#most definitely before episode 100 aired

[monarchisms]

AH’s minecraft series is ten years old today

#i was studying for my calc exam when the realization hit me #happy birthday but also #what the fuck man #i've been watching for about eight of those years #most definitely before episode 100 aired #and even back then i was like #''aw man i have so much to catch up with'' #it was worth it though #i hope they do something special to celebrate #but i also would understand if they don't want to #since they've forced themselves to play the game every single week until recently #for now i'll just cherish the memories and get excited for newer stuff and all that #feeling sentimental on this tuesday morning lads #i'm not gonna queue this lol #wait it's wednesday #time isn't real

[still-a-morosexual-help]

Asmo is the personification of "I'm a delicate beautiful flower uvu" and then throws hands when someone disagrees, MC is just there to hold his stuff when he beats the stuffing out of some poor demon. Afterwards he pretends like he didn't lose his shit and threw hands because someone said that x wasn't his colour

HE CANONICALLY KNOWS AND USES WRESTLING MOVES!!!!

I see this as him starting to watch wrestling because of all the hot muscular people in it (remember that chat when Beel gets tickets to either a body building competition or a wrestling match and asks MC to come along but when MC suggests Asmo, because he'd like it, Beel says that's precisely why he can't take Asmo) but then he really got into it because of the actual wrestling & violence (whether or not it's fake isn't the point)

Okay but, I love Asmo so much???? He gives off this ditzy yet sweet air most of the time which contrasts greatly with how vicious he actually is? ;

He's the most vicious, out of the lot, to Mammon when he's pissed off - with his lines being brutally cutting

His entire Desire speech to MC in S1 which sounded like a villain monologue

When he finds out MC was lying about Belphie and why they wanted to make a pact with Asmo in the first place and he threatens to rip their heart out if they lie to him again and this is after they're technically friends!

How condescending he sounds during his solo in the group song with Levi & Beel

Princess Asmo going evil in that one anime episode was hilarious but honestly what did you expect would happen

The whole thing with Helene and how not only was he unapologetic he didn't even seem to realise he did anything wrong

Or the hints at the Sarah storyline which if they follow the irl story is very dark

The fact that (assuming that Levi's animal is a giant sea serpent rather than a snake) he's the only one with a venomous animal and I'm 100% convinced his demon form is venomous

His demon form consists of a bleeding heart as his marking, plus a scorpion which is obviously venomous and roses which would definitely have thorns

The fact that like I said in this post Asmo equates his place in the family to his beauty and then suddenly he fell and changed (and didn't the devs say that in the version where they have more demonic forms that Asmo hated his?) and that would have seriously messed him up

Like I really wanna know what it was like for him right after the fall becaue look at this and tell me he wasn't absolutely deranged

I haven't given Asmo any long scenes in my fics but I love writing him;

Asmo side eyes him, gaze sharp and calculating before his mouth thins into a parody of a smile. "Don't worry about it, Belphie," he says with an almost condescending pat to his cheek before he practically saunters away. 

Belphie watches him feeling mildly irritated but as equally amused and fond. He has always respected Asmo, found familiarity in the wicked sharpness he hid under bubbly giggles and hypersexual ditziness. 

tldr:

There's a reason why it's called blood lust

edit:

#asks #obey me #obey me shall we date #obey me! #shall we date? obey me! #swd obey me #swd obey me! #shall we date obey me #obey me asmo #obey me asmodeus #om asmo #om asmodeus #obey me! asmo #obey me! asmodeus #om! asmo #om! asmodeus #shall we date asmo #shall we date asmodeus #swd asmo #swd asmodeus

[comicaurora]

Hi Red! I was curious if you've watched the new Yu Yu Hakusho live action, and if so, what your thoughts were on its pacing and handling of various plots. Personally I thought it did some very clever things and it genuinely pleasantly surprised me at a couple points, but at the same time the fact that it's only 5 episodes hurt its ability to do the story justice a bit.

Also I was rewatching the Dark Tournament arc of the anime today and wondering what it must've been like to watch when it originally aired, considering all the multi episode fights. Do you remember any of your thoughts at the time?

On an unrelated note, I'm really excited for arc 2 of Aurora!!!! Also sorry this is so ramble-y

I have watched it! For the most part, I really enjoyed it, although in pursuit of compressing everything down to five episodes it did a couple things I think definitely harmed the overall impact and characterization.

Spoilers below!

The first episode is I think nearly pitch-perfect. The visual design on the Spirit World is top-tier, and the choice to make everything that was a sacred artifact move like ferrofluid was a very clever bit of visual design. It's absolutely weird and original and I think it was a very fun way to spice up Fluffy Cloud Heaven.

Of all the things they sped through, I'm very glad they did not speed through the crucial characterization of Yusuke initially choosing to stay dead on the assumption that everyone is better off without him, and the show subsequently taking its time to show the wake, let Yusuke's mom and Keiko really feel their feelings, etcetera. The adaptation of the wake was, to my memory, almost 100% true to the anime version, including the gut-wrenching moments like Kuwabara starting off angry and then breaking down, and the toddler Yusuke saved not really understanding that he's dead. And I had no complaints about the parts of this arc that they did speed up - a lot of the timeline of the original show is training arcs and Yusuke having to prove himself, and I had almost no problem with them skipping over that. Yusuke not having to do any tasks before coming back to life is A-OK with me.

I also entirely lost my shit at The Dropkick.

And then the last bit of episode 1, where they have to deal with the possessed kid, was absolutely top tier. The way they make demonic possession look and feel in this show is truly horrific, and I loved the way they played it like a one-man zombie apocalypse. The fight choreography was also very impressive and I liked how much they used the environment. Also, letting Kuwabara fight this guy first was a very good way of making the power-scaling clear and establishing that Kuwabara is a fundamentally very decent person willing to punch above his weight class to try and help.

However, this episode did get me excited for something they ended up not doing, which was a bummer. The first thing we see in the show is a Makai insect, which in the anime are the tools of the villains in the Four Saint Beasts arc - at the climax of that storyline, Makai-insect-possessed students and faculty corner Keiko and Botan in the human world while Yusuke fights an increasingly desperate battle against Suzaku to try and stop him. If the full-on body horror zombie thing was what makai insect possession looked like, that scenario immediately seemed like it was going to be butt-clenchingly terrifying.

Of course, they ended up entirely sidestepping the Saint Beasts arc, which is understandable - narratively speaking its only real function is to let the four protagonists team-build after their contentious first meetings. It became clear pretty quickly that with the time they had, it wouldn't be worth it to go there. That said, I think they really could've used a little more team-building time - more on that later.

The first episode also pretty solidly established the tone they'd be taking for the rest of the show - much more dark, almost no comedy. Normally I find those sorts of adaptations pretty dour and joyless, but in this case I thought it helped make the stakes feel solid, and if anything it lined up better with the original premise of "the demon world is a truly horrifying place and its incursion into reality would be an absolute nightmarish apocalypse." I didn't mind that it felt like the stakes were real and the heroes fighting demons was really necessary.

The second episode made it pretty clear where they were going with the series adaptation. While it speeds through the intro of Goki, Kurama and Hiei, it also lets Yusuke's fight with Goki feel - again - extremely well-choreographed and tense. The choreography in this show is consistently very impressive, especially considering how often our heroes have to fight fully CGI bad guys - and this fight doesn't even have any dialogue in it, but it still makes it entirely clear what Yusuke is thinking at every point, which is very impressive, especially since he goes through an entire arc from "I don't need to figure out how to use the Spirit Gun" to "I desperately need the spirit gun to start working right the fuck now". They also handle Kurama's intro very well, making it very clear that he's cunning and kind of inscrutable but not necessarily malicious, and in the scene where Yusuke's tailing him it's pretty clear from the choreography that Kurama knows he's there and is very carefully waiting long enough for him to follow him without feeling like he's being lured, which is entirely in-character, and again a very impressive way to show characterization without any dialogue required. And of course the reveal that Kurama is in fact a Nice Boy who is trying to sacrifice himself to save his mom is real good, and letting Yusuke's past experience with seeing how his mom reacted to his death make him immediately ride or die for Kurama was a very solid bit of characterization - and adding Kuwabara to this subplot where he wasn't originally there helped balance out the characterization a little bit with an entirely justified naysayer pointing out "dude he's a demon maybe don't trust him immediately." It also helps get Kuwabara involved in the main story nice and quick, where he originally is a bit of a late arrival.

The part I was getting a little worried about at this point, and an element of the adaptation that I legitimately think is a detriment, was how they were handling Hiei. A huge part of what makes Hiei fun in the original series is that he is legitimately a huge bastard, and in his introduction is a full-blown bad guy who Yusuke very nearly dies fighting. Classic Hiei kidnapped Keiko and nearly turned her into a demon just to fuck with Yusuke. And what makes their relationship great is the team-building that happens in the Four Saint Beasts arc the adaptation is evidently skipping over, where Hiei is so baffled - and so touched - by Yusuke's completely unearned trust in him that he immediately becomes 100% ride or die for Yusuke and only Yusuke.

He's a vicious little asshole who takes himself very seriously and legitimately has the power to back up his grandstanding 90% of the time, and that's what makes him so fun to watch - those little slivers of characterization where he's goofy or baffled or vulnerable or lets himself be visibly impressed with one of his teammates, mixed with the moments where he's like "okay this has been fun but it's time to die now" and just one-shots the bad guy with another dangerous forbidden technique he picked up for shits and giggles.

So I was getting a little worried that the adaptation wasn't gonna let Hiei be, like. An actual asshole. Because what makes him fun as a character is that he is an asshole, he just also has a handful of sympathetic motivations and nice qualities that he usually doesn't own up to. And I ended up being right about that, which was a bummer, but again, the way they did it was a bit of extremely efficient streamlining. In the anime, Hiei's introduction is just him being a dick for no reason - then everyone has a team-building bonding arc with the Four Saint Beasts, and then Hiei is revealed to have a real heroic motivation hiding somewhere in there: rescuing his secret twin sister Yukina from a nasty human holding her prisoner.

So the adaptation basically just streamlined the entire rest of the show into that arc. Hiei's intro stealing the fancy knife? He's using it to get the Jagan Eye to look for Yukina. Hiei storming this compound full of humans? They're the ones holding Yukina prisoner. It's 100% sympathetic, he's just not willing to own up to that to anybody. Everything he does that's dubiously moral or kind of a dick move? It's actually fine, or he's being framed (like in the shot they perfectly remake from the anime where he kidnaps Keiko, except just kidding it's a shapeshifting bad guy framing him), or Yusuke's the one who attacks him in the first place.

And that's extremely efficient storytelling! It just makes Hiei kind of an antisocial dick and not even slightly a villain, which I think dramatically reduces how fun his character is - it just flattens him into a very standard-issue lancer archetype who refuses to express any sort of emotional or physical vulnerability to anyone, which is a fine character trope, it's just kind of more boring than the dickhead outdoor cat I was hoping for.

The same thing also happens to Genkai, who in the original series has dozens of episodes of screentime to show off how she is the best kind of mentor ever written - a dickhead mentor.

She's rude and snarky and a full-blown asshole, and she and Yusuke have a truly hilarious mentor-stydent dynamic because they're both assholes. And it's not until a good way into the Dark Tournament that we see them in a dynamic that's not just being assholes to each other - when Genkai consolidates all her power into a sporb for Yusuke to absorb, and he spends several episodes nearly dying about it. The fact that Genkai truly cares about him as her student - and the fact that he truly cares about her as his master - only comes out in this subplot, when she honestly believes she's fucked up and killed him and he goes beyond his limits to absorb the power she's given him. It's a beautiful moment of payoff after dozens of episodes of planting, and right after that happens, Genkai is killed.

So when the live-action show introduced Genkai, and after a good solid montage of training and anime-accurate fight scenes and some really good Kuwabara moments, she told Yusuke she had one final technique to give him, I said out loud "oh my god please don't speedrun this." And then they did. She gave Yusuke the sporb and he absorbed it immediately and painlessly, and then they left, and then she immediately gets killed.

My notes on that part were just

So I didn't like that part. Like Hiei, Genkai is such an effective character because her moments of vulnerability and non-assholeness are so rare, and the rest of the time she's an absolute goblin nightmare. Getting rid of that reduces her to another, much flatter trope, and killing her in the same episode she's introduced almost entirely removes the impact of the moment and just makes her another dead mentor. But again, this is episode 3 of 5. This isn't the writer's fault, this is the writers making a very hard decision on what they need to get into the plot if they're planning on speedrunning the entire Dark Tournament arc - which they are. The primary rule they seemed to use when adapting Yu Yu Hakusho is "if the heroes fought this bad guy more than once, no they didn't." So the first fight with the Toguro brothers is going to become the only fight with the Toguro brothers, and they need to speedrun the entire core plot of the Dark Tournament arc within the confines of Toguro's introduction in the Rescue Yukina arc.

And the thing is, hot take? I'm not mad about that. The Dark Tournament is an iconic moment in Shonen anime history, but like. it's a tournament arc. Like all tournament arcs, it goes on a very long time, a lot of it is extremely repetitive, and it eventually arrives at the foregone conclusion end state of "team protagonist vs team final boss". In a five-episode adaptation, you pick the smallest number of good fights with real stakes and you just use those. And that's what they do here. Kurama and Hiei both get little bottle-episode fights with their respective most plot-relevant opponents from the Dark Tournament, and they both get to show off their dangerous forbidden techniques.

And it slaps. It could've used more buildup for maximum punch, but again, five episodes. And frankly in the original they didn't get much buildup either, just "this is a thing I've been working on, hopefully I don't die about it."

And consistently, the fight choreography continues to be really good. The physicality of the actors is very solid and the way CGI attacks and opponents get worked into the choreography is so fluid it's sometimes hard to tell where the CGI ends. And considering the final boss is two full-CGI photorealistic bad guys, I think they do an incredibly good job making the fights feel real and solid.

Characterization-wise, since so much of the final episode is just a lot of fighting against a big damage sponge, there's not a ton of time for talking, but the choreography is, again, a standout. Even outside combat, the secondary characters get a lot of little moments to shine - even Damsel In Distress Du Jour Keiko gets to pull the "oh no, I, your valuable prisoner, am sick, please come into my cell within easy throttling range" trick and breaks herself and Yukina out, which slaps and makes the whole breakout feel like much more of a team effort, and it also lets Keiko and Yukina share some brief but extremely tender moments of characterization that does a lot to make them feel like well-rounded characters. And back in the main fight zone, the characters don't have much dialogue but show where they're at through how they move. Everyone is exhausted and beaten down and has already used their finishing moves, but Yusuke's in trouble, so it's time to scramble back up and tackle the bad guy. It's just such good choreo and such good acting that it makes me forgive a lot of the pacing struggles they're dealing with from boiling everything down to 5 episodes, and without dialogue - just through fight choreography - they manage to make me buy the teamwork dynamic they've thus far failed to establish due to speedrunning past all the stuff that's supposed to help them bond. This is the first part of the show that makes me believe that Hiei has any affection for the gang and any reason to fight alongside them beyond coincidence.

And they continued the trend of hitting all the major plot beats from the stuff they were speedrunning, which led to me counting down the minutes to the Kuwabara Fake-Dies To Motivate Yusuke moment.

The rest of the fight is pretty much just a shot-for-shot adaptation of the final stage of the Toguro bossfight, plus the added fun that it's the first time in the show Yusuke has actually yelled "spirit gun" out loud, which is neat. And it took every second of those five episodes, but in the closing scene they finally reached the group dynamic I was hoping for.

All things considered, given the parameters they had to work in, I think this is the best we could've possibly gotten in only five episodes. I would've probably preferred one where instead of cramming the entire dark tournament into three episodes they just left it alone and just did Rescue Yukina plus maybe the Saint Beasts, but if this is what we were getting, this was a very solid way to do it. I, at least, had an overall very good time, and have been thinking about rewatching it, which is wild since it's only been like three weeks since I watched it the first time. But yea, overall the pacing is wild but I think there was a lot of love and thought put into it, and it really shows.

#asks #not aurora #media recs

[bethanywritesbooks]

my immediate thoughts on the first four and a bit episodes of netflix's avatar!

massive spoilers below!

okay I’m sorry but there is NO WAY sozin was actually present and storming the air temple. dude’s the fire lord. he would absolutely have been sitting behind a desk from the safety and comfort of his own palace and receiving the occasional update via letter at MOST. 

are we supposed to infer the airbender woman who gyatso nods at is aang’s mum? surely the camera lingered on her (and showed her having absolutely bananas-level tornadobending skills) for a reason.

gyatso with the kids :”( literally made me cry. 

honestly I was not as outraged as some people with the whole ‘toning down sokka’s sexism’ thing, bc I do understand some of his lines coming across differently/more maliciously in 2024 than intended at the time they were written. but I have to say … this version of katara opening the iceberg was not entirely convincing :/ like in the OG version you could see how she was so angry at sokka that it fuelled her waterbending enough to break the iceberg, but in this one she just … raises her hands? 

I get that this show is trying to be its own thing, but ‘will you go penguin sledding with me?’ is SUCH a perfect introduction to aang’s character, and I’m kind of bummed they nixed the line :/ 

and I get there are time constrains etc, but they didn’t include any of katara and aang actually bonding together, so it doesn’t really make sense now that she’s willing to go off and travel the world with him. 

the music is really good! 

GRAN GRAN DID THE THING! 

speaking of, why does gran gran know everybody’s business?

they definitely seem to have toned down zuko’s personality? like OG show zuko would not be having a back and forth conversation with iroh about the avatar, he would’ve just shouted at him and stormed off. 

I also really like the interaction between iroh and aang. iroh’s toeing the party line, but you get the sense that he believes differently. 

okay, I have to say this, and this is something I’ve been thinking since the first promo pictures came out. everyone’s clothes look too clean! our real clothes have were and tear, but these outfits don’t look lived in! it’s distracting me!

that said, paul sunghyung lee is completely spot-on as live-action iroh. completely captures the character’s personality and appearance. I want a hug from this version of iroh.

must admit I am glad that appa and momo are 100 times cuter and nowhere near as terrifying as they looked in [REDACTED BY THE DAI LI]. 

okay, heading into episode two. 

seems they have retconned zhao’s origin story, since this seems to be the first time iroh has met him? does this now mean zhao was not present at the zuko/ozai agni kai, like he was in the OG show?

SUKI!!!! 

suki’s reaction to meeting a boy she likes being to throw down and fight him, what a little weirdo (affectionate). 

oh, zuko. having the confidence to try and fight AVATAR KYOSHI is certainly … A Decision. one that a teenage boy would make! 

AVATAR KYOSHI LOOKS SO GOOD! 

avatar kyoshi if you are free to hang out on thursday night, I would like to hang out on thursday night when I am free, if you are free. 

hmm I’m kind of intrigued as to where they’re going with the live action version of zhao. because right now it seems like he’s a nameless commander — like we’re supposed to infer his letter is his first direct communication with ozai? he’s not been around the royal family before? by taking away this backstory, the show is missing out on the total hilarity of a middle-aged man having longstanding, personal beef with a sixteen-year-old.

listen, if daniel dae kim wanted to be in my tv show I would absolutely be like ‘yes, of course, how many close-ups do you want?’ but I do think the OG show not revealing ozai’s face until season 3 was a really smart decision. it built up so much suspense and mystery around this character (who is supposed to be larger than life!) and it had SUCH good payoff IMHO. I do kind of wish they had committed to this too but, like. if daniel dae kim was in my show I’d want his face in it, so I get it. 

time for episode three! 

azula!! introducing her doing undercover work makes sense for her character, given how she later infiltrates ba sing se. though I’m not sure it’s entirely believable that the people … wouldn’t recognise her? in the fire nation capital? she’s a (very!) public figure!

again, season 1 zuko would not have had the patience and self-control to compromise with zhao like this. 

mai and ty lee! I like that the show is already hinting at mai betraying azula for zuko — her first instinct is to defend zuko (even though she walks it back when she sees azula is upset), hinting at where her true loyalties eventually lie. 

being a teenage girl and getting led astray by a bad boy with a shaggy haircut is, unfortunately, a canon event for us all. 

katara brushing by zuko and him touching her scarf!!! not the 2024 zutara crumbs! 

‘zuko, don’t fire bend, it’ll draw too much attention!’ zuko: proceeds to have a huge smackdown fight w aang, destroying multiple vendors’ goods in the process. 

that lady smacking zuko for attacking aang was genuinely the funniest part of the episode. 

‘MY CABBAGES!’ iconic, outstanding, give him an oscar immediately!

episode four! 

more aang and iroh interactions! maybe they'll do a jailbreak together? 

loved seeing the iroh and ozai interaction, I hope we get to see more of their dynamic together. (I think a lot of ozai’s actions make sense when you remember he’s a youngest child.) 

loved the detail of zuko giving iroh lu ten’s broach (badge? pin? it’s late, my brain’s getting fuzzy), showing that his softer side was always there.

bumi’s voice and mannerisms and completely spot-on, but I’m not sure I entirely agree with his new characterisation. he seems so … jaded and bitter? yes, they’ve captured his silliness and eccentricity, but he’s also supposed to be wise, and I’m not sure if the latter is really coming across.

okay episode five! (it’s 11:30PM at this point, and I can feel myself becoming less and less coherent, so don’t expect as much detail at this point.) 

ooof. the CGI while the gaang is on appa seems … worse than in earlier episodes? did they run out of money at this point? 

this version of ozai seems more … pragmatic? he’s strategically playing his kids against each other, but IMHO animated ozai would never praise zuko (even if it was to put azula in her place) bc he didn’t like him enough to do that. ever. 

JUNE LOOKS SO GOOD.

okay I am too tired to keep watching, I'll watch more tomorrow.

#atla netflix spoilers #atla spoilers #atla #avatar the last airbender #the last airbender

[justmeinadaze]

Inside of Her Head (Steve X You)

A/N: This is just a little thing I wrote real quick. I'm actually experiencing this right now with my brain going a mile a minute. I literally spent 15min telling my roommate I don't want her to leave my side because I'm afraid something is going to happen to her or she's going to leave. My therapist says that's my inner child...some stuff we've been working on *sigh*. But my roommate suggested I channel this energy into something creative and thus you get this...this is what I wold love rn. Steve just holding me till I calm down and then watching a movie with me till I fall asleep <3.

Warnings: Reader experiencing an anxiety (manic) attack; Steve helps her through it

Word Count: 803

Steve comes home from work to a spotless apartment and he’s immediately on edge. Most people would be happy to come home to a clean space but not for him. When the home is this organized, something is wrong. 

“Y/N, baby? Where are you?”

No one responds but he knows you’re here, promptly going on the hunt. It doesn’t take him long to find you sitting on the bathroom floor with your knees to your chin and your hands twirling your hair as your blank eyes disassociate through him. 

You two have prepared for moments like this; you warned him when he moved in. It still doesn’t take away the guilt that bubbles in your stomach when you finally notice him as he places himself on the floor cross-legged in front of you. 

“Hey, Stevie. When…When did you get home?”

“A couple of minutes ago.”, he answers softly as his eyes continue to scan you over. “How was your day, honey?”

Your hands shake in front of you as your fingers seem to drum the air, moving without any real thought as your anxious eyes sift through memories. 

“It was good. It was good. I-I-I cleaned. I had only meant to clean the kitchen but then I thought you would want to relax in the living room when you got home so I tidied up in there but then I noticed your movies were out of whack and I thought it would be fun to organize them buy genre for our next movie night. When I finished that, I was going to lay down and nap but I couldn’t stop thinking about how the bathroom has been really messy lately and you know how I’ve been slacking on that…”

Steve listened to your rambling with the patience of a saint. Your lips were moving a mile a minute but he didn’t need to follow everything to know what was going on. Some days your brain just wasn’t 100%. Some days the medicine didn’t always help or something triggered an episode for you that had you like this. 

You tried explaining it to him before but he never truly understood until he experienced one with you himself. You sobbed on the bedroom floor, crying about fears that he would never allow to happen. He didn’t know you during your trauma so he couldn’t be there for you then but he could definitely keep you safe now physically and emotionally. 

“Baby girl, look at me.”, he cooed as he placed his palms out for you to take, grinning when you did. “I want you to inhale for me. That’s my good girl…and exhale. Good.”, he soothed as his thumbs tenderly massaged your skin. 

“Everything got so loud, Steve. I couldn’t…”, you shook your head as the tears fell before he scooted a bit closer to where you were.

“What triggered it this time? Do you know?”

You shook your head again. 

“I just…had this voice in my head…that says I don’t deserve you. That you’re going to leave me here alone just like everyone else. Today…it was so loud…”

“It’s ok, sweetheart. Breathe in again for me…and out again. Good, pretty girl. You’re doing so good.”, he smiled as he reached up to caress your cheek before taking your hand again. “Y/N, I love you so much. I’ve never met another girl like you in my entire life. You are beautiful, sweet, so talented and so smart, baby. There’s no one in the world more perfect for me than you. I’m not going anywhere.”

Once your breathing had slowed, Steve collected you into his arms and held you to his chest as he kissed your forehead. 

“I’m sorry I’m such a nuisance. I don’t mean to be.”

“You’re not, honey, I promise. Your parents are the nuisances…making you think you aren’t enough. You are more than enough, baby. You’re everything to me and I’m always going to be here to take care of you.”

You two sat like that till your anxiety passed and you finally felt safe. After kissing his lips, he guided you into the shower where he cleaned you and washed your hair before putting you in your most comfortable pajamas and carrying you out onto the couch. 

“How about I make some dinner and we watch something EXTREMELY violent?”

You giggle as he widens his eyes and you nod. While he’s making dinner, he brings you your favorite drink and turns on one of the sitcoms that makes you laugh until everything is ready. 

“Steve. Thank you…for everything. I love you to, baby.”

Tilting his body to kiss your lips, he playfully rustles your hair and throws a blanket over your legs. 

“You don’t have to thank me, Y/N. I’m always going to be here for you; good days and bad.”

#steve harrington #steve x reader #steve harrington fluff #steve harrington stranger things #joe keery #joe keery fluff #steve stranger things #stranger things #steve harrington blurb #one of those days #i just want to be held #anxiety is a bitch

[nuzzle]

why do lolitas typically dislike "living dolls" ? im not a living doll myself but see lolitas have them in their dni and such so im curious as to if theres a reason..?

↑ i hope you don't mind me adding the second part of your question so i can answer in one post. this is a question that interests me a lot!

while i'm not 100% sure, this is definitely more of a speculation from what i've witnessed over the years.. to get the best answer i would honestly just directly ask lolitas with the DNI (i haven't seen it myself actually) but i do think it began in early 2014 with that "my strange addiction" episode you're referring to and the drama surrounding it. the reason being is that before the episode aired, lolita wasn't exactly something known on a widespread level.. and after the episode aired, it gave the general public the idea that they're essentially the same thing—that every lolita is associated with living dolls or present themselves as one, and vice versa.

you can be both, and they can be mixed. it's definitely possible and not looked down upon.. but the point being is that, that would be a very small minority of people and doesn't accurately represent the entire community, on either side. both the lolita community and the living doll community are niche groups with not many people to begin with. especially when compared to a hobby more mainstream, and something both groups get confused with on occasion, like cosplay.

in reality, similar to how people don't want to be referred to as cosplayers when they're not cosplaying: not every lolita is a living doll or wants to be referred to as one, and not every living doll is a lolita, wears the fashion, or wants to be referred to as one. lolitas already struggle with a lot of misunderstandings surrounding the fashion, and the with media continuously lumping them together with living dolls, it only added one to the list.

now to clarify, i wouldn't blame either of the groups for this outcome. it has been proven time and time again that when a reality tv show expresses "interest" in someone who is a little different than the norm, it is only to exploit them for views, attention and thus, monetary gain. shows like "my strange addiction" (and, if any of you remember, the "what not to wear" lolita episode) don't actually care about giving an accurate report on what lolita is or what it means to us. they don't do any research or listen to any information they're given. they simply cut footage and twist words to get the most views.

the same goes for articles in magazines that just want to garner more sales or go viral. they decide that largely playing up the "living doll" association, even if it has no solid relation to lolita and despite what the interviewee says, is a lot more "interesting" than the simple explanation of what lolita is: "these are just clothes and how i dress. it's a street fashion originating from japan, and for many at the time and even now, a fashion of protest and social resistance."

magazine and interview source

and to end, i would only note that this doesn't include the BJD community (i understand the confusion, but they're very different from the living doll comm!)

#asks #lolita fashion

[pencilpat]

I couldn't sleep all night and I was rewatching DWIT, and I'm analyzing dukexiety here we go!

I SWEAR why is he looking at Virgil like this? Hello? Is there a single non-gay way to make this face at your ex-buddy? What? Affectionate eyes and a slight smirk? Is that what we're doing buddy? I swear when Remus in particular likes someone he is really obvious about it.

Anyways,

He's so, like, soft with Virgil the whole episode, which is 100% not reciprocated, but.... it tells me that it used to be. Virgil probably was playful right back at one point. And he expects him to just keep doing it, despite any fallouts they may have had. Remus is the most hopeless about relationships and trust with other people, he genuinely seems to think everyone in the world wants to hurt him or judge him - except Janus and Virgil. Even if Virgil doesn't desire a friendship, they were friends before, and to Remus that makes him special and worthy of this eerie gentleness that I can only assume is genuine affection as he shows it. Because to him, no one ever changes, so Virgil will be right back as his and Janus's friend the moment he realises that he 'can't change'.

Janus feels the same thing, in a way, that Virgil isn't actually capable of change, but to him that reads as abandonment and that Virgil is trying to be better than all of them, light sides included. Janus and Virgil most definitely lost all trust in each other due to whatever fallout occured, but Remus? I don't think he even believes much has changed at all. They were all three rejected and feared before, so why would that ever change? Everyone on the lighter ends of Thomas's mind has feared him since he's ever existed, most likely, and Virgil and Janus were there in the dark as well. They are made to be scary - Virgil will be right back once he realizes that too, of course! 'It was just like old times!' both as a real expression of feeling and as bitterness that Virgil hasn't been with them in so long. And that is the meanest he gets to him directly. An air of bitterness. Compared to Janus's outright insults and ire and direct confrontation that's shocking.

Remus seems to still see Virgil as somewhat of a friend. Virgil does not want him as a friend ever again.

#remus sanders #virgil sanders #dukexiety #sanders sides #platonic dukexiety #<- platonic as well since this is mostly about their friendship #this is open for additions and comment i just think about the dark sides a lot </3

[deliciouswastelandgoddess]

Kinnporsche and Safe-Keeping Fans' Expectations - The Genius of Kinnporsche's Plot Twists

Also read:

The Genius of Kinnporsche's Intimacy

The Genius of Kinnporsche's Wardrobe

The Genius of Kinnporsche's Humour

I'll be the first to point out plot holes in this show but I absolutely love the way they have been doing plot twists so far - well we are already at episode 14 so there isn't much else left to draw my conclusions now.

Calling them plot twists feels almost like an exaggeration because of how organic they are, I have never seen them done like this before. Despite the camp and some ridiculously unrealistic world building, these twists feel exactly like real life. Like they're confusing but also sort of make sense? Like they are so wild nobody could've predicted them but it's also so inline with the character that it's not jarring - a soft plot twist, if you will.

A real life example of this would be (and desis do back me up here) Priyanka Chopra getting married to Nick Jonas like- NOBODY could have predicted that but it's organic, it's real life, that's how the world works. Like, I am hoping this is making sense because I'm at loss of words now.

Now the plot twist that made me think of this entire meta is Episode 13, when Porsche decided to tag team with Vegas while Vegas decided to help Porsche because he's fed up of the adults and because he wants a way to reach out to Pete.

Not the brotp I asked for but definitely the brotp I needed.

Anyway, this had me thinking - this is what they have been doing it with us the entire time. Some of the plotlines are cliched AF but most of them really blindside you. Like I see so many people trying to predict what's gonna happen in the next episode and they are all wrong 99/100 times lol. They have made clowns of the audience but WITHOUT punishing us for our expectations (unlike some other western showrunners like Game of Thrones I am sorry for always making this comparison). KP's showrunners have subverted our expectations by giving us things that were even better than what we could have imagined.

Take the bathroom scene for example, it came out of nowhere, that was not at all how I imagined that scene would go, it was absolutely beyond my tiny tiny western media fed brain. It was a plot twist!! It was shocking!! I had to pick up my jaw from the floor when it aired!! I couldn't think of anything else for a month!! We all lost our minds over it!! It was intentional!! I want to have this scene framed and displayed in my house!! My life is divided between before I saw this scene and after!! This scene fundamentally changed my perception of humanity and sexuality!! I don't know what else to say here - it was earth shattering!!

You know what else was a plot twist?! THEIR FIRST KISS BY THE PIER!! I did not see it coming. I was only expecting flirting and a general romantic set-up, I was expecting Kinn to tsundere his way into figuring Porsche out but my man straight up went for a kiss right then and there!! And now it seems like such a perfect, organic thing, like we can't even imagine it any other way but when it happened you bet your little ass I was pleasantly blindsided.

Go to episode 4, their first time having sex with each other was also a plot twist! I was only expecting Porsche to ask Kinn about his feelings, tease him, kiss him maybe, etc but again!! They just- went for it?? Like?? I remember everyone losing their collective minds over it in the best way possible??

And then we transition right into episode 5 where again!! Plot twist!! Porsche is not happy the morning after and this was hard to watch ngl but they couldn't have been more careful and gentle in their handling of the situation.

The resolution of this episode was also, one of my favorites in the entire show with Kinn coming to Porsche's house and apologizing and asking him to come back home. This wasn't the plot twist though. The real plot twist of episode 5 was that Kinn isn't a badass Crime lord, Kinn is a clown.

Clown!Kinn appeared in episode 5, installed himself into our hearts in episode 6 and never left.

Which takes me to the most plot twisty episode of the season: the jungle escape - just littered with minor plot twists throughout. WHAT DO YOU MEAN KINN KNEW HOW TO OPEN THE HANDCUFFS? WHAT DO MEAN HE WILL TELL EVERYONE PORSCHE DIED IN THE FOREST?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE LIKES TO SEE PORSCHE HAPPY?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN PORSCHE FORGAVE HIM A LONG TIME AGO?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN KINN IS INTO OLD SONGS?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN???????

I could write a dissertation just about the beats of their cave conversation and how well they managed to convey Porsche's journey into falling in love with Kinn (who was already in love with Porsche by this time)

Another plot twist they had was Kinn straight up announcing that he loves Porsche in front of everyone - again, something I don't think anyone saw coming but that's how things work out in real life, don't they?? There isn't a dramatic reveal to these things they are just revealed. NOBODY could have seen that coming and if you did I congratulate you on having a large brain.

The hedgehog (RIP) being the plot driver to push the Vegaspete agenda was not on my bingo card that's for sure. The plot twist?? That Vegas is a cry baby and a hedgehog dad and Pete can't leave a pathetic man alone. Everyone thought they'd be the sexy couple but nah nah nah it's psych time you hoes, they are the pathetic couple.

Psych again! Because they are BOTH pathetic and sexy! Vegaspete plot twist number 2: Pete handing the rope to Vegas.

WHO???? THE FUCK???? came up with that??!! I want to know their names so I can erect a shrine in the honor of their brains. I don't even remember what I was expecting but I'm sure this wasn't it. PLOT. TWIST.

Psych again!! Pete is actually traumatized by the whole experience and it's so painful to watch you will want to die but also it's feeding us emotionally in way we never could have imagined!! (More deep dive into this in my post about Dehumanizing Pete here)

It's the stuff of the best fan-fiction but making it 100 times better without following any of the usual tropes. It's insane how big brained they have been and how much they really want to make the audiences happy. And that's it. That's the Genius of Kinnporsche's Plot Twists - they want to make the audiences happy. It's so simple.

#the way i haven't even mentioned kinn showing up at yok's bar in ep3 #or porsche calling kinn constantly in ep7 #or porsche dropping the l-word in episode 8 just like that #or kinn and Porsche going to the temple together #or Vegas showing up at the pool to serande (manipulate) Porsche #i had a 10 gif limit what was i supposed to do #kinnporsche #kinnporche the series #kinnporsche meta #vegaspete

[i-heart-hxh]

Hi! Ok honestly I was going to find a more proper way to phrase this but can we just talk about Nagareboshi Kirari for a minute, and how it is 100% a love song from the perspective of Killua to Gon. I don’t see many people talking about it and it gets glossed over compared to some of the other endings but honestly it’s always been my favourite. The fact that nearly every single line is a direct reference to something Killua has been through with Gon is crazy, and with the “shooting star” references and implications, I don’t think it’s crazy to say that YUZU interpreted the manga the same way most of us shippers do, especially CAA. Idk, maybe I’m just crazy but this is something I’m almost 100% convinced of (like a lot of Killugon stuff in HxH I guess ha ha) but what are your thoughts?

Sorry for taking a bit to reply, I wanted to reply thoughtfully!

I definitely agree with you! I've read before that Yuzu re-read the entire manga before writing the songs they did for HxH, and also that they're big fans of the series to begin with, so I think it's fair to say that they wrote the songs they did with intention. Also, multiple people have pointed out that Nagareboshi Kirari uses wedding bells in it, which I mean, enough said. As big fans of the series, it would make sense that they see the (pretty clear) implications with Killua's feelings and they would include that in a song made for the series.

@hunterxhell also shared another song that Yuzu wrote around the same time period that may have been used for HxH if things had gone differently (I agree with this conclusion, it's too coincidental otherwise with the lyrics), and some other songs that they may have written with HxH in mind.

Honestly, the 2011 production is riddled with staff who have made romantic implications between Gon and Killua--from the director saying they're like a mature married couple, to Mariya Ise saying outright and extremely clearly that she thinks Killua is in love with Gon, Niuya, one of the animators for HxH 2011 would post KilluGon fanart on Twitter while it was airing (and published a doujin with shippy drawings included), and so on. Not to mention things like the Huncyclopedia kiss, ai-ai gasa, the episode previews during Chimera Ant arc, and more. These are all additions that didn't need to happen, they just as easily could have not included them. But they did!

The people who worked on the anime certainly studied the manga carefully--it's simply a big part of the process of adapting a manga to an anime, and especially with how faithful 2011 is to the manga (*overall, with some exceptions :p). I don't think it's a coincidence at all that many people looking at this manga carefully came to this conclusion. It's the same conclusion I've come to as well after years of carefully studying it and reading about Togashi and his inspirations/interviews/etc. The subtext is strong and clear and all over the place once you start looking for it, and a good portion of it isn't even subtext but just...text.

Anyway, I got on a bit of a tangent, but YES, I definitely think it's intentional and I absolutely think Yuzu wrote it with Killua's feelings in mind!

#asks #killugon #hunter x hunter #hxh #meta #I guess you could call it that #my posts

[startrekexplained]

The potential Spock two parter we could have gotten on Enterprise

Star Trek: Enterprise (or just Enterprise, as it was originally called) is an interesting series. A prequel set 100 years before TOS and 200 years before the TNG era of series, it had a very mixed at best reception when it first aired, and of course was cancelled due to low ratings during its fourth season, making it the first series since TOS to not end voluntarily. But it's been re-evaluated by a lot of fans in recent years and while it usually doesn't rank near the top of peoples lists, there's a general consensus now that the series wasn't "that bad" and even had some pretty good episodes, at least near the end. I'm personally a fan of the series, warts and all. But as good as I think the fourth season is, when it finally embraced the prequel concept it ran away from in its three previous seasons, it could have been even better if certain episode ideas had come to fruition, and I'm going to talk about one such episode(s).

A lot of fans know there was a shakeup in the fourth season, with co-creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga effectively standing aside for a new showrunner, Manny Coto, who turned the direction of the show around from its weird half prequel/half sequel premise into a genuine prequel to all the series that came before it, but particularly TOS. While this did change reception somewhat with fans and critics at the time of its airing, it wasn't enough to change its ratings decline, so we never got even one more season with this new direction, which is a real shame.

There was an attempt to grab ratings though, by getting William Shatner himself to guest star in a two parter about Mirror Kirk and the creation of the Mirror Universe. Shatner pitched the story himself (written by Judith and Garfield Reeves Stevens, who worked with him on the Shatnerverse novels) and it was well received by Coto, Braga and Berman but apparently Paramount was not willing to pay the modest fee Shatner was asking for the appearance and thus the plans were cancelled. The story pitch, IMO, was quite good so it's a real shame we didn't get to see this two parter but I actually don't want to talk about that today, I'll leave that for another post. Instead I want to talk about another two parter suggestion, that almost no one talks about but would have made for, potentially anyway, an excellent two parter and perhaps even a far superior series finale than what we actually ended up getting.

Mike Sussman, one of the lead writers of ENT, pitched a possible two parter in the event Shatner couldn't be convinced to guest star on ENT involving Leonard Nimoy guest starring instead as Spock. The pitch was inspired by an episode (Mystery of the Blues) from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles where Harrison Ford guest starred in a framing story about adventures in his youth. Leonard Nimoy would guest star in a similar capacity.

In this episode, Spock would be a distinguished and retired ambassador in the 24th Century, and he would be visited by a young Human/Vulcan hybrid in Starfleet who's seeking guidance for balancing his two alien halves. Spock would then retell a story about how, in the early 23rd Century he met T'Pol, who's a legend by the 24th Century and how he assisted her on a vitally important mission involving the retired NX-01 crew stealing the old NX Enterprise from the fleet museum for one last mission. During this mission, Spock would learn important lessons with the audience learning a lot of new information on Spock. Most importantly, Spock would learn during the course of the episodes to reconcile his desire to be a diplomat like his father and his desire for a career in Starfleet. Overall it would be something of a passing of the torch from ENT to TOS.

I don't know about you, but while this pitch isn't that detailed, and the story would have obviously needed a lot of ironing out from pitch to script, the idea is very strong and it could have potentially been one of the best Spock stories and definitely one of the best ENT episodes. It really is a missed opportunity, and what comes to mind is the Spock two parter in TNG "Unification" which served as a tie-in to Star Trek VI, which is one of my personal favorite TNG episodes and Spock stories. This potentially could have been ENT's version of that. While not pitched as a series finale, it also would have easily been far more suitable as that than "These Are The Voyages".

So what happened to this pitch? Obviously it was rejected, but I couldn't find any reason why. Presumably Leonard Nimoy either wasn't interested or wasn't even approached about it after Paramount rejected Shatner's modest pay demands to appear on ENT, and the only reason we even know about this is because Mike Sussman posted the memo pitching this to his twitter in 2016. I couldn't even find mentions of this pitch outside Memory Alpha. One wonders how many other great ideas were pitched and haven't been revealed.

#Spock #star trek #enterprise #t'pol

[fostersffff]

The Big Gundam Watch, Part 9.2: Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, Episodes 27-49

Well, it took a while, but I finally finished watching Mobile Suit Gundam Wing.

I gotta be honest, guys: this was frustrating. The point I made in the first part of this where I talked about how Gundam Wing is at its weakest when aping aspects of Universal Century Gundam comes back in full force here. What got me particularly sour is that the show actually did start to rally by heading in a direction I didn't expect, rife with potential, before hard-stopping and saying "alright fellas, last batch of episodes, we gotta do Char's Counterattack now". But then, peppered throughout "we're doing Char's Counterattack again" is some really good stuff that just doesn't get the chance to soak in.

Let's get into it:

THE STUFF I LIKED:

Dorothy Catalonia is the most consistently great part of Gundam Wing's second half. At first, it's because she was the most straight-forward character in the series- she is Based and Warpilled- and seeing her be comically unsubtle about her love of and desire for war was pretty funny. She then begins to occupy the position of "villain who gets underestimated because they're so transparently villainous they seem incapable of subtlety", which leads to some shockingly simple but effective maneuvering to get exactly what she wants, including the death of her grandfather. But ultimately, when they decided they should pair her off with Quatre, her hawkishness is sensibly re-contextualized and made deeply sympathetic, in a way that the series doesn't really achieve with Milliardo and definitely doesn't with Treize, who have the exact same motivations as her.

Speaking of Dorothy, the way Relena's commitment to Total Pacifism didn't play out the way I thought it would was an extremely pleasant surprise. The whole time I was anticipating a corruption-style arc, where Dorothy acts as the devil on Relena's shoulder, urging her into taking violent action in the name of peace... but she doesn't. From the time she takes over the Sanc Kingdom through to the end of the series, she is 100% committed to the ideal of Total Pacifism, no matter how much of a disadvantage it puts her at.

I guess maybe that's why Relena was so hated when the show first aired in the West? But I thought her absolute commitment to such a childish ideal was actually the most endearing thing in the series. It's naive in the exact way that the character is portrayed as naive from the very start, but she takes every opportunity to show her commitment to it in bold, bombastic ways. My personal favorite was "my brother is Milliardo Peacecraft, I have no idea who this Zechs Merquise loser is, so kill him if you feel compelled to, it's got nothing to do with me"

In general, the whole Sanc Kingdom arc was the show at its smartest, because the conflict between Relena/the Sanc Kingdom and the Romefeller Foundation under Duke Dermail was simple at its core, which meant they could do more interesting things with it. "Invading force proclaiming to the world that they are saviors and liberators protecting the locals from hostile elements when their real goal is to destabilize the region" is effective as hell!

Tremendous credit to the series for being also smart enough to highlight that Dorothy/Milliardo/Treize's goal of "have a war so horrifying it scares mankind out of having any more wars" was even more naive than Relena's Total Pacifism because it was completely and utterly ruined by Lady Une's surrender.

I wrote in my notes "if Milliardo just flat-out refuses Treize's duel and fires the Libra canon at him I'm giving this series a +2 buff no matter what else happens", so I have to mention that's exactly what happens here. Except, I reduced it to a +1 buff for a reason we'll get into later.

There's a handful of really tight, exciting action sequences that do specific things to elevate them over "Gundam pilots lay waste to an entire army of dolls". The one that I loved the most was in Episode 39, when Quatre realizes that he won't be able to make it to Trowa in time to protect him because the Sandrock isn't properly kitted for space, so instead of trying to use his verniers he takes advantage of the nearby exploding shuttle to launch himself. That's a fucking BALLER maneuver, and actually adds more credence to the "Quatre is the brains of the team and a good strategist" thing the show starts to lean on towards the end.

Despite just saying "Gundam pilots lay waste to an entire army of dolls" in a negative context, the aforementioned scene immediately being followed by Trowa and Quatre bump into Duo, who decloaks Deathscythe Hell and starts tearing up the battlefield as Rhythm Emotion starts playing was also Fucking Unbelievably Cool

On the same subject: using Rhythm Emotion as an insert song a couple of times but waiting until episode 41 out of 49 to introduce it as the new OP was very bold, but the correct decision.

Ending the series with Relena tearing the birthday card Heero left for her is just raw, unfiltered kinography. Maybe the single smartest decision in this entire series. I was hootin' and hollerin'.

THE STUFF I LIKED LESS:

The last nine episodes are just Char's Counterattack. Any time I tried to give it leeway and thought they were gonna do something interesting or different, it slapped me in the face, first with Milliardo delivering a speech in a Sweetwater-style colony (when literally every colony shown in After Colony is a Halo-style ring), then ultimately resolving to drop a space fortress on Earth to usher in an ice age, and then even doing the "We stopped the drop!... Oh no, a piece split off and is still heading to Earth!" part. This was hack shit, and kind of made me hate Milliardo because the interesting thing about him was the idea of taking the Char archetype in a different direction, not just writing Char doing all the things Char did, again.

I made a post just the other day about what turned out to be the setup for pairing off of Quatre and Dorothy, which I mentioned right at the top here was one of my favorite aspects of the series. Someone corrected me that they did actually 'meet'- Dorothy was in the room when Quatre and Heero introduced themselves as students, and presumably Quatre was in the room when Dorothy introduced herself to Heero- but looking that up reminded me that really should've been Quatre she was dueling. As it is, it's almost the same problem I've talked about with The Rose of Versailles, where you have a REALLY STRONG arc built on a foundation of nothing.

While I thought the reveal of the true nature of Dorothy's "love" of war was pretty well executed, the same cannot be said last second reveal that the Gundam Scientists sabotaged Operation Meteor somehow and that the original mastermind was Quinze. It's a good concept, and would actually explain a lot of why Operation Meteor was so disjointed, but like the character himself, there was literally no time to develop this.

When it comes to suspension of disbelief, I usually let things pass unmentioned, as long as they don't disrupt me in the moment. That's why I wrote that post about Quatre and Dorothy; at the exact moment it happened I went "THAT'S RAD... wait, what?" Even worse than that, though, was Lady Une waking up from her coma, escaping the hospital, hijacking the Wing Gundam and somehow making it from Earth to Libra fast enough to knock Trieze out of the firing path AND not dying herself. It wasn't even cool because...

I hate Treize. I already talked about how much I hated Treize in the first part, and it only got worse here. And it's not "oh man, what a good villain" hate, it's just... he sucks. Everything he says and does is so incongruous and lame, and not in a way that reads to me as intentional. It's insane that he survived until basically the last minute, but the silver lining is that led to Lady Une surrendering on behalf of the World Nation and completely fucking up Dorothy, Milliardo, and even Treize's plans.

No need to go over my dislike of the Gundams in the series again, but man does Epyon suck. Fuckin' boneless Master Gundam is what it is, and transparently just given to Zechs so he would have a red mobile suit to use in the final conflict (because he's Char, ya see). It sucks even more because they did make a Tallgeese II, and it actually bridges the gap between native After Colony mobile suit design and Gundams like I was bitching about, but they gave it to Treize!

So much of Gundam Wing can be boiled down to "poor planning and not enough time". It was regrettable in 0079 that they ran out of time because they got cancelled, and unfortunate for ZZ that Char's Counterattack went into development and they had to scramble to put together a story that somehow fit- or at least didn't clash- with that, but this? There doesn't really seem to be any good excuse. I still don't know most of these characters' backstories or motivations, and some stuff that's implied in context but is never meaningfully addressed, like the fact that Dorothy and Treize are related.

Another overall problem I have with Wing is that it talks about war as part of the innate human desire for conflict, when those are two very different things. Even near the end, Milliardo talks about how the colonies gave in to their desire for conflict, and like... no they didn't! They were manipulated by an external, fascistic power (Romefeller) into fearing The Other (non-Romefeller-aligned powers on Earth) and started developing weapons for the fascistic power, and then those weapons were hijacked by an extremist sect (White Fang). No part of that is the colonies, as a united entity, going "we crave violence". In fact, mankind's susceptibility to fear and the manipulation that comes with it could so easily be worked into other theme that Wing likes to bring up- that mankind is weak- but that's more about literal, actual weakness. It's just so bad at trying to make its points.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS:

Once again we get some haute couture with Noin's non-uniform outfit of choice being a fuckin' cowboy fringe vest. Just amazing that when this woman isn't in fatigues or a dress uniform, she's ready to go to the rodeo.

Watching this dub has forced me to confront the possibility that maybe G Gundam also had a not-great dub, and I just love it because that's the one I saw when I was a kid. But to be honest, this dub would be perfectly fine if not for the fact that they had like six actors total, and major character's voices would be coming out of Random Soldier #3 one scene later.

There's a line in the final episode where Duo's like "we're gonna celebrate with some champagne when we get back!" and Quatre goes "just as long as it's non-alcholic". I was 1000% sure that was a dub thing, so imagine my surprise when I checked the subs and nope; Quatre is a good little boy in Japanese, too. Totally in character, but that's such a staple of 90's localization.

It's incredibly funny to me that the Wufei is responsible for both kicking off the Char's Counterattack portion of Gundam Wing by effectively staging a false flag attack for Milliardo because he's having a Category 5 Muh Justice moment, and then also completely ruins Milliardo's plans by actually killing Treize. Both because it's funny to be responsible for both parts of that, and also because, again, he's the one who pointed out to all the other boys that they got finessed into killing the Alliance brass.

Speaking of which, what the fuck was up with Wufei's cult of suicidal ascetic monks? Were they the only people onboard that colony? Did they murder millions of innocents for Wufei's (what can charitably be referred to as) "chararacter development"?

Duo calling himself "the God of Death" really takes on the energy of someone trying to force a nickname on themselves, especially the way that absolutely no one else ever acknowledges it. It gets even more laughable when he refers to the Gundam scientists as "the Gods of Plague". You don't have a Four Horsemen thing going on, dude!

Heero Yuy should never ever be portrayed with eyes this soft ever. Deeply unsettling.

IN CONCLUSION:

"Frustrating" is definitely the word for Gundam Wing, as far as I'm concerned. For a little bit there, I was comparing it to Angel Links, and re-reading that post, I think a lot of what I said about it also applies here. The difference is that when Wing tries to swings big more often, and in doing so, it will occasionally succeed. The trade off, then, is that the hackish lifting of entire Universal Century storylines with worse execution looks even worse. I don't think I would ever really recommend it to anyone- you're better off checking out literally any of the Universal Century Gundam stories- but if someone were hellbent on it, I don't think I'd go out of my way to ward them off, either.

But wait, I shouldn't be doing an "In Conclusion" section, because I'm not done yet!

Next up: the conclusion to the Gundam Wing experience, Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz! My impression, based on what I've heard, is that even people who are out-and-out Wing haters think Endless Waltz is alright, so I'm holding out hope that this will be all of the stuff I liked about Wing and none of what I didn't.

Considering this one's a movie, and only 90 minutes at that, I don't think it'll take quite as long as my previous two Gundam Wing write-ups.

At least I fucking hope not.

#Gundam #Mobile Suit Gundam #Mobile Suit Gundam Wing #Gundam Wing #anime #The Big Gundam Watch #long post

[guys-in-distress-database]

The GID Awards: Live Action Television

For our next category, we have the crowd-pleasing, most popular medium for GID: live action television.

Being in the community, I have certainly learned that live action television is the favourite of most people and while it's certainly not my favourite, I can definitely see why. There is a bias toward live action scenes in general and between film and tv, television is more reliable for consistent scenes. It seems there's always some show airing that has scenes, which makes it honestly hard to keep up with them.

There are a few shows that usually come to mind when thinking of an overabundance of good GID. While I do acknowledge the impact Supernatural has had on GID (and how the people involved seem ACTIVELY aware that they are feeding people's kinks), my choice is ultimately:

The 100

This one is HEAVILY influenced by personal preference, I will admit up front. I find the guys in The 100 quite attractive and I mean... just look at it! Someone behind the scenes clearly has some preferences, shall we say.

I've gone on about it before, so it's probably no surprise that Jasper's scene in season 1 is my favourite in the show. I had a crush on Devon Bostick when I was younger, so you can imagine my excitement when I found out he was bound and gagged. His acting in the scene is fantastic, particularly the expressions. Also that gag was SOAKED. It's really rare to see that and I appreciated the realism.

Admittedly, I've never actually watched more than a few episodes of the show, so I can't speak too well to how the bondage works within the story. From what I've seen, I think the creation of 90% of the show's conflict was: person gets captured, and I can honestly admire that.

This one is my choice because it's just really good bondage and I don't need any further justification!

Honourable Mentions

Some other notable live action tv shows I considered for this award:

Supernatural (I don't think I need to explain it)

Duel (for stakes and number of scenes)

Riverdale (for clearly fuelling people's kinks)

The Walking Dead (for lots of cleave gags)

#the GID awards #live action television #whump #GID

[lo-diehards]

NBC's Law & Order Franchise -- A Franchise in Disarray

NBC's Law & Order franchise (which started with the original series in 1990) has seen numerous changes over the years, but in this post-COVID-19 era of television, some of these new changes are not for the good.

The Law & Order 2022 reboot is lacking what made it's original run legacy television, Special Victims Unit lost a beloved show runner/executive producer (Warren Leight who decided the leave at the end of season 23) and cast member (Kelli Giddish, who was fired at the start of season 24, which later resulted in controversy as details of her firing came to light), and Organized Crime which has had a revolving door of show runners/executive producers since it's inception BEFORE it even made it to air.

I'm going to start in sequential order in which negative change [IN MY OPINION] came into play with this once beloved TV franchise that was once taglined by critics and press as "Must See TV/Most Watched Television"

Please Click the read more tab below to read my thoughts on the brand and what I feel can be done to correct the course of the brand, before it's too late... hang on to your seats!

Law & Order: Organized Crime (2021-present, season 3) - a Disorganized Mess.

The Christopher Meloni led series has had numerous complications behind the scenes since the show's inception pre-production. Chicago P.D.'s Matt Olmstead co-created the show with Dick Wolf (and later Ilene Chaiken) and Olmstead left the production after the pilot ("What Happens in Puglia") to be replaced by Chaiken (of The L Word fame). Law & Order: OC never started with much of a premise and a way to establish itself as it started with Stabler mostly bringing Kathy Stabler's killers (the Wheatley's: portrayed by Dylan McDermott and Tamara Taylor) to justice. And in between that, Stabler and the unit going in and out of undercover assignments. The Organized Crime Control Bureau has never really been fleshed out since the series start; season 3 brought some new detectives into the fold to assist with that but storylines in the serialized series have been all over the place.

While Organized Crime was meant to distance itself from the formula of the Law & Order brand, it doesn't feel like a Law & Order show - it feels more like the Stabler show to where we mostly see Stabler as IMO this almost vigilante cop seeking retribution, in this day and age (and Stabler's because he should definitely be matured from this kind of mindset), it doesn't work. This show lacks "the Law & Order feel" (title cards don't even exist in this show except for one episode, "Gimmie Shelter") and I believe it's why the series doesn't hold audience much as SVU or even the rebooted mothership.

It doesn't help that the show is now on it's 6th show runner, being SVU's David Graziano (who is surrounded by a controversy of his own that seems to be being pushed under the rug and ignored by higher ups at the network and at Wolf Entertainment). Olmstead, Chaiken, Barry O'Brien, Bryan Goluboff from SVU, Sean Jablonski and now Graziano. What ever is going on behind the scenes at OC needs to come to a full stop otherwise this show won't make it to syndication status (5 seasons, 100 episodes). This show has a super talented cast that deserve the best; Danielle Moné Truitt and Ainsley Sieger absolutely shine!

Law & Order (reboot 2022-present, season 2) - more like crash & burn.

Now this show is really pushing my buttons and it's only because of how the stories are being written for this reboot starting from the very first episode. Dick Wolf and the network decided to give the mothership it's very much deserved second chance (it never should have been canceled) and they've managed to put together a stellar cast out of Jeffery Donovan (Burn Notice), Hugh Dancy (Hannibal), Odelya Halevi, and Camryn Manheim. Sam Waterston returned as Jack McCoy and this season Mehcad Brooks (Supergirl, Necessary Roughness) replaced Anthony Anderson who only opted to do one season.

I'm not going to sugar coat this, making Rick Eid (who 'developed' a show that was already developed once back in 1988/1990 when he was still in grade school - it's a reboot where nothing has changed formula wise!) the show runner/EP over this series is a very poor business decision. Eid has had a poor history within the Law & Order franchise itself. He was part of a writing team that Dick Wolf and the network had to intervene and dismiss back in 2007 due to declining ratings on mother ship due to the decline in the quality of the writing at that time, Wolf made him show runner over Law & Order: SVU's 18th season and Eid "had to move on [to Chicago P.D.]", basically for the same reason. The. Same. Reason. It's a case of "Fool me once, fool me twice," we're on the 3rd now.

From the minute "The Right Thing" hit the airwaves, I knew it was 2007/2016 all over again! The reboot storylines are tone-deaf, have massive plot holes, pull directly from the headlines without much deviance, skew to certain political leanings (hard left and right) and is shoved into the faces of viewers, and problems with legal strategy that actually go against the actual law and procedures that wouldn't even wash in an actual courtroom (and yes I am aware it's work of fiction but that is why they have legal advisors on the payroll - or at least I hope).

And the characters? Caricatures. I can't really root for any of them - Samantha Maroun & Jalen Shaw (Halevi & Brooks who are great) are the closet ones who are actually being fleshed out as characters that can be relatable/likable. Cosgrove and Price need work bad! Cosgrove is basically a more hard-core Elliot Stabler with a thick Bronx accent in one episode and then another episode he's a young Lennie Briscoe/Michael Westen from Burn Notice mix; it's not consistent. Most seem to prefer him portraying Cosgrove in a Michael Westen-ish style as opposed to Stabler 2.0 (if that's the case swap Donovan and Meloni).

Nolan Price? I don't know where to start. Who is Nolan Price? I don't know honestly but I can tell you he is NOT a great prosecutor. He's no Mike Cutter, McCoy or even Ben or Peter Stone. Price is written just as inconsistent as Cosgrove is and the cases as they make it to court and trial make Price worse, because it seems ambition and wanting to win is the only thing this character has. "Bias" that just aired showcased Price as a colleague was murdered and he had a personal investment in the case. He should have be recused and maybe even suspended due to his misconduct. And Price's arrogance in this episode, telling Jack McCoy that he let him run with the case because "I'm the best." I love Hugh Dancy and he's a magnificent actor but this writing is hurting this role for him in my view.

And speaking of McCoy, where the hell is he? I understand Sam Waterston can't do what he was doing back in 2007 in the courtroom scenes and he is the district attorney but my goodness, his scenes "lack meat" now, it's all bone. Jack says something pithy about the case, yells a little, and walks out his office/elevator/outside. Eid said in an interview that he wanted McCoy to walk in the shoes of Adam Schiff (Steven Hill), if that's the case Schiff was way more involved in his prosecutors cases and had more say in the direction the cases go. Again, it goes back to the writing.

Unlike on OC, Law & Order could use a show runner change, and it could use it ASAP, because what's airing as quality in this reboot is tarnishing the legacy that the original mothership established.

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999-present, season 24) - what is going on behind the scenes and on screen is especially heinous.

Warren Leight's departure last year was the catalyst, however Kelli Giddish's firing was the irresistible force slamming the immovable object - so to speak. Kelli Giddish was fired in place of Wolf/NBC wanting younger blood (Molly Burnett, Days of our Lives); not even a year prior Wolf/NBC faced a form of backlash after dropping two cast members of color - Demore Barnes and Jamie Gray Hyder - in exchange for one male (Octavio Pisano). Star Mariska Hargitay tried to step in to keep Kelli on the show but she was overruled by Wolf and the network.

Meanwhile something that hasn't been overruled but more overlooked; new show runner David Graziano's prior and current accusations of bullying, misogyny, and toxic behavior on sets and behind the scenes of show's he's worked on, including SVU. Graziano took to his Instagram to try and 'explain' his accusations but he did not deny them. How can you write and supervise any kind of story about women's empowerment, healing after trauma and sexual assault, inclusiveness, and justice as someone who has/is doing personal actions against that very stance? And how can Dick Wolf and NBC over look it? Money talks in short. He's also running OC for the last 3 episodes in this season.

That aside which is problematic of itself, like the mother ship, the storylines on SVU have taken a turn sideways. Season 24 started off pretty solid, it wasn't the best it's been in it's prime and younger years (S3-7, and again S13-17), but it was passable to view. Now? Post-Kelli Giddish it seems like the focus is on Muncy (Burnett), Velasco (Pisano) and the recurring guest cast (Kevin Kane and Jasmine Batchelor); ICE T and Peter Scanavino's screen time is noticeably decreased this season than season's past. And like mothership's storylines, inconsistency is on display in full view.

Under Graziano in his first 6 episodes (Gimmie Shelter is written by Rick Eid and Gwen Sigan as part of the season premiere crossover) were the solid ones, even before Kelli's last episode I felt a change in tone coming into play; and coming off of the season's Bronx trilogy its even more noticeable. It's like it's a mix of Eid's season 18 and some other show that's NOT SVU. The focus has gone off of the survivors, veteran characters, the pursuit of the worst criminal offenders, the pursuit of justice and the unit itself. SVU has gone off of the rails and if they want this show to continue to break records and preserve the legacy that it has both on and off screen, they better make some changes fast. SVU's ratings haven't exactly decreased but all this 'change' could soon have a negative impact on them; SVU's dominate the entire franchise right now as a show that's consistently been on air for 24 years now in a changing TV landscape.

In summary/my suggestion(s): the Law & Order franchise needs to undergo some major changes behind the scenes, starting with the gentlemen running these shows. I don't directly want to call for the dismissal of show runners/executive producers Rick Eid and David Graziano (certainly from SVU) but I do feel this is the start absent them being given a different set of marching orders that they should follow (not likely). The issues I brought up above only touch the surface, I don't want to sound nit-picky but things could and should be better.

This franchise is 33 years old and still going, and it could go longer and further but if there aren't any immediate changes that make an impact and turn things around, and the shows keep going about as they are: this franchise won't be around much longer. "The Story Is Everything" is what Dick Wolf has said about the L&O brand and NBC even used that as a tagline during the prime years on the network 2003-2007. That's where the investment needs to start.

#Law & Order #Law & Order: SVU #Law & Order: Organized Crime #Law & Order: OC #Organized Crime #L&O #SVU #Law & Order: Special Victims Unit #NBC #Mariska Hargitay #Christopher Meloni #Sam Waterstoon #Hugh Dancy #Mehcad Brooks #David Graziano #Rick Eid #Dick Wolf #Peacock

[harocat]

(prev anon here. First of all, thank you very much for their sources! It definitely made a bit more at peace. Second, I am very sorry if this goes very long, or if it makes you uncomfortable (feel free to ignore this if it does, I am just kind of venting))

Okay so basically. I finished yoi like a couple of weeks ago and I was so giddy with happiness! (Though there were a few things I could have wished went differently, overall it was such a pleasant, feel good show) HOWEVER I made the mistake of searching for meta on tumblr because I wanted to see what other interpretations were. Because I came across a lot (and I mean A Lot) of posts form when the show aired (2016-18) about people either being disappointed by it being a queerbait/ multiple posts saying it was y//a/o/i fetishizing everything/about how it was just a generally shitty/mediocre show and that it's fandom was delusional or whatever and like. On one hand I do understand that the rep isn't perfect, and that there were various fandom drama that resulted in the wank (namely the crunchyroll award thingy, kubo's confusing interviews(?)) But also it's just. I was obviously not there so I still do not know the full context and it was all OVER years ago and presently, the show is mostly remembered by people with love and nostalgia. But now, I guess I just read too many negative comments about it and I just. Am very upset since I feel like I've lost the happiness the show gave me when I first watched it? I just don't know how to or what to do to like. Not take them seriously?? Obviously people have different opinions, they HAD different opinions but it also feels very draining to read something very, very negative about something you are emotionally connected to. On my first watch, I was almost 100% sure victuuri were canon? (Especially with Yuuri saying he's going to show his love to the world multiple times, and just. The whole show with every episode) and on one hand I get that people wished they could get explicit confirmation, an on screen kiss without it being hidden and everything but I just. I feel so confused and low-key stressed about this, especially since I KNOW all of this discourse is in the past and the fandom doesn't really have any of it now?? And it's been seven years since everything happened and it's over!! But. I just. I saw you've been here right form the start and I really wanted to know if you really had any advice (in lack of a better word) on how to just get over all of this? (Again: please ignore this ask if this is kind of out of nowhere because I am *this* close to chickening out and not sending it fjdgd. But I think I really need to talk about this and put it down because it's bothering me too much:( )

OKAY this is super long. tl;dr corporations and some fans are evil and homophobic, Kubo and Sayo are queens, and YOI is and always will be 100% canon gay.

First and foremost the main reason that the show is remembered largely fondly now and that all those meta about it being queerbait and all are ignored now is because 90% of them were bad faith criticism. There were a fair amount of people who REALLY hated this show, and most of their reasons were pretty petty (seriously I remember them calling themselves the YOI salt squad? lmao)! And they wrote really disingenuous meta that has not stood the test of time because of that. So I know it may be hard and some of their posts might get to you, but do your best to ignore them. They're not done in good faith. They're not done because these people legitimately care about representation. Most of them were done because a show they didn't like was popular and was being heralded as very special. There was actually even a big anti-Kubo movement on 2chan Japan that aimed to basically destroy the popularity of her work and of YOI by doctoring fake tweets, making accusations of plagiarism, etc. Mind, this was not just because of YOI. Before YOI, Kubo did a popular radio show with her best friend, who is one of the most famous trans women in Japan, Mineko Nomachi. She also occasionally discussed lgbtq+ rights in the workplace. You can imagine this annoyed the very conservative users of 2chan.

Secondly, one thing that caused issues in the fandom was mistranslations. There were two translators famous for taking interviews with the creators and basically 'no homo-ing' them. If you ever see translations floating around from Tora on Ice or K@rice, please just ignore them. Even the translations they did that weren't inaccurate, it's not worth digging through the mistranslations to find them. The problem with this ended up being that their mistranslations upset A LOT of people. People ended up really heartbroken over them because YOI and Victuuri meant a lot to them, and though it's mostly ebbed by now, there's still some damage caused by their homophobia.

Just to give perspective, K@rice said that if Victuuri were ever 'confirmed canon' (because according to her, despite making out and getting engaged they weren't canon), she would sell her blu-rays and leave the fandom. Well, I don't know if she sold her blu-rays, but when Otsuka said that quote I linked in the previous ask, where he used the indisputably romantic word 'renai', she did make a post about how 'disappointed' she was and never talked about YOI again. Both of them had a history of doing this in canonically lgbtq+ fandoms before, and have continued to do it in other fandoms since. But yeah, they caused a lot of damage.

Next up, CENSORSHIP.

When Sayo Yamamoto pitched YOI, she couldn't find a studio to take the project on. Although she was considered somewhat of an auteur, neither of the anime she'd made before were hits, and she was trying to sell a show that no one thought that would be popular. Studios that were interested in the project suggested she make it about teenagers in a high school club, which she refused to do. She brought Kubo on to help, and eventually they were able to get Mappa to take the project. At the time Mappa was considered an experimental studio that took on really creative, inventive projects that other studios might consider too risky. Otsuka (Mappa's second in command) at the time thought the show could be a hit, but probably not many other people felt the same. Indeed, there was almost zero buzz for the show before it aired in Japan. They always do big polls for most anticipated anime of the season, and YOI didn't even rank in fall 2016.

So Sayo and Kubo wanted it to be a romance, but Avex (the parent company above Mappa) didn't want this. She had to push for it, and she said that 'all parties' tried to stop her from putting the kiss in, but she insisted. To note, as a woman in the anime industry without any popular shows under her belt, this is hugely badass of her. She and Kubo both could have lost their jobs and lost control of the show they wanted to make so easily. She would NOT compromise. It was amazing of her.

YOI comes out and ends up being like... the biggest hit ever in both Japan and internationally, but while Mappa is pretty happy to embrace the gay (which you see with all the merchandise they directly produce; it's very overtly romantic), Avex gets cold feet (I'm assuming BECAUSE it's so popular). They want this to be a super marketable franchise, but because they are stupid they don't grasp that the romance is part of what makes it that. They stop doing a bunch of magazine spreads of just Victor and Yuuri looking romantic, and start shoving Yurio in there as an awkward third wheel. They try to market the series as a cast of bishounen where you 'pick your fave boy' instead of focusing on what fans are wanting. It's all very messy.

And then, this might not be Avex's fault, but magazine publishers get in on the censorship. In order for YOI art to be accepted in these magazines, they force Mappa artists to remove the rings from Victor and Yuuri's fingers. Although this at first is excused by fans because 'well the rings are spoilers', by a few months post series, fans begin to outcry, and even Japanese fans are growing very angry. One Mappa artist comes forward after the spread she drew is criticized for lack of rings, and says 'she never would have left them off, and that they were there when she submitted the art.' And this is how fans find out what's happening. This happens again when YOI animation director Noriko Ito expresses surprise that the design page for the rings is not included in the YOI setting book released by a publisher, because she knows it was supposed to be in there. The publisher removed it. Later art, as in post 2018, has more often featured the rings, but there's so little of that art that it's hard to know if it would be a permanent thing if YOI ever continued. Plus, that art has been specifically for YOI collabs and merch as opposed to magazine spreads.

After that we find out that Kubo and Sayo are being censored in interviews. Please don't criticize Kubo for being 'vague.' She did the best she could in a situation where she wasn't allowed to talk super explicitly about the romance. We know for a fact that when Kubo and Sayo were interviewed, Avex SPECIFICALLY told interviewers that they were 'not allowed to be asked questions about lgbtq+ aspects of the series.' I know! It's so upsetting. We also found out that Kubo and Sayo brought character designer Tadashi Hiramatsu on the project because they did not think they were being taken seriously as a team of two women (no hate on Hiramatsu though, he's amazing and he totally loves YOI). Avex didn't believe in YOI as a romance, even after it proved so successful. It's the saddest thing on earth.

So the end conclusion is that Kubo, Sayo, and yes Mappa (though I have plenty of criticisms of them now) were pretty cool about YOI. Kubo and Sayo pushed for and wrote a gay romance into a sports anime, something that had never been done before, at constant risk of losing their job and status in the industry. They were badasses and they're both writing heroes of mine because of that, and it actually makes me love YOI more knowing how much they cared and how much they were willing to risk to tell the story they wanted to tell, that of a romance between Victor and Yuuri. And it is a romance, indisputably so, and anyone who disagrees is frankly giving them a slap in the face.

#anonymous #yuri on ice

[briangroth27]

A Fandom 30 Years in the Making

Two weeks ago on June 11, my favorite movie of all time turned 30! Let’s talk about Jurassic Park!

I’ve heard it said that this was the Star Wars of my generation–the movie that showed Millennials what movies could be–and that’s 100% true for me. This was formative in both my love of movies & my taste in them: I’ll always believe a crowd-pleasing blockbuster adventure with heart & brains can be just as impactful & important as traditional Oscar fare. JP is the kind of movie that makes me want to make movies, which is the highest compliment I can give. Even before I realized writing & filmmaking are what I want to do for real, it helped stoke my imagination when I’d invent new adventures for my toys.

Jurassic Park was one of my earliest experiences seeing a film in the theater; not the first, but definitely one of the most impactful. My family didn’t see a lot of movies in the theater–Friday nights at Blockbuster (paired with Dominos!) & TV airings were my avenue into most films back then–but seeing Jurassic Park when I was 7 is still one of the most vivid memories of my youth.

JP came out in the early days of my experience with fandoms; when things hit for me they hit BIG. I recall being excited about Happy Meal tie-in toys & promotions for movies before Jurassic Park (going back at least as far as Dick Tracy & Rescuers Down Under; Rescuers was actually the first movie I saw in theaters), but Jurassic Park was–along with the Batmania of Batman Returns the previous year–one of the first true blockbuster experiences I got wrapped up in and obsessed with. Batman (the films & the Animated Series), X-men the Animated Series, Spider-man the Animated Series, Power Rangers, Star Trek the Next Generation, & Goosebumps were some of the other massive fandoms of my youth: I had to have everything related to them and was blessed (& probably a little spoiled) by relatives who obliged. Jurassic Park stood out even among those though, because even in pre-streaming days I had fairly constant access to the shows & movies I loved: VHS copies of older movies like Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Superman, Back to the Future, and weekly TV episodes kept me regularly engaged with my favorite characters. I had a general fascination with dinosaurs beforehand, but Jurassic Park was a singular experience that was just as earth-shattering as any of those franchises. I only saw it once in theaters in 1993, but I immediately loved it and reenacted the jokes & one-liners more times than I can count. Sure I watched the VHS a ton later on, but for it to have such an impact on me without preexisting build-up & hype or familiarity with the characters is pretty impressive.

After seeing it, I remember trying to collect the McDonalds cups (eBay has since helped me out!), reading the junior novelization & original book in the car while my parents drove me & my little sister around, and playing with action figures that took liberties with a few characters’ likenesses & had oddly intensely battle-damaged dinosaurs in the Command Center Playset. I remember the branded school supplies (maybe my first experience recognizing production/promo images that weren’t in the final movie), stopping my mom in the electronics section of Wal-Mart to watch the first T-Rex attack scene on the display TVs, seeing the dinos on covers of Disney Adventures magazine, and playing as Dr. Grant (& a Raptor!) in the Sega Genesis video game. Years later I worked at Universal Orlando and it was still a thrill to walk through the Jurassic section of Islands of Adventure with the iconic theme on repeat, ride a water attraction only briefly referenced in the background of the movie, wish I could ride the Pteranodon Flyers, meet a raptor, and explore the Visitor’s Center!

Disregarding the careless science and horrific deaths, Jurassic Park still makes me wish a place like that existed (obviously a safe version…clearly I’ve learned nothing haha). If it were real I’d absolutely go, even if I’d only be able to afford it on Coupon Day. Can we at least get a video game that lets you visit, explore, & survive the park on the ground instead of just building it? Let me play as Park Operations (like that excellent demo Universal shut down), a park guest caught in the terror, and a dinosaur too!

Despite how much I love it, I can admit Jurassic Park isn’t technically perfect (no movie is!). There’s a literal plothole–that T-Rex paddock ravine comes out of nowhere!–but plot holes don’t matter & I don’t care that the ravine isn’t established before Grant & the kids flee into it. The movie is better for it. Likewise, there are plot threads that don't get tied up neatly and only display character or pay off themes & theories rather than tying into the narrative: the triceratops illustrates Ellie, Alan, & others’ character while the nest Alan & the kids find proves Ian correct, and both moments show us how little control & understanding Hammond & his team ever had (which also proves Ellie right). And sure, Tim could've grabbed the shotgun for Alan instead of watching Lex figure out the computer, but that's a character panicking, not a plot hole. Some might call these moments messy, but none of it is distracting or damaging to the movie.

Even with these technical “flaws,” Jurassic Park is perfect. I love the mix of wonder, adventure, horror, found family, humor, & sci-fi social commentary at play. It’s a fantastic balance masterfully pulled off by Steven Spielberg, David Koepp, and all the actors (who will forever be Alan Grant, Ian Malcolm, Ellie Satler, etc to me). The mix of practical puppetry & CGI is still mind-blowing, the characters are well-crafted & the actors have excellent chemistry, the pacing is superb, and John Williams’ score is one of my top 5 movie themes of all time.

I went back and saw it twice in theaters for the 25th anniversary, making JP the movie I’ve seen most in theaters (I know 3 times isn’t anything compared to some people, but even pre-pandemic when I was going to the theater almost every week I didn’t have the time or money to see anything more than once). And I love that I’m still finding new things in it! As I learned more about filmmaking, I recognized that the character intros are a master class in brilliantly & succinctly telling you exactly what you need to know about every one of these people. Despite never kissing onscreen, Alan & Ellie’s body language & how comfortable they are touching each other (there are even some literal “hold on to your butts” moments in their early scenes) gives more evidence that they were at least friends with benefits if not full-on dating (I always got the impression they were together, & I totally disagree with the discourse from last year that she was his subordinate or significantly younger than him in the movie: even though Laura Dern is much younger than Sam Neill he looks young enough that the characters could be relatively the same age, she acts & is treated as the co-lead of their dig–& she’s got a doctorate too so she’s not a grad student or anything–and you can see how Alan actually does relate to a subordinate in Jurassic Park 3). I’ve seen Nedry’s clothes called out as recreations of the Goonies kids’ attire and that’s fun, but to me it’s cleverer that Tim wears the kid version of his hero Dr. Grant’s outfit. I love the little moment where Hammond (“accidentally?”) puts the map down on Ian’s injured leg when they’re guiding Ellie through the power station. Hammond also mutters a line when the storm is approaching about how he should’ve built in Orlando which was cool to hear since I grew up around there, but is really another example of how he has no idea how to control or escape nature since tropical storms hit Central Florida a lot too.

None of the sequels have lived up to Jurassic Park, but I still enjoy them all (Camp Cretaceous did the best job of recapturing the feel of the original IMO). A problem I had going into Dominion was that I didn’t want either humans or dinosaurs to go extinct, so trying to wrap up this saga in some final battle for dominance was never going to fly for me. Locusts weren’t the answer either, but just give me a streaming show about life in a world with widespread dinos and we’re set. That’s how I want to see this franchise grow: a wide variety of episodes exploring all genres from Espionage to RomCom to body horror to Amblin-styled "kid sneaks a dinosaur into their room" family fare, exploring how life finds many different ways. They could also catch up with classic characters and explore the implications of dinosaurs in any modern setting as well as dig into the misuse of cloning technology & effects of capitalism on scientific advancement without feeling pressured to put a narrative bow on it!

Regardless of where the franchise goes in the future, every time I watch the original I’m immediately swept up and I’m a kid again. “It’s…it’s a dinosaur!” will make me tear up with joy. Every one-liner will land. The T-Rex and Raptor attacks will have me on the edge of my seat. John Hammond failed to create an authentic spectacle he could control with the park, but everyone involved in this movie absolutely created real magic.

#jurassic world #jurassic park #jurassic june #dinosaurs #life finds a way #welcome to jurassic park #alan grant #ian malcolm #ellie sattler #john hammond #t rex #raptors #dilophosaurus #dennis nedry #steven spielberg #david koepp #universal studios

[justanotherfanaccount]

A play-by-play of the live action Avatar

Episode 1

SPOILERS (obviously)

Daaannngg CGI is good

Who is this guy?

Ohhhh it's a flashback...totally knew that (he in fact did not know that)

KYOSHIIIIIII

I kinda love that we get to see all the air nomads 🥺

...aang can fly? ...that's a huge thing that he can't do for a reason hold up...maybe he's just gliding a lot?

Aang is so cute 🥺 just a little baby

I love that we get to see aang learning he's the avatar and seeing him with gyatso

"Keep pretending I'm your friend" "I am your friend" don't mind me crying 😭😭

APPA YOU'VE ARRIVED

"Monks don't even trust me to feed the baby bison" that's so aang love that for him

This kid is such a good actor for saying this monologue to Appa who is probably some giant blue thing in reality

So far the worst CGI is Appa (which I think is kinda funny)

Is it gonna show the genocide!? AHHHH NO THAT'S TOO PAINFUL

"brothers, sisters were under attack!" If that doesn't show you how peaceful they are 😭

Omg I hope gyatso doesn't believe aang abandoned them in their time of need

THESE AIRBENDERS ARE SUCH BADASSES

...this is brutal... Netflix definitely changed the "no deaths on screen" policy. I'm just watching people get burned to a crisp

I know what happened and I'm crying seeing Gyatso protect all the kids 😢

(This is really good so far... I'm enjoying it)

AVATAR AANG LETS GOOOOO

100 years later

*said in SpongeBob voice*

"Sulk later paddle now" there's the sokka sass

(Also I like how they haven't stated that it's been 100 years cuz I feel like they're gonna make it a big reveal)

RIP sexist sokka causing katara to release aang 😔😔 we'll miss your character arc

Zuko looks so tiny next to the other fire benders hehehe

KATARA WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?! (jk I know)

I love how dramatic aang looked just for him to slide down the hill

"Mysterious little bald person" hahhahah yeesss

YOU LEFT APPPPAAAAA

Irohhhh I love yoouuuu (all he did was show up)

APPA thank goodness

Sokka stepping behind katara was perfect

Not gran gran saying the theme 🤭 I can't even take it seriously

I feel like gran gran isn't dramatic enough. Give me that SHOCK factor.

Don't make fun of zuko BITCH 😡

"Are you okay?" ...no katara...he's not okay

"Guess he had to grow up fast" yes 🥺 he did...my baby

Yes zukoooo get that fire

"A nice cup of jasmine tea" 😌

"You're wrong" ...he's not wrong baby but I understand...it'll take a while

"I'm a warrior I should be able to do more for our people" I love her 🥺

Das not good (referring to the fire nation)

Dang gran gran knows everything

I kinda like angry sokka 👀 I feel like he's gonna have a good character arc

"I am sokka" > "hi there, zuko here" pipeline

Aang baby whatchu doing watching sokka get beat up

...spoke too soon lol

THE ROCKS LETS GOOOO CHILD WARRIORS sokka looks like a proud dad 🥺

"I think you're the bravest person I've ever met" 😭 sokkas face when he said that

"Let's go save that weird kid" heck yeah sokka!!!

"Myself included" love the honesty iroh hahhah

"Is that what you believe?" No answer is an answer iroh 👀

I love how none of them have ever dealt with an airbender before so they have no idea how to deal with him

"There's no way you're getting me on that- AHHHHH" is the most sokka thing yet I laughed out loud

HIS GLIDER LET'S GOOOO (I know that's in the og but i never know what they're gonna change so I'm gonna continue getting excited over little things)

Zuko is so concerned 😟 his face literally says 'that's my only hope getting away'

"Hey kid!" YES SOKKA LOVE YOU

KATARA YES YOU DID THAT!! HECK YEAH MOTHER FUCKER (...pardon my language)

Aang not going into the avatar state is kinda cool cuz you got to see katara be a badass

"So where do we go?" My brain immediately went "do you want to go penguin sledding with me!?"

...well this is way sadder than penguin sledding

On another note aangs tattoo is so cool...i.love the patterns in it

Gyatso 😭😭😭 NOOOOO

This must be so hard for him cuz in aangs mind he just saw everyone YESTERDAY

AVATAR STATE AANG

Don't mind me I'm just crying

That was very emotional...I was not prepared even though I should've been

I'm glad sokka still had some comic relief in him...I was really worried

Aang keeping gyatsos necklace (??) 😭

Showing zuko during aangs speech was good 👀

I love how dramatic it is but i hope they still put in some of the silliness from the original show

Overall I enjoyed it though!! I was really nervous so it went a lot better than I anticipated I'm not gonna lie

#avatar the last airbender #atla #atla live action #avatar the last airbender live action #atla la #aang #atla epiosde 1 #atla play by play