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vivalgi · 8 months

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I finally finished The Phantom Agent! I'm gonna try to write down my impressions and hopefully make up a somewhat coherent review. I played with male MC and and romanced female agent Gray, so it's going to be from MLW perspective. TL;DR version at the end.

When I first started reading TPA, I was quite intrigued - an action-adventure book with a confident seasoned spy as a main character. Seems like a perfect recipe for a simple man like me. The further I kept reading though, the more the book began to fall apart sadly.

Firstly, I'd like to start with the strongest aspect about the book for me which was the dynamic between the MC and his new partner, agent Samara Gray. We got a masculine leaning MC and a more feminine LI which is a rarity. Even in the game's dialogue files their default pronouns reflected that intention. So I have to thank PB for daring to try it out. I think it worked quite well and I've not managed to find anyone complaining that the MC acted too masculine or the LI too girly, like we, the guys, usually like to whine 🙊. So, I really do hope that however the book itself performed, it won't discourage PB from trying this in future books to change up things a little, even if it's just a casual romance story more oriented towards female readers.

Gray started off ice cold towards MC based on what she'd heard of him, so it seemed like a fun challenge to make her warm up to MC. I enjoyed the constant witty banter between them and that Samara always managed to fire back with her razor sharp tongue. The angst when they began catching feelings for each other was also quite pleasing. Of course, it's another single LI book where you can never fully escape the romance, so for those who don't like Gray it would feel like a chore to read through TPA.

Vivian was also a fun character. As a team member who always followed us on our mission, it seemed like a missed opportunity to turn her into an LI as well. She probably would have been more sidelined but still a great alternative for those who didn't feel the chemistry with agent Gray. When was the last time we got a nerdy weirdo LI anyway, especially a male or GOC one?

However, that's kind of where the positive stuff mostly ends. When I first heard the book's title, I imagined a serious and gritty spy book. A "phantom agent" sounds like a rogue spy who's been framed for a crime they didn't commit and now has to clean their name in a high stakes cat and mouse game. Unfortunately, TPA turned out to be more like a mix between the campiest James Bond movies and the later Fast and Furious movies. On steroids. It was so silly and weird, it sounded like the writers were trying to fit in every imaginable spy story cliché. I almost thought it was a parody like Austin Powers or Johnny English but the book tried to take itself too seriously for that comparison.

My biggest gripe were the action scenes. PB has never been good at writing that stuff but in a book that's all about fighting and chasing bad guys, it really stood out like a sore thumb. There was some silly physics defying action like MC turning around a motorcycle and keeping it moving in reverse or Gray using a falling billboard as a ramp. Then there's fighting scenes where the main characters always had time to run towards heavily armed enemies as if time had stopped. Like those stupid robots near the end who were pointing guns at us and had been tasked to kill us but for some reason they allowed us to run to them and easily knock them out. This all came off as a lack of care from the writers' side. It was weird that MC almost always preferred hand to hand combat, preferring to knock out his enemies instead of using firearms. I guess our spy didn't have the license to kill. It's not like this was a family friendly book preventing to write a main character who wouldn't shy away from shooting a bad guy's brains out (damn, now I miss the gore from WTD). Near the end I didn't even bother buying extra action scenes and just wanted to get over with that part.

Besides the usual action, I wasn't the biggest fan of the overreliance on otherworldly and futuristic tech. As a kid I always eagerly looked forward to Q showing Bond cool gadgets but I've long grown out of it. In this day and age when everyone can learn to create CGI robots at home, it's difficult to be amazed by this stuff. And while Vivian is cool as a character, her inventions played a too important role in my opinion, often acting as deus ex machina to save us from another sticky situation.

At first I was glad like most of us that we'd gotten a professional MC who's great at what they do for a change not another young and stupid rookie. Sadly, I was a bit disappointed by the end. He was supposed to be a seasoned spy, hardened by dozens of life threatening missions, yet during the story he was often stupidly clumsy, short sighted and forgetful of his surroundings, letting enemies to easily best him, one moment of which I talked about in a separate post. I guess he's another victim of writers making MCs do stupid things for the sake of the plot because they don't know other ways to make plot move, in the end ruining the immersion which is very important for interactive fiction.

When it comes to the big bad of TPA then the Architect wasn't the worst one PB has come out with lately (though the bar is extremely low). However, the way he's portrayed is too reliant on players buying diamond scenes to learn more about his character. Without them he'd probably be another one dimensional hateful villain. You really need to buy the extra scenes for him become more multifaceted, even almost compassionate because his backstory really is a sad one. He's still too much of a text book supervillain with a heart of ice and a hunger for world domination but that paywalled information adds some important depth to the Architect's character.

Let's also not forget every supervillain's compulsory sidekick, which in this book was the Contractor or should I say our dead but not actually dead (how original, right) ex-partner Rowan Salazar. I'm very conflicted about her character. She was supposed to be our MC's love of life, yet the story did nothing to make us love her more and when it was time for the "big" reveal, she acted all cold and cocky like she had never loved our character, as if it had all been stupid lie. Her character arc feels very underdeveloped. The story should have given us many glimpses to their past romance to make us feel more compassion towards Rowan, or reignite the love. Like with Vivian, it would have been another great opportunity for a romance path, a one more a kin to enemies to lovers. However, while the players have practically no chance to get to know her, we're forced to watch how MC is still weak for this seemingly despicable and unredeemable stranger and they kiss and we're given a chance to hook up. *Sigh* whatever, let's give the superficial horndogs a chance to screw another hot sprite, because 💎💎💎.

While we're at the topic of pounding sexy pixels then, like every proper Bond movie, our MC was also given chances to hook up with side characters. The first one, with nurse Lou, came out of nowhere, the proposition was like an intro from a p0rn movie. I prefer a longer build up and that's where hook-up with Alexis really shined. The wait and anticipation through the two chapters totally paid off. And like agent Gray, these two fling partners also seemed to be written in a more feminine way.

All in all, TPS was a book with great potential but ultimately didn't live up to the hype and fell a bit flat. The action was silly and over the top, lacking the sense of urgency and high stakes. The MC wasn't quite as competent as a seasoned spy should be. The enemies weren't the worst but still left a lot to be desired. The book still had plenty of fun moments to keep me invested but I wish it had been more like Mission Impossible and less like a parody on campy James Bond movies. For me the story was mostly reliant on the relationship with agent Gray who I quickly grew very fond of and I could say that despite TPS's shortcomings, my dear Samara definitely earns a spot among my favourite LIs.

#playchoices #pixelberry #choices stories you play #the phantom agent

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maoam · 3 years

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WHY HINATA IS NOT A GOOD CHARACTER

INTRODUCTION

I wanted to take a deeper look at Hinata’s character, considering there are a lot of claims about her out there, that she’s strong, that she’s kind, that she’s complex and relatable, that she’s the perfect woman and that she’s at least better than Sakura. I don’t really think so, and I’ll explain why. I’ll be focusing on canon, so no fillers or novels will be included in this post. I’ll say this as a warning, if you’re a fan of her character this probably won’t be something you’ll like. This will be tagged with the anti tags and put under read more so please do not complain if tumblr somehow puts this in the normal tags, it is not intentional. Also Sakura stans please don’t write lengthy comments about Sakura under this, I’m not a fan of her either and I’ll write about her later. Make your own post instead.

”HINATA IS STRONG AND THE BEST KUNOICHI”

Hinata is generally really bad as a shinobi and I’m not sure where the claims that she is strong come from. Hinata's entire character revolves around her being weak. This could have been fine if she actually developed, or if she found some other area for herself, yet she's mediocre at best and a waste of panels at worst, because she never becomes good or strong at anything. She’s not only physically weak from start to finish, but she’s also the equivalent of a damsel in distress. Everytime Hinata attempts to do something, she ends up failing, getting beaten up and having to be saved. She lost to her sister who is five years younger than her, which is what marked her as a failure in her clan. She tried to fight Neji in the chunin exams and ended up coughing up blood and losing her consciousness, and Naruto had to beat Neji for her. After Kabuto heals her fully, she spends the rest of part 1 either sleeping or missing in action. Very underwhelming.

If this had been only the beginning, it would have maybe been fine, but it’s a reoccuring pattern with her character. She throws herself in front of Pain, managing to do nothing but get one-paneled and almost killed. Even at the start of the war she had to be saved by Naruto. She tried to run to Naruto and tripped over a rock. Actually, she’s so weak she got Neji killed, when he had to jump in front of her so she wouldn’t get impaled. Why is she even in the front lines when she can’t fight? Even in Naruto the Last movie she had to be saved multiple times. In Boruto the movie she is still useless and reckless, leaving her daughter’s side to help Naruto, ending up defeated and having to be healed by Sakura once again.

I can’t say she’s mentally strong either. She has the personality of someone who hates conflict and tries to avoid it as best as they can, to the point of agreeing with others on everything, as Neji pointed out. Even without him saying it out loud, most of Hinata’s moments that aren’t her thinking about Naruto are her doing exactly this. This is not the personality of someone who is strong mentally. It’s the personality of someone who is too weak to have their own mind, someone who will go with the flow and is easily led and convinced. It can be dangerous the more you think about it. Hinata is also the bystander who never stands up for Naruto despite liking and admiring him. If she’s a compassionate girl, why isn’t she showing this by reaching out to Naruto and befriending him? Why doesn’t she show he’s not alone? Why is she only drawing inspiration from him? I don’t normally watch fillers, but there was one filler scene unrelated to Hinata where this girl says if you only look at the loser and do nothing, you aren’t much better than the oppressors, which probably wasn’t meant to be a call out for Hinata, but ended up being so anyway. Another thing that’s annoying is how she is berating herself often, yet doing nothing, it comes off as self-pity. Even in the Last movie, she is talking about how she must be a bad sister for knitting a scarf when her sister is in danger. Then why are you doing it and not stopping? Of course everytime this happens Naruto must cheer her up because she just can’t stop moping around and doing something herself.

Aside from all this, from the very beginning Hinata’s honor needed to be defended by Naruto because she couldn’t stand up for herself. Of course, after Naruto’s words she did stood up for a moment, and that was good, but it should have been a wake up call which altered her course. Instead, she kept doing the same she always did. If we take the Last movie into consideration, she’s still not strong enough to do anything even about her crush on Naruto. She needs genjutsu and Sakura to do the work for her. So even when it comes to the only thing she cares about 90 % of the time, which is Naruto-kun, she can’t do anything about it. That’s really sad.

”HINATA IS KIND AND SELFLESS”

There’s one mistake I see people make often, and that’s assuming characters that are quiet and shy are automatically kind. I wouldn’t say Hinata is as kind as the fandom makes her out to be. She simply comes off that way because you don’t really see her have her own opinions or disagree with the other characters. Hinata’s shyness on the other hand is most of the time a fetishized quirk to appeal to certain subset of fans. Her shyness doesn’t stop her from taking exams or hanging around Shino and Kiba, or talking to characters other than Naruto. She also has enough attitude to rub Neji’s status as a house slave in his face during their match, but because she stutters Naruto-kun every five minutes she’s supposedly kind. Kindness is shown through actions, not through standing around and stuttering. For comparison, we see Ino befriend an unpopular kid like Sakura, and give her confidence. That’s an act of kindness. Did Hinata ever cared about helping the branch members in any way? No.

She's supposedly "kind" but like I mentioned before she never shows this kindness by standing up for Naruto, or reaching out to him. She simply stares at him behind a tree and draws inspiration from his suffering. The only time she can actually stand up is to selfishly confess her love and die. She even said she felt like being selfish, and like I said she knew there was nothing she could do, she was told she’d only be in the way. She came there only to confess and commit suicide. This actually reminds me of another anime where this female character, after being unable to receive a male character’s love killed herself in front of him and said ”now you’ll never forget me”.

In the end, she cares about nothing but her own hormonal urges. Hinata tried to help Naruto cheat to pass an exam at the risk of disqualifying her whole team. This is the first individual action we see her character take. Did she consider Shino and Kiba during that moment? No, she didn’t even have an inner conflict on whether she should do this, whether it’s right towards her teammates. Even Naruto considers he might get Hinata, Sasuke and Sakura all in trouble if he accepts Hinata’s offer, which is why he doesn’t do it. Then when Hinata wonders if she can cheer for Naruto during his and Kiba’s match, she thinks Kiba might get mad. It’s more about how Kiba views her rather than whether she should cheer for Kiba because they are in the same team and should support each other. During the Pain attack, she left an injured shinobi, who couldn’t move, to go to Naruto, even when said shinobi told her she would only be in Naruto’s way. She didn’t try to save people, she simply wanted to confess and act in front of Naruto. This is about a threat to the entire village, which includes her comrades and her sister and she’s thinking only about her romantic feelings towards a guy she had maybe two conversations with and who barely remembers she exists. How is she better than Sakura? War arc really was the icing on the cake that Hinata’s character is only about Naruto. We should not forget the infamous ”Naruto-kun’s hand is so big… so manly...” is that really the right time to be thirsty? When Neji just died? Shikamaru mentions that he could help out Naruto as a right-hand man and then Hinata thinks “I-I want to be by Naruto-kun’s side too.” Then there’s of course the scene where she starts running to Naruto, leaving her post and teammates, even when Naruto is a mile away and already in the hands of medical ninjas, and even that ends up her pathetically tripping over a rock. Kiba has to remind her to use her byakugan because she is too busy gushing about Naruto. Eventually her only last line is “Naruto-kun”, when everyone is put into IT. It’s like a parody by this point. She doesn’t have any concern for her sister, her father, her teammates, Kurenai or her baby. It’s just “Naruto-kun” like it always is. Even in the Last movie, she is knitting a scarf for Naruto during the mission where they’re supposed to save her sister. Who brings a scarf on a mission? Why is she thinking about her romantic gift to Naruto so much she has to take it with her on a mission which focus is saving her sister? She even looks more devastated when Toneri tores the scarf apart than she ever does for Hanabi’s sake. It’s just silly and selfish.

”HINATA IS A COMPLEX CHARACTER”

Is she complex though? Her development goes from standing behind a tree looking at her crush she never talks to, to committing suicide for feelings that could never be reciprocated, to… waiting that a genjutsu and Sakura guilt trip Naruto enough for him to be with her? Like I already mentioned her character revolves entirely around Naruto, she has no hobbies or interests we know of aside from him. She has no motivations aside from being by Naruto’s side. She once had an interesting goal and backstory, but that was never fully explored, and it turned into her wanting Naruto’s attention and thinking about him. Her clan plot was irrelevant, she showed no interest in wanting to be a leader or even wanting to make things better for the branch members. It’s funny because immediately after the ending, no one cared about the Hyuuga branch and how the storyline was dropped and had no resolution. It was only when Hinata was being attacked for not showing to care did her fans start to over-analyze all the panels looking for the tiniest little clue that might hint at some changes.

It’s possible to be both shy, anxious and quiet and also to be strong, motivated and have interests and dreams. Hinata is never strong for herself, she’s only strong to be with Naruto, to die for Naruto, to motivate Naruto, to have Naruto look at her even for a moment. All the while Naruto doesn’t pay much attention to her unless she’s literally dying in front of him or she slapped him. Even when a big climax is happening, what’s on her mind is always her romantic feelings and her crush. I saw someone say if she were a male character, and she pulled this pointless sacrifice and theatrical confession in the final fight of an arc, she would’ve been universally mocked. Actually, I think even if it was Sakura who did this instead of Hinata the former would have been mocked, because their stans are unable to see the same flaws in their own fave as they see in the other girl. Naruto is a battle manga, characters are supposed to contribute to the defeat of the villain in some material way. The only reason people praise Hinata for what she did in the Pain arc is because they either pity her or because they’re men who think women killing themselves for a man is great because it boosts their ego.

I also notice many Hinata fans don’t notice the vanity in their own fandom. They call Hinata “princess”, ”heiress”, ”Konoha’s first lady” and draw fanart glorifying these concepts and how it makes Hinata good, because they like the superficial status, what they don’t care is the titles are unearned. I thought Hinata’s appeal was that she’s the underdog and a loser? Or maybe her real appeal is the idea of getting everything you want without doing much in order to get it? Another claim is that Hinata is the perfect woman, which you might see from men. This is what I might dislike the most. Men judge Hinata’s worth and whether she’s a good character based on what kind of woman they want and think is the right kind of woman. Hinata has big breasts, she’s submissive, she has no other interests than the man she likes, and she’s the only girl in her class who didn’t go for the popular guy. Many men hate Sakura, Ino and Karin for being fangirls but praise Hinata for being a fangirl. Basically to them if a character is a fangirl of the wrong guy, she’s a stupid slut. If she fangirls their self insert, she’s wife material and the ideal woman. If Sakura has to be saved, she’s useless. If Hinata tries to kill herself for Naruto, she’s ”so kind”. Rin is a one-dimensional character, but Hinata saying Naruto-kun for the 50th time is depth. Hinata is also claimed to be better than the other girls because she had more kids and thus is more ”fertile”. It’s like feminism never happened and we are back to the 16th century. Why are we judging women’s worth on how many kids they have and how much they can please a man?

I could also talk about how Studio Pierrot turned Hinata into a hentai bait for otakus, which also plays a part in her popularity, but I don’t think it’s necessary, so I will just offer this picture which speaks for itself.

END NOTE

Hinata is simply just a sexist stereotype, a shadow of a real woman, with not much depth, and who is certainly not better than Sakura either. Both of them are fangirls whose characters revolve around men. It’s wild to me how there are women who genuinely act like one must be a misogynist if they reject Hinata’s superficial, one-dimensional and boy crazy character. Her character itself is misogynist for crying out loud. And honestly, what does it say when even the creator himself assumes that Hinata is someone’s favorite character because he must like big boobs?

#anti hinata #anti hinata hyuga #mp #I'm not sure if I'm satisfied with this #but there's just not much to talk about when it comes to her character #it would just become repetitive

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itsclydebitches · 3 years

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Welcome back, everyone!

We’re now on Chapter Eight and once again the story is told from Velvet’s perspective. So our starting question is: why is she getting the most attention so far? If memory serves, the PoV order has been Coco, Velvet, Sun, Fox, Yatsu, Velvet, Scarlet, Velvet again — meaning that in a text balancing eight main characters, so far four of them have received a single chapter, two (Sage and Neptune) zero chapters, and one three chapters. That seems rather imbalanced. I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense if we factor in RWBY viewers’ familiarity with Velvet, but I’d wager we’ve gotten far more screen time with Sun overall. My only point being, why Velvet? It’s not that you can’t make her a focal point of the narrative, I just haven’t seen anything to explain that choice in the first 100+ pages. Her perspective hasn’t brought anything unique to the story, something we couldn’t have gotten from the seven other characters involved in these events… but here we are, back with Velvet for the next six pages.

Yeah, this chapter is short. Silver lining?

We learn that Team NOVA is on their second mission — why bother showing us the first when they’re an entirely new, volatile team, right? That would be silly! — escorting a technician “through the Grimm-infested mountains just outside of Oscuro Combat School.” So Shade students regularly conduct real huntsmen work but throw a fit over having to spar with one another? Interesting. See, if I were a civilian who got even a glimpse of what goes on inside these schools, I would not trust these kids with my life.

Lo and behold, things go horribly! We learn right off the bat that “The technician had been knocked unconscious in a skirmish with a band of Dromedons.” For those of you with an iffy memory like mine, these are the camel-like creatures that spit acid and… that’s about all we know about them. That’s really all we need for this scene though because this grimm nailed the tech in his leg, a wound which now requires “serious medical attention.” Great. Gus Caspian, who I learn is a younger friend from the previous novel, is trying to treat the wound as best he can, clearly a little freaked out about being here, “but apparently Oscuro teachers didn’t coddle students any more than Theodore did.”

Do you expect them to? Despite Atlas being the only one who combines their academies with their military, we can’t pretend like these schools aren’t teaching teenagers to wield deadly weapons and kill things with them. There’s no institution on Earth (or Remnant) that should “coddle” those looking to take on that responsibility. I mean yeah, we had moments where Ozpin encouraged them to be kids, like after the food fight and during the dance, but he still took a hard stance whenever there was an actual lesson in the works: “No. You will be falling.” Based on the age of the students, the academies are akin to colleges. In real world college if you don’t do your work or don’t pay attention in class, well… nothing that bad happens. This is by no means a call to not do you work, merely an acknowledgement from a formerly grade obsessed student that individual test scores really don’t have the impact on your life that it feels like they will at the time. Trust me on this. So yeah, some leeway is great in the real world… but when the students are fighting monsters and defending others from death? Then the schools should absolutely discourage any slacker-esque attitude. The concept of any institution “coddling” huntsmen is horrifying.

Note though that the chapter starts after all the action has taken place. We skip the rest of reinitiation. We skip NOVA’s first mission. We skip the attack that landed Velvet in this predicament. It’s not automatically a bad technique provided you’re skipping over boring parts to get to the interesting bits… but this isn’t interesting. We learn almost nothing new from this scene: Velvet misses her old team, her new teammates don’t believe in her, Nebula is mean. Those are the emotional beats here — things we’ve known for at least three chapters now. The only thing that’s introduced is the advertisement on Gus’ scroll, which could have been been added to any other scene.

Let’s revise a bit:

We get to see the battle against the Dromedons wherein Velvet uses her camera, revealing her weapon to Team NOVA and earning more of their respect. Information about Gus’ improvement is shown through his combat abilities as he’s unexpectedly chucked into this battle (perhaps with him using his semblance to further his growth there too). While taking a hit he loses his scroll, slightly damaging it. In the aftermath Velvet retrieves it for him and finds this ad displayed, growing curious. Over the course of Gus’ explanations the rest of Team NOVA is clued into Velvet’s worry and suspicion. What’s wrong? It’s just an ad. But you’re clearly hiding something… Now, does she tell her new team about the Crown, or keep it silent and risk the tenuous trust they’ve just created?

Why is Myers skipping over all the action and potential growth?

Instead we get the boring stuff. Velvet admires Gus’ uniform because of how it’s built for the heat and recalls that “Coco had been messing around with new outfit designs for Team CFVY.” I swear though, 95% of my enjoyment with this novel comes from the throwaway details. I would actually like seeing how Coco combines her personal love of fashion with the necessity of designing combat gear appropriate for the environment. Maybe they frame it as merely a hobby outside of their huntsmen work, giving them an excuse to keep helping their former teammates. That could be cool!

Though of course, this is the series where Cinder, Neo, Hazel, and Emerald all walk into the ice Kingdom with skin bared, so...

(You all are going to freeze to death, have fun.)

“Velvet’s ears swiveled around, listening for danger.” That’s anything detail I like. At the very least Before the Dawn remembers that Velvet is a faunus and frequently incorporates that into her character. She’s on the lookout because other than Gus tending the unconscious technician, she’s alone “on the sidelines.” It’s framed simultaneously as the group rejecting her and as an unavoidable necessity: “it wasn’t like she didn’t have an important task of her own [repairing the relay], one that none of her teammates had the expertise to perform.”

Wait. Why does Velvet have this expertise?

The justification is that she’s “handy with electronics” and “Anesidora was incredibly complicated, and she’d designed it herself,” but that’s like saying “I built a computer so I’ll come fix your refrigerator. That’s easier.” I don’t know, maybe someone with the ability to build a computer from the ground up could figure out a refrigerator on the fly, but they feel like different skill-sets to me. All electronics are not built the same and claiming that because you understand one you automatically understand all others — even supposedly simpler pieces of tech — seems a little suspect. If that were the case, we’d have no need for experts who fix your phone, your television, your toaster, and your watch. Surely if you understand one you understand the others, right? It’s the same assumption here: If Velvet can understand building a hard light weapon, then she must understand relay communications too!

…right.

She even goes so far as to say that they “probably should have left the technician at Oscuro—she could have done this on her own” yet just a few minutes later it’s, “Velvet double-checked everything. She didn’t know what was wrong. She glanced back at the technician, Gus still at his side. The guy was out cold. He’d taken a pretty hard knock to the head. Well, she had tried.” So she’s confident enough to think that the technician is unnecessary one moment and then looking to him for help the next? Which of course isn’t followed by any sort of revelation. Velvet doesn’t acknowledge that her knowledge isn’t as specialized as she had assumed it was, or that huntsmen rely on non-combat experts for other things. She just shrugs and…

…kicks it.

Yeah. Velvet’s skill amounts to kicking the box until it works. Which, of course, it does.

I can’t with this novel.

More seriously though, that’s terrible characterization. Not only does it undermine Velvet’s actual skill to reduce it to being “handy with electronics” — isn’t every huntsmen “handy with electronics” then, considering they all build their gun/energy/dust weaponry in school? — but it adds another layer of supposed uselessness to the adult professionals around her. Theodore doesn’t teach them anything because, as their headmaster, he’s removed from everyday interactions. Rumpole can’t be trusted now and every lesson she tries to impart is rejected. The unnamed technician who is referred to only by his professional title is deemed unnecessary, knocked out, and then indeed proves useless when Velvet magically does his job for him. So why are any of them in school? Why aren’t they just running the world with their superior knowledge and skill-sets? Every time the RWBY franchise puts its characters in a position where they might actually learn something through failure, it pulls back at the last second. ‘Never mind, they actually knew this all along!’ Or, ‘Never mind, the things they’ve been taught are stupid, so best to forget them!’ I struggle to understand what kind of story I’m reading — or watching — when the characters are already framed as perfect. Or rather, flaws absolutely exist (as these recaps attest), but the story pretends they’re not there.

I hesitate to use the term “Mary Sue” here due to its origins and history. Meaning, the Mary Sue was conceived of as a parody, a deliberate exaggeration to comment on the types of characters written in the Star Trek fandom. Then people began using “Mary Sue” as a catch-all term for any female character that people deemed too talented (regardless of how talented their male counterparts might be), we started acknowledging the sexist undertones of that, then started reclaiming the term as something to celebrate and embrace… but we haven’t quite gotten there yet. “Mary Sue” is still a pretty loaded name to force on a character and it carries a lot of implications that I absolutely do not want to attach to Velvet. Yet it’s also the closest term I know to describe the act of an author giving a character what feels like a badly justified skillset. Such as “handy with technology” actually meaning “can fix anything powered by electricity or Dust as the plot needs.”

Velvet is the action movie hacker going, “I’m in” is what I’m getting at. It’s not a compliment lol.

During all this grimm watching and relay fixing, Gus wants to know why they don’t just high-tail it out of there. Especially since the person they brought to do a specific job can no longer do that job. Mission’s a bust. Velvet gives what sounds like a decent explanation: “Retreating from Grimm isn’t an option when you’re fighting this close to a settlement. If we leave without destroying them, the Grimm will just look for another target.” AKA the settlement itself.

Thing is, by this logic any grimm that are currently close enough to attack them are already close enough to the settlement to latch onto those people as the next target. They’d pick up on the civilians whether Velvet’s group was there to kill them or not. The group is there though, so they feel responsible, but why not just head to the settlement anyway? If the grimm follow you, fine. You can still fight them AND you now get the additional benefit of any other huntsmen/students who might be there. If they don’t follow you, great. If they were close enough to the settlement all along… again, this was always going to happen.

Which, to be clear, isn’t the worst stance to take. I understand them wanting to avoid any potential risk by leaving/leading the grimm towards anyone else. I only want to point out the additional stupidity of fighting them when you’ve already got an unconscious civilian in your care, a barely trained student, and the whole reason you came out here might now be for naught. Yeah, Velvet gets the relay working with her magic kick and yeah, the rest of the team handles the grimm just fine, but none of them are able to see into the future and know that both these events will occur. Gus’ ‘Why are we staying here? It’s dangerous and pointless’ question has merit.

But of course, no one in RWBY would ever consider retreat. It’s a very iffy characteristic at this point.

We learn — or at least I learn now — that Gus’ semblance is the ability to enhance others’ emotions, so basically the opposite of Ren’s. That would indeed be incredibly handy provided he has good control over it. We get another reference to Yatsuhashi’s “meditation exercises” that helped Gus’ grandfather in the last novel. Velvet theorizes that his improved memory has more to do with Yatsuhashi’s semblance than any generic meditation: “No one knew for sure what Yatsuhashi had done with his Semblance when he’d tried to heal Edward’s mind … even Yatsuhashi wasn’t sure. His ability was to erase memories, but it was possible that there was more to Yatsu’s Semblance than that.” Um… subtle yikes? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad things have turned out well for the guy, but if I were the grandfather—or a family member of his—I wouldn’t really want a student messing around with my mind when he “wasn’t sure” what he was doing. Especially when the base skill is to erase memories, not recover or strengthen them. Honestly, I love taking a good look at fantasy series because half the time you realize how horrifying things actually are, once you strip away the common place aspects of these skills. An equivalent third year college student is running around experimenting with peoples’ memories to see if he can achieve something other than erasing them. Great!

The good thing is that Yatsuhashi is just as suspicious of this power as I am. Velvet things that he “hated messing with people’s minds.” Understandable, bud. I’d hate the ability too.

While they’ve got this time alone, Gus mentions that he had planned to contact Velvet soon anyway. Two of his classmates have gone missing and though his school has told Shade about it—there’s at least some of that additional info that Rumpole mentioned—he wanted to let her know too because remember, no one in this franchise trusts the professionals to fix problems. It’s a mindset I’d better understand if the professionals were actually inept. Or the protagonists weren’t training to be those professionals. It’s still exceedingly weird to me that there’s so little respect and trust for huntsmen while they desperately try to become huntsmen…

Something something broken systems, but RWBY isn’t interested in exploring that.

So yeah, Gus ropes Velvet in with the hope that she can help. He says that they were last seen attending a new club called Mirage that hosts one-on-one fights for a championship title. So… it’s not really a club, right? Sure, sure, we’ve all seen Fight Club, but generally that’s used to describe dancing, not fighting. It’s a rather misleading term for what they were actually looking for. No one else finds this odd though. Nor that the information was sent out to select, powerful individuals. Nothing shady about this, folks! Velvet obviously recognizes all these details—a club, powerful semblances, a crown in the advertisement—and asks Gus to pass it along to her.

Our plot forwarded ever so slightly, their conversation ends as Arslan calls Velvet on the now fixed connection. One of the first thing she says is that Octavia used the other students as bait for the grimm.

At least Velvet shares my reaction: “What?!”

Octavia then takes an already bad situation and makes it that much worse. Listening in, she defiantly says, “That’s right. And it worked. It’s called strategy.” She confirms that the students are “mostly” okay and taunts Velvet about inviting them to her “Baby Brigade and you can all cry about it!” I hope I don’t need to take up precious document space by explaining how awful this is. Overlooking the fact that these would-be huntsmen are willing to put their younger peers’ lives in danger like that—and then mock them for needing mental health resources after the fact—why is Octavia the one pulling the murderous Mean Girl act? Yeah, she was an asshole during reinitiation, but wasn’t the whole point of that to demonstrate that she and Velvet got a little closer? Even if she won’t admit it? She saved Velvet from flying down that hole, but now she risks the lives of students at least three years her junior? If anyone should be this violent and antagonistic towards Velvet, it’s Nebula. The most she’s done for Velvet is offer a hand up, otherwise we just watched her express glee in getting to fight her and mock her for not abandoning Beacon… the same sort of behavior we’re seeing from Octavia now. Does Myers think that these two characters are interchangeable? That he can just pick one willy-nilly per chapter and let her play at being Velvet’s Mean Girl?

As a lovely anon reminded me recently, these are also the girls that were created and backed by fans. If I had put money and creative energy into these OCs, I’d be pretty frustrated with how the RT team has been treating them.

Arslan at least is complimentary towards Velvet for fixing the relay—“Truly, great work today”— and Velvet herself is appropriately shocked at Octavia’s behavior. That’s more emotional consistency than I’ve come to expect of this book, so I’ll take whatever little bits I can get.

Arslan signs off with plans to meet back up soon and Velvet thinks about how “everyone was safe after the mission, which was no small thing.” I’d agree… except for Velvet’s early thoughts about how easy this mission supposedly was and Octavia’s decision to put her teammates in danger. It sounds like if anything did go sideways, it’s in part because you chose to enter this overconfidently and then actively made it more dangerous.

Finally, the chapter ends with Velvet believing that she might be able to make her new team work with time. Our final line, in its own paragraph is: “If they had time.”

Am I the only one who finds this weird? The line reads like an omniscient bit of foreboding. Velvet thinks about how she just needs time and we, the reader, hear that this won’t be possible. Except this chapter is told from Velvet’s perspective. So why does she think they might not have time? Because of the Crown? I assume there will be an attack towards the end of the novel—can’t have a RWBY story without the final, epic battle—but right now Velvet has no reason to believe that an attack is imminent, or that the teams will change back, or anything else that would interfere with her hopes of strengthening this relationship… so why the rather confident sounding pessimism? I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know anymore lol.

At least this chapter was short? As said, silver linings. We’re still treading water though: Velvet’s bond with her new team seems to have regressed after two missions, rather than improved, and Gus didn’t reveal anything we didn’t already know, just further confirmed it. I assume that next chapter Velvet and the others will visit Mirage. Let’s hope something actually happens then.

See you! 💜

[Ko-Fi]

#rwby #mymetas #Before the Dawn #BTD Recaps

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bluinary · 4 years

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gag anime that you need to watch maybe

hi hello my name is juli and i will now gently guide ur attention to some top-notch shows, please pay attanetion

(this list is for people who don’t watch much anime or who are new to it. if ur a fucken weeb youve probably seen it all. dont @ me i want to help the kids)

ONE PUNCH MAN (the obvious 1st choice lol)

Genre: Action/ Shounen

Expectation: OP protagonist with riveting backstory fights to become the strongest hero, makes many friends along the way who recognize his talents and pure heart, big bad scary villains make him stronger

Reality: OP protagonist is already the strongest hero. His backstory? After fighting a lobster-man with nipples drawn on him with a Sharpie, Saitama decides to do a workout routine every day, and somehow ends up becoming the most powerful known being in the universe. His main issue is that now, he literally can take down any villain with a single punch, and he’s very bored of it.

Best Qualities: Animation is bomb, music is dope, humor is funnie, and Best Boy is a man whose superpower is riding a bicycle. Also Saitama egg head

If you were in a coma for all of 2015, this is the main thing u missed. Moving on.

Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun (Monthly Girls’ Nozaki)

Genre: Romance/ Comedy/ Slice of Life

Expectation: Smol shoujo protag girl grows closer to her oblivious crush through a fated, if awkward, incident which reveals an embarrassing secret that has to be kept at all costs. Through one another they gain more quirky friends, help each other grow, and, eventually, the male lead realizes that what he needs has been beside him all along.

Reality: The crush writes romance manga, and that is literally all the man cares about. It’s not a secret, but when he told people they didn’t believe him. Nozaki and Sakura grow closer, but only because he confuses her confession with a request to be his Beta. They gain quirky friends through one another, but there is zero character development throughout the entire fucking cast. Every episode is run by Idiot Plot. All the characters share a singular brain cell. There’s a tall butch lady turning every girl in the school gay. Please watch

Best Quali-teas: Everyone is baby, lots of gay shenanigans, and toxic masculinity does not exist, the OP is pretty nice, too

I literally heard about this damn show, like, two months ago. This shit was released circa 2015. Pleeze watch

The Disastrous Life of Saiki K. / Saiki Kusuo no Psi Nan

Genre: Shounen/ Supernatural/ Fucking Everything tbh

Expectation: Slice-of-life supernatural where protag has psychic powers, albeit limited ones, and has to keep them a secret at all costs for fear of his safety. He has a few friends he loves and cherishes, and at least two girls who are in love with him that he has to choose between-- all of which are people he wants to protect from his double-life.

Reality: Kusuo is very aware that he is the protagonist of an anime, and he does not want to be. Born with pink hair? He rewrites the human genome to make colored hair normal. End of the world looming? He just keeps rewinding time so he doesn’t have to deal with it. Harem situation? He actively uses his powers to avoid all love interests at all times (see the above). The plot of each episode is him trying to stop the plot as quickly as possible without killing anyone. The main issue is that everyone around him is either dumb or just generally attractive to plot-driving circumstances, and they all, for some reason, want him to be in on their adventures.

Best Qualities: Heavy “me and the boys” energy, plenty of Idiot Plot, so funny that my 47yo mom who hates anime admitted that it’s funny, meta as fuck, occasionally sweet scenes, equally good dub and sub, Saiki is babie

The fandom for this shit is like. Nonexistent. Apparently it came out the same season as Mob Psycho 100, so that might be why. I almost didn’t watch it, but I got bored and it turned out to be a serious gem. Go watch if ur having a bad day, it will make u cry laughing

Sakamoto Desu Ga/ Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto

Genre: Slice of life/ Comedy

Expectation: God I don’t even know. I’d say a typical slice of life where the quiet kid is bullied but makes friends, there’s a love triangle as they grow up together through high school, yadda yadda, but look at this dude. I can’t imagine him being anything other than what he is-- a legend.

Reality: The entire show is just a question of how extra one man can be, and how well he can pull it off. Sakamoto is an “average” high school senior (in the sense that he has no supernatural abilities), but he’s....far more than that. He’s Sebastian Michaelis if he’d never been a demon. Everything always works out for him in the most ridiculous of ways-- he’s just that good. He makes a McDonald’s uniform look like Prada. He’s so smooth his bully ends up having a crush on him (and yes, it is a gay crush. no heteros in this show).

Best Qualities: lots of homo content. the side characters, inspired by Sakamoto’s grace, all become better people, and you root for them. The circumstances are always average, but the presentation is fucking riveting. Watch to send ur depression into remission.

Another one no one talks about????? U all were so busy with ur broku no hero macadamias and ur Nartoes that you slept on this. Now’s the time to take back what was lost. Love yourself and binge this shit.

Nichijou/ My Ordinary Life

Genre: Slice of Life/ Comedy

Expectation: Cute girls do cute, girly things and have fun with Their Close Good Friends (TM).

Reality: Cute girls get into very bizarre situations with extremely manic energies. Sometimes, the situations are normal, but the girls react in a bizarre, manic fashion. It will make you alarm-laugh.

Best Qualities: Adorable art style, little continuity, relatable as fuck

A nice little watch if you’re bored. I think the eps are on YouTube.

Pop Team Epic/ Poputepepiku

Genre: Only God Knows

Expectation: Probably a cutesy 4koma-type thing with 2 schoolgirls having shenanigans.

Reality: A regular acid trip with lesbian icons Popuko and Pipimi who are not schoolgirls, but gods. Like if Eric Andre and Hannibal Buress were turned into omnipotent anime icons. Watch at your own risk.

Best Qualities: Lots of unexpected parodies and references amongst a shitpost of a show. The OP is a bop. Popuko terrifies me, but also empowers me as a young woman because she will not hesitate to kill a bitch. She and Pipimi love each other a whole lot, so it is LGBTQ content, which is always a plus.

I’m sure you’ve seen this one floating around. It will make you feel fear, and then laugh. Now, finally...

Ouran Highschool Host Club

Genre: Romance/ Comedy

Expectation: The protagonist is a girl who is mistaken for a boy and must be the servant of six rich, handsome young men, all of which are in love with her, and her secret must be kept at all costs. A reverse harem anime with plenty of fanservice.

Reality: Haruhi is a genderfluid queen who doesn’t give a fuck what others think she is. Because she broke a Conveniently-Placed Vase and is relatably poor, she has to pay off her debt by being a host herself-- which means male-presenting when flirting with her female classmates to make her dough. The six rich, handsome young men all share three brain cells, and most of those cells go to the character who has one line per episode (usually, it’s “Yeah”. I hope that VA got paid well). The only love interest-- the “leader” and most popular of the six men-- is so dead-set on their club being his Found Family, he confuses his romantic feelings for Haruhi with paternal ones. This is obvious to everyone but him. He never gets the brain cells.

Best Qualities: Trans characters!! Lesbians!! Extreme “me and the boys” energy, except they’re all rich, so shenanigans skyrocket. Many 4th wall breaks. The most powerful Host looks like he’s 5. Any “fanservice” is never played straight. Takes the Found Family trope to a whole new level. Nice Parks & Rec-quality balance between hysterical and sweet. Everyone is in drag at some point.

I know all of us senior citizens grew up on this shit, but you younguns need to watch the classics to appreciate the newfangled stuff. I recommend watching when you’re in a cheesy rom-com mood.

Honorable Mentions:

I can’t count these as gag anime, but they’re still ridiculously funny.

Mob Psycho 100

Scissor Seven

Kill la Kill

Cells at Work!

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure

Ones I haven’t seen but have heard a lot about

Osomatsu-san

Himouto! Umaru-chan

Azumanga Daioh

Gin Tama

Sgt. Frog

Okay that is all just limke put this in ur feel-good tag because these shows will make you happy and donut for get to like and describe to my channel, where I post literally nothing at all ever good night.

#anime rec list #shows to watch #anime #shitpost #tumblr memes #pls rec me similar ones in the replies y'all i need another hyperfixation #rn im just using saiki k jokes to get me through the day #also this took me so long to make???????????#i have no clue why. but pls reblog just for that reason #i feel like there's a whole wave of neo-weebs coming in from bnha and stuff and they must be....guided #oh and yes. jojo is a fucking comedy to me okay #i dont think many people actually take it seriously but if you do please know #i cannot. i fell on the floor laughing trying to explain one scene to my coworker #spring break ideas #too #if u need something to fill the time with #most of these are pretty damn short #my posts

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winderbecky · 4 years

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Week #6 Blog Post due 9/30

1. Why is it so difficult for people to talk about race?

It is so difficult for people to talk about race because it is such a controversial topic to talk about. According to Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman, “The ‘race is biological’ argument…seemed intent on nothing so much as killing off the race thread entirely so that the list could return to safer, less controversial topics.” In other words, people wanted to talk about simpler topics because talking about race was difficult and required a lot of work, especially because people have to be careful with how they talk about race. The authors included this statement, “Though no one ever officially proclaimed race to be an unacceptable topic for discussion, for months afterward even the most innocent and ‘safe’ references to race were regularly met with snotty asides about how ‘we don’t want to go into all that again.’” This is an example of how hard it is for people to discuss race.

2. In Ow’s chapter, what is the point in the creators of 3D Realms saying, “If this game offends you or anyone, go play another game. We won’t mind.”?

This, in my opinion, is basically the creators saying that they don’t care if what they create offends anyone, it is their decision to play or not. They seem not to care if they lose players because of what they said. Ow seems to think that playing these games that are offensive to some people can create people who agree with those offensive behaviors. Ow reveals another comment made by the creators of 3D Realms, “Our intent was not to make a racist game, but a parody of all the bad kung-fu movies on the 60s-80s. We wanted to make a ‘fun’ game that didn’t take itself too seriously.” I do not think that mixing up the Asian cultures and stereotypes was a great way to make a game fun; instead it makes it seem like the intent was to make fun of and be racist towards Asian cultures.

3. Do games, like the ones that 3D Realms creates, make offensive behavior seem as if it is okay?

Yes, these games include things like saying racist comments or treating women as objects. Being able to do certain things in the games makes it seem as if it is normal and okay to do those things. For example, Ow states, “3D Realms situates all female characters nude in contrived conditions, such as bathing underneath a waterfall in the midst of a battlefield or sitting on a toilet in Master Leep’s temple…he can ‘talk’ by pressing the key that denotes ‘action,’ resulting in lewd questions and comments that are hardwired into the game: ‘Those real tits?’ ‘Ha ha! You go poo poo! I leave room.’…the gamer is compelled to kill these stationary women in ‘self-defense’.” Being able to make those comments in the games would teach some players that it is okay to make those kind of comments in real life.

4. How has technology and social media impacted peoples lives when fighting for what they believe in or when trying to get others to stand up and fight?

Technology has become something to inform others about what is going on around them. People can pass on information in an instant now. According to Daniels, “Democratic movements, organized at the grassroots by people of good will with Internet-enables mobile phones, have transformed elections.” With people having internet on their phones, it makes it quick and easily accessible to information about candidates, so it allows people to be more informed on their decision when voting. Having access to the internet also allows for people to become more involved like in this example that Daniels states, “In 2007, using e-mail, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, cyberactivists organized nearly ten thousand people to the march in protest against a white supremacist judicial system in Jena, Louisiana.” Another example was “almost ten years earlier black women excluded by the white-dominated mainstream media and the male-dominated African American press took advantage of the participatory quality of Internet technologies to organize the Million Woman March.” In these ways, technology and social media has become a platform for people to get involved in the world around them and fight for what they want and believe in.

Kolko, B. E., Nakamura, L., & Rodman, G. B. (2000). Race in Cyberspace: An Introduction. Race in Cyberspace (pp. 1-13). Routledge.

Ow, J. A. (2000). The Revenge of the Yellowfaced Cyborg Terminator: The Rape of Digital Geishas and the Colonization of Cyber-Coolies in 3D Realms’ Shadow Warrior. Race in Cyberspace (pp. 51-68). Routledge.

Daniels, J. (2009). White Supremacy in the Digital Era. Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (pp. 3-16). Rowman & Littlefield.

#WGST320

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ginnyzero · 5 years

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Retelling Old Stories

I've written a book based on old fairy tales and legends and am currently reviewing the Shrek movies in Action Movie Friday. (Shrek 2 post coming next, I hope.) I thought I'd talk about retelling fairy tales, myths and legends.

Myths, fairytales, legends, these are the stories that are near and dear to our hearts. And let's face it, they're familiar, comforting and popular. Fairy tales such as The Sleeping Princess, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast have been told over and over to young children for generations. These stories are oral traditions passed down from generation to generation and have strayed quite a bit from their horrific and sexist roots. So much, that outside of a few key points their original creators may not recognize them anymore.

These oral traditions form the basis of the hero's journey which can be found in high fantasy stories such as Lord of the Rings and Science Fiction stories, such as Star Wars. They've been satirized (Ella Enchanted, the movie), parodied (Shrek) and outright made fun of (Mirror, Mirror) and also taken far too seriously (Snow White & The Huntsman.) Just as much as they've been played straight (see the Elemental Master Series of Mercedes Lackey.) And they've been mixed together until almost unrecognizable. (The Princess & The Frog, Frozen, Once Upon a Time, the 500 Kingdoms also by Mercedes Lackey.)

The great thing about fairy tales and myths and legends is that they have a very low risk level. People are far more likely to pick up something to read of watch that is relatively familiar to them and that they know they already enjoy rather than a brand new concept they don't understand and aren't sure they'll like. Fairy tales are comfort food. People know they like them. And given a choice between a concept they aren't sure of and a fairy tale based media, they're more than likely to choose a fairy tale based media.

So, how do you go about retelling these fairy tales and making them fresh and new for your audience? This was a question I (sort of) asked myself when I started to write the Dawn Warrior. (Available in Ebook & Paperback.) How do I take Sleeping Beauty and make her different without relying on, say, what we know of her through Disney or from Grimm, not the TV Show. (Which honestly, isn't much in either case.) And make them partly relevant without losing making a good story?

Change the Roles:

What if the Princess really isn't the Princess? What if she's the bodyguard in disguise that's protecting the real princess from assassins? (The Decoy Princess, Dawn Cook) What if the Princess is also a spy? (The Princess Series Jim C. Hines) Maybe Prince Charming is actually an actor!

I mean, come on, in real life unless your Prince William and Harry and work for the British Royal Navy, royals don't really have adventures. (I wouldn't want to get on the bad side of Queen Elizabeth either.)

Or, maybe the Princess and Prince aren't really the good guys after all. Maybe it's the Big Bad Wolf or the evil stepmother or even the sea witch. (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Gregory Maguire) Or, to borrow from Hoodwinked, the Big Bad Wolf is really an investigative reporter trying to do an expose on Red Riding Hood. (I mean, she can't be all that sweet and innocent.)

A good example of this was a recent Sleeping Beauty movie that was in the horror genre. (Unfortunately I heard it was a really bad horror movie.) The Sleeping Beauty in the movie was supposed to be the damsel in distress and ended up being both the trap and the villain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdEo_t-iVbM

(I'll just leave this here.)

Change the Setting:

Fairy tales in SPACE!!! (Lunar Chronicles, Marissa Meyer) Okay, there aren't a lot of fairy tales in space. I think I saw another example on instafreebie the other day. In fact, there aren't many romances in space either. (I was listening to a podcast about an indie author who was doing this and she was the first writing romances set in the backdrops of aliens?) But, this is like Star Wars. Greek Myths in SPACE!!!! (Seriously, Star Wars is built around the classical hero's journey. The franchise even freely admits it in their authorized literature. I've got a book by Bantam called Star Wars: The Magic of Myth that goes through it step by step.)

This is one of the easier ways to make fairy tales seem more relevant and seems to be currently the most popular. Grimm the TV Show, Once Upon a Time (in Wonderland), The Harry Dresden Files, and Fables, all take fairy tales and legends and drop them into the middle of the modern world. I include Harry Dresden, not because he's playing out a fairy tale so to speak, but he's some sort of misguided Prince Charming type on his own hero's journey. The book Charming by James Eliot, takes the character of "Prince Charming" plays it straight, and makes it a bloodline that is involved in some sort of knighthood charged with keeping the mundane world safe from the evil things that go bump in the night set in modern times.

Mercedes Lackey took a slightly different approach with her Elemental Masters series. She took fairy tales, played them straight, but set them in Edwardian times right up through the First World War. By doing so, she was able to show how the beginnings of the modern world like industrialization and rail roads and wars fought with machine guns instead of swords were effecting the world of magic and the magical creatures. (For instance, all the pollution made it easier for evil or nasty type elementals and creatures to thrive and good elementals and creatures that couldn't abide cold iron were dying off or going into hiding.)

Change the Genders:

Let's face it. Fairy tales are pretty sexist, no matter what your gender is. I had in the first draft of the Dawn Princess an entire rant by Roxana, who is a 'Beauty Asleep' about the differences between how a female Princess who is cursed to sleep and a male Prince is cursed to sleep and how neither tale does royalty any justice whatsoever.(Seriously, in the male version, when the Princess who had been sitting by his bedside took a nap, the clock should have reset, the Prince shouldn't still have sneezed and been woken by the maid.)

Maybe it's really Prince Charming asleep in the Castle and well, Beauty has to belt on her sword and gird her courage to get through the hedge and kill the dragon. Or, the tower bound male Rapunzel is intruded upon by a Pirate Princess who is looking for gold, not love. Maybe it isn't a brave little tailor but a brave seamstress! Or it is a male who is captured by a bunch of cannibalistic female bandits.

...

Okay, there is taking some things too far. (That story is terrible no matter what.)

Apply some Common Sense:

In fairy tales, things don't always make sense. I read them and go "why? why would they do that?" A lot of times Princes don't get punished for their ill deeds. Another Prince comes along, "saves" them and they go about their adventures without showing any sort of remorse for what they did in the first place. Princes don't become goose boys or shepherds or kitchen tweenies.(Or at least, not very often, I think Faithful John/Hans is about the only one I can think of.)

No, those punishments are reserved for Princesses who have been tricked into changing places with their maids and end up being goose girls or in the kitchen. (I can think of half a dozen variations of that tale.) And the Princess, instead of finding a nice baker or farmer to settle down with who appreciates her, instead figures out how to reveal her plight to the Prince who actually married her uppity maid/sister and seems happy with the maid/sister and once the maid/sister is out of the way, marries the Prince. (The Prince was tricked, happy to be tricked and the Princess took him anyways? That makes no sense.)

A really good example of this is the original and horrific Beauty Asleep tale. In the original tale, the King comes upon Beauty Asleep in her tower and rapes her, while she's asleep, repeatedly. In fact, he gets her pregnant with twins. The babes are born and he doesn't even take them with him! No. He leaves them with their sleeping mother. One of the babes gets hungry, as babies do! And sucks the thorn out of her finger that was keeping her asleep. Beauty wakes up. The Queen finds out about her existence. Tries to kill her. The King kills the Queen in turn and ends up marrying Beauty and bringing her and his twins to the castle.

Just what the ever loving hell?

It's good to be king?

No, really, the Queen should have taken Beauty's side. They could have killed the King for being an adulterer and ruled the kingdom together setting up the twins as the heirs. Female solidarity. Because the story as written is insane.

There's a post wandering about tumblr about swan maidens and selkies. And how awful the stories are about the men who take the swan maiden's cloaks and the selkies' skins to force these women to be their brides. One of the reblogs adds the caveat that it feels like these stories don't take into account the actual nature of swans and seals. Swans are pretty. They look graceful.

Swans are mean, they hiss, they bite, they're incredibly aggressive and they can break bones. Approach with caution. Don't try to steal from them. Don't try to pet them. Aggressive swan is aggressive. Okay. Anyone who steals a swan maiden's cloak deserves the punch in the face!

And seals, seals aren't all that nice either! Zefrank1 hasn't done a true facts about seals, but maybe he should. Male seals are called bulls for a reason! Elephant Seal bulls charge at each other when they fight. Leopard Seals are considered one of the ocean's more dangerous predators and take on whales and sharks. Seals train well to do tricks. Look, just, don't mess with them because not only are they cute and have sharp teeth and claws, they're smart. Do you really want to mess with the woman who can steal all your nets and drive the fish away and beat you to a bloody pulp? Seal fights involve mud wrestling.

Add some reality to the stories. Give the actions of those involved real consequences. Change the personalities to actually reflect the animals they are sharing their bodies with.

Mash things together:

This is another popular tactic and TV Tropes calls it the "Fractured" Fairy Tale. Think how in Once Upon a Time, (spoiler alert) Rumpelstiltskin is also the Beast of Beauty and the Beast and his father is Peter Pan. And he's the grandfather of the Truest Believer and thus the "father in law" of Emma Swan the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming. And that barely dips a toe into the confusing of Once Upon a Time Family relationships.

Mercedes Lackey also did a version of mixing up of fairy tales in her 500 Kingdoms. In the 500 Kingdoms, The Tradition is a form of magic that ties to make fairy tales happen no matter what type of tale they are and no matter if all the pieces are actually 100% correct. Fairy Godmothers are there to steer the tradition so that disaster doesn't strike constantly. (Because what if the Prince of the Cinderella tale was actually a Princess or well, a Prince who was too young, too old, or just liked other Princes.)

Fables does this as well. Prince Charming is the same Prince across Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty ends up marrying the Beast in her second marriage. (Prince Charming is good at wooing, not staying.) The Gingerbread witch of Hansel and Gretel ends up being the witch who puts most of the tales in action across the Enchanted Forest. The last arc I read, Rose Red was making her own version of Camelot (and there was much trepidation about how that was going to turn out, probably badly.)

Grab a bunch of different stories that seem to work well together, stitch them together in a way that makes sense or seems fun. It's okay not to always tell the exact same tale.

Add Real People's stories:

Look, if you're going for a more empowered woman in your stories. There are plenty of women in history that were actually pretty awesome. And I'm not just talking about Esther from the Bible or Rahab. (Both pretty awesome ladies.) There were female pirates and female queens who outwitted and beat their male counterparts to be on the throne and to keep themselves out of jail. There are female scientists, female snipers and well, I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find something a woman did in real life that men get praised for more often.

In fact, one person go so fed up with the way fairy tale princesses are praised at places such as Disney, they created a site/book for girls about such heroines at Rejectedprincesses.com.

Youtube has videos labelled things like Top Ten Badass women from History you probably don't know about. (But if you'd read Rejected Princesses you actually might!)

So, don't be afraid to use some real world inspiration to give you ideas about how awesome your female characters can be.

And these are just a few ideas on how to take something old and make it something "new."

In the Dawn Warrior, I took a bunch of these. I applied some common sense. Changed the Princess' role. And really mashed some things together. But, I kept a medieval fairy tale like setting because I wanted to keep this series different from my other series, Heaven's Heathens MC, which is a light science fantasy that could read urban fantasy if you squint at it. (Or maybe it's the other way around.) Two series set in the modern/future world seemed a bit silly to me.

Mostly, my advice is if you want to retell a fairy tale or myth or legend, have fun with it. Take your ingredients, mix them up as needed and don't sacrifice your story for message. (Because really, that gets old very quickly.)

Whelp, now if you like fairy tales there are plenty of pieces of media in this post to check out. Happy reading/watching/researching!

#writblr #wrtblr #writing advice #writing tips #fairy tales #myths

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cyrelia-j · 6 years

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A Tale of Two Parmaks (or the big write up on my crazy versions)

In thinking of multiverse and character stuff, I thought this would be a good opportunity to familiarize everyone with the two big versions of Parmak that I write. He isn’t super fleshed out in the books, but I think that there’s still somewhat of a consensus on defining character traits both physical and mental/intellectual/emotional that make up the heart of him. I know that in both my primary iterations of him there are some characteristics which diverge sharply from what most people imagine he’d look like/think like/act like. There are a few short things I’ve written where I think he remains “canon” Parmak but those are definitely the minority.

So, without further ado, may I present:

C132 Parmak and C147 Parmak

(Yeah, I totally ripped off Rick and Morty for this)

The idea for those not familiar with the show is that there are various multiverses where alternate versions of the world/characters exist. It’s a pretty common theme in sci fi but I took the universe designation format from that show. Just as a reference, in the show it’s generally accepted that the “Primary Universe” characters are C137 so I definitely will not be using that number :)

C132 Parmak: This Parmak appears in my serious and dark/dramatic stories. I’m working on an ambitious series of backstories for his life in this universe. Right now these start with “If” and are going to continue through [upcoming as of 5/24/18] “The Downward Spiral” and others. Parmak in these stories is intersex- having characteristics of both sexes. In this universe I had envisioned Cardassia as having a detailed spectrum of sexes (Known as the Ba’zan Spectrum) which range from what we would approximate from Cis Male at one end to Cis Female on the other. I won’t get too detailed with that in this post but as a note, Parmak is “X210” which means that his primary body characteristics skew slightly female in appearance (ie the hip to shoulder ratio, slightly more feminine ridges, a bit of a softer voice etc) but as far as biological sex are closer to the center of the two.

The reason that this characteristic and matter of his sex gets such detail is because it’s a critical part of this Parmak’s identity. What I mean is this: I wrote this character to reflect a bit of myself. In the Cardassian records systems and medical systems etc he’s not considered male, he’s defined by this designation. But he considers himself male and refuses to be defined by the sum of his biology. As a trans male I wanted this part of him to be reflective of my own feelings and experience. (Yeah I know, confusing avatar- think of the Cyrelia J pseud like Conchita Wurst) This Parmak has spent his life with different expectations and prejudices being pushed on him because he refuses to call himself anything other than male. He’s rejected from his petition to study medicine before he gains a sponsor, he’s slandered and objectified by people he encounters, and he encounters a lot of pressure to conform. In spite of that he refuses to be anyone other than who he knows himself to be.

This Parmak is from Nokar. He was a physically “abnormal” child in that he is an albino (in the Cardassian sense), he has poor eyesight, and has kyphosis (a spine curvature which can be very minor to a pronounced hump- my cousin was born with this so that’s where the concept had originated from. Scoliosis, that thing they test for in schools is a spine curvature on the other axis). He’s terrified of his own reflection and has no desire to know what he looks like. He’s actually very attractive. His main drive and passion in life is medicine. When he was a teenager there was a plague of a mutated Yarim Fei which struck his village and everyone but him died. He spent months burying those who died while simultaneously trying to cure them with his own limited medical knowledge. He realized later he wasn’t infected because of his mutated genes. This really shaped his life because when he was able to devote himself to medicine he worked tirelessly for a vaccine on that and other diseases.

His passion and unique talent is in pharmacology and chemistry. This gets a bit “too perfect/sue-ish” but I like it so it’s not likely to change here. He’s like a magician/alchemist when it comes to his ability to mix up serums and drug compounds. It’s a highly coveted almost genius ability and one that Tain wants like oxygen. This Parmak was involved sexually with both Tain and Garak. He’s afraid of Garak’s eyes because of Tain’s induced illusion ability. He was soft spoken but fearless and was taught by his foster father Vakem Parmak that the Doctor’s role is to survive at all costs, be unbreakable, and so he was raised from his late teenage years to his mid 40s to withstand poisons and torture of an extreme form. It had only ended when Vakem Parmak died. Shortly after that he was recruited by Enabran Tain (albeit not exactly willingly). It made him arrogant in his abilities until Garak broke him. That combined with his experience in the work camp changed him.

In the present day, he’s kind but pragmatic. He’s aware of his own shortcomings but he still has a “survive at all costs” mentality due to his upbringing. The Parmak family credo which he lives and dies by is “one for a hundred” meaning for every life taken he must save a hundred. He’s unbending in this assessment. He still has his quirky sense of humor, he still refuses to look at himself in the mirror, and he doesn’t understand why people find him attractive as his own self-image is still poor. He has few hobbies because his life is work be it medicine, advocacy, raising a family, or self assigned “missions”. He enjoys reading and gardening but really has to be dragged into leisure because he doesn’t understand it. His life has taught him that life isn’t leisure only survival and work so he’s not very able to relax.

He’s a tireless advocate for the Northern Continents and northern rights and he has far less moral limits than I would imagine canon Parmak to have. He’s willing to kill to save but he works to heal the disenfranchised and protect those who need him most. He also has a warped pain tolerance because of his foster father’s training and enjoys being hurt- he doesn’t ask for it or seek it out, but he was conditioned to have that response when it occurs so that’s been used against him. I guess you could say he’s a bit of a broken Parmak.

Stories featuring C132 Parmak are: “If—“, “The Downward Spiral”, Invictus, and Inside a Dream” so far

If you like your Parmak closer to Julian ethically, more “light” than “dark”, and much less twisted then this isn’t the Parmak for you :)

On the opposite end we have:

C147 Parmak: This Parmak appears in all my humor/crack/lighthearted stories. His sex is irrelevant to the character unlike C132 Parmak though for reference he’s usually male in this iteration unless otherwise stated; so far in every story but “The Power of Three” he’s been cis male. This character borders on being a parody so I would encourage most to take this one with a grain of salt because he’s not meant to be a serious representation of Parmak. A lot of his traits come about because of silly late night conversations or “what if” jokes. The biggest example would be his cock obsession. For me this is more of a running gag because I imagine it to be so far off of real Parmak canon and behavior that it’s just silly. I find all sorts of stupid things amusing.

He had a happy childhood in the North, has living parents, and only moved South to study medicine for the adventure of it. He’s usually near lifelong friends with Garak (as this Parmak appears primarily in AUs) and occasionally it’s a friends with benefits arrangement. He appears as various types of doctors/healers but in the Extraverse he’s a yoga instructor as well. I’ll probably branch out his professions as I write more for him. He likes to wear his signature hair beads (silly fanon thing of mine) and often says outlandish things “unintentionally”.

He has a massive hoarding problem and he loves pop culture. You’ll find his space (car, house, office, etc) full of records, CDs, books, bumper stickers, old bottles, and anything he finds interesting. In some universes this includes a massive sex toy collection This Parmak loves taking pictures and loves music. He comes across as oblivious and spacey. Some of that’s genuine, some of it’s played up a bit because he likes seeing people smile and he likes spreading positivity. He loves yoga and tends to be super flexible and fit (sometimes in teasing contrast to the C147 Garak who’d rather lounge with a cocktail). This Parmak also loves television, Queen, and Columbo. He’s incredibly adventurous and has a devious little smirk. He’s a voyeur and a closet sadist (in a playful sense- he doesn’t enjoy actually hurting people).

He’s a bit of a bad driver, is into conspiracy theories in a big way, and is into alternative medicine and new age ideas. He’s more the “Hippie” part of “Hippie Lizard”. He absolutely loves sex and could be considered shameless but he’s proud of this and infinitely creative in that realm. I might even make him a sex therapist one of these days since I think he’d be good at it. As a side note, his companion C147 Garak is much the same. He loves games and stories and “cute” things though he seems rather unaware that he himself is one of those “cute things”. He likes to wear his sunglasses perched on his head while still wearing his glasses. Fun fact- his sunglasses aren’t prescription and he never actually wears them as sunglasses.

He’s a good listener, emphatic to the max and is comically strong while being pretty slim and unassuming. Sometimes he’ll also have the congenital stoop of C132 Parmak but not always. He dresses very free in the summer and bundles up like the kid in A Christmas Story in the winter. He has a strange obsession with tentacle porn and stopped consuming sugar sometime in the early 2000s. He’s pretty much everyone’s friend and can be outspoken and opinionated (especially on obscure things). He totally grows on people even if they don’t like him much at first and is always a brilliant doctor and ethically upright and kind character.

Sometimes he’ll appear in contemporary Cardassian fics/drabbles so some of the more Earth centric traits will be missing but everything else will pretty much hold true. The sex thing also holds for anyone in the C147 Parmak verse including Julian and Garak who are usually the 2 other constants. This too is actually kind of personal for me. It’s a lens through which I see the world. Maybe it’s because growing up I was like listening to Howard Stern since I was 7 and had a lot of exposure to that sort of thing. It’s difficult for me not to sexualize things and interactions and in my writing I tend to be super sex driven. Since my RL doesn’t even remotely reflect that activity I enjoy expressing it through fic even if the C147 Parmak and others get kind of caricature-ish.

Stories featuring C147 Parmak are: The Extraverse, Lizards Melt in your Mouth (epilogue 1 not 2), The power of Three, and the drabble Fine Print

So if you don’t like your Parmak to be an over the top extra dick magnet then steer clear of this Parmak :)

As a side note “A Gift for My Darling” has a mirror Parmak that’s a combo of both these Parmaks while being kind of completely insane.

Thank you everyone for taking the time to read, and I hope this enhances everyone’s experience with my stories. I’m always super appreciative of anyone reading and giving feedback. I’m kinda of like a sponge... but not the Seinfeld kind haha

I’ve been debating if people might prefer that I tag either version of this character for ease of filtering so any feedback on that either by reply or DM would be much appreciated!

#star trek ds9 #star trek deep space nine #my fics #Kelas Parmak #headcanons sorta #more like alternate versions #Parmak

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lucky-clover-gazette · 6 years

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season 4 first watch impressions

under the cut are my thoughts and my new overall series episode ranking (spoilers)

ep1 - uss callister

- by far my favorite of the season

- a perfect blend of comedy and tragedy

- i would have loved this as a full movie

- honestly nanette is amazing, like she owns her smarts and sexuality and never gives up i love her

- male coder: “it won’t work, i’ve already tried”

nanette: “well i haven’t” HELL YEAH

- i honestly loved all the ‘crew’ characters, even the gym rat boss

- i especially enjoyed the speech from the boss to robert, where he’s like ‘i acknowledge that i was an ass, but dude, YOU PUSHED MY SON OUT AN AIRLOCK’

- also the fuckin casual dialogue between the monster and bad guy and the crew

- OHHH BOY AND THE FACT THAT ROBERT’S GONNA ROT TO DEATH IN HIS APARTMENT BECAUSE HE PUT ‘DO NOT DISTURB’ ON HIS APARTMENT DOOR, HELL YEAH

- ‘oh my fuck’

- 10/10, watch it now

ep2 - arkangel

- preface: the kid playing young owen teague and his family were actually really close with my family when he and my little sister were kids. it was goddamn surreal to see that lil guy talking about porn when i remember him being, like, eight. but nice going nick, keep kicking ass lil dude

- okay so this episode was... conflicting

- the opener made sense, but in some ways i thought it was TOO obvious and indicative of the episode’s message and tone. i can’t help but wonder if it would have been better just starting like five minutes in

- her father looked like counselor healy from orange is the new black, so that was distracting

- okay jesus christ lady, i get that losing your kid is scary, but implanting her with ‘optional’ optic spying and censoring software is such a massive violation of her privacy. like, it’s one thing when she’s tiny, but how the hell are you going to feel okay with yourself as a parent when she’s an adolescent?

- the blocking especially pissed me off. that’s so fucking dangerous. either this woman is just very stupid, or very desperate

- at least the narrative established that it kind of was the latter. when her father gets sick, the mother has to care both for both her father and her child. that’s a lot. but still not an excuse for such mental violation of a quickly-growing human being

- young edgelord and sara are fucking adorable

- sara’s self-harm and rage issues are not, however,, and i’m glad that her mother took her head out of her ass and ditched the tablet

- is it just me or is fifteen-year-old sara kind of an idiot? like i get it she’s grunge and artsy, and i loved her giving a treat to the dog, but she seems to be almost hanging out with owen teague because he deals, and not despite it. like i get that i’m supposed to buy that their romance has kind of a subtext of him ‘teaching’ her about things, but like the underage sex and coke are kinda yikes. i feel like he definitely should have had more restraint, and although what the mother does is royally fucked, he and sara are also both to blame

- all right, so the smoothie motif. what a great narrative tool. the miscarriage pill was the most clever part of the episode. sara’s reaction was very well-acted, and the standoff between her and her mother was intense as hell

- i liked that sara’s rage issues remained into adolescence. i was glad that the tablet got wreckt, but i can’t help but wonder if it would have been more effective to have her rage-smash it prior to her mother coming come, leaving the pieces for her to find. the actual beating up of the mother with the tablet seemed to literal, too much sinking in the message. there were moments in crocodile and hang the dj that were the same way.

- the ending, with sara hitchhiking in some stranger’s truck, was very smart. the ambiguity of a young girl, on her own, hopping in some stranger’s vehicle, is powerful without much explanation. any parent would be horrified by this; that’s what i don’t think we actually needed to see the mother screaming sara’s name and bleeding to understand the horror of losing a child to the unknown

- this one definitely gives me the most complicated feelings of the season; on one hand, it had a lot of great devices going for it. on the other hand, it was over-written and at times trying too hard to be ‘black mirror.’ the grey morality and ambiguous ending reminded me of a literary short story, which i love in my TV.

- 7/10, watch it if you liked most black mirror episodes that weren’t san junipero

ep3 - crocodile

- ah yes, the ‘i watch black mirror to be fuckin ashamed of humanity’ episode

- idk man, i liked it. it was bleak, and fucked up, but i’m all about that downward spiral. i liked that the story kind of began in three different places and then tied together. just as i had with ‘hated in the nation,’ i love police procedural stuff

- also damn, it was freaky as hell to see the straight-laced white blonde soccer-mom type being a despicable murdering sociopath!!! like, gotta go kill an entire family of POC, including a goddamn INFANT, and then see my kid’s show, that’s great. i was so happy when she got what she deserved.

- all right, so i had one MAJOR PROBLEM with this episode: why the fuck did they make the son blind? the guinea pig twist was so GOOD, and mia fuckin killed a BABY, they didn’t need to further modify that!!! this is another example of black mirror doing just a tad more than it needs to make the audience feel horrible.

- okay black mirror, we get it, that song is your thing, but can you maybe slide it in as a less glaring easter egg?

- 8/10, but only if you’re into dark shit and bad endings

ep4 - hang the dj

- not nearly gay enough

- seriously, the entire episode i was unable to focus on the main characters because i kept looking around this Tinder-esque 20′s dating paradise and saw ZERO GAY OR LESBIAN COUPLES. i’m so surprised by this, especially after ‘san junipero.’ at first i was like, maybe this is like society’s way of encouraging procreation because of population decline, but that wasn’t the twist at all. no reason for nearly everyone to be hetero

- THAT BEING SAID, i see you. bi amy. even before the girl partner, i was aware that she used ‘they/them’ pronouns when referring to hypothetical partners. i just wish we could have seen more gay couples in the background (for example, at the choosing ceremony thing, it coulda been two dudes of something)

- uh okay, so everyone loved this episode, and it was okay. some of the banter and jokes were funny and relatable, but honestly, this wasn’t *that* good. the plot wasn’t super original (reminded me a lot of ep1 of hulu’s ‘dimension 404′) and the execution was kind of suuuuuuper basic. like, black suited Enforcers with tasers? a massive matrix wall? the whole thing seemed so predictable and just... basic as hell.

- but shit man, amy was cool. loved that character in a vacuum.

- honestly if someone could explain the reasons for loving this episode, i’d like to hear them. because i just don’t get it, man. maybe it’s because i’m gay, or young, or single, or unexperienced... but i just wasn’t very impressed

- 6/10, not even fuckin close to ‘san junipero’ lmao

ep5 - metalhead

- black and white seemed sort of pretentious, not gonna lie. i think i would have preferred the dirty palette of ‘white bear’ post-apocalypse

- i am all for these female protagonists this season. hell yeah

- soo those corpses in the bed were heavy, but i actually kind of wish we got to see more of that? like, the remains of humanity after the dogs attacked? also, more small explanations for the dogs’ attack would have been interesting

- loved the chase and fight scenes. i can see how they’d be boring, but the moments of conflict between man v. machine were fucking awesome

- K N I F E D O G

- anyone else get serious farenheit 451 vibes?

- the teddy bear thing was dumb. i don’t think we needed to see what was inside the warehouse. yet another time black mirror threw in just a little more than we needed

- okay so belle keeps alluding to the fact that she has safe family members out there somewhere, so am i to believe that there is some place where humans are safe from dogs? if so, why the actual fuck did she leave? i can’t believe it was just because of fuckin teddy bears

- alllllll the david lynch vibes

- 7/10, but you gotta actually pay attention to the visual details to get the best parts

ep6 - black museum

- BOOOOYYYYYYY! this entire episode i waited for the fuckin shoe to drop and then SHE! DID! THAT!

- the amount of callbacks to previous episodes was,, nice,, but also it was kind of annoying??? and unnecessary?

- the museum owner was reaaaaaalllly annoying, which is think was intentional. what a fuckin sleaze. in comparison, i thought that jon hamm in ‘white christmas’ was still a somewhat charismatic narrator, but this dude was just yikes

- so, the first story was... kind of a lazy reach? idk, it just felt kinda like a parody of black mirror itself. i get the entire ‘mad science’ vibe they were trying to evoke, but as opposed to the next story, this one had very little to say about human nature. black mirror works its best when it tells stories that use technology as a way to analyze humanity; this one really didn’t (we all already know we’ve got weird kinks)

- the second story was better, but, like, SUPER heartbreaking. poor carrie. i don’t think her husband should have done The Thing at all, honestly, I don’t believe that he couldn’t have seen what happened next coming. it’s like the arkangel mom again; either these characters are just SUPER present-oriented, or just fuckin dumb

- the most tragic moment in this season was ‘monkey needs a hug.’ i felt nauseous

- okay, now for THE TWIST! the accent drop was a great touch, and i loved that she was poisoning him the entire time. also fuck white men and supremacists, and fuck the museum dude for enabling them.

- the ending was great. i liked that her mom was chillin with her. the building blowing up was very tarantino. loved her a lot

- 8.5/10, boring in the beginning but the end is worth it

and now..

BLACK MIRROR EPISODES RANKED (AS OF SEASON 4)

1. U.S.S. Callister

2. Nosedive

3. Hated in the Nation

4. San Junipero

5. Fifteen Million Merits

6. Be Right Back

7. White Bear

8. White Christmas

9. Black Museum

10. Crocodile

11. Arkangel

12. Metalhead

13. Hang the DJ

14. Playtest

15. The Entire History of You

16. Men Against Fire

17. Shut Up and Dance

18. The National Anthem

19. The Waldo Moment

#black mirror #black mirror s4 #sam reviews #uss callister #arkangel #crocodile #hang the dj #metalhead #black museum #bm

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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The Boys Season 2 Unveils the Daddy Issues Behind the Toxic Masculinity

https://ift.tt/2GXXppR

This article contains spoilers for The Boys season 2.

Most male monsters in fiction are made by women. Or, at least, it’s women who tend to get the disproportionate share of the blame when their creations turn out to be significantly less than civilized (perhaps because, historically, most of them were written by men). The most famous examples of murderer-moulding mothers are probably Norma Bates, Cersei Lannister, Olivia Soprano and, of course, Mrs. McAllister (momma raised a real little trap-setting psycho there). In real life, too, serial killers like Ed Kemper, Ed Gein, Ted Bundy and Dennis Nilsen were all brutalized or disappointed by their mothers to such an extent that to some people the link between their formative maternal experiences and their misdeeds seems as tight and as strong as a steel cable.

This isn’t the case with Amazon’s The Boys, where it’s bad or inadequate fathers who provide male characters with the bulk of their nefarious neuroses and murderous motivations. Wee Hughie (Jack Quaid) inherited and internalized his father’s cowed outlook on the world to the point where he almost didn’t fight back when Vought tried to brush his girlfriend’s death in an A-Train wreck under the carpet. Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) was raised under the fast fists and hot temper of his old-school, tough-guy dad, whose mantra seems to have been kick first and don’t ask questions later, unless the question is: “Do you want me to fucking kick you some more?” “John” a.k.a Homelander (Antony Starr) doesn’t have a father in the conventional sense – as far as we know – but he was treated coldly, cruelly and dispassionately by his scientist ‘dad’, Jonah Vogelbaum (John Doman). So to what extent have failed father figures forged the monsters who sit upon the show’s chessboard? What else is missing from their lives? And what could prove the key to their salvations?

The previously mentioned The Sopranos is a ripe comparison, being that it also deals with familial legacies, internecine struggles, and toxic masculinity. The hallmark HBO show took the bold step of sending its proto-typical alpha-male mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) to a shrink to deal with his panic attacks and baseline depression. His sessions with his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Braco), teased out the revelation that the root of his anguish and anxieties was his own mother, the irascible and melodramatic Livia (Nancy Marchand), who in the first season shifted her life-long modus operandi from trying to kill his spirit to literally trying to kill him. It’s not hard to trace a direct line from that callous maternal influence to Tony’s behavior, and its internal and external consequences (especially when you’re dealing with Melfi’s favoured Freudian approach, for which parental trauma is its raison d’etre). But as the series – and Tony’s therapy – progressed it became clear not only that Tony’s life was richer and darker than his mother’s input allowed for, but also that Livia herself wasn’t the two-dimensional, havoc-wreaking demigod of Tony’s fears and imagination.

She, too, had been a victim of sorts; a slave to poverty and discrimination (on grounds of both race and gender); in thrall to a violent, charismatic criminal, a man who thought nothing of throwing men a beating, chopping off their pinkies or shooting them dead; a man who was out with one of his many mistresses on the night that she miscarried a baby and needed him by her side. Tony, his son, takes these revelations and buries them, as deep as they’ll go, partly because Tony’s world is a man’s world and men get a pass, but mainly to avoid the bright bulb of introspection from falling upon his own, very similar behavior. His mother gets the blame, but who really made Tony?

The world of The Boys is, to an extent, a man’s one, too, except that the boys here don’t get a pass. Given its title, it’s a surprisingly feminist show for one that is also, on the surface at least, a testosterone-fuelled superhero show (albeit one that takes an anti-superhero stance). The female characters are strong, but not inhumanly, infallibly strong like some of the Marvel heroes they parody. They’re flawed, human, and fascinating. They kick ass, they fuck up, but they’re never one-note or scapegoats. Of course there are bad women and mothers out there in the real world, and we shouldn’t shy away from imagining or creating those kinds of stories, but what we’ve seen on TV and film over the last decade or so is the steady opening up of a multiplicity of perspectives that’s been busy enriching our cultural currency. We should roll with that for a while. There’s a lot of lost ground to catch up on.

The Boys Season 2 Succeeds By Allowing Its Female Characters to Shine

By Lacy Baugher

The Boys Season 3: What to Expect

By Lacy Baugher

Perhaps much of the appeal of stories about bad mothers relies on our preconceptions of motherhood and the expectations that have always been laid upon women to be not just good mothers, but perfect ones. A bad mother stands out more than a bad father because for much of human history it’s been almost impossible to be classed as a bad father.

Let’s take Butcher. Without his own father’s brutality he mightn’t have been capable of becoming the effective, remorseless killing-machine we know and love, but, on the other hand, without his father’s brutality, he mightn’t felt the urge to pursue his vendetta in the first place. He might have been more like an immediately post-A-Train Hughie. But here’s the rub, because, arguably, a world with Homelanders needs Butchers, and plenty of them. There’s a weird and tragic duality at play here. Homelander is who he is largely because of his own failed father, so really the two men are destroying each other, and the world around them, because of their daddy issues.

Butcher himself is a flawed father figure. He uses a grief-wracked Hughie as a pawn to pursue his own vendetta against The Seven, showing the same sort of callous disregard Homelander might show an underling. But through Butcher’s influence Hughie learns to be (or is forced to become) bold, assertive, even brutal; the sort of son his own father could never have let him be; wouldn’t have known how to kindle. In time, almost despite himself, Butcher comes to care about Hughie, albeit not always in a conventionally paternal way. Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) tells Butcher early on this season that Hughie is his ‘pit canary’; if something bad happens to Hughie, then Butcher will know he’s gone too far. So if Butcher can be said to be the kind of father that Hughie never had, then Hughie, in turn, can be said to be the conscience that Butcher long forsook in favor of bloodshed.

For better and worse the men in The Boys are made by their fathers, but that only tells half the story. Their fathers, and they themselves, are aided in their osmotic, Franken-Freudian fuck-ups by the sometimes literal, sometimes figurative absence of a mother figure. Hughie’s mother? – MIA; Butcher’s mother? – passive; Homelander’s mother? – accidentally hugged to death by a young Homelander (she was a scientist Homelander had thought of as a mother, not his biological mother).

The lack of a maternal presence bleeds most noticeably into Hughie’s and Homelander’s lives. Hughie is insecure and desperate for attachment. His romance with Starlight (Erin Moriarty) is sweet, but carries a mild undercurrent of mommy issues. What Hughie really seems to want from Starlight is words of encouragement, validation, co-dependency and a tuck-in at bedtime. Even though their relationship is sexual, there’s something charmingly chaste about it at the same time.

It would be impossible, though, to trump Homelander’s mommy issues, manifested as they are by a fierce predilection for suckling, and a fondness for warm titty milk. Homelander may be peerlessly physically strong, but of all the show’s characters – and this is perhaps something of an understatement – he’s the most psychologically fragile.

Dr. Vogelbaum laments that the lack of a mother in Homelander’s life made him aggressive and full of hate. Putting aside for a moment this rather idealized notion of women and motherhood, if we assume that in Homelander’s case the observation is correct – and that Homelander is also on some level aware of how he’s been warped by this absence (the roots of his fetish surely can’t have escaped him) – then it’s interesting that he would choose to rob his own son, Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), of the loving maternal influence of which he himself was deprived.

By stealing Ryan away from his mother near the end of season two – by fracturing their bond and their reality – he risks making Ryan as miserable as he was as a child; worse, in truth, because Homelander never had a loving mother to miss. While The Boys deals very well with its female characters, it hasn’t yet explored motherhood in any great depth, except to show the consequences to fatherhood when it’s absent. Season 3 may very well add some texture by exploring in flashback form Stormfront’s (Aya Cash) relationship with her now-departed daughter, or by bringing Hughie’s mother into the fold, now that we know she isn’t dead.

While Homelander’s actions vis a vis Ryan are fuelled by his malignant, myopic selfishness, and his screaming God complex, the evolution of his feelings towards the boy hinted at a capacity for redemption. As hellish as the family unit Stormfront manipulates Homelander into creating – Nazi eugenicist mother, psychopathic father, and kidnapped child – the experience of being in that family seems to soften something in him, at least for a short while. He appears receptive to and empathetic towards Ryan’s fears, and even appears not to relish the idea of Stormfront filling his head with racist propaganda. Just for a moment, salvation seems possible.

Ultimately, though, no one can allow Homelander to guide Ryan’s destiny, potential for change notwithstanding. Ryan is too powerful and volatile to risk Homelander stamping his skewed outlook upon his soul. Ironically, the act of saving his mother from Stormfront propels Ryan along the same trajectory as his father – both have now killed their mothers. I wonder if Ryan, like Dexter before him, will be born in blood, the splatter pattern arranging itself into the shape of Homelander’s cape.

Butcher isn’t Ryan’s father, but his fealty to his dead wife and her cast-iron concept of family helps raise him from the swamp of his primal urges, resulting in him doing the right thing by both her and the boy who is the son of his greatest enemy. Clearly Butcher isn’t his own father either, his selflessness here indicating an encouraging break from the poor way he was parented.

Perhaps The Boys isn’t trying to communicate anything about solely fatherhood or solely motherhood but rather family itself; its power to make someone belong; its power to save. The family Homelander experienced was predicated on a falsehood, but he liked the feel of it nonetheless, and it threatened to humanise him. Butcher has a family now, too – his friends, The Boys, the people around him who would die for him, and vice versa – and a surrogate son in Hughie. Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) and Frenchie (Tomer Capon), whatever faint promise of romance swirls around them, have found for now a joyous familial bond, like brother and sister. And Mother’s Milk is now back in the bosom of his estranged family, a moment that must rank among the series most touching.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

All Happy families, then? For now. But Homelander might have something to say about that in season three.

The post The Boys Season 2 Unveils the Daddy Issues Behind the Toxic Masculinity appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3lYjaoz

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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mst3kproject · 7 years

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Dimension 5

Dimension 5 was written by Arthur C. Pierce. He also wrote The Human Duplicators, which is a sillier movie than this one but only by a very narrow margin. Most of the cast are strangers to MST3K (although a surprising number of them appeared on Star Trek), but we do get to see Kam Tong and Robert Ito from Women of the Prehistoric Planet. That is also a sillier movie than this one, but again, only slightly. Above and beyond that, there are just a million tiny things in Dimension 5 that scream MST3K, and I'm sure the Brains would have had a ball with it.

Our Hero, who the movie wants us to consider the coolest guy in the world, is Justin Power. See? With a name like that, how could he not be amazing? He's a secret agent with a 'time converter', which is some kind of magic belt that looks like part of a circus acrobat's costume (there are plastic jewels on it) but actually allows the wearer to time travel and teleport. Power's current mission is to take on a Chinese terrorist organization, the Dragon, who are planning to explode an atomic bomb in Los Angeles. Along with the beautiful but perhaps not entirely trustworthy Kitty Tsu, he must track down the Dragon leader Big Buddha and foil his evil plot before Lex Luthor becomes the worth's wealthiest owner of seaside property.

The moment I knew this movie was destined for MST3K in some universe (even if it's sadly not ours) was when Power's boss at Espionage Inc arrives, walking with a cane. “Hello, Justin!” he says. “Hello, Cane!” Power replies. It was a weird, confused couple of moments before I realized that 'Caine' was the guy's name, and for the rest of the movie I kept giggling like a lunatic as I imagined Joel and Bots calling out Power's greetings to random inanimate objects. “Hello, Watch!” “Hello, Teapot!” “Hello, Obvious Concealed Bomb!”

I'm not making fun of the movie by calling the organization ‘Espionage Inc’, by the way. That's its actual name.

There are a hundred more moments that beg to be riffed. Consider the utterly baffling bit with a balancing spoon and a scientist who claims he's searcing for the anti-graviton. This feels like it should be setting up a plot point, but it's never mentioned again. A captured baddie is interrogated with a mind-reading torture device that's really just a salon hair dryer. Big Buddha's personal thug, Genghis, looks exactly like Tor Johnson. There's a scene in which Power calls his boss in the middle of the night just to mess with him, and multiple moments when his voice sounds exactly like Adam West. The Dragon apparently have a disintegrator ray and they never use it! If I were in charge of an evil organization with a fucking disintegrator ray, I wouldn't even bother with the stupid atom bomb!

The movie wants so badly to be about how cool Justin Power is. Its opening sequence plays like something you might see on a television screen within an episode of The Simpsons to suggest that a character is watching A Spy Movie. There's a car chase, and then Power kisses a girl before punching her and confiscating the gun she was about to pull out of her purse. He then leads some soldiers on a merry chase back and forth through a cave before being taken away by a very conspicuous helicopter. It all seems slightly desperate, like the movie is waving in our faces and yelling, “look! Our fearless Hero! Isn't he great? This is a spy movie!” Not to mention all the time spent implying that Power has bedded literally every woman he knows, from his female co-workers to the waitresses at his favourite restaurant.

The over-blown-ness of all this seems even more absurd when it's contrasted with Kitty Tsu's introduction. We first see her when she foils an assassination, with such skill that nobody even notices her doing it, even though they can tell somebody intervened. Unlike Power's introduction, Tsu's is also relevant to the plot – Power's opening serves only to be a James Bond wannabe and demonstrate the time converter. All that work put into telling us how cool he is, only for her to be six times cooler without getting a hair out of place.

In fact, the entire first half of the movie consists mostly of Tsu being smarter, more capable, and more on top of things than Power, to the point where I began to think it had to be intentional. Could it be, I wondered, that the film is deliberately making Power look like an idiot in order to parody macho spy movie cliches? Tsu is so far out of his league, both as a spy and a human being, that I really enjoyed watching her take him down peg by peg. She even turns out to have a backstory that's interwoven with the villains', giving her a personal stake in this story that Power just does not have. Surely, I thought, this all has to be on purpose. This is Kitty Tsu's movie, and Justin Power is her sidekick, not the other way around. Right?

Nope. In the final showdown with Big Buddha, Tsu has a monologue moment and is captured, and Power has to save her. Even with the motive given for her behaviour, I find it hard to believe she would be that stupid. I find it even harder to believe that in a crunch she would throw a gun to Power instead of shooting the bad guy herself. Then, in the closing scene, he continues the condescending 'lesson plan' he's been giving her the entire movie, and she responds by kissing him! All that time spent building her up as way more awesome than him was actually, I think, meant to show that she's worthy of retiring and raising his children. Fuck that. The end credits just left me pissed off that Tsu didn't ditch Power and go get her own movie franchise.

The end credits also contain the information that Ken Spalding played 'Negro Agent'.

Tsu is left in very much the same situation as Lisa Dornheimer from The Human Duplicators, in that she's an interesting character in an an interesting situation, well-placed to do something about it, and then... nothing. The viewer gets the idea that Arthur C. Pierce was quite good at coming up with female characters and quite bad at giving them a real role in the plot, preferring to lavish attention on his 'dynamic' male leads while not realizing that they're what's sucking the life out of the story. Human Duplicators would have been much better if Glenn Martin hadn't been the hero. Dimension 5 would have been better with Justin Power relegated to a supporting role.

The weirdest character moment in the movie, however, is at the very end. Power and Tsu have been captured by the Dragon and are about to be shipped to Hong Kong for torture and interrogation. The only thing that stops this is Big Buddha's masseuse. At a critical moment she just steps up and stabs her boss, I think because he'd earlier ordered the death of her boyfriend – I can't say for sure because the relationship is not set up at all. We never even met her until five minutes earlier. She provides the necessary distraction for Power and Tsu to escape, and then while Big Buddha is distracted by the ensuing fight, attacks him again and kills him. Then, as the audience sits there wondering what the hell just happened, the whole incident is rendered moot as Power and Tsu go back in time so that Espionage Inc. can stop any of this from happening in the first place. That was weird.

What else is going on in Dimension 5? Well, this is rather obviously a Yellow Peril movie. The plot to destroy Los Angeles is explicitly a communist one, carried out by agents who are posing as Americans. Restauranteur Kim Fong is Power's friend, but is helpless to do anything but watch when Dragon orders a hit on him. Nancy Ho claims she was born in California and has never even been to China, but she's a liar. Even Kitty Tsu, for all she's one of The Good Guys, has her own motives that are more to do with her native homeland than her adopted one. Despite the presence of token Agent Sato (significantly Japanese rather than Chinese), the theme seems to be that these people are not Americans, and cannot be trusted no matter what they say.

The Asian characters are furthermore a collection of stereotypes – cowards, schemers, dominant women, and sexless men. I think the film-makers may have been afraid that Big Buddha, an intimidating guy whom we see shirtless and being oiled up by a beautiful woman, would seem too sexual, so they put him in a wheelchair to imply that he's impotent. Sure, let's insult disabled people while we're here. And yet... this was in a time when Christopher Lee was still starring in Fu Manchu movies, so I guess I at least have to give them credit for casting almost all the Asian characters with Asian actors. The exception is Genghis, who (like Jang in Women of the Prehistoric Planet) is played by a Hawai'ian, Lee Kolima. I guess one could argue that the movie never explicitly says Genghis is supposed to be Chinese.

If you want a movie that makes for a good do-it-yourself MST3K episode, Dimension 5 is pretty much perfect. The list of things you can make fun of here is almost endless, but like the best of MST3K features, there's also a coherent story you can follow. Get some popcorn, some friends, and enough liquor to invent your own drinking game, and this one comes highly recommended.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #dimension 5 #60s

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leeholtwrites · 5 years

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Red Queen: Chapter 16

After a week of staring at my clock, waiting for midnight, I begin to despair.

Wait... what? They send her the message saying “Midnight,” and then make her wait a week before they act on it. These resistance fighters are pretty bad. If there are cameras in Horse’s room, wouldn’t it have tipped off her guards at some point if she is suddenly staying up till midnight for a week straight if it wasn’t something she did before. Usually one word covert messages like “Midnight” imply that night, not a night one week from now.

The power goes out and Walsh - the serving lady who gave her the massage - pulls her through the darkness saying they have 15 minutes if they’re lucky. They reach the conservatory where Farley, with a fresh facial scar, is waiting.

The Maven joins them, because of course its Maven, not the brother whose been sympathetic to Reds from the beginning, Cal, who would have made more sense period.

Farley puts her gun to Maven’s head and forces him to tell her his reasoning. He says that his brother will be a just ruler but believes the balance is Silver over Red, and that change wouldn’t be worth the cost. Maven says his reasoning changed because when he went to the front he became friends with a Red named Thomas who saw Maven as a person because he didn’t know he was the prince on sight. Maven could have saved him, but his guards didn’t let him because his death couldn’t happen. Oh, and war is bad because people die and waste and shit. (I know this is flippant, but this message is made every single goddamned chapter.)

Horse wants to give him a hug because of how shaken he seems, but stays put. Holland - Maven’s servant - vouches for him by saying his attitude has been noticeably different since he returned from the front months ago. Farley lowers her gun and makes Maven swear on his colors. He does, and he takes Horse’s hand.

Okay, so we’ve seen Cal be a Silver apologist, but it never felt like a character thing he couldn’t get over. Cal’s view of the war is skewed, that’s for certain, and him joining the Scarlet Guard would be a tad far fetched, yet I don’t feel like I would have had a problem with it. Maven, on the other hand, has given no indication outside of telling Horse she’s not alone he’d do such a thing. I’m 16 chapters and 185 pages into this book and I’m less shocked than weary. Maybe if Maven had told Horse the story about Thomas and she got him into the Scarlet Guard along with Holland, then I would buy it. I just feel like I took a 2x4 to the head at this point.

Farley asks what Maven can bring to the table and he starts with some bureaucratic stuff, but Farley wants targets.

Maven shifts, uncomfortable. “I would prefer a less hostile path,” he mutters. “Your violent methods aren’t winning you any friends.”

Farley scoffs, letting the sound echo over the conservatory. “Your people are a thousand times more violent and cruel than mine. We’ve spent the last few centuries under a Silver boot, and we’re not going to get out by by being nice.”

I would like to remind you at this point all the Scarlet Guard has done is bomb Silver targets. I haven’t heard anything about them interrupting supply lines for Silver palaces and giving the loot to communities in need or any number of less violent means than blowing shit up because Silvers are evil. I’m not saying both of them are right because Maven is from the privileged class speaking to a marginalized class, but Farley is uncomfortably blood thirsty for any kind of sustainable change. I would ask Maven to see if he can flip Cal since his brother is the future king while working on other revolutionary tasks.

Farely mocks the two of them, because she’s a woman, so she’s the worst, and the rest of the Scarlet Guard in attendance make their number know. Aveyard also forgets that Farley was wearing a scarf over face. I’m beginning to think remembering appearance details are not this writer’s strong suit.

“We can bomb and burn down every inch of this country down... but that will never do the damage you two can do. A Silver prince turning against his crown, a Red girl with abilities. What will people say, (comma splice) when they see you standing with us?”

Nothing, because they’re currently undercover in the palace. Long story short, she wants them to be the face of their revolution. Maven is on board.

Farley wants to do something so big the Silvers can’t cover it up. This was written pre-Orange Man Administration, so I’ll give it a pass. Horse is hesitant because she saw all the innocent people killed during the riot and that her brother, Shade, died for the “cause.” She’s worried that doing something big enough to target Reds is just going to get people hurt. She’s not wrong, but remembers that Julian taught her that revolutions have to start somewhere. (This remembrance brought to you by Love Interest #3). Horse is still hesitant, but Maven reminds her that Cal doesn’t believe that change is worth the cost and so he reminds inactive. Horse caves, but is still wary.

This is so weird because it’s trying to be an argument on when it’s appropriate to start a revolution against an oppressive regime (the answer: there isn’t) yet the actual revolution organization doesn’t feel like it works because the Scarlet Guard feel almost like a parody of a revolutionary organization, but not in a good way. A lot of this book’s villains/antagonists can be hilariously over the top, but it doesn’t always work when trying to discuss serious stuff. Farley makes me tired.

They decide to go after the up and coming ball because too many people means Queenie won’t be able to pick out dissenting minds. Horse wants requests that Kilorn be kept safe as payment like their original deal, and then he steps forward. He has joined the SG against his friend’s request.

Horse is understandably upset since saving his ass is how she got into this mess. Kilorn isn’t even very sensitive to this either. He says he’s doing it because he wants to save her too, but instead of feeling like friendly solidarity it just feels like his ego can’t stand to have him just being a dude-in-distress. I’m all for character agency, but sometimes its okay to have a male character just stand on the side rooting the female protag on, especially since she has 2 other love interests.

As they disband he says “Mare.... At least say good-bye.” She doesn’t, because Kilorn is a Dickbag.

A week passes and nothing happens. Everything goes as normal, until one day in training people seem to take things more seriously. Maven and this water girl are called up, and BAM! an arena is telekenetically created. Cal explains to Horse that the water girl will win because older and superior element. She does indeed kick Maven’s ass. They both lecture him on using his head over his fists. Maven is butt hurt over his more successful, perfect brother giving him advice and Horse sympathizes with him because of her relationship with Gisa. Honestly, don’t mind this. I kind of wish Maven were more friend than love interest. He’s actually pretty good potential BFF material.

Polarity Princess’s minions fight. Horse pretends to like the brutality as much as the rest of the Silvers because more silver = evil.

Then Cal fights the wind guy and a girl who turns her skin to stone. He utterly destroys them reminding Horse that maybe Maven’s assessment of his brother as a warrior at heart is probably correct.

Cal’s blood might be silver, but his heart is black as burned skin.

Wh-what? I never got the sense that Cal was sociopathic like Polarity Princess or Queenie. He always came across as privileged and misguided. Rich white boy, but the kind who thinks he’s helping people not the kind that throws rocks at immigrants doing his lawn.

When his eyes trial to mine, I force myself to look away. Instead of letting his warmth, his strange kindness confuse me, I commit the inferno to memory.

This feels more appropriate for whats going on, but as we’ve seen before, there is always a line that should have been cut because it changes the meaning from “Yes. Yes. Very good,” to “Huh?”

Polarity Princess challenges Horse to the ring.

Next time, Horse will either win because she’s so speshul, or get her ass kicked.

#red queen #victoria aveyard #mare barrow #mareena titanos #scarlet guard #ya #book review #fantasy #reds and silvers #chapter by chapter #people said i'd loath mare but i mostly find the writing inept #this is definitely a garbage read that you shouldn't be guilty about

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recentanimenews · 5 years

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TRIGGER Staff Shares Secret Stories About Kill la Kill and More

This piece was originally published on Famitsu.com and is republished on Crunchyroll News with permission from KADOKAWA.

Beginning with Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann at Gainax, they’ve put out hot titles that have stirred the hearts of viewers, and among anime fans they’re a well-renowned golden tag team—Kazuki Nakashima and Director Hiroyuki Imaishi. TRIGGER’s latest bombshell is their first original animated film Promare (released in Japan on May 24, 2019), which has these famous two heading up the production, lighting a flame of excitement and anticipation in fans’ hearts.

Separate from this article, we did another interview where we spoke in depth with two key members involved with TRIGGER’s creation, Kazuya Masumoto and Hiromi Wakabayashi, about what led to the studio’s creation and its history, from the details of their series starting with the work that immediately preceded the studio’s creation, Gurren Lagann, Kill la Kill and more. This is a must-read for TRIGGER fans so please check it out!

The Road to Promare: TRIGGER Staff Discuss the Anime Studio's History

Kazuki Nakashima

In charge of the original work and script of Promare. Supported Director Imaishi and was in charge of the script for Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill. Has a wide range of experience doing scripts not only for anime, but for live action films, SFX and stage plays as well, and currently he’s hard at work as the script writer for the popular Japanese theatrical company Gekidan☆Shinkansen.

Hiroyuki Imaishi

Director of Promare. Left the Anime Studio Gainax after managing titles such as Gurren Lagann. In 2011, together with Director Masahiko Ootsuka and Producer Kazuya Masumoto, created TRIGGER and has since worked at said studio as a director.

The Name of the Unexpected Person Who Brought Them Together

The two of you first formed your tag team for the television anime Gurren Lagann, but after Kill la Kill you haven’t worked together as a team again until Promare. Could you tell us what it was that sparked the formation of your tag team to begin with?

Nakashima: That would be Neon Genesis Evangelion’s (Hideaki) Anno-san. Back in 2004, Anno-san was the director for Cutie Honey’s live-action film. A project popped up for a spin-off of the series, a three-episode OVA called Re: Cutie Honey. I received an offer from Anno to oversee the series composition and script for Episode 1. Imaishi-san was the [Episode] Director for it.

Imaishi: That was my first time working with Nakashima, but the two of us were really on the same wavelength. “I’d like to make something else with you again,” I said.

Nakashima: After that, Gurren Lagann became Imaishi-san’s first work as a TV anime director.

At what point during Gurren Lagann’s production did you become involved, Nakashima-san?

Nakashima: Gainax spoke to me about the project before it had even taken shape as Gurren Lagann. It was actually quite a while after that before I started on it in an official capacity though.

Imaishi: It took some time before I was confirmed as the director for Gurren Lagann, which slowed the call for Nakashima, but after I began as director, I immediately reached out to him.

Nakashima: Back then I was still working for a publishing company called Futabasha, and while I was handling series composition, I was only doing scripts half of the time. At the time [for Futabasha] I think I was doing book editing and copyright work.

What?! So, in addition to your editing work, you were writing scripts too?! Is that really possible…?

Imaishi: I always found it strange too, “Why is he able to complete scripts this fast?” (laughs). During the first half of Gurren Lagann, we entrusted half of the work to different people as we were creating it, but starting in the latter half we almost entirely relied upon Nakashima-san. When we did that, even though the number of staff members had decreased, it felt like the speed at which the scripts were completed had picked up. And yet the completed scripts were always entertaining every week. I thought, this is really abnormal (laughs).

Nakashima: When I was younger I’d also worked as a weekly manga magazine editor, so I had experience in working with creating a story every week. I also didn’t receive many requests for revisions from Imaishi-san, so maybe that’s why I was able to complete them that much quicker. At any rate, at the time it was like “the weekly Gurren Lagann” (laughs).

(laughs). The fact that there weren’t many revisions means you must have really understood Director Imaishi’s intentions then.

Imaisih: If we entrust the script with multiple people, in the long run the script deviates in flavor from the story I’ve pictured, so then we have to do revisions. However, with Nakashima-san that wasn’t the case so it really made things easy for me (laughs).

From Gurren Lagann

We Packed In “the Most Interesting Stuff” in Kill la Kill

After Gurren Lagann was Kill la Kill, what are the details surrounding its beginnings?

Imaishi: I couldn’t think of creating anything with anyone other than Nakashima-san anymore, so from the planning stage we immediately reached out to him.

Nakashima: Imaishi-san was the one who launched the company TRIGGER, and this work was to become the face of the studio, so I replied with an enthusiastic, “Let’s do it.” For us, Gurren Lagann was a good series, both as a robot series and as a story that depicted the growth of a single young boy. That’s why we put in all this effort when we were creating Kill la Kill because, “We have to surpass Gurren Lagann!” But when we calmed down, our feelings turned more toward, “That type of thinking is what produces failure.”

So you became overly conscious of Gurren Lagann, which led to you getting overly enthusiastic?

Nakashima: Yes, that’s exactly it. But during one of my numerous conversations with Imaishi, we changed our way of thinking and said, “Let’s forget about Gurren Lagann and just create the most interesting story that we can think of.”

Imaishi: That released the tension from us and made it much easier to create [the series].

Nakashima: That’s why we added elements to Kill la Kill from my favorite school resistance-themed shounen manga and 1970s Toei Pinky Violence (a genre of sexed-up bad girl films). A manga by the name of Otokogumi was serialized in the 1970s, but there isn’t a female version, is there? It was from that line of thinking that the idea of “two heroines in a rival relationship fight each other while wearing uniforms” was born. With that as our basis, Imaishi-san quickly drew a character that was like the prototype of Ryuuko, and when I saw it we both nodded to ourselves and said, “This could work.”

Imaishi: Nakashima-san spoke of a female version of Otokogumi, but I interpreted it as a combination of Delinquent Detective and Fist of the North Star.

Nakashima: Those generations are about ten years apart (laughs). Even so we had a shared notion that, “If we made this story with a male protagonist, it wouldn’t be realistic for us.” If we were going to do it, we wanted to do it like Delinquent Detective.

The first season’s ending definitely has that image to it, doesn’t it?

Imaishi: It was completely Delinquent Detective, wasn’t it? (laughs)

Nakashima: (laughs) Once you take that original idea and have a prototype of the character drawn for it, it’s all about whether or not you can then picture scenes of that character moving in your head.

Imaishi: Definitely. If you can picture that character moving, then you get a real sense that you’re getting close to completion.

By the way, Nakashima-san, when you’re writing the script, do you ever think about anything in particular like, “Since Imaishi-san is the director, let’s try doing it this way”?

Nakashima: Imaishi-san gets on board with my ideas and makes them even more interesting, so I write the script with that in mind. For instance, in Kill la Kill there’s the setup where wearing a uniform makes you stronger, and yet for some reason when its abilities activate, the characters are almost naked. That does make you question what in the world is going on (laughs).

Imaishi: I thought we better explain that one later (laughs).

Nakashima: I am the one who added an explanation for it after all! (laughs) Also, if I write a completely normal script I don’t think Imaishi-san would show much interest in it, so I’m always stuffing in these elements that make it seem like I have a screw loose. A prototypical example of that in Kill la Kill would be that there are a bunch of crazy characters who appear with this sense of “I’m steadfast in my beliefs, and I will still never stop to listen to someone else’s opinion,” and that made writing the script a lot of fun. I decided from the very beginning not to add in a single normal character (laughs).

From Kill la Kill

Promare Was Born from the Tasty Flavor of a Hamburger?!

This time for Promare, Nakashima-san was on board from the planning stages, correct?

Nakashima: That’s right. We got a proposal from the production side saying, “Let’s do an anime film next,” and Promare was what resulted from us talking quite a bit about what kind of film we should create. I personally wanted to create a zombie musical like “Les Zombierables” (parody of Les Miserables) but no one other than Imaishi-san would agree to it (laughs).

The combination of zombies and a musical seems like it would be a bit too unique (laughs).

Nakashima: No, no, if the zombies sang the music clearly, I’m sure everyone would enjoy it! (laughs)

Imaishi: But if they sang, their jaws would come off! Because they’re zombies!! And that’s why I thought it would be really interesting… (says disappointedly)

Nakashima: After that, the zombie flick One Cut of the Dead became a hit. Made me think ah, maybe we could’ve made it if we’d named it “Zombian Rhapsody” (parody of Bohemian Rhapsody) (laughs).

(laughs) With that idea rejected, Promare was born as a result of you reassessing your idea, correct?

Nakashima: After that we came up with the idea, “Let’s make fire our theme.” We expanded on that idea, and at first we started moving forward on an adolescent route with a concept like How to Train Your Dragon with a young boy who matures after a meeting a fantastical creature. We really polished the script for it, I wrote up to about three drafts of it, but Imaishi-san just could not accept that setup, so the entire script was thrown out.

That… was a bit of shock, wasn’t it?

Nakashima: Of course it was a shock! During the meeting where it was rejected I slammed both hands against the table and went home steaming mad (laughs). After the script was thrown out, I had no idea how to go about reworking it. That’s where I decided, “For now, let’s just go out to eat together,” and Imaishi-san, Komaya-san (Shigeto Komaya, Promare’s Character Designer), Creative Director Wakabayashi and myself went out for hamburgers. Then as we were eating it was like, “This is it!” “This standard delicious flavor!” Standard is fine, everyone will eat it, so let’s create a flavor that people will find delicious.

So that hamburger that you just so happened to eat was what lead you back to the starting point?

Nakashima: That’s right. Up until that point we struggled and made this objective for ourselves of, “Let’s put away our usual habits and try to do something we’ve never done before,” but our way of thinking turned around and we thought, “What’s wrong with doing things the way we normally do?” We realized, “The only thing we can make is hamburgers, and yet we’re overthinking things almost like we’re trying to make a hamburger out of rice” (laughs). Well, of course, rice burgers are delicious, but we decided, “The standard way is good too!”

So you changed your direction to, “Let’s put forth the same distinct style that we always do”?

Nakashima: There at that restaurant we talked out the scenario and all in one go we gradually decided on the story composition up to the climax, and right there Imaishi-san took one of the restaurant’s paper napkins and drew the characters on it. That day, it suddenly felt like I could see the finished picture. Hamburgers are very important (laughs).

Imaishi: Once we decided to go with our usual style, the concept for the entire film was pretty much set, and we decided from the beginning to go full throttle and show intense action.

Nakashima: In the previous scenario’s concept, we forced ourselves along the creative process even as there were points we couldn’t agree on, but once we cleared up all the problems we were able to put together the whole thing smoothly without forcing anything.

Promare is the Culmination of Years of Hard Work and the Ambitious Result of a Search for a Way to Express Something New

So it’s not the story of a boy maturing, your problems were solved by making the protagonist a young man who had already matured, but what exactly does that mean?

Nakashima: The biggest thing was, in the case of a film, there’s a hard time limit, so we wanted to have a protagonist that was already in the thick of things, but if our protagonist was an adolescent boy, then making that idea a reality would be very difficult.

Imaishi: By making the protagonist a young man and the film an action movie, we solved those problems without an issue.

Nakashima: When we made the story about the conflict between Burning Rescue and Mad Burnish, it was like we could see the overall picture of the film. From there, more and more, we were able to get serious and really add our own style into it. For example, the way the Burning Rescue characters feel like TRIGGER’s usual style (laughs).

A TRIGGER fan might be able to figure out what kind of personality a character has just by looking at their face (laughs).

Imaishi: On the other hand, unlike the 30-minute episode TV anime series we’d created up until this point, we were desperate to acquire a sense of balance that would hold for two hours as the story hit its climax. It takes a lot of effort to construct a story that’s like a rollercoaster in a two-hour timeframe. You have to make rough storyboards based on the script and make them into a film, and add some temporary voicing to it so you can check the overall picture. Then you watch it, redraw the storyboards, rewrite the lines… that’s what it’s like.

Nakashima: We looked at the storyboards which showed us the overall picture, then discussed between the two of us about the parts that we found lacking, and we were able to wrap up the story in the two-hour timeframe.

Imaishi: Nakashima-san never runs out of ideas. In Promare’s case, I’d go to him and say, “I’d like to put a gag in this scene,” and he’d immediately reply with something like, “We can have their butt catch on fire.” Normally, most of those ideas are something the director comes up with.

Nakashima: Thinking back on it, I think we made Promare in a very theatrical kind of way. We trained and trained, gradually increasing our level of precision.

When you were at the recording studio and checked the finished lines, you decided to redo them to make them better?

Nakashima: This is something I also did for Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill, but I was present at for the recording of all of the lines. I listened to the actors play out their parts, and I would alter the lines that I thought needed changing as much as I could. I decided I wanted to use lines that had that natural acting feel from the voice actors.

In TRIGGER’s productions, Tohru Inada who is one of the cast members said, “The art changed after the recording.” Was this because you wanted wanted to harness that “raw” feeling?

Imaishi: That was, for better or worse, because at the recording stage the animation wasn’t completed, so we were still able to fix it. I can’t say this too loud but, coincidentally, we’re never on time (bitter laughter).

So it’s “pure coincidence” that you’re “never” on time? (laughs)

Imaishi: Well, our sense of time sitting at a desk animating and the sense of time for a voice actor giving a natural performance are completely different. For instance, animators have a tendency to draw the entire thing at the same tempo, but depending on the actor, their pacing when reading the line may be different. That’s why if you go hard and do the animation ahead of time, then you’re no longer able to accommodate the actor’s own natural performance speed.

Nakashima: At that point, the actor is forced to perform according to the animator’s line of thought.

Imaishi: So if instead you let the actor perform freely, then after recording is over you match that up with equally masterful animation, you get a more natural production… or so I’m going to solemnly say! (laugh)

This will be the last question. What do the two of you find incredible about the other person? I would think that the two of you have found a lot of areas about one another that you respect through all of your work together up until now.

Nakashima: Well, let’ see, Imaishi-san is very well-liked. I’m sure this doesn’t just go for me but the other staff as well, you want to bring an interesting idea to him and have him tell you, “Nice!” Everyone is working with the desire to please Imaishi-san. That feeling is connected to the “I want to please the customer” mentality, I think. Also, he’s normally a very mild-mannered person, but when he draws, he creates these incredibly shocking things (laughs). It really surprises you like, “How is this person able to come up with stuff like this?” So, I guess… I like that he’s gap moe.

I can’t believe I heard “gap moe”! (laughs)

Imaishi: The gap moe goes for Nakashima-san as well. The script is really refined and precise, but when you meet him he’s just your normal guy (laughs). Nakashima-san is famous among the TRIGGER staff as someone whose scripts are insanely entertaining. First of all they’re just straight up interesting to read, so when I get them, they always fire me up and make me want to put out the best art possible to go with them. But putting art to a script like that is difficult, so I enjoy it but I’m also troubled by it like, “This is incredibly interesting but the characters are talking the whole time as they’re fighting, so it’s hard to keep them moving constantly. How am I supposed to do this?” (laughs)

Nakashima: Promare is also a title that has a lot of battles in it (laughs). The script for it was a culmination of my hard work, but I was also worried, “I haven’t really accomplished anything new in this, have I?” Still, Imaishi-san did a lot of challenging things with the animation, so the work as a whole is fresh and new and that reassured me.

Imaishi: Just as Nakashima-san said, the scenario isn’t too complicated, it’s a pretty straightforward work. But, on the other hand, we really brought out a fresh style of animation, with the shading of the art and its layout on screen and such, and we devoted a lot to devising a way to produce a different texture to it. The content of the film is something anyone can enjoy, so for those of you who love anime and those fans of action films, please watch it!

From Promare

See the original article at Famitsu.com.

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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sillyfudgemonkeys · 6 years

Note

Oh! I wanna hear your hyper critical opinions towards p3 (and p4 if youre up to it). I am genuinely curious as to what it is!

pDSOAPFADFJIOA;FJIA;JF;DA Ahhhhhhh if only I wrote down everything I said (I did this over a year ago). under the cut cause long:

It was easier cause I was ripping it as we played and I had some nitpicks in the dialogue (more so with like “WAIT THAT MAKES NO SENSE!” or “WHY ARE YOU JUMPING TO THAT CONCLUSION?!” kinda thing rather than a translation error). But I can’t really specify what it was cause it was so long ago. The only one that comes to mind is when they’re jerks to Naoto, it must be how she’s talking in Japan cause like.......they’re really, REALLY rude to her. Like, they do realize she has a right to be suspicious of them right? Like, don’t get me wrong, I loooooooove the animosity in some way (great foe-yay/rival shipping yay fodder for me to ship her with the MC ahuhuhu 8U) but dang I wish they made more tension (and made it even). That’s actually the one thing I thought the P4 anime did right (and trust me I don’t think that anime did a lot of things right, esp concerning Naoto...ironically XD), they really built the tension between her and the group very well. Anyway I want to go into more detail some other time, maybe when I replay the two games, but for now I’ll give you a general overview).

Ok so all and all I think P3 and P4 are fine the way they are. They did a good job with them. P3 for being Hashino’s first hoorah into the series (also didn’t have enough time or money to include everything and had to cut stuff, LIKE THE FEMC! ;W;), and P4 for.....having such....a small.....budget....and....not a lot of time....and.....the company was struggling.....Like dang man I’m surprised we got P4. So like, compared to P5, I’m a lot easier on these two cause in one case Hashino was trying to find his style, and the other he was struggling with working with almost nothing (P5, however, didn’t have any of these issues).

Ok so like.....My biggest issue with P3 is mostly it’s characters and character relationships. P4.....I wish we could’ve hung out with Naoto earlier (even before she joined the team, that would’ve been interesting if the MC and her met up and attempted to draw more info out of each other about the case), and I wouldn’t have minded if they added more to the murder plot.

P3....ngl the first act until Aigis show’s up is.....so....slow.....and boring....and no one is really likeable imo. I hated Yukari, I hated Junpei. Mitsuru seemed interesting but she wouldn’t hang out. Akihiko....didn’t really care for him, but I couldn’t hang out with him. I couldn’t hang out with Yukari or Junpei if I wanted to (Yukari won’t hang out till around Aigis joins anyway, I remember from my last playthrough we tried, it was an NG+ and she snubbed us). Kenji is a moron (don’t hate him, feel bad for him, but god so boring), Kaz is a moron, didn’t do Yuko the first time (should’ve I did like her, hate I only got the first rank the first time I ever played through P3), I didn’t like Chihiro (she started off fine but was kinda creepy later on), can’t hang with Fuuka unless you have maxed courage cause eff me (not like I can ever remember her gd link anyways that’s how forgettable it is, I don’t even like Yukari but at least I remember her’s). Basically......the SL sucked balls. Major balls (I liked Maiko, the Star dude, the old couple, the Hermit, and the Devil......I guess the Tower too he was ok, and....that’s it....for outside teammate links aka Aigis and Mitsuru). Silly was not a happy camper when she popped P3 in after having fun with P4 (and esp after being told P3 was a GAZZILLION TIMES BETTER!!!!1!), tbh I took like a 4 month break from P3 and replayed P4 before I picked P3 back up (after Aigis showed up I def enjoyed it a heck of a lot more after that). Now, P3′s plot is really good and very solid, it’s P3′s strong point. My issue is that.....everything P3 does is for the sake of the plot. It does it well, don’t get me wrong, but everything about the characters is only happening cause “plot demands it.” They never felt super fleshed out, and it’s probably why they feel a little odd (maybe even flat-ish) in the spinoff games (even more so than the P4 team), cause the spinoff games aren’t relying on their (P3′s) plot. I also don’t buy a lot of their friendships (esp the males teammates with the Male MC), Yukari and Mitsuru’s is....ok (I don’t like how the game makes it feel like “oh you have a dead dad? me too! let’s be friends” as a thing, I know she’s just trying to relate and sympathize but.....I’ve seen that as a complaint come up by a lot of people, for someone so popular Yukari isn’t much of a people person in this regard, from how the game frames it that is). Also the fact you can’t friend girls. There’s not a lot of bonding moments in the game, there’s more than P5, but I still don’t feel as close to the team as I should even by the end. And gawd, Ryoji? Wut I’m friends with him now? How? When? I like the guy but I don’t think he likes me. You’d think he’d want to hang out with me cause.....PHAROS! ;W;

There’s more but I don’t want to leave you hanging, but anyway it’s just....I have a lot of issues with how the characters are handled. They’re good characters, I wish there just....more to them. But the thing is.....THIS IS AN EASY FIX! You’ve probably heard me say about the P5 manga/anime “a change in medium can do wonders” or something like that. That’s cause I have P3 to look at. The manga and movies do wonders for P3 my problems with P3. There’s more bonding, character relationships are improved yadda yadda. Yes there are issues within the manga and movies themselves...... but they do a lot of good things too. One of the things the movies did was actually......influenced by it’s P3P remake (aka establish a relationship with Ryoji, yay!). Oh man, P3P/the FeMC fixed sooooooooooooo many problems (it also added some even more awesome duality to a game that already had a lot of duality going on with it), I can talk to Yukari and Junpei from the get go (and they treat me different, and more pleasantly than when I played as the dude), I can actually hang out with the guys (and I DON’T automatically have to date them, in fact I have to work to date them, every single one), the stats for character requirements are laid out more fairly like in P4 so by the time someone is available I can probably talk to them (without having to kill myself trying to manage my social stats).But man, the first act just flows so much better when you’re able to bond with your teammates (also Rio and Saori are great SLs!). Even tho they don’t change the female SLs pretty much at all (making it veeeery gay XD), it does feel like it is at least a friendship by the end (even tho I’m literally dating everyone and you can’t tell me otherwise! 8U). I also love her personality comes across more clearing (and varied) than the males, there’s a more clear progression of her psyche than her male counterpart (it’s still there, just not as obvious, and I love how they’re inverted to each other~! :D). It’s just, with P3, the really minor changes go a LOOOOOOOOOOONG way. The only thing I would change with P3 is the minor stuff. Just add more scenes (that don’t take up time) to the game, on both sides. Gameplay wise add more SLs, alternative SLs even. Heck, if they remade the game, I think being able to go to new places would be cool (and it’d be where you’d meet your new SLs) cause man you’re in a city, you deserve to do more stuff! It’s just the little things man, the little things can make a big impact! It says something that probably my fav Persona fanfic and fav Strain42 Persona parody comicis the P3(P) ones, even tho P4 is my fav game. You change a few things around, even the medium, and it makes a difference.

Ok onto P4. Now P4 is the opposite of P3, with P4 it’s strong point is it’s characters. The characters drive P4. P4 is character based, P3 is plot based. P4 the plot takes a back seat. This is fine, it works in P4′s favor, like how the plot worked in P3′s favor. P4′s plot is ok, it does a great job with supporting the characters. Sadly I understand if you wanted more murder mystery (or just mystery) in a murder mystery game. And in P4′s defense, again, it had a barebones budget and not a lot of time and the company was doing pretty bad and P4 still came out pretty great (was the most popular before P5 came out, lord knows if it may even come out on top again if it gets an updated graphics/gameplay remake). And it’s also really hard to keep a murder mystery going for about 70-100ish hours (and only finally solving it in the last 1/5 of the game). Also P4, like P3 (forgot to mention that above), sticks to it’s theme really well. Even making it solving it/obtaining the good ending routes semi-difficult. Sure you can deduce Adachi, but tbh it’s also difficult. They do a pretty decent job building the guy up as a friend (even more so in P4G due to the SL). Izanami is also well hidden. The game makes you work and it rewards you.

Now if I were to change stuff.....it’d range from minor to major depending on what we’re talking about. Minor would be adding more scenes of Naoto bonding (she needs it cause the late game doesn’t do her justice), and like I mentioned above, I think have a deduction off would be interesting (Naoto’s SL was one of my favs cause of how we solved a gd mystery, god I’m so mad that never made it into the anime, even as an ova, it could’ve been a great team-building filler one too). Another thing I’d add would maybe be.....something similar to quests, but instead you have to solve a mystery (which means talking to people, and investigating areas), it can range from finding a cat in a tree or finding a bully or whatever. Just something minor that can give the mystery lovers something fun to do. I’d also have Izanami/gas station attendant be an SL (she originally was the Empress before giving that to Margret). Oh I’d also like to take Margret out on “dates” (c’mon gimme dem fun shenanigans). And.....now this can be minor or major (depending on what they do, but it’s probably more major), add another red herring. I don’t care how.....but....it would help draw attention away from Adachi. Maybe they’re added from some of the mini mysteries you solved, maybe they squeeze an extra dungeon into the game some how-some way (doubt it for the later, that’d be a major change), but another red herring would be good.

For a Major change it’d be restructuring the plot a looooooot, adding more dungeons for more red herrings. I would actually make Dojima a red herring. He originally was suppose to be the killer (but they thought that was too dark, understandable), with Adachi as the red herring instead. Other than that I’m not exactly sure how they’d overhaul that. I mean, if they made a P4 game based off of P3P’s route (aka different route/game, different killer), I’d like to see their prototype stuff play out. Short-haired ice queen Yukiko, delinquent/bully Rise, Pretty boy Naoto (actual boy this time, also make him dateable.....what? I like Naoto 8U), 1st year MC, Female Teddie, Adult(?) Kanji, Dojima as the killer, Adachi as the red herring (Chie and Yosuke are actually pretty much the same). I’d really like to see that.

But tbh, I don’t really know where to start in giving P4 a major overhaul (except to go with the prototype set up), possibly cause it’d mean introducing/creating new characters. But P5? I do, oh man I know where I would start (P5 is where I’d make my major changes left and right, no minor changes here...except maybe dungeon 1), I’d make soooooo many changes to P5. But that’s for another time (not now, it’d take too long). 8U

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indigovalleyfilm-blog · 7 years

Text

Interview with Nadia Alexander - Actress, "Blame"

Jaclyn Bethany: Where are you from and where you based now? Nadia Alexander: I was born in South Carolina, but lived in Pittsburgh from age 1 to 13. I then relocated with my family to New York City, where I have remained ever since! JB: How did you get involved with BLAME - did you audition, or were you referred, etc? NA: The director, Quinn Shephard, actually reached out to me via Facebook! We didn't know each other personally, but I knew of her because she had booked several projects I had auditioned for (I always get sucked down the IMDb rabbit hole of "who booked that job?") Her mother, Laurie (who was also the casting director), had known about me for a little while, and I had also booked a Salem Witch Trials HBO pilot earlier that year, which I think cemented me further in their minds as someone who could be an asset to a similarly-minded project. Initially, when Quinn reached out with information about BLAME, she actually asked me to read for Ellie, a character who is much closer to who I am in reality. I read the script and really enjoyed it, but I never even thought twice about Melissa as a possible alternative. I had written her off as the bitchy, blonde cheerleader-- a Regina George type, which definitely isn't my style. So you can imagine my surprise, after I sent my first tape in as Ellie, when Quinn asked if I would be willing to take a stab at the villain. I almost said no, but Quinn persisted and I decided there was no harm in trying for multiple roles. I walked into the callback still sure Ellie was the role for me, but something changed when Quinn had us do a four person improv (myself, Sarah Mezzanotte, Luke Slattery and Owen Campbell--all of whom would book the parts they were reading for!) We improvised a party scene similar to the one you see in the film. We were dancing and goofing around and it helped that Owen and I have actually known each other since we were 14 (we went to high school together), so I felt very comfortable sitting on his lap and playing around with him and what have you. Simultaneously, I was trying really hard to be the "sexy, bitchy" girl, which, when you boil down Melissa's character, is really exactly what she does-- she puts on this character that isn't really who she truly is. It took two more rounds of callbacks (and some rewrites from Quinn), but together we discovered a new version of Melissa who wasn't so effortlessly the role she plays. We added a lot more anger and fire and crassness to her, which felt far more up my alley than a girl who was complimenting her friend's bracelet and wearing pink on Wednesdays. JB: What was it like working with Quinn, someone who performed as writer/director/ and actor on the project? NS: It was, in all honestly, an utterly life-changing experience. Quinn is such a singularly unique talent, and it was truly an honor to get to work on what is her first of many incredible films in her career. By getting to work with her on her debut, I feel almost as though I got let in on a secret before everyone else was clued into her incredible abilities. People are definitely realizing it now with the finished product in their hands, but I've known it for almost two years--pretty much since the moment I met her! She has the kind of vision and perseverance that I find rare in any artist, let alone someone as young as she is. Right from that very first Facebook message, I sensed that BLAME was going to be something really special. I even told her I'd work crew if she didn't want to cast me as an actor (thankfully--for the sake of the crew's sanity-- she did!) She has a willingness to think outside the box (as evidenced by her casting me as Melissa instead of your stereotypical blonde, sexy cheerleader type) and she gives her actors an incredible amount of freedom while never letting them stray too far from the path of what is needed to tell the story of these characters. There also was never a moment where I thought of her as someone too young or inexperienced to be doing what she was doing. She ran the ship like she's captained for decades, even on the stormiest of seas. Weird sea metaphors aside, she brings such sensitivity to her work (both on screen and off) and there was not a moment in this entire process where it wasn't very clear that this was her blood, sweat and tears passion project. She poured so much of her soul into this film, so it really makes me so happy to see the positive reactions to it! Beyond just the film, Quinn is also a huge part of my life offscreen, so I'm very very grateful to BLAME for bringing us together. She is a huge inspiration to me as an artist, but more importantly, an invaluable asset to my growth as a human being. JB: Tell me a little bit about your character, Melissa. NA: Pretty much from the moment you see her, it's clear Melissa is the villain. With her leather jackets, miniskirts and bright red hair, she stomps into school full of anger, crassness, and viciousness for no obvious reason. She frequently bullies Abigail (played by Quinn), who is set up to be the story's protagonist. When Abigail is cast over her as the lead in The Crucible by their new drama teacher Jeremy (Chris Messina), she grows increasingly jealous of their budding relationship, having gotten used to always getting her way, particularly with men. This, in turn, spirals into an almost manic obsession to reveal the truth about their potential romance and destroy as many lives as she can in the meantime. However, as the film goes on, we see more and more of Melissa's messy home life and the insecurities that lie under her nasty facade. Without revealing too much, Melissa is far more than your 1-dimensional villain. She is an immensely complex young girl struggling with a lot of internal demons. She may start out as a "bad girl" stereotype, but believe me, you won't leave the theater thinking you can put her in a box. JB: Why do you think it's important that more females feel comfortable taking on leadership roles, especially with directing, or even as multi-hyphenates to get their voices heard? What do you think might be some of the challenges as a female filmmaker and how do you think the industry's attitude towards women is changing? NA: Well, to start with, white, heterosexual, male-centric narratives have become almost a parody of themselves, and I think people are yearning for new, unique voices and stories. I think there are tons of women in this industry who already feel comfortable taking on leadership roles, but they are working in a system that is already set against them. Even in an industry that prides itself on being liberal and inclusive, misogyny still runs rampant. The whole movie and advertising mantra of "sex sells" primarily involves women being reduced to purely what their bodies bring to the table. This makes it hard enough to be taken seriously as an actress, but makes the battle of being taken seriously as a leader in a writer/director/showrunner position even more intricately difficult. Thankfully, I do think the industry is starting to move away from the "old white dudes in suits" power dynamic, but we still have a long way to go. What I think it ultimately takes is a combination of women pioneers and male allies in positions of power to knock down the walls holding these storytellers back. The world does not grow from being told the same story from the same perspective over and over again. True change comes in the form of that which is different. And I honestly believe we need women-- women of all colors and sizes and backgrounds-- to help shape the world into a better and more tolerant place. After all, women are the key to humanity even existing. It's about damn time they had a serious voice in our storytelling! JB: You won the Best Actress Award at Tribeca Film Festival! What did that feel like? After this incredible journey, what's next for you? NA: It was really surreal. Literally, the first words out of my mouth were, "What?!?" And I just kept repeating that all the way to the podium. I didn't think I was going to win--after all, this is pretty much my first lead role that is actually getting seen by people- sadly my biggest roles in the past have been in pilots that weren't picked up. So I had just assumed it would go to someone with a little more tenure in the field, and there were a lot of great performances to choose from. So when I won, some part of my brain realized I hadn't prepared a speech and I was going to have to make it up on the fly. My brain basically went "thank your mom, thank Quinn, and talk about the need for more women in this industry, for god's sake!" So I managed to hit on those three points in under a minute. Afterwards, a lot of people came up and told me they were moved by my speech, which was very sweet and really all you can hope for when you stand up there. I have two more films coming out this year, both of which are unique takes on the horror genre. The first is called Boarding School, directed by Boaz Yakin, which is about a group of undesirable kids who get sent to a boarding school where very mysterious things start occurring, increasingly raising the danger level as the film progresses. The second is called The Dark, which is Justin P. Lange's feature directorial debut. It follows a monstrous, flesh-eating undead girl (that's me!) who discovers a blind kidnapped boy in the woods she has haunted since she was murdered decades earlier. Hilarity ensues (I kid, I kid). I also am in a new Netflix series which will be out later this yead, called Seven Seconds, showrun by Veena Sud (the brain behind The Killing). It is a very timely piece in the Black Lives Matter vein about a white cop who injures a black teenager, and the repercussions that emerge as a result. My role in the story is really interesting, but if I told you about it, I'm pretty sure the Netflix cops would lock me up forever and not in a cool, Orange is the New Black kind of way...

#quinnshephard #femalefilmmakers #womeninfilm #tribeca

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