#‘it’s too different make your own character’ should be about characterization not appearance (unless you’re making the character wear

[rainbow--skies]

Fandom culture on other sites is mindboggling to me because I just saw an Insta post complaining about people’s redesigns and reimaginings of characters, and it was already an annoying ass post that people were making more annoying, but the craziest part to me is people in the comments were genuinely trying to call queer headcanons that get added on sometimes fetishization 😭

#rainbow rants #like who do you think drew that… because it was probably queer people #their reasoning was that adding it on top of a redesign is unnecessary and using queer people as an aesthetic but that’s dumb #if you want to throw out everything internet fandom has been doing for years and rebrand it as problematic… why the fuck are you here??? #comments were also filledddddd racism and fatphobia who cares if a redesign is black or fat. they are pixels #‘it’s too different make your own character’ should be about characterization not appearance (unless you’re making the character wear #something that contradicts their personality maybe) #the only valid criticism is i hate when people headcanon characters that are super homophobic as gay #or change canon queer characters’ sexuality #that’s actually annoying #rest of the stuff these people were saying was some bullshit though

[rachelbethhines]

Tangled Salt Marathon - “Rapunzel Knows Best!” ( A first half of S3 Recap)

So I decided to place the recap after Be Very Afraid for several reasons. For starters it’s where the season three hiatus took place. It’s also framed like a cliffhanger episode the same as The Great Tree and Queen for a Day; so while Cassandra’s Revenge is technically the midseason finale, Be Very Afraid functionally servers this narrative purpose better. Finally I want to keep the Cassandra heavy stuff contained in it’s own recap later same as I did for Varian’s arc in season one. 

Also keep in mind, everything I discussed in previous recaps still apply here. Nothings changed and you could argue that the issues I bring up now could have also apply to past seasons; they just happen to be at their worst here. 

Here are the past recaps 

To Filler or Not to Filler

Hey, What Ever Happened to That Varitas, Guy?

What Is the Point?

‘Whatta Twist’

And here are the episodes that’s covered in this recap

Rapunzel’s Return Part 1

Rapunzel’s Return Part 2

Return of the King 

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf

The Lost Treasure of Herz Der Sonne

No Time Like the Past

Beginnings 

The King and Queen of Hearts

Day of the Animals 

Be Very Afraid 

Poorly Defined Conflicts 

I’m not just talking about Cassandra’s lack of goals here either, though that is a part of it. I mean in several episodes the central conflict isn’t laid out clearly enough before being resolved.  We flip from one set up to the next without ever resolving the first; like in Rapunzel’s Return when Cass and Varian fight for screen time or whenever Rapunzel is suppose to learn one lesson only for someone else to learn a completely different lesson in every other episode. And to this day I don’t know what Rapunzel and Feldspar’s subplot in Lost Treasure was suppose to be about. 

There’s also of course the ill-defined overall conflict; which at this point has become convoluted and nonsensical to the extreme, and will only grow more aggravatingly stupid as the season progresses. The main villains lack clear goals, their motivations don’t align with previously stated facts, and the actual interesting conflict involving the threat of the rocks and their destruction of people’s lives and homes is just shoved under the rug and forgotten about.  

There is no story without conflict. Having the conflict be all over the place is not only confusing but makes it harder for the audience to invest in what’s going on. 

Failed Narrative Promises 

Tying in with the above statement regarding conflicts, we have failed narrative promises. Rapunzel is repeatedly told to that she needs to learn something in several episodes only for her not to learn it at all. She either learns some unrelated ‘lesson’ that wasn’t established, (like in Rapunzel’s Return with her pervious goal about ‘opening up to others’ being switched out for a generic ‘responsibility’ lesson that at the last minute, where she doesn’t even do anything responsible,) or she winds up ‘teaching’ the opposite lesson to a different character thereby rewarding her for her bad behavior.   

And that’s just within the induvial episodes themselves; there’s also broken narrative promises through out the overall story arc; like...

no justice/redemption for Lady Caine, 

no acknowledgment that the Saporians are the victims of colonization

no conclusion regarding Corona’s murky past

no satisfying ending to Varian’s plot that sees everyone in involve grow

a poor copout of an explanation for Cassandra’s face/heel turn

The Dark Prince reveal going nowhere 

The Brotherhood being put on a bus 

King Frederic, or any royal, not being held accountable for their past actions 

Lance’s new found responsibilities just being thrown away for the tenth time 

The Disciples plot being being dropped 

next to nothing in season two winds up being relevant 

And Rapunzel, the protagonist of a coming of age story, fails to learn anything at all 

I could probably go on but you get the gist. Tangled is incredibly frustrating show to watch because doesn’t deliver what it promises. You’re not being clever by ‘subverting audiences expectations’ unless you can justify your narrative decisions with previous set up. Tangled is too lazy to build proper set ups so it’s ‘twists’ leave you wanting to punch things rather then impressing you. 

Character Assassinations 

Every single character in Tangled the Series gets thrown under a bus, driven off a cliff, and then allowed to drown in the ocean of their completely unaware self-congratulatory smugness.  

Rapunzel is turned into a bully

Cassandra is given the idiot ball to hold permanently 

The King and Queen are lobotomized

Quinin gets replaced by a robot  

The rest of the Brotherhood are pale shadows of what they could have been 

Edmund is transformed from tragic complex figure into a dumb jerkoff who abuses his kid for a laugh 

Zhan Tiri, once an ancient demon warlock, is reduced to a floating impotent ghost girl 

The Saporians become poor hipster parodies

Cap is put on a bus

Any villain who isn’t Cass is gets ignored

Lance is infantilized to the point of absurdity

Eugene becomes a doormat 

and poor Varian is forced to become a complacent victim to his abusers as oppose to being allowed to keeping his dignity 

I think the only person who escapes this mass murder of characterization is freaking Calliope, and she’s hasn’t even appeared yet! (Well okay her and Trevor, maybe) 

This all ties back into the poorly defined conflict and failed narrative promises. Rather than let the characters drive the story, they’ve become puppets to the plot, and plot is really stupid and forced, and circles back in on itself and is full of contradictions. 

Manipulating the Audience’s Empathy to Do the Work for the Writers  

The reason why the creators believe they can get away with such poor characterization and lazy writing is because they expect the audience to do all the heavy lifting for them.  

Cass isn’t given an on screen reason for what she does because they’re hoping her fans will just automatically excuse her because they like her/relate to her and not, you know, get mad at the writers for dumbing her down. And after all who doesn’t love the creator’s pet? Meanies! That’s who! 

No one calls out Rapunzel’s bullshit on screen, because if everyone likes her, then you, viewing audience, should too. Because if you have any sort of independent critical thinking abilities and a sense of right and wrong then clearly you’re ‘just a hater’. 

Everyone should just shut up and be satisfied that Varian is even on screen now and be grateful for the scraps that they get cause he’s not the real point of the show and according to Chris ‘Varian fans aren’t real fans’. Even though they make up most of his viewing audience. 

I could go on, but it’s just variations of the above. The writing in this series is very fond of gaslighting the audience and trying to trick them into justifying the absolute worst behaviors while desperately hoping they doesn’t noticed the continued downgrading and dismissal of characters they do like or once liked.  

And the sad thing is, it’s worked. There are people to this day that still try to justify this show’s shitty morals and bend over backwards to excuse the likes of Rapunzel, Frederic, Cassandra, and Edmund.  Worst, there are loud sections of the fandom, (usually on twitter) who think bullying is okay and follow in Chris and his characters footsteps. Most of them young impressionable girls who are now ripe for TREFS to indoctrinate because they use the same bullying tactics and excuses for authoritarianism. 

Media does effect reality, but not in the way purists and antis would have you believe. No one is going to become a violent manic from playing a video game nor a sex offender because they read a smut fic. But they very much will conform to toxic beliefs if it’s repeated enough at them by authorities they ‘trust’; like say the world wide leading company known for family entertainment and children’s media, and the ‘friends’ they find within the fandom for said company... 

I’m not saying you can’t enjoy Tangled the series or that you’re some how wrong for liking it’s characters, nor do you have to engage with every or any criticism thrown it’s way. But yes you need to think about the media you consume on some level and valid criticism is very much important to the fandom experience for precisely the above reasons. 

Conclusion    

This isn’t even the tip of the iceberg of what’s wrong with this show, but it is most of its biggest problems laid bare. Anything that haven’t covered here or in the past recaps will be explored in the final recap. Cause this is it folks; the last leg of the journey for this retrospective. When come back, hopefully next week, we’ll tackle Pascal’s Dragon.  

#tangled #anti-tangled #tangled the series #rapunzel's tangled adventure #tts #rta

[itsclydebitches]

RWBY Recaps: Volume 8 “Divide”

Hello, everyone, and welcome back! It feels good to be doing some normal RWBY-ing in this strange world of ours. First, some supplementary materials.

Number One: In response to any (valid) questions along the lines of, “Hey Clyde, it’s now been a full year since Volume 7 was airing and you still haven’t answered my ask about it. Or the ones about Volume 6… what’s up with that?” I’ve created what I hope is an informative video detailing the problem:

(I assure you, the Earth, Wind & Fire was a happy accident during the screen recording.)

Needless to say, there’s a lot and I’ve known for some time now that I will LITERALLY never get through all my asks. Which doesn’t mean I don’t want you to send future thoughts in! Just know that as we head into Volume 8 territory I’ll most likely prioritize those, as well as any Volume 7 asks that aren’t woefully out of date. But I do want everyone to know that I read all the asks I receive, appreciate them immensely, and think too much about hypothetical answers, even if I don’t have time to actually write them out 💜

Number Two: There’s a bingo board this year!

Jury’s out on whether I’ll remember to update it, but at the very least this serves as a decent glimpse into my — and others’ — expectations going into this volume.

Number Three: I’ve collected a list of things I’ve heard about Volume 8 from what seem to be reputable sources. I did this because RT is developing a tendency to talk up certain points and then fail to deliver, either because something was taken out of a volume/moved to another, or because RT apparently has radically different ideas about what including something means. So this might be handy to keep on file and ask ourselves two months from now, “Did RT actually deliver on what they promised?”

Emphasis on Ruby’s leadership and how Summer’s death has impacted her

Insight into Ren and Nora’s flaws

May Merigold will supposedly have a larger part

More information about The Long Memory (Ozpin’s cane)

Theme of the volume is that you can respect someone but that doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with them

Very short timeline (supposedly just two days)

Yang in particular is very suspicious and distrustful

I was also going to include a list of all the threads that need to be continued/wrapped up, but honestly that would have taken too large a chunk off my life. Let’s just throw out the highlights:

Are we really going to have Qrow gunning for Ironwood?

Clover is dead regardless. Press ‘F’ to pay respects

Oscar bb you got shot please acknowledge this

Ozpin bb you got done dirty please acknowledge this

Penny is a Maiden now. I feel like the fandom has been sleeping on this (myself included)

Queer baiting, queer baiting… you’re on thin ice at this point, RWBY. Just skate on over to the queer snack bar before you fall straight into the lake.  

Ren spill your deep dark secret already and it had better be something more than just ‘Oh no Nora might someday die :( ’

Salem is here so how the actual fuck is the cast surviving this?

Will Ironwood likewise survive his descent into antagonism? Yes or please yes no?

I think that’s all the biggies. I strive to keep lists like this in mind while analyzing, but honestly RWBY has a hundred moving parts that are abandoned or changed or simply retconned at the drop of a hat. So an attempt will be made.

Number Four (last one I promise!): Normal disclaimers and reminders for Recaps apply:

Please don’t fill up the already full inbox with flames. It’s still 2020. No one has time for that nonsense.

There will absolutely be typos and wonky parts because I try to get these out the same day an episode premieres. I have now been working on this for ten hours, nearly straight, and have no more energy for edits. Apologies in advance and RIP to my Saturdays.

I reserve the right to use stupid GIFs and memes at my discretion.

I strive to keep my focus on recapping/analyzing but salt tends to worm its way in… If you’re a die-hard RWBY fan with little patience for criticism, let alone (at times) snarky criticism, please proceed with caution.

No wait I lied, this is the last thing:

Okay, got that out of my system LET’S DO THIS!

We start not with the episode itself but rather Rooster Teeth’s (RT’s) strange non-promotion of it. If you follow my blog you may have caught the post where I pointed out that there was nothing on RT’s website to suggest that one of their most popular shows—if not the most popular show—was premiering today. Nothing on the main page. Nothing on the RWBY page either, not unless you count the Volume 8 poster background (easily mistaken for the Volume 7 poster) and the trailer buried all the way down past Episodes, past Merch, in the Bonus Features section along with videos like Live From Remnant and the volume intros. RT… the promotion of your feature show is not a bonus. This should be front and center! Honest to god, five minutes before the episode dropped I was checking the website for a Volume 8 section, a countdown, anything that would tell me the episode was imminent without relying on fans on tumblr to keep me in the loop. We got nada, zilch. I’m not sure whether that speaks more to RT’s iffy management of the series or simply the website’s horrible design—RIP losing RWBY on Youtube—but I was surprised when I saw the episode a few minutes after 11:00am. At that point I honestly expected to hear about a dely.

So that’s the mood I entered the premiere in, but truly? We start off strong. Things take a pretty severe nosedive later on, we’ll get to that, but I was impressed with our beginning and that probably has a lot to do with the fact that we start with our villains.

We open on a Cinderella character, Cinder, and thus I’m immediately pleased that we’re getting something about her backstory after all this time. Seven years! She appeared in episode one, folks! To say we’re overdue is an understatement. There isn’t a whole lot to go on, just a younger Cinder sadly scrubbing the floor, poised under a spotlight. What we learn, or potentially learn, is based far more in cultural knowledge than this scene. We know Cinderella’s story, which includes the abusive family, the longing for more, the eventual escape, and thus we’re able to read all of that in this image, despite the image itself not telling us any of this overtly. That means we could be wrong in our interpretation, but if we’re not it’s an easy shorthand in an already packed story.

What I’m really impressed with is the sound bridge between the scrubbing and her nails on the back of Neo’s chair. Fantastic way to confirm that this is Cinder as well as showcasing just how far she’s come. The sound of her labor has been replaced with the sound of her power and given that Cinder’s power is stolen, tied to a grimm arm, the property of a genocidal maniac… that’s messed up. It’s a Cinderella story gone wrong.

So yeah, Cinder tells Neo to head straight into the creepy, grimm infested blood cloud to see Salem and Neo is like, ‘Uh… no thank you?’ lol.

RT does a good job this episode with her expressions, ensuring we know exactly what she’s thinking despite an unwillingness/inability to speak.

Poor Neo might be in too deep, but I quite like the overall atmosphere of this opening. Say what we will about Salem’s awful characterization, at least she has style. This woman knows how to make an entrance and, piggybacking off of the Apathy, RT knows how to infuse horror elements into their fantasy. The red and purple coloring of the clouds, spiked whale teeth peeking through, bright orange in the background looking like explosions… that’s all 👌 Including the intro card.

The only thing I want to gripe about is this:

I’m sorry, why does the whale grimm have landing pads? Or something like it?? The whale otherwise works because it’s poised between the natural and the fantasy synthetic. It looks like a real grimm whale on the outside, but is sporting a throne room, a control panel, and other unnatural elements on the inside. It’s a visual indicator of Salem’s ability to control and change grimm. Now though, the additions are wrong, infringing on the line between organic and tech, the line between what helps the grimm individually (giving monkeys wings) and what just helps Salem. Every other aspect of the whale straddles that line wonderfully, adding to the creep factor, like a grimm version of the Uncanny Valley: it’s not quite a whale anymore… but landing pads? That looks ridiculous. Why does Salem even have that? How many ships are her people feasibly using? Why are there five?

Take it away, please.

Cinder waltzes in like this is a normal home visit, but Neo has an appropriate ‘What the actual fuck?’ face going on.

They approach Salem on her throne where Cinder immediately kneels, greeting her with, “My queen.” I mentioned during my trailer breakdown that I think Cinder is lying her ass off here, and I still think that based on a line we’ll get in a minute, but now at least we have a sense of how she can pull this off. A woman who started out as a (presumed) servant is going to know how to mimic subservience, even if her heart isn’t in it. Salem is very good at playing the girl who will still kneel and scrub the floor for you. She will scrub the floor, she’ll do everything you want, she’ll just be plotting her own rise to power while she does it.

There’s quite a bit of interesting cinematography in this episode, not all of it good, and I think one of the mistakes is here when we get a closeup on Salem’s mouth as she greets Cinder. A closeup like that should be reserved for more significant dialogue—“Rosebud”—and yet we get this shot again when Cinder tells Emerald to be quiet. It’s awkward and coupled with the numerous eye closeups we got in the trailer, I think RT is playing a little fast and loose with the camera. Each shot should add something to the scene, not distract from it. If you don’t have a reason for including a technique like that then leave it be.

Back to the actual dialogue though. We knew that Salem knew Cinder was alive and now it seems that she just expected her to come back? I’m slightly lost. It feels like we’re missing something here. Cinder goes off to secure the lamp, fails, nearly dies, wanders on her own for months, and then randomly shows back up on Salem’s whale doorstep, yet Salem isn’t angry at all? Did she have faith that Cinder would return when she has something to offer? Did she just not care about Cinder, considering her return an unnecessary but otherwise welcome surprise? That would make the least sense given that she holds the key to accessing Beacon’s relic… but that circles right back around to why Salem is seemingly indifferent to Cinder’s comings and goings. Surely she can’t actually believe that Cinder is loyal?

“So I trust you wouldn’t return to me empty handed,” she says. Yeah, trust means nothing in this show, Salem, didn’t you watch Volumes 6 and 7? Again, I simply don’t know. I suppose I’ll just chalk it up to confidence, that if Cinder did bail Salem knew she could track her down again. Deciphering her motivations and beliefs is a lost cause when the show continually gives us so little.

The important thing now is that Cinder does indeed have an offering and you can see that Salem is somewhat surprised at being handed the relic.

Cinder, of course, takes credit for the victory and we’re given another wonderful shot of Neo. ‘YOU took it?’

Oh, Neo. Best get out while you still can.

Tyrian appears having obviously made his way to Salem’s ship sometime between her arrival and now. The exchange is pretty standard for this group. He insults Cinder for failing and needing this victory to make amends, talks about how any win against Ironwood says more about his lack of intelligence than her skill, and Cinder… doesn’t have a whole lot of comebacks, actually. I’d say Tyrian won that verbal spar, enhanced by a better use of the camera when we get his tail looming menacingly towards Cinder and Neo.

He goes on to say that Watts was a “necessary sacrifice” so, uh… I’m just going to toss out the ask I answered yesterday. Based on our intro I’d say Watts is still significant to the volume—hacking Penny is my guess—but by the end? He could be in trouble.

(As a side note: I plan to analyze the intro next week. It’s just easier when it comes first.)

Tyrian also calls Neo “little one” which I just found absolutely hilarious. In an on brand creepy manner, that is. Not that Neo couldn’t kick his ass, but there’s something wonderfully chilling about having the serial killer use an endearment towards a potential victim, one that comments on her size while he’s looming.

In contrast, Cinder refers to Neo as a “valuable asset” and we get our third mood of the episode.

Who’s going to start a Neo reaction image collection?

It’s true enough on the surface—who wouldn’t want an ally who can turn into anyone else?—but we’re still bumping up against question of why Salem needs this. She’s immortal! She has an endless army! Magic! This scene works well with a villain who needs a skillset like Neo’s to succeed, but Salem doesn’t. RT is doing a great job writing a story thus far, just not the story we’ve previously been given. This isn’t the story they set up.

This will come back up when we reach the RWBYJNOR group. Just wait.

Before that though, the gang’s all here as Emerald, Mercury, and Hazel show up, all in new outfits.

I think I like everything except for the weird Xs on Emerald’s jacket—it’s way too distracting and frankly makes an otherwise good look ugly—and the fact that she’s showing her midriff in Atlas. Hazel doesn’t have any sleeves! Oh my god, why doesn’t anyone dress for the weather in this show?

Frankly, I found their reunion to be kind of lackluster. I mean, there was nothing wrong with it. Emerald does sound briefly excited, she does run, and it’s in character for Cinder to cut her off… it just didn’t resonate with me emotionally. I thought after two volumes of thinking she’s dead, then working through the knowledge that she’s alive, that I would feel Emerald’s shock and relief more, but I didn’t. And I’m not entirely sure why. I don’t want to level any accusations at the voice acting because frankly I know next to nothing about that skill (and from what I’ve seen it’s usually praised in the fandom), but I will say that throughout the premiere I was noticing it more than I ever have before. The lack of emotion here and some awkward deliveries later, like when Yang goes, “Ruby, there is no way Ironwood will cooperate with us” and I immediately thought, “Wow, that came out stilted.” These observations stick with me because, as said, voice acting usually isn’t on my radar. It’s not something I’ve studied or had practice analyzing. If you’d never told me that Ren or Qrow’s VA changed then after a year hiatus I literally wouldn’t notice… but there’s something about this episode that didn’t sit right. Anyone else get that sense, or was it just me?

Regardless, the arrival of our other three villains really doesn’t amount to much, though I’m happy for all the Emerald and Mercury fans who get to see them in new outfits. The focus is still on Cinder as she delivers a line indicative of her true motivations: “That power will be mine.” Yeah, she’s not loyal to Salem, she’s just power hungry. Of course, Salem immediately takes note of this and raises her hand, in another nice use of the foreground, reminding her that she hasn’t given that order.

Cinder is shocked, angry even, but quickly covers it up with her “Without you I am nothing” line. If I caught it right I think she also calls Salem “Ma’am”? Hilarious. Again, skilled at playing the servant.

Also, before I forget, it’s worth noting that almost everything from our trailer appeared in this episode. Yeah, there are a few details like Nora attacking some tech and the group on their bikes, but on the whole we’ve already seen the majority of our promo material and will likely get most of the rest next week. It makes me both interested and nervous for what another twelve episodes are going to hold.

Salem opens her whale, or opens a portal type view in it, something that gives us a long-distance look at Atlas. I don’t know what exactly is going on here, but it’s pretty so I’ll take it.

She also delivers the frankly badass line, “Just because you’re more valuable to me than a pawn does not make you a player.”

She waves them all away with perfect ‘You mean nothing to me’ attitude and we sadly leave our villains.

Sad not because I don’t love my farm boy, but because things are about to get a whole lot messier.

Oscar has made his way to a camp of civilian survivors… all of whom are just hanging out in the supposedly deadly cold. Yeah, there’s a single fire, but at least four of them aren’t anywhere near it. Three of them also aren’t wearing gloves. What was that survival rate again?

A nice if gruff dude gives Oscar soup—water?—while showing off his… badger claws? I don’t know what kind of faunus he’s supposed to be, but he feels like the sort of two second, minor character who could easily become a meme lol.

Oscar thanks him (my polite son!) and hands the bowl back after a single sip. Which is impressive because I would have assumed the guy was giving me the whole bowl and just taken it. Hell, I’ve done that even when I didn’t assume it’s all for me. A Starbucks barista once approached me with a tray and a plate of samples, I knew I was supposed to take just one, yet for some reason my hand went to take the whole goddamn plate. He had to tell me off, then I was trying to explain that I didn’t actually want or think I should have eight shots of cappuccino all to myself, I don’t even like coffee, he clearly didn’t believe me… it was awkward. So good job, Oscar. You’re less awkward than me (though that’s not saying much).

Now a question, Oscar. Darling. Brilliant boy who has been through too much: why the fuck aren’t you talking to Ozpin? This will be A Thing later when he presents a lack of time to talk as justification for keeping more secrets (we’ll get to that too…) yet here is time! You’re just sitting there for who knows how long, with plenty of privacy to hide a supposedly one-sided conversation so the Mantle citizens don’t get weirded out or suspicious. Talk to Ozpin. Our headmaster gets two lines in this episode, utterly inconsequential lines like his airship scene, lines that feel like they exist to say, “See? He’s still included in the story!” even though he absolutely is not. Two volumes of mostly silence, a perfect setup to start the reconciliation process, but we’re going to put it off again?

Instead Ruby randomly and conveniently appears. I want to know how she found him. Oscar isn’t wearing a tracker. He clearly didn’t call them because he’s surprised when Ruby shows up. He fell alllllllll the way back down to Mantle and then wandered to a random part of the slums. You’re telling me they flew over the entire city—after beginning this search thinking he was in Atlas—and somehow managed to spot him from up in the air? C’mon. I would have rather had a beginning where Oscar makes his way back to the group himself, giving him and Ozpin time to hash things out.

“Need a lift?” Ruby says, eliminating that potential. Sigh.

Oscar immediately starts beating himself up when he gets onboard, saying that he “was stupid to think the General would listen.” Nah, you were stupid to buy into Ruby’s nonsensical confidence and for telling Ironwood he’s as bad as Salem. Sorry, Oscar, but everyone is written badly these days. I will, however, say that I am THRILLED at the group’s reaction to his return. Ruby says that she’s “just glad you’re alright.” Nora has a wonderfully tender moment where she hugs him gently rather than her usual glomp.

That? That added a year to my life. Everyone else seems relieved that he’s okay too, so kudos there. After four years of Oscar being an outsider in the group, this is one of the few moments that feel like he’s 100% accepted. Really glad to see it.

Now let’s see if it sticks after they learn Ozpin is back...

They fly to the Happy Huntresses’ base and I again feel like I’ve missed something crucial. When did they team up? I mean, RWBYJNOR was working directly under Ironwood up until the last hour and Robyn ran off to fight Tyrian/Clover in the last couple episodes. When did she have time to explain her (briefly) changed allegiance and why would the Happy Huntresses trust the group without that? Did Robyn share that Blake and Yang went behind Ironwood’s back for her? Do the Huntresses instinctively trust them because they’re now wanted by the military? How did they even run into each other?

Again, I think we would have been better served to have an episode before all this. Let Oscar make his way back and let the group struggle with the magnitude of their situation on the airship, before they find new allies. Transferring directly to, “They have help and a secret base and a plan in the works!” makes me feel like I missed the real premiere last week. You know, the one where Salem unexpectedly arrived and we left the group like this.

This is where we’ve ended up though. The group is cozy in this hideout, getting info from Joanna, and my only other thought is, “Why is she giving all this exposition?”  

Shouldn’t it be May? I mean, we were told that she was going to play more of a role this volume, a promise that’s pretty important imo given her status as a (so far off screen) trans character, so why not put her in the role of mediator between the Happy Huntresses and RWBYJNR? Giving her that setup as a leader among her people as well as lots of lines would be meaningful. A trans character just existing and being a part of this fight! May could obviously still fill that role—I’m well aware that we’re only one episode in—but it just seems like a missed opportunity to me. Out of all the undeveloped Happy Huntresses, our premiere focuses on the one who has the least importance to the fandom.

As said, Joanna talks a fair bit but what it basically boils down to is trying to get everyone to the crater below Atlas. It’s apparently not safe, but it’s warm, which is what matters right now.

So… let me get this straight. You want to gather everyone into a not safe crater, by leading them through an army of grimm, so that they can wait there in case someone moves the Staff, thus dropping an entire city on top of their heads? That’s the plan? Which admittedly isn’t Joanna’s fault. This is another instance of RWBYJNOR having information that a leader does not and they should really consider speaking up about it. But of course they don’t.

Also, how long does everyone have in regards to the cold? Shouldn’t there be dead civilians by now? The time it would take to find the Happy Huntresses, team up with them, get settled in the base, and find Oscar says that things should be pretty grim right now (pardon the pun), yet every non-aura user in this city seems content to just hang out in the snow. Either the cold is deadly enough to justify moving everyone to the crater, or it’s mild enough to let everyone survive this long, not both.

After hugs are given everyone obviously wants to know what happened to Oscar. His response?

“It’s a… long story. I get the feeling there’s been a few of those tonight.”

That’s a check for the bingo card! We’re halfway through the first episode and we’ve already got another secret. Yes, this is a secret. Oscar actively chooses not to tell anyone that Ozpin is back—something Ozpin himself comments on—and then skillfully draws attention away from himself with “I get the feeling there’s been a few of those tonight.” Indeed, all eyes go to Penny. Oscar’s plight is forgotten, which is what he wanted. His justification?

Ozpin: “You’re not going to tell them?”

Oscar: “You and I aren’t done talking yet.”

Along with this look.

Oscar no. There’s so much wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin. Let’s create a list.

As said, you had plenty of time to talk to Ozpin and chose not to. Miss me with this excuse.

You are now doing to your friends exactly what you and your friends did to Ironwood, which in turn is what Ozpin did to you! I can’t believe we’ve got Oscar critically side-eyeing him when they are still—still—repeating the behavior they drove Ozpin away for.

What is there to even talk about now? Oscar didn’t punch himself/Ozpin (lol) but he did steal Jinn’s name from Ozpin in the first place. You got what you wanted, drove him away, and have been lying and keeping secrets ever since. The only thing they should be talking about involves apologizing. Any further criticism—which is what Oscar’s expression and curt reply suggests—is beyond hypocritical.

Seriously, what needs to be discussed? There’s no reason not to tell the group unless Oscar wants to talk about whether they should tell them. There’s no good ending here...

Don’t you think it would be nice to know that Ozpin is back and you’ve got super magic powers while making plans to save the entire world?

This is all especially stupid given Oscar’s “Salem wants to divide us” reminder to Ruby in a moment. Oscar, you are doing the most to divide the group right now. By not forgiving Ozpin. By refusing to work with him. By keeping him secret from everyone else.

This is bad, friends, I worry for what the rest of the volume will bring…

The story is done with Ozpin for now so I guess I will be too. The group continues filling Oscar in and we get some shots of the base, including a rather prominent poster of what I assume are two Happy Huntresses. Did they die in battle perhaps?

It’s a little strange.

Oscar: “Where’s Qrow?”

Me: “Likely still making bad decisions.”

No one knows so they just drop it. Which I kind of get, only so much you can do to find him if he’s not out on the streets like Oscar, but it still reads as kind of iffy that two nieces look down at the ground for a hot second and then move on with their plans, content to leave Qrow to whatever fate befell him. In a minute we’ll see Yang firmly take Ren’s side regarding helping the people they can in Mantle, which frankly comes out of nowhere for her. I think an easy motivation would have been Qrow. Ruby wants to save the world, Yang wants to find and save their uncle, and that just happens to align with Ren’s desire to save the civilians who need immediate grimm and cold help. Don’t get me wrong, I like that there’s finally some division between the sisters, I just wish it hadn’t come about so abruptly. Ren had setup for standing up to Ruby. Yang did not.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Joanna lists the grimm horde and no heat as the major threats to everyone. The group agrees.

Me: What about Salem?

Joanna says that this is all doubly dangerous because there’s “no more military protection.”

Me: Oh, so now you want the military?

This is all so disjointed. Even more-so when Joanna mentions that Ironwood has stopped all evacuations to Atlas, likely due to the “hard light shields” that are the only thing standing between Salem and the city. Thing is, the show never makes this connection, I just did it myself based on this scene and the one that comes later. The show presents Joanna’s line as a pure condemnation. Ironwood won’t let more evacuees in because… he’s just evil, I guess. Yet there is a justification here, namely that continuing the evacuations even while he’s stuck without Penny leaves him wide open to a Salem attack, the death of everyone currently safe, but that argument is never presented to the viewer. I don’t need people to agree with Ironwood’s perspective, I just wish that perspective was offered as an option. The show is very good about acting like RWBYJNOR’s opinion is the only justified opinion, or simply the only opinion at all.

After everything is laid out Weiss goes, “We’re never going to sleep again, I just know it.”

I could make a crack about the lack of continuity and how the group should be collapsing right now… but that was a funny line. It can stay.

What is far more of a problem is the fact that no one is talking about Salem. Okay, that’s a lie. They do talk about her, but in a roundabout way like her presence isn’t impacting every decision they make. That’s the real issue. They’re acting as if Salem isn’t here right now, like she’s off far away, maybe approaching slowly, and they’re arguing over how best to prep the world for her eventual attack. There’s no emotion here—let alone action—to reflect that the series’ Big Bad has arrived and is poised to murder them all. Literally what is this? Ruby is yelling about warning the world and, ignoring the continued question of why that’s a good thing when the world can do nothing to stop Salem and knowledge of her continually drives people to horrible acts, she has yet to acknowledge that… she’s the world? Ruby is the world in this conflict. She, Mantle, and Atlas. Salem is here for you all. Right now. You are, this instant, in the situation you want to warn others about, so why don’t you try to do something about it? Or at least acknowledge it. Ruby wants to warn the neighborhood about a potential fire while her house is actively ablaze, and the fire could have totally killed her by now but decided not to for… reasons.

“Ruby’s right,” Nora says. They have to tell the world so “they can prepare.” How? How are they supposed to prepare for this? The story cannot continue ignoring Salem’s immortality.

“Ruby’s right,” is all Blake says and I’m starting to thinks that’s why her character exists now, to agree with Ruby. It’s great that she’s getting a little distance from Yang, but man.

As Ruby asks whether Pietro can get Amity up and running despite it not being finished (called it) we start an incredibly odd sequence of flashforwards to their individual missions. I’ve seen a lot of praise for this already and though I agree that, in theory, it’s a good way to save time, I found the actual execution to be jarring. Upon thinking back through our timeline, it became clear they were flashforwards, but while watching I thought they might be flashbacks (especially since that’s more common).

Some of the shots, like Nora’s, just look awkward when you’ve got the exact expression and pose transplanted from one scene to another, like she’s a cardboard cutout behind a green screen. To say nothing of how the flashforwards ruin any suspense (I use that word loosely) in the conversation itself. If the question is, “Will they decide to go to the military compound?” then that question is answered when we see Ruby scoping out the compound, not when the group actually decides on the course of action.

It just made an already muddled scene worse for me, so I hope this trend doesn’t continue.

And of course, Amity can be used despite all the info last volume claiming that it wasn’t finished. Pietro suddenly acts like it is finished and the only thing standing in their way is Ironwood providing access. If that were the case, he would have used Amity weeks or days ago like he wanted to! When was it finished? Not after Watts commented on how incomplete it was. When did they get back the resources they needed from Robyn? It’s as ridiculous and retcon-y as I thought it would be.

Yang points out that Ironwood will never listen to them and Ruby counters that “he doesn’t have to.” They’ll just take the access from him. Because why wouldn’t they in a series where they’ve already stolen two airships? Stealing from the super evil military that Joanna wishes were helping them right now is just the group’s go-to plan nowadays.

Pietro isn’t sold on this plan though. He lists at least three obstacles they’d need to get through “and then… oh boy, I might need to think about this some more.” “And just to clarify,” Oscar says, “This is the easy option?” Um...no it’s not? We also know there’s an access point in Ironwood’s office so… why not go there instead? They really think the Academy is less guarded than the military base? There’s a potential justification here along the lines of, “After Neo and Cinder broke into his office Ironwood will have the place on high alert,” but unless I missed it the group doesn’t assume anything like that. They just listen to Pietro point out all the ways they can’t get into the military base and jump straight to that being the best option. It feels like a transparent way to create conflict for the group. We’ll just have them taking the most dangerous route despite an easy route being offered alongside it. Why bother mentioning his office at all? Just have the access in the military base. Boom, done.

It’s that conflict and the fact that Ruby tends to hear “You can’t” and digs in her heels. You can’t go to Atlas. I’ll just steal a ship then. You can’t defeat Salem. Watch me. You can’t break into this base. Guess what I’m doing! She’s dangerous in her fairy tale, meta-driven insistence that everything will turn out her way because she wants it to.

Speaking of, we finally—FINALLY—get someone challenging Ruby. Sort of. Not actually but it’s the closest we’ve ever gotten:

Yang: “Ruby, when we came here we said we’d follow your lead… but things haven’t exactly worked out.”

Now, there are two things to take away from this moment. The first is how utterly shocked Ruby and the others are. I mean, take a look at these expressions.

Ruby straight up can’t believe what she’s hearing. Weiss put her hand to her mouth like this is the most dramatic thing to ever happen to her. Oscar looks down in a ‘Yeah, I agree but please don’t look at me and make me admit that’ way. And Nora looks indifferent in the screenshot but animated she goes sort of stern, likely pissed that Yang would dare say that given her own agreement with Ruby. This not only reiterates that Yang’s challenge came out of nowhere—seriously, how did we move from following Ruby no matter what to this? Last volume she asked a single question along the lines of, ‘You sure?’ and when Ruby said ‘Yes’ Yang was entirely on board—but also demonstrates that no one has EVER said no to her before. Ruby is amazed that someone would challenge her. The act of challenging Ruby is, in and of itself, shocking. This group has gotten so used to following Ruby blindly that the teensiest little pushback is greeted with this.

Because it is teensy. This is the second takeaway: Yang barely challenges her and that challenge leads nowhere. She doesn’t accuse Ruby of anything, she doesn’t question her continued authority, she just broadly implies that things could be better. We followed you, now things are bad, take from that what you will. It’s incredibly mild as far as criticism goes, making the shock all the more, well, shocking, but it also amounts to—wait for it—nothing! Because Yang didn’t truly challenge Ruby’s leadership. She’s still in charge, she’s still calling the shots, and they’re still listening to her. We might have gotten some change if this division had been allowed to play out, but instead Jaune comes in with a, “Let’s go for both!” solution. It let’s both groups get what they want which, in turn, releases them from the need to grapple with whether they’ll listen to Ruby when she’s advocating for something they don’t agree with. We have now lost the chance to see whether, when push comes to shove, Ren and Yang will cave to Ruby’s will or stick by their own beliefs.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s more conflict than we’ve gotten in years, but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly compelling conflict. It’s good by RWBY’s standards, which doesn’t necessarily make it good. The actual issues at hand—Ruby’s dangerous arrogance, the group’s loyalty, her choices up until now—are just swept under the rug. For all the visuals we get insisting that there’s this great divide in the group… there’s really not. Not in any way that matters.

Also, Ruby is an idiot. Okay, that was mean, but she really is in this scene. She’s actually not an idiot overall because she was written as wonderfully intelligent in the early volumes, but now? Lately? She makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

“But that’s how Salem got this far,” she cries. “By dividing us!”

Ruby… oh my god, Ruby. No one should have to explain to you that dividing people means turning them against each other, not literally dividing your team to complete separate tasks. This girl honestly thought that because there was this teensy disagreement and that half the team would complete Plan A while she and the other half completed Plan B, both of which notably work towards the goal of, “Protect people from Salem,” that this was somehow what Salem wanted. That is was dangerous. Honestly, it’s a scary look at her view of leadership too: If everyone doesn’t 100% agree with me and do what I say, that’s an objectively bad thing that the grimm queen wants, right? Does Ruby think that unification means following a single person (her) without question or variation? That would explain a lot...

The fact that Oscar needs to explain the difference to her is not good. It really doesn’t say great things about this version of Ruby. Though he was comparing Ironwood to Salem last volume, so really they should all be wearing dunce hats.

Penny offers to take the relic directly to Salem in exchange for her leaving the kingdom alone. I honestly didn’t expect that. If anyone took that risk I would have put my money on Ozpin (but of course, during all this talk of the women he knows best, he’s kept quiet). Oscar is again the voice of wisdom, pointing out that they have no reassurance that Salem will keep her word. At least Penny is thinking about Salem as a threat though, so kudos for that. When this plan is shot down she volunteers to get Ruby past the military security instead and, uh, she’s a little intense about it.

I’m not entirely sure what is going on with Penny. She disagreed with Winter but then seemed to come around to her point of view, enough to help anyway. They had another (stupid) disagreement about the value of individual lives, so that helps to explain why she’s teaming up with RWBYJNOR (if you ignore that Ironwood is also trying to save individual lives...). Did watching Fria die shake her up? Is it being the Winter Maiden that’s not sitting right? Does Penny have lingering feelings about the framing that haven’t shown up until now? Her status as a ‘real girl’? We’ve got a lot of reasons that could definitely explain this sudden need to fight, but we’re not told which—if any of these—is the driving force.  

We’re then given a lot of little details. Someone points out that if Salem gets the staff and “create[s] anything else” then Atlas will fall (so yeah, let’s move the people underneath it). We still don’t know what exactly the Staff does because “creation” is kind of broad and “powering a city to float” doesn’t seem to sit within that category at all. Pietro gives Yang the keys to his lab so they can get the bikes. We see the group dividing in the flashforwards, something I do like, especially since the show has gone out of its way to break up most of the usual duos. Nora in particular is pissed at Ren for his choice.

“Oh, I’m saving Mantle because I actually believe we can do this.”

#yikes. Well, I did say I wanted a conflict other than ‘Oh no, one of us might die’ and it looks like I got it. But Nora, the only reason you can do this is because the plot is in your corner: none of you are collapsing from two major fights, you didn’t lose your aura so the cold isn’t a danger, the military is barely a threat all of a sudden, Salem is helpfully hanging out in her whale instead of killing you, and the story decided that Amity can function so long as you all are the ones who get to use it. That’s why you can do this. Ren, who follows in-world logic and doesn’t want to risk a whole kingdom’s worth of lives on a pipe dream, thinks differently, oddly enough.

As they leave though Penny gets a call from Ironwood. I know precisely what the fandom is going to say here: “This evil man is just trying to use Penny to open the vault!” Of course he is. He needs it open to save everyone he can, Penny included. Plus the concept of “using” her is a double-edged sword. What do we think the group is doing right now? Using her to get past the security. Penny’s power is a tool any way you slice it. Granted, Penny volunteers to help the group, but notably here Ruby speaks for her. Penny seems torn and Ruby takes the scroll away with, “She’s not going anywhere until you change your mind about Mantle.”

Sorry, Ruby, but coming from you that sounds less like a reassurance for Penny and more like just an order for Ironwood. Remember Harriet? We’ll stop attacking you provided you do what we want. Ruby has yet to learn about compromises, let alone acknowledge that she might be wrong. How about you let Penny decide where she goes, especially since by all logic she should have a lot of loyalty to Ironwood. She knew him before she ever met you. She’s worked with him since she was rebuild post-Volume 3. Despite what Penny has said, if the story would just let her think about his actions for a hot second—making her the protector of Mantle, sticking up for her after the framing, sending her to the party, teaming her up with Ruby, etc.—she might realize that the ‘He doesn’t want me to have friends’ and ‘He just treats me like a tool’ assumptions are just that, unfounded assumptions. But no, Ruby speaks for them both because Ironwood is evil now.

“If she makes it through our defenses,” Ironwood says, “everything that follows will be on your hands.”

That’s true! Kind of like how it’s own Qrow’s hands that Clover died. When you insist on making a bad situation worse you hold responsibility when the shit hits the fan. You know though that Salem won’t get through their defenses now, somehow, so that there’s no chance RWBYJNOR will be blamed for it. Or, by that point Ironwood will be so crazed that anything coming out of his mouth is dismissed, no matter how accurate it might be.

We then transfer to the Ace Ops who are, despite what the fandom theorized for many months, clearly upset about Clover. Also pissed. Which they have every right to be. Their friend and leader was killed. Imagine for a moment that Ruby had been murdered by Tyrian with an allies’ help. Exactly what do you think the group would do? Swallow it quietly and get over it? Ha.

I’ve already seen some speculation that Clover survived due to details like showing us the bandage and his room being listed as for a “Patient,” but he looks pretty dead to me.

He got gutted through the chest and left out in the snow for who knows how long. We saw him slip away. Qrow screamed over his dead body. He’s not breathing now. If RWBY suddenly claims he survived this, I’m calling BS.

Most of the other visuals we get here were already dropped in the trailer. Winter is pretty injured from her encounter with Cinder, likely permanently based on her new outfit. Ironwood had to replace his arm—and I am calling BS on that “Losing his arm is reflective of him losing his humanity” commentary from RT. Please go read up on a couple decades worth of ableism in media and then get back to me.

We get Ironwood’s line about the light shields and, notably, a whole lot of empathy. Regardless of what he might want Penny for, he still called her with compassion. He’s watching the Ace Ops mourn their friend. He’s talking about protecting his kingdom. The first thing he says to Winter is, “Thank you, Winter. I don’t know what I would do without you.” Ironwood has a heart! It’s always on display, which makes this scene utterly ridiculous.

I literally don’t know how to respond to this. The gunshot made me jump, both because it’s a gunshot and because, again, what the fuck? I know I said that next volume RT might just have Ironwood descend into full villainy, shooting whoever he pleases now that he’s shot Oscar, but I didn’t actually expect them to do it. Because he never should have shot Oscar in the first place! I wanted the story to let Oscar grapple with it a bit and then quietly backtrack, acknowledging it as the mistake it was. The concept that Ironwood, empathetic Ironwood, rational Ironwood, always thinks before he acts Ironwood, let’s kids yell at him Ironwood, tried to team up with Robyn Ironwood, did everything Ruby wanted Ironwood, won’t kill Watts after he destroyed his arm Ironwood would shoot this guy just to shut him up is absurd. It was absurd then, it’s absurd now.

That being said, there’s a possibility he didn’t actually shoot the council member, but rather just (“just”) gave a warning shot down the hallway. I say this because the reactions to this are pretty tame. Everyone looks startled, yeah, but after the initial shot there’s nothing that I would expect if there was now a guy bleeding out on the floor. The council woman doesn’t scream. Winter doesn’t seem overly shocked. No one is running to try and help him. Basically, if Ironwood had just killed a political figure in front of six witnesses, entirely unprovoked, I would expect a bit more of a reaction than this. This feels far more like a, “Damn he’s not joking around, letting off warning shots to get people to leave him alone” not “WOW, our general just killed someone in cold blood!”

What I really hate though—beyond just assassinating his character—is how many fans think my friends and I are delusional for calling it character assassination at all. I hopped onto the RWBY tag for five minutes this morning and was bombarded with posts about how Ironwood needs to be murdered horrifically, anyone who likes him is sick, the Ironwood stans are as bad as Adam stans, you’re an idiot if you want him redeemed… because apparently the concept of a story writing a character badly doesn’t compute. I’m not here to argue that Ironwood didn’t do these awful things (regardless of whether he actually killed the guy or not). I’m not here to argue that they’re not awful. I’m just here to say that we never should have gotten these scenes in the first place, or if we were going to get them, we deserved an actual descent into murder at the drop of a hat territory. I’ve already explained extensively on this blog how early Ironwood was not accurate foreshadowing for this, and Volume 7 certainly wasn’t setup, but it looks like the majority of fans aren’t interested in examining whether any of this adds up. Which makes my job, as someone trying to examine this series somewhat objectively—in as much as that’s possible for any single viewer—as well as simply enjoy it as a show, really hard. It’s bad enough when a story keeps taking the characters you love and villainizing them, and doing that badly, but then when you turn to the community and see them rallying around the idea that you’re awful for being dissatisfied—you’re the bootlicker, you’re the blind stan, you can’t see what’s ‘really’ going on here… that sucks. For those of you happy and satisfied with Ironwood’s arc, that’s great! I’ve also seen a lot of posts hyping up the complexity of his character now. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying what we’ve been given and I’d never want to imply that just because it’s not what I wanted it’s somehow wrong. I’m honestly thrilled that after a year of worry so many people have adored our premiere, including this scene. I just wish that I could say RWBY had given me something I didn’t want in a persuasive manner and that the fandom as a whole was a bit more welcoming of differing criticisms.

Not that I didn’t already know the RWBY fandom had its flaws, but still lol.

That’s basically it for our premiere. Nice note to end on, huh? Our final scene is of Salem using the lamp to set her bloodhound grimm on the city. Why doesn’t she just go herself? What was she planning to do here in Atlas in the first place, considering that getting the relic was a surprise? Who knows. Little about this holds together. But we do end with another awesome shot, so small favors.

It’s always strange concluding a recap, but even more-so when it’s a premiere, during a historical moment in the U.S., amidst all the nonsense that is 2020. So for now I’ll just conclude with three quick things:

The updated bingo board will be listed at the end of each recap, provided I don’t forget about it lol. Today I’m checking off tone (not nearly enough freaking out about Salem), the team keeping secrets (Oscar), and major plot point dropped (Amity is suddenly finished). I could also probably check off the cold not killing civilians and getting Amity up and running, but we’ll see if any changes with those.

I’m including my Ko-Fi link at the end of recaps now. Not with any expectations. Not with anything resembling pressure. I thought long and hard over whether to include it at all—let alone mention it here—because I love doing these and never want anyone to feel like it comes with strings attached. But life is a little harder and weirder than it was last year, so I figure it can’t hurt. Feel free to pass on by and I won’t be bringing it up past this note.

Far more importantly: thank you for reading! :D

(Bonus 4. Editing this was an absolute nightmare — damn you, tumblr!  — so I apologize if anything is super wonky when I finally post.)

See you next week! 💜

[Ko-Fi]

#rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby volume 8 #mymetas #rwby recaps

[greenteabtch]

your characterizations of sebastian are so interesting and got me thinking! how does meeting helena impact seb? does he go through some kind of development in his relationship to the chantry over their years? what point in terms of self-image would you love for him to get to?

Hi Gabi!! Thank you for asking :) you’re about to enter the #Deep Sebastian Lore. 

So before I begin to tackle this, I feel like it’s important to acknowledge that there are many different interpretations of Seb’s character. I consider him a lot more malleable in final interpretation than a lot of the da2 companions because his Rivalry and Friendship route actually results in two very different outcomes with regards to primary characterization. (Other characters like Merrill also have this, but I personally don’t consider a rivalry route with her or Isabela to be healthy or done well in any valid manner of speaking so I do not see it I am looking away.)

As a quick sum, Sebastian’s Friendship path commits him further to the chantry and quells his disagreement and conflict with his role as a brother, thus making him more complacent, while his Rivalry path spurs him to reclaim Starkhaven by encouraging him to give in to his dissent and impulses, eventually making him more headstrong.

Both of these are valid because each character trait that gets emphasized, depending on the path, all make up the whole of Sebastian as he is. He is compassionate, pious, and faithful, but also rash, stubborn, and witty. 

This is all set up to say that in my personal canon, I follow the rivalry path because it aligns the best with my personal experiences and identity, as well as (in my opinion) encourages Sebastian to fulfill his wants best. Unlike other rivalry paths, it is able to encourage growth and development in a manner that isn’t harsh and abusive, as it targets his ideas and ideology taught to him rather than his personality or integral core as a person. I like that it inspires him to question the chantry as an institution while maintaining his faith in a personal way.

In addition to that, (cw for mentions of neglect and abuse) the rivalry path allows him to take his faith, and his expression of that, into his own hands. From a young age, The Vaels believed that their youngest son of three, Sebastian, was a disgrace to the family name, and would be a weight around his brothers' necks. According to the wiki, Sebastian had always had faith but it was not his will to enter the chantry. His short story implicates how drastic the situation was for him, as he describes the Chantry as a prison, his room as a cell, the guard as his jailor, and even more, but notes how he is still wont to pray to Andraste for his safe escape. Even so, when he is given the “opportunity” (It doesn’t feel like a true opportunity, as I read it, but I digress) to leave, he is trapped, stuck by his parents’ descriptions of himself and what he will be if he chooses to leave. “Words race through my head: useless, aimless, selfish, alone.”

Because of this, I don’t truly believe that it is necessary for him to recommit his vows of chastity, poverty, or any others as a brother in order to stay true to his faith or his character. Traumatized by his parent’s neglect for him as the son “left in the cold,” for they already had the “heir and the spare”, Sebastian was forced to accept his position as one that would never be of value to his parents, purely because of his order of birth. He was resigned to be worthless (which, I honestly think was the reason he acted out so heavily as a youth), till his parents gave him an out by committing himself to the Chantry. As a result, I connect the friendship path of staying as a brother as one that is not the kindest (as it may appear), but the one that is the most affirming of his worst fears for himself. That he, his desires, wants, dreams, and choices, are worth nothing unless he resigns himself to a life of piety and service. In sum, there are many ways to keep that faith the way he had always had it without giving up the excitement of life and love he clearly thrives in by recommitting him to the Chantry.

Personal Canon: I believe that Helena immediately presents herself as an aloof and standoffish force for Sebastian, though one that does not deter him, but challenges him. He certainly has no trouble befriending any companion (except for Varric, but that’s more about his insecurities than Sebastian’s lmao), and Helena is no different. More than just his general disposition to making friends, though, he has a curiosity about her. Because she works directly and has no qualms about violence as a tool to aid others, he sees an inkling of his desires or questions about himself in her and she encourages that further just by her actions. Other than the attraction things (they both like to cook, they both think the other is hot, they have similar family situations, they’re both secretly compe-- ok i’ll stop) he has a vested interest in listening to her disagree with him because she is a part of a new perspective that he has never considered, nor ever been given the option to.

For my custom rivalry path, Helena expresses consistent disagreement with how Seb has been treated, both by Elthina and by his parents, and encourages him to make the choice that he wants, not what the chantry wants or what his family wanted. 

Throughout the acts, Helena allows him to vent his contentions with his role to her, usually over food as they watch the sunset outside the Chantry. For Helena, things run very simply, not exactly black and white, but in a manner where she knows exactly which group of grays each action lies in. I think this simplicity is helpful in getting Sebastian to confront his past. For example:

“My parents thought I was a disgrace to the family, so they forced me into the Chantry to make something of myself.”

Helena looks at him with wild and confused eyes. “They didn’t like how you acted so they imprisoned you? Didn’t they care for you?”

“Well… Yes, but it wasn’t as if I was a good son.”

“You were a son. That should have been enough for them.”

Additionally, her own complex relationship with Leandra allows her to identify the abusive behaviors of his parents and the manipulative actions of Elthina later. This pattern of confrontation and disagreement between them continues until Act 3, and along the while, Sebastian’s dissatisfaction with the role of the Chantry wedges him farther away from his possible recommitment. By the end, he is able to recognize that he has worth as a human being regardless of whatever choice he makes and that he doesn’t have to sacrifice his life as Andraste did in order to be considered deserving. 

It’s at that point that he solidifies his choice to retake Starkhaven, with the hopes of bringing Helena along if she’ll have him, and sticks it to his past controllers and manipulators by doing what he knows he can do better than anyone.

In terms of his self-image, I think Sebastian simply deserves to know he has worth regardless of whether or not he is the epitome of good service and faith. I want him to be able to be “selfish” and acknowledge his wants as not things that are impure and lower his value, but a part of what makes him a human being, and one that makes him a good one too. Because of his wants and desires, he retakes Starkhaven, which is ultimately the best choice for the people there because his contender for the throne doesn’t know the first thing about ruling a city-state. Sebastian, at his best, will acknowledge his desires with temperance and balance, such that is accomplished by his faith. When all is said and done, Sebastian will only be complete when he can find faith and life through his embrace of self.

#wow im so sexy for this #thank you for askin gabi T_T ily #asks #gayvhenan #sebastian vael #my meta #neglect cw #abuse cw #da2 #dragon age 2 #ship: wings sprout from broken backs

[9worldstales]

MCU Loki Ep 1 “Glorious Purpose” intensive analysis

So, I’ve seen the first “Loki” episode and, of course, I couldn’t stop myself from talking about it.

Beware about spoilers!

We start in New York 2012 and that part is merely “Avengers: Endgame” albeit they changed a bit the visual so there’s more focus on Loki. We’ve close up of Loki when he is ‘Captain America’, when he says by to the Hulk in the lift and so on.

It’s a good choice because he’s basically the only character the visual seems to focus on (the only other character who gets a close up is the Hulk yelling ‘No stairs!’), subtly telling us the story is about him.

On a sidenote though, in “Avengers: Endgame” you might see Loki walked vaguely near 2022 Tony Stark and we also have Scott Lang asking Tony if he wears Axe body spray, which he confirms. In “Loki” we don’t see these scenes but keep them in mind, they’ll be relevant later on.

Anyway as everyone knows Loki picks up the Tesseract and disappear.

We get the Marvel opening but without the usual ‘heroic’ music, this time it’s more ominous? Or maybe it’s just me. “Marvel studios” also gets written in green and gold on a black background.

It’s not the first time Marvel changed how it presented, in the first episode of “WandaVision” for example it was in black and white instead than in the usual red and silver but it’s still a nice touch.

So we resume… with the visual showing us an insect walking through the desert. Then the camera shows us the full view of the desert, informing us it’s the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.

Rather high in the sky a space portal opens for a moment and the next we know is that Loki is lying flat on his back on the ground among clouds of sand which, I guess, were raised due to him falling into the desert. Loki is without the chains holding his wrists (did the power of the Tesseract destroy them? The fall?) and easily pulls away the muzzle Thor put on him and from his confused expression as he sits up and see people coming close to him, I get the feeling he didn’t exactly plan to fall there and in such a way.

So I guess maybe this is his first attempt at using the Tesseract and he didn’t quite gave it a direction on WHERE he wanted it to take him? Because really falling from the sky flat on the ground in the middle of the Gobi desert among people who didn’t even talk his language doesn’t seem the sort of thing one would plan.

Anyway, despite being in an unfamiliar situation Loki finds a rock to stand over and introduces himself:

“I am Loki of Asgard. And I am burdened with glorious purpose.”

Which yes, it’s how he introduced himself to Fury in “The Avengers”.

The people there have no idea of what he’s saying and asks him who he is in their own language (Mongolian). It’s unclear if Loki gets what they’re saying.

In the comics all Asgardians, can speak every language thanks to the ‘Allspeak’ or ‘All-Tongue’, in which what they say is understood by every species in their own native language.

In “Thor” earlier script though there was this dialogue:

Darcy: So, how can you speak our language? Volstagg: Your language? Ha! Silly girl, you're speaking ours.

In an interview Ray Stevenson (Volstagg) and Joshua Dallas (Fandral) discussed that bit.

Part of this seems to be set in a world where you guys fit in perfectly and the rest is very much on Earth. Ray: Yes, but on Earth we started it all, you see. This is just one of the realms. This is where all the legends come from. All the ruins have gone into myths and Norse mythology. It’s all us, love. It was all us before that. They’ve forgot their place, really. They think, “Oh, you speak our language?” and it’s actually, “No, you’re speaking ours.” Joshua: We invented it. [Ray Stevenson (Volstagg) and Joshua Dallas (Fandral) On Set Interview THOR]

The implication seemed to be that there was no Allspeak, they just spoke the same language because Asgardians invented it and Midgardians learnt it.

We also have this bit from “Avengers: Infinity War”:

Rocket: You speak Groot? Thor: Yes, they taught it on Asgard. It was an elective.

This implies it’s not that Thor was magically granted the ability to understand Groot, he had to study his language.

So well, I would say that no, so far Asgardians didn’t have Allspeak in the MCU, hence, unless Loki studied Mongolian or his magic powers granted him Allspeak, he can’t get what whose people are saying to him. So really, I don’t think he wanted to end up in Mongolia, he should have thought he wanted the Tesseract to just bring him somewhere very far from New York City. That is unless it’ll turn out someone managed to interfere and have him fall there for some purpose.

But, back to Loki.

As I said he doesn’t really get to talk with those people because a door opens up out of nowhere and near to the Tesseract which is lying forgotten in the sand and people in an armoured suit and carrying weapons start to appear.

Loki is kind of confused but he recovers fast.

Putting up a tone of confidence he orders the guy not to touch the Tesseract, thinking they aim at getting it. Another door opens up out of nowhere and we get another person in armour. To save time I’ll say the woman is supposed to be Hunter B-15. I wonder if she’ll get a name beyond this or not.

The situation of the people at the TVA isn’t exactly great but I’m running ahead.

Now, I think Loki preferred to deal with the Mongolian people because although he can understand what Hunter B-15 says, it clearly makes no sense for him.

Honestly I’m not going to blame him.

“Appears to be a standard sequence violation. Branch is growing at a stable rate and slope. Variant identified.”

This isn’t the kind of sentence that makes sense in a conversation, if you aren’t familiar with the TVA.

Hunter B-15 doesn’t care what she says doesn’t make sense to him and wouldn’t make sense to any other normal person. She calls him ‘Variant’ and talks as if everyone should know and respect the Time Variance Authority as an authority to defer and obey to.

I love Loki’s reply here:

“It's been a very long day, and I think I've had my fill of idiots in armored suits telling me what to do, so, if you don't mind, this is actually your last chance. Now get out of my way.”

He had a very bad day, he’s probably still bruised and sore due to his ‘meeting’ with the Hulk and his fall from the sky, he might very well be exhausted and he’s clearly confused but he acts as if he’s in control and won’t let himself be intimidated. I love him.

As he moves close Hunter B-15 hits him and informs him although he’s moving at 1/16th speed he’s feeling all the pain in real time.

Now… from when “Loki” trailers had started going around there had been a debate if the TVA is the good guys or the bad guys.

I’ll jump a bit ahead and tell you they clearly believe they’re the good guys.

But just from this bit you can start to question the idea they’re good guys.

They aren’t just acting as Vigilantes but they’re claiming an authority that no one on planet Earth gave them and demanding submission, not hesitating to beat people when they do not complain.

I know, some of you are thinking that Loki is a bad guy so serves him right but that’s not really the point because they aren’t even beating him for what he did to New York but for a crime he didn’t know he was committing, acting with an authority no one on Earth gave them. They just took it. And they would have taken it if the one picking up the Tesseract and ending up in Mongolia were to be a random person that out of bad luck had picked up the Tesseract and had ended activating it by accident.

This is not about Loki, this is how the TVA operates and it’s scary.

I don’t know if “Loki” will want to dig into police brutality and I honestly don’t dare to hope in it but it would be an interesting turn.

Hunter B-15 seems to be enjoying her work. I won’t call her evil yet, it’s clear she thinks she has the authority to do so, that the TVA enabled her to think she’s doing a good thing but she doesn’t seem to have… hesitation in doing so. One can still do his duty and not enjoy beating up people and causing them pain, yet the dialogue gives me the impression she’s very cool with beating up resisting Variants who has no idea they’re Variant and causing them pain.

Maybe it’s just me, maybe she’ll prove she’s actually a gentle soul but, for now, she doesn’t look as such. We’ll see.

Anyway she straps a collar around Loki’s neck and then, finally, she let him fall at normal speed before two of the men with her grabs him and carry him away while she picks up the Tesseract and orders to ‘reset the timeline’, which, at first I thought would mean they use that sort of mechanism to send back the time, erasing Loki’s appearance from the timeline. I’m not sure now. It might as well erase everything there. Loki turns to see what this mechanism does and from the look on his face it doesn’t seem anything good.

I hope not but well, in a way, sending everything back of some minutes erases lives that could have possibly be lived differently so yeah, in a way they erased lives. It’s the dilemma of changing time after all.

Whatever, Loki is dragged through the door that opens out of nowhere and appears at the TVA. The door disappears behind him and he has no idea where he is.

Now I guess it’s a good point to point out how people had been wondering which kind of Loki this one was, if he was based on the Loki on “Thor”, the one in “The Avengers”, the one in “Thor: The Dark World” or the one in “Thor: Ragnarok”.

In itself he can’t really be based on neither of them.

Loki’s characterization in “Thor” is split in two, there’s Loki prior to discovering the truth, and there’s Loki after discovering the truth, mad in shock and grief until he realizes his father would never accept him and let go of Gungnir.

This Loki can’t obviously be the Loki pre-truth but he can’t even be the one post it, as in that one the pain was still too new and raw and mixed with the desperation of denial and the attempt at ‘fixing things’.

So, can he be “The Avengers” Loki?

Marvel’s site confirmed that during “The Avengers” unknown to Loki, he was influenced by the sceptre as well. Very likely he wasn’t influenced in Clint Barton or Erik Selvig style, as the site says:

“Gifted with a Scepter that acted as a mind control device, Loki would be able to influence others. Unbeknownst to him, the Scepter was also influencing him, fuelling his hatred over his brother Thor and the inhabitants of Earth.”

Basically the sceptre on Loki works in a manner similar to how it worked on the Avengers when they started arguing in the Helicarrier. It warped his perception to the point he might have seen them as his most hated enemies, making difficult for him to see Thor was extending his hand to him or that the people were actually just scared but it didn’t make him a mindless, loyal servant. A different type of control on him but one that’s no less dangerous. Anyway I’ve talked at length about it while replying to a post so I’ll just link it here.

Loki is now very far from the sceptre so the mind stone shouldn’t be able to influence him any longer. As a result he’s probably more in control of his emotions.

So… “Thor: The Dark World” Loki?

Close enough but not quite, as that Loki had to go through Odin telling him some pretty awful things and spending a year forgotten by Odin and Thor in a jail.

Even more clearly he can’t be “Thor: Ragnarok” Loki as that one lived a huge chunk of things he hadn’t lived yet… never mentioning Waititi wanted “Thor: Ragnarok” to be his own thing, not a continuation of “The Avengers” and “Thor: The Dark World”…

“I was lucky enough they didn’t force me to acknowledge things- there were certain things in the film, like the play, which makes fun of the scene in The Dark World where Loki dies, but there’s a point to that play, sort of to recap what happened, but also to tell the audience, “This is not what you think it’s going to be, this film is not going to be a continuation of that. It’s its own thing, and what you think you expect from this film ends at this play.”” [Empire Podcast Spoiler Special: Thor: Ragnarok with Taika Waititi]

… while Loki is an alternate continuation of “The Avengers” so it has to be more “The Avengers” compliant than “Thor: Ragnarok”.

In short this Loki is his own Loki… or a Loki we hadn’t seen yet because we weren’t really shown much of Loki post sceptre influence, pre one year of solitary confinement.

Back to the story two things are interesting to point out.

One is that there’s a Variant Skrull as well in the TVA.

The other is that once there the Tesseract lost part of its shiny light as if it powered down.

Last but not least, instead than a futuristic look the TVA has the look of midcentury modern aesthetic as if, instead than going in the future ore remaining in the present, we’ve gone back in time.

Anyway, as another prisoner is dragged into the room, Loki tries to escape and discovers that Hunter B-15 can rewind his time so he’s back where he started. She then gives the Tesseract to a man at a desk, telling him to log it as evidence.

The guy, I’ll spoiler you and tell you his name is Casey, has no idea what it is and it’s Loki who has to explain him it’s the Tesseract and one should be very careful with it. Casey merely find it sounding dumb.

This is our first clue that to the TVA the Tesseract doesn’t matter at all. We’ve finished Phase 3 with the infinity stones raised at the level of immensely powerful artifact but, for the TVA, they’re nothing.

This is the first blow that the “Loki” series gives to the MCU as we previously knew it.

On a sidenote it’s nice Loki explained what it was to the unsuspecting desk man. If this weren’t the TVA he might have ended in the Gobi desert as well just by handling it carelessly.

Hunter B-15 drags Loki to a door and Loki tries to threaten her only to be showed inside that door.

Have you noticed how no one read Loki his own rights so far? That’s because he has none and the story is about to make it even more clear.

In the room there’s a robot of some sort (which I find slightly creepy despite its smile) which would like for Loki to undress. At Loki’s refusal accompanied with a comment that “This is fine Asgardian leather” the robot, without any warning, merely disintegrates his clothes.

Some assumed it was played for laugh but the music doesn’t suggest it, and Loki is clearly upset as he stutters when he speaks again. In real life, when you’re arrested, in many states your belonging are confiscated but they will be returned to you once you’re released or they’re returned to your family.

The TVA destroys them.

A trap door opens below Loki and he finds himself in another room, dressed up in TVA uniforms for Variants.

There’s something I think I need to mention which is I love how the show is characterizing TVA desk people.

The guy we’ve met before had his own character which we could guess despite the few lines and moments in which he appeared.

This new guy is also characterized.

He has a kitten in the room, which moves away slightly as Loki appears, probably scared and a mug with the image of a kitten. It’s tiny details but they made him a person instead of merely something that’s there.

He pushes in front of Loki a huge stack of papers telling him to sign to verify this is everything Loki said. Loki’s two following comments get printed and he’s demanded to sign them as well.

It’s another aspect of the TVA that’s actually unpleasant.

The amount of paper is huge and it would take a lot to read it all in order to check it but… the truth is the request is impossible. People isn’t made so that they can remember everything they’ve said, exactly as they’ve said it and it gets even more troublesome if there isn’t the other half of the conversation but just what we said.

So it’s not even a point to discuss if Loki really said just that stack of paper and nothing more or that stack of paper is too small, or if maybe there’s more paper he’ll have to sign or if that stack of paper only cover his time as a Variant and not the time in which he followed the Sacred Timeline.

The request doesn’t just make the TVA look like a bureaucratic place but shows it demands impossible tasks from its victims.

Oh, another interesting thing I noticed is that the camera is at a slightly lower point when it is on the TVA guy, so, despite the guy being seated, it gives him the impression of being higher than us viewers. On the over side when the camera is on Loki, it’s far from him, with the result of making him look small.

It’s a fine detail that gives us a certain subconscious impression.

The TVA guy stares at Loki as the latter gives up and start signing. It seems he only signed one paper, without even trying to read them all. I wish they had let us see how Loki signs. I wonder if he writes his name with runes, since the inscription on Thor’s hammer was in rune.

We’ll see, we’ll find out Loki knows how to write in English so he might use it to sign.

Anyway as soon as he finishes signing another trapdoor opens below him and he finds himself in another room.

So far the TVA is reminding me more and more of “The House that sends you mad” from “The Twelve Tasks of Asterix”. Well, of a very dark Variant of it to be exact, a Variant that reminds me of something way more unpleasant, but we’ll get there. In the next room Loki is asked:

“Please confirm to your knowledge that you are not a fully robotic being, were born an organic creature, and do in fact possess what many cultures would call a soul.”

Loki just asks if there are many people who don’t know if they’re robot and this is taken as a confirmation at which he’s urged to move through it. At Loki’s question he’s told if he actually were a robot and didn’t know it, the machine would melt him from the inside out.

Before thinking the situation is absurd let’s remember Vision exists in the Marvel universe and he’s a robot and he could have been programmed so that he wasn’t aware of this or might lose awareness of it due to a malfunctioning.

So if a Vision variant unaware to be a robot where to show up at the TVA they would just melt him from the inside out, no big deal.

The machine turns out to be a photographic machine, which doesn’t take Loki’s mug shoot but photograph his temporal area, which Loki has no idea what is and no one bothers to explain him.

Again, through the whole procedure there’s no request of consent nor explanations, Loki has no rights for the TVA, he’s merely supposed to comply.

Loki ends up in another room with another ‘convict’. They’re both demanded to take a ticket. The first convict refuses, Loki complain there’s just two of them so it’s useless but complies and put it in his pocket. Loki clearly has better manners or has figured out there’s no point discussing and is bidding his time to when arguing or rebelling might be worth something.

As Loki complains...

“This is a mistake. I shouldn't even be here.”

...we’re introduced with Miss Minute. Miss Minute is a cartoon watch which is supposed to FINALLY help people catch up before they stand to trial for their crimes. We’ll find out that Miss Minute is there not for the convicts’ benefit but for us viewers’ benefit as it explains us the origins of the TVA.

If we want to stretch things it might be there also for the TVA benefit as it might give them a sense of legitimacy.

Anyway Miss Minute’s speech feels like Odin’s speech at the beginning of “Thor”.

Is a self glorifying narration in which they paint themselves as the heroes and something that exist for other people’s benefit.

But it only paints the TVA in an even darker light because when it explains how one becomes a Variant it says:

“But sometimes, people like you veer off the path the Time-Keepers created. We call those Variants. Maybe you started an uprising, or were just late for work. Whatever it was, stepping off your path created a nexus event, which, left unchecked, could branch off into madness, leading to another multiversal war. But, don't worry, to make sure that doesn't happen, the Time-Keepers created the TVA and all its incredible workers. The TVA has stepped in to fix your mistake and set time back on its predetermined path. Now that your actions have left you without a place on the timeline, you must stand trial for your offenses.”

A break here.

From this little bit we’re introduced to the idea there’s only 1 timeline because each time another timeline could be born, the TVA erases it. This begs the question of how we’re supposed to judge this bit in “Avengers: Infinity War”

Stephen Strange: [Panting] I went forward in time to view alternate futures. To see all the possible outcomes of the coming conflict. Peter Quill: How many did you see? Stephen Strange:14,000,605. Tony Stark: How many did we win? [Dr.Strange stares intently at Tony for a moment.] Stephen Strange: [Pause] One.

If there’s only 1 timeline, it seems impossible there could be 14,000,605 futures… but actually the key might be that there could be 14,000,605 futures… but the TVA erases them. The time stone might show those futures who had the possibility to be born… and that the TVA squashes under their feet, all for the sake to make canon their favourite future, while all the others have to cease and desist. If this is true I do wonder if the actions of the TVA can be undone, so that we can have “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”.

Back to “Loki” and to what Miss Minute said, which is pretty worrisome and not at all uplifting.

I mean… we can speculate who starts an uprising might be someone bad (which is not necessarily the truth, what about the people involved in the French Revolution or the American Revolutionary War or the Resistance in WW2?) but a poor guy who’s just late for work?

They don’t really see the difference between him and a guy starting an uprising because for them the matter isn’t what they were trying to do or which kind of people they were, just that they created another timeline, a crime they clearly weren’t aware to commit as no one warned them about how this was forbidden by this self imposed authority.

Loki clearly finds all this idiotic but then he hears the previous guy arguing with some sort of guard who demands his ticket. Now the previous guy is clearly a dumb liar, as insists he asked for the ticket but wasn’t given one, when he was loud enough and alone enough everyone in the room could notice he was the one refusing to take a ticket.

Anyway at this point the guard vaporizes him. In short they just murdered him, without trial or anything for the terrible crime of ‘not taking a ticket’.

Loki is appropriately shocked and hurries to get his ticket.

Something that’s also worth mentioning is the whole TVA is clearly structured to make people feel powerless.

There’s no explanation, they’re forcefully dragged in an unknown place by people claiming authority from an unknown structure, they’re forced to comply, they’re stripped naked against their will, dressed all the same, handled like objects who’re not called by their name but ‘Variant’ with even assigned a number, threatened to be melted if they don’t know they’re robot (and what if they know? They don’t take their picture or they just melt them?) and subjected to an explanation in form of a cartoon that feels absurd and that merely has the point of legitimizing the TVA as heroes and them as criminals.

Anyway Loki finds his ticket and shows it in a scene that reminds me of “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade”. Do you remember when Indy and his father board a Zeppelin to leave Germany and Indy tosses a Nazi out of the window and explains his actions by saying the guy was without ticket so everyone shows his ticket at him?

Anyway at this point we’re shown the title, “Loki" with a filter that makes it look like an old movie and the letters changing font.

Okay, I’m a bit late but I should probably mention that, form when Loki go to the TVA the colouring had a huge abundance of yellow and brown with basically no blue (except a little in the Miss Minute cartoon) which gives an idea of this being like an old movie. The music is kind of creepy and there’s a clock tickling as we see it.

Which is an interesting idea. Even though the TVA seems so modern, furniture and the structure of the place felt all but modern. Even the robot that stripped Loki felt as if it just came out from a very old and outdated idea of how a futuristic robot would look like.

We resume the story but this time we’re at Aix-En-Provence, in France in 1549.

We’re in a beautiful gothic church and one of the TVA agents, explains that the corpses on the ground belongs to some Minutemen (the name for the TVA agents who do field work apparently) who responded to a routine Nexus event. As soon as they arrived someone jumped on them.

Mobius is there as well, and he’s apparently playing the part of the detective as he’s studying the corpses.

Hunter U-92, another poor guy who apparently has no name but just a number clearly suspect of someone and tells so to Mobius who agrees as the stab wounds look consistent with the previous, the Minutemen were hit on surprise and the reset charge (remember? The stuff that erase the deviation from the timeline) is gone.

Oh we’re also told this is the 6th attack in the last week THAT THEY KNOW OF. I hope for them it’s Saturday, because this would mean ‘only 1’ attack each day. This would be rather terrible if they were just at Monday since the day hadn’t even ended yet.

Now… remember when I was comparing the hunters of the TVA to police and wonder if the show would dig into police brutality?

Well, we’ve this scene in which someone enters in the place and Hunter U-92 is immediately ready to attack him with the wand they used against Loki or some other similar TVA weapon.

Only the one who got in is, apparently, just a kid, not the dangerous variant they’re searching and it’s Mobius who has to stop Hunter U-92 from attacking a kid who, for all they know, is completely unrelated to the crime, a kid that’s far from them and weaponless.

I don’t want to know what would have happened in Mobius hadn’t told him ‘Wait, stand down! Stand down’ (note how he has to say ‘stand down’ twice) and had physically stopped him in his track with his arm.

Mobius approaches the kid, speaking gently in French, apologizing for Hunter U-92’s behaviour, saying he’s just an imbecile.

Hunter U-92, annoyed by his comment, reminds him that he too can speak every language on the timeline, and that in short he can understand what Mobius is saying. The sentence though is more for our benefit, telling us those men can use the TVA version of Allspeak or whatever the “Loki” series wants to call it.

There’s a lovely visual showing us the kid and Mobius met in front of a beautiful stained glass window which depicts Satan.

To get the boy to talk Mobius draws a stick figure on some sort of small tablet he has and then passes it to the boy, telling him to tap on it. The boy does and the figure becomes a walking holographic projection which causes the boy to smile instead than assuming it’s witchcraft and running away screaming.

Okay, we are in 1549 and not in middle age, but that would still feel like magic even at the end of Renaissance age. But whatever, boys sometimes can put aside their fear for something that amuses them and this one had no troubles dealing with the guy killing all those TVA agents.

Anyway Mobius asks the boy if he knows who did that and the boy conveniently does. He points to the figure in the glass stained window, a horned demon, likely Satan. We might think it’s symbolic, that for the boy whoever kills someone is a demon… but… wait a moment.

Anyway Mobius says the boy shouldn’t worry because that devil is afraid of them and that they will put the boy back to where he belongs.

The boy smiles and Mobius notices his teeth are blue. It turns out that the ‘devil’ has gifted the kid with some… candies? Bubblegums?

I’ve no idea if those ‘Kablooie’ are actually some kind of American food, sorry about it but it’s clear although the kid has pointed to a devil, he wasn’t so scared by him to turn down his gift or to not try it out. And a devil giving him a gift doesn’t really feel like someone who wanted to harm him, despite the boy seeing him.

I get this feeling this ‘devil’ is targeting specifically TVA hunters only instead than the timeline or people inside it. He leads them somewhere and then attacks and dispose them. If he’s doing so because the TVA hurt him or because he wants to control the timeline that’s up to speculation.

We’ll later be said this guy is another Loki variant, and in this scenes we were given clues to figure out ourselves, like how he stabbed the TVA agents and how the boy pointed to a demon or, more specifically, to a horned figure, and we knows Loki wears horns when in his full Asgardian attire.

Anyway Mobius takes the ‘candies?’ ‘bubblegums?’ away from the boy and orders Hunter U-92 to run the candies for sequence period and temporal aura… not that Hunter U-92 thinks they’ll find anything but he’s worried because the branch is nearing red line and they need to go. In my understanding if it reaches the red line it could risk creating a multiverse.

Mobius sends the boy to play outside while Hunter U-92 orders to set a reset charge.

Again we aren’t explained what a ‘reset charge’ works.

However we’ve seen the cartoon with Miss Minute and in that one there was a reset charge and when it activated it didn’t rewind the timeline… it erased it. So the creepy things is it could be this reset charge just… destroys everything, erases all the lives in that alternate timeline because, in a way, they’re all Variants, and the TVA disposes of Variants.

Well, I hope I’m wrong because otherwise it means each time the TVA resetted a timeline they basically killed each life living in that universe, which would make Thanos, who ‘only’ killed half the population once, a rather tame mass murderer.

Anyway before the timeline is resetted another TVA person joins Mobius and it shows him a file about the just apprehended Loki. Maybe nobody except me cares but they had previously shown an image of a Loki file and in it there were question marks on where the race was. Now they’ve written ‘Frost Giant’. Either the file shown was for another Loki Variant or they managed to remember Loki was a Frost Giant and fix the file.

It could be the file for another variant though, as his height in it is given as 6’4” while in this file he’s 6’2” (1.88m) which is Tom Hiddleston’s true height (for who’s curious 6’4” is Jeff Goldblum’s height… not that I think the Grandmaster is walking around pretending to be Loki because well, this would be weird…)… or they messed up Loki’s height as well. We’ll see.

As I know some have wondered about it, Loki’s eyes are given as blue and not as green… which is correct as Tom Hiddleston said:

Loki is a sexy villain, but that’s not part of his ambition, is it? He doesn’t seem to be interested in love or sex but he has this sexuality about him, maybe it’s his lust for power. What do you think of Loki as a sexy beast? Tom Hiddleston: [Laughs] That’s the first time anyone has ever used that phrase about Loki. It’s fascinating isn’t it? I don’t know because it’s not a part of the conscious construction. I take relish in playing him. I think there’s a physical self-possession about him, a self-acceptance. Of course I’ve been very exacting about his physicality. You know, I was born with very blonde, curly hair, and a mixture of Scottish and English genes, and my complexion is very ruddy and healthy. In making him with this raven black hair and blanching my face of all color, it changes my features. Suddenly my blue eyes look a lot bluer, which lends a severity to my face. And even my own smile has a distorted menace to it. Whatever comes through me naturally is distorted. It’s almost like a filter on a light. ['Thor: The Dark World’: Tom Hiddleston on boom times for evildoers]

Which implies he never wore green contact lenses to play Loki.

Whatever, we’ll go on.

We’re back to the TVA and Loki’s trial starts.

He’s taken in front of the judge Ravonna Renslayer who addresses to him as Laufeyson. Except for a small comic later retconned in “Thor: The Dark World”, this is the first time in the MCU Loki is called Laufeyson… which is a little sad as he never identified as such (the closest he goes is to say he’s Loki of Jotunheim when he tries to trick Malekith) yet meaningful as well as the TVA evidently never recognized Odin’s ‘adoption’ as valid. For them he’s not Odinson, he’s Laufeyson because that’s what he’s born. ‘Loki Odinson’ in his file is labelled as an alias same as ‘God of Mischief’, nothing more.

But well, they aren’t really interested in his name, for them he’s ‘Variant L1130, AKA Loki Laufeyson’. Renslayer informs him he’s charged with sequence violation 7-20-89 which can mean everything and nothing at the same time as, to us, and to Loki, is just a collection of numbers, and asks him how does he plead.

Loki tries, as it’s his habit, to put up a polite yet confident front.

He claims a god doesn’t plead and has been a very enjoyable pantomime, but he'd like to go home… and boys, we know he would really like to do so. He’s putting up a front because we saw how uncomfortable and scared he was through his permanence at the TVA.

In an old interview that’s sadly no more available Tom Hiddleston said:

“The thing with Loki is that, if he’s afraid, he won’t show it. He’s been highly trained, through the experience of his slightly traumatic life, to shield his fears.”

Why didn’t we see him scared in “The Avengers” even though he took risks in it too while now we’re allowed to catch glimpses of his fear here and there?

“The Avengers” had to paint him as the big adversary, the great obstacle the heroes have to overcome.

Are we going to feel that bad for you in this movie, or are you gonna – ? Tom Hiddleston: Yeah. He does some pretty nasty things. On one level, it was like, I knew I had to up the ante because there’s seven superheroes that make up the Avengers, and, in order for the film to work, the film is the most redemptive, feel-good, kind of fist-pumping story. And, in order for the audience to be pumping their fists for Iron Man, and Hulk, and Thor, and Captain America, they need to overcome a really big obstacle. And, unfortunately, that big obstacle is me. [LAUGHS]. I hope I have retained a sense of his kind of emotional damage [like we saw in Thor]. There is a lovely scene with Chris Hemsworth where you see a glimmer of his — his vulnerability, but… he’s yielded to the dark side, you know? [Interview With Tom Hiddleston AKA Loki]

In this episode the Loki we met isn’t the adversary, he’s the main character, so we get glimpses of his true mind. He’s afraid or confuse, yet he reacts to all that by putting up a front, by presenting himself as confident and in control. It started from when he found himself in an unfamiliar situation, facing the Mongolic people and it continues and will continue and mind you, it’s a good and popular technique to hide your fear.

By presenting yourself as confident, your opponent might believe you might have some reason to be confident and be more careful and hesitate in attacking you, and sometimes this is all the advantage you need.

Renslayer remains unfazed, as she likely knows Loki has no advantage over her. She knows he’s powerless, in an unfamiliar environment he knows nothing about, forced to wear a collar that somehow controls his time, submitted to rules he knows nothing about and surrendered by enemies.

Loki isn’t the first who was carried in front of her and she knows he won’t be the last. The system is unjust and the trial a farce but she’s persuaded for it to be righteous and the right way to deal with ‘Variants’ as this leads to the greater good of avoiding wars into the Multiverse so justice and fairness are clearly not something she has to care about.

Anyway she pressures the issue and, understanding she won’t let go, Loki shifts the blame on the Avengers, pointing out how he came into possession of the Tesseract because THEY traveled through time, according to Loki in a ‘last-ditch effort to stave off his ascent to God King’.

So yes, even though he was soundly beaten by them and he’s in a bad spot Loki still tries to play highty and mighty and not cower up in fear. But how did he know about the Avengers travelling through time? We saw he noticed the whole thing with the case, but how did he knew the Avengers were involved and not some other guy?

Remember how I mentioned that “Avengers: Endgame” had Loki walking vaguely near 2022 Tony Stark and we Scott Lang asking Tony if he wears Axe body spray?

Well, Loki clearly has a fine nose because he recognized the Axe body spray coming off from 2022 Tony Stark and figured out he was a future version of 2012 Tony Stark.

It’s kind of a pity they hadn’t kept these bits in the series but whatever, I get why they might have cut them.

Loki, like most of the fandom, blames them as the Time Criminals and suggests if Rendlayer were to provide him a taskforce he could eliminate them for her.

As he spoke we see Mobius intruding in the trial and sitting down as it carries on.

Back to Renslayer, she isn’t interested in the Avengers, claiming they were supposed to go back in the past but Loki wasn’t supposed to grab the Tesseract and escape.

Loki laughs at the absurdity of the statement and demands to know who decided this.

The answer is the Time-Keepers who dictate the proper flow of time so that Renslayer can dictate the proper flow of time according to their dictation.

And you start to see the horror of this system.

The Time-Keepers arbitrarily decide which is the proper flow of time and impose it on everyone. They basically make the rules according to what they like the most… and, of course, they don’t inform anyone of which ones the rules should be.

When Loki picked up the Tesseract and escaped there was nowhere a big warning sign saying ‘if you do so you commit a crime’. He didn’t even know there were Time-Keepers and a sacred timeline and the TVA did nothing to fix this.

While in many countries you’re supposed to know the law and pledging ignorance is not an excuse, the TVA is a self imposed and not recognized Authority of whose existence nobody knows anything which dictate rules according to the Time-Keepers’ tastes.

There’s the risk of total annihilation due to a multiverse war?

Fair worry but then why they get to decide how the sacred timeline should be? Which are their criteria for it? Why the Avengers going back to time was okay?

Although they saved lives, the whole things was incredibly messy as discussed in “The Falcon And The Winter Soldier”… and that series only touched the tip of the iceberg.

But whatever. The Time-Keepers, which Loki defines gods because that’s basically how the TVA paints them, at the moment remind me of the gods of gods in the “Loki: Agent of Asgard” comic and with them the whole idea everything is a tale.

The Sacred timeline feels like nothing else but the tale the Time-Keeper enjoyed, their canon, as if they were Marvel. Everything else is a fictional Au written by fans that gets a ‘cease and desist letter’ and is erased from the net.

Anyway Loki is feed up. He decides to plea ‘guilty’ but not of the crime they’re trying to pin on him but of… using his magic against them. Only his magic doesn’t work.

Hunter B-15 is probably the first who realizes what’s going on and, chuckling, explains it to Renslayer who’s not catching up. As Loki gets angry for not managing to use them, Renslayer explains magic powers don’t work at the TVA, which might explain why she didn’t recognize what Loki was doing while Hunter B-15, used to fieldwork, did. Renslayer might have never seen people using magic powers but Hunter B-15 might have done so.

Only no, because in an interview Gugu Mbatha-raw said about her character:

“She had a history of a hunter and a more military role like Wunmi’s character” [Many Sides of Loki | Marvel Studios' Loki Cast & Creators]

So, no, I’ve no idea why she didn’t catch up. Was she playing dumb? Has she been so out of the field she didn’t recognize the signs? Or, despite being the judge at Loki’s trial she hadn’t read his file and didn’t know he could do magic? It can be, as I said the trial is a farce so she might not have cared to document herself beyond a certain point.

Hunter B-15 is still laughing. She’s enjoying this.

Anyway she decides Loki is guilty and sentenced to be ‘reset’… you know, like the timelines.

Note again how Loki had no rights in this. He had no lawyer, he wasn’t explained things, he was just asked how he pled but that one was more a pro-forma than anything else. They had already decided he wasn’t allowed to do what he did and therefore guilty.

The trial was a farce to give the TVA a semblance of justice but it’s all a show.

Back to Loki, he has no idea what they mean with ‘reset’ and they didn’t even have the courtesy to explain it to him. Angrily he says:

“You ridiculous bureaucrats will not dictate how my story ends!”

To which Renlayer replies:

“It's not your story, Mr. Laufeyson. It never was.”

So yeah, now they’ve started with the references to stories which are another subtle jab at the “Loki: Agent of Asgard” plotline.

By the way, keep in mind Renslayer’s reply.

As Loki complains they have no idea what he’s capable of and tries resisting being taken away Mobius speaks up.

Fundamentally Mobius wants Renslayer to pass Loki to him as he has a plan.

There’s clearly a story behind the relation between Renslayer and Mobius, they aren’t just professional to each other, they’re closer than that.

Renslayer agrees although she says he’ll get the blame for whatever goes wrong.

Mobius looks at Loki, Loki stops struggling and asks him who he is and Mobius smiles in a satisfied manner and doesn’t reply.

The scene shifts to them walking through the place, Loki threatening to burn the place to the ground. Mobius clearly doesn’t take him seriously, saying he can start from his desk.

The fact is… Loki is powerless and Mobius knows. We know too, we’ve seen how the trial went. However there might be more at play. Mobius knows the whole of Loki’s life which as far as we know, included only episodes of violence post discovering who he was and during his permanence on Earth.

To him Loki’s statement might feel more an expression of frustration than a sincere threat.

As they walk Loki happens to see the world outside the place he’s in from what looks like a window. He’s surprised and Mobius encourages him to have a look.

Loki points out he though there was no magic there. I’m not sure if he’s saying so because he sees car flying and assume it’s magic.

In “Thor” and “Thor: The Dark World” magic was compared to science so maybe that’s what he’s saying, that the world he sees seems to advanced.

Mobius insists there isn’t magic there so Loki says that’s not real.

They exchange some more lines in which Mobius continues to play on Loki’s declaration he’ll burn the place down.

I’m curious.

We know Mobius is actually chasing another Loki Variant, one who killed many TVA agents (we’ll see some of them got burned down too).

He’ll later claim this Loki is not dangerous, but what’s the difference between this Loki and the other? What makes the other dangerous? And can’t this Loki get dangerous too?

Is Mobius doing the same that Loki does?

Acting confident and joking about Loki burning down the place because he actually fears he might have the potential to just do so if not handled correctly?

We’ll see.

Once they’re on a lift Mobius decides to introduce himself as ‘Agent Mobius’ and offers him his hand to shake… and I’m reminded of this scene from “The Avengers”.

Natasha: But you figured I'd come. Loki: After. After whatever tortures Fury can concoct, you would appear as a friend, as a balm. And I would cooperate.

The TVA doesn’t see what they’ve done as torture or even as ‘wrong’… but many states wouldn’t approve of some sort of vigilante capture a person for something THEY labelled a crime, force him to undress, destabilize him to the point he’s not even sure if he’s a human or a robot, put him through a mock trial and then threaten him to be ‘reset’.

It’s in dystopic universes you find authorities who can just arrest you for breaking laws they made up without your knowledge and then decide of your life.

Mobius might not be looking like Natasha but, after all this, someone acting like a friend would make him automatically more cooperative and, in a way, it does.

Hunter B-15 had to drag him where Loki just follows Mobius more or less quietly.

Anyway, back to the story.

Mobius decided to introduce himself in a friendly manner and I would want to remark Loki asked him who he was when they were at the trial so this is a rather late introduction which he might be doing right now because we just hear Loki sighing as he’s clearly unnerved.

Mobius is playing the role of the good cop in a way, trying to gain his trust.

Loki doesn’t handshake, he’s not going to make friend so easily, but asks him if he’s taking him somewhere to kill him.

Mobius says no, that’s where he just was which, if it’s not a lie, means that resetting Loki would have meant to actually kill him. So again… what about the timelines that get resetted? All the people in them get killed? The place gets razed to the ground? Disintegrated? What?

Mobius’ reply might be truthful but it’s also clever because he’s setting himself up as Loki’s ‘saviour’. Others wanted to kill Loki but he? He just saved him which begs the question of ‘shouldn’t Loki be a good boy and comply with Mobius’ requests and trust him and all the stuff?’

Now… I know that people feel like Mobius is a good guy because he saved Loki but the story will make clear he didn’t do it out of the goodness of his heart… but merely because he needs him.

We’ve seen Mobius with the boy before, he made him comfortable so that the boy complied and gave him info, which is one of the many interrogating techniques.

That’s what Mobius is doing here.

Anyway we proceed with the best known scene of “Loki” as it was in the very first trailer.

I remember people discussing Mobius’ words about Loki liking to talk, as in the first movie he was often silent and quiet.

Well, to be honest if the movie had been left in his original cut Loki would have surely talked more, but what stuck with me watching “Thor” wasn’t so much that Loki was often quiet, but that many times he attempts to speak but he’s silenced.

On the Rainbow Bridge Volstagg asks him:

Volstagg: What happened? Your silver tongue turn to lead?

…which means Loki normally was skilful at persuading people to believe what they say or to do what they want them to do, which doesn’t necessarily makes him a chatter, but surely someone who knows how to talk. And we see that in “The Avengers” when nobody is there to interrupt him he allows himself to monologue. It’s an interpretation, of course, with whom people can disagree.

Anyway Loki decides to talk with Mobius. It’s not a stupid decision. Mobius is clearly not seeing him as a threat but he’s not being overly hostile either. Loki is completely a fish out of the water so it’s in his own interest to play along with Mobius, talk with him and find out more information about the place. In fact the first thing he asks is how long Mobius had been there, because this is tied in how much knowledge he could have.

In fact, the more he’d been there, the more he might know.

Mobius though remarks since time passes differently at the TVA he has no idea… which is a convenient reply as it only confuses Loki and explains nothing. In fact he could have said not the exact time he’d been there but give an approximation like ‘a lot’ or ‘very little’, instead, by giving out a vague reply he gives Loki an info he could do nothing with (time passes differently) and no real info about himself. At the same time, by giving out an answer, he again seems amicable, like how, when Loki asks what his answer means, he says Loki will catch up, as if he’s not withholding information, it’s just ‘complicate’.

Loki resorts to check the information Miss Minute gave him in her cartoon, which Mobius confirms because he has nothing to lose.

Loki laughs and tries to spark a response by being rude in defining the TVA system.

“The idea that your little club decides the fate of trillions of people across all of existence at the behest of three space lizards, yes, it's funny. It's absurd.”

Note, ‘little club’, ‘three space lizards’, ‘funny’, ‘absurd’.

He’s mocking the system, likely in order to get a response, but also in order to gain some measure of control.

It’s something he has done during the trial and is something he did in “Thor: The Dark World” facing Odin… or in “The Avengers” when he was held captive. But in “The Avengers” and “Thor: The Dark World” he had some understanding of what to expect. Here he’s blind flying, trying to test Mobius to see what he can get out of him while still trying to hold a façade of control.

On another note Loki says rather often how all this is absurd. To him this is a world of nonsense, like the one Alice found when she ended up in Wonderland (and it’s ironic how “Alice in the Wonderland” also contain a mock trial about the stealing of tarts in which rules are made on the spot as well as Alice here and there questioning her own identity or discussions about paths…) but I think having him repeat ‘it’s absurd’ so often it’s also for us viewers, to drive home we’re in a dystopic universe.

The TVA isn’t good, it’s absurd, with its rules that don’t make sense, a huge bureaucratic world and we might laugh at it if it wasn’t that’s also an organization that kidnap people from their timelines and subject them to their rules, rules they follow without questioning, like religious fanatics.

Who says what the Time-Keepers chose it has to happen is better than something else? They don’t know but, what’s more, they don’t care.

But let’s go on.

Mobius don’t fall for Loki’s provocation, he just retorts

“I thought you didn't like to talk.”

Which is a convenient way to answer Loki without giving Loki any answer.

They enter in a room which, Loki comments, looks very much ‘like a killing-me kind of a room’.

Mobius turns the situation by shifting the blame on Loki. It’s not that the room looks like a killing-him kind of room, it’s just that Loki is not big on trust. Because Mobius is totally deserving Loki’s trust because he saved him and was nice to him and acted like the perfect good cop so Loki really, should trust him. If he’s not doing it then it’s because he’s lacking in the trusting department.

But Loki had had his fill with trusting people and then discovering he wasn’t his parents’ son nor an Asgardian. His answer his moved by all the pain that discovery caused him.

“Trust is for children and dogs. There's only one person you can trust.”

Mobius’ reply again doesn’t take Loki’s words seriously, as if they were just something to slap on a shirt. He’s being passive aggressive in order to force Loki to question himself and keep control of him. The more Loki is unsure and question himself, the easy for Mobius is to manipulate him.

A break here.

It’s not that everyone has only one person they can trust… actually sometimes you can’t even trust yourself, while some other times you’ve plenty of people you can trust.

The idea you CAN’T trust in anyone is as damaging as the idea you should blindly trust in people but, in Loki’s situation yes, he should definitely only trust in himself, everyone in that situation should do it, trauma of being lied through your whole life or not, because Mobius isn’t doing all his out of good will but out of his need to use Loki.

So he’s not to be blindly trusted, he’s to be assessed so that one can see up until which point Mobius can be of some aid, so as to turn the exchange one of reciprocal benefit. If Loki were to hand himself in his hands, instead, only Mobius would get a gain for it, while Loki would risk to be used and then disposed once he has ended his purpose.

As Mobius is fiddling with a round thing that apparently control a projector, Loki questions him again, but with those words he has raised the bar a little.

If Mobius wants him to trust him, he has to start giving more clear answers.

“If the TVA truly oversees all of time, how have I never heard of you until now?”

Mobius is still good at diverting the attention as his reply irritates Loki and causes him to lose track of the conversation.

Mobius: 'Cause you've never needed to. You've always lived within your set path. Loki: I live within whatever path I choose. Mobius: Sure you do.

There are two things from the exchange.

One is that Mobius ends up confirming that the TVA is sort of a secret organization that decides for others, that’s ABOVE OTHERS. They don’t let you know which rules you’ve to follow, they decide which rule you’ve to follow and then let you blind fly until you stumble into a rule you didn’t know exist and break it. And then they come to punish you. And that’s when you learn they existed.

The second is that again Mobius, while not openly disagree with him, is dismissive of Loki. He has made him defensive by pushing him to say ‘I live within whatever path I choose’ then he hadn’t outright said ‘no, you don’t’ but by the way he replied he hugely implied it in a manner that sounds more like he had said ‘oh, you naïve child, and your delusions, of course you don’t chose your path’.

As Mobius invites him to sit down Loki tries to attack him since Mobius gave him his back but Mobius uses what we’ll learn is a Time Twister to loops him and send him standing back where he was. Then Mobius very calmly insists for Loki to have a seat, again driving home the point that Loki has no choices and is powerless.

Loki complies and sit down.

We can argue if he should have or not but the truth is there was no real point in resisting beyond making things difficult for himself because if there’s something true here is that he’s powerless and he should just bid his time and search for a weakness, instead than resisting.

Of course this is all well and good for Mobius, as things are proceeding in the way he wants.

Loki crosses his arms, which, in body language, hints that he’s feeling anxious, resistant, tense, insecure, afraid, or responding to distress. Arms crossed indicate also defensiveness, unyielding attitudes, and perseverance working as an act of self-comfort.

Long story short, Loki is not comfortable or willing to cooperate and he’s physically putting a barrier between himself and Mobius… and letting Mobius know of this.

Mobius is unfazed.

“If looks could kill.”

It’s a simple sentence that let Loki know that yes, he gets the message Loki isn’t going to go down to this willingly, but also reminds him of Loki’s powerlessness and of how Mobius is unafraid and in a position of power. ‘If looks could kill… you would kill me, but looks can’t kill so you’ll have to sit there and do as I say. Your resistance is futile. Amusing even.’

Loki doesn’t play along, making clear he doesn’t plan to cooperate. At least not easily. Mobius doesn’t believe him.

“Really? Even when you're wooing someone powerful you intend to betray? Come on.”

It’s an interesting sentence for Mobius to say, because he’s lampshading Loki isn’t using with him the same technique he used with Thanos and the Grandmaster. Since the story knows Loki should act more cooperative and obedient according to his previous records, I wonder which point they’re trying to make. Is the idea that Loki started to act as such after his one year imprisonment in Asgard, understanding opening defiling Odin got him nowhere and that he should have instead played along, therefore this Loki hadn’t gotten to that point yet?

Or is the idea Loki is deliberately choosing to act like this because he has already figured playing along with Mobius wouldn’t work?

We’ll see.

The answer could as well be a Doylist one, the audience expects him to act a certain way, the author is aware Loki normally acted in a certain way but they wanted him to act differently for… reasons.

We’ll see.

Mobius continues to make a show of his power. He is specialized in the pursuit of dangerous Variants but not like Loki, Loki is just a pussycat… only it’s EXACTLY like Loki… as it’s Loki he’s pursuing. Another version of him. He’s not telling him that though, exactly because the whole point of the discussion is making Loki feel small so that he can control him.

Credits when it’s due, Mobius is playing a dangerous game because the Loki he’s pursuit and this one might be two different Variants but they’re always Loki and this one has all the potential to become the same as the other, if he’s not already and just keeping it buried inside himself.

Anyway, the fact that Loki is so contrary, forces Mobius to act as if he were willing to make Loki some concessions for his cooperation. A reward for good behaviour if so we can call it.

“You answer them honestly, and then maybe I can give you something you want. You wanna get out of here, right?”

The truth is I genuinely doubt Mobius can grant him that, or, at least, not that in the way Loki might intend it. The TVA erased the timeline he came from. He has no more a place outside of the TVA. The most ‘getting out of there’ could mean is what will later happen, make him a worker for the TVA. He won’t be allowed to go back home, he’ll just have to serve them in exchange for having them not delete him.

Mobius though shifts cards and pretends it means he can go back to where he was, asking him what he would do, should he return.

I particularly enjoy this dialogue.

Mobius: You wanna be king? Loki: I don't want to be, I was born to be. Mobius: I know, but king of what exactly? Loki: ( Scoffs ) You wouldn't understand. Mobius: Try me. Loki: Midgard.

The ‘I don’t want to be’ echoes what Loki said to Thor in “Thor”…

“I never wanted the throne! I only ever wanted to be your equal.”

…and ties in with what Odin told him as a child…

“Only one of you can ascend to the throne. But both of you were born to be kings.”

Which is something Loki hints at in “Thor: The Dark World” as well.

Frigga: You know full well it was your actions that brought you here. Loki: My actions. I was merely giving truth to the lie that I had been fed my entire life, that I was born to be a king.

“The Avengers” suffers of a huge plot problem in this regard, which is the jump between Loki in “Thor” and Loki in “The Avengers”. In the year that went between the two Loki is deeply changed but “The Avengers” refused to explain why, it just shows us a different Loki.

To search for an explanation we’ve to read interviews:

“And in the time between the end of Thor and the beginning of the Avengers, Loki has explored the shadowy highways and byways of the universe – and he’s met some terrible, terrible people and probably had some awful experiences, which he has survived and overcome. So by the time he arrives in The Avengers, he knows the extent of his power – and he’s unafraid to use it. And more importantly, he’s unafraid to enjoy it.” In Marvel’s The Avengers, Loki sets out to remake Earth as his personal kingdom. “That’s his motivation. Thor has his own kingdom in Asgard. Why shouldn’t Loki have his own? As Loki sees it, planet Earth is a world at war with itself. All of these races and tribes are fighting each other. And if they were united in the reverence of one king, there would be peace. It’s not that he plans to attack Earth. It’s that he plans to ‘restructure’ it as a new kingdom of which he will be the head. Loki feels that it’s his birthright. He feels that he was born to rule. And he sees the human race as an incredibly weak people who actually were made to be ruled. And, in his mind and in his opinion, the human race functions better under rule.” [The art of The Avengers]

“I think he went, like with everything else, to—Joss Whedon and I discussed it—to a sort of… it was just, like, the worst place imaginable. I think he went to, sort of, all of the darkest recesses of the universe. I’m sure he had a brush with—several brushes with death. I think he ran into the shadiest characters you can find in the Nine Realms. I think he had to rely on his wits to protect himself. It was really, really, really unpleasant, I think. I don’t have any frame of reference for that, except for imagining what it might be like to be kidnapped by a terrorist or something and have to survive a very, very frightening and precarious existence. But whatever it was, it was important when Loki came back for The Avengers, that whatever compassion he had left was absolutely shriveled to a minimum because of the experience that he had. Harrowing, I think, and scarring for life—in a way that Thor and Odin and Frigga find very, very difficult to understand.” [Tom Hiddleston - live on stage Q&A: Popcorn Taxi - part 2]

And in the end we stumble into this:

“Well, I can’t tell you exactly what went on because it’s this dark, dark secret that I didn’t make up yet. But, the other day, I had trouble with that because he had this very passionate Shakespearean tragedy thing going on in Thor and then I needed a villain who’s not only capable, but ready and willing and anxious to take on all these heroes. For me, he just basically went on some horrible walkabout… That was pretty much as far as I got.” [Joss Whedon told Comic-Con the question he doesn’t want us to ask ever again ]

So fundamentally “The Avengers” didn’t know what happened to Loki that changed him, they just went with the idea something bad happened, which of course should have happened since Loki met up with Thanos, who’s famous for torturing his daughters. They also tossed in that while on Midgard he was under the influence of the Mind stone.

“Gifted with a Scepter that acted as a mind control device, Loki would be able to influence others. Unbeknownst to him, the Scepter was also influencing him, fuelling his hatred over his brother Thor and the inhabitants of Earth.” [www.marvel.com/characters/loki/on-screen]

Ultimately though, what happened is never stated nor explained.

When Loki wants Asgard’s throne it’s clear he’s doing so because he associates it with his father’s love. Who gets the throne is the son Odin’s love.

“To prove to Father that I am the worthy son. When he wakes, I will have saved his life. I will have destroyed that race of monsters. And I will be true heir to the throne!”

But Midgard? Midgard is chosen by Thanos, because he needs the Tesseract, which is there. Did Loki wanted it too? Or was it Thanos who chose for him? Hard to say but “The Avengers” still ties Loki’s wish for a kingdom to his father.

THE OTHER: You question us? You question him? He who put the scepter in your hand, who gave you ancient knowledge and new purpose when you were cast out, defeated? LOKI: I was a king! The rightful kind of Asgard! Betrayed! THE OTHER: Your ambition is little, born of childish need. We look beyond the Earth to greater worlds the Tesseract will unveil.

It makes sense. When Loki is told his whole life is a lie, his first action is try to erase the truth by erasing Jotunheim. That was as much personal as practical (they were at war with Jotunheim). Becoming a king might have been another attempt at still erasing the truth. He doesn’t attempt to become king of Jotunheim, as it would be his birthright, but of something else, Midgard. He’s imitating Odin.

Loki: I went down to Midgard to rule the people of Earth as a benevolent god. Just like you.

All this to say that Loki’s reply ‘I don't want to be, I was born to be’ is actually a lot more layered that it sounds is actually a lot more layered that it sounds and that’s why he doesn’t think Mobius would understand it and gives him a simple answer, something he thinks he could understand. A location over which he could rule.

At the same time the irony of the situation isn’t lost on me. A moment ago Loki said he ‘live within whatever path he chooses’ yet he claims he was born to do something. This wasn’t a choice, this was predetermination. Or letting Odin dictate his path.

Anyway Loki claims he would then move to conquer Asgard and the Nine Realms and agree when Mobius suggests him to go for the space… and honestly I think here Loki is just playing a part. He’s giving Mobius the answers he thinks Mobius wants, an evil Loki. “Loki” clearly is not going to retcon “Thor: Ragnarok” and we’ve seen that in that movie once Loki had the throne of Asgard he didn’t start a conquering rampage but just contented himself with it.

So, no, Loki doesn’t want to rule the universe, he just wants to prove himself something he was told was true.

Mobius don’t take him seriously, either because he knows Loki doesn’t aim to universe domination or because this is convenient for him. He says something interesting though, albeit misleading.

Loki: Mock me if you dare. Mobius: No, I'm not. Honestly, I'm actually a fan. Yeah. And I guess I'm wondering why does someone with so much range just wanna rule?

With ‘I’m actually a fan’ I don’t think he means he supports Loki, I think he’s subtly hinting he’s very interested in Loki. The other Loki, the Variant he’s trying to catch and that holds them all in a stalemate. Kind of like Sherlock Holmes might have appreciated Professor Moriarty’s intellect. This Loki and his other Variant might have a shared past… which makes this Loki interesting as well.

Then Mobius lead Loki in a loop in Loki’s reasoning. Loki is big on how he decides what he does. He values his own freedom. A huge part of why he reject the TVA system is because they want to dictate what he can and can’t do.

Yet in “The Avengers” he said:

Loki: I come with glad tidings, of a world made free. Fury: Free from what? Loki: Freedom. Freedom is life's great lie. Once you accept that, in your heart...[Like a gunslinger, Loki turns to face Selvig who's standing behind him and places his spear against Selvig's heart. Selvig's eyes glow black.] Loki: You will know peace.

and

Loki: Kneel before me. [The crowd ignores him. Three more Loki's appear, surrounding and blocking the crowd from escaping.] I said KNEEL! [While the crowd quietly kneels, Loki embraces out his arms with a wide smile] Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? It's the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel.

It’s unclear how Loki came up with those ideas, albeit the fact he came from Asgard, which is a place where Odin rules as a supreme ruler and humans are viewed as inferior…

Odin: She does not belong here in Asgard anymore than a goat belongs at a banquet table.

…this might be another result of Odin’s awesome parenting, and not necessarily the result of Thanos’ manipulation… though the two might have superimposed so that it’s hard to say where one stop and the other begins.

Loki confirms this view here as well.

Loki: I would've made it easy for them. Mobius: People like easy. Loki: The first and most oppressive lie ever uttered was the song of freedom. Mobius: How's that one go? Loki: For nearly every living thing, choice breeds shame and uncertainty and regret. There's a fork in every road, yet the wrong path always taken.

On a personal note I think Loki wants to see himself above of this, but it’s clear that he too had to deal with choices that breed shame, uncertainty and regret, never mentioning he believes he was seen as inferior by Odin and deprived of his path.

Loki: So I am no more than another stolen relic, locked up here until you might have use of me.

The fact he thinks Odin would have never put on the throne of Asgard a Frost Giant (a monster and therefore even more inferior in the Asgardians’ opinion than humans) no matter what and that he thinks this got confirmed when Odin told him he couldn’t do it, which pushed him to let go of Gungnir.

Loki wants to be above… he wants to be the master of his fate after instead he was forced to dance on other people’s strings (Odin, Thanos) but deep down he’s drawing from his own experience the downsides of freedom. He just wants to overcome them.

Mobius then says he’ll show Loki a sampling of Loki’s greatest hits… which are basically the end of the battle of New York.

It’s fundamentally a close up of how he was beaten and how he asked for a drink, which Mobius mocks further offering him a drink, which Loki refuses pointing out he remembers that scene.

We kind of stumble in a problem the series has. Mobius says:

“It's funny, for someone born to rule, you sure do lose a lot. You might even say it's in your nature.”

The problem here is that the sentence is misleading. Loki at the moment has two big failures on his shoulders, the one in “Thor” and the one in “The Avengers”. It doesn’t make a lot and note that in “The Avengers” he also had minor successes. He walked away from SHIELD’s facility with the Tesseract, he managed to have Clint Barton steal the Iridium, he let the Avengers capture him so that he could let the Hulk lose, which worked and he could recover the scepter and escape, he managed to open the portal and let the Chitauri in. Basically, since he let himself be captured and even Steve knows, Loki won all the battles except the one who decided the war. Which yes, was a big loss because it was the one that mattered the most but still it shows Loki’s losing record isn’t as big as Mobius makes it look like.

Loki ends up bringing up Coulson. To prove his point that Loki isn’t really good at winning Mobius could bring up the fact that Coulson was resurrected in “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” but no, he prefers to say the Avengers came together to literally avenge him by defeating him.

Now yes, Coulson’s death played a big part in all that, they felt guilty and sorry for him, as they all were tied to him one way or the other and this made what Loki did personal enough they could easily put away their differences… but I’m not overly fond of this theory because it implies if Coulson hadn’t died the Avengers would have never came together, would have never overcome their difficulties and would have lost.

Which, I guess, might be a possibility “Loki” might want to explore, we saw in a trailer an image of New York completely destroyed… but it’s something I don’t particularly like because it paints the Avengers in a pretty dark light.

If they didn’t have a common grief, they would have never cooperate for the common good.

Of course it’s not that Mobius care, this explanation is convenient for him, an Augustinian view of evil in which evil collapse its evil’s own doing. Because Loki killed Coulson, Loki set up his own defeat. Evil loses because it’s a snake that bites its own tail… which is an interesting view, really, but, in this case, it put a huge shadow on the Avengers.

Whatever, let’s go on, Mobius’ point is to make Loki feel small, not to explain him why he lost.

But still… he would manage to make a better point if the series weren’t forced to use only the footage from the movies. But well, I guess they had no other choice.

I enjoy the next bit of discussion. Mobius asks Loki:

“Do you enjoy hurting people? Making them feel small? Making them feel afraid?”

Which is exactly what he’s doing to him. There’s a huge irony in the whole discussion. They both think they’re in the right doing what they’re doing/what they did and that this excuses their actions.

They set up a moral motive, Loki sees himself as a liberator, Mobius sees himself as the saviour of the sacred timeline so they are above others, they came make them feel small and afraid and don’t have to feel guilty for it.

They get to a stalemate, although Loki isn’t looking at the screen, which is our clue he isn’t enjoying what he’s seeing, the people suffering. He didn’t like to look at them in “The Avengers” either, not looking when he ‘freed that eyeball’ as Mobius put in. Even when Thor forces him to look at the attacked city he shows he’s distressed. Loki however enjoyed being at the centre of the attention, it’s that what got him to smile, not hurting that man.

But whatever, to try to compensate, the series shows us some unseen material from Loki’s past, namely when he played the role of D.B. Cooper.

On a sidenote this hugely confirms my theory Loki used to hang out on Earth since he could play that part. Among the other things which the series didn’t show Cooper appeared familiar with the local terrain; at one point he remarked, "Looks like Tacoma down there," as the aircraft flew above it. He also correctly mentioned that McChord Air Force Base was only a 20-minute drive (at that time) from Seattle-Tacoma Airport. He asks for 2 bourbon and soda, paid his drink tab (and attempted to give flight attendant Tina Mucklow the change). He even offered to request meals for the flight crew during the stop in Seattle This makes Loki someone who knows very well how things work in Midgard… contrary to Thor.

Mobius introduces the whole thing saying

“You're really good at doing awful things, and then just getting away.”

And yes, it was awful. Although Cooper is described as extremely polite I can’t imagine that the crew who knew he had a bomb onboard felt comfortable with dealing with that situation. The worst part though is that he did it because he lost a bet with Thor.

Now they don’t exactly dig in what the bet was, but Heimdall was likely watching his every move and Thor asking him to do something similar as penance for losing a bet paints Thor also as pretty awful.

The best part though is that Loki excuses it by saying ‘he was young’. The whole thing took place in 1971, in short, 41 years before “The Avengers”. 41 years are a lot for a human, enough to make them say ’41 years ago I was young’, but Loki is at least 1047 in “The Avengers”. We don’t know how fast exactly Frost Giants and Asgardians age but, unless they do an abrupt jump, if Loki was young 41 years ago, he probably still is, which would match with the fan theory he’s actually around 17 in human years.

Now we can take Loki’s sentence as something a young person would say, as in a span of a short time they effectively grow and change a lot so their slightly younger self might feel a lot younger to them, or he might be talking in a more metaphorical sense.

Discovering the truth about himself and what followed forced him to grow faster. Now he wouldn’t do such immature things… which is a rather sad though.

At Loki’s request of where was the TVA back then, Mobius replies they were right there with him, just surfing that Sacred Timeline. Loki asks then if that has the Time-Keepers' seal of approval.

He scores one on this one as Mobius can’t reply, he just says not to think in terms of approval or disapproval.

Let’s remember something else that had the Time-Keepers' seal of approval was Thanos wiping away half of the universe but not just that. There’s also Thanos travelling through time to get to that future and stop “The Avengers” from undoing what he did with the infinity stones, which means they approved Tony Stark’s death in order to stop him.

Awesome people, don’t you think? More similar to writers who’ve to sell a good story than to people who care and wants to protect the people who lives in the timeline.

Anyway Mobius says they’ll go back to Loki’s escape and to a little psychobabble, which tells us not even Mobius sees this as a psychology session or therapy or whatever you want to call it. This interrogatory’s aim isn’t to let him know Loki better, he believes he knows him already. He’s trying to shape Loki into a willing collaborator because that’s his goal, not heal Loki or whatever.

Mind you, I think he’d like to get to know Loki in the sense he’s trying to catch a Loki and knowing Loki better might help him in his work… but so far he really hadn’t asked anything he didn’t know already so no, this isn’t a big ‘let’s get to know Loki’, though he might find some interest in seeing what makes him tick in the conversation, this is just a ‘let’s manipulate Loki into cooperating’.

Loki wants to stand, Mobius uses the Time Twister to loops him ‘back in his cage’. Because don’t mistake the situation just because he’s not being aggressive or physically abusive, Loki is in a cage and Mobius makes a show of showing it to Loki. He can’t stand up without Mobius’ permission and Mobius further remarks it by saying he ‘can play the heavy keys, too’, in short that he can play the role of the ‘bad cop’ that slams back the prisoner in his chair when he tries to move.

Or should we assume Mobius feared Loki was going to attack him?

Maybe, as I said Loki and Mobius might be more similar than it looks like, both acting in control and high and mighty to hide they are actually in a tight spot. Mobius isn’t a hunter, he might not be strong, he might not know how to fight beyond waving that Time Twister and the TVA wand, while Loki knows. We don’t know from which race Mobius is, but Asgardians and Frost Giants are naturally very physically strong, much stronger than humans, and Mobius might belong to a race that’s just not the same.

But still the scene works conveniently for Mobius, because it’s another chance to drive home how he completely control Loki.

Loki’s reply, regardless of it being sincere or not, is good because it says Mobius just overreacted as Loki merely wanted to make a point.

After an exchange in which Mobius gives him permission to stand and Loki remarks he’ll do what he wants, which in a way he did since ultimately he stood, he asks him what he wants.

Mobius says

“I want you to be honest about why you do what you do.”

Loki calls it a lie and he’s probably not completely right but neither completely wrong. Mobius likely doesn’t care about why Loki did what he did in the past, that’s not a time he has to deal with, but he cares about forcing Loki to be honest. Loki has to trust him and cooperate with him and this includes that he has to open up. Mobius has to already know the answer to his questions, otherwise he could never know if Loki is being honest and he knows them because he knows Loki’s future, how he evolves, how it pained him to see Frigga die, how he saved Thor even though it lead him to be stabbed, how he didn’t aim for space domination when he was king of Asgard, how he came back to save Asgard, how he died for his brother.

So Mobius is not lying when he says he wants Loki to be honest… but that’s not because he cares about the answer, which is what Loki figured and why Loki called him a liar. It’s a matter of control and Loki can see it.

Loki: I know what this place is. Mobius: What is it? Loki: It's an illusion. It's a cruel, elaborate trick conjured by the weak to inspire fear. A desperate attempt at control. Now, you all parade about as if you're the divine arbiters of power in the universe.

And Mobius claims to be sure to have such a role which again, it’s an awesome irony because they both play the same game, they act as if they’re superior than others.

Mobius shows him his speech about freedom, which of course feels like a slap on his face because now it’s turned against him and his mad scramble for power.

Loki catches up and insists on his freedom, on how he’s the one in charge of his destiny who will win because HE did it, not because it was supposed to happen or was allowed by the TVA.

Mobius tries to bring him down again informing him if he hadn’t picked up the Tesseract he would have been taken to a cell on Asgard… or, you know, he might have been out there killing TVA men staging the 7th attack in the last week that they know of. But let’s not tell this to Loki at this stage. It might give him ideas about not being completely powerless against the TVA.

Mobius shows him the scene of his return to Asgard, which Loki rejects as a trick as ‘it never happened’.

Mobius agrees, it didn’t happen TO HIM, but it would have because they know also how his future was meant to be and that he should think of it as ‘comforting’. Which is not considering how his life was meant to be.

Note how Mobius is showing him only Frigga. How she was there for him when he came back, how she asked him if she wasn’t his mother and how he rejected her, hurting her. Loki doesn’t know what the argument was about or what pushed him to say so, all he sees is her being there for him and him hurting her and as he watches he moves closer.

Then Mobius explains how Loki believed to send the dark elves to Thor and instead sent them to Frigga… only he’s conveniently overlooking Loki had no idea they were Dark Elves or that there was a Dark Elves attack. Loki assumed the Kurse was just another Marauder arrested by Thor.

The Marauders were a collective of loosely affiliated alien pirates composed of many different races. When the Kurse is captured no Asgardian figured out what he is, they’re all persuaded the Dark Elves are dead, exterminated by Bor. For all Loki’s know this is a prison uprising, the Dark Elves’ ships hadn’t even appeared yet and started their attack when Loki sent Kurse on his way.

Mobius is cherry picking facts so as to shape them the way he wants.

Loki is shocked at seeing Frigga’s death which Mobius knew would have happened because he knew how he reacted when this happened.

He tries to rationalize what he saw by thinking they captured Frigga and forced her to play that part, while Mobius insists that’s the proper flow of time and that’s what has to happen because it has to and the TVA makes sure of it. However, although the TVA ensures Frigga’s death, he tries to make it all Loki’s fault. He caused it, and now Mobius wants to know if he enjoys hurting people, as if he could not know how devastated Loki was when Frigga died. He asks him if he enjoys killing people like he did with his mother.

He knows the past time Loki felt completely responsible for it, he’s trying to get him to feel the same even if Loki actually never meant to kill Frigga.

On a sidenote, he’s trying to send him on a vulnerable loop to get his collaboration like Thor did that time… but it’s a dumb move. Let’s assume Loki swallows they could send him back to his time and accepts to submit to being jailed. The TVA would still ensure he would direct the Kurse to Frigga so that she’ll die because this is the proper flow of time for them.

Although I doubt he meant it, Mobius actually isn’t giving Loki reasons to cooperate with him permanently, just to think harder to a way to avoid that future.

I don’t really know what Mobius is thinking but he seems so sure that he can come out as so overly powerful and righteous he can both bend Loki to his will by saying he’s to blame for Frigga’s death and, at the same time, that he should do nothing to prevent it.

Anyway at this point Loki attack him and is looped again. He ends on the ground with Mobius apologizing, BEFORE PUTTING THE TIME TWISTER IN HIS POCKET, saying it because the Time Twister just loops him, not the furniture… but he actually meant it, because Loki had been standing by a while and he could have looped him to just standing there.

Mobius goes on trying to make him again feel even more smaller.

“You weren't born to be king, Loki. You were born to cause pain and suffering and death. That's how it is, that's how it was, that's how it will be. All so that others can achieve their best versions of themselves.”

In short he was born to be used by the sacred timeline to create heroes. But it’s a ridicule argument, in itself, because every living being create pain and suffering in his life, albeit sometimes in smaller measure than Loki or for better reasons. And the idea that people become better only through pain and suffering and death… is scary because somehow it legitimize it. It makes right to kill Coulson because then the Avengers can be born. It makes right for Thanos to wipe away half of humanity because so the Avengers joined forces again.

It’s a damaging and wrong mindset… that Mobius is of course pushing forward because that’s the narrative the TVA spins. They don’t save people, they just decide who lives and die according to their taste… which works if you’re a storywriter but it’s awful if you’re talking of real people.

Loki calms down and asks again what is that place. Mobius offers him his hand in a classic stick and carrot game. He wants Loki to obey. Loki complies and they’re interrupted by Hunter B-15. Mobius is forced to leave with her but not before telling Loki:

“Don't go anywhere. It was just getting good. Spirited.”

In short he was enjoying making Loki feel miserable, which I don’t think he does because he’s a jerk but just because that’s his job. Like Hunter B-15, they’re very motivated in doing their job to the point they don’t realize the other isn’t just ‘a variant’ but a person with feeling. They think they’re doing the people a service by murdering the extra.

Kind of like how Thanos saw himself as noble when he murdered half of the people in the universe to save the other half and expected people to feel grateful to him.

By the way, do you think that Loki is complying too easily?

Not really, do check the way he let Mobius pull him up and how he then moves his left hand for a moment inside his pocket to pull it out immediately afterward. We’ll come back to it in a moment. For now let’s follow the plot that has Hunter B-15 claiming that talking ‘to that Variant’ is a mistake as he should just be reset, read, if Mobius had been honest, killed.

For Hunter B-15 Loki is not a person, he’s just a Variant, a Variant to destroy. Actually it’s not even because the other Loki Variant is killing their units, because Mobius says she thinks all the Variants should be reset.

And remember about how Loki could be in a jail or plotting the 7th attack in the last week that they know of? Well, that’s just what the other Loki variant did as they just lost another unit.

I know I should be cheering for this Loki but I’m also really cheering for that other Loki variant. Go burn the TVA to the ground.

Mobius goes back to Loki and… discovers he disappeared. Because when Loki let Mobius pull him up he caught his chance to stuff his hand in Mobius’ pocket, steal the Time Twister and put it in his own pocket. That’s what Loki was thinking when he calmed down, a plan to get out of there, a chance to take the Time Twister.

Now… don’t the TVA know in advance what happens in the TVA? What the Variants would do once they’re captive? Because Mobius seems genuinely surprised and they’ve to search for Loki so for all their bragging about knowing everything and controlling everything maybe they actually don’t. They can’t control the Variants, which is why the other Loki Variant can attack without them knowing in advance. Their sacred timeline doesn’t cover it so they’re blind to it.

Of course it’s possible he let Loki take it on purpose but I want to think against it.

We see that Loki has looped himself in an early point of his entrance in the TVA and has noticed Casey, the guy at the desk who has taken the Tesseract. He follows him, clearly planning to get the Tesseract back and, with it, to leave the place.

Mobius and Hunter B-15 search for Loki, giving each other the blame for his disappearance. Hunter B-15 would like to catch this chance to dispose of Loki but Mobius rejects the idea since he believes he can still help.

Loki tracks Casey down. Casey recognizes him and he forces him to kneel behind the desk. He asks him his name and once he has it he tells him in his most threatening tone to give him the Tesseract or he’ll gut him like a fish.

Only Casey wants to know what’s a fish because he wants to know what he’s being threatened with, before complying and he has spent all his life behind a desk so he has no idea what a fish is. I guess he also doesn’t know what it means gutting.

Loki can’t imagine not knowing what a fish is… which is kind of weird because he should know for example humans never head of bilchsnipes… but maybe due to his name he’s thinking Casey is human. Honestly the whole TVA staff seems human. Can I say I don’t like it?

In the comics though, the TVA staff was made by people cloned. They literally were made by the TVA. I wonder if this is Casey’s situation.

Anyway Loki clarifies he’s threatening him with death. It doesn’t unfazed Casey much (do people die INSIDE the TVA?) but, to Loki’s relief, he complies, opens his drawer and give him the Tesseract whose light is still mostly turned off. Loki feels a moment of relief before noticing that in the drawer there are assorted infinity stones.

At Loki’s confusing Casey explains they get a lot of those, enough to use them as paperweight. I guess the infinity stones influence might allow people to do different choices and become Variants as they can influence them.

Something inside the TVA though, turns off their power.

Loki is confused as he picks up a green one, which should be a time stone. We hear the sound of stones moving but we can’t see if he placed it back where it was.

Loki is utterly confused as he walks away with the Tesseract in a daze looking at the sacred timeline and wondering if the TVA is really the greatest power in the universe. Behind him, Casey nods.

The elevator opens, Hunter B-15 tries to hit Loki but Loki uses the Time Twister to disappear again so she misses him completely and almost hits poor Casey. Note that the blow would have been fatal for either Loki or Casey.

Hunter B-15 didn’t care of how Mobius said no pruning or resetting, we can see that the cart, which gets hit instead of Loki, disappear.

This time Hunter B-15 didn’t go for physical pain, she went for the kill.

Loki is back in the interrogation chamber where he put the Time Twister on the table and watches on the projector his future. First Frigga’s death, as if to try to accept it, and he’s almost in tears, then he lash forward to Odin telling him and Thor that he loves them and that they should remember that place. This too touches him emotionally. He sees Thor telling him how he thought the world of him and he sees them fighting side by side against Hela and then telling him maybe he’s not so bad. He smiles at seeing that, laughing sadly but then… he sees his death at the hands of Thanos. It’s obviously traumatic but, I hope, when he can think at all that in perspective, he’ll be able to see the truth.

He wasn’t born to cause pain and suffering and death. He also saved lives, his brother’s specifically but also the ones of some Asgardians.

And, at the same time, he could see, he could learn his father and brother did love him, or at least that was the intended message of those scenes (I won’t dig into them portraying it correctly or not).

The file about him ends.

Loki gives into a slightly hysterical chuckling and the door behind him opens. It’s Hunter B-15 who asks him what’s so funny.

Loki replies ‘Glorious purpose’ which can mean all and nothing. According to the file his glorious purpose wasn’t to become king, but not even to cause pain and suffering and death. At the same time it’s not a particularly uplifting message the one that file gave him. The moment he could start again with Thor, Thanos killed him. In the end, even if he tried to change, his life would be one of pain and suffering until his death.

Loki and Hunter B-15 fight and somehow she doesn’t have anymore her murdering wand nor the men following her.

She’s alone and disarmed but she’s clearly a trained to fight and rather strong. Loki is smarter though. As soon as she slams him on the table he grabs the Time Twister, unlatches his collar and wraps it around her neck. Then takes on her his revenge for having been looped way too many times that day by looping her a lot until he makes her disappear. Where to I’ve no idea but I hope for him far enough. He was clearly taking out on her all the abuse he suffered from her and Mobius. In the end he tosses the Time Twister again on the table.

Meanwhile Casey is retelling his misfortunate meeting… evidently finding the idea that Loki would turn him into a fish much worse than the idea Loki threatened to kill him and then complains about the hunters showing up and pruning his cart.

Really, it makes me wonder if the TVA doesn’t use the world ‘dead’ in conversation. It’s all ‘reset’ or ‘prune’. I’m not saying they don’t know of it, just that they don’t use it to define what they do because it would make them look bad. You murder a living being. You reset a timeline, prune a branch. There’s a psychological difference that allows them to see Variants not as living beings but as objects.

As he speaks Hunter B-15 appears in front of him so that’s where Loki sent her.

Meanwhile Loki has remained in the room in which he was. He seems worn out as he sat on the floor against a wall, his face in his hands and the Tesseract set next to him.

Mobius, who gets into the room holding one of those TVA wands, finds him like that. Mobius rubs in he has nowhere left to run.

Loki states how he can’t go back to his timeline, then decides to comply with Mobius previous request. He tells him he doesn’t enjoy hurting people, he does it because he has to, because it's part of the illusion. It's the cruel, elaborate trick conjured by the weak to inspire fear. And claims to be a villain.

Is he being sincere or just telling Mobius what he wants to hear?

I like to think he’s being both. In “The Mentalist” Patrick Jane once tried to teach Teresa Lisbon how to gain someone’s trust. His first suggestion was to ask that person for a favour, so that they would feel more powerful, when this didn’t work he told her to get that person to lower their guard she should lower her own. I get the feeling Loki is doing this. He’s lowering his guard, giving Mobius what he wants, so that Mobius will lower his guard too. Like when he accepted his hand only to steal the time twister.

There’s a power in being sincere as well, which is to make Mobius feel more powerful by giving him power and therefore push him to underestimate Loki.

Mobius, who previously told him

“You weren't born to be king, Loki. You were born to cause pain and suffering and death. That's how it is, that's how it was, that's how it will be. All so that others can achieve their best versions of themselves.”

Now saying him that’s not how he sees it.

He’s either giving him the carrot in his carrot and stick game or he’s just remarking one of the main characteristics of the TVA. The TVA is neutral, they don’t approve or disapprove actions, people has no choice, they’ve to follow a path and Loki’s path was to do what he did so that others could become better. The TVA doesn’t really seems to care of the moral axis of Loki’s alignment… or their own or everyone else, they only care of the ethical alignment.

Now, as I’ve seen fandom discuss this, in roleplays people created character alignments to give an ‘ideal’ for a character to live up.

This caused the birth of two Axis, the moral axis (Good, Neutral, and Evil) and the ethical axis (Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic).

The alignments of the moral axis are pretty easy to figure out, so I’m not even discuss them, but the one of the ethical axis are basically meant to tell if a character follows the law or not.

The TVA is clearly lawful aligned, they blindly follow their rules as if they were a dogma, a faith. Hydra is lawful. Steve Roger is lawful, as he wants to follow rules.

Loki in a good part of the movies doesn’t follow the rules, we saw it from the start, in “Thor” he decided to act to interrupt the coronation, which was against the rules of Asgard, and then he tricked Laufey, which is against the rules of war. In “The Avengers” he let himself be arrested so as to unleash the Hulk. In “Thor: The Dark World” he pretended to join forces with Malekith so that he would remove the Aether from Jane and then stole from Odin the throne… and so on. He’s not the only one though, Thor himself as moments in which he’s chaotic, like when he invades Jotunheim against his father’s order and how later will invade that SHIELD facility, or how he’s challenge his father again in “Thor: The Dark World”.

Actually all the Avengers here and there had been chaotic… and here and there had been lawful.

Loki’s situation places him more on the chaotic axis because he has no other master but himself. In short he doesn’t respect anyone else’s rules, sometimes not even his own as he claims Frigga isn’t his mother when he clearly feels she is and fights to avenge her… but he too had his own moments of being lawful.

That’s because people aren’t roleplay characters and they wouldn’t feel realistic if they were just sitting on one alignment.

But whatever, let’s go on.

Loki picks up the Tesseract, and Mobius asks him if he tried to use it.

“Oh, several times. Even an Infinity Stone is useless here. ( Scoffs ) The TVA is formidable.”

And here we’ve Loki trying on ‘wooing someone powerful he intend to betray’, to put it with Mobius’ words. I wonder if Mobius can realize it or he’s so sure in his idea he’s powerful he misses it.

Either way he has gotten what he wanted, Loki acting this way means he has acknowledged they’re powerful enough he has to play along with them.

Mobius tell him:

“I can't offer you salvation, but maybe I can offer you something better.”

And here I feel an echo of Thor in “Thor: The Dark World”:

“I did not come here to share our grief. Instead I offer you the chance of a far richer sacrament.”

I wonder if Mobius is trying to play that same game to get Loki to cooperate. Loki though has seen the video. Maybe he knows too. And well, at least Mobius came out more honest because he told him he can’t offer him salvation. Remember when he babbled about what Loki could do if he were to go back to his timeline? It was all a pourparler, words that weren’t meant to turn true as Loki is not meant to go back to his timeline. Ever.

That timeline doesn’t exist anymore it was reset.

But at this point Mobius has to be honest and give Loki something back, the reason why they’re interested in him… which is the dangerous Variant they’re hunting is HIM, or better another Variant of himself.

Meanwhile in Salina Oklahoma, 1858 Hunter U-92 and his men are checking on something. They find an object from the early third millennium but discover there’s oil on the ground and think it’s just someone who found himself a time machine and came back here to get rich. Hunter U-92 thinks he’s not worth the paperwork of searching for him and that they should just prune the timeline. Then they notice a figure in a black cape.

The figure has a oil lamp which they drop on the petrol covered ground. The fire spread to the Minuteman who start to die by arson. Hunter U-92 tries to crawl to the reset charge but someone grabs him and pulls him back. Then a hand, clearly not his own, picks up the resect charge.

And either this is the story sharing with us the 7th attack or the other Loki’s Variant has just managed to make the 8th attack in the last week that they know of. Really, I would say for the TVA it’s better to hope it’s not Monday.

As for me, I’m sorry for them but I hope it’s Monday there.

I’ve no sympathy for bureaucratic regimes who views people who don’t complain with their wishes as things… pardon, as Variant, and implement on them the “Final Solution” under the guise of pruning or resetting them.

This doesn’t mean everyone at the TVA is necessarily evil… but they’re dangerous, they’re fanatic who live in a regime that elect them at judges of other people’s lives. Judge Ravonna Renslayer dictates the proper flow of time according to the Time-Keepers dictations without bothering to question them, or the justice of it. At the TVA no one asks himself if it’s right or wrong, they just do it, they don’t know any other way to do it.

It’s not that they want to be evil, they actually want to be noble and just, they believe in the propaganda that’s all spread on the creepy posters around them and think they’re incredible, courageous and dedicated workers and don’t question their work or their lives at all.

They’re just many little Adolf Eichmann mostly bereft of initiative, cultural and moral depth; the latter did not go beyond the conditioning that had been given to them by society.

They lack empathy for what they destroy, for what they prune or reset and so they won’t stop thinking at what they’re doing.

Long story short, we should be grateful the TVA doesn’t exist because, really, that’s a creepy organization that pulls out the worst from people empowering them to murder others and telling them they’re doing something good.

Mobius, Casey, Hunter B-15 are brainwashed by the TVA worldview. It’ll be interesting to see if prolonged interaction with a Variant, Loki, might open his eyes or not. For now they’re like children who can’t distinguish good from bad because they buy a wrong narrative in which they’re above it.

I’m curious to see if they will ultimately eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of the good and the evil or if they’ll remain ignorant and dedicate executors of the TVA. We’ll see.

Well, this was long. Thank you to all the people who remained through this long, long episode study of mine. I can’t wait to see the next Loki episode!

#loki #loki odinson #loki laufeyson #mobius m mobius #thor #thor odinson #mcu the avengers #mcu loki #mcu thor #mcu thor ragnarok #mcu thor the dark world #mcu avengers endgame #mcu avengers infinity war #frigga #tony stark #clint barton #steve rogers #odin borson #9 worlds study #9 worlds study mcu loki

[traincat]

What’s Peter’s natal chart look like?

An astrology ask! Fun! So the problem with doing a full natal chart for any long running comics character is, as with so many things, the sliding timescale. Even if we had a concrete everyone-agrees-upon canon birthday for Peter (which I don’t believe we do) his birth year would still slide as time went by and that would affect his chart. For Peter to have been a teenager in the early ‘60s like he was during his inception, he would’ve been born in the late ‘40s. However, we know Peter isn’t currently a 70-year-old man; he’s ~30. That would currently put his birth year in the late ‘80s, but it’ll move before long and soon Peter will be a ‘90s baby instead of a baby boomer. The outer planets are slow movers -- some of them can stay in the same sign for entire generations. One thing I think would be interesting to do, although it’s not what I’m gonna do today, would be to run a natal chart for the same comic book character through every decade of their publication history and to look at how the placement of the stars at the beginning of that decade corresponds to the shifts in their characterization or the events of their lives during that decade’s publication. So for example, to contrast the decade of Peter’s inception, the ‘60s, against his most commonly thought of “strongest decade”, the ‘80s, with what I believe is currently his weakest period of characterization to date, right now. 

There’s obviously then multiple ways to do a full natal chart for a character with this situation -- you can pick the birth year that suits your purposes best, whether it’s the year that character would have been born at their inception or the birth year that lines up with what their current age would be. I’m doing neither of those things -- my personal preferred way to do a full natal chart for a comic book character is to treat the date of their first published appearance as their birthday. This is, after all, the day they came out into the world, the first day anyone but their creator could meet them. That’s a birth, baby. So that makes Peter Parker’s “birthday” July 31, 1962. The cover date of Amazing Fantasy #15 is August, so I guess we could also go with August 1st, 1962, or August 10th, which I’ve also seen as the release date for Amazing Fantasy #15. I’m not gonna go down a google well trying to find the exact date and I think Peter feels like a July baby, so that’s what I’m doing. If someone knows better they can run their own. Now unfortunately for a completely accurate natal chart, we also need a birth time and a birth place as well as a birth date. You’re basically never going to get a birth time for a comic book character unless you find some canon detail where they go “and then I was born at exactly 7:37 PM” in some comic, but that’s okay -- a lot of people don’t know their exact time of birth either. We can still run charts for them. The formula I’ve been taught is to use 12 PM if the time is unknown, but the closer you can get for a real person, the better. You want the time of day, if not the hour, and if you can get the minute that’s the best. We’re gonna use 12 PM for Peter because he’s fictional, though. As for birth place, Peter’s lucky -- we’re going to use New York, New York both as the place of his creation, where Stan Lee and Steve Ditko came up with him, and as his most likely in-universe place of birth. So that gives us Peter appearing in the world at 12 PM on July 31st, 1962, in New York, New York. I usually use ASTROLABE to run full charts because they’re free and I like their formatting. Let’s go.

Here’s the breakdown we get from running that information: Peter would be Leo -- that’s his sun sign, which is what people mean when they refer to “their” sign -- with Libra rising and his moon also in Leo. This works for me -- I think Peter is without one single doubt a fire sign, and Leos are big flashy showoffs, which, look at that red and blue costume. Look at how he initially wanted to go into show biz. Look at how he’s remained in the spotlight of pop culture for decades. He’s a scene stealer, an attention grabber, the big ol’ MGM lion. A Libra rising would also make sense -- Peter’s got real charm and charisma, and Libras are famously charming. (And also good looking.) Your rising sign is how you’re perceived by others -- what they think when they look at you. Astrolabe describes this placement as “very attractive and popular, your charm helps you to get your own way and prevents others from getting angry with you” which like, does explain how the fuck Peter has friends. But with both moon and sun in Leo, that’s a very strong influence on him. (I’m a triple Scorpio, sun, moon, and rising, for example, which means when you look at me you think Scorpio and when I look inside myself I feel Scorpio and what am I actually? A fucking Scorpio.) Leo is a fixed sign -- there are three sign categories, and they are fixed, mutable, and cardinal. Fixed signs have a tendency to be stubborn and set in their ways, literally fixed, which -- everything about Peter.

Moving past the Big Three into the other planets, this lands us with a Peter with Mercury in Leo, Venus in Virgo, Mars in Gemini. These are all interesting; to simplify it, Mercury is how you think, Venus is how you love, and Mars is how you fight. So he’s also thinking like a Leo -- he’s got a big ego. He’s very “me me me” in his thought processes. Which, we know this is true for the character. He’s convinced he’s right and that his way is the best way. He’s stubborn and proud, and he doesn’t like being personally challenged on an intellectual level -- look at his interactions with Paul Stacy when he was in grad school. Astrolabe says Mercury in Leo “delights in being asked for your advice and counsel.” Peter is very much the person in his friend group that others go to for help and advice, so I would say this is true. I wouldn’t have necessarily put his Venus in Virgo myself -- Virgo is a hyper-critical sign, good at finding flaws, and Venus is how you love. However, the first line of Astrolabe’s description is I think an extremely good fit for how Peter loves: “You express your love and affection through selfless service to people or causes.” That’s love as devotion, and if you view Spider-Man as a love story not just between Peter and his romances but Peter and his city, that’s what he does. It’s selfless love and that’s what Spider-Man represents at his best. He’s always trying to fix, and he has a sense of service. Mars in Gemini is perfect. Gemini TALKS. It’s a sign commonly characterized by being hyper verbal, and Spider-Man is perhaps best known for his quips during fights. He’s got one vicious tongue. I’m personally very attached to the idea that Peter’s Mars is in Gemini, and it’s where I always tend to place it in my own estimations, even if I run a chart with a different date that places it elsewhere. My Mars is in Gemini and I know my own asshole argumentative tendencies when I see them in the wild. Astrolabe goes on to say, “You love to debate and argue, usually in a spirit of friendly disagreement. But watch out that you do not get too overly aggressive or antagonistic or others will be quick to take offense where none may have really been intended. You need to be in constant physical motion -- sports or daily exercise is a must for you if you are to feel fit and healthy.” I think this is all pretty spot on; we know that for Peter being Spider-Man isn’t only about the crimefighting -- he loves the physicality of it, which is a pretty good reflection of this sentiment.

Jupiter in Pisces: “You are at your best when you give of yourself and what you have -- try to avoid being a martyr about it, though. You're a true idealist, but you must learn not to be upset when life does not cooperate with the way you think things should be.” Again, that’s pretty accurate. Now though as we move through the outer planets we’re going to hit things that are generational instead of strictly personal. I think they still make for interesting character dissection, but everyone who was born around this time is going to have these things in their chart because the outer planets have much slower rotations. Saturn in Aquarius, Uranus in Leo, Neptune in Scorpio, Pluto in Virgo. One thing that’s interesting here is he’s pretty balanced in terms of the elements -- lot of fire, but also some earth, water, and air. The air influence is BIG, too, with his Rising, Mars, and Saturn, which makes sense -- Peter’s a literal aerialist.

Now if we wanted to go really in depth -- and I’m not going to because this is already long -- we would look at his chart on the whole, the placements of the planets within houses, conjunctions within planets, whether anything was retrograde, and then factor that into how we view his chart as a whole. But even just looking over the basics, I think this is a pretty good reflection and summation of who Peter Parker is as a person in his own universe and as a popular figure in the pop culture landscape. 

#peter parker #spiderman #marvel comics #traincat talks comics #astrology #*replies

[bltngames]

SAGE 2020: Fan Games

I’d hoped to have this article out a little bit sooner, but I overestimated how long it would take to write about some of these games. Whoops! Like I said when I outlined the posting “schedule” on the first day, we’re playing it fast and loose, so this is just what you get.

Today is the day I talk about fan games! And even though SAGE has “Sonic” right there in the acronym, it’s always hosted fan games from all types, so today we’ve got Mega Man, Mario, Rayman, and even fan games of fan games, if you can believe it.

Sonic Pinball Panic!

Pinball is one of those things where I’ve always been obsessed with it, but never very good at it. And now, with access to digital pinball collections like Pinball Arcade and Pinball FX, I don’t actually find myself playing as much pinball as I thought I would when I was 14 years old. Still, I find myself fascinated by a good pinball table, and this honestly caught me off guard. This could very easily be an official DLC release for one of those aforementioned pinball collections and I wouldn’t even bat an eyelash (in fact, if you ask me, this is better than Pinball FX, which has always had weird ball physics). This looks, sounds, and functions exactly like a real pinball table should. My complaints are minor: for starters, the table feels kind of easy. I’ve never been a pinball wizard, but I was losing balls left and right here and it still took a good 15 minutes before I finally got a game over. Score accumulation is also pretty slow; most pinball tables will dump millions and millions of points on you, but here, it felt like a struggle just to reach the 379k I finished with. Both contribute to the fact that the table feels a little flat, like it’s missing a spark to really put it over the top. And, third, it would be nice if it had controller support. The keyboard works just fine, here (it’s just pinball, after all) but I find that the triggers on a controller feel really good with pinball flippers, and mapping the plunger to the right stick is great, too. This is a Unity game, so I wouldn’t think it’d be that hard to hook it up to the controller mapper. Still, I came away impressed.

Mega Man: Perfect Blue

There are two things out there that always give me pause: fan-made Doom level packs, and Mega Man fan games. Fan made gaming content generally has problems when it comes to difficulty balancing anyway, but these games have earned a certain reputation for their difficulty, which creates a problem when you have content made by fans, for fans. This insularity means these things are usually way too hard for what I would consider “normal” people (read: casual fans and outsiders). Add on to the fact that I’d even say that there are official Mega Man games with bad difficulty balancing, and you have a recipe for frustration. Sadly, this is how I’d characterize Perfect Blue: though this introductory level isn’t impossibly hard, it’s definitely pushing that edge where it’s not very accommodating to someone who hasn’t played and finished every Classic Mega Man game ever made. It almost immediately throws you into scenarios where you have jumps you can barely reach, insta-kill spikes, and enemies that not only actively dodge your shots, but invincible enemies that launch counter attack homing missiles. And then it starts making you juggle all of this stuff, together, at the same time. None of this is insurmountable as long as you’re paying attention, but as a very casual Mega Man fan, it’s an unfriendly first impression and makes me worried about what the rest of the game is going to be like as the challenge naturally ramps up. For those hardcore Mega Man fans among you, the rest of this is solid, at least. The presentation and controls are excellent, and the new sprites are beautiful. It’s a game I’d love to enjoy when it’s done… but I’m assuming I’ll be left out in the cold. A shame, really, because there’s so much promise here.

Sonic and the Mayhem Master

There’s a lot to like about this game, but there’s a part of me that really wonders if this should even be considered a Sonic fan game. Mayhem Master’s depictions of Sonic and Amy Rose are atypical to put it mildly. Here, Sonic seems to be a bookish nerd of sorts, a sidekick to Amy Rose, who has been turned into a burnt out, cigar-smoking detective. Most of the game plays out as half an adventure game, half an RPG, where you roam around the world talking to NPCs and gather clues while being assaulted by random battles. The battle system is super off-the-wall, too, perhaps taking inspirations from games like Mario & Luigi and Undertale. This means that battles aren’t passive -- you spend most of each fight dodging or nullifying incoming attacks with simplistic action-based commands. It’s weird, and different, and occasionally even a little bit overwhelming. That’s kind of the whole game, really. It’s the sort of thing that really doesn’t feel like a Sonic game at all, but it also doesn’t feel bad. The artwork is very charming, I’m interested in seeing the characters develop, and there’s plenty of worldbuilding and mystery. Would this still be as intriguing if you removed the Sonic connection, even if it’s so threadbare? That’s a hard question to answer. I know that some of my interest in this game is seeing how it spins more familiar Sonic elements into something that’s completely different. Worth checking out, for curiosity’s sake if nothing else.

Sonic and the Dreamcatcher

This is a fairly brilliant little game with two unfortunate quirks. If you didn’t know, the special stages in the original Sonic the Hedgehog were inspired by an arcade game of the era called Cameltry, published by Taito in 1989. Now, Sonic’s special stages were different enough from Cameltry that it wasn’t a case of Sega outright stealing the gameplay, but there’s a clear lineage there, and it only becomes clearer when you compare the special stages in Sonic 4 Episode 1 to Cameltry (spoilers: in that game, they’re nearly identical). Dreamcatcher is also from this lineage, but is infinitely more charming than either Sonic 4 and maybe even Cameltry itself. The idea is that you must collect a specific number of blue spheres in order to reveal the Chaos Emerald, after which you have a limited amount of time to find and collect it. It’s very simple, but the presentation really sells the game’s charm. It’s just a game that looks good and sounds good, with an interesting premise executed very well. Also, you get a dedicated “& Knuckles” button to spawn infinite Knuckles to help you collect blue spheres and bash enemies. Being able to have unlimited numbers of these guys sounds like it would break the game, but once that countdown clock begins, the last thing you need is 20+ echidnas clogging up the route back to the emerald. The first quirk this game suffers from is that there’s only two levels. Parts of this have a very “game jam made in a weekend” vibe to it despite the rock-solid music, sound, and gameplay, and only having two levels contributes to that. Hopefully more are coming in the future. The other quirk? You can’t actually download this game -- it’s embedded in a webpage. I’m sure this is to make it easy to play on any platform with a web browser (phones, PCs, etc.) but I find myself greatly desiring a hard copy of this game that can live on my computer forever.

Sonic Galactic

Now here’s just a good old fashioned Sonic fan game. Though it clearly takes inspiration from Sonic Mania’s aesthetics in some places, it’s clearly doing its own thing, featuring not just the core cast of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles, but also Fang the Sniper, and even a brand new character named Tunnel the Mole. Unlike a lot of Sonic fan games at SAGE, this appears to be using something besides Clickteam Fusion, Game Maker, or Unity. Here, it’s the “Hatch Game Engine,” whatever that is. Whatever the case may be, the game runs very well and is basically indistinguishable from just playing Sonic Mania. Visuals are sharp, music’s good, the two included boss fights are surprisingly fun to fight -- everything seems to be in order. As a result, there’s not really a lot to say. This is just a good, fun game. Anything else I’d say would come off sounding like nitpicks. For example, there’s no way to set graphics options yet, so the game is stuck in 2x Windowed mode. Fang and Tunnel are cute additions, but I wonder how much utility they have as characters. Unless I missed something, Fang’s pop gun is mainly for a weak double-jump ability, and Tunnel’s ability to dig and ricochet off floors, walls and ceilings is cool, but it doesn’t have quite the universal utility of Tails’ flight or Knuckles climbing and gliding. It’ll be interesting to see how or maybe even if their abilities have a chance to grow into something special. Anyway, like I said, those are nitpicks, so try to give this a shot if you can.

Sonic Robo-Blast!

Remasters seem to be a bit of a theme this SAGE, between Sonic Triple Trouble 16-bit, Sonic 2 SMS, Sonic 1 Revisited, but this is perhaps the most surprising of them all: a loving remaster of the original Sonic Robo-Blast. SRB1 was perhaps one of the first true “landmark” fan games, given that it was basically a whole entire game that people could play. It's not a stretch to say that SRB1 probably helped kickstart the fan gaming community that still survives to this day -- I certainly owe my involvement in the community to seeing SRB1 for the first time. The problem is, as historically significant as the game might be, it’s nearly impossible to go back to nowadays -- it’s much, much too dated to be any fun. This remaster completely re-envisions SRB1 as a regular Sonic game, while also pulling in gameplay elements from Sonic Robo-Blast 2. It’s a bit of a time paradox mindwarp, but it helps give it a bit more personality than just making a bog-standard 2D Sonic. It works, aided by the fact the sprites, music and overall presentation are fantastic. The only downside is the Act 2 boss, which commits the cardinal sin of taking away player agency and making you wait around far too much. Here’s hoping this gets finished, because it’s definitely on my radar now.

Super Mario Flashback

This has been floating around for a few years now and I’m glad to see it’s finally starting to get some more substantial content as it moves towards becoming an actual game. That being said, this is also one of those games that’s kind of hard to talk about because it’s just… really polished. The art is incredible, it controls exactly like a Mario game, and there’s already a decent mixture of ideas at play in the demo. Anything else I’d say would sound like nitpicking -- like, for example, the backseat game designer in me wonders if maybe the game is prioritizing aesthetics a little too much. This is a wonderfully animated game, absolutely gorgeous, but some actions, like the butt-stomp and the wall kick, feel a bit sluggish, and I think it’s because they show off fancy animations. Even if it’s a split second, waiting for Mario to attach to a wall to kick off of it feels slow. Really, though, that’s an insignificant complaint. This demo is still well worth checking out.

Sonic Advance 4 Advanced

This game seems like a greatest-hits of Dimps best ideas, spanning the first Sonic Advance all the way to Sonic Rush. There’s just one problem: the game seems broken. Now, my desktop PC is starting to show its age. I built it four and a half years ago, and though it can handle game like Gears of War 5 on high settings at 60fps, slowly, newer games seem to be leaving it behind. That being said, I don’t think a game like Sonic Advance 4 here should be running at what appears to be half its intended speed. It also originally launched in a teeny-tiny window (we’re talking, like, smaller than a postage stamp) and even though the options menu has a toggle for full screen mode, it doesn’t want to work. Something about this game under the hood seems to be struggling very, very, VERY hard. It’s a shame, because if this actually played at the proper speed, it seems like it might actually be an alright game, if a bit complex and busy.

Sonic 2 SMS Remake

Here’s a game I was all buckled in expecting to enjoy. Like it says on the tin, this is a remake of Sonic 2 for the Master System (and Game Gear), but with wide screen visuals and huge expansions to the mechanics, roster of playable characters, and levels. On the outside it seems really impressive, and to a certain degree it is, but something about the controls feel a little off. Sonic’s heavier here than he is on the Master System, perhaps to simulate “real” Sonic physics a little more accurately, but you can also pretty much stop on a dime, and the combination of the two feels awkward. The camera also needs a lot of work, as it’s basic at best and does a poor job of letting you see what’s below (to the dev if you’re reading this: there’s actually video tutorials out there on how 2D scrolling cameras work, it might be worth looking a couple of them up). It also leans into some of the tech limitations of the Master System, like how you aren’t given any rings for boss fights (and even hiding the HUD, a move done to save on resources for the large enemy sprites). I could be picky on a bunch of other little stuff, too, like how the flight mechanics feel, but there are other games to play at SAGE and I’ve got at least two more articles to write. Needless to say, this is a solid (impressive, even) foundation but it’s missing a lot of late-stage polish to clean up the tiny little rough edges.

Rayman Redemption

I tell this story every so often, but it was about three quarters of the way through Rayman 2 on the Sega Dreamcast when it struck me, suddenly: I love this game. I was being chased by a pirate ship through some rickety bridges and even though I was dying over and over and over again, I realized I had been enjoying Rayman 2 enough that I might put it in my top ten Dreamcast games. But that was 2002, and the years haven’t been so kind to ol’ Rayman. From the strangely celebrity-infused Rayman 3, to the tragedy of Rayman 4 (eventually becoming Raving Rabbids) to the endless, careless ports of Rayman 2 to every platform under the sun, one gets the impression Ubisoft maybe didn’t know what to do with Rayman. Especially now, when most of Ubisoft’s games are some form of online live service or cookie cutter open world experience (or increasingly both). But the fans know what they want. Rayman Redemption takes the original 1995 Rayman game and lovingly gives it a fresh coat of paint. The results are akin to what Taxman and Stealth did for Sonic CD in 2011, with wide screen visuals, improved controls, touched up level design, but gameplay that still feels faithful and accurate to the original experience. Except that Sega charged money for that, and here, fans have released this for free. Ubisoft’s loss, I guess. I didn’t play Rayman 1 until well after I’d finished Rayman 2, and I’ll admit, I kind of bounced off of it back then. It felt slow, and awkward, and when the difficulty ramped up, it got very hard, very quickly. Now, admittedly, I’ve only put about 30 minutes into Redemption here, but just the addition of a run button is incredibly welcome, and the retooled level design and powerup mechanics helps the game feel way less obtuse overall. It’s just a cleaner, tighter, more accessible and more polished version of Rayman.

Stay tuned for the next article: Indie games.

#sage #sonic amateur games expo #writing #review slew #rayman redemption #sonic pinball panic #mega man #perfect blue #mayhem master #dreamcatcher #sonic galactic #sonic robo-blast #super mario flashback #sonic advance 4 #sms remake #sonic the hedgehog #sega #sonic team #review

[holly-poly]

Nominations Open

Nominations are open, and they'll stay open through 11:59pm EDT on 18 October. You're allowed to nominate up to 10 fandoms, with up to 10 relationships per fandom.

The tag set is located here: https://archiveofourown.org/tag_sets/4750

In order to nominate a relationship, simply click the Nominate button located in the top right-hand corner of the tag set. If you do not have an account on the AO3, please let me know, and I should be able to get you an invite. On a similar note, if you have any questions, or if you're nominating something that you think might be confusing, please either send a private message here on Tumblr or send an e-mail to [email protected].

Please don't panic if I add some type of disambiguation to relationships that you nominate. Especially for ones where the same characters fall under different fandoms (various comic fandoms, movie/TV show vs. book fandoms, etc.), as doing so helps keeps tags from wandering to fandoms where they don't belong.

This is an exchange for romantic and/or sexual relationships, not friendships, so make certain to nominate relationships that use a "/" rather than a "&". If you want to request that a relationship be asexual/queerplatonic/etc., then that's something to include in your optional details when signing up.

Please see under the cut for more specifics about how to nominate relationships in many of the larger, more complicated fandoms.

Please nominate original works under Original Work for the fandom.

Please nominate crossovers under Crossover - Fandom for the fandom. List the characters with their fandom after the character name. For example: Mary Poppins (Mary Poppins)/Ms. Frizzle (Magic School Bus)/Thirteenth Doctor (Doctor Who), or F!Shepard (Mass Effect)/Garrus Vakarian (Mass Effect)/M!Hawke (Dragon Age), or Hal Jordan (Green Lantern 2011)/Ryan Reynolds (RPF)/Wade Wilson (Deadpool Movieverse).

Please nominate all relationships involving characters from the MCU movies, Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter, Hulu Marvel series, and/or Netflix Marvel series under Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Please nominate all of the X-Men movies under X-Men (Original Timeline Movies), X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), and Deadpool (Movieverse). The Wolverine movies go in Original Timeline. Any relationships featuring characters from movies that fall under different categories should be nominated as a Crossover.

Please nominate Marvel comics under the universe they belong to: Marvel 616, Marvel Adventures, MC2, etc. If you feel the specific title they're from is complicated enough that it should be listed separately, please either leave a comment or send an e-mail with more information. Characters like America Chavez who are originally from another universe but canonically spend time in a different one can be included as part of relationships requested for either universe.

Please nominate standalone Marvel movies/TV shows such as Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes or X-Men Evolution separately under the name of the specific movie/show.

Please nominate DC films set in the current movie universe (Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, Justice League, Aquaman, and Shazam!) under DC Extended Universe.

Please nominate relationships from various DC comics under DCU (Comics). If you feel the specific title they're from is complicated enough that it should be listed separately, please either leave a comment or send an e-mail with more information.

Please nominate standalone DC movies/TV shows such as Birds of Prey, Gotham, and Smallville separately as individual fandoms.

Please nominate the various DC shows on The CW (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, and Batwoman) under DC's Arrowverse. Relationships including characters from The Arrowverse as well as from other DC shows like Birds of Prey or Smallville who appear due to crossover events can be nominated under this umbrella fandom, while relationships solely from Birds of Prey, Smallville, and the like should be nominated separately under the name of the show they're from. Crossover relationships featuring characters from other DC shows who do not canonically appear in The Arrowverse, even if other characters from that show do, should still be nominated under Crossovers.

Please nominate the various cartoons considered part of the DCAU (Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series, The New Batman Adventures, Batman Beyond, Static Shock, The Zeta Project, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited) under DC Animated Universe (Timmverse).

Please nominate everything set in the Doctor Who universe under Doctor Who (including Big Finish Audios, Class, Sarah Jane Adventures, and Torchwood).

Please nominate Tolkien fandoms under Middle Earth – J.R.R. Tolkien or Middle Earth (Movies), depending on whether you want bookverse or movieverse. The Silmarillion would fall under the books. Any relationships featuring a mixture of movie and book canon (which would include anything set in the movies but with characters who aren't in them, such as Elladan, Elrohir, Glorfindel, etc.) should be nominated as a Crossover; please specific which characterization you want for any characters who are in both the books and the movies, ie. Aragorn (movies)/Elladan/Elrohir.

Please nominate the Star Trek TV shows under Star Trek: Classic Timeline and AOS under Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)‎. Any relationships featuring characters from both the original timeline and AOS (other than those who canonically are in both of them like Spock) should be nominated as a Crossover.

Please nominate Stargate SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis, and Stargate Universe under Stargate - All Media Types.

Please nominate Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel: The Series, and the assorted spinoffs (including Fray and other comics) under Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Related Fandoms.

Please nominate all of the Dragon Age video games and books under Dragon Age - All Media Types.

Please nominate all of the Mass Effect video games and books under Mass Affect - All Media Types.

Please nominate anything Star Wars related under Star Wars - All Media Types.

Please nominate Game of Thrones (TV) and A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin as separate fandoms.

Please nominate Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), The Witcher (TV), and Wiedźmin | The Witcher Series - Andrzej Sapkowski as separate fandoms. Use the appropriate names for characters based on the source rather than the longer canonical tags that include multiple names (ie, for the TV show it would be Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier/Yennefer of Vengerberg rather than the canonical tag of Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg or for the video games it would be Dandelion/Eskel/Geralt of Rivia rather than the canonical tag of Eskel/Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion).

Please nominate anything related to Once Upon a Time or Once Upon a Time in Wonderland under Once Upon a Time (TV).

Please separate anything related to the Power Rangers television shows under Power Rangers (TV), the comics under Power Rangers (Comics), and the recent(ish) movie under Power Rangers (2017).

Please nominate relationships featuring characters from various Disney/Pixar animated titles (ie, Jasmine/Megara/Mulan or Jafar/Maleficent/Ursula) under Disney - All Media Types. Relationships featuring characters from a single Disney and/or Pixar movie can be nominated under the specific movie/movie series name (ie, Cobra Bubbles/David Kawena/Nani Pelekai would be nominated under Lilo & Stitch (2002)).

Please note that while [Specific Character]/[Specific Group of Characters] is acceptable as a nomination, [Specific Character]/Everyone is too broad.

For example: Lex Luthor/Lionel Luthor's Board Members is acceptable because "Lionel Luthor's Board Members" involves a finite group of people. The same goes for Voldemort/Death Eaters, Shipwrecked Sailor/Mermaids, and Peter Pan/Lost Boys. While Carol Danvers/Anyone and Everyone or Jack Harkness/Everyone He's Ever Met are understandable, they're too broad because it could essentially involve an infinite number of people.

If you have any questions about a relationship you want to nominate that might potentially be too broad, leave a comment or send an e-mail.

RPF characters must be 18+ at the time of nomination. Significant others/children/etc. of public figures are not permitted unless they are public figures in their own right.

If you have any questions about what fandom to use when making nominations, or any other questions in general, please feel free to send a message here on Tumblr. You can also send an e-mail to [email protected].

#holly poly 2020 #nominations

[rivalsforlife]

oooo i'm sorry but one more scene for commentary if youre up to it: maya and phoenix talking in chapter 6?

Of course, no need to apologize!! Once more, keeping this under a “keep reading”:

Around noon, his apartment intercom buzzed. “Nick, it’s Maya! Let me up.”

Maya? What was she even doing here? Maya never visited him out of the blue anymore… Whatever. She’d probably think he was at his office. She’d go away soon.

There was another buzz. “Nick! I know you’re in there! I called your office, you know!”

Kids these days. Selling out their bosses that easily… Maybe he should cut Athena’s salary. Nah, he wasn’t Edgeworth. … Edgeworth.

“don’t think about Edgeworth don’t think about Edgeworth -- ah damn it”

“Nick! Hello! Nick!”

She had to give up eventually, right? Whatever she was here for, someone else could help her…

“Security’s coming after me, if they arrest me you’re gonna have to defend me, you know, do you want that? I’m not even gonna try to pay you for it since it’s gonna be your fault —”

Ugh.

Phoenix stumbled out of bed and buzzed her in. “Fine. Come up.”

“Thank you!” she chirped in a sing-songy voice. “Hey, you heard him, let me go…”

Maya’s Obnoxious Little Sister Energy is eternal. Her next strategy was to break from the guards and dash as far as she could go trying to break her way into Phoenix’s apartment which... wouldn’t have ended well haha.

Also! Like I mentioned in the previous ask, a lot of this fic was just Phoenix’s Relationship Issues, and the way I characterized him in this fic was a lot of... he needs to have people around or he kind of falls apart, and his history of having people around was that these people needed him in some way -- Maya after she was accused of murder and then hanging around for Mia’s sake, Trucy being abandoned and needing looking after, even Miles to an extent needing to be saved from his corrupt ways and the von Karma influence -- and now that they’re all growing up and don’t need him anymore he thinks they’re going to abandon him.

That’s a long-winded way of referring to that one sentence of “Whatever she was here for, someone else could help her”

Also... I don’t live in an apartment and haven’t visited many apartments? So I’m not totally sure how the whole buzzing someone in process works. no one’s called me out on it though so I guess I’m okay.

Phoenix sighed and wondered if he should make himself look presentable. There probably wasn’t enough time. Maya wouldn’t notice that he hadn’t changed his clothes for two days, right?

She probably would. But he couldn’t do anything about it, as just then there was a knock on the door. Figuring he should appease her so she wouldn’t give security anymore trouble, he reluctantly let her in.

Indeed, there was Maya, looking cheery as ever. “Hey, dude. What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing,” said Phoenix, and in response to Maya’s raised eyebrow as she took in his appearance, “Just not feeling well. Why’re you here, Maya? I thought you were busy up at the village.”

passive-aggressive “oh aren’t you supposed to be busy?” from Phoenix here...

One of the other major changes I made to this fic in the editing process was cutting out a LOT of Maya content. I really love her and wanted her to be here more, but to properly go through the Phoenix Characterization Study I had to make it seem like she wasn’t around as much so that Phoenix would feel more lonely. again, sorry, Phoenix... but like originally she came down for the picnic in chapter 3 and was around at the beginning of chapter 4, so it would be SO WEIRD if she showed up in every single chapter except for chapter 5 and then Phoenix accuses her here of being too busy to hang out with him. She was there all the time! So I only had her show up for the wedding and added in a few more lines alluding to her not being here as much as she used to in trilogy days.

“I am,” she admitted, pushing her way into his apartment. “But your daughter called me yesterday morning and said that if you didn’t call, I should check in on you. So. Here I am. And I know you’re not just sick.”

Kids these days indeed! Like Phoenix didn’t feel bad enough, his own daughter had to go and parent him. “Look, Maya, everything’s fine. I’m sorry Trucy made you think something was wrong.”

One writing tip I got and I’ve been working on implementing is like... trying to have a general idea of what every character is up to when they’re not “on screen”, so to speak. Even then, what they’re thinking about when they’re not the POV focus. So basically after the call with Trucy just prior to this scene, she immediately decided to call Maya (because she could tell something was Off with her dad and Miles, given his reaction when she mentioned his name,) and then told her to check up on him because he really scared her during that phone call... though she wouldn’t admit it. She basically saw it as a hint of returning to a sort of... disbarment-era depression, which she didn’t want, so she wanted to make sure someone could check in on him as soon as he could since she couldn’t.

Also another small aspect of Phoenix characterization (that’s going to be like 99% of my commentary about this fic I’m sorry) is that the way he deals best with depression is like... being around people, and doing things with people. It’s obviously not a method that works for everyone, but it keeps him from dwelling on things and kind of gives him a purpose, helps him feel like he’s needed. Mostly got this headcanon from RFTA where he says he was unable to take on any cases when Maya was gone until Ema showed up... and then even at the beginning of 2-2 he does seem pretty down. Trucy kind of knows some of this since she was the main thing keeping him together during disbarment era, at least enough to know that when Phoenix is depressed he’ll do much better if he’s got someone he cares about around.

Anyways, Trucy probably told Maya just to call in, because she knows her aunt is busy and part of the reason Maya hasn’t been around much is because she’s stuck with all sorts of Master responsibilities at Kurain, but Maya herself wanted to come down and check on Phoenix in person because she knows how he can get and if it was enough to worry Trucy, then she was pretty worried too.

Maya planted her hands on her hips. “No way, mister. I did not take a two hour train ride down here for you to tell me everything’s fine. Do you know how difficult it was to get permission to leave?! I had to pull the old ‘I need to visit my boyfriend’ card for them to let me go!”

Phoenix groaned, despite himself. “Have they still not caught on about that?”

“Their desperation for an heir has blinded them to common sense. They made me drink some disgusting fertility tea before I left, so you really owe me one.” She lowered her hands and sighed. “Look, Nick, I know something’s up. So talk to me. Please.”

I took a few liberties to sprinkle in my Kurain headcanons in here... which I’ve rambled about more in depth elsewhere, so I won’t go into too much detail, but basically: hereditary spiritual power leads to a lot of pressure on people who have said hereditary spiritual power to reproduce so they can pass it on to the next generation. Particularly with Maya (and Pearls to some extent though I believe Maya would willingly take the heat on it) since the two of them are the only remaining spirit channelers of the Kurain technique. And since it took Maya a really long time to become the Master officially (I don’t buy the idea that she wasn’t skilled enough by the end of T&T, my headcanon is the Master training process involves two years in Khura’in but she put that off until Phoenix was in the clear regarding Kristoph stuff) they probably don’t want her leaving the village to “goof off” unless she’s doing it to produce an heir. her biological clock is ticking! haha! (... ugh.)

And this kind of leads to -- in the elaborate backstory of this fic that I can only touch on through DVD commentaries which is like half the reason I do these things -- Maya and Phoenix agreeing that if Maya needs to get out of the village but whoever the other people in the village are start putting pressure on her, she can say she’s “visiting her boyfriend” who they think is Phoenix but really isn’t... and I guess they assume they’re getting up to heir-making activities but oh darn! didn’t work this time! guess I’ll have to go again next week! (obviously they’re just out getting burgers or something.) 

Hence people in the village pushing fertility tea on her because they think the problem is that she’s not getting pregnant... although they’re kind of misunderstanding the reason why she’s not getting pregnant... because no amount of fertility tea in the world will lead to a spontaneous pregnancy without other activities first. which aren’t happening. I feel like I need to clarify this multiple times just in case someone misunderstands.

Pearls both knows about this agreement and knows that Phoenix and Maya aren’t actually dating because she’s like nineteen now? She’s probably known for years, she never brings it up during DD and SOJ.

“I won’t go into much detail” oops. I’m so sorry.

Phoenix didn’t say anything.

Maya took him by the arm and guided him to the couch, plopping him down none-too-gently before sitting next to him. “You can trust me, right?” she asked. “You’re my best friend. I’m here for you, even if you did something really stupid.”

Phoenix laughed a bit. “Yeah… I did something really stupid.”

“Okay. Tell me.”

Phoenix buried his face in his hands with a sigh, then rolled his head to peek through his fingers at Maya. She looked — angry, sure, he wasn’t exactly being the most cooperative of people right now, but — open. Prepared. Like she was actually going to listen.

I know that SOJ called Miles Phoenix’s best friend, which don’t get me wrong I absolutely loved, but I do wish Maya was ALSO considered Phoenix’s best friend if not one of his closest friends, because they’re so obviously best friends. They’re a different flavour of best friends than Phoenix and Miles, because Phoenix and Miles are the “it’s complicated and there are secret romantic feelings possibly but we trust each other unconditionally” best friends, Phoenix and Maya have a twenty-five step secret handshake they have to execute every time upon meeting.

But of course that doesn’t mean they can’t be serious, Maya is absolutely here for her dumb best friend

“It’s…” He sighed, again. “Have you ever — have you ever wanted something for a really long time, but — but you never thought you’d get it, and then you have this chance, and you just… panic?”

Maya nodded solemnly. “Steel Samurai movie premiere tickets. I won a raffle, but I forgot I signed up for them and thought it was a hoax, and didn’t get to accept them before the deadline. The bad Wi-Fi didn’t help, either.”

“But that doesn’t mean they can’t be serious” um

The one constant among all the ace attorney main characters is that NONE OF THEM WANT TO TALK ABOUT THEIR FEELINGS EVER

Also I struggled a lot with this fic trying to figure out... exactly what was going on in Phoenix’s head, and how he would interpret what was going on in his head. I kept changing opinions all the time and it was so off before I did editing haha. Even this line is still a little weird with the “Have you ever wanted something for a really long time” because he probably shouldn’t be aware that he has wanted this for a long time. ... I’m going to stop pointing out the flaws in my own fic now--

At Phoenix’s glare, she added, “I’m just kidding. Thought I’d lighten the mood a bit. Is this about Edgeworth?”

“What makes you think that?”

“‘Cause when is it not about Edgeworth with you,” asked Maya, cutting straight to the heart of things, as always. “Did he ask you out?”

“Not even that.” Phoenix turned his gaze to the floor, ashamed. “He said he loved me. I… I told him I didn’t feel the same.”

Maya was silent for a moment. Phoenix didn’t dare look at her. “Do you?”

“I like being around him,” said Phoenix. “I like seeing him smile, and laugh, and — and he makes me happy.”

What he wouldn’t give to see Edgeworth smile and laugh at him again.

“Not what I asked, dude.”

“Nick’s being really broody again it’s GOTTA be Edgeworth...”

Anyways that second-to-last line there is sticking out at me and I’m pretty sure it’s one I wavered back and forth on deleting before deciding to keep. ... at least I think I kept it? I’m taking these from google docs so there might be a few tiny changes from the ao3 version but I don’t think there’s anything too major I changed while doing last-minute edits.

Again we run into the problem of Phoenix Is Incapable Of Admitting He’s In Love With Miles -- which is the whole psyche-locks thing that pops up in the scene after this. The psyche-locks were also a pretty last-minute addition plot-wise... I think this fic was the most I deviated from my outline, but I was pretty rushed for time so I didn’t do as much planning as I normally would.

Hm I think there’s another ask where I can talk more about the psyche-locks? I’ll talk a bit here because I put a lot of thought into it. Basically I ran with the idea of black psyche-locks hiding something even the owner isn’t aware of, and that those psyche-locks are (typically? who knows about Kristoph) inflicted through traumatic events. Phoenix has three because I came up with three main Issues he had to work through, but some of them kind of blend together... two of them came up through specific traumatic events (Phoenix guesses them in chapter 8) and another one is just general overall trauma. if no one brings up the particular scenes by the time I get to that other ask, I’ll talk more about them, but basically there are three locks from three separate traumas and three occasions where they break -- someone guessed one of the breaking scenes on the narumitsu discord, but no one’s brought up the other two yet! 

Long-winded way of saying that the psyche-locks are the reason that Phoenix can’t admit that he’s in love with Miles yet... and it’s kind of a cheap fantasy visualization of the trauma, basically? Maybe not the most elegant way of addressing it, but I never claimed to be writing for a series which addresses issues elegantly.

“But — but can you even imagine it?” Phoenix demanded, raising his head to gesture fully at the ridiculousness of it all. “Me and Edgeworth?”

“Yeah,” said Maya, simply. “It’s not that hard, really.”

Phoenix had no response.

“You two balance each other out well, and you trust each other, and you both care a ton about each other,” Maya elaborated. “If you love him, what’s the problem?”

oh Phoenix you have no idea. you and Miles are so easy to imagine together that you’re the number one pairing on ace attorney ao3 by a longshot.

Also one thing I kind of wanted to avoid was less of the... “you and Miles are PERFECT for each other how do you not SEE this” thing. nothing against the trope, of course! Just the whole concept of people shipping their friends intensely is something I’m not super familiar with and tbh would make me pretty uncomfortable...? It’s sort of the deal with rpf. Of course this is fanfiction with fictional characters but from an in-universe perspective...

So Maya’s taking the approach of more “Yeah, I can see you and Edgeworth as a couple, I think you’d work well together” rather than “you two are SO perfect together and I’ve been shipping you since 2016!!” because while that may be what Maya is THINKING it’s definitely not what Phoenix needs to hear right now.

“It just… seems like a recipe for disaster. I wouldn’t even know how to… like, this isn’t my first time feeling like this, but when I think about us, me and Edgeworth, it’s…” Why couldn’t he find the right words? “It’s too much.”

Maya brought a hand to her chin and tilted her head thoughtfully. “So — tell me if I’ve got this right — you like Edgeworth too, but for some reason, when he confessed to you, you panicked and you don’t know why.”

“I guess…” Phoenix returned his face to the comforting darkness of his hands. “I don’t know what it is. I-I shouldn’t have a problem, right? But the thought of a-actually admitting that I… or being in a relationship, it feels like I’m standing at the edge of a cliff and am about to fall off.”

Maya was silent for a long time. Phoenix just hoped that whatever she said next, it would somehow magically fix all his problems.

Instead, she said the most ridiculous thing Phoenix could possibly imagine. “Maybe you have trust issues?”

It certainly lightened the mood. Phoenix threw his head back and laughed harder than he had in a long time.

Phoenix is a very trusting person, absolutely, but you can’t tell me this man walked out of the Dahlia Debacle without quite a few romance-related issues. It’s kind of a weird sort of contradiction... 

“No, I’m serious,” she persisted, through his laughter.

“What are you talking about, Maya?” Phoenix managed to get out, once he had that fit of mirth under control. “There’s no way I have trust issues. My whole thing is trusting people and believing in people until the end, you know?”

“Yeah, I know. But trusting someone not to be a murderer is a bit different, isn’t it?”

“It’s not like that’s as far as it goes,” Phoenix argued. “I trust you, I trust all of our friends, more than just not being murderers.”

“Yeah, sure, but romance is kind of on a different level.” She leaned back into the couch thoughtfully. “When’s the last time you’ve been with anyone?”

“... At least not since I got Trucy,” Phoenix admitted, only a little shamefully. “You try hooking up with people while having the world’s most perceptive daughter who’s desperate for a ‘new mommy’.”

“Been with anyone seriously, I mean.”

Phoenix winced. “... College.”

“I rest my case, Your Honor.”

Prettty self-explanatory here, I managed to get most of my thoughts on the actual fic instead of wanting to put it in an appendix or something. Basically... you can trust people in different ways? Phoenix can trust someone to not be a murderer to the extent of putting his own life on the line for them... but when it comes to revealing any sort of details about himself, or general emotional intimacy, he’s kind of stingy about it. Of course the out-of-universe explanation is “Phoenix doesn’t talk about this stuff because we need suspense so the player keeps playing the game instead of an exposition dump as soon as the issue comes up” but I like finding in-universe explanations for out-of-universe stuff.

I think I just regurgitated my points in a few excerpts oops.

Last little comment there regarding the idea of Phoenix presumably having a casual sex life -- Iiiiii am super asexual, have known that for a long time, generally kind of squeamish about the concept and also live a very sheltered life. so I don’t know much about people hooking up... like how people just go out and do these things. But I know people do these things so I try to reference it within my limited knowledge. Anyways yeah presumably that was happening in the background throughout the trilogy in the universe of this fic. probably not an important point. i’m moving on now.

“I’m not hung up on that!” Phoenix insisted. “Iris was a good person, she was the person I trusted. I’ve known that for years, now!”

“But she did lie to you,” Maya pointed out. “And you thought she tried to kill you for five years. I dunno, if it were me, I’d have a hell of a lot of relationship issues now.”

“Do you want me to psychoanalyze you too, now, Maya? It’s not gonna be pretty.”

“Oh, no thanks, that’s what therapy’s for,” she said, far too cheerily. “But really, Nick.”

Anyways I’m pretty invested in the whole Iris-Phoenix dynamic post-Bridge to the Turnabout, because like on the one hand, hypothetically the woman you were in love with but you thought was a killer coming out to say that she actually didn’t kill anyone and was actually in love with you should resolve all your lingering relationship issues resulting from that... but I don’t see that actually happening.

It probably took Phoenix the whole five years to come to terms with the fact that Dahlia hated his guts and tried to kill him, because I do believe he was seriously hardcore in love with her at the time. Well, Iris, but he didn’t know the difference. And then finding out Iris actually loved him... but not enough to actually, say, tell him this beforehand?... makes things kind of messy. Phoenix probably thinks he should be all better now but really the whole Dahlia-Iris thing was messed up and undoubtedly messed him up a lot.

Last little bit is just me squeezing in that Maya probably also has a lot of messed up relationship issues and also definitely needs therapy. (And is getting a bit of therapy in this fic! Good for her!) I have a lot of thoughts about Maya’s trauma... but unfortunately this fic is about Phoenix so I couldn’t go too in depth about that. Sorry, Maya. One day.

Phoenix sank further into the couch. “I don’t have trust issues.”

“Y’know, there’s still a lot of stuff I don’t know about you,” said Maya. “You never tell me anything personal until there’s a murder or something and then you have to. What happened to Edgeworth, both times. The whole Dahlia thing. It took me ages to get you to tell me how you got disbarred, even! And, like, romance has this level of intimacy to it, where he’d need to know stuff about you that I wouldn’t know, that Trucy wouldn’t know. And Nick, you know I love you, but I know you’re scared of that.”

“What do you know about it?” Phoenix snapped. “You’re barely ever here.”

He felt horrible as soon as the words left his mouth. Maya gave a sharp inhale and stiffened, her eyebrows knitting above an angry and hurt glare.

“I’m sorry,” Phoenix apologized, looking at the floor. “That was… that was unfair.”

“Yeah,” said Maya. “Yeah, it was.”

yep regurgitating my points from above. Anyways, highlights: platonic “I love you”s are great, we should have more of those. Just... emphasizing that it’s platonic because the Phoenix and Maya friendship is one of my favourite things in the series.

And there’s that “You’re barely ever here” comment that I had to cut Maya out of most of this fic to fit in, because otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense. In the universe of this fic Maya was pretty distant being busy with training and spirit medium Master stuff after the trilogy... and presumably hasn’t seen Phoenix as much as either of them would like. She loves hanging out with her best friend, and probably feels super guilty too, that Phoenix is dealing with all these issues and she can’t be there because she has other responsibilities -- so obviously it upsets her when Phoenix kind of accuses her of not being there for him, because she definitely would be, if she could, and if Phoenix would let her. 

Pretty much you can’t always be around for everyone all the time, Maya would be so worn out if she had to juggle coming down to the city to hang out with Phoenix all the time on top of all her other responsibilities. She knows this, Phoenix knows this too, he’s just kind of lashing out right now because he’s hurt and confused and misses all his important people, but Maya just happens to be in front of him right now.

And yeah what Phoenix said was pretty uncalled for, which he realizes right away, and Maya acknowledges -- a pretty short fight, I don’t think these two would stay mad at each other for too long. 

They sat in a tense silence for some time, until Maya sighed and brushed back her hair.

“Look, I’m saying these things because I’m scared of it, too,” she said, barely above a whisper. “After Mia, and Mom… I don’t want to be left behind again.”

“Maya…”

“Just think about it, okay?” She extended a pinky towards him. “Promise.”

Reluctantly, Phoenix linked his pinky with hers. “Fine. I’ll think about it.”

points at this and says Maya’s Definitely Got Trauma From Trilogy Events then brushes it off to get off the uncomfortable emotion topics

“Good.” Maya hopped up from the couch and stretched her arms above her head. “I’ll forget about what you said if you buy me lunch, okay? I’ve got a client this evening, so I can’t stay long, but I’ve got enough time to stop by Eldoon’s.”

“If you insist,” said Phoenix with an exaggerated sigh, and Maya laughed, so Phoenix willed himself to push the conversation from his mind for now. Maya would be spending four hours on a train today for his sake; Eldoon’s really was the least he could provide.

and in true Phoenix and Maya fashion we’re just gonna forget about the emotions and go get ramen! 

Anyways thanks anon for requesting this scene I apparently have so many thoughts about Phoenix and Maya friendship... sorry if this is totally incoherent I should not have started this so late it’s like 11:30! But thank you! I will do more of these tomorrow... hopefully.

#dvd commentary meme #the catch-up game #asks

[roominthecastle]

duality in the Red/Liz dynamic filtered through James’ own words

∎ “If I’m choosing a project on content, it’s through a prism of sexuality, in the oddest corners of someone’s life. I’m not someone so much interested in exploring a slice of life unless that is down the corridor, around the corner, up the alley and down the rabbit hole. That I like.” [x]

∎ “I really think it’s safe to say that you don’t really know what the nature of the relationships are going to be, and also what the future holds for each and every one of the individual cast members. […] For me the [Blacklist] is what I had hoped for when I first read the pilot. It has a broad landscape in every aspect - in terms of tone, storyline, the development of characters, and the development of the relationship between different characters.”

⇢ excerpts from the pilot script (establishing sexual attraction from Red’s side, i.e. “a prism of sexuality”):

On top of instant physical attraction that is clearly indicated in the script, romantic attraction also seems to be in play but this develops slower, is guarded, and lives on a predominantly subtextual level.

∎ “To figure out a character, I try to look for something that’s not in the screenplay - a little secret they carry around with them. Sometimes it’s allowed to show itself, sometimes it isn’t, yet it’s always there.”

∎ “[ Red ] clearly has strong feelings for [ Liz ].” [x]

∎  “The challenge in playing [Red] is really the diligence in trying to strike a balance between what to tell and what not to tell - or to tell something in a way that you are not aware that it’s being told. To let the viewer in on something in a way that you are not telling them something. You’re letting them feel it and see it. Something that is new. Or something that is surprising. Or something that adds just another layer of complexity.”

But sometimes the secret “is allowed to show itself”.

for example, compare James’ personal experience of romantic love

∎ “When you’re in love, you can’t control it. It’s when you can’t take charge of what you feel, when you are completely powerless in the face of the emotion. When it happens, it happens in spite of you.” [x]

with

⇢ Red to Liz in 208, The Decembrist: “When you love someone, you have no control. That's what love is. Being powerless.”

 ⇢ J. Eisendrath in Behind the Blacklist S2: “Red is an incredibly powerful person but the only person who renders him powerless is Liz.”

⇢ Red about Liz in 319, Cape May: “There was a woman I loved. She was my life. My heart.”

There are moments where Red’s attraction - both physical and romantic - clearly surfaces in the text - in dialogue and behavior. This attraction was 100% absent in the past and it sparked in spite of the role Red assigned himself earlier (a protector, nothing more), which is why it must feel like “a kick in the head” when he meets her after decades as an adult.

It is something new, surprising, and complicates things for both of them - especially for Red because it conflicts with the original concept (of the past) he held of her in his mind: the helpless child he saved and felt obligated to protect from afar vs the new concept (the now) which is of the attractive adult woman who is perfectly capable of taking care of herself and demands to be treated as such. He has been struggling with this conflict, trying to come to terms with it, with his feelings, and the colliding concepts that pit his “duty” as a platonic protector with the present attraction he feels as a man (a conflict he projects on Tom’s behavior, as well).

⇢ Red to Kate in 421, Mr. Kaplan: “She's not Masha anymore. With little to none of my presence or influence through the years, she has grown up to be Special Agent Elizabeth Keen.”

⇢ Red to Liz in 611, Bastien Moreau: “All those years spent worrying about you, fancying myself your guardian angel. [My mother] would've taken one look at you and known you'd be fine.”

He is both distancing himself from her past image here and emphasizing the lack of actual contact during her childhood, which makes sense if he is indeed experiencing new, different feelings for her now. He re-affirms that his contribution was in the form of money, which also parallels Liz’s guilt-fueled way of trying to anonymously “compensate” the daughter of a man who got murdered as a result of a situation she was partially responsible for creating. Neither Red’s not Liz’s contribution can be characterized as actual parenting, but they were both trying to be “pseudo providers” in place of parents who - due to crossing paths with them - were no longer around to do so.

In Cape May, Red’s past and present traumas wash together in an opium-induced mind trip. Liz first gets referred to as “a child” he wanted to provide for to balance some cosmic scale but later she becomes “a woman” he loved.

There has been only one 4th wall breakage in the entire show but it is unmistakable and speaks clearly to this “conflict of concepts”:

⇢ Mr. Solomon in 305, Arioch Cain: “What is the deal with you two anyways? It's what everybody wants to know. Some say it's a daddy/daughter thing. Others swear it's May-September. I prefer to believe... it's a little of both.”

This dual approach is also echoed in Eisendrath’s off-screen “twisted paternal” label or his more recent remark about Red’s “Liz fetish”, and Bokenkamp’s interesting take on how there's conflict in Red’s reaction to Liz’s faked death: the parent figure part should forgive, the romantic partner side struggles [x].

James appears to be in agreement:

∎ “It’s a very, very complicated relationship between the two of them. As much as she doesn’t know the true nature of their relationship, I think it’s quite equitable for Reddington, as well, because I think he is trying to grasp a hold of what the true nature of their relationship is now. Forget the past, regardless of what that the past represents. What is the nature of their relationship now and what are even the possibilities of a relationship with her.” [x]

∎ “The most compelling relationship is, in fact, what it’s turning into. What the nature of that relationship is now and what it will be building over the next few years. We’ve already seen them very fractured at times and yet there’s some sort of compulsion that they have for one another. And not just Reddington’s feelings for her but also her feelings for him. And to me that’s one of the most fascinating things besides the fun to be had on the show. In terms of the emotional center of the show.” SDCC ‘14

Based on these bits and pieces (coupled with on-screen interaction), I think it’s safe to conclude that Red and Liz’s present dynamic is in flux and carries conflicting elements. Both James off-screen and Red on-screen emphasize the ultimate importance of their present over their past, though: “Forget what the past represents.” & “She is not Masha anymore.” While this instantly rules out any biological connection, their past still exerts its influence (manifesting in guilt and fueling uncertainty) and it will continue to do so until it is sorted. So it is not surprising (imo) that Liz wants to keep Red both near but also at an arm’s length, repeatedly needing a buffer zone whenever things flare up btw them, be it physical distance (e.g. putting him in jail) or another man (getting involved w/ someone else). He is a question mark still, confused himself, and she faces that wall of puzzling, magnetic intensity that has the very real capacity to consume her (she has been warned of this before by other women, too).

They love each other, that much has been firmly established, but the precise nature of that intense (compulsive) feeling is still under negotiation, so to speak. They may never have an overt romantic-sexual relationship but the seeds are there, they have been since the pilot, and they still have at least one and a half seasons to map the possibilities and figure out the best way to be together.

#the blacklist #lizzington #long post #tbl spec #musings #james spader #i hope this manages to answer a couple of messages i got on this issue #this is one glorious hot mess ppl #but it makes sense #i think... #red has his dude parts in conflict and liz is like ??!?!y/n/y/n/idk #that's the gist of it

[thestupidhelmet]

I’m trying and failing to write T7S fanfic :(( I feel like I don’t capture the characters voices, you know? Imo you capture them spot on, do you have any tips to do so? Especially for JH, but tips for the other main characters would also be nice...

First, thank you for the compliment! It’s one of the best a fanfic writer can receive. 😊

On your own, you can watch some significant, character-developing episodes for each character and take notes about the kind of language they use when they’re under stress (e.g., angry, sad, frustrated, etc.) or happy. But I’ll give you insight into how I approach each character’s voice.

Hyde

He rarely expresses his emotions verbally without some kind of deflection, misdirection, or concealment. In “Eric’s False Alarm” (4x25), for example, Eric calls Hyde on being the one who stopped Donna and Casey from potentially having sex. He also calls Hyde on one of his true motives. Hyde claims, however, that he “didn’t do it to be nice. I did it because I always wanted to commit a felony. Misdemeanors just ain’t the rush they used to be.”

Eric’s responds, “Well, all I hear is, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’”

Hyde is almost all subtext. That is the key to his character. If he does express his feelings directly, it’s very hard for him. It’s like being constipated but emotionally (sorry for the gross analogy, but it’s apt). He’ll have trouble looking the person in the eye or scratch the back of his neck. Or he’ll stick a curse or two while being sincere.

Hyde doesn’t tend to give long speeches. Usually, he’ll say a sentence or two before another character talks or he does some action to break up his dialogue.

He often uses humor, often sarcastic and sometimes cruel, to defuse a tense situation.

He uses the word, “man” at the beginning or end of certain sentences. Don’t do it too much, though, or it’ll feel forced.

Speaking of word choice, this is a key to capturing a character’s voice. For instance, Hyde has never – and would never – say, “Anyways,” with an S. Whenever I read a fic where Hyde says that, I hear the author’s voice, not Hyde’s.

Hyde-specific words include swell and super (when he’s being sarcastic), freakin’ and damn it when he’s pissed or frustrated. He’ll say ain’t instead of isn’t sometimes. He’s called testicles both ‘nads and stones.

Jackie

Jackie is the opposite to Hyde in terms of expressing her emotions verbally. When she feels something, she’s vocal about it. That’s not to say she can’t keep her feelings to herself. She does so when she’s significantly afraid of rejection.

I interpret Jackie’s character as being really insightful beneath her superficiality. Enough episodes depict her this way to support that interpretation, but other episodes depict her superficiality as being more than skin-deep. That’s up to the individual fanfic writer to decide which characterization to go with.

But with mine, I intersperse her insight with moments of egoism and vanity. A prime example of this on the show is from “Jackie Bags Hyde” (3x08). In the midst of offering Hyde a compassionate, accurate analysis of his childhood wounding, she compliments her own beauty.

She often makes analogies when giving advice (to Hyde, to Donna, to whomever). These analogies are created from her own experiences and interests (e.g., styling her hair, having a pet rat, etc.), but they’re apt, nevertheless.

She has a generally romantic view of life, which influences her language, but she also has a more down-to-earth side. So she’ll say both, “Make love,” and, “Doing it,” when describing sex, for example. 

Unlike Hyde, Jackie has said, “Anyways,” with an S, but she mostly says, “Anyway” without the S. She doesn’t curse all that much. When she does curse, she really means it.

Unfortunately, she uses a lot of slut-shaming language. Most of the characters on T7S do. That’s a consequence of T7S’s writers finding that humor funny. I try not to have the characters speak that way unless it’s going to be called out by another character or in a character’s thoughts.

Jackie probably thinks a mile a minute, which sometimes leads her to digress from her main topic while speaking.

Eric

Eric expresses his feelings pretty easily, but he can be hyperbolic. Examples: “This is the worst day ever.” “This is the [FILL IN THE BLANK] in the history of time.”

Like Hyde, he’s sarcastic. According to Red, he’s a smart mouth. Kitty has called him a porky mouth on more than one occasion. In “Burning Down the House” (2x15), for instance, he says about Jackie’s party, “You know what might make this party a little more fun? Sweet death.”

Depending on his mood and whom he’s with, his dialogue can either be compassionate or insensitive and sometimes a bit cruel. Sometimes his wit his biting. Others, it’s corny. E.g., he doesn’t like and resents Hyde’s girlfriend, Jill, in “The Third Wheel” (4x11) and calls her both Terri Tube Top and Yoko.

But he can also be nervous and lack confidence, which will make him hem and haw while talking. He’ll interrupt his speech using, “You know,” several times in one sentence or pauses. E.g., “We … barely knew.”

He sometimes uses antiquated language like m’lady and ‘tis I.

He makes quite a few Star Wars and comic book references.

Topher Grace’s comedic timing and line delivery adds a lot to his dialogue, and it’s possible to emulate that in prose. Again, watch some significant episodes for Eric and take note of his speech patterns and word choices.

Donna

Donna has a quick temper, but she also usually recognizes and owns her mistakes quickly. She has an easy time expressing her anger and frustration, as well as more loving and affectionate feelings. But she’s not a crier. She often expresses her sadness through frustration or anger. Not always, though.

She has a very playful and silly side. She can be as witty as Eric, but in anger she can make some odd metaphors. E.g., “He’s an ass, and you’re an ass – ‘cause the ass doesn’t fall far from the ass tree!” (From “Jackie Bags Hyde”.)

Dillhole and get bent are part of her idiolect. She also peppers her sentences with the filler word like (which should be set off by commas).

Kelso

Kelso’s language is dictated by his impulses, what he’s interested in at that very moment, and his unique POV about the world. He’s very excitable, which leads him to expressing himself as efficiently as possible – in terms of language, not ideas. . E.g., “You gotta see this!” not “You’ve got to see this!”

He comes up with bizarre scenarios and ideas, which is usually adds humor to an episode.

His egoism and narcissism color his dialogue. E.g., “You know what your problem is? I’m too good-looking.”

He’s emotionally immature for his age, and he often speaks like he’s thirteen, not eighteen. (Sorry to the mature thirteen-year-olds out there; I know there’s plenty of you.)

Fez

Fez alternates between using contractions and not using them. E.g., “I do not think you should do that,” vs. “I don’t think you should do that.”

He’ll express his emotions melodramatically. Even when he’s trying to “keep it all inside,” he’s over the top while explaining that this is what he’s doing.

He’ll say, “Ai,” when he’s upset or hurt or worried. I chose the Ai spelling instead of Ay because Fez’s native language isn’t Spanish, despite Wilmer Valderrama being the one portraying him. Just like Jackie’s eyes are brown, despite Mila Kunis’s eyes – at the time of T7S – being two different colors.

On the show, Fez’s dialogue is often used to break the tension with humor.

“You sonuvabitch!” and “Good day. I said good day!” are two of his catchphrases.

He’ll talk about his country, and what it’s like there, without every saying where he’s actually from.

His characterization varies, depending on the season. I’m not a fan of his post-Rhonda personality. In the early seasons, he isn’t a perv so much as someone who doesn’t know how far to push a joke. He’s trying to fit in with his friends, and the cultural differences cause him confusion.  

He can be poetic and romantic.

Red

Red is similar to Hyde and Donna. He doesn’t express his feelings easily, save anger and frustration. To Kitty, however, he can be very sweet. To Hyde, he’ll dispense wisdom (and he practically cried in “Hyde’s Father” [3x03] when telling Hyde he’ll always have a place in his house, etc.). To Eric – well, that is one contentious relationship. 

He was in the navy during World War II and the Korean War, and that colors his POV. He’s not politically correct, but writing that aspect of him … it’s a fine line. He’s not racist so much as xenophobic, which stems from his experiences in the navy and his somewhat extreme patriotism.

Honestly, watch pretty much any episode of his from seasons 2-4, and you’ll understand his voice quickly. The Red of season 1 is quite different, more nuanced  – and I actually prefer it, but alas. That Red makes a guest appearance in “Hyde’s Birthday” (4x23), but he’s more of a hardass post-S1. After season 4, his character begins to become even less nuanced. And during season 7, he’s sometimes very OOC.

Kitty

She’s compassionate and a little cartoony. She’s wise in certain areas and naive in others. She’s smart and savvy – until the show devolves her in the later seasons.

To get her speech pattern and idiolect, “Vanstock” (2x06), “Kitty and Eric’s Night Out” (2x18), ,“Red Sees Red” (3x01), and “Kitty’s Birthday” (3x17) are good episodes to watch.

I hope this helps! :D

#That 70s Show #That '70s Show #Jackie x Hyde #Eric Forman #Michael Kelso #Fanfic Advice #Writing Advice #My Meta #My Essay #Meta #Essay #Ask #Anon

[sigritandtheelves]

You told me you don't believe in canon, can I ask why? I am really curious, and I don't mind a long detailed answer ( lol). Also what are your thoughts on the difference between canon divergent and AU?

Crisis on Infinite Truths, or, Why I Don’t Believe in Canon (And Neither Should You)

Thanks for this ask, friend. I’ve thought about this quite a bit, especially when I see occasional comments about what or when events “really” happened, or people saying that they don’t like AU (by which they often mean any canon divergence). So here’s my little manifesto on why I think adherence to canon is pointless (and painful).

The world of the X-Files contradicts itself. Constantly.

Mulder and Scully met in March, 1992 (Pilot). But in December, 1993, they’d known each other only a few months. Scully was missing for four weeks. No wait, Duane Barry clearly takes place in August, and she was returned in November so that’s three months!  Samantha’s middle name is Teena—no, Anne! Margaret Scully gave Dana her cross necklace for her birthday… or was it for Christmas?

Anyone who’s ever tried to piece together a coherent timeline for this show knows that there are constant, frustrating contradictions, and numerous impossibilities—but not the good kind that Mulder likes to investigate. We pick and choose these minor points to accept or deny all the time without worrying about betraying canon. Why, then, do some remain committed to the idea of a “true” storyline (canon), even after major contradictions in story, not to mention the betrayals and cruelties of our Clueless Creator? It’s a matter of personal preference and one’s own relationship to the show, but here’s why I don’t believe in canon.

The smaller discrepancies listed above (just a tiny sampling) appear early in what I think of as the main timeline of seasons 1-7, but the contradictions that began to appear afterward were truly egregious: major changes in the mythology and characterization that were incompatible with earlier seasons, and which were sometimes later retconned by the show itself (Supersoldiers? Never happened. Colonization in 2012, “The date is set!”? Nup.). The plot became desperate (for ratings and to intensify its drama), cruel (to both Mulder and Scully in its violences and unjustified, poorly handled traumas), dictated by real-world constraints (Duchovny’s absence), and utterly nonsensical (the Smoking Man appears to be an otherworldly demon? He dies how many times?). I mostly hang with canon in the first seven seasons, but after that, I feel absolutely no obligation to this nonsense. Season ten was so painful and so offensive in so many ways—I won’t ever go near most of that season. I don’t think any fan should feel obligated to believe in one “true” timeline, especially when it seems written into the show that there are multiple possibilities and versions of truth.

My orientation toward canon, and I think that of many fanfic writers, is based on this multiplicity: we pick narrative elements that are grounded in what’s given or represented in the show itself. We reframe and retell. We offer something new. I’m going to draw, just briefly, on the work that I do academically, and talk about hermeneutics. Writing fanfiction is a transformative act of interpretation. By necessity, all of it is canon-divergent to some extent, because canon (like any primary text) contains no “true” interpretation. There is no single and correct reading, no singular meaning beyond what we, as readers and viewers, bring to it. A text is worth what we make of it and nothing more. Isn’t that incredibly liberating?

Why are some people so committed to the idea of canon?

When I first returned to writing fanfic, I had an epic goal in mind—I wanted to trace the relationship development between Mulder and Scully through all of the years of the show. I failed very early on because the project quickly felt both impossible and unnecessary. Most fic that is “canon compliant” emphasizes a particular piece of the timeline in order to parse out the distinct emotional and psychological nuances of a single arc. We zero in on one place to make sense of it (hermeneutics) and then tell our stories that offer more than the original. Already, we diverge from canon.

Rather than an account of the whole series, my idea became an effort to understand and reframe the reproduction arc, beginning in season five. It became the “Bearings” series of four stories, which attempted to be faithful to canonical events as much as possible. But even then, it diverged after the beginning of season eight because the things that happen in that season do not make sense in the arc of the rest of the show. I could find absolutely no justification for Mulder’s “death” based on what we know of the alien plot. Supersoldiers? They get written out of the show after season nine! They don’t make sense in relation to anything else we know about the aliens, and they never appear again. Screw supersoldiers, and screw the nonsensical mytharc of seasons eight and nine. I rewrote it in the final part.

People focus on the canonical because they want there to be coherence and consistency—they want a true truth that is grounded in the show’s representation. I say: let go of that. It is impossible both because the writing contradicts itself, literally, over and over again, and because many of the events that do become consistent (Scully gave up William? Really, we’re sticking with that one because no one in Hollywood knows how to write children?) are so fundamentally wrong in relation to what we know of the characters.

There is no dogma, there is no truth, there is no single and correct canon. We have pieces. Let’s make beautiful things with them.

Through all of a narrative’s divergent possibilities, we choose our elements.

We know that the arc of this overall story was not planned. There’s no show bible, no “truth” that was ever out there, in the end. What we have instead are truths (plural) and infinite possibilities: factoids, events, feelings, characters. Personally, I have a few things that I hold as true across most versions of the stories that I like to tell, and some of that borrows from post-season-seven events, even as I tend to rewrite canon after that point: Mulder and Scully tried IVF, but it didn’t work. Afterward, they had two children together (at a reasonable human age for conceiving children). They find their way (in all ‘verses) to the unremarkable house. They keep fighting the good fight and are as tough as nails—but they always love the absolute hell out of each other and their kids. These are the elements that I often choose to keep, and the rest I can play around with. Others do great things with other bits and pieces, and I like to experiment with angsty vignettes, too. I dig a good break-up fic, for example. Even an on-the-run fic: I love those, too. There are interesting, nuanced, painful, and beautiful things that can be done with what 1013 gave us—but not with everything it gave us and nothing else.

What’s the difference between AU and Canon Divergence?

This is a difference that gets conflated all the time, and I’m just as guilty of this mix-up as anyone else, because of the way the term AU gets used these days. It’s not a huge deal; I’m not really into taxonomizing and hair-splitting. But I do think story metadata is useful for finding what you’re looking for, so maybe we should clarify what these things mean. AU stands for Alternate Universe, and initially, that’s what this term was used to designate: a fundamental difference in worlds. Let’s put Mulder and Scully in the Wild West, or the 1950s, or in space, and see how their story changes or stays the same. I love these stories, as many do, because they maintain essential elements from the world of the show (characterization, certain plot points, family relations, approximations of life-defining events), but allow readers and writers to speculate about how things might have played out, were the world not as it is.

Canon divergence is different, and also is pretty self explanatory. This is the world of the X-Files, but here’s how things would play out if just this one thing (or these five) happened differently: Melissa didn’t die in Paper Clip; Scully and Mulder kept and raised William; Mulder finds Samantha alive at the end of Closure; etc. These stories are great because they allow for imaginative speculation, but keep us in a world we’re familiar with. But again, all fanfiction involves creative speculation. All of it diverges from what we actually saw. These just diverge a little more widely. They speculate a little bit harder, maybe.

The difference between canon divergence and AU gets fuzzy in spaces like pre-XF, because it’s kind of an AU—a world that takes place before the timeline of the show, and therefore makes major changes before there’s such thing as “canon” (see—we using scare quotes now). It seems like hair-splitting to argue for one or the other, but AU probably makes the most sense, unless you’re going to incorporate major elements of the canonical storyline too.

So that’s pretty much all I have to say. Sorry for the long-windedness, but I’d love to chat more about it.

#xf meta #my rant on canon #and why it's bullshit

[human-zim]

ok but like serious question umm? i rlly wanna be/make a zim-related rp blog but i dont exactly know how to start? uh sorry for the dumb question dude but do yall got any advice for me..?

You Cannot BE A ZIM unless you ARE ZIM! Seeing as I am ZIM myself, you CANNOT BE. Unless of course you are a LIAR. To each his own.

Now, ZIM-RELATED you say, is also impossible, as I have no relatives. Unless, of course, I am a LIAR. To each my own.

———————————

(((First of all I don’t want you to be afraid of NOTHIN that comes your way, not fear for the unknown nor fear of interacting with others in a pleasant manner. NOTHING matters if you’re not looking out for the number ONE (you). My advice is to JUST DO IT. That aside, I only got some basic shit to say but HOPEFULLY it will help you to organize your thoughts. This is gonna be long my bad

(1) Personally I think it’s a good idea to start by gathering the general aesthetics you want. Also personally, I tend to leave a lot of that TBD (to be discovered). But while that route offers flexibility, it can also lead to some momentary pursuits that you may regret later. Even the job description “loud and chaotic” has some guidelines.

(2) Idea: Think about how you want to go about characterizing your character. List some vocab words or concepts that reflect your intentions. Ex: Loud or passive? Sexy? Keeps-to-themselves, or assertive? If so, in what affairs? Naive? Pugnacious? Capable? Wordy, or laconic? Do they interact with others, or not much at all? Just keep that in mind as you do what you do.

(3) Idea: Think about what role YOU are going to play. For example, are you gonna break character a lot (y’know in those double parenthesis that people do when they’re just talkin as themselves), in the tags or otherwise? Or are you going to remain gloriously hidden behind the shroud of the screen, making your puppet appear the puppetmaster? The latter was my goal for this blog, I never wanted to get personally involved at all. I hate breaking character in these parenthesis because this is ZIM’S BLOG GODDAMNIT…but i still do it and that’s on me

Also: as it is your blog, think about your limits. If you have any, and if you want to be open about the fact that you exist, then feel free to list them in the bio or just keep them near. One good role that You play if you grant yourself a presence is the ability to moderate how others interact with you, by just lettin them know in the bio or the tags what’s what.

(4) Idea: Get your aesthetics in place! What kind of posts will you reblog - Productive or Puzzling? Visuals or texts? Does it matter? What will YOU post - words, pictures, stories, what? What would your character like? For example, I originally wanted this blog to reblog relevant posts, sometimes about aliens, but nothing good ever came up back then. Nowadays, ZIM here enjoys reblogging weird and out of context things (also Golden Girls) and making solitary textposts that serve as brief glimpses into the life of what must be a maniac. There is some continuity, but most things are said and then forgotten as the ferris wheel of his life whips him around for another go-around. Mostly, there is no logic to the madness. Think about what kind of vibe you want your characterization to give off, and let it develop over time.

(5) Idea: Decorate your blog! Think about what you want to convey. 

Ex: this blog is a HARSH red and purple and a simple, yet awful, icon. The header image is just what it is. the title and whatnot is bullshit. This effect (whatever it is) was better put together when the autoplay (an instrumental of Oingo Boingo’s “Weird Science,” aptly titled “ZIM’s Theme” on here) was functioning, but the youtube audio that I had used got taken down and this stupid idiot asshole website wouldn’t let me edit the autoplay with the replacement vid back into the html bc it “wasnt compatible” so eat my ass i guess…sorry y’all I miss it too

Note: see a busted ass autoplay could potentially serve a purpose, had i wanted the aesthetic to follow a more twisted, broken, dismissive route, but ZIM here is Cocksure and Loud and SEXY and he’s not broken it is YOU who is the bastard…so yeah don’t be afraid to get metaphorical if you want

(6) Idea: ask others more qualified than I. I’ve seen everybody do it differently. Some people keep a very organized tag system with who they interact with. Others have a specific way that they handle replies (reblogs, start a new post and @ them, reblogs but have a cut-off point…?). Maybe you’d like some extra input on that. Go ahead and ask. They’ll be happy to answer, they’re RPers, it’s their job to reply. Personally, my only limit is to stop the reblog chain when it becomes a burden to scroll past. Then ZIM @’s them if he wants to keep the arguementConversation going.

Note: I never considered this blog an RP blog - in my words, it’s a “shitpost blog” - so I’m sure that there are things (customs, norms, taboos maybe) that I just flat don’t know about, but, maybe not. Regardless, if you’re uncertain, just follow others’ examples. Human-zim counts as an example bc it’s a free internet (for now) and you can do what you want

(7) Idea: Hopefully you know what your intentions (or motives, or reasons) are. If not then find them now I guess. Also, hopefully one or all of them is to HAVE FUN. just show up one day and do shit and make others deal with you. Get comfy while one ancient purple-hued blog with a strenuously grinning icon and a busted autoplay scrolls past all that nonsense on their dash real quick while wondering whether they, too, should make a post that day or not..

also remember that it’ll be rough at the beginning as you’re trying to get a foothold on the blog/character, but you’re free to go in any direction you choose as time progresses. So don’t worry if you hate how you start out, it happens to the best of us.

 thanks for asking and I hope this helped xoxo….if anyone else has any input then don’t be afraid to add-on)))

#crayon-boi #long post

[itsclydebitches]

Hey Clyde! Love your reviews on RWBY. My question is about Ozpin. If he survived fighting Cinder, would the events of volume 4-6 still happen? I believe the only reason team RWBYJNR treated Ozpin that way was because he was with Oscar who basically looked like a kid to them. However, if he was still in his adult body, would they have been more respectful?

Hi, anon! Thank you! I’m actually super glad you asked this. I’ve touched on how Oscar’s age and looks have impacted how others perceive Ozpin a bit in other asks, but haven’t had the chance to compose a substantial meta about it. I will attempt to fix that here! 

FYI, it’ll get decently image heavy from here on out. 

First, as a general response to the question of whether the events of Volumes 4-6 would have changed if Ozpin had survived: absolutely. If only because Ozpin as a figurehead would have still been around to lead both his inner circle and function as a symbol of strength for the rest of the world. Unless he was completely incapacitated from the fight or something (like in a coma), the expectation is that Ozpin would have begun rebuilding his school. Glynda wouldn’t have been left alone to try and deal with a frozen Wyvern attracting grimm. Ironwood wouldn’t have been left to figure out where to go from here. Qrow wouldn’t have been sent on a mission to return Ozpin’s cane. The whole world (including Atlas) may have been less likely to panic with Ozpin there to provide perspective and support. Lionheart presumably would have been less inclined to betray him, at least so soon and so overtly. An Ozpin who will reincarnate at some unknown point is a future Lionheart problem, and therefore far less intimidating. An Ozpin who still lives and commands his inner circle is way more of a threat and Lionheart would be more likely to get caught. Remember that even Salem was surprised by how quickly Ozpin reincarnated and dove back into the game—all the baddies were banking on more time. So yes, a ton would have changed. The group’s focus is now more along the lines of, “So is Ozpin going to fix things and can we go back to school?” and less, “Ozpin is dead as a door nail and no one is able to fix things for us. Might as well go hunt Cinder ourselves.” 

But onto the meat of the ask. Is the group treating Ozpin like they are at least partly because he’s in the body of a kid? That’s also a resounding ‘yes.’ Human beings, including the humans and the faunus that we write in fiction, are incredibly judgmental (for better and for worse) based on how someone else looks. If you’re able to see then you tend to prioritize that information over other aspects of a person. We create markers that we then learn and assume mean something when, much of the time, they don’t. Or, to put it another way, we create stereotypes. We can think about this in terms of gender presentation: a masculine-looking person giving orders is seen as the “boss” whereas a feminine-looking person giving orders is seen as a “bitch.” We can complicate that with race: we’re more likely to view a white woman giving orders as “assertive” when compared to a black man giving orders. That’s “aggressive.” From giving a girl long blonde hair when you want to cue people into the fact that she’s (supposedly) dumb, to making a man skinny when you want him to seem vulnerable, our media is chock-full of those markers, subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) encouraging us to read characters in particular ways. There’s a reason that Yang, the go-getter, is blonde whereas Blake, the bookworm, has black hair. There’s a reason that Cardin wasn’t designed as a twig and Jaune is a couple inches shorter than him. There’s even a reason why the sap the group collects is red rather than, say, yellow, orange, blue—literally any other color. Only red sap makes it look like Cardin is covered in blood when he attacks Jaune, thus increasing how much we read him as a threat. The characters’ designs matter. 

What does all that have to do with Ozpin? Well, at the start of the series his markers all point to authority and wisdom. He’s a white man, for one. He dresses in a formal suit. There are nods towards his age (a cane, white hair) that tell us, despite his baby face, that he’s someone who has been around a while and thus has a great deal of experience to draw on. He’s also, significantly, tall. Take a look at how his talks with Ruby read visually. 

Ruby is incredibly small compared to Ozpin. He towers above her and she’s constantly in a position of looking up to him, mirroring the ways in which she figuratively looks up to him for advice. Her mannerisms are also younger and don’t carry much confidence. Crossing her arms and sulking. Wringing her hands while asking if she’s made a mistake. The way Ruby moves contrasts Ozpin’s own very still, very composed mannerisms. Body language and facial expression is one of the primary ways that we communicate and the slightest change can carry a world of meaning. For example, compare these two shots of Yang from Volume 1 and Volume 6: 

On the surface they appear quite similar, but provided there isn’t something impacting how we read these moments (such as some people with autism), we learn that these poses mean two very different things. Two hands on your waist is a relaxed pose; one hand on your waist is an arrogant pose. At least when combined with an angry expression. One arm, the placement of her eyebrows, and suddenly Yang’s attitude towards Ozpin has radically changed. We went from casual respect to defiance, and most viewers wouldn’t need to know anything else about RWBY’s story to read that here. Her body language alone tells the story. 

Ozpin’s body language with Ruby then cues the viewer into the fact that he (supposedly) has the answers here, simply by virtue of him exuding a confidence that Ruby doesn’t possess yet. Who do you look to in a bad situation? The person screaming and running around in panic? Or the person who calmly announces that they can help, getting everyone else to calm down by keeping calm themselves? This sort of characterization is partly why the fandom grew suspicious of Ozpin early on. It’s not simply that he (on the surface) is modeled after the shady authority figure trope, but that we’ve learned from real life experience that a person’s ability to keep calm and speak eloquently doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re right. Sounding authoritative is a skill and it’s why the likes of cult leaders and dictators are so dangerous. If you just sound and look like you know what you’re doing, people have a tendency to believe you. And if you’re inclined towards critical thinking, you might be wary of the person whose demeanor is a little too polished. 

Even when Ozpin is being playful he maintains a certain level of dignity. His clothes, his physical looks, and the controlled movement of the mug—he’s not jumping around like Nora might—all remind us that Ozpin is the headmaster here and thus, though he’s making silly jokes about popcorn right now, he deserves a certain amount of respect. Even his posture speaks volumes, one arm still tucked behind his back and shoulders ramrod straight. It’s a posture that speaks of training and discipline. There’s a reason that the general (Ironwood) is always animated as standing tall with hands neatly folded and the presumably less dependable drunk (Qrow) is animated with a constantly hunched posture. How Ozpin stands is a quick and easy way to tell the viewer, “This guy is in charge. He’s powerful. He’s wise. You can rely on him.” 

All of this changes dramatically once Ozpin is thrown into Oscar’s body. Moving chronologically, it’s significant that the group is not introduced to this new Ozpin as a dignified individual. 

This is what we get later. Note the crossed legs, still good posture, even the ‘adult’ way he holds a mug. In contrast, someone younger and more childish in terms of their personality, like Ruby, tends to hold a drink with two hands and chucks it all back in a manner that would never fly at a dinner party. 

Rather than a dignified Ozpin knocking at the door, the group first encounters Oscar, someone who, like Volume 1 Ruby, can be incredibly timid and lacks in self-confidence. This isn’t the body language of a leader arriving to provide you with all the answers. 

Oscar’s slouched posture, downward gaze, wringing hands, and fearful expression all paint him as the weak one here. Made worse by the fact that he asks to see Ruby and ignites (an entirely understandable) suspicion in the group. Their first interaction is characterized by perceiving him as both a potential threat, but also one they can easily handle. We don’t like that he’s asking about Ruby, but we can take him in a fight no problem. 

And yes, this first impression makes a difference. Knowing something about someone on an intellectual level usually doesn’t trump the emotional response we have to the physical markers we’re faced with. As a non-RWBY example, let’s say you were introduced to these two characters. 

Ignoring for a moment that we’re comparing a villain and a hero, let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re told—and are provided proof—that each of these characters are morally sound, powerful adults and you should afford them with the respect they deserve. Being told that simply can’t outweigh what we see. Who are you more likely to respect? The woman who looks like a literal child named Baby Doll in a cutesy outfit, or the very old looking man in badass robes, literally named the Ancient One? All the, “But I am an adult” in the world isn’t going to convince people to read, and therefore respond to, Baby Doll in the same way they would the Ancient One. 

That’s the situation Ozpin is in now. He’s told the group that he’s Ozpin, he’s managed to prove it, but there’s always going to be a part of Ruby and the gang that doesn’t quite believe it. Not in Jaune’s literal sense of, ‘He could be lying about who he is,’ but just in a more instinctual, ‘He says he’s our headmaster, but all I see is a fourteen year old kid.’ What you see makes it really easy to ignore what you know, particularly when those two things contrast. Those markers Oscar brings to this new version of Ozpin are simply too influential and yes, that opens the door for the group to treat him with far less respect than they would in his adult form. We see it right from the start when, despite having been told that this is also Ozpin, the group coos over him in an overbearing, disrespectful manner. 

This continues even after Ozpin has taken control and is doing everything he can (those dignity markers) to regain some level of trust and respect. Even while seated and attempting to command the room as Headmaster Ozpin, Nora nevertheless undermines that with “Cute little boy Ozpin!” She has chosen to emphasize his looks over his status and notably no one listens when he says, “Please don’t call me that.”

Ozpin has, in this moment, literally been labeled as a child. A “boy.” Though we can’t be sure about what age all his hosts were when Ozpin arrived, based on Jinn’s vision it doesn’t look as if reincarnating into teenagers is common. This may even be the first time.   

Any of these past reincarnations would have been able to command more authority, simply because they’re adult men not dressed in dirty farm clothes. If this Ozpin had shown up in Haven, 

we would have gotten a very different volume. Age matters. How we perceive age matters. We saw this right in RWBY’s second episode wherein Weiss calls Ruby out on attending Beacon. 

It’s Ruby’s looks and Ruby’s looks alone that encourage Weiss to come to the conclusion, ‘You shouldn’t be here.’ The same thing has now happened to Ozpin. You look younger than us and are inhabiting a body that physically couldn’t beat us in a fight? You shouldn’t be here. You definitely shouldn’t be giving us orders. 

The group had control of Ozpin’s safe house. They were poised to interrogate him for showing up at it unannounced. Now they emphasize Oscar’s age and characteristics over his, which is ironically the only time that they emphasize Oscar’s individuality over Ozpin’s. In short, they’ve created an environment where a part of them truly believes that they’re older and more knowledgeable simply because of how Ozpin now looks, even though technically they know this isn’t true. It’s a new dynamic and with that comes the confidence to treat him like the fourteen year old stranger he “is”. I don’t believe for a moment that Yang would have ignored Ozpin’s direct questions, shot out irrational accusations, and then demanded a promise from him if he still looked the way he did at Beacon. Especially as someone who came to Haven later and therefore missed the initial proof, Yang simply doesn’t read Ozpin as Ozpin. We’ve seen how other characters interact with him from a student-teacher dynamic and it’s far more respectful. 

As this shot demonstrates, there’s also that issue of Ozpin’s size. Where as a headmaster Ozpin commanded authority by being taller than almost everyone else around him, Ozpin as Oscar immediately loses authority by being the smallest in the room. As I mentioned with Jaune and Cardin, size is an easy way to emphasize vulnerability. We quite literally couldn’t have gotten this scene if Ozpin was still 6'6" and looking twice Jaune’s age. 

In this scene Jaune honestly thinks this might be Ozpin. He’s accusing him of lying again, of claiming to leave when really he’s spying on them, or just pretending to be this kid called ‘Oscar,’ whatever. The point is that Jaune is working under the assumption that he’s interacting with his headmaster, yet that knowledge obviously doesn’t give him pause. Because Ozpin’s new look outweighs everything else Jaune knows about him. He’s angry and now suddenly Ozpin isn’t an intimidating huntsmen capable of defending himself, Ozpin is a teeny-tiny kid with no training. Jaune becomes Cardin through the realization of, “Oh. If I’m bigger and more powerful than this person, I can do whatever I want to them.” 

Ozpin’s size is an ongoing reminder that, despite possessing his own skill as well as magic, he’s in a vulnerable position. He needs to stand on the furniture in order to recreate his students literally and figuratively looking up to him, but now it just reads as a joke. 

This isn’t the first time RWBY has used size this way. Cordovin is an excellent example of how a small, non-dignified looking person is unable to maintain authority in the way someone with another appearance might. Her white hair just makes her look old rather than wise and her short stature is so extreme that it invites humor. It’s not just that Cordovin is a racist, or that her guards act like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Her appearance immediately gave the group another excuse for why they shouldn’t listen to her. Look at this tiny old woman trying to tell us what to do. Yeah right, lady. We could probably punt you into the sun so step aside.

This is a look that makes guards release prisoners in three seconds flat. 

This is a look that encourages laughter and, by extension, a lack of respect. 

The extreme camera angle in order to make Cordovin look ‘imposing.’ The fact that she looks like a literal child next to Weiss… none of it encourages the group, or the audience, to take her seriously. Rooster Teeth made a conscious decision when they decided to animate Volume 6′s “bad guy” as an old woman with sagging breasts and an extremely small stature. 

The only time when someone that small is re-characterized as authoritative is when they’re standing up against unimaginable odds. 

Ignoring that this scene in reality is Ruby refusing to take responsibility for the crimes she is currently committing, what Rooster Teen wants this shot to do is function as an example of extreme heroism. That’s accomplished by taking our second smallest character and situating her in front of a larger-than-life mech. Ruby’s refusal to back down in the face of something so much bigger than her is (again) supposed to be inspiring. She’s standing up to Cordovin’s “bullying” in a way Oscar was unable to do with his own mech: a bigger and more threatening Jaune. 

(I really cannot express how awful Volume Six was wow). 

All of which brings me to my final point. Namely that, by virtue of his age and size, Ozpin as Oscar will always look ridiculous when attempting to make use of his former markers. Using a cane? 

Headmaster Ozpin’s age and height makes it look distinguished. Ozpin at Oscar’s age and height makes it look silly. What’s the fourteen year old doing with a cane nearly as tall as he is? (Acknowledging that this is an ableist assumption. Some fourteen year olds do need canes, but most viewers are going to question this in a way they never would with the white-haired adult). What’s the kid doing with such a fancy looking cane when he’s literally covered in dirt, bandages, rags, and badly mended clothes? That’s a silly contrast. 

Headmaster Ozpin fighting? Totally badass. One of the shortest and yet most talked about fights in the show. 

Ozpin as Oscar fighting? Still badass… if you’re willing to work for it a bit more. But really, the kid swinging a cane around just will never have the same feel as a grown man who looked like Ozpin did. 

Ozpin himself is a dignified person, but anytime he adopts those mannerisms now he looks silly at best, arrogant at worst. 

I think his look is largely why so many fans read the snow scene as him talking down to the group. He no more talked down to them here then he did when he conversed with Ruby, or Pyrrha, or the team while heading off to Mountain Glenn. The only difference is that the previous Ozpin commanded all that authority, so his warnings and criticisms held weight. This Ozpin not only doesn’t look the part of an authority figure, half his time is spent being Oscar, someone who defers to and scurries around the rest of the group. So when Ozpin tries to take charge here, everyone is far less willing to listen. People are inclined to read him as arrogant, patronizing, talking down to others, etc. because it looks like a small child giving orders to a more older, more powerful team. Even though it’s not. 

It’s the combination of everything above that leads to moments like this. Where Ozpin is smaller, more vulnerable, looks too young, too naive, where the group towers over him for once and hurts him both physically and emotionally because now they can. 

Tl;dr: Yeah. Oscar’s looks and Oscar’s personality changed things irrevocably. If Ozpin had still looked like Ozpin the group wouldn’t feel half as entitled to this behavior and gaining their respect—from ‘Please don’t address me like that’ to ‘Please understand why I kept secrets’—would be far, far easier. 

#Anonymous #rwby #ozpin #mymetas

[teatalksbooks]

Murder is Bad Manners/Most Unladylike* by Robin Stevens

*The publishers are being cute again and changing the titles for oversea audiences...

Tea Recommendation: English Breakfast, with milk and sugar - this is a middle grade boarding school murder mystery! If you would like to read this and you are not a) 13 or b) in need of the anti-shock properties of milk and sugar-laced tea, forego it, and just make yourself a cup of nice plain black tea. It is also immensely important to acquire cookies for your bunbreak. Hazel likes chocolate and gingernut best, but I think I’d go with shortbread because, again, I am not thirteen. 

I apologize in advance for the length - if you’re not interested in a lot of meta, skip to the end!

The year is 1934. Hazel, from Hong Kong, age thirteen and one year into her boarding school experience in England, loves learning, sweets, and her best friend, Daisy. Together, they form the Detective Society. It’s been all fun and games so far, with cases such as The Case of Lavinia’s Missing Tie, but then Hazel stumbles across the body of a teacher in the gym - and before she can show anyone else, the body disappears. Everyone thinks that Miss Bell has simply run away, but Hazel and Daisy know better, and are determined to solve the mystery and find the killer.

First off, I would like to thank @mirrormasque for recommending these books as the perfect antidote to the exhausting and stressful end of the school year. They are - sweet, well-written, charming, yet still complex enough to be interesting to readers above the intended age group. If you’re a fan of murder mysteries but struggle to find ones in the sweet spot between bleak and cloying, these ones land there pretty much perfectly.

What makes me love this book - and the ones that follow - so much is the way Stevens utilizes voice. Hazel, as a narrator, is perfect - she’s clever, observant, empathetic. But she’s also thirteen. What she sees, she often doesn’t understand, or doesn’t fully interpret, in ways that readers her age or younger will identify with. 

Because of this, Stevens can be inclusive in natural, non-didactic ways. This book is replete with representation - Hazel is Chinese, there are lesbian and bisexual teachers, and there are students in lesbian relationships. In later books, and in this book to some extent, there are students with learning disabilities and students struggling with mental illness. While such inclusivity is a goal for many authors, it’s not easy to do smoothly, and that Stevens achieves it in a completely natural and unobtrusive fashion is impressive. That she manages to work in period-appropriate prejudices and simultaneously make it clear that being from another country or being interested in the same sex is also completely unexceptionable is astonishing.

As an example, when discussing the arrival of The One (the dashing new art teacher), Hazel writes in her case book, “You see, before this semester, the whole school knew that Miss Bell (our science teacher) and Miss Parker (our math teacher) had a secret. They lived together in Miss Parker’s little apartment in town, which had a spare room in it. The spare room was the secret. I did not understand when Daisy first told me about the spare room; now that we are in the eighth grade, though, of course I see exactly what it must mean.” Hazel still doesn’t truly understand, though she pretends she does, in the way of teenagers everywhere. 

However, what her discussion of the labyrinthine relationships between the teachers reveals is this: as far as the school is concerned, this secret is no more astonishing than The One’s subsequent clandestine relationships with Miss Bell and Miss Hopkins, the athletics instructor. Any two teachers in a relationship is a bit of juicy gossip. Yet the adult world and the student world are inherently distinct; everything that happens in the adult world is exotic, but other standards apply amongst the students. There’s a clear distinction made between girls who have “pashes” on each other and girls who are genuinely in love - the first is accepted as part of normal boarding school behavior, and the second is a secret that can damage the reputations of the students involved - and both Hazel and Daisy are explicitly confused about what the difference is. Their lack of understanding and experience with regard to sexuality allow them to identify the hypocrisies inherent in the standards presented to them in a way that feels very natural and observational, rather than didactic.

This does lead to Hazel coming off as pretty immature, however. Hazel reads as a couple of years younger than her canonical age, and I’m on the fence about it. It’s necessary for Hazel and Daisy to be a little older than the target demographic because they are literally solving murders. However, Hazel’s voice is appropriate for the 10-12 age range, which is where the book is aimed. From an audience perspective, it makes sense, but as an older reader, it can be jarring. Her immaturity can be rationalized away - she’s a very sheltered kid, and it was a different time - but since the book also spends a certain amount of time working with the uneasy intersection between the adult and child worlds, it can seem a little counterproductive. However, it may also be key to Daisy and Hazel’s characterization, and to the game the book is based around.

It’s clear from the beginning that initially, the Detective Society is imaginative play. The year before, they had the Pacifism Society and the Spiritualism Society, and this year, since Daisy’s gotten into detective fiction, they’re playing at being detectives. Imaginative play is a huge part of childhood, but it’s also something that starts phasing out around middle school (and certainly high school) as adult life starts both intruding more and becoming more desirable. However, unlike the previous societies, the Detective Society is secret - only Daisy and Hazel are engaged in this game. It’s suggested that it’s because they’re best friends and they don’t want anyone else in on it, but there’s an implication, as well, that the other girls might not take it seriously. When, later in the series, some of the other girls do participate, it becomes clear that it wasn’t much of a secret - and that they weren’t especially interested in it. Their later participation is contingent upon the initial success of the Detective Society, and the later necessity (there’s another murder, of course) of participation (here, it recontextualizes the murder as a game for the other girls, and so makes it safe, as well as controlled).

That Daisy and Hazel are so invested in it is a sign of their immaturity; that Daisy is, as always, the instigator, is a key insight into their dynamics at the beginning of the series. The inequality of their relationship is obvious from the first - although there are only two members of the Detective Society, Daisy has declared herself the president - and Hazel the secretary. There’s no reason at all that Hazel couldn’t be co-president or vice-president of this two-person team, but Daisy does not even admit this as a possibility. Initially, I felt like this should rankle more with Hazel, but it becomes evident fairly quickly that the need for control is integral to Daisy’s character and Hazel is friend enough to let her have it unless the stakes are high enough to warrant protest.

That does not mean that their friendship is unproblematic. From the beginning, Hazel refers to Daisy as “perfect.” Not the perfect English schoolgirl - she’s careful to point out that though Daisy pretends to be the game-for-everything girl that everyone at school wants to be and, failing that, wants to be friends with, she is not, in fact, what she pretends to be. She is wearing a mask to fit in - but whether she’s wearing the mask or not, she still puts herself in a place of power over Hazel. 

Storybook-schoolgirl Daisy is cream-and-roses pretty, old money, funny (but not too funny), always up for a prank and a midnight feast, and infinitely popular. In contrast, Hazel is the new girl, and even worse, she’s foreign. Real Daisy is sharply intelligent, impatient, secretive, and controlling. She calls herself Holmes and Hazel, Watson - and the comparison, as far as she’s concerned, is very apt. Take Sherlock Holmes and transform him into a British schoolgirl in the 1930s, and you get Daisy Wells. Why, at least in this first book, is unclear - we simply see that this is how Daisy is, and that Hazel accepts her for who she is, even when it means letting Daisy diminish her.

Hazel, as chronicler, is on the surface much like canonical Watson. Loyal, empathetic, and cautious, she’s as intelligent as Daisy, but less assertive. Part of that is because she knows that her acceptance at the school has been contingent upon her friendship with Daisy. Hazel is very aware that she is different from the other girls, and while she doesn’t dwell on it, it does inform many of her behaviors. She learns to don a mask from Daisy, to pretend that she is not as intelligent as she is, not as different. For her, being Daisy’s friend, instead of Daisy being hers, is a form of protective camouflage. 

However clear-eyed Hazel is about Daisy, and about their relationship, Daisy’s consistent diminishment of her combines with her own uncertainty about her appearance and leaves Hazel feeling inferior to Daisy much of the time. Hazel was raised in an extraordinarily Anglophilic environment, and has grown up seeing girls like Daisy as the ideal of what a girl should be. Being Daisy’s friend puts her in constant comparison with Daisy - she is quiet, she is not athletic, she is not popular, and most of all, she is not thin and blonde and blue-eyed. While she is confident in her own intellectual capacity and perfectly happy contradicting Daisy when she feels Daisy has, once again, jumped to a conclusion, she is not confident in her body. I blame her dad for that, personally - he’s very sure that Hazel is the smartest, most logical, most morally upright child around, but oh boy does he love him some British everything. It’ll be interesting to see what Stevens does with Hazel’s self-image as she grows up more - in the last book I read, it’s starting to become more of a problem as romantic interests start popping up, and I imagine that in the other three books that are out that are NOT AVAILABLE IN THE US WTF, we get to see even more of that.

The relationship between the two girls is the most interesting part of the book for me, but the other characters are well-drawn, and the plot is solid. So far, I’ve always been able to identify the murderer before the girls do, but in my book, that’s a good thing - I’m thirty, and it means that Stevens is acting in good faith and putting in all the clues. A proper mystery has to be solvable by the reader - if the author holds back the one clue you need to solve the case, it’s cheating! The framing of the story - that it’s a case book - is cute, if not at all convincing, and the ways in which it is a case book will be appealing to young readers, though I find the interruption of the suspect lists to be a little annoying, since we’ve usually just discussed why we’re ruling a suspect out right before we get the list... explaining why we’ve ruled the suspect out.

In that the book is deeply respectful of its readers’ intelligence, it reminds me of Diana Wynne Jones, which makes sense, because Stevens mentions her as one of her favorite authors. According to Jones, writing for young readers is much harder than writing for adults, because kids are so deeply immersed in texts that they pick up on everything, whereas adults need things said two or three times to get it. That ethos is evident in this book is well - it does not condescend to its reader, and because of that, it is enjoyable for all readers, not just for the target demographic.

The last thing I want to mention, since I'm not going to do this for all the books in the series, is that the same thoughtfulness and subtlety about prejudices inherent in the time period (and today...) is also present with regard to historical events and movements in later books, especially the rise of the Nazi party and the remnants of imperialism. It’s pretty great!

tl;dr - a cute murder mystery with complex character relationships, a solvable but satisfyingly complex plot, and diverse characters! Highly recommend. Trigger warnings for murder, blood, unhealthy friendship, but honestly, it’s all appropriate for middle-grade readers.

Amazon - free to read with Kindle Unlimited!

Goodreads

#robin stevens #book review #murder is bad manners #murder is most unladylike #wells and wong #tw: death #tw: unhealthy friendship

[sabbathism]

People don’t like season 2, and here’s what they have to say :

tl;dr: I answer the web’s most vehement complaints about season 2 of American Gods. If you happen to recognize yourself in one of those, then I suggest thinking about it really really hard and, perhaps, giving the show another chance. If you recognize yourself in several of those, please drop the show. It’s not worth wasting your time and especially not ours. (I put a list of helpful cast and production related facts at the end.)

Hi, Nelle here, I’m but a humble fan who wishes to have fun seeing gods bicker and argue among mortals, complete with the craziest of situations, stellar cast and great visuals. And yet I can’t help but hear things when I start browsing this hellsite in quest of juicy fanworks.

Although I’m no Joan Of Arc, I hear voices from above and here’s what I have to shout back (lest I get burned at the stake)  :

“The pacing is all over the place ! It’s too slow !”

Is it tho ? Pacing has been “all over the place” (really meaning: different from what we avid show-viewers are accustomed to) since season 1, we’ve never gotten straight answers out of anything unless we started listening and paying attention to details. 

The book (you know, the source material) has four parts, the fourth serving as an epilogue to the whole story, season 2 is most definitely meant to close part 1 which, allegedly, had the slowest of pace to begin with. And it doesn’t even have half the new narratives the show has been creating. So no, it’s not slow. I promise you things are happening.

“It needs to follow the actual book more !!”

What’s a good adaptation ? Is it something that is 100% truthful to the source, down to every word ? Is it something that should offer something for people who don’t know the source ? Or, on the contrary, be something inseparable from it ?

American Gods as a TV show offers new things for people who have read the book and for those who haven’t, while keeping the beloved moments and aspects from the original material.

Why add or change stuff ? Well because, if you’re a book reader, you get welcomed into the state of existential dread that comes with not knowing what happen next, I promise it’s part of the fun. But also because author Neil Gaiman believes that he can do more, do better, with something that was written 20 years ago and needed the changes in a lot of places. He’s aware that he has, in fact, a show to make, and not a carbon copy of the book, as well as a fanbase that deserves to be challenged and entertained.

“Why taking the focus off Shadow ? He’s barely the protagonist anymore !”

Because there are..... characters ? who are also part of the story ? Like, actual stories need characters ? But alright, I know it can get confusing when you have a lot of those, here’s how you can still tell Shadow is the protagonist : months of advertising and the entirety of season 1 which was spent following Shadow with only minor breaks allowing other characters to breathe. Trust me they need the development too, or then we’ll really have reasons to complain.

You want a narrative focusing solely on staying in Shadow’s head ? Alright. Try the book. But here’s my take on its narrating choice, as a graduate in english literature : it’s boring. To the point where Neil Gaiman himself got sad that he couldn’t follow other characters.

“They’re not giving the POCs enough space ! Where are the coming to america segments ? At least they gave actual insights.”

Out of every piece of fiction, I truly don’t think you want to get angry at American Gods for how much room it’s giving POCs... (a 20% white cast ensemble, POCs and especially WOCs writers and directors on production, ethnically accurate casting and writing, diversity positive messages, etc) Really I’m sure there are many other places in the fictional industry were the question of diversity is more than legitimate. American Gods has yet to be one of them, by far.

As for the Coming To America stuff, well, there’s not that many in the book to begin with. There are a whole bunch for sure, but we’ve got over quite a few of them in season 1. If there’s more believers you want, we’re served with the latest episode 4, with humans worshiping both Old and New, and interacting with gods. I’m sure we can review that point again once the season is over.

“Those white directors don’t even know how to read or write POC characters !”

*cough*

here’s a list of the POC directors and writers on episodes 2 to 5 of season 2 only :

Deborah Chow (director)

Aditi Kapil (writer)

Salli Richardson (director)

Rodney Barnes (writer)

Orlando Jones (writer)

That’s half the entire director-writer team for these episodes, with Neil Gaiman being involved. You’ll have to point out to me exactly what you mean by “not writing right”.

“New Media ? 1. she’s a bitch, 2. her actress is just plain bad, 3. she’s a hurtful stereotype.” 

And here comes perhaps the trickiest one of all... I’m gonna have to bear with you, as much as you’re gonna have to bear with me :

1. Yes. 2. No. 3. Yes, and it’s a problem, but not for the reasons you think.

First of all, and let’s get it out of the way : actor =/= character nor writing. You think the writing is bad and/or that the character is annoying ? Well, it’s certainly not on the actor. You wanna know the actual level of Kahyun Kim’s acting ? Starring in an Alan Cummings play alongside him. We’ve got a lot to discuss but please keep her out of this.

Second, New Media is an absolute bitch of a character. She’s mocking, manipulative, and too ambitious for anyone’s good. A lot of people seem to love her tho and to that I say good ??? I mean, great if you like her, because she’s got as much potential as the rest of these crazy characters, I’m not here to tell you who you should hate and who you should love.

But there’s a problem you shouldn’t ignore, and that its so far she’s not well written. It’s a terrible thing to say in such a show but she’s really not : because we barely see her talking, because we barely got any scene with her (remember what I said about letting character breathe ?), and because what we’ve seen of her so far is the stereotype of the hypersexualized naive asian girl. Complete with tentacle porn scene. (Whether you felt weirded out, amused or utterly disgusted by this is your own valid opinion.)

The character has been officially described as “the goddess of global content”, “a cyberspace chameleon” and “a master of manipulation.” In recent addition to that, actor Bruce Langley (Technical Boy) has said : “New Media’s willing to be perceived as naive because if she’s being underestimated, when she does make her move, you’d never see it coming, but she knows way more than she lets on.” He then goes on to compare her to Gillian Anderson’s Media.

This proves that the way New Media comes off isn’t a problem of intent (the naive part is calculated and they want the character to be duplicitous, falsely seductive), but of handling, and it’s just as bad. Sure, Gillian’s Media also knew more than she let on for about as much screen time -I’m sure New Media will get to her four scenes in one season-, but she had been grounded in the narrative as her own character, she’s had her exposition speech and time. (See her meeting with Shadow in S01E02) We’ve yet to see that much of Kahyun’s New Media.

Because they do not give her what she needs to be more than a two dimensional character, we find ourselves with a shallow character who doesn’t give too many signs of the thought process everyone seemed to have put into crafting her beforehand, including Kahyun’s acting. This is a serious issue that needs to be handled before the season ends, or she will just stand out like a nasty spot in an overall incredible piece of fiction. Hell even Laura (another very unlikable character) manages to be a great addition to the narrative. Come on people.

You can of course argue that they could have gone for another type or personality for her, other than naive and sex-oriented, for a korean actress to play. You’re right, there’s a lot of aspect of social media that could have been put to work, but not only are we gonna need more than two scenes (at least the tentacles aren’t a regular occurrence so far), but it’s just like they could have not made the Technical Boy hang Shadow. 

The New Gods appear as the ‘general bad idea’ we promote through and associate with their element. Mr. World is gonna be the creepy looking government dude, Tech is gonna be the lanky rude geek, they’re gonna be cold, insensitive and selfish. They’re gonna be the things we don’t like. Throughout season 1, Tech Boy was in the same place we find ourselves in with New Media : he was the loud white racist teenager hating on anon on the net, he was unlikable from start to finish, and it’s only once we got inputs from his actor, the writers, and then now that they’re showing more of his story and personality well after season 1 that we see him as the fully complex and interesting character he is.

Let’s all keep our wits about us, not engulf ourselves in blind hate or love, and encourage the writers to prove us all that this character is worth the while like her actress says.

(I still won’t forgive the bitch, but at least she won’t stick out like a sore thumb.)

(if you want Kahyun’s input on her character and experience, here’s a lengthy interview)

"They don't even know how to write their own character, period !"

By all means, tell me your basis of characterization to declare that characters who didn’t even have enough screentime to have much substance in season 1 (except Shadow, but strangely no one complains about him) aren’t written right when their creator is literally hovering over the writers and actors shoulders, because he wants them to be developed and written right.

It’s not Harry Potter, Neil isn’t making up facts about them to make himself look better, maybe accept that the vision you had in your mind wasn’t entirely accurate to the truth of the characters and that’s okay ? You can still write them yourself however you want, tell the stories you want to tell, Neil has made it very clear that he doesn’t consider fan ideas less valuable than his.

“Bryan has such as specific, unique vision ! They’re just trying to copy it and they’re failing.”

Definitely. No really, you’re right, I’m a big fan of Bryan’s work, I lost my mind like everyone else when he said he wasn’t giving up on Hannibal season 4.

But you know who else has a unique vision ? The seven directors who took over (four of those are women) and the show-runner who had already worked with him beforehand. They’re not trying to copy his style, they’re trying to make a smooth transition so fans like you don’t have a hard time mourning the terrible loss of Bryan and Michael. And for every person who noticed the changes, there were just as many who haven’t even paid attention to it.

Concept : some people may watch shows/movies for the story and the characters, not just for who’s behind the camera. (As far as I’m concerned, I actually like the image better. Everything was killer in season 1, and I think it’s even nicer in season 2.)

“Bryan gave us Salim and the Jinn, and now they’re just gonna be cast aside because those directors lack the LGBT+ sensibility Bryan has !”

Alright, yup, sure. As a member of the community myself, I totally recognize that someone who’s also part of it will know firsthand of the subtleties and details to give the best representation possible on screen. The example of Salim and the Jinn is perfectly fine, since the entire segment was indeed beautifully made. But if we cannot allow people from outside to ponder and think about our lives through writing (which is probably the best way for them to start understanding and broadening their mindset), how can we expect wide representation to improve in any meaningful way ? Especially considering that the show has been casting LGBT+ actors, in an environment where the cast is listened to and solicited on their opinions. 

And especially when Bryan was not the one who gave you Salim and the Jinn. (Because I’ve seen people genuinely believe it.) Neil Gaiman did. He wrote a gay muslim couple in his book 20 years ago, way before it was considered a political statement. He’s also the one who gave strict and specific directions as to how these very characters should be handled. Because if he expanded Salim and his fire boyfriend Jinn’s story from a one-shot to a full story integrated into his entire narration, then it’s certainly not to pull a “bury your gays” or make them miserable. No need to be LGBT+ to be a decent writer and human being.

“Production was a mess anyway, I knew it’d turn out like this. It sucks without Bryan.” 

Define “mess”. Because all the incendiary reports we got throughout early production had been utter bullshit.

Showrunners being “fired” ? Bullshit. “Disastrous” organization ? Bullshit. “Screaming matches” between directors and actors ? Bullshit. Actors “refusing” to come back ? Bullshit.

Every report that wasn’t made through direct input of the cast or production team was not only wildly exaggerated, but also fake ? But please, hear it from Neil himself :

It was weirder for me to read some of the stuff online that said, “Oh, my god, American Gods, behind the scenes, is all falling apart.” I was going, “But they just shot four episodes, and everything is fine. They’re doing some re-shoots, but they’re doing less re-shoots than they did in Season 1.” [...]

I was reading Steven Bochco’s biography on the tube, going into work on Good Omens, every morning, and learning about what went down on Hill Street Blues, and then on NYPD Blue. That was worse, by a factor of thousands, than anything that happened on American Gods. A showrunner came, and a showrunner left. That’s not even an unusual thing. [...] The weirdest thing for me was putting out a thing on Twitter on Season 2, and having a bunch of people go, “We thought this was canceled.” No, it’s not canceled. In its own mad way, it’s on schedule.  

(Source)

The show was never in any danger, much less in jeopardy. It's overreactions to false rumors and dramatic assumptions that can kill a show faster than a showrunner leaving. You want to be critical of a production ? Go ahead, and check your sources and facts. Please. I promise most of the time it’s not worth the worry, much less losing all hope.

“Bryan cared, they’re just ruining what he’s built.”

I dare you to watch any cast interview and tell me these people don’t care about the show, and that they do not value the work everyone else (from hair department to makeup artists, producers, writers, directors and costume team) puts into it as well.

I’ve watched my fair share of shows, I’m curious about production and behind-the-scenes material in general, and I’ve never seen a group of people being so genuinely happy and passionate about what they do and create together.

Neil took time out of preparing Good Omens (which he was showrunning himself) to be more active because he knew things would be different between season 1 and 2. Ricky Whittle (Shadow) had his contract reviewed to better accommodate shooting and planning. Orlando Jones (Nancy) contributed to writing episodes (especially regarding Black history and representation) and brought inputs on characterization. Ian Mcshane (Mr. Wednesday) participated in directing when he explicitly said during season 1 that he wasn’t interested in working as a director on this kind of show.

And that’s for the well-known names only. Go on the American Gods hashtag on instagram, you’ll find all the various artists who participated in crafting all the details found in new episodes. They’re out there talking about how excited they were to work on it all, how they did it, the love they have for the show and crew. They’re active and positive in every way you can be, please tell me how much they don’t care.

Production made the choice of taking its time making this season rather than rushing it when it’s been very clear that delaying can cause massive loss of viewers, because they care more about how the show comes out than what people actually think. They took in stride whatever problem a show of this magnitude could naturally encounter (again guys, no disaster happened) and worked to solve it the best way they could because they were perfectly aware that we fans care. And somehow that’s what made some of yall disappointed ??

If you seriously think Bryan (and Michael, some people forget about him smh) cared more about American Gods than these people -when he, in fact, cared just as much-, then by all means, leave right with him.

(Also uhm, idk if you noticed, but they’re both still credited in the fucking opening. Because, you know, they’re going by the bases they’ve settled.)

Some (hopefully) helpful facts :

+ Bryan and Michael weren’t fired, they walked out of the show after mutual understanding with the rest of the production that they weren’t agreeing on budget and realization. They concluded that pushing it would just be harmful to the show.

+ Likewise, Jesse Alexander (second showrunner) wasn’t evicted but stepped out once disagreements rose as to how to handle the end of the season. Again, they found a solution fairly quickly.

+ Gillian Anderson had only signed for season 1. Whether her character will ever be seen again (probably in flashbacks) is entirely up in the air. No promises, no impossibilities.

+ Both Kristin Chenoweth (Ostara) and Chris Obi (Anubis) have not been able to contribute to season 2 due to conflicts in their schedules.

+ Neil Gaiman has been much more involved in the production of season 2 as he had finished shooting Good Omens, something which took up most of his time when season 1 was produced.

+ Taking time producing a show =/= production being a disaster.

+ Always go for the reports/articles involving interviews and/or inputs of the persons actually working on the project (cast members, producers, writers, directors). Those are the most reliable sources you can fight. (Just remember that there’s always a possibility for fake news/drama online !)

#please do message me if you want clarification/to discuss #summary + facts in the tl;dr and at the very end #american gods #starz #freemantle media #american gods season 2 #neil gaiman #bryan fuller #michael green #ricky whittle #new media #gillian anderson #kahyun kim #rant #my writing #bitch this is so long