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#plot drop arc one part two

xerith-42 · 3 months

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Some things we may have forgotten

I've been rewatching MCD and taking extensive notes on it in hopes that I'll never have to watch it again and this is just a list of things that I don't see mentioned or brought up very often/ever that we should talk about and think about more

In the first episode Garroth tries to attack Vylad (angst potential) and Vylad literally just combat locks him by logging out of the game. This is objectively funny and should not be rewritten in any capacity. This should be canon as it is in every universe.

Aphmau's cat Meowki gets randomly killed in Episode 12 by a skeleton while Kiki is right upstairs. Just saying, there's some angst potential there.

In episode 11 Garroth reveals that he knows some medicine. Pretty sure this is never brought up again, but we could always bring it up.

Logan is apparently good with a bow while Zenix is trash at it despite being a self proclaimed "expert archer" which I think is very funny (I know this is part of Zenix's cover but what if we took it seriously it would be so funny)

Zoey is originally from the river village, as is Donna. Pretty sure they retcon that for Zoey, but I like to think the two of them could have been friends before Phoenix Drop.

Garroth actually almost dies in episode 15. Like Dr. Doctor says he will probably die soon at the start of the episode. And he doesn't get healed until episode 20. He literally spends 5 episodes laid up in bed dying.

Brendan's at his side probably angsting the entire time I'm just saying if you want sad gay fanfics, it's sitting right there!

Azura and Garroth were friends as kids??? Hello???? I think this is just a massive plot hole considering what Garroth's actual backstory ends up being asjfgshjdfgjk

Okay but if we twist it a little bit, they were friends as kids as in like at the guard academy??? Bc they're like vaguely teenage/young adult so maybe that's what she means? In which case I wanna think about that more because childhood friends to lovers is one of my favorite romance arcs ever. But is it really childhood friends if you met when you were like... 18?? And you're in your like mid to late twenties probably, I wouldn't really classify that as childhood friends.

WAIT IT GETS WORSE!

I don't... I don't even have a joke here, this is just a massive plot hole. Like all of this is just not true to Garroth's backstory as we know it. Grew up in the same village? You mean O'Khasis?? Where Garroth also FAKED HIS DEATH????

I literally don't know what to say to this I was just trying to find silly little facts to try and incorporate into my rewrite and instead I found a massive gaping plot hole

Moving on, in episode 19 when Aphmau confronts Zenix and they fight, he actually apologizes to her. As if he regrets having to hurt her for the sake of his/the Shadow King's goals.

The Lord of Brightport says the Shadow King "used to be a lord". Which like... Okay, I can bend backwards a few ways to say that he could be referring to how Shad started Falcon Claw, but how the fuck does this dude know that??? I feel like Laurance constantly just stumbling into plot holes by complete accident

Dale is apparently a Garmau shipper, going as far as to ask Aphmau if she plans on hooking up with Garroth. I like to think that he and Molly have a bet going for how long it takes for one of the two of them to finally fess up.

Raven's mom tried to eat him??

Okay then.

#minecraft diaries #text post #aphblr #aphverse #garroth ro'meave #laurance zvahl #screenshots #silly post #I just think we need to talk about these more #aphmau #mcd zoey #mcd logan #mcd brendan #mcd kiki #my beloved #this post is a mess #most of my posts are though #it's part of the fun

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alargehunkofdebris · 9 months

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the necessary anguish of the Good Omens 2 finale

Ah ok. So after 4 years of waiting post Season One and ten cumulative years of bookish fannery, I watched bonified New Content of Good Omens. And when those credits rolled, I sat there, not in my expected state of pleasant satisfaction, but in a state of abject shock.

I actually don’t know if I’ve ever had such a reaction to a show before. Or, rather, that I could still have such a reaction. I’m thirty, for goodness sakes – I was planning on being thrilled and charmed and entertained, not having my hands shake so much that it was hard to type a text. I wasn’t planning on losing an entire night of sleep because my heart wouldn’t stop pounding really hard, Neil. This was not expected. I had an estate sale to run the next day – by God, I needed that sleep.

Anyway. These are my thoughts on the season, and on this upswell of mourning/unhappiness at such a gut-wrenching ending. As always, this are my dumb opinions and nothing more; take with a grain of salt, etc.

I have seen a lot of suffering on Tumblr today. Everyone is in pain, and it makes sense. I, too, am in pain. But I might be in the minority, because I thanked God/Mr. Gaiman when things turned to pure pain in the end. Because narratively, despite the anguish we all feel, this is how it needs to be. And I was getting real worried there for a second.

When we have a mini-series (ie, a show with a set number of seasons) it can’t act the same as a series without a set end. We’ve got three potential seasons; therefore, they logically should behave like a three-act play, or the three acts in the standard Western movie/book plot. This middle season is the middle act, the second act. While it definitely doesn’t work exactly the same way, and needs its own story arc to work as a season, it is still functionally the middle part of one overarching plot.

And what usually happens near the end of the second act? All Is Lost, and the Dark Night of the Soul.

We NEED this to happen. This is what makes a plot delicious. If we’d had this perfect, lovely, romantic season where the stakes aren’t raised one bit and everything is fixed at the end, we would want for nothing and the gorgeous tension that keeps us waiting and watching would be lost. We wouldn’t feel that drive to create fanfics and fanart, we wouldn’t have the need to speculate or dream, because most of the tension was eased, and you just can’t have that if you want a highly anticipated third season. We’d have nothing huge and concrete to look forward to.

In fact, I was getting really worried once the Ineffable Bureaucracy started happening on screen, because I could see (I thought) past that bend in the road toward the end. I could see how this season might conclude, with big happy confessions of love and hugs and handholding (that’s all I expected, because I only expected the same chaste level of affection with both angelic/demonic couples) and then…then it’d all be over. What more could there be? I mean, there certainly could be more, but THIS is the main thing people waited for. The Happy Confession. The hug. The handholding. Whatever we got. And in my mind, having it now, at the end of season two, just wasn’t adding up – it did not fit. It couldn’t. No, we can’t have this now. It doesn’t work.

I get this peculiar thing that happens when things start getting too “everything is great!” in a story. I get the “someone needs to die” instinct. Instead of pure happiness that things are going great, there’s this feeling of intense discomfort, because I feel the weight of the shoe that’s failing to drop. I need it to drop, or else it throws off my entire standard-Western-narrative-trained brain’s balance. In the build up to The Scene, when things seem to be going swimmingly and heading directly towards the happiest and syrupiest of endings, I had to pause and pace my living room and roll around on the floor to alleviate the sheer build up of stress. Things can’t go this well. They can’t. There hasn’t been enough bad things, this is too sweet, too much. Can’t handle it. This can’t just be pure wish-fulfillment at this point; Good Omens shouldn’t work that way, it never has. We’d be happy in the moment, but then it’ll ultimately be a let down. No more danger. Nothing keeping them apart. No more tension, no more story. It was all too easy.

And then, finally, that shoe dropped. After a season of mainly getting along and being just thrilled with each other, they began to really argue. Things got horrific and serious, and I literally let out a breath of relief. I was able to watch without pausing every two minutes for a breather. Ok. Things weren’t over. This wasn’t the end. We had more to wait for.

And then it went on. The confession started, but in that gorgeously wrong way. And for the first time that season, I was actually feeling the stress of the story. Yes, there was danger throughout this season, but it was always layered with humour and wit. You didn’t get a demon scene without them doing something hilariously stupid. You didn’t get an angel scene without them being delightfully out-of-touch. The stakes were high, but they weren’t allowed to get EXTREMELY high. We never thought there was any question of them getting out of scrapes unscathed, because it was never all serious.

Never…until now. There was zero humour at this point. After 6 episodes of being pleasantly delighted, I was feeling the dread. However, I still thought I knew where it was going.

See, I thought I had it figured out. If I had any extra money, I would have bet some of it. I knew that, whilst they’d likely have some kind of subtle confession of love and caring, and perhaps a touch – a hug, or a hand-hold (like Gabe and Beez) – I knew we couldn’t expect a kiss. This is a story thirty-three years in the making, and it’s always been in that grey area. They weren’t humans; they didn’t necessarily show affection that way. Besides that, we’ve had so many TV shows that get close, but rarely ones that go all the way to smoochville. OFMD was one of the very first, but it was new. It wasn’t an old, established story from the 90s like this is. It didn’t have decades-old fans waiting with bated breath for canon content. For Good Omens, we heard it time and time again in interviews; it’s a kind of love story. They had this kind of marriage. They cared for each other. They had a bromance. It’s close, but never quite there. So I thought I knew exactly how this would go, and would be thrilled with what we got.

And then it absolutely didn’t go that way. It went exactly as far as so many hoped. And it went there like a knife to the gut.

And it was perfect.

Goddamn, what a season ending. Despite my lack of appetite and failure to sleep, I could not be happier with what Mr. Gaiman did. I am screaming crying throwing up and I’m thrilled about it.

The middle of a story is typically what drags; it never holds the highest stakes. Lord knows what we’re going to get in season three (knocking on wood), but I can only expect it to get bigger and heavier. And by God and/or Satan, am I prepared, in this deliciously painful purgatory, to wait and see.

#good omens #good omens 2 spoilers #go2 spoilers #good omens season 2 #good omens season 2 spoilers #good omens 2 #go2 #gos2 spoilers #gos2 #neil gaiman

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yandereforme · 3 months

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Yan Batfam x Singer! Single mom! Martha lookalike! Reader

( I know it’s a lot but they are all important to the plot)

Part 1:Beginnings and first encounters

You are Bruce’s bio daughter. Your mom, who didn’t know who the father of her kid was, gave you up to your aunt to be raised by them, but you didn’t know until your adoptive parent’s funeral that you weren’t their biological daughter. You had twins recently with a shitty ex of yours who you broke up with not long before the funeral after he tried to hurt your daughter for crying.

After the funeral, where you learn that your bio mom wasn’t sure who your bio dad was, but that she knew he lived in Gotham, you decide to move to Gotham. In part due to your biological father, in part due to avoiding your ex(who had refused to be listed on the birth certificate since you gave birth during a break in your relationship), and in part due to the basically free house your bio mom had owned in Gotham. So, you moved with the twins to an abandoned, slightly dilapidated house just outside of Crime Alley, and got yourself to work.

You got a job at the Ice berg Lounge, in part due to there being an opening, and in part due to you helping two women who worked there who apparently worked right under Mr. Cobblepot?

You quickly got a reputation as a singer with a knack for knowing just what song fit a customer. It was a bit of a game between you and the other workers, where they would point out a person and you would sing a song based on their vibes. You always managed your hit home with your songs, leading to you becoming one of the most popular performers at the Iceberg Lounge.

That’s what leads to Red Hood coming in one night. He had heard about you from a few of his men, and wanted to know what all the hype was about.(This take place after the Red Hood arc, where he has already been established as a crime boss and the Batfamily know his identity, but he hasn’t made up with any of them)

Cobblepot asked you to sing a song for Red, and pointed him out to you. You knew who he was, you were just outside his area, and honestly you kind of liked what he was doing for the community, so you were willing to preform, even offering to sing two songs about him(something you had only done a few times with regulars who you really liked.

Jason accepted. You started off with You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid by The Offspring. You didn’t usually do a lot of rock songs, but that song resonated with you when you looked at him.(Jason loved the song. It was angry but fighting music, and your voice was really good. He understood why so many of his men praised your music(he just couldn’t understand why you looked so familiar))

The next song was different. You didn’t usually sing two songs, and the few times you did, people tended to vary reactions, from shock to anger to accidentally setting off a break down. But you had promised. You just hoped Red Hood wouldn’t hate you for the next song(you didn’t understand why it felt so right to sing the next song, when it didn’t seem like a Red Hood song, but you didn’t want to question it now.)

Then, you sang Good for you by Olivia Rodrigo, and everyone froze. (Jason didn’t know how you knew this anger of his. How did you know how he felt about Bruce replacing him? How did you know?) No one understood the song, especially when the recipient was a murderous crime boss, but they didn’t interrupt.

After you finished the song, you looked at Red Hood. He was sitting ramrod straight. You couldn’t see his face, but his posture was very tense. Slowly, he stood up, and walked to the stage. You didn’t know what you expected, but it wasn’t for him to drop $200 in your tip jar, and leave without a word.(Jason’s head was spinning. The green wasn’t invading, but it surrounded the edges of his vision. He needed to leave. He had to come back again, probably as a civilian, but for now, he needed to leave.)

After that, you got even more visitors, and a raise in your salary. You even made a new friend, Jason, and you were even starting to consider sending your kids to daycare instead of a baby sitter(you wouldn’t do that. You liked your arrangement with the street kids, where you would pay them in food and cash to watch your kids during the day. You liked taking care of them, but they needed to feel like they were doing stuff for you, so you didn’t make a fuss.)

Then, the Joker got out of Arkham.

Edit: I hope you guys enjoy this. This will probably be a series. I’ve had this idea for ages but never got around to it before now. This isn’t related to my Bruce or Jason series, which I will do, but I just wanted to finally put the on here. Please comment any suggestions for the kids names, or what you want to see next!

#yandere #yandere batfam x reader #yandere jason todd #Martha Wayne look alike #daughter reader #singer reader #single mom reader #platonic yandere batfam #platonic yandere

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ladyluscinia · 6 months

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Ok, I think I might be exiting the "are you fucking kidding me?" period and ready to make a real argument, so lets talk about Three Act Structure!

Is OFMD S2 just the "Darkest Hour"?

A very common explanation I've been seeing for some of the... controversial... aspects of S2 is that it's meant to be that way. That the middle act is where the protagonists hit their lowest point. Where we get the big failure point. Where everything looks kind of shit.

S2 is supposedly just that point. It's The Empire Strikes Back. People have been making that comparison since before the first episodes even dropped, telling everyone to expect something that could be disappointing or unsatisfying - it's just a matter of needing to wait for S3 to pull it all together.

It's not a baseless framework to consider the show through - I'm pretty sure David Jenkins has mentioned it in interviews (or at least mentioned he planned for three acts / seasons) so it's certainly worth asking how he's doing at the 2/3rd mark.

So - quick summary of Three Act Structure:

Act 1 introduces our characters and world. It includes the inciting incident of the story and the first plot point, where a) the protagonist loses the ability to return to their normal life, and b) the story raises whatever dramatic question will drive the entire plot. Act 2 is rising action and usually most of the story. The protagonist tries to fix things and fucks them up worse, in the process learning new skills and character developing to overcome their flaws. Act 3 is the protagonist taking one more shot, but this time they are ready. We get the climax of the story, the dramatic question gets an answer, and then the story closes.

If you want examples, the Star Wars Original Trilogy is a very popular template. And, hell, he said it was a pirate story... the main Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy also does a solid job with their three acts.

Let's compare. (Spoiler: I'm not impressed 🤨)

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First thing I need to establish... Wait. Two things. First is that Three Act Structure is flexible, so we can't really analyze success or failure by pulling up a list of necessary plot beats that should have been hit in X order. Second is that if you tell me you are writing a romance with a Three Act Structure - where "the relationship is the story" - the first thing I'm going to do is ask you how you are adapting it. Because while there's not necessarily anything preventing you from applying this to a character driven plot, most people are familiar with it as plot structure for externally driven conflict.

Unless there's a reason the status of the main relationship is intrinsically tied up in the current status of the war against the evil empire, a standard Three Act Structure is going to entail either an antagonistic force that absolutely wants your main couple apart being the main relationship obstacle OR the romance aspect being a subplot to the protagonist's narrative adventure. None of those sound like how the show has been described.

So how is OFMD adapting it?

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Act 1

(Can't figure out how well Act 2 is doing if we don't start at setup.)

Right out the gate, OFMD breaks one of the main "rules" for a story where the Acts are delivered in three parts. Namely the one where the first Act is treated as an acceptable standalone story, with it's own satisfying yet open ended conclusion.

In Star Wars, A New Hope ends with the princess rescued, Luke finding the Force, Han finding his loyalty, and the Death Star destroyed. The Empire isn't defeated, the antagonists still live... the story is not over, but this one movie doesn't feel unfinished.

Similarly, Curse of the Black Pearl gives Jack his ship back, Elizabeth and Will get together, and Norrington has the English Navy let them all off the hook and give Jack and the pirates one day's head start.

OFMD's final beat of S1 being Kraken Arc starting is not that, even if Stede returning to sea is still a pretty hopeful note. Now... I don't necessarily think this was a bad call. At least, not if the story is the relationship. It's easy to close on a happy ending and then fuck it up next movie if the conflict is external and coming for them. Not so much if you're driving the story with your protagonists' flaws, in part because it should be really obvious at the end of setup that your main characters need development and can't run off together right now. I actually like that they were risk-takers and let S1 look at the situation clearly vs doing a fragile happy end, because it takes into account the difference between a character-driven and plot-driven narrative.

I think OFMD's Act 1 actually ends at maybe the Act of Grace? Well, there through the kiss on the beach, counting as our "first plot point" before everything goes wrong, basically.

At that point, they have setup the story and characters. We've been introduced to Edward and Stede's current issues. Signing the Act of Grace does make the intertwined arcs between them real - it's no longer a situation that either one of them could just walk away from like it was in 1x07 - and we narrow in on the (alleged) driving question of the show:

It's not about "Will Stede become a great pirate?" or "Will we develop a better kind of piracy for the crew?" - the show is the relationship and the big question is "What is Stede and Edward's happy ending?"

Act 1 ends on their first solution, being together and making each other happy and admitting it's more than just friendship. Act 2 starts, appropriately, by saying both of them are currently too flawed for that to go anywhere but crashing and burning.

Now... looking back, what does Act 1 do well vs poorly?

I think it's really strong on giving us the foundation for BlackBonnet's characters and flaws. We aren't surprised Stede goes home or Edward goes Kraken (or at least... we weren't supposed to be surprised. There are still a lot of holdouts blaming Izzy for interrupting Edward's "healing" despite how at this point in the story it doesn't make sense for Edward to have the skills to heal... but I digress). The relationship question is compelling at the end of S1, the cliffhanger hooks, and the fandom explosion of fics did not come from nowhere - the audience was invested.

I also think Act 1 does a great job of settling us in the universe. We understand the rules it abides by, from how gay pirates are just a fact of life to how there's no important organs on the left side of the body. Stede has a muppety force field. Rowboats have homing devices, and port is always as close as you want it to be. Scurvy is a joke. The overblown violence of pirate life is mostly a joke, but we are going to take the violence of childhood trauma seriously.

Lucius's fake-out death, while technically part of Act 2, works well because Act 1 did a good job of priming everyone to go "obviously this show wouldn't kill a crew member for shock value, and we're 100% supposed to suspend disbelief about how he could have survived getting flung into the sea in the middle of the night." And we do. And we get rewarded for it.

Regarding antagonists - a big focus of any setup - the show is deliberately weak. The one with the most screentime is Izzy, and he's purposefully ineffective at separating our main couple. Every antagonist is keyed to a particular character, and they function mostly to inform us of that character's flaws and development requirements. The Badmintons tell us about Stede's repression and feelings of inadequacy, and Izzy tells us about Edward's directionless discontent and tendency to avoid his problems. Effectively - the show is taking the stance this will be a character driven narrative where Stede and Edward's flaws are the source of problems and development the solution. No person or empire (or social homophobia) is separating them...

...which leads me to something not present - there nothing really about the struggle of piracy against the Empire. Looking at Curse of the Black Pearl... we see piracy is in danger. The Black Pearl itself is described as the last great pirate threat the British Navy needs to conquer. Hangings are omnipresent - Jack is sentenced to die by one almost as soon as he's introduced to the story, when his only act so far had been to wander around and save Elizabeth from drowning. OFMD tries to invoke this kind of struggle in 2x08, but there's no foundation. Our Navy antagonists are Stede's childhood bullies, and so focused on Stede the crew isn't even in danger when they get caught. The Republic of Pirates is getting jokes about being gentrified, not besieged.

Even the capture of Blackbeard by the Navy is treated as a feather in Wellington's cap but not a huge symbolic blow against piracy... because we just do not have that grand struggle woven into Act 1. You only know the "Golden Age of Piracy" is ending if you google it, or have watched a bunch of pirate shows.

Overall, a solid Act 1, well adapted to the kind of story they've said they were looking to tell - a romance in the (silly-fied) age of piracy, instead of a pirate adventure with a romantic subplot.

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Now, Sidebar - Where is the story going?

The thing about the dramatic question - in OFMD's case: "What is Stede and Edward's happy ending?" - is that a) there's normally more than one question bundled up in that one + sideplots, and b) while you aren't supposed to have the answer yet, you can usually guess what needs to happen to give you the answer.

Back to our examples... Luke's driving question is "Will the Empire be defeated?" Simple. Straightforward. Also: "Will Luke become a Jedi?" The eventual climax of our story from there is pretty obvious... the story is over when Luke wins the war for the Rebellion in a Jedi way. That's the goal that they are working toward.

Pirates of the Caribbean is a bit more complicated. We're juggling more characters and have a less defined heroic journey, but there are driving questions like "Is Jack Sparrow a good man?" and "Is Will Turner a pirate / what does that mean?" and even "Will the British Navy defeat piracy?" They get basic answers in Curse of the Black Pearl, and far more defined ones in At World's End. Still, this is another plot-driven narrative. They've laid the foundations for the Pirates vs Empire struggle, and when that final battle turns into the trilogy climax then you know what's happening.

OFMD is not doing a plot-driven narrative. To judge how they are doing at their goals, we have to ask what they think a happy ending entails in a character sense.

Clearly it's not the classic romantic sideplot, where the climax is the first kiss / acknowledgement of feelings. They've teased a wedding in Word of God comments a lot, so that's probably our better endpoint. Specifically, though, a wedding where both of our protagonists aren't ready to flee from the altar (big ask) and where they've both grown enough that their flaws / mutual tendencies to run away from life problems won't tank the relationship.

In Stede's case it's still massive feelings of inadequacy and being too repressed to talk about his problems. Also he ran away from his family to chase a lifelong dream of being a pirate - "Is Stede going to find fulfillment in being a pirate captain, or will the real answer be love?" Edward meanwhile expresses a desire to quit piracy and retire Blackbeard, but we also find out he's struggling with massive self-loathing and guilt from killing his father - "Is retiring what Edward wants to do, or is he just running away?"

If they are going to get to a satisfying wedding beat at the climax of their story, what character beats do we need to hit in advance?

Off the top of my head - both characters need to self-realize their flaws (a pretty necessary demand of anyone who runs away from problems). They are set up to balance each other well, but also to miscommunicate easily. They have to tell each other about or verbally acknowledge that self-realization so it can be resolved. Stede has to decide how much being a pirate means to him. Edward has to decide if he's retiring and what he wants to do. They both need to show something to do with getting past their childhood traumas given all the flashbacks. Through all this, they also need to hit the normal romance beats that convince the audience they are romantically attracted to each other and like... want to get married.

Oh, and this is more of a genre-specific sideplot, but once they demonstrate a behavior that hurts the people who work for them, they need to then demonstrate later how it won't happen again. Proof of growth, which is kind of important in a comedy where a lot of the humor is based in them being massively self-centered assholes. Stede doesn't earn his acceptance in the community until he kicks Calico Jack off the ship, making up for causing the situation with Nigel in the first episode. A workplace comedy can get a lot of material from the boss as the worker's antagonist, but if you want the bosses to stay sympathetic you have got to throw them some opportunities to earn it.

All that sounds like a lot, but like - the relationship is the story, right? If we spend so much time on establishing flaws big enough to drive a story, we also have to spend time on fixing them. Which is where the turning point hits.

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Act 2: How it Starts

This is where the full story reality-checks your protagonist. Glad you saved your boyfriend and embraced new love in Act 1, but his repressed guilt means he's about to completely ghost you, and your own abandonment issues and self-loathing are about to make his dick move into everyone else's problem.

Again, it's a non-conventional choice OFMD has this start at the very end of S1 rather than with a sudden dark turn in the S2 premiere, but it's still pretty clearly that point in the Three Act Structure.

In Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back opens with a timeskip to our Rebellion getting absolutely crushed and hiding on a miserable frozen planet. The Empire finds them as the plot is kicking off and they have to desperately flee. They get separated. Han and Leia try to go to an ally for help and end up in Vader's clutches. It's a sharp turn from the victorious note that A New Hope ended on.

Pirates of the Caribbean's Act 2 starts dark. Dead Man's Chest opens with our happy couple Will and Elizabeth getting arrested on their wedding day for the "happy end" escape of the last movie. Jack has not been having success since reclaiming his ship, and we'll soon find out he's being hunted by dark forces. As for the general state of piracy, we get a horrifying prison where pirates are being eaten alive by crows, and a new Lord Beckett making the dying state of piracy even more textual. "Jack Sparrow is a dying breed... The world is shrinking."

The key here is making a point that our heroes aren't ready. This is the struggles part - things they try? Fail. The odds do not look to be in their favor.

Now, OFMD apparently decided to go all-in on flaw exploration, especially with Edward. The first 3 episodes of S2 are brutally efficient in outlining Edward's backslide. In S1 you could see he had issues with guilt and feeling like a bad person. S2 devolves that into a destructive, suicidal spiral where Edward forces his crew into three months of consecutive raids, repeats his shocking act of cruelty with Izzy's toe offscreen (more than once!), escalates it with his leg, and finally they state directly that Edward hates himself for killing his dad so much that he fears he's fundamentally unlovable and better off dead.

Stede's struggles are subtler, but most definitely still there. He's deliberately turning a blind eye to tales of Edward's rampage, half from simply being too self-centered to care about the harms Edward causes others, and half from being unable to face or fathom that he had the ability to hurt Edward that much. Upon reunion he wants to put the whole thing behind them, not addressing why he left in the first place. Very "love magically fixes everything" of him, except Stede is no golden merman.

Interestingly, here, BlackBonnet's relationship dysfunction has very clearly been having a negative impact on the surrounding characters we care about. Make sense, since it's the driving force of the story, but that also adds a lot more relationships we need to make right. Like... Edward is the villain to his crew. The show focuses on their trauma and poisoned relationships with him. And then draws our attention even more to Stede taking his side to overrule their objections to him.

For a story where the conflict and required resolutions are primarily character based, and the setup had already given the main couple a good amount to work with, dedicating a lot of S2 to adding more ground to cover was... a choice. Potentially very compelling on the character end, certainly challenging on the writing end... but not a complete break with the structure.

Bold, but not damning.

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Act 2: How it Ends

Now it is true that Act 2 tends to end on a loss. Luke is defeated by Vader and loses his hand, and Han has been sent away in carbonite. Jack Sparrow for all his efforts cannot escape his fate, and he and the Pearl are dragged to the locker.

But the loss is not the point. The loss is incidental to the point.

Act 2 is about struggles and failure, but it's also about lessons learned. There's a change that occurs, and our cast - defeated but not broken - enters the final act with the essential skills, motivation, knowledge, etc. that they lacked in the beginning.

Luke Skywalker could not have defeated the Empire in Return of the Jedi until he'd learned the truth about his father and resisted the Dark Side in The Empire Strikes Back. (Ok, confession, I'm using Star Wars as an example because literally everyone is doing so, but frankly it's a better example of formulaic Three Act Structure repeating within each movie because on a trilogy level - relevant to this comparison - it is a super basic hero's journey in a very recognized outfit and as such the Act 2 relevance is also... super basic "the hero tries to fight the antagonist too early" beat where he learns humility. Not really a lot going on. So, for the better example...)

Dead Man's Chest has a downer ending with the closing moment of the survivors regaining hope and a plan against an enemy now on the verge of total victory - a classic Act 2. But in that first loss against Davy Jones we get Will's personal motivation and oath to stab the heart, Jack finally overcoming not knowing what he wanted and returning to save them from the Kraken (being a good man), Elizabeth betraying Jack (being a pirate), Barbossa's return, and Norrington's choice to bargain for his prior life back. The mission to retrieve Jack from the World's End is the final movie's plot, but things are already on track to turn the tables back around as we enter the finale.

Now, relevant sidenote - one major difference between Three Act Structure within a single work vs across three parts is that Act 2 continues into Part 3, and only tips over into Act 3 about midway through. This is because obviously your final movie or season cannot just be the climax. That's why both movie examples start with a rescue mission. They have to still be missing something so they can get the plot of their third part accelerating while they go get whatever that something is.

But if you wait until the 3rd movie / season to get the development going at all - you're fucked.

Jack's decision in the climax of At World's End to make Elizabeth into the Pirate King goes back to the development we saw in the Pearl vs Kraken fight in Dead Man's Chest. So does Elizabeth's leadership arc. Will's whole arc about becoming Captain of the Dutchman gets built upon in the third movie, but it starts in the second. Not just as an idle thought - he's actively pursuing it. Already consciously weighing saving his father vs getting back to Elizabeth as soon as he makes the oath. Everyone is moving forward in Act 2. Their remaining development might stumble for drama, or they might be a bit reluctant, but I know that they know better than to let it stick, because they already faced their true crisis points.

I'm not sure we can say the same about OFMD.

S2 does a good job of adding problems, yeah, but there's not really any movement on fixing them. Our main couple stagnates in some ways, and regresses in others.

Stede opened Act 2 by running away in the middle of the night back to his wife without telling Edward anything. We know he did it because of feeling guilty and his core childhood trauma of his dad calling him a weak and inadequate failure. Now in S1 he actually speedruns a realization of his shitty behavior with Mary, but what about S2? Well...

He continues to not talk to Edward about... pretty much anything. My guy practiced love confessions galore but Edward only finds out about going back to his wife via Anne, and it gets brushed aside with a love confession. He seems to think Edward wants him to be a dashing pirate, or maybe he just thinks he should be a dashing pirate. Idk, it doesn't get examined. Regarding his captaincy, they give him an episode plot about Izzy teaching him to respect the crew's beliefs, but this is sideplot to a larger arc of him completely overruling their traumas and concerns (and shushing their objections) to keep his boyfriend on the ship so. That.

Stede kills a man for reasons related to his issues, shoves that down inside and has sex with Edward instead of acknowledging any bad feelings. At least this time Edward was there and knows it happened? Neither Chauncey's death nor his dad have been mentioned to anyone. He gets a day of piracy fame that goes to his head, gets dumped, and ends on a complete beat down by Zheng where he learns... idk. Being a boor is bad? He's still wildly callous to her in the finale, and spends the whole time seeking validation of his pirate skills. He reunites with Edward, kisses, and quotes Han Solo.

Where S1 ended on a great fuckery, his S2 naval uniform plan after they regroup is ill defined except to call it a suicide mission - and we don't get to see what it would have been because it devolves into a very straightforward fight and flee. And gets Izzy killed. Quick cut funeral (no acknowledgement of his S2 bonding with Izzy), quick cut to wedding (foreshadowing), quick cut to... innkeeper retirement? Unclear when or even if BlackBonnet discussed Stede's whole driving dream to be a pirate and live a life at sea, but I guess that got a big priority downgrade. Despite the fact he was literally looking to Zheng for pirate-based compliments in the post-funeral scene.

I guess he's borderline-delusionally dogged in his pursuit of love now - so unlikely to bolt again - but he's also got at least a decade of experience mentally checking out in a state of repression when he's unhappy. And he's stopped being as supportive and caring toward the crew in that dogged pursuit, while arguably demonstrating a loss in leadership skills, so, um, good thing someone else is in charge?

And if Stede is a mess, Edward's arc is so much worse.

As established, they devote the Kraken to making Edward worse. He literally wants to kill himself and destroy everyone around him in the process because Stede left, and this is fixed by... Stede coming back. That's it. The crew tries to murder him and then exiles him from the ship (and Izzy takes the lead on both, indicating exactly how isolated Edward has become), but it's resolved in half a day by Stede just forcing them to put up with his boyfriend again. Like they think he murdered Buttons and still have to move him back in???

The show consistently depicts Kraken Era as a transgression against the crew, but they also avoid showing Edward acting with genuine contrition. He admits he historically doesn't apologize for anything, and then mostly still doesn't. It's a joke that he's approaching probation as a performance (CEO apology), and then the only person he genuinely talks to is Fang - the one guy cool with him - and the only person who gets a basic "sorry" is Izzy - the guy he really needs to be talking to. Edward's primary trauma is guilt, but apparently he only feels it abstractly after all that? He's only concerned with fixing things with Stede, despite Stede being about the only person around who hurt him instead of the reverse.

Speaking of primary traumas, Edward hating himself doesn't really go anywhere after the beat of self-realization. Apparently Stede still loving him is enough of a bandaid to end the suicide chasing, but he doesn't like. Acknowledge that. Edward is maybe sorta trying to go slow so he doesn't hang all his self-worth on Stede again (you can speculate), but they a) absolutely fail to go slow, and b) he doesn't make any attempt to develop himself or another support structure. Just basically... "let's be friends a bit before hooking back up." And then we get the whiplash that is Blackbeard and/or retirement.

Kraken Era is Blackbeard but way worse, like no one who has known Blackbeard has ever seen him. In the Gravy Basket Edward claims he might like being an innkeeper, before destroying his own fantasy by having the spectre of Hornigold confront him over killing his dad. The BlackBonnet to Anne & Mary parallel says running away to China / retiring makes you want to kill each other - burn it all down and go back to piracy. Stede rightfully points out prior retirement plans were whims. Edward gets sick of the penance sack after a day and puts his leathers back on to go try "poison into positivity". But also claims to be an innkeeper (look - two whole mentions!) when trying not to send children to be pirates after teaching them important knife skills.

Killing Ned Low is a serious, bad thing that prompts ill-advised sex and then going hardcore into retirement mode - leathers overboard, talk about mermaid fantasy, get retirement blessings from Izzy, end up dumping Stede for a fishing job instead of talking about how he's enjoying piracy. The fishing job, however, is also a bad thing and a stupid decision because Edward is a lazy freeloader fantasizing about being a better person. We have an uncomfortable, extended scene of "Pop-Pop" weirdly echoing his abusive dad and then sending Edward to go do what he's good at - disassociate, brutally murder two guys, fish up the leathers, rise as the Kraken from the sea. He continues with comically efficient murder but also he's reading Stede's love letters and seeking to reunite with him so... wait, is this a good thing? Post makeout / mass slaughter he's trading compliments on his kills with Zheng so. Yeah. Looks like it. Murder is fine.

Wait, no, skip ahead and Izzy is dying and Edward suddenly cares a whole lot as Izzy makes his death scene about freeing Edward from Blackbeard. Now being a pirate was "encouraging the darkness" because Izzy - a guy who had little to no influence over Edward's behavior - just couldn't let Blackbeard go. Murder is bad again, and he is freed. Minus the little detail that the murder he explicitly hates himself over was not related to Blackbeard or piracy whatsoever, so presumably haunts "just Ed" still. Anyway he's retiring to run an inn with Stede now, as the "loving family" Izzy comforted him with in his dying moments sails away from the couple that can best be described as the antagonists of their S2 arc. Also Edward implicitly wants to get married. It's been 3 days since making out was "too fast". He's still wearing the leathers.

So most of the way through Act 2 and Edward's barely on speaking terms with anyone but Stede, who he has once again hung his entire life on really fast? Crushing guilt leads to self-hatred leads to mass murder and suicide, but only if he's upset so just avoid that. He's still regularly idealizing Stede as a non-fucked up golden mermaid person (that maybe he personally ruined a bit) because he barely knows the guy. His only progress on his future is "pirate" crossed out / rewritten / crossed out again a few times, "fisherman" crossed out, and "innkeeper ?"

Just.

Where is the forward movement?

It's not just that the inn will undoubtedly fall apart - it's that the inn will fall apart for the near-exact same reasons that China was going to at the beginning of Act 2, and I can't point to anything they've learned in the time since that will help them. I guess Stede realized he loved Edward enough to chase after him, but that was in S1! They should be further than this by now. You can't cram another crisis backslide, all the Act 2 development, and the full Act 3 climax into one season. Certainly not without it feeling like the characters magically fix themselves.

If they just fail and keep blindly stumbling into the same issues because they don't change their behavior, then Act 2 doesn't work. You're just repeating the turning point between Act 1 & Act 2 on a loop.

---

Where Did They Fuck Up?

Actually... lets start on what they did right.

The one consistent aspect of S2 that I praised and still think was done well in a vacuum (despite being mostly left out of the finale) was the crew's union-building arc.

With only 8 episodes and more to do in them than S1, side characters were going to get pinched even if the main plot was absolutely flawless. That was unavoidable. With budget cuts / scheduling issues, we regularly have crew members simply vanish offscreen outside of one scene, meaning cohesive arcs for your faves was not likely. Not to say they couldn't have done better - my benefit of the doubt for the TealOranges breakup and Oluwande x Zheng dried up about when I realized he was literally just her Stede stand-in for the parallel - but something like Jim's revenge plot from S1 was realistically not on the table without, like, turning half the crew into seagulls to afford it.

The union building works around this constraint really well. They turn "the crew" into the side arc, and then weave Izzy's beats in so that they aren't just about Izzy. The breakup boat crew working together to comfort each other and protect him turns them into a unit, and Stede's crew taking it upon themselves to address the trauma vibes while the captains aren't in the way solidifies it across all our side characters. The crew goes to war with Stede's cursed coat and wins, they Calypso their boss to throw a party, and they capitalize on a chance to make bank with an efficiency Stede could only dream of.

We don't get specific arcs, but Frenchie, Jim, and Oluwande are defaulted to as leaders in just about every situation, and Roach is constantly shown sharing his inventions with different characters. Individuals can dip in and out without feeling like the sideplots stutter. Any sense of community in S2 is coming from this arc - even if there are cracks at the points where it joins to other storylines (Stede and Edward, Zheng, etc.)

So why does it work? Well, because it's a workplace comedy, and you can tell they are familiar with working on those. They know where the beats are. They know where to find the humor. They know how to build off of S1 because they made sure the bones were already there - an eclectic group of individuals that start as just coworkers, but bond over time in the face of their struggle against an inept boss who they grow to care for and support while maintaining an increasingly friendly antagonism because, you know, inept boss.

OFMD does its best work in S2 when it's being true to its original concept... and its worst work when it seemingly loses confidence in its own premise.

"The show is the relationship," right? It's a romance set in a workplace comedy. The setup of Act 1 was all about creating a character-driven narrative. So given that... where the hell are we getting the dying of piracy and a war against the English Navy?

That's not a character-driven romcom backdrop, it's an action-adventure plot from Pirates of the Caribbean or Black Sails. It's plot-driven, creating an antagonistic force that results in your characters' problems. Once the story is about the fight against the Empire, the dramatic question becomes the same as those adventure stories - "Will the British Navy defeat piracy, and will our protagonists come out the other side of the battle?"

Forget the wedding. The wedding is no longer the climax of the story, its back to the happy ending flash our romantic subplot gets after winning this fight.

Except, of course, trying to pivot your story to a contradictory dramatic question near the end of Act 2 can be nothing short of a disaster, because either you were writing the wrong story until now, or you've completely lost the plot of the real one. I shouldn't even be trying to figure out if they are doing this, because it should be so obvious that they wouldn't.

And yet.

What do the Zheng and Ricky plots add to the story if not this? Neither of these characters have anything emotionally to contribute to Stede and Edward - they truly are plot elements. It's a hard break from the S1 antagonist model, but it also takes up a lot of valuable screentime. This was considered important, but still Zheng's personality and motivation only gets explored so far as it's an Edward-Stede-Izzy parallel with Oluwande and Auntie, and they only need the parallel for Izzy's genre-jumping death scene. Which follows a thematically out-of-left-field speech about how piracy is about belonging to something good (workable) and how Ricky could never destroy their spirits (um...?). And then David Jenkins is pointing to it and saying things about "the symbolic death of piracy" and speculating S3 might be about the crew getting "payback"??? An idea floated by Zheng right before our temporary retirement, btw.

Fuck, the final episode of S2 didn't have time for our main couple to talk to each other because it was so busy dealing with the mass explosion of Zheng's fleet and Ricky's victory gloat. We get lethal violence associated with traumatic flashbacks until they need to cut down enemy mooks like it's nothing, at which point we get jokes with Zheng. The Republic of Pirates is destroyed outright, and it feels like they only did it because they got insecure about their "pirate story" not having the right kind of stakes. Don't even get me started on killing a major character because "Piracy’s a dangerous occupation, and some characters should die," as if suspending disbelief on this aspect makes the story somehow lesser, instead of just being a fairly standard genre convention in comedy. Nobody complains about Kermit the Frog having an improbably good survival record.

Did someone tell them that the heroes have to lose a battle near the end of Act 2, so they scrambled to give them one?

Just... compare the wholly plot-driven struggle in 2x08 to Stede and Edward's character-focused storylines in 1x10 and tell me how 2x08 is providing anything nearly as valuable to the story. Because I can't fucking find it.

At best they wasted a bunch of time on a poorly integrated adventure plot as, like, Zheng's backstory or something, and just fucked it up horribly by trying to "step up" the kind of plot they did for Jim. In which case the whole thing will be awkwardly dropped but damage is done. Otherwise, they actually thought they could just casually add a subplot like this because they've done something wildly stupid like think "pirate" is a genre on the same level as "workplace comedy" and can just trample in-universe coherency while you draw on other media to shore up their unsupported beats.

Bringing us to the most infuriating bit...

---

"...end the second season in a kinder spot."

If this was the goal, the entire season was written to work actively against it in way that is baffling and incompetent.

The really ironic thing is that the reason that the Act 2 part typically gets a downer ending is because of the evil empire that OFMD did not have to deal with until they pointlessly added it. A plot-driven story has an antagonistic force - a villain - that the heroes need to defeat. Something external working against them. The story ends when they beat the thing, and it's not much of a climax if they do most of the defeating before you get there. Ergo, they have to be outmatched up to the climax. Ergo, the second part cannot end on them feeling pretty comfortable and confident going into the third.

The same rules do not apply in the same way to a character-driven arc.

We already established Edward and Stede declaring their love is not the end of the story. Nor, necessarily, is both of them confidently entering a relationship. Even once they've developed a bunch they will have to show that development by running into the kinds of problems that would have broken them up before and resolving them better.

David Jenkins keeps talking about this idea that S2 is getting a hopeful open ending and S3 will get into potential problems, and like... I don't see any reason why they couldn't have done that successfully. They didn't, but they could've.

If S2 grew them enough as characters and then had them agree to try again in the last minute of the finale, they absolutely could have had a kind and hopeful ending where you were confident they could do it. And then a potential S3 can show that. It's a bit rockier than they were counting on, but they have learned enough lessons to not break up. And then the overall plot can build to proposal (start of Act 3) and wedding (the romantic climax). It doesn't have to be a blow out fight to be emotionally cathartic.

(Hell, the main rockier bit that they overcome in the S3 Act 2 portions could be marriage baggage. I'm sure they both have some. It would work.)

In the same way focusing on our character's long term flaws and character-driven conflict makes an Act 1 "happy ending" more difficult, I suspect it makes an Act 2 "happy ending" easier.

Instead they wrote an Act 2 that failed to convincingly start development and got confused on its direction, and then presented a rushed finale ending in a copy of the predictable disaster from S1 as though it's a good thing. They yanked the story at least temporarily into an awkward place where a romcom is trying to sell me on a bunch of serious drama / adventure beats that it has not put the work into, and inviting comparisons to better versions of those same beats in other, more suited media that make it look worse. The need to portray everyone as reaching happy closure overrules sitting with a major character death and using it for any narrative significance, while still letting it overshadow those happy endings because a romcom just sloppily killed a major character with a wound they've literally looked into the camera and said was harmless.

If I'm being entirely honest, Dead Man's Chest ends effectively at Jack Sparrow's funeral and then cuts to the British Navy obtaining a weapon of mass destruction, and it still feels kinder and more hopeful just because I leave with more faith the characters are actively capable of and working toward solving their problems.

OFMD S2, in contrast, has half-convinced me our main couple would live in a mutually obsessed, miscommunication-ridden horror story until they die.

---

Additional Reading

Normally I link stuff like this in the post, but that requires more excitement than I'm feeling right now. Here's my alternative:

Where I thought they were going with Edward - really outlines the mountain of character development they still have unaddressed

Where I thought they were going with Izzy - touches on a lot of themes that might be dead in the water & also context that's still probably relevant to why Izzy got a lot of focus in S2

My scattershot 2x08 reactions

An ask where I sketched out the bones of this argument, and another where I was mostly venting about the fandom response

This one, this other one, and this last one (read the link in op's post too) about genre shifts and failure to pull them off

The trauma goes in the box but it never opens back up - the whole point of Act 2 is that they needed to start opening shit like that - and also they focus so much on needed character growth and so little on following through

They can't even carry through on character growth that we got last season???

Why Izzy's death feels like Bury Your Gays ran smack into shitty writing

EDIT: Oh and this post is REALLY good for outlining the lack of change in way less words than I did

#our flag means death #ofmd #ofmd s2 #ofmd s2 spoilers #ofmd meta #three act structure #character arcs #blackbonnet #genre #blackbeard ofmd #stede bonnet ofmd #my meta #ladyluscinia #ofmd critical

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thepunkmuppet · 6 months

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I have spent so much time thinking about the miss holloway musical WHICH THEY HAVE ALREADY WRITTEN and I need to spill my thoughts about it

there is no point or end to this it’s just a brain fart of all the thoughts I’ve been having so enjoy I guess lmfao

“backstory”. it will be about her backstory. was she an 80’s music star who sold her mortal life for fame in a deal that backfired on her?? or was she a woman with the gift about to be hanged by the hatchet men who saved herself by making that same deal?? HOW FAR BACK DOES THIS GO IS WHAT IM ASKING WE KNOW FUCK ALL ABOUT THIS WOMAN

if it’s the former, I would love to maybe have mariah as casey (the girl with the gift in the witchwood who asked for her autograph) be an actual character who holloway maybe tries to help. also kim singing 80’s songs fuck yeah

and if it’s the latter then,,, oh wow. some heavy musical numbers, a shitload of hatchetmen / church of the starry children lore, and maybe another form of the lords in black (maybe the creepy hooded figures that we see drawn in the black book???)

also sorry EDIT I just looked at this picture again and the middle one (probably wiggly) is holding a knife. there’s no fucking way that’s not the black blade this is absolutely miss holloway guys omggggg

I would love to see this scene on stage with kim!!!! this would make 5 different forms of the LIB that we’ve seen / heard about (dolls, teens / humans, their true forms, wiggly in made in america, and whatever this is). I’m just imagining you see these black hooded figures, and then in the pro-shot you get a good look inside their hoods… and their faces are NOT human. like just imagine a massive purple eye staring out of one of those hoods, maybe even moving and blinking, a cool animatronic thing. SO CREEPY!! I also love the idea of switching up the actors again - I love jon so much as wiggly and I don’t think they would change him bc of his voice, but with the rest of them I think any actor can play a LIB which opens up so many possibilities…

I also would love to know how miss holloway met duke, and potentially even how many times they have met and then he had to forget her. considering the fact that we now have weird lore about his dad in 2005, did she know duke when he was younger?? did she help him out when he was a teenager, or help his dad?? is it a family thing, like she’s vowed to watch over the keane family or something??

duke’s dad is a big part of this tbh, because what a random insane lore / backstory drop, like WHAT? I genuinely have no idea what douglas keane sr’s murder could be about, except that it ties in to duke and to wilbur. and shows that 2005 is SO DAMN IMPORTANT

2005 was the year hannah was born, the year the portal to the black and white was created, the year wilbur cross went insane and became a disciple of the LIB, the year miss holloway took on the mantle of “miss holloway”, and (very likely) the year miss holloway and wilbur fought. so i think it’s safe to say that the musical itself will be set in 2005, which to me means macnamara and wilbur backstory alongside holloway and duke, which is very very fun

I like the idea that wilbur and macnamara were canonically together, and I really want to see pre-LIB wilbur. I also love the idea of macnamara and holloway working together or even becoming friends - despite being set a decade and a half before nightmare time, it would feel like the culmination of the two hanging plot threads / overarching arcs to me. also the idea that it was holloway who introduced macnamara to the paranormal and therefore essentially set up PEIP and doomed wiley is some juicy stuff that I would LOVE to see, especially if either macnamara or wiley lived in hatchetfield as kids and miss holloway helped them, inspiring whichever one of them to set up PEIP

ok so leading off of that I have a clear vision of a potential final scene that is driving me insane, and that’s the main reason why I patched together this post.

the final scene is the fight between miss holloway and wilbur, the one that happens in every single timeline.

and the basic idea is that we see both fights at once. there’s a song, and the stage is like black friday and spies are forever, with a level above the stage the actors can walk up to and stand on. joey and kim sing, and do their bit on the stage, but above the stage there are either doubles or a projection, mirroring the choreography. only in the pro-shot version, they would splice in joey and kim playing both pairs, which I just think would turn out looking really awesome despite being tricky to pull off live.

and yeah basically at the exact same time, one wilbur stabs holloway, and the other holloway stabs wilbur, creating a gorgeous visual representation of the newly splintered timelines.

either that or they do a trail to oregon and just do a different ending each night, and then splice them together in the pro-shot like I was saying. but I personally prefer the first one, if they’re able to pull it off and make it look good

and duke shows up just after that, having followed miss holloway throughout the story so far. and in the universe where wilbur’s dead, miss holloway makes him forget it all, hence this being the year that she takes on the new name and the fact that we know he has forgotten about her / her true past before. and then in the universe where holloway is dead, he holds her as she dies in his arms. bonus points if we get dying holloway saying “please don’t forget me” and living holloway saying “you have to forget me”. oh and just to be cruel, both dukes saying “I could never forget you” at the same time :) stew on that for a bit. yeah. fuck you I guess lol I woke up and chose violence today apparently

the idea of the two of them finding each other again after that in some timelines is just gorgeous to me, especially given the fact that NMT3 seems to suggest them finding each other AGAIN after she needs to make him forget. truly star crossed lovers they are so insane for this

in summary I guess what I’m trying to say is I think it will include miss holloway’s full backstory and then be mostly set in 2005, and centre around the opening of the black and white portal (macnamara and wilbur), miss holloway meeting duke (wilbur murdering duke’s dad, possibly something with lex and hannah if duke was already a social worker) and eventually the big fight between holloway and wilbur, ending in the audience seeing both potential endings. also obviously a reference to hannah’s birth because that seemed to be some kind of catalyst. thank you for coming to my utterly deranged ted talk goodbye

#anyway yeah that’s my two cents lmk what you think please please please!!!!#the idea of the holloway musical is keeping me up at night it’s literally all I can think about #miss holloway #duke keane #douglas keane #wilbur cross #uncle wiley #general macnamara #general john macnamara #hatchetfield #hatchetverse #hatchetfield universe #lords in black #nightmare time #nmt #starkid #team starkid #starkid productions

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genericpuff · 5 months

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The Extended Mishandling of LO's S3 Midseason Finale Premiere (Pt 2)

Alrighty, I promised a part two back in the first part of this analysis, but found myself busy with Rekindled and my day job, so I'm finally sitting down and finishing this up. If you haven't read that first part yet, please go check it out!

CAUTION: THERE BE FASTPASS SPOILERS AHEAD!

We left off with Hebe and Apollo roleplaying that one scene from The Lion King, albeit with a lot less sense or nuance. Literally all the "drama" so far feels purely manufactured for cheap plot progression and tension and it hardly feels authentic. But now we gotta talk about the second half of this episode, where we finally address the cliffhanger that the FP midseason finale episode left off on - Persephone causing winter.

And what better way to kick it off than with a completely off-base Persephone monologue?

Now, what's shown here is actually a flashback to the job interview scene from S1, when Persephone asked to see the snow in the Underworld. But it's written as if Persephone has some intimate relationship with snow as a whole, as if she's experienced more than this one time which... she hasn't. There was nothing "romantic" really about that scene following the job interview, she literally just wanted to go out and see something she hadn't seen before.

But that calls into question - why does Persephone constantly act like she has an intimate relationship with snow when it doesn't occur in the Mortal Realm? She even says in the honeymoon episode that it's hot all the time in the Mortal Realm, and the temperature only drops every now and then during rainy days... and she somehow makes this about Hades when it literally has nothing to do with him lmao Persephone monologues are some of the worst /r/im14andthisisdeep moments in the series because she's constantly using word salad to describe feelings we never saw or scenes that never happened.

And this scene is no different. She says that snow is something that's interwoven with her most 'treasured moments' but all the visuals have to show for is that one scene from S1 that, again, didn't even come across as a 'treasured moment', it was just her seeing the snow for the first time, there was nothing 'romantic' about it in a vacuum. All the moments from the series you could call ACTUALLY TREASURED milestones of Hades and Persephone's relationship - and Persephone's supposed "love" for the Underworld - are scenes where snow was completely absent (ex. the scene of Persephone and Hades talking about Sicily in Zeus and Hera's garden, Persephone and Hades spending the night in the cabin during the trial arc, etc.)

But then, to make it even more confusing, she goes on to describe her losing her powers and causing winter a "betrayal". As if the concept of winter owes her anything. As if Erebus owes her anything.

The allusion to Erebus itself in the visuals implies that she feels "betrayed" over this happening, as if it wasn't made ABUNDANTLY CLEAR TO HER that she would have to sacrifice something. She's gone SO LONG without knowing or caring about what she could have possibly given up, that by the time it finally revealed itself, she's acting all shocked Pikachu because there's finally something she can't just have. Everything that could make her seem imperfect has been washed away, from her SA trauma to those pesky green hands. Now we finally ARE seeing her affected by her own choices and she's basically waxing poetic about how sad it is that her actions have consequences.

That said, she does seem to have a moment of self-awareness here... but I can't be confident it will actually amount to anything seeing as how all the past attempts at 'growth' have been overshadowed by her vanity and ego.

This line is really confusing / weird in the way that it's written but I think she's trying to say that the source of the cold is from her, she can't pin it on any sort of 'big bad' like she could with Apollo and Kronos. It's just her.

And again, this could be a moment of realization for her that her actions are her own regardless of whatever she wants to pin it on-

But she rejects it instead. She's still not capable of acknowledging that her choices affect others, that her actions have consequences, that she's finally paying the price for something she knew had a cost.

If this were any other comic, I would accept her rejection of this, I would have confidence in knowing she may recognize it eventually. But this is LO and we're three seasons in, she's technically already gotten her happily ever after in the form of becoming Queen and married to her 'true love', so all of this feels like a very last-minute attempt to paint Persephone as this "struggling" character. But she's not "struggling", she's just finally experiencing karma catching up to her and as expected for a person like Persephone, she's already cracking under the pressure of realization that she can't have everything she wants.

Again, in any other comic, this would feel satisfying or endearing to see her fall on her own sword, but to me it just feels frustrating in the context of LO because we've spent five years seeing her get everything she wants with barely any real struggle that wasn't manufactured - with all of it painted as a GOOD THING - while still getting away with treating the people around her like shit.

And when I say she rejects this concept of having humility, I don't just mean through her monologuing, but also through her actions.

If I were to critique LO the same way I would an actual functional series, I would say that this should be the point of realization, the point where we see her crumble under the weight of her not being perfect, not being able to "fix" everything. It all stems back to her entitlement as a bratty main character, someone who can't fathom not being the main character or the "hero".

Because she's not the hero. Demeter is - or at least, she tries to be.

Again, it's hard to know if this is intentional or if this is yet another attempt to present Demeter as an "overbearing mom", but Persephone here looks and sounds like she's been reduced back to the state of a child crying for her mother in the face of her own failures. Despite now technically being a mother herself (through literal babynapping sigh) Persephone is still not a mature adult. Aging her up 10 years and giving her a husband and baby will not make her an actual functional independent adult who's capable of taking care of themselves or making the right decisions... unlike Demeter who is still, ultimately, more skilled than Persephone. She is an actual experienced and mature adult who's capable of rationalizing and decision making, and knowing when it's time to put aside your ego, walk away and let someone else who's far more qualified take care of things.

What Demeter has is something that one can only gain through true hardship, failing, learning from one's own mistakes, and experience, all of which Persephone does not have because she transitioned from a cage of her own imagination where hard work and responsibility was a virtue, into a gilded cage where true hard work can be passed onto someone else whose efforts she could take credit for while sitting on a throne and buying anything and everything she could ever want.

Despite everything Persephone and the narrative claims to have 'earned', she's still a child. The adults have to take over.

And like a child, she doesn't let them.

This is not an 'anime moment'. This is not a moment of redemption. This is immaturity and irresponsibility in its most visible form for Persephone - refusing to let go of her ego and shortcomings to "prove herself", even if it means making things worse.

And Hades enables it.

I want to make it clear there is a massive difference between not being controlling over someone, and actually enabling them.

This is not some small hill to die on. Persephone is literally causing winter, which could very well kill the Mortals. As we've seen in that prior Hebe scene from the first part of this essay, the snow is showing up in Olympus. This isn't something that's happening in the isolation of this single scene, this is happening everywhere and instead of taking the L, Persephone is trying to make things 'better' by simply 'trying harder' which is just not the solution here, Demeter knows this, but Hades is playing the "girlboss" version of a "good husband" by not even bothering to try and convince her to do otherwise. Hades above everyone else should be the one stepping in because he'd likely be the only one she'd actually listen to, but he's refusing to because he has to be the "good husband" who doesn't control the actions of his wife.

So he flat out enables her instead by not even bothering to try and reason with her, to help her see that what she's doing is not helping. Not even so much as a "Persephone, I know you want to help but it's clear something is wrong and if Demeter can figure out what to do to fix this, we should let her", just him saying to Demeter who wants to stop her that he can't stop her from trying... ignoring the fact that he should at least try.

And that's the difference between being controlling and being an enabler. He's not keeping her from doing something that benefits her and doesn't harm him or others. He's not micromanaging her decisions or trying to tell her she's not capable. Now, don't get me wrong, there are definitely things that make Hades a walking red flag especially when it comes to him being a groomer, but when it comes to directly controlling Persephone, most of the time she's doing things of her own accord convinced that it's "the right thing" (which is still just a side effect of the obvious grooming because I really doubt S1 Persephone would have done this shit lmao).

Here, he's not stepping in to even try to reason with her because "well I'd be a bad husband if I stepped in", completely ignoring the fact that it makes him a terrible person, period, to not at least try to calmly reason with his wife and explain to her that her 'help' is not going to help here. Just like when he rewarded her with sex for abusing a nymph in her own home, he's completely complacent to Persephone's actions and doesn't step in to try and help because, according to Wattpad and TikTok, a "good husband" is someone who looks the other way while his life partner does whatever she wants regardless of the consequences to herself and others. "Happy wife, happy life, who cares if the wife wants to be an actual piece of shit to people if it makes her happy".

And thus she makes things worse in her pursuit of "happiness", while Hades stands idly by, watching it all unfold as if he's just an innocent bystander who can absolve himself of any responsibility in this situation. As if she didn't become this way because she ate the pomegranate to be with him and a part of his world.

Now, there's one other sort-of-blatant smoking gun that I want to talk about that I haven't really seen anyone else mention since this episode went up. Granted, this might be me reading far too much into it, but hey, that's what this blog is for and I think it's something that absolutely needs to be mentioned.

Persephone goes on about how her powers aren't just gone, they've been replaced, all she can create is decay, and more specifically-

Now... think of the context of LO's narrative, what it's told us both literally and through subtext, intentional or not.

What does this sound like?

Hades lost his ability to produce children when he ate the pomegranate. He can no longer "create life".

And now, Persephone is finding herself in a similar situation, unable to "create life" the way she knows how. I'd like to think this isn't literal, but it really feels like there's a metaphorical implication here that Persephone losing her ability to create life is meant to be taken literally, that she not only can't create flowers and plant life anymore, but she's lost her fertility entirely. You can go even further back in this when it was established Persephone didn't eat six seeds, but nine, which originally felt like a weirdly random choice, but now seems intentional. I know some people have theorized that it has to do with her possibly being pregnant, but I don't think that's the case, I think it's the opposite - that the 9 months was a metaphor for the 9 months of childbearing that Persephone can no longer do.

And if that's the case... LO truly is no longer a "feminist" piece of work. It barely was before, but if the point of all this winds up being an attempt by Rachel to give Persephone a "flaw" by taking away her ability to bear children... that'll be a punch to the gut.

That said, if it does go somewhere, maybe the point will be Persephone learning she doesn't need to be able to reproduce to have value as a woman. But considering LO's track record with these sorts of plotlines, I can't be confident in the slightest that's where it'll end up. What I can be confident in is that Persephone will likely not stay this way. Like her green hands, she'll likely get her powers back, maybe after the resolution that she's still a real woman deserving of love even if she can't reproduce. I can't possibly know at this point where it's going, all I do know is that LO hasn't done a great job at resolving these sorts of deeper narratives so this just feels like another dart on the wall of bad ideas. Because it's, again, all being framed through Persephone being the "perfect woman", without there being any actual subtext throughout the narrative to imply that this may be a flawed ideology to have, it's just what Persephone has to be and it's sold in the narrative as a positive.

There's one term to describe this with that's rather consistent throughout LO when you peel back the layers of both the comic and Rachel's past work - white feminism. Despite LO's attempts to be "feminist", it's still ultimately being written through a heteronormative male gaze, that women are only "valuable" so long as they're youthful, that any goals or dreams a woman may have should be dropped as soon as they fall in love with a rich and powerful man, and that "other women" who don't fit into that mould of being rich, white, and heterocis are not worthy of love, empathy, or understanding. It's hard to trust that LO will actually challenge these norms when it's been practically enforcing them for five years.

But ultimately, that's a very loaded topic and right now, we don't know where this is going... I'm just not so sure I want to see it after all the missteps the series has pulled over the past half a decade. Like the miracle of childbirth, it's gonna take a miracle for LO to actually stick this landing.

Now, I'm assuming you read this line of dialogue, and you understood it. Yes? You positive? Okay, great. Why am I asking you this question as if you're an infant who doesn't understand what being "passed out" means? Well, you'll see what I mean in a minute.

Now, again, like with the whole "I can't bring life to anything anymore" thought process I just went through, I can't know exactly what they're trying to do here, but Demeter is fully in the right. I want to make that abundantly clear that Demeter was right the whole time and it's pretty telling that even a lot of the people reading the comic in good faith are pointing this out in the discussion circles they can actually access.

Now, in case anyone hasn't noticed, it's clear that Demeter herself is drawing upon the fertility magic of Gaia or Rachel is just alluding to Gaia for some reason. At first I thought it was supposed to be her form of "wrath" until I remembered that (unfortunately) Eris was the only reason for Persephone's wrath, so this is clearly meant to be some allusion to Gaia. Considering the fertility powers were passed down purely through Gaia and Ouranos, this means Demeter is a descendant of Gaia, which... calls into question Rachel's attempts to "remove the incest" from LO, but that's for another topic.

Either way, Demeter is fully in the right here. Hades is a fucking idiot - a useless lump - for not only enabling the shitty actions of his shitty wife, but for not taking even any amount of accountability for the fact that Persephone found out about the pomegranate through him.

"But Puff, she had to eat the pomegranate to beat Kronos!" Did she? Or was that purely manufactured for Rachel's sake because she just had to have an MCU Evil-Robot-Jeff-Bridges villain despite the fact that this FANTASY ROMANCE series didn't need one? The fact that it was written purely to 'force' Persephone into doing something she already wanted to do was completely redundant, it wasn't a 'sacrifice' she made, it was made pretty clear in Episode 165 that she wanted to eat the pomegranate as soon as she found out about it and while that decision is certainly her own, that does not absolve Hades of responsibility for not questioning his future wife's fascination with it or realizing that he unlocked the inner Pandora's Box of Persephone's mind.

And so, Demeter holds him responsible. As she should.

Okay, you read that, right? But remember that line I asked you about before? We should all know Demeter doesn't mean this literally. We have brains and we should all have a minimum amount of media literacy to understand that Hades was telling the truth when he literally said Persephone was "passed out".

We finish the episode on this panel, which I swear to christ I couldn't tell you in all of my own divine wisdom of the arts what in the world is going on in this panel. I'm literally looking at salad.

Is it Demeter and Persephone? Just some dying plants? I have no fucking clue, your guess is as good as mine.

But we're not done. Because we have one more glaring issue to talk about with this episode, and it comes in the form of an author's note that was inserted at the end of the episode. It is truly, despite EVERYTHING we've talked about in both parts of this analysis, the dumbest, most airheaded and egregiously pretentious thing I've seen in this entire episode.

Rachel quite literally put in a fucking disclaimer telling her audience what Hades already told us point blank in the comic - "Don't worry, audience members, Persephone is not literally dead, it's a metaphor for her spring powers being dead!"

I literally can't even express to you how pretentious and shitty this is of her to do. I can't tell if it's legitimately her thinking her writing is "too smart" for even her older audience members to grasp, or if she just wants to dispel the theories that people would want to make about this, or if she completely misconstrued the criticism about her writing not being "clear enough" and thinks that THIS is what people meant. Pardon my tone because I've kept it together relatively well throughout this post, but this is some 2009-era Fanfiction.net level of author's note bullshit.

If she thinks her writing is "too smart" for her audience to grasp, I'm sorry Rachel, but you're just wrong and this is incredibly shitty of you. You think the 14 year olds in your community aren't also reading other webtoons that have deeper writing than LO? I read Death Note when I was fucking 14 and I knew exactly the point of what the story was getting at by the time it was over, despite all the other stories I read at that age that completely flew over my head. And you think LO is somehow more complicated than Death Note, baby's first introduction to the grey areas of morality and justice?

If she's trying to dispel the theories... that actually holds some merit because not only is Rachel notoriously bad at not letting her fandom just talk about their theories without her swooping in to "um actually" them (even if it means killing the fun of theorizing), but the official FP page on FB was closed to new submissions in the hours following this episode and it since hasn't posted any new content. Is it because people aren't posting? Absolutely not. The mods are quite literally holding these posts hostage through the submission and approval system. People are legitimately trying to submit only for the mods to block it entirely from going through. If this is Rachel's attempts at trying to "protect herself" from the criticism this episode has surely earned, then all she's really doing is punishing her own fans who want to talk about it. It doesn't matter anymore that the discussion groups are finally back from 3-4 months of being shut down over the hiatus, they're still not being allowed to operate. The best there is now is the Discord and it's undoubtedly just as heavy moderated as the FB groups.

And as for the third possibility, this also feels like an attempt at Rachel trying to make her writing "more clear" without actually putting in the work of writing a good story. She's undoubtedly seen the criticisms towards LO as a whole that it doesn't express itself clearly, that it constantly flip flops on character motivations and information that has been established, and that any monologuing that's done implies things or events that we've never seen unfold on screen (case in point, the Persephone monologue from the start of this episode) but she seems to have either misconstrued or ignored the point of that criticism entirely by solving it with a quick and shitty author's note at the end explaining her intentions with a scene that was already clearly laid out to us. Instead of putting in the work to write a concise story to explain the things that are a bit more under-developed, she's slapping in a spoonfed explanation for scenes that literally don't need explaining and that ultimately cheapens the scenes that are TRYING to have impact, bringing them down to the same level of mediocrity as the scenes that never had the impact they intended to have to begin with. "You've killed the Goddess of Spring" was plenty clear after Hades said she was passed out, Rachel. Taking the time to explain it in a note at the end is just sad and it really goes to show what you think of your audience, especially when it comes to how you treat your fans in regards to community accessibility in the official discussion groups.

"The haters" didn't set this comic onto the path that it's on or ruin the fanbase experience, Rachel - you did.

#also i stg if she's just redoing the coma plotline from S2 #you can't just go to sleep and avoid the consequences of your actions persephone #wake tf up and take some goddamn accountability #lore olympus critical #lo critical #anti lore olympus

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mari-lair · 1 year

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Nene and Aoi’s friendship doesn’t change and it is a problem.

Aoi is the first friend Nene makes at the academy, so they have known each other for a while.

Nene is sweet to Aoi, she consistently worries for Aoi well being when she is in danger, and shows great care for her, always going for Aoi when sharing her romantic woes.

The manga shows mostly Nene venting about love, while Aoi engage but never bring up her own problems. Aoi is guarded and rarely vulnerable with Nene, something that over the years, we are told Nene have noticed.

But when Nene says “Sometimes I think that she only gets close to me,” She is severely overestimating how much she understands Aoi, most of her interactions with Aoi are with a friendly persona.

When I say ‘friendly persona’, I do not mean Aoi is faking liking her, her friendship with Nene is genuine, Aoi only have two people she is deeply attached to at the start of the manga, and Nene is one of them. I just mean Aoi always shows off her cute and cheerful side, even when she isn’t feeling like the ‘cheerful girl’ she displays, her approach is always the same.

Her words here are condescending as hell but she still acts cutesy and friendly: It comes off as superficial. And a lot of what she says is pretty fake, just things that people expect a popular girl to say, things we know she doesn’t believe in or relate to:

“It’s all about experience!” “why don’t you date him just to try it out?” as if she ever dated someone, or viewed love and relationships as something to try out and move along, instead of a concept she is scared of.

But no matter how different from her personal beliefs Aoi’s words are, no matter how long Nene have known her, she always falls for the ‘popular girl’ approach.

Nene is confident Aoi is the girl everyone loves: She always pictures Aoi with a cute smile, oblivious in her throne, able to get any guy she wants.

And yet, even with that mental image, Nene doesn’t know what being popular really means.

When Aoi visits the stage, Nene is confused as to why she would ever go here.

Akane is the one who gives Nene an exposition on Aoi, dropping hints that her life is not a sea of roses.

When Nene hears this, she ignores that her friend was put in situations where she was pressured to do things she doesn’t want to, often in isolated places, to the point she constantly need to be protected, or how Akane looks troubled that this is a recurring problem. Instead, she focused on Akane’s devotion.

Nene’s fantasies of popularity are sugar coated, so she subconsciously undermines Aoi’s troubles and focuses on Akane’s behavior, which fits her personal reality that being popular is amazing and “Boys will do anything for Aoi, she is so desirable!”

Attention is attention, and since Aoi gets lots of attention, Nene puts Aoi on a pedestal: Give her a life devoid of issues.

Her view is in part Aoi’s fault. There is truth to what Akane said here:

Nene doesn’t ask about Aoi’s life, or go in dept about her own, but Aoi is the one that consistently plays along, she is the one that keeps the focus on superficial topics and make an effort to only shows Nene her cheerful and cutesy side. It makes their interactions feel empty: there isn’t a single instance in the manga where they have a talk that isn’t about boys, or school rumors, which are always used to move the plot along, not expand on the basis of their established friendship.

There is a mutual lack of interest to change what they have: Nene because she is content with the way things are and see no need for change, and Aoi because she is Aoi.

With Nene’s view of Aoi in mind, the lack of depth in their interactions, and Aoi’s playing along with the cheerful popular persona, I am not surprised Nene didn’t notice there was something weird with Aoi on the Grim Reaper Sacrifice arc.

Of course Aoi is so chirpy and playful after being kidnapped by a demon, nothing can phase her! Of course she knows the exit, that’s a popular girl for you!

The cute and smart Aoi is the only Aoi she knows well, so unlike Akane, Nene fully trusted her words and reasonings, falling in the hole.

Somehow, something as big as this betrayal doesn’t change her view on Aoi.

The only Aoi focused thought we get outside a chapter recap is “Sumire looks like Aoi.”

Which clearly has the “cute girl everyone can’t help but love” in mind.

When she does think about Aoi in the severance/rescue arc is always about the lifespan dilemma, not Aoi’s strange behaviour or why she acted like that. There is no wonder as to how Aoi feels, or if she did something wrong herself to be ‘thrown in the trash’, there is no thoughts at all about this other side Aoi have shown. No reflection.

Her view hasn’t changed in the slightest, just look at the way she talks about Aoi with Katakuri in the red house.

And we know that’s not true.

It was never true.

Nene is still her friend, she may be oblivious to a lot but she has been by Aoi’s side for years, so she knows more about Aoi than an average person would. She noticed Aoi genuinely loves and is proud of her plants.

She also knows Aoi has a crush on Akane and the knowledge made her discard him from being a possible crush option despite once upon a time finding him cute and worthy of dating.

Nene values their friendship more than any crush: Notice how Akane doesn’t show up on ‘Nene’s type’ list at all instead of dropping to ‘not her type’, subconsciously deciding he is not an option. Aoi’s feelings are more important.

This genuine care make the way she refuses to change her views on Aoi very sad.

Nene is so sure they are close and she gets Aoi, that she doesn’t understand that the Aoi she knows, who treasures her and loves plants and can feel distant, is just a fraction of the real Aoi. A very small fraction considering how long they have been friends, yet it’s understandable: Nene consistently covers her eyes when Aoi acts out of her persona and shows slivers of personal problems.

She doesn’t want her ‘universally loved’ best friend Aoi, and the Aoi that threw her in the trash to be the same people. She want thinks to stay the same, simple and sweet. To Nene, the cruel one was a brainwashed fake. That’s it. There is nothing else to it, no reason to think about it.

Which is not true.

We never get hints that imply the drug made Aoi do something against her will. Even after she completely snap out of the drug effect, Aoi owns her actions. She regrets it, deeply, but she also connects with it: She knows herself.

It’s because Aoi wasn’t faking it that she was so scared to apologize to Nene in the first place. She is shaking and anxious because it was her, an ugly part of her she isn’t fond of, but still a part of her: Still Aoi.

Nene saw her more unpleasant side. That terrifies Aoi.

This fear that Nene will hate her once she realizes who she is have been around for a while.

One of the few times Aoi was vulnerable and honest with Nene was in chapter 29, when she assumed Nene avoided her on purpose, because she ‘suddenly’ decided to hate Aoi.

When Nene heard this she is distressed, she doesn’t like seeing her friend sad, but there is no “I wonder why Aoi would think that...?”, no matter how unusual this insecurity is from Aoi’s ‘oblivious in her throne’ image, Nene doesn’t question it. We aren’t shown a single panel of Nene thinking about it.

But we are shown her thinking about the way Aoi makes people’s hearts race, which happened only two pages later, but is something Nene can easily fit into her established view on Aoi.

To Nene’s credit, Aoi is trying to distract Nene from her moment of vulnerability here, but it’s sad that it works so well.

“Is this a popular girl skill?” Aoi's personal mannerisms, no matter how distinct are always connected to that of a “popular girl” in Nene’s head. Is not malicious, but it shows ‘popular girl’ and ‘my best friend Aoi’ are interconnected in her head.

“Is this how you win men over, Aoi?” She doesn’t even suspect that Aoi isn’t a fan of all this attention, that unlike her, Aoi doesn’t want to 'win over’ any of the boys, even after Akane explicitly told Nene this attention is a problem in chap 24.

Aoi is aware of Nene’s simple view of her. It’s why she wasn’t honest in chapter 96.

We all noticed how scared she was of Nene’s reaction, she even flinched when she went to apologize

But Nene doesn’t ask for an explanation of why Aoi did it, she doesn’t address what happened, she doesn’t want to know about any of Aoi’s problems, truly just chalking Aoi’s actions as “Not Aoi” and being done with this to have her cute bubbly friend back;

So Aoi doesn’t address it either.

Aoi is super relieved that she isn’t outright hated.

She doesn’t go over her emotions about the events, you can feel Aoi’s walls coming back: She falls back to her friendly and cute persona.

She wasn’t putting hearts and flowers in her speech before her apology to Nene.

And Aoi may be naturally cute, a girl that enjoys cute clothes and using cute speech, but she never talks with hearts and flowers when she is vulnerable and honest about her feelings.

We can see how her speech ties with her vulnerability best when she talk cutely with Hanako on the far shore train to distract herself from her bleak situation, but the moment she shares her honest view on Akane her tone change, she drops it.

Aoi is genuinely happy that Nene still sees her as a friend, but when she say she is fine on chapter 96, she goes over the events without adding any personal thoughts, and change the topic the moment she finish giving exposition. Something Nene accepts and doesn’t question further.

Once more, she is giving Nene the perfect problem-less cute friend Nene wants, and their talk feels superficial.

Akane behavior changed drastically after Aoi’s rescue (no confessions, no compliments every second, more physical contact, and so on,) because he confronted her, forced Aoi to open up, and listened to what was the problem, what he had been doing wrong, and did his best to adapt accordingly: He took her off her pedestal while still showing her the attention and affection she craves.

Nene’s behavior is exactly the same because she likes what they have, and she refuses to change it: Aoi is the same Aoi as always or “The Aoi she knows” the “popular queen”, so she is also the same Nene as always.

She truly considers Aoi a dear friend, but an unchanging one.

She blinds herself to Aoi’s problems, so she can’t confront Aoi, and Aoi is too cowardly to have an honest talk with Nene that she is convinced could lead to Nene hating her.

They are in a stalemate where Aoi can’t be completely honest with Nene (with far more than Aoi losing feeling in her right hand) and I hope something changes.

#tbhk #toilet bound hanako kun #nene yashiro #akane aoi #aoi akane #jibaku shounen hanako kun #jshk #aoi is a far more dificult girl than people give her credit #notice how only akane give trust worthy expossition on aoi #character analysis

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look-how-they-massacred-them · 7 months

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Submission reason:

So, they establish Steve Rogers as this scrappy punk with a problem with authority and an unkillable bond with his best friend Bucky, right? And then they spend the next several movies developing him. He brings down a significant portion of the government, in part to save his best friend. He starts a war, also to save his best friend. He was willing to let his best friend beat him to death, and the last thing he would have said was to tell him to do it, because he was with him ""'til the end of the line."" He dropped the shield, the symbol of who he was and who he had become, the one that had been with him since 1943, because he was choosing loyalty to his best friend instead. He would kill god himself if it meant saving Bucky. He would pick a fight with someone four times his size if it meant protecting people and their rights. He has a big, long character arc about how he adjusts to living in a new century, and how, despite being a man out of time, he finds a new sort of space for himself in the century he's in. And then what do they do? When it comes time to write him out, they have him choose to go back in time, abandoning his friends and the life he had made for himself, in order to go back in time to the 1950's of all times, to marry a woman he kissed ONCE and is STRONGLY implied to have nazi sympathies to put it nicely. And the Google form is bugging out so I can't add any more

Spent a long time getting over time warp trauma only to abandon all his friends to run to the past for a woman who already lived her own full life (which he then erased/replaced/negated) and whom he already had closure with. NEVER NOT MAD ABOUT THIS

1) The third movie of the Captain America movie was altered to give Robert Downey Jr more screentime so he would get a bigger check. Thus, huge chunks of Steve (Captain America's) last movie are dedicated to a character that is unrelated to the plot of the preceding Cap film. This takes time away from all the Cap trilogy protagonists, including Steve. 2) Endgame, the final movie featuring Steve as Captain America, centers Steve's emotional journey on Peggy Carter. The end of Cap 1 and the beginning of Cap 2 emphasize how losing Peggy hurt Steve. However, Marvel pretty much fucked up by having Steve abandon the present day in order to have a life with Peggy. It rejects the investment in Steve's friendships with Sam & Bucky. It places a heterosexual marriage in mid-1900s as markedly more valuable than having multiple friendships in the present, which seems to cater to the Make America Great Again fanaticism that was surging in the US at the time of the film. It also takes the subplot of Steve's PTSD in Cap 2 and concludes his character by having him return to the past & unwriting much of the loss he experienced. This invalidates the Cap 2 + Cap 3 healing narrative of Steve making a life for himself despite trauma & loss. 3) Cap 2: The Winter Soldier shows Steve struggling with loneliness & loss of purpose. Sam & Natasha, minor protagonists, have their own emotional journeys. The movie is named after Bucky, Steve's best friend who has secretly been tortured and used by HYDRA. Steve is devasted about Bucky, and the emotional climax of the film features them fighting and conversing. This is a lot of investment in these two characters!! Cap 3 diverting screentime away from these 4 characters is bullshit, and Endgame barely showing the two interact -- and then having Steve leave Bucky without showing any internal struggle relating to that decision -- is an illogical waste of an interesting relationship that was built over the course of three movies. 4) Steve's character is inconsistent as fuck across the non-Cap-Trilogy films. It's because Marvel's staff/director choices were a mess. Whack af imo.

In Age of Ultron, Steve literally says ""Family, stability... The guy who wanted all that went in the ice 75 years ago. I think someone else came out."" And then he stays in the past with Peggy?? Abandons Bucky and the life he's built for someone he already saw die? The Steve I know has moved on from his past. And then he becomes an old man despite the fact that Bucky has barely aged in that same amount of time and they both have the same super serum in them. One of the worst ways I've ever seen a character written out of a franchise

Entire arc for 5+ movies was about learning how to adapt to living in the future, finding a team/friends/family he trusted and loved, and doing the right thing despite all of the baggage he had about his past; Avengers Endgame ignored ALL of that in favor of him choosing to return to the 1940's to be with a woman he had finally let go of, ignoring all development he'd had over nearly a decade of movies.

Sent back into the past to live an ‘ideal’ life in the 1950s, marry a woman who had canonically married someone else, and who, incidentally enabled a fascist death cult to take over SHIELD.

They spent many films building up Steve's relationship with his best friend Bucky, the only other person in the world who understood what he was going through who he constantly promised to stay with ""till the end of the line"" only to have Steve go back in time to live a life with Peggy Carter, a woman who told him to move on, leaving his friend all alone with no warning. He abandoned not only the person he had more of a bond with and more emotional scenes with than the woman he went back in time for, he also essentially abandoned his team and just his ability to help people in general despite the fact that helping others is the core of his character and the reason why he got his powers in the first place. (There's also the muddled implications involved with the fact that in going back in time he would have prevented the man Peggy was supposed to end up with from being with her but I won't go into all that mess).

Despite the whole ‘frozen for 70 years’ thing, he still got used to a new life. He had a girlfriend, multiple best friends, just an entire life. But no~ he had to pine after the dead girlfriend he knew for maybe a year and moved on from out of Nowhere and decide to rewrite her history for her to stay with her. Granted. I, as an aroace btw, would also love Peggy Carter. But it just came out of nowhere?! They both deserve better tbh

Propaganda:

He could've been so much cooler/tougher/"more punk" if the MCU wasn't scared of any sign of alternative culture from their cookie cutter All-American Boy fantasy.

ENDGAME destroyed Steve’s character.

I understand a lot of people have mixed or negative feelings about the MCU but I don't think that should be a reason to overlook how much they destroyed his character just to give him an ending and get him out of the MCU.

(I copied the wrong photo and it won’t let me fix it. Sorry. I can send in another if you can’t crop that one. I follow you so…) They thought it was a great idea for him to help raise his niece that he slept with in present day. Just saying why make it awkward man Also! This clearly had a v bad impact on said niece bc she went from SHIELD AGENT (good guy for the most part) to a leader of a criminal/gun smuggling operation. Good job Steve/writers what a sound decision

See above

we never saw Steve's mom, Sarah Rogers, but Tony Stark's mom appears in TWO scenes in the third (read: FINAL) Cap film???!!!?? In STEVE'S movie?!!?? WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!!

#look how they massacred them poll #look how they massacred my boy #steve rogers #marvel cinematic universe #mcu #captain america #mcu steve rogers #propaganda post

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cobra-diamond · 6 months

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My Problems With Azula In the Spirit Temple

Spirit Temple feels like a breath of fresh air in a lot of ways, but it also contains a number of lingering foul odors. Here are some of the problems I have with Spirit Temple:

This Version of Casual Bitch Face Azula

Not be confused with Resting Bitch Face Azula. I'm talking her eyebrows raised casually, her aloof expression, flippant demeanor, and very sharp, even jaundice features. I know we’ve seen variants of this Azula before, but this comic's version in the beginning and at the end feels like an amalgam of her characterizations from Book 2, Book 3, and The Search, maybe even Smoke & Shadow a bit. Something feels off about this characterization of Azula. It feels a bit forced and exaggerated.

The Fire Warriors Not Wanting Revenge on Society

Huge missed opportunity. This was an area where Azula and her acolytes could have related to each other and bonded on a personal level; being discarded by their society and their families. The potential was there for the Fire Warriors to be inspired by Azula because the princess of their nation went through the same ordeal as them. They even wore facsimiles of Azula’s clothes. Instead, they want to be Robin Hoods? The fuck? I know why the story did this. It wants to end the Kemurikage plotline and tie Azula to a new, likely comic-erased, plot for Avatar Studios. It’s still a monumental missed opportunity made even worse by the ending.

The Ending

Trash ending. I’ve changed my mind. It’s terrible. It almost sinks the whole comic. Almost, but not quite. One of two outcomes could have occurred for this story: Azula reconciles with the Fire Warriors, or Azula leaves them be, which is what happened. But we needed a more definitive statement from Azula, not Casual Bitch Face Azula flippantly walking off into the sunset. Once again, Azula is walking off alone into a forest, with no clear indication of what will come next for her or what she actually wants.

But the worst part of the ending is her line, “I’ll find new followers, a new place to rule." What complete nonsense. What, is she going to Neverland to rule over the Lost Boys? Skull Island and marry King Kong? This is 100% a result of Avatar Studios' and the franchise’s overall lack of plan surrounding Azula and the Royal Family. Don’t give me this amateur fanfic garbage of her venturing around the world with no money and no allies. The more I look at this ending, the worse it gets.

The Fire Warriors Getting Dropped

This ties into the ending. The franchise has a massive problem of not having people for Azula to talk to, not having anyone in her corner like Iroh was for Zuko. She’s alone in the finale. She’s alone in The Search. Smoke & Shadow is a joke so ignore that crap. And this comic continues the trend.

Being alone is not naturally part of her arc at this point. It's artificial. There should be no shortage of people in the Fire Nation who are willing to befriend the princess, help the princess, woo the princess. The Fire Warriors were clear examples of girls who would admire her, but the franchise chose to turn them into “good” people who just want to steal from the rich and give to the poor. Perhaps the problem is that Azula's allies would be political in nature and the Fire Nation currently lacks the necessary worldbuilding to have political allies for Azula when that would create huge downstream affects for Zuko.

The War Is Not Mentioned

Azula can’t separate her identity with her political role in the Fire Nation, and that's fine, but the franchise needs to be honest about why the Royal Family is so fucked up, why Zuko and Azula fought an Agni Kai, and why Azula is still adversarial to her older brother, because of the war.

The war.

The war. The war. The war.

The war that wiped out the Air Nomads and Southern Water Tribe waterbenders. The war that led Azulon to be an evil sack of shit to his grandson by commanding Ozai to kill him. That war that led Iroh to either be a proud warlord and favorite of said sack of shit Azulon or feckless burnout in the face of his sack-of-shit-to-be brother. The war that led Ozai to have a reason to be brutal and self-serving. The war that led Iroh to convince Zuko to battle his sister and prevent her from being Fire Lord. The war that pinned Zuko and Azula against each other in the first place.

The war, Sozin, and Azulon need to start getting blamed as root causes for a lot of these problems. Ozai is already getting his portion and is starting to get more from Azula. And Iroh doesn’t get off the hook. He failed to challenge his brother to an Agni Kai when clearly any member of the Royal Family can do so according to Zuko's and Azula’s Agni Kai. I need the war to be blamed for destroying the royal family. This comic barely does that.

Azula Was Too Complacent Around the Spirit

We all know Azula is an incredibly brave girl, but she’s also intelligent enough to sniff out danger. Why wasn’t she more forceful in demanding answers from the scary monk? Why did she play the spirit’s game instead of fight it immediately? This isn’t a big problem, but it made the exchange feel a bit forced and Azula experiencing Plot-Induced Stupidity.

The Spirit’s Intentions Were Too Vague

Was it trying to eat her? Why did the monk kick her out? Why couldn’t it “control what happens next”? Why did it think it new how to "redeem" Azula when it demonstrated tat it didn't know her well enough? There were major Coraline vibes in this story, from the Other Mother-esque tactics of giving Azula what she wants, to Azula circling back to the temple when trying to leave. Again, not a big problem, but it made the spirit frustratingly vague.

Azula’s Blank Reaction to the Zuko Monster

Too many blank stares while the Zuko Monster was lambasting her. I think I know what this scene was doing, but, please, if Azula is confused, use some dialogue to express that. If Azula is scared, or overwhelmed, use some dialogue to convey that. The prior scenes already used dialogue very effectively to convey Azula’s perspective.

Too Short

I don’t care about the comic format. I need more of this. The ATLA franchise does not have a character remaining who can hold a candle to Azula’s complexity, psychological damage, inner and moral conflicts, and potential for transformation. The Bounty Hunter and the Tea Brewer? Mystery of Penquan Island? ‘Fuck outta here with that shit. Give me more Crime and Punishment, Azula-edition.

#avatar the last airbender #avatar comics #azula #azula in the spirit temple

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axel-ambassador · 2 months

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Thinking about Ripaxel again

I think one of the biggest reasons I've come to love it as much as I do is because it does almost everything right where the first gen characters went wrong.

As I've said before, I've been burned before by this show and the way it handles romance. It is not fun to be a Gwen and Courtney fan, and it's especially torturous to have Gwourtney as an OTP considering everything that canon offers.

I also loved Gwent during island, despite the inconsistent writing. Trent's derailment and the messy breakup that followed painting Gwen as the only one in the wrong absolutely destroyed me.

I became obsessed with Gwen's friendship with Courtney. It was so nice to see these two girls whose arcs were normally contextualized by their relationships to breathe and be themselves, without any of the romance drama.

But then the love triangle happened and we all know how I feel about that.

But then All Stars gave me hope. Sure, my fav was incredibly derailed at this point, but it was worth it for the genuine relationship she formed with Courtney.

And then the show spit in my face. Romance and relationships would always suffer just because the plot simply demanded it.

Ripaxel though...doesn't have any of those issues.

Never at one point are they trying to change each other that negatively affects them. Yes, Ripper does change, but he makes the conscious choice to change because he wants to be better. He wants to fix his misogynist tendencies and superiority complex because he knows Axel won't take any of that shit.

Axel on the other hand, sees this. She's willing to give him a chance, and yet she never changed herself besides trying to be more friendly, which she did for herself.

And once they're together, that's it. They are their authentic, better selves. They bring out the best in each other. Axel is the driving force for Ripper to drop his faux persona and be himself. Ripper brings out Axel's sweeter, more compassionate side.

They actively try to better themselves while sticking to who they are because they love each other. And they embrace each and every part of each other.

It's so personally vindicating to see my favorite character flourish in a relationship after the absolute disaster that was Gwen and Courtney's love lives.

No toxicity, no derailment, no drama, just 2 people in a loving, healthy relationship. It's so refreshing to see.

#total drama #total drama 2023 #tdi 2023 #total drama island 2023 #td axel #total drama axel #td ripper #total drama ripper #ripaxel #axeripper #td gwen #td courtney

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scepterno · 6 months

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you've made the mistake of endorsing my josé redemption arc so i shall release the horrors within

because i like to think that josé, to some extent, in the back of his mind always felt bad about hurting alejandro. yeah, he thought it was necessary to get him to man up and for alejandro's own good in the long run, hell he even enjoyed taking his frustration out on someone else sometimes. but you don't press lit cigarettes into your little brother's skin and just not care. you don't have someone looking at you with hate and fear and exhaustion in their expression every day and not feel anything. you don't hurt someone day after day and remain oblivious to what it does to them

and maybe years down the line, after a lot of therapy and a long and ongoing process of healing, josé will look at the tiny circular scars on alejandro's arm and feel this... pit in his stomach. something heavy and cold that claws at his insides and makes him nauseous, it clogs up his throat and makes him want to look away. it's the same feeling he gets whenever he sees the relief on alejandro's face when josé doesn't turn something into a competition between them, or when he tenses up at being called "al", and so on

it's so different from the warmth he feels deep in his chest whenever alejandro laughs at something he says, loud and unburdened and giddy, whenever he lets josé see him weak and in pain without trying to cover everything up, whenever he shows the tiniest bit of trust in his older brother

being part of alejandro's life means he has to put up with that annoying twig boyfriend of his, who seems dead set on antagonizing josé with snarky comments and long, hard stares that seem to burn the side of his face. but the effect is lessened whenever alejandro comes to his defense with an easy smile and a "he's not so bad, come on, stop being mean". it also means he has to deal with the lovey-dovey looks exchange between the two of them, which, eugh. but fine, whatever, he can handle it

he still fucks up sometimes, of course he does, they both do. they step on toes and revert back to old habits and hurt each other and pull away. sometimes it feels like it's an uphill battle of three steps forward, two steps back. it's painful, it's messy and it's a long, long process. but they're burromuerto men, which means they're stubborn beyond reason and the very thought of giving up is appalling to them

one time josé goes over to alejandro's and noah's apartment when the little bastard is at work. they're supposed to hang out, just the two of them, watch some cheesy telenovelas and poke fun at the acting, predict the plot 30 minutes in, and get way too invested in the characters' relationships. which is why he's confused to find the apartment silent and empty, no sign of life in the living room or kitchen. he knows alejandro's home, his shoes are at there under the hangers and the door was unlocked, so where is he? he calls out his name as he makes his way towards his bedroom, knocking on the door and waiting for a reply. still nothing. he pushes the door open cautiously and feels his heart drop to his stomach

he recalls both carlos and alejandro mentioning something about "bad days" offhandedly, but neither of them seemed particularly interested in talking about it in more detail, and so josé never bothered asking either. and now he can only assume this is what they meant, because to him this seems pretty fucking bad. alejandro's in his bed, blanket pooled around his hips, a layer of sweat covering his entire body, hair messy. one of his hands is gripping the sheets next to his thigh, knuckles white from the effort, while the other one is pressed to his forehead, obscuring his eyes from sight. he's shaking, jaw clenched tight and in the silence josé can hear how ragged and uneven his breathing is.

he can only stand and stare for another moment, before he calls out alejandro's name again, quiet and more uncertain than he's felt in a long time. alejandro startles at josé's voice, tensing up, before lifting his hand away from his face enough to look at josé. his eyes are bloodshot and filled with tears, exhausted and pained and utterly miserable, and josé doesn't know what to do

later on he's sitting on the edge of alejandro's bed, one of his hands caught in a death grip so tight he swears he can hear his bones creaking, his other hand wound around alejandro's shoulder and buried in tangled, sweaty hair. alejandro has his forehead pressed to josé's shoulder, his entire frame trembling like a leaf, breathing a mix of sniffles and gasps under the weight of his sobs, his hand clutching at josé's back so hard josé can feel his nails digging in.

and it's sat like this, holding alejandro, lightly scratching at his scalp, desperately trying not to fuck this up, that he realizes he doesn't want to see his little brother in pain anymore. fuck what the doctors say, or what his father or the rest of the family will think. this is his hermanito, and josé cannot stand seeing him in pain, not anymore

holy fuck anon just send me to an early grave why dont you UROGUGHGT *psychic damage* *psychic damage* *psychic damage*

yeah so this is EXACTLY what i had in mind with their relationship. you nailed it. it's on the damn cross. i dont even know what to say other than holy shit, you get exactly what i was putting down. AND THEN YOU RAN WITH IT. you dropped this bomb ass mini fic into my inbox and just. HOW DO YOU EXPECT ME TO RESPOND?? my jaw is between my feet.

we stan the burromuerto brothers redemption and healing arc WE STAN IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BURROMUERTO BROTHER SUPREMACY!!!!!

#long post #tagging so i can save this and find it later #alenoah #josé burromuerto #alejandro burromuerto #total drama

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ace-and-ranty · 2 years

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I've seen a number of people now say they don't get why the Liesel sex scenes were included, and I wanna come to their defense now.

I think the scenes make two perfectly valid points;

1) Casual sex can be good and healthy for you. I feel it was firmly stablished both times that El has sex with Liesel because she needs solacing, and sex is an uncomplicated way of making her feel good and grounded in her body. That's... literally it. El had sex because it feels nice. You don't need any more reason than that.

2) El and Liesel are bisexual. Very easy and direct way of stablishing both of these characters are bi. They are queer. They are into girls. I, for one, am fucking overjoyed. We love explicit representation in this house!!

I feel like the disconect is from people thinking sex HAS to be meaningful and profound? I, for one, think it's totally fine and sweet if sex is just something casual El does with a friend.

Which also brings me to my third point:

3) Liesel and El friendship arc! The first sex scene, El is convinced Liesel is doing this to get something out of her. By the second one, she knows Liesel is doing it just to help her. The sex is part of their mini-plot of becoming friends and allies, plus it ties into Liesel's mini character development arc of dropping years of obsessive revenge planning to go save the world with her new annoying hippie kumbaya best friend, and I, for one, think it's fantastic.

#The Scholomance #The Golden Enclaves #The Scholomance spoilers #The Golden Enclave spoilers

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peaterookie · 9 months

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Most of us know by this point that the Lupin III manga series doesn't particularly have the best reputation, but why is that?

Is it simply because of the content itself, or is there more behind it?

It is August 10th, the 56th anniversary of the og manga, and I will be exploring the causes of the manga's poor reputation in the Lupin community with as most detail as I can try to be.

Bluntly put, I will not hide the fact that the manga series as a whole contains extremely problematic elements. All three series, OG manga, New Adventures, and Shin Lupin III all contain instance of Lupin and other characters raping and sexually assaulting women.

It certainly gets better as the series goes on. At the last three major arcs of Shin Lupin III, Lupin becomes almost entirely sexless, with some instances of plain pervertedness. However, it is not an issue that cannot be glossed over and it is the by far biggest burden that this series has to carry over its 56 years of existence.

OG manga is the biggest culprit of this, barely two chapter goes by without an instance of Lupin pulling his sexual advances onto random women and succeeding. Those moments of the manga are extremely gross and uncomfortable- and it really makes our protagonist extremely unlikeable, which brings me to my next point:

The fact that the OG manga is the first of the three manga series contribute heavily to its poor reputation.

"Aiee!! No way that the biggest manga preacher in tumblr is slandering the manga! Isn't that out of character!?"

It quite is, luckily I can think. As someone who has spent about 5 months reviewing almost all of the chapters, I can say that I know quite a bit about what it does right and what it does wrong... and it sadly does many things wrong.

Of course, the main thing is the sexual violence, but it is also the series with the least interaction between each member of the Lupin gang, who are characters people already come to really like. Lacking that element takes away what many people regard to be the best part about the series.

The beginning chapters of the og manga are also poorly paced. A bunch of things are going on, and the panelling certainly makes it hard to follow as well.

And to even add to the original issue, the english translation provided by Tokyopop also fucked everything up too!! Many of the extreme dialogues that you come across, including ones that make jokes at Monkey Punch's expense, are done by Tokyopop. Tabbiewolf explains this much better than I can:

"Just remember: a LOT of the…more offensive stuff in the manga is from the TokyoPop translations. I’m not excusing ALL of it, mind you — it was the 1960s and this was an adventure/spy manga marketed at cisdudes, after all — but the script writer for the English version was extremely, uh, artistic, with his localization of the translation."

"it was the early 2000s, manga was trying to appeal specifically to people who didn’t read it: teenaged cisboys who watched South Park, basically ;) So a fair amount of the stuff was very much the new English script, NOT the creator ‘s original work! Some plots got changed entirely just because the Japanese slang from the time didn’t translate."

First impressions matter, and the OG manga makes a very bad impression for people attempting to get into the manga series. Many readers are most likely taken back by how different it is from what they are used to, and they are definitely not going to like the problematic elements.

Those who still try to give it second chances are going to be met with disappointment when they find out these glaring issues are only partially fixed further into the series. Believing that it won't get better, they end up dropping the manga altogether and generalizing the rest of the manga series as depraved nonsense.

And I can't simply blame Monkey Punch for all these issues!! It was the first of what's to come, and he was not aware at the time just how big Lupin III would become in Japan and eventually worldwide. The og manga is very experimental, and you can tell he was only trying to figure out what works. I also cannot blame the people that dislike the manga. People naturally dislike something that is problematic and different.

Heck, most manga fans feel indifferent about the og manga as well, with the majority of them liking Shin Lupin III much better.

I have the statistic right here!!! It's not a lot of people, but there's an obvious majority choice here.

(By the way, if you're enjoying reading this so far, you should totally join my Lupin III server ahem cough cough nudge nudge)

So not even the manga fans love the OG manga. In my opinion, I would definitely not recommend people to read that as their first Lupin manga either. It is the type of media that if you really love the source material in general, then it'd be ok to read.

It is quite a shame to say that the series that does a better job at getting people in the manga, is the third one of the bunch. Most people aren't going to know that however, and they end up reading something that is going to likely give a bad image of the manga.

Ok so I dont have a good segway to the second part of this post so have a panel.

Now I'm gonna talk about how the fandom itself screw up it's reputation!!

(Before you get further I have to say that I have nothing against anime fans, if I do sound like I don't like them it's just sort of poor wording on my end)

Many fans of Lupin III start with the anime, if not probably all of them at this point. This causes a huge skew in public opinion, where those who are pre-exposed to the anime are probably going to view the manga as something lesser than its animated counterpart.

This can be seen particularly in CloudConnection's video of his manga analysis, which is concerningly just a portion of this 18 minute video, but I'll look over that. The portions of the video where he analyzes the manga contain a large amount of negative opinions about it.

A lot of his points are very good, and a lot of them I agree with, like his issues with the rape and sexual assault and how its a good time capsule but definitely not something that people should start off with. But a rest of the points seem a bit unreasonable to make and rather biased, like how the characters feel inconsistent, the bad pacing, and really emphasizing how dark and grim the manga is (it is very goofy and nobody ever talks about that)

And I have to state- It's totally valid for someone to prefer one thing over the other, but my point is that when this opinion is overwhelmingly the majority, it is going to cause the general public's opinion to unfairly be against something, ignoring what it does good and pinning the focus on what it does bad.

That video example was very popular, and I know someone personally that got the wrong memo from it and hated the manga without reading it for a long time, so you can see how it can probably effect the rest of the people that viewed that video.

So what can we learn from this?

We now understand that two of major reasons responsible for the manga's bad reputation is one: the unfortunate circumstance of the OG manga being the first series, and the overwhelming public opinion being unfairly skewed against it.

To wrap this up, I ask you to please give the manga a chance!! Read Shin Lupin first, and be aware of its flaws while also appreciating what it has contributed for the franchise and anime as a whole. I hope you enjoyed this little essay I wrote, and happy birthday Lupin III!

#lupin iii #lupin the third #lupin iii manga #monkey punch #peater rambles

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ladyluscinia · 6 months

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I think they were so worried about not getting a season 3 they ruined both the viewers expecting one and the viewers who would've liked it to end there. they've created an easily destroyable status quo because of course something needs to happen to get everyone back together for season 3. so it's not even a happy ending; it's so fragile, it's designed to fall apart the second that anyone learns that the show is back on. i get not wanting to bank on having a third season and wrapping it up but like. Galavant did that and did it better. WITH THE HEROES RETIRING AND THE TWO MINUTE MARRIAGE CEREMONY TO BOOT. But it gave an outline of where the plot might go from there and how the adventure will continue if it gets to. And it never got to, and season 2's ending is good because it's not /fragile/--it's not a cliffhanger, but you get the idea that they could keep going from there still. whereas this one didn't want to be a cliffhanger so much that they created the most breakable new status quo in history and if there is a season 3 it'll immediately be undone and I'll probably still watch it but like I'll /know/, y'know? They could fix everything in the first episode of season 3 and I'd still have to know that at one point, this was considered an acceptable outcome.

The thing that is driving me absolutely insane is they DID NOT HAVE TO DO THIS!

There's so many people looking at it like "well it's a shame that 2x08 clearly had to cram several episodes into one for budget reasons and it made the development weaker but that's the situation MAX put them in" and I cannot emphasize enough how much that is not true.

MAX did not break it to them after episodes 2x01 - 2x07 were written and half filmed that they would have to wrap up the whole plot in 30 minutes. Like absolute worst case scenario they had 10 eps mostly written and budget came back 20% over and they had to reduce to 8 total. More likely they knew they were getting 8 from the start.

It is absolutely nobody's fuck up except David Jenkins and his writers' room if they were unrealistic about what character beats were needed and would fit in the timeframe to reach a satisfying wrap up.

Worries about no S3 were on the table the moment it took until JUNE to get confirmation of S2. This wasn't sprung on them. If they wanted their story to have a "just in case" happy ending and then a "fully realized arc" happy ending, they should have fucking acted like it???

I was shocked when the first three episodes that dropped were so hardcore on destroying Edward's relationships and laying bare exactly how deep his issues went. It only made sense to me if they were going all in on getting a S3 and prepared to spend all of S2 focused on the implications of all that, and then the not-even two week in-universe timeline of the season reinforced my understanding that was happening.

"Shame we don't have time for our main couple to even start addressing their relationship or having moments of self-realization and sharing their issues," says guy who decided to make the first half of S2 about adding more problems on top of well established ones from S1 and the second half of S2 about throwing in a second breakup cycle instead of dealing with the fallout from the first.

Want Edward to end on a beat of feeling part of the found family? Well maybe adding a timeskip after 2x05 and then a crew chat in 2x06 where you make it clear he did an apology tour offscreen could help, but you also could have just not focused hard on him poisoning his relationship with every single one of them in the first place???

There's multiple different ways you can do Act 2 of a three act structure, and they did not have to choose one that ends on another dark cliffhanger beat or right at the open ended turning point toward growth? Like they didn't even do the one they picked in a way they could fit in their season. I feel like by the end of a struggles Act 2 both your protagonists need to have self-realized their issues and maybe had one conversation about it? Edward still wasn't talking about his guilt, and Stede wasn't talking about anything.

They aren't even at the turning point of growth and out of the backsliding / lessons learned era yet, that's why potential S3 will start on another backslide when status quo breaks and Stede starts "that's nice, dear"-ing Edward during the day and slipping out at night to vicariously listen to pirate stories or whatever (and they frame it like he's cheating).

We have two out of three seasons in a show that might only get two, and I feel like the characters have barely moved from their starting position.

Like idk maybe they are really good at coming up with character flaws - ex: Stede is repressed and bottles up his traumas until he mentally checks out / runs away - and just drawing blanks on how to believably "fix" them, but just going "well what if we just used this flaw to throw another miscommunication roadblock in their relationship?" is not getting them where they want to be.

The season was fundamentally designed against their stated goal and did not make what seem to be necessary writing concessions to the reduced screentime if they wanted their finale to land as an even plausibly happy ending. It's hollow.

And possibly not even salvageable in S3 since they aren't demonstrating the skills to salvage it.

#our flag means death #ofmd s2 #ofmd s2 spoilers #ofmd 2x08 #david jenkins #ask #ladyluscinia #ofmd meta #ofmd critical

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evankinard · 2 months

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okay I promised my full deranged buddie s7 spec so walk with me here

imagine we start the season, its a couple weeks/months after the bridge collapse, and bobby and athena have just left for their cruise. cut to buck and eddie and buck seems kind of sad/dejected for some reason but no one knows why and eddie is riding the high of starting dating again and taking his shot with marisol. then chris drops the bombshell that he's dating on eddie and asking him for advice and eddie starts panicking because what the hell does he know about women he very spectacularly ran off the last two and the night's still young with marisol. so he goes to buck, because its chris and buck always has the answers with chris and anyway buck may suck at keeping a girlfriend but he's good at the dating part and he has natalia now and he seems so sure about her so clearly he's doing something right. and buck says yes, of course he's gonna say yes, it's chris, but while chris is asking all these questions about love, and dating, and how do you know when you really like someone and what do you do when you like someone like that, buck is answering them but the weird kicked puppy air keeps clinging to him and he sounds wistful if nothing else. and toward the end of the episode, he admits to eddie that him and natalia broke up. he dodges the question of why no matter how anyone asks throughout the rest of the season.

the rest of the cruise ship arc goes by and then its ep 100 and HOWEVER it happens (maybe its tommy, maybe its anything else I actually have no spec for this part) buck starts questioning his sexuality or just plain going "why the fuck not clearly I'm doing something wrong with the way I've been going about dating maybe its the fact that they've all been women" and starts thinking about dating men. he talks to eddie about it and eddie starts feeling some type of way but tries to be supportive anyways (and then immediately goes to bobby and begs for a transfer which is why bobby tells him he can't tell him how to feel about the job. jk but i actually have no idea where that line fits into any of this or what its about so we're ignoring it). eddie and marisol are still doing perfectly fine and going on casual dates atp.

then ep 5 rolls around, which looks like a pretty shenanigans filled episode, so it could mostly have nothing to do with the rest of the plot or it could have some of that underlying tension festering between buck and eddie, especially with a name like "you don't know me"

now starting with episode 6 I'm not totally decided where this spec plot would go but it can go a couple different ways. if episode 6 is the bachelor party episode only and there's no actual wedding the tension could just keep building OR there's actually gonna be a Moment. maybe nothing happens or maybe they get drunk and wake up in the same bed but even if they do they immediately start freaking out or avoiding each other and not acknowledging it. either way, the wedding will happen. it will be chaotic and insane and beautiful and by the end of the night buck is standing in his sad little corner watching everyone when hen or maddie comes up to him and he will finally admit that the reason why natalia broke up with him was because she knew he's in love with eddie. maybe eddie's also looking back at him or maybe he's glowing, twirling marisol around on the dance floor.

ORRRRRRR

nothing actually happens between buck and eddie after buck comes out. eddie and marisol break up sometime before the wedding/bachelor party for seemingly unrelated reasons. the bachelor party and wedding go off with several hitches but none involving buck and eddie's relationship. and then the next morning they wake up in bed together à la chandler and monica getting together in Friends.

#are there several holes in every single aspect of this #yes but mind your own business #the entire purpose of this post is so that I have all of my delusions in writing either to clap or point and laugh at once the season start #911 spoilers #lmao #911 abc #evan buckley #eddie diaz #buddie #911 speculation #weewoo brainrot

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