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#i should go rewatch it
churchofthecomet · 3 months
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I haven't watched Leverage in a while, see my last complaint post about their Stuxnet episode. But in the meantime I've been consuming other media, and it just struck me how equal the dynamic is between all of the Leverage characters.
Every character in this show is competent. They each have Their Thing that They Do, and if one of them is absent for an episode, the rest of the team suffers until they get back. I complain about them short-changing Hardison by making the tech stuff unrealistic and incomprehensible (so you can't get a feel for how good he is at it, like you can with Eliot punching people -- although if I knew more about fighting I'm sure I'd be complaining about Eliot's scenes too). But at least within the narrative he is really good at his job, and the other team members know it. Likewise for Eliot, Parker, Nate, and Sophie -- they're each at the top of their respective classes. They have separate specialties and they're amazing at those specialties.
And what's more, the interpersonal dynamics reflect this. Nate is an asshole to the rest of them, but there are FOUR OF THEM so it balances him out -- they can commiserate with each other, sit him down and have a talk with him, threaten to strike, whatever, and their side of the relationship is treated with importance because the team couldn't function without them.
Hardison and Eliot's sniping is just friendly banter, and they know it. Everyone is so supportive of Parker's social problems. Sophie is the one with the most traditionally-feminine skillset, something which might be demeaned in another show (and I have some complaints with Leverage's treatment of her), but she's taken seriously both in-universe and by the show itself. They all work wonderfully together. They balance each other out, and they become more than the sum of their parts.
Contrast this with the dynamics in a bunch of other modern media. Let's grab my favorite punching bag of late, BBC Sherlock. Sherlock is far and away the more useful member of the Sherlock-and-John team. The narrative places incredible weight on his intelligence, and John is stuck in a support role. Sherlock is also mean to John, and since John is one person (without much of a spine for standing up to Sherlock!) it feels utterly abusive. The "friendly banter" isn't banter. The "aww look they really DO care about each other" moments were enough for me when I was 13 or 14, but now it just feels like a cycle of abuse. The dynamic is fundamentally not equal. If I'm watching a TV show and I start to think "man character A really needs like 6 months of therapy to stop hating themself and they NEED to leave character B," when the show's message is "character A and character B are a match made in heaven you guys," the show has failed.
See also Our Flag Means Death season 2 with the relationship between... honestly Ed and the rest of the crew, but mostly Ed and Stede. Ed is the best pirate anyone's ever seen -- the rest of them are pretty good but no match for him. The one guy who had a chance of standing up to Ed and equalizing things got killed off at the end of the season, and Stede (as we've seen) lacks a spine to stand up to Ed. Controversial take but Good Omens might be heading in this direction? They defanged Aziraphale and made him into way more of a softie than the book or Season 1 imply. Meanwhile Crowley is Competent and Right About Everything by comparison. The general pattern here is that couples (or whatever the fuck was going on with BBC Sherlock and John) are worse off. I don't know if it's lasting heteronormativity or "two-person dynamics are hard," but the urge to make sunshine-and-stormcloud pairings where the stormcloud acts like shit towards the sunshine is just... too strong.
Leverage is this rare show that refuses to shit on any of its protagonists. Everyone's in the loop, everyone sees some character development, and it fucking RULES. I wish they could make more TV shows like this in 2024.
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spidey-bie · 5 months
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who was your fav pony? my is and still is fluttershy :)
Twilight because she was relatable. (It's the autism)
Also pinky pie. I liked how energetic and happy she was.
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pbear · 6 months
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I just reblogged something about We Bare Bears and it’s reminding me how I cried during the episode where Grizz gets overly attached to a giant burrito
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zzzero-percent · 8 months
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who wanna scamper through the forests w me
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creepymutelilbugger · 10 months
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xxbeyondangelsxx · 8 months
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skrunksthatwunk · 3 months
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thinking about how eiji's a pole vaulter and how ash talks about eiji "flying" and how eiji's associated with bird imagery and how eiji's free (unlike ash) and how eiji comes in on a plane and leaves on a plane and how ash cannot fly, ash cannot be free, how nyc is ash's prison, and how ash is the leopard who dies climbing the mountain, unable to live at such elevation, how he was trying to reach the sky and be free but was always stuck to the earth, how he chose to die instead of climbing back down, how he chose to die where he could see the sky and hope and freedom almost like a bird with eiji's letter right in front of him rather than letting everything go wrong and ruin it once again, how eiji's a failed pole vaulter anyway, how a bad fall ruined his career and grounded him (physically and emotionally), how it took flying to america and meeting ash and needing to save him and skip for him to try flying again, how he landed hard and harsh and still the thought of that escape compelled ash to protect eiji at all costs because if he could fly that means something to him, even if he doesn't think he can fly, how eiji is the manifestation of his hope and how when he breaks and asks eiji to stay with him a while he folds himself over his legs and weighs him down and traps him and grounds him, how ash fights like hell to keep eiji alive not because he thinks he can be like him (hopeful, flying, innocent), but because he makes him forget the gravity of his situation, and so he can see eiji fly again. how he wants to see him escape. how eiji is a bird and ash is a wildcat and how ash never once saw eiji as prey. how eiji never saw ash as a predator. how it is eiji's naivete that first endears ash to him, how it is his freedom and flight and removal from darkness and his ability to leave that darkness that really roots eiji in ash's blood as something essential to him keeping on living in this hell of nyc. how it is that distance from the violence and that hope for the future that ash chooses to surround himself in as he dies. how ash dies in a dream because he feels more than anything that he can't fly like eiji, that he can never leave. how his violence is a part of him and will be forever, how it weighs him down. how he wants to enjoy the view from the mountainside rather than looking up from the ground below. as if they can both fly. as if he is with him up there and not grounded. eye-to-eye with what he can't have, seeing eiji's homeland: the sky. how he dies trying to reach the top because he couldn't take retreating and trying again. how ash, tired and tired and tired and convinced it will go on forever if he crawls back down the mountain, chooses to close his life deluged in eiji, in eiji's insistence that they can fly together, in eiji's hope for him and for them, in eiji's beautiful dream. how ash dies without trying to realize that dream. how ash, in dying, destroys it.
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secondbeatsongs · 4 days
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when you're into the Big Ship™ in a Big Fandom™, you have the luxury of having an OTP - a real One True Pairing, where you can read about just them for ages, and you will never run out of fics, and everything is perfect and beautiful and nothing hurts
but when you go to a smaller fandom, you'd better pray to whatever god you worship that someone else in this room ships the same thing that you do, and that if they do, they're writing more than late-night crackfic, because you're on thin fucking ice!
and how small is your small fandom? is it less than 100 fics? maybe even...less than 20 fics?
welp, then it's time to make peace with that god and either open up a text document or learn how to ship everything, because it's swim or drown babey! and your ship is sinking fast
anyway all of this is to say that after hanging out in small fandoms and shipping less-common pairings for a while, going back into a Big Huge Fandom™ is wild because suddenly it's like...wait, why didn't I ship these people again? I don't remember. why was I only sticking to one ship in this fandom?? boring of me, honestly. these guys should make out.
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cquackity · 5 months
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forever thinking about how o!wilbur was like "yeah i'm o!tommy's dead phantom brother who died badly. and i'm jealous of his alive wings" he didn't have to do all that but he did
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hermitshell · 8 months
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It's a little funny to me that in Last Life you would lose you allies the second you became red and everyone would go around talking about "those stinky reds" and you were doomed to a life of loneliness but in 3rd life and limited life whenever your ally became red it was like hell yeah we can murder now
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c-kiddo · 1 year
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pov caduceus shows you rei ayanami 16cm plush doll
[image ID: a coloured digitally sketch of caduceus from critical role holding a cut-out photo of a plush toy of rei ayanami from neon genesis evangelion in one hand, gesturing to it with the other. he's grinning and looking to the side, with messy bob hair and a big cardigan on. End ID.]
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planet4546b · 4 months
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fatt cast understands the joys having ocs like no one else. austin naming a bunch of people in xcom after tm characters in old xcom streams. ali just has a sims house of marielda characters ready to go. media club plus constantly being like 'this is just like palisade...' you all GET IT!
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atlcscp · 1 year
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is this anything </3
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wellhalesbells · 7 months
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Ummm was that a dinosaur I spotted in those Meg II gifs??? At first I thought it might have been a crocodile but after absolutely no scrutiny I was like: dinosaur.
I might need to actually watch this. Do I need to watch Meg I for it to make sense? Even if I don’t should I watch them both anyway? I’m not going to lie those gifs make it look incredible…
That is, in fact, a dinosaur because Meg 2 was like: well what's better than a seventy-foot shark? And the answer was watching a seventy-foot shark eat a Tyrannosaurus Rex. And they were right.
Yes, you 100% need to watch this and join me in my delusional fantasies - I have now watched this three times in three days, dialogue skeletoned a 5+1 fic and need to find time to watch it yet again so I can make sure my gestures and content are pitch perfect.
You do not need to watch Meg the first for this to make sense, it will just deepen your affection for the legacy characters, which is never a bad. Plus, there are a few callbacks (that make it more of a gay underwater romance) that I missed the first time I watched it (which obviously did not hinder my enjoyment) and on day two, I watched both back to back and caught them. (3.5. This is a movie about sharks eating dinosaurs, underwater research bases, giant carnivorous octopi, Fun Island, and two dads coparenting a teenager who can run circles around them - so just to note: it also does not need to make sense.)
That said, I absolutely recommend watching Meg the first. It was a hoot and it makes Meg the second more fun because once you start off that strong, you have to go wackier, right? Once you get to two, you're like: okay, I know why we are at this level of wacky and you have my stamp of approval.
It is, in fact, incredible. JOMING 5EVA (I gave them a ship name, I think I can do that when - at least last I looked, which admittedly was last week - I've got the only fic going [granted, it is unposted but nOT FOR LONG] and there are less than ten of us, haha.)
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bandtrees · 2 years
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one of the most infuriating things i’ve realized about fandom spaces lately to me has been some people’s inability to just trust a story and engage with its premise and what it’s trying to express. “canon sucks i can do it better lol!!!” is one of the most annoying attitudes to me and i do kinda hate how prevalent it’s gotten (in actually good polished media that isn’t to be engaged with like that)
like between people who read things in as bad a faith as possible and ceaselessly criticize things they supposedly like, and people who only care about media for the sake of making cookie cutter self-indulgent fandom content, it feels sometimes like the most controversial thing you can do in a fandom is “actually liking the source material for what it is”
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blessyouhawkeye · 1 year
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i think i am going to spend the rest of my life chasing the high that kinnporsche the series gave me. that show had a guy sucking dick and cock in a helicopter and then there was like. more show after that. nothing will ever beat it.
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