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morwensteelsheen · 3 years

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farawyn and borodred for the ship ask game thing?

thank you so much!! :)

okay i’ll start with borodred because for some unfathomable reason i actually got there first —

1. What made you ship it?

One of my favourite Types of ships is the Elder Statesmen Of War-type set-ups, where it’s less about people brought together through theatrical romantic gestures and more about the steadiness of people who are going through similar (immensely difficult) circumstances, who know that in their hearts they’re always going to put their duty to that cause first, but still seek out human comfort in other people who will understand what their priorities are and why.

I think there’s also a lot of similarities about the kind of helplessness they both face despite having this tremendous innate strength. Both of them still have to deal with family dynamics that are complex (made more complex by the war) and that can’t be fixed just by their own sheer will power; both of them die these utterly unnecessary deaths (not that death makes a ship but I think in this instance it actually points to the constant tragedy these guys face); and both of them are meant to be the principal figures of their families and people and are ultimately sidelined by the cruel mechanisations of war and the forward march of history or whatever wanky term there is for it — my apologies to ep thompson's ghost, dont haunt me bro.

Plus there’s obviously the interesting thread raised when Faramir starts bitching about Gondor and likens Gondor (and by very explicit extension, Boromir) to Rohan. That always made me go ‘Hmmmmmm, wonder what else Boromir liked about Rohan,’ lmao.

Anyways for me the ship is the equivalent of Star Wars’ Kanan and Hera or (my OTP to end all others) Luke and Wedge, just people getting by on love and duty and without big ol fancy romance.

2. What are your favorite things about the ship?

The fanon, I think, really makes it, as with so many other LOTR ships. battlefield manners, by themightypen is essentially the definitive take for me on them — these two guys who are just so fucking exhausted, man, but still overcome by defensive love for their families, even if their (foster-)siblings are naïve fools. That I just love, love, love. Plus I think they’re unique for their ability to pretty comfortable explore the relationship between Gondor & Rohan in advance of the Ring War without having to stray too far into AU, which I always appreciate.

3. Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

Not really, tbh, except in that I don’t think Boromir is necessarily as laddy as people like to portray him. I’m happy to play into it in, say, my modern AUs because I think that’s a fun and sweet niche for him, but I am a bit 🤪 about Boromir as this kind of reckless, drunken playboy (not least because I think that’s a much funnier niche for Faramir to fill, at least when he’s younger). Chapter Four of Swaddledog’s Hearts and Minds gets my preferred Boromir characterisation absolutely spot on, I think.

And now, sigh, the ultimate OTP, Farawyn —

1. What made you ship it?

For starters, I think I am obsessed with Éowyn in a way I’ve never quite been obsessed with any other fictional character. I came to reading LOTR at this moment in my life where I was intensely frustrated about everything — trapped inside permanently (helplessly!) because of the pandemic, just starting a new political organisation that I truly believed in but that was still making me feel like shit, facing down an untenable about of work, and, fundamentally, really, really hating being a woman and what that means. And along comes Éowyn, who is bitter, who is cold, who is ANGRY, and who doesn’t perform joy or softness or gentleness just because people expect her to. She’s this seminal Woman Of War in so many ways, I think the kind of person a lot of us wish we could be. She’s got her emotional taps cut off at the source, she holds her head high and faces down unimaginable personal and political terrors, and at the end of it all still has this abiding love for her family that, I would argue, is almost unparalleled by anyone else in the book.

After all that, she gets this incredible moment of emotional catharsis (or what we expect to be emotional catharsis): “no living man am I!” She undertakes THE greatest martial act of the Ring War, and in that moment there’s this unbelievably sophisticated dialogue happening about gender (“Éowyn it was, and Dernhelm also”), and leadership (Merry finding his courage not because of the immediate scenario of the Witch-king, but because he’s spurred into it by Éowyn’s presence), and love and care.

And then we learn that no, actually, this glorious act of violence wasn’t the emotional catharsis we thought it would be. She gets to ride to war, she gets to throw herself headlong at death, and in the end that hopeless act of individualism isn’t really what does it for her. She’s still left desolate and despairing, and actually all of her problems haven’t gone away.

And then we need to rewind a bit, because along comes Faramir, who is gentle, and is kind, and does seem to believe in joy, but not because people expect it — actually it's made abundantly clear nobody expects it — but because it’s something quite innate to how he figures the world. And he’s a huge fucking nerd too. I have a lot of thoughts on Faramir’s flaws and why I find them endearing, which I won’t put here, but almost immediately you get this sense of a guy who’s quite melodramatic, good humoured, and very much not made to live in a time of war.

But he’s also clear-headed about war and what it requires (tactically, if not strategically, though that’s a post for another day), but who is kind of cynical and weary of it in his own unique way. And it’s a unique cynicism given his personal circumstances because he’s the second son of The great family of Gondor, he’s apparently — though with some big ol’ question marks hanging about the extent — very able to command some of the elite units in the realm, and what’s more than that, he’s got all these fantastical powers (the light mind reading to start, to say nothing of this apparently magical ability to command animals too. bruh.). By all accounts he should be this brazen hot mess, but he’s not. He’s desperate to claw his way out of this war-torn cage of expectation his people have for how a man should comport himself in time of war. Is it a little naïve? Sure. A little fussy? Absolutely. But does it point to that same desperation that Éowyn has? Yes! But also the practicality, like, neither of them are really enjoying the circumstances they live under, but good fucking god are they both able to Make It Work.

So finally we get to the Houses of Healing and what is the finest and most aggressively romantic writing of LOTR. Seriously, it’s so fucking much. It’s breathtaking. It reminds me quite viscerally of this fabulous quote from Les Mis:

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.

At some point I will devote more time to talking about the two reasons line, and the blissful Queen of Gondor speech, but I think to me that big, important line is: “And then her heart changed, or at least she understood it; and the winter passed, and the sun shone upon her.”

It’s not about Éowyn changing herself entirely (though, I think, it really does bear mentioning that she does change, and that’s every bit as important to understanding that scene as it is romantic), it’s about Éowyn coming to terms with how to live with herself as herself, and how to live in communion with someone else. She can’t just cut people out anymore, and she can’t just treat them as objects of infatuation as she did with Aragorn, she has to reckon with people as they are. And that’s sort of the moment where I knew I was about to plunge fully off the deep end with these two and never know a moments’ peace again, lmao.

2. What are your favorite things about the ship?

Someone on here once called Farawyn a love letter to women and, by god, yes, exactly that. I love the capacity for emotional intimacy, that is beautiful in ways I can’t express. To me, though, my favourite thing is the promise of life they speak of. Not as in oh they shag loads and have babies (though not opposed to that, obviously), but in the sense that unlike Aragorn and Arwen, who are always going to be buried under/burdened with the crushing weight of history and tradition, Éowyn and Faramir are going out yonder those hills and they’re going to do some real cottagecore farming shit. Obviously with all the trappings of rank and nobility and whatnot, but they, unique to anybody else in the books, get to sow this new idea of what life should be. They are, outside of Aragorn, the single most powerful people in Gondor. Éowyn’s got the ear of a king, a steward (which is essentially a prime-ministerial deal here), and functionally her own prince (if the hobbits are to be believed when they refer to it as essentially hers). I suspect that, in life, there were remarkably few arguments she wasn’t winning, and that Ithilien probably trended towards the jumped up noble hippie camp Tolkien so desperately wanted Oxford to be (or, in other words — Cambridge, lol).

3. Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

Yeah, man, everybody stop treating Faramir like he’s a big fucking crybaby and Éowyn like she’s some kind of shrieking 2010-era tumblr girl.

One of the single most important lines defining Faramir’s character is when Denethor roasts his ass for always trying to appear noble and lordly, if you ignore every other piece of textual evidence we have about him, what part of that line makes you think Faramir’s some simpering daisy? And why would you want to link tremendous emotional intelligence and care with being too limp-wristed to function, lol??? Like I struggle loads with writing Faramir, because I have never once in my life tried to be noble or self-restrained, so find it hard to get into that mindset, but better, I think, to imagine him too closed off than to do this wilting flower song and dance lmao.

And stop making Éowyn out to be this over-emotional angst machine. She’s got problems, yes, and she’s sure as shit got a lot of angst, but at almost every point in the book where we’re overtly dealing with her emotions, she’s sublimating them into something else. One of the most serious times we see her cry is when she’s fighting with Aragorn about riding out, and after that moment she literally tries to kill herself. Those tears aren’t standard, man, that’s a real watershed (lol) moment for her. You have to read around what the text is saying to get a better feel why everybody’s constantly calling her cold and distant.

#god this is probably obnoxiously long because i can't do cuts on my phone #but refuse to open the tumblr website on my laptop lmao #faramir #éowyn #boromir #théodred #farawyn #borodred #god sorry for these fucking tags man im just trying to make my blog slightly more organised #i just have a lot of thoughts #i should really write more metas it would probably help my writing out quite a bit #asks #meta

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daisylincs · 3 years

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Today is, officially, the last day of 2020 - so it's literally just in time that I'm getting to @aosrecweek's amazing challenge. But that does go to show the nature of this crazy year a little bit, right? Time has just been INSANE, and I honestly cannot believe it's so close to over.

That said, I want to put it out there that everyone - absolutely everyone - who created something in this mad year, is a SUPERHERO. Like. We could have hidden away in dark corners, curled into little balls, and lost touch with our creativity entirely - but instead, we made some of the most fantastic content I have ever seen. And, excuse the language, but that is fucking amazing, of each and every single one of us. We're bloody INCREDIBLE, you guys. We really are.

Now, the rules of this challenge dictate that I've got to start with some of my own things, then repeat with the same number of creations by other people. So I'm going to do that, and I apologise for the sheer length (and self-plug-iness) of what is about to follow - but, bloody incredible, remember? I really mean that. 💜💜💜

My Own:

you could call me babe for the weekend - 19k of Spideychelle being oblivious, mutually pining IDIOTS while being snowed in. And, you know, fake dating. (This thing was SO MUCH FUN to write and though, yeah, it got completely out of control, as evidenced by the 19k, I still really love it.)

'tis the damn season - my first attempt at writing a multi-chap, and, yeah, it only has one chapter as of now, but I really love said chapter. Basically, it's Daisy and Mackelena being friends, and honestly just the BEST friends - I adore the style I managed to achieve in this thing. Plus, the Skimmons I have planned up next is going to be da bomb.

the closest thing - Philindaisy plus fake family. Also; amusement parks. And for a fangirl like me - well, it was pretty much a dream come true to write!

oh valley of plenty - in this fic, I basically told myself, so AoS won't give us Huntingbird in the finale? Fine. I'll just do it myself then - in the fluffiest way possible. And that's exactly what I did - making them, and their kids, be best friends in Perthshire.

maybe life should be about more - a very angsty Skimmons and Daisy-centric AU, focusing on the internalised homophobia Daisy has experienced through her life, and shaking it off (and eventually, y'know, getting together with Jemma.)

and it's dark in a cold december (but i've got you to keep me warm) - Fitzsimmons just make such a supreme pairing for hurt/comfort, what with how insanely well they understand each other and care about each other, so I'm really glad for the Fitzsimmons Secret Santa giving me the chance to write this! Basically, this follows our science duo through a stressful mission on Christmas Eve (so yes, it's a mission fic!!) and realising that the two of them can do anything together.

july second - ahhh, one of my personal favourites to write! Daisy birthday surprise fluff will always be top-notch for me, especially for all the team-as-family fluff you can add in, especially especially that this is set in Staticquake times! Also, it's from Hunter's point of view, which will forever be the most insanely fun thing to write, I do think.

i just wanna be with you - man, I'm such a big royal fan, so getting the chance to write a modern royalty AU for my OTP was nothing short of amazing!! This is Princess Daisy and her fiancée Lincoln Campbell at their official engagement interview

see the line where the skye meets the sea - shameless season 1 bby Bus Kids fluff, featuring movie nights, singalongs and... so much fluff your teeth will rot. Also I'm really freaking proud of the pun in the title okay

'cause all that you are is all that i'll ever need - Huntingbird waking up together fluff (because, fight me, Huntingbird in their sweet moments is one of the sweetest things you will ever get to read or write.) This is also my, fluffy, take on the origin of the Franny's Saloon keychain.

we love you, we love you (and we hope you love we too) - aha, my first polyship fic! Also my first try at some actually fancy HTML formatting (forever thanks to Kat for explaining.) Both of these things combined to form a fic that even I think is ridiculously fluffy and funny, and kinda amazing, at that.

and man I don't know where the time goes (but it sure goes fast like that) - Another Bus Kids movie night fic, but this one set post-season 7, and reflecting on how far they've come. A little bit more hurt/comfort-y than it's pure fluff prequel, but still super fluffy and soft. And, of course, with a happy ending.

she shares my dreams, i hope that someday, i'll share her home - snowy Fitzsimmons fluff, complete with them falling in love at the Winter Olympics, as you do.

then you walked in and my heart went boom - 16k of Dekesy for the wife, and remarkable for that, because literally a month ago from this, I hated Dekesy with my entire soul. Then I started reading Kat's fics, and, well, fell in love with them... so much so that I wrote sixteen thousand words of enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, bed sharing holiday fluff for them.

a love like that - a Fitzsimmons Cinderella AU, featuring my two favourite science babies, in true science bby style, falling in love over science and how stupid the whole courting thing is. Also, Daisy makes a brief appearance, and she's the freaking best.

ever after - ah, probably the one single fic I'm proudest of. A post-season 7 Daisy character study focusing on her emotional rollercoaster re: losing her family/things never being the same again, which just achieves... an emotional level that I have never managed to replicate again. I was full-on sobbing while writing it, and, guys, it also part-holds the Closest To Making Kat Cry prize.

blue - Daisy character study spanning snapshots of seven seasons, and before - but tied together by something blue in every moment. Researching for this, and finding all the blue moments, was very interesting, and immensely satisfying, especially since all the moments where a little bit of blue was present actually combine to chronicle Daisy's journey on the show remarkably well.

who is that girl I see - the one time I decided to write straight angst, and straight angst with no happy ending. Melinda May post-Bahrain, folks.

take my hand, take my whole life too - aww, the first thing I wrote that I really and truly loved. A Staticquake and Fitzsimmons Actors AU, featuring a proposal on set and INCREDIBLE amounts of fluff and softness.

hold out your hand, 'cause friends will be friends - the wife's favourite, and, as second fics go, pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. It's a Soulmates AU for Staticquake and Mackelena, with the focus being on DaisyMack friendship, and lots of denial, angst, and guilt about finding their soulmates. (They figure it out eventually, don't worry - it's me, of course I made them happy.)

Fitzsimmons + Fake Dating moodboard - Fake dating will always be FAB, and picturing it out in a moodboard - especially for my clueless bby best friends in love - was the best, and super satisfying.

Staticquake + Orange moodboard - One of the cooler ideas I had for Trick or Treat (which I still have not finished, heaven help me) was to make a series of moodboards for my OTP plus different colours. This orange one is just so light, and cheerful, and happy, and honestly I kinda adore it.

This Philindaisy + Family Moodboard - making moodboards can be insanely frustrating when you just can't find the photo that fits exactly right. With this one, however, I found all the pics I needed pretty insanely fast, and, better, the whole thing just worked, and really nicely so, too.

This Bus Kids + Baking Cookies moodboard - there's absolutely NO faults to be found with tiny, adorable Skye, Fitz and Jemma concocting choc chip cookies - but I'm actually doing a tiny cheat here, because, cute as my moodboard here is, the accompanying fic by my love @eowima is the SWEETEST and best thing you could ever wish for!!!

This Daisy Johnson Appreciation Week Photoset - Day 3 of Daisy Johnson Appreciation Week focused on an emotion, and I picked confidence and power, because honestly, it's nothing short of amazing how confident and powerful our gorgeous girl has become.

This Daisy Johnson Appreciation Week Photoset - One of the times I wish I could gif, because this quote about struggling though never giving up just suits Daisy perfectly. The photos I found are cool, though, and I mean, it's Daisy, so that's already absolutely fabulous.

Other People's:

I managed to find twenty-six of my own things that I liked enough to put up there (because, yes, I'm that big a dork, 26 things for me being 26 is the way to go :D) Anyway, now that gives me the amazing chance to spotlight twenty-six of my favourite creations by my FANTASTIC mutuals! 😍

To start, my wife - Kat said I couldn't put everything she's ever written on here, so, ugh, I guess I'll just do my top five then. *grumbling* Everything by Kat is on here in spirit, though!!

Chasing Cars (even after the story ends) by @aleksandrachaev - the epic Dekesy roadtrip AU and incredible Daisy character study itself, which, I do believe, finishes today!! Words aren't enough to describe how freaking AMAZING this thing is, or how spectacularly well characterised. Just: if you haven't read this yet, you are missing out. You will laugh, you will groan, you will want to wrap Daisy in a very tight hug, and you will probably cry, too. This fic just has it all, really!

there goes the maddest man this town has ever seen by @aleksandrachaev - the post-season 7 Deke-crashes-the-Framework-Zoom-call fic I didn't know I needed (but spent the next two weeks rereading every single night.) It is absolutely INCREDIBLE, with all the Deke & Team feels we missed in the final outro scene, and honestly just the most fantastic writing. I cannot recommend it enough!

To Box It Up And Start Again (everything must go) by @aleksandrachaev - bloody hell, this BROKE me. Deke never really got to say goodbye in canon, but Kat gave him the chance to do it here. And, my freaking GOODNESS, she made it so incredibly bittersweet and heart-shattering. 10/10

i am a leaf on the wind by @aleksandrachaev - a little bit of a stretched-out, reflective moment in the season 7 finale. As Daisy lingers on the edge of death, she reflects on all the lives she could have had - and, man, what a study in bittersweetness!! This entire fic is utterly incredible, and something I think all Daisy fans should read.

Falling Into Place by @aleksandrachaev - here's a tiny cheat from me (sorry, babes, lmao) because technically this isn't one fic, but a series of three. Way too amazing to miss out on, though!! Set mid-season 7, this has the Chronicoms go after a young Mary Sue Poots to kill Quake before she can become a problem for them. They stop the Chronicoms, yes, but not without a TREMENDOUS dose of feels and hurt/comfort. There's also a wonderful little dose of Dekesy friendship, and then an adult adoption (!!) that honestly made my entire day to read. Actually, that's true for the entire series - I really canNOT yell about it enough!!

destroyer of worlds by @bobbimorseisbisexual - a study in incredible parallels between Jiaying's daughters. Utterly breathtakingly done, this will give you ALL the feels for this small and complex Inhuman family.

Muscle Memory by @robotgort and @bobbimorseisbisexual - a Huntingbird!! Bones!! AU!! And also a collaboration between two of the most fabulous Huntingbird authors in the fandom - honestly, what more can you ask for?! This will make you laugh, and gasp, and wince, and keep you guessing at each new plot twist (and also screaming at your screen for Hunter and Bobbi to get their acts together and TALK ABOUT IT.) In short: it's completely and utterly amazing, and I cannot, cannot recommend it enough!!

You Belong Among the Wildflowers by @libbyweasley - a freaking incredible Scis & Spies Regency AU! I only just started reading, but I was hooked all the way through, especially on the way Libby writes all four characters' complex relationships (and their attraction, and their history!) Everything about it is just completely stunning, and I for one cannot WAIT for these beautiful idiots to figure out they all belong together.

Family Snapshot by @tomatobookworm - if it's family fluff you're after, especially Staticquake family fluff, look no further! This tremendously soft and utterly amazing fic follows a day in the lives of a pregnant Daisy and her husband Lincoln, and their not-so-little family of Inhumans, both adopted and biological. There's also shopping with Grandma May, lots of feels, lots of shippiness, and just AMAZINGNESS all the way through!!

Best Day Ever by @loved-the-stars-too-fondly - Jemma and Daisy want to adopt a pet, and make a very special trip to Wisconsin to do it. Also, whether he knows who he is or not, Jemma has an important question to ask Cal - and just, AHHHH, everything about this is utterly stunning! For starters, Aubrey's writing is FANTASTIC, and the scene she sets is absolutely beautiful, and so very bittersweet. I was actually misting up a little with happy tears towards the end of this - really, I cannot recommend this enough, to any Skimmons fan.

so why don't we go somewhere only we know by @loved-the-stars-too-fondly - more Skimmons (platonic this time, though), more hurt/comfort, and, yes, again, more absolutely INCREDIBLE writing. This one is canon compliant, following a shaken Jemma struggling to sleep after Maveth, and how Daisy finds a way to help her out. Incredibly sweet, tender and BEAUTIFULLY written, this one was an instant favourite the moment I read it!

Unspoken by @anxiouslynumbme - a birthday fic for yours truly, and, honestly, one of the most STUNNING Staticquake introspectives I've read. It follows Daisy and Lincoln in a beautifully tender missing moment in season 3, with them both realising their feelings, and just... AHHHHHHHH, everything about it is utterly incredible!! I cannot, cannot recommend this gem of a fic enough

the thing about water droplets and ruffled hair by @que-mint-tea - here's another fic that proves, once and for all, how good Kat's Dekesy is, because it managed to convert T to write some Dekesy smut. And, oh my GOSH, what Dekesy smut - so goshdarn angsty, but so FANTASTICALLY characterised and written that it leaves you more than a little breathless, and gaping at your screen. The first chapter initially left us on the most HORRIFIC cliffhanger, but then T fixed it, and it's just... this thing is really a whole new level of emotional writing, raw and gripping and intensely perfect for both of these characters. My haw still drops whenever I think of this thing, and how utterly AMAZING it was, so yeah. Fic rec!!!

beautiful stranger, there you are by @justanalto - I do believe I still owe Serena a long and very gushy comment on this thing, because, MAN, does it ever deserve that!! Pipsy and fake dating, with the most HILARIOUSLY incredible writing, plot and characterisation, and honestly just a giddy "askhdfkhsfh" whenever I think back to how much I enjoyed it. Yup, it was that good.

Jumping to conclusions by @eowima - a very special one, because it marks my love Océane's first venture into writing AoS fic! It's an AU of 1x06 (the Fitzsimmons episode of s1) where Fitz does actually jump out of the plane to save Jemma. Realisations of feelings, and some of the most genuinely FANTASTIC Fitz characterisation I've read in a while, follow - and, yup, I was shouting at my screen for them just to get together already. Amazing stuff, really!!

Look into your eyes and the sky's the limit by @eowima - okay, this. This. Another gift for me, and one that I will probably treasure forEVER, because it is just?? so?? utterly?? perfect?? Just for starters, the title is a Hamilton reference - and then the theme of Hamilton references continues into the fic itself, I'm delighted to say. There's also the most BEAUTIFUL, playful Skimmons friendship, and teasing, and then of course the bet about who can make out with their crush first... Staticquake & Fitzsimmons perfection. And all rendered in Océane's delightful, best-thing-ever-to-read writing!! I'm going into a giddy keyboard smash just THINKING about this, so yeah, cannot recommend it enough.

lullabies and clear blue skies by @springmagpies and @bobbimorseisbisexual - okay, I never thought I'd catch myself shipping FitzBobbi, let alone shipping it this hard, but... wow. Maggie and Al teamed up to completely blow me away, and MELT MY WHOLE ENTIRE HEART with the sheer cuteness of this!! It features Fitz, Bobbi and adopting two daughters, and it's just the most tender, beautiful development through that little family - I love it so, so much.

We made all the wrong choices by @browneyedgenius - the winner of the AoS Angst War 2020, how could I not include this one? It is such a well-deserved win, though, whoa - I was sobbing, full-on sobbing, at least twice while reading. It follows the season 5 team through the events of the time-loop, after they failed to save the world - and, oh my gosh, it ripped my heart right out of my chest, but beautifully so. Everything about this fic just hits so hard, and it's written so well - yeah, really a most AMAZINGLY deserved win, for an utterly SHATTERINGLY incredible fic.

I threw stones at the stars (but the whole sky fell) by @nazezdha321 - this is Z showing us all how to write a backstory for a minor character, and write it so well that everyone's hearts break all over again when she dies. This one is about Victoria Hand, and it builds a stirring and profound childhood for her, also making her rise through the ranks of SHIELD and just her entire character mean so much more. Really, fic-wise, this is goals, and I take my hat off to you, Z, 1000%, for writing it.

in which the universe is put together by @besidemethewholedamntime - Rebecca's emotional writing, particularly Fitzsimmons' emotions, is incomparable, and she proves it all over again in this fic. If follows Fitz and Jemma before, after and during the bloodwork, and I just... wow, honestly. The emotion!! And the characterisation!! Absolutely stunning, and honestly all I could wish for in a we-had-time fic.

Agents of SHIELD Season 8 by @egumal - THIS. This, this, this, oh my gosh - as fix-it fics go, this has to be the most spectacular one I have ever read. What it does is find a way - a potentially canon compliant way, too - to bring back Lincoln Campbell, and reunite Staticquake. Basically: just about as season 7 finishes, the Astro Ambassadors get an unexpected visitor from another timeline, who asks them to come help out against Hive. Case in point, Daisy meets her lost love again (... but he has no idea who she is) and also has to relive the Fallen Agent drama. It all gets even more complicated when Kora restores Lincoln's memories, and Daisy meets the full team Deke has assembled around him in the 33 years (for him) that they've been apart... in short, this is one of the most thorough, well-written and downright SHOCKING plot-twist-wise fics that you will ever read, and honestly, saying "I can't recommend it enough" is an understatement. This thing is thd BEST, plain and simple!

Black Roses aren't real (but you and I are) by @ohwriteiforgot - ahhhh, a fic that will always have an incredibly special place in my heart, because it introduced me to one of my best fandom friends. The main focus is on Clintasha, it's true, but it's also a crossover with AoS in the sense that Clint was adopted by Coulson and May. Also, Daisy is his little sister, and their bond is gold. Also - there's Staticquake!! And flower shops!! And rivals to friends to lovers!! All I'm going to say is, what more can you ask for?!

A book to shield my story by @maybebrilliant - Staticquake High School AU, ahhhhhhhh!! There are only two chapters out so far, but the way this is shaping up is making my DAY - with Daisy as the new girl who meets Lincoln and his group of friends, and, though her foster parents are absolutely shit, starts to find actual happiness in a school for the first time in her life. Also - THE REFERENCES. Guys. I'm crazy for those, and in this book, so are my favourite dorks, Daisy and Lincoln - and let me tell you, it's nothing short of the best thing ever.

This AoS Finale Gif Edit by @heysteverogers - AoS really has been the most INCREDIBLE journey through the years, but what's really made it special is the company - and that's summed up perfectly in this gorgeous gifset. Also, the graphics on this are just, ahhhh, stunning - I'm in awe, and I've spent very long periods of time just looking at this thing in a state of heart-eyes.

This AoS Finale Gif Edit by @jemannesimms - combining Auld Lang Syne and the final scenes of my favourite show was a raw emotional - but utterly brilliant experience - for me. It's just so absolutely beautiful, and perfectly suited to the team, and their goodbyes!! Breathtaking editing work here, too.

This Daisy as Peter Parker and May as Tony Stark moodboard by @agentsofcomedyandchaos - ahhhh, a crossover of two of my favourite fandoms!! And what a lovely one, too - the colour scheme, quotes, and just the whole FEEL of this is absolutely genius, and I am guilty of being inspired by way too many fic ideas by it. Stunning stuff!!

And... whoa, that was long, but I really do feel that we deserve a bit of a proper pat on the back after creating such magical content in such a messed up year. So that's the note I'm going to leave you with for 2020, my friends: hell-year or no, look at the absolute beauty we were still able to create!! We really are freaking amazing, guys.

#aos best of 2020 #fic rec #massive fic rec list #and honestly; WHAT a list!!#despite this utter hellstorm of a year #we as a fandom have still been nothing short of INCREDIBLE #and honestly; I am SO proud of us #💜💜💜

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ailec-12 · 3 years

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Today, September and Calendar

Thanks!

Today: Have you made any progress in any wips today?

Uhh, no. Remember what I said about writing earlier this week? Well, I've done a million things, but unfortunately writing hasn't been one of them.

September: Share a comment or review which still warms your heart?

Oh, Anon, I can't share only one. I've been rereading comments this past month and several come to mind right now. These all warm my heart no matter how old they are or how many times I've read them already.

randomdork11 on House Potter:

You’re back!!!! I’ve missed you and this story more than I realized. Little Sev dealing with sick Harry and exhausted parents is so heartbreaking and sweet that I can’t handle it! Plus, I can totally relate to the exhausted parent bit XD. That whole family is just far too adorable. A certain bean who is far less evil than she proclaims to be, told me you were about to post again, so I’ll admit that I’ve been checking my updates like a crazy person.

Self-doubt is easily the worst part of writing. However, if I can offer you any encouragement, it’s that you have no reason to doubt yourself. Sometimes stories seem so big and daunting and we aren’t sure if what we are writing even makes sense or is relatable or true to character. Everyone goes through it and - as I’m sure many have already said - in your case, you’ve nothing to worry about. This story is beautiful and charming and captures the characters so very well. You’re doing a marvelous job of creating well rounded characters who all have faults and positive traits. You’re writing it in a way that none of the characters seems too good or too bad, just simply human. It’s utter perfection and you should be extremely proud of this work!!

Happy writing Ailec! And if you end up in doubt, just remember that your readers all agree that you are wonderful and we are here for you!!

@allstoriesrtrue24601 on the last OFaH chapter on AO3:

What a beautiful ending to an unbelievably impressive series! Having read the original series on fanfic.net repeatedly habitually since their original completion, it’s brought me so much joy to have weekly reminders of how much I love this story; and now with a gorgeous new epilogue!!

I’ve said it before but the one thing that really gets me about your writing is the characterisation - it drives the stories in a way I feel is really missing from most pieces of published works and tv shows. The bonds you build between characters and the whole dynamic really comes through throughout each installment - making the character development extremely natural and impactful. I’ve waxed lyrical previously about your writing style but I reiterate that it’s utterly and irrevocably beautiful, especially when considering English is not your first language. The pacing, plot and actual progression of the pieces are so well thought-out and really prompts excellently-executed dialogue and exposes opportunities to get to the hearts of the characters. It is suffice to say I have THOROUGHLY enjoyed your work in every one of its forms.

On a side note, I feel massively honoured to be mentioned in author’s notes (I have to say I’m slightly star-struck) and I’m more than happy for any future English queries. Have a wonderful day x

Kuroui, also on OFaH, but the first version on FF:

I realize I never actually left a review on here but here it goes.

This is definitely one of my all time favourite fics to ever exist period. Not just within the OUAT fandom. I was ecstatic with the introduction of Zelena, as it opened potential for Regina to have someone blood related still alive for her to interact with. At the end of Season 3 when Zelena was given that second chance, I was excited to see a possible turn around for her character. Up until that point, everything she had done was to give herself a better life, one with her blood mother, in hopes that she may be loved. She was not unlike Regina's initial persona and I could see how they could connect over it.

Season 4 dashed those hopes, and the progressing seasons left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. In the end, I am glad at least that at the end of Season 6 they had become something like sisters, and for that I am glad. I am also happy to see Zelena returning to play some time in Season 7. I dont know what it is but Zelena is my favourite OUAT character, and I love Rebecca Mader who plays her. For that reason I always seek out Zelena fics in hopes of finding good ones as she is not one of the most popular characters, in terms of fic writing at least.

This fic was both amazingly written and brought to light my hope of them reconciling as sisters. I like that it was not an immediate turn around from "villian" to "good", but a gradual process that involved interactions with multiple people and learning from mistakes. It made her a very real and relatable person. Everyone has flaws and makes mistakes and going from a life where her only goal was to hurt Regina, to living with her and attempting to be "good" was a large turn around that no doubt shook her to her core. You displayed that in your series very well, showing the ups and downs in her journey as well as the reflective reactions from those around her.

Henry's role in this was very heartwarming and he really is a miracle. The Greatest Believer. I do not think that Zelena would have come as far as she had without him. Though Regina does her best, it is always nice to have someone else there, not to mention someone who looked at Zelena without any negative feelings. Having multiple people care and believe in her no doubt gave her greater motivation to change and be a better person. Not to downplay Regina's role in this of course. Regina very much has been the core to this family, to Zelena's change.

At the end, Zelena desired to be wanted, to be enough, and she was going to look for that in Cora. Regina knew though, that it wasn't Zelena's fault for that, Cora only wanted power. Which you had her explain. And I think that having Regina turn into that person that Zelena wanted to be enough for, to be loved by, was a big change even if she didn't realize it. The initial hostility, anger and sadness moved away from being targeted AT Regina, to more herself and referenced in terms of Regina instead.

At that point, I think that Zelena's family slowly began to form in her own subconscious which eventually or hopefully would expand onto friends like Robin and Tinkerbell and perhaps even the Charming family, they do get along well enough of course. And if Charming's reaction to her run in with Sidney was any indication, I'm sure they would welcome her with open arms at this point.

Overall I suppose I can summarize it into this.

Thank you for writing this story/series. It holds a very very special place in my heart and I come back every once in a while to read through it. It warms my heart every single time no matter how many times I've read it. I love it with every inch of my OUAT loving soul and I am so glad that such an extensive well-written piece on Zelena exists.

Long comments aren't the only ones that have my eternal love and gratitude, though. Here's a couple of recent ones that are making this writing hiatus much more bearable:

Ninafia on the latest instalment of Hotchpotch:

I loved this! You're really good at writing emotions.

It's like I'm in their head, if that makes sense. Thanks for the chapter!

Lilia on House Potter:

This is such a remarkable story—so subtle and heartbreaking. Use of child Sev’s POV is a true narrative tour de force. Wish I could give it 100 kudos.

I'm lucky to have received a lot of nice comments over the years and you can be sure that, if your comment made me happy the first time I read it, I've come back to it more than once.

Calendar: Do you have a schedule for posting?

Not right now —I only keep a posting schedule when there are a few chapters already written at the very least.

Fanfic questions :)

#Fic writing #Comments #Feedback #Reader appreciation #Ask meme #Ask Ail #anonymous #*

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meganswish · 4 years

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do you know what I find incredibly interesting? that so many of us believe that Snape is redeemed through Lily - or rather, his love for her - when that's clearly not the case.

because for many people, Snape being redeemed because he loves Lily is a truly dissatisfying redemption. the love involved is not as untarnished as Dumbledore's love for Ariana, as selfless as Regulus' for Kreacher, as dramatic as Narcissa's for Draco. all of these love-based redemptions have one thing in common: Evanna Lynch's thesis (for the purposes of this text post, JKR didn't write Harry Potter 🙃) that love, if allowed, can be a transformative force. Andromeda Tonks, for example, turns her back on bigotry because of love. but the if allowed is very important; the Malfoys are all presented from the very beginning as people extraordinarily devoted to and concerned with members of their own family - Narcissa's redemption, however, is pinpointed at the moment where that love compels her to act, and act in the way that is right. everybody loves - except potentially Voldemort, which is what makes him such a perfect villain for the series - but in Harry Potter, your love absolves you of absolutely nothing until it overpowers all the darkness within you.

that translates very well to the readers. we all understand that Regulus' redemption, whilst motivated by his love for Kreacher, was him sacrificing himself and attempting to destroy the horcrux. we all understand that Narcissa's redemption, whilst motivated by her love for Draco, was her lying to the Dark Lord and allowing the Light to triumph. we all understand that Dumbledore's redemption, whilst motivated by his love for Ariana, was him turning back on his relationship with Gellert and devoting himself to the true greater good for the rest of his life. (depending on your opinion of Professor Dumbles that's more of a backstory than a redemption, but we can roll with it for this.) but Snape's redemption is always characterised as loving Lily (or being sexually attracted to Lily, for some reason?) and not the actions that came with it.

I find this very intriguing. Regulus kept newspaper cuttings of Voldemort's crimes in his bedroom to study because he hero-worshipped him so much. he joined willingly, he was marked. Narcissa never took a Dark Mark, but she sat at the Dark Lord's table, and she only began to act against him when Lord Voldemort began to punish their family for Lucius' failure. even then, the Unbreakable Vow did nothing to stop the assassination attempts - it was meant to preserve Draco, not the intended victim. at their darkest, we have very little evidence to believe either of them to be better people than Snape. (Dumbledore did comparatively very little for Grindelwald's regime so I'm leaving him out of this, but I find it fascinating that despite that, I'd say that the fandom dislikes him more than either Narcissa or Regulus.) so why are their redemptions more convincing, more touching, more acceptable, than Snape's?

I think it has a lot to do with Harry as a narrator. Harry's softest emotion towards Draco Malfoy is probably pity, and even that pity is perhaps dosed with a little contempt. he has little understanding and no appreciation for Narcissa's lifestyle. he and Kreacher get on better during Deathly Hallows, but we can't forget how troubled their relationship initially was. and Harry never relates to Kreacher in the way he does to Dobby, simply because of his servitude - because unlike Dobby, Kreacher internalises the bigotry and belief system of his household as well as the abuse, something that Harry never does.

Snape, however. Snape's object of love is Harry's mother. Harry idolises her maybe more than even his father or Sirius (and that is saying something.) not to mention that throughout Snape's memories, we see that Snape harboured a strong dislike for Petunia, and that throughout most of his childhood he was neglected, underfed, and dressed in clothes too big for him. they show him as a target of bullies, as an underprivileged, miserable outcast with no support system. Snape is so like Harry, and Harry strongly emotionally identifies with him. the parallel is mentioned before the Deathly Hallows - when Harry sees Snape's 'worst memory', his first instinct is to put himself in Snape's place and view the Marauders as Dudley's gang, which is part of the reason he's so horrified. in sixth year, Hermione points out that Snape's speech as their Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher has some remarkable similarities to Harry's own whilst he's addressing Dumbledore's Army. the two characters do have their differences, don't get me wrong, and I'm talking glaring differences - but the connection is certainly there. and I don't think it's coincidental that both of their first friends were a warm-hearted redhead who could relate to them about magic.

Harry responds to Snape on an emotional level. his reaction to finding out that Snape is a Death Eater in Goblet of Fire is almost gobsmackingly underwhelming if you compare it to him finding out that Snape was bullied by his father in Order of the Phoenix. he loses his temper when Snape insults his dad, insults Hermione, insults Neville, but he couldn't care less when he joins the Order ("he's still a git," says Ron, and that's the prevailing attitude going forward). it makes sense, after all. Snape's duty is constantly in conflict with his emotions. he saves Harry's life when Quirrell jinxes his broom, he refuses to provide Umbridge with Veritaserum to use on him, and he sends him Gryffindor's sword, sure - but he'll still try and provoke, belittle and punish Harry at every turn, because he didn't like James Potter and he doesn't like Harry either. Hermione, who is very goal-oriented, bases her opinion on Snape on whether or not he appears to be on their side, but for Harry, that's not good enough, because their interactions are defined by their mutual dislike of one another and not by the fact that for all intents and purposes, they are working towards the same goal.

and so for Harry, a large part of his forgiveness, in turn, is emotional - our narrator is far more concerned with the fact that Snape truly loved his mother and that this motivated him to protect Harry than he is with any of Snape's actual redemption. and therefore, the effectiveness of the chapter is strongly affected by how the reader perceives Snape. are we able to identify with him as Harry does? is our gripe with him mostly formed by his daily, schoolteacher-style malice? or are we more concerned with Snape's political positioning - do we want to be assured that he isn't a Death Eater? if the answer to the latter question is 'yes', it's easy to come away angry, because whilst it's made very clear that Snape is not a Death Eater, that doesn't really feel like it's supposed to be our takeaway because it's not Harry's. when he finally confronts Voldemort, their discussion about Snape revolves around '[his] mother, [his] common, Muggleborn mother', because Harry views Snape's devotion to Lily as all important. more important than even his sacrifices and work as a spy.

this may make little to no sense and there are probably tons of other reasons why we view Snape in this way, but I think this one is the most interesting. Harry is a human narrator, and the way that that impacts the story is fascinating.

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pebblysand · 3 years

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Hi. Big fan of your work!

In your post earlier you claimed that “nothing is inherently AU character-wise”. I’m trying to wrap my head around that.

So if Harry spent his summers between books on a murder spree of baby animals…. that is not AU? If Uncle Vernon is caring, compassionate and changes careers to a midwife in between books 6&7 (but you don’t hear about it because Harry doesn’t say it)…. that can be canon too?

Where do you draw the line? How are those examples not out of charactre enough to be AU? Please help me understand because I am confused……

hi anon,

thanks for your question! i’ll address both points below.

so, the thing that i was trying to explain in my post is that nothing in fic really exists in a vacuum. these examples that you have given are wild, i’ll give you that, but for the sake of the argument, let’s conceive them as prompts and see how they fit on the au spectrum.

i. harry potter and the baby animals

so, for harry killing baby animals over the summers, i would need more context on this to determine if this is au or not so i’m going to build it up as i go along.

here, you would be in the we only make tsunamis scenario where you fill the silence of the books that don’t chronicle every single day that passes, and fill that silence with stuff that might have happened but isn’t mentioned in the books (in that fic, it’s the h/hr stolen kisses; in your fic, it’s harry killing baby animals). as i said before, i - personally - don’t think doing that is inherently au. silence is susceptible of being filled with whatever you can make of it as long as it doesn’t explicitly contradict events that are mentioned. here, i think you could make that au, or not, depending on how you write it. let’s build it up. first, is harry killing baby animals a recurring thing or is this just one summer? when does it start? why? is there a reason for his killing of baby animals, or are you just making him into a psychopath?

as a writer, if i were to write that prompt for an individual summer, i would probably set it the summer after fourth year. we know that this is when harry is having the shittiest time at the dursleys, feels survivor’s guilt over cedric’s death, etc. could a very good writer make me believe that to work out his grief/angry he starts killing baby animals without it being ooc? maybe. like, it’s really hard to discuss in the abstract because such a fic has not (to my knowledge) been written, but to me, it really depends on the writing and on the build up to said violence. a little bit like the ballerina!draco example i gave in my initial post, i won’t deny that it would take very good writing to make me buy into that character development, and it would take the right study of the right circumstances but ultimately, i can’t say: ‘ah, harry would never do that.’ i don’t think i would be that categorical. you’d have to explain to me why he makes that choice though.

if we’re talking multiple summers, we may be verging into the concept of psychopathic tendencies. in that case, i think the characterisation is harder to justify as ‘canon’ as you’re not even operating by the same starting point. in my original post, i said i also understood as canon: ‘the characterisation of characters as they are at the start of the fic.’ if you’re going to take make somewhere i don’t expect, we need to at least have the same understanding of facts as a common ground to stand on at the start. as such, if you’re starting your fic upon the assumption that harry is a psychopath, it’s hard to call this ‘canon’ as i don’t think you could really ever find an appropriate starting point in the books to build that character development on. could grief or anger over the dursleys/loss of his parents make him that way? again, maybe. but it would have to be very well researched and argued and imo would be even harder to pull off than the first option.

now, also, the interesting thing is: what is the consequence of that behaviour? as i pointed out initially, nothing truly exists in a vacuum. so, let’s say for the sake of the argument that harry starts torturing baby animals in the summers, without it being mentioned in the books. where does that lead to? as a writer, that’s the question i would ask.

and, you could go two ways about this. you could go: well, it doesn’t change anything. it’s just the way he works through his grief or whatever, it has zero impact on the grand scheme of things or on the story of the seven books in general. now, imo, that would be a) a very hard feat to pull off because that kind of behaviour is bound to have some sort of impact so i don’t really think it would be believable, regardless of canon, and b) a very useless fic to write because, then, why? like, what’s the point of all of this? (unless, of course, you start edging into beckett levels of absurdism, which, like, fair enough). but, for the sake of our discussion then, yes, if you were able to a) convincingly build the character evolution to support this and adequately explain (see first & second paragraphs), and b) keep the rest of the story absolutely identical to the events of the seven books - then yeah, it would be canon-compliant to me. i wouldn’t necessarily adopt it as a headcanon or anything because it might not suit my personal taste or whatever, but it would certainly be ‘compliant,’ if that makes sense. i don’t see why not.

if you decide that harry killing baby animals in the summers will have an impact on the rest of the story, then to me that makes it au because you’re changing the events of the books and going off on a different story (which might be interesting, why not?).

so, tl:dr, unless you make explicit changes to the events of the seven books through the consequences of harry’s behaviour, no, i don’t think this is inherently au.

ii. vernon the midwife

i’ll be quicker on this one because it’s basically the same idea as the above. if vernon adopting a different career is well written enough that there’s a convincing reason behind the change, etc., i don’t think this is inherently ooc/au of his character to do so. that being said, him becoming ‘caring,’ and ‘compassionate’ is au because we see him (albeit briefly) the summer after year six and he’s still a dick to harry. so to me here you’d be explicitly contradicting events of the books, which makes it au.

iii. random additional remarks

i have a couple of things i want to add as a quick note on your question itself:

i just want to clarify: this is my interpretation. i don’t have any ambition to dictate what to think to anyone, it’s just the way i see things.

there is one thing about your question that caught my eye. you asked: ‘can [that] be canon too?’ i just want to clarify that neither of the above are explicitly ‘canon’. they don’t happen/aren’t listed in the books. they could however, as i pointed out, made to be canon-compliant. those to me are different concepts.

anyway, thanks anon again for the question! i hope this makes sense! and thanks for your kind words on my work i appreciate it.

#canon-compliance #further notes on writing #i think this discussion is interesting #I low key want to read the fic in which Harry kills baby animals now

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toxicpineapple · 4 years

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Please give me your amami essay, I'd like to know the TEA! I was also gonna ask for the mastermind essay, but honestly I REALLY wanna hear your thoughts on his characterization (and your thoughts on his shitty fanon characterization)

HOOO BOY OKAY. this is good, it gives me an excuse to procrastinate on reading that new amasai fic on the latest feed. (note that i REALLY WANT TO READ IT, i’m just anticipating commenting and tbh the spoons,,, i lack them. it’s okay though i’ll get over it.)

so!!! let’s start with general attitude, because i think that amami’s is really unique. he’s a subversive character. in general i feel like that was the biggest goal with his character design and personality combination-- he looks like a total playboy, kaede even comments as much moooore than once. but he’s the absolute opposite. i’ll rant about that in a bit. i’ve already gone off on a tangent and i said i was gonna talk about attitude.

amami is laid back, but not to the point of complacency. y’know what i mean? like, he’s relaxed, but he’s on his guard, too. his speaking style is pretty casual (typically he’ll greet people with a “hey,” whenever he’s slightly uncomfortable he’ll probably say “haha”... this isn’t necessarily a canon thing but i like it when people have him talking in sentence fragments. ex. “forgot to grab my jacket” or “wanted to get a snack” sort of thing) and that’s just,,, the type of person he is. he’s casual. it’s remarkable considering how wealthy amami is-- though bear in mind, he still IS wealthy, so there are bound to be things he doesn’t understand about people-- that he can be so normal and like, down to earth, in a way. when people mess around with him he’ll probably just laugh it off.

to cite a fic i read once that had REALLY phenomenal characterisation, imo, ouma ends up dumping a bucket of water on amami’s head (on accident; there are some semantics and i won’t get into it but again the fic is really good and funny and you should totally read it) and amami just squeezes out his shirt and makes a couple cracks before walking away. (sorry this isn’t meant to be a “dumping love on fics” post but GOD that fic is hysterical.) he’s an enabler too, at least i think so-- remember that anthology chapter where kaede, shuichi, and kaito are trying to catch ouma and kaito sets an “amami trap” to stop him? all ouma has to do is flutter his eyelashes and go “pleeeaaase let me go amam~niichan!” and then he just. he does. what a fucking doormat i can’t believe him.

he’s like that though. i feel like big brother stuff is kind of his weakness. (and not in a kinky way alright i will destroy you. he might make a joke about having a sister complex in one of his ftes but he DOESNT that joke was just tasteless COME ON RANTARO WHFKLDSJFK) which brings me to his whole older brother thing, because like,,, YEAH. guy grew up with twelve younger sisters!!! and he remarked in his ftes with shuichi that they’re mostly step sisters, which means he just.... has a nurturing personality. i mean amami is somewhat conservative (if you try to come on to him during salmon mode you will be brutally rebuffed; amami tells u to keep your horny thoughts to yourself, though you shouldn’t be ashamed of having them) so i imagine he’s not the biggest fan of his father’s tendencies-- not that i don’t NECESSARILY interpret his father’s behaviour as him sleeping around.... it’s possible he just likes children and deliberately marries women who already have kids so he can take them... i mean it’s exceedingly decent to keep considering ur step children to be your children after a divorce so i have a hard time reconciling this common image of rantaro’s dad as some kind of player figure with the impression i got of him in my head but that’s just my daddy issues coming into play again so ignore me-- and yet he still considers all his sisters to be his sisters.

not to mention he feels a great deal of like, responsibility, when it comes to taking care of them. i find it impossible to believe that all the losses were his fault. you could ARGUE that the one he tells you about with his younger sister was to be blamed on him? but i mean, amami is a child. he didn’t even know his sister was following him out. sure he blames himself for it but there’s no real good way to blame him just considering that,,, he’s a kid. and he was so young-- he was obviously so young-- when it happened. so like, not to be all Good and Bad on you, but i do feel that amami is fundamentally a good reason. and you SEE that too, in the killing game. i’m certain he was on the fence about trusting that note he woke up with. would you trust it? he had no memory whatsoever of writing it, all he had were the words “ultimate hunt” and a map of the school to guide his way. i imagine he wasn’t even sure if he should do what the note said. but then ryoma started talking about sacrificing himself for everyone else, and rantaro probably thought, “well... if i have a way to get us out of here, even if it doesn’t work, i can’t just let ryoma sacrifice himself without having tried.”

rantaro is self-reliant too, i think. in the talent development plan mukuro remarks that she noticed he was injured a good number of times, but never said anything about it because she felt like he was trying to keep it under wraps. (note: good idea for an amami and mukuro friendship fic. must write. someone remind me.) i think amami kind of feels isolated from his classmates? either because he has these perceived notions of like, independence and whatever, not burdening anybody else with his problems (honestly not to go chabashira on main but wtf men ask for help c’mon i promise if you find a person who’s worth being in ur life they won’t treat you like shit for feeling ur feelings) or just because he’s not around a lot. i think amami is the type of person to invalidate his own problems a lot, or at least downplay them to others. he blames himself for all his sisters going missing, took the responsibility to find them all. you know the blow that’s going to be to his education? traveling around the world looking for twelve different people? and he plans to keep doing that!!! forever!!! ugh ;-; poor babey. but anyway i feel like he doesn’t want to tell anybody about his problems because he feels like it’s his thing to deal with.

i also believe that rantaro is a bit prideful. i mean, anyone can be prideful under the correct circumstances, and in fact there is a great deal of pride that simply isn’t addressed by the fandom in analysing characters and that makes me really sad because pride is such a SEXY character flaw but i’ll leave that alone for now. he hates being told to give up on what he’s doing. i mean everyone in his life has been telling him to stop looking for his sisters. that’s got to suck, but also, DAMN look at what his reaction was. this utter refusal to open up to anybody. shuichi’s ftes with him are spent pretty much just trying to get amami to stop squirreling around and actually TALK to him. amami asks shuichi at one point if he has any siblings and when the response is negative, amami immediately assumes that shuichi wouldn’t understand, would tell him to quit. just like everyone else.

(i mean, even with kiyo and mukuro, whose circumstances mirror his almost painfully at least in willingness to sacrifice stuff for their siblings, he doesn’t tell them what he’s doing, just that he’s doing it for his sister-- singular-- and that he would do anything for her. kiyo and mukuro!! out of ANYBODY, they would understand. in tdp they DO talk about it-- kiyo encourages him to keep searching-- as his friend...... fuck amaguji is such a good ship even if the implications of kiyo saying he wants to meet rantaro’s sister after he finds her bc she must be suuuuch a good person if he’s doing all this for her are uhhh not great-- and mukuro immediately understands when he says it’s to do with his younger sister. like, full stop. she just goes “okay” and goes serious. all at once. damn rantaro, mukuro, and kiyo really do be a power trio huh. i need to write more fic about them i miss them.)

this is more into baseless conjecture so take this as you will, but i also think rantaro is kind of,,, easily distracted lmao. he mentions helping out a village with a disease-- been a while since i’ve seen his ftes, sorry for any inconsistencies-- among other shit and like... bro what are you DOING. you have sisters to find. and he can’t be getting injured all the time, getting wrapped up with gang violence and all that, looking for people who were lost traveling. i mean sure, you could say they went all over the world and got wrapped up in all sorts of mess, but more likely they stayed in roughly the same area, waiting for him to come back. and also? i have a hard time believing his sisters were lost in these remote forest places people always put them. COME ON, who the fuck goes to some village for a vacation? a RICH person no less. i’m on another tangent. sorry. but yeah, i love the people who write rantaro as an absolute airhead. i headcanon that he has no way of judging the passing of time and thus is the absolute worst in the bathroom bc he sits there for twenty minutes thinking about the universe and then walks out like “:) ok ready to go” like wtf are you even doing there stupid akljdf anyway.

i think rantaro is softhearted and thoughtful. in his ftes with kaede he demonstrates an ability to look past what people show at surface level-- you can ask him about miu, kiibo, or kiyo and he’ll give u Good Fucking Insight(tm)-- and analyse their intentions more closely. and i mean this is just from a couple day’s interaction. he’s down to earth for sure, understanding when people are intimidated but also caring and observant. (his “talk about a first impression” line is so fuckaindgf.... good for his characterisation. i love romantic amamatsu but he so clearly takes an older brother role in those ftes, he’s really such a sweetheart,,,, hnadhfkj ;w;) rantaro is just. he’s patient with people. and selfless and kind. idk it’s all the good stuff. warm smiles and indulgence. all the way. probably lets kokichi steal his lunch.

THAT BEING SAID: i think rantaro also has a very serious streak. he doesn’t show it a lot but there are moments. he’s self-sacrificing-- i mean, obviously. he was the ultimate survivor, after all. some people hc that he got there by killing, or maybe everyone else in his game died but one person, but bro that doesn’t make any sense???? no. what happened was there were probably like three people left, and monokuma was like “one has to be sacrificed” and rantaro thought, welp. it’ll be me then. and i wouldn’t say the choice would be immediate because rantaro DOES has self preservation instincts-- he’s only human-- but i don’t think he’d have let anybody else make that decision. i think ultimately he would try to protect other people.

he can be scarily confrontational too. i do believe he’d usually only do it in the defense of others-- like, his base instinct is to protect. i read a fic once (oumami, unfortunately) where ouma was committing crimes and went to hide behind rantaro and rantaro instinctively moved to protect him, and that’s.... that’s good characterisation. point one to the oumami stans, point zero to me. motherfucker. (love u oumami stans, it’s just not my thing.) i really like it in fics when he’s stern, lecturing people for hurting other people, but i also think rantaro is too understanding to be truly unforgiving. like if two people got into an argument and one came out of it more hurt than the other, i don’t believe that amami would be unsympathetic to the less hurt one. i think he’s mature enough to take a look at the situation and go, well, okay.

i think he’d be TERRIFYING when angry. he’s patient, y’know? so it takes a lot to get him to that point. he’s really, ah, accommodating of people. puts up with a lot of bs kind of thing. but i imagine the best way to get him to snap is by hurting someone he cares about. and at that point: ur fucked. i’ve never written it before because i’m terrified of what i’d do with that kind of power but.... imagine the shuichi whump. holy god.

i’m NOT here to talk about shuichi whump (though i’m down to do that any time of day believe me) so i’m gonna like. shhhhiiiiiiffft.

i project on characters a lot so at this point it’s difficult to distinguish if some of my characterisation things are like, actually characterisation things? or just me venting, so like, take nothing i say as canon, but also,,, akdsjf we love a man who bottles up his emotions.

because rantaro just doesn’t have the TIME to be crying all over the place. he was probably a total wreck when he lost his first sister. and his second. and maybe even his third. but then he started to gather his composure, more and more. because if there’s anything that rantaro has in excess, it’s composure. the more losses he suffers the more of a shield he builds up. and the self hatred and the guilt and the blame and the responsibility are piling up and up and up, but god he hates it when other people see him sad, because he needs to be the strong one, he can’t just pile that up on other people. that’s not their weight to carry, and besides, he’s the older brother, he should be able to deal with his own problems. he’d just be burdening the people he cares about by letting them see his demons.

and then he doesn’t have any coping mechanisms because he never lets himself feel enough to cope, and when people get close enough to actually CARE about him, when people notice he’s upset or struggling and offer him help, he doesn’t know how to deal with it-- and god he hates lashing out at people but it’s so much easier to deal with the consequences of being mean than the consequences of breaking down. only conflict is scary when he’s one of the causes so he needs time to recover, and well, what better way to do that than to get on a plane or a boat and go look for his sisters? after all he’s wasting time whenever he’s just sitting around, they’re still out there and he needs to find them, so might as well just keep pushing himself to the limits, because it’s his fault they’re lost anyway...

something mukuro said to rantaro in the talent development plan stuck in my brain. like, initially it’s just a funny and cute interaction (rantaro even blushes and a blushing rantaro is a GOOD FUCKING RANTARO) but when i thought about it more i was like.... huh. hm. angst ideas. mukuro makes a joke about rantaro going over to her stand at the festival to flirt with her-- i think that’s the context, i know it’s play-boy related-- and rantaro assures her (as he always does) that he’s not that kind of guy, and mukuro agrees, saying she was just pulling his leg and that he seems like the kind of person who gets dumped because he doesn’t show his emotions enough. rantaro laughs, blushes, and says “haha, not touching that one,” and akdjfnnnnnn god mukuro you’re so blunt i love you fkdjf but wow. i usually have rantaro as not having dated anyone, just because i feel like he kind of hyperfocuses on finding his sisters? and given that he’s like sixteen (seventeen at the MOST) there’s not much of a timeline for when his sisters got lost. in my fic search i had to cram all the losses into a four-year period and damn that was rough. anyway i just don’t think he’d really prioritise romance. but that reaction implies that that’s EXACTLY his experience with romance, which makes a bit of sense because mukuro is ridiculously sharp, and also it’s,, it’s just sad idk poor rantaro. getting dumped because he’s like the emotional equivalent of a doorknob when it comes to his own feelings.

i do think rantaro is a bit cowardly. not in the sense that he’d shy away from danger-- i think he’d RUSH INTO IT HEAD FIRST because he’s a man or whatever, i know he respects women but he does seem to hold some of those very stereotypically masculine ideals of constantly protecting those around him, which is like.... ok toxic masculinity mcgee can u and kaito stop throwing hands every time u see each other ty-- but more in the sense that he avoids,,, confrontation. emotional confrontation just ain’t his thing. and i think he’d rather run away from it or otherwise find some way of ignoring it than try to address his problems.

he would, with that in mind, probably try to associate with people who don’t push the matter. kiyo and mukuro, for example. they both have a fair amount of baggage themselves so they’d probably be respectful. ryoma is lowkey enough that he just, he wouldn’t bring that shit up, that’s uncool. i also think rantaro would get along REALLY WELL with kaito, and i actually don’t think kaito would pull his sidekick stuff with him? just because in a way they’re kind of kindred spirits, and i think kaito would see an ally in rantaro before seeing someone to try to nurture, so they’d probably have some kind of a truce like, if you don’t force me to be vulnerable, i won’t force you. one of the reasons why i love amamota so much is because it involves the two of them growing to care about each other beyond that sort of unhealthy camaraderie and breaking down each other’s barriers and i just..... hhnnfhhdkfj they could be so good for each other but nobody wants to talk about thatjslfkj

you weren’t asking for my amamota mess lmao sorry anon i get sidetracked SO easily. but yeah, amami gravitates towards people who wouldn’t try to get him to be more honest with himself. and i honestly think the v3 cast would be pretty good about that overall, except for shuichi who is a detective and has a habit of sticking his nose in places it shouldn’t be, but i see no reason to write that out because amami’s ftes already display that beautifully. (well, that’s a lie, i’m absolutely plotting out a slowburn in my head already that involves shuichi stripping down his walls one by one, but forget about all of that rn we don’t need to talk about why amasaimota is my ot3.) also he is softer on childish people like ouma and himiko. ain’t nobody wants to TALK TO ME about how brilliant it would be if rantaro and hiyoko were friends because hiyoko has such problems in that department and he would take one look at her and go hm. i’m adopting her. and he’s so fucking patient and nice and she’d lose the will to make fun of him and i have to do ALL THE GODDAMN WORK AROUND HERE but it’s fine. at least i get to write it.

i’ve described the fundamentals of his characterisation pretty well by now i think. i have some throwaway headcanons, like uhh,,

he’s claustrophobic

plays the guitar and the ukulele

he prefers warm weather and perishes in the cold

high pain tolerance

he’s a Good Cook

doesn’t like sex jokes (they make him uncomfortable)

asexual (i do like a good demisexual hc at all times of day tho)

master of piggyback rides

does his own piercings

impulsive as hell

gets lost easily but can always find his way back

has a lot of scars from travels

hands are rough and calloused (again from travels)

morning person

smells like evergreen (you know i had to, you know i did)

Radiates Heat Like A Fucking Toaster Oven

good hugs

hates tying his shoelaces

likes being the big spoon :)

has a tongue piercing

i said “some throwaway headcanons” but i ended up listing way more than i mean to. i’ll make a separate list of my rantaro headcanons someday and talk about them all in detail but for now, uh, there’s that.

SO AS FOR THE RANTARO CHARACTERISATIONS I ABSOLUTELY DESPISE:

god where to fucking begin. actually i know exactly where to begin. it’s my least favourite one just because, like i said at the very beginning, rantaro is a subversive character. i mean i think he’s kind of a low hanging fruit when it comes to that. there are plenty of other subversive characters in the dr series but rantaro is like that. you expect a flirt and u get,,, a sweetheart. but then some people (usually the ones who ship him with female characters exclusively though i will see it on occasion in an amasai or oumami fic) decide to throw that out the window and make him a total playboy!! and listen, i have no problem with people who are a little flirty. we’re kids!! flirt ur heart out!!! and hey, that’s not what this is about but y’know what? so long as everything is safe, sane, and consensual, then yeah!! exercise your sexual freedom and sleep with whoever you want to!!! i don’t think there’s anything wrong with messing around a little, dating who u wanna and experimenting with ur tastes and preferences. if rantaro WAS a playboy, then there would be nothing wrong with that. i would love him just the same because he’s such a fundamentally GOOD character.

except that.... he’s.......... NOT. you slaughter one of the biggest aspects of his character by throwing away what matters to him and making him some hunky-deep-voice-dreamboat dude meant to sweep kaede/tsumugi/whomsteverthefuck off her feet. rantaro is one of those characters where he’s so blatantly not that kind of person, and it’s like. it’s an affront, almost, to portray him that way? and i do believe you should have the freedom to write what you want, since we’re in that age (aside from romanticised pedophilia and incest; that shit ain’t cute, i say this often but pro-ship DNI) where u should be able to take some liberties, but it’s just. hnnn. it’s so frustrating. rantaro does not know how to smolder! if he DID smolder, he wouldn’t even realise he was doing it. he doesn’t have people lying at his feet, okay? he’s too flaky for that. i wouldn’t say he’s unreliable but he definitely ain’t at school as much as he should be.

another one that i hate: st-stalker? what the fuck? that is not sexy that is creepy and weird?

another another one that i hate: yandere? what the FUCK??? that is not sexy that is glorified ABUSE???? the yandere trope is AWFUL bc you’re taking a controlling relationship and turning it into a fetish. NO. if he limits ur contact with other people, if he follows u everywhere, if he threatens ur loved ones, if he tries to control you, ladies and gents and nonbinaries, he’s not a yandere, he’s an abuser and you need a fucking restraining order. actually, people of ANY gender or sex can perpetuate this behaviour and IT IS NOT CUTE. I DO NOT GIVE A FUCK WHAT BOUNDARIES U SET IN PLACE, IF YOUR FREEDOM IS BEING RESTRICTED THAT IS ABUSE.

hate it when people make rantaro violent. hate it when people make rantaro a murderer. hate it when people make rantaro controlling. hate it when people make rantaro overtly sexual. some kind of sultry deep voice dominant kind of figure. dude, what the fuck? i don’t,, want to make any public comments about sex positions because i think that’s kind of Strange to just talk about on a post, but i do think that the way people portray him for their smuts is,,, idk it’s weird. i’m not gonna kinkshame u but like. :eyes:

i will however accept rantaro as a thrillseeker, or a highstrung rich boy, or a total space cadet, or a himbo, or a cryptid. these are all very good interpretations of the Mans. just, like. be wary of making him two dimensional. a good character is multifaceted. if you can take a trait that clashes with all of these and SELL ME ON IT, i will buy it. if u give me good justifications, or even just good writing?? then i will accept it.

the long and the short of it is, anon, he’s my favourite so i think about him a lot. i love writing rantaro. he’s just, he’s a Guy. y’know? He’s A Good Dude, If You’ll Give Him A Shot. :) we don’t get to see very much of him but i think that there’s plenty of material if you overanalyse everything, which, as you probably all know by now,,,, i absolutely do.

thank you for the ask, this was a delight to spend an hour talking about.

#amami rantaro #rantaro amami #abuse mention #long post

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blubberquark · 4 years

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Why Puzzle Platformers?

Why are there so many puzzle platformers? Was everybody simply copying Braid, hoping for the same level of success? And more importantly, now that Braid has been out for over a decade, why are people still making them?

If you make games, you already know why there are so many puzzle platformers, but I haven’t found a comprehensive answer to this question anywhere I can conveniently link to.

There are different ways to read that question:

Why are people adding puzzles to platformer games?

Why are there so many commercial indie puzzle platformers?

Why weren’t the same puzzles presented in an abstract, more puzzle-focused way?

Why are people adding puzzles to platformer games?

When it comes to jam games or small shareware projects, we should first ask “Why platformers, puzzle or not?” Part of the answer is probably “because platformers are easy to make with GameMaker“. Another part of the answer is “Because in a platformer, the player character interacts with the level, items, and NPCs, but these do not, for the most part, interact with each other, which makes a platformer comparably easy to implement (compared to an RTS game) and design (compared to RPG games), and platformers don’t need many extradiegetic UI elements.“

But beyond that, when you can add other mechanics to games, why puzzles?

The two obvious candidates to add to games are combat/stealth, and puzzles.

You can could also add multiple-choice dialogue, inventory, RPG elements (quests, skill points, classes), or procedural generation to any sidescrolling game, but none of these cannot carry a game on their own when you tack them on to a platformer. If the dialogue is actually substantial enough to carry a game on its own, the 2D platforming may stick out as “tacked-on” instead.

Strategy or economy (building, trading, tactics and management) are better served by a mouse-based UI. Dialogue-heavy or text-based games usually don’t have platforming sections, but platformer games can have some dialogue. In both cases, the pacing and movement of a platformer undercuts these game mechanics, and a different UI would be a better fit.

You can give your platformer a theme like horror, romance, science fiction, or medieval fantasy.

Puzzles are something you can add into a platformer game, either in between difficult platforming sections, or in combination with them. You can even alternate between stealth/combat and puzzles. Puzzles can be easy or difficult, and you can use them to break up levels or slow down the pace of an action platformer, or centre your whole game around them.

It takes some skill to design a puzzle mechanic that stands on its own, but it’s much easier to design an simple and easy one-off puzzle that you can throw into a platformer level. Easy puzzles are easy to balance: They have a binary win condition and an intended solution, but often no explicit failure state.

If adding another mechanic to a platformer makes it a puzzle platformer, is Speer a puzzle platformer? Is Super Meat Boy a puzzle platformer because you sometimes have to push buttons and the levels are self-contained? Is Outer Bounds a puzzle platformer? It’s not a bright line, but many action games that are lumped with “puzzle platformers” are still about jumping and running, but with a move set that isn’t 100% copied from Mario Bros.

If the main appeal of a game lies in the platforming, then as long as it’s solvable and doesn’t get in the way, it’s a good puzzle. Puzzles in platforming games can present their own platforming challenges, and rely on a slightly different kind of platforming execution skill, instead of puzzle-solving as a core aesthetic and source of difficulty. Players can be forced to traverse the same terrain back and forth along different paths. This can squeeze more gameplay out of fewer designed levels. Combined with traditional platforming obstacles like enemies to avoid, spike pits, moving platforms, one-way platforms, this can lead to more varied and difficult platforming challenges. Instead of getting in the way or breaking up the platforming bits, puzzle mechanics can go hand-in-hand with the platforming, without presenting a challenge in terms of puzzle solving, but only in terms of executing the solution.

Why are there so many commercial indie puzzle platformers?

For commercial games, the answer is more complicated. Maybe the premise of the question is not even true. Trine, Fez, Limbo, and And Yet It Moves all can in one way or another be described as “puzzle platformers”, but no two of them are in the same genre. If you cast a wider net, you get games like Mushroom 11, Owlboy, The Cave, Starseed Pilgrim, and Gunpoint.

Like “Action Adventure”, the phrase “puzzle platformer” has become a catch-all term for sidescroller games that aren’t punishingly difficult.

Of course, many commercial long-form games are classical puzzle platformers. Braid, Vessel, Closure, The Swapper, and Snapshot. These games are about puzzles, not about platforming.

Many smaller games like WarpSwap, ElecHead, Ministry of Synthesis, or LegBreaker are just exploring one puzzle mechanic to exhaustion in a series of one-room puzzles. Larger or long-form games often expand their repertoire of mechanics to create puzzles based on different mechanics held together by common themes or a story, or they focus more on platforming.

Why weren’t the same puzzles presented in an abstract, more puzzle-focused way?

Simple Controls and User Interface

If you see a puzzle platformer, you don’t need to figure out the controls or UI first, you can just pick up the controller and start running around. In their simplest form, the controls for a puzzle platformer are four directional buttons plus one for jumping and one for interacting the with puzzle mechanic, but more complex controls schemes are common.

The controls make writing a puzzle platformer for a game jam much easier than a mouse-driven puzzle game: You just need to check six keyboard buttons. If you are making a big commercial title, ease of implementation in terms of programming is not really a factor: After a day or two at most you’ll have implemented whatever mouse picking, widgets and UI elements you need. What’s much more time consuming is figuring out where to put the buttons so they don’t obscure the scene, or how to communicate which objects are clickable. Getting user interfaces right requires playtesting and iteration. A puzzle platformer might only need a context-based prompt that says “press X to interact“ or “walk into a boulder to push it“.

Game Feel, Embodiment and Characterisation

Another benefit of puzzle platformers over abstract puzzle presentation is game feel. The player controls the player character, and feels like a the player character existing inside the space of the level, increasing immersion compared to the feeling of a person sitting at a computer thinking about a crossword puzzle.

Many big-name 2D puzzle platformers like Braid and Snapshot have a rather zoomed-in view that focuses the level player character and the immediate surroundings, instead of showing the whole level. This allows the game to present important characters, items or places in great detail, and lets the camera pan to frame the most important parts of a scene. Animated movement in a two-dimensional space can give weight and character to the player character, and connect the gameplay to a story. NPCs can live inside a level, next to their home, their things, and their friends.

Imagine the same thing in a tower defence, or a racing game: You’re walking around in a level, and suddenly you meet an NPC, you’re having a conversation, and then you go on your merry way. Characters and environmental storytelling are not unique to platformers, but it’s more difficult to pull off in a game without a player character existing in the world with the NPCs. Puzzle platformers keep all options open.

Of course, this is not the only way to connect characterisation and puzzle gameplay, and it can be done in abstract games. Just in the most recent Ludum Dare, I played the game Interstellar Connection, a puzzle game with a rather abstract, disembodied presentation, in which the characterisation was delivered through dialogue. (I should briefly remark on two aspects of Interstellar Connection here, even though it has very little to do with the rest of this post. First, the game is at its heart a bunch of mazes that can be solved by backtracking. Every puzzle is equivalent to a maze graph, but the presentation makes use of a quirk of human cognition to prevent you from seeing the solution the way you would see the solution in a small maze. Second, I don’t think this mechanic can support a long-form game. If it weren’t for Ludum Dare, this would have been a forgettable minigame, not the main meat of the game, motivated and contextualised by the plot.)

Characters living inside a world could also be achieved with isometric graphics, first- or third-person 3D, or in a text-based game, but they don’t work well in self-contained or grid-based puzzle levels. We’ll get back to other aspects of more open level design later.

Puzzle Design

In a puzzle platformer, you have a player character, and you can have different kinds of obstacles, like pits filled with spikes, ledges, and doors. In a top-down platformer, you can of course also have doors, but you won’t have the same dynamics of gravity with falling down, of dropping things. It’s easier to get down from a ledge, or to drop something than to lift it.

With a visible and embodied player character instead of an abstract cursor, every puzzle can be complicated by combining manipulation of the puzzle environment with traversal of the level:

The level has an “obvious” solution, but the real challenge is navigating the environment to get there.

The challenge is to manipulate the environment to open a path for the player to jump to the right place to implement the solution.

The level has a “red herring” solution that solves the main puzzle but leaves the player trapped behind an obstacle, unable to progress without undoing it.

Level Design, Progression

Multiple puzzles can be placed in the same platformer “level” or “room“. In a “pure” puzzle game, puzzles are self-contained, with a beginning and an end, a starting state and an explicit solution condition. In a platformer, the goal can be implicit: You want to go from left to right and traverse the obstacles.

If a puzzle has an obvious missing piece, it can be a prompt for the player to explore the surrounding areas, to look for a tool, or for a certain puzzle piece that is exactly shaped like the gap that needs to be filled in the puzzle.

Strange Keyworld is a puzzle platformer, almost a puzzle metroidvania. Every so often, instead of reasoning through the puzzle that is currently shown on the screen, you need to explore the adjacent rooms to find another piece and bring it over. Although the puzzles in Strange Keyworld are mostly self-contained, they are still embedded in the larger world.

Most levels in Braid are bigger than one screen, and they have more than one puzzle. Often the first order of business is to get your bearings and explore. Then you learn to traverse the level to get everywhere, identify and separate the different puzzles, and only then can you think about solving all the puzzles by manipulating time and level state to get everywhere.

An interesting twist on this happens in Recursed: Levels are always on one screen, 20x15 tiles... but you need to explore inside all the chests to see what the level actually looks like!

Of course, you could have the same kind of dynamic in an abstractly presented puzzle with a mouse-based UI, where you can zoom in and out, drag the viewport around, or enter doors (and Recursed-style chests) by double-clicking. Then you’d lose the sense of exploration and progression, and the challenge of traversing the space via platforming. Exploring a large level would be easy, but tedious. You would need to program (as the developer) and then learn (as the payer) a new user interface, or you can just move a player character in a world. This ties back into the very first point: Platformers don’t need many extradiegetic UI elements.

tl;dr “Puzzle Platformers” are actually a bunch of genres in a trenchcoat. Character-focused 2D side-scrolling graphics are compatible with many different mechanics and game designs. Character-focused 2D platforming can counterbalance the abstractness of puzzle games.

#game design #puzzle platformer #puzzle game

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pass-the-bechdel · 5 years

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Brooklyn Nine-Nine season five full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

68.18% (fifteen of twenty-two).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

30.03%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Two (episode seventeen ‘DFW’ (42.85%), and episode twenty-one ‘White Whale’ (42.85%)).

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

One (episode nine ‘99′ (15.38%)).

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

Thirty-two. Four who appeared in more than one episode, three who appeared in at least half the episodes, and ZERO who appeared in every episode.

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

Sixty-four. Thirteen who appeared in more than one episode, six who appeared in at least half the episodes, and three who appeared in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

Fairly standard expectations for this show, that is: above-average compared to most tv. That said, their biggest progressive move of the season came off more prescribed than genuine to me, and sometimes I felt like they were including little remarks and things just to half-ass being ‘on brand’ rather than because they actually believe in it. This season often lacked the heart to make its social commentary really land (average rating of 3.04).

General Season Quality:

They had a whole bunch of good episodes around the middle of the season, but they started and ended weak, and a lot of the story and characterisation is starting to meander and go stale. They lifted their game in season four, but this feels like a return to the dissatisfaction that was rife in season three.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Well, this is the worst they’ve done on the male:female ratio, decisively. It’s not the worst they’ve done on the Bechdel, but it is worse than what it has been in recent seasons. And while the positive content score is above average, outside of the single episode which raised that score they really did a lot less to impress than what I would consider this show’s standard (and even that one episode, I maintain, could have been much better). Setting aside the critical aspect of what I do here to speak on a pure entertainment level, this season seriously lacked one of the best qualities of the show in previous seasons, which was the basic guarantee of a good time; some episodes will always be better than others, but if nothing else, you used to be able to rely on that good time. There were no episodes this season that were just utter garbage, no, but if I were a casual viewer, then the majority of this season would probably fail to hold my attention or convince me to tune in next week, and that’s not what you want. As ever, when the show is good it is really, really good, but when it is bad it is DEEPLY mediocre, feeling phoned-in or, sometimes, like it was written by someone who does not understand the appeal of this show in the first place. To touch on some various aspects of all of the above, lets talk about character arcs.

Now, I am not one of those people who believes that every character has to have a definable ‘arc’. They really don’t. What they DO need is to feel like they’re part of the story for a reason, and giving them their own task or journey which traditionally lays out in an arc format tends to be the go-to method for achieving that. It is easily possible to have a character without a personal arc still fit into the story and feel necessary and wanted: my case in point for this season of B99 is Terry. Terry was seriously underused, and that’s a shame because he’s great, and yes, giving him some kind of arc to bring him to the fore a few times across the season would almost definitely have been a good move...but. The fact that he had no arc to speak of did not render his character obsolete, and he worked and played really well as a character whose stability can be an anchoring quality for the show sometimes: Terry is still a reliable good time, even if the writing is sliding in other places. Vitally, there is a confidence about the way that Terry is presented which allows his character to function fully regardless of the attention level; I would have LIKED more Terry, but his character is firmly established as a constant such that he can occupy a regular space without seeming superfluous. On the flip side of that, we have...Gina.

I’ve never ‘got’ Gina in that fan-favourite way that has worked for so many people, and her selfishness and her constant put-downs have often made her the antithesis of the feel-good mentality that - to me - has defined what makes this show worthwhile when it is at its best. But, setting aside my personal opinion of Gina as a character, this season failed utterly to achieve the very thing they used as the driving purpose of her return to the show at mid-season: to prove that she is ‘needed’. Real-life maternity leave is necessary and I would never advocate for axing a character just because the actor needs the time off, so I’m not suggesting they should have just ditched her and moved on despite Chelsea Peretti’s evident desire to return to the show, but what they NEEDED to do was to...give Gina literally anything meaningful to do once she returned, in order to re-establish her as someone with a reason to be around. They didn’t. Even the one subplot where Gina admits to Terry that she’s having a hard time balancing being a working mother lacked the impact to drive home a real-life struggle, and that’s pretty dire; Gina never felt right, when she was around at all, and it made the decision to bring her back on board after the show had got on just fine without her for half a season feel like one long false note. How hard would it have been to turn that weakly-delivered subplot into a proper mini-arc as Gina settled back in to work? How hard would it have been to make it clear that becoming a mother has changed Gina in a fashion which plays out in the long-term instead of just being a few remarks she made in a single episode? These are trick questions, of course. It’s not hard. It requires a bare minimum of effort which usually doesn’t even register AS effort, it’s just the writer asking themselves the question ‘What is going on with this character right now?’ and then answering it in their script. That’s just how basic character consistency works, really. And yet, they fumbled it.

In other dissatisfying news, we have the ‘Sad Excuse For An Arc’, featuring Charles Boyle. I really wish that I never had to talk about Charles again because I really hate him, for reasons elucidated constantly across my posts for this entire series which ultimately boil (heh) down to him being an emotionally manipulative nightmare of a person with possessive overtones who regularly disrespects and disrupts the lives around him without ever taking proper responsibility for his actions or recognising and working on his desperate need for self-improvement, and who somehow continues to be packaged by the narrative as just ‘ha-ha well-meaning but awkward’ while other characters pander to his manipulations and weather the many and sundry inconveniences he introduces to their lives without complaint. I still haven’t forgotten that he was an A-grade creep to Rosa in the first season and the show just kinda glossed over it and never mentioned it again, because damn, maybe if they had owned their mistake and had Charles actively tackle his flaws back then, they might have inadvertently written the character with literally any kind of development over the course of five freakin’ seasons. Because as-is, he has not changed at all since the show started (even adopting a child hasn’t changed him, it just gives him something to reference every now and then - what is it with this show and failing to incorporate major home-life changes (LITERAL! CHILDREN!!) into the character’s daily lives?), and this is how we end up with an ‘arc’ like that crap with Charles and the food truck. It goes like this: Charles buys food truck. Charles is a megalomaniac asshole chef in the food truck (significant food wastage ensues). Charles’ food truck gets destroyed. Three episodes across the season, one two three, and only the last one is the A plot of the episode instead of a minor subplot. And this? This is Charles’ personal story for the entire season. Unfortunately, he’s around constantly in the rest of the season as well and it feels like there were nowhere near enough episodes which offered a reprieve from his noxious personality, so he doesn’t suffer from Gina syndrome in the sense of seeming pointless, but that kinda...proves my point about arcs. The one Charles has here is a joke, and not the funny kind. He was used excessively throughout the rest of the season without the assistance of an ‘arc’ to legitimise his presence, he didn’t NEED one to function in the season, but the Sad Excuse For An Arc that he DID have only highlighted the wider problem of the character over the whole series thus far, which is that he has NEVER had an arc which brought about meaningful development or change.

And then there was Rosa. There was actually a sneakier amount of character fodder for Rosa this season than what may seem immediately obvious: the dominant development was her bisexuality, but there were also other pieces to pick up with her reconnecting with her family after her stint in prison, and also some welcome focus on her career in the latter end of the season (notably ‘Show Me Going’ and ‘White Whale’), which did a solid job of re-anchoring the character professionally after a season disproportionately interested in her romantic life. I feel very cynical, complaining about the bisexuality storyline, and I’d like to reiterate that I am genuinely glad to have this openly-declared positive representation for a frequently ill-treated branch of the big queer tree. I stand in unequivocal solidarity with my bisexual brethren. THAT SAID. I also sincerely dislike the way this show went about including bisexuality as a part of Rosa’s character, and it’s because of the ‘arc’ element: specifically, that the ‘arc’ is literally just about her being attracted to women. Rosa’s ‘coming out’ is not the arc - there is just the one Very Special episode about that specifically - and I’m ok with that because it’s rare to have a character whose queer sexuality is revealed comparatively late in a story without it being a revelation for the character themselves and not just the people around them. My problem is that - once the bisexual cat is out of the bag - the way the show packages the arc is just to double down, triple down on reminding the audience that Rosa is into women, is dating women, is being set up with women, is being wowed by hot women she sees...and there is no further mention of her interest in men. After four seasons of her only ever being depicted in relationships with men or having active interest in men, the narrative packages her coming out as bisexual in the same way as shows typically package a character realising that they’re gay: by giving them conspicuous subplots that revolve specifically around same-gender attraction. And that comes across to me as a brownie-points grab, as performative queer content designed to get attention, rather than the kind of inclusive representation I have celebrated this show for in the past re: Holt. It feels like the writers aren’t comfortable with the reality of Rosa’s bisexuality, that they’re subscribing to the idea that if she’s shown to be still interested in men that she’ll become magically not-queer and they’ll lose their brownie points, and so they’re throwing women at her in the kinds of meaningless subplots that they never assigned to the character before she came out. As a rule, if you treat a character differently for being queer than you would if they were straight, that’s bad representation. The way that Rosa’s life is presented to us should not spontaneously change just because we know she also likes women, especially because this is the status quo for her; the ‘arc’ here is about the expectation of an audience reaction, and not actually about the character at all.

The good news? Jake, Amy, and Holt all have successful, meaningful arcs this season, with Jake and Amy’s journey from engagement to marriage, and Holt’s gambit for his dream job as commissioner. While both arcs came to lacklustre closes in the predictable season finale, through the course of the season they supplied various A and B plots, never slipping entirely from the audience’s memory or causing glitches in the sense of character or narrative continuity, but also never dominating the show in a manner that became distracting or tedious. Both plots were told as stories, with ups and downs and complications large or small, like proper arcs instead of perfunctory beginning-middle-end or ‘three times makes it a pattern’ ideas (which is more than I can say for the Seamus Murphy misfire which made a Sad Excuse For An Arc for the first half of the season at large - it may have ended on a high note, but it failed to generate any tension as a long-term plot or deliver on its initial promises from the ultimately-weak time-wasting two-part premiere). Honestly, as a whole this season felt like they were winging it on the bulk of the story, with the Peralta-Santiago wedding and the fate of Holt’s career the only things that were planned for the finale from the outset and everything else just fabricated as they went along, and the looseness of the entire rest of the season is the messy disappointing result of the ‘we’ll figure it out when we get there’ ethos. Last season had me so hopeful for the show getting back on track, getting back to its roots and remembering what made it work with quality story for the characters, a solid narrative backbone, and a social compass at the forefront. After the vague characterisation of this season, the shapeless meandering of so much filler plot, and commentary that was ham-fisted and anvilicious when it was there at all...It’s not like this was bad. It wasn’t bad. It was just so much less than what I expected or hoped to see.

#Brooklyn Nine-Nine #Brooklyn Nine-Nine season five #Bechdel Test #female representation #full season review #B99

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oosteven-universe · 2 years

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What’s the Further Place From Here? #1

What’s the Furthest Place From Here? #1 Image Comics 2021 Written by Matthew Rosenberg Illustrated by Tyler Boss Lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou The world has ended. All that remains are gangs of children living among the ruins. But Sid believes there must be something more out there. When she disappears into the wastelands, her gang will risk everything to bring her home. A story about the things that matter most—your survival, your loved ones, and your record collection. This is quite possibly one of the weirdest, most disjointed and odd stories I’ve read in quite some time and I’m obsessed with it! There are things I have been able to garner from what we see and learn and it kind of has this post apocalyptic Children of the Corn kind of feel to it that is weirdly fascinating. Once you hit a certain age you age out of the clan that you are in and I don’t know what happens next but you have to leave, at least from what I can gather. Now Sid’s boyfriend aged out and he disappeared leaving her with child, not that anyone knows what that means because apparently none of them have had children before. I think, I believe, this is the catalyst that will lead her and by extension her family on a quest to find a mysterious city in the wastelands. Now I could be off base I dunno but it seems logical enough to me at this stage. I’m a fan of the way that this is being told. The story & plot development that we see through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how they learn information is presented exceptionally well. The character development that we see through the dialogue, the character interaction as well as how we see them act and react to the situations and circumstances which they encounter. The pacing is excellent and as it takes us through the pages introducing the characters, the story and this world that they live in as it prepares us for what’s next. I really like how we see this being structured and how the layers within the story emerge, grow, evolve and strengthen. I also really like the way the layers within the story open up new avenues to be explored and many of these engage the reader and take them off page while it adds this great depth, dimension and complexity to the story. How we see everything working together to create the story’s ebb & flow as well as how it moves the story forward is impeccably achieved. The interiors here are simple yet complex at the same time. The linework is clean, crisp and strong and how the varying weights and techniques are utilised to create the detail within the work we see is extraordinary. The way that backgrounds are being utilised to enhance and expand the moments as well as how they work within the composition of the panels to bring out the depth perception, sense of scale and the overall sense of size and scope to the book is marvellous. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show a remarkable eye for storytelling. The colour work we see is phenomenal, and in the plaid shirt or the patterned floor are real standout moments. The various hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work really show a great understanding of how colour works. This is pretty out there and anything this outside the box in terms of thinking is something that we all should be reading. This is a huge issue, three-in-one and it really does a lot to get the reader invested, engaged and intrigued by what we see. With some solid if cryptic writing and excellent characterisation alongside these bespoke interiors we see the next big thing coming to life right before our eyes.

#Comic Books #Comics Reviews #Image Comics

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rheaitis · 6 years

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Writing has been #difficult this week. I was gonna write about my own mental state as part of Mental Health Awareness Month, but apparently I'm not well enough to be able to write that stuff out for strangers yet. Moving on, then.

Today marks the first day of US Pride Month, so the five media posts this month are all gonna be queer as hell. And, like, happy; no dead queers here, so buckle in that rainbow seatbelt, cause this is gonna be one gay-ass ride.

Today's media is some 38 episodes long, and both diverse and diversely queer. It's got transformative work, it's got early eighteenth-century politics, it's got pirates, it's got treasure, it's got lesbians and bi women and genderqueer historical figures, it's got long-term committed poly folk, it's got blood, it's got gore, it's got amaaaazing black women ruling their own communities with care and compassion, it's got disabled folk being given focus and allowed agency, it's got conspiracies and alliances and mentoring between people of all genders and generations, it's got really lovely cinematography and music, it's got Toby Stephens' fabulous micro-expressions.

That's right, gentlefolk, today's media consumption is Black Sails. This is more of a weekend binge project, or a month-long thing if you're inclined to be sensible about things. It is also aimed at creasedknees, because I want her to watch it so we can squee.

Black Sails is a prequel of sorts to Treasure Island, dealing with the adventure that leads to the discovery and burial of that treasure. It takes up Captain Flint (Toby Stephens), Billy Bones (Tom Hopper) and of course John Silver (Luke Arnold) from the novel, and peoples itself with various fictional and fictionalised historical figures of the time, most significantly Jack Racham, Anne Bonny, and Charles Vane, who function as foils to our heroes throughout the show. I'm going to talk about them in just a bit but first Our Hero Captain James Flint, whom I adore entirely. (I want to like John Silver, but as in the novel Silver is a marvelously done character, without ever being someone it's safe to trust wholeheartedly or really at all.)

Captain Flint kills someone in the very first episode, and he doesn't actually get any nicer. (Even that killing is preceded by the pirate crew taking a ship with due savagery, so if you dislike gore I sadly cannot recommend watching this series.) In fact he escalates considerably, up from individual acts of piracy to cannonades directed at cities, and the show doesn't particularly gloss over this violence or the human cost entailed. Flint is the most consistently Slytherin character I have ever seen (and the fact that he resembles his mother to the last and most infinitesimal degree is often jarring): a man of vaulting ambition and enormous rage, with a capacity to hold onto grudges undiminished over a decade and longer. I love him. I love him absolutely, and not just because he is so wonderfully tender with all the women around him without ever doubting or trivialising their personhoods or capacity for doing what they set hands and minds to, though that is admittedly a very large part of why. Flint is always furious, always hurting, always ruthless with himself and his crew and associates, groaning away from a primal wound.

Primal wounds are maybe a good way to talk about this show without showering people with spoilers, as so many of the main characters have such wounds, inflicted by living in systems characterised by ills ranging from slave trafficking, bonded labour, debt prisons, early marriage, sexual violence, weaponised misogyny and institutionalised homophobia, and too often and deeply realistically by the rutted interstices of such injustice. Again realistically, the show's leads do not emerge from these experiences as noble crusaders, but rather as a den of Slytherins desperate to get ahead in whatsoever manner they can, and find whatever they think of as safe harbour: from Max (one of the characters original to the show and superbly played by Jessica Parker Kennedy) who wants to leave behind her miserable childhood and exploited adulthood by gaining entry into the Big House where life is soft and easy, to Madi who wants to lead her enslaved people into liberty, to Rackham who wants to make his mark on the world through narrative instead of having his story told as one of crushing poverty and debt. Our villains have stories as well, but even the few delineated in any detail are effectively subsumed in the institutional machines of which they are privileged cogs.

But important as all these stories are in motivating and substantiating the show, Flint's is the wound at the core of Black Sails. There are problems with this centering of white queer trauma in a show that, set in West Indies, could and almost certainly ought to have instead centered PoC and enslavement. It does deal with these issues, and inarguably allows Max and Madi Scott together as much space as Flint. Still, one has to accept at the start that this is a show about queer resistance that includes other aspects of marginalisation, rather than being a show of marginalised resistance against the institutions perpetrating and perpetuation said marginalisations. Significantly, Max and Mr. Scott are not initially characterised as being interested in working towards liberation, but the viewer complaints about the slow reveal of Mr. Scott's plans in this regard seem as facile as the screaming about Flint being queer.

I can go on about this show endlessly, as T, poor child, can easily testify, because I love everything about it, from the cinematography, to the gore, to the wlw relationships and just Anne Bonny queen of my heart and every violent impulse. And I do think that if I was a better person I would dwell longer on the gorgeous and deeply complex relationships between Charles Vane, Jack Rackham Anne Bonny and Max, and how I want them all to be alive and married but for Charles and Max to never ever ever touch, OR for Charles to scrub himself raw and bleeding before he's ever allowed to be near Max, and also Max's brilliance and subtlety and compassion and ruthlessness, how she's clung on to kindness in a deeply unkind existence and how that in no way signifies a lack of Nature, red in tooth and claw, and the way her change of clothing reflects and reiterates her change of status and and just. Her faaace, her golden glowing beauty and that heart-stopping smile. But the thing is my interests were set early and I imprinted on exactly one sort of character as a child and I continue to love them more than anything, and much as I adore Max, and much as I worship Madi Scott's regal compassion and strategic mind and her trust in and friendship with Flint and her renewed affection for Eleanor (whom I love also! and who is so sharp and such a merchant-prince and so tramelled by her gender), well. Look. I love Flint. I love his anger, and his sorrow, and his everything. I think it's remarkable how Flint’s story goes from Achillean (my lover is dead I will go to war, my lover is dead I will burn down this town, fight this empire, challenge fate/gods) to Odyssean (I am home from the wars and here is my lover who has longed for me as I for him). But what I love the most is how in a story that is almost entirely about stories and how and when and by whom they are told, Flint gets to say, angry and wounded and betrayed again,

This is how they survive. You must know this. You're too smart not to know this. They paint the world full of shadows... and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light. Their reasons, their judgments. Because in the darkness, there be dragons. But it isn't true. We can prove that it isn't true. In the dark, there is discovery, there is possibility, there is freedom in the dark once someone has illuminated it.

I love it so much, so intensely, so much more than Rackham's playing around with narratival style and truth, I love my sad bi ginger pirate uncle, and so would you if you gave the show a chance. It's all on directseries.net, at fairly good quality, with subtitles and everything. Please pretty please?

#Black Sails

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voightsgirl · 7 years

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Your Voight post made me think, and I think CPD doesn't get enough appreciation re: how they seem to effortlessly go against a lot of toxic masculinity. Like, there's been any issues with the guys crying or expressing their love for each other, and it's never made into a joke or followed with a no homo reaction or smthn like that and idk I guess I really appreciate the male friendships in CPD. Even the rest of the franchise doesn't do so well as this imo (not counting justice bc it's still new)

You know I started replying to this and then I realised that I’ve never really thought about the male characters in that much depth…I’m the first to sing about how amazing Erin and Burgess are, as well as male characters individually, but when I really thought about how well the men have been created, I ended up with an entire essay so apologies it’s so long but I just love this show and these guys. Also since there’s been a lot of negativity in light of *cough* recent events, I thought it would be nice to show my appreciation, so here goes. Feel free to add examples/contradictions/points/other ideas etc!!

Something I need to say before beginning: I find it really, really difficult to empathise with male characters. It’s just harder for me to really relate to their issues. And I think a huge reason for this is just that being a female character in these shows and these professions is just harder. And therefore there are a certain amount of fundamental difficulties that each female character has to face, and since being a female in general involves a lot of these struggles, it’s much easier for other women to look at these characters and see themselves in them. Look at Erin and Burgess struggling to keep their hard work and intelligence a more valuable feature to their unit than their bodies. Look at April and Maggie trying not to be undermined by their male, more qualified co-workers - and Manning being a single, working mum. Look at Gabby beating the odds and becoming a firefighter even though no one thinks she can do it because she’s small and female.

And I love that this show can do that: take these vital professions and give them amazing, well developed, multifaceted female characters whose constant struggles are so relatable for any female watching because we’ve all been there.

But what PD does that I just don’t see so much in the others (Fire does it to an extent, but I can’t really think of any examples in Med - although it’s my least favourite and so I’m probably not the best person to make analyses based on it, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) is do the same with the males. And it’s something that I have never seen on a TV show before. There’s no “no-homo” bullshit, there’s no reservations around being friends. They hug each other when they’re worried about them, they do the friendly shoulder squeezes and arm-punches and fist-bumps. They go out for drinks together. They trust each other and look out for each other and they talk to each other about how they feel. And it’s really, really nice to see.

People go the extra mile when writing female characters (although admittedly, as a teenage girl I’m probably not using the widest sample range of TV shows) because they know that either a) their audience is mostly female, or b) they’re worried about sexist accusations. Women have always been victims of horrible media tropes, so I’m so, so glad that they do go this extra mile - I love seeing female friendships more than anything else in the world - but because people are so aware of the issue surrounding female characters, they’ve taken that into consideration, while assuming that there isn’t actually a problem with their male characters.

What Chicago PD does that I think is incredible from a characterisation point of view is they take these archetypal cop characters - the dirty cop (Voight), the by-the-book cop (Antonio), the shell-shocked veteran cop (Halstead), the old-cop young cop (Ruzek and Ollinsky) and the gentle giant (Attwater). **there are more, such as Attwater arguably being the “token minority” and Ruzek being the “fair cop” but you get the idea. They all seem to represent one of the main tropes that are almost always present in cop shows (at least all the ones I’ve watched).

And the show doesn’t subvert the tropes, not exactly - even though doing so would be so much easier - but they three-dimensialise (idk if that’s a word just roll with me here) all the characters on top of these fundamental archetypes. ie:

Voight is a dirty cop. He kills people in the name of justice, he’s used dirty money and lied under oath and done things that probably should have lost him his badge a million times. And yet, he works tirelessly for the protection of his city. He loves his son with everything he has, and his grandson, and his daughter-in-law. He took in a 13(?) year old who’d been hooked on heroin and arrested for solicitation and loves her like she’s his own daughter. He made amends with the guy who put his son in jail. He always, always fights for the underdog and doesn’t let the system take advantage of them. He treats his unit as if they are his “family” - literally his words - and he has formed relationships with every single one of them, bending the rules and putting his neck and badge on the line if they ever do anything wrong or against the rules. (Example: 3x05)

Antonio plays by the rules, that’s just who he is. He believes in the system more than Voight does, arguably because he’s always been on the right side of it. But that doesn’t mean he’s not willing to make compromises if those he really cares about are on the line - he is more than willing to turn a blind eye to other people’s ‘interpretations’ of the law, and he will do everything in his power to fight his way using the rules of the system before he breaks them. (1x02, 3x01)

Halstead’s military history I think is one of the most interesting aspects of this show because he had the potential to turn into a “cold sniper” as I think is the norm with ex-military characters, and yeah, he was affected in ways that we don’t even know - and may never fully understand - by what he saw and did in his tour(s). But he’s so selfless and sweet and supportive. His PTSD and general commitment issues mean that he can’t open up to everyone but he still lets them open up to him, being Erin’s #1 supporter, and he’s finally started to work on looking after his mental health properly and learning how to ask for help. He’s kind and caring and understands the importance of sacrifice and, like Voight, is willing to bend the rules a little bit - even if he’s always there to question Voight’s methods. (3x17, 4x18 - deleted scene)

Ruzek is the token rookie of the show, and the audience is placed in the same boat as him when initially learning the ropes of the unit and how everyone fits. He’s the young and attractive one (I mean….), and he does exhibit those typical rookie traits: he’s rash and reckless and cocky and definitely not as cynical as any of the others, but at the same time he has a huge heart, he’s sweet and caring, and he can be as tough as hell when someone he loves is in danger. He doesn’t have the “tortured romantic” side to him and he has a typical cop family tree, but he’s the person I feel like most people can probably relate to - someone who puts themselves in harm’s way every single day for no reason other than he wants to make a difference. (1x01, 1x11)

Ollinsky is the other dirty cop, although he functions more as an assistant to the dirty cop. He has the tough coldness about him that you would probably expect Jay to have instead, if following these tropes by the book, and he comes across as very sinister and quite scary. And yet he is an absolute darling around Lexi and Michelle and when Lexi died and Meredith was kidnapped, he totally lost control. Despite all the coldness and being closed-off he is perhaps the most emotional of them all, grieving and crying and not caring about how tough he is when someone he loves is threatened. (4x16)

Attwater is the gentle giant of the show and although this doesn’t need much more explaining, he, alongside Erin, is also the token minority of the unit (even more so now that Antonio’s left and Burgess has joined Erin in Intelligence) and although this trope is constantly seen as a bad thing, using a token character to avoid criticism of being racist in casting choices, in PD Attwater opens the door to addressing cases of police racism, corruption and brutality against ethnic minorities, and the episodes in which they do deal with this, Attwater is quick to express his opinion on the matter and challenge within seconds everything that’s wrong with the institution and their society. But on top of all that, he has relatives in prison, he’s expected to be a big tough “scary black man”, but in actuality he looks after his two younger siblings and does stand-up comedy and probably gives the best bear hugs ever.

And the support system that these six men have together (or five, now that Antonio’s left) is incredible to watch. They understand barriers, they know when to push and when to give each other space, they all work together so well in such a potentially toxic environment without even a hint at this hyper-masculinity that is so huge in other cop shows. They’re all just bros.

What’s also great is that even though there’s a lil bit of that bro-masculine culture especially when Erin goes undercover and dresses up all nice, they’re never anything but perfect gentlemen. There’s no teasing and no sexist remarks about her legs or whatever, they all just seem genuinely impressed by how pretty she looks and how well she does her job. Adam even says things like “there’s about a thousand things I could say right now but won’t” because they all respect Erin and Burgess and support them as much as each they do each other. They don’t care if the women do better jobs than them, or save them, or shoot more accurately than them, and they’d never dream of undermining their femininity while doing so.

Other examples of the bros being bros:

Antonio getting Jay into the unit in the first place as a thank you for helping out Gabby (Chicago Fire, season 2 sometime, mentioned later when Antonio leaves)

Voight literally crying on Alvin’s shoulder after Justin’s death

Every single one of Jay and Mouse’s interactions, especially when they talk about their time in the military and Jay realises how much he cares about his friend when Mouse wants to re-enlist and when Mouse is taken hostage (4x05, 3x03)

Antonio and Voight’s entire friendship and the fact that Voight would go to such measures to help Diego even after Antonio was the one to put the cuffs on and send him to jail

Attwater and Ruzek being bros until the end and *sniff* the whole best man thing

They all buy Antonio a zimmer frame when he gets shot isn’t that just beautiful

Ruzek hugging Al after Lexi’s death and his little “I don’t know what to say” and “can I hug you?” - like he knows Al might just want space but he has to let him know he’s there for him

They all get so upset when Jay is taken. Just watch the scene where they see the video of his torture and their faces break me. They can’t handle the idea that someone so close to them - their brother - is in so much pain. (3x01)

Seriously tho just look at these bros

So I was just gonna write a few paragraphs and sorry this is so long but feel free to add more!! I want to know what everyone else thinks!

#meta #cpd meta #jay halstead #hank voight #ruzek #antonio dawson #cpd #cpd appreciation #cpd positivity #asks #anon #my meta

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careergrowthblog · 5 years

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Saffron Walden County High School: An exemplary school. The Learning Rainforest made real.

Last week I spent a day visiting Saffron Walden County High School in the North-West corner of Essex. This was the result of a conversation with Head and CEO, Caroline Derbyshire who suggested that I should consider writing a ‘Learning Rainforest in Action’ follow-up book. Having read the original book, Caroline felt that SWCHS embodied many of the ideas in it – so I went along to see for myself.

It wasn’t the first time I had been to SWCHS – I’ve had the pleasure of visiting several times in the last 10 years, including the visit that resulted in writing one of my all-time most-read blogs ‘Making Feedback Count: “Close the Gap” which features the feedback system the school was developing at the time. A key element of that visit was a superb CPD session with a carousel of departmental workshops coordinated by Polly Lankester who is now Associate Headteacher.

On my latest visit I had the privilege of observing 21 different lessons on a day-long tour supported by various members of the leadership team. It was wonderful. I can safely say that SWCHS is one of the best schools I’ve ever seen, in any sector.

It would be tempting to attribute this to the advantages the school enjoys: it’s an extremely nice part of the country to live in; teachers want to live in the area, they stay and invest in the community; it’s near Cambridge so there’s a pool of fresh talent from the PGCE courses there; the school has had a benefactor who funded building an exceptional concert hall facility, Saffron Hall, run as a professional arts venue on site. The school’s size and locality enables it to recruit a very large Sixth Form of 600 students (impressively, the school has only recently started taking about moving from GCSE 4s to 5s as the entry requirements: strive for 5 is the mantra! ; It’s a very comprehensive Sixth From compared to many schools and their ALPS 2 suggests they’re doing a great job!).

But these advantages don’t come close to explaining the quality of the experience students are getting there. Dare I say, the reasons align with the elements of my Learning Rainforest analogy:

Establishing the conditions: I’d say that the school provides optimum working conditions for staff. It feels like a wonderful place to work. The physical environment is fabulous but there’s a palpable spirit of professional trust, extensive investment in CPD and the best in-school coffee shop you’ll ever see! Certainly in a state school. Stability in staffing is very high – but this has been crafted, worked at – it doesn’t just happen. Recruiting and retaining great teachers isn’t taken for granted and a lot of effort goes into supporting the teaching school and other alliances. They also offer a superb curriculum with a clever blend of breadth and depth, using Year 9 as a bridging year leading into a wide range of options.

Building Knowledge: The quality of teaching is brilliant. It’s rare to see such sustained quality over a day visiting lessons; each teacher brimming with subject expertise; each presenting a sense of drive and purpose, matching very high expectations of students with expert lesson structures engaging all students in a rigorous, inspiring learning process.

The school’s emphasis on research-engagement has yielded superb practice linked to retrieval practice, modelling and feedback. At a lunchtime meeting with curriculum leaders, I was struck by the thoughtful evaluation of their practice and the way they’re seeking to continually develop their curriculum and pedagogy to embrace the learning from research, reading and their own enquiry work.

Exploring the possibilities: The school provides exceptional extra-curricular opportunities through trips and visits, visiting artists and so on – but the possibilities are largely evidenced in lessons. I saw some of the best drama lessons I’ve ever seen, probably the best KS3 technology work I’ve ever seen and multiple examples of A level teaching where students were firmly in the driving seat. The sixth form is big because its quality attracts students to join – there’s a virtuous spiral of success fuelling success.

All of this emerges from a deliberate blend of systems and culture. There’s a rigour to everything with intelligent systems – including the assessment regime I described in an earlier post: The Ideal Assessment Tracking Regime? The school has high expectations of staff, for sure. But the culture allows the systems to deliver. It’s the kind of school you want to be in to teach, to lead, to express yourself. Of course, it’s not perfect. They have some achievement issues to address; some further gaps to close. Not everything lines up perfectly at once and, despite their successes, they’re fully aware of where further improvements lie. That’s the sign of a great school: always ambitious for further success.

To bring all this alive, here are some nuggets from the lessons I observed:

English Y7: Students were engaging with a range of new words such as indolently, impertinently .. used in sentences. The task was to infer their meaning from the context. There was a superb follow-up Q&A where the teacher explored their answers and consolidated the correct meanings.

Physics Y12: A classic demo lesson and whole-class experiment: measuring bullet velocity with an air-rifle and air track, applying conservation of momentum. I used to do this one myself over 30 years ago – I love how stable the physics curriculum is!

Computing. Y9: In a bookwork lesson, away from computers, students were working on code for a PIN number verification routine, explaining and checking each other’s solutions. The peer supported problem-solving going on around the class was impressive.

Drama Y9: An exceptional lesson featuring a devised piece rehearsal: three groups formed circles rotating to bring each student to the front in turn, with everyone else mimicking the central speaker – a range of accents, characters, personal stories. This was followed by a machine/rap ‘families’ choral piece and other elements with students working towards an imminent performance. I was so impressed by the discipline, expectations, trust, rigour… and the time given to repetition and practice. Notably, the drama teacher was about to head off to a 2-day residential theatre trip with her A level students to see three shows in London.

Maths Y9: Applying area in problem solving using algebra. A well-pitched balance of stretch and practice; modelled and checked in the detail. Great maths teaching.

History GCSE: Planning for source question on suffragettes: There was a big focus on securing the relevant knowledge and on retrieval practice: knowing the facts. A3 sheets of annotated pie charts were used cleverly as a device to identity the relative effects of different factors. I also loved the macro timeline reinforcement….students had impressive recall across the Power and People theme: 1170 to present; Magna Carta to Brixton Riots.

Art Y11: Students were making superb clay heads or teapots… extended pieces using a range of new 3D skills, working towards their mock exam. Supporting portfolios were excellent and the ambition, high expectations, support for creative exploration and the intensity in the process/work rate were hugely impressive. The ‘close the gap’ feedback system was still going strong.

Graphics Y11: Interestingly, a recent switch to the Art and Design spec moving from old-style DT design portfolios to art portfolios was making it more much more creative. Students were exploring shapes with a link to natural forms to inform a design brief for an outdoor structure. I remarked on the quality of an exemplar project displayed on the wall. It belonged to the student next to me who was beaming.. it was stunning.

PE: Y7 basketball : An expert blend of group practice, whole class instruction with student modelling, then more practice –with all students involved! One student’s enthusiastic demo of a dribble technique was lovely – in answer to the question ‘why do we need to use that method?’, he showed how it could go wrong if you didn’t use it. Metacognition in PE – brilliant.

Drama Y7…This lesson showed how a curriculum platform is built enabling the Y9 lesson seen earlier to be so good. Here, one group was in the centre with everyone acting as audience offering critique. Again the lesson was characterised by challenge, structure, expectation with tons of feedback; a blend of disciplined creative thinking.

Psychology Y13 : An essay planning lesson; highly synoptic, with the teacher guiding discussion, bringing together different points, modelling how to make links. The was excellent probing questioning (my favourite thing in teaching) linking knowledge to essay technique i.e. linking specific studies to the particular question. It was notable how students had the option to use laptops for notes in a high-trust grown-up manner.

History Y13: Russia: A small group activity to prepare a set of annotated images of Soviet art to share as a revision tool – the question being the extent to which the images represented reality. There was impressive harnessing of student agency, discussing ideas, making notes, sharing.. collaborating with links to the bigger question about the success of establishing a socialist society 1917-41. Again, I was impressed with what students knew and how the task supported them in probing deeper.

Percussion Workshop: Part of the day included observing the visiting So Percussion ensemble who were there to run a workshop with a group of 20+ Year 9s for three days. In the workshop students were involved in a rule-based composition activity taking turns for a practical hands-on marimba lesson, the plan being for them to contribute to a public concert on the Friday.

Geology Y13: So great to see Geology A level going strong! Here the class were going somewhat off-piste, using desks to model a geological event– making a fissure and linking this to the pressure/forces and the flow of magma. Great stuff!

English Y13: A fascinating discussion of gender, with students forming a schema around polarities, organising ideas on standard gender characteristics as students volunteered them. This fed into a process contrasting and applying these identities to central characters in The Duchess of Malfi: a superb blend of teacher instruction and group discussion.

Business Y13: The topic was critical path analysis. Students were using the idea of making tea to explore how far you can go to specify step by step processes. As elsewhere, the teacher-student rapport was wonderful.

English Y11: Lord of the Flies. Revisiting the text for the first time after studying it in Year 10, students were looking at how to deploy quotations, reviewing prior knowledge and undertaking a keyword check: eg microcosm, allegory… – a great example of allowing all students to think, explore their own recall and understanding and then check.

Textiles Y8: A double lesson forming part of a week on/week off rotation with food tech and wider rotation with resistant materials. For a relatively short dose of textiles, the expectations and outcomes were fabulous. Very well structured booklets drive the curriculum with ‘close the gap’ improvements shown. In the lesson all students were at sewing machines making batik cushions and the mini-portfolios made for homework were superb. I don’t think I’ve ever seen KS3 DT homework this good.

Spanish Y10. This lesson exemplified so many aspects of what I regard as great MFL teaching. The activities got everyone speaking; the key structures were being repeated, reinforced, practised. All class instructions were given in Spanish, with lots of teacher talk in Spanish. The focus was on revision of the language to develop opinion and included the retrieval practice game: Quiz, Quiz, Trade… cleverly allowing all students to be involved simultaneously in practising and checking each other’s understanding. Magnífico!

French Y10: Another great MFL lesson featuring a tic-tac-toe game to rehearse pronunciation. Again instructions were predominantly in French for a task that supported the rehearsal of vocabulary; the teacher intervened to reinforce key pronunciation. Attention to detail! Students had an impressive knowledge organiser booklet with all the key phrases organised lesson by lesson; they explained how they learn phrases by a combination of practice and testing themselves.

Y9 Physics: Great teacher demo of Newton’s laws involving with trolleys for people to stand on moving in opposite direction; good emphasis on making sure students distinguish weight vs mass. This was followed-up with remote control car on a surface moving in opposite directions. Here we had a term one NQT doing a great job balancing developing skills of behaviour management with developing the teaching of the subject. And it says a lot about SWCHS that they have such confidence in their NQTs and the support they get to allow visitors in to see their lessons.

Y8 Geography: Students were looking at GDP/capita vs life expectancy. The graph plotting is challenging providing an important reminder of the attainment range in the school; students operate within a palpable ‘teach to the top’ ethos that permeates the school. In classic Rosenshine style, there was lots of supervised guided practice as the teacher circulated.

I hope the details shared here go someway to illustrate the Learning Rainforest: superb conditions, deep knowledge, exciting possibilities. Culture and systems. Rigour. Teaching to the top. Teaching for memory and recall. And Joy, Awe and Wonder in plentiful supply. SWCHS is a truly wonderful school that many could learn from. I hope they’re prepared for the visit requests! Thanks to Caroline, Polly, Cathy, Matt, Angela and Graham for your hospitality. I know how proud you and your colleagues are of the school and everything you’ve achieved. And thanks especially to all the SWCHS teachers who welcomed me into your classrooms so openly. Excellence like this doesn’t happen by magic. You’ve all created something very special.

Rainforest Image: Taken from SWCHS corridor art display.

Saffron Walden County High School: An exemplary school. The Learning Rainforest made real. published first on https://medium.com/@KDUUniversityCollege

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careergrowthblog · 5 years

Text

Saffron Walden County High School: An exemplary school. The Learning Rainforest made real.

But these advantages don’t come close to explaining the quality of the experience students are getting there. Dare I say, the reasons align with the elements of my Learning Rainforest analogy:

To bring all this alive, here are some nuggets from the lessons I observed:

Maths Y9: Applying area in problem solving using algebra. A well-pitched balance of stretch and practice; modelled and checked in the detail. Great maths teaching.

Rainforest Image: Taken from SWCHS corridor art display.

Saffron Walden County High School: An exemplary school. The Learning Rainforest made real. published first on https://medium.com/@KDUUniversityCollege

0 notes