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aerialflight · 3 years

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Fic Recs (cause it's always nice to give a shout out and get people into things I'm into rn)

[The Magnus Archives] (I recently finished the podcast and I fell into a hole for a while so here you go)

Sing a Song of Sixpence by Kaiel

Ship: Jon/Martin

In which Jonathan Sims is a Siren, and he fails to notice any new abilities granted to him by the position of Archivist. Or really anything about the Entities at all.

Takes place in season 1 featuring Jonah Magnus’s slow decent into madness

(The new mythology interwoven with tma's worldbuilding is so freaking good and I love how all the characters change and develop because of these changes. Also, f you Elias)

Along Came a Spider by Dribbledscribbles

Ship: implied Jon/Martin

Sasha James is the Archivist, as expected. Martin Blackwood is menaced by Jane Prentiss, as expected. Elias Bouchard weaves his web, as expected.

All goes as it should.

At least until something calling itself Jonathan Sims steps in.

(Web!Jon in this makes me want to weep, it's so freaking good. A pretty long, very excellent oneshot on what could've happened if Jon got taken by the web when he was a kid. And Sasha as the Archivist is ALWAYS so cool, we love her in this house.)

A Break in the Clouds by Ash_Rabbit

“I’m eight.” the kid sniffs as if eight was any different from four, maybe not an unspeakable horror then, just a regular horror. “And I heard that the Magnus Institute deals with-” his little nose scrunches, cute. “-spooky things.”

“Do you have a-” he cracks a grin, and then rethinks it as small hands tighten against their burden.”-spooky thing to deliver?” gods he hopes not, it’s bad enough when adults walk in and lay out all of their baggage, but for a child-

“There’s a spider in this book.” the kid says solemnly, raising his textbook sized parcel. “It ate Evan Pritchard.” a bloody fucking Leitner. Of course an eight year old would find a murder spider book. “This seemed like the best place to bring it.”

(I never thought about what the Original Elias could've been like AND NOW I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT IT BECAUSE OF THIS FIC. I LOVE HIM, HE'S COMPLEX AND HE CARES AND JON CARES AND THEY BOTH CARE ABOUT EACH OTHER. THIS IS THE CONTENT I WANT, OMG. Also, Jon being even smaller than usual is adorable, so cute. No wonder Elias wants to hug him, a LOT.)

See the Line where the Sky meets the Sea by The_Floating_World

Ship: Jon/Martin, Jon/Oliver Banks

When Jon is a child he looks into the infinite abyss of space. The Vast looks back into him.

(One of my all time fave fics in this fandom, no questions asked. I have reread this three times and am open to doing it again, god. Vast!Jon, such a concept. It's written so beautifully and the relationships Jon develops, so good. ugh. My heart. Please please read.)

Sweet As Roses by Prim_the_Amazing

Ship: Jon/Martin

“Come in, Martin,” he says, not looking up from his notes.

“Hi, Jon,” he says, and Jon stops writing at the sound of his voice. “We’re out of the green tea, but we’ve got lemon?”

Jon looks at him. Martin smiles at him in his usual tentative way as he sets the mug of tea down on Jon’s desk. Heat spikes so sharply in his gut that he twitches with it.

“Thank you, Martin,” he says, mouth dry, and he stands up.

“Oh,” he says, sounding almost surprised. He smiles again. “No-- no problem-- um, what are you--”

Jon takes Martin by the shoulders, leans up on the tips of his toes, and kisses him.

(You have no idea how much I howled through this fic, my god. *buries face in hands* The number of times I wanted to cry from sheer hilarity and horror reading this good lord.)

Things Could Always Be Worse by theOestofOCs

Ship: Jon/Martin, Georgie/Melanie

Sometimes, the most horrifying thing of all is what might have been.

Somewhere, Jon could swear he heard a crowd laughing.

Or: in which Jonathan Sims is forced to swap places with his alternate self—a tall, chivalrous hero extraordinaire, who knows neither fear nor nuance—and is sent to the aggressively straight alternate universe the Magnus Archives was never meant to be.

“Whatever place this is,” Jon announced, “I just want to be sure it knows I hate it.”

(I will say this once, THIS IS THE MOST CURSED THING IVE EVER READ EVER. Like holy hell. I can't believe this thing exists. please read it oh please please please)

[Supernatural]

heard from your mother (she don't recognize you) by Schmuzz

Ship: Dean/Cas, Jessica/Sam

A man named Cas wakes up in 2003 with no memories, but he's able to piece together a few things:

1. Supernatural creatures exist, and most of them will hurt innocent civilians if he doesn't stop them; 2. He has abilities that no human hunter should have, but he knows enough about human hunters to keep that to himself, and finally; 3. He keeps running into another hunter named Dean Winchester, who seems to be about as lonely as he is if he's willing to put up with those former facts long enough to help Cas unravel the mystery of who (or what) he really is.

For his part, Dean's still (not) dealing with Sam's departure to Stanford, and figures distracting himself with a bit of mystery and intrigue is as harmless as it gets, right? Right.

(THE fic I'm most into right now, been following this from the very start and it's AMAZING. Cas has agency and is making friends and S1 Dean is growing out of John's influence and is becoming a Person and the both of them first being friends then more. The slow burn as their relationship develops, SO GOOD. SO SO DAMN GOOD. *screams* Seriously one of the best spn fics I've read in a long, long time.)

anamnesis by cenotaphy

Ships: Castiel/Dean, Sam/Eileen

Chuck is depowered, Jack is the new god, and the world is free. Dean and Sam get into the Impala and chase down the miles on an endless highway, and their story is finally, finally their own to follow. At least, that's what Dean tells himself. But the diners and motels and painted interstate lines are blurring together and the smallest details keep catching at his brain like tiny fishhooks and he can't quite shake the feeling that not everything is exactly as it should be.

* Fix-it/alternate series finale. Canon-compliant through the end of 15.19.

(THIS IS THE FIC THAT GOT ME THROUGH THE FINALE OKAY. WHY COULDN'T THIS HAVE BEEN CANON. It's Disturbing and honestly plot-wise this makes more sense. Why couldn't we have had this. *screams*)

[Avatar: The Last Airbender]

where the stars do not take sides by WitchofEndor

Ship: Sokka/Zuko

When Azula is nine, she becomes an only child. She hears the Fire Lord call for Zuko's life, and in the morning, her mother and brother are gone. Azula may be young, but she isn't naive. She knows what happened to them.

Which makes it all the more surprising when Azula tracks the Avatar down and fights his group of peasant friends, only to find herself staring into an eerily familiar face.

(The fact one of the tags in this fic is, "Sibling Dynamic: Fucked Up But Wholesome" should give you an idea what this fic is like. Chaotic as HELL and I just love Azula here, she loves Zuko so much in her messed up way and Zuko loves her back in the exact same way lol. It's batshit and I am Here For This.)

[Naruto]

Eclipse by AislingRoisin (JayBird345) for HybrisAnaideia

Ship: Nara Shikaku/OFC

"In life, it's easier to remain stagnant and wallow in your troubles. But life isn't merely about continued existence, nor is it meant to be gone through alone."

(This is a fic that's slept on and I NEED people to read this. A self-insert fic that I find really interesting in its approach and the worldbuilding for the post-third war shinobi world is fantastic. I feel like there's a certain pattern with self-insert fics, not that is a detriment in any way to how much I enjoy them, so this fic feels fresh to me in a way I haven't read in a while. I am waiting eagerly for this to get updated! Please read!)

On Freedom and Other Formalities by iaso

Ship: Kakashi/Genma/OFC

When push comes to shove, Hiwa Inuzuka doesn't go down easy. Reborn into a new, dangerous world? She puts her past life as a spy to work. Thrown into a war? Hiwa does her duty, for Konoha. And when she's forced into an arranged marriage? All there is to do is beat them to the punch and get married first. Thankfully, Genma Shiranui is willing to lend a hand. Literally. SI/OC

(Listen, LISTEN, it's about the slow burn, the longing, the communication (it both has and hasn't and isn't THAT great??), the messy way you fit three very different people together, it's so freaking good! Also, Kakashi is so Chaotic here this is my fave characterization of him, you can't change my mind. And Genma is a Good Boi who is Doing His Best, along with the Self-insert character who I LOVE SO MUCH, SHE'S FANTASTIC FNEIWOPAF. Sped past this fic in the speed of light, I could not stop reading!)(Honestly, read all of the author's fics, they're all really REALLY good!)

Building a Castle by WhisperingDarkness

Without needing anyone to tell her, Sakura knew that talking to someone no-one else could see or hear would make her weird. It would draw the bad kind of attention to her, something people could make fun of her for.

She didn’t like being weird, but she did like the voice. Her inner voice was helpful and it was a part of her that had always been there. The idea of it not being there would have been so much weirder than anything else.

It was during her first year at the Academy that Sakura realised the voice was not in her head at all, but that it came from a cloudy shape floating next to her.

(Basically a short-ish retelling of Hikaru no Go. Only with more Shogi and Nara and Ninja's)

(Sakura can see ghosts (I'm noticing this is a popular trope for her) and it's really cute haha! Her relationship with Tobirama is sweet and I just enjoyed reading this so much.)

[The Magicians]

So Long (And Thanks For All The Books) by IncompleteSentanc (Erava)

Ships: Quentin/Eliot, James/Julia, Quentin/Margo/Eliot

When Quentin is told Julia wasn't admitted to Brakebills, he realizes he has a drastic decision in front of him. If he tells Julia about magic, he'll have his mind wiped as well as hers. But he can't just leave her behind, either. He can't lose his best friend, and he can't let her life a life with her magical potential stolen away from her.

So he makes a third choice.

(Really, and I mean REALLY well-done canon divergent fic, this is the Quentin & Julia friendship fic I have been looking for forever. It explores so much of what could've happened and I just love Quentin here, I really really do. Characterization done so right. I also recommend the author's other works too. Been a follower of them for a long time, they're great.)

[Game of Thrones]

The Road to Victory by writing_as_tracey

Too late in preparing for the Night King and the Long Night, the last stand at Winterfell is close to falling. Bran takes desperate measures to ensure victory, and Jon, Sansa, and Arya pay the price for it in a time unfamiliar to them, on the cusp of another war. [GoT, time-travel fix it]

(I swear, this fic made me laugh so many times, all the Stark are BAMF and fantastic, and Rhaegar gets Wrecked lol. It's crack btw, and the plot goes in directions you'll never guess and it's amazing hahaha!)

[Haikyuu!!] (I am very very late to the fandom but here I am)

Ballare (To Dance) by MidnightSparks

Ship: Iwaizumi Hajime/Kageyama Tobio/Oikawa Tooru, and platonic Kageyama & Kentarou (really love their friendship)

Kageyama’s first love is volleyball. His second, however, is ballet.

In one world, Kageyama Tobio is left behind by his parents. In this world, the existence of soulbonds keeps Kageyama’s parents in Miyagi and leaves Kageyama in the care of his grandma and grandpa.

(In which soulmates exist and that changes everything and nothing at the same time.)

(*buries face in hands* I have fallen for this ship so hard and I can't get out fudge me. I understand now. Their DYNAMICS FIEWONPAF)

Kings of Tomorrow by bokubroya (liarielle)

Ship: Kageyama Tobio/Oikawa Tooru

On the eve of Tobio’s 16th birthday, he counts down the seconds to midnight, and emerges with Oikawa Tooru’s name on his wrist.

It’s been two years since then, and Tobio thought they had an understanding. A silent, never spoken about understanding that this thing between them is nothing, and they’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Of course, it’s just like Oikawa to change the game and leave Tobio wondering what comes next.

(I am WEAK for soulmate fics between these two, I don't even really like soulmate fics half the times what is WRONG WITH ME-)(Please suffer with me, I'm begging you. Its a good fic, thumbs up.)

[Crossover]

Honey and Magic by JustARatherVerySillyWriter, White_Squirrel for Super Carlin Brothers

Fandoms: Matilda (yeah you read that right), Harry Potter

Everyone knew Matilda was a rather extraordinary child, but even she didn't know she was a witch. Matilda Honey receives her Hogwarts letter in the year of the Triwizard Tournament, and soon, she will leave her unique mark on the magical world.

(Do I even need to explain how amazing it is to have Matilda in the wizarding world? And Matilda is a HUFFLEPUFF AND I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL THIS FIC IS GREAT PLEASE READ!!!)

An Eye for an Eye by DpsMercy

Fandoms: The Magnus Archives, Welcome to Night Vale

In which Jonathan Sims is not from the UK but instead, if you took his origins and turned them sideways twice then flipped them over, he technically would be from the US, the town of Night Vale specifically. Elias can’t do shit about it and gets a headache and slowly creeping madness instead.

(Look, I know probably everyone has read this because if they haven't, what have you been DOING with your lives??? Jon interning at Night Vale is Incredible, nothing phases this man, it's Delightful. I laughed so many times reading this, I'm not even kidding right now. Read or perish.)

The Favour by R_Cookie

Fandoms: Harry Potter, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Ship: Original Percival Graves/Harry Potter

Percival is ten years old when his grandfather tries to tell him that he's ensured the greatness of the Graves legacy for him, that he ought to be eternally grateful - but the explanation is hijacked by a stranger who manages to intimidate Chester Graves with an ease never seen before.

or: Hadrian (Harry) Potter is the Master of Death, who grants Graves a boon. Nobody could have known that the Deathly Hallows didn't turn you so much into the 'Master of Death' as into the anthropomorphic personification of Death. And so, Death becomes Percival's guardian angel, and Percival does not spit out his cereal.

(Look, I don't know how I stumbled back into the FBAWTFT fandom either, it just happened and I'm grateful for that. Otherwise, I wouldn't have found this amazing fic. Their relationship is slow and strange and I just love how Percival is characterized here. Also, one of the tag promises that it deviates from canon so I am really, really excited for that! XD)

baby that's what i do by natanije

Fandoms: Naruto, Katekyou Hitman Reborn!

"Are you telling me," Hidan exclaims, incredulous, "that you collect money all this time to give to orphans?!"

Kakuzu pauses. He blinks a few times.

"Huh. I guess I do."

(Tsuna reincarnates as Kakuzu and it's HILARIOUS. HE'S SUCH A MOM HAHAHA)

#Fanfiction #AO3 #Fic Rec #Fic Rec List #Podcasts #The Magnus Archives #Supernatural #Avatar The Last Airbender #Naruto #The Magicians #Game of Thrones #Haikyuu!!#Crossover #Matilda #Welcome to Night Vale #Harry Potter #Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them #Katekyou Hitman Reborn

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nightwingmyboi · 4 years

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Dick Grayson Comic Recs

I’ve been getting an increase in requests for comic recs, so I finally caved and decided to list a bunch of comics and series I recommend about Dick Grayson and put it all in one convenient place. I also wrote out a little description/review, to try to give people an idea if the comic sounded appealing and they wanted to check it out. Some of these are just single comics, others are some series to check out, pretty much in chronological order.

Robin:

Robin (1993) Annual #4: One of my preferred Robin origin stories. Fairly solid characterization, and a more reasonable timeline for events than other tellings. Provides an inside look at Dick’s thoughts during this time.

Batman: Dark Victory #9-13: All of Dark Victory is excellent, these are the issues that Dick appears in. It could be considered another Robin origin story, though it is not solely focused on Dick. Everyone is characterized very well, especially Dick. The plot is very engaging, involving Two Face and a crime family, along with tracking down Zucco. As the name implies, it is a bit grimmer than your usual retelling.

Batman Chronicles: The Gauntlet: Dick has been training to be Robin, and he thinks he’s finally ready, but he has to pass Batman’s final test--to keep away from him for a whole night. Of course, the test goes off track, and Dick soon finds himself the target of a ruthless mob boss, his deadly gang of thugs, and the GCPD. Batman chases after Robin, trying to save him before it is too late.

Robin: Year One: This is a four issue run that gives you a snapshot of the time where Robin is just introduced in the crime fighting scene. It features villains like the Mad Hatter and Two Face. The art style is really fun and dynamic, and we get to see Bruce and Dick start to figure each other out. Lots of Alfred as well!

Scarecrow: Year One: Another fun look at Dick and Bruce’s relationship, a little further along the road. Dick is very small and cute, and has also basically become Bruce’s therapist lmao! Not a great Scarecrow origin story though.

Legends of the DC Universe #6: The first time Superman and Robin meet. An absolutely delightful team up, I still have cavities from reading it because it is just so sweet. This one is so good, read it.

Teen Titans: Year One: A short little origin story for the fab five (ie Wonder Girl, Speedy, Kid Flash, Aqualad, and Robin). A cute introduction to the original titans.

The New Teen Titans (1980) and (1984): Forming the Teen Titans was a really important part of Dick’s development as a superhero, and some of his best stuff is when he is in a team setting. This run has the team you’d be more familiar with if you watched the animated Teen Titans show: it has Raven, Starfire, etc. Dick decides that he is going to leave Robin behind in issue #39.

Nightwing:

The New Teen Titans: The Judas Contract: This is the infamous run where Terra betrays the Titans. Dick dons the name Nightwing for the first time in this run (discowing style), and goes off with Joey Wilson to save the rest of the Titans from Slade and Brother Blood.

Batman #416: Dick meets Jason for the first time, and eventually the two bond over beating up some baddies.

The New Titans (1988) #55: You can read this series too for some Titans action, but even if you don’t you should skip over and read issue #55. It shows how Dick reacted to Jason’s death, and how Bruce and Dick had a huge falling out. It’s heartbreaking to read honestly.

Nightwing (1996): If you want to read Nightwing, it’d be best to look at his solo run also. It starts with him moving to Bludhaven, and continues from there. If you’re looking for Batfam cameos, I specifically remember issues #6 and #25 for its really cute brotherly Tim and Dick moments. Issues #13 - #15 have Dick and Batman working together. #105 and #106 have Jason (as Robin) working with Dick. There are a lot of solid Barbara moments throughout with her as Oracle. #138 is when he meets Damian for the first time. There’s a lot here, so I would just pick and choose the arcs that interest you, and go from there.

Action Comics #771: Another comic where Nightwing and Superman team up. Sue me, I love their dynamic!

Gotham Knights #17: Dick finally gets adopted in this one.

Batman (1940) #615: This one is smack dab in the middle of the Hush arc, an arc that focuses on Batman’s relationship with Catwoman and a mysterious new villain named Hush. I like this arc of comics (they recently made it into a movie!) so if you want to read the whole thing it starts at #608. This is just one that features Nightwing a lot. I include it because I really enjoy the dynamic Dick and Bruce have. It’s good stuff.

Titans/Young Justice Graduation Day #1-3: It’s fun to see Tim and Dick’s generations interact and deal with growing up as superheroes, and there is a lot of drama. Pretty important crap goes down in these comics: several people die, including Donna, and as a result Dick disbands the Titans. If you want to read Outsiders, you should really read this one first.

Outsiders Vol 3 (2003): Dick is mourning Donna’s death and self-destructing, so Roy forms a team called the Outsiders--a team that is meant to be just business rather than a family. Dick is more stern and his temper is shorter than usual, but I think it is all pretty in character for him, especially since he is grieving. Highlights include Roy and Dick’s lovely relationship.

Teen Titans (2003) #6: Ok, I almost didn’t put this one on here because it is very self-indulgent, but I couldn’t resist. This series has the Teen Titans starting back up again without Nightwing, but in this issue he makes a little cameo. If you’ve seen those panels around where Nightwing lectures the Justice League? This is where it happens. He’s just really cool here.

Batman:

Batman #687-688: This follows the Batfam’s initial reaction to Bruce’s death, and how Dick begins to approach being Batman himself. It is technically an epilogue to Battle for the Cowl, but that doesn’t have to be read for these comics to be understood.

Batman and Robin (2009): This is the series where we see Dick and Damian transform into people forced together who can barely tolerate one another, to some of the closest partners in the Batfam. They develop their relationship very nicely, and we get to see how Dick approaches a lot of the emotional and physical challenges that come with being Batman. Some of the arcs are good, some of them very much miss for me.

Batman: Black Mirror: This is a collection of Detective Comics #871-881. I’d say these are my favorite Dick!Batman stories ever. All the cases are very good (really chilling), and the characterizations are top notch stuff. Lots of Gordon, Barbara, and some Tim also. I won’t spoil who it is, but the big villain they have for this book is one of the best I’ve seen for Dick, an almost perfect foil in my opinion.

Batman: Gates of Gotham: A good story, it’s interesting to see how Dick interacts with his siblings as Batman. I think this may be one of the first times Cass and Damian meet, though I’m not positive about that.

Just as a heads up, I’ve left out some significant events and this isn’t an exhaustive list on everything there is to know about the character. These are just some comics I enjoy. I hope they help you get a start on who Dick Grayson is, and how he figures into the Batfam and the larger superhero community.

#dick grayson #dick!robin #Dick!Batman #nightwing #DC comics #comics #comic recs #my comic recs #batman #long post

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peel-a-potato-with-a-potato · 3 years

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So I binge read Invincible

What a trip of a story. Gotta say, I’m really hoping Amazon doesn’t screw it up, but what I’ve seen of the show so far seems to be a good update. The comic came out in 2003 after all, so there’s some parts that don’t hold up well 18 years later.

The ending wasn’t to my taste, but it was mostly satisfying. Spoilers if you keep reading beyond here.

The comic makes gratuitous use of time skipping, usually because of Mark being very vincible (yes, bad joke, don’t care), at several points. The worst ones for me were the 3 or 4 months he spent with his father and brother healing from a stomach wound and the 5 year skip after the “reboot”.

And oh boy do I have thoughts on that reboot. Some mysterious entity we are never given any further information on traps him in a cave and sends him back to being 17 with no powers on Earth. He proceeds to do everything in the most efficient way he can before giving up to be with his family. And then he’s back, but 5 years after he left. Was he really in the past or was that entity just messing with his mind? And did it really take him 5 years to process those few weeks? Or did he get brought back to the wrong time? Was that thing vengeful and wanted to rob him of what he wanted for disobeying it? And after that little section is over, we never hear about that thing again.

And then there’s the deaths of Oliver and Nolan. Both were mostly well done, Oliver died in battle (sure he would have wanted it that way), and Nolan died with his favorite son present. Or least favorite, it’s hard to tell at some points. And both were well used catalysts into propelling the story. Oliver’s death convinced Mark he had to act against Thragg. Nolan’s death put Mark in control of the new Viltrum Empire, and in direct opposition to Robot. I refuse to call him Rex. Rex Splode deserved better than that.

Through the whole series, I didn’t trust Robot. From the beginning, I had a bad feeling about him, and when he was revealed to be a human, Rudy, that pretty much cemented it for me. A genius who relies entirely on logic, even when they have an emotional attachment to someone? Yeah, if that doesn’t scream trouble, I don’t know what does. Putting his brain in a jar and leaving Immortal in charge seemed like the best option.

But that also brings up the question of why he left Immortal in charge at all. Having been brought to the future by two people working for Immortal just so he could get his death, don’t you think Mark would have remembered that? Would have known the pain he would cause his friend? Or was there really no better option? It does provide continuity, answers why Immortal was in charge, and I guess prevents a paradox, which is all probably why it was done. Mark doing that knowing what would happen though, it’s probably the most Viltrumite thing he does in the series, cold and devoid of human emotion. Mark does have a habit of disagreeing with his allies at times, and sometimes that leads to what feels like betrayal.

Even Allen got the short end of that stick, with the Viltrum Empire spreading peace at the end, Allen’s coalition fell apart. And Mark makes some good commentary there that definitely applies to Earth today. But wouldn’t you think he’d want to help Allen change the COP to make it better for those planets being exploited? That seemed to be his thing, but instead he just left them to figure it out.

Going back to immortality for a bit, let’s talk about Eve. She gets severely wounded and suddenly she becomes a god just long enough to patch herself back up. This is used a couple times, first on Eve alone, and then on herself and Mark. The first time she gives herself bigger breasts (yup, it’s a guy writing the series) and the second time Mark asks “Did you make me stronger?” while he flexes. Given that Eve was carrying their child at the time, it makes sense why he wouldn’t leave her power to kick in to replace her lost leg, but it ends up making death feel a bit cheap, the way Marvel and DC do by killing off their heroes and bringing them back. It’s really made worse when Eve dies of old age and is suddenly in her 20′s again. “Guess I’m immortal” my ass. If she’s just going to keep doing that, eventually she will outlive Mark’s thousands of years and she’ll be just as lonely as Immortal. Feels like they didn’t think the ramifications of that one through. I do enjoy the fact that Eve is always, and I do mean always, the one initiating their intimate moments though. A woman taking charge of her sexuality is nice to see.

And then there’s Marky. Poor Marky. Left alone on Earth with an adoptive human father while Mark ignored him because of his rage at Marky’s mother. Debbie steps in to help, and it’s clear Mark still has some contact with his son, but he’s definitely not going to have the support his father did growing up, even if he is the new Invincible. Why on earth would this poor half abandoned child take the name of the father that clearly doesn’t want to take much interest in him? I get it’s a carrying on the family legacy kind of thing, but it gives me weird vibes.

For all my griping though, I have to mention Cecil. Almost a perfect foil to Mark’s black and white thinking. Cecil only sees in shades of grey. No matter where someone’s actions put them in Mark’s eyes, Cecil always sees them as a force to be used to his own ends. Cecil’s need to protect people and his search for peace align so perfectly with Mark’s but because of his way of looking at the world and lack of superpowers, he contrasts so perfectly with the hero of the story. I disagree with Rudy that Cecil would have been okay dying to get the world brought about by Rudy, but I’m not really sure how to put those thoughts into words just yet.

But the ending in general, while neatly wrapping up most of the plot threads (looking at you tentacle entity from the reboot storyline), feels a bit too much like a happily ever after. Now that’s personal taste, but honestly, if they’d just ended it with Mark taking over and saying he was going to leave Earth with the Viltrumites on his mission to help the universe, I’d have been a lot happier leaving the rest up to the imagination. Instead, we get flashes of this race of near gods forcefully bringing peace to the universe and we end with another vaguely satisfying callback.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the series and I’m honestly tempted to read it again to get a better idea of the callbacks and setups we see. The perspective on some things might be different now too, and that’s always interesting. I’m very much of the opinion that if you love something, you should be critical of it. And there’s a lot in Invincible that seems like doing something just to make the story work. I can’t tell if that’s just because of the medium or if it actually makes sense given that Mark is an alien, so maybe I would need to read it again to figure that out.

#Invincible #Invincible comic #Mark Grayson

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discovisiondreams · 3 years

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Top 15 First Watches of 2020

I’ve never been good at staying current on pop culture, and that became especially pronounced in 2020. A year where most of the anticipated theatrical releases were pushed to VOD (and the price nearly tripled) meant that a lot of flicks I was excited for got added to the end of the “Maybe Someday” watchlist.

But in this strange year, I did manage to watch 245 movies- and 195 of those were first-time watches. Some were new, only available on the (virtual) festival circuit. Some were Criterion mainstays, films I’m horrified to admit I hadn’t seen before. But this year, when movies cemented themself as my biggest joy, I began to really track what I watched- including a “top 5 first watches of the month” roundup for every month. These top 5s weren’t ranked, and weren’t even based on technical ability, strength of dialogue, or critical acclaim. They were just the 5 I loved the best.

So without further ado, here are my top 15 of the year- one selected from the top 5 of each month, with some bonus entries thrown in as well. As a general rule, I only included features on this list- I was fortunate enough to catch shorts that streamed at Chattanooga Film Fest, Celebration of Fantastic Fest, and more, but to add them to the running would have made writing this listicle absolutely impossible.

HONORABLE Honorable Mention: The Holiday. Inspired by the fine folks at Super Yaki, I finally watched this Nancy Meyers classic. Why is it two and a half hours long?! Why is that two and a half hours so significantly lacking in Jack Black?! The scenes that Black is in, though, really shine. This one is going to be a Christmas mainstay in the Disco household (and not just because I spent money on the DVD).

15: The Love Witch (Honorable Mention, April). This one came highly recommended to me by friends of all sorts, and like most of my 2020 first watches, I’m deeply embarrassed that it took me this long to get to it. Upon finally watching it, on a rainy Sunday, I described the movie in general (and the color palette, specifically) as “sumptuous,” which is one of the most complimentary visual descriptors I can bestow upon a movie. The plot felt a little convoluted at times, but I still found The Love Witch incredibly enjoyable and am hoping to explore more of writer-director Anna Biller’s filmography in 2021.

14: The Guest (Honorable Mention, October). The Guest is one of the few movies I watched multiple times this year- and the only one I watched twice in one week. From the sultry industrial soundtrack selections to the numerous visual nods to Halloween III: Season of the Witch, The guest was Extremely My Shit. The casting here is truly tremendous- especially Maika Monroe, who was similarly brilliant in It Follows. Also of note: Lance Reddick, one of my current favourite character actors.

13: The Fast and The Furious (Honorable Mention, May). 2 Fast 2 Furious (and its bespoke theme song, Act A Fool, by Ludacris) came out when I was in the 6th grade. Do you remember the music and movies that entered the world when you were in 6th grade? Do you have an inexplicable zealous love for them? 2F2F was the only film in the Fast Cinematic Universe I had seen for a long, long time. Then I saw Fate of the Furious. Then I bought the series box set, as a joke?? And then, slowly but then also all at once, I genuinely started to love this franchise. Some of them are truly ridiculous. Some of them are genuinely bad. But the first one? The Fast and The Furious (2001)? Timeless. Point Break updated and adapted for the early-aughts, The Fast and the Furious walked so The Italian Job (2003) could run. Without The Fast and The Furious, Paul Walker would just be “the guy from Tammy and The T-Rex” to millions of casual cinemagoers. The cultural impact of The Fast and The Furious simply cannot be denied!!

12: Come to Daddy (Top 5, July). Honestly, this is the exact flavor of bonkers bullshit I’ve grown to expect from Elijah Wood, and that is not an indictment. Wood’s genuine love for genre film is evident here, in what can only be described as an uncomfortable film of family, reunion, and redemption. The tense and abrasive first half gives way to a surprisingly relieving wave of violence and exposition in this critically-acclaimed flick.

11: The Stylist (Top 5, September). The feature-length debut of writer-director Jill Gevargizian, based off her short of the same name, is female-led horror that pays homage to genre mainstays like Maniac and Psycho while still being decidedly singular. Not only shot in Kansas City, but set in Kansas City, The Stylist made my midwestern heart happy. This is one that I really, really would have loved to see in a crowded theater auditorium, were this year a different one.

10: In The Mouth of Madness (Top 5, March). Despite being the beginning of pandemic awareness, March was a slow month for me, movie-wise (even though it’s not like I had anything else going on??). But I finally made time for this Carpenter classic, and I’m so happy I did. I’ve long been fascinated by stories about stories, and the people who find themselves trapped within those stories, and this one is truly, in the most basic sense of the word, horrifying. Sam Neill proves that he belongs in horror here, making his role in Event Horizon seem like a natural fit. Also a highlight: noted character actor David Warner, best known (to me) as “Billy Zane’s bodyguard guy in Titanic,” who never ever fails to be unsettling.

9: Profondo Rosso (Top 5, April). Before this year, my only Argento exposure was Suspiria (which is phenomenal), but Deep Red goes off the deep end in all the best ways. The score (by frequent Argento collaborators Goblin) is truly groovy. The number of twists and turns the plot takes is kind of mind-boggling, but also delightful. Daria Nicolodi (RIP) is at the top of her acting game here. This quickly became one of my beloved background movies- if I opened Shudder and Profondo Rosso was playing on one of their live-streaming channels, it stayed on while I was cleaning or cooking or paying bills. Profondo Rosso is a must-watch for those hoping to get into giallo.

8: Crimson Peak (Top 5, November). This one was definitely not what I was expecting, but it was GORGEOUS. I loved the world immediately (a Del Toro trademark, to be honest). As a longtime Pacific Rim stan, it made my heart happy to see Charlie Hunnam and Burn Gorman reunited under Guillermo Del Toro’s vision.

7: Palm Springs (Top 5, August). I am not typically a time-travel movie enthusiast- but I am a sucker for witty repartee and Andy Samberg. This one made me ugly-cry, which I should probably be a bit more ashamed to admit. August had a lot of really great first watches, but the Hulu exclusive takes the cake due to its novel premise, some truly heart-wrenching reveals, and the amazing casting (is there anything JK Simmons cant do?).

6: Scare Package (Top 5, May). Is there any format I love more than the horror anthology? While there have been so many over the years (Creepshow, All the Creatures Were Stirring), Scare Package might be my favourite of them all. A variety of fun and inventive stories combined with a genre-lovers dream of an overarching narrative make this one a must-see- in fact, it was the whole reason I bought a pass to this year’s online version of Chattanooga Film Fest. There’s a cameo here that absolutely knocked my socks off (and continued to do so even on repeat viewings). While the scares here are honestly minimal, Scare Package is a great love letter to the genre at large.

5: Do The Right Thing (Top 5, June). Yes, it took me until 2020 to watch Do The Right Thing for the first time. The palpable tension, the interwoven stories of Bed-Stuy’s residents, all seem timeless. Giancarlo Esposito is, as always, a joy to watch.

4: Knives Out (Top 5, February). “It’s a Rian Johnson whodunnit, duh,” states the SuperYaki! T-shirt famously worn by Jamie Lee Curtis, star of Knives Out (2019). This one has received worlds of critical acclaim, I truly do not know what I could even hope to add to the conversation. I want more old-school murder mystery cinema.

3: The VelociPastor (Top 5, January). It should be testimonial enough that The VelociPastor beat out Miss Americana, Netflix’s Taylor Swift documentary, as the top pick for January- but in case it isn’t, let me end 2020 the way I began it; by evangelizing the HECK out of this movie. Written and directed by up-and-coming triple-threat (Director/songwriter/prolific cat-photo-poster) Brendan Steere, The VelociPastor is a true love letter to genre cinema, complete with a big wink to the criminally underloved Miami Connection. Alyssa Kempinski shines as Carol, a doctor/lawyer/hooker with a heart of gold. The VelociPastor premiered in 2019 but gained tons of attention in 2020 (thanks in part to YouTube sensation Cody Ko)- attention that it truly deserves. A sequel is rumored to be in the works, but mark my words, anything to come from the imagination of Brendan Steere will be worth a watch.

2: Dinner in America (Top 5, October). I genuinely feel sorry for the other movies I watched in October (there were a lot) (they were all SO GOOD). Dinner in America, which I caught during the Nightstream hybrid festival, was not at all what I was expecting. While the other features were all very solidly genre flicks, this was…. A comedy? A modern love story?? I’mn honestly still not exactly sure, but I do know I loved every second of it. I laughed. I cried. I threw my hands up in the air exuberantly (in front of my laptop, looking like a true fool). I did not shut up about this movie online for weeks. I told anyone and everyone that Kyle Gallner is the most underrated actor of my generation and I still believe it! Dinner in America, the story of a punk band frontman who unwittingly takes refuge from the police in the home of his biggest fan, was an unexpectedly heartwarming tale of family, young love, and arson. Watch it as soon as you can.

1: Promising Young Woman (Top 5, December). This last-minute debut from Emerald Fennell, originally scheduled to hit theaters in April of this year, finally made its way to the big screen on Christmas Day, and became the 2020 entry on my annual “Christmas Day Trip to the Theater” list.* Carey Mulligan is an icon and deserves all of the awards for this. The soundtrack is sublime. The casting choices are truly incredible. While I have no doubt that the general themes of the movie will be polarizing, I absolutely loved this one- I sat in my car in the theater parking lot for a WHILE, considering just buying a ticket for the next showtime- that’s how badly I felt like I needed to see it again immediately. I look forward to writing its inevitable Criterion essay.

*Nobody else in rural iowa was interested in seeing this movie at noon on Christmas Day. I’m shocked.

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lechevaliermalfet · 5 years

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In the Name of the Moon – A Look at Lunar Legend Tsukihime

There’s a popular joke in the Type-Moon fandom that there is no Tsukihime anime, but boy it sure would be great if there was one.

I had only ever been dimly aware of this attitude toward the Tsukihime anime myself. Watching it fansubbed for the first time in the early 00s, I wasn’t really plugged into the fandom, and the joke seemed like a minor thing to me. I had all but forgotten it by the time I was with my wife at Otakon in 2012, and we went to a panel about Type-Moon for fandom newcomers.

The panel was pretty salty about the Tsukihime anime, taking the joke about there being no such thing so far as to refuse to acknowledge it or discuss it. If I recall, they insisted on this refusal even when directly asked about it by someone in the audience. I also don’t recall them being all that complimentary about the Fate/Stay Night anime (the original 2006 series) for that matter. We had a long drive home after the convention – fourteen hours, give or take – and our discussion about the convention kept circling back to that panel.

She’d gone mostly to accompany me, I think, and because she didn’t have anything she wanted to do that conflicted with it. She had some minor interest herself, as she’d seen this supposedly nonexistent Tsukihime anime, and like me, she enjoyed it. So it was pretty irritating for her to go to this panel ostensibly for newcomers and then have them trash the one thing she’d experienced in the fandom. It was all the more irritating when you stopped to consider that at that point that it was, in all probability, one of the handful of things real newcomers might have experience with.

In its way, though, the panelists’ hostile and disdainful attitude toward the most accessible works in the general Type-Moon oeuvre did make for a suitable introduction. If not to Type-Moon and their work, then to the fandom, and the high levels of toxicity most of its assholes could and would display given the opportunity.

But I’m not here to talk about the Type-Moon fandom, except as it amuses me, or is relevant to the subject at hand.

The subject being this supposedly non-existent anime: Lunar Legend Tsukihime.

My own relation to the Western Type-Moon fan community is tangential at best. A couple of guys I know (one a good friend, the other an acquaintance), back in the early to mid-aughts, were moderators for the Beast’s Lair forum, basically the center of the English-language fandom community at the time. Of course, at the time, the fandom was almost brand-new. Tsukihime was all the rage then, because Tsukihime was almost all there was. Fate/Stay Night was new enough that there hadn’t really been time for the discourse around it to even form, let alone evolve much. And in those days, Beast’s Lair was basically the forum owner and a few of his online friends, and I feel like half the reason it existed was because at that point, it was more convenient to just have a forum than it was to get a bunch of guys together on an AIM group chat with that level of frequency. This was before Mirror Moon created a translation patch for any of these games. These were guys who bought the game direct from Japan, paid the outrageous import fees, referred constantly to a GameFAQs walkthrough, and died like men. It was that, or learn Japanese. Most of them opted for the walkthrough. Thank Whoever you believe in that the game runs windowed, I guess.

Fate, which has been the bread and butter of Type-Moon’s success for well over a decade now, was a commercial game. But it was one built with on the base of the huge support Tsukihime had garnered following its launch. Tsukihime itself was a doujin game, made when the guys at Type-Moon were a bunch of nobodies and had no real money to speak of.

Because they were nobodies, and because they needed the game to sell big if they were going to make the kind of money they needed to make, they did what a lot of Japanese doujin developers have done and continue to do, and will probably do until the end of time, and put porn in the game.

This is not unknown in Western development circles either, just for the record. But Japanese culture is in some ways more permissive when it comes to depictions of sex or sex-adjacent topics and material in their mainstream entertainment. Porn can net you a decent career, or at least a halfway-decent living, and it’s generally easier over there for porn artists in any field of endeavor to “go legit” and make the jump to the non-porn version of their field.

That doesn’t happen in the West, or at any rate not in America. Or very rarely. We have (for better or worse; there’s a whole separate debate there) a much sharper division between the porn and non-porn sides of the entertainment industry, and that barrier’s much less porous. But porn fans will support you. If the success ceiling is far lower than in the legitimate side of the industry, it’s also true that the floor is likewise lower.

So here we have Tsukihime. Not “porn with plot”, or even “plot with porn”, but “plot (…with porn)”. It’s there because they were worried the game wouldn’t sell without it, and so there’s not much of it in the first place. What I’m saying is that if you’re wanting to get your rocks off, you’re going to be a while.

Which is not to say that Tsukihime as a game is inherently like… progressive, or woke, or anything like that. Oh no. Nonononono. It’s horror (-ish, depending on your route), for starters – a genre that thrives on objectification and exploitation. And then it’s Japanese, which gives it an extra few layers of seeming weird to American sensibilities. So this is less like going down the rabbit hole and potentially more like falling into a snake pit.

I say all this to lend some context. When we think of Type-Moon today, we tend to think of this highly successful production house with a star franchise that’s rapidly hitting the market saturation point. If it hasn’t already (and I have a friend who maintains that it has). And that is absolutely not Tsukihime. Not the game, and certainly not the anime. No ufotable animating, no Yuki Kajiura composing, no Gen Urobuchi directing the critically acclaimed and popularly loved (and irritatingly overpriced) prequel.

This is Tsukihime. This isn’t the property that launched Type-Moon to stardom. That would, again, be Fate. This is the property that let them make Fate the way they did. Tsukihime is the visual novel world’s equivalent of some garage band you never heard of releasing their demo tape as their debut album, and the demo tape is actually pretty good, even as it suffers from having basically rock-bottom production values. It’s one of those things where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. You have to look at what it tries to be and tries to do, and like it for that. In that much at least, even as they differ in many other ways, that much is true of both the anime and the visual novel.

It’s worth it, though.

Phantasmal Fantasy

If we’re being honest (and why wouldn’t we be honest?), Tsukihime, at least going through the main route, is a little bit less straight horror and a little more what I think of as horror-fantasy. It isn’t horror because it’s rarely if ever actually frightening. But it uses horror aesthetics in a fantasy setting (urban fantasy, in this case), which may lend things a generally eerie and unsettling sense of ambiance and a particular feeling of threat to the main characters without ever quite getting your pulse up. It’s a hybrid genre I happen to have a huge soft spot for (I’ve been reliably informed that this is sort of My Thing). The entire Legacy of Kain series falls under that banner for me, as do most of the Castlevania games. The Dark Souls games all have it to some extent, and Bloodborne leans into it hard enough that it actually is kind of legitimately scary at various points. And then there are movies like Vampire Hunter D.

Lunar Legend Tsukihime, the anime based on the visual novel Tsukihime, was released in the early to mid 2000s. On a technical level, it’s very middle-of-the-road, with a bit of a generic visual style and workmanlike animation. But we’re talking about an anime based on a doujin hentai game. More mainstream visual novels’ adaptations tend to get better treatment. Tsukihime is well-regarded, but probably not really “popular” in the same sense as something like, say, Da Capo or Little Busters or Air, or... Look, Type-Moon’s getting the star treatment was pretty much going to be impossible at that stage. It took Tsukihime and the first Fate adaptation before we got to that point. That the Tsukihime anime happened at all is honestly kind of remarkable, and a testament to how much of an impact the game made.

Tsukihime takes place in the modern day (well, modern for the date of its release, which for the game was 2000, and for the anime would be 2003 or so). It’s a vampire story, of sorts, though the only creatures we’d recognize as traditional vampires are a minor threat at best.

Our main character, or at any rate, our viewpoint character, is Shiki Tohno. He’s part of a large, wealthy, and presumably powerful family, though he lives with an aunt and uncle whose ways and means are much more middle-class than his father, the head of the family. He was banished from the main estate eight years ago, shipped off to live with his aunt and uncle after an accident when he was about eight.

He doesn’t remember much about the accident. He (and therefore we) are initially told it was a car accident, and that it damaged his heart. He has fainting spells occasionally if he over-exerts himself, and otherwise generally anemic symptoms. Something to do with damage to his heart after the accident; it’s not really clear. The weakness makes him an unfit heir to be head of the family, hence his being put aside.

The real change in him is far stranger, and far harder to understand.

While recovering in the hospital, he begins to see odd lines running through everything, making the world look fractured. He discovers that if he cuts along those lines with a blade or other edged implement, the object will simply fall apart along those lines. It takes little to no force to do this. He could cut down a tree simply by dragging the edge of a knife along a particular line on its trunk, a line invisible to anyone but him. His attempts to convince others that these lines exist fall on deaf ears, and only cause concern for his mental state.

One day during his recovery, while wandering around outside, he runs across a woman named Aoko Aozaki who not only believes him, but understands what’s happening. She explains to him that he has a rare ability – perhaps the only one in the world with it – known as the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception. What he is seeing is the inevitable destruction and dissolution, the “death”, of every person and object around him. The lines are the only way his brain can make sense of it, as this is something the human mind doesn’t readily grasp. She gives him a pair of glasses which make the lines go away while he wears them, and which therefore allow him to go on with his life as normal. She tells him that he mustn’t use this power of his unless absolutely necessary.

Shiki lives his life normally from that point forward, until one day while he’s in high school, he receives notice that his father has passed away, and Shiki is to move back into the main estate. Said estate is in the same town, so much of his day-to-day should remain the same – same friends, same school, same daily routine.

But a strange thing happens on his way to the manor after school. While resting in the park, he sees a young woman with shoulder-length blonde hair and a white sweater. From out of nowhere, he is overcome with a furious, murderous impulse. His body seems to move on its own, with no input or control from him. Off come the glasses, out comes the knife he carries with him, and he’s off chasing her. Bad things happen.

He wakes up in the Tohno mansion, having blacked out and been retrieved by Hisui, one of the two maids of the home. She dresses as a Western maid, while her twin sister, Kohaku, also a maid, prefers a kimono.

But his arrival at the manor comes with significant culture shock. In the wake of his father’s passing, possession of the manor and the position of head of family have both fallen to his younger sister, Akiha, whom he hasn’t seen since his accident some eight years ago. His memory of her is a little hazy, but he seems taken aback by the polite but stern young lady she’s grown into. Altogether, the four of them – Akiha, Shiki, Kohaku, and Hisui – are the only inhabitants of the house.

Shiki finds its size and sense of isolation intimidating, all the more because his daily life in and around the house is in for a massive shake-up. For starters, there’s a strict curfew, and also no television. When Shiki objects, Akiha puts her foot down, and seems determined that he will live according to the family’s ways and rules, or… Well, there is no “or else”. He just will, end of story.

So he sneaks out to go buy some snacks and magazines. On his way, he is accosted by one of his classmates, Ciel. But here, she’s dressed in an odd outfit, carrying a set of deadly-sharp swords, and seems intent on killing him until she satisfies herself that he poses no threat.

The next day, further weirdness ensues. He encounters the blonde lady, the one he thought he killed, very much alive and well. His initial relief that he didn’t actually kill her is quickly undone by her assertion that actually, he did, and with rare skill and gusto. She then goes on to describe the exact cuts he used to slice her into seventeen separate pieces.

Then it gets stranger.

She is, she tells him, a vampire, albeit not all that much like what you’d think of when the word comes to mind. And no, she doesn’t sparkle. Her name is Arcueid Brunestud, and she’s hunting an enemy of hers who’s in the area, and is responsible for a string of murders and mysterious deaths that have been occurring lately. She was doing well enough until Shiki came along murdered her. While she was able to recover from this inconvenience, their encounter has left her in a weakened state. Now she needs help, and who better than the one who put her in this position in the first place?

Twists, Turns, and Dead Ends

I��m a little conflicted about the problem with the Tsukihime anime. I can’t decide whether its creators overestimated what they could do in twelve episodes, or underestimated the material and the time it needed. I supposed it really doesn’t make much difference. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Bad news first.

There are some technical issues with the show, which are probably the least of its problems. The art style is kind of lackluster and workmanlike, and the animation is overall pretty by-the-numbers. There are numerous moments where you can see drawing or animation shortcuts were taken, and there are lots of long shots where the camera lingers on one place or on one person well beyond what’s necessary for drama. On the other hand, the more important action scenes do see a slight jump in quality, so maybe the producers were keeping something up their sleeve for when it counted.

The English voice work is serviceable. The actors’ voices are by and large a good fit for the roles, but the acting is occasionally a little wooden. The writing is somewhat off as well. Shiki disappears from his normal life for a while in the third and fourth episodes, and his friends’ and family’s discussions of it once he resurfaces don’t seem to agree on the times he was gone – at one point, even within the same conversation. This may be a translation or dub writing error, though. There are other weird gaffes (this time in the original script), such as that Shiki doesn’t notice that Kohaku and Hisui are identical twins. This despite the fact that their only notable differences are eye color and wardrobe.

But these are mostly technical troubles, and they’re things I can overlook pretty easily. The writing errors are never so serious that I get confused about what’s going on, and the artwork issues aren’t too out of line, either. Certainly I’ve seen other shows from the time that did worse and more often.

The real issues \with Tsukihime, and the problem most of the original game’s fans have, stem from the way it’s adapted from the game.

Like a lot of visual novels, Tsukihime has multiple routes, and many if not all of them are mutually exclusive. In fact, some don’t even involve Arcueid, who you’ll remember is one of the main characters. This presents some difficulties when making a TV series. On the one hand, there is a canon route, and you could probably make a decent twelve-episode TV series out of just that. On the other hand, there are lots of fans who prefer the alternate routes, who would be pissed if their favorite characters showcased in those routes weren’t given some screen time, and so you want to give them something. And, too, one of the intriguing things about a game like Tsukihime is all the lore and world-building that makes these divergent plotlines possible and interesting. Even when not pursued, elements of those routes may come up one way or another, and lend a certain richness and depth to the story. It would be a shame to leave that on the cutting room floor.

Another possibility the show’s creators could take is to craft their own continuity, essentially creating a story hybridized from multiple routes from the game while not adhering strictly to any one of them, and create a single story that way. This hypothetical hybrid story would then be better able to explore more of the background and lore, and incorporate that richness into its own new canon. But that would take probably more than twelve episodes, and twelve was all Tsukihime got. For anyone who’s curious about what this approach might look like, there’s a manga adaptation that incorporates elements of the other routes into the main story. It’s out of print now, sadly. Originally published by ComicsOne, it was taken over by DrMaster after ComicsOne went out of business. Then DrMaster themselves went out...

Anyway, the compromise measure that the show’s creators eventually decided on was to largely tell one story (the Near Side routes, particularly the Arcueid route), while throwing in bits and pieces from other routes… and then never following up on them. There wind up being a few non sequiturs and narrative dead ends or red herrings, almost as a kind of wink and nod to say that the show’s makers at least know those possibilities exist. But this results in the show being unfocused. For instance, a couple of episodes build up the Problem With the Tohno Bloodline, but this ultimately doesn’t figure into the story. This material comes from what the game refers to as the Far Side routes, and those developments largely go unnoticed during the Near Side routes which the anime’s plot focuses on. The problem is, again, that these are mutually exclusive as the presented in the original game. Weaving them together in the “new continuity” approach would be fine – maybe ideal for the anime, even – but it would take an amount of alteration to the continuity that the anime never makes. It winds up being less of a problem than it sounds like, but it does manage to be frustrating.

The main story, meanwhile, hints at interesting elements from the broader cosmological background that the game establishes (and which later Type-Moon games borrow and build upon), but many of those elements never quite leave the background. This leaves a frustrating sense of massive, powerful forces and entities moving in the background, that there is something far larger happening that we are not even quite glimpsing, but only being given hints of.

But if it sometimes seems that Tsukihime only scratches the surface of the greater and deeper lore of its setting, that lore and setting are still compelling. There’s an almost Lovecraftian sense of cosmic scale to the supernatural as it’s presented in Tsukihime. Arcueid, Nvrnqsr Chaos (no, that’s not a typo; it’s the real name of an adversary in the game, though the anime presents it as Nero Chaos instead), and her ultimate enemy, Roa – all of them are connected to higher forces and entities. The murders occurring in Shiki’s city are the most minor of problems in the grand scheme of things. This is what makes the anime both fascinating and frustrating. It shows us this conflict, but refuses to give the full context for it. So much seems to be held back; the full natures of these characters goes unexplored.

I like a little mystery. I like it when some things are unexplained, or when the answers are there to be found rather than to be given. It’s one of the things I love about Dark Souls and Bloodborne. But the story of Tsukihime fails to explore these mysteries in a way I find really satisfying.

I feel like this is the root of why a certain overly vocal segment of the fandom chooses not to acknowledge the anime. Coming to it from the game, I can see where it might seem a little disappointing. Many of these hooks can seem like teases to those who understand their significance enough to be upset that they ultimately don’t deliver.

But that’s not the experience that either I or my wife had watching the anime. We both came to it before we ever knew anything of the game. For us, those odd hooks were just moments where we went, “Huh. Weird,” and carried on watching the show. Sure, there was clear and unaddressed significance, but it wasn’t a problem. If anything, it made me more curious about the game.

The show may seem meandering to some, but to me, I just tend to think of its pace as sedate. It doesn’t really dig into the characters’ backstories, but it does help to develop them and give them room to breathe.

In particular, the anime spends a lot of time developing Arcueid. We see that despite her power, and her potential for wrath and violence, she’s surprisingly cute and innocent-seeming at times, and actually innocent when it comes to some things. You can see her interest in Shiki grow, but she seems unable to express it. Her attempts at being normal can come across as almost mocking, when they are instead sincere and well-meant, but hopelessly clueless.

What we learn of her story is somewhat sparse, but we know that she spends most of her time asleep, awakening only to deal with threats like Roa. The reasons for this are complicated, at least enough so as to be beyond the scope of this writing. Suffice it to say that there’s a wiki if you’re after more information. Just be warned: The writing there is pretty iffy. Anyway, Arcueid is capable of getting by just fine on her own (when some inconsiderate dick doesn’t just up and murder her, anyway), but it’s also clear that, thanks to spending most of her time asleep, she doesn’t really understand a lot of what’s going on around her. There’s a kind of obliviousness to her that might be frustrating in another character in a different show, but is somehow just endearing here. Like my wife said at one point: You just want to hug her. Which is not, you know, the normal reaction you have with vampires. “Aloof”, “compelling”, “seductive”… These are the words we tend to think of when it comes to vampiric “affection” in fiction. “Huggable” doesn’t really show up on the list. And yet, here we are.

There’s a certain cat-like quality to her. Elegant, graceful, mysterious, sometimes selfish, frequently endearing, and occasionally ridiculous. There’s comedy in her situation. Shiki, despite his powers, is otherwise kind of a dork who could not be more clearly in over his head, at least at the start. He spends most of the series bewildered, confused, scared, and very occasionally snapping and completely losing his shit against some eldritch horror. And yet he’s the one who has to keep Arcueid grounded (to the extent that this is really even possible) and basically explain to her how the world works. In some ways, it’s really Arcueid’s story.

The pace of the series helps it build a sense of brooding mystery as it explores the twin dilemmas of finding a way to stop Roa and figuring out Shiki’s uncertain place in and relation to the rest of the Tohno family. And as you might suspect, these two problems aren’t as separate as they first seem.

If nothing else, the opening theme is just about perfect. Subdued, mysterious, haunting; it sets the mood of the show almost perfectly, in a way that comes close to over-promising on what the anime actually delivers. It definitely sets a mood.

That mood is one I tend to get into around this time of year. I’m normally a night person in the first place. No amount of working mostly first-shift jobs over the last two decades has changed the fact that there’s some part of me that wakes up when the sun goes down, and wants to stay up until the sunrise. I like to be out and about in the dark. I can remember back when I was in college, I would be out with friends trying to find any reason at all to stay out as late as possible. Later in life, I’d duck out long after everyone else was asleep and go for roaming walks at night (at least, back when I lived in a reasonable neighborhood). With fall here, the urge just gets stronger.

There’s something of that feeling I get from Tsukihime, large portions of which involve that same nocturnal roaming, and take place in the nighttime times of life. And I enjoy stories about monsters and the supernatural – I went through something of a vampire fascination phase when I was younger, and still maintain a certain amount of interest – and so those things alone might have gotten my attention.

Fuck the haters; the Tsukihime anime exists, and it’s good. Not great, and not as good as it might have been, but it’s fine. If it’s not exactly gripping, edge-of-your-seat suspense, it’s still an entertaining way to spend the better part of five or six hours. Certainly worth a watch if you can track it down.

Tsukihime tells an odd, interesting story – moody, dark, weird, mysterious, fantastical – all things I like. A story of supernatural threats, monsters, mystery, and marauders in the night. It’s hard to think of anything more appropriate for fall – for October – for Halloween.

Availability

The DVD release for Lunar Legend Tsukihime was originally handled by Geneon in both Japan and the U.S., since they were part of the original production committee. After they folded, it was picked up by Sentai Filmworks, one of the several splinter companies that rose from the ashes of ADV’s implosion in the late aughts.

Geneon’s release was evidently a multi-volume affair. Which seems ludicrous today, when you typically buy an entire season of twelve episodes or so all at once these days, in a single set. But Geneon (which had previously been Pioneer) had been around since the VHS days, and a lot of those companies in some sense inherited the mindset that had governed the VHS release schedule, which was to release a volume every couple of months or so, with three or four episodes on each one, and that was that.

Sentai Filmworks’ version is a two-disc, single-volume set, so that would probably be the way to go. Especially if shelf space is a concern.

There is no Blu-ray release, and honestly, it’s hard to imagine what Blu-ray would really do for the show. At any rate, it seems to be out of print currently. Geneon, of course, folded about a decade or so ago. And although Sentai Filmworks lists it in their catalog, there’s no option to buy. And it doesn’t appear to be available for legal streaming anywhere. Like a lot of older (and I hate to think of this as “older” – I remember being an adult when it was new) – maybe I should say somewhat older anime – Amazon and eBay are your best bet if you’re interested.

Postscript the First – The Anime versus the Game

Tsukihime, as a visual novel with multiple routes, contains far more material than the TV series. HOWEVER, please consider this paragraph your giant, flashing, neon-lit trigger warning for content potentially involving sex, assault, sexual assault (of various kinds), incest, violation of consent, and more violence than the anime producers could show even with the series airing at otaku o’clock.

Just to be up-front for a moment, I haven’t played much of the game. Much of my information comes secondhand, or else is the result of reading the Type-Moon wiki and talking with friends who’ve played through it. I’ve yet to finish a single route. I’d like to, and I occasionally chip away at it here and there, but the problems are twofold.

The first problem – probably the main problem – is the low level of engagement. I get curious about visual novels from time to time, but they’re always a little too easy to put down, and a little too hard to pick up. And that may seem strange, since there’s so little to do in one. The amount of effort involved is nil. But that’s just the thing. I often wrestle with whether or not I even consider them to be games at all. And, look: It’s not like I think visual novels are unworthy of anyone’s time. They’re fine. Largely not my cup of tea, but fine. But what you do in a visual novel could hardly be called playing, any more than you “play” a Choose Your Own Adventure book. There are no mechanics, no maneuvering through the world, no use of skills. Just decisions to make, and those not very often. The thing about an actual game is that I’m mentally engaged, fully occupied and firing on all (or most) cylinders. When I want to play a game, that’s what I’m after. And visual novels just don’t offer that.

Of course, I do love to read, and so it would seem like they should be right up my alley for that reason at least. But no. The writing is actually my second problem.

So far as I’ve observed, which admittedly isn’t much, most Japanese visual novels translated into English are pretty awkward, and this is probably a combination of factors. One is that what constitutes good writing (in terms of how the language is deployed) in Japanese differs considerably from what constitutes good writing in English. It’s not just visual novels, mind you. The couple Haruki Murakami books I’ve read have both also seemed off to some degree as well. I think it’s just something in the translation, some difference between English and Japanese in the matters of word choice, rhythm, and flow, and the sense for how these things work in each. I sincerely think that making a Japanese work really sing in English would involve a level of change that most translators (and visual novel fans in particular, given their greater likelihood of being total Japanophiles) are deeply uncomfortable with.

But beyond the general problem of Japanese-to-English writing, there’s the problem of Kinoko Nasu in particular, who is Type-Moon’s writer.

Nasu is, I think, something of a Lovecraft disciple, with his cosmic-scale sense for horror. But he’s also like Lovecraft in another very important and distinct way, which is that despite having really interesting ideas that set my imagination on fire, he actually can not fucking write.

I’m sorry, Lovecraft fans, I really am, but it’s true. Deep down, you all know it. Lovecraft, for his part, was a man who at some point earlier in his life swallowed a thesaurus, and was then hell-bent on vomiting it out over every page he wrote ever afterward. He never used one word if he could find a way to use five or six to say the same thing, never used a simple, elegant, and concise word when he knew a more complex one, and his style has so little flow you’d need an electron microscope to find it. You could make a workout of running back and forth to the dictionary while reading his work. Or you could make it a drinking game. And then die, of alcohol poisoning.

He had some great ideas, once you got past the writing, and the multiple onion-like layers of intense racism. And he was intensely racist; let’s not forget that. Not just “racist because it’s the 1920s or ‘30s and basically everyone white is racist right now,” I mean racist even for those times. People back then were a little weirded out by how much he hated the Jews, and black people, and anyone else who wasn’t the right shade of paper-white. But even just focusing on his writing, the feeling remains that he was not the best vehicle for his stories, and that’s just how it is. The most aching, taxing, fucking grueling reading I have ever done on stories I still actually liked is mostly found between the covers of the various Lovecraft compendia I have lying around the house. I like his stories; I just don’t like reading them much.

Nasu may well be his reincarnation (and oh, would it ever have horrified Lovecraft to be reincarnated as a Japanese person). A common complaint I’ve heard about Nasu’s writing (from people who’ve read it in Japanese) is that he has good ideas, but just isn’t a skilled writer. Now, I’m not qualified to really dissect how he comes across in his own culture, but when translated into English, he’s a painful read. Maybe it’s the fault of the group responsible for the translation (Mirror Moon), but at the very least, I can confidently state that he should stay out of porn. His sex scenes have some of the least sexy and most unintentionally hilarious writing I’ve seen in my life. It’s why I think that even Fate didn’t really take off to become the absolute phenomenon it is until after we started to get anime adaptations of it. Those adaptations would all have been written by other people, or at least had some amount of editing or collaboration to dilute the worst of his influence, letting the good ideas shine through without Nasu’s own writing griming everything up.

I don’t have a lot of basis for comparison, but I feel like on a technical level, Tsukihime is pretty basic. The character artwork is nice enough, with a distinct style. The backgrounds, though, are in most cases very clearly photographs that have been filtered or otherwise manipulated so as not to clash too badly with the character art. This was probably a shortcut to save time or money, or both.

On the balance, I’d say it’s worth looking into, with the major caveat that there’s a lot of stuff in it that didn’t (and couldn’t) make it into the anime, that makes the story overall much darker and more sinister than the anime could manage. Unfortunately, it’s going to be hard to find. There’s only the original version released in 2000. There’s talk of a sequel and a remake, but the amount of time that’s passed for no more attention or work than the project has received, to the extent that these things have become running gags in the fandom. They probably are things that the higher-ups at Type-Moon really do mean to create at some point, but which aren’t a huge priority for them, and so are very, very back-burner projects.

As I mentioned above, the anime and the game are both similar in that their quality persists despite somewhat lacking production values. But the anime’s middle-of-the-road budget and somewhat generic style was never the problem. The game, meanwhile, was pretty clearly made on a close-to-shoestring budget, but this actually doesn’t matter nearly as much. Visuals novels live and die on their writing, ideas, and artwork, I think. Rarely if ever do they rely on really cutting-edge graphics for their impact. And in truth, Tsukihime the game was always going to be marred far more by Nasu’s writing than anything technical.

A nice upside is that, since we’re privy to Shiki’s internal monologue, he comes across as a more interesting character. He seems to sometimes just float through the story in the anime, with bouts of intensity here and there when things go wrong or he’s totally lost it. But the game gives us his thoughts, and we get a better handle on why he does the things he does.

For English-speaking fans, there are walkthroughs, of course. But if that understandably sounds like too much of a pain in the ass, there’s also a fan translation (unauthorized) by Mirror Moon. In addition to rendering the game into English, I believe it also introduces an option for removing the sex scenes. So for those who are uncomfortable with those, this will answer that concern, at least.

Postscript the Second – Alternate Takes: Kara no Kyoukai

Frequently referred to in English-speaking circles by its subtitle, The Garden of Sinners, Kara no Kyoukai (which Wikipedia tells us means something like “Boundary of Emptiness”) is an interesting story from Kinoko Nasu’s early days. It began publication (independently) in August of 1998, and is set in that timeframe. Originally a series of novels, it’s primarily known in the U.S. as a boxed set of seven movies (plus a stand-alone eighth) priced exorbitantly by Aniplex USA (the Blu-ray boxed set for the first seven will set you back a cool $400). These movies tell the story of a different Shiki, this time a young woman who wears a kimono, boots, and red leather jacket, named Shiki Ryogi.

There are pretty clear linkages between it and Tsukihime, though these are thematic rather than narrative, and the result of ideas being reused. Nasu began writing Kara no Kyoukai first, and seems to have cannibalized some of its concepts for Tsukihime. The two stories take place in alternate universes. As with Tsukihime, this version of Shiki also has the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, although Kara no Kyoukai’s Shiki does actually come by them after an automobile accident. There’s also a redheaded sorceress with the last name Aozaki (Touko instead of Aoko), and I want to say that I’ve read somewhere that they’re sisters, and that Touko traveled to this alternate reality from the “main” one where Tsukihime and Fate take place. She was initially envisioned with sort of pixie-cut blue hair, but was converted for the movies into a redhead like her sister Aoko, and Nasu decided he liked the change so much that it became canon.

But although it features a Shiki with the Mystic Eyes, she shares the spotlight with Mikiya Kokuto, who’s a dead ringer for the Shiki of Tsukihime. His personality’s different – he lacks Shiki Tohno’s deeply buried killer instinct, for a start. Mikiya has no special abilities beyond a knack for information-gathering and a better-than-average capacity for deductive reasoning. Moreover, even without any special powers of his own, he seems to move with relative comfort in a world full of sorcerers and mystical murderers, in part by keeping an open mind, taking nothing for granted, keeping his assumptions in check, and taking everything as it comes. He works as an investigator for Touko’s paranormal detective agency, Garan-no-Dou. Shiki is mostly the muscle.

Mikiya has a younger sister, Azaka, who in her turn looks an awful lot like Shiki Tohno’s sister Akiha. Except for in flashbacks, where she looks like a young Rin Tohsaka from Fate instead. As with Tsukihime, she is attracted to her brother. Unlike Tsukihime, the two of them are actually blood siblings, so... At least with Kara no Kyoukai, this profound failure of the Westermarck Effect is entirely one-sided; Mikiya has eyes only for Shiki. TV Tropes would undoubtedly describe it as Single-Target Sexuality.

There are any number of other parallels between the two, but these are the most obvious. Much of the background lore seems to be similar between the two series, although Kara no Kyoukai doesn’t use the same parts of it, and doesn’t dig into the parts it does use quite as much. It’s much less concerned with cosmic entities like Arcueid or Roa or Nvrnqsr Chaos, and more concerned with its characters as individuals, and how they relate to each other. That isn’t to say that it doesn’t dive into the sort of metaphysical strangeness on display in Tsukihime and Fate – Kara no Kyoukai is aggressively weird – but its metaphysical struggles are more self-contained, connected more directly to the characters and less tied to the cosmological backdrop.

The movies were released in Japan beginning in 2007, almost a decade after the novels began publication, and well after the successes of Tsukihime and the first Fate series. They’re animated by ufotable, and feature Yuki Kajiura as the composer. I’d encourage anyone interested to track them down, though I know the price tag can be offputting. Aside from high-quality video and sound, the set is pretty bare-bones. There’s no English audio track; in fact, the impression I get is that this is basically just the Japanese Blu-ray release, re-encoded for Region 1. This includes the movies’ proper titles not being displayed in English anywhere on the discs or cases, so you have to do a little sleuthing to figure out which movies are which. This is doubly aggravating considering that the intended viewing order isn’t chronological, so it’s not immediately apparent if you’ve started with the wrong movie. If you feel totally lost and like you’ve just come into the middle of things, then it’s highly likely you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. Thankfully, the menus are in English, and the subtitles are serviceable.

There’s a DVD version of the boxed set that costs less – I want to say the whole boxed set went for something like $200 – which is still a decent chunk of change, but more reasonable for a set of seven movies. Unfortunately, a quick browse of Amazon makes it seem even harder to find than the Blu-ray set. And, sadly, there are no legal streaming options for this series.

#type-moon #tsukihime #shingetsutan tsukihime #visual novel #anime #halloween #vampires #lunar legend tsukihime #arcueid #arcueid brunestud #shiki tohno

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calliecat93 · 4 years

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Top 5 Things I Disliked About Red vs Blue: Season 2

When I decided to do this series, I knew it was gonna be hard to do lists for Blood Gulch. Not because I can’t think of anything I like or dislike specifically, but as I said before, BGC is mainly comedic driven. The worst I can say is ‘this isn’t funny’ and critique the earlier production standards. Which that’s kinda mean since they were working with what they had and trying to learn to do the show. As such, I have to reach on Dislikes for these and S2 was a tough one in that regard. I managed to come up with five, but GOD I had to stretch haaaard on it.

But still, I did it. Just remember, take this with a grain of salt. So here we go, Top 5 Things I Disliked About RvB S2.

#5. Doc

If you asked me which of the BGC to write out and never bring back… I’d probably have to pick Doc. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate him, but I’ve also never loved him. He comes off more whiny than funny, and most of the time he’s only funny due to the back and forth with O’Malley. Otherwise, usually… he’s just there. Even here in S2, while having a pacifist medic in a cast where several are trigger happy could lead to some funny stuff, Doc was just an annoyance. The situations he got into were funny, like getting knocked into the Warthog when the Blues unknowingly made it go rogue, but he was literally just there for the ride. Something IDT later season really improved aside form 16 and 17, which tbh I think is stretching it.

IDK, I just find Doc whiny and kinda boring. Even if he’s meant to be the annoying, disrespected nice guy, doesn't Donut kinda fit that slot already? Heck, they both even have the recurring ‘disappear for seasons and then suddenly comes back’ joke. The only times that I feel invested in Doc is when he has O’Malley, which is how he re-entered the plot here. I’m gonna save more about that in the S3 posts, but on his own? Doc just… doesn’t really work and I didn’t really miss him in between the Reds dumping him and him reappearing when O’Malley infected him. It’s also a flaw IDT recent seasons have really fixed, though they are trying. Plus I don’t hate Doc and some jokes with him do work (the gag of his naming made me giggle), I'm just… indifferent. But that’s why he’s at the top of the list since the most I can say is I find him whiny and not as funny,

#4. The Cyborg Subplot

So due to losing Lopez and because he’s Sarge, Sarge decides to turn one of the Reds into a cyborg to do all the stuff that Lopez did. He settles on Simmons. Now in and of itself, the subplot is fine. It leads to a good few jokes, like Grif trying to ruin Simmons’ parts after the surgery or a few gags like Simmons shooting his own foot and of course, faxass. While IDT the season would have been hurt without it, it has plenty of funny bits. Sow hat’s the problem. Well… like I said, cutting it wouldn’t have hurt anything. It kinda is just there to give the Reds something to do during the O’Malley and Tex stuff since otherwise, they’d just be standing around and taking… well, more than normal. Otherwise, it’s only significance plot-wise is Tucker tuning into their frequency, which is important in the finale when he picks up Vic and Sarge’s conversation.

So yeah, the subplot isn’t all that important. But it is still funny, so I don't mind it being there. But nowadays… how much so we see this come up? I mean Grif got mutilated by a tank and got another guy’s body/organs haphazardly stitched on. Simmons, while he possibly gave up those parts to Grif willingly, was otherwise forcibly converted into a cyborg. This… hasn’t really come up again. I mean the only time I think Simmons mentioned it in-show was as a brief joke in S11. Nine seasons later. I don’t think Grif’s side of it has come up at all ever again. Though… considering you can only get so many jokes out of this setup since everyone is always in armor, I do understand why. Though I feel with Simmons’ side at least, they could play with it some more, both comedically and maybe even storywise. But that may be my need for Simmons content talking…

So yeah, the subplot was okay. It’s at Number Four since I don’t hate it and it was funny. I just feel like nothing would be lost without it, especially since it pretty much never comes up again. Maybe one day though, who knows? At least the fanfic writers keep it alive XD

#3. The Caboose Forgetting Church Thing

Okay this is brief, but it does annoy me. During the whole trip into Caboose’s mind, Caboose’s memory of Church gets shot. As such, Caboose forgets who Church is. Makes sense, O’Malley killed the personification of Church in Caboose’s mind, so his mind would forget it. It also explains why Caboose got, well… for lack of a better way to put it, intellectually challenged later on due to having three AI’s in his brain and all the chaos that broke out. But Caboose forgetting Church lasts like… one episode? Maybe two? Anyways, Burnie explained on the commentary that it was just too hard to write out so they did one joke with it, and then just dropped it. Probably for the best... but then we have to figure out how this works in-continuity... damn it.

Really this is only on here because it forces me to try to figure out how this is possible in a show sense. Which yeah I probably don’t need to, but I am a continuity loser who tries to piece together these things. If I had to guess, maybe the memory of Church fixed itself somehow or Caboose was able to recall after being around Church for a little while. But I honestly really don’t know, and trying to think it through hurts my brain. It also did little to nothing either story-wise or comedy-wise, at least we got a few jokes out of the cyborg subplot. IDK, I feel like they gave up on it too soon. But then again this is the saga where they’ll break/ignore continuity for the sake of a joke and that’s just how these seasons worked. Hence why I put it smack-dab in the middle.

#2. Some Holdover S1 Issues

You can tell that there was a mass improvement in terms of production for Season Two. Pacing felt stronger, more was going on, characterizations began to settle in, and they even began to form more of a plot. They clearly had a much better idea of what they were doing now that they got through Season One and I think things like Matt becoming more involved in writing and production as well as Gus moving back to work on the show really helped as well. That being said, not everything got resolved. Most did, but there are still a few holdouts.

Audio mixing is a LOT better, especially when it comes to effects. The filter is still a little distracting, though better compared to S1. Not all the characterizations really set in. Grif and Donut are about 75% there and Simmons and Tucker are probably the least set in stone. The traits are there, like Simmons clinginess to Sarge and Tucker actually showing some competence when forced to, but nothing set in stone. Donut’s also on the right path with his hobbies and tendency to babble into TMI territory, but the voice is still off and his personality isn’t quite there yet. There’s some other, but I’ll touch on it in the Likes list. Some jokes could also still drag, like the whole switch joke where some of Church and Tucker’s back and forth went on a little too long.

We’re clearly making progress, but the mark hasn’t quite been hit. It’s still an improvement over S1 though, the pacing especially. This is nitpicky, but still it’s there. But hey it’s progress, and that is never a bad thing. So yeah, RvB is still evolving here, but the progress bar is loading steadily and trust me, by S3 I think we’ll be settled in… well, for the most part.

#1. Some Outdated Humor

The BGC was made from 2003 to 2007. Obviously, there’s gonna be some stuff that is outdated. Take the graphics themselves for example. Halo has evolved, so the game can look a little outdated, especially when you compare the original footage to the remastered footage. Let's put it this way, VIC is uncanny in the remaster… and is utterly horrifying in the original version. Thank God that the DVD is the remaster and I was spared of looking at that monstrosity. Visuals aren’t the only thing though, some pop culture references can also come off as outdated, like Creed joke in the RL vs Internet PSA. So can some of the humor that shows how stupid we were back only two decades ago.

There are… some jokes that are uncomfortable to listen to. For example, there’s the Grif shaming himself joked by saying he’s a girl and likes ribbons in his hair. It’s not the worst joke and clearly, it isn’t made to offend… but nowadays I think it could look offensive to certain individuals. It didn’t necessarily offend me, but it did kinda make me feel uncomfortable when I first watched it, but it could be me thinking it over too hard. There’s also the casual usage of the R word. Last season it came up a bit, but I noticed it came up more frequently here. Not excessively, but there were quite a few instances where it was treated as a casual curse word. Obviously back in 2004 we didn’t realize this was an offensive term, and I think they’ve even said that they regret the casual usage of it during the early years. You certainly would probably not hear that word used unless maybe to emphasize how terrible a character is, but even then I think they’d be more careful.

Now obviously RvB uses a lot of adult and offensive humor, especially in this era. I guess you can kinda call it the web version of South Park, only RvB has never really resorted to shock humor. It puts it above many, /many/ animated adult comedies in that regard. Still, when you run for this long, you’re gonna have some outdated elements. It’s not necessarily their fault, it just shows that times has changed. Still, it does make some stuff hard to look back on without cringing, and I imagine that the Founders would agree. So yeah… there’s just some stuff that wasn't fun to look back over and S2 isn’t the only offender, but this was where it stood out to me and took me out of the moment. As such, it is Number One.

(Top 5 Likes)

#rvb #rvb reviews #top likes/dislikes

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recentanimenews · 5 years

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THE GREAT CRUNCHYROLL NARUTO REWATCH Begins with Episodes 1-7!

*guitar*

*shadows*

COME ON!

Welcome to The Great Crunchyroll Naruto Rewatch! I'm Nate, and I'll be your host this week as we make our way through all 220 episodes of the original Naruto. Last week, I told you how all this worked, but everybody who's new I'll go over things one more time.

Each week, we'll be watching SEVEN EPISODES of the original Naruto, and sharing our thoughts on them interview-style every Friday at 5pm PST.

This week, we're starting things off with episodes 1-7, featuring an introduction to everyone's favorite super-loud orange ninja, the rest of our main cast, and this world of ninja that they inhabit. Things move pretty quickly--it's not long before Naruto's assigned to Team 7, they have their first real test against their teacher and commander Kakashi, and they face their first life-or-death fights against the Demon Brothers and Zabuza!

But, before we discuss these episodes, let's take a look at the comments and questions that you had from our last installment!

The number one question we got last week was a simple one: ARE WE GOING TO SKIP THE FILLER?

No. We are not skipping the filler.

You may skip the filler, but be sure to tune in to see our reactions to it... there's gonna be a lot down the road.

Now, let's see what the Crunchyroll Features team thought of this week's episodes!

Alright, this is where it all starts--I know a bunch of you are new to Naruto. How did actually watching it compare to your expectations?

Paul: Judging from my previous experiences with the fans, I was expecting Naruto (both the show and the titular character) to be a little more meat-headed and hyper-masculine. Instead, the show sets a laser focus on evoking sympathy with a protagonist who wants to be the best in the world simply so people will recognize him. I didn't anticipate such feelings of internalized inadequacy from the shouty, fighty shonen hero.

Peter: I’m rewatching and also decided to read the manga alongside. So far I’m really impressed by how strong Kishimoto’s aesthetic was from the outset. The environments and character designs are all unmistakeable and his action is like this perfect combination of piece-by-piece panels and splashes. I like the anime’s additions, especially some extra Naruto/Konohamaru scenes which drive home the difference in how they’re treated and an early Ino intro that sets up her rivalry with Sakura.

Kevin: I was one of the people watching the original Cartoon Network run of the show’s dub back somewhere around 2003 or 2004. Going back and rewatching, I forgot how much the early parts of the show focus on Naruto’s emotional struggle, first of not being accepted by anyone and just trying to get attention, then how he feels about his various failings as a ninja. As a result, the stakes aren’t as high, but it feels like a much more personal story.

Jared: I completely missed out on Naruto after dropping off anime around 2003, but going in I was more expecting it to follow a similar structure to other shonen shows I’ve seen. From the start, the opening episode completely shattered any expectations I had with how tight the entire episode was woven together with regards to its narrative, characterizations, and how much info it packed into 24 minutes. Outside of that, I think I’d missed out on knowing that Naruto can act like a brat early on in the series.

Joseph: I’m in an interesting position, because I watched maybe 40 episodes of this a decade ago and I’ve read around 50 volumes of the manga. I will say I was surprised at how nostalgic it felt to watch this compared to, say, Shippuden, which has a much different vibe. It’s also impressive how much groundwork is laid for the entire series via Kishimoto’s designs and world and the way the anime adapted it.

Carolyn: I was very surprised at how quickly they dove into Naruto’s backstory. I have seen the show many years ago and didn’t seem to remember that such a “big reveal” occurred so quickly. I… honestly find the story quite boring and hard to keep my attention focused on, I guess I’m just not super invested in the characters. However, I can absolutely see seeds of how this show has affected and inspired many that came after it. I hadn’t really noticed that when watching other anime, but going back and rewatching Naruto makes that pretty clear. Also, I am cracking up at the totally rad ‘80s Breakfast Club-esque opening sequence. I didn’t remember that music at all.

Noelle: Naruto was one of my first encounters with manga when I first really started getting into it, but it’s been a long time since I touched it. I read the whole thing, but I never reread it, so a lot of instances I completely forgot about. For example, I forgot how kind of gruesome it was at the start, focusing on serious injuries instead of just fantasy violence. At the same time, I’m impressed how strong the characters are established, along with themes such as kindness and proving yourself that will resonate throughout the entire series.

Kara: I was five years out of college when Naruto started, and I remember in the circles I ran in it was Not The Done Thing to be into it. I can’t remember if it was because it was considered a “casual’s anime” or if it was based on run-ins with cosplayers at conventions. Likely a little of both. Watching it has been a lot more chill than I expected, and while I see a lot of the tropes I figured I’d see, it looks like it’s leading somewhere interesting.

David: I basically grew up with Naruto, but I fell off of it in high school so it’s been more than a decade since the last time I actually watched an episode or read a chapter. Comparing it to my expectations, it’s much more focused than I recall--the first episode could stand alone as a very emotionally effective short story, for example. Kakashi is still the only side character who seems to have a lot of thought put into their long-term character arc, though.

Daniel: I like it, though Naruto has always kind of been a blind spot for me. I’ve seen a decent chunk of it, but it’s always kind of been background noise, something to have on so that when people ask me “Do you only watch One Piece?”, I can say “NUH UH. I ALSO WATCH THIS ONE ABOUT ANOTHER LOUD BOY.” That said, actually paying attention to it, it’s pretty fun. I dig Kishimoto’s world building, and the environment that he’s set up. I’m really interested in finally figuring out why so many people adopted this show as their gospel.

Danni W: I actually did watch the first dozen or so episodes of Naruto around six or seven years ago, so this was more of a refresher than anything. It never quite clicked with me the first time, so I was surprised to find I enjoyed it more this time around. I think it helped that the show gets real pretty immediately. We’re only seven episodes in and Naruto has already had to face real combat three separate times. The characters aren’t enough to hook me yet, so the early doses of action have made for a good on ramp for me.

I've always enjoyed how Naruto hangs on to its emotional core, and we see that very strongly in the first few episodes. What did you all think of this part of the story?

Paul: I'm not fully invested yet in the emotional stakes of the series, mostly because I don't really know the scope and scale of the world that Naruto inhabits. Why are these children being trained to be spies and assassins from such a young age? What dangers does the outside world present such that it prompts entire villages to weaponize their kids?

Peter: I feel like I never gave Iruka enough credit in retrospect, maybe because his act was the first in what later emerged as the series core. Without him, Naruto probably would have been another Gaara. I also never realized that Naruto is wearing Iruka’s headband the entire damn story. After Naruto’s hand stab I’m trying to remember if grand masculine gestures are regularly mocked as an inverse toward the important compassionate gestures, so I’m planning to track that moving forward.

Kevin: While I like seeing the cool techniques and fights from later in the show, going back to the beginning and seeing much more of a focus on each character’s internal conflicts is an interesting change, giving each of their actions a bit more personal weight. It’s not inherently better or worse, just a different focus on the same story.

Jared: It really seemed like a great way to start the series and let people know from the onset that this is a story that deals heavily with empathy. I figured eventually the series would go that route, but to do it immediately sets a tone that allows for these characters like Naruto to instantly have layers that otherwise might take a long time to see. With the show really bouncing between emotional moments and comedy pretty frequently, I’m curious whether it’ll continue that or try and lean more in one direction or the other.

Joseph: Naruto is the most three-dimensional character in these first episodes, mostly because we haven’t had much time to delve into the stories that drive Sakura and Sasuke. I think they do a great job of making Naruto sympathetic, which makes up for his brattiness. One other thing I appreciate is that they make it clear from the outset that being a ninja isn’t just cartoonishly huge shuriken fun and games. People die on the regular here, and Naruto and the rest of his upstart era would do well do remember that before taking the next steps.

Carolyn: Just let Naruto live! Everyone is so mean to the poor kid. Again, I was surprised at how quickly they jump into this and I have a feeling it is what kept me watching the first time around. They do a good job of making you feel empathy for Naruto even when he is being totally obnoxious.

Noelle: While I remember pretty vividly the general plot, I don’t remember a lot of the small moments that make up a scene. Naruto is set up really well, and I to this day really enjoy that he’s not just cast as a quirky problem child with no future, but someone who genuinely wants to be acknowledged, and acting out is the easiest way to get attention. Knowing how things end up, seeing everyone at the start and how they are introduced is a good refresher and sets up a lot later on. At its heart, this really is a story about teamwork, empathy, and growing up.

Kara: It’s been all right—some cute and funny bits, and I like what action scenes we’ve had. From a writing standpoint, it feels like (except for Naruto himself) everyone’s categorized largely by wanting to be the Hokage, wanting to kill someone, or having a crush on someone. But I can also see that we’re quickly moving forward from that. Being on the News team means educating myself fast about unfamiliar shows, and the wildest thing to me has been seeing Hinata in the background crushing on Naruto when I just recently posted an article about her wedding figure.

David: Iruka and Naruto’s relationship has to be my favorite single part from this section. Iruka is given every reason to not like or just give up on this kid, yet he sticks up for him the whole time (while also never letting him slack--no free pass on the exams for Naruto!). Kakashi is setting up to be a good role model, too, but I’ll definitely miss how intimate Iruka’s care for Naruto is.

Daniel: You can really sympathize with Naruto because he’s the “chosen one” character without being a prodigy. He isn’t impressive right out of the gate, but he has the potential to be impressive. I think you can relate to him easier than, say, Goku, who is ready to dropkick most of the world the first time you meet him. That feeling of being meant for bigger things, but still struggling to even get on the path to those bigger things is pretty powerful.

Danni: I think it’s showing some promise. I really appreciate the lengths it goes to explain why Naruto is a troublemaker in the first place. He can be pretty annoying, but the reasons for that are mostly justified. In the end, he’s a victim. I like that Sasuke can already see that and identify with him in that respect. They both have a lot of trauma to work though in the next *checks notes* few hundred episodes.

I know we're really early in, but have there been any standout moments or characters so far?

Paul: I know everybody else is probably going to go with Kakashi as the standout character, but also cool as Kakashi may be, my heart goes out to Akimichi Choji, the chubby ninja who is stuffing his face with potato chips in Episode 3. I also like the design of the oversized shurikens and other exaggerated weapons, and I dig the visual aesthetic of the Village Hidden in the Leaves.

Peter: This question is kind of hard to answer since I’m retracing old ground but I definitely did not recall Sakura being such a little shithead. Completely forgot her putting her foot in her mouth with Sasuke saying Naruto’s a troublemaker because he’s an orphan. Funnily enough, I think her hating Naruto for who he is rather than what he represents is a really important connection between the two.

Kevin: Naruto freezing up in his first real fight and then stabbing himself, swearing that he’ll never be a burden again was a scene that I feel is an exemplar of how the early story focuses more on Naruto’s emotional journey, rather than just trying to fight increasingly strong bad guys, but still has the kind of payoffs that the audience can rally behind.

Jared: Iruka is a good dude who really wants what’s best for Naruto, even if it means taking an oversized shuriken to the back. Naruto stabbing himself in episode 6 was an immediate “YO” moment from me. The entire atmosphere of the fight in the back half of episode 7 was incredibly good. I really hope that Konohamaru continues to show up with either worse and worse stealth or continuously better ways to try and fight Naruto.

Carolyn: Glad to see Shikamaru show up so early. Love him. As I mentioned before, I’m not sure I’m fully invested in these characters. I am quite disappointed in Sakura. I remember loving her when I was younger and she is not the strong female character I remembered. She’s kind of desperately boy-crazy. Which is fine! But it feels like it comes on strong and the first several episodes don’t give her many traits beyond that. She must grow throughout the series, or my memories were warped? Kakashi Sensei feels sooooo much like a Shoto Aizawa (My Hero Academia’s Eraserhead) prototype. The mystery, the aloof manner, but secretly a big softie that just wants his student to do well. Similarly, Naruto has a lot of traits that seem to overlap with Bakugo and Soul Eater’s Black Star. More evidence of the show’s reach. Sexy Jutsu has not aged well. Also, the ending theme song is beautiful.

Noelle: Kakashi’s great, and knowing that he’s pretty close to my age puts a lot of things into context now that I’m an adult. Kakashi’s got a lot on his plate with these three problem children under his wing, but he’s still a pretty laid back guy personality-wise. Someone who stood out to me more in my rewatch was Iruka. Iruka’s presence means so much to Naruto, being the father figure he never really had. If Iruka wasn’t kind to Naruto, and he really was the only person to treat Naruto like a kid and not just a monster container, this would’ve been a very different series. Naruto truly did need someone to be there for him, and seeing their relationship really does make my heart warm. Iruka’s a good guy!

Kara: I actually cannot believe how much I associate with Naruto, and 12-years-ago me would faint at hearing that. The absolute need to prove himself, the feeling that he’s sliding backwards the harder he works, all that is something I (and others, I’m sure) can relate to. Obviously he goes a little harder than most people would in his situation—seriously, if you’re wearing Safety Orange constantly, you’ve gotta think really highly of yourself as a ninja—but it’s really something to see how much of his attitude is couched in fear of failure.

Joseph: Kakashi’s kancho, obviously.

David: Konohamaru only gets his one episode here, but I actually thought his bit was the most emotionally effective. He largely has the same issues as Naruto but in reverse. Konohamaru isn’t necessarily "royalty" but treated as such, infantilizing him from his perspective. Even his name is a point of contention for him, putting a burden on his very existence that others can’t relate to. To these ends, he looks up to Naruto for being a free spirit, but as the viewers we understand that they are more similar than they know. Naruto is the main character--we see his troubles garnering respect and even love from his peers and mentors in these episodes--but Konohamaru grounds that conflict by mirroring it.

Daniel: In my high school band class in Freshman year, a kid asked the teacher to be referred to as “Sasuke.” He also had a ninja headband that he’d wear around some time, and while I thought it was goofy then, I think it’s ABSOLUTELY DOPE now. So, while I still figure out the characters, I’m gonna nominate broody ol’ Sasuke in honor of that kid.

Danni: Kakashi covers like 75% of his face with ninja gear and to show how badass he is fought one-handed while reading a book called Makeout Paradise. I want to be that cool someday.

The action escalated pretty quickly--we started with Team 7 having to take the bells from Kakashi for the first full-on action scene (even if it wasn't "for keeps"), and then we have to worry about Hidden Mist assassins and our first real villain, Zabuza. Any thoughts on the action?

Paul: I like all of the action that I've seen so far, but the resolution to Kakashi's test wasn't dramatically satisfying for me. The payoff didn't match the build-up. I wanted to see Team 7 put up more of a show of resistance than simply refusing to obey Kakashi's instructions not to feed Naruto. The scene plays more like everyone being recalcitrant teenagers and less like anyone taking a principled stand.

Peter: I can’t believe the action is so sick even this early on. I always thought of Sasuke’s style as the most orthodox and the intricacy of some of his combos and the shots are so damn satisfying to look. Kishimoto made it super easy for the animators to make some stylish shots and they ran with it. The series is already building its vocabulary with a Sasuke attack that obviously builds into the Lion Combo and some underground shenanigans.

Kevin: I feel like this is the show’s action at its weakest. None of the Genin know how to fight yet, so once the actually dangerous fighting begins, they’re relegated to standing around watching Kakashi and Zabuza fight, and even that hasn’t gotten to the more impressive techniques. It’s not bad since at least there is still a fight between two experienced combatants to watch, it’s just weaker than what the show delivers on later when the protagonist and major characters are experienced enough to contribute.

Jared: I was surprised how subdued the action had felt before Team 7 took on Kakashi with there being pretty minimal fight scenes until that point. Kakashi messing around with Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura gave a good baseline of the complete difference in skill between all of them, but it wasn’t until Zabuza and his ridiculous cow print sleeves showed up that we truly get a sense of how much of a gap there is between Kakashi and Team 7. The beginnings of that fight truly gave the feeling of their being stakes involved which had been missing elsewhere.

Carolyn: Again, surprised at how quickly the show turns on a dime. They can go from goofy to serious in a heartbeat and it is very reminiscent of how things often progress on My Hero Academia. But I still find it hard to really get into the peril. I’m not sure why, exactly, I’m not very invested in the characters, but it’s early. I’m sure that will change.

Noelle: Since this series came out where it did, Jump was still very much comfortable with keeping pacing slow. As a result, the fights are a lot slower than what I’m used to, even if that was the norm back then. At the same time, the action itself isn’t bad--it’s pretty clever, and introduces the rules of the world in a way that anyone can pick up with ease.

Kara: I have a feeling a lot of my appreciation for the fighting will come as I start learning the different abilities in play. There have definitely been some cool moves, but I think we’re still in that exposition phase where we’re learning the types of things ninjas can do (and what our main cast’s strong and weak points are). A couple weeks from now when I’ve seen more of how this universe operates, I’ll probably be all in.

David: Sure, the action isn’t flashy, but the Kakashi training fight was much better than I remember it being for two reasons. One, it’s just funny. Kakashi doesn’t do anything truly harsh to the kids (well, aside from starve them, but that’s part of the plan), and what little physical combat he does with them is either light or just plain comedic. Two, it serves as a small show-don’t-tell of the show’s combat mechanics. For example, he calls out at the beginning that he’s going to use taijutsu, leading to his infamous kancho when he could have done a million other things; Sakura even believes he is using a more fancy technique before it happens. From there more involved strategies are used and by the end we have a basic primer of Naruto combat simultaneously serving as a team-building exercise for our heroes. Very efficient storytelling.

Joseph: The action is really clear and well-handled in these early episodes. I’m not sure how it gets later on, but I know in the manga I found some of Kishimoto’s action layouts much harder to follow than they should be. His designs and the intention behind his action translate nicely to animation, thankfully. Naruto is also really good at suddenly showing just how powerful a character really is within action, which is a total must-have shonen staple.

Danni: It’s not very flashy so far, but it is pretty tense. The high-level combat so far seems to entirely be a contest of clones and substitutions. The substitution jutsu seems way too broken. That being said, it’s a pretty cool technique. I hope we get to start seeing some good hand-to-hand soon.

For this batch of episodes, what were the highest and lowest points, respectively?

Paul: High point: Naruto getting caught in Kakashi's rope trap, grumbling about not getting tricked again while he frees himself, and then immediately getting caught in another rope trap. I love those kind of gags. Low point: ninja diarrhea.

Peter: In both cases probably the information reveals. Purely narratively speaking, a lot of the info that comes at the characters feels like common knowledge in retrospect. Kakashi is famous for having the Sharingan, how the village and mission systems work, and Sakura not knowing about her crush’s family being murdered seem like they should things the kids know. On the other hand, I’m super impressed with how much of a foundation Sasuke and Kakashi’s backstory have so early on and foreshadowing for both.

Kevin: The lowest point for me was the repeated use of the “Sexy Jutsu.” Once made sense to show Naruto as a troublemaker who could invent new techniques if he tried, and the Harem Jutsu showed that he can be creative and combine techniques for new tactics, but the other 2-3 times just feel like a joke being overplayed. The best moment was the fight against the Hidden Mist Chunin, since each of the kids’ personalities show through clearly. Sakura is terrified but keeps to her main duty, Sasuke starts retaliating to get rid of the threat, and Naruto freezes in place and needs to be saved, leading to an excellent emotional payoff when the fight is over.

Jared: The high points for me were Kakashi vs. Zabuza, Naruto’s hand stab, and Sakura and Ino’s incredibly ridiculous power walk competition in episode 3. Sexy Jutsu really beats you over the head with how many times they use that gag and Naruto’s stomach issues from episode 3 were just strange, so those would be my low points.

Carolyn: The music is a definite high! The emotional moments and humanizing of Naruto is nice to see. Using ninja skills to save a lost cat is completely adorable and feels like something All Might would do. Did the My Hero peeps grow up on Naruto? It feels like it. I also like how positive Naruto is in the face of adversity. He can make any situation a positive one. Laughing at the clunky exposition, “It’s going to take someone who is highly skilled.” Low point, again, definitely Sexy Jutsu (and teaching Sexy Jutsu to a little kid, WTF, these were different times) and Sakura’s desperate crush.

Noelle: Sexy Jutsu got old really fast. It was interesting to see Naruto expand it, as that showed he was learning, but aside from that, it’s an overdone gag. Glad they cut down on it. For good points, the Zabuza fight for sure, and each one of the kids standing up for themselves in the face of danger. And of course, Naruto stabbing himself in the hand to show his resolve!

Kara: Low point was absolutely the diarrhea episode—add to that the weird middle school comedy of errors surrounding it. I only had so much tolerance for Sakura’s crush and Naruto’s willingness to either mess with or take advantage of it. High point for me was Konohamaru’s desire to be called by his name and not his function or association. It was such a goofy little episode, but something really resonated for me about being willing to go to ridiculous lengths just to be recognized for who he is.

David: The bizarre ‘love triangle’ dynamic as a whole is the low point--this is notably represented well in the “diarrhea episode,” but comes across everywhere else too in how obviously undercooked Sasuke and Sakura’s characters are at this point. On the other hand, the high point is how obviously fully developed Kakashi is despite us knowing so little about him at this point. Unlike the rest of the side characters, there is clearly a lot going on in both what we see him doing here and what is implied to be happening in his background, and that’s as exciting a hook as it was when I was in middle school.

Joseph: The gags are hit or miss, but mostly decent. For me, the low point is any time an information dump rears its head. Zabuza standing on top of his sword for an eternity while he and Kakashi trade off exposition about the Sharingan is sloppy. I dig most everything else, and the high point is how the story handles this early-stage version of Naruto. He is just straight up a bad ninja, and it shows. He’s loud, brash, and obnoxious in an all orange jumpsuit. He’s the anti-ninja. Best of all, he’s terrified, and he totally should be.

Daniel: I really like the show’s tone, usually. But the high point and low point were within five seconds of one another. In the first episode, it’s so rad when Naruto finally reveals his Shadow Clone Jutsu against Mizuki. And then they all beat up Mizuki, and you get these “BONK BOOP SCHWWWWOOOP” sound effects, which takes all of the power of the scene and kicks it out the door.

Danni: For me, the highest point of this batch was in the first episode when Naruto overhears Iruka defending him against Mizuki. That’s a potentially life-changing moment for Naruto, finally learning why so many in the village hate him. Had it been anyone but Iruka who had found Naruto, he likely would’ve ended up turning against the entire village in anger. It’s a touching moment of understanding not just between teacher and student, but also between a pair of orphans linked by the same tragic event.

The lowest point is anytime I‘m reminded the sexy jutsu exists.

COUNTERS

Ramen consumed so far: 2 bowls, 1 cup

"I'm gonna be Hokage!" count: 8

Number of Shadow Clones summoned: 46

And that's everything for this week! Remember that you're always welcome to join us for this rewatch, especially if you haven't watched the original Naruto!

Here's our upcoming schedule!

-Next week, on JANUARY 25th, we'll be discussing EPISODES 8-14, hosted by KARA DENNISON! The mission in the Land of Waves continues! THIS IS THE ONLY INSTALLMENT WE'RE ACCEPTING QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS FOR THIS WEEK!

-Then, on FEBRUARY 1st, we discuss EPISODES 15-21, with KEVIN MATYI hosting! Not only do we start the Chunin Exam arc, but we get our first FILLER EPISODE!

-On FEBRUARY 8th,we'll discuss EPISODES 22-28, with JARED CLEMONS as host! The Chunin Exam kicks into high gear!

Thank you for joining us for the Great Crunchyroll Naruto Rewatch! Have a great weekend, and we'll see you all next time!

Have any comments or questions about episodes 1-7? What about our upcoming installment, featuring episodes 8-14?

-----

Nate Ming is the Features Editor for Crunchyroll News and creator of the long-running Fanart Friday column. You can follow him on Twitter at @NateMing. Check out his comic, Shaw City Strikers!

By: [email protected]

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

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renaroo · 6 years

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hi! did bruce ever come to accept that cass DID kill a man or is this something he's still in denial of?

Oh boy, so this is a favorite subject of mine and especially now that we have two continuities to provide comparison for, I’m going to wig out a bit and go for a full deep dive here. My apologies, one and all.

Discussions of murder, child abuse, and suicide under the cut.

New Earth | Pre-Flashpoint Continuity

The simple answer to this is that Bruce learned the truth but rejected the truth and for as far as we were ever given evidence for in all of Batgirl (2000-2006) and all comics after that – minus the OOC “Evil Cass” Saga that everyone agrees to ignore – he basically rejects it without fail.

Now, one would say that Bruce Wayne objecting to hard evidence on anything is out of character and they’d be right. And, in fact, for Bruce’s subplot throughout Batgirl (2000-2006) that dichotomy actually proved to be one of the leading problems.

Even when David Cain gives Bruce video evidence of the murder Cass committed as an eight year old child, he is heartbroken but also refuses to accept it no matter how much the evidence stacks up.

[Batgirl (2000-2006) #4]

But, of course, the more he analyzes the tape, the more he looks for signs of tampering or editing, the less he finds, and the more angry he gets at himself for not being able to somehow change the reality of what is happening.

[Batgirl (2000-2006) #4]

This isn’t a new thing for Bruce’s characterization in this era. Earlier that same year in the premiere issue of Batman: Gotham Knights (2000-2006), his “blind spots” were actually the main crux of the issue, as all the evidence pointed toward the son of the two victims being the one who committed the heinous murder, and he spent valuable time and effort, as well as everyone else’s time and effort, trying to find any evidence at all that would prove the truth wrong. To the point that Dick was trying pretty desperately to take the case from Bruce so it wouldn’t bother him so much.

But even with that case, as as much as it affected Bruce, he ultimately conceded to the evidence.

Cassandra, though, is personal. And throughout her Batgirl run, Bruce again and again makes comparisons between the two of them. Bruce almost uncharacteristically opens himself up to Cass soon after beginning to work with her. She had be “vetted” by Barbara, easily Bruce’s most trusted ally at the time, had proved herself by saving Bruce’s best friend Jim Gordon, and provided assistance at their darkest hour during the No Man’s Land crisis. But more than any of that, Cassandra was the first person in Bruce’s life who seemed to carry his blind allegiance to the “No Kill” rule that he had.

And just when Bruce was most confronted with the facts, when he had heard from Cain himself that Cass had blood on her hands, Cassandra proved herself in an act that even Bruce himself would have had difficulty doing as selflessly and heroically as Cass did. She races into gunfire, not dodging a single shot in order to keep a criminal behind her from being taken out by friendly fire.

And in the process, has a quiet moment that once again shows just how incredibly similar she and Bruce are in their attitudes and mannerisms.

[Batgirl (2000-2006) #6]

And when Bruce asks her about it later, she gives him an answer that seems to help him draw the wool over his eyes all the more, because she couldn’t be so instinctively protective of life like he is if she had ever taken life herself.

[Batgirl (2000-2006) #6]

If Cassandra, who embodies his philosophies and beliefs so much could kill, then that meant that Bruce could kill, and this was at a dark time in Bruce’s life where that very question was something that could have been the end of him, even the suspicion of murder – such as in Bruce Wayne: Murderer?/Fugitive – would tear down everything he believed at its foundation.

But of course, all of this was still a willful delusion on Bruce’s part. Cassandra had killed. Cassandra’s guilt and death wish was because of her past. And just because Bruce came up with any excuse possible to ignore these facts didn’t mean that it wasn’t plain to see for everyone else.

And thus the main conflict for Bruce in Batgirl (2000-2006) wasn’t really portrayed as him discovering the truth about Cass’ past – he had the evidence for it since the third issue – it was about how his inability to accept it, because of his inability to forgive that fault, fed into Cassandra’s death wish as much as her personal guilt.

Bruce couldn’t accept the reality of Cass having been used and manipulated to do something so heinously wrong when she was a child, because he couldn’t accept the flaw of his own morality that (at this time in his life) he would not be able to find it in himself to forgive someone he loved and admired so much as a part of his family. His very staunch black-and-white worldview was shaped in a way that it made it simpler for him to put criminals away and to see willing killers as deserving of punishment without nuance was at odds with the girl he had adopted as his own who very much was born as evidence of the world’s shades of gray.

But Bruce wasn’t Cass’ only parental figure. In fact, Barbara Gordon was a far bigger influence at this time and Babs was someone with a far more nuanced outlook. And also someone who believed not only that Cass had been haunted by this crime, but was someone who wanted Cass to learn how to forgive herself for something that wasn’t ultimately her fault. Barbara knew that Cass needed to see from her mentors that she could be forgiven before she could really forgive herself, and as long as Bruce wasn’t budging, she was going to continue on her path of self destruction. This frightened and angered Barbara because she couldn’t force Bruce to believe and forgive, even as the time of the death-by-Shiva was approaching.

Without getting too much into it, I’ll just say that this sentiment is very similar to the helplessness one feels with being familiar with the signs of someone becoming increasingly suicidal, but incapable of pressing others in the loved ones’ life to open their eyes and see the danger for themselves – to accept that there is a problem so that they can then begin to help heal and fix and forgive for it.

This comes to a head in Batgirl (2000-2006) #23 when Barbara tries one last time to wake Bruce up to the reality of it while Cass prepares for her final fight.

[Batgirl (2000-2006) #23]

Honestly, #23 is probably one of the most underrated issues of the entire series and… while the subject material is dark it’s vital to really understanding what the first third of the run was even about.

There’s an element of Bruce’s denial that is a bit self serving. He doesn’t want to see what’s wrong with Cass’ behavior or her suicidal behavior – her death wish – because it requires him to defend a fundamental flaw of his own philosophies and beliefs. It requires him to really confront how he’s capable of forgiving criminals who have more identifiable motives and, often, mental illness, but is much stricter and less forgiving of the people he loves most and has the highest expectations of. Usually people whose mental illness and trauma aren’t as easily identified.

It confronts the mindset of valuing any belief system over the circumstances of reality. And Bruce, until he goes through this himself and forgives himself in Bruce Wayne: Murderer?/Fugitive can’t begin to accept what it would mean for Cassandra.

But, for reasons that many can fannishly extrapolate on, Barbara can. and it’s fortunate that she can because Cass surviving, Cass being reborn after what is for all intents and purposes a failed suicide attempt, it was Barbara who let her know that her life was still valuable, that her sins and burdens were not beyond forgiveness or made her undeserving of love. That no fault would make Barbara love her less.

[Batgirl (2000-2006) #25]

Cass’ victory in this moment is actually also Barbara’s love as a parent winning as well. Because sometimes putting aside long held beliefs and traversing into new territory to adapt to the grayness of reality is the only real way to be moral in life.

And it’s because Babs showed Cass the way that Cass is able to finally accept herself and see outside herself enough to recognize that same tendency, that same crushing death wish in her opponent as well and ultimately give Shiva the gift of living past a death wish as well.

[Batgirl (2000-2006) #25]

This is just an amazing powerful moment and for obvious reasons can effect many people very differently. This tone, this strangely optimistic story about conquering the shadow of death after it haunts you for all of your life, was one of the most important comics I personally had ever read. And because of that it means a lot to me. I like that there were so many layers to Cass’ feelings, to the reactions of the people around her, and how sometimes those people around her failed her without ever even realizing it.

And in a way, Bruce did fail Cass in this respect. And it’s because of that that I think a lot of people don’t come away from Batgirl feeling it lines up well with any Batman they know. In a sense, yeah, it feels pretty damning for him to have never accepted the danger Cass was putting herself in, to never fully accept it as something he could change or even that he could contribute to.

But that’s a sad reality. And in 2003? It would have been all too easy for a parent to write off suicidal teenagers as something that was completely outside of their control, and as much as that angers me today in hindsight, I can’t say that such mistakes would ever singularly make someone a completely terrible person.

We never get evidence that Bruce accepted the truth later in the series or beyond. And I do think that’s a dangling plot thread that works against the overall “score” of Cass’ Batgirl series as there were quite a few plots that were left aside unceremoniously. But I can also argue that it was something that was left behind because they didn’t think it held any narrative purpose after presenting the “wrong” way someone handles other people’s suicidal feelings. Batgirl is Cass’ story, and Bruce being able to accept the truth for himself once Cass moved past it could have been part of her story, too, but it was still mostly a Bruce story. And it was never brought up in his own series again.

Not to say that Bruce didn’t…. evolve on those thoughts over the years anyway. Just. Not in regards to Cass. Just in regards to Damian and David and…. Selina in hindsight. Comics are weird, and this drop off of this narrative point also marked a lot of change up in Editorial and Writing for the Bat Books that would take us down a path to War Games so saying that we weren’t going to be getting much nuance on the subject is putting it lightly.

Prime Earth | DC Rebirth Continuity

Cass is a really different character based purely on her origins alone in this because a fundamental change was made that... kind of took a lot of power out of Cass’ original death wish by some’s measure, and moved us beyond years of idealizing a teenager’s depression and mental illness in others. It will really depend on what side of the fence you land on for how you feel about either.

Cassandra’s murder was not a nameless mobster here but instead one of her best friend’s mothers, Miranda Row. She also has a mission before she joins the Batfamily of her own volition, one specifically handed to her by Bruce who knows she was Miranda Row’s murderer from the start.

Bruce’s acceptance of Cass’ past sin is actually the main crux of their relationship in this version and isn’t at all independent of the very real fact that Cass hasn’t been given a mother figure in all of this, there is no Barbara who will play opposite to Bruce’s approaches to Cass’ struggles and past. Therefore the narrative doesn’t have the freedom to explore how different approaches to raising a child with these conditions, especially an adopted child, and so Bruce has to be good and accepting of Cass or else the narrative is just needlessly mistreating someone without giving them any relief or help. To avoid that, both Bruce and Cass have a lot of those layers removed and the story is streamlined.

Bruce isn’t only accepting of Cass’ past, he is actively encouraging her to move past it and maybe even give up vigilantism and violence as a way to reclaim herself.

....

While simultaneously reminding her that Miranda Row will never come back? But at least Harper forgave her?

.... Batman and Robin Eternal was a mess.

[Batman and Robin Eternal (2015-2016) #26]

You can sort of see the editors and writers desperate to sidestep subjects they don’t want to deal with but also wanting complexities and so... never... really threading that needle.

But since Bruce never really ignores or avoids her past and her faults, that need for Cass to internalize her guilt and to exile herself from the basic joys of life doesn’t really exist either. If he accepts her openly and acknowledges her past, Cass knows that her idol will love her despite her flaws without a blanketed, irrefutable moment like we got between Cass and Barbara in Batgirl (2000-2006) #25.

Un...less we randomly have it anyway?

So. Starting with the relaunch of Detective Comics in Rebirth, we have the mandatory team-gathering issue where Bruce gives his analysis of all the recruits one by one and it includes a moment about Cass over the backdrop of her saving children from a human trafficking ring -- this is notable only because that seems to be the only thing Tynion ever has Cass doing on her own, busting up these rings, but it’s also never commented on and we’re never told how she tracks these down and whether it’s something she dedicates herself to as it has something to do with her past under Mother and that child trafficking. Tynion likes to... not get too far into the subjects he brings up. Which is again a bit at odds with how the old Cass went.

And in this overview Bruce is giving Kate about Cass he.... remarks that she’s the most dangerous fighter he knows which. Seems to go back on his previous reactions to her where it was all about how he believed in her and saw past her one sin and knew how good she was, enough so he trusted her to run interference while he... self-amnesiaed himself for the majority of BaRE.

[Detective Comics (2016-present) #934]

This also leads to some questionable choices on how they present Cass’ internal struggles. Because she’s been forgiven, she isn’t isolating herself willingly or unwillingly anymore, and she’s already confronted the murder she committed and received resounding forgiveness from Harper (and notably no one writing cares about Cullen’s feelings on the matter hmmm) who regularly pals around with her now like nothing happened.

So it’s confusing when the only arc which has centered around Cass so far tells us that she’s... drowning in guilt and that she’s desperate to figure out why Batman believes in her. Even though... we know as readers that he.... doesn’t necessarily believe in her all that much.

[Detective Comics (2016-present) #950]

I should note that none of this is really resolved by the end of this particular arc. she just. Learns that she doesn’t have to fight alone because she has the family behind her and she gives her declaration to Shiva that “I am not less, I am MORE.” so. What I’m saying here is there’s some confusion and a lack of cohesion in what they want to do with Cass here.

They’re not comfortable with tackling a teenage girl’s suicidal tendencies and, really, that’s more than understandable. I wouldn’t want any writer to tackle a subject that important without having a full vision and lots of comfort in doing so. Even the original take with Cass, which benefited from having different circumstances and an editorial team that allowed for Cass to have two mentors to balance things out with, was far from perfect and Bruce’s part in the relationship is a key example of that.

In New Earth, Bruce never had to fully confront how he was wrong in his approach with Cass, or the fact that it almost cost his adopted daughter her life. Somewhat ironically, Batgirl (2000-2006) was often limited by its failure to sum up the points of its more complicated perspective and storytelling into exact words. The lessons could be missed.

But in Prime Earth, we have the broad outlines of a relationship dynamic that doesn’t really match up with the text it keeps providing us with, or how they strive for that perilous tone that was known in Cass’ original series, without wanting to dive into the greater themes and struggles. This is a limitation of wanting to hit those notes without focusing hardly any published page time on Cass and her story. These things will only become more and more noticeable as time goes on and we’re continuously sold this idea of growth and relationships without Tynion’s team actually dedicating the time to them.

So, that’s my summation of the whole thing! Sorry for going a little extra on it lol I appreciated the question a lot.

#Batgirl #Cassandra Cain #Batman #Bruce Wayne #Rants of Unusual Size #Batgirl (2000 2006)#Barbara Gordon #Oracle

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heatherly84 · 6 years

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Ben’s Ultimate Movie Playlist

When he gave this to Zane and Xur, I have no idea. Maybe after they watched Star Wars, I dunno. But watching Star Wars was why. For him, it was actually really fun and exciting to be part of shaping how aliens see his planet. And also he just loves sharing the movies he likes generally.

It was those two goals that drove what ended up in this collection and what didn’t.

So. The list. Alphabetically:

Aladdin (1992)

This is actually Ben’s favorite Disney movie. That started for a typical seven-year-old reason (it was one of the only feature length animated Disney films that wasn’t about a girl), but frequent rewatching and the passage of time has just turned it into pure, unadulterated nostalgia.

And The Band Played On (1993)

(Author’s note: Did not realize that alphabetizing the list would put the biggest downer on it so close to the top. Whoops. /o\)

This movie made the list, even though Ben has almost no other serious ones on it, because trying to explain the whole gay thing to Ziz and Zia was a nightmare for them as a family (obviously more Nat and Zach, but- Ben cared) and he thought of this movie as the ultimate one that shows what human society has historically thought about it. And maybe that’s something Zane might want to talk to the kids about, with some context to put it in. Essentially: this is Ben trying to help Zane parent. ...that the movie he chose is so depressing says something about how Ben feels about the idea of parenting.

Clue (1985)

Ben doesn’t watch a whole lot of mysteries, but when he was told that Xur liked them, he really tried to squeeze one he really loved out of his memory. This was the first result he got. Sure, it’s not exactly a mystery in the classical sense, but it has one and it’s also really funny. He especially loves that it has three endings (his favorite is the one where Miss Scarlet did it).

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Secretly, Ben likes musicals. He blames Disney on general principle. This one is one of his favorites, even though it does edge too close to more serious than he’d like, because he kinda identifies with Tevye. He’s a dreamer and a joker who resolves an incredibly serious issue at one point by just making up bullshit. Yeah, Ben relates.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

This one ended up on it because of the tendency people have to refer to Zane as Space Hitler. Yeah, Ben thought he’d give him a movie about plotting to kill Hitler when people call him Space Hitler and that seemed totally appropriate. Because Zane’s trying not to be Space Hitler anymore, and that goal is one Ben really wants him to succeed at. So he’s trying to show Zane the lens through which other people see him. He knows it’s something Zane already knows, but he wants it to be something Zane feels. Part of the magic of movies is that they can give people feelings in a way that history lessons and witness statements cannot. (Though he is genuinely anxious that when Zane watches the legendary scene of Hans Landa intimidating a dude into giving up the Jews he’s hiding in the floor, Zane’s going to relate more to Landa than to Shoshanna, the girl in the floor.)

Juno (2007)

The “find him a movie about it” school of teaching people things is an ideal that Ben comes by honestly because it’s how he was raised. If Squirrel didn’t know how to explain something to him, she’d find a movie, a TV show, or a book that did. This was part of a series on sexual responsibility that his mother put him through. She chose it because it got across very nicely “sometimes people get pregnant, and giving the baby up for adoption is a choice available to them- but that can be very hard, even if you’re very sure.”

For Ben, this is a formative movie that he has a lot of feelings about because of that, but also? It’s funny. And sweet. And has a romance that gave him a lot of feelings as a kid who was bad at socializing, because Paulie Bleaker should not remotely have been able to get a girlfriend like Juno with how awkward he is, but that happens and in context, it even makes sense. Plus, the soundtrack is fucking rad.

Kill Bill - Vol. 1 (2003)

This is just straight-up a fun action movie, with awesome sword fights and insane karate. This edges out most other action movies for Ben because- well, he likes Quentin Tarantino. (He’s the only director represented on the list four times.) And on a somewhat tactless level, he hopes that Zane will identify with someone on a revenge quest for their child, and the twist that the child is actually alive, complete with happy ending. (I suspect that’s not going to be as cool for Zane as Ben is hoping.)

Kill Bill - Vol. 2 (2004)

Well, you can’t rec the first one without the second one! The second one is the one that has the happy ending!

Moana (2016)

The first movie to make it as part of Ben’s Intro To Human Religion series. Ben’s not a particularly religious person, but he recognizes how much of that informs human culture- and also that Zane’s kind of going through a crisis of faith right about now. So here’s a story about what humans think gods are like, what other gods are out there, and what kind of relationship some humans have with them. (Yeah, Moana and Maui have a relationship that’s between god and man. Weird to think of that way, huh? *g*)

Also, it’s just plain got a good story with cool characters and a good soundtrack. ...this is the second time that observation has been part of a movie’s selection for the list. It will not be the last.

Mulan (1998)

Ben’s second favorite Disney movie. (His feelings on Classic Disney, like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty is that yeah, they’re prettier, but he doesn’t like the stories or music as much.) This is very much his Weep A Lot Over My Daddy Issues movie, which is not really a secret. Mulan goes on the quest as part of her search for independent self-identity, sure (and he figures Zane can relate to that), but at the heart of it all, she did everything for her father.

Ben doesn’t know what it’s like to have a father, but he likes to imagine it involves loving and being loved that much.

Plus: LET’S! GET DOWN! TO BUSINESS!

Newsies (1992)

Part of Ben’s secret love for musicals. This is a favorite- although he’s seen this five hundred times and actually still can’t describe the plot to anybody beyond, “Um. Strike, strike, strike, strike! ...?” But he remembers the songs and the dances. Holy fuck, does he remember the songs and the dances. If he wasn’t tall enough now to hit his head on the ceiling, he would probably still sometimes jump on his bed singing “King of New York.”

Other than that, he’s also hoping to teach Zane to root for the underdog. Which is a pretty important component to human movies in general, actually.

Prince of Egypt (1998)

Another part of Intro to Human Religion. Ben finds the actual Bible very tedious, but discovered in films that a lot of the stories in it are fucking amazing. This is a good one for that because from the very beginning, the stakes feel tremendously high: it starts with Moses’ mother, a slave, trying to hide her baby from Pharaoh’s soldiers so that he isn’t killed. That is a strong as hell opening, and the movie is very good at keeping you on the edge and very invested in what’s going to happen.

As ways to introduce Zane to the most popular theology on Earth goes, he figures this movie is better than most.

Psycho (1960)

Another that made the list because Ben wanted to have more mysteries for Xur and this was the closest he could think of. This DVD case actually has the plot summary on the back removed with a note stuck in its place that says, “Report back. I wanna know when you cracked the twist.”

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Another Tarantino. This one was chosen because it has more pop culture jammed into its first fifteen minutes than most of the other movies on this list combined. If you wanted to condense everything you needed to know but were afraid to ask about late 20th/early 21st century humans into one movie, it would probably be this one.

Plus, how fucking legendary is Samuel L. Jackson doing that fake Bible verse?

Plus plus, also a great soundtrack!

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Ben realized at some point he had got this far without having even a single horror movie on the list. He’s not a huge fan of horror, but at the same time, he felt like he should make an effort to include one. Just for the sake of exposing them to the idea. ...also, this one’s scary as hell, even though there’s almost no violence and only one special effect in the whole damn thing. That’s actually a majorly impressive achievement.

It cemented its place when he realized that its plot is kind of also a mystery. (The next time he sees Xur, he is going to apologize for how many of his choices are only “sort of” a mystery or “also has a mystery,” nothing is straight-up procedural. He just doesn’t really watch them.)

Saved! (2004)

Continuing Intro To Human Religion, but also borrowing again from his mom’s series on sexual responsibility. (”Keeping the baby is a choice you can make, too.”) This one’s a comedy that’s also a great look at Evangelical Christianity (...it’s very critical of it). He thought it was probably a more helpful choice than Prince of Egypt was, since that one’s about the mythology that inspires people to believe, but this one is about how people who believe actually live.

He did tape a note to the cover to watch Prince of Egypt first, though. The scene where Mary tries to get G-d to smite her really only makes sense if you already have the context that G-d smites people occasionally.

Se7en (1995)

“Finally, a mystery that’s pretty unambiguously a mystery! Shows police work and research! Excitement! \o/

...okay, yeah, it’s also a gruesome horror movie with a horrifying twist ending, but I’m doing my best here, okay?”

Does not count as Intro to Human Religion, but Ben did consider that some of the movies that are will probably give helpful context to this one.

The Shining (1980)

Also part of his “crap, I should add some horror movies” selection, although like Rosemary’s Baby, it made the list because it’s good and it’s scary, even without a lot of violence or special effects, just something that builds tension and builds it and builds it and builds it until the protagonist snaps and it’s almost a relief that you’re not just waiting for when he’s finally gonna do that anymore.

As human movies go, it’s a fucking great one.

Sound of Music (1965)

This movie appeals to Ben on several levels. One, it’s a musical, and it’s probably one of the best ones, at that. Two, Ben had a desperate hunger as a child for brothers and sisters, and this movie is about seven of them. Just watching them all together was the kind of thing that could suck him into a movie for no other good reason as a kid. Three, they’re siblings in a band. Fuck. Yes.

Oh, and there’s some cool historical drama stuff unfolding.

But mostly that siblings in a band thing.

West Side Story (1961)

Just one more musical! Just one! This actually isn’t one of his favorites (did they not have Latinos in the sixties? Were we invented by a mad scientist in 1985?), but he recognizes that its influence on how musicals would be made afterwards is important and worth acknowledging. Also, they managed to make Romeo and Juliet without suicide, that’s pretty cool.

And who among us could ever resist singing “I Feel Pretty” in the shower after hearing it for the first time?

Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968)

This movie is basically sibling porn* for people who used to fervently wish they had siblings. Ben grew up enraptured by the relationship between Mike and Philip as they go from stepbrothers to brothers. He also still falls over laughing over the line, “My sister’s locked herself in the bathroom and she can’t get out and I can’t get in and it’s my turn!” “Which sister?” “I don’t know her name yet, but she’s stuck for sure!”

It’s also basically “being a military family” porn for people who might be into that. Like, for instance, Xur or Zane.

#Ben Howell.#Admiral Xur.#Zane Auzael.#This took so long.#*cries*

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mytherapistsays-blog · 5 years

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The Princess Switch is a Tale as Old as Time

The Princess Switch is a Tale as Old as Time ⁣⁣ ⁣⁣ @MyTherapistSays ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣ https://mytherapistsays.ca/the-princess-switch-is-a-tale-as-old-as-time/

Or… as old as the merging-of-two-frames editing technique. Vanessa Hudgens is the latest star to sink down to join in on the low budget Christmas movie train, playing two mysteriously identical strangers who swap places and assume each other’s identities. Sound familiar? The answer should be yes, because since time immemorial we’ve witnessed many a Disney starlet in more or less the same film. The question is, who did it better? Someone call Us Weekly, because we are blowing this sh*t wide open.

IT TAKES TWO

(MARY KATE & ASHLEY OLSEN, 1995)

Okay, to be fair (barring any outlandish conspiracy theories), these two actually are separate human beings, but the identity swap principle still applies. In this 90’s classic, orphan-girl/ inner-city-kid Amanda attempts to trespass explores the woods beyond the grounds of her summer camp and bumps (quite literally) into prim and proper Alyssa, who lives with her rich ass wealthy father, Roger. Amanda is about to be adopted by the Butkises, the family who collects kids for child labour- actually you know what, it was for child labour- and Alyssa is about to have the gold-digging stepmother from hell, Clarice. They decide to swap places so Alyssa can know what it’s like to be a real kid and Amanda can know what it’s like to have real human affection, and they work together to set up Alyssa’s social worker with Amanda’s father. Chaos, food fights, and less-than-romantic horseback rides ensue.

Pros: Olsen twins before their acting skills absolutely nosedived. Kirstie Alley. Whoever the rich dad’s driver was.

Cons: The Butkises. The horror that was THIS scene.

Most memorable line:

Amanda: It’s got to be that can’t-eat, can’t-sleep, reach-for-the-stars, over-the-fence, World Series kind of stuff, right?

THE PARENT TRAP

(LINDSAY LOHAN, 1998)

Another unmistakable 90’s classic, which also coincidentally involves the same-but-not-the-same girls to meet over summer camp. Hallie is a cool, laid back Cali gal while Annie is a posh English girl. Despite a rocky start meeting at summer camp (what are the chances!) the girls realize they have the same birthday… and the same parents- wait, they’re sisters?! They decide to switch places so that they can like, actually MEET the other parent who has abandoned them for years, and set up their rich vineyard owning father with their classy but slightly disheveled mother, and also get rid of their treacherous stepmother to be, Meredith Blake. They succeed, and though this movie has the best cast and best soundtrack possible, it is seriously unsettling how f*cked up it is for their parents to keep them apart and live without one of their own daughters. What kind of co-parenting tactic is that?!

Pros: Dennis Quaid. Dennis Quaid. Dennis Quaid. The epic handshake sequence. Vineyards. London. The crackling-candy-wrapper-to-sound-like-static phone hack. Also Janice from Friends.

Ohhh. Myyyy. GAAAHD.

Cons: The cringey prank wars between Hallie and Annie that are honestly very telling of how frightening and ruthless 12 year old girls can be. The hot-pin-and-apple-as-a-homemade-ear-piercing-kit. Meredith and the lizard. This movie is not for the weak of stomach.

Most memorable line:

Hallie (or Annie, who tf knows): So if your Mom is my Mom and my Dad is your Dad… and we’re both born on October 11th, then you and I are… like… sisters.

THE LIZZIE MCGUIRE MOVIE

(HILARY DUFF, 2003)

In the best movie-from-a-TV-show production of all time, Lizzie and her, like what, eighth grade graduation class take a graduation trip to Italy (??? wtf? Is this PCA? How is everyone affording this?). Lizzie bumps into Paolo, a cute, charming Italian boy whose age I am really troubled by and don’t want to think about too much tbh, because I am already scarred from watching one too many episodes of Age Gap Couples. While Gordo is trapped in the Upside Down friend zone, Lizzie begins gallivanting around Rome with Paolo, who out of the blue drops a bomb on her that she is the exact Doppelganger for his former singing partner and could she like, assume her identity? Leave it to Lizzie McGuire to say yes, Kate willingly helping her out by covering for her (yes, hell really has freezed over) and shit to hit the fan. It all ends with Paolo being exposed for the weenie that he is (which we really should have anticipated from this lewk below):

We have Lizzie performing at the Colo freakin seum, while Gordo is clawing his way out of the friend zone (but I’m sure if Lizzie McGuire continued into their high school years she would have fallen for a Jesse McCartney or equivalent hottie of the day and dumped Gordo’s ass).

Pros: Italy. Pasta. Ethan Craft!

Cons: Paolo. No Miranda?!

Most Memorable Lines (because you can’t pick just one):

Kate: Lizzie McGuire, you are an outfit repeater!

Miss Ungermeyer: David Gordan. I think that’s Italian for ‘sneaky little brown noser with a hidden agenda’.

Miss Ungermeyer: Mr. Craft, you are in the most beautiful city in the world, is this having any effect on you?

Ethan: Yeah the cobble stones are like totally thrashing on my wheels.

Isabella: Sing to me, Paolo!

MONTE CARLO

(SELENA GOMEZ, 2011)

After years of saving from her shitty waitress job, Grace, a down-on-her-luck Texan girl fresh out of high school, finally gets to go to Paris with David Cassidy’s daughter her coworker Emma. Instead of the vacation of her dreams, she gets a shitty tour bus version of the city with Blair Waldorf as her salty stepsister, Meg, tagging along. It doesn’t take long for the girls to have a falling out and find themselves in a swanky hotel lobby to take shelter from the rainstorm that is kind of a metaphor for their disaster of a trip. Their luck changes when Grace is mistaken for a wealthy British heiress, and with some encouragement from Emma takes her place and fills in for her duties, which leads the three girls to Monaco. Grace falls for Theo, a local rich boy with other character qualities that don’t seem notable to me at the moment; Meg falls for an adventurous Aussie, and Emma just really wants to get home to her long term boyfriend Owen and install some dimmer lights. Of course the fiasco unfolds when Cordelia returns unexpectedly, and some drama goes down with an expensive piece of jewelry going missing (a telltale sign of an unoriginal plot). But not to worry because just like every chick flick out there, everyone gets a happy ending.

Pros: The excellent casting of romantic interests (Read: Corey Monteith, Luke Bracey, Pierre Boulanger). Who Says. Monte Carlo- it actually looks really effing bomb. Why is Monaco so underrated?! I might just be too poor to even have it on my radar as a travel destination.

Seriously. God bless this casting director.

Cons: Selena Gomez’s acting. Selena Gomez’s fake British accent. The fact that I will never be mistaken for an heiress and have a whirlwind romance with a foreign wealthy man.

Most memorable lines:

Grace: I finally meet a guy who likes me for me. And I’m not even me.

THE PRINCESS SWITCH

(VANESSA HUDGENS, 2018)

So here we are in present day. Let me just start by saying, there isn’t even a princess in this movie. Lady Margaret is a duchess. It’s called royal decorum honey, look it up. Stacy, a baker from Chicago, is somehow invited to this very prestigious international baking competition in Genovia Aldovia Belgravia (is anyone else noticing that these fake European countries all kind of sound like font families?), and ditches her bakery during what I assume would be her busiest time of the year to hop across the world with her business partner/ best friend and his daughter. There she runs into Lady Margaret, who mysteriously looks exactly like her and proposes they swap places so she can get away from the world of schedules. Stacy agrees, and falls for Margaret’s fiance of an arranged marriage/ loveless engagement, Prince Edward of Belgravia. Meanwhile Margaret falls for Stacy’s DILF friend Kevin. They manage to swap back before Stacy’s competition (which she wins despite her competitor cutting the cord to her Kitchen Aid, which she only notices after the majority of the cake has been baked, which like, b*tch, how were you mixing the batter before?), only for the Prince and Margaret to have to present the awards to the winners (because like, I’m sure that’s how William and Kate fill their schedule). Though Margaret had revealed their secret to Edward before the event, the four go backstage to give Kevin the downlow. Stacy is alarmingly okay with Edward (sort of) proposing to her, and Kevin is alarmingly okay with this despite having JUST caught feelings for who he thought was his best friend? Flash forward to a year later, and Edward and Stacy have married, and it is implied Kevin and Margaret are next? What the hell happened to their award winning bakery?

Pros: Gunner from Nashville. Kevin’s abs.

Cons: The haircut. The Jackie O blazer and pencil skirt ensembles. Another ill fated horse riding trip. The mysterious old guy who kept showing up but whose presence/ significance was never really explained?

Seriously, why is everyone dressed straight outta 1952?

Most memorable line:

Stacy/Margaret: In fact I took a nap on it. Slept like a log.

Edward: A log?

Stacy/ Margaret: Yes, dear, a royal log. It’s an expression we have in Montenaro.

Over the passage of time, the same-actress-two-characters/ swapping identities plotline has served us some of our most heartwarming and cheesy memories of film. I honestly don’t know if there really is a way to rank which is best, because they are all terrible in their own right. What matters most is that this tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme seems to keep going strong 20 years later, so we can expect another version of this more-or-less same story to make us gag/dazzle us in the coming years.

#funny #Hollywood #Movie #Princess Switch #Twins

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loislaneinvestigatesauthors · 6 years

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From lab science to the art of the novel: historical fantasy writer Linda McCabe

Linda McCabe speaks in Oakland, CA at 2pm at the California Writers’ Club meeting at 1204 Preservation Park Way this Sunday, October 21st. Open to the public for a $10 cash donation at the door.

More info on the Club and on Linda here.

1. What drew you in to Greek mythology and to the story of Orlando Furioso? Why do you think those stories have appealed to readers throughout time? I started reading Greek mythology as a small girl. I loved the larger than life stories and characters. The first time I ever stayed awake reading until the wee hours of the night was with D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths. I adore that book. It is wonderfully illustrated and it introduces each member of the Greek pantheon with their own story. My favorite Greek goddess is Athena. She is powerful, respected and derives her strength from her intellect and not from beauty. She's not only the goddess of wisdom and victory, but also of the arts such as weaving tapestries. One of my favorite stories is of a mortal who was a gifted weaver who had boasted she was more skilled than Athena. The goddess disguised herself, tried to get the girl to take back her words. The girl, named Arachne, refused to take back the boast and instead issued a challenge to the goddess. Athena threw off her disguise and accepted the challenge. They both created incredible tapestries. While Athena's depicted the Olympian gods in all of their glory, Arachne's made fun of Zeus and his various wives. Athena's wrath brought about the destruction of the irreverent artwork and transformed the talented girl into a spider who would weave for all eternity.

Harsh, but fair punishment. Pride cometh before the fall. Hubris. Greek mythology is filled with these kinds of stories. I started reading Orlando furioso in 2003 when I was engaged in online debates regarding the Harry Potter series. This was before the series was finished, and there were many various theories floating about. One theory involved the symbolic meaning of hippogriffs. I wound up reading Ariosto's masterpiece because that was the first time a hippogriff was used as a character in literature. I became drawn to the love story between Bradamante and Ruggiero, which was considered one of many subplots in this epic poem. Bradamante reminded me of Athena. She was a respected warrior who was cool under pressure. The major difference is that Bradamante fell in love, whereas Athena never allowed herself to love a man. Bradamante was the niece of Charlemagne and was a Christian. She fell in love with an honorable warrior who was a Muslim and on the opposing side of a holy war. Their love was kept secret until they could find a way to be together with honor, and there were many, many obstacles for this couple to overcome. She was even given the Call to Adventure to rescue him when he was being held captive by a wizard. It is amazing that this incredible kick-ass heroine was created over 500 years ago, but has somehow become largely forgotten over the years.

These stories become timeless because they demonstrate heroism and perseverance as well as Karmic punishments for those without honor. 2. How do you know when you've done enough research and you're ready to write? This is a gut feeling. There's a point when I feel like I am procrastinating more than I am doing research. Sometimes I just have to shift gears and stop researching if the aspect I am trying to understand isn't "knowable" or maybe isn't all that important. I spent over a week wondering about diapering in the middle ages. This was all because I wanted to have a character do some action in a scene with her baby. I started imagining the characters in my setting and thought of where would the dirty diaper would be placed. Then I wondered how the diaper would be closed, (did they have diaper pins?) How often would they wash them? How many diapers would a noble household have for a baby? Some research suggested that babies might not have been put in diapers at all. Instead, the parents would watch them carefully and hold them at arm's length over straw to absorb urine flow. I considered this matter for too long. I was obsessing over a minor detail that did not enhance or further the plot. I decided to take it out and not "go there." Instead, I described the baby as been freshly bathed in the scene.

3. Conversely, where can you go to make sure your writing doesn't contain obvious historical errors or anachronisms? Are there 'continuity readers' or 'historical readers' available to regular authors? I have several beta readers who have looked at various passages or aspects of the story to give me this kind of feedback. Finding experts for your writing can be a challenge. I suggest during the writing process to try and identify those who may be able to provide specific feedback. I joined different list servs where I could ask experts questions that I had been unable to find answers to on my own.

There is a wonderful internet resource for a multitude of disciplines called H-Net for Humanities and Social Services. https://networks.h-net.org/ I recommend that resource for those who wish to find experts. Go to the website, explore different listings, subscribe and read back postings to get familiar with the style of discussion before posting. Most of the subscribers are university faculty members, so being an "independent scholar" will set you apart. Don't be intimidated, but try not to ask overly broad questions showing that you haven't done research on your own first. Tell them you are a writer and have a few specific questions. Or write a post stating that you are looking for beta readers for historical accuracy who will give feedback. Many of the professors read fiction in their spare time, make an appeal asking for help in identifying errors might work. Finding good 'continuity readers' is a more difficult nut to crack. You have to find close, careful readers who will notice nit-picky items that contradict earlier details in your story. This cannot be done effectively for beta readers who get a few pages here and there. You need critique group members who will read large chunks or the entire manuscript *and* will focus on minutiae. For example, someone who will pull up a calendar from the year your story takes place and notice if there really was a full moon on the night of the murder. That's the kind of thing I do for my critique group partners, and sometimes they appear annoyed prior to expressing gratitude for my corrections/feedback.

In regard to historical errors or anachronisms, I have had some instances where I balance historical accuracy versus dramatic needs. I initially try to find a way to make the historical record work, but there are times when it would lessen the drama. Or it would cause the narrative to become immensely more complicated. In those occasions, I will choose dramatic necessity over historical accuracy and write a disclaimer in my author notes to detail the reasons behind my decision. I feel that the greatest sin a writer can commit is to bore readers.

An example of this type of decision regarded the Medieval walls around the city of Paris. The poets described a complex set of ramparts that were first built by King Philippe Auguste in the 12th century. The story of Charlemagne and his knights is set in the 9th century. I considered removing the historically inaccurate walls, but quickly realized that my already complicated plot would become exponentially worse. I decided to keep the walls and mention my dilemma in my author notes. After all, I am retelling a grand story originally written to entertain one noble family in Italy and it featured wars that never took place with mostly fictional characters, magical realms and flying hippogriffs. Therefore, know that I took care in telling this tale, so please just enjoy the ride! 4. I notice you also write essays and editorials in addition to your historical fiction. Would you agree with the advice I myself heard as an aspiring novelist, to get other pieces of writing published before you go out there to agents and publishers with a first novel? While I believe that having publication credits is important to demonstrate your authority as a writer, it isn't as important to an agent as the sample pages of your completed novel. Writing an article or short story is like running a 100 yard dash while writing a novel is more like running a marathon. Perfecting the art of the query letter or verbal pitching to an agent in order to get the request to submit sample pages is a different skill set than regular writing. Once you get the go-ahead to send your manuscript and synopsis, your overall craft will be on full view. The agent and subsequent potential publishers will only green light a publishing contract based on the strength of your finished product and not because you had an op-ed published in the LA Times. Honestly, I think getting a pithy book description will do more for you with agents and publishers than having multiple credits to your name. However, it is a different matter if you are writing non-fiction. If you had publication credits in magazines or peer-reviewed journals and you were submitting a book proposal on the same topic - it might help influence the decision of the agent/publisher to sign you as a client/author.

5. How do your feel your "day job" has influenced your writing? And what is your educational background? While I love writing, my education is in the sciences. My undergraduate degree is in Laboratory Medicine and my master's degree is as an Historian of Science. I also have training in competitive public speaking from high school and acting in plays. My only creative writing classes were in screenwriting and those were taken without being applied to any degree program. Screenwriting helped me analyze scenes in movies to determine how best to distill narrative and reveal characters into scenes that further a plot. Participating in debate and drama helped me understand how to craft a strong argument and then overlay my steel girder like-logic with pathos to stir the emotional senses. As a laboratorian, over the years I have developed a keen analytical mind. One of my previous jobs, I managed the organ recipient list of over one hundred patients for a laboratory in downtown Detroit. I reviewed and monitored changes and updates to the statewide list published by the Organ Procurement Agency of Michigan. Soon after I took over that responsibility I discovered and corrected numerous errors on our list of patients . Learning to have a scope of memory to track and manage so many details helped prepare me for adapting a story of epic grandeur with a massive cast of characters.

Similarly, having been trained in historical methods of researching for my master's degree, I feel obligated in learning about the time, place, cultural practices, etc., in my story. I have done my best to ground this story in a real time and place, giving my narrative the historical details of ninth century Francia. So once I decided on doing an adaptation of Orlando furioso, I had to learn about Medieval history and the life of Charlemagne. I immersed myself in research while simultaneously trying to determine parts of the story to retain and parts to cut. After doing an intense analysis of my source material, I discovered continuity errors. One enchanted castle was located in three (!) separate and distinct locations. The narrative is immensely complicated, and I doubt the patrons noticed the discrepancies let alone raised any objections. However, I am well aware of L.O.O.N.s (the League of Obsessive Nitpickers) and so I had to fix one location for this enchanted castle and made this determination based on my plot necessities. I also moved several locations of other plot points that I felt made more logical sense.

The Carolingian legend cycle spanned several centuries in the south of France and north of Italy. The jongleurs and troubadours told and retold these legends for the nobles and the masses. By the time Ludovico Ariosto and Matteo Maria Boiardo wrote their masterpieces, these characters were popular. My contribution in this legend cycle is to transform a portion of these stories into a tale for modern day audiences using current storytelling techniques. ***side note*** The Italians do not capitalize the second word in the title of the poems. I'm not sure why, because I do not speak Italian or know the particulars of Italian grammar rules. So my use of Orlando furioso and not Orlando Furioso is not accidental, it is purposeful. If you do a quick Google search, the results for capitalization are not consistent. However, once this was pointed out to me, I have endeavored to follow the Italian convention.

More about Linda McCabe and her current works here.

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mysteryshelf · 6 years

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BLOG TOUR - Color of Evil Box Set

Welcome to

THE PULP AND MYSTERY SHELF!

DISCLAIMER: This content has been provided to THE PULP AND MYSTERY SHELF by Premiere Virtual Book Tours. No compensation was received. This information required by the Federal Trade Commission.

Color Of Evil Series Boxed Set by Connie Corcoran Wilson

Publisher: Quad Cities’ Press (Aug, 2017) Category: YA, Psychological Paranormal Thriller Tour Dates: Oct/Nov, 2017 Available in: E-book, 725 Pages

THE COLOR OF EVIL series presents you with characters who live, breathe and die in small town Cedar Falls, Iowa. Tad McGreevy, the focus of the series, has a paranormal power, Tetrachromatic Super Vision, that allows him to see auras that tell him whether a person is good or evil. At night, in horrifying nightmares, Tad relives the crimes of the evil-doers. Eventually, becomes the target of a particularly lethal antagonist, Michael Clay (aka Pogo the Clown) who wants to eliminate the teen-aged boy. In three books, we witness the power of evil faced off against a good-hearted young boy who just wants to protect those he loves.

Beginning with the first manifestations of this supernatural power at the age of 8, the book quickly takes us forward to the high school years of Tad and the band of friends we come to know well. We follow their progress from their junior year of high school through graduation with danger always lurking in the background. As others have said, it’s quite a ride.

Begin the journey today with this specially-priced trilogy: THE COLOR OF EVIL; RED IS FOR RAGE; and KHAKI=KILLER..

“THE COLOR OF EVIL series is old-school psychological horror, artfully blended with new-school shocks and twists. Bravo!” —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times best-selling author, multiple Bram Stoker winner.

Praise for Color Of Evil Series Boxed Set by Connie Corcoran Wilson

‘The book has all the elements of a compelling mystery and an inventive paranormal twist. One must credit Wilson for treating her teenage protagonists with respect, as they face adult dilemmas and resolve them with maturity and grace.”- Kirkus

“Connie Corcoran Wilson weaves a deftly fine scalpel in an age where a crude blade is more the norm. Her work is a smooth, subtle hybrid mix of science fiction, thriller, and horror that realizes a unique and pointed vision in the great tradition of Phillip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury. Her voice is a wonder to behold, at once dark and somber while maintaining a glimmer of hope that shines in the hearts of her heroes, who cling to the light. Like Stephen King, nothing escapes her discerning eye, the result of which is tale after tale that bleed life onto the page, both literally and figuratively.”–Jon Land, bestselling author of the Caitlin Strong Series

“Wilson’s characters come alive on the page. Comparisons to Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Philip K. Dick aside, Wilson has spent 33 years teaching students in this age range. She knows what she is talking about.”–Gary Braver, author of “Flashback” and 8 other thrillers.

Interview with the Author

What initially got you interested in writing?

I won $50 for writing a poem in 6th grade in a contest sponsored by the Archdiocese of Dubuque. (That would be $500 in today’s dollars.) After that, the Editor of my small home town newspaper asked my father (the local banker) if I would do some interviews for the local newspaper, which I did. In high school, I was Editor of our school newspaper and that led to a Ferner/Hearst Journalism Scholarship full ride at the University of Iowa—a school noted for its Writers’ Workshop—so that’s how I ended up becoming a writer, and I’ve written for newspapers and for online outlets ever since (which is over 6 decades now).

How did you decide to make the move into being a published author?

A: I got tired of the small publishing houses that published many of my books (a) going under (b) not honoring our signed contracts (c) not sending me royalty contracts (d) not promoting my books. I decided that if I put out my own books, I probably wouldn’t cheat myself. (And, note: there were a couple that did try to pay in a timely fashion and do it honestly, but it certainly was not 100%.)

What do you want readers to take away from reading your works?

I hope that readers who enjoy a fast-paced plot (thriller/horror/paranormal/ new YA) with lots of action and plenty to think about will like my books as much as readers like books by Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, or Dean Koontz (the authors I am most often compared to.) THE COLOR OF EVIL was my first solo novel. I hope I am improving and boxed set readers can decide for themselves. However, if the reviews are overwhelmingly negative, I probably will never write another one. I am really sort of tired of hearing that “This is not suitable for New YA” (which is supposedly the time frame when young people are graduating from high school/college and going out in the world, and that is where the fourth book’s plot would place the protagonists. I have a fourth installment in this series half written, but it will be up to the bloggers and readers to give a girl a break, as to whether or not I suffer through the time and effort in putting out a 250+ page tome only to have petty objections (“You repeated yourself on page 12.” “ You got the names Shannon and Sharon mixed up on page 2”) derail me, because writing a novel is A LOT of work, and a lot less fun than writing short stories or reviewing film, my other major writing these days for www.WeeklyWilson.com , www.TheMovieBlog.com and www.QuadCities.com. I’m actually sitting back and waiting to see how the book is received. Then I’ll decide whether or not to continue with what I had planned for Book #4. Maybe th-th-th-that’s all, Folks. Who knows?

What do you find most rewarding about writing?

I have always written as a form of therapy, and I still do. I like finding out what my characters will say and do, and they surprise me every time.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

It’s called the “butt in the chair” and it’s hard to pass up fun things to do in favor of writing a 250 page, 75,000 word novel. I’m not a Stephen King disciplined writer with a schedule. I’m a binge writer who writes into the wee hours of the morning. Right now, I’m more interested in seeing as many of the 150 films showing at the Chicago International Film Fest, which I am covering for the 14th year, and, the day it ends (Oct. 26th), I head for Austin for the Austin Film Festival, which ends November 3rd. Doesn’t leave a lot of time to hole up and write novels.

What advice would you give to people want to enter the field?

Learn the basics of grammar, spelling and composition, usually taught in the lower grades up through junior high school (which I taught for 18 years). At that point, if you think you are good at it, please find beta readers and a good editor. Then, if you don’t want to starve, don’t give up your day job. I can afford to do this because I worked steadily from 1969 until 2003. Then I began writing ‘long” (rather than short, as in newspapers and blogs, which I had always done while teaching and running my Sylvan Learning Center and my Prometric Testing Center.

What ways can readers connect with you?

I’m very accessible. I have a blog (WeeklyWilson.com). I’m on Facebook as Connie Corcoran Wilson (please “like” the professional page that we are overhauling now.) I am on Linkedin as Constance Corcoran Wilson. I twitter as @Connie_C_Wilson. I have an Instagram account and a Pinterest account and a Goodreads account as Connie Corcoran Wilson. I have a newsletter that we’d love to sign you up for (“Weekly Wilson’s New News”). We only send that out when I have “new news” about a release or an event, so it won’t clog up your mailbox. And, last, and certainly least, I still have my old AOL account with my college nickname. You can write to [email protected] or to [email protected]. After 22 years I “upgraded” to the $5 a month AOL Gold and it doesn’t work at all, so far. I’ve lost all my British friends in Pub Quiz and none of my mail will open or send, but, other than that……

Excerpt from the Book

November 3, 2003

12:01 A.M.

Stealthy step by stealthy step, Michael Clay climbed steadily towards the top of the San Giovannis’ basement stairs. When he reached the top step, he stretched out his hand towards the doorknob. At first, the doorknob, although it turned, didn’t open the door. Michael applied more pressure, pushing with slightly more force. The door was stuck. He would have to apply greater force to gain entry. He hoped it wasn’t locked, as that would mean breaking the door down. If anyone was on the other side, they’d have time to dial 911 while he was breaking down the door.

So much for my theory about people not locking their basement doors, Pogo thought, just before the door gave, and he was able to slide, like a phantom, into the house.

In the family room, Jenny SanGiovanni heard a noise. She knew it was probably just her imagination. She had been through this before with her parents. They always cautioned her about panicking unnecessarily. The SanGiovanni house had a hot water heating system. The hot water was pumped around the perimeter of the rooms in metal ducts. It often made loud cracking noises. It was usually the case that the heating system had caused Jenny to become frightened, when nothing at all was wrong. She had become the butt of jokes. But, this time, if she were to cry “Wolf!” would her cries be answered!”

About Connie Corcoran Wilson

Connie (Corcoran) Wilson (MS + 30) graduated from the University of Iowa and Western Illinois University, with additional study at Northern Illinois, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. She taught writing at six Iowa/Illinois colleges and has written for five newspapers and seven blogs, including Yahoo, which named her its 2008 Content Producer of the Year. She covers politics and entertainment and writes for The Movie Blog, QuadCities.com and her own blog, WeeklyWilson.com.

She is a member of ITW (International Thriller Writers) and a member of IWPA (Illinois Women’s Press Association, Chicago chapter), which awarded her its Silver Feather Award in 2012 and 2014, MWA (Midwest Writers Association), AWP (American Writing Program) and MWC (Midwest Writing Center), which named her its Writer of the Year in 2010. She has won numerous E-Lit awards, a NABE Pinnacle award, an ALMA (American Literary Merit Award), Lucky Cinda competition and two IWPA Silver Feather Awards (2012, 2014).

Her stories and interviews with writers like David Morrell, Joe Hill, Kurt Vonnegut, Frederik Pohl, William F. Nolan, Anne Perry, r. Barri Flowers, Valerie Plame, Allen Zadoff and Jon Land have appeared online and in numerous journals.

Her work has won prizes from “Whim’s Place Flash Fiction,” “Writer’s Digest” (Screenplay) and she has 30 published works. Connie reviewed film and books for the Quad City Times (Davenport, Iowa) for 12 years, wrote humor columns and conducted interviews for the (Moline, Illinois) Dispatch.

Connie has three ongoing series: THE COLOR OF EVIL, HELLFIRE & DAMNATION (short stories organized around the crimes or sins punished at each of the levels of Hell in Dante’s Inferno) and THE CHRISTMAS CATS, which she writes for her granddaughters. (www.TheColorOfEvil.com; www.RedIsforRage.com; www.KhakiEqualsKiller.com; www.HellfireAndDamnationTheBook.com; www.TheXmasCats.com)

Connie lives in East Moline, Illinois with husband Craig and in Chicago, Illinois and Austin, Texas. Son Scott and wife Jessica and granddaughters Ava and Elise live in Austin and her daughter, Stacey, currently flies for Southwest Airlines and flies from Denver, Colorado.

Connie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ConnieCWilson Connie on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Connie-Corcoran-Wilson/275020829241869 Connie on Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/conniecwilson/

Follow Color Of Evil Series by Connie Corcoran Wilson Tour

Teddy Rose Book Reviews Plus Sept 29 Review & Giveaway

Gayle Books Reviews Etc Oct 3 Review

Beverly’s Book Blog Oct 13 Review, Excerpt, Interview, & Giveaway

Dawn Bound 2 Escape Oct 10 Excerpt & Giveaway

Angélica Amazon Review Nov 1 Review

Jessica JBronder Book Reviews Nov 8 Review

Shannon The Pulp and Mystery Shelf Nov 13 Excerpt & Interview

Donna Amazon Review Nov 15 Review

Cheryl’s Book Nook Nov 21 Review, Excerpt, & Giveaway

Dawn Bound 2 Escape Nov 28 Review

Dr. Jacques Coulardeau Amazon Review Nov 28

Lisa Lisa’s Writopia Nov 29 Review

Erica Bassgiraffe’s Thoughts Nov 30 Review

Lorna Amazon Review Nov 30 Review

*This schedule is subject to change.

BLOG TOUR – Color of Evil Box Set was originally published on the Wordpress version of The Pulp and Mystery Shelf with Shannon Muir

#shannon muir #pulp and mystery shelf

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thejpfdude-blog · 7 years

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The Upcoming Fall 2017 Shows I’ll Be Watching

WHAT? Yes, I’m back! Long time no see. I’ve been busy with school, so unfortunately I have a huge list of episodes to watch (that let’s be honest, I’ll probably never get to).

But yeah, hopefully I’ll be able to start writing TWiA posts again and start watching stuff on a weekly basis. To start that off, there’s this post: the annual “looking at what shows I’m watching this season post”.

A reminder of the usual thing I say in these posts:

I might watch some other shows that are good or drop some shows if they aren’t good, but that’s for the future.

Like always, I’m organizing these shows into three categories: Full Chance are shows I’m giving the whole season towards, Short Leash are shows I’m giving three or so episodes towards, and One Shot are shows I’m giving one episode towards. As we progress towards categories, expect less words for each anime as I lose interest in writing. Also a reminder that MAL links to the shows are on the titles for those interested.

Before we start, a general comment about next season: it’s honestly looking pretty bare for somebody like me who likes them slice-of-lifes/comedies/romances/moe shows. Other than the few shows I have on Full Chance, there’s nothing I have a shred of hope towards. Even some of the Full Chance shows are questionable to me to be honest. But hey, some shows could still be good, and I’ll go into more detail about that below. So with that let’s get started with this post, starting with...

Full Chance Shows

Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World - The Animated Series: Well, I tried to watch the original show from 2003, but that was during my blue period. But apparently it’s okay, because this show’s actually a remake/sequel hybrid thing. What I got from the info given to me was that it will adapt some new content, but it’ll also remake some of the stories from the original series. So not a full-on sequel, but not also a full-on remake either. A little of both.

Oh I should probably say what this show is about. Well it’s kinda hard to describe. The best way I can put it is that it’s an adventure about a girl (who I thought was a guy) and her talking motorcycle traveling throughout the world, experiencing many distinct places. Sounds boring, right? But from the one episode I watched, it was actually super interesting. Now this show doesn’t offer much in terms of action, but it’s a nice relaxing watch that occasionally really makes you think. It’s also episodic, if that concerns you. I would definitely recommend watching this, or starting off with the original series. After all, you still have time to catch up.

Love Live! Sunshine!! S2: Who woulda thunk: not even six months ago, I shunned anything idol. But now, this is honestly tied with Shokugeki S3 as my most anticipated anime of the season.

I feel like I shouldn’t really describe this show: after all, if you don’t know what it’s about, you probably shouldn’t be watching anyway since it’s a second season of a spinoff series (though I honestly find the spinoff to be better than the original anime-wise). Just know it can be described in two words: SCHOOL and IDOLS.

I’m not expecting this show to be great - after all, I’ve never scored any Love Lives higher than a 6. But I’m still expecting some fun slice-of-lifey moments that’ll be even better now that we have the full cast of 9 members doing their thing. And honestly, that’s all I want in a show sometimes. I also honestly expect some more increased drama similar to how S2 of the original series contrasted with S1, but hopefully the slice-of-lifey moments make up for that. I’m also secretly hoping this isn’t the final season of the anime, but guess we’ll find out about that.

Mahoutsukai no Yome (The Ancient Magus’ Bride): So this show looks super interesting. Plot-wise it doesn’t really look like my type of show, but digging deeper it sounds pretty cool.

Basically the story is that we have our main girl Chise who has no hope in her life only to meet a magus who makes an offer to her to be his apprentice and his bride (wowzers).

Sounds pretty fantasy, which isn’t really my schtick. But apparently from sources, I’ve heard this show is actually quite the opposite: it’s more a darker fairytale-like slice-of-life with a evolving narrative, which I’m all about. Plus the PV was pretty hype, so that’s nice. There are prequel OVAs already out, but I haven’t had the time to watch them yet, and they aren’t too necessary to watch before watching the main series. Still, go watch them if you’re interested. I might do the same.

Osake wa Fuufu ni Natte kara: So this is one of the few times where I can say that I read the source material before the anime came out (hopefully I can say the same later when Kaguya Wants to Be Confessed To gets an anime...). The best way I can describe this show is Alcoholism: The Anime.

Well, not really, but it’s pretty much like that. The main character is a reserved office worker who likes drinking alcohol. Unfortunately she becomes cute when she does so (oh no the horror) so she only drinks the concoctions that her husband makes. Some cute stuff, and if the manga’s any indication it’ll be a nice short watch. Already confirmed to be a 5-minute short, which is good because honestly the manga doesn’t offer much other than an occasional “aw that’s cute I guess”. I’m not expecting much, because honestly the last few chapters were pretty eh for me. Plus I don’t know how well the manga’ll translate into anime. Well still somewhat excited for a nice little short.

Shokugeki no Soma S3: So, it has come. After season 2 my hype for this died down a little, and so I’m cautiously excited about this installment. All that I’ll say is that as long as the show is able to balance the intense food battles with the funny slice-of-life moments, it’ll be a pretty good bet to be a favorite of the season. Though I am a bit worried that manga readers say that this portion of the story is when the manga started getting a bit questionable, hence the lack of hype for the show from said audience. I’m not too confident on that front though - details and all that are a bit unclear because I didn’t want to go into too many spoilers. But anyway, excited for some more food porn.

Short Leash Shows

Animegataris: So the general gist of this show is that a new girl shows up and makes an anime research club in school, slowly getting more and more interested in the medium (boy I can relate). Though there is one thing that confuses me from the synopsis, and that’s this part: “while they stand against the student council's continuous efforts to disband their club, and they ignore the impending end of the world, they talk about anime...”. Uhh... yeah that seems like it was brushed under the rug... like what? That part makes this seem different from your typical high school show (a la Konobi). Interested to see what the whole deal is with that since nothing from the promotional images or the PV shows anything referencing that. Plus the fact that this is an anime original series means nobody knows what’s gonna happen. Though otherwise not too remarkable of a show, and I’m not expecting too much from this.

Blend S: Oh boy another CGDCT. My favorite.

In all seriousness, I do like this genre, but I don’t know about this one... Basically at first glance it looks kinda like a GochiUsa style show, but it’s a bit different from that. Yes, there are cute girls working in a cafe. But this is a bit different: the girls working there play out a role: for instance, we have the main character playing the sadist role. There’s also the classics such as the tsundere, the imouto, and so on. A bit like a maid cafe actually. I think what’ll make or break this show for me is whether or not the girls keep up their roles outside of work, or if there’ll be times shown when they aren’t so... typecast. Sorta similar to one of my favorite YouTube channels out there, Cow Chop, where they obviously play out a role during their videos, but we can see times where they’re actually genuine in videos like the Behind The Scenes or their podcast. Other info is kinda limited since like Animegataris, this is an anime original show. So I guess we’ll see how it plays out.

Boku no Kanojo ga Majimesugiru Sho-bitch na Ken (My Girlfriend is a Faithful Virgin Bitch): Uhh I can explain. So I’ve been told this show is basically similar to Seitokai Yakuindomo where it’s Sex Jokes: The Anime. Basically a guy confesses to the most popular girl in school in desperation, and she accepts. Only this girl is pretty deadpan, and in an effort to be the perfect girlfriend she “optimizes” her behavior, usually too far on the sexual scale to the dismay of MC. Comedy ensues, and so on. I’ve read some snippets of the manga, and it’s your standard “person does random stupid thing and MC responds”, AKA the boke and tsukkomi routine. I’m not sure how well that’ll go considering I’ve seen complaints that it’s just endless gags, which the recent Aho Girl showed me I’m not really about. But hey I’ll give this show a chance, because who knows?

Just Because!: Why am I watching this? Just Because!

I’m so sorry.

Ok, with that out of the way this show looks decently interesting. Guy comes back to school as third year right as graduation approaches. Apparently this causes four students’ lives to change in some way. Sure.

Looks to be drama-y, based on the PV I saw, but I don’t know too much about this show otherwise. One thing I can say is that those uniforms are comfy as heck, and I’m all about that. Though I’m not all about the character designs: the faces look a bit questionable. But I’m sure I’ll get used to it. It’s not Koi to Uso levels of bad.

Konohana Kitan: Oh boy another CGDCT, but with wolf girls. Wow.

Okay well this time I’m not being sarcastic. I’m not about the wolf girls, cat girls, whatever girls trend. Basically it’s your standard new girl comes to work at place, and slowly gets along with others. But apparently according to the synopsis it’s through “her simple cuteness“. No I’m not lying, go see the MAL page.

Well might as well give it a shot I suppose.

One Shot Shows

Juuni Taisen: Normally I wouldn’t usually watch these types of shows, but a friend of mine convinced me to give at least one episode to this one. Sort of a battle royale where 12 people who share names with the Chinese zodiac members fight for one wish. One interesting thing to note is that this was written by Nisioisin, the same guy who wrote the Monogatari series. So from that it has some good potential.

Kujira no Kora wa Sajou ni Utau: At this point I’m kinda getting tired, so I’ll just say this is a fantasy show. The PV looked super interesting though, which is the biggest reason why I’m giving this at least one episode.

RoboMasters the Animated Series: College students + RoboMasters competition = anime? Sure why not.

And that’s all for this post! Not as many shows as last season, but I think there are some potentially good ones in this batch, plus maybe some more that I haven’t listed here. Anyway, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next post!

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