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stillsimpingforaymeric · 2 years

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Kaidan Alenko and the importance of visual storytelling

(Since this post was unable to appear in searches on my old blog, simpingforaymeric, I have chosen to repost it here on my new one)

1. Introduction

One of the most prominent criticisms leveled against the character of Mass Effect’s Kaidan Alenko is that he is, in a word, boring. It’s a comment that seemed confusing after first playing the game and falling almost immediately in love with the character, but gaining some distance after ten years and playing the games more critically than before, starts to make more and more sense.

Don’t get me wrong - Kaidan Alenko is perhaps my most favorite character across all Bioware games. He is by far the one I relate to the most. The following… experiment? Thesis? Elaborate soap box? Is therefore not meant to convince anyone that, Actually, He Is Boring, or even criticize the character of Kaidan Alenko in that sense, but aims to explain why “boring” is the gut reaction of so many (often slightly more casual) players. I want to propose a theory of what issues there are, why they appear across all three games and finally propose a range of edits and changes that might alleviate them. And when I say changes, I in no way mean to change anything about the character of Kaidan Alenko - but to change how that character is communicated to the audience.

I will preface this by saying that this post is roughly ten years in the making and does not reflect just my own personal observations, but relevant input from other fans across social media, from the BSN, to twitter, to tumblr. Many of these people have moved on, many of them have changed blog names so often it is simply impossible for me to look them up. So while I can no longer source any person in particular for any specific observation, I still want to make clear that this is the result of many thoughtful and insightful posts from many thoughtful and insightful people over a span of years. I have no intention of taking the credit for myself, I am just trying to bring it all together in one project. Once we get to the “How to fix it” part, I will only discuss the ideas that I’ve come up with myself over the past few weeks of replaying the trilogy.

If a post like this already exists and is already in circulation, please let me know. I have not been active in the fandom for some years and would be very interested if anyone has done a write up similar to mine before.

Also, this will likely include spoilers for most titles in the Dragon Age and Mass Effect game franchises (not books, or comics, though), so if you haven’t quite finished Inquisition, ME3, or any other game, you may want to hold off on reading this.

You may also want to hold off on reading this because it’s honest to God 19 pages long. I like this character a normal amount.

2. The core issues

If there is a thesis statement to this, it is that Kaidan Alenko sounds like an incredibly interesting, multifaceted, uniquely skilled and powerful character who you never see fully represented on screen. My own particular love of Kaidan comes, if I am honest, less from the cutscenes the game actually puts him in and can instead quite often be traced back to deep analysis of dialogue, codex entries and tracing and connecting implications of the two.

To give a concrete example, I know for a fact that Kaidan Alenko is a very powerful biotic. Most companions in the first game can remark upon this fact and all of them seem impressed. His powers don’t just contribute to an ambiguous Coolness Factor, though. They also impact his personality significantly. They weigh heavy on his conscience, something we learn when he states in early ME1 party banter that he has been deliberately holding himself back for fear of hurting someone. He learned the hard way that his powers are a massive responsibility when he accidentally killed Commander Vyrnnus, something he confesses to you in one of his more powerful conversations in the first game. It’s also a physical burden as we hear from Dr. Chakwas that he suffers from chronic migraines. On top of that, his unique power and his suffering both come from the L2 implant he wears, an outdated model that is considered dangerous. Kaidan has debilitating migraines, but he is one of the luckier ones; other children suffered anything ranging from severe mental disabilities to fatal brain tumors. During the timeline of ME1 there is a serious legal battle raging in the background, of the surviving L2 biotics trying to get reparations for what was done to them. And finally, he is one of the first human biotics to even exist, wearing only the second generation of implants that allow him access to manipulating dark energy. Human biotics are essentially space mages and are socially ostracized and feared by much of humanity.

It’s safe to say that the entire character of Kaidan Alenko hinges on his biotics. His abilities are a fundamental part of him. They have shaped his personality, his ethical code and his sense of personal identity. Kaidan Alenko as a character simply does not make sense without his biotic abilities.

The problem is that you can count the amount of times Kaidan Alenko, one of the most powerful human biotics in the alliance military, actually uses his biotic abilities, on one hand. In fact, you can count them on one finger, because there is exactly one scene - a very simple, not particularly impressive use of Throw on two random goons in the Citadel DLC. Not only is this cutscene not particularly reflective of Kaidan’s extensive ability, it only happens for people who have already locked in his romance and therefore made the game prioritize him. The specific scene could theoretically happen with most other characters. That means anyone who isn’t already completely and entirely sold on the character of Kaidan Alenko, to the extent that they ship their personal OC with him, will likely never see this. I’ll get into why he doesn’t have those scenes a little later.

You can extrapolate this basic issue for most of the other fundamental cornerstones of his character:

Kaidan’s morality is strongly rooted in the concept of Paragon, that is to say, he is not an “ends justify the means” kind of guy. He will often try and resolve things peacefully, like when he talks down his fellow L2 biotics from committing homicide during UNC: Hostage in ME1. But because of how the game’s companion system works, Kaidan is never afforded the ability to do more than politely disagree with a renegade Shepard who happily commits war crimes. Voluntarily leaving the squad, as companions in a Dragon Age game might, is simply not on the table. In fact, his personality is so malleable in the first game that it takes one conversation to turn him into more of a renegade and, by proxy, a xenophobe. This option likely exists to ensure that players of a renegade Shepard have a choice in surrounding themselves with companions that do not fundamentally disagree with their ethics and choices, but it significantly weakens a character we are told values integrity.

Kaidan is an officer. He held the rank of Staff Lieutenant with over a dozen special commendations in ME1, putting him barely one rung below Shepard. The reason Shepard’s initiating dialogue is “Just trying to get a sense of where the crew’s at. Thoughts?” is that Kaidan handles staffing issues and is for all intents and purposes in charge of the marine detail of the Normandy. This simply does not come up. The only thing that is even peripherally mentioned is that Kaidan was the one who recommended getting Ashley Williams on board after Eden Prime. By ME2, he is Staff Commander and outranks Shepard. By ME3, he’s a Major, which is equivalent to the rank of Captain that Anderson held in the first game. As a Major, Kaidan was specifically put in charge of a spec ops team of human biotics. We will never meet them, never see Kaidan commanding them or even talking to them. Never be able to reflect in any way how this changed or affected Kaidan, who was himself abused in an alliance military project under a bad teacher. The game sometimes even forgets that he holds a significant rank at all and will generally consider Shepard to be his superior officer. And I haven’t even gotten into the Spectre stuff.

Kaidan is a chronic pain patient. You will never see him actively suffer the effects, unless we count an idle animation in the first game. Kaidan values self-control. He will never be put into a position where that self-control is tested and he either overcomes or lets loose. Or, at the very least, highly emotional scenes that could tempt his self-control, simply don’t.

3. The importance of visual impact

Kaidan Alenko is a very interesting character. On paper. Anyone who doesn’t spend the extra effort reading codex entries, reading character meta on tumblr and investing a considerable amount of time into wrapping their head around the particulars of his character will likely miss a great deal of his personality, because it’s just not on the screen. It used to be my instinct to argue that, well, reading codex entries is important and putting in a little effort to understand a character is fine and dandy. Anyone who isn’t doing that is simply cheating themselves out of appreciating some wonderful fictional guys. And in some cases, I think it is generally fair that not every aspect of a character need be spoon fed to the player. Fans engaging with the text, rather than passively observing it, is a natural part of media consumption.

However, I have to admit that at the end of the day, video games are a visual medium. Furthermore, the old adage of “show, don’t tell”, still applies. And when a character is fundamentally underrepresented, when even the most basic, core concepts of a character are simply missing from the screen, then I can no longer fault anyone for not immediately connecting to a character who is for all intents and purposes absent.

If you are having trouble wrapping your head around the importance of visual input in video games, let’s contrast Kaidan’s lack with other characters’ plenty.

If you don’t think showing Kaidan’s biotics would contribute much, then think about how Samara’s biotics are serene, precise, beautiful. Picture her sitting on the Normandy carefully meditating, shaping a perfect, beautiful little galaxy between her hands. Now contrast it with Jack, violently and impulsively ripping through three heavy mechs to escape her prison. Biotics aren’t just technically something these characters are capable of - their personalities are reflected in what situations they use them in, how they use them and what they look like.

If you don’t think it matters if a character is afforded an opportunity to show a strong sense of morality, then think about how most companions in Dragon Age do not follow blindly, how big choices like templars vs. mages can cost you the loyalty of one or more companions, if you didn’t invest enough time into forming strong relationships with them. Think about how even in a romance, even at 100% approval, Alistair will leave the party if you choose to spare Loghain. How he will never even consider making that choice if he is put up for that final duel at the Landsmeet. Sure, you can toughen him up a little, you can give him a different outlook and in so doing have some impact on his potential epilogues, but the player is never afforded the opportunity to fundamentally change him. If Alistair leaves, it’s not just a codex entry or a mention on the side. He will confront you and he will walk out on you.

If you don’t think seeing Kaidan in command of his troops is important, then think about how Cullen’s leadership in Inquisition is reflected on screen. How, at the temple of sacred ashes, in one of the very first cutscenes you may meet him in, he is shown carrying his own wounded soldier off the battlefield. How he is present in some way for almost every major battle in the game. In practice Cullen is stuck behind a desk for most of the game so the player can talk to him, but you don’t feel like he is a passive observer. You know that when battle rages, Cullen leads from the front because you have seen that happening consistently throughout the story.

I could even be more concrete and talk about how much Jack manages to develop as a character when you see her interacting with her own gaggle of biotic students in her very own mission. How much care is being depicted in how fiercely she protects those she has come to view as “her own”.

If you don’t think it might be relevant to see Kaidan suffer the migraines we’re told about, think about the gut reaction you have when you see a character like Cullen double over in pain at his desk, how he breaks down, visibly shaking in front of you when he is overwhelmed with the debilitating effects of his condition.

And if you don’t think seeing self-control depicted on screen would be all that impactful, think about how you reacted when you first watched Anders visibly fight to control his power. How his own anger, his own suffering cause him to struggle with his abilities, blue light literally pouring through the cracks in his veneer. You cannot adapt any of the above mentioned scenes 1:1 to Kaidan. He has neither the perfect asari control of the centuries old Samara, nor do I think he has quite the raw power of a royally pissed off Jack. Kaidan is not afforded the opportunity to walk out on Shepard due to how companions work in the trilogy. Kaidan is not in charge of a whole army like Cullen, nor is he likely ridden with trauma quite as intensely as him, since his pain manifests differently and there are modern treatments available to him. He’s not literally possessed by a spirit, like Anders. But all these characters showcase the potential of how a character can impact an audience. They show what can be visually communicated, when care and resources are spent on portraying a character on screen, rather than purely through dialogue and world building.

4. How did we get here

I promised earlier I’d circle back around to the why of it. For all three games, the causes are slightly different and often the result of what I generally call gameplay or story “technicalities”. That is to say, certain aspects of the game or story are simply constructed in such a way that they do not afford Kaidan (and often by proxy, Ashley) the opportunity to do much of significance, if they get to act at all.

I’ve already mentioned how Kaidan’s morality is entirely malleable in the first game based on a mechanic that has less to do with strong characterization and more to do with affording the player the ability to essentially customize their squad. The same applies to Ashley - though I reckon we see her conversation as a little less glaring since turning Ash into more of a paragon generally aligns her morally more closely with most players, while very few people are likely to enjoy turning Kaidan into a raging xenophobe.

The first game offers up little opportunity for Kaidan to display either his biotics or his position as Staff Lieutenant of the Normandy. The latter is easier to explain - the marine detail of the Normandy are just NPCs. They aren’t relevant to the story in any meaningful way, so leading them isn’t a particularly relevant job for Kaidan to be doing. In theory it’s incredibly important to keep an entire detail of soldiers in line, especially when the CO decides to mutiny three quarters through the story, but the plot is driven by Shepard and the squadmates, not the marines of the Normandy. Therefore, there is no real opportunity to showcase Kaidan’s abilities as a leader of soldiers.

The first is a bit more difficult to explain and seems to me like plain oversight. Kaidan doesn’t actually have any character introduction scene. The scene where we first meet him on the Normandy is not his introduction, it’s Joker’s. Joker is being characterized as our snarky, cynical pilot - Kaidan is just the person he is being contrasted against. Every other character on the Normandy has a strong introductory scene. Ashley is seen fleeing the geth, before we see her determinedly reload her rifle and turn back to enact some good old fashioned vengeance. Garrus is first seen arguing with his boss, marking him as a not-by-the-book kind of cop, then established as a crack shot by resolving a hostage crisis with a single precise shot of his pistol. Tali is seen negotiating with shady dealers, shown to be self-sufficient and clever enough to know something is up, characterizing her as intelligent and resourceful. Wrex is hilariously unintimidated by the space cops on the Citadel and thus presented as a certified badass. Finally, Liara is our traditional damsel in distress. And Kaidan… well. Nothing. There isn’t a Kaidan-specific scene in the first game.

At a guess, Kaidan might have played a bigger role in the cut segments on Eden Prime. For those not in the know, dialogue from the game files indicates that the Eden Prime level used to be longer (look for DanaDuchy’s “party banter” video on youtube and start from around 28 minutes. I had it linked originally, but it seems it prevented this post from showing up). Maybe there was a cutscene somewhere here that introduced new players to the concept of biotics in general and Kaidan’s abilities in particular that eventually ended up on the cutting room floor when the Eden Prime level was shortened. Maybe it’s just a general oversight and it truly never hit anyone that a) new players to the universe might want a crash course in what the heck is up with that space magic thing or b) players might need a strong, effective cutscene establishing Kaidan as a character.

(Incidentally, that cut dialogue from Eden Prime also states that Kaidan was originally intended to be vegetarian, which is, if nothing else, damn funny in hindsight.)

In ME2 the issue can be summed up summarily as “missing out on content”. Kaidan isn’t really afforded any space to act in the story. The one brief moment of involvement he has in the plot - Horizon - is once again reduced to mere dialogue. The one scripted cutscene he has, he shares with Ashley, in which both are fruitlessly shooting at a swarm of insects, trying to protect colonists, but are immediately and forcefully removed from the plot via convenient sedatives. They only return for yet another dialogue-heavy segment, which a lot of people dislike for understandable reasons, but is to me one of the few moments in which the characters display a firm moral stance. I might hate the scene because I hate Shepard and Kaidan fighting and the dialogue itself leaves a bit to be desired, but I like it in the sense that it provides decent characterization by making both Virmire Survivors stand their ground, even against someone they respect or possibly love.

To make things worse, thanks to the loyalty mission concept, ME2 was actually the game that best handled its character driven storytelling. Every squadmate is afforded the care and resources of a completely unique mission that tells us something important about them and provides ample characterization through their motivations for the mission as well as its outcome. Liara manages to circumvent the problem of not being there for those loyalty missions by getting her own story-driven DLC, which pushes forward her character development and resolves the lingering tension between her and Shepard, whether in a platonic or romantic sense. Kaidan and Ashley are not afforded the same opportunity.

Some people have pointed out that it is a positive thing, that Kaidan and Ashley do not need a loyalty mission, that their loyalty is gained organically and through actions throughout the trilogy rather than in one specifically scripted mission. I agree with that interpretation, but it does gloss over the fact that loyalty missions are not just a sign that a character is struggling and needs or wants something from Shepard, but an opportunity to spend time with a character on a mission tailored completely to them. Resources and time are dedicated to their portrayal and in so doing communicate what the character is all about to the audience. And Kaidan and Ashley lacking that kind of content is not a net positive.

In ME3, the preceding issues are not addressed and compounded by new decisions. The lack of a strong, initial cutscene remains unsolved. Kaidan’s introduction in 3 is short and dialogue-heavy, before he is once again forcefully removed from the plot, so Shepard and Anderson can shoot their way through the combat tutorial. When he reappears to effectively save Shepard with the Normandy, he doesn’t do much more than fire a standard assault rifle at a bunch of husks. He briefly returns for the segment on Mars, where the dialogue begins to meaningfully address the tension that was resolved for Liara in the preceding game, but he is then forcefully removed from the plot a third time, getting punched straight into hospital. Even the Citadel standoff, one of the few scenes the VS gets with some general plot-relevance, is undercut by the fact that it has to accommodate both Kaidan and Ashley - two characters who are very different. This is where the problem with the biotics really kicks off.

You see, the reason Kaidan is never using his biotics prominently during cutscenes is because he shares a majority of his cutscenes with Ashley, who isn’t a biotic. Outside of the few romance and friendship scenes, such as the Citadel dates, cutscenes for the Virmire Survivor have to accommodate two characters who are fundamentally different. Ashley is more renegade, Kaidan is more paragon, Kaidan has biotic abilities, Ashley does not. Their personalities and skills are almost at opposite ends of a spectrum, but because any one player of the series will only ever be able to keep one of them alive, fewer resources seem to have been spent on each character individually and their biggest, most important scenes have to operate on an ambiguous middle ground. Ashley is impulsive, a renegade and only has her gun at her disposal, so if Shepard hesitates to shoot Udina during the Citadel standoff, Ashley will shoot him for them, same as she did with Wrex in the first game. For her, this is a fine scene. But Kaidan in contrast is supposed to be calm and controlled, has a strong paragon personality and a range of abilities at his disposal. If the cutscene reflected him truthfully, this scene could diverge significantly for Kaidan. He might choose not to kill Udina and instead wrap him in a stasis field, both to spare his life and so he can be interrogated. These are options Ashley does not have, so the cutscene can’t go there.

In general ME3 gave me the distinct feeling that a majority of cutscenes are written with Ashley in mind first and then dialogue is adapted for Kaidan. Liara’s comment about the Virmire Survivor becoming “very capable” makes some sense for Ashley, who started out as gunnery chief and was new to serving aboard a ship, alongside aliens and operating in deep space. Ashley was a bit of a rookie in some sense. Kaidan starts the series as an officer, already in charge of a significant number of soldiers. He already had over a dozen special commendations. I’m certainly not offended on behalf of the character, but this commentary doesn’t make sense unless you ignore everything the world building and codex establishes about Kaidan and just see him as any other soldier, some kind of raw recruit who was looking up to Shepard. Instead, it is Shepard who is afforded several opportunities to ask Kaidan, three years their senior, for advice on both tactics and politics in the first game - and Kaidan who looks out for Shepard in turn. Liara’s commentary is simply not reflective of Kaidan’s role in the story up to this point, or his relationship with Shepard.

His role as Major is undercut on several occasions. After the Citadel standoff, the game briefly forgets that Kaidan outranks Shepard by now, as Joker complains that Kaidan “almost shot a superior officer”. His leadership of the spec ops squad is mentioned and party banter even indicates he finds at least one squad during the game, but we will never meet them. This time I really don’t understand it. I can easily see that you can’t rewrite the entire structure of ME1 to give the marine detail of the Normandy a more active role to play in the story just to better reflect Kaidan’s rank - but I honestly don’t know why there isn’t even a small cutscene involving Kaidan in the Normady’s communications center just talking to his spec ops squad. It’s a huge wasted opportunity to not put names and faces to his students (like we do for Jack). If we don’t have the time or money for a full loyalty mission (which at this point may be sorely needed) that’s one thing. But to choose to ignore the one, cool new thing that is unique to Kaidan, to not spend five minutes on exploring that aspect of his character? It feels like such an obvious problem in hindsight.

His chronic pain barely comes up, which again just feels a bit odd. If you ask me, ME3 is the perfect opportunity to showcase some vulnerability, to display your companions cracking under the pressure of the end of the world. The game does that quite admirably with Shepard, in fact. It doesn’t have to be a scene where he breaks down the way Cullen does, but it wouldn’t take that much to show some of the facade starting to crack.

You can easily add the issue of self-control to that. It might have been interesting for Kaidan to be put into a situation where that self-control could be on display, where a difficult decision might make or break him. It could intensify his romance, to really portray the emotional difficulty of finally reuniting with the person he watched die after two long years.

If you ever catch me complaining about the date at Apollo’s or even the scene in the Citadel DLC, this is why. I don’t hate the idea of Kaidan cracking jokes about his Canadian-ness or his fondness for steak and beer. It’s that these are the things the game chooses to spend time on, to spend money on, when the more fundamental parts of his character are left either entirely on the cutting room floor or restricted to off-handed mentions. There isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with having a cutesy home cooked dinner scene. I could and would even argue for the fact that this kind of normalcy is a great contrast for a character who didn’t have much normalcy in his life. What bugs me about it is the knowledge that money and time were devoted to a custom beer clink animation when the character of Kaidan Alenko, after several years of game development and an entire trilogy, does not have a single cutscene where he prominently displays the extent of his biotic abilities. What bugs me is that the lighthearted and fun stuff ends up taking precedence over the deeper, more meaningful cornerstones of his character, rather than flesh out the strong foundation that could already be there.

Even the fans who really enjoy Kaidan in ME3 seem to be at least tacitly aware that Canadian in-jokes and memes about Kaidan’s fondness for steak and beer feel like a little much. They don’t technically take up that much time - it’s only two cutscenes - but because the character lacks so much on every other front, they become overwhelming. They don’t become a cute contrast of normalcy to a character who has lived a life that was anything but - they become the fundamental cornerstones of his character. They become the thing that people take away from the story. They displace and overshadow everything else that was not prominently featured on screen. And even those of us who have dissected his character to hell and back, who know that a strong foundation is there if you dig deep enough into every codex entry, every smidgeon of dialogue - even we are not immune to the impact of visual storytelling. And even we can end up feeling like there’s a bit too much memeing about Canada, too many discussions of steak and flavors of alcohol.

In the end - what about Kaidan was visually presented on the screen?

That he’ll spend a disconcerting amount of time aimlessly shooting at insects. That he’ll shoot Udina if you won’t. That he really likes steak and alcohol. Anything else, we just don’t see.

If you take all of this together, is it any wonder the main takeaway from a more casual observer is that Kaidan is some relatively uninteresting, painfully average kind of guy?

5. So what?

It’s one thing to identify the issues and even how we got to those issues, but another thing entirely to provide actual, constructive feedback on how to do things better. So I want to spend the next and longest part of this cry for help thought excercise by finding ways to address the issues identified earlier. I’ve already alluded to a few ideas but I want to bring some structure into it.

As such, I want to outline a script, an editor’s note of the existing franchise. I want to brainstorm some basic ideas for cutscenes and interactions that untangle Kaidan from Ashley, that give Kaidan a bit of a space to breathe and develop as a character and in so doing, create better contrast for Ashley, making the choice between the two seem a bit more meaningful.

What I want to avoid is airing my own personal grievances with the way Kaidan was portrayed in ME3. I do not intend to win any arguments over who the “real” Kaidan is. Kaidan is a fictional character who was originally conceived by one writer and then adapted for the third game by another. Small inconsistencies, differences in creative decisions and focus are often unavoidable, so I am uninterested in fostering some kind of bizarre fan civil war. Some people prefer Kaidan in ME3. Some people prefer Kaidan in ME1. I cannot objectively prove which version of the character is better - some fans might never even have felt a tangible difference - so I won’t. And I won’t try and change anything about ME3’s Kaidan that I believe to be my entirely subjective preferences, or result from the kind of differences in style of writing that are inevitable under a new character writer.

Instead, I aim to limit myself to critiquing only those scenes which I believe don’t so much portray Kaidan as “ooc”, because that can mean something different to every single person, but instead simply fail to portray him at all. The scenes that do not provide strong characterization either way, the scenes where I feel like time and money could have been allocated more wisely. I will try and explain my reasoning for why these scenes are often not bad, but achieve less than they could.

I also limit myself in what can feasibly be displayed on screen, if we consider that games are made under time and budget constraints. I will not do anything that would require large rewrites of any of the games. I will try to achieve as much as possible with as little as possible and won’t replace quiet, dialogue-heavy scenes with busy, animation-heavy scenes. I will try to think as a game dev and writer might, with the caveat that a) I am not actually in game dev and might over- or underestimate certain issues and b) I’ve had the past 10 years to think about this in hindsight with the input of an active fanbase, which is a very different environment to be in, than a game dev who’s been given a certain number of months to come up with or adapt someone else’s fictional guy.

This is why I am also uninterested in discussing questions of writing competency, or talk about things in terms of “bad writing”, because I do not feel comfortable rendering that kind of judgment on people working in a field I have no tangible experience in and who worked under conditions so very different from the ones under which I am able to comfortably analyze and critique their choices with a decade of hindsight.

Ultimately, my proposed edits are just my own personal thoughts, though. The idea behind this is to analyze how you visually represent certain characteristics. If you don’t end up liking any of my proposed solutions, if they don’t really match up your interpretation of Kaidan, I hope they at least provide a decent framework for you to come up with your own.

With all this in mind, let’s see what we could do to address the existing problems.

6. How to fix it:

I will be writing this segment mostly with a paragon Shepard in mind. Renegade dialogue options are often confrontational or shut down a conversation, rather than extend it, so for now I am uninterested to also include an “and you can tell him to shut up too!” option at every turn. In a realistic scenario I would of course need to script a full dialogue wheel including diverging paths, but this is already embarrassingly long for a thought exercise. When actions, rather than dialogue, are supposed to reflect a specific morality, I’ll accommodate both paragon and renegade options, but for conversations I will outline a simple click-top-right-on-the-dialogue-wheel path.

ME1:

All we really need in the first game is a Kaidan-specific cutscene during Eden Prime, affording him the minimum amount of time and resources that are afforded to every other squadmate in the game. I propose the following: As the team encounters the husks for the first time, during the cutscene where they slowly descend from the dragon’s teeth, Shepard, Ash and Kaidan almost get swarmed. Kaidan manages to pull a barrier around them all, pushing the husks out and smashing some of them against the prefab homes. Combat starts after that. Dialogue back on the Normandy will reference this and Shepard can comment on Kaidan’s extensive abilities.

I would also plainly cut both the conversations for Ashley and Kaidan that allow a player to modify their morality. This change is not really reflected in later characterization of either VS, so it has become redundant in retrospect. Removing it makes both characters seem less malleable and more firm. Any character development or change they might go through would be on their own terms.

ME2:

I suggest altering the Horizon segment and extending it by a little bit. A lot of this comes down to extending dialogue and adding concrete consequences.

In the initial cutscene, neither Kaidan nor Ash stand around firing pointlessly at a bug swarm. Both of them attempt to cover the colonists, but upon realizing their shooting doesn’t accomplish much, they follow the colonists, shooting at the swarm once or twice (Kaidan maybe even remembering to use those biotics that he has), but ultimately run with them to the nearest prefab house and hunkering down. Shepard, partway through the colony, breaks into that exact house and finds themselves face to face and gun to gun with the Virmire Survivor. They are disbelieving, but there is not much time to ask questions, similar to how we first encounter Tali. To gain their trust, Shepard can share the swarm-countermeasure with the VS, at which point the path diverges depending on which VS is alive and if they have been given the countermeasure:

If Kaidan is alive:

If given Mordin’s countermeasure, Kaidan decides to head back out and try to find as many survivors as he can. He has figured out by now that his biotics can slow the swarm down and barriers hold them off effectively (as we see in the suicide mission later on), so he focuses on protecting people. A paragon Shepard will agree with him, a renegade Shepard may try to get him to focus on killing Collectors instead, but ultimately Kaidan is immune to their influence right now and will move forward with his plan.

Later, when hitting the Collector ship, more of the pods will be empty, but the ship is almost fully staffed. Companion banter indicates that Kaidan protecting the colonists has saved more lives than initially thought. More paragon inclined characters will note their approval, more renegade inclined characters will bemoan that it’s a hollow victory if they don’t finish the rest of the Collectors off. Shepard’s agreement or disagreement depends on their own alignment.

If Ashley is alive:

If given Mordin’s countermeasure, Ashley decides to head back out and shoot as many Collectors as she can. She has enough explosives to blow a decent amount of them to hell and wants to slow them down, so they can’t hit the next colony like they hit Horizon. She lacks the biotic abilities that would let her meaningfully protect the colonists. A renegade Shepard will agree with her, a paragon Shepard may try to get her to focus on protecting colonists instead, but ultimately Ashley is immune to their influence right now and will move forward with her plan.

Later, when hitting the Collector ship, more of the pods will be filled, but the ship is running only a skeleton crew. Companion banter indicates that Ashley going after them has taken out more Collectors than initially thought. More renegade inclined characters will note their approval, more paragon inclined characters will lament that a lot of colonists are dead now to give them this advantage. Shepard’s agreement or disagreement depends on their own alignment.

After the final battle on Horizon, if Shepard gave the VS the countermeasure, they are slightly more amicable in the ensuing dialogue, but ultimately do not join Shepard, still citing distrust of Cerberus and still not fully convinced Shepard isn’t just a clone or a particularly clever VI. They will say that they will share the countermeasure with the Alliance and bolster other human colonies against the seeker swarms. In the debrief, the Illusive Man will be pretty ticked off for sharing such useful tools with the Alliance, but ultimately agrees since this saves human lives. This will also count favorably towards the Citadel stand-off in ME3.

If Shepard did not give the VS the countermeasure, they were unable to participate in the fight, forced to remain locked down with the colonists. They are even more distrustful in the ensuing dialogue and do not join Shepard, still citing distrust of Cerberus and still not fully convinced Shepard isn’t just a clone or a particularly clever VI. Without the countermeasure, human colonies will remain vulnerable to Collector attacks, but a renegade Shepard’s reasoning is that they will put a stop to the attacks themselves. The Illusive Man will compliment Shepard on being discreet and sticking to the mission plan, revealing perhaps in some sense that his care for humanity only goes so far. This will count negatively towards the Citadel stand-off in ME3.

ME3:

Vancouver

To provide one more, at least marginally stronger initial cutscene for the VS, I would involve them a bit more in the flight from Earth. I would have most of it play out as is but modify the touchdown of the Normandy, giving Kaidan and Ashley something more interesting to do than providing broad, unfocused cover fire.

If Kaidan is alive, he could use his biotics to protect Shepard, raising a barrier and pushing away husks similar to how Jack/Samara can push out the seeker swarms in ME2’s suicide run. This is not just to use the same idea twice - if my proposed scene from ME1 is added, this could be an effective callback.

If Ashley is alive, she could use her marksman ability (her tactical scores are, according to dialogue in ME1, exemplary!) and protect Shepard from husks with a few well-aimed headshots, similar to how Legion protects Shepard during the derelict Reaper mission in ME2.

The important thing is to visually portray both characters as distinct, with unique abilities all to themselves.

Mars

I am fine with a majority of the dialogue on Mars (barring earlier criticism of the “very capable” conversation as it applies to Kaidan).

The main change I propose on Mars is that during the final cutscene where the VS is attacked and almost killed by Dr. Eva Core, rather than shoving Liara out of the way, the VS should be shown visibly protecting and saving Shepard. Dialogue later in the game seems to indicate that this is the scene’s intent. Shepard is later portrayed as concerned, possibly guilty over the VS’ injuries and in some dialogue outright states that the VS “got hurt protecting me”, but this is just not what is reflected on screen. Sure, it sounds like pedantry to even bring this up, but players identify strongly with their avatar and a scene in which a character visibly gives their life for the player’s avatar has a very different impact than a scene in which a squadmate visibly protects another.

So, in my opinion, it should be Vega helping Liara away from the fire, while Shepard and the VS approach the shuttle. When Dr. Eva Core turns out to be alive and tries to attack Shepard, the VS pushes Shepard out of the way, after which the VS gets grabbed, affording Shepard enough time to get up and into position to fire at Dr. Eva Core. The rest plays out as is.

This has the added advantage of turning the scene into a more obvious parallel for the events on Eden Prime that kick off the first game. Where once Shepard pushed Kaidan or Ashley out of the way and they had to carry their commander’s unconscious body back to the Normandy, the VS finally gets the opportunity to save Shepard at the risk of their own life in turn.

(Optional: None of the scenes on Mars can be adapted to truly reflect Kaidan’s biotic abilities without fundamentally altering how they play out. For example, the encounter with the turret would have to be amended considerably if Kaidan could meaningfully impact this scene with a biotic barrier, since it’s a tutorial on how to move from cover to cover. Therefore, I am omitting this. If we want to really be sure that no one shouts “plot hole!” just because, dialogue later in the game can posit how Kaidan was tapped out biotically after the fighting in Vancouver and on Mars and therefore was unable to construct a strong barrier when facing the turret or Dr. Eva Core. But that is rationalization of scenes via dialogue and those things missing are not the games’ most glaring issues. Not when contrasted against the missing visual impact of certain cutscenes. This scene is made impactful by Kaidan being severely injured, being pedantic about how he got put into that position isn’t helpful in this case, provided he has ample opportunity elsewhere to show off his abilities.)

Priority: Citadel

I suggest adjusting the Citadel standoff as noted in one of the earlier sections, with one additional change. The Citadel standoff primarily works for Ashley and in my opinion requires no great adjustment. But I would enable Kaidan to make a different choice. Since the standoff is a big emotional scene I would have it test Kaidan’s self-control and show Kaidan’s biotics flaring slightly when confronted by Shepard, then once again more dangerously when Udina pulls out a gun. In a twist, Kaidan, instead of attacking, uses his biotics to trap Udina in a stasis field, allowing Udina to be taken in alive. Maybe that achieves nothing in gameplay terms, maybe Udina is just not high enough up the chain of Cerberus to carry valuable intel, but it would still show that if pushed, Kaidan will remain calm and controlled, take charge of a difficult situation and try to preserve what life he can as a Paragon would.

A renegade Shepard can still choose to shoot Udina anyways. This gives the resulting recruitment dialogue more possibilities too. Kaidan can be grateful that Shepard extended the same trust to him that he has extended to them, enabling them to resolve the standoff peacefully. He might butt heads with a renegade Shepard who shot Udina, as his current dialogue reflects.

By contrast, Ash might butt heads with a paragon Shepard who was hesitant, but might approve of the quick reaction time and decisive action of a renegade Shepard, who shot Udina themselves.

The standoff can largely function as it currently does because it’s not a bad scene in theory - it’s one of the most meaningful the VS ever gets - it simply needs to provide stronger and more distinct characterization for either VS. Two fundamentally different characters should not be making identical choices.

The Normandy

To better display the impact of the war on Kaidan and his chronic pain, I would add visible pain to the very first conversation on the ship, the one about his parents. The scene is already suitably heavy and Kaidan is already voiced to be deep in thought and in emotional turmoil, so it wouldn’t take much. Slap in the idle animation from ME1 of him rubbing his head, add a line of Shepard asking him if he’s doing ok and bam! - players can see the stress of the war getting to him.

There are a number of ways to diversify how this plays out. Maybe a romanced Kaidan puts in more effort to hide his pain, maybe Shepard is shown to quickly cut through his bullshit. Perhaps an opportunity could be offered for a Shepard to reach out and attempt to comfort him in the form of a paragon interrupt, falling into familiar motions from before the Normandy went down. It can be a little tense, a little awkward, a little emotionally fraught.

Most of those ideas hit better than the very general “there’s strength in camaraderie, in empathy” line. This is the first interaction for Kaidan back on the Normandy. It should be a little more personal than that.

(Re-) Initiating Romance

In a more controversial decision, I would toss out the dinner date at Apollo’s entirely and replace it. I’ve said that I would not remove scenes based on personal preference and this is one of those cases where I just don’t think the scene provides adequate characterization.

The basic idea of the Citadel date is a sanity check - a break for Shepard and Kaidan. The restaurant, the food and the drinks are vectors to communicate that idea, but the vector is not the important part, the message is.

Moreover, while a date is cute, this is the scene that potentially reunites Shepard and Kaidan. Whether we’re talking about a female Shepard who romanced Kaidan in ME1, a male Shepard who was never afforded that possibility but for whom the lingering romantic tension can finally blossom into a real relationship in ME3, or a new player who is trying to make sense of two characters who, romantically or platonically, clearly have a history - this scene is pretty significant. Does a romantic dinner date provide useful contrast or does it undercut the potential emotional intensity of what actually happens? Your mileage may vary, but for me, it is the latter.

And that is why I propose a change. Kaidan’s love for steak and beer will a) return in the Citadel DLC anyhow, where food and drink are not just a vector of a message but part of a message. Namely they set the backdrop for a moment of domesticity and normalcy, providing a valuable contrast to the rest of the games and their more emotionally heavy, serious scenes. And b) it returns at least one more time as a throwaway line, which is better suited for that. Food preferences are almost always communicated in small mentions at the periphery of a character. Fandom made a big deal about Alistair’s love for cheese, but that’s one, maybe two off-handed lines in the first game.

(Maybe Kaidan’s original writer was somewhat aware of that idea when he wrote that “I’m glad I’m a vegetarian.” line to play on the sidelines, rather than devote an entire cutscene to it. Maybe it’s entirely incidental. But either way, I think it was the right idea.)

My proposition would be to take that break at a location that is significant to Kaidan and Shepard from the first game. My mind almost immediately went to the scenic view from the wards where Shepard, Kaidan and Ashley first have their moment to just talk. It is the first instance of flirting between Kaidan and a female Shepard, symbolically turning it into the place where their relationship kicked off and making it an emotionally significant location from which to pick that same relationship back up. The locale presents some difficulty from an animation standpoint - the wards weren’t put into the game for ME3 - but the game already reuses assets from the first game when talking to the Council and I see no reason why we can’t do the same here. The location can be polished up with new assets and the view over the ward arms exists in the game, in ME3 you just see it from the docking bay.

With refugees pouring into the docks and shortly after the coup on the Citadel, this part of the wards could be comparatively quiet, empty streets reflecting a Citadel during war time, with people either spending time with their loved ones or letting loose in clubs. Dialogue could clarify this to set a scene of quiet reminiscing and establish that, just as the Citadel’s residents, Kaidan and Shepard take a moment to spend time with the people that are important to them, platonically or romantically - each other.

The conversation would be nostalgic, looking back to their first day on the Citadel, reminiscing about Ashley and bonding in their shared grief. Regardless of specific lines, I think a nostalgic, contemplative mood a) reflects Kaidan as a character better, b) has a heavier, emotional impact on the player (esp. with that incredibly sad music that suddenly overshadows the cozy mood of Apollo’s) and therefore better fits into the narrative arc of ME3, c) better communicates the characters’ shared history, both to returning and new players.

The confession can play out rather similar to the original date, but I would support the emotional tone a bit more with animations. Rather than the calm hand kiss we see, I want to showcase Kaidan’s self-control one last time - this time, by breaking, rather than maintaining it. Regardless of whether this is a returning or a new romance, I think I can justify an impulsive, sudden kiss between the two, initiated by either Shepard with an interrupt, or, if missed, by Kaidan, finally and symbolically giving in (possibly once again) to his feelings for Shepard. If Shepard initiates the kiss, it mirrors the kiss in ME1 on the flight to Ilos. If Kaidan initiates it, it becomes a parallel that maybe indicates some measure of character development on his part has taken place - here, at the end of the world, he’s finally, truly letting go. (Can you tell I like parallels?) A harmless flare of his biotic corona underlines this idea and could give rise to a bit of jokey flirting.

Animation-wise, think Solas’ first kiss in the Fade or Cullen’s first kiss on the battlements. If that’s not in the budget, maybe they can reuse it from the first game? This is where it probably shows that I am not in game dev and therefore cannot properly estimate how easily animations are converted from one game to another, so it’s entirely possible that this kiss is a bigger challenge than I think it is. But a hand kiss is a unique animation too, costs money and time to make too, so I like to think a regular kiss would not be completely out of the question or out of the budget.

One criticism that can be leveled at this idea is that this isn’t as much of a break - not as much of a sanity check as the original date at Apollo’s, but for me, creating strong characterization is more important than sticking to any one writer’s original plan for a scene, even if their original idea was good on paper. If you feel very strongly about the date at Apollo’s, if you have an emotional connection to it, I understand if this seems like an unnecessary and unwelcome change. I hope it’s at least understandable why I think changes like this are valuable, even if any one person does not agree.

Biotics Division

The only thing we’re missing now is something that adequately portrays Kaidan as an officer, teacher, leader of people. I’ve already said I won’t script additional, animation-heavy content like, say, an entire mission (loyalty or otherwise) and want to come out under or within the current scope. So I am replacing another scene that isn’t fundamentally wrong or “bad writing”, but underutilizing the character.

I’m specifically talking about the Cerberus debrief after Jacob’s mission. While I think it’s a decent portrayal of Kaidan’s character - he is shown to be introspective, thoughtful and empathetic - I don’t think it adds enough to really justify its existence. Kaidan reflects on Cerberus and comes to the realization that some people in Cerberus might have been “good” people. Which doesn’t seem like the kind of epiphany he needed to have.

This kind of dialogue implies we’re supposed to believe Kaidan had an extremely simplistic “evil bad people” view of Cerberus as an organization, which undercuts his intelligence. He was already pretty insightful about politics, especially when it came to the distinction of “pro human” and “human supremacy”. Dialogue about Udina, about humanity and its place in the galaxy and his responses to the presidential candidate from Terra Firma already establish Kaidan as savvy enough that he probably shouldn’t be so completely blindsided by the idea that some people working for Cerberus might have been doing so for the right reasons. Several of those people are already on the Normandy, including Kenneth and Gabby, Joker, Dr. Chakwas - and the person he is literally talking to right now. For Kaidan to have this epiphany only now and in such simplistic terms, visibly stumped by a morally complex situation, seems almost condescending.

In short - ideas are being communicated that a) don’t need to be communicated from a player’s perspective, who is already submersed in the moral complexity of working with Cerberus in ME2, b) wouldn’t be particularly useful in providing context for the new players and c) doesn’t communicate an idea that Kaidan would really be struggling with at this point. And if it doesn’t do any of that, then it seems arbitrary to have it and I feel no great sense of loss by replacing it with a scene that is absolutely sorely needed - an introduction to Kaidan’s spec ops squad.

With the upgraded communications room and the fancy new blue holographic imaging, the choice feels rather obvious. Shepard gets a message to join Kaidan for a call when they can. Biotics division has made contact with Anderson as they are currently fighting on Earth, who put them through to Kaidan and Shepard.

Shepard walks in mid-conversation as Kaidan is talking to the holographic images of his XOs; maybe Anderson makes an appearance too, bringing them all together. The particulars of the dialogue are once again not that important. I would simply include something that reflects Kaidan’s intelligence and tactical know-how, giving his people advice on things - maybe how to secure rations, maybe how to approach a specific mission. The important thing is - you are seeing Kaidan leading. Some informal banter between him and his squad can cement an emotional connection Kaidan has with his people.

There’s probably space here for both light-hearted banter/flirting, or other more emotionally heavy conversations about hope, tough calls and the end of the world. Kaidan could reflect on his position and how he feels about it after everything Vyrnnus once put him through. I don’t want to settle in favor of any specific idea because like I said, I don’t want to script out the exact dialogue wheel, but rather set the stage for a general scene that can go a variety of ways, be used in any manner to communicate something fundamental about the character. The important thing is seeing Kaidan having a relationship with his squad and Shepard, not me dictating what that relationship looks like exactly.

Aaaaand that’s it! There’s nothing else I think is in desperate need of extensive editing. The Citadel DLC scene can remain happily as it is - because now it has become a bit more stand-out, a bit of a better contrast to the rest of the games’ content. Anything else I might note would be based on my own personal preference, rather than meaningfully contribute to visual characterization.

7. The core issues: resolved?

After all that, let’s do a recap and see what original issues we have addressed and how we’ve addressed them.

Characterization through biotic abilities:

Added the display of biotics in all three games, mostly focusing on defensive abilities (barrier, one of his core abilities), showing us a more protective, caring Kaidan. When he uses offensive abilities, it is ultimately in service of protection, which is fitting for a sentinel - the resident tank class. The use of his biotics displays a character who is calm and in control of himself and the battlefield.

Cementing Kaidan’s morality:

No opportunity to change Kaidan fundamentally. He is his own person.

Paragon morality is depicted in both the main interactions in which Kaidan is presented with a choice - Horizon and the Citadel standoff. When Kaidan is permitted to act, he acts like a Paragon.

Displaying Kaidan’s leadership:

In ME2, Kaidan is shown doing his utmost to protect the residents of Horizon. That may not be leadership in a military sense, but it does show that he can take responsibility for other people’s lives and take charge of a situation.

In ME3, Kaidan is shown interacting with his students. While we still can’t see him in action without more extensive changes, we can get a glimpse of what he might be like as a leader based on how his troops interact with him.

Empathizing via pain:

Kaidan is now shown at least once to visibly strain under his migraines. It also affords Shepard the opportunity to emotionally connect with him in this moment of pain.

Maintaining self-control:

Kaidan now showcases strong self-control even in a very tense, high stakes situation during the Citadel standoff, using his abilities to pacify and control the situation, to avoid harm. It becomes an inversion of his original fight with Vyrnnus. Kaidan’s an adult now and he chooses to use his abilities to prevent harm, not cause it.

On the flipside, because he manages to resist the loss of control here, it makes it feel more significant when he finally loses it in the romance scene. It underlines how strongly he feels about Shepard and how liberating their relationship is for him.

8. I think we might finally be done here

In the end, your mileage may vary on how much you like my proposed changes. I am not the original writer of Kaidan Alenko, I can only give my interpretation of the character and at best speculate about narrative intent. Other fans might interpret characters differently, might prioritize different things. The things that I see, value and love in Kaidan Alenko might not be the things you see, value and love in Kaidan Alenko. The scenes I suggest removing might be so important to you that you can’t get behind the idea of changing anything about them. And that’s ok.

My goal with this… whatever the fuck this is, is not to prove what Kaidan’s characterization is or should be, but to illustrate how characters in video games are characterized and use that technique to construct a characterization for Kaidan. You can use the same thought exercise to come up with scenes that better reflect your Kaidan Alenko. Maybe you really just enjoy the character as he is and don’t think anything needs fixing, in which case, boy I hope you didn’t put yourself through reading this entire thing.

In the end, I made this mostly for myself, because I enjoyed it as a creative exercise and because in a way it allowed me to exorcize (get it? Exorcize, exercise? ) a lot of the things that have been itching in my brain for the past decade.

I may in the future fully script the proposed dialogue scenes, as another creative exercise and will happily post them here as well. If anyone else manages to get a kick out of it, that’s fine and dandy.

And with that, I rest my case.

TL;DR

Kaidan Alenko is one of the most interesting characters in the Mass Effect universe on paper. Because he lacks a number of character-specific cutscenes, misses large parts of the plot and ultimately shares a large part of his scripted animations with another character, players cannot pick up much of that character while playing the game. Seemingly small parts of his personality, like food preferences, do get screen time and become almost overwhelming, rather than provide additional detail to a well-defined character. The result is a character that requires a not-inconsiderable amount of time and effort spent dissecting dialogue and connecting codex entries to find the real personality underneath.

#Kaidan Alenko #Mass Effect #Mass Effect 2 #Mass Effect 3 #shenko #character meta #meta #let's see if it lets me post it this time

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dragonsongmakhali · 5 months

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10 fandoms, 10 characters, 10 tags:

Basic rules: choose 10 fandoms that you are part of/support, and choose a favorite character from each of those. Then, tag ten folks!

Tagged by: @jigschosai @sealrock @reikatsukihana and @sasslett! Thank y'all :'D

This is not ordered by how much I'm into them, they're just in whatever order came to mind :) I will caution that I don't tend to choose favorite characters, I'm more of an OC maker. Feeling chatty, so I'm putting the actual list under a cut. You're welcome.

1. FFXIV : Pretty self-explanatory for the xiv sideblog. Since I'm not as in to the MSQ, I don't think I actually have a favorite character (which I know is illegal, I'm sorry :<). I really love seeing what the community does with the characters, though!

2. Halo : The storyline went to hell long ago, but I do still adore the original trilogy and constantly mine it for gpose captions. It was basically what I lived off of in high school. If I had a tumblr back then, I'd have been insufferable. Favorite character is easily Rtas 'Vadum.

3. WoW : Kind of. Asterisk. I really only know Classic, and even then, I'm way more Horde than I am Alliance. I have approximate knowledge of many things. No favorite there either - I'm all about the world and making OCs. We have two concurrent WoW tabletop games running at the moment, so this is where most of my headspace is. Their shared timeline is different from the canon, so I'm not really in the fandom per se.

4. Mass Effect : Alien dating sim, my beloved. I even enjoyed Andromeda (jump jets implemented perfectly, fun combat, the Jardaan reminded me of Forerunners). If you ask me to choose a favorite, I'll cry. How is a mother supposed to choose between her two sons (Legion and Grunt)? Drack also gets an honorary mention for his 100s of low res pictures of guns email.

5. Elder Scrolls : Mostly Skyrim, some Oblivion. I know, I'm one of those fans. Anyway, I've probably played over 1k hours of Skyrim by this point and yet. And yet! I don't have a favorite. The entirety of the Companions? I just wish that the faction questlines in Skyrim weren't "you killed 3 wolves and have been here a week. You lead us all now", but it does give me good scaffolding which. As an OC fiend. Grabby hands.

6. The World Ends With You : This game made me good at calculus in high school. My favorite character from here is Sho Minamimoto, and I was a completely normal teenager who dealt with that by doing calculus problems for fun. Turns out, the trick to get good at math is repetition.

7. Pokémon : Probably my earliest fandom. Still play the games now and again, just got Legends Arceus (super late, I know), and that's been a lot of fun. My favorite character from the franchise is Sinnoh's Rock type leader, Roark. I had a long-running sideblog dedicated to the Sinnoh region because gen IV is my favorite in general! It's inactive at the moment.

8. Guild Wars : 2, to be more precise. I started playing about a month after release, and since it's f2p, I still drop in from time to time. Like every MMO, I have no favorites. I really love playing Sylvari, though! (The glow!! The nightmare!! The [[Heart of Thorns spoiler!!]] They're just so neat)

9. Star Trek : we're now getting into "shows I watched and didn't hate" because I'm definitely not in the 'fandom' for Trek. We've been going through the old series as a way to wind down before bed, starting with TNG. We're on Enterprise now, and I'm sad that it got canceled. Still will probably have a better ending than Voyager. I don't have a favorite, but I can tell you that the writers' collective favorite must be either Seven of Nine or Data.

10. Uh. Various anime? I can't say I've recently loved any particular series to the point of fandom, but as a whole, I've been a weeb since I was in middle school. "Recent" series that I've enjoyed have included Mob Psycho and Love is War. Coincidentally, they both saved the most banger opening for their third season.

We had to stretch a little bit, but we made it to ten! Proud of this community (this community is my brain desperately trying to remember 10 things I like)

Have no idea who's been tagged in this, so if you've done this, please ignore! Or reblog it again!

@miqojak @airis-ray @wilanserulia @ahollowgrave @blackestnight @starstrider @iron-sparrow @sumifinalfourteen @jump-n-dive @otherworldseekers

#it was so hard to come up with more than 8 imma be real #i tend to hyperfocus for years on things so I'm more depth than breadth #sorry makhali all of my brainworms are for the tabletop :(#tagged

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luna-rainbow · 2 years

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Something that your lastest post w Matt Damon made me think about something. I’ve recently rewatched a bunch of Christopher Nolan’s movies, including the dark knight trilogy & it just…knocks me on my butt to look at how well those movies have aged, not just from a visual standpoint, but from a story too. Nolan’s is KNOWN for insisting on practical effects whenever possible (the man had an entire spinning hallway built for inception) & it SHOWS. It’s amazing to look at these movies that were made now over 10 years ago, & they’ve aged better than some of the movies marvel has released in the past 5 years. This isn’t even a dc vs marvel argument to me, but an artist vs corporation. Nolan is extremely serious about the art of filmmaking & you can see the love & devotion & meticulousness that goes into his films (again. The man took 10 years to make inception bc he wanted it to be done right) but with marvel you can just see & feel that the love is gone.

I love Nolan movies (although *clears throat* I wasn’t a huge fan of the Batman trilogy). His movies are constructed to be revisited. You know that quote about how a bad plot twist just makes you go “wtf” and a good plot twist will make everything fall into place? His movies are the latter.

I have to say it’s been a few years since I last watched his movies so my memory of them are a little vague, but there is genuine craft going on. Regardless of whether you like his intentional ambiguity or his style, you can tell he has a strong vision of the story he wants to tell and the message he wants to convey. Whether it’s The Prestige where competition for fame and recognition drive the main characters’ progressive deviation from ethics, or Inception where it asks what defines reality and whether that is important. His movies are also built so that the first time you watch it, the twist is unexpected (but still fits into the characterisation), but on each rewatch you discover more that fits into the puzzle.

The other thing about Nolan is the humanity of his stories. You can call it melodramatic (partly the reason I didn’t love the Batman trilogy) but he has a very classical appreciation of tragedy and pathos, whether that’s the tragedy of someone gifted being dragged to their downfall by their flaws (The Prestige and some of the Batman movies), or the tragedy of being unable to overcome forces beyond one’s control (Interstellar), or the tragedy of the loss of self and identity (Inception).

One of the problems with some of the newer franchises coming out of the MCU is this unwillingness or inability to engage with human tragedy. This isn't about making MCU glum and dreary like the Batman movies, but rather - one of the reasons why Pixar had such wide appeal is because at the heart of every Pixar movie, there is a human tragedy. It might be as small as gaining sentience and a sense of loneliness after being left on a planet for centuries as in Wall-E, or it could be as devastating as losing your lifelong beloved in Up. The rest of the movie is about moving forward and living with that tragedy until happiness comes around again.

Early MCU movies were like that. Each of the MCU heroes are burdened with immense tragedy (yes, even your blarfo), and the tragedy shapes their actions until they can make something heroic and good out of it. New MCU franchises tend to introduce tragedy on the fly, and then make a joke about it to tell you "they've gotten over it".

The problem with that approach is that tragedy is an inseparable part of human experience, and taking that dismissive attitude is how you quickly lose the emotional investment of your audience. Happiness isn't about ignoring the tragedies or the absence of any sadness. It's the idea that we, as humans, have the strength to adapt and carry ourselves through tragedy and find something better on the other side, and that's where the hope and inspiration comes from.

#asks #anti mcu #chris nolan

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denimbex1986 · 8 months

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'A luminary from Oppenheimer, who thoroughly enjoyed being part of this summer’s blockbuster, is now shifting his gaze beyond his Oppenheimer role. He’s set his sights on a coveted future aspiration: portraying a villain in a James Bond movie. He is none other than David Dastmalchian, who played William Borden in Oppenheimer.

...a proposal put forth by David Dastmalchian has caught everyone’s attention.

Does David Dastmalchian Have What It Takes To Be A Bond Villain

...David Dastmalchian stands out as an actor who consistently delivers an unsettling aura. His knack for inducing chills is well-established (just consider his role in Prisoners, where his eerie portrayal was impeccably executed).

“Whoever is reading this, take it as a sign. You were meant to be reading this line at this moment as you’re thinking about the future of what you guys are doing with the franchise,” Dastmalchian told Slashfilm. “Trust me when I say that I can bring something to an enemy of 007, whether he or she or they be played in a way that no one has ever seen Bond brought to life before, which is of course the way that you guys always do it. I think there’s no one to push Bond to the limits of their capabilities the way that I could, and I would love to do it. So there’s my pitch to them. I can’t wait for them to read this. And then I will owe you when or if I ever get that role, I guess 10%.”

Those who have witnessed Dastmalchian’s performances in his more sinister roles would readily acknowledge his ability to effortlessly embody a disconcerting Bond adversary. While the future remains uncertain, the prospect of this casting choice receives a resounding endorsement based on his track record.

David Dastmalchian Has Previously Worked With Christopher Nolan

Renowned for his intimate connections with his cast, Christopher Nolan frequently exhibits his penchant for casting familiar faces across multiple projects. This practice has solidified his renown for cultivating a cooperative and encouraging creative atmosphere. Therefore, it’s entirely expected that, for his inaugural venture into biographical filmmaking, the director has curated a remarkable ensemble of performers who have previously shared his cinematic journey.

David Dastmalchian’s acting repertoire spans a wide spectrum. It includes appearances on television in iconic productions like The Dark Knight trilogy, as well as lead roles in notable works like Blade Runner 2049 and The Suicide Squad. Prior to his portrayal of William L. Borden in Oppenheimer, Dastmalchian had the opportunity to collaborate with Nolan in The Dark Knight, where he played one of the Joker’s henchmen.'

#David Dastmalchian #William Borden #Christopher Nolan #Oppenheimer #The Dark Knight #James Bond #Blade Runner 2049 #The Suicide Squad

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ferusaurelius · 1 year

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Mass Effect Universe Meta - 1

I suppose I should call this ‘mass effect critical’ but it’s really more a meditation on the questions that the series poses and the ones it chooses to ignore ... with a focus on ‘choice-based’ narrative, character-driven storylines, and geopolitical philosophy.

If any of the above annoys you, I’d recommend not hitting the read more. This’ll probably be the first part of a series. xD

This first one is just a meditation on the choice-based narrative implementation in ME as a series.

I’m sure I’m not saying anything someone else hasn’t already covered, in fairness, probably better or more extensively than I’m doing here ... but this is kinda where I have to begin in order to tackle my other themes.

If you just get annoyed by this sort of navel-gazing, probably best not to proceed past the cut. I’ll totally understand!

So You Want Choice-Based Story In Your AAA-Shooter

Starting with the above: much ink has been spilled on the way that gameplay implicates and frames morality. Back in the day, Mass Effect (2007) on release was stirring up controversy because it let players choose a lesbian relationship with Liara! We’ve come a long way since then.

In some respects, Mass Effect is a product of its time and also another milestone in BioWare’s narrative portfolio. Which, before Mass Effect, included other games such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Worth noting is that BioWare as a development house has refined its use of morality systems and mechanics over time! We’ve seen everything from lightside/darkside sliders, to paragon/renegade, to the innovation of ‘party approval’ ratings in the Dragon Age franchise. Of note is that once BioWare establishes a canon morality or choice-rating system, those mechanics tend to remain in place or consistent throughout a particular world.

There’s a notable (and expected) departure in Mass Effect: Andromeda because the writers felt like the Paragon/Renegade system was too tied to Commander Shepard, specifically, to be used as a basis for Ryder.

What makes these game narratives so engaging from a player viewpoint will also be necessarily limited by the under-the-hood mechanics of the systems and how they are capable of responding to the player. Without a set of key markers to help the game function and implement narrative choices, and without a highly-structured narrative framework that can accommodate or reflect those choices on-screen in ways that are emotionally resonant, we get ... whatever happened with Starchild.

... but we didn’t get there all at once.

Mass Effect 1: Cosmic Horrors and You

At a very high-level read, Mass Effect 1 sets the scene for the rest of the trilogy to follow and makes very clear the stakes and the plot-related questions it’s going to tackle. In the first five minutes of the game we’re confronted with eldritch horrors from beyond the stars, the return of the geth, AND Saren Arterius killing his friend, Nihlus Kryik!

I kinda knew right about then that the game was not going to be tackling plot questions (and cultures) in ways that were interesting to me, since if they were going to do that ... it would have made more sense for Nihlus to live. I have been (politely, affectionately) boo-boo-the-clown ever since.

While I still loved the aspects of universe exploration and getting to know my human and non-human crewmembers (Ashley, Kaidan, Wrex, Tali, Garrus, and Liara), the shocking moments of Virmire where you -- and I’m pretty sure this isn’t a spoiler at this point -- have to determine who lives and who dies and it’s a scripted loss?

Narratively powerful because you’ve spent a while getting to know both characters, but problematic from a mechanics standpoint because now you have to maintain a universe that more or less hangs together throughout the game no matter “who” you chose to survive. Death-as-choice becomes a notable proxy in Mass Effect’s storyline for morality and impact.

Mechanically, you’ll also note that a lot of “moral choices” are framed as kill/don’t kill, to various and sundry effects. Personally, I wasn’t a fan of the binary choice framework underpinning most of the game’s critical moments.

And rather than be totally critical I’ll just spotlight the one choice I DO remember: with enough paragon points, talking Saren into shooting himself before he gets reanimated as a Reaper abomination.

In fairness, I think it would’ve been nice for that moment not to be gated behind a Paragon points check, since it was a NEAT narrative flourish that I didn’t see structurally repeated in other areas in the game.

As much as I fell in love with the universe, the idea of the Protheans, and what Vigil and Ilos implied about the murky past ... I was less enamored of the Reapers as a universe-ending threat and more intrigued by the internecine conflicts between the various species of the galaxy. Other game-defining options which carried over into ME2 included whether or not to save the Council (cake or death?), who to appoint as humanity’s first Councilor (slightly less death-driven), whether or not to shoot Wrex (also cake or death).

The amount of “save or kill” decisions and the lack of other equivalents (and those that WERE provided being given less narrative weight than the life-or-death elements) clued me in to the design philosophy that what the game and the narrative would most remember about the world state was who was still alive.

On the one hand, the narrative impacts of presence or absence are obvious for the player! We know these decisions are significant. On the other hand, as you’ll see in my description of ME2, this design choice did start to paint the team into a corner.

Mass Effect 2: About That Suicide Mission

Much as I loved the new squadmates for ME2 and the overall pacing of the story, as well as the interim character development for each former squad member, the clue that most of this was going to happen off-screen or not at all was that these developments occurred while Shepard was not present -- conveniently killed by the Collectors.

Again, this was my hint that this story was going to focus on different questions!

Cerberus, who played the role of minor mooks in the first game, were upgraded to a level of influence that would be a conspiracy-theorist’s dream. One of my personal soapbox “dead dove: do not eat” elements is “but the conspiracies were REAL!” So this was honestly my bad.

Favorite moments in this game included getting to know new squad members, reuniting with old characters (including Wrex! and Grunt, who has one of my favorite arcs in the game alongside Garrus). YMMV about which characters and squadmates you connected with the most/least, but we can all agree that The Suicide Mission was Certainly A Choice.

With that said, it’s possible for no-one to survive and to avoid recruiting the new squaddies. Because choices, remember?

Unfortunately this also has the impact of “kill/save” being, once again, the primary impactful narrative game mechanic.

One can forgive the developers and narrative designers for getting a little tired at this point, because we’re not sure who survived or how much narrative content we’re going to have to adapt to another totally new character in the third act, based on who survives The Suicide Mission. Which does rather put a crimp in the amount of relational development we can presuppose in the third game.

One gets the idea that Liara was the favorite child in part because she is more or less impossible to kill. She will survive all the games no matter what choices you make, unless that choice is getting killed by Harbinger’s laser beam at the very end of ME3 and failing the game.

Small wonder that, in many respects, one of the ways the game develops Liara’s character is actually taking away player choice to avoid having to do an “impactful kill/save” option that would otherwise render her permanently inaccessible to the narrative.

Mass Effect 3: Enter the Starchild

So, what are we to make of the “kill/save” and “presence/absence” dynamic as the most narratively impactful and important? Ironically, these choices have impact only insofar as they determine what resources and relationships your Commander Shepard has access to in the game. The narrative does not so much branch as continue on, with slightly different details, depending on who you saved or recruited.

There will still BE a Tuchanka mission with or without Mordin or Wrex, and you will still conquer the Reaper capital ship alongside Kalros, the mother of all thresher maws (which is a pretty cool moment, let’s be real).

From a narrative design standpoint, these moments are what’s absolutely critical to a functioning storyline -- the character-development bits are secondary, as they must be in a game where the suicide mission can deplete your squad so thoroughly that nobody is left.

I won’t spend too much time on the original choice to lock Javik behind a DLC gate, but that’s another unfortunate choice that limited the baked-in narrative options for the third installment of the game.

Outside of the Commander-Shepard-Driven set pieces on each world, at this point, character relationships were more the icing on the cake than the narrative bedrock, something as a consequence of deciding early in design that killing characters is the clearest way to communicate narrative impact.

However, the other side of this choice, is that killing off characters when you have no narrative attachment to them and no stake in that sacrifice, ends up having progressively less and less impact, even in a AAA-shooter where the whole point is to reduce endless waves of mooks into a fine mist...

... which is where Starchild comes in.

Commander Shepard is locked into a final color-coded narrative choice of who to kill and who to save. That’s the narrative’s way of making sure you know that the choice is important -- because, without that design choice, there’s really no other established way for the game to communicate significance.

Which is a tragedy in and of itself. So many other moments are often significant or meaningful ... and I really think the choice to go with life-and-death as the biggest, baddest, most narratively-supportive element is what essentially painted the team into this final corner.

If You’re So Smart, What Would You Do?

This is easy, since it’s ultimately what BioWare and its narrative designers decided to implement in its next games: party-based approval and relationship systems that operated separately from a Paragon/Renegade personal scale.

Yeah, yeah, a cop-out. I know. Essentially, this is just external evidence that the narrative designers learned from the limitations they encountered in the Mass Effect universe and applied those lessons to their Dragon Age games.

Which again is not to say that I’ve seen concrete evidence of leaning LESS into the “kill/save” dynamic as impactful (remember the Witherfang quest in DA:O?). But it’s the thought that counts!

Branching out to other choices being signaled and framed as impactful is a key to choice-based game design and storytelling being able to incorporate character-driven narrative alongside the raw individual plot.

While this ultimately didn’t happen in Mass Effect, I am interested to see how the mechanics will be implemented in DA4 to detail and interweave other motives and questions into that storyline.

That’s What Fanfiction is For

Watching the canon Mass Effect universe default to “kill/save” decisions as the framing morality structure is pretty much why I write fanfiction designed to fill in and detail out the other blank spaces in background and backstory, and to imagine what other questions might have arisen in a more flexible approach that would not have been possible before the relevant lessons for narrative design were learned in these games.

My motivation as a writer is to expand in areas that were dropped because they wouldn’t make the cut in a AAA-shooter on a protagonist-driven schedule.

For the same reason that narrative significance eluded the final “controversial” ending of the series, I find that there are enough other aspects of character-driven plot and geopolitical philosophy that remain interesting (and implied-if-you-squint by the codex material) to keep me sufficiently occupied for a number of WIP fanfics. ;)

Which, in the end, is more a testament to the strength of the central thesis of the game (what if humanity is the new kid on the block in a galaxy full of advanced alien species?) rather than the questions the narrative ultimately chose to center.

-Ferus, out.

#mass effect meta #choice-based story #my writing #mass effect critical #sorta?#i mean i think i'm being pretty fair to the design choices in the end #especially given what later design choices in DA imply about #the relative limitations of these systems of design #and hopefully it explains a bit about why i'm still so fascinated #with the mass effect universe overall #since my fanfic is all fix-it-of-sorts #I just allow myself a lot of room with or without Reapers #ferus chats

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misscammiedawn · 23 days

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Permit me some self-indulgence to share my Favorite Character Bingo.

For this bingo I favored my fandom tags (17/24 spaces selected from my 25 listed fandom tags) and tried to round out with movies that I adore.

I wanted to diversify my range of franchises to include TV, animation, books, comics and video games and also pick characters that resonated most with each of us, though Camden's influence is felt the strongest. I won't state where the attachments lay but I'm sure those who know us can infer.

Descriptions and reasons under Read More.

Full spoilers for any character featured. Content warning for suicide discussion under cut.

1: Miles Edgeworth - Ace Attorney - Literally the last square filled in and we looked at the remaining 9 fandom tags and thought "which of these 9 have a character that we feel strongly about", it was either him or Alucard Castlevania and both for the same reason, daddy issues. I love the idea of a virtuous child of anime Atticus Finch being raised by a deliciously evil prosecutor to become everything his father would have hated. I love the conflict between two siblings raised in the house of Perfection. I love his dramatic ass (except when he pulls that "chooses death" bullshit. That was unforgivable). Plus I just adore his slowburn romance with Phoenicholas, how supportive he is of their daughter, Trucy, and how the sequel trilogy is sparing enough of him that we always miss him when he's not around. He is our favorite Ace Attorney character by a mile. Plus he's a the straight man (well, he's got his hidden eccentricities, but for comedic purposes he's the straight man) in a world of lunacy. The first game leaned heavy on that joke and it always made me smile.

2: Catra - She-Ra (2018) - Our tag for She-Ra is "Catra Did Nothing Wrong" and she is the character in all of fiction I would go up to bat for every time if I saw a debate start up on a Discord I frequent. I'll be straight. She's our (Camden's, anyway) BPD projection character. I adore watching characters with crucial personal failings get swallowed up by dramatic irony. There's something so powerful in being an audience member and knowing what a character wants, what they need, what they should do-- while understanding it's not in their nature to do it. I wanted her to stay with Scorpia in the desert where she was respected and comfortable but knew that it just couldn't be. I loved all the moments where her failings caught up with her. When Scorpia walked away from her, when Double Trouble gave her emergency therapy, the way she struggled with her hair and entire season to force herself to be something she couldn't sustain. I love Catra more than I can measure. I could write essays on how I would do exactly as she did in Season 2 and ruin EVERYTHING for just the chance of a parent proving that they loved her. To be consumed by self-doubts and paranoia and terror of abandonment. Catra is the character we are most like in all of fiction. For better and for worse. Much like her, we're trying to be better.

3: M'gann M'orzz/Miss Martian - Young Justice - Surprisingly I have two Greg Weisman shows on this bingo and no fandom tags for his work, I am using my generic DC tag here. I should change that at some point. M'gann gets so much character development over the 4 seasons of Young Justice. From a starting point of her blue and orange morality of being a Martian not understanding Earth customs causing her to break consent boundaries with her abilities and hurt people (including a fairly uncomfortable angle where she grooms Connor to be her fantasy boyfriend without him knowing what she's doing) to her learning in season 2 that a black and white morality is hardly any better (she mind crushes enemies, thinking that it's good to pacify evil until she does this to someone who turned out to be innocent) to her being a transgender allegory in season 4 (where she meshes the two cultures that she's part of and tries to gain cultural acceptance). There are elements of her story which are under baked, we know that she received a heavy amount of discrimination growing up due to her being a white martian and the arc of her embracing her heritage happens off screen between seasons 2 and 3. Her romance with Connor was well handled, though, particularly as she was not virtuous. In season 2 she was in the wrong (having tried to mind control Connor against his consent) and reacted very poorly to his rejection of her and used a rebound relationship to make him jealous (fortunately Lagoon Boy ended up in a healthy poly family and is doing great. Did I mention Young Justice has good relationship dynamics? Because it does). As with Catra I adore characters who have made mistakes and take a slow road to making up for those mistakes because it begins dialogues about their ethics and every season of Young Justice is about trust, communication, deceit and manipulation and Megan is easily the most complex character when it comes to those themes, particularly as her abilities allow her to blur those lines even in her personal relationships. She's an ethical trainwreck and I love her.

Every character in Young Justice brings something to the table and I think I should note how that deep vein of character driven story telling brings out the best in others. I had mentioned Megan groomed Connor. She was obsessed with an Earth sitcom when she was on Mars and decided to become the main character of it and then when presented with the newly born Superboy decided to start treating him as that Sitcom's love interest who was named Connor. It was a massive violation and Connor was hurt and confused when he learned and it was also in an episode where Megan lied about her racial heritage and Connor, who had been inside her mind, KNEW she was lying and told her outright that she shouldn't fear his judgment. The thing about Connor is that his arc is about finding personal identity when he is defined by everyone else's expectations and impressions. Cadmus and Lex literally programmed him, Superman put him in a box and kept distance from him, the Genomorphs have expectation of him, the team have expectation of him, even his girlfriend is trying to shape him and for much of the show he struggles with it but doesn't reject it. He finds comfort in being accepted in these windows of projection and expectation and I find that him learning who he really is and what he stands for to be one of the more compelling narrative threads throughout the 4 seasons. He and Megan are the main couple in a show about trust and communication after all and I think it should go that the character who typically displays the most raw honesty and vulnerability should be paired off with the most ethically complicated character because they bring the most out of one another while still wanting their relationship to succeed. I know much of the audience dislikes the pair and thinks Connor forgiving and eventually marrying Megan is a bridge too far but I really think they work for one another and even when they don't, from a storytelling perspective it's compelling as shit.

4: Briar Moss - The Circle of Magic - When I started this meme Daja (username relevant, yes) asked if I was going to pick Tris or Briar. They are both "Camden characters" with one being a child who has been kicked out of her biological family and the other being someone who grew up in extreme poverty adapting to moving up the caste system. I went with Briar purely because of the 4 siblings he is the one with the most interesting dynamics with his mentor and student. Evvy sticks around in the main cast while the other apprentices do not hang around and Dedicate Rosethorn is my favorite adult in the franchise easily. Briar is a streetwise kid who has to learn how to trust and rely on people and sadly in the third quartet (pending Tris' Lightsbridge book being written) he gets a painfully accurate depiction of PTSD. I wrote about my reaction to the ending of Will of the Empress a while ago and I stand by my comments. Briar building a safe place as the home he built with his siblings and staying there when he was tortured burned my heart. As did the sequence of him deciding that if Rosethorn was going to let herself die then he was going to follow her. As I'll allude later, I have experience there... and it certainly aided my fondness for Briar.

Much of the fun of the Circle of Magic series is seeing how the siblings adapt to their abundance of magical potential and I love the fact that for 3 of the 4 this is depicted via external means. For Daja Kitsubo and Sandry it is via their art, Daja bends and shapes metal, pouring her power into items where Sandry weaves it into fabric. Briar cultivates his via life. He grows plants and those plants are imbued with his magic. If I had picked Tris this would be where I note that her magic is entirely stored within her, bottled up (literally when she starts glasswork) and too much to contain. Magic is emotion, it is passion, it is a connection to life and the world and with Briar his is not giving shape to his creations, it is cultivating the growth of things that cannot be tamed, he communes with the wild of the world and aids it and heals it. Daja and Sandry give their power shape and form as art. Tris tames the raging storm inside and eventually scries the winds to connect with the world without letting it break her, Briar's power is in love and nurture (which I adores as he is the only member of the 4 with masculine pronouns- as with all Tammy's work, gender is not a box) and it's fitting that his connection to both mentor and student be the strongest due to this.

Also his tattoos are cool.

For a personal anecdote that happened while we were reading Briar's Book. Towards the end there's a sequence where Rosethorn and Briar had an argument in the afterlife and Rosethorn only chose to live again because Briar would have let himself die otherwise. That parent-child suicide gambit--- that's what I was alluding to before. I don't want to type more than is necessary about it. We have experience. It caused a switch and our girlfriend, Daja, is observant enough that she noted the shift in how we typed. Particularly in how we used the word "ain't" which apparently is something specific only to our male part, Craig. Daja was so lovely, kind and caring in accepting him, seeing him and not pressuring him when he was out that it helped us heal a part of our heart that we had pushed away. I'll always remember that whenever I read that book or think of Briar. It's a huge part of why we're fond of the character.

Incidentally if I picked from Tortall I'd have been paralyzed for choice with Numair, Daine, Kyprioth, Farmer, Kel and Alanna herself. Tamora Pierce writes amazing characters.

5: Jesse Faden - Control - Is Control an isekai? It starts with our main character talking about crawling through the hole behind a poster as if it were the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole.

Anyway, there's a fantastic character analysis I read once that spoke about the relationship between the director of the FBC and the service weapon with Northmoor trying to impose his will upon the Oldest House and the items within it and Trench being a turn-key manager who simply filled the power vacuum and spent his career trying to find a suitable replacement. These represent the two extremes of Jesse's potential leadership of the Federal Bureau of Control. She could either go all in and try to claim ownership of the Bureau and impose her will upon the forces that are too strong to control or she could reluctantly attempt to maintain the Bureau without considering herself actually in charge of it. What she actually does is she finds a path of humility. She is the janitor's assistant. Neither king nor steward of the bureau but the custodian of it. She does not seek control nor does she seek to pass on the responsibility. She merely manages the messes and does so as an assistant. Ahti is the most powerful entity in the game by far and by trusting in him and following his direction, Jesse becomes the perfect head of the bureau.

I was predisposed to love her because she has red hair, she was a lot like the tabletop character I took my name from, she's got a queer dynamic with the head of research and technically she's plural. She's wonderful.

Oh and she's an oddball. I love the little hints of just how weird Jesse is beneath her protagonist swagger. I should probably write more about her, particularly as much of her depth as a character is not obvious from a surface read of the material. Maybe I will some day, but I love her.

6: Chidi Anagonye - The Good Place - The Good Place is a sitcom adaptation of Jean-Paul Satre's play No Exit and involves 4 people sent to hell and are utilized to be one another's unwitting tormentors. The thing is that part of the message of the virtue ethics driven show is that in the modern world every action we do or do not do causes additional suffering in the world and the 4 "cockroaches" are not bad souls, they just made choices that made them bad people. For Chidi he is a good and loving person who is kind and heavily believes in virtue ethics. He belongs in hell because he's anxious and indecisive and makes people's lives harder by worrying so much about how to be a good person. I love Chidi because his growth is less about becoming a better person and more about being confident enough in his convictions to know he's a good person. In every reality he will inevitably help the other cockroaches and teach them to be better people because that's who he is. But he's also selfless to a literal fault. It's one of his damnable traits. After everyone makes it to heaven people can enjoy paradise until they're ready to move on and he decides to continue past the point of which he makes peace with moving on because he doesn't want to hurt Eleanor.

The final episode of Good Place made me gross sob so much and a big part of it is the sofa scene where Chidi explains his personal philosophy after countless lifetimes of discussing, teaching and learning philosophy he gives Eleanor one final lesson on their final night and then, on request, disappears while she's asleep. Heaven knows I understand making that request of someone you love.

He's the heart of the entire experience. Truthfully I love all 4 of the cockroaches and it comes down to how I reacted to their final episodes. Chidi's final moments were the most powerful of the show for me. I love him so much and admire him.

Plus he's a philosophy nerd and as a fellow philosophy nerd <3 I love love love him!

7: Allison "Ally" Carter - Sunstone - Every character in Sunstone deserves to be on this list but I went with Ally because (much like with Chidi) when I have difficulty picking between a stacked cast of great characters I go for the love interest of the protagonist because people really shine when the perspective character is in love with them.

Ally is a god damned dork and she's also an incredible domme. Sunstone is a romance about entering the world of kink circles and navigating the troubled waters that come with consensual risks, emotionally charged play and non-standard relationship dynamics. I love the way the story is presented so much that it is my strongest inspiration for Madison/Belladonna stories.

The thing I love most about Ally is that she's not just the amazing dominant that she plays during the spicy scenes. We get to see her freaking out with nervousness, scared about having to host and live up to expectation, we see her be an absolute nerd, we see her in her element while performing.

I've been Ally and the people I love most have been Ally. Being a Top is hard as heck and you can't help but love the dork as she lives up to expectation while trying to be an adult. Seeing her and Alan literally learning the ropes in the recent GNs has been a gosh darn treat!

8: Elliot Alderson/Mr.Robot (Alderson System) - Mr. Robot - What can I say about my dear Elliot that I haven't already said in my DID Representation in Mr. Robot essay? I love him. The whole system. Though I have an affinity for protectors and so Mr. Robot himself is my favorite. He is such a protector that he will attack his host (well, the show fucks up that aspect of DID enough that it's complicated to call the Elliot we see in the show a host) in order to save him from the evils of late-stage capitalism. When pre-show Elliot wants a way out of loneliness and the evils of modern society he fantasizes about taking it all down. The Elliot in the show just wants to make the evils of the world pay, Mr. Robot is perfectly okay killing entire buildings of collateral to achieve his goals. Not because he's evil but because he's laser focused on his mission. I respect the shit out of that, especially as later seasons show that he's not even remotely as capable as he thinks he is.

The scene during the "sitcom" episode where he takes a beating so Elliot doesn't have to was the moment he won me over and then in season 4 he has the speech where he begs Elliot to understand that he is not their father and that he will disappear if it will help him out of the dark hole he's in. Just the fact that, post memory retrieval, he starts by saying "hey, kiddo..." despite that being the reminder of who he is modeled after. Mr. Robot cannot help but be a manifestation of Edward Alderson, it's who he is, it's why he is. Elliot needed a version of his father who was not a monster. I love him deeply. I love the whole system. Even Magda for all her 7 minutes of screen time.

Plus, Elliot summed up the thesis of the show in the final episodes in saying that changing the world is about living and being visible and in not backing down, no matter what.

And then there's the monologue. Fuck I love this show and these dumb hacker boy.

9: "Badeline"/A Part Of You - Celeste - Well, we're on the topic of plurality so let's stay there. Badeline's a fairly subjective character. Celeste's narrative isn't very long and she doesn't even have an official name. Even the DLC chapter refers to her as "A Part of You". But whether she is a living symbol of Madeline's depression, the doubts and fears she holds towards climbing the mountain/transition or is a protective alter in a plural system, I love her. I always have. The fear she puts into thinking Madeline wants to just get rid of her, the fact that she pushes Madeline to move past grieving Granny faster than Maddy is ready for.

Watching the pair learn to loan one another strength and conquer the mountain was lovely and then seeing Baddy try to stop Maddy from hurting herself in the DLC chapter only to be pushed away was heartbreaking. I just want these two to play nice.

I love that the entire objective of Celeste 64 was for Maddy to reach Baddy and say she's going to go on another adventure and soothe Baddy's fears. Climbing mountains is tough (happy trans day of visibility everyone!) and these two are going to continue doing it, so long as it's together <3

10: Laura Palmer - Twin Peaks (Fire Walk With Me) - So first off, read this essay for better words than we have. We could have picked Dale but Twin Peaks is a show about Laura Palmer and the community that failed her. Laura was a victim of abuse from her father and was commodified by the town who all chose to only see parts of her that they could use for sex, charity, kindness, validation etc etc. There's a meme that goes around:

and I think that at face value it's silly, but it's important to know that everyone in Twin Peaks was complicit in her murder because they used her up for all she was worth and the story works best when you consider that she had no one protecting her, no one saving her. This is why, in Fire Walk With Me, she talks about the angels not coming for her and Donna tries so hard to convince her that they can and will, because Donna, of all the people in Twin Peaks including Dale Cooper, does not want anything from Laura but her trust and friendship.

If you watch Twin Peaks and view Laura as "the victim" then you're doing yourself a disservice. She's a nuanced character and a horrifying Lynchian portrait of those who are caught in webs of abuse. But she has agency. She just has no meaningful way of escaping, particularly when by the end of her life she views the whole world as a prison full of users and abusers and when she finds someone who tries to offer her kindness, she rejects them at first and when they refuse to leave or back off, she tries to drag her down with her. It's only when she realizes that she's so far gone that she'll bring Donna into her personal hell that she decides to become the angel for her and save her. The Pink Room sequence in the movie may well be my favorite part of all the Twin Peaks saga. Laura Palmer is such a compelling character. I love her.

11: Lady Bird/Christine McPherson - Lady Bird - Lady Bird is a phenomenal movie and one of my all-time favorites. I'll split this one up into character and then personal attachment.

For the film, Catherine/Lady Bird is a young woman raised in Sacramento in 2002. She goes to a catholic school because her parents are afraid of sending her to the local public school. Well, I say her parents but the movie is entirely about Lady Bird and her mother. In that regard it is a tough movie to watch because the pair clash so much. Lady Bird and her mom are both willful women and care a lot about what other people think about them. They see one another in the other and hate what they see while still loving one another.

The conflict between Marion and Lady Bird typically displays itself in Marion's refusal to refer to Lady Bird by the name she has chosen for herself. In the Opening Scene she says that "it's stupid and it's not your name" and continually talks down to her daughter, saying that she cannot get into a New York college because she couldn't pass her driver's test (which Lady Bird argues was because Marion refused to let her practice). These clashes continue throughout the movie and any time Lady Bird figures out a way to reframe a critique against her mom she just pivots away. Another example is the "Name a number" scene where after being told that she has no idea how much money it takes to raise her and Lady Bird responds by demanding a number so that she can pay her back; Marion just says "you'll never get a job that earns that much money".

All of this squabbling makes the most sense with the scene in Goodwill where Lady Bird confesses "I just wish that you liked me" to which Marion, dodging again, says "Of course I love you" and Lady Bird calls her on it with "But do you like me?"

Marion pauses and says "I just want you to be the best version of yourself you can be" and Lady Bird, hurt and knowing she won't make a connection says "What if this is the best version of me there is" and Marion gives an incredulous look before letting it sink in. The fact is she is trying to be the best mother she can be and is confronted with the vulnerability that maybe neither she nor her daughter is failing to be their best, maybe this is the best and she has to make peace with that.

That's why I love the movie so much. Two women who want the best for themselves and thus each other but are completely unable to understand one another or connect and speak different emotional languages. It's such a powerful and honest narrative about growing up and becoming your own person. I find the conclusion a little too forgiving on the mother's side, but I love Lady Bird. I love how willful she is, I love how cultured she wants to be. I love how she just wants to be part of the world she feels connected to while knowing she is on the outside of it. Legitimately one of my favorite film characters of all time.

For personal attachment. Camden Dawn is the name of one of my OCs, I first wrote her in 2001 but the version I consider "Camden Dawn" started off in tabletop games that began in 2010. Camden was a raised catholic by two parents who were obsessed with optics and how Camden's behavior reflected on her and their household and she successfully emancipated herself from them after managing to get them to fund her to go to college in Chicago. Over the 7 years I wrote that version of Camden she was always special to me. More than I think I could display to my tabletop group at the time. I considered her my "trainwrecksona" the fantasy version of what we would be like if we were allowed to express our anger, frustration and pain. Camden smoked, she had an alcohol problem, she made bad relationship decisions and was a mess. Watching Lady Bird was like seeing a film version of everything that I was trying to do be done by a masterful actor, director and screenwriter. There is no amount of language I can put into how powerful it is to pour so much of yourself into a fictional character you created, enough of yourself that you adopted her name as your own and to see someone take all the passion and soul that you tried to convey through fiction and do it better. It was awe, admiration and connection.

I'm not Camden (the character) and I'm certainly not Christine. But I understand what emotions go into writing a character like that. How can I not love her when she's the culmination of everything I love about my favorite original character?

12: Bill - It's Such A Beautiful Day - Three heavy movie characters in a row. Bill suffers from an unspecified psychological disorder that messes with his perception of reality and his memories. The movie is an outside view of his life and the narrator becomes so attached to him by the end that it cannot bear to let him go. "He lives and lives until all the lights go out." is such a powerful line to end the production with because that's it. That's all any of us get. The world may continue on without us but our capacity to perceive this beautiful trainwreck is only within us and there's no grander design than that. We live and then the lights go out. Even our memories may die before our ability to perceive. The movie talks about how we start looking forward, start looking back and in the end... all we can do is look around.

Which makes the bus ride so unspeakably poignant, long before the titular Beautiful Day. As the narrator says early on in the experience, life isn't the big memorable experiences, it's all of the tiny little things that happen in between. That bus ride, Bill looking at the raindrops and admiring the world. That's far more true than any moment in the film and what Hertzfeld wants the audience to pick up through the experience.

I became attached to him during the runtime. The mundane thoughts of a person who begins the story with the news that he's going to die and ends up finding the sentiment that gives the movie its title.

Hertzfeld does such an amazing job with Bill. The subtle gestures like how he wrings his hands together or the wrinkles under his eyes betraying his fear and worries. He's a stick figure in a world of stick figures and all he has to differentiate himself is his hat. We cannot even hear him speak because the movie is conveyed only by the narration and yet the animation gives him so much personality.

There are so many scenes which just connect so well, like when he meets his father despite both men being so incapable of understanding the relevance of what is happening.

Bill lives until he doesn't anymore and we share the journey of life with him. It's breathtakingly beautiful.

13: Susan Sto Helit - Discworld - Susan is really three characters. Soul Music Susan, Hogfather Susan (goth Mary Poppins) and Thief of Time Susan (goth Ms. Frizzle).

I love her. I love her more than I have words for. Especially Thief of Time Susan.

She's almost human. Part of her will always be a deity. She is the granddaughter of DEATH and much of her character in Hogfather and Thief of Time is attached to her wanting to embrace her human side. But it's in Thief of Time where she learns that what she's looking for is not to be accepted within humanity, but she wants to find someone who is like her. That's why I adore her connection to Lobsang. She puts up a ward of sensible Susan and tries to be practical and put together but she's a deeply emotional woman and she's lonely because no one else shares her experiences.

She loves her grandfather very much but she cannot abide by "the family business", she is kind to him but wants to be her own person and she ends up finding herself more attached to children because they haven't lost their curiosity yet, in many ways she finds they are more sensible than adults because they haven't decided how things are and closed their hearts and minds to ideas outside of what they think and expect.

Susan is important to me. I love her dearly.

14: Ben Reilly - Spider-Man - We're unapologetic in our love of the clone saga. The thing about Ben (and Kaine) is that he's a fantastic character study into the nature and nurture of Peter Parker and the writers had so many fun and cool ideas for how to handle a version of Peter who had 5 years to not be Spider-Man.

One of my alltime favorite moments in comics is when Aunt May died and Peter is embraced by MJ and Anna, he's surrounded by family. Ben is on the roof, alone. Ben's has no one because he's a clone and completely broken off from others. He slowly builds his own family over time and considers Peter (and Kaine) his brother(s) but it takes time.

The lost years are where he exemplified himself in my eyes. We get to see how he grows from finding out he's not Peter Parker until he returns to New York. How he tries to walk away from responsibility, how he tries to live a normal life. He's a tragic character because no matter how much he wants to be a different man, he still has Peter's memories and cannot help but have the drive that makes him Spider-Man.

15: "Sunshine" Joe Fixit (Banner System) - Hulk - So I did two whole essays on Banner's system with the second part entirely about Joe and Betty's relationship. Fact is Joe is what happens when a man is so repressed and ashamed of himself that he cannot act out. Joe is all of the things that Bruce wants, lusts for, desires but cannot allow himself to act out upon. He's capable of lying, cheating, stealing and killing in a way Bruce can never allow himself to believe he is capable of. The period of time that Peter David was writing Joe as the main front of the system gave us some incredible insights into the widening chasm between his morality and Bruce's as well as what Joe finds himself wanting. There was a period of time where changing into Banner was the greatest fear of Hulk(Fixit) and it worked remarkably well to see the two having their day and night battle for dominance.

But what really made me love him more was the Immortal series where he's in Banner's body and needs to keep the body safe the way that only he can. The latter half of the comic Bruce is not even in the system and it's just Joe and Savage against the world. Joe's a reluctant protector. He used to be a hedonist but over time his affection for the system

Look at this page (first panel especially) from a 4 page side-story where Joe is talking to their therapist and briefly remembers Brian Banner beating the shit out of him and how he would take the beating so Bruce didn't have to.

Joe's attachment to Mike was evident in Peter David's run and solidifying that Joe just wants a father figure is such amazing characterization. With both Mr. Robot and Hulk I love how these adults are driven by childhood notions of safety and comfort. I even hint on it a bit with Catra too with how she sold herself out to get a chance of Shadow Weaver's affection. Good trauma representation is showing how a character carries their past into their present and Joe is a manifestation of Bruce's repressed anger and childhood trauma just as much Hulk himself is. Joe just wants what we all want, to be loved and protected in a world where the person who owed him both those things failed to do either. In lieu of being loved himself, he's damned well going to love his inner family, especially the kid.

16: Kimberly Wexler - Better Call Saul - Kim is a phenomenal character in a character driven drama. Again, when surrounded by amazing characters I go for the protagonist's love interest. But here it's different. In the final season Kim is approached by Mike. Mike is the most level headed guy in the canon. He's the one who is objectively right about everyone and has a good eye to who people are. Enough that Season 4 of the show only makes sense if you consider they needed a season long plot arc for why he didn't execute Walter where he stood in during BrBa.

Mike approached Kim because he judged that she was the one who could be trusted with the information that he had about Lalo Salamanca, another incredible character in a show full of them. Kim is headstrong, crafty and hates being talked down to. She is attracted to Jimmy because they are equals and she typically acts up when Jimmy doesn't display the trust and respect that he owes her.

Throughout the show we get glimpses of her childhood and there are some gems with her mom. She refuses to be picked up from school when her mom shows up late and drunk and ends up walking home miles on her own. There's a scene where she steals from a store and her mom picks her up and acts up the punishment she would get only to laugh about the store manager after leaving the scene. Kim had a tough childhood and bad rolemodels and yet still clawed her way up to being a lawyer.

We get to see her realize that the system is inherently broken to its core and no amount of pro-bono work within the system will make a difference, she is reduced to constantly being hit with "did Jimmy put you up to this" levels of disrespect for her agency. Kim is fascinating because she was always the capable one and Mike and Jimmy are about the only people in the show who can see it and even Jimmy can't when his ego gets in the way.

Aren't you tired of being nice? Don't you want to go apeshit?

Kim is best girl and Rhea Seehorn should be given every Emmy forever.

17: Johnny Truant/Pelafina H. Lièvre/The Book Itself - House of Leaves - This one is a total cheat. The fact is I wanted to type "anyone who types in Courier or Dante fonts" but the book is a mind worm and the mere act of trying to communicate about it is a bottomless pit that will make you look like you're in front of a Pepe Silvia wall. The fact is nothing inside of the book House of Leaves can be said to have happened in any meaningful sense. It's a journal of a man reading an analysis of a film of events that likely didn't happen and the person at the top of that narrative pyramid (well, under The Editors, I suppose) is an admitted liar. Which means that I cannot say The Whalestone Letters are true or not. I can say that they are my favorite part of the book and judging from my interaction with the only fandom, this makes me a little unhinged. Johnny's panic attack at seeing purple ink, the back and forth on whether Pelafina attempted to strangle Johnny as a child or not, why her secret decoded message mentions Zampano, how her letters can refer to events after she died... as I said, it's a bottomless pit and the more you think about it the more insane you become. Fact is, Johnny is an interesting character and there's a lot to him and part of that IS the fact you cannot tell if he's lying and that means that if he forged his mother's letters they are his words and if he didn't she's equally compelling in her complexities. We have an unknowable psyche of someone who is both inviting us in to see the innards of his soul AND pushing us away so we can not know him, see him or judge him. It's brutally honest AND guarded. Deceptive while bearing everything. I tend to feel strongly for characters if they go through something I've been through because I get to see someone else deal with the thought processes I went through, I don't need to see myself reflected in that, just empathize with the fact they're dealing with it. A parent being put away in a mental care facility is fucking tough shit and as I saw Johnny's trauma unfold through his journals I cared more about him and wanted to understand him more.

Which brings us to the end of his portion of the narrative and his big "fuck you" to the reader. I'll admit it. Upon first reading I was hurt by Johnny's betrayal of the reader and then I realized, much in the same way HBomb's described during his analysis of Pathologic, that I knew the entire time I was reading a book and Johnny wasn't real, that by feeling betrayed and hurt by his lies it just showed I cared and that he had made me care. No character has ever violated the attachment I form with fictional characters in such a way that really made me understand how one-sided and false that connection was and it was a unique experience. Certainly one that makes me love the character, for all I know they are an unknowable wreck and I cannot ever truly understand them. House of Leaves is a mirror and it reflects everything you put into it and that's why I love it so much. The experience of reading that book is mine and mine alone. My relationship with the book and its characters is unique. It cannot be replicated. It can barely be described.

18: Puck/Owen Burnett - Gargoyles - Seems I posted without writing about Puck! Better edit it in. I LIKE FAE AND BUSINESS MAN OWEN AND I'LL EDIT THIS IN LATER I PROMISE!

19: JJ MacField - The Missing ((JJ Macfield and the Island of Missing Memories) - Beating this game made me come out the closet. I'd known I was trans for almost 20 years before playing it but when I beat it I told the support network in my life at the time that I couldn't stay in the closet any longer and began formally socially transitioning.

The Missing is about two girls going to an island. JJ and Emily. Emily tried to initiate intimacy and JJ pulled back and soured the mood, when she wakes up the next morning Emily is gone and JJ has to puzzle solve through themed areas of the island to find her. As you progress text messages fill you in on JJ's life.

So. Being honest? I thought it was a game about being a lesbian. I thought that it was about JJ coming to terms with her sexuality, even when her mother is controlling monster (literally in terms of the game) and sent her to conversion therapy. Nope. Turns out JJ is trans and I didn't see it. I didn't know.

I played the game on release day and just... didn't figure that out.

JJ is a cutie who loves donuts, she loves her stuffed plushie, she loves Emily, she loves flowing fashion. The game sadly is a nightmare from her trying to kill herself and being saved.

The thing is, though, the game's aftercare is so healing. After beating the game you have the opportunity to play the game without JJ's "idealized" dream form. You can play as socially transitioning JJ with her developmental voice, change her wig, let her experiment her look. Here's some gallery items showing the differences between first run and second run versions of JJ.

and I think it's beautiful to show her as being the same person no matter what she appears on the outside. Because she's JJ. Voice, wig, eye color and outfit do not change the fact she's a sleepy donut gremlin.

I could write more. Like how the themes of the game are the amount of pain one must endure to actualize as their true selves and how learning to live with that helps you pull yourself together and become endure more (not to fetishize suffering, but well, learning to endure pain can be virtuous if you cannot avoid it) or how the player becomes the final boss themselves and lashes out against Emily to show how her attempted suicide was a harmful act.

The thing I adore most though is that the final secret in the game, the reward for everything is photographs of JJ and Emily going clothes shopping and buying the outfit that JJ wears during the game.

Fuck that story makes me so happy. Especially from the perspective we were in when we were closeted.

As a sidenote, I own a F.K plushie and love it very much.

20: Korra - The Legend of Korra - Running low on steam but I'll be quick and say "Avatar is the story of a normal little boy finding out that he's the chosen one and having to learn how to save the world. Korra is the story of the chosen one who was raised to save the world learning to become a normal woman."

I find the latter so much more compelling than the first. Especially when season 4 spends so much time on her rehabilitation after Season 3 left her disabled. The depiction of both recovering from a severe injury and the PTSD was well handled.

Anyway. She's rad.

21: Hal "Otacon" Emmerich - Metal Gear Solid - He's the spiritual child of Dr. Strangelove and The Boss. Huey was a sperm donor and nothing more. Hal's an idiot. He's a geek. He's a hopeless romantic who makes dumb mistakes. He's also Snake's husband and Sunny's father and he saved the world. I love him.

22: Adonis "Donnie" Creed/Johnson - Creed - Gosh I wish I wrote about him when I had more in the tank but I'm 22 characters in, the end is in sight and I'm tired. The Rocky franchise is a special series of movies. We get to see the same man through 50 years and even in the first film they were talking about him being past his prime. I chose Donnie over Rocky though because Creed is my a contender for my favorite movie of all time. Ryan Coogler said about it

"[My father] used to play [the Rocky movies] before I had football games to pump me up, and he would get really emotional watching the movies. He used to watch Rocky II with his mom while she was sick and dying of cancer. She passed away when he was 18 years old. And so when he got sick he was losing his strength because he had a muscular condition. He was having trouble getting around, having trouble carrying stuff. I started thinking about this idea of my dad’s mortality. For me he was kind of like this mythical figure, my father, similar to what Rocky was for him. Going through it inspired me to make a film that told a story about his hero going through something similar to kind of motivate him and cheer him up. That’s how I came up with the idea for this movie."

"If I fight, you fight"

It's about a father being a hero, it's about being strong enough to live up to legacy, it's about passing down knowledge and inspiration from one generation to the next. Donnie is a conflicted character. On one hand he is the foster care kid who got into fights in juvie. On the other hand he is the son of world famous Apollo Creed and raised in a mansion. He is Adonis Creed and he is Donnie Johnson. Both of these are true and that conflict burns within Donnie because he burns for a father he never got to meet and connection to a world he's not part of anymore. In being rescued from his group home situation by Mary-Anne he left behind all he knew. We learn more about his childhood prior to juvie in Creed III. Point is, he's hurting to make a place for himself and prove he belongs. The armor piercing quote in the first movie is when he says "I gotta prove it - That I wasn't a mistake."

I cried when I first saw that scene and just loved him. Rocky movies are about underdogs putting their heart into what they do and overcoming the odds and winning the moral victory. Donnie isn't a perfect person. He's kind of an arrogant jerk at times, but I adore him.

The second and third movie are heavily about his growing relationship with his wife, Bianca, who is the star of her own movie that should exist too, about becoming a performing music artist while her hearing is fading. His daughter is born deaf and he has to adapt to her hearing loss. Watching Donnie learn ASL and just exist with his family is one of the highlights of the movies because though there's a brief scare in Creed II where Rocky asks if he's going to love his daughter if she's born deaf, the franchise never treats Bianca or Amara's disability as anything more than a part of who they are.

Creed movies are the best. I hope Michael B Jordan makes them as long as Stallone hung with the Rocky franchise.

23: Parker - Leverage - She was a side character who became the star of the show. Parker is brilliant. A foster kid who tangled with a brilliant gentleman thief and learned to be the best there ever was. She's autistic, she's brilliant and she's an oddball. Her relationship with Hardison was the emotional backbone of the show and throughout the entire show her need for a family is one of the threads that ties seasons together. Season 4 includes an episode where she needs to learn to dance from Hardison and he says "I've got you, I've always got you" and prepares an escape route for her at the end of the episode only for the finale to have a callback where she saves him on an elevator wire with the "I've got you". If you watch Leverage through the lens of her rising to become the new mastermind you have a 5 season show (and ongoing revival) about a girl who never fit in everywhere, prickly and defensive and unable to understand other people creating a family for herself, building a better world and being the best version of herself she can be.

Also she really hates it when people are mean to kids and I love that about her.

I love Parker. Häagen-Dazs!

24: Asuka Langley Sohru - Neon Genesis Evangelion - Why did I leave her until last? Asuka prides herself on being the best EVA pilot. She is not the best EVA pilot.

She wants Kaji, a grown man who will never be with her.

She wants her mother to have not succumb to mental illness and projected all her maternal affection onto an inanimate doll who she hung alongside herself, leaving Asuka alone in the world and so thoroughly rejected that when her mom killed herself she took the effigy of her daughter with her on the way out.

Asuka doesn't get what she wants.

Instead she gets Shinji. Someone who, while complaining the entire time about how much he hates and doesn't want to do it, is a better EVA pilot than she is. Who in End of EVA...

Well.

Y'know.

Asuka is a cautionary tale of what happens when you pin all of your personality, your reason for existing, your pride and passion onto a single thing that you do not control. It can be taken away from you and it will leave you with nothing.

Asuka needs to put others down to feel good about herself because the source of her self-esteem is in her ability to perform a task that may not always be there, that others may surpass her in. She needs to learn to create worth from within, not from external praise and validation. Shinji shares that flaw.

EVA is a show with a lot to say about isolation and connection. About drive and purpose. About the reason why we exist and what we do with our the time we're given. Hopefully through looking at the other 23 entries and seeing the themes, you'll see it's pretty clear she's just my type of character.

I love her.

BONUS

Because I didn't do all my tags, here's the remaining tags with my favorite characters:

POTO - Erik Castlevania - Alucard Umineko - Beatrice Sonic - Fleetway Super Sonic Persona - Aigis Sailor Moon - Makoto Kino/Sailor Jupiter Scott Pilgrim - Kim Pines Pathologic - Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky (the fact I do not have to justify this down here is a big reason he's not on the bingo)

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fostersffff · 11 months

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The Big Gundam Watch, Part 11: Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket

In my experience, when it comes to recommendations for getting into Mobile Suit Gundam, there are three common answers. The most sober- but intimidating- answer is to start with the original 1979 anime or trilogy of compilation movies, and go from there in chronological order. The next best answer is telling the person asking the question to check out whatever they think looks interesting; after all, you're more likely to investigate a franchise further if you have a good first impression. The runner up to these two choices is to recommend The Good OVAs- The 08th MS Team and 0080: War in the Pocket.

The rationale behind recommending these two typically falls along the following lines: they're both relatively short- 12 and 6 episodes respectively, compared to the ~50 episode run of most TV anime- they both look terrific because they're OVAs not beholden to a TV production schedule, and they're more "realistic and grounded", which makes them an easier buy in for people not acquainted with the mecha genre. Personally, I'm not really a fan of this recommendation: for one thing, it makes it sound like they're the only things worth watching, and for another, both are side stories to original series, which I feel implies you should probably check out the original series anyway.

Having now watched War in the Pocket, I can at least understand why it's such a prominent recommendation, and while I still think it's not the best jumping on point, it's certainly one of the best Gundam things I've seen.

THE STUFF I LIKED:

No contest, this is my absolute favorite ED of all the Gundam stories I've watched so far, and I don't think it'll be replaced. It's ultimately just a series of images, but the images are candid photos of everyday life against the backdrop of the One Year War, and the way they include shots that could be from real life, like the photo of the refugees sitting next to their luggage or the kid crying in the middle of the road while soldiers walk by, along with Gundam specific ones like the kid swimming around a scuttled Zaku or a kid looking out the window of a space shuttle to see an explosion is just fucking perfection.

By my count, War in the Pocket only introduces three new mobile suit designs- which makes sense, considering when it takes place- but hot damn are all three of them home runs. The Hygogg is the first amphibious Zeon mobile suit that doesn't look like a joke, the Kampfer feels like the apex of what Zeon mobile suits should look like, and the Gundam Alex is literally the missing link between the RX-78 and the Zeta.

On a similar note: all the mecha fights in War in the Pocket are actually pretty simple, in a way that I think benefits the argument of this being easily recommendable to people as a starting point for Gundam. Like, even as someone who is into mecha, it can be difficult to remember all the different kinds of mechs that show up and what they come equipped with and relative power/threat levels. The Kampfer versus the Alex is a great example: Mischa is a better pilot than Chris, and the Kampfer has seems to have a weapon for basically any situation, but with just the arm-mounted gattling gun, the Alex shreds the Kampfer like tissue paper.

(This is also of course reinforced by the actual story, because it's already obvious from the circumstances that this is a desperation measure, but its worth complimenting how well the mecha aspects are integrated).

Al is perfectly executed petulant shitkid. Not only is the scene of him intentionally destroying everything in his video game perfect foreshadowing, the way he’s just droning “yes mom, yes mom, yes mom” while doing it is such a real shitty kid thing.

I also think his coming to grips with the reality of war is good because of how long it takes, and it takes so long because he’s just constantly in denial. The scene with the dead kid being extracted from the rubble is the most obvious one, but I also really love the scene where his friends are showing him the spoils they picked up from the school being bombed out, and he starts to cry, and the friends are like “hey man don’t feel bad you can come along next time” and he’s either trying to hide it or genuinely doesn’t understand why he’s crying. It’s so good!

In general, all the characters are well-writen and executed, although I want to especially highlight the Cyclops Team. They're all grizzled veteran assholes, but they're not evil, which is my favorite part of Gundam. Or maybe it'd be better to say "not evil beyond what's necessary to do their job as soldiers", but that should be taken for granted.

Ordinarily I don't care about spoilers in these, because they're long form things that you probably wouldn't checking out unless you already saw it yourself, but I'll avoid talking about The Moment in the last episode, because even knowing how everything resolves, finding out why it resolves that way and how casually it's revealed was genuinely heart-wrenching.

THE STUFF I LIKED LESS:

I thought the way the Federation was portrayed in this series was kind of at odds with what we've seen to date, or just weird that we don't see any high-ranking Federation officials. Chris is a white meat babyface, through and through, and that's fine- refreshing, even- but the scene where the cops are grilling her for information and she's trying to stonewall them with "I HAVE NO FURTHER COMMENT AT THIS TIME" doesn't sit right with me. We, the audience, know that she's a good person who's trying to wrestle with the guilt of people being killed as a result of the Federation's covert activities, but in the absence of a face to pin that decision to, it just comes across as a personal struggle for Chris and not institutionalized disregard for human life by the Federation.

Maybe it's intentional, but it's very weird how casual Bernie is when he first meets Al. Like, if I were an inexperienced pilot who got shot down in neutral territory, I'd be scrambling out of my fucking mind to stay hidden, not posing on top of my mech for a cool shot.

Also possibly intentional, but the fact that Bernie swung for the Alex's head in the final confrontation instead of the chest is bizarre. Arguably, Zeon didn't know how the Federation designed their mobile suits, but I don't know why he'd think the cockpit was in the head instead of the chest like his Zaku.

If it's not clear, I'm struggling to put anything here. War in the Pocket is really solid.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS:

I just want to be on record, as this is maybe the most applicable place to put it, that I think the people who turn up their nose at Gundam- or really any media- for having an anti-war message while also having cool spectacle based in war are just dumb.

To my knowledge, War in the Pocket was conceived of entirely as an OVA, so it's strange that it has eyecatches for commercial breaks. Maybe they were in case they ever planned to have them televised?

I think the extent of referencing 0079 is that one of the mechanics working on the Alex says it's going to be shipped out to "someone on White Base", which is the exact level of reference that should be made. No hero worship for Amuro or the Gundam, just "yeah it's supposed to be going out there", which is in line what the general Federation attitude towards White Base at this time.

Circling back to that scene of Al playing the video game: it's just straight-up lifting sound effects from Super Mario Bros. 3. This is notable because SMB3 only came out like six months before the first episode of War in the Pocket, and I'm also not sure how they could have gotten such a clean sound effect at that time.

I swapped over to the dub after I found out Bernie was voiced by David Hayter (best known for Solid Snake), and in general I think this is a stellar of-its-era dub cast- Al is Brianne Siddall (personally best known as Jim Hawking from Outlaw Star), Chris is Wendee Lee, Colonel Killing is Richard Epcar- but special shout-out to Mona Marshall, pulling double duty by using both of her voices, Overbearing Mom and Young Boy Who’s Kind Of A Dick.

On the sub side: I think it’s incredible that Al’s voice actor, Daisuke Namikawa, has become a prolific voice actor to this very day, which makes the commercials he did for the DVD and Blu-ray releases of War in the Pocket where he voices a “grown-up” Al even more affecting:

IN CONCLUSION:

I actually watched War in the Pocket back in March, and I kept putting this off because I was trying to figure out what I could say about this besides "it's good, it's good, it's really very good", but like... that's what it is! War in the Pocket deserves the status it has as one of/the best entries in the Gundam franchise, whether you've never seen a Gundam before or if you've watched everything else to date.

Next up: Mobile Suit Gundam F91! I've actually watched this shortly after I finished watching War in the Pocket, which is another reason this has taken so long. Not to spoil it, but I think my post about F91 is going to be a little more even-handed than this was.

#Gundam #War in the Pocket #Mobile Suit Gundam #Gundam 0080 #The Big Gundam Watch #anime #blu-ray #long post

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drawnaghht · 11 months

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tag guide anyone? + differentiating between usagis (thinkpiece)

I'm really just curious now if something like a "tagging guide" would help? If you would like this, or know if anyone else has posted something like this, sound off in the comments or like/reblog to agree ^^

I posted a poll about this on twt and it looks like 13 so far really want one, so I’m putting a lil test post around here too. I also found while researching for this post that apparently on tumblr, the first 20 tags show up in search! so I guess they changed that from 5 to 20 at some point. huh. that’s a bit more helpful than just 5 tags!

I’ve noticed sometimes people have no idea what to tag with a show like Usagi Chronicles that is less than 2 years old and is based on existing IP, but also that ppl use a lot of tags in general, perhaps confused about what is the “main tag” or most used tag for a character in rottmnt for example. So I started writing a little tag guide, which I’ll post the draft of at the bottom this thinkpiece. The main issue around tumblr seems to be excessive mis-tagging or multi-tagging i.e when a character isn’t there. I think I’ve seen this in some other fandoms too (primarily bigger fandmos), but I’m not gonna get too deep into it. You can skip to “tagging guide” via CTRL+F to search it on the page. I’ve also included a little character “separator” part with graphics, cuz it seems some are having trouble seeing the characters differently from fanart alone. I thought it would help to post more of the “source” materials ^^

Also if you have problems differentiating between the two in general…aside from both being white long-eared rabbits they are almost as different as night and day, at least on the surface ^^;; Here is a helpful post by Freakova, about how to tell the difference between Miyamoto Usagi and Yuichi Usagi, ancestor and descendant respectively:

https://freakova.tumblr.com/post/707461151549702144/i-made-this-for-my-besties-to-help-explain-the

But I kinda get it! Especially if characters are intentionally obfuscated a bit (e.g. there are characters in the show who can’t tell between Miyamoto and Yuichi Usagi, but it is mostly used as plot hook/humor). But they have different names and characteristics and slightly differing fanbases on a site like tumblr, so separating them in tags is helpful. I think part of it also comes from the name confusion, but I already wrote a post about that. Imo, if you have your own design already and it looks like neither of the two characters, you can just use “Rise Usagi” or “rottmnt Usagi” or other variations as tags, those are popular and used enough already that you don’t need to use the main character tags ^^

Personally, I would only like to see Yuichi Usagi in his own tags when it applies (he’s in the pic/fic), but if he’s not, well, what are you doing tagging him there?

I also get that some newer/younger TMNT fans apparently didn’t know the Usagi characters are from their own franchise for a short while last year (but ppl probably learned, right? I’ve literally only seen posts/tweets asking what the series is abt and unrelated posts exasperated that ppl don’t know) but visually they’re quite distinct, even if they are all white rabbits. I’ll post these comparisons just so I can use the tags properly and not piss off anyone else.

We have the original Usagi and his 1000-years later descendant.

Stan Sakai based Miyamoto Usagi largely on his childhood inspiration of samurai films, mainly “Samurai Trilogy” starring Mifune Toshiro playing Miyamoto Musashi, a real-life samurai who inspired many other films and adaptations. You can hear more about how Stan created Usagi here in this Portland Art Museum video where he explains and draws his Usagi. The story usually goes that he drew a rabbit with a chonmage (the edo-period top-knot) and suddenly, Usagi was born.

In the show he has a slightly older-looking design? but in the comics his look varies slightly because the series has been going for 40 years and the character has developed over the pages. so he can look slightly different cover to cover, page to page, but mostly it’s all him, the same character, just different situations, life periods and emotions. So he can look different in official material depending which publication period you start reading from, but mostly the same.

Then we have both the Miyamoto Usagi’s in different animated mediums,

And Yuichi in different media (show itself in 3D and 2D and merch by Stan)

And then there’s also Jotaro (very important Usagi Yojimbo character introduced early on/vol 1) and Yamamoto Yukichi(introduced in later stories/vol 4), who I think people aren’t mixing up with any of the previous rabbits yet, but who knows, i don’t look through absolutely all the tags myself after all and tumblr seems to have a problem of not showing much older posts in the public tag search anymore, so I can’t find older posts I used to see anymore ^^;

More thoughts on tagging + being a fan under cut.

This … is not really a vent or analysis post, I can't get that upset about it myself. with real life worries etc - fandom is supposed to be a fun outlet for creativity, at least for me. So I try not to feel anything about it. But tagging has always seemed fairly straight-forward to me and it’s mostly to organize a blog/find other people with similar interests. Writing non-structured non-essays is basically how I interact with a piece of media when I feel like fanart is not enough. And because tumblr posts now apparently Do Not HAve Limits, this is a better alternative to tag rambles.

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So when I saw the post about the Miyamoto Usagi tag I remembered that this was why I didn’t use the “follow tag” feature + the “your tags” tab as much myself (aside from not having it before and not being used to it on tumblr). Because usually with bigger fandoms, people do mis-tag or tag their other shows/fandoms into it without including the main character, this happens on occasion because there are a lot of people using the tag. I also don’t follow the Leosagi tag anymore for the same reason, that people can’t seem to differentiate between the characters and it becomes hard to tell what they want to post or which character they are talking about/drawing ^^;

As pointed out by Tamalinvonpineapple's post about it, people mis-tag Yuichi Usagi and Miyamoto Usagi and that’s a problem for people who would like to see just one of those characters but not mis-tagged as the other. I’m not gonna assume these are made in bad faith e.g. intentionally to piss off other fans, cuz there can be so many different reasons for people doing this. This post is also not gonna get into ship tags much because that is a contentious topic and tbh, left for a separate thinkpiece (I also already wrote smth abt tags for myself).

I tried to find out more possible reasons for mistagging in general or what the general consensus on tumblr is about tagging but it seems (or we can assume) it is a “bad practice” from how social media sites have given a slightly different use for tags tiktok/instagram/twitter - “tag for reach” - so like those social media accounts for companies that spam other tags. I do see this in anime/manga fandoms occasionally. Not just for the different spellings of characters (e.g, when a dub would give the character a new name; japanese vs western way of writing names) but specifically when 1 character is the only one there and the tags then have 30 other characters listed as well so the post/media would show up in search. But I wonder where this habit is from? Aren’t people curious to see what other tags their character/show have? I remember that on sites like blogger, we only tagged so that we could find things later, so people often made their own custom tags, i.e. "my work on the show" or "midnight doodlies". if a show got tagged, for example TMNT or Usagi, it would probably get 1-word/1-phrase tag (i.e. “turtles” “turtlies” “mutant turtles”) or just the series title tag - either the abbreviation or full name of a series/comic/cartoon depending on content. When it comes to tumblr tags, I remember getting annoyed at NOTPs permeating the tags as well. Or just posts about other seriesM multi-crossovers where your blorbo is only there to die, but then is still tagged after that; edits that have no relation to the character but they share a name or tag for whatever reason and you keep seeing these unrelated posts in the tags. I’ve seen more than enough from almost any of the fandom tags I’ve visited on tumblr. So I get how annoying mistagging itself can be.

But basically in regards to tags on tumblr itself, it seems people misuse them mainly because they don't know or don't like the tags for the other shows. Folks also like to see their posts get to as many people as possible, which I understand, I do the same on instagram, cuz that’s what I’ve learned by other artists example. Seems to make sense that more tags = more views. On tumblr, this sort of doesn’t always work this way. I could post a drawing from a popular cartoon and get maybe 5 notes total in 12 years, while a scribble I deemed too ugly to tag properly might get 54 notes on it’s first day. It’s almost like a Murphy’s Law of Tumblr that what you expect to do well, doesn’t. It’s just how it is here and I’m so used to it, it feels weird to complain about it, even on other sites with actual algorhitms and working apps etc.

Well, as a fan of the Usagi Chronicles show, perhaps what makes me more sad is that this has had the adverse effect of older TMNT/Usagi Yojimbo fans being so angry that they can’t stand the show/character itself now, even if they already disliked it before seeing other fans post about it. Which is just plain sad because some people even make up stuff about it just to discredit it as a show that Stan Sakai worked on. I understand that people have different reasons to dislike the show, most probably valid, but they also assume many things about it, to the point of stating them as fact when the opposite is true. I have… a different post about it. In general, we can say that being online seems to be the common thread between fans annoyed at fans.

In some ways, what’s even sadder however is an empty or unactive tag. Imagine that the last post you saw in that tag is still the one from 2013 you made yourself. It’s a bit annoying seeing people mistag or post unrelated fanart in it but hey, maybe this means they also read the tag? A chance to educate or get more views on your own fandom? Just a chance for communication? I know that doesn’t seem very appealing when those same fans are the ones mis-using the tag, but it just seems better than something completely empty. Of course, this is not a problem for TMNT fandoms perhaps, but from my experience in smaller fandoms, or being a fan of smaller/less popular media. And with how much there is mainly ship-related posts in almost all the Usagi Chronicles tags, this seems to be a matching experience I’ve been having so far in the Usagi tags. The comic series tag itself is also often full of other things, or only ship things, or sometimes only TMNT things for a short bit, but overall, I guess at least people use it?? But I would still like it that Samurai Rabbit, SRTUC, etc stuff gets tagged with those tags so I can actually find it instead of combing through multiple tags at a time just to see something new. While the newer “Your tags” feature on tumblr makes this a bit easier, I can see the easy annoyance at when people tag a character but then don’t include the character. and to add insult to injury, they tag a different character, but without acknowleding the first character at all.

But this is now like a joint fandom for a crossover for two franchises which have had crossovers before and now… there’s sort of a joint fandom? Sort of? So because it’s a bit bigger, it feels nice when other fans are considerate of small things like tagging. Now, on the whole, while many do still mistag and the leosagi tag is still mainly yuichi x leo for many, I’ve also seen in my own tagscrambles that not as many do this as much anymore, or going through a tag in time, the newer stuff seems to do this less. So like I’ve written in previous posts, my honest hope is just that fandom will adapt and grow into healthier online habits. Still, there are a few other things in the tags that I just can’t help but notice each time. it’s also why I don’t bother too much with repeat-viewing tags unless I’m looking for something specific.

It often feels like people just make up their own versions of any Usagi and/or write off the show as “too bad to watch”. And. idk, this just makes me feel sad about it because as mentioned above, I’ve seen it before in other smaller fandoms I’m in. In transformative works, it’s fairly normal that people make their own versions of a show or it’s characters, because that’s something fun to do with fanart and fic. But to openly hate a character? idk man, just feels weird to me personally. Like I don’t have the energy for hatedom. I know my little sibling really gets into hating one series that really disappointed her as a viewer, but even she now says that it’s an odd way to spend time, when she could be making fanart of something she likes instead. And I get that. I also spent my earlier non-internet days being more hateful of new media I disliked at the start, and while expressing that isn’t always bad (it’s just an iopinion), it became weirdly detrimental to me actually enjoying stuff in my tweens. Everything me and my friends and their friends ever talked about, was related to somehow being more above others or knowing better than others, being hateful of anything new or popular. And without quite realizing it right away, that was really tiring. Even if I spent time on things I did like, hobbies I enjoyed, that hate and childhood snobbishness sorta simmered there. I remember that for me it mainly came from “oh, I want to be a real animator one day, I should act like a real profesional adult and always be critical of the media I view, because that’s how I see adults treat real serious film.” Fast-forward 15 years, I’ve been through making comics as a tween, making fanart as a teen, I’ve been making a lot of different kinds of “cartoon art” in general as well as some actual art education, thinking, maybe I want to have some more general art schooling too. Later in my mid-twenties, I met someone with this similar mindset to my childhood self, who at first I got along with. We laughed at cartoons we didn’t like and made fun of the bad endings of those we did. At some point, I listened to them talking about getting to visit a big animation festival. And how they completely unironically expressed their hate directly at a leading crew member of a cartoon they didn’t like. And then I realized like. Wait a fucking minute. I don’t wanna act like this to other people! And this is why I don’t really “shoot the shit” about cartoons I don’t like as publicly anymore as I maybe once would have online on tumblr etc. Like I just don’t get it anymore. At most I’ll write down my thoughts somewhere private or to friends and try to understand why I don’t like the thing. And if it’s a very simple dislike, I just don’t spend time on it.

So like, I don’t get the hate the show (SRTUC) and character(Yuichi Usagi) get. Like I can understand sort of where people are coming from. but I don’t get why they gotta publicly tag it, announce it, or put it in the reblogged tags sometimes. the og poster sees that after all? so that’s like a bigger thought for me when it comes to tags.

I believe people can learn to be nice about a show they don’t like, but if they start to feel annoyed at fandom parts of the web they see online, they also start to feel hate toward a specific show, even if the show or thing itself might not be as bad. Example - I have this toward Star Wars for example, it’s a big fandom. I feel indifferent now, but in my youth, I found it annoying that everyone was talking about it as if it was the best thing ever, when it was spoiled for most of my childhood for me, and also felt like a generic movie series after all that. Something growing in popularity, or being really popular in a niche fandom can make ppl dislike it in general and that’s fairly ordinary as fandoms go. Often, people just don’t like a popular thing. Just think of series of like GoT/ASoIaF or HP. But then again those go down the cultural road so easily, I suppose in countries where western-media is really popular/common, it becomes like a cultural osmosis and fans can assume *everyone* likes it, even if not everyone does. I’m thinking about the fresh 30+ dads from 10 years ago I read about who only interacted with their kids through their own nerd interests. Pokemon is such a culturally permeated thing, it’s everywhere and everyone seems to assume everyone has played it or at least knows about it, even if at some point, some of us were big fans of Digimon instead, or some don’t like it at all. At some point, my dad gifted me a Harry Potter book, even though I (non-vocally) disliked it, but it was in the cultural osmosis here so strongly that it was everywhere and he just assumed I was into it (bless his heart, he genuinely didn’t know). HP was something that I initially disliked because it was so popular, but the idea of a “basic magic premise, but extended” seemed interesting, and it was required reading in my middle school, so at 11, I went to see the movie and thought, alright, maybe I’ll give it a chance. But reading the book I found things that didn’t make sense to me, that didn’t match what seemed like the themes of the book (the whole slave freedom plot for example) so I always sort of kept it at arms-length - not quite getting into it, but also not turning it away if I found anything, not saying anything upsetting to people who were fans of it. Everyone at my school read it though to varying degrees, or at least everyone knew things about it even if they weren’t fans or weren’t invested at all. (This was all before we knew JKR is a vocal TERF, so now I feel a bit validated in my dislike, even if I feel sad for the fans who got something positive out of the series).

So point being, fandom can have different types of people in it. A type of media will often accrue a specific type of fan and sometimes it won’t match what the show itself puts out. E.g. fans acting in ways that go squarely against what the media talks about (Steven Universe is a popular show with many fans that comes to mind), or a show having an unexpected viewership next to it’s intended demographic (us 90s kids still being cartoon fans in our late 20s/30s/early 40s). It’s slightly unpredictable in a general way.

Of course, TMNT fandom is a bit different from those bigger properties because it was an indie comic made in the 80s that was so different and off-the-wall indie for a comicbook, it sold out and gave its creators Eastman and Laird a hefty legacy, lasting careers and actual money. Good for them! Personally I think it’s thanks to how genuinely creative and collaborative their work was then. Like Usagi Yojimbo, it’s an old comicbook/franchise now, so the “fandom” as such differs from generation to generation, from childhood to childhood. I met the turtles for the first time with the 87 series in the early 90s, then the next time w the 2003 series, which i initially hated as that angry, cartoon-critical tween, but was surprised at how much it seemed to take from the comics. I think I was initially angry about it for different reasons, mainly, “why is it so serious? why are the jokes so lame?” and also because I had invested so much emotionally into the idea of seeing something as good as the 80s cartoon again... but then found that it grew on me and now 20 years later I can look at it with nostalgia. As a result, my reaction to the 2012 series was mostly “wow another TMNT cartoon?” and “huh it looks interesting” and “oh I’ve seen this person work on another cartoon before”. My little sibling on the other hand only saw the 2003 cartoon and their reaction the the 2012 adaptation was “Wow, THEY’RE FINALLY TEENS” because as kids, we thought the 2003 TMNT looked and sounded “too much like boring adults”. But from many online fanspaces back then a lot of the more vocal reactions was around “THE 3D IS SO UGLY” and “WHY ARE THEY SO YOUNG”. You’ve probably heard similar sentiments of various degrees if you’ve been a fan or viewer of any TMNT cartoon.

Usagi Yojimbo is unique in this sense because Stan Sakai has been the only one drawing and writing the comicbook for 40 years. Some of the visual style and writing tone change from book to book, but it’s gradual because Stan has changed as an artist and writer too. If you look at any comic series like this, it’s actually a natural part of many comics i.e. webcomics used to be a prominent example of this, as the creators were often complete novices at the beginning and graduated to a more consistent style. But even from a surface level view, lets say, reading other people’s reviews, you can see that people really enjoy Usagi Yojimbo for how consistent it is with it’s treatment of its characters, story and Edo-period culture. Stan Sakai really does his research and puts respect back into fiction inspired by samurai. Even though guides will often tell you that you can jump into the series from any point in the series, there’s just something really consistent about it as a whole. Sakai gets to do whatver he wants with his books and what he does seems to be thought-out usually. Even if the early animated adaptations were a bit incorrect, comic readers in general have a lot of respect for Stan and his work. My favourite part about this all is how Usagi Yojimbo is actually used to teach about japanese culture in a college course in the US.

Because both TMNT and UY are originally creator-owned comics (still so with UY regardless of publisher or adaptations but not so much TMNT as Viacom bought the rights in 2009), perhaps the general fan experience is more similar to original comics fandoms in Japan. Although whether a series is creator-owned varies from series to series, the manga and magazines culture in Japan seems wholly different from what US comicbooks were in the 80s and even what they still are now in that regard. Because a series will more often be written and illustrated by the same creator/artist/team, there are less variations and book-to-book differences both visually and tonally. In the US, a comicbook series can start with an artist-writer team, but then switch if the editorial decides some change is needed. This is something that often affects consistency and a story or character’s canon eventually and in a convoluted way, it’s the reason why we got “alternate earths” and “multiverse crossovers”. Which, while fun, make american comicbooks hard to read for some newer readers. Even with TMNT, once Eastman and Laird started having less time to make the comics and their other problems, it led into breaking off their creative partnership and never speaking again. But they had to continue the comic. If before the feud, they would just have fun passing the pages between each other, now they actually so they wrote it he series became different based on who was writing it. One more sci-fi leaning and one more martial-arts and mysticism leaning. You can see this difference in the TMNT animated adaptations as well. The 2003 series namely is more based on Laird’s storylines in the comics and he was also consultant on the series. After the 2009 sale of Mirage to Viacom, we get the 2012 series, where Eastman acts as consultant, so it’s more heavy on his ideas of what the TMNT are. In 2019, the documentary series “Toys that made us” brought them together for the first time in almost 2 decades. And then we fans got to have The Last Ronin, a collaboration between the two again.

(What I’ve paraphrased here is mostly based on this video overview of how the comic became a franchise “How did a violent indie comic become a $15,000,000,000 franchise?” by matttt if you’re interested in seeing and hearing a more picturesque summary of this)

So getting back to fandom, because it’s mostly been one comicbook series, both the more avid and casual UY comics fans might not be used to there being adaptations of Stan’s Usagi. Yes, even with the visual examples I brought up above, perhaps some simply haven’t seen the animated adaptations because these are still marketed “for kids”. This is like the only reason I can think of that people who are 30+ adults, go online to complain about the Chronicles series online, even though it’s obviously for kids, meaning they probably didn’t even watch it. Folks are “surprised” Stan “let Netflix ruin his series” etc - even if it’s explicitly in a new futuristic setting to avoid affecting the comics canon. It will be interesting to know how people react when or if Sakai puts out his “Kagemusha” anthology, where the idea is about different creators telling different Usagi stories.

Even TMNT fans, many of whom don’t know Usagi beyond the animated adaptations, might jump in with this similar mindset of “different = bad”. Maybe there’s a manga/anime adaptation out there with the fans having similar concerns about their adaptations. Sailor Moon comes to mind, but as always, people’s grievances with an adaptation may have good reasons underneath. But also I’ve personally never seen an avid Sailor Moon fans be as annoying as the casual Star Wars fan. It might also depend on the age and lifestyle of the fan. Someone who is a teacher or parent, maybe they’ve met more people, put more thought into it, might feel milder about new or different things vs someone who is used to going online to see people angry and enjoys getting into arguments.

If I start to think about it, I can get a similar reaction out of myself. It was hard to look at mid-00s fanart of Usagi because it always felt a bit “extreme” like fans changed things about Usagi to suit their own understanding or image of samurai, which was always more based on popular movies or anime rather than the comic. I think this is just a general thing about fanart over the times. I still balk at some fanart, either UY or SRTUC, if for example the sides of the clothes are opposite - right over left, for burials vs left over right, like the letter ‘y’ - because it just means the fanartist didn’t bother to look up even references. Most times people just don’t know about this sort of stuff, they might be anime fans or they might even be part of a different asian culture, but it it’s not something that’s taught, of course it won’t reflect in something like fanart. But then, it’ll just be something new to learn. To me it also speaks of a wider annoyance of people liking things only for the surface-level appeal.

Usagi Yojimbo I’ve noticed has much more of a fanbase than fandom. I know fanbase doesn’t get used much as a term these days as more and more media gets an active fandom rather than staying at a fanbasem but it’s a term I’d like to use in this case. “The Wilkes Beacon” in 2014 defines the difference so: “Not everything with a fanbase has a fandom, because a fandom is a group of committed fans who are always vocally interested in their “thing,” usually expressing that on a social website such as Tumblr. Just because you’re a fan doesn’t mean the fandom will accept you.” Indeed sometimes fandom feels almost like being in a separate part of the club, only for people in the know about it. The origin for fanbase is attributed to early 20th century baseball fans. The origin of fandom, most well-known as a portmanteau of fan + kingdom, is often attributed to the original Sherlock Holmes fans who actually gathered to mourn the character when Arthur Conan Doyle decided to kill him off (bless your hearts and souls, sometimes it feels like fandom has never changed) but also from early 20th century sports fans and 60s Trekkies, who saved their show. A lot of different sources give different origins and histories for these words and many will also equate them as synonymous.

My own experiences tell me that a fanbase is more general - any fans of a thing, whether they attend conventions, buy the media or no (i.e. Sherlock Holmes readers, sports fans) and will comprise the “base” of any activity - the larger number of fans that exist for a piece of media/sport/celebrity. A fandom will be the more “active” part, more interested in being connected with each other within that fanbase. Of course, to any other person outside of fans, both of these will be synonymous and a fan will look weird and fanatical regardless of how little they invest themselves into a media. But I’’m making this distinction to describe what I see as more casual and more active “fanbase as a whole”. Fanbase as a word feels more general, while Fandom sounds more specific. So as an example, the One Piece “fanbase” might feel large and more everywhere, like with pokemon or Sherlock Holmes the book, but the OP fandom can feel more active and particitative, like the .It’ll depend entirely on what way each person interacts with the media. Do you have friends who are also fans of the series? it’s like a fandom. You just watch it but don’t participate as much? You’re in the fanbase, but you might partake in fandom activities if you feel like it. You might be a more casual fan, but you might have more avid feelings about the series as well, but you’re not that interested in making fanworks or posts or reacting to other fans at all. A fandom might be big, but more ubiquitous, more silent and conversely, some fandoms may be small, but still very active and vocal. I’ve often theorized that this is because So UY online fandom sorta feels like the latter, but more under-the-radar. Small and active but also more silent and appreciative. With the previous “big fandoms” example, it’s also the juxtaposition between Old and New that comes into play. An old Spidey fan from the 70s might have become an official Spiderman fanartist, but they might not partake in all the fan stuff they used to anymore. Still a fan, but maybe the newer and younger “fandom” as such is just not appealing to them in the same way.

The larger or more advertised a TV series or book is, the larger and more annoying its fanbase in general. If a piece of media has less popularity, it will ergo have a smaller fanbase and sometimes no “active fandom” at all. So now with the Samurai Rabbit: the Usagi Chronicles TV show as an animated spinoff-adaptation, we have a similar problem that TMNT fans have been familiar with over the decades. Thanks to the show, there’s a more active, slightly younger fandom who want to connect over the series and maybe even read the comicbook, know more about the source and origins, they might want to even know how the show was made, make fanart or fic. So fans like any other, but just that the media they’re a fan of now, is still relatively new. Maybe these newer fans act or write differently online from how older fans are used to. Maybe they even treat the original source comic differently or just don’t know anything about it. In any case, new series and new fans will generally seem annoying because culturally that’s what we’ve started to associate some of fandom with. Otaku culture etc. So it and it’s fans might get the “new thing” treatment as mentioned above with the TMNT animated adaptations.

The difference here is that Stan Sakai has been wanting his own animated adaptation for a long time (just look at the Space Usagi pilot for proof) and while many suggested projects to him before, this one actually piqued his interest bc they did something new with the characters. You could say that what people don't like abt this series are some decisions resulting from this being a netflix cartoon for kids. the decision to set it in a near-future with a new younger for example, was made in the beginning by netflix and I haven’t found any articles yet that’s found a legit reason for why it stayed this way. My guess based on interviews with Stan and crew is that Stan found it interesting as a possible new way to get more readers to the comic. Something for the younger generation. Although many readers and even parents will attest that the comic is child-appropriate (and really, it is), the TV-Y7 ratings and so on exist for a reason. And while I would love for more western studios to get funding for more adult animation in general (I’m not from the US myself and animation such a large medium, the way that genres are explored or what gets made for adults vs kids feeks so different elsewhere), I think it’s good that the first full series based on UY is this “non-violent” (your mileage may vary). Because a lot of the more vocal adult fans of UY seem more focused on the violence vs what kids might get out of it. A popular quote from Sakai is “Once, a mother asked me, 'What is Usagi Yojimbo about?' and before I could answer, her son said, 'It’s about honor.'" (Komai for JANM, 2011). Sometimes it seems like the “older adults” or the “more casual” fans of UY sort of don’t get it.

Even the naming of the series and character has reasons, which I’ve seen some Rise Leosagi shippers make their own reasons for. So the various hate from “older fans” I see about it is strange because all evidence points to the show having Sakai’s approval and his full involvement. Of course, I could also be wrong, but watching the series, it doesn’t feel to me like an “empty cashgrab” as one angry TMNT fan put it. It feels more like something made by other UY fans, those more familiar than I was at the time, with both Usagi Yojimbo lore as well as the culture and lore behind it. In their quest to properly honor the comic series they loved, crew put a lot research hours into making sure both edo and post-edo periods got to be part of their show. Like “trips to japan during a pandemic” type of research. The show is an interesting fusion of old and modern in futuristic setting and feels wholly unique as an experiment.

Another aspect of course is also the shipping parts of fandom. I can never quite get my head behind this “arguing about ships” because it just reminds me of my Grandma and her older sister fighting over their soap operas and who should get together with who. And alright, maybe this was fun for them...? I’ve never been that invested in this myself but it can be fun to have a pairing you root for in a show, when it’s just a bunch of connected ideas over the story, there really seems like a real genuine connection between the characters or if there’s a chance to connect with other fans over it. That’s kind of what fandom is for me in general, but with crossover ships, it’s like a strange and interesting combination of “oooh what interesting similarities and differences” and “lets find out” with fanworks.

This is the main way I enjoy making crossovers in general work, even if I’ve never finished an actual fic (I’m more of an artist) and even if the works sometimes don’t go together (it’s like a fun challenge). I wonder sometimes if the SRTUC crew also imagined crossovers with TMNT? As in this fanart post on facebook by Samurai Rabbit character designer Andry R, I wonder what that could have been like. After all, if many of the crew are fans too, it just makes sense to think about that? it’s fun to think of crossovers after all! And since it’s fanwork, I personally don’t feel as obligated to make some of the quality as insanely good as I would have in my younger days. I want to enjoy the art making process too, so putting research and sketches into a piece is sometimes my own “enough”. So I don’t really care about views either because I know even now, tastes might still just be not geared toward something sketchier that I make.

Even so, despite the experience with online sites and social media people have in general, or other artists/fans encouraging to feel a bit less worried about socmedia algorhitms, it might be frustrating that posts are not as popular even if your idea feels great.

So connecting all of that fandom talk, I can only assume people mistag between a popular and non-popular series for similar reasons. As said earlier, fans might assume everyone prefers the popular thing and that it’s better to tag that popular/bigger/older thing. Because at least that So in our case, I’ve noticed more that ppl tag Yuichi Usagi with the Miyamoto Usagi tag. From the surface, it seems like people don’t know about the Yuichi tags/show or they just don’t like it for some other reason. Now Tumblr is more a “home of fandoms” than casual fans, as most of the user-generated content is entirely by people who get much more invested in a series than a casual fan. Similarly I’ll see people tag their TMNT 2012 inspired fandesigns as ROTTMNT as well, because that is simply seen as the popular fandom at the time ergo, more attention on your post.

Maybe a solution for the mis-tagging could be smth as simple as fandom outreach, something active to unite the different types of fans into using tags correctly, but of course, something more active and social might feel more unnatural, as most of us are more wall-flower than social butterfly - working off the assumption here that most fans are shy. I used to be pretty shy as a fan and now I’m more active and out-going in general in my adult years, but at the same time, doing something socially more active is still a scary thought in my brain so I can understand that it’s easier to just tag and hope it’s correct. Or easier to make ticked off posts vs something with a different kind of effort. But then again, as brought up in my examples of other fandoms, being a fan can make people very active in taking part in similar fan activities. As we all enjoy the same thing in different ways or different media in similar ways, we are all still fans at the end of the day. Whether casual or more involved, that’s a unique experience that should unite us. So I’ll have my peace with the older cartoon-hating fans who only view Usagi Chronicles as an empty children’s cartoon etc etc.

So, because I’m an adult, but also an artist and animation fan, this is how I’ve been approaching TV cartoons for the past 5-10 years. Against my first reaction of “oh, this is too slow for me” the way I chose to view the series once I saw more of it was “I’m an adult, and this is a cartoon made my other older adults, for kids - let me see what it’s about”. It’s more about curiosity and seeing what other creatives have done to put connective tissue between one idea to another.

Personally when it comes to tagging I try to keep to a general amount of “minimum amount of tags possible” bc I’m a bit lazy but also, I will never find anything on my own blog later if I used more than 20 tags about a simpler fanart post. So maybe like 1-2 tags for show/series, 1-2 tags for characters and my own art tags. I am lazy but I also like being considerate with other people. But also because of my previous experience with blogging, I like to keep tags I re-use as consistent as possible so I have the same experience. Of course, sometimes I forget what I’ve actually used if there are many tags i.e. many characters. so keeping the tags short is a boon for that end.

Here is the draft version for the UY and Usagi Chronicles tag guide, i'm gonna change this more but this is mostly how I've been tagging stuff (or have tried to so far) and I wrote a small guide back in march before all this, but have been coming back to it now with more general and character tags in mind.

== Tagging Guide ==

Hello Rise of the TMNT and Usagi Chronicles joint fandom! Here’s a guide on how to tag Usagi Chronicles/Samurai Rabbit stuff! Mostly it’s my own view on how to tag things based on how I interact w the fandom stuff posted here but also from my experience of using tumblr and older blogging platforms - how I see the most common/make-sensical ways to tag characters/shows. But maybe you will find this useful too, fellow fan!

Usagi Yojimbo - the name of the original comicbook series - I decidedly reserve this for posts and reblogs ONLY about the Usagi Yojimbo comic (pages covers,, screenshots, memes), or general fanart of the comic or its characters. This helps me keep it separate so I can find posts about it later.

Usagi Chronicles - personally I use this for all content for the show, but especially the crossover stuff and my own art posts. This seems to be the most commonly used unique tag about this show.

SRTUC - acronym, good for short posts, for quick tagging. but I also use this to tag general reblogged posts about the show

Samurai Rabbit - I only try to use this if it is about the official stuff, like interviews and GIF/screenshots in bulk (more than 2). This tag gets used a lot for both the series but before that it was also used for posting general UY comics content and alternate covers by other artists, as well as for original samurai rabbits unaffiliated by UY. It is too general for me to use it on my own posts outside of text posts maybe.

Samurai Rabbit the Usagi Chronicles - mostly I use this tag for more general posts, but also reblogs if someone else has made something directly related to the series.

SamuraiRabbitNetflix - lol I only use this one on twitter, bc I saw someone from the crew use it and it has stuck for most of my more finished posts I guess ^^ Literally nobody else on tumblr uses it which is fine, but I think it’s a good way to separate the series and the more general posts people make about the comic or guest art of it (or sometimes original art unrelated to UY)

Characters:

Miyamoto Usagi - I try to mainly use it for just comic Usagi and fanart, but occasionally I will use it for fanart depicting

Rise Miyamoto Usagi - Any Rise!versions of comics Usagi. Usually these are fandesigns, but sometimes fans will adapt it wholesale (usually adapting him from his younger years). Sometimes it is unclear which version it is based on or it is a completely original version so I simply tag these as Rise Usagi.

Yuichi Usagi - pretty self-explanatory! I only use this for posts/fanart including Yuichi Usagi (but not when he is only mentioned in passing). Sometimes it is hard to differentiate between these versions however,

Usagi fandesign/Yuichi Usagi fandesign/Miyamoto Usagi fandesign - I use all these tags to organize the fandesigns ppl make of all these characters, reserving “Usagi fandesign” when it’s really an original design based on various canon Usagi concepts or more of a “general” Usagi than a specific one i.e. meant for the Rise or 2012 TMNT crossover AUs. This counts for me in reblogs also when the OP hasn’t really decided what the character is and has tagged both characters. Lol there is a lot of different fanart of these characters and for my own sake, I tag these separately where possible so I can find the fanart easier later (especially if the posts themselves have text which doesn’t use these names, or if tumblr search is not working on blogs)

UY character - I use “UY” as the common acronym before characters from UY, but I also generally tag their names in reblogs. idk, this just makes it easier for me to find them later in my own blog and that’s all (Kenichi and Mariko for example are quite common Japanese names)

Tomoe Ame - This character just deserves her own tag, but also, I think the 03 version, while quite different, can fit in the same tag because people don’t post about them as much ^^;;

And now for the TMNT tags!

Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - the official name! long, but good if you are tagging official stuff i.e. screenshots, gifs, concept art, tweets from crew etc

ROTTMNT - good short catch-all tag, lots of ppl use this to tag their reblogs quickly, but shorter posts can also go under here

Rise of the TMNT - Slightly longer tag than the full acronym, but more descriptive, if you wanna make sure people know it’s a TMNT show

Rise TMNT - I’ve seen a few ppl use this as a tag and it’s a valid way to tag (short and unique) but it’s not as popular as the others

2018 TMNT - again, general tag for the series. Common way to make a tag for a TMNT series - adding the year of airing before the TMNT acronym. Same with TMNT 2018. Same for the comics! I’ll use IDW TMNT as a tag for example, bc it seems widely used and understood.

TMNT18 - same as the previous one, but shorter! There are a lot of TMNT media besides the comics, (movies, animated series, etc) so it’s a general easier practice to tag via year. Ppl also sometimes use the variation 18TMNT. Anything is basically fair game with these general tags as long as the author of a blog finds stuff later.

Characters![I’m not sure about the characters yet bc I use the tags differently than other people apparently. my blog my rules i guess!]

rottmnt [character] - reserved for when i tag this character in crossovers, eg rottmnt April, rottmnt donnie. I generally use nicknames for the rottmnt boys cuz I am lazy.

Rise [character] e.g. Rise Leo, Rise April - I try and use this just for

April O Neil (full name) - for when I’m tagging them in general and just want to see them in this tag with the other versions

12 April or 12April - for the 2012 TMNT versions of the characters. I often write the tags together bc I am just lazy but in the case of numbers, I can also forget. On tumblr I try to remember to use spaces cuz that is allowed here lol.

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And that’s it! I have more in the list, but that is the gist of the style of it. Basically hust explaining what I’ve seen and if/how I use it on my own blog. Let me know if you have more thoughts about this. I’m curious to know what other fans of both series think!

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