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coolman229 · 2 years

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So I’ve watched two episodes of Brooklyn 99. The first one was years ago and I don’t remember what episode it was since this was still when the show was relatively new but I didn’t like it or found it funny at all. I concede that it was probably just really bad luck that I happen to check out the show with a terrible episode, but I just watched another episode because I was looking for a clip to use for a video and I ended up watching the season 4 episode “Mr. Santiago”. I have to say it was much funnier than the other episode I watched and

Though while I found the episode funny and that’s really important for a comedy I have some criticisms regarding the writing of the story in it, or stories to be more accurate.

The biggest issue with the episode is that it’s a 21 minute episode split amongst three stories. You have the main A plot where Jake meets the titular Mr. Santiago and tries to impress him. You have the B plot where everyone is trying to have a Thanksgiving dinner and hijinks ensue. And you have the C plot involving Captain Holt lending money to a guy to help him and hijinks ensue. To be honest each of these stories could have a full half hour show dedicated to them, with the A plot easily being able to fill out an hour long episode (which in reality is more like 42-45 minutes). The biggest problem that arises from this format is that while each plot on its own is fine they are crammed together into 21 minutes and none of them have any time for development and end up with lots of scenes that should be happening cut just because there’s no time.

The Holt subplot is the one that suffers the most despite having a really funny idea for it. Holt is hanging out with some guy who’s name I can’t remember that seems pretty unstable. He decides to give the guy a decent chunk of money to help him out, which he immediately blows by betting on a dog in a competition in some sort of black market illegal underground Caribbean dog competition betting organization. Holt is pissed off because his money just got wasted and the guy was so desperate to make money he bet on a dog that Holt didn’t think had a chance to win. So they try to get the money back but it’s already in the Caribbean and they can’t just fly over there to dramatically get the money back. So they go to a bar and threaten the guy there to put on the dog competition so they can watch it and hope that the dog that was bet on did well enough to make the money back, and he wins giving them a huge payout.

Conceptually this episode is freaking hilarious and what little of it is in the episode is pretty decent, though it gets bogged down by the other dude in it being pretty unfunny and his jokes dragging out way way longer than they need to. Holt is what keeps the story afloat tbh. But other than that particular issue it could have really done well if it was given its own episode to flesh things out. Actually show more of the characters, what they’re doing, have Holt and this guy talk more about the situation and give the guy more of a chance to develop. And it would have been much easier to get invested in the dramatic finale where the (literal) underdog wins.

The B plot where Amy gets everyone to come over for Thanksgiving dinner is generally fine and overall pretty funny. The primary drama is that one dude was supposed to get a turkey and decided to get a live turkey to kill there and cook at the house. This raises protest from a couple of the people there and results in them refusing to let them cook the turkey and everyone else tries to get the turkey so they can actually eat. It’s pretty funny overall but could have easily had it’s own episode. The story is simple and carried by the actors and the jokes.

The A plot and what the episode is named after really had the best potential. Despite not having the previous seasons of context I can understand that Jake is meeting his girlfriend’s dad for the first time and since he’s such an anal stick in the mud he’s desperately trying to impress him by acting like he’s more detail oriented and sophisticated than he actually is. This whole story leads into Jake’s secret getting found out, resulting in the two arguing then going on to solve a case from 20 years ago that Mr. Santiago couldn’t solve.

Only a decent chunk of that is offscreen. All of the build up and preparation Jake does is skipped and only explained in dialogue later. Much of their general interactions at the party are shown as quick flashbacks, and even the big dramatic finish where they actually solve the case and arrest the true culprit happens offscreen. It’s only vaguely described after the fact. It’s a frustrating break of the “show don’t tell” rule. You can certainly tell things and explain stuff but when so much stuff is happening offscreen and you just have it described it feels like a waste to even have this plot in the first place. You could have easily had this fill out two entire half hour episodes on its own but it has to share a 21 minute runtime with two other plotlines. And what’s really weird is that despite this supposedly linking directly to the B plot of the episode of a Thanksgiving dinner it feels strangely disconnected, which makes it even more pointless to cram these stories together and give both truncated screentime.

You also had Jimmy freaking Smits in it as Amy’s father. You had Bail Organa himself and his screentime is limited. He’s a fantastic actor who did his role to perfection, nailing both the comedy and the serious aspects of it and seamlessly switched between the tones. He surprisingly also had great chemistry with Andy Samberg, with them playing off each other really well. It’s a shame we didn’t get more of it.

I wouldn’t say the episode overall is bad, but it certainly could have been a lot better.

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canmom · 2 years

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Are you still watching Centaur World? Looking forward to anything you have to say re: Season 2 and the ending.

Ahaha, writing something about this was something I had planned, once I'd finished talking about Houseki no Kuni. But since you've asked~

So, on rewatch, Season 1 of Centaurworld held up very well. It maintained a good balance of humour and pacing, the characters were appealing, and the driving character arc was compelling. I definitely want to say more on that in a minute, but let me comment on Season 2!

Centaurworld is kind of structured like a joke: you have setup, and then payoff. In this case, the payoff is a grand finale featuring reprises of the ideas set up earlier in the story and resolving its major emotional arcs (namely: Horse learning to chill out and connect to her new friends, reuniting Horse and Rider, and Wammawink learning to let go). This setup-payoff structure produces some of the best moments, such as the unexpected reprise of Comfortable Doug with a solo in the S1 finale; it's generally a good basis to build a story around.

Unfortunately this really put themselves in a tough place at the outset of season 2, having fired most of those guns and thus lost most of the narrative momentum. They had some exposition to handle, such as establishing the character of the General and the nature of the Minotaurs as chimeras (which would be thematically important) before we could deliver the big Nowhere King backstory to the finale - an understandable decision given the actual impact of dropping it all as essentially one big 90 minute Disney musical, but with much of Horse's arc already resolved, it left little ground to cover in the first few episodes so it kind of felt like spinning wheels for a bit, even if it was setting up the same payoffs for the finale.

It's just tough for 'imposter syndrome/performance anxiety/did I make the right choice' to live up to 'I must get back to my wife rider in whom I've staked my entire emotional existence in life thus far/will I be too changed for her to recognise me'.

There's also an unfortunate tendency to take a good joke that was evidently popular in the first season and try to spin a lot more out of it; Comfortable Doug's many appearances in Season 2 had the feeling of that time My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic made a whole joke about the fan favourite drawing error 'Derpy Hooves' (disablism aside) - it just felt strained, rather than novel. OK, maybe that’s a bit harsh - Comfortable Doug was like, actually a significant character already! - but it felt like ‘ok here is more of that guy you like so much’.

All the same, after a couple of episodes to ease back in, it hit its stride around Holes Part 3, with the theme being fleshing out the rest of the Herd (who were for s1 almost entirely joke characters) and seeing Horse go through a crisis of confidence.

Honestly? Although Becky Apples was kind of funny, I think there would have been potential if they had put Horse back on the other side of the rift and developed her relationship with Rider onscreen.

There's still a lot to like, and once they actually spelled out what the Nowhere King's deal was, he actually made plenty of thematic sense as a villain. The main problem is perhaps that, by saving it all to the end, we basically have no understanding of what the main conflict is and just see him as 'generic bad guy' until the finale. It's a shame because, conceptually, it's actually a really good use of the 'world of centaurs' concept; an attempt to take a part of oneself and suppress it for the sake of respectability all being portrayed as something horribly misguided and traumatic is... juicy!

I think they made the best of it. It's an impressively ambitious project - the sheer number of songs far exceeds anything I've seen in TV animation - MLPFIM and SU could manage a song once every two or three episodes, whereas this can drop two or three every single episode, almost always with an impressively choreographed animated sequence. If I were more literate in musical theatre, I might be able to better recognise if they're riffing on existing musicals or just using certain familiar song structures. Regardless, it's compelling.

In terms of animation... there was some really strong work at many points. I noticed a very impressive bit of effects animation in the whaletaur episode in s1, and s2 had a couple of "oh, they really had fun there!" fight scenes. There's also a lot to be said for the sheer animation challenge of animating a cast of mostly quadrupeds constantly walking about and emoting. Wonder if anyone's put some up on sakugabooru? ...yeah! mmhm!

When I first watched this show, I was on a bit of an obsessive kick about solid drawing; at that point it felt like the greatest principle of animation was the kind of James Baxter/Toshiyuki Inoue/Mitsuo Iso/Hiroyuki Okiura/Shinya Ohira/etc. feeling of a convincing 3D object in space. Which is to neglect... basically all else in animation. Rewatching it I noticed a lot of the other good they're doing in terms of timing and making things feel bouncy and active; there's some very charming bits of stylisation, with Wammawink sometimes almost looking like a Jonni Phillips character. I'm ashamed I ever felt I could dismiss it as toonboom puppet animation.

I think the main thing that both bugs and interests me, is, well, the sorta faux-anime/disney look they use for the human world. Let me try and explain...

Here's the official turnaround of the main human character, Rider:

And here's a closeup of her face:

You can see that her head structure is very much of the anime template... but it's a kind of, slightly different mode of stylisation; elements like armour are reduced to sharp graphic shapes which can kind of feel like they're made of cardboard. The lines are very even, and much thicker than they would be in anime, with digital precision; there are also very few areas of higher detail to break up the large flat shapes. And, just, it really feels like nothing has any thickness to it! Basically she looks like she's drawn with vectors. And to me... that just doesn't quite work.

Faces are incredibly subtle, and what seems like a very minor tweak, like an increase in line weight, can completely change the impression of a face. The human characters here remind me of the designs of Infinity Train - there's nothing technically wrong with them, they have clear design language and are simple enough to be animated very nicely, but there's this curiously stiff quality. It's interesting as a sort of case study, because these designs are generally a lot more ambitious in terms of anatomical realism than most of what you see in Western TV animation at the moment, so it draws you to try and work out 'what's missing?'

That said, I do feel like the human designs in Season 2 tend to have a stronger identity to them.

On the other hand, I really do like Horse's pre chibification design. The full design sheet is far too big and detailed to include here but it includes some fascinating instructions to the animators:

"A real horse could never hit this pose. Don't be afraid to completely break the anatomy at times."

"Her front legs can act more like arms. When this happens, gravity no longer affects her body like it normally would. No need to make her back legs support her full weight."

"She can hold objects magically. It should always look as ridiculous as possible."

This one on quadruped construction is also fascinating.

Horse's design appears to take quite a lot of the way Dreamworks would construct a horse in a movie like Spirit. (You can see the full collection of design sheets and concept art for Spirit here).

In both designs, the model begins with two spheres, and there is a very clear indication of the plane changes around the bridge of the nose, which gives Horse's face a very strong recognisable structure as she moves around. I imagine it was quite a lot of work to keep animating it though.

Of course, the arc of season 1 sees Horse gradually transform from this kind of Disney/Dreamworks mode of stylisation to a much more simplified graphical design as in a modern TV cartoon.

Visually, this basically removes all the hard right angles in Horse's original design and replaces them with rounded shapes with few clear boundaries. Thematically, this represents a character adapting to the values of Centaur World, i.e., chilling out, learning to communicate and respect their friends rather than fighting a war. Although Horse initially reacts with horror to her transformation, ultimately this is treated by the narrative as unequivocally good; after the finale, the same starts to happen to Rider; we only see the beginning but eventually she's gonna end up like this:

This sense of design language is pretty pervasive. Notably when we see the past of Centaur World, its designs much more resemble the human characters; for example, a certain deertaur:

This design has considerably more complex shapes and sharper angles compared to the current era of Centaurworld, and symbolically this represents that this is a troubled character (who will eventually become the villain).

My feelings about this very explicit design sensibility (many characters joke about how Horse now resembles two beach balls glued together) is... hmm. Of course, Centaur World is a parable - it signals that we shouldn't take its lore too seriously when it starts going out naming characters things like 'Horse' and 'Rider'. Formally, putting these two animation styles side by side and giving them alternate meanings is a compelling device. It naturally makes sense to add a visual layer to the metaphors in the story.

And yet, I miss the element in the first season where the cuteness was experienced as an imposition; the centaurs heavily implied to be burying themselves in their childlike antics to escape from the war, as a perhaps rather unhealthy thing to do. I feel like more could have been done to either develop ro trouble the implied associations - round/soft/cute/willfully ignorant vs. angled/hard/serious/joyless/unable to connect, maybe even look to find some synthesis instead of ultimately just upholding one pole of the presented dichotomy! Haha maybe that's asking a bit much though...

The other fascinating oddity about it is just how... blatantly they paint the Horse/Rider relationship as romantic. Like basically all the drama they get out of it in S2 is about that! All the narrative beats! I wonder what AO3's done with this...

...fewer than I expected if I'm honest. Actually Nowhere King/Woman seems to be the most popular ship, followed by Splendib/Zulius (reasonable, even if they didn't exactly develop that one much outside of a 'this is happening, here's our ship name' joke). But for a show that spent an entire episode parodying fandom, it's really not got much out there at all. Maybe my expectations are rather uh, miscalibrated by MLPFIM's fandom lmao.

As a story about a war, it's of course not really about a war at all, and all military matters are treated in the vaguest terms, totally subordinate to the character arcs. 'The General' might as well be Dad for all the actual soldiering he does. That's fine though, because it's a story about interpersonal relationships and growth, and the war is just set dressing metaphor. (Rider pleading to do war crimes was funny though.)

Anyway, all in all, it's really got a lot going for it; whatever flaws I see in it I think are mere 'unrealised potential' than anything that really kills it, and I had a great time watching again. Very glad I gave it another go in a less miserable state of mind lmao.

#animation #centaur world #centaurworld #solicit bryn's anime opinions #;p

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blindedbythedarkness · 3 years

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Josh,

There’s this show about dying that I always wish I’d showed you; it’s called In The Flesh. I mean, it isn’t exactly about dying; it’s about depression and growing up and not fitting in and... zombies. Yeah, okay, the show’s about zombies but the whole thing’s a massive metaphor, trust me.

To summarize it briefly, the show is about a young boy, Kieren, who comes back from the dead after committing suicide a few years earlier. He took his life after his boyfriend, who had been pressured into joining the army by his homophobic father, was blown up in Afghanistan. Kieren doesn’t exactly have an easy time moving back home though, since the rural northern village he lives in is very anti-zombie, given that before they learnt how to medicate them, all the undead sort of ran rabid around town killing people. Not exactly ideal, I’m sure you’ll agree. So yeah, a lot to unpack there, even though it only ever had 9 episodes in total (something I will forever be salty about).

From the first time I watched the show I fell in love with it. The fact I was so depressed at the time probably helped make me feel understood, but it went deeper than that too. I related to Kieren on so many levels, feeling trapped, excluded and suicidal and other ways I still struggle to put words to. Even the mere physiology of the zombies, the being cold, unhealthily pale, unable to eat and generally falling apart, seriously resonated with my situation.

There’s this saying they have in the show, an affirmation they call it, for the undead struggling with the guilt of what they did:

I am a partially deceased syndrome sufferer and what I did in my untreated state was not my fault.

I’ve always loved that. Not only is it obviously amusing conceptually, but I always felt as though a part of me related. I’m pretty sure I’ve never gone rabid and eaten my neighbour, so in truth I don’t know why I feel that way, but I do and so it weirdly brings me comfort. I even got a T-shirt with it on, maybe you saw it? I’ve had it years now and it’s been washed so many times the letters are starting to peel. I’ve had people, strangers even, comment on it before and laugh a little. I don’t mind, of course, I’m glad they appreciate the joke, but for me it’s more. It’s a reminder that I’m not alone when I catch sight of it in the mirror.

Okay so, I have a slight obsession with a zombie show, why am I telling you about it though? Well, because it very much contributed to saving my life back when I was younger and dangerously suicidal. There’s plenty of heart wrenching scenes in the show, but there’s this one in particular that really etched its effects into my soul. Kieren goes off on his own into the woods after things get shit again in Life Attempt Two, and when he returns home he tells his dad to open up. To just fucking tell him how he’s made him feel by being selfish and “disappearing again”. So that’s what his dad does:

“I was worried sick. You just go out. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. No contact for days.

Jem thinks she knows where you might be. So I put on my jacket and get my torch and I go up into the woods. And I get there. I get to the cave. And there you are. You’re sitting down; you’re leaning on a rock. I think “thank God he’s okay”. But then I get close. I see that Swiss army knife I got you for your birthday. You’re covered in blood. So much blood.

I take you in my arms! I run with you! I run and I run and I run! But I can’t because you’re...”

The first time I watched that scene I sobbed. It broke my heart. I was someone who had been more than toying with the idea of ending my own life in a way not dissimilar to that, but this finally made the impacts of my decision real. When I first watched In The Flesh, I had been jealous of Kieren. Not jealous that he got a second chance at life, but jealous that he had had the guts to take it in the first place. I truly understood why he did it. But that scene, the final scene of the first season, made me feel so fucking guilty. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about hurting my family and friends in committing suicide, it was just that the pain I felt outweighed that guilt. But this, seeing someone confronted about their suicide and how the effects of a decision like that play out; it changed something in me. From that point onwards, as close as I got to ending my life, I could never go through with it. That scene just kept on playing in my head, a virus and a stark reminder that my actions would have consequences. That scene broke my heart and in doing so made sure that it kept beating.

So, Josh, do you see now why I wish I had shown you this show? I mean, I see it in a whole different light now that you’re gone; I’m on the other side of it all. I’m not trying to say that it would have saved your life too. I mean, that would be a lot of pressure for a TV show. But perhaps it would have made you feel less alone; I can think of a hundred ways you would probably have related to Kieren and other characters too. Maybe it would have just entertained you, maybe it would have brought you peace and comfort too. Maybe you wouldn’t have vibed with it at all. I can only speculate. But I wish like fuck I’d at least tried to share it with you. Should of, could of, would of, eh?

For the record, I think it would be pretty cool if you became a partially deceased syndrome sufferer. Although, maybe not the rabid sort. A word of warning though if you ever do: there would be a long queue of people ready to let you know what you did to them, and not all as calmly as Kieren’s dad did.

I miss you so much, Josh.

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script-a-world · 4 years

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I really want to create new foods and recipes for one of my worlds, but I have no idea how I would go about doing research for something like that. Do you guys have any resources or advice that might help? To be more specific for this world, most ingredients are incredibly low quality (but they are in abundance) and any imported ingredients are only used for the rich. I was thinking their food would use a lot of seasoning to mask the quality, but I'm not too sure. Thank you!

Feral: We could actually do with a few more specifics to answer this question as fully as you would probably like, but I’ll do the best I can.

First, I’m not sure whether you want to create recipes using real world ingredients that would in fact be cookable to release on your blog as some kind of companion for your audience or you want to conceptualize some recipes to be able to describe taste, texture, etc. If it’s the first option, creating recipes from scratch is pretty difficult. You might want to consider taking some cooking classes to learn techniques, reading cook books for a lesson in combining ingredients, and doing a lot test cooking to nail down the flavor profiles. If you don’t want to go completely chef-y, you could also take recipes and then tweak them by substituting an ingredient or using a slightly different technique (baking instead of broiling, etc). This would also be helpful in the second case. If by "low quality" you mean "low cost," try looking at food preparation that developed in poorer, underprivileged, or minority communities, like American immigrant cuisine and soul food (the original styles, not the bougie, hipster, “elevated” styles).

For example, understanding how immigrant cuisine differs from motherland cuisine can be particularly helpful in determining how your world’s “rich” food can be adapted into “poor” food. In America we often think of corned beef and cabbage as being a traditional Irish food, but in reality, no one in Ireland really eats corned beef and cabbage - it’s a traditional Irish-American food because poor Irish immigrants could not afford the lamb they would have eaten at home (which was more readily available in say rural Ireland than in New York City and therefore at an affordable cost), and they often could not source any bacon or cured pork products because the butchers who would sell to them were often the Jewish immigrant butchers. So, the cheapest cut of cured meat they could get was corned beef and replaced the traditional proteins they would have used at home.

Second, I’m working off the assumption that your world has the same ingredients as we do, but it’s unclear. When you mention creating new foods, that could mean food preparation or it could mean edible plants and animals. If it’s the latter, then the easiest way to do it would be crossing real world things.

So, for example, everyone’s favorite vegetable on your world may be a cross between a cucumber and a lemon (the flesh is cucumber like but grows in segments in a thick skin that wouldn’t be eaten straight but could be zested, and the flavor is like a very watered down citrus). This also gives you the ability to create recipes by using the two ingredients you crossed.

Also, I’m assuming that you’re using actual food rather than powders and extracts (very common in scifi settings where "real" food is incredibly scarce), which I don’t have too many ideas on how to create recipes that way. Firefly has a pretty good method of just obliquely referring to “protein powders in every color” and showing cans of things but only really showing food prepared and being consumed when it is in fact real food provided to the crew as payment.

Finally, seasoning is a good way to hide low quality ingredients, whether it’s a cheap cut of meat or slightly wilted vegetables. Especially sauces. Especially, especially cream sauces (providing that milk of some kind is one of the ingredients generally available). Sauces make spices go further. Also, keep in mind preservation techniques (salting, smoking, drying, pickling); in the real world what has often made something the “cheap” version is that it is preserved and not fresh (with the common exception of salted foods when salt is an expensive import). But those preservation techniques also infuse additional flavors into the food.

And speaking of the real world - have you ever heard that England conquered most of it in search of spices and then decided it wasn’t going to use any of them? Spices were the purview of the very very wealthy for a very long time. The common folk did not have much access to anything they couldn’t grow in their own backyard. So, the working class dishes we commonly associate with England are not particularly spicy. As you’re deciding how the poor disguise the low quality of their food, whether it's less costly trying to appear more costly or slightly less fresh than one would prefer to eat or whatever, keep in mind what they are able to grow in the soil and climate they have (spices are typically tropical while herbs are more often temperate).

A helpful guide in food experimenting:

Cook Smart: How to Maximize Flavor Series

Part 6: Guide to Adding Flavor with Aromatics

Brainstormed: Low quality how? Like, the bakers put sawdust put in bread to save flour low quality? Our teeth are worn down by forty years old because we live in a desert and the sand gets into our food no matter what we do and grinds our molars to nubs? We only get the worst cuts of meat because it’s all we can afford or the best stuff has to be sacrificed or tithed? Salt is expensive because we don’t live near the sea or any salt deposits so trading for it is pricey? There’s been plenty of cheats, circumstances, and shortcuts throughout history that may decrease what we would call the quality of food, and all of those examples really did happen.

Your idea of quality may be a hoity-toity five star restaurant, or an enormous home-cooked fresh meal, or the tastiest dish with all the seasonings on it. Instead of describing the food as low quality, think about what your people would consider high quality. What do they love? What flavors are common, and what’s rarer and therefore richer? How available is plant-based food, meaning are there herbs and fruit trees in everyone’s garden or is agriculture and import the only way of obtaining them? How available is animal-based food, meaning do these people live as herdsfolk and eat a whole sheep every week including the organs or do fishing boats bring in dozens of kinds of seafood or is the entire population practically vegetarian until traders arrive with preserved meats?

Think about where your people are situated geographically to figure out the resources available to them, and their neighboring countries for trade. Also think about how developed your people are. This website is a timeline of food throughout history, and may help you pin down some barebones basics.

Tex: Both Feral and Brainstormed offer excellent advice, and I’ll be reiterating most of that in my own opinion.

Cooking techniques are cumulative skills that reflect a culture’s technological progression. We started with a plain old fire, so cooking food with that meant techniques like spitroasting - with the invention of pottery, we could put things in containers over, on, and even under said fire, which would bring us “new” techniques like broiling, boiling (comestibles in a liquid), roasting, sautéing, searing, and blanching (comestibles scalded in boiling water and then removed into an ice/cold water bath).

These cumulative skills are also exponential, in that most of these adapted techniques can be combined with other skills. Take, for example, a stew. The base ingredients - meats, vegetables, grains - can be cooked with direct heat (e.g. grilling over a fire), then added to a cooking container (e.g. pots of different compositions) with a fat (e.g. oil, butter) to further cook the ingredients until it’s a desired texture (e.g. “spoon tender”).

This would be a “complete” meal by itself, of course - but it’s a cook’s decision to continue on to a stew because… well, because they think it tastes good, and there could be social/cultural reasons to continue expending effort into their food. Adding a liquid - it could be water/milk, but also a composite liquid (more cooking!) such as a broth - and simmering (low indirect heat over an extended period of time) would turn this dish into a stew.

Stews (and soups, the less dense predecessor) are popular in a great deal of cultures for a variety of reasons. For one, it’s relatively easy to make - Medieval European pottage could be tended over a fire throughout the day, portions taken and the dish stretched with minimal fuss. For two, such dishes are filling, with minimal concentration on the type or number of ingredients - the basic recipe is usually water + grain(s) + vegetable(s), and can be dressed up with whatever extra ingredients are on hand. Vegetables are resource-cheap foods, as they can be grown in family/shared gardens, and grains provide the lion’s share of carbohydrates (glucose, necessary for cell function; see: cellular respiration) as well as other things like protein and fats that vegetables are usually unable to provide in significant quantities.

Soup is, in itself, preceded by gruel. Originally, soup was nothing more than something to dip your bread (or other grain-based, dry food) into, and expanded into more than just a glorified sauce. Gruels are liquid + grain, and even simpler than soups or stews. They’re very easy to make, and often invented when a culture experiences their transition to a sedentary society (marked by the shift from hunting/gathering to agriculture). Breads of some sort usually accompany this because someone will figure out indirect heating (our first baking!).

Bread-beers (Ancient History), as a side note, frequently accompany breads and gruels in terms of cooking technique epochs. The Ancient Egyptians had one, Eastern Europe another (Kvass). This is a cousin, sort of, to gruels and breads in terms of technique, and utilizes the introduction of fermentation (another skill! Possibly discovered by accident via “oh this spoiled food didn’t kill me, neat”) from ingredients such as yeast. Alcohol that doesn’t start from a solid base such as bread is the refined version of this technique.

So far, everything I’ve mentioned is made from staple foods. It is the application of technique that creates such a wide variety. There is some degree of social hierarchy when it comes to what techniques are picked by a cook, if only because some of the more refined (a term I use as a concentration of technique, not an indication of quality) ones are costly in terms of time and sometimes also available tools (e.g. it’s simpler to make a bread-beer than vodka, especially if you don’t have a distillation set-up).

Seasoning is… a thorny topic. Most ingredients that get called “seasoning” - especially in the modern, North American sense - are just plants used in lower ratios than others in a dish. Take basil, for example. When it’s used in low proportions, it’s a seasoning (e.g. tomato sauce with basil). When used in high proportions, it’s an ingredient (e.g. pesto).

Now, there’s significant overlap in which plants are called “seasonings” and which are called “herbs”. This would be because plants designated as herbs are frequently prized in cookery as adding aromatic or savoury elements to a dish - too much can be overpowering (e.g. rosemary in small amounts can be delicious, but in large amounts can be too bitter to enjoy), so they’re often relegated as a component towards flavour profiles. Their physical quantity available to a culture does not necessarily designate “high” or “low” quality, merely the ratio that is culturally-accepted in recipes. (E.g. Italy uses basil in many dishes, but does that make either the dishes or the basil low quality? No.)

Herbs, as another side note, are frequently also used in medicine - hence herbal medicine. The medicinal plants wiki is less biased than the herbal medicine one, and offers some greater anthropological context.

Quality in terms of food is… usually more the ratio of preferred to not preferred qualities. In meat, this would mean things like fat, tendons, and gristle. Food, or rather ingredient, quality is a benchmark of how much time needs to be invested in preparing a dish. It takes significantly less time to cook bread when the grains are already hulled (and oftentimes polished), than if you had to go out to the field and do it yourself. Higher quality = higher convenience.

(Despite what Apicius might claim, spoiled food is not actually edible, and is different than purposefully fermented or cultured foods.)

Higher-quality ingredients means time saved, and that time could be allocated toward more complex cooking techniques. This isn’t always true in practice, since something like a cut of meat is better for one type of dish as opposed to another for practicality’s sake (i.e. if you’ve trimmed your meat so much it’s cubed, you’re not going to get a steak out of it). There’s some debate as to the idea of ingredient quantity vs technique complexity, where touted “high quality” foods (e.g. Sachertorte) use few ingredients, and “low quality” foods have many ingredients - usually seasonings, to mask the subpar flavour of something like a cut of meat.

Like Feral said, sauces are a great carrier for flavour, as well as helping to stretch the usable lifespan of an ingredient. A cut of meat ordinarily good for a steak that’s close to expiration might not be a good steak, but it could make for a decent stew or sausage, both of which could have sauces added to them to increase the complexity of the flavour profile. The food timeline which Brainstormed mentioned also has a timeline on sauces, which I think might interest you.

You mention “all the imported food is for the rich”, and I’m curious about that. Feral gave the example of the British upper-class restricting usage of some spices to the wealthier - and thus upper - classes of their society; is that what you’re referencing? What spices are you using as a base for your world, can they be domesticated? (For that matter, do greenhouses and the accompanying opportunistic entrepreneurs also exist? Or just a general opportunistic individual.)

The economic context of spices can’t be readily dismissed - there’s a weighing of amount of resources against amount of diplomatic tensions, so even if there’s an abundant amount of a given product, the providing nation could well make a money-based rude gesture in the direction of their client and increase the prices to artificially restrict supply. (Take tea, for example. Many, many economic wars have been fought over that [Abstract].)

The fluctuations of class-availability can include a factor of a nation’s influence on the global stage, and they could demand a good at a lower price and in large enough quantities to satisfy - at least temporarily - multiple social classes. This often comes at the cost of quality (here, in terms of purity of ingredients) - you can see this with tea, black pepper, olive oil, and many other class-oriented comestible goods (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I will stress that quality grades aren’t precisely the same for single-source foods and multi-source foods (e.g. sirloin steak vs curry powder), because a drop in single-source quality is more noticeable than multi-source quality due to fewer things to hide an ingredient’s quality behind.

Foods can still be heavily seasoned on both ends of the class spectrum, but there would be differences in local vs foreign (domesticated vs imported), and whether it’s a specialty dish (e.g. foods made for holidays, see: stollen) because infrequently-made dishes on a cultural basis are more likely to have fewer differences in ingredient quality and technique complexity.

There are also some dishes that have artificial class restrictions, because the upper classes have a habit of refusing to eat dishes from the lower classes as a means of social division. This is especially apparent in something like bread (1, 2), but fluctuations of technique complexity and ingredient quality availability can mean that the classifications of bread types can shift (1).

Further Reading

(PDF) Evolution – Culinary Culture – Cooking Technology by Thomas A. Vilgis

History of Cooking by All That Cooking

Feral (again): Modern History has a four part series on food in Medieval England broken down by social class with commentary on how it compares to food today, which may elucidate some of what we’ve been talking about in regards to the culturally variable meaning of “quality” in food.

#pylons #food #Anonymous

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thecarmillacurator · 5 years

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Your Mom Called, You Left Your Game At Home - Carmilla Fic Review & Recommendation

*New Reviews Posted Every Saturday with one-shots and drabble recommendations Mid-Week*

Title: Your Mom Called, You Left Your Game At Home (Softball AU)

Author: catmilla on Ao3, @chaoticbecky on Tumblr

Word Count: 127K

Chapters: 20

Rating: Mostly Teen but with Mature scenes

Ship: Hollstein

Tags I’d Assign: #softball au #rivals to lovers #enemies to lovers

Author’s Synopsis: softball au in which laura and carmilla are pitchers on "rival" softball teams in the silas parks and recreation softball league. laura takes this very seriously, carmilla does not. laura hates carmilla, carmilla loves riling laura up. laura has a strict (personal) rule against not fraternizing with the enemy (save for her best bro kirsch that carmilla stole for her team on purpose) so, what happens when a dry spell, a losing streak, and a very flirtatious carmilla all finally culminate to laura's breaking point?? read and find out!

Readability: Easy. Reading level and narrative flow make this 127k novel feel more like 80k, so it’s an enjoyably fast read considering the length. In the first part of the story, there are punctuation issues relating to dialog: I.e. Using commas at the end of dialog, within the quotation, but then capitalizing the start of the attribution or descriptive text that goes with it, or else using a period within the dialog quote when it should be a comma because there is still attribution/descriptive text to follow. However, eventually the brain gets used to it and it stops being distracting. There are also some “it’s/its” typos, and a few sentences where the author switches up to present tense when, given the context, it should probably be future tense. But again, overall, it’s very easy to read.

Reviewer’s Plot Summary: The definitive (at least to date) Hollstein Softball AU. Laura Hollis’ life is in a bit of a slump, which is why she’s obsessed with leading her city league softball team to a repeat Championship season of glory. Unfortunately, her team can’t stop sucking. Enter Carmilla Karnstein, captain of their rival team, who lives (and loves) to rile Laura up. Only, there’s history there. Six years earlier, they’d led their highschool softball team to a State Championship season with their mutually stellar pitching skills, and the older Karnstein- who had been a bitch and a bully to Laura as a teammate- had gotten all the glory. Laura still hates her for that, and also for what happened between them at the Championship game’s afterparty. Which is why, as Carmilla now flirts and taunts her into a (fr)enemies-with-benefits situation, Laura is ill-equipped to handle evidence that the object of her hatred doesn’t actually hate her back. In fact, for Carmilla, it’s not her team’s standings that matter: It’s the three-balls-and-two-strikes count where it comes to her heart.

Recommended to Read: Yes. It’s by far my favorite softball AU across any fandom I follow.

Review: There are some conceptual cons to this novel for me, and yet, rereading it never feels like a chore. One half-enemies to lovers, one-half unrequited love, it’s a recreational softball league romance that brings in the feel-good dynamic of the whole gang (Laf, Perry, Danny, Kirsch, Will), a good mix of angst and fluff, and the fun, competitive nature of sports rivalries. The

story is written in third person limited (primarily), with Laura as the narrative focus. Also, if you happen to be a Pitch Perfect fan, there will be a few subtle (very, very subtle) Easter eggs for you.

The Con [Edited]: This time, I’m going to put the negative first and simply address it as a “con” rather than “concrit” because I don’t want to put people off reading it (READ IT!), and also, I can’t fairly call it as much “constructive” criticism as personal preference. But here it is: This is not my favorite version of Laura. For my taste, she is a little too much of “a raging bad person” to Carm.

My issue lies only in my personal moral/relationship tastes, not in something about the story itself, so just take that worth a grain of salt. And, further, there *is* a backstory that explains Laura’s dislike of Carmilla and her difficulty in changing her own opinion. (Although, I would have loved to seen some flashback scenes to their time playing high school softball together. I think it would have been exciting, and also made Laura’s tight grip on her hatred a little more fleshed out.) Finally, I easily concede that upon rereading YMCYLYGAH for this review, I made a conscious effort to try and ‘listen’ to this version of Laura’s words and thoughts in my mind’s ear with a view towards favoring heavy sarcasm rather than the vitriolic hate I took it as during my first read. It helped a lot. And, in fact, it may simply be that I just wasn’t getting it the first time around.

The Good: I *love* softball AUs. (Did I mention I really like softball AUs?) This story has great energy. It does a beautiful job balancing the tension of the softball season with the tension of the relationship plot. The balance between what happens in the main characters’ lives outside of both of those things is also nearly expertly done; there’s exactly enough to make the story and world feel sufficiently fleshed out, but not so much that it drags the plot or pacing down. There are two subplots, one for each Laura and Carmilla, that come into the story at exactly the right relative timings in Act II, both of which weave well into the fabric of the main story to support it without coming off as contrived. The minor characters, likewise, have a perfect ratio of being present and mattering, without becoming distracting. (I appreciate the fact that Danny isn’t an overbearing jerk. #dannydeservedbetter)

Ah hem. Here, also allow me to gush for a minute over catmilla’s Carm. How hard she falls for Laura is so adorable. How thoughtful she can be is cute. The fluffiness of her- which Laura refuses to see- is so sweet that it’s tangibly cotton candy. You root for her. And at times, you *hurt* for her. (Which is probably why I had such a hard time with this Laura, because, “Dammit, Jim, WHY DOESN’T LAURA JUST ADORE CARM BACK??!!”) Yet, this Carm keeps swinging for the fence because she’s so in love. Ungh.

Also,something I always enjoy as a reader, and which I believe is a hallmark of really good storytelling, is when location has a pivotal and evolving role in the plot. Here, it’s the softball field. The author does a great job covering in-game action while not devoting a distracting number of scenes to it. But cleverly, she also made so much *more* happen and orbit around the field that without it, the love story itself wouldn’t exist and wouldn’t be nearly as fun. It is sometimes a wing-man, sometimes a foe. It is sometimes a dance floor, and sometimes a war zone. Day and night, heat or cold, I’ll just hijack the saying, “In life as in [soft]ball, all good things happen at home.”

In conclusion, it’s an easy, satisfying read with laughs, tension, fluff, angst, and sex that isn’t overly smutty.

Oh, and did I mention?

Carm gets the girl.

NEXT IN THE QUE: Vampire Hotel by Jenocide (Ao3) / @heyjenocide (Tumblr)

#carmilla #hollstein #carmilla fan fiction #hollstein fan fiction #fic rec #@chaoticbecky #softball au #rivals to lovers #enemies to lovers #the carm curator #the carmilla curator #@thecarmillacurator #carmilla karnstein #laura hollis #danny lawrence #lafontaine #lola perry #carmilla the webseries

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ofrosesandash · 5 years

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100+!

Holy crap, I've broken a hundred followers. And this reboot of Margaery has been kind of fantastic for me, so thank you to everyone following me, and everyone who has talked to or written with me. In honor of this milestone, I am giving a nod and a shout out to some great blogs and their writers. Due to my ass being terrible with noticing these details, I'm using the pronouns "They" because I'm not positive who is a she or a he or in between.

To begin with, my first shout-out to those I feel are constantly under appreciated: MultiMuse Blogs. I mean, there can be rare and wonderful Muses in their rosters. Running one of these Bad Boys is a HUGE commitment to multiple characters you believe you'll use frequently. These peeps are the lifeblood of RP Communities.

@astormofagirl

Cori is amazing and we go way back to when I first started writing Margaery, I wanna say in 2015. We've both bounced between in different URLs and Blogs. While I've only written with their Sansa at this time, they have a lovely selection of ladies they write quite well!

@openxstrings

They've got a selection of top notice rare muses, and at least one nifty OC. It's been a bit since I checked out the roster. The ones I've written with are Edward Covenant from "The Order", Herc Hansen from "Pacific Rim", their Pacific Rim original, and Riddick-aka the badass Scifi Anti-Hero portrayed by Vin Diesal. Not only are all of these characters available, they write them damn well. Talking with them has been a true delight; and though there is a time zone difference, it's worth waiting for them to respond. Not to mention, they're honestly just great to talk to about antics planned or occurred.

@fallesto

This lovely person reblogs a roster of their active muses. They've got some of the tougher ones in the fandom-Cleganes, Joffrey, Qyburn, Selmy, and others. The roster also currently includes all of Margaery's husband. You should, honestly, already be following them.

@asoiafundone

A multi Muse by Lady Grey. A fantastic Mun and a dynamite writer. We haven't written quite as much as I'd like yet-but we have spoken a bit. Lovely person, brilliant writer.

@orionknytechildofzeus‌

Don't let the URL fool you, they’ve got more then one muse. They've got a cool selection of OC's and Canon characters, and they're a lot of fun to write with!

@sarcasmasadefense

I haven't written with them yet (my bad), but they seem very nice, and on their roster includes the lost Tyrell brothers, Willas and Garlan!

@mcssagcinabottlc

A lovely person I spoke to and wrote with a little; their roster contains Margaery's sister in law, Leonette Fossoway.

The Squad

These are two who've had the most OOC and partial crack interactions which. These discussions have been pretty much perfect, so, I identify them as Margaery's squad.

@bastardslayer

I mean, look at that URL. There are many talented Sansa's on this site, but that URL definitely stands out to me. We've been plotting and talking out of character almost fairly regularly, and they've got a great grasp of their muse.

@chevalier-de-la-fleurs

Similarly there are a number of great Loras's out there. That said, this particular Loras writer has always been the easiest for me to talk to. I don't know them well, but they're friendly, and a great writer, and I've really enjoyed writing with them.

Precious Ones

These are people I love writing with. Maybe they aren't in Margaery's squad (at least yet), but she definitely enjoys her time with them, and is prepared to fight for them.

@outlawerofbeets

NORA IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SUNSHINE SPOT IN THE FANDOM. We mostly scream head canons about Margaery and her smol King Husband back and forth at each other, but we have threaded. It's always a treat, and it usually tugs at my heart strings. For instance, once upon a time, Margaery found herself romantic with a Tywin. And she started to apologize to Tommen and explain she didn't think it was wise if they married, because she'd fallen in love with another. When she revealed who, Nora's Tommen's response was the most precious, purest things ever. "But he's old!" Also they've got an older Tommen/Arya ship that's to die for.

@agirlofwinterfell

This is the first time Margaery has really connected to an Arya. And, like most of the older people Arya meets, she would kill for this murder inclined child. We've already got one AU for my Olen verse, where both Arya and Margaery are at the wall pretending to be boys.

@a-maimed-man-and-bitter

So far we've got one thread; but ya know, it's been great watching Margaery and Jaime interact. This is furthered by the fact that their grasp of Jaime hurts my heart.

@mombeavty

Margaery is so happy to finally connect to her twice sister by law. And honestly, I've never quite grokked full book or show canon, as I personally favor blended-so I really like what the mun has done with their muse.

The Greatest Ladies GRRM Inspired

I have a mad love for original characters. While writing a pre-established character takes talent, original characters express one's love and passion for a fandom. That fandom has inspired a whole character. Side note, I honestly love original character relations to canon characters. (If you couldn't tell). I don't see role play as needing to follow canon, as long as everyone acts in character. So, the more the merrier.

@thelittlestrcse

Margaery didn't know how much she wanted a real sister until Trysta appeared. I'm a bit slow to respond to my threads with them, but this isn't commentary on my appreciation for mun or muse.

@lilliyxn

A newer lovely muse, one can never have enough Blackwaters. Where GRRM stopped with Bronn, they decided he needed a sister.

@meryllfrey

Honestly this is an original character that's managed to stick around, and that's saying something. Writing an OC can be extremely discouraging, with minimal interaction, almost no chance at shipping. But Lady Grey's Meryll Frey is a testament of creativity and determination.

Shout Outs

These are people I've talked to but for whatever reason haven't written with yet. For some of them, this is strictly on the standard of Margaery wouldn't interact with them, or I haven't cooked up anything yet.

@truetargaryen

This is a super sweet muse running a book based Danaerys Targaryean. While I favor blended canon myself, book canon is nuanced, so pulling it off is an impressive ability. And pull it off, they do.

@exilekniight

I first ran into them on one of my OC blogs, and honestly, I love them. Other then a previous absence of Jorah Mormonts in the fandom, well, let me quote them "Jorah Mormont FUCKS". This highlights their delightful attitude.

@longmayshereignxcersei

For obvious reasons, Margaery and Cersei will never be best buddies. That said, this is still my personal favorite Cersei-and not just because they put up with my originals. They're lovely as a person, and a very talented writer with some brilliant insight about their muse.

@foreignaccent

This is another monument of the fandom. I've been dabbling between different muses since Season 3, and I can usually find that URL around. A fandom treasure, and a nice person

@potterstillstinks

In talks with them, I fleshed out Margaery's wizarding world verse. They also put up with me because we were in the middle of discussion when I found myself in the ER due to a negative medication reaction. Even checked in. So, if you've got an HP verse, I strongly suggest following this Draco Malfoy.

Shameless Self Promo For Other Blogs of Mine You Should Check Out:

Did you know the Hightower's - Margaery's Mother's Family - are actually really interesting? They have a Valyrian blade called Vigilance. Their house is one of the oldest, they man a Lighthouse, and their words are "We Light the Way". OH and more notably, they're rumored to dabble in alchemy, necromancy, and other magic. So Margaery has two side Blogs: One for her mother, and one for one of her Aunts.

@vigilantalerie

Alerie Hightower is probably the mother of your favorite Tyrell. Olenna was born a Redwyne, she doesn't count. That's right-this is Mace Tyrell's wife, mother of Willas, Garlan, Loras, Margaery-and Trysta too!

@madmaidmalora

First of all, consider that that's not just a clever url. That's literally what she's called-the Mad Maid, rumored to dabble in spells, last seen locked away with her father looking for a method to stop the Greyjoy Incursion.

Next up I have a pair of OC Families. The Wildcrows, completely Original Content, and House Ferren-mostly original content.

@thewildcrows

Technically Alyssa and Baelor Wildcrow had different names when I first conceptualized them. But those original concepts were AU's for characters whose face claims already existed in Game of Thrones-and characters I'm actually plugging in original works. As I result, I created these two. Lys and Bael Wildcrow are Sellswords born of a Night's watch Deserter and a Wildling. Their father may have been a Blackfyre, but they have no idea what that means-nor would either of them care. If I'm not bothering with giving them a claim, why bother making them Blackfyres? One: I wanted to give them purple eyes. Two: Fire invulnerability neither of them realizes they have, as they grew up isolated. I find this could make for excellent hijinks.

@ladyferren

See, I love ferrets. Probably my favorite animal. So when a canon house was revealed called Ferren with two silver ferrets on its banner, I was desperate to know more. Except there wasn't much. They existed. Banner House of House Lannister. So I got a little carried away creating a history of a House and occupants to inhabit it. While the primary character is Seiran-the sudden Lady of her house after her father's sudden death-I also have the whole damn house hold available for interactions.

Finally, just a pair of fandomless girls I think you might just like:

@trixboomblast

Beatrix is a favorite creation of mine. She's a fandomless original character with explosive tendencies, behaviors, and habits.

@wikipediawoman

This is a side blog of Beatrix. Deia was inspired by Deadpool-what with the ability to poke the Fourth Wall and know way more then she should about pre-established character. I'm winging her as well somewhere between a Time Agent from Doctor Who and a member of the Temps Commision from Netflix's Umbrella Academy Adapttion.

#Falling Petals || PSA #((HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS))#((THANK YOU!!!))

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arachcobra · 5 years

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Winx Club A Magical Adventure 1/3 Review

Father of the year, right fucking there.

ArachCobra

So it all starts out with a new year beginning at Alfea. Not that this will have any impact on anything and if you're asking yourself what year it is by now, then you've clearly given it more thought than the people making this movie.

Hardly have the festivities begun before people start turning into frogs and the Trix attack.

Griffin just find the whole ordeal funny and Faragonda just sighs like this is another student prank and not a sudden and unexpected attack by three well known criminals who more than once have aided extremely dangerous villains.

Lucy and Mirta also fight. For some reason. I dunno.

Anyway, the Winx minus Bloom save the day and begin restoring people to a non-froggy existence.

Speaking of Bloom, she's currently with her royal biological parents. She manages to enjoy her morning for about a minute before three servants storm her room, dress her and attempt to make her eat a live fish. I will admit, this scene is actually funny.

Bloom escapes into an room with a... Pool? Let's go with pool. After releasing the fish, she has a short chat with her ghost sister.

She then runs into her parents who give her a horse. There's no indication that Bloom has any equestrian skills whatsoever, but sure, girls love horses, so just throw her on one and it'll all work out.

I mean, it does, but that's just narrative convenience.

She runs into Sky, who offer to take her for a real ride.

By which I mean he'll steer the horse for a while. Get your mind out of the gutter. This is wholesome family fun.

Well, as wholesome as forcing the horse into a death defying leap over a gorge that looks quite deep. Kiko almost falls off in the process. It's so hilarious when people endanger their pets. And themselves, to be honest.

So getting back, Sky takes Bloom through the castle garden and proposes to her. On a nearby balcony, Bloom's parents spy on them, with Oritel noting that he specifically had some bushes or trees cut down so the area wouldn't be hidden any longer. That's... All kinds of creepy. Seriously, not cool.

Meanwhile, the Trix return to their current evil employers, the Ancestral Witches. How they got to serve them is unexplained. I mean, season 3 ended with them being carted off to Lightrock, so how did they break out again? It's a mystery. Either way, they're ordered to go bug the pixies.

Sky returns home to tell his father the good news. His father claims that they are bad news and that he must call off the wedding, before revealing a sealed scroll containing his dark secrets. The scene is fine conceptually, but man does it feel rushed.

Back with Bloom, we get a wedding shenanigans montage. Then Sky calls and calls off the wedding. Instead of wondering who hijacked her boyfriend's mind this time or concluding based on her many years of associating with him that something must have happened, she has a tearful breakdown, while her father snaps and decides that the only way to fix his daughter's broken heart is to be a complete asshole. Nothing about this makes any sense.

The other Winx suddenly hears of Bloom's upcoming wedding and decides to act.

Sky then tries to get to Bloom so he can explain, but finds himself uninvited. So he mugs two innocent bachelors for their clothes in order to compose a dumb disguise. Meanwhile, Stella manages to force her way past the two armed and trained castle guards by yelling and swinging her arms wildly.

Good grief, why did the Ancestral Witches need to curse Domino? Their army could have been taken down by a kindergarten's worth of toddlers armed with crayons.

Inside, they learn from Bloom that her father has decided to marry her off as a way to get back at Sky. As I said, asshole. So the girls try to make Bloom unattractive by making her wear glasses and bracers. Because stereotypically nerdy looking girls are the epitome of unattractiveness.

Dear Winx Club. You're cordially invited to go fuck yourself.

Anyway, the whole thing backfires because the first bachelor is a stereotypical male nerd who find Bloom attractive, despite her attempts at looking repulsive. He tries to win her over with comic books and action figures. Ha, ha. Let's all laugh at him, because he is a nerd.

Seriously, this scene. It works much better with the two other bachelors, who respectively is a braggart that accidentally depants himself and a gluttonous groper who gets chased off with fire after he slaps Bloom on the bum. Those are actually funny. But the first guy, who's last seen running out of the throne room crying, does nothing but like Bloom and try to share his interests. His crime is really being a nerd. And I find that insulting.

So at the end, Sky sneaks in and then his disguise falls apart. Oritel refuses to listen to reason, Sky escapes and the girls tell the royal jackass off, before leaving.

All in all, a mixture of okay or bad scenes, with some actually funny moments. The first third does suffer from severe compression though and many scenes feel like they can barely breathe.

Givenea

So... First half an hour of the second movie, what to say about it.

Not much happens. Bloom’s is established to have moved back to Domino, she gets engaged to Sky, he breaks it of for no discernible reason (There is something that his Dad might have done), aaand Bloom dad is a dick…

That’s it.

Seriously, Bloom’s dad is the worst. His reactions to Bloom and Sky’s relationship: Spy on them while they’re on a date and the first time they hit a snag he tries to set op Bloom for an impromptu arranged marriage. And she doesn’t even call him out. I thought Bloom had more of a temper than that… and more of a backbone.

Oh, and the Trix are here and work for the ancestral witches.

Seems a little unnecessary, with Bloom’s newfound relationship with her parents, the conflict between her and her dad, Bloom and Sky’s marriage, and whatever was the deal with Sky’s dad, the movie would have enough to focus on. I know, I said not a lot happened. But there was a lot of establishing going on, then there should be fleshing out, and then a conclusion to these things. The Trix seem like they belong in a different movie. One about action and adventure, this one seems to be about family matters.

I don’t know, maybe the Trix are on contract. Has to appear in every season and movie.

Link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13311272/1/Winx-Club-Rewrite-4-5-Ties-from-the-Past

#winx club #winx club rewrite #review

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overthinkingkdrama · 5 years

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Exit Rant: Mr. Sunshine

[This is intended to be a spoiler free review of Mr. Sunshine but it may include a few minor spoilers throughout. It’s also long as all hell. Enjoy.]

Wow, here I am with my Mr. Sunshine review and it's only...*looks at wrist despite not wearing a watch* nearly three months after the final episode aired. Totally in keeping with this blog's commitment to publishing consistent and relevant content *manic laughter*.

The truth is, even if it hadn't been bad timing schedule-wise, Mr. Sunshine was going to be a difficult drama for me to review. This drama has so much to recommend it in terms of beautiful production, epic scope, unique period setting and blockbuster cast. There is something conceptually mesmerizing about Mr. Sunshine that engaged my basest fangirl and aesthetic sensibilities, but the actual experience of watching the episodes does not live up all the premise promises. What Mr. Sunshine delivers as a drama is, paradoxically, less than the sum of it's parts.

Let's focus on the positive first.

The cast in this drama is god-tier. You're rarely going to find an ensemble cast like this outside of Chungmuro. Your first, second and third leads all can and have headlined films and dramas of their own, and a lot of the stars here (like Kim Tae Ri of The Handmaiden fame) have critically acclaimed film pedigrees.

There's a lot to say about the actors and the performances, and there's no way I'm going to get to all of it. The extended cast is large and exceptionally great, and I'm not going to be able to remember and talk about everyone by name, so I'm going to have to limit myself to the main cast.

It's really the cast that moves heaven and earth to make this script work. To the degree that sometimes it felt that each actor lived in their character and lent flesh and texture where the writing let us down. Kim Tae Ri, played Ae Shin with so much fierceness and unshakable dignity that I couldn't stop cheering for her, even when the plot sidelined her character for what felt like episodes at a time.

For many people, the rousing showstopper performance of the drama was Yoo Yeon Seok as Gu Dong Mae. Early in the life cycle of the drama I recall hearing that Kim Eun Sook got herself embroiled in some controversy because people felt that the Japanese-sympathizer Dong Mae was far too likable considering his political ideology. Some hasty shuffling was done and rather than being characterized as a bald-faced fascist, Dong Mae became more of a freewheeling mercenary gangster-type. This was a positive change in my opinion. I don't want to retread what has already been said (a lot of it by me) about Dong Mae, but YYS has never been and may never be as interesting or as sexy as he was in Mr. Sunshine, in my opinion. He plays the morally grey character with edge and blazing charisma and, if nothing else does, makes the drama worth checking out.

Information broker and enigmatic owner of the Glory Hotel, Kudo Hina, as portrayed by Kim Min Jung and (my personal favorite) and the soulful Hui Seong, born into a blood-soaked privilege he can't escape, played by Byun Yo Han, wonderfully round out the cast and are, if anything, tragic underutilized by the plot. The only person here who perhaps underwhelms is Lee Byung Hun as the titular main character. I don't have strong feelings about him as an actor or as a person one way or the other. I've enjoyed some movies he's been a part of. I do feel that visually he looks too old for baby-faced Kim Tae Ri, but I'm almost used to that kind of thing in Dramaland. His performance is perhaps meant to be restrained--nigh on repressed--but it comes off as a bit bland and wooden. Which isn’t to say he’s bad, and I feel Eugene had a lot of potential to be a very interesting character just...decidedly less interesting than everyone else.

A lot of praise has been heaped on the way this drama looks, and I will agree, it’s a very pretty show. Personally, I disliked how heavily color graded certain scenes, especially outdoor scenes were. I found it a bit distracting and it took away from how otherwise gorgeous some of the scenery in this is when the sky is tan or everything in a scene is tinted blue for some reason. But the production deserves a lot of credit for creating a full and lived in feeling world, for the beauty of the sets and the costumes, the sheer attention to detail, and the way they used all four seasons to set the tone and give you a sense of the passage of time.

And let me just state that during Mr. Sunshine’s run I was decidedly obsessed with it. I posted about it, I talked about it to my friends, I talked several of those friends into watching it with me...and a few of those people still speak to me to this day. When I start criticizing it here in a few seconds, know that doesn’t mean I didn’t get a lot of hours of enjoyment out of this drama or that I think I’m too good for this show. I’ve seen 4 of Kim Eun Sook’s dramas so far and this is easily the best one. It’s not just better than Goblin, DOTS and Heirs, it’s miles better. Is that everything? I think that about covers it.

Now for the bad stuff...

I’ve said this in the past in relation to Goblin, but it bears repeating: Kim Eun Sook is good--possibly even great--at creating singular, iconic story moments and absolute rubbish at developing a cohesive plot that builds tension over multiple episodes and pays off in a logical way. At the time I said it I was basing it off of relatively little experience with her writing, but I’ve seen the pattern repeat itself two more times since then and I’m increasingly convinced that I’m a genius.

I do believe there are extenuating factors that account for the poor pacing of her dramas. The number of episodes and the episode length might not be within Kim Eun Sook’s control and she’s not responsible for poor editing either. Both Goblin and Mr. Sunshine suffer a lot because of bloated run time, and maybe that’s the network’s fault but it leaves plot feeling thin in places, even like it’s futilely spinning it’s wheels waiting for the next important event to come along.

With Mr. Sunshine the issue wasn’t even that there wasn’t enough interesting plot or character backstories to fill 24, hour plus episodes, possibly even more, it was that at times it felt like the drama flatly refused to delve into the interesting details, preferring to leave us miserably treading water in the doldrums of the story. It felt like we had to beg and wait for even morsels of backstory about certain characters--the drama was especially mum regarding Kuda Hina’s history--while the two leads endlessly mooned over one another. How many scenes did we need to watch Eugene and Ae Shin soulfully stare at one another?

Mr. Sunshine never successfully builds momentum until the last 2 or 3 episodes of the run. And while there is a lot of lip service paid to guns and glory and sad endings, but much of the drama feels like it's milling around with hands in pockets waiting for the tragic curtain call. Even the badass sniper heroine is frequently sidelined. It feels like the story remains stubbornly in the set up phase, one step forward and two steps back. It's as though Kim Eun Sook has all of these wonderful toys--great characters, huge budget, interesting time period/setting--and she simply doesn't know what to do with them.

Consistently my frustration with Mr. Sunshine was its inability to effectively incorporate the extended cast into the plot. It feels like all characters exist in separate bubbles waiting for their turn to have a scene. Those scenes are interesting but maddeningly brief, and then they are shuffled backstage once again until it's once again time for their requisite 5-10 minutes of screen time per episode.

This problem is especially present in the main cast with Dong Mae, Hina and Hui Seong. And that is what is so deeply exasperating about this drama, because there is just enough good peppered in to keep me invested, so many great elements poorly employed. It makes one want to take KES's script away from her and take it home and fix it yourself, because you just know she's not treating it right.

When calamity comes, and it does, it feels disproportionate and somewhat unsatisfying, because the build up didn’t do it justice. The drama ends with a rousing crescendo, but it feels that the individual character arcs were never allowed to reach their full potential. I’m not one to shy away from tragedy, but it left me feeling rather empty.

I wish I could a finer point on it than that, but it’s a murky issue to me. I know I’m not connecting with the story as much as I want to, but it’s hard to put my finger on the exact reason and that just adds to my frustration with it.

I stand by my assertion that this is still the best KES drama I have watched. Thought admittedly I’ve still only seen 4 of them, this one shows the most promise and, I think, the most growth. But it’s not there yet. I don’t know if I could ever watch it again, but I’m glad I watched it once. If for nothing else for the fantastic performances of several old and new favorites. I give Mr. Sunshine an 8.5/10, which is probably too high considering everything I’ve said about it up to this point. However, it’s just too strong in terms of overall production and cast for me to feel good about rating it any lower.

#Mr. Sunshine #mister sunshine #kim tae ri #byun yo han #yoo yeon seok #exit rant #exit rave #kdrama review

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pass-the-bechdel · 5 years

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Brooklyn Nine-Nine season three full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

73.91% (seventeen of twenty-three).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

33.21%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Three (episode three ‘Boyle’s Hunch’ (41.66%), episode eleven ‘Hostage Situation’ (45.45%), and episode twenty-one ‘Maximum Security’ (40%)).

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Eighteen. Seven who appeared in more than one episode, three who appeared in at least half the episodes, and three who appeared in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Forty-eight. Eleven who appeared in more than one episode, six who appeared in at least half the episodes, and four who appeared in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

Nothing bad, but nothing particularly impressive either, which is a let-down for this show. It has encouraged its audience to expect a higher standard (average rating of 3).

General Season Quality:

Messy. Not disastrous, but not quite the sure thing it felt like it was in the first two seasons. It’s still a good time, but it feels unfocused and occasionally tone-deaf.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Well, the good news is that despite the stats not being as good as I hoped they might be for this show, they are an improvement on the first and second seasons, albeit a negligible one. Something is better than nothing. Not that the something we got was that dire; I’m just not really sure what to say about it, in the end. I said it was messy, and I meant it.

The season started out ok, with the status quo all changed up, Holt in the PR division, the Vulture in the Nine-nine. I do think it was a good move, not dragging out that set up for too long, but they had good fun with it for the few episodes that it lasted, and most importantly, they milked some great character/relationship fodder out of it, proving that it wasn’t just a bang-and-bluster idea to close out the second season, with no real fallout on the other side. As much as we both want our Captain back and can feel fairly sure that we’ll get him, delivering on that and returning to the status quo within the first episode or two of the season would have cheapened the event. A handful of episodes of hardship followed by an emotionally satisfying sacrifice to restore the natural order is much, much better. It’s not about shocking twists, it’s about character arcs, and the journey to Holt’s reinstatement was a quality one that enhanced the personal and combined narratives of Holt, Jake, and Amy. Unfortunately, it seems like the quality journeys and character-enhancing narratives kinda stopped there.

Obviously, various other events took place after that arc concluded, and many opened up new avenues of exploration for our characters. The problem is the consistency of that exploration, or rather, the lack of it. The personal lives and narratives of the characters seemed to be on-again, off-again, there was little sense of them as developing events that remain in play even when they’re not actively on screen. For example: there’s no forgetting that Terry has twin girls at home in the first two seasons, even though the kids and his wife are almost never on screen. Terry mentions them often, he has sub-plots relevant to his home life even if the home life itself isn’t depicted, and even when there’s no explicit evidence that he’s a family man, it remains present in his personality; he’s responsible and settled, he’s not on the dating scene, he’s a paternal presence for the rest of the squad, etc. There’s a consistent image of Terry Jeffords that maintains our memory of his personal details even when they’re not active elements of his on-screen behaviour or plots. The fact that he just welcomed a third child this season, however? Easily forgotten. It almost never comes up at all. A major change like that SHOULD be reflected in his character (Terry is extra tired lately; Terry is taking extra shifts for the money OR Terry is avoiding working overtime so that he can get home to help with the family; Terry is more stressed; Terry is extra friendly because he’s full of familial love and it’s overflowing into his work life). Normally, these are exactly the sorts of things that would be incorporated into subplots that allow us to explore different facets of the character, thereby reinforcing the audience’s retention of new character details while also allowing the character to get into whatever fun little not-necessarily-meaningful shenanigans the plot wants of them. This season frequently lacked this kind of basic character consistency, using characters for random not-necessarily-meaningful shenanigans that could have happened at any time in the series, or with any character. WHO is involved becomes irrelevant, because their personality isn’t being used to enhance the plot, there’s nothing being continued or fleshed out or just reinforced in the audience’s memory, and that leaves us with nothing much to hold on to. Stuff happened, and maybe it was fun in the moment, but you forget it almost as soon as it leaves the screen.

The consequence of a lack of character engagement - not the same thing as just having the character’s be present - is that disjointed effect that I complained about regularly across the season as I struggled with subplots that I frequently forgot were happening even mid-episode, despite the fact that conceptually at least, they were fun ideas. Nothing was using the characters properly, and so their personalities seemed to be shelved whenever they weren’t being handed specific single-episode personal content, and the consequence of THAT was that sometimes even when the characters were ‘on’, they felt off, forced, awkward, because their behaviour wasn’t consistent with what it had been the previous episode when they were given some meaningless subplot that existed for no other reason than to make sure all the actors earned their paychecks week by week. And that’s part of the problem, again: shenanigans written not for character, but just to fill space, just to give whoever isn’t involved in the central plot of the episode something to do in the meantime. They were much, much better at making the narratives flow together in the first two seasons, so that even perfunctory busy-work subplots didn’t FEEL like perfunctory busy-work subplots. Again, the key to that was character engagement, not just character presence. The shenanigans should be driven by the personalities of the characters; if the personalities of the characters are being molded to facilitate a shenanigan, you’re getting character presence, not engagement.

AND THEN THERE WAS PIMENTO. As I noted while watching the episodes, both the dude and the plot he brought with him were erratic, sometimes super serious, high-stakes, and not funny, and sometimes slapsticky weird-for-the-sake-of-it comedy, and the tonal back and forth was a mess. There were aspects of Pimento’s very clear need for intensive therapy which I was not comfortable seeing as the butt of a joke, and of course the whole plot of FBI moles and witness protection which brought us to our season finale and the status quo shake-up coming in to next season was a cut entirely above what the show had served us previously. At mid-season, they did their very own Die Hard episode, and I was delighted by how they balanced the action-movie-style jeopardy with the show’s traditional comedic flavour. The Pimento episodes and the story that followed was still fun, still good watching, and it was some of the most character-consistent and engaged plotting they had turned in over a very patchy season, but it also set a strange precedent on a wobbly foundation. I’m not sure the show can sustain this level of serious intrigue, or that it intends to, and my concern is that it’s hard to back off from something like this and return to being irreverent without leaving a weird dark cloud over the show. Pimento and his game-changer narrative came out of nowhere, meaning that even when it was good, it was out of place, and I’m not sure what else I can say about that until I’ve seen how it plays out in season four. It just feels kinda like no one was paying that much attention to what kind of stories they were telling in this season, or how it was hanging together, or whether or not individual characters were having meaningful narratives that continued to impact their lives in large or small ways as time went by, the way that normal things do. I guess my wish-list for season four is looking pretty clear at this point. Nine-nine?

#Brooklyn Nine-Nine #Brooklyn Nine-Nine season three #Bechdel Test #female representation #full season review #B99

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jcmorrigan · 5 years

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So I'm guessing from your teaser of TBTC, you've seen Wakfu Season 3. Thoughts?

Terrible. Absolutely terrible.

If you enjoyed Wakfu S3 and you don’t want to see me just TEAR INTO IT, turn away now! Because this is a RANT INCOMING!

So first and foremost, the big problem is Oropo. They overshot when trying to conceptualize the new biggest threat that could hit the World of Twelve. A guy trying to slay and replace the gods because they left him behind? Good! Solid concept! But he’s also a dark clone of the hero who was accidentally created during the climax of the last arc but we never knew it? Ummm…that’s a bit of a stretch. Also, he’s been around since the beginning of time and influencing history for millennia AAAAAND IT JUST GOT STUPID.

Really, they would’ve been fine if Oropo were just some dude who we’d never met before who was mad at the gods. That’s sympathetic. This whole Eliotrope thing (IT’S THE SAME NAME AS ELIATROPE BUT WITH ONE VOWEL SWITCHED?) is too complicated and just too unbelievable. Also, yeah, let’s not foreshadow this at all and pack all the exposition about why Eliotropes exist into a five-minute flashback.

Not to mention that his messing with history means that most of the threats we’ve dealt with up until now are his fault. We will never not live in a timeline where Nox became Nox BECAUSE OROPO ARRANGED THAT. Which cheapens Nox’s original motivation of “a formerly good man who caused his own destruction, but then, due to the combination of that and an accident, was motivated to change time to undo his mistakes.”

Same case with Ogrest. The OVAs set up a nice background for him about being sad because Otomaï abandoned him, and that was simple enough to understand and tugged at heartstrings. The extended lore of course has the incident about Dathura leaving him, which is again an understandable motivation. And all of this is Ogrest’s own story. It’s his own agency. This is a thing that happens to people. His father abandoned him, his lover betrayed him, and he became so sad, he flooded the world because he can’t control his tears. Oh, but what’s this now? Turns out Dathura didn’t leave him. Oropo just stole her away. Meaning Ogrest’s tragedy is now just a big pile of “Oropo did it again!” and honestly, at this point, we’re just trying to tack the mythos’ biggest tragedies onto the résumé of a subpar villain to make him seem scarier.

Not to mention this is my personal preference, but the whole subplot about Oropo pretending to love Echo when he wanted Amalia all along was really not to my taste. You had the chance to do one of two of my favorite villain tropes: 1) Oropo/Echo as partners in crime who are evil but also in true love, or 2) Oropo as Amalia’s creepy stalker for a whole season, adding the yandere dimension to his villainy and upping his threat level on a personal standard. They did NEITHER.

Also, the fact that Oropo tried to taunt Yugo with visions of Nox and Qilby telling him off for leaving them to terrible fates is 50% wrong. Would Qilby guilt Yugo over stranding him in the White Dimension, and would Yugo feel that guilt? ABSOLUTELY YES. But Nox? Nox left the battlefield to die quietly. He realized the weight of his sins. Nox would NOT guilt Yugo. And Yugo knows he did right by Nox. Oropo doesn’t understand Nox at all, despite being the guy WHO CREATED HIM.

Now, on to some complaints with the new gods in the tower.

We didn’t see the reasons for a lot of them actually WANTING to overthrow the gods. This is supposed to be a group that felt like life left them behind and so wants to take charge of it. The Osamodas girl who wanted to take care of her animals? YES. GOOD. GREAT. THAT’S WHAT THE REST OF THEM SHOULD’VE BEEN LIKE. But we never saw the motivations for most of them. We can assume Ush was just in it for a power grab, Dark Vlad was literally brainwashed, and…why did Black Bump, Toxine, the Sacrier, and Arpagone even want in on this plan? I love action shows that have good battle sequences, but I feel like in a LOT of these cases, the battles against the various new gods usurped us actually getting to KNOW them and SYMPATHIZE with their reasoning for doing this scheme.

I was afraid from day one that they were going to make extended canon stuff that wasn’t easily accessible part of the main series and expect us to just know about it, and Dark Vlad proved me right on that front. I KNOW Dark Vlad was explained in all the comics and spinoffs. But I still don’t have a clear idea of what he is because he wasn’t explained anywhere I saw.

Why even have a Sacrier if we weren’t going to meet her at all?

Black Bump is just a horrid waste of a character. Because we needed a villain with a panty fetish. Oh, wait, no, I guess it’s not a fetish. He just collects panties for completely non-sexual reasons. …WHAT?

Arpagone had ten million years of buildup and ten seconds of payoff. What EXACTLY was the resolution between her and Ruel? (Also, why is Ruel being depicted as a bad guy for avoiding a relationship that would’ve ruined his and Arpagone’s life financially and wound both of them up homeless? I know love is more important than money, but I’ve seen stuff in the real world, and I know you have to be able to balance your standard of living with your relationships. I have a good friend who got into a relationship for love and ended up financially TRASHED and stressed out for three years.)

Then there’s…Amalia and Yugo’s relationship. Hoo boy. So I always thought it would end up with Yugo confessing his love to Amalia and her turning him down because he doesn’t age and is therefore too young for her. But…it’s the other way around? Why is 20-year-old Amalia still interested in eternally-14-year-old Yugo? I love Amalia and I REALLY don’t like the implications surrounding this. I’m just calling it a writing fumble and going on believing that Amalia isn’t a creep. But then it comes out that the real reason Yugo doesn’t want to be in a relationship is because he still thinks Amalia is self-absorbed, which…yes, is her fatal flaw, but isn’t something he ever picked on before that exact moment. She overhears this because of course she does…AND THEY NEVER GET THE CHANCE TO DISCUSS THAT PROBLEM. Which is frustrating as all get-out. I don’t know if they’re saving it for the next season or if they just intend to drop the issue. But, like, why have a communication problem between them if they were never going to solve it? Why leave that thread dangling?

Finally, NO. REMINGTON. SMISSE. We went to all the trouble of canonizing that he survived EVERY near-death experience he suffered in S2 and beyond and then that he is able to travel dimensions without explanation in the OVAs. And…he’s just…gone now? He doesn’t show up? THE AUDIENCE LOVES HIM. HE GOT HIS OWN SPINOFF COMIC BECAUSE OF HOW MUCH PEOPLE LOVE HIM. WHY WOULDN’T YOU. The last time we saw him was with Ush, and they brought USH back and that would have been the PERFECT way to bring Rémy in. But I dunno, maybe they killed him off permanently in his spinoff comic and they just expect us to know that because they refuse to recap the extended canon’s important points in the actual show.

Anyway, S3 basically tried to pack too much into 13 episodes and failed to flesh out any of the concepts it brought up…many of which were garbage to begin with. I’m not sure whether or not I’m on board for S4. I am MORBIDLY curious to see what Ingloriam looks like and meet the gods of the twelve races. But we will NEVER NOT LIVE IN A TIMELINE WHERE OROPO CREATED NOX.

#wakfu critical #wakfu spoilers

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murasaki-murasame · 5 years

Text

The moral of :re episode 21 is that Hide is The Absolute Best, and I refuse to hear any objections to that fact :)

Seriously though, this episode was really nice, and actually fixed some of the issues I had with this part of the manga.

The rest of my thoughts will be under the cut [including spoilers for the whole manga]

I already figured that I’d like the Dragon arc a lot in the anime, since I already more or less liked it in the manga [at least conceptually], but even then, this episode still kinda surpassed my expectations in certain ways. At least in terms of writing. The art was sorta iffy at times, but I can’t really hold that against them too much. The background art was consistently great as usual, though.

Anyway, to begin with, I liked how they handled the first scene, with Dragon continuing to emerge. I like how they kept the framing of some of it being televised by news reporters and stuff. And as I expected, not much time needed to be spent on it.

We also got to see the culmination of how the anime has replaced the plot-line of Ui getting manipulated by Furuta with more focus on Mutsuki and him getting steered down this path by Furuta, and I really love that writing choice. It helps tie everything together surprisingly well. I always kinda disliked how everything about Kaneki killing the Oggai and becoming Dragon felt like such a string of perfect coincidences and contrivances, but I actually really like the explanation of ‘Furuta intentionally put Mutsuki in charge of the Oggai so that he’d inevitably lead them to Kaneki’. It doesn’t actually change anything about how things played out, but it gives a way more clear and understandable explanation for why things ended up the way they did, and it makes Furuta’s plan seem less obnoxiously perfect. And I think they did a good enough job of setting up the fact that Furuta would know about how Mutsuki feels towards Kaneki, since we saw him visiting him in the hospital earlier in the season.

Overall it’s just a way more interesting and effective version of the ultimately weird and pointless sub-plot between Furuta and Ui that the manga had. It’s also worth noting that this also recontextualizes Mutsuki’s feelings in this episode slightly, by having him be forced to realize that he was at least partially responsible for everything that just happened, because he’s the one that lead the Oggai to Kaneki. It helps set up the emotional stakes of this episode a lot, and it continues the anime’s trend of portraying Mutsuki as a victim of a corrupt system, which is nice. I’ll talk about the scene with him and the Qs later in the post, but there’s other things to talk about first.

Such as Hide! We finally get to properly see him in the anime, and let’s just say that my thoughts during his scenes mostly consisted of ‘my SON. my fucking SUNSHINE CHILD!’. It was pretty great, lol. There’s not actually much to say about his scenes, other than that I’m happy they kept the scene about his feelings for Kaneki. I don’t really mind how the subs translated it since that was just their decision alone, and I could tell that the actual Japanese line was unchanged, so there’s no big deal, although I have a feeling that it’s still gonna incite some gross neckbeards to be like ‘the subs said ‘like’ not ‘love’ so obviously it’s just BRO LOVE hurr duurrr’.

I do wanna point out that I really like the way the anime is handling how his voice sounds, since he’s using an electronic assistive device to talk now. It’s nothing particularly noteworthy, but I think they handled it nicely. He actually sounded a fair bit less creepy and robotic than what I thought he might sound in the anime, lol.

His entire presence in the story is definitely just inherently weird, but let’s not ignore the fact that his reappearance was just as sudden and unexplained in the manga. If anything, it was MORE jarring in the manga, since in that version of that story we already had the whole flashback to him asking Kaneki to eat him, which made his death seem a lot more definitive. And just to be blunt, even after he came back into the story in the manga, Ishida never actually did anything to explain how he survived getting part of his face eaten, how he managed to go into hiding, how he managed to find out about Rushima and rescue Amon from there, how he knew about the secret of the RC Gates in order to give that info to Marude, etc etc etc. There’s just this complete void of nothingness between ‘Kaneki apparently eats most of Hide’s face’ to ‘Hide pops back up in the story several years later and nobody really comments on it’. So I can’t really hold this against the anime at all. It’s not THEIR fault that Ishida never explained any of that. And honestly I’m growing more appreciative as time goes on of how the anime cut out the flashback to Hide rescuing Amon from Rushima, and how they cut the reference to him leaking classified info to Marude. It’s a slightly disappointing way to go about it, but it’s a valid choice to deal with the topic of ‘questions that never get answered’ by opting to not even raise them in the first place.

It does make me really curious to see how they handle the next episode, with Hide and Kaneki finally having their big reunion. Since they’ve kept the detail of Hide’s facial injuries, but haven’t explained how they happened. I think the two main possibilities are that either the anime will make up some separate reason for why it happened that doesn’t involve Kaneki, or they’re gonna have it be that Kaneki only remembers having eaten Hide’s face once they actually reunite. I’m leaning more toward the latter at this point, and I think I’d at least prefer them to handle it that way compared to how the manga handled that whole reveal. It’d feel more appropriately timed, and it’d probably lead to Kaneki at least expressing actual shock and remorse over it, instead of being bizarrely nonchalant about it like he was in the manga. In general I hope they flesh out their reunion scene a bit in the next episode, since it always bugged me that it was just like three goddamn pages long in the manga.

I still don’t like how the story in general handles Kanou as a character, but again that’s more Ishida’s fault than anything else, and I kinda like how the anime changed the timing of it slightly so that Marude’s group only think to try and find him right when they find out that he killed himself. It shortens the scene a fair bit, and it makes it feel less ‘hyped up’, if that makes sense, which makes Kanou’s suicide feel at least somewhat less anticlimactic. It’s still a lame way for his character to go out, though. At least the anime kept the details of how he cares mostly about furthering medical science in relation to studying ghouls, and how he knew that Furuta was planning for this to happen, and that it will lead to humanity being pretty much forced to further medical science to deal with Dragon. It’s still overall a clumsy plot point, but it gets the point across well enough. It’s at least a bit more subtle about the point of Furuta creating Dragon in order to ultimately benefit mankind than how Ishida just had Furuta lay out basically all of his plans to Kaneki right at the start of the Goat arc, lol.

It’s also worth noting that, along the same lines, I’ve always been really disappointed by Kurona as a character in :re, since she just loses any real purpose and only exists to be focused on an even more clumsily handled character, but overall my biggest issue with everything to do with Kanou is how it feels like such a missed opportunity that the topic of his involvement in Kaneki’s surgery doesn’t really become relevant. Specifically what I mean is that the two of them only ever have one face to face confrontation in the entire series, and that was way back before :re happened at all. It just feels like there was so much room to explore that conflict. I understand why it ultimately ended up being unimportant compared to all of the bigger issues at hand, but still.

I still have somewhat complicated feelings about the entire topic of how humans and ghouls end up more or less joining forces against Dragon, but at the very least it feels like the only real way that the story was ever going to achieve anything close to actual peace between them.

Anyway, onto the whole scene at the end with Mutsuki fighting Saiko and Urie, I really liked how that scene was handled. At least compared to how it was done in the manga. It was much shorter, for one thing, which I appreciated. Cutting out Aura and the other second gen Qs helped it go by a lot faster, and it also made it feel more personal in scale. They don’t really bother spelling out why Mutsuki is lashing out at the Qs, but at this point in the story I think everyone watching it knows that fucking EVERYONE just winds up expressing their feelings through punching and stabbing when they’d really be better off just talking to each other, so I at least don’t think this scene stands out as being any more glaringly weird than most other random fight scenes in the series. It is worth pointing out, though, that with the anime original stuff at the start of the episode I mentioned earlier, it’s very easy to piece together the fact that Mutsuki is blaming himself for this entire thing, and so he’s just lashing out because he doesn’t know how to handle his self-hatred, and he has a lot of complicated feelings about the fact that everyone is trying to save Kaneki.

Even if it kinda muddies his motives a bit, I honestly quite like how they completely cut out the whole obnoxious ‘if I can’t have him then nobody can!’ way that Ishida tried to spin this whole part of the manga. At least this version of events doesn’t make me roll my eyes in exasperation. I’ve said it before, but I do really appreciate how they’ve cut out like 99% of how the manga tried to frame him as some kind of generic psycho yandere character. It works a lot better that in the anime, this whole scene was almost purely focused on Mutsuki just lashing out at his friends because he’s dealing with way too many emotions and he doesn’t know how to handle it. [fake edit: before I forget, they also cut out the part where he attacks Touka while she’s searching for Kaneki, which is a nice change. That whole bit was just super unnecessary and obnoxious in the manga]

His aborted suicide attempt also felt a fair bit less jarring than it did in the manga, since the anime did a better job at showing exactly how much self-hatred Mutsuki feels.

I don’t really wanna bother touching too much on the references to Mutsuki’s sex here, but at the very least, if the anime really wants to convince me that he’s a cis girl, this is at least a much less overtly offensive and off-putting way of going about it. It’s not gonna change my stance on things, though. But I still gotta give the anime props for at least handling everything about Mutsuki with infinitely more respect than Ishida did.

Also, I actually just double-checked my imported copy of volume 15 to make sure I wasn’t forgetting something, and I can confirm that the references to Shirazu at the end of the episode were actually anime-original. I can also confirm that they fucking tore my heart to shreds :) It almost makes me wonder why Ishida didn’t think to bring Shirazu up like that in the scene originally. It’s such a perfect way of really hammering in the emotions. It also does a really nice job of further tying up Urie’s character development, and showing how much respect he feels for Shirazu.

As I expected, it looks like the next episode will cover volume 15. Or rather, the rest of volume 15, since this episode actually ended about two chapters into volume 15, after having gone through all of volume 14. Again, the whole confrontation with the Qs took WAY less time in the anime, and I’m grateful for that. So I think the next episode should be able to easily adapt the rest of volume 15, and presumably end with Kaneki and Hide’s big reunion scene. Hopefully this will give them time to flesh that scene out a bit.

Since we’re already partway into the second to last volume with three episodes to go, I think the rest of the season will be paced really well, so that’s nice.

All in all, this was a pretty fantastic episode. It’s still hard to avoid some of the really fundamental issues the manga had, but the anime’s honestly doing a GREAT job of patching things up and actually making it all feel cohesive and reasonable, while also removing the more offensive and shitty parts. I’ve been thinking of the :re anime as a sort of second draft of the manga’s story since it started, and episodes like this really cement why I feel that way.

#murasaki rambles #tokyo ghoul #tokyo ghoul :re

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silvermp · 7 years

Text

Flock Together - Part 1

(part 1) (part 2) (part 3) (part 4) (part 5) (part 6)

Read on AO3 HERE

----

Her world began with a muffled sort of sneeze.

Warm darkness had cracked open moments before, cold air prickling uncomfortably over wet skin. She was alive, in that moment… But the air was cold, so she did what any warm blooded creature would do in that situation - and sneezed.

Her first memory of her mother was of a massive, dark shadow blotting out the dappled sun. Instincts prompted her to open her mouth, and swallow. She did not experience hunger, in those first few hours. The yolk in her belly still nourished her, for a time.

She began expecting the large bird, and the slimy offerings of food. It sank heavily into her stomach, hunger relenting with each eager gulp. She learned to voice her growing hunger, and her satisfaction in different notes. The other bird sat quietly, watching her with one keen, black eye.

Her body felt… awkward, somehow. It was the only body she knew (right?) yet it felt bloated, lopsided. A dozen unpleasant concepts slithered up into her brain, and the dissatisfaction grew. Her arms were too short, legs so thin and weak she could barely move them. The bird returned, her hunger quieted, and she fell quickly into unconsciousness.

The next time she properly awoke, her body felt… less sore. A bit less tender, but just as lopsided. She was able to drag her oversized head to look around, blinking against the way her vision swam. The enormous, disgustingly high-definition body of a baby bird leaned against her.

No… that was her body.

She groaned, hearing her voice come out as a warbling sort of croon. There was something twitching at the edge of her brain that said she should be able to conceptualize this into meaningful sounds. Words, even. This body felt heavy, dragging her down away from something that should have been.

Shit.

But the shadowy bird was always swift to return when she woke up, and the desire for food drowned out logical thoughts.

The tightly woven nest still pricked her delicate skin, sunlight feeling too hot, wind too cold, and the ever-present feeling of vulnerability sitting heavy in her chest.

This wasn’t right…

But, it was the only existence she knew.

So she slept.

----

“Wake up.”

She groaned, tucking her head a bit closer to her chest, wishing the world would just pass on by. A warm shadow passed over her.

“Wake up, before I eat you.”

A jolt of fear shot through her tiny body, and she shot upright, flailing little stubs of arms (wings?) and kicking out with her feet.

She slumped onto her back, heart racing, muscles already tired from that small movement. The shape above her sharpened into the black bird, beak open in mocking, raspy laughter.

“Now that’s better.” It growled, finally stopping the harsh choking noise. It sidestepped around the edge of her nest, peering at her from different angles.

“You wake up when I come back.” It finally demanded, nipping at her tiny stub of a wing. She pulled it away, tucking it closer to her and trying to sit upright. She glared at the bird with as much strength as she could muster, trying not to feel put-out when the bird just huffed another chuckle at her anger.

“Don’t be so prickly, little squirt. You need to eat more, or your flesh will fall off your bones. I’d rather not try hunting down that good-for-nothing this late in the season. Egg laying is a pain” The bird muttered something under her breath, beak clicking with irritation.

These words mean something. She noted with a blooming amazement.

As unpleasant and aggressive as they were, the bird was still Communicating with her. She opened her mouth and gave a pleased warble, the hunger growing stronger with every second. It gave her enough motivation to lift her head and look around.

Food? She tried to ask.

The sound came out more like a long whine fading into a teetering hiss. She quickly shut her mouth as the crow snickered at her again.

“You’ll have to practice using that tongue of yours, Kuroko.” The bird’s eyes squinted shut in what could be called a smile, if one were being generous about giving birds facial emotions.

“Since you’re awake, You’ll eat something, yeah?”

She nodded meekly, the gnawing hunger writhing like it could carve open her gut. Black feathers rustled as the bird leapt away into the air, the sound of wings blending quickly into the quiet slide of leaves and wind.

A twig popped upright, from where the bird had been pinning it down.

She realized with a some amazement that the food she was being offered was changing, as was her skin. Black down spread swiftly across her back and sides, softening the ugly lumps of flesh. She swallowed something crunchy, and something interestingly sour.

“Always so hungry…” the bird murmured.

I can’t help it. She tried to respond, but only trilled a stilted melody.

Something is wrong, her brain whispered.

It was difficult to tell when the large bird was present, or if it had left yet to retrieve some other weird food. Sometimes she wondered if it even flew, or just appeared somehow. No, that was ridiculous. Maybe flapping just wasn't as noisy as she thought it should be.

She'd be introduced to a variety of long or recently-dead things, and a whole host of leggy, crunchy bugs. (To be honest, she preferred the bugs to the meat, but beggars can’t be choosers.)

At night, black feathers draped warmly over her body, smushing her comfortably into the nest.

The crow’s voice spoke softly of old gods, alliances between giants, and the birth of a world. She was enraptured by the stories, listening closely as the bird described a rivalry between siblings and the disgust that beget the gods’ division.

“Amaterasu brought up the sun, and Tsukuyomi pulled up the moon. Susanoo directed the storms and seas…”

She forgot most of it, moments later, but remembered the joy in listening.

“Kuroko, wake up…”

The new-spring leaves unfolded before her eye, time passing in an odd haze of existing-without-direction. She grew restless as the night wind became warmer, and the melody of forest birds shifted tune.

“Do you remember who I am? My name is Ko----”

She focused on the dappled leaves, watching them shift and dance and cast twisting shadows upon the branches around her. Itchy feathers had begun to develop, and her body had grown nearly large enough to fill up the nest. The crow’s presence became a bit too hot at night, making her squirm when the thick feathers became uncomfortably warm.

She started beating her wings, flexing the quills apart and testing how they caught the wind. It was a marked improvement on the bald, ugly stubs she had been born with. Her body looked more like a spiky sootball than a bird, but it was a marked improvement compared to the lump of raw meat she had been born looking like. The crow watched her progress, light shining green off black feathers, glinting like pale flames.

How did she know what fire looked like?

---

As her muscles developed, it became easier to look out over the forest, watching other birds and small animals flit around. She felt a pang of longing, and looked forward to the day she, too, could fly. The freedom her bird-keeper must feel, when leaping away from the nest…

Her claws gripped the bark easily, wings pumping absentmindedly as she tried to strengthen her muscles further. She wasn’t sure if it was a gust of wind, or if she really had just lost balance, but she definitely noticed when she started falling ass-over-teakettle down through the branches.

She squawked and scrabbled at the branches and leaves, before landing in a painful pile at the base of her tree.

She lay quietly, panting and getting her bearings for a long moment. The world loomed around her.

She pushed herself awkwardly upright, hunching down and shuffling backward until she was sort-of protected by a large root.

Not good.

Her mind flashed to a dozen ways a baby bird could be gobbled up by passing wildlife - from other birds, to snakes, to cats or dogs. Hell, there might be bird-eating spiders laying in wait.

She eyed the half-decayed leaves suspiciously, heartbeat skipping.

She nearly jumped out of her skin at the dark shape rushing at her, but relaxed when it settled into the familiar feathered shape.

“A bit impatient, are we?”

She shifted awkwardly, tongue sitting heavy and clumsy in her mouth. The apology came out garbled.

The other bird clucked at her, hopping around before stepping closer to her and prodding her sides with that sharp beak.

When she didn’t yip or flinch at the prodding, the bird stepped back, satisfied.

“Find some bugs or something.” The older bird instructed, looking distracted. “Your squealing pulled me away from a good meal, so you’re on your own for this one.”

The elder bird must have sensed her swelling terror, and flicked her tail in irritation.

“Not abandoning YOU, idiot squirt. You need to learn to feed yourself sometime. ” The bird huffed, taking again to the skies.

She swallowed, watching the bird alight on a nearby tree, turning to stare down at her. She obediently stood up, wobbling a bit as she tried scratching at the leaves and dirt for a bug.

(Honestly, she didn’t know which was more humiliating. This, or waiting for a chunk of mouse to be pushed into her face.)

She hopped over an oddly shaped throwing knife, and a rusty plate of metal in a half-hearted chase after a centipede before deciding it was too much work. Centipedes were bitter anyway.

She did eventually find several black beetles, almost caught a mouse, and apparently that satisfied her mother enough to come swooping in and drag the little rodent back by its neck.

They shared a bloody meal that night, and the black eyes on her back felt much more comforting than the shadows around her.

This isn’t right. Her mind whispered.

Of course it wasn’t she was grounded. Birds were supposed to be airborne, right?

No, why did she know about birds?

She paused, tilting her head to look up at the moonlit sky.

Why did she know about knives, or metal, or how soot looked, to compare myself to? Why do I feel comfortable around that bird?

That was easier - they were both crows, right?

How do you know what a ‘crow’ is? Why would this crow care for you at all?

Those were… very good questions.

She swallowed, the night feeling a bit darker, uncertainty creeping in on her sleep-fuzzy brain.

When dawn began sending a pink haze into the dark sky, she woke to find the crow was missing from the branch she had last been spotted on. A warm breeze stirred some leaves, and hunger rumbled in her belly once again.

She ended up flipping leaves over, hopping around the underbrush and kicking over half-decomposed sticks and bark to find little grubs.

One large chunk of bark flipped up, and revealed a coiled up little snake. She stared at it for a moment, frozen where she stood with wings half-open for balance. Then it was moving, and she shrieked, flapping backward and tumbling into a graceless pile. Leaves rustled as the brown snake fled, and she relaxed, rolling upright again with an ungainly flop of wings and flailing legs.

“Sometimes I wonder why I even bothered to let you live.”

She nearly jumped out of her skin at the sudden voice, chirping in distress and whirling to find the crow standing on a nearby rock. The older bird jumped down, walking toward her with an aggressively lowered head. Where on earth did she come from?

“After all this work, you jump out of the nest like an idiot , and freak out at the smallest thing.”

She blinked at the grumbled words, meekly pecking at a small spider crawling near her feet. Her feathers prickled, and she spread her wings in a futile attempt to show she wasn’t weak.

“You won’t be able to fly.”

The crow snapped her beak with no small amount of irritation.

“Not before a damn cat gets you, anyway. You’re too young and stupid to use the shadows properly, but I’d rather not have wasted all this energy for nothing.”

The ruffled chick froze, feeling her mother looming over her, regarding her with one dark eye.

“You’re the only one out of your siblings that had a lick of Chakra, so don’t make me regret not eating your egg as well.”

Grey eyes widened, and she twisted to look at her mother - she must have been her mother. What else could that comment mean?

Darkness swallowed her.

And Darkness ignited.

---

Kuroko screamed, thrashing out of the shadows and squirming in the woven nest she landed in.

Electric fire lanced through her veins, starbursts exploding behind her eyes. Liquid shadows poured between her feathers, black claws twitching spasmodically as a billion images and impressions raced through an unprepared brain.

Her mother (That was her mother! Kokoro!) sat quietly on the edge of her nest, watching the fledgeling flop around, before growing still.

Kuroko laid for a long moment, panting as words rushed back through synapses. "The Northern Roost was laid to waste by fearful humans” “You were born on the eve of-” “She was jealous of her son’s Chakra, and turned our script against-” “Kuroko, can you understand me? Can you-” “Susanoo, angry at his sister’s insistence, lashed out and drove Amaterasu to hide in a cave, bringing an all-consuming night.” “Wake up, little one, I can’t tell if you’re breathing-” “The Many-Eyed, corrupted, was pulled from their union, and split into the Great Tailed Bijuu. Kaguya was sealed-” “Kuroko, please eat. The Southern Roost is calling, I can’t-”

Kuroko wheezed, curling up a bit tighter, letting the sounds and images and thoughts, oh gods she could think clearly! Wash over her in convoluted, overlapping trails.

“Are you dying, Kuroko?”

She sucked in a stuttered breath, squinting one eye open at the dark crow perched over her. Her mother’s feathers were flat, black eyes dull in a miserable expectation.

And the darkness of unconsciousness enveloped her at last.

----

When Kuroko awoke, she was alone.

Well, in the broadest sense of the term.

She could see birds swooping through the trees, and a pair of squirrels scampering from tree to tree, chattering at each other and weaving a graceful dance of travel.

For the first time, her mind was clear.

She could recall the legends her mother murmured to her in the haze of twilight, about the moon and sun, and the creation of demons. - and that word meant something now.

She marveled at the efficiency of her own mind, flitting from subject to subject, directed completely by her own willpower. She focused on the word, demons, and found countless mentions over the long weeks she had been alive.

“Humans feared us or worshipped us,” her mother had said.”It depends on the individual, whether they want to call us ‘kami’ or ‘demons’. Every once in awhile, you’ll find one who does both.”

Kuroko stretched her wings, identifying the feathers that had been plucked and named while she watched in a sleepy haze.

“Coverts. Alula. Primaries.” She whispered, stretching her wing this way and that, to make them shift. “Secondaries…”

Kuroko twisted her head around, tilting her head and delighting at the strained position. It was new and novel just like the rest of her ‘awakening’.

“Tertial…” She flicked her tail. “Retrices…”

“Remember all your feathers, so you can put yourself together again.” Her mother had said.

Kuroko wiggled her tail, considering what that was supposed to mean.

She shrugged, having no idea whatsoever, and deciding that was alright.

The warm darkness still seemed to be pooled in her chest, twisting and pulling with every delighted movement she made.

“Chakra?” She wondered aloud, mentally prodding at it. The silky warmth seemed to ignore her touch.

“Chakra is your spirit’s way of connecting with the world. It is your energy, your essence, your life. It’s how we manifest, and how our kind can use the shadows.”

Kuroko pondered that explanation for a moment, feeling the warmth shift around her body. She stretched, and the warmth stretched to her wingtips with her. Her mother had such nice things to share.

“I have to go again - I’ll be back soon. The Southern Roost needs me…. I can’t lose them again.”

Kuroko paused, remembering her mother’s words a few nights ago, before she vanished again within darkness. The roost was… “Our home, from the beginning of this world. The crows gather there to breed, and connect.” ... Like a big nest, or a collection of a hundred smaller nests. She couldn’t remember what it looked like. (Had she ever seen it?) but if something was wrong, then her mother was right to worry. That kind of thing was important.

Kuroko flexed her wings again, looking up at the mottled clouds beyond fresh summer leaves, wondering what she was supposed to do to pass the time. Existing in a haze and worked up until that point, but she wasn’t eager to return to it.

She spent a few long hours waddling along the thick branch that held up her nest, stopping periodically to pump her wings and feel the wind stir her feathers. (And her Chakra. How interesting)

Kuroko eventually fell asleep as the sun sank down toward the horizon. She remained blissfully unconscious when her mother came back, squishing against her in the tight nest, and fell asleep.

---

“Good morning, Kuroko. Are you hungry?”

She yawned, shaking her head with a flurry of bristling feathers. Kuroko blinked at her mom, and the unusually haphazard way her mother’s feathers laid. Her memories were still trickling in, but she always remembered the glossy black feathers had been neat and tidy.

She stood up, leaned over, and tugged one of her mother’s back feathers (scapulars her mind whispered) into place.

“Yes.” She finally decided with a little head-bob. “I am hungry.”

Her mother froze.

“...Kuroko? Do you… know who I am?”

“Yes? You’re Kokoro - my mother.”

Something like a shiver ruffled up the bird’s dark feathers, and she managed to hear the raspy words “-get you some food” before her mother swept away into the early morning fog.

#naruto #smpwrites #fic rec #third mizukage #FlockTogether #Fanfiction #Naruto fanfiction

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