#me after episode 1: AN ENTIRE BUFFET

[halveablock]

take responsibility!

#gundam witch from mercury #suletta mercury #miorine rembran #i wanna see suletta sweating at how intimidating miorine is for the next 24 episodes #me keeping up with gundam news prior to premiere: hmmm this looks like yuribait im gonna end up eating up the crumbs aren't i #me after episode 1: AN ENTIRE BUFFET

[jessilynallendilla]

Danny Phantom Episode Breakdown

Part 1

Fucked Up Facts In Bold 

1 MYSTERY MEAT 

Danny states he wants to be an astronaut  

Sam thinks ghosts are mainstream like cellphones (this show aired in 2004 cellphones we’re common but not every teen had one but Sam is rich so unsure if she’s just playing being disinterested to throw Jack off or she’s genuine)   

First appearance of Danny’s ghost sense  

Ectopusses first appearance  

Jack is an expert in ghosts but has never seen one  

Fenton thermos first appearance  

Jack was born in a log cabin in the woods doesn’t remember where but as a child wanted a pony but had to eat horse meat during the war and had a problem with it (show aired in 2004 he was in college during the 80s so which war)  

His parents invent the Fenton Finder and when outed by it almost comes out 

The one-time Jazz drives Danny to school Jack immediately thinks she’s a ghost  

“Why can’t they accept me for who I am?!” first hint of Sam’s issues with her parents  

It’s been only a month since his accident he still can’t control his powers and thinks he should tell his parents  

He already wants to be normal and Sam gives him the unique is good speech  

Sam’s an ultra recyclo vegetarian Danny explains she doesn’t eat anything with a face on it (does this mean she’s just a vegan)  

Tucker has a heighted sense of smell when it comes to meat can tell what someone ate for dinner the night before  

Sam’s wore down the school to make a new lunch menu to entirely conform to her particular diet (which is grass on a slice of bread)  

Lunch Lady first appearance she was summoned because the menu was changed  

Jack built a new weapon to use on his daughter who he believes is a ghost with no proof and only Maddie is concerned he is wrong and could hurt her Jack says it can’t unless it gets into hair which it does and painfully rips all the hair off his head  

Lancer first appearance  

Tucker can sense the totally not real all steak buffet in the teacher’s lounge  

Dash first appearance and he’s angry his order of mud pies has mud blaming Sam calling her Danny’s girlfriend which they both deny  

Dash acknowledges these are his best years and after high school his life will suck  

Sam says the mud is actually topsoil (I think parents will have a problem with the school feeding their children dirt)  

Lunch Lady looks like Tucker’s grandmother  

Lunch Lady is angry the menu was changed after fifty years (so was she this school’s lunch lady did she make the menu has she been dead for at most fifty years)  

First appearance of “going ghost” catchphrase and on-screen transformation  

First appearance of ghost tail  

If superheroing doesn’t work out he can have an exciting career as bus boy  

Lunch Lady can control lunch and everything related to lunch  

First appearance of Danny turning others intangible and is excited it worked  

Lunch Lady makes a meat suit out of the actually real all steak buffet from the teacher's lounge leaving them only one bone  

First appearance of Lancer cursing in book titles “Paradise Lost”  

Danny depowers on accident  

Tucker was repeatedly in trouble for loitering by the girl’s locker room  

After 34 broken beakers Danny’s been banned from handling fragile school property  

Lancer is biased against students willing to exempt Dash from punishment because he’s a star football player  

Tucker’s meat sense is strong enough to scent out where the meat is in the school   

The school keeps boxes of meat in the basement with no refrigeration  

Danny has ghost powers but Tucker is the weird one  

Tucker just carries around a fork and knife (those better be plastic because real ones would get you into major trouble at school)  

First appearance of Danny able to stretch himself  

After his first fight Danny passes out from exhaustion and depowers  

As soon as Jazz walks through the door her parents throw a smoke grenade and attack her  

Danny sleeps as his friends carry him all the way home  

Maddie tells Jack Danny isn’t a ghost Jack doesn’t think he is but is still suspicious of Jazz and she tries to get the modified vacuum cleaner to let go of her hair  

Tucker freaks Danny out saying he was unconscious for days when it was only a few hours  

Tucker and Sam then leave having an argument on whose fault it was and about changing the menu   

Overnight Tucker arranged a meat fair/protest at the school and Sam a vegetarian protest and demand Danny take a side  

Sam says ultra recyclo vegetarians don’t have to waste time cooking their food (so ya’ll just eat raw veggies)  

The Lunch Lady attacks first appearance of Star and the two hug Danny so he can transform  

Jazz is attacked by her parents after she just told Spike if he opens up to his parents they won’t attack him (can we have Spike be Jazz’s only friend at school can we make him into his own character like we did Wes)  

Danny flew through a plane twice but he was invisible/intangible what were those people reacting to before Danny shouted thanks and stole that man’s water (it was in a glass didn’t planes already switch to bottles in 2004)  

Jazz got her father to have a change of heart and Jack even stated he was turning his back on ghosts  

First appearance of Danny using his foot as a scythe  

Danny depowers   

Jack says ghosts don’t exist throwing the thermos at Danny  

Those little meat gremlins threw Danny to the ground from that height they fully expected to kill him a human child   

Danny manages to transform and save himself and him saying thanks for the thermos was enough for Jack to feel vindicated ghosts are real and gloats in Jazz’s face  

Danny uses his ghost powers to operate the thermos (he changes human again off screen between that and capping the thermos)  

Danny decides not to tell his parents having decided fighting ghosts is what his powers are for  

Lancer blames this all on the trio and has them clean the school grounds until nightfall  

Danny being petty with his powers and crushing Dash under an avalanche of garbage dumpster meat 

2 PARENTAL BONDING 

First appearance of the Fenton Ghost Fisher  

There is a Fenton urinal  

Danny reels in Dorathea’s dragon form/first appearance of Dorathea 

Dorathea loses her cursed amulet as if falls into Danny’s bag changing her back to normal and she goes back into the ghost zone crying that her horrid mummy won’t let her go to the prince’s costume ball  

First appearance of Paulina and she’s so hot boys can’t take their eyes off of her to the point of tripping over themselves  

Sam says girls like her are a dime a dozen Tucker and Danny immediately start counting their pocket change  

Sam says you can’t judge a book by it’s cover (this will be the theme of the episode won’t it)  

Sam takes offense when Danny says he gets weak kneed when he talks to girls implying she’s not cute  

Sam pushes Danny to go shoot his shot but his uncontrolled powers cause his pants to fall down in front of Paulina  

“a gentleman usually tips his hat but I’ll give you points for originality” (I can’t tell if she was making fun of him or trying to lighten his embarrassment)  

Sam calls Paulina shallow which she takes offense to and as revenge will lure Danny away from her (she calls Sam a goth geek but to me she seems more like a poser)  

Dash pushes Danny into a locker to introduce himself to Paulina (does this mean they didn’t know each other before this)  

 Danny is petty with his powers again overshadowing Dash/first appearance of overshadowing and gets Dash to say embarrassing gross stuff (note eyes turn green when overshadowed by Danny)  

“Why do I suddenly feel like scrubbing my mom’s feet?” (so does this imply when overshadowed it can have aftereffects of the influence is it permanent how long does it last)  

Paulina finds the amulet and thinks it’s beautiful (it’s not) and Danny lies that he got it for her in case she said yes to go to the dance with him  

He manages to stop his pants from falling down this time  

Paulina says he’s cute and has great taste in underwear (I don’t know if she’s genuine or this is her manipulation ploy)  

Paulina puts on the amulet and immediately becomes influenced by it  

Since Paulina is interested he forgets about getting the amulet back to his mom or sister who he believes could own it then his pants fall down  

Lancer sees his pants fell down again saying it’s the third time that week calling it “dropping trow”/first appearance of him using dated slang and he wants to meet with Danny’s father to talk about it in the meantime gives Danny a belt to stay “outta trouble with the man”  

Jack is so frustrated with his fishing he’ll take out his rage on the first person that gives him bad news so Danny doesn’t tell him about the conference  

Danny overshadows his father for the conference about the incidents with Danny's pants   

Jack/Danny lies that Danny studies so hard he forgets to eat Lancer says that explains things  

Jack/Danny flatters Lancer that’s he’s Danny’s favorite teacher and the Fenton's consider teachers underpaid and underappreciated (well he’s not wrong)  

Lancer is impressed and has Jack chaperone Friday’s dance “catch you later G”  

When finding out Danny can control people and they don’t remember Tucker wants him to overshadow a girl for about two minutes but Danny refuses telling him he can get his own date like he did  

Sam asks if he has to take off his pants and act like a dweeb for it  

A discontinued fleecy tee is so trendy the sales lady tells Paulina without one she’ll have to languish as a toxic social outcast for five to sixteen weeks   

This enrages Paulina so much she turns into a dragon and burns the display table  

Sam says she’s glad she’s not going to the dance saves her from wearing the lame dress her parents bought her (by her tone you can tell she wanted to go)  

Tucker can tell no one’s asked her and Sam is bitter that if she was as pretty as Paulina Danny says being pretty isn’t a crime Sam tells him looks are deceiving (this will play into the theme of the episode)  

Paulina’s dragon form is knocked out causing the amulet to fall into a lady’s sales bag she transforms back having no memory of the fight she puts the amulet back on and thinks the tee in the bag is hers saying good things happen when you maintain a positive attitude  

First appearance of Valerie she states she won’t go out with Tucker unless something happens that makes her dateless Kwan then appears/first appearance of Kwan saying his first choice said yes so he’s ditching her Tucker takes the rebound date  

Jack has no memory of agreeing to chaperone it’s just a vague blur  

Jazz says she knows Danny’s sudden clumsy nervousness is because he has a girlfriend Danny panics denying he’s not a ghost  

Jazz warns he better warn his date his family is insane if she finds out after marriage that’s entrapment (I don’t think it is)  

Danny walks out of the doorless kitchen but it then cuts to him opening a door and walking down the stairs  

Sam being dateless facetimes the two with the dragon research she did but the first picture of the amulet of Aragon shows it on a thin chain when the whole time it’s thick and sectioned like a snake chain (is it because if the serpent theme also the picture is colored and the dragon depiction is accurate and it’s supposed to be from the medieval era is it an artist's rendition is Dorathea and her dragon form from actual history does this world have ghosts and cursed objects and the general populace is just unaware)  

Sam’s final remarks hoping they have a wonderful evening on the date with the dragon is a cue for Danny to see she really wants to go they’re her best friends they should have known  

Despite Tucker’s protests Danny overshadows him to ask Sam out (so Valerie is gonna think Tucker ditched her)  

After Danny leaves his body Tucker was about to tell Sam no until he saw how hot she was in her dress (Sam you said your parents bought you that dress but it’s so your style I doubt that were you just deflecting your hurt feelings)  

Paulina’s dad is the protective Papa bear type and basically gave Danny the shovel talk  

“Let’s get down with our bad selves” “Yo shake that thing” “Hey G you’re my dog” (Lancer going full how do you do fellow kids)  

Danny lies to Paulina that the amulet is actually Sam’s Paullina is pissed but not enough to turn full dragon  

As Lancer talks to Jack about their discussion about Danny Danny overshadows Jack again and Maddie notices he sounds strange  

When Jack/Danny goes up to Tucker and Sam Tucker is all too quick to throw Danny under the bus  

Paulina refuses to give back the amulet or Danny believing he’s Sam’s boyfriend  

Sam explains he’s her best friend and maybe that’s why she why so hard on her and says she didn’t mean to call her shallow (this could be a great character moment for them both)  

Paulina then confesses she only went out with Danny to steal him from her and is disappointed so she put the amulet on Sam calling it crummy and goes to dump Danny calling him dorky  

This enrages Sam calling her a shallow little witch (you know it this wasn’t rated 8+ on Nickelodeon that would be bitch)   

Paulina faints from the shock (I mean yeah) 

Sam’s dragon form breaks a giant hole in the school roof and no one notices  

Danny sees the dragon is holding Paulina so it’s Sam he’s fighting confirmed when Sam calls Paulina shallow  

Jack doesn’t recognize Lancer and demands to know why he’s talking to Maddie  

Danny overshadows Jack again and lies that he didn’t recognize him because the light made him look like George Clooney (was he popular in the early 2000s) 

Apparently Jack/Danny and Maddie’s dancing is so good the people on the dance floor cheer  

Danny tangles dragon Sam up in the Fenton Fisher fishing line and removes the amulet and tells Sam she had a roaring time at the dance   

Dash tries to flirt with an unimpressed Paulina  

Danny and Sam go off to dance  

As Tucker bemoans being dateless again Dorathea reappears wanting to go to the ball and Tucker freaks out   

3 ONE OF A KIND 

First appearance of the Box Ghost (they’re fighting in a warehouse does this imply Boxy is a dead warehouse worker)  

That address on the box is labeled for Arlington Heights Illinois (they're also at a shipping at a port so is Amity Park in Illinois)  

Danny thinks seals are canines (I don’t think he’ll be an astronaut)   

Tucker fumbles the thermos dropping it and releasing dozens of ghost businessmen and the Box Ghost and it’s only 9 PM  

First appearance of Skulker who states Danny being half human half ghost makes him one of a kind making him a fine addition to his collection  

Skulker threatened Boxy that if he touches the cage he’ll adorn his fireplace with his pelt (so ghosts can be skinned)  

Jazz considers her mom a genius and is happy Genius Magazine a magazine by women geniuses for women geniuses about women geniuses will answer her request to put her on that month’s cover  

Danny thinks it is the swimsuit issue and thinks it’s gross his mom will be in it  

Jazz sees it as an opportunity for the world to see her parents as normal and not ghost hunting freaks Danny denies they’re freaks  

Maddie considers Jack to also be a genius as besides every genius woman there’s a genius man and Jack also wants to be beside her on the cover the world deserves to know the Fenton's are a family of geniuses cuts to Danny getting a D on the test (which makes sense those answers he wrote are nonsense also throw back to when they taught cursive in school and made us write in it)  

Sam tells Danny he can to research on the endangered Purple Back Gorilla proving they deserve to be set free (Sam you have a fundamental misunderstanding on the importance and purpose of zoos)  

Even Danny says he doesn’t have time to deal with her agendas but Tucker (blaming Sam for making him let all the ghosts out) uses his PDA to manage Danny’s time  

First appearance of Mikey and when he continues screaming after Skulker webbed him to the wall and yells at him about being the world’s greatest hunter Skulker scolds him to be quiet in the library and gags him  

Dash and another football player come in and the football player says he didn't do it but can appreciate high quality bullying (so bullying is highly prevalent at Casper High)  

The trio spent 6 hours watching a gorilla scratch his butt  

Tucker and Danny fall asleep hugging and Sam takes a picture to use as blackmail (I haven't seen a polaroid camera in years after everything went digital to the cloud they’re only just now bringing them back)  

Sampson the gorilla freaks out when he hears Skulker fight a tiger he points and pulls on the door and Sam just lets him out of his enclosure (not only is the switch unlocked it’s also unguarded did this zoo just let three teens spend the night unsupervised)  

Skulker’s binoculars alert him to an attacking gorilla right before Sampson goes apeshit on him (so is it because animals can sense ghosts or can Sampson sense Skulker is a threat)  

Danny and Tucker sleep through the gorilla fight and Skulker crashing through the observatory tower window and most of the gorilla ghost fight round two  

They are startled awake by the noise startled that they’re hugging and startled for a third time by the loose gorilla  

Sampson freaks out and runs from Danny’s ghost form   

Danny cuts Sam off before she warns him of the ghost and when Tucker threatens to tell everyone at school she released a gorilla she threatens them with the photo so they keep it a secret  

Maddie sees Danny looking like crap and doesn’t like his overnight zoo research Danny says they just some kids at a zoo at night alone  

Danny has a large sign on his door that says “DANNY’S BEDROOM”  

Tucker gives him 13 minutes to sleep but Skulker was waiting calling him ghost child and captures him  

Skulker explains he’s a collector of the rare and unique and that’s what Danny is and more (Skulker’s hair is now blue instead of green is it because of the dramatic lighting)  

Jack and Maddie hear the loud noises from the fight and assume there's a ghost in the house (well they’re not wrong)   

Sam says the noise Danny is making is from him lifting weights Maddie says he doesn’t have any when Danny yells about Jazz’s computer Sam says he’s using that  

Danny crashes making a hole through the ceiling and falls into the kitchen shattering the table and Skulker kidnaps him Tucker plays off the damage as him doing karate  

The interviewer is more interested in talking to Danny and Maddie wants to know what he’s doing too  

Skulker has a device that can turn on the ghost portal  

Sam starts lecturing about cages like how Sampson's a beautiful animal and deserves to roam free telling Skulker he should be ashamed  

Skulker than takes Tucker’s PDA to Tucker’s complaint that he had three more payments on it (so technology is ghost compatible)  

Now Skulker’s suit has to abide by Danny's schedule  

Danny hurries and stops his family and the interviewer from seeing his destroyed room the interviewer takes his brooding messy and reclusiveness as a sign of a true genius but complains he’s not a woman  

Tucker has a backup PDA to track Danny and Skulker’s schedule  

Skulker hid a booby trap in a milk carton but is interrupted by the schedule now Danny realizes he could use it to his advantage   

Danny gets Dash to open his gym locker triggering him to be the booby trap's victim  

Even Skulker knows Dash will have an average life after high school  

Danny now decides to plan to use the schedule to trap Skulker  

Where did Sam and Tucker get that lifelike gorilla costume  

Tucker hacks Skulker's PDA to mess with him as Danny fights him not taking the opportunity to power hi down before Skulker destroys that one and Tucker bemoans it had four more payments (I just looked it up the average price for a PDA in 2004 was about $350)  

Skulker has had enough and plans to keep Danny’s pelt at the foot of his bed instead of having him live in a cage  

Danny uses gorilla habits to call Sampson to fight Skulker declaring it was easy to learn his language when all he does is scratch his butt  

Tucker wonders why a ghost would need a high-tech battle suit right when Sampson tears off Skulker's head to reveal a little frog sized ghost  

Bending down to pick up the tech Danny is low and close enough to see something shocking about Sampson  

The Genius Magazine publishes about Danny being the genius child of a genius woman discovering Sampson is actually a Delilah “Nobody at that zoo bothered to see if it was a boy or a girl?” (I know this was meant as a joke but it is possible to be mistaken recently a zoo discovered a male gorilla was a girl after she gave birth)  

Lancer acknowledges he was desperate enough risk being mauled by a gorilla so gives him a C for it telling him next time try the library to get his grade up  

Danny wants to take his misplaced aggression out on something then Boxy shows up he has five free minutes four more than he needs 

#danny phantom #long post #dpeb

[battleangelaelita]

The longer a fan culture goes on, the more often it gets stuck in a rut that amplifies the flaws of the original work. With Avatar, that chief flaw is the narrative framing conventions of YA and the simplification of conflict. This is why we spend so much time on here stuck on old favorites like the perfect woobified awkward turtleduck Zuko, his demon-child war criminal younger sister, his supposedly neglectful and frigid girlfriend, his perfect wise old sage.

If one judged Avatar based on its fanworks, you’d think Zuko was the main character.

I don’t think we can just fault the fans for fanning wrong. To me, there has to be something at the heart of the story that informs this attitude, even if it is detached from the original story that was told.

And rightly or wrongly, the original show does invest most of its nuance in Zuko. Aang is the protagonist, and his conflicts and goals drive the story forward, but most of Aang’s character episodes are presented in the straightforward matter one expects of a children’s show. A lot of them are parable of the week stories that can come across as really hamfisted even to children, like the episode where the Gaang meets Bato and Aang gets a pretty crude little fable about learning to trust and not lie or keep secrets from friends.

Besides its brusque framing, the conflict begins and ends within the confines of a single episode. Aang’s larger character arcs are just not as prominent when compared to Zuko’s, which does not present the character or the audience with quick and easy answers.

Because of this complexity and the amount of time the narrative invests in giving the audience reasons for why Zuko behaves the way he does, it becomes very easy to just explain away the times Zuko continues to be an asshole even after he flips to the good guys, because the audience has already become invested in his happy ending.

We learn about Zuko’s sympathetic back story way back in season 1, when he’s the show’s principle antagonist. The narrative framing invests the audience in that redemptive outcome even before it even presents it as possible. This isn’t a bad thing, I just wish as much care had been taken in trying to get people as invested in Aang’s wellbeing.

ATLA, to its credit, does give just enough material for other characters that if you are paying attention, most of its child characters are sympathetic, and even if they remain villainous to the end of the story, they are tragic figures. See, for example, just how many people have gotten emotionally invested in Azula, who had just enough people going to bat for her in the writing room even though the showrunners never intended for her to be anything but a one-note villain for Zuko to beat.

And I shouldn’t let fans entirely off the hook. Fan culture has this terrible tendency of treating content either like it’s something to binged without appreciation, like a trip to the Golden Corral buffet, or getting hyperinvested in minutia that you miss the forest for the trees.

#Avatar The Last Airbender #zuko #aang #meta

[shimmershae]

So.  I slogged through TWD Episode 17-Lockdown and, you know me, I had some thoughts.

I always have thoughts.  They’re not always coherent, but they’re definitely there.  

Look behind the cut if you’re interested in skimming through them.  

Slogged is definitely the word I meant to use because it took me almost 3 hours to consume this episode--I kept getting up and leaving to do other, more interesting things (blasphemous in the TWD fan days of old, the only way to keep my sanity in these trying times).  

But like I said, I slogged through it and all I could think about afterward was thank God I didn’t pay AMC any money for this.  

Shae’s stream of consciousness thoughts incoming in 3-2-1.  

So finally, finally they are giving us some connection to the past, playing up on our nostalgia with Judith’s voiceover and the flashbacks.  

IMHO, they should have included flashbacks of Lori in there since, you know, she’s kind of one of the biggest reasons why Judith is alive at this point and able to hear these stories.  Like why is she hearing stories about Shane’s descent into madness and not stories about the mama that sacrificed her life for her?  I mean, did I miss it or do they continue to do the most to erase Lori from the fabric of baby girl’s DNA?  

That said?  Carol and Lydia at the cliff!  My forever bruised heart!

Oh lawd, more Daryl and Maggie. I can already tell this episode is going to be lacking because they are BORING AF together.  Like there is just ZERO energy between them.  

I love how Aaron says “Carol’s there” when Gabe worries about Hornsby going after their people/families.  My girl is Team Family’s one woman protection squad.  

You know I’m proud AF but also?  I cry.  Because who’s looking out for her?  After the way so many of them seemed to turn on her last season, it doesn’t feel like they have her back back, you know?  

Negan and Annie would be kind of sweet if they weren’t basically one of those mug cakes that you throw in a few ingredients and toss in the microwave for 30 seconds.  Oh and if there weren’t actual good people still struggling to find their own happiness when this “reformed” murderer is basically getting to play house.

Negan really using that nasty ass Whisperer mask as the centerpiece to his entire wardrobe whenever he has “date night” has me simultaneously cringing and laughing because yuck.  And also?  Wonder if Annie’s like “Eww, didn’t I throw that out with the trash last week?”  

I hate how my Denny Duquette crushing days rear their head at the most inopportune times.  Like here I am, fighting against finding any redeeming quality in this butt abscess of a human being and I remember how charming Denny was and I’m like, fuckkkkkk.  Let’s not even get into JDM fanning the flames of the hellscape that is fandom since AMC decided to insert its head so far up its ass I can see Scott Gimple’s bolo tie dangling between Chris Hardwick’s teeth whenever he opens his mouth and just glides over the spinoff debacle with 101 questions about Princess and Mercer and Judith’s hairstyle like it’s nothing.  

Daryl and Negan tag-teaming it will never not make me go WTF.  Like the ways in which TWD has contorted these characters to keep that fucker alive would be impressive in some kind of alternate universe where people weren’t such assholes about a woman mourning her murdered son and seeking vengeance and ultimately the protection of her people in a two birds, one stone kind of way.    

Those Walkers ripping out those guts like people down at Disney during free dining (RIP) going ham after buffet snow crab legs.  

·AMC lying even in its opening credits because Melissa McBride and Christain Serratos been glorified guest stars this season and they’re 2nd and 4th billed.  

Oh look, they decided to put all 99 members of the cast in the opening. Cool, cool.  Too bad only about 4 of them have had any appreciable screen time this season.  

The comic style opening is cool and all but the original opening hit way harder.

Lance losing his shit in that suit is sending me.  

Don’t they know they’re wasting a precious commodity in the ZA—fuel. Jeez.  

Wow!  Yumiko lives!  Magna too.

You know Negan wants to comment on the pumpkin suit.  I mean, that twinkle in JDM’s eyes is on point.  He’s having to forcibly restrain his lesser angels (actually devils, but eh), lol.

Negan’s in is April?  Guess she’s dead so she can’t refute his story. Makes sense.  If I hadn’t rewatched the 2 minutes of that episode where Carol and Daryl awkwardly make a date and Carol comes to save her Pookie’s bacon recently I wouldn’t have remembered who TF she was though.  

Carol!!!  How is it possible she gets ever more beautiful every time we see her on our screens?  Granted, AMC is doing the most to see how that absence makes the heart grow fonder thing works out.  

 Fuck TWD having her play babysitter.  I know she’s been working things undercover and I know I’ve been salivating over Aunt Carol/Judith scenes for literal years but damn them for doing it this way.  

Seriously.  I hate how now they’re doing more than implying Carol has a relationship with these kids.  You know, conveniently sidelining her from the action.  They’ve been employing this same tactic for years.  Remember when they kept her from Negan’s lineup (my only consolation is she was spared that trauma) by shipping her off to the circus that was the Kingdom?  

That’s it!  Daryl’s solo spinoff is about him going back in time to that silly Ren Faire and showing his girl why she belongs with him and not some man who would self-appoint himself King.  

I kid.  I think.  Let’s move on from that farce, shall we?  

I do like, however, that Daryl and Aaron know their kids (because let’s face it, Daryl’s had more time playing daddy to those kids than Rick ever got the chance to) are safest WITH Carol. Takes the wind out of the sails of the old and tired mantra of the haters that Rick never trusted Carol with his kids.  Feels kind of like a fuck you, haters to me, lol.

Fake Stephanie and that other person I can’t remember the name of—hmm, guess they weren’t all that memorable. The hell are they doing coming in on Carol’s (Daryl’s?) apartment that way?  

You know.  I love the implication that Carol has been in that apartment enough that she’s super comfortable and knowledgeable about the whereabouts of everything but like, would it have killed this damn show to actually SHOW us Carol and Daryl slouching on a couch together instead of taking another whack at the dead horse that is Carol’s failed marriage with the petting zoo keeper?  Would it have?  Really?  

Poor babies be pretty skilled at that quiet game.  Especially RJ.  ; )

“Where is Carol?”  

Negan, Man.  We been asking that same question the whole damn season.

Carol’s always right, lol. We been knew.  Now we just got to convince the haters to accept that IN CAROL? EVERYBODY TRUSTS.  Actually, we don’t.  Because haters gonna hate.  Sure would be nice though.  

Carol’s been planning for things to go to hell from word go.  Sending the babies to an attic safe space?  Stocking it with supplies?  

Oh look. They remembered Yumiko and Magna used to know each other.  

They should have used Magna more in this class struggle in CW.  Given us more scenes showing her struggles instead of Eugene getting his groove on.  

Lockdown?  Hmm.  Oh damn.  Just remembered that’s the name of the episode.  My bad.  

The hell did all those Walkers come from?  Thought I was watching a different show for a second.  I mean, I know my attention’s wandered quite a bit but still.  

So Pamela releases “swarms” of Walkers on her citizens whenever she’s feeling some heat?  Sounds like something, eh, nevermind.  At least that’s the impression I got.  

Negan talking to Carol like they’re friends.  Look. I hate the hoops they’ve jumped through to keep him alive and relevant but I love the scenes he shares with Carol, lol.  I realize there are some double standards at work here but they fascinate me because he respects the absolute shit out of her (AS HE SHOULD) and MMB/JDM have their own kind of magnetism at play.  

Ya’ll already know all these Maggie/Daryl scenes are flatlining my interest levels but can you imagine if Daryl wasn’t there at all with her?  Because I think I honestly would end up wearing my thumb out on the FF button. Like no offense to LC at all but she needs somebody dynamic or in direct opposition to her character to come alive because Maggie is too straight line A to B, black and white, what have you.  They’ve muddied her up some this season but keep drawing the line at letting her really lean into the shades of gray because they want to keep her “heroine” persona intact. Guess it’s much easier for simple-minded folks to hate on Carol.  Besides. MMB is much better at selling her character’s layers.  

“I know that Leah meant something to you.”  Bitch, please.  Not as much as LCol hoped but I guess we’re supposed to at least pretend that whole waste of time Reapers storyline served some kind of purpose or had some miniscule impact.  

Daryl looking out for Maggie because of Glenn.  Now that actually tracks.  

Little dude that plays RJ can’t even sell that he’s terrified for his life.  He ain’t even breathing fast.  Kid’s stone cold.  As in dead and unable to portray human emotion.  Flare some nostrils.  Something.  Damn.  His parents putting back the money he’s getting from this show for his college fund though so kudos.  Plus, he’s a cute little boo so.  He still winning at life.  

Oh goodie.  Another trip through some sewers.  Aren’t they worried the CW is going to smell them coming?  

How shitty, literally, would it be to spend your eternity in a shit tunnel?  

OFC, Carol sniffed out Sebastian.

“I have seen her pull little bunnies right out of her ass with my very own two eyes.”  LOL.  But also?  Eww.  What ya’ll wanna bet Gimple sits at his laptop gleefully rubbing his hands together as he thinks up Negan’s dialogue and it’s always the most cringe ever.  Like there’s a distinct difference between the shit that has come out of his mouth this season versus last season.  And it’s not like he was weaving sonnets but his words weren’t full body cringe inducing either.  Dare I say it, they had more nuance.  At any rate, even if Gimple didn’t write it himself, you can still see the faint impression of that damn bolo tie in the stamp on it.  

Who is this random dude shouting on the megaphone?  I literally don’t know or care anything about any of these people.

I mean, I know I’m supposed to care more about this protest but all I can see are a bunch of redshirts taking up screen time from the characters I’m really interested/invested in. And sadly?  Kelly is the only “known” person in that crowd I’d be upset about if something happened to her.  I’m just not there with Connie because largely?  They’ve failed to put in the work to actually develop her, instead cheapening what she could be?  By using her as a tool for shipping wars.  If they stopped that bullshit and really and truly committed to fleshing her out more, I get totally get onboard because she has the foundation of a good character.  But right now she’s a crepe paper flower whereas Carol’s a whole bouquet of homegrown Cherokee roses.  

Rosita telling Mercer her family comes first and him respecting that and offering her help to get out if/when she needs it? One of the few moments of this episode so far besides the Carol moments where I’ve been like, yes.  Give me more.  I like this dynamic.  We could have had so many more quality moments with Rosita had they cut all that Daryl/Maggie fat that’s unneeded.  At this point, it isn’t even giving the episode more flavor.  

Speaking of flavor--is it just me or are these Walkers especially ravenous this episode?  

I love how my girl Carol is always ten steps ahead of every damn body but would it kill this show not to skip every step she takes until the final one?  

Lance looks like he might enjoy a little knife play, lol.  

The best thing I have to say about this episode insider thing is Angela’s hair looks pretty.  

Anyway.  I hope you got more enjoyment out of my free-flowing word vomit than I personally got out of the episode.  I’ve yet to work up to caring enough to sit down and watch 18 but whenever I finally do, expect to hear all about it here, lol.  

#The Walking Dead #The Walking Dead spoilers #Season 11 spoilers #Lockdown #Shae's thinky thoughts #things that make me smile and cry #for reasons

[lavenderek]

Why were you disappointed by the Howl's Moving Castle movie? I think I read the book years ago, but I don't remember much about it

i'm gonna critique the gibbly movie and it's my understanding that it's a special movie for a lot of people so if that's you feel free to skip this one

so i was delighted and enchanted by the book, which has only twice to date not made the movie a devastating letdown, so my dear friend sending me this book was pretty much signing a contract in her own blood accepting that i would be cranky about the movie. i'm not really a ghibli person either, like i can appreciate the artistry and value in them, and i'll watch it if the people i'm with really need to watch princess mononoke or whatever, but i just don't go out of my way to watch them. (i like reading meta about spirited away, though.)

i did go out of my way to watch this one because i loved the book so much.

it's important to remember the culture in which the movie was made as opposed to the culture in which the book was made. howl is welsh, if that says anything to you. (his name is howell, and he adopted the name howl to run from himself and seem more magical. i love him and movie howl had none of those elements except for when he told us he was a coward and i was like. ok lol, i'll jot that down because i didn't see it in the text)

so i'm not necessarily surprised by the creative changes they made, but i am confused, because those changes drastically affect the characterization, the character motivations, and the pacing of the story.

(i also was only able to get my hands on the dub and i loathe and detest christian bale as howl lmfao but that's subjective)

so first of all, does movie sophie, like, want anything? she's flawless as a character. even though she has a completely different personality as an old lady than she does as a young lady, there's nothing wrong with her. everybody is fond of her, she's shy, she's gentle, she's beautiful, and she's kind, and her only motivation in the whole movie is this vague desire to cure the curse, but even then she doesn't work on it much at all. her life before howl is about being buffeted around like a leaf in the wind, and her life after howl is about being buffeted around like a cow in a twister. sophie in the movie is a blank slate. she is insecure about her looks (seriously, they couldn't even give her like a crooked nose or something, only doll-faced, thin, pale women over here), and her confessing this and crying about it for about four seconds was the first truly deep emotional response i had seen of her. i cried when she cried, who doesn't grapple with feelings of inadequacy? then the kid came out and she was like, okay, i'm done being upset now :)

second of all, howl is a little eccentric, but mostly he's just a glorious gentleman who has a messy room and one (1) overly dramatic depressive episode. it was disturbing to me as a viewer because it was violent and came out of nowhere, and it never comes back again lmao. it was so bizarre, he's introduced as this suave, debonair man in a cape, and he stays that way the entire movie, except for a weird moment in the middle where he screams at sophie naked and then lists the character flaws that we the viewers have never witnessed. why does he like sophie? why does sophie like him?

why did they turn michael into a child? i just don't see what that added to the story lmao. i get them taking out the complexity of secrets involving sophie's decidedly interchangeable sisters and their mystery beaus, it's a lot to fit into a little movie; but like, why did they turn him into a child though lmao

there's a lot of fatphobia in the movie too.

the change that upset me the most, though, was that the element of sophie having the ability to influence things without her knowledge was totally abandoned. like i said, things just sort of happen to her. in the book, her hats are the most lovely because she's inadvertently cast spells on them to make whoever wears them seem alluring or mysterious to people. the witch curses her because she recognizes these little spells and believes sophie's trying and failing to trick her (and also because sophie snaps at her lmao, why is movie sophie only an asshole when she's old? leave my daughter alone).

book sophie unknowingly protects howl by worrying over his cape (which she previously shredded because she got mad at him, i love her), she unknowingly enchants the scarecrow by helping it stand and complimenting it. she does that the entire book. she also starts the book already feeling sort of dull and trapped, and spends the story trying desperately to solve mysteries and protect loved ones. movie sophie doesn't like, sit around and knit demurely, don't get me wrong; but all the major plot points are things that howl makes happen to her lol.

i think the scarecrow is an excellent representation of book sophie's inner struggles. it's something she inadvertently enchanted, and she doesn't understand it, so she runs from it. she's terrified of the thing. in that way it kind of stands in for her own agency: only when she was forcibly in disguise did she feel free to find out what she wants her life to look like, and that kind of power is foreign and frightening to her. i loved that for her.

and very late in the book, howl reveals that he knew all along she was under a spell, that he tried to get rid of it out of curiosity (book howl doesn't seem to notice that he's just as imperious and nosy as sophie is), but she resisted it. he couldn't get the spell off. so he assumed she wanted to stay that way and let her be about it. so basically it's very huck finn on the raft, she realizes that in running to get away, she was already away. she had that agency all along.

all of that was missing from movie sophie. the idea of her inadvertently hanging on to the curse is still there, we see that she sort of fades back to her young self while she's asleep (not the case in the book, we know this because howl doesn't know what she looks like until she turns back in the end); but she doesn't seem to gain any knowledge about herself because of this. the only time she seems to have any personal drive, it's to learn about and help howl. her inner struggles are about howl. and i hated movie howl lmao, i hated his design and i hated his voice and i hated how like, patronizing he was to everyone around him. book howl was a condescending dick at times and just weird and distant at others, but he never came across like he was absolutely positive he was seducing sophie at any given moment. it was clear that he was the star of the movie and sophie was just the audience stand in to be like 🤩🥸🧐

the scarecrow who is a prince was the most hilariously egregious moment in the entire movie. in the book, the missing prince is introduced as a plot in the beginning and is referenced repeatedly throughout. and he's a major player in the climax. in the movie, it's the last like five minutes of the film and the scarecrow turns into a dapper boy with bread for hair and is like, "you've cured me! i'm a prince who went missing from a nearby kingdom and i was cursed but now i'm free." and i was like NICE, so we just found out there's a nearby kingdom that has a prince who's been missing. love that for us

the book had a lot of themes that i don't often encounter in fantasy novels - themes of female agency, of disguise, and of chaos. the chaos is my favorite part, every chapter is equally chaotic at various levels. you'll have michael fretting over some spell, sophie fretting over her own spell, howl trying to get someone in disguise to fall in love with him, THAT someone pining over michael, and all the while sophie and howl are bickering because she is cleaning (it seems like she cleans to clean up her mind) and he doesnt want her to (he is afraid of change and of reality), and he needs a huge favor of her, and she needs to wheedle out of it, and she promised calcifer she would free him, and calcifer is repeatedly promising to die of not being appreciated enough, and everybody is having three arguments at once. it's like that in every chapter, culminating in the moment howl and sophie realize they're in love, and they stand clasping hands and sort of smiling at each other in the middle of a room full of panicking and perplexed people just yelling over each other lmfao. surrounded by chaos and no longer thrown by it, rooted there in the middle of it, stabilizing each other in a way. i loved that. i actually flipped back a few pages so i could read that moment again.

and it seemed to me that the movie tried to imply that with visual chaos, but everything else was really quite linear and simple. everything was very airy. and since the conflama and the general atmosphere and character dynamics of the book is what made me fall in love with it, the movie didn't work for me.

tumblr user door pointed out that the book and the movie are extremely different and she appreciates them both as separate entities, and she's wise and correct; i knew this and i tried so hard to engage with the movie on its own terms. but i couldn't divorce them in my mind. i felt the same way about ella enchanted and practical magic. i cant stop thinking like, i wish they hadn't gotten rid of x, i wish they hadn't added this weird element of y.

also it was boring. i checked to see how much more was left three times. sorry. i can't express enough how little i cared about the plot with the witch and somebody's secretly evil boss and time traveling to yell at howl or something, because i didn't connect with the characters. and the feathers growing out of howl triggered my weird phobia about things being embedded in skin. i'm skeeved just remembering it.

anyway, yeah. the movie was beautifully animated and whatever atmosphere they were going for was pretty consistent throughout. oh and i LOVED calcifer. he was my favorite in both the book and the movie. in fact, he was the only character in the movie who they didn't really change, he was petty and bitchy in both versions. i loved him. he's like, "SHE FED ME SOMETHING YUCKY" my perfect, horrible boy.

oh and. book sophie was a redhead. that's all.

after i finished the book i tried to draw how imagined them:

couldn't finish it though, i wasn't super jazzed about how it was coming out.

she's sitting in like, a window well altering a coat of his without permission. and he's like, i guess i'll have to wear this one instead, and she's like, i guess you will

#haters #who is this even #long post #howell's mobile home #talking out of my ass

[popculturebuffet]

Ducktales Della Arc Reviews: The Spear of Selene or THE INCREDIBLE STORKULES, GOD OF HOMEROTIC SUBTEXT OUT OF MYTH!

Hello all you happy people and welcome back to my coverage of the Della arc! It’s our last 2017 episode before the Finale, and it’s a huge one as we delve into a fan faviorite that introduces a pair of fan faviorites, a drum of tzatkiki sauce worth of gay,  an asshole so odious getting sent to the bowls of hades and laughed at for all enternity after being cast out by eveyrone he knows really was getting off light, and at last some plot progression on this arc. At the time it aired mind you at this point Dellas been a beloved cast member for three years, and we’ve known what happened to her for longer than that. 

At the time though.. it’d been 8 MONTHS since the Great Dime Chase. Let that sink in. The Della reveal was the biggest hook of an already exceptional pilot: It not only promised to flesh out a character who’d had all of one story in the comics at this point in present day, but solve the mystery of why she was gone. Not only that but Scrooge and Donald’s feud clearly stemmed from this exact moment. And the first full episode in the arc confirmed it: Della had taken whatever “The Spear of Selene” was and apologized to Scrooge for it. So why had she taken it, why did Donald blame scrooge, why did Scrooge not blame himself, at least outwardly, where was she, what was the spear of selene...

As I pointed out last time airing order didn’t help and due to airing the arc episodes really close together, gave the impression the arc would not only move fast but take up more of the season than it did. In practice both arcs take up a fourth of the season not including the finale, which would take both up to about a third. The expectation on how much of the season would be taken up by the arc.. was on Disney for airing things badly. I will give credit where it’s do as they moved this episode up in the order to try and make up for it (and give themselves a huge mid season opener).. but then for some reason shoved the last episode before last crash, ie. the only one they coudln’t move, way back to right before that episode. “ Here’s an actual photo of the person who made this decision

As I said they did get better next season with only a few swaps and only for good reason. So props. 

HOWEVER.... this episode still has some  flaws with pacing and revealing info, with or without Disney drunk driving the schedule. The wait between episodes in this plot is an episode LONGER in production order... and dosen’t move the plot forward by much. I will get to that when the time comes.. and that DESPITE this treatment of the fans.. this episode is still one of the seasons best. How are both things true? Join me under the cut to find out. 

Thunderstormy to be precise and the Sunchaser is natrually encountering loads of turbulence with Launchpad barely holding int here while Donald’s buffeted around the back. Why Donald’s with them... 

But it’’s one of his only five starring episodes in the season, out of 9 appearances total the rest of which are cameos.  Yeah now seems as good as time as any to talk about Season 1′s Donald Duck problem. 

See Donald was promoted as a major part of the series, rightly so since he was reduced to a guest star for the 87 series due to a combination of Disney not wanting to overexpose the characters, people possibly not being able to understand his voice and thus making plots hard to understand, and Tony Anselmo being new to the roll at the time. So the reboot went all out promoting the fact Donald would be in it, front and center and gave him TWO character shorts to the rest of the casts one. Disney really went out of their way to show he’d be in there so as a certified Donald Fanatic, I was sure he’d actually be in the show a lot and on the adventures a lot. The crew were not blameless as both promotional arts featured him. Launchpad and Beakly conversely were asbent, so the impression given by all of this was that Donald would be central to the series and in a lot of episodes, given equal focus to scrooge and the kids. 

This.. didn’t happen as you all know. Instead as stated he’s up front and center for 5 episodes, and makes cameos in others, but generally is hardly around. Now there is KINDA an excuse to this as he doesn’t want to adventure, be in the mansion or any of that.. but it’s a REALLY weak one. He still at least could’ve made more cameos, the fact he was working on the boat all that time isn’t made clear till last crash, and his two spotlight episodes both have him dragged along on the adventure anyway, so it’s not like his not wanting to be there meant he woudln’t be forced to join in anyway. There were ways to include him, still have him in a supporting role instead of leaving him back at the mansion.. and even the second episode proved there was still comedy to be mliked from that.. and pathos don’t forget the pathos. So yeah this was easily the biggest mistake of the season and one season 2 largely corrected: He got four dedicated plots, and was around a decent amount in the first half of the season and while he DID get shot up to the moon... it was for valid reasons. They wanted to focus on Della and the kids, give her room to breathe as a brand new major addition to the show, and thus him being around and the elephant in the room of his and scrooge’s feud that was never dealt with on screen, would’ve distracted from that. And even with that they still gave him a focus episode that somehow added more depth and MASSIVELY advanced the main plot, and a sizeable roll in the finale. Season 3 likewise had things better: while he shows up as much as in season 1, the episode count is lower by one, and he’s a major part of the plot in every one BUT Last Christmas, with four of those having the spotlight on him in some way. They eventually did figure out how to use him far more ballanced. So yeah credit where it’s do it got MUCH better, but he still felt like a recurring character in his own series, that was still bad, and I still needed to give out about it. 

But Webby and Dewey have a mission even if Dewey dosen’t quite get what’s going on so they flip a switch to turn on a warning light of some kind forcing Launchpad to make an emergency landing on a gorgeous tropical island. To Huey’s amazement, as the place was apparenlty only a myth, though naturally the guidebook did have it’s aproximate location listed... Ithaquack, home of the gods. Naturally Scrooge and Donald want to leave as soon as possible for reasons we’ll get into but Launchpad , for once is being a responsible pilot “Better safe than.. something right? Scrooge is of course irate that Launchpad picked NOW of all times to be safe, and the Kids.. don’t listen because Huey sees a beautiful realm of myth, Louie sees a beach vacation and Dewey and Webby.. have work to do. Webby eventually fills Dewey in on why their here, having wrongly assumed he got why they were going to a mythical greek island. As Dewey delightfully puts it later “Don’t assume I know anything. “ So she pieces it together for him: Selene was the greek goddess of the moon... Della took the SPEAR of Selene. Ergo this island is the best place to find the Spear and failing that, Selene herself to get more info on it and Della. 

So we have our two plots. Scrooge and Donald dealing with their pasts and the gods, and Dewey and Webby diving into his mom’s past. And unlike the last review where a genuinely unsettling story about an abuse victim forced to manipulate her girlfriend not going into a murder vault was paired with Louie having to deal with a Sasquatch while Huey catches a case of Dewey’s stupidity somehow, these two plots are perfectly paired: Their both perfectly thematically connected, both dealing with the past, Della’s absence and Scrooge and the Twins past encounters with the gods.. but both being self contained outside of that, entirely unconnected but stilll necessary to be in the same episode. THIS is how you do two plots. But since they don’t really synch up again till the end, let’s cover each one at a time shall we?

“What if My Mom was a Bad Person?” 

The plot is pretty straight forward but expertly done: Dewey and Webby first check your standard Zelda dungeon which apparently has a cursed weapon at the end. We also get an utterly adorable and sweet shot of Webby comforting Dewey after he’s clearly shook from it. Awwww. Turns out it’s the SWORD of Selene. and quickly turns into a game of put the Cursed Sword back before we all die. 

Next up is a monster who nearly kills both protecting it’s spear.. the spear of POSIDEN. (Look at meeeeee). And since they aren’t going to be on a boat that isn’t a house boat anytime soon, they don’t need that and the monster cheerfully redirects them, with Dewey apologizing for calling it ugly. 

So all pretty standard stuff for the show and really good stuff.. but it’s the building tension underneath that truly makes the episode and leads to one hell of a climax for this plot. All the while Dewey is DESPERATE for some explination for his mom’s disapperance that isn’t her betraying Scrooge, maybe returning the spear because it was cursed or getting eaten by a monster. Just ANYTHING but the mounting and horrifying suspicion.. that his mom was a bad person who destroyed her family and betrayed her uncle and laughed all the while. Webby.. does not help, backing that side of things and constantly voicing hte idea Della betrayed Scrooge, so obsessed with solving the mystery of her life.. but so unfamilliar with people she dosen’t see the very real toll this is taking on her best friend. To her she’s just making a logical counterpoint.. to him it’s just another idea in his head about the way his mom could’ve betrayed everyone she cared about. 

So that climax is where it explodes. Our heroes find a scale model of ithaquack (Complete with Tiny Maniticore! It’s so cute Webby just wants to slay it)  and an opening.. with an ominous message about incurring the wrath of the god seemingly conforming the worst. So Webby prepares to find out the whole story.. only for Dewey to stop her. No one’s finding this out, whatever it is, no matter how far they’ve come. And given this is the biggest mystery of her life and she simply dosen’t understand WHY Dewey dosen’t want to know.. both sides are ready to fight for this. And Webby DOES try to back him down, pointing out he really can’t beat her in a fight. But Dewey’s already grown leaps and bounds form the pilot and is working smarter not harder. Beat Webby, who spent a good chunk of her life being honed into the most badass child on the parent, one who can take on several of scrooge’s worst foes one on one? Not on his life. But hold her off long enough for the gate to close? He can do that. 

So the result? One of the best fights of the series... and given the sheer amount of great ones we’ve gottten since this one it still says something it holds up THIS well. It’s an even, furiously paced fight, with Dewey using every advantage he has including tossing said manticore to keep up, but not slowing down one bit. It’s heartbreaking to see the two come to this but it’s an delight to watch. Webby DOES win eventually, though time’s running out to get in and she finally asks WHY. And  while the stakes have been crystal clear for both this whole time.. we get them laid out in the most painful way for both. 

Webby: We're so close to the truth! Why won't you let us find it?! Dewey: Because...*his voice cracks* what if my mom was a bad person?

It hits VERY hard. For Webby this has been a puzzle something to solve the greatest achivment of her life, her chance to make her mark... and her best friend just wanted to abandon it. But in one swift response, he disarms all of that.. and makes her see how insnstivie she’s been: He may not know his mom.. but he can’t bear the thought she was a bad person. That she left or WORSE, because she didn’t care about him, or scrooge or ANYONE. Knowing nothing is better than knowing she was a monster. 

Webby realizes what she’s been doing to her friend and is horrified and offers to back out. The answers.. aren’t worth destroying her brother. But her willingness to back down.. finally gets Dewey to see the light. His fear was valid.. but at the end of the day,  it’d never go away. it’d just keep eating him for the rest of his life, every time she was mentioned or he found something else out he’d just wonder if it was a lie and wonder wht he COULD’VE learned this day. And if Webby’s willing to sacrifice THIS MUCH to give him peace of mind... then he can sacrifice that peace of mind for the truth, for her, and for himself. So he pulls them inside. 

Inside they find Selene who suprises them.. and is then confused. Their not della. Also I guarantee mentally she’s thiking “Thank me I didn’t do it naked this time. “. After some confusion as to who this is, Webby explains that IS Selene, and Dewey begs for answers about the spear... only to find out she dosen’t have one. Nope. The sword seen before and a SPHERE, yes.. but no Spear. So the poor boy breaks down, back to square one. It’s hard not to see why... all this effort, all of this sacrifice.. and he’s no closer than when they first set down. 

Selene does help though... giving him an idea of who his mom WAS: one of her closest friends (And let’s face it  Della named the ship after Selene and Selene casually uses Della’s shower. If they didn’t go out at least once, I am an outer god. And I very much am not and they very much banged hard. Goodnight. ) , a good person who brought fun to everyone, and loved her family more than anything. Wether she betrayed Scrooge or not, she wasn’t a bad person. And her own orb shows it showing Della in her prime, brightly smiling next ot her family. Selene encourages the boy not to give up, that his mom always loved a mystery.. and he can solve this one and gently hugs the sobbing child.. with Dewey quickly pulling webby in. It’s genuinely touching and a satisfying ISH ending. 

The ish... is because while this is a VERY good plot, i’ll gush more about it at the end, it does have one supreme flaw: the mystery dosen’t progress. And with the huge gaps between this episode and hte next one, in BOTH airing orders... it’s unforgivable to not have EITHER plot give us any hints about what happened. I don’t ask for much, but they could’ve found a clue in the sphere Dewey got, or saw a memory of her that brought up the next place they look, just something a little. While it’s still a very fine story, the main plot suffers a bit by having one of the ONLY three episodes delving into the della mystery before it’s fully revealed in sunchaaser have almost no progress. Della was probably a good person, which comes from her ex who clearly still loves her so that’s not really reliable, and the spear isn’t literal. While the lack of progress works for the story in the episode itself.. it comes at the cost of any actual plot progression. We end up exactly where we started and have to wait SOME TIME before we get to the next spot on the tour. Well we did, you guys will find out Monday or Tuesday depending on if the finale goes up in the morning or Disney holds it till the actual airing. Please don’t you bastards. Point is it’s  VERY good plot, but it’s hampred by not really progressing the arc. 

The arc progression for this storyline is painfully slow, and tha’ts not on disney. In either order there’s a MASSIVE gap of 15+ episodes between what we learned in the great dime chase and what we learn in castle mcduck. It’s sloppy writing and I expect better from this team, especially since the Lena plot the same season is far tighter paced: each one builds a bit, both on Lena as a character (Why she’s doing this etc), her development as a person, her relationship with webby growing and Magica and her growing more and more spiteful with one another. They could’ve had at least ONE MORE subplot to build this up, especially since we really dind’t need the sasquatch episode but just.. didn’t for whatever reason and it’s still frustrating.  But as always credit where it’s due.. the next two seasons were better about it. 

Season 2 while not perfect, and we’ll get to it’s plots someday.. and I do say plots as not alternating between the two plots for season 1 was a mistake if a well meaning one as not to drive up the price for Kev but for future refrence if any of you want me to cover an arc for something I WILL have to cover all of it or any adjacent to it that flow into it. Point is they move faster and both Glomgold and Louie’s are pretty lowkey and low stakes so while enjoyable, their not moving incredibly fast dosen’t hurt the show. And the Moon plot has the best pacing of the three and possibly of the series plots period: We get filled in on Della fairly quick, getting answers on her WAY faster, get introduced to the moon and it’s people right away, get a whole episode on them, and the most importantly in sharp contrast? She returns HOME halfway into the season. 

I will probably go into this again when I get to nothing will stop della duck but Season 1′s pacing and general wisdowm made me think she wouldn’t get home anytime soon and she’d return in the finale. Instead? We get a whole half a season fleshing her out further, seeing her connect with her kids, all that good stuff, WITH an episode advancing the moon arc, without that arc feeling unimportant, but still having the slow pacing. 

Season 3 meanwhile while again not without bugs, the last few episodes before the finale having no real build up to it really wasnt a good idea and I question why these two episodes were the ones leading into it, has two seemingly barely related plots.. that EFFORTLESLY merge into one, with one hell of a huge twist in impossibin that ratchets up the stakes. I don’t know how it’ll payoff.. but we’ll see. 

So they did get better, i’m still hard on it because it happened.. but I will never stop stressing how this crew usually corrected a mistake. If they fucked up, they LEARNED FROM IT, course corrected, and made it better and they listened to US. IN the good way, not letting fans run the series but listening to valid concerns and adapting to them. And given how fucking rare that is and how hard it must’ve been with the tight schedule, I.. I really appricate it and i’m going to miss it. And I can’t think of a segue so enjoy this picture of a turtle hitting a trapper in the face with a bat instead. 

“Someone Always Gets Hurt”

So let’s take it back a few hours. Hit it boys!

Donald tries getting the boys back on the ship, clearly fearing something coming for him.. and we soon meet that something. Yes it’s the hero of legend, the stork out of myth, the star of a LOT of Donald Duck Slash FanFiction only half of which he wrote, STORKULES!

In case I didn’t make it clear when I reviewed New Gods on the Block! I love this guy. He reminds me a LOT of the marvel version: Boisterious , horny (if in a far more pg version), Gay (Pansexual for the marvel version), flawed but still immensley likeable. Stork is a bit diffrent, a bit more naive, a bit peppier and entirely blind to the fact his father is a terrible person. But my love of the marvel herc means Stork was an easy sell for me and Chris Dimatopolis’ performance is second to none, only topped in this series by his later work as Darkwing where he got a bit more range than “Joyous ham who wants to bang”. Also I’m 100% convenced he’s made this memetic expression to donald at some point... 

If someone hasn’t redrawn that with Storkules yet, we have failed as an internet. And if someone has please show me. 

His crush on Donald is also endearing even if I don’t ship the two. And if your curious as to why it’s simple: Storkules is attracted to a version of Donald that no longer exists. Storkules craves a Donald whose a brave daring hero who loves adventure. And while still a brave hero when the situation calls for it as this episode will bare out.. he just.. dosen’t have the passion for adventure he did as a kid. While a LOT of that is loosing his sister for a decade, even once he makes peace with that and later gets her back... he just wants a normal life. His greatest wish was for one. He apparenlty “wishes for this every day”. He dosen’t hate adventuering anymore and by season 3 has come to terms with the fact he’ll never get everyone else to stop.. but I also think it’s always been obvious he clearly wants to one day. To have a normal life, settle down, find a girl, and if she wants to get married. Get old , fat and happy. I honestly think that’s the direction the finale’s heading in judging from the previews. I don’t think he’ll ever stop entirely, his family life’s too insane for that.. but he just dosen’t want to keep going forever and Stork, being an immortal hero does. They want diffrent things entirely and that just won’t work. Though that’s also JUST me and if you ship them or have a way around that, feel free. This is just my opinon. 

Anyways Donald’s not happy, the kids are confused  and Scrooge. has problesm bigger than simply not knowing how to say i’m not into you.... aka Zeus, king of the gods and of all assholes. He was originally supposed to be a swan due to a certian myth.. but they realized since that myth is both really fucked up and really not for children to not do that because why the fuck would you. Point is Zeus in myth is an asshole, a rapist, a cheating husband, and a vengeful, petty dick and that’s with barely any knowledge of Greek Myth on my part. He’s played by Micheal Chiklis whose famous for The Comissh and the Shield.. but whose famous to me for playing the ever loving Blue Eyed thing in the Tim Story Fantastic Four movies.. and honeslty, at least till marvel takes a crack at it soon, is the best screen version of the character. Look the film is flawed and I don’t remember a lot of it.. but his stuff in it just NAILS the character perfectly, at least the first one, and while the look is.. eh, he was the perfect casting. He just wasn’t in the right movie. So he’s naturally awesome here as history’s greatest douchebag. 

As for why Zeus is pissed at him unlike say Donald (The whole Spear of Selene fiasco) or Magica (Who while even worse than Zeus still lost her brother because of his callousness), or others he’s wronged.. Scrooge did absolutely nothing wrong here. During a beach party Storkules intiates, he reveals he used to be king of the beach and loved and worshipped by the people of ithaquack, which last time the adult ducks visited was a lovely hideaway for heroes. Scrooge naturally did a bunch of heroic and cool stuff, and upstaged him, and then bested him in various games and what not. Zeus claims they ran off because of this and because they didn’t want to party with a god bested by a mortal.. but scrooge reveals pottery showing it’s because Zeus threw a temper tantrum aka “a year long lightning storm”. So yeah for once all Scrooge did was just upstage someone who was already objectively horrible and who brought all of htis on himself. Scrooge even points it out perfectly “They didn’t leave because they liked me, they left because they didn’t like YOU. “ 

Pissing off the god who already didn’t like you for stupid reason goes about how you’d expect and when Storkules tries to cool things down by suggesting a game, Zeus turns it into a contest. His son against Scrooge’s nephews. Because he uh dosen’t want to lower himself. Yeah that’s it, totally not that Scrooge would kick his ass and then fucking kick his ass. Yeah that’s the ticket. 

So our boys don Toga’s, and gear up for the first challenge: grabbing the bag of winds. In case you thought Spongebob just made that up. Zeus of course opens it so Donald can’t just leave, but Huey simply thinks his way out and wins , Zeus demands best 2/3 and we soon get a montage of various events from chariot racing to sculpture where we get our title picture, lest you thought I was kidding abotu Storkules obession with donald. I mean there’s subtextually having a character have a crush on another and then ther’es making a naked muscular statue of him. I.. I don’t even have a joke here. He made a naked muscular statue of Donald. The only way they could be less obvious without just coming outright and saying it was if hte statue was of hima nd storkules making out. And i’m 100% sure Frank, Matt and Dana, yes Dana Terrace was involved in this one i’m as unsurpised as you are, only didn’t do that because Disney said no. 

Zeus declares one final round because he’s tired of this..e ven though he CLEARLY won the last one while Donald once again tries to just leave and Storkules finally calls him on it wondering why he’s given up adventuring and wondering what della would say if she could see him like this, having just given up and not caring anymore about any of ths stuff.  “Well she can’t! Someone always gets hurt....”

And that one very sharp and painful line both outlines Donald’s arc here, and for the season, and makes it VERY clear why he retired and why I felt like he was already on his way and the spear of selene was simply the final straw. He gave up.. because he was just tired of it. Tired of being the one who got hurt.. and devistated when it wasn’t him that time. When he lost his sister for what he felt was NOTHING. Sure hte stars would be great but they’d done everything and gone everywhere..w asn’t.. wasn’t that enough/ Couldn’t they just be done? Couldn’t he just stop. The spear gave him an excuse to do what he always wanted, but it also caused him to harden up and view EVERYTHING about his old days of adventuring as bad when like most things i’ts not that simple., There were good times, sunshine, giant sized gay men obessing over you.. okay maybe the last part isn’t a plus in his book, but point is there was good and his arc is seeing that and realizing he can’t just cling to his pain. He has to let go so he can move on heathliy. 

As for said final challenge Zeus tasks the boys and Storkules with stealing the golden fleece from a little girl. While this is part of a whole scheme... he undereistmaed his son’s valour and Storkules is naturally sent spinning over having to steal from a child and is sent into a crisis. Louie however has no such qualms, as he is a children.. and he’s also louie.. but as he tries to the child starts singing. As Scrooge puts it “nothing good happens when creepy children start singing. “ Very true, it’s usually a sign freddy kruger’s about to show up or your  about to be taken by a miltiary orginzation obssed with The Doctor. 

The boys plug their ears.. and Zeus’ plan becomes horrifically clear. Turns out he had no real interest in an actual contest this time, and has the child take control of Storkules to murder them. And gives the doucheist shrug imaginable when his OWN SON IS BEGGING HIM NOT TO MAKE HIM MURDER SOME CHILDREN. 

Scrooge naturally gets involved. Meanwhile Donald is trying to escape the lightning cage Zeus is using to make sure no one leaves... when he hears the boys cries of terror. He may hate this kind of thing.. but there’s one thing and only one thing that can make him snap back into who he used to be like it was yesterday. And that’s harming his boys. So Donald snaps into action and it’s a glory to see as Scrooge snaps back with him “Just like old times”. The two once again get a little closer to reconclisation by wrestling a golden pansexual to prevent him from brainwashdely murdering two children. God I love this show and this job. 

Huey however is more of the aim for the head sort and Louie simply uses his natural talent to talk the siren into working with him, with him as her agent. As he puts it Zeus just wants to use her.. he wants to use her too.. but to make them BOTH rich. She agrees, Louie wins, and Donald finally accepts storkules is his friend. Scrooge TRIES to use this to mend fences with Zeus.. but Zeus being a petulant dick wants another game and Scrooge simply throws a game of billiards or something like it to get this over with. 

So we get our wrapup. Dewey and Webby return, and Storkules and Donald say their goodbyes. Donald finally admits he’s his friend.. and in that one act finally admits he can’t just bury his past because parts of it are painful. And as Storkules puts it he may be done with adventure.. btu adventure’s not done with him. He’s got more of his old self in who he is now than he thought. Dewey also accidently wins and our family finds launchpad took the plane apart. There.. there’s no real ending. I can only assume Selene said knock this shit off when she found out or beakly later came in guns blazing. I don’t know. 

Final Thoughts: This episode is excellent. It has it’s fault: there’s no plot progression, and the ending is just stupid and is the only one of the series that feels like nothing was resolved. That being said.. the rest of the episode makes up for it. It’s filled with great gags as usual.. but the real meat is the character work. Dewey’s worries about his mom, and Donald’s attempt to literally leave his past behind, it’s really amazing stuff that elevates the episode past it’s flaws and into one fo the series best. Wheras revisting Other Bin reminded me it had a bad subplot that drug it down.. revisiting this one showed me just HOW near perfect it is with only a few things holding it back. Even with the dispaoitnment factor.. this one’s still excellent, with Ben, Kate and Tony all at the top of their games. Great stuff. 

Next Time on this Arc: Dewey has to face the future when the truth comes out. And Scrooge.. bitches with his dad for half the episode. Sure beats his dad sadly btu sweetly passing on to be with his wife huh?!

Next time on this blog: Amphibia time! Speaking of facing the consequences of lying to your family, Hop Pop’s FINALLY forced to face hiding the Box from Anne, and we also get an ivy episode. Super fuckin shooters. 

If you liked this review, consdier joining my patreon, link’s in the blog and next stretchgoal is a darkwing duck episode a month. Until the next rainbow it’s been a pleasure. 

#ducktales #the spear of selene #delene #della duck #dewey duck #donald duck #storkules #zeus #scrooge mcduck #huey duck #louie duck #webby vanderquack #ithaquack #reviews #della arc

[ichika27]

Mairimashita! Iruma-kun s2 ep18

Was gonna post this days ago but I decided to do twewy-related stuff first lol.

Anyways, lots of pictures below again. At least 20, I think. Talks of ships below as well.

The last time we saw them, Iruma had jumped in front of the beast preparing to shoot a blast of magic in front of Ronove. Everyone else is worried but don’t know what to do cause if they tried to help, they’d get blasted, too. It seems though that Iruma himself has a plan.

Iruma plans to use Ali-san’s ability to swallow the huge amount of magic to eat the blast of it the beast is going to release saying he thought it was possible since Ali-san is the Ring of Gluttony. Arikured is surprised by this and complains at first but agrees he could do such a thing but Iruma's strength will be needed to succeed.

Remember that spell Iruma learned before about changing the appearance of something? Iruma uses that magic spell to turn Ali-san into this... cat thing. Giant cat thing idk so it could swallow the magic. Ali-san swallows the entire beast and let it explode inside him. Once it was over, the sky clears up, too. The plan totally worked and Ali-san is full!

Does this mean Iruma could use the power that got eaten from the beasts?

Trouble is over and Iruma gets together with his friends again. His friends were all worried about him though and Kalego-sensei came up to tell him he'd been reckless again. Iruma says he hasn't forgotten about what Kalego-sensei had said before at the home visit and that he had now finally understood what sensei meant. He was so used to danger due to almost always being in one himself that he never realized how bad such situations were until everyone else he cared about got affected. He adds that he gave it everything he's got even though he wasn't sure he'd even win because he wants to protect everyone and holding onto that ideal is part of his "desire".

I’m happy this arc helped some of them grow and show the growth of those who already have. Pretty cool.

Random screenshot but I just wanna direct your attention to fluffy Kalego-sensei who is being adorable right now. I cannot take him seriously when he’s like this and even when he’s angry, this form makes it look adorable.

Back to the story.

While all the mess is happening on the surface, Kiriwo-senpai has finally been found by the Six Fingers who are there to help him escape under the orders of Baal. The other escaping inmates are also in the area but still behind bars and Kiriwo-senpai tells them that he never planned to help them escape alongside him and never said he'd do such thing in the first place.

I kinda feel bad for them but they are also bad people so, eh.

Upon donning the same coat the Six Fingers' wear, one of the prisoners had the realization that unlike all of them there who are merely "bad", Kiriwo is actually "evil".

One of the Six Fingers asked why they couldn't just let the prisoners escape, too as it'll help in causing chaos and Kiriwo-senpai answers that seeing the despair the prisoners are gonna be in when they realize they'd never be let out despite going this far will be fun to see. Plus, they're not strong enough and will be caught again anyways.

I missed seeing Kiriwo-senpai’s evil hairstyle. It’s been a while. I guess this answers the question I had back in season 1: Kiriwo-senpai chose to be evil. Sad but I should’ve seen it coming.

Back on the surface, a parade starts and on the float are the heroes who saved Walter Park. While Iruma is properly mentioned, the owner, Rossevelt also shows off his son (Ronove does call him Legend-daddy as in the English word lol). The owner thanks Iruma for saving the park and calls him a hero.

They look alike except for the mustache and hair length. Anime genetics never fail. Does Legend-daddy also sing his own bgm?

Unbeknownst to our heroes, Kiriwo-senpai is around the corner watching the parade. He's surprised to find out that not only was Iruma also at Walter Park at this time but Iruma is also the one to defeat the beast. Instead of being angry at another evil plan foiled, Kiriwo-senpai says that this must be destiny and was happy to see Iruma. He was gonna walk out into the crowd but snaps out of this happy state by a call from Baal.

Senpai really blurs the line between love and hate cause he acts similarly when it comes to Iruma. Congrats to the fans of this ship for getting this scene and also, I still don’t know the ship name for them. How do I tag this?

Back to the phone call, Baal isn't happy that the park still stands. Walter Park is created to vent out demons' evil cycle after all and he has no need for that in his goals as he prefers that the demons go way beyond the evil cycle and just become ultimately evil. Unfortunately for him, the authorities are coming and they can't really do much else so he tells Kiriwo-senpai and the rest to escape already.

After being told to escape, Kiriwo-senpai says that this isn’t the end and declares that he and Iruma will meet again as they are destined enemies.

I guess in Iruma’s harem, he’s the “enemies to lovers” love interest lol.

Iruma looks at the direction where Kiriwo-senpai was but of course, he doesn’t see anything and he’s none the wiser.

Opera gives Iruma back his backpack at the float. As Iruma looks inside for his stuff, he finds the note his grandfather gave him of things he must do on his trip with the final one on the list being "Have fun with everyone!". Iruma looks at his smiling friends and thinks that even though a lot of scary things happened today, he still did have fun with them. Aww so cute!

Iruma gets reunited with his worried grandpa who goes to the hotel to check on him. Iruma says he couldn't go home early as Ronove's dad let them stay at the hotel as thanks for saving the park. Ronove’s dad adds that they are also Sullivan's students so he's happy to give them such things. Iruma tells his grandpa that he's happy and okay and that the teachers and Opera protected them. Grandpa Sullivan decided that the three adults would be given the job of protecting Iruma from now on (and Kalego-sensei felt a chill down his spine elsewhere in the hotel lol).

These two adults are the same. They probably won’t stop talking about their kids if you’re around them. Reminds me of FMA’s Maes Hughes (thought still makes me sad).

While the teachers are discussing information about the attacks, Kalego-sensei goes to his room to find his team on the bed making fun of the stuff he said earlier much to his annoyance. The boys said wanted to stay in the teachers' room as it's better than the room they got but Kalego-sensei quickly kicks them out.

The girls also get rewards and are allowed to get any clothes they wanted which made them happy. Ronove’s dad is pretty generous, huh? Like, I know these guys deserve it for all their hard work but the guy looks so happy that he’d probably still be nice to them even without all the trouble happening.

They are all also given an all-you-can-eat buffet. Iruma eats a ton of food obviously. Clara is having fun at the chocolate fountain thing and Ronove is trying to make Agares eat. Those two got close, huh? lol I wonder if Ronove’s doing this to try and make Agares unattractive or something. It’ll be cool if they became friends though with their very contrasting personalities and all.

While everyone is having fun inside, Iruma leaves without anyone else realizing except for Ameri who decides to follow. They end up at the rooftop by themselves with Ameri trying to calm herself down as she's thinking of romantic stuff as it’s just the two of them. Iruma then reminds Ameri of the question she asked him before about his goal and tells her he finally found one: he wants have fun with everyone. He's willing to change in order to be able to protect that ideal of his. Ameri is happy to see Iruma has grown.

Ameri decided that she also wants to give it her all for her own desires and ambitions. She then tries to tell Iruma something but sadly she gets cockblocked by Clara and Azz both appearing. Ameri gives up for now and tells Iruma to just go with his friends.

Before leaving, Iruma asks Ameri a question - the same thing she was going to ask him earlier! He asks if they could hang out sometimes but just the two of them and she passes out from this lol.

Congratulations to Iruma x Ameri fans for getting a scene like this, too. I also don’t know the ship name for them. Anyways, why is it just the senpais getting a moment with Iruma? Ameri has been getting a lot of moments, too and it’s making me wonder if she’s endgame.

lol also, Ameri is worried about the other female rivals not realizing there’s another threat somewhere else.

While all that teen drama is happening, both Romiere's dad and Iruma's grandpa are being interviewed on tv. The two men then tell everyone how their kids and those kids' friends are the heroes of Walter Park. Since Iruma's name had been specifically mentioned (with everyone knowing the heroes are "Iruma and friends"), there ends up being reporters outside the hotel wanting to see Iruma the next day. Iruma, of course, doesn't like this popularity. With the thought that there may also be reporters waiting at his home, Clara offers to let Iruma stay at her house.

Oooh... will we finally get Iruma x Clara and Iruma x Azz moments as well? Hehehe

There's something new in the ED video by the way! This used to be for Kuromu but now it’s for these boys! Cute!

---

I’m guessing this is the end of this arc? I wonder what the last one will be since we only have like, what, 6 episodes more? What kind of arc will it be, I wonder cause this one had battles.

Okay, the end where the heroes are mentioned to be “Iruma and friends”, I’m happy and surprised that none of the others were bothered by this at all. No one complained about why Iruma is the only one specifically named. It didn’t cause a fight between the entire group unlike what would’ve happened if this was any other story. I get why Iruma got proper credit as he is the one to end the incident and saved everyone around from being fried but his friends did a lot of work, too and it’d have been better if they were all credited properly in the news. None of them were mad though and are happy that they won because they did their best.

Ronove calling his dad “Legend-daddy” will never not be cute and funny to me. His dad, despite being rich enough to own this entire park, isn’t an annoying, arrogant asshole and I like that. I’m happy that most characters in this show subvert my expectations and they make me like them more.

I’m sorry if I don’t tag ships in my mairuma posts but I don’t know any of the series’ ship names lol. Speaking of ships, as I mentioned before, Ameri’s been getting a lot of moments with Iruma or focus on her growing feelings for Iruma. Kiriwo-senpai only showed up a bit in this arc and got a bit for himself, too. Kuromu and Clara only had a bit when Iruma went evil cycle and I wonder if they’d get more, too. I personally ship him with Azz so I wish they’d gets some moments as well. Eiko gets hers mostly on the “Interval” segments.

So... is it possible to have a mairuma dating sim or not? Look at how many routes are available! XD

Anyways, focus next time is on Clara’s family probably with Iruma spending time there. I expect another Valac Family musical! XD

Thanks for reading!

#Mairimashita! Iruma-kun #welcome to demon school iruma-kun #sana_post

[duhragonball]

Bulma

Give me a character and I will answer:

Why I like them: Somewhere around 1998, Kurt Busiek took over as the writer for the Iron Man comic.   This was back when Iron Man wasn’t particularly popular and the last two attempts to reboot the guy had failed.   I read an interview in Wizard Magazine where Kurt promoted his upcoming run, and he explained the character this way: Tony Stark is a superhero, an inventor, a ladies’ man, and a billionaire.    You could have a blast writing a comic book about any one of those four things, but he’s all four.    I may have gotten those four items wrong, partly because it’s been 22 years, and partly because it was more famous when Robert Downey Junior echoed that pitch in 2012.    Take away the armor, and what is he?   A billionaire genius philanthropist.   

My point is that this is the appeal to Bulma as well.    When we first meet her, she’s an adventurer, but then we find out she invented the device that lets her locate the Dragon Balls.  And her mission is a romantic quest, so she’s like the heroine in a romance story.    Then we meet her parents, and it turns out she’s a wealthy heiress.    Well, I’m assuming Dr. Brief doesn’t plan on leaving his fortune to all of his pets, but you get the idea.  

There’s a lot of versatility to the character.   Some arcs barely make use of her, but others take full advantage.    You can plop her in almost any scenario and it works.    You want to write her at a fancy charity dinner?   She’d fit right in.   You want her teaching shop class in your high school AU?   No problem at all.   You want her to seduce a bad guy?     You want her to shoot a bad guy?    You want her to be the bad guy?   It all works.  

The main thing people dislike about Bulma is the way she treated Yamcha when they were together, and she’s kind of a jerk a lot of the time.    Fair point, but I think this adds to the character.   If she were sweet as could be and a rich, attractive polymath, she’d be downright insufferable.    Also, her attitude plays off of the compassion she shows through the series.   I can’t explain her behavior around Yamcha, but she did offer free room and board to the entire population of Namek, so I feel like that needs to be taken into consideration.

Why I don’t: In the first... hundred or so episodes of DBZ, Bulma doesn’t get a lot of chances to shine, despite all the screentime they gave her.   Early into my DBZ-watching experience, I found her to be something like a shriller version of TMNT’s April O’Neil, a sidekick whose job was to look cute and get into danger so the good guys could save her.   She really doesn’t get back into her groove until she returns to Earth, and once I saw those episodes, and her time in the original Dragon Ball, the character began to make a lot more sense.   Really, the Bulma in DBZ #1 through 108 was probably intended to demonstrate how out-of-hand the situation was.   She fixed the scouter and then it exploded.   She fixed Nappa’s spaceship and it exploded.   She fixed Kami’s spaceship and then Namek exploded.    She just couldn’t keep up with the crisis. 

Favorite episode (scene if movie):

Not exactly any one episode, but one of my favorite bits in the Red Ribbon Army Sagas is that the RRA has their own Dragon Radar, but it’s not portable, or anywhere near as precise as the one Bulma invented.    It’s Goku’s biggest advantage during that conflict, and when it breaks, there’s literally no one else who can fix it.    Those magic babies from Arale could make a new one, but I’m pretty sure they only did that by copying the design or something.   And the RRA assumes that Goku must have an entire team of scientists providing him with logistical support, and that Master Roshi must be their leader, since he’s so old.  

Also, near the end of the arc, Bulma needs to call Yamcha on the phone, but Roshi doesn’t have one, and then Turtle suggests that Bulma should just build one from scratch, since she had just finished building a robot drone a few episodes earlier.    And she’s like “Oh, yeah, I forgot I knew how to do that.”

Favorite season/movie: The Androids/Cell arc is a big deal because it has two Bulmas, and her son is in it too.   

And this is what I mean when I talk about versatility.    That Super Dragon Ball Heroes series has two Gokus and two Vegetas, and I have no idea why, because they’re exactly the same, except one pair does SSJ4 and the other does Super Saiyan Blue.   Bulma’s got more layers, so in a story like this, you can have 30-something Bulma care for an infant son and tackle logistical problems while she figures out her relationship with Vegeta, while the 50-something Bulma in the future can be this strong-yet-gentle post-apocalyptic survivalist, who hopes for a better tomorrow as she longs for her fallen friends.  

Favorite line: I’m gonna stray from the canon for a minute, because I’m having trouble coming up with something, but in DBZ Abridged, when she’s arguing with Vegeta during his training session, they just start shouting “Fuck you!” at each other.    Then she stops and says: “My room.    Ten minutes.” 

And holy shit, the delivery on that line was incredible. I knew they’d try to do something to set up their relationship, but there’s no footage to do that with, so they did it all with one line and some killer VA work.

Favorite outfit: This is a big, big wardrobe to choose from, but I’m partial to the one she wore in the Imperfect Cell Saga.

I can’t really explain the appeal, but I like this hairstyle and the clothing looks like authentic stuff you could actually buy at a store, which just makes it feel more real, even though it’s not any more detailed than her other outfits.    I’m not sure that makes any sense.    The trucker hat looks cute on her, let’s leave it there.

OTP: You know, there’s a lot of chemistry between Bulma and Yajirobe, and even though it’s kind of a rarepair, I can’t help but-- Okay, it’s her and Vegeta.   I’ll stop messing around.   

Brotp: Definitely her and Goku.  I’m imagining the set up to the DBS Broly movie going like this.

“Hey, I’m gonna invite Goku along on our trip.    That way you can fight him when you get bored.”

“Why do you keep asking him to tag along I can’t stand him.” 

“Yeah, but I like him and I paid for the resort, so I guess you gotta deal with it.” 

“...”  

Then he shows up and she sends him on some ridiculous mission to search the ocean floor for sunken treasure or something.   

Head Canon: Future Bulma does tech support in Toki Toki/Conton City, because Xenoverse is canon and the Goku Black Saga can just bugger right off because it never happened.   

She shows up from time to time to check on all the Capsule Corp tech in the city, and she drops by just to say hi to her boy, and also she has coffee with my Mary Sue OC, because Future Bulma appreciates how tough and cool my writing is.

Unpopular opinion: The Vegebul ship probably gets way too much attention.  Not that it’s a bad ship or that it doesn’t deserve the attention, but it feels like a buffet where all anyone gets is ranch dressing.    They just ignore the rest of the spread and fill an entire bowl with ranch and head back to the table to drink it.   Then they come right back and line up for another helping.  

I’m not knocking it.   I have a Vegebul calendar in my kitchen.   But it reminds me of how the “comics fandom” in the late 90′s was really just an X-Men fandom that acknowledged that other comic books hypothetically existed.

They’re gonna come after me now, aren’t they?

A wish: A lifetime supply of strawberries does sound kind of nice...

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen: I hope we’re done with Bulma’s Resurrection F outfit for good.   The cowboy boots, no, we’re done with that. 

5 words to best describe them: Five would never be enough.

My nickname for them: Don’t have one.   Vegeta calls her “woman”, but I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t go over well if I started doing that.

#ask duhragonball #dragon ball #bulma #2d3dlover

[belliesandburps]

Followup with MGS4 Peace Walker and 5?

History has a funny way of repeating itself. :P

This one's actually gonna be long, so I'll cap it here to spare those uninterested in non-kink posts the burden of having to scroll past this fanboy rant. 'XD

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

3. It's Okay

Soooooo...not a controversial opinion to say that I don't think MGS4 is GREAT. I adored it when it first game out, and I still enjoy replaying it from time to time. But good lord, so many of the interviews shed light on a LOT of this games problems.

Some backstory is required. Hideo Kojima was done with MGS by this point. He planned to move on and leave the series to the younger generation. But then, there was a lot of internal conflict and struggle to determine what MGS4 should be after Fukushima quit (AND was rumored to have been murdered by the Yakuza...how that rumor started...and became a SERIOUS rumor that millions believe, I do not know...). So Kojima came back, course corrected, and the end result was kind of a giant mess.

I'm not talking story because, there's just way too much to unpack. But as a game, MGS4 can't decide what sort of video game it wants to be. It had a brilliant idea that had never been done before with its Battlefield Stealth, which were the best parts of the game. And then they get dropped two acts in, and what gets replaced in their stead is not nearly as fun.

The game had substantially less boss fights than its predecessor, and a lot of them were mechanically simplistic or just didn't let you get creative with how you fought them. And we later learned there were a lot more bosses planned, more gameplay sequences planned, and an entire other PMC group that got canned in favor of the Scarabs so Shadow Moses could be guarded by machines instead.

There's a lot about MGS4 that I love. I think the first two acts are amazing, ESPECIALLY Act 2. I think the mechanics are great. REX vs RAY is criminally fun. The sheer buffet of insane weapons gives the game a good amount of replay value. And the graphics still hold up to this day!

But what I finally realized is that the game juggles way too many ideas and doesn't give any idea the time they deserve to flourish. Battlefield Stealth could've CARRIED MGS4. But it gets dumped before we can get our moneys worth. A disguise sequence could've been really creative, having to juggle different identities with OctoMask every time one identity is burned. But it's only used once and wasted because it's only used for a terrible tailing mission that doesn't let you actually explore the European City. And too many of the action set pieces are kind of bland except the bosses and piloting Metal Gear.

MGS4 should've been MGS4. Not MGS's "Best Hits."

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

1. LOVED it!

I know this is unpopular to say, but I'll say it. Peace Walker is one of the best Metal Gear games ever made. I adored almost everything about it. The gameplay improves on MGS4 in most ways because it doesn't juggle a billion ideas all at once. It's MGS4 stripped down to stealth action from start to finish, and that's all I wanted. The level design is great. The insane volume of guns changes the entire feel of combat in later post-campaign gameplay. The mission select options mean you can jump into all the parts of the game you enjoy the most. There's TONS of bonus missions that are really inventive and fun to replay. And the story is one of the best in the series. It's straight forward, very tight, characterized well, and is the best iteration of Big Boss to date.

Peace Walker's also the FUNNIEST MGS game by Kojima as well. There's so much more personality and levity to everything, to the point where Big Boss often feels like an MCU character. That might sound bad, but it's really not. That corniness fits MGS PERFECTLY, and I'd argue is tonally spot on for this series. MGS doesn't need to be dark, gory or explicit. It's a silly series that's about giant robots, corny bad ass super agents with an anti-nuke message.

The only downsides to Peace Walker are the QTE's and the boss fights. This was a feature that only ever appeared in this game and for good reason...it was fucking terrible. So basically, you had cutscenes that forced you to do various QTE's or else get dinged on your ratings at the end, even if you played perfectly. Fairly minimal, but then, you get to Strangelove's torture. And this is the single most rage-inducing part of any MGS game ever made. It's an insanely physically painful button mashing sequence that will leave your fingers raw and your PS3 triangle buttons jamming. And the ONLY way you can replay one of the best missions in the game (the prison escape where you have no items) is by redoing that sequence over and over. And the boss fights? While inventive, they're all just grindy bullet sponges with no personality, no stealth tactics, and no room for creativity the way you can get creative with every other MGS game's bosses. This was the biggest disappointment for me because the stealth and combat mechanics of PW are great and would've been SO good against human enemies like what Portable Ops had. Instead, every boss is a mini-Metal Gear all voiced by the VOCALOID AI from the mid 2000's, and each one takes forever to destroy. It sucks because PW had a TON of bosses, but only a few of them are any fun, and that's only if you have weapons that are strong enough that they don't take ages to destroy.

But asides from the bosses, the REST of the game is so damn good that I don't even care because that's just one element to a much larger, grander game. Which is even more impressive when you consider PW was originally on the PSP before the PS3 port. And this game has more content and replay value to it than most games I've played since.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

1. LOVED it!

Hooooooookay...so, I've rambled about my storybook romance with MGSV for YEARS now. (Just ask @twistedtummies2, he's been subjected to my fanboying of this game more than anyone in existence XD) But there's a reason I regard this game as one of my all time favorites and the best MGS game to date.

It's REALLY freakin' fun.

Kojima had been re-energized by the time he got to MGSV. He'd been working on the game around the time he finished Peace Walker in 2010. He KNEW it was his final MGS game and wanted to do something completely different...

...He wanted to make a game where the central focus was on...waaaaait for it...the gameplay...

MGSV was designed to be, what he described, as a toybox. You have these missions that all take place in structurally unique outposts like any level in MGS. And the missions are designed with the structure needed so that they all feel different, but all remain so open ended that you can play them countless different ways.

MGSV's game model is everything GTA SHOULD'VE been. It fully embraces the open world freedom and incorporates that into the missions flawlessly. And it plays in such a way that stealth and combat both feel like they were the primary point. In MGS, combat is usually a last resort. But with MGSV, you can fly into an outpost blasting away on your helicopters mini-gun, shoot up the bad guys, rescue your target, throw them back into the chopper and fly away while "The Final Countdown" blares on your choppers loud speakers.

Every method of gameplay is valid and the controls, the enemy AI responsiveness, it's all, bar none, the best I've experienced in ANY video game. Sneaking around feels tight and tense and combat makes you feel like Jack Bauer on adrenaline. (I mean, he IS the voice of Venom Snake)

And I really like the story for the most part too. Its weaknesses are really glaring. Namely, the "Fun" of MGS is completely devoid in the story (which is really odd since it's FRONT AND CENTER in-game). Venom Snake only has maybe six minutes of dialogue in the entirety of this 30+ hour long game. And the way Skull Face gets completely undercut right at the home stretch is something I have NOT stopped bitching about for almost six years, and my friends can personally attest to that.

That and the ending feels too abrupt.

We know that Kojima got fired by Konami's VP and said VP scorched the entire production company after that and made a series of dickheaded decisions that pissed off a LOT of fans, burning much of the good will Konami IP fans had towards the company. But that had nothing to do with MGSV's abruptness. That was the plan from the start because only Kojima would think to end the entire series on a plot twist like that.

And I think the issue isn't the twist at all. In fact, I LOVE the twist. The issue is that the game should've continued beyond it so Venom Snake could cope with the truth and realize how badly he'd been screwed. I think even people who hated the twist could've been won over if there was a little more to the games epilogue than Episode 46.

Also, the games boss fights were a tad underwhelming. Not the fights themselves, I LOVED all five of the games bosses.

Oh? There were twelve?

No. I meant what I said. Because so many of the games bosses are rematches against the same bosses. All MGSV has is the Skulls, Quiet, Eli, The Man on Fire, and Metal Gear. They're great bosses that do everything the best MGS bosses always did; give you tons of options, incorporate combat AND stealth, have varied attacks AND even have multiple methods to sneak around the boss and avoid the fight completely. But for a game as long as MGS, you need more variety. And frankly, the bosses NEED more personality. Skull Face should've had more XOF assassins acting as the bosses in the game along with the ones we have. Elite assassins like Quiet, with their own powers and specialized weaponry so the fights feel completely different from the ones we have. And oh yeah, SKULL FACE HIMSELF SHOULD'VE HAD A GOD-FUCKING-DAMN BOSS FIGHT!!!!

Buuuuuuut those issues don't even matter if for all the games issues, I still replay it frequently when it's almost six years old.

So yeah! There's the massive rant you totally didn't ask for! :D

#ask belliesandburps #mgs4 #mgsv #peace walker #metal gear #metal gear solid #seriously #i'm very very VERY bitter about how Kojima did Skull Face dirty #here's this really great villain with a super complex backstory and motivation #whadduya wanna do with him kojima-san? #I'VE GOT IT!!!!!! #we'll do...absolutely nothing! #he'll show up in five missions out of a thirty nine mission long game #he'll talk at venom snake a few times and do some cool things #then right around the time we're supposed to fight him? #a random twelve year old will hijack metal gear through a PSYCHIC twelve year old and crush Skull Face before we can do anything cool! :D #hold your applause children! :D #................we weren't clapping kojima-san........... #also sins of the father? #heaven's divide? #donna burke is amazing #seriously she is an in-freakin'-CREDIBLE singer #sorry cynthia hall #i got love #but... #whoooooa-HHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!!

[leverage-ot3]

notable moments from The First David Job

leverage 1.12

sophie organized the notecards for the intervention

- - - - -

Sophie: Drunk again?

Nate: Are we still unclear? I'm a functioning alcoholic, you know? And the trick is not to get hung up on the "alcoholic." But celebrate the "functioning" part of the sentence.

- - - - -

Nate: Yeah, I- I know all this.

Hardison: No, no, no. See, while you are well-versed in dead-guy art, I myself am not. My entire criminal career is based on technology built after 1981. So I am riveted. Quite so. Please, do go on.

- - - - -

Hardison: Man, am I glad I don't have to break in there. That is one sick security system.

Parker: What, with our tools? Give me three days of prep, it'd be like taking diamonds from the French national bank. That's like taking candy from a baby.

Hardison: I got it.

Parker: A very easy thing to do.

Hardison: Got...it

I love her

- - - - -

Parker: Oh, look, little buddy. (picks up fake statue) That's your new home!

Hardison: Can you please not play with the little naked man? Please.

Parker: I'm not. (sets the statue down)

- - - - -

Eliot: You guys--you know each other?

Ian: Of course. Maggie is Nate’s ex-wife.

Eliot (nervously): Oh.

eliot being completely RATTLED lmfao

- - - - -

Parker: Which conversation do you want to listen to?

Hardison: That's what stereo was invented for.

- - - - -

Hardison: Now, Nate, is Maggie a very good Art Inspector?

Nate: Yeah, she's the best.

Parker: No, no, no, we can't let your ex-wife anywhere near our little naked man!

parker: don’t talk to me or my naked son ever again

- - - - -

Hardison: No, no. Nate, we haven't done any prep. We don't have our tools.

Parker: You want me to break into a secure storage facility with whatever I can scrounge up at the buffet table?

Nate: Pretty much, yeah.

Parker: Cool. I think Sophie left some dresses in here. (turns to look through things)

Hardison: I'll go, too. I, uh, I got a white shirt. I can go wait staff.

(Parker takes off her shirt and Hardison looks the other way, turning the fake statue away from her as well)

hardison is a bashful lil respectful boy and we stan him for it

- - - - -

parker walking in in that amazing dress and everyone looking? good, it’s what she deserves (I’m gay)

- - - - -

Parker: Door's got a silent alarm. (to Sophie) You should hide. (to Hardison) We should pretend to make out.

Hardison: Make what?

(Parker grabs Hardison and they begin to kiss and she pushes the door open a little)

[Founder’s Reception]

(Nate and Eliot turn to look at the building as the sounds of making out come over the comms)

[Museum]

(Sophie goes around a corner out of sight)

Hardison: Let's talk about-- A little bit--

(Parker and Hardison continue to make out. Two guards approach and seem embarrassed. One clears his throat)

Guard: You, uh, bumped the door there. Sets the alarm off.

Hardison: You know what?

Parker: Oh.

Hardison: We, you know how it is.

Parker: Sorry.

(guards walk away and Sophie rejoins them)

Parker: Makeup. (takes makeup from Sophie) Come on. (goes through door)

Hardison: Can we talk about the pretending? That was nice.

(Sophie pushes him after Parker and returns to the party)

poor hardison’s heart must be beating wildly

- - - - -

Eliot: Which one of you did she kiss?

(Sophie sighs)

IMAGINE IF IT HAD GONE THE OTHER WAY THO

- - - - -

parker’s laser grid dodging skills are legendary + her delight when she stands up to see the first david !!!

also we stan a QUEEN who broke into a vault with only a glass of ice, a roll of aluminum foil, gum, and eyeshadow (and a fake makeout sesh)

- - - - -

Hardison: You did not just think about this on the way in from the van.

Parker: Some people do crosswords

- - - - -

Maggie: I-I just, I’m just trying to tell you that I still care.

Nate: No, I-I was –

Maggie: Care what happens to you, I mean. I've never stopped caring about you, Nate

maggie is such a genuinely good person and we love her for it

- - - - -

Parker: Ready?

(Hardison uses his phone to access remote system)

Parker: Come on, come on.

[Parking Lot]

(alarms begin to blare an all the cars)

[Security Control Room]

Guard 1: Hey, the vibration alarm just went off in the restoration room.

Guard 2: Wait. (points at monitor) Look. The car alarms all went off in the parking lot.

Guard 1: Little earthquakes.

Guard 2: Just another tremor.

that’s so smart tho???

- - - - -

Parker tosses the real David to Hardison who catches it)

Hardison: Wha-you-- Don't throw the David.

Parker: You caught it, didn't you?

Hardison: You're crazy

I would have had a HEART ATTACK

- - - - -

Maggie: Adam!

Eliot (turns): Uh, yeah?

(Eliot stops as Nate continues away)

Maggie: Let me give you my number.

Eliot: Great.

[Leverage HQ]

Eliot: I'm sorry your wife gave me her phone number.

Nate: Don't want to talk about it.

Eliot: I-It was only to coordinate where we were gonna go anyway.

Nate: Not talking about it.

hardison is enjoying it so much in the background dnjsjajsjsnnsnn

- - - - -

(Parker puts the statue on the table between them)

Parker: We just stole an $8 million statue on, like, our day off! (she shakes their shoulders happily)

SHES BABY

- - - - -

Pilot: Uh, work? W-what are you talking about?

Hardison: Spot inspection. FAA. Now, look, I want to see this plane's TCAS, VRSM, and 8.1 FM spacing in operation to make sure it's fully functional and in compliance with the new FAA regulations.

Pilot: New regulations?

(Hardison takes out a pen and writes on a clipboard)

Hardison: Pilot unaware of latest regulations.

Pilot: Oh, the new regulations. Of course. Please, come this way. I'll take you right up.

Hardison: Oh, no, no. It's cool, it's cool. I don't need to go up. Just taxi me around the building.

Pilot: Taxi? I thought you need to get up in the air.

Hardison (writes on clipboard): Uncomfortable with black authority figures.

Pilot: Sir, please don't write that.

Hardison: Oh, I will write a letter to your mama if I feel like it.

Pilot: This way, please. It's in order. I-I promise. This way. It's okay. (to copilot) FAA, he's a hard-ass.

(copilot tries to get bags)

Pilot: Screw the bags. Let's go!

this was really funny but also SUCH A GOOD WAY to con people

- - - - -

quinn’s hair did nothing for him in this episode. i said what i said.

- - - - -

(Sophie and Nate get into his car and leave while Quinn continues to take pictures from the open door of the hanger. Eliot walks up behind him)

Eliot: I'm gonna count to three.

(Quinn turns and hits Eliot hard, knocking him across the floor)

Eliot: Nate, we're blown. W—

Nate: Eliot, what’s--

(several feet away, Eliot’s earpiece is lying on the floor. Eliot tries to scramble away, but Quinn kicks him in the ribs, throwing him back, and kicks him several times more)

Quinn: That rib's broken.

(Eliot manages to get to his feet)

Quinn: He said you'd be tougher than this.

quinn: *is a really good fighter*

eliot: *surprised pikachu face*

ALSO the reason eliot was beat up so bad in the beginning was because he kept on trying to get back to his comm every chance he got INSTEAD of truly fighting back. his first priority was warning his team over his own personal safety and ugh we stan a man who cares about his family

- - - - -

,,, imagine you’re driving on a highway and see a chick jump off a bridge onto an armored car, pick its lock and then BREAK INTO said armored car ,,, wyd

- - - - -

poor hardison was ready to relax ,,, he got a soda and made himself some popcorn too

- - - - -

(Quinn and Eliot both stand hunched over, breathing hard)

Quinn: Why won't you go down?

(Eliot laughs, blood falling from his mouth to the floor. Quinn comes at him again, but Eliot catches him and knees him in the chest several times before pushing him away. Quinn falls to his hands and knees, gasping for air)

Eliot: Now that rib's broken.

(Eliot hits Quinn in the face hard, sending him to the floor. Holding his ribs, Eliot walks to the earpiece and puts it in)

payback is sweet

- - - - -

Sterling: Mr. Spencer?

(Quinn is still unconscious as Eliot walks out the hanger doors, breathing hard, limping and holding his ribs)

Eliot: Hey, Sterling. I got some dental work with your name on it. What do you say me and you hook up so I can give it to you?

- - - - -

Sophie: Sterling knows us. He knows how we think.

Nate: So we think like somebody else

THEY THINK LIKE THEIR KIDS

- - - - -

Nate: With a couple broken ribs and a concussion, I don't think Eliot can take out six guys.

(Eliot looks like he’d give it a try)

Nate: You know, but then I thought, "what would Hardison do?"

(Hardison looks at Nate in surprise)

(Eliot pulls out his phone and accesses the computer system, sending a high pitched whine into the comm. devices of the guards. They all bend over in pain. Eliot punches the one closest to him. Nate grabs Geary and slams his head down on the table. Hardison hits another guard in the face with his tied hands)

THAT MEANS ELIOT WAS ALSO THINKING LIKE HARDISON IF HE KNEW WHAT TO DO WITH THE PHONE AND WAS READY FOR IT

also YEET hardison is a badass but wbk

- - - - -

(Parker runs for Sophie. Sterling and his men run for Sophie and Parker. Parker reaches Sophie first and the dive from the roof, Sophie screaming and Parker laughing all the way down)

parker is the only character I’ve ever seen that can scream “yeehaw” and “yahoooooo” without it sounding ridiculous

- - - - -

(Eliot walks into the lobby, holding his ribs. He turns to yell over his shoulder)

Eliot: Hardison!

(Eliot follows Nate toward the door)

Hardison (breathing hard): Wait, Eliot. Eliot, come on.

(Eliot goes back inside)

Eliot: You've got to be kidding me, man.

(Eliot goes to help Hardison carry the painting out)

Hardison: Bring it out, come on.

Eliot: This is just weird.

Hardison: I painted this

okay so we all know that hardison actually hit a lot of cash in the painting but also, eliot actually goes back to help instead of just rolling his eyes and leaving hardison behind. eliot can get annoyed with him but he’d never leave him behind. not even on day one when hardison fell in the exploding building in the nigerian job. eliot was there for him then and he will be there for him for the rest of their lives.

ALSO I really hope eliot got his ribs checked out sometime soon after

- - - - -

Sterling: You're fired. Dust the whole place for fingerprints, okay? I want a forensic computer spec—

(the monitors come to life, showing Hardison’s face)

Hardison: Hey, Sterling. Get out of my house.

(display changes to a 30 second clock that begins to count down)

Sterling: Run. Run!

(all of the men run from the office, coming out onto the street)

Geary: Maybe he was bluffing.

(the entire floor of the building explodes, shooting fire)

Sterling: That's the funny thing about con men. They don't bluff.

- - - - -

the third “scattering scene” of the series

#leverage #leverage 1.12 #leverage 1x12 #the first david job #leverage season 1 #season 1 #notable moments #mine

[reluming]

dairy heir! nod! mr. march!

thanks natalie! :)

The Dairy Heir: Invent a ridiculous d20 ship and argue why it should be taken seriously.

misty moore/arthur aguefort... honestly, i have no reason other than i just love wild old people. they both seem p horny and into fucking a lot of different beings/creatures! they WILL throw amazing orgy parties together and you cannot stop them. i think they will enjoy telling each other stories from all the many years that they’ve lived. they will have dramatic arguments and fall out with each other constantly but then they’ll just get back together again and make up passionately. also, in a way, misty moore kind of IS a phoenix, you know??

Nod: What was the moment that d20 hooked you?

tiny heist was the first d20 thing i watched, bc of the mcelroys, and the moment episode 2 started and they showed the battle set i fell in love. that was what appealed to me most about d20 at first, just the AMAZING battle sets. the tiny heist battle sets are just so stellar bc of all the... tiny things... they really capture the wonder and whimsy of the setting so well! TINY THINGS!

but i think the thing that really cemented my love for d20, including the core cast, is i think just... the whole of that tiefling greasers ep in fantasy high... i don’t know WHAT it was about that ep but just like. everything brennan made those tiefling greasers say and do was so incredibly hysterical to me. fig confusing everyone with her winking bardic inspirations! that moment when fabian kills johnny spells at the end is fucking CINEMATIC. and then we get the delightful cubbys!!

Mr. March: Rank the Dimension 20 seasons based on a silly metric of your choosing.

hmm here you go, d20 seasons based on how cool a restaurant themed around that season would be, from least to most:

1. escape from the bloodkeep - eftb, while a very fun side quest, is probably the least appetising season.

2. fantasy high - yes i would love to go to basrar’s in real life but otherwise i don’t think there’s that much material to draw on for a themed restaurant! MAYBE the seacaster manor could work, then it’s almost like a PIRATE SHIP MAID CAFÉ. unlike in a typical maid café, the wait staff are just like, older women who are mostly sweet but occasionally terrifying serving you kippers and cookies. and i could totally dig that, but there just isn’t a good solid theme for a restaurant here.

3. tiny heist - the decor would be SO cute and wonderful i am just thinking about all the tiny heist battle sets... eating dishes of food made to look like giant crumbs! there could be a stage for small live performances on the weekends inspired by ti and bean’s shows or boomer’s theatric endeavours!

4. the unsleeping city - i think this would be like a VERY normal-looking restaurant when you first go in, like it couldn’t GET more normal and unassuming, but the food is fusion food from loads of different cuisines all around the world and it’s all very delicious. then, once you finish your meal, you’re ushed into a bar in the back area, and suddenly it all transforms into somewhere nod-like, with funhouse mirrors on the walls and mist on the ground and dim trippy purple lighting and a huge crescent moon hanging from the ceiling that lucky guests get to sit on, and someone is playing the piano while the wait staff are all dressed as bizarre characters, singing and occasionally making absolutely nonsensical statements as they serve you drinks (including non-alcoholic ones, ofc!) named after unsleeping city characters and episodes.

5. a crown of candy - yes i did this entire ranking bc of acoc. I WANT AN ACOC-THEMED RESTAURANT SO BAD!!! it would be a very fancy buffet style restaurant with everything laid out according to the map of calorum. lil ships displaying fine cheeses in a sea of ice and yoghurt tubs! of course, there are salami-wrapped cheeses - the “meat” ambushers from ep 2. there’s a veggie station where you get to grill your own keradin deeproot or belizabeth brassica. a large bread selection to choose from so you can TOAST THAT BREAD, whether it’s ciabatta or grissini. the dessert section has an array of smiley yet sinister looking cakes with googly eyes, and of course a very beautiful pick n mix area featuring all your fave rocks characters. the freezer where you get your lollies from is made to look like the ice cream temple. the person who torches the creme brulees on demand is dressed as cinnamon the dragon. there’s a fridge with lil glass bottles of milk and you can make your own cute mini outfits to dress the glass bottles up in and take them home afterwards as a souvenir!

#tagsharkodactylnotthisblog #ask #sharkodactyl #dimension 20

[heightkeener]

Discover the Famous Places of India

INCREDIBLE INDIA

We arrive at the territory of 1,000 languages along with 1,000 gods. In the Intercontinental, the ladies in my personal collection are well versed with marigolds and branded with all a standard red dot onto our foreheads. This lodge is an oasis of luxurious at a polluted metropolis of 14 million folks. Two times have been spent traveling Delhi. The sites comprise Gandhi's Tomb and lots of UNESCO World Heritage Web Sites. Wherever else have historic customs combined together using the present in the scale therefore clear as in Delhi. Extra fat sacred Brahma bulls block site visitors creating flaws. Within this land, cows guideline. Canines, monkeys, and kiddies cross their risk.

I really like spiced foodstuff and commence each evening with a3 alarm-curry breakfast. We mind through trainer for Rajasthan, the gorgeous desert country by which cattle are substituted with camels. The atmosphere will be sweeter and that which more vivid. Here's really a microcosm of everything India is. Many folks are refined having a stunt in the event soul and light at the sight of thieves. We always tide by way of our chimney to people that struggle with fascination and appear to mention "why should you ever come ?" Like being a lover of this 3rd universe, this spot was around my own fantasy record for ages. I vividly enter that area of traveling providing you with me astonishment.

We have begun to wait for the yearly Camel honest at Pushkar that's occurred for one million decades past Whilst the entire world's most significant, it's in its summit attracted 50,000 camels by 200,000 dealers. We all unpack at our camp identified as unique Adventures. Our spartan tents didn't en suite baths but bathroom paper has been in a top. That has been a 2-4 hour shield out who stingily rationed his or her quota. From the summer, nighttime is freezing and afternoons sweltering. I confided into some guests in your American Embassy I felt as though that I had been at an episode of"Survivor." She whined reassuring me it had been worth every penny. So on my jolt turns out into amazement since I input fairgrounds.

Place on kilometers of sand slopes using festooned camels plus also a flood of pilgrims, the spectacle appears utterly forgettable. It's such as a Condition Fair On-steroids. That clearly was really a flurry of horse, bullock and camel races, competitions such as milking, creature adorning, turban linking, tattooing in addition to snake-charmers, completely free carnival rides, mystics, astrologers and magnificent booths of handicrafts at reasonable rates. The earth reverberates using pursuits. Countless Rajasthani lady has came dressed up in their very best apparel in close sweet colors. I see illuminated monkeys, painted cows, and cobra's dancing. No words could adequately clarify this helter-skelter overwhelms my 5 perceptions. The others could possess Europe having its own cathedrals and museums. As an example personally, this really exotic vulnerability and ethnic immersion would be your best traveling!

Wrapped in the dust, and people come back. Every single night there's entertainment underneath the celebrities together with musicians, folk dancers, puppet present or flame fighters. No alcoholic beverages are authorized and all foods are vegetarian buffets. An Ayurveda middle delivers us treatment options to cleansing toxins. We reduce these induced throwing up, enemas, nasal drainage along with blood-letting.

We see the sacred town of Pushkar having its own sacred lake made by Lord Brahma. Pilgrims appear from afar to wash at the ghats and snore round-the-clock. We know about religions: Zorastrism,'' Sikhism, the mysterious Sufi's, Jainists who won't eliminate a mosquito, Hinduism that asserts no total accuracy and also the caste system. We see temples in the lake; a few really are"blessed" by priests. Later on, a highlight for me personally was 1 hour Camel Cart Safari supporting the scenes of this honest. Kiddies line our path yelling to us"Hello, 1 pencil remember to!" We view a slaughtered and half of nude folks washing daily. Straight back within the reasons we see an orphanage and scatter separately for lost from the frenzied revelry. We trip enormous spitting camels offering us an increased view of this all. I buy twelve garnet silver and necklaces ankle bracelets. Teen boys tactic Terry to picture him. He has 6'5'". One as him"Sir, what would you consume?"

Our collection proved to be all wonderful!

You will find infinite food however we ought to pass enticements to protect against"Delhi stomach." I detect that the cacophony of insanity lovely. Pushkar is quite an event affair for those sailors and also we have been an only captioning company. I am really so thankful to undergo this a while and energy to move with all our hectic trip.

We arrive at the famous"Pink City" of Jaipur, today a more profound maroon from contamination. Additionally vacationing its own palaces, architectural and fort marvels, we know of those amazing Amber rulers and maharajahs of this Moghul empire. Heritage will come alive and now also I locate myself interested because I cared for. And here's really a shopper's heaven for silk sarees, stone, marble, and jewelry crafts. I saw a creature refuge known as"Assist ." The most peculiar examples of species have been treated by volunteer veterinarians. Exotic 5 stray canines have been sterilized each day and that I see an operation. (Watch www.HIS-INDIA.com ) you are able to easily email them a test to provide help.

Only assist in Enduring' a puppy spaying Building a contribution Volunteer vets speak to Suzy

Onto observe the expansive Fatehpur Sikri, "Ghost Town of Akbar" which has been left as a result of lack of plain water. We reach Agra, a busted town of 2.5 million. Hawkers disturb us. Chained conveys dancing for rupees on the road. Starving kids ensue. We're grateful to marvel in the deluxe Sheraton the following along with its own western cuisine and also cheap massages at $20. It had been similar to a galaxy shift from your Caribbean.

Soon after seeing an eyeful of miracles on the way in which, we've spared the very best for final in the planet's biggest tribute to really like. Goose-bumps climb since I input the royal gate into the Taj Mahal. Morning sun warms it as just a perfect pearl...22 years to construct with 200,000 adult men with two million bits of wrought semi-precious stone. After having a lecture about which this ideal symmetry is made to get Queen Mumtaz, we distribute to picture exactly what looks like quite a mirage. It's poetry in design so that as glorious as is envisioned.

Straight back in Delhi, most of us like a completely free afternoon of leisure to research once we all choose! Most proceed shopping since deals will be low but just how lots of Pashmina shawls do you want? For the final day, we now enjoy a series known as"Dances of India" followed closely by means of a farewell banquet of the Last Day (Indian) Supper.

That I remise still another travel well done with great manuals, motorists, accommodations and assistance. I remember my favored time that happened in the reason when I employed two"human anatomy manuals" to aid me throughout the audiences, Jamal and also Ranchi. Both of these 11-year-old boys ensured me enjoy barnacles along with also their glistening grinning faces that will probably forever stay etched in my own memory of India. This excursion has revived my fascination with the earth reminding me that my love of traveling proliferates itself. The longer I visit, the longer I desperately wish to watch.

This nation will be for the traveler. I'm exceptionally impressed with all the fortitude and persistence of my bunch of sixty persons in a property of infrastructure that is jagged. For a while, it had been their very first trip to this next world nevertheless all of them lived to enjoy experts. To see discomfort hand would be your most economical approach to love dwelling. We watched matters both dreadful and joyous. The phrase"intriguing" but would amount up the whole holiday season. I have to reunite back again.

MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACE ON EARTH - INDIA

If you're planning about one's next holiday, then think of India. Probably one among the absolute most vibrant states on the ground, India has a lot of offers you will simply not need to return straight back! The broad array of civilizations, customs, heritage and also the all-natural splendor of this position are guaranteed to create your trip most notable! The glorious Mogul monuments, the most enchanting splendor of its own temples along with temples of this splendor and attractiveness of this Rajput predominate really are a couple of explanations for why tens and thousands of people arrived year after year. A property of ethnic diversity,'' India is still amongst the biggest democratic nations on the planet. From luxurious locales to calm countryside, this remarkable vacation destination is packed with surprises! From hiking at the hardest Himalayan peaks, to ride from the huge desert stretches and out of wild-life Safari in a National Park into some relaxing shore family vacation at Goa, there's therefore far to adventure! During the time you're here usually do not miss sites including Agra -- home for the globally renowned Peninsula, the Taj Mahal, Rajasthan - the property of architectural marvels and also Goa - a sexy place for anyone that really like sunlight'n' Sand. One other place which may catch your spirit would be Kerala. Called the god's own country', the stunning shores here offer you a refreshing escape. Due to many nations within a governmental border, every single invest India is comparable from one other. The northwest includes its own very own gaudy civilizations and also the south-east beckons people to watch the most intricate spiritual festivals. A heady combination of this older and also the brand new, you fulfill get the price approach of this past heavily maintained from the existing. India can be renowned for adventure trekking. Hiking, hiking, river rafting, hockey and also the wildlife shore at Jim Corbett playground are those actions you may have pleasure inside! Whether you're coming alone or together with family, then you may always receive yourself a package on the web to coordinate with your vacation requirements. Still another benefit of reserving your trip on the internet is the fact that a few internet sites also supply you with vacation insurance plan, therefore you never need to think about receiving you. Using all growth of tourism business, the united states features lots of all lodges spa hotels and resorts to earn your stay at ease. Whether you're searching to get a luxurious lodge with world-class facilities or even some wonderful budget lodging, then you are going to readily come across one yourself. But until you measure from one's hotel space, choosing a vacationer counsel is extraordinarily recommended. You'll find many types of excursion choices to traveling India. You may pick those tours determined by the specific regions you'll prefer to go to. Should you want to know more about the cultural heritage of the united states afterward choosing a trip that ensures the most outstanding historic destinations will probably provide you exactly what you really want. However, if you like to experience, then you have to reserve an experience excursion to go through the optimal/optimally adrenaline match betting. The other famous excursion would be that the Golden Zone tour, which covers major metropolitan areas in Delhi, Jaipur, and Agra. The scenic landscapes, gold beaches, blazing deserts, even the early temples and also the civilization of this contemporary era have manufactured India - a land of dramatic contrasts. Nowhere on the planet, you'll locate incredible charm and fascination since you'll discover throughout your visit to India.

I'm firmly confident that the united states of India were transplanted from the other world. You may locate no other place just like it around this particular world.

India can be a nation at which you can notice all you may see right now. What's more, that which you may observe will likely be more intense. You are not going to observe a beggar that you are going to notice countless of those. You are not going to observe a gorgeous shore, you are going to realize the very gorgeous beaches on earth. Spots of riches really are over the top you are going to be shocked. The shantytowns of this inferior, on the opposite side, will put you straight back to your own bites.

India could be the 1 location you may travel to and come off entirely enthralled and laughing in an identical moment. In case your notion of travel is sitting down at a posh lodge, India has these kinds of hotels nevertheless, you are going to not be able to steer clear of the attractive locations. In the event you would rather get outside and also choose a civilization that's totally unfamiliar for you, you won't ever locate a greater place compared to India.

India is truly numerous states in just a political border. The southeast of India is completely distinct compared to the northwest. The exact same holds for that east-west and west. In the event, you really don't enjoy the region you are in, then only get to the train to get a time or 2 and also you are going to be on a totally different planet.

Among those largest passenger complaints concerning India could be that poverty. In fact, it's lousy. There's just no way across the actuality. All you've got seen, where you might have done nothing fits with the poverty in India. The majority of cities are cities and also the states are far less than the best. To receive a very first-hand account, I recommend you examine the superb publication, "Shantaram", by Gregory David Roberts. Roberts dwelt in a few of those shantytowns for a long time busy by law enforcement. The publication is enormous and provides you with an alternative outlook in the poverty circumstance. No matter you'll have issues addressing all the poverty in India. Additionally, it can destroy your journey in case you are not attentive.

In case you are contemplating seeing India, then you want to simply accept the simple fact life is much different, and also you also have to return to grips on this specific until you're gone. In fact, India can be a remarkably attractive state of all beauty, magnificent websites and unbelievably humorous men and women.

#Travel

[spiftynifty]

On Let’s Voltron, the showrunners, and fandom

On Thursday an interview came out on Let’s Voltron, the ostensibly final interview with the showrunners of this now-completed show. Within an hour a few tweet threads appeared and incited a new wave of hatred and anger towards the showrunners, mostly by people relying on these tweet threads rather than listening to the interview themselves.

I don’t like secondhand info that sparks outrage; and having watched both AB interviews and seen how outraged people got over them, without having seen either, I strongly suspected that this interview was nowhere near as incendiary as the tweet threads suggested.

And lo and behold, I was right. Much of what was reported in tweets was misconstrued, or lacking the additional information that listening to someone’s tone provides. I didn’t hear two snarky showrunners smugly enjoying the chaos that their truly lacklustre season provided. I heard two people who were exhausted and beaten down by both the expectations of the fandom and the limitations placed on them by people with more money and power. They didn’t call Shiro “boring”, they referred to their initial vision of him as boring. They didn’t say he was repetitive, they said his backstory was repetitive of other characters’ in the series and was cut. There was one salty comment from JDS about how Voltron and Atlas merging was cool but everyone was too bummed about s8 to appreciate it, but there’s a dark humor to it that reads to me like a man struggling to joke about something neutral and positive in a season that was poorly received by fans and many critics alike. The vast majority of the interview is not much we haven’t already heard, though there is a very telling segment that lasts about 5-10 minutes where they discuss the heavy limitations on representation in cartoons. Ezor and Zethrid were allowed to exist, they say, because they were secondary characters. And female. The words “main heroes” with an S, are repeated several times by LM when describing who was and was not allowed to be LGBT. She explicitly states that wlw is one thing, but mlm is a whole other battle.

As disappointed as I am in the mistakes JDS and LM made, I find myself feeling very defensive of them as I see the people who once defended them from ants now begin to exhibit ant-like behavior themselves. “They should never be allowed to work in animation again” says one tweet. “They never gave a shit about this show” says another. “S8 was their explicit revenge on fans.”

It makes me unbelievably sad to read this. JDS and LM made mistakes. S8 was objectively terrible. Their attempt to shoehorn in “bonus” representation backfired terribly. They’ve been upfront about Voltron never having been planned with a happy ending in mind, and buckle down hard when confronted with the notion that killing Allura was a bad move.

But as they’ve said many, many times, this show was a labor of love for them. They worked their asses off to pitch something grand to Dreamworks because they were fans of the original and wanted to do it justice. But then they got the show and proceeded to get buffeted around for 4 yrs by dreamworks and the rules of a pre-existing IP and half the story ideas they come up with get shot down by execs for any number of reasons. People have latched onto the fact that the last third of the series wasn’t properly planned from the beginning, but I’d like to remind people that the plan they had for s3-6 was completely upended by one (1) executive call. The showrunners have said that they purposefully left things out of the bible to make it harder for execs to say NO to something well in advance. They were, as my director frequently calls it, “playing the game”, the careful balance of trying to tell a good story while also pleasing the client demands for a robot toy show. It’s a fight. Part of playing the game is leaving decisions so late that it becomes far too late to be changed by executives. But the downside of this is sometimes running out of time to do the things you want to do.

I’d like to point out too that in the interview at one point they actually say, “we knew who our audience was. They [the marketing people and higher ups] didn't.” So for 4 yrs they struggled to make the story they wanted to tell, they lost directors and writers, because the demands were way too high and people were burning out and leaving in an industry where being overworked is so par for the course that burnout is just a constant state of being. In other words, it takes extreme amounts of stress for people to burn out, and there is a certain mentality in this industry of burning out being a sign of weakness. When 2/3 directors left (one of them without the safety net of another offer) they put a bit of their reputation on the line-- and left anyway. And through it all JDS and LM, like any creators, were just trying to tell the story they wanted to see, scrambling to manage executive demands, working on multiple episodes at once and trying to maintain the storyline through them, losing people to burnout, having to rewrite entire scenes when voice actors weren’t available, and fighting for the show to be better than it was. 

I'm not absolving the showrunners of guilt, I'm just feeling bad that this is where they ended up because at the end of the day they genuinely were coming from a place of good intentions and a desire to tell, from their perspective a good story. And they did fight for rep, to the point that when initially Shiro was not allowed to be gay, they considered getting up and walking away and ending the project but they stayed because of the crew who would have been summarily put out of work. They weighed the importance of having that representation vs the jobs of 100s of people. That’s how important it was to them. 

Obvious, they didn't stick the landing, and it’s fair to say they outright screwed it up in a massive way that’s going to be remembered for a very long time. On the Shiro front they didn't have time to, in a way that would have felt genuine and agreeable for everyone. Keith was never ever going to be allowed. Maybe if Shiro and Keith had both been women, it would have been, which is a sad thought on the state of this industry and the kind of gendered homophobia that still exists in media both animation and otherwise. JDS and LM didn’t think far enough ahead on this, didn’t think outside of their pool of internal knowledge as non-LGBT people. As terrible as it is, it’s important to note they did this not out of a place of malice or vengeance, but an earnest, if misguided attempt to try and diversify the landscape. It did a lot of damage and they should not be rewarded for this move; but they also shouldn’t be being painted as the mustache-twirling villains so much of the fandom tries to make them out to be.

I hope this has been a huge lesson for them on the importance of stepping outside of your own situation when creating minority characters and properly discussing these characters with multiple people in real life who fall into those categories. No one LGBT person can or should speak for the entire community, as we’ve well seen with certain crewmembers.

Killing Allura is a much harder act to forgive because that was something they had time to think about and plan for and it should have been the more obvious lesson. There was ROOM to ask someone outside of themselves, “does this work”. There was room to be educated on why this was a terrible move both socially and narratively. There is room and time now, and dozens of articles about this very issue, that both showrunners should be reading and absorbing especially as their next projects involve a host of diverse characters. Their insistence to buckle down on the Allura Issue to me reads as; they haven’t learned anything from this, or taken the time to understand people’s pain about it. This is something that desperately needs to change especially as they continue to make movies and presumably TV shows. I do hope it’s something that will.

All this to say, please listen to the interview yourself before adding to the hate mob. If you’re still angry after listening to the interview yourself, that is your prerogative but I encourage you not to transform that anger into venomous hatred against the showrunners. The show is over; as fans we can transform this space into whatever we want it to be since Voltron is effectively ours now. Is attacking the showrunners, as ant1s have famously done for years, the image we really want to hold onto going forward?

#voltron #salt #sorta?? #i just want people to be mad while also maintaining compassion towards other humans #the animation industry is a brutal one #especially for creatives #vld

[popculturebuffet]

Amphibia Reviewcaps:  Scavenger Hunt/ The Plantars Check In

KEITH DAVID IS HERE! KEITH DAVID IS HERE AND NOT IN SHADOWY STINGER BITS BUT FULL CHARACTER! And okay other stuff happened I guess. Anne deals with her insecurity over her girlfriend being way more smart and acomplished than her, then the Plantars meet King Keith David, followed by Sprig reinacting the plot of Home Alone 2 mixed with a bit of Blank Check. You know that forgetable disney movie about the white dumbass who uses his computer skillz to get rich and has to deal with the mob.. I assume. I really have no idea exactly what blank check was about and neither do you. KEITH DAVID, under the cut. 

Scavenger Hunt

And with Marcy’s big intro out of the way we’re back to simplier problem of the week episodes, though this one does lead into the next which does have some solid plot progression, and the new setting and fresh injection of Marcy mean they do feel a bit newer after the road episodes. Like a good road trip after all that time you finally get to see the sights, enjoy the place and just relax. And also eat because your usally hungry when you first arrive, which is what the plantars and new addition Marcy are doing to start.  Marcy’s treating, because she’s friends iwth the king and as we learn next episode the king gives his friends acess to the royal treasury because he’s a seemingly nice dude. Again, more on that in a minute. While Hop Pop marvels at Marcy’s smarts and analytics, a messag efrom the king arrives.. and yes I too have “A MESSAGE FROM THE KING A MESSAGE FROM THE KING’ from hamilton in my head right now. 

Turns out the King likes to send Puzzle grams, basically sending marcy on scavenger hunts to tell her something because their both massive dorks. And it is taking ALL my willpower not to jump right ot the keith david of things, but for the sake of profesionalism I will stay here. So our party splits up: Marcy, Anne and Sprig go off to solve the puzzle and see the town while Hop Pop ends up staying because you can get free shit the more you eat, which yeah is a nice thing and all but is usually not worth what you spend. But it’s not his dime so fair enough. The king’s toilet’s are probably gold with gems and the softest seats in the land. I mean if I were king of the world I”d want the best toilet in the world. I’d also install free health care and other good stuff, but I’d expect a really nice crapper as one of the perks of the job. 

Anyway the hop pop plot really is just him eating a lot to get free stuff and showing up at the end , so i’ll focus ont he main plot which is pretty standard: Anne is insecure about how smart Marcy is, and TRIES to out marcy her in solving the puzzle, while befrending various people: Resucing a girl’s cat/caterpillar from a tree, befreinding an old lady and doing her nails, and then bonding with the gnatcho cart lady.. which made me want nachos bad, who enocourage a dispondent anne to be herself and try anyway. But yeah Marcy suceeds instead, Anne gets depressed, then Anne tries TOO Hard on the last clue when Marcy is stuck and ends up in the sewer with the alligators.. which unlike real life sewer gators, were put there on purpose by marcy to eat garbage when she redid the sewer system.. because of course she did she’s the best. It’s a really nice gag. They escape the gator when the various people Anne helped form a chain, along with an exasperated hop pop and Polly.  Then sprig blabs about Anne’s insecurity, and Marcy comforts her, pointing out that while she’s a genius and what not.. she dosen’t.. get people. Anne does, which.. I found a nice twist. The first thing she did,g etting the cat, made me think “oh their going to go with her physical skills”.. but instead in a nice twist that made me like this episode more, it’s her heart. And it’s not something they pulled out of thin air: While it hasn’t really come into play a lot this season, last season was all about Anne slowly connecting with the town and being suprisingly good with people.. she can be blunt, dosen’t think things through.. but she does have empathy, problem solving and a desire to genuinely help people who need it. It’s a hard trait to learn and it’s one she does with natural ease. It’s a nice bit of showing her character and what she’s good at. Also the message turns out to be “bring the plantars” which.. yeah the second the first clue was bring, even without next episodes description, I could’ve guessed. And they close the episode as all episodes should close.. feeding nachos to a  sewer gator. 

Final Thoughts I:  As you could tell by how easily I sped through it, the episode was...eh. It’s not bad, but no episode of the series has been truly terrible. It honestly, and this kind of complaint is overused, feels like filler. And granted I rarely watch anime, I know cartoons work different.. but this episode feels like it’s just there to provide more Marcy before we focus primarily on the Plantars again, and before the plot turns them against her.  Which isn’t a bad thing mind and she’s great as she was last week.  The problem is Anne. Her feeling down about herself, while a normal human emotion.. just dosen’t jibe with her normal brand of overconfidence. It’s not entirely out of the blue for her not ot feel as smart as marcy, it’s just set up poorly. We could’ve easily used a flashback or something to the human world to help make it feel like a more longstanding issue, than one that just crops up because Polly said a thing after a full episode of her being totally fine with Marcy being way smarter than her. Even the intro has her entirely fine with it. It would’ve flowed better if she played off she was fine, but secretly was trying to one up her and did feel dumber versus that being spelled out so early, as it woudl’ve fit more with the character. So yeah this one’s more just forgetable, a stop gap between two plot important episodes. And I don’t mind catching our breath after the last episode given it was a huge one what with introducing a new major character and a new setting and having a lot of action set pieces, I just know the show can do that BETTER, as seen with HandY Anne following up , if a year after, from the emotionally draining season 1 finale, they just.. didn’t this time and it just flopped a bit, but still had enough nice moments and good bits to make it still enjoyable. 

That’s something I do have to give the show credit on as I have been hard on it, as i’ve said reviwing more forgetable episodes is hard: Most shows don’t make it out of season 1 without at least one terrible episode. OK KO had “Let’s Not Be Skeletons”, Ducktales had “The Beagle Birthday Massacre” (And i’m a huge fan of Lena as a character, just to be clear, her debut episode was terrible for other reasons) , Steven Universe had Arcade Mania,  Adventure Time had “Freak City” and Legend of Korra had “The Spirit of Compettiton”.. and really the whole love triangle plot but that’s a story for another day.. all of these are really..e xcept arcade mania that one’s just dull and pointless. But i’m not: My point is it’s still a really good sign the show hasn’t really flopped over in the span of two seasons, with even the annoying quarallers pass still having some really good stuff to it. I may be critical, because as a critic that’s my job no one pays me for, but I do love this show and want to make it clear it’s still excellent. I’d rather watch this episode again than any episode of “Hoops”.. seriously I have no interest in that show and I question why Jake Johnston thought signing on for it was a good idea. Then again, Keith David was in this

And this

And BOTH of these

So I can’t blame Jake for wanting an easy paycheck when Screen Legend Keith David has done far worse for one. Speaking of Keith David....

The Plantars Check In 

IT’S TIME. 

We’ve had a sample of keith david with the omnoius end from last week but now we get the full package. And i’ve made no secret how much I absolutley love Keith David or how excited I was to see him joint he cast. The main is a voice acting and regular acting legend. Sure he usually does bit parts, but he does the hell out of them. 

The man also has a longer history in disney than I ever realized. While I knew he played Goliath and Dr. Facilier, I had no idea just how much minor voice work he’s done for disney over the decades, doing a LOT of minor roles during the 90′s and even vocing Mufasa in “House of Mouse”, subbing for James Earl Jones which.. yeah if anyone’s the next Jamers Earl Jones, it’s Keith. He’s the king of making a meal out of side rolls and on the ocasions he gets a big one he makes a damn buffet of it, as seen with Gargoyles and Community. 

So yeah, I love the guy and was excited for his first full apperance and pleasantly suprised.  We open at what looks like a comibation of the temple of time and Hyrule Castle for Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and I swear that’s what their going for with the background music here.  Anyways after Lady Oliva tries to keep things formal, and reveals King Andrias has been king for over a thousand years, which makes things even more interesting, he .. happily hops off the throne, gives the Plantars a friendly greeting and then a bear hug. I was expecting him to be stern yet nice, for now, but this is a nice change of pace and i’ts shown by the way Olvia acts towards this behavior, wishing he’d be proper because “Most unorthodox” and all that monocle popping nonsense, that this is normal for him. So it’s not ENTIRELY an act for their benefit. He is apparently nice to his immediate subjects, vistors and especially Marcy. It’s also lovely to see Keith David play such a diffrent character from his usual villian, stoic badass or hilarious grandpa rolls, instead playing a cheerful and boisterous king. He honestly reminds me a lot fo River from star vs the forces of evil. Which by the way I also love Alan Tuduk and regret not bringing him up in either review river’s been in so far. 

Anyway, we then get some more plot stuff as he meets anne, and we get a nice bit of him doing the “thumb of approval” and marveling at anne’s awkawrd fistbump in response. But it’s down to buisness, he wants to send his loyal knight and new friend he just met home, but needs the box. While anne reveals she don’t got it, with Hop Pop acting nervous as he realizes “oh shit, maybe lying to my surrogate grandaughter about something this important when we’re ont he way to a place where people will naturally want ot see the thing, and STILL not telling her after meeting Marcy and knowing sh’ed want to know about it too has started to backfire!” And yeah while he has sympathetic motives, and clearly knows SOMETHING about the box, and I supsect King Keith David does too but give me a second, his not telling Anne what he did at any time is only going to make it harder to trust him later, especially if Marcy ends up betraying them. He also notices something I actually failed to notice , as did Anne: The colorful stones on the calamity box are drained of color. So the King’s going to have to reserach this for a bit, with Marcy helping obviously and since Anne’s usless at research, the king instead happily treats the plantars to a vacation on him while they sort thigns out: A stay at the nicest hotel in the city, on his dime, and acess to his royal credit card, which given he’s king of everything means he just gave them the unlimited funds code. 

Before we move on, my thoughts on the king: He’s hard to read. I do think he’s genuinely that nice a person.. but he CLEARLY has a dark side, having subjugated the toads and the frogs, which had to have happened under him as he’s first in his line and both remember the status quo as only such. Hop Pop dosen’t even question the way things are or one god king ruling over all for over a thousand years. The question is did he do so because he didn’t know better, because he thought he had to, or because 

I do n’t know what that’s from but expect me to be using it a LOT from now on. My point is it’s hard to tell what his game is here. He could be a cruel asshole masquerading as a fun loving king on the service to sugarcoat his shadier actions.. or he could be a well intentioned extermist, doing awful things for what he sees as the greater good and possibly having lost the plot, or his empathy over thousands of years. Or he genunley could have no idea what he’s planning is bad and see no harm in it due to a different set of morals, again due to being immortal. There’s a LOT of intresting directions they can go with this character and i’m curious to see just what sort of vilian, or possibly good guy all along though I doubt it, he will be and given both grime, more recently i’ll admit but still, and sasha have been complex villians instead of one dimensional assholes, the show will no doubt give us something spectacular. HOpefully i’m not tempting fate but if I am, screw it, i’m rolling those dice. This is going to be godo and I can’t wait.  It’ll also be intresting to see if he genuinely values marcy or is putting on the good king act and puzzles and all that to manipulate her. After all we’ve seen with Sasha that she’s easily manipulated, as far as we can tell, and sees this all as a game.. it’d be easy enough to lead her along by playing int othe genre and her desires to get her to play his game the way he needs her to. Though it’s also a question of if Marcy will see it or back the wrong side... though she MIGHT. while she isn’t great with people, she does know games and half the time a benevolent ally will turn out to be a dick in sheeps clothing. Though i’m hoping that isn’t the case for Marcy. But we’ll see..

Anyways with the first third or so of the episode down, the Plantars Check in, TITLE DROP, and Polly, Anne and Hop Pop all put on comfy robes and relax, while Sprig being sprig wants to go exploring though hop pop refuses to leave him wiht the card because of course he does. And honestly having done a few road trips myself.. yeah usually when you get back to the hotel first you want to just relax and crash, maybe go out for dinner or something with your friends, which they already did ahead of time, and recharge before doing allt he fun vacation stuff. Though I also relate to sprig as I too have been in hotels with arcades and pools from time to time as a kid and a teen and wanted to go do the fun stuff while everyone’s tired. Thankfully I also liked to read or play my various game consoles, from the game boy advance up to the switch on my most recent vacations,so I understand his restlessness.  The rest of the episode goes about how you’d expect, with Sprig taking the card once hteir asleep and adventuring around and getting into various hilarious one off gags via montage, before loosing the card and fighting over it with a Bellhop Named Belle, played byt he always wonderful and always talented Krstien Schal.. about two episodes late for the gravity falls homage but never too late to do some voice acting. Sprig gets the card thanks to futurama caffine bullet time, saves paige and then saves her from firing by talking like a rich kid asshole to save paiges job before collapsing and being woken by everyone else wanting to go do fun shit. 

Final Thoughts 2: This one was better. While again I sped through the recap section this time.. it was funny> While the plot was a simple: kid sneaks out and does something he’s not supposed to yet and gets into trouble and ironic ending and all that, it’s funny enough to be enjoyable, Kristin is game as always, and the gag of Sprig using the card to wave off the snooty man at the counter is great. While most of the meat of hte episode is with the king at the start, the rst of it is still an enjoyable come down episode after the plot heavy first third of this one and marcy at the gates and does the job way better thant he previous episode. While it doen’t have a lot of tie to character or what not, it dosen’t WASTE any either. I didn’t realize till this episode that while sprig certainly hasn’t been unterutlized, he really hasn’t had his own episode this season, sharing Quaraller’s Pass with poly and only having subplots in “A Caravan Named Desire” and “Marcy at the Gates”. Here he gets a plot to himself and while it does nothing for his overal character, it’s entertaining enough, with some great gags like the caffine bullet time, the aformentioned rich people gag and the hair bit being the best “Now to put on my hat!”. It just lets the character loose to have a fun side story. See I can dog on an episode for WASTING a good opprotunity, even if I understand the stress of production and what not.. but I won’t dog one for just having fun and letting a character have the limelight if it’s still entertaining which this was. The problem with say “Scavenger Hunt”, “The Ballad of Hopidiah Plantar”, “A Caravan Named Desire” and “The Ballad of Hopidiah Plantar” is that while their not BAD episodes, they had far more potential. This one knows it’s basically home alone 2 meets blank check, but actually entertaining, and justh as fun with it. Is it hte best episode ever? Probably not. But was it fun and a nice change of pace, as well as relatable to me and thus giving me a bit of the warm fuzzies, especially in this hellscape of our lord 2020? Absolutley.  That does it for this week. if you liked this review i’ve reveiwed the rest of the season so far , just check the Disney tab on my blog, along with many other shows, and i’ll be covering the show weekly for the rest of the season, along with Ducktales when it comes back next month, so follow if you want more of that and random reblogs and such. You can also shoot me an ask if you have any things you want my opinon on, any episodes you want to request or you can direct message me to outright comission an episode of any aimated show for me to review for 5 bucks a review. Either way, till we meet again, bwahahahahaha. 

#King Andrias #amphibia #keith david #anne boonchuy #hopidiah plantar #hop pop #sprig plantar #polly plantar #marcy wu #lady olivia #reviews #recaps #reviewcaps

[sparkycanteven]

In defense of Cassarian/Variandra/Vassandra

Okay tumblr anons, you asked for it.

Yeah, I ship it. 

Is it problematic? No. I will tell you why.

1.) Obviously, it's not canon and will never be.

2.) In spite of what you anons THINK, none of us Cassarian shippers actually ship Cassarian/Variandra/Vassadra AT THEIR CANON AGES!!!!

3.) ACCORDING TO THE CREATORS OF TANGLED, BESIDES RAPUNZEL, NO ONE ELSE HAS A CANON AGE!!!

There was ONE BOOK that barely mentioned Varian’s age but the books are not considered part of the show’s canon so I take that information with a grain of salt. 

Also, in every Cassarian fanwork I have seen (or created for that matter), VARIAN IS OLDER! It’s usually post-series (where he would be of legal age) or AU where he is the same age range as everyone else. In my entire time in the fandom I have YET to come across ANY problematic works that would advocate anything less than a healthy, adult relationship! 

So I don’t honestly know where all this hate is coming from. In fact, I think it’s rather ludicrous for anyone to be triggered by Varian’s harmless crush on Cassandra when obviously the show isn’t going to go in that direction. I mean, people, this isn’t Once Upon A Time, this is a show created for 7 year olds that is animated. CALM YOUR TITS!!!

But I think the shipping side of the fandom has been affected by the Mrs. Flanders phenomenon. “Oh, won’t someone please think of the children???”

No one here has any interest in harming any minors in any shape, form, or fashion. We are simply adult cartoon enthusiasts who happen to like a certain ship.

But while we’re talking about THE CHILDRUN:

- I’d like to see a few of you who are so triggered sit through an episode of Kodocha, the anime. Not the Japanese version but the english dub. In it, a young girl who is 10 refers to her agent/manager as HER PIMP. She has a very unhealthy, sexual crush on him and in the episode where he finally explains why they cannot be together, the final scene has them SITTING IN HER BEDROOM ALONE TOGETHER. Go pick on that fandom and see how many people laugh you out of existence! Oh btw, said Agent/Manager stays all the way through the series, is not put on a bus to hell or gotten rid of in any way because that’s one thing that anime culture realizes that Western Cartoon Culture has yet to hit upon...

- KIDS DEVELOP CRUSHES!!! They are not cheerful baby robots that wait until they’re 18 to pine after someone! Some are even problematic! Did you ever develop a crush on a teacher? Or an older siblings friend? Or a celebrity that had no idea you existed? Did certain people think it was cute? Okay... was it their problem that you had the crush in the first place? No? OKAY THEN. 

- And there are some of us who never headcanoned Varian at 14 anyway. Like me, I never once thought he was 14, I thought he was 21 and just short for his age because during that time if there were famines and you didn’t get enough to eat, guess what, your growth got stunted!!! 

- Also, it was a different time. Think about it, back in the time period that this is set in, 14 and 15 year olds were regularly married off all the time. Granted they were usually girls married off to much older men, but young boys would definitely start LOOKING back in those days. EDUCATE YOURSELF!!

But honesly, if you want my take on it, I think some people just like being triggered. They just LIKE finding problems with otherwise harmless things because they don’t agree. I personally hate eggs, but do I go to breakfast buffets wearing a sandwich sign that says “NO CHICKEN ABORSHUNS!”? No. Because that would be pointless. Just like your little anon opinion.

Good day.

#cassarian

[glapplebloom]

Tomorrow, I’ll review the latest MLP Episode. Today, the latest Equestria Girls Special.

Its Spring Break and the Girls are on a Yacht! Not the Crystal Prep Yacht since this is something Twilight prepared for them, but they do have a concert on the boat. While the others are having a relaxing time (minus Sea Sick AJ), Rainbow Dash is restless since she’s looking to use her powers to defeat Bad Magic.

This in turns ruins the Cruise for the others. Specifically, Pinkie (because of Dash) is banned from the Buffet just for associating with someone who attacked the chief. Scared all the Animals so the Petting Zoo is now just a Zoo, bumming out Fluttershy. And again, Sea Sick Applejack, who RD is just bugging while she’s trying to avoid barfing (and fails).

Thanks to a confrontation with Trixie (who performs two shows daily), Rainbow Dash gets an idea. If she wants to find Bad Magic, she needs to convince the others to Pony Up and bring it to them (under the guise of having a Rainbow Light Show during their concert). Also, Rarity meets a guy, but that’s not important.

Rainbow Dash: Just say it! I can take it!

Sunset Shimmer: You're ruining it for everyone!

Rainbow Dash: Ouch! Your words just... punched my feelings.

Sunset Shimmer: You said you could take it.

Sunset seems to convince Rainbow Dash, but she in turn convinced them to try the Rainbow Lasers for the show. And when she does it, the entire ship seem to lose power. Dash thinks its because of Bad Magic while Twilight tries to fix the ship. The others are off doing their own thing. That’s when Dash spots a familiar looking symbol...

The Symbol of the Storm King. Apparently Storm King is a bigger threat dead than alive. That’s pretty sad. Dash forcefully gathers everyone to show them but the symbol is gone. Twilight believes its a natural thing that Dash saw and an argument leads to Dash going off on her own without the others.

Sunset Shimmer: No one's blaming you for wanting to give us a normal spring break. We'd be having one if it weren't for me. I brought magic to this world in the first place.

The next morning, Twilight is feeling bad for arguing with Dash while Sunset takes an attribute from Peter Parker and blaming herself for them not having a normal spring break. Spoilers, none of this is her fault. It was Dash who was ruining this trip and with a second entrance to Equestria found, the Storm King’s Magic has nothing to do with Sunset’s originally bringing in magic. She is entirely blameless right now. The only way she can have less blame is if she never existed in the first place.

Speaking of people to properly blame, Rainbow Dash took a lifeboat to find the Bad Magic on her own. Worried, Sunset and Twilight go to try to find her while the others get everything ready for an emergency. Twilight and Sunset find an island and a very informative Parrot confirmed to them that Rainbow Dash is indeed on the island.

They find Rainbow Dash stuck in quicksand. Dash apologizes for ruining the trip because there is no magic, only to find out there are killer man eating plants. Granted, it could still not be magical, but Sunset figured out the only way to remain safe is to take a dive into the quicksand.

Because Sunset found out it wasn’t quicksand, but a portal to Equestria covered in a layer of sand. How it didn’t go through the portal I do not know. But the others are taking it well...

Twilight Sparkle: [continues screaming, pants, screams again, screams louder] PONY FACE!

Twilight Sparkle: [gasps] All my things are horse things!

Twilight Sparkle: Sorry, I wasn't listening. Because we're ponies!

Dash seeing this as a way to apologize thinks that this could be their vacation. After all, with the ship not working and the storm logically going to pass by eventually, they got nothing to worry about as they go into Ponyville. So how are the others doing on the boat?

The storm is making precision aiming, they restored the power only to lose control of the ship and crashing into rocks and they’re sinking because the storm also took out all the frikkin Lifeboats. Again, it is really sad he became more effective dead than alive. Back in Ponyville...

We were so close of having Prime Dash meet EQ Dash, but Sunset stopped that before it happened. And they eventually go to Twilight’s Castle, where we don’t see the School of Friendship nor Spike’s wings. With that, I believe this is happening during Season 8 Episode 1: before Twilight even started to build the school.

After at least an hour (20 minute fondue wait, a Spike story about a Dragon Wedding he attended and I assume multiple stories from Twilight), Dash notices the symbol and after remembering there was Lightning, Prime Twilight assumes correctly that the energy the Storm King was wielding wasn’t fully contained in the staff. So apparently he can indeed control Storms.

But despite being much more threatening, he was still a piece of cake to defeat. Because all the girls have to do was bring the staff to their world and drain that Storm Magic back into it, thus defeating the Storm King once and for all. Dash apologizes to Twilight. Twilight apologizes to Dash. Am I forgetting something?

Parrot: [squawks] "The ship is still sinking." [squawks]

Thank you Iago. The girls make it to the Yacht and with the others Pony Up, Rainbow Lasers, Light it up and save everyone and every creature on the boat. With all the living creatures safely off the boat and on the island, the only problem is how will they get back home? It ends with Sunset solving the problem quite easily...

Now she’s thinking with portals. Overall, it was fun. Dash did get annoying in the first half (think how Dash acted in 12 Pranks Later but worse) but in the other half she did get better. But one thing I left with is pretty much a bigger desire than ever before to have the EQ7 meet their Prime versions. We get a small taste of it here but now I hope to see a crossover before the series end. Maybe they somehow get transferred to each other’s world and have to find a way to make it until they can fix it. Or something.

As for how this fits with GLAB, as established on my take on the original Equestria Girls, the Portal to the two worlds were destroyed. But with them discovering yet another one, it’ll be the same until they go through it. Sunset is a little shell shocked because she never expected to be a pony again and Dash convinced them to look around.

Since Sunset never been to Ponyville, she doesn’t know about having to hide. But because they see Rainbow walking and talking with new ponies they don’t suspect nothing of it. It doesn’t last long, as Apple Bloom recognizes Sunset Shimmer during her brief time in the Pony World, captures the three of them before they could do anything.

Sunset apologizes, and Apple Bloom does recognize the Indigo ring on her, but still wishes to play it safe and see if they were indeed telling the truth about their friends being on a boat. In the EQ world, good news, she totally does believe Sunset. Bad news is she recognizes the symbol as being the Storm King. So Sunset becomes an Indigo Lantern while Apple Bloom powers up. The EQ Seven reunite as Apple Bloom takes on the Storm. 

As our Green Lantern holds back the storm, she looks in amazement how the other seven are doing. With everyone safe on the island, Apple Bloom turns it loose and unleashes a powerful blast that disperse and destroys the remaining Storm King magic. Since they have no way to get back home, Apple Bloom volunteers to take them back with her ring.

Sunset stops her and volunteers to do it instead. Apple Bloom slowly agrees, saying Sunset does seem like a completely different pony from what she was before. And offers her the right to visit one day if she feels like it. Sunset is thankful, thinking maybe once school is over she could return home.

#Equestria Girls #season 9 #mlp review #Green Lantern Apple Bloom