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breakandbuildfiction · 2 months

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My rant about Danny Phantom and DPxDC tropes

This is just going to be a listing and rant about some of the Danny Phantom and DPxDC story and prompt trends I tend to see around Tumblr. I want to make it clear that I don’t care if you like the things I don’t like or dislike the things I do. Everyone is entitled to their own tastes so long as they don’t harm others and that includes headcannons and fanfics. So don’t be a dick.

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Danny is the Ghost King: I admit I really like this one, but I also admit it doesn’t make a ton of sense.

I like OP Danny, I think it’s fun and it fits how several of his enemies can easily be called gods or have global-level powers— Vortex with his storms and Ember with her mind control/power siphoning being key examples— and having him basically be the leader of an entire infinite dimension filled with several godlike beings makes him come off as super badass.

On the other hand, this headcanon typically leans into Danny getting the job via Right Of Conquest against Pariah Dark. The thing is, Pariah wasn’t a recognized ruler. He was a tyrant and conqueror that few if any actually wanted to follow. He didn’t have ‘divine right’ or the willing submission of his subjects. He was the Ghost King because he had the power and desire to force his will against the rest of the Realms. Hell, he was so hated that a cabal of super-powerful/ancient spirits deposed him and locked him away for hundreds/thousands/millions of years and NO ONE other than Vlad tried to free him! So Danny beating him shouldn’t suddenly make him a legitimate ruler.

That all said if you go with the less used reasoning that the Ghost Zone NEEDS to have a single ruler for whatever reason and Danny beating the previous singular ruler/being one of the few ghosts/spirits who have the power and fame required for the position I have no problem with the idea.

Danny is Dani’s dad: Another thing I like, but also another thing that gets messy when you think about it.

Cloning as I understand it basically gives you a genetic twin, not a genetic child. So even with Dani’s genes being modified somehow she’d read more like Danny’s sister than his daughter. So unless you want to throw in that Vlad used some third party’s genes to help stabilize her, Dani is not genetically Danny’s kid.

Ignoring genetics and sticking to emotions and such, emotionally and mentally Danny is a teenager and Dani is somewhere between 8 and 12, way too close of an age difference for Danny to really take on a paternal role for Dani. And even if you say that Dani is mentally younger due to her being force grown it would still leave Danny as a very young teenage parent of a preteen and Dani in a very weird state as her physical and mental development would be at gross odds with how she can filter information.

If you deage Dani to a toddler however and have Danny be AT LEAST 16, things could make more sense as far as them seeing each other as parent and child go.

Danny gives off Uncanny Valley vibes: This has no basis in canon, be it for full ghosts or Halfas or anything else. That said, I love this idea and have no further notes.

Danny is an engineering genius: This is one that comes up pretty sporadically, and I guess it MIGHT have some basis in canon if you stretch some things, but it’s not something that was ever explicitly stated or even heavily implied. I still like it though and think it’s really fun when used for things other than just saying Danny is smart.

Tucker is a master hacker: I get where this is coming from and I understand the vibes, plus it has more of a basis than Danny being an engineering genius, but this also doesn’t really have any real basis in canon. The only ‘hacking’ that he really does is against Skulker and that involves the ghost first assimilating Tucker’s PDA, giving him a back door into Skulker’s systems to do one specific thing. So while fun in some cases, I don’t like it when it gets blown out of proportion and having Tucker being on par with the likes of Tim Drake, Barbara Gordon, or Cyborg as a computer genius. He is smart and he is a programmer, but he’s not a super genius.

Everyone is Liminal: I don’t know who popularized this idea, but I don’t like it. The idea that just being around ectoplasm makes someone liminal sounds like something that the Fenton parents would have been at least vaguely aware of if they were already smart enough to wear hazmat suits for protection when working with ectoplasm, so if they knew it would make people basically proto ghosts/ensure they would become ghosts, they sure as hell wouldn’t have set up shop in a city.

Not only that but we already know that the GIW is willing to use heavy artillery and lethal force on people they think MIGHT be under the influence of a ghost or could be ghostly themselves. So if a whole town was showing up as being so ‘ecto-contaminated’ that they are not even registering as fully human anymore you KNOW they’d start coming in to commit genocide.

The GIW isn’t a legal government body/their actions have violated their purview: Admittedly this one isn’t very common, but I HAVE seen it used a few times, so I’m going to talk about it.

First, I really like this because it avoids the trap of just saying ‘Oh the government is inherently evil and wants nothing more than to commit war crimes and genocide’, so big points there. Beyond that though I also just think it makes sense. I mean the US Government has a LOT of departments and I can see them having a small agency dedicated to keeping track of ‘supposedly’ paranormal shit for one reason or another, but I can’t see them getting a lot of funding— like the amount of discretionary funds needed to buy out all of Fentonworks— without them having to bring up the evidence before Congress and the Senate. From there there would definitely be ethical concerns regarding their actions, legislation would be introduced en-mass, and it would cause a national if not international uproar.

So for the GIW to work they’d either need to be a whole sale corrupt and rouge agency taking money from third parties— like Vlad— and going way beyond whatever authority they might have been legitimately granted to do most of the shit they end up doing, or they were never a government body to begin with but a special interest group funded and staffed by fanatics from around the world and are committing several additional crimes in addition to war crimes by impersinating a government agency.

The Anti-Ecto Acts: I honestly can’t remember if these are canon in some form or not, but I see them brought up a lot so I’m talking about them either way.

These make NO SENSE.

Getting something like this through Congress and the Senate would be INSANELY difficult even if you had evidence of an immediate threat. You can say ‘they hid it in another bill’ all you like but that kind of thing is way harder than you think. Even minor bills about laws and regulations that are just being put through for renewal get read over to make sure things aren’t slipped into them. And bigger, more complex laws take months if not YEARS to get passed and end up getting combed over with a fine comb. There would be no way these Acts could be passed without it being a major event that would be dragged out and debated for ages seeing as it’s literally about declaring a complex species non-sentient and opening them for no-holds-barred scientific experimentation and termination. Religious concerns would be brought up, ethical bodies would be formed and disbanded every day, calls would be made for third-party research, and more than a few people would demand that diplomacy be tried.

And if you tie this into DPxDC it makes even LESS sense as it would be against several laws, acts, and clauses that are meant to protect metahumans– please note that metahuman does not just mean having the metagene in DC, it means having extra-human abilities and powers including magic or alien blood.

Sam and Tucker have powers: I mean, there were entire episodes dedicated to Tucker being jealous about Danny having power and Sam pushing Danny to use his powers for social and/or political causes, but I can get behind the idea of the trio all having powers. So long as Sam and Tucker’s powers aren’t based around ghosts at least.

A big point of Danny Phantom’s story is that ghosts were super rare and believed to not exist before the start of the show and that Danny and Vlad’s powers are unheard-of anomalies caused by the Doctors Fentons’ experiments and creations so having other people get ghost powers in more ‘natural’ ways really undermines that and isn’t supported by canon at all. Yes Tucker was being used to resurrect a Pharaoh or something and Sam was the favored puppet of Undergrowth, but that doesn’t mean they would KEEP their powers after the ghosts giving them to them were removed from play. We see this in the episode where a bunch of Casper students get infected by ghost bugs, they got powers while infected and they lost them when the ghosts were removed. Beyond that we also have the time Jazz was almost sacrificed by Johnny to get Kitty back into the living world, she never got any powers from that despite being infused with Kitty’s power and essence and when said essence was removed she returned to a fully mortal human teenager with no powers.

Make Sam a witch or give Tucker nanite implants or something and I have no problem with this idea.

Danny becomes the Ancient of Space: I’ve already said that I like OP Danny, but I don’t think this title makes sense.

Yes I like giving Danny space powers and/or an eldritch space form, but I don’t like calling Danny the Ancient of Space because we don’t know how a ghost gets that title. Giving him this title seems to stem heavily from Space being the equal of Time which is Clockwork’s domain, but the thing is Clockwork isn’t called the Ancient of Time, he’s called the Master of Time. So I just generally feel like calling Danny the Master of Space fits better even if Ancient of Space sounds cooler.

Now onto more DPxDC exclusive stuff–

Jason is a Halfa/a developing Halfa: This is another one of those things where I just think goes too hard against the lore of Danny Phantom to make sense. Just dying and coming back to life does not make someone a Halfa, even if they don’t come back as fully alive. Not only that but it takes a LOT of ectoplasm and power to make a Halfa with Vlad and Danny being blasted with an opening portal and Dani being specifically grown from the DNA and ectoplasm of an existing Halfa. It just feels like its cheapening the existence of Hafas if they could have been created at any point in history using natural resources or general necromancy magic.

The Lazarus Pits are just rancid Ectoplasm: This just doesn’t work in my mind. Yes they are both green and are connected to death, but they don’t function or act anything like each other. Ectoplasm has shown no indication that it can be used to heal wounds or that it can be used to resurrect the dead outside of the creation of Hafas. The Lazarus pits have showcased no ability to be used as an energy source or for the waters to be in any state other than liquid, though it is a highly flammable substance in some interpretations while Ectoplasm can apparently be volatile enough to explode if not properly treated and filtered.

This idea also just cheapens both the Pits and Ectoplasm in different ways, with the Pits making it so Ectoplasm isn’t nearly as rare or tied to ghostly phenomena in the mortal world as we were lead to believe and Ectoplasm being readily available post-Fenton Portal activation making the constant search and hoarding of the Pits kind of useless. That and the Fentons apparently have Ectoplasm filters that I’m guessing could at least partially purify the Pits.

Backtracking a bit to the Jason is a Hafa/developing Halfa thing, a common way for that to be implemented is by saying the Pits are rancid Ectoplasm and he’s got a stunted Core. Well if that was the case than Ra’s Al Ghul would be just as far along as a Halfa as Jason if not being a fully fledged one himself at this point because while he might not have stayed dead as long as Jason in a single stretch– depending on how you look at the timeline of Jason’s revival– he did definitely spend more communicative time being dead over the centuries he’s been alive.

And finally, we know what rancid/corrupted Ectoplasm does to a person. It gives them Ecto-Acne. Which at best puts you in the hospital for years before giving you superpowers and usually would just slowly and painfully kill you.

Danny goes to Gotham: This one really just depends on WHY he goes to Gotham. Like, there’s nothing wrong with having a character go to a new city as the basis for a crossover, but I feel like it should make sense at least you know? And to be fair, most of the posts I’ve seen that talk about Danny going to Gotham do in fact make sense. So yeah, solid trope.

Danny and Damien are Twins: I have no problem with this in a vacuum, but I think people take it too far and ignore things like basic logic. Namely, the fact that for them to be secret twins then you have to acknowledge their looks. If they are fraternal twins then there is no real issue here, but if they are supposed to look super alike or even be capable of being mistaken for each other then there is the minor issue of their ethnicities.

No one ever suspects that Danny isn’t Jack Fenton’s son, and since both Jack and Maddie Fenton are caucasian, that means that Danny looks fully caucasian. Meanwhile, Damien is at very least one-quarter Arabic through his mother– I can’t recall if Talia is one hundred percent Arabic or not but I know Ra’s is– and is often depicted as having at least a dusky skin tone. So if you want them to be identical twins you’d have to say that both Damien and Danny appear to be completely white ethnically.

Maddie Fenton is a former member of the League of Assassins: Two issues with this: One, the League isn’t exactly big on letting people walk away from it, and Maddie isn’t exactly trying to hide from them. And two, we have seen Maddie’s canonical biological sister so unless both of them got away– which is even less likely than one person being allowed to leave– and only Alicia is smart enough to stay low-key, this one doesn’t make much sense.

Danny is dating Jason Todd: I get it, Jason is the second hottest Batfam member and he has some surface level similarities with their temporary white streaks and dead guy themes. But outside of that this one just doesn’t make sense. At least not to me.

For hobbies/civilian life, Jason is semi-canonically and very heavily fan-canonly a literature nerd. Danny hates his English class. Danny is often depicted as liking rock music and video games in his downtime, Jason… I don’t know his music taste is, but he is a neat and tidy book nerd.

For vigilante/hero life, Jason is extremely violent and open to using lethal options to the point where he has attempted to kill at least one of his brothers in nearly every timeline and is a mass murderer/serial killer with a higher body count than some of Batman’s rogues. Danny won’t even keep his worst enemies like Skulker trapped in the Fenton Thermos long-term and never even tries to injure potentially dangerous humans like the Guys In White.

These two personalities aren’t a case of being mix and matched, they are very strongly opposed to each other on a philosophical level and a moral level.

Danny is dating Tim Drake: Again, I get where this comes from, and to be fair it makes a bit more sense than Danny X Jason in so far as Tim not being a violent bipolar and him actually seeming to share some hobbies with Danny, but it still doesn’t work in my mind. That stuff that Vlad did to cause Danny to call him a fruitloop? Tim has done almost all of it. He’s a stalker, he clones people when he can’t have the real version, he has used his resources to fuck with people– though Tim’s actions in that sense aren’t nearly as bad as Vlad’s–, he has gone batshit crazy in grief before… need I go on?

So yeah, as much as I like the idea of neurotic sleep-deprived heroes falling into each other’s arms, this doesn’t work. Tim is too fucked up for Danny to want to get involved with. It would be too much like Maddie deciding to give Vlad a shot.

Danny is dating Cassandra Cain: Not as popular as Danny X Jason or Danny X Tim, but I’ve seen a couple of these.

This has some of the same problems as Danny X Jason in that they don’t seem to have any real hobbies in common, but it has the advantage in that their temperaments and personalities are at least somewhat more in line with each other. They both really like and really don’t like fighting, they both have issues with their parents who want them to follow in their footsteps while also being open to killing them, they latch onto friend groups as family, are both anti-killing despite being super lethal living weapons, they tend to be pretty chill out of combat situations to the point where they can even be blase about pretty crazy shit, et cetera. But they don’t have many if any overlapping interests… then again, most people tend to say that Cass and Stephanie are pretty close friends, and I think that is canon in some timelines, and as I will be talking about soon Danny and Steph have a fair bit in common so… yeah.

This one has some really good fanfics running for it though, such as ‘lex luthor's ascent from supervillainy to fatherhood’ by Halfgone over on AO3. A fic that I highly recommend.

Danny is dating Stephanie Brown: Even rarer than Danny X Cass as far as I have been able to see, but it’s also the one that makes the most sense in my eyes. The same snarky attitude, love of puns and messing with the people they are fight, they both have issues with their parents, they fight for things that their fathers’ are completely opposed to, and depending on the DC timeline and your stance on Danny being Dani’s father both are teenaged parents.

They also don’t, as far as I can tell, have anything that makes them opposed to each other. So while this one doesn’t have a ton of civilian weight behind it, it also doesn’t have anything against it. A solid choice despite not being very popular.

I still prefer Danny X Cass or Danny X Raven though.

Danny is gay/bi: I have no problem with this. Let me say that again, I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH THIS. I think that as a fictional character being used in fanfiction things like sexuality can be altered in whatever way the writer desires– it’s different when it’s a canon continuation of an existing work, but fanfiction is anything goes– but dear gods people PLEASE pick better dating options for Danny. I know that people think Jason Todd and Tim Drake are hot and fun characters, and they are, but as I already ranted about they are NOT good dating options for Danny.

Personally, I think Cyborg works better, or some incarnations of Conner Kent.

Danny has been to Krypton: For most timelines used this requires some time travel along with the intergalactic travel, but I find this one to be very fun. Be it just Danny having visited Krypton and having some stories about the place, maybe some souvenirs, or Danny accidentally/on purpose being revered as a god of the planet. It’s a fun addition or starting point to a story.

Kryptonite is Ecto-Candy: This makes no sense and I don’t like it enough to ignore that. Krypton blew up in the mortal universe within the last fifty years according to most canon timelines and even if the ENTIRE planet became Kryptonite– which it might have to be honest, I’m not sure about that– and 50% of it fell into the Infinite Realms– which makes no sense statistically even with natural portals being a thing– that still isn’t a lot of mass for an INFINITE dimension, plus the timeline would make it a relatively very recent thing to ghosts. And that’s ignoring the fact that Kryptonite is not in any way, shape, or form the same thing as Ectoplasm no matter how you split it outside of that one issue that says Kryptonite is the crystalized screams of horror and pain of everyone who died on Krypton.

Danny is a Martian Manhunter Fanboy: No real notes here. It fits, makes sense, and is often used in a fun way.

Danny hates rich people: This one is funny sure, but it doesn’t make sense. Sam is rich. Danny was rich for a bit. Ghost King Danny is beyond rich. Danny is often written in fanfics to be friends with the likes of Pandora and Dorthea who are both rich. Really he just doesn’t like Vlad because of who he is, it has nothing to do with him being rich.

The Justice League abandoned Amity Park: I don’t like this one. It just doesn’t seem like something the Justice League would do. They have too many heroes that specialize in the paranormal and Batman sure as hell wouldn’t let something like an interdimensional portal remain open without being super on top of it and studying it in case of a worst-case scenario like what happened in Reign Storm.

I’ve seen variants of this where the reasoning is that John Constantine labeled it a no go zone to avoid the possibility of a superhero getting possessed and used as a meat suit to cause mass destruction and chaos, which does make more sense, but if that were the case then the JLD would be aware of the situation and would at the very least check in on some of the bigger events like when Undergrowth attacked, Vortex’s whole deal– particularly when his storm covered the entire world except for Amity park– Pariah Dark’s invasion/abduction, when Fright Knight attacked, and when Clockwork showed up and Dark Danny followed suit.

So really this idea just seems like a way to include shallow drama where Danny hates the Justice League or other heroes in general and feels upset that he, as an untrained teenager, was left to defend his town all by himself… just like Static Shock tends to do.

The Justice League thinks Danny is Immortal and hundreds/thousands of years old: No real notes here either. Danny has time traveled in canon, there are a lot of fanon things involving him doing it even more, and I can definitely see him playing into the bit to avoid being treated like a kid who needs to listen to his elders ala Billy Batson as Shazam.

Clockwork is Chronos: This requires a LOT of hoops being jumped through and a lot of ignoring of the mythology of Chronos himself, but they are both super powerful time deities so… I see where it comes from at least. And it allows for stuff like saying Danny and Wonder Woman are family.

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There are a lot more tropes and such that I’ve seen here and on dedicated fanfic sites in the Danny Phantom and DPxDC fandoms, but this is already an incredibly long post so I’m going to end things here. If anyone has anything they want to add or comments they want to give, feel free to leave them! Just don’t be a dick and don’t PM me anonymously with insults and threats. I’ll just report and block you.

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rallamajoop · 8 months

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Resident Evil 6: When a franchise has an identity crisis

I can’t tell you RE6 is a better game than RE5, but if nothing else, it’s a far more interesting failure.

RE6 is famously the game that tried so hard to appeal to everyone that it wound up appealing to no-one: overlong, overproduced and utterly OTT. RE5 left the franchise at a crossroads: the previous two games were huge successes, but drew criticism for straying from the series’ horror roots. Faced with the choice of doubling down on the new direction or diverting back towards something more survival horror, Capcom attempted to do both, at once, and then some.

The new RE6 would have three different main campaigns (Chris & Piers, Leon & Helena, and Jake & Sherry), all aimed at different markets, plus a fourth which would unlock only after the previous three were completed, which was to be different again. It would have something for everyone! Provided ‘everyone’ wanted a co-op shooter experience with ALL the explosions, or was prepared to play through three different extended co-op experiences just to unlock the one that was kinda more designed to be played solo. Completing that fourth campaign would also be essential to ever finding out what the fuck was going on during those first three. How could that go wrong?

RE6 is, in other words, exactly what happens when a franchise has an identity crisis.

Experienced purely on the level of plot and cutscenes, RE6 remains hard to rate overall because while there are parts of this game I genuinely enjoyed in a way nothing in RE5 could boast, so many other parts of were legitimately uncomfortable to sit through, and in ways owing less to effective horror than to gratuitous, ugly misery porn.

Watch, as these bit characters you barely know die in horrible, gruesome ways in front of people who care about them! Watch! As Helena is finally reunited with the infected sister she committed treason to save, just in time to watch her beloved Deborah transform into a horrific butt-naked-lady monster who will spend the ensuing boss fight posing sexily while her tits show off their jiggle physics! It’s so traumatic for poor Helena, you have no idea!

Watch! As Chris reaches desperately for the outstretched fingers of StarryEyed McNewKid in the final seconds before his body erupts into a monster cocoon! Chris, dude, how long have you been in this business? He’s not falling off a rooftop, Chris! Grabbing his hand is not going to help!

It would all be hilarious if it wasn’t also all so skin-crawlingly unpleasant. There’s something uniquely gross about how these scenes play out, and largely not in the fun way.

With all four campaigns down, the big secret behind devastating bio-terror outbreaks in three different locations around the world turns out to be that some member of the Actual Illuminati gets Big Mad that Ada Wong won’t put out, and converts a loyal scientist (Carla) into an Ada-clone, who promptly sets out to end the world in a fit of clone-angst. There’s a bit more going on in some of the individual campaigns – Illuminati Dude also sets up a plot to kill the US president so he can’t reveal the truth about Raccoon City (whatever that means), then frames Leon and Helena for it. He’s also sent Sherry out to find Wesker’s son, whose blood may be the one cure for their latest alphabet-virus, Sherry little realising who she’s really working for. And the real Ada’s around too – you can tell her apart by how the clone doesn’t wear enough red to be the real deal.

Among the many problems with this game are that Illuminati Dude and clone!Ada are our only real villains, and neither are up to the franchise standard. Ada is just too well-established a character to work as the kind of villain who just wants-to-watch-the-world-burn – you can see the twist coming long, tiring hours before it hits. And Simmons (Illuminati Dude) just does not have any of the personality that makes people remember villains like Wesker or Salazar. There is some impressive creature design in this game – some of the boss monsters are far more memorable than the villains. But by this stage of franchise-transformation, your base level infected-enemy is just a generic guy with a machine gun and maybe an extra couple of eyes up close. It's a military shooter with occasional monsters, expecting you to mow down mooks without stopping for breath.

Speaking of military shooters, Chris has a campaign too, but for the life of me I could not tell you anything in it that matters to anyone else. He runs around a few locations, he fights a lot of monsters, completely fails to stop a missile launch, and loses people in the field. In the wake of RE5, the new game has honed in on the one defining feature of Chris’ character, Man With Lots Of Feelings About Losing People In The Field, and doubled down. Chris loses a lot of people in the field in this game.

The four campaigns in this game are separate enough that I’m going to talk about them that way, so let’s start with Chris.

Chris and Piers

Like the franchise as a whole, Chris is in the midst of his own identity crisis. Is running from place to place, fighting monsters and losing so many people in the field really his whole life now? Yes, Chris. Yes, it is. I don’t know what else to tell you.

As much shade as this game gets for not being proper horror, there’s a case to be made that Chris’ campaign is absolutely a horror story, just one about the specific horrors of toxic masculinity. Aww, Chris, are you having an alcohol-fuelled, amnesic breakdown after traumatically losing your whole team in the field? You think maybe you could use some therapy, some downtime? Well fuck you, Chris, what you need is for the one survivor of your big fuck-up to come yell at you, drag your amnesic ass back to base and give you a whole new team. Then you can go lose them all in the field again, this time down to the very last man, so you can learn how to be a fucking man about it! MEN DON’T GET TO HAVE FEELINGS!!

Chris persists in having feelings nonetheless, mostly rage and denial. By the end game, poor Chris is about half a breakdown away from the point where he could see his whole team smeared into a bloody pulp, and would still have to be dragged away screaming “noooooo we can still save them!!!” The sheer hilarity can only temper the misery so far.

Watch as Chris solemnly retrieves the C4 cartridge that is all that was left of the last (non-playable) survivor of the second team he’s lost this game, which game text will dutifully label as Marco’s C4. Watch the sadness in Chris’ eyes as he slaps it onto a door and blows it open! (That was Marco’s C4, Piers! He loved that C4! He took it everywhere with him! Now it’s as burned and blackened as he is!)

If you’re here for testosterone poisoning, Chris and Piers’ campaign is here for you. Up to this point in the series, one of Chris’ few vaguely-distinguishing features was how many women there were in his life, and how he generally managed not to be weird about that – Jill, Claire, Sheva, even Rebecca. In RE6, Chris is a man’s man in a man’s world, full of men – no lady partners around to slow down this Redfield!

Chris interacts with all of three women in the whole game, and is one of those is him telling a barmaid ‘Listen, sweetheart, you’re here to pour drinks and look pretty’ when she tries to cut him off during his drunken-amnesic opening sequence. Chris spends the rest of the game hunting clone!Ada after she gruesomely murders his first team in front of him. He never gets his final showdown with her. He never finds out she’s a clone. But he sure does get into a big punch-up with Leon when Leon has the gall to suggest they need to bring “Ada” in alive, not in a body bag (the clone herself slips away while they’re still arguing).

Chris does manage to be nicer to Sherry, at least, but his biggest interaction with Jake is similarly testosterone-laden. If you play these campaigns in their intended order, you’ll have the big Wesker-junior-reveal exposed for you in other people’s dialogue long before you’ll ever see Jake find out for himself. Chris decides this means he absolutely has to let Jake know that I Killed Your Father at the first possible opportunity, never mind that the lives of millions could hang on whether he and Jake can get on long enough to get out alive. He and Jake very nearly come to blows over it.

It’s all so ridiculous that even Piers calls him out on it; Chris simply insists that Jake “had a right to know.” Sure, but why now? For which matter, why would Jake suddenly care about the death of the evil, asshole deadbeat he hates so much? Oh, let’s not kid ourselves, it’s all because the writers wanted their big, tense, manly, “I killed your daddy!”-confrontation, and were going to shoehorn it in at any cost.

And yet, for all the bullshit that is Chris’ manly, manly campaign, I can’t completely hate it, because there’s this one bit at the end where Piers injects himself with a virus in a desperate moment, and promptly grows a giant mutant arm that shoots lightning. Like, if you are playing as Piers, you get to wield his mutant lightning arm through the remaining combat scenes.

The game even throws up a bunch of lightning-destructible barriers after the big boss battle just to give you more to do with it. I mean, how can you not love a thing like that? It’s amazing.

More importantly, why the fuck is there not more use of Piers’ horrifying lightning-shooting monster-arm in Chris/Piers fanfic? Do you all not see how 100% DTF Chris would be if he thought it had even a chance of helping convince Piers his monster-arm wasn’t so bad and he didn’t need to nobly stay behind to die? You can’t experience this game and tell me this isn’t the moment Chris has been building up for the whole damn campaign! Am I going to have to write monster-fucker!Chris myself?

Ahem.

Leon and Helena

Leon’s campaign does not start in a bar, comfortably far from the action. It starts in a presidential office, where Leon is already pointing a gun at the zombified PotUS, who is even now eating another victim.

“Don’t make me do this!” Leon begs, demonstrating that Chris has absolutely set the standard for seasoned-pros-still-living-in-absurd-denial that we can expect from everyone in this mad game. Leon, c’mon – wake up and smell the decomposition! Fuck, your boss is so far gone already they can probably smell him from the building next door!

Leon seems to be working presidential security, but he can’t be doing a very good job, considering that not only has the president been zombified on his watch, there’s a woman with a drawn firearm standing next to him in the president’s presence, and (in one of many record-scratch moments) we’re about to find out Leon hasn’t a clue who she is. Other games might have spent some time leading up to this moment, establishing how Leon, Helena and the ex-pres all got into this position. They might even have given us a scene or two to set up Leon’s relationship with said president, a man whose death has apparently been so traumatic that Leon’s forgotten everything he ever knew about zombies (and take note that this isn’t even Ashley’s-dad-the-president, it’s apparently some completely new guy, so even franchise vets are coming in blind). But not RE6! RE6 gives us a few seconds of flashback-montage right before Leon pulls the trigger, and gets right back to its regular schedule of misery porn.

Helena mutters, “It’s all my fault!” but refuses to elaborate in any way until they reach this cathedral on the other side of town (naturally hiding some kind of biotech lab facility) where it will all become clear. It takes a long time to get to the cathedral, however, because there’s a zombie outbreak in progress, and Leon and Helena keep stopping to watch people die.

There’s a man who wants help looking for his daughter! “We don’t have time!” says Helena. “We’ll make time!” says Leon. Well, they sure do make time to watch that newly-zombified daughter eat her father in a horrific scene. Yay! Later, they find a security feed showing a couple of helpless civilians desperately waving “HELP” signs at a security camera, like there’s going to be anyone checking security feeds in the midst of the zombie apocalypse. Leon watches the feed. The civilians persist in waving signs in one of those awkward video-game animation cycles. Leon watches some more. The signs wave some more. Finally, “we should go help them!” says Leon, as zombies show up to eat everyone present. Helena points out it may be a little late. It’s all so hilarible it hurts.

There’s no good reason why Helena can’t explain anything until they get to the cathedral. All she needs to say is that she’s a federal agent whose sister was taken hostage to force her to cooperate with the villains responsible for the president’s death, and who've been making bioweapons in a secret lab under the cathedral. You could question why a major bio-terror outbreak was necessary for one little act of political assassination, but because this is the Resident Evil universe, any evil worth doing is worth doing with zombies.

You could question exactly what Helena was forced to do, but the game isn’t interested in any of that logical plot stuff. You could question exactly why whatever the president was about to reveal about Raccoon City was worth a political assassination, but the game isn’t interested in politics either. We’re going to the cathedral! It’ll all be much easier to explain there! (It won’t be, we’re not here to explain anything.)

It doesn’t really get better from here. Leon’s campaign is, in short, an epic mess. But I can’t completely hate it, because despite all the bullshit material he’s working with, I am kind of into this take on Leon. This is a Leon who’s older, cooler and more sophisticated, and it just gets me something ridiculous. I’ve seen complaints from fans of the original RE4 who weren’t happy he’s more serious and has less goofy one-liners, which is probably fair – Leon still gets some good ones in, but Jake is hoarding most of the real one-liners in this game, and Leon does come across kind of absurdly over-earnest in a lot of early scenes. He's not going to be to everyone's taste.

But frankly, I’ll take this Leon over RE4’s any day. He feels so much closer to the version in the new games I fell for so hard (and not just because he can actually work with women without being weird about it). He also looks amazing in a suit and still has great chemistry with (real) Ada, and good god, they should just run away together already, those combined genetics would produce the coolest babies imaginable, you just try and tell me they wouldn’t!

And, y'know, sue me, but I kinda liked Helena too. I could do without the police-brutality backstory that she gets in documents, but she's a woman who has fucked up big time, who knows it, and is trying to make up for it, and that kind of complicated tends to be what gives me most of my female faves in this franchise.

Jake & Sherry

Much as I enjoyed Leon and Helena though, their campaign at large is still a pretty miserable slog. And having already sat through two long campaigns of indifferent misery porn, I can’t tell you what a breath of fresh air it was it reach Jake and Sherry’s story and realise, oh my god, I’m actually having a good time! They’re actually having some fun together! They have such great chemistry! Jake even has an actual character arc where he looks back on his life with new eyes and real drive to become a better person! Did I accidentally switch to a whole different game?

Jake (aka Wesker Junior) is the kind of character who shouldn’t work: an above-it-all edgelord mercenary asshole who sounds like everything wrong with this game in a nutshell. His reaction to discovering he might be carrying the cure to a zombie plague is to cheerfully put a price on his own blood in the millions. And yet, he’s refreshingly not awful to Sherry, quickly get attached to her and develops a great dynamic, and he’s young enough that he’s out of his depth a lot in the world of bio-terrorism, and not too uptight to admit it.

Finding out his father was none other than Wesker prompts some serious self-reflection, but we’re not going to watch him spend the rest of the game angsting over it, and even through all the horror he mostly seems to be having a good time. Jake’s great.

My only serious complaint about this campaign is that it’d be nice if they’d given Sherry a little more personality beyond being Jake’s no-nonsense handler. I like that she’s grown up from rescued-little-damsel into trusted agent, that she’s competent and comfortable enough with the world of bio-terror that nothing really fazes her (even if the game does get a little patronising about having Jake tackle her out of danger repeatedly), but she’s stuck being the straight-man to Jake’s wilder personality, and that’s just a bit disappointing.

For someone whose parents were neglectful Umbrella scientists responsible for throwing her into a world of horrific childhood trauma, Sherry comes across like she’s never questioned an authority figure in her life since, and that just doesn’t ring true to me. But at least she and Jake get to have friendly interactions with Leon and Helena, because god knows Chris and Piers can't ever be invited to a group cutscene without one of them having to hold the other back.

I can’t say whether I’d have enjoyed Jake’s storyline nearly so much had I not suffered through Chris and Leon’s first, but Jake’s feels like a far more complete story than either of the previous – and there’s a refreshing lack of stopping-to-watch-people-die-horribly. I don’t feel like I’m missing a preceding act’s worth of set-up, and clone!Ada has a smaller role, so the fact Sherry and Jake never find out what her deal is doesn’t feel like it leaves their story critically unfinished.

Which brings us to Ada’s campaign.

Ada

So here’s where we learn that the Ada in the purple dress is a clone created by that one Illuminati Dude she ghosted after he got too clingy. And by ‘we learn’ I mean ‘just the real Ada learns’, because god knows Chris and Leon never find out – and one can only imagine the kind of furious arguments they’re going to have over Ada’s character, motives, and whether she’s even alive or not after the events of the game. Even Ada only finds out her clone exists because the clone insists on trying to best her original, in that classic clone-angst way.

I have such conflicted feelings about Ada’s portrayal in this game. I’d like to be able to enjoy how unflappably cool she is, even when faced with evidence that the Literal Illuminati may be trying to make her the scapegoat for the apocalypse. But the reality is that Ada flaps so little she’s utterly one-note here – like, if you thought the RE4 remake Ada was a little limited in range, RE6 is exactly that, only more so, for much longer. Surely she should at least be annoyed that someone with Chris’ connections thinks she’s directly responsible for major bio-terror outbreaks in multiple countries? A little flap or two would go an awful long way here.

The most memorable part of Ada’s campaign is her final showdown with Carla, her clone – who mutates into a monster so huge and horrific that she basically becomes the whole battle stage, and it’s fantastically creepy and fucked-up (in a way I can actually enjoy, for a change). But most of the rest of Ada’s campaign is her wandering through her scheduled appearances in other characters’ stories, and there’s just not much of interest going on there. Time to fight all those same bosses that keep coming back over and over again!

A lot of what makes RE6 ultimately so unsatisfying is that in the end, thousands or millions of people have died around the world because of what amounts to bullshit illuminati infighting, well beyond the ken of any of the heroes running around the edges doing damage control. Even when Chris finally catches up with the Ada clone, it’s only to see her shot down by mysterious men in a black helicopter who just fly away out of the story again as inexplicably as they entered.

The clone’s not dead, of course – she gets right back up again in time for her boss fight with Ada. There’s no need for the helicopter in this scene at all – letting the Ada clone throw herself off the rooftop without being shot would have served the same narrative purpose. But throwing in an Illuminati drive-by shooting sure does underline how little real agency any of the heroes really have, when the world can be brought to the brink of a bio-terror apocalypse because one rich, white man couldn’t deal with the fact a woman said no to him.

No-one other than Ada even seems interested in the real truth: no-one asks who was flying the helicopter, or ends their campaign with any ‘time to get the rest of those Illuminati bastards’-declaration. Had RE6 been a smash-hit success, I don’t doubt that some kind of get-the-Illuminati plot would have come up in the sequel, but as it stands, Chris and Leon seem unbothered by being mere pawns in the schemes of the unknowably powerful. That’s not much of a happy note to end on.

In the end, the best thing about RE6 is that its reception was so tepid that it led directly to the IP being almost completely reinvented for RE7. And without a trainwreck on the scale of RE6, that might not have happened.

For all the parts of this story I like enough to wish they’d appeared in a better game, it’s hard to call RE6 any kind of success. But it’s at least an interesting failure – a fascinatingly awful trainwreck of an experience – and that’s at least something worth talking about.

#Resident Evil 6 #Chris Redfield #Leon Kennedy #Jake Muller #Sherry Birkin #Helena Harper #Piers Nivans #RE reviews #Resident Evil

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beevean · 11 months

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What bothers me about how forceful/unbased some neurodivergency/LGBT+ headcanons are is how they give off the vibe only neurodivergent or queer characters are allowed to have anything going for them. Not even anything special! Let's take TMOSTH: Tails feels empathy for many things? Autistic! Espio speedread a book to spoil the ending for Knuckles? Autistic! Or what you pointed out in Archie, with Shadow stating he likes his motorcycle? Autistic! As someone who only recently found out they might not be entirely neurotypical, I recall quite disliking and feeling somewhat hurt that every single thing a character did immediately gets spun around to fit the OP's projecting, with the attached "fuck the straights and the neurotypicals only gay people would ever do this" that tends to come along with it (where the thing "only gay people do" 99% of the time is the most basic thing in the world). It's almost like people don't want to consider that the most normal, down-to-earth, "boring" (used in the way such OPs tend to use it: as an easy jab) neurotypical cishet person can feel empathy for many things, speedread, or like a motorcycle. I feel like there is more behind that due to the state of the world at large, but it's annoying to see have to come across it in fandom all the time, and then have the "proof" be complete nonsense or entirely taken out of context to "support" the statement. Not to mention the "joking" accusations of bigotry if you do not share such headcanons that occasionally get added as well.

Another example I thought of the moment I hit the "ask" button: Surge getting revealed as Sonic's "clone" and the ENTIRETY OF TUMBLR immediately deciding this meant Sonic was trans. The fact they aren't even the same species nor look alike in the slightest and the fact I thus promptly got very worried about the biology knowledge of the entirety of Tumblr aside, thank god that shit died down when it got revealed Surge legit was just some rando Starline plucked from the streets with no relation to Sonic.

You hit the nail on the head.

When autistic headcanons are created from the basis of "X has a passion for Y!", I'm here like... do you think autistic people are the only ones who can feel any sort of love or attachment over something? Do you think neurotypical people can only blandly tolerate things? Isn't hyperfixation something much, much more intense than a passion? Isn't autism much more than "being shy and with something they love", and isn't ADHD much more than being excitable? This shit makes legit harder for people to realize if they're neurodivergent or not because I swear that literal human nature is deemed to be "divergent". If "neurotypicalness" is associated with being an emotionless, insensitive asshole, no wonder no one would want to identify as, or call their favorite character, neurotypical!

Don't get me started on how for some people "straight" is a synonym for boring and "gay" is a synonim for fun and quirky. Shocker: love and fun are not limited to non-cishet people. It's not a "weird", exceptional state of humanity. Cishet people can have a personality too.

lmaooooo I remember that headcanon, good times. Speaking of which, while the headcanon "Sonic is trans because he doesn't have chest fur" is... something, I side-eye people who headcanon Surge as trans. Oh, you think that the nasty, aggressively masculine bully is trans? It doesn't look good in either direction :) (same for the people who headcanon her as a lesbian, despite her having 0 meaningful interactions with female characters, solely because she's "butch". I wouldn't want to do that, but I may be biased lmao)

#sonic the hedgehog #important #unrelated but funnily enough #even imposter syndrome 4 implied that eggman's computers are unable to distinguish between sonic & tails and surge & kit #i don't need to explain why it doesn't make sense #especially after s&k were revealed to be random people and not artificial creatures

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tricos-here · 2 months

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EYE would like to know about the Mei lore 🙋‍♀️

well uhm! the thing is I have a bunch of scattered lore points that I still don't know how to connect together and/or what they're supposed to lead to but you can have some disjointed bullet points

she was actually born into the White Mantle, was yoinked out of there by the Shining Blade during a particular raid, while she was still a baby

was adopted by a noble family as some kinda PR move but only stayed w them for little more than a year before being given to the Church of Lyssa - she dropped the noble family's name, Ermenred, and instead took up Donnadieu ( "meaning “given to God”, surname given to a child because they were given to a priest or monastery or either an orpan")

she's besties with Raph, they grew up together in the same Church congregation

Raph (at the time working w the Seraph) also helped her hide the body of her creep bf after Mei stabbed him but dw about that

somewhere between the Church and being picked up by the Mesmer Collective she'd go on some type of spec ops missions, mostly dealing with excess magic, retrieving artifacts etc

one such mission was to go undercover and infiltrate the White Mantle, which is how she ended up getting the tattoo across her torso and neck - she also picked up on a lot of their tricks ie mesmer abilities and utilizing bloodstone in said abilities

she'd also later joined a raiding guild called Solargarde, which is partially funded by the Mesmer Collective (Mei being one of their tie-ins), she's canonically been through most if not all the in-game raids, including facing Matthias and Xera, and getting her soul punched out of her body by Dhuum (it's ok she got better)

might be kinda lore breaking but she was a 'virtuoso' from the get-go and not after like. visiting cantha and discovering it - she doesn't really like looking at her own clones

there's probably more but 🏃‍♀️💨 this will have to do

on less serious fun facts she has two bloodhounds named vanessamarie and amelie and her middle name is eloise which she lowkey prefers to mei but nobody ever picks up on it

#ahem thank you for your interest 👉👈#mei donnadieu

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soupct123 · 1 year

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I saw a post the other day about “the Portal renaissance” basically about how new people consistently come into the fanbase due to Portal 2 going on sale on Steam every so often. That’s probably the actual explanation for a whole lotta people, but that wasn’t for me, and it got me thinking about my introduction to it. So I decided it would be fun for me to reflect on the story of how I discovered it, and then post about it because blebityblehbleh parasocial strangers’ approval blibbityblooblah

In 2017, Lego Dimensions sets started showing up at 99 cent stores. I was 15, and I still liked legos but I knew how expensive they were so I always looked for bargains. I really wanted the Jurassic World set, but I never found it. I still got quite a few, and one in particular sorta stuck with me.

The other sets all ended up used in miscellaneous ways for like brick built dinosaurs and transformers and stuff, but I decided to keep the cube and Chell built. Every so often I’d look at them, they lived on a shelf with my lego clone troopers, and I’d think “I should look up what those come from, it seems pretty cool” but because I was a dumb ass adhd teenager I never got around to it.

Then in 2020 I discovered RTgame’s YouTube channel through his Minecraft videos, he was my #1 fav channel for a few months, so I started working through his backlog. My favorite videos were the ones where he played with CallMeKevin, so I looked for those videos specifically and found out they played Portal 2, that thing that the lego things were from! So I watched it, and it looked fun and stuff, I liked the robots and the sci fi aesthetic, but through the screams of these Irish idiots I heard snippets of the most heavenly voice that ever graced my ears.

And something in my gay little brain just clicked and I just needed to hear her more.

Luckily, this video popped up in my recommendations thanks to raniel and kev, and it gave me fucking hives, and I became a GLaDOS junkie

I started eyeing the fandom from afar, but I very rarely ventured outside my niche, that being Portal 2 GLaDOS voice line compilations on YouTube. If I ever needed cheering up or had trouble sleeping I listened to her, I didn’t need any context because she was funny and had the most radiant beautiful voice I ever heard, and it stayed that way for a while.

I built a lego glabos late 2020 that I’ve consistently upgraded, but I’ve decided not to stray for 100% accuracy because I’m just not skilled enough.

That was it for like 2 years, I had the lego, I liked the GLaDOS voice, I was happy. Then in January 2022 I was looking for a Blu-ray DVD player since I started living on my own. Then my little brother suggested I get a video game console, and I realized there were a few older games that I really wanted to play, so I took his advice and looked up what consoles had Transformers: War For Cybertron, Fall of Cybertron, and Lego Jurassic World.

X box 1 had them but x boxes cost like $300. Ps4s had them and were a bit cheaper but still over $100.

Then I saw that all 3 games were available on PS3. So I looked up the prices and I found some used for like $70.

On January 6, 2022, I got this PS3 from a used games shop for something like $40, and War For Cybertron to go with it.

I wanted to find a co-op game to play with him since he had the idea, but he found one for me on January 20th. He said “my friend told me this is about robots, a lesbian computer, and a creepy facility, so I thought you’d like it. Plus it has a two-player mode so we can play it since you still haven’t found Lego Jurassic World”

I hadn’t even checked if Portal 2 was on PS3 previously. After my first play through of the singleplayer campaign I cried my ass off and told him it was the best gift ever.

It was the thing that triggered me to actually start getting into the community, and I luckily started in the right place: looking through the GLaDOS tag on Archive of our own. Then I became a Chelldos addict and now I feel like I’ve been here for years.

Later I found the Orange Box to play Portal 1 and then everything came full fucking circle

Basically, the reason I got into Portal is because I’m a cheapskate who watches twitch clips on YouTube

#portal game #valve games #portal 2 #ps3games #lego dimensions #GLaDOS

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awholelottayeehaw · 1 year

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Mando Finale Thots (Spoilers Below Cut)

I was honestly disappointed with the Season Finale. Was it fun? Sure. Did it have everything I ever wanted for Din and the gang? Almost. But this is why I can't be happy with what we got:

What happened to Paz?? If he died this heroic death why was he never brought up again? I'm glad his son got his baptism finally but like... what about his dad's funeral?? You're telling me that Din wouldn't be mourning the loss of his childhood rival?? Either Paz isn't dead and will make a return next season in a villainous role or the writing was weaker than white people's tolerance to spice

What was the point of the Dr. Pershing episode?? It took precedence over the premiere AND the finale yet nothing came of it?? That whole episode could've been a fucking email if it wasn't that important to the season's overall plot

What happened to the armor the Armorer gave to Grogu?? It was never brought up again and you can't tell me Season 2 and BOBF Din WOULDN'T have been sobbing under his bucket upon seeing it. Also, who bathes Grogu?? Din is a parent is he allowing his son to be a stinky stank and that's how he never saw the armor?? Whack.

How could the darksaber, an ancient indestructible weapon that is capable of slicing through beskar... be defeated in a Ghetto Stomp. Either that wasn't the real darksaber or they got lazy and tossed a major SW artifact out the window because it no longer serves them and they wanted the easy way out hoping no one would notice

Why was everyone suddenly okay with Bo-Katan?? She's a racist terrorist who not once had gone in depth or atoned for her war crimes and I'm genuinely disturbed that people chose to forget that. It's like cheering on Hitler because you liked him as a person outside of his political beliefs. I wanted Bo's redemption to be fulfilling while holding her accountable cause like what the actual fuck how is anyone okay with Bo's leadership after so many failed attempts and lies

The build up was to show that Gideon is so full of himself he had to clone himself?? I doubt that was the big reveal, what they saw in the lab on Navarro wasn't Gideon. I refuse to believe they needed Grogu just to make a more OPed version of Gideon. Gideon isn't stupid why would he clone himself with powers he doesn't have when he knows he'd just overthrow himself? That was bait and I'm not buying that or that he's dead that was a clone

Whomst the fuck wasn't watching Grogu and how did he manage to save Din without being detected????

The Mythosaur deserved better. I'm glad it's getting it's centuries long nap in, but I still refuse to believe the darksaber or Din being a himbo was the reason for her seeing it and then barely remembering to mention it again in the end like if it doesn't come back I'm suing Disney

Why was Din made out to be such a damsel until it was convenient? You're telling me this man easily passed out sinking to the bottom of a historic well despite knowing how to swim and his armor being canonically light, but was able to take down half an army by himself?? Din in the finale was the Din I knew who would never have perished from just being a dumb ass not watching his step. Even Grogu conveniently using the force after refusing to all season felt cheap and you can't change my mind

It's great Din adopted Grogu and all but he still hasn't called him his son?? Just his apprentice?? We spent three seasons with everyone else calling Grogu his son and Din his father but the titular character can't?? Where was that cuddly fatherhood from season 2 and episode 1 of this season? He's been treating Grogu like a nephew at most and I just... give me my space dad back

And why did they name drop Dooku but not Satine? What were the stakes? Why is there a season 4 when there's nothing that really needs to be said or done? Going back to the space western season 1 and 2 promised is fantastic but like... at what cost? Are they going to pretend season 3 never happened? Will it all be a dream? Will the peace be destroyed and Din and Grogu need to save Mandalore themselves and the galaxy with the friends they made along the way???

#The Mandalorian Season 3 #The Mandalorian #Season 3 Finale #The Mandalorian Finale #Din Djarin #Bo-Katan #The Armorer #Paz Vizsla #Spoilers #Thoughts #Billie Vents #Grogu #Everyone deserved better

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shouldhavebeenpersephone · 8 months

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AAAAAAAAAAH One Way by S.J. Jordan was SO GOOD! Going for the sequel next but pleasssseee do you have any show or movie recs??

AAAAAAAAAA I am so glad you enjoyed it! Feel free to scream at me about it ANY time. I think I may have to go and reread it now.

In regards to other recommendations... oooooh boy. I have so many. This took me a while because I was considering if this would be respectful to the strikes, but we haven't been told to stay away from any streaming services etc. yet, so after removing a scab from the recommendation list I decided to post it. Apologies in advance for the tangents I go on for every single recommendation. Some of these have been quite popular so you might know of them but it still felt worth mentioning.

Under the cut is a non-exhaustive list of media in no particular order that makes me want to eat glass. Take a shot every time I say heartbreaking.

Movies

Lord of the Rings 1/2/3 - I feel no need to explain myself. If you haven't seen this please for the love of god get your hands on the extended versions and watch them. Then read the books and watch the movies again. Rinse and repeat.

How to Train Your Dragon and How to Train Your Dragon 2 - You read that right, NOT the third movie. In this house the third movie doesn't exist. This is an animated movie and sequel based on the book it shares a name with by Cressida Cowel. The movie follows protagonist Hiccup who lives in a town of Vikings who hunt and kill dragons. He finds out that he can't kill a dragon he has caught, and is surprised when the dragon won't kill him either. His curiosity gets the best of him and he returns to watch the dragon in it's hideout, and a beautiful friendship emerges from a very messy situation. It doesn't happen often that a movie is better than the book, especially if the source material has been changed so drastically, but HTTYD pulls it off. The first movie was also my introduction to fandom, and both movies have an incredibly special place in my heart. Fun fact: I actually am the OP of a pretty popular fandom headcannon and it makes me giggle every time I see it be mentioned in the HTTYD tag.

Inception - Obligatory action movie. Heist movie except sci-fi and also everyone is queer and sexy (no it's not canon but it is canon to me). Conman Leo DiCaprio breaks into rich boy Cilian Murphy's dreams to convince him to give up his father's business in exchange for getting his criminal file wiped clean so he can see his kids again. I love sad dads and I love mind games and I love high stakes and I love time fuckery and I love mentally ill women. Watch it if you also do.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire - Perfect. Showstopping. Incredible. Does not pass the reverse Bechdel test. It is so incredibly hearthbreaking and soft and tender. Period drama with lesbians. Painter Noémi Merlant is hired to pretend to be a companion to Adèle Haenel while secretly painting her portrait to be sent off to a man she is being married off to. There is betrayal and trust and community and lust and it's so gorgeous to look at. The attention to detail is incredible and I want to kiss Céline Sciamma for bringing this movie to my screen. I cry every time I watch it. Queer heartache done right.

The Lake House - I don't know if this movie is actually that good but to me it is perfect. Contractor Keanu Reeves moves into a gorgeous lake house (my dream home) and starts receiving letters addressed to the previous owner and doctor Sandra Bullock. When he gets a letter from her with her new address and sees it's to a building that's still in development, the two skeptics come to the conclusion they are living years apart and their post box is some sort of portal. They fall in love, things go wrong, things go right, and there is a dog!

Series

Orphan Black - Listen. Listen. LISTEN. Tatiana Maslany. Wow. She plays a dozen (if not more) clones and I still have a hard time believing they weren't all different people. Trouble kid forced to be an adult because she is a mother sees herself jump in front of a train and uhhhh has issues with that. She then discovers there are so many others like her, that they were a part of a cloning project and that she is a bit of a special case. There is a lot of plot I cannot summarize but it's deliciously queer (one of the main character clones is a lesbian as well as two prominent gay side characters and other minor queer and trans characters). Found family, questions of what it means to love and of morality, some wonderfully written character arcs and a decently satisfying end. First few episodes can be a bit hard to get into, but Tatiana Maslany is incredible and the show is totally worth it.

Adventure Time - This is a big comfort show for me, not only because Marceline and Princess Bubblegum were one of my first queer ships ever, but also because I enjoy this show just as much as an adult. No real main story line, you could watch individual episodes and still follow it. There are some heavy themes, but they are always handled so wonderfully and with a true sense of childlike wonder, and it makes me have faith in humanity again. Finn the Human and Jake the Dog go on adventures together in a gigantic fantasy land and meet lots of interesting figures. Even the evil characters get attention, compassion, screen time, and dignity. It's heartbreaking and beautiful and so so so good.

The Mentalist - Sorry, there is a cop show in here. Simon Baker is an ex 'psychic' grieving father and husband working as a consultant with the CBI. His boss, Robin Tunney, is so in love with him she looks stupid. It's basically a man who is too smart for his own good running around, being charming or extremely annoying, and an exhausted tough-love type of woman running around fixing his messes. Oh and they catch killers. I am a Patric Jane kinnie, sue me. Jane and Lisbon are also very Griddlehark to me, kind of a what could have been if they had been friends from the beginning.

Russian Doll - Have I ever mentioned how much I love Natasha Lyonne? This is a kind of sexier Groundhog Day, where Natasha Lyonne keeps dying and waking up in the bathroom of her friend throwing her a birthday party. She loses her mind in the midst of gorgeous scenes, seriously beautiful cinematography, and in sexy ass outfits. If you like mind fuckery, cinematography, and sexy women this is the show for you. It sure is the show for me.

Arcane - Speaking of gorgeous visuals, Arcane is a beast of a show with such an incredible and unique look. Also so many hot and/or gay women. There are a few men too, they're okay, I do like me a pathetic little guy so it works. But WOMEN. So many powerful, intelligent, cunning, courageous women. I have to admit that I remember very little of the storyline, but I do know that they took 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl', said "yes and", and made a truly incredible and multi dimensional character with Jinx, with fully fleshed out motivations and morals (or lack thereof), understandable but still properly wrong actions, and such incredible story building around her progressing mental troubles. Must watch.

The Sandman - This one is not technically an obsession I have ever had, but it is a great watch and rewatch. I adore Vivienne Acheampong as Lucienne and I adore Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer and I adore Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death. I also love pretty much anything that comes out of Neil Gaiman's brain so that helps. Great casting is what makes this show a winner for me. Morpheus/Dream gets locked up by some insane guy trying to capture death to bring back his son and he spends the rest of the show dealing with the consequences of being gone for decades. Tom Sturridge is a wet cat of a man and I do like that a lot as well. Very pretty cinematography seals the deal.

Misc.

The Magnus Archives - Podcast wildcard. Horror and paranormal and delicious. I love voice actors so much and archivists are hot. Becoming something you didn't choose and dealing with the repercussions of no longer really being human is so !!!!!!! I love it when people just go through the horrors. Everyone's voices scratch something in my brain that nothing else can reach. Brilliant piece of media.

What Remains of Edith Finch - Game wildcard. Semi-sandbox semi-railroad narrative. Gorgeous visual representations of so many difficult things in life. Particularly, the bit where one of Edith's family members loses himself to his own imagination is so gorgeous and heartbreaking. I have written essays on the cinematography of this game. It is so beautiful. Whether you lay it or watch a playthrough, you have to witness this.

MISSED RECOMMENDATIONS ARE HERE

There you have it.

I am sure there is more and I am sure I will be hitting my head on a wall after remembering something I forgot to include. Anyway- enjoy!

#Ash Answers

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phoenixyfriend · 3 years

Text

Ezra and Fulcrum’s Wacky Adventure

Ezra's attempt to save Ahsoka on Malachor by fucking around with space-time goes wonky, and the two of them end up in the first year of TCW... with Vader in pursuit.

"You're Ahsoka... from the future?"

"Sure am, Skyguy."

"And that's your padawan."

"A friend's padawan. His master died recently, and I'm keeping an eye on him until we figure something out."

"Right, right... and, uh, mister tall, Dark, and horrifying?"

"Oh, that's future you."

"..."

"Yeah, Palpatine's a Sith Lord and he's been grooming you for a decade. Shit’s fucked. Anyway, get ready to jump, Vader’s gaining on us."

I just have this mental image of hyper-competent "I am no Jedi" Fulcrum leading 20yo Anakin and angstiest ever Ezra on a merry ride called "avoid Vader before he kills us all."

Intermittently she tries to talk Vader down with "Padme's still alive!" and that sort of not-quite-reassurance, and Anakin is getting very concerned about... many things.

Smol Ahsoka is very "future me scares me." Like yeah Fulcrum is a badass but Fulcrum is also incredibly blase about like. Really horrifying things.

Fulcrum's had a long time to come to terms with "Vader is probably Anakin" and a week or two to come to terms with "Vader is DEFINITELY Anakin and also trying to kill me and this child (teenager) I'm currently in charge of." She's coping by making very morbid jokes and being scarily calm about things, and just overall Very Unperturbed about, like, an explosion going off two feet away from her.

She keeps dropping bombs like "Yeah, all the clones have mind-control chips in their heads with orders to kill us or themselves and I remember like a solid half of you trying to kill me in particular, it was a very formative experience for how I dealt with the rise of the Empire" with the most unassuming, bland smiles.

Everyone's horrified except Fulcrum herself and Ezra, who grew up in the Empire and has never known anything else, but ALSO he's consistently freaking out and having negative reactions to shinies and even some of the older clones because even painted phase one armor is setting off 'These are stormtroopers' PTSD.

So there's:

- that general "Vader fucks around and everyone, including Sidious and Tyranus, is trying to figure out the identity of this absolute motherfucker wrecking everyone's shit with no restraint or apparent care in target allegiance"

- "a friend from The Future shows up to tell you about the horrible, horrible fate everyone is going to suffer, now you have to fix it"

- "Future Me tried to kill The Little Sister?????"

Do you think your teenager is traumatized now, Anakin? Think again! In eighteen years, it's going to be so much worse, and it's going to be in large part your fault!

Fulcrum, smiling: Humor makes the trauma bearable.

Anakin: [concerned noises]

@atagotiak: I have this mental image of Anakin and Fulcrum making the very inadvisable decision to spar

Fulcrum thinks she’s able to handle it. She’s not.

She has the skills! But. Uh. Panic attacks are fun, especially when they take the form of "my brain flipped a switch and I could no longer process that this was a spar and not a fight to the death."

Ezra suggests that maybe she'd be better off sparring with General Kenobi instead of Skywalker. Ezra can spar with Mini-Soka and Anakin, he's fine with that. He knows Vader is Anakin but it's just a Fact, like "there are this many stars in the Chommel sector." It's certainly true but he has no emotional connection to this information.

Tia: It’s not great for Fulcrum mentally and also tbh it seems like there might be a risk of her injuring Anakin. Probably not too seriously just because the sabers aren’t gonna be full power but still, seems like something to avoid

Does she flinch around non-Rex 501st clones? Probably!

Fulcrum: Here's a list of clones we're likely to encounter that I'm not going to panic around.

Anakin: ...there’s only three names on this list.

Fulcrum: Yeah.

Tia: Trying to figure out what her opinion of Bail Organa must be. Which is complicated by how I haven’t seen Rebels.

I mean yeah there’s some degree of trust and respect and stuff there. But in the novel at least I didn’t really get any friendship vibe from them. To be fair I’m pretty sure they barely knew each other at the point.

“He’s trustworthy but a much sneakier motherfucker than anyone gives him credit for.”

"We aren't friends but I would lay down my life for him without hesitation"

"He's very soft compared to Jedi or clones but he's almost stupidly brave and apparently tried to help when he saw the Temple go up in flames, it's wild."

"But you're not friends?"

"Nah, future Bail was kind of my boss and I saw him once every two years if that. He has my ultimate respect, though. Ten outta ten, would become a black ops agent for again."

Tia: “Also his office is very fun to break into”

The looks that last one gets her.

Obi-Wan was nodding along because Yeah, he Gets It, Bail is incredibly impressive for a politician, he's a good man with a good heart and nerves of steel! Obi-Wan also finds him worthy of total loyalty! This is all--his office is What.

Fulcrum: Hey, you wanna know something terrible?

Anakin: No.

Fulcrum: Too bad, telling you anyway.

Fulcrum gets a lot of mileage out of being the future version of one of Anakin's current Five Most Important People (Obi-Wan, Padme, Ahsoka, Palpatine, Rex) since the twins haven't been born yet and Shmi's already dead.

Also, Tia pointed out that Caleb is like eleven at this point, and that’s very awkward for Ezra.

#Ezra Bridger #Ahsoka Tano #Fulcrum #Anakin Skywalker #Darth Vader #Bail Organa #Obi Wan Kenobi #time travel #sw rebels #star wars #the clone wars #Phoenix Posts

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antiloreolympus · 2 years

Text

10 Anti LO Asks

1. I'm glad LO fans are pissed at this Eris twist, they should be mad. You cannot claim to be a series about empowerment, giving Persephone a voice, and showing her inner complexity only to chicken out and make her a laughable depiction of a "perfect" woman and placing blame on a random character. RS wants all the perks of showing a "Complex Dread Queen" without actually letting Persephone have any sort of remotely "negative" traits, and the fans are right to be mad over it. It's insultingly bad.

2. Soooo, persephone = sleeping beauty????

Gifts from gidesses (fairy godmothers), hiding the kid with other godesses, ir the TGOEM, her seeing a man ONE TIME, and immediately in love. Jesus just let her get pricked by a thorn and fall asleep for 100 years already.

3. rachel purposely making sure persephone isn't even demeter's biological daughter in this is just wrong, esp when she says metis ISNT a mother to H/H/D because she only "created" them. she's making sure there is no actual connection between them in any way so demeter's overprotectiveness is even more demonized and persephone has /nothing/ for herself, meanwhile hades gets all the friends, family, power, etc. persephone is left with nothing and rachel thinks it's feminist/empowereing. this sucks.

4. you know i get a big part of the attraction to hxp and couples like it is the forbidden romance/"i can fix him" mentality and all but like idk how we're supposed to "fix" a literal slave owner lmao. like yeah you can fix myths hades, or hades game hades, or pjo hades, but theyre not hyper violent slavers who lust after barely legal interns, cheat with his sister in law, physically maim teenagers bc of a tiny slight, and literally corrupt the laws in his benefit like?? you cant "fix" that??

5. i thought this was supposed be a H&P retelling, not sleeping beauty 🤨

6. anon dont be silly, hades will just buy persephone her degrees so she feels better about having no accomplishments of her own. who needs school when your boss slash husband will just buy it for you?

7. you guys need to stop comparing lo to fifty shades. even ana steele got her degree and had a life before getting with her creepy boss, persephone doesn't even have that.

8. i know rachel eggs them on to think this but its so creepy the readers are obsessed about hades impregnating persephone and her giving him babies?? like he just found out she was r4ped only a few or two before only for persephone to just not care?? and now planning out how to give him kids?? arent most of the readers teenagers? would they like random people obsessing over when theyll have kids too? because i would guess not, but the r4pe victim better hurry up and give him mini clones ASAP!!

From OP: The amount of “but it’s not the fun way” responses to Persephone suggesting to create a baby is so gross (but not surprising). Like, why do they feel disappointed if they don’t have sex to have a child??

9. The fact that the other gods and goddesses have actually met Persephone when she was a baby is just... it's gonna haunt my many sleepless nights to come.

10. that one comic anon is talking about is called "when jasy whistles". jasy in myth is a literal child but the creator aged them up for shipping purposes.

#anti lo #anti lore olympus #lore olympus critical #lo critical

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mqgriett · 3 years

Text

Tech- Princess

Request: hello darling, i saw you were taking requests (it’s okay if you aren’t anymore, just disregard the rest of this) and I was wondering if you’d be able to write something for Tech? I’m absolutely starving for content surrounding him and I’d take literally any crumb you’d be willing to spare🥺 prompt/genre is totally up to you! @bandaid-bunny

Pairings: Tech x Fem!Reader

Warnings: small mention of death (very very minor, like a sentence)

Summary: you left the Jedi Order a year ago, which meant also leaving the Bad Batch. Tech’s feelings for you never faded, and neither did yours for him.

Notes: I really want to write a part 2 to this!! Please lmk if y’all would want a second part!!

Tech adjusted his tie for the fifth time, looking at himself in the reflection of the silver elevator. He licked his hand, smoothing back any stray hairs on top of his head.

“Nervous much?” Hunter muttered next to his brother.

Tech shook his head, “of course not. Why would I be?”

“Because this is the first time you’re seeing her in a whole year.” Crosshair replied, a smug smile on his face as he crossed his hands over his lap.

“And why would that make me nervous?” Tech scoffed, rolling his eyes and straightening the cuffs of his suit. The collar of his dress shirt felt increasingly tight and he pulled on, further giving his brother more of a reason to tease him.

“Last time you saw her you couldn’t talk right!” Wrecker slapped him on the back, making Tech choke on his own spit.

“That-”, cough, “is-”, another cough, “not true.” He finally caught his breath and repeated his sentence a little clearer. “That isn’t true.”

“Really?” Crosshair raised an eyebrow and turned to Hunter, who was giving Tech the same look.

Sarg intertwined his fingers, bringing his fist to the side of his face and making his voice a few octaves higher to mock Tech, “You look especially beautiful in the night time, it hides all of your imperfections. No- it highlights your imperfections. No- you have no imperfections in the night time. No- you’re perfect”

Tech crossed his arms, his cheeks glowing a shade of bright red as Hunter reenacted the scene from a year ago.

“We’re here for a surveillance operation, that’s all.” he swallowed the ball in his throat, “I might not even get the opportunity to speak with her, so I have no reason to be nervous.”

The quiet ding of the elevator reaching the top floor was his saving grace. Tech was the first one off and he automatically began to scan the crowded room for any sign of you. As Wrecker walked behind his brother he whispered, “surveillance operation.” He nodded and followed the rest of the Bad Batch, eyes still searching for any sign of you.

“Sarg, good to see you.” said Cody’s strong tone of voice, catching Tech’s attention again.

“Same to you, Commander.” Hunter replied, giving the 212th trooper a strong handshake. Cody pointed out that the Bad Batch and 212th were allowed to have fun that night, and that they were only to interfere with anything if it was a threat to the princess’s life. He pointed to the other troopers that had accompanied him that night. The majority of the 212th attack battalion dotted the ball room.

There was no sign of you after roughly twenty minutes, allowing Tech to ease up a little bit. Crosshair returned from the bar, standing next to his brother and handing him a medium sized glass with a small amount of black liquid. Although he wasn’t much of a drinker, Tech downed the shot within seconds of having it in his grasp.

***

“Nervous much?” Padme asked, watching from the corner of your room as you adjusted the front of your corset for the fifth time.

You ignored her snarky comment, continuing to speak your thoughts out loud, “Out of all the squadrons he could have asked, of course he chooses 99.”

“You’re going to smudge your makeup if you keep pacing and sweating like that.” she replied, walking to your side. “And, who knows? Maybe he’s not here.”

“Hunt- The Sergeant, doesn’t go anywhere without him. He’s here.” you answered, taking a loud breath in to calm yourself. “It’s been at least a year. Last time I saw him I was allowed to go on missions and hold a weapon that’s bigger than my palm.”

You reached behind yourself and started to undo the corset, “Now I need to go and sit in meetings, sit like a lady, smile and nod, and be pretty. That’s all… Could you re-tie this for me? The seamstress made it so I couldn’t breathe.” You motioned to the strings of the corset.

“How about you wear that blue dress, you liked that one.” Padme suggested, trying her best to get you into a better mood.

You sighed, “alright.”

As you walked back to your closet, Padme spoke behind you, “if you look on the bright side, attachments are no longer forbidden for you.”

It genuinely made both of you laugh, lifting your spirits a little as you unhooked the blue dress from its hanger. “maybe embrace that he’s here. You no longer need to follow the code, make the best of it.”

She was right, the Jedi code no longer applied to you.

About a year ago, when your sister had passed, it left you to take the throne of Alderaan as Princess. Your father, Bail Organa, was a senator and your mother, Breha Organa, was Queen. Someone needed to help her govern the planet, which led to you leaving the Jedi order and fulfill your duties as the only living legacy of your parents.

It was a difficult decision to make, and tonight would lock it in. The majority of Senators were here, including a few other monarchs. Last time you had seen the bulk of them you were still a Jedi Knight, now you were Princess of Alderaan.

This party was risky to throw, but it had already been postponed many times before. There was a small window to celebrate the new princess, which is no-doubt why the Bad Batch was called in. Majority of the troopers were on missions, and if the party was to be short on guards then it needed the strongest battalion available, Clone Force 99.

It was already twenty minutes into the celebration, and you had five minutes prepare to see them again. Last time you five were together it was a special operations mission, you were a Jedi and they were your designated clone battalion. Now you were tasked with pretending to be someone else, a princess.

You tugged your dress on and allowed Padme to lace the back up, it was time.

***

A loud sound of trumpets echoed through the room, quickly drawing everyone’s attention. The lights dimmed everywhere except the grand balcony with a staircase leading down to the main floor.

Tech followed the voice of the announcer, who seemed to be invisible among the huge crowd. “It is with great pleasure that I welcome the Queen and the new Princess of Alderaan.” he said obstreperously.

Queen Breha walked with grace down the steps, waving as she descended.

Next came the princess, her gold-accented, sleek, pastel blue dress shining in the light beautiful. Tech’s heart raced as he saw you, his glass slipping from his grip. He had nearly forgotten how beautiful you were, and the way you quickly walked down each stair nearly made him faint. The expensive glassware would have broken if it weren’t for Hunter’s quick reflexes.

The only other time he had witnessed the sight of you in a dress was during an undercover op, other than that you were frequently in your robes. Maker, you were breathtaking in that gown. He was going mad and you were still across the room.

You turned over your shoulder, automatically scanning the crowd for any signs of the Bad Batch. It seemed that every free moment you had was interrupted by a Senator or distant relative congratulating you on your new status. So, you smiled and made small talk, a tiny headache beginning to creep up on you.

As you thanked Senator Clovis for coming, a strong hand touched the small of your back. “Need a break?” Hunter asked behind you.

In that moment you could have cried at the sound of his voice. You were so overwhelmed and tired, wanting to collapse every time you needed to start a new conversation with someone. As you turned, you straightened your back, “Sergeant.” You gave him a curt nod, “Thank you for coming on such short notice.”

Hunter raised his eyebrow, waiting a moment before hooking his arm within your own. “Since when do you call me Sergeant?” he mused, beginning to lead you over to the edge of the ballroom.

You were well out of earshot of anyone important now, and your whole demeanor changed. You let out a breath of air and slouched, letting your legs rest a shoulder-width apart. “You have no clue how happy I am to see you.”

“Right back at you Command- Princess.” he said, letting go of your arm.

“Don’t call me that, for maker’s sake.” you pleaded, your tone genuinely sad.

He smirked, “not your thing, huh?”

You shook your head, “where’s the rest of the boys?”

“Wrecker spilled that Corellian wine on his shirt, Tech and Cross are helping him get cleaned off.” he responded with a shrug, as if it was a regular thing; on that thought, it was.

Your heart fluttered, “Tech’s here?”

Hunter chuckled deeply, combing his hair back, “he is. Why?”

You pursed your lips while narrowing your eyes, “just curious.”

Before Sarg could tease you any further, the large gold door to the men’s bathroom opened and the other three Bad Batchers stumbled back inside the room. You instinctively looked over your shoulder, your gaze catching Tech’s.

You both froze, trapped in each other's presence. He smiled, eyes sparkling in the faint light of the ballroom.

The group of three made their way to Hunter and you, Wrecker with a huge grin on his face.

Crosshair performed a dramatic bow, “m’lady.” he slid his hands into his pockets, a smug smirk on his face as he greeted you.

“I hate you,” You teased, shaking your head the smallest bit to show you disapproval.

“Hi Princess.” Wrecker didn’t hesitate to pull you into a tight hug, but he soon let go once realizing that he was possibly transferring the wine stain onto your dress.

Tech wrapped his arms around your waist and whispered, “you look nice.”

You rested your chin on his shoulder, “back at you.”

Crosshair interjected, “you got something on your dress.” he twirled his long finger towards your abdomen.

Wrecker had accidentally transferred some wine on your gown. You frowned, knowing that you now had to change dresses. “Kriff,” you mumbled, secretly slightly relieved that you got to leave for a few minutes, “I’ll be back. If anyone asks, just say I’m touching up my makeup.”

As you took a step forward, Padme’s words seemed to echo in your mind. Maybe embrace that he’s here. You no longer need to follow the code, make the best of it.

You smiled, “Tech would you mind coming along? I’m not supposed to leave the room without another person.”

He looked slightly surprised at your offer, but after tripping over a few words he nodded and followed.

Tech took a deep breath once you two were alone, clenching and relaxing his fists to ease a bit of his nerves, “I missed you, we all did. Missions aren’t as fun without you.”

You grinned, “I missed you too. Everything goes by slower nowadays.”

“You don’t enjoy your new life?” He asked, eyebrows creasing to form a concerned expression. He looked around at all the gold accented treasures hidden among the castle.

“There’s no excitement. Every day is just a repeat of the last.” The elevator doors opened and you both stepped inside.

They slid shut, officially making it just the two of you. “Do you miss the Order?”

You shook your head, “Not as much as I thought I would, but I miss the adventures. I miss you.” you said the last piece quietly, hoping he didn’t hear.

But since it was Tech, and he was the most attentive person you knew, he heard. He turned to look at you, making deep eye contact, “I miss you too. Co-piloting with Crosshair isn’t as fun as it was with you. I’m not as good at calming Wrecker down as you were.”

You arrived at your floor, the doors opening again and both of you walking out. There was an awkward silence surrounding the two of you now, both wanting to say the same thing.

As you stepped foot in your room, the energy shifted a little. You motioned for Tech to make himself comfortable and made your way to the closet.

He sat at the foot of your huge bed, admiring how well-decorated it was. He turned to look at the wall his back faced, eyes wandering to your nightstand. In the middle stood a framed photograph. It was a picture that Wrecker had taken after a rough mission. You and Tech were both asleep, your head on his lap and his hand draped over your waist. He sighed and called out to you, “You know I’ve always loved you, right?”

You froze, barely finishing at pulling the peach-colored dress over your head when his voice reached your ears. By the time you had turned around, Tech was standing in the doorway of your closet.

No more Jedi Code.

You walked to him, placing a gentle hand against his cheek and kissing him. He grabbed your hand and held it, leaning forward to deepen the kiss. He had waited too long for this to end quickly, and you felt the same.

#tech x reader #badbatchxreader #clone trooper tech #clone trooper crosshair #clone trooper hunter #clone trooper wrecker #bad batch #clone force 99

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rainofaugustsith · 2 years

Text

SWTOR Asks Revisited

Someone liked an old post of mine with some SWTOR asks. As we approach the end of my SWTOR journey, unless 7.1 or whatnot fixes everything the devs are doing wrong, I thought it would be fun to revisit it.

1. How many characters do you have?

Technically 34 across four servers, but most of them are clones and some are characters I really don't play much. I've played at least one toon for each advanced class. My characters on the European servers are there so I can visit with friends if need be and I usually don't play them.

Sith Warriors: 10 (Viri and all her clones)

Sith Inquisitors: 5 (two x Suvia and three other OCs)

Bounty Hunters: 4 (two x Taran and two other OCs)

Smugglers: 4 (one each of Marlena and Amedria on each NA server)

Troopers: 2 (clones of the same character)

Jedi Consulars: 3 (all clones of the same character)

Jedi Knights: 3 (all different)

Imperial Agents: 3 (Brynn x 2 and another OC)

2. What is your favorite class and why? And/or list the player classes in order of most -> least favorite

Favorite is Sith Warrior. It was the class I started with, it's still my favorite, and I really love playing my Juggernauts more than any other combat styles.

Favorite to least favorite:

Sith Warrior

Sith Inquisitor

Bounty Hunter

Smuggler

Jedi Consular

Trooper

Imperial Agent

Jedi Knight

3. Do you prefer to tank, DPS, or heal?

DPS. I don't like group content too much so I have no interest in playing the other two.

4. What is your favorite player combat ability?

Shatter. It is a leap-and-stab for the Vengeance Juggernaut, and there's even a sinister little laugh with it. Also Vengeful Slam, also for the Vengeance Juggernaut. No better way to put an exclamation mark on a fight.

5. Favorite advanced class and discipline?

Vengeance Juggernaut!

6. Do you primarily play Republic, Empire, or a mix of both sides? Is there a specific reason for this preference?

I greatly prefer to play Empire. Besides all the reasons I've already mentioned, I just think the Imperial stories are far and away better written overall, with the exception of the Smuggler. I do like the Consular's first chapter, but it is so painfully obvious the Jedi Council and Republic intend to literally work the poor Consular to death that I can't feel okay about it. Imperial-side I find the Agent story really triggering. Out of my three agent characters, only one finished the class story. The other two leveled to 75, got to the end of Chapter One, dealt with Jadus and then skipped ahead to SoR.

7. Which player voice actor is your favorite and your least favorite?

Natasha Little (female Sith Warrior) is my favorite. I think her voice performance really adds to the character. I don't particularly dislike any of the player voice actors. I think they all did an awesome job.

8. Name your top favorite companions (feel free to include reasons why).

Top ten, in order: Lana, Vette, Talos, Blizz, T7-O1, HK-55, Veeroa Denz, Darth Hexid, Felix Iresso, Nadia Grell.

10. Favorite love interest?

Lana!!!! I'm wlw and almost all my characters romance her. I"ll admit in some cases this is because there aren't any other wlw characters they can romance, but I think she's amazing with Viri.

11. Which expansions did you like the most, and which ones did you dislike?

I really liked KOTFE and SoR most. I have major issues with some of the story choices in KOTET and wish we'd seen the full version, not the truncated one, but I like most of the chapters. Makeb I like for the aesthetics - the waterfalls, the beautiful houses, and so forth - although the story is really grim and the gameplay can be really repetitive and boring since you're just doing the same things over and over again in many quests, and there are so many mobs. I didn't care for Onslaught at all. I don't like Ilum much because those two flashpoints are so LONG, although I love the night sky over Ilum. I also get mad with Oricon because it would be an intriguing story if they had not locked the ending behind two Ops. I am still salty about that.

12. Do you have a preferred mount/speeder? Is there one you want, but don’t own yet?

All of my toons have special mounts that seem to work well with them specifically, but for Viri I especially love her Aquatic Sleen, Guirion Royale and Roche Gangster. I more or less have every mount I want in the game. The one I probably wanted most was the sleen for Viri, and that dropped at random on Rakata Prime story mode.

13. Which planet’s aesthetic/atmosphere do you enjoy the most?

I love Belsavis. That might make people say WTF because of the prisons, but I'm not talking about the prisons, which are an atrocity. I'm talking about the rest of the planet- the lava next to the snow, the natural green areas, the Rakata ruins everywhere, the fact that you can use the Rakata transporters to get around.

I also am really found of Yavin 4, Odessen (the little we see of it) and Tatooine. Tatooine is just so perfectly done IMHO - the music, the way you can almost feel the heat in the cities, the long stretches of sand dunes, the random buildings you can just walk into to look around, everything.

14. Favorite planet story arc?

The planetary arc for Tatooine, which has some variations but is the same story in the end on both Imperial and Republic sides. It's just such a good mystery/horror story and I'm really glad it is available to both factions. Second, the Dread Masters storyline on Imperial Belsavis because it’s really designed well. You get deeper and deeper into the Rakata areas and it works.

15. Show us your main(s)!

Oh, Viri is alll over this Tumblr already. Just look at the icon.

16. Do you have a favorite Flashpoint or operation? A least favorite?

Copero (Traitor Among the Chiss) is my far away favorite. It's SO long, but the scenery is beyond anything in any of the other flashpoints, IMHO. Just wandering around the little alleys in the town, or the ruins on the mountain, I could spend hours doing that. I like how the flashpoint has some parts that are more strategy/puzzle based, but the puzzles aren't hard or frustrating. I also love how it goes from daytime to twilight during the flashpoint. I think Copero has the best decos and they drop very generously, too. They also finally stopped the NPCs from yelling FOR HOUSE IROKINI!! every two seconds so you don't have to mute it anymore as you play through. Second favorite is Rakata Prime, and again it's largely for the scenery and environment. The beaches. Actual Rakatans. The Rakatan buildings. If you amble off the beaten track you can even find a garden. It's really cool. Hands down least favorite is Spirit of Vengeance. My God, what a horrifying waste of coding. I hate that flashpoint so very much. It's long, it's got thick mobs and it's so completely and utterly boring and tedious. SoV is the only flashpoint where I won't even attempt to get the achievements and have skipped the bonus quests. I play that thing once when it's required as I'm taking a character through the story and then never go near it again. Close second is Objective Meridian. It's not quite as much of a slog as SoV but it's so boring and I hate the mobs. It's nothing but one long, drab slog.

17. If you participate in warzones, which is your favorite map?

N/A. Never ever PvP like ever.

18. Which achievement(s) are you most proud of?

- Finishing the HK-51 quest chain, because it was a long slog to find all those components. - Getting the "kill 1000 NPCs" achievement on every single companion possible, including all the Star Fortress ones. - Soloing all the Uprisings, even Trial and Error, which gave me a hard time. - Soloing Dread Seeds all the way to completion several times on both factions. - Soloing the entire Macrobinoculars questline up until the final mission (which can't be soloed). That speeder jumping puzzle is no joke and I got through it more than once. - Soloing all the Veteran Star Fortresses.

19. Where can other players most commonly find you in game?

They probably can't. :) I stick to instanced areas and keep to myself as much as possible. A few of my strongholds (Dromund Kaas, Manaan, Coruscant on Star Forge; DK on Satele Shan) are open to the public under the name 'Viridana Dragoi' but I don't hang out in those.

20. What do you most often do while playing? (ex. PVP, FPs, quests, crafting, RP, etc.)

I am usually either working on story quests or the solo Conquest objectives, as well as some (mostly instanced) flashpoints. Or just wandering around, enjoying the solo content I like and working on achievements. I've spent a lot of time decorating my strongholds, too.

21. Which player ship is your favorite?

Overall the Imperial Agent has such an amazing ship. I"m actually surprised they didn't give it to the Sith characters because it's top of the line luxury. Second, the ship that the Sith Warrior and Sith Inquisitor have. It's nowhere near as swishy as the Agent's ship, but it's nice.

22. Of all the in-game events (Relics of the Gree, Rakghoul, Life Day, so on) which do you like the most, and which do you dislike?

I really love Gree because of the decor in the Grey Secant. It's so 1980s roller rink/disco and I love it and wish there were more of it in the game. I'm fond of the swoop races, too.

I've given up playing Bounty Contract Week because it is all open world and you constantly have other players grabbing the targets. I also hate Dantooine's pirate week for the same reason. And no, shared tagging will not make any of that better - I literally cannot follow what happens when there are too many players and companions onscreen, and if I wanted to group I would - I don't want it forced on me with shared tagging.

24. Do you have a primary/preferred stronghold?

Probably Nar Shaddaa, the apartment on Rishi and Tatooine. Most of my toons end up going back to Nar Shaddaa when I'm finished playing them for the day, unless I have a specific reason for them to be somewhere else.

26. Who is/are your favorite non-companion NPC(s)?

I really love Tora, Crysta Markon from the Bounty Hunter story, Somminick Timmns, Captain Golah from the Imperial Tatooine planetary arc and Lord Zavrasha from the Imperial Nar Shaddaa bonus series.

27. If you could make any current NPC a player companion, who would you pick?

I would love if Major Anri were a permanent companion. I think Viri would get a kick out of questing with Somminick Timmns.

#swtor #rain talks swtor

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watery-melon-baller · 3 years

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I think that, overall, only four good things came out of Danny Phantom season three:

1) Frostbite. I like that he can serve as another ghostly mentor figure to Danny, even if he is coming pretty late in the game, and he adds some decent worldbuilding.

2) Danny’s ice powers and ice core. There area lot of fun things to be done with these, especially in fanon, but even in the show they can make fights more interesting and dynamic. It’s a new element to play around with without it being too overly obtrusive. It does come a little out of nowhere, and just adds to Danny being absolutely OP, but I can look past that and see it as a net positive.

3) The episode Forever Phantom. This and the episode I’m going to discuss in point four are the only two episodes I feel truly hold up and are genuinely good in this season. There are some others that can be fun to watch, but they’re overall pretty mediocre. That’s not to mention the fair share of flops that just completely missed the mark. Forever Phantom works because it pulls its focus back in to grounded problems. A lot of season three has the issue of being all action, no breaks; the writers try to up the stakes, but it doesn’t work because there’s nothing to tie it back, and therefore it has little meaning. It’s just spectacle. What Forever Phantom does is give us a conflict with stakes that are much lower, but at the same time have a very pointed effect on Danny’s life. That’s able to keep viewers invested. The tone, also, just works a bit better for me than a lot of other season three episodes; some of the humor really works. Finally, we get Amorpho. He’s a very interesting antagonist; his morally gray motivations and general presence make him interesting to watch, and his direct goal to screw with people (and Danny specifically) brings up some good situations.

4) The episode D-Stabilized. This one holds up, and even excels, in a different way than Forever Phantom. Forever Phantom was an excellent example of how this show does a low-stakes, humor-driven episode. D-Stabilized shows off the potential for more plot-driven dramatic storytelling. One thing of the episode’s major strengths is its use of the characters. It was a good decision to take Valerie, Danny, and Danielle as a focus. They in particular did a good job with Danielle; while she definitely didn’t get enough screen time in the overall series to be fully realized as a character, this episode was a good step in the right direction, making use of the limited time they had. Through the focus the episode puts on her, the writers do a good job of fleshing her out into more of her own character (seperate from Danny), but keeping her familiar as well. As for Valerie, she was criminally underutilized in season 3. Nevertheless, her inclusion in the episode definitely improved it. She’s one of Danny Phantom’s strongest characters. To be perfectly honest, she’s probably a more developed and realized character than Tucker or Sam, despite the fact that the latter two are part of the core cast. She has a level of depth those two simply don’t have, with more thought-out motivations and traits that make her more belivable and three-dimensional. As such, D-Stablized took advantage of her strong character and arc to further it, staying true to her motivations and personality. And, critically, the characters are in character. This was an issue that season three had a lot more than the previous seasons of the show. D-Stabilized being able to succeed in this was critical to making it a good episode. Another thing D-Stablized handles well is its narrative. As I mentioned earlier, it gives us a strong and continuity-driven plot which helps to push many of the series’ ongoing points. It continues the thread begun by Kindred Spirits, bringing back Danielle and Vlad’s cloning plan. This is a compelling choice, as for much of season three Vlad has been exaggerated and his motivations twisted out of proportion. His previous motivations, to get rid of Jack and take his family, and more than that his critical trait of wanting love above all but not realizing that one needs to give back to get it, has been largely dropped in favor of a more generic set. His main goals are now shown to be world domination, power, and wealth, which makes little sense for his character. But that is beside the point; to bring us back on topic, the choice to bring back Vlad’s cloning plot demonstrates that he still does hold the desires he was shown to have previously: he wants a ‘perfect son’. It brings his character more in line with earlier seasons, bringing back that more compelling scenario. Another thread it continues is Valerie’s arc. I touched on this briefly earlier when I discussed characters, but to go into more depth, this episode gives us excellent insight into her life and motivations, wholly building off of what we already know about her. It fits in with what we’ve learned, but the events of the episode’s narrative also push Valerie into growing. It makes excellent use of her established anti-hero tendancies, showing how despite her prejudices she still has morals, and it trying to good even if it is somewhat misguided with regards to Danny and her unwavering hatred of ghosts. Especially considering how we’ve seen virtually nothing of her over season 3, the inclusion of Valerie and ties to her storyline certainly helped this episode exceed the rest. The action was dramatic, the development was logical and satisfying, and the characters and interactions are well handled and compelling. This is not even to mention the episode’s ending, where Valerie figures out about Vlad. This was clearly setting up more, but the arc got cut off before it could reach its completion. It is a real shame that we didn’t get a conclusion to this storyline, as it would have been really interesting to see how Valerie would handle the shift to her worldview, and how that could affect Danny and Amity Park.

#whoops this got really long #Danny Phantom #Writing #Season 3 #Analysis #(maybe?)#Let's be honest this mostly just turned out to be a critical analysis of D-Stabilized because that's the episode I rewatched before writing

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cruelfeline · 4 years

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Anyone who hangs about Twitter potentially saw an unfortunate Hordak take cross their timelines today.

As is custom on this blog, I’ll be taking it apart for my own personal amusement (and for the amusement of any of y’all who like to watch me do so). I doubt the poster will see this, as they’re on Twitter and not apparently on here, but in case they do: this is for my own enjoyment and the enjoyment of followers; it absolutely does not need to be responded to if that’s not your cup of tea.

So, that little disclaimer in place, let’s see what we can make of this! Because this is on Medium, I’ll be using screenshots as quotes; just a heads-up.

So... this first bit isn’t really anything Hordak-related. It’s more... fandom drama, I suppose? Not really something I can pick apart. I can, however, give my own personal opinion on this sort of thing, for what it’s worth.

It’s true that people can and should be able to feel whichever way they wish about a character. And to talk about that character.

However: it is also true that people who dislike Hordak can be very unpleasant in making that known to those of us who enjoy him. Including descending into personal insults for no discernible reason. Add to that the fact that his character means a great deal to some fans for intensely personal reasons, and it is not difficult to see why some fans aren’t keen to see anti-Hordak content on their timelines, in their mentions, etc.

Censoring character hate isn’t a requirement, but in some circumstances, it can simply be a polite thing to do. It doesn’t take great effort, and it prevents people from experiencing just another bit of unpleasantness on their social media. And if you don’t want to do it? Well, that’s your right; but don’t be shocked when people voice their displeasure by replying to your words. Because that is their right.

And that’s all I really have to say about that.

Odd way to phrase things, really. These aren’t “reasons to forgive.” The first two scenes involve Catra’s asphyxiations and are things that would need to be forgiven, not things to forgive.

Though, y’know, I really only apply that to the first scene, where he assaults her without her necessarily doing anything wrong. Mind you, I believe he does it out of a combination of needing to maintain a hierarchy for safety purposes (this is a man who needs people to be afraid of him to maintain his own safety) and poor leadership skills mimicked from a narcissist, but it’s still a terrible thing.

However! The second time? After he asks her about Shadow Weaver? This isn’t torture-fun-times. This is Hordak neutralizing a threat to the entire Horde. Because that is what Catra is in this moment: a threat to the security and wellbeing of him and the entirety of the Fright Zone. She lies about a critical mistake. She proves herself to not only have poor judgment in serious matters, but to be very willing to lie about it in order to guard her own selfish motives. While I can’t condone the method Hordak uses, I do wish people would stop using this second instance of punishment as some sort of proof-of-torture. He does not do this for no reason. He does it because Catra released a dangerous prisoner into the wild and lied about it. And his concerns over it ultimately prove correct.

This entire qualification doesn’t have much to do with whether he deserves forgiveness or not, but it’s a point I want to make because it combats this idea that Hordak did this to an innocent girl “for no reason” or “just to be cruel.” That’s simply not the case; no matter how unpleasant the method, Hordak is a military leader punishing a subordinate for seriously endangering him and everyone else in the organization. Badly. I don’t know what the equivalent would be in modern military, but Catra’s error is massive. It doesn’t make what Hordak does right, but it does give a reason other than a simple “he’s a bad, bad man.” So.

Adding this scene is... actually kind of odd because he doesn’t really do anything to Adora here. And also: this scene is... what’s the word... meaningful-in-hindsight, so to speak. Essentially: in this scene, Adora is claiming that Hordak is responsible for stealing her, for robbing her of a peaceful life with her family. And Hordak is claiming that he neither knows nor cares who she is, and that she does not matter to him.

The interesting aspect of this scene, and something that OP fails to acknowledge at all, is that both Adora and Hordak are wrong.

let’s see if I can talk about this without crying... nope, already starting to tear up

Hordak never stole Adora; Light Hope did. Hordak did not orchestrate this unfortunate life for her. Rather, Hordak, a lost clone dealing with his own insecurities and fears and problems, found an equally lost infant in a field and gave her the only home he really knew how to create (and one that, for its flaws, was still better than the absolute nightmare he was “raised” in). In all likelihood, given Light Hope’s lack of understanding of infants, he probably saved Adora’s life by doing this: without him, she may well have perished alone in that field.

Hordak likewise does remember her, eventually. And she is not inconsequential to him: by saving her, he ends up saving himself, and all of his brothers. By forging this near-unknown bond with her all those years ago, by choosing to take in an infant rather than letting her die, he plays a key role in deciding the fate of the universe.

This scene that OP sarcastically claims is a reason Hordak shouldn’t be forgiven has a sibling:

The fact that OP apparently fails to recognize this and realize that these are the only two moments in the series during which Adora and Hordak directly interact, that they’re a pair, means that OP misses the connection between the two and the significance of how they misjudge one another initially. It indicates a lack of understanding of the themes of the show: themes centered around connections with other people, love, and forgiveness. Which, given the contents of this essay, is unsurprising.

Moving on!

Y’know, whether or not one believes, in terms of definition, that Hordak is a colonizer (I personally don’t for pedantic and clone-cult reasons, but that’s not really relevant to this post), it’s interesting that OP notes how Stevenson confirms that he is... but conveniently leaves out the part where she confirms that he did it because he was brainwashed.

That’s... an important piece of information to leave out when discussing whether Hordak should be forgiven or not. A very important piece.

And it doesn’t really matter whether he’s a colonizer or a conqueror; the reason it comes up is because people seem very stuck in the mindset of “if it’s a colonizer, it must die” without acknowledging any sort of nuance. There’s also the question of whether what Hordak did actually caused the same sort of upheaval and lasting damage we see resulting from legitimate colonization, and all of the implications of that, but this isn’t really the place to go into that. Honestly, I don’t really think SPoP as a whole is the place to go into that.

No. Hordak is not the person who taught her all of these things.

Shadow Weaver is.

Hordak did not personally teach her that Princesses are evil. He did not teach her that wanton cruelty is fine in getting one’s own way. He did not feed her propaganda.

Actually, as an aside: can we even confirm that Catra ever thought that Princesses where evil? I mean... she works with Scorpia, and she has no apparent morals to speak of. She does as she wishes for her own personal gain, not because she displays any sense of “fighting the evil Princesses.” And in terms of disposing of Entrapta because she was “manipulated” into viewing Princesses as evil: Catra disposes of everyone. She manipulates and uses everyone. That is one of the key aspects of her arc: she uses and abuses people for personal gain. She does this whether they are Princesses or not: just see Lonnie, Rogelio, and Kyle. Add to this the fact that Catra, from the first season, knows that she and Adora have been lied to, manipulated, and that the Horde is in fact evil, and... this entire line of reasoning falls apart.

None of this is an attempt to “absolve Hordak of blame.” Hordak just... legitimately had no hand in raising any of the children. That was not his role (and while I know that this was confirmed by Stevenson at some point, I don’t have memory of where; potentially the last podcast?). And Catra did not operate on any sort of propaganda that she actually believed in: she simply used and disposed of people as she saw fit because she cared more about her own rise to power than she did about those around her. This was one of her major character flaws, and really? Trying to pin this on Hordak, or even fully pin it on Shadow Weaver? It absolves Catra of the blame, of the intentional bad choices she made (as emphasized by Adora) and thus weakens her entire arc.

All in all: Hordak may have created a poor environment for the raising of children, but of note is the fact that only Catra turns out this way. The other kids, whatever their problems, are not in the habit of manipulating friends, lying to them, using them, and then tossing them aside. That is a Catra Problem. Part of this can be attributed to Shadow Weaver (who only treated Catra in the poorest way), and part of it is just... Catra being not-the-best.

All right. Now we get to the really disingenuous portion of the essay.

First, as just stated: Hordak is not Catra’s abuser. Shadow Weaver is. Hordak had no hand in raising her. Hordak did not direct Shadow Weaver to abuse her. Hordak did not personally feed Catra anti-Princess propaganda, and even if he had, we know by the first season that Catra sees through whatever propaganda she was exposed to and has no actual moral objections to Princesses. But that’s not the main aspect of this portion that irks me.

The main aspect that irks me is that this is not the scene Hordak stans mark as abusive. And I cannot imagine that OP does not know this.

But let’s talk about this scene, for a moment, before getting to the actual, legitimate abuse.

OP talks about his scene almost flippantly: “Hordak finds out Catra lied about Entrapta, he becomes angry and attacks her with a clear plan to kill her.”

Yes. Yes, he "becomes angry.” He becomes angry and attacks because as far as he knows, Catra killed Entrapta. This isn’t some annoyed “you lied to me!” moment. He legitimately thinks Entrapta is dead because Catra sent her to Beast Island. OP just blissfully glosses over the fact that Hordak is attacking Catra in rage and grief because Catra, as far as either of them know, killed his only friend and then lied about it for approximately a year. Like... how do you gloss over that in discussing this scene? How do you gloss over the enormity of what Catra did, and the unimaginable pain Hordak experiences when finding out?

So. The writeup of this scene is poor. It misses all of the emotion, all of the reality of what Catra did and what Hordak felt. But! That’s not even the unfortunate part of this portion. Let’s get to the real disingenuity.

This is the abusive scene. This is that stomach-turning moment when Catra removes a disabled man’s ability to move with dignity and without pain solely to force him to escalate a war for her own personal benefit.

Hordak is not a danger to her here. Hordak has not been a danger to her for a while because he has been holed up in his private quarters, trying to deal with the emotional fallout of Entrapta supposedly betraying him. He wants nothing to do with Catra. He wants to lick his wounds and gather himself and somehow heal from this deep personal pain that’s been inflicted upon him.

And that’s a problem for Catra because it stands in the way of her using the war as a way to best Adora.

So Catra identifies Hordak’s physical weakness and exploits it for the purpose of spiting her ex.

The fact that OP completely fails to acknowledge any of this is... well. Disingenuous. Absolutely so.

The next portion of the essay talks about people feeling that Catra was too easily forgiven and isn’t really Hordak-centric; I won’t really go into it here. Moving forward:

Ah, one of the most annoying questions I see asked. Let’s, again, acknowledge and move past the fact that Hordak was not actually Catra’s abuser...

When, pray tell, was Hordak supposed to show this remorse? When? While he was serving on Prime’s ship, trying to forget the pain of losing Entrapta, of failing to prove himself, of losing everything? Should he have done it while screaming in agony in the purification pool? Should he have done so while alone on Prime’s ship, trying to serve quietly while piecing together his memories?

Not only was Hordak simply not in a position, narratively, to go into a whole remorse bit, but he had other problems. Like, life-endangering problems.

The appropriate time to go into his feelings on Etheria and the Princesses and All of That would have been after Prime’s defeat, upon Hordak’s re-introduction to Etheria... but then the show ended. So.

Agh, vulgar. Taking a brainwashed, conditioned slave and bastardizing his triumph at finally seeing himself as a real person, instead claiming that his intent was to glorify his own misdeeds. No. Just... no.

Again: this is not the time for guilt. And it is a demonstration of why guilt and remorse were not front-and-center in Hordak’s arc during season five: his arc was about finally realizing that he was his own person, a person worthy of identity and love and care and freedom. And this arc culminated in him separating himself from his abuser and declaring his personhood.

That is what this scene is: not Hordak reveling in his makeshift empire, or in the terrible deeds he’d committed, but in declaring himself his own person.

I should hope that he is proud of doing that. I’m proud of him for doing that daunting feat, of defeating his abuser and defying his god and recognizing that he is worthy of more than what Prime thought of him. And I recognize Entrapta’s role in it: not as the sole inspiration for his change, but as someone who showed him a foundation of love and acceptance, someone who introduced him to the idea that he was worthy of care and happiness and affection simply because he was a living being, no strings attached.

Trying to shoehorn in some sort of claim that this is about pride in his misdeeds, rather than joy at finally accepting his own sense of self is a massive misinterpretation of this scene, a misunderstanding of Entrapta’s role in Hordak’s arc, and... can I say it’s disingenuous again? Because I’m going to: it’s disingenuous.

All right; we’re at the end. And while the first sentence here is something I absolutely agree with - the decision to forgive Hordak is personal and subjective both for viewers and for in-show characters - the whole conclusion falls apart from there.

It highlights another glaring omission from OP’s arguments: the fact that Hordak is a brainwashed clone slave.

Hordak did not choose to “spend his life trying to prove his worth to Horde Prime.” He did not choose the method of said proving: that Prime would look kindly upon conquering rather than some other task. And he did not choose to have certain concepts and ideas (all beings must suffer to become pure; all creatures, no matter how small, have a place in service of Horde Prime; failure is when something ceases to serve a purpose) conditioned into him.

Hordak was manufactured as a cultist slave. He was “born” with hardware implanted into his body against his will to better control him. He was indoctrinated and brainwashed to the point that he believed that Horde Prime was his literal god - and in a way, Prime was, because he could mentally invade and possess and physically control the clones whenever he wished.

Hordak was not allowed to have a sense of self. He was not allowed to have a name. He was not allowed to express emotions. He was not allowed to live without that life serving to glorify Horde Prime. Hordak was so absolutely sick with this mentality that he saw himself as a failure due to physical disability and assumed it was his responsibility to fix that.

The idea that Hordak simply chose to do what he did, that he had the same foundational morality and mindset as any “normal” person might, shows a glaring lack of understanding even the basics of his narrative.

Yes: Hordak did bad things. But he did them for legitimately tragic, nigh-horrifying reasons that this essay just ignores for the sake of... I don’t know? Trying to justify OP’s distaste for the character? I am uncertain. But it’s a mark of a poor essay, of a poor understanding of the character, and is honestly just disappointing to read when the show itself tries so hard to drive home its wonderful, hopeful themes through Hordak’s story.

Whether one forgives Hordak or not is one’s personal choice, but I certainly hope one makes said choice with better insight into his character than this essay provides.

#discourse #hordak #I wonder if I come off as too sassy in this but honestly this essay was a chore to read #so much was just ignored or misinterpreted #it was like a willful misrepresention of Hordak's character and I did not like it

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sethmacenzie · 3 years

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Spinner time travel quirk headcanons

For @whoatimetravel-main whose answer to this post from @oldphone-whodis my tumblr forgot to tell me and I saw by sheer luck.

So thing is I have like a lot of different headcanons for different time travel versions, but all have in common that Spinner is not letting it happen again the same way, especially the death of Twice and Magne (even though they weren’t close).

And Spinner still wants to destroy hero society and be with his friends and wants them to succeed. Especially Tomura. And of course he does not want AFO to take over Tomura.

Version 1: only Spinner gets time travel powers and it’s pretty much the original post base (some variations would be a little earlier, so Spinner can stop some other stuff from happening, but all versions where the League consists of already wanted criminals start this way.

Basically: Spinner can go two different ways, either he tells them, hopes they buy into it by using knowledge he should not have or he does not tell them and instead just tries to play it saver by reducing the damage the league gets, aka Twice and Magne alive, Compress keeps his arm etc.

While I do find the he tells them and convinces them interesting and a lot of fun it does lead to major changes in the story if the League can just ask Spinner: how did this go, he tells them, they do it differently and hope for the best.

But Spinner is the kind of guy who probably played enough games where one decision can change the entire outcome of the game, so he’d know that this could lead to way worse consequences.

So I think he’d play it safe and go with sticking to what he knows and only making sure his friends survive.

Especially because Tomura pre AFO imprisonment would still be under AFOs influence and saying something against AFO could lead to Spinner’s death, so while I think Twice and Toga would be on board right away with time travel person, Giran, Compress and Dabi could be persuaded through logic arguments, Tomura is the biggest issue to convince here, so Spinner would probably go and play it safe.

Even though I’d love the comedy of Spinner trying to get everyone to believe him. And I can see Spinner telling Dabi, Compress even Giran the truth, he’d probably be safe for them to keep the secret, the chances of Twice or Toga finding out and being distrustful (more so Toga, than Twice, I think he’d understand why such curtail information wouldn’t be given to him) are too high. And of course Dabi is a bit of a wild card in regards to his own goals.

So Spinner plays it safe: he doesn’t tell anyone and just tries to change things a little bit. The Forrest Training Camp and the Hideout ark stay the same (I know OP likes Mustard, and it’s really screwed up that this middle schooler villain just vanishes, but I just have to little knowledge about him to include him and I’d say unless that changes (bnha stand chapter 314) neither does Spinner, so he probably would let the 3 M get arrested.

And he’d definitely let AFO get imprisoned, so that Tomura is finally free of him.

He goes with them to the Overhaul meeting and stops Magne (and therefore Compress) to attack Overhaul, saving them. But he was still an ass, so the Overhaul ark remains relatively the same.

So the next ark with big problems for the League would be the Meta Liberation Army which is where I am a bit torn like Spinner probably would be. Should Giran and Tomura get to keep their fingers? Issue being: if this goes down differently the outcome could be catastrophic for everyone. Tomura needs to win against Re-Destro (and unlock his childhood trauma) and so do Twice and Toga need their power up. So I’d guess that Spinner would let it slide because getting involved could mean a way worse outcome than 7 lost fingers.

Which leads to the currently biggest problem Spinner will have to face: the fight against the pro heroes and Twice death and maybe getting Tomura to not get surgery so that AFO can’t take over.

I’d say this would be a huge moment of Spinner going: this is the point where he’ll have to overdo everything because the outcome is too bad. Current standpoint: Toga missing, Compress arrested and in bad health, Maschia arrested, Twice dead, Tomura’s body got taken over by AFO, their forces lost.

So this would for me be the point where he decides to change everything he can to not let that happen, because saving that point seems useless for this outcome.

My personal favorite would be to get Twice to clone EVERYONE form the PLF and have them at the hideout but actually relocate everyone elsewhere so that the heroes are busy fighting the clones (we saw what the Re-Destro clone alone did). He would hate to find a way to hide this information from Twice as long as possible, until the last moment Hawks is around, then be fast of cloning everyone.

I’d say Spinner made himself a questlog for this, a to-do-list if you will, so in order to finish this mission he has to do the following:

Gets Hawks not to find out about the clones until it’s too late. Get the League into safety. Make sure Twice is as far away as possible from Hawks. Kill Best Jeanist probably, I mean he is just lying around in a bag in the corner right now. Get Tomura to not get into that tank. But have AFO believe that he does? Last thing would definitely be the hardest part but also might be the moment where he tells Tomura that time travel was involved, because by now they are actually friends and Tomura was out of AFO grasp for a while.

And of course to still stick close to the raid and the heroes getting Ujiko to knock him out and keep the heroes busy while the League gets out of there he’d need something to put into that tank. Twice clones would not be able to hold it up obviously, maybe Sceptic’s can?

Or Spinner forgoes the whole thing and just tells Tomura and the League just blows the hospital up themselves before getting to Tartarus to kill AFO before anything worse happens.

This is the moment for me where I go in like 50 different directions of what could happen.

Spinner could tell everyone about the future he stopped. Spinner could have everyone be complelty elsewhere and them just watching the heroes loose their shit because everyone is a clone.

The PLF having survived could go full on war against the heroes, which would probably not end well either.

Spinner might tell Dabi that he knows who he is and wants to help take down Endevour and they could make it bigger than what actually happened. I am sure Compress would help putting up a show and Toga and Tomura would be on board of: shitty father deserves to go down.

There are so many possibilities for this.

Other than that and other Version of Time Travel would be either completely different times, picturing baby Spinner trying to get to baby Tomura before he kills his family or stopping Dabi from burning himself, teenager Spinner straight up getting the gang together early, kidnapping Toga before she snaps and showing up at the bar with Kurogiri letting them stay (Oboro liked strays too), maybe it’s a groundhog day situation of the day of the raid and he has to figure out how to save Twice from Hawks and Tomura from AFO.

And then there are the versions of Time Travel where it’s not only Spinner but other people get it too.

Like every one of the League getting time traveled and now there have some meeting before everything goes down just sitting there like: now what? And Toga not stopping to hug Twice. Maybe ever person I currently see joining as a major player in the finale battle against AFO getting time traveled and they have to figure out how to not let that happen, with Shoto going all out trying to find his brother and talk to him, Uraraka reaching out to Toga and Deku knowing he has to save Tomura but not knowing how to in this timeline.

My personal favorite: Spinner and Bakugo being the only people who time travel and they have to work together to stop this whole mess and the whole thing just being an entire comedy because they keep in check with each other, planning out who does what like: If you take down Overhaul, we’ll take down the Doctor and his Nomus – We’ll have to wait until Daku wins this fight and unlocks this power otherwise it won’t work, -I forgot Toga can’t use quirks yet. Like the worst version of a buddy comedy you can think of.

#bnha #au headcanons #spinner #shuichi iguchi #league of villains #tomura shigaraki #himiko toga #dabi #mr compress #twice #magne #bakugo katsuki #afo

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opbackgrounds · 4 years

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Hi there Sarc' ;) I am sorry if the question has already been asked but I thought it could be interesting to have your opinion about this. While I love most of the female characters in OP and think that most of them are well developed and can be truly good role models for girls I still feel that Oda sometimes has a sexist view on female characters (the jokes about the naked bath scenes for example or Kororo being considered ugly make me really uncomfortable). What do you think about it?

Ah, I wondered when I would get this question.

When people talk about sexism in One Piece they typically are referring to two different things: How women are drawn, and how they’re treated within the narrative. While there’s some overlap here, there’s enough distinction that I want to address them as two separate points in two separate posts, because I guess I had Opinions, and by god there should be a limit to how much text one tumblr post can be expected to hold. Consider this an introduction.

Buckle up, kiddos. This is gonna be a long one.

Nami Face Syndrome Isn’t the Problem...

An important thing to remember with Oda’s art and storytelling style is that almost everything is hyper exaggerated for effect. You don’t go into One Piece looking for realism. You don’t go into One Piece expecting the characters to act like normal people. Everything--from the art to the humor to the battles--is stretched and pulled to its absolute limit in hopes of garnering a particular reaction. When a character is sad they cry big bubbly tears with dribbles of snot coming from their nose. When they laugh their mouths take up half their face.

And when a girl is hot, her tiddies are two great big watermelons stuck to the center of her chest.

What is often dubbed “Nami Face Syndrome” within the fandom is somewhat misleading. After all, why was Wanda, who is a literal dog that walks on two legs, decried as yet another Nami clone at her introduction? I would postulate it’s less to do with her face and more to do with the fact that from the neck down they are virtually identical, something that’s made more obvious because Wanda is literally wearing Nami’s clothes

What makes this frustrating for a lot of people, myself included, is that it’s not that Oda is incapable of drawing more diverse body types, but that he often chooses not to. Take for example the Kuja tribe

or the Charlotte family daughters (thanks to Arthur at Library of Ohara for the resource). It’s pretty clear Oda has the chops to make his women as weird as the men, and he often does! For important characters, even. And yes, as the Kokoro example given above sometimes the gonkness is brought attention to, but for others like Lola and Chiffon it’s...not.

(more on mermaids later)

But Sarcasticles, one might protest, even Oda’s “ugly” characters have ginormous boobs! Where is my itty bitty titty committee representation >:(

To which I can only shrug. For Oda, boobs on a woman are like abs on men. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense, they’re gonna have ‘em

Seriously, Oda. What the fuck.

...So What Is?

I have a theory that’s impossible to prove, and that the problem isn’t so much Oda’s character design so much as the ratio of his male to female characters in general. It’s not that every female character is a Nami clone, but Oda has a template he uses for attractive female characters ages 16-25, the same way he uses Robin as a template for attractive women ages 26-35, which is how you get cases of mistaken identity like Viola for Robin or scenes during Reverie where one could be forgiven for thinking Nami’s supposed to be an identical triplet

Oda does this for his men, too. It’s not as obvious because 1) Even men with similar facial features can have a wider variety body types due to Oda having a sliding scale of buffness he’s willing to attach to a pretty face and 2) There are more men.

There are a lot more men.

In groups where the male to female ratio is more or less equal (Baroque Works, Big Mom’s kids) you get a wide variety of designs. But there’s only one female Supernova. There’s one female Warlord. CP9 only has one female agent. Only one of the Revolutionary Commanders is a woman. There are very few female background characters in crowd shots, especially among marines. Big Mom might be the only female Emperor, but she’s not young, In fact, when drawing her at age 28, Oda defaults to a much more generic “pretty girl” face before giving her much more striking, memorable features in her 40s

If you look at Oda’s male characters, the ones that are supposed to be hot are often given the same square jawline and the thin-bladed nose that at one point in time was reserved for Robin. Both Coby and Sabo had very distinctive noses before their glowups, while Ace must have had a laser treatment done on his eyebrows sometime between Alabasta and Marineford.

But the biggest difference on the men has got to be muscle mass. The overgrown noodles of early One Piece are lost to the annals of time. Shanks alone must have gained 30 pounds of pure muscle from the time Luffy got his first bounty to his appearance at Marineford.

Now, I will acknowledge that there is a difference between the increasing sexualization of female characters and the male power fantasy of giving Zoro bara tiddies post-timeskip. While I do think there are certain male characters specifically designed to be the Hot Dude, what I’m trying to emphasize here is that Oda works with templates for both men and women, and both of those templates have been exaggerated over time. Bigger boobs for women, more muscles for men. And when you’re only slotting for one girl in any given group, and that one girl has to be The Hot One then you’re going to have a lot of ladies that end up looking the same.

My love for Otohime on this blog is well known, and I want to use her as an example of what Oda can do when he works beyond this template, because it’s really freaking good

Otohime is neither conventionally attractive nor gonk. She’s dressed in very conservative, traditional clothing and has a narrow waist and small chest.

There are no sharp edges on Otohime. Not her eyebrows, not her jaw, and most of the time not even her hands, emphasizing her gentle nature. You don’t see it as well in this panel, but Otohime’s head is often drawn wider than her shoulders, emphasizing her frailty. Oda gives her a longer neck to compensate, and the overall effect is a very soft, willowy figure.

Her headpiece looks like a sunburst. The audience never sees her fins, so Oda gives her a scale patterned kimono-dress-thingy (my knowledge of Japanese clothing is, uh, not good) as a visual reminder that she’s not human. The sash that circles around her head harkens back to Japanese mythology as a symbol of divinity, similar to a halo in Western culture. And fun fact: Otohime is named after a god, just like Neptune, while her goals and ideals are pure enough to be heaven-sent.

I’m not an artist, but this is a really damn good character design. A lot of Oda’s older female characters are. Dandan, Tsuru, O-Tsuru, Shakky, Kureha, Big Mom, and Nyon are all instantly recognizable and have strong designs, even if a few of them fall into the hourglass figure that Oda often defaults to. It’s just...there aren’t that many of them.

So the question becomes why aren’t there more women, and I think the answer is because, ultimately, One Piece is a series geared at boys. While I wish there were a few more important ladies, I can understand why there aren’t.

Note, that doesn’t mean I think it’s right or that Oda is obligated to include more women. It’s just one of the facts of the shonen manga industry at this point in time.

A more important question, I think, is why does every younger woman have to be attractive? And why do the attractive ladies have to wear outfits that are blatant fanservice? This is something I don’t have an answer for. Oda has said on more than one occasion that he writes One Piece with his twelve year old self in mind. It could be that it’s a calculated move to appeal to his audience, in which case it’s certainly worked because said Hot Ladies are constantly used in marketing and merchandising. It’s the Hot Ladies that top the popularity charts (although, to be fair, who’s there for competition?). In the most recent chapter a new Hot Lady was introduced, and the fandom went batshit crazy for her.

Even the fans who are very vocal about how Oda sucks at drawing women. It’s interesting how that works out sometimes.

Or maybe I’m giving Oda too much credit, and he’s just horny. Not having direct access to Oda’s mind, I don’t have an answer. If I had to guess I’d say it’s a little of Column A, a little of Column B, because that’s usually how life is.

But in a vacuum big tiddies are just a design choice. An exaggerated aesthetic, in a series full of exaggerated aesthetics. It’s when that design choice is paired with in-story comments, actions, and decisions where things really start to get heated. But that’s a whole other ball of wax, and there should be a limit to how much one tumblr post can be expected to hold. I promise I’ll get to the meat of your question next time.

Thank you so much for your patience. I really do think it’s important to start here before diving into everything else, if only because it helps keep my thoughts organized. I hope you’ve found this helpful, and if not, I hope to do better next time.

#long post #dear lord what a long post #Character Design #one piece #I don't know why tumblr fucked up with the formatting of my answer #but I apologize in advance #sexism #sarc talks

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