#and before it stops making any resemblance of sense in the context of season 2

[kori-senpai]

pov you're looking for the love of your life and hear rumors that he is terrorizing the Caribbean while sporting a new flag with a bleeding heart

#Since there's no way i'll ever finish this #have it now before I ignore and never look at it again #and before it stops making any resemblance of sense in the context of season 2 #like honestly there no way there aren't rumors about Blackbeard suddenly having a make-over #and flying a new flag that literally means 'I leave no survivors no matter how many white flags you wave' #not sure if Stede and his depressing amount of self esteem regarding the world of love could put these points together #but still #our flag means death season 2 spoiler #ofmd #our flag means death #ofmd season 2 #stede bonnet #gentlebeard #blackbonnet #blackbeard #stede x ed #my art

[thefirstknife]

The Fall of a Pyramid Ship

Besties, I have a thought. Many of them actually.

I recently went on a long tangent about how there is a possibility that some time during Season of the Lost a Pyramid will appear in the Dreaming City and we will be bringing it down. That Pyramid will then end up in Savathun's throne world which is where we will be going into it for the Witch Queen Raid. Post with the details here.

The rest under the cut because it's long:

The original post was mostly spurred someone asking about Sjur's dream from the lore on Sleepless. The relevant parts:

"I was dreaming," Sjur says, wiping her mouth off with the back of her hand. "I saw you on a great black triangle. You split it in two with your bare hands."

"Mm."

"And I was dead, I think." She cracks her neck with a deliciously loud pop. "Or… trapped? Like in a maze. But pretty close to figuring my way out."

"Mhm."

Sjur stands up to stretch. She does not mind that Mara is not listening. Let her read. "And there was another woman with you."

"On the triangle," Mara murmurs.

"Mm. Yeah. She was helping. Then your brother showed up, and…" She shakes out her arms, frowning thoughtfully. The dream is already fading. "He said, 'Tropaea.' Or maybe it was, uh, 'Tropical.' Anyway."

I bolded the most relevant sentences. The original post really wasn't about the whole Pyramid business, but I had to add my thoughts now that we know more than we did back when this lore was released. Not only the stuff I mentioned in the post, but also now we know that Savathun is (allegedly) trying to help us defeat the Black Fleet and the same was said about the reason why Mara wants her Techeuns back.

And I was just re-reading lore, as I do, and I remembered something. The lore book Stolen Intelligence details some of the records made by Ikora's Hidden and other Vanguard agents. Specifically, the page Fragment is what caught my attention. In it, an agent FEN-092 (most likely the one, the only, the man, the legend: Fenchurch Everis) reports a strange incident on the Moon:

2. Around 1900 hours yesterday afternoon, I began to experience a crushing headache and excused myself from patrol to recuperate. Though I originally intended to lay down for a nap, I fell asleep instead, and experienced multiple vivid dreams over the next 11.5 hours. In all of these dreams, I was trying to catch up with agent ERI-223 in a crowd. She was always out of reach, whether by 200 m or 20 m. I had the sense that I needed to speak to her.

3. When I woke, I found that my headache had not improved. I prepared my armor and exited my bivouac to find a single stationary Thrall crouched nearby. It stood as I approached, but made no motion to attack me. I fired one shot, killing it immediately. Upon stepping forward to examine its corpse, I saw a solid black fragment of an unknown material embedded in its chest cavity. The fragment resembled a flake or a shard of some larger object, not dissimilar to a high-gain photovoltaic panel.

ERI-223 is Eris Morn. The fragment was peculiar at the time this was released (Forsaken), but now post-Shadowkeep and post-Beyond Light, we can definitely identify this artifact as a piece of the Pyramid. Fenchurch's Ghost also reports:

5. I requested that my Ghost attempt to contain and transmat the fragment for quarantine on my jumpship. He was unable to establish a Light link with the object, describing the fragment as "slippery" and "tiring" to try to catch hold of.

To me, it is most likely that this is literally a shard of the Pyramid, like those little pieces you can see on Europa when a Pyramid scale ripples. But more important is what follows:

8. At this point, I broke protocol and did not request additional backup. Instead, I picked up the fragment by hand and immediately experienced a vivid hallucination: I stood over VIP #0704's shoulder as she dressed a seven-inch gash on agent ERI-223's thigh. Both #0704 and ERI-223 were dressed for combat. Hundreds of fragments of the unknown material hung in the air around us, apparent shrapnel from the wreckage of a nearby ship of unrecognizable make and model. ERI-223 looked directly toward me and said, "Патетическая."

Obviously none of this made any sort of reasonable sense at the time. But now?

"Hundreds of fragments of the unknown material hung in the air around us, apparent shrapnel from the wreckage of a nearby ship of unrecognizable make and model" is a pretty clear hint at what we now know is a Pyramid ship. Specifically, a wreckage of one.

As we've established, ERI-223 is Eris Morn. Who is VIP #0704? As of now, it is undecided. I've done a bit of a search and most of the guesses are 2 years old and they usually settled on it being Eriana-3 OR Mara Sov. I think it's pretty obvious that it's Mara, if we pair it with the Sleepless lore tab.

But there's another link. The lore book The Dreaming City has a page called Letters. This lore book in general is kinda all over the place and details some lore that doesn't really have a place elsewhere, but it generally revolves around the Awoken and characters adjacent to them. There is a lot about Mara, including information about how Eleusinia and the Oracle Engine were created, as well as her relationship with Riven.

Anyway, in Letters, we see several letters written by Eris to various people, but never delivered. We kinda have to assume a lot here because nothing is explicitly named, but we can for sure say that these letters were written by Eris. To whom? It's up to debate. Some of these seem to be for Mara, one is most certainly for Asher and one is most likely for Ikora. The one I want to focus on is one I can't decide where to place but it features a word we've seen before:

Undelivered, burnt.

Патетическая. The swelling of strong sentiment in your chest even as you mourn the world that is and was and will be. I did not go to Mars. I will not go to the Dreaming City. There is only the plan.

"Патетическая" is Russian and it means "pathetic." I'm thoroughly lost on why this is repeated twice as coming from Eris in two different instances. Truth to Power claims that Eris was born during the Golden Age in Russia, but Stolen Intelligence disproves this. Hm.

Either way, there are several things that seem to fit together in all of this:

1. Destruction of the Pyramid ship (Sleepless, Fragment) 2. Eris and Mara involved with some sort of an ongoing plan (Sleepless, Fragment, Letters) 3. A battle that involves a Pyramid, Eris (who ends up wounded), Mara and Crow (Sleepless, Fragment) 4. Eris saying the same peculiar word seemingly completely out of context (Fragment, Letters)

I want to point out something about the Letters entry. It's not chronological. As in, the entries in that lore page aren't all from the past or current plot from when the lore book was released. Observe the final part of Letters (which released in Forsaken):

Delivered.

I have been inside. I have nothing but beautiful and violent words for my report. I will meet you at your throne.

Lore book Letters from Eris, from Shadowkeep, page Regarding the Pyramid:

[DELIVERED, RECONSTRUCTED.]

It's coming, my Queen.

It's coming for US.

We have been manipulated. We are right where it wants us. The Darkness orchestrated its plan magnificently; the Nightmares were so impeccably calculated to draw us in, make us vulnerable, and leave us exposed.

The Darkness plans to use us. We are to do its bidding. I don't know how to stop it.

I detect no fear on the part of our nemesis. We aren't even a concern. We pose no threat.

The Darkness needs a reason to fear our Light, and I intend to provide it.

I have been inside. I have nothing but beautiful and violent words for my report. I will meet you at your throne.

This makes the entire Letters lore page entirely up for debate.

I believe these entries are connected and that both Fenchurch's hallucination after touching a piece of the Pyramid and Sjur's dream are telling us about the same future event that involves Eris, Mara and a destruction of a Pyramid ship. And I absolutely believe that we will see this at the end of the season, considering there's a downed Pyramid ship in Savathun's throne world. Other connecting details are very confusing for now and may have something to do with Savathun's involvement. After all, she also claims to be interested in fighting back the Black Fleet and ends up in possession of the Pyramid.

#destiny 2 #eris #mara #savathun #pyramid #witch queen #lore vibing #long post #besties help. lol.

[jenetica]

A Brief Note from Our Sponsors: Us.

Greetings! If you’re here, it’s likely that you have questions or complaints about our decisions regarding the Calendar Girls series. An ominous start to this discussion, but truly, we welcome you! If you’re here, it means you have been emotionally impacted by our work and, even though this context isn’t the cheeriest, we are so, so grateful you (1) enjoyed our work enough to care about it, and (2) want to develop a better understanding of our process so that you can engage with Calendar Girl more.

First of all, we understand why you’d be upset with us! The cliffhanger at the end of AotM was a DOOZY and leaves a LOT of important questions unanswered, and we left you readers hanging for a LONG time. This post will, hopefully, assuage the worst of your fears without giving away too many plot points.

That being said, please note that there WILL be spoilers ahead. If you want to see the story unfold as we intended, do NOT read this post further. We will tell you now that the post addresses the Deadpool’s identity, our decisions regarding the construction of AotM and the final cliffhanger, our decisions regarding developing the sequel as a prequel, and our plans for future installments. And, naturally, the accusations of “queerbaiting.”

Let’s get started.

QUEERBAITING

It makes sense to open with the most serious issue, so let’s talk about queerbaiting. For anyone here who doesn’t know, queerbaiting is defined as the purposeful insinuation of a homosexual/queer relationship, only to backtrack/subvert that insinuation to avoid the queer relationship. For an example, see: Supernatural from Season 4 and on. 

We have received accusations of queerbaiting for about four years, based exclusively on the reveal at the end of the final chapter. Similarly, we have received complaints that we duped readers into reading hetfic. So, to get things out of the way, yes, Deadpool is Gwen. No, it’s not a trick of the light, or a mistake, or some odd resemblance. They are one and the same. HOWEVER, that does NOT mean that we have queerbaited anyone.

First of all, the tags of the story are honest, and they always have been. AotM is tagged as a “Multi” fic, meaning that there are relationships of multiple orientations involved, and it is tagged with Peter/Gwen as well as Peter/Wade. Careless Whisper is tagged as F/M. We have never suggested or implied that the story would exclusively be slash fiction. We actually left multiple hints that Wade enjoyed femininity, at least as a practice, if not an identity. iFlail and I discussed this issue at length as we wrote/edited AotM and carefully crafted the story with queerbaiting in mind. 

Peter is an unreliable narrator, he always has been, and he always will be. In AotM, Peter assumes Wade is a man and thus, for the purposes of the narrative, Wade is one. The truth, however, is less clean than that. We won’t get into the details here, but safe to say, gender is not binary, it is not permanent, and it is not inexorably linked to one’s biology. Wade has a complicated history and a complicated/unique sense of identity. We have always intended for him to be that way, just as we always intended for him to be notably, pointedly smaller than Peter. 

The accusations of queerbaiting and/or conning readers into reading “het” fic are exclusionary of the greater conversation of gender identity. It was, frankly, disheartening to see so many people assume heterosexuality based exclusively on the last word of AotM. We hope that our work will challenge readers to be more mindful of the expansive world of gender, and to avoid assuming that a specific kind of pairing might involve specific kinds of body parts.

If you have any questions or reservations about our queerbaiting at this point, you are either welcome to keep reading future installments of this work to learn more, or you are welcome to stop altogether. The choice is yours. 

CONSTRUCTING THE STORY ARC - PRESENT, PAST, AND FUTURE

With that hot-button topic out of the way, let’s talk about the greater concept of ending a story of a cliffhanger, our thoughts behind building this series, and our goals for future installments. 

The second part of the Calendar Girl series, Careless Whisper, was written first, and it comes first chronologically. I (Jenetica) initially worked on the story by myself, as an exploration into the concept of “Gwen becoming Deadpool” to see how it might play out. I ended up writing a story I loved, so I moved onto the next part of the story, set four years later. This ended up becoming Angel of the Morning. 

@iflailfic, a good IRL friend of mine from college, came onboard (after I wooed her with several stories worth of porn, as you can see through a jaunt through my posted works) to help me edit. She fell in love with AotM and, as we worked on first draft edits, she floated the idea of AotM coming before Careless Whisper. Honestly, I rejected the idea at first (not sure if she actually knows/remembers that part, lol), because I couldn’t fathom how we would be able to link the parts of the story together. But, eventually, I began to realize her point: AotM introduces our protagonists, develops the “current” world for the series, and has a more dynamic/engaging plot. 

The cliffhanger was a joke at first. My idea. I think my exact words were something like, “LOLOL what if we just ended on ‘GWEN?’ OMG IMAGINE hahahahaha.” But, as we continued to edit… it became the perfect way to end things. Anything that came after that point felt like trash. If we’d expanded any further, we ran the risk of falling headfirst into Part 3 and doubling the size of AotM. Let’s be real, the ending is, all waiting aside, an absolute nuclear bomb on the rest of the story. 

We talked about the likelihood of enraged readers. But we rationalized it by telling each other/ourselves that we had Careless Whisper written, so the wait wouldn’t be too killer.

Best laid plans.

I (Jenetica) take full responsibility for the time it took to start posting again. Over the last four years, I have gone through a number of experiences that challenged my sense of self and pushed me to become a different person, including moving halfway across the country, attending a relatively prestigious law school where I was no longer “the smart kid in the room,” and losing the relationship that I later learned was toxic and abusive. I lost my confidence in a number of ways, including my confidence as a writer. I became terrified that I would never produce anything that lived up to AotM, and that I would disappoint the many (many!) readers demanding answers. Luckily for me, through that adversity I found rewarding friendships, a beautiful partner who treats me the way I’d always fantasized/written about people like me getting treated, and an engaging career that leaves me with enough energy to write. My experiences are mirrored by iFlail, who went through a different, but similarly life-changing, series of events. But through this all, we never lost hope in this story, and we always planned to complete the series. We are wiser, stronger people now, and we both believe that the story will be richer for it. 

Which brings us to now, and our plans for the future. We do NOT intend to wait another four years to post X Gon’ Give It To Ya, the third and final installment of the series. We have spent countless hours brainstorming the plot, and all that’s really left to do is put it to paper. But, for people who are afraid of being burned twice, we will warn you now that Careless Whisper is JUST a prequel. If you want to know what happens after the “Gwen?” reveal, you will not get any answers until XGGITY (which I have, as of just now, decided to pronounce as “Ziggity”). We hope you stick around to watch Careless Whisper unfold, but we will understand if you want to wait until XGGITY to start reading again.

IN CONCLUSION - FINAL THOUGHTS

The Calendar Girl series has received more attention than we’d ever dreamed, and regardless of whether you liked or disliked our work, we want to thank you for taking the time to read it. If you made it to the end of AotM, we did something right, and again, we are so grateful that so many people have stuck with us this far.

We encourage everyone, moving forward, to keep a close eye on the tags that we use for our stories. We may not tag everything relevant, for the sake of preserving mystery about the plot, but we will be sure to tag everything that may be triggering or concerning, like self-harm, violence, or expected brand of romantic/sexual interactions. We will be adding this warning to the beginning of each story in the series.

Additionally, we want to acknowledge that there is a stark difference between legitimate concerns about the story and unfounded attacks on our character. Our decision to make this post is our attempt to dissuade the latter: We are not queerbaiting, and we have no interest in “forcing” people to read content that is not to their taste. However, that doesn’t mean that our execution of AotM, Careless Whisper, and/or XGGITY will be beyond reproach. The conversation on gender politics has evolved tremendously over the years that we’ve been working on this series, and it will undoubtedly continue to evolve as we progress into the future. We encourage constructive (!!!) criticism and open conversation on ways that we can improve our story, even if it involves tweaking published work to avoid mishandling deeply personal issues.

That said, if, after reading this post, you are still upset and/or unconvinced about our intentions for this series, we encourage you to stop reading it. We are not compensated for this work, and we have spent hundreds (probably thousands, by now) of hours striving to make the Calendar Girl series the best that it can be, for our own benefit. We believe that it may be the best fanfiction we will ever produce, and our satisfaction with our work is our priority. We will continue to post with that priority at the forefront, and with the demands of our reader base playing second fiddle. Similarly, we expect our readers to prioritize their needs above all others. We ask for your patience and your kindness moving forward and, if you cannot give us that, you are welcome to close the tab and move on with your life to other ventures that suit your interests better.

For those of you that choose to stay: You are in for a hell of a ride. We are both anxious to get through Careless Whisper, because we are both SO excited to share XGGITY with you. We believe it’s going to knock your socks off. We hope to see you there. 

Thanks, everyone, and happy reading!

#angel of the morning #calendar girl #spideypool #hashtags

[kinetic-elaboration]

March 16: Mr. Robot 4x01

So I have finally gotten to S4 of Mr. Robot. I saw the finale (on the night it aired) but I haven’t seen anything else from the season.

A few quick thoughts (because I’m tired, and I still stubbornly kinda want to try to read before bed).

That was a really tense episode! Like I was basically just a clenched fist the whole time, until about the last ten minutes when I started losing interest a little. (Obviously Elliot isn’t going to die with 12 episodes to go so no real suspense there.)

I could write a whole dissertation about Angela’s death. Like, I knew she died, but not the circumstances. And I knew it would happen roughly when it did but I was still... I kept trying to find a familiar rhythm to the scene but there wasn’t one and that just upped the tension a lot. I mean this is as a compliment. For example, at the moment when Angela stops and she and Price start talking as if she were basically already dead, I thought there was going to be one of those secret injury reveals, somehow. The inevitability was just so strong. But then I realized later that she was seeing the goons; she wasn’t literally injured but she knew there was no way out. Even if she ran or begged--not that she’d do either.

Another thing that that scene did was keep the mystery of the secret project open because I was all ready at the end of S3 to be like “well I guess it was a con the whole time whomp whomp whomp no time travel.” BUT now in context it turns out the whole scene would have been a lie, that Price was only trying to get her to stop thinking about and potentially poking at the project by saying it was a delusion, and so we’re left with as little understanding of it as before!

It is of course fake but the finale makes more sense to me now.

My mom and I were discussing it a little and I don’t think there was any way Angela was leaving that conversation. I think Price might have believed he could save her but that whiterose’s plan was always to kill her. I don’t buy this whole ‘Angela died because she was threatening whiterose’ thing because like... she wasn’t threatening her until that conversation. Before she was picked up in the van, she was completely devoted to whiterose and her vision. My mom made the point that Angela was so out of her mind by then that her very instability was a liability and I can see how that would be true...but her biggest character trait besides paranoia was extreme devotion to whiterose so if whiterose’s concern was protecting herself and her project, why would she purposefully rock that boat? why would she try to shake the loyalty of the unstable person, making her more unstable and less reliable? You have to assume, given that Price was wearing the wire, that nearly everything he said was scripted by whiterose. Maybe not the specific words, but the general gist. whiterose crafted and orchestrated that scene, from beginning to end.

Watching it today, it felt like a test of sorts. A test for Price specifically. And upon reflection, a test he was set up to lose.

My reading: Angela was initially a problem for whiterose because she was poking around at the plant. So to neutralize her--with a bonus of annoying Philip--whiterose captured and brainwashed her. But from then on, the threat she posed was gone, and everything was just about Price, with maybe a bonus of an extra pawn at ECorp. Angela was useful for the Cyber Bombings, but certainly not irreplaceable in that role. Plus, the bombings themselves were about Price! And wrecking her, making her the mess she was by the end of the season, was an extra dig at him: look what I did to this person you seem to like so much. But at that point, Angela is at best, useless, and at worst, a liability because of her instability. So whiterose sets Price up as if he had a chance to save her, but ultimately always knew that she would get rid of Angela at this time. That’s what I think.

I do wonder... exactly how whiterose put Price in this scenario. That’s not exactly clear to me, unless it’s just supposed to be, she owns him and always has.

Anyway, in non-Angela thoughts. I feel like this season is a bit of a reset in ways. Or a simplifying of the remaining story. Like, S2 and S3 were the direct aftermath of S1 but now a lot of that story seems to be resolved. The 5/9 hacks were effectively “undone,” the economy is rebounding, characters are back in familiar roles: Tyrell at ECorp as if he hadn’t spent the last 2 seasons a terrorist on the run; Darlene alone and a bit of a mess, as if she’d never been the co-leader of a revolution; absolutely no sign of fsociety at all; Elliot back at his crusading. We even see Allsafe again!

So now that we’ve basically made peace with ECorp, roughly, and finished the fsociety and 5/9 story basically completely, as far as I can tell, and killed off almost every major character save Elliot, Darlene, Tyrell, and Dom, and the two big villains Price and whiterose, the narrative can become a simpler tale of hacker versus hacker, rather than a complex story of various factions and the effects of their machinations not just on each other but on society. Now it’s all about whiterose and Elliot--or this particular personality, at least. whiterose wants her secret project. Elliot wants to take whiterose down. And it’s Christmas. I think this is very smart and I’m excited for the rest of the season.

A few small thoughts: I did not get that Dom was home for the holidays (DUH) so my first thought was actually that she’d quit the FBI. That wouldn’t be very good mole behavior of her lol. Also the reveal of the not-lesbian as actually a Dark Army minion was SO GOOD. Chilling.

Gary Busey’s son looks so much like him. I was trying to place him the whole time, because he looked familiar but also not.. and then I was like oh duh. Family resemblance.

The reveal of Elliot on the train and Mr. Robot as just something he was imagining as he watched the station through security cameras was amazing!

I also liked the way he pivoted out of the conversation with Darlene and then let Mr. Robot take over. Although I didn’t totally get when his physical body moved, or why Darlene continued to look straight ahead if he did move to the couch when Elliot did.

There were times when I really felt like I could see how the Hacker was a personality specifically (even though I continue referring to him as “Elliot” lol). His purpose is to protect and to do these projects, go on these crusades, and that’s what he’s doing again.

...And I think that’s finally it! Excited for some potential Alderson sibling interaction in the next ep, and more Dom!

#the year 2021 #2021: mr robot #2021: fandom thoughts

[backupblogforjg]

The racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism and cruel tropes in Voltron

So, it’s the anniversary of the ending of Voltron. And I’m getting really, really tired of people saying that only shippers hated the ending. There were many issues with Voltron, and they were neither limited to shipping nor to S8.

So, I’ve decided to compile a list.

It gets LONG. Turns out there was a hell of a lot of racist, sexist, ableist and cruel tropes in VLD.

In fact, I had originally planned on writing a list of both the terrible tropes and the plot holes. But there just wasn’t enough room for both. The post is huge as it is, and with the plot holes, it would have been twice as long, so I had to focus on only one thing.

Salt, obviously. So, so, so much salt. I could turn a lake into a sea here. You’ve been warned.

RACISM:

1) The Alteans are genocide survivors. Out of all the Alteans, only the black Altean was used for a Reverse Racism story where she resents a teammate for belonging to the race that exterminated hers. The white Alteans are totally cool with him, and with his race in general, and only hate the bad people. But the black one had to be taught that hating people because of their race is wrong.

2) VLD Allura is also the only version of Allura who is black. In every other Voltron media (several different cartoons and comics), Allura is blond with blue eyes. All the white versions of the character get a happy ending, while only the black version ends up dying to save the world.

While "hero sacrifices their life to save the world" is not a bad trope in and of itself, it becomes bad when it kills off one of the extremely few black female characters in leading roles. You kill off a white male hero, there are 463278462387 more. You kill off the black female hero, you are kinda screwed. Making it worse, Allura had been portrayed as suffering from depression throughout the latest seasons, so that her death comes across less as heroic sacrifice and more as suicide.

3) The brown Cuban kid who dreamed of being a pilot, and never once in 78 episodes ever expressed anything but sheer love for an exciting life, in the final two minutes of the final episode ends up realizing that the place for him is a farm.

4) As told in interviews, Lotor was meant to be a bad example of mixed-race person, to contrast him with Keith as good example of mixed race person. Do I even have to point out how messed up this is?

5) Even before they became Space Nazis, back when they were still on the side of the angels, the Galra invaded and conquered planets. This is portrayed as totally cool when they happily name the prince after a "hero" who invaded and conquered a lot of worlds, and the peaceful Alteans think the guy is just as heroic as one of their greatest scientists. Apparently there is such a thing as ethically killing people to steal their land.

6) They whitewashed Keith, a character who is poc in every other iteration of Voltron.

I’m sure a lot of people are going to get angry here, claiming that I hate Keith. Let me assure you, I don’t. I love Keith, and I hate what was done to him. I hate that they took a traditionally poc character and went to frankly ridiculous lengths to erase that part of his character. Keith should be Asian, and it would be incredibly easy to make him so in VLD (seriously, all they’d have to do is update the freaking bios, an intern could do it right now in 5 minutes). But they refuse to do it.

A lot of people don’t realise that the surname “Kogane” in VLD is fanon.

I’m serious. Check his official bios page. Keith is not actually called Keith Kogane in VLD. Fans started calling him that in fanfiction, and it stuck, but it’s not canon.

In every other Voltron media, Keith is an Asian guy. But in VLD, they:

- went out of their way to always avoid giving him an Asian surname

- gave him a Texan father

- refused to confirm his race, even when every other character had a specific race. Again, check his official bios. All the other characters got a race, Keith gets “human.” It got so ridiculous it would be funny if it weren’t sad. It pretty much went like this:

Fans: Keith is half alien, but about his human half, what is his ethnicity? EPs: oh, we couldn't possibly say, because the story takes place in the future, and in the future, everybody is mixed up! So, Keith is HUMAN, we can't give him a specific race because there are no specific races in the future! Fans: ok. And what are the races of the other characters? EPs: Pidge is Italian, Lance is Cuban, Hunk is half-black half- Samoan, Shiro is Japanese. Fans: but Keith...? EPs: HUMAN! There is no such thing as race in the future!

Some people at least hoped that Keith's Texan father had Asian ancestry because he kinda looked like Shiro, who is Japanese. But the EPs confirmed that the resemblance was just a coincidence, they never meant for the dad to look Japanese.

At this point pretty much the only evidence that Keith is Asian is that he is voiced by an Asian person. But then, Josh Keaton is not Japanese, is he?

7) After whitewashing Keith, they claimed he is the best leader of Voltron, better than his poc predecessor, because he has Galra blood.

So, instead of bringing up any sort of legit reason to justify why Keith should be in charge (like his empathy or pilot skills), they go with "the half-white guy is also half space-nazi and that's why he should give the orders instead of the poc guy."

If you think I’m bashing Keith here, please ask yourself why you are getting angry at the person pointing out the whitewashing instead of getting angry at the whitewashing. Especially when, again, making VLD Keith canonically poc could be done anytime with zero cost and zero effort, and DW just doesn’t want to.

- Hunk, the half-black half-Samoan guy, was going to be killed and replaced as Paladin by a blue alien. The EPs were pissed when DW forbade them to, and complained in the interview about it.

SEXISM:

Every single woman who is ever put in charge ends up going insane, making terrible decisions that endanger her planet, or losing all of her authority.

Allura starts out as co-leader of Voltron and leader of the Coalition. Ends up as a foot soldier who takes orders from the new leader and his right-hand man, and is treated as a cadet by the Earth military.

HOMOPHOBIA:

1) Dreamworks, Netflix and the EPs very, very, very heavily promoted S7 as GLBT-friendly. The EPs gave whole interviews about the past relationship between Shiro and new character Adam, retweeted a ton of posts celebrating Shiro’s homosexuality, and enthusiastically sent tweets like "you are going to see more of Adam in S7! :D" from their personal accounts after they showed the episode that introduced him.

In S7:

- Shiro's homosexuality is so ambiguous that even the Brazilian voice actor didn't realize that he was supposed to be gay. Just by watching the show, without knowing the World Of God, you can’t tell he and the other guy were engaged.

- Adam gets about 30 seconds of screentime after that one episode they had already shown. Then he dies screaming in pain and terror in a fire.

A lot of people claimed that it was okay to kill Adam because Shiro was supposed to be our rep, not Adam, who was a brand new character we knew little about. And, out of context, that would be true. Adam was pretty much a NPC, why would his death matter?

But the problem here is the context:

- Shiro is closeted in S7, you need to read interviews to know he is gay. So, if only Shiro is meant to be the rep, they couldn’t even do that right.

- They very heavily marketed both Shiro and Adam as gay rep, and specifically talked at length about Adam in several interviews.

In THAT context, REGARDLESS of what you ship, killing off Adam revealed a complete willingness to manipulate the audience to the point of outright lying. Even if you hated Adam, even if Adashi is your NOTP, the clear evidence that the creators had absolutely no problem making empty promises was NOT a good sign.

2) The moment Shiro is revealed to be gay in interviews, he is practically quarantined from the Team.

3) Shiro is also given a Totally Not AIDS deadly disease.

Making it even worse, Shiro never actually gets cured in canon. We are told he is cured in interviews, but the show itself drops the topic entirely. Depending on where you lean in the Word Of God VS Death Of The Author debate, Shiro may be doomed to die.

4) A female villain is revealed to be a lesbian. 30 seconds later she gleefully tortures a little girl. Then she, too, dies in a fire.

(Fan outrage about pulling two Bury Your Gays in the Season that had been very heavily promoted as GLBT-friendly caused DW to retcon her death and bring her back in S8, but she was originally meant to die in the explosion)

5) Shiro ends up marrying a random character who doesn’t even get a name in the show.

ABLEISM:

1) Shiro's PTSD magically disappears offscreen. In interviews, the EPs claimed that he "got over it" between S6 and S7 because "he is a professional." Wow! Who knew being a professional magically cures mental illnesses!

2) Shiro is an amputee. The EPs admitted that they never put any thought into his status as disabled rep, they just wanted a character with a cool-looking arm. It literally didn't occur to them that making him lose his arm (TWICE! First up to the biceps, then up to the shoulder) meant anything. Also worth noting that Shiro’s new arm makes him look like the guy who tormented him.

3) Shiro is systematically robbed of his agency.

- He is the only Paladin who never gets to use his bayard.

- He loses his bond with Black for no given canon reason (and the reason they give in interviews makes no sense, they basically say that transferring his soul out of the Black Lion makes her stop loving him. But she still lets Zarkon fly her!).

I know that Keith is traditionally Black’s pilot in Voltron media (although that shouldn’t matter, because VLD made a lot of huge changes to the traditional status quo). But if they wanted Black Paladin Keith that badly, they could have given some non-insulting reason for it. For example, say “because Shiro has spent so much time within Black, their bond is now so strong that he will get absorbed again if he flies her again.” Or co-pilots in Black (if Pidge can co-pilot with Matt, why can’t Shiro co-pilot with Keith?).

- He is defeated not only by Sendak, but also by a bunch of random Alteans. He basically can’t win a fight anymore unless it’s played for laughs.

- His new robot Atlas is bigger than Voltron, but also much weaker, and can only buy a few minutes for Voltron to come save the day.

- Every single enemy he ever defeated comes back to be finished off by somebody else (even the friggin' Gladiator from S1 comes back in S8). In the epilogue, he retires in his twenties.

4) Narti, the disabled General, is fridged shortly after her introduction. For a while at least it seemed like her death had affected the remaining three Generals, but then it turns out that the "For Narti" line was a trick and they never actually planned on avenging her.

CRUEL TROPES:

1) They intentionally baited the fans by pushing the plot thread that Lotor would be redeemed. They named the episode where he defects "A New Defender," they kept saying in interviews that they come from Avatar and they are very familiar with Zuko *hint hint*, they showed his family as incredibly abusive and Lotor himself as desperate, they showed that Lotor was a victim of severe racism (he is mixed race, and as stated above, the Galra are Space Nazis and are pretty obsessed with blood purity).

Then, after revealing him to be a villain, they gave an interview where they practically dislocated their shoulders by patting themselves on the back as they gleefully bragged that "we made them think we would give them a Zuko, but we gave them an Azula!"

(Nevermind the fact that Azula herself was a 14-year-old child, not a monster, and that Aaron Ehasz himself confirmed that he always wanted her to be redeemed).

When fans who are survivors of child abuse told them that the bait-and-switch was really hurtful, they laughed it off, and claimed that Lotor was just beyond redemption. Then they proceeded to redeem Lotor's abusive parents, who were objectively much worse.

2) Shiro’s clone, who sincerely believed he was Shiro and always meant well, was dehumanised, demonised and discarded like his life meant nothing. His short existence was full of pain from literally the moment he first opened his eyes, as Haggar kept torturing him with migraines to manipulate him. In the end, she brutally violates him body and mind, and brainwashes him to force him to turn on the family he was so desperate to find in The Journey. He dies in incredibly questionable circumstances, without ever getting to learn that his family survived Haggar’s plans. He is victim-blamed for the things she forced him to do against his will with mind-control, and is never mourned because the only family he ever had writes him off as a “thing” and “evil.”

In fact, the horrific treatment of Kuron foreshadowed S8. The Medium article “It never stops at one - Why Voltron: Legendary Defender's tragic ending wasn't a surprise and why more DreamWorks' series will follow suit” explains how.

The tl;dr version is that, when a story posits that the circumstances of your birth determine the value of your life, so that good intentions and hard work mean nothing, and long-established bonds can be discarded with zero thought and care, and your very humanity can be revoked over something you have absolutely no control over, and the whole sociopathic disaster is celebrated as a happy ending... it really, really can’t end well. Not just for you, but for the entire cast.

#voltron critical #vld shiro #vld keith #vld lance #vld allura #vld lotor #voltron #voltron salt #takashi shirogane

[amegatronfan]

Jame Roberts’ Instagram Q&A -November ‘18

Right. 

So.

- Back in MTMTE #15, when the original Rewind got locked in the Slow Cell with Overlord, he suddenly learned how to shrink while he transformed. This was not an ability he previously had, as shown in, for example, MTMTE #2, when Tailgate sees Rewind for the first time (before Swerve introduces him to CDRW) and remarks that he can see a “giant memory stick” in the distance. However, the fear that Rewind felt in that moment triggered his ability to shrink to the size we see him in, like, LL #25, for example. This helps him survive both Overlord and the shots fired off by Chromedome, and so he, along with Overlord, is recovered by the Galatic Council. Overlord is seen as too dangerous, so Rewind is chosen as the guinea pig for an experiment the Galatic Council are trialling; an experiment that would allow them to “punch holes” into alternate universes. Since they want to use Rewind as a weapon against the Black Block Consortia (and other enemies of the council, such as other Cybertronians), the technology is built into a suit of armour meant to resemble Primus (this suit of armour was built in the same vein as the Magnus armour, in that it made so that a small robo could pretend to be this big, famous robo and not, like, the sentai suit dealio I had originally envisioned when JRo was describing this. this was done because they rightly assumed that seeing Primus land in the middle of a battlefield would scare the royal shit out of everybody, most especially other Cybertronians, who have the cultural context to know who the fuck he is.) 

So, then, it worked, and Rewind made it into the past?? of another dimension (that wasn’t the Functionist universe), but then it malfunctioned and he got trapped there. He had fight his way back to the original universe by travelling through a bunch of other alternative universes (there would have been an interlude during the Mutineers Trilogy where we saw Rewind 1 travelling through the Marvel 2006 universe). At first, he was travelling back to the OG universe was so he could be reunited with his conjux (he met other Chromedome's along the way, but he wanted to find his Chromedome), but as he was travelling, he discovered Chromedome’s secret; that he had helped in the cover-up of Dominus’ murder, and so it became more complicated (he kinda wanted to avenge Dominus.) This would’ve all culminated in an issue where Rewind 1 finally made it back the original universe. As has been previously established, only one Rewind can exist at the one time, so Chromedome would've had to decide which Rewind would be cancelled out, all while Rewind 2 (and by extension, the audience) would’ve learned from Rewind 1 what Chromedome did to Dominus, which would’ve complicated things even further.

JRo came up with this idea before he began writing MTMTE, but by the end of season one, he was starting to become uncertain about this particular storyline, as Rewind, Chromedome and their relationship began to develop. Having Chromedome do this to Rewind started to feel wrong. After talking to his editor at the time (Carlos, I believe?), he decided to leave in the scene with Chromedome and Prowl, where Prowl threatened blackmail and Chromedome used Shadowplay to erase the blackmail from his memory, just in case he still wanted to go through with it. However, by the time it came to the final stretch of issues, he already so many other plot points to introduce, explain and tie up, he didn’t have time to do all three for Rewind 2 and his ultra-complicated, high concept adventures, and deal with the complications it brought with it to the cast, so he was forced to drop it.

So, with that out of the way, here are the more breezy answers:

- Megatron didn’t have a mentor who taught him medicine in the Warren, he taught himself everything he knows about treating people because he’s “the most ferocious autodidact.” (i stan a legend)

- Ratchet would still be the better medic though

- Megatron specialised in neurology

- Flame survived the events of LL #24

- The only reason Functionist Universe! Orion and Terminus were killed was because of time restraints 

- Making Drift and Ratchet’s relationship a romantic one started feeling right around their return in the Remain in the Light arc, but JRo didn’t really decide that they were definitely conjux endura until he began writing LL #25 

- Rewind’s colour changing pants are now (dubiously) canon (”Chromedome is fascinated; he might be an outlier.”)

- Admitted a couple of times, once again, that he wished he hadn’t killed Trailcutter 

- If a Cybertronian is gifted a vial of innermost energon and survives whatever near-fatal injury or illness they had, they have the option to either keep it, as a reminder of the love they and the donor share, or they can regift the donor’s innermost energon to them. If they do indeed die, the most common practice is to donate the innermost energon (as Ratchet did posthumously in #25)

- “Sorry, I’ve seen ‘Chromedome is a bottom’ on the screen and that’s thrown me.”

- When asked if he’d change anything if given the opportunity to rewrite the series, he admitted that there were “a bunch of things”, which included:

    * Spacing out events more, most especially near the beginning of MTMTE,            where so much was happening that it all felt “a bit busy”, and the Crucible           arc

    * Writing more stories about the tertiary cast (eg. Spotlight: Hoist) to really            sell the fact that this was a ship with 200 mechs on board (the main cast            would still have had their own quirky adventures going on in the                          background)

                * An example of such a story would’ve been having an issue focusing                    on the writer behind the Lost Light Insider

    * More stories with the Mutineer’s

    * Give the Scavengers an entire tradeback to themselves in Season 3,                  encompassing an entire arc he’d had planned for them

     * He wouldn’t have “decapitated Red Alert like that” 

     * Having the charisma parasites being followed up by Swearth “didn’t do              him any favours as they were three very high concept issues one after the          other”

      * Would’ve seeded more mentions of the Guiding Hand in MTMTE (though             not in Lost Light, which had enough, he felt)

      * More Star Saber (longer fights with different characters)

      * Way more Roller!

      * Show Cyclonus’ recovery from his injuries in #47 more as more of a slow,          arduous process instead of an “Oh, he’s fine now” dealio

      * Would’ve liked to pull off the Troja Major two-parter better

- [SPOILERS FOR IDW’S UNICRON SERIES]

When asked who’s death Megatron would be most cut-up about, Optimus, Soundwave or Starscream, JRo said he’d take Stasrcream’s the worst, as the two had “unfinished business” (the new Pacifist Megatron wanted to reconcile with Starscream). Though Soundwave was listed last on the “who'd Megatron would mourn the most” list, he also said that he’d be “proud of what Soundwave did”

- On a more lighthearted note, he said that Stan Bushs’ Dare was playing in Rodimus’ head during his “Til All Are One!” montage in the 2012 annual

- Cyclonus is, unfortunately, no longer rich, because much of his wealth came from Tetrahexian real estate (as stated in the prose story Signal to Noise, packaged in Volume 4 of MTMTE), and the value kinda dropped after Unicron, you know, destroyed the whole planet (though he also said it’s more than likely he and Tailgate invested in real estate on New Cybertron)

- Said that if Rodimus and Drift had been amica endura “no one would’ve batted an eye,” (and that they would’ve completed the ceremony off-screen)

- Rodimus was originally going to sacrifice himself in Crucible to stop the Omega Guardians from using the Warren to enter our universe and take it over. (”Even saying that is making me yawn”) Everyone would’ve thought Rodimus was already dead, and as such, another, unnamed character would’ve gotten credit for his sacrifice. Rodimus would’ve known this, and sacrificed himself anyway.

- “You’re all [unapologetic] shippers and I salute you.”

- As he stated on Twitter before, he’d have liked to include a scene between Cyclonus and Drift, where Drift proclaims his new respect for Cyc after seeing his Great Sword. This scene would’ve happened around the Remain in the Light arc. 

- “Are you guys still talking about Chromedome being a bottom? Oh my god.”

- In a fight between Drift and Cyclonus, Cyclonus would win.

- When asked who he’d ship Rodimus with, he said that Rodimus was an interesting case, as he’d actually be quite well-versed in the area of romance, unlike the rest of the cast, and that he “wouldn’t pine for people.” In the end, he ended up choosing Roller.

- Getaway didn’t make up the Conjux rites; they’re real 

- Rodimus’ flame abilities are not an outlier ability, but an upgrade he got along the way (he compared it to getting a really excessive tattoo). The ability is really painful and uses up a lot of Roddy’s energy.

- When asked what he hoped from the next continuity, he said that he wanted it to continue to be inclusive “in every sense of the word”, specifically pointing out the LGBTQIA+ representation as something he wanted to see continued. 

- “Yeah, Springer’s pretty hot.”

- First Aid has a crush on crush on Springer (as does JRo)

- Cyclonus is legitimately a great singer. It’s that his abilities are more of the operatic kind, meaning “he is not always appreciated by the uncultured”

- “[A fan] says that Lost Light is a love letter to fan fiction, which it absolutely is”

- When a fan asked why (to paraphrase) Roller was just so dang hot, JRo said that “Roller just has that effect on people thanks to Jack’s lascivious designs” (and before you go off and google it, lascivious is defined as “feeling or revealing an overt sexual interest or desire”)

- Drift’s wealth was made through bounty hunting

- Brainstorm and Chromedome might have been amica endura, but that Chromedome felt “burnt out” from his various failed relationships, both platonic and romantic. 

- No one even has a “Rung-shaped gap” in their memory after LL #24. They honestly can’t remember where the various matrixes came from, as is the case with all the things Rung was responsible for. They all blame it on memory creep and have each come up with their own contradictory explanations as to how and why these things happened. 

- When asked if Swerve liked The Big Bang Theory, JRo replied with a swift “No, he has a brain”

- Instead, he said Community was Swerve’s favourite show

- Cybertronian weddings are “very long”

- There was a lot singing at Cyclonus and Tailgate’s wedding

- Brainstorm and Perceptor’s wedding, meanwhile, “would be very complicated” because “they’d be trying to outdo each other in subtle ways”. It would “make for a good sitcom episode.”

- Roddy’s favourite meme is “the butterfly one”

- Rung’s favourite meme is “the woman looking confused with algebra in front of her face”

- Swerve is over memes

- “[Drift’s thighs] are certainly impressive”

- Swerve is “destined to have many friends”

- Whirl and Cyclonus most certainly became amica endura after LL #25

- Swerve got Misfire’s number in the end

- Though he said many times in the lead up the end of this continuity that this was his last time writing for Transformers, he said he would like to write a 12 issue series centred around a character he didn’t name, and then later admitted that he wanted to try to convince IDW to let him write another series. He also said that is there was ever a Grand Collecter’s edition of the series (that collected all the issues, prose stories, additional stories from other series etc into one or two hardback editions, for example), he’d write an additional prose story to make it worth people’s money

- Hoist confirmed the Lost Light’s resident furry

- “Tailgate is the cutest? Yes, he’s a little marshmallow.”

-  In his final days, before his execution, Minimus would’ve taken his poetry to Megatron so that he could read it (he would’ve also read Minimus’ poetry on the Alt! Lost Light, though assumedly under far less tragic circumstances)

- Getaway was considered the hottest mech on all of the Lost Light, with Skids as a close second. Together, they were “a hot duo.”

- Functionist Universe! Anode was a brilliant war general 

- Nickel had a girlfriend before her homeworld was destroyed 

- Rung can’t dance (we been knew)

- Crankcase and Con4Eva did hook up in the original universe

- “Does Rung know we love him? No - he’s very lonely” 

- No one in the cast likes all of the Shrek movies, but all of them like the first one.

- Chromedome and Brainstorm met each other the New Institute (which was my question answered :D) 

- Roddy would eat Doritos if he could 

- Not a single Transformer (in the IDW-verse) would like Trump

- The worst film that Roddy likes is Caddy Shack 

- Terminus would’ve never admitted that he was lying to Megatron

- Unfortunately, the song Boogie Wonderland by Earth, Wind & Fire never made it to the Lost Light

- “Who would make the best romantic partner? Depends on your taste.”

- JRo’s favourite superhero is Spiderman, his favourite TF toys as a kid were Hot Rod & Sandstorm and Nautica is his favourite character (from MTMTE/LL)

- Megatron, does indeed, both give the best hugs and deserves hugs! 

- “You’re a tactile, compassionate, thirsty bunch, aren’t you?”

- Tailgate, Swerve and Rewind would all play Fortnite

- Drift and Ratchet would’ve opened a “clinic” together (the question asker was unintentionally vague, so JRo was intentionally vague with his answer)

- Drift thinks that Ratchet was the one who made the first move, while Ratchet thinks Drift was 

- Ratchet and Drift would’ve been together for “decades and decades” before Ratchet died

- While Nautica/Skids still isn’t canon, he did confirm that Skids’ feelings for Nautica were romantic in nature 

- While Jack Lawrence bases many of the characters’ mannerisms on his own, he bases Rung’s mannerisms off of JRo’s, which doesn’t help his “anti-mary-sue argument.”

- I can’t remember the exact quote, but when asked what it’d be like to have Whirl as a roommate, he said something along the lines of “you’d have a crush on him even though you’d hate him.”

- In case it wasn’t clear enough in the text itself, Whirl rejected Ratchet’s hands because of a shift in how he saw his own disability. He no longer saw it, and by extension, himself, as a “deficiency” that needed to be “fixed”

- JRo pronounces “Omega” as “Oh-me-gah”. This is important information to include. 

And then the livestream ended with JRo saying we all “need a cold shower” after all this “fervent shipping” and went off to finish his half a pint of Corona. (what a legend)

Feel free to add in any answers or details I missed.

#tf #transformers #maccadam #idw #idw comics #idw transformers #mtmte #lost light #ruby speaks

[karenpage]

There’s a lot to unpack with the kastle episode, so this is my best attempts to articulate my thoughts regarding it. There are, of course, spoilers below the cut but I tried to keep my discussion to only that of Karen and Frank’s interaction (with mentions of the first episode for obvious reasons). This is just my take away, I’ll write more about the season as a whole at a later point.

But yes. The Punisher season 2, episode 11: The Abyss.

Okay. First and Foremost, you can tell the writers were strapped for time, that they might’ve had a larger role for Karen/Deb if she wasn’t busy filming dds3, which sort of makes me bitter because by and far Lightfoot has treated her character better when she’s on screen in the Punisher, but I digress.

We open up on Frank, beaten 99% to death which isn’t new to any long time fan of the show- but there’s something different. Something broken in him that we haven’t seen before and I’ll be the first to admit, it’s as unsettling as it is upsetting. Watching Frank, who has persisted through the worst of the worst, who has conquered unimaginable hurt and grief, be so willing to give up.. Ready to die in way that’s more a sense of him deserving it, rather than a byproduct of the life he’s chosen to live.

It’s all over the news, the radio announcing ‘the Punisher in police custody at the hospital’, and then we cut to Karen toting the sixth amendment and strong-arming her way past the heavy police protection surrounding Frank.

A direct, obvious, and intentional parallel to when they first met.

Frank’s tied to the bed, the setup is similar to that of dds2, visually. But Karen pulls a chair up to his bedside and she waits.

We don’t have any context for time, as for how long she’s there while he’s unconscious but something I’ve read in 10,000 fanfics winded me the moment he woke up. He was having a nightmare, saw the same vision he’d seen of Maria and the kids and then heard a hail of gunfire and screamed when he woke. Karen was there. Soothing him. Comforting him. And she grabbed his hand with both of hers.

Two hands.

It’s hard to watch as Frank relives their deaths, talks, at length about the day his family died and major kudos to Jon Bernthal, yet again, delivering a monologue that ripped my heart out and spat on it (not dissimilar to the speech at the graveyard in dds2 eps4), but Karen’s there every step of the way. She’s quiet, and supportive, and everything he needed in that moment because Frank’s grappling with something big and ugly.

He thinks he accidentally killed some women in a shoot-out with Billy Russo and his gang, they were innocent bystanders, and that circles back to what he’d been dreaming about. About his entire identity as the Punisher, and why he feels like he deserves to die.

‘Now I’m the monster’, GOD, let’s be real for one second. Kastle notwithstanding? That Shit HURTED the emotions evoked with a single sentence, with tears in his eyes and a trembling lip. I Don’t Think I’ll Ever Recover.

But Karen outright refuses to believe that. Denies that Frank deserves to die and she knows something’s up. Because Karen’s pursuit of the truth continues to be a cornerstone in their relationship. There’s some uh … Questionable Writing that I think they meant to use as comic relief but it just came across as gross (like some scenes in the season, the implied humor falls flat in the face of glaring and problematic issues), but, the effect is that she and Madani discover that it was meant to look like Frank killed those women, but Billy had executed them beforehand.

He wanted Frank to suffer. He knew that that’s a wound he’d struggle to heal from when they could only do so much damage to him physically (without killing him, and Billy didn’t want that).

Now, at this point, Frank’s TRIED to have a ‘normal life’ (time to segue into that real quick, because I have to break down episode one even if I’d rather claw out my eyes). Now, I firmly believe that he was doing what he did, behaving as he had because he doesn’t know how to heal. Frank’s never had the after. He says so himself in the end of season one. He’s scared. Where does he go? How does he navigate a life that no longer resembles his own? That’s a lot for a person to do by himself but Frank is headstrong, stubborn, and so he does it anyway.

PTSD (especially recurring, horrific trauma) can make people act… differently to say the least. One of the things associated with losing children, losing family, is that there’s no measure on how to cope with it. Frank saw a chance to feel normal and he took it, but he did himself (and Beth) a disservice. He’s a damaged man, and he was bound to bring all that accompanies it, to her doorstep. I’m not a fan of episode one but, surprisingly, it’s not that Frank hooks up with someone. Not that Frank tries to ground himself in a stranger, carve out a bit of an after. Which, again, people with PTSD don’t know how to open up to the people closest to them because they have the most to lose. If that person/those people can’t see through the fog of his struggle, the loss of them would be catastrophic. It’s infinitely easier to do that with a stranger. You have nothing to lose if they walk away.

My issue was him having sex with a woman named Beth, (his late wife being Maria Elizabeth) and that in the sex scenes they CONSTANTLY hone in on the wedding ring he’s wearing around his neck and he has flashbacks and it’s strange and mildly upsetting? It feels a bit like they were trying to show that Frank’s projecting (which he is) but they went about it all wrong from a narrative standpoint. And then, again, she gets shot - at least she doesn’t die, that would’ve solidified all of my fears - but that pain, that visual is still a raw wound for Frank and it’s what sets him back on the path of being the Punisher, with Amy by his side.

OKAY. BACK TO KASTLE. I have some issues with the scenes, but, again, I think it’s more based on the storytelling (which I’ll address at the end, independently), overall I just.. I love them deeply and profoundly but it definitely hurt to see Karen admit her feelings (again) and be rebuffed (again). NOT because Frank doesn’t feel the same way, not because, in an ideal world, Frank wouldn’t want to be with Karen. But because he doesn’t think he deserves it. He doesn’t think he gets to have a happy ending, period, which is stereotypical of a protagonist in the middle of their hero’s journey (we saw the same shit with Matt Murdock).

Karen straight up said she doesn’t want Matt. That she wants Frank (even if that means wanting and loving the Punisher too - which is new. Karen can’t deny who he is and I don’t think she’s trying to any longer). She told him to give loving someone other than a war, a chance (her. Love her, Frank. Choose her.) and watching her open herself up… pour out the contents of her heart only for him to give nothing (in that moment) in return??? That Shit Hurted 2.0. BUT, him saying ‘he doesn’t want that’, in reference to life with her, where they try together. Is just a continuation of the same thread they’ve shared from the get-go.

Frank continuing to push away the people he cares about most (Curtis, Karen, hell even Madani in the end), while they hold onto him tighter for it. That’s a pretty poignant and reoccurring theme in Marvel’s Netflix; that the heroes detach themselves. Think they don’t get a life like everybody else, and then have to get slapped in the face by the persistence of the people that love them.

He thanks her. That she waited by his bedside for him to wake up and was there for him when he did. He thanks her and there’s something broken in that, too. Like it’s him trying to say goodbye but he can’t find the words just right.

So Karen tells him to show her. AND MY HEART ! FUCKING ! STOPPED ! My gut knew we wouldn’t get a kiss, but this was clearly intended to be one, and Amy’s interruption is a semi-colon. It’s not their end. Just the middle. Which leads me to believe that, should we get a season three, Karen will continue to play a significant part in Frank’s life and they’ll take advantage of the fact that she’s no longer filming Daredevil, and her availability won’t be nearly as limited. Lightfoot and Jon both confirmed that they’d want more and more of her, always.

My take away: They are in love. They confessed it. It was as heartfelt and sad, as beautiful and ugly, as any of their scenes have ever been (And likely will be), but it didn’t feel like an end because it wasn’t. It’s ‘not right now’, if Frank had kissed her, if they’d pushed through and tried to be together then, it just wouldn’t work.

He’s in the middle of his story. That means there’s growth and learning yet to come and Karen deserves more than where he’s at, now. (Doesn’t stop me from writing a fuck ton of fanfic about it, though). He has to learn how to co-exist with the two halves of himself, and that’s something that needs to be done without throwing romance into the mix (but he really shouldn’t be alone, he should get help, and I really fucking hope they touch on that in season 3).

Karen’s also a big girl. She can make her choices and is fully aware of what they mean. I didn’t like that she was hurt, again, by someone she loves, again, and at the end of the day, Karen Page deserves to be loved deeply and entirely and Frank just can’t be that person right now. That doesn’t mean never (what’s the point of telling their story if it ended like that? Lightfoot might be on thin fucking ice but he wouldn’t do Karen OR Frank dirty like that).

The Punisher was written in three parts, the beginning, the middle, and the end (much like every other story, ever). Middle installments tend to be the most poorly received, which isn’t an issue in film franchises because of the revenue stream attached, but it DOES mean shows struggle in their Sophomore years. I like to use ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ as a point of reference, because it was almost universally hated upon release, and is now a cherished part of a dynastic film franchise. People cannot tell a story, or understand it, with only two acts of a three-part play so it can come off strangely, or the general tone can feel ‘off’, because there isn’t active resolution and we’re left with just as many questions as we entered with.

Ultimately, we need a season three to see how this plays out, (we DESERVE one, and a kiss, goddammit), but if this is where it ends. If this is the last time we see Karen and Frank, at least it’s ended knowing they’re in love, that it’s an indisputable fact of canon that cannot be ignored. Whatever that means going forward, we as a fan base can figure out in our own writing, conjecture, and in the beauty of all they’ve shared up until this point.

I am so profoundly happy with what we got, the tone of the season and everything else notwithstanding. I have issues, yes, of course, I do, but I’ve waited well over a year to see them share a screen and this is what my sleep-deprived brain could make of it.

Thank you all for reading, xo.

#kastle #kastle meta #my meta. #meta: the abyss. #tps2 #tps2 spoilers #long post for ts

[fakesam]

Stopped Procrastinating just in time for “Games of 2017” List

The worst year most of us could’ve imagined wouldn’t have been much worse than 2017. This year gave us the following: dystopian nightmares brought into reality by sycophants and cowards. Capitalistic greed reaching its inevitable, destructive conclusion. A bigoted baby as a president and given free reign by people who chose money and power over morals. Despair is constant. Hope is scarce. Next year might be worse. But at least we had good video games?

Referring to this year’s crop of games as simply “good” is like describing Ajit Pai’s face as “slightly punchable”. This was an all-time year for the medium, with a full catalog of memorable games that will be talking about for years to come. Every type of gamer was satiated. You could explore open worlds with diverse environments and secrets to discover. You could play tiny, affecting indie games that helped the expand the notion of what games are capable of. You could play games that leave you exasperated and angry at the depths publishers will steep to in order to extract maximum profits. There were more games than anyone could ever keep up with. At this time, I’ve only played seven games released in 2017, so rather than scoop the diamonds out of the muck, I decided to just rank the games I had the chance to play over the course of the year. Overall, these games are a good mix of brilliance and profound disappointment, which is a pretty good description for 2017 as a whole. If your favorite game isn’t on my list, It’s simply because that game sucks and you have bad taste. Here's to 2018!

8. Danger Zone

I wiped this game from my memory until I wrote most of this list. I reviewed the game when it was released over the summer. Go read that if you want more detailed exploration of my disappointment. There was a rumor floating around a couple weeks back about a remastered version of Burnout: Paradise. I will pray to whatever deity makes that happen.

7. Battlefront 2

Star Wars was the first thing I chose to love. My earliest childhood memory is watching the remastered original trilogy tapes. I convinced my mom to fake a doctor’s appointment to see Episode three on release day. My first viewing of The Force Awakens is the best theater experience I’ve ever had. Star Wars means a lot to me. This backstory is why I feel Battlefront 2’s total failure so heavily. It’s almost impressive how thoroughly EA managed to poison the well for three giant franchises (Mass Effect, Need For Speed, and Star Wars). But Battlefront 2 is the Mount Everest of completely preventable fuck-ups. Enough’s been written about the predatory design of the multiplayer and the various ways that segment of the game is awful. But the single-player is even more of a letdown.

Viewing the end of Return of the Jedi from the Empire’s perspective should be fascinating, the writing ruins the plot before it has a chance. The premise collapses under the simplest questioning. It’s taken as a given that Iden Versio’s reversal is inherently meaningful, but Battlefront 2 does little to justify this. Why does the destruction of her home planet upset her to the point of defection? What was her life like there? How is this the first time Iden has seen evidence of the Empire engaging in nefarious tactics? She goes from diehard Empire defender to joining their sworn enemy in the span of about ninety minutes. The gameplay is just as dull. Sometimes a space battle gets thrown in and those are enjoyable, but those sequences aren’t prevalent enough to elevate the dreck that surrounds them.

Rather than tell an original story that earns its own space in the canon, the campaign becomes an edition of Star Wars Madlibs. Heroes from the original trilogy show up constantly, for little rhyme or reason other than EA wanted to give players the chance to demo each character before, in an ideal world, you move on to the multiplayer you don’t want to play. This overwrought deference to the past is put into even more stark relief by what Rian Johnson did with The Last Jedi. The thing that makes that movie so great is the number of chances it takes to add to the universe in surprising ways, such as the casino planet full of war profiteers, or the quad-boobed slug seal monster that provides Luke Skywalker with delicious space milk (These points are equally important in my mind). Battlefront 2 had the opportunity to really show what it’s like to be indoctrinated in the ways of the Empire from the moment a person is born, and it chooses to do the exact opposite. Bummer.

6. Nier Automata

There’s a chasm of quality between Nier and Battlefront 2, but many people might be surprised to see Nier this low on my list. I really wanted to like Nier more than I currently do. Let me explain: I loved the way the game’s experiments with form and storytelling, treating each playthrough like a season of television. The commitment to world building all the way down to the mechanics of how you save the game is impressive. The list of side characters I’ve ever met who have affected me as much as Pascal is short. Every encounter with him left me wanting more. He’s the robot stepdad of your dreams.

But after playing through the game three times, the idea of roaming through the world destroying generic machine enemies for the 800th time fills me with dread. Nier Automata needs to be open world to get its ideas across. But the environments are very drab and crossing this overly vast expanse became very tiresome very quickly. You should’ve seen my face when I unlocked the ability to fast travel. Christmas presents don’t give me that much joy. The combat would’ve been described as uninspired ten years ago. My completionist streak is urging me to see the two endings I have yet to see, but the dozens of enemy mobs I have to shoot and slash to see it through actively impede me from doing so.

And it’s all in service of a story that, while filled with cool images and presented incredibly well, isn’t really tailored to my tastes. The way the machines and androids reckon with their autonomy is fascinating at times - some of the context given to boss battles in later playthroughs is heartbreaking, but Nier is ultimately another “robots discovering they have feelings” tale. The future horror stories that interest me the most - Black Mirror, Twilight Zone, The Fallout series - are more focused on how humanity reacts to such calamities. When you remove humans from the picture altogether, it becomes more of a science experiment, and I struggle to invest in that. Sorry!

5. Portal Quest

If you’ve never heard of this game, it’s a free-to-play mobile action-RPG. Its art style could accurately be described as ‘Tearaway on a lesser budget’. There are a lot of modes, most of which use timers and daily limits to control how you play them. One of these modes comes attached with a story, but it never calls attention to itself. The gameplay mostly resembles strategy games, in the sense that the player has very little control once combat actually starts. Portal Quest is deceptively simple enough to worm its way into the slivers of boredom that accent everyday life, where mobile games are at their most seductive. I play it in line at the grocery store. I played it while waiting for my screening of The Last Jedi to start. I play it when I’m avoiding hard/meaningful work during my small time on Earth. There are guilds you can join which add a substantial multiplayer component that plays on my deep-seated displeasure at letting other people down. I’m currently in a guild named after the devil. My old guild kicked me for reasons unknown and I was sincerely annoyed when I found out. I’m not making this game sound very good, am I?It’s probably because I’m so confused by it. Mobile games tend to be non-starters for me (I actually tried to look at my phone way less this year), and the only reason I downloaded this game at the suggestion of an app that claimed that credits I earned for using certain apps could eventually be used as currency for many online marketplaces. I didn’t stick with that very long. And now we’re here. Is Portal Quest’s standing on this list a mediocre joke from an unfunny man? It might be. Did I place this above Nier Automata just to mess with that game’s passionate fanbase? Possibly. Do I feel good about placing a mobile game this high on a game of the year list? Not especially. I dunno man. It’s the one app that keeps me checking my phone more than any other. It’s free on the Android store (I assume it’s playable on iPhones, but I also don’t feel like checking?). Go check it out.

4. Fifa 18

When it comes to sports games, I don’t ask for much. The FIFA franchise has reached a baseline level of good that means that EA would have to seismically screw up to keep me from playing the newest rendition for forty hours at the minimum. Career mode dominates my time in this genre, and FIFA 18 was the year that this mode finally got the overhaul that’s been needed for years.The AI tactics still aren’t where I want them to be, and their version of Jordan Henderson continues to look more “Vegas wax figure” than man. But these details are small in the grand scheme. It’s the only reality where I can see Liverpool not shoot themselves in the feet, hands, and superfluous third nipple to win the Premier League. The Journey is also the best story in a sports game, and it’s not even close. That’s worth something.

3. Persona 5

Following Persona 4 is basically an impossible job. That game was a comet across the sky that dropped from the heavens and into my heart. I’ve watched the endurance run multiple times, played through the game twice on my PS2, and played through most of the game again on my Vita (Rest in peace.). Whatever Atlus followed that with would be a comedown. It’s definitely colored how some of the characters and the story affected me. The crew in Persona 4 was a much cooler hang than the Phantom Thieves were, and I missed some of the small-town intimacy of Inaba. But when taken on its own merits, Persona 5 is a spectacular RPG. It just plays so well. Every annoying quirk from Persona 4 was dealt with in a way that kept dungeon crawling from feeling too stale. Coercing enemies to become your persona was a surprisingly engrossing tactic. Being able to switch out team members on the fly is a game changer. I was able to capture hearts in a couple in-game days and focus on the social interactions that make this series so special. I eventually grew to love this version of Tokyo, and realized its sense of big city culture shock was a feature, not a bug. And no discussion of Persona 5 would be complete without commending the game for its impeccable style. It’s not quite Persona 4, but it never could be.

2. Horizon: Zero Dawn

Robot Dinosaurs! Is there a more attractive combination of words in the English language? No one expected Guerrilla Games, a developer who had previously been such purveyors of sludgy monochrome shooters with the Killzone franchise, to suddenly discover the entirety of the color spectrum and create a universe that pulls from the earliest parts of human civilization and far-flung science fiction pontifications. Fewer expected that such a fusion would be so successful. It’s been a while since I fell for an open world this hard. I had to see everything this world had to offer, and document it via Horizon’s photo mode. Watching these machines go through the motions of real animal behaviors became a regular past time (Although it still frustrates me that I couldn’t make the machines fight each other more easily).

Horizon is iterative more than innovative, but I enjoyed playing it much more than the recent Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed. I usually hate bow and arrows, but I loved how the weapons felt in this game. The moment to moment story about the three tribes was just okay, but uncovering the mysteries of the world and how it became this way kept me going until the end. They even made audio logs a powerful storytelling device again. One of 2017’s few pleasant surprises.

1.Super Mario Odyssey

Nintendo is a company defined by reinvention. Their consoles and games refuse to follow market trends and exist in their own world, for better or worse. The last couple years had skewed towards the worse end of that dichotomy.  I’ll die on “The Wii U wasn’t actually that bad” island, but the system was still a commercial disaster. Nintendo’s genius is singular and vital to the industry, but, outside of Splatoon, there had been few examples of their creativity delivering on its potential. It was fair to question whether the company could make their increasingly fleeting moments of brilliance slightly less fleeting. But Nintendo tends to show out when their backs are against the wall, and this year proved that axiom true yet again. The Switch is the great console the Wii U should’ve been, and the games released for it are good and interesting in surprising ways. I was excited for Super Mario Odyssey by the time I heard the phrase “New Donk City”, but by the time I started playing it, I was feeling full up on open-ended sandbox games with dozens of hours of side content and an overarching story that only unfolds at my pace. Over 200 hours of Persona 5, Nier, and Horizon will change a man. Nintendo showed why that sentiment was false. It wasn’t the genre. It was the imagination.

Each kingdom is an intricately designed diorama that constantly throws new things at you while continuing to be a peerless platformer we’ve come to know and love an indulging fan nostalgia along the way. There doesn’t seem to be any idea that wasn’t met with anything less than an affirmative “hell yes!” The childish exuberance that courses through most of Nintendo’s best work somehow becomes more surreal and gleefully discordant as Mario explores more and more worlds that are completely alien to him. Super Mario Odyssey has so many moments that make me smile involuntarily, from the hundreds of moons I’ve found due to blind faith in Nintendo’s design process to the NES-style levels that somehow exist in the world without a loading screen, to the objectively perfect festival scene in New Donk City. How many other games would reward you for sitting with a lonely man on a bench? This game is so damn weird, I love it. I’m not usually inclined to obsessively mine every bit of minutiae out of a game, but I definitely plan on finding every moon and purple coin that’s evaded me so far. I’m 600 moons in, and I’m still nowhere close to being sick of Super Mario Odyssey. This game is special.

#games of 2017 #writing

[humanegardener]

To save wild nature, we have to attend to human nature, too. Here’s how to garden for all your neighbors, domesticated and otherwise.

Chairs, paths and other simple cues add a human element to our roadside wildlife habitat. (Photos above by Nancy Lawson)

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]ears ago, a colleague was relaxing in his backyard when he heard a noise. Upon investigation, he discovered a stranger heading through an open window and toward his couch. It wasn’t a traditional home invasion, though. The squatter had taken one look at the property and assumed it was unoccupied: Why else, he reasoned, would the yard be so “overgrown” with wild plants?

This was not the scenario I’d envisioned when my workmate first asked for wildlife gardening advice. While offering ideas and plants from my habitat, I’d assured him he’d see butterflies and other animals taking up residence. It never occurred to me that his efforts would also encourage fellow humans to climb through his windows.

The problem was that the new gardener had implemented only half my suggestions, putting his plants directly into the old lawn that sloped to a busy sidewalk. He didn’t feel like bothering with part 2, which would have involved digging out the turf around his plantings or smothering it with newspaper and mulch. Instead, he let that old lawn grow high. The result was not the layered native plant garden I had imagined but a smattering of wildflowers engulfed in out-of-place fescues and invasives gone to seed. (Adding to the abandoned-home effect was an ascetic and nearly opposite approach indoors, where all walls, tables and shelves were bare.)

Though the front-yard planting was partly intentional, it didn’t look that way to other people. Without “cues to care”—a phrase coined by landscape architect Joan Iverson Nassauer to describe visual hints of human stewardship—the property resembled an abandoned lot or roadside ditch. While I find such free-range, self-willed patches beautiful because of their high value to wildlife, most suburbanites accustomed to mowed-down yards and sterile office parks see them as aberrant.

“Cues to care,” a concept first described in the 1990s, refers to visual signals of human intention. At Molly McElwee’s home in Catonsville, Md., a Baywise certification sign alerts passersby to the landscape’s ecological purpose. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

As an environmentalist and wildlife advocate, I alternate between pushing for the world as it should be and accepting modest improvements to the one we’ve already created. Knowing how important a “messy” garden is to animals large and small, I’m often tempted to blow off the mass appeal of homogenized landscapes entirely. But if my quest to help nature doesn’t also attend to human nature, I risk something greater than the encroachment of an intruder just looking for a place to sleep: I risk losing the chance to influence the broader community. Research shows that neighborhood norms strongly influence landscape choices, and if well-maintained ecological gardens are more prevalent, they may have positive ripple effects across a community.

In replacing lawn with this new pathway to my front door, I’m nurturing an inviting space for neighbors and friends as well as habitat for wildlife . (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

And helping wildlife and meeting community standards aren’t mutually exclusive goals.  “For way too  long, I’ve heard from plenty of gardeners that the reason they don’t want to use native plants is that they’re messy-looking, and that’s just not true,” says James Faupel, the restoration ecology coordinator at Missouri Botanical Garden’s Litzsinger Road Ecology Center. “The wildlife will still use all these native plants, even if we design the plantings in a more traditional fashion.”

Most of my own 2-acre habitat is less of a garden now and more of a nature preserve. But in the areas of the front yard that are visible to neighbors, I put a bit of thought into appealing to the senses of the human animal as well. I know there’s no pleasing some people, like the couple in the cul-de-sac who cut down all their trees. But many more neighbors are open and at least mildly curious about this little wildlife paradise, stopping now to inquire about the flowers, admire the bees and butterflies, and even ask if I have any extra plants they can take home to their yards.

By incorporating the following visual signals of intentionality and care that I’ve learned from landscape designers and artistic friends over the years, I’ve been able to ensure we can fit in with our neighbors, both wild and otherwise, as well as inspire the creation of more oases for animals.

Let plants lead by example.

Winterberries are more palatable after freeze-thaw cycles, so they brighten the landscape late into the season before finally serving as emergency food  for wildlife.  (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

When a highway planting of winterberry hollies bore beautiful red fruit, excited homeowners called the Delaware Center for Horticulture for more information about the stunning shrub. The response surprised University of Delaware professor Sue Barton. “By planting something on the roadside,” she marvels, “I could make a bigger impact on people than anything I could ever write or lecture about.”

Long after the leaves have fallen off the winterberries, a mockingbird guards his fruit. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

Adding native plants with colorful fruit or flowers to your own front yard can produce similar results, providing priceless PR for wildlife gardens while also nourishing their visitors. Those winterberries burn bright through much of the cold season because they become more palatable after a few freeze-thaw cycles; in late winter when other food is scarce, the fruits are emergency food for birds and mammals. In the summer and fall garden, plants that serve as both wildlife feeders and people pleasers include mountain mints, Joe Pye weeds, milkweeds, bonesets, coneflowers and many other native wildflowers.

Blooming as early as March and as late as November, the native coral honeysuckle vine (Lonicera sempervirens) invites our neighbors to admire its lush blooms and hummingbirds to feast. Hummingbird moth caterpillars rely on the foliage, and chipmunks and Eastern comma butterflies enjoy the fruit. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

Frame the view.

Layered plantings are essential for creating wildlife habitat, drawing much more life than the large lawn across the street from us. They also add sloping lines for human eyes to follow. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

Think about how you and your family might use the space, and design your wildlife plantings accordingly, suggests Faupel. Look out the window to see the garden from another perspective, and consider where you’ll need pathways for walking and access to beds. “It doesn’t have to be this big, beautiful blueprint kind of drawing. It can be a lot simpler,” says Faupel. “But if you start with that design element from the get-go, it’s going to look a lot more intentional to people. They will see that you are trying; they will see a more layered effect.”

The view from Molly McElwee’s front door is open and formal but also overflowing with wildlife-friendly plants. In addition to natives, she includes more conventional garden plants that are recognizable to neighbors, a strategy that Faupel employs in his home garden as well. Read more about the McElwee garden here. (Photo by Molly McElwee)

Mulling over plant choices and layout also helps ensure you have enough food and shelter for different types of wildlife throughout the seasons. Habitat hedgerows provide winter shelter and summer nesting sites for birds and small mammals while conveying neatness and order—traits considered desirable in the landscape since ancient Roman times. Rows of low-growing native flowers, grasses, sedges and ferns help define the edges while nourishing bees, butterflies, and many other animals. A mowed strip along the road in front of all these plants “frames patches of greater biodiversity with clear signs of human intention,” Nassaeur wrote, and makes unconventional plantings seem familiar.

A hedge keeps our streetside planting more uniform and provides cover for birds and rabbits, But it also creates a screen that helps me privately experiment with cultivating wilder spaces. This one started with a planting of red buckeyes, grey dogwoods, ferns and other native groundcovers, and soon enough staghorn sumacs and Eastern red cedars made themselves at home, too.

Plant in drifts.

Large drifts of just a few low-growing native plants—Pennsylvania sedge (Carex pensylvanica), roundleaf ragwort (Packera obovata), and sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis)—provide habitat within the context of a formal garden at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Shaw Nature Reserve. (Photo courtesy James Faupel)

Too often gardeners treat a trip to the nurseries or native plant sales like a run on Filene’s Basement and fill their cars with anything that catches their fancy, only to get home and wonder where the heck they’ll put everything. (I’m guilty as charged.) Avoid the “collector mentality,” advises Faupel, because it almost always results in a hodgepodge that’s confusing not just to human eyes but also to pollinators. Many native bees spend their time gathering pollen only from certain species, and even those who are less discriminating can’t afford to expend too much energy flying around in search of more flowers. To create a planting that’s readable and functional for both human and wild neighbors, aim to start with a dozen plants, recommends Faupel: three that bloom in early spring, three in late spring/early summer, three in mid-summer, and three in fall.

An exuberant groundcover, golden ragwort (Packera aurea), helps tie together multiple gardens across my front yard, including in this grove of sassafras trees edged with sedges next to the driveway. After flowering, it stays evergreen nearly all year. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

Many gardeners pull fleabane (Erigeron spp.) despite its value to bees, rabbits and groundhogs. Two years ago, I moved some from the pathways to create a clump at the edge of the rain garden, where it’s still free to reseed. The large drift makes the planting look intentional, elevating the status of a native species often dismissed as a “weed.” (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

As a longtime home gardener before I started working in ecological landscaping, I know how expensive it can be to buy multiples of a single plant at retail prices. Many native wildflowers are easy to grow from seed, and I also encourage gardeners to allow as many plants as possible to spread naturally in their gardens; you can always transplant or give away extras if your space fills up. An increasing number of companies—from Izel Plants to Missouri Wildflowers Nursery—offer small plants or plugs that can be much more affordable; check with your state native plant or botanical society for regional recommendations.

Create pathways.

Taming the wild: Human-friendly paths define the wilder plantings at the McElwee residence. DeKay’s snakes like to hang out under the arborvitae to the right of the milkweed. (Photo by Molly McElwee)

Paths through our meadow enticed our niece to go exploring on her own. When she returned after spending some time under a tulip poplar at the bottom of the slope, she said, “I found a special place!” (Photo by Will Heinz)

Though I’ve spent my whole life yearning to be surrounded by plants whenever possible, some people have a more claustrophobic reaction to lush vegetation. Impenetrable plantings can exacerbate fears of nature and feelings of separation from the natural world. Walkways winding through gardens have the opposite effect, inviting interaction with the landscape. When my niece was 7 years old and spotted a mowed path through our meadow, she fired up her wheelchair and took off by herself to explore, finding a new favorite spot under a tree all on her own.

Wildlife follow routines, too, traveling the same paths every day. By edging those paths with vigorous plants they can nibble, including goldenrod, sassafras and black raspberry (above), we’ve fed deer and other mammals enough to deter them from other plants. I also mix in scented natives they don’t prefer, including the lavender-colored wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) shown in the planting below. (Photos by Nancy Lawson)

Paths are just as well-trodden by wildlife, including deer. You can use this knowledge to help design a space where you and the herbivores can more easily coexist. When staghorn sumacs, ticktrefoils and goldenrods volunteer along pathways, I leave them, knowing they’ll get browsed soon enough. If certain plants are growing near a path that I want to protect from browsing (such as tasty Joe Pye weed, whose flowers will later feed butterflies and bees), I often add scented native plants in front of them—mountain mints, monardas, blue mistflowers, bonesets—to create an effective deterrent.

Use wood and rocks as habitat-rich natural sculptures.

When a neighbor cut down trees, my husband placed pieces of the trunk around the gardens. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

Lining pathways and beds with rocks or branches creates navigational cues as well as hiding places for amphibians and other small animals. “I’m a huge fan of using found objects within the property,” says ecological landscape designer Jesse Elwert Peters of Jessecology, based in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. “The land that we live on is really rocky. Whenever we’re gardening, we dig up huge boulders.” Peters artfully arranges these unearthed treasures among plants.

Peekaboo! Leave fallen logs, and many animals will find them. (Photo by James Faupel)

Tree snags, logs, and pithy stalks are essential to cavity-nesting bees. (Photo by James Faupel)

At the Litzsinger Road Ecology Center, a fallen log provided a home this summer for broad-headed skinks, and Faupel also watched a mason bee checking out a tree snag as a nesting site. “It was just going around to every single little hole, stopping and seeing if it could fit, trying to find the perfect-sized hole,” he says. “These things are incredibly important, and it just goes to show you how many things wildlife are using. … A lot of people complain about carpenter bees in their home, going into porches and thing like that. Well, it’s because they don’t have anywhere else to go. We remove any kind of habitat for them.”

Logs and branches line beds and create art pieces in my habitat, where I sometimes hang bird baths from the dead limbs. (Photos by Nancy Lawson)

Our stumps are home to woolly bear caterpillars. PIleated woodpeckers snack on beetles and ants living in the decaying wood. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

By placing a bat house atop a tree snag, Maryland artist Melinda Byrd created a sculptural habitat. Though bats have yet to roost, woodpeckers have excavated holes in the dead trunk, building homes for nesting chickadees and bluebirds. Stumps in my own garden offer shelter to woolly bear caterpillars, one of whom crawled into a crevice last year to make his home for the winter.

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Bluebirds and chickadees nested in this snag following excavation by woodpeckers. Growing a vine on the snag would also create a natural trellis. (Photos by Melinda Byrd)

Add functional ornaments, and have a seat—or two.

While visiting the native plant area at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s Gardens at Elm Bank, I felt right at home. But for those intimidated by tall plants, a trellis and seat made of natural materials provides a calming, “we-meant-to-do-this” effect. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

A fountain by our walkway pleases people and birds. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

Arbors and trellises suggest a planned landscape in addition to offering support for climbing native vines. Birdbaths and water dishes on the ground are also recognizable cues of human influence. “It looks really nice, and it’s really a kind thing to do for wildlife,” Peters says. Even the suggestion of human habitation can ground a garden and help people feel more in their element. Adding chairs and tables near unconventional plantings lets them know that they, too, have an open invitation.

A chair among the grapevines, wild senna, trumpet creeper and hickory trees gives me a secret spot to watch wildlife without disturbing them. While I don’t expect anyone else to get this cozy with my plants, this simple addition to an otherwise “wild” spot never fails to inspire expressions of delight when visitors come upon it. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

From this roadside vantage point in our informal front-yard garden, we see squirrels peel walnuts, hummingbirds drink from  cardinal flowers, monarchs lay eggs on milkweed, and neighbors out for a walk who stop to chat. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

In Sue Arnold’s Indianapolis garden, the backyard is also a front yard of sorts, visible to other neighbors who live around the lake. A seating area is all it takes to remove any sense of randomness from the natural plantings of grasses and wildflowers. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

Post signs of the times.

Not long after I installed my Monarch Waystation sign, a male hatched in the milkweed patch and sat for a spell on the sign to dry his wings. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

When my signs became unruly, my husband and father conspired to create a totem for them, complete with a carved bird my dad made for the top—whose shape a visiting reporter deemed “half-cardinal, half-kookaburra.” Several neighbors have inquired about where they can find such signs for their own gardens. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

“Pollinator Habitat,” “Monarch Waystation,” “Humane Backyard,” “Bat Friendly”—at my house I refer to these signs as my 37 pieces of flair, but they’re more meaningful than the tacky pins Jennifer Aniston’s waitressing character is forced to wear in the film Office Space. Habitat signs from organizations like the Xerces Society, the Humane Society of the United States, the Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Save Lucy Campaign let your neighbors know your property is in transition to a more life-sustaining landscape. It even helped Texas master gardener Mary Karish fend off misguided demands to replace her garden with grass, “making it very difficult for the HOA to overturn what the city thought was a great thing,” she says.

Driving by a house in Newark, Delaware, last year, I was delighted to find a garden packed with native plants. At the corner of the property, in easy view of passersby, a sign from a nearby Audubon chapter explained the importance of the garden to birds. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

You can contextualize your efforts by posting explanations of the importance of dead wood, available from the Cavity Conservation Initiative, and signs declaring your yard “pesticide-free.” These visual anchors can also help you spread the seeds of an idea—along with the seeds of your milkweed and other wildlife-friendly plants—far beyond your own habitat.

RELATED STORY: A Small Garden with a Big Heart

Wild by Design To save wild nature, we have to attend to human nature, too. Here's how to garden for all your neighbors, domesticated and otherwise.

#ecological design #wildlife garden

[marcusssanderson]

What Higher Education Owes Its Students to Achieve Success

Higher education has a value problem. What was meant as the gateway to social opportunity and higher earning power has seemingly been treading water for decades. The student community owes more money in educational loans and interest today than at any point in history — but you may feel less and less like you’re getting something worthwhile for your money.

Now’s the time to change things. Being honest with yourself about what you should receive in return for your time and money should turn into a national priority. With an eye toward greater and wider success for all, here are ten proposals for what the modern college owes each one of its students.

1. An Engaged and Supportive Career Center

Attending college is an investment in your future. So why does it seem like career services often feel like an afterthought? Some schools make more of an effort than others. And some students are more interested in taking advantage than others.

But it’s probably fair to say that most colleges don’t excel at impressing just how important proactive career planning is. It’s a shame because an engaged and supportive career center is how students find out about those opportunities in the first place. Colleges should invest much more money and talent into their career services, resources and personnel.

It’s tempting to spend three and a half years at college and assume the career thing will take care of itself. But it doesn’t, really — at least, not for most of us. This is the vitally important “last mile” of the college experience.

But higher education is currently failing a lot of people who need practical guidance on seeking a rewarding career in their field. Between 2010 and 2016, 61 percent of college students visited their school’s career center. Regrettably, only 17 percent found the services “very helpful.” Another 17 percent said they did not find the experience helpful at all.

2. Required, in-Person Advisor Meetings Before Course Scheduling

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when choosing classes. Advisors are “humanizing” individuals who can help make the opportunities college represents a little more real, practical and relatable for students.

In-person meetings with advisors should be mandatory whenever course scheduling season comes around again. Students deserve somebody who understands their strengths, weaknesses and hopes for the future and is “in their corner.”

Ideally, these advisors would be professors and professionals in that student’s department who can give rigorously practical advice about the next steps to take in an unfolding educational career. That kind of insight is absolutely priceless and helps students get far more out of their education than they would have otherwise.

3. Mentoring Programs

The benefits of mentoring programs aren’t often what you think they are. Sure — mentors are incredible resources when it comes to imparting knowledge and hard skills. But it’s also about networking — or “professional socialization.” It’s about opening doors.

Multiple surveys of graduate-level students indicated that those who developed mentoring relationships with faculty were more likely to find themselves in a tenure-track career later on and enjoyed greater access to administration-level job opportunities.

Moreover, students with mentoring relationships are more likely to receive financial assistance, more productive in terms of research and publication and even stand a greater chance of reducing the time required to earn their degree.

4. Continual Self-Improvement

Colleges aren’t always willing to perform critical self-assessment which is a big part of the reason why the actual value of a college education has not kept pace with its cost.

Colleges have every reason in the world to take a deep dive into the long-term impact and effectiveness of their course catalogs. That means using the data at their disposal to see whether students are engaged with their chosen programs and whether those programs actually translate into real-world success.

Big data stands a good chance of helping colleges engage in this kind of institutional soul-searching. There are several examples of what’s possible when colleges gather insights and study patterns using student and faculty assessments, regular reviews of student engagement and results in individual programs.

Professionals in the workforce are well accustomed to undergoing periodic reviews of their performance. Colleges shouldn’t be any different, and modern data gathering removes any excuse.

5. At Least a Surface-Level Education in Personal Finance

We’re setting young people up for failure every time one of them makes it into the workforce without learning what a Roth IRA or a mutual fund is. Unless we choose to attend college to study the financial sciences specifically, there aren’t many universities that require students to take classes in practical personal finance.

A robust and practical education on surviving adulthood with our financial dignity intact should turn into an ideal core curriculum in college that balances the pupil’s chosen fields of study.

6. Affordable and Diverse Study Abroad Options

You might’ve attended a college yourself that required students to study abroad for a semester. Or maybe you know somebody who did. The value of this kind of transcontinental education is difficult to express in terms of a cold cost-benefit analysis. But imparting a sense of worldliness is one of the greatest gifts a college can give.

In an educational setting, “worldliness” involves learning communication skills that apply across cultures. It also means learning to place one’s home country in context with a quickly globalizing world.

Visiting another country is an immersive learning experience that makes the retention of new skills dynamic and exciting. But on a more subjective level, it also opens our eyes to how the peoples of the world live and think.

7. More Robust Retention Programs

It’s easy to take for granted that, once a student enrolls in college, they’re going to stick with the program, the school or even higher education in general, for the full course.

In 2013, the National Center for Education Statistics looked at 1.5 million first-time college enrollments to better understand student retention. They found that less than 40 percent of enrolled students successfully earned a bachelor’s degree in four years. And of the nearly 900,000 students included in the study from two-year schools, only about one-quarter of them earned a certificate or degree.

So what’s missing?

For a start, although we tell ourselves higher education is for self-sufficient, put-together adults, there’s quite a lot more that the modern college could do to seek out and support students who are at risk of dropping out and giving up.

Modern technologies such as predictive modeling can help schools identify red flags such as patterns of absenteeism, lackluster math and writing skills, falling grades and changes in behavior.

8. More Distance Learning Opportunities

There has been a well-observed increase in the number of adult and “non-traditional” students enrolling in colleges over the last several decades. What this teaches us is that the “quintessential” college experience — dorm living, meal plans and campus life — isn’t as “necessary” these days.

Accommodating people from different walks of life and those who got a later start in higher education is absolutely essential. One way to cast as wide a net as possible is to broaden the types and availability of distance learning courses.

Since adults are likelier than ever to pursue degrees later in life, colleges increasingly owe their students as many options as possible for earning those degrees. Even many Ivy League schools are recognizing this and finding new ways to help adults work education into their already busy lives.

9. An Education on Basic Civics

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni published research in 2015 with the goal of better understanding the average student’s level of civic knowledge. Among the 55 top-tier schools they looked at, more than 80 percent of college seniors would have failed a high-school-level civics exam.

Politics is thorny and controversial. But maybe the problem lies in assuming this is always true. And perhaps things would get a little less controversial, and consensus a little easier to assemble, if we didn’t let our students stop learning about how democracy works, how government functions and how taxes get spent when they’re still in grade school.

10. A Lower Financial Barrier

Private and public colleges have only gotten more expensive and exclusive over the years. Thankfully, we’ve learned a few things about college inclusivity thanks to the handful of colleges who go out of their way to enroll a student body that more closely resembles the cultural and financial makeup of the country in general. What’s hanging in the balance here is the very idea of upward mobility in modern society.

When we rank American universities using a combination of their financial inclusivity and their students’ “mobility rates” — that is, their likelihood to elevate themselves to the next rung of the socioeconomic ladder — you end up with a list that doesn’t even remotely resemble most of the college rankings you’ve seen.

Compared with Ivy League schools, more affordable and less-selective schools — those who admit more students from lower income brackets — rank far higher when it comes to social mobility.

Cal State Los Angeles, City College of New York and UT Rio Grande Valley admit 20 percent of their student body (compared with Harvard’s 4.5 percent, for example) from the bottom fifth of the economic scale.

Building a Better Graduate

It’s not just about earning power, obviously. Everything we’ve talked about here today is another component in helping to build a worldlier and more confident graduate — and a more collaborative and harmonious world.

The post What Higher Education Owes Its Students to Achieve Success appeared first on Everyday Power Blog.