#in all seriousness the thing is that i tend to complain about general fandom treatment of trans character writing vs specific fics | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ozcarpin · 5 years

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have you ever thought about tweeting your criticisms regarding volume 6 to miles luna and kerry and some of your complains on how ozpin was treated and yang and cos behavior and hypocrisy

No, and I don’t think I ever will, for a few reasons.

To start, I don’t think they’d even read them. Miles and Kerry have enough people screaming at them under the guise of ‘criticism’ that I doubt they’d take more than a glance at my remarks, denote a general negative view and move on with their lives. I don’t blame them for that, it doesn’t matter how thick your skin is, you can only take so many people defaming every aspect of your work and person before you just start viewing any criticism in a similar light. It wouldn’t be my intent to insult them or their work personally of course, but we have to be realistic here. They don’t know who I am, and I doubt they’d give me the time of day.

Secondly I just don’t think it would accomplish anything. I mean, lets say for a moment that they did read my thing, and it got through to them in some way. What would it change? The canon is the canon. Its not going to take away what happened and, pragmatically, as effective for drama as it was to have everyone and their mother beating up and ridiculing Ozpin and Oscar in volume 6, continuing that theme would just become a dead horse after a while (not to mention its very clear that they don’t actually want to have any focus on Oz and Oscar) so I’m pretty sure we’re not going to have another ‘session’ of Oz abuse, unless of course they’re gung-ho to animate Ironwood beating the shit out of a 14 year old boy. I’m being hopeful here, and rambling, but really what would I expect if they even bothered to read my comments? An apology? Unlikely. Again, they’d probably just move on with their lives after a ‘huh’ if anything.

Three is simple and I’ve already mentioned it: They just don’t care about Ozpin and Oscar as characters. There’s a reason all of Oscar’s development is happening off-screen and a bigger reason as to why none of the main characters give a shit about abusing them. If the writers only see them as plot devices, I’m not surprised that’s how its coming through with the characters. I’ve seen it before, the fan reaction tends to be the same, and at the end of the day are they really going to care what the minority of the fandom feels about their treatment of Oz and Oscar when the mass majority is screaming about girl power and teenaged rebellion? Probably not.

Finally, its just not my place to tell them how to write their show. Do I absolutely hate what they did to Oz and Oscar and how they’ve narratively framed their abuse as okay when its taken seriously in the female cast? From the bottom of my heart. Am I ever going to shut up about it? Probably not because male victims of abuse both deserve and need recognition and when they’re just constantly either ignored or treated as a joke in media, how can anyone expect them to come forward in reality? Or even to take their situation seriously? It disgusts me how the reactions of the main cast were handled after they had such an excellent set up both before and after Ozpin’s backstory to show their compassion and humanity, but at the end of the day, I’m just some person with a blog. They have no reason to listen to me or give me the time of day, and I’m sure that others before me have already mentioned everything I could. Besides, who knows? Maybe all of this is leading up to some great lesson in Atlas. I’ve been disappointed before but I’m willing to hope that Ironwood might set some things straight with the kids, maybe they just ran out of time in Volume 6 to recognize the hypocrisy going on. Unlikely, but possible.

At the end of the day, I’m not going to pretend that I can tell them how to write a better show. Critiquing after the fact will always be far easier than creating, and they have a lot to juggle in their work. I’m going to do what I can, from the position that I have, getting my voice out with my blog and trying to make a positive change from within the fandom, rather than chucking pebbles at the creators and hoping they look at the scribbles on them.

Also....have you seen my writing?? Twitter was not made for rambling schmucks like me >..>. Have a nice day though, thank you for your question.

#mun #really its just not my place #I can analyze and critique and rant all I like #but its their show #it'd just be a waste of everyone's time ultimately #I'd rather do what I can from here #Anonymous

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ncfan-1 · 7 years

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Legacy of Mandalore: Things I Didn’t Like

Given that I’ve been waiting for payoff of Sabine’s family heritage since it was first brought up in ‘Protector of Concord Dawn’, and that we had several weeks to wait for ‘Legacy of Mandalore’, I suppose it’s kind of inevitable that it wouldn’t live up to all of my expectations. Life never quite lives up to legend, and all that. Honestly, I didn’t really expect it to live up to all of my expectations, but there are things that I think bear commenting on.

- Seeing as I’ve never read ‘Son of Dathomir’ all the way through (by the time I became interested in Star Wars comics, the print run had ended and I couldn’t find a paperback that cost less than $300, and I’m not going to buy a Kindle just to buy the e-version of the comics), I am probably not quite as upset as others might be that Rook Kast didn’t turn out to be Sabine’s mother. However, given all of the parallels drawn between Rook and Sabine and Ursa, and all of the connections seemingly drawn Rook and these two women, I do hope that there is still a connection there. Because what is the point of the similar markings on the helmets, what is the point of Sabine’s design being an intentional call-back to Rook Kast, what is the point of them all looking so similar to one another, what is the point of Ursa and Rook’s helmets being the exact same shape, if there is no connection there at all? If there is a connection, than it’s the writers foreshadowing it through these parallels. If there isn’t a connection, it’s just fandom baiting, the writers being assholes by playing with fandom desires and expectations.

And ‘red herring,’ you say? Well, here’s my problem with that. First of all, this isn’t even really the right genre for a red herring to work. For me personally, the red herring is always most effective in the mystery genre, and even then, it’s difficult to do well. You have to present things in such a way as to make it so that the red herring could (based on the evidence the detective has found) plausibly be the culprit, while also laying down enough evidence that an astute reader can pick up on who the real culprit likely is. This is difficult enough to make work in the mystery genre, and even more difficult outside of it. Furthermore, we were not given all of the pieces of the puzzle in this case. Without all the pieces of the puzzle, there can be. no. red. herring. It’s not that we “just didn’t pick up on the real answer.” It’s that we were never given enough information to pick up on the real answer in the first place.

- And they killed off Saxon. Oh boy. Okay, I do have the occasional complaint to make about how the story handles things in Rebels. I love the show, but it’s not perfect, and I… also love to complain. But this is easily my biggest, most enduring complaint about Rebels: the fact that it tends to kill off the arc villains way too soon, without proper exploration or resolution. The Grand Inquisitor came the closest to receiving proper treatment before getting axed, and even then, we could have done with at least a couple of moments foreshadowing his past as a Jedi. The Season Two Inquisitors, and the surviving Inquisitorius in general? Well, we have hints of the Grand Inquisitor’s death having created a power vacuum in the Inquisitorius, hints that are never followed up on. We have ‘The Future of the Force’ alluding to the fact that small children are being kidnapped to be indoctrinated into the ways of the Dark Side, something that is, again, never followed up on. Seventh Sister and Fifth Brother are both killed extremely unceremoniously, and ‘Twilight of the Apprentice’ introduces a brand new Inquisitor, Eighth Brother… only to kill him off even more unceremoniously in the same episode. I actually refused to believe he was dead for a good long while because I didn’t want to believe that the writers would seriously introduce a new non-mook villain just to kill him off in the very same episode.

And now we can add Saxon to the list of villains that were killed off without proper exploration or resolution, and asides from Eighth Brother, he is easily the most egregious case of it. He only had two episodes. Like, Rebels, come on. You had your established villain for the Mandalorian arc, and now you have to go and establish another one. Unless the writers do something I’m really not expecting them to do, they are going to have to establish another villain. There is a possibility that the writers could make the central conflict of the Mandalorian arc the fact that the distrust and infighting amongst the various clans and factions often make the Mandalorians their own worst enemies (see the fact that due to millennia of warfare, Mandalore is now an unlivable toxic desert outside of its domed cities, and the fact that these people literally blew up Concord Dawn at some point in the past; hell, the infighting is probably what made them so easy for the Empire to conquer in the first place), but portraying conflict on this scale without a single villain to serve as a focusing point is not something Rebels has been willing to do on a sustained level so far. I suppose if they have to bring in another villain, this is where they could bring in Rook Kast (and hopefully establish that yes, there is some sort of connection between her and Sabine and Ursa)—I’ll admit that having another female major villain would be nice, as would seeing Rook as Saxon’s more competent and dangerous successor. I just hope to high heaven that if they introduce another main villain for the Mandalorian arc, it isn’t everyone’s favorite cockroach.

- The ending. On the one hand, I knew things weren’t going to go smoothly for Sabine, not at all. On the other hand, I really hope her “I’m not a leader” is just the writers possessing that rather bizarre “the only person who be trusted with power is the one who absolutely does not want it, runs away from it and has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the halls of power” mentality. I really hope it’s the writers being the same as a lot of people, and not realizing that you have to want power in order to effect change. Because the writers built her up to be her people’s King Arthur, and not following through with that would just be a massive letdown. Granted, last episode she was basically pressured into taking up the Darksaber in the first place, and only began to want it by story’s end. So maybe Sabine’s still having to work herself up to the idea of being a leader to her people. I hope so.

…And since I spent all this time complaining about the things I didn’t like in ‘Legacy of Mandalore’, I suppose it’s only fair to make a post listing the things I did like in ‘Legacy of Mandalore,’ seeing as there was plenty I did like and all.

#Star Wars: Rebels #Rebels spoilers #SWR Legacy of Mandalore #Yes yes ncfan is complaining again #There is a reason I wrote the positive post to accompany this though #And that only the positive post will get character tags

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