#they're the ones who made the change from the source materials so doesn't that mean they are the ones with the problem

[olehoncho]

How I would fix Dr Who (revisited)

While I am sure there are folks that love the Doctor Who show and the direction it has taken under Chibnal, I know there are others who are not satisfied with certain developments. Ever since the end of Matt Smith's run there have been issues with the continuity of the series: - The expansion of The Doctor's regenerations was first explained via a "time lord energy infusion" in Town of Christmas, but was later revealed to be an aspect of the Timeless Child. - The swapping of sex/gender was first done with the Master and later explored with the Doctor. - Letting go of a Time Lord's power was explored in Human Nature and later in Uptopia, but revisited as being a "female presenting" quality later. - The Bi-Generation creating two time lords.

A lot of this new canon has been... not easy to absorb. And I'm not going to say there's any connection to ratings or audience scores, but as someone who is more interested in the science fiction aspect of the show, I think there is enough of the new canon to play with to fit in with the long-running series canon.

Make The Doctor a distinct being separate from The Timeless Child. - This is the main one, and could be done a couple of different ways. My previous theory was to make The Timeless Child the Time Vortex at the heart of the TARDIS (which explains why it is different from other TARDIS). This would explain the leeching of memories and power to other individuals as well. - Another way to do this would be to have The Doctor either be a bi-generation from The Timeless Child, or perhaps be the son of The Timeless Child who inherited some memories. There are options.

Restore the Regeneration Limit and explain how it was bypassed. - The previous explanation is that The Doctor is the first Time Lord and therefore has endless regenerations. This never felt right. The Doctor being a Time Lord whose uniqueness comes from their decisions, the promise to be "The Doctor" rather than their particular history is the key to the character. - You could do another bi-generation backstory into The Doctor's past, and that part of The Doctor has been dormant, sleeping aboard the TARDIS for near a thousand years (my personal choice would be the regeneration from 2nd to 3rd Doctor). - Then you would have to explain that The Doctor who has been adventuring has been part of The Doctor, but a being who got mixed up with The Timeless Child and is therefore confused. Then explain that the reason for the regeneration limit being bypassed is because of the TARDIS - so many Doctors regenerate in the TARDIS and this is shown to have led to many explosions of energy which were not present in earlier regenerations because this version of The Doctor is growing unstable. - Time Lords are not meant to live more than 12 regenerations, because the energy in their bodies becomes more than they can handle, like a dying star they either go supernova or become dwarf stars.

Kill off the current version of The Doctor and bring in "The Original" - This could be a series-long arc involving The Valeyard - with the "current Doctor" being the Valeyard and "The Original" questing to stop them, but would end up with The Doctor dying and creating their grave on Trenzalore that is eventually visited by 11 and Clara. - The "original" Doctor would then continue the adventures, absorbing all the memories of their alternate selves - and resume the regeneration limit from 3 (a new 3, not Pertwee) and then regenerating into 4.

Anyways, that's how I'd rework Doctor Who if it was up to me. But it's not, so whatever.

#Doctor who #tardis #seriously though I stopped watching because I hated how mean 12 was to Danny Pink #Like there was no reason to be that rude to your companions love interest #I just could not jive with Capaldi and could not bring myself to go back to the show #kept up with the lore and the drama and felt satisfied I stayed away #but can we stop race-swapping people please #I mean I guess its fine when you consider alternate realities but that was never Doctor Whos thing #Like time travel is fine and all and they really haven't done enough fun back to the future or quantum leap stuff about fixing timelines #but as part of a larger trend I just think race swapping historical figures is lame #Now fictional characters is fine and dandy #But like if Doctor Who went on an adventure with Sun Wukong I wouldnt want the Monkey King played by a scotsman #So its just weird to see Isaac Newton played by Nathaniel Curtis #And then to have the showrunner attack fans as racists #Like he was the one who changed the race of the person showing he was the one with the problem in the first place #this is my problem with folks who cry racism or sexism or shout at fans for not embracing changes #they're the ones who made the change from the source materials so doesn't that mean they are the ones with the problem #like don't say its the fans fault for not accepting the changes you make blame yourselves for not getting it right #but again that's just the way I see things #not a shipping post #yeah I'm done talking about doctor who #I bloody stopped watching the show 9 years ago why do I even care

[pharawee]

I just finished watching Love Syndrome: The Beginning and... I actually really liked what they did with the source material. It's interesting that this and the series are by the same production company and director but other than the choice of skinny jeans (someone must have been a big fan lmao) and Tuss reprising his role as Neil, the movie has a very different vibe imo.

It's also unfinished, meaning it ends on a cliffhanger with a big 'to be continued' - which probably isn't intentional seeing as they were originally aiming for a cinematic release (not to mention the sudden passing of the producer/director). I can't blame them either because I think they made the deliberate decision to mostly leave this as is to honour the director's final work:

As it is, I think the movie is a very solid piece of entertainment with some really nice acting, especially by Bix Tagon as Itt.

I've read most of the novels in the Love Syndrome universe and they're actually very same-y with the same non-con kink repeated throughout pretty much every couple's story (and there's A LOT of couples). This is why Day and Itt were never my faves (especially since the tropes really be troping with these two) and tbh I wasn't really into Long and Frank's version of them either (which isn't their fault at all - I just don't think Frank was a good fit for Itt), but Nef and Bix really make them work for me this time.

For one, there's zero romanticisation. Day is positively unhinged and there's zero doubt that Itt is the victim here. The scenes between them are incredibly brutal to watch but at the same time there's this almost stageplay-like feeling to them - as if every little piece of dialogue and acting has its place and nothing is drawn out or glossed over. I really appreciated that (as difficult as their scenes were to watch). I don't think that's easy to accomplish. I saw in some of the bts that they worked closely with either an acting coach or an intimacy coordinator (or both) throughout the filming of Day and Itt's scenes and imo it really shows. As bad as it sounds because Day is such a horrible person and Itt is straightup going through hell, theirs really were the most interesting scenes in the movie for me.

According to MDL Nef and Bix are rookie actors too so kudos to them for doing an incredible job. I hope we get to see more of them especially since Day and Itt's story is far from finished and I'd really like to see if they can pull off the transition from toxic hate to toxic love (imo it didn't work at all in the series, mostly because it started with book 3).

As for Gear and Night, they chose to almost completely sanitise their story (except for the initial bet itself) which imo was a good choice because in the novel reading about the same trope over and over again got tired real fast. Night takes Gear back relatively quickly and then they just pick up where they left off (but with Night more or less in control now).

Plus, Tiger Tanawat (who btw is a Change 2561 artist) as Night is such a mood:

I already loved Rossi as Night but dang (also, I need that shirt). 🫠

There's also some cute Four and Gus moments that unfortunately (or fortunately - seeing as how the writer of the novel also seems to have an age gap kink that's better left unmentioned 😬) gloss over most of their story. Knot, Fu and Neil kind of appear but that's about it.

I wonder - providing we ever get to see the second part of this movie - if they'll scrap the horrible Neil as the villain side plot or not because I could totally do without that. 😬😬

That being said, if you thought The Effect was difficult to stomach then you probably shouldn't watch this. Love Syndrome never hides the fact what it is about but it unfortunately doesn't offer any content warnings. Its SA scenes are explicit and realistic so if that's upsetting to you please please don't watch this. 🙏

#love syndrome the beginning #jane watches stuff #spoilers #love syndrome spoilers #i might make some character gifs later #nothing spicy bc i'm uncomfy w that in this context #but bix is just too pretty not to gif #also still trying to figure out why ming scares me and day doesn't #maybe because ming is more nuanced #while day is way more unrealistic

[beesmygod]

What's your take, if you have one, on the cut moon presence boss on the lake of mud?

as always, i dont know. i thought i didn't really have much to say but the more i typed the more i Realized. but i still don't really know lol. this is really image heavy, which made it long, so most of it is under a readmore.

e: hello bea from the future here. hey. this gave me so much to chew on for the next section in a shockingly positive direction. thank you so much for getting this ball rolling

it half-relevant but there's also some kind of. intermediary thing. i think it's the same shape as the used moon presence but its blue. for some reason.

no animations on this one, so it was cut early. different "faces" as well. or the low quality of the cut one doesn't maintain the "features" as accurately.

oh what the fuck. hold on. look at the head of the "lake of mud" (LOM from now on) moon presence compared to the others

ive made posts in the past about anti-clockwise and clockwise metamorphosis runes possibly referencing the in-game phenomenon of creature's heads being turned in odd directions. loran silverbeasts and the crawler enemies (ostensibly both loran/nightmare frontier residents) have their "heads" turned clockwise, like above. slime scholar and probably other things i cant remember turn anti-clockwise.

the crawlers are....i mean they're gross. but also uncanny. there's SOMETHING going on here, right? god only know what though. they are also known for the grim sight you can take in when they rear up to Get You: their...stomach?? is rife with messengers. being consumed? maybe? it evokes the image of the artbook moon presence, who is swarming with messengers in the same area of its body.

anyway back to the little creep.

in the center of its chest there's this bizarre unknown thing. if you peel away the majority of its body it looks like this. a grey blob with tentacles. as far as i can tell it doesn't have bones to animate, unlike the rest of the model. the entire model has unfinished textures so its hard to tell what it's supposed to be.

judging from the blisters on the creature, it is CURSED. the orphan of kos' placenta weapon (which is, i think, just a huge cursed blood gem?) has these same blisters, marking it as a fellow "cursed" great one infant (? probably? look at what a runt it is).

curses are a complex aspect of the bloodborne universe. sometimes they can be identified by the appearance of "sickly spots", but other times, curses are color-coded with purple (or red, but that seems strictly related to cainhurst nope i forgot foetid offering can give enemies red rally auras and change their drop tables to include cursed blood gems. much to think about) auras and magic.

a curse is exactly what you expect it to be: great power at a high price (like a huge weapon bonus but your health depletes per second), but the source is arcane. the cursed and defiled pthumerian chalice states, "curses are caused by inciting the anger of the Great Ones, and used to hex others." winter lanterns, the enemies with the heads made out of messengers fused into a brain shape, are the only enemy that consistently only drops cursed blood gems (and, evidently, blood gems only form in the dungeon or nears its entrances). given the pattern of these spots appearing on bosses, it can be reasonably assumed that winter lanterns are the result of a great one's wrath. what the fuck! i dont know what that means!

we're not going to bother going into the nuances of rites and data-mining because holy shit. this garbage is needlessly complex for how half-baked its implementation is. but cursed offerings create cursed dungeons to explore with cursed blood gems to collect. cursed and defiled pthumeru is differentiated by the purple (!) skull vapor overflowing from the chalice. cursed rites required cursed materials: bastards of loran are the mummified bodies of infants who died midway through their transformation into a silverbeast. with the clockwise heads.

okay. that wrapped us up back around to the beginning. i think the lake of mud arena was intended to be in loran, canonically. it has a bunch of different variations that probably would have been used for root dungeon generation rather than canon usage. a lake of dried up water fits perfectly with the terrifyingly arid climate of loran (which generates the blue bolts in the atmosphere). at one point, it seems that several chalice dungeons would have had secret 4th layers (they're still in the game and can be accessed with some light hex editing); i propose that this is where that fight would have taken place. the previous layer would have been the cut great one beast. and layer 2 would have been the loran darkbeast. layer 1 would have been the abhorrent beast instead of the baffling loran silverbeast boss fight that's completely inexplicable otherwise. isz has similar pacing issues. oh shit, i wonder if that's what that blue one is supposed to be. fuuuuccckkk.

the ailing loran chalice tells the player that "some have made the dreaded extrapolation that Yharnam may be next" but the game is telling YOU the player that YOU are supposed to look at loran and extrapolate the fate of yharnam from it. loran was also using old blood as medicine and became a place overrun with beasts and abandoned by god. the loran moon presence is bloated with curses and lives in a place devoid of water, a horrible thing for a great one given how much they love to yammer about lakes and the sea. the area outside of the LOM arena is, amazingly, the exact same facade as the entrance to mergo's loft. there's a stained glass window above the door that's shared between locations, yet again linking loran, the nightmare frontier, and the nightmare of mensis together. and, really, the hunter's nightmare, since the LOM arena was very, VERY similar to the orphan's ocean with identical architecture.

holy shit i guess this is what im working on tonight. and now i see how micolash fits into the entire timeline. neat

#bloodborne #bloodborne lore

[novelmonger]

So I'm a pretty big LotR fan. And I'm a pretty big fan of the movies. No, they're not perfect, but they're a really good adaptation and a truly masterful work of cinematic art. I've grown pretty familiar with the movies over the past 23 years (@_@) - and not just the movies themselves, but I also love learning all about how they were made. I've watched all the way through all the bonus material in the Extended Editions at least five times (and some of the more fun bits way more times than that XD). I've even watched all three movies with the cast commentary.

But you know what I've never done, not even at the height of my obsession when I had way more free time than I do now? I've never watched the movies with the other commentaries. It looks like there are three more commentaries, with different groups of various people on the crew, and for some reason I never got around to listening through them. I can't for the life of me think why - maybe I thought I already knew everything they'd talk about? maybe I somehow thought it would be boring??? - but today that changes!

I'm going to just jot down the main things that stick out to me that I didn't know before. I've gleaned a lot of BTS information and stories about these movies from various sources, so I'm not sure how long this will be, but I'm sure there will be some new things that jump out at me.

From the FotR writer/director commentary with Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, and Fran Walsh:

There was a draft of the script where they didn't have a prologue, and all the information about Sauron and the Ring and Gollum and everything was going to be in that conversation between Frodo and Gandalf @_@ Can you imagine? I mean, yeah, it would be more like the book, but At What Cost? (At the cost of several memes and short attention spans, that's what.)

Peter Jackson says he doesn't like magic or wizards in movies. Um...sir? Why the heck are you making fantasy movies then???

The location where they shot the Ford of Bruinen was a real ford that was used during the gold rush in New Zealand! Because New Zealand had a gold rush around the same time as the one in the U.S.!

Hugo Weaving actually did the voice of Isildur when he claims the Ring and says, "No." I have...questions.

Peter Jackson says the journey through Moria is the best sequence in the book, and Fran and Philippa say it's the best-written chapter. Interesting! I don't know what I would point to as the best-written chapter of FotR; I don't think I've ever thought of that (though I might say some of the best descriptions in this book are in Rivendell).

They said they might redo the Gollum scene in Moria to make him look more like he does in TTT. Uhhh...it's been 23 years, guys, where's my remaster? XD

The Frodo-Gandalf conversation in Moria (the "all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us" conversation) was done with forced perspective??? I never realized that! I thought they just had Elijah sit a little lower than Ian so their eyelines would be right! They totally look like they're looking into each other's eyes, but they're not! :O

"Often in movies, that's a rare thing, to have shots in which nothing is real." - Oh, PJ, if you only knew what the state of things would be in two decades....

The scene of the Fellowship mourning Gandalf outside Moria was filmed before Ian McKellan had even arrived in New Zealand! :O So they were all mourning and reacting to the death of someone they probably weren't even sure what he looked like yet!

Sean Bean was apparently the only one of the primary actors who had any experience with a sword? Or at least he had the most experience. Viggo had to do the Weathertop fight scene on his first day, when he'd never touched a sword before @_@

In Boromir's death scene, the words sung by the chorus in the background is an Elvish translation of Faramir's line "I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend." ;A;

At one point, they were going to have Frodo fighting off an Uruk-Hai before he goes into the boat??? They even shot some of the footage?! Thankfully, they realized that was completely the wrong way to go about his end to this movie; it needed to be an emotional climax, not an action scene, and Frodo's victory is over his own doubts and the Ring's influence on him, when he grasps the Ring and marches forward to continue on his Quest, alone if need be. Thank goodness they realized that before it was too late.

SEAN ASTIN WAS NOT UNDERWATER IN THE SHOT OF HIM DROWNING WHAAAAAT MIND BLOWN

The shot of Boromir's boat going over the edge of the waterfall was actually footage of a barrel going over the Niagara Falls, and they just used CG to replace the barrel with the boat O.O

Fran Walsh: So Viggo's just put on Boromir's gauntlets... Me, a nerd: Vambraces, actually.

#lord of the rings #lotr #peter jackson #philippa boyens #fran walsh #these might be a little slow coming in because i don't want to binge the movies three times in a row #but i WILL be going through all the commentaries besides the cast commentary which i've already heard

[kingfisherprince]

the history of rafole, part two

or: flip a coin and win both sides.

(you can find part one here.)

officially their rivalry begins with that roland garros quarterfinal, but really it's not until the sunshine swing in 2007 that it really turns into something.

indian wells, miami. two matches, ten days apart. after all, is it really a rivalry if you don't split the honours?

(continued under the cut.)

let's ignore the rather prominent boris becker in the middle of that photo, and turn to either side. rafa and novak, novak and rafa, playing the final of indian wells against each other.

maybe this is a good time to remind y'all that i'm writing this as an outsider looking in on a personal history, without much primary source material available to me, and sometimes that means there are going to be knowledge gaps in the progression.

which all goes to say, i don't know exactly when this happened. but at some point while becoming rivals rafa and novak had also become good friends. his brother notes that they knew each other even before their first match in 2006:

and so by the time of the 2007 iw final, it's pretty fair to say that they're friends.

which doesn't change the stakes of the match in the slightest. it was novak's first masters final, bringing him up to the top ten in the rankings for the very first time. rafa was looking to win his first tournament of the year.

and even without that, well, it's a masters final. safe to say, it mattered.

in the end, experience won (and man, have these two continued to show us that in recent years. sorry, anachronism) with nole overwhelmed by the occasion, and rafa doing what rafa does.

he won his seventh masters title, eighteenth title overall, and his first of the year.

the speech that followed was nothing short of endearing, especially from novak, who hadn't given many finalist speeches, and who had ― and still has ― a tendency to ramble.

spectacular video quality, maybe not, but certainly spectacular content.

but wait! there's more. it was actually after this match that we got this infamous hot tub picture:

because rafa decided to celebrate his win with his team ― including benito, who was his and novak's shared agent at the time, and probably a big reason for their introduction to each other and their friendship ― and got novak to take pictures, before inviting him in as well to celebrate his first masters final.

meanwhile on the rivalry front, there's this observation in rafa's blog:

directly acknowledging how much of a threat novak was. (though he'd just reached world #10 at that point, not #3.)

it doesn't take long for that to change, but to get there we'll need to cross the country from california to florida,

the state known for sunshine, alligators, and ― especially in mid-march ― young people being young. author julie klam recounts a story her brother told about the two of them during miami 2007:

(yes, this is the origin of the 'novak screamed primitively at horrible driver rafa' headline. context, much?)

their friendship made sense, for what they were. just two kids around the same age, who ― at the time ― shared an agent, a sport, and seemingly a sense of humour.

their rivalry did as well. two kids, nineteen and twenty, on the rise and rise, the best of their age, trying to be the best in the world, which meant trying to be better than each other.

this time, ten days later, they faced each other in the quarterfinal.

and this time, ten days later, the scoreline flipped over.

novak would go on to defeat guillermo cañas in the final to win his first masters title, taking him to third in the rankings.

it would take him some more time to reach any higher, but with these two matches ― both high profile, both with different results ― rafole had become a young rivalry to watch for the rest of 2007.

there was really only one direction their careers could go.

hey, you out there. look up.

[end part two.]

immense gratitude to @rafolearchive, who provided quite literally all of the best moments, and without whom this wouldn't be half as interesting

#tennis #novak djokovic #rafael nadal #rafole #rafole history posts #up next (probably): #2007 and the first public rafa impersonation #<- notice how i used those tags last time? #that's how you know i'm fuckin winging it #but y'know what we chillin #enjoyyy #Youtube

[demivampirew]

My thoughts on The Witcher/ The Witcher: Blood Origins situation

Disclaimer: This is going to be a long post. I've been meaning to write this for a while. I might do a 2 parts post because it's going to be really long.

Let's start with that stupid, stupid rumour started by Deuxmoi. First, I think it's idiotic to pay attention to what a sh*tty gossip blog says about Henry, especially when they've talked badly about him in the past - they had shared negative blind items with any legitime source, on the style of "someone told me this alleged thing about him"

So let me post first the stupid rumour and then I'll comment point by point:

"I recently got this message and somebody was like, "do you want to know what really went down?" She doesn't say who the source is and if she verified that the rumour at least came from someone who could actually have access to what happened on set; for the way that the rumour is disclosed, it could've been a random person who hated Henry and Deuxmoi took it as legit.

(...)"A lot of unusual demands" which demands? If they're unusual, they should be specific so people can examine if they're actually unusual and he's behaving like a diva. "that made people feel like he wasn't really a team player" this person is talking about Henry in season 1, the same Henry that dehydrated himself to look ripped for shirtless scenes but, sure, he's not really a team player 🙄.

"But in seasons 2 and 3, something shifted" could it be that right after episode 1 of season 2 there was a global pandemic and he had months of solitude to think about his life goals; also he injured himself while filming (such a bad team player, I know) and he might have re-think if it's worth it to keep pushing himself for a show that doesn't respect the IP as he does and that put him on the background except when it's time to promote the show and they use his likeness to sell the final product he's not happy with? "it became really impossible for women to work with, which is always a big problem" even if this rumour is true, I don't see how this could be his fault; as we're going to see next, he's going to be accused of being "toxic" for being a gamer and use gamer language, well guess what? The Witcher became famous through video games, meaning, the targeted audience and the ones who made the IP well-known are gamers. If women feel uncomfortable working with gamers and people who want to stay loyal to the source material, maybe don't work in a show where the targeted audience is gamers and they tend to be opinionated about the adaptations of the lores they love. "But even worse, because the showrunner is a woman" again, how is this Henry's fault? Lauren is the one who agreed to be the person with most power in a show adaptation of a story who became famous worldwide thanks to video games, it's not like she didn't know they were the ones who would watch the show and the ones who she'd have to please. Also, she worked in comic book adaptations before so she can have an idea how passionate (and sometimes toxic) that kind of fanbase could be yet, she accepted the job and all that comes with it. "He would try to overrule her and try to get changes made last minute across the board without her knowledge" so far, I think the only change he made was the lines after Roach's death and, it was because he felt it was an insult to make a joke. Also, it wasn't completely without her knowledge because they had an argument about it before this and she told him to see if he could find something better to say, according to Lauren herself. "(...) The showrunner has to sign off on every minuscule detail down to the bottoms of a costume" this, this is where I want to put stress on. Lauren a few weeks ago tried to deviate the blame from Eskel's death to the writer, Beau de Mayo, because he was the one who wrote the episode -it's worth mentioning that she tried to throw him under the bus because he's the one who said there were writers who hated the IP. She's the showrunner; she's the maximum authority there; she has to greenlight everything for it to happen and, she could've easily said no if she didn't want Eskel to be killed. Also, yes, Beau was the one who wrote the episode but he might have been told to kill an important character in that episode; again, the showrunner is the one who has to supervise everything and if a writer does something that could hurt the story, like killing a character that survives in every other media, she has to say no or change the writer if this doesn't want to. There's no excuse here for her incompetence. This is on her.

"Female writers and directors were suddenly ignored on set, unable to do their jobs" sorry, what?! 🤣 Writers are never on set, their job has to be done before filming the season starts. The showrunner is the only one who's usually on set. As for the female directors, there are only two listed for S2 and one of them said and I quote "Had the pleasure of directing episodes 6 and 7" (source https://www.instagram.com/p/CW8z6KurW2f/?hl=en ) As for s3, the only director attached it's Stephen Surjik -who in the past said how polite Henry was on the set and that he could become a politician because he was so polite to anyone and took the time to greet everyone (https://youtu.be/kcUgoyQSQ1k?t=84 I marked it on the exact time he speaks about Henry)

"He started making comments. It wasn't a sexual thing: he wasn't grabbing anyone or being lewd, but it was disrespectful and toxic all the same." again being too vague and don't give specifics; how was he being toxic? What kind of comments would he make that would make people, especially women uncomfortable? Could those comments be about the script and how unhappy he's with it? He's a famous actor and his reputation is on the line so, yeah, he has the right to speak when he's not happy about it. His indie movies proved his range as an actor but, he prefers to do comic books and video game adaptations, that's his chosen career path so he wants to keep the reputation as someone who cares for the source material and he's going to be outspoken about it. If anyone behind the scenes cannot take a gamer critiquing the work of an adaptation of an IP they love, maybe those people should be looking for a different job.

Then they talk sh*t about him being an addict because he likes to play video games. "He was distracted, he was late, he was obsessive" funny because Stephen Surjik in the interview that I link above said how he was always on time, prepared and knew all his lines and stunts. Also make-up and hair takes him about 2h so maybe sometimes he could've been a bit late because of that. Also, in case this person forgot, he was injured while filming s2, so maybe he could've been late sometimes because he was in pain? I don't know, I assume it must hurt; I hurt my ankle years ago and I was in pain for months. And, again, this could also be a lie because Stephen said he was always ready. Then again with the bullsh*t about gamer language, what language, Karen, what language did he allegedly use that was so disrespectful?

Then back again with the re-writing scenes, I assume it's the Roach scene and only Freya was there and she had no lines at that moment, so it doesn't affect her.

"He decided he didn't want any romantic scenes at all. No kissing, no shirtless scenes, etc" oh Karen, I'm going to fight you so hard on this. I'm actually pissed. As for romantic scenes, he didn't say no romance, he said no romance with Triss; he felt the real love story was between Geralt and Yennefer and he felt Geralt would be loyal to Yen, the fact that there was no romance was a writers/Lauren issue because they went against what the IP says and made Yennefer a b*tch who tried to sacrifice Ciri for power so of course Geralt wouldn't ignore that and just be romantic with her despite what she did. As for kissing scenes, I call it bullsh*t because Henry himself said in interviews that he had no problem with kissing scenes even when covid was (and is) still a thing; he said he'd only be uncomfortable if there was a kissing scene involved and he saw Anya coughing and sneezing, meaning with clear symptoms of covid (https://youtu.be/JldJ9cDzZ1o?t=1081 source). As for shirtless scenes, is it a crime that he didn't want to have shirtless scenes? Correct me if I'm wrong but, Anya didn't have naked scenes this season either. Why is it a problem only if he doesn't want to do shirtless scenes unless they're necessary? Also, S2 was filmed in the middle of a pandemic; there was a hiatus of filming that lasted months where he couldn't go out to the gym and only had a few weeks to properly train in a gym before they resume filming, it's possible he didn't feel comfortable shirtless after a long period without training.

"He wanted complete control over storylines," I think he wanted Geralt to be more than a grumpy dude that says "hmm" and "fuck" all the time. If he's used as the lead actor for promotion, his character should have more screen time and focus on the show. The part about him not knowing about tv structure and budget is bullsh*t. The problem he had was with the script and characters motivations and stuff, things that didn't require the budget to fix; maybe if they didn't go for the stupid Voleith Meir thing they could have afforded other stuff, just saying.

About the "weird alliance" with the witcher writer who was allegedly fired, who I assume was Beau, the one who exposed them for not liking the source material. Could you, Karen, explain more? So far, the only connection I saw was a text message that Beau send Henry after Nightmare of the Wolf (the movie he wrote) was released to see if Henry saw it. That doesn't seem like two people with a weird alliance. Also, if Beau was so toxic, why was he allowed to write the animated movie?

Here's the receipt to the message; the photo was taken by a paparazzi and posted to DailyMail.

"Henry did anything he could to hold up production and cause problems" How? What did he do to hold up production and cause problems? Was it maybe that he challenged a few script points to better the end result? Maybe he pointed out how uncharacteristic was that Yennefer tried to kidnap Ciri and sacrifice her for her powers because Yennefer loves Ciri as if she was her own daughter. Or maybe he thought it was unrealistic that Vesemir would use Ciri to try to create more Witchers, including Ciri herself. There are lots of plot points that could've worried him that it wasn't going to work out and, guess what, it didn't work. Fans hated it.

Ok, assuming it was right about the HR complaints; then, why would Netflix allow him to be in Enola Holmes 2? That was filmed after S2 wrapped. Why would they allow a person who had lots of complaints to go to work on another movie and do a third season of the show he was an assh*le. If this is true, and the part about him sending an email to the entire writing staff (I doubt, even if this is true, that he'd send an email himself, given that even posting on his social media nowadays is a task of his team) if, and it's a very big if, he sent an email to writers, I assume must have been to apologize because he didn't realize he was being perceived as rude or hard to work with.

For me, this is just bullsh*t. Even if this person actually worked there, it's clearly someone, possibly a writer, that's pissed about the Witcher campaign to fire them and re-hire Henry. And, even if this is true, it's definitely an exaggeration as I proved. It wouldn't prove that Henry is toxic but, actually, if women and people there can't take gaming lingo and people are passionate about the IP they love, maybe they shouldn't seek to work in video game-related adaptations -I know The Witcher is supposed to be an adaptation to the books but it was the game who put the IP in the map, worldwide, so gamers and the targeted audience for this.

Ok, part 1 of my rant/thoughts ends here and continues on a new post (I'll edit the post with the link to the second part once I post it)

#henry cavill #geralt #geralt of rivia #the witcher #the witcher netflix #anya chalotra #freya allan #ciri #yennefer #lauren hissrich #lauren schmidt hissrich #deuxmoi

[rhaenyra-first-of-her-name]

This is kind of a long rant against HotD and not structured at all so you might want to avoid it if you like TG or Alicent. Or even Daemon, sorry, I don't like him much either.

I was always skeptical of HotD even before it started but I had never expected that it would be so much worse than the source material which is, mind it, a very pro greens, biased, misogynistic spiral by some dead maester.

I don't enjoy F&B as a book and the Dance wasn't remotely my favorite part of it. Like the whole Dance of Dragons reads like a misogynistic spiral sometimes but HotD just took a biased source and dialled it to a 100.

You would think they would try to do the opposite bcoz the source is acknowledged to be biased but nope, they just had to make it worst. The Greens get to be whitewashed, they can literally not commit to any actions (Alicent committed treason by mistake, Aemond murdered a child by mistake, like wtf? Wtf are these fucking uwu passive characters and writing. Fucking commit to treason if you are gonna do it. Who half asses treason? Book Greens would gobble up Show Greens for breakfast. The Lannisters would have a laugh.) The Blacks are villainized and all the Velaryons are sidelined (which is worst with the show changing their race intentionally and then doing this).

Like the Greens have no redeeming qualities, just the narrative framing them as the good guys on their sides and I always hate how the narrative is trying to shove it down my throat. I can't stand it.

Like I don't even like Daemon but the show is stripping all the depth from him. I seriously don't like him but it's like the show can't stand anyone on the TB to have anything good or significant.

They literally showed Aegon to be a rapist onscreen and want me to root for him? Wtf are they smoking? The amount of cognitive dissonance you need to like TG is too high. Ik the show doesn't expect much from its viewers but it's like they expect the viewer to be stupid.

Show Alicent is so passive, they make me prefer the book Alicent and I hate the Evil Stepmother trope. The show acts as if Rhaenyra wasn't supposed to be the Good Mother and Good Stepmother counterpart to Alicent.

And F&B and George isn't subtle about who won the Dance. It's the Blacks. Rhaenyra might have died but her fraction won the war, her sons and descendants sat on the throne. Daenerys is her direct descendant and she brought the dragons back from death (especially given that the Dance was the main reason for their downfall and even the Targaryens' powers thanks to TG).

TG has the same fate as all the usurpers in the series- Maegor, Larys Strong, Robert Baratheon - the end of their line. Alicent 's line all dies before her eyes. The current Higtowers have nothing to do with Alicent and her line, they're not even worthy of remembrance and mention in the main series so far. Margaery is a half Hightower and despite the Tyrells' obvious efforts to make her queen and have one of their own on the throne, no one remotely mentions the only Hightower Queen ever. Imagine how embarrassing is that. You know if Alicent was a decent queen in any right, it would have been mentioned by now, the Tyrells aren't one to not use every advantage they have given that their Bannerman have more royal blood than them, which was again mentioned in the series.

Anyway, Alicent 's line dying and going to oblivion for all purposes is their ultimate defeat. I can't stand the TG stand trying to make it anything else.

And yes Rhaenicent is just queerbaiting and terribly at that. As a queer woman, I don't want them as any sort of a representation. An evil step mother aged down for a pairing where she plots treason and murder for Nyra and her sons? No, God, Daemon is a better option than that and I can't believe they made me say it.

Also, Laena was right there if they wanted to have a sapphic pairing.

When I said I wanted more morally gray female characters, I didn't mean totally irredeemable ones. There is a fine line in what characters, or crimes, you can redeem, starting a civil war out of personal greed and misogyny is not one of them. And yes, TG are all misogyny even if Alicent plays the uwu victim of patriarchy all the time. And funny how she never does anything to help any woman, not even her daughter Helena; does nothing against the man who actually harmed her and actively wants to put her rapist son on the throne instead of the rightful heir but her stans act as they or she is some kind of feminist when Alicent is no woman's friend.

And canonically, which are the books btw, not the badly written fanfictions (I am so sorry, this is an insult to fanfiction tbh) of the producers: GoT and HotD, Nyra had her mother's sigil on her flag, not Aegon the Rapist+Usurper.

(Can't believe the show tried to make some kind of gotcha moment with Alicent in that green dress. Idk why the characters even stood up. They only do that for the ruling monarch, not the consort and Alicent literally did nothing to deserve that kind of reaction. She just wore a green dress so what? Once again, the show is giving TG credit for doing nothing.)

On the last notes:

Cole is an incel.

I can't believe people ship Aemond and Luke. The former is his murderer and a war criminal while Luke was just a child. Leave my baby boi alone.

Otto is a cunt. Idk why Alicent stans don't crucify the man who arranged her marriage (and the bane of her existence) more.

Daemon is somehow better than all the men in TG which is an accomplishment especially since I dislike his character.

Once again, Aegon is a drunkard rapist.

Helena deserves better than her family.

I never liked Jaehaerys I and this is all kinda his fault. For the best king ever, he singlehandedly roped his daughters and all the Targaryen women of all their rights. Rhaena I should really have been the queen.

Viserys I, you tried but you should have done better. Aemma would have been so disappointed.

#anti hotd #anti alicent hightower #anti alicent stans #anti team green #anti TG #anti daemon targaryen #anti daemyra #too sorry #rhaenyra targaryen #team black #pro rhaenyra #pro team black #ash rambles #I am so sorry for how disjointed it's #I just wanted to write up everything I thought about this show and damn it got long and kinda messy #narrative framing #hotd 's terrible writing #and cognitive dissonance

[fresiants]

y'know when you read something ages ago and didn't think of it for many years, then try to get into that thing again - hp, only severus and remus related stuff tbh - and you find out the fandom is even more idiotic than you remember, by "fandom" meaning the marauders fans?

your last post made me remember how i'm still in shock people have this newfound fascination with regulus, invent crazy narratives where they basically give him severus' entire character's story, some even go as far as to disappear severus' from their aus, all in favor of giving regulus the space severus had as an spy, AND TEACHER EVEN! i just don't get it. instead of analyzing severus' character to try and understand even the things they don't like about him, they create a whole personality for a character with no real scenes in the stories, while trying to paint him as holy perfect, like he wasn't a black and sirius' kid brother; he wasn't going to be mr. kindness and perfection, no one in that sick family was.

i just? don't understand this wave of hp fans, if the source material is too much to work with, with what it has to offer, then maybe read another book series, a more sugar coated teenage book series? idk. i hate r*wling. i understand being apprehensive of the canon, but i don't like nothing they come up with. it's all the same corny shit but they paint everyone as goodie two shoes and completely ignore their wrongs, minus' severus'. severus can't be forgiven for his mistakes even though he was a child as well when he made them. i feel like the hp fanbase went even more to shit 🤷🏽‍♀️

Yep, and whenever we call them out, 90% of the them they would reply with : Fuck the canon. Which is funny cuz they refuse to stop dogshitting on canon!Severus. I found a character poll on twitter few weeks ago and I can't believe so many marauder fans were shocked that Severus is more popular than Barty and Rosier. Bitch, they were irrelevant 99% of the time of the whole series.

Someone even asked them : Why would Rosier and Barty be more popular than Severus when they were barely there in the book? And they replied : Because they're hot.

Yup. They will fake anyone's whole personality and backgrounds as long as they're 'hot'. And they're not even hot, FANCAST DOESN'T COUNT. They don't give a fuck if someone was a death eater, they never did. (they use this excuse a lot to hate on Severus) God forbid ugly people exist. Marauder fans give me high school mean girl vibe.

Invent crazy narratives where they basically give him Severus entire character's story

Their inability to be creative is so funny to me. Bitches really had to yank Severus' whole storyline and slap it on their favs to make them interesting. Why in the world would Regulus Black work as a spy and teacher in hogwarts? Why would he ask Dumbledore for help? Who is he trying to protect? Kreacher? "Hide Kreacher, I'll do anything" "Kreacher? After all this time?" "Always" lmaooooo.

While trying to paint him as holy perfect, like he wasn't a black and Sirius' kid brother.

They choose to ignore the fact that Regulus Black gave 0 fuck about Muggleborns getting tortured and killed. The only reason he changed sides was because Voldemort tried to hurt Kreacher, someone he genuinely cared about. Sounds a bit familiar to you? Yep, he got the same reasoning as Severus. But one got unnecessary hate while the other was glorified. Ironic.

They paint everyone as goodie two shoes and completely ignore their wrongs, minus Severus.

I've seen too many marauder fans defending the sexual assault during SWM. At this point, they're not even trying to 'ignore' their wrongdoings, it is the opposite actually. They're literally enabling bullying and sa which is hella disgusting.

And you're right, op. The fandom is getting shittier and shittier each day. This is why I refuse to interact with anyone outside of Snapedom.

#severus snape #pro snape #pro severus snape #anti marauders #pro severus #ask #professor snape #anti marauders stans #my take

[shihalyfie]

I've watched Appmon thanks to your recommendation and it was amazing! Eri, Astra and Rei were my favorites :) But after looking at past discussions online about the episodes, I've noticed so many people had a problem with its 'filler' (which i think didn't feel like filler at all), much more than any other series in the franchise (besides ghost game, probably) Why do you think this is so? Is it something in the context of its original airing's run?

First of all, congrats on finishing Appmon! I'm so glad my recommendation could get someone else to enjoy it!

Well, I'm going to be honest: I think the prejudice against Appmon having "filler" is, quite simply, a double standard. Savers actually gets this as well in regards to its first eleven episodes (it's just that since it's a fast-paced narrative after that, it's hard to make any accusations of it having "filler" after that no matter how prejudiced you are). But if you look at Adventure through Frontier, there are a lot of episodes that don't advance the plot much. Most Frontier fans agree that the hamburger episode is one of the finest episodes in the franchise despite it technically also being one of these. In fact, if you actually sit down to think about Tamers and ignore the cult that constantly insists it's incapable of having anything wrong with it, its beginning is extremely slow and there are a bunch of early episodes that don't actually advance much of anything "plot"-wise. Adventure through Frontier will automatically get a lot of passes for things that later series won't just because they have the My Childhood Nostalgia™ pass attached to them.

(I do think Appmon episode 26 is entirely skippable, but that's purely because it's a recap episode made to accommodate a timeslot change and any newcomers jumping on at that time, which obviously isn't relevant for people watching it now.)

That being said, I actually despise the word "filler" the way it's used now. The word was supposed to be used in the context of anime adaptations, especially adaptations of manga or video games; anything that was original to the anime and wasn't from its original source material is "filler" (because just sticking to the original material only won't fill enough episodes). Filler in that context was never supposed to inherently be a bad thing, it just was more often than not in practice because it was too obvious the original story wasn't made for it, and it can't advance much character or plot status quo because otherwise it'll derail it from the originally intended storyline, so it usually would end up being kind of boring. But that wasn't always the case, and I've definitely met a lot of One Piece and Dragon Ball fans who have said that some of its filler episodes are its best ones because they have interesting ideas or do interesting things with the characters even despite being so limited in what they could do.

But nowadays, people just use the word "filler" to mean "an episode I don't like" or "an episode I think is boring" -- very subjective. And even when they aren't trying to be condescending about it, they still use that word to apply to "any episode that doesn't 'advance the plot'" completely ignoring the fact that "not advancing the plot" can still have fascinating character studies or interesting ideas, oftentimes even moreso than series that don't. I've seen anime that are entirely minimal-plot that have interesting character studies and/or are episodic. Hell, I don't know many people who watched Digimon Adventure for its totally riveting plot of (checks notes) some isekai where they defeat some bosses who want to take over the world...like, how many people actually watched early Digimon because the "plot" was oh so spectacular?

I do think there's room to criticize Appmon's early pacing (in that it's kind of hard to tell where exactly they're going with the plot in the first handful of episodes, and I honestly wonder if it should have taken so long to introduce Eri and Astra), and frankly I would actually apply those criticisms to Adventure, Tamers, and Savers too -- in fact, I've had very little success introducing new fans to Adventure because it takes almost half the series to feel like it's going anywhere, and it makes it easy to get bored and drop it. But if the problem is pacing, I wish people would actually say it that way instead of saying something is "filler" and therefore useless and unnecessary just because it focuses more on characters than background plot intrigue.

#ninasheadband #shiha's ask box #appmon #digimon multi series talk

[eilooxara]

I'm tired of people who pretend categorization is inherently bad

Like sure, bad categorization is bad

But regular old categorization is actually good!

(I know this sounds like it's about gender and sexuality but it's actually about music)

Someone said "genre is fake" and they could not be more wrong

(maybe they were riffing on "gender is fake" but that's ALSO wrong, actually for the same reasons, but THIS POST IS ABOUT MUSIC)

Like yes. There exist genres that are fake. "Pop" is one. That's not a judgment about the relative quality of pop music, that's a statement about the existence of pop as a kind of music at all.

It just means popular, what's popular changes over time, many unrelated styles can be popular at the same time, there's no inherent musical similarity among the set of music that has been called pop

So why is pop music a thing? Well it's an industry category. Broadcasters and record labels care about what's pop music because it fits into their business model a certain way.

So, pop is not a real genre. Alternative rock isn't a genre for the same reason: it's a product category created to be sold to the people who don't like pop music (whatever that may be). These are inventions by corporations for selling products.

(Now, the "genre is fake" person was talking about the distinction between "country" and "Americana", which is a corner of music I know absolutely nothing about. Maybe one or both of those genres are fake. Maybe these categorizations don't tell you anything useful about the sound of the music in question. I suspect the former is absolutely fake, because I keep being surprised at what gets called "country" because none of it has anything in common with the other stuff I've heard called that.)

But most music genres are in fact real! They are based on specific characteristics shared in common among the whole set of music in that genre and, critically, each new piece of music is not created in vacuo but in response to the music that already exists, with characteristics in common with some subset of all extant music

So when new music is made it's going to belong to a genre! If I play power chords on an electric guitar with a lot of distortion and growl it's going to be metal. If I play a bodhrán and sing in 3/4 time with four measure phrases with stress on beats 1 and 3, it's an Irish jig.

"But Xara, what about when someone makes completely new music that's not like anything anyone's ever heard before?" ok well first of all that doesn't happen as much as you're implying, second if it did happen it would be dogshit, and third if it's good enough that anyone cares about it then that's just a new genre, which happens all the time anyway. Many musicians defy categorization; they combine influences and novel sounds in a way that hasn't been done before, amd if anyone cares, a new genre is born.

Like, say, death metal. What happened is that a band called Death played metal in a way that was novel and those who drew inspiration from that formed a new genre called death metal and that proliferated away from the source material as each new death metal band was riffing on the work of all previous death metal rather than just Death

SO, categories are created because they convey information! If I tell someone who knows what death metal is that a band is death metal, they're going to know it involves fast tempo, heavily distorted rhythm guitar played with a palm muting technique, a particular style of growled vocals, and frequent key changes. If it does something ELSE, like say it's also got a bodhrán and 3/4 timing in 4-measure phrases with stress on beats 1 and 3, then I can tell someone it's a death metal Irish jig.

(this is why genre labels get long)

People like to make fun of genre names that start with "post". But that label carries information (with one exception) just like any good category label does. What it means is that musicians who are very familiar with, say, rock, are creating something (post-rock) that is heavily influenced by rock but defies some central element of the genre (verse and chorus structure for example) to an extent that it can't really be called rock anymore. (or punk or hardcore or whatever we're being post of [except metal. Post-metal is actually metal inspired by post-rock, so it IS still metal. If you want a genre that's actually the post of metal, it doesn't get called that but it's whatever Anathema played since A Natural Disaster])

It's like

There's the whole "is a hot dog a sandwich" thing

And the thing is that if I tell someone who knows what a sandwich is that they're getting a sandwich, they'll know it's going to be a food that they can pick up with their hands and take a bite from, probably without getting their hands sticky, and that this is the normal and expected way to eat the food

The category contains information!!

Like sure sandwichness is fake I guess if you think that the existence of boundary cases makes a category fake, but sandwichness is a USEFUL construct that helps people convey information

If I am expecting a sandwich I'd be more satisfied with a burrito than a plate of spaghetti, and I'd be more satisfied with a plate of spaghetti than a concrete brick

Genre is not fake! Categorization is not bad! Nothing is "just a word" (except when it is, like pop music)!

As with all my rants, anyone who tries to pick a fight with me on this is getting blocked, not responded to.

#eilooxara rants #Eilooxara expounds #eilooxology #People who are all ''I defy categorization'' are a very annoying category of person

[apocalypticavolition]

Wheel of Time Season 2 Episodes 1 - 3 Thoughts

In my reread - which I won't be doing today, or probably any day that a show episode comes out in the immediate future - this is the part where I'd have some sort of snark warning about spoilers to shoo away the viewers who might not have blocked the relevant tags for some reason. This is about the show, but I will be discussing a few things that will be spoilers to show-watchers only - and if you haven't caught up at all then obviously I'll be spoiling the show.

After seeing Apple TV's Foundation blossom into this beautiful and entertaining show that had almost nothing to do with its source material, I figured I could come to Wheel of Time's second season with an open mind. And hey, episode 1 of the show made me think that we were over the rough part. Yeah, I had to meet its plot changes in the middle, but if I was willing to do that, the show seemed to promise that I would be rewarded. After the three episodes released so far, I'm not quite sure. I want to love the show, but I'm not a show lover.

And yeah, it starts with the opening. Jordan's world is one in which evil doesn't prosper and makes no illusions about being an alternate system of morality that good guys just besmirch because they're meanie pants. Having a little girl pet a rape-and-murder machine that's purring at the prospect of human contact isn't a great start for me, and frankly there's just something about Ishamael in this scene that feels like Nandor from What We Do in the Shadows, which isn't a worthwhile comparison.

Nor does the new show intro excite me. The previous season's over-focus on the Aes Sedai felt to me like a mistake overall but the concept of the opening sequence was still strong. I wanted to see it change and evolve over the course of the eight seasons, but now we're just given a few seconds of a snake devouring itself. It's a major step backwards.

But these are quibbles. I know they're quibbles. If they were the biggest kinds of complaints I had against the show I'd move on. Things get a lot stronger from there, showing us some great TV! Let's break it down:

Moiraine and Lan: Moiraine is not taking being shielded well. This is a legit reaction. Her misery is clear and the bath scene is a great contrast. Lan's attitude isn't much better. It's well-acted, well-set, and seeing changes like Verin being folded into Vandene is good! Like I said, I get that it's TV, I get that there have to be changes, and this little change works. Heck, Bayle Domon showing up works. He's fun, Moiraine fucking him over is fun, it's good TV. It's a little frustrating that we still don't know what the poem is (I mean, I know as a reader but still), but that's all in good fun.

But I do have problems with the division forming between Lan and Moiraine. Not that it's happening at all, under the circumstances it makes perfect sense. However, the characters and narratives taking the stance of, "Moiraine is suffering trauma so she's allowed to be as cold to her best friend of twenty years as possible and he just has to take it" does not work for me at all.

Then there's the Fade sequence. In the next episode, Lan will apologize for not sensing the Shadowspawn coming, which raises the question - why didn't Moiraine sense them coming? She's shielded, not severed. Why did the first Fade go down so easily? Why is Lan so terrible at fighting Fades when he spent his whole life training to do so? At least Verin saves the day. Really, Verin is awesome in general and I have no complaints, she's everything she should be for this adaptation.

And then comes the double dose of cruelty. First we get a summary of how Lan and Moiraine met, based on the New Spring novel, but we leave out the coolest part, which frankly only does Moiraine dirty. Though, they do Lan dirty too by making the sexual assault he suffered something to laugh about as a funny cultural affectation instead of the rape that it clearly was.

And then things go downhill. Book Moiraine might have been cruel in setting up the transfer of her bond to Lan, but she didn't make it happen right away and she didn't explicitly tell Lan she never thought of him as an equal. Her behavior is abhorrent and unheroic and while Moiraine's always been on the utilitarian side of things, this is just more than I'm willing to deal with. It also only makes Alanna feel skeevier as a character, which is impressive considering all the rest of the stuff she pulls. And that's it. They're gone - and frankly, for show Moiraine all I can say is "good riddance".

Wondergirls: Egwene is overall good, Nynaeve starts well enough. I don't really like Nynaeve's getting to skip the novice phase taken away from her - I feel that Rafe's love of Egwene consistently tears down the characters around her and now that she's chiding Nynaeve that she should be happy I feel very vindicated in this belief - but I can live with it. Nynaeve choosing to suffer rather than address her block is good. The Aes Sedai politicking about how to train Nynaeve and who should be her mentor is great! Egwene's jealousy is in-character.

Nynaeve training with Alanna's Warders though, while impressive, feels like mostly an excuse to give those two a few extra lines. And Alanna feels genuinely skeevy in this incarnation; I had thought her advice to Egwene was just inappropriate metaphor until the characters clarified, and at that point I'm just wondering why Alanna is supposed to be a positive representation of polyamory if she's clearly trying to groom Egwene on the side. Like, at least Liandrin being a bad mentor and person overall is clear from her interactions with Nynaeve. Of course, much less about Liandrin is clear in general. She steals medicine as if an Aes Sedai wouldn't be able to obtain such things without question)

And then we meet Elayne. Book Elayne is a sweetheart, only stuck-up in the most basic of ways (taught to walk around with her nose in the air). Show Elayne makes several faux pas and doesn't seem to present much reason for Egwene to want to be her friend. "I haven't seen a soul", she says, surrounded by servants. She says she spent six summers in Tar Valon but her attitude screams six summers in Seandar. Sheriam at least seems like she's gonna beat some sense into her, but I shouldn't be rooting for that outcome, should I?

Meanwhile, Nynaeve follows Liandrin out of the tower and discovers her dark secret, a son dying of old age. At first my associate and I thought it was all going to be some kind of ploy to impress Nynaeve and influence her ajah choice, but it's all legit. I thought that Liandrin having a son was fine, but my friend is less convinced and there's something to be said for that. Liandrin's attitude doesn't scream, "son she's outliving", and it adds to the sense of incoherence to her character.

Elayne just barely manages to recover as a character during the drinking sequence when she chews Egwene out, which also sets her up nicely for her bullshit. Not sure what I think about the convenient drama of Nynaeve overhearing Egwene bitching about her, but at least it kind of goes places. It helps explain why Nynaeve's so vehement about the testing, anyway.

Her testing is... where things start really going downhill. The beginning is fine (though the whole "attacked by bandits" thing doesn't work for me at all for the Two Rivers - not in the last season, not in this one), and the middle is a good adaptation, but then we hit the end. The fake out's good, but then... Ugh. In the books, Nynaeve wills the portal back, but that's not what happens here. Further, Liandrin's motivations remain incoherent: if she's a Darkfriend working to bring about these peoples' downfall, Nynaeve's death (a huge loss for the Light) shouldn't be something she's this upset about. Like yeah, corrupting her would be more fun, but a win's a win. But the Shadow doesn't want wins in this episode. It wants to lose as hard as it can.

Sheriam is also a bit odd here but since she may not know Liandrin is Black I can buy her behavior as being generally shitty while covering for herself. I mean, "your grief is your own" is so unnecessarily cruel that it's clear that she's Black. That said, not sure why she's discussing arches with the girls when my impression is that the test was supposed to be something of a secret until the novice was ready to advance. Nor do I think Elayne is done any favors with her absolutely hollow condolences - Sheriam was more believable as a sympathetic ear.

Egwene confronts Liandrin, which leads us to yet another situation where somebody on the Shadow could easily eliminate one of the five ta'veren but absolutely refuses to do so because... it wouldn't be sporting? She then tries to save Nynaeve while Elayne talks her out of it, but makes absolutely no difference whatsoever (ah well, at least she isn't personally responsible for bringing Nynaeve back). Then Nynaeve... does come back. For no apparent reason. Apparently every other woman who entered this segment just killed themselves after missing the first door out. At least book Nynaeve forces the arch to reappear - show Nynaeve only forces the scenario to stop being scary and the arch shows up anyway.

Perrin: I thought that Marcus was the weakest actor last season, and while he's grown quite a good deal, it also feels like he's been given the least to work with. He's with mostly new characters bar Loial, who doesn't get the love and attention he deserves. Everyone in his sequence exists to push him along, and he doesn't have much going on just yet as he's reacting to what goes down. I do like how they're representing his power, and again combining Elyas and Hurin is the right sort of choice for TV, but I feel like Perrin was meant to be bouncing off of at least Mat at this point. His writing is very on the nose when he and the Shienarians are burying the Darkfriends, it feels very much like we're just being told what he feels instead of being shown it.

But hey, while the woman in the house horror sequence was not remotely something Perrin went through, and it was pretty changed, I honestly didn't expect it to show up at all, so I'm calling that a win for him. It's well-acted too, he doesn't have too much dialogue telling us how he feels so it works. That said, his place in the world gets a lot less certain as we go on - I assumed he was in the east like the books, but he seems to have crossed thousands of miles to go west considering what happens. Why are the Seanchan here? Why is Perrin where they are? This isn't a coincidence, it's blatantly forced.

Also sorry not sorry but the damane outfit isn't dehumanizing like it should be, it's just dumb. The damane in Perrin's arc is, as far as I'm concerned, named Little Miss Binky. Speaking of LMB, it bothers me a bit that she can sense all these channeler women when in the books the testing required the use of the a'dam. This is a random-ass village, there shouldn't be two sparkers. And Uno should not be fucking dead and no amount of Suroth's nail batons is going to make it okay for me (okay actually there is an amount but the season isn't going to run that long so same thing).

We end Perrin's arc in these three episodes with him waking up in a carriage with Ishamael, being stabbed to death as part of the Shadow's plans to bring about-- No wait, that would be competent. Instead, Ishamael is super interested in Perrin's character development (why bro?) and lets Perrin escape with Elyas while the two ditch Loial (unforgivable).

Mat and Min: Being imprisoned at this point works based on where the story ended up, but Liandrin is just kind of a cipher throughout his story. She's clearly relishing the opportunity to be evil editing him out of the letters she reads, but this is about as evil as she gets beyond the wrongful imprisonment. Why does she give him cakes in the next episode? Why is he being kept alive for months on end? There's no clear motivation for her character - if she's being a villain, she should have offed him long ago. If she's following Tower procedure in some fashion, it should be clearer.

Mat manages to make contact with Min - no one noticed his efforts, which is fine, but it stretches credulity that none of Min's captors notice that her wall is suddenly damaged after this. They're great friends and I love this for what it is, or rather what it seems to be. It really helps their relationship - though not her characterization - that he's not interested in having her read his future. Shame, considering what she sees.

After some more time, Nynaeve's apparent death prompts Liandrin to set Mat free. He almost goes to help Egwene, but then decides to ditch her because fuck Mat's character, amirite? One actor ditched us so all Mats have to be shitty now even when it's a central facet of who he should be. Then he doubles back to Min - why is he doing things in this order, this is the least logical order - but it turns out that this whole thing is staged by Liandrin and that Min is working with her. What the actual fuck?

Rand: I'm not loving how little attention he gets in the first episode, but whatever. The main problem is that his motivations are obscured to us for such a long period, and we aren't really given a clue as to how he figured out this was an option in the first place. At first I simply thought it was weird that he'd go to Cairhien when he knows he's a time bomb and that being a nurse-type made sense considering his overall sense of altruism.

Really, most of the hospital stuff works in isolation. The soldier suffering from PTSD is a nice touch and it helps build up the Rand as Aiel foreshadowing that the show hasn't had much time to get to yet. I don't like that Rand is cheating on Lan with another teacher but TV shows I guess.

Then we jump into a darker Rand. He stalks the asshole orderly and assaults him, in part with the power (though this seems to be unwilling). I thought this might be madness coming on early, but the truth isn't much better. Of course, before we find it out we get to see Rand hook up with Lanfear. Book Rand was clearly compelled and overwhelmed by a hottie being interested in him, but this atmosphere is gone here as well. Rand took one look at the slippery slope and said, "Watch how fast I can get to the bottom!"

And meanwhile, Lanfear is bizarrely self-aware! "I pretend you're Lews Therin," she all but says. "Go ahead and think of other women while you're having sex with me, your crazy and obsessive stalker!" The Forsaken are cartoonishly evil people because only someone cartoonishly evil would sign up to work under Satan. They shouldn't try to argue that they're actually good guys and they shouldn't have healthy standards in their romantic relationships!

So Rand's secret plan was to get close to Logain, which just... Why is he here? He's a war criminal who had an army of loyal fanatics! Even with the severing, he's way too much of a risk to toss amid the general populace for exactly the reason we see: a young man who can channel goes to him to learn how to carry on his traditions! Logain being Rand's teacher might be a good way of combining book characters, and he's certainly an awesome actor, but there's not enough of this stuff.

Rand learns more about the hunt being called, which is just going to raise further questions. I will note "Queen of Illian" and thus have to ask: have they relocated Berelain in this show? Have they just gender-flipped the king? These books don't need gender flips like they seem to like doing with her and Farstrider.

Then Rand and Lanfear end up at a fancy party. There's no clear explanation for how they got in, nor why the royals would be confused about Rand and Lanfear's identities. She lives at the Foregate, people! He's renting a room! The foreign prince thing doesn't work in this context! Then Rand gets an awkwardly designed infodump about the cruelty of the royalty and the reveal that the Hunt is a fake. Presumably the whole thing is supposed to be a fake that isn't happening outside of Cairhien, but that's not actually clear - and after a long sequence of Rand's arc being well-written if objectionable for his hunting down a man and beating him half (?) to death to steal is job, it's just a low note.

But hey, we get to see Logain be psycho and Lanfear be psycho, so that's pretty fun. Not really sure where Logain's gotten the impression he's the descendant of a man that is most famous for having killed his entire family, but that's crazy for you I guess. Rand also burns down the inn, an incident which everyone treats as no big deal despite the general flammability of everything in the vicinity.

Closing Thoughts: The TL;DR of all of this is, "Just as I got comfy with it, it got weird." Rand is darker than he should be at this point, Mat continues to lack the loyalty that defines him, Moiraine is awful to Lan in ways that the narrative gives no hint it disagrees with and past and future sexual assault is on the table for him, Nynaeve loses the behavior that justifies her being special and just survives by fiat, Elayne is way too awkward and rude, and the Darkfriends pass up every opportunity to eliminate or properly capture Mat, Perrin, Egwene, and Nynaeve, all of whom should be high priority targets. This season started strongly and I hope it can recover from these hiccups, but I'm worried that little details will continue to fail to add up like this.

#wheel of time #wheel of time spoilers #wot on prime #wot on prime spoilers #wot on prime s2 #moiraine damodred #lan mandragoran #egwene al'vere #nynaeve al'meara #elayne trakand #perrin aybara #loial #mat cauthon #rand al'thor

[applepies-and-starlight]

sorry for this incoming long rant in your inbox

I have a hot take w/r/t ishqueg queerbaiting and canto v in general. I think the incel kerfuffle had something to do with it. they don't want to threaten Ishmael's (imagined) sexual availability to the (prioritized) heterosexual male audience by explicitly confirming her lesbianism¹ because said idea of sexual availability is part of their business model as a gacha game. much has been correctly stated about LC's art design and the avoidance of stereotypically sexualized designs. but the characters are still hot. you're supposed to find them attractive.

there's a lot in C5 that feels weird and disjointed and I wouldn't be surprised if they made some last minute changes. this is why heathcliff pulls ishmael out of the white ego death goo out of nowhere² (I mean he spends the entire canto complaining and even floats the idea of going it alone inside the Pallid Whale even though he admits they'd irretrievably lose people in the process) when it's Dante who was the one rebuilding trust with her and helping her pull free from her spiral. (For that matter multiple characters have interactions with her in C5: Dante, Rodya and even Outis.) the white ego death goo scene makes a lot more sense as the capstone for Dante and Ishmael, doesn't it? I think it was, originally, but Dante isn't male as far as we know and they might have realized that none of the people pushing the action in the canto were men. obviously unacceptable if you don't want to alienate the incels in your audience. I mean, shit, "heathcliff and ishmael learn a bit about why they're each Like That and make peace³" would have at least been an arc, but that's not really what happened.

yeah I dunno sorry again for rambling semi-coherently but C5 and its inconsistencies really bothered me. queequeg⁴ deserved better.

¹Or bi/pansexuality, but I can only do so much discourse in one ask.

²one more note. the scene is clearly meant to be important because it gets its own CG *when even Queequeg's death didn't* but like -- it doesn't seem to have changed their dynamic even a little bit. during the Green Ordeal bit Outis says Heathcliff is the least trustworthy member of the team (or something like that) and Ishmael agrees! it's like it never happened. she's still offhandedly mean to him later.

³or make out. I'm not into heath/ish in the slightest, as you probably inferred, but whatever. they're much more interesting to me as platonic haters.

⁴one last thing. it really is unbelievable that they shied away from explicitly acknowledging the queer relationship while saying shit like "you unearthed her broken heart" and having a scene of Ishmael planning out her life with Queequeg and mentioning "her hidden wounds that only I saw" (paraphrasing here). they don't need to have like them scissoring onscreen or anything but come on. even the 173-year-old source material was more upfront!

Anon gets it (even when i only half get it; wonderfully worded anon(/genuine))

Honestly, in light of this rant, I'm curious about an alternate timeline where the incel controversy never happened, sure it would most likely happen by the time Canto V Happens™ instead (because, as you said, lesbianism) but I'm wondering if they would've been more open about Ishqueg's dynamic...

#apple asks #limbus company #i'm assuming anon's already one of my moots but if not can we please be mootd

[mmx-code-crimpphire]

Headcanon - Xev and Axl headcanoned as autistic

AND A LITTLE MORE ON AXL IN THIS!!

I'm struggling coming up with headcanons lately and wanna write other things, so I might stop for a little bit after this one. My backlog of headcanons are a little short right now, esp ones that aren't spoiler heavy, so I'll stop for the moment and focus on writing other fics

Once I'll have more headcanons, you'll know when I post a new one!! Especially the world building headcanons when I write more for the towns!! I might post something I'm planning on writing today which I can finally post a new series on AO3 I've been meaning to make for the past few years!! I'm excited!!

Anyway, have this lengthy headcanon I have a lot of thoughts on~

Half a headcanon for Axl and half not for X just yet, I’m still deciding but

I wanted to talk about this primarily because I wanted some characters I can relate to in regards to this topic. Plus, either one has tendencies in one having the potential and the other having that kind of vibe period. At least to me, in most regards.

NEW CHAPTER ON AO3

I pretty much viewed Axl mostly with the autism I had in mind. Pretty much similar abilities and disabilities to mine- basically kinda projecting from this character but also making him his own, pretty much canon in his own right, and also kinda tweaking him to what I personally view him as.

We all know Axl is the young and ambitious but risk taking and noble hunter we've known up to X8. But that's basically all we know about him. I'll touch on his backstory sometime when I finally start the bio series for these characters.

But point is, that's all we know, and we don't have anything else to go off of except for our headcanons of him and depict it best we can from the source material. And this is my take on him besides the autism headcanon: He's a young adult and very ambitious, but from what he's learned from Red himself and his team of wannabe Maverick Hunters, he learns to adapt to his delta nano powers, gain close friendships and learn what his goal and purpose would be in life. Especially after certain events in his life that change it drastically. One that brings him into Red Alert into the first place, and years later after something happens to his found family.

He had to rush to the Maverick Hunters and rush for help in a panic when he couldn't face whatever was happening, and he was torn apart until he got to meet X and Zero in person. Except they're going through something themselves that he eventually had to get into the middle of. Especially bonding with Zero and trying to talk to X, which doesn't work.

Basically kind of a reverse scenario with Iris talking to Xev while Axl talks to Zero more in depth. And I do mean the key words being "kind of". Since Zero briefly talked to Iris, and he didn't need much talking to, for Xev, he needed budging. Whereas with Zero and Axl, he definitely needed that push as well down that time in the main story.

And he helps bring X and Zero back to their realities they needed to face and they, of course, face the big baddie head on. Which won't be Sigma, but I won't spoil who else ;3. Especially after this, he starts gaining a heart of gold and has another found family he can protect once he takes his powers and training more seriously. So he won't lose that second found family like he did his previous one.

Anyway, yeah that's what his general character is like in the AU, now for the Autistic headcanon. I don't know exactly where I got it from, other than I KNEW he had the vibes for it. So I slowly implemented what he would want as a stimulant, what he hyper focuses on, what his hyper fixations will be, what his sensory issues are, etc.

To which, I list that he stims with rubbing his thumbs, squishing things, vocal stimming and rocking. Either in a rocking chair or swinging. He gets a swing later on when his autism is being made more aware of in Hunter Base. He hyper focuses on what he vibes with and what he wants to do in that moment.

Anyway, what his hyper fixations/special interests would be, is he would wanna write music and play on his electric guitar. He loves stimming to softly playing and hearing the electric chords, btw. He loves doing it. He also hyper fixates on German Rock and hard rock from the 80s. Such as Def Leppard. he's a HUUUUUGE fan. Rick Savage, the late Steve Clark, and Joe Elliot are his favorite band members. He feels connected to them, and sometimes feels sad that he can't meet them, being he's in 21XX/22XX, and they're all long dead by then. Unless someone makes reploids out of them if their minds are preserved in data ;3. But, continuing on, he is OBSESSED with music theory and wants to write his own songs. Zero wants to write songs and has music theory down to an absolute tee- however, he won't know how to condense his deep love and feelings for Xev. He asks Axl for help, and they both collab and write a song together, which helps Zero gain an extra boost of experience in writing songs, which gives him the chance to write another song condensing his feelings for Xev for their wedding by writing "Only One Blue Jay in the Sky". What they both write together is called "Bird Wings Glide".

I’ll probably make another headcanon when I get the details down on the songwriting process of the two and Zero’s feelings and possibly the lyrics to what they’d be like in another post, maybe.

Another special interest he has is squishies. He loves to squish things, as stated previously, and squishies are his number 1 go to for that. He also loves pushing buttons or tapping on things. Especially when he loves making certain noises that tickle his neurodivergent A-Chip. He also loves remaking them. Repurposing them into something and making them into his own style he loves to make into art. Yeah, if you couldn't tell, Axl actually loves watching Moriah Elizabeth on Youtube lol. Don't worry about if youtube's still a thing or not, idk if I wanna figure that out for the AU at all yet lmao.

His sensory issues would be with smell and texture from coconuts, human bones (like basically touching them, especially the marrow), soapy water with grease, seeds in jam (yes, I said jam, not jelly), large crowds (especially when they touch him unprompted), sitting still without able to stim at all (I'm debating on headcannoning him with ADHD as well, haven’t decided yet), textures that feel rough (in his words, "icky", which I feel that, man) when rubbed the opposite direction of a texture he loves feeling. It's a very complicated one we both feel tbh haha

Anyway, that's all I can name at the top of my head, I'll probably make a list specifically to both his and Xev's things they have troubles with.

Which, speaking of Xev, it's still a more up in the air kind of thing, since I'm still not sure. This headcanon kind of spurs from a friend's headcanon I got from, @curtashiism specifically. They had an X that was headcanoned autistic and I really liked it cuz he had the potential to have autism, and it made the most sense to me so I figured I'd think about if I wanted the same thing for mine.

But I'm still unsure about it, really, even if I'm leaning towards wanting to do it. So, if I ever fully decide to go that route, I'll post the list of stuff he has trouble with, as well as his strengths in terms of what he loves doing, etc.

I hope y'all liked this post/chapter and felt connected in some way, cuz I def sure do~. Anyway, that's it!! Hope this was also a fascinating read~.

#vincent rambles #code crimpphire headcanons #headcanons #curtashiism #ayyyyyy friendo it's been a hot minute since I tagged you!! #headcanon - axl being autistic and xev having that potential

[windrixville]

saw your ask to kate acotars and also i want to see your rwrb thoughts!!!!!!!

omg hi coco!! i was warned by the reactions to the movie but i was still not expecting That 😭 leaving my rant under a keep reading

i think that the changes in the movie flatten every character's personality and undercut the emotional complexity in the book. i read the variety article and the singular intent to focus on the love just takes away the soul of the book and makes it this basic romcom that feels so underbaked. alex's character into basically a different person. what i loved about the book was alex's internal struggles in figuring out his bisexuality and him juggling his ambitions in politics. i get the movie had to streamline the plot of the book but some of these changes just felt nonsensical to me (ie: why are his parents together? there was like one line about what home means to alex and the lakehouse scene and now it doesn't feel as impactful bc his parents are still together). henry doesn't come out unscathed either, i actually liked his actor more than alex's but he had so little to work with. leaving out june and princess catherine were certainly choices (especially since june is central to alex's arc that they completely left out). the other secondary characters they did keep in had no personalities and were just there for exposition to move the plot forward (also the pacing of the movie was just awful). also the emails!!! alex and henry connect so deeply with one another over email sharing things they can't tell anyone else because they're both in public-facing roles and the movie just glosses over it completely undermining the impact the leaks had.

besides butchering the emotional nuances between alex and henry, i think what really made me hate this movie was that they completely cut out raf luna and added in miguel?? i genuinely don't understand this change from a mentor alex looked up to who helped expose richards to a jealous ex who leaked the email bc spite?? this change was just too much for me and it actively feels harmful imo by changing the villain from the GOP candidate's campaign to a queer journalist. the politics in the book were not perfect but it was not this bad. it's been said before but the way the movie had alex give his coming out speech without even talking to henry or knowing how he was coping with the leak just felt so insane. even setting aside the source material, the movie chooses to have one character essentially outing another in a speech that is supposed to be uplifting which is just completely unnecessary and gross.

#ask #coco tag #withasmiles #rant over i have got to stop thinking about this movie #anti rwrb #also the production was giving disney channel original movie with a dash too much of CGI i wonder what the budget was

[utilitycaster]

I'm in the mood to rant and between the fix-it-fic post I made and the "you should, perhaps, be familiar with the source material post" I reblogged (and the horrendous comments on said post) and the scathing goodreads reviews I'm going to talk about why so many of these fics are terrible.

Here is the thing. Some writing is bad. Some writing is good. There's room for opinion; there's styles that are grating to some, and there's a reason why someone who loves Nabokov may loathe Hemingway or vice versa; but those two still have coherent styles and the ability to craft a good sentence. It's just a matter of whether the sentence is five words or fifty.

However, writing is more than just pretty words put together in some kind of coherent order. You write to communicate. Even when you are trying to be deliberately oblique it is deliberate. There's intent. There's something you are trying to convey or elicit through being oblique. Even when you write things down for yourself to straighten out your thoughts you're writing them down for an audience, for a purpose.

Conventions exist because of this. There are ways to ensure you convey something to the intended audience, because they've seen the pattern before and understand what it means. There is a reason why we can read Shakespeare's 400-odd year old plays and enjoy them, and it's because the way things unfold, with hints and beats and foreshadowing and dramatic irony, are fairly universal in how people process information and the world around them. Because this is a blog that's largely about D&D and actual play: this is why we "see" death flags and foreshadowing in an improvised medium: we know the conventions so well that we interpret chance and happenstance as fitting within them. We put the intent in even if it wasn't there.

So for fix-it-fics: If the work met the bare minimum of "adequately executed" and was successfully finished without interruption, that intent is woven throughout the story. There's foreshadowing there; there are character choices and themes and consequences. There's a lot of work that was done to lead to that ending, whether or not you liked the ending. The ending is part of the story and the rest leads there. Fix-it-fics are therefore nearly always poorly grafted on to a story that doesn't support the new "fixed" ending. The threads don't match up, the patterns clash, and it looks terrible.

This is most notable in my opinion with tragedies. A lot of people don't like tragedies. I think those people are weak and boring but they're allowed to hold that opinion; the problem is that tragedy is a genre and a good tragedy - one that's good enough to get the people who say they don't like tragedies to watch it - knows it. People die in tragedies and the story says it will happen, it promises it will happen, and subversion of that isn't interesting; it's a disappointment. Subversion and playing with genre are a bit like tightrope walking: if someone has put immense practice into it and knows what they're doing, it looks incredible. Most people don't and they'll be lucky if all they do is fall on their ass.

Now there are works that are poorly executed but had an interesting premise (these often fall into the category of "something external happened and cut the story off or forced an unintended change" - abruptly canceled TV shows, for example) but it takes a decent amount of skill to recognize that and distinguish it from a work that is simply bad through and through, and it takes even more skill to match the good parts of that premise.

Another thing worth noting is that fanfiction specifically is usually character-centric. That's what the tags are about and what people are searching on; that's usually why people want something fixed. The thing is, those characters are part of that weave of the story. If you try to make them go in a different direction, you often lose the character in the process. It is painfully obvious when someone doesn't like a character or doesn't understand how to write them.

I will defend fanfiction to people who get snobby about it in general because I think it's one of the best ways to learn voice and tone in writing, through trying to match an existing character - but you have to actually put in the work to do so. Otherwise it begs the question "why didn't you just write a new story that isn't beholden to all these restrictions?" and usually the answer is "because I want the audience, so I made these vaguely character-shaped OCs", or else "because I wanted my favorite character to do something that they didn't and which tbh probably wouldn't have made sense for them to do." And to be clear: you can do this, because you can write for an audience of you and people who already agree with you. But when other people say the story is sloppy and the writing is bad - not on your specific badly and sloppily written story but just in general - they're probably right.

Again: you can write and read fluffy self-indulgent nonsense. That's fine. No one is stopping you. I have my own comfort reading and it's not Nabokov nor Hemingway, let me tell you. But - and this is important - if you can't tell the difference between "I have an emotional attachment to this" and "this is objectively well-written" you are going to be a terrible writer. To do that, you need to understand the difference between "did the story achieve what it was intending to do" and "did the story do what I wanted it to do." And that in turn requires understanding what the story was intending to do, and plenty of people don't make it that far.

#honestly the biggest thing is like. you can't be a good writer if you're a bad listener #and if you can't listen to criticism or what the original story was telling you? yeah your writing is going to be bad. #it's also like. it is VITAL you be able to separate what is good (in the sense of done well) from what you like

[litcityblues]

Foundation, Season 2: You Can Put The Haterade Down Now

One thing that kind of surprised me about the first season of this show was just how many haters came out of the woodwork to proclaim their disdain for it. I couldn't understand that-- the original source material covers something like a thousand years or so and had they done a page-to-screen adaptation, pure and simple, it would have been... boring, quite honestly.

No, what Apple has done is what I wish that Amazon would have done with The Wheel of Time: they've put some money behind this thing, and as a result, even if you have issues with the adaptation of the show-- which, in general, I don't, then you can at least acknowledge that it looks beautiful.

Season 2 picks up about a century after we last saw our heroes and the Second Crisis predicted by Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) is approaching. This time around, however, we get multiple Seldons. There's the one on Terminus, hanging in his vault, popping out to send mysterious messages to the waiting crowds like 'HOBER MALLOW' which people eventually figure out. It turns out, in the time jump forward, the Cleons (Lee Pace, Terrence Mann, and Cassian Bilton) have assumed that Terminus is long gone and haven't bothered to double-check, so the Foundation is now spreading the 'gospel of Seldon' as a religion to neighboring planets and is starting to attract attention. Mallow (Dmitri Leonidas)-- who isn't a priest, but a ne'er do well merchant of sorts, gets tracked down by a couple of the clerics- Poly (Kulvinder Ghir) and Constant. (Isabella Laughland)

Back on Trantor, a fresh trio of Cleons is confronted with some unusual happenings: someone sends assassins to try and kill Day, who has made the momentous decision to end the genetic dynasty and marry to produce heirs. (Also, he's sleeping with Demerzel (Laura Birn) now, which is... weird. Dusk is especially weirded out by it, but few others seem to comment on it.) Naturally, his decision to seek a bride-- in this case, Queen Sareth I (Ella Rae-Smith) of the Cloud Dominion makes Dusk and Dawn a little nervous, as once the baby is born, it sort of makes them irrelevant. Happily for them, before Day can go too much further with his plans, he catches wind of something going on in the Outer Rim and finds out that the Foundation has survived thanks to renegade General Bel Riose. (Ben Daniels)

The second one is on flooded Synnax with Gaal (Lou Llobell) and Salvor (Leah Harvey) and he's a little upset because he's been trapped inside the Prime Radiant pretty much the entire time and it hasn't been fun for him.

Gaal and Salvor do acknowledge this, but point out that they're going to need some help getting off the planet and Mobile Seldon after some reluctance- for obvious, 'you trapped me in the Prime Radiant for like a hundred years' reasons, agrees to do so. They start exploring Gaal and Salvor's mental abilities- and Gaal sees a vision from 150 years in the future where a powerful Mentalic called The Mule (Mikael Persbrandt) kills Salvor. Desperate to prevent that, they answer the mental call from the planet Ignis, where they find a colony of Mentalics, who seem welcoming at first, but their leader Tellem (Rachel House) takes them captive instead and the trio- which turns into a duo after Mobile Seldon is (seemingly) killed by Tellem have to figure out how to break free and defeat Tellem.

Eventually, they do-- but at a cost. Salvor sacrifices her life to prevent Gaal from being killed-- and proves that the future can be changed because her death now means that her vision of the future can't have come true. Gaal and Mobile Seldon agree to enter cryostasis for a century or so, waking up once a year to teach the nascent new Second Foundation.

Back with the other Seldon, the second crisis has arrived- though it doesn't go the way that Empire thinks it will though. Mallow cuts a deal with the Spacers to deny Empire the use of hyperspace and they start a chain reaction that slowly destroys the Imperial fleet, even as Empire sends the wreck of Invictus spinning down to the planet where everyone and everything is seemingly destroyed. Day is kicked out an airlock by Riose and then Mallow and Riose await their fate together while Constant is set adrift in a converted cleaning module, hoping that someone will pick her up.

On Trantor, Demerzel is outsmarted- kind of. Dusk finds out the truth about her (the standout episode, "Long Ago, Not Far Away" fills in a lot of the gaps) and her programming means that she will stay loyal to the genetic dynasty above all, so Dusk is killed to protect her secret. Sareth-- with child- and Dawn flees and Demerzel- with a copy of the Prime Radiant decants three new Emperors and just keeps on keeping on-- at least for now.

It turns out that Constant does survive and gets picked up by Seldon's vault and it turns out to be a little TARDIS-like, since it's bigger on the inside and can hold the entire populace of Terminus.

We flash forward to the future, where a crazed-looking Mule vows to find Gaal Dornick, as he senses her presence.

Overall: Look, you can put down the Haterade now, people: this is a good show. It might even wind up being a great show and-- it's not that far off from the books. It might be one of those rare adaptations that- and I realize I'm treading on some very thin ice here- improves upon the source material?

I know that's going to seem like heresy to a lot of sci-fi fans and I respect that. If Asimov is your do-or-die and you expected something closer to the books with this adaptation, I get it. You can be made-- but with adaptations, you've got to figure out how to bring new viewers in without them having to read the books first and if you're really good at what you do, you'll inspire new viewers/people who haven't read the books to maybe go check them out. Either way, I think people are going to be reading those books that maybe wouldn't have before and so, even if you disagree with it or hate the adaptation, I'm going to come down on the side of this being a good, solid adaptation-- maybe even a great one. (I mean, come on y'all: the source material did have some issues.)

That's not to say that it's not without potential problems. I don't know if you can keep leaning on Gaal Dornick if you go much beyond the next season or so. If she keeps freezing herself to jump ahead, I'm going to hope that the character at least suffers some side effects or something. It's going to start straining credibility a bit if she just keeps getting iced to go between seasons and jump ahead in time.

I'm also intrigued by the Seldon Vault and where they're going... because that is definitely not in the books either, so I'm kind of curious to see what they do with it.

My Grade: Stop hating, this is good and potentially great science fiction that while not a perfect adaptation of its source material does right by it at the very least. **** out of ****

#foundation #season 2 #review