#and separating the season into two antagonists was a mistake

[let-us-cultivate-our-garden]

Could you elaborate on your comment on Discord? I would specifically like to know why The Owl House is bad at consistency:

This is Dana [Terrace]'s first time as a showrunner (granted [Gravity Falls] was also Alex Hirsche's [sic] first show as well). But all of the writing mistakes we have talked about point to a team that struggled with basic world-building, character dynamics, consistency, etc.

So this one's going to be a two-fer since the questions are similar.

First off, writing in film and television is always a team effort; writers plan, storyboard, revise, edit, and bounce ideas off each other when creating the script. Second, any first time show runner will have difficulties helming their show by virtue of being inexperienced. That's not indicative of them being a bad writer but a novice one.

I don't believe it's helpful to classify anyone as a "good" or "bad" writer based on one piece of work because even a world-famous and world-renowned author can produce a dud. That's just the nature of the creative process.

So when you ask what went wrong in the writing process you really have to know what that specific writing process was. For TOH, I don't know what that was; looking at the list of episodes and the staff responsible, it looks like they pretty much had the same roster of people throughout the run of the show. So any inconsistencies in the plot, character development, etc. cannot be blamed on a changing staff.

If I were to hazard a guess as to why the show is so structurally flawed, I would guess it's due to a lack of discipline. TOH likes to speed run through character arcs to get to the big dramatic moments and not really put in the work to get there. Just look at how quickly Luz and Amity went from rivals to OTP in half a season or how quickly Lilith was forgiven despite being a major antagonist for pretty much all of season 1. They wanted to get to Lumity and Cool Aunt Lilith right away without putting in the work to get there.

And yes, the cancellation did play a role in the show speed running through season 3 HOWEVER the writers also added in the Collector as a secondary antagonist without dealing with Belos first. The result was a character that took a lot of time away from established characters and plot lines and his own subplot resulted in his character being stripped of anything interesting or unique and just another Sad Boy for the audience to coddle.

Again, this is due to lack of discipline and wanting to cram characters and concepts into the show without stopping to think if it is beneficial to the overall story or not.

In the end, what separates a "good" writer from a "bad" one is that good writers will acknowledge their mistakes and fix them while poor ones keep repeating the same mistakes or make even bigger ones.

I hope this answers your question because without knowing how the writers chose to approach their story and why they made the decisions they did, I can only point out the flaws and what that means for the show as a whole.

#asks #the owl house #toh critical #toh criticism

[flowerycoffin]

Stella is bad written villain

I will be honest here - I don’t like the direction “Helluva Boss” series is going and I have a lot to cover, so I’ll start with the most controversial subject in this fandom right now… Stella character.

Trigger warning: I’m going to cover various forms of abuse, so if you are sensitive to those topic please consider if you want to read this.

Spoilers to: “Helluva Boss”(duh), “The Help”, “The Case Study of Vanitas”, “The Owl House”, “Prince of Egypt”, “Pręgi”, “Jujutsu Kaisen”

Sorry for any writting mistakes in advance :^)

Season two came out and fandom is on fire again and I will give a bit more fuel to this. I want to show that Stella fails as a villain, abuser and character all together. I will divide it into few parts so it’ll be easier to separate my points:

1. Stella as abuser in media.

2. How Stella was written in season one.

3. How Stella was written in first episode of season two.

4. What is even Stellas goal?

5. Closing thoughts.

STELLA AS ABUSER IN MEDIA

Let’s start from something simple - What even is an abuser?

Definitions by Cambridge Dictionary

As we can see we definitely can call her an abuser as a person - she is harming Stolas emotionaly and tries to hurt physicaly. No doubt about that. But she is a character of fiction and that means that her behaviour can be used as abuser who is a tool or abuser who is an antagonist. Her behaviour must have a purpose in the story. Let me show how by storytelling point of view those two roles work:

ABUSER AS A TOOL

When I think about this kind of abuser in fiction my first thought is Leroy - Minnies Jackson husband from movie “The Help”

This shot is the only time we can hear him. We don’t see a face, hand or even a shadow. Only panicking Minny and a thrown pot. And that is perfectly enough, because his purpose is not to be relevant to a story but to show one of many obstacles which our heroines have to face in everyday life. Leroy is a tool showing how at the very beggining maid despite having sassy personality is not strong enough to fight husband and system she’s trapped in but at the end of the film we are told that she got a divorce symbolising better changes and finding inner strenght in her.

Another example of abuser meant to be a tool is Veronica de Salvo from “The Case Study of Vanitas”

This time we can see abusers face and have more screen time with her than Leroy, yet girl is still a tool in the story showing a chierarchy in vampire world and destructive power future opponents can have. Not only that; she torments mentally her younger sister (side character) making her fall deeper into depression and guilt trip. Veronica is rotten to the core, having one of the most twisted moral spines I've ever witnessed and yet I doesn’t demand her further exploring. Show wouldn’t change much without her yet having Veronica as a tool to show how cruel vampire world is, is working perfectly.

So what is abuser when used as a tool?

- abuser is showing a world building,

- abuser is an obstacle,

- abuser is not related to a main plot,

- abuser non deliberate cause of characters actions.

And who is abuser used as a tool?

- abuser is one-dimentional,

- abuser doesn’t need a reason why,

- abuser is symbolism.

ABUSER AS AN ANTAGONIST

In order to show what I have on mind I’ll start with one person Stella is mostly compared to - Odalia Blight

Odalia is actively gaslighting her family and use their abilities for her own gain, but what is making her a villain and not a tool is being an active thread to our main protagonists. She is abusing not only side characters but also main cast and is a deliberate cause of heroes troubles. On top of that her behaviour and goal have an impact on the story. Yeah let's talk about a goal - Odalia is not evil for sake of being evil; she is evil because she wants her corporation to grow and her family name to be known by mass. It’s a good reason for villain - she’s not a bad person because she’s a bad person, she’s a bad person because her goal makes her blind on other factors.

Another good example of abuser being an antagonist is Ramzes from “Prince of Egypt”. No wait, hear me out-

Ramzes taking role of the pharaon in the same time is active counterpant in Jews slavery which is (who would’ve thought) a form of abuse and torments his adoptive brother mentaly while tormenting others physicaly even more than before, because sibling wanted to free those people and break a chain of hatred and misfortune. Ramzes’s goal is to make even greater country than his father did with hands of slaves and his reason of thinking it’s right thing to do it the way he does is living in a broken system which empathises slavery and lack of consequences from pharaon side.

So what is abuser as an antagonist?

- abuser is a thread to main protagonists,

- abuser have an active role in the story,

- abuser is a deliberate cause of characters actions.

And who is abuser as an antagonist?

- abuser have a reason why,

- abuser is character with personality outside being evil,

- abuser is enemy to a main cast.

What kind of abuser Stella is then? She sure does have an active role in the story hiring an assasin and is a cause of Stolas and Octavias mental states and actions; Stella is also Stolas enemy making a thread to his life. That should mean she is an antagonist right? But Stella doesn’t seem to have personality outside being awful wife trope and her reason for her attitude towards Stolas is unclear. Also as in season one a reason to kill her husband is slightly on point, while in season two it doesn’t make sense anymore and we’ll see why in a bit. If you decide to make abuser your antagonist you must take into consideration why they became the way they are, no shortcuts.

I remember when one movie was showed to my class at sex education lessons. It was awful, ‘cause it glorified romance with dangerous and easily thrown into physical abuse individual. Thanks to this essay I watched it again :’^) and it wasn’t that bad :^D until glorifying molestation romance plot came in :^[. The movie I’m talking about is called “Pręgi” (”Stripes”) and I’m mentioning this because “Pręgi” is telling hurtful story about domestic abuse and it’s outcome (also throwing at viewer sex-assaulting girl but it’s not about her thankfully).

 We have not one but two abusers as antagonists (both men, one being a main character so more like abuser as protagonist but ssshhh) and one abuser as a tool (a woman). This film can show how every of antagonists have layers, reasons, motivations and different emotions. Something which Stella have none of but sure resembles the only tool-abuser whom doesn’t have any other personality trait besides passive-aggressiveness and no reason for being awful human being beside drinking too much wine. Again - if you put abuser into role of the antagonist, abusers personality can’t be just a plain angry caricature. This is mane weakness of Stellas character - she doesn’t have one! Thats why she fails as both abuser and character.

HOW STELLA WAS WRITTEN IN SEASON ONE

First time we can see Stella’s behaviour is in episode 2 and we are getting introduced by this scene:

We can see she’s pretty self-centred taking a whole sheet around her and probably done with parenting (being woken up by a toddler after whole day of taking care of them ain’t a great thing, trust me). This doesn’t tell us much; just that she’s probably selfish, that’s all. Than the next time we see her we have a small time jump to the present day, but before this we get little, yet informative quote from Stolas during his lullaby

Yes, those are YouTube subtitles, I was too lazy to add them myself.

“I used to think love would be fun” - this can indicate that marriage even if arranged could be merry at first or that Stolas had other potential partners before Stella. Anyhow that means that their marriage is slowly falling apart or something is not like it used to be.

Now to the time jump-

Stella finds out her husband cheated on her with lower class. Don’t want to play devils advocate here but anyone would probably react similar way after finding out they were cheated on. She seems to be the most angry at the fact that a person Stolas cheated with was an imp (the lowest class in hell). It’s easy to see that she is on the verge of her nerves and can’t control herself anymore (according to her daughter it’s yet another time they were arguing so it must hurt deeply).

What else do we have in this episode?

Via’s words “My parents didn’t hate eachother”. If you think that’s not important because people tend to romanticise their childhood, you are only half right here - children are the best observers on the world and soak everything like a dry sponge. Octavia didn’t used words ‘loved’, ‘liked’ but ‘didn’t hate’. This can mean that even if Stolas and Stella disliked eachother they tried to appear well infront of their daughter and weren’t as chaotic as they are now. To justify this point I want to show the last thing what appeared in this episode:

Family picture with whole THREE in the LooLoo Land. Stella is visibly uncomfortable here but still goes with them. What was stopping her to say “No, I’m not coming.”? She’s with her family willingly even if she herself is not keen on spending time in amusment park.

We don’t see her for the next couple episodes until harvest moon festival where Stella is shown at the end of the episode ordering Striker to kill Stolas.

She’s visibly out of her mind and can’t think straight anymore. She wants it all to end and by end she can’t think of anything else except eliminating Stolas for good.

“I want this cheating prick dead” - don't know how about you, but I think she wasn’t mad for sleeping with lower class but for sleeping with someone else at all.

HOW STELLA WAS WRITTEN IN SEASON TWO

We have first episode of second season, we have deep dive into Stolas life, I can’t wait to see what Vivzie’s team come up wit- Oh man….

Wait, she was like that even as a baby? Great character development guys.

What a cold bish. And motivation is a peak of greatness.

No angry wife stereotypes on the horizon.

All of those hints, all of this build up for nothing? Stella is bad because she is bad? What is the point in killing Stolas anymore? How can you burry a great concept like that?

Yeah, all of those theories can be shoved under the rug; it seems like Stella have nothing except sheer enjoyment of tormenting her husband and being angry when he finally stands for himself. She is one-dimentional blank paper page with no motivation. She is made because apparently it’s not clear enough who we should feel sorry for. Spindle Horse really thought it’s a good idea that one of the main villains is just screeching fursona whose sole purpose to exist is to say to the viewers “Look, this birb is a baddie and this birdie is not. Look how deep it is.”. Yes, I am mad. I am mad because everything condensed in season one is worthless, because I am sick of bad wife stereotype, because it’s annoying watching somebody being bad for sole reason of being bad. Spindlehorse Toons have huge impact on mainstream, and rooting character model like that into viewers is just invalidating.

WHAT IS EVEN STELLAS GOAL?

We know Stella wants Stolas dead, but why? If her motivation is love of tormenting him than she doesn’t have much planning comprehension, because she won’t be able to do that anymore. If thats because he shreded family name, divorce should be enough - that litterally means you aren’t bounded with anything at all anymore, If she’s doing it to have her revenge than….. for what exactly? Stolas isn’t making a whole Goetia family name dirty, only his. This will be just dump to see whole family be taken as immoral (whatever it means in hell) because husband made a mistake- HUSBAND; somebody who can be cutted off and replaced.

I wish to add something more here but can’t, because Stellas goal makes no sense at all. She isn’t hurted by the fact Stolas cheated on her, only highly annoyed. Trying to make Goetia name clean also doesn’t make sense, because eliminating one of family members would make the name even worse and because reasons from paragraph before. Stella is litterally this cartoon villain with no motivation except “getting those ugly smurfs/taking back what was once stollen/rule Equestria”. Alright, maybe don’t paint Gargamel, Queen Chrystalis or another Skeletor in a bad light because those are villains from kids cartoons - they’re meant to be easy to interpret. Stella is villain in adult animation. Standards are different.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

I can hear somebody writting carefully “You’re mad because Stella is female, if she was a man you wouldn’t write this.”. Guess what - I want mane abuser and villain to have depth no matter the gender. Making female character awful demon spouse who have no other trait besides being evil is not innovative take; it’s lazy, bad and stereotypical writting. 

I really wish I wouldn’t be so harsh on Vivziepop and her team, but I can’t stand seeing once very complicated situasion in arranged marriage where fault is on both sides getting run over a steamroller and changing into ‘poor manbaby with no friends is chasing his only love and his horrendous wifey is a huge baddie and always has been’.

Stella fails in every aspect, and it says someone who could say “Step on me” to Mahito - a villain hated by whole fandom because he’s bad since day one and hurts main protagonists on daily basis and even kill loved by everyone cinnamon roll Junpei for sake of putting main hero on verge. But here’s a thing - even if both Stella and Mahito are awful people since they were born Mahito somehow manages to be well written villain with his reasons and other traits than mean and bad.

Please people, I know we already have huge favour by having those series for free on YouTube and animation is stellar, but sometimes we need to remember that nothing is perfect and Stella’s character really insulted writting abilities of creators and audience. Just look at all those examples above - there are women and men having different purposes in the stories, screentime and personalities, but all of them are abusers and negative characters. Even if media themselves have isssues here and there, they know how to use their opressors and Spindlehorse is (I believe) capable doing the same. It’s nothing wrong in feeling empathy to a villain (”My Sister’s Keeper”), it’s nothing wrong when villain have fiddling excuse (”The Bookshop”), but it’s wrong to make it insulting, non-motivated way like in Stella’s case.

Thanks for staying till the end. Have this heart as a gift for staying for so long on this a bit negative post

<3

Dividers by @delishlydelightfuldividers​

#helluva boss #helluva boss rant #anti stella goetia #stolas goetia #octavia goetia #essay #vivziepop #spindlehorse

[toa-kirhan]

First time watching ToH S2E9 (Eclipse Lake). Thoughts below:

Detailed thoughts:

I watched the episode a little while ago, so pardon if my analysis up here isn’t as in-depth.

This episode pairs Amity, one of the series’ former antagonists, w/ Hunter, one of the current antagonists, w/ the two of them on separate stages of reform. While Amity has come to terms w/ how she used to treat others and has learned to step up to the people controlling her, her parents, Hunter is still loyal to Belos, though his conversations w/ Amity and sheltering of the cardinal Palisman shows that might start to change.

Like Amity, Belos controls Hunter’s life through expectations and fear: Hunter feels that he needs to prove himself to Belos, that he has to earn his approval by meeting his expectations and going above and beyond to make up for past mistakes or else face reprisals or outright dismissal if he fails to live up to them.

Hunter is able to leverage that shared trauma to convince Amity that Luz’s message to her is a threat. Although, it is also possible that Hunter genuinely believes that Luz was threatening Amity and can’t recognize a genuine loving and affectionate relationship. That would make sense considering that Hunter was raised in the Emperor’s Castle w/ Belos as his only family who has constantly framed Hunter’s purpose and relation to him as a tool for him to enact the Titan’s will.

This episode also gives us a look at Belos w/o his mask. Seeing Belos’ face makes it clear that Belos wears his mask to maintain his image of power and strength to his subjects as the marks from his curse would detract from that (assuming that they don’t disappear after he absorbs the magic from other people’s Palismen).

Belos has a very interesting appearance. In addition to the aforementioned curse marks (green discoloration w/ black holes or spots on his skin), he also has a notch on his ear like Hunter, natural blue eyes (the default color that shows through his mask), and a wrinkled mouth that conveys his age. The notched ears are particularly concerning since it brings to mind tracking livestock. What did happen to Belos and Hunter’s family?

According to Belos, he has been to the Human Realm before, which helps explain why he plans on uniting it w/ the Demon Realms given his glowing review of it. Though, that fact does raise the questions of why, how, and when Belos ended up in the Human Realm before returning to the Demon Realms. Presumably, the answer has something to do w/ Wittebane since Belos knew about the portal door he created and has its blueprints.

Now Belos has the recreated portal door, enough magic bile(?) to power it, and the original key w/ some of its Titan’s Blood left in it. Although he might need more to create a new key or repair the old one, Belos is very close to his goal. Will he still wait for the actual Day of Unity once everything’s in place? Or will he jump the gun?

General thoughts:

Another episode picking up w/ Belos at the start. We’re only half-way through the season, but things feel like they’re ramping up.

Belos has blueprints for the portal key and notes for something called a Grimwalker, which requires Galdorstone, Palistrom wood, Stonesleeper lungs, Selkidomus scales, and Bone of Ortet. The first two are also labeled heart & power and keratin, respectively.

There is also a diagram of eyes and a diagram of a developing child, possibly the Grimwalker? Does the Grimwalker have something to do w/ the fake Luz in the Human Realm?

So are all the pipes are to channel Bile/Titan’s Blood from the heart into the portal? Why does Belos need magic for the Day of Unity too? As part of the binding/ fusion process b/w realms?

We get to see part of Belos’ face! I’m pretty sure we’ve seen his hair before, but not his face.

Belos has been to the Human Realm? Did it involve Wittebane? When Belos talks about it he sorta sounds like him.

Amity’s taking charge of the Owl House!

Ghost! Amity’s Palisman is a cat!

“Lofi beats to study and relax to”, you say?

Eda’s trying to turn to her harpy form again.

Dragonclaw Z! Eda watched it in theaters? In the Human Realm?

Amity summoned a little abomination to take care of Luz. c:

Amity’s going to lose the key to Belos.

Amity and Luz have a little communicator? PDA? Whatever you’d call it?

So the Titan still has veins w/ blood coursing through them (explains the heart in Belos’ throne room), but just a little blood can make a portal too?

Eclipse Lake? That’s the episode title!

Amity is really taking being Luz’s girlfriend seriously.

I like Kikimora’s earmuffs.

Steve makes his grand, offscreen, appearance!

So Hunter knows the Blights? Makes sense since they’re a prominent weapons manufacturer and probably have a seat on the council. (E: forgot that he was the one that told them Belos’ order about the Abomitons!)

So Titan’s Blood itself is also a powerful source of magic? Does the magic of the Boiling Isles specifically come from its blood?

So the veins of the Titan aren’t literal? They’re just solidified Titan’s Blood?

Whale song or K-Hop? Hmm...

“A bad but sad boy.”

Kikimora’s really lost it.

Fool’s Blood.

I love the Abomiton minecarts.

Aw, Owlbert’s got another scratch. :c

OH NO! He’s squawking! ;-;

Oh, Eclipse Lake’s dried up.

How did Luz expect anyone to understand that?

OH NO THE KEY’S STICKING OUT OF HER COAT!

AMITY’S TOP OF CLASS FOR A REASON!

So they both have a few drops of Titan’s Blood now.

#the owl house #toh #toh season 2 #toh s2 #first watch

[ultraericthered]

Anime Update V2 19

Noragami Aragoto - Halfway through the season with the last two episodes of the Bishamon arc. I felt so terrible for Bishamon here and while at first I wanted Kazuma to face heavier consequences for the trauma he’d caused her in the past, having to live with his mistakes and atone for them is the better option. And I got soooo much satisfaction out of how things with Kuguha played out. Like Unalaq from The Legend of Korra, his compensation for being such an incredibly boring and unpopular antagonist is being so utterly loathsome, like somewhere between Tonpa from Hunter x Hunter (1999) and Takaoka from Assassination Classroom level of loathing. So watching him just lose his composure, throw a big tantrum like a whiny, attention-deprived child, and get forcibly cast out of his Regalia status as he’s screaming for mercy was cathartic as hell. While all seems well for not just Bishamon and her remaining Regalia family, but our main trio of Yato, Yukine, and Hiyori (who lived through this, thank God!), Nora answering a call from her father means that she’s far from done creating trouble for them to deal with.

Hunter x Hunter - Watched the final phase of the Hunter Exam to its (seeming) conclusion in both adaptations.

1999 - I thought the way things were depicted here were far less effective compared to the 2011 anime. Killua stating his one desire is to be friends with Gon is meant to reveal the sincerity of how he feels about Gon, but this anime already had him reveal that in the interview with Netero so this now has much less of an impact, not to mention he and Gon’s friendship feels a little understated in this version to start with. There is then a pointless skirmish between Gon and Illumi, followed by an equally pointless fake-out of Gon, Leorio. and Kurapika having to separate, which just felt like a time waster.

2011 - Thankfully those pitfalls were avoided in this adaptation. Moving the part where Satotz remarks that the true final phase of the Hunter Exam isn’t quite over yet to the very last scene was a great call, and Hisoka talking to Illumi about waiting “for the fruits to ripen” (in reference to Gon and Killua) was disturbing and scary as fuck here! If I’ve got one criticism, it’s with the dub, as I feel like Chris Hackney was rather miscast as Illumi’s voice. The voice he has in the Blue Water dub of the 1999 anime fits the character far better.

Fruits Basket - 2022 is halfway over and the characters in this series are already celebrating the coming of a New Year!

2001 - The first half of this episode was not particularly strong as yet again we’re treated to zany shennanigans around Shigure’s house that didn’t happen in the original manga. Most of it wasn’t that funny and I just felt bad for poor Mitsuru by the end. When the second half actually got to telling the proper story, it got much better, even though some of the stylistic and tonal choices admitedly still felt off at points.

2019 - Much improved all around, but one part did raise an issue - Yuki and Kyo not looking forward to meeting with Akito and Kagura respectively at the Sohma Family New Years gathering was brought up quite a bit, like those two are the abusive family members the two boys are most wanting to avoid. But the equivalence falls flat when you remember that Akito exploding with rage, screaming and lashing out with violence at their loved ones is played dead seriously while Kagura behaving the exact same way was played for laughs! It just reinforces what a disaster the writing for Kagura is, and we can’t even say this is a double standard based on “girls abusing guys is funny, but guys abusing girls and other guys isn’t” ‘cause, spoiler alert, Akito isn’t a guy! So it’s just an all around failure in the writing.

Rozen Maiden - The two episodes about Suiseiseki’s twin sister and the old man she lives with and how he’s slipped into madness due to the tragic loss of his son and his wife being comatose were, as can be inferred by just that description, the heaviest that this show has gotten to date in terms of how fucking sad that story is, and if that really was the boy’s ghost inside the mother’s dreamscape then that makes it all the heavier. Suiseiseki’s whining at Souseiseki got a bit old, but I like that they both have a new home and family now.

Fate/Stay Night - Gilgamesh got dealt with rather anticlimactically by Shirou and Saber’s combined power, so of course he’s not done yet and we’re going to have to face him at his full power later. But far more distressingly than that? At the very end of the episode, Shirou comes upon some dark secrets being kept by Kirei at his church.

Revolutionary Girl Utena - That Wakaba and Saionji episode, and their whole relationship, didn’t go the way I’d expected. While Saionji isn’t a total sociopath like Touga and is more capable of sincerity and decency regarding how he feels, his narcissism and constant want for status that matters and could take him out of Touga’s shadow made giving into temptation too easy for him when Mikage gets his expulsion reversed, at which point he totally disregards Wakaba again and leaves her feeling like nothing special. Poor Wakaba!

Love Live! Nijigasaki School Idol Club S2 - This second season continues to be a glowing step up from the first in its next two episodes, with Lanzhu reaffirming her stance on performing solo and being the center of attention, finding out more about Mia regarding her background and relationship with Lanzhu, Yu struggling with her composition assignment, and the total delight of Kasumi, Kanata, Emma and Rina stalking Lanzhu throughout a daily routine. The second episode also did something no previous Love Live! anime did by actually incorporating a “subunit” group into the show itself, as the four girls I mentioned there form Q4RTZ and make their big debut. The show is even starting to sound more like Love Live! than before. The opening song, Lanzhu’s songs, and Q4RTZ songs - all bangers!

MAR - Jack’s first fight in the War Games took an incredibly mean-spirited turn. All the demonstration of how strong he’s gotten and how well he can hold his own in a fight even when at a disadvantage, while his mother, the now reformed Rougilo brothers, and this mysterious delivery man are watching from back at Jack’s farm home, only for a single wrong move to turn it into a humiliating loss for Jack as he’s mistaken for being a no good pervert! Felt real bad for him, but I do have to give Pano props for her quick thinking there.

AMC: Gintama - 3 episodes of this show this time, one where Odd Jobs met the Gendo Ikari-looking government guy and had to retrieve and then kill the pet octopus of an alien prince, one where the Chief of the Shinsengumi doggedly pursues Shinpachi’s sister until Gin beats him in a fight all while the rest of the Shinsengumi’s exploits are being followed documentary style, and the last being sort of an immediate followup where Gin does battle with Vice Chief Hijikata when he comes after him during a job. Still such an insanely fun cartoon, and from all I’ve heard it can only keep getting better.

AND

Belle - This movie came out last year and now I finally got to see it. It drew me in with Suzu’s personal story and how she channeled all of her painful emotions over the tragic loss of her mother and her desire to sing into the online virtual metaverse of U and then totally changed gears from anywhere I’d been expecting that story to go by turning into a modern day Beauty & The Beast retelling. Honestly, I didn’t really get that into U itself, it’s kind of an eyesore at points, so playing out a compelling enough story with it definitely helped to keep me engaged. The biggest point of contention for me is that like Weathering With You, this is a movie that sort of falls apart in its final act. The idea that damn near the entire world, online AND offline, had gone bonkers over the mystery of the Beast’s true identity, the unfortunate implications behind who the Beast really is and why he is the Beast, and the sheer amount of narrative contrivances that even launch the story into a second climax right after a legit phenomenal sequence that seemed like the big climax already, broke a good deal of my immersion in the film and made me ready to see it just end already. But admittedly, the overall film and the high points it hit even in that final third were beautiful, and well worth the watch.

#Anime Update #Anime Update V2

[clarkgriffon]

#my hot take for tonight #the 100 #the 100 season 3 #is it s1 or s2 level? no! #it has clear plot and pacing problems #and separating the season into two antagonists was a mistake #but pike and ALIE are BOTH good antagonists that are well written #and the storyline tracks mostly #aside from a too heavy focus on grounder culture it isn't a bad season #especially when you compare it to trainwreck 5 #im just saying #every time i rewatch 3 it gets better #give it another chance

[crystalas]

Kaos allignment swap [or brothers AU] ideas:

Main series

·         Eon found Spyro on his way back from picking Kaos up from Kaossandra’s castle, so he raised them together as brothers.

·         In the actual series Spyro wants to become a Skylander still but Kaos is being trained to be the next portal master, they are secretly jealous of each other for it. Spyro is jealous of Kaos because he will always be ranked higher than him no matter what and Kaos is jealous of Spyro because as a Skylander he will have more options and freedoms in his life where as he will be duty bound to be a portal master.

·         Kaos is a book worm.

·         Because Kaos is the good guy in this AU the Doom Raiders pretty much fill the void, in the first episode Golden Queen snags the Book of Skylanders and turns it to gold and thus everyone in it to gold. Kaos and Spyro are unaffected due to them not being in it [cos Kaos is still an apprentice portal master and Spyro flunked his exam]

·         Instead of needing to find the dark relic of Koassandra’s spell book to send Crash home they instead find a chunk of crystalised darkness [from Skylander Swap Force game]. The Doom Raiders want it because it’s a chunk of dark magic but Kaossandra wants it because it will help reenergise her to keep Strykore at bay.

·         I like the idea that Doctor Crankcase is about in the second season and being an antagonist in his own right, like he appears at a science fair showing off his gadgets and then finds a dragon species he thought was extinct and a hybrid capable of using all the magic elements. He’ll try and coax them into letting him try experiments and the boys will be onboard at first because Spyro wants to find out more about his kind and this might help, Kaos agrees because he wants to know his limits and how long he has because he dies of elemental conflict [this takes place after Brothers in Sneaking] Eon will forbid them from doing this after finding out about it but this just enrages the brothers as they know Eon is hiding stuff from them and threatens to leave. Eon in his desperation tells the truth.

·         The truth of Spyro’s past stays the same but Kaos’ is different yes his mother gave him up because the dark magic she had to use to trap Strykore was twisting her up, but also because she couldn’t bear the idea of watching her child die. This upsets the two as this proves that Eon has been lying to them their entire lives, he wiped out Spyro race and Kaos felt like his entire exsistance was a mistake.

·         The boys run off to the one guy who actively helped them but soon Doctor Crankcase shows his true colours and just full on kidnaps them.

·         The season 2 final changes at bit as well because instead of Strykore just showing Dream Catcher where he and Kaossandra is, he instead tricks them into thinking they need to bring a Skylander to be used as a distraction or something. Luckily Golden Queen knows a guy who just happened to have kidnapped one or two.

·         Kaossandra is weakened to the point she falls for Strykore’s promises of helping her find her son and when they Doom Raiders bring him she takes him away to try and ‘make up for lost time’.

·         Strykore is freed and either send the Doom Raiders packing or make them his hench men. He fufills his promise of making Kaos her son by wiping away his memories of Eon basically doing to Kaos what he did to Spyro.  

 Mirror of Mystery

·         A completely separate idea I had which I nearly ending up writing down was using the Mirror of Mystery so that the Kaos from the canon universe could met good Kaos…mayhem ensues as Canon Kaos pulled his counterpart through the portal and swapping places so he could run wild and take over the academy without any resistance.

 ·         Good Kaos will go to his mother for help only to be totally ignored or just flat out denied before asking the nice troll that helped him get his bearing where to find the Skylanders. Glumshanks cottons on a lot faster than Kaossandra [espically when Kaos actually uses the word ‘Please’!] that this is not his Kaos and for a brief moment is tempted to keep this one.

 ·         Canon Kaos is finding the world he’s in very disturbing and unsettling as everyone is treating him…nicely? Like no one is insulting or attacking him. It got very weird when Eon showed up called him Son and had a heart to heart with him about something called ‘elemental conflict’ and told him that no matter what happened Eon will always be there for him and love him regardless. Canon Kaos walked away from that feeling a strange pain in his chest and hoping he hadn’t caught whatever it was that Eon was going on about.

 ·         Good Kaos finds the Skylanders and they fight for a minute before finally figuring out that this isn’t their Kaos. Mainly because this one called Spyro brother and he knew about Eon’s portal mark something only Eon knew about at the time. As they try to figure out how to get Good Kaos back he reassures Eon that he can’t be the father of this time line’s Kaos as there was no way Eon would willingly leave his son with a lady so horrible. Eon looks sheepish at that comment.

 ·         Canon Kaos is feeling conflicted now as everyone has been so welcoming, no one except maybe Spyro has noticed anything amiss except for his change in clothes. People are respecting him here, no one is trying to shove him away, people like him! he’s in no rush, he can enact his evil plans from the shadows while slowly charming everyone and learning all he needs to in order to conquer the realms. If that means he gets to hang out with a family who doesn’t despise him for just living then that’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make.

 ·         So naturally when Good Kaos shows up they have an epic showdown cos no way in hell is Canon Kaos giving this place up! when good Kaos points out that no matter who wins his cover is blown and his plan is ruined Canon Kaos seems…sad? Before going back to default Canon Kaos of angry screaming about unfair it is that he gets to live a nice life with people who want him while he’s stuck in a dingy shed of a lair because his own mother hates him. Good Kaos is about to try and talk him down when Canon Spyro and Eon grab him and drag him back to their world.

 That’s all I got if anyone actually wants any of this typed up as story prompts or whatever by all means let me know.

#skylanders kaos #skylanders spyro #skylanders #swapau

[sometimesrosy]

Rosy that's fantastic news for your book!! I'm really happy for you. And just seeing "bellarke consum their love and even have grandkids" makes my heart full. Bob and Eliza said tthey were disappointed that 1/the charaters couldn't have kids in the end and that 2/ there was no hope. I totally agree with their interpretation of the end. Some people said the ending was super cool, and inkeeping with the whole show, and somehow hopeful. HOW WAS IT HOPEFUL?? the human race gets wiped out...

People said the ending was “super cool?” How?

Wait. I need to wrap my head around that. What are they looking at that seems super cool?

I actually don’t have a problem of the concept of transcendence that they worked on all season, nor Cadogan, the fake-spiritual, love-your-fellow-man-but-also-sacrifice-them-because-they-mean-nothing cult leader who favored his daughter, used his son, tossed his exwife into the apocalypse and killed Becca because she had power and knowledge beyond him.

Like, that could have been super cool if they’d kept him the villain, the antagonist, but instead they made him the protagonist who was, somehow, right about transcendence as if it wasn’t just another fucking doomsday cult that wanted humanity to end. I mean, it WAS just another fucking doomsday cult that wanted humanity to end, and the aliens vacuumed up humanity and allowed for no dissent. Here, have your perfect happy transcendence...but your body dies, the world ends, and humanity is gone. That is EXACTLY what ALIE did, and she was a villain. Perhaps a well meaning villain, but a terrifying villain.

How did the SAME story, get switched around to being some sort of victory for the state of humanity? How did the end of humanity, no chance to continue on, because they removed their ability to have children and carry on?

Why couldn’t they just fucking stay on The Ring if that was going to happen. At least they could have a small community up there.  But no. Without the info that our heroes brought, they wouldn’t have reached transcendence. 

That wasn’t transcendence. It was judgement day. Transcendence means you have worked your way to a higher state, and yes, it might be condescending and elitist, but you at least worked for it. And it wasn’t really a judgement day because they just took everybody, despite the fact that those idiots were fighting for no fucking reason. It was a PUNISHMENT day for Clarke, one of the only people who was actually TRYING to be better and do better. 

What was cool? The way the aliens brought back the people they cared for? Yes, that was cool. It wasn’t them of course, but some people would be impressed by the alien dressed up in the costume of their fav. I could see that being considered super cool. But honestly... that’s a story line that would have worked better in season 3 and in fact DID work remarkably well in season 3 when Lxa showed up in the COL. And it was ACTUALLY her, not some facsimile.

Was it cool to take away the agency of the hero of the story who we’ve been following for 7 years? Was it cool to erase the personality and motivation of our dual protagonist? Ok. So lets say you didn’t love Clarke or Bellamy. Octavia’s character was erased and she didn’t have a thing to do until the final battle, and then she got a romance that frankly made me uncomfortable but that’s taste. Echo was erased and she didn’t have a thing to do until the final battle. Raven was also erase although she got to be the one to convince the aliens that they weren’t totally awful beings. That was cool, but it seemed like a patch put on top of a story that had failed. The story being about how Clarke saves humanity, and Bellamy saves Clarke, which has been THE STORY FOR SIX YEARS. We spent six years building up a team with these two heroes who have been through so much shit and made the CHOICE to be the good guys, and in the end, Bellamy gives his power over to a charismatic obsessive leader (also happened in season 3 with Pike who was a great character and FAR better than Cadogan and actual sympathetic awful villain who thought he was saving his people while doing evil.) And Clarke actually becomes THE BAD GUY, who loses her sense of reason and commits violence due to loving too much-- a really tired, misogynistic storyline. Give women power and they go crazy. The hysterical woman. THIS DOES NOT FIT WITH CLARKE GRIFFIN. Also, we saw her go through that trauma of fear for her daughter, and she DID NOT GO CRAZY. Ruthless, yes. And then she worked through what she had done and recognized she was wrong and promised not to do that again. I honestly don’t know why she did it again.  Even if Bellamy betrayed her again, it didn’t make sense that she couldn’t work through it.

They had to keep the two characters apart in order have that ending happen. Why? Because Clarke acts as the center to Bellamy and Bellamy acts as the Center to Clarke. This season is the story of the FAILURE of the duo protagonists of the show. They separated them and broke them individually, and this meant they were unable to save the universe. 

Is it cool to make a show about heroes and then destroy them in the last season? But frame that destruction and the end of humanity as a VICTORY and positive ending? Maybe if you hate those characters and humanity and think there’s no hope for us anyway, so lets just burn it down.

Oh wait. I’m trying to figure out what’s SUPER COOL about that ending.

The purple sparkly aliens. Ok. How is that cool? That there’s actually an omnipotent alien out there that has the ability to just snap a whole race of people out of existence or into their big ole stew pot of consciousness.

1. Why? 2. How? 3. Where did that power come from? 4. Who are they? 5. What do they get out of erasing races and basically eating them?

Okay, putting aside the questions about how these omnipotent gods aliens came to be... is it possible they can be see as “super cool?” Let me go through.

1. Omnipotent aliens going through the universe, deciding when life forms were “ready” to be judged and then either wiping them out totally, or wiping them out totally but accepting their consciousnesses into their massive consciousness where they don’t want any “bad” lifeforms, which makes them now a higher lifeform but not at all what they once were. 

Cool/Not Cool. I dunno. Kind of seems like some sort of puritanical god who willy nilly decides if people are worthy of heaven. Will He, Nil He. That’s what that means. If we’re gonna get aliens at the last minute, I want aliens. I want to know who they are and what’s up with them. THAT’S the story. Those alien guys. Instead, the story was about the flotsam and jetsam at the end of humanity, either getting swept up into the god-form in the sky or being pounded to bits on the rocks. The heroes of our story have no say in what happens. They’re toast either way. Oh you mean we can be erased into nothing or erased into your hive mind? The only way this is cool is if you like nihilism. Which, yeah, some people do. NONE of their struggle over the past six years meant a damn thing. None of it. Their beliefs, their sacrifices, their mistakes, their heroism. It al reduces down to whether those sparkly purple aliens like them or not. That’s some bullshit. 

Not cool. 

2. Cadogan. Cult leader from the first apocalypse who conned the bulk of his followers and left them shady shelters that let them die. Kept the good stuff for his “best” followers. Paternalistic, obsessive, ruthless, megalomaniac framing his leadership and personality as “Love for Humanity,” while discarding every human who he deemed unworthy. Including his own family. Actually. Pretty cool.  AS A VILLAIN. Ending up at his cult colony in space hundreds of years later with thousands of years of development in time dilation. Cool. They’re creepy but make some bit of sense. Ok. Waking him up and then making him this fucking GURU who preaches love for humanity but sacrifices 99.9% of humanity all so that he can reach his mythical transcendence which is really the eradication of all humanity.... well, that’s actually cool. AS A VILLAIN. But somehow in the last season, Cadogan turned out to be the one who was right all along, and the story seemed to accept HIS concept that transcendence was the best thing that could happen to them, because humanity sucks and they always fight so they should be erase by paternalistic omnipotent gods. CADOGAN’S choices were the ones that were enacted. Bellamy gave his will to Cadogan and made CADOGAN’S choices, not his own. Never before in all the seasons did Bellamy “need it all to make sense.” He fucking KNEW it made no sense and he didn’t want to make those choices any more. And he did it to be a better person and make better choices and keep his family safe. The excuse they used for our hero to side with Cadogan did not fit. CADOGAN became the protagonist in the second half of the season. CADOGAN made all the choices that furthered the story. Our heroes were reduced to either brainwashed followers or ineffective, hysterical messes, our really not wanting anything to do with anyone’s salvation and just interested in their love life. It left Raven, Echo and Octavia to scramble around in the end and try to convince the purple sparkly gods not to erase them out of existence, just erase them and swallow them. :/ Cadogan as protagonist bringing humanity to “transcendence.”, Our supposed heroes as useless flotsam and jetsam floating around on the wreck of humanity whose choices and actions make no goddamn difference.

NOT COOL.

3. Character Storylines

Clarke’s storyline. NOT COOL. Bellamy’s storyline. NOT COOL. Octavia’s storyline. S.A COOL. S.B NOT COOL. Raven’s storyline. COOL. Echo’s storyline. S.A COOL. S.B NOT COOL. Murphy’s storyline. SUPER COOL. Emori’s storyline. SUPER COOL. Indra’s storyline.  COOL. Hope’s storyline. S.A COOL S.B NOT COOL. Jordan’s storyline. NOT COOL.  Diyoza’s storyline. COOL Gabriel’s storyline. COOL. Madi’s storyline. NOT COOL The grounders. Fucking morons. You really shouldn’t make a whole culture’s choices based around being absolutely too stupid to be allowed to live. EVEN when you get past xenophobia and learn about who they are and why they do things. NOT COOL. The culty people. Cool set up and world building. The society was dumb and had too many plot holes. MIDDLING SHEIDHEDA. NOT COOL. pointless plot device just used to make everyone forget everything they learned from 6 seasons. CADOGAN. COOL AS A VILLAIN. But he was the protagonist. So the ruination of the entire show and universe they created. NOT COOL.

SEASON A COOL OVERALL.  SEASON B NOT COOL. TOTAL SEASON NOT COOL

I think if people think the ending was supercool, they’ve never heard of a deus ex machina, and how that’s a BAD ending that is really just a cheat because you can’t figure out a way to get out of the story mess you made. 

I really hate post apocalyptic fiction that ends with no hope for humanity. JR kept telling us there was hope. I mean narratively, not in interviews, although he did that too, and in the last half season, he switched it around so they wouldn’t have hope, not even just our heroes, but all humanity. It was a bait and switch I did not appreciate. And I’m not talking about ships, I’m talking about the essential genre of the show. 

PS. thanks. I love my book and I hope someone picks it up so you all can read it. It also has elements of Han/Leia and another couple, Brashen/Althea from the Live Ship Traders book by Robin Hobb. They are, however, less traumatized than the characters in The 100. 

#RANT lol

[constant-eggs]

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about William on Supergirl from fellow Supercorp shippers, so I wanna talk a bit about Kara and Lena’s love interests and how they are viewed, and also about racism in the show and fandom. This has probably been done to death but I’m new to the fandom — I binge watched the show over the winter and just started using Tumblr in a real way about a month ago. So anyway, back to the men:

There’s the major three: James, Mon-El, and William. Jack is cool too — he should’ve had more than two episodes which is part of the issue I’m going to get to, but he never got to be a major player.

So let’s talk about James. Now, I liked him a lot, particularly in season 1. Of the three main love interests for Kara, he was the only one who (season 1) writers took time to establish as a character separate from her. He had hopes and a backstory (of course), and his own idealism that usually uplifted and sometimes contradicted with Kara’s. He was honest, and vulnerable, and when he made a mistake (like calling Superman against Kara’s wishes) he grew from them. Because he respected Kara, and himself. Now the chemistry between Kara and James for me felt good — it wasn’t earth shattering — but it was typical in what I’d come to expect from a heterosexual pairing. And I would argue that had the writers not done a complete 180 on Kara’s feelings for James in S2 and had let them keep growing together as characters, that the chemistry and relationship could have been really good. But they didn’t because as the writers themselves said, they’re ‘in the drama business.’ So having a healthy, supportive partner for Kara wasn’t their priority, James was sidelined, and then they never figured out what to do with his character from that moment on. Also, I do think that race played a part in the writers’ decision to change direction with their relationship, and it’s...disheartening.

Now real briefly on James with Lena: it reminded me a lot of Laurel 1 and Oliver — when they talked about each other to other people— I believed that there was love, but when they were together, I didn’t see any real spark. Even their drama wasn’t particularly interesting — so I won’t even get into it. But it’s been long enough in this post for me to get to the point of it: the fault of the deterioration of James as a character lies with the writers. They chose to sideline him, have his values constantly shift, and have his character development stagnate post S1. He could’ve had interesting stories as Guardian, could’ve worked more closely with Kara when he replaced Cat Grant, or any number of things. But his potential was squandered. And if they were so dead set on having a male love interest for Kara, he was their best option of the three.

Mon-El and Kara had chemistry. To me, it was very much sibling chemistry in nature, which is kind of funny considering that in the comics he was a pseudo brother to Superman. To be clear I’m talking about Kara and Mon-El and not Chris and Melissa who are married, because they aren’t their characters. That’s how I think he should have stayed — as an antagonistic, shallow brother type who slooowly became decent through character growth and not specifically to become Kara’s love interest. But the handful of times Mon-El did the right thing — rebelling against his parents, trying to be a hero etc. it was because he liked Kara. How boring is that? As a love interest he was subpar — and he continued to be a liar. I don’t hate him like some fans do — and I’m well aware that he was a shallow partner who owned other people on his planet, and a habitual liar. I also see that this show is fantastical in nature where I am rooting for Lena after nearly mind-enslaving the entire population just last season. And also in a universe where a primary hero — Oliver Queen, was a serial killer (as are Laurel 2, Sara Lance, and Mick Rory to name a few). So that isn’t the main reason why I don’t like Mon-El for Kara. I just feel as early Kara felt: She deserves so much better than him.

What is there even to say about William? He’s essentially the audience in character form — the chorus in an Ancient Greek play telling us how we should feel about whatever action he’s being sidelined from. If they wanted him to be endgame, he should’ve been introduced bare minimum a season earlier to give him a fair shot. He needs to be better integrated in the fold, and at this point there isn’t a lot of time to do that well.

I’m making this post though because I don’t agree with some of what I’m seeing in fandom. Yes, I too dislike Mon-El as a love interest for Kara, but I’m not going to yuck someone else’s yum. Same goes for William and James. If you see something romantic, that’s okay. If you’re a multi shipper, that’s okay too. I was into other Arrowverse shows when Karamel and Supercorp animosity was at its highest and saw some of what went on and now I see some people uniting over their mutual dislike for William. But his underdevelopment as a character is once again entirely on the writers and execs. Not Staz Nair. And @motorcyclegirlfriends has a much more nuanced post about how race plays into characters being empathized within fandom and the screen time they are allotted by writers and directors. https://motorcyclegirlfriends.tumblr.com/post/649196192472924160/what-a-lot-of-the-nice-fellow-fans-dont-harass

We shouldn’t be tearing down actors of color or characters of color out of frustration over (potentially/hopefully) queer (white) characters. We should instead be asking for them to have more well rounded stories, just as we ask for better LGBT rep — the two aren’t separate. If Supercorp doesn’t become canon it won’t be because of the subpar heterosexual romances they were given. It will be because the writers see the love story they’ve created, inadvertently or otherwise (even doubling down on it in S5) but chose to ignore it. I really hope that isn’t the case. Us fans deserve more complex, messy slowburn romances, and Supercorp could be up there with She-Ra as one of the best ever portrayed. Here’s to hoping.

#supergirl #supercorp #james olsen #mon el #william dey #lena luthor #kara danvers #let’s be real lena gets the screen time of a co lead #which I love but give me more #kelly olsen #brainy #m’gann m’orzz #j’onn j’onzz #nia nal #and yes william dey if he is going to be the endgame love interest

[magnoliae]

Hii, I saw u had ppl who support the penumbra podcast on ur DNI, and i was just wondering, what was the hiring event u were referring to? It's on my list of podcasts to listen to n I was wondering if I should take it off

Hi! Ill start from a beginners perspective of the penumbra as the main controversy is very much a direct result of all of penumbras past mistakes, sorry if you know parts of this already. Also Im white and started listening mid season 2, so this is more of a rundown than like an authoritative judgement.

Theres two unrelated stories that are just going into the fourth season, one a scifi noir show with many themes on family, trauma, recovery and corruption, and a fantasy D&D like fiction which I have not listened to as much so I dont know the themes as well. However both stories are really popular because of their diversity in primarily LGBTQIA+ charcaters, but also race, disabilities, age, gender.

The main protagonist of the scifi noir is Juno Steele, a black disabled nonbinary character who has PTSD and other traumas. However, the penumbra has a predominantly white cast and writing crew, especially at the beginning of the show, and didnt explicitly give any charcters a race or ethnicity (except for iirc the antagonists of the now non-canon pilot who were south asian and said to "breed like rabbits" yikes).

Then in 2017, penumbra hired Michaela Buckley, whose art is a whole nother can of worms of racist and transmisogynistic caricatures. As the first "official" artist she gave the characters a lot of their traits that are still seen today, especially races and ethnicities like black for Juno, and South East Asian for his love interest Peter Nureyev. As a white person its not my place to judge the harmfulness in making an angry alcoholic character with a broken home black, and a suave homme-fatale thief Asian, but it doesnt sound good on paper.

When people brought this up with the creators of the show, they sort of made it canon but not really? Nothing really was mentioned on changing their ways or combating fandom racism. According to this timeline by @/ofdreamsanddoodles they later apologised, but still sold Buckley's merch. They also kinda sidestepped it by making their future "race blind", however the setting is very much not a utopia so idk the decision to avoid race as a topic seems a bit glaring imo. I think Buckley as well apoligsed separately, and she never intended to be like, the voice of god on canon representation.

The recent controversy however is around the newest artist penumbra have hired after their season 3 artist left. They hired Ellison Estephan, who also has a history of drawing racist, lesbophobic and transmisogynistic caricatures. the link goes over one of the most offensive artworks, which the penumbra team later address.

The first "statement" was given by one of the showrunners, Harley Takagi Kaner, on twitter I think a day after the announcement. However they basically only talked about the bullying theyve received in the meantime. It was mentioned later by Kevin Vibert how this was done in the spur of the moment by Harley. Vibert did compare the numbers of slurs sent to him, a white cis gay guy, vs Harley, a nonbinary POC so like, I understand why Harley would try to stop like abuse rather than criticism, but it wasnt great when this looked like their only official apology. Ellison also dismissed their offensive art as "goofy", which was also not great when fans hadnt heard anything else from the team. They did later apologise properly.

Then a week after the announcement, Vibert releases an 12 page statement on the matter. However, a large part of this was more going over why it took the team so long to respond and their hiring process, rather than an actual apology. In regards to Ellison's infamous artwork, he only goes over Alessandra Strong because no one on the hiring team was a black woman. And the response was it made sense to make a tall gruff muscular woman black because of her personality and because previous fans (like Buckley) had drawn her as black so it'd be taking away representation. I cant truly make a judgement on that, but he handwaves away the overly offensive caricature style which is what people mainly had an issue with, and didnt bring up the other characters. The crew have also decided to keep Ellison as their artist, so this is just another case of the penumbra team refusing to make changes and not take accountability in writing their characters and plot.

#ty for the ask! #antiblackness #misogynoir #long post #transmisogny tw

[insert-cleverurl]

solaine copies her dsmp meta twitter part one

preface: i wrote this on february 13th and am now archiving it over here on tumblr before i get around posting it to the actual archive (of our own). i'd like to clean it up before i go there, becuase i wrote this at like one am lying in bed and typing on my laptop that was sitting on my stomach. it's a lot of rambling. i go on a lot of tangents. it is not the cleanest nor likely most accurate meta you will ever read.

how characters (children) on the smp learn from history rather than repeat it: a thread

aka: stop liking the other one you fucks i opened the wikia so i actually know what happened now /lh

context here is that i had earlier made a much less coherent thread (not that this one is very coherent) with the caveat that i was going entirely off memory

this thread is mainly going over how tommy + tubbo both emulate and turned away from wilbur + schlatt respectively, and how i think that's going to reflect in ranboo's arc

"as long as i can't be the next jschlatt, you can't be the next wilbur." okay we all know this. it's obvious from this point on that both tubbo and tommy saw or had fears of how they were each developing into scarily familiar people - schlatt, a dictator, and wilbur, a madman.

starting with tommy, the parallels between his exile arc and wilbur's pogtopia arc are immediately, and glaringly, obvious. paranoia, trust issues, "maybe i'm actually the bad guy here", and most notably, intense loneliness. wilbur made it obvious he believed pogtopis's allies would all abandon them in the end (them being he and tommy, though how much he trusted tommy by the end is also up in the air), and he was completely prepared to kill anyone he had to in order to secure pogtopia's victory, despite also preparing himself to be the one to end it. wilbur gave up on l'manberg, at the very end. he believed tyranny was all that would ever reign, so he blew it up.

tommy, in his exile arc, was also despairingly lonely. he hallucinated tubbo, grew attached to dream, etc etc. tommy was very very close to "becoming" wilbur here (god i'm sorry this is so long already and just me summing things up we already know it's to keep my thoughts in order + satisfy my inability to shut up and use too many words)

where wilbur and tommy go their separate ways is when they were given an out. dream gave wilbur tnt + for tommy, he was. you know. gestures vaguely at logstedshire. wilbur took the out - he gave up. he gave in. we know he had moments of clarity (when niki was in danger) and Maybe this was one he could've had too, but he didn't. he took the tnt.

tommy decided enough was enough. so at a crucial moment in time, tommy turned away from being wilbur. he did not repeat history.

onto tubbo; admittedly i know much less about his arc as president so this will be less outlined. tubbo,,,, acted very similarly to schlatt. probably moreso than tommy and wilbur! strange new laws, ignoring his cabinet, execution, generally appearing to lose his care for the world and the opinions of others. i'd argue the thing that separates him from schlatt is the most important part of this thread, because it proves my point: he remembered.

i just want to clarify here: by "proves my point" i mean this is the clsoest we get to an agreement of the ideas i'm putting out here in canon?? ig?? as in like. this is the most on the nose way to say it. similarly in recent days to quackity consistently referring to his treatment of dream as torture, which seems to be a very "I Am Not In Character" move but is definitely meant for us, the viewers, rather than character dream or character quackity themselves. tubbo's is a little less like that but still it's kind of like pointing at the X on a map for us the viewers. ok tangent over

tubbo lived under schlatt's rule as one of those people he treated extremely shittily. he lived under schlatt's rule as that person he executed. and tubbo remembers all that! tubbo remembers how schlatt's rule played out, and he looks at his own uh, less than stellar time in office, and he admits this out loud (to ranboo, according to the wikia. i am getting all of this off the wikia. i did not watch any streams during this arc.) that he can See himself becoming schlatt.

and when quackity tries to execute ranboo for being a traitor, tubbo stops him.

onto dream and ranboo! dream is a special case in that we never get to see his perspective of things and are rather left to play fill in the blank, and this whole arc is special (in terms of this thread) in that it isn't over. so i will be doing a lot of extrapolating here.

dream starts out as a generally ambivalent character who has very few rules that he pretty much never bothers to enforce anyways (i think? i don't remember).

by this i mean, this is all stuff i heard secondhand in recent months and can no longer remember what it actually was because i never went back to check. i'm pretty sure, but just a disclaimer. i don't wanna get hit with an "um, actually

his villain arc starts very very early - two whole seasons before he really became one. in the war, he is the antagonist and he plays up to it! most of the war is from l'manberg's pov (or that's how we look at it now, at least) so obviously he is the Bad Guy here.

ranboo griefed a house like two days into the server. 'nuff said /lh

ranboo + dream are both heavily vilified characters from the get-go - dream's part should be fairly obvious (uh, the everything leading up the exile arc where he actually did villainous things), whereas ranboo's is most notably during the second festival's aftermath. taking the blame for blowing up the community house, wanting to "pick people not sides" (he wants all his friends to be happy - sounds familiar, right?), etc etc, and now he's with techno and phil, the former of which is Definitely considered a villain for working with dream

now many many parallels are being drawn between he and dream, especially with the whole enderwalking thing. in the aftermath of everything happening, he chooses to stay out of all conflict, until Something Happens and forces his hand. (the egg!) he wants peace for everyone, which again, sounds very familiar, right?

(slight tangent: yes, the griefing was forcing dream's hand. it's nigh impossible to construe it as anything other than a political attack - the vice president of l'manberg griefing the home of the greater dream smp's king? dream looks weak + open to attack if he lets it slide)

this was a bad way to put it but the spirit of it gets across i think. fuck character limit on twitter

that catches us up on all current lore. where do i think dream and ranboo are going to split? dream has been alone in his decision-making basically since the very first war. not once has he (successfully, we don't know if he tried) gone to fall back on his friends' support and ask for their help in making these hard decisions (of which there are many). he severs his final connections ("i don't care about anything on this server") and cements his place in history as a monster.

i think it is very likely that we are getting a ranboo "friendship and relying on other people" arc here. there are other ways they could go with it, obviously, but given his current arctic anarchist ties and what appears to be other friendships developing. hmm! i'm interested. this part is entirely speculation/extrapolation. point being. the kids on the smp do, in fact, learn from history. they still make mistakes sometimes, but past a certain point, they're always different mistakes. they learn, and they almost always get happier endings for it

i don't know if it's a coincidence that it's the three lore-relevant kids who are the ones doing this. i don't think it is, because this is a very well-written and clever story. the younger generation is the one learning and fixing past mistakes and leaving the world better off for it. that's very neat! i like it a lot. also now that purpled's becoming lore-relevant, goddamnit if i don't want to see next season being his "learning from history" arc. punz vs purpled, maybe? that'd be neat. who knows. ok i think im finally done lol ty for reading :)

caveat I forgot to add last night: obviously ranboo and dream start out in very different positions, moreso than both tommy and tubbo. but at the end of the day, all three of them are their own people who just happen to take after other people in some ways :)

again, ty for reading! here's the original thread. i'd like to add that this is probably out of date and i may come back to it some day but who knows. maybe this will just be a relic of before Now (may 25)

#solaine's dsmp meta #dsmp #dsmp meta #c!tommy #c!ranboo #c!tubbo #tommyinnit #ranboo #tubbo #schlatt #c!schlatt #c!dream #dream #c!wilbur #wilbur

[spiders-hth-is-an-outlier]

Honestly the Supernatural ending was fucked all along, because to have a strong ending, a work has to resolve whatever tensions and questions it set up in the opening – not necessarily in an uncomplicated way, but it has to offer a kind of answer to the fundamental story questions.

The premise set up in The Woman in White is: Sam has a good life, Sam is an up-and-coming guy on his way to happiness and success, but Sam's father is not doing well; Sam is angry at his father, who he remembers as, at best, a habitual drunkard who kept Sam's life in chaos and then disowned him.  So question number one is, given that Sam is better and happier now that he's no longer entangled with his father, should he revisit any of that?  Does he continue to owe his father anything, should he help look for him, should he even care at all that his father might be in trouble?  That feels like a clear no, not really, let John solve his own problems – until Jessica dies in the same way Mary did, and that introduces a twist.  Has Sam actually misunderstood who his father was?  Does John know, has John all along known something that Sam needs to know about his own past, that he can't live his happy life until he understands?  The search for John is now about not just “does Sam owe his family anything?” – it's about “does Sam need his family?”  And there's a plot resonance, but also a thematic resonance there: do you need your family?  Even if your family's pretty fucked up?  Does going back to your unhappy childhood serve some necessary function on your road to a successful adulthood?  Can you pretend forever that you don't come from the fucked-up place you come from, or do you actually have to go back and understand the truth about who your parents were because the past is never just the past?  

So the early seasons are largely about answering that question, through the vehicles of Sam, who would prefer not to admit that his fucked-up past can't really be run away from, and Dean, who would prefer not to admit that there was anything fucked-up about his past at all.  Both of them learn and change: Sam begins to understand where he really comes from and why he can't separate himself from the forces that made him, and Dean begins to understand that yeah, actually, he should separate himself a lot more from the forces that made him, that it's foolish to hold up his father as some kind of infallible god, because even God isn't that. All the stories that spin out in the early seasons about Earth as the cosmic battleground for the family strife between Michael and Lucifer are linked to the pilot by that question: is there any escaping the reach of your family and its history?  And the show decides, yeah, we have free will, we shouldn't just lie down and die because that's our inheritance.  We should change the script.  We can be better than our parents were.  Better than we were ordered or prophesied to be.  And the clear mechanism for all of this is love: Sam falls to Lucifer's influence when he's rejected again (Dean following in John's footsteps), but Sam is able to shake off that demonic control long enough to thwart Lucifer because Dean loves him and accepts him and remains with him when it looks like it's too late to save him (the thing John never did, couldn't do).  Dean changes the script by being more able to love Sam unconditionally than John could, and the basic question of the premise is answered: you do have to go back to your family – not to accept or replicate their mistakes, but to do better, to love them better this time.  You have to heal from the root.  As a viewer, you can accept or reject this resolution; I personally like it, but I'm from that same cultural background, I have a family history that vibes with the things the show is discussing, I'm primed to like and agree with the conclusion.  Maybe you're not, and that's okay!  The point is, it is a conclusion to something.  The show asked questions and then provided answers.

The problem is...the show answered its own questions in 5 seasons, and in such a way that the naturally satisfying conclusion was – literally anything else except more hunting.  You can't say the Big Answer is loving and forgiving your family in spite of their flaws, and then also say that what you want to do with your life is The Family Business just as your father practiced it.  Once you say that the prescription is to heal at the root, something should change.  And it doesn't, really, because the show can't change.  It has a formula.  It's about hunting.  Dean can't give up violence and become a family man, even though that's been clearly established as something he'd be better and happier doing.  Sam can't pursue any dreams that weren't the dreams his father had for him, even though that's been clearly established as the thing he's been willing to fight for all along.  So if the show isn't going to be over, they both have to actively choose to go against their own self-interest. And season 6 is pretty clever, actually – soulless!Sam is a device that does get them back on the road in a way that makes sense; we know why Sam isn't doing what's right for Sam, and we know that Dean can be convinced to do what's wrong for him in order to save Sam.  It tracks.  But it can't last, and what takes over pretty soon from there is...inertia, basically. They keep doing this because this is what they do.  It doesn't really make them happy.  It just feels necessary, because Hunters is what they are; no Hunters retire, in the whole show.  They are never allowed.  It is not done.  They may lapse into more of a part-time gig, but nobody actually leaves the business, because it would be – bad.  People would die, we guess?  A hero never would, we guess? It's not terribly clear, but the general sense is that it just has to happen this way because this is their story now.  This is who they are.

And that's the opposite of what the initial story was about.  Now the story about using your free will to transform and redeem the dysfunctions you inherited is a story about two guys just working in the family business while they die inside of loneliness and PTSD.  There's no story question in the later seasons; there's just stimulus and response.  Oops, Leviathans.  Oops, Mark of Cain.  Oops, Amara.  Oops, Lucifer and Lucifer and more Lucifer. Oops, Michael again.  We better deal with that, I guess.  Some of the storylines are okay in later seasons; some individual episodes are fantastic.  But the whole thing is mired in the fact that there can't be forward momentum in the story because there are opponents and antagonists galore, but there's no internal engine to the story, no fundamental problem to conquer or question to resolve.  From outside the story, we can sit here and say, Hey, it's a problem for me that these dudes are fucking miserable, I'd like them to work on resolving that!  But within the story, they're never allowed to admit that is a problem.  Because it's an adventure show about brave guys doing good deeds, and it's undermined at the most basic level if we come out and admit that what would make these dudes less miserable is no more fucking adventures, no more martyring themselves to do good deeds, no more hunting at all.

When the show came to an end, it was epically fucked, because it had nothing to resolve.  And to give the show credit, it did try to do something interesting that would refer back to and provide a commentary on the whole show – this meta business about “have we all been God's favorite tv show all along?” There's something there; it reminds me of the CS Lewis quote about how he never worried that God didn't exist, but he did often fear that God was actually a vivisectionist.  What if the reason this show has been churning along in place forever in spite of the characters' vivid and unchanging dissatisfaction with their life is that some other force wanted them to keep going on adventures?  Maybe it's God, who's a writer (that's ground we've gone over before), but not just a writer – he's his only fan, his only audience.  He's the Fandom. He's the Audience.  He's us.  Sam and Dean have been on this hamster wheel of labor and loss with no endpoint in sight because that's what we tune in to see; if they both quit, we change the channel.  We're the ones who demand they Always Keep Fighting, who call them heroes for suffering through this endless parade of baddies and funerals.  I mean, that's pretty good, as a way to retcon the complete pointlessness of the last ten years!  The point is: it was fun to watch.  We liked the characters and the episodes and we wanted them to keep doing that for our entertainment, even though we knew it wasn't any fun for them.  It's basically the network tv version of Cabin In the Woods, and there's a – I would say mildly interesting question to raise there about what's drama, what's catharsis, what do we get out of stories about other people's suffering and other people's heroism?  In my opinion it's a mildly interesting route to open up, although I don't know that there's enough meat on the bone to really make it pay off.  An effort was clearly made, though!

But to follow that through to its conclusion, you'd have to answer it, and the way it's set up, there is no satisfying answer possible from inside the universe.  We can answer what we get out of stories, perhaps.  But why would that be of any interest or comfort to the people in the stories?  Their story can't resolve for Sam and Dean if we learn it was actually a story about us the whole time.

So what do you do to end that story? Well, you're a little bit stuck.  You can have them resign or get free somehow, sure, and the show does that.  But what then?  You have two choices, really: either we loop back to s6 and they keep being hunters because It's a Show About Two Hunters – only this time they have True Free Will so you have to assert that they're really freely choosing it, and you have to somehow justify that they would really freely choose to keep doing this thing that's never made them happy, which is depressing as shit – or you have them quit and go pursue their own lives and their own desires – which pretty much goes ahead and admits that the last ten seasons have been us the audience benefitting from the Winchesters' unwilling participation in this Saw-like theme park that was set up for our entertainment (via our stand-in, Chuck).  That's clearly the bolder option, but it's also like – super fucked up!  And it denies both the audience and, more critically, the people who make the show from having any real victory lap,  any way to present the show as a completed entity and say “here's a great story that we're proud of and excited about.” It's such a bleak corner that the show has painted itself into at that point – all of this only happened against our heroes' will, but enjoy it anyway!  Of course that got pushback.  Of course people wanted to end with something that portrayed the characters as the drivers of the show, protagonists whose choices mattered, whose lives mattered.  But they weren't, and they didn't.  That was the premise the writers went with in season 15, because they needed to do something about the fact that nowhere in the past ten seasons had the Winchesters done anything on their own behalf, because they'd never been given story goals.  All they'd been allowed to do is play whack-a-mole with monsters.

It's a mess all the way around, and it's almost impossible to resolve this late in the game.  Season 15 couldn't be about the Winchesters resolving any real Stuff, because the show had long since realized that its prime directive was making sure that the fundamental pattern of the show remained intact: the boys go on adventures, bad things happen somewhere and the boys show up to stop it.  And if that fundamental pattern is not a problem – if we're supposed to be glad it's there – then you can't allow any storylines that would end in changing it.  Everything that's introduced has to be resolvable by a reversion to that vision of What We Do Around Here, so we can keep doing it.  The legitimacy of What We Do Around Here is never allowed to be in question, and an attempt to question it at the very end of the series winds up inherently muddled and out-of-place.  Third-act problems are always first-act problems, and the problem with the finale is that the show had spent so long actively reifying the value of an endless, unchanging sequence of events and actively working to quash anything that started looking like a linear story that would end in a place other than where it began.

I like a lot of the plotlines and episodes and characters in the later season.  Honestly, 12 is probably my favorite season, just on the weight of good episodes I enjoy watching.  But the only part of Supernatural that ever had a coherent story at the heart of it was the original five seasons, where things were set up, explored, and resolved in Swan Song with admirable narrative focus and direction.  Everything after that was just stuff that happened, which is not what a story is, and you can't come back from that in the series finale and somehow make it work.

#spn finale #apparently i give writing advice now?

[puresoulshope]

Stranger Things – Season 4 Teaser  Analysis

I am excited I have some thoughts and I need people to scream with me so, here we go.  

First shot we see in the trailer is the shot of a clock. I don’t think it is a coincidence at all, because we have been waiting for season 4 quite some time. The clock’s minute hand is on 12, and the hour hand is on 3. It makes me, hopefully, think that new season will be released on 12.3.2021 which is 3 December. 

Then, we are greeted by a security camera, which is on. From the lens of the camera we can see that the kids from the laboratory are being watched. This camera and its red light means the Hawkins Lab is still watching the kids they experimented on and our characters, especially Eleven, right now. Or, maybe it is referring to the Upside Down still watching our characters, especially Will. Maybe both.  

We see two kids, playing and crawling on all fours on a rainbow floor. From earlier season we know that The Rainbow Room is where the experimented kids played, and from their hospital gowns it is safe to say that they are from the Hawkins Lab, or another lab participated in the same study. I noticed that they are crawling on a very similar pace and they are very close in shape. My first thoughts went: twins. The MK Ultra experiments were made on pregnant women; it is very possible that the researchers wanted to know how would the results be effected if there were two babies being affected at the same time. Also the fact that between 8 and 11, the only revelated laboratory kids so far, there are two consecutive missing numbers, 9 and 10. Maybe, we are looking at 9 and 10 here

Hands down, the most crucial part of the trailer. The fact that there are at least two older/ teenage looking laboratory kids here means that maybe right now there are two adults out there who were once laboratory kids. Or, maybe they are already dead. We are not aware of their fate but there is something else here this shot is telling us something important. They are playing chess. A chess game with figures which very much look like D&D characters. This shot, is telling us that all those seasons we watched so far are a chess match between our protagonists and antagonists. But who is winning? The team that has the King wins, of course. Our King is Will Byers (literally) and the party who has the king on their side wins that season/match. The first season’s winner was Upside Down, because Upside Down still had a part of it inside Will which lead to the events of season 2. In season 2, our Queen piece Eleven, the most powerful piece of the game, and the team play of other pieces saved and protected the King, so they won. But Upside Down still had pawns in its hand, and it extended them with Billy in third season. In all seasons, valuable pieces were lost due to game. Upside Down took them (Bob and Hopper).  

I don’t have much complex thoughts about this shot. Only that the kid who is holding the ball probably has the power to see the future. That’s it. That’s the theory.

In this shot, red circle figures landed on the numbers 4, 7 and 8. We know that the number 8, Kali, is alive. Referencing from that this shot here may be telling us about the numbers of kids who are still alive.

There are five red blocks here. Four of them are put in doubles while the fifth one is on top of them, alone. This shot may referencing the fact that at the end of the third season, most of our couples got seperated : Mike and Eleven, Nancy and Jonathan, Joyce and Hopper. Only couple left standing together is Lucas and Max. This seperation is also emphasied in the next shot, but I want to say that this can also symbolise that these couples getting closer and becoming one again at the end of the season. 

Lastly, this shot is showing three kids playing together while another kid is sitting all alone by himself in the other side of the room. Three kids may reference Mike, Lucas and Dustin who are still together in Hawkins while Will is away from them. This is a sad reminder for us that Will got separated from his party at the end of the season. We may see a new side of Will because of this development. He may be a little different when we see him again this season. Personally, I have a lot of feelings for the character development of Will and effects of the events happened on him, so, hopefully this is something that will be examined in this season. 

(Friendly reminder : This is my first time writing a teaser analysis and English is not my first language. So if you notice any mistake, please comment on them. Also I am ignoring the books and comics published, only taking the events showed on TV series as canon)

#stranger things #stranger things 4 #stranger things theory #stranger things season 4 #stranger things season 4 teaser #stranger things season 4 teaser analysis #stranger things teaser #eleven #el hopper #mike wheeler #dustin henderson #lucas sinclair #max mayfield #joyce byers #nancy wheeler #jonathan byers #jim hopper #mileven #mike x eleven #jancy #jonathan x nancy #jopper #joyce x hopper #joyce x jim #lucas x max #lumax #will byers

[cosmicclownboy]

Some people are mad when Jesse/Maria comparisons are made because Jesse should logically be leaps and bounds worse, but I ended up having a much harder time with Maria in s2 (and even Liz, to some extent), at least in the context of Alex, than I ever did with Jesse. For all of RNM's faults and the CW's love of redeeming shitty white guys, this show has never for a second pretended that Jesse wasn't a piece of shit. Carina never once tried to make excuses for him off-screen, even while she was victim-blaming Alex for his own trauma responses. He got murdered. But we will never get any sort of resolution with Maria ever taking responsibility for her own actions. Even in the breakup scene, she never acknowledges any mistakes she might have made. I go back and forth on whether I'd like her to have an actual honest conversation with Alex in s3 where they both don't sound like straight out of a fetishizing Carina fanfic the way 2x05 and 2x06 happened or giving her another personality transplant might just be the way to go.

There is some fandom policing regarding critiquing Maria where people approach any Maria criticism with and I pulled out an Uno card that says your a racist everybody lets witch hunt this individual and bully them out of the fandom. And whilst I 100% appreciate the lengths people go to stop racism its become a point where real racism in fandom is ignored because people simply want to spite individuals who have criticism and drive them out of the space. Which really if your trying to call out a form of oppression and proceed in the way of doing it by bullying individuals....you are not the delicate warrior of social justice you think you are. Its is very transparent. Nobody is 100% woke. No one is educated on everything.

Now in me saying Maria/Jesse have narrative antagonistic parallels it’s not me saying Maria is a psycho fascist who agrees with genocide. Parallels can be traits or narrative plots where the two are similar. With Maria/Jesse it’s that specifically.

Malex’s separation is really built upon homophobia, abuse, manipulation selfishness and moments of trauma where there is an event that is violating. Narrative wise they are the underdogs - a couple to root for.

In season one the person who creates that environment is Jesse. He doesn’t view Alex as a person merely a pawn. He plays upon his relationship and emotional connection with Alex. He’s manipulative. He feels a sense of ownership over Alex. He gaslights and in order to separate Malex he turns to violence. Jesse’s entire behaviour is built upon selfishness.

In season two the person who creates that environment is Maria. She doesn’t view Alex as a friend/person merely a pawn. She plays upon her friendship and emotional connection in every scene with Alex to get her way. She’s manipulative. She feels a sense of ownership over Alex and upon hearing that she was the only person that an abused Alex took comfort in she felt that sense of ownership extended towards his sexuality. And in turn she completely created a situation that was violating to Alex and Michael. Maria’s entire behaviour is built upon selfishness.

In both situations Alex leaves to cope.

The show does try to gaslight a narrative within that Maria is an empowering woman for this behaviour and a good person. The reality is she’s created another harmful environment for Malex. And me pointing this out isn’t me saying everything is on Maria. Michael did pursue Maria. But the way she treated both parties of Malex in season two didn’t come across as concern vs her own selfishness and feelings of ownership of the two. And both 1x06 and 2x06 contain moments of a violation which is a manipulation tactic.

Frankly I just don’t want her interacting with either of Malex. Maria and that specific episode has caused me to feel uncomfortable any time she’s on screen. They aren’t her queer accessory. She isn’t entitled nor does she have ownership over either one.

#anti maria deluca #mentions of 2x06 #tw consent #tw assault

[ariainstars]

Congratulations, We Fell for Another Love Bombing or Thank You, Disney, You Did It Again

Sigh. Luke Skywalker is back. And Din Djarin and his child had to say goodbye. I never thought I would curse and say “Oh no!” when Luke appeared in that fateful corridor. 

I wonder why the Disney studios are doing this - trying to "make up” for the oh-so criticized sequels, I suppose?

The Jedi have made their time. It was shown and proven over and over again that their attitude is wrong and needs to change, and Luke was the last of the old school Jedi. Again, a Force-sensitive child is all but kidnapped by a Jedi: he obviously did not like to go. Mando is no longer the hero of the story, he was stripped of his agency and all of his personal choices were questioned and valued for null and void. But the Dark Saber is in his hands now, so he’s the heir to the throne of Mandalore I guess. Like he ever wanted that.

This show, which grew to be so well-beloved in only a few episodes, now is not “The Mandalorian” any more. Its new title is “Luke’s Skywalker’s Comeback”. Hardcore fans may be out of their minds with joy, but for us, who admired Mando both as a badass hero and as a father figure and loved the dynamics between him and Grogu, the whole purpose of the show is destroyed. And here I naively had thought The Rise of Skywalker was bad enough to teach the studios not to repeat its mistakes.

~~~ more under the cut ~~~

Star Wars ought to be a fairy tale. It is and always was one. I can understand that the prequels had to end in a tragedy, we all knew that from the start, but why the sequels? And now, why must this generally acclaimed and beloved tv show again appease hardcore fans of old with Luke coming to save the day, cancelling in a matter of minutes what the story had built up within two entire seasons - the relationship of the two protagonists, heart and core of the narrative, as it had been with Rey and Ben Solo? And when both of them had their relationship just getting started - Rey and Ben kissing, Din calling Grogu by his name and the latter seeing him and touching his face? Why make Rey a queen without her king, and Din a father without a son? 

Again, a Force-user is denied having a home: „Jedi training” matters more. By Luke of all people, the guy who never was trained in the first place (only very briefly), who except for a few lessons with Obi-Wan and Yoda was self-taught in the Force, and never understood that his strength lay with his compassion and his connection with other people, not with his alleged „superpowers”.

Think back to how Anakin, Luke and Rey were before they met the Jedi: unaware of their powers, compassionate, idealistic, brave. The Jedi mindset tainted their characters and lives, making them believing that they are (or have to be) untouchable and invincible, compelling them to live for duty instead of love, condemning them to a lifetime of loneliness. Will the Jedi never learn?

Though I practically grew up with the classic movies, I loved The Last Jedi; I can accept that Luke failed, and also that Han and Leia did. Nobody is perfect, and the Jedi mindset as well as the universally accepted idea that „Jedi” is a synonym for infallible saint-like hero was wrong in the first place, else the Empire never would have risen. Making Luke not the cavalry who came to save the day - until the battle on Crait, that is - but a man who failed and picked himself up again was much more meaningful, and I know not a few fans who felt inspired by this. Luke had saved his father choosing love over power, not the contrary. Some fans just never get it. To appease them, why not simply give him a new storyline of his own, instead of making him intrude in other Star Wars related shows? Why stop the new stories in their tracks just to bring him back?

Instead of seeing Luke as the grand kickass hero in a tv show that never had anything to do with him until now, it would have been more to the purpose to finally shed light on the thirty years between his father’s and his nephew’s death, to explain us where the Jedi and the Skywalker-Organa-Solo family failed to make such an outcome possible - the granddaughter of Palpatine taking over with their own blessing. There must have been a huge build-up between the end of the original saga and the fateful night at the temple when Luke briefly panicked looking into his nephew’s mind. Many fans still are convinced that „Kylo Ren just chose to be bad” because we hardly know how the relationship between these two was in the first place. (A very easy plot twist would e.g. have been Snoke warning Ben that his uncle sooner or later would turn on him, frightened by his power. The fulfilment of that prophecy would have made the night at the temple much more impactful.) 

I understand that the studios want to tease us, to make us watch the other shows, too. But honestly, I’m getting tired of feeling duped. Tired of getting attached to new heroes to have their purpose smashed just so the Star Wars dudebro fans can sleep quietly at night because „some Jedi will take care of it”. First the characters from the sequels, now the ones from The Mandalorian. You get to love the new characters, you root for them to find happiness or at least some closure, and then, at the last moment, poof!, the hero of old comes back and the story development stops right there. 

It is not right and it never was for the Jedi to take Force-sensitive children away from home, to enforce „you have to become a Jedi, like it or not” on them, to teach them not to have attachments, to make them focus on the Light Side thereby bringing the Force out of its much-needed balance. While Ahsoka saw that Grogu has formed a strong attachment to Din Djarin, Luke obviously did not, or he did not care. The irony is that he always wanted a father, and knows the pain of losing a father you’ve just found.

The Mandalorian felt like a consolation after Episode IX, a blessing for the fans for whom heart and soul are more interesting than nostalgia and „Jedi superheroes”. Now it’s just another kick in the guts. It’s painful and embarrassing to get to love characters so much, to get invested in their story so deeply, and then to realize again that they seem to mean nothing in the shade of the heroes of old. Ben Solo died young and miserable and Din Djarin and Grogu can now, I suppose, be miserable too. Can someone please explain to me why after the classics, no Star Wars film or show had an uplifting ending any more? With the possible exception of Solo, which was a nice filler but not a really important storyline. (I do not count Episodes I and II, they officially had a happy ending but it was tainted by the knowledge of what was to come.) 

Fans are not blind. We saw the parallels between Darth Vader and Din Djarin as well as the differences - both being cool and tough but the latter not disdaining to be a caring father at the same time. The entire show lived from the dynamics between the gruff but kind bounty hunter and the innocent-looking powerful child, ever from the first episode. Two years of build-up for nothing, as it was with the four years of the sequels. Mando has to relinquish Grogu, Rey loses Ben. What was all that for? Both Mando and Rey are fighters, they have done nothing else their entire lives. What is to become of them now that they have nothing to fight for any more, nor anyone to live for? Except staying on a planet that is foreign to them and, for all they know, inhabitable or at least inhospitable? 

With Rey and Ben Solo, the situation was different: she had proven good intentions but bad attitude (arrogance, violence, judgement) over and over, unable to deny her heritage, and even impaled her „antagonist” once while he was only defending himself. He had been the head of a criminal organization for years, and had committed patricide. Of course there are nuances to these characters and I still believe that they would have deserved another chance; I understand however that would have been unfitting to let the sequels end giving them a happy ending.

But in the case of Din Djarin, a man of honor, who has made friends and brought peace wherever he went throughout the galaxy? Grogu, the last surviving padawan of the old Jedi temple, who saved both his and Greef Karga’s life despite the danger for himself? What did they do to deserve being ripped apart like that? 

So, all I can say: thank you, you did it again. And, once more, just before Christmas. I wish at least these depressing endings would be released at some other time. 

I would dearly want to see a galaxy that finally learned from its faults, where family and attachments and Balance and free choice are not contrary to being a Jedi. I am in my late forties and I’m beginning to give up hope that I will live to see it. By now I am wondering whether George Lucas himself will live to see it. 

I always loved Luke. He is one of my favorite heroes. But now he’s become an insensitive know-it-all who suffered from his own daddy issues to the point that he almost died crying out to his father for help, yet did not learn not to separate fathers from children and vice versa and, on the contrary, is doing it over and over again. He did not even tell Mando his name, or where he could reach him. We don’t have a clue as to if, when and how the Clan of Two will meet again. 

I get it that since this show is set five years Return of the Jedi, it would have been difficult to ignore Luke’s existence altogether. And of course, we can rest assured that Luke will do his best for Grogu. But still: he has made his time. I wanted to see the new heroes going their own way, not hanging on the sleeves of the former generation. Mando is a man of honor, he had promised to bring Grogu to his own kind and he relinquished him despite his own wishes. (Not to mention that technically, since he identifies as a Mandalorian, by being a Jedi Luke is his enemy.) Why did Luke have to take the child away? His greatest strength always was that he was first and foremost himself and only in the second place a Jedi. What became of his trademark compassion? 

Before The Mandalorian, we have never seen a healthy and working father-son relationship in the saga. It was incredibly refreshing and heart-warming to see these two traveling through the galaxy and living through adventures together; also, contrarily to Yoda, Grogu saw a lot of the bad things happening in the galaxy with his own eyes, which certainly was good for his character development.

But in the end, both he and his „father” did not go anywhere. Like Rey in Episode IX, they found a) power and b) a surrogate place, but neither got what was actually his heart’s wish - a home. I can’t understand why. Deliberate cruelty? We never knew whether Han and Leia and Ben felt how painful it was to break up their little family for the sake of „Jedi training”. You bet Din and Grogu did feel that pain and loss.

Both as a person with a heart and a brain and an almost lifelong Star Wars fan I am sickened by the readiness of the studios to end all that this well-made show had built up, for the appeasement of Jedi worshippers who just don’t want to see that the Jedi mindset needs urgently to change. It can’t be that difficult to renew them for the better; there is no necessity to erase the Jedi completely and there is nothing bad with making them grow wiser and stronger by finally understanding and accepting the importance of attachments and family ties. Yes, I realize that being a father also means learning how to let go; but here we are speaking of a literal child, not of a young adult who chose his own way in life.

I thought that George Lucas knew why he sold his franchise to the Disney studios, given their tradition in telling stories about family and friendship. This development is not a triumph, it is unworthy both of the studios and of the entire Star Wars saga. I’m tired of producers bowing down before fans who see every shred of the saga through „Jedi are always right”-tinted glasses respectively who value coolness over compassion even though it always was the saga’s central message. 

Whatever happens in Season 3, countless fans will only be watching it asking, „Where’s Luke?” If Grogu should choose to join Mando again, everybody will be like, „But how can he want to leave Luke Skywalker of all people?” Some already see Grogu die prematurely, killed by the oh-so-bad guy Kylo Ren, for no other reason than to just to further prove how evil he is. In which case both Ben Solo and Grogu will have lived and died for nothing except for leaving a lot of heartbreak behind. 

There must be another and better way to honor the legacy of both Luke Skywalker and the original trilogy than to think up new heroes and then destroy their purpose for the sake of old times’ glory. Lucas himself had said that Star Wars is basically for twelve-year-olds. It seems not: it’s for the fans who were twelve years old forty years ago, when the first movies hit theatres. 

There are enough voices crying out for the sequels to be erased from canon. Who knows? This may be the next step into the past instead of the future. The sequels were hinting at a better future (Balance), Grogu was, too (family). But the grand past is so reassuring. The sequels tried to tell the audience to grow up and learn to do without their heroes, to see that even they were flawed and that the new heroes could grow beyond them. Fie on them, said the hardcore fans. Now it’s the turn of the younger generation, who got to know and love the saga with the sequels or The Mandalorian, to be like „WTF”. 

Rogue One also had been a huge disappointment to me. Not that I found it badly made, but I went into a depressive mood for three days for the same reason: I did not like that I had grown so attached to all of these characters only to see all of them die. The infamous Darth Vader scenes and the design with the huge hints at the classic movies were no consolation. Nostalgia does not make me happy. Heart does. Rogue One, the sequels and The Mandalorian were all, in the end, deprived of all human feeling except loss and regret and many, many thoughts about what might have been. 

The Mandalorian was an excellent story on its own. It did not need Luke Skywalker. It is and ought to be Din Djarin’s story, who lost or gave up everything because he was afraid to lose the child: and now he did. It’s not comforting that he lost him to the alleged Good Guy. Luke of course won’t turn a hair on Grogu’s head, but he can’t offer him a home, we already know that. Ahsoka saw the attachment between the two and she knows the dangers of it; Luke does not know what drove his father to his terrible fate. If the sequels remain canon, then we already know that Luke will not allow his pupils having and keeping healthy attachments. And that does not promise well for the child’s future.

Unless the studios commit the madness of officially erasing the sequels and starting the saga anew, we can only hope that the child will not stay with Luke for long since it’s a good five years before he will start his own Jedi temple. Maybe he will die of a broken heart, poor little guy. And Din Djarin might become the new ruler of Mandalore, though sad and alone. But who cares: Luke is back. Please: I did not subscribe to Disney+ wanting to see Schwarzenegger movies. The lonesome hero can ride into the sunset for all I care, out of sight and of mind. Star Wars’ greatest strength always was its heart. 

My own take was that Grogu is meant to be a healer, and since Luke is not, there is no way he can teach him this particular skill in the Force. Anakin was a pilot and a mechanic, Luke and Ben also were pilots. None of them were Jedi by choice. Grogu is older than Luke and he was already trained at the old Jedi temple: he’s more likely to be a teacher to Luke than the other way around. Grogu as the first Force-user who values attachment and family over power and Jedi training, that would indeed have been a new hope. This backpedaling is shallow and useless. Even if Luke sends Grogu back to Din Djarin, this won’t teach him not to take a child away from its home, since only a few years later he will do the same thing to his nephew. (Although it would admittedly be an interesting plot point to see a small Ben Solo interacting with Grogu for a while.) 

Please give us back The Mandalorian the way it was, with its characters and dynamics. The themes and messages of The Last Jedi already were almost all aborted in The Rise of Skywalker; we didn’t sign up on Disney+ to see the exact same thing happen with The Mandalorian. I for my part am fed up with this kind of love bombing followed by a quick and coldblooded let-down. Star Wars may be a cult, but it need not be the kind of cult where you get hooked and then unwittingly follow a carrot hanging before your eyes. I thought the exaggerated Jedi cult was mostly made by the fans: the studios did not need to jump on this ship. This is not the Way. 

Now everything I feared is flaring up again - fans jubilating because “the Jedi are taking matters in hand” instead of accepting the failure of the Jedi mindset at last; and even insisting that since things are going so well, all Disney needs to do is to cancel the sequels from canon and everybody can be happy again. 

Please, please, give this tormented galaxy a chance to heal at last. We don’t need Luke Skywalker to save the day by killing all the bad guys. We don’t need the oh-so-powerful and perfect Jedi. We need faith in the Force. We need a home. Don’t take it away from us again. Thank you.

 P.S. If we see Luke again in Season 3, at least give the role to a live actor. That digital “rejuvenation” made him look wooden. Luke’s best trait, apart from his compassion, always was his smile.

P.P.S. What’s with Boba Fett claiming Jabba’s throne? I thought Jabba had a son. What in the galaxy happened to him?

P.P.P.S. I don’t mind kickass women, but honestly, I’m getting somehow tired of them. What became of the ladies of Star Wars, the diplomats, the good queens, the loving mothers, the accurate librarians, who contribute to the galaxy without killing (or hurting) anyone? I’m feeling kind of underrepresented here...

#the mandalorian #mando #din djarin #grogu #baby yoda #spoilers #luke skywalker #jedi #the Force #greef karga #disney #disney studios #disney lucasfilm #ben solo #rey #kylo ren #sw #star wars #rogue one #solo #read more #darth vader #tros salt #the rise of skywalker #episode IX #star wars sequels #boba fett #the last jedi #ahsoka tano #anakin skywalker

[middleofnowhere92]

Ranking all ATLA Villains/Antagonists from worst to best (by someone who loves villains)

This post was inspired by this ask 

Warning: I swear quite a bit in this post and I’m a dumbass, not an ATLA scholar, so take this with a grain of salt. Also I have no idea wtf my ranking criteria was. I assigned arbitrary and meaningless points like Dumbledore giving all the points to Gryffindor at the end of the year. 

Iroh

 I have a secret for you...Iroh is an antagonist.... Say it with me... Iroh is an antagonist. For the people in the back, IROH IS AN ANTAGONIST. He’s not particularly good at at it, but he belongs on this list. Primary reason being, his siege on Ba Sing Se, which was a major battle in the 100 year war and all the other things he did in the war to become a general. If he was good at being a villain, he would at least have the decency to conquer the city, but as Ozai points out, Iroh excels at tea and failure. When we see Iroh in Book 1, He’s a very chill antagonist for the same reason a lot of our other antagonists are (June, the Yuyan Archers, Combustion man etc)-they are helping a villain achieve their goal. In Iroh’s case, he does help Zuko in many ways ( like sneaking him onto Zhao’s ship) and these in turn help Zuko get closer to his goal of capturing Aang. I love Iroh as a character, but he’s not good at being an antagonist, which is why he is ranked the worst. 

Circus Trainer

This man is straight up, evil. I like villains, but I do not like this man. He’s cruel and not in a fun way, which is why he’s near the bottom of the list. The whole point of being a villain is to be cool and do bad things, but he’s not even a little fun to watch. He’s the least interesting to look at... 

Yon Rha

This man is a coward. Like how did he lead the Southern Raiders? He went soft when he got old. He was more savage back in the day. Like this man is a firebender, but he cowers from Zuko before Katara even pops up. He needs to grow a pair. Like Katara said man is pa-thet-ic. 

The Rough Rhinos (ignoring the comics)

They get points for creating my favorite antagonist, Jet. But the first time we see these clowns in the show, the gang just rides away on Appa, easily avoiding them. And then the gang easily defeats them in their next run in. These clowns are good at destroying things, but not really fighting or pursuing others. 

Ozai

I expected more from this man. He was hyped up for three seasons and I just didn’t feel like he was smart enough to be the bad guy for the whole ass show.  The man clearly doesn’t think for himself or show up throughout the series doing  menacing things. The final agni kai overshadowed Ozai and Aang’s showdown. That’s the theme, Azula outshines a grown man as the star villain of the show. He does get some points for his fashion and flair for the dramatic. 

Mai's Uncle (Boiling Rock Warden)

This man, is a dumbass with the reflexes of a sloth. Suki overpowered him in 2 seconds flat. How is this grown man getting defeated by a little nugget like Suki? She was only holding his wrist. He could have just kicked her? Like you are a prison warden, look alive man! And he should have captured Zuko’s little ass and sent him right over to Ozai to get some street cred, but instead he just gets pissed cause Zuko broke up with Mai? First lesson in being a villain/antagonist- power over everything (including family). He does get points for ordering them to cut the line. That’s straight savage. 

Xin Fu and Yu

Toph gets it right, these are two dunderheads. How did they not hear Toph bending metal? They react almost as slowly as the Boiling Rock Warden, letting Toph easily overtake them. They are two skilled benders and they didn’t even stand a chance. 

General Fong

This man gets points for being a bat shit crazy. And I think he’s one of the first non fire nation antagonists we see in the show, so points for him. He’s an underrated antagonist. He does cool bending and his emotional manipulation to get Aang into the Avatar state is A+ villain work. 

Azulon

Azulon gets villain points for keeping the war going. He didn’t fuck it up like Ozai. But Azulon gets his villainness handed to him on a platter, he didn’t really do much, besides maintain status quo. We do get the scene where Ozai asks for the throne. But I don’t think Azulon assumed Ozai was going to kill Zuko. Azulon was trying to make a point, that Ozai’s request was absurd, but he obviously didn’t know Ozai well enough...

Koh

Koh almost didn’t make the list. I don’t really consider him to be an antagonist. Aang came to him asking for information and Koh was trying to do what he does..steal faces. He was just vibing. I included him on this list, because he antagonized us (the viewers). Dude is easily the most terrifying part of the show. 

Ghashiun

He muzzled Appa! He’s not ranked high on this list, because he didn’t know Appa was Aang’s so he wasn’t intentionally trying to fuck with the Avatar. I do like the sandbenders as a whole. They just run around causing chaos with their cool bending. This character, however, loses points, because when he is confronted about stealing Appa, he gets defensive and tries to lie. If you do something bad, at least have the balls to own up to it. 

Wan Shi Tong

Gets points for his flair for the dramatic a la Ozai. I did like Wan Shi Tong’s logic around not giving the gaang information: “You think you're the first person to believe their war was justified?!” He had more brain cells than some of our other villains/antagonists, but was also dumb too? Sokka pretty easily outsmarted him. This Spirit has been alive forever, he shouldn’t be outsmarted by a child. 

The Old Man

Oooof. I almost put him in the number one spot tbh. He did us and Haru so dirty. Like he could have died,but he turned in the person that saved him??? He gets points for shock value and pettiness. I personally think Jet should take him out...

June

June gets points for being a bad bitch. I like her vibe. She’ll do anything as long as you’re paying her the right price and I can respect that. She isn’t higher on the list, because she is executing someone else’s plan, not her own. 

The Yuyan Archers

Speaking of bad bitches, the Yuyan Archers are so cool and I wish they got more screen time! We see very few antagonists that can keep up with Aang the way that this group does. They add a bit of spice and a different flavor to what we know about Fire Nation fighting styles, which I approve of. I hope we see more of them in future ATLA projects. They aren’t higher up, because they are still doing someone else’s bidding. If they had their own leader and their own agenda, that would be some cool shit. 

Combustion Man

This man gets points for giving the gaang a lot of trouble. As viewers, we really worry about whether they will be able to defeat him. I like that he has a different style of bending, which in and of itself is terrifying. He still doesn’t make it up higher on the list, because he’s still doing someone else’s (Zuko’s) bidding.

Rig Warden

On second thought, I may have him ranked a little too high. But oh well, fuck it. He gets many many points for being voiced by George Takei. This man also gets points for having general villain swag. He is sassy and I am here for it. He’s highly effective at crushing the souls of the Earthbenders on the rig. Also, he does not stutter when Haru throws those rocks at him.Came at him full force which is what all the other himbos on this list should have been doing when these children played them! He outright told Katara he was gonna kill her “You’re one mistake away from dying where you stand.” Loses points for begging as he’s dragged off the rig. Go down with some dignity!

The Southern Raiders

So the Southern Raiders get ranked separately from Yon Rha, because he led them towards the end of their conquest. I think they started under Sozin’s reign. This group gets ranked fairly high, because they were very effective at their task. They came, they saw, they decimated-leaving the SWT defenseless and barely able to sustain itself. 

Mai

I like Mai and wish I could rank her higher. I like her knives, they are very cool form of defense that was unique to her. I also love how she just immediately flung arrows at Aang, no hesitation. She does get style points, her aesthetic is everything. Her one liners are pretty funny, “You’re so colorful, you’re making me nauseous.”  She lacks in her commitment. Anytime anything inconveniences her she’s just like eh, no thanks. Hardcore antagonists need to be have some dedication to their cause, which Mai does not.  I feel like she would eventually run out of weapons in a longer battle, which would be a big issue for her. 

Long Feng

Gets instant points for villain swag, creepy vibe and sass. This man kept news of a whole war from Ba Sing Se, even though the city was filled with refugees? Long Feng had his work cut out for him. He loses points, because he lets the children get away with too much. He should have locked down Aaang and co immediately, because they were trouble as soon as they rolled up. Also, he should have fought Azula. He let a fourteen year old take his whole career away. He was never even a player.

Sozin

Sozin gets a  large amount of hypothetical points from being the one to start it all. He’s the one who initiated the 100 year war. He did not play around. He used that comet to its maximum potential. Also he has a dragon, which is fucking cool. He gets bad bitch points for leaving Roku on the exploding island. Like that’s a power move right there. He wiped out the air nomads and invaded the Southern Water Tribe, which is why his successors  are ranked much lower on the list. They really didn’t do shit.

Hama

Gets points for being a waterbender, which is something cool that we hadn’t seen in a villain yet. She also gets points for executing her own deranged agenda. I would love to see her and Jet link up, cause that would have been chaos. She also gets heaps of points for inventing bloodbending. Many of the villains of this list can barely think and homegirl has big brain energy. She is cunning and quick, like when she utilizes Sokka and Aang to attack Katara. I like her general bruja (witch) vibes. She gets more points because she does not motherfucking stutter when Katara figures her out, she just starts bloodbending immediately. She really enjoys her power and I can’t blame her for it. She’s a baddie and she knows it. More points for Hama, because she gets Katara to carry on her legacy (whether she wants to or not) and goes off to jail with her dignity. She’s an all-star villain and I love to see it. She loses a few points, because her bloodbending is limited to the full moon, but she still has her waterbending which is terrifying enough...

Dai Li

Like the rig warden, I probably ranked these himbos too high, but I love them as henchmen. Their bending is amazing, they are sneaky and they can brainwash you? Like fuck me up man. They really are just a joy to watch and their betrayal of Long Feng is so unexpected. This group really creates the creepy/ominous aesthetic the creators were going for in Ba Sing Se. Don’t think their bending is good? They one upped Toph and almost had her, but Jet saved her at the last second. 

Zhao

I feel like Zhao’s characterization is inconsistent (sometimes he has a bad temper, sometimes he doesn’t?) which makes him hard to rank, but let’s do it anyway. He gets points for being voiced by the guy that played Lucius Malfoy, like yaaas work that Slytherin aesthetic. Gets points for using the Yuyan Archers. Loses a lot of points in his fight with Aang, like that child was obviously baiting him. He has a lot of ambition and actually has to work to his rise to power, which he obviously relishes. He’s the perfect antagonist for Zuko. He accomplished his goal of frying the fish/moon and he actually captures Aang. I think the writers added in his hot temper later on, because they realized he was too competent and had to give him a flaw. 

Zuko

Ohhh my morally confused prince, Where do we even start? Zuko gets a lot of points for his sheer determination. I would love to see an unhinged Zuko without Iroh. Zuko’s tenacity and unpredictability make him a fantastic antagonist. Iroh and Azula try to control Zuko, but they never really know what he’s gonna do next and neither do we as the viewers. He’s near the top of the list, because even with so many struggles he kept Aang on the run for two seasons. I like that he actually struggled to be good. He obviously loses points for joining the good guys, but we still love him. 

Jet

Speaking of morally grey, cue up Jet’s theme music. He gets instant points for swag and cool swords. Like the Yuyan archers, Jet is one of the few antagonists we see that can keep up with Aang. Like Zuko, Jet’s dedication to his cause get him high on this list, because he will defeat the Fire Nation at any cause. The creators lose points for being cowards and killing him off. We saw plenty of other people (Sokka) get hit with similar rocks and not die. Jet is a fantastic antagonist with a backstory that the audience can sympathize with. He loses points for not being more versatile in his tactics. I’ve written more on this here. 

Ty Lee

Katara is terrified of her, do I need to elaborate? Ty Lee by far has the scariest skill set on the show. It’s too easy for people to underestimate her. Katara and Suki make that mistake once and then never do it again. Like Toph, Ty Lee knows to wait for the right time to strike, making her highly effective at taking out our favorite benders and whole groups of benders (The Terra Team). Her betrayal of Azula is ICONIC and unexpected, but as always, Ty Lee knows just the right time to strike. I think Ty and Mai were perfectly capable of getting away at the Boiling Rock and I’m disappointed they were captured so easily. 

Azula

Look down, you’re talking to your highness. Can’t see her? She’s the reason for your blindness. 

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Azula is the baddest bitch in the game. PERIODT. She is ruthless, cunning and powerful. Her lightning bending is at a whole other level. She is the smartest person on this list. She takes Ba Sing Se from the inside out, utilizes the Da Li perfectly and has antagonized Zuko from the beginning. As far as I’m concerned, she was made to be Firelord. 

#atla villains #atla unpopular opinion #unpopular opinion

[movie-magic]

How Superman & Lois Is Avoiding Falcon & Winter Soldier's Fatal Mistake

Superman & Lois is avoiding the storytelling and pacing issues that hurt The Falcon and the Winter Soldier by focusing on the characters.

Despite Superman & Lois featuring the Man of Steel as a lead, the Arrowverse show is keeping its story grounded, thus avoiding the biggest mistake the MCU made with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The CW's series focuses on Clark Kent and Lois Lane as a married couple raising two sons. Despite Clark being Superman — arguably the most powerful being on the planet, and likely Earth's most important hero — Superman & Lois uses conflict within the Kent household as its primary narrative conflict. In the Arrowverse, Clark already knows how to be a hero — but he's still learning how to be a dad.

So far, Superman & Lois has successfully distinguished itself from the rest of the DC titles — particularly other Superman-focused series like Smallville — by focusing on a different period in the hero's life. Superman & Lois season 1 centers on Jordan Kent developing powers, and the family moving from Metropolis back to the Kent farm in Smallville, giving the troubled teen a chance at a new start in a quieter environment. This comes at great personal cost to twin-brother Jonathan, who loses both his star quarterback status and his girlfriend. Still, the predominant theme of the series is family bonds, and although there is tension between the Kents, every person is incredibly supportive of their loved ones.

Superman & Lois is leaning into the CW's strengths: relationships. Rather than having each episode feature a "villain of the week," the Arrowverse show wisely reserves its action for small scenes — saving on the effects budget while still satisfying Superman fans — and lets the conflict between characters be the main narrative thrust. The Marvel show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier did the opposite: instead of focusing the short 6-episode series on the relationship of its two leads, the Disney+ show overcomplicated its story with the Flag-Smashers plot. That fatal mistake prevented Falcon and Winter Soldier from living up to its potential.

Falcon and Winter Soldier had a strong premise: Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes coming together, coping with the unexpected loss of Steve Rogers and grappling with Captain America's future. The show's initial marketing presented the series as something like Marvel's version of a buddy-cop story. However, just like so many of the MCU movies, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier introduced a global crisis for its heroes to solve: the increasingly violent terrorist group, the Flag-Smashers, and the resurgence of the Super Soldier serum. The stakes became much higher than the reluctant partnership of Sam and Bucky — and as a result, their interpersonal drama took a backseat in the story.

There were many aspects of the Falcon and the Winter Soldier that worked really well, and largely, these are tied to strong characterization. Bucky's at his best when he's being introspective and flawed: the show hints that he is still drawn to violence, but is deeply ashamed of the Winter Soldier's violent actions. With Steve Rogers' Captain America gone, Bucky is more alone now than ever, being a relic of the past. All of the people he grew up with are dead or much older than he appears to be — and while he's grown accustomed to this new world, he acts perpetually uncomfortable. It's a theme the show sets up in the premiere but doesn't adequately address.

Falcon and Winter Soldier was poised to give Sam and Bucky a relatable, complicated, and resonant relationship — but this never came to fruition. Instead of genuine conflict between the two, the show relied on forced quips and odd-couple banter. Sam Wilson's past as a PTSD counselor made him the perfect figure to help Bucky cope with Steve Rogers going back to the past: something Bucky no doubt wished for himself, and — given his history with Steve in the MCU and how close they were — may have felt resentful of. At the same time, Bucky could have helped Sam on his journey to becoming the new Captain America. Bucky, as a white man, is ill-equipped to help Sam grapple with issues like systemic racism in America — but as a friend, he could have offered quiet support.

There are hints at the show that could have been in Falcon and Winter Soldier: in the ending, for example, when Bucky helps Sam fix up the boat and joins in on the family celebration, or the scenes of Sam and Bucky training with the shield together. The action in the series is often exciting and is executed well — but any antagonist would have worked for those scenes. Sam feeling such an affinity with Karli Morgenthau never made sense — he literally held her in his arms after she shot Sharon Carter, his friend. In general, the character motivations in the show were underdeveloped, all because not enough screentime was spent on exploring the relationships that mattered. This was the fatal mistake Marvel made with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: not using the characters' relationships as the focus of the narrative.

How Superman & Lois Avoids Making The MCU's Biggest Mistake:

The CW was wise to make Superman & Lois largely about the Kent family adjusting to major changes: the death of Martha Kent, the children learning the truth about their father, the family moving from Metropolis to Smallville, and the realization that boys could have inherited their father's Kryptonian powers. While there is a larger conspiracy at the heart of Superman & Lois season 1, the Morgan Edge plot is secondary to the story of Jordan discovering his powers and Clark trying to balance being a hero with being a father. The show isn't about super-powered beings donning costumes to beat up bad guys. While other Arrowverse shows have dealt with similar themes, Superman & Lois is the first to do so without focusing on being a superhero. For example, Black Lightning dealt with similar family themes, but is still primarily about Jefferson Pierce fighting The 100, and his daughter begins crimefighting almost immediately after discovering her powers.

Superman does appear in Superman & Lois and is presumably still averting Nuclear disaster and catching criminals, but much of this happens either offscreen or in brief subplots. The best moments in the show are scenes with Clark trying to coach Jordan, like the moment when he quietly tells his son to let out the built-up eye energy on the football field. These moments work because they're so earnest. While the circumstance is fantastic, the parent-child dynamic and the coming-of-age allegory are incredibly relatable. Clark doesn't know what to do, but he's trying his best. Jordan, as a typical teenager, lacks the maturity to make smart choices. He struggles to understand and control his powers, and he reacts to situations impulsively. He has the concerns of a typical teenage boy: his interest in a potential romance with Sarah, his newfound popularity thanks to football, and his emerging sense of self as he navigates puberty. Instead of scenes with Clark and Jordan stopping bank robbers or flying, audiences get glimpses of their family life; it's a story where the character motivations always feel genuine.

The relationships in Superman & Lois are realistically complicated and nuanced. Jordan and Jonathan Kent break the CW's warring brothers trope by being supporting and caring about each other, even when they disagree. Clark and Lois clearly love each other while having their own separate lives, and the show wisely avoids using Lois as a damsel in distress figure for Superman to save. None of the characters are perfect, with Clark in particular struggling with parental choices and the twin boys making the kind of dumb decisions teenagers make. Unlike The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which overcomplicated its first season with unnecessary global stakes, Superman & Lois keeps the story grounded on its family dynamic, which is a refreshing new standard for superhero stories.

- Screen Rant

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