#and they're probably badly written but also they're complex and feel more real to me than most other tv characters

[transrightsyamaguchi]

thoughts on volume 2 of real

i was going to liveblog it like i did with volume 1 but i. got so absorbed i ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting. anyway (under a cut bc it's Long but it's mostly spoiler free):

i can See the nomiya-azumi-kiyoharu love triangle coming but i want azumi and kiyoharu to end up together so badly holy shit. especially now that i know just how long this slow burn has been burning. i love. straight people

MENTION OF THE WHEELCHAIR BASKETBALL POINT SYSTEM!!! author did his research 👍

i changed my mind about takahashi i like what happened with his arc here. it might be because i went 3 weeks between reading the first and second volumes and had time to forget about his asshole behavior but man i felt for him. he's such a dick but you can't help but cry with him. out of all the characters you feel takahashi's anger/sadness/grief the most viscerally. and good lord is this boy going through the five stages of grief.

also re: takahashi i NEED to know how nomiya and kiyoharu react to seeing him again once he gets out of the hospital. we got a little sliver of nomiya reaction to finding out he's been hospitalized but i need the reunion scene. especially since takahashi's met kiyoharu before and even lost a game of basketball to him. that reunion will be so interesting. i don't even have predictions for how it would go but i think losing another game of basketball against kiyoharu would be good for takahashi in terms of character growth.

i cannot stress enough how masterfully done the scene transitions are here. the first volume too. i was wondering if that was a fluke but i think this guy just really likes Juxtaposition.

HI BABYGIRL!!! (said about an adult man who is the same age as me)

KIYOHARU BACKSTORY. god he's such a cute little guy. the eyelashes.

my heart was racing during the whole backstory sequence and THE VOLUME ENDS IN THE MIDDLE OF IT. i hope we see him get diagnosed---i can't imagine why we wouldn't? other than brevity purposes at least.

the whole "i'll confess to her when i break 11 seconds" thing. i had to put down the book for a second and wait for my heart to go back to normal. do you mean to tell me that (gestures to the backstory) all THIS happened and then he just. sat on that crush for five. years. not just him but azumi too. oh they're perfect for each other.

also they NAMED THE CANCER. i don't know why i'm so excited that a writer has done the bare minimum amount of research on a medical condition a character has but. you know. usually i don't even get that (gestures vaguely to yukimiya kenyu). i wonder if it's too much to hope for for kiyoharu to have a rotationplasty. probably. we'll find out.

one negative thing for all this gushing: i hope this series passes the bechdel test at some point. azumi is a good character but she's very Not Like Other Girls. i'm inclined to blame some of this on the fact that this was written in 1999 but. come on man.

i keep feeling like this is a bit too good to be true if that makes any sense. like. togawa kiyoharu is a disabled character who is fully capable of kicking ass but is also well-rounded with flaws and personality, who isn't constantly angsting over being disabled, whose character arc does not surround his disability (what's set up of his arc so far is that he quit his team because he's more competitive than the other players and he's bad at cooperating. bit of a kageyama complex. he'd have fun in blue lock). and he's cute. no way they're just Giving us all that. there has to be some sort of catch. i'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

hopefully the other shoe doesn't drop in volume 3 otherwise i have to return the whole stack to the library at once and that will be even more embarrassing than checking them out was. i spent so long at that damn self-checkout stand trying to cram all 14 books into my bag.

#he speaks #live nephi reaction: real

[ihopesocomic]

Something I appreciate in a weird sense in IHS is that you've established that, on no uncertain terms, Jasper is abusive to Vicious and his other kids. It really bothered me the way MP tried to paint Quickmane as a loving husband and caring father after all the horrible things he'd done. It made his character writing feel extremely inconsistent. People who commit infant genocide with a sick grin then continue to abuse the child they disabled mercilessly aren't typically loving parents and partners on the side. What felt like an attempt to make him a 3 dimensional villain did the exact opposite and made him flat and inconsistent. Jasper, on the other hand, feels like an actually engaging villain. His interactions with those around him a more complex and the way he emotionally abuses those under his control feels much more real and sinister. Jasper just feels generally more real as a villain and abuser, and as awful of a person as he is he's an engaging villain. It also adds a layer of complexity to Vicious because you can tell Jasper's abuse and control plays a part in influencing her treatment of Hope and her other kids. Ultimately her treatment of them is her choice, and I'm glad you're not going to try to write her some sort of redemption arc, but it's a small detail I appreciate in the way you make your characters complex and multidimensional.

Thank you so much! And I have some complaints about sympathetic villains let me tell you LOL At least modern ones. People probably noticed the trend of movies and shows trying to justify the villain's actions. What that usually ends up doing is trying to get the audience to side with the villain instead of the hero and it either ends up with how the audience feels fighting against what they're "supposed" to feel, or the audience has a fucked up view on what counts as villainy and heroism and end up siding with the villain that way lol Its done so badly so often, I just have a hard time picturing professional productions failing this hard in the writing department.

More competent writing would have their audience feel conflicted, like ugh... this guy makes a good point... but he's clearly wrong. Or they make good points, but for all the wrong reasons. And of course there's good examples of how to make a villain a good parent, you can have a complex villain, but it can't be filled with double standards, like oh he actually loves the people he abused. (Which, if it was used to be manipulative, that sort of thing would get called out by someone at some point.)

But some villains don't need depth. They don't need a "traumatizing backstory" or somebody "comparatively worse" or anything. Like okay, I'm still hung up on him killing babies with a smile on his face, but for the sake of argument, did Quickmane decide he was gonna be a "good husband" immediately after killing Powerstrike's first husband, or was it something he had to learn over time? We have no idea cuz Powerstrike "quickly" had his cubs, he is rightfully pissed at Nothing leaving his cubs alone to potentially die, and by the time he gets killed, his character earned exactly zero sympathy from the audience, and the only thing he had going for him was in this one instance where Nothing had to be written to be stupid for the sake of conflict. And its just hammered into our heads that we're supposed to like him because Feather mourns him (and we're meant to like Feather), and Powerstrike later tells Proudmane to honor Quickmane's decision to allow a couple of lesbians live among them lol (And apparently we're supposed to like her because she stood up for Hover, so naturally what she says is /reasonable/sarcasm.) And don't get me started on how manes "have to do horrible things to survive" like what a fuckin joke.

I especially don't care for the trope of "These two people have similar trauma, but one is good and the other is evil!" It's like the concept of being a perfect victim -gags-

In real life, some people are just terrible people. They don't always have bad upbringings. They don't always have missing parental guidance. Heck, a lot of times they aren't even wronged by society. (There almost always seems to be a sense of entitlement tho.) There's no Hollywood-tier story to tell about them, sometimes they're simply just bad people. Parents included. And justifying why they are the way they are just makes it look like you're trying to win people over even tho what they do is not worthy of sympathy. And we wanted to do keep it fairly simple with Jasper. No tragedy, no nothing. He just is awful and manipulative. No matter how many second chances he's given. And I'm sure alot of us have known someone like that. There's no point in over-explaining him. And I'm glad it worked out. People sure do love hating him and he deserves it haha - Cat

#ask #ask us stuff

[katya-goncharov]

i try so hard to get into other tv shows, but nothing i've watched recently has had characters half as compelling to me as the ones on supernatural. there's just something about them all that i love so much, and even though the show is trash half the time, i just absolutely adore the characters in a way i never do characters on any other show

#they're just so... i don't even know. #they're likeable! to me #and they're probably badly written but also they're complex and feel more real to me than most other tv characters #and they're just somehow really easy to become attached to #particularly dean cas claire kaia rowena charlie and jack i just adore #it's like. they've got this place in my heart now! #and i love daydreaming about them and reading fics about them and everything #i just really like them okay?

[pilferingapples]

Brick Club, 1.4 entire (retro)

Cosette's story often has such a fairy-tale feel, and it starts with this  section (what should I be calling these chunks of text? the X.X sections as a whole, not the X.X.X ones? Volumes?) .

And yet I'm not at all sure why I get that feeling quite so strongly, in terms of narrative technique.  The initial namelessness of the cast, with Two Mothers echoing the way people in fairy tales are Mothers and Millers and Eldest Daughters?  But if Fantine is presented as if she was s stranger to us again, it's not different than what happens with JVJ, and his story never feels this way.  The  Three Sisters made by Cosette, Eponine , and Azelma maybe? That's a very fairy-tale motif indeed.   Something about the way the inn itself is described..?

Augh, I absolutely cannot put my finger on it.   Still,  something about this passage feels as ominous and certain and doomed  as if the inn was a gingerbread cottage and Fantine was vowing to keep silent for seven years while making shirts out of nettles.

Notes on Various Things under the cut:

-  love that the inn sign is really badly made. I've seen several attempts at it in various adaptations and they're always a disaster and it's excellent, I want a collection.

-  the cart is covered with "the same ugly yellow mud sometimes used to decorate cathedrals".  The cart that is A Metaphor for outdated social institutions.  I see you, Hugo. 

- I will FIGHT Hugo about peasant/working class women's clothing in this era, this outfit would be super charming!  But it's definitely more about utility and practical wear than Fantine's old outfits.   There are roughly a billion dissertations to be written about the way that things working class people do and use are , through history, treated as inherently ugly/undesirable, regardless of how much art and beauty might actually have gone into it; I feel like the classism kinda speaks for itself on that.  And then,since Hugo's already drawn a huge Romantic Aesthetic defining line between the Useful and the Beautiful  in this book, I think  I can fairly just quote Gautier's explanation of the issue -- "Nothing is really beautiful but that which cannot be made use of; everything that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and the needs of man are vile and disgusting, like his poor, weak nature" -- and leave this for now.  I suspect it will come up again. 

- Fantine has been "marked by irony" --that is, scarred by her time with Tholomyes.  I do like the way  this new line on her face sounds almost like a dueling scar. Fantine's a fighter in her own way!

- ...Tholomyes is gonna make it to at least 1828, meaning he'll outlive everyone we love in this story except Cosette and Marius.    And he'll do it while being  "always a man of pleasure"--I feel like there's an implicit suggestion that Cosette has a lot of half-siblings in the world, all of them with a story as important as hers, if only people would take them seriously. 

- ...as a Somewhat Taller Than Average woman myself, I am rather delighted by Hugo's obvious terror of women who are Not Tiny.   ( And I realize I'm probably Reaching to think that Mme T might have been much happier and more well-adjusted if she weren't trying to cram her giant self into a tiny box of Ideal Femininity?  Maybe she'd have been much more ok if she'd  been able to go into showbiz and get famous as  a weightlifter or something. )

But I do think there's a real sort of sadness to her introductory chapters.  She had an ideal dream for her own life , and it wasn't even a particularly ambitious one--just a love story, really-- and it's fallen through as much as anyone else's hoped-for Ideal in the novel. She's still trying to hang onto it at this point, but we're already given a glimpse of the future  when she'll not only have given up on that ideal, but come to despise herself for it.  This is no way absolves her of her cruelty towards others, but I think she's a more complex villain (and she is  a villain) than she's sometimes treated as. 

- Fantine does try to lie about having been married, here! ...but she also comes right out and tells people she's making a financial Deal with exactly how much money she has, and how much she's able to give over, before it's all settled.  It's  painful how ill-prepared she is to deal with this kind of economic manipulation (and I think "prepared" is really relevant; she's had no one more naturally skilled or experienced to teach her how to handle these things, and business negotiations, which this is, are incredibly complicated) . 

Seeing how much money Mme T gets for Cosette's fine clothes makes me strongly suspect that Fantine was severely underpaid for pawning her own fancy things--unless, and I guess this is possible, her "putting all her finery" on Cosette  is meant to be literal, and Cosette's current clothes are directly made of Fantine's old fancy outfits. 

- Fantine tries to lie about having been married , and the neighbors *see* her crying as she leaves Cosette, and Cosette must have been well dressed and all for that first months or so...but still, everyone believes the Thenardiers when they start telling the town that Cosette is an abandoned, illegitimate child.  They believe it because Cosette looks the part, and Cosette looks the part because the Thenardiers force her into it.  In so many ways, Fantine is never in control of  the narrative about her child, and What People Say about them does indeed matter more than anything she does--no amount of effort, no show of love, can save her and Cosette when everyone else  has decided they're socially damned. 

...but on the less thematic and more practical side,how on earth are the Thenardiers learning about her marital status? Seriously, was this freely avaialable info?  This  issue is something that comes up several times in the novel and I really have no idea what access to people's family records was like? 

- we get our first negative association with a cat , hm 

- ...workers have "generous impulses", huh?  (also I am not at all sure if the corresponding Bourgeois Respectability is meant to be entirely a good thing, but I'm not sure it's NOT , like I would be with Some Writers? Agh) 

- The Thenardiers' animal souls are : 

French: écrevisses 

Hapgood: crab-like FMA: crabs Rose: crayfish  Donougher: lobsters

Google Translate agrees with Rose, but I wonder if this isn't one of those words that was colloquially used to mean a general category of creatures in its day --Things Like a Crayfish/lobster/crab-- and has come to mean something very specific now?

-  ..y'know, what really kills me about Cosette in this every time is how everyone , *everyone*  in this town really either believes she deserves her abuse, or thinks it's BETTER than she deserves.  This is not happening in secret, behind closed doors, in a private house; it's at the public inn and very blatant. Everyone knows she's out in the cold , first up every morning, starving and beaten, in a home where the other kids somehow have more than enough (because their parents steal it from Cosette, directly).  And not one person in this discount Omelas even thinks it's bad , much less intervenes. It's a point in the Thenardiers'  favor, socially.   This isn't just the gamins of Paris being brushed aside,this is a whole town actively citing horrible child abuse as the Moral and Good Option that elevates the people doing it.  

And in this, I suppose, Cosette shares a history with Valjean-- they're  both put through absolutely horrific abuse , which is not just societally ignored, or accepted with jaded apathy ,  but openly lauded as morally correct.   I hate Montfermeil so much-- but Montfermeil is not really different from Arras, or Digne, or any other place where people think that abuse of the "deserving" is a Good Thing. 

#LM 1.4 #brickclub #brick club #LM 1.4.1 #LM 1.4.3 #LM 1.4.2 #child abuse mention #long psot #long post

[agl03]

1 Hi. I'm sorry, I know you must be tired of negativity, but I can't shake this feeling that in 15 and the clip for 16 there's this weird feeling of OOC surrounding most characters. Like the way they act doesn't feel quite right, and not cause they're traumatized or whatever but because in my mind things don't fit with the characters I've known for 5 years. Like, Jemma saying in the clip with all the nonchalance in the world "Oh, yeah Fitz made a hard choice and is paying for it". It feels...

2 weirdly forced. First, it reinforces the notion that Fitz just said to himself “ oh well, I guess I gotta torture Daisy to use her powers and I’m gonna use the doctor to do it!”, when is obvious that he had no idea of what he was doing at the moment. Second, the way she says it feels like there’s no doubt that he did what was right and at the same time it doesn’t carry the emotional weight that Jemma would be feeling at seeing Fitz experience all of this. That’s just an example, but it all…

3 feels too weird since 14, like someone grabbed the characters that I loved and is writing a fic that doesn’t really capture their essence :( I’m not writing this to be negative, it’s just that 14 triggered me badly (taking my favorite MCU character into a route with no real way back) and since then I don’t feel any action from any character is really soothing the injury, just making me feel more at odds with everything :( I can’t even watch the wedding, cause it makes me sick to feel that…

4 the writers just gave us something that they knew we valued so much just to break our hearts a moment later. Looking at things now I feel like the writers don’t really have a plan to give Fitz a real closure from everything and just did it for the shock value. I miss our Team SHIELD and I know it feels like overreacting but Fitz is really important to me, I saw myself in him in a very unique way and I can’t really cope with what they chose to do, cause I don’t even feel like it’s “a hard

Anonymous said:5 subject that leaves a lesson”. Just needed to get this out my chest. Sorry, I know you probably shouldn’t even publish this to try and stop negative asks bit I needed some soothing from you :(

Hi Anon,

I don’t know how much help I can be.  Because yes, the negativity was getting to me so I went behind my moat and am not engaging and deleting most that comes into my ask box.  I am very well aware I am looking at this story a lot differently than many fans are.   I am not a writer for the show, I actually enjoyed the twist with the Doctor (no not the how Daisy got her powers back), excited to see the Fitzsimmons team up, and am excited to see where it goes.  Its messy and complicated and complex.  This even deals with things that are very close to me and hit very close to home.   

In order for this rift in the team to really be as nasty as its going to be they needed an equally nasty catalyst for it.  The writers did it by having Fitz have the break and the reveal he’s been hearing the Doctor since the Framework.  Then the Doctor ‘taking over’ to do what Fitz himself was unwilling to do.   They reminded us Fitz has been through a lot, he needs to heal from the Framework.  Which is something many in the fandom where screaming for.   

I also like this route because it does give Fitz the chance to learn to accept it and use it when he needs too.  Its part of him now, he cant just wave a magic wand and make it better again.  The team has to also accept this too.  Between his previous injury and what AIDA did to him in the Framework he was hit pretty hard and as a result he changed.   “Your just different now and that’s okay,”.   Just as the team had varying reactions to Daisy’s Inhuman reveal the team will have different reactions to Fitz’s and its further complicated by the how of giving Daisy her powers back

I don’t think he’ll ever break to the extent he did in 14 again.  That series of events won’t be replicated and now that Jemma knows she can help him through it when it does get bad. I won’t be surprised if he isn’t tempted/under pressure again.  That gives a chance to show Fitz actively choosing to do good.  We are very well aware what he is capable of and he’s using both the shadow and light to protect people.  He also doesn’t like how he did it either.

If Fitz wanted too, he could go full on real life super villain.  14 he could have killed everyone else or let the fear rift take out the Lighthouse and the Town above.  Fitz isn’t okay with how he got Daisy’s powers back, he fought so hard against what he knew deep down was the solution he suffered the break.  He has a considerable amount of “power” in The Doctor but now its how he chooses to use it now and in the future.  It goes back to that discussion about potential in Seeds.  

Not to mention they are really allowing Iain a chance to just run with this.  

I did find 15 a little OOC but a lot of that was just the time.  A new writer had a ton to cram into 10 minutes.  So I am waiting until after 16 to really comment on this….bearing in mind 16 is also written by a new writer.

Jemma is NOT condoning the how but she sees the science behind it.  They were out of time and it was the only way.   We also don’t know what happened before that scene between her and Daisy, I got the gist that Fitz is being kept in there for more than giving her powers back.  HERE is a meta I did earlier on why I feel what is coming is fully in line for Jemma.  

Do I wish they’d found a less icky way for The Doctor to give Daisy her powers back, absolutely.  I would have much preferred he created some sort of special EMP that shorted it out.  She still would have been upset with him for giving them back but it would have been considerably less traumatizing all around.

It hasn’t taken away from the wedding at all to me, if anything it makes it more special.  Marriage is hard.  Crap happens.   I am not the same person my husband married nor is he the same.  And he certainly didn’t sign up for some of the crap that has happened to us over the years.  But we got through it and are even stronger for it.  Would it have been nice if we’d gotten more than an episode of Honeymoon time before poop hit the fan, yes, but we had a whole bunch of good leading up to the wedding and were due.  This is also AOS and things need to move along, especially this point in the season.  And part of what makes it more special for me is they are actively fighting for their future together.   Jemma isn’t letting him go and he’s letting her in.  

We are supposed to be missing the team right now.  They are supposed to be broken.  That was one of the major reasons they did what they did.   Only what is different from previous seasons is the rift has come from within.  Its also a result of nearly everyone doing what they think is the right thing.  They need to get back on the same page and that takes time, “A team that trusts is a team that triumphs”.  

I don’t know if that helped at all or if I just did a lot of rambling that didn’t go anywhere.   This is dealing with very serious and personal topics so I will encourage everyone to do what they need to do to take care of themselves.  This is supposed to be messy, complicated, and morally grey.   I’m going to give the writers the chance to see where they go with it and how it all plays out…and I’m honestly excited to see where it leads.  

#aos spoilers #aos speculation #ask agl03