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magireco · 3 years

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ive never played/watched magireco but do you think the large cast is a part of iroha just being seen as “madoka 2” ?? ive never touched the thing because from what i know its much darker than the original anime, but i do know there’s like 20 thousand megucas in the game and each of them has their own story, so there’s plenty of characters that could be seen as more interesting. theres also the fact that a lot of people dont like gacha games (and magireco, other than being one, is sexualized quite a bit so that probably makes people steer away from it as well, but that’s another topic) and magireco NA no longer exists anyways so it’s harder to actually understand the new content, plus as far as i’m aware season 2 of the magireco anime has not been confirmed to be planned? correct me if i’m wrong on that though

hi!! i have a lot to cover with this ask, so i’m going to answer your questions as neatly as i can in a fun little numbered list. read under the cut!

1. what do you mean by large cast? if you’re talking about how there’s more characters in the game/anime than in the original series, then i don’t think that really has anything to do with iroha. it might just be to garner fans’ collective interest since the original anime hit it off so hard. also, it’s just really hard to please huge collectives of people, especially really critical anime fans... *shiver.*

2. i think iroha bearing a similar resemblance to madoka was used to draw old fans back in, as well as living up to the tradition of all “main character” magical girls having pink hair. iroha and yachiyo were probably meant to resemble madoka and homura at least design-wise, and also seeing iroha, madoka, and homura together in one image is visually appealing; the colors and the familiar faces next to a new face are nice to look at.

3. magia record is not nearly as dark as the original series! in the anime, there are no main-cast deaths. this does not inherently prove that a show isn’t dark, but literally, the only onscreen death is of yachiyo’s friend from her original team, and that was in a flashback... rather than slowly losing characters as the story goes on, it starts off with iroha alone, then she meets other magical girls and they form a team, etc. i go on about this on my blog bc, once again, in my opinion, magia record has much more hopeful undertones and actually gives the girls a chance to, well... live. it’s an alternate timeline(that madokami can’t interfere with, there’s lore to that) wherein glasses homura is the homura featured(she actually gets a lot of character growth in the game), the main quintet is all together, the mikazuki villa crew really are just the found family trope combined in a little package.

4. there are a few reasons for there being a lot of characters in the game, one of them being that they literally adapted every spinoff into the game. oriko magica, tart magica, suzune magica, kazumi magica... all those characters are there. then they added a bunch of side characters, which, i dunno? there are some side characters i really like and others i just kind of don’t really care about. but they really grow on you! .... most of them.

5. yeah, blegh. the game certainly has its flaws(the whole series does, but that’s another ask for another day). the anime is much, much less fanservicey though! i have my gripes about the designs and i certainly have my gripes about the way the characters are drawn sometimes (looking at you, swimsuit mami artist), but with me being an experienced gacha player (unfortunately) that was just something i decided to put up with in exchange for a fun story. i can see why people might get the misconception that the anime is just as sexualized, though. i don’t like the main characters’ designs that much, honestly... they all show too much skin, so i agree. weird.

6. season 2 was confirmed!

7. NA was discontinued right after the first arc of the series. disappointing (oh, i could go on), but we got to see a lot of iroha’s character development in the story.

8. what i was really trying to get across with that post was really just to gripe about in-fandom stuff. there are plenty of other characters that could be seen as more interesting than iroha, especially considering the mikazuki villa girls are all so varied, but that’s kind of how it is with every series, honestly. there’s always going to be one character that seems less interesting compared to other ones. i just kind of realized that iroha gets the short end of the stick compared to the other girls. not only because of her resemblance to madoka, but because of her perceived blandness and the lack of people who care to analyze why she might act that way. her pink motif and gentle, kind demeanor translates as “madoka copy” in people’s heads, and, y’know, it translated like that in mine the first time i saw her, too. but, when you actually think about her arc aside from her resemblance to madoka in several different ways, you get a really interesting and special character; just as special as the others! there was a similar issue with madoka, honestly, with people brushing her off because she wasn’t as “emotionally deep” as the rest of the quintet, even though that’s not true at all. i think it’s unfair that people will brush off a character just because they’re nice; that they’ll reduce characters like iroha and madoka to their cuteness and kindness only and not analyze the rest of the details that they have intentionally(or sometimes unintentionally, y’know how anime writing can be) been written with!

...but then again, i’m biased in my own way, admittedly. i relate to iroha (i really just made that post because i was thinking about how i’ve never seen someone touch on how her memory gaps affect her), and i just wasn’t seeing any coverage on it, so i thought, someone has to do this! i also just... don’t see people who coin themselves as “iroha fans” very often? she’s one of the characters who is there, but usually not deemed interesting enough for someone to be a superfan of. i’m probably hypocritical, considering homura akemi is my favorite character and she’s pretty popular in the fandom, but what i said is more of an observation than an accusation anyway. i had similar feelings with madoka, but i haven’t gone on a proper ramble about that yet.

...these characters also aren’t real people, so i’d say i probably shouldn’t go on such long rambles about them, but i really do feel like they reflect a lot of real life experiences sometimes. like, me connecting to iroha’s struggles is something that connects her character to an actual experience. however, like i said in my original post, i am very much an overanalyzer, and i tend to take concepts and just run with them, especially when something stands out to me. this is also just a magical girl show, so i’m really not taking anything that personally.

also, to clear anything up, the original post wasn’t meant to come across as me being angry, per se, at people who think iroha is boring, it just kind of ticks me off that she’s brushed off so quickly in the larger fandom because of her demeanor. this doesn’t really apply to people who aren’t into the series at all yet, because i’d literally also think “okay so we have madoka, and madoka with a hood” if i were in your shoes! also, people are allowed to dislike characters for no reason. i’m just silly and go on long defensive rants over the sad magical girls, and would probably be sad if people didn’t like iroha because of the reasons i mentioned.

all in all, i do reccomend magia record very much if you can get past the sexualization of the gacha cards and the, um... poorly designed outfits. because the NA server has been shut down, there are channels on youtube that graciously upload videos of the in-game stories as well as side stories! in the game, there are sometimes entire side stories for characters’ outfits. because it’s a gacha game, there are events and such, and the event stories i’ve seen and/or read (most of the ones i’ve read have to do with homura though) are a lot of fun. i reccommend checking out muffinrecord’s channel if you’d like to read any of the stories (hopefully you’re the type of person who can sit and watch live2d models move around with boxes of text on the bottom for 25 minutes like me). they have everything sorted into playlists in that section of their youtube. of course, i also reccomend watching the anime, if you’re interested! the animation is polished and nice, even if the story is a little hard to follow at times. but if not, that’s okay too.

thank you for the ask, and i hope i could clear some things up for you!

#asks #anon #i am so sorry for all this text

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fireflysummers · 5 years

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Just Fiction (and When It’s Not)

I’ve been tying myself in mental knots for the last while about the “It’s Just Fiction” argument. At this point I’ve heard a lot from both sides that’s actually pretty valid, leading to a lot of general confusion.

The conclusion that I’ve come to, though, is that “It’s Just Fiction” is not a universal defense, and its meaning shifts drastically when it’s shifted out of the originally intended lens.

I propose that there are three lenses through which the “It’s Just Fiction” argument can be viewed: in-universe, authorial intent, and public interpretation.

Before jumping into the analysis, I should note that there are a few assumptions here:

The fiction in question is actually fiction, and does not resemble any real life persons, living or dead in an identifiable capacity. Therefore, things like the Ted Bundy Case Files are immediately disqualified.

We are assuming innocence until proven guilty.

The In-Universe Lens

The “It’s Just Fiction” defense is most often applied to in-universe logic, and is related to the suspension of disbelief--the mechanism by which we can ignore our comparisons to the real world and immerse ourselves in a fantasy.

When you say "It's Just Fiction" about in-universe logic, it understands very clearly that fiction is fake, and that the characters and events do not exist in the real world. It may echo real life, and real people might to replicate it, but no matter how dark or gross or fluffy or fantastical the content, no matter how gritty and “realistic” it is, it is not real.

Arguing that "It’s Just Fiction" is basically stating that you understand how to separate reality from fantasy, and treat characters and in-canon logic as the mechanisms by which an interesting story is told. While they may feel real, especially if you have a special connection with them, they fundamentally are not.

As a result, content creators are generally allowed to use it as space to explore taboo topics and search for relationships and meaning in places that no sane person would enact in real life.

However, this is not free reign to create whatever you want, and expect no consequences, as we will get to in our next point.

Authorial Intent

As stated earlier, the general assumption here is that the content creator did not intentionally have ill will towards anybody. Unfortunately, there have been too many case where this has proven to be bad faith. As a result, how to approach this aspect of the “It’s Just Fiction” argument is very difficult and controversial, because sometimes it is very difficult to “prove,” especially since the creative process is often multi-faceted as content creators draw from multiple inspirational and motivational sources.

Oftentimes, content creators are young, ignorant, and lacking self-awareness. This leads to them not knowing how to take critique, especially if they are approached in a harsh, critical manner, and generally only alienates them in a way that stifles their desire to learn and grow naturally. It is generally not your job to educate strangers on the internet, either, since there are often trolls who disguise actual ill intent as ignorance.

The most surefire way to address this is to curate your own internet experience by blocking liberally those whose content you do not wish to see.

There is another case, though, that needs to be discussed: that of predatory content creators. These people usually straddle the line between “a distasteful lack of mindfulness” and “preying on vulnerable populations.”

Accusations of ped/o/phil/ia against any individual are serious, and in process you have to consider a personal history of predatory behavior, rather than applying a blanket "if it's dark and taboo topics, then it automatically implicates the author as a pervert.”

You can usually identify these individuals based on the content’s tone and approach--that they aren't approaching a taboo topic for the sake of literary exploration, but because they are self-inserting themselves. There are heavy implications about people who self-insert into that sort of fiction, such as people who write or draw cartoon character CP, and you can usually tell on a case-by-case basis whether or not somebody is hiding a gross perversion behind "It’s Just Fiction.”

Public Interpretation

Public interpretation is usually where the “It’s Just Fiction” argument breaks down entirely, because we are no longer working directly with the work (in-universe) or the people immediately responsible for its creation (authorial intent). Public reactions are very, very real and need to be treated as such--but first, you have to consider the likelihood that a work of fiction will actually contribute to swaying that public.

The argument here is “even if the person didn’t mean any harm, that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be held responsible.” And this is another tough one, because on one hand, yes, content creators ideally should exercise mindfulness about how their work will be received and interpreted. On the other hand, the public is beyond the control of any single individual, and things can easily be taken out of context or snowball out of their control, regardless of their intent.

So, for the sake of this particular case, we have determined that the author did not mean to cause harm, the next question is how much harm is being done.

In other words, who exactly is the public, and how many of them are there?

For instance, a bunch of kids filming a shitty monster movie featuring sharks may have the exact same messages as Jaws (sharks are evil and need to be killed). Neither one of them intend to do real sharks any harm; however, the one that needs to be held responsible is Jaws, not the shitty indie film.

Why? Because Jaws was a box-office success that became a cultural phenomenon. It impacted the opinions of the millions of people, leading to a sharp increase of shark hunting.

Yeah, the indie film was equally bad in the messages it was conveying, but it just fades into obscurity without actually doing any harm.

It’s the same spiel with fandom works. Because fandoms are insular spaces, they feel a lot bigger than they actually are. That’s why fan-content creators are not held to the same standards as mainstream content creators, because the public they actually affect is actually quite small.

When people say “It’s Just Fiction” in relation to content that is not intended to do harm, but is controversial in content, what they’re really saying is “fandom is a small, in-bred pocket of the internet, and and because it is not written by somebody intending to cause harm and will never likely see the public eye, the damage that it does is negligible, and any energy that you put into causing an outcry over it is merely a petty waste of time.”

At which point, again, the best course of action is to just block what you don’t want to see.

Applications

This is a long read, and the basic point is to exercise your own critical thinking skills. My general rubric for what I keep versus what I block is:

Is the content actually fictional.

Is the content creator acting out of a desire to hurt others?

If the harm is unintentional, how many people are affected, and how wide-spread is the damage?

Let’s Practice

Case 1

Person A is obsessed with a villainous character from an anime.

They know that the character is completely made up.

They have no desire to hurt other people, since this affection for a fictional character is literally just them. Their actions do not pose a threat to vulnerable groups.

The number of people even directly aware of Person A’s special interest is pretty small, and if you’re squicked out by it they’re an easy block.

Therefore, by this rubric, “It’s Just Fiction” works just fine as an explanation for their actions.

Case 2

Person B’s fanfic reduces your favorite character to LGBT+ stereotypes. The tone of the fic, though, is fluffy and light-hearted.

Again, this is entirely fictional and all parties know it.

It’s difficult to gauge whether this was done intentionally or not; sometimes a quick chat with the author will clear things up; otherwise, the tone of the fic and the lack of mean spirit in any of their other works, so it’s probably unintentional. It’s probably safe to give the benefit of the doubt.

The general readership on the fic and the number of kudos is pretty low, which means that it’s not getting much attention anyways. It was distasteful, it made you feel gross when you read it, but overall the damage is pretty contained.

Therefore, by this rubric, “It’s Just Fiction” still generally works, because of the limited number of people even aware of the fic’s existence.

Case 3

Person C made an AU with characters aged-up from the canon, and there are some N/S/F/W scenes or jokes!

AU = fictional

This is a tricky one sometimes, because there are absolutely people who age up characters just to “legally” draw them in N/S/F/W situations.

However, there is a difference between people who do that, and others who say, project out an entire timeline full of unique character interactions and are looking to explore the various aspects of adult life, which sometimes involves consensual sex. The authorial intent here is usually pretty easy to pick up on, because a well thought-out aged-up AU often takes a lot of mindfulness on the part of the creator.

Again, things limited to fandom spaces are by default pretty small in the public that they reach.

“It’s Just Fiction” absolutely applies here because of the amount of work that has been put into it to create an adult version of the world and characters, and it’s clear that the intent was not to expose minors for the entertainment of perverts.

tl;dr: If you’re going to treat fandom with academic scrutiny, please apply critical thinking to situations as they come. “It’s Just Fiction” does not work as a general statement because it wasn’t originally meant to be a general statement.

#long post #fandom wank #text #idk man #i'm tired

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doshmanziari · 5 years

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Castlevania: Curse of Darkness ~ It’s Just Like Symphony of the Night, Except Not At All! [Part IV]

When asked recently if Curse of Darkness is good, I answered: no; but, I’ve played through it about ten times. So, on a subjective level that can’t really be transmitted to other people by telling them what to focus on (although I’ll try to enumerate what I focus on), there is something here that, well, I just like. I’m not the sort of person to make the claim that, “[X] is a fine videogame, but a bad [series-name] videogame.” That’s not my conclusion -- to suggest that there is an inherent goodness to the series I like just because it generally excites my palate, and that anything below one’s standard is a “betrayal” of that inherence.

Even though difficulty isn’t what I go to videogames looking for, I think what makes Curse of Darkness work best for me is its hard mode, accessed by finishing the game once and then inputting “@CRAZY” for your file name on a new file (the same goes for Lament of Innocence). The norm for the Castlevania series and iterative challenge has been “loops” -- clearing the game once and then having it roll over automatically to a new game, whereupon enemies deal more damage and are perhaps more numerous and/or newly appearing. Although these adjustments have provided an extra challenge, the presence of new material, of differing enemies or enemy placements, has tended to be relatively minimal. The first Castlevania, for example, halts its modifications on stage four on subsequent loops. CoD’s hard mode is remarkable in that pretty much every area has been edited for enemy type and occurrence. It is also, at least on some hypothetical level, the toughest of any Castlevania hard mode. Hours in, you will still be easily slain in just a few hits, your curative capacity is strict, and money is tight. What all of this means, for me, anyway, is that Curse of Darkness becomes a sort of brutal dungeon crawler: the endurance which the level design, by default, asks of the player better matches what you need to do in order to survive until the next save point.

What it also means is that you might be compelled to more intentionally curate your familiars, here called Innocent Devils. Normally, these critters are absolutely peripheral, excepting a handful of spots where one’s ability is required for progress. On hard mode, having the right familiar in the right situation, using the right abilities, is an enormous help -- sometimes, the difference between your life and death. If I could retroactively magically redirect all of the labor poured into the Innocent Devils to the level design, of course I’d do it in a heartbeat; but the variety that effort produced -- the physical differences between a Devil’s evolutionary forms, their skills, and the descriptions for each (two of my favorites: “A star motif graces the rod of this mage. Its owner dreams of one day becoming one with the stars”, and “Pure rage in corporal form, it is chaos with wings. Many find its anguished form hard to look at”) -- has its place among the rest of the game’s marginalia. Without them, too, Curse of Darkness would perhaps be an overly lonely experience.

Curse of Darkness has something in common with KCET’s post-Game Boy Advance Castlevanias (most of all Order of Ecclesia), which is that its bosses are excellent -- fun to look at and fun to fight, especially on hard mode, where precise mechanical execution is mandatory. The downside is that they are, in fact, so good that returning to the game as usual after each can be especially deflating. Just as fun are the narrative interludes featuring some wonderfully on-point voice acting by, best of all, Liam O’Brien (as Isaac) and Adam D. Clark (as St. Germain), and, somehow, some of the subtlest facial expressions found on the console. To be sure, the characterizations are limited -- caricatures more than characters -- but what they lack in humanistic texture (something perhaps not to be sought in this series) they make up for in flair. People might pick on the Lords of Shadow titles for resembling “high fantasy” ersatz with doses of Castlevania jabbed in wherever, and while that is a fair criticism, just as awful was the games’ relentlessly grieving tone, as if a suffocating sense of self-seriousness were what the material needed for effect. Curse of Darkness’ tonal strain -- reverential, obscurantist, and funny -- could not be unlikelier. There is the rendering of Trevor Belmont, after we first fight him to no avail, as a near-saintly figure; the inscrutable, fanfiction-like logic guiding the major plot beats; the way Hector, as protagonist, slams between ridiculous shrieks of vengeance and introspective “Indeed”s. It is, all in all, maybe the best-relayed storyline Castlevania has ever gotten, and maybe will ever get.

If there’s one mechanical idea, separate from the Innocent Devils, to applaud, it’s the stealing mechanic, whereby Hector can snag various items from ghouls and ghosts if done at the proper time. This is indicated by the lock-on reticule momentarily switching from orange to purple, and often requires waiting for certain animations to begin or finish. It’s a neat micro-challenge to engage if you’re so inclined (bosses are where it shines; the Wyvern, for example, has an optional aerial sequence that’s tied to the steal-window), and a nice alternative to item drops being determined by randomized success/failure rates. To be clear, randomized drops do still exist -- they’re there in the bestiary as a delineated datum -- but they’re no longer the sole possibility. For some, this mechanic might also serve as an invitation to observe Dracula’s army with a heightened degree of purposefulness, to better appreciate the effort that went into giving its members life. However viewed, it’s kind of a shame that the idea remains unique to Curse of Darkness. I suppose pure statistical randomness pumps up the playtime for anyone who enjoys grinding; but the intentionality underpinning the stealing mechanic, the terms of its execution and our means of utilizing it, is a tantalizing window into an alternative, less number-crunchy shape for the action-RPG mold of Castlevania.

And, really, for as often as Curse of Darkness’ visuals compare unfavorably to Lament of Innocence’s, I couldn’t’ve taken as many photos of it as I did for another lo-fi-/CRT-dedicated project last year (a fraction of the results can be seen here and here) if the game’s world didn’t have an ambient luminescence of its own, albeit one thinned out by the aforementioned issues with the scope and camera, and several stale settings. In a fashion seemingly particular to PlayStation 2 releases, scores of exterior and interior spots are clothed with polychromatic, sourceless “lighting”, such that a wall’s surface might go from a deep blue to a brown-green to a purplish red. Taken as a sum, Curse of Darkness’ Wallachia is dim and gray-faced; taken constitutionally, it’s in fact abounding with colorful dispersions. Especially delightful for its brazenness is the pause menu/status screen, centralized by a pillar of neon-green stamps, headlined by a teal and an orange ochre banner, and itemized on the right by a stack of iconographic boxes. As coloration and organization go, compared to Lament of Innocence’s screen, it’s sloppy. But as a chunk of graphic design to linger in, it’s delicious, and happily recalls Harmony of Dissonance’s palettes (also directed by Takashi Takeda).

Well! That’s nearly all I have to say about Curse of Darkness right now. I’m curious if the animated Castlevania series’ second season, featuring Hector and Isaac (Isaac is physically recast and no longer queer-coded in the way media tends to do that coding; a gain and a loss, in my opinion), got some people to try this game out for the first time. If it did, I’m also curious if the show’s characterizations transferred over, maybe allowing those people to enjoy Curse of Darkness in a way foreign to myself (no, I still haven’t watched the show) and others. Could the imaginatively supplementary reach of fanfiction sustain such a playthrough? Surely it’s possible.

You can read the prior three essays on CoD here, here, and here.

#curse of darkness #Castlevania #brick by brick #akumajo dracula

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murasaki-murasame · 5 years

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Thoughts on Sarazanmai Episode 6: “I Want To Connect, So I’m Not Giving Up”

All things considered, this episode was way more positive and hopeful than I expected, but it still hurt in it’s own way, and Ikuhara is still aiming to literally murder me with these post-ED scenes.

I was worried that Ikuhara wasn’t going to be able to pace out an 11-episode anime properly, but thus far it’s been fine, and this episode in particular gives me hope that the rest of the show will be just as good.

Also, I really think that anyone watching the show by this point needs to at least check out the ReoMabu prequel manga, if not also their twitter account, so you can get more context for their relationship, now that they’re becoming more prominent.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut.

It almost feels like a spoiler to include the episode title at the top of the post, since it’s one of the big emotional climaxes of the whole episode, but oh well. I still really love how this series is using it’s episode titles to hammer in specific emotions at the end of each episode.

This episode title also reflects how this is the episode where the patterns that have made up the show thus far have pretty much veered off-track. There were no musical numbers, no transformation scenes, no new Lucky Selfie Item, the kappa zombie of the week is determined to have love instead of desire, and for the first time ever, the episode title is actually a positive one that shows how Kazuki has grown as a person. I haven’t watched Penguindrum or Yuri Kuma Arashi yet, but I really like how Ikuhara intentionally deviates from the episodic patterns he sets up in order to create a sense of dissonance and change, and this is a great example of that. It really feels like this is the halfway mark that’s bridging the two halves of the show. I wouldn’t be surprised if the kappa zombie of the week stuff more or less stops after this, with how Reo and Mabu seem to be changing tactics, and the main trio are more aware of how the process works and how they’re erasing people from existence by defeating the kappa zombies.

Even though this is just the mid-season climax [and the point where the first of the two light novel volumes ends], it really feels like it could almost work as a full-on season finale, or at least a penultimate episode, with how it pretty much wraps up Kazuki’s entire character arc. But we still have five more episodes to go, and the post-ED scene in particular makes it clear that there’s still more to delve into. As I said above, I was worried that, based on what I’ve heard about Yuri Kuma Arashi, Ikuhara isn’t good at properly pacing out 1-cour anime, but this episode in particular makes it feel like if he was bad at it before, he’s certainly gotten a lot better at it. The pacing actually sorta reminds me of Planet With from last year, in how it feels like every single scene in this show is meaningful, and it feels like there’s more development than you get in most full series.

And on the note of Kazuki’s development, it didn’t go at all how I expected, but I’m really happy with how it went. I was honestly expecting Haruka to get turned into a kappa zombie and for the main trio to find out about the ‘erasure from existence’ thing after they defeated him, so I was surprised to see that he got saved, and I definitely wasn’t expecting it to also involve Kazuki finally accepting his brother’s love and saving him, after being given the choice to basically kill himself to erase all of his sins.

I think we can all agree that that whole sequence in this episode was ultimately a metaphor for him being suicidal and thinking that if he could die, or if he could have never been born in the first place, then everything would be better. There was just a vague plot mechanism in place to make him think that that might be genuinely true. Kazuki is a really complex and divisive character in a lot of ways, but moments like this really make it clear that he’s just a depressed teenager who feels unworthy of love. So it was nice to see Enta and Toi come through to save him before he could go through with killing himself [especially with how that whole bit incorporated Toi’s gun and Enta’s soccer skills].

The big climax of Kazuki’s arc, and his acceptance of Haruka’s love, ties in a lot with how we finally get some fairly blunt info about how society works in this series, and what exactly the loss of a Shirikodama means for a person. Like with how basically every Ikuhara anime is ultimately concerned with the idea of society being made of an in-group and an out-group, with being forced into the out-group being equivalent to death [but also to transcendence, sometimes], people in Sarazanmai are connected via their Shirikodama, and the linked desires that they represent, with those who cannot ‘connect desires’ being forced out of that circle of connection, and erased from existence. There’s a lot of in-universe lore and jargon going on there, but it basically boils down to ‘isolated outcasts get rejected and forgotten’. But on a more small-scale and personal level, this episode also explores the idea of smaller social circles, and the way that people can be rejected from them, and reject themselves from them. Kazuki feels that he was always on the outside of the circle after he found out that he was adopted into his family, and he’s been pushing Haruka away and refusing to connect with him directly for a variety of reasons. He’s been intentionally rejecting himself from that circle this whole time, and his big emotional realization in this episode is that Haruka genuinely loves him and just wants to have a normal relationship with him, and that he can allow himself to be loved and accepted into that circle. He can allow himself to be chosen. The fact that Haruka wants Kazuki to know that they’re a part of a circle together, from beginning to end, pretty much encapsulates all of that.

We also learn that part of why Haruka also has his own self-loathing issues going on is because he stole Kazuki’s mother’s scent pouch and rejected her out of fear that she’d steal Kazuki away from him. So he probably feels responsible for what ended up happening that day when Kazuki went to go see his mother at the train station.

I really hope we get to see the two of them interacting and talking things out soon. In a lot of ways their whole arc together has basically wrapped up, but it’ll still be nice to actually see their relationship improving.

I’m curious to see if Kazuki’s going to ever go back to his cross-dressing days now that the whole Sara thing has been exposed, and he’s finally allowed himself to love and be loved by Haruka as himself. I guess that’ll be what shows whether he only cross-dressed solely to try and connect with Haruka, or if he also had other reasons for it.

I have the wonder what’s gonna happen with the main trio now that Kazuki’s come to his big character development climax moment, and they all have a better understanding of how the kappa zombie thing works, and about the broader otter/kappa conflict. It’s also worth noting that, since they apparently defeated the sachet kappa zombie for good this time, they should have their fourth silver plate of hope, so they should just be one away from getting a full gold one. I’m really curious to see how that turns out, since I don’t think Kazuki is going to care about it at this point, since he’s managed to restore his relationship with Haruka without it. I think he’ll just let Toi or Enta use the gold plate for their own wish instead. And out of the two of them, with how things are going, it seems like Enta will probably end up letting Toi make the wish for himself.

It’s worth pointing out that even though Kazuki’s development more or less wrapped up here, there’s presumably more to do with Toi and Enta and their own personal conflicts. I think they’re each going to get one more focus episode before the anime wraps up. I don’t know entirely how their own stories will end, but Toi still needs to sort things out with him and his brother, and Enta clearly has to do SOMETHING about his repressed crush on Kazuki.

I would say that it feels like there’s actually not much more that even needs to happen with the main trio at this point since they’ve gotten so much focus and development already, but that’s where Reo and Mabu come in, since they’re clearly going to be way more prominent in the second half. The synopsis preview for episode 7 seems to imply that we’ll get more backstory for them, which will hopefully include the short chapter from the light novel that the anime’s apparently skipped over thus far. At the very least, this episode’s post-ED scene is enough to make it clear that there’s a lot to learn about them.

At first I was super thrown off by that whole scene, mostly because the art used for the backgrounds was so stylized that it looked like it took place on some fantasy planet, but after thinking about it, it makes sense, and I think it still slots into the same timeline as the manga and their twitter account. I think that their twitter account basically ended with the two of them getting drafted into the Otter Empire, and the post-ED scene in this episode shows them serving in the empire afterwards, and Mabu getting killed in the middle of them trying to finally capture Prince Keppi. It’s all very sudden, but it makes sense. And obviously we’ll learn more about it later.

It still looks like Mabu is being kept alive by a mechanical heart, which was probably provided by the Otter Empire in exchange for their continued service. But we still don’t know exactly how he got given that heart, and what his maintenance entails. It seems interesting that his situation resembles what Keppi said about the effects of having a Shirikodama removed, but Mabu still seems to be around, and Reo still remembers him and their history together, even if Mabu does seem to have lost his emotions. Maybe his mechanical heart is basically keeping him in a stasis where he’s not completely rejected from the circle like the defeated kappa zombies are. It might be worth noting that we’ve also only seen Reo interact with Mabu at all thus far, but that might just be a coincidence.

It looks like their goal, or at least Reo’s, has shifted over to capturing Keppi once and for all now that they’ve seen him in the security camera footage of the main trio saving Haruka. It definitely looks like his ultimate plan is probably to use Keppi to make a gold plate of hope that he can use to wish Mabu back to how he used to be. And honestly at this point I think he deserves it, lol. The main trio’s problems are all just real-life relationship issues that can be resolved through communication and honesty, but Reo doesn’t really have much of a choice if he wants to fix the issue of Mabu being a living corpse fueled by a magical mechanical heart.

I’m really curious to see how their methods change after this, now that they have a more concrete goal. I wonder if they’ll keep making new kappa zombies each episode, or if they’ll continue to play a more active role in things.

At the very least, I think that there’ll be a sequence later on where the two of them get their own Sarazanmai musical sequence and secret-leaking scene. It’d just make sense in a lot of ways if we find out that, similar to the main trio, they can transform into otters and do the whole Sarazanmai thing.

I’m also still curious to see if/when their connection to Sara comes up in the story, especially since it seems like the prequel manga is probably canon to the anime. I think it’d at least be weird if it doesn’t come up at all, since the fact that they raised Sara seems like a pretty big deal.

And on the note of her, and the prequel manga’s plot in general, this episode raises even more questions, even if it answers at least one. At the very least, it looks like the sleepwalking dude at the end of the manga was her manager, and the silhouetted figure with a crown was Prince Keppi. But even knowing that just raises it’s own questions. In particular, why didn’t Keppi mention Sara in his whole info-dump about the otter/kappa war? He basically acted like he was the only surviving member of his kingdom, but Sara [and her manager] are obviously still around. She’s even a popular TV idol, and even uses her kappa form as a mascot, so Keppi should at least be aware that she exists. So I wonder if he might be intentionally trying to hide his connection to her, for one reason or another. In particular, I wonder if maybe Keppi is trying to protect her from the Otter Empire by acting like he’s the only kappa left alive, so they won’t get suspicious of her. Though it’s hard not to think that his overall motives might be more sinister after his episode, so who knows.

I have a feeling that Sara might also have the power to produce dishes of hope like Keppi can, regardless of what he says about him being the only one able to do that. If she does, I could see that leading to an ending where she’s able to grant Reo’s wish, and they can basically go back to being a family together.

This episode kinda makes me even more confused about Sara in general, though. Now that we know more about the reality of the war going on, and the kappa being a nearly extinct kingdom, you’d think that she wouldn’t be quite so flippant about transforming into a kappa in public, or using her kappa form as a mascot on TV. Episode 5 also made her seem a lot more . . . spacey and off in her own world, in a way, than how she seemed at the end of the prequel manga. I wonder how she feels about all of this.

I was a bit worried that the show has been spending so much time on the main trio that it wouldn’t have enough time to really go into Reo and Mabu, and the whole otter/kappa conflict, and so on, but it looks like all of that is becoming a lot more important now, and this episode already spelled out a lot of info, so I think it should work out fine.

I really want to check out the light novels now, but I’ve already decided that I’ll wait until near the end of the year to buy both volumes together. I did import the ReoMabu manga yesterday, though, so that should get here next week. I have a feeling I’ll also end up importing the physical volumes of the new manga adaptation as well, lol.

All in all, this was a really fantastic episode. I’m really happy that Ikuhara hasn’t lost his touch, and that we’re still getting such great shows from him. Now I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping that the second half of the show can stick the landing.

#murasaki rambles #sarazanmai #this post got really long but there's a LOT to say about this episode #this show is just SO GOOD Y'ALL

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lacktastrophe · 5 years

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Thank you for your reply! :) So Paulo trying his best to support him isn't enough, because he defies that his relationship with Sandy isn't as perfect and happy as he wishes? Hence, everything that Michael did for Sandy was for nothing, and that would break his status quo as "the nicest of all guys"? Though, why is everyone joining Lucy? Is she an oasis away from Mike's grumpiness? Why do you think is the reason of them "giving up Mike" instead of supporting him? (I will send you another ask)

That’s all pretty much it! Mike is a story about a teenager who for a greater period of the comic is caught up needing to live up to expectations set by everyone else around him. Resulting in him feeling trapped and isolated at his own sacrifice. It starts seeming like it involves ‘dealing’ with Lucy, but it also becomes the established trend with how he presents himself across to Sandy, who is seemingly perfect in his world and he tries to resemble the same ‘perfect’ thing she took a liking to, causing him to keep quite a great deal from her to remain so. The resulting need to keep his actual feelings bottled up causes him to have larger freakouts than some of the other characters. So far, every one in the cast has met that at least once, whether it’s Sue, Paulo, Lucy, or even Abbey.

The ‘Nicest of all guys’ isn’t technically a benchmark that Mike has set up for himself, that was set up for him by people like Daisy, who idolised him that much they would be more than willing to lay flat in the mud so he wouldn’t get his shoes dirty. Mike actually never set up any expectations up for himself, but at some stage he felt the need to live up to the ones around him, and in time everyone had started to believe them.

It didn’t help that Mike technically had everything anyone could ask for; he came from a wealthy nuclear family, he was smart, he had good looks, a smiling personality, and the prettiest (but fierce) girl in school by his side who would only want to hang around him. He’s living the dream according to his male peers and any of the girls in his grade would be more than willing to gladly take Lucy’s spot if he’d let them. But, that became a problem much later when it came to him and his feelings.

With regards to his and Lucy’s relationship, Lucy is this constant source of frustration for a number of reasons. When they first met, Lucy had latched onto him, having shown her attention unlike the peers in their class who rejected her due to her quirks. But Mike didn’t like the relationship because of the way Lucy treated it like a rivalry. A year later Mike would come to know a nicer girl who would give him all sorts of attention before she moved away. Lucy would latch on again. Mike would only find out afterwards that Lucy did not make friends in the period they did not have class together, and at some point then he believed he had to be her friend because no one else wanted to. In time he learns to live with it.

There would be a symbiosis that would develop, as Lucy is someone who is willing to lend Mike the support in telling him that not all is lost in his relationship with Sandy. Mike’s second dream with Lucy was a flashback to the time where he misses Sandy in Hot Pursuit, seeking Lucy to talk to someone I tend to feel it might have been this moment where Lucy starts progressively working up the courage to tell him her feelings.

Invitation is the about the same time Lucy comes to terms with her feelings for Mike, it’s about the same time that Sandy and Mike talk, and Sandy learns about how Lucy is rough with him, and Mike gets the idea that Lucy is not a good friend. When Zachary tries to talk to Mike about his and Lucy’s relationship in Intervention, Mike finds it to be a joke as he is not in love with Lucy and Lucy is very much aware that he and Sandy are both in a relationship. He comes to the conclusion that Lucy only loves him because without him, she’d be alone again. Mike speaks of his involvement like a role.

Mike is normalised with being associated with Lucy. It’s an expectation everyone has - If you’re looking for Lucy, she’s likely with Mike. All the girls at their table are surprised when he rejects her confession. He doesn’t understand the real reason they’re both paired up in Sue’s play, but it happens for some reason. And in December, Mike has a freakout when it appears like they’re going to be paired up again.

When Mike tries to explain the expectations, he isn’t able to, other than trying to reassure him that he knows what he’s talking about, and ‘she just needs me’.

Mike feels its his obligation to remain Lucy’s friend but another side to this symbiosis is that Mike does have feelings for Lucy, especially having tried to confess to her before they became highschoolers and before Sandy appeared again. In fact he ping-ponged between them as he started to fall in love with this rare side of Lucy only he would see when Sandy was not in the picture, only to forget about it when Sandy would come back into the scene. On the day of Curtain Call, Mike starts to remember about some of the good things about their friendship, particularly when Lucy asks him if he would marry with someone like her at some stage. By the end of the play Mike tries to repair the bridge, realising there was still something meaningful in it to him. Throughout the period of Lucy leaving, Mike begins to remember all the things he loved about Lucy or was thankful to Lucy for.

True enough, In the times where Sandy wasn’t around, Lucy was. He was just too in love with the perfection that Sandy had to notice the diamond in the rough was right beside him.

Problems start happening despite Lucy’s absence when in Happy Hour, Mike, guilt ridden, reveals it was what he said to her in December that caused her to leave, chapters after Sandy shows Mike what Lucy had sent to him, and what she really meant when she only wanted her to treat him nicer, not for him to isolate her. Paulo assaults Mike for treating her so awfully, but Mike fights back saying it’s nothing different from what he had been feeling for the last number of years; none of his friends stuck up for him in the time when Lucy was mean to him. She was able to get away with being awful. He was the one who was isolated and alone.

This page sets up the conundrum in the much later chapters when Lucy returns. Now back in Roseville and Mike has found she doesn’t want anything to do with him. As it turns out, Lucy is not willing to have the symbiosis return to what it was like originally, because Lucy believes Mike only valued their friendship because of her support for his relationship with Sandy, who has become uncontactable again. It’s hard not for her to think that after Mike refused her confession years ago, and seemingly not wanting anything to do with her again. We start to think that Mike is only wanting to repair the relationship like he did back when the play happened. But Lucy, not knowing whether Mike is still dating Sandy brings up that their relationship only existed because of her support for his relationship. That causes Mike to become enraged that Sandy is being bought up, and we still see that if these two were to be friends again, that would have to be part of the relationship again too.

The conundrum that Mike faces is he’s about as much of a parasite as he made out Lucy to be in December; Mike is a social vampire when it comes to the affirmation that is relationship with Sandy is still valid. Mike’s now acting more resentful now that he doesn’t have that backing, because the relationship has to work; Sandy is perfect to him. She can’t know his real feelings and she’s gotten to the point where she may have believed he doesn’t need her attention all the time. The last worst thing that Mike wants to deal with is that he may have been wrong about Lucy the whole time.

I don’t necessarily think that everyone is ditching Mike for Lucy intentionally because of Mike. Some of them are not privy to the fact they are fighting, only Daisy knows about this having Mike believing Lucy’s intentionally trying to make him jealous. One of the things that Lucy and Mike both have underestimated is how much Lucy means to everyone else. Daisy considers Lucy like as if she was her sister, Sue considers her the next closest friend she has to Amaya, and Paulo is actually in love with her. Mike was under the belief that Lucy could not make any friends in the way she was, but he only cared to remember the worst parts of her. Lucy was inclined to believe him knowing that since Confrontation, everyone tried to co-exist with her in order to either be closer to Mike (Daisy and Sue albeit not obviously) or wanted something from her (Paulo). This isn’t the case as it turns out, as even with Augustus’ presence in the latest chapter,, Luc has miscalculated. Her ex-friends are more than inclined to want to hang out her despite this and co-exist with Augustus, and it’s because she means something to them. It’ll be interesting to see if Paulo crosses the road too, hopefully, with Mike in tow.

I tend to feel like he’s going through the stages of a breakup with Mike’s relationship with Lucy and Sandy. We’re seeing stage where Mike is coming to the realisation that he cannot keep up what he’s got going on with Sandy. The moment he tells Daisy it’s been weeks since her last phone call was almost the depression stage. But he’s still at the barganing stage with Lucy. When Daisy tells him it’s not all about him do I think Mike has realised what he told Zachary wasn’t entirely accurate, Mike doesn’t know precisely why he keeps to Lucy either. Mike doesn’t want to admit that Lucy is doing better now. They’ve both traded places, and the one who’s isolating themselves through toxicity, albiet involuntarily compared to Lucy who did not want to appear weak. Mike just does not want to hear or admit his relationship with Sandy hasn’t ever improved, and the Sandy he met in model girlfriend is nothing like the Sandy he knew the time she met before. At the end of the day, he doesn’t want his own mud thrown back into his face, he will end up being the asshole.

Mike hasn’t really been able to grow with regards to his feelings. For the last few volumes, he has been living in a dreamworld if that’s anything ironic going back to what Paulo told him. I’d tend to figure it’ll take a couple more chapters when he finally gets an understanding of his feelings and hopefully can learn to express himself better without being explosive, as a lot of the other characters have worked closer on figuring out their own. At the moment, it’s a weird world for them as Mike is no longer conforming to the expectations of some, and Mike is discovering he might not be right about everything there was to Lucy.

#bcb #bittersweet candy bowl

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markoberposts · 5 years

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More Fun Movies Seen

Well, I did yesterday as I’d forecast within my prior posts. I went out and saw another large group of movies all at once...this time FOUR of them one after the other all at the same theater...this occurring once again at Tempe Marketplace as I’d done the day before as well. In fact, I’ve just set what I’m sure are 2 separate new records for myself thanks to all of the great new Summer movies that have come out all at once. As I’d talked about yesterday, I had just seen on Thursday all of the 3 movies: Child’s Play, Annabelle Comes Home, and The Secret Life of Pets 2. And then on Friday--yesterday--I followed this up by further seeing the 4 movies: Men in Black: International, Anna, Toy Story 4, and then lastly, The Dead Don't Die. So seeing yesterday’s 4 movies both sets a record for me for the most theater movies seen all in the same day as well as the most--as in 7--theater movies seen all within a short time period...that of a 2 day period. So I think that the movie-makers have been making up for last year, being that I don’t recall there having really been very many movies at the start of Summer that had attracted my attention in 2018. But wow...this was a lot of movies for having seen all at the same visit, with my having scheduled them intentionally so that I’d have about a half an hour between each movie if for no other reason but to go outside the theater and get warmed up again! And I say that with this even being in Phoenix and with it having been 110 degrees at the time! Yes indeed, they keep our theaters cool by comparison, especially when you are wearing shorts and a thin T-shirt.

Anyway, to start with, the movie Men in Black: International was a very fun and cool movie, with both of the lead actors of course being great within it and with my particularly enjoying watching Tessa Thompson, even with my not having become a fan of hers before this movie. And of course all of the cool aliens really make it interesting and fun to watch...it being right up there with Star Wars in this regard and probably even much more elaborately designed within these movies compared to Star Wars or most other Sci-Fi movies. Anyway, the story was exciting and fun, and the special effects were as great as ever.

And next I saw the movie Anna. And although it was a bit different than I’d expected, it was nevertheless interesting and fairly exciting. I admit that what had attracted me to it the most was the previews where it had showed her literally destroying guys around her with hardly lifting a finger, being such a precise and skilled fighter. I hadn’t read about it in advance, however, so I was surprised by it being a story about growing up in Russia and working for the KGB. But that was still by itself somewhat interesting, although I admittedly enjoyed the action scenes quite a lot more. I was, however, sympathizing with her all along, hoping that she would eventually find freedom. And even though I’ve always been strongly against killing any life forms (and no I’m not a Democrat...I’m actually an Independent simply because I don’t align with ANY political parties...not even whatever being an ‘Independent’ represents simply beyond being literally independent from all party ideals, my feeling repulsed by ALL political parties), I nevertheless find it odd that I’m able to--for movies such as this--feel completely okay watching her slaughter people left and right, perhaps simply because they’re supposedly the bad guys...or at least they’re agents who align themselves more with loyalties to bad people rather than to upholding what’s good and right on a moral level. And of course I also really enjoyed the movie because the actress is simply beautiful. In fact, I had to look her up after the movie for this very reason, finding that she is actually a true Russian actress, and that this film was a French film, even with it also focused on the American C.I.A. And when I looked her up in Wikipedia and then in IMDb, I was at least happy to see her smiling and happy most of the time, being that she did a great job of appearing so depressed and sad most of the time in the movie, with the couple of sex scenes not really detracting much from this overall dark mood. But in the end, it actually finished rather nicely. So I’d say that it was a pretty good movie overall.

And then I saw the movie Toy Story 4, which I really found to be very pleasant and entertaining, with it actually being just as much a love story as it was a movie about helping “Forky” to get back to its little human female creator kid who was really missing it quite a bit. And aside from the movie also being a love story involving Bo Peep and Woody, it was also the tiniest bit about it kind of resembling the Transformer movies, at least as far as how a human might be able to cause their toys to “come to life” as happens within the Toy Story movies. But this movie was really fun and exciting, and the dummies in it were really rather scary. In fact, I’d always wondered exactly why the ventriloquists had designed dummies to look like that...with their always looking so spooky-like! We never find out within this movie...but it does work well to make it rather scary. And I love all of the carnival scenes, being that they reminded me of another recent animation movie that I’d seen of a similar nature called Wonder Park, which I’d enjoyed because of the fantasy aspect of finding a hidden giant place such as Disneyland tucked away in some remote hidden forest. Anyway, this movie, Toy Story 4, was great and exciting and fun and was well worth seeing.

And finally, I then saw as my last movie for the night the movie, The Dead Don’t Die, which was a very, very slow-paced but nevertheless campy type of amusing movie about the end of the world zombie apocalypse. It has a lot of appealing parts to it, although it certainly didn’t follow the typical Hollywood type format of a small group of people--especially the heroes--surviving in the end. Nope! We all die in the end...and that is that! LOL. It really was a bit sad in this respect, however, because I really wanted the always-attractive Selena Gomez--normally known for her songs--to actually survive in the end. But SORRY! She’s a goner just like everyone else is...except perhaps the man in the woods...oh, and the alien-lady, who was VERY interesting to watch because of her always looking...well...kind of like an alien! But she was really great in this movie with her abilities to strike zombies down with her sword! Too bad she couldn’t rescue them all in the end. But perhaps some of the funniest and oddest things were the tendencies of Adam Driver--the bad guy in the latest Star Wars movies who KILLS his father Han Solo (DARN HIM!)--to step outside of character and talk about the script of the very movie itself. And this is part of what makes it so funny, being that from the beginning, Bill Murray asks him about what’s going on and Adam Driver always responds that he has a feeling that things will end badly. Eventually, in fact, Bill Murray finally asks him why he always acts like he knows that it’s going to end badly, and that’s when Adam reveals that it’s because he’d read the script! In response, Bill Murray finally then admits that he’d read the script as well, of course, but that he hadn’t read that it would end badly. Anyway, there are plenty of other fun jokes within it as well, with the key to the humor being of course the deadpan reactions by most people, especially Bill Murray and Adam Driver, to all of the various events that happen around them, even as they work to both figure out things and at least attempt to see if there’s anyway to help people out. But of course there isn’t in the end, because when the Moon develops a purple edge to it, and the Earth changes its rotation, then we are all DOOMED for sure! So we’d best take a lesson from this movie, with that lesson apparently being for us to simply give up! I mean, if there ever really is a zombie apocalypse to come of this nature, then there wouldn’t seem too awfully much that we could do about it. But who knows, perhaps a small group of survivors might be able to board one of the rockets from either Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and somehow make it outside the scope of influence of such a badly-resurrecting type of force! Or then again, perhaps instead someday a resurrection might occur where the people aren’t really zombies, but actually become once again like normal people, although perhaps with bodies that no longer age nor feel pain. Wouldn’t that be great?! One can always hope... :)

#Men in Black: International #Anna #Toy Story 4 #The Dead Don't Die #movies #theater #Tempe Marketplace #Phoenix #Tempe

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morbidlyqueerious · 5 years

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So. Let’s talk about Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. (Spoilers below the cut)

Tl;DR: Excellent animation carries a story that’s generally good but makes some missteps.

Let’s start with the good:

The animation is, in a word, excellent. It really takes full advantage of the medium to display a lot of different styles, and all of them look genuinely quite good. The characters all move fairly fluidly.

The sound design is also generally excellent. A few of the songs weren’t to my taste, but I do have to admit they were at least well made. They also match the action quite well.

All of the characters are good! Miles, Gwen, Peter, even Penny--they all drip with character and make it easy to see their primary drive and motivation, and they all have a clear conflict and a clear divide between who they are and who they want to be.

The story is, despite it all, generally good. It tackles some interesting questions about agency, expectations, and responsibility, which makes for an interesting reinterpretation of the classic quote--”With great power comes great responsibility”. Unfortunately it stumbles a bit here, which segues smoothly into my main criticism.

The main thrust of the plot is about expectations. This is how we’re introduced to Miles--he’s struggling at school and with his family specifically because of the expectations they put on him. Even around his uncle he struggles with expectations, just a different sort, and his boundaries still aren’t respected--he clearly didn’t want to go to the Underground, he was just dragged along. This is only exacerbated by his superpowers--at least to me it’s pretty clear he didn’t enjoy getting or having them, and although he certainly felt guilt over not saving Peter, there’s never any indication that he actually wanted to be Spider-Man, he just felt like he had to. His next few fights end up coming to him, and he spends most of the time running, and his trip to the lab is explicitly out of wanting to fulfill the dying Peter’s wishes. Even in the very end, he fights Kingpin solo specifically for Peter Parker, which while heroic doesn’t show any real change in his character.

In my mind, this is the key issue with the plot; in a plot about agency, the main character never really feels like he has any. This isn’t, inherently, a bad thing, but it’s not the story Into the Spiderverse wants to be. Everything about the movie, all of its major plot beats, are selling this idea of self-determinism, the idea that you alone get to chose who you are. Unfortunately, that’s not what the end of the movie says; it certainly shows him being better at being Spider-Man and doing better in school, but there’s absolutely no indication that he actually wants these things. In fact, a big deal is made earlier in the movie about how he felt crushed by the school and the social environment around him, and since no future scenes were really about classes we have no reason to believe that’s suddenly turned around. What was supposed to be a message of “You get to chose who you are” is turned into a message of “If you try hard enough, you can live up to other people’s expectations”--which for a lot of people isn’t inspiring at all!

This is exacerbated by the specific context around Miles. Although it’s never explicitly stated, it’s fairly clear* that Miles Morales is supposed to be a Gifted Child(tm), and as any former Gifted Child(tm) can tell you, this comes with a lot of pressure to be excellent at everything. As such, many of them grow up without ever having learned how to study and then burn themselves out trying to reach strict academic goals. They don’t even get to fall back to try something different, because they know they are technically possible of success, and changing goals or even approaches would be “laziness” or “giving up”**! This is a really tricky issue that’s hurting a lot of people and doesn’t get talked about much, and Into the Spiderverse has a stance on it: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

No! Stop that! What that quote should mean is “Don’t be selfish, and if you can help people, do so.” What gifted students get told it means is “Since you’re so smart, you’re responsible for making the world a better place entirely by yourself, also you’re not allowed to imply you’re better than other people in any way.” This movie is clearly aiming for the first but ends up hitting the second square on the head. The most annoying thing about this is that it wouldn’t be hard to fix--literally just put in one scene of Miles deciding that he actually wants to be Spider-Man, above and beyond his sense of obligation. Put in one scene in which he speaks out against some of the things people expect him to do (do well in school from his father, be “cool” from his uncle) and he actually gets treated as correct by the plot. Heck, you had an entire flashback montage of him hearing quotes, but instead of something about him (they could have put in a quote about how he really likes to tag up the street!), they just had a bunch of stuff talking about how scary it was, and what we have is a montage of a gifted child (but still a child) pushing himself to do something he doesn’t want to do and doesn’t think he can do, just because “We aren’t a family that runs away from problems.” I sincerely hope that this was simply a tonedeaf plot choice and that other people read some choice into his later actions, because the alternative is that someone out there is intentionally repeating the exact rhetoric that gives tons of people anxiety and self-image issues.

There are some other issues issues with the characterization. In particular, the side characters (Spider-Ham, Noir Spider-Man, and Peni Parker) are never really properly used as well as they could. Spider-Ham was enough of a comedy character that they certainly didn’t need a second one, yet this was all that Noir Spider-Man was reduced to, rather than using him to actually give us a different perspective on the plot. Likewise, the narrative seems to want Peni to be a comic relief character herself, yet she’s actually just a compelling and interesting character who gets mostly ignored. The fact that SP//dr*** was made by her dead father and she just pilots and maintains could certainly have been explored much more, especially considering how well it ties into the movie’s themes of responsibility and obligation, but she never gets enough characterization or development to do anything with her. There was an excellent metaphor waiting in the wings where each of the spider-people symbolizes one of Miles’s views of being Spider-Man, with Peter Parker showing it as an unreachable goal, Spider-Gwen as socially isolating, Spider-Ham as all just a fun game, Noir Spider-Man as a unpleasant and morally ambiguous task, and Peni Parker as an obligation he’s obliged to act out. Instead, Peter Parker is pretty much exactly the “sleazy mentor who used to be great” (albeit with some interesting characterization involving Mary Jane thrown in), Gwen Stacy is reduced to “cool but aloof love interest”, and Noir Spider-Man is just an edgelord, while Spider-Ham disrupts the flow of the plot and Peni is along for the ride. All of these characters were interesting enough for their own comics (and I would certainly watch an entire movie about Spider-Gwen or Peni Parker), but here they’re barely more than set dressing.

Some of the people reading this may have played Okami, a rather popular game largely due to its art style which resembled nothing so much as traditional Japanese painting. Strip that away, however, and you were left with a fairly standard Legend of Zelda clone****. Much the same is true of this move; the usage of animation is so far outside the box that it helps paper together a plot which is solidly within it. The writing is good in the moment and each individual scene is clever, but step back and the plot is stretched thin over the many characters, with an accidentally terrible moral. I still recommend it for the animation alone, but only reluctantly; it’s an enjoyable movie while you’re watching it, but not for one second longer.

* At least, I thought it was clear--other people might see him differently. That being said, he got into an elite school on a “lottery” that was more likely some kind of merit exam, he cracks “smart jokes” when under pressure, and a lot of the classroom behavior we see makes a lot more sense when you parse it as a room full of people whose entire self-esteem is staked on being the smartest person in the room.

** If this sounds familiar to you: when you are told you have a responsibility to people, that includes yourself, and as such you’re allowed to simply not strive for goals you don’t care about regardless of how easily you can reach them. Also, intelligence is not in any way a measure of moral value, school performance especially in higher grades is not a measure of intelligence, and you should seriously learn to take notes because at some point you will go from not needing them to really needing them (speaking from experience).

*** Yes, that really is the mech’s name. I checked. Apparently in the comics, it’s also more Evangelionesque, but this version of Peni and SP//dr are good in their own right.

**** Not to call it bad--anything that follows the Legend of Zelda formula at least competently will be fun to play through!--but merely to state that it really wasn’t original or innovate in anything save its art and its controls.

#long #really long #I did not mean to write a 3 page essay with footnotes but I Guess We're Doing That Now #me @ me where is this energy for classes?#Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse #Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse spoilers #review #at least between Spider-Gwen and the new Deadpool there's a possibility for Gwenpool someday #and a Gwenpool movie would be Nuts

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mellowfilmmaker · 7 years

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12 Dumb Anti Su Critical Arguments (Part 1)

You know what’s been annoying about the SU Fanbase lately? The whole SU Critical vs SU Stans discourse that’s been going on lately. Which side am I on? Well if you’ve been following my blog you would know that I’m on the SU Critical side. Yes, sometimes Su Critical can be nitpicky, they can be rude too, and I don’t agree with everything they say. I’m still on their side though because people are allowed to critique things, critiques can help artists, and the show is not as good as it use to be. I feel like I’m always the one to stand up for criticism so I’m going to do that again. Here are 12 dumb arguments (in no particular order) that are almost always said to SU critical people. If you think I’m using a straw man here, I’m not. Su critical people can attest that yes, people really do make these arguments. If any of you receive these arguments, just link the Stan to this article. I’ll admit that I might get a little mean, but I believe it’s justified. These arguments are dumb and even a little toxic.

12. Stay out of the Tags!!!:

This one starts off the list because it isn’t an argument; it’s just an annoying statement. Why should we? Our post is related to the show just the same as yours. Is it because you’re a crybaby that can’t handle somebody having a somewhat negative opinion on the show? How will you react if you have a friend that doesn’t like a film as much as you do? Are you going to bitch at them too? People are allowed to have a different opinion than yours. Saying people can’t critique a show because you like it is so conceited. The thing is, SU Critical people do stay out of the tags. They only tag their stuff as SU Critical and I noticed that they’ve been calling the show by different names like Steven University or Stephen Galaxy. I use to think they did this to be funny, but I recently realized that they do this so they can stay out of regular SU tags (Tumblr puts something in the tags if the word is mentioned in the post, even if you didn’t tag it as such). Anti Su Critcal people aren’t as cordial, they post so much SU Critical hate in the SU Critical tags.

11. Personally Insulting the Critics:

This is a fallacy called Ad Hominen. It’s a fallacy because it’s not a real argument; it’s just petty. You could tell an SU Critic that they have no life, so they decide to get a full time job, a loving spouse, and 2 kids. They do all that stuff, but Steven Universe will still be flawed. Their argument still stands.

10. Just Sit Back and Enjoy It:

This argument is used so much, not just against su critical, but film analysis people in general. People, stories are complex, especially in a visual medium. Some people like looking deeper into the complexities because those are interesting. Analyzing it is enjoyable to us, so we’re not trying to ruin your fun, but you sure as hell are ruining my fun. As for criticism, the quality of art is felt first and thought of second. Analyzing a quality of a story is analyzing our reactions to a story. When we find a film boring, we think about what the film did (or didn’t) do in order to bore us. If we find a film exciting we think about why the film excited us. So really, we can’t just sit back and enjoy a story, when we didn’t enjoy the story. There seems to be this misconception that film analysis people are pickier, but we’re really not. From my experience film analysis people actually like a wider variety of movies and shows. The difference is that we’re better at explaining our opinions. Non-film analysis people say that they didn’t like a film because it was stupid and boring. Film analysis people explain why they found the film to be stupid and boring.

9. Redesigns Aren’t Criticisms:

Really? People redesign characters because they don’t like how the character is designed and they find faults in it. Think of it this way. There’s an artist who draws a character and shows it to her friend. Her friend says that it’s not horrible, but there’s something off about the design. The friend is also an artist so she decides to redraw the character herself with a few changes. The friend asks the first artists if she likes the changes, and she does and decides to incorporate them into the design. See, would you say that’s not criticism? No! It totally is criticism.

8. They’re Aliens! They Don’t Have Race:

Um, race coding exists. There are always non-human characters that appear human, but are meant to resemble different races. Sometimes this can be offensively (like the race coding in Phantom Menace), but it can also be done well. It’s pretty clear that characters like Garnet and Bismuth are coded black. Their hair, overall appearance and voice actors imply that the characters are supposed to resemble black people, so it’s perfectly legitimate to take issue with how the characters are handled within a race context. Also, some of you people (and by some of you people, I mean some of you white people) might not know this, but there is dark skin prejudice even within ethnic communities. I learned about this because I did a report on Bell Hooks in college and watched a documentary about the problems dark skin black women have to go through, and they seem to not be treated as well by society as much as lighter skin women within the same race. I mention this because even if you want to say that they’re aliens, they do enforce darker skin stigma by having character have darker skin when they’re suppose to be evil, but have lighter skin when they are suppose to be good. They did this twice with Lapis and Blue Diamond (though I don’t think they are intentionally trying to reinforce a stigma against dark skin people). What I’m saying is that bringing up race when talking about aliens is totally legitimate.

7. You’re not an Animator so you can’t Critique:

I’m not an actor, but I can tell you that this right here is shit.

youtube

You don’t need to be in the field or work in order to be able to tell if somebody is doing a good job. People might not have practical experience in animation, but they might have seen a lot of animation. They have eyes and can tell what is pleasing to look at. They know that artwork is supposed to be appealing to look at (if it’s suppose to be) and they can tell when there are errors made in animation. Saying that you have to be an animator in order to criticize animation is pretentious nonsense.

To Be continued...

#steven universe #su critical #su stans #garnet #pearl #amethyst #peridot #lapis lazuli #jasper #bismuth #ruby #sapphire #article #criticism #film criticism #su criticism #redesign

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gotgifsandmusings · 7 years

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Quick asks roundup

I’m going out of town this afternoon for labor dabor, and probably won’t be around much during the weekend. Thought I’d answer a few asks below--just a grab bag, with a vague focus on S7. Should be able to do a video one of these next week, and Julia and I are eyeing a UBS podcast episode pretty soon too.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: Have you read David Benioff's book City of Thieves? I'm curious how it compares to GoT.

I haven’t, no. I’m not sure if that’s something I want to subject myself to (it has been mostly positively received from what I know, though not across the board) when there’s so much I’ve been putting off reading as it is.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: Is cerseï pregananant in the boox?

She’s actually gregnant.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: Just read your criticism about Fair Game and wholeheartedly agree. You touched on the core of why your (and Julia's and Caroline's and Jess' and Turtle's) GoT analysis are so great: they understand the intersection of narrative flaws and social issues. Sure, some people may complain that they don't want "SJW" stuff, except, y'know, you don't stop being a feminist when you write a review. As you say, media is not produced in a cultural vacuum. Sadly, I admit I feel reluctant to...... Actively criticize GoT with people around me because the ones who dislike it also dislike ASOIAF and fantasy/sci-fi ("The show is bad because GRRM is a bad writer who isn't really character-driven, but it's not surprising since genre stuff is awful"). That sucks :(

Yes, exactly! This is in reference to this piece by myself and Julia, btw. That’s really depressing about that perception of genre fic, especially given what Martin does being so unique. I’ve never particularly understood that attitude; I want to read about cool places and stuff happening as much as I want to read about weighty character journeys, and why scoff at any that pull off both? Though Julia has a piece on that too.

But absolutely, as we said, it’s asinine to ignore the ways culture shapes media and vice versa, and often the reason the writing is so poor is because it’s so sensationalist or reliant on shitty tropes and stereotypes. “Just enjoy it (or critique) without focusing on social issues” is the ultimate sign of privilege, and it drives me crazy because it’s tossed out as an appeal to “objectivity.” IF YOU’RE IGNORING PEOPLE’S EXPERIENCES YOU’RE ALREADY NOT BEING OBJECTIVE.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: I'm curious why you guys interpret Cersei's internalized misogyny as nothing to do with gender dysphoria. All because Cersei doesn't break down during her period doesn't mean you must read her as cisgendered. She treats femininity like her least-favorite subject in school, not like part of herself. You're welcome to read her story as about women internalizing misogyny, but her thoughts feel familiarly trans, and outright denying that reading closer-to-earths her

This is really interesting, and my assumption would definitely a result of my own distance with that experience. Are there any metas on it? I haven’t really considered this before (I’ve seen the case argued for Brienne), and I’m not very convinced Martin had much intentionality here, but that’s a reading of her character I’d definitely like to learn/think more about.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: How can Euron "Crow's Eye, Terror of Pentos" Greyjoy come across as such a wimpy villain that I'm missing Ramsay? Hell, effing Joffrey could have torn that cuddly pooh bear a new one.

But...he’s the storm. You weren’t quaking in your boots when his fleet armada magically descended on Yara’s?

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: I haven't seen anyone else comment on this, but did you notice Cheryl says "You expect me to command our troops to fight beside foreign scum?" almost immediately before telling Jaime she's bringing the foreign Golden Company from Essos to fight beside their troops? Do you think the writers ever make it to second drafts or do they just knock out the first on the back of a Hooters napkin over Natty Ices and fist bumps and say, nah, we're good bro?

A showpologist would tell you it’s clearly demonstrating what a horrible hypocrite she is and actually rather cutting commentary.

It’s really, really hard for me to imagine a world where Operation Capture a Wight received a look-over. A whole lot of what they do feels thoroughly unedited.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: Hey, I really appreciate all your GoT analysis. 1) Is Cheryl's assistant actually Ezri Dax? 2) Did you see Linda's episode review where she called D&D "smug idiots?" 3) Is it possible to enjoy GoT as schlock? I can't and don't, but It is certainly bad enough and dumb enough. Thanks!

Thank you :)

1) According to wikipedia, Ezri Dax’s actor is currently starring in “Corrupt aka Trust No One” and “Where’s my Baby”, but I’m glad you made me look her up, because the resemblance there is quite uncanny. The maid is played by Sara Dylan, and has actually been a consistent, recurring character since Season 2. Apparently her name is “Bernadette” because why not.

2) Was it her newest review? I do listen to those in the background of work when I’m doing spreadsheet kind of stuff, so I may not have caught that exact phrase, but I did hear the part where she basically said “just don’t even bother writing a plot. Only write battles because everything else is terrible.”

3) I mean, the people enjoying GoT are watching schlock, so it must be possible. I happen to think the ardent defenders/honeypotters aren’t the majority, and most people turn it on to watch dragons for 60 minutes, then talk about how cool the dragons looked the next day at work. It’s just that GoT comes with a stamp of “SMART ADULT SHOW” for reasons that will never cease to amaze me. So yeah, totally, but for me, I have a hard time enjoying something when the more you think about it, the worse it gets.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: I would bet my right hand that someone in the GoT writers' room probably rewatched season 1 which is why there's so many callbacks to it like Arya's "that's not you", Dany's infertility, Bran's "I told you not to trust me", etc etc. Like it just seems so obvious that they realized they ran out of content and decided to just revisit past seasons to make themselves seem smart and like they planned ahead so much.

Oh 100%. Season 1 was this year’s Lord of the Rings, which they had obviously binged before last year. I love it because then all the critics are like, “ohh my god it’s so well-planned and deep.” But no. It’s essentially grinning into the camera going “remember when?”, completely on par with Gendry’s boat joke.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: The writers gave up 3 seasons ago, but it feels like no one was really trying this year. The cast looked bored. The wigs were trash: Dany's fire-proof wig is also boatsex-proof and freezing wind-proof. The costumes were either too anachronistic for a so-called prestiege Medievalesque Drama or straight up uninspired: Cersei's modern office wear, Dany and LF are shopping at the same department store, Lyanna S dressed up for a college roman-themed party. I guess the special effects were ok.

I’m very, very hesitant to call out costuming because I know Michele Clapton is like, making up these immaculate honeypots and ordering the finest fabrics from Lithuania to pull everything together. But...yeah, as a viewer everything was kind of clearly ridiculous (Euron’s jacket), and EVERYTHING WAS BLACK with the exception of Deadpan’s coat, that was, I’m sorry, objectively hideous. The reason people fawned over it was because it was actually contrasting the blah they had been seeing all season.

As for the cast, I mean...I think these guys are decent actors who get into their roles when they can. But who could get into anything happening at this point? Stuff happens, don’t question it. The directing was probably fine (I don’t know enough about that stuff), but when the script is fundamentally lazy and uninspired, it’s going to bleed into everything.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: (Regarding episode 7) So the only leak that didn't come true was "Cersei's" bed of blood prediction and I'm wondering if she'll miscarry next season because morally evil incest women like Cheryl don't deserve babies while morally good (with the help of our friendzoned Saint T🙏) incest women like Deadpan get to conquer infertility and birth a Targ with the help of Jonny Cardboard's magic seed. That would be one boring Aegon 2(3?) infant. Thoughts?

Honestly, I can’t make heads or tails of why she was even pregnant. Larry didn’t need that to stay on her side at all, and the only thing I can think was that it added an extra TWIST for us. Haha, viewer! You thought she might have actually wanted to fight the threat because of her unborn kid and how many times we’ve told you her only redeeming quality is her motherhood, but now she’s EVHUL and even idealized motherhood can’t save her!

I guess it’s...kind of trope busting?

I kind of agree though, I don’t see them letting a BAD woman give birth and mother. At the same time, I don’t see how enough time can even pass where this would be a relevant plot-point to anything. So...I just, I don’t get it. I’ve gotta figure out how to structure my sexism & s7 analysis, and going back and revisiting Cheryl is probably going to be one of the most confused parts of it. I see many paths for how this unfolds, and none of them are really too promising.

Alrighty, gotta cut it here for today. Everyone have a safe labor day weekend (I guess there’s no heightened risk for non-Americans, but a safe weekend all the same), and I’ll talk to you guys later!

#asks #ask roundup

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marvelandponder · 7 years

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Building Off of Simple

When we even just first saw the synopsis for this episode, I thought, ‘Damn that’s simple.’ Character A has to stop Character B and Character C from seeing that Character A has invited them both to the same thing.

Granted sometimes the beauty of a simple premise is that it’s so simple that the characters can bring it to life through their interactions. With less plot to explain, simple and in this case dare I say cliched premises can give the characters room to breathe, or perhaps make a greater point, with the simple plot as a foundation.

Does this episode do any of that? Well, I’d so say so, yeah, if with a few misses here and there. But the more I think about all that it does right, the less the stale premise takes away from the experience.

For one: I called it.

Usually whenever I call something, hell has frozen over, but this time it’s because they set it up well in advance around the time I was examining Spike’s character arc in my What is Spike’s Special Talent? editorial from last year:

“Spike’s destiny, I think, is to be an Ambassador of Foreign Relations under the Princess of Friendship herself. He can use the fact that he never belonged anywhere to belong everywhere, and help connect countries far and wide back to his home.”

And look at us now! Spike has officially become the “new official Equestrian Friendship Ambassador to the Dragons,” good personal friends with the new leader of the changelings, and he’s successfully able to be called on by the map.

It’s quite the episode for showcasing his potential, isn’t it?

Sure, he makes assumptions that pad out the run-time when the conflict could’ve been solved with a conversation, but I think his accomplishments in this episode and his good intentions save this from Princess Spike territory, or even Spike at Your Service.

I mean, he’s trying to stop a war from happening. As short-sighted as he is to let his anxiety get the better of him---which, by the way, made for a great parallel to Twilight---he’s endearing because he’s trying to do the right thing, which I think is something you need when you’re writing this particular kind of story.

The other way to go is to have Character A/Spike intentionally invite them both to the same thing, which is selfish and that much more predictable. I like that here it’s not even purely scheduling error, either, it’s that both friends needed to talk to him, and by the nature of how long it takes each of them to get from their homelands to Ponyville, it just so happened to be the same day.

Still a plot contrivance, yeah, but it’s one that just makes honest-to-god sense (these kind of communication/timing errors do happen), and again, really endears us to Spike because he’s only trying to help.

So, yes, I’m extremely proud of Spike for his accomplishments. It might’ve been a more impactful character moment if they had come with a less well-worn conflict, but they still make me extremely proud of the little guy because they’re still so fitting and have been built up over the course of multiple episodes.

The moral about assumptions fits with Spike’s character arc rather nicely. He’s spoken out about making assumptions about another race in The Times They are a Changling, but this episode challenges him to not underestimate his friends on a personal level. Because of it, he comes out a better ambassador for having learned the lesson.

Which brings me to the map, and Spike solving his own problem. The episode shows us twice that Spike can actually be a great mediator if he tries, which is a very smart thing to write in, because by episode’s end Spike’s first friendship problem is just an internal one. Without those demonstrations of what a good help he can be to others, it would be easy to argue Spike might not be able to solve actual friendship problems in the future, and thus, not a good addition to the map’s roster---which he totally is.

Quick detour while we’re still talking about the moral: I also just love that they have a running gag where Ember not only criticizes how alike Starlight and Twilight are as a wink to the fans who’ve said the same thing, but as thematically resonant point. Like, not only does making generalizations about your friends based on their personalities come back to bite you, but making generalizations based on their race or nationality still only forces conflict and hurts feelings.

It’s a joke based on the Cross Race Effect, which is “the tendency to more easily recognize faces of the race that one is most familiar with (which is most often one's own race” (x). Often, we only think of blatant racists saying “all ___ look alike,” but the greater point isn’t just that Ember’s pretty racist, it’s that even though it might be harder at first for Ember to tell the difference between Twilight and Starlight, the better move is to recognize the bias in herself and think more of their feelings instead of just straight up saying she has a hard time telling them apart. Just thought I’d throw that out there, because knowing that tid bit of sociology only adds to the meaning of that running joke and choosing to give it to a character who freely speaks her mind.

Anyway, going back to what I said up top, this simple episode uses its characters and their interactions to make the episode, and it works in a number of ways.

The moments that fall flat are the ones that are following the formula that comes with this plot: awkwardly phrased excuses and distractions that are rather obvious from the viewer’s perspective.

But aside from a few of those beats, this episode really takes advantage of every character it has and it shows!

Ember and Thorax are both characters fans have been clamoring for more of (Ember especially because she’s only had one appearance), and both of them shine in this episode.

Ember’s, for lack of a better word, tsundre character type continues to work well in a friendship context instead of a romantic and/or sexual one, as the archetype often does in anime (yes, it has been used for just friends before, of course, but not as often). Because of that, it’s sweet to watch her want to try to learn about friendship to be a better leader to the dragons (perhaps, even better than her father).

Thorax is once again his adorably neurotic, self-depreciating self. With the character development he’s received in his past few appearances, including this one, he’s becoming less and less like the hilarious, but one-note archetype FimFlamFilosophy/Dawn Somewhere uses for Fluttershy in the Mentally Advanced Series (just try and tell me you don’t see the resemblance).

Even Twilight and Starlight get great moments as Spike’s support in this. Twilight gets to show-off her character development, ironically being the level-headed voice of reason for Spike while he freaks out and catastrophizes the problem. Starlight gets in some good lines, and once again this season proves she can play a supporting role to other characters without stealing the spotlight or anything of that nature.

And there are a lot of little jokes and moments that stick the landing and make the episode that much better overall (which I’ll get into in a sec), so even though the story feels a bit too standard from concept, there’s a lot to like and not a lot to cringe at or take real issue with.

All in all, I like this episode for Spike’s development and it makes me look forward to what adventures our little ambassador will get up to next.

Details, Thoughts, and Whatnots

Starilight’s “You’ve been hanging around Twilight for too long” line.Self-aware jokes never fail to make me laugh

THORAX IS AN ADORABLE BUG, I LOVE HIM GETTING DISTRACTED BY FIRE (which by the way: wasted opportunity to have him be distracted by Ember’s fire)

“Is that ice in the shape of a dragon?” --- I love that Thorax is delighted by this and doesn’t question it, because seriously, that’s the appropriate response to something that a life-sized ice sculpture of a dragon

Thorax mentions that he has a brother, which [spoilers] ties into an episode later this season where Starlight and Trixie help him continue to solve the problem he has in this episode. I just. I love. This. Continuity.

I also just love that the way they did it, you might not hear it on the first watch through because Spike is distracted. So cool.

You know one thing I kind of realized? I want more moments of Twilight and Spike feeling close. Not just comforting or supporting each other like they do for the rest of their friends, but that quasi mother-son or sister-brother relationship we’ve seen in previous seasons. That’s an element I really want them to emphasize again, especially now that Spike has an official title of his own. They could do a whole episode about it. Are they growing apart now that their jobs don’t include each other? Do they have the opportunity to be close than ever, if they work together on, say, a map mission (heck, a Twilight and Spike map episode would be adorable, and you could have them going about it in different ways and Twilight trying to treat Spike as an equal instead of an assistant)

I realize I’m going off on a tangent about this, but it just kind hit me that even though Twilight’s supporting him throughout the episode, I don’t necessarily feel how close they are and I miss that. It’s not like they’re cold or distant at all, I’m not saying that, I’m just kind of reminded of how sweet they are and now that they’re both established ambassadors of friendship, I think it’s high time we had an episode emphasizing the oldest friends in the series again.

The hug thing all throughout this episode is just... it’s too cute. This is why I have to call a spade a spade/a tsundre a tsundre.

Also, tiny detail: I love that the first thing Ember notices is how colourful everything is. Seeing Ponyville through her eyes in that regard is neat

CUTE ALERT: Twilight and Ember still write letters to each other, and Ember wants to say hi to Twilight to be a good friend to her

I suspect the dragons don’t have a great medical system if one of their mottos is push past the pain... it kind of makes you wonder how they live so long

Twilight distracting Thorax with chairs. What a dork. She also still studies even years after graduation, and that just makes me happy

The small set-up and pay-off to Starlight not wanting to have to tell Twilight her house is being devoured though

Lyra and BonBon had a lover’s quarrel over cupcakes. I’m just going to enjoy that fact for a while...

Just the way Thorax says “Even though I said ‘Hey, let’s not do that anymore,’ and they said, ‘Hey, we’ve been doing that for hundreds of years’”---super cute way to introduce his problem

Never thought I’d say this but: Ember’s eyebrows.

Spike interrupts two stallions living together, about to have a cute domestic meal (and yes, it’s gay):

Once again MLP embraces the idea that drastic differences between friends make for stronger friendships than what they have in common. The show is all about learning from one’s own flaws to be better friends and a better person/pony/dragon/changeling/what have you, as was so simply put in in last week’s episode (”Without our flaws, there might not even be friendships to begin with.”), but a key component to that is often having friends that help you make up for your flaws by having drastically different and sometimes even polar opposite flaws and strengths themselves. And, this time, the show uses Ember and Thorax to make it clear as day that bonding over working through your own difficulties creates stronger relationships than even characters who can bond on what they have in common.

Or to sum it up: Friendship is Struggle, Endured Together. It’s a simple truth, but the fact that MLP thematically insists that differences can teach us more than commonalities is still neat. Especially because the best scenes I can think of where characters bond over what they have in common/understand each other through empathy are in EQG, not the main series, which might, in a roundabout way, mean the two series are starting to operate under different themes and dare I say philosophies, as simple as they may be.

And that, kiddos, is what over-analyzing looks like.

I also feel like we’re ultimately building to either one of two things:

1. Twilight and Company Found the United Nations: It would be fitting to ultimately bring together all of the different creatures---crystal ponies, dragons, changelings, griffons, breezies, yaks, seaponies, cats, humans (EQG) etc.---into one organization that focuses on keeping peace and spreading friendship. The representatives would be the characters we know so well now and our own ambassadors. Twilight would even get to codify a rule book with their help on how to treat each other.

2. Giant Battle/War Where Equestria Needs to Call on Its Allies: It’s been done in other shows before (i.e. Samurai Jack), but it can still be a great moment where all the friends they’ve made come to their aid to help them face the biggest threat they’ve faced.

Overall this episode might’ve been improved by avoiding more of the pitfalls that come with this standard plot, but it does a lot with it, and I can’t deny I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Yet another good season 7 episode... we’re on a roll at this point.

Pony? Yep, I got that! I write reviews and editorials, and heck, have the last three things I’ve done, just to make it easier:

Honest Apple Review, SciTwi v. Twilight, and Fame and Misfortune Review

Year of the Pony

Special Thanks to Millennial Dan on Deviantart, who made the Microphone vector for the logo!

Pony in a Dragon’s Body Helps Shape-shifting Deer Thing and Dragon Lord Be Friends

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couragesun · 7 years

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Out of the original 8 chosen kids and their digimon can you rank your favourite digimon child partnerships?

You bet I can!

Disclaimer: I really do love all of them, this is just my interpretation of which partner pairs I think compliment and support each other the best. I’m more than open to a discussion if there are disagreements

1) Jou and Gomamon #partnergoals

2) Yamato and Gabumon

3) Takeru and Patamon

4) Taichi and Agumon

5) Hikari and Gatomon

6) Mimi and Palmon

7) Koshiro and Tentomon

8) Sora and Biyomon

More details under the cut!

Jou and Gomamon are my FAAAAVS. They genuinely feel like friends: they tease each other, challenge each other to be better, and are supportive and encourage each other. I honestly think they have the most true and authentic relationship. These two are family; there for each other for the high points and the low points (and during those low points, Gomamon is there with a hug and a smile!). They balance each other out and bring out the best in each other and I absolutely love it. (*buries head under blanket*) I have so many feelings about these two cuties I don’t think I can articulate it. They’re so much more than partners and I wish all the Chosen had a relationship like theirs.

Yamato and Gabumon are so perfect and awkward it makes me squeal on a regular basis. Like, they understand each other on such a spiritual level, and yet they are still so awkward around each other; almost like they don’t know what to do with the amount of love and loyalty that they have for each other. I think Gabumon is the one character in the series that truly understands Yamato, and you can see it so clearly in their bond. When I was younger, I was always a little confused as to why Yamato got the Crest of Friendship, but his relationship with Gabumon really helped him understand what friendship is and what it can be. I really believe that Gabumon helped Yamato become a better person.

Takeru and Patamon also have a beautiful relationship. Even when I wasn’t a huge fan of Takeru, I always appreciated the bond these two shared. Takeru is the only digidestined who has watched his partner die in battle, so I think that he really loves and appreciates his partner in a way that is different than the other digidestined. UGH! And that scene in tri when Patamon was infected!! I was IN TEARS. How DARE they make me FEEL EMOTIONS!!

Taichi and Agumon have a relationship that I find fascinating. It’s a strange combination of Taichi treating Agumon a bit like a younger sibling and also like a trusted battle partner. I’ve rarely seen Taichi have long heart-to-heart conversations with Agumon, and I think that stems from Agumon’s emotional immaturity. Agumon is great, but he’s not on the same level as Gabumon or Biyomon in terms of awareness. When Taichi is uncertain, Agumon’s instinct is to say “We got this cuz we’re friends, and friends can do ANYTHING!” He trusts Taichi to a degree that makes him seem almost infallible – if Taichi asked him to step into traffic, I think Agumon would do so with very little hesitation. He doesn’t have the same role that Gabumon plays in Yamato’s life, where he helps Yamato grow. Agumon’s role is to be more of a safety net – Taichi can screw up, and Agumon will still be there (i.e. SkullGreymon). He is a loyal solider to his general, and will always be there to support Taichi. I think this makes them the best partners in battle, because they trust each other so much, but I don’t think they’ll ever have the same relationship that the former three have. And maybe they don’t need to – maybe Taichi has enough advisers through the other Chosen that he DOES need someone whose response will always be “I will go wherever you go”.

Hikari and Gatomon! Okay, this ranking is completely because I’m the worst. I really need to re-watch 02, because I’m drawing a blank on Hikari and Gatomon’s relationship. I mean I know that they have a really solid partnership AND friendship, but I can’t really think of many specific instances to draw from. Part of this is because they came into the series so late in 01 and Hikari and Gatomon haven’t had too many scenes together in tri (although that mall scene nearly KILLED ME), so I just don’t have much to work with since it’s been so long since I’ve watched 02. Thus, I’ve placed these two comfortably in the middle because the scenes that DO come to mind are pretty great: when Angewoman and LadyDevimon are having their cat-fight and Hikari is on the sidelines cheering like a lunatic, the tri scene at the mall, the entire lead-up to discovering Hikari was the eighth child. Yea, these two are pretty great together.

Mimi and Palmon are kind of the opposite of Taichi and Agumon… Palmon and Mimi LOVE each other the way that besties do, but I think their relationship is different than Gomamon and Jou because Palmon’s role is to bring out Mimi’s genuine self and humility. I’ve always found it appropriate that Palmon is a plant-type digimon because she is so down-to-earth and she balances out Mimi’s over-the-top nature. I always imagine them at a sleepover, braiding each other’s hair (it’s not a perfectly accurate scenario..), while Mimi gushes/rages/gossips about someone or something, and Palmon being that little angel on her shoulder reminding her to slow down and consider all of the facts before making snap decisions. They are friends first, and everything else second. Palmon has helped Mimi grow up a lot, and has no problems calling her out on her bullshit (the Numemon castle episode…), but I don’t see the same level of trust and understanding that the above partnerships have. Mimi and Palmon are awesome for each other, but I’ve never found myself wishing I had their type of relationship.

Koshiro and Tentomon!! I love my nerdlings!!! UGH! Individually I think these two are perfect, but as I was thinking about each of the partnerships I even surprised myself how low I rated these two because I really do love them. And the problem, unfortunately, is Koshiro. I KNOW that Koshiro adores Tentomon, but I have seen enough moments where Koshiro treats Tentomon more like a business partner than a friend. Which, if this situation were like Mimi and Palmon, wouldn’t be so bad if that’s what they needed, but it’s not. Koshiro NEEDS someone to keep him in check, someone to drag him out of his cave every once in a while, someone to remind him that oolong tea can’t be the ONLY thing someone consumes to stay healthy… The other Chosen (Jou, Mimi, and Taichi especially) I think do a pretty good job at this, because they are hard to argue with. I feel so bad for Tentomon because you can see him TRYING to help Koshiro, but Koshiro often ignores him. And that… doesn’t always sit well with me. I think Koshiro can forget that Tentomon is his friend and confidant, instead of a partner on a research project. And then Tentomon has to do something drastic (like the cave of curiosity where he had to devolve until Koshiro snapped out of it, or when he had to sacrifice himself in tri to prove a point) and then Koshiro remembers “Oh no! That’s my friend and partner!”. So yea, they’re great, but Koshiro needs to get his priorities straight…

Biyomon and Sora. Yea, I feel like I might get some hate for this one, but I’ve never liked Biyomon. These two have had the most tumultuous relationship throughout all of the seasons, and while I’m glad that they eventually came to an understanding of each other before the reboot, watching them come to terms with each other was almost painful. For the longest time they didn’t trust each other, and I often got the feeling that Sora didn’t even LIKE Biyomon at the beginning. It wasn’t until Sora’s crest glowed for the first time that I saw anything resembling a friendship between the two of them. Which is okay, everyone develops friendships differently, but I don’t think I ever saw proof of this ‘amazing, loving’ friendship that they supposedly had after that moment. For example, When Yamato was in his depression cave with Gabumon, Gabumon was the one who pulled him out of it by talking to him and showing how much he cared about Yamato and by telling him he didn’t have to be alone anymore. I BELIEVE their friendship, because I saw it! I saw Gabumon fight for Yamato’s friendship and it was beautiful. Sora was in the exact same situation, and Biyomon was unable to pull her out of the cave of sadness. I just don’t see the same level of trust and understanding that the others have with their partners – I’ve been told it’s there, but I didn’t get to really watch the evolution. They just suddenly understood each other, and it felt forced and fake. And THEN we get to tri and the reboot and Biyomon is SUCH a jerk! And, believe me, I’ve read enough “in defense of Biyomon” posts to try and understand the other side, but there was a point where Biyomon was just being intentionally hurtful. I get it, you don’t know her, but how can you rebuild a friendship unless you TRY, and if you’re not willing to try then why are you still there?? I’m glad I got to watch their relationship form throughout that episode, but it still felt a little forced and rushed. I think that these two are just rarely what the other needs, and instead of pushing each other to be better they force the other into a standstill. It’s very frustrating for me to watch. So yea, they’re one of my least favorite partnerships, which is such a shame because I love Sora!!

#50cyg #CS chats #asks #digimon adventure #digimon adventure tri

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tortuga-aak · 6 years

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How Chris Gethard took his boundary-pushing talk show from public access to cable TV without losing its fun and spontaneous soul

A. Bisdale/truTV

"The Chris Gethard Show" is a live weekly show hosted by comedian Chris Gethard.

Gethard's show allows its audience members and fans to be a part of the show.

Gethard purposefully chose not to stick to the traditional talk show format for his show.

Prior to taping "The Chris Gethard Show," host Chris Gethard can be found chatting with audience members in such a casual manner that you find yourself wondering if everyone in the audience is an old pal of his.

But Gethard just wants his guests to feel welcome, and like they're part of a "community."

Gethard remains amiable with his guests even when the cameras start to roll, and often chats with them throughout the show. Large portions of the show are allocated for call-ins from fans, where they ask questions, tell stories, and sometimes just share a few seconds on air with Gethard.

It's not unusual, or rare even for hosts to engage with their guests. But "The Chris Gethard Show's" high level of audience inclusion, including spontaneous dancing, and the way Gethard interacts with his guests, challenges the very notion of what you can and cannot do on a talk show.

"The Chris Gethard Show" originally aired live on the New York City public access channel MNN in 2011. Gethard shot the talk show on a set that largely resembled a basement, where he would conduct interviews with friends from the local comedy circuit, give comedians a platform to do various character bits, and invite viewers to call into the show to answer a question, or tell a story.

It wasn't until 2015, when "The Chris Gethard Show" got picked up by Fusion, that Gethard's show got a serious cable TV makeover. This included a stylized new set, and access to celebrity guests like Diddy and Will Ferrell. Gethard would interview his guests, and invite them to partake in unusual activities. In one episode, Gethard asked Ferrell to deliver a speech to a couple who got married on the show, and in another he held an underwater themed prom, which Lena Dunham came to in a full mermaid costume.

But Fusion chose to pre-tape the talk show rather than shooting it live — something that Gethard felt left something to be desired. After a year on Fusion, "The Chris Gethard Show" moved to truTV in May 2017, and went back to live taping, gaining back its edge and the show's unpredictability factor.

Since then Gethard has continued to create strange new segments at his new home on truTV, and now delights in the idea of continuing to push the boundaries of what he can do on his talk show. This season Gethard spent an entire episode working out while interviewing "The Mindy Project" star Adam Pally, and invited circus performers to teach Seth Meyers how to balance a spinning plate.

Gethard isn't trying to be a "rebel" or "change the talk show" by any means, he just doesn't want to feel bound to any particular way of making a talk show, he said.

Gethard spoke to Business Insider about what inspired him to deviate from the traditional talk show format, and why he still wants things to "look messed up" on his show.

Here's what Gethard had to say about "The Chris Gethard Show":

"The Chris Gethard Show" is built on a sense of community.

A. Bisdale/truTV

Amanda Henning Santiago: I've never seen the host and cast of a show chat with guests before a show before. It really feels like the audience is such a big part of the show, and almost like another character on it. Did you know that you wanted to engage that much with your audience from the start?

Chris Gethard: I think I very quickly realized if this show is going to survive it was going to be because there would be a sense of community surrounding it. This show is admittedly pretty strange, and intentionally very different from things that people are used to, and you know a lot of times we walk away from the format. There's nothing that really resembles a talk show format on our talk show.

The [talk show] format is done for a reason. It's to make things palatable, and so you immediately understand it, and you can turn a show on midway and say, "Oh, I get what they're doing, I've seen that structure before." And, we don't have that. What we have instead is this show that kind of goes where it wants, and does what it wants.

Gethard ignores the traditional talk show format, with the exception of two late night staples.

A. Bisdale/truTV

Henning Santiago: What elements of your show did you want to deviate from the traditional structure? Were there any elements of a traditional talk show structure that you wanted to keep?

Gethard: I don't really have much interest in being a rebel, like we've got to change the talk show, because at the end of the day who really cares about that. But I do feel like you just know what's coming. It's going to be the intro song, it's going to be the monologue jokes about politics, it's going to be a desk piece where they sit down and talk about a thing, and interview a celebrity, then there's going to be another desk piece, another celebrity, and then maybe it's a band, or maybe it's a comedian. It's at a level where that's locked in. Which to me is a little bit of a bummer.

And the monologues are never my favorite thing. So I thought, let's abandon that, that's not my favorite thing, and I bet there's a lot of talk show viewers who kind of feel the same way about these monologue jokes. And then that started getting me thinking, what if we just blow the whole thing up? I was always like, why does the audience sit up in those seats, that seems arbitrary to me, let's put them right here. Like, especially where we come from. Our show is so underground and so hidden that anytime someone wanders through the doors it's like, "Yes, welcome. Do you want to be on camera? Be on camera."

A lot of that started too, because our show just visually was so flat on public access we were like wear a costume, do something crazy, you're a part of the scenery now, be a part of the scenery. Be a part of it.

And I think there's certain things from talk shows I really love. Like, I think one thing you see show up a lot in our show are remote pieces. Letterman and Conan, both of them did such fantastic remote pieces, and I'm always trying to mimic that. Just getting out of the studio, and bringing a camera out into the real world to see if we can make something happen. And then I think character stuff too. I think Conan in particular, when I came up in New York he would use people from UCB [Upright Citizen's Brigade] all the time in his character bits, and they always blew me away.

Gethard fights against the slick live show format, and strives to make his show "still look messed up."

A. Bisdale/truTV

Henning Santiago: Did you know that you wanted this show to be live? Was the public access show live?

Gethard: The public access show was live, and that's one of the biggest reasons that we went to public access. We had been doing it ["The Chris Gethard Show"] at the UCB, and a friend of mine who took classes there. Who I actually taught for a long time. He told me, "You know I work at the New York public access station, and I think your show would be a great public access show."

And at first I was like, "Man, is public access still around?"

He was telling me, "Dude we have a four camera studio, you can do the whole thing live, we can stream it online, and you can take phone calls."

And the more he told me about it the more I was like, I think this might be the best kept secret in New York. The fact that we could do it live, and the fact that we could take phone calls, and put it out on the internet all really appealed to me. I just had this hunch that if you do something live, people really feel like they have to be there to see it. Live is the thing that defeats the idea that you can watch the best 45 seconds on Reddit the next morning. There's so much more power, it's live so you don't want to be there after the fact, you want to be there when it goes down.

And then the fact that it can be interactive, that we take phone calls, and that it was uncensored, that we could just throw it up there and see what happens, that was all the stuff that really appealed to me.

On our former network, on Fusion it wasn't live, and I think the show really lost something. I'm really proud of what we did but it felt like there was a certain life to it that had been diminished. I think truTV saw that, and they actually suggested doing it live again, which I was astounded by because it's not a safe thing to do on any show, let alone with us. We barely know what we're doing, so I really commend them for allowing this to happen.

Henning Santiago: Yeah, it's hard for me to think of any shows that are really live anymore. Save for like SNL, and some news?

Gethard: Yeah, it's news, its sports, and I think Andy Cohen, right? I think that's one of our big battles this year, and one of the things we've really been pushing for is that we've been doing this more and more, and we're better at it, and it made me realize, we have to work harder at it and make sure things still look messed up. That we have to get ambitious enough with our ideas that they fall apart and the edges fray on TV.

That's another thing I don't understand about live TV like "SNL." I have so many friends who worked there, I was a guest writer there, I really have so much respect - I don't want this to sound like I'm talking bad about it. But I feel like one of the things that astounds me is that that show doesn't feel live. I feel like one of the accomplishments of it is that it's so slick that things barely ever go wrong, and to me I'm like no I want to run in the opposite direction.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider from Feedburner http://ift.tt/2AjfatY

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junker-town · 7 years

Text

Duke refused to let the haters watch them crash and burn

After a turbulent season, the Blue Devils pulled out a death spiral at just the right time.

BROOKLYN, NY — The opening scene in Garden State takes place inside a crashing plane. Zach Braff sits in the middle seat as a beverage cart topples over onto his lap and people on either side cry in fear. Everyone’s wearing an oxygen mask except for him. He calmly reaches up and adjusts the flow of air from the circular vent above his head.

If you replaced Braff with sophomore Luke Kennard, the other passengers with the rest of Duke basketball’s roster, and the pilot with coach Mike Krzyzewski, it would’ve been an apt metaphor for the program heading into the ACC Tournament. Duke’s season would’ve ben turbulent for any team, let alone one ranked No. 1 in the AP preseason Top 25.

Thanks to injuries and other curveballs (ahem, Grayson Allen, ahem), the squad resembled at least four different versions of itself in terms of starting lineups and styles of play this year. What seemed like it was going to be an easy flight turned into a no, no, we swear that No. 1 ranking wasn’t bullshit — we’re just going to take the most difficult route possible to prove it to you.

"Crazy as it may sound, I think we're still evolving," Krzyzewski said Duke’s second-round win against Clemson last week. "I don't know who we are completely, but I have good kids. I have really good kids, and they play hard, and they share the ball. Maybe we'll develop a little bit more of an identity."

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The roster looked shiny and sturdy in the summer: They had Allen, a superstar many thought could’ve gone in the first round of the 2016 draft, returning as a captain. They also had senior leadership in the form of Amile Jefferson and Matt Jones, and fresh blood with the debut of much-anticipated freshmen Harry Giles, Frank Jackson, and Jayson Tatum. The reliable Kennard was returning for his sophomore season. Coach K was buckled into the cockpit. You may hate him, but you have to admit he knows how to work the controls.

And while almost everything that could go wrong did over the course of the season (more on that soon), it was a fully functioning team that showed up to the ACC Tournament last week.

“Well, we’re winners, and I think we showed that we didn’t give up,” Allen said after winning the championship.

Anthony Gruppuso-USA TODAY Sports

Allen stood on the court at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn surrounded by reporters, blue and white confetti littering the wood beneath his feet. The piece of the net he’d cut off was tied to his Championship snapback. He spoke quietly, with a slight southern twang, and seemed slightly awkward in the spotlight. He made eye contact reluctantly.

“Four games in four days is not an easy task,” he continued. “Especially playing four great teams. But we fought, and end of the day, it was all emotion and heart leading us through those games.”

Winning the ACC Championship with four games in four days isn’t an easy task. But it was what the team had to do — making ACC history in the process — if they were going to pull out of what looked like an almost certain death spiral.

The engine light came on before the season even started, as injuries postponed Giles’ and Tatum’s debuts. The team seemed to be getting back on track when the freshmen finally began to play, but then Coach K underwent back surgery (probably after attempting a few too many dunks in practice) and had to parachute out for seven games. Jefferson and Allen were also hurt.

Luke Kennard emerged as the team’s superstar, averaging 20 points a game and acting as a constant when almost nothing else was. Even though he’d broken LeBron James’ high-scoring record as a high schooler in Ohio, he didn’t have the kind of fanfare attached to his name that a player like Allen, or even Tatum, did heading into the season. But Kennard ended up playing the role of the doctor who happens to be on the plane and saves everyone’s life, though he’s reluctant to take that credit.

“I think for me it started in the summer and in preseason,” Kennard told me after the semifinal win against UNC. “My coaches, my teammates, being able to play against players like Grayson and some upperclassmen and the freshman class coming in. Competing against them made me better as a player. And the confidence that my coaches and teammates built within me has been great. They want me to continue to do what I’ve done.”

If Kennard steadied the ride, it was Allen who created the bumpiest air.

If Kennard steadied the plane, it was Allen who created the bumpiest air.

Because if you didn’t hate Duke already, Allen was the guy who gave you good reason to. He lent a despised Duke team an even more villainous sheen when he intentionally tripped a player during the game against Elon in December and then raged on the sidelines when the ref gave him a technical. This would’ve been bad on its own, but it was the third time the captain had played so obviously dirty; he tripped two different opponents in two different games last February. Coach K stripped him of his captainship and suspended him indefinitely for his third offense.

That indefinitely suspension didn’t last very long. And by “not very long,” I mean one game. Which makes Coach K look pretty hypocritical, doesn’t it? A coach who says he cares about character and his players puts someone who clearly needs to learn discipline and work through his on-court issues right back in the game.

If last week was any indication, Allen does seem to be keeping it together. He had a great four games off the bench after a disappointing season compared to his 2016 performance. He behaved himself in the tournament. His teammates seemed to genuinely like him.

As he sat in the locker room after the win, the 21-year-old with patchy stubble seemed calm. He wasn’t combative or defensive, and seemed aware of — but not bothered by — the fact that he’d made his bed and was lying in it.

“I mean, I know I’m going to get booed no matter where I am,” he said. “It happened last year, so you really just get numb to it. You don’t let it change you, you don’t try to play into it or play softer because of it. You just go out there and play your game. And when you win it gets quiet.”

Given that Allen is probably the least liked player in college basketball, Coach K the least liked coach, and Duke the least liked program overall, there were a lot of people ready to point to the team’s beleaguered season and say, “See? They were overrated this whole time!”

But Duke wasn’t about to give that to them. They somehow fixed the plane mid free-fall and pulled off a miracle at the ACC tournament.

Anthony Gruppuso-USA TODAY Sports

Duke had no choice. It needed an inspired run in Brooklyn if they were going to even begin to be competitive in the NCAA Tournament, both physically and mentally.

“It’s amazing, after everything we’ve been through this season, the ups and downs, it makes you wonder what’s going to happen when we get to this time,” said sophomore Chase Jeter in the locker room after the team’s fourth win. “Our journey this season has set us up for nothing but success.”

Watching Duke over the past four games was like watching Zach Braff wake up and realize the plane crash was all a dream in the next scene of the movie. After three late-season losses that seemed to signal another tailspin, the players got to the ACC tournament, took off their oxygen masks, and started to fight.

Each game had moments of the rocky season within in; there was no reason the Blue Devils should’ve been tied with Clemson at the half. They were down by 11 with 13 minutes left in the second half of the Louisville game. They trailed UNC at times, and Notre Dame gave them a real run for their money.

But, ultimately, they did it. They hit threes, they blocked shots, they communicated, and they made it through the storm, nabbing a No. 2 seed at the Big Ol’ Basketball Dance in the process. In true Duke-against-the-world fashion, they didn’t give the haters the satisfaction of watching them flame out.

So: Duke back? Allen laughed when I posed the question.

“I think we’re getting there,” he said. “We’re forming into the team that we need to be, and it’s at the perfect time. We just showed that we know how to win basketball games, really. It’s more than hitting shots, getting a stop. It’s playing together.”

Obviously, anything can happen in the NCAA Tournament. This is, as the saying goes, March. Allen could lose his cool again, players could get injured. There’s always a chance these guys crash and burn because they can’t manage to land the plane. But if the past week showed us anything, it’s that there’s reason to believe they just might.

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