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shihalyfie · 3 years

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Some things to know about the upcoming 02-related movie

As someone who seems to be known for being a 02 metablogger now (and 02 lover in general), and who’s been closely following Kizuna’s development and is generally fond of the movie itself, I figured I’d probably need to address the elephant in the room that is the announcement of the upcoming (unnamed, as of this writing) 02-related movie. This is also especially because I’ve personally been on the record saying that I absolutely did not want a Kizuna sequel. And, well, on top of that, to be a bit blunt about it, a lot of us, especially 02 fans, have a lot of reason to be skeptical of Toei right now given some of the things they’ve done with this series in the past, and 02-related things in particular (trust me, the wound is still extremely fresh), so it says a lot about what it took for me to get even remotely positive about this prospect.

Well, here’s the good news: while I of course still think there’s good reason to be apprehensive, and while I wouldn’t say everyone should be getting their expectations up for it to be guaranteed fantastic (which is something I would say about anything, regardless of whether it even has to do with Digimon or not), I don’t think there’s too much to be panicked about with this movie. Again, it took a lot for the staff to gain my trust in this respect, so it’s not something I say lightly. But if you’re a 02 fan and you’re extremely apprehensive, here are my reasons for feeling this way, and, hopefully, they might make you feel a little better too.

The reason this movie exists to begin with

One of the most striking things about this movie’s reveal was that they’ve literally only just started production on this movie. This was to the point that, at DigiFes, where this was revealed, even the voice actors stated outright that they knew absolutely nothing more than what the audience knew from the trailer. Katayama (Daisuke) only knew anything in the sense that they had him record those few lines for it. So even though it’s been a whole year and a half since Kizuna released to the public, it had only just been decided to make a new movie like this. All of the statements between Kizuna and now stating that there was nothing particularly in the works at the time were completely accurate. Of course, there are obvious hints that they were setting up for this possibility (many, many people noticed the suspiciously favorable position the 02 group was in during Kizuna, and the press releases were carefully worded so that having a movie about “Daisuke and his friends” would allow any statement about Kizuna being “the last adventure of Taichi and his friends” to still be technically truthful), but for all intents and purposes it seems like there had been no actual commitment to making this 02 movie until now, and that they’d at least wanted to gauge the surrounding climate and fanbase reactions for what people were looking for before they decided to go ahead with this.

The obvious reasons as to why this movie exist involve the fact that Daisuke and co. are pretty much the only “out” you can have to continue the Adventure universe without constantly defaulting to Taichi’s group yet again, because at the very least it’d be something that you can’t deny hasn’t exactly had the best representation in recent years. Of course they’re trying to capitalize on this! I’m not going to pretend they aren’t! But producer Kinoshita left a very interesting comment about a particular goal they have with this movie:

This time, the core behind the movie is everyone from 02! Daisuke’s group has their own different kind of charm from Taichi’s, and we want to express that precisely because we’re in the times we’re in right now.

That comment alone has a lot to unpack. (For a frame of reference, Kizuna released in Japan in February 2020; development had already long finished by the time the pandemic first hit, and it was unfortunately one of the first victims of the initial lockdowns because of how bad the timing was.) Acknowledging directly that there’s something different about Daisuke’s group and their dynamic, which makes them especially suited for what we need in “the current times”...hmm, what could that be?

The implied answer is one that many 02 lovers will know very intimately: the 02 group’s particular specialty is in uplifting others and giving each other emotional support. While Adventure had traces of these themes, 02 was the one that went really hard on the themes of dealing with grief and loss, the existential crisis of what to do with oneself in a world placing heavy pressures on you, and how to move on from hardships with the help of others. The fact that the 02 group specializes in this more than anything else is probably one of the most distinguishing factors between them and their seniors, so there’s a very heavy implication here that they understand what distinguishes 02 from Adventure, and what it uniquely would bring to the table in this kind of movie. So this isn’t just “we’re relying on the 02 kids because they’re part of the same universe”; there’s some degree of substantial understanding of what makes 02 as a series unique, and a desire to use this to its fullest extent.

Still don’t believe me? Well, how about this...

This staff really likes 02 a lot

Seki Hiromi, the original producer of Adventure and 02, was involved as a supervisor on Kizuna’s development. Seki was personally involved in the creation of these kids and 02 itself -- she’s the one who noticed the story of the nine-year-old boy skipping grades into Columbia University, the one that formed the basis of 02 itself and eventually came back for Kizuna -- and even personally vetted Kizuna’s script to make sure everyone was in character, gave her thoughts on what the kids would be like in 2010, and was (repeatedly) commented as seeming to love the kids like her own children. As of this writing, it hasn’t been confirmed whether she’s involved on the new movie, but even if she’s not, this means that the staff on Kizuna that is returning all listened closely to those discussions about what the characters are like, straight from the mouth of one of their own creators. The new character song releases had a brief mention in Lounsbery Arthur’s interview that there were apparently extensive discussions with the staff on what the characters should be like at this time, so while Seki’s involvement with that is unknown, at the very least, a lot of conscientious thought seems to be put in at all times into maintaining these characters’ integrity.

Of course, just having an original creator alone on it doesn’t necessarily do it by itself, so here’s another interesting thing: Taguchi Tomohisa, director of both Kizuna and this movie, is also very fond of 02.

I suspect we’ll be hearing more from him as this new movie goes further into development, but Taguchi himself implied that 02 was actually the one he happened to connect with in particular, and when you really think about it, given the circumstances surrounding Kizuna, it’s not actually surprising that a movie trying to be conscientiously aware of 02′s position in the narrative would have someone with a particular fondness for it on its staff. (Reason being: a lot of Adventure fans don’t care much for 02, but you’ll almost never meet a 02 fan who doesn’t also adore Adventure.) The really fun part about this, however, is that Taguchi has repeatedly stated that 02′s first movie, Hurricane Touchdown, is his favorite Digimon movie -- in a climate where everyone else was talking about Adventure. The expected answer for the majority of Adventure fans in terms of “favorite Digimon movie” is almost always Our War Game! by knockout, but no, for Taguchi, it’s Hurricane Touchdown, and not only has he said this, he won’t shut up about it. He’s been saying this since 2019. Even Seki noticed. A whole article got made about this. He brings it up whenever he has a chance to. To top it all off, when a Kizuna event asked everyone present about their favorite characters, and everyone gave Adventure-related answers, Taguchi’s response was instead Terriermon and Daisuke. And I mean, look at Kizuna itself -- its entire plot revolves around having to move on from unhealthy nostalgia, represented by kidnapping people and turning them younger and an antagonist swallowed by their own negative emotions, which, well, is literally the plot of Hurricane Touchdown. (Yeah, that Wallace cameo is very, very likely to be sheer self-indulgence.) And considering that Taguchi said his favorite human character was Daisuke, not Wallace, it means that he understands what Hurricane Touchdown brought out of Daisuke, what his interactions with Wallace meant for both characters, and how Daisuke’s best strengths lie in his ability to support and uplift others.

And, finally, we have Yamatoya, who was responsible for penning both Kizuna’s script (and, thus, being privy to Seki’s corrections) and the bonus drama CD that came with it, on the script, and he personally said that he enjoyed writing for the 02 group because he felt they were important to lightening up the mood of the heavy story Kizuna was becoming. In fact, every comment from this staff about what the 02 group brings to the table in particular has showed a good understanding of what their appeal is -- that they have to be “fun”, that they were “healing in a heavy story”, and Taguchi himself said that he got the impression that the 02 group had more straightforward paths to their epilogue careers (which is interesting, considering that I’ve also personally pointed out that the 02 group seemed to have careers with significantly lower bars than their seniors’ due to their difference in priorities). All of these things are observations you make when you know this group and the importance of the story they came from.

Extend it even further to the rest of the staff members and you’ll find there are a lot of 02 fans on there, including the animation staff, who made some very neat observations about 02 and its finale. Miyahara Takuya is a particularly amusing case, because he seems to love Imperialdramon so much that in the thanks booklet for the deluxe edition for the Blu-ray, he drew a picture of Daisuke and Ken with Imperialdramon Dragon Mode because he didn’t get to be in the movie. (As in, he actually said, point-blank in the caption, that he loves Imperialdramon and wanted to draw him because he wasn’t in the movie.)

Of course, even if you’re trying your best, things may not always work out, so I’m not saying having love for the characters will necessarily guarantee that the product turns out for the best. However, considering that historically a lot of our fears come from the idea of them milking the name value of the characters without really caring about their integrity or understanding what the series was about (especially since a lot of people in the fanbase itself don’t tend to read 02′s nuances very well), I think, at the very least, we don’t need to worry about the staff for this movie not being conscientious, nor the idea that they’re making this movie without understanding or caring about 02.

Furthermore, one thing I appreciate is that they’re actually leading the advertisement with a premise that is distinct from Kizuna’s. Of course, it covers a similar topic of “partnerships”, and it’s very possible it’ll cover the issue of the solution to Kizuna’s problem (especially since the answer was already hinted to have a heavy relationship with 02), but nevertheless, it’s an actual premise that’s not just “Kizuna’s story, but more of it”. It’s an understanding that something 02-related should be allowed to stand on its own rather than just tacking it onto an Adventure-related thing. Beyond that, while I think it’s generally expected that a side story like this should have an original character, I think it’s actually very good this time in particular that there’s a new element/character for the 02 group to interact with; again, as with Hurricane Touchdown and Daisuke, these kids often have the best brought out of them when they’re supporting others, and honestly, because the kids suffered so much in their own narrative, I’m not particularly fond of the idea of seeing them having to go through too much more trauma themselves (it’s a big reason I don’t like the idea of a 02 reboot). So while I’m sure a lot of 02 fans feel a bit antsy that the actual group itself wasn’t advertised first, I actually consider it a positive sign that they have an understanding of what context this group performs best in, and, moreover, well...the last time they unveiled something that was so focused on advertising the return of old characters that it forgot to actually be straightforward about the premise, I don’t think that ended well. So to speak.

In general, the track record is good

It’s easy to just smile and nod at the portrayal of the 02 quartet in Kizuna, because in general everything from them is in-character, but I just want to point out how significant it is that they were portrayed so conscientiously when it is really easy to mess them up. (As I like pointing out very often: even official has not historically been very careful with Daisuke’s character.) There are so many easy pitfalls you could have fallen into and pigeonholed the kids into, but Kizuna absolutely demonstrated the quartet at their best, showing off all the nuances of their character and bringing up all the parts that were most important, especially Daisuke’s best quality being “positivity and cheerfulness” and not all of the other things about him running in circles or having a crush on Hikari-chan. This even goes down to the casting; Katayama Fukujuurou sounds terrifyingly like Kiuchi Reiko in terms of all the little nuances and pitch shifts she had in her performance, and the cast themselves spoke of all the nuances present in their characters as they were studying for their roles. These are things that even fans of the series tend to miss, but the voice actors for the quartet nailed their roles so well that it’s very easy to tell that the direction understood exactly what they were looking for and needed, and casted accordingly. Even those who didn’t care for the movie much had a very hard time disputing the voice casting for the quartet (and this is saying a lot given how much voice actor changes are often a really sore point among Japanese fans).

But while the 02 group had a limited amount of screentime in Kizuna, the staff also had a lot of opportunities to prove themselves with the drama CD and the new character song CDs, and every single aspect of these reflects something that was represented in 02 itself -- again, things that often go over the heads of people who aren’t paying as close attention. The drama CD captures a lot of the essence of the dynamics between the group in only short lines, and all of the statements about the characters in the character song interviews are accurate (and remember: Arthur said directly that there were discussions with the staff about keeping them true to character). On top of that, not only do the lyrics in said songs directly mirror each character’s development from the time of the original Best Partner series, there are also a lot of things in said songs that demonstrate a nuanced understanding of each person’s character and what they got out of the events of 02. Someone with only a surface-level understanding of Ken or Iori’s character might think that Ken should only have a soft song, or that Iori shouldn’t want to do anything ridiculous, but the series goes ahead and gives Ken one of the most passionately emotional rock songs in the batch and Iori outright rap with Armadimon, which are both fitting decisions in light of Ken actually being one of the more emotionally assertive people in this group, and Iori only being stoic because he’s strict with himself and being willing to let loose in certain circumstances (especially after the events of 02).

As of this writing, I don’t know if the new movie is going to be featuring the entire group in a major role, and I’m not sure if I even want it to; as much as I do strongly feel like the group should always work together at all times, one minor personal complaint I had about Kizuna was that it tries to do too much in too little time, and I’m personally fine with this new movie being more Daisuke-centric or something if it means it can just get a nice story on the table (after all, if I wanted something that more evenly represents the entire 02 group, I’d just go back and rewatch a very nice anime series called Digimon Adventure 02). There’s also the very thorny question of what to do about Tokumitsu Yuka, since I don’t personally really like the idea of still dragging her out of retirement like this (but I also wouldn’t want them to awkwardly write around her just for this, and I’m wondering if Sonozaki voicing Tailmon in the reboot would let people accept her as a replacement without much fighting).

Nevertheless, I think Kizuna’s staff has proven more than well enough that they understand the essence of 02 and its characters, so, again, regardless of how it turns out, I at least expect that this can be made with some degree of conscientiousness, and at this point, that’s all I can ask for. I don’t think it’s fair to expect or want this movie to be the second coming of 02, because, again, if we wanted that, I think it’d be better for us to all go back and watch that lovely little 50-episode anime called Digimon Adventure 02. But in terms of being something that can add a little nice thing to the mix, I think, so far, this movie at least has positive signs of turning out that way -- and, remember, think about what I just said about initially being very against this idea; as a diehard 02 fan who has a lot of very picky feelings about how to best represent it, it took a lot for the staff to earn my trust in this sense.

#digimon #digimon adventure 02 #digimon adventure last evolution kizuna #kizuna spoilers

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calzona-ga · 4 years

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She might change her mind; she certainly has before. But midway through an interview, Ellen Pompeo casually drops the bomb that after more than 360 episodes, the upcoming 17th season of “Grey’s Anatomy” may be its last.

“We don’t know when the show is really ending yet,” Pompeo says, answering a question that was not at all about when the show might end. “But the truth is, this year could be it.”

Pompeo has played Meredith Grey — the superstar surgeon around whom “Grey’s Anatomy” revolves — since its start. The show, created by Shonda Rhimes, premiered on ABC on March 27, 2005, and became an immediate, noisy hit. Since then, for a remarkably long time in Hollywood years, the drama has been among the most popular series on TV, even as the landscape of television has changed seismically. At its Season 2 ratings height, the program drew an average audience of 20 million viewers. And all these years later — in a TV universe now divided by more than 500 scripted shows —“Grey’s” ranks as the No. 1 drama among 18- to 34- year-olds and No. 2 among adults 18 to 49. In delayed, multiplatform viewing, Season 16 averaged 15 million viewers.

Strikingly, technology is such that teenagers who were born when the show premiered, and later binged “Grey’s” on Netflix, watch new episodes live with their parents. The series has spawned two successful spinoffs for ABC, “Private Practice” (which ran from 2007 to 2013) and “Station 19” (which enters its fourth season this fall). “Grey’s Anatomy” has been licensed in more than 200 territories across the world, translated into more than 60 languages, and catapulted the careers of music artists — from Ingrid Michaelson and Snow Patrol to Tegan and Sara and the Fray — whose songs have played during key emotional sequences.

In its explosive initial success, “Grey’s Anatomy” was an insurgent force in popular culture. The Season 1 cast featured three Black actors — Chandra Wilson, James Pickens Jr. and Isaiah Washington — as doctors in positions of power at the Seattle hospital where the show is set, and Sandra Oh played the ambitious intern Cristina Yang, who would become Meredith’s best friend. For the women characters, the “Grey’s” approach to sex was defiant and joyful, starting in the pilot with Meredith’s one-night stand with Derek (Patrick Dempsey), who turned out to be one of her bosses at the hospital.

Rhimes presented these images to the world like they were no big deal, when in fact, nothing like “Grey’s” had ever been seen on network television. Krista Vernoff has been the “Grey’s Anatomy” showrunner since Season 14, as anointed by Rhimes, and was the head writer for the first seven seasons. She remembers the moment she realized how radical “Grey’s” was — a medical show driven entirely by its characters instead of their surgeries — as she watched an episode early in Season 1. “My whole body was covered in chills,” Vernoff recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh, we thought we were making a sweet little medical show — and we’re making a revolution.’”

Still, no one expected “Grey’s Anatomy” to become the longest-running primetime medical drama in TV history, outlasting “MASH” and “ER,” the previous record-holder. Since 2005, “Grey’s” has inspired countless women to become doctors, and along the way, its depiction of illness has even saved a few lives. The show has remained popular through three presidential administrations, the Great Recession, tectonic shifts in how people watch TV and two cultural reckonings — one feminist, one anti-racist — that demonstrate how ahead of its time “Grey’s Anatomy” has always been.

And they’re not done yet. When Season 17 premieres on Nov. 12, “Grey’s Anatomy” will tackle the subject of the coronavirus as experienced by the doctors at Grey Sloan Memorial, all while filming under strict COVID-19 protocols. The season is dedicated to frontline workers. And Pompeo, a producer on “Grey’s” — whose Meredith has removed a live bomb from a patient’s body, was in a plane crash, was widowed after Derek died in a car accident, was beaten nearly to death by a patient and, in a separate incident, actually did die briefly after a ferry accident — is intent on making the show top itself once again.

“I’m constantly fighting for the show as a whole to be as good as it can be. As a producer, I feel like I have permission to be able to do that,” Pompeo says. “I mean, this is the last year of my contract right now. I don’t know that this is the last year? But it could very well could be.”

Pompeo has been refreshingly transparent about her fight to become the highest-paid female actor on television, having detailed a few years ago how she negotiated a paycheck for more than $20 million a year. She clearly knows what she’s doing with these frank pronouncements as well.

As Pompeo laughs over the phone from her car, she says in a near shout: “There’s your sound bite! There’s your clickbait! ABC’s on the phone!”

The “Grey’s Anatomy” team — led by Rhimes and executive producer Betsy Beers — created the first season in a vacuum, because the show did not have an airdate. The 2004-05 season was a comeback year for ABC because “Desperate Housewives” and “Lost,” both of which debuted that fall, became phenomena — not only ratings successes but also watercooler events.

But at “Grey’s,” Rhimes was getting noted to death by network president Steve McPherson. According to Vernoff, McPherson — who resigned in 2010 under a cloud of sexual harassment allegations — stonewalled with “pushback every step of the way,” as ABC’s then- head of drama, Suzanne Patmore Gibbs, fought for the show. Vernoff was close with Patmore Gibbs, who died in 2018, and recalls her talking about her clashes with McPherson.

“He just didn’t get it; he didn’t like it,” Vernoff continues. “Honestly, I’m going to say, I don’t think he liked the ambitious women having sex unapologetically.”

Wilson, when she was cast as Miranda Bailey on “Grey’s,” was a New York theater actor (“Caroline, or Change”) relatively new to series television. But she was well aware of the network’s issues. “We took a creative break around the Christmas holiday, which to me meant ‘Oh, we’re out of a job.’”

Pompeo was frustrated: “Once we finally got an airdate, two weeks before that airdate they wanted to change the title of the show to ‘Complications.’”

In an email to Variety, McPherson disputed these assertions, saying, “I made the original deal with Shonda. I developed ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ at the studio. I picked it up at ABC.” He praised Patmore Gibbs, and added, “As for defaming me again and again, I don’t know what to say other than it’s sad that anyone feels the need to spread lies about me.”

Yet there was so little faith in the show that the writers were asked to clear out their offices when they finished the season. But to Vernoff, who had clicked right away with Rhimes, the early episodes had “felt like a labor of love.”

And it was worth the battle. “We fought for the right for Meredith and Bailey to be whole human beings, with whole sex lives, and not a network TV idea of likable,” Vernoff says. “You might not have been likable, but now you’re iconic.”

As far as the medicine went, the cases were often ostentatious. “Every kind of crazy accident that had ever caused terrible harm to any human ever, that was our homework at night,” Vernoff says. It was up to Zoanne Clack, an emergency room doctor-turned-writer, to be a sounding board in the writers’ room. She began as the only doctor on staff during the first season, and is now an executive producer. “What was interesting was that the writers don’t have those boundaries because they don’t know the rules, so they would come up with all of these scenarios, and my immediate thought was like, ‘No way!’” Clack says. “Then I’d have to think about it and go, ‘But could it?’”

When the program finally premiered — on a Sunday night after “Desperate Housewives” — to massive ratings, it was a shock to the cast and crew, given that they had shot the first season under a cloud, Pompeo says, adding, “So the fact that the numbers were that huge the first time we aired was a big f–k-you to McPherson!”

With Season 2 now a given, everything changed, Vernoff says: “It was like a hurricane-force gale, and everyone was just trying to hold on.” They had made 13 episodes for Season 1, airing nine of them and holding the final four for Season 2 — Meredith finding out that Derek was actually married (to Addison, played by Kate Walsh) had felt like the perfect finale. But upon the writers’ return, Vernoff says, the feeling was “Holy s—. We have to make 22.”

The entire cast — mostly unknown actors like Katherine Heigl as the sunny Izzie Stevens, T.R. Knight as the chummy neurotic George O’Malley, and Justin Chambers as the troubled, secretly vulnerable Alex Karev — had become famous overnight. For Wilson, whose Bailey was the stern teacher the interns called “the Nazi,” it was a new experience. “Folks were scared to talk to me, like in the store or in the Target — people would just kind of leave me alone,” she says. “It was like, ‘What’s going on?’”

According to Vernoff, “Paparazzi were following the cast to work — it was wild.”

The mid- to late-2000s were the height of glossy gossip magazines such as Us Weekly (and its copycats), as well as the inception of TMZ and Perez Hilton as celebrity-hounding, news-breaking forces that fueled (and soiled) the fame-industrial complex. The cast of “Grey’s Anatomy” was firmly in the sights of these new, often toxic forces in media.

Pompeo says the cast was so talented that it “was all worth it” — but yes, the transition to stardom was hard for the group: “At the time, it was just a real combination of exhaustion and stress and drama. Actors competing with each other — and envious.”

Heigl, Knight and Isaiah Washington all went through press cycles that made the show seem scandal-prone. To rehash it all now seems pointless; you can look it up. Washington was fired in June 2007. Knight and Heigl asked to be written out of the show preemptively, in Seasons 5 and 6, respectively.

Vernoff and the other writers were watching the internal messes unfold. They had to deal with how the fallout affected the show’s plot, as when Washington was fired just as Burke, his character, was about to marry Cristina. “When word comes down that an actor is leaving the show, and what you’ve got scripted is a wedding …” Vernoff trails off, laughing.

“There was a lot of drama on-screen and drama off-screen, and young people navigating intense stardom for the first time in their lives,” she continues. “I think that a lot of those actors, if they could go back in time and talk to their younger selves, it would be a different thing. Everybody’s grown and changed and evolved — but it was an intense time.”

Pompeo doesn’t want to talk about what happened with individual actors from the show, because when she has in the past, “it doesn’t get received in the way in which I intend it to be.” But she does make a point about the way television is produced. “Nobody should be working 16 hours a day, 10 months a year — nobody,” she says. “And it’s just causing people to be exhausted, pissed, sad, depressed. It’s a really, really unhealthy model. And I hope post-COVID nobody ever goes back to 24 or 22 episodes a season.

“It’s why people get sick. It’s why people have breakdowns. It’s why actors fight! You want to get rid of a lot of bad behavior? Let people go home and sleep.”

Debbie Allen would eventually be Pompeo’s savior in that regard, but that was years away. Allen — an actor and a dancer — began her directing career when she was on the 1980s TV series “Fame” as a “natural progression” because, she says, “I was in charge of the musical numbers, and so many directors didn’t really know how to shoot them.” She went on to be a prolific director and producer, most notably overhauling NBC’s “A Different World” after a tumultuous first season. As a fan of “Grey’s Anatomy,” Allen wanted to work on the show, and in Season 6, she was hired to direct. To prepare for it, Allen shadowed Wilson, who had been tapped to direct by executive producer-director Rob Corn. (“He came to me and said, ‘You should direct,’” says Wilson, who has now helmed 21 episodes. “And I said, ‘OK.’ Because I didn’t know what else to say.”)

Directing that sixth-season episode led to Allen’s fruitful relationship with “Grey’s.” In Season 8, Rhimes wrote Allen into the show to play Catherine, a star surgeon, a love interest for Richard Webber (Pickens) and the mother of Jackson Avery (Jesse Williams). Ahead of Season 12 in 2015, Allen became the show’s EP/director. Her duties included hiring all of the directors, weighing in on scripts and casting, and, as Allen puts it, “minding that people feel good about themselves.” Several years before the revived #MeToo movement would lead to calls for systemic changes behind the camera in Hollywood, Allen set a goal of hiring 50% women directors. She also increased the number of Black men who directed “Grey’s” during her first season as executive producer, among them Denzel Washington. (When she sold him on it, she recounts, he said to her, “I’m going to say yes, Debbie Allen.”)

Pompeo and Allen are close. Allen began her new role the year after Dempsey left, “at a time when we were really broken,” Pompeo says. “And so much of our problems were perpetuated by bad male management. Debbie came in at a time when we really, really needed a breath of fresh air, and some new positive energy.”

Pompeo continues with a laugh: “Debbie really brought in a spirit to the show that we had never seen — we had never seen optimism! We had never seen celebration. We had never seen joy!”

According to Pompeo, Allen began advocating for her to have more humane hours — Fridays off (Pompeo: “And I was like, ‘What? What? Fridays off?’”) — and for the show to shoot 12-hour days maximum, and ideally no more than 10 hours (Pompeo: “And I was like, I love this woman.”).

Allen speaks affectionately about her bond with Pompeo. “Coming out of Boston, she’s so earthy and real in a way that you might not know,” Allen says. “There’s a sisterhood between us — I guess you would say it’s almost a Blackness that exists between us. And she’s part of our tribe.”

Allen has been a key member of the “Grey’s Anatomy” brain trust since Season 12, and two seasons later, Vernoff returned to run the show. She’d left at the end of Season 7, consulted on “Private Practice” for a few years, and then went to Showtime’s “Shameless” for five seasons. As her contract was set to expire, Rhimes asked Vernoff to lunch, and told her she wanted her to take over. “It felt like she was saying, ‘Hey, our kid needs you,’” Vernoff says.

Before accepting the offer, Vernoff had to catch up on the show. She had always written “Grey’s” as a romantic comedy, and what she saw on-screen during her binge was dark as hell — especially after Derek’s death. “If this show that you are currently making is the show that you want ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ to be,” she recalls telling Rhimes, “I am, in fact, not the right writer for it.” But Rhimes was insistent, saying it was time for a change after the mourning period for Derek.

Vanessa Delgado, who started as a production intern during the seventh season and has worked her way up to being lead editor and co-producer, says the show’s trajectory shifted when Vernoff came back — it was a return to the original, saucier tone of “Grey’s.” “We changed the music completely,” Delgado says. “The dialogue felt lighter and more fun, and wewere having fun again.”

That lightness will be difficult to maintain this year, of course, when, as Allen puts it, “COVID is No. 1 on the call sheet right now.”

Vernoff at first wondered whether “Grey’s” should ignore the coronavirus, thinking the audience comes to the show “for relief.” But the doctors in the writers’ room convinced her this wasn’t the time for escapism, saying to her, “This is the biggest medical story of our lifetime, and it is changing medicine permanently.”

When they’ve had doctors and nurses come speak with them this season, Vernoff says, “they were different human beings than the people we’ve been talking to every year. And I want to honor that, tonally. I just want to inspire people to take care of each other.”

Pompeo, who is not shy about offering criticism, sounds positively enthusiastic: “I’ll say the pilot episode to this season — girl, hold on.

“What nobody thinks we can continue to do, we have done. Hold on. That’s all we’re going to say about that!”

Pompeo has a few more months before she decides whether she wants to continue — and as Rhimes and ABC have made clear in recent years, the show will likely end when she leaves. “I don’t take the decision lightly,” Pompeo says. “We employ a lot of people, and we have a huge platform. And I’m very grateful for it.”

“You know, I’m just weighing out creatively what can we do,” she says. “I’m really, really, really excited about this season. It’s probably going to be one of our best seasons ever. And I know that sounds nuts to say, but it’s really true.”

Vernoff doesn’t worry about the creative well drying up. “We’ve blown past so many potential endings to ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ that I always assume it can go on forever,” she says.

And Wilson knows how important “Grey’s” is to its audience, in that the characters have essentially become people who “live in their house.” As one of only three actors who’ve been on “Grey’s” since the beginning — the other is James Pickens Jr. — Wilson is in it until the end: “In my mind, Bailey is there until the doors close, until the hospital burns down, until the last thing happens on ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ That is her entire arc.”

Whenever the show does conclude, part of its legacy will be about the talent it launched into the world, beginning with Rhimes, who will soon release her first shows for Netflix, after her company, Shondaland, made a lucrative deal with the streamer in 2017.

But it will also be about the characters of “Grey’s Anatomy”— mostly women and people of color — who are trying to make the world a better place as they find friendship, love and community.

“The show, at its core, brings people together,” Pompeo says. “And the fact that people can come together and watch the show, and think about things they may not have ordinarily thought about, or see things normalized and humanized in a way that a lot of people really need to see — it helps you become a better human being. If this show has helped anybody become a better human being, then that’s the legacy I’d love to sit with.”

#grey's anatomy #Ellen Pompeo #chandra wilson #Debbie Allen #krista vernoff #season 17 #variety #news

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justalitlecreacher · 4 years

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I’m here to prove that Andrew Garfield’s portrayal of Spider-man/peter parker in The Amazing Spider-Man is objectively the best love action adaptation of the character. In this essay I will....(yes this is really happening)

Edit: 10/20/20- i want to indulge myself in spiderman content but finding non mcu spiderman content is exhausting so imma update this instead

TL;DR

Andrew Garfield is my favorite of the 3 Spider-Man actors. TAS’s Peter is more fun and dynamic than the cookie cutter “shy introverted nerd that has a crush on a girl who’s way out of his league” Peter in Tobey Maguire’s movies. I enjoy Tom Holland’s portrayal of the character, but hate the way Disney has written the movies. I enjoy the characters, plot, and humor of The Amazing Spider-Man far more than the other 2, and i deeply wish we had gotten the third movie with the canon BIder-Man of Andrew’s (and my) dreams.

[DISCLAIMER: I HAVE NOT SEEN THE AMAZING SPIDERMAN 2 OR ANY MCU SPIDERMAN MOVIES OUTSIDE OF CLIPS AND REVIEWS ITS ALSO BEEN A VERY HOT MINUTE SINCE IVE SEEN A TOBEY MAGUIRE MOVIE]

Characterization

Most arguments against Andrew Garfield’s Spidey( AG’s from now on) begin and ends with “he was a good Spider-Man but a bad Peter Parker”. This references an outdated post comparing all three Spidey actors.(Id attach the image here but i dont want the post to be too long(thats a lie this is so long what am i doing with my life)) The post also claims that Tobey played a good Peter and a poor Spidey; and that Tom is good at both “roles”.(Honestly I think it seems silly that this seems obey the “third time’s the charm” rule but thats just me). Most people using this seem to be Tobey stans who have forgotten or ignored the rest of the post funnily enough, but the ones that go further into the WHY AG is a poor Peter are also incorrect. This argument also ignores the idea that there can be more than one version of Peter Parker which is blatantly incorrect. Just look at Into the Spiderverse or the PS4 game; these provide 4(5 if you count the pig) versions of Peter themselves, and that doesnt even include the comics.

Arguments that go further in depth claim that the AS Peter is too cool or well liked by his peer to be a “true” Peter Parker. The evidence for this seems to be that Peter has a skateboard.(which what? didnt realize that having a skateboard would instantly make you cool brb guys). Adding to that i dont really see where people get the idea that Peter is popular or well liked. While looking for complaints i found this qutoe from reddit(theyve since deleted it looks like but i’ll add a link in the notes) “He's angsty, pretty socially awkward, has an aptitude for science, and is kind of an outsider. He gets bullied by Flash and he gets his ass kicked after trying to stand up to Flash. He isn't a "cool" person in any way (until the ending, in which he's best buds with Flash, so I'll give you that). While Maguire is more accurate to the 60s comics where Peter in high school is just a fucking loser with basically no friends, in the ultimate comics, Peter is more of the kid who has a small amount of friends, but isn't popular.”. Honesty i fully agree with this because once again, other versions of a character are allowed to exist. You can dislike one version, but its silly to dislike something for not being exactly like another thing.

Ive also heard that Peter isnt “nerdy enough” in this movie which really doesnt make any sense considering the entire plot happens because Peter was looking into some of his parents’ research. If he wasn't interested in looking further into his father’s work what reason would he have to go to Oscorp where he’s bitten by the spider? Why would he have become Dr. Conner’s assistant? If he wasn’t intelligent how did he develop the web shooters?(something that Tobey!Peter doesn't have to do out of plot convenience might i add).

Another complaint i see is that the quips he uses in the movie(the first one specifically it seems) makes him seem like an asshole. Honestly thats a fair complaint, but i think its a good bit of characterization; espcially if he does get better about it in the second movie like the internet suggests.The Peter in this movie is a rightfully angsty teen; of course he acts a bit of an ass to criminals(also i feel like its important to mention that he’s like that to criminals? its not like hes being a dick for no reason).

Compare this with the Tobey Maguire(TM) movies. Like i said i haven’t seen these in awhile but as far as i’m aware TM’s Peter doesn't really do anything particularly nerdy in the film? I may have forgotten something( ok in the scene before he gets bitten he knows a cool spider fact) but he doesn’t have to invent the web-shooters because they came with his powers and he’s only at Oscorp in the first place because it’s a school field trip that he appears to be taking photos for. This Peter does fit the definition of outcast(friendless and bullied for it), but honestly i just dont like him. He’s weird and something about the character makes me feel like i should be a little grossed out every time he looks at MJ at the beginning of the movie.

I honestly don’t have any complaints for Tom Holland’s(TH’s)Spidey. Tom is a great actor and from what ive seen i enjoy his portrayal of the character.( He made me cry when i character i actively dislike died).

Story

I cant really say much for TAS story. It’s interesting but nothing special really. However, there is one scene that i don’t think i’ve seen anything like since( the closest would probably be the train scene in the original trilogy).

The crane scene. Early in the film Peter saves a boy from a car that has fallen off of a bridge, and at the end of the movie this becomes relevant again when it is uncertain that Peter will be able to get to the lizard to stop him in time.(as Peter is already injured and pretty far from the lizard’s location). The boy’s father is then revealed to be a construction worker who recognizes that Spider-man is going to need help to get to the lizard; he remembers how Spider-Man saved his son and organizes the rest of the construction workers to build a path out of crane arms for SM to swing from. All of them are putting themselves in danger by not evacuating, but SM’s actions in the first act of the film motivate them to do what’s right.

I love this scene primarily because it highlights something that i think is a really important part of Spider-Man’s character; his connection to the people he saves. SM is often shown interacting with and chatting with the people he has saved after the fact. One comic shows Peter accidentally scaring some bullies and then taking the time to ride the bus to school with them to continue their conversation and educate the students on bullying.( There’s definitely more but this is off the top of my head).

Another scene in TAS that i love is shortly before the crane scene when Peter is originally attempting to make his way across the city to stop the lizard, and he is shot down by the police. They manage to unmask him before Peter comes to his senses( he had just been shot and fallen pretty far out of the sky in his defense). From there Peter is able to deal with the police while keeping any of them from getting a good look at his face. The one cop he cant take out happens to be Gwen Stacey’s father who had previously had an argument with Peter about Spider-Man(Peter obviously on SM’s side and Mr. Stacey against SM). Peter turns and allows Captain(?) Stacey to see his face. I believe that this is an example of an unwilling identity reveal done right. i really enjoyed this moment because Peter had just shown that he likely could have gotten out of this encounter with his identity in tact as he had just taken down however many men. This implies that it was an active choice on Peter’s end to trust that Captain Stacey would ultimately do the right thing and allow Peter to go fight the Lizard, rather than a final desperate attempt to get away unscathed. Whether or not this interpretation of the scene is correct or not it still gives the character a bit more agency than some versions have done with their identity reveals.

In Spider-Man 2 Peter starts to lose his powers because he’s having internal conflict about wether or not he should be Spider-Man. Honestly thats kinda neat and i might want to give that a rewatch. As for the one i have seen i don’t have any complaints. I do however prefer the way that Peter was bitten in TAS because it was a result of him poking around where he shouldn’t’ve been rather than him just happening to be standing in the right place for a spider to land on him.

Onto TH’s movies; the way Disney has treated Spidey in the MCU is why TH’s is my least favorite version of the character. I feel like too much of the story revolves around Iron Man; Iron Man made Peter’s suit and equipment, Iron Man introduces Peter to the MCU(via blackmail but thats another rant for another annoyingly long post), its Iron Man that “makes” Spidey in this universe rather than Spidey being self-made. In Homecoming(which remember i havent seen outside of clips so bear with me) most of the conflict is cause directly or indirectly by Tony’s refusal or inabilty to communicate with the teenager he’s meant to be mentoring

For one the entire incident with the ferry could have very easily been avoided had Tony bothered to communicate with Peter enough to tell him that the situation was being taken care of. On top of that at the moive’s climax Peter is shown trying to get in contact with Happy(from what ive picked up isnt he a chauffeur? like idk his deal i just know he’s someone Peter got pawned off onto after Civil War). Peter even goes as far as to somehow hack into Happy’s phone(i think thats what happened it was a weird tech thing that shouldve been a red flag that the call was important though) but instead of listening; Peter is ignored. If this was a different kind of movie Peter literally could have died and itd be the fault of Happy and Tony like..... A large portion of conflict comes from characters being incompetent and not communicating and thats just poor storytelling.

Before this turns too much into an anti mcu rant id also like to say that the way they did Civil War was really dumb considering that Peter defects to Cap’s side in the comics, but whatever.

Also i loathe the way they handled the identity reveal at the end of Far From Home. With MCU movies most people know to expect an end credits scene by now, but typically that scene is not important to understand what’s happening in the films; they just aren’t important. Putting an identity reveal here makes it seem significantly less important than it is. On top of that i dislike their use of J Jonah Jameson for this scene.

JJJ is a character who has been repeatedly shown to have a genuinely good heart. All of his anger comes from a place of love for his city(he even says this hemself in the ps4 game when May writes in to tell him that he needs help). He hates Spider-Man because SM reminds him of the masked man who killed his wife; JJJ has never been able to get past that( and Peter’s antagonism of him definitely doesnt help) However, JJJ has been shown to care for people; he has a son who he often brags about, and one comic shows that JJJ is paying Peter for “amateur” quality photos because he knows that Peter is having a hard time and “just need some help”. JJJ has even learned Peter’s identity before and kept his secret for him(seriously though i cant remember the name of the comic but its defiantly worth the read), and in the original trilogy when Goblin threatens JJJ he claims that he doesn’t know who sends in the photos of Spidey because he does it via email( this is a lie). The MCU will have a very difficult time convincing me that JJJ would ever out a teenager’s identity and put him in danger like that. It goes too far against his character.(this could be hypocritical of me to say considering how i just insisted that multiple versions of a character can exist but whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

This is accidentally turning into an MCU rant but id also like to say that i hate the lack of a TH!Spidey origin movie because it gives you no motivaion for Peter becoming SM or explanation of his powers; most people will know these things but if youre unfamiliar with the character its bound to be confusing(and im a sucker for origin movies)

#long post #spiderman #andrew garfield #The Amazing Spider Man #mcu crit #j jonah jameson #can you tell i care a lot?#cause i do #rant #ramble #this was not proofred #like at all #see theres a typo in that tag!#i would apologize but im not sorry

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gunnerpalace · 4 years

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YoruIchiRuki (Neapolitan Ice Cream) AUs & Headcanons

(Art by @371am, used with permission and originally posted here; if you like it, please go show your appreciation!)

INTRODUCTION & CONTINUITIES

YoruIchiRuki, or variously YIR, The Idiots, or Neapolitan Ice Cream (so named because Yoruichi: chocolate, Ichigo: strawberry, Rukia: vanilla) is my AU-only OT3 of choice, and I’m here to talk about their major AUs and my headcanons for them! Most of the notes I have are from discussions some years ago with @sequencefairy (Jess), although many other people have contributed as well and I will try to point them out as and when possible. If you find this post interesting, please give me your feedback!

As YIR is explicitly AU-only (because it doesn’t really make any sense at all in anything even really remotely resembling “canonical” Bleach) it’s probably prudent to go over its contexts first. The major AUs are as follows:

Grounded! Modern Continuity - What might be called the “prime” YIR continuity, Grounded! is the original timeline, set in a No Powers, Human, and Modern alternate-history in which Japan colonized the West Coast of North America. Rukia, Yoruichi, and Ichigo are drawn together in a series of comic (yet sometimes angsty) circumstances in the midst of the worst snowstorm in ages, and become entangled going forward. Its revised outline can be seen here, its namesake fic here, and other fics set in its timeline here (with two more associated fics here and here). I am attempting to get back to continuing the main fic in the near future.

Western Continuity - Set earlier in the above timeline (but technically in a parallel universe version of it), the as-yet unnamed Western Continuity is intended to be an east-meets-west fusion set in the Wild West, reminiscent of things such as Sukiyaki Western Django. Currently largely undeveloped. There is, however, a post about some of the aesthetics here.

Samurai Continuity - The as-yet unnamed Samurai Continuity is much the same as Western Continuity, except set earlier still during the Edo period and drawing major inspiration from Samurai Champloo, with Ichigo in a role like Mugen, Yoruichi in a role like Jin, and Rukia in a role like Fuu (searching for Byakuya, “the samurai who smells of sakura”). Currently largely undeveloped.

BattleTech Continuity - The as-yet unnamed BattleTech Continuity is set in a distant future where mankind has colonized the stars, only to divide into five major political powers and descend into internecine warfare, often waged by means of BattleMechs, hulking bipedal war machines. Yoruichi, Ichigo, and Rukia are members of the elite of three of these powers, and wind up serving together as soldiers of fortune due to a strange series of events. The initial outline can be seen here.

Operation GAMER QZGS Continuity - Designed by @synoshian (Lies), Operation GAMER is set in the same timeline as Quan Zhi Gao Shou / The King’s Avatar, a Chinese property (novel, manhua, donghua, and live action series) revolving around an MMORPG called Glory. Taking place five years after that series begins, and focusing on the Japanese (rather than the Chinese) professional scene, it sees Rukia, Ichigo, and Yoruichi as pro-players on different teams who all meet on alternate accounts shortly after the opening of the 15th Server. Although largely undeveloped, there is some nifty art of Yoruichi and Rukia’s in-game characters.

All of the characters are aged up in these scenarios, with Ichigo and Rukia usually being in their early-to-mid-20s, and Yoruichi being in her mid-20s to early-30s, depending (with the youngest age I could see being Ichigo at 18 in the Western Continuity; even Mugen is 19 in Samurai Champloo). The mechanisms of how YIR gravitate together vary by continuity. For example: in Grounded!, Ichigo and Rukia know of each other, but only properly meet each other after Yoruichi makes moves on Rukia; meanwhile, in BattleTech Ichigo and Rukia meet much as they do in Bleach, with Yoruichi entering the picture roughly a month later as usual. What matters to their dynamic is less who makes the first moves, and more who they are as people and how they interrelate.

VISUAL NOTES

Before I move on, I would like to briefly note the visual contrasts each pair of the triad presents. Everyone already knows how Ichigo and Rukia visually contrast one another. Ichigo and Yoruichi have a similar height contrast (as manga-Yoruichi is notably shorter than anime-Yoruichi), a skin tone contrast, and a hair color contrast (orange vs. purple). Rukia and Yoruichi are of fairly similar heights, but again have a skin tone contrast, an eye color contrast (violet-blue vs. yellow), and a body shape contrast (petite but developed vs. curvy but thin).

Each set looks good and distinct from one another optically, and the same is true when they’re all together as a result. I feel that their aesthetic is reflected in the OT3 name of Neapolitan Ice Cream; they’re just really nice to look at together.

LOVE LANGUAGES

To expound on how the three relate to one another, I recently discussed the concept of love languages with @rukia-kuchiki-divided (having first been informed of the concept by Jess and having discussed it with her), and she wrote a lovely post introducing the concept and applying it to IchiRuki. I agree with her reading of how it applies to them, and find it useful to expand on what’s presented there as a means of better understanding how YIR interact with one another. My best estimate for a more detailed take on the love languages that each of them hear (desire) and speak (provide), based on “canonical” Bleach, is as follows:

Yoruichi • Desires: 1. Physical Touch, 2. Acts of Service, 3. Quality Time • Provides: 1. Acts of Service, 2. Physical Touch, 3. Quality Time Ichigo • Desires: 1. Words of Affirmation, 2. Physical Touch, 3. Quality Time • Provides: 1. Acts of Service, 2. Physical Touch, 3. Quality Time Rukia • Desires: 1. Acts of Service, 2. Physical Touch, 3. Quality Time • Provides: 1. Words of Affirmation, 2. Acts of Service, 3. Physical Touch

As can be seen, Ichigo and Rukia are almost perfectly reciprocal. (Rukia’s tertiary provision was settled on being Physical Touch rather than Quality Time due to her tendency to bond through token violence, and initially aloof disposition, although it’s a fairly close thing. I think most of the others are essentially self-evident and don’t require much substantiation.) However, it can also be seen that Yoruichi has very strong secondary and tertiary matches across the board. That is what forms the basis of her addition to the triad in all scenarios.

Having at least alluded to the sorts of circumstances under which they come together (and hopefully having piqued your interest!), allow me to elaborate upon that further by explaining the history of the concept, which is strongly related to the writing history of Grounded! itself, before moving on to actual headcanons.

IDEA HISTORY

When I first came up with the idea for Grounded!, the original intent was for it to be a sort of sexy and comedic one-shot. The short version was, instead of “just as keikaku” shounen shenanigans organized by Kisuke and Aizen leading to Ichigo and Rukia meeting, it’s instead Yoruichi’s desire to live her life the way she wants and enjoy herself that lead to her bringing them together, as she basically steps into their nascent awareness of each other in pursuing a physical attraction to Rukia, and then decides to catalyze them meeting each other by going after Ichigo and then setting the two of them up together. This probably epitomizes it:

“Listen: you could do the normal thing of going on dates and trying to do some kind of long-distance relationship and whatever, and be miserable about the opportunity you might be losing. Or you could trust in my judgment and believe me. You and you,” Yoruichi said, pointing between them, “are like this.” She clapped her hands together, interlinking her fingers.

Ichigo and Rukia flushed and looked at each other with disbelief.

Yoruichi unhooked her fingers and made a circle with one thumb and forefinger, poking the other forefinger through it. “So, you should save us all the drama and just do this already.”

Their expressions shifted to mortification.

Yoruichi shrugged and lifted a hand, rolling her eyes. “If you’re so nervous, I could be there for your first time together,” she teased. She didn’t really believe they’d agree, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t been with both of them.

At that, Ichigo and Rukia both gaped.

She gave a mock frown. “What?”

“No!” they both stated at the same time, looking at one another in surprise.

Yoruichi smiled and held up her hands in surrender before scooting her chair back and sauntering off. She’d expected as much. Besides, it was clearly a mission accomplished.

The pair watched her abrupt departure together before slowly turning their attention toward one another. It wasn’t long until they both flushed.

Ichigo looked away decisively.

Rukia looked down. “Well...”

“Let me take you out to dinner.”

She blinked and side-eyed him.

“I don't know about... all the nonsense she was saying. And you can decide whatever you want. But at least... let me take you out to dinner.”

Which would lead to dinner and a movie and staying over for coffee and one thing leading to another until Ichigo and Rukia lay together, cuddled together under the sheets and blankets

“She was right,” Rukia whispered.

“... Yeah.”

One of her hands spiraled over his chest. “But?”

Ichigo shifted his jaw. How Yoruichi had gone about proving she was right still didn't entirely sit well with him.

She peered up at him lazily. “I guess we owe her.”

There was a long silence.

“Yeah...”

Which led to the idea of the two getting their “revenge” on Yoruichi by rewarding her in kind. All’s well that ends well, and the three were supposed to go their two separate ways.

It was only gradually that the internal timeline of the story expanded and more emotive and genuinely angsty elements started to creep into my notions of it: Ichigo’s self-loathing at being unable to work up the nerve to approach Rukia, Rukia’s loneliness and isolation, the touch-deprivation of both, Yoruichi’s growing realization she made a mess of things by following her own heart, her resolve to “fix” things, and finally and most importantly, her own budding attachment to the two of them.

I started thinking about Yoruichi’s physical attraction toward first Rukia (and then Ichigo) turning into actual feelings. My read of her has always been that she’s much more emotive than she lets on, she just has a fairly tight grip on her sentiments most of the time and tends to keep her observations to herself. But after having slept with both Ichigo and Rukia, and especially the two of them together, I imagined her seeing what they had together and missing it afterward. I thought of her going to Kisuke’s bar and asking if she could sleep in his room just to not be alone at night. And I imagined Rukia and Ichigo missing her too—her playfulness and teasing, her confident smile, her laugh. The more I contemplated that, the more I thought of them returning to her some weeks later to invite her on a proper trip with them, only to find Yoruichi still hurt and lonely and aching for the connection with them. This is where “The Ending” section of the summary of Grounded! (linked above) came in:

Yoruichi frowned and set her expression hard, focusing intently on some point off to the side. When she spoke, her voice carried the gravitas of authority. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Rukia blinked and automatically drew her hands back in confusion.

Ichigo likewise released her as he felt her go rigid.

Yoruichi closed her eyes. “I can understand wanting to pay me back, but you did that already! Do you think I was bullshitting you!? You’re perfect for each other! Hell, it’s like you were designed to be together! You’re like yin and yang, black and white! Why are you trying to ruin it, you idiots?!”

Ichigo and Rukia’s gazes found each other before they glanced to Yoruichi and then looking to either side.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” Yoruichi’s tone was low, but in the quiet that had descended over the room it was more than loud enough.

The attentions of the two were instantly upon her again.

Yoruichi clamped her hands around her upper arms tighter yet, letting out a brief, harsh laugh. Her voice grew quieter still. “Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe that there’s any place for me in that kind of thing…?”

A moment passed. Then another.

Rukia bit her lip and looked to Ichigo.

He met her gaze. A decision flickered between them and he turned his attention to Yoruichi, delicately taking hold of her waist again.

She blinked her eyes open in surprise only to freeze as Rukia’s hands returned to her cheeks.

Rukia once more tried to turn Yoruichi’s head—succeeding given her preoccupation—and studied her intently. Yoruichi’s voice had been steady but there was no mistaking the gleam at the outer corners of her eyes. She carefully brought her thumbs up to wipe the tears away.

Yoruichi’s eyes widened in response and she was suddenly aware of her heartbeat hammering in her ears. She looked up, needing to focus on anything but the concern Rukia was radiating for her. “I just wanted you to be happy,” she whispered. There was no space for her in that picture. No room.

Ichigo moved closer so he was lightly pressed to her back, and brought his forehead down to rest against the top of her head, burying his nose against the start of her ponytail. The citrus scent of her hair put him at ease and his arms naturally slid around her waist. “Then come with us.”

She shivered at the contact but didn’t try to pull away.

Rukia released Yoruichi’s hands and slid her arms around her neck, hugging her and pushing her back against Ichigo. The sudden rush of the aromas that so defined Yoruichi filled her thoughts and she found herself relaxing at it. “Please?”

Yoruichi shut her eyes. “But…”

“We’d like you to be there,” Ichigo insisted.

“And we know you’d like it too,” Rukia whispered.

Yoruichi clenched her jaw before dropping her chin so she leaned against Rukia, unfolding her arms. She got one hand around to the back of Rukia’s head and brought the other up onto the back of Ichigo’s.

This is where I came to a conundrum, and then happened to find the solution a few weeks later. Ichigo and Rukia, even in AUs, still often feel like they have the weight of their “canonical” symbolism arrayed about them—their Sun and Moon symbolism in all its resplendent glory. And this is what Yoruichi is alluding to in her criticisms of their actions; how can one fit into such a picture?

It’ll probably sound silly to you when I try to explain it, but there was a video of a black cat that got into a bath tub full of seaweed-based glitter from a Lush bath bomb going around at the time. Someone then drew some art with the caption, “he’s cosplaying the night sky,” and something in my head just clicked. While I reblogged it at the time with, “I know this is a male cat, but: imagine Yoruichi…” the association went deeper than that.

The characters of Yoruichi’s name, 夜一, mean "night" and "one" respectively. There are a number of ways to potentially read her name. The use of numerals in names is often just a counter, so it could mean something like "(first daughter) night," but counters are usually reserved for men. (Presumably, her brother Yuushirou's name, whose characters are "evening," "four," and a suffix for "son," is a similar time reference to his birthday rather than a counter, as there is no evidence Yoruichi had any additional brothers, be it two or three more, whom would presumably be dead.) What I think it might actually be supposed to signify is wordplay on her birthday, as she was born on the 1st of January (thus, on the literal first night).

If taken more literally and combined with her shunshin nickname (usually translated as “Flash Goddess,” but more literally meaning something like, “God of Moving in the Blink of an Eye”), it becomes evocative of a meaning like, “The Goddess Who Disappeared in One Night.” (There was an old name meanings post on the Soul-Society LiveJournal which has since been deleted which affirms this, but her relevant entry is still quoted here.) This was sort of a play on her disappearance from Soul Society, but as an actual character it does her quite a disservice; she is actually quite loyal and sticks around when she wants to. (One could also easily make “one night stand” jokes about her and I think this likewise does her a disservice, but I’ll get into that more later.)

Regardless, her association with the night is very established through her name. It's the dominant component of her name.

And so I thought, “My god, that’s exactly it: she’s the night sky. She’s Space.” What’s interesting about the Sun and Moon is that they do not exist unto themselves. You might initially think of space as nothingness, yet not only is that scientifically inaccurate, but more importantly for our discussion it obscures its role in permitting the Sun and Moon to exist and move around. Space is not nothingness, it’s a place. It is a thing unto itself.

I don’t think Rukia and Ichigo, themselves, are aware of their Moon and Sun symbolism, because that is essentially metatextual to them as characters. But if they were, and they were trying to explain why they wanted Yoruichi to come along with them in the scene above, I think they would say exactly that: “The Sun and the Moon aren't just these Platonic ideals, you know. They exist out in Space. But Space isn't just nothing, doing nothing. And you, you're our Space. You helped make this happen. You’re a part of it.”

I have had this idea in mind from almost the very start of actually taking Grounded! (and YIR in general) seriously, and as I constructed the more detailed love languages chart above, I felt that I was again seeing the same kind of underlying logic borne out in it. My conception of YIR’s dynamics, the way I really see it, might be considered as an expansion on traditional IR dynamics, rather than something bolted onto the side; like going from the set of real numbers to complex numbers, rather than just adding on a new code library to a program.

This has been a somewhat long-winded way of circling back to where we were with that love languages chart, but I felt that addressing the historical process of how this happened was important to explaining it and why I personally feel it’s more than just run-of-the mill crack fic, even if it again makes no sense in relation to “canon.”

INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

Ichigo and Rukia’s relational mechanism of being (playfully) combative is quite well established. They essentially play fight over petty or inconsequential matters as a way of showing engagement, but there’s a demonstrated understanding and affection underneath such behavior. Their comfort with and ease in being in physical contact and proximity with each other is a reflection of their secondary and tertiary love languages, with their primaries coming out in more serious and meaningful moments. This is not to say that they aren’t capable of being sappy or romantic, but rather that they often code it within their squabbling; arguing and teasing each other is often how they show they care. Consider Rukia’s teasing of Ichigo in chapter 423 of the manga as the archetypal example:

Rukia: What's this? Don't look so sad. Even if you can no longer see me, I will still be able to see you. Ichigo: What the hell? That's nothing to be happy about. And I don't look sad!

The image that Ichigo and Rukia front is one of a pair who seem to argue but do so mostly just to keep things interesting, like an old married couple, which is the main reason why so many people both in the text and reading it assume they are a thing. I think structurally similar but expressively different behavior would happen between the other two sides of the triangle.

Ichigo and Yoruichi’s behavior would often come across as being more like that of “bros.” In “canon,” Ichigo is clearly shown to have hobbies and interests (video games and literature) and to at least engage with other activities even if he doesn’t particularly care about them (sports, pop culture, movies). While the same is not immediately obvious for Yoruichi, it can be inferred she probably has similar token interests as otherwise there’d be precious little for her to do in the Living World. (I have always headcanoned her absence[s] from the Urahara Shop as being her out seeing the wider world.) We’re not talking about Bleach, but I think these behaviors are intrinsic to them as characters, and I think it’s how they’d often connect. They might talk about TV shows, movies, games, sports teams, whatever. I can imagine them setting up a fantasy football league between them, even if they didn’t care about football. The content is not really what matters to them so much as the fact that it provides them something to talk about and bond over, without necessarily being overtly emotional. They would probably also leaven it with physical teasing or innuendo (mostly from Yoruichi’s end, with Ichigo playing the role of straight man in response). The sense you would get as an outsider is a couple who are on the same wavelength and have the same values and interests and are rather physically in tune too.

Rukia and Yoruichi’s behavior would by contrast often come across as “girly.” I don’t mean that pejoratively or necessarily to typecast it. As they’re both proud, independent, and strong women, and are often in positions that require them to present a certain face to the world that relies on those attributes, I think they’d relish opportunities to figuratively let their hair and guards down, relax, and just laugh and smile and have a good time. I think one of the ways this would manifest is that they would see time together as a way of indulging in shared activities, many of which are seen as feminine, such as shopping, gossiping, and enjoying time out and about (such as in restaurants or cafes). A less traditional avenue of expressing it would be shared physical activities. I can imagine them wanting to do things like duos beach volleyball, badminton, paintball, and so on. (Ichigo, although physical and perfectly capable of playing sports, doesn’t seem much interested in them for their own sake; he is ironically the biggest “nerd” of the three.) I think they’d find a lot of commonality and companionship in these shared activities, regardless of what they were actually doing. They’d probably also tease each other and have a back and forth, as they both often tend to like adopting that role (perhaps more physically from Yoruichi’s side, and more emotionally from Rukia’s). From the outside, they would probably seem like a sprightly and sincere couple, more akin to “young love.”

I think what makes the concept of YIR really special to me is what happens when the three of them are all together, because what I see winding up happening is a synthesis of all three of these paired relationships. I imagine it as being fluid and fun. There is this concept in astronomy known as the three-body problem, the simple explanation of which is that when there are three (or more) celestial bodies moving together, it becomes impossible to accurately determine their future motion; there is no general closed-form solution and a dynamical and chaotic system is produced. And that’s exactly how I imagine YIR would work together. One minute, Yoruichi and Rukia would be teaming up to poke fun at Ichigo; the next, Ichigo and Yoruichi would be doting on Rukia and making her feel flustered; the one after, Ichigo and Rukia could be making Yoruichi feel sappy and mushy. From seemingly fairly simple operating rules, one gets very complex interactions that can turn on a dime. And I feel that’s really the joy of YIR as a triad: they’re very high-contrast and have tremendous range together.

I think all four sets of interactions (each pair and the triad) would have strong but subtle elements of verbal teasing and physical touch. Holding hands, light touches here or there (the shoulder, the side, the arm), and more provocative ones (little butt pats or brushes or slaps, or the ladies discreetly rubbing their chests against the recipient of affection), or a whisper in the ear... but I’ll address their teasing and more involved physicality and sexuality in more detail in two later sections.

Even more pronounced than that, however, would be their routine eye contact. Ichigo and Rukia are well known for using their eyes to communicate with one another, and I think Yoruichi would fit into that dynamic quite well, as she’s very visually expressive too. Where and how she is looking at things is a big tell for her mood and psychological state, just like it is for the other two, and I think she would be very good at speaking to them and hearing them in ways they already understand.

I’m working on a sort of compilation fic for @duckiesteasmiles (Nami) called The Many Mornings of Yoruichi, where each entry is a different morning of Yoruichi waking up within a YIR relationship (nominally Modern Continuity), some of which are sweet and fluffy, some of which are spicy and sexy, and some of which are wistful and thoughtful. In one of them:

Her gaze continued to linger in his direction for long seconds until she closed her eyes and turned her head the other way, pressing her lips and nose to the back of his hand. She neither quite kissed it nor merely nuzzled it. His skin smelled good in a way she couldn't really explain, just like Rukia's hair did. Just like all of both of them did. And being like this with the two of them...

They gave her something that was difficult to put into words. It was like the difference between being out on the water and standing on dry land. It went beyond something as simple as a mere sense of stability. For the first time since she was a child, it felt like there was a place for her that she could truly call home. Such a gift, she wanted to both pay it back and pay it forward. She wanted them to have that feeling too, as best as she could possibly manage. Their family situations might not be nearly so estranged as hers, but... she wanted them to always feel that sense of home.

Yoruichi smooched the back of Ichigo's hand and turned her head back toward him and Rukia, quietly sighing in contentment. Did she really have butterflies in her stomach from just this? These two idiots have turned me into such a sap...

I feel like this middle paragraph is true for all three of them, if each in their own ways. In Bleach, it seems evident to me that Ichigo and Rukia create a sense of home for one another, and it manifests in the familiar and expected, the little things that fill in the gaps in their lives. I think things would be much the same for YIR.

A big part of that, I think, would be homemaking—mundane and domestic things through which they could show their care and affection. Things like washing the dishes together, going out for groceries, meeting each other at the arrivals gate and acting as chauffeurs for one another (Yoruichi would mostly drive, although sometimes Ichigo would), and collapsing on the couch together to watch TV or movies, or play games, or just lounge after they've had long days. Yoruichi would put away leftovers but always make sure there was lunch for them for the next day, Rukia would remember to pick up the juice she knows they like when she's at the store, and Ichigo would bring little things home for them when he comes back from wherever he's been travelling.

I think they would all take to cooking for one another. Yoruichi would do a lot of it and would be responsible for the majority of meal prep, and be the closest thing they had to a chef. Ichigo would only really be good at making a small set of about a half-dozen (hearty) hings, and they would often look a bit sketchy, but they’d taste fantastic (think like that one really ugly cake Gordon Ramsay hated to admit tasted great). Rukia is more into making fiddly pastries and desserts. They’d often wind up dividing dinnertime efforts between them (almost like an Iron Chef team) and sometimes it’d all go wrong and they’d have to order pizza, but they always have fun with it.

It feels like, by virtue of her choices in life (especially military service) and spending a lot of time living alone, Yoruichi would be primed to know the most about domestic activities (keeping things neat and tidy and clean, doing chores) and would try and set examples that way, even and especially when their schedules didn’t really line up. So, Ichigo and Rukia would come home to find everything in order and ready for them, and meals cooked in the freezer they could heat up. I think they’d always be kind of shocked she tried so hard, but that’d be part of how she justified her role in it to herself: she’d want them taken care of so they could be excellent, because that's what she was wanting and trying to do from the start.

And they’d take it up too and reciprocate it; when she was away from home for a while and they weren’t, they’d do the same for her—both of them realizing it was one of the ways she would tell them she loves them without saying it, and remembering to do it in return. Ichigo would perform a lot of this, sort of standing in as Yoruichi’s second in command in this regard, and also take on a lot of the “manlier” responsibilities like mowing the lawn, raking leaves, cleaning out the rain gutters, and so on. I imagine him becoming handy around the house and doing a lot of the heavy, tedious, or mindless things.

Meanwhile, Rukia would focus more on supporting morale, leaving around little notes and messages and reminders for them to keep up their spirits; things like fridge magnet messages or little framed photos or collages, cheery messages by text or chat or on social media. She’s the one who’d tell them both all the time how much she loves them—she's the one who would (eventually, because she’s stubborn sometimes herself) say that she misses them, who’d call when it was late and she thought they might be lonely, and when and she wanted and needed (however privately) to hear from them. She'd always be there with the right words at the right time; psyching Ichigo up before a big case, helping Yoruichi navigate a difficult co-worker situation... Rukia would always know what to say and when. (This, by itself, might move Yoruichi less, initially, but I think she would always appreciate the intent behind it.)

I think they’d also have interesting relationships with one another’s relatives. Ichigo would have to field some interesting questions from Karin and Yuzu and deal with some absurdities from Isshin (or Masaki!). Rukia and Yoruichi might work with Kuukaku to shield Ichigo from the public spotlight on the Shiba. Little things like that. Byakuya would probably be more than a little protective of Rukia and have interesting interactions with Yoruichi and Ichigo. Early on in the relationship, he might wind up getting into a staring contest with Yoruichi over the whole thing. Ichigo would back her up without question, and he’d just look between the two of them for a time before stating, “I know you will treat Rukia well.” Later, Yoruichi would be annoyed at Ichigo and be all, “I didn’t need you to do that,” and he'd be like, “Yeah, yeah, I know, Captain.”

(In the Modern Continuity, at any rate, Byakuya initially does not really approve, but also does not really disapprove. He sometimes checks in with Rukia by phone, and can occasionally hear Ichigo and Yoruichi yelling at each other in the background. This sometimes seems like an actual argument but is of no substance and is just about some surreal nonsense. [What is “Dance Dance Revolution” anyway?] Kuukaku catches him brooding about it after the calls sometimes, and is always touching a shoulder and intoning, “If she's happy, it’s fine.” “I know,” he says. Eventually, he really does come to believe it and respect the other two. In the other continuities, and especially BattleTech, it’d be... more complicated still.)

I also think the three would have a lot of intimate moments that weren’t sexual. Things like: Yoruichi and Rukia waiting for Ichigo to come home so they could surprise him with the contrasting lingerie they bought together; Ichigo and Yoruichi drawing a bath with candles and rose petals and scented wash for Rukia, sitting beside it and keeping her company while she soaks and then massaging her together; or Ichigo and Rukia laying out a candlelit dinner for Yoruichi and pulling her over to a fire place to sip wine with her, giving her just enough to loosen up but not enough to lay her out. (Yoruichi is “canonically” a total lightweight, although I sometimes headcanon that she developed a strong aversion to alcohol in her past; Nami has come up with a cute headcanon that she pops her hair-tie off and lets her hair down when she drinks, like Chisato in Love is Like a Cocktail.)

Hell, even the way they jockey for position in front of the mirror in the morning to brush their teeth together strikes me as cute.

To make a long story short, I think they could have a very mature and nuanced but still fun and playful relationship that winds up mutually supporting all of them.

TEASING

In my opinion, one of the other great joys of YIR is how they’d tease each other. I think their teasing of one another in public or private would be quite multifaceted, especially through repartee.

Yoruichi and Rukia would always be teasing Ichigo just for the fun of it; going to the bathroom together, shopping for clothes and going to the dressing rooms at the same time, it wouldn't matter. Always leaving him standing there in the store with the pile of bags or at the table with drinks and coming back giggling to each other and flushed. Maybe a third of the time they’d actually have done something, and the rest they’d just pretend they had, working each other up to the teasing by critiquing each other's acting and telling jokes. And he’d know, and play along even if they caught him off-guard:

“I know you're just saying these things.”

“Do you?” they both asked with raised eyebrows

They’d also always be being wing-women for one another, winding him up. They might be at a restaurant and:

Ichigo’s eyes instinctively tracked Rukia as she went to go get a bottle of ketchup from another table.

Yoruichi leaned sideways and brought her lips to his ear. “Did you know she's wearing crotchless panties?” she breathed.

He abruptly reddened.

She give his earlobe a kitten lick, adding, “So am I,” then smoothly leaned back into place before Rukia could return.

When she did so she stopped and studied him, noting the sweat at his hairline. She adopted an exasperated look. “Did you order your food too spicy again?”

Or Ichigo and Rukia might be laying on recliners poolside while Yoruichi is stretching some distance away before hitting the pool:

“Oi, Ichigo,” Rukia said mildly.

“What?”

“Have you ever noticed how well that swimsuit defines her mound?”

“Don't say things like that!”

Rukia grinned impishly at him.

And Ichigo would, of course, sometimes get them back:

Rukia: Don't act like you know my favorite kind of chocolate, fool. Ichigo: Of course I do. Yoruichi: So, what is it then? Ichigo: The same as yours: salted. Both ladies blink and then flush. Ichigo: The same as how I know your favorite pies are— They clasp their hands over his mouth while glaring at him.

But his main method of retaliation would be being really good at inappropriately hot goodbye kisses that leave whichever of them he’s kissing breathless and reaching for him as he steps back. That and he’d be good at low-key yet also really flagrant public displays of affection that give away they're a unit, like swatting or groping their asses, though he’d also be good at timing them so nobody else saw them.

This kind of teasing would extend across a wide range of scenarios too. Imagine, if you will: Ichigo and Rukia are sitting down for dinner in a really fancy restaurant; Ichigo has on a very fitted black tuxedo, Rukia has on a slinky black cocktail dress with lots of bling, and they're waiting on Yoruichi, who said she’d meet them there. When she walks in, she’s got on a white tuxedo jacket like James Bond (although her lapel flower is orange; I headcanon it as her favorite color) and the other two just kinda stop and stare because that is not at all what they were expecting, but damn.

Yoruichi: What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue? Ichigo: ... Rukia: I think he’s just realized he’s kinda gay for you in that. Ichigo: ... Shut up! Rukia: ... I’m a little gay for you in that... Yoruichi: Haha. Only a little~?

When I was contemplating the Samurai Continuity, I thought about them commenting on the show intro of Samurai Champloo as though they were actors playing the roles and seeing the assembled cut for the first time:

Yoruichi: How fitting that Ichigo is symbolized by a cock. Ichigo: I could say the same about the irony of you being symbolized by a fish. Yoruichi: Are you insulting my hygiene, you bastard!? I don't recall you complaining about it last night when you had your head down there for an hour! Rukia: Shut up, both of you! How could I possibly be expected to eat so much food? It’s ridiculous!

In the same setting, I sort of imagined that Yoruichi and Ichigo would sleep together first given all the crackling tension between them (not quite a hatefuck the first time, but something competitive, rough, and passionate and not exactly loving) but would refuse to admit they had a thing together even afterwards:

Yoruichi: Me? With that orange-haired brat? Ichigo: With that purple-haired bitch? Yoruichi: With his stupid chocolate eyes? Ichigo: With her arrogant, gleaming, little canine-toothed smirk? Yoruichi: His oxen, large, dumb, wide shoulders. Ichigo: Her prissy, smug, sashaying hips. Yoruichi: Always getting you vice-like in those big, strong hands... Ichigo: Always shoving her chest into you every chance she gets... They both blush and go quiet. Rukia, in the background: GOD, JUST FUCK ALREADY! Yoruichi and Ichigo, turning: SHUT UP, HOW DO YOU KNOW WE HAVEN’T!?

I think Yoruichi would often indulge Rukia’s flights of fancy and cuteness. Going back to Grounded!, I can imagine them subjecting Ichigo to “The Thrilling Adventures of Chappy and Kitty” while he’s trying to work from home:

Yoruichi, wearing cat ears: He’s just mad because he doesn't have an animal associated with him, nyan. Rukia, wearing bunny ears: That’s right! You’re just a strawberry, pyon! Ichigo: Seriously, it’s annoying, stop it. Rukia: Fool. Yoruichi, luridly: You plan on making us? Ichigo: Hmph... you wish! Rukia: You know, bunnies are famous for nibbling, and kitties for licking... Yoruichi leans over and gives Rukia a cute peck on the cheek followed by a small lick. Yoruichi: Maybe he doesn’t want to play~

A random little teasing scenario:

Yoruichi got her arms around Rukia’s shoulders from behind and put her in a light and playful choke hold, poking her head out to one side and leering at Ichigo. “Oi, wanna know how to make her squeal like a schoolgirl? I can tell you~”

I really just cannot emphasize enough how much I love their banter and playfulness and the different forms it can take, from mature and witty to childish and bratty.

ANGST

I don’t think YIR’s relationship would always be sunshine and rainbows. I think each of them has their own trauma to deal with, regardless of the timeline. In every one of these continuities (although not every possible continuity), Rukia would be dealing with the death of Kaien, and Ichigo would be dealing with the death of a parent (often Masaki, but as time goes on I think it’s increasingly more interesting that Isshin die instead). That’s well-established. But I also think Yoruichi has her own sources of angst too, albeit perhaps not as severe.

In “canon” Bleach, Yoruichi is shown as having given up everything in order to live on her own terms. This is often presented as no big deal, and as having been her choice, but I often get the sense that it added a contemplative and possibly even morose side to her. (If you made me pick two songs for her, one would be a song I had her choose to do karaoke to in a fic, Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life”, and the other would be a remix of Lana Del Rey’s “Born To Die”.)

I imagine the same is true of the various versions of Yoruichi in each of these continuities. I think many of them also have their own additional traumas. Yoruichi in Grounded! had some unpleasant experiences during the Gulf War (having had to eject and evade capture on the ground overnight), while Yoruichi in BattleTech would have seen (and done) a fair share of nasty things as Coordinator and as a mercenary, and the Yoruichi of the Samurai Continuity and the Yoruichi of the Western Continuity both probably would’ve done more than a little maiming, if not outright killing.

The result is that I see all three of them as burdened with some degree of PTSD, which would occasionally take the form of moods or nightmares. An example of the former, for Yoruichi:

Ichigo quickly finished shredding the pieces of chocolate he'd picked out and sprinkled them over the bowl of ice cream, peeking through the kitchen's breakfast bar into the living room.

Yoruichi's hair poked up above the back of the couch, unmoving.

He grabbed a spoon and slid it into the bowl, got a paper towel, and made his way out into the living room, going around to the other end of the couch so as not to walk in front of her.

Drawing nearer, he sat down next to her, scarcely hazarding a glance her way. He didn't have to, really.

Sometimes she would cry, but he had never seen it. She wouldn't ever let him see. Not even Rukia had ever seen it happen either. But he'd heard it, and listening to it was like standing in a rain made of nails. He hated it. Seeing her willingly vulnerable was one thing, but when she was compromised... Ah, there were times he wanted to burn the world down, go out and fight whoever had wronged her, hit them until blood trickled from their mouths like water from a faucet.

Mostly though, when she was in a mood, she'd be sullen. Sometimes with a side order of aggressive irritability if she was provoked. He could tell with a glance that that was how things were at the moment.

Yoruichi was curled up in a corner of the couch, sitting in a fetal position, her arms crossed atop her legs, frowning disinterestedly at the TV.

Ichigo kept his eyes on it. They'd bought a ridiculously large plasma screen after much deliberation, and it was currently playing an episode of Meerkat Manor on Animal Planet. The audio was barely perceptible.

He set the bowl of ice cream on his lap and took a bite, savoring it. It was chocolate chunk ice cream with chocolate syrup and more bits of milk chocolate on top. There was nothing subtle about the emphasis on boosting endorphins. After swallowing the bite, he took up another spoonful, holding it in front of her.

Yoruichi didn't react.

Ichigo kept waiting for a few seconds, then brought it back and ate it himself.

He kept on alternating for four more runs before he felt a tug on the spoon; she'd clamped her mouth over it.

After that they began to switch every bite until the bowl was empty.

Once Ichigo had finally set it on the coffee table, Yoruichi flopped over to one side, resting her head on his lap.

He started to gently rake his fingers through her hair, just carefully combing it out. They had all the time in the world.

I think they would have additional hang-ups that would occasionally beset them. Ichigo might sometimes feel that he didn’t deserve the attention of either Rukia or Yoruichi, let alone both. Rukia could sometimes feel that she was kind of superfluous or a burden upon Ichigo and Yoruichi. And Yoruichi could sometimes feel like she was just getting in the way of Ichigo and Rukia and didn’t deserve such companionship. (This is before getting into uncertainties they might have early on in their relationship together as a triad, which need not necessarily be a smooth process.)

I don’t have strongly developed ideas for hurt and comfort, but the BattleTech, Samurai, and Western Continuities all provide plenty of actual danger on a regular basis that could set up opportunities for it. We all know the lengths Ichigo would go to for Rukia, and vice versa, but I don’t think it’s very hard to imagine what Yoruichi would be capable of if either of them were threatened or injured.

I think that all these things give them an added dimension of complexity, as they’re not just perfectly content and happy forever, but it also gives them opportunities to lift one another up.

ASSORTED SCENARIOS

Within Grounded!, I have a line I like that may or may not wind up fitting in when (if) Rangiku goes to confront Yoruichi on what’s happening during the snowstorm, so I thought I’d include it here:

Rangiku: Kuchiki Rukia could decapitate a man with a meal tray’s plastic knife, and I just watched her giggle and pirouette up and down the shopping mall. What did you do, Yoruichi?

In the post-Grounded! era of the Modern Continuity, the vacation which Rukia and Ichigo invite Yoruichi on, which she assents to, is to the South Pacific, perhaps Tahiti. I can imagine the sand is hot and Ichigo has to carry Rukia and Yoruichi out onto the beach under each arm, like how he held Rukia at the Soukyoku in Bleach; Yoruichi acts indignant at being carried and deliberately makes it difficult by pouting like a kitty. (Maybe on a different day he takes Rukia in a bridal carry while Yoruichi rides piggyback, or vice-versa.) The three of them would have fun putting sun tan lotion or sun screen on each other. Yoruichi might casually strip off her swimsuit, making the other two blush only for her to chide them with, “What? We're the only people here, live a little.” They have a midday nap together on their bleach blanket under a big parasol. Yoruichi teases Ichigo and Rukia by poking them with cold ice pops, saying something like, “Ah, you're all sticky now, somebody will have to clean you off!” only for them to start returning the favor. Clouds roll in in the afternoon and they beat a hasty retreat through the brush to their rented bungalow, laughing in the warm rain that comes down before they make it. They wash off together and the power goes out, so they assemble in a sort of cabana area and listen to the steady rain and surf and thunder together, bundled up with one another. Things like that.

I think that Yoruichi’s lifestyle in the Modern Continuity is relatively austere given her history and background, but still very comfortable. Once Ichigo and Rukia decide they want to move in with her (which would probably happen sometime relatively soon after their post-Grounded! vacation together) Yoruichi would probably set about trying to get them a house, which would be quite nice but not palatial or opulent.

I think her one eccentric and rich hobby, given her background as a naval aviator, would be having bought and maintained a surplus F-14 Tomcat (probably the unproduced-in-our-reality F-14 Super Tomcat 21) like she flew in the Navy. She’d keep it at a local airport, probably have a mechanic to help her maintain it (could be something Tessai does in his spare time?) and take it up now and then to have fun. I imagine it’d be heavily customized and have a lightning paint job. Anyway, I can imagine her getting really excited to show it off to Ichigo and Rukia and to take them up in it for the first time. (She would probably get a special safety harness and air supply splitter made so Rukia could safely sit on Ichigo’s lap in the rear RIO seat, rather than make them ride separately.) Anyway, I imagine that Yoruichi’s aviator call sign would have been either Flash or Flash Goddess (probably originally earned for her nonchalant and risqué behavior rather than her piloting ability), and she’d have a customized flight helmet. For their first visit, I imagine she’d have gotten them helmets made and would give them their own call signs. A short list I came up with, with @rukia-kuchiki-divided, were Glacier, Aurora, Ice Queen, Snow White, or Blizzard for Rukia (although the 3rd is normally an insult, I think it’d be taken as kind of endearing here, like how in “canon” Ichigo at one point thinks of Rukia as “bitch” and Rukia openly calls Ichigo a “brat”), and Anarchy, Mayhem, Skyscraper, Havoc, or Riot for Ichigo (with the 3rd being a reference to both “canon” Getsuga Tenshō and a dig at his height relative to them), with their own custom designs. (There could be a whole fic of Yoruichi just writing out different names and talking to herself about them; I imagine her laughing at Snowpiercer for Ichigo and Snowjob for Rukia.)

(These would probably also be used as their call signs in the BattleTech Continuity.)

I watched Top Gun a lot as a kid and the karaoke scene of The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” has always been in my head as a result, and I can picture Yoruichi hooking Rukia up with a spare Navy uniform and insignia so they could surprise Ichigo at a local bar by replicating it. (Which of them takes whose role is up for debate; I headcanon Rukia as being fantastic at singing and Yoruichi as pretty good, but the idea of Rukia in aviators tickles me more. They could mix it up and both wear sunglasses and treat it as a genuine duet.) Ichigo would be mortified (but enchanted), especially if other people recognized what was happening and joined in on the song.

I like the idea that, although Yoruichi and Rukia start out with their “canonical” haircuts (long and either of Rukia’s shoulder-length haircuts, respectively) that they might eventually decide to synchronize their styles; Yoruichi might cut hers short again (like in Turn Back the Pendulum) to match Rukia’s, or Rukia might grow hers out to match Yoruichi’s, or back and forth. I get these images of Ichigo and Rukia helping Yoruichi with her hair and maybe playfully braiding it too. I feel like Rukia would be sorta fascinated by Yoruichi's hair, just its length and the feel of it. The weight and texture of it would be different from her own (I imagine it’s a little thicker than Rukia’s) and she likes the feel of it spilled over her. This could also be an interesting reason for Rukia to later grow her own out. (Ichigo likes the hair of both and is often touching it or putting his face into it, especially since they’re shorter than him. The scent of it is one of the ways he thinks of home.)

I have this scene in mind of them going out fishing, which is something I feel Yoruichi would’ve picked up at some point before meeting them. I picture all of them out on a dock or in a rowboat real early in the morning, wearing personal flotation devices; the sun's not even come up fully yet, and there’s mist over this pond or little lake they’re on. Rukia is just conked out asleep between the other two, her head on one of their laps and feet and legs on the other’s. Yoruichi looks perfectly content and is just beaming. Ichigo is tired-looking and clearly wondering why he’s there, but he still is because Yoruichi thought it was important they had the experience and, as he thinks about it, it isn’t really so bad. Eventually he smiles despite himself.

Sometimes I think Yoruichi would be resistant to Ichigo being sappy; their personalities are sort of similar in that they put on a tough exterior, but I think they would break each other down in interesting ways:

Yoruichi crossed her arms and looked aside dubiously. “Oi! I know I’m not her, and you miss her, but you don't have to be so sullen all the—” She stopped as his palms came to rest against her cheeks. Her gaze snapped toward him right as his fingers came to rest against and behind her ears.

Ichigo gently cradled her face and leaned in, studying her.

Her focal point swung from one of his eyes to the other as she searched. His look smoldered but what she saw was cryptic and it gave her pause. She wasn’t worried—she was never worried with him—but something about it made the difference in their sizes abundantly clear, made it obvious just how large and strong his hands were.

A beat passed before he irritably whispered, “I love you too.” He never felt that it needed to be said, but apparently he was wrong.

Yoruichi blinked.

Ichigo moved in closer and dropped his eyelids fractionally. “I’m in love with you too,” he added, with a quieter and almost-not-vexed delivery.

Her lips parted slightly before her eyes swung to one side again and she scoffed. She tried to follow suit with her whole head but found herself gently restrained. A furtive glance back at him had her eyes going wide as he kissed her. She resisted for a moment before leaning into it, reaching up to grasp his shirt with both hands.

He brought a hand around and slid his fingers into her hair, moving the other down to rest on one of her shoulders.

Yoruichi pushed closer and turned her head more to one side, taking in handfuls of his shirt.

I had this idea of the three of them going somewhere cold (Alaska? Hokkaido? Russia? Swiss Alps? Canada?) and having to wait around in a space that’s not really heated. Yoruichi’s wearing a round ushanka, while Rukia has on a flappy-eared one that’s just a touch too big. Ichigo takes off his coat and drapes it over both of them, who huddle up under it (as it’s big enough to fit them both), and:

Rukia: Idiot, you’ll catch a cold. Yoruichi: We're not babying you if you get sick. Ichigo: Shut up!

Maybe later they wind up in front of a fireplace together, curled into one another. Rukia has long since started calling Yoruichi “fool” as well, it being one of her signs of affection and care. They continue their gentle backbiting:

Yoruichi: Brings back memories, huh? Rukia: Fool. Ichigo: You know she has a thing for us tying her up, she just wants us to do it again. Yoruichi: I do not!

The three of them regularly alternate who is being spooned and who faces who. Yoruichi and Rukia take turns in the middle and change up who they face; Ichigo is usually only in the middle when he’s on his back and they can cuddle into his sides. Both Yoruichi and Rukia steal some of Ichigo’s t-shirts and boxers to use as pajamas and start to share them interchangeably. Whenever one of them has to go off for a couple of days, somehow one of his shirts is always mysteriously packed into their bags, and Ichigo never says anything about it. (They get him back by sometimes smuggling pairs of their underwear into his luggage with cheeky little notes.)

Ichigo is a t-shirt and boxers kind of guy when it comes to lounging or sleeping clothes, although he’ll swap out for long-sleeves and plaid lounging pants when it’s cold enough. Rukia has several sets of cute pajamas that she uses, in addition to items stolen from Ichigo. Yoruichi is highly variable, and sometimes can be found in odd combinations like a turtleneck, her panties, and long fluffy socks. In the winter she's prone to sprawling out in beams of sunlight filtering in through the windows and disrobing to catch the same; in the summer she might be found laying around in just her panties or Ichigo's boxers, fanning herself and complaining about the heat until they turn on the AC (both are very distracting).

Their soaking tub is spacious but isn't really properly big enough to hold all of them, so sometimes they share lap space, and both Rukia and Yoruichi are always glaring at Ichigo and warning him about funny business (as if they don't sometimes do things in the tub).

Rukia: There’s a time and a place, Ichigo. Ichigo: Watch those hands, Yoruichi. Yoruichi: Maybe watch where you've got your feet, Rukia.

In the Samurai Continuity, I can imagine them running out of food to eat like Mugen, Jin, and Fuu do, and Yoruichi's like, "Ichigo, you're the biggest, you have to eat more," and he's all, "No, shut up, I'm fine, there's enough here for you two." Yoruichi falls silent. Rukia continues protesting instead, only for Yoruichi to touch her arm to get her to stop because she knows what he's doing. Ichigo can take it better than they can precisely because he is bigger, and he’s always going to try and protect them first.

A little scene about comforting and snuggling together:

Ichigo cinched his arms a little tighter around Yoruichi's waist. There was a long silence. “Are you cold?”

She shook her head faintly against his chest. “No.” He was putting out enough warmth for two.

He shifted and brought his face down into her hair and inhaled. The orange and saffron scent underlying the spice and musk of her aroma made it smell bright and sunny despite its indigo hue. It was different but... right. “You smell good,” he eventually whispered.

A small chuckle escaped her. “You're such a sap, but you're not so bad yourself.”

“I mean it.”

A pause passed. “I know.”

“Yoruichi—”

“You're tired, get some rest.”

He gently squeezed her sides. “Hey.”

He used his grasp to draw her up while shifting down so they were face to face on the pillow they were sharing.

She studied him curiously.

Ichigo did the same before looking aside. “You shouldn’t need any more convincing that I’m a man, not a boy, so don’t treat me like one.”

Yoruichi blinked before smirking slightly. “Is that right?”

He locked eyes with her again. “I’m glad you're here.”

There was a pause before she looked down.

He started to rub her back and neck to assure her through touch. “And not because Rukia isn't.”

She just quietly pressed in a bit closer.

I feel like Yoruichi would have the least personal sense of “ownership” of the relationship, since she would have lingering doubts about her place in it, and Rukia would have the most. Ichigo thinks of them as “his girls,” but Rukia... Rukia views herself as theirs after a time, and accordingly, they’re hers. Not in some transactional or proprietary way, but just... it’s like her with that soul ribbon in the first ED of Bleach: it just is. And i think that’s where her knowing what to say often comes in, because she does have that perspective. She can ferret out when, say, Yoruichi is feeling like maybe she doesn't belong to them as much as they belong to each other, and Rukia is the one who brings her back, who reminds her that they are three—that two was nice, but three is best.

You might imagine her curling into Yoruichi and quietly stating, “I love you,” and Yoruichi's just kind of at a loss for words, so Rukia repeats herself and waits for Yoruichi to say it back. Yoruichi would feel... maybe a little overwhelmed at the quiet declaration, because it would never be a big or loud thing with Rukia, just firm and quiet and brooking no argument. And this is also why, for as much as Yoruichi and Ichigo wind up curled around Rukia, sometimes Rukia conspires with him to just snuggle Yoruichi between them:

“She's got better ‘pillows’ anyway,” Rukia stated.

Ichigo blinked and flushed, looking away. “There's nothing wrong with yours.”

She glanced to him dubiously but still cracked a thin smirk.

Yoruichi is often physical in showing her concern; sometimes she plays it up and hugs Rukia’s head to her chest, and other times it's just very natural. Ichigo she can only really tease properly when he's sitting in some fashion; neither ever really objects much, no matter how ridiculous they think she's being.

They all drink coffee and tea alike. Yoruichi likes her coffee with sugar and cream, and her favorite tea is a heavily spiced chai. Ichigo likes his coffee black, and his favorite tea is Earl Grey. Rukia likes fancy dessert coffees (like Starbucks Frappuccinos) and likes white and green teas. Yoruichi is the one who actually makes coffee, while Rukia tends to make the tea.

Yoruichi is probably the only one who is really even remotely a morning person, although by habit rather than by choice. Making coffee is like her early morning ritual and meditation to start the day, and including their favorites into that routine just gives her more time to wake up naturally. On work days she likes to let them sleep in—she slides out of bed, careful not to jostle them, but sometimes Ichigo will wake up anyway and reach out for her before settling back when she pats at his hand. It also gives her a chance to have a bit of quiet in the morning and think about things. The sounds and smells of breakfast are often what wake Ichigo and Rukia.

They make an effort to bathe together whenever possible; although they wake up with breakfast, the shower and bath is when they really start their days. It’s a bonding thing for them. (They probably shower both morning and night, but bathe whenever they have the time.)

I sorta like the idea that Yoruichi is a loud and kind of angry gamer, which Ichigo and Rukia regard as kind of an endearing quirk given how put together she is most of the rest of the time. I can see her being really mean on mic to annoying pre-teens. “Yes, I’m a girl, you prepubescent brat! What’s your excuse for sounding like one other than that your balls haven’t dropped yet?!” Ichigo and Rukia just kinda look at each other when she really starts popping off; Ichigo goes over to start to massage her and she sinks into the couch, grumbling and focusing up on whatever she’s doing.

Ichigo is kinda ticklish, Rukia is not all that ticklish, and Yoruichi is very ticklish and she absolutely hates it.

SEXUALITY & PHYSICALITY

My personal read of these characters, which I invoke in these scenarios, is that Yoruichi is pansexual, and Ichigo and Rukia are both something approximating demisexual, with at least Rukia (and possibly Ichigo) being bisexual. (I think in “canon” a strong case could be made for them both being closer to but not necessarily purely at asexual, while Yoruichi could be read numerous ways, but that is neither here nor there.) These are, of course, only my interpretations.

At any rate, Yoruichi is usually experienced (somewhere between fairly and quite so depending on the scenario; I imagine she and Kuukaku could have fooled around when they were younger, and that in more recent times she has had Kisuke as a lover, but that the two of them are an off-again, on-again thing) and views sex as a fun, normal, and healthy way of physical and/or emotional bonding; Ichigo is uniformly a virgin but is old enough to not be a stammering fool about it; and Rukia is either a virgin or may have had a sexual relationship previously (if so, with Renji) but is not very in tune with her sexuality or sexual desires to begin with.

It might initially seem like Yoruichi trains both Ichigo and Rukia, being the one who moves first physically and the one who’s got more experience, but I don’t think she herself or either of them think of it that way. Yoruichi would always be more interested in coaxing the other two, in helping them to figure out what they like and want, and encouraging them to explore it. That would quickly get turned back around on her as they grew more confident, as they would start to return the favor to her. Personally, I think that Ichigo is often physically dominant, but loves to serve and please. Rukia and Yoruichi can both be dominant themselves (with him or with each other) but also like being submissive; Rukia enjoys the comfort and safety of the headspace it puts her in, while for Yoruichi it heightens her pleasure more than she could imagine. I think this would be a surprise to Yoruichi, and eventually she’d come to realize that she had always still been keeping up walls in her past relationships to try and maintain some control. Ichigo and Rukia would be the first to really break through those, which would give her all kinds of feels and open her up more to trying things she had only rarely explored with partners before. (As examples, I think Yoruichi would have a thing for light bondage and anal sex, but only have tried them with other people a scant handful of times.) Their process of discovery would not at all be a one-sided thing, and I think they’d be very sexually active (probably having orgasms only every other day at the longest stretch).

If I had to pick words to describe what sex is like for each of the pairs, for Ichigo and Rukia it’d be cosmic (powerful and beautiful, breathtaking) for Yoruichi and Rukia it’d be oceanic (constant motion and energy, unifying) and for Ichigo and Yoruichi it’d be tectonic (earth-shattering and resonant, awesome). Just like with the rest of their behaviors, when they were all together, it would vary and oscillate among the three. However, sex between them wouldn’t necessarily always be a big production or need to go both ways either. I think they wouldn’t think much of pulling clothes down (or dipping their hands into them) and using their digits and mouths on each other, depending on the mood. I think they’d all just be very invested in making one another feel good, and that could be quick and servicing or slow and mutual as the case might be.

The three would always wind up appreciative of one another in states of undress, although Rukia and Yoruichi would be more circumspect and covert about it. Ichigo doesn’t hide his admiration, sometimes earning him rebukes, but those incidents really only tee him up to say something sappy and adoring, which usually result in the other two getting annoyed at how gooey it makes them feel. Sometimes they reward him by showing off, Rukia usually emphasizing her ass, and Yoruichi her chest. Yoruichi might turn quick so she swayed and bounced, put her hands on her hips and lean forward, say something like, “If you want to have a look you can always just ask, you know. I don't mind,” then lift her arms up and stretch. Rukia might lean forward or bend over to show off more, use a hand to pull a cheek aside and waggle her eyebrows, say something like, “If you see something you like, you should give a compliment.”

Something that would melt Ichigo and Yoruichi's hearts would be having Rukia between the two of them, arched and trembling, weakly clutching at them and moaning out, "Yoru... Ichi... go..." Hearing their names co-mingled like that, they'd be filled with thoughts of how they've got to protect her, they've got to deliver her, they've got to give her everything and be one with her. And afterward Ichigo would pull Yoruichi tight to gently squish Rukia between them, Yoruichi not much less spacey than Rukia would be. Rukia might be gathered between them, face buried in Ichigo's neck and Yoruichi pressed up against her back, the pair of them grounding her to the earth.

Yoruichi and Rukia sometimes pair off together while Ichigo is left in the dust recovering from his refractory period, and they make him watch. He'd always be astonished at seeing them together, how they can keep on and on, and always be kind of struck by, Why... do they need me...? and I don't think he'd ever fully get over it, but it would inspire him to always try and be worthy of them, and sometimes give them cause to reassure him.

“Fool. You think we'd just... always be doing this without you?” Rukia asked.

He turned and stayed silent. Why not?

Yoruichi maneuvered around so he she was in front of him, cupping his jaw. “We need you too.”

Ichigo's eyes widened as they met hers.

Rukia pressed against him from behind. “Who else is going to make us feel safe, idiot?”

Yoruichi tapped a finger above his heart. “And it's not like you're bad...” she purred.

“Not bad at all,” Rukia added quietly.

"There's some things toys just can't do,” Yoruichi mused, looking deep into him.

Ichigo's face heated. “Well. I...”

Rukia grinned, pressing against him. “Fingers and tongues and toys are good and all, but...”

"Nothing like a man who knows how to use what he's got,” Yoruichi finished, and she and Rukia shared a meaningful look.

Ichigo cleared his throat.

“A toy doesn't feel warm like sunlight.”

“It doesn't tangle fingers in your hair and smoothly pull your head back.”

“It doesn't clutch at your hips.”

“It doesn't tremble between your thighs.”

“It doesn't curl up with you after and tell you it loves you.”

And he quietly thought, But, you can do that to each other... And yet, even so, his cheeks went red and he just kind of sank between them as they petted and stroked at him and whispered sweet nothings that eventually became soft kisses here and there.

When they’re separated due to travel, I think they would remember each other in different ways. Much of it would be domestic and fluffy, but when their thoughts turned to intimacy, the focus would be a little different for each of them. I think that Ichigo would remember sights and feelings: Yoruichi on her back and Rukia atop her, their legs interlocked so as to spread each other and both of them looking back over their shoulders at him expectantly and hungrily, and how that made his chest clench around his heart. Yoruichi would recall images and physical sensations: Ichigo and Rukia moving together, Rukia spread under her, the feeling of Ichigo’s hands tangled in her hair, the tastes and smells of them. Rukia would focus on emotional memories, of what it felt like in the afterglow and during aftercare: Yoruichi and Ichigo curling around her and the way she felt safe and warm in their arms, the way it felt like they built a boundary between her and the world. (Rukia would still sometimes think of particular things though; things like images of Yoruichi between her thighs, while Ichigo held her from behind—his voice in her ear, a low rumble of all the things he was going to do to her when Yoruichi was finished...)

I think, when they were paired off with Ichigo due to the absence of the other, Yoruichi and Rukia would be intrigued with how he treated the other. I imagine they'd watch each other often when they were all together; sometimes it might be all three of them at once, but other times they'd take turns. Rukia might be fascinated by the contrast in Ichigo and Yoruichi's skin and the difference in the way they moved, the power of them. Yoruichi might be bewitched by the tenderness Ichigo showed Rukia, the softness of them even when they were rough together. So you might have, with Ichigo and Rukia:

Rukia ended the kiss and dipped her head, bringing the fringe of her hair to rest against Ichigo’s chin. She gently squeezed his shoulders and pressed closer.

His fingers dug into the sides of her waist appreciatively.

She let out a small sound and pressed her face down against his neck, getting secure against him. Being so close seemed to distort things, as if she was in a deep gravity well. She closed her eyes. “Ichigo...?”

“Hmm?”

She spiraled her pointer fingers against his collarbones with a touch of uncertainty. “Um...”

He began to massage her sides in reassurance. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing’s... wrong, I just—” She broke off and pulled her head back, looking up at him.

Ichigo met her gaze.

Rukia looked between his eyes, wondering at how soft they were—always so soft for her. She looked down again. “I want you to treat me like you do Yoruichi,” she whispered.

He blinked.

“I’m... not made of glass, Ichigo,” she murmured. She loved how tender he was with her, but... He was always powerful with Yoruichi, even when he was slow with her, and the two of them always looked... so damn sexy! The more she’d seen of it, the more she wanted it for herself. She wanted to feel that power, that strength, that energy.

Ichigo soon reached a hand up to brush her hair. “No, you’re not.”

Something about his tone made Rukia bite her lip, and she pressed her head toward his hand, appreciating the contact for a short time. She then released his shoulders and carefully turned around, getting her legs astride his and pushing back firmly against him before slowly starting to roll her rear suggestively against his hips.

He gripped her sides firmly. “Rukia...”

She turned her head fractionally to look at him out of the corner of her eyes, asking with them. She needed to know what it was like.

And with Ichigo and Yoruichi:

Yoruichi softly bit Ichigo’s tongue to signal an end to the kiss, wrenching her lips away from his and sliding her head forward so they were cheek to cheek.

He turned his head toward her neck to follow on as he pushing her up against the fridge more firmly, squeezing handfuls of her ass.

She let out a needy moan and pressed her cheek to his, drawing her arms tighter around his neck and tangling her fingers in his hair. “Ichigo.”

“What?” he whispered, his impatience hanging from every letter of the word.

“Wait.” It was a soft instruction, but an instruction nonetheless.

Ichigo paused and blinked, very deliberately focusing on her. She’d never been one for delays. A little silence rolled out between them before his eyelids slid halfway shut again. “What's wrong?”

“Don't assume something is wrong,” Yoruichi chided mildly, slowly arching a little to push her rear into his hands. She waited a few breaths, beginning to brush through his hair. “I want to try something different,” she eventually conceded.

He started to rub his cheek against hers as a memory returned to him of something very much like this. “Different? How...?”

Yoruichi lowered her head a little. “Treat me like Rukia?” He was so caring and patient with Rukia—always making love to her in the most passionate yet considerate way. She loved what she had with him—it was always fun and satisfying—but she’d seen them so many times and she increasingly found herself wondering...

Ichigo looked askew at the side of her head for long seconds before lowering his face, snuggling her against the refrigerator door. “You know... Last time, she asked me to treat her like you.”

She blinked in surprise.

A little smile curved his lips and he gave her neck a soft kiss, musing on the irony. “Did you two plan this?”

“No!” she denied in a sharp whisper, only for her eyes to widen as he squeezed her ass again, very differently. The motion was smooth, celebratory, and made her shiver—something about it made her soul ache with recognition.

“Okay,” Ichigo promised, standing up and pulling her away from the appliance. He held onto her securely as he bore her to the bedroom.

Yoruichi faintly bit her lower lip at the sudden change in his attitude but clung to him, offering no resistance or further comment.

All three of them quite like one another’s scents and flavors (although Ichigo and Yoruichi regard Rukia as primus inter pares and think she’s the best) and they’re not shy about it. You can imagine Yoruichi mocking the old Tootsie-Rolls commercial line while she and Rukia are holding Ichigo, whose cock is covered in magic shell topping: “How many licks does it take to get to the creamy center...?”

CONCLUSION

There is even more (as there are a dozen or so little in-progress fics and ficlets scattered around, mostly for Modern Continuity) but that’s the end of all the notes I have on hand for now. If you made it this far, thank you, and I hope you found this charming or persuasive, or at least entertaining! If you did, please leave me your thoughts!

#YoruIchiRuki #OT3: Neapolitan Ice Cream #yes this is about #13000 words of meta #on my favorite OT3 #and i am so hoping #that at least a few people #might like it #but i had to write it regardless

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rachelkaser · 4 years

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Has the Assassin’s Creed series lost its way... or its mind? (Part 2)

Disclaimer up front: The fact that my last blog post coincided with the reveal of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was a complete coincidence. That being said, I’m so glad it happened, because it gives me more examples of the, we shall say, modern problems with Assassin’s Creed. But still, I won’t judge it too harshly considering I haven’t seen it yet.

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It’s time for me to give what I think are the two most prevalent (and fixable) problems regarding the series -- namely what the fuck everyone in the games is doing, and what they’re trying to accomplish. I also want to talk about the disconnect between the way the series started and where we currently are.

And we might as well start with the biggest disappointment in the series so far: Juno.

Juno A Thing or Two

First, let’s go all the way back to when this series began. The original game cloaks Those Who Came Before in very sinister hints, and Al Mualim speaks of them with even more quiet reverence than he does the Apple of Eden. In the next game, we meet one of TWCB, Minerva, albeit very briefly, and she outright states that her people, who aren’t gods, are long gone from the world and have only left behind a trail of bread crumbs in order to protect humanity -- their creation -- from a world-scorching solar flare.

If you think about it, that ought to have been all we ever knew about TWCB, at least to a certain degree. We know they aren’t gods, and we know they’re no longer around. Based on the cutscene from AC Revelations, we know they also didn’t manage to protect humanity from the previous solar flare. They were kind of like the Protheans from Mass Effect: a wise, powerful predecessor race brought low by their own overconfidence, acting as a warning for humanity to use their talents for better things.

Yet, by the time Odyssey rolls around, we see them constantly meddling with human history, undermining the original point that it was a last-ditch effort on the part of Minerva to avoid utter catastrophe, and not something they otherwise would have tried. In spite of the fact that Minerva explicitly said she and her kind weren’t gods, and weren’t strong enough to stop the solar flare, later games ramped up their power as a way of trying to make them interesting enough to take up a bigger part of the story.

They really didn’t need a bigger part of the story.

Also, the first six games of the series -- that’s about a combined 200 hours of play time, roughly -- revolved around one central plotline: The Juno story. It was even brought up, albeit in a tangential way, in later games such as Syndicate. Essentially, it was the backbone of Desmond’s story arc, and involved him making the difficult decision to unleash a literal evil god in the machine in order save all of humanity from a natural disaster. Not only did he die, but subsequent Assassins were left to deal with the fallout of a malevolent entity trying to assert herself in the modern world. It was corny as all hell, sure, but in the hands of interested and creative writers, I think it could have gone somewhere cool.

Now the modern stories are primarily about the pursuit of the Pieces of Eden, and the Juno plotline has been dropped entirely. Juno herself was actually unceremoniously killed off -- in a comic book, no less. Just to make the whole thing feel more like a rip-off, she was killed by Desmond’s bastard son (a character the games have only hinted at up to now) who’s also a Sage, meaning he carries the soul of Juno’s dead husband.

I can’t even begin to describe the disdain and frustration within me when I say, “Gee, I sure as hell wish I could have played that.”

The son of the previous protagonist, struggling with the sinister presence in his head, joining forces with both Templars and Assassins to take down the sinister would-be god responsible for his father’s death, his own mental health struggles, and potential global catastrophe? Pardon my language, but why the actual FUCK was this not the plot of one of the games?

The comics came out in 2017 and 2018. What were the games we got in that same time period? Origins and Odyssey, which star Layla Hassan in the modern sections, quite possibly the most boring person in the whole series. You’re telling me that someone seriously looked at this series and decided the modern gameplay of two tentpole games would best be propped up with the most uninteresting stick of wood Ubisoft has yet crafted? Fuck. Right. Off.

Everything the first seven games, from AC1 to Black Flag, had been building towards with regards to the modern story, including Desmond’s sacrifice for humanity and the race to give Juno a physical form, is for absolutely nothing. It’s abandoned in-game for no better reason than to give the player Pieces of Eden to play with instead.

Having mentioned that, it’s about time I told y’all what I really think about this particular plot device.

Pee Oh Ees? Pee Oh Ess

For the uninitiated who’re only here to see me have a big ol’ fangirl aneurysm, the Pieces of Eden are gadgets left behind by TWCB with various superpowers assigned to them as the plot demands. In-universe, they’re objects of great renown that cropped up in various forms throughout recorded history -- as crystal skulls, sacred orbs, swords, staffs, blankets, jewelry and even, in one memorable instance, the actual Koh-i-Noor diamond.

But let me establish -- as indeed we must again -- that while the POEs have always been described as powerful, in the first several games in the series they were only ever used to further a larger purpose. They were part of an elaborate communication network left behind by TWCB in order to contact Desmond, specifically, and get his help averting the end of the world.

The only reason they were ever important was because they usually somehow led to the clue that would help him move forward with that goal. Altair’s Apple? Showed where to find the other Pieces. Ezio’s Apple? Led to Desmond’s first contact with Minerva. Connor’s crystal ball? Showed Desmond where to find the medallion that opens the chamber where the end of the world may be averted. My point is, while the concept of them was cool, laying hands on them was never the ultimate goal.

Sure, they’re leftovers from the Precursor society, but let’s not forget they had a literal Precursor spirit haunting Abstergo’s computers, and the writers chose instead to focus on this garbage. And I don’t use the word lightly: In Assassin’s Creed 2 codex, Altair even wonders if humans are just squabbling over what was effectively rubbish to TWCB. He’s not exactly right (see again: communication network to Desmond), but you gotta wonder if he’s completely wrong either.

Instead of examining that, and pondering whether anyone, Assassin, Templar, or otherwise, should have these artifacts, the series has settled for shuffling them around like so many footballs. And to make them more interesting, the writers of later games have chosen to make the PoEs more powerful.

For example, the one in Syndicate is essentially a healing blanket that brings people back from the brink of death. The one in Odyssey makes the bearer immortal. All I could think when I found out about these was “Gee, it sure would have been nice if Minerva had led Desmond to that one when he was preparing to sacrifice himself for humanity.”

It’s getting to the point where I’m goddamned sick and tired of seeing them crop up. All three episodes of Assassin’s Creed Chronicles were about retrieving a POE -- the same POE, no less -- and playing keep away with the Templars at three different points in history.

It’d be different if we saw the Assassins ever used the POEs to further their cause or make the world a better place, but it’s happened almost never in the series. Most of the time it’s as though playing POE hot potato with the Templars is the only thing the Assassins can actually be bothered to do.

Which brings me to my last, and biggest issue...

Road to Nowhere

Let me ask a question: What, at this point, is the endgame for the Assassin’s Creed universe?

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I don’t mean what’s the planned endpoint of the series -- Ubisoft will keep making them for as long as we keep buying them. I mean, what’s the desired world state for the Assassin and Templar factions -- what, in essence, is the end goal of their efforts?

I have played every game in the series multiple times, read the comics and novels, and even watched the movie. I know this series very well, and it disturbs me that, when I ask myself that question, I can’t come up with more than a vague answer for the Templars, and no answer at all for the Assassins.

Think about it: What have the Assassins done for the last few games besides follow behind the Templar group du jour with a paint roller, covering up and undoing whatever it is they’ve done? When’s the last time the Assassins made an effort to do anything, rather than just react? When’s the last time you, the player, felt like you were playing a character that could have actually existed in history and made some kind of an impact?

The longer we do this dance, the less it feels like we’re working towards some kind of goal -- and that’s a damned drag. At the very least, with the Desmond storyline, we had a definite end. Ubisoft kind of painted itself into a corner by needing Desmond’s story to be wrapped up before the end of 2012 in order to tie into that whole “Mayan Doomsday” thing from December of the same year. So if nothing else, we knew his story was going to have to end by then.

Even Disney is aware it couldn’t just keep making Marvel adaptations forever without some kind of larger destination in mind or people would lose interest. But apparently that lesson’s escaped Ubisoft, because there doesn’t seem to be a cosmic expiry date on the modern-day story.

Its very tempting to say the series would be better off it cut out the figurative tumor and no longer have a modern narrative at all. But if it did, what would tie these games together, truly? Because the meat-and-potatoes of the games takes place in the past, it falls to the modern-day sections to deliver the big-picture story, which they have failed to do for a while now.

The problem isn’t that the modern sections exist. The problem is that the modern sections aren’t good. They’re aimless and boring, and the characters are so bland and uncontextualized that it’s impossible to sympathize with them. And that sucks because it means we have no connection to the world beyond the past storyline anymore. If you’d told me circa 2012 I’d be missing Desmond Miles in a few years, I wouldn’t have believed you, but here we are.

I’m not trying to give the impression, with this screed, that I don’t like or have fallen out of love with Assassin’s Creed. Because somehow, shockingly, I haven’t. I still love AC. I’ve loved AC since I was 17, which is over a third of my life. I’m just bitterly dissatisfied with AC at the present moment. At this point I’m afraid Valhalla is going to resemble For Honor more than previous entries in the series.

A franchise can change. A franchise can evolve. But this isn’t evolution. This is a game series that has gone completely off the rails and is spinning its wheels aimlessly in the air. I’ll revisit this topic after Valhalla, but I’m not holding out hope for a great change.

#assassin's creed #assassin's creed valhalla #juno #piece of eden #those who came before #assassin brotherhood #templars

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mobius-prime · 4 years

Text

228. Sonic the Hedgehog #160

Birthday Bash! (Part One): Giving and Receiving

Writer: Ian Flynn Pencils: Tracy Yardley! Colors: Jason Jensen

Welcome to the beginning of Ian Flynn's reign, everyone! As many of you will know, Ian is a fan favorite amongst readers of the comics, and for good reason. Objectively, I'd say he has a much better sense than any previous writer of how to construct dynamic and interesting stories, as well as a great head for writing dialogue. Every character has their own unique voice when speaking, and as someone who takes a particular interest in dialogue in her own writing, it's something I admire a lot, especially given how stilted and unnaturally formal a lot of dialogue by Karl and especially Kenders often sounded, regardless of who was speaking. That said, I think that it took a good year or so for him to fully come into his own as head writer for the series, so some earlier issues are a bit strange and not up to par with a lot of his later work. Some of this, to be fair, is due to him essentially playing clean-up for this first year, untangling a lot of the bizarre leftover plot threads that Karl and Kenders left behind, and generally trying to make the world of the comics conform a little better to that of the games. All that aside, anyone reading the comics will likely notice an immediate and apparent improvement in the overall quality of the work starting with this issue. This is helped along, in addition, by none other than the very talented artist Tracy Yardley! who always (well, almost always) introduces himself in the story credits with an exclamation mark. It's kind of his calling card. Tracy took a while to really improve his art as well, so while his earliest issues sometimes have some strange proportions and poses, later on his style became easily one of the most visually attractive and recognizable ones in the series, simplifying a lot of the inconsistencies that many character designs had as well as doing away with the strange pseudo-human proportions that some artists tended to favor, particularly with the female characters. All this said, I will say that Ian isn't going to be immune to my criticism, as while I do recognize his skill as a writer and the good things he brought to the table, there are definitely some problems I have with the way he handled certain things. We'll cross those bridges when we come to them, however, so for now, let's dive into the new world he's creating and see how he does!

Elias and Sonic are walking on the outskirts of Knothole as Elias explains why his father approved the Metal Sonic troopers from last issue. We don't even really get to hear the explanation, but to be fair, we hardly need one, as the idea was so insane to begin with that the only true explanation is that Kenders needed a plot device. Sonic tries to make Elias promise that "you royals" won't hit him with any more weird surprises, and Elias says they only have one more, leading him to a building next to where the Great Oak Slide into the village ends.

I mean, canonically he's supposed to be turning seventeen here, even though realistically he should be turning eighteen, because remember, for him to have turned sixteen in StH#68, had the Robians be deroboticized in early June in StH#123, and still have managed to spend close to a year in space before turning seventeen, literally everything in between the two aforementioned issues would have had to take place in the span of a few weeks - yes, that's counting the month-and-a-half time span that Sonic was confined to Knothole, as well as major events like Eggman's return and the entire Green Knuckles saga. You can see why this huge discrepancy still bothers me, right? Hmph. Anyway, no sooner has the party begun than an explosion destroys the door, and two new players enter the scene - Bean the Dynamite and Bark the Polar Bear from Sonic the Fighters! Nack's been part of the comic for long enough now, so it's cool to see these two make their first appearance. Bark is totally silent - as far as I remember, he never says a single word during the entirety of the comic - but Bean, in the absence of an obvious personality to draw from in the game, has subsequently been given the personality trait of "criminally insane" in the comics.. He's erratic, he talks to himself, he cracks jokes where jokes really shouldn't be cracked, and most importantly of all, he loves his goddamn bombs. Bean starts chucking said bombs left and right at the various Freedom Fighters in the base, while Sonic tangles with Bark. He seems to think these guys are only after him due to something Evil Sonic did in his place, something which he has by now apparently finally explained to all the women of Knothole, and manages to break away from Bark to stop Bean's bombing spree by pinning him to a wall and asking about Evil Sonic. However, Bean happily insists there's been no mistake and he wasn't even aware of Sonic having an evil twin, nor does he particularly care. Oh, speaking of Evil Sonic…

Huh, it seems that Evil Sonic has actually explained his true identity to Rouge in between their previous failed attempt and now. I'm surprised she hasn't outright abandoned him by now due to Rouge not exactly being evil-aligned to begin with, but I guess the pull of the shiny is just too strong for her to resist. And as it turns out, Bean suffers from a similar insatiable need! Fiona pulls out a ring of keys and shakes them around, completely distracting Bean from his current activity of bashing Sonic's head in, and throws them out the hole he made in the wall, prompting him to immediately abandon everything to chase after them. Fiona then advances on Bark, who by now has gotten himself cornered by every Freedom Fighter in the room, and convinces him to stand down as he's outnumbered. Outside, Bean plays with the keys and talks to them, seemingly convinced that they're a beautiful woman with an "adorable accent" who wants his number, when a suspiciously-Shadow-shaped shadow converges on him, prompting him to try to invite him into smashing Sonic as well. Good luck there, buddy, I don't think Shadow usually runs with crazy…

Geez, Sally, cut Fiona some slack. Not everyone had a squeaky-clean record - hell, just look at Shadow! Back in the Chaos Chamber, Rouge and Evil Sonic begin to battle Locke, who tosses Evil Sonic to the side as he perceives Rouge to be the bigger threat. However, that turns out to be a bit of a bad idea, as with Rouge tied up in the fight, Evil Sonic takes his chance to go after the Master Emerald without her, obviously recognizing it as more than just a shiny trinket.

Back in Knothole, Shadow explains that he's only here to thank Sonic for saving Hope, as he knows he wouldn't have been able to do it on his own, and reminds him that as soon as he leaves this building they're back to being enemies, as Shadow's still aligned with Eggman for now. Sonic, to his credit, seems to recognize that Shadow is only allied with Eggman because he doesn't yet know better, and cheerfully invites him to come back here whenever he cuts out on that deal in the future. It's at this point that everyone realizes Bean has quietly snuck into the brain trust's comms room to casually let Eggman know that he and Bark failed to take Sonic down, and when Fiona ushers him back out of the room, Eggman is only too happy to let Sonic know personally that he wishes him a happy birthday and he's sending him a new, more metallic present. Within seconds a thud outside alerts them to the arrival of this present, and everyone rushes out to see a strange figure emerging from an egg pod - a figure which resolves itself into the combined forms of Crocbot and Octobot, now merged into the singular entity of… Croctobot! (Don't worry, Ian knows just how silly this is and even acknowledges it next issue.) But what of Evil Sonic and Rouge? How is their fight faring against Locke after the former got knocked aside? Well, Evil Sonic takes his chance to dramatically emerge from behind the emerald as the other two get ready to continue their fight…

Plot twist! How many people actually didn't know by now that Evil Sonic and Scourge were the same person? I'm guessing there had to be at least a few of you. You can actually already see Ian's new plans being put into action - it's very telling of his intentions when the very first issue he ever pens immediately makes a point of distinguishing a rather tired and boring character into a new and improved version of himself, with a unique name and new, visually distinct look. Apparently Kenders, who if you recall is the original creator of Evil Sonic, never liked this and continued to insist on referring to him as Evil Sonic, but screw that, Scourge is a much more interesting character and this was a change that sorely needed to be made.

Sonic Rush (Part One of Two)

Writer/Pencils: Tania Del Rio Colors: Ben Hunzeker

So unfortunately, Sonic Adventure 2 isn't the only case in the preboot of a partial adaption of a game being included without any actual ending. Sonic Rush, the game, introduces Blaze, a cat from an alternate dimension that is controlled by the Sol Emeralds rather than the Chaos Emeralds, and most of the plot revolves around the Sol Emeralds ending up in Sonic's dimension and her trying to recollect them to bring back to her own world. However, things are a bit different in the comics universe. In this story, Blaze comes to Sonic's dimension because, apparently, she's been having nonstop dreams about him, dreams which show her visions of Eggman threatening the Sol Emeralds and Sonic helping her protect them. She's frustrated that she would have to rely on anyone else to help her protect the emeralds at all, believing them to be her sole responsibility, but nonetheless she's tracked Sonic to Knothole. However, while deliberating her next move, a squad of swatbots - yes, ordinary ones, it's been a while since we've seen them rather than shadow-bots - happen upon her and decide that they should take her in for interrogation.

Yeah, I guess Blaze doesn't understand the dangers present in this universe yet, does she? An hour or so later, Rotor sends for Sonic, informing him that they caught the aftermath of Blaze's capture on their video surveillance. Neither of them know who she is, but they decide she can't be from their village, since she left several disabled swatbots behind, while most people in Knothole are noncombatants and those that aren't are accounted for elsewhere. Sonic rushes out to find their trail and tracks them to a nearby facility set up amidst the trees, and while he begins fighting his way in, the scientific robots in the building go about studying their new specimen.

Sorry, but why the hell would Eggman be looking to add some random Mobian to his team? He only likes robots anyway, and tends to either betray or enslave every living being that comes to him. Blaze suddenly awakens and becomes furious - not that she's been captured, mind you, but that they took off her coat while studying her. She must be really goddamn attached to her coat, because she starts absolutely trashing the place, exploding into flames and screaming so loudly that Sonic becomes genuinely worried about her wellbeing, rushing to where he last heard her. The door of the lab she's in is completely blasted off its hinges by the force of Blaze's explosions, but thankfully after this she seems to have found her coat, because the blasts subside and she appears in the doorway wearing it once again, staring down at an utterly shocked Sonic with a look of fiery fury (the literal flames coating her entire body probably help with the "fiery" bit). Uh… good luck dealing with that, buddy boy!

#nala reads archie sonic preboot #archie sonic #archie sonic preboot #writer: ian flynn #writer: tania del rio #pencils: tracy yardley #pencils: tania del rio #colors: jason jensen #colors: ben hunzeker

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thefloatingstone · 5 years

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Hey C-Puff! So I know I keep saying that I love your taste, but I'm curious, what would you consider essential scifi movie viewing?

Oof! (and thank you! 8DD) It really depends what kind of mood you’re in. Because “sci fi” is essentially a weird genre, because it can be mushed with literally any other genre and still work without straying too far from the ‘sci fi’ concept. Sci fi is a genre the same way fantasy is a genre or horror is a genre. You can make a horror-comedy or a fantasy comedy, but you can’t make a drama-comedy (At least without some major tonal dissonance). So it REALLY depends what you feel like watching or what mood you’re in or what tolerance level you have in some aspects.

I can list a few though which I feel are super essential viewing but are vastly different from each other. I’m not gonna give a full summary break down of each one because it’ll take me like 3 hours to write (these things take a while sometimes) but I’ll give a little indication!

Edit: oops…. I ended up spending 4 hours writing this….

1: Alien (1979)(Sci-Fi horror)

These days the Alien franchise seems to automatically = Xenomorphs. So it can be hard to remember the very first movie that not only started the franchise but literally changed sci fi as a genre, you barely see the Xenomorph on screen, and when you DO the film does its best to hide what it actually looks like with lighting, camera angles and editing. Because the first movie’s Alien costume was not really good, and the movie had a VERY small budget comparatively speaking. So it literally has the opposite goal of trying to show off the xenomorph as much as possible.

Originally sold as “Jaws but in space”, the whole idea of the film was “What if you were a bunch of truckers in the middle of space and nowhere to run, and something unknown started picking you off one by one. Where can you run? Who can you contact? What can you do?”

The original’s entire focus is on fear. From long sequences of Ripley running where it’s filmed facing her so you can’t see “behind you” as the audience to instill paranoia, to hearing what sounds like extreme amounts of gore off screen where you can’t see it, the entire film is designed to be terrifying.

It’s difficult to remember that with what the franchise is known for today.

Also noteworthy is that so much of what is Alien came from Jodorowsky’s “Dune” which was never made, but nevertheless still achieved Jodorowsky’s goal of changing sci fi forever.

2: Blade Runner (1982)(Sci-Fi Noir)

in 2012, Ridley Scott said in an interview; “30 years ago, I saw the future”.

As far as I am aware, the first movie to ask the question “where exactly does ‘being human’ start or end?” regarding robots. The original Blade Runner is filmed in a way to replicate a 1940s style crime noir story, complete with brooding detective and femme fatale. However, it is set in the FAR OFF FUTURE of 2019.

The story follows our detective, known as a “Blade Runner” chasing down a specific class of robot which is illegal on Earth (but used in off-planet labour deemed too dangerous for human work) after the model number started a riot on one of these off-world labour camps. Detective Decker is tasked in finding and “retiring” a group of robots recently landed in futuristic Los Angeles, especially since the robot group is tracking down and murdering the designers in charge of creating their line.

However, the further Decker investigates things, the more uncomfortable questions he finds himself asking. How are these robots so much more different than us humans? What are their motives? Are they really just machines gone berserk? Or is there something very very human they are trying to achieve.

A film that exploded in Japan and essentially caused every anime between 1982 and 1995 to be in some way a Blade Runner fanfic, it changed the genre even more than Alien did. This time letting philosophical questions and atmosphere do most of the work, as the cyberpunk aesthetic of future Los Angeles was as important a character to the story as any of the human players. It was the first time we truly saw Cyberpunk, and literally EVERYTHING we consider “Cyberpunk” these days came from this movie’s direction and cinematography.

Watch the Director’s cut. DO NOT watch the Theatrical version. The Theatrical version was forced to add narration to the long stretches of silence as the movie distributor thought audiences would be too stupid to handle a movie with so little dialogue in it. The Director’s Cut is how the film was meant to be watched, doing away with all the needless talking and letting the film’s visuals and music speak for itself.

3: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)(Sci-Fi Mystery)

Yes yes I’m biased because it’s my favourite movie. But even if it wasn’t it’s an essential film to watch in the Sci-Fi genre.

Some people will think E.T. holds this title, but E.T. came out 5 years AFTER Close Encounters and so, Close Encounters is one of the first movies if not THE first movie that came out and asked… “What if the Aliens came and were our friends?” Because up until this point, All the “Big-Eyed Grey Aliens in Flying Saucers” movies portrayed them as invaders trying to take over the planet. And the sci fi stories and movies that DIDN’T have this narrative, the aliens were always human looking (Star Trek, The Day the Earth Stood Still etc)

And so, this is one of the first movies that suggested that maybe the weird looking space aliens from another planet who look nothing like us could be our allies. Would want to speak to us. Would want to know us.

Not that the movie is full of love and friendship. in some places it feels more like a horror movie than anything else. But that’s because the film thinks its audience is smart, and it doesn’t have to have a character EXPLAIN things to us. We can understand what’s happening by WATCHING. And if something is strange and doesn’t make sense, it either will by the end of the film thanks to context, or it was never that important to understand anyway.

Also a giant part of the film’s power and influence comes from its visuals, but even more importantly, its soundtrack which I can’t communicate in a gif. And so I am left linking a trailer.

I think it says a lot that it was THIS movie, not Star Wars, that helped the first Star Trek movie to be made a few years later, and with that, helped give us Star Trek TNG. Not bad.

(You can watch any of the 3 cuts of the film. I’m most familiar with the Director’s Cut so that’s my fave and what I would recommend but I haven’t heard of any of the 3 cuts being “the bad one”)

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4: Total Recall (1990)(Sci-Fi Action)

It was only a matter of time before Arnie showed up on this list, being in no less than 3 Sci-Fi game changers in the 80s and 90s.

What makes Total Recall Unique, however, is that we have Paul Verhoeven as director, who likes movies that have a little more to say than “Arnie shoots a bunch of bullets at things” (as great as that is, don’t get me wrong) And I think the fact that people will STILL debate this movie says a lot about it.

The story is set in the far future, where normal construction worker Arnie is bored with his normal life (which is weird considering he’s built like a truck and married to Sharon Stone but I’m not here to judge). He’s been having reoccurring dreams about going to Mars, as well as a strange woman he meets there. One day while traveling home on the subway, he sees an ad for a copany called “Rekall” who can use a sort of brain implant machine to give you instantaneous fake memories. Basically, you can take a vacation that lasts 6 months in your memories within the span of 10 minutes real time.

Arnie’s character decides to visit, and asks that his fantasy take place on Mars, and describes the woman he meets there. However, during the fake memory implant something goes wrong. VERY wrong. The machine drags up suppressed memories Arnie has of being a sleeper agent, put on Earth until needed, as well as images he’s been seeing in his dreams. The Rekall employees have to sedate him and send him home, refunding him for the poor experience.

However, Arnie can no longer just forget what the machine dragged up from his subconscious, and starts to question if his life really is his life. If his wife really IS his wife. (after all…. Someone who looks like Sharon Stone married to a construction worker who looks like Mr Universe living in a very cushy apartment? Something doesn’t add up.)

Arnie finds himself suddenly dragged into a massive conspiracy plot revolving around Mars, the corrupt governor running it, the rebellion and its mysterious revolutionary, as well as who the hell WAS he before he was who he is now?

That’s the movie’s plot at least. But as many people who watch the movie has pointed out, despite the movie itself never making a point of it, funny how all this adventure and conspiracy hits Arnie right after he’s plugged in to a fantasy machine at Rekall. Convenient.

Nobody to do with the film has given a straight answer as to how real the movie’s events are supposed to be, and film fans have been arguing to this day of it was all real as the movie shows it to be… or a meta narrative.

5: Robocop (1987)(Sci-fi Satire)

The movie that very almost got an X rating for its violence, also directed by Paul Verhoeven and even more biting in its meta-narrative than Total Recall.

The STORY of the movie is that future Detroit is a complete shithole so full of crime that the police force just can’t keep up. After a police officer named Murphy is blasted to fuck, his corpse is used by the CPO company to create a “robotic law enforcer” meant to be put on the street to handle crime. Robocop is his name, and if he proves to be effective, CPO is planning to mass produce them. During the course of the film, however, Murphy learns to regain his humanity through the help of his police partner, and uncover the scrupulous CPO company’s hand in the city’s crime wave.

So that’s the STORY of Robocop… but it’s not what Robocop is “About”.

Robocop is essentially an enormous criticism of Corporate America in a way that’s basically come true since the movie came out. Robocop is one of those rare movies that is BETTER now than it was when it came out.

OCP is essentially Apple or basically any current American company. Focused on rushing out products for the good press it’ll give them before ironing out the problems and bugs, and taking MASSIVE and inhumane shortcuts in development to meet a deadline, uncaring who gets hurt in the process.

This message is further highlighted by the fake commercials peppered into the movie, a very clear criticism of everything from America’s extreme focus on its military and racism of other countries, American manufacturer’s disregard for what is environmentally safe in favour of “Status Symbols” in its fuel guzzling cars, America’s obsession with defending people’s ownership through unethical violence, Medical and health advertised on television like a luxury product, as well as just the inane meaningless garbage that is/was American television.

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As a native of the Netherlands, Verhoeven pours so much cynicism and criticism towards American culture, both in the jokes as well as the core theme of the movie, that the film as a whole is less “Watch Robocop shoot his handcanon at bad guys” and more a dystopian nightmare, and finding humanity in it despite it all.

The only movie to top Robocop in its criticism of American culture would be “Starship Troopers” also directed by Verhoeven. But that movie is so depressing I almost can’t even reccomend it, despite it being GENIUS.

It’s the movie where the human race wins a war against giant bug aliens… and that’s the worst ending that could happen.

6: Enemy Mine (1985)(Sci-Fi drama)

*leans forward and smiles at you* hey there, friend. Do you like aliens? Do you like enemies to friends to lovers? Do you like found families? Do you like “Racism is bad” narratives? Do you like non-binary aliens who have no gender? Do you like romantic undertones between non-binary aliens played by a male actor and a cis white dude also played by a male actor?

Because BOY DO I HAVE THE MOVIE FOR YOU.

You think I’m joking with that description…. I am not. Not even a fucking little.

I very rarely see anybody talk about “Enemy Mine” and that’s a fucking crime because this movie is friggen AMAZING. The fact that it exists at all, let alone was made in the 80s is borderline absurd.

The movie takes place in the future. Humanity is in an intergallactic war with an alien race called the Dracs. Battles and skirmishes between the two races explode throughout the galaxy on various planets whenever the two species run into each other, and we follow our human main character Davidgewho, during a spaceship confrontation with the Drac, crash lands on an uninhabited planet, along with the Drac pilot named Jeriba Shigan.

The planet they crash on is a violent world battered by meteors and storms, which forces the two pilots to seek shelter in a cave near their crash site (and there was only one cave!). Despite them both needing shelter, the two absolutely despise each other, completely prepared to kill the other one the second they make a move. It’s a tense and paranoid stand off where each one waits for the other to move first. Neither of them do.

They find out that the planet is sometimes used by human miners for its rare ore (who use captured Drac as slave labour) but they only visit the planet periodically when the years- long bad weather settles. And so, Davidge decides to wait for rescue, despite knowing it may take several years before any human comes to the planet. Until then, he just has to survive and NOT get killed by the Drac he’s sharing the cave with.

So… the two wait. And a weird truce is called. And they wait… and time passes… and with literally no other life to turn to for company… well…. they start talking. First spitting and insulting each other. Then, slowly, learning more about each other. Then, slowly, sharing cultural information with each other, learning about their different species, learning about what each’s species have been telling them about the other. And well…. after several years… it becomes very hard to see the only living person you have been talking to for years as an enemy.

And then, after a while, Jeriba (nicknamed “Jerry” by Davidge) brings up a tiny problem.

He’s pregnant.

Davidge asks how the fuck that’s possible. Jerry explains his race has no gender or binary sex, and they produce asexually. So… ok…. Now you’ve got an alien you don’t FULLY trust who is pregnant and going to have a baby on this hostile planet.

…..oops.

Also, as time goes on another problem arises. The humans who will eventually show up to mine this planet use Drac as slave labour. This wasn’t ORIGINALLY a problem…. but it’s kinda become a problem now.

This movie is fucking amazing and nobody talks about it. Go watch it. Although be prepared for tears and feelings.

7: Galaxy Quest (1999)(Sci-Fi Comedy)

In modern day America (or rather 1999 America) there use to be a show called “Galaxy Quest” which DEFINITELY WAS NOTHING LIKE STAR TREK OK???

It was a very big show, but it eventually got cancelled. However, it is still considered a massively popular and influential tv show, enough to have its own conventions and dedicated fanbase. (AGAIN. IT’S NOT STAR TREK STOP SAYING THAT!)

The actors who starred in it many years ago now struggle to get work in other roles which they all deal with in different ways. Our Kirk Character played by Tim Allan is an egocentric selfish asshole who bathes in the “glory” of his role as the captain, despite it having been years, in complete denial that he’s a has-been and the fact that none of the other cast like him. Our Spock character is played by Alan Rickman who wants to know where his life went wrong. He use to be a REAL actor. He use to star in Shakespear plays. How did it come to this? He hates all of you. As well as Sigourney Weaver who had the important role of “Sexy Girl” in the show (a fact she resents) and a handful of others.

One day at a convention, they are approached by some super awkward and weird cosplayers, who ask them in-character if they could help their alien species, the Thermians, who are getting decimated by a warrior race lead by a General Sarris. As the Thermians are peaceful and have no experience in battles, they’ve come to ask the “Crew of the Starship Protector” to aid them. Alan Rickman agrees, believing it to be a promotional gig, and signs up his co-stars (only telling them after the fact which they resent him for)

The next day they play out their roles as they did on the show rather unenthusiastically, ordering the Thermians to simply shoot at General Sarris to defeat him, and then take them home.

Things turn complicated tho when the Thermians show up again and say “uhm… it didn’t exactly work. general Sarris is still alive and killing out people.”

And then our motley crew find out… the Thermians are NOT actors. They are in fact a real alien race. An alien race who are unfamiliar with the concept of “lying”. Their species had picked up the radio waves from the Galaxy Quest TV show and, believing it to be a historical record, modeled their entire civilization after the show. And now they need the crew of the “Protector” to help them in the face of this threat that could wipe them out as a species.

So our washed-out has-been actors find themselves pretending to really be their characters in a real space mission to save an alien race. Which is kind of a problem considering they have no idea what they’re doing at any point during this adventure.

8: Terminator 2 (1991)(Sci-Fi action)

I could have put the first Terminator movie on here… but I didn’t. Beause although both are excellent I personally prefer the second one. You don’t really need to have seen the first one to understand the second one either. I saw the second one first and it’s pretty easy to follow since the first movie’s plot wasn’t that complex.

10 or so years ago, Sarah Conner was visited by a time traveler who revealed he was from the future, and that in 1997 an AI known as “Skynet” would launch all the world’s nukes, causing the human race to almost become extinct. But Sarah Conner is the mother who will one day give birth to John Connor, the human rebel leader who will one day vanquish the machines. The machines know this, and Skynet sent back a robot called a “Terminator” to kill Srah Connor before she can give birth to humanity’s last hope.

Fast forward to this movie, Sarah Connor has been put in a mental institution (for rather obvious reasons) and her son, John Connor now 10 years old, lives with his aunt and uncle and is what we call a “problem child”. With no father figure in his life and his mom “going nuts”, John is a kid who smokes, steals bikes and is constantly in trouble. Then, one day, a robot from the future shows up to kill him. An advanced NEW kind of terminator sent by the machines, made of liquid metal, it is another attempt by the machines to kill John Connor before he can grow up to be the rebel leader.

This time however, Humanity has sent someone else to protect John. The exact same model of Terminator who tried to kill his mother, repurposed and reprogrammed to protect John from this lethal machine.

John, being a child, has to cope with the fact that not only is a killer robot trying to murder him, but ALSO his “nuts” mom turned out to be right. And he also starts developing a weird relationship with the robot sent to protect him. Looking for some kind of father figure to fill that hole in his life.

Although the first Terminator might have been more impactful in terms of visuals and ideas, the second Terminator is the one people remember as a movie. This is where “Hasta La Vista Baby” come from. This is where “Made from Liquid Metal” comes from. This is where THIS comes from

and where this comes from

and this

I don’t know if I can call it a BETTER movie than the first Terminator… …except it kinda is…. And one of the very few sequels where it ended up having more of a cultural impact than its predecessor.

9: Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan (1982)(True Sci-Fi)

One upon a time there was a show called “Star Trek”. It then had a movie which did kinda of ok at the box office but many thought was rather boring.

And then they made Star Trek 2.

Set several years after the original show, where all the main characters are off living different lives. Kirk is an admiral working on Earth behind a desk. Spock is a training instructor to students who will one day be pilots and crewmembers in the Federation. The rest of the Enterprise’s former crew are all scattered across the Federation, either on Earth or on other Starships.

Far off in space, a Federation ship is looking for a dead planet to test a brand new technologcal creation called the “Genesis Device”. While doing so, they find Khan and his crew, who 15 years ago were left on a lifeless planet by Kirk after they tried to take over the Enterprise for use in Khan’s mad plans revolving around Genetic engineering. Khan and his crew take over the ship and learn of this “Genesis Device” with its power to destroy all life when unleashed on a living plan. Khan only has one goal in his mind; Revenge.

While on a 3 week long training mission under Kirk and Spock, the Enterprise picks up a distress signal, and go to investigate.

This movie honestly has no right to be as good as it is. Even if you have 0 knowledge of Star Trek (as I did when I first watched it) it makes complete and perfect sense on its own, and its extremely easy to understand what’s happening and why. It helps if you’re familiar with the characters, but the film on its own portrays their friendships and relationships with each other so perfectly that you completely buy every scene with them together, and WHY they’re friends. And how LONG they’ve been friend, without having to watch seasons and seasons worth of episodes to catch up. You don’t even need to watch the first Star Trek movie.

The film is a story about revenge… but it’s main core theme is about grief. Grief in many forms. Khan’s grief over the death of his wife which he blames Kirk for and his burning fiery hatred. Kirk’s grief as an aging space captain, unable to cope with himself growing old and the fact that he never truly learned how to handle loss, as someone who ALWAYS believes there is a way to save the day. Grief over lost relationships with his ex-lover and a grown son he never knew about and lost an entire relationship with.

Despite being about spaceships in space shooting at each other and long drawn out tension filled scenes between Kirk and Khan, it’s a movie about mortality, and the need to face it.

10: The Last Starfighter (1988)(Sci-Fi Adventure)

I could have put many things down for “Sci Fi movie about having an adventure”. I could have put ET or Explorers or Flight of the Navigator, but I decided to put The Last Starfighter. Even though ET may be the better known adventure film, it’s also the movie most people will have already seen, and Flight of the Navigator might look better, but it’s story is far weaker. So Last Starfighter it is.

In backwoods tiny-ass American town there lives completely normal teenager Alex Rogan. He doesn’t have that much going for him. He lives in a trailer with his mom and younger brother and has just recently had a scholarship rejection. Frustrated with his life and with little else to do in the trailer park, Alex spends most of his time playing the only arcade machine called “The Frontier”. After a lot of play and effort, Alex manages to get the high score on the machine.

After doing so, he is approached by the creator of the machine called Centauri, who is there to offer him a ride in his fancy car as a prize for holding the grand score. Having been taunted by the other teens around the area, Alex decides to take Centauri up on his offer, only to get abducted. And not in the “Teenager kidnapped by a creep” kind of way, but the alien kind of way.

It turns out there is a very real intergalactic war going on between Rylan Star League and the Ko-Dan Empire. And the arcade machine had been placed on Earth as a sort of recruitment tool for new pilots to fly for Rylan Star League.

Given the chance to actually have something happen in his Life, Alex has to learn how to be a Starfighter with the help of Centauri who reveals himself to be an alien, and the rest is simpy fighting the Ko-Dan Empire and saving the day.

Most notably, The Last Starfighter’s space battles were all done using early CG and it has… .not exactly aged that well tbh.

But is still incredibly impressive for 1988 and helped paved the way for special effects, leading to their peak in Jurassic Park in 1993. But although the CG might be why the movie is important to the genre on a technical level, the reason most people remember this movie is nostalgia in its purist form.

Who wouldn’t want to be so good at a video game that aliens come and give you a spaceship and ask you to save the galaxy?

I personally find the scenes on Earth without the CG to be the better parts of the movie, but it does what it sets out to do. To be a sci fi adventure film for teenagers and kids to watch and enjoy and see the hero win. Uncomplicated, fun, and easy to digest as a movie.

I was gonna leave it at that but I gotta add one more

11: 2010: The Year we make Contact (1984)(pure Sci-Fi)

in 1968, a year before America landed on the moon, Stanley Kubrick made the groundbreaking movie “2001: a Space Odyssey”. The movie is a sort of horror movie in space, but also not quite. It tells the story of an enormous black rectangular monolith being found on the moon in the year 2001. Upon human astronauts touching it, it sends off a signal into space. Not long afterwards, another monolith, this one more than several kilometers in size appears orbiting Jupiter.

A crew of 5 men and an AI computer are sent to investigate. But the AI, called the HAL 9000 goes mad and kills off all the crew except for one, named David Bowman, who takes the HAL 9000 offline before leaving the spaceship and entering the Monolith.

The original movie is a masterwork of film, suggesting that the monoliths are responsible for jumpsarting human evolution. But it is also a very SLOW film. Famously taking 40 minutes before the first line of dialogue is spoken. And its horror of distrusting computers maybe be seen as rather old fashioned by today’s standards.

Then in 1984 they made a sequel. 2010 takes place 9 years after the first movie (obviously). Several American astronauts and scientists are approached and recruited for a secret mission joint sponsored by America and the Soviet Union. Their mission is to travel to the long abandoned space station, find what information was retrieved from the monolith, and try and discover what caused the HAL 9000 to malfunction. Time is of the essence as the abandoned space station will crash on Jupiter’s moon Io soon. The Soviets want to know what caused the disaster, but they need the Americans’ help to get into the space station, and an uneasy joint mission is formed, lead by Dr Floyd who was in charge of NASA when the original disaster occurred and had since been disgraced, but who would prove the best person to find out what happened to cause the disaster.

The movie, although perhaps slow by modern standards, moves at a much better pace than the original, and although you could say its plot is more basic, it’s also easier to follow and understand. There are moments of extreme tension from multiple areas. Reactivating the HAL 9000 and having to try and NOT repeat whatever it was that caused it to murder the original crew. The time limit before the space station is set to crash on Io, the mystery of what happened to David Bowman. The presence of the silent monolith orbiting Jupiter. And the seemingly unimportant political differences between the American crew and the Russian crew, despite being hundreds of thousands of miles away from Earth.

It also has some of the most incredible space cinematography I’ve seen in a film. Rather than the modern depiction of space in movies as a swirl of navy and stars and colourful nebulas, the space of 2010 is pitch black, with endless stars and enormous looming planets in the foreground, and nothing but a wall between you and the endless void.

Anyway those are my reccomendations.

Please consider donating to my kofi…. this took like 4 or 5 hours to write.

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#C-Puff answers #long ass post #Sci fi #movies #film recommendations #aurora-bloorealis

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ljones41 · 4 years

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"STAR WARS: EPISODE IX - THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" (2019) Review

"STAR WARS: EPISODE IX - THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" (2019) Review Despite its success at the box office, the second film in the Disney STAR WARS Sequel Trilogy, "STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII - THE LAST JEDI", proved to be something of a publicity disaster. Many film critics loved it. An even greater number of moviegoers disliked it. Many have attributed this schism within the STAR WARS fandom as a contributing factor to the box office failure of "SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY". To regain the universal love of the fandom, Disney Studios and Kathleen Kennedy of Lucasfilm brought back J.J. Abrams, who had directed "STAR WARS: EPISODE VII - THE FORCE AWAKENS", to handled the trilogy's third entry, "STAR WARS: EPISODE IX - THE RISE OF SKYWALKER".

Disney Studios and Lucasfilm heralded "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" as not only the end of the franchise's Sequel Trilogy, but also the end of the Skywalker family saga, which began under George Lucas. The 2019 movie began a year after "THE LAST JEDI". The Resistance under Leia Organa has been hiding from the ever growing threat of the First Order, which has been ruled by her son, Kylo Ren aka Ben Solo. Leia has also been training Force acolyte Rey, while orchestrating the Resistance's attempts to rebuild the organization and form contacts with other worlds and factions throughout the Galaxy. However, the film's opening crawl reveals that Emperor Sheev Palpatine is still alive, despite being tossed down the second Death Star's reactor shaft by Anakin Skywalker aka Darth Vader, while being electrocuted in "STAR WARS: EPISODE VI - RETURN OF THE JEDI". Palpatine vows revenge against the Galaxy for its rejection of him and his power. Leia charges Poe Dameron, Finn and Rey to search for Palpatine and destroy him. Kylo Ren also seeks Palpatine with the intent to kill the latter and maintain his own supremacy of the First Order. Kylo Ren eventually manages to find Palpatine on the remote planet of Exegol. He learns that his former master, Snoke, had merely been a puppet of Palpatine. And the former Emperor wants him to find Rey and kill her in order to remove any possible threat to the resurgence of the Sith Order. When I learned that J.J. Abrams would return to the "STAR WARS" franchise to conclude the Sequel Trilogy, my reactions were mixed. On one hand, I disliked his handling of "THE FORCE AWAKENS". On the other hand, I completely loathed what Rian Johnson had done with "THE LAST JEDI". And when Abrams had promised to do right by the Finn character, which had been so badly mishandled by Johnson . . . well, some part of me did not know whether to welcome Abrams' return or be leery of it. There were aspects of "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" that I liked. I was impressed by Dan Mindel's cinematography for the movie, especially in scenes that featured the planet of Pasaana. I thought Mindel did an excellent job of utilizing the country of Jordan for those scenes, as shown below:

I was also impressed how Mindel shot the visual effects for the last duel between Rey and Kylo Ren among the second Death Star ruins on the Endor moon. Some of the film's action sequences struck me as pretty memorable, thanks to Abrams' direction, Mindel's cinematography and stunt coordinator Eunice Huthart. I am referring to those scenes that feature the heroes' occasional encounters with the First Order on Psaana and aboard the First Order star ship. I was also relieved to see the trilogy's three protagonists - Rey, Finn and Poe Dameron - and Chewbacca spend a great deal of the movie together. The four characters managed to create a pretty solid dynamic, thanks to the performances of Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac and Joonas Suotamo and it is a shame that audiences never got a chance to experience this dynamic in the trilogy's other two films. There was an aspect of the film's narrative that delivered a great deal of satisfaction to me. It is a small matter, but involved Rey's Jedi training. I am very relieved that Abrams finally allowed Rey to receive substantial training from a mentor, who happened to be Leia. A year had passed between "THE LAST JEDI" and "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". Rey's first scene established that Leia had been training her during that year. The movie also established in a flashback that Leia had received her training from her brother Luke Skywalker. Why did I find this satisfying? Most of Luke's own Jedi training had also occurred during the period of a year - between the events of "STAR WARS: EPISODE V - THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK" and "RETURN OF THE JEDI". And during this period, he had received his training from . . . you know, I have no idea on how Luke managed to complete his training. Even after so many years. To this day, it is a mystery. And this is why I am grateful that Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio had made it clear that Leia had continued Rey's training between "THE LAST JEDI" and "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". The performances featured in the movie struck me as pretty solid, especially from the leads - Ridley, Boyega, Isaac and Adam Driver. The movie also featured solid, yet brief performances from returning cast members such as Kelly Marie Tran, Domhnall Gleeson, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Billie Lourd, Lupita Nyong'o, and the late Carrie Fisher. Dominic Monaghan, Naomie Ackie, Keri Russell and Richard E. Grant all made nice additions to the trilogy. It was great to see Billy Dee Williams reprise his role as Lando Calrissian. He was one of the bright spots of this film. Hell, it was even nice to see Denis Lawson as Wedge Antilles again, despite his brief appearance. But if I must be honest, I was not particularly blown away by any of them - including the usually outstanding Boyega. Actually, I take that back. There was one cast member who provided a moment of superb acting. I refer to Joonas Suotamo, who did an excellent job in conveying a true moment of grief and despair for Chewbacca's character in the film's second half. But I do have a complaint about one particular performance. And it came, from all people, Ian McDiarmid who portrayed the surprisingly alive Emperor Palpatine. How can I put this? This Palpatine seemed like a ghost of his former self. No. Wait. That was phrased wrong. What I meant to say is that McDiarmid's portrayal of Palpatine in this film seemed like an exaggeration in compare to his performances in the Original and Prequel Trilogy films. Exaggerated . . . ham-fisted. I found McDiarmid's scenes so wince-inducing that I could barely watch them. However, aware of McDiarmid's true skills as an actor, I finally realized that his bad performance may have been a result of J.J. Abrams' direction. The latter's failure as a director in Palpatine's scenes and failure to visualize the character as a subtle and manipulative villain really impeded McDiarmid's performance. Unfortunately, McDiarmid's performance was not my only problem with "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". I had a host of others. Many film critics have bashed J.J. Abrams for trying to reject what Rian Johnson had set up in "THE LAST JEDI". I find this criticism ironic, considering that Johnson had rejected a great deal of what Abrams had set up in "THE FORCE AWAKENS". Not that it really matters to me. I disliked "THE FORCE AWAKENS". I disliked "THE LAST JEDI". And if I must be brutally honest, I disliked "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". Like the other two films, I thought the 2019 movie was pretty bad. My first problem with "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" was its main narrative. Basically, the entire story revolved around the heroes and the First Order's search for the now alive Palpatine. The film's opening crawl pretty much announced to movie audiences that Palpatine was alive without bothering presenting this revelation as a surprise. It is simply the old case of "tell and not show" that has hampered a great number of fictional works throughout time. I believe this narrative device especially does not suit a plot for a motion picture or a television series, because it comes off as a cheat. It is lazy writing. Worse, most of the main characters spend a great deal of the movie searching for Palpatine. And when they finally discover him, no one bothered to ask how he had escaped death after being allegedly killed by Anakin Skywalker aka Darth Vader in "RETURN OF THE JEDI". How did Palpatine survive being tossed to his death, while being electrocuted by Force lightning? Well, STAR WARS fans finally learned the truth in the film's novelization written by Rae Carson. The only major character who immediately managed to find Palpatine was Kylo Ren, who used a Sith wayfinder . . . or compass. Meanwhile, Rey, Finn, Poe and Chewbacca had to resort to following clues to lead to first a Sith dagger, and later, a Sith wayfinder - traveling from one planet to another at a dizzying speed. This whole search for a wayfinder and Palpatine struck me as unnecessarily rushed. I do not think it is a good thing when a person complains about the fast pacing of a movie with a 142 minutes running time. For me, this exposed the hollow nature of the movie's narrative. As I had earlier stated, the majority of the film's narrative is centered around the protagonists' determination to find Palpatine. A part of me wonders how did the Resistance and the First Order had planned to kill him, once he was discovered. And yes, the First Order's leader, Kylo Ren, also wanted Palpatine's dead. But how did any of them plan to kill him? The movie never conveyed any of the other characters' plans. Worse, this search for Palpatine had transformed the movie into some space opera version of both the INDIANA JONES and NATIONAL TREASURE movie franchises. Was that why Abrams had decided to expose Palpatine's return or resurrection in the film's opening crawl? So he could have his major characters embark on this "Indiana Jones" style hunt for Palpatine from the get go? Or relive the whole "map to Luke Skywalker" search from "THE FORCE AWAKENS" that proved to be so irrelevant? Well guess what? The "Search for Palpatine" proved to be equally irrelevant. Watching Rey, Finn, Poe and Chewbacca hunt down artifacts that would lead them to Palpatine was one of the more ridiculous aspects of this film. I felt as if I had watched a hybrid STAR WARS/INDIANA JONES/NATIONAL TREASURE movie. It was fucking exhausting. Returning to Palpatine, I was unpleasantly shocked to learn that during the thirty years he was missing, he had created a new fleet of Star Destroyers, each ship equipped with a planet-killing laser. Thirty years. Is that how long it took Palpatine (or his clone) to create a fleet of planet killing Star Destroyers? Is that why he had taken so long construct these ships? If one Star Destroyer can destroy a planet, why did he bother to wait so long to use any of them to re-take the Galaxy? Three decades? I wish I could say more, but I do not see the point. Is a Star Destroyer strong enough to be used as a "base" for a laser powerful enough to destroy a planet?

I have also noticed that the lightsaber duels featured in "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" . . . well, they were bad. Quite a travesty, if I must be honest. I have never been that impressed by the lightsaber duels in the Sequel Trilogy, but even I must admit that Kylo Ren's duels with both Finn and Rey in "THE FORCE AWAKENS" were somewhat better than the Obi-Wan Kenobi/Darth Vader duel in "STAR WARS: EPISODE IV - A NEW HOPE". But after the 2015 movie . . . dear God. Rey and Kylo Ren's fight against Snoke's guards in "THE LAST JEDI" struck me as something of a joke. But Rey and Kylo Ren's duels in "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" were simply abysmal. Dan Mindel's cinematography and the movie's visual effects team could do nothing to hide the laughable nature of the duels. Both Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver seemed to spend a great deal of their time slashing at each with no semblance of swordsmanship whatsoever. Where is Nick Gillard when you need him?

Not surprisingly, "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" revealed a number of Force abilities that appeared for the first (or second time) in the STAR WARS franchise. The Force bond between Rey and Kylo Ren, which was created by Snoke in the previous film; allowed the First Order leader to snatch a necklace from the Resistance fighter's neck in a violent manner - despite the fact that the pair was thousands of miles from each other. And in another scene, while Rey faced Palpatine and Kylo Ren faced the Knights of the Ren, she was able to hand over a lightsaber to him - despite being miles apart. How did they do this? I have not the foggiest idea. I do not even understand how Abrams and Terrio managed to create this ability in the first place. And frankly, I find it rather stupid and implausible. Force healing. For the first time in the history of the franchise, a Force user has the ability to heal. How did this come about? I have not the foggiest idea. If this had been the case during the events of the Prequel Trilogy, chances are Anakin Skywalker would have never become a Sith Lord. The Force healing ability made its debut in the Disney Plus series, "THE MANDALORIAN" . . . I think. However, Kylo Ren had the ability to use Force healing. So did Rey. I do not know who taught them or how . . . fuck it! I will just treat this as another plot device that came out of Lucasfilm's ass. "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" also revealed that the "resurrected" Palpatine had the ability to transfer one person's essence into the body of another. How? More contrived writing.

Speaking of contrivance, there is the matter of one Leia Organa. Although a part of me still believes Lucasfilm should have killed off Leia Organa in "THE LAST JEDI", in the wake of Carrie Fisher's death a year before the film's release; I must admit that Abrams did an admirable job in utilizing old footage of the actress from "THE FORCE AWAKENS", digital special effects and Billie Lourd as a body double for some of Leia's scenes. But I hated the way Leia was finally killed off. It was similar to Luke's ludicrous death in "THE LAST JEDI". I HATE how Disney Studios and Lucasfilm portray the Force as some kind of energy that can kill an individual if it was used too long or too hard. As if the Force user was some kind of goddamn battery. I really hate that. And this is why I dislike Leia's death just as much as I disliked Luke's. In fact, this movie seemed to be filled with contrived writing. As for the Rebel Alli . . . I mean the Resistance, I noticed that their numbers had grown since the end of "THE LAST JEDI". Had Leia managed to recruit new members for the Resistance's cause during the year between the two films? If so, "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" did not hint one way or the other. I mean there were barely enough Resistance members to crowd the Millennium Falcon in the last film's finale. And the narrative for "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" seemed to hint that aside from Maz Kanata, hardly anyone new had bothered to join the Resistance during that year between the two films. So . . . if this is true, why did the number of Resistance members seemed to have tripled during that year between the two movies? Among the new members is one Beaumont Kin, portrayed by "LOST" alumni Dominic Monaghan. Speaking of characters - the arcs for the major characters have proven to be as disastrous as those featured in "THE FORCE AWAKENS" and especially "THE LAST JEDI". I was surprised to see Maz Kanata as a member of the Resistance. Her recruitment into the organization was never seen on screen. Even worse, the former smuggler and tavern owner was basically reduced to a background character with one or two lines. Actress Lupita Nyong'o's time was certainly wasted for this film. Although I thought Rose Tico was a promising character, I never liked how Rian Johnson had used her as a very unnecessary mentor for Finn in "THE LAST JEDI". However, my hopes that J.J. Abrams would do her character justice in "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" proved to be fruitless. In this film, Rose had been reduced from supporting character to minor character, who spent most of her appearances interacting with Monaghan's Beaumont Kin in three or four scenes. What a damn waste! Speaking of waste . . . poor Domhnall Gleeson. His character, General Armitage Hux, was another character whose presence was wasted in "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". Audiences learned in the film's second half that he had become a mole for the Resistance, supplying the group information on the First Order's movements. The problem with this scenario is that film had Hux explained that he was simply betraying his leader, Kylo Ren. But his reason for this betrayal was never fully explained, let alone developed. Harrison Ford returned in a brief cameo appearance as the ghost of Han Solo. Wait a minute. Let me re-phrase that. Ford returned as a figment of Kylo Ren's imagination . . . as Han Solo. How was his performance? Unmemorable. "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" also featured a good number of new characters. Probably too many. I have already mentioned Resistance fighter Beaumont Kim. Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio also introduced Jannah, a former stormtrooper who had deserted from the First Order like Finn. When she was introduced, I had assumed that Finn's background would finally be explored. Never happened. Worse, Abrams only allowed Jannah - a new character - to speculate on her background in one line spoken to Lando Calrissian. And nothing else. Next, there was Zorri Bliss, a smuggler and former paramour of Poe Dameron's, who provided the Resistance with information on how to interpret the Sith dagger in their possession. Aside from this task, Bliss managed to miraculously survive the destruction of Kijimi, her homeworld to participate in the final battle against Palpatine and the First Order. Through her, audiences learned that Poe was a former spice smuggler . . . a drug smuggler. More on this, later. And finally, we have Allegiant General Enric Pryde, who came out of no where to become Kylo Ren's top commander. It occurred to me that Pryde turned out to be the Sequel Trilogy's General Grievous. I love the Prequel Trilogy, but I never liked Grievous. He should have been introduced a lot earlier than the Prequel Trilogy's last film. And Enric Pryde should have been introduced earlier than "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". It would have made his brief conflict with Hux a lot more believable. I read somewhere that the character of Kylo Ren aka Ben Solo is the most popular in the Sequel Trilogy. I am a firm admirer of actor Adam Driver and I thought he gave a solid performance as Kylo Ren. But . . . the character has never been a favorite of mine. I could complain that Kylo Ren is bad written, but I can honestly say the same about the other major (and minor) characters. Yet for some reason, Lucasfilm, a good number of the STAR WARS and media seemed to think the stars shined on Kylo Ren's ass. I hate it when the glorification of a story or character is unearned and then shoved down the throats of the public. In "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER", Kylo Ren's character arc proved to be just as rushed and full of writing contrivances as his relationship arc in "THE LAST JEDI". Honestly. Unlike Anakin Skywalker in the Original Trilogy, Kylo Ren's redemption was never properly set up in "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". It merely sprung up in the film's last third act so that Abrams (the unoriginal storyteller that he is) could allow him to mimic his grandfather's arc. Looking back on Kylo Ren's character, he should have continued his arc from the end of "THE LAST JEDI" - as the main villain. Instead, Abrams and Lucasfilm brought back Palpatine so they could have Kylo Ren repeat Anakin's arc and avoid dying as the film's Big Bad. This decision only brought about bad writing. And then we have Poe Dameron. In some ways, Poe proved to be the worst written character in this trilogy. It almost seemed as if Lucasfilm, Abrams and Rian Johnson did not know what to do with him. His death was initially set up in "THE FORCE AWAKENS" and he spent most of that film off-screen, only to make a miraculous re-appearance near the end, with no real explanation how he had survived the crash on Jakku. In "THE LAST JEDI", Johnson had transformed Poe into some hot-headed Latino stereotype, who questioned the decisions of the Resistance's two female leaders - Leia and Admiral Holdo. And "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" made another revision to Poe's character. The movie revealed that Poe had a past romance with the smuggler Zorri Bliss and was a spice runner (drug smuggler). How quaint. Abrams and Terrio took the only leading character in the Sequel Trilogy portrayed by a Latino actor and transformed him into a drug lord. Where the two writers watching "NARCO" or old reruns of "MIAMI VICE" when they made this decision to Poe's character? God only knows. I do know that in my eyes, this was another mark of racism on Lucasfilm's belt. Speaking of racism . . . what on earth happened to Finn? Following Rian Johnson's shoddy treatment of his character in "THE LAST JEDI", J.J. Abrams had assured the franchise's fans that he would do justice to Finn. And he failed. Spectacularly. Did Finn even have a character arc in "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER"? The former stormtrooper spent most of the film either participating in the search for Palpatine, while keeping one eye on the constantly distracted Rey, like some lovesick puppy. He seemed to lack his own story in this film. "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" could have provided the perfect opportunity for Lucasfilm to further explore his background as a former stormtrooper. With the creation of Jannah, I thought it would finally happen. Instead, the movie focused more on Jannah's questions about her origins. And Lucasfilm and Abrams wasted the chance to even consider at subplot regarding Finn and the First Order's stormtroopers. Boyega also spent most of the film hinting that he had something important to tell Rey. Many believe he was trying to confess that he loved her. That is because the movie DID NOT allow him to finally make his confession. Even worse, audiences learned that he wanted to confess his suspicions that he might be Force sensitive. And Lucasfilm confirmed this. Why on earth could they NOT confirm Finn's Force sensitivity on film? Why? What was the point in keeping this a secret until AFTER the film's release? I also noticed one other disturbing aspect about Finn . . . or John Boyega. I just discovered that John Boyega had been demoted by Disney Studios and Lucasfilm from leading actor to supporting actor. Only this had happened a lot sooner that I thought. In the studio's Academy Awards campaign for "THE FORCE AWAKENS", it pushed Boyega for a Best Actor nomination. But in both "THE LAST JEDI" and "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER", the studio pushed him for a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Yet, for all three movies, Lucasfilm and Disney also pushed a white actor for Best Actor. They pushed Harrison Ford (along with Boyega) "THE FORCE AWAKENS". They pushed Mark Hamill for Best Actor in "THE LAST JEDI". Yet, both Ford and Hamill were clearly part of the supporting cast. And they pushed Adam Driver for Best Actor for "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". Hmmmm . . . Driver went from supporting actor to lead actor, while Boyega was demoted from lead actor to supporting actor. A few more notches in Lucasfilm/Disney's racist belt. God, I am sick to my stomach. And poor John Boyega. He was poorly misused by Lucasfilm, Disney Studios, Rian Johnson and J.J. Abrams. As for Rey . . . I am completely over her as a character. Although I found her Mary Sue qualities annoying, I found her arc in "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" a complete mess. The only good that came from her arc was the fact that Leia had trained her in the ways of the Force for a year. Otherwise, I had to grit my teeth and watch her behave in this chaotic manner throughout the entire film. Every time she and her friends were in the middle of some situation, she would get distracted by Kylo Ren's presence and break away. Why? So she could kill him . . . I guess. Apparently, killing Kylo Ren was more important to her than completing a mission for the Resistance. Why? I have no idea. The movie's narrative never explained this behavior of hers. And it gets worse. Rey eventually learns that she is Palpatine's granddaughter. Granddaughter. Palpatine managed to knock up some woman years ago and conceive a son after he had become Emperor. That son conceived Rey with her mother before dying. Palpatine, who had been alive all of these years, never bothered to get his hands on Rey . . . until this movie. Why? I have no idea. During Rey and Kylo Ren's final duel, she managed to shove her lightsaber blade into his gut. And then she used the Force to heal him. Why? Perhaps she felt guilty for nearly killing him. Who knows? Later, she is killed by Palpatine (who could not make up his mind on whether he wanted her alive or dead) before Kylo Ren Force healed her. And then she planted a big wet kiss on his pucker. Lucasfilm and Disney claimed that the kiss was an act of gratitude on her part. I did not realize that gratitude could be so sexual. Nevertheless, Lucasfilm and Disney ensured that the only leading male that Rey would exchange bodily fluids with was one who shared her white skin. Despite the fact that this . . . man had more or less abused her - mentally and physically - since "THE FORCE AWAKENS". There was no real development that led to this sexual kiss of gratitude. But I guess Disney and Lucasfilm were determined that Rey would not exchange a kiss with the two non-white men. Another notch on Lucasfilm/Disney's racist belt. Oh . . . and by the way, the film or Lucasfilm had established that Rey and Kylo Ren were part of some Force dyad. What is a Force dyad? Two Force-sensitive people who had created a Force bond, making them one in the Force. And this happened because Rey and Kylo Ren were grandchildren of Sith Lords. I have never heard of anything so ludicrous in my life, especially since it was established in "THE LAST JEDI" that Snoke - a creation of Palpatine, by the way - had created their mental bond. How he did that I have no idea. You know what? I could go on and on about "STAR WARS: EPISODE IX - THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". But I now realize it would take a goddamn essay to explain why I dislike this movie so much. I should have realized that J.J. Abrams' promises that he would fix the problems of "STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII - THE LAST JEDI" was worth shit in the wind. He, Chris Terrio, Disney Studios and Lucasfilm only made the Sequel Trilogy worse . . . as if that was possible. Not only was "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" a waste of my time, so was the entire Sequel Trilogy. And it wasted the acting skills of its talented cast led by Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac and Adam Driver for so many years.

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the-desolated-quill · 5 years

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Doctor Strange - Marvel Cinematic Universe blog (as requested by 1000+ followers)

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Before I start, I just want to say thank you again to all one thousand of my followers (still can’t believe it. That number just doesn’t seem real. LOL). And, as promised, here’s my review of Doctor Strange. I chose to review this movie to mark getting one thousand followers because people have been wanting me to do this review for a long time now (nearly three years in fact) and also because it was this movie, or rather my harsh criticism of this movie, that arguably cemented my reputation on this site. So here we go. Hope you feel it was worth the wait. Enjoy :)

2016. A year of ups and downs to be sure. While it will forever be infamous for the Brexit referendum result, Trump’s victory in the presidential elections and many much beloved celebrity icons dropping dead like fruit flies, it was also the year where two of my all time favourite comic book characters would finally make the jump to the big screen. The first was Deadpool. The second was Doctor Strange. Two characters I thought would never get movie adaptations on account of them both being somewhat niche products. Deadpool was a violent, anarchic parody of antiheroes like Wolverine and the Punisher, while Doctor Strange was a psychedelic fantasy story focused on existentialism and Zen philosophy as well as having its themes and influences deep rooted in various Asian cultures and mythologies. Not exactly mainstream. And yet, against all the odds, both movies found great success at the box office. The difference being Deadpool managed to stay true to the tone and themes of the source material, whereas Doctor Strange... oh dear.

Now my long term followers will be very much aware of my stance on this movie. At the time I refused to watch it due to the casting of Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One, viewing it as not only racist erasure, but also demonstrating a severe lack of understanding on the filmmaker’s part. East Asia isn’t just used as window dressing. It’s vitally important to the story as a whole, so discarding it would be incredibly moronic as well as deeply offensive. Now I’m not going to go into all the reasons why the whitewashing of the Ancient One is racist and why all the excuses Marvel gave at the time was bullshit as I’ve already explained these reasons ad nauseum various times before. If you’re curious, read Doctor Yellowface And The Bullshit Machine, where I explain it all in excruciating detail. Here I’m just going to say that this movie is racist. That’s not my opinion. It’s demonstrably, objectively, scientifically, factually and literally true. If you think otherwise, you’re an idiot. Period. Full stop. End of discussion. Do not pass Go. Do not collect £200. With this in mind, when I sat down to watch this for the first time, I expected to be angered and outraged by it throughout. But I wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a bad movie and a bad adaptation of Doctor Strange, but honestly the most remarkable thing about this movie is how unremarkable it is. Which is a problem in more ways than one, but now we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Lets start with the things I liked. Don’t worry. This won’t take long. There really isn’t that much to like about this film frankly. Even the bits I like have massive caveats to them.

My first shiny gold star has to go to Benedict Wong as Wong. Now as much as I love the comics, I’ll be the first to admit it has massive problems when it comes to how it presents Asian characters. So I’m pleased to report that Wong is the only aspect of the film that’s actually better than the source material. Whereas comic book Wong was Doctor Strange’s manservant, movie Wong plays more of a mentor role in Strange’s story. He’s the librarian of Kamar-Taj, guarding the sacred tomes, and is actually at a higher rank than Strange, which I love. It’s a good shift that refreshes the dynamic between them, and Benedict Wong’s deadpan delivery is exceptional. I just wish we could have spent more time with Wong and Strange. Maybe see Wong actually teach him something.

The second praiseworthy element of the film is the visual effects. This film was nominated for an Academy Award and... yeah, can’t argue with that. The CGI is fairly good for the most part. My favourite part of the whole film was when the Ancient One shows Strange the multiverse for the first time. The visual effects team clearly had a lot of fun coming up with weird and wonderful worlds that we only get a short tantalising glimpse of. (the dimension of hands gave me the shivers). This sequence came the closest to realising Steve Ditko’s vision in my opinion. Beyond that all we see for the rest of the movie is the poxy mirror dimension, which admittedly is cool at first, but quickly becomes dull and repetitive each time its trotted out. There’s even an entire fight sequence between Strange, Mordo and Kaecilius in a distorted version of New York, which would have been impressive if Christopher Nolan hadn’t done it first in Inception. And the less said about the technicolor monstrosity that was the Dark Dimension, the better.

Finally there’s Benedict Cumberbatch as Strange himself. I know some people were disappointed that Marvel didn’t racebend the character and I would have preferred that to, but if we must have a white guy in the role, I’m glad it’s Cumberbatch. He does a decent job in the role and there are moments where Strange almost leaps from the page and onto the screen.

Almost.

Because that’s the problem. Cumberbatch does the best he can, but he’s ultimately let down by the script. This film has a lot of issues, but by far the biggest is the title character. He may be called Doctor Strange, but he’s really Doctor Strange in name only. I was a massive fan of the comics growing up and I’m telling you this guy isn’t Doctor Strange. At least not the Doctor Strange I remember. And the weird thing is this seems almost by design. In order to show him to a mainstream audience, Marvel seem to have felt the need to completely sanitise the character, removing everything about him that made him unique and interesting in order to fit the expectations of the lowest common denominator.

Let me explain.

People often compare Strange unfavourably to Iron Man, and I can understand why to a certain extent. Both represent the epitome of white privilege and materialist obsession and their origin stories focus very heavily on criticising and deconstructing these inherently selfish and unlikable characters. Iron Man is about forcing a capitalist industrialist to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions, whereas Doctor Strange is about forcing an egocentric man to care about the wider world outside of his own bubble of privilege. Both may sound similar, but there’s a key difference between the two. Iron Man’s origin revolves around responsibility whereas Doctor Strange’s origin revolves around relativity. This needs to be understood if you’re going to attempt to adapt Strange and director Scott Derrickson doesn’t seem to understand that at all.

The fatal mistake Derrickson makes with this movie is that he’s trying to make Strange like Iron Man without fully understanding what made the first Iron Man movie good and what sets Strange apart. He’s clearly hit upon the arrogant, egocentric thing, but the problem is people exhibit arrogance and egocentricity in different ways. The comics understood this. Iron Man’s arrogance takes the form of this charismatic, devil may care kind of attitude, whereas Strange’s arrogance was more along the lines of an Ebenezer Scrooge type figure. Someone who’s cold and uncaring. Someone like...

Yeah! Someone like Dr Gregory House from the TV series House M.D.

See, if Iron Man is like Elon Musk, Doctor Strange is like House. Both are arrogant, but in different ways. So to see movie Strange acting all smug and making quips and one liners just didn’t feel right. Which is not to say Strange can’t be funny. The comics had their humorous moments, but it’s not the same kind of humour as Iron Man. Strange should be more cutting. More snarky. He needs to have more of a bite to him. Instead we get the poor man’s version of Robert Downey Jr.

But wait, because it’s actually worse than that. It’s not just Strange’s personality that’s different. Our perception of him is different too. The first Iron Man movie was extremely clear in how we should view Tony Stark. The gambling, the drinking, his lack of responsibility and the way he takes his friends and co-workers for granted. We’re clearly not supposed to like him. That’s why his character arc works. We’re seeing this selfish individual realise how selfish he is and try to make amends. Strange should be similar. He’s a callous arsehole who won’t lift a finger to help someone if the case isn’t interesting enough, seeing it as beneath him. So when the car accident occurs, him getting nerve damage in his hands feels less like a tragedy and more like karma. The universe punishing Strange for his selfish behaviour and forcing him to change. In the movie however, he doesn’t seem like that at all. In fact kind of the opposite. He doesn’t object to helping his ex girlfriend get a bullet out of a patient’s head and he seems to get on well with most of his colleagues, including his ex. Sure he’s a bit of a dick, but he still seems nice enough. The only time we see his Scroogeness come out is after the accident, at which point it’s hard to hate him even after he berates his ex because he’s a decent guy who’s understandably frustrated, which absolutely should not be the case. Strange is a bastard who cares for no one but himself. We’re not supposed to like him. But Marvel and Disney are so preoccupied about getting bums on seats that they’ve actually managed to strip away all the elements that make Strange Strange.

And then there’s the origin story itself, which the film gets completely wrong. Sure the basic elements are still there. Strange, in a last ditch effort to save his hands, travels East to see the Ancient One (except the Ancient One is now in Nepal instead of Tibet because of the Chinese market, but apparently they still can’t cast an Asian person as the Ancient One even though the film no longer has anything to do with Tibet and therefore there should be no issue. Marvel are racist dicks. Case closed), but beyond that everything is changed. In the comics, the Ancient One refuses to heal Strange’s hands because he’s a selfish arsehole who deserves no pity or help from anyone, but then when Baron Mordo tries to assassinate the Ancient One, Strange does the first selfless thing he’s ever done in his miserable life and tries to warn the Ancient One despite having his mouth magically sealed shut by Mordo. Then it’s later revealed that his mouth wasn’t sealed shut at all, and that the Ancient One knew all along Mordo was planning to assassinate him and was merely testing Strange, at which point he invites the good doctor to practice magic in order to stop Mordo in the future. In the movie however, Strange gets kicked out by the Ancient One only to then promptly get let back in after banging on their front door for several hours and gets taught all these spells despite showing no sign of selflessness or willingness to change whatsoever. Oh yeah, and Strange and Mordo are now total besties.

Do you see what I mean about this being a bad adaptation? There’s no longer any conflict. No character arcs. No one learns anything. Everything is just hunky dory and Strange is just magically a good person now. This is truly shit writing.

Everything about this movie seems to have been designed to be as bland and uncomplicated as possible. All the Asian influences and philosophies have been surgically removed to make way for a generic, knock-off Hogwarts for Dummies. The interesting plots and themes have been replaced with a by-the-numbers save the world plot. Even the lore has been simplified to an almost insulting degree. Take the Eye of Agamotto for instance. A powerful magical artefact created by and named after the most powerful sorcerer that ever lived.... reduced to a fucking Infinity Stone.

Oh and the Cloak of Levitation now has a mind and personality of its own because why the fuck not? Who wants to watch something intelligent or philosophical? Lets just make a shitty cross between Harry Potter and Mr. Bean.

And then... there’s the white saviour stuff.

Now I confess I haven’t read the comics for quite some time, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Strange didn’t have a photographic memory. Yet in the movie, that’s the convenient explanation we’re given for why Strange is somehow able to learn complex spells in a matter of days. Spells that are apparently meant to take years to learn, like astral projection and time manipulation. Now the comics had this problem too, what with proclaiming that Strange is not only the Sorcerer Supreme, but the most powerful Sorcerer Supreme that’s ever lived, as though his white skin were like the star power-up from Super Mario Bros, but the movie seems to go out of its way to double down on this bollocks. Oh sure, we see him struggle to create magic portals every now and then, but it doesn’t hide the fact that he’s somehow able to create mirror worlds and time loops despite having little to no training whatsoever. He’s like Rey from Star Wars. He can just pull any random super power out of his arse when the script requires him too.

So having completely botched Strange’s characterisation and journey, how are the rest of the supporting cast? Well like I said, I like this new Wong, even though he’s criminally underused. As for the other characters, it’s a pretty forgettable bunch.

Lets start with the elephant in the room. Tilda Swinton. Having heard all the excuses under the sun as to why Marvel and Disney simply had to cast a bald white woman wearing a bathrobe in an Asian role, I was expecting something pretty spectacular from Swinton, especially after all the praise critics gave her. Instead we get... well... a pretty dull character actually. In fact I’d go as far to say that this is the blandest and most uninspired performance I think I’ve ever seen Swinton give. There’s just nothing there. Now admittedly the Ancient One wasn’t all that complex or well developed in the comics neither, being little more than a racial caricature, but I thought the whole reason they whitewashed the character was to make him/her ‘enigmatic and ethereal.’ Instead we just get the same generic mentor figure we’ve seen dozens of times before. All the stuff about her tapping into the powers of Dormammu to increase her lifespan could have made her more interesting, but the film never fully capitalises on this revelation before she kicks the bucket.

Baron Mordo is pretty much just dead weight, with the great Chiwetel Ejiofor utterly wasted in the role. He’s essentially reduced to being yet another black sidekick for the white lead. Again, the comic book version isn’t all that great neither, but the movie replaces this camp pantomime villain with absolutely bugger all. We don’t get to see any real conflict between him and Strange until the very end and even then it doesn’t really make sense. Mordo is a stickler for rules and so gets pissy with Strange when he breaks the rules in order to save the world, to which I can only ask... what else could he have done? I didn’t see you come up with any bright ideas Mordo, you fucking moron.

Rachel McAdams... exists.

Seriously, why is she in this movie? Why does Doctor Strange need a love interest? Why not just wait and introduce Clea? I could get behind using an ex girlfriend to display how selfish and narcissistic Strange is (a bit cliche I admit, but this is an MCU film we’re talking about. I’m not exactly expecting Citizen Kane here), but as I said before, the two seem to get on quite well. And other than stitching up a stab wound, Christine Palmer pretty much does nothing throughout the majority of the film. So what is she even doing there?

Also it appears the film’s racism doesn’t just extend to Asian people because it turns out Christine Palmer is actually Night Nurse in the comics. The same mantle Claire Temple has, who appears in Marvel’s Netflix shows. Not only does this come off as quite alarmingly racist, it’s also just plain weird. For all their boasts about wanting to create a shared universe, Marvel seems to spend every opportunity it can find to keep the Netflix stuff at arms’ length, to the point where you question why they’re even in the same continuity in the first place. If Strange must have some human connection, why couldn’t it have been Claire Temple? For one thing, Claire’s character is much more interesting than Christine’s (and Rosario Dawson is a much better actor than McAdams. Sorry, but it’s true), and it would be a great opportunity to bridge the gap between the movies and Netflix shows without having to bog the narrative down with exposition. But as I’ve said numerous times in the past, Marvel are more interested in creating a BIG shared universe than a coherent one.

Finally there’s the villains. Nearly always the worst aspect of any MCU film and Strange is no different. We have Kaecilius, played by Hannibal’s Mads Mikkelsen whose performance is more wooden than Pinocchio, and Dormammu, played by Benedict Cumberbatch who seems to be competing with Andy Serkis as to who can play the most CGI/motion capture characters. Both, unsurprisingly, are shite. Kaecilius wants to save the world from death by allowing Dormammu to destroy it.

I don’t get it either.

So you’re probably wondering who was Kaecilius in the comics. I mean I’ve explained everything else, haven’t I? And honestly, I haven’t the faintest idea. Turns out he was a henchman of Baron Mordo who I completely forgot about because he barely ever shows up in the comics. So... they turned Baron Mordo into the black sidekick so that the villain could be played by a white guy. Oh. And guess what race Kaecilius is in the comics.

YYYYYep. He’s Asian. I guess all the Asian actors were sick that day, so they had to cast a white guy.

Oh and you’ll never guess what his backstory is. You’re right! He has none! Other than references to some tragedy, we know absolutely fuck all about him. Critics actually liked this movie?!?!

Oh and don’t get me started on the humour.

Kaecilius: “Mr...?”

Strange: “Doctor.”

Kaecilius: “Mr. Doctor?”

Strange: “No, it’s Strange.”

Kaecilius: “I guess so. Who am I to judge?”

Dear God, someone was paid to write that.

Then there’s the Big Bad Dormammu from the Dark Dimension. (Yes, the same Dark Dimension from Agent Carter and nope, that’s never referenced. In fact this doesn’t even look like the same Dark Dimension as the one from Agent Carter. Although, to be fair, I’d want to forget Season 2 happened as well considering how fucking terrible it was, but come on guys!). In the comics Dormammu is a mystical entity that has a quote ‘unnatural obsession with our material universe’. Could be interesting to explore. Oh but I forget, this is an MCU film. They don’t want interesting. They want safe. So instead we get a purple, floating CGI head and the generic destroyer of worlds archetype. (In fact Dormammu weirdly has more in common with Galactus than the actual Dormammu. Sometimes I wonder if anyone at Marvel Studios have ever even so much as glanced at one of their own comics before).

In conclusion, is this the worst film I’ve ever seen? Admittedly no. It’s not that bad. If you switch your brain off, I can imagine someone having a good time with this film. But you see that’s the problem. You shouldn’t have to switch your brain off to enjoy Doctor Strange. If anything the opposite is true. The comics, despite their faults, were intelligent, surreal and thought provoking, asking questions about our universe and our place within it. Steve Ditko (and only Steve Ditko. The late Stan Lee may have put pen to paper, but it was ultimately Ditko’s ideas and vision, which makes the gratuitous Stan Lee cameo in this film particularly galling to me) created something truly captivating in Doctor Strange. Despite the racial caricatures and white saviour tropes, I still love these comics because of how it explores the world and our relation to that world. How we are just small cogs in a massive and intricate machine. It’s truly groundbreaking and would influence many other comics to come. The Doctor Strange movie doesn’t even begin to do that. It won’t influence anyone. It won’t make anyone think or question their role in the cosmos. In fact, three years later, despite being a huge box office success, it’s largely been forgotten. And that’s a crying shame because Strange deserves so much more.

Doctor Strange may not be the worst comic book movie ever made, but it’s a terrible adaptation of the source material. Anything that made it unique or interesting was carefully removed with surgical precision under the guise of making it more progressive, when in reality they just wanted to make it profitable. But profitable doesn’t mean good, and Doctor Strange doesn’t even come close to being a good movie. I would love to have seen what a director like David Lynch or Ang Lee would have done with this psychedelic material. This movie could and should have been the most intelligent and surreal comic book movie that’s ever been made. A perfect opportunity to allow a visionary filmmaker to go wild and express themselves artistically. Instead it’s just another MCU movie. It’s such a shame.

And people wonder why I’m worried about Deadpool joining the MCU.

#doctor strange #marvel cinematic universe #review #spoilers

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