months imo

i don’t think credence joining grindelwald is a bad story choice, but i do think it was handled incorrectly. they should have played into the “i’m being persecuted and i feel alone and scared and he may have used me but so has everyone else in my life and he seems to care about me so i’m going to go with him because i think he can keep me safe” aspect instead of reducing it to “he can tell me my real name”

on the bright side i continue to adore newt and his creatures, and i think eddie redmayne’s acting is fucking fantastic

credence being dumbledore’s secret long-lost much-younger brother is about as farcical as voldemort having a secret daughter with bellatrix lestrange

more under the cut. i’m about to go into highkey analysis mode.

queenie

yeah i’m fucking mad about this. the closest i came to crying in the entire movie was because i was so upset about what they did to her character. not bc it moved me but bc it pissed me off. queenie goldstein is smart, capable, and empathetic. i was so happy to see her again -- for about five seconds, until we found out she’s enchanted jacob so she can marry him without his consent? what the fuck? and then she spends the rest of the movie with no other motivation than to be with a man? she’s apparently so stupid and blind that she would join grindelwald, genuinely thinking grindelwald’s going to create a world where muggles are allowed to marry witches no problem? grindelwald’s manipulative tactics are blindingly obvious, and yet the woman who has spent her life learning how to read people and manipulate them in turn for her own protection can’t see that she’s being played?

fuck that. that’s not the queenie goldstein i know. and i’m not cool with her being turned into the “woman who makes bad, stupid, blind choices out of her desire to be with a man, because that’s all women really want, i guess” trope.

the only way i can see her joining grindelwald is if she followed credence, to protect him, and was a double agent from the start.

grindelwald

not even getting into johnny depp as a person, he’s clearly the wrong person for this part. it would’ve been better to keep the percival graves persona going than to turn grindelwald into a bleached rat who has apparently never seen the light of day. colin farrell was the perfect example of a seductive villain. grindelwald as graves was confident, persuasive, compelling even after you realized he was the bad guy.

grindelwald should have stayed that way even after he showed his true self or whatever. they kept telling us that he was seductive, that he couldn’t even be trusted with a tongue or he’d turn every guard to his side, and yet? i saw nothing of the sort? johnny depp’s grindelwald, both his acting and the character design, screams “i’m the big villain and you should hate me because i’m sleazy and creepy.” but that’s not how you gain followers. tom riddle was charming and handsome and persuasive; it was only after he gained power that he slowly became the inhuman creature we think of as voldemort, and that was after everyone was too scared of him to defect. grindelwald should have been smooth, should have been charming, should have showed a real ability to connect with the people he wanted to convert. and, you know what? he should have been handsome. he should have stayed jamie campbell bower tbfh. people follow a pretty face.

the point is he seemed like a caricature, an obvious villain. not somebody i can believe could genuinely win so many people over to his cause. you can’t just tell me he’s seductive and then make me watch pasty johnny depp make vague, empty speeches the whole time. not good enough.

dumbledore

i mean, i don’t have a problem with jude law. i think he did a pretty good job. so there’s that going for him.

too bad they were off with.....pretty much everything else.

i’ll stick with my two biggest complaints, i guess. the first is that it makes no sense for dumbledore to be out here talking to anyone who asks about his sister and his relationship with grindelwald. the whole thing in dh was that nobody knew he’d ever been affiliated with grindelwald -- his oldest friends refused to believe it. it happened over the course of one summer, they kept their plans secret, and it ended in disaster. and we know dumbledore never talked about that shit, not till he fuckin died. so why would some ministry dude be able to waltz in and say, yeah, we know u and grindelwald were close as brothers, and why would dumbledore respond that they were closer?? why would he ever disclose that??? that was secret fuckin information my dudes

same with ariana. i get the spin on empathy, but i don’t see him just casually bringing up his sister to leta. maybe i’m wrong on this one, idfk, maybe he would use ariana as an example to relate to a hurting student -- but i have a hard time imagining him bringing it up like that. it’s his shame. seems to me like another one of those things he’d avoid mentioning unless he absolutely had to.

and then. then there’s the whole fuckin grindelwald relationship thing in the first place.

i get that they’re trying to correct themselves. “you calling dumbledore gay without making any real references to it in canon does not count as representation,” we said, so now they’re making it real clear. but, really? really? you think dumbledore would look into the mirror of erised and see the current grindelwald? you think grindelwald is the deepest and greatest desire of his heart, and not, idk, his family, whole and unharmed? you think his love for grindelwald defines him more than any of his other motivations? no. bullshit.

as far as i can tell, they made dumbledore’s gayness central to his character in this story -- which is just as bad as not acknowledging it at all. because his relationship with grindelwald doesn’t define him, it certainly isn’t more important to him than his grief for his family, and he has plenty of motivation and character that doesn’t stem directly from his encounter with grindelwald, so (as tempting as it might be for mediocre storytellers) to spin his entire characterization in the fantastic beasts arc around the fact that he was gay for grindelwald when he was 17 is not only a disservice to his character, it’s also just shallow writing.

#cog spoilers //#there's more i could say but i mainly wanted to talk about queenie / grindelwald / dumbledore #so there we go #that's my piece #i'm gonna stop myself from rambling more in the tags #also most of this is negative but let me say that there /were/ things i enjoyed about the movie #there totally were #but it's more fun to analyze where i think they went wrong #and hoo boy were there plenty of places they went wrong #; wandless ( ooc. )

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greyias · 7 years ago

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How will Grey react to Theron's new horrific hair? Will she laugh at it or just stare at it dumbfounded?

I’m pretty sure this is 100% canon how things are going to go down in-game. I’m just really good at guessing like that.

It was the moment Theron had been dreading since his shuttle had left the surface of Umbara. The usually perfectly pinned ponytail in disarray, her cheeks flushed from the exertion of the battles she had just fought, and wide blue eyes focused on only one thing in the room: him.

And for a moment everything just stopped, as even now just the sight of her still could take his breath away and make him forget about everything. And that was a bad thing because if he forgot what he was doing, if he let himself slip even the slightest, then all of his work to infiltrate the Order would be for nothing—and she’d never be safe. She had already gotten hurt, nearly killed, because he hadn’t seen the trap they’d laid on Iokath. He wasn’t about to let that happen again.

He needed to go, before he blew the carefully crafted cover he and Lana had put together. And that was exactly what he had planned to do, just put one foot in front of the other and flee like a fleeing thing. So imagine his surprise when his mouth opened instead and asked the question that had been bothering him since he’d laid eyes on her: “What are you wearing?”

“Me?” She asked incredulously. “‘What am I wearing?’ That’s seriously the first thing out of your mouth?”

“But, the cape, the ridiculous shoulder pads,” Theron was definitely not whining, “they were so cool! Now you just look like a Jedi with a fondness for the color red.”

“I am a Jedi—and you said you hated that armor!”

“That’s because the clasps on it make it trickier than a Zeltrosian bra to remove!”

“How do you know how tricky—you are not helping your case here!”

Oh, shit. He should have just run. In fact, that was a brilliant plan. He was going to do that. Now. “I have to go.”

“Theron, wait, we can talk about this!”

“There’s nothing to talk about I already told you that the Alliance is rotting—”

But apparently his villain speech wasn’t going to work this time around.

“It’s normal when a man gets to a certain age, he starts to feel the need to experiment, to change things up, try to make life exciting again.”

“A certain age?”

“Everyone does call you ‘Old Man Shan’. Well, they’re now calling you ‘Dirty Filthy Traitor Shan’ even though I keep telling them to stop. But I figured it was the first one that might have set you off.”

“Please don’t tell me you think this is some sort of midlife crisis.”

“It explains everything.”

“No, it doesn’t! I’m evil now! I’m a bad man, you should stay away. Far, far away!”

She wasn’t listening to him. “The the heavy drinking, the mood swings, the inexplicable and sudden need to destroy public property and try to ruin every personal relationship in your life, the need to try and refresh your image—”

“I recall your pep talks being more effective in the past.”

“This is happening because I only offered you one fleet of warships, isn’t it?”

“No!”

“I can give you two. Or three. Really we have like all of Iokath at this point so—”

“I don’t need a fleet, woman!”

“What about a Corellian cruiser? I hear they come in red—oh wait, you don’t like the color red anymore, do you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Theron, I love you. You can tell me anything.” She was managing to keep pace with him and laid a gentle hand on his arm. “This is a safe space.”

“This is a literal war zone.”

He yanked his arm away, because if he let it linger there too long he was going to say to hell with this stupid undercover assignment and let the galaxy take care of itself for once. Except he wasn’t capable of that at all, so scratch that.

But he missed Odessen. And his bed. And his real jacket. This one was itchy and too long and made his shoulders look way too small — like they could actually fit through doorways. He’d had to overcompensate his disguise with his hair to try and look more intimidating. And it was working! He knew this from the looks the House Inrokini soldiers kept giving him.

“I was speaking metaphorically. I’m listening, Theron, I’m here for you, all you have to do is stop this nonsense and come home.”

“I…” Damn it, why did she have to be so nice all the time? Didn’t she know that love and understanding was his greatest weakness? “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can, everything will be okay. We’ll get the finest deprogrammers—I mean doctors—and they’ll help you see that you don’t need to join a cult to feel complete and whole—”

“I didn’t join a cult!”

She just looked at him.

Oh, right. His cover. “I mean they’re not a cult! We’re just doing what needs to be done to bring peace to the Galaxy.”

“Of course you are, but maybe you just need better friends—like all of the ones waiting back home in front of the intervention sign. Even Grandmaster Satele came.”

“I don’t need an interven—wait, my mother’s there?”

“And Jace too! And the ghost of Darth Marr for that matter, even though I don’t recall inviting him. Let me tell you, that made things awkward—I’m getting sidetracked—what I’m trying to say is we’re all really worried about you!”

That was—oddly touching. (And weird. Why was Marr’s ghost still hanging around his mom?) And more importantly, why the hell hadn’t Lana put a stop to this nonsense? She knew what was going on. Surely she could wrangle one well-meaning, overly helpful Jedi and maintain his cover while he was off saving the galaxy. For that matter, why was everyone just waiting for the Alliance Commander to return from Copero with him in tow? It seemed like there was better use of everyone’s time than standing in a room with little envelopes of written confessions.

Or maybe he was putting too much thought into this. He really needed to finish running away before anyone noticed he had no actual intention of trying to injure, maim, or murder the woman so lovingly (and quite unnecessarily) trying to reach out to him as if he’d gone off the deep end. Apparently he gave a really compelling and convincing villain speech. Score one for the SIS method acting course he’d taken.

The sounds of battle had grown distant, although blaster fire and the occasional explosion still rocked the ground. It was actually impressive they had managed to carry on a conversation as long as they had without being interrupted by the fierce dogfight between forces. Beyond these blast doors was the corridor that led to the private hangar where he’d parked his shuttle. But he’d never be able to escape the planet and finish delving into the Order’s real plans (not to mention smoke out the real mole back on base) if he didn’t ditch his well-meaning tagalong. Maybe if he asked her really nicely…

“Just go home and forget about me, Commander.”

Okay, maybe that was more of an order than a request, but he was really distracted by the thought that Darth Marr had insisted on attending his intervention. Theron really needed to know how a ghost had managed to write out a confession on flimsiplast, and if Jace had attempted to start a fist fight with Satele’s new incorporeal bestie.

“Theron, I could never forget you.”

Damn it, she was going to force him to do something traitory and nefarious again so he could get away, wasn’t she? Being able to finish this plan and get things back to normal would have been a lot easier had she been let in on the fact that there was an actual plan. It was almost like this extremely elaborate ruse wasn’t as well-thought and brilliant as he and Lana originally had envisioned. Come to think of it, why hadn’t they brought the Commander in on their plot to uncover the true traitor within their midst?

Oh right, because she giggled inappropriately every time she attempted to lie. She would have snickered the entire time he was giving his villain speech on the train instead of looking at him like a kicked puppy. That would have convinced no one. There were definite downsides to picking the most benevolent goodie two-shoes in the galaxy as the leader of their no-longer-rebel faction.

“I will always love you,” she continued on, oblivious to Theron’s internal struggle, “even if it looks like a womp rat died on your head.”

That brought him out of his melodramatic sulking. “Hey!”

“Don’t worry, I’ve bought you a whole closet full of really fashionable hats—”

“You do realize this is my exact same hair, right? I just shaved off the sides to make it look cooler—I mean more intimidating!”

“Is that why you shaved a thong on the back?”

“A… what?”

“You have looked into a mirror, right?”

“I don’t need a—“ She magically produced a mirror and he proceeded to crane his head awkwardly to see what she was referring to. “Those sons of bitches!”

“Language, Theron!”

“I joined a cult, I don’t have to watch my language anymore!” He cursed again and traced the V-shaped mark down the back of his head that looked far too similar to women’s lingerie to be a mere coincidence. He was going to kill those guys when he got back. Okay, that was actually the point of this whole thing, but now he had another reason to take these evil bastards down. “Stupid hazing rituals — I should have known that wasn’t the traditional ‘Welcome to the Order Cackle’!”

She frowned. “Wait… ‘the Order’? What Order?”

“I’ve said too much.” He quickly moved away from her mirror and the horrors it contained, feeling a new and urgent need to exact vengeance on a couple of cultists and their vibrorazers.

“Where are you going?”

“To avenge my hair! And get back my jacket!”

Oh, and save the galaxy and Alliance too. But first, those bastards were going to pay…

Or TL;DR – outwardly she’s more concerned that he’s seemingly cracked and is acting like some cheesy Bond villain than the Theron she knows and loves. Inwardly, she is aghast that he would shave off that beautiful hair, but is also confused by the feelings the new do and the Evil Jacket™ are stirring up.

#swtor fanfiction #this turned into fic #crack fic that is #don't be fooled by the super serious intro #traitor among the chiss -- spoilers and speculation #okay not really #swtor #fanfic #theron shan x jedi knight #theron shan #Jedi Knight/Hero of Tython #otp: adorkable #oc: greyias highwind #Anonymous #greyfic

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sailor-arashi · 7 years ago

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Anime suggestions?

Asking a 42 year old lifelong anime dork for anime suggestions!?

Sorry that it’s taken me a little bit to address this. In the absence of specifics I decided to provide a recommendation of my old favorites as opposed to new releases. Of course then I realized I could write entire essays on each of my old favorites as a recommendation and started thinking about how to make a post like that. Then I decided to provide short recommendations for most of the old favorites and save the hard-sell for a single great freaking show. This in turn led me to end up re-watching large parts of said show because it’s just that freaking great. Also, if anyone reading this wants lengthy essays on why I love a certain series, ask away and I’ll write one up if I’m feeling productive one day!

Anyway!

If you’re looking for recently-aired stuff, you can go through my GIF tag to see what I’ve been watching for the past few seasons. Chances are if I’m making GIFs of something I also recommend watching it. The only recent show that I’d mention specifically as deserving more attention than it received is Made In Abyss. It’s a great little show. It’s also really dark, despite the cutesy character designs, so don’t be fooled. Also, if body horror is a trigger, stay the fuck away. The Abyss does bad bad things to people. Anyway, on to the old stuff ;)

Macross SeriesMacross is my all-time favorite ongoing setting. It’s one of the great pillars of the Real Robot genre. It’s stands apart from its peers by focusing more on the human side of conflicts, having an actual nuanced take on the role of the military, and just being very hopeful in general. There are several separate series that I recommend, thus I am grouping them together.

The Super-Dimension Fortress Macross (1982): The original. A true classic of anime. The animation is terribly dated at this point, but the story still holds up. Every time I remember that I first watched this within a year or two of it airing, I feel really old.

Do You Remember Love? (1984): A stunningly-animated movie version of the TV series. The story is slightly different, but close enough if you don’t want to put in the time to watch the TV series but want a better frame of reference on the sequels. It’s also one of the most technically impressive hand-animated movies put to film, so it’s worth a look.

Macross Plus (1994): Four episode OVA series set 30 years after the original. The focus is on the reunion of three former friends rather than the overarching events of the setting, so it can easily be watched without knowing anything about Macross. It’s also widely regarded as one of the best OVA series ever made. It launched the career of Yoko Kanno, among others.

Macross Frontier (2007): Takes place 47 years after the original on board one of Earth’s many outbound colony fleets. Like Macross Plus, the cast is original to the series, and the first 8 or so episodes begin with summaries of the history of the Macross setting, so it can be watched without watching the others…though you’ll miss a lot of references and a bit of the story nuance, but not enough to be unenjoyable.

Moving on from Macross!

Azumanga Daioh (2002): The original slice-of-life show. Cute girls doing cute things. You will cry when they graduate. Watch it.

Nadia of the Mysterious Seas (1990): High adventure in the 1800s! Very very loosely based on 2000 Leagues Under The Sea. This is the series that put Gainax on the map. It also has one of my favorite openings ever.

Aim For the Top! Gunbuster! (1988): While we’re talking about the glories of 80s-90s Gainax, let’s drop in on Gunbuster. A surprisingly-deep take on the Super Robot genre, featuring the most hot-blooded female pilots you’ll find anywhere, which is a huge selling point. If you ever wonder why Evangelion took off so quickly, it’s because it was sold to us as a TV series “by the people who did Gunbuster!”

Marmalade Boy (1994): For years this was my ‘warm blanket and dark chocolate’ anime. Whenever I was feeling down for reasons hormonal or otherwise I’d just start watching randomly from one of the 76 episodes. It’s just an animated soap opera. The main character, Miki, is stunned when her parents come back from a vacation and announce that they’re swapping partners with a couple they met in Hawaii. They all move into the same house together, and Miki meets the other couple’s son Yuu. Hijinks ensue. Nearly every episode ends on a cliffhanger or stunning revelation. It oozes melodrama from every frame of animation.

EDIT: I just walked out into the living room and told the wife what I was doing and mentioned that I recommended Marmalade Boy. Her response: “RUN MIKI! RUN FROM YOUR PROBLEMS!” and now I can’t stop laughing, because that’s exactly Miki’s response to everything bad that happens to her.

(I appear to be drifting closer to writing essays for them all, I’ll just add a couple more and move on)

Yamato 2199 (2012): A bit of a cheat, as this is fairly recent, but it’s a direct remake of the original 1970′s series that I watched as a kid…and it’s frankly better than the original.

Please Save My Earth (1993): Six-episode OVA series that covers the first half of the manga series by the same name. A girl named Alice begins having dreams of living in a hidden base on the moon. She encounters several other people who are dreaming the same thing. I used to hate one of the characters for what he did. Then I understood but still couldn’t forgive it. Finally, now, I think I can forgive him. It’s a series that makes you feel very strongly, but to explain is to spoil. One of Yoko Kanno’s first series as a composer.

His and Her Circumstances (1998): A romance buds between two people who hide their true selves behind a mask of normalcy. Will they still like each other once those masks are stripped away? A compelling romantic comedy from Gainax, and also one of the codifiers of the Gainax Ending, so the show kinda goes to shit in the second half, with three recap episodes and the animation devolving into stick figures, but the main plot is resolved long before then and despite all of this it remains a truly incredible series.

Okay, so, now we come to it. The hard sell.

If there is anything at all in this post that you watch, you absolutely MUST WATCH

GIANT ROBO: THE ANIMATIONThe Day The Earth Stood Still (1992)

I cannot possibly summarize the plot better than its own intro, so watch this:

youtube

The entire show is like that! Breathless exposition! Dashing heroics! Fearful villainy! And the entire thing done in a retro-60′s design aesthetic as an homage to the original creator of all the characters within, Mitsuteru Yokoyama. Top it off with a literally operatic soundtrack and you have the recipe for…well…maybe that’s hard to say? Why am I recommending a series about a kid who controls a giant robotic pharaoh?

The show looks absolutely ludicrous, and in many ways it is. The characters are over the top in a very old-school sort of way. You’ve got your obvious good guys, literally called the EXPERTS OF JUSTICE. You’ve got your obvious bad guys who constantly pledge themselves to the service of a guy named BIG FIRE. The heroes protect the new utopia that the world has become with the invention of a perfect power source. The bad guys seek to destroy that utopia and crush humanity beneath their heel. It’s all so cut-and-dry. Even the characterization of some of the villains as “noble monsters” and some of the heroes as “ends justifies the means” loose cannons doesn’t really give it much depth.

At first.

The show very quickly disabuses you of that notion as it delves into what it actually took to carve out a utopian existence from a humanity that is so frequently opposed to any such thing. It examines the motivations of the villains and finds them valid. It examines the motivations of the heroes and finds them wanting. It provides two questions that drive the emotional arc of the story and demands that the characters, and you the viewer, answer them.

Can happiness be achieved without sacrifice?

Can a new era be reached without misfortune?

As the sins of the past rise up to destroy the hope of the future, somehow the giant robot pharaoh stops seeming so ridiculous. The fact that everything looks like 1960′s guy-in-monster-suit action cinema only serves to contrast the actual depth of the characters and the series as a whole. To say more is to spoil, so I’ll not go into detailed analysis. Suffice it to say: The show looks silly, yet is really quite serious.

It also has one of the best finales of all time. I watched this series as it was released, and there was a three year wait between episode six and episode seven, and I can honestly say it was worth every second. Re-watching it just a few hours ago, my cheeks were wet with tears and stretched in a big grin at the same time. It’s probably the most satisfying end to a series I’ve seen.

So, there you have it. A whole bunch of old anime to watch. (WATCH GIANT ROBO)

If anyone reading this actually watches something based on my recommendation and enjoys it, please let me know. It’s always great to hear that a recommendation was well-received.

#holy crap how to tag this?#I think i'll leave it and maybe tag the series in later #i've been writing this for a couple hours now #wife loving dork #gotta put that one in for the wife mention #how-tobe-him #giant robo #macross #kare kano #his and her circumstances #azumanga daioh #please save my earth #marmalade boy #fushigi no umi no nadia

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shinygoku · 7 years ago

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OG DB Anime - Mini Thoughts

I wanna have a little moment for an Anime Retrospective before I advance on to Z! Not much took me by surprise, having read the mangas cover to cover beforehand, but the anime is another beast...!

The first draft of this post went on and on, so if you’re sufficiently interested in a more deep version of my regards to a particular arc, feel free to ask, but I’m not good at writing for too much at once lol

So! My likes, my dislikes and if anything much was changed by the anime~!

PILAF ARC

Pros: It gets things started, which is always nice. A lot of important characters are introduced, as well as several elements that’ll reoccur, like Kamehamehas, Oozarus and speculation on what the heck Goku is (even if it’s clearly a joke instead of foreshadowing!)

Cons: I’ve always felt that this is the weakest offering by Classic DB, the characters being much flatter and the filler being tedious padding. Some is necessary evils, you gotta start somewhere, after all, but the crass jokes don’t do anything to help out here. I hate the pinball episode as it’s 20 minutes of precious time wasted. Goku is lacking a lot of his personality outside the iconic scene where he meets Bulma, mostly being a food-charged punching machine.

Anime Changes? Pretty much just more filler. And Goku eats a hamburger instead of a meat bun? Curious.

KAME SEN’NIN TRAINING & 21st TENKAICHI BUDOKAI

Pros: This is actually where DB starts to find itself and take off. Seeing Goku and Kuririn grow is satisfying and Lunch is also added to the roster. Kuririn’s growth from resenting Goku to becoming his bro is excellent. The Announcer Man is introduced. The Jackie Chun vs Goku fight is great and helps establish how strong and tenacious that little monkey kid is. A rad insert song for the Budokai!

Cons: Still rather lowbrow, cringy humour. Half the characters in the 21st are joke gimmics who bring nothing but quick yuks. Or yucks, because Ew, man, I can do without some of this stuff.

Anime Changes? Roshi gets cockblocked many times in karmic ways. Giran and Namu are expanded in filler, which makes their presence a fair bit more interesting. I’d list Namu as a Pro, but sadly he only makes a couple of brief appearances going forward after this, but at least we do have this filler!

RED RIBBON ARMY (Part 1)

Pros: Goku adventuring solo and beating up the weird jerky soldiers who keep getting in his way. All of Muscle Tower and Hachan. Bulma forcing her way in and getting more than she bargained for. Goku, Kuririn and Bulma in the Pirate Cave. Arale in Penguin Village.

Cons: Blue makes for some very uncomfortable watching. I don’t particularly want to go into depth here but hoo boy is this homophobic. Also Silver is boring. You’re boring me!!

Anime Changes? Boring ass Silver filler and a brief moment where they make Blue a pedo as well. Urrgggghhh. HOWEVER! Also some nice filler with the Jingle Village crew. We get introduced to the man who made Hachan (Jinzonigen Hachigou / Artificial Human #8) who will get forgotten about during Z where some ugmo is the new Jinzo maker guy, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

RED RIBBON ARMY (Part 2)

Pros: All of it. Bora and Upa’s relationship! Tao Pai Pai being the first villain to actually be high stakes and also does it while being entertaining! Goku’s character development when he resolves to avenge Bora and wish him back to life with the Dragonballs! Karin-sama! Goku obliterating TPP and the RRA base! The image song! The Baba Miniarc! Jiichan Gohan!! The first time Shen Long revives somebody...!

Cons: Almost nothing, really, mostly that dirty joke moment with the invisible man lol

Anime Changes? All for the good, expanding the characters and training to give it more substance. Goku’s character growth is really highlighted and he goes from a tough, nice kid who happens into foiling evil into much more of the bringer of hope and justice! He makes a very clear choice here which is still present in the manga but the anime really performs it better.

TENSHINHAN SAGA & 22nd TENKAICHI BUDOKAI

Pros: The filler, which I like to refer to as “Purple Goke Adventures” is all high quality stuff, and even makes the bold move of introducing Tenshinhan (and Chaotzu) early to give us a taste of what’s to come, and what will change! The 22nd Tenkaichi Budokai is Fantastic, with much less dumb gimmicks and much more interesting fights, personal stakes, gorgeous animation and that sweet, sweet character development. Also, Yamcha gets a rad image song.

Cons: Honestly nothing much is coming to mind lmao. I’m not saying it’s flawless but the dirty humour has largely been shed by now. I will say that Namu shoulda been a featured character instead of New Randos we don’t give a rat’s ass for, but that’s a small complaint.

Anime Changes? Great exclusive content here, and also Yamcha listening to the radio for a lot of it. Lunch also beats dudes up while holding an ice cream cone, which is amazing.

PICCOLO DAIMAO SAGA & HEAVENLY TRAINING

Pros: You thought the shit got real with Tao Pai Pai? Well boy, the shit gets so much realer here!! Damn though, this arc goes hard in all the right places! We see Son Goku at rock bottom and higher than he’s ever been before, while also having an interesting side story focused on Tenshinhan. After all that, there’s a bunch of training Goku’s gotta go through, which makes him again much more compelling, as even though we’ve seen him do what no one else can, we also catch a glimpse of how much further there is yet...

Cons: Some animation and filler antics are a bit of a let down, though only in a couple of episodes. Nothin’ too big, mind you.

Anime Changes? Filler, almost all of it is really good! Of note is Goku and Yajirobe searching for the Super Actually Real This Time Magic Water, which makes Goku’s Massive Powerup feel a lot more earned (hey, if it’s poison does that mean he Zenkai’d into more strength?) and the training he goes through with Mr Popo, which shows how much of a noob he is on the grand scale and makes the stuff he does in Z more noteworthy and well deserved, too! Also I sure love the Back to the Future Episode~

PICCOLO JR & GOCHI ADVENTURES

Pros: Another lot of characterization and beautiful fights! Watching Goku vs Piccolo really reminded me of how many notes future fights in Z, most of all Goku vs Vegeta, would take from this. Everyone (who isn’t Chaotzu) gets some time to shine, even Yamcha! After the tournament, we get the adorable pair of Goku and Chichi on their five-episode quest to put out the blazing inferno on Frypan Mountain, which really intensifies my love for them as a couple~

Cons: Not a whole lot, really. It’s main crime is maybe not being quite as rad as the adventures 15 year old Goku was having. Also no insert songs. And the Gochi pacing as a little odd, poor Gyumao is stuck in the burning castle in each of the eps as Goku and Chichi meander about (not wasting time, but it’s very fetch quest-y) and I was honestly really shocked to see all of 3 minutes dedicated to their wedding! What?! We don’t even get half of an episode?! Even 1 more episode would have been a lot nicer, imo.

Anime Changes? All the Gochi content after the tournament, smaller character moments during the Budokai, too. We even get to see Piccolo saving a young boy from a poorly-timed clock falling (haha), before doing a dick move by squashing something or the other the boy had, but it foreshadows his eventual Heel-Face turning in a neat way~!

There we are, I hope this sums it up nicely~

Coming soon: The Liveblogging of the second half of the story!! Which has rather overshadowed this one lol

Obviously I’m looking forward to most of Z, but it’s still bittersweet to be done with DB. Even when I knew the plot beats seeing it all in order and high quality for the first time was wonderful! I’ll return to it, some time after I’ve consumed all of Z and GT too, so it may be quite a while anyway. Maybe watch other things to make DB feel more like coming home? I’m getting rather ahead here, my main point is that

💕 I LOVE DRAGON BALL!! 💕

#DB Liveblogging #Firefly's rambling

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clexa--warrior · 5 years ago

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Fear has a problem. And it ain’t a small problem, either.

I could go on a tirade about the past and how the show has suffered because it’s moved away from the good ole days (aka Season’s 1–3), the Clark family, and Dave Erickson’s original vision and promise that we were seeing our heroes slowly become the villains in their own story, but I don’t need to bring that up because I already have in a previous article.

The show has become incredibly boring in it’s own right because it lacks any direction in both story and character development.

Instead, I want to focus on what’s wrong with the show in it’s current iteration within the framework that showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg have set out for their rebooted version of Fear. Simply put, without any comparisons to the past, they have not succeeded in pushing their own narrative forward in any interesting or compelling ways. The show has become incredibly boring in it’s own right because it lacks any direction in both story and character development.

Coming off of last week’s episode,”Ner Tamid”, the show has hit another series low this season. The latest episode debuted to a mere 1.14 million live viewers, which was a significant drop even from this season’s previous low of 1.37 million viewers. We are now 12 episodes into the fifth season and yet nothing substantial has happened. For starters, there hasn’t been any major deaths in these 12 episodes, let alone the half season that came before it in season 4B. And while the show doesn’t necessarily have to kill people off to create interest and tension, it would certainly help inject some stakes for the characters and give them something to work with that could further the story along.

Instead of copping out on contrived drama, such as Alicia getting radiated walker blood in her mouth that apparently is of no consequence despite being told just how dangerous a little drop could be; or Morgan stepping on a mine that could blow him up except we know it won’t, why not raise the stakes by putting a main character in real jeopardy and have it pay off with their death?

It’s no secret that the title The Walking Dead actually refers to the remnants of society who are left to survive and not actually the dead that walk among us. The dead rising is simply a narrative jumping off point to set the stage for character stories of those who live in this universe.

Death in a narrative, as in real life, is more about the people who remain and how they react to the grief, anger and hurt. Having someone die and having their death serve as a means to propel the story forward for those left behind can create some dynamic character moments and tension among the group. Death always serves as a way to remind the living that life is short and unpredictable. Death has an impact, both good and bad. It reminds us that life offers no guarantees and it can push us to live life to the fullest knowing just how precious and fleeting life can be. Others dwell on their loss and are so consumed by their grief that their only way to cope is to forge a destructive path forward to bury their grief and hold back their anger. There are just so many human complexities that can be explored through genuine loss, yet the writers waste the opportunity to mine this narrative gold.

Another issue that could easily be resolved is to stop forcing the characters to service the plot. Instead, the writers could do the fans and themselves a favour and have the plot service the characters. Apocalyptic shows, movies and books are a dime a dozen, but what sets them all apart is a focus on the characters. It’s no secret that the title The Walking Dead actually refers to the remnants of society who are left to survive and not actually the dead that walk among us. The dead rising is simply a narrative jumping off point to set the stage for character stories of those who live in this universe. Yet, all the writers on Fear seem to be more concerned with one-upping themselves on the gimmicks they put into the plot and connecting the characters to those gimmicks rather than to serve a real purpose.

These gimmicks are pretty much the only thing that people talk about — usually to outline just how absurd the show is being by introducing these gimmicks. It’s meant to up the wow factor I suppose, but it obviously is not working. Instead of applauding the “ingenuity” of these gimmicks, the fans have become bored and complacent by the missing character development and plot that they serve to replace. And no matter how I feel about the direction of the show and the writers in charge, I doubt that their goal is to bore people to death.

Instead of breaking up the characters and giving them menial plots that get resolved in a single episode why not plan out a thoughtful story for the characters and have the plot points that develop over the season act as tent poles towards the characters development? We should be able to reach the end of the season and look back and see the character growth and development of our main characters. Yet, as it stands right now, there is no singular character defining moments. And whatever character defining moments the writers try to introduce, such as Morgan leaving Grace behind because he’s afraid of losing her too, are stale and old.

In truth, there’s only the collective “I’m here to help” motif that is driving Alicia, Strand, Morgan, Daniel, June, John, Al, Charlie and Luciana. They are all main characters and have been since before this season began. They should have far more interesting and defining character traits and stories at this point. In fact, an excellent example of the absent character development comes from Fear’s latest outing, “Ner Tamid”.

This episode was meant to primarily serve as a Charlie story. Yet, the writing and the episode did her a disservice. Why? Because we had barely seen her all season and when we did she really didn’t have any purpose. When you can literally subtract a character from a scene and sub in any other character on the show and not notice a difference in the story that you’re telling there’s clearly a problem.

Had we seen more of Charlie and experienced some of her feelings about the ever moving convoy and how it affects her given her time with the Vultures, and also understand that she couldn’t share that with the group because she still holds onto her guilt over Nick’s death, then it would have actually meant something that she was so determined to find a home for them, no matter how misguided her search may have been.

Instead her story, like so many others this season, fell flat and did little to move her character forward. At this point the writers should be more concerned with endearing her to the audience given that she is still to blame for Nick’s death. Shit, we haven’t even had her have any scenes with Alicia, which the show spent it’s only one good episode of season 4B defining their dynamic and Alicia’s forgiveness, this season. Seeing their relationship develop further and have Alicia continually have to reconcile her decision to forgive Charlie would be worth something. Instead it’s another failed opportunity.

Here’s some thoughts on what I think would be interesting to see and could take the show in several different and interesting directions:

June dies while trying to help someone because of Morgan’s blind passivism, which in turn challenge’s Morgan’s outlook on “All life is precious”.

Morgan spirals out of control because of his guilt over June’s death, and Grace tries to reach him and help him realize that he can find a compromise in his values and keep his humanity, despite having to realize he can’t help everyone. But before she reaches him his recklessness causes more issues than it does solve them. (A source of conflict)

John is broken from June’s death and separates from the group for a while. He comes across a stranger in the apocalypse and it turns out to be Madison, who couldn’t find her family and given up hope. Together they help each other cope but Madison’s influence makes John a little darker, given him new angles to explore in his character.

John reunites with the group and brings Madison back. Alicia is elated to see her Mother alive, but has to carefully navigate around her mother by hiding the truth about Charlie’s involvement in Nick’s death from her, knowing how volatile her mother can be. This would force Alicia to truly own up to the redemption she has been seeking, realizing that even though Charlie killed Nick, she really does care to protect her and not just because she was bored and Morgan told her she knew what it was and she had to.

Madison would sense the rift in her and Alicia’s relationship over time and they would easily come into conflict about the way things are done. Madison would eventually put two-and-two together and decide to lure Charlie away from the group in an effort to get revenge for Nick’s death.

The narrative of Madison’s return would to be for Alicia to complete her journey to leader and to stand up to her mother and tell her that she’s no longer willing to follow Madison but that Madison will have to follow her now if she wants to be apart of Alicia’s life.

BONUS: Madison, Victor and Strand could start drinking together and just being badass as filler episodes, which would be 10/10 better than the current filler episodes.

If Chambliss, Goldberg and Gimple could simply reign in their non-creative flights of fancy and focus on the quality of their characters and the dialogue they deliver the show would be about 80% better off for it.

Honestly, there are so many ways to drive natural conflict and push character development forward. Perhaps it would be best to pay for better writers and cut the budget put into these mindless and stupid gimmicks. And while we are at it, trim the cast down, too. This really can all be summed up in the age old adage of quality over quantity. If Chambliss, Goldberg and Gimple could simply reign in their non-creative flights of fancy and focus on the quality of their characters and the dialogue they deliver the show would be about 80% better off for it.

There are only four more episodes to go before this season finishes. I know that Andrew Chambliss has stated that the season will end with a big shift in how they tell stories, but really, can his words be trusted given how let down the fans feel over all the other failed promises to tell an exciting story? I mean, these guys reintroduced one of the best characters of the series this season in Daniel Salazar yet managed to make that pretty bland too, so I don’t have much faith in the show heading in a better direction with the same showrunners next season.

My hope is that AMC does some long, deep thinking on the state of Fear and make the right decisions to put this show back on track. I just began watching The Walking Dead again starting with Season 9 after skipping out completely since Season 7 because of these same sorts of issues. Two episodes in and I already feel a renewed sense of interest in that show. So clearly it can be done.

The thing is AMC and the other executive producers on Fear need to really want to make the show better. And sadly, right now, I’m not sure that they even care enough to do that. But if they do, maybe season six can avoid becoming a hot mess that attracts less than a million viewers. Just a thought.

#fear the walking dead

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withacorkscrew-blog · 8 years ago

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The Six Thatchers

**Sherlock analysis/spoilers below**

In which some people can’t decide how clever everyone is, whether death is permanent, what makes a villain villainous, or how emotions work.

And no, “some people” does not refer to Sherlock Holmes.

What was supposed to be compelling about this mystery? Hopefully not the whodunnit; calling the secretary as the culprit after her first scene would’ve been obvious except that seemed too dumb to be real, and not just because “but the service worker did it!” is a tired, tired plot twist. There was one person in the debriefing room (/story) who had no reason to be there, who they pointed out had no reason to be there (when Mycroft said notes were not to be taken because of the level of confidentiality at which point there is no reason a secretary would ever have been let into the room in the first place, let alone allowed to stay), who had random extraneous dialogue as though to point a giant flashing arrow at her head, and who Moffatt can point to as an act of feminism the next time someone on a panel asks him why he doesn’t write a complex array of female characters. But I can genuinely no longer tell whether this was intentional. Does this show wants the viewer to feel clever and included, or is it getting more predictable and less clever itself?

Who is this Sherlock Holmes? Except maybe a parody of himself. Have they forgotten that part of what made Sherlock such an exceptional detective in Seasons 1 and 2 was his ability to accurately perceive human emotion and motivation? He might not have been interested in having feelings or encouraging other people’s, but he sure as hell knew they were going on and understood that they had significance and what they suggested. He also learned the importance of working with other people, on having people he turned to for help and not going off half-cocked, as opposed to, say, hanging out next to a pool in the middle of the night waiting for a mystery criminal or criminals alone. This Sherlock is a parody of who he used to be. I’d like to believe that that’s because the show wants us to buy in to him buying in to the idea that he’s a sociopath, and that would explain why he’s so distant and dedicated to being entertained by it all in the first third of the episode. But that’s pretty hard to believe given his actions in the second half, and particularly in the last ten minutes.

Also, they gave him a dog out of nowhere, after redbeard, which they referenced in this episode, and established that Sherlock was attached to the dog, and then the dog completely disappeared again and nobody commented on that and Sherlock was completely unmoved? Are they even trying to write Sherlock as a consistent character anymore, rather than their own personal Mary Sue?*

Who is this John Watson? And not just the weirdness of that noise he made after Mary got shot. He contemplates cheating? Why? Where did that come from? He’s been unhappy with his relationships before, sure, but always because he was so immersed in his work. But now, when he’s unhappy in his relationship, he entertains an affair instead of immersing himself in his work? What validation is it that he needs from women now, when that’s always been secondary to him before? And why is he mad at Sherlock because Mary jumped in front of a bullet? Since when is John that irrational? Or that invested in Mary, who he showed only the most perfunctory interest in all episode? Or that willing to cut Sherlock out of his life? He forgave Sherlock two years worth of faked death and attendant avoidable emotional pain, but won’t forgive him a choice that someone else made?

Is this show so invested in its ‘no homo’ that it’s given up caring about the show’s continuity and appeal? Sherlock and John barely interacted in this episode, and without their relationship the show is lacking heart. It doesn’t matter whether you ship them or not, whether you think their investment in each other is romantic or platonic. What made this show work so well was their dynamic. And, for the viewer, having a point of entry in John and in the relatable spaces between John and Sherlock. Without their relationship, we’re no longer solving mysteries with them, but watching them from a remove. Sure, they’ve proven that John and Sherlock can get by without one another. But can the show?

Does this show have rules? Limits? Internal consistency? Ethics? Setting aside, for a moment, the incredibly number this must all be doing on John Watson’s psychology and sense of object permanence (though feeling like he must be having the world’s most fucked up time of it is one of the few points - maybe the only? - point of emotional investment I got out of the episode), how are we supposed to get invested in a universe when the rules keep changing so arbitrarily and dramatically? Is Sherlock dead? Moriarty dead? Is Mary dead? Is anyone actually dead? Is Mrs Hudson secretly a vampire? Are we going to see Magnusson’s face on screens across London next week? On the one hand, in the one confirmed case of someone coming back, we had visual confirmation before the end of the episode. On the other, if they keep teasing at the idea, how much impact do they expect these deaths to have? Ditto the idea of the big, bad villain. Magnusson was the biggest, baddest, and most grotesque, but next week we’re going to have someone who is the new biggest, baddest, and most grotesque? So…what? What’s the point of it? To see how many viscerally off-putting affective choices they can come up with without losing all their viewers? (Which is especially grating when some really appalling stuff - like Mary giving her newborn daughter her name, thereby assuring Rosie a very heavy mantle, and/or giving Mary an easy way to blur her very laden identity into her child’s - goes uncommented upon except as an easter egg type victory for the marginally attentive viewer, because yes, no shit, Mary left the R out in her recap to Sherlock.) Aside from a few flashy moments - which is the sort of storytelling technique guaranteed to have diminishing returns - what are they hoping to accomplish with this non-progression towards an extraneous more?

tl;dr: Moftiss are losing their grip on what makes stories moving, and this one wasn’t. The show is still interesting for the puzzles it presents (sort of), but it’s not much fun to solve along when the answers are simultaneously obvious, bewildering and, most of all, distant from the emotional lives of the characters. But there’s no real stake left to have when the characters behave inconsistently, the mysteries are flat, and there’s no relationship/principle/outcome that anyone is fighting for.

Thoughts on things to watch:

Mary’s alias, Gabrielle Ashdown, gives us another G and A, as in A.G.R.A. If this show is still making any attempt at being intentional, that seems…well, what do we say about coincidence? But who knows if this show is still being intentional!

Mary didn’t get herself to a hospital, even though she would have been fully capable of getting herself there, by ambulance or the neighbors who owe them a favor or the people they asked to be godparents or cab. And, while this may be news to anyone who has ever worked on this show, a woman who wanted to be that on top of her game would have to be pretty damn aware of how her body worked and changed and felt. Mary giving birth in the car instead of going through the NHS system? Not a coincidence. Something is going on with her identity. But who knows if that will ever revisit us or if it ever occurred to Moftiss that giving birth is significant and telling rather than a funny throwaway gag?

Who sent Mary’s “Miss Me” DVD? Physically, who knew where it was and put it in the mail? If Mary really made a spur of the moment decision to jump in front of that bullet, if she was at all surprised at the reveal, it wouldn’t have been her. So who was she working with that knew about the DVD, had access to it, had Sherlock’s address, and had orders to act in the event of her death?

What is this cave that Sherlock was lurking in? Where did he get it, whose is it, how is he storing highly sensitive equipment there, since when is it a thing?

There were more than six Thatchers on the table when AJ put his USB key in one, and none of them had bottoms. Which means that someone else had to see that the USB key was in there - there’s no way a rectangular object with a metal chain wouldn’t have fallen out or at least rattled around the inside of a hollow, curved object as soon as someone lifted the thing up to finish/ship/move it - and make the choice to seal it up inside the thing. So, who? And why did they make that choice?

Random thought: In this political climate it felt hella irresponsible for Moftiss to start us off with an explanation of how governments fake coverups.

* nothing against Mary Sues, genuinely. I just am not that interested in this particular one; Steven Moffatt’s id!fic is the sort of thing I’d like to give a wiiiiiide berth.

#i had a lot of feels to get off my chest. they mostly fall under the umbrellas of annoyance and confusion.#sherlock #sherlock s4 #sherlock spoilers #six thatchers #the six thatchers #writing about tv

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