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dualdeixis · 2 years

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[Image description: The latter eight pages of a digital comic featuring Vanitas and Ventus. There are full descriptions of all of the pages under the cut. End image description.]

the dishes, part two of two (previous)

[Image description: The ninth page. Ventus sighs softly and follows Vanitas, finding him sitting in an armchair next to a circular wooden table, holding his knees to his chest and facing the window. The Blue Sea Salt and a Red Hot Chili hover in the air, and the Hareraiser sits in the armchair opposite Vanitas. Ventus comes and picks up the Hareraiser, which wriggles around in a panic. He sits down and strokes the Hareraiser, calming it down. He’s silent for a beat, then says, “They’re not going to hurt you over a glass. Or over anything else.” Vanitas looks over at him, his face cast in shadow and his eyes glowing, and says, “Shut it, eavesdropper.” Ventus looks down at the Hareraiser sadly and replies, “I’m not trying to. Our hearts are connected. …Even when we’re not sharing a body.”

The tenth page. The central border between the panels wavers from left to right, in a push-pull type manner. Ventus sets the Hareraiser down on the floor and says, “I don’t think... that reuniting is possible anymore. And even if it were, I don’t know if I’d want to.” Vanitas smiles as Ventus says, “It’s selfish of me. I’m sorry.” Ventus places his hands on his lap, palms up. “But… we’re our own people now.” He clenches them into fists. “We can’t change… the things that changed us.” He relaxes them. “We can’t keep chasing a past that’s gone.” He begins to lace his fingers together. “So there’s no ‘true Ventus’ anymore. It’s just us.” His fingers are fully laced. “We’re him, and he’s us. That’s all.”

The eleventh page. The panels are drawn in the shape of an X. Vanitas's glowing eye is half-lidded as he replies, “...I don’t want to be me. I don’t want to be apart. It’s too painful this way, just the dark half of the person I was before. But that’s why you don’t want me back, isn’t it? Because then you’d be in pain, too.” Ventus insists emotionally, “I do want you. I want you here, not ‘fading away’—and you already are here, with me. Not reuniting doesn’t mean we’re apart. We’ve always been connected, even after that day.” The outline of Ventus and Vanitas’s armchairs is connected into the shape of a heart by a bright pink thread, which twists around the panels. Ventus holds his left hand to his chest and says firmly, “I’m with you.” The shadow on Vanitas’s face starts to melt away, and he gazes at Ventus silently with an ambivalent expression.

The twelfth page. Ventus keeps his hand on his chest and continues solemnly, “And maybe the pain isn’t coming from the darkness. I don’t think it’s as simple as light is good, and darkness is bad. Maybe you don’t think it’s possible for me to feel true pain with a heart of light, but I can and I do. Because ‘pure light and pure darkness don’t exist,’ right?” Vanitas’s face has cleared up and he leans into his palm. Annoyed, he mutters, “Eavesdropper...” Ventus continues, “Maybe it’s just… that you went through a lot. That someone hurt you a lot.” Vanitas’s face is half cast in shadow again as he looks down with a bitter smile. Ventus finishes, “So it’s not you. It’s not something that’s wrong with you. You just were never shown a different way. You hadn’t been given a chance to see all the good things in life, just the bad things.” Vanitas looks pensive as the Blue Sea Salt alights on his knee, the Red Hot Chilis flit through the air, and the Hareraiser and Thornbite look up at him. He says, “...Like the Unversed.”

The thirteenth page. Ventus smiles gently and says, “Yeah. So let’s live. Together.” He extends his right hand. “We can share our darkness and our light with each other.” Vanitas silently clenches his fists in his lap, then rises from the armchair. He slowly walks over to Ventus, who is questioning but silent as Vanitas grabs his extended hand, lifting him from his seat. The panel border bursts into a series of stars as Vanitas pulls Ventus in for a hug. Ventus reacts with initial surprise, then hugs him back with a relieved smile. Their panel transforms into a radiating yellow circle, with a black crescent and small white star within. A red halo is drawn around Vanitas’s head, and it fades into Ventus’s green one.

The fourteenth page. Still hugging, Ventus starts, “...Hey. Do you want me to call you ‘Ventus’?” Vanitas looks surprised. He pulls away and stutters uncertainly, “N-no, that’s...” He turns his face away with closed eyes and a bead of sweat on his cheek. He says, “It’s too late, and everyone would be confused and ask annoying questions, and… It’s fine. It’s your name as much as it is mine. You can keep it.” Ventus pensively taps his chin with his finger and asks, “But ‘Vanitas’ isn’t that good either, is it?” He’s silent for a beat, then points up with a smile and suggests, “What if I gave you a nickname?” Vanitas puts his hand on his hip with a wry grin and says, “Really? This whole thing started because I said I don’t like our name being mangled, and now you’re gonna do it too?” Ventus crosses his arms with an irritated grimace and answers, “Well, it’s a stupid name from a stupid guy. Maybe it deserves a little mangling.” Vanitas scoffs and says, “Yeah, I guess.”

The fifteenth page. Ventus asks, “So, ‘Van’?” Vanitas responds flatly, “No.” Ventus asks, “...‘Vani’?” Vanitas responds, “I’ve already given up.” Ventus urges, “Aw, come on, give me a chance! Umm, ‘Nita’!” Vanitas reacts with a slightly flustered expression. He turns around and snaps, “That’s it, I’m going to go do something actually pleasant. Like stick some more glass in my hand.” Ventus protests, “Nooo!!” The color palette changes to monochrome greens in a series of panels that show Vanitas back at the dishes, putting toothpaste on a toothbrush, lying in bed to sleep, and still lying awake as the sun rises. In all of them, he is thinking of the name “Nita,” and his expression gradually changes from neutral to deeply frustrated.

The final page. The color palette is in monochrome reds. Ventus strolls into the panel and yawns, “Morning, Vanitas.” Vanitas freezes, then looks silently over his shoulder at Ventus with an embarrassed expression, holding his hands up like a raptor. Ventus stares silently at him for a beat, then tilts his head and says quizzically, “...Nita?” Vanitas becomes very embarrassed, his face once again being covered in shadow and his glowing eyes darting away. He suddenly runs off into a big ball of darkness. From offscreen, Ventus cries, “Wha—?! NO CORRIDORS OF DARKNESS IN THE HOUSE!!” End image description.]

#kingdom hearts #ventus kh #vanitas kh #unversed kh #drawings #me the day i finished drawing my 8 page comic which was the longest comic id ever done at the time: who are you #me two days later after writing the script for this twice as long comic at like 7 am after a night of no sleep: im u but even more deranged #clearly it took me much longer to actually make this comic but that sequence of events still makes me laugh.#similarly i have an essay of thoughts for this one too so feel free to send an ask abt it :)#//#suicidal ideation #do not tag as ship

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tedturneriscrazy · 3 years

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Here we are with Eda's Requiem! This is one I've been eagerly anticipating, thanks in no small part to one Raine Whispers. You know the drill.

Opening with Eda being a soft owl mom❤

Also, she has her own keepsake Grom photo❤❤❤

Oh, impending empty nest syndrome? (Heh, how approriate, considering she has a literal nest)

Ooh, a preview of bard magic?!

Oh, that seems...ominous...

That was an impressive flying sequence! Whatcha training for, Luz?

There they are! Raine! My beloved!

Oh my god they're adorable

Wow, Eda, you sure do sound like you definitely don't want Luz to stick around for a while longer

Guess Lilith took the brain cell with her when she left

Ah, a race! So Luz wasn't playing Grudgby after all

Boy, Eda is doing her best to avoid that particular subject, huh?

Really pushing the "apple blood = booze" angle here

Oh, hey, it's that one demon hunter lady! Makes sense they'd all be wild witches, I suppose

The bartender's name is Kevin and I don't know how to feel about that (that's my name)

Either that mask spun around or Eda's punch was powerful enough to twist his head around. In which case, damn

Oh, there's the band! Bard magic!

Even with a mask they can't get over the stage fright

(I still love them)

Also, very impressive how they can pull stuff off with singular string plucks. Guess they're the head of the Bard Coven for a reason

Bards Against the Throne. BATs. Clever!

Ah, there's the sewer scene that kept showing up in promo images

Trailer shot of Raine!

Aaand blushing at being embarrassed by Eda. Looks like they'll kill you, is actually a cinnamon roll.

Still, glad to see they're not bitter exes

Flashback time!

Fuck, the framing is so romantic, it has to be intentional

Facing your fears by punching them in the face? Sounds like Eda, all right.

Those who were hoping for blushing Eda are being fed

They really wasted an opportunity for Luz to train with Willow

"LEAN ON ME!" Let's hope Hooty doesn't cover Bill Withers anytime soon

"You're not our mom!" Give it a minute, Amber.

So food fanfic girl's name is Katya! Good to know

"Rainestorm" it's not Rainedrop, but I'll take it!

Forgot to mention: these two are so obviously yearning for each other and it's amazing

I'm sorry, but Raine summoning Eda's...mandolin(?) while lounging like that is sexy as fuck

The way the curse affects that magic is fascinating

Oh yeah: title drop!

Amber turned around quickly, didn't she?

Keep on putting that off until the last possible moment for dramatic effect

Everything about the Cup of Ephemeral Glory is hilarious

And Eda's gonna miss the whole thing, isn't she?

Where's Admiral Ackbar when you need him?! *remembers TRoS* Oh. Right. God that movie sucked.

Ooh, Abomination and Beast Keeping heads!

Also, Horde Prime is that you?

(Looked it up. That is, indeed, Keston John)

Sick burns, King

Every once in a while Luz reminds us how good she really is with those glyphs

If people weren't simping over Darius before, they will be

It's really cool to see more beast keeping and abomination magic in action, ngl

Also glad to see resourceful use of invisibility glyphs

Also also, loving the way Raine is bridal carrying Eda. They stronk, indeed.

Oh shit, utilizing the curse

Uh, Darius? Buddy? You literally turn into abomination goo. A bit of mud seems like small potatoes in comparison.

Oh shit, they're going feral

This sequence is amazing

Oh, there's the question.

Raine, you botched that quote, but I appreciate the sentiment

(God, they're cute)

Aw fuck

NOOOO GODDAMNIT RAINE

(The stage fright gag was set up to punch us in the gut, well done)

Eda is clearly devastated...and so am I💔

Oh that picture is wonderful

Somehow I had a feeling Luz wouldn't win the race

Even the vomiting? Wow, this episode is just callback central

Even Eda knows the power of social media (and her username is Badgirlcoven!)

Okay how dare they show such an adorable shot of Willow in her room (Might have to post separately about this)

Amity still rocking the purple hair

KING DAD REAL?!?!?! AND HE HAS WINGS!!!

KING CLAWTHORNE!!!😭

Much tears very cry wow

Eber is a little shit love it

Oh hi Kiki fuck off

I am very okay with Darius calling Alador a hack

KIKIMORA I WILL END YOU HSSSSSSSS

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

WHYYYYYYYYYY

I guess they're not dead?

THEY BETTER BE OKAY IN THE END I SWEAR TO THE TITAN

Wow! Loved this episode! My favorite this season, probably due to Raine! I love them! I'm a simp! I'm Raeda trash!

That aside, so many amazing moments, and the music was top notch. This show is a gift!

See you for Knock Knock Knockin' On Hooty's Door! It'll probably hit us out of nowhere, knowing how this works.

Can't wait for this post to be buried by the Comic-Con panel😆

#the owl house #eda clawthorne #luz noceda #king clawthorne #raine whispers #kikimora #hooty #toh s2 spoilers #the owl house s2 spoilers #the owl house season 2 spoilers #toh spoilers #the owl house spoilers

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noodlecupcakeswritings · 3 years

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An Unbreakable Bond - Chapter 15 (Ben Solo/Kylo RenxOC)

Supreme Leader Kylo Ren now has everything he could possibly dream of, except for someone to rule by his side. And he’ll do anything to get Cora back.

The final fic in my Kylo/Cora Star Wars canon series. This is most definitely a TROS fix it fic because fuck that movie and shitty writing.

Please leave likes, comments and reblogs if you like it. If you want to be added to the taglist, please let me know.

Warnings: Violence, Language

Chapter 15

Cora

The Supremacy had been thrown into chaos thanks to The Resistance, which meant now was my chance to take the ship down and take out a good chunk of The First Order. After all, their beloved General wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. And I was more than willing to make that happen. Stepping out of Kylo Ren’s quarters showed me just how chaotic the situation was. Officers and troopers were running in every direction, not knowing what to do. Some had bags packed, ready to jump ship and abandon their cause. It was almost comical. Not a single one of them looked in my direction. They were all too worried about themselves.

Meaning none of them would bat an eyelid if I was seen near the armoury. Ben still had my saber, so I needed something to arm myself with. If it came down to that. Keeping my head down, I ventured through the ship until I found the armoury. The door was open, probably by the last careless person who had been inside. In their panic, they had likely forgotten to close the door and put in the passcode to lock it. Luck must be on my side. Entering the large armoury, I searched the shelves, ignoring the various blasters and ammo.

Finally, I found the perfect weapon. A small yet powerful bomb, one that was controlled by a countdown timer. Ignoring the screams from outside, I carefully picked the device up and put it in a duffel bag. The Resistance must already be aboard. Standing in the doorway, I scanned the corridor for the source of the screaming. At the far end of the corridor on the left stood a very welcome familiar sight. Varidun had his saber drawn, several stormtroopers already cut down and scattered haphazardly across the floor. Another three have their blasters pointed at him.

Varidun blocks the fire with his saber, using the force to throw one trooper back into the nearest wall hard enough that the sound of his spine breaking could be heard. The next one is taken out by his own blaster fire, deflected back at him. And the third is quickly decapitated by Varidun’s saber. Ignoring the bodies on the floor and only focusing on the happiness and hope that filled me at the sight of my teacher and true father figure, I ran to him. I was glad that he was the first familiar face I saw again. As I reached him, I threw my arms around the taller man, embracing him for the first time.

Varidun stumbles backward a few steps, having not expected the hug. There’s a pause before he puts his free arm around me to return the embrace. Smiling softly, I knew I would never get a chance like this again and savoured it whilst I could. Finally, I let go of him. “I’m assuming you're all there is to my rescue party?” I asked with a soft smirk. “Unfortunately.” “Well, now that you’ve successfully rescued me, would you maybe help me with a little something? A surprise for the General,” I asked, motioning to the duffel bag.

“Surprise, huh?” Varidun asked, struggling to keep the smirk off his face. “He told me he would rather go out in a blaze of glory than be arrested by the resistance. So I figured I’d help him with that.” “But the resistance isn’t here,” he replied with obvious sarcasm. My smirk grew at his tone. If it had been a member of the resistance, they would have condemned my plan. Good thing Varidun was the only member of my rescue party. Leading the way to Hux’s office, I knocked first to make sure he wasn’t inside. After a few moments of waiting, I then headed inside and placed the bag on his desk.

“You’re sure he’s going to show up?” Varidun asked. “I’m sure I could plant the idea in his head.” “I’m clearly not going to be able to stop you, so make sure you are quick. I’d rather not spend any longer here than we need to” After I pulled out the device, I looked it over. I had no idea how to turn the thing on, let alone set it up. “Any idea how this thing works?” I asked. “I doubt it’s the same as the Imperials, but I can try,” Varidun replied.

“I dont know, they looked up to them so much, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were similar just updated.” “Good point.” Varidun looks over the device a moment, flicking a switch before setting a sequence. “Set it for ten minutes. That should be enough time to get far enough away from the blast.” I spoke. Closing my eyes, I used the force to find Hux. Of course he’s on the bridge, barking orders at officers and troopers. It requires a little more effort and exertion to plant the idea in his mind from this distance, but it works, and he leaves his post.

“Okay, he’s coming,” I confirmed. Ushering Varidun out of the room, we took a few turns so we wouldn’t bump into Hux. “It’s a shame we won’t be able to see the look on his face,” I smirked. “It won’t exactly be there for long.” Stifling a laugh, we continued to the hanger. As we reached the open area, we were spotted by stormtroopers. They group together and start firing at us. Using the force, I deflected their fire, whilst Varidun did the same with his saber. There’s a trail of bodies littered across the floor, likely let by Varidun when he had landed his ship.

Varidun continued to block any blaster bolts I missed, providing me with cover as we made our way through the hanger. Not wanting to be weaponless, I picked up a fallen trooper’s blaster. When we reached the ship, Varidun ushered me inside first. There was only one seat. Rolling my eyes, I squeezed in behind the chair as Varidun climbed in after me. “Remind me when we get out of here to get you a bigger ship,” I remarked. “When I need one, I’ll let you know. Now hold on.” Varidun brings the ship to life and moves towards the hangers exit. Planting my feet firmly, I gripped the back of the chair for dear life as the ship lurched out of the hanger.

Now that one problem had been dealt with, I needed to find Ben and make sure he was alive. I had to help him somehow, even if it was a death wish going up against Sidious. Varidun dodged ships and swerved to avoid blasts. “Take me down to Exegol,” I shouted over the noise. “Why in all of deep space would you want to go there?” “Ben’s down there. I’m not just leaving him.” “What do you mean Ben’s down there? He went alone?!”

The familiar screech of tie fighters could be heard behind us and Varidun does a series of sharp swerves to avoid their fire. My nails dug into the leather of the chair as I tightened my grip, doing my best to keep my footing. “Rey was stupid enough to go alone, and he felt he had to help as he’s the one that caused this,” I explained. “Is this the same ‘Rey’ I heard about back at the Resistance Base?” Varidun asked. “Yes, the one who they hail as a hero even though she caused more trouble than actual heroics.” “In my experience heroes tend to be the ones causing the issues, anyway.”

Once Varidun dealt with the tie fighters, although thankfully there are plenty of resistance ships around to help, he landed on Exegol’ s surface next to Kylo Ren’s tie silencer. The dark force energy on the planet made my blood run cold and my skin turn to gooseflesh. But I had braved a sith tomb, I could brave this. I had to, for Ben. I would not let him face Sidious alone. Even if it meant I died in the process. Placing my hand on Varidun’s shoulder, I knew this could be the last time I saw him. “I understand if you don’t want to come with me, you’ve already done so much for me. Thank you for everything.” I said softly.

As Varidun helped me down from his ship, two crafts belonging to The First Order landed, having followed us. “It appears I won’t have a chance to follow you. Go, make sure Ben is alright. I will stay and make sure you aren’t followed,” Varidun declared. Nodding, I swallowed down another wave of fear as I got closer to finding out what was inside that cave. “Thank you, Varidun,” I repeated. There was a small pause as I felt the need to say something else, but I thought better of it. He probably wouldn’t appreciate my sentimental streak. Turning, I ran inside the cave.

Keeping a tight grip on the blaster, I scanned my surroundings nervously. Stepping onto the turbo lift, I headed further down into the darkness. At the bottom, I spotted three bodies in the distance, all of them dressed in black. As I got closer, I could make out it was the remaining three knights of Ren. Continuing past them, I eventually came to a large room, which was eerily quiet. Inside there were no signs of Sidious, but that still didn’t completely put me at ease. Instead, I found Rey cradling a body whilst Ben tried to comfort her. The sight of Ben, alive, filled me with a happiness so great I thought I might burst.

Ben heard my footsteps as I ran to him, dropping my blaster. He struggled to get to his feet and limped over the best he could to meet me halfway. Throwing myself into his arms, we fell backwards, as he couldn’t support both of us. I kissed him hard, overjoyed to finally have him back after all this time. Ben returned the kiss just as eagerly, his fingers threading through my hair. “Ow,” he grumbled. I tried to climb off him so that I would stop being the source of his pain, but Ben held me still. “I said ow, not to stop,” he smirked.

Dare I say it, but I had even missed that cocky smirk of his. Rolling my eyes, I gave him another kiss before getting off him and helping him up. Looking him over, he had a few cuts and bruises across his face, and he was doing his best to keep any weight off his left ankle. “What happened?” I asked. “Rey got more help than she hoped for. Sidious won’t be coming back this time…” he trailed off, glancing over at Rey, “but we lost Luke.” My heart sunk at his words and I turned to Rey. Putting aside our differences for the moment, I knelt beside her and hesitantly took Luke’s hand in mine.

It was still warm, which I hadn’t expected. His face looked peaceful, as if he were only sleeping. Tears rolled down my cheeks, as my last words to him hadn’t been the kindest. Yet my words had been enough to potentially influence his decision to finally help his daughter and nephew. Luke Skywalker had died a hero’s death, protecting those he loved.

Taglist: @sweetfictionalworld, @sweetsec-93, @cltex84, @neeharlow

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garazza · 4 years

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Action Comics #1023 Review

“The House of Kent: Part 2″

Action Comics #1022 “House of Kent: Part 1″ Review

Hoo-boy.

I actually appreciate this recap page, I really do, but it just rubs me the wrong way. I’m not sure if it’s the content of the recap that pisses me off or if it’s for the fact that they literally just took a page from the previous issue and slapped in some new dialogue (see Bendis’ Man of Steel mini for this to be taken to the extreme).

Most likely the latter, but there’s a good argument for the former because reading objective statements about what Bendis has done tends to do that. I guess what they could be going for is for something similar to when Svengoolie comes back from commercial break and it’s a still from the movie with Sven’s face superimposed somewhere and he makes a quip about the movie before it starts back up again.

But I digress. It fills me in on what’s been happening in the book and that’s what I needed it to do.

The art really goes down in quality since last issue. Romita, Jr.’s pencils aren’t as good, Janson’s inks are heavier and a lot more boring, and Anderson’s colors are bland and flat and not as lively. There are a few good spots and I’ll point them out, but they’re infrequent, and overall, the quality of the art is much more similar to the art in the Metropolis Doom arc than it is to last issue. This leads me to believe that editorial only gave the art team enough time over the pandemic-induced break in publishing to produce one good issue before forcing them back into a deadline where Romita, Jr.’s work is not as good and tends to suffer.

Red Cloud attacks and attempts to kill Jimmy Olsen instead of Lois Lane to send an even greater message to her and Clark.

For those of you that don’t know, the Invisible Mafia speak in code to avoid detection by Superman’s super-hearing and meet in areas surround by lead to hide from his supervision. In the beginning of this confrontation, no one says anything that Superman would respond to if he hasn’t already tuned it out, which is why Lois says out loud her nickname for her husband to get his attention.

It’s a sign of affection for them and could be utilized for such a scenario, but I don’t see why she had to say his nickname over anything else to get his attention. Maybe because since he revealed his identity to the world his real name is being said a lot more often in non-criminal ways, so he doesn’t respond to it as much as he has in the past. I’m not sure if I’m trying to come up with a rational excuse for what is actually a writer’s weird and out-of-character creative choice or if it’s what an actually competent writer intended for a discerning reader to infer and get joy from a successful analysis.

Regardless, it’s what got Superman’s attention at the end of Superman segment in the last issue. I don’t think what was supposed to be conveyed with those panels last issue was accurately conveyed by the art. Either Romita, Jr. didn’t sufficiently depict (but still beautifully rendered) what Bendis had directed him to draw, or Bendis had poorly directed Romita, Jr. in what he wanted him to draw. With this added context, however, these panels do make a lot more sense, but only with the added context. Without it, the scene is a little unclear.

You can clearly see the change in art with the two issues side by side like this. This issue, the art just doesn’t look as good. It’s just kinda blegh. It accomplishes what it needs to convey the story, but in a very boring and unspectacular way.

Also, this panel is very Harry Potter to me. Superman’s more subdued face is similar to that of book!Dumbledore in Goblet of Fire, but the almost hyperbolic dialogue is more akin to that of movie!Dumbledore. It’s very dissonant.

I really want to hate the humor of this panel, but it’s just so fun, so I won’t.

This is a really cool panel, one of the few standout moments, but I have issues.

First, I may have enjoyed the humor in the last panel, but Bendis’ attempt at humor with Jon here just makes me want to cringe. Whenever Bendis makes Jon talk, it just pisses me off and makes me want to stop reading.

Second, I see what they were going for with the glowing eyes, but this is some more of that dissonance between the art and the writing. It actually looks quite menacing, but the dialogue has a more humorous tone. Also, the actual effect for the glow is just two red circles, making their eyes look more like flashlights than radiating energy. I also want you to keep this moment in the back of your minds, I’ll refer back to it in a second.

I think the dissonance is the result of the Bendis-speak, where some of the characters are quippy, but other characters are playing the situation straight and are reacting accordingly to the incorrect behavior. There’s nothing wrong with a superhero comic being light-hearted, but it just doesn’t quite fit here. All the right ingredients are present, but they’re not all in the right proportions.

Another panel I really like. The smoke and its color are really well done, especially in contrast to the all black silhouettes except for their back logos of the Supers.

The eye glow effect looks much better here. It’s simple yet powerful.

I don’t know how important this revelation is actually supposed to be, so I’ll defer to the depiction of the comic instead of playing the fool and acting upset about something I’m ignorant about simply because I’m not a fan of the writer.

This moment is cool and all, but I don’t think Conner has super-breath. He doesn’t actually have the powers of Superman, he uses his tactile telekinesis to mimic some of the powers of Superman.

The “extreme high-velocity super-speed” was this issue’s first indication that Bendis might not know anything about this character he has stewardship over, but that can just be chalked up to Superman not remembering the powers of Conner. We don’t know the upper limit of Conner’s tactile telekinetic flight, nor should we care, it’s supposed to be a fun line.

The second indication is that Conner is shown to have heat vision when his eyes glow alongside Clark and Jon’s. He only has heat vision when he wears special goggles or a visor. Again, he doesn’t have all the powers of Superman. Tactile telekinesis only covers so much of Superman’s powers. But this can be forgiven because it is a pretty cool image.

“Once Is Chance, Twice is Coincidence, Third Time Is A Pattern.” This panel is the third instance of Bendis’ lack of understanding of Conner’s character. If this was the only instance, this would be fine, but it’s not. The moment is cool, but it’s a bridge too far.

Refer to my review of the first issue for more of Bendis not knowing anything about Conner.

EDIT: Thanks to @thebartallenblog for pointing out to me that Conner does in fact start developing more Kryptonian powers outside of his tactile telekinesis in the 2003 Teen Titans book by Geoff Johns, so Bendis does in fact know more about the character than I give him credit for, which is more than I can say for myself in this instance.

Also, this moment goes on for way too long, almost two entire pages. Beautiful, the art of decompression and wasting reader’s time and money.

“Should I super-inhale?” Shut up, Bendis.

Also, why is Red Cloud is so fixated on Superman’s family instead of just Superman. Does the Invisible Mafia have something against his family as well? It was my understanding that they have it out for him specifically, anything that is ancillary to him is extraneous and not worth their time.

“Hey! It’s not my favorite super-move on a good day.” Then why the fuck did you even make him suggest it, Bendis?

I don’t know if loved ones referring to Lois as Ma is something Bendis has been trying to push as a character quirk or if it’s some sort of weird one-off. Either way, I don’t like it. It’s not bad in of itself, don’t get me wrong, it’s just not my thing and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Again, I’m not sure how significant Jimmy figuring out Red Cloud's identity is supposed to be to the plot and the narrative, but this seems to be a bit of lampshading from a writer who literally has no right to be lampshading.

Couldn’t give a shit about the plot, I’m just here to nitpick. Next.

Feels a bit janky in the art department, but the dialogue is surprisingly in character. They all feel like they have their actual voices. It’s a nice little moment.

I would address all the instances of Bendis making Jon talk, but that would make this longer than it already is, so I’ll only do it when it’s particularly egregious.

Red Cloud comes back and attacks not!Jon and I couldn’t care less. Kill the bitch. Please.

The next two pages are a lot of nothing, just a boat load of Bendis-speak.

I’m pretty sure this played out a lot differently and more humorously in Bendis’ head when he wrote it down and Romita, Jr.’s art makes it all the more funny but for all the wrong reasons.

Who’s his partner? Officer Tomasi?

You know when I said that one panel with Lois, Clark, and Jimmy was written really in-character? This panel with Conner and Jon is the exact opposite of that.

Red Cloud and Ms. Leone have a fun back and forth for two pages. It’s a good example of Bendis-speak working well.

“Black Label Club?” One meta-reference is enough, but two is stupid. I actaully feel a little conflicted nitpicking this, but Black Label is in such a weird place right now, so why reference it?

But “Clark Kent walked into a bar...” is a pretty bad ass line, very John Wick.

A very cool sequence, but it’s full of Bendis-speak and very decompressed.

Why the fake-out of the Superfamily executing a gangland-style shooting with Jon being the one pulling the trigger? I get it’s a story beat the narrative is supposed to hit, but still.

The reveal is pretty funny, shrinking the club, so it’s a little forgivable, but the set up and the pay off don’t quite match. It’s just another example of that dissonance I’ve been mentioning.

I know that “supersons” line was put there by Bendis as a deliberate dig at his detractors, so I’m not going to take the bait and get pissed. Nice try, big guy.

All in all, this issue was not as bad as I initially thought. It’s series of some really big highs and lows.

#superman #superboy #conner kent #jon kent #lois lane #jimmy olsen #red cloud #robinson goode #ms. leone #invisible mafia #brainiac 5 #clark kent #action comics #brian michael bendis

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fipindustries · 3 years

Text

list of comics i made so far

i already shared the list of all the novels i tried to write throughout my llife so i see no reason why not to do the same with the comics i tried to work on. no i should clarify, with my lists of novels there was a clear cut distinction between what was a novel and a short story so to parse one from the other was an easy task. it should be known that i wrote hundreds of shorts stories that i havent shared with anyone. now a similar situation occurs with my comics, i have done hundreds upon hundreds of little comics, short jokes, little skits and short lived strips through my life, so in order to give this list some weight and not make it longer than the bible the criteria i used was that it had to be something i did on a regular basis or that tells a self contained story with a beggining middle and end.

now without further ado, lets begin!

spike Vanderville (age 7)

you can tell i was way more into comics than i was into novels from a young age. done with pen and folded paper, it was the story about a young kid called spike, whose design was heavily inspired by bradley from sticking around, who had magical powers which allowed him to manipulate reality. it was a mix of harry potter and a series of illustrates short stories that came in a magazine in argentina. his best friend was a scarecrow with a pumpkin head that he had brought to life, his archnemesis was a fat bully.

curiously enough i was so passionate about this project even though i had no idea what i was doing and no talent that i actually did like three full colored issues of it. my family was really proud of me. sadly those comics are completly lost to time

andrew and the monkey (age 10)

this was the classical story about a boy and his best friend the talking animal. one page comedy strips done in pen and paper. nothing too clever, just a way for me to try lame jokes mostly stolen from spongebob squarepants. not much else to it. i tried to do like a revamp in 2014 but it was short lived, as you can see the jokes didnt get any less lame

FIP industries (age 17)

mostly done in digital. yes as you can see fip is something that has followed me my whole life in quite the variety of mediums. there were as a matter of fact multiple attempts to make this comic a real thing but time and again they would peter off as i saw that my skill was just not up to the task. i think i have talked more than enough about fip industries on this blog, one interesting thing is that if you follow the link you will come across a lot of proto ideas that i had before they cemented and took their definite shape in the novel (and even after the novel i kept retconning and retooling things over and over again, fip industries is an ongoing thing that will probably last my entire lifetime)

Disregarding Reality I (age 20)

the first iteration of disregarding reality, a humorous strip done in pencil and paper, a fairly short lived affair, lasting no more than 3 months. the entire premise of the comic was an MRA activist and a feminist live together, they are friends, they argue a lot. remember 2013 guys? back when this whole politics bullshit truly kicked off online? this was before gamer gate, mind you. but by that point i had seen more than enough of it on tumblr and i was like “someone should do some scathing commentary with wit and penache” and that someone had to be me. mainly inspired by commics like f@nboys and el goonish hive and a thousand billion others that were so popular back in those halcyon days.

i got bored of it pretty quickly and it wouldnt be until three years later than i would finally decide to re-start the project but until then...

Strangers in the forest (age 21)

here comes a rather productive era in my ouvre, ink and paper, based on a short story i wrote, its about an eldritch monster pretending to be human and a ghost girl, killed by her father. they have a dispute because the monster wants to eat the corpse of the girl but the ghost doesnt want to give up her bones because its the one thing that tethers her to the mortal plane. they eventually resolve their dispute. by this point i was actually, unironically trying my best to do comics which i felt looked professional.

Song of a nightmare (age 21)

another one based on a short story i wrote. ink and paper, a private detective wakes up in the middle of the night and sees a mermaid lying in bed next to him. he spends most of the comic trying to figure out how the hell is this possible. still one of my favourite ones and certainly one of my family’s and friends favourites as well. a rather poetic tale, strongly inspired by argentinian fiction and their propensity towards magical realism, i was reading a lot of cortazar back then.

Aika (age 21)

as you can tell i was on a fucking roll that year. ink and paper, this was a story based upon a simple and basic idea that i had in my mind for years and years. i always liked the concept behind the movie “the kid” where bruce willis mysteriously comes across himself as a kid. so of course one day i came up with the idea, what if you recieved a visit from your future self... but she was a woman?

this is probably the most aggresively trans story i ever wrote in my life, it is literally about a guy realizing they are trans and breaking down over it. here is the giant kicker, i did not realize at all what i was doing. i was completly unaware of what was going on here, i was still deep deep in the closet and not even realizing i was there. it really is astounding the honesty and the rawness with which i wrote this comic and it went all over my head. a perfect example of “im such a great ally lol”

oh also there is time travel i guess. my main impetus (beyond whatever my subconcious was forcing me to do) was my desire to make a complete clusterfuck of a story, i was a huge fan of homestuck, i had read fleek and demon, i wanted to do my own take on a hypercomplicated time travel puzzle plot. other things came out on top of it but i didnt noticed them. fucking hilarious

Hello Agatha (age 21)

a comedic strip about a wacky pixie dream girl having wacky adventures with her wacky friends, one of which is a man with a toilet for a head. what a gut buster, what a knee slapper!

there is not much to say about this one, wacky surreal comedy was always my favourite and so time and again i would try my hand at it but it is surprisingly hard to do!

The /co/ ventures! (age 20 - age25)

an ongoing project done in multiple mediums. i think i said more than enough about this in here and here. it was me practiscing comics, practiscing my humor and adding my tiny grain of sand to the 4chan culture. i am proud to say these comics were actually very well liked there and that i would be recognized without a name or signature of any kind, just on the strength of my style.

the vest kind of madness (age 22)

probably one of the projects in which i put the biggest amount of effort to make it look professional. traditional inks and digital colors. a crossover that i cant believe never happened in comics considering how obvious it is. Rac Shade, the changing man and delirium of the endless, the two flagship vertigo characters associated with madness. clearly a match made in heaven.

to this day im flabbergasted i seem to be the only one to think of this.

Disregarding Reality II (age 23)

another work where i have already spilled rivers of bytes explaining my thought process behind it. after having a no good, terrible, very bad day, finding my self aimless and without purpose, deep in denial and depression, i decided to give my self a big project to have something to get me out of bed every day. these three guys came from the depths of my mind to save me.

this time leaning a lot more on silly humor and surrealism than political commentary, still insanely proud of how much i managed to make this last, almost three years, well over 200 pages! and in here i found the inspiration and the creative energy to tackle all sorts of diverse projects of which we are about to see all about.

Mama Bird (age 24)

my masterpiece.

by far the best comic i ever did. a kid with a bird for a mom. hilarious, touching, heartbreaking. it was a concept that i had come up with when i was 21. back then it was supposed to be exclusively a humorous comic strip but then i found a dramatic angle for the story and that was when everything clicked into place. that was when i realized this was a comic i had to do. and i did it. it took me five months but it was well worth it. still insanely proud of this one

Soft boys (age 25)

a weird experimental little story where i decided to sit down and deconstruct one of the most popular superpowers. super elasticity. more akin to me just mashing my toys against each other than me trying to tell a serious story. i am actually really happy with some of the art here and some of the sequences presented. particularly the final one where a brick joke twenty pages in the making finally pays off.

Hexen Snatch (age 25)

a semi spinoff to my novel FIP industries, we focus on a side character that managed to survive after the events of the novel and how they’ll manage to survive further beyond that. insanely soaked by the magical world of pact by widbow i wanted desperatly to share my own take on magic, every page is accompanied by a little text where i expand upon the lore and the way magic is supposed to work on this world. i really like the prose on those snippets and the ideas they work almost more that the comic itself with which i was not happy at all when i was working on it. i didnt like the character design, i didnt like how the art in general was coming out, i didnt like the pacing of the story or how superficially we were getting to expore this world in the comic proper. i had to take a very long hiatus just to accumulate the will to finish the comic and once i did i feel it really petered off without much of a satisfying payoff.

on some level i blame the exhaustion and frustration that i came out of this comic with for the fact that i ended up quitting disregarding reality soon afterwards.

Maxplosive (age 26)

another project that has followed me across multiple mediums. came up with an idea for a videogame back in 2015. saved it on the back pocket for a while, used it as a story within a story on my novel fan.tastic, practisced a couple of animations with the characters and eventually decided that, if my skills at videogame making were not enough, i had at least more than poven myself as a comic artist so maybe that was the definitive medium in which this idea would have to exist.

the original idea was to tell the story in two parts, the first half would introduce the character and the videogame as if the comic was a playthrough of the game. all fun and childlike and innocent. then the second half was meant to explore the life of the main character as an adult, how being “a videogame protagonist” had ruined her body, her mental health and her life. i tried all sorts of weird stuff with the format here, using reciclable assets, static camera angles and generally presenting the whole thing as if it was a videogame.

sadly the project got too big for my breaches, i was fucking exhausted back then, swamped with a bunch of other projects, my job, other responsabilities, unsatisfied with the story and with no idea where to take it. eventually i got tired, decided to skip a day, then the day became a week and then the week became a month and by then i had to face the facts, i was just no longer able to continue the comic. and so i quit not only maxplosive but disregarding reality all together.

i still did the occasional comic here and then but it wouldnt be until the very end of 20-fucking-20 that i was finally inspired to tackle a new project, my newest one, my last one....

Lapsarian (age 27)

an interesting experiment, i decided to do the whole comic in one sit and then post it chapter by chapter on a weekly basis. a surprising result of this was that i managed to do in one month the same amoung of pages that would have taken me 5 months back when i started disregarding reality, is good to see that after al this time i still got it.

took me a while to get the hang of it again and find my own style once more but once i armed up it was smooth sailing for 40 pages all the way to the end. but what is this comic even about?

its... weird, with full disclosure and no shame, it is mostly a fetish story about big lizard creatures commiting vore. the milkman had already shown me that i could do those types of stories and no lighting would come from the heavens to strike me down so i said, why not as a comic? i like to think that beyond the fetish content it is still a decent story in its own right, an interesting feedback that i got from this is that people are suprised how earnest it is, one saying something like “this is the best pitch for a fetish that i was never interested in”

Conclussion:

looking back on this im surprised, turns out i was a lot more prolific and working a lot more regularly than i expected, in here are documented ten years of creative output that never seems to wane. it was fun to do the roundabout trip and see how my style, my technice and generally my work ethic evolved through the years. another nice thing to see is the multiple formats, the multiple tools and mediums i experimented with, i find myself constantly trying new things, new methods, new angles, new interesting ideas for how to make a comic (without even getting into what to make a comic about).

something i always knew about myself was that drawing is a fundamental part of who i am, it is something that just cant be taken away from me and that will always be a part of my life one way or the other, is good to see it so plainly, in black and white, on this list. here goes for what i might be able to do in the future

#art #writing #fip living life

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macklives · 5 years

Text

homestuck recap

i hated this so fucking much bc my 2 am bitch-ass didnt want to read a recap thats probably longer than any slowburn out there

anyways here it is

also, uhhH sorry im using this as a end of session discussion bc that shit gets explained in her as well. and im not writing up more recaps of a recap so this is where im done for the day. (by done for the day i mean last nights session, im still doing a liveblog soon. i just wrote this yesterday)

also that this is long

you dont have to read it, theres nothing of importance

ive been coping with humor to get me through it

neato.

have fun with what i suffered through:

why was “beta” the only thing unhighlighted?

like did i miss a page???

OH its the beta version of HS thats why

damn its like 5 pages and thats it

mmh

well youll all be happy to know im clicking every single one of these links again bc i like looking back like ahh i remember that. good times. also in case i forgot some shit existed.

do you think andrew had fun writing this? or was he like “fuck”

thats a lot of fucking package talk. good thing im not confused as of now and remember it pretty clearly. of else, this early on in the recap, id be screwed.

god remember when i did an analysis on each item and what it did

i feel as if i have the technology engrained inside my head right now

cruxite, alchemeter, all that jazz

flashbacks are starting up already

yeah, that was the good part in homestuck where i knew 100% that i probably would continue on this liveblog in its entirety, ngl

that one explosion scene. bc it kept me going.

OH W A IT SHIT

i just realized how the intermission spades probably fucking foreshadowed the whole jack revolts thing and gains the ring, which was also technically JOHNS fault considering he slashed up the doll in the first place

my god, i guess thats the only good aspect of the recap. looking back at things and realizing the missing pieces.

oh that makes sense for the whole “this prototyping had no effect on the enemies, since he was already in the medium” i didnt actually think about that

little did rose know where that would get her right now

oh yeah

there’s still the whole entire lab terminal thing and how mom basically knows the place exists. i guess we’re still venturing onto that and itll come up later when we find out how mom knows SO MUCH about the game.

still think shes some weird spy or secret agent

i kinda love her ngl

anyways, theres literally no reason for skaia to produce a cloning machine. so technically, they only sent the meteors in, right? so who put the cloning machine in if not mom?

oh yeah that impact was nerve wrecking asf

and still at this point in the comic i called dave fuckboy red

huh, how times change

i hated reading that whole paragraph ngl, the frustration just kicked me in the boobs again

yeah nobody else got tornadoes, huh?

OH that makes also much more sense

bc she did prototyped them before she entered the medium.

i gotcha

man one of my favorite edits i made, rose hitting that meteor with a bat

are you

telling me

the exiles structures they arrived on were in the form of the items the kids used to enter the medium?

THE EGG

THAT EXPLAINS “EGG”

of course it was 413 years ago. that was never explained. simply vague “many years in the future....” but i expected no less from this

man serenity is the most wholesome character in hs no doubt

damn thought andy here was really gonna spoil us jade’s planet

okay cool, im glad i now have the layout to the whole “their stations went to the coordinates of the home button” shindig

man i honestly dont know what else to say besides “yeah cool recap” when i already pretty much know what went down? ofc im looking into each link and shit and adding in things when i see fit, but otherwise its just me going “ah good times” yknow

the whole meteor thing kinda makes sense now?

we’re still missing a few pieces of info but we’re getting there, folks

oh yeah that reveal

god jade and dave have it in the shits for parents huh

bro isnt the best and jade has a fucking dog

who lowkey

is doing better than bro

who knew a fucking dog is a better guardian than bro lmfao

dreambot = terminator. im telling you.

sorry im still on that idea and it will never leave unless i have the actual proof in front of me that its not going to become a thing. meaning, ive finished hs and theres still no terminator dreambot or either andrew himself gives me a canon letter with “the robot is not arnold, mackenzie, pls just let it be”

why is the entire game session highlighted

i swear to god if this is like to a second recap or smth of the whole game session i may fucking CRY

okay thank god its just a design of the skaia layout

which is honestly cool

idk why its blurry tho but i can at least see the layout now. which is honestly how i pictured it anyways.

yeah, john did make a huge impact in his friends’ life and i find that so fucking touching

yep. got that. everything loops around. cool.

especially when the trolls come in. god we havent even gotten to that recap portion yet, we havent even gotten to the INTERMISSION

pls can this be the halfway point to the recap

AT LEAST

so they were exiled after the whole jack: ascend thing, right? considering theyre way in the future. man no fucking wonder.

speaking of jack

man that whole dad and jack interaction was gold, ngl

OH THAT EXPLAINS THE RING THEN

and wow, andrew’s really giving us the best female content huh. andrew is the true god of equality and diversity.

also hey, i didnt realize that wow. so PM tricked the queen in showing the parking ticket to be able to take the present from jack. she’s a smart cookie, that one..

she and PM basically snitched on jack and it was the best thing that has happened to me so far

oh yeah okay

but why did AR panic over bec? bc thats something we havent learned yet, right?

anyways

exile town, the only town which should exist. facts. i dont make the rules.

noice

i love PM being queen. like.. thats canon now. shes an actual queen.

yeah that was a fun game and the consorts were cute

fuck yeah the dick head

hate them even more now that i know john was killed because of them

anyways, i wonder what dick move dave’s denizen did? maybe thats why its filled with lava bc the denizen was like “fuck it. make the land red. kill them all”

UH WHAT

WHAT

OH MY GOD HOW DID I JUST FORGET NANNAS LETTER LIKE THAT LMFAO

THEIR TITLES WERE THERE THE WHOLE TIME!

so i still dont know what they mean but i can gather it has something to do with the game giving them abilities. considering dave is the “knight of time” and he can go back in time. whack.

which means john can either control someones breathing or simply wind. and rose is... like that one girl in the winx club who does the sun shit. bc whenever i think of light powers, i think of stella.

and jade is space. witch of space.

nice

i have no idea what that means ngl

okay finally

we’re at the trolls

maybe this recap will end soon

i remember when i thought they were internet bullies

yesss

someone asked if i basically knew the trolls were on a different veil than the kids, so not presently with them, and i know lol. i was making a joke before btw. jsyk. dont think im incompetent to forget these things when sometimes i choose to forget it so i can add in a joke

it be like that, i annoy many

then again, pls dont assume im trying to say im not incompetent bc im also a fucking dumbass and DO forget shit and i have no excuse

imagine being so bored on the meteor, your last resort is speaking to aliens

ngl me if i was ever trapped on a meteor and could potentially do that

nah ik its bc its their only hope at helping with their session or whatever tf CG said to john. but there was BOUND to be a conference meeting between them like “okay guys. humans. that needs to be sorted out” and you just hear CG screaming in the background

i cant wait to meet them honestly bc im growing on all 4 of the ones we’ve seen already. and on top of that, i know what they look like and i know theyre not THAT bad, just a little on the crayy zee side sometimes

but theyre trying

OH MY GOD

I GET IT

FUCK

DOES THAT MEAN THE INTERMISSION IS *APART* OF THE MAIN FUCKING STORY??

AND SPADES IS WV FOR THE TROLLS

GOD D A M N

wow

i didnt expect that. but maybe the signs were there and i was just willingly choosing to ignore it or smth bc “haha couldnt be, right”

flashbacks to how i thought the trolls were humans

anyways, i guess he got his revenge on the kids version of “snowman” ie the black queen. but really

he did not have to do that. he could have cut off the finger and fled. but he decided “nah, lets implode her” so the loml is dead and all i got was a catchy song

i knew they were different types of “bullies” but now i just have to replace bullies with uhh

trolling strategies

anyways, this is cute. i love how they’ve come to be friends through mutual frustration. good part in the comic.

i wonder why it explodes

more importantly

....

terminator time?

this was my favourite sequences of dialogues in the whole entirety of homestuck. that is to say the back and forth thing that the kids went through to become a sort of wingman for the other.

absolutely gold.

all except AT’s rap.

GC was the only smart one with the linear shit

anyways fuck he still has to kill the denizen now but apparently its hard to beat for a sleeping dick head so

that will be fun for the future

john will probably need to kill A LOT of imps to get there

yeah rose is a badass bc she slayed that thing with needles of all things

OH and the white queen was the cursive

damn did AR ever do the whole guide process to a kid yet? maybe he will with dave, idk

oHHH

i fucking SEE

thats why he said DNA

to use it and replace all the life forms in the ocean

fucking neat wow

man that sounded sarcastic but im genuinely impressed bc all i got was bullshit as i read jaspersprites log

so thats the secret. it was “meow” bc that somehow translates to the genetic code she needs then. and that code apparently took fucking years to write as well. sick. whack. oh man.

derse is very pretty, ngl

and wow shit

“dave had already been awake in his tower all along without realizing it” how tf does someone just

do that, awake in both places at once

i didnt even fucking realize that fact as i read that pesterlog wow

ah yes, around the time things got confusing

okay so the capsule makes sense bc at first i didnt know it was a fucking time capsule so i got confused as to how it just apparated the game lmfao

the more you know i guess *twinkle*

i find that a neat concept tho

like the whole whatever you prototype affects the imps and shit

yeah so that whole “he had no advice” basically impacted his future

no shit dave wanted to reset things bc he probably thought he caused some sort of bad butterfly effect and killed his best friend

fuck calsprite thats all im gonna say

i read that first sentence and i think i got an aneurysm

and then everything else just made me sad again

i mean good thing he fucking did amirite?

we got pain at first but now we got cool shit like idk

fucking DAVESPRITE

damn idk how that works

will rose have like two minds now? or will this be some steven universe fusion shit?

“and understood their meaning” course well i fucking didnt so could you pls elaborate, rose?

okay but then what the fuck did he use that was inside the fucking box

bc i thought he used his knife?

im only every going to refer him as that now, thank you andrew

alright okay..

god that was a lot

i dont know what will happen once i click on those links but i am going to see that for myself bc i refuse to add ANYTHING ELSE

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rosewilliams1736 · 4 years

Text

This I Promise You Chapter Two

In case you missed chapter one

Kara had helped keep her family and their small village alive by scavenging for over a decade now. Much of what she found was small mechanical bits and bobs that she could carry in a small bag, or in the arms of a couple of her friends if they were lucky enough to find a bigger target. Today though, she couldn’t help but stand slack-jawed at the loading dock full of goodies just waiting to be taken. Her head buzzed as she surveyed the room and she couldn’t tell if it was from the thrum that brought her here in the first place or the excitement of the prospect of finishing what she’d set out to do. It could have also been from her loss of blood, but she chose to ignore the implications of that. Even with a few hiccups, this was the most successful she’d ever been on a solo mission.

Krypto bumped up against her uninjured leg and flashed their yellow light along with a few questioning beeps.

Kara looked down and gave the droid a soft smile. “You worry too much. I’ll only grab enough to sell for a few weeks worth of food now and then we’ll come back with a full crew whenever we can spare one.”

If Krypto was capable of rolling their eyes, the droid would have done so right then. Kara knew as much and gave her companion a tap on the head.

“Last one to the loot pile has to tell Eliza where we’ve been!” She started limping toward the nearest crate with Krypto following reluctantly behind her.

Kara spent the next few minutes sorting through all of the loot she could get her hands on. Scavenging was a simple enough task and she’d done enough of it to have a pretty good idea of what kinds of items she was looking for. She separated out the items that would be worth the most credits and left the rest for later. The further she got into the pile, the more she felt as though she was looking for something specific. As for what that was, she had no clue.

Minutes passed and she felt herself starting to grow weaker and more unfocused. The buzz in the back of her mind continued to grow until it was strong enough that Kara could no longer hear herself think and she was forced to stop looking all together. She sat down hard on the closest flat surface, which appeared to be a box full of blasters, and clutched her head in her hands. Krypto rolled up next to her and let out a series of beeps but she couldn’t focus long enough to comprehend what they said.

Kara closed her eyes to try and ground herself, but the thrum only intensified. She was close to whatever she was looking for. She could count on one hand how many times she’d felt the buzz this strong and that both terrified and excited her. Kara’s eyes flicked open, and her brain fell silent for the first time in weeks. She let out a relieved sigh and allowed her eyes to refocus on the room before her.

In her haze, she had overlooked a giant slab of metal that was sticking out from under the crate that she had been rummaging through. Kara looked it over once, twice, and then a third time. There was no way she was seeing what she thought she was seeing. She shook her head, and then hoisted herself back onto her feet so she could get a better look.

It took a moment to move the crate out of the way, but what she found underneath confirmed all of her suspicions. “Are you seeing this Krypto?”

The droid rolled over and beeped in confirmation.

Kara nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t hear you the first time.”

Krypto flashed a familiar sequence of lights, telling her that they didn’t mind.

Kara turned back to the slab and drew her eyebrows together. Before her was a carbonite containment unit. She didn’t know much about them other than the stories she’d heard while she was growing up. Few people had access to the technology required to encase people in these units, but those that did used them to punish bounty hunters, smugglers or other such people who got in over their heads. Alex had told her once that it was cheaper than prison and cleaner than an execution. Kara had thankfully never witnessed it because it was outlawed when she was very young.

This was clearly what she had been brought here to find, but why? She didn’t recognize the poor soul who had been trapped, but it was hard to really see any discernible features through the thick metal. The only thing she could really say for sure was that whoever it was had been screaming in pain when this happened to them.

“This has to have been here for years, do you think we could still reverse the process if we wanted to?” Kara kneeled down to look at the panel of buttons on the side of the unit.

Krypto lit up immediately, flashing red and beeping loudly.

“Woah, take it easy bud.”

Krypto continued beeping, though a little more quietly now.

“You’re right, it could be a super bad guy, but it could also be an innocent. I’ve heard stories about the Luthors and according to Alex, they’d kill anyone who even looked at them the wrong way.”

Krypto didn’t respond, and Kara took that to mean that they knew she was right.

Upon further inspection, the containment unit was in amazing shape. For something that she assumed had been lying here for a decade, it showed little to no wear. Kara ran her fingers over the buttons out of curiosity and felt a tingling sensation run up her neck as her hand passed over the top-most button. She hovered her hand there for a moment before she made up her mind and pressed the button.

Nothing happened immediately and Kara gave Krypto a half guilty, half cheesy smile. A moment passed before a faint sizzling sound drew her attention back to the slab. The pained face trapped within it glowed a vibrant red into a molten orange before beginning to pock and crack to reveal the person beneath. Kara scrambled backward onto her ass and drew her blaster.

Slowly, the carbonite melted away and Kara watched as a woman who had to have been just a few years younger than her was revealed. She had raven black hair, remarkably pale skin, and was dressed in clothes almost as ratty as Kara’s. Her cheeks looked sunken and her body was frail. Kara was familiar with this look, and wasn’t entirely convinced that she wasn’t sporting it herself right now. Whoever this woman was, she hadn’t been eating much before she was placed in this containment unit. Kara couldn’t help but feel an immediate kinship with her.

The woman’s eyes fluttered and her already pained face tightened before she let out a low groan. Kara stayed put, debating whether she should get up and help her or keep her guard up in case she was attacked. She watched the woman slowly start to feel around her surroundings before rolling onto her side and vomiting over the side of what remained of the container.

That was all Kara needed to see. She hauled herself back up to her feet, taking an extra second to stabilize herself when a fresh wave of dizziness washed over her. It was becoming apparent that she’d have to do something about her leg sooner than she had hoped.

The closer she got to the woman, the easier it was to see just how poor a state she was in. The woman was shivering and Kara could see a thin sheet of sweat across her face. Her eyes were flying back and forth sightlessly.

“Hey.” Kara said softly.

The woman jumped and curled in on herself.

Kara slowed her pace and held her hands up in front of her, though she was now almost positive that the woman couldn’t see her.

“I’m not going to hurt you, I promise. Here,” Kara stepped up and knelt down a few feet away from the woman before taking off her coat. “You look like you’re freezing. I’ve got a jacket you can borrow. I’m going to leave it right next to you and then I’m going to back up and give you some space, you’re welcome to it.” She did as she said she would and placed the jacket a few inches from the woman’s hands before taking a few steps backward, making sure to make as much noise with her boots as possible.

With small measured movements, the woman reached out and touched the jacket. “Who are you?” Her voice was hoarse and quiet but held elements of a lilting accent.

“Oh! Uh, right. I’m Kara.”

The woman slowly pulled the jacket onto her lap. “I assume that we’re on a Luthor base?”

Kara nodded, momentarily forgetting that the woman couldn’t see her action. “Yep! But they aren’t here, and I don’t work for them or anything.” Kara held her hand up to her mouth and started to whisper comically loud. “I’m actually here to steal some goods to bring back to my family. And I’m so sorry, I didn’t ask for your name.”

The woman raised an amused eyebrow. “Lena. Now, not to be rude Kara, but how exactly are you alive? I’ve had a few run-ins with the Luthors and well,” She motions down to the melted container beneath her. “They aren’t fond of intruders.”

Kara glanced down at her now completely blood soaked pants and cleared her throat. “It took a little bit of doing.”

“What did they get you with, blaster bolt or saber?”

Kara’s eyebrows shot into her hairline. “Um, a droid shot me in the leg, how did you...?”

“And how long ago did this happen?”

“I’m not sure, fifteen minutes ago maybe?

“Shit.” Lena closed her eyes and threw the jacket off of her lap before trying to swing her legs off the side of the container. She couldn’t get her body to move the way she wanted to and she cursed under her breath again.

“Alright Kara, if you aren’t already, you are going to be in very bad shape any minute now. The monsters who own this place are known to have invested in special bolts that burn their victims, but not hot enough to cauterize the wound. You essentially have a gaping hole in your leg that needs to be tended to immediately.”

Lena’s words hit Kara at the same time as another wave of dizziness. “Mmm that does not sound like a good time.” Kara’s response was slow and slightly slurred.

“Kara?”

This time, her question was answered with a loud thud.

“Shit, shit, shit.” Lena pushed off of the container with as much energy as she could muster and soon felt her knees impact on the cold metal floor.

She could tell that her vision was slowly beginning to return because she was starting to see flashes of color and movement every few seconds. This wasn’t entirely helpful though because she couldn’t see Kara and only had a vague idea of where she was standing when she fell. Lena was just beginning her crawling search when she felt something bump into her. A few frantic beeps sounded off right next to her ear.

“I’m going to help her, I just have to find her first. Can you lead me to her?”

Krypto gave her a few affirmative beeps before rolling away slowly and beeping intermittently as they went, giving Lena a path to follow.

Crawling on unsteady arms and legs took longer than she would have liked, but it allowed for more of her vision to return. By the time she had caught up to Krypto, she was able to see the girl who had freed her from her prison.

When Lena got to her, Kara’s skin had grown sickly pale and she was taking extremely shallow breaths. With all of the blood accumulation and the hole burned through Kara’s pants, it wasn’t difficult to find the wound. As expected, the wound was about fist size and blood was still flowing relatively freely from it. Lena put two fingers on Kara’s neck to check her pulse, and given how weak it was, Kara was fading fast.

For the shortest of moments, Lena considered just leaving the girl here, but she was quickly struck with a wave of guilt. That was Luthor talk. She’d worked too damn hard and lost too damn much to think like that anymore. She looked back down at Kara and bit her lip. Her options were pretty limited. Simply wrapping the wound wouldn’t help, it was clear that Kara had already tried that. If she had gotten to her sooner, Kara’s chances would have been much better. Dread washed over Lena, she knew what needed to be done, but she wasn’t sure she could pull it off.

There was no time for second guessing now. Lena sat down and centered herself with a few calming breaths before reaching out and hovering her hand just above the wound on Kara’s leg. She closed her eyes and concentrated. Before long she felt the familiar burning sensation of the force shoot up her back and out of her hand. She clenched her teeth and allowed the anger that she fought so hard to keep at bay flared through her system. Her free hand pulled itself into a fist and she could feel her nails begin to dig into her palm. An internal war tore through her. Just like always, she felt the darkness try to overcome her but she skillfully pushed it down with the little excess energy that she could muster.

She couldn’t tell how much time passed, but eventually, the burning and anger drained from her system. It was replaced by an exhaustion so deep, she could feel it in her bones. Even after the feeling had faded completely, Lena kept her eyes closed. She couldn’t take the chance that they were still burning amber. Kara would bolt for sure and then she’d once again be left all alone on this base.

“Lena?” Lena opened her eyes to see Kara staring back at her for the first time. Kara’s eyes were stunning, and at this moment, they appeared to be tinged with concern, or was it fear? She backed away and pushed herself into a standing position.

“Did you just heal me with your hands?”

Lena swallowed thickly and nodded before looking down at her own hands. This is why she had sworn never to tap into that power, it was too dangerous and it scared people. It was much more suited for people like her mother and brother.

Kara sat up and looked through the hole in her pants and found that the wound had shrunk significantly, though it wasn’t fully closed . “Wow. That was amazing! Thank you.”

“I… I wouldn’t call it amazing. It’s just something that runs in my family.” She cleared her throat and looked around at the stacks of goods behind her. “Do you have a ship? That’s not a permanent fix, we’ll need to get you some proper help quickly.”

“Yes. Well, sort of. We took a few hits on our way in here,and then there may have been a bit of a shoot out.” Kara brought a hand up to rub the back of her neck. “I’m not sure if it will be able to get us back to my home planet.”

“Are we far from your planet?”

“Not really, if we can get into hyperdrive we can make it back to Tatooine in under three hours.”

Lena fell silent for a moment as she pondered their situation before turning slowly around to face Kara. “What year is it?”

Confusion flashed across Kara’s face briefly before understanding dawned on her. “Oh shit. What year do you think it is?”

“It was the beginning of 15 ABY when I got caught.” Lena looked up at her, looking almost as vulnerable as she had when Kara first saw her. “What year is it Kara?”

It took Kara a moment to come up with an answer. Living on a planet that no one bothered to visit made things like keeping track of the years trivial at best. All the while, Lena stood watching her with baited breath.

When Kara finally spoke, her voice was soft. “The good news is that it’s still 15 ABY, the bad news is that we’re three quarters of the way through it now. You’ve missed some time.”

Lena visibly relaxed and let out a deep breath. “Well that’s something.”

Kara nodded. “I was sure that you had been here for years when I found the carbonite unit…” Kara trailed off and furrowed her eyebrows. “Hang on, the use of carbonite was outlawed nearly twenty years ago, how is it possible that it was used on you so recently?”

Lena shook her head and let out a humorless laugh. “The Luthors have no regard for the law. Trust me when I say that continuing to use carbonite is low on their list of offenses.”

“Right,” Kara cleared her throat nervously. “And I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say that they probably wouldn’t like it very much if they knew that I just freed one of their prisoners, or that I’m planning on robbing them?”

Lena grinned, her face brightening for the first time since she woke up. “Not at all, but I’m certainly enjoying the hell out of it.”

Kara’s eyes shot down to look at her boots as she felt her cheeks grow warm. “Well, uh, in that case, do you think you can help me load up some goods before we take a look at the ship?”

“It would be an honor.”

The girls quickly gathered up the more expensive items that Kara had already sorted out and a few others that caught Lena’s eye before making their way back to Kara’s ship.

“Tell me again how you managed to survive all of this.” Lena said as she took in the army of fallen droids and the blaster hole ridden cargo bay.

“I’m a deadshot with a blaster and I’m super sneaky.” Kara said nonchalantly.

Her facade cracked almost immediately when Lena raised an inquiring eyebrow. “I also got really lucky.”

“Mmhm, let’s see if that luck translated over to the state of your ship.”

Lena set down her arm load of cargo and began to give the ship a thorough once over, occasionally stopping to mumble comments to herself. Kara did her best to stay out of Lena’s way and managed to collect a few more items from the piles outside before Lena had finished her diagnostic.

When she was done, Lena found Kara inside the cargo bay tying a fresh swath of cloth over her leg wound. Kara seemed to be doing alright for the moment, but she wasn’t out of the woods yet.

Kara looked up when she heard Lena approaching. “What do you think, is she going to make it?”

Lena gave her an amused smirk. “You’re girl has definitely seen better days, but the fire you took earlier managed to miss all of the vital elements. If your luck continues, we should be able to limp her back to Tatooine.” Kara leaned over so that she could pat the floor of the cargo bay. “That’s my girl.” She looked back up at Lena. “Shall we?”

Lena nodded and watched Kara get unsteadily to her feet. She rushed over and pulled one of Kara’s arms over her shoulder to help steady her.

Kara closed her eyes and groaned. “Do you think you can fly this thing?” She asked through clenched teeth.

Lena led Kara into the cockpit and set her down in the seat next to the captain’s chair. Krypto rolled up beside them and into their place between the seats.

“I think me and your friend here can manage. All you have to do is hang in there for me alright? We’ll get you home.”

Kara nodded and relaxed into the seat, her exhaustion finally starting to catch up for her.

Kara’s eyes slid closed and she let out a long yawn. “You’re not going to hijack my ship are you?”

Lena paused her preflight checks and laughed. “I wouldn’t be able to get far enough to make it worth it.”

One of Kara’s eyes popped open. “Is that the only reason you’re helping me then?”

“You saved me.” Kara raised a sleepy eyebrow and Lena couldn’t help but smile. “And I love inconveniencing the Luthors any chance I get.”

“That’s more like it.” Kara said as she closed her eyes and settled back into her seat.

Lena watched her for a second before turning back to her work. Kara was not just some random smuggler. That much was obvious by the fact that she had tried to take a Luthor stronghold on her own.The girl had nerves of steel, Lena couldn’t deny her that.

Lena bit her lip as she tried to fight off the other thought that kept pushing itself into her consciousness. It had to have been a coincidence surely, but when she woke up, she was met with a soft hum in the back of her mind; one that she hadn’t felt since she was very young. There was no way that that had anything to do with meeting Kara, right?

Lena’s grip tightened over the hyperdrive lever, she had bigger things to worry about right now and any Kara related thoughts didn’t really matter much in the grand scheme of things anyway. She was just going to see the girl off on her home planet and then never see her again. There was business to take care of and this little detour would only slow her down.

*** “Pardon me Mrs. Luthor.”

The messenger flinched as icy blue eyes flicked up to meet his gaze.

“Yes?” Her tone was as cold as her stare.

“There’s been a break in.”

“A break in?” Lillian Luthor pushed back from her desk and stood to her full height, which allowed her to tower over the young man in front of her. “Handle it, and take care not to waste my time with something as insignificant as…”

The messenger swallowed and cut her off mid-sentence. “It was base 511220.”

Lillian opened her mouth to barate the messenger for the interruption, but stopped as his words reached her ears.

“And the prisoner?”

“Status unknown.”

Lillian clenched her teeth and blew out a sharp exhale. “Gather the droids and ready my ship.”

“Yes ma’am.” The messenger turned on his heel and hurried out the door.

#supercorp #supergirl #supergirl fanfic #lena luthor #kara x lena #my writing

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omniversalobservations · 4 years

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Supergirl (December 2019)

Holy crimson skies of death! Part One of the Arrow-verse crossover “Crisis on Infinite Earths” destroyed Earth-38 and sent Stephen Amell’s Oliver Queen to an early grave after he stayed behind to avert the anti-matter wave from killing billions more people. Even The Monitor didn’t foresee it happening! While all the superheroes assembled to try and prevent Earth-38’s destruction, the episode still managed to include quite a few familiar faces from across the DC multiverse. Here are all the cameos from the Supergirl portion of “Crisis,” so let’s get to it.

Alexander Knox Sees Red Skies On Earth-89 Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman was confirmed in “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” even if the moment was short-lived. Robert Wuhl’s Alexander Knox, a Gotham Globe reporter, appeared in a brief scene at the beginning of the episode. In the scene, Alexander is seen reading the Gotham City Gazette with the headline “Batman Captures Joker!” As soon as the red skies emerge, Alexander notices the Bat signal. “I hope you’re watching, Big Guy,” says Alexander. Unfortunately, even if Batman was around to see the red skies, it was already too late and Earth-89’s fate was sealed.

Dick Grayson Walks Ace On Earth-66 While Burt Ward had already been confirmed to appear in “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” it wasn’t expected for his cameo to be nestled in the opening montage of Part One. The scene in question detailed the multiverse’s birth (and upcoming death) while flashing to different Earths across the multiverse.

One of the Earths was Earth-66, which showed Burt Ward’s Dick Grayson from the 1966 Batman TV series walking Ace, the beloved Bat-hound. Ward played Batman’s trusty sidekick, Dick Grayson/Robin, in the Batman series. Ward’s version of Dick is clearly no longer the Boy Wonder, but it was good to see him again before Earth-66’s unfortunate demise.

DC Universe’s Titans Appear On Earth-9 Arrow-verse executive producer Marc Guggenheim tried his best to bring together a plethora of characters from across DC’s shows and movies, and even asked Nicolas Cage to appear! Even though fans knew to expect the unexpected when it came to cameos, it was still surprising to see Jason Todd’s Robin (Walter Curran) and Hawk (Alan Ritchson) from DC Universe's Titans, which just wrapped its second season and finally transformed Dick Grayson into Nightwing. It was only a quick shot of the two of them, but it does confirm that the Titans exist somewhere in the DC multiverse. Too bad Alan Ritchson couldn’t return as Smallville’s Aquaman, though!

Earth-X’s The Ray Makes A Comeback! The crossover “Crisis on Earth-X,” which saw Nazis crash Barry Allen and Iris West’s wedding on Earth-1, introduced a freedom fighter named The Ray. Originally from Earth-1, The Ray helped the Arrow-verse heroes defeat Earth-X’s Nazis. He’s briefly seen flying across the skies, presumably while protecting his earth from those who wish to destroy it. However, the cameo is brief as he and Earth-X vanish in the anti-matter wave.

Source: Cinema Blend

The baton has officially been passed.

In hour 1 of the CW’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover, which aired on Supergirl Sunday night, Oliver Queen/Green Arrow (Stephen Amell) and his daughter Mia (Katherine McNamara) joined the rest of the Arrowverse’s heroes on Earth-38 to fight the Anti-Monitor’s shadow army. Before wading into battle, though, Oliver gifted Mia her very own Green Arrow super-suit.

Katherine McNamara opened up about how much this exchange meant to be both Mia and her personally when she dropped by EW’s after-show Crisis Aftermath, which was hosted by Kevin Smith and aired on the CW following Supergirl.

“That was one of my favorite moments to shoot definitely just because Stephen and I have spent most of the season together and getting to watch him work and being a part of this story and this being my first crossover,” said McNamara. “That was such a big moment for both characters and I think we both felt that.”

Shortly after this, though, Oliver is mortally injured battling the shadow army, and the Monitor returns him to the Team Arrow bunker, where he dies surrounded by Mia, the Flash (Grant Gustin), Sara (Caity Lotz), and the other heroes. McNamara felt a very weird mix of emotions when they shot that scene.

“That was a historic moment in many ways for me personally. It was my first day on set with everyone in the suits. It was my first day wearing my suit on set, so I was so excited,” she said. “Then I get to set and I realize, ‘Oh I have to cry over my dying father. Let me reframe my entire headspace.'” She continued, “It was so wonderful, and Stephen killed it. Everybody really came together because Stephen, in a sense, was the beginning of this entire universe.”

With Oliver’s death, the Green Arrow mantle is now firmly in Mia’s hands. But, as Smith wonders, does Mia actually want this responsibility?

“That’s been the toughest kind of struggle for Mia throughout her entire process of being involved in this,” said McNamara, who will be the new Green Arrow if The CW orders the in-development spin-off Green Arrow and the Canaries, which will have a backdoor pilot in Arrow‘s final season. “She was raised in a world in which vigilantes were villainized and she’s come full circle with that having met her father and kind of gotten a look into the difficult choices he’s had to make. Now, she’s been through and worked through all of these issues and has a wonderful relationship with her father. She doesn’t want the responsibility because she doesn’t want to lose him. She knows she can take it on. She knows she’s ready for it. But she’s finally filled the one missing piece of her life and doesn’t want to lose that. That’s kind of the tragedy. Yes, there always needs to be one Green Arrow, but there’s only one Green Arrow. So she knows that’s coming to an end and it’s difficult.”

Crossover executive producer Marc Guggenheim added that legacy is a big theme in “Crisis on Infinite Earths.” “It’s not just the passing of the torch from Oliver to Mia,” he said. “There’s a lot of passing the torch and keeping the flame alive.”

Guggenheim also revealed a very intriguing detail about the Arrow hour of the crossover, which doesn’t air until January. “We open with the mother of all flashbacks and we basically do the secret origin of the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor,” said Guggenheim. “Actually that whole sequence, the first draft, was written by [Crisis on Infinite Earths comic writer] Marv Wolfman.” He added, “We give you an explanation for the [Monitor’s] outfit.”

Source: Entertainment Weekly

The Arrowverse's biggest crossover ever takes place over all five superhero series on The CW, starting with Supergirl. Crisis has been building since last year's Elseworlds crossover, which introduced the cosmic being known as The Monitor (LaMonica Garrett), who began 'testing' the many worlds of the Multiverse to see if they were strong enough to survive the cataclysm to come. Crisis has accelerated throughout the current seasons of Supergirl, The Flash, Batwoman, and Arrow but now the end is here.

With the anti-matter wave sent by Crisis' big bad, the Anti-Monitor, threatening the Multiverse, Harbinger (Audrey Anderson) gathered Green Arrow (Stephen Amell), Mia Smoak (Katherine McNamara), Superman (Tyler Hoechlin), Lois Lane (Elizabeth Tulloch), Sara Lance (Caity Lotz), Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh), Batwoman (Ruby Rose), and The Flash (Grant Gustin) to Earth-38, the home of Supergirl (Melissa Benoist). The heroes had to defend Kara Zor-El's world from the anti-matter wave using a Quantum Tower constructed by the Monitor and repel an attack by a horde of Shadow Demons. However, despite their best efforts to evacuate the planet with the help of Lena Luthor (Katie McGrath), they couldn't save Supergirl's world.

Crisis Part 1 delivered on the promise that the crossover's stakes are life and death on a Multiversal scale. Literally billions died in the first chapter of the epic and this, shockingly, included one of the Arrowverse's founders and greatest heroes. Here's the body count of Crisis Part 1, which is just the start of the cataclysm that will reshape the Arrowverse:

* Alura (Erica Durance), the mother of Supergirl. Alura was introduced in Supergirl season 1, when she was played by Laura Benanti but Smallville's Erica Durance took over the role in season 3. Helped Superman and Lois launch their infant son Jonathan on a rocket before the antimatter wave struck, in a moment poignantly echoing Kal-El's origin story, so Jon Kent survived, though he landed in Earth-16's Star City in the year 2046 and had to be saved by Lois, Brainiac (Jesse Rath), and Sara Lance. Of course, Durance will return as Smallville's version of Lois Lane later in Crisis.

* Everyone on Argo City, the last surviving city of Krypton. Unfortunately, Argo had no starships to evacuate besides the spacecraft Alura saved for baby Jon so the people of Argo were all wiped out by the antimatter wave. Luckily, Harbinger teleported Superman and Lois to Earth-38 at the last minute.

* Earth-38 was destroyed, including 3-billion people who couldn't evacuate the planet in time. Despite the superheroes' efforts to defend the planet, they couldn't stop the antimatter wave from wiping out Supergirl's adopted world. While a wave of spaceships supplied by Brainiac and many of the aliens who took refuge on the planet was able to evacuate 4-billion lives to Earth-1 (thanks to a dimensional portal built by Lena Luthor), they couldn't save everyone. The Monitor said 7.53-billion people lived on Earth-38 so over 3 1/2-billion people died when the planet was destroyed.

* Green Arrow (Oliver Queen) gave up his life to help the evacuation of Earth-38 after the Monitor had teleported the rest of the superheroes to Earth-1. Out of arrows, Green Arrow took on the army of Shadow Demons by himself and was fatally injured before the Monitor rescued him. Oliver had long expected to die during Crisis and he spent all of Arrow season 8 preparing for the inevitable. On his deathbed, Oliver confessed to Barry Allen and Kara Danvers that he made a deal with the Monitor to spare their lives in exchange for his during Crisis - but the Monitor revealed that this wasn't the death he foresaw for Oliver, which casts serious doubt on how the Arrowverse's heroes can defend the Multiverse in Crisis On Infinite Earths.

Source: Screen Rant

In the beginning there was only one. A single black infinitude. Then the infinitude found release, and finally, the darkness broke, filling it with life.. With the multi-verse. Every existence multiplied by possibility. And spread out before space and time in infinite measure. Civilizations rose and fell. And rose again across reality's expanse. Life. A precious gift persevering in the face of every obstacle, until finally, the age of heroes was born. Chaos. The constant enemy of life, kept at by champions across the multiverse. Joining forces to fight on behalf of all creation. They found each other just in time because now, the entire multi—verse is about to come under attack. There is a malevolent force at work, one driven by a singular goal. The destruction of all there is. I have planned, there are those who say I have schemed, but the time for preparation has passed.

Source: TVMaze

(images via YouTube)

#television #Supergirl #Batman #Robin #multiverse

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calliecat93 · 5 years

Text

Top 5 Things I Disliked About RWBY Volume 1

(Top 5 Likes)

Welcome to the first installment of this little series of mine! So with Red vs Blue, I’ve done these ‘Top 5 Things I Like/Dislike/ posts regarding the recent seasons. So I thought ‘well, why not do it for RWBY to lead-up to Volume 7′! Sure, I thought of it at the last second and have to do two posts a day in order to be done by Saturday, but hey! it gives me something to do, so yay!

Anyways, here’s how these works. I’m going to release two posts a day. One for dislikes, one for likes. I want to say this about Dislike sin particular. As far as Volumes 1-5 go, the dislikes are things that I find weak about the volumes, but are NOT relevant to where RWBY is now. Volume 6 will have my relevant issues, but that’s about it. These are also gonna be nitpicky cause honestly, I have very few things that I dislike about each volume. Yes, including V5. Anything I bring up here I’ll do my best to explain, and same with Likes though obviously that’s gonna be more positive/happy. Dislikes are gonna be first cause I wanna get them out of the way.

Okay! Let's do this!

#5 - Chapter Runtimes

As of now, we RWBY fans are used to chapters bing about... 12-15 minutes on average, and longer than that on certain occasions. If it goes past 20 minutes, then we know that it’s a biiiig deal. Volume 1 though was... bizarre. Aside from Chapters 1, 8, 15, and 16 they ranged from about 6-8 minutes. Sometimes even four minutes. Now, this may not seem like that big a deal, especially since it is Volume 1 so they were still figuring the show out. So there's no reason to harp on them... but it is still an issue for this volume in particular and while I came into it after all the chapters were out and was able to just binge it in one go, it was a frequent complaint that I saw regarding it.

The issue is that many of the episodes would end up being two-parters when may of them would just be one episode nowadays. I’m gonna get to the Jaune Arc in another section, so let's take say... The Badge and the Burden for example. It’s a two-parter that I really like... but Part One is five and a half minutes, and Part 2 is seven minutes. Combined, they equal a total of around 12 1/2 minutes, reaching the current standard. I really feel that this could have improved pacing, especially for the Jaune arc since if it only went two episodes, IDT it would have annoyed as many people as it did. If you combined all the two-parters, V1 would ave a total of ten episodes. Now I assume that the episode order would have been cut down, so if they went with 12 then that gives them two episodes to do more things like showing more of Team RWBY growing as a team, showing more of how Beacon works, setting up things like Weiss’ racism towards Faunus and Blake’s Faunus status, etc.

As I said though, this was the first volume. I think that they were trying to go with how they did Red vs Blue episodes since that was what they knew, and that format just didn’t work for RWBY. It was a critique that they listened to, and fixed accordingly in V2 and beyond. They were still finding their feet with the show and nowadays since you can just binge the volume, any pacing issues aren’t as big a deal. But I do feel like some things could have been better established or fleshed out had they gone with the current format here, so it is still something about the volume that I don’t care for. But it is certianly not an issue anymore.

#4 - Length of the Jaune Arc... Arc

Oh Jaune, the shit that you got for these four episodes...

So in V1, there are these two parts titled Jaunedice and Forever Fall. In it, Jaune is being bullied and struggling in his classes. Pyrrha offers to help, but Jaune refuses and we find out hat he cheated his way into Beacon. Cardin finds out, blackmails him, Jaune grows a backbone, Grimm fight, and Jaune finally accepts Pyrrha’s help. It’s more than that. We have Jaune opening up about how worthless he feels and how he hates being the Butt-Monkey that he had been made as over the course of the volume. He’s doubtful of his role as a leader, with Ruby giving him encouragement that later helps him stand up to Cardin. We see how caring Pyrrha is as she tries to convince Jaune to let her help him, how disappointed she is when he rejects her, and her using her power to help Jaune and give him a confidence boost. It’s a good story that especially helps with the bond between Jaune and Pyrrha and without this plot, the things that happen later wouldn’t have been nearly as impactful, especially during V3.

That being said, however, the issue here is that it’s four episodes long. In a 16 episode season where the runtime for each was under ten minutes. That meant that four weeks straight, instead of focusing on the actual main characters of having cool fights, people spent essnetially a month watching this ‘Jaune gets bullied’ storyline. Now I want to make this clear, I love Jaune. He's one of my favorite characters and I think that him hating being a fool and wanting to be a hero but having this kinda macho mindset about it makes him an interesting character. They subvert the ‘loser hero who becomes greater than everyone’ cliche by having Jaune have to man up, but he doesn't ever really become this ultra-badass hero. He has to learn to accept help and pays consequences for cheating his way into Beacon by having to actually work to prove his worth.

Jaune had a very good character arc here... it’s just that the season’s structure makes it feel like he took the spotlight from other characters, especially Team RWBY. It being kind of a standard bullying story that isn’t out of place in any teen drama also didn’ make it very interesting, it just sets up more interesting things in later volumed. Even the Grimm fight at the end, compared to every other fight this volume, isn’t all that great and only serves to both reveal Pyrrha’s Semblance and to end the Cardin conflict. Had this been in the current format and just two episodes, it probably wouldn’t have annoyed as many people. ut as such, it’s just kinda... meh compared to the high fantasy that we get later and maybe gave aune a little too much attention. They do a much better job of giving Jaune time when prominent, but not letting it override other characters. But I will stills ay the arc is good character stuff for Jaune and Pyrrha, sets up Jaune training to become better, shows Pyrrha’s selfless nature, and without it, anything that happened later wouldn't have been nearly as impactful. So I don’t hate it, but it ain’t perfect.

#3 - Cardin Sucks

Okay, this is gonna be brief, but Cardin sucks. Okay yeah, I know that he’s supposed to suck, but he’s just... a bad character. He is a one-dimensional bully who exists solely to make Jaune miserable. After this arc, he has no prominence and in side stories like the manga or comics, they only use him to have a hate sink against other characters. He’s boring. He has no reason to be an asshole. We know nothing about him or why he’s that way. Which makes him utterly uninteresting, especially compared to later villains. Like say what you want about CInder or Adam, but at least they have actual motivations and impact. And it looks especially lame when you have Roman in this volume, who is one of the most beloved villains from the show because of how charismatic and fun he is.

Sure Cardin's not supposed to be this great villain nor do I want him to be, and yes sucky people who suck just because are a thing. But Cardin just exists for the Jaune Arc... arc, which really with a couple of adjustments you could write him out completely. Like did we really need to have Jaune get blackmailed to make his arc work? There is nothing interesting about Cardin’s character. he’s just... a bully, and that’s it. I get it, he's made to be a hateful bully, but it also makes him a poor character and I just want him to vanish form all material because he’s not good for anything really.

#2 - Penny Fight

Let's get this out of the way before I say anything else. Monty was an incredibly talented animator who clearly had a love for his work and was incredibly creative and passionate. His fights were always amazing, this one included, and he gave us a show that I have loved for several years now. Even now, he is greatly missed but will always be remembered as an amazing animator, and as an amazing person. That being said though, Monty was not perfect and I think that this moment from the finale shows that sometimes he let his love for cool action scenes go too far.

Monty sometimes had a bad habit of making the characters more powerful than they really should be. This could look bad in stories where the characters would lose fights and people would get upset due to it. Like with how Adam was made out to be this badass... and we’ve ALL seen how people keep trying to use that argument for how Miles and Kerry ruined him, even though they didn’t. Then we have things like Penny. Now originally, Miles didn’t want the Penny Robot reveal to happen until V2. Now admittedly he and Kerry... kinda made it obvious that enny was at least not normal during her intro so everyone pretty much figured it out by the finale, but still, there was room for speculation. But Monty decided that he wanted a badass action sequence with Penny... and in doing so it gave the reveal away. And apparently, no one bothered to inform Miles and you can tell on the V1 Commentary that he was pretty surprised to see the sequence.

Monty was a great animator and he created a fantastic world. But like anyone, he had his flaws. I’m still annoyed at how that fight, as cool as it looked, gave the reveal away and went against the writer’s intention. I do not like it when stories get messed with just for coolness, and this is a prime example. IDT it annoyed people as much as the V2 finale where Monty definitely went overboard with cool action scenes. but this is still very much an example of the problems with doing that. V1 still is my least favorite finale for this and one other reason that we’ll go into in a bit. It’s not a big deal now and again, most people already figured the twist out due to the lack of subtlety. But it still pretty much ruined any build-up that it could have had, and that is a shame. Nevertheless, it was a very badass sequence by Monty and shows off just how crazy talented that the man truly was. Monty was a mad genius, and his memory still goes on even today. So for that, I can give it a little bit of slack.

I cannot give a much slack for Number One though...

#1. Weiss at the end Black and White was poorly done

To be honest, The Stray and Black and White is... not a strong finale. Yes, it brings up the Faunus oppression and introduced the White Fang as well as Sun. But the Faunus stuff had very little build-up. Sure, we had Cardin bullying Velvet... but it was Cardin, who bullied everyone so not a great example. Wiss worked better as, why this was her bitch phase, he wasn't a bad person and we saw her kinder side earlier. Plus she had a reason that wasn’t just racism and helped build-up to her problematic family life. But I find it hard to believe that Weiss hadn’t been showing her anti-Fuanus stances before The Stray, which is what it felt like so I feel like a better job could have been done regarding her.

Then we get to the ending of Black and White, and it feels... forced. Really forced. At the end, Weiss suddenly did a 180, telling Blake that she doesn't care that Blake is a Faunus, asks Blake to open up to her team more, and tries to hold back on any derogatory terms against Sun. It’s nice to see Weiss trying to be better, and later volumes very much show how much that she’s improved... but there is no build-up to her reaching this epiphany. Sure Ruby and Yang call her out on how horrible she’s acting towards Blake... but that was before they knew that she was a Faunus with Penny having to spell it out for them. Yeah, Yang makes a snide remark towards Weiss later about Weiss not caring which Weiss rebukes... but that’s it. We don’t see Weiss learn anything or see her view shift whatsoever over the course of these two episodes. I guess you can argue that the revelation is what made Weiss reconsider... but since she was calling Blake a criminal before the revelation, it kinda makes it hard for me to believe that. I guess it was meant to be implied, but even when I watched it the first time, I was baffled by it.

It just kinda cheapens the ending when Weiss did a 180 out of nowhere. Now Om glad that she had the revelation. As I said, later volumes show that she meant in with V2 having her stop Blake from closing up in Chapter 2 and get her to open up to them. V3 has her defend Velvet, a Faunus, and shows concern for her safety. V6 had her get pissed at Cordovin when she made a racist motion at Blake with murder clearly in her eyes. And I expect that V7 is going to show us more of this. it’s also clear that Weiss’ racism was due to a hateful mindset that she was raised into that she knows is wrong and had to grow out of. So I can see Weiss growing out of it in the finale and am happy for what we see later... but we don’t see her start to break out of it here. She says that she had 12 hours to think about it... and we’re just supposed to assume that she came to the conclusion because we were told that it happened. ‘Show don’t tell’ has been a frequent critique of the show, and sadly this is one of the best examples. Maybe if we saw Ruby and Yang call Weiss out after the Faunus revelation or saw Blake and Weiss interacting before Weiss’ racism became known it would have worked, but... no. We don’t. Again, it’s V1 so it’s not gonna be perfect and we do see that Weiss was genuine. I just wish that they did a better job of letting us experience that growth with her.

________________________________________________________________

Okay, Dislikes are done. Again, many if not all of these are no longer relevant to where RWBY is now. It’s just a little trip down memory lane. If anything, it really shows how much that everyone has improved over the years, which is a great thing. The good news is that now we can focus on the good things for VOlume 1. That post will go up later today... after I sleep. So thank you all for reading, and be on the lookout for the Top 5 Things I Liked About RWBY Volume 1~!

#rwby #rwby reviews #top likes/dislikes

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lucyreviewcy · 5 years

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The Mummy (2017) Dir. Alex Kurtzman

What can I really say about this movie?

I wasn’t allowed to watch the original Mummy movies as a kid, so when I eventually came to watch these forbidden films I was vaguely disappointed that they weren’t spooky enough. As a result, I was pretty excited for the much spookier looking Tom Cruise reboot (even though it had Tom Cruise in it - usually something that drives me away from the movie).

There were a few alarm bells in the first fifteen minutes of the movie. For starters, we have a love interest who is a solid 23 years younger than our protagonist. She’s also definitely a love interest: she doesn’t do very much apart from get injured and be sad.

The second alarm bell was something I hadn��t picked up on before seeing this movie, but which I believe to be generally true. Rule: if the main character in a movie is called Nick, the main character in the movie is usually the worst. The Mummy compounds this issue by layering the Nicks all over the place. The first two characters we are introduced to are Nick (Tom Cruise) and Sgt. Vail. Sgt. Vail is played by Jake Johnson, who most of us will know as Nick from new girl. This issue is then made even worse by the introduction of Russell Crowe’s character, Henry, who is essentially the Dark Universe version of Nick Fury. THAT IS TOO MANY NICKS. More Nicks than a well-used broadsword. More Nicks than a Santa vs Satan themed birthday party. More nicks than Adrian Dunbar in a room full of bent coppers.

Aside this sig-nick-ficant issue which probably only affected me. There are so many other problems with this movie, but before I list them I want to state that I found it a fun romp. I would probably watch this movie again as a spooky treat around Halloween. I am fully disappointed that the Dark Universe never took off, because if this were the first offering I would have been so ready for the rest of the franchise. Sadness abounds.

That said, I can completely understand why audiences may have had trouble with this movie. Please see the following list of glaring flaws in The Mummy:

Tone. This movie has more trouble with tone than a dog trying to tastefully decorate a penthouse apartment. I don’t know much about its development, but it feels like an original version of the movie was shot and then producers said “Can’t you add a funny in every scene?” I don’t know if it was intentional, but even the big scary Pharoah-faced statue has something vaguely comical about it. As they lower the Mummy into her prison, past this big ol’ face, the face just looks really shocked and vaguely disgusted by her. I guess that’s a nice way of hammering home that the evil lady who just killed a baby really is evil. But also… She just killed a baby. We know she’s evil. We don’t need a statue to make an emoji-esque face to tell us that. This gets worse when later, as she’s lifted out of the prison, the same statue looks shocked and afraid. But we know that she’s bad. We don’t need to be told to be shocked and afraid by a big statue. Stop telling me what to feel, statue! This is typical of the film as a whole. Spooky fight scenes have comical sound effects and any brief emotional scene involving Nick is punctuated by a witty one-liner. I would have been happy with this in smaller doses, it works really well in Jurassic Park. In Jurassic Park we have lots of comical one-liners and witty banter from Jeff Goldblum in the early stages, but as the film darkens and characters start dying, Goldblum’s character is removed from the action and the gags are fewer and farther between. That doesn’t happen in this movie, we have jokes all the way through and a lot of them aren’t even funny. Especially this exchange: “You’re a good person Nick, I know that because you gave me the only parachute.” “I thought there was another one.” This doesn’t work for lots of reasons but it especially doesn’t work when it is referred back to as an emotional flashback in the final scene, sans punchline. The punchline of “I thought there was another one” is Nick’s way of brushing off this and indicating that actually he might just be an asshole through and through. You can’t use that compliment later on as proof that he’s a good person! You think you can do these things but you just can’t Nemo... sorry... I digress...

Gender. There’s a blonde female character who’s vaguely intellectual but actually clearly only there to roll her eyes at Nick and how he’s the worst. She earned her right to eye-rolling by having sex with him at some earlier point but now that’s all she’s allowed to do. She also provides the emotional core of the movie… What a shock, said no-one ever. Perhaps this is just because the last movie I saw that I loved this much was Fast and Furious: Hobbs and Shaw which has Vanessa Kirby kicking ass and propelling the plot forward with sheer force of will, but I found the character of Jenny unnecessarily dull and cliche. She just screams a bunch to tell us about the threat that’s happening. In case we weren’t feeling threatened by the zombie mummies that are attacking her. But we were aware because we could see that happening. So… Thanks for trying, Jenny. Then there’s the Mummy herself. I swear no actress on the planet gets her talent squandered as frequently as Sofia Boutella. Equal parts terrifying and beautiful, Boutella is at her best when she gets to wreak havoc in Kingsman - but since then I’ve only ever seen her in limiting roles that don’t make the most of her delicate threat/allure balance. From almost bond-girl in Atomic Blonde to the-hit-woman-in-the-red-dress in Hotel Artemis (She’s a hitman = THREAT, but she’s in a red dress = ALLURE - delicate, subtle…), Boutella gets landed with characters that are tired stereotypes. Ahmamet is not much of an improvement. The parts of the film where the Mummy is less CGI and more makeup and physicality are really satisfying, allowing Boutella to be her spooky self. It’s disappointing that the mummy makes people into other mummies by kissing them, because of course the only way a woman can win a man over is by using her sexuality. FEMINISM. The Mummy could have pushed her much further, but if this movie proves anything it is that Sofia Boutella would have made a far better Enchantress than Cara Delavigne did in Suicide Squad.

This movie doesn’t know the difference between Zombies and Mummies. As soon as she wakes up, the titular Mummy starts snog-converting all of the locals into mummies who then become her lackeys. But they just look like zombies. She’s made zombies. They shamble around like zombies. We have the “Zombie on the car” sequence that I’ve seen before in zombie movies. These are zombies. I didn’t come here for zombies. I came here for mummies, the risen dead. Not zombies, the undead. The thing that’s really irritating about the snog-mummification sequence is that she turns all the living people into zombies even though it is later established that she can cause corpses to rise from the dead. So why is she bothering to turn all these alive people into zombies when she is in a graveyard. That’s so much extra effort. Has she never mapped a process? Has she not considered she may need to conserve her resources? Have you ever heard of RECYCLING? I mean she’s from ancient history so I guess not. Eventually, we do end up with a significant number of mummies because of some very heavily established buried knights (SO MUCH EXPOSITION), but those are fine. I’m just mad about all the zombies.

Tom Cruise. I regret to inform you that Tom Cruise is no-longer a bankable star. The Mission Impossible movies are a bankable franchise and that is a different thing. I am never tempted to go and see a movie because Tom Cruise is in it. I spent the last hour of this film listing actors who could have made this movie better. The list ended up with one name on it and that name was Ryan Reynolds. Reynolds’ typical cynicism in the face of a well-loved franchise might have resulted in a more consistent tone to the movie. We know from every other movie that he does that he can balance serious and silly in a way that keeps the audience laughing and crying. We know that he can make even the thinnest of storylines seem plausible. We know that he does well opposite another equally sarky character so the chemistry with Jake Johnson (one of the few commendable parts of this movie) would still work and maybe even be improved.

I loved Russell Crowe in this movie and there won’t be any more Dark Universe movies and it is all Tom Cruise’s fault. This point doesn’t need much expansion. Russell Crowe is just really fun as Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde and I loved every second of his performance. The structure of the movie is weird because it introduces him and then drops him almost immediately for about an hour, but he’s just great. I don’t normally love Russell Crowe in anything and this really won me over. I would have watched all the Dark Universe movies for Russell Crowe alone. My boyfriend pointed out, from only hearing his voice emanating from my laptop, that Russell Crowe in this movie sounded like he was voicing the big fat posh tuxedo cat that used to live near us. I loved it.

I didn’t know how many feelings I had about this movie until I started writing them down. I loved the idea and I felt like I was enjoying it but now that I look back there were so many problems. It’s like if I spent a few days knitting a scarf without looking at my work and then discovered that I’d dropped like half the stitches and it was just a mess. That’s how I felt.

I hope you can look past the many problems I have highlighted with this movie next time you need a wild, undead but also risen dead romp. In a lot of ways, The Mummy is just like Sofia Boutella’s characters in everything: both alluring and threatening at the same time.

#themummy #the mummy #tom cruise #movie review #mummy 2017 #sofia boutella #feelings #stop telling me how to feel statue

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douxreviews · 5 years

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American Gods - ‘A Prayer for Mad Sweeney' Review

"You have a story to tell." "Do I?" "I can see it in your fingers."

American Gods pauses in the penultimate episode of its first season to tell us a story. It's a really good story.

It seems like an odd choice, given that they only had eight episodes in the season to work with, that American Gods should devote almost the entirety of its penultimate episode to telling us an extended Coming to America sequence. It seems like even a stranger choice that they should have almost none of the regular characters appear or even be mentioned.

It should be an odd choice, but it isn't. For three important reasons:

- Neil Gaiman loves telling stories about stories themselves. That was roughly 85% of the Sandman comic's groove. It's not just about the story, it's about how stories themselves can affect a life.

- Essie MacGowan's life is a great story, and is very well told. It's actually surprisingly rare for a television show to excel in both of those things.

- When you actually break it down, this episode isn't just telling us Essie's story. It's also telling us Sweeney's story. And giving us a concrete example of how the old Gods ended up in America. It's demonstrating how the old beliefs die. It's showing us how belief can shape the course of a life, and how it can bring comfort as that life passes. It's telling us what Sweeney thinks about Laura, and why. It's showing us how his and Laura's relationship is evolving through the expediency of telling us the story of his relationship with Essie. On a fundamental level, this episode completes Sweeney's emotional character arc. The Sweeney that puts his coin back in Laura's chest is not the Sweeney that broke into her hotel room only a few short episodes ago.

I just want to touch on Essie's story before we get into the Sweeney and Laura stuff, because there's one factor that makes it work really, really well. Essie was a servant girl who got her heart broken early, and then did what she had to for herself to survive. She stole without regret. She seduced the ship's captain in order to get back to England and then robbed him blind the second he left again, and she had what is implied to be a lot of sex with the gaoler in order to get pregnant and therefore not be hanged. They were all completely pragmatic choices that she made for herself. She enjoyed many of them and she didn't feel bad about any of them. And the show doesn't demonize her for any of it. Not even for a moment. All of the things she does which society would condemn are presented in exactly the same tone as her telling stories to her children, leaving cream out for the little folk, or being kind to a husband that she essentially conned into marrying her in order to get out of servitude, but whom she seemed to like well enough and whom she apparently made very happy.

None of these actions are presented as good or bad. They're presented, as a whole, as having been her life. Nothing more or less.

That said, the decision to have Emily Browning play both her usual role of Laura and that of Essie MacGowen was a brilliant move. Brian Fuller mentioned in the little after-show interview that they used to do that she has a gift for accents, and he is not wrong. Essie's Irish accent was every bit as believable as Laura's American accent. It was with some surprise that I discovered that she's actually from Australia, which means both are equally false. That's a real gift, as anyone who watched David Boreanez struggle with the task back in the day will attest.

Having Emily Browning play both characters explicitly tells us as viewers that we should be contrasting Sweeney's relationship with the two of them, and that choice really pays off. With Essie, Sweeney is roguish, charming, and open. He clearly treats her as, if not an equal, than at least a compatriot if not a friend. With Laura, Sweeney is bitter and cynical, clearly not thinking of her as being worth his time but being stuck with her in order to get her coin back. Just seeing the difference in him while he sits next to essentially the same woman tells us everything we really need to know about what the years have done to Mad Sweeney.

The mirror imagery serves the entire episode well, really. The usage of Fionnula Flanagan as both Essie's grandmother in the beginning and Essie herself at the end. The usage of Emily Browning as both the woman Sweeney liked and the woman he currently dislikes, and of course, the mirror car accident that finally brings Sweeney to his emotional catharsis. We all kind of assumed that Wednesday had caused the car accident that killed Laura, and that Sweeney was probably involved, right? Even so, as much of a not-surprise as that information was, it was right for them to hold it back until this point. Sweeney has witnessed Laura's kindness in letting Salim go. They've had the heart to heart in the ice cream van about having done bad things, and at that emotionally vulnerable point Sweeney is confronted with essentially the same visuals and experience as the car accident that he himself caused, which had murdered the woman whose animated corpse was currently sitting next to him. At this moment, and no other, he's presented with the thing he wants most. His coin has been knocked out of that same woman, the woman he murdered and who is herself an echo of a woman he liked very much. All he has to do is pick it up and walk away. And he can no longer do that.

That's a proper character journey, that is.

Two things that really seal this final moments into something special. First, thank you to the show for not translating for us whatever Sweeney screams at great length in Irish at this point. It can't possibly be as moving as what we're left to imagine for ourselves. And second, even more thanks for the choice to not have Sweeney tell Laura what he'd just sacrificed for her. As far as she knows she just got back up off the road and they're off again. That was the dramatically right choice.

Such a good story.

Quotes:

Mad Sweeney: "That’s what you get for putting a god in a petting zoo."

Laura: "So, do you love god, or are you in love with god?"

Mad Sweeney: "Can’t a man get a moment alone with his prick?"

Ibis: "Malice draped in pretty can get away with murder."

Essie: "I had my opportunity." Mad Sweeney: "Doesn’t seem right, just giving you the one."

Mad Sweeney: "We’re like the wind. We blows both ways."

Bits and Pieces:

-- The use of 50s music in the Essie scenes is there for a deliberate reason, despite being anachronistic. In visual storytelling, at this point in time, pop hits from the 50s indicate innocence. And more specifically, nostalgia for innocence. Not that the 50s were actually that innocent, but what can you do. The study of the use of symbols in a performed text is called 'semiotics,' if you were wondering. Tellingly, the music cues for Essie only become the 'appropriate' Irish period style when Sweeney comes to collect her at her death.

-- The three ships we first see deliberately visually invoke the whole Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria fairytale version of American history that we like to tell ourselves here in the US. Then it cuts to the interior and they're essentially slavers. A visual metaphor for American attitudes toward its own history. Discuss.

-- Were we supposed to infer that the coin that Essie gave Sweeney early on is his lucky coin that is currently in Laura's xiphoid process, or is it merely another visual echo? The sides we see of each don't match, but I don't think we see the other side of either.

-- Is Tatonka Ska supposed to be the buffalo that Shadow keeps seeing? Is he (she? They?) the 'proper' god of America?

-- I wonder if Pablo Schreiber was told when he got this part how much of it was going to involve public urination. That said, his losing an argument to a raven while he relieved himself was comedy gold. No pun intended.

-- It was sweet that Laura took the first opportunity to tell Salim where the Jinn was so that he could just go directly there and skip the rest of the road trip, but it's also hard not to read that just a little as 'We're not gonna need you for a bit, so why don't you take the rest of the season off and we'll meet you in the season two premiere, k?'

-- The implication seems to be that Essie kept forgetting to leave gifts for the leprechauns because she was too busy having sex. That's a tiny bit slut-shamey, but the episode doesn't dwell on it in any detail, so it's probably not intended as such.

-- The moment when Laura hands the ice cream truck driver everything from Sweeney's pocket and he politely takes the wallet back but leaves the money was a nicely staged bit of physical comedy.

-- This car accident was caused by a rogue bunny running in the road. We learn next week that the road bunnies are in league with Easter, who's all about renewal land rebirth. Did Easter just give Sweeney a push to facilitate some kind of spiritual renewal?

-- The title of the episode appears to be a reference to the novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, but unfortunately I've never read it so I can't speak much to it. I'm not a huge Irving fan, to be honest.

A great story. A great episode. Sweeney and Essie's last conversation makes me cry every time.

Four out of four cups of the best cream

Mikey Heinrich is, among other things, a freelance writer, volunteer firefighter, and roughly 78% water.

#American Gods #Laura Moon #Mad Sweeney #American Gods Reviews #Doux Reviews #TV Reviews

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theredeemingfactor · 5 years

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Alita: Battle Angel

So ... Alita: Battle Angel (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0437086/?ref_=nv_sr_1) coming in with an IMDB rating of 7,6 and a Redeemer Rating of 5,7. What we have here is some great Japanese source material that is made into a semi live action, semi good movie. There are just a few classic Hollywood changes that just bring the overall rating of the movie down. I have yet to see the all the source material movies, and I have not actually read any of the manga comics. But I have done some research on the subject and looked over the Manga movie that seems to be the source of most of this remake. And the one thing that I took away from that was that, to my surprise, this movie was actually not whitewashed. The characters from the source manga movie where not all asian either. Lets get on with the review.

The plot. Cybernetic cyborg surgeon Dr Dyson Ido is out scavenging the scrapyard when he comes across the torso of a female cyborg. He manages to attach her to a new body and reactivate her, but she cannot remember anything from her time before the scrapyard. As she struggles to learn about her origin she meets new people and interacts with the people in Ido’s life. In time, certain memories are triggered giving her an insight to who she was, and how important she might actually be.

The movie. Ok, let's begin with the good .. as opposed to .. to .. the bad. The animation is stunningly good, even though I will come back to this later as well. The world creation is rather stunning and the characters in this movie, most of whom are motion capture a la Avatar, are really cool. The cast is good. The story is a good one. There are some good performances in the movie. And lastly I am, in spite of all the things that I am about to say, really looking forward to the sequel. And yes there will be a sequel, cause of course there will be. The movie has made too much money already to not have a sequel, and the movie ends so amazingly open ended that it would be impossible for there not to be sequel. Now .. the bad. Amazing animation, yes .. but there is still a clear lack of human reality. This might be partly due to bad acting as I don't know how much of a performers face is unaltered for MOCAP (motion capture). Some of the scenes in this movie are just not engaging. So, while there are some good performances in this movie, there is an equal number of lackluster performances. Good story, yes .. great, no. Much like some of the performances .. the main story does not engage at all. Moving on to casting .. yes, it is good .. like in the case of Mahershala Ali, but not with Christoph Waltz. Waltz just was not right for this movie. Same thing goes for Keean Johnson, who just happens to be the anchor in the main cast. Lastly for the bad, we have that classic Hollywood need to make characters older than they should be so there can be a romantic subplot in the movie. Alita, in the source material, is much younger. Having a young kick ass female character works, just look at .. Kick Ass .. Hit Girl is brilliant and bad ass. The wrap things up here .. this movie is a still really fun to watch. And I suppose part of the reason it did not appeal to me more is that I was not the target audience for this movie. This movie is aimed a 13-17 year old demographic. For me, this movie could have used an R-rating and a bit more character development and backstory. It also overuses some over stylized battle shots/sequences that work really well in cartoons but not in live action. Longer un-cut battle scenes would have been much better, too many quick cuts. But for what is was, enjoyable.

The redeeming factor. Dr Dyson Ido’s hammer. That thing is so cool, and clearly has a backstory all of its own that I would like to hear. A thruster powered spike hammer that Ido uses in his bounty hunter life. That thing is wicked.

The final word. This was an enjoyable movie, but feels like it was made for a younger audience than myself and also for people who have to some extent read some of the manga comic source material. Watching this, I understand for the first time how someone who has never read a comic feels like when they watch a comic book movie that is not an origin story. I feel like I am missing out on half the movie because they almost do nothing to talk about why the world is the way it is. I think it would have helped a lot to add some depth to this movie. But by all means, go ahead and watch the movie .. it ain’t that bad.

#alita #battle #angel #battle angel #battle angel alita #action #scifi #science fiction #manga #movie #movies #cinema #review #reviews #redeeming #factor #adventure #romance

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paulisweeabootrash · 5 years

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Retrospective Review: Rewatching Azumanga Daioh as an Adult

This may seem hard to believe if you are a younger reader or one who got into anime only recently, but there was once a time when recommendations spread by word of mouth, it was absolutely commonplace for anime seasons to last longer than 13 episodes, and the vocabulary of the anime fandom wasn’t nearly as full of internet-originated in-jokes. A time when the internet-savvy congregated on forums dedicated to specific topics instead of social networking sites, and the imageboards that generate so much of the internet meme landscape were just starting to take off among lonely nerds as an obscure haven for perverts, racists, and assholes instead of the role they have today as… uh… well... a well-known haven for perverts, racists, and assholes. A time when there was no such term as “weeaboo trash” because that Perry Bible Fellowship comic hadn’t been published yet, let alone used for that meaning. It wasn’t some golden age, but it was different, and today I’m taking a self-indulgent trip back to the end of that period, when I was in high school in the mid-2000s.

Azumanga Daioh (2002).

1. Why is this show important to me?

My introduction to anime consisted mostly of Pokémon and Sailor Moon, and took off with scattered episodes of several other shows that aired on WB and Cartoon Network, which were generally driven by action and combat. I can’t remember the circumstances or even who did it, but someone who owned, or perhaps pirated, a copy of Azumanga Daioh must have shown me a few episodes at some point.

Here was a show that had been on the leading edge of the moe trend a few years earlier, and although certainly available, such things were not yet common. Moe has, of course, taken over a large chunk of anime since, to mixed reception since it can range from innocently delightful to extraordinarily creepy. Azumanga is close to the innocent end of the spectrum, and absolutely delightful (as, BTW, is the author’s current ongoing manga series Yotsuba&!), with a softer, cuter art style than I was accustomed to and instantly-lovable characters.

It was clearly in a different genre and had a different sensibility about how to make a show, too. It had few repeated or filler elements, unlike any of the shows following the “monster of the week” formula. It was broken up into several vignettes per episode — a practice that I was familiar with from the format of many Nicktoons, but while American shows with that format told multiple self-contained stories, the short segments here were typically parts of larger episode-long stories, often focusing on different parts of the same event or different anecdotes about the same character. It showed us, the foreign audience, something about life in Japan, and at least for me was the first time I’d heard of distinctly Japanese school practices like applications for public high schools, students cleaning classrooms, or the particular kinds of seasonal festivals they have. It lacked story arcs driven by overcoming some enemy and instead was driven by character relationships themselves and the instantly-relatable experience of school. It was an encounter with something utterly different — and it made an excellent first impression.

Eventually, I bought a copy of the complete series of the manga it’s based on. Azumanga Daioh was originally, well, a manga, written by Azuma Kiyohiko and originally published in the form of a 4-panel comic strip that ran in the magazine Dengeki Daioh. See, it’s Azuma’s manga in Dengeki Daioh. Azuma manga, Dengeki Daioh. Azumanga Daioh. Ha. Clever. Anyway, in there, I encountered largely the same characters and interactions, a mix of believable school life and quick gags, just presented in a different format. I eventually got the DVD box set of the show, too, and I’ve rewatched a few favorite episodes several times, but this review is the first time I’ve revisited the whole series in years.

2. Who are all these people?

Rather than focusing on a small core friend group like Three Leaves, Three Colors, another much more recent adorable high school slice-of-life I greatly enjoy (and should maybe review?), Azumanga has a pretty large ensemble. Most of them are students and the “story arc” such as it is follows them through three years, from entering to graduating from high school, over a single 26-episode season. So rather than cover a plot synopsis, I think it would make more sense to dive into specific characters and their relationships. The show its at its funniest and sweetest with the dynamics of certain combinations of the main characters, and there are a lot of combinations available. Covering all of the recurring named characters approximately in the order we meet them (except a few characters who show up only in an episode or two each and another classmate named Chihiro who shows up on the periphery as a friend of Kaorin), let’s look at the relationships that stand out:

Yukari and Nyamo: Yukari Tanizaki, the English teacher who is the homeroom teacher to most of the cast, is unprofessional and insensitive from the first moment we see her, traits which are elaborated in later episodes into a sort of impulsive over-the-top-ness that clashes with the fact that she actually is a pretty good teacher. Emphasizing her less-serious attitude, students even refer to or address her by her given name (although the subtitles exaggerate this a bit by consistently calling her “Miss Yukari” when she’s usually just addressed as “teacher”). Minamo Kurasawa, the gym teacher, is a long-time friend of Yukari. She and Yukari (who calls her “Nyamo”) were even classmates at the same high school they currently teach at. In addition to being central to the gym class/sports-related episodes, she’s also Yukari’s more caring, approachable, and professional foil, which sets up interactions where Nyamo tries to be helpful and manage situations in the face of Yukari being antagonistic (and, outside of school hours, drunk) towards her and the students. Yukari in particular prods at Nyamo’s sore spots: being single and having done embarrassing things in high school.

Tomo and Yomi: Tomo Takino is 100% genki girl. I mean, come on, she’s the illustration for the TV Tropes article by that name. She’s not only enthusiastic, but loud, intrusive, and pointlessly competitive to the point of being just plain mean. She’s the kind of person who might mature into a less competent Yukari if she burnt out a bit. Koyomi Mizuhara, on the other hand, is much more serious and self-conscious, and although she still genuinely is Tomo’s friend and goes along with some of her silliness, she barely puts up with Tomo’s teasing and flurry of bad ideas. She is the Nyamo to Tomo’s Yukari, complete with Tomo enforcing a nickname on her, so she’s almost always called “Yomi” throughout. Yomi is much more considerate than Tomo, too. This often comes out in Yomi scolding Tomo’s insensitivity, but it’s also seen less directly when they are giving Chiyo (more on her below) birthday presents — Tomo offers first a joke that doesn’t go over well, then a magic wand she apparently expects Chiyo to believe will make her grow taller, which Chiyo dismisses, while Yomi offers a book which Chiyo enthusiastically accepts and says she expects to enjoy.

Osaka, Tomo, and Kagura: Ayumu Kasuga is a distractible and soft-spoken transfer student from Osaka whom Yukari, Tomo, and Yomi pester with misinformed questions and assumptions about her home city. Tomo, naturally, saddles her with the nickname “Osaka” as if that is her entire identity. The nickname quickly catches on, with even Yukari calling her that instead of her actual name in class. She is accepted as a friend by the other students who still consider her eccentric and baffling, but not annoying or embarrassing like you might expect. (In fact, the other girls react more and more to Tomo as the annoying and embarrassing one.) During the second year of school, she bonds with Tomo and Kagura (introduced as a star athlete from Nyamo’s homeroom during the first year, she becomes a major character in the second year) over their similar incredible forgetfulness and poor academics. Yomi calls them “bonkura”, translated as “knuckleheads”, and the three of them adopt the name for themselves as they study together — an idea which is doomed from the outset. The three of them together, or any two of them, play off each other wonderfully.

Chiyo and Osaka: Chiyo Mihama, a child prodigy who is only 10 years old at the beginning of the series, is so academically gifted it can upset and embarrass her classmates, but on the other hand is naive, and not just because she’s a child. She is in fact clueless about the outside world. She fails in the first summer break trip (ep. 5) to understand that the other characters’ families are nowhere near as rich as hers, and in the second summer break (ep. 14), even after a year and a half of being around high schoolers, she entirely fails to understand Nyamo’s off-screen explanation of “adult relationships” (kids innocently being oblivious to what sex is seems to be a common basis for jokes in Japanese media). Chiyo being five years younger than her classmates — and on the other side of puberty from them — also makes her lag far behind them in athletics. On the one hand, this makes her very self-conscious and afraid of being a burden on her classmates in team activities, and on the other, it sets up a running gag of Chiyo and Osaka teaming up to be by far the worst pair of athletes across the board. Oh, and Osaka’s dream about Chiyo’s pigtails in the New Year’s episode is one of the weirdest and most authentically dreamlike dream sequences I’ve ever seen. Although maybe that just says more about my own dreams than about the show.

Sakaki and Nobody (or, Multiple Kinds of Unrequited Feelings): Sakaki is considered effortlessly cool and somewhat intimidating — Kagura calls her a “silent lone wolf” — but she’s not big on that reputation. Students openly admire her, especially for her athletic talent, and treat her with distance and respect by almost universally calling her “Miss Sakaki” (since this is apparently her family name, not given name). She does not enjoy this treatment, but is also too private (and perhaps too insecure) to complain about or discuss it. She is indifferent to sports despite excelling at them, and doesn’t even recognize Kagura when she proclaims herself Sakaki’s rival, presumably because the first-year sports festival just didn’t stick out in her memory the way it did in Kagura’s. Despite calling it rivalry, however, Kagura quickly inserts herself into Sakaki’s life in a friendship that Sakaki responds to more with quiet tolerance than reciprocation.

Kaorin, meanwhile, mistakes Kagura’s one-sided friendly rivalry for a very different kind of attention, and accordingly treats her one-sidedly as a romantic rival (although she does eventually calm down about it). Kaori (family name not mentioned), usually addressed by the more affectionate “Kaorin”, is shown at first to ambiguously admire Sakaki, but it quickly becomes clear that she is infatuated with her. And, despite the insistence of many fanfic writers since, Sakaki never catches on to this, even with Kaorin gazing dreamily at her while dancing with her, or clinging to her arm while posing for a picture together. I'm sure, given how over-the-top she is, that Kaorin’s unrequited feelings are supposed to be funny, but I find it sweet and sad and end up rooting for her.

Sakaki and Cute Animals: Sakaki is not unfriendly, or even very socially inept, though. She gets along well with the main cast, especially Chiyo. But she is aloof, not just because of shyness but because she has a secret love of all things cute, especially cats and dogs, and gets caught up in her own thoughts about cute things. Although she loves animals, they don’t necessarily love her back. There is a series-spanning running gag with a cat in the neighborhood whom she repeatedly tries to pet, no matter how many times it bites her for doing so. In fact, in that very same episode where Kagura declares her rivalry, the strongest emotional reactions we see from Sakaki are horror directed at Kagura for scaring that cat away and, later, being moved to tears by a story she’s constructing in her head about another cat while Kagura is trying to talk to her. Sakaki’s thoughts on cute animals also yield a second running gag: "Chiyo's dad". An orange cat-like doll (evidently some kind of character or mascot in-universe?) that appears numerous times in the background early in the show appears in Sakaki’s New Year’s dream and introduces himself to her as Chiyo’s father, so Sakaki refers to the doll as “Chiyo’s dad” for the rest of the series without explanation, much to the confusion of the other characters. While he’s an inanimate object in the background before the dream, afterwards he appears as alive and magical, sometimes in Sakaki’s imagination and sometimes intruding into the real world as short transition clips between scenes.

Kimura vs. Everyone (mostly Kaorin): Last and certainly least, let’s consider Mr. Kimura, the literature teacher. Within a minute of the first time we the audience see him, Tomo asks him why he became a teacher and he blurts out that it’s because he likes high school girls. Which a group of creepy boys in the class call “brave”. Ugh. This presages chronic inappropriateness of varying levels from Kimura — from unsolicited suggestions for cheerleading uniforms to hanging out during gym class to watch the girls swim to heaping unwanted “favors” on Kaorin, to whom he is obviously attracted. Beyond the increasing variety of his inappropriateness, he doesn’t really develop as a character. He is, interestingly, shown as an otherwise decent person outside of school, but this is not portrayed as excusing him. Rather, it’s made clear that his creepiness is contextual, and his role throughout the series is consistently as a grotesque comic relief, not a sympathetic character. Kaorin even consciously tries to improve her opinion of Kimura because his wife is so nice, leading her to believe that this means Kimura himself must have good points to deserve someone like that, only to be immediately shown otherwise. We the audience are laughing at him, not with him, and at some points are genuinely upset at him on the girls’ behalf. Or at least, I hope that’s how the rest of the audience takes him.

3. Yeah, but there's some kind of progression, right, even if it's not really a story arc?

Again, it's not the kind of show that has an overarching goal or conflict. The goal, such as it is, is the characters' graduation from high school. The topic of what they'll each do after graduating comes up several times, as you might expect, but isn't that much of a plot point. Not all of the main characters even have clear plans laid out that we know of, but the plans we do know about match their established personalities well. Tomo changes her mind repeatedly between several half-baked ideas. Osaka decides at the last minute to try to become a teacher based on Chiyo straining to think of something fitting Osaka's... unique way of looking at things. Chiyo is perhaps overconfident, planning to study abroad in America despite being only 13 when she graduates. Sakaki anonymously showed interest in veterinary school early on, but didn't discuss it with her friends until much later, after she started showing her weakness for cuteness in front of them.

The main progression that happens is some evolution in the characters' relationships and attitudes. There is of course the progression from strangers to friends among the main cast, but also some character development growing out of things that started as gags. Osaka, for example, begins as the butt monkey of the class, but by the end of the first year, she is very well accepted by her classmates, and she even gets along particularly well with Tomo, who was originally shown teasing and stereotyping her the most but has now toned it down a bit. Nyamo’s miserable singlehood, previously a running joke, leads her to open up to the idea of trying matchmaking instead of dating. Sakaki becomes more willing to express her love of cute animals in front of the other girls, starting with Chiyo, and her running gag experiences with the hostile cat play out to a resolution when she adopts, of all things, an endangered wildcat which is the only cat that doesn’t bite her, then has a final encounter with the hostile cat where she tries to make amends. Chiyo's academic talents were met with light irritation and mockery at first, but by the end, her new friends are grateful for her help and rise in applause when she is recognized for her grades during the graduation ceremony. Kagura relaxes her Tomo-like tendencies more and more, and shows a degree of gratitude and sentimentality towards her new friend group that would’ve been shocking when she was first introduced. Even Tomo, usually the show's last bastion of immaturity, shows tiny bits of improvement: self-reflection and regret during a serious conversation with Yomi over what American audiences would call "finding your passion", and later leading the applause for Chiyo. To compare Azumanga to Three Leaves, Three Colors again, it’s true that this show doesn't go into as much depth in character relationships as that one despite running for more than twice the number of episodes, but I don’t think that’s a flaw in Azumanga so much as a combination of Azumanga’s larger main cast, gag comedy focus, and choice of a different “zoom level” on the main cast’s lives.

The show itself evolves a little bit, too. As it goes on, more episodes have segments that flow together and they contain more references to events in previous episodes. By the last few episodes, with graduation looming, it almost feels like it has become a conventional plot-driven show. The shift from shorter to longer segments, shorter to longer jokes, etc., is seamless — and pretty typical of comic strips where perhaps the author hasn’t “figured out” their own characters at the beginning. Surreal elements also get more common, like the “Chiyo’s dad” running gag and increasingly-elaborate looks into what characters are imagining. As I recall, these changes reflect the stylistic evolution of the original manga, but... uh... my copy of the manga is with my parents at the moment so I didn’t check myself on that.

4. How is it different in retrospect?

As I said, I first saw this in high school, so I was about the age of the main cast. Perhaps this was one of the things that made it so enjoyable. The characters seemed relatable, and I lacked the aversion to depictions of ordinary life that some people had because I didn’t have a particularly negative high school experience despite being decidedly uncool. (I was, in fact, neither interested in being cool nor in being self-consciously uncool, and was content with the set of people I got along with. I was never really an angsty teenager so much as a sad one.) My experience of the show is, if anything, even greater appreciation now. Some of that difference comes from knowledge and some from aging.

I’ve become a bit less of a poser and/or snob about some things since then. I’d seen a lot of obviously-atrocious dubs growing up, and they really put me off the idea that anyone actually cared about dubbing into English well. Since then, I’ve lightened up a bit, partly because it seems like nowadays distributors do a lot less 4Kids-style butchery of shows when they’re translated and partly because I’ve realized that there is plenty of bad Japanese voice acting, too, so sometimes the English version is just plain easier on the ears. So I’ve watched this mostly in the English dub this time around (some episodes in both to check the different versions of specific jokes) and I really enjoy it. The voices are character-appropriate and the English lines fit the lip movements better than the original Japanese voice track while only rarely resulting in rhythms and stresses that sound unnatural in English, which really impresses me.

Just from the sort of vocabulary one picks up by being weeaboo trash, I occasionally notice differences in meaning between the dialogue and subtitles when watching the sub version. And I even picked up on an interesting translation choice for a joke I hadn’t noticed before. When Yomi tells Osaka that Chiyo is a child prodigy in ep. 2, Osaka responds comparing Chiyo to a boy she knew growing up, resulting in her expressing a different misunderstanding in each version about how the boy was described by adults. In the English dub, Osaka says something about him “smarting off”, the joke being she thinks that means he’s smart. In the English subtitles, she says he was “precocious”, to which Yomi says she doesn’t think that meant he was smart by calling him that. This time around, I finally caught that the Japanese dialogue there clearly uses the phrase “otoko no ko”, insinuating that the boy is a crossdresser and/or gay. Even though I don’t understand the full Japanese joke, the implication is clearer than it was in English (because I, um, also didn’t think of the double entendre on the word “precocious” until now), as is the degree of the misunderstanding.

I appreciate now how many scenes are psychologically-savvy. Just in the episode in which the main cast of students move up to their second year of high school, we see two scenes that just click with me as “yes, people do this, and I don’t know why we don’t seem to notice it!”. I mentioned above Kagura wanting to compete more because of the sports festival while Sakaki thinks nothing of it at all, which hinges on the simple difference in the sports festival having been a memorable event in Kagura’s life but not Sakaki’s. That episode also features a scene in which Tomo eggs on her classmates to eat their lunches early because it’s a thing that (according to her) second-years do, which sets up Mr. Kimura to arrive the room for literature class, see everyone eating, and therefore assume he must be the one who has the time wrong and go back to the faculty lounge for his own lunch. This tendency to defer to others in decisions in our own lives, not through peer pressure per se but through assuming that something done commonly or confidently must be correct, is just something I don’t see portrayed or acknowledged much in Japanese or American media. And I love it. For those two scenes alone, this is one of my favorite episodes in the whole series.

As far as the characters, I still find the students charming and relatable, and I’m willing to bet that everyone knows someone like most of them in real life. They fit Japanese character archetypes to a certain extent, but are also developed enough especially in their interactions with each other that they come off as realistic to me. So they hold up well. But mainly, I find I have much more appreciation for the teacher characters as an adult. I can think of times when I’ve been the Yukari in a situation, whether that means being overbearing and inconsiderate when I think I’m being funny or whether it means or digging through a messy desk swearing that I know exactly where something is before creating a landslide. And I can think of times when I’ve been the Nyamo accidentally antagonizing the Yukari by trying to be helpful. I even appreciate Kimura, not because I think he’s relatable or a good guy, but because he’s distressingly realistic. His creepiness comes at the same time as genuine competence and, as far as we are aware, a normal and functional home life. It is widely-acknowledged yet never stopped by the administration, even though it ranges from unprofessional obnoxiousness to genuinely alarming sexual harassment. Kimura is unfortunately plausible and all-around frustratingly topical.

Revisiting these characters, I’ve also realized something about myself. When I first watched this show (and read the manga), I got a serious crush on Osaka. She would go solidly in the “endearingly pathetic” column if I were to evaluate her that way, and she also reminded me at the time of a few different confidently strange and spacy people I went to high school with. And then, getting older, I realized… She’s endlessly distractible by trivial things. She asks weird hypotheticals and follows odd tangents to other topics. She often misunderstands people. She’s hopelessly unathletic and clumsy. Oh no. I'm the Osaka of my circle of friends. So, uh, that’s a thing that happened, and I have no idea what to make of it.

Azumanga is relaxed, wholesome, and hilarious, and its characters and major events are believable even when highly stylized for comedic effect. When it's not in hyper-simple comedy mode, the art can be downright beautiful. It’s clearly an artifact of its time given, for example, the lack of cell phones (even basic ones) and persistence of film cameras, but that kind of aging happens to any show. The situations are still relatable despite not being topical, which makes me think — or at least hope — that this can last well into the future as something new audiences find worth watching.

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W/A/S Scores: 8 / 3? / 3

Weeb: There are lots of little things that will seem odd if you go in believing that Japanese school schedules and activities are the same as American ones, but anime is so saturated with high school comedies nowadays that it is much less weeb now than it was then to expect that background knowledge. Many non-school things like flower-gazing or the fact that seasonal fairs in Japan have different activities and expected clothing than in American ones will seem distinctly foreign but understandable to a naive audience, while a few episodes might need some looking up to “get” because they expect audience familiarity with things still obscure to most Western audiences, like lucky dreams in the New Year’s episode or the yōkai in the second culture festival episode. Mostly, familiarity with the conventions of other anime or of Japanese culture will enhance enjoyment but aren’t strictly required to enjoy it. The art style sometimes shifts for specific gags to a particular style of minimal-movement chibi characters on very simple backgrounds which is more at home in the 4-panel comic world in which Azumanga originated (and in pre-moe-era comedy anime, or at least the few I've seen) than in other manga formats or newer anime, creating an additional small hurdle even for those with different Japanese media exposure.

The show runs into more of a barrier with hard-to-translate jokes than anything else, leaving the viewer the choice between replacement jokes with similar general ideas in the dub vs. the occasional feeling that there should be a joke but you’re not quite getting it in the sub. One particular joke that they made no attempt to adapt ended up being utter nonsense in both the sub and dub unless you get that "Mr. Yukichi" refers to 19th Century Westernization advocate Fukuzawa Yukichi, who is on the ¥10,000 bill, and I gave the show an entire extra point on the Weeb scale just because I had to look that up.

Ass: Unless you’re Mr. Kimura, probably no “ass” score at all as far as sexualizing the characters, but there is the occasional sexual joke or implication. Even the obligatory beach episodes aren’t fanservicey in the way or to the degree that a contemporary moe high school show often is. Probably the single most sexual-looking thing is characters holding their skirts down in the intro, which is tame by comparison to anything released in the last decade. Kimura, however, does make the show unsuitable for audiences… well… younger than the show’s main cast, probably.

Shit (writing): I have very little problem with the bulk of the content. I think the show works and the characters are relatable and delightful. But I do have some gripes about translation, mostly in the dub. Although I still maintain the dub is unusually good in acting and synchronization, they do take more liberties than I’d like with changing jokes, and the dub and sub both lose some subtlety in how characters address each other, as mentioned before.

On top of that, there are some odd localization choices in the dub. For example, the way Yukari, their English teacher in the original Japanese, is not portrayed as teaching a foreign language at all in the dub, while still making a big deal of her foreign language skills outside of class, or how characters repeatedly say “taiyaki pastry” in the dub instead of just establishing once for the English-speaking audience that taiyaki is the name of a specific style of pastry and using the name “taiyaki” from then on. Also, I know this is very small and specific, but I noticed a place in ep. 17 where they inserted a strained pun in the dub where there was intentional awkward silence in the sub, so that’s just… weird.

Shit (other): The animation is often sparse, and although this is usually fine, it does sometimes come off as cheap. The biggest problem visually is that the DVDs I’m watching have noticeable and pretty frequent combing, which I was able to reduce but not eliminate by fiddling with video player settings. On the other hand, kudos to the director for hitting a sweet spot on shots that are lingered on or actions that are repeated for “too long” (e.g., Nyamo demonstrating chopstick use, or any of the scenes of Chiyo and Osaka failing at sports, or Osaka trying to wake up Yukari) because they end up hilarious when they could have been tedious.

Oh, and I love the soundtrack. Some people may also find the frequent use of recorders annoying, but those people are (1) wrong and (2) not writing this blog. The soundtrack is appropriately lighthearted and/or relaxing. The opening theme “Soramimi Cake” is catchy and accompanied by an opening credits sequence that decently shows who the main characters are. But “Raspberry Heaven”, the ending theme… ah… the sequence accompanying it is a beautiful dream and the music is movingly bittersweet for reasons I lack the music theory background to articulate. Like, this is a really weird example, but it conveys my feelings: have you seen Soylent Green? You know the scene where Sol is listening to a medley of classical music while he’s being euthanized? If the last thing I ever heard were “Raspberry Heaven”, I would die totally content.

Content Warning: Kimura.

—–

Stray observations:

- I think Kaorin may have been the first unambiguously gay character I saw in any anime. Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura would’ve beaten Azumanga to the punch with representation, but I grew up on the butchered-for-pearl-clutching-audiences versions of those shows.

- Kimura has, incidentally, produced one piece of lasting weeb culture. While trying to save his illustration for a proposed magical girl cheerleading outfit, he drops a picture of a woman. Tomo picks it up and wonders out loud who it is. Kimura responds, in heavily-accented English, “my waifu”. So… yup. We have him to thank for the whole waifu/hasubando phenomenon. Or, well, the terminology, since attraction to fictional characters is probably a phenomenon as old as fiction itself.

- More of a fun fact than a stray observation, Kuricorder Orchestra, who collaborated with Oranges & Lemons on the Azumanga soundtrack, recorded two Yotsuba-inspired concept albums, which are also adorable. They’re hard to come by in official copies, but I can’t help but notice that nobody seems to be stopping anyone from uploading them to YouTube...

- The background music in the cheerleading scene in ep. 6 is the “Grandpa Polka”, a.k.a. “The Clarinet Polka”, which fans of various other weird geeky media may recognize as the melody for the Candy Mountain song in “Charlie the Unicorn” and/or as the song between “Love Shack” and “Pump Up the Jam” in Weird Al’s medley “Polka Your Eyes Out”.

- My junior high, oddly, did have sports festivals somewhat like those depicted in anime, but I don’t hear much about other American schools doing similar things.

#weeaboo trash #retrospective review #anime review #azumanga daioh #this post is way too long

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braincoins · 6 years

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How do you write so well?

Okay, first of all, bless you for giving me something to do! We’re just gonna start right there, ‘cause clearly if I can’t sleep, I need to do SOMETHING with my time that’s not getting myself in trouble.

Second of all, thank you for the compliment! I’m just over here smiling like an idiot, I’m so pleased. Glad everyone else (Pengy and the kitties) is asleep, so no one else can see it. ^_^

As for the question, setting aside the opinion… it’s practice. AND I KNOW! Wait, wait, come back! I know everyone says that, but let me elaborate a little bit.

When my mother brought me home from the hospital, she had no idea what to do with me. When she’d gone into labor, she’d been re-reading some Dickens, so she sat down with me, opened the book, and started reading out loud to me. Mooms read to me until I was old enough to read by myself. I abused the hell out of the Book-It! program (so… many… free pizzas…) because I loved reading.

And out of that love of reading stories came a love of writing them as well. I entered my first writing contest in the 6th grade (got an honorable mention) with the encouragement of my teacher. When we first got a personal computer (sweet chaos, I’m old), I started using it to type stories instead of writing them by hand. In high school, my best friend and I kept an inside joke notebook that we swapped back and forth between us, and I occasionally wrote stories in that, too. I took Creative Writing class. I continued to read, to watch TV shows and movies, listen to songs, to consume stories in every form I could think of.

I’ll be 40 in a little over a month. I have spent that time not just writing, but trying different things. Trying to write in the style of one author or another. Trying to write horror, trying to write comedy, trying to write erotica, etc. Trying to write poetry, but let’s not talk about that. Not all my experiments are successful (especially the poetry) but they all teach me something.

I continue to consume stories (add podcasts, tabletop RPGs, webcomics, and video games to the list of story types I enjoy now) and think about what I liked about them: certain turns of phrase, certain elements of world-building, the way this plotline was structured and paced, the way the characters reacted to situations, etc.

Look at the stories you like and ask yourself why you like them. Not just the characters and storylines (though those are both important) but how they’re presented. Would this story be better in a live-action medium versus an animated one?

For example, I complain a lot about the Voltron tie-in comics, but setting aside my personal grievances, I do feel a little bad for the writers. Someone clearly gave them the direction that the paladins have to form Voltron in every. single. issue. And the act of actually Forming Voltron is best in an animated/motion-based medium. In comics, you just basically have Shiro shout “Form Voltron!” and then you have two splash pages of Voltron already formed and ready to go, because you can’t just do the transformation sequence panel by panel. You have a page limit you have to hit, you’ll drive the artists up the wall, and it’s just not as interesting in a static medium. (For that matter, trying to “form Voltron” in a text-based medium like fanfic is ANNOYING AS HELL, and I should know ‘cause I did it TWICE.)

I also like to do readouts of my stories after I finish the first draft. Reading them out loud (to myself, with no one else around) helps me hear things that might sound off, like “did I use the word ‘say’ too much in this paragraph?” Also it’s GREAT for finding dropped words: y’know, you meant to put the word “his” in there, and you totally thought you did, but oopsie, guess you didn’t. OH, and a good editing trick is to shift your draft into a different font. It makes you pay more attention to the words because they look a little different now, and you’re more likely to catch stuff. (I shift it back to my preferred font afterwards, and I don’t pick a font that annoys me, just one that’s sufficiently different from what I wrote in originally.)

Plus, I also have awesome beta readers (99% of the time, it’s @materassassino, who’s wonderful) and, for longer pieces, an editor (my friend @explodingcrenelation who has actually done professional editing and gives me a “repeat customer” discount). Getting at least one more pair of eyes on something helps so so SO much, because they’ll catch things you missed/didn’t think of.

Okay, that’s long and babbly. Welcome to 4 AM. I hope this helps, Writing Anon! :)

PS - I can’t stand Dickens

#socks babbles #socks is old #writing #CONSUME STORIES #Anonymous

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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How Wonder Woman 1984’s Practical Effects Set it Apart

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Going back to Themyscira is one of the most anticipated aspects of Wonder Woman 1984. For many fans, the Amazons were the highlight of the original film and an all-Amazon movie can’t come soon enough. The physical prowess and the pure joy of seeing so many women not only in combat, but engaging in fight choreography that’s developed around their physical attributes/gifts/features, is a rare and wonderful thing. The resulting actions sequences were unlike anything on screen before: highly stylized yet clearly effective.

Heading into WW84, director Patty Jenkins and her team (which now includes Gal Gadot as a producer) had a reputation to uphold, and then some.

“There was just no way we’re going to take any shortcuts,” Gadot said during a WW1984 press conference. “And we’re just going to raise the bar and give everything we have because we knew people were so invested with the character and cared so much about her.”

One of the biggest opportunities for action on an epic scale is the so-called Amazon Olympics, an extended opening sequence from Diana’s childhood, where she competed against some of Themyscira’s best in a triathlon of sorts involving an obstacle course high in the air, swimming, and archery on horseback. Lilly Aspell returns to play young Diana who’s now 10 years old. She did at least five months of training to run the obstacle course, which she actually runs through herself. Some of the more fantastical elements are enhanced with green screen and CGI for her safety, but all of the running, jumping, climbing, and swimming is Lilly herself.

If the Amazons were the high point of the first movie, the unequivocal low point was the final fight in the third act, a messy overlong CGI spectacle that felt out of step with the spirit of the warm, character-driven movie audiences had fallen in love with up until that point. While no one mentioned it by name in interviews, it’s not hard to imagine that’s what Jenkins is keen to avoid when she talks about avoiding CGI action – or when Chris Pine refers to “cataclysmic computer graphics explosion nonsense.”

As star Gal Gadot put it: “Patty really made a point about wanting to have a minimum amount of CGI in our movies. So most of the stuff that you’re going to see is real people doing the real thing. Whether it’s us or the stunt people, it’s real people. So it took much longer. You have to prep and to rehearse much longer.”

Gadot calls WW84 “the hardest movie I ever got to shoot by far” but also says it was worth it.

“[The first movie] was received in such an amazing way that there was just no way we’re going to take any shortcuts. And we’re just going to raise the bar and give everything we have because we knew people were so invested with the character and cared so much about her,” said Gadot. “When you see it in the movie … you can just tell that it’s the real deal. You can see by the face expressions that it’s real. You can see the weight and the movement and the speed.”

Practical effects have major advantages, and directors like George Miller and David Leitch, who directed female starring action movies Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde, respectively, are big fans. But there are disadvantages as well.

“The hardest parts were just how demanding the shoots were and how physical it was, because it was very important for Patty that we do minimum amount of CGI,” Gadot told Den of Geek and other outlets during a recent press event “So most of the stuff that you see—the running on Penn Avenue, the Amazon sequence, the fight with Cheetah—most of it, it’s real people doing it for real. And for the obvious reasons, it took longer to shoot and it’s very tiring on your body. But then you see the result and I was so satisfied with it cause I was like, ‘Oh my God, you can see the difference. You can tell the difference between real action to CGI action. You can see it in the way that we move, that we hold, our faces, our bodies.’ So that was the hardest part. The rest of it, honestly, Wonder Woman feels like a second home for me.”

There’s a decent amount of wire work in the film which, as Gadot pointed out, isn’t exactly new so much as something that’s fallen a bit out of favor with the rise of CGI.

As fans of the comics know, and the trailer has alluded to, Diana and Barbara have a relationship of sorts before Cheetah enters the picture. Gadot, Jenkins, and Wiig discussed the unique nature of their climactic altercation at a press conference for WW84.

“And I think Gal and I talking about this from the very start,” recalls Jenkins, “saying, ‘However they would fight, it would be completely different. And they’re friends.’ Right? Or at least they have this friendship in the past. It’s not about punching in the face … They’re both trying to literally get the other one under control. … So, narratively, it was fascinating, and then how it would work spatially was fascinating, and then executing it was long and laborious and wild.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before,” Gadot says. “It’s not like when you see women try to fight like men. No, we’re females, our bodies are different, the way we move is different and this is how we do it. And just to see it, it was so great.”

Each part of the set was carefully designed around the needs of the fight choreography. Eagle-eyed viewers might pick up on a railing or two that play key roles in how the performers bring the action to life.

“We designed what we wanted something to feel like and look like and what the moves were. And then we had to build. There was no stage big enough in the world so we had to build the stage,” Jenkins says. “And then we had to build all those things. And then we have Cirque du Soleil performers practicing them and showing us what things are going to look like. And then these guys have to end up doing it. And so it was incredible, but it was fun to really aspire.”

Of course many fans are simply worried how Cheetah herself will look. As Cinema Blend helpfully points out, while Cats and WW84 were made around the same time (and filmed in adjoining studios) Kristen Wiig looks significantly better than the cast of that delightful little monstrosity.

“Finding the right blend of prosthetics and CG to make that transformation was… it took a ton of (research and development),” Jenkins told Cinema Blend. “It started from the day I started it, and we didn’t complete it until the day we finished. It was so complex trying to figure how to pull off that character. I would lose so much sleep over it. Honestly. Because I was like, it could go so wrong. The first thing I did when I got on to the movie was that they said, ‘We can do this all CG. We can put hair on people.’ And I was like, ‘Show me the best example of that.’ And I saw it, and I said, ‘That’s not good enough. If that’s where our technology is, that is not good enough.’ … Cats was shooting on the stage next to us, and I knew that they were going through the same thing. And then I heard that they were just going to do it in CG. And I was like, ‘I hope it works out for you!’ But I’ve never been so thankful for the process I went through.”

It’s worth noting that while they were filmed at the same time, WW84 is coming out a full year after Cats. The VFX artists who worked on Cats were famously mistreated, rushed to put out an inferior product in order to make financial and awards show deadlines (the latter of which they missed) and then many were laid off and their work publicly derided, an all-too-common occurrence in the industry. Nevertheless, Jenkins once more opted for practical effects as much as possible, and held off on incorporating CGI until absolutely necessary.

“I didn’t want Kristen’s face to become some animated bizarreness. So then we ended up doing tons of prosthetics. Real work. And we only took over certain parts of her body. The rest of it is prosthetics.”

Perhaps most importantly, the action in WW84 is an extension of characterization and moves the plot forward—one of the biggest advantages of using practical effects and a reason actors often cite when they insist on doing as many of their own stunts as possible. The opening sequence in Themyscira illustrates a lesson that shaped who Diana is as a person. Her relationship with Barbara informs her tactics in battle. Her stance on violence and war in the first film—a tricky but welcome one for the genre—is refined here, and directly impacts how she fights.

Wonder Woman isn’t just a demi-goddess who punches her way to victory—how, who, and when she fights matters, both behind the scenes and within the story.

The post How Wonder Woman 1984’s Practical Effects Set it Apart appeared first on Den of Geek.

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kierongillen · 7 years

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Writer Notes: The Wicked + the Divine #29

Spoilers, obv.

Weird issue this, for me.

We've been away for a few months, so this is the reintroduction. As I've said, the second half of Imperial Phase is more constricted in time than the first, so we've got to set all that up. And in terms of my “stuff to do” list, I obviously had a bunch. I also had a structure, which was putting the focus on Persephone and take her through her day (akin to 24). It's about that hangover, juxtaposing the realisation of Sakhmet's actions and the feeling of being sapped and wrecked and regretful.

(I'm writing this with a hangover, oddly, though it's the “last night was amazing!” sort of hangover, so not exactly right.)

Anyway – I have the story goals and the structural means and all that, and basically hit them. But I also didn't do something more than that, despite having plans for a Big Swing issue. I simply choked. I hit the point and just didn't want to write what I had planned. Not even “didn't want to”. Maybe “wasn't capable of putting myself through it.”

As such, even though the issue has gone down well – better than I would have thought – it nags at me. I suspect it was best for me not to do it, and may even show character growth on my part in choosing not to, but it's still mildly annoying. I suspect it'll be my least favourite issue of the arc... but that may have been true anyway. I am particularly fond of the rest of this arc.

Anyway – that ennui and reluctance fed into what the script ended up being: “I'm tired and I don't want to do this any more but what other choice is there?” is very much the mood and the point.

(Why has this gone down well? The character focus, I suspect. We've got 10 main characters, and all of them bar Baph (and arguably Woden) get meaningful scenes.)

Okay – remember back in issue 27 on Phased I talked about how I solved trying to fit all the information in by realising one sub-plot could be excised and then pushed later? That was the Sakhmet/Persephone relationship stuff from this issue and the rest of the arc. We obviously had some of it in 27, but it was the absolute minimum necessary for 28 to make sense and to establish their interactions. I realised the rest would be just as effective if it's stuff Persephone remembers, in terms of the ghosts of their past together. It integrated well with the themes of Waking Up The Night After And Thinking Back.

Jamie's Cover

Was mildly annoying that this was released online just before the last issue dropped, as the blood coated coat is something of a spoiler. But you end up shrugging, because “Sakhmet covered in blood” is very much her look anyway.

Jamie covered this one, due to Matt being away on well deserved holiday.

The breaking of the portrait is the theme for the second half of Imperial Phase, as those who've seen the future covers will know.

Jock's Cover

Very happy to get Jock doing a cover – one of the definitive cover artists of the 21st century, and one of the nicest people in comics. If I ever made a faustian deal, it was made on the floor of Jock's hotel room in Dublin, waking up and picking fluff off my tongue and thinking “you need to earn some money at some point, Kieron.” Jock had let Jamie and me crash on his floor, like the kind and lovely fella he is.

Anyway! Morrigan, in full fashion-sepulcharal. Obviously look at how Jock uses space here, and plays with the logo. That sort of awareness of the specifics of any individual cover is one of the reasons why he is what he is. Lovely stuff.

The 25 Issues In Future Cover

For Image's theme months, we normally say yes or no depending on whether it strikes us as a worthwhile idea in terms of the book – which normally means “do we have a good idea instantly.” In this case, Eric went “A hypothetical cover for your book 25 issues in the future.” Everyone on the team went “Well, by that point the book is over so...”

Original idea was a graveyard, but realised that a monument would be the way to go. It's based on one in Glasgow, which Jamie pointed out as we went past it.

One day I'll get the HUMANITY statue in London into the book, but not yet.

IFC

Deciding what information gets added to these is always an interesting challenge. What matters? What doesn't?

Page 1-2

We're back, and first panel is the Laura narration we haven't seen since issue 11. I miss that girl.

Jamie does this whole sequence so well. Matt too, in terms of mood. I'm always interested in the question Jamie asks me – in this case it was “why the hell is she living in a crappy room in the underworld? She's rich.” And then I have to justify it, which is nice, because it reminds me that my choices actually do have the justifications built in. I suspect I believe I used Bojack Horseman and Sid Vicious in crappy hotel as my references.

Yes, the Lucifer fangirl is cruel and unusual. That Persephone left the party saying she wanted to be alone and wasn't in the mood, and between then and now she's picked up someone else, and someone who reminds her of her old friend says a lot about her. Same as later, when she goes clubbing rather than go home.

Really interesting colour choices in the second panel of the second page by matt – that beige-y red of the cigarette light. And then look at the cold blue/white light when the phone clicks in.

I think a lot about how we hear about news, both personal and world news. Occasionally it's in person, but I think of refreshing the Warren Ellis Forum and then the top post being “Plane flies into World Trade Center” with one unread message or anything else. Just a line of text that is going to change everything. We do a lot of stuff like that – I find myself thinking of the climax of The Immaterial Girl.

Page 3

I believe I was thinking of Bananarama's Love In The First Degree. Bananarama were my original text pop band. Huge chunks of what I love in Pop Music can be traced back to Bananarama.

Page 4-5

Earliest scene in the current recurrence, I believe... at least in terms of showing gods.

This is in part to make sure the timeline was clear. As Baal's Death Day was revealed, we know when he must have appeared... which was before 2013 Ragnarock which still clearly believed the gods not have returned yet. If this is Baal's first gig, then we know he spent a couple of weeks not doing performances.

The question of when Sakhmet came is open. I suspect I'm never going to actually say it in the script, but I can see Sakhmet's appearance basically prompting Baal into doing his first gig just to make sure he gets to be first. Those would be fun conversations. I could talk about our choices in terms of when we started our story, but there's certainly another version of WicDiv which did everything in straight chronological. If I was writing it for (say) television, I suspect I'd take that route.

(The short version is that in a monthly comic “Gods reincarnating as pop stars” isn't a big enough hook. That's a theme and setting. I needed the specific big plot, which was the Did Lucifer Do It?)

Anyway – party in a Warehouse, but look at what Matt does with the colours here, which are brutal. In an issue with so little joy, this level of pop just shows what the book isn't now.

Page 6

I'm always interested in Jamie's choices for the gods when they're not on stage. Amaterasu's clearly herself, but not quite as loud.

Eight panel grid, which is my standard choice. I suspect I could have pushed either of these half scenes to longer scenes, but I have bigger fish to fry.

Jamie does great stuff here with the body language – being questioned by the police about your girlfriend murdering a bunch of folk when you're hungover can't be much fun, and panel 2 really shows it. And then there's panel 4 – Persephone holding herself as she trudges away. The contrast between that and the detective's words is a lovely bit of irony by Jamie – she really doesn't look like someone who could.

Matt's colouring in the fifth panel is just startlingly wonderful. Just look at that.

Chrissy's ongoing biggest regret is that we did PERSY instead of PERSEY when we first did Amaterasu's nickname for Persephone.

Page 7-9

The formalist in me is a little annoyed that I break the purity of “follow around Persephone on her hangover day” and have a scene which starts before her.

Jamie and Matt always realign their work between arcs, and Jamie is trying some slightly different approaches to the page. I mention, as for me, this scene is where it's most obvious in terms of “something is a little different to usual.”

Return to the I Can't Believe It's Not The Danger Room, introduced in issue 17. Also, Minerva and Baal in Valhalla, which says how seriously they're taking it – neither live there any more.

I smile at the hot pink in panel 4 on page 8. Hot pink! Hot Pink!

The last panel of page 8 took some tweaking – originally Amaterasu didn't have a line, which made it easy to overlook their entrance, which made Persephone appear to come out of nowhere in the next panel. Adding a line to her solves that problem, but does undercut the beat of Baal/Minerva – Baal had a line which we lost, which meant the reader's eye would treat the panel as two moments. The celebration of the two – a gap on the page – and then Amaterasu coming in on the right.

I think Marlboro Shite has been in my notes since issue 4 or 5. Everything eventually finds a home.

(It's so old I was worried I'd used it before somewhere. Baal repeating himself would be terrible.)

Writing that has also reminded me that I had a stress dream last night about a continuity error in Uber where someone pointed out we'd changed names of one character mid-through the story. My subconscious is totally crap.

Page 10-11

I don't use that sort of caption-dialogue transition a lot in WicDiv, even though it's a classic story writer trope. In terms of modern writers, I always connect it to Rick Remender. It's one of his main bridging devices.

More about the gig next issue, but it was important to set up a bunch of stuff here. It's been talked about, but not in this level of specific. Clearly it's going to be a big part of the plot. It's been a while since we've done a big performance scene, after all. Imperial Phase is all about getting to your Knebworth, after all.

God, Cass is almost translucent here. She works too hard.

I really like Persephone's necklace in this page. Just noticed it.

Page 12-15

Highbury & Islington, as seen in issue 5 and returned repeatedly to since then.

I'm still not bored of how we flipped Young Avenger's White Backgrounds As Aesthetic Device when dealing with the Underground. Which probably says everything about the two books.

Obvious setting up key stuff for the Underground we'll need later in the issue on page 12 – namely that we can find to places you've been before, but it is infinite down here.

I believe ”Crap Narnia” was a last minute tweak of the script, but it does please me. The Norns are not have it with these tropes.

Panel 3 on page 13: Awwwwkward.

I have no idea how Jamie keeps on doing these outfits. He's an amazing talent. I should do a comic with him.

The specific choice of “At least 3G” makes me smile, as if Cass is working out what signal is reasonable to get in a magical underworld. “Yeah, maybe you'll lose 4G, but 3G should be good” she thinks to herself.

Yes, nothing at all comfortable in any of this.

It's always interesting to me how Cassandra is as vulnerable as she clearly is. You choose the right places to hit her, and she'll be derailed. Some characters clearly understand that, and others don't.

The last panel is the point where people who read the solicits are thinking “wait – when Kieron said “Wherein Dionysus sits in the darkness for most of an issue, but in an awesome way. Honestly, you'll love it. Also: other stuff.” was he being literal?”

Last panel is great. Full bleed gets the sense of the endlessness of the dark, and Dionysus sitting there, facing it. Art against the void. Our comic in a panel.

Page 16-17

There's more interaction with the public in this issue for a while, but the crowd stuff is where we're trying to show the responses more. Some people are petrified. Some people are still trying to snap her. Some are both.

Yet more fine gods-casual-clubbing looks.

The club they're leaving would be the Buffalo Bar, as seen in issue 18 of WicDiv (since repaired in WicDiv). They're stairs leading down on the right. Also showed up in Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl.

Interesting flashback colour choices here from Matt. Teal and turquoise? Colourists are amazing.

The Bridge Reconstruction sign is 100% period Highbury & Islington sign. We moved dialogue over it to try and signal “I know this looks important, but it's not.”

Deciding which exact euphemism for sex Cassandra should use on 17.1 was some degree of thought. Originally I'd written “Fucking” but that jarred with Persephone's own Fuck. “Banging” was the most comic option – it just speaks to the lack of respect Cass has for Pers/Baph's act.

“I've never said that out loud before” echoes with Young Avengers, of course.

I wanted the hard – mid sentence to set up for a hard-cut to the club. I'm a fan of hard-cut jokes, but doing it as an anti-joke was kind of the point. Let's go home, as I need to OH NO I AM IN A CLUB AND HAVING A SHIT TIME.

Page 18-19

I look at the first page, and smile, in purely a “I love comics” way. When I talk about “Wanting to write comics” versus “wanting to write stories that get turned into comics” way, it's stuff like this I'm thinking of. If I didn't write full script, it wouldn't work like this. Well... not as easily. It's calling for specific effects that Jamie and Matt completely get. Matt bleeding the red in is pretty astounding – that third panel especially. The second one you can think it's just the club lights, but the third is saturating the image, and then it just takes over. And that expression on panel 5. Yay, jamie. Comics!

Thinking this was a pro-pantheon fan club, so the response is different than on the streets. These people are shook up. They mean well. But... yes.

Obvious call back to Baphomet's dialogue way back in issue 7.

I believe the last panel description was “Hmm. I do like coke?”

Page 20

A general sentiment, but dancing with Taylor Swift's Blank Space.

21-22

And we return to where we started.

How good was the coke? Will we ever find out? Stay tuned to The Wicked + The Divine, kids!

(Not the first time Coke has been explicitly referenced in Imperial Phase. It was implied in episode 24, and Woden's memorable nose-piece in 28. Imperial Phase, proggy double albums and all that shit is just connected with that particular drug for terrible people. Year 4 will be less coke-y, hopefully)

And Ruth's surname revealed.

It's odd – when writing this I'd completely forgotten the obvious fact that Persephone is disobeying the television's instructions. I am useless.

That this is the second time that data access in the underworld has been referenced in this issue makes me wonder whether my own router problems were working their way into the comic. All work is autobiographical, but not usually that crappily.

(Don't worry. It's solved now.)

Great Jamie expression on the final panel, of course. The colouring of the section was one of the most debated bits of the book, and I like where we ended.

Page 23

I suspect I've got some pun interstitials which are worse than this ahead, but not many. That would be impossible.

Anyway – back next month for top sitting in the dark adventures.

Thanks for reading.

#WicDiv #the wicked and the divine #Writer Notes

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